Title: And whence do they rise, the cycles of changes (Reference) Series: Three red words Story #10 Fandom: DCU (AU from Nightwing #93 and mid-Robin: Unmasked, spoilers in an AU way for Identity Crisis and Under the Hood) Summary: "I've got a clown problem." Rating: Content some readers may find disturbing. Nonsexual. Notes: For Marcelo. Te poked me until I finished it. Katarik tidied it up. It's three fifty-seven in the afternoon and there is an alarm going off in Arkham Asylum. It rings through the Clocktower in a grating, terrible klaxon that makes Barbara minimize almost everything she's doing. Bruce is returning to his office from a meeting. She has two seconds to make sure that the overrides are still in place on the alarm and on the monitoring systems he used to have. There's still time to let the signal go through before he opens the door. It would set the silent alarm on his desk spinning at the precise speed and angle that signifies this caliber of alert. The alarm is still shrilling in her ears. Bruce walks into his office, drops a fat file on the desk, and sits down. None of his alerts are showing. Barbara takes another deep breath and cues a company she owns most of, far away, to manipulate its shares of WayneTech in a way that the brokers will recognize as problematic in two minutes. Her news daemons, normally programmed to scan and bring her back the news, keep any alerts from going out from the Gotham Police Department. They needed to know, but there will be no way that they can contact anyone to tell them what has happened. On the roof of Central, a tiny charge blows a large, custom-sized lightbulb. The Themiscyran embassy in New York receives a phonecall from a voice no one will ever voicematch, begging for help before the line goes dead. The Justice League will be in the Sahara, beyond most communication, within three hours. Bruce is still at his desk when the call comes in from J'onn, and then he's leaving, frowning, calling Alfred and leaving a message for Stephanie, for Cass, for Superboy. He'll be back as soon as possible. But even that will be too late. Barbara watches him until he disappears off the street in a red-blue blur. Robin, Batgirl, and Superboy will be dealing with an absolutely normal and unpleasant shipment of Russian illegal immigrants today, all mob-affiliated and armed. Oracle will be on their side, too, by the simple expedient of a program Barbara only calls Eliza in her head. She never relies on the ways she could get away with not really being present despite the voice synthesizer. It should take them at least three hours to realize that there's a problem. It's far more than long enough. She turns off the voice synthesizer and dials. On her screen, Tim raises an eyebrow and says, "Yes, Barbara?" "The Joker's out. Gotham's clear." "Ah." Tim takes the phone into the next room, where Jason is playing a console game. "It appears to be time to reawaken that killing rage of yours, Jay." "Yeah?" Jason pauses the game and looks up. Tim hands him the phone. Barbara says, "You remember tall, green, and pasty, Jay?" "The guy who stopped you from dancin' with me?" Jason's on his feet already. Tim is out of the room, waking Dick up. "I'll never forget him." "I've got a crowbar you can borrow," Barbara says. "And a gun." Jason pats his hip. "I'm good." Tim, in the other room, explains, "We need to go to Gotham." Dick is awake in less than a heartbeat, tousled but on. "No, we don't." "So," Jason says, following Tim at a leisurely pace, "are we doing this hit ourselves? Do we get earrings?" "They wouldn't suit you," Barbara says, and Jason laughs. He tosses the phone to Dick, who squints at the caller ID, blinks, and puts it to his ear. Barbara says, "I've got a clown problem." "Well, now," Dick says, reaching for his suit, then his boots. He manages to dress with the phone cradled between his ear and shoulder. "You sure you've got the right number?" Barbara smiles at him on the screen. "Absolutely." "In that case --" Dick flips his basic weapons into their holsters, though Tim's modified equipment will be far more to the point. "-- we live to serve. Especially for dames like you." "Take care of my problem and I won't maim you for calling me that." Dick salutes a camera as if he knows it's the one she's got tapped. Perhaps he does. "Your problem is our problem." "That, too." She squints at her map of Gotham. "The faster you get here, the better." "Half an hour tops." Dick makes a kissy noise at the phone and walks out of his bedroom. "We'll be getting going." Tim and Jason are already fully dressed in their costumes. Perhaps they haven't noticed that it's still full daylight, or perhaps, under the circumstances, they've ceased to care. "I've got your number," Barbara says, and it's been the work of weeks on a server to crack their communication system, but when she starts the link, it should look instantaneous. "All systems are go, yes?" Tim's smile says he knows the processor time it's cost her, but Jason startles. "Damn," Jason says, rubbing his ear. "You're good." "This is only the beginning," Barbara says. "At least, if you're working with me." "Not for you," Tim says, his voice sharp. Barbara smiles. "You could be a Bird of Prey if you wanted -- Flamebird -- but not for me. With me." "We'll talk about it later," Dick says, and they're all out of the apartment in different directions a second later. Each of their bikes is indubitably customized by its rider, but she can hear the ways they've also worked on each others'. Only the best for them, of course, and it's a positive sign that they're mutually supportive. Tim ignores her presence to ask Jason some unrelated question. She tunes them out and switches the channel in Dick's comm for him. "So," she says. "I'm not going back," Dick says, and she doesn't have a camera on him, but she can hear the resolve in his voice. "You mean you're growing up?" Barbara asks, tapping her fingers on the edge of the desk. "Putting the past behind you." Dick chokes and speeds up further. There's a finite distance between the two cities, but sometimes it seems as though he travels faster than humanly possible between them, as if desperation gives him access to the speed force. He clears his throat. "You could say that." "About time," Barbara says. "Love you, too." Dick does something that makes a driver honk at him. The noise Dopplers away into nothing. "Look, we should have done this years ago." "Talked while you risked your life? You know, Lost Boy Wonder --" He interrupts her. He's always known how to command, but it's never hit quite so hard as this. "Stop. I don't want to hear it. That's over." Barbara takes a slow breath and smiles. "Good. Yes. We can work with that." "Sorry," he says, quickly, but it's more social training than actual apology. "It's just I'm not anymore. At all." "No," Barbara says, "I know. Not if you're really going to take the second Gotham exit and use a little deadly force." Dick lets out his breath, clicks over to the channel they usually use for communication. She can hear his performing smile. "Well,  I already killed him once. What's one more time?" "Great job on that," Jason says. "When I kill somebody, they stay fucking dead, Big Bird." "We're not going to decapitate him," Tim says, his voice tense. "It would be overkill," Barbara says. "Entirely," Dick agrees. "It'll be sufficient to shoot him several times in the spine --" "-- and beat his skull in with a crowbar," Jason says. His smile sounds far less false than Dick's does. Tim sighs. "We're still not going to decapitate him." "Purée might do better," Barbara says. She hears a quick snort and has to check on the frequency tracker to know that it's Jason. Dick says, "What's his current location, O?" She checks -- the police still aren't aware of his escape, and anybody else interested in the situation is otherwise occupied. The possible routes he could have taken since the last camera that registered his presence are small -- any driver in Gotham who picks up the Joker is too stupid to live, but there aren't any major traffic tie-ups at the moment, so that's probably not happening. She transmits the coordinates and extrapolations to the guys' computers. "You've got all the data I do." "When did you start telling lies?" Flamebird asks. It's not quite Tim's voice. She smiles. "Before you were born. Get this done for me and you'll know more of what I do." "Can I visit?" Jason asks. "It's been a while." Once, she danced with him at a social bash. A couple times, they fought side-by-side. Back when she could dance, and when she didn't need them to fight for her. At least they'll do a better job of it than Bruce has been. "I'm going to be out of town for a while," Barbara says. "Yeah? We can have a sleep-over," Jason says, and she can practically feel his elbow in her ribs. "When things settle. Maybe." It's more of a concession than she would've given Dick before all of this, and less than she'd say to him now. But he's not the one who asked. There's radio silence for a minute. Two minutes. She uses the time to check on the Gotham operatives, to make sure Dinah's all right in her tenth visit to Santa Prisca, and that Helena hasn't gotten fired from her temporary posting in Milan. Yet. "I've got visual," Tim says, and Barbara cuts the connection to Helena quickly. It would be a mistake to involve Huntress in this operation; she and Black Canary will be under enough suspicion without direct proof of complicity. "Confirmed," Dick says, and the computer triangulates. The cameras come onscreen. There's a psychopath in the park, Gothamites. Do you know where your little brother is? That particular shade of green has shown up in way too many of Barbara's nightmares. She'd know it with her eyes closed, and any second now it won't matter. Jason whistles softly. "Long time no see. Can I do the honors?" The sigh in her ear is Dick's. She knows it before she checks the receiver log. "You owe him one." "I brought the crowbar," Tim says drily. "Nah." The background noise of motorcycles is gone, now. They can't be subtle, even though they're not in the same place. Any second now the maniac -- plucking a pigeon and throwing its feathers up -- will see them, and from there -- "That's too damn messy." Jason takes out a gun and something in Barbara's stomach clenches. "Better to just --" He aims and fires. There's blood in the inhuman green hair, brains on the pigeon, and Barbara lets out her breath. "Well, that was easy." "This isn't sufficient," Tim says sharply. He leaves the view from the camera that had been following him and shows up again just as Dick does, in full view of the body and the accumulating spectators. There are small children cheering and women crying. Men crying. Camera phones everywhere, and the pictures they take flood the network in a moment and fly into Oracle's databases. She doesn't block the calls to the police, this time. There's a dispatcher whooping with joy on one of her phone monitors. Then all the cellphone pictures are of flames, not hot enough to consume a body but enough to clean up the stray DNA, and Dick, silhouetted against them, his head bowed until he spots one of Oracle's cameras and turns, and smiles. "I guess that means it's my turn to take out the trash, huh?" "You've got space on your bike," she says, and starts the destruction sequences on her banks of computers. The data isn't there, but some of the keys are. While they bundle the Joker into a body bag, the PD arrives -- and stays back, so far back, too speechless and pleased to interfere, while the spectators show off their pictures and swear up and down that it's real. Barbara makes the phonecalls that will get her out of Gotham. The computer that's blocking police scanner access to the JLA, not to mention Batgirl, Robin, and Superboy, isn't in the Clocktower at all. When they trace it -- and they will, in horror and bewilderment -- no one will be surprised, at the last, to find that while Jim Gordon checked weather.com, there was a background program holding communication lines silent. No one's going to mention it to him, either. She knows them that well. She'll have to call him herself from the safe haven -- not the 'haven -- and remind him, for the thousandth time, to run his virus-scan software. By then, she'll have a new place in every system. New priorities and checks on the teams that need her. She'll still be the superuser, but with certain -- handicaps. In certain locales. Her next mission is to get Bruce to see what happened as a good thing. At present, she projects it will take at least three years. If Cass -- Batgirl is going to be in Gotham, cemented there by Robin -- as, in a way, she should be. Oracle won't abandon her there, whatever Batman has to say about it. Maybe she can change Cassandra's mind, given enough time. The boys -- her operatives, her teammates, her allies -- get kissed and petted and clung to by the crowd, but they get out safely enough, and once they hit 120 on the freeway, no one's chasing them. She'll visit soon.
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