Archive of Our Own ^beta

It goes like this.

There was a girl. There was the Joker. And there was the woman who jumped between them.

Look, this is important. Barbara believes in the importance of word choice. Articles- ‘the’ indicates somebody specific, something present and close. ‘A’ means it could have been anyone. Any girl. Any boy. A person who was standing unwittingly in front of a madman and the hero who saved them.

She did. Save them. All she paid for it was the price of a bullet. 

(It could have been any bullet.)

Practicality has always been this woman’s roots. She spent her childhood watching her father manage a slow and corrupt system. Police arresting those who just need a little help, working with gangs, taking bribes- tiny blown out forms of injustice. The world presented itself as a problem to her and her quick, sharp mind picked up the pieces and put things together. 

The solution? Cut out the middleman.

So Barbara Gordan becomes a hero at fourteen, and officially Batgirl at fifteen, and she does good. She wants to help. She wants to be someone capable of helping. She wants so many things. Teenagers tend to do that. To want. This isn’t a bad thing. Just a life thing.

Teenagers: she’s sixteen and Robin is fourteen and they share rooftops on cold Gotham nights. The concrete scrapes against the soles of her boots and both of their shoulders are relaxed, taking a breather after stopping a mugging turning for the worst. 

“What are you gonna do when you graduate from high school?” Dick asks, because he’s thinking about it, too, the asshole who skips two grades and is a junior before his voice finishes dropping. 

The words of a child on a rooftop aren’t actually going to determine her future, but Barbara takes the time to think about it, to turn various responses over in her mind. Plans don’t often survive first contact with the enemy, but they often give you a place to start.

“I want to keep helping people,” she says, rocks her feet so they knock against the edge of the building. “I don’t know. Maybe a lawyer?”

Robin hums, considering.  He slowly lowers himself out of a handstand to sit besides her. “You’d be good at it,” he offers after a second, and she lightly kicks against his shin in thanks. A few buildings away, someone has turned on the radio, even though it's one in the morning. The faint notes reach them like a melody the world has half-forgot.

“Oh!” he says, already moving to stand up. He’s been on his butt for less than three seconds.“I love this song!”  

Which is how Barbara Gordan spends three minutes dancing to a song she can barely hear, laughing and rolling her eyes. It’s a rather good way to spend an evening. Her legs are strong and they carry her, and when it’s over she runs off a rooftop and swings into the night.

Skip forwards, skip forwards, and Barbara is twenty-three. It will bother her for the longest time, for no consequential reason, that she lost her legs in that strange, odd number. Twenty-three feels like such an in-between time, where things are supposed to become clearer as you move on to twenty-four, become less of a college student and more of a full-on adult. She thought she was supposed to be well on her way to figuring things out.

Instead she wakes up in a hospital room and she can’t feel her legs. She had saved someone, she had done good, and now she’s never going to walk again. Karma, or the lack of it, can be a real bitch.

Little practicalities. Barbara has always been practical. She knew when she started this that she would one day have to stop being Batgirl. Possibly dying in the line of duty, yes ( god, Jason, Jason), but also just because nothing can be permanent. Bodies just aren’t made to last forever, especially in the face of such a demanding nightly extracurriculars. Bones can only be broken so many times before they stop getting stronger. She knows this. She knew this, had made plans for when the day came for her to retire.

Plans. Plans. The enemy was a bullet (it could have been any bullet). Those plans did not survive first contact.

No. No. The enemy had been the man with wild hair cheaply dyed and eyes wide enough to swallow you whole. It would be easy to call him a monster, but the Joker is a man and Barbara believes in correctly labelling things. She believes in the power of defining precisely the person who had almost killed her because she had stopped him from murdering someone else.

Almost, being the key word, because she wakes up.

It’s a hospital room, and a fancy private suite. There are curtains on the window, billowing. There are bushels of flowers by her bed. Her father sits beside her with more lines on his face than she’s ever seen, and the first thing he says is, “I’m so sorry, Barbara.”

There are things you just know. The pieces slot into place and you just know with cold hard certainty that something has been broken that cannot be fixed. She can’t feel her legs, can’t twitch her toes, and it’s like taking a punch from Bane, the knowledge that something has ended.

Barbara always knew that Batgirl couldn’t last forever. She just never thought it would be taken from her so soon. Not like this. Never like this. Even minds as clever and sharp as hers don’t tend to think about losing the ability to use your limbs, not when you’re young and still feel shades of invincibility. Not when you still have so much to do. 

“Dad,” she croaks, and he leans over and hugs her like she’s still eight years old and has just scabbed her knee. Barbara hides her tears into his rumpled sweater and breathes and breathes and breathes.

First things, and last things. The last step Barbara ever took was to get in between a girl and the Joker. The first thing she said after the surgery was a call for her dad. It was her first word when she was a toddler, too.

First things, and last things. The first thing Bruce says to her in a midnight visit is also an apology. It’s the first thing a lot of people say to her. Condolences for something taken, something gone, and Barbara won’t think about it for a while because she’s feeling rather sorry for herself, too.

Except for this: Dick Grayson bursts into the room the minute she’s cleared for visitors outside of immediate family. He looks like a mess, eyes red and blotchy and hair disarray. He looks like a twenty one year old kid who’s just dropped out of college. A month ago they had gone drinking on his birthday, and his foot had become entwined with hers as they sat on the bar stools and laughed and laughed and laughed.

She won’t feel that ever again. Her feet against his feet, a pair of sensible heels against his sneakers. The warmth of their bare legs brushing.

He offers no condolences. He says, voice breaking with relief, “Babs, you’re alive. You’re alive.”  

First things, and last things. The weird thing about things that end is that there is often a beginning to follow it. The weird thing about losing her legs is that she still has a set of lungs to breathe with, a heart that still beats, and a mind that still thinks. The weird thing about all the apologies she’s getting is that she’s still here when she very well could not have been.

When Dick Grayson hugs her she hugs back. She squeezes hard, despite the strange angle. She closes her eyes, looks at the problem, and starts to put pieces together.

Here’s the thing, Barbara’s roots are grown in all things practical and being in a chair just… isn’t. Not in this world. Not in this society.

Counters are too high. Fridges with freezers on top make the frozen section unreachable. Elevators break. Ramps are too steep or not well maintained. Tight corners are evil. She goes to a public restroom and has to reach to get to the sink. She attends lectures and classes and has to tell people, firmly, repeatedly, that she can get to where she needs by herself. She can’t drive anymore. The bus system is shit. The sidewalks are crowded with people and those people are Gothamites, hard and calloused folk who won’t always clear a path for her. 

Her job fires her, not for any particular given reason but certainly for one particular reason. She’s been reading up on disability rights and aids and it’s basically the bare minimum, if that. She has to figure out how to use the bathroom again, how to find a comfortable position to sleep at night, and how to get from her wheelchair to her couch. She can’t visit her dad easily any more because he lives in a tiny little house with stairs and narrow hallways and it’s impossible to get around. She can’t get her own groceries without asking for help.

Practicalities. Definition: things that are practical. 

This isn't.

People ask her, “How’d you get hurt?”

Barbara, when she does reply at all, says, “I got in the way of a bullet.”

It’s about agency. It’s about claiming things as hers. It feels better than saying I got shot because I got in the way implies she made a choice about what happened. 

She did. This was her choice. Not her choice in outcome, maybe, but still a choice. There was a girl and there was the Joker and there was the woman who got between them. There was a bullet. (It could have been any bullet.) It lodged itself into her spine and it knocked her out of the field for life.

Wheelchairs aren’t practical, but they’re more practical than dragging herself around on her belly. The bright side doesn't feel too bright, these days.

Barbara sits in her new apartment and traces the collection of scars on her legs. They’re already pretty atrophied, three months in. It was to be expected, of course, but it’s strange to see them slim and soft and pale. Her favourite move had been to knock people out with her kicks, once. The muscles had been rock hard.

She leans her head back against the arm of the couch and closes her eyes. Breathes, breathes.

“What are you going to do next?” Dick is lounging on one of her second couch, staring up at the ceiling and not at her. He is tap, tap, tapping his fingers against his forearms, his legs consciously still. She’s not sure of his reasoning for that. She’s not sure she wants to know, but she’s too tired to call him out.

He’s been staying with her in the specifically customised apartment Bruce had bought for her, helping her get settled in. Her dad had offered, but it had seemed less embarrassing for her quasi-boyfriend to be the one to help her re-figure out basic life skills like how do you put on pants rather than the man who raised her. Jim Gordon does not need to see his daughter holding back frustrated tears in only a pair of boxers and a hoodie with a pair of sweatpants thrown halfway across the room.

(He’s staying with her because her dad’s first response had been I’m so sorry and Dick’s first response had been Babs, you’re alive. But that’s neither here nor there.)

She shrugs. Works her shoulder up and then down. Her arms ache from wheeling around so much, and she’s got blisters between her pointer fingers and her thumbs. She doesn’t really want to talk about it. She doesn’t want to think.

Her life is not a tragedy. She refuses to let it be a tragedy. But so much of her is fire and brimstone and exhaustion. God, she is trying to figure out how to do things she hasn’t had to think consciously about since she was a toddler. She is a grown fucking woman. There is anger and she is vindicated about it. Something was taken from her. It was a choice and it was her choice but it wouldn’t have been one she’d have to make if this world was not full of terrible human beings who point guns at children and laugh.

Dick pokes her cheek and smiles when she looks up at him, registering that he’s moved. It’s a lopsided kind of grin, tired around the corners of his eyes, but mostly real. “Mind if I sit with you?”

“Sure.”

So she levers herself upright, he sits down, and she manually shifts her legs to make room for his own. Leans back against his chest and he hums into his hair. His feets intertwine with hers and she can’t feel them. She thinks about never being able to dance with this man again and squeezes her eyes so tightly shut the world blooms red under her eyelids.

Then she lets it go. Opens her eyes and blinks away the frizzies. They’re both here and still breathing. 

She stares at the fancy custom made wheelchair to her right, another gift from Bruce in his awkward way of showing he cares, even in the midst of grief. Dick shifts against her, and maybe makes a face that she can’t see. There are tiny yellow detailings on the handles. Flowers, she thinks.

Turning her face away, she tucks her nose against his collarbone. Inhales the scent of clean sweat and deodorant. In a few hours she’ll insist he goes out and patrol and he’ll reluctantly obey. She’ll be left behind and will try very hard to not be bitter about it. 

She’s ventured outside of her apartment to meet up with some college friends. She hasn’t seen them in a while, not since the hospital room. They’re not close, or anything, because Barbara got through college with her mind half in the rooftops and it’s hard to deeply and meaningfully befriend people when they can’t know or even suspect you of being a midnight vigilante. Still, friends were friends, and Barbara was getting sick of loneliness, of being stagnant.

Her dad drops her off, because Dick has stopped staying with her by her request. It’s a quiet ride, but Dad helps her figure out getting in and out of her chair for the ride. Drives off with a kiss to her forehead and a wave. She waves back, heads forward and-

There are steps on the way up to the cafe.

She blinks. Frowns. Barbara had double checked to make sure this place was wheelchair accessible. She had looked it up. 

Flagging down a server is awkward and a bit of an annoyance, though she tries to keep the latter feeling tucked deep down and out of the way. It’s not the server’s fault.

“Hey,” she says. “Your website says your cafe is wheelchair accessible?”

The server wipes sweat out of her eyes, pushes her hair back and cocks out her hip to balance her tray on it. There are bags under her eyes, hidden partially by makeup. “There’s another entrance, in the back. You’ll have to go around the block real quick.”

Then a customer calls over from one of the outside tables. The server closes her eyes, takes one deep breath, and opens her eyes with a bright, fake smile. “I hope you have a nice day!”

And then she’s gone.

Barbara closes her own eyes. Taps her phone against her head and wishes it was a wall. Wishes, almost, that it would hurt. Breathes.

There is no feasible way for her to ‘go around the block real quick.’

Tap, tap, tap, and she wants to yell. Or maybe cry. Or maybe just sleep because all too suddenly she is exhausted. Instead she huffs another irritated breath and turns on her phone and opens her messages. 

sorry guys i don’t think i’m gonna make this one. maybe next time?

There’s a selection of quiet dings as her college friends text back, but she’s not in a mood to check them so she doesn’t. Just rolls slightly more out of the way and into the shade. Calls a familiar number.

Dick Grayson picks up on the second ring. Bless him and his golden retriever ways, even though the whole reason she had booted him out of her apartment two weeks ago is because of his hovering.

“Hey,” she murmurs, taps the wheel of her chair with her free hand. “Mind giving me a ride?”

“Sure,” he says back, easy and conversational. “Are you at your apartment?”

“No, no- I’m at a cafe.”

She rattles off the address. Waits. Enjoys the sun on her face even though she hasn’t put any sunscreen on and is at imminent risk of burning. Rubs her fingers through a dog’s fur after it comes by to sniff her chair while the owner stands nearby, unbothered. He must get lots of people asking if they can pet. It’s a very cute dog.

Fifteen minutes later, Dick Grayson shows up. He’s been staying in Gotham because he wants to be nearby, just in case. Barbara lets him help her into the passenger seat. Watches him carefully fold and stow her chair. 

“Where to?” he asks.

She thinks about returning to her apartment with no small amount of dread. Decides against it. “Let’s go to the manor.”

If he’s surprised, he doesn’t say anything, even though she hasn’t visited since she first lost the use of her legs. The manor’s old and has a lot of floors and stairs, which isn’t great. Also, the manor was the base of the Bat vigilante operations. Going there just felt like it would be a reminder of all the things she couldn’t do anymore: stairs, Batgirl, casual driving. No amount of willpower or bravery or strength would make any of those possible again, and she's come to terms with it. She still hadn’t wanted to deal with it.

But it’s familiar, which means she knows what to suspect from it. 

Except-

Except that the stairs leading up to the front door have been replaced by a slowly sloping pathway. Except that there’s a newly included elevator waiting for her inside, and some newly refurbished bathrooms. Barbara is not going to cry about the construction that had been happening in the Manor behind her back, but she does lean her head a bit on Dick’s hip. He grins and swipes some stray hairs behind her ear.

There’s an elevator down to the batcave, too. 

“Partially for me,” Alfred says, eyes twinkling. “These old joints don’t quite take to the stairs like they used to.”

Barbara laughs. It’s not exceptionally funny but it is humorous, and it feels good to laugh about elevators rather than grind her teeth about them, or lament for the days when she could have quickly, easily dashed up some stairs. 

There’s a new, tiny Robin who looks at her with stars in his eyes, still. “You’re Batgirl!” he cries, and it’s been only a few months since someone called her that but it makes her sit straighter in her seat. Makes her grin. Bruce doesn’t smile from where he’s seated at the computer, but he doesn't do much of anything but mourn and rage these days.

Tim shakes her hand very properly. Jason would have made a crude gesture and thrown in a grin, but she’s not thinking about that now. There are only so many griefs she can hold inside of her at a time. She’s not Bruce. She has to let things go. She has to move forwards.

That night, she manages coms and security feeds. 

It’s the first time she’s not felt restless since she got between a girl and a bullet. She’s focused. Her thoughts are clear and concrete. She draws up feeds, answers questions, and directs patrol routes. She is involved. She is helping. She is doing good.

It is its very own adrenaline high. She wonders if Alfred had let her take his usual place for this specific reason. To get her back into the game and shake off the listlessness she's been carrying around with her like a weight. Or maybe he really did need to go clean.

Could be both. 

(There are things you just know. The pieces slot into place  and there’s this vibrating kind of warmth in your chest. Barbara sits there, stretches her arms above her head, and knows that something has begun.)

“You were amazing,” Dick says when he gets back, grinning like a loon and covered in sweat and grime and Gotham smog. She lets him kiss her cheek because he’s back in her good book, and then swipes at the grey grimy imprint he leaves behind with an alcohol wipe.

Tim just stares and stares and stares at her with unrestrained awe until she lets him know she’s caught him looking. Then he flushes bright red, lets loose a little eep noise, and scurries off to the showers.

“Cute kid,” she says, and means it even as it aches.

Batman grunts.

They’re arguing, and she’s not sure when they started and she’s not sure when they’ll stop. Dick sits before her, hands tugging at his hair. He’s not yelling but his tone has been bitten off for the last ten minutes and clipped for the five before that.

Barbara isn’t doing much better.

The problem is that people treat her like she’s so goddamn fragile. It’s fair, because her spine has been broken, but it’s also not. Barbara was Batgirl who took down men three times her size on the regular. Barbara has fought metahumans, wrangled with giant vines, and thrown herself into the fray against gunmen who outnumber her four to one. She is still the person who did that. She’s just sitting down.

“I don’t need you to be my prince charming,” she says, and she means it. There is something cold and tight at the base of her spine and it feels like a bullet. “I can slay my own dragons. I don’t need you to treat me like I can’t help myself.”

“I know you’re perfectly capable. I just- I’m worried about you. I want to be there for you.” His eyes seem so genuine and Barbara wants to scream but they’re both grown ups who can talk about things mostly civil. They can.

“You can be there for me by letting me be the one to figure out when and if I need help! It’s not up to you, Dick!” His name sounds like less of a name and more of an insult on her tongue. “I’ve already lost the use of my fucking legs. The least you could do is let me figure out how to be my own person with my own autonomy and my own life. I can’t- I can’t just be attached to you, or you attached to me. It’s not gonna work.”

It's not about being useful for other people. Barbara has never based her self worth on things like that, though she knows Dick has. 

It's just- it's about finding a new sense of practicality. It's about knowing she can reach out and grab a hand if she needs it, but being allowed to scale her own mountains. It's about people being people. It's about wanting to do things for herself.

Dick pinches his nose. Breathes deep and rocks a little on her couch. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Babs, you’re right.”

She deflates. They sit, quietly. The whole living room is cast with blue light from the glow of the computer screens she’s been slowly collecting and amplifying, making them suit her needs. She’s been working on her hacking and surveillance. There’s still so much to do. The light brings out the bags under Dick’s eyes when he looks up at her.

Not for the first time, she wishes she could still pace.  

First things and last things. The first time they had fought had been in his bedroom, trying to figure out what music they should play after she had soundly beaten him at Mario Kart. The last time they had fought, before the bullet, before the end that was a beginning, she had called him clingy and he had called her controlling. He cried on her couch for three hours straight after Jason’s funeral, speaking about regrets. He’s not crying now but he’s still speaking these quiet apologies into the closed air.  

Things change and they don’t.

“We’ll figure this out,” she says, tired, and he nods.

They always do.

Barbara has been running coms every night for a month from the comforting space of her own apartment when Bruce finally asks for her to come up with a name to call her when they’re out patrolling. It’s getting confusing calling her Agent B, because the nickname for that ends up being B, and that’s what the boys call Batman in the field the grand majority of the time.

She goes with Oracle. It feels fitting, somehow, and Barbara is a woman who believes in correctly labelling things. She’s no longer Batgirl, out on the streets. She’s tucked up in her mysterious cavern, weaving webs of intel together and revealing the reality of what is and was and will be.

During the day, she works as a librarian, helps kids figure out reading and organises books for easy reshelving. During the evening, Batman sends Robin over so that she can teach coding skills. Tim is very shy and very nervous right up to the point he isn’t, which is when he dishes out the snark and the sass and seems to revel in any laugh or hair ruffle he can pull from her.

She and Dick are tentative around each other until they naturally, absentmindedly, fall back into the rhythms of their decade long friendship. It’s a strange thing to think about, time, but she rolls with it. 

Three times a week, she heads over to Wayne Manor. Sometimes she takes a bus, sometimes she calls for someone to pick her up and drop her off. Sometimes she still misses the convenience of being able to drive herself to and fro as she pleased.

They start working on accommodations. 

There are hand-operated vehicles on the market , and she looks into them, considering. She works with Alfred to modify her wheelchair into something that can contain weapons and protective measures, so it’s sturdy enough to take a hit. She works with Dick to figure out how to fight again without the use of her legs. How to rely on her developed core and arm strength, which is better than ever. How to manoeuvre something while she’s sitting on it.

They watch a lot of youtube videos on the paralympic Olympics, analyse movements and manoeuvres. Try stuff out to see if it works or not. The first time she manages to disarm Dick, they high five with great enthusiasm and cheer and then falter, feeling like kids again. Then they laugh. 

It’s nostalgic.

You have to live in your own skin, is the thing. The sun rises and the sun sets and the whole wide world turns round, and at the end of it all, this is her flesh and her bone. She cannot trade it with the body of another. She cannot change who she is, and being disabled is a part of that. Not all of it, certainly, but a part.

In another life a bullet fired and missed. In another life Barbara grew from twenty-three into twenty-four still walking. In another life Barbara grew into an entirely different human being. But in another life, too, she never picked up a mask. In another life she got more into linguistics than coding. There are a thousand lives that could have been and will never be hers.

Experiences shape you, is the thing. Life doesn't leave anyone untouched. That's why we make plans.

Time. It’s just time and it’s just life. Tim grows up, in spits and spurts and starts. Bruce starts smiling again, smaller than before but also real. Stephanie Brown enters the picture, edging into the outskirts of all of their lives with a lot of confidence and a lot to prove. Barbara contemplates old costumes and new legacies. Things that end so that something else can begin. 

Jason comes back, but angrier and half-mad. Barbara wishes she could talk with him. Wishes she could hold his hand and hug him tight and tell him, I know, I know, I know- the Joker has taken from me, too. 

There are days she doesn’t get out of bed. There are days where she gets angry all over again. There are days when she looks at her legs and they seem alien to her, limp and small and wrong.

But only occasionally. Babara has too much life left to live to spend all of it contemplating regrets and injustices. She’s too practical a person to not want to do something with what she has. She can still do good. It’s enough because she makes it enough. Because this is who she is and it seems pointless to regret it.

Her existence does not deserve apologies. It is not second rate. She is here. She is not lost or gone or broken. 

(She wishes she could tell Jason, Your grief can sit next to my grief and together we’ll be okay. Nothing is permanent, not even pain. We are here and alive and this is something to be called wondrous.)

They are in the kitchen, and Dick has driven down from Bludhaven for a visit. The windows are open wide and he’s sitting on a dining chair with his legs crossed, cutting onions beside her. She’s got her phone out, playing music from a random playlist, the speakers in the corners of the room amplifying and clarifying the sound.

“Oh,” Dick says, already smiling, “I love this song.”

He stands up, offers her his hand. She takes it uncertainly and they try to dance.

Dancing in a wheelchair isn’t very practical, it turns out. But Barbara thinks of the awkward shufflings of two teenagers not grown and settles herself with the knowledge that any kind of dancing probably isn’t the most practical of things. That’s not the point of it. 

So they dance. It’s nothing like it was, once, and it’s yet another thing to relearn. Their first attempt is an awkward, stumbling thing where neither of them knows where to put their hands. It has them both chuckling to fill the silence, out of beat with the music, and it gets bad enough that Dick hums and pulls out his own phone, pulling up youtube so they can watch what others do and learn from them. 

(Plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy, but they often give you a place to start.) 

(This is her, starting, again and again and again. Every day begins and ends and throws at you something new.)

It goes much better the second time around, and even better the third. One melody after another and they start to sort things out. Dick laughs, a warm chuckle, and she beams up at him. Pulls him down to give him a kiss. 

(There was a woman. There was a man. There was love between them. It could have been anyone but it’s them. It’s them. ) 

It’s about the spins and the bends of it, it’s about making something new out of something that is. A Taylor Swift song comes on and Dick sings along off-key, carefully dipping her and her chair as he does. They have garlic bread in the oven and that will probably be a bit burnt, but she can’t bring herself to mind.

She grabs her phone and fiddles with it, puts on something slow. Dick smiles his lopsided grin. She thinks, absentmindedly, What a strange and wonderful thing, love. 

They’re alive, and that’s a strange and wonderful thing, too. Nothing practical about it.

Barbara Gordon, reaching out to pull her boyfriend closer, finds she doesn’t mind.