Nightwing: Sins of the Fathers

Just One Fix

Another day, another lovely Criminal Psychology lesson with creepy Professor Crane.

It was hard to focus on the lessons knowing that Vertigo was in Gotham – it had been a big deal in Star City, causing mass addiction and a lot of deaths. From what I understood, the centres that Oliver Queen funded to rehabilitate Vertigo addicts were still very much in operation. Rumour had it that the Green Arrow put the only supplier, a guy who aptly named himself Count Vertigo, out of business permanently.

"Today we will be focussing our attention on a very relevant topic, especially to our fair city of Gotham" Crane began "We will be studying the psychology and motivations of masked vigilantes."

Great, just what I needed, a classroom full of people theorising my motivations in life.

"I'm going to put you in pairs for this assignment" he continued "You and your partner, which I will select, have to research vigilantes and their decisions – and conclude whether or not you believe these acts to be necessary and justified or just a blatant disregard for our laws and rules. I'll be very interested to see people's conclusions."

I'd only ever seen Crane smile when he was causing misery to someone, which meant he was about to do something evil. Classroom evil anyway, not Joker evil.

"So your partnerships are as follows..." Crane began to run off a list of names, it was crazy how many names I didn't recognise – I needed to socialise more "...Emily Briggs, your partner will be Tyreese Anderson" Emily looked at me and rolled her eyes, Crane knew that Emily and Tyreese were from entirely different social groups and had no interest in spending time together – I could see where this list was going.

"...Dick Grayson" Finally "You'll be partnered with Melissa Daggett" I saw him smirk again, Melissa was the girl who'd had to patronisingly explain what I'd missed during my nap in Crane's previous lecture - this was embarrassing, the bastard.

Melissa turned her head to look at me, she'd purposely avoided making eye contact with me until that point, she didn't seem impressed. What made matters worse was that she was still stunningly beautiful, even more so than I remembered from the day before. This was shaping up to be a fantastic week.

***

Once class was over I made my way back to my apartment, Emily had caught up with me outside of class to tease me about my new 'study buddy' as she so humorously put it.

As much as I'd have liked to dwell on the awkwardness of my predicament like a rational human being, I had superheroey type stuff to do - I called Barbara on the way home to get her assistance on the Vertigo situation.

"Hey, Dick – what's up?" She said.

"I need you to come over tonight if you can, I could use your help," I explained.

"Is it important? Like, super important?"

"I'd say so... Depends if your other plans are super important."

"I have a date" I had to pause for a second, Barb and I dated for quite a while two separate times and I still wasn't comfortable talking to her about relationship-style things.

"Oh... in that case can I just send a sample to the Batcave for you to analyse?" I wasn't about to act like what she'd said bothered me, even though it did.

"Sure, no problem," She said without hesitation. It seemed to me that we were in very different places, I might have been reluctant to tell her about someone I was dating - I'm relatively sure we'd never even talked about Kori, who was my only other truly serious relationship.

"Alright, I'll send it over later, have a good date," I said, sounding almost sincere.

"Thanks, see you later," She said, hanging up the phone. As she wasn't coming over to help me out, it looked as if I was getting an early night.