conflict and compromise / barbara gordon

favour

This was a brief respite, she thought, pausing on the rooftop adjacent to the Clocktower to take a drink. This entire week had been just as bad as Bruce had predicted, and worse. The benching, for lack of a better word, of most of the Batfamily roster had left them spread thinly across the city, not to mention how the general populace didn't seem to trust them anymore. She'd seen some civilians check jackets, jumpers and coats after being rescued as if searching for trackers, not unwarranted, she thought, but still unhelpful. The regular roster of villains also seemed to have noticed the thinning of vigilantes, with riskier and riskier crimes being committed each night. 

Barbara's lamenting was broken by an ominous beeping coming through her earpiece, four pulses and then a pause, the signal for a bomb threat. She immediately joined the main communication channel and started routing her way towards the closest red dot on the map presented.

"Batgirl reporting, currently making my way to One Gotham Center." 

"Hello Batgirl, Bluebird reporting, making my way over to the Water District Tunnel now."

"Spoiler and Orphan on our way to the Financial District."

"Huntress at Miller Harbour."

Barbara tuned out the call of her fellow heroes, missing the commanding tone of Bruce, who had immersed himself in League activities to stay busy. Landing on an outcrop of the skyscraper she spotted a dumpster with a hastily spray-painted Knights of the Sun symbol. It was obvious she thought, why the Knights of the Sun would take this shot at them while trust in the Batfamily was lowered. Normally she would have thought about it deeply, but with the number of threats she'd dealt with in that week alone, she just resolved to defuse the bomb and move on to the next threat of the night. 

Landing in the alleyway she opened the dumpster to see messily ordered carboys of some sort of liquid connected to an archaic timer. A few seconds and it was done, and she could tune back into the comms channel. She pulled up the map on her cowl's mask and skimmed the location of the other her- 

Her heart froze, how could she have missed it?

Lying on the map, was a little red dot, pulsating as if teasing her, and it was right underneath the Clocktower.

She launched her grappling hook across the street, through the light summer rain and neon signs of the corporate building, no longer caring if people saw her or not. No more somersaults or twists mid-air that pumped her with adrenaline, she ran and jumped from rooftop to rooftop with an almost savage desperation. She felt the air beat upon the lower half of her face with a light sting, narrowing her eyes she focused ahead on the illuminated clocktower. With a glide she landed on the roof of the building next to the Clocktower, it was a painful landing, one that she would inevitably regret later, but now wasn't the time to worry about it. If her memory was right, and it most definitely was, now was around the time that the last bomb would have went off, which meant she had just a few seconds to defuse this one. She threw herself off the edge of the building, slowing her descent with her cape, just in time to see a figure with foxlike ears stand up, looking almost proudly down at a defused bomb.

♡♡♡

"Wenlock, get up," Oracle's voice came out of all the speakers in her bedroom.

Wenlock merely rolled over, muttering before wiggling deeper under the covers.

"UP."

She groaned, warbling out a faint, "What is it?"

"Thought you might care about this," Oracle pulled up a map on Wenlock's phone, it was tracking all of the Batfamily, "Ripped this from Barbara's system, red dots are bombs."