The fighter, The Princess, and The Mercenary (DC x MaleReader)

Hidden in the Green

Isaac stopped at the edge of the park, where Ivy and Harley were supposed to be hiding. The coordinates checked out, exactly as Bruce had texted them, but Isaac still felt his feet sinking into moss and leaf mulch as his mind reeled in anticipation of something—a trap, a tail, maybe even something supernatural.

He let the moment wash over him: the sharp, loamy tang of disturbed earth, the thick fog rolling off the city's retching sewer-mouths, the sense of being watched by not one but many eyes. And still, in the deepest, most fragile chamber of his heart, he hoped that Lily, his little girl, was the source of that stare. But he'd long ago learned that hope, left unchecked, would unspool into disappointment far faster than any bullet.

"I know Bruce mentioned he'd call another leaguer," Isaac muttered, pretending to be annoyed rather than panicked. "But if they're going to be late, I'm not sure how much longer I can wait. Besides..." He drew a breath, then untucked his shirt. With a smooth practiced motion—a chill echo of the man he'd once been—he drew two Beretta 92FS Inox pistols from beneath his waistband. They gleamed a cold, surgical silver in the halo of streetlamp light, the barrels already smelling faintly of gun oil and the blood of a hundred previous jobs. Isaac had sworn, a decade ago, never to hold these guns again. But the world had a way of laughing at human vows.

He ejected each magazine, inspected for buffs and grit, then slammed them back with a satisfying click. The ritual was as comforting as it was damning. He'd given up this life for Lily; if she was lost now, then what was the point of pacifism, of mercy? Inside the windowless safehouse, behind some reinforced door, might be a reunion—or a massacre. He couldn't afford the luxury of optimism.

He wondered, for a bitter instant, if Lily would recognize him at all, if she had become so changed by her captivity (or whatever had happened to her) that all their shared history would evaporate in a second. Would she recoil at the sight of his newly hardened face, at the blue-gray eyes that had seen too much? Or would something break inside her, and she'd run to him as if they'd never been apart? His hands shook, barely, but he forced the tremor down, masking it with a dry, sarcastic smile.

He checked the sightlines, calculated the angles. "Guns over batarangs any day," he muttered, a private joke for an audience of none. "Sometimes the old ways are best." He holstered the pistols, slow and deliberate, and stepped into the semicircular gravel drive that led to the safehouse's reinforced basement entrance.

Three seconds later, his phone buzzed. He ignored it.

It was only when he heard a footstep behind him—delicate, measured, but alert—that Isaac pivoted, drawing one Beretta one-handed and raising it to eye level. His voice dropped into the calm register of a man used to firefights. "I strongly suggest you make yourself visible right now, or—"

"It's just me, Isaac," came a voice, warm and clear as spring water, with an accent he'd only ever heard in documentaries and on rare afternoons at the Met. "Batman said you would need assistance. Are you well?"

From the shadow of a flowering dogwood, she stepped forward: Wonder Woman, her armor gleaming even in the moonlight, her bearing as effortless as that of a seasoned general at a victory banquet.

Diana of Themyscira.

"Diana?" Isaac said, blinking twice to reset his mental image. "Bruce sent you?"

She nodded, her face unreadable, though her lips quirked at the corners. "So it seems. Bruce said only that you needed help with a... personal matter. He was not explicit."

Of course he wasn't, Isaac thought. That was Bruce's way: never let anyone have the full picture but himself. But the fact that Wonder Woman herself had been sent suggested that the matter was not just personal, but potentially catastrophic. Either that, or Batman trusted her above all others to restrain Isaac if things went sideways.