Homecoming (Complete)

Chapter Fourteen

The next few months blurred by—between moving into her new apartment, and working closely with her new project manager getting things caught up and back on track at the site, Alex was kept so busy that she barely noticed the passage of time. There were even some gaps in her memory, but she wasn't worried about it—it happened every now and then when she was extremely busy. The gaps would fill themselves in eventually, or the missing information would pop up for later review if needed. It was part of how she had been trained to survive—prioritize and focus on what was vital for the current situation, and shelve everything else for later.

What little free time Alex had was spent with Kate, Dinah, and Babs—the friendship between the four had become very deep, and, whenever possible, they were together. The trio had even convinced Alex to patrol with them as Shade, and she had reveled in the experience. She was so used to working alone, except in the odd instance like at the yacht basin, or the occasional mission she was able to go on for the Servare Foundation, that a regular team environment was new and exciting, sometimes exacerbating, and generally so much more efficient than dealing with things on her own. She also hadn't realized just how focused she had become on being a business woman—the excursions helped her work out some kinks and frustrations, and reminded her how good it felt to use her skills to benefit others.

The foursome had become a tight knit team that worked very well together (eventually, that is—to be honest, it had been a little shaky at the start, and Alex was fully aware that it was her fault—it took her longer than she expected to adapt to working as part of a regular team), and they had slipped into a natural flow and rhythm that had made them extremely effective. The crime level in Old Gotham had decreased dramatically, and there was a sense of hope among the area residents that hadn't been there in a long time.

There was, of course, a downside—in Alex's personal experience a downside was always inevitable. A local gang took exception to the hard hit on their business, and had begun mass recruiting in the area—and from surrounding areas—in order to build up their numbers in an effort to take back their territory. It wasn't an entirely unexpected side effect, and the foursome had been working hard to counteract it, but they couldn't figure out how the gang was filling its ranks so quickly—every piece of information the four had been able to scrape up indicated that the gang had at least tripled in size in less than a month, but no one knew how they were doing it. There was another problem too—outlying gangs were getting angry that the Old Gotham gang was recruiting in their territories, and, as a result, Old Gotham was brewing toward being ground zero for an all-out gang war.

"Rumor floating around right now is that there is about to be a big move down here. As early as tonight," Dinah told them when she caught up for their evening jaunt through the area surrounding the construction site.

"That rumor has been bouncing around for about a week," Kate said. "Hear anything about where or what? This is getting tedious. I'm tired of chasing shadows. We haven't stumbled across any new information, nor have we encountered much in the way of the usual crimes and hubabaloo that normally goes on around here." Kate snorted. "Things have been way too quiet this week. It's obvious something big is coming, but what?"

"Hubabaloo?" Babs asked with a grin. "That from your crime fighting manual? An official description? Goes hand in hand with 'kerfuffle' and 'shenanigans'?"

"Personally I'm a shenaniginator from way back so that one isn't part of my official descriptions," Kate grinned back.

"Shenaniginator?" Dinah cocked an eyebrow. "What the hell is that?"

"One who instigates shenanigans of course," Alex supplied seriously. "It's a lesser evil than creating a kerfuffle or hubabaloo so it doesn't technically belong in the manual."