Steady On Forward

Chapter 9

A/N:

Since it's referenced in this chapter, the comic pages referencing Dick's rape by Mirage in The New Teen Titans issue #84 are linked under 'External Link' at the bottom of the chapter (desktop users only, unfortunately) for those who didn't read/don't remember and want a refresher on what exactly happened.

—

"Shit shit shit shit, Batsy is not gonna like this," Hal muttered to himself. He bit his lip for a moment, before finally giving in and calling for Batman over the JL communicator. He really hoped this wouldn't be a case of killing the messenger.

"This had better be important, Green Lantern. I was in the middle of something," Bruce's growl came through the comm. Well damn, he already sounded pissed — although he kind of always sounded pissed. Whatever. There was never any winning with Batman.

"Trust me, you're gonna want to see this," Hal said. "Or...hear this."

"What is it? Send it over the JL network."

Hal took a deep breath, and pasted the link. "I just want to preface this by saying I wasn't looking for it, I was just chilling on Twitter, and I happen to follow a bunch of superhero tracker stuff and—"

"Just send the link, Lantern."

"Right." He pressed send.

He heard the moment Bruce opened it, the recording starting to autoplay with the now-familiar, breathy, "Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit," of the filmer, and the squeal of a protesting window being shoved open over top of the yelling from the rooftop. "—that feel, motherfucker? Stronger?! You thought I was stronger than that?"

Hal heard the tap, as Bruce paused the recording.

"Thank you for telling me, Green Lantern. I'll speak with the rest of the JL."

Bruce ended the transmission before he could respond.

Well. That could've gone worse.

◇◇◇

As soon as he hung up on Hal, Bruce was contacting Barbara. "Oracle," he demanded, sternly.

"If this is about the situation, I know, I know, I'm working on damage control right now," Barbara said.

"How did this happen?"

"I fucked up, I know. I wasn't paying much attention, I was working on the case with you, and on some cases with the Birds of Prey, and I thought the first few alerts were nothing. Do you know how many people post whole blogposts or Reddit threads of some small snippet of noise they caught out of their window that they think is a vigilante? I only caught on when it made its way to Twitter this morning and started gaining traction, and now it's been reposted so many times I can't completely wipe it. People will have downloaded it and all I can do is just keep doing damage control."

Bruce sighed. "What are we going to tell Nightwing?"

"He already knows, I talked to him and apologized this morning when I found out. I told him to expect that Vicki Vale has probably already gotten a recording — there's almost no chance there won't be some stupid article about it. I've deleted a lot of the tweets, but it's still kind of blowing up."

Bruce sighed again. "Don't worry about it. It's too far gone now. Could you tell the rest of the bats, if they don't already know? Red Robin is calling me right now, so I'm betting he knows."

"Fine. You tell Red Hood though. You didn't catch it either."

He paused. "If Nightwing knows, he knows too."