DC Elseworlds 1. Prologue

**ENDANGERED SPECIES  
**  
by Lydia Hunter  
  
  
  


Author's Notes: _Welcome to Earth-A, my own streamlined version of the DCU. In this universe there are far fewer superheroes than the DCU proper, and the ones that do exist age and change at a normal rate, reminiscent of the pre-Crisis Earth-2. The main difference is the lack of any sort of Justice League on Earth-A, and the complete absence of metagenes. (And the heroes have this odd little habit of aging one year for every year that passes...imagine that!) This particular Green Arrow is very much based on Mike Grell's characterization from "The Longbow Hunters". Both Black Canarys, mother and daughter, owe their background to the biographical sketch at the end of the first "Birds of Prey" one-shot, including the use of the name "Diana" rather than "Dinah, Sr.". It seemed a lot more expedient to go along with that version, though if I ever write a story featuring Black Canary I and Wonder Woman I'm screwed. Speedy's background is significantly changed; the character is sort of an amalgamation of Roy Harper and Connor Hawke. Batman, however, is precisely the same continuity as my BTAS stories._   
  
  


PROLOGUE

  
  


Gotham City,   
February, 1972

She was terrified.

In the last seven years she'd faced mobsters, muggers, psychotics...the worst the mean streets of Gotham City had to offer. And not once in all that time had she ever felt as afraid as this. Before, she'd only had herself to worry about. There were others she'd have been willing to give her life for, the innocents she'd sworn to protect, but their lives were all but meaningless in comparison to what she faced this time.

Her footsteps echoed hollowly through the warehouse and she cursed herself, not for the first time, for the vanity that made her choose high-heeled boots to go with her costume. She could hear her own heartbeat, too, and hoped it wasn't audible to whoever else might be around. 

Suddenly another sound cut through the stillness, and the woman almost sobbed with relief. A high, childish voice raised in song -- one of those silly advertising jingles from television. Oh, God, she'd never complain about those things again! The singing seemed to be coming from the warehouse office. Light spilled from the partially open door, providing virtually the only illumination to be found in the cavernous building. 

Cautiously, the woman who called herself Black Canary crept forward, towards the light and the sound of her daughter's voice. When she was close enough, she peered around one of the stacks of crates, hoping for a better view. It wasn't unobstructed, but she managed to see the most important thing; her almost three-year-old daughter had her back to the door, singing to herself and playing with a pair of fashion dolls that her kidnappers had thoughtfully provided. She was okay! 

Unfortunately, that knowledge was enough to override all sense of caution, maternal instinct triumphing over any kind of rational thought, and Black Canary stepped out into the open. Almost immediately, a large man in a dark suit stepped in front of her, staring down at her silently as he blocked her way. His companion moved even more quietly, but she could feel his presence behind her.

The crimefighter stood her ground, determined not to move until they did. The one in front didn't seem to be expecting that, and stood staring at her for a long moment, as if trying to decide what to do about her. 

"Boss has been waitin' for you, Canary," he informed her succinctly. 

She gestured toward the office, signalling her willingness to accompany him. With one suspicious glance at their prisoner, the man turned his back on her and started to walk away. "Watch her, Murphy," he ordered his associate.

Black Canary didn't move. Murphy stepped closer and shoved his gun in her back, urging her forward. She took one step forward, then angled sideways and grabbed his sleeve with her left hand. The right hand reached up for his collar, and Murphy felt himself being lifted off the ground as the much smaller crimefighter bent her hips, shifting her weight enough to propel him over her shoulder and straight into his unsuspecting colleague. His gun went flying off to the side. Unwilling to leave it long enough for the two to sort out their tangled limbs, she made a beeline for it. She stooped...and then straightened again, head tilted upwards at an acute angle to avoid the sharp blade pressing against her throat.

Mentally she ran through her catalogue of defensive maneuvers. There were at least three she could think of that _might_ get her out of this situation, but it was a dangerous gamble at best; with her child less than five feet away, she didn't dare take the risk. Praying the little girl wouldn't be too frightened by what was happening, she went along peacefully when he ordered her to move.

"You were right, boss. She came for her kid just like you said," the man with the knife said as he shoved her into the office.

The child looked up from her toys and jumped to her feet when she saw her mother. Then, seeing the knife, her big blue eyes opened wide and she stopped dead.

"Dinah, stay right there," her mother ordered in a low, firm voice. "Don't move a muscle."

"Mommy?" the little girl questioned fearfully.

"Mommy will be just fine," she told her daughter, hoping she managed to sound reassuring. "Just stay still. Everything will be just fine. You're safe now," she lied.

The thug with the knife at her throat laughed. His boss looked up from his account books with a frown of disapproval. "Hey, stupid," he scolded. "Don't you know it's rude to threaten a kid's mother with a knife right in front of her? You're probably traumatizing the little thing." The henchman hesitated, and his employer shook his head. "That means put it away, Carson. And then go stand by the door. I gotta have a little talk with our guest, here. Have a seat, Mrs. Lance."

Black Canary sat down in the hard wooden chair and nodded to her daughter, who wasted no time in scooting across the room to the relative safety of her mother's lap. The costumed woman cuddled her close against the warmth of her body, stroking her dark curls comfortingly while she glared at the man across the desk.

Samuel G. Ballard, known variously as Soapy Sam, Sleazy Sam, and, in his younger days, Ballsy Ballard, had been Gotham's most powerful mob boss since the mid-fifties. Not many people dared stand against him, and the ones who dared generally didn't survive long, as a rule. It didn't bother him unduly to know that his city was one of the few in the country that had its own personal guardian angel, one of the so-called "Mystery Men" that had plagued crime-ridden areas for the last thirty years or so. Especially since in this case, the Mystery "Man" was a woman in a short skirt and fishnets, and therefore even less of a threat to his way of life. Or so he'd believed.

"So," he said affably, resting his clutched hands in front of him on the enormous desk. "You've been giving us quite a bit of trouble over the last few years, Canary. I wouldn't have thought it very likely from a little slip of a girl like you. Then again, I ran up against your dad a few times. He gave me enough trouble in his day, too. Everybody knew Drake was one of the few honest cops in the city. Pain in the rump, if you wanna know the truth. You take after him, obviously."

She smiled slightly. "Thank you."

"It's not a compliment, woman! Who do you think you're playin' with here, one of those two-bit hoodlums off the street? I got a multi-million dollar empire here, stretching halfway around the world."

"I know you do."

Ballard narrowed his eyes. "That's what I hear. We underestimated you big time. How much info have you got on my operation?"

"You honestly don't have any idea, do you, Soapy?" she asked smugly.

"Too much to be of comfort, that's all I know," he admitted. "Too much for your own damn good."

She nodded. "Oh, more than that, Sam, more than that. You think I've been trouble for you before? Well, let me tell you, you can't even _imagine_ the kind of trouble I can cause if you kill me, or if you touch one hair on my daughter's head, ever again. I don't have quite all the names, or all your trade routes, but I believe I've got most of them. Enough to bring down your whole organization."

Evidently he believed it, as well. He stared across at her for several moments, deep in thought. Normally, he'd just eliminate her. He flinched at the idea of killing women, but not so much he couldn't actually do it. However, the data she'd managed to accumulate was in her favour. Sure, she'd probably started with information her father had left behind, but it was phenomenal how much she'd managed to glean without them ever paying much attention at all to the little crimefighter. From now on he was going to take these costumed lunatics a little more seriously.

However, all he said to her was, "Well, little bird, we seem to have reached something of a stalemate. You've got all that information on me...but you don't dare use it, do you? Pretty little girl you've got there," he added meaningfully.

"If you even _think_ of doing anything to hurt her --" Black Canary began. Her eyes blazed.

Ballard waved away her threats. "Why would I wanna hurt an innocent child?" he questioned. "Children are a precious resource. Not everybody's lucky enough to be able to have them, you know. My daughter, for one." He left off, the implicit threat hanging in the air between them.

"And if I _don't_ use the information I have? If I just let your organization go on and on, destroying more and more lives? Then what?"

"Then, your daughter gets to grow up safe and sound in her own home. Your little family oughtta have a charmed life, with my boys looking out for you. Not every crimefighter can brag about that, huh?"

Sickened, she said nothing. What choice was there, really?

"So, we got ourselves a deal? I don't move against you, you don't move against me? Then why don't you run on home where you belong, Mrs. Lance? It's probably way past little Dinah's bedtime."

If he'd thrown one more taunt in her face, she might have done something she would have immediately regretted. But he didn't, and so she did something she was to regret for the rest of her life, every time she read in the newspaper about another of Soapy Sam Ballard's triumphs.

Face pale, she stumbled out of the warehouse and around to the side of the building where her husband was waiting for her. Catching sight of her, he bolted out of the car and ran to meet her.

"Diana, thank God!" he said. He took his daughter in his arms, and gasped, mostly in relief, as he felt her tiny arms go around his neck in a choke hold. "And Dinah's okay?"

"She's fine, Larry. She just needs to go home."

He opened up the back door and placed the little girl on the seat, bending inside to give her a kiss as he did so. Then he closed the door and took his wife in his arms, kissing her as if they were newlyweds. He'd never tell her he'd been on the verge of going in there himself. He had the utmost faith in her abilities, and as a professional detective he knew better than to go running in like an idiot, but as a husband and father it was a completely different story. 

"Are you sure you're all right?" he asked at length.

She gave him a weary smile. "Never better. I just want to get out of this place, okay?"

"You got it, sweetheart."

  


...to be continued

  
  
Coming up next:_ Twenty-five years later, the same mother and daughter are brought together by a hospital stay, but can't seem to find any common ground. However, an unseen danger lurks just around the corner.... Stay tuned for Chapter One: Mother and Child Reunion. _


	2. Mother and Child Reunion

Author's Note: _Sorry, I forgot to mention earlier. As will become apparent in later chapters, this story is rated R for violence, language, nudity, and sexual situations (non-graphic). _  
  
**

Chapter One:   
Mother and Child Reunion

**  


TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER  
  


Gotham City,   
July, 1997

_God, she looks so much _older_ than I remember. How is that possible? She's not even sixty, yet...it's only been three or four years since I saw her._

Dinah Lance leaned forward in the uncomfortable hospital chair and studied her mother's sleeping face. The older woman had been out of surgery for several hours now, drifting in and out of consciousness for some time, but her daughter's presence had yet to really register. 

Ironically, the last time she'd seen her mother, three years earlier, Dinah herself had been the one in the hospital bed. She'd been recovering from an emergency hysterectomy performed in part as a preventative measure to keep her from developing the same uterine cancer that had killed her grandmother and was even now ravaging her mother. _No, don't think that way!_ she scolded herself. _They got it all. You heard what the doctor said: her outlook is good, and there's every reason to think she'll be fine._

"Dinah?" her mother's voice said weakly, breaking into her gloomy thoughts.

"Yes, Mom, I'm here," she reassured her, moving quickly to her bedside and clasping her hand. "How are you feeling?"

Diana Lance gave her only daughter a feeble smile. "Like I've been hit by a truck," she answered. Then, after thinking about it a moment, she amended, "No, I've actually _been_ hit by a truck. That was more generalized. This is more like somebody walking on your belly wearing golf cleats."

Dinah laughed. "I remember."

"Oh, yes," her mother said, "that's right. Medical emergencies seem to be the only time we ever see each other. Thank you for coming," she added, pleased.

In a hurt voice Dinah asked, "Did you really think I wouldn't?"

"I wasn't sure. Things between us haven't always been what they should be."

As if Dinah needed to be told! "We'll have to work on that," she told her mother quietly, giving her hand a squeeze. "No more fighting."

"Right. No more fighting," Diana vowed. "We owe it to your father. You know how much he always hated it when we didn't get along."

"You remember the time he threatened to divorce you and give me up for adoption if we didn't stop screaming at each other constantly?"

The older woman smiled reminiscently. "I remember. Smart-aleck Larry. He was a good man."

"The best," agreed her daughter, over the lump in her throat. Dinah and her father had always had a close, natural relationship; they'd understood each other very well. If her mother had been the one to make that sort of idle threat about divorce and adoption Dinah would have been terrified. As it was, she remembered that both she and her mother had burst into laughter, ending their battle just the way Larry Lance had intended.

They talked about him for some time, stopping occasionally if Diana seemed to be tiring. Larry had died when his daughter was fifteen, and the relationship between mother and daughter, difficult at the best of times, had never really recovered. He wasn't strictly the only thing the two women had in common -- in fact he'd always said that the reason they didn't get along in the first place was because they were far too much alike, a charge both vehemently denied -- but he was the only thing they agreed about. And now, trying hard to get along, a safe subject was a matter of necessity. 

"How have you been, Dinah?" the older woman asked at length. "Everything all right in Seattle? Your business?"

"Everything's great, I'm just busy most of the time. Sherwood Florist is doing really well -- we're getting to have quite a regular customer base."

"That's good. I'm glad to hear it. I guess you inherited a knack for the family business."

_"All_ the family businesses," her daughter answered meaningfully.

Diana gazed at her silently. "Yes. Well. Forgive me for mentioning it, but I'm still relieved that you gave up the _other_ 'family business'," she said, giving her hand a squeeze.

-----------------****  


  


Outside the door, an Asian-American man in orderly's clothing came to attention suddenly. He risked a look inside, but to his disappointment the conversation seemed to have stopped dead. So...did that mean the daughter had been a crimefighter, but wasn't anymore? That fact might just interest his boss.

****-----------------  


  


Dinah, disproportionately infuriated by the remark, didn't trust herself to speak right away. The last thing she wanted was yet another screaming match with her mother, especially under the circumstances, but the woman never changed. She couldn't seem to go five minutes without needling her daughter about her former costumed alter ego -- which had originally been _Diana's _creation, as she never let her forget. Like her mother before her, Dinah Lance had spent several years fighting crime before suddenly deciding to give up the Black Canary persona for domestic reasons. And ever since then, she'd been on the receiving end of scornful disapproval both for giving up the lifestyle and for having ever been silly enough to take it up in the first place. 

Diana caught her expression and gave her look that held a faint note of apology. 

It was enough. Changing the subject for both their sakes, Dinah asked quickly, "So...is there anything you need, Mom? Anything I can do for you?"

Diana thought a minute. "If you don't mind," she answered, "You could bring me that pile of newspapers in the corner of my living room. I've sort of neglected my scrapbooks lately, but it looks like I'll have plenty of time to fill in this place."

"Okay," her daughter agreed quietly. The older woman had always kept scrapbooks of news items, usually crime-related, that interested her. Her 'reference materials' she called them. Dinah found it depressing to think that her mother had been too ill lately to even comb through the papers she collected religiously.

"By the way, you're welcome to stay at the apartment while I'm in the hospital."

Dinah smiled but shook her head. "Thanks, but I think Oliver would probably be more comfortable in a hotel," she said, and their unseen listener breathed a sigh of relief.

Her mother smiled sardonically. "Oh. So you brought the bearded wonder along. How did you talk him into it?"

"He's planning to go on to New York tomorrow to visit Roy, but he wanted to be here for me while you were in surgery."

"Don't be defensive, dear; I never claimed the man was utterly valueless."

Dinah snorted. "Not in those precise words, no. Look, Mom, I know you and Oliver have never gotten along, but you might as well accept the fact he's a permanent fixture. After all, we've been together for nine years," she added proudly.

"Well, it's nothing to brag about, but I will admit that he certainly seems to have more staying power than your first husband. Well, your only _husband,_ but still...."

Mother and daughter had begun fighting over the subject of boys when Dinah was about eleven years old; even then the girl had had a seemingly irresistible attraction to older boys who were utterly wrong for her. At barely eighteen years of age she'd quit college to run off and marry a graduate student in anthropology who was seven years her senior. The marriage hadn't lasted long; within nine months Craig Windrow pulled a disappearing act, leaving his young wife stranded in Seattle. And soon after that she'd met Oliver.

Diana had never cared for her daughter's live-in boyfriend. Fifteen years older than Dinah if he was a day, Oliver Queen _defined_ the word rake. Like the two women, he'd been a costumed vigilante when he and Dinah hooked up, but the difference was he seemed disinclined to give it up.

"Mother," Dinah said warningly, through clenched teeth. Then, alarmed, "Mom? Are you okay?" as a spasm of pain passed over the older woman's face.

-----------------****  


  


The man outside the door risked another furtive look inside, wondering if his quarry was going to do something unexpected like die on him. That wouldn't be good, he thought. Or...maybe it might be the best thing. He wasn't getting paid enough to try to figure out the repercussions. 

Well, apparently the old lady wasn't in such bad shape after all. She was talking again, though her voice was so weak he couldn't make out what she said, and he heard her daughter laugh faintly.

The smell of coffee reached the man's nostrils suddenly, and he jumped as he realised there was someone very close to him. A tall man in his early forties with wavy blond hair and a goatee had somehow managed to sneak up behind him without being heard. Thankfully, the bearded man didn't seem to suspect anything was amiss. He glanced into the room to make sure the patient was awake, and apparently assumed that the orderly had merely stopped to enjoy the view of the younger woman's shapely backside as she bent over her mother's bed, for he gave the young Asian a knowing grin and a quick lift of the eyebrows before continuing inside with the two Styrofoam cups he carried.

Breathing a sigh of relief, the false orderly fled. While he waited for the elevator, he dialed a number on his cellphone. "Yeah, it's Johnny," he said in a low voice. "The old lady's apartment's gonna be empty tonight, once her kid stops by to pick up some stuff. Yeah. Okay. Tonight it is, then."

...to be continued

Coming up next: _Flashback to 1988, and the beginning of the second Black Canary's crimefighting career, as a 19-year-old novice meets a smartass youngster who knows more about the business than she does. Stay tuned for Chapter Two: Sleepless in Seattle._


	3. Sleepless in Seattle

**Author's Note**--_So, apparently there is _some_ interest in this story after all. News to me! I was just going to remove it entirely, but hadn't got round to it. Either way, here are more chapters._**  
**

**Chapter Two:**

**Sleepless in Seattle**

Seattle, Washington

March, 1988

The sound was anything but unusual in the alleys of Seattle's waterfront at that time of night. A feminine whimper, not quite a scream. A red-headed boy in his mid-teens stopped to listen, fitted a red-fletched arrow into the bow he carried, and crept stealthily toward the source of the sound. Suddenly he heard something he wasn't expecting: a cry of surprise and then the unmistakable sound of flesh being pummeled. Then the echo of running footsteps and loud, terrified sobs.

_She must have got away,_ the boy thought. _I'd better make sure he doesn't catch up with her._

But the woman's footsteps were the only ones he could hear. And, to his great surprise, the sounds of the scuffle were still going on. Warily, the teenager stepped into the alley, bow held at the ready. It wasn't two men fighting, as he'd expected; instead, a tattooed thug in a sleeveless leather jacket had a blonde girl about half his size in a heavy grip. The girl, one of the local exotic dancers to judge by the fishnet stockings and leotard she wore, aimed a couple of well-placed kicks at her aggressor's legs and tried to pivot in his embrace.

The red-headed archer took careful aim, waiting until the fight brought the creep's shoulder directly into his range. He loosed the arrow just as the girl flipped her attacker onto the ground in a well-executed judo move...and gasped in horror as he saw the bolt headed directly for her head.

She was quick, he had to admit. Stepping nimbly out of the way just in time — she couldn't have even had time to even see it coming! — she made a grab for the arrow as it whizzed past her left ear. She caught it, barely, but not without nicking her hand on the sharp tip. Frowning in irritation at the blood on her palm, she looked up to give her "rescuer" a decidedly unfriendly glare.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" she demanded angrily.

The boy gulped. "Um, rescuing you?" he said uncertainly.

"Oh, good job," she said witheringly. The guy with the tattoos was trying to get to his feet, without notable success. He'd been drunk to begin with, and being dropped on his head on concrete hadn't exactly done much to improve his condition. The scantily-clad young woman spared him an impatient frown before she bent down and knocked him unconscious. "Now, if you want to do something useful help me lock him in this dumpster," she ordered her would-be saviour.

He rushed forward and lifted the man's shoulders, taking most of his weight. "I don't think the dumpsters lock," he said as they heaved their burden on top of the smelly mess inside. There was a groan when he hit, but no movement.

The girl dusted off her hands. "Doesn't matter. He won't be happy when he wakes up, regardless. And chances are he won't be picking on any more little victim types tonight."

"Who _are_ you?" the teen asked in amazement.

She brought herself up to her full 5'5" and gave him as imposing a look as she could manage under the circumstances. She was dirty all over, one stocking-clad knee was smeared with blood where her injured hand had brushed against it, and her unkempt blonde tresses — a wig! he now realised — had slipped out of position a bit, revealing the faintest trace of dark hair underneath.

"Black Canary," she announced proudly.

"You're one of us," he accused, belatedly figuring it out. "You're a crimefighter."

She raised one eyebrow and stared at him. "Well, yeah. What did you think I was, little red riding hood?" His glance traveled slowly from the exorbitantly-cuffed boots, the fishnet stockings, the black (blue-black? he couldn't really tell in this light) leotard with the matching short jacket, up to the blonde wig. The girl's eyes opened wide and she added quickly, "Don't answer that if you know what's good for you."

He grinned. "Okay. I won't. My name's Speedy, and —"

"You've _got_ to be kidding me!" she exclaimed. "Why would you ever call yourself _that?"_

"Because that's what I am. I'm fast. I can nock an arrow faster than Green Arrow can reach for one, and that's saying something," he bragged.

"Hmm. Now _him _I've heard of," Black Canary said, strolling out of the alley with her newfound colleague by her side. "As soon as I came to this city. You work for him?"

Speedy considered. "Yeah, I guess so. I've been doing this nearly two years."

She gave him a sidelong glance. "You're kidding," she repeated. "How old are you?"

"Not much younger than you, I bet," he said challengingly.

"I asked you first."

"I'm sixteen," he answered. She just looked at him, and he hung his head and admitted, "Well, this summer. How old are you?"

"Nineteen," she told him, then some vestige of honesty compelled her to add, "Next week." The two of them grinned at each other for a moment, then Black Canary held out her uninjured hand. "Nice to meet you, Speedy. Maybe I'll see you around sometime."

He watched her walk away, sticking carefully to the shadows. _She's not bad for a beginner, I guess, _he thought with a hint of condescension. _I better find out who she is before Green Arrow gets back to town. We can't just let anybody in a costume come in here and start playing hero. God, she's gorgeous. _

Speedy hadn't said anything about his skill as a tracker, but if he had he wouldn't have been bragging. The girl who called herself Black Canary never had the slightest idea anyone was following her as she made her way home. A tree and a garage roof gave her access to the window of her second-story apartment. The boy watched from the shadows, making careful note of where the light went on and counting the number of windows. He moved around the front of the building and checked the mailboxes. If his figuring was right, she'd gone into apartment 2B, which had two names written on its box. The first name had been obliterated with black magic marker. Greg maybe? But the girl's first name, Dinah, was still there. The last name Windrow had been x-ed out and replaced with Lance.

_Dinah Lance, huh? Nineteen next week, and apparently divorced or something. Well, well._

_ ------------------------- - _

Mystery Men attract trouble.

Doubtless there was some truth in the warning she'd heard all her life, but Dinah Lance had been a magnet for trouble long before she'd ever actually taken the step of putting on a replica of her mother's old costume. Characteristically disregarding the advice, she assumed the situation was the same way with the rest of the handful of brave souls (or nutcases, to put it another way) who had chosen to become crimefighters.

Black Canary, a long coat hiding most of her costume, stood looking at the racks of high-calorie snack food, sipping a cup of coffee and questioning her judgment. She was cold, lonely, wet, and exhausted.

_Why am I doing this?_ she asked herself. _It's not like this city doesn't already have a protector or two...what can I possibly add? And am I even enjoying it? _Then she caught sight of herself in the overhead security mirror and grinned ironically at her distorted reflection. _Oh, snap out of it! Even crimefighters need a coffee break once in awhile. A little chocolate and I'll be ready to take on the whole underworld by myself. Now, what kind do I really —_

Uh oh. Moving a few inches to the right in search of a different kind of candy bar, the girl had a different view in the mirror. She could see the gun clearly as the guy in front of the counter opened his coat. A few quiet words were exchanged, and the clerk didn't offer to put up a fight. The woman's eyes were round with terror as she handed over the money in the register, all fifty dollars of it. The robber didn't appear satisfied, nor was he buying the story that all the big bills were locked up in the safe until morning. The pistol made its predictable appearance, pressed up against the petrified clerk's forehead.

Moving quickly and as silently as possible, thanking fortune for the store's noisy fans, Black Canary put down the coffee and divested herself of the coat. Keeping low, in the vain hope the robber wouldn't look up and notice her in the mirrors, she crept toward the front of the store.

She had only one chance at this. One second's mistiming, and the woman would be dead. But there were several feet of open space between herself and the robber; she would have to traverse that _and_ jar the man's hand upwards before his finger was able to squeeze the trigger. No. Her reflexes were remarkable, but she probably wasn't that fast.

Gathering her courage, the young crimefighter heard herself say in a querulous voice, "Excuse me? Do you have any trash bags?"

The distraction worked. The robber swung around and turned the gun on her, just as she had instinctively known he would. He stood gaping for one precious second when he got a good look at her clothing, giving Black Canary all the opening she needed. The look of fear on her face, mostly feigned, lowered his guard even further and he was starting to enjoy himself just before a lightning fast high kick took the pistol out of his hand.

She had no time to stop and tell herself what a monumentally stupid thing she'd just done, and how outrageously lucky she was. The man tried to hit her in the face, but Black Canary blocked his punch. She grabbed his wrist and used his own weight against him, landing him ignominiously on his butt on the floor.

"Jesus, lady!" he swore. "Fifty bucks ain't worth it." He fled the store as the clerk pressed the panic button over and over.

Dinah, barely breathing hard, remarked, "Guess I don't need the bags after all — the trash took itself out. Are you okay?" The clerk couldn't answer. She just stared at the costumed figure in shock.

"I'll be back for my coat later," Black Canary called back as she gave chase.

She managed to trail him for several blocks before she finally lost him in a paved area behind a mission and a Chinese laundry. Hands on hips, she stood under the dim streetlight and surveyed her immediate surroundings through the fine mist.

The faint but unmistakable sound of footsteps somewhere above her head got her attention. As she went to investigate, Black Canary ventured too close to the shadows.

Without warning, she felt a pair of hands grab her roughly. Dinah moved to kick her attacker, but her feet were imprisoned by a second man. She struggled to free herself, mentally going through all the judo moves she knew, but to no avail. The first man, the one she'd been chasing, ended up with a split lip when she butted him with the top of her head, but he managed to keep his grip on her.

His friend, trying hard to keep hold of the girl's thrashing feet, let out a sudden agonised shriek and dropped his burden. He limped away into the shadows as quickly as he could go, moaning with every step.

A red arrow dangled from one of his buttocks.

Black Canary seized the opportunity. She pivoted, ducking under her captor's arms like a square-dancer, and used her momentum to spin him around. A karate chop to the back of the neck sent him to the gravel without another word.

The crimefighter, resisting the impulse to give him a good solid kick, gulped in several breaths of the night air. Taking one last deep breath she barked, "Speedy, get down here!"

The boy in the yellow and red costume scrambled down the drainpipe. For a moment he was torn, tempted to go after the guy he'd shot, considering the other was subdued for the moment, but Dinah didn't seem too concerned. Figuring he'd have enough trouble with the arrow — he might even be stupid enough to try going to a hospital for treatment — Speedy dismissed the second assailant from his mind.

He reached back and unsnapped a small pouch on the side of his quiver, pulling out a section of strong plastic tie wrap. Expertly, he used the cord as a pair of flexible handcuffs, attaching the would-be convenience store robber to the drainpipe.

"Better?" he asked his new friend.

Black Canary nodded and rewarded him with a kiss on the cheek. "Yes. I can't thank you enough for coming to my rescue in the nick of time."

It was impossible to tell under the pinkish glow of the light, but his face darkened suspiciously. She could have sworn his skin suddenly turned a shade somewhere between the colour of his hair and the silly red Robin Hood hat he wore.

"Now," she said with mock sternness, "have you been following me?"

He gave her a slightly embarrassed grin and shrugged. "I thought it was you I caught sight of. Thought maybe I could help out."

"And you did. Thanks again."

"Anytime, Dinah," he smiled.

Her mouth dropped open. With a quick look to make sure their prisoner was still unconscious, she grabbed Speedy's arm furiously. _"What_ did you call me!" she demanded, dragging him with her.

"I'm sorry."

"Come on, I've got to see if I can retrieve my coat before there are too many cops crawling all over the mini-mart."

Flashing lights a few blocks away informed them they were too late. Black Canary sighed in irritation, but Speedy urged her forward. Keeping carefully out of sight beside the building, they kept watch until Speedy spotted a friendly face. Officer Chandler was by himself, thankfully, talking on the radio of his police cruiser. When he started back inside, his attention was attracted by a loud "Psssst!"

He stopped, looking at the dark space warily. The teenage crimefighter stepped out of the shadows, and with a resigned look Chandler moved closer to meet him. "What now, Speedy?" he started to ask, and then he caught sight of the girl.

"Ahhh," he said in sudden recognition. "So this is our new vigilante, huh? The heroine of the night. Nobody really believed the clerk's description, you know."

Speedy drew her forward. "This is Black Canary."

The officer shook his head in resignation and contemplated moving to a city where the police took care of things and there wasn't a costumed nut job running around. With the addition of the girl, apparently Seattle was now up to three.

"Aren't you cold in that get-up?" he asked by way of greeting. She scowled at him and he turned his attention to the boy. "Where's your old man?"

"Around," Speedy hedged. "Right now I'm trying to get my friend's coat back. She left it inside the store. Think you can oblige?"

Chandler muttered under his breath. "I'll see what I can do," he promised.

"Well, just to make it worth your while, you'll find your suspect tied to a drainpipe behind Santa Dominica's Mission."

A few minutes later, her overcoat having been surreptitiously returned to her possession, Black Canary sighed wearily. "Well, I'm calling it a night, just like I was planning to do before all this came up."

She paused, then looked at her new friend suspiciously. "I suppose you know where I live, too?" He nodded. "Then I guess you might as well come up and talk to me for awhile."

->>>————————>

An hour ago, Dinah reflected, she'd been ready to go home, by herself, curl up with a chocolate bar and go to sleep. But the convenience store holdup had abruptly changed her plans — and kept her from picking up the candy bar. And now, instead of getting a few hours sleep before she had to go to work, she found herself, still in costume, curled up on one corner of her ratty old couch entertaining a smartass teenager who seemed to know far more about her than he should.

The boy sipped his mug of hot cocoa — the two envelopes of instant represented her entire stash of chocolate — and looked at his surroundings, unimpressed.

"Live here by yourself?" he asked.

The needless question irritated her. "Like there's some chance you _don't_ know?" she scoffed.

"Only what I got off your mailbox," he told her candidly. "Name, address...doesn't take much to figure out you had a husband — or something — when you moved in, but you don't anymore."

"Technically, I still have a husband, at least until he signs the divorce papers. He took off for South America someplace and I don't have the cash to follow him." It was absolutely none of his business but what the hell, she thought. It wasn't like she had anybody else to talk to.

"So _that's_ why you took up crimefighting? Not that you don't do okay out there," he added generously.

She raised one eyebrow. "Oh, _thank_ you," she said sardonically.

"Ah, come on, Dinah, I didn't mean it like that," he protested. With the worldly experience of two whole years on his side, he continued, "Not many amateurs could handle themselves as well as you do. The only real mistake I've seen you make is assuming the guy was alone when you got too close to that dark alley. I could train you, though, if you want. You know, a few tips here and there — prevent what happened tonight."

He stopped and watched her expression warily. He'd seen enough of her mercurial temperament to expect her to be furious with him, but he'd felt he had to make the offer. Obviously she learned from her mistakes at least. He'd noticed almost immediately that this time out she wore gloves. Maybe the nick on her hand from the arrowhead had taught her a lesson.

To his surprise, the tightly compressed lips loosened into a sudden smile and she _laughed_ at him. Laughed at him and tousled his hair like he was six, and he blushed like an idiot as usual.

"I grew up knowing how to do this stuff," she told him, while his face flamed. "And I hardly need lessons from some kid who can't even pick a better name than 'Speedy' — but thanks for the offer anyway, kid."

"My name's Roy," he mumbled. "Roy Harper."

"Hey, that's a start! Nice to meet you, Roy Harper," she said with a friendly smile that positively bowled him over. Then, probably to get back at him for his audacious offer, she ruined it by asking, "Does your mother know you're out this late on a school night?"

He shrugged, then shook his head. "She's dead," he said simply, with a tone of carefully cultivated indifference.

Dinah, with a similar hurt not that many years behind her, reached out a sympathetic hand and patted his wrist. "I'm sorry. My dad's dead, too. It happened when I was your age," she said, as if there was a huge interim. "He was a detective. Taught me everything I know."

"Green Arrow taught me."

"Good teacher," she smiled.

Roy's freckled face lit up. "I could introduce you," he offered, figuring she'd have to be impressed if he arranged for her to meet someone who was on his way to becoming a local legend.

"Sure. Sounds nice," she said indulgently, not sounding particularly impressed.

He thought about it for a minute, formulating his plans. He remembered their first meeting, when she'd told him she would be nineteen in a few days. "Your birthday's this week, right?" he asked.

"Thursday," she confirmed. "Why?"

"Because I was just thinking...if you don't have any friends in Seattle, why not come over for dinner Thursday and spend your birthday with us instead of by yourself? And then you can meet a _real_ superhero."

She was almost positive his comment about her lack of friends was pure speculation, but he couldn't have hit the mark any more effectively with his arrows. It was true; she hadn't managed to get close to the people at work, and the only social contacts she'd made in her few weeks in the city had been colleagues of her estranged husband. She'd been planning on ignoring the occasion, but Roy's invitation sounded better. Besides, the irony of the last remark amused her. Clearly he didn't know everything.

"Tell you what, Speedy," she bargained with him. "You told me your real name, that should be all I need to find you. If I can work out where you live by Thursday night, then I'll join you. Okay?"

He laughed. "What's this, a contest? Sounds like fun. You sure you can—"

Dinah cut him off. "If I can't manage that one I'll _know_ I shouldn't be in this business."

She rose and picked up his empty cup, carrying it and her own to the sink. Roy recognised the dismissive gesture for what it was and snatched his red cap from the table.

"See you Thursday?" he said hopefully.

She gave him a nod and a tired smile. "Eight o'clock," she said. "Now, you run along home, kid. Some of us have to work tomorrow."


	4. Cupid's Arrow

**Chapter Three**

**Cupid's Arrow**

For someone with her background, tracking down Roy's address proved no challenge at all. Given the information she had, his true name and age, she simply called the area high schools and asked if he was enrolled. Claiming to be his after school employer, she'd asked to speak to his guidance counselor, pretending to be fearful that his schoolwork might be suffering because of his extra-curricular activities. She'd learned, in the conversation, not only the name and address of his legal guardian, but also the fact Roy was a decent student who could be a great one, and sometimes fell asleep in class. She'd pretended to be deeply apologetic over that one, and secretly hoped she had done him a good turn.

Thursday night at precisely eight p.m., Dinah stood outside the door of a condominium in a complex which surprisingly seemed to house mostly senior citizens. For a second, she wondered if she'd been following the wrong trail. But on the whole she was sure of the detective work that had led her here, and had no fear about ringing the bell.

Sure enough, when the door opened the unmasked but still mostly familiar face of Roy Harper split into a wide grin. "Dinah!" he exclaimed, surveying his guest delightedly. "I knew you'd make it! Happy birthday. And...wow. You look really different without the wig on."

"Kinda the point," she observed mildly.

He continued to gape at her till a male voice from inside the apartment reminded him, "Hey, Roy — why don't you introduce me to your protegée instead of making her stand out in the hall."

"Oh. Right. Come in," said Roy, embarrassed. He moved out of the way and gestured for Dinah to come inside. "Ollie, this is my friend Black Canary — Dinah Lance. And _this_ is the Green Arrow."

There was a touch of reverence in the teenager's voice as he indicated the man who stood next to him. The blond man smiled at the newcomer and held out his hand. "Otherwise known as Oliver Queen."

"Nice to meet you," Dinah said, leaving her hand in his grasp just a touch longer than necessary.

"Charmed." Oliver looked her up and down, as if trying to visualise her in costume.

_God's gift to women!_ was how Dinah summed him up to herself. Even at her age she could recognise a player when she saw one. Suave, a little _too_ masculine in a particular kind of way...still, she thought, there probably weren't too many women who turned down the so-called gift. Dinah herself wasn't entirely immune; five minutes earlier she wouldn't have believed it possible to see someone with such ridiculous facial hair and not feel the slightest urge to laugh.

Her host was equally impressed with her. She really was stunning, and to her great credit she met his gaze steadily instead of blushing and turning away giggling like a little schoolgirl. He couldn't wait to see what she looked like in the blonde wig and stockings.

"Sit down," he invited. Dinah made her way into the seating area and sat primly on one end of the sofa. He draped himself across the other end while Roy perched nervously on a chair across from them. A few seconds later the boy was on his feet again, offering his guest a soft drink or anything else she wanted.

Accepting the offer graciously, she turned to the older man with interest. "So, you're the greatest archer of all time, huh?"

"Is that what Speedy tells you? Well, I admit I'm no Howard Hill or Saxton Pope, but I'm on the short list."

"But _I'm _still faster," Roy reminded him cheerfully. He handed Dinah a glass with too much fizzing liquid and too little ice.

His mentor leaned across to him and whispered, "That's not something you want to brag about in front of a girl."

Roy blushed furiously and looked as if he wanted to either sink through the floor or murder his guardian. "I haven't had any complaints," he said under his breath.

"Don't worry, Roy," Dinah told her friend. "My mom pulls the same stunt on me. I guess when people start to get older they try to hold onto their youth by acting _childish."_

Oliver let out a whoop. "Pretty fast with a shaft yourself, birthday girl!" he said, impressed.

She gave him a mischievously smug sort of smile he found very attractive. Roy, delighted to see that they had taken a liking to one another, grinned from ear to ear. And, although he certainly didn't need defending against his guardian's very familiar teasing, he was elated to think she was _willing_ to jump to his defense.

Still chuckling, Oliver unfolded himself from the low couch and crossed the room to the kitchen, divided from the living room area only by a brick hip-wall and countertop. He removed the lid from the large pot simmering on the stove and looked at the newcomer. "What do you do for a living, Dinah?"

"I'm a florist. What about you?" she asked, continuing the casual small talk.

He hesitated a moment. "Oh, this and that," he said only a little evasively. "At the moment I'm working as a bodyguard."

"That's appropriate."

"Uh huh." Returning to his seat next to her he gave her a piercing look and inquired, "Okay, you _know_ I gotta ask...what's a pretty girl like you doing in a dirty business like this?"

She scowled at him, figuring he was about to start lecturing her about being too young, about how it wasn't a fit job for a woman anyway, much less a girl. She was only surprised it had taken him so long to get around to it; he struck her as the direct sort. "What's _your_ excuse?" she countered.

Oliver shrugged. "I had nothing better to do. I had time on my hands, at the time I had plenty of money, I was irresponsible as hell. See, my parents died before I was old enough to fend for myself, so I never really had a chance to learn sensible behaviour."

Roy, who recognised the gambit for what it was, rolled his eyes, but Dinah was immediately all sympathy. "Oh, I'm so sorry. How old were you?"

"Twenty-one."

Dinah blinked. "Twenty-one. Oh. Okay." Then she laughed; she couldn't help it, the wide grin behind the beard was infectious.

"Now come on, your turn — answer the question. I'm just curious. I won't bite."

She smiled at him and shrugged slightly. "I'm not actually the first Black Canary. I guess you could say I inherited my mother's secret identity. Well," she amended, "maybe not so much _inherited_ it as stole it because she wasn't using it anymore. My very first memory is of her climbing in the window of our apartment wearing her costume.

"I mean, I grew up on this stuff. My favourite bedtime stories were my parents' tales about all their great, exciting adventures. I met all their old friends...I grew up with an 'Auntie Wonder Woman' for heaven's sake! This...is _normal_ to me."

"Wow," breathed Roy. "And I thought knowing Green Lantern was impressive."

"Don't let him hear you suggest otherwise," grinned Oliver.

Dinah gave a little shrug. "Oh, there weren't that many, even then. Come to think of it, most of 'em were already retired by the time I knew them. The hero business has kind of gone into a slump, I guess."

"Driven underground," Ollie suggested. "The government probably thinks we're some kind of threat. Like _we're_ the ones attracting all the criminals."

"That's Mom's theory, actually. But I don't know if she really believes that we bring it all on ourselves, or if it was just a way to keep me from going through with taking up the trade myself."

"So how'd she take it when you actually did?"

Dinah finished off the last of her soft drink, and looked at him coyly over the rim of the glass. "She doesn't know yet."

Roy grinned. "I don't think mine would've gone along with the idea, either. Oh, hey, you want a refill?"

"I _know_ she wouldn't have," Oliver agreed firmly.

"Thanks," smiled Dinah, holding out her glass. "Maybe just a little more ice, if you don't mind."

The boy smacked his forehead. "Uh oh!"

Oliver gave him a slightly irritated look. "I _told_ you to pick up a bag of ice."

"I know, I know. I just forgot."

Oliver dug a dollar bill out of his pocket and tossed it at Roy, who disappeared without acknowledging Dinah's protests about not really needing it that badly.

"I oughtta make him pay for it," he said lazily. He knew very well why the kid had been so uncharacteristically absentminded; he'd talked of nothing else but this girl all week.

His guest's mutinous expression reminded him suddenly that she really _was _just a girl, in spite of her obvious maturity. She might seem much older than her age most of the time, but she was still at the point where she'd take a kid's side over a parental figure every time.

He gave her a no-harm-done sort of wink, probably meant to be apologetic though it didn't quite make it, and returned to the kitchen. "Want a taste?" he asked after a minute.

Dinah leaned across the low wall and took a mouthful of the chili. Wishing Roy hadn't forgotten the ice, she gasped and fanned her mouth with both hands. "Oh my _God!"_ she exclaimed.

"Well?"

"Needs more garlic," was her only comment once she recovered her powers of speech.

"Atta girl!"

She grinned back at him. "Hey look, seriously — thanks for letting me come over and eat with you guys. Are you sure you don't mind throwing a birthday party for a total stranger?"

"Considering we've got a grand total of six supermarket cupcakes for dessert, it's not much of party," he said. "And anyway, what guy in his right mind would object to his son bringing home a pretty girl?"

Surprised, she asked, "Is he your son? I sort of got the impression otherwise."

"Hrm." He was long enough about answering to make her wonder if she'd offended him by asking a question that was really none of her business. "He _might_ be," he answered finally.

Dinah felt slightly embarrassed, and wished she'd never brought it up, but Oliver didn't seem to mind. It wouldn't take long for her to learn that circumspectness wasn't really a large part of his character.

"His mother was an old girlfriend," he explained needlessly. "More to the point, she was an old friend. She always claimed she never really knew for sure, but my name's on his birth certificate. Either way I've sort of been in and out of his life for years. We do have the same blood type, though," he added hopefully.

"And the same eyes," Dinah reflected. He looked back at her steadily across the barrier as she stared up into his green eyes just a touch too long. _Stop it!_ she told herself firmly, dropping her gaze. What was it about her and older men? Sheesh!

Oliver pretended not to notice anything. "Just a coincidence," he said casually. "Mind coming around here and getting some bowls? No, the other cabinet. Roy's mom had the whole redheaded, green-eyed Irish thing going."

Dinah began to set the table, just to keep herself occupied. But when she stepped back into the kitchen space to look for spoons, she found herself in uncomfortably close proximity to Oliver. They were both acutely aware of one another's presence.

"Y'know," Ollie said lightly, "there's a joke I could make about this. Your name, where we are..."

"Old folk song? Yeah. I'd really rather you wouldn't."

Roy's return cut off whatever reply he might have made.

Later, while the three of them were eating, Oliver asked Dinah impulsively, "So, do you intend to keep on being a solo crimefighter, or join our little club?"

"I think I can teach you boys a thing or two," she replied, managing to keep her surprise hidden.

Roy gave her an enthusiastic thumbs up. "Yeah!"

Oliver held up his glass and the others clinked theirs against it.

"Here's to the start of a beautiful friendship."

->>> ————————>

Recognising in her a kindred spirit, a similar disdain for authority, Green Arrow made no attempt to "train" the young woman as Speedy had imprudently suggested. Instead, over the next few weeks he offered a combination of honest compliments, tactful suggestions, and a few swift kicks in the pants along the lines of "Well, now _that_ was a goddamn stupid thing to do." The latter invariably resulted in a fantastic flare of temper, but since his criticisms were usually justified, once Black Canary had calmed down a bit she generally took his advice.

One bone of contention was her daredevil refusal to wear a mask while she was in costume. She shrugged off the need, saying most people thought they were an urban myth anyway. He pointed out to her that one stupid journalist — and they were _all _stupid, take it from him — with a telephoto lens could make her life a living hell. She promised to think about it, but did absolutely nothing about acquiring a better disguise. Fed up, the archer appeared one night with a black domino mask in hand.

"You just don't take 'no' for an answer, do you?" Black Canary laughed.

He grinned back at her and motioned for her to sit next to him on the low, sloping roof. "Contrary to popular belief," he said, taking out a tube of spirit glue, "I do occasionally take 'no' for an answer. What I don't take is, 'I'll think about it,' followed by a week of 'I haven't gotten around to it.'"

"Nag, nag, nag," she said, trying not to laugh. Behind the older man's back Speedy was nodding emphatically.

"There," Green Arrow breathed as he fixed the mask in position. One finger brushed softly against her cheek for a moment before he pulled his hand away. The green eyes behind his own mask looked deeply into hers, and Dinah felt herself tremble.

Oblivious, Speedy surveyed his mentor's handiwork. "Definitely better," he said with approval. "Like you always say, Ollie, nothing's sexier than leaving somethin' to the imagination."

With difficulty, he tore his gaze away from Black Canary's. _"I_ said that!" he demanded playfully. "What would I ever say a silly thing like that for?"

The retort the young man was about to make was cut off by a scream for help, more frustrated and angry-sounding than frantic, somewhere in the vicinity. "Probably another purse snatcher," Oliver said, starting to rise.

"I'll take care of it," Speedy offered, in a slightly deeper than normal voice. He hurried off down the fire escape.

"That was for your benefit, you know," Green Arrow said with a glance at his remaining companion. "He's got such a crush he's desperate to impress you."

Black Canary leaned back lazily on her elbows. "I know," she chuckled. "It's cute. He's trying so hard to sound grown up."

Green Arrow threw back his head and laughed uproariously.

She glared at him for two solid minutes, then she began to see the humour in it. She gave him a rueful smile. "I know, I know. You're right. Roy's only a couple years younger than I am. It's just that I'm about a hundred years older than he is."

The smile faded off Oliver's face. "I know that, Pretty Bird," he said seriously. "That's the whole problem."

What he meant was, a problem for _him._

———————— -

The last Friday in May, traditionally one of the busiest months in the floral industry, found Dinah busily making graduation wreaths when a coworker tapped her on the shoulder.

"Hey, Dinah, somebody up front asking for you personally." Dinah made a face and the woman reassured her with a grin, "You'll _like_ this one. Tall, blond hunk with a beard. Yum."

"Oh!"

Oliver Queen leaned across the counter as soon as she entered the front of the store, resting his weight on his fingers in a characteristic gesture that made him look exactly like the archer he was, even without the bow. His green eyes sparkled with excitement. "Guess who I just ran into at the airport?"

"Ronald Reagan," she guessed, playing along. She rested her elbows on the counter, her face close to his.

He shook his head. "Wrong villain entirely. You —"

The shop's manager interrupted his urgent news. "Dinah?" she said quietly. "We still have a lot of work to do with those graduation orders. I'm afraid Ms. Lance doesn't have time to entertain visitors during work hours," she added sternly, giving Oliver a freezing look over the tops of her glasses.

He broke into a warm smile and turned all of his considerable charm on the woman. "My dear lady, I assure you that I have every intention of being a paying customer just as soon as I find what I'm looking for. A customer brought into this particular florist by the fact that you have the taste and intelligence to hire this young lady, I might add. Ah, here we go," he said, selecting a single yellow rose off the counter display.

This speech, which might realistically have sounded insulting coming from someone less flamboyantly charismatic, reduced the manager to a wilted wreck. She blinked her eyes, patted her hair into place, and said, "Well. I'll let you get on with your business, and please, do come again."

As soon as she disappeared into the back Oliver got on with his business. As Dinah made change for his five-dollar bill, he leaned close to her. _"You're_ the only one in the country trying to get rid of _this_ particular S.O.B."

"Craig? You found Craig! Oh, Oliver, thank you!"

"Never mind the thanks. We can't count on his plane being delayed more than another couple hours. We've gotta get those papers and get going, or he'll be back in the Amazon basin and you'll still be stuck with him."

She opened her mouth to object, then grabbed her purse and hurried to the door with him. "I'm afraid I have to leave, Mrs. Leatherman. It's an emergency," she shouted. She had one glimpse of the manager's outraged face appearing at the door before they turned onto the sidewalk to make their way to Ollie's car.

A sudden fog had made its way inland during the day, necessitating putting up the Mustang's top which he hated to do. Like any transplanted Californian Oliver complained incessantly about the weather in the Pacific Northwest, but he seemed to have taken a real liking to the area for all that.

"What do you want with a yellow rose, anyway?" she asked him as she opened the passenger door.

He took a deep sniff and offered it to her with a flourish. "_Canary_ yellow," he corrected. "I bought it for the prettiest soon-to-be divorcée I know."

"You're such a flirt!"

"How would you know?" he asked.

It was true. He'd always been uncharacteristically well-behaved around her; not one single pickup line or come-on, simply because she was nineteen, married, and a friend of Roy's. And maybe, later on, for a few other reasons as well. He glanced over at her, sitting in the convertible's passenger seat, head bent over the flower, and thought that if he didn't know better he'd probably buy into the illusion that she was the demure young maiden she looked.

_Idiot,_ he scolded himself and slammed the car into gear.

"So how did you happen to run across my soon-to-be ex?" she asked when they finally neared the airport's parking area. It had taken them more time than expected to find the divorce papers at Dinah's apartment, and by that time the weekend travellers were congesting the foggy highway near SeaTac.

"Sheer blind luck," he admitted. "I had a little business to take care of here, and I saw Windrow's name on his bags, so I started talking to him. Friendly guy. Told me more than anybody could ever possibly wanna know about what and where he's studying. Including the fact he's been back in Seattle for two weeks."

Dinah slammed the door in irritation as she got out. "Sounds like him," she said sourly.

As they made their way through the crowded terminals, they heard the announcement, "Pan Am flight 514 to Buenos Aires now boarding at Gate 3." Oliver swore under his breath and increased his speed.

"Hey, Windrow," he said, catching hold of his quarry's arm as he was picking up his bags. "Hold on a sec, will ya?"

Craig looked round in surprise. "Oh, hi, uh...Queen, right? Look, I was just about to head to the boarding area." He started to walk away, but Oliver fell into step with him.

"Yeah, yeah, I know. This won't take more than a minute. See...after I talked to you earlier I found out we've got a mutual friend, you and me," Oliver said, shaking his finger in the other man's face. "And she's just _dying_ to have a couple of words with you before you fly off to the back of beyond again."

The younger man stopped, suspicion clouding his expression, and began impatiently, "Look, Mr. Queen, I'm afraid I don't have — Dinah!" he interrupted himself.

"You're damn right you don't have Dinah," she spat as she stalked up to the two of them. "In fact, as soon as you sign these, you won't ever have to be troubled with me again. And vice-versa."

"Huh?" he questioned, reaching for the sheaf of papers she held out to him. "Oh. I see. You're divorcing me."

"She's trying to, you nitwit," Oliver said under his breath. He relieved Craig of his heavy bag so he could take the pen Dinah produced from her purse.

Craig gave his wife a long look. "You know, I came by the apartment once," he said awkwardly. "I was kind of hoping to see you again, but I guess...are you sure about this?"

"You better believe it," Dinah told him decisively. "And you better hurry if you don't want to miss your plane."

He shook himself, his slightly glazed eyes focusing again. Then he scribbled his signature on the indicated lines and handed the papers back to Dinah with a bittersweet smile. "Well, I guess this is it, then."

"Yep."

As Craig retrieved his carry-on bag from Oliver, he inspected the bearded man curiously. "So, are you some kind of private detective, or do you just have a vested interest in my wife?"

"Something like that," was the ambiguous answer.

Dinah laughed at the exchange and turned to leave without so much as a backwards glance. Oliver followed suit, leaving Windrow to blink once at their retreating forms before he shook his head and ran to make his plane.

"How do you feel?" asked Oliver as he caught up to his friend.

Dinah stopped walking. "Is the courthouse still open?"

He checked his watch. "We should have time to make it."

"In that case, after I file these with the judge, _then_ I'll tell you how I feel. But I can tell you right now, it's gonna be good."

"Glad to hear it. I think this calls for a celebration, don't you?"

"Absolutely," she agreed happily. "Now if we weren't both broke I'd make you take me to the most expensive restaurant in town, but..."

He laughed. "Dream on, kiddo. But I think I can afford a couple of decent steaks if you feel up to braving my cooking. Then maybe we can go out later and bust a few heads, just the two of us. Whaddaya say?"

"Sounds like my idea of the perfect evening," she grinned, linking her arm through his.

->>> ————————>

The presence of Roy Harper, away on a weekend camping trip with some school friends, was certainly missed, but not as much as Roy would have hoped. He was delighted his two companions had become friends, and no other interpretation had ever entered his mind. He was too young, and too infatuated with Dinah to realise that he might not be the only one thinking three wasn't exactly an ideal number sometimes.

The steaks had depleted Oliver's budget, and as Dinah couldn't legally buy alcohol, the pair were roaring sober, toasting her divorce with Soder cola. The lack of artificial stimulant wasn't affecting the party atmosphere, however. They told story after story about the lifestyle they'd both chosen, trying to top one another and growing more hilarious by the moment. Dinah was at a distinct disadvantage in the contest with only a few months' worth of experience, a lot of which he had shared, but she countered with second-hand tales of the people she'd grown up with.

Ollie, not one to relinquish center stage easily, was in the middle of telling her about the first real superhero he'd ever met. "So, anyway, there we were in Singapore, just having a drink and arguing politics as usual, when this guy about seven feet tall bursts in and starts shooting up the place. I don't mind tellin' you, I was down on the floor in a second."

"No bow and arrow, after all," she agreed.

"Right. Plus, I might have been a bored playboy looking for adventure, but I wasn't a complete idiot, you know? But when I look around for my pilot, I realise he's standing up, holding out his fist in front of him, and this weird green light comes shooting out of his ring. Now that was enough to floor me anyway — if I hadn't already been down there — but then the green light turns into a giant boxing glove and knocks Gargantua stupid. And I'm like, 'Hal, you have magical powers.' And then, 'Hal, you have _no imagination_ whatsoever!' A giant green boxing glove, for God's sake!

"Turned out the big guy with the Uzi was some gangster the authorities had been after for a long time. They told us they owed us a debt of gratitude for catching him, but they didn't want any trouble in their country so we should just get out before they deported us or worse."

Dinah couldn't stop laughing. "Unbelievable," she choked. "I don't know what I like best: the police kicking you out, your private pilot turning out to be Green Lantern, or the giant green boxing glove. What happened to Hal after that?"

"Oh, we travelled the world for awhile, became buddies, then he got called back to his test pilot job, and I had to go back to being a crappy businessman. I still hear from him off and on. Boy, he tried his damnedest to talk me out of going into the hero business. '_I_ have powers, _I_ have responsibilities, _you're_ just an idiot who wants to shoot arrows at people.' I got back at him, though, when I was going through my 'trick arrow' phase. How does a green boxing glove-tipped arrow grab you?"

She hid her face in her hands. _"Please_ tell me you're kidding..."

"Oh, no. I had all kinds of gimmicks; I'm surprised Speedy hasn't told you all about them. He's been after me to go back to the trick arrows ever since I decided to stick to the basics. I'll dig them out and show you one of these days."

"I can't _wait."_

"Hey, I'll have you know it takes _serious_ skill to fire specialty arrows," he said defensively. "Wildly varying heft and balance. Not just anybody could use something like that."

"Not just anybody would want to, would they?" she teased.

Oliver folded his arms on the table and leaned across, moving the "canary" yellow rose in its glass of water out of the way so he could pretend to glare at her more effectively. "Now, listen, you —"

Dinah held up her hands in surrender. "Okay, okay, I'll stop making fun of you," she grinned. "I believe you. You started using them just to prove you're the world's greatest archer, right?" A strange expression crossed his face as she said that. Pained, almost horrified. "What? Oliver, what's wrong?" she asked, alarmed.

"Yeah, that's what it was, all right," he said, not quite managing his normal voice. "Not for the reason you think. It's because I did miss once."

He got up and paced around the room for a few minutes, changing the CD to something a little heavier, less in tune with the carefree evening they'd been having until a moment ago. Moving to the window, he twitched the curtain aside and stared moodily into the darkness. Dinah watched him silently, biting her lip.

"Short version — bank robbery, hostages, cops crawling all around, and an idiot in a costume getting right in the middle of everything as usual. I'd been playing hero for about a year by then. I was learning. And I found a sniper the cops didn't. He had one in his sights, just about to fire, so naturally I had to stop him. I don't know if I made a noise, or if his hearing was good enough he heard the bowstring, but either way he turned, and I missed. I was just aiming for his shoulder, but the arrow caught him —" he patted his chest above his heart. "Poor bastard was probably dead before he hit the ground."

"Oh, no," breathed Dinah. She stood up and crossed to the middle of the room, but she stayed several feet away from him, respecting his space. "But it wasn't really your —"

"It wasn't my fault. I know," he interrupted roughly. "Even the police said that. There wasn't even much of an investigation, can you believe that? Nobody except a few high-ranking officers found out who I was, and the only thing the news people ever knew was that one of the bank robbers was accidentally killed during a standoff with the police."

He turned to look at her, his expression more serious than at any time she'd ever seen him. "At first I tried to do the same thing, telling myself that he was just some worthless piece of scum and the world was better off without him. Probably true enough, but I still couldn't wriggle out from under the fact that I was the one that killed him. And I couldn't _handle _it, Dinah. I'm not one of these broody guys that has to question every move I make, but that was just more than I could take for awhile."

She moved close to him and took hold of his arm gently. Oliver patted her hand and looked out the window again. Dinah watched his reflection in the glass. Two hours ago he'd been her hero, the handsome older man, the object of one last teenage crush before she left her teens. But now, humanized, stripped of all the romance and glory, he was _incredible_.

"I reacted just like the spoiled brat I was. The game was getting too intense for me, so I just changed the rules. Made it into a real game, one where nobody would get hurt if I could help it. I started using all the trick arrows, boxing gloves, nets, bolos...all kinds of stupid stuff that would slow them down, but not hurt them. By the time I realised I wasn't actually accomplishing anything except making a jackass of myself, I was over the worst of it."

"How are you doing now?" she asked gently.

He looked down into her concerned face, and put on a sudden smile. "Oh, absolutely cured, thanks to your catharsis," he answered fatuously. "You're a miracle worker, just for listening to me."

"Ha ha."

"Seriously, Dinah, I'm okay. I don't wake up thinking about it anymore, and I don't usually go around dumping on people. And, for what it's worth, I apologise for ruining your celebration party."

She nodded silently, accepting his apology. "Not necessary. That's what friends are for. And besides, after what you did for me today, I owed you."

"Well, that's true," he said magnanimously. "But...nevertheless I ought to make it up to you. Let's go out and have some fun, shall we? There's got to be someplace in this city the two of us can get into trouble."

"Everywhere you go, Oliver," she teased. She wasn't quite sure if he was putting on a brave face for her sake or his own, but he had apparently said all he intended to on the subject. So, if he was determined to recapture the carefree atmosphere of the evening, she'd do everything she could to help. "Now, are you going to be a good host and help me with the dishes before we hit the rooftops of Seattle?"

He waved away the suggestion. "I have a dishwasher."

"And a self-clearing table?"

"All right, all right," he grumbled, picking up a couple of plates and following her to the sink. "Women! Can't even go out and fight crime without finishing the housework first. I thought 19-year-olds were supposed to be completely lacking in housewifely skills and all that stuff."

"I _was_ married, you know," she reminded him.

He grinned. _"Was_ is the operative word, Miss Lance. Now you're a free woman."

"A free woman," she repeated, taking the glass he handed her and running water into it before putting in the dishwasher. Dinah became quiet. She couldn't bring herself to look at Ollie, though she felt his eyes on her. Their attempt to recapture the lighthearted mood had failed; the easy banter had become forced and they both knew it. Something had changed between them the moment he confided in her.

"Yeah. A free woman. Except..." She swallowed, then continued in a quiet voice. "Except that for some reason I don't understand I think I'm falling in love with somebody else."

At that moment, Oliver Queen came face to face with nobler instincts than he'd ever known he possessed. Several facetious remarks were on the tip of his tongue: "Who's the lucky guy?" "I hope you're not talking about Roy," and, utterly unforgivable, "I certainly hope you're not talking about _me!" _But the heartless quips fortunately remained unsaid, and he looked at Dinah with absolute seriousness.

"You wanna talk about it?" he asked softly, resting his hand lightly against the middle of her back.

She responded by pivoting into his arms and pulling his mouth down to hers. His arms tightened around her, and she was gratified to feel that his heartbeat was as out of control as her own, his breathing just as laboured.

As soon as he'd noticed the attraction, the tension building between them, Oliver had cold-bloodedly considered the idea of seducing her just to get her out of his system. Now, after everything that had happened tonight, the way he had let himself go with her, it occurred to him for the first time that it might be a little too late. He cared for her. He wasn't in love with her, not yet, but she was _really_ starting to get under his skin.

"What were you saying about the two of us getting into trouble?" she whispered.

"I _meant..._in costume."

"I didn't."

"You brazen hussy," he murmured approvingly, his lips brushing against hers.

So Seattle was left to look after itself for the weekend, and Roy was in for one hell of a shock when he got home Sunday morning.


	5. Things That Go Bump in the Night

**Chapter Four**

**Things That Go Bump in the Night**

Gotham City, 1997

"Wow," said Oliver breathlessly. "And to think I was afraid you might feel a little _restrained_ in your mother's house."

Dinah rolled away from him and wiped the sweat out of her eyes. She grinned up at him flirtatiously. "Now, when have you ever known me to be restrained?"

Oliver propped himself on one elbow to look at her. His features were shadowed, backlit by the bedroom window — the only one the apartment possessed — but even in the dark she could make out the wide grin. "That's a trick question, right? But seriously, this once it wouldn't have surprised me, considering how weirded out women get about their mothers."

"Chauvinist."

"Chauvinist, my eye. Hell, even I'm a little turned off the more I think about it. The thought of spilling my se—"

She shushed him quickly by laying two fingers over his mouth. "And a vulgar chauvinist at that," she chided. "Anyway, look at it this way. You know I was mad as hell when we left the hospital. I definitely needed to work off some steam, so maybe you actually owe the lady a debt of gratitude."

He snorted. "You never did tell me what she said to get you that worked up. On your case about me again?"

"Among other things. You, my ex, crimefighting... Not so much an out and out attack, she was just needling me constantly."

"Yeah. The woman's a regular pincushion, all right."

"Mm hmm. I just can't _believe_ some of the things she said to me. But I ought to — same thing she's been doing since I was a little girl. So I can't even excuse it on the grounds that she's sick, even though that's the only thing that kept me from blowing up right back at her like I normally would. And the great irony is, this time we were trying _not_ to fight."

"Ech, parents and children," he said sympathetically. "Sometimes I think they shouldn't be allowed near each other after a certain age."

She gave him a knowing smile. "Dreading your visit to Roy tomorrow?" she suggested sweetly.

_"Ohh,_ yeah. I'm still trying to find an excuse not to go." Oliver sighed. "But it's past time we mended a few fences. 'Course that's what _you_ thought, too."

Dinah adjusted the pillow behind her and leaned against it, head resting on her crossed hands. "My mother is a monster," she said conversationally. "Not that I don't love her — exactly — but we've been at each other's throats my whole life. You and Roy were close as could be till the last couple of years. I've had a _lot _longer to be a parental disappointment."

Ollie shook his head. "You may have had more time, but seriously...you can't really tell me that dropping out of college to marry some loser really compares to getting _kicked_ out for drug abuse. And you didn't drop out of the hero business to go to work for a gun manufacturer that just makes my job all the more necessary. And then there was the business about him sleeping with a _terrorist,_ for God's sake!"

He was getting himself all worked up, probably more from the strain of the upcoming reunion than anything else. Dinah reached out and stroked his arm lovingly, trying to calm him. There were a lot of things she felt like saying out of fairness to Roy, but now wasn't the time. Gently, she scraped one fingernail up his chest and throat, twined her fingers in the stiff beard and moved closer to him.

"I'm on your side, you know," she reminded him softly. "But I do know that when all's said and done, you still love your son more than anything else in the world."

Feeling more relaxed, he smiled at her and dropped his head to rain a series of kisses along her shoulder. _"Almost_ anything," he corrected.

Dinah surrendered herself to the delicious afterglow. "Mmmmmm..." she said happily, as he nibbled at her neck. Without warning, she abruptly sat up and commanded, "Sshhh!"

"Whaddaya mean, sshhh?" Oliver demanded. "I tell you I love you and you _shush_ me?"

"I thought I heard something," she explained in a whisper. "In the living room."

He rolled his eyes, but when he spoke, the volume of his voice was considerably lower. "Oh, brother. I knew I shouldn't have brought up where we were. Don't tell me after all these years you're going to start acting like one of those neurotic sitcom wives —"

_Thud!_

Instantly alert, the couple looked at each other. There was definitely something happening in the next room.

Oliver got out of bed and promptly tripped over his hastily discarded clothes. Swearing under his breath, he kicked the garments out of the way and groped against the dresser for the carrying case that contained his cherished longbow.

"Pants!" whispered Dinah frantically, but he paid no attention to her. She herself had already unpacked, and had her robe at hand the instant she slipped out of bed. She looked around the nightstand for a flashlight.

Bow re-strung and arrow nocked, he simply looked at her and nodded. Dinah's hand reached for the doorknob. Stealth was out of the question; they remembered making a joke earlier about the loud creak of the hinges, so the element of surprise was paramount.

The young man in the living room, believing himself alone in the apartment, jumped in fright when the bedroom door opened with a loud shriek of protest. The beam of light caught him right in the eyes, momentarily blinding him as well as illuminating his longish black hair and rather rodent-like features. Instinctively he reached for his gun.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Oliver said firmly.

He moved slightly and the light from the bedroom window behind him allowed the intruder to make out the shape of the bow, and a faint glint of metal from the deadly-looking arrow aimed directly at his throat.

The younger man panicked and fled. He tried to slam the front door behind him, but its latch was broken and the pressure bounced it harmlessly open again. Oblivious to his nudity, the bowman took off in hot pursuit.

A neighbour, returning home from a rather unsuccessful date, found herself shoved rudely against the wall as the burglar rocketed past her to the elevator she'd just exited. He slipped inside just as the doors closed.

Ollie was a split second too late. The doors stubbornly refused to respond to his frantic presses on the signal button, and he heard a mechanical groan as the lift began its descent. With an oath, he slammed his hand against the metal doors and turned to stalk back to the apartment.

Midway, he met the casualty of his pursuit. The woman gaped at him in open-mouthed astonishment, taking in the bow and arrow...and his leanly muscled, utterly naked form. Without a trace of embarrassment, he met her stare with a grin and a saucy wink.

"Evening," he said amiably, and disappeared back inside his mother-in-law's apartment.

Dinah was on the phone with her assistant back in Seattle. "Okay. Yeah, call me as soon as you finish checking the place over, Jenette. Okay, bye. No luck?" she asked Oliver.

"Nah. He got away, and I couldn't follow him like this."

"I _told_ you to at least put some pants on," she reminded him caustically. She was still a little sore about the "neurotic sitcom wife" crack.

He had no answer for that. He couldn't very well argue that the guy might have gotten away if he'd taken time to dress, since that was exactly what happened.

Brushing past her, he asked, "Have you called the cops?"

"Not yet. I'm just about to."

"Much good it'll do," he said from the bedroom.

She picked up the phone again. "Well, do me a favour and get dressed before they get here. The last thing we need is for you to be arrested for indecent exposure."

->>> ————————>

A uniformed officer went through the formality of dusting the apartment and corridor for fingerprints, although the complainants were warned it was all but useless if the burglar had been wearing driving gloves as they'd claimed.

The plainclothes officer, who gave her name as Detective Montoya, was a rather acerbic Hispanic woman in her early thirties. She interviewed the couple and filled out a standard B&E report without noticeable interest. After all, to the best of their knowledge nothing had been taken.

"You're free to come down to the station and look at mug shots if you'd like," she was telling them as the phone rang.

"Excuse me," Dinah said. "Hello? Yes, Jenette. Absolutely nothing? You're sure? Yes, that's wonderful...thank you very much for checking it out for us. Right. See you in a week or two. Bye.

"My assistant," she informed Montoya. "I wanted to make sure everything was okay at our place back in Seattle."

The detective's interest was piqued. "Really," she said, looking at the pair with interest, her pen paused above the notebook she'd been about to close. "Do you have any particular reason to assume you were the intended victims? Especially since, as you claim, you had no intention of staying in the apartment until you actually arrived here tonight."

It was unusual, in Renee Montoya's experience, for two witnesses to give such closely matching descriptions of a perpetrator, especially one viewed in the beam of a flashlight for only a few seconds. Usually, when such a thing happened, it turned out to be the outcome of discussing the matter beforehand, augmenting one another's memories and almost invariably building up a false recollection of events and features. Or...they'd both had considerable training and experience in the matter.

They looked at one another. "No particular reason, no," Oliver answered with a bland smile. "But we don't have any reason to ignore any possibility, either."

"My father was a private investigator," explained Dinah. "He always said to leave no stone unturned; I must have picked up the habit, Detective Montoya. Therefore, I'm not going to eliminate a connection to ourselves, or a grudge against my mother, or even some tie-in to one of Dad's old cases."

"Stranger things have happened," agreed Oliver.

The policewoman put her notebook away and rose to go. "That's true, Mr. Queen. However," she reminded him, "random break-ins _do_ occur all the time. Even in Gotham City. As I said, you're welcome to come down to the precinct tomorrow to check out mugshots. Other than that, I'm afraid it's a waste of time."

And with that, she exited the apartment close on the heels of the uniformed officer.

"She's probably right, you know," Oliver told his girlfriend.

"I know."

———————— -

Looking through the oversized books of GCPD mugshots was a time-consuming process, and the longer it continued the more the faces tended to blend together.

Dinah, looking away to rest her eyes and refresh her mind, found herself distracted more than once by her surroundings. The squad room probably wouldn't have changed much since her grandfather's time. Her mom, she knew, had practically grown up in this building. What had the cops Richard Drake worked with been like?

A light tap on her knee ended her reveries. Oliver gestured toward the page now open on the table. Almost immediately, her eyes found the same picture that had caught his attention.

"Y'know, I could swear I've seen this guy before somewhere," mused Ollie as the officer on duty pulled up the information on the computer.

"In Seattle?"

"No, I don't...I don't know. Just somewhere."

Officer Glickman swiveled his chair around to face them, studying the printout in his hands. "Okay, your boy is called Johnny G. Last initial G., even though his last name really is Gee... G-E-E," he over-explained. "Plain old-fashioned B&E isn't really his style; he's a mob wannabe. Got a couple of outstanding warrants here already, nothing too major. Nonpayment of child support, stuff like that. We'll add this to the list and see if we can bring him in."

"One of these days," agreed Dinah in saccharine tones. "When the backlog of _real_ crime isn't quite so high, right?"

Glickman sighed. It was the same routine he went through several times a day with victims of petty crime. "We find him, Miss Lance, we got a lot of reasons to bring him in. That's the best we can do. Flipside, you folks live on the opposite coast, and your mom can't ID him, right?"

The couple simply frowned at one another.

Aside from one grumbled monologue from Oliver regarding the iniquity and general incompetence of the boys in blue worldwide, the couple avoided the disheartening subject once they were alone. After all, they couldn't say they hadn't been warned: in a city like Gotham — or Seattle, for that matter — petty crimes like housebreaking simply weren't considered worth wasting manpower on. Hell, they couldn't even say they entirely disagreed. Not entirely.

The July morning already held promise of sizzling heat, so they chose a cafe with tables outside for their late breakfast.

Dinah studied a train timetable as she sipped her coffee. "There's a train at 11:30 you could probably make, if you want to hang around New York for awhile until Roy gets off work."

"You that anxious to get rid of me?" her boyfriend smiled.

She lowered the schedule card and winked at him. "You ought to know better than that. However, since I'll be busy myself all day, between visiting Mom and looking in on her shop, I just thought you might get a little bored. There's another train at 3:15, though, if you don't want to rush. Taking a cab you'd probably get to Roy's apartment just about the time he gets home."

He leaned back and stretched. "Oh, I don't know. I'm sure there's something I could do around Gotham City to keep myself...entertained...for a few hours."

Dinah accepted a coffee refill from the passing waitress, and studied him suspiciously. "You're planning on going out looking for trouble, aren't you, Queen?"

Oliver gave her a look of exaggerated innocence. "Why, I never go out looking for trouble — you know that. It just seems to find me all on its lonesome."

"Which of course is why you brought the costume along," she replied in a low voice. "So you can help it find you a little more easily."

"You know me too well," he grinned, and took another bite of his breakfast.

"You're not using this as an excuse to avoid talking to Roy, are you?"

"Who, me?" he asked, feigning surprise. Then his expression grew serious again and he told her, "No, I'm going to see him, probably today. But I wouldn't mind having a little look into this matter first, since the police obviously aren't going to. Just put it down to my generally suspicious nature."

What she put it down to was his reluctance to leave her before he'd made sure she was safe, but he didn't say it. Probably in fact _wouldn't_ have said it. Retired or not, the erstwhile Black Canary was a lot more capable of defending herself than most people could ever dream of being, and he had good reason to know it.

An ambulance screamed to a halt across the street from the café, and Dinah said lightly, "I hope it wasn't the food."

Oliver chuckled and went on eating. As he watched the white-uniformed attendants unload the gurney and roll it into the bank he had a sudden flash of memory. The forkful of eggs stopped halfway to his mouth.

"What is it?" Dinah asked him.

He frowned at her. "I think I may just cancel on the kid after all," he announced. "I just now remembered where it was I saw that guy before. Dinah...yesterday he was dressed up as an orderly outside your mom's hospital room."


	6. Unfriendly Allies

**Chapter Five**

**Unfriendly Allies**

Across town in the theatre district, a different sort of meeting was taking place.

Cary Young was a short, balding blond man in his late thirties. Ostensibly he was a theatrical producer, well known for being rather _too _successful. His productions were extravagantly backed fanfares that seemed to always manage to turn a tidy profit in spite of modest ticket sales. His ties to the Gotham underworld had been suspected for years by the police, but no one had any solid proof. Not even Batman, who knew rather more about Young's connections than the authorities, had _quite_ enough evidence on him.

Three weeks ago his unknown benefactor had died, giving Young the greatest boost of his career. Sam Ballard — the most powerful crimelord in Gotham two decades ago — had generally been believed to have fallen on hard times the last few years, but Cary knew better. Ballard's only offspring was his childless daughter, but he had practically adopted a teenaged Cary after he caught him trying to pilfer and resell Soapy Sam's own stolen merchandise.

Most people would have ended up dead after such a stunt, but Cary Young had always had more than his share of good luck. This time it came to his defense when he landed in the hands of the one mob boss who had a notorious weakness for women and children. Ballard had taken an extraordinary liking to the plucky kid, and treated him as the grandchild he would never have. He'd trained him, listened to his theatrical ambitions, and helped him achieve his dreams.

And when Ballard's son-in-law was murdered in the early 90's, he'd made Cary Young his unofficial heir.

Upon his death, his "legitimate" assets — what little was left after the expense of his lengthy illness — went to his daughter. But his _real_ money, his files, and what remained of the power base he'd once controlled, had all come to his surrogate grandson.

The effete Young, in spite of his passion for the arts and his expensively over-decorated penthouse, ironically shared none of his patron's old-world sensibilities. In his recent attempts at housecleaning, he'd proven to be as ruthless at taking care of old debts as his theatre cronies knew him to be in his other life.

In sharp contrast to most crimelords, who generally hired ugly mugs or supermodel types to do their dirty work, the producer had a marked preference for pretty boy subordinates, the more androgynous the better. Johnny G., with his sharp features, longish black hair, and the hint of exoticism his mixed heritage gave him, fit the bill exactly.

Johnny G. wasn't precisely the most competent mob lackey in town, and he was uncomfortably aware that he was on probation. And under his impeccable manners, his new boss had a barely suppressed air of instability that made Johnny G. really dread giving him the bad news.

Cary Young was seated in the third row of the Byzantium Theatre, watching the rehearsal of his latest production and holding a whispered consultation with the director. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Johnny G. trying to work up the courage to try to get his attention. With a sigh of impatience, he whispered his excuses to the director and made his way to the wings, motioning for Johnny G. to follow.

"Well? You get it?" he asked brusquely.

The younger man hesitated. "Not...exactly."

Young narrowed his eyes. He didn't speak, but let his silence work on the other man's insecurities.

"Never had a chance to look, actually," Johnny G. stammered. "The place wasn't empty after all."

"I thought I told you to make sure it would be. You _claimed_ that's what you'd done."

"I did, boss, I swear. The daughter was supposed to stay in a hotel. I heard her tell the old lady. But I hadn't been looking five minutes before she opened the bedroom door and —"

Danger was implicit in Young's soft voice. "She _saw_ you!"

"Well, it was pretty dark, but yeah. I took off, but then her husband chased me with a spear."

Young blinked in disbelief. "Chased...you...with...a..._spear_...?"

"Well...maybe not a spear, exactly, but close. One of those, whatchamacallit, bow things." He added defensively, "Hey, you'da run off too if a naked man was chasing you with a bow and arrow."

On second thought, it occurred to him that the boss might _enjoy_ that. He knew absolutely nothing of the producer's personal life, but his manner had always made Johnny distinctly uncomfortable.

Somewhat to his surprise, Young seemed to believe the outlandish story. "This daughter. You said she used to be some kind of crimefighter, like her mother, right? And she lives in Seattle...doesn't that city have a problem with some kind of Batman rip-off who goes around with a bow and arrow?"

Johnny G. shrugged. He'd never heard of any such thing, but he didn't have the connections his boss did. Or, for that matter, the interest. Staying out of the way of the real Batman was enough for him.

"Could be a coincidence," Young admitted. "But it might bear looking into. I'll handle that angle. _You_ get your hands on that database."

Johnny G. was foolish enough to argue back. "I still don't see what's so important about that database. It's gotta be hopelessly outta date after all these years, anyway," he opined.

Young gave him a backhand slap across the mouth. "Get that database," he ordered. "No excuses. And while you're at it, take care of Diana Lance."

->>> ————————>

Two against one. It really wasn't fair odds.

One of the punks rushed Green Arrow headlong while the other disappeared behind him, obviously planning some sort of sneak attack. His booted foot shot out, catching the second kid violently in the stomach and sending him sprawling out of action for awhile. His companion, however, took advantage of the second's distraction and grabbed hold of the bow, grappling with the older man in a test of strength.

Although he landed a lucky blow, managing to tip the edge of the longbow back far enough to clout Green Arrow on the nose, the pain only served to infuriate the crimefighter. He wrested it away from his attacker and used it as a staff, pushing the wooden edge against the young man's throat and shoving hard till he reeled backwards, gasping and choking.

Not fair odds at all. By the time the young punk, who couldn't have been more than about twenty-one or so, thought to make a grab for his gun, he found the business end of a razor sharp arrow aimed in his direction.

"You just go right ahead and try it, boy," growled the mysterious man in green. "I'm looking forward to it."

On an average night, some of them decided to try their luck and some didn't. This one made the gamble. The gun came out, the arrow was released...and both weapons were knocked away harmlessly by a scallop-edged black object that came hurtling out of nowhere.

With a look of stark terror on his face, the boy ran away as fast as he could. Green Arrow turned, knowing exactly what — or rather _who — _he would see standing behind him.

"Huh," he snorted. "I was wondering when the city guardian would show up."

The newcomer was only slightly taller than Green Arrow, but a lot more powerfully built. He was dressed in a tight-fitting grey bodysuit with a black bat emblem contained within a golden oval across the center of his chest. A cowl topped by pointy ears hid the top half of his face, and the long, blue-black cape he wore had the vague suggestion of bat's wings. In his black-gauntleted hands he clasped three very familiar looking arrows, lost earlier in the evening.

"Hey, thanks," Green Arrow said, reaching for his discarded property. "Those things are expensive to replace."

Batman said nothing. His eyes narrowed to slits and he made no move for a few moments. At length he held out his hand, allowing the other man to take back his arrows.

"Deadly weapons," he said, his voice a deep rasp. "I don't believe in excessive force."

Green Arrow gave him an incredulous look. "You've got to be freakin' kiddin' me! I suppose there's nothing dangerous in that arsenal you carry around?" he protested, gesturing toward the gold utility belt Batman wore around his waist.

"Dangerous, yes. Deadly, no," the newcomer told him succinctly. Lacking patience for the debate he could tell was about to start, he added, "Aren't you on the wrong coast?"

The other man raised his eyebrows. "Oh, so you know who I am, huh? I'm flattered," he joked.

"Don't be. I like to keep up. Why are you in Gotham?"

Oliver sighed wearily. By city standards, it was still early, only a little past two a.m. But it had been a long, frustrating day after getting little sleep last night, and he was tired. He'd spent many hours on the back streets of this strange city "interviewing" people about the whereabouts of his quarry, with varying results. The two he'd run into a few minutes earlier weren't the first who'd shown an inclination to fight, either. The last thing he was up for was an interrogation by a territorial vigilante.

"Look, if you're going to start marking territory here —" he began.

The cold look never left Batman's face. "What are you doing in my city?" he repeated slowly.

"Enjoying the low crime rate," Green Arrow responded sarcastically. "Other than that, not really any of your concern, all right? So feel free to butt out any time you like."

The cowled figure stepped closer to him. "Let's get one thing straight. This is my city. I don't care what you do in Seattle, but once you step foot in Gotham, it _becomes_ my concern."

The archer shook his head disgustedly. "So, now I have to check in with the local vigilante? You know how stupid that — oh, what the hell? I'm looking for information on a little creep who calls himself Johnny G."

"So I've heard...from a couple of guys you shot arrows at."

"Yeah, yeah. Second verse, okay? You know anything about him?"

"Strictly small time. What do you want with him?"

Green Arrow leaned against the dumpster, arms folded, and studied the shadowy figure carefully. Normally he would be more than happy to continue this little confrontation all night long, but he lacked sufficient time and energy just at present. Besides, he'd promised Dinah he would do everything he could to find out what this small time hood wanted from her mother, and this Batman character might have the answers he needed. Goodness knows no one else seemed to.

"You know who he works for?" he asked.

Batman wasn't exactly forthcoming. "Various people, short term," he answered tersely. "Now, why don't you return the favour and tell me exactly what you're looking for?"

"If I knew that, I wouldn't be wasting time with you," Green Arrow told him shortly. "My girlfriend's mother is in the hospital, recovering from surgery. Yesterday, this guy was outside her room, dressed as an orderly. Last night, he broke into her apartment. The cops don't take the matter seriously, but her daughter does."

"Naturally," said Batman. "Is there any particular reason anyone should want to harm her? Has she crossed paths with the wrong people, or does she have information she shouldn't?"

He sounded interested, and his questions were a lot more pertinent than anything they'd gotten from the police at any point. Dinah had insisted on going back to tell them about the incident in the hospital corridor, but they were still less than helpful. Mistaken identity, they called it.

Green Arrow decided to take him into his confidence. "The monster-in-law used to be a crimefighter. Called herself Black Canary. You'd probably have been a kid at the time," he guessed.

"I don't remember."

Oliver laughed, but there was no humour in the sound. "Somebody'll say the same thing about us one of these days. Urban legends. All the same, I think there's somebody that _does_ remember her."

Batman was inclined to agree. "Have you questioned her?" he asked sensibly.

"Not yet. We're not exactly what you'd call the greatest of friends. I wanted evidence before I tried confronting her."

"Mm. I think maybe I can help. Meet me tomorrow night."

Without another word he blended into the shadows and was gone, leaving Oliver wondering if he should get his eyes checked. Handy technique though, he thought. He was good, and he was quiet, but this guy moved like a ghost — take your eyes off him for a second and it was like he was never there.

———————— -

Batman was right. He needed to talk to Diana, and soon.

It was humiliating having to admit that he hadn't yet taken that obvious step, but Dinah had been dead set against it. Her mother was recovering from major surgery, she was still very ill, the last thing she needed was to be frightened over this situation. Oliver hadn't agreed, but it was her call to make and he'd accepted her judgment.

If she was asleep he wouldn't bother her, he decided. It wouldn't hurt to look in on her anyway, might help put her daughter's mind at ease.

He sidled along the fifth floor ledge, envying the other crimefighter's gadgetry. Without question, Batman would have some sort of device that would let him shoot a line up to the proper window and pull himself up without having to do any climbing at all. Lucky so-and-so.

From the open window he heard the unexpected but very familiar sounds of a struggle going on. Flattening himself against the wall, he inched closer and risked a look inside.

Damn!

He'd made his move faster than they had anticipated. Johnny G. — the man was becoming positively ubiquitous — held a pillow above Diana's head, pressing lightly against the hands held up in protest. She was too weak to put up much of a struggle, but the young man prolonged the encounter deliberately, taking pleasure in tormenting her.

"I'll bet you weren't much of a crimefighter, even back in your own day," he heard the punk say. "And look at you now, a sick old woman who can't even hold a hospital pillow off her face. Why don't you just go ahead and tell me what I want to know, huh? You might even be too pathetic for me to kill, then," he lied.

_Sadistic little bastard,_ thought Green Arrow as he ducked quickly out of sight.

But while the protracted strain was no doubt bad for Diana, the delay would ultimately be to her advantage. The archer reached for his bow, took an arrow out of his quiver, and fitted it against the string. Bracing his knee against the window frame, he took aim and fired.

The arrow went straight through Johnny's thigh, far enough so that the head pierced the other leg as well. With a high-pitched scream of agony, he fell down clutching his injured leg. Blood poured out of the wound.

Diana, fighting for breath, her eyes wide with terror, managed to gasp, "Oh, thank God!" and reach belatedly for the emergency button on her bed. She'd thought, in one of those moments of clarity that come in the middle of mortal peril, that she was going to die with a way to summon help only inches away. But fending off her attacker took all of her already depleted strength; she couldn't have risked removing one hand from the pillow, even for a moment.

Her gaze travelled from the whimpering, sobbing mass on the floor to the window. Her saviour was visible in silhouette only, bringing to mind the image of Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, just the way he intended. She had to admit, he cut a dashing figure.

"Go!" she ordered, in a shaky voice that was barely more than a whisper.

He knew what she meant; it wouldn't be advisable for hospital security to find him there. And she would cover for him, either out of gratitude or for Dinah's sake.

"I'll be back," he said, and disappeared from sight.

- >>>————————>

She seemed to be sleeping peacefully when he climbed back through her window, somewhat more than an hour later.

He stood watching over her with an expression of unaccustomed sympathy. All right, so she wasn't his favourite person in the world, but she didn't deserve this...any of it. No one did. And God knew Dinah deserved better than to have to fear for her mother's life on two separate counts.

Oh, no. Dinah. He hoped no one had called her yet; he wanted to break the news to her himself.

"I'm awake," Diana said without opening her eyes.

Oliver dragged a chair next to the bed, noticing that someone had been in and mopped up the gory mess on the floor. He'd noticed the same thing from time to time while visiting other patients, usually in a professional capacity: hospital security might not be all it should, but housekeeping was usually on top of things.

"How ya doin'?" he asked quietly.

Her only answer was a raspy, mocking laugh. Then she opened her blue eyes (unnervingly like her daughter's) and looked him in the face.

"Thank you," she said, not without some difficulty.

He smiled at the understatement, and responded in kind. "It's my job," he reminded her.

"I remember."

"I bet you do. That's what all this is about, isn't it? Something to do with the first Black Canary. What did he want?"

"That's a lot to assume," she said, neatly evading the question. She didn't really feel up to sparring with him, but her pride was hurt. Why make it easier for him to come in here and play the conquering hero like the belligerent alpha male he was?

Weakened though she was, he recognised the return of the old Diana Lance.

"Listen, lady. I want some answers out of you and I want 'em now."

Unimpressed, she warned him, "Keep your voice down. There's a guard outside in the corridor."

"Well it's _about_ time they got around to protecting you!" he exclaimed, thinking of everything Dinah had gone through in the last thirty hours or so trying to convince someone that her mother might be in danger.

"Don't pretend you care," she said snippily.

He knew she was just blowing off steam after the experience she'd just gone through, and because of her illness and all that, but the night's frustrations were catching up with him, too, and he wasn't in the mood to cut her any slack.

"Right this minute I wouldn't give a rat's ass, personally," he said candidly. "But whatever happens to you affects your daughter, and I damn sure care about that!"

Diana struggled to sit up straighter in the hospital bed. "And you think I don't!" she inquired icily.

"The way you treat her? Damned if I know. I don't think Dinah does, either."

"You are the very _last_ person in the world who's qualified to give me parenting advice," she snapped. The sheer audacity of the man! After the _fine_ job he'd done with his kid... And then the import of his words hit her.

_She doesn't know? Dinah...doesn't know how I feel about her. That can't _possibly _be true, can it?_

Diana remained silent for a long moment. Then, quietly, she told him, "I have a database on the kid's boss and his predecessor. I've been keeping it since the late sixties. If Cary Young didn't know about it before, he obviously does now."

"What do you have on him?"

"Everything," she said simply. "Trade routes for their drug operations, details on money laundering, connections. The personnel sheets are a little out of date by now, but I don't have quite the inside edge I did twenty-five years ago. There's enough to do plenty of damage, even now."

"So why didn't you?" he was compelled to ask.

She shrugged. "Balances and leverages. It's really none of your business."

"Okay," Oliver agreed. She was speaking to him as one hero to another and he understood. He'd had more than a few of those arrangements himself over the years. "But why come after you now, after all these years?"

Diana hesitated, trying to decide how much of the back story to give him. "Twenty, thirty years ago, the biggest crimelord in Gotham City was a man named Sam Ballard. You hear a lot about the so-called criminal giants in the mob today, Rupert Thorne, all those guys...but they're all competing with each other for territory Ballard had mostly to himself in the sixties and seventies.

"My father — he was a cop; Dinah might have told you — worked the case for years. He kept copies of most of his important files at home. And after he died, I took his notes and started adding all the information I could gather to the collection. It was sort of a tribute to him, I guess. Eventually, Ballard found out about it."

Green Arrow knew further information about what had happened then wouldn't be forthcoming, so he didn't press. For the first time, he wondered if the story Dinah had believed all her life, about her mother retiring from crimefighting to concentrate on her family, was really true.

"So how does this guy Young fit into all this?" he questioned.

"Ballard practically adopted him. That's not widely known, I understand. Especially in the circles where Young usually keeps himself. But word has a way of getting around, especially if you know how to listen. Soapy Sam — that's what they called him, because he could slither out from under the law like he'd been lathered — lost a good deal of his action when guys like Chuckie Sol started coming in in the seventies. But not everything."

"And you kept track."

She nodded. "As best I could. I don't know _precisely_ what went to whom when the action started spreading out, but I've got some of the threads. The new guys weren't my target. Three weeks ago, Ballard died. If I know him, he would have left everything he had to Cary Young, including his file on me."

Oliver said, thinking aloud, "And whatever reason Ballard had for leaving you alone, Young doesn't abide by the original contract."

"Obviously. I assume you know how to handle it?"

He chuckled. It was, he thought, more respect than she'd ever accorded him. "I think I've got some idea," he assured her. "Don't worry; you'll be okay."

Diana laughed openly at the irony. "Aside from the gangsters and the cancer, you mean?"

Oliver moved to the window. Turning to her with a cheeky grin he said, "Ah, the cancer won't kill _you_, lady. You're too mean to die. And I'll take care of the gangsters." And he placed one foot on the sill, ready to make his exit.

Diana called him back. "Oliver..."

He hesitated, and she looked at the man who was, for all intents and purposes, her son-in-law. She'd never liked him, but now she had to trust him. Her life, almost literally, rested in his hands.

"What is it, Diana?" he asked softly.

She chose not to tell him what she was thinking. What she had to say was more urgent, and she knew she didn't have to explain that to him. "Oliver, keep my daughter out of all this. As far away as possible."

"Trust me," he said, and left without a backwards glance.

And, as much as she hated the idea, she thought she could.


	7. Starting at Nothing and Counting to Zero

**Chapter Six**

**Starting at Nothing and Counting to Zero**

She hadn't closed the bedroom door all the way, but the old hinges still protested loudly, clearly audible over the whine of the air conditioner, as he pushed it open further and made his way into the room.

Dinah slept right through the noise, and for a second Oliver was tempted to take the coward's way out and just let her sleep. But no, he couldn't. She deserved to hear the details from him. Besides, she was kind enough to decide to let _him_ sleep, which meant she'd leave the apartment without waking him and go to the hospital without any idea of what awaited her.

He leaned his bow against the dresser with care, then slung the quiver over his shoulder and onto the mirror frame in one smooth move. Grimacing at his shadowy reflection, he shoved back the hood of the dark green tunic he wore.

_I swear I'm getting too old for this,_ he told himself as he peeled the domino mask off his face. It was a complaint he made often, every time he got tired or discouraged, and tonight he was both. It was true, he did sometimes — well, often — encourage trouble to look in his direction, but sometimes he wished it would just go away and bother somebody else for a change. However, standing there thinking about it was just delaying the inevitable.

Gingerly, he lowered his weight onto the bed. He studied Dinah's sleeping form solemnly, and reached out a long finger to brush the hair out of her eyes. She stirred slightly in her sleep, and he caressed her cheek tenderly.

"Hey. Wake up, sleeping beauty," he whispered.

"Mmm," she murmured, dragging herself to consciousness. She tried to focus her fuzzy vision on the illuminated dial of the alarm clock. "What time is it? Oh. Early. Anything happen?"

"Lots of things happened," he answered. "It was an eventful night. I met Batman," he added.

Dinah sat up, looking interested. "Does he live up to his reputation?" she wanted to know.

"Ho-_ho,_ yes. I'd say. Fun guy." He lowered his voice to a deep rasp. "'What are you doing in my city?'" he mocked, and they both laughed. "I'm supposed to meet up with him again tonight."

"Did you find any leads?" Dinah asked hopefully, getting to the subject foremost on her mind.

Oliver was silent for a moment, then he took a deep breath and answered, "Yeah. Yeah, I did. I also got Johnny G." He could see the expression of pleasure that brightened her face even in the pre-dawn light of the bedroom, and cut her off before she could get too excited.

"That's the good news portion of the good news/bad news scenario," he confessed. "I put an arrow through his leg while he was in your mom's hospital room."

"Oh, my God...Oliver," she breathed, blue eyes wide with horror.

His gloved hands rested comfortingly on her shoulders, and his voice was low and soothing. "Sshhh, shh, don't worry," he reassured her. "She's okay. She isn't hurt, I promise."

"Thank goodness!"

There were tears in her eyes, and her breath came in ragged gasps that weren't quite sobs. She hid her head against his chest, drawing strength from him as he held her in a tight embrace and rocked her back and forth.

"Sssshhhhh," he murmured softly. "Everything's all right."

"Oh, God," she said again. "I _knew_ something was going to happen. That's why I kept on at the police, because that's all I could _do. _But he'd just been snooping; I wasn't expecting an out-and-out attack in the middle of the night. I'm so _stupid!_ I've lost every instinct I ever had."

"I wasn't expecting it, either," he reminded her.

"At least you were _there,"_ she said bitterly. "That's a lot more than can be said for me."

Oliver kissed her forehead tenderly. "If I know you, you'll be there all day tomorrow...today," he corrected himself. "And the police have a guard on her door now — _finally._ So there's nothing for you to worry about."

"Like hell there isn't," she argued, moving a few inches so she could look up at him, a worried frown creasing her face. "Mom is still in danger until we find out what's going on. Johnny G. couldn't have been working by himself, Ollie."

He didn't need to be reminded of that. In fact, he'd hoped that aspect of the situation wouldn't occur to her, but he knew better. Her instincts were too sharp, no matter how she berated herself.

"I realise that," he told her. "But I know who he's working for, and what they're after. I had a nice long talk with Diana after everything settled down. She had quite an interesting little story to tell about the old days."

He kicked off his boots and stretched out full length on the bed, pulling Dinah down beside him. Encouraging her to get comfortable, he began to tell her everything her mother had revealed to him, willingly or otherwise.

"Wow," she said at length. "So it really was connected to the first Black Canary, then."

"Yep. You were right on the money."

A hint of a scowl crossed her face. "I should have just _asked_ her what was going on, instead of trying to keep everything nice and pleasant for her. You can't protect someone by pretending they're not in danger."

"That's true," admitted Oliver, the closest he was willing to come to 'I told you so'. "But don't beat yourself up over it, Di. Remember, this _is_ your mother we're talking about. It's not like she would have told you anything."

Dinah sighed. "I know. I can't imagine her ever telling _you_ anything if you hadn't just saved her life."

"Not without a snarl or two, I can tell you," he laughed.

She smiled as well, then grew serious again. "Thank you," she told him solemnly.

"What for?"

"Just for being in the right place at the right time, as usual. For taking all this on yourself when you should be off enjoying yourself, getting drunk with Roy."

Oliver gave a snort. "Well, that's a point," he said wryly. "Ironic, isn't it? I've been waiting that kid's whole life for him to get old enough to be a drinking buddy, and what happens when he finally does? He moves to the opposite end of the country and I can't even seem to make it for a visit when we're practically in the next city."

"Awww," smiled Dinah, patting him sympathetically on the arm. "I'm serious, though. You shouldn't have to do this. My mother, my problem."

"Your problem, my problem," he reminded her firmly. "'Whither thou goest' and all that stuff, remember?"

She shoved herself up on one elbow and gazed into his face. "Keep saying things like that, Mr. Queen, and I could _seriously_ fall in love with you," she said, kissing him thoroughly.

Oliver returned her kisses with languid enjoyment. "I love you," he told her, barely able to stifle a yawn.

She simply smiled back at him, not insulted. "Why don't you get some rest?" she suggested gently. She pulled the archery gloves off his hands, and he winked at her as he sat up and removed the rest of his loosely fitting clothing.

"Good idea," he agreed as he lay back and closed his eyes.

->>> ————————>

Sleep, of course, was out of the question for Dinah. Long after Oliver had dozed off she sat beside him, back against the headboard, knees clutched to her chest, watching the sun come up. Occasionally she looked at her sleeping hero, stroking his hair lovingly as the increasing light brought his features slowly into focus.

He'd take care of her; she knew that. He loved her. Certainly he had his faults — San Andreas sized ones — but that was the one thing about him she could absolutely count on. He loved her enough he would willingly die for her, probably even kill for her if necessary. Anything to keep her from being hurt. And by extension, that protection included her mother also, because he knew...

Because he knew how much she loved her.

That was the hardest thing of all to face. Dinah was overwhelmed by emotions she'd never even suspected. Once, as a teenager, she'd been forced to admit having some sort of feeling other than antipathy toward Diana, and she'd dismissed it out of hand.

"Simple biological bond," she'd called it, with the facile arrogance of the very young. Her premise, which had made her mother's friend very angry, had been simply that the two of them would never willingly _choose_ to have a relationship at all, were it not for that incidental connection of blood.

As it turned out, she was right about that at least, since that's exactly the sort of relationship they'd had since the period of legal dependence had passed. Without the presence of the person they'd both loved more than anyone else in the world, there was nothing left between them...or so Dinah had made herself believe.

It hurt to realise just how much she really _did_ care about her mother. Whether it was nothing but a "simple biological bond" or not, the relationship was there. It might be largely adversarial in nature, but it existed. She was a central figure in her life whether Dinah wanted her to be or not.

There was an old proverb she'd always hated, something about every woman, at some point in her life, looking into the mirror and realising she had turned into her own mother. That saying had _always_ made her angry, especially since she sometimes had the uncomfortable suspicion it might have more than a little truth in it. Good Lord, she was practically reliving aspects of her mother's life. Same occupation (why _hadn't _she chosen to become a detective instead of a florist?), same secret identity, same decision to give up her life as a crimefighter.

Diana had never asked her daughter to come to Gotham, in fact she hadn't even hinted at the possibility. She'd merely called to update her next of kin on the state of her health, and tell her she'd be in the hospital for the next few days in case she needed to get in touch with her. A very terse, matter of fact, almost entirely unemotional telephone conversation, but Dinah hadn't even considered _not_ flying out to be with her.

Likewise, a few years earlier the same situation had occurred in reverse, although that was a time in her life Dinah never thought about if she could help it.

One minute she'd been joking with Oliver, making plans for the baby that had been very much wanted, if not entirely _planned_, and the next minute she'd been in worse pain than she'd ever thought possible. The emergency room doctor had diagnosed an ectopic pregnancy, disastrous at the best of times, but there was worse news to follow. An ultrasound revealed several tumours in her uterus, and although the biopsy proved them to be benign, she was told that most likely she would never be able to undergo a normal pregnancy. Furthermore, given such an extensive family history of that type of cancer, a hysterectomy was strongly advised as a preventative measure.

Oliver had gone against her urging and telephoned her mother, who had flown in to stay at her bedside even after she was released from the hospital.

Because she loved her?

But she'd accepted the fact that she'd never be a grandmother with such equanimity that Dinah had accused her of being _glad._ Diana had tightened her lips into a thin line and walked out of the room without, for once, saying a word in retaliation. It had taken months for the younger woman to realise that her mother had been _hurt _by the accusation

That's what they did, the pair of them. They'd spent twenty-eight years hurting each other and protecting each other.

Only this time, Dinah was helpless. They both were. Her mother was in serious danger, both from her illness and from some gangster with an _inherited_ grudge of all things, and there was nothing she could do on either front to help her.

More than anything else Dinah Lance hated the feeling of helplessness. She got out of bed and went into the living room, pacing back and forth restlessly. She was angry, and scared, and frustrated, and utterly disgusted with herself. There was no reason she should be sitting back like a helpless little female, waiting on a man to make things right.

It wasn't Oliver's _job_ to take care of things. Not this time. No matter how much he cared for her, no matter how much he insisted that her problem was also his problem, it was still _her_ mother. _She_ should be the one protecting her.

Black Canary could handle the situation...if only she hadn't given up.

———————— -

Seattle

October, 1991

"—ther for the Seattle-Tacoma area this morning: rainy, with a chance of showers this afternoon turning to thunderstorms tonight. Turning to local news, attorneys for alleged drug kingpin Derek Rambaldi claimed yesterday in a motion filed w—"

Oliver's hand reached out and silenced the clock radio.

"Hey, I was listening to that," objected Dinah sleepily.

He rolled over and kissed her. "I've heard enough about Rambaldi to last me a few lifetimes. You already caught the guy, your part's over. Quit obsessing already."

"You're right." She sat up and yawned, running a hand through her short dark hair. "Besides, I got a day job. How much sleep did I get, anyway? Oh, man. Barely three and a half hours."

"Getting too old to keep up with the late nights?" her lover teased. (_He_ would be thirty-eight at the end of December.)

Dinah picked up her pillow and threatened him with it, then dropped it lightly onto his face and climbed out of bed. "Watch it, buster. Anyway, you've got to get up for work yourself, so there."

"Er—"

Dinah, in the middle of surveying the contents of her closet, grasped the clothes bar in both hands and rested her face against her outstretched arms, wondering why it should even catch her by surprise. The column at the Seattle Star was the third job he'd had in as many years; it was only remarkable he'd managed to keep it for as long as he had.

"What happened?" she asked him mildly.

He shrugged. "I just pissed off the wrong people."

"You seem to have a talent for doing that," she agreed. Finding the blouse she was looking for, she sat down on the bed next to him and looked at him quizzically. "I thought the publisher said the kind of controversy you stirred up sold papers."

He shrugged. "Yeah, well. They liked that all right — it was more the threat of the libel suit they didn't care much for. Seems I'm suddenly a 'libelity' to them."

Dinah moaned, though more over the news than the atrocious pun. "I knew that was going to happen, Ollie! I told you you couldn't carry on some sort of private vendetta against half the industrial leaders in town and expect to get away with it."

Oliver was hurt. She knew the situation as well as he did; he'd expected sympathy, not 'I told you so'.

"Private vendetta!" he scoffed, throwing off the covers and swinging his legs over the side of the bed. "This is as much a matter of public concern as it can be. I know you haven't had time for anything but this Rambaldi mess for months, but you ought to know what those guys have their hands in."

Realising she wasn't going to have time for the luxury of a shower this morning, she started pulling on her clothes while she talked to him.

"Yes, I know it," she answered impatiently. "But we can't _prove_ it. And if we haven't been to find the evidence we need _privately_, what in the world did you think you were doing going _public_ without anything to back up your claims?"

It was an old argument. Business tycoons involved in shady dealings had been a fact of life ever since civilization had become industrialized. But simply because the situation _did_ involve corporate "fatcats", it had an infuriating effect on Oliver.

In the time they'd been together, she'd learned very little about the years he'd spent as a businessman. He hadn't enjoyed it, and by his own admission he didn't have the personality for it. He always claimed that the downfall of his family business — and the concurrent loss of most of his personal fortune — had been due to his own negligence, but there were hints of something else, something slightly more sinister, that made her wonder sometimes.

Either way, his spite against dishonest businessmen was deeply ingrained and he seemed sometimes a little _too_ anxious to bring their sins to light. Given that fact, and his general lack of patience, Dinah had had more than a few reservations from the start about the kind of trouble he could get himself into with a public forum to vent his opinions.

He shrugged off the complaint. "This libel thing is just an excuse, Dinah. All this is just another way for the greedy, high-living bastards who control most of the damn economy to keep the little guy down where they think he belongs. What better way to do it than strangling the freedom of the press, keeping information away from the public? Get rid of the _one_ guy who wants to tell everybody the truth about what those parasites are —"

"This has _nothing_ to do with abridging the freedom of the press, or anything like it," she said angrily, cutting him off before he had a chance to start foaming at the mouth. "Not this time. This is all about _you_ going off half-cocked and using that damn column as nothing more than a mouthpiece for Green Arrow, which is _exactly_ what I knew would happen when you took on the job."

"So you were just waiting for me to fail? Again?"

She knew exactly what he was doing. Trying to get her to feel sorry for him, making himself the injured party. He'd done it so often over the last three years that she knew every variation of the theme by heart...but it still worked.

Her voice was much softer as she told him, "No, Oliver. Never." Turning away from the mirror where she was applying makeup with a hand that wasn't quite steady, she looked at him earnestly. "Honestly — you have the intelligence, and the education, to do anything you want to do. If you'd just give yourself half a chance you could work miracles."

Oliver gave her a slightly sour look. "Only on the streets, babe," he said sadly. "And they don't pay me for that."

"Pity."

"Yeah. Well, don't worry about it. I'll find something in the next couple of weeks, I always do. Hey, how do you think I'd do in the field of public relations?"

_"What!"_

"I'm serious. Somebody that came around the paper not too long ago was sounding me out about the prospect. What do you think?" He grinned, eyes dancing with merriment.

Dinah studied him seriously. He did have a knack for making people like him, but he also had a talent for making enemies that beat anything she'd ever seen.

"I think...you're crazy," she said finally. "You've got half the people in this city wanting to murder Green Arrow, and the other half screaming for Oliver Queen's head on a platter, and you want to _introduce_ them?"

He gave a snort of amusement. "That's a point," he admitted. "Not really what it's all about, but I don't think he really meant it as a serious job offer, anyway. But still, it's something to think about, huh?"

Dinah bit her lip. "Just...don't think about it too long, okay?" she suggested tactfully.

"Don't _worry_ about it," he repeated, blowing it off. "Something'll turn up before long."

"Something will have to," she told him seriously. "We can't _afford_ for this to keep happening. You can't just work when you feel like it, and expect me to take up the slack."

The pattern she could see forming appalled her. She'd once found it captivating when he described himself as "irresponsible as hell". It was cute and dangerous and sexy, and God help her, she hadn't really believed he was serious. Now that she _knew_ he was serious, she still found the trait just as charming and sexy, but the dangerous aspect frightened her sometimes.

There were women Black Canary met on a regular basis, different women with stories that were so exactly the same they all started blending together after a while. They put up with husbands and boyfriends who used them, cheated on them, beat them, sat around and drank while the women worked two jobs to support the family...not at _all_ the sort of man Oliver was, but on some level there was just enough similarity to unnerve her.

Especially since every single one of those women made the same excuse she did. _But I love him._

"What, you think I get fired deliberately?"

"Not deliberately," Dinah admitted. She was making a concerted effort to be patient with him, be reasonable about the whole situation, but it was getting harder with every excuse he made. "But I do think maybe you have a real problem with staying committed to something when it stops being 'fun'."

"Sooo...?"

"It's just that when you get bored you start causing trouble, and when you make trouble you get fired," she said through clenched teeth.

He stared at her blankly, unable to figure out why she should get so worked up losing about a stupid job. In the scheme of things it was worthless, at least in Oliver's mind. In his experience jobs like that were a dime a dozen: easy come, easy go. His _real_ job, fighting crime, was the only one that mattered. Dinah of all people should understand that.

"And then I get another job," he reminded her.

"Eventually," she sighed. "And in the meantime what are we supposed to do for money? Look, I know you grew up rich, and never had to work for a living. But guess what? You do now."

Her condescending tone strained his temper to the breaking point. "Guess what? I know that, Dinah," he said angrily. "How about you stop talking to me like a child and give me a little support here?"

She took a deep breath, trying to quell the urge to laugh out of sheer frustration. What irony!

"Well, that's a hell of a way to put it, considering that's what I've had to do, more than once."

It was a low blow, and his pride was wounded. In a cold voice he told her, "Well, I'm sorry you fell in love with such a lazy, worthless slob who can't even be a decent provider."

"I didn't say that and you know it," she snapped back. "You're just trying to get me to feel sorry for you." And the trick wasn't about to work a second time.

"Be a nice change," he said unfairly.

"Why should I? You seem to be doing a bang-up job all by yourself. Poor little Oliver — _somebody's _always out to get you. Even me."

"Don't be a shrew."

The comment stung. She was surprised and hurt that he would say such a thing. "I'm not _being_ a shrew, Oliver. I'm just trying to be a grownup — God knows somebody in this relationship has to be!"

Voice laced with bitterness, Oliver finished the thought for her. "Go on...you might as well say it. We both know it's not gonna be me, don't we?"

Dinah fought back tears, although she wasn't a crier by nature. "I have to leave," she choked. "I'll be late."

With that she slipped on her shoes and left, slamming the bedroom door behind her.

"Dinah?" he called after her, but he could tell by the silence in the apartment that she'd already gone. Punching his pillow angrily, he muttered, "All that over a couple of weeks between jobs."

->>> ————————>

Oliver's predictions turned out to be somewhat overly optimistic, and several weeks later he was still one of Seattle's unemployment statistics. He'd tried looking for work, meeting the same story everywhere he went: the white-collar types wanted nothing to do with the loudmouthed jerk from the Seattle Star, and the less discriminating places of employment were reluctant to hire someone who resembled the local vigilante to such a degree. "You'd scare off customers," was a complaint he'd heard more than a few times lately. "Nobody wants to be around a guy that even _looks_ like that Arrow guy. Maybe if you got rid of that beard..."

Over the last few days he'd spent less and less time pounding the pavements during the daylight hours. As a result, when Dinah got home from work every afternoon he was usually to be found fiddling with his archery tackle or camped out in front of the TV set. Today it was the latter.

Dinah stepped inside the apartment they shared, shaking the water off her umbrella and placing it on the plastic mat by the door. If the look she gave Oliver was at all critical she was unaware of the fact, but his tone was laced with rather defensive irony.

"Hey, isn't this just what you always dreamed of? Trudging home in the cold rain from a hard day's work to find your unemployed boyfriend sitting around in his socks watching TV and eating olives out of a jar? However, it's not all bad news — I made dinner."

She smiled at him rather vaguely. A glance in the kitchen told her he'd made his famous chili, and hadn't bothered about washing up any of the pots and pans required. Normally that would drive her mad, but today she had more important things on her mind.

"I need to talk to you."

"Yeah," he agreed seriously. He gestured toward the television screen. "There's somethin' I wanted to talk to you about, too. The news —"

"I know. The Rambaldi thing." With a heavy sigh she sat down on the couch beside him. Oliver gave her a comforting pat on the knee.

"Ah, hon, I'm so sorry. I just can't _believe_ they let him go. After all the work you did. Crooked bastards."

She reached out and put her hand on top of his, appreciating the sympathy. "It's about par for the course these days, seems like. That's part of what I want to talk to you about."

"Shoot."

Dinah closed her eyes for a second and leaned back against the couch. Then, taking a deep breath that turned into yet another weary sigh she said, "Oliver, I've come to a decision. It's time I hung up the tights. Maybe past time."

"'Hung up the tights?'" he repeated blankly.

She nodded. "I think maybe it's time for Black Canary to retire," she said simply.

He looked at her in astonishment. "You're kidding. You can't do that! It's your whole life...you always told me it's in your blood."

"So is quitting, remember?" she answered bitterly.

Oliver stared at her. He'd noticed that she hadn't really been herself lately, especially after a night out, but this was the last thing in the world he'd ever expected from her.

"But what about all the good you do out on the streets?" he asked, trying a different tactic.

"That's debatable." Once again, the tone of unaccustomed bitterness caught him by surprise. Instinctively he moved closer.

She let go of his hand and stood up, feeling suddenly confined. She paced nervously for a moment and then sat down again with a sigh. "I'm _tired,_ Oliver," she said finally. "I mean, we come home in the middle of the night and it's time to get up for work almost before I even get to sleep. It was one thing when I was only doing part-time, but since I had to increase my hours, it's really starting to take its toll on me. I'm starting to burn out, I think."

He stared down at his hands in silence, suddenly too guilty to look her in the face. It was his fault she'd had to go to work full-time to support the two of them — not to mention his somewhat expensive "hobby". This was the result of his stupid, belligerent finger-pointing at the wrong people. The realisation made him feel about two inches tall.

"Dinah," he told her solemnly, "I'm looking as hard as I can, I swear. Something's gotta turn up soon, and when it does then we can get back to normal. It's just that right now it seems like the whole town's pissed at me — at least the establishment types, and they're the ones that do the hiring. 'It's that loudmouthed Queen guy from the paper. Let's get 'im!' But they'll forget all about it soon."

She knew it was the truth; he had made himself startlingly unpopular during his short tenure as a journalist, but she resented his habit of turning the conversation around to _him _as usual.

"And until then?" she asked, more harshly than she intended.

He had no answer for that. At length he said bitterly, "God, I wish I was still rich. Normally, y'know, I don't really care, but when it affects you..."

Dinah snuggled against his shoulder, laying one comforting arm across his. "Hey, at least you got to keep this apartment," she pointed out. "We'd _never_ make it if we had to pay rent."

"True, Pretty Bird, true. God, I'm gonna miss you out there," he lamented. "Green Arrow just won't be the same without his Canary. Well, at least it's only temporary, till we get straightened out, right?" he asked with resignation.

She frowned. "You want to know the truth? I'm not so sure. I've been thinking about it for awhile. About how maybe I should just grow up and stop running around in fishnets playing superhero. Just the way my mom did."

"Yeah, but, Di — you've always hated her for giving up crimefighting," he objected. "You said she was an object lesson on how _not_ to be a strong woman."

"I was a kid. I never stopped to think before now that maybe she had her reasons, maybe she _wasn't_ selling out after all."

Oliver gazed at her sadly, hating to see what was happening to her. She was only twenty-two; she'd always told him she didn't intend to give up crimefighting till she needed the wig just to disguise her grey hair.

"You know," she continued, "I said I was tired and that's true. But I'm not just _physically _tired. I'm...I don't know. Frustrated. Fed up. The excitement's still there, the adrenaline rush, but after that...nothing. It all falls flat. I feel like I'm not _accomplishing _anything.

"I mean, look at Derek Rambaldi. All those months of work. My great triumph. And yet he's back on the streets tonight. Everything I did, and it hasn't left a single mark on him."

Oliver swore. "We'll get him, Dinah. Eventually we'll get him. I promise you."

_"You'll _get him," she corrected. "Honestly, sometimes I think you were better off with Speedy as a partner."

He shifted position slightly so he could put his arm around her. Hugging her close, he said softly, "Hey, kiddo, don't even think that. You're the best partner a guy could ever have, in every sense of the word. I mean, I'm not knocking Roy, but I always knew he wasn't really in it for the long haul. He was always talking about college, and what he was gonna do after that. The costume bit was always just some excitement till his _real_ life started. With you, I thought this _was_ your real life."

"So did I," she told him with a wan smile. "Guess we were both wrong, huh?"

With the sort of falsely cheerful voice he always used when he was trying not to admit anything was wrong he suggested, "Hey, partner. I think what you need right now is a little comfort food. The chili's just the way you like it — extra garlic. How 'bout it?"

Dinah shook her head. "Mind saving it for later? I don't think that's the sort of comforting I need, exactly. I'd rather just...go to bed for awhile."

"Yeah, you're probably right," agreed Oliver. "Get some rest, then you'll feel —"

"I didn't say anything about resting," she reminded him, and smiled as she watched his eyes go wide with pleasure.

They had a lot more going for them than just sex, but it was the great panacea for their relationship. Anything that went wrong for one of them usually became somewhat more bearable in the other's embrace, even if the problem couldn't necessarily be fixed.

Much later, holding her in his arms in their darkened bedroom, he told her quietly, "I still want to change your mind about all this."

_"I_ want you to change my mind about it, Oliver. But I don't think it'll happen. I think this is what I have to do," she said miserably.

"Damn it," Ollie said helplessly.

He vowed to find himself a job as soon as possible, even if he had to try a different city. Hell, he'd commute to Vancouver every day if he had to. Surely, he thought, surely Dinah would start to feel differently about giving up her double life if she wasn't so exhausted all the time. The idea of what she was about to do scared him a little. Because if it really was his fault, if she turned her back on some part of her life she loved that much because of him, she would come to resent him for it sooner or later. And then it would come between them and he couldn't stand the thought of that.

On the other hand, if it really was a case of burn-out the way she said, the alternative might be even worse. She'd always spoken contemptuously of her mother's decision to put her family ahead of everything else, as if she'd betrayed her entire gender by doing so. And yet here she was doing much the same thing, and the signs of self-loathing were already evident. What kind of damage would this do to her?

"Will you at least go out with me tonight, for old times' sake?" he asked coaxingly, but Dinah was asleep.

_Chapter title comes from the curiously appropriately titled Wings song, 'Arrow Through Me': "You couldn't have found a more down hero, if you'da started at nothing and counted to zero."_


	8. Pretty Bird Uncaged

**Chapter Seven**

**Pretty Bird Uncaged**

Gotham City, 1997

Oliver Queen sat at the table in the kitchenette, surrounded by piles of books and papers. One of Larry's old Louis Armstrong records was playing on the stereo. He had many of the same old classics in his CD collection at home; he remembered Dinah commenting on the fact when they first met. It had been quite a pleasant surprise to him to find such a young woman who liked the same kind of music he did, no matter how she came to hear it in the first place.

He looked up with a smile of relief as she came through the door of the apartment with an armload of shopping bags. It was well after eight o'clock, much later than her normal time for getting home, and he had begun to feel a few twinges of concern. He was hardly the nervous sort, but under the circumstances a little extra caution was only prudent.

"Guess the old saying's true," he teased. "'When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.'"

"Very funny. Since when did you start quoting T-shirts?" she replied.

She put the bags down on the floor and headed for the coffee maker. It had been a stressful day, and she needed caffeine more than anything else at this point — especially given her tentative plans for the evening. Wearily, she pulled out the chair next to him and dropped into it.

"Tired?"

Dinah sipped the hot, soothing liquid, taking her time about answering. True, she had been awakened very early, and she _should_ be exhausted, but her adrenaline level was still at a higher level than it had been in years. It felt...wonderful!

"Mm, a little, maybe. But I don't really figure I'll be getting much sleep tonight she said with meaning.

Her words were open to easy misinterpretation, especially when he glimpsed the lettering on one small, shiny gold bag. "Veronica's Secret, huh?" he said, impressed. He leaned over, one hand tugging the string handle, to sneak a peek at the contents.

Dinah gave his hand a playful warning slap, like a mother saying "don't touch" to a toddler. "_That's_ for later," she told him.

"I have to go out later," he reminded her with regret.

"Give you something to look forward to, then, won't it?" she teased. She laughed as he waggled his eyebrows and gave her his best dirty-old-man leer, then added hesitantly, "I'm not...absolutely sure you're going to like it, though."

He shrugged. "Bound to beat the hell out of Batman's man-panties," he joked. He'd heard the phrase somewhere in the past, and his meeting with Batman had brought it to mind again.

Dinah choked on her coffee, barely managing to avoid a classic spit take, then spluttered with laughter. "Man-panties! Oh, God...Ollie!" With a shake of her head, she stood up and started for the bedroom, still giggling, to put away her purchases.

"Well, you know, the dark underwear on the outside of the tights look," he explained, raising his voice slightly. "You didn't _see_ the guy. How can any self-respecting crimefighter dress like that? Not as bad as that Superman guy, though. Blue and red? Please!"

Dinah, shifting things around in her mother's closet, shook her head. "And this from the guy who spent — how many years was it? — running around in a little green feathered hat?" she shot back. She waited, but there was no response from the other room.

"Szechuan okay with you?" he asked after a long silence. "I didn't have any idea what time you'd be home, so I went ahead and ordered out when it started getting late." He lowered his voice as she came back in the room, wearing shorts and pulling a T-shirt over her head.

"Bless you," she said, voice muffled in the folds of cloth. "I _really_ wasn't looking forward to cooking tonight."

She came to stand beside him, dropping a grateful kiss on the top of his golden head. Oliver put his arm around her hips and gave her an affectionate pat. She looked down at the books and papers he had spread in front of him on the table, noticing for the first time that he'd been looking through her mother's collection of scrapbooks and taking notes.

"Finding anything?" she asked casually.

Relieved she wasn't angry at him about looking through the stuff without permission, he answered, "Some background info, that's about it. I don't suppose she told you any more than the story I got last night?"

"Less. I've been ordered, in the nicest terms possible, to stay the hell out of this and not worry my pretty little head about it."

He doubted that was quite what Diana had meant, and doubted even more that she'd put it that way, but it was strange to find himself suddenly in the position of defending the woman. "She's just trying to keep you safe," he offered awkwardly.

Dinah, expecting some muttered pejorative, was more than a little surprised. Not only at the fact that _Oliver_ of all people was sticking up for her mother of his own volition, but at the idea that _either_ of them could possibly think she was in need of protection. "Keep her safe" indeed! Was that the image she'd acquired over the last several years?

As she opened her mouth to make some cutting retort, exactly what she didn't know as yet, the door buzzer sounded. Oliver went to pay for the food, while Dinah scowlingly grabbed plates from the cabinet.

_Maybe I'm overreacting, _she admitted to herself. To be perfectly honest, her mother had _always_ had a tendency to be smotheringly overprotective from the time Dinah had been a small child, insisting she remain in her company or her father's at all times. The only reason she'd been encouraged to study martial arts was for self-defense...just in case. She'd seemed pleased by her accomplishments in judo and karate, but she'd never actually seen the sort of thing she was capable of during her tenure as Black Canary. Ollie, on the other hand, ought to know exactly how well she could take care of herself, but he'd never been able to entirely control his protective instincts where she was concerned. He didn't _mean_ to treat her as a damsel in distress; it was just part of his nature to play knight errant.

Well...she'd just have to show them both.

———————— -

This was the most incredible vehicle he'd ever seen — long and low and sleek, with an outrageously extended hood in front, sort of like a cross between a stretch limo and the world's most powerful sports car. The mighty engine was almost silent as it idled, producing just a low rumbling sound that faded into the background noise of the neighbourhood. He tried not to let his surprise at its presence show, but he couldn't keep the look of frank admiration off his face. The low bubble canopy slid back as he made his way around the side of the vehicle, and Green Arrow hopped inside.

"Nice ride, Bats," he said casually as he settled himself in the cockpit. "Must have cost a little more than thirty thou."

"A little," Batman confirmed, with a hint of a smile.

The man in green folded his arms across his chest and leaned back in the seat, very much at his ease. He wasn't about to give the other man the satisfaction of asking just how he came to be waiting for him outside the apartment building.

The Batmobile pulled smoothly away from the curb and joined the flow of traffic on Adams Boulevard. Green Arrow looked around with interest. Most cities are supposed to look more or less alike, but Gotham was at least as far removed from Seattle in character as it was in miles. Gothic and deco buildings everywhere you looked. The state's license plates proclaimed it to be the Dark Deco State, and its premier city certainly lived up to its title.

"I hope you do a better job of concealing your identity in Seattle than you do here," Batman remarked at length.

"Eh," Green Arrow shrugged.

"I'm not the only one who could track you down, you know."

His passenger looked over at him with a frown. "Believe it or not," he drawled, "once upon a time I was just as anal about that as you are. But I outgrew it."

"Mm," Batman grunted. "Did your enemies outgrow it, also? I'm sure you've managed to make a few over the years. Have they ever come after your girlfriend to get back at you?"

Something of the sort _had_ happened, more than once, because one or the other of them had gotten sloppy about their identities. As a matter of fact he couldn't help but think that the present situation could have probably been avoided if only the senior Black Canary had worn a mask. But that was none of this jerk's business.

"Leave her out of this," he warned, anger flaring briefly in his eyes. "You may think you're the so-called 'world's greatest detective', but you don't know as much as you think you do."

To prove a point, Batman began to reel off a long list of information he'd uncovered after their previous encounter. He'd merely accessed the police files to discover what visitors from Seattle had made a complaint, and let his computer fill in the blanks from there.

"Your name is Oliver Queen — no middle name. You were born in 1953 in Star City, California. You were the only child of wealthy parents, both of whom died in a plane crash off the coast of Greece in 1975."

"Smartass," grumbled Oliver. Characteristically, his flash of temper had quickly disappeared, to be replaced by a kind of tolerant half amusement, and he let the other man continue for the moment.

"You've never been married, although for the past several years you've been living with a woman by the name of Dinah Laurel Lance. You have one son, born when you were eighteen." Batman gave him a sidelong look, almost but not quite disapproving. "He came to live with you when he was twelve, after his mother's death.

"In 1982 you fell off a yacht in the South Pacific and were presumed drowned. Three months later you showed up again, quite unharmed. The next year you took a trip around the world with a corporate plane and company pilot."

Oliver smirked at him. "I learned my lesson about boats," he said easily enough, though the dubious amusement was beginning to pall.

The Dark Knight went on, taking no notice of the interruption. "You played a sizeable role in bankrupting your family company, whereupon you moved to Seattle, into the condominium you inherited from your maternal grandmother."

"All right, all right; I'm convinced. Knock it off. I already know the story."

"Since then your employment record has been erratic and rather...colourful. For the last two years, you and your girlfriend have co-owned a shop known as 'Sherwood Florist'," continued Batman remorselessly. "You —"

"You know, Bats," Green Arrow objected in a dangerously mild voice, "you're seriously starting to _piss me off!"_

"Merely trying to prove a point," the other crimefighter informed him with an expression of smug superiority,

"That you're a real bastard? Yeah, thanks, I got the idea." Batman didn't respond to the taunt, and they drove on in silence for several minutes. Finally Oliver roused himself and asked suspiciously, "Where are we going, anyway?"

"Theatre district," replied Batman tersely.

Green Arrow studied the dark figure with interest. "Why not start with his house? Chances are that's where he'd be keeping any incriminating papers."

Batman shook his head. "Too early in the evening. He'd be too likely to be at home and awake at this hour."

Oliver knew he was almost certainly correct, but he couldn't help taunting his new ally a little. "Where's your sense of adventure? Doesn't the Dark Knight like to live dangerously?"

"You mean reckless grandstanding and unnecessary risks?" He shook his head in the negative. "Save it for the west coast. We've got a job to do here."

_And some people call _me _a hypocrite!_ thought Green Arrow, shoulders quaking with silent laughter. "You are one funny guy, anybody ever tell you that?"

As they passed the imposing structure of the Byzantium, it was still early enough for a few people to be around. The driver turned onto a side street near the theatre.

Batman was beginning to tire of the competitive banter. "Do you ever take anything seriously?" he asked rhetorically. "For that matter, do you even know who we're trying to find?"

"Guy by the name of Cary Young."

A faint smile tugged at the thin line of Batman's mouth. "It might have prevented a few problems if you'd thought about talking to Mrs. Lance _before_ you had to put an arrow through a man's leg, but at least you finally did a little detective work."

"Y'know," Ollie began conversationally, "I'm not really a patient man, and I don't imagine you are, either. So, either let's quit messing with each other and exchange information, or else pull this fancy car over and exchange a few punches. Your choice."

The other man gave him a look of sardonic amusement. "You really are too dependent on excessive violence," he said as he turned the Batmobile into an alley and pulled to a stop. His voice held a tone of mild reproach, as well as that ever-present, intolerable smugness.

Green Arrow raised his eyebrows in surprise when the car stopped. Did this nutcase actually intend to take him up on his idle threat? he wondered. The canopy slid back and Batman hopped out. Green Arrow followed suit, but the Dark Knight didn't deign to answer the look of inquiry he gave him.

Pulling a small, blunt-edged device from his utility belt, he pointed it in the direction of one of the darkened windows on the fourth floor of the building. As he pressed a button a thin cable shot upwards towards the target.

He handed the grappling gun to his companion. "Press this button to send it back down to me," he ordered.

Green Arrow gave him a look of incredulity. "You've got to be kidding me. Haven't you ever heard of a fire escape?" But he took the device and with a slight, what-the-hell shrug, allowed himself to be lifted into the air on the retracting cable.

He had the window of Young's office unlocked and open and was checking carefully around inside the frame for alarm mechanisms by the time Batman joined him on the ledge. Finding none, he lowered his lean body through the window feet first. He turned to Batman with a wide grin as the latter joined him inside.

"I _like_ your toys!" he said with enthusiasm.

Batman gave him a grimace that might have passed for a smile.

- >>>————————>

She'd noticed the long, blue-black vehicle on the street below when she'd stood guard in the hall while Oliver made his exit through the floor's fire escape window. _So...he's got himself a ride. Boy's night out,_ she thought sourly as she went back into the apartment.

Entering the bedroom, she opened the closet door and pulled out the black bodysuit she'd bought that evening, stood holding it in her hands for a long time. She hadn't been absolutely certain when she made the purchase, but seeing the two crimefighters — the two superior, arrogant _male_ crimefighters — go happily off together to take care of something that by rights was _her_ responsibility, she realised the decision had been made. Resolutely, she began to assemble the things she needed.

It had been six years since she'd last done this, but the ritual was well remembered.

She pulled the fishnet stockings taut, zipped up the crepe-soled, black leather ankle boots (they'd cost far more than she could afford, but soft, supple leather was important when you didn't have the luxury of breaking in a new pair of shoes gradually), and adjusted the fit of the half-jacket she wore. Then, with slightly shaky hands, she applied a little spirit gum just below her hairline to ensure the wig wouldn't slip. A few more unnecessary adjustments while she gathered enough courage to finally look at the finished product.

Dinah Lance looked into the mirror; Black Canary gazed steadily back at her. The dark pageboy was hidden by slightly longer blonde tresses, the somewhat wan complexion covered by makeup and the domino mask.

"Long time no see, sweetie," she told her reflection approvingly.


	9. Too Many Heroes

**Chapter Eight**

**Too Many Heroes**

Cary Young lived by himself in the penthouse apartment of a ten-story building in one of Gotham's more affluent sections.

The wide, sculpted terraces around the four sides of the building formed part of the deco architecture. The concrete railings and the balusters curved inwards, so they were virtually invisible from the street, making the building appear as if it had unsupported shelves suspended at regular intervals along the sides.

A line, attached to a small wedge of black metal cut to resemble a bat's wing, wrapped itself around one of the ornate railings and held fast. A moment later, a black-gloved hand caught hold of the structure, followed immediately by another. Batman pulled himself onto the balcony, muscles rippling under the grey fabric of his costume. At the same moment, a pair of green-clad legs dangled from the rooftop overhead. With an inward swing at the last minute, Green Arrow landed gracefully on the terrace. Like the other crimefighter, his arrival was virtually silent.

"Not bad," he told his companion quietly. "Maybe we should have raced."

The other man ignored him and turned his attention to the steel security screen stretched across the French windows. Very _paranoid_ thing for a simple, honest denizen of the theatre to have around. After studying it thoughtfully for a few seconds, he fished in his utility belt for an electronic lock-pick that would disable the locking mechanism without alerting anyone to the presence of the intruders.

A small figure detached itself noiselessly from the shadows. Green Arrow, instantly alert, moved toward the potted shrubs...and stopped dead at the sight that greeted his astonished eyes.

_"Well,"_ he breathed. "What do you know? Is this the surprise you were saving for later, Pretty Bird?"

The moonlight glinted off her wig and turned her skin pale as she looked up into his face with a huge, beaming smile that made his heart melt. "Do you like it?" she asked him softly. The smile on his face was all the answer she needed.

Dinah herself was ecstatic, for another reason besides the sheer thrill of getting back into the action and doing something for herself instead of sitting around wringing her hands and feeling helpless. He'd called her Pretty Bird again. The endearment had all but disappeared from their relationship the last several years. The term itself called to mind Black Canary, and thus, the _absence _of her former identity. It hurt Dinah to hear it and, after seeing his lover flinch a few times, it hurt Ollie to say it.

Batman cleared his throat, reminding the couple of his presence. "Black Canary the Second, I presume?"

He gave her the once-over and was apparently impressed by what he saw. Beneath the half-mask he wore, enough of his expression was visible to make Green Arrow dubious. He narrowed his eyes slightly as he put a possessive arm around her shoulders. She looked up at her boyfriend and shook her head.

"Nice to meet you," she told Batman with a polite smile. Her inspection of him was just as appreciative, if more furtive. Unfortunately, there was just enough moonlight to give her a good look at his costume, and the term 'man-panties' popped unbidden into her head. She bit her lower lip to stifle a nearly irrepressible urge to laugh. _You and your stupid sense of humour,_ she thought, looking at Oliver.

Batman opened the terrace door. "Ladies first," he announced cavalierly, holding the door open for Black Canary. She was glad to escape into the darkness of the penthouse. Green Arrow gave the other man a glare as he followed her inside, but failed to register the look of amusement on his face.

———————— -

The threesome separated and began to search Young's home office. They worked swiftly and noiselessly. Batman, putting his safe-cracking skills to work, noted the professionalism the other two showed in the endeavour. He hadn't expected that level of competence from either one of them, based on his preconceptions and the brief time he'd spent with the undisciplined Green Arrow. The girl in particular seemed skilled at this kind of delicate ransacking. She might be years out of practice, but she hadn't lost the knack.

Green Arrow clicked his tongue in satisfaction as he discovered a false bottom in one of the drawers of the massive mahogany desk. "Ah _ha!"_ he said a moment later, perusing a ledger with the aid of his penlight. "Gotcha!"

"What did you find?" Black Canary left her search of the bookcase and crossed the room on silent feet to peer over his shoulder. Batman looked up from his work for a moment to see about the latest development.

"Not a lot," the archer admitted in a quiet voice. "But it's more than we found in the office downtown — _told_ you we should have come here first. He does have a second set of books, just like we thought. Check this out: here's a payment sheet in the name of one John Gee."

Batman went back to rifling the contents of the safe, only slightly impressed. "It's a start," he admitted in his taciturn way.

It was also a finish; though the trio searched for almost an hour, they found nothing else that could tie Young to Ballard, Johnny G., or Diana Lance.

Fed up, Green Arrow suggested, "Let's just go roust him out of bed and force a confession out of the bastard."

His girlfriend viewed the idea with concerned skepticism, but it was Batman who vetoed it absolutely. "No way," he said coldly. "We've done all we can here."

Oliver's mouth fell open in consternation as he watched the tall man leave through the French windows and make his way up to the roof, clearly expecting his companions to follow him. The couple exchanged glances of shock and disapproval. He had no right to be giving either of them orders but they followed him anyway, out of boredom and sheer frustration as much as any sense of agreement.

- >>>————————>

He hadn't bothered leaving any of his neat toys behind for their use. With a scowl, Green Arrow gave his girlfriend a boost up to the cornice framing the top of the door, then hauled himself onto the roof after her. Batman stood in wait for them, arms crossed over his broad chest. His body language managed to convey his impatience with them without stating it overtly.

He seemed to have appointed himself the supreme authority in command of this case. His territorial attitude smacked of medieval feudalism at its finest; merely crossing the city limits — or was it the state line? — was, in his apparent estimation, tantamount to giving him permission to take over any investigation.

However, Green Arrow was not the sort of man to step into a subordinate role gracefully. The bowman stalked over to the Dark Knight and stood nose to nose with the other man, his posture aggressive.

"Listen to me, you insufferable, long-eared lunatic. What exactly gives you the right to think you can tell us how to run an investigation?" he demanded. "I've been in this business as long as you have, mister, and Canary's a trained detective. We're _more_ than capable of looking into this mess without having to rely on the help of the great and wonderful Batman. This doesn't concern you."

"That's _exactly_ what gives me the right," announced Batman calmly in that raspy, deep voice of his.

The blond archer seemed poised to jump down his throat, but a light touch on his arm restrained him. Oliver looked down at the woman by his side; she wasn't looking any too thrilled with the Bat herself, but she indicated her willingness to at least listen to what he had to say. Her partner scowled fiercely at the other man, but he stood down.

"_I_ could get away with waging a campaign of aggression, but you can't. Not under the circumstances. There's a good chance your identities have been compromised, so you have to tread lightly. There's a time to be a detective, and a time to be a thug," he announced pompously.

Oliver had been in a good humour most of the day, but Batman was having a detrimental effect on his positive mood. "You _do_ know you're the biggest hypocrite in the known universe, don't you?" he asked the cowled figure belligerently. He'd _think_ thug in a minute.

"And do _you _realise that if you go too far right now, Young could turn around and accuse you of harassment?"

Dinah cast her eyes heavenward. What colossal egos they had! Honestly, one of them was as bad as the other. Before the tension between the two men had a chance to escalate, she moved between them.

"Excuse me," she interjected, "but if you two _little boys_ don't mind, there's this little matter of protecting my mother I'd like to get back to. Feel free to join me if you're through with your macho pissing contest."

And with that she stalked off to the other side of the roof, leaving the two men to stare after her for a second or two before exchanging surprised glances. _Women,_ they were both clearly thinking.

Impressed, Batman commented wryly, "Kind of feisty, isn't she?"

"Oh, yeah!" the other man confirmed, one side of his moustache quirked up in a smile. Dinah always had been "feisty" but it had been a long time since he'd seen her in her element. Just like the spirited teenager he'd first met. He gave Batman a look of sudden suspicion. "But she's also taken. So don't go gettin' any ideas, bud."

Batman gave his companion a look of mild contempt. "Hardly. There are enough costumed females in this town already."

Green Arrow nodded. With sudden interest, he asked, "That woman in the cat suit — is she the same way?"

"She has claws."

"Ah."

———————— -

Black Canary seated herself on a rooftop air-conditioning unit, and sat scowling at the lights of the city. _Men!_ she thought mutinously. _Can't trust a woman, even an experienced one, to do "man's work", but they can't be bothered to do it for sniping at each other. I should have sent Oliver to New York and put on the costume again the second anything happened._

The two "little boys" put in an appearance, Batman on one side, making no attempt to sit; Green Arrow on the other, sitting down close to her but making no attempt to touch her. Typically, neither of them seemed chastened in the slightest.

"It's time we discuss this whole situation like three rational adults," pronounced Batman, strongly implying the idea was his all along. His demeanour gave the impression that he believed _himself_ to be the only rational adult present.

Like most long-term couples, Dinah and Oliver could communicate without words a good deal of the time. She turned to him with an expression that clearly said, _I see what you mean about this guy._ However, _he_ wasn't about to get off easily, either.

"Well, it would be a nice change," scoffed Black Canary. "But it's not exactly surprising we haven't managed it so far. My partner here has that effect on people."

"Hey!" her lover objected fondly.

Batman ignored the by-play and concentrated on business. "I think we can take it as a given that Young is the one who's been targeting your mother. But he's always been incredibly good at covering his tracks. We have to find some conclusive link to criminal activity before we dare move on him directly. At the moment, all we have is a tenuous connection to Johnny G."

"There's nothing on his computer?"

"Nothing. He must keep his important files on backups and delete them from the hard drive. But the recovery software didn't come up with anything. It must have been overwritten already."

Green Arrow scuffed the gravel pensively with the toe of his boot. "Okay, he doesn't have anything like that at the office, he doesn't have it at home, unless it's in another room we didn't get a chance to look in. It's got to be _somewhere,_ dammit."

"We better find something _soon,_ before he succeeds in killing Mom," Dinah reminded them.

Batman hastened to reassure her, "She should be safe for awhile. Commissioner Gordon has a police guard outside the door of her hospital room after the attempt on her life last night."

"I know that, but forgive me if I don't have a whole lot of faith in the competence of Gotham's finest. Especially considering we're having to do their job for them."

"They're not incompetent, just undermanned," argued Batman. "That's why they need occasional help from people like us."

"Well, they've done a hell of a job acquitting themselves so far," she shot back. "If they could have been _bothered_ to believe us when we told them she was in danger, she never would have been attacked in the first place."

Green Arrow nodded his agreement, but Batman disagreed. "They had no reason to assume there was anything more to the case than a simple attempted burglary. You're too close to the situation; you've lost perspective." She shot a furious glare in his direction, but he continued, "That's not to say there's no urgency in getting Young out of the way before he can harm your mother, but we have to find some hard evidence. Perhaps if you —"

"I still say we take off the kid gloves and go after him directly, right here and now," Green Arrow interrupted.

"No, Oliver, he's right," Dinah said softly. "At least about that. We have to get enough evidence so the cops can have a reason to hold him. I don't think I could stand it if the same thing that happened with Derek Rambaldi happened here."

He had to think a minute before he remembered Rambaldi, and the details of her last case. She'd spent months accumulating incriminating evidence on the powerful drug czar, as had the Seattle police department, but the courts hadn't considered it conclusive enough to go to trial. His walking away from the indictment unscathed had been the final straw in her decision to get out of the crimefighting business. It had taken a long time for her to recover from that blow.

"Perhaps if you tried talking to your mother," suggested Batman, as if he'd never been interrupted.

"Her mommy doesn't want her anywhere near this case," Oliver said scathingly. He felt sorry for Diana, but his general feeling toward the woman hadn't changed, especially regarding the way she treated her daughter. "And it's not like _I_ could get anything more out of her,"

Dinah rounded on him furiously. Her fear and frustration were wearing her nerves to shreds, and she wasn't up to listening to any more of his sarcasm. "Maybe that's because she knows you don't take this seriously," she told him unfairly. "You don't care what happens to her, you never have."

Green Arrow turned to her with a shocked expression. "Take it seriously!" he shouted angrily. "Dinah, goddammit, think a minute! If they succeed in killing your mother, and they don't find what they're looking for, there's a good possibility they might decide to come after her next of kin. How seriously do you think I take _that!"_

"I told you it was my problem in the first place —" Black Canary began, but Batman didn't let her finish.

"Keep your voices down!" he ordered. "This is no time or place for a lover's quarrel."

"Butt out!" they both told him, but their voices were lower.

He wondered if that sort of volatile romantic relationship was endemic among people in costume. Disapprovingly he said, "It looks as if we're not going to accomplish anything productive tonight. There's someone I need to talk to. I'll contact you tomorrow," and disappeared off the side of the building, leaving them to fight it out. At home, with any luck.

->>> ————————>

Commissioner James Gordon was awakened by the pressure of a hand on his shoulder. "Hmm?" he inquired sleepily, rolling over.

Silhouetted in the moonlight streaming through the light draperies was a frightening figure, massive and dark. Gordon sat bolt upright, clutching at the bedclothes, and waited for his breathing and heart rate to return to normal. He was used to his old friend's sudden appearances from out of nowhere — well, as much as anyone _could_ get used to something so inherently startling — but not in his bedroom! He darted a fearful glance at his wife's sleeping form, relieved she hadn't been disturbed by his momentary panic. Sarah wasn't much of a fan of Batman at the best of times.

The dark figure put a finger to his lips and moved silently to the bedroom door and out into the upstairs hall. Gordon picked up his glasses and followed reluctantly, knotting the sash of his bathrobe as he moved downstairs.

"What the devil do you think you're doing, breaking into my house in the middle of the night?" he demanded of his old friend. He remembered to keep his voice low to avoid waking Sarah.

"You weren't at the office," Batman answered unapologetically.

"Well, what is it you need to talk to me about?" groused the commissioner.

"I thought you might be interested to know who was behind the attack on the woman in her hospital room last night," said Batman.

"All right, what have you got?"

"Not much at the moment," admitted Batman. "But the threads are starting to come together. You think it's possible to offer our little injured friend a deal in exchange for information about his boss?"

Gordon considered the proposition carefully. "I don't know what the D.A. will have to say about it, but it might be worth a shot. If you're talking about the guy I think you are, we've never been able to get a scrap of evidence on him."

Batman gave him an enigmatic look. "If you can get the grounds to arrest him, Jim, I'm fairly sure I know where to find all the evidence you need to make a solid connection with organized crime."

"That'd be a relief," Gordon told him. "You know, I used to know the woman who was attacked. Diana Drake, her name was then. Her dad was a hero of mine when I first joined the force...he was the guy everybody who wanted to be an honest cop looked up to. I haven't seen Diana since his funeral. How did she end up mixed up in this mess, I wonder?"

"Maybe she decided to carry on her father's work," Batman suggested. There was a hint of something Gordon took to be irony in his voice, and the older man snorted.

"Maybe. I don't suppose you happen to know how her assailant ended up with an arrow through his leg, do you?" The dark eyes behind the cowl narrowed slightly and Gordon felt, as he usually did, an unwilling compulsion to explain. "At first he claimed it was somebody who was working for you."

"Hardly my style, Commissioner."

Gordon nodded in agreement. "That's what I thought. Though I'll be honest with you, there are others in the department who aren't so sure. At any rate he's changed his story a couple of times since then. Now he seems to think Young or somebody else he worked for is out to get him. He even claimed at one point that it was the lady's son-in-law that shot him."

That tidbit caught the other man's interest. "Did you follow up on that?"

"Yeah. The fellow wanted to know how exactly we figured a middle-aged florist was gonna climb up the side of a public building and into a fifth floor window. And Diana Lance has no idea who her rescuer might be."

"If Johnny's that paranoid about his boss, that might be to our advantage."

"Just what I was thinking," the commissioner replied. "I'll talk to the D.A.'s office tomorrow, see what I can work out. Meanwhile, do me a favour? Next time, if you can't catch me at the office, don't come through my bedroom window anymore."


	10. Showdown

**Chapter Nine**

**Showdown**

"Think he'll show up?" Black Canary asked her partner.

The two of them sat side by side on the rooftop of the Byzantium Theatre, backs resting against the wall of the cupola, waiting for Batman to join them. He had telephoned that morning ordering — not asking — them to meet him here tonight.

"Unfortunately. Much as I'd like to keep him out of our business, he'll show," Green Arrow answered glumly. He got to his feet and walked to the edge of the roof to check out the nearby opera house clock. In a more spirited tone of voice he added, "I'm sorely tempted to go on down there and have a look around that theatre myself. What?" he asked, at a look from Dinah. "I just said I was _tempted,_ not that I'm _going."_

He still felt a bit like he was treading on thin ice with her. The fight they'd had last night had turned into a bad one, in spite of its essentially trivial beginnings. They had gone to bed angry, and slept as far apart as the confines of the double bed would allow. And though they'd patched up their differences this morning, something was indefinably different. From the moment Dinah had found the courage to put on that costume, their dynamic had changed.

It had been a long time since they'd worked together, and Oliver had forgotten how different it was from the routine they shared in their daily life. It had taken him several years before he'd finally got used to her being more of a wife than a playmate, and now it looked as if things might possibly be going back to the way they used to be. Whether the Canary's return was permanent or not, there would inevitably be repercussions and Ollie was, typically, trying to avoid thinking about those.

Think about the case. That usually worked. "What exactly did Bat Boy say when he called?" he asked, not for the first time.

Dinah answered patiently, "He said things are progressing, and to meet him here at 1 a.m. And then he hung up."

Green Arrow took his place beside her once more. "Sounds like he's just as bad on the telephone as he is in person."

"Mm. I just want to know what he meant by 'progressing'. Has there been a break in the case or not?" she fretted.

"Well, what_ever_ he knows, you can be damn sure he's planning on keeping it to himself till the very last second."

"Says the man who never mentioned being implicated in wounding Johnny, and questioned by the police," said a deep voice, seemingly out of nowhere. He'd managed to sneak up on them again, but somehow neither of them was very surprised.

Green Arrow jumped to his feet. "Hey, pointy ears," he greeted Batman in a surprisingly affable tone. "You're late."

Batman glanced at the opera house clock, whose hands proclaimed it to be just under a quarter past one. "That clock is always fifteen minutes fast," he said.

Black Canary was in no mood for a replay of their previous meeting, no matter how friendly the banter seemed to be. "What did you mean by 'progressing'?" she demanded of Batman.

"The D.A. agreed to offer Johnny G. a deal in exchange for what he knows about Young's activities, and the police have issued a warrant for his arrest."

His companions exchanged a glance. The news was better than they had hoped, and Dinah fought to contain her enthusiasm. Obviously if they'd found him, Batman would have said so.

Green Arrow was thinking along the same lines. "Maybe we'll get lucky and find him before they do," he said, with a dangerous smile.

"Maybe," Batman agreed. "But remember what I said before about excessive force. You —"

"Yeah, I remember. You're the only one allowed to go postal on bad guys. I'll try to keep that in mind."

The Dark Knight ignored the taunt. "You're lucky no one took Johnny seriously when he said you were the one who shot him with an arrow," he said.

The other man opened his mouth to make a retort but a look from Black Canary silenced him. Giving her his best 'I'm a good boy...honest' look, he inquired mildly, "So, what's the game plan?"

Batman seemed gratified. "This theatre has a hidden room that's been out of use for years. I'd be willing to bet Young knows all about it."

———————— -

The Byzantium had been built in the late nineteenth century, and remodeled extensively during the 1920's, just before the Depression. Countless establishments, following the fad of the Victorian era, had been built with hidden rooms and secret passageways, but few still existed intact. The area tucked between the prop rooms and the east wall of the theatre had escaped destruction during the big renovation, but over the last few decades it had fallen into disuse and been largely forgotten.

Young's latest production was not slated to open for another few weeks. The evening's rehearsal had ended several hours ago and the theatre was now utterly deserted, making this the perfect time for a little illicit prowling.

The three crimefighters made their way through the darkened theatre, conscious of the faint sound of their own footsteps, the only noise in the cavernous building. Followed by the others, Batman headed backstage and made his way to the back wall of the furniture storage room. He felt along the wall where it joined the exterior of the building, fingers groping confidently for a depression or lever of some sort. Finding the hidden catch, he pressed it and watched as the doorway slid open. His penlight illuminated an incredibly narrow hallway.

The trio made their way inside, single file in the confined space. There were two rooms, only slightly less cramped, opening off the hall. One held a desk with a fairly recent computer system, the longer one, running parallel to the hallway, was crowded with several filing cabinets. The cramped chambers had a stifling, airless feeling, but they were relatively free of dust.

Without a word, Batman turned on the computer and began a search of its files. Green Arrow preferred doing things the old fashioned way, and he and Black Canary perused the contents of the filing cabinets by flashlight. After a few minutes, he let out a low whistle.

"Gotcha," he said with a triumphant little chuckle. "We have got you by the balls this time, sucker. Check this out, baby!"

His girlfriend moved over to take a look at the file he held. "Yes! Very nice," she said approvingly.

"I aim to please," he replied with a grin. "You find anything yet?"

She'd been searching the cabinet with the oldest collection of files, some with papers dating back decades. "Nothing incriminating about our friend Young, per se, but the name Ballard sure crops up a lot in the old papers. Some of this stuff must have been what Mom was working from."

"Good girl. You got anything, Bats?"

A grunt was the only reply from the adjoining room, but their colleague seemed pleased by whatever he was looking at. They exchanged amused glances before returning to their snooping.

The three had been at their work for some time when Batman looked up from the flickering screen, expression suddenly alert. He reached out a finger and hit the power switch on the computer. The crimefighter crossed the room in rapid silence, but there was no need to check. The sound he'd half-heard a second ago was the hidden door sliding open. Two voices, one of them Young's, were now clearly audible in the narrow passage.

Green Arrow swore under his breath and shoved the top drawer closed as slowly as he dared, trying to make as little noise as possible. There was no need to advertise their presence any sooner than necessary.

"This way," Batman whispered urgently from the connecting door. He had his hand on the panel that opened the trapdoor into the prop room, waiting for his confederates. He slipped through the dark opening and disappeared from sight, followed quickly by Green Arrow.

As Black Canary was about to follow, she heard the voices just outside. The door started to open. Realising she wasn't going to have time to make it, she touched the panel she'd seen Batman activate earlier, then scrambled down and squeezed herself into the niche between the connecting door and the nearest filing cabinet.

->>> ————————>

With an almost inaudible click, the trapdoor slid shut behind the two men. There was no light at all inside the prop room, and only the faintest noise of muffled conversation from the space they'd just left. Batman realised what must have happened before his companion did. He risked the penlight, inspecting their surroundings in the light of its thin, focused beam.

Green Arrow brushed a stray spider web off his hood and looked around. The grin froze on his face for a second, then disappeared completely as he realised with a shock of horror that the two of them were alone in the prop room. Dinah hadn't made it out.

The archer made an involuntary lunge for the trapdoor, then stopped himself. He stood, breathing hard, fighting an almost desperate urge to go back in after her. Batman eyed him warily, not sure what the man might do or even if he should try to stop him if he tried something reckless. Their eyes met and the two men stared at one another for a long moment, then Green Arrow shook his head.

Numbly, he followed Batman out of the blackness of the prop room into the relative illumination of the backstage area. The oversized warehouse door at the back of the theatre had been left partially open, showing a gap of two or three feet. Young's car, an unassuming black Packard, was parked outside near the door.

"She'll be all right," Batman told the other man quietly. "She had to have been the one who shut the door. More than likely she'll have had time to hide."

Oliver stared into the murky interior of the building, anguish written on his face. "And what if they find her?" he responded, just as quietly.

"Unless I'm completely wrong in my estimation of her," Batman said confidently, "she'll still be fine."

Green Arrow nodded, seemingly in agreement. Abruptly, he slammed his fist into the palm of his other hand violently, then his shoulders sagged and he let his arms hang down at his sides. He appeared limp all over, but the impression was deceptive. Batman noticed that his hands were still clenched into tight fists.

Every nerve in Oliver Queen's body was screaming at him to go in and rescue her. His mind was barely managing to override the impulse, telling him he could only make things worse by charging in.

And even if he didn't screw things up, she'd never forgive him. A large part of their battle last night concerned her belief that he didn't trust her to take care of herself anymore, or maybe he never had. He could still hear their angry words in his head.

_"All I said was you're out of practice. I remember how good you used to be, but you're not used to the streets anymore. You need somebody to watch your back."_

_"Oh, yeah. Defenseless little females always do, right?" Dinah answered bitterly. "We all need a big strong man around to protect us. That's what it all boils down to, isn't it? You have to treat me like some damn porcelain doll because you don't trust me to take care of myself."_

_"Nooo _way,_ lady. This has nothin' to do with _me_ not trusting you — I think this is all about _you_ not trusting yourself. You're afraid you're not up to it anymore, and you're using me as a scapegoat."_

It was admittedly a low blow, but the truth was he did trust her...didn't he? And although it was the last thing he wanted to do, this was the moment he had to prove it to them both.

Only...he wasn't used to having to worry about her anymore.

———————— -

In actuality they spent less than ten minutes waiting in the sweltering alley, but to Oliver's anxious mind it felt like an eternity.

At length the sound of footsteps was heard from inside the building. Whoever it was was walking at a normal pace, making no attempt at stealth. Good. More than likely that meant Dinah hadn't been discovered, because if they'd found her their natural assumption would be that she probably wasn't alone, and they would have come looking.

Green Arrow brought his bow forward the instant the sound reached his ears, grabbing an arrow from his quiver. Batman threw his cape back and flattened himself against the wall next to the open door.

It wasn't their target. It was a younger man, dark haired and good-looking in a vacuous sort of way, completely unlike the usual gangster flunkies in appearance, but he might have had the word "henchman" stamped on his forehead all the same. He didn't utter a sound as Batman looped a muscular arm around his throat, rendering him unconscious. A second man joined him on the ground soon after.

Cary Young strolled out of the building a moment later, slowly flipping through the pages of a thick file folder. The sight of it came close to panicking Green Arrow. What if he'd gone into the second room? That was the only possible place Black Canary could have found to hide, and there certainly wasn't much cover in there. Batman, who was less personally involved, was calm enough to realise the file was more than likely the one he'd spotted inside the desk and hadn't had time to give more than a cursory glance while checking the computer files.

The producer was considerably startled to find himself facing the business end of a very nasty looking arrow.

"You've reached the end of the line, mister," the hooded figure holding the weapon said to him.

Young looked around frantically, taking note of his bodyguards lying incapacitated on the ground. The two costumed men looked like they meant business. His voice steady, he tried to finesse his way out of the situation.

"Hey. Guys," he said agreeably. He closed the folder, careful not to make any sudden moves, and held up his hands in a conciliatory gesture. "I think you boys have the wrong idea. I don't know why you're after me, but I can assure you, there's been some mistake. I'm strictly legit."

His peripheral vision caught a glimpse of movement from one of his men. If he could just keep their attention until his associates woke up he might have a chance, he thought.

"Like hell you are," growled the guy with the arrow aimed at his skull.

Young took an involuntary step backwards, and saw the finger tighten on the bowstring. He looked at Batman in supplication. It was widely rumoured among the Gotham underworld that the Dark Knight didn't kill, but he couldn't be quite sure about this guy. At this moment he looked capable of anything, and besides, look what he'd done to Johnny. He was finally starting to understand what his underling had been so afraid of.

"Seriously. I'm strictly a legitimate businessman. Anything else you might have heard is just rumours. Professional jealousy. I've made a few enemies here and there, and they spread all kinds of stories about me. You know the kind of thing a gay man has to put up with."

Which would normally be exactly the right tactic to use with a liberal like Ollie, but he wasn't buying it. Not from this sleaze. "You're some piece of work, you know that?" he told the gangster, shaking his head in disgust. He hated having his deeply held beliefs used against him, even inadvertently.

"That doesn't make you guilty _or_ innocent," Batman interjected.

Thanks to the debate, the delaying tactic was working. The dark-haired young man was climbing to his feet slowly, shaking his head woozily. Given the threat against his boss, the crimefighters figured the situation was under control and neither made a move in his direction, though Batman was careful to keep the young man in his line of vision.

"What makes you _guilty," _Green Arrow took up the refrain, "is ordering some flunky to kill a sick woman you never even _met. _Somebody who never did a thing to you personally."

Cary Young looked him straight in the eye. "I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about," he replied smoothly.

"Liar!" cried a feminine voice from inside the theatre.

Before Young had time to even look around, he felt something small and hard hit him in the back with considerable force, propelling him violently to the ground and knocking the breath out of him. Papers spilled in all directions as the folder he was carrying hit the pavement. He landed on his knees in front of Green Arrow, who was looking at the spot where Young had been standing a second earlier with a huge smile on his face.

The gangster turned to see what sort of fury had just attacked him. Strong for her size, Black Canary grabbed hold of his lapel and yanked him to his feet. "You lying S.O.B.!" she shouted.

He made the mistake of giving her an unctuous sort of smile, preparatory to launching into his 'this is all a big misunderstanding' speech, and she smashed the heel of her hand against his nose. Young covered his bleeding nose with both his hands and stared at the little spitfire in shock.

"Bitch," he spat, and went for her.

Thanks to his background with Ballard's people he was a much better fighter than most soft, middle-aged theatrical producers would have been. He was a few inches taller than his opponent and considerably heavier, although that shouldn't have weighed greatly in his favour in facing a trained martial artist. He was a dirty fighter, but Dinah knew all the tricks of the street. Even out of practice she should have wiped the floor with him.

But her anger was getting the better of her. Blinded by her own fury, for a moment she seemed in real danger of losing until her training reasserted itself and she regained some control over her emotions.

"Let her," ordered Green Arrow, when Batman moved to intercede. His eyes never left the combatants, and he covered the fight closely, bow at full draw. The Dark Knight watched him through narrowed eyes and realised he was starting to actually like the guy.

Unknown to the crimefighters, another of Young's men was at that moment completing his own inspection of the property. He rounded the corner and gave a muffled shout as he saw what was going on. Some sort of costumed female was engaging the boss in hand to hand combat, while Batman just stood and watched. He launched himself at the Dark Knight, and the two men went down together.

He was no match for Batman, who quickly had him on his feet, administering a pummeling he was going to remember for quite some time.

Taking advantage of the distraction, Young's dark-haired lackey decided he was recovered enough to join the fray. Stumbling only slightly, he headed toward Black Canary, hand reaching for the gun under his coat. The man shrieked in pain as an arrow went through his arm.

Batman growled in irritation. "I warned you before..." he said, landing a punch on the latecomer's jaw, "...about the use of excessive..." He delivered a left hook to the head. "...violence!" he finished up, grabbing the man's lapels and flinging him, barely conscious, onto his hysterical colleague.

With one final high kick to the chin, Cary Young went down. Black Canary stumbled over to her friends in triumph.

"My hero," Ollie said proudly, holding her by the shoulders. He grinned down at her.

"Heroine, if you don't mind!" she corrected him with a shaky laugh.

"You know that Bats is going the get all the credit, don't you?" he pointed out. Even now Batman was bundling up Young and his cohorts for the police.

Black Canary nodded. "I know," she said, finding she didn't really mind all that much. "But everybody here knows what _really_ happened."


	11. Not Faint Canaries

**Chapter Ten**

**Not Faint Canaries  
**

There was no one around at that time of night to witness the trio entering the hospital through a side door, though they were making no particular attempt at secrecy. The door had been locked hours earlier, but Batman's lock-pick made short work of the obstacle.

The uniformed young officer standing sentry outside Room 504 went slack-jawed with amazement as he saw the three costumed individuals heading his way. He stood up straight, determined to stand his ground no matter what they said, until he caught sight of the third member of the party. He'd seen Batman once or twice from a distance, talking to the commissioner. This was the man Gordon considered his most trusted ally, so as far as the officer knew, he was entitled to go wherever he pleased. The young officer didn't recognise the other two costumed figures, but if they were with Batman that was good enough for him. He stood aside and let them pass, gulping in awe as the imposing caped figure swept by him.

Diana was sleeping lightly, her pain medication having finally kicked in a little while ago. She stirred as she sensed someone approach; she still hadn't managed to get used to the constant comings and goings in a hospital.

"Mom?" Dinah touched her mother's shoulder.

Diana opened her eyes, surprised to find her daughter standing by her side in the darkness. She felt for the appropriate button on the panel next to the headboard and pressed it. The area around the bed was flooded with fluorescent light.

"What in the world?" she questioned, staring from one of her visitors to another. But her glance lingered longest on her daughter, mesmerised by the appallingly familiar costume she wore.

Dinah beamed at her. "It's all over!" she announced triumphantly, but her mother didn't seem to hear.

"Good...lord," she said weakly. "It's like looking into a mirror." The first Black Canary stared at her successor, shaking her head in disbelief. "Somebody turned the clock back thirty years."

Oliver stepped forward and laid a hand on Dinah's shoulder. "Chip off the old block, eh?" he grinned.

Diana looked at him accusingly. "I thought I told you to keep her out of all this."

He snorted. "You've tried that yourself," he pointed out unrepentantly. "You oughtta know just how well it doesn't work. Besides, your daughter's the one who took down Young."

"Well," Dinah hedged. She was justifiably proud of herself, but in the interest of fairness she felt compelled to point out, "Batman found out where Young's files were stashed, and Oliver —" _Oliver trusted me,_ she thought, with a loving glance in his direction. He reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze.

"All I did was keep a couple of guys covered while you kicked pretty boy's butt, that's all," he finished for her.

Diana preferred not to witness their mutual admirations. Concentrating on the salient point, she said, "You found Young's files? All of them?"

"And Ballard's," her third visitor added from the shadows. He seemed to prefer to stay there in the dim recesses of the room, out of the circle of light spilling from the wall fixture above the bed. "I'd be interested to see how the information we found matches up with what you collected years ago."

"I'll think about that," she replied noncommittally. "In the meantime, thank you. For all your help."

"Always happy to help out a 'living legend'," he answered drily.

"Takes one to know one," was Diana's mischievous response. "And I'm glad I finally got to meet you. But if you don't mind, I think I'd like to spend a little time with my daughter right now. That goes for you too, ya bearded old goat," she added to Oliver.

Her tone held considerably less venom than he was used to, and he looked at her in surprise. "Fine, I know when I'm not wanted," he said huffily, but the wink he gave Dinah made it clear it was all an act. "C'mon, Bats. Let's leave these two birds to their girl talk."

- >>> ———————— >

"How do you feel?" Dinah asked, guiltily realising that they'd come bursting into a hospital room at 3 a.m. with no consideration for the patient at all.

Her mother gave her a slightly strained smile. "A little better in a way, if all this is really over. A little worse if my daughter's going to take up crimefighting again."

"I just _meant,_ are you in any pain?"

"No," the older woman answered shortly.

She continued to stare at her daughter until Dinah grew uncomfortable under the cold scrutiny of those blue eyes. She knew she was expected to provide an answer to the question that hadn't _quite_ been asked, an answer she wasn't entirely certain of herself. With a tiny shrug of resignation she drew up a chair and sat down.

"I don't know if I'm going back to it or not," she said quietly. "I have responsibilities now, a business to run... I'm not nineteen anymore. But I can't deny there's a pull. It was _exciting!_ I'd forgotten just how good it can feel. The adrenaline rush, the feeling of doing something _important_..."

"I remember." Diana's voice was gentle, quiet, barely more than a whisper. "There's not a thing you can tell me about how good it feels — or how _terrible _— that I didn't experience first." The old refrain again. _It was _my_ creation._ But she didn't say it this time. Her eyes were sad as they beheld her scion, giving a whole different context to the frowning mouth. "I hoped I'd never have to see you like this."

Dinah tried not to be hurt. "Well...now that you have, what do you think?" she asked hopefully.

"I don't know, Dinah. I just..._don't_."

The two women sat in silence for an uncomfortably long time, carefully avoiding one another's eyes. Darkness, even partial darkness, brought with it a deceptive feeling of intimacy, a dangerous impulse to reveal too much. It was easier, in the daylight, to hide their feelings from themselves and each other. Then, too, they were seldom alone for very long. Doctors and nurses bustled in and out, the patient slept a good deal of the time, Dinah had any number of errands to run, and there was a steady stream of visitors from among Diana's many friends.

The silence stretched to the breaking point. "Do you remember being kidnapped when you were little?" Diana asked suddenly.

Dinah raised her eyebrows in surprise. "I was kidnapped?"

"Mm hmm. You weren't quite three. I'd taken you to the playground, and it was getting cold so I turned around to get another sweater for you, and when I looked around again you were gone. It was _hours_ before we found you. I thought I'd go out of my mind.

"I knew what must have happened, of course; I was playing with some dangerous characters, and Ballard knew who I was. He made it clear he was more than willing to use that information if I didn't stay out of his operations. Next time, he said, I wouldn't be able to find you."

"You let him blackmail you like that!" Dinah exclaimed, horrified.

"Dinah, what choice did I have, honestly? Things were different then. That man might have had the reputation of being a soft-hearted so-called 'gentleman', but he was _dangerous,"_ she said earnestly. "The big name crime lords today are just penny ante compared to the sort of power he had. I was in way, _way_ over my head, and I wish I had realised the fact sooner than I did. Sure, I had the means to cripple his operation, but putting him behind bars wouldn't have neutralized the threat. It wouldn't have been any trouble at all for him to strike back at me from some nice, safe cell."

"So you just...gave up crimefighting. Just like that."

Diana leaned back against the pillows feebly. The story, and all the emotions it brought up, had drained her strength. Eyes closed, she answered in a weak voice, "Not just like that. I went on keeping up the pretense for about another year. And then one nice, springlike day we all went for a family outing in the park, and I looked up and there they were. He said he was going to keep an eye on my family, and he did.

"I'm not denying I did a lot of good in my day, but in the end the whole costumed nonsense just didn't seem to matter a whole lot. You and your father did. My responsibility was to the two of you, not this stinking city."

The younger Black Canary gazed down at the gloved hands she held folded in her lap, sickened by everything she'd just heard. She realised, with a shock of enlightenment, that deep down her mother must have resented the hell out of her, probably without even knowing it. Perhaps her father as well, though she never remembered any strife between them. To give up..._everything_ for them. That would _have _ to leave some kind of scar, surely. And it was obvious she'd always felt some sort of resentment about her only child taking on the same identity she'd been forced to give up; she wouldn't harp on it so much if she didn't.

One day she'd find the courage to ask her, but this wasn't the time. Not tonight.

Dinah felt sad and obscurely guilty. She gazed at her mother's pallid face, her expression wretched, and wished she could change...well, _everything._ For both of them.

At length she spoke, voice low and confiding. "I had a Sam Ballard, myself, you know."

Diana's eyes flickered open briefly. "Really? You want to tell me?"

A frown creased her daughter's pretty face. "Are you sure you're up for it?" she asked. After a brief nod of assent she went on. "He was a drug lord by the name of Derek Rambaldi. We'd been running across his people for years, getting them off the streets one by one, watching them multiply like roaches. Couldn't touch _him,_ of course."

"Naturally."

"Anyway, this high school girl who worked at the same shop I did died of a drug overdose. She'd never given anybody a reason to think she was involved with drugs, she was one of the cleanest kids you'd ever hope to meet. But her boyfriend was another story. I did a little digging and found out he was one of Rambaldi's people, low echelon. So I took off on a crusade and tracked the chain from him right up to the top, tipped off the police, and cheered when they hauled him off. And then three weeks later the courts let him go, claiming they didn't have enough evidence for an indictment.

"And it just happened to hit me at a really low point. We had money problems, Oliver had just lost his job, I was so tired I couldn't see straight most of the time; it was absolutely the last straw. I decided I was tired of the whole game, and I never looked back. Not as dramatic as yours, I admit."

The older woman gave her a look of sympathy and understanding. "It can still tear you to pieces, though," she said knowingly.

"It did that, all right. And to add insult to injury, a couple of years later Green Arrow brought him down single-handedly. So," she concluded with a shrug, "after everything I did, Rambaldi's rotting in prison because of Oliver, who barely even remembers his name."

"How'd you handle that?" Diana asked curiously.

Dinah thought carefully about how to answer that one. Some things her mother was better off not knowing, especially where Oliver was concerned. "Not well," she admitted finally. "At first I just felt worse about myself. You know, if only I had done a better job, if only... And then I started resenting him a little."

Which was putting it mildly. They'd hit a rough patch in their relationship not long afterwards, and that previously unsuspected resentment had played more than a small part in the crisis.

"You wouldn't be human if you didn't."

The younger woman shot her a suspicious look, searching for hidden meanings in her words. That simple sentence might hold the answer to her question right there — or it might be little more than polite interest. Still, knowing that shrewd old character, she was a lot more inclined to believe the former.

"I guess you'd know something about that yourself," she said slyly. She might have been mistaken, but she could have sworn she saw the faintest hint of a smirk around the patient's pale lips.

"It's late, Dinah," she said. "I'm glad we had a chance to really talk, but I'm tired out now. Do you mind?"

Dinah was instantly contrite. "Oh! No, of course not. I'm sorry I kept you up. I'll go now so you can get some rest. See you in the morning, Mom."

She got to her feet, but her mother put out a restraining hand. _"Not_ in the morning," she said firmly. "Sleep in tomorrow. You've earned it...Canary."

It was her way of telling her daughter, "I'm proud of you," without actually saying it, but Dinah realised what she meant without needing it spelled out. With an expression of unaccustomed tenderness on her face, she squeezed her mother's hand and bent over to kiss her on the forehead.

"Goodnight...Canary," she smiled.

_Chapter title refers to a line in one of John Donne's elegies: "Not faint canaries, but ambrosial". Personally, I stole it from Dorothy Sayers..._


	12. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

August in Gotham City was usually if anything more oppressively hot than July. This year was no exception, but Diana Lance, only a few days out of the hospital, was still feeling sensitive to cold. An old-fashioned standing fan, aimed away from her bundled up form, was the only concession to the room's other occupants.

Ten days or so had passed since the night of the big confrontation. The drama surrounding the unexpected arrest of one of the city's top theatrical mavens was still making front page news, and every night there was guaranteed to be some new development bandied about on television.

Diana herself was kept out of it. Her database, which had sparked so much trouble for all concerned, was rendered largely superfluous in light of the files recovered from the hidden room at the Byzantium. She'd had one or two conversations with the commissioner of police — who claimed some sort of prior acquaintanceship, although she couldn't remember him from Adam — but he didn't seem to think it was going to be necessary to subpoena the information or bring her into the business at all, more than likely.

Meanwhile, she and Dinah had been making slow and somewhat painful progress in the attempt to mend their relationship. At this point they were both sadly coming to the realisation that they were probably never going to live up to the ideal image of what a mother and daughter are supposed to be. A lot of water had gone under their proverbial bridge, and the gulf it formed couldn't simply be ignored. Hurtful words, once spoken, can't ever be taken back, and complicated relationships don't tend to resolve themselves neatly into nice pretty packages.

But...they _were_ getting along better. Some of the mutual condescension had disappeared now that each knew a little more of the other's career, and for the first time in a very long time they were at least trying to stop and think before blurting out something spiteful.

Oliver had just returned from a week in New York, where he and Roy had chosen to mend their father-son relationship by pretending there was absolutely nothing to resolve. They had simply ignored any and all unpleasantness that had come between them in the last few years, and had a fantastic time together.

He and Dinah sat together on the end of the couch, trying in vain to cool their sweat-drenched bodies in the hot air of the fan. The sun had gone down hours before, but it didn't seem to be having much affect on the temperature of the room. Diana was curled up in the large armchair, wrapped in a cushy, long-sleeved bathrobe. She kept her slippered feet tucked carefully under her.

The other occupant of the room remained standing, dark cape wrapped around him, in a corner of the room where the dim light from the one floor lamp didn't penetrate.

"The commissioner said you had something for me?" The deep voice sounded gentle this time, not at all like the brusque tones his erstwhile associates had grown used to hearing.

Diana drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair and frowned. "It's not like it really _matters_ at this point, but I suppose it's best to be rid of it."

She got slowly to her feet and padded into the kitchenette, where she retrieved a claw hammer from underneath the sink. Hooking the claw end around the side of the board that held the door frame in place, she began to pry at the wood. The attempt quickly proved just a little more than her strength could handle at the moment, and she leaned against the wall to take a break.

Oliver crossed the room hurriedly and took the hammer from her. "Sit down," he ordered gruffly, but the expression in his green eyes was kind. With a couple of tries he'd opened up a sizeable gap between the board and the wall, enough to see that there was a hole behind the wood. Something was hidden inside. He edged his hand gingerly into the tight space and grasped the small package. He tossed it neatly into Diana's lap. "This what you were after?"

"It's what everyone was after."

"You know, Mom, some people keep their important stuff in a safe deposit box," Dinah teased.

Oliver laughed. "Hands up anybody who's ever broken into one of _those,"_ he challenged, and raised the forefinger of his left hand. Diana extended her fingers slightly, and Batman, unwilling to stoop to the indignity, inclined his head. Dinah knew when she was beaten.

Diana undid the wrappings on the package and fingered the plastic CD case. She turned it over and over, inspecting it carefully, and then held it out to Batman. Her hands maintained their grip for just an instant before she relinquished it.

"A lot of my life went into this," she told him. "A lot of my father's life as well. It might seem extraneous now, but it never will be to me. I thought you might understand."

His eyes met hers. "I believe so, Mrs. Lance. I'll take good care of it."

Oliver dropped down heavily onto the end of the couch. "Well, I don't mind admitting I'll be glad to see the end of it, after all the trouble it's caused." Dinah nodded in agreement.

Batman paused with his hand on the doorknob. He couldn't resist one last parting shot at the grandstanding hero. "Now you see why it pays to be so 'anal' about guarding your identity," he pointed out.

Diana narrowed her eyes. _She_ had been this city's protector when he'd been running around in short pants, and she wasn't about to have him casting aspersions on the kind of job she'd done, or on any member of her family.

"Good advice..._Mr. Wayne,"_ she said in her arch voice. Dinah's mouth dropped open. Oliver blinked in surprise and then doubled up with laughter.

A look of utter shock flickered across the billionaire's masked face before he managed to regain his composure. He turned around slowly, giving Diana a cold look. "You may have been a fine detective in your day, Mrs. Lance, but you can't prove every theory."

He wrenched open the front door and disappeared into the corridor outside, leaving the three of them alone to laugh at his discomfiture.

Laughing a little like a real family, in fact.

The End

7-7-02

3


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DC Elseworlds, Adventure, Drama