Paragon: A Justice League Story
Paragon
a Justice League story
by June Whitfield
Copyright 2006
PG
Summary: Helena didn't fight alongside them during the Invasion; that didn't mean she didn't fight, or wasn't fighting still. Huntress/Question.
Disclaimer: So very not mine.
Notes: Written for merfilly as part of the "Revenge of the DCAU Ficathon." Spoilers for "Destroyer".
She was in Gotham when it happened, working. She had a job teaching children at a small Catholic school downtown near the river. The fight hadn't started until after mass had finished, and she'd began hustling the kids into class. One of the other teachers had wheeled a TV into an empty classroom, and they'd filed the kids in one by one after a heated argument between Helena and the Mother Superior. The teachers and sisters sided with the old nun despite Helena's protests, and the children under eleven were kept in a separate room.
The fight was bloody. The static lines on the old TV didn't do it justice. Helena couldn't hear half of what was going on, but she couldn't tell whether that was due to the poor quality of the film or the loud sobbing and praying behind her. After a while the cameras were hit by soundwaves and blacked out in snow. Then the broadcasting antennas were chopped through by something or another, and the screen dissolved into blackness. They could hear loud scraping noises outside, and every now and then the ground shook.
She couldn't leave, couldn't fight, couldn't help. She didn't even have a cell phone.
Didn't have a way of contacting Vic.Her gut writhed.
She helped the other teachers load the kids into the cafeteria. Irony, Helena thought: they built a school with a bomb shelter to protect against Russians, but it had only been used for alien invasions. People started calling in on teacher's cell phones to have their children pulled out of school -- despite the immediate danger of taking their kids out of a safe place -- and Helena, after the fourth or fifth call, got up to start monitoring the streets for parents's cars without being told to. She wondered how long it would be until the rest of the power and phone lines fell.
Helena hated small, tight places almost as much as she hated the world being attacked.
The first time Helena had killed had been in the Thanagarian Invasian. She hadn't been in costume. The only things that she'd had with her were a gun, which she had picked up off the body of a cop, and a knife, which she carried around in her purse anyway. And when one of those things (Helena was of the private opinion that at least the traitorous bitch in the League looked semi-human) had tried to attack her she had shot him dead.
And this was the same thing all over again.
Helena crossed herself and started running.
----
As it was, bloody and damaged as she was, she knew that she had to say yes when Steel offered the medical facilities of the Tower. She didn't like it, and she knew that Vic knew that she didn't like it, and that he would say no if she didn't say yes. So she did.
She wished that she were still out from the drugs. Helena retained a dislike of hospitals from her youth. The Watchtower didn't have a hospital, but an infirmary bay, which was the same thing in different words, and still made her feel nauseous.
"Helena."
She shifted from her position and tried her best to sit up. The machine at her bedside made beeping noises. "Making rounds?"
"Something like that." Helena, when she was younger and stupid, had watched Superman on television, and had had the sort of crush that one got on actors and important, handsome business men. He looked tired. "How are you doing?"
"Not dead," she said.
He nodded, moving to sit in the plastic chair across from her bed. This was an odd feeling that Helena had never gotten used to -- the idea that you were sitting across from a person who, if given the right prerogative, could snap your bones in half with the same pressure that they would use to open a jar of mustard.
"Supergirl's gone," she mused. Then, "Vic," in an explanatory tone to his sudden startle. He relaxed. "He misses her," she continued, stronger, her vocal cords loosening with use. "I think she was one of the only people here who treated him like an honest to God human being."
He nodded after a long minute. "Thank you. It's good to -- it's very good to hear that."
She wondered whether he had a wife at home, children, whether that was even possible. Everyone knew how Superman had come to Earth and everyone knew that he was the last of his kind. How awful that must be, to be the most powerful being in their small solar system. How much responsibility. How much pain. How lonely. "Any particular reason you're here?"
"We'd like to offer you readmission into the League," he said.
Oh. "I thought you guys didn't like killers."
"We don't." She waited for him to continue. "There's been a lot of damage done. To buildings. Cars. Houses. Bridges. The rest." Her mind pictured what Gotham had looked like as she'd been beamed up. Smoking, crumbled, ruined. "We'll need all the help we can get."
"Even killing help?"
His face hardened. "You know our boundaries."
She stared at him for a moment. "Who said they'd vouch for me?"
"Batman."
"Why?"
"That's confidential."
Maybe he had seen her -- or seen tapes of her -- fighting alongside his partners. The brat and the girl. They'd fought off the creatures to the best of their ability until they'd been sent reinforcements, and even afterward. She and Dinah had fought side by side, and now that Helena knew enough about Dinah's fighting style to write a book about, they'd fought using the same techniques and had been able to avoid injury. Mostly.
"No." What else could she say?
He looked weary. "It would only be temporary. We're willing to give you a second chance."
"I have a job." She had a job that she loved for its versatility and its community and its faith. She didn't want second chances.
"You'd be placed on a shift system base--"
"No."
"Is that your definite answer?" He looked irritated, although not at her. She knew that he had disagreed with Batman and still did. She wondered why he'd been the one to come. Publicity, maybe. Everyone knew his face. She was no exception.
"Yes," she said. And it was. It would have to be. He nodded, face shadowed from the white infirmary lights, and stood, the chair shaking slightly as he left it. He looked relieved, she thought, the anger not quite dissipating with his walk toward the door.
"Say hi for me."
"I will."
She waited until she heard the last sound of his heels hitting the floor down the hall to curl up into a ball on the sheets and bang her head against the infirmary bed's railing.
----
"The car," Vic said.
The clock on the wall said it was eleven. She felt woozy from the drugs. "What?"
"The engine hit a wall."
"Oh." She paused, trying to loosen her tongue from the top of her mouth. "It's okay. I'll walk to work."
"I called the school," he said.
She winced. "And?"
"They want you to pick up your stuff when you've recovered."
"Guess I can't say I didn't expect that." But it still gave her a hard, painful pang in her lower belly, one that didn't have anything to do her injuries.
"Why did you say no?"
She looked up from her gaze on her white sheets. "What?"
"Why did you say no to Superman?" He had his mask off. They'd turned off the light, but there was still a soft glow coming from the hallway outside, and she could make out the twitch in his jaw that she knew meant he was worried. "When he asked you to rejoin the League?"
"I..." She paused, faltering. "I don't know." She attempted to wet her tongue with non-existent saliva. "I... I don't like it here." She hated drugs, hated taking drugs. She even hated taking asprin. "I hate it here."
He was quiet, but only for a second, before his hand found hers in the dark. "I know."
"I'm a moron," she told him.
"Yes."
"You shouldn't date morons. I hear it's a bad policy."
His hand gripped hers tightly and she found herself thanking God once more for giving her this man. "Let me be the judge of that."
"I think I like you better caffeinated," she said.
"Don't we all?"
"Who did you meet on the way back?"
"Ollie. He wanted to know how you were feeling." Vic made the kind of amused noise that he made when he was about to share personal information. "Black Canary is moving to Seattle."
"Don't blame her." She silently wished Dinah good luck. She deserved it.
"There's talk of Ollie resigning."
"Don't believe them."
"Wasn't about to."
"What am I doing here, Vic?" She traced her fingernails over his palm, keeping herself awake through the haze of the drugs. "I hate it here. I hate everyone here. I hate the stupid sticks up their asses."
"You're recovering."
"Life sucks."
"Mmm."
"Where am I going to find a job?"
"You'll find one."
"Thank you for the voice of confidence, Vic, but who's going to hire during the hours I need?" She resisted the urge to knock her head into the wall. "I'm screwed."
"I'll help you find one."
"...Thank you," she said after a minute, finally, and looked at him hazily.
"Rest, Helena."
She yawned. "No problem there."
He held her hand until she slipped off into dreamless sleep.
----
She got a job as a librarian in a public library. It had flexible hours and it paid fairly well. Her bosses were lenient enough. And there were backrooms with well-oiled windows that she could change in if time was needed.
Their lives didn't exactly revolve around each other. They had their fights. They had arguments over stupid, small things like what kind of pasta to buy or where the cheapest gas station was or how to properly clean windows. He'd made her cry once. He'd stormed out once or twice. Things weren't perfect.
But they were learning.
Frighteningly, it was probably the most normal relationship either of them had ever had.
They established check-in points. She wrote him sticky notes and stuck them to her refrigerator. He had a key to her apartment and she had one to his. They'd bought a new car, which he used more frequently than she did. Neither of them had family to introduce the other to; sometimes Helena thought about what her mother or father would think of Vic, with his insecurity and his hidden heart the size of the world, and liked to pretend that they would accept him.
They went on dates once in a while. Restaurants, movies, plays. More often than not they stayed at home, curled up on her couch watching DVDs and talking.
They talked a lot.
They were contacted by the League more than once, and she helped them more than once, but always kept her distance. Three years later they both attended Ollie and Dinah's wedding -- Helena as a bridesmaid -- and Helena turned over thoughts as she watched Dinah smile and cry.
She didn't want to get married; she didn't want to have children; she didn't want anything she couldn't have. Now she had the possibility, but it remained distant and the likelihood of either of them standing in one place long enough with other people around in a frustrating social circle made her feel nauseous. She was happy where she was. Where they were.
They left after the Sunday brunch (because Dinah had insisted). Too many familiar faces, familiar jaw lines and body shapes.
In the car, on the way back, she kept the window open -- it was June, and hot everywhere -- and would occasionally lean out the window and squint her eyes at the grass or the trees or the dust, and laugh when he poked fun.
What they had wasn't perfect; but since when had Helena been perfect, and when had she ever wanted to be?