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The Other Wife	By : serious Category: DC Verse Comics > Batman Views: 9290 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own the Batman series, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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Month 2/September: EPT

Barbara ran a hand through her frazzled hair, regretting it when her hand came back damp with sweat. She wiped it on her shirt as best she could and hoped it wouldn’t gunk up the keyboard. Two days without bathing… or eating. The glamorous life of playing savior to the saviors. Thank heaven Dick was in Mongolia with the Outsiders or the sight (and smell) of her would permanently dampen his libido. How did that perfume jingle go? Every woman has the right to feel sexy?

Somebody call the ACLU, my right to sexy is being violated.

She could just feel the key to Katarina’s firewall hiding behind her eyelids, as if she could see it if she kept her eyes open long enough. Before Helena had cut out on her, the teacher had given her some homework advice. ‘If you can’t solve the problem, take a break from it and come back with fresh eyes. You’re not doing yourself any favors by trying to force it uphill.’

Barbara took off her glasses and kneaded her sinuses between two fingers. Okay. Fresh eyes, fresh eyes. Just as soon as she tried an Inverseness Procedure on the little bugger…

The phone rang. Obviously, the phone was in on it. Couldn’t she get a lousy thirty-six hours of peace around here? She pressed speaker-phone, only because she wasn’t about to let an interrupter off the hook with voicemail.

“This better be import--”

“I missed my period,” a female voice said.

“Uhh, who is this?” Barbara didn’t recognize the voice.

“It’s Kory. We had sex? With Dick?” she prodded.

“Oh, right.” Barbara touched the necklace hanging under her shirt. “How could I forget? Not to sound insensitive or anything, but people miss their periods all the time. It doesn’t mean…”

Kory interrupted her, the words spilling out through the phone line in that barraging way Barbara usually associated with excitement (Kory couldn’t stop babbling after she’d heard Barbara’s proposal for the anniversary) but was now worryingly anxious. “So I bought a home pregnancy test. It said… it said… it said red dot.”

“Congratulations,” Barbara said softly, after gathering her wits.

The phone was stubbornly silent.

“I’m sorry?”

More silence. Barbara swallowed.

“Who’s the father?”

There was a faint sob. Barbara hung her head as Kory began to cry. With a heavy heart she reached out, took hold of the phone, and lifted it from its cradle.

“Hey,” she said into the mouthpiece, as comfortingly as she could. “Hey, hey, hey. Don’t go anywhere, I’m going to come pick you up, we’re going to go see a doctor, okay? Everything’s going to be fine.”

“You w-would do that?” Kory asked, her voice already starting to clear of the emotional outburst.

“What are friends for?”

***

Barbara borrowed one of Dinah’s fastest cars, a convertible, for her drive to Kory’s place. It was already modified to allow for a handicapped driver. Before that, she showered and changed her clothes. Already Katarina’s little game had fallen out of her head. This was more important. This could change everything.

Kory had been a nomad the last few years, moving from city to city with a marked disdain for permanence. She’d done stints in every super-team Barbara could name, starting with the Titans and ending with a brief flirtation in the new JLA. Nowadays she lived in a manmade (well, Tamaranian-made) bungalow just outside Metropolis, near the forest that the Cadmus Project called home. Barbara got an escort from the motorcycle-riding Hairies, who cut off in front of Kory’s hut. It wasn’t really wheelchair-accessible, but Barbara managed. Inside, Barbara was surprised to find a few electrical appliances tapped into Cadmus’s power.

“Dick set it up,” Kory said. She was leaking phosphorus tears from her eyes. Every so often she would wipe at them with a dishtowel and then run it under cold water. “He helped me move in, along with the other Titans. Donna and…” she sniffled. “Gar and Vic and the others…”

Barbara wheeled closer over the uneven dirt floor. Kory collapsed into a hug with her and Barbara unenthusiastically patted her back. Damnit, she was a Gotham girl. She was no good at this comfort stuff. Hadn’t been when Dick needed it, wasn’t here. In Gotham, when you needed help you picked yourself up by your own bootstraps. It was a way of life, wrong as it was, that was far too engrained in all of them. She struggled for the words.

“They’re still your friends. They’ll help you through this. And so will I.”

Kory’s tears, hot and leaden, were soaking into Barbara’s lap. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was supposed to have children, of course, I love children, but with Dick as the father. As my husband, not yours.”

“I’m sorry,” Barbara said, though she really wasn’t.

“Who asked you to come back and renew some schoolboy crush? He may have grown up with you, but he matured with me! I love him… loved him.”

Barbara petted her hair. “We’re going to go see a doctor. This could all be nothing, you understand? Let’s not cross any bridges before we come to them.”

“I think all my bridges are burnt, Barbara Grayson-Gordon.”

***

There was no conversation to make as they left the forest, even when a motorcycle side-car packed tighter than a clown car hollered for them to take off their tops. Kory was mostly under control. She’d submerged her sorrow under a Zen calm that Barbara wished she could replicate.

Halfway there, Kory turned on the radio to a country and western station. Barbara was so shocked she almost didn’t realize Kory was crooning along to the song. She knew the lyrics and had a decent voice. Barbara would’ve sang along with her, if she knew what to feel. There had been so many times that Barbara had sung along with Dinah’s sultry jazz, thrashed her head to Helena’s black metal (“Forget vigilantism,” as Helena always said. “My students would flip if they knew I listened to Dimmu Borgir.”), or hummed one of the thousand old swing numbers that Zinda was rediscovering. But Barbara could never be that close to Kory. For both the obvious reasons and because she couldn’t stand country music.

As for Barbara herself, she was torn. Kory could be hysterical and quick to anger… judge… feel, but she wasn’t an idiot. She wouldn’t have called if she didn’t think Dick was the father. Barbara supposed the closest thing to what she should feel was resentment, but there was a kind of calm attached to it. The Joker’s bullet had ended her maternal hopes before she could even hatch them. Denied to her a possibility she hadn’t even begun to contemplate. She held no illusion that Kory would just step aside and let another woman mother her child, but the thought of Dick’s son or daughter could be worth it. Maybe she should step aside. Her relationship with Dick was always volatile and if she just stopped fighting to allow Kory to take her place… but then, if she’d been good at letting go then she never would’ve married Dick in the first place.

The stereo conked out, them too far from a radio tower to hear anything, and Barbara broached the silence. “I’m taking you to Dr. Mid-Nite. Your file says that he checked you out for pathogens when you first came to Earth. He’s studied Tamaranian biology, so he should be able to....”

“It’s not that.” Kory raised her head to face the oncoming road, the loneliest stretch of highway in existence. “I was experimented on, my body modified. It gave me my namesake, but I can’t stop wondering about what it might do to the baby. Or the child being half-human, could that pose a risk? I’ve never seen the child’s face or heard his voice, but the thought of harm fills me with dread. How can it mean so much to me when I didn’t know he existed last night?”

“You’re Koriand’r,” Barbara said. “You fell in love with me the first time we kissed.”

“And you fell out of love the next morning. As did I. A love affair can last for a moment or an eternity, depending on how it’s built. The materials, if you will. The people.”

“Dick and I?”

“Very sturdy.” Kory smiled. “Dick’s always been sturdy, hasn’t he? Always been someone you can rely on…”

“And you can rely on him now. And me too.”

“But can I rely on myself?” It wasn’t an idle question. “I was trained for war, groomed for leadership, prepared for death… but nothing like this.”

Kory’s hair flapped behind her in the slipstream, leaving sparking contrails in the air.

“Never anything like this.”

***

Dr. Mid-Nite was polite and courteous, although Barbara got the feeling that her holding Kory’s hand had more to do with Starfire’s calm than any bedside manner. When the tests were too hazardous for Barbara to stay, she left message after message on Dick’s voice-mail. She tried to break it to him gently, but by the twelfth message she just told him that Kory was pregnant.

“I checked who the father was,” Dr. Mid-Nite said, calling up a hologram of a triple-helixed DNA strand. He pointed to one spiral. “That’s Starfire’s DNA, as you’d expect. And this one matches Nightwing’s.” He pointed to the last spiral. “But this one doesn’t match any of the samples I took. I ran it through the database, just in case it’s some villain trying to piggyback his way in.”

“Oh God,” Barbara said.

“But it matched a DNA sample I took during the Brainiac incident. Barbara, this baby is a third yours.” Dr. Mid-Nite shut off the hologram. “Congratulations.”

***

Dr. Mid-Nite’s lab was at the top floor of STAR Labs, where he could be picked up easily by hovercraft and other superhero vehicles. Barbara found Kory sitting on the helipad, her legs dangling over the side. Her shirt was pulled up to just under her breasts, her bare back facing Barbara, and her hands were running up and down her flat stomach.

Barbara didn’t have to make an effort to be sympathetic. “Are you going to keep it?”

”I’m not sure.” Kory wiped at her eyes. “I feel like a terrible person for not being sure. Who couldn’t be decisive about a… a child.”

“If you’re thinking of it as a child…”

“She,” Kory interrupted forcefully. “I just know it’s a she.” She bit her lip. “I need to talk to Dick.”

“I think we both do. How is this even possible? How can… she have three parents?”

“It’s a vestigial evolutionary function… even our biologists don’t know why it developed or why it remains. Your DNA being incorporated into the fetus was a freak accident. When Dick penetrated me with your vaginal fluid on his penis, my reproductive organs accepted both.”

“I understand and am fairly squicked out.” Barbara looked out in the city. In the far distance, there was an outline passing between two building that could’ve been Superman’s cape… or a bird, or a plane. Barbara took off her glasses and closed them inside their case with a snap. “All this time I’ve envied you. You can walk, hell, you can fly… you’re beautiful… But then it turns out you have periods too.”

Kory paused to process that. She frowned and turned to look Barbara in the eye. “You Earth women have strange ways of bonding.”

“Sister, you’re telling me. I remember this one time, Dinah and I… it’s not important.”

“You’re the mother of my child.” Kory took Barbara’s hand. “Of course it’s important. And you’re wrong. You are beautiful.”

“Not like you.”

“That’s true.”

Barbara’s eyes blinked. “I was kind of fishing for a compliment there.”

“I said you were beautiful.”

Kory was engaging with her, raising out of her funk to socialize. Barbara squeezed Kory’s bare arm and wasn’t surprised to find oodles of muscle beneath the golden skin. “But men don’t look at me the way they look at you. Dick doesn’t look at me the way he looks at you. That and so many other reasons are why I envy you. Not so much the pregnancy, now…”

“Oh, I fully intend for that to be glorious.” Kory patted her belly. “Much as I worry about the child’s future, his present is guaranteed.”

“Kory, I don’t know quite how to say this… I can’t say this is a dream come true…” Barbara stiffened when Kory looked at her, hurt. “But I just want you to know that you’re one of my… people. And I don’t leave my people. Ever.”
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The Other Wife