Chapter Text
"It's Spoiler or the detonator, Batman. Your choice." Two-Face’s voice crackles over the speakers, soaked in glee. Nine henchpeople circle her like vultures, electric batons raised, sparking violently with green arcs. One hit from those, and she’s probably toast.
"Don't listen to him," Spoiler shouts. "B, you know it's not real! He doesn't have anything to stop it. We need to get out of here." She knows where the bomb is, she's known all along. Sadly, getting pulled from the ground into a giant helicopter before she could get away, meant she now has to deal with Batman's infuriating reluctance to believe her and Harvey's batshit crazy talk.
Of course, all of it while being surrounded by nine dicks, with another five unconscious with cuffs on the ground against the metallic walls of the plane. What's nine more, right?
"Fifty-fifty chance that the detonator will stop the bomb, Bats. What'll it be," Harvey kept on cackling. If Steph didn't know any better, he really did go Joker level crazy after they locked him up in Arkham six months ago. What happened in there, nobody really knows, but no one expected him to plan to blow up Ace Chemicals a week after he got out, with it potentially making the whole east coast a radioactive wasteland.
"Give it to me Harvey, we both know that this would be suicide for you and your business. This isn't you." Batman’s voice is calm, quiet. He's acting like this is some low level negotiation. Great. Meanwhile, the henchpeople inch closer.
"Your little sidekick in the cargo bay will think very differently in a moment." Harvey sneers. He must have almost turned on the detonator, because suddenly Batman panics. "Stop! Harvey stop, we can help you. Whatever happened in Arkham, we'll put a stop to. Just give me the detonator. Let us help you."
Stephanie needs a way out. Fast.
The cargo bay is a cavernous metallic space, no exits but two heavy doors leading to the cockpit. Crates surround her, but won't give her enough cover. She can’t attack without getting fried. She can’t run. Can’t dodge forever. So...deflect and disarm. Use their power against them. “Only way out now,” she mumbles.
"There is no stopping this, Batman. The whole city will pay! You call yourself a saviour, yet tonight you won't save anyone. Not even yourself." Harvey’s voice rises into a howl.
"The choice is still yours Bats, the sidekick, or the city." Stephanie already knows his answer before he says it.
"Just give me the detonator, Harvey." There it is. The moment she's been waiting for.
Any notion of hope she might have had that she ment anything at all to him, dies a quiet, sad death in that moment. If it wasn't him who made the decision, it might as well have been Oracle or anyone else shouting into Bruce's ear, who all probably agree that her life isn't as important as this stupid detonator. It's a good thing her comm stopped working. It's better not to know. Better that she stopped believing that they'd choose her for once a long time ago, too.
Spoiler glares with gritted teeth towards the screen and speakers on the wall. "I'm not his sidekick, you lunatic!" She shouts. It's unlikely that Two Face heard her, but it had to be said anyway.
"You know the detonator is a trap, you dumb fuck, why are you doing this?!" She shouts at Bruce, "Greatest detective my ass."
The henchpeople snicker. "Tell that to the Bat in person, Spoiler. No one's gonna save you now." A woman behind her says. A slow, wicked grin forms at the edge of Steph’s mouth. "Yeah? Come at me. Let’s see who'll really need saving tonight."
Crashing through a window always sounds cool, until you’re thrown out of a moving aircraft.
Especially when the one who's responsible for you being thrown out is the person you thought had your back.
But who was she kidding? Of course he didn’t. He never did.
Before she fully registers it, she's falling. The initial shock immediately gives way and shifts to the back of her mind, because if there is one advantage of being so high up, its that it gives her enough time to at least try to not die.
Flipping around, she faces the city below, still approximately three kilometers above the ground. She needs something to slow down her fall if she ever wants to survive this.
Steph grips the edges of her cape, attaches them with a hook to her back and lets it billow behind her like a makeshift parachute while she takes out her grappling gun. Ten seconds until she’s level with the tallest Gotham towers. Seventeen before impact.
Stephanie looks around her. "Come on, comeoncomeoncomeon." It doesn't look good and for a second she wants to rethink all the life choices that brought her here.
Then she sees it. A metal ledge on a skyscraper across the street. It’s risky. But better than dying.
"Now or never, Steph!" She twists, aims, fires.
She drops—
One.
Two.
Three—
The grapple catches.
She arcs wide and fast, slamming toward a wall of glass ten meters high. The W on the spire tells her exactly whose building this is. Figures. At least the damage will be accounted for. "Fucking hell!" She tucks into herself and braces—---
The enormous impact and the shattering of glass can probably be hear all over the block. All the air in her lungs is knocked out of her the moment she collides with the windows. She dazedly feels like she's floating for a second, before she starts her free fall towards the floor. She has just enough time to flip, turn and leverage her body to fall on her back--
CRASH
Pain. Blinding, immediate, everywhere. She blacks out on impact.
She doesn’t know how long she’s out, but when she comes to, her nerves are screaming. Her back feels like it’s been hit by a truck. Her lungs protest with every breath.
Coughing, cursing, she eventually levers herself into a sitting position of sorts, propped against the broken wood of what seems to be a massive mahogany table, which she broke in half with her fall, the jagged ends of the broken wood surrounding her on all sides. Every motion hurts. She grunts and then reaches for her comm slowly, dazedly hoping that it works now, but all she hears is static and small electrical shocks. A sharp spark explodes against her ear as she presses her finger to it.
“FUCK!” She rips it out, hurls it to the floor. It pops in a hiss of smoke.
Silence follows, except for her breath, the ringing in her ears, and the rush of the wind from the shattered windows.
I'm going to kill that egotistical son of a--
No. Focus. Categorize. The voice in her mind complies.
Her eyes dart around the room quickly, scanning for things she can recognize. There is shattered glass all around her. Light is coming in from the skyscrapers outside, reflecting off of the glass and creating small ponds of light across the walls of the room. All the overhead lights are off, but the light coming in from the outside brightens the entire floor she's on regardless.
It's a conference room, that's for sure. It's enormous. There is also a huge smart screen on the right wall of the room, displaying a big W.
There's text moving under the sign, but her eyesight is too blurry and unfocused, so it's hard to make out anything else from where she is supporting herself against the broken table. On her left are another set of see-through walls and doors leading out. On the other side of it is a big square hallway, with marble floors and in the middle a sitting area and secretary's desk. Behind that are another set of glass doors that lead into a big office. Way in the back, even with her extremely blurry vision, she can make out the backdrop: The skyscrapers that make up the Diamond district of Gotham city.
Bruce Wayne's office.
The realization hits like a fist. Her chest tightens. Her breathing speeds up, her vision becomes searing white around the edges. It's even harder to breathe for second. Great. It's really all coming together now.
"Next step, get the fuck out of here." Her brain helpfully tells her. Putting weight on her legs and trying to stand up unsupported proves unfruitful though, as pain shoots throughout her legs with a rush so great that it stiffens all the muscles in her body. She begins to lose balance, but thankfully, she has just enough time to grab for a piece of the unbroken table and lean against it before she falls to the floor again.
It's at that moment she sees all the damage rather than that she feels it. There is a deep cut on her left leg. Bad. She's hopeing it doesn't become arterial as she moves. Fuckfuckfuckfuck--
No. Focus. Her brain repeats.
Looking at her other leg, it doesn't seem heavily injured, if you're not counting the smaller cuts here and there. "Move." Her voice is raspy, her mouth full of copper.
There is nothing of note around her that's tall enough to support her while walking, so it's going to be a tough one, but her need to get out of this building is greater than anything. She's not passing out here, she's not giving him the fucking satisfaction. Her breathing picks up again, her heart beating fast. She shouts, grunts and curses, and tries standing on both feet again.
Rage and spite, she knows, are very powerful motivators.
Pulling herself up proves itself less difficult this time, as she leverages her weight on her right leg. She notices the small puddle of blood she leaves on the marble floor when she stands up. Steph's not sure if that's only just coming from her leg, but she doesn't feel anything hurting anymore at the moment, not even the cut on her left leg. Good.
Steph lifts herself unto the table, avoiding the rough edges where she has created the massive rupture and slides slowly to the other side. She can feel splinters and glass pieces that were already there embed themselves deeper in her legs and back. Great.
Scanning the room, she now recognizes the digital clock on the smartscreen. She can barely make out what it says, as her vision still hasn't cleared up enough. However, she needs to know how much time she has, if she has any at all.
While she supports herself against the table with one hand, the other clutched against her side, she limps closer.
23:57. Shitshitshitshit.
25 minutes to get to the old harbour and solve Harvey's fucked up puzzle.
She throws open the glass doors and starts limping towards Bruce Wayne's office, blood slowly dripping down onto the floor. There’s a hidden rooftop exit in Bruce’s office. She knows this well enough by now, because she and Cass used it plenty of times before.
She can hear alarms blare somewhere below as she runs across the hall. Shit. This means she probably has less than two minutes before security comes in to check the disturbance. At this point the limping turns into a full on wobbling sprint as she arrives at the glass doors leading into Bruce's office. When she pushes them open, though, her hand leaves behind a red handprint on the doors from where she'd held the one against her side.
She snarls, curses as her vision singles in on the blood.
Calm down. In. Out.
She clenches and unclenches her fists, rolls her shoulders and looks at her blood smeared hands. Then she turns to the glass wall and scrawls a message on it in blood. Petty? Maybe. Worth it? Definitely.
That done, she limps toward the door unto the roof, leaving red footprints on the white carpet next to Bruce's desk.
Rain greets her on the rooftop, mixing with the blood running down her suit. It paints the puddles in spirals of red and neon from the billboards around her. The billboard lights and spotlights almost make her body a complete shadow against the light polluted city.
The rooftop of Wayne Enterprises is a big area with two metal towers with a opening in the middle, making the whole building look like a spire with at the end of the roof a helicopter pad.
It's the best place to jump off, if she wants to get to the old harbour quickly. When she arrives at the edge she looks down at the street below. There are hundreds of cars on the street, filled with people and families who want to get away from here as fast as possible, ever since Harvey started to broadcast his threat to the whole city, which has due to Oracle's help hopefully stopped by now. She hopes most of the people down there make it out.
In any case, Harvey's reign of terror ends here, she's going to make sure of it. Though she knows it's going to be a long night.