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Dick Grayson lies awake long into the night aside from Barbara hoping to fall asleep. It’s only one night in a long while when he isn’t allowed to be patrolling the city, but it’s enough to drive him insane. He loves his family but they have to understand that his stress isn’t unfounded.
Recently Bludhaven has been dealing with a new villain in town that has yet to actually show their face. Not even in the usual “wearing a mask” way, but literally shadow work levels of insanity.
It almost makes him want to ask someone who’s a lot more well versed in magic to help him out, because whoever it is keeps haunting him like a shadow.
The villain is getting too close to home, and despite his adequate worries, Jason Todd is now looking over his city because he admittedly freaked out a bit. Like yeah maybe he shouldn’t be yelling at people, but that doesn’t mean he should be forced to stay home! That’s ridiculous.
They don’t believe that it’s a new villains since it’s way to clean and the villain has managed to “stay under” for over a year.
It isn’t usual for villains to not make themselves known for roughly a year, only leaving traces of them behind unless their on a level that’s working with a group that can allow them to remain shadow level. There’s a reason why most villains wear costumes and it’s for flair. They don’t like pretending to not be divas. They like being out there with their names plastered everywhere.
But that doesn’t mean it never happens, this could be Court of Owls levels of insanity! He doesn’t understand how no one can see how the “harmless incidents” that have been happening are not “incidents” at all.
They’re obviously directly targeting his friends! His family! And it neees to stop before it increasingly gets worse.
Any villain that hides themselves for this long is always planning something big.
Any moment calm now just feels like the calm before the storm. It is causing him to get a bit antsy.
Okay maybe a lot antsy, but who wouldn’t when there’s obviously a new villain about your city that you know nothing about? The ball will drop and when it does it will be big.
So yes he will pace back and forth a lot, and yell here or there, but he promises that it is reasonable. The closedown of his favorite restaurant since childhood was not an accident! Why else would the leave town so quick, someone was obviously behind it.
Barbara has even been willing to sleep (for exactly one night with threats of trapping him in a bunker) instead of doing Oracle business. He knows how he’s coming off like his “edgy” teenage years, but he swears that he’s not going insane!
Something is wrong, and when something is wrong that means you have to make it right. Otherwise the wrong will increase and hurt people.
There is no sleeping on that.
He hates lying to Barbara and she will absolutely kill him if something happens while she’s asleep but he has to do something. His city needs him.
From there, Dick Grayson gently rises from the bed. He sits and thinks for a while about the state of his city and wonders how it could be fixed.
He truly does try to stay, but when has any superhero just sat when their city is under attack by a mysterious threat? His family might be worried that he's losing it a bit, but hasn’t it been shown that benching someone won’t stop them?
He knows that he’s right and there’s something sinister behind the closing of Diamian’s favorite zoo, and no one will convince him otherwise. None of these things can just be coincidences.
He opens the window to the room that Barbara is still sleeping in.
She deserves the rest after all that she does for them.
He hopes that she sleeps well.
He does his signature jump down in the city before landing on another buildings balcony. He climbs higher so that he can see his city better, and stares mesmerized by the city he calls home.
Dick sits perched watching the bright lights below him in the city that he has been protecting for years now. It’s always peaceful watching cars go by until he hears something rustling.
He goes towards it, finding that the noise is coming from a trash can. If it weren’t for the fact that the trash can was glowing a green light he think it was just a raccoon, but it might just be a new supervillain.
It’s dumb to announce yourself to a superhero, now he knows that there’s someone’s there. There’s no way to even try to take him by surprise. He thought that he’d find the shadow villain today but an easy fight is always appreciated.
When a woman steps out from where she was, dressed in a mimicry of a robin costume, he pauses for a second.
It’s not usual to see something like that everyday.
She immediately goes for the attack and he obviously dodges with ease.
His Robin brain is already working to think of who she could be. She was obviously trained very well, and her fighting skills are accurate. A lot more precise than other first time villains. She seems to know a good amount making her difficult to fight, but it seems she hasn’t been in touch with her skills in a while. She fights like she used to fight, but has since slowed down on it.
“Oh what do we have here? Don’t you know those colors mean something around here,” he giggles a bit. She even has a robin cape.
“Of course, being a Robin is important, although personally I like to call myself Roberta,”
Nightwing tried not to laugh. Is this really what he’s dealing with tonight?
“You don’t remember me, seriously? I guess it makes sense considering you ruined my life but I was probably just a couple of days of your story,” she snarls.
“Well, I don’t make it a habit to talk to insane people!” Dick quips back, and lands a good hit on her and it causes her to cry out to top it all off.
“God you’re just as annoying as you used to be, I can’t believe that I used to think highly of you,” she nearly stabs him with a knife that he didn’t realize she had. He must be tired.
He doesn’t fully listen to her, his brain is a bit too tired to listen to villain shenanigans.
His tiredness makes the fight a lot more difficult than it needs to be.
“Well, do you think that causing that substance to remove my mask on camera was just going to have no repercussions?”
Nightwing stares at her in confusion.
“I-”
“Your selfishness proceeds me, Boy Wonder, and I hope you know that,”
He goes back to at least fully analyzing her skills. He can’t fight back if all he knows is that she sucks.
Her skills are stunted to start. Not in the sense of stopping to fight for months, it is obvious that she has not seen a fight in years.
She obviously has not updated her skills in a long time but she’s still able to put up a very good fight.
The problem seems to be that she leads way to much with her legs. She tries to do some tricks that he actually did know in his youth, but it just doesn’t work in many situations with villains. They’re fun but not very practical. It’s strange that he knows how he fought at all though. This weird fan stuff always goes to far.
Maybe he should try-
Oof.
Straight kick to the stomach.
He really is tired what an embarrassing fumble.
The winds him for a second giving an opening to Roberta.
In those few seconds of weakness, Roberta blows out blue dust that he isn’t adequately prepared for, and he’s out like a light.
When he’s awake again he realizes he's trapped in a probably abandoned warehouse.
Again.
He sighs and deep down wishes he got actual sleep before this mess but alas not listening to Babs has once again come to bite him in the ass. His head hurts, he feels like shit, and he’s embarrassed that he fell to a Z tier villain.
“Do you seriously want to continue pretending to not know who I am?”
She stares at him as though he's truly supposed to know but he truly can not recall where she's from.
A circus visitor maybe? What a strange villain ploy, there is truly just know way that he knew this woman.
“You ruined my life!”
He stares blankly back at her.
“Don’t you remember exposing my identity to the entire world because of your jealousy?”
He does not. It was probably so many years ago that the events feel sort of blurry. Almost as if the events started getting jumbled like the universe couldn't decide what was real or not.
Did he steal her candy as a toddler or something?
“Are you serious!” Her face looks as though she ate a million fire peppers “I was by your side once! As Roberta the Girl Wonder! A fellow classmate who was doomed from the start when she had a crush on you therefore you apparently had to take her down in order and date some other girl you know”
His heartbeat beats harder for a minute.
“Do you plan to hurt-?” He asks
“No. I don’t believe in punishing women for their pathetic man’s mistake,”
Well, at least they have that going for them.
“Look, I’m sorry alright. I was a kid freaked out due to the fact that you were so close to both of my identities. It was a risk to my identity,”
He tries to plead with her but she looks unimpressed.
“So you decided to release mine? Do you seriously not hear how hypocritical you sound? You ruined my life, Robin. I was never able to recover from it, I had to move towns, and more. If I could and saw it to be worth it, I’d kill you for the life that you stole from me.”
Dick starts looking for any potential exits. It’ll be easy to get out of the restraints, but he’ll need to know how to get out without being affected by the powder once again.
“You're not even listening to me,” she moves closer and kneels in front of his face, “My. Life. Was. Ruined. Because of you. Do you know how many sick people have come after me after everything went down? Did you even care? I was a child too! I wanted to be a superhero too!”
He jumps to a higher platform after successfully breaking out of his chains. Now that he knows who she is and what she wants it’ll be much easier to deal with her than before.
It’s obvious that this is just another revenge plot, and he does feel terribly sorry, but hurting people close to him to reach their goals is not the way to go about it!
He can hear her close behind him.
She’s fast but not fast enough.
He skillfully uses his acrobat skills to climb as fast as he can to the roof. He doesn’t have his usual weapons at the moment, they were probably taken when he was knocked out, but her hand to hand combat skills are obviously not that great.
She reaches the roof a bit after him, he stares at her and feels in his gut that he has to take at least some accountability.
“Look,” he tries to show in his face that he really is deeply sorry, “I’m sorry that I did that to you. It was wrong. I should’ve known that in my fear, and honestly jealousy, that revealing your identity would be just as dangerous as you finding out mine,” he says.
She looks unimpressed.
“I promise, you don’t need to get revenge in this way, there has to be a way to fix this, or at least make it better!”
She glares at him with so much hatred in her eyes.
“Your apologies won’t give me back my life.” She looks down, “After what happened I wasn’t even allowed to continue having a life in acting! It was such a terrible time where I lost everything, villains went after my family, and any evil person in power made sure to make my life more difficult,”
“I’m so-“
“No, I’m speaking,” she interrupts, “I should’ve known you didn’t like me but that doesn’t change that no only did you apply the mask dissolving adhesive on me, but you carelessly didn’t even try to see what happened to me after. I want that same to be done to you.”
“I really am sorry I swear,”
He jumped down to some crates. She follows.
“But that doesn’t excuse you hurting the people around me,” he says.
He grabs some rope and fights her.
She really does try to hold her own with kicks and punches, but her lack of embellishing her skills made her a terrible match for him.
She eventually stops fighting when she realizes that she can’t fight him back without any tricks up her sleeves and smiles.
“I’ve won anyways,”
“What?” Nightwing is very tired of this, where’s the bomb so he could be over this mess?
His comm finally picks up Barbara, “Dick are you there?”
“Yes I’m here, no need to worry about me,”
“Great,” oh he is so dead, “Did you find anything on you venture during your very dangerous mission with no one knowing where you were, or where you were going?”
“Okay, let’s back it up for a second, you would have been able to find me so matter what,”
She does not dignify him with an answer.
“Did you at least find anything useful during your very eventful night out?”
Oh yeah the potential bomb threat.
“Yes I’ve caught this weirdo in a Robin costume, she claims that she’s planning something else, can you look into it?” Dick asks.
“Of course. On it.”. Oracle is obviously out so Dick turns back to Roberta.
He’s never seen a villain be beaten so quickly. The whole thing almost feels like a distraction.
“You can arrest me all you want but you can’t take back what is already done.”
Oh she’s not done yet.
“There’s nothing you can do to stop what comes next!” She says with so much confidence that it almost made him forget that she is very much tied up in the moment.
Her laughs sound deranged and her ear grating. God, do they always need to laugh like that? It’s like they think an obnoxious laugh makes them scarier. He decides to humor her though in order to get more information on what she is planning.
“What did you do?” He asks.
A smile fills her face, a lot less deranged looking than her laughs.
“Why, all I did was the same thing that you did to me!”
Sometimes shadows catch up to you one ways you don’t expect.