Author’s Note: I’ve been inspired by some Craig Armstrong music to write this.

Legalities: All characters and ideas are property of respectful owners!

Rating: G (for “Gasp! It’s for kids too!”)

Summary: A moment in time, how one glance can inspire so many thoughts.

Continuum: Comics (Barbara Gordon/Dick Grayson, pre-what they have going now)

Glance

By: Carmen Wayne

It was tough work, for most the day. Joker, never ceasing to amaze the amazing, had managed to light half of Gotham and Metropolis on fire in the shapes of smiley faces. The entire day was wasted on call after call for information of the nearest clinic of a number of street by a name of a street, and what kind of pain killers are best for what kind of wound, and who was available to come help clean the mess and the dead. At one point, becoming so overwhelmed, the “guardian” of these verbal pathways called for another to aid. When the other arrived, not once did they look at one another.

The last call came in. It was Superman, the Man of Steel.

“Oracle?”

“Yes, Superman?” the red head asked in her voice synthesizer, cool and collected on both ends of the frequency as always (well… almost always).

“I just wanted to thank you for your help. You’ve been nothing but a big help today.”

“It’s my pleasure, Superman,” she replied with a smile. “I love getting ‘thank yous’, especially from the Last Son.”

A light-hearted chuckle came from the other end.

“You rest well, Oracle. I’m sure this day has been hard on you as well. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Superman, take care.”

With a push of a button, Barbara Gordon shut down her side of the elaborate computer system she had set up—and reorganized for the day. She turned her wheelchair to look over at her partner for the time being.

“All done, big boy wonder?” she asked.

“I certainly am,” Dick Grayson said, running a hand through his raven hair. He did a twirl on his stool and took up his jacket to slide it on. “And not a moment too soon! I gotta get to the ‘haven and get some shut-eye…”

“You want to crash here for the night?”

“Nah, thanks though. Sorry to run on you like this though…”

He started for the door, Barbara pushing after him in her wheelchair so she could simply show him out.

“It’s alright. Was nice not seeing you,” she joked with a wink.

Dick laughed a bit. He opened the door and finished zipping up his jacket.

“No kidding. You’d think in ten hours, we’d actually look at each other’s faces. But we will! To at least say ‘Guten Nacht’!”

“Practicing your horrible German again?” Barbara asked, wheeling up to hold the door open for him.

“Yeah. So…”

He turned to her after zipping up his jacket and smiled faintly, pushing his hands into his pockets. Barbara looked up to him and smiled back. What could have been deemed an “awkward silence” followed, though neither one of them seemed to notice.

In Barbara’s mind, in that instant that she was looking up at his cool colored eyes, she could remember the first time she saw him as a child. He was… rather weird looking, but then again, most children were. His hair had been a mess because he had been playing a futile game of tag with Bruce Wayne. She had to drop off something in an envelop from her father to Bruce, though she wasn’t sure what. He stared at her a long moment, making her rather uneasy, and then just turned his back almost scornfully and went to get Bruce and Alfred, who were bickering over what voltage of light bulb to use in some burnt out lamp. When Bruce came to talk to her, she kept seeing Dick’s head pop around a corner to watch her, trying to disappear before she would see him every time she’d look his way.

When she saw him at age sixteen, he was starting to grow into such a charming young man. Muscles were being defined, and he wasn’t oddly built anymore. He was starting to grow in the ways a boy should at that age. And a charming young man he truly was. Bruce Wayne had invited her father and she to an opera on a wet rainy evening. Though Dick would exchange so few words with her, he would open doors and help her over puddles. Trained to be the perfect gentleman is what she and her father concluded later on after the night was over.

At eighteen, he was almost completely the man he was meant to be, both physically and mentally. Considerably the best student in his school, raved about as a incredible young man in all ways by the press, Barbara would often halt whatever she was doing if she saw something, anything, about him in the papers to read. And if she saw something about Bruce, she would do the same, curious about the young man. She wasn’t interested in him though, really. He was far too young for her.

As Nightwing, she could see the full man he had grown to be. Muscles finely designed for the acrobatic skills he so masterfully harnessed. Eyes that were so cold in color, yet so warm in emotion. He looked so much like Bruce Wayne in pigment, but where Bruce was appropriately large, Dick was structured without excessiveness. Where Bruce was cold in emotion, Dick lighted the cold with his emotional warmth. He was a leader, a friend, a warrior and a prankster. Barbara had begun to think of him as a man as well, never again regarding him as “far too young”. Often she found herself thinking one thing about all the years she’s ever noticed him…

“He’s never even noticed me…”

In Dick’s mind, he remembered the first time she came to the mansion on Wayne Manor to see Bruce. When he opened the door, he stopped in place, just staring at her. He wasn’t quite sure what to say to the teenager. He didn’t even notice his own hair a mess and his chest heaving. Behind him, Bruce and Alfred argued about something, but he honestly couldn’t remember what. He continued to stare at her, until she appeared to grow annoyed, and he hurried to get Bruce. When Bruce got irritated and went to talk with her, Dick slid around a corner and would peek around every so often to look at her, and he would hide each time she would begin to look his way. To present day, he was positive she didn’t see him.

At sixteen, Bruce told him they were going an opera, and he had invited Commissioner Jim Gordon and his daughter Barbara. It had been years, so he really didn’t think of it… Until he saw her face once more. The entire night he spent on chivalrous acts for her, being the best of a gentleman he could. He felt slightly guilty though, because he didn’t know what to say to her, so he said so little words to her. He felt like she was judging him as well…

At eighteen, as Robin, he found himself often checking around her area of Gotham at least three times a night. It wasn’t even his area of patrol but it didn’t seem to bother him. The teenager he first met when he was so young was now a young woman, beautiful and refined. Eloquent and intelligent. She could be a supermodel, kick serious butt and also tell you all you needed to know about binaries. But even so, he still continued to check on her, until the time of Robin passed from his life and was born anew to another.

When he became Nightwing, he had begun relationships, and quasi-relationships, with others. But still he often looked back to Barbara. She was beginning to mature from a beautiful young woman to an astonishingly beautiful woman in her mid-twenties. He swore that wasn’t old, but to the female standard, it was insisted she was no longer “young”. And despite the wheelchair she so adamantly hid behind to guard her from the pains of relationships, it seemed, all he could see was the gorgeous woman he had watched grow all those years, seemingly in stages, as both Barbara Gordon and Batgirl. Her almost flaming red hair, her incredibly loving and caring emerald eyes that he always gazed at whenever she was patching up a wound of his with the greatest of care or even screaming at him for being a stupid male.

So many times he tried to point out through words something he tried to make obvious in actions, but something always prevented her from hearing. And now, watching her in the doorway of her clocktower home, he found himself thinking the same thing he’s been thinking for years, every time he’s seen her…

“I’ve loved her since the first day I saw her…”

The two of them watched each other for a long moment, longer than either planned. And that silence that others would feel awkward seemed to be obsolete, their eyes saying more than they felt they could say aloud.

With a deep breath to restrain himself from doing something he shouldn’t, Dick merely watched her eyes while he spoke.

“Goodnight, Barbara,” he said softly.

Barbara nodded to him slowly.

“Goodnight, Dick… Be good.”

She slowly backed inside and shut the door, making it lock up securely. Dick stared at the door a bit longer, and then sighed and started down the hall.

Meanwhile, inside, Barbara leaned on the door, eyes spaced, until she gathered the strength to sit up and make her way to bed.

Their silence was all they needed to make their feelings clear. Their silence, their eyes, said it all for them.

“Why don’t you ever notice me, Dick?”

“I’ve always noticed you.”

“I don’t want to restrict you…”

“Love isn’t a restriction. Love allows you to do the things you can’t normally. Love lets you fly, Barbara.”

“Love makes you blind.”

“Stop pushing me away, Barbara.”

“I don’t know how to love, Dick.”

“You do too… and one day, when you let me in, I’ll show you that you can love. I’ll show you that you can love stronger than you ever thought possible. Until then… Goodnight, Barbara.”

“If anyone can teach me, Dick, it would be you. Goodnight, Dick… Be good.”

The End.