An one-shot about Dick and Barbara. Post The Killing Joke, Richard Grayson visits Barbara Gordon at the hospital.

I love this pair. Read, review, enjoy.

AliaAtreidesBr

"Why, Dick?"

He doesn't have an answer for that. In silence he remained.

"Please, talk to me", she supplicates. In Barbara's own way of supplicate, which is that deep concern in her features, her green eyes misted – no tears dropping, though, and not a single insinuation of despair or hysteria, her voice a whisper, words coming through her lips not in a hurry, but in a sensible way. That's Barbara, all right; confined to a hospital bed, unable to move her legs, and still capable of keeping control of herself.

That's probably why he can't speak, by the way.

He has been doing this pathetic number all week: he goes to the hospital; he watches her from a distance for a while. After an hour or so, he manages to go inside her room, usually as she sleeps. He stares at her – quietly, for such a long time. Sometimes she wakes up while he's still in there, sometimes she doesn't. When he leaves before she wakes, that's a good day; he leaves a note, the flowers, and kisses her goodbye. It sucks anyway, and he feels like shit just the same when he's outside, but it's better; better than this, at least.

The days she catches him there, oh, these days, she wants to talk. She asks him how he's doing, like it even matters; she tells him something about what the doctors had said concerning her spine injure, or about any progress in her health. Just today she had pointed out how the swelling in her face had almost disappeared, leaving nothing but those angry bruises on her jaw. I don't think it's gonna leave a scar, she said, a half-smile brightening her face despite the stitches that crossed her lower lip.

He said nothing the entire time. Mouth shut, not a sound out of his throat. And Barbara frowning, preoccupied:

"Please, tell me what's wrong, Dick…! What's going on…?"

Her hands she can move. She grasps the sheets under her, and he wonders if she even notices the nervous gesture. Poor Barbara; his sweet, gentle Barbara.

Crippled Barbara. Violated, raped, tortured Barbara.

He wants to tell her, and yet he can't. He sees her beautiful face defiled, cuts, bruises, the signs of pain. The discernable dark marks of those cruel, slim fingers around her throat. The burns the ropes left around her ankles and wrists, deep cuts at some points that denounced how she had fought her attacker the entire time, shot in her stomach and all. The vile wounds over her arms, chest, legs: he slashed her, that bastard, almost as he wanted to cut her in pieces…

Joker. Fucking Joker, how Dick wanted to kill him right now.

It was all he could see as he looked at her, and all he knew, even if he didn't want to. He could picture it in his mind, the way the son of a bitch had torn her clothes as she agonized from that shot. Blood all over the place, he had seen the house; hell of a mess, and that pool of her own blood and filth where she had struggled and suffered, the damn clown over her, pictures taken as she was in her most frail, undignified moment. The pictures Bruce had hid from him, but he searched for them and looked at it anyway.

He wished he hadn't. Sometimes.

But there was no way around it. No way he could have avoided it. When he first located the file in the cave's computer, he thought long and hard about actually opening it or not – wouldn't it be best if he could just try to forget about it?

He couldn't, though. He couldn't live without really knowing it, he couldn't keep going with all the "what ifs" in his mind. In the end of the day, he wasn't just Dick Grayson, Barbara's boyfriend; he was also a crime-fighter, a detective, a hero, many called him. He shouldn't be spared.

Because he had failed her, after all. He wasn't there, he hadn't been able to help her, he still couldn't help her – the consequences of what had happened would remain there, the permanent memento of his greatest incompetence. There was no way around this one; no fixing, no happy ending.

He saw the pictures.

He vomited.

He cried his damn eyeballs out.

And now he was dried. There were no tears, no words.

Just hate.

Barbara would never walk again. Barbara would never be same. Whatever the Joker wanted, he succeeded – maybe not exactly as he wanted, maybe his twisted plan had ultimately failed, and he was now in Arkham rotting again… but the freak had done it. Inadvertently, he had destroyed something, he had smashed and crippled… and Dick didn't mean Barbara's spine.

It was something inside Dick Grayson. Something that had once been good, a source of hope and kindness. The thing that kept him one step away from the darkness that Bruce had in himself, that made Dick believe that the world wasn't all bad, that no soul was beyond hope, that things would actually get better eventually.

That had died.

And so, as Barbara stared at him in confusion, so frail and helpless in her bed, begging him for an explanation, asking for nothing but Dick's hand and support, he realized he just couldn't give it to her. There was nothing but resent and guilt. Shame, shame for all he hadn't done, all he couldn't repair.

There were no words. No tears.

He could only hope Barbara hadn't been robbed of everything; he hoped she could maybe, someday, forgive him for not being able to say I'm sorry.