Title: Shadows & Sinners

Author: Aeryn Sun

Email: willowrose_98@yahoo.com

Feedback: Yes, please.  It would be appreciated.

Archiving: Realm of the Shadow.  Any others, ask.

Rating: R/Violence, Language, Sexuality

Spoilers: I’ve never seen an episode so if I manage to spoil one, I’d be impressed.

Summary: A new threat arrives in New Gotham as thougts resurface in Helena’s mind

Couple: Helena/Barbara

Warning: If the idea of two women involved in a romantic relationship together disturbs you, run, run far far away and never look back. If it's illegal where you live, move quickly. Too young? Age quicker, it's fun here. Other than that, enter at your own risk, and enjoy.

Author's Notes: I have NO idea what I’m doing but, I loved the characters in the fics I was reading SO much I HAD to give it a go.  Forgive me.  Oh and I’m not sure if DC’s STAR Labs exists in this particular TV universe, but it does in my fic.

Disclaimer: Sadly, they are not mine.  I would like to lay claim to the stunning Ashley Scott tho, if anyone’s keeping score.  All my earthly possessions for that one.  Ahem.  Anyway, they belong to people that AREN’T me, I’m making no money and only having fun.  Please don’t sue.

Thanks to Mel for the help with the title.  J

Part One

It was raining. She hated it when it rained. Wet leather and wind whipped hair were never a comfortable combination. Add to that the salt air coming in from the docks and it all served to make Helena Kyle a very cranky Huntress.

"Come on, hurry the fuck up," she mumbled angrily. She was perched on top of one of the warehouses at the New Gotham docks waiting for a shipment of what the Oracle's sources had said was going to be pulse weapons as opposed to the coffee beans the ships manifest claimed it was. But she'd been waiting for over three hours and all she had to show for it so far was a slightly runny nose and, she figured, a good inch of water in her leather boots.

"Patience is a virtue," Oracle's calm voice came back over the comm system, slightly tinged with amusement. She knew Helena hated being so cold and wet. She sometimes wondered if it was a 'feral' thing or an actual personal aversion. Not that Barbara was going to ask.

Helena snorted.

"One we both know I don't have," she retorted. “Can I come back in yet?  Cos I’m drowning out here.” Barbara clicked her tongue against her teeth in slight annoyance.  She understood Helena’s impatience; she was growing tired of waiting too and she was in the relative warmth of the Clocktower, not stuck in the pouring freezing rain.

“Afraid not, Huntress.  Harbor Patrol reports that they’re going to start unloading the ship anytime now,” she informed her waterlogged partner.

“Oh goody,” Helena sighed.  Then movement to her right caused azure eyes to narrow and go feral, heightening and honing her sight to sharp precision.  Two men were prying open a crate under the protection of a tarp and illuminated with flashlights.

“Oracle, something’s going on to my right.  I’m going to get a closer look,” she reported.

“Understood,” Barbara responded. “Be careful,” was said much quieter but it served to warm Helena even in the cold rain.  She wondered why knowing Barbara cared made her feel the way it did for half a second and then pushed the thought to the back of her mind.  It was time to concentrate on other things, like kicking some ass, her favorite activity.

She effortlessly leapt from her perch down onto one closer to the two men, landing soundlessly.  She was practically on top of them and they were unaware.  It made her smile; being able to stalk her prey like this gave her a thrill that if she were forced to she still would never be able to put into words.  She felt powerful, superior and other things she couldn’t pinpoint.  The urge to just jump down among them and crack their heads open was overwhelming but she knew that she’d get that damned disapproving look from Barbara.  Barbara wanted intel, THEN Helena could bust heads.

‘I HATE that look,’ she thought to herself.  She wasn’t sure why knowing Barbara was disappointed in her bothered her so much but it did.

“These things are beautiful,” one of the guys spoke up as the lid came off and they removed the packing material from the contents.  Large, black metal gleamed back at them from the light of the flashlights.  Helena had to admit from where she was standing, the streamlined compact weapons were nice, you know, if you were into that sort of thing.

‘Barbara’d probably go nuts to get her hands on one of those things and take it apart to see how it worked,’ she smiled.  Sometimes Barbara reminded her of a kid who just had to take everything apart. ‘At least she can put them back together again…without pieces left over.’

“Dangerous too,” the other guy added. “One blast’ll cut through most anything.”

“Shit, man.  Ain’t no one gonna get in our way with these things,” his buddy laughed. “Where’d they come from?” The second guy shrugged.

“I only heard that they were developed by STAR Labs and were being transported for testing when someone else lifted them.  Beyond that, man, I don’t know nothing.  We’re just supposed to check and make sure everything’s here, make the payment and drop them off to the Boss.” The first guy lifted one out of the crate and flipped a switch.  A soft humming drifted up to Helena’s ears, along with a slight change in the temperature around them.

“So?  Boss ain’t gonna miss a few,” he said sneakily. “We lift a couple and then say the shipment was short.  No one will ever be the wiser.”

“Shut that thing off,” his friend hissed. “And yes, they WILL know.  I’m not gonna get killed cuz YOU’RE a greedy fuck, Bob.” Suddenly Bob leveled the weapon on the other man.

“Don’t tell me what to do, Frank,” he warned. “You know what? I don’t like your attitude.  And you are gonna die because I’m a greedy fuck.” He pulled the trigger and Helena watched as a ray of green light cut straight through Frank’s chest.  He gaped at the hole for a second before toppling over dead.

“Holy shit!” Bob exclaimed happily.

“Fuck me,” Helena hissed.  Not only was that blast hot enough to burn through Frank but also the light pole behind him, which toppled down in a rain of sparks.

‘Looks like a damn painful way to go,’ Helena decided.

“Huntress, what’s going on?” Oracle demanded to know over the transmitter.

“Idiot number one poked a hole in idiot number two with one of those guns,” Helena told her. “And I think he’s gonna take off with his new toy.”

“Well, stop him…but be careful. Police are on the way but it sounds like he doesn’t have much regard for human life,” Barbara warned.  Helena grinned ferally as she prepared to pounce on a still jubilant Bob.

“Me either sometimes,” she whispered.

She leapt down hitting Bob square in the back with her feet, sending him sprawling onto his face, the pulse rifle sliding out of his slick hands and across the landing.

“Aw, you dropped your toy,” Helena said with mock sadness.  She cocked her head to the side in a rather cat-like action. “You do know what they say about the size of your gun, right?”

Bob dragged himself to his feet glaring at her.

“Who the fuck are you?” he barked.  Helena smiled, the limited light of the docks shining off her sharp white teeth.

“Huntress,” she said calmly. “But you didn’t answer my question.”

“I’m gonna kill you,” Bob growled as he lunged at her.  Helena easily sidestepped the clumsy lunge and landed two blows to Bob’s back, sending him flying again.

“A gun that big, well, someone might say you were over compensating for something,” she teased.  Unseen by her, she’d sent Bob face first into his fallen rifle.  He grabbed it, spinning around in mid fire.  The change in air temperature gave Helena enough warning to back-flip out of the way of the arc of green light as it cut through the metal shed behind her.

“OK, you don’t want to play, I can see that,” she said, leaping over him as he fired again.  She grabbed the front of the rifle, stifling a slight gasp at the heat of the barrel and shoved it as hard as she could into his chest, breaking his grip on the wet weapon.   She then swung up, breaking his nose with the handle before bringing it crashing down on his head.  Bob collapsed at her feet unmoving.

“And he’s down for the count,” she said happily, absently tossing the rifle over her shoulder into the water.  The piercing shrill of the police sirens cut through the rain and alerted Helena that she’d have company soon.

“And as always, they arrive AFTER all the fun and I’ve done all the work,” she grumbled.

“You’d better get going unless you want to talk to Reese,” Barbara teased, not seeing the way Helena rolled her eyes at the mention of the detective’s name.

“He is SO barking up the wrong tree,” she complained to no one in particular.  Still, stringing him along WAS kind of fun. In the whole ‘dangling carrot’ sense.  “I’m heading back now, Oracle.”

“Acknowledged,” Barbara’s voice was somehow soothing now that Helena was feeling somewhat on edge after a somewhat less than challenging fight. “If you can, bring me back one of those rifles, Huntress.  I’d like to see what this new technology is.” Helena rolled her eyes again.

‘Barbara and her electronic gismos,’ she mused. ‘Give her something new to play with and that woman is happy.  She’s so geeky it’s cute.’

“Muhr?” Helena said out loud at her last thought.

“What?” Barbara asked over the link, hearing Helena’s confusion.  Helena shook her head.

“Nothing, just lack of sleep catching up with me I guess,” she responded as she grabbed a rifle from the crate and leapt onto the nearby fire escape. “Be back soon, going silent.”

“Confirmed,” Barbara’s voice floated back to her.  Helena reran her last train of thought in bewilderment.

‘I did NOT just think Barbara was cute…did I?’

**

‘OK, bunnies and fuzzies and frosted cupcakes with sprinkles are cute,’ Helena was still trying to straighten out her thoughts after a hot shower back at the Clocktower. ‘But Barbara Gordon is not cute.  She’s…she’s BARBARA.’

She glanced over at the person in question, watching as the redhead’s deft fingers flew over the keyboards, carrying out a myriad of experiments on the retrieved pulse rifle.  Helena could hear her muttering to herself about ‘power sources’ and ‘limited outputs’, things Helena herself didn’t understand or care about.  So she took advantage of Barbara’s distraction to study the older woman unnoticed.

Sure, Helena had always noticed Barbara’s beauty.  She’d have to be blind not to see the other woman’s aesthetically pleasant features.  The flame red hair, jade green eyes, full lips and athletic body were all part of a wonderful package that held a mind which rivaled none other that Helena knew.  When she looked at Barbara, Helena didn’t even see the chair the other woman was limited to.  Hell, sometimes she even forgot about it entirely.  That was just the kind of personality Barbara had; you didn’t focus on what she didn’t have.  You were overwhelmed by what she DID have.

And the brunette could admit to more than a passing attraction to her former mentor at times, a strange kind of longing that made her heart seize with the impossibility of it.  But that was nothing new.  It’d been there almost from the first day that she’d met the redhead, when age 10 she’d been enrolled in a gymnastics program at the same gym where Barbara trained.

She remembered being in awe of the then 18 year-old Barbara Gordon, full of fire and spirit.  Helena always thought of her as a living flame; wild, passionate, unpredictable.  And she knew nothing of Barbara’s double life as Batgirl.  She only saw her in the confines of the gym when the older girl would give the overactive bundle of energy who drove her usual instructors nuts small pointers and a smile.  Barbara was the only one that could seem to put up with the child’s fits of energy long enough to see the potential underneath.  It made Helena feel special that Barbara would single her out to help and that made her want to work all that much harder.

When she grew older and ended up with Barbara as a teacher in high school, she was beyond happy.  School had always bored her and presented no challenge.  Helena knew Barbara’s class would be different and she wasn’t disappointed.  Barbara presented her with challenges at every opportunity, seeming to enjoy her student’s enthusiasm as much as Helena herself.  Her meta-human abilities were growing stronger at the time, making an already awkward time of life even more difficult and the only time when she didn’t feel like a freak was when she was debating a point with Barbara.

It even got to the point that her mother Selina noticed and went in for a Teacher’s Conference to meet the person that was somehow getting her 14 year old daughter to do her homework and read Dylan when she wasn’t out racing across rooftops.  And Selina had been impressed with the young woman, but not just for her teaching skills.  Years as a thief and learning to read people had taught Selina Kyle a lot of things, especially when garbed as her alter-ego Catwoman.  Five minutes in and she was shocked to realize that the redheaded young English teacher in front of her, who was also the police commissioner’s daughter, was her nemesis, the baby-bat, Batgirl.

Of course, Barbara was no slouch in the deduction department either.  She soon added it up that Selina Kyle was the newly returned Catwoman.  She later told Helena when the grieving young girl asked, that the husky voice and eyes gave her mother away that day.  No one else had slate grey eyes like that that Barbara was aware of.  And the blonde hair topped with a voice like smoke and whiskey capped it for the young teacher.

Sometime in their night jobs, the two women had reached an agreement, the terms of which Helena was still unsure about but in the daytime the two women were almost what you’d call friends.  Not that Selina had a lot of friends but, Barbara seemed to be someone she trusted which was odd given the duality of their lives and relationship.  Selina always told Helena if something should happen, to go to Barbara and she’d help.  That always scared the young teen; the thought of losing her mother unbearable but she knew about her mother’s true activities and knew it was a possibility in her line of work.

Unknown to Helena, Selina had set it up that Barbara would get custody if anything DID happen.  She was desperate to keep Bruce Wayne’s hands off her daughter’s upbringing.  Even if putting her in the care of his former protégé seemed hypocritical, Selina saw it as the lesser of two evils.  She liked and trusted Barbara, despite or maybe because of, Batgirl.  Barbara wasn’t Bruce; that much was very evident in the fact that she hadn’t told him about Helena.  She’d thought of Helena’s benefit over her mentor and that spoke volumes to Selina.

Most of that was explained in the letters Selina left in event of her death.  She wanted Helena to understand her decisions.  She needed Helena to understand why she was trusting Barbara with her care and to try and put that same trust in the woman.  That she could see Helena through her mother’s death.  Of course, Selina couldn’t have foreseen that the same night she would be killed in front of her daughter on a darkened street that Barbara would be cut down in a hail of bullets from the Joker’s own gun. 

They would end up needing each other more than she could have ever realized.

Helena had clung to the critically wounded woman, begging her not to leave her all alone.  Her mother had just passed and the only other person who knew and understood her was lying swathed in bandages, comatose and paralyzed.  It left the fragile fifteen year old in an emotional free fall made worse by her meeting with the man she knew instinctively to be her father.  He’d come to visit Barbara and run into Helena sitting at her side.  By then he knew who she was and vice versa.  They’d sparked off of each other like gasoline and flame, grief turning to rage until Helena charged him and demanded that he leave.  She’d shouted accusations and incriminations that to this day she still felt were justified.  And he’d left, looking more wounded than Barbara lying motionless in the bed and never returned.

Eventually, Barbara did make it out of her coma only to find herself paralyzed, her days as Batgirl crushed to dust and now she also had a grief-stricken and powerful teenager to care for.  They clung to each other like they were drowning for the first few months, each one soothing the others rages when they appeared.  But then Barbara seemed to grow to accept her fate over time while Helena rallied against hers.  They balanced each other out but sometimes controlling Helena was a handful.

It was a year or so after her mother’s death and Barbara’s shooting that Helena noticed her feelings for Barbara were somewhat less than innocent.  She never sought to classify her sexuality, preferring to go with whatever whim hit her at that particular moment.  If it was attractive and interested her, she usually screwed it.  It wasn’t like she waited around for the ramifications in the morning.  Male or female, Helena really made no distinctions.  Fun was fun.

But her dreams about Barbara, her fantasies and daydreams were better then anything she experienced in her waking life.  Sometimes she found her nightly romp slightly resembling her mentor and in the morning she hated herself for her thoughts.  This was the woman who took her in when Helena knew no one else would have and she was entertaining debauched thoughts about her.  The thought of Selina being severely pissed at her helped to quell her growing attraction to the older woman.  Plus knowing on every level that Barbara would say ‘no’ out of duty, honor, and numerous other moral ideals that Helena couldn’t get her mind around most of the time helped too.

But still, the seed was there, growing in the back of her mind and at times when she let herself, she thought about what it’d be like.  Then she’d get pissed at herself and go kick someone’s ass.

Helena tore her gaze away from Barbara’s slouched back and rubbed at her eyes with her palms.

‘Rehashing my past isn’t going to help me figure out what the hell is going on with my head now,’ she sighed.  She wondered why her mind was going down this road again.  It liked to do so periodically and every time it did, the feelings would be stronger than the last time, making it harder to fight.  The whole experience usually left Helena off-balance and more surly than usual.  She hated being constantly taunted by her own mind, mocking her with what she couldn’t have.

‘Why do we always want the things we can never have?’ she lamented while tapping her tongue stud against her teeth in nervous habit.  She threw her legs up on the coffee table and an arm over her eyes while she tried to calm her thoughts.

“What’s on your mind, Hel?” Barbara asked, her voice suddenly coming from right beside the couch.  Helena jumped at the closeness of it.

‘Shit, I musta dozed off,’ she swore to herself.  That was a true rarity, relaxing enough in anyone’s presence to fall asleep.  It only really happened when she was around Barbara.  The redhead was the only person Helena was at ease enough around to let the constant coil of tension inside of her unwind and relax.  She waved Barbara off with a sway of her hand.

“Nah, just tired I guess,” she lied. “How’s the new toy coming?” she switched subjects.  She really wasn’t in the mood to get into a heart-to-heart with Barbara at the moment.  For whatever reason, she was feeling far too emotionally raw for the battle.

Barbara regarded her carefully for a minute knowing a ‘Helena’ distraction technique when she heard it but not wanting to push Helena and therefore push her away, she relented.

“It’s fascinating,” she said. “Incredibly flawed, but fascinating.” Helena raised an eyebrow.

“Flawed?  Do tell.” Barbara wheeled herself back over to where the rifle lie in more pieces than a jigsaw puzzle.

“Its design is inherently flawed.  You and…Bob,” Barbara smirked. “Are lucky it didn’t just blow up when he turned it on, never mind that every time he fired it the power manifold overheated and he ran the risk of, you guessed it, blowing himself up.” Helena let out a low whistle.

“Yeah well, his tinker toy set was missing pieces so it wouldn’t have been that big a loss,” she said offhandedly as she stood and stretched.  “It does explain why the muzzle was so hot when I grabbed it.  Burned right through my gloves.”  Barbara jerked back from the piece she was examining in surprise.

“You didn’t say anything.  Are you all right?” The warmth and concern in the redhead’s voice sent a flood of emotion through Helena that she couldn’t hold back and didn’t want to deal with.  She bit her lip and nodded, leaning her hip against the couch.  The coil of unease was back but this time accompanied by such a surge of desire and want that Helena had trouble clamping down on it.

“Yup, I’m fine,” she muttered.  Barbara frowned.

“Are you sure, because you seem a little…off.” Helena looked up into imploring green eyes and suddenly felt trapped.  There was so much going through her mind and she couldn’t get a handle on it.  She needed out of there, away from Barbara and somewhere to sort out her head, fast.  Her air cut off in her throat.  She needed to leave, to get out to where the air was freer.

“Yeah…I gotta go,” she said, grabbing her still soggy jacket off the chair where she’d tossed it to dry.

“Helena wait, it’s still pouring out,” Barbara called after her.

“I’ll catch you later,” Helena said before diving off the ledge.  Barbara reached up and rubbed at her temples.

“What the Hell just happened there?” she wondered.

TBC