Title:  Willful Blindness

Author:  Harper

Email: Xfjnky2@yahoo.com

Fandom:  Birds of Prey

Pairing:  Barbara/Helena/Dinah (see warning)

Rating:  NC-17

WARNING:  The fic contains the implication of a sexual relationship between, among others, Barbara and Dinah.  By this, I mean the Dinah from the show, who is most definitely underage.  If it bothers you, don’t read this.

Archiving:  This will be at www.realmoftheshadow.com/harper.htm.

Disclaimer:  I don’t own the characters, nor do I purport to do so.  I’m just having fun with them, and mean no infringement.  I make no profit.

A/N:  I’d started this with no intentions of ever finishing it, but then I did and thought I might as well post it since I’d written it.  The characters are rather unlikable, or so I’ve been told.  You can blast me for it if you feel it necessary.  I’ll be at Xfjnky2@aol.com.

Barbara wasn’t quite sure how it had all happened.

Her life, though unpredictable, had always been at least based on the presumption that things would follow a sane, logical and linear path.  Some might say she’d taken deviations from those premises, large ones at that, but in her mind, every decision she’d made had been rational.  Practical and inevitable even, because Barbara was nothing if not a thinker, and everything she did had been weighed and measured, the ramifications plotted in all conceivable directions.

She was an over-achiever.  She knew it, was comfortable with it, and even embraced it.  Barbara identified with being the best, and it was all she’d ever really wanted.  Sometimes it had been difficult.  Her initial forays into the Gotham night as Batgirl had been tentative, the results not always spectacular.  But, she knew why.  For Barbara, everything had to be controlled, had to be ordered in just the right way so that when the pieces fell, they fell together.  Batgirl brought with it an aura of the unknown.  The identity completely confounded her normal way of doing things, but despite the disruption, she found she liked it.  Because, no matter how unpredictable crime-fighting was, the end goal was always clear and undeniable.  She was there to keep bad things from happening to good people, and to keep good things from happening to bad people.  Criminals didn’t prosper on her watch, and there was undeniably a sense of satisfaction in that.

Joker’s bullets had done a lot to wreck her old comfort zone, of course.  Life altering events often had the unfortunate side-effect of doing precisely what they promised.  Things had changed, not only for her personally, but for the world around her.  Everything became a new challenge, from personal hygiene to transportation, and Barbara tackled it as diligently as she had every other task with which she’d ever been presented.  She dove in headfirst and beat things into submission until once more her life was in order.  She was Oracle, mistress of Delphi, New Gotham’s cyber-cloaked avenger.  Everything was yet again as it should be.

Except for Helena.

Helena was an uncontrollable variable.  Neither predictor nor outcome, she was instead a confounder, always there to make the end result of anything as unpredictable as the New Gotham winds.  She was selfish, hedonistic, irrepressibly sexual, and far too used to getting what she wanted.

What she wanted was Barbara, and so she took her.

Not over Barbara’s protestations, or anything of the like.  She merely made her intentions known, and acted on them, and Barbara couldn’t find a reason or a desire to say no.  So, she hadn’t, and had been very, very happy with the results. Enthralled, even, the thrill of participating in the taboo shivering down her good girl spine, broken as it was, to settle into near permanent arousal in the pit of her belly.  Until, of course, Helena decided she wanted something more.

What she wanted was Dinah, and so she took her.

Barbara hadn’t known what to make of that.  She hadn’t declared her relationship with Helena to be mutually monogamous, but she hadn’t necessarily expected the brunette to pick another partner from within her own household.  There had been a bit of jealousy at first, and anger and resentment and Barbara felt like a fool for staring at a schoolgirl with adult fury, until Helena decided to tell them what she really wanted.

She wanted Barbara and Dinah.  Not Barbara and Dinah as separate and distinct from one another, but Barbara and Dinah as a whole.  That was how the redhead had ended up with two lovers, one as fair as the other was dark.

And now, she didn’t know what to do.  The situation didn’t lend itself easily to dissection.  There was so much there that she simply didn’t want to look at or examine or even really think about at all.  During the day, when she took the time to think of it all in a logical and rational fashion, the situation filled her with disgust and self-loathing.  What was she thinking?  Getting involved with Helena was bad enough, if considered from the guardian/ward standpoint, but dragging Dinah into the whole mess?  That was unforgivable.  She’d been able to excuse it to herself at first, weak though the excuses were, as something somehow removed from her.  She hadn’t brought Dinah into her bed.  Helena had, and Helena was the one the blonde was there for.  If, in the course of the things that followed once Dinah was in her bed, Barbara happened to touch her, or kiss her, or even fuck her, then it was only because Helena had instigated it, and Barbara had been caught up in the moment, in the web of seductive, forbidden desire.  After all, it wasn’t as if she would have ever approached Dinah outside of the twisted confines of their current relationship, much less ever found herself with her tongue buried between the younger girl’s thighs.

And, she told herself that it was only in those moments, when her mind was occupying some otherworld where what she was doing didn’t matter, when she had succumbed to the magical, erotic haze Helena created and facilitated, that such a thing could happen.  Only, she couldn’t tell herself that any more.

Barbara had never, before the sometimes seemingly infinite varying, shifting and rather disturbing continuum she found herself currently occupying, considered herself a creature driven by carnal needs and desires.  In fact, she’d always had a rather firm rein on those aspects of her life, suppressing them until they were certainly more than manageable.  Until they were almost non-existent, unable to interfere with her work, her thoughts, or her actions.  That she was unable to carry on easy flirtations seemed inconsequential.  She wasn’t a slave to the pitiful desires of the flesh.  That was a trap others fell into, not Barbara Gordon.

Until Dinah had come to her.  There’d been no Helena, no intoxicating seductive pull of seeming insanity or mania.  There had been nothing but her and a girl roughly half her age, impossibly young features twisted with desire and need, and even as her actions invoked horror and shame, Barbara gave in to a reciprocal need she hadn’t before acknowledged she possessed.

Afterward, laying there with long, silky blonde hair trailing across her torso, a face returned to innocence pressed angelically into her shoulder, Barbara cried.  Cried for the loss of her precious control, cried because she didn’t know if she was strong enough to face her latent almost combative need to do nothing that would stop the progression of her dual relationships.  Cried because she was already presenting herself with rationalizations, with excuses.  In their line of work, it was only natural for bonds to form that were stronger than the norm, for the lines that governed society to be twisted and bent, to disappear completely.  If she occupied a normal life, then certainly what she was doing would be wrong.  But, her life wasn’t normal, the lives of her two meta-human lovers were decidedly far from normal, and in the face of that, she shouldn’t be expected to conform to the arbitrary dictates of a convention that would not and could not understand.

Things would have been easier if she’d actually believed in the words her overly active mind contrived.

She didn’t.

She told herself it was a situation beyond her control.  In a moment of what she later perceived to be weakness, she’d allowed things to be set in motion that she didn’t have the wherewithal to stop.  Objectively, she knew she could stop them.  Indeed, she knew she should stop them.  All it would take would be a single word, just two letters, and things could be, if not set to rights, then at least halted before any more damage was done.

No.

That’s all she needed.  But, where would it leave her?  Would it alleviate any of her shame?

No.

The shame was there, an omnipresent specter looming over her life, its darkness pervading every move, every word.  Shame because she’d been weak, because she’d given in to the bliss of an offer she knew she shouldn’t accept.  Shame because she’d enjoyed it, because she still enjoyed it.  Shame because she didn’t want to stop.  Shame because she probably wouldn’t.  Each time, it got just a little bit easier.

Nothing you haven’t done before, her mind would whisper seductively, eyes taking in smoothly tanned skin and the allure of two sets of bright blue eyes.  She chose to come to you, it would say.  She wants this.  She wants you.  They want you.  They love you.

Barbara would wonder where she went wrong.  People like her didn’t do things like what she was doing.  People she despised, people she reviled… they were the ones.  They deserved her scorn, her hatred.  Only now, she deserved it too.  It was hard, though, in the face of all that exuberance, all that excess and flesh and lust, to remember the guilt and the shame.  They came later, when her mind wasn’t twisted by desire, when her body wasn’t racked by pleasure.  They came in the middle of the night, when the comfort of two warm bodies kept her from facing them.  They came in the bright light of day, before her resolve crumbled to dust.

Barbara wasn’t sure how it was all going to end.  She wished she knew, but she didn’t.  She thought she knew, thought she had it all figured out, but as soon as she saw the end present itself, she’d be drawn back in.  Sucked into the ever-darkening vortex of her downfall by a smile, or a look of desire, or the knowledge that she was needed… wanted… soon to be consumed.

As long as she didn’t look too closely, she could imagine that was all she needed.

It would end badly.  She’d already accepted it, had told herself she was prepared for it.  There were no actions without consequences, at least not when the actions were the ones she’d taken.  Indulgence would come with a price, one she was looking forward to paying.  Penance would be her way out, suffering her salvation.  Until then, she was left to her own mental flagellations, the invisible lashes insufficient in the face of a mind well used to rationalization, well versed in skirting the thin edge between right and wrong.  It was inevitable, she told herself, that she would stray too far to the left eventually.

The only problem was that this time, there was no one there to catch her.

The End