Slowly, Barbara Gordon opened her bleary blue eyes and gazed up at her ceiling sleepily. If there was one thing she hated about her life, it
had
to be her condo's ceiling. That hate got her out of bed every day -- and every night, for that matter.
The only daughter of Gotham City's famous police commissioner had a strange sleeping schedule that bewildered all of her friends and family, waking up bright eyed and bushy tailed for the morning but hitting the hay in the middle of the afternoon. She would then wake up a few hours from midnight and stay up until the wee hours of the morning, catching a nap until seven forty-five AM sharp.
The unusual routine was like clockwork to her, something she fully meant to rinse and repeat ad nauseam for the rest of her life, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year. Not that she'd take a vacation on a leap year or anything like that. Babs crooked a little smile and stretched out languidly in her tangled sheets, before reaching down to the warm and fuzzy lump laying over her thighs. She scratched her cat Huntress right behind her ear, relaxing and just enjoying the noisy vibrations of the kitty's purring.
The only thing that would
ever
stop me is a stray bullet to the spine,
Barbara thought to herself. Her sleepy smile dimmed down just a shade.
"That's a very specific example," she mumbled to herself, though she decided not to dwell on why it jumped to the forefront of her mind, and why she could almost feel a phantom pain in her spinal column. Barbara let out a slow breath, then turned her head and peered at her clock. Seven fifty PM. She didn't need to get up for another ten minutes. Her night job wouldn't kick off for another hour after that. Deciding to just enjoy her feline company while she had it, Barbara looked back up towards the ceiling she loathed so much.
Some people called it an acoustic ceiling. Others called it a stucco, or a stipple. Most people knew it as a popcorn ceiling. But to Barbara Gordon, it was just an ugly ceiling that
had
to go. One year ago, when she broke up with Dick Grayson and he
ever-so-generously
let her keep the fully-paid condo before fucking off to Bludhaven to roleplay being a Kryptonian bird, she told herself that when she could afford to, she would remove that stupid, ugly eyesore that Dick loved so much. He thought it was
classy
. Well, they'd see how classy he felt it was when she sent him all the scraped-off parts of it in an expedited parcel.
The pair's ugly breakup caused no shortage of problems for Barbara. Chief amongst them was how difficult it made balancing her school with her moonlight job as Batgirl. While Dick was covering her bills and their living expenses, Barbara didn't have to work. She could even fit in a little bit of a social life into her day-to-day routine. Without him, well, she
desperately
needed cash.
The only way she could possibly fit a real job into her routine was if she cut back on her education or if she cut back on crime fighting. Barbara wasn't willing to do either. For the first two weeks, she relied on her father's support, but as a public servant he wasn't exactly rolling in cash. Bruce, her mentor for almost a decade at that point, offered to cover her living expenses when he walked in on her in the Batcave going through a copy of
The Gotham Globe
, cutting out job advertisements in the classifieds.
It was a tempting offer, but Barbara realized that was where all of Dick's money came from. Hell, it was the money that paid for the condo she was living in. Her pride wouldn't let her say yes to Bruce, even though her brain screamed at her to just say yes. She told him he had it covered. Of course, the moment Bruce left her alone, she just about had a nervous breakdown, cussing at herself for her own stupidity. Her pride wasn't worth her stress, but unfortunately for the caped crusader, it was as stubborn as a bull.
The next day, she hit a bar with some of her friends, all of them eager to help their friend get over the loss of her handsome, rich boy toy, the one they were all certain she was going to shack up and settle down with. When she had the liquor flowing in, her worries started flowing out. Not that any of them knew about her double life as Batgirl -- she mostly just complained about how stressed she was over money. They probably all thought she was dreading the kinds of part-time jobs available in Gotham, and all the free time that work would take away from her. All of them made appropriately sympathetic noises to Barbara without ever saying what most of them were really thinking: "Sorry you lost your sugar daddy, but be glad you had one who
left you a fucking fully-paid condo
, woman."
Some of them suggested she rent out her two spare rooms, but that was straight up impossible. One of them housed a computer terminal that connected to the Batcave's supercomputer, while the other was her armory slash training room. Renting them out would really just mean fucking with her crime-fighting career, and that was a hard no for her. All the girls started talking about employment opportunities after that, and for the most part Barbara tuned them all out. She just took shot after shot, wallowing in her little pool of self-inflicted misery, even considering calling Bruce and begging for his help.
Until one of her friends admitted, her voice hushed, that she had an easy job that paid extremely well while asking very little from her. Barbara's ears practically pricked up, and her attention left her glass to focus on her girlfriend -- the second hottest of the bunch, right behind Barbara herself. An upper-class socialite with a rich sugar daddy of her own. No one ever questioned where she got the money for her designer clothes and accessories. That she had her own income, largely discreet, her earnings disproportionate compared to the amount of work she put in? That surprised them all.
"What is it?" one of them asked, and the table went quiet as everyone waited for her answer. When it came, they all burst out with laughter and gasps, surprised and scandalized. They all started grilling her after that... Barbara most of all. She smiled crookedly at the memory, then gave a start as her alarm went off. Once again, Barbara glanced at her clock. It was eight. It was time to get ready for another night of crime fighting.
* * * * *
"Now," Barbara whispered softly to herself, affecting a playful tone cut with just the slightest bit of throatiness. She had studied up on Marilyn Monroe to perfect it. The boys
loved
it -- and the men, far more. "Observe how the mighty bat stalks her prey." It was ridiculous, but that was the point. Shifting, Barbara -- now wearing her Batgirl costume -- adjusted herself carefully, in more ways than one. Perched atop a street light in a thighs-splaying crouch, her balance was a precarious thing.
Most people would have fallen flat on their face within minutes if not seconds, but not Barbara. She had years of experience as Batgirl at that point, and it helped that she had three times as many years of gymnastics, acrobatics and ballet training. "Any moment now," she sing-songed under her breath as she watched and waited, patient as a cat waiting to pounce a rat. Though, considering
she
styled herself after a winged rodent...
She cut the thought off, her blue eyes brightening as her stake-out began to pan out. The Falcone family thugs rolled up in their unmarked black van, all four of them piling out as soon as it rolled to a stop. Barbara couldn't help but smile. If only one of them would stop and look up, they'd get quite the eyeful, the kind of eyeful that would make them certain a life of crime was worth it.
Though each wore a handsome, fitted Italian suit, they matched them with black ski masks and small arms -- two handguns, a sawn-off shotgun and even a submachine gun. They took a moment to discuss their plan. Barbara already knew everything from interrogating one of their cohorts earlier that night; they expected to storm the office of a nearby biotech company and make off with an expensive vaccine in development there. She was going to make sure they didn't get past the lobby. "No one ever took the time to teach these guys how to accessorize," she quipped softly. "Let's fix that, boys and girls."
Barbara was alone, but that didn't mean she was talking to herself. There was just one thing left for her to do before descending on her quarry. She reached up to her chest and tugged off her bodycam, turning it around and grinning right into it. "See you all on the flipside," she whispered, winking sassily before turning the camera about again. She leaned down and stuck it to the street light, where it would have a bird's eye view over most of the action that would soon follow, peeking through the soon to be open doorway.