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."