Dick limbered up, rotating his arms and legs, cracking his joints like he hadn't done since his acrobat days. Bruce had trained him so hard that his calisthenics tended to be running along rooftops, swinging from one building to another. But for this, Dick thought he'd like a proper warm-up.
Diana faced him across the arena floor. Her costume's colors, brighter than even the Robin costume he'd so recently outgrown, seemed to glow in the bright sunlight. She gripped a stave carefully, moving it minutely to test its weight. Dick's own was stabbed into the ground, waiting for him to loosen.
"You know I don't stand a chance against you, right?" Dick asked.
"It's more a test of fighting spirit," Diana replied. "Besides, we're Amazons. When don't we love a good fight?"
Dick picked up his stave, giving it an easy twirl, looping its spin around his body with a precise judgment of its heft. Diana quirked an eyebrow, impressed, and Dick gripped it across his shoulders, a relaxed but ready bo-staff stance.
"Now?" Diana asked.
"Well, I'm not immortal."
Diana smiled, offered a quick, imperial salute, then lunged. Dick blocked, not with the full force of his muscular physique, but with an almost playful motion of his own stave. They were both too good not to want to gauge the other before truly engaging.
Dick snapped his stave at her; she deflected it and struck; he parried that as well. Motionlessness. They regarded the strumming of each other's muscles, the coolness of one another's skin. Despite swinging their staves so hard that the crack of one upon the other had been heard to the highest tier of the amphitheater, neither had broken a sweat.
"Bold," Diana said. "I can see why Donna likes you. Most would be a little put off by going into battle with me."
"Oh, I am. But once you've seen Bruce without his morning coffee..."
Dick swung, hoping to score a quick hit on Diana's ribs, but she blocked—so damn fast, even without her power. He backpedaled, trying to avoid her parry, and succeeded, but gave up ground, almost tripping over his own feet before coming to a sliding stop. Sand kicked up from the arena ground, clouding around his ankles. Diana, pleased, offered a grin.
"I think I'll end this now," she said. "After all... you're not immortal."
She came in, three hearty blows—blocked, blocked, blocked, but it jarred the stave in Dick's hands, rattled his bones right down the weapon's length—he felt sweat on his palms, grinding into the stave's finger-bitten handles. But he was quick on his feet, thinking fast. He knew Diana was counting on disarming him, pressing her offensive until she'd gotten the stave out of his hands. Instead of staying on the defensive, he moved in close, his elbow sweeping in, muay thai.
She brought her arm up to block and their forearms collided, bone against bone. Dick retreated, quick footwork evading a kick she sent after him. In a split-second, he'd steadied his grip. Now, lightning-fast, he went on the offensive again. Brought the top-half of his stave down, hit her block, ricocheted into the bottom-half of his stave coming up. The butt of it thudded into Diana's stomach, not able to produce a sound from her, but scoring a hit nonetheless. Diana scowled, more at her own overconfidence than him, because she offered him a congratulatory smile after.
"I think it's cheating," she joked. "Lulling me into a false sense of security with that ridiculous outfit..."
Dick could feel the sweat on his exposed chest—one of the new wrinkles of the costume he'd adopted as Nightwing, now that Jason Todd was Robin. He thought he'd have to change it soon. Gar had started calling him 'Discowing' and the name was getting around...
"If you want, we could take a break while you change into that outfit you wore while Artemis was Wonder Woman. That would make us even."
Here was where Donna, if he were fighting Donna, would stick out her tongue at him. Diana was much too refined for that—in fact, Dick worried he'd offended her for a moment. Then she broke into a rich laugh.
"What can I say?" she asked. "It was my first chance to really shock my mother."
"Did it work?"
"Not hardly. She was just glad I wasn't dating a Minotaur. Shall we finish?"
"Let's."
Everything before had simply been prologue to this: full combat, each of them thinking, hoping they had the measure of each other. Their staves clashed, whirled, danced, striking against each other continuously, the tempo of a racing heartbeat. They'd ascertained each other's' weaknesses, sorted the feints from the openings. Now they tested each other.
But as fast as they moved, Dick's mind worked even faster. He knew he couldn't beat Diana in a simple throwdown, he'd have to outthink her (and good luck with that, his inner Barbara needled). He feinted, faked that a good parry on her part was a great one, and she capitalized instinctively, committing all her disciplined strength to swiping his stave from his hands.
He let her; the blow, expert as it was, had put her just an iota off-balance, and he threw himself into that, tackling her to the ground, the combined impact of his body against hers and the ground against her back thrusting her own stave from her hands.
She didn't just let him have it. Dick had a bare moment of the heat of her body against his, so much hotter than even the sweat and burning of his own muscles, then she was in motion. He countered, a simple struggle to fit his body to hers more efficiently than she could, to place her in a hold before she could put him in one.
He wasn't that fast. Diana clawed over him, rolled him onto his belly, covered him from behind, his right arm jerked behind himself, in her hands, pressure applied.
"Do you yield?" No more challenge in her voice. She was now deathly serious.
Now psychology came into play. Dick was good at reading people, and Diana was more open than she thought. She wouldn't break his arm. Not over a simple sparring match. So, he tested her. Pitching himself forward after straining backward into her grip, throwing his legs back over his own head, then swinging them back—gathering all the momentum, all the flexibility he could—slipping inside her grip with a few inches of leeway, then capitalizing, scrambling out from under her, back around, swiping the tiara from her head. Her hair, unbound, fell forward like night descending. Then he was away, rolling across the sands before her angered swipe could catch him.
They both rose, stained with sand, breathing pitched from the close-quarters wrestling. Diana's hair fell tangled over her face, bordering on her blazing eyes and high cheekbones. She casually brushed a lock behind her left ear. Said nothing. Nothing to say. Dick knew using the tiara as a weapon was outside the boundaries of their combat; he moved to set it aside. Diana shook her head. Gestured for it, two fingers crooking from him to her.
Dick tested its weight, tossing it up and down. Not so different from a Batarang. He threw, giving it a nice little curve—Diana moving to pluck it out of the air, but missed, and it cut through the stray lock of hair on her right. Boomeranged around her and she caught it then. Looked down at lock of hair cut from her head and finally nodded, impressed.
