When Spidey Met Oracle

There was nobody inside.

"I guess Mr. Parker isn't in today," Max sighed. "Despite my emphatic instructions."

"Parker?" Barbara repeated.

"Our most recent member of the Lucky Seven has a real knack for jerry-rigging quick and dirty tech to meet spontaneous circumstances," Max explained. "Now, he's asked me not to go into the specifics of some of the work he's done that makes him uniquely qualified... and I would never dare let him out of his contract at Horizon to work for Dark Knight Enterprises or whatever the devil you're calling it, but I think Peter could be a real resource to your organization that we could lend out to you in a pinch..."

"Peter Parker?" she blanched, incredulous. "Peter Parker works here now?"

"I'm surprised you've heard of him," Max admitted. "Guess your research on my little lab here was a little more extensive than I expected... Despite his intellectual acumen and natural ability, I'm afraid Mr. Parker's only beginning to make a name for himself in this field. I understand he spent the last several years as a crime photographer, if you can believe it..."

"Oh god, no."

"I know how it sounds, but I assure you, he's thoroughly capable," Modell was telling her in overly soothing tones. God, she must have been having a visible freak out.

Why wouldn't she be? It had all just clicked. Barbara, of all people, should have known. Why hadn't she checked the lab's current employment roster? Especially when, all of a sudden, Horizon had long-standing Spider-Man villains crawling out of the high-tech woodworks? She'd thought it was all about the connections to Jameson and Morbius, but that was stupid... Of course he was working here...

Pull it together, Gordon, she told herself before facing Max. "I'm sure your guy's just as good as you say, Mr. Modell," she said, "but Mr. Wayne likes to thoroughly vet any and all employees on this project."

"And I'm sure he'll pass muster," Max said then. "Trust me. Peter Parker is the guy you want..."

"No, he isn't." Barbara insisted. "He isn't." She was doing it again. Freaking out. "I... I need to go, Max."

"Miss Gordon?" Max was understandably confused by her outburst, but she'd make it up to him.

"I will get you that Man-Bat antidote," Barbara promised as she wheeled her way out of the lab. "For the terms we agreed on... as long as I can leave right now."

"Uh... okay...?"

She'd actually made her way back to the Atrium before Max caught up with her. The once buzzing nest of intellectual activity was now silently entranced by a single high def display of a local media outlet's account of a supervillain incident in Midtown.

"The Hobgoblin has launched an assault in Brooklyn's Rock Bottom Bar," Indira Daimonji announced on New York's premiere news station.

Of course, Barbara thought. Another one of his...

But with any luck, Spider-Man was swinging his way there right now and she'd make it out of here before he got back. Barbara turned to resume her mad dash out of the building only to find Peter Parker himself standing between her and the exit.

Maybe he won't recognize me, she hoped briefly. After all, she was older now and she'd let her hair grow out longer than ever in the last few months...

"Barbara?!" he blurted.

She didn't understand why she thought for one second that might work. Like a pair of glasses and a smart business outfit was actually going to fool anybody, even with her other accessory. This damn wheelchair of hers wasn't always the distraction she wanted it to be.

When she first heard his name, she'd cursed herself for not anticipating this ahead of time, but actually seeing him now she couldn't help but wonder, what were the odds?

Barbara had been to New York a number of times since that first encounter with Spider-Man in Gotham all those years ago. Her first trip to the Big Apple as Batgirl, when she ended up helping the Defenders when the demon Dormammu possessed the Multi-Man, she'd worried the whole time she was going to run into her wall-crawling one night stand. It took three more Big Apple trips over as many years before she realized that New York was a pretty big city. By the time she was Oracle, though, she was completely capable of knowing where Parker was at all times while she was there, like when the Joker threatened to level Manhattan with a neutron bomb and Oracle had interrogated him while he was trapped in a cargo container in Brooklyn.

But now that she actually found herself face-to-face with Peter Parker once more, it was just as terrible as Barbara Gordon always feared. She could see it all over his face... It would have been a total cliché to say that Parker looked like he'd seen a ghost, but he was definitely stricken.

Hell, so was she.

"I had heard that you..." he started to say before noting the chair. "I didn't know."

"It's been a very long time," she replied, looking away.

Barbara still couldn't believe it. He worked here now? Granted, she hadn't been keeping tabs on Spider-Man the same way she used to -- a deliberate decision after what happened. Oracle understood the importance of maintaining an up-to-date account of meta-human activity, but she'd just wanted one week without having to think about him and everything that had happened in her head during that bad Black Cat op. Of course, with her new job at WayneTech and all it entailed, she'd never gotten back into the web-swing of things. Seriously, though, how the hell had Peter Parker gone from abject unemployment to working for one of the top think tanks on the planet? Even if she had looked into things like she should have -- and she planned to do just that once she was out of the building -- Barbara wasn't sure she would have believed it.

The goddamn Parker luck, she thought to herself.

"Pete, I didn't know you knew Miss Gordon," Max said, breaking into Barbara and Pete's intense, impromptu staring contest. "She's been one of our preferred customers for a few years now..."

"Ms. Gordon, huh?" Peter mulled, rolling the sound of her last name around on his tongue. His initial shock had clearly worn off as Parker's cadence was now positively puckish with mischief. "Well, Mr. Modell, me and Barbara Gordon here met years and years ago, back when I did a campus tour at Gotham University..."

"Peter spent a rather dull night at my house," Barbara interrupted, picking up where he trailed off.

"Dull?" Parker's eyes quirked upward. Barbara ignored him.

"Gotham University Alumni are sometimes asked to host perspective students if there's a housing crunch," she explained further. "Especially us former scholarship students."

"Missed out on a preview of the madcap fun of dorm life, Peter?" Max asked with a chuckle.

"It wasn't that bad," Peter smiled. "Ms. Gordon managed to keep me pretty entertained."

Barbara didn't say anything to that. She was too busy trying not to blush.

"Funny, Babs," Parker said then, "but I thought I ran across you, um... your online profile a couple months back, but you never got back to me..."

"I'm sorry," she hissed softly, fighting to compose herself. "I've been a little too busy for social networking, Peter."

"Well, Barbara's our visiting rep from WayneTech," Max broke in. "They've taken an interest in Uatu's Big S.I.S. program, so I thought they might take a shine to some of the tech you've whipped up for... our mutual friend."

"And I'd love to show her some of that, sir," Peter swore. "Sincerely and truly, but something's come up..."

"Seriously, Mr. Parker?" Max sighed. "I thought I'd properly expressed how much I wanted my top tier R & D staff available today..."

"You did, sir. It's just that our, uh, mutual friend's got an errand to run and would appreciate some tech support," Peter said, looking past Max, distracted. Barbara followed his gaze to the big screen mounted in the lounge where Daimonji had been replaced with live footage of the super-powered fight.

"Shouldn't take more than an hour," Parker murmured as they both watched the Hobgoblin slice a police cruiser in twain with some kind of plasma sword. "Maybe two."

"Well, given the circumstances -- which actually brilliantly illustrates my argument in your favor -- I suppose I don't actually need you here to showcase your talent," Max acknowledged. "I'd appreciate it if I could show Miss Gordon some of your less-than public work, though. Nothing inside your black box or any of the gear you've whipped up for our friend, of course... Perhaps the adaptive countermeasures you developed for the mayor's Anti-Spider Squad using the contents of the NYPD's supervillain evidence locker."

"Absolutely," Parker nodded, stealing less-than-sly glances at her.

Max must have found it odd. Barbara had no idea how close he and Peter were. Hell, it was entirely possible that Modell knew everything about his employee's web-spinning activities, but considering the steps Parker had once taken to somehow remove that knowledge from the world at large, she doubted it. And Peter suddenly seemed reluctant to leave now. He'd been in such a hurry a moment ago... Barbara suspected she understood his sudden reluctance to head off -- he'd just see a woman he thought was dead, after all -- but the real work still needed doing.

"Don't let us keep you, Peter," she told him then. "I'm sure whatever you need to do is much more urgent than showing me your new toys. That's hardly a matter of life and death."

"Right..."

And just like that, he was rushing out the door. Barbara knew she should have been relieved, but that wasn't what she was feeling.

"I like to tease young Parker about his irregular hours," Max confided to Barbara, "but he always gets the job done."

"I bet he does," she murmured.

Barbara decided it was time to get her job done, so she followed Max back to Lab 7 where Peter Parker had been working apparently since she'd tried to drop him out of her life completely. She looked over everything he'd created and she demonstrated how impressed she was with his myriad accomplishments, but the whole time, she was worried he'd come back.

It was only after she'd mentally calculated how long it would realistically take him to get to Brooklyn and back before she finally let herself really see what Modell was showing her.

Barbara had used the crème de la crème of crime-fighting tech in her day. Bruce Wayne had practically invented the art, after all, but this was impressive by even those standards. And the consumer products Peter had come up with based on all this... She suddenly understood why Max didn't want Wayne Enterprises stealing him away.

Of course Parker was working here. This was where he belonged, wasn't it? She'd actually told him he was good enough for all this, hadn't she? Was all this because he'd actually listened?

Eventually, after she made the rounds with the rest of Max's team, Barbara managed to leave without making a scene and meet her driver.

"Where to, skipper?" Zinda asked after Barbara transferred herself into the town car.

"I'm not sure," Barbara confessed. "Give me a moment."

*

It probably went without saying, but Spider-Man was really starting to hate this new Hobgoblin since he first popped up last fall. And, no, it wasn't just that the jerk kept getting away.

First of all, what were with all the jokes? This new guy made these terrible, corny one-liners while they fought. That was Spidey's thing! No real goblin bantered like that. Not anymore. Sure, Norman used to peel off the occasional atrocious pun -- especially in the beginning -- but after the old bastard went totally homicidal, Osborn's sense of humor had devolved to the decidedly dark. Even his pithy asides fairly dripped with malice before he slipped into that coma. The new Hobby, by contrast, was more-or-less a prop comic supervillain -- Carrot Top hopped up on goblin serum and Ritalin.

And even worse, the ass-hat laughed at his own jokes.

That'd be annoying enough if his self-amused chuckling didn't resonate at a brain-scrambling hyper-sonic frequency. This wouldn't have bothered Spider-Man so much if his clone, Kaine, hadn't run off with the soundproof stealth suit Peter developed for these very occasions, but there you had it. What was done was done. Spider-Island had been a mess and things slipped through the cracks.

The web-head didn't even want to get started about that freaking plasma sword. And those wings! The goddamn bat-wings on the Hobgoblin's back! Goblins didn't use wings to fly! They used gliders, damn it! Peter might not have a lot of respect for Norman Osborn as a scientist or an engineer, but even he had to admit that those gliders were iconic! Even Menace had gotten the glider part right!

Hell, Peter had actually built one himself recently. A spider-glider, if you would. That was cool, right? Maybe he should have brought it with him today to deal with Hobby... Maybe then it wouldn't have been such a disaster.

Suffice it to say, the fight hadn't gone well. Spider-Man knew he'd saved lives, and hopefully he'd tossed a wrench in whatever Hobby was up to for the Kingpin, but most of that had come down to luck. He'd taken a few swipes from the goblin's flaming sword -- nothing too deep or searing, but he'd always managed to dodge that before -- and some shrapnel from a pumpkin bomb had nearly unmanned him...

He'd been distracted. How could he not be?

Seeing Barbara again had been an incredible shock. As he swung his way back to the lab after Hobby had flapped his way off, somewhere in the back of his head he knew that shock should have been "spectacular" or "sensational" or maybe even "amazing," but "incredible" really covered it.

He guessed he really shouldn't have been all that surprised Oracle was still alive. It was this terrible cliché in the capes and tights community that only the bad guys came back from the dead, but that wasn't really true, was it? The Human Torch was alive, right? Aunt May had even accomplished a return from the beyond or two in her day.

It didn't help that Barbara had shown up at Horizon of all places. Despite all appearances, Peter thought he'd set up a decent enough distance between his Spidey life and his workplace. Sure, he'd had a few fights in the hallways, but it's not like he was bursting out of broom closets to do that like in his naïve Daily Bugle days. He usually found a way to come into the building in costume when that kind of thing went down. The place was packed to the gills with geniuses. He tried not to push it.

Besides, when an old ally like Batgirl or Oracle or whoever she was came back from the dead, there was supposed to be all this crazy build up to it. Mysterious encounters with shadowy figures or something. Or they at least showed up in some really dramatic way. Like you're about to be killed by your greatest enemy and at the last minute, the original Blue Beetle swoops down and saves your ass.

They didn't just pop by your office on a fairly standard day to sheepishly say hi then send you on your way.

What had happened to Barbara? Why was she in that wheelchair now? Was it tied into Oracle's supposed death or was it the reason she hadn't been Batgirl for all this time? She'd said that wearing the costume stopped being an option when they last spoke, hadn't she?

That wasn't what really had his head reeling, though. What he really couldn't figure out was whether or not she'd come to Horizon looking for him or not. She said she hadn't known he worked there, but that could have just been for cover with Max, right? Peter's job wasn't exactly a secret or anything, and this was a woman who'd prided herself about knowing everything about him the last time they met...

But at the same time, it's not like he'd ever really expected to see Barbara again, even before he'd heard the greatly exaggerated rumors of Oracle's death... She'd made that perfectly clear when she'd dropped him off at the train station all those years ago and again when she broke contact during that nonsense with Norman Os-bot... Twice. She had a deep-seeded need to give him the brush off, which is why when he called to check in with Horizon after his little lunch date with Hobgoblin, Peter wasn't too surprised to discover that she had left shortly after he had.

"I saw on the news that Spider-Man managed to run-off the Hobgoblin," Max said over the phone. "Such a pity that he's failed to apprehend that madman so far..."

"He's not too jazzed about that either, sir," Peter said under his mask. "So, since I'm guessing the open house is over..."

"Feel free to head home if you want, Mr. Parker." Max chuckled. "Miss Gordon seemed rather impressed with the countermeasures you came up with for the Sinister Six," Max informed him.

Peter was always happy to hear Mr. Modell happy. Especially since he was still waiting for that other shoe to drop and for Max to kick him out.

The Parker luck was always out there... Waiting to strike.

"Good work, as ever, Mr. Parker," he said. "I'm sure Miss Gordon would have liked to say so herself, but she had a flight back to Gotham."

Peter kind of doubted that. If Barbara had come to Horizon to see him, then she could have and with a pretty solid cover story in place. Had this really just been some random bump-in?

He briefly thought about trying to find her at the airport, but between JFK, Laguardia, and Newark, he had too many to choose from. And despite the preponderance of spandex-clad crazies mad science experiments, and long thought dead friends and enemies who kept coming back, Peter Parker lived in the real world. This wasn't the third act of a bad romantic comedy.

Barbara was gone, just like she always wanted.

What could he do? Swing around Gotham City screaming out "Barbara Gordon!" at the top of his lungs?

Then again, Peter had more viable options now. It wouldn't be that hard to turn up at Wayne Enterprises. Hell, if he ever finally got his flight training, he could maybe even borrow the Fantasticar or a Quinjet from the Avengers. But what would he even say to her then? What did he even want from this poor woman?

He was still mulling it over as he swung his way home.

Peter would have much rather gone back to Horizon. Hell, he'd probably'd end up going back before the night was over, but he's taken a bit of a beating and he neeeded to clean himself up and slap on a bandage or two first.

It was still weird to web his way toward his new place in Tribeca. When he first moved in, Spidey was always sure to take the long way home on foot since he didn't want to risk climbing in through the window on the off-chance that Carlie had let herself in with her key, but now that they were no longer together, there wasn't much point in worrying about it. Especially not tonight, as the lovely Officer Cooper was currently a thousand miles away at a crime scene investigation convention in Central City.

Peter was supposed to be there with her, but, well, that wasn't really appropriate anymore, was it? Back when she first mentioned it months ago, he hadn't been sure they were ready to go away together, but he had to admit he'd been excited. Despite all these years, he still remembered how none of the girls at Midtown High had been interested in the least with joining him for a certain life-changing science exhibition on controlled radioactivity, but a decade later, there he'd been with a woman who couldn't wait to attend seminars on measurement uncertainty in forensic toxicology and chemistry. He remembered that Carlie had been really jazzed about Barry Allen's keynote speech. Whoever the hell that was.

Peter couldn't help but wonder if she ended up taking somebody else with her. He'd heard from Mary Jane that Carlie was "maybe sort of seeing" some hunky cop these days -- Spidey's exes were friends now, which was so much fun for him... really -- so maybe this new guy was in Central City with her right now. Maybe she was meeting someone else entirely...