When Spidey Met Oracle

"Where are we going?" she asked dreamily.

"I'm taking you to bed," Peter smiled.

"Oh no, Mr. Parker," she gasped. "What makes you think I'm that kind of girl?"

"I won't touch you, I swear," he promised, setting her down on his bed. "I'm kind of worn out."

"You and me both," she sighed.

"So it was okay?" he asked.

"I know I've lied to you in the past, Peter, but I don't go out of my way to fake orgasms."

"That's not really an answer."

"Only better once since... since it happened," she sighed. "I... I fucked this shapeshifting alien..." The second she said it she regretted the confession, but her head was still reeling and she was too pleasantly dazed to lie. She glanced up into his eyes, expecting shock or hurt or disapproval, but Peter just looked at her steadily.

"Been there," he replied. "It messes you up, right?"

Barbara wanted to mount him right then, but even if her legs weren't an issue, she really didn't have the energy for another round. "Just... just hold me for a bit," she said instead, kissing his chest.

"Go to sleep, Babs," Peter sighed.

"Think I'm a little too wired for that," she said. "You know how it's weird but you're tired but completely awake at the same time?"

"That's when I usually go web-slinging, but I'm afraid if I do that now, you're not going to be here when I come back."

"So instead you're just going to hold me prisoner instead?" she smiled, snuggling into him. "How ever will we pass the time?"

"There's one thing we could do, but you might think it's a little nuts," Peter said after a while.

"Like what?"

"Nothing too crazy," he swore, sensing her apprehension. This is how this always started, so Peter pressed on, telling her what he was thinking.

The look she gave him when he was done said it all, but she said it anyway. "I don't know, Parker..." He wasn't surprised. That was Barbara all over. And worse, she was calling him Parker again. That wasn't a good sign.

"It's going to be fine," he tried to assure her as he rolled out of bed on his unsteady legs. "I can almost promise you'll enjoy it." He scrambled to set everything up. "No one's ever regretted it afterwards."

"You've done this with... with other people before?" she asked just before he was about to start so he stopped.

"Lots of them," he confessed. "Mary Jane... Ms. Marvel... They loved it. So did Wolverine."

"You did this with Wolverine?"

"It was after this thing with the Avengers," Peter explained. "Logan got pretty messed up. The Crime Syndicate doesn't exactly play nice, you know? I took him back here to spend the night while his body knit itself back together because he wasn't ready to go back to San Francisco with the X-Men. It was right before they completely imploded. Logan's kind of a dick, but he's had my back in the past and I really just wanted to show him a good time... He had a few beers, loosened up a little and..."

"You're scaring me."

"Do you trust me?" he asked her.

There was a long pause before she nodded, but he put it on anyway.

"This is probably going to seem really weird for the first twenty minutes, but just go with it, and I promise, you're going to like it." As soon as he heard himself say this out loud, Peter was terrified he was about to ruin a good a thing... but right then, he really wanted to share this with her.

"Could we get something to eat first?" she suddenly asked him. "I'm starving."

"I can order out, but it's probably not going to get here before we're done," he sighed. "We could just get started now while I'm on the phone, Babs."

"I'm not doing this with you while you're on the phone, Parker."

"Fine!" he relented. "But I'm telling you, we'll be done before it gets here."

He was wrong of course. Barbara insisted on falafel and there was this great Mediterranean grill around the block Johnny used to order from all the time when he was living there that had this weird tendency to rush over whenever he called. The Human Torch was what Uncle Ben would have called a truly irresponsible tipper. "Anything over 20% and they get the wrong idea," the old man would constantly tell Peter. It was right up there with "Don't go messin' 'round with no Italian girls" and that thing about power and responsibility. Despite this sage wisdom, now that Peter was a member of the gainfully employed, he felt compelled to match Johnny's reckless generosity.

Pete had been right about one thing, though. When Humphrey called up from the lobby about the delivery thirty minutes after they'd started, Barbara hadn't wanted to stop. That's just how it was with the first episode of Dog Cops. You watched the first two-thirds in jaw-dropped horror, but by the end, this wall around your heart came tumbling down, and you were in love.

"The pug dies in the pilot?" Barbara exclaimed when Peter returned with their dinner as the credits rolled. "But he just made detective!"

"Don't worry, you see Jake again in all these really poignant flashbacks for the rest of season," Peter assured her. "But I don't want to ruin it for you."

"Nobody who ever says that actually means it," she told him. "My dad's been begging me to watch this stupid show for a year. He just kept saying it was the most realistic police procedural he's ever seen, but he's got this weird soft spot for Columbo and Law & Order, so I didn't trust him. And who's got time for television?"

"I always thought TV helped with the crime-fighting," Peter shrugged. "How else are you going to come up with the funny pop culture references while you're hauling in the bad guys?"

"My dad's a cop, Pete," she sighed. "They don't focus on making jokes when they bring somebody in as much on silly things like Miranda Rights and evidentiary chain of custody. It's serious business. It's like Dog Cops so far. They benched the Doberman when it was obvious he was personally involved with the witness, and we don't see him again the rest of the episode, even though he's their best detective. None of that 'Come on, Captain, who knows this case better than me?' nonsense they usually peddle... "

"Your dad's a cop?" he asked, setting the food out on the bed.

Barbara blanched at the realization that while she still knew so much about him, he still didn't know that much about her. And yet she'd fucked him again... "He's the Police Commissioner in Gotham," she told him. Now that he knew her last name, he'd figure out that much from the clumsiest internet search. She'd taken innumerable steps over the years to make sure someone couldn't google "Oracle" and come up with anything too impressive, but she could hardly eliminate Barbara Gordon's digital footprint entirely. "Commissioner's Daughter Shot by the Joker" didn't have quite the notoriety of "Spider-Man: Threat or Menace?" but it was still out there.

"Deep down, I always thought that I should have become a cop at some point," Peter told her. "Or a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent or something legit. When I was a kid with weird powers who just wanted to help people, the Spider-Man thing almost made sense. I thought I could do the right thing without making a huge mess of my life, but now I know how that worked out, but by the time I grew up, I kind of thought it was too late..."

"And then there was your aunt."

"Never thought she could handle it, but I've learned my lesson," Peter said. "You underestimate May Parker at your peril. I guess I stopped worrying about it after I joined the Avengers. If Captain America gives you the nod, it's hard not to assume that you've been doing something right despite all the screw-ups. But that got crazy, too... Probably why I unmasked for Tony. I thought that would fix things but it just made it all worse..."

"Never tell them the secret, Peter," she said. "That's the first thing Batman makes you promise."

That said, she still wasn't sure why it seemed so much easier for him to tell her these kinds of things than it was for her. It couldn't have just been that they were only his secrets to share and he trusted her. She'd made mistakes, too, of course. Things she could tell him about without it leading back to anyone but her. It wasn't about protecting Bruce's secret. The fact that everybody hadn't figured it out since the Batman, Inc. launch pretty much proved the world just didn't want to know. So what was it really? Was it just that she was too guarded... or that she still needed him to think she was completely amazing? That she'd never let any of her friends or family down?

When she was Batgirl, she'd been constantly terrified she was making mistakes, but when she looked back on it now, it all seemed so simple. So straight-forward. When she became Oracle, at first, the risk had seemed so miniscule. She was safe behind a screen, buffered by firewalls... And that's when other people got hurt, and worse, that's when it started being her fault.

She'd been trained to pretend that she was so much less than she was -- the same way Bruce played the dim-witted playboy -- but at the same time, Barbara had felt compelled to show the people who knew her that she was more than they thought she could be -- to bury those moments when she'd just been so afraid so they never imagined that she still felt so vulnerable now. Like how Barbara wasn't willing to admit that she was still scared of the Joker, because there was this terrible fear in the back of her head that if she told Dick or Bruce, they'd make her stop being Oracle, which was crazy. Logically, she knew they wouldn't. Stubbornly, she knew they never could -- but it was there. This insane terror that if she ever said those words out loud -- to anybody -- that those two would find out and it'd be the end of a life that meant everything to her.

She couldn't tell Peter that then. She didn't even want to, but would it have been all that much of a risk to tell him that she'd always wanted to be a cop? That her father had always opposed it? That this was why she became Batgirl? After all of this, what possible reason was there not to let Peter Parker in?

"Peter..." she started to say.

"It's okay, I know..." he told her, kissing her forehead. "We can watch the next episode."

Barbara had an out, but she didn't want it. She wanted to tell him something real the way he'd just told her. She desperately wanted to tell him this little bit about her right then so that he could know that she wasn't some closed book to him... That she was more than willing for him to get to know her. She was all set to do just that until she saw something that made the last forty-two minutes of implausibly live-action canine police procedural drama all the more bizarre...

"Why are they getting briefed by a cat?" Barbara asked as she watched a calico in an undeniably adorable feline-sized police cap address a roomful of dogs.

"That's Sgt. Whiskers," Peter informed her. "Nobody on the force likes him because he's an affirmative action hire, but they'll learn to respect him and so will you."

"Okay, just... just pause it a second," she insisted, grabbing the remote away from him to just do it herself.

"What?" Peter asked. "You don't want to watch the next one?"

"Not just now," Barbara sighed.

"Why not?"

Barbara knew she couldn't explain it to him just then. Not the way a pure scientist like Peter Parker might understand. She knew she wasn't really an oracle. She couldn't actually see the future, but she had a good head for patterns and human behavior and access to the secret things they thought no one else knew, so more often than not, she could make a pretty good educated guess...

They'd keep watching Dog Cops until one of them couldn't take it anymore and they started screwing again. And they'd probably keep doing that until the excitement waned and exhaustion caught up with them and they finally passed out.

Sometime after sunrise, she'd wake up in this bed, briefly confused. Perhaps in his arms, perhaps not. Maybe he'd have gotten up early because his spider-sense told him he was needed or something -- she didn't really know how that worked yet. No matter what, whether he was with her or not, she'd feel self-conscious about her bed-head and morning breath, which -- if he was there -- he'd insist he didn't mind, but with her chair still in the bathroom, there wouldn't be a lot she could do about it either way.

Barbara was sure of one thing, though. She was going to eat wheatcakes tomorrow morning, because Peter Parker had once promised to make her wheatcakes -- whatever the hell those were -- and if she'd learned anything about him, he was a man who tried to honor his vows.

Beyond that, there was no telling. A multitude of factors could come into play -- everything from an attack from his considerable rogue's gallery or an early morning pop-in from one of his old girlfriends. She was sure that she'd get some call from Lucius Fox about her absence from her cubicle at WayneTech. And then there were all of the things completely beyond them. Mental manipulation from old foes with new tricks... Multiversal shifts they might not even notice...

Right then and there, Barbara Gordon was happy where she found herself... with Peter Parker...

Even if, with all of her skills, she couldn't predict the future, it wasn't like she didn't have an active imagination... And in that moment, she just wanted to imagine the best future for the two of them. One where she could tell him the secrets that frightened her still.

Plus, she'd done the math, and based on the height of his dresser by the window, if he plopped her down on it, the two of them could "do stuff" rather comfortable...

"I'm not always right," Barbara told Peter, leaning her head on his shoulder. Her hair still smelled like strawberries. "Maybe you can fall in love with me, nerd-boy."

THE END