Something Blue 
by Chris Dee

“ESOLC TNOD! ESOLC TNOD!” a frantic voice called, while a Disney Store shopping bag wedged itself between the closing elevator doors.

Lois Lane raised an eyebrow as the doors parted and a panting Zatanna stepped inside, smiled apologetically, then pressed the button for Barbara Gordon’s floor.

“Flight was late,” she explained, “Magic Convention in Vegas—forgot the shower—stopped to get this on the way in from the airport—Cabbie was a pig.” She sighed dramatically.  “Hi, Lois.  How you doin’?”

Lois just smiled, waiting for Zatanna to notice they were still looking into the lobby.

“I mean, I’m in showbiz, right, I don’t mind if a guy notices my legs, but to talk about them on his radio right in front of me—”

“Um, Zatanna,”

“-and, okay, it was nice of him to wait while I ran in and got this, but it’s Gotham. If he didn’t want to wait, I could’ve got another cab easy enough, right?”

“Zatanna, the doors.”

“Oh, don’t mind me.  Just feeling bad I guess, ’cause I forgot and had to get a gift at the last minute like this.  Think she’ll be getting a lot of dishes ‘n stuff?”

“I doubt it.  I got her lingerie.  Zatanna, you froze the doors magically. You want to unfreeze’em, or should we take the stairs?”

“Oh, sorry,” she apologized.  “WON ESOLC SROOD”

They were the last to arrive. Dinah took Lois’s elegantly wrapped gift box and Zatanna’s Disney Store Bag to a side table while Selina offered “tea or champagne.”

“This is very nice,” Lois observed of the large sprays of flowers on each end of the gift table.  Then she saw another floral display next to the tea—and another near the champagne, and still another by the food, “It’s all very, um, pink and white.”

Selina and Dinah exchanged a brief ‘you go’ exchange, then Barbara cut in.

“They each bought decorations,” she explained, while everybody who heard the story before perked up, waiting for their cue, “So did I,” Barbara continued, “And so did Alfred.  And Dick sent flowers.”

“Awww,” came the collective gush.

“Finest tush in the super-community,” Dinah remarked to Zatanna.

“I heard that,” Barbara chimed, ushering the new arrivals into the center of the party while the hostesses retreated to a quiet corner to continue their conversation about a mutual acquaintance now known as “The Cadaver”…

It began when Barbara had parted yet another boxful of Victoria’s Secret tissue paper to find yet another item of intimate apparel—with the difference that, unlike the previous boxes of powder blue teddies, sapphire blue nightgowns, and midnight blue penoirs, this garment was an intense purple.

Everyone looked to Selina, who laughed and sputtered, “Not from me.”  Then, as Cassie meekly admitted it was her gift, Selina whispered to Dinah, “Like I’d really want Dick thinking about me on the wedding night—sheesh, after all I did to squelch that Nightwing story last year.”

It was a joke—but it was enough to remind Dinah what she had in common with Selina.

“Those reporters at the Post should be buried to their necks at low tide,” she seethed.

Selina’s instinct was to laugh again, but she saw Dinah was in no mood to laugh it off.

“Rotten break, about Ra’s,” she said sympathetically.

“Megalomaniacal slimebucket,” Dinah pronounced.

“Hairdo,” Selina offered.

“Sicko freak,” Dinah added.

Selina looked around then whispered, “Flyweight”

Dinah giggled, then held her fingers together between them, about a half-inch apart.  “Small…feet,” she confided.

Selina’s eyes bulged.  Her comment was an assessment of Ra’s as a global threat—Dinah clearly had another yardstick in mind.

Wordlessly, Selina picked up a champagne bottle, and she and Dinah retreated to a corner with their glasses. 

By the time Barbara was opening Zatanna’s box of Disney Store glasses, Selina and Dinah were comparing notes:

“He claims to know all these famous dead people,” Selina was saying, “Did you get that too?”

Dinah nodded.  

“Are you kidding, he wanted to impress me.  I heard’em all.”

“He told me he knew Wagner.”

Dinah nodded more vigorously, then broke into a fair impersonation of Ra’s voice and manner: “We were sitting in a café and I said ‘Richard, it won’t do.  You can’t cover this material in a single opera, it must be longer. Three, no four full operas.  Don’t worry about the length, a few hours each.  And the Valkyries need a theme song!’”

Selina laughed merrily so Dinah continued: “‘What’s that Fair One, not much of a music lover?  Theatre then.  Shaw, Wilde, I knew them all.  Why it was I who told Christopher Marlowe that Helen was ‘a face that launched a thousand ships.’”

“He knew Helen of Troy too,” Selina gasped in pretend shock.

“All the great beauties,” Dinah pishawed, still in character, “Helen, Cleopatra, it was I who told Shakespeare about Cleopatra—though she was a shrew.  Taking over the world is man’s work.  But where was I, oh yes, the great beauties—Helen, Cleopatra, Catherine the Great, knew them all.  All!” Then she resumed her own voice, “I surpassed them all of course.”

“Of course,” Selina toasted, and they clinked glasses.  “You do that really well, by the way, I know people who would just die to see that impersonation.”  She sighed, “Too bad really.”

Dinah sighed too, and they moved to rejoin the party as the doorbell rang.  

The party froze with a collective “Who could that be—not another centerpiece?” 

It was Barbara herself who finally answered the door.

“Diana!  You made it after all.  How… wonderful.”

“No stripper?” Kyle Rayner looked incredulous. “Isn’t that the whole point of getting together on a guy’s last night of freedom?  Look at one last pair-HEEY!”

This last was in response to a smack in the head delivered at subatomic speed. 

“Last party,” Wally West said levelly,  “I missed the good stuff  - stuck in the men’s room of the Foggy Bottom Bar & Grille ‘cause a wiseass Green Lantern moved the party—actually moved the ENTIRE BAR except for the men’s room to another location.  This will not occur again.”

Oliver Queen walked over from the bar with a glass in one hand and a bottle in the other.  “Good man, West, you remembered.” And he gestured with the bottle.  “A man’s drink.”

“Tequila,” Wally mouthed to Kyle, and Kyle slid his Zema behind a table lamp.

There had been some debate whether Oliver should be invited, not because he was dead, body brought back from the underworld without a soul and possibly inhabited by an evil spirit, but because he was the chief agitator in the matter of Clark, the waitress Lola who learned he was the groom-to-be, and Hal the hotshot who objected to any man other than him getting special attention from the girl, especially milquetoast Kansas, even if she did have an “L” name.

“So this is Bruce Wayne’s famous playboy pad,” Kyle asked, leaving Ollie’s vicinity for safer territory near Dick and Tim.  “Does he have any of those cool gadgets, like in the movies,” he asked flipping each light switch in turn, “with a mirror ball and funky lights and a bed that comes out of the wall.”

“Ah, no,” Dick answered, wondering—not for the first time—why Kyle seemed magnetically drawn to whatever idea would most likely result in Bruce killing him.

“Hold on to your roll bars, girls,” Zatanna was whispering, “we’re gonna do a little off-roading, and I want a seat in the back, cause I’d hate to get hit by a flying reporter.”

The colloquy in Barbara’s kitchen had assembled the moment Diana stepped into the powder room to “freshen.”  She didn’t have a hair out of place, Dinah was quick to observe, but when you arrive at a party you said you couldn’t attend because of an uprising in Argentina, which is then resolved and you can come but you’re 2 hours late because you came straight from the Pampas, you are expected to go to the powder room and freshen.

“Can somebody explain this?” Selina asked, “I didn’t bring my decoder ring.”

“They don’t like each other much,” Dinah explained, “and there’s gonna be fireworks.” 

Selina raised an eyebrow.  “Look, I’m just the outsider here, but you guys are all on the same side, right.  If everybody’s treating me okay, why would there be any friction with—”

Barbara understood how to explain it succinctly:  “That’s kind of like saying you and ‘the demonspawn’ are ‘on the same side.’”

“Oh!” recognition dawned. “You don’t mean Superman and—”

“Of course not,” Dinah cut her off, “that’s just talk. Gossip.  But like we were saying before: the talk, when it hits the newspapers, can get pretty—”

“At least you two contradicted those stories,” Zatanna put in, “the thing with Diana is she’s never once so much as….”

“Get Diana drunk,” Barbara suggested, grabbing Selina’s sleeve.

“Barbara, contrary to popular opinion around here, I don’t actually have any special powers to get heroes drunk.”

“Ah, guys,” Stephanie interrupted from the doorway, “of the two women you’re discussing, one has super-hearing and the other is a professional snoop.  And they’re both out here.  Come and help!” 

“What I want to know,” Eel O’Brien grumbled, “is how that uptight, tightass, master of gloom rates the hottest piece to ever pour herself into spandex.”

“Meow,” Oliver’s demon mouthed the word with quiet menace.  In life, he’d always admired the Catwoman’s curves, it was logical to assume the other more red-blooded heroes did as well… 

Wally looked towards Bruce then around the room, “Check it out:  Penthouse—Picassos.”

“Nah, they had a thing before she knew he was rich, didn’t they?” Kyle whispered, completely missing the undercurrent of envy and malice Oliver was subtly exuding.  This wasn’t because he was any purer than the others.  It was habit: Batman intimidated him, and he always kept Bruce or Batman in his peripheral vision if they were in the same room.  Only superficially participating in the conversation with Oliver had kept him immune from its darker subtext.

“…Hitman used to say he’d crawl fifty miles over broken Pepsi bottles just to clean her bathtub with his tongue…”

Kyle’s eyes grew wide.  “He can hear you!” he whispered through clenched teeth.

“Balls.” Ollie dismissed the idea as ridiculous.

“He’s looking this way,” Kyle insisted, still not moving lips or teeth, “and he’s rubbing his knuckles.”

“He can read lips,” Wally said, holding a glass to his mouth.

“And he’s coming over,” Eel announced.

“Don’t be such a pussy,” Ollie said distinctly, glaring up at Bruce on the final word.  “We’re not allowed to TALK now?  Bad enough you can’t come into ‘his’ city without say-so.”

“You can come to Gotham, Ollie,” Bruce said amiably, “any time you like.  But call first so I don’t mistake you for something—evil.”  The last word only was spoken in Batman’s foreboding growl.  Then he placed a hand on Kyle’s shoulder and resumed Bruce’s fop manner: “Kyle, you haven’t met Dick’s roommate from Hudson U…”

He led Kyle to a small group at the far side of the room, then whispered something to Tim who immediately looked towards Ollie, Wally and Eel.  A few minutes later Tim whispered to Clark, then joined the trio and said: “Ah guys, deal is you knock off the Catwoman talk this second or you’re in orbit ‘til they’re back from the honeymoon.  ‘Kay?”  The threat was delivered in tones of such sparkling innocence, an eavesdropper would have assumed it was a joke… even if they knew Tim knew Superman… right up until they saw Clark pause in the middle of his conversation, turn towards the trio, and nod.   

To be continued…