Endless Legacy (DC Comics)

A/N: Barbara goes and gets herself some healing~

-x-X-x-

This was almost certainly a mistake. And yet, she hadn’t been able to help herself. Here she was not even a week later, with an appointment to meet with one Dr. Luke Maximillian. She’d told no one where she was going, knowing full well that anyone she COULD tell would either try to talk her out of it at best or go out of their way to stop her at worst.

That said, Barbara hadn’t been completely foolish about things. For one, she’d set up a dead man’s switch that would go off in the event that she didn’t check in within the day. That was just common sense, really. If she was out of contact for more than twenty-four hours, then the information on Luthor’s new clinic, as well as her location, would be sent to a select few people and they would decide what to do with it from there.

Barbara didn’t know exactly how long this magic healing was meant to take, of course, but nothing had talked about staying overnight or needing to be out of contact for days. So she figured it was a pretty safe bet to assume she would be done and able to take care of the dead man’s switch before it went off in the event that this wasn’t somehow a trap.

Of course, on top of that, she’d also disguised herself, producing a false identity to go along with this whole charade. Even if Luthor and his cronies didn’t know that Barbara Gordon was Oracle and formerly Batgirl, she was still the Police Commissioner’s daughter, and she didn’t want them thinking they might be able to use her as leverage against her father. That would just be embarrassing.

Fortunately, Gotham had no shortage of rich, dead families. People died in Gotham all the time, but more than just the amount of death, the sheer amount of orphans who inherited immense estates only to vanish for a little while and then return with some plans for revenge were so numerous it was bordering on ludicrous.

Setting up her false identity as one such rich hidden heiress had been as simple as finding an old Gotham family with a daughter that had been completely wiped out by gang violence, and taking that daughter’s identity for herself. And so Barbara Gordon was now a brunette with brown contacts named Hope Laville.

She’d managed to ‘survive’ her family’s massacre, albeit not without being shot in the spine during the slaughter, resulting in her paralysis and wheelchair ridden state. It also explained how Barbara had the money to pay for this special procedure that the new clinic offered to rich clientele, because as the inheritor of the Laville Fortune, of course she was loaded.

That said, Barbara doesn’t just wheel herself in through the front door or anything like that. No, as it so happens, the clinic has a private entrance for the more affluent clients such as herself. And so after jumping through hoops to get ‘Hope Laville’ this meeting with Dr. Luke, Barbara finds herself driving into the private parking garage hidden under the clinic.

Once the car, modified for a wheelchair user to drive, is safely parked away, Barbara brings her wheelchair around and transfers herself over to it before locking up behind her. Even as she’s wheeling over to the nearby elevator however, it’s already dinging open… to reveal the clinic’s only other employee besides the doctor.

Barbara stops in her tracks as Kamara Blackwater steps out and pins her with an incredibly intense stare. Black hair, blue eyes, and pale skin, just like her pictures. Except, the pictures really didn’t do the woman justice. She was striking in a way that made Barbara’s heart beat a little faster in her chest, while her gaze was… well, Barbara had weathered worse, but had Hope Laville?

Swallowing thickly, currently brown eyes widening in fright, Barbara plays her role to the hilt. She’s a sheltered young heiress who saw her entire family gunned down and then spent the intervening years confined to a wheelchair. Independent but wary, hopeful but desperate. That’s where she wants to take this.

“A-Ah… I have an appointment? I’m Ms. Laville?”

Kamara continues to stare her down for a long moment more before finally stepping forward. Barbara tenses up and doesn’t untense even as the other woman strides around her and takes control of the wheelchair, pushing her wordlessly towards the elevator. As the disguised young woman brings her hands up to the armrests, she tries not to clutch at them too tightly.

Barbara hates being wheeled by anyone, truth be told. She hates the loss of control. She thinks the character she’s trying to embody would hate it too, but she also thinks Hope would be too… well, hopeful about being healed to possibly complain.

And so she strikes an uneasy middle ground, letting her nervousness and trepidation leak out, but not actually saying a word in protest of the harsh treatment.

Even once they’re in the elevator, Ms. Blackwater doesn’t say a word. Barbara tries to make small talk, but it’s like talking to a stone wall. Finally though, the elevator door dings and opens and they’re admitted out into the clinic itself. Barbara doesn’t bother trying to hide her curiosity. Hope Laville would be curious as well, so instead of being suspicious by trying to be subtle about it, she makes it incredibly obvious she’s taking everything in, even craning her neck to look through open doors as well as glass windows as they move down the hall.

She sees… well, she sees a lot of state of the art medical equipment and supplies. A tremendous amount of it, in fact. Just off the top of her head, there must be millions in value in this place. Not surprising… but dangerous. Very dangerous.

Before they can reach the end of the hall, the door there opens and the man himself steps out. Doctor Luke Maximillian, an identity as fake as Kamara Blackwater. His pictures don’t do him justice either. She’d noted the chiseled jaw before, but damn if it didn’t look better in person. All of him looked better in person under that lab coat he was wearing.

Tch, if they really wanted to make him pass as an actual doctor, they shouldn’t have given this man the same physique that she’d only ever seen on the men of the Bat Family.

His smile, as well, is white almost to the point of blinding as his eyes fall upon her.

“Ah! Ms. Laville, a pleasure to meet you.”

Striding forward, he thrusts out his hand, even as he continues talking.

“I’m Dr. Maximillian, but you can call me doc, Dr. Luke, or Luke! Whichever you prefer!”

Good cop, bad cop. That’s the thought that immediately rushes through Barbara’s mind, even as she hesitates for a second before finally taking Luke’s hand and giving it a shake. The doctor’s charm offensive is like a breath of fresh air after the stonewalling and intense, almost spiteful silence from his ‘assistant’.

But then, that’s obviously intentional. Kamara plays the part of silent and hostile, which in turn causes any patients to see the doctor in an even better light as a result. Even knowing it’s all a trick, the corners of Barbara’s mouth are trying to lift up of their own accord. Since she’s playing a character anyways, she goes ahead and lets them after a moment, hesitantly smiling up at him.

“T-Thank you, Dr. Luke. I… I appreciate you scheduling me in. Are you absolutely certain that you can… give me my legs back?”

She makes sure to inject the right amount of desperate hope and incredulous disbelief into her voice, even as she hides her true feelings. In response, the doctor just chuckles and winks at her before finally letting go of her hand.

“Well, you paid quite a lot of money to be here, my dear… so I’ll let you in on a little secret. You’re our first paying customer! We’ve had some modest foot traffic for the free side of things, but you, my dear, represent the side of the business that will allow us to keep running and helping the poor and destitute of Gotham for years to come!”

Whoa. Laying it on thick there, buddy. At the same time, Barbara is honestly a little surprised. She knew from all of her snooping, of course, that she was the first one to actually give this a try. However, she hadn’t expected him to just admit it.

“Come then, Ms. Laville. Let’s get you healed, shall we? Ms. Blackwater, I’ll take things from here. Thank you my dear.”

Barbara blinks, but before she can even formulate a response, she’s already been passed off. Kamara Blackwater still doesn’t say a word, even to her boss, as she turns and walks away. Meanwhile, Dr. Luke wheels Barbara into one of the side rooms, leaving her to wonder what was in the room he’d come out of a minute ago.

However, she doesn’t have long to wonder, because she suddenly finds herself staring at a horizontal tube. It was clearly incredibly advanced technology… at first glance. Oh, it had all the bells and whistles one would expect. In fact, your average layperson would think it was alien, probably. And since she was playing a role…

“Is that… alien?”

Glancing at her, Luke smiles with a twinkle in his gaze.

“Good eye, Ms. Laville. Yes, this is not entirely of our world. Not to worry though, it’s perfectly safe.”

That WOULD have been her next question, to keep up the act. Barbara lets her mouth click shut as he preempts her, even as her mind whirls with about a billion questions she can’t actually ask. At least, she can’t ask them without giving the game away. Because this… this wasn’t alien technology.

Moving to a nearby console, Dr. Luke presses some buttons and the tube cycles open. Barbara watches him and the machine, biting her lower lip. She wonders, not for the first time, what the hell she’s doing here… and what she’s getting herself into.

As the Oracle, she’s worked with many groups, including the Justice League. And she’s handled aliens of all sorts, as well as their technology. Her information network might not extend TOO far outside of Earth, but she had aspirations of one day pushing it further. Regardless, as a result… she knew what alien technology looked like. She also knew what fake alien technology looked like.

While Barbara wasn’t going to pretend that she knew every single alien civilization in the universe, nor could she claim to have studied all of their different, separately developed technologies she did know humans. She knew humans very, very well. And she knew what human-made, fake alien tech looked like.

This tube and all of the machinery around it positively screamed to someone of her skill set ‘I was designed by humans to look alien and mysterious!’. It screamed it at the top of its lungs, at least to Barbara Gordon. But of course… she wasn’t Barbara Gordon right now. She was Hope Laville.

“May I?”

As such, when Dr. Luke approaches her with arms outstretched, asking for permission to lift her up from her wheelchair and put her in the tube, Barbara as Hope can do nothing more than smile and nod hesitantly. His own smile is clearly meant to be warm and reassuring, as he carefully lifts her up.

Letting one of her arms dangle loose, Barbara slips a bug on the underside of the tube right before he sets her down. He doesn’t seem to notice, thankfully, even as she lays there in the tube.

“Alright, this shouldn’t take long, Ms. Laville. A few minutes tops.”

Blinking in honest surprise, Barbara can’t help but repeat his words.

“A few minutes?”

Dr. Luke grins at her.

“It’s very good technology. Now please lay your head back and just breathe. It’ll be over before you know it.”

God she wishes that she could interrogate this smug, handsome bastard. But there’s no world in which she can get leverage over him, not right now. So she just lays her head back on the tube’s cushion, watching as the tube cycles closed over her. There’s a glass window on the front of it at least so she’s not entirely enclosed in a dark space… but to be fair, even if she were, Barbara isn’t claustrophobic.

She watches as the inside of the tube lights up. She watches as it goes through this strange cycle. She tries to feel out what it’s doing to her, and wonders briefly if this is how she dies.

But… beyond the lightshow and fancy colors, nothing seems to happen. Barbara’s brow furrows as she stares up through the viewport of the tube. A few minutes pass… and the lightshow ends. She still can’t feel her legs or anything… so did it not work? Is that perhaps how this is meant to begin? A scam where it fails the first time, allowing them to get her to give them more to make sure it succeeds or… or something?

Even Barbara finds that to be rather flimsy. The tube cycles open, but before she can do or say anything, Dr. Luke takes hold of one of her hands in his own, giving it a firm, comforting squeeze.

“How are you feeling, Hope?”

Barbara hesitates for a moment, before forcing herself to blush as much as possible. Hope would definitely be a little embarrassed and maybe a little happy to have a handsome man like the doctor get so familiar with her. Though she would also be disappointed it hadn’t seemed to work so…

“I… I don’t feel any different. Did it not work?”

She waits with bated breath for him to confirm that part… only to blink in shock when he just chuckles and shakes his head.

“Give it a moment, sweetheart. You should be feeling it any second.”

Furrowing her brow, Barbara opens her mouth to respond… only for her currently brown eyes to shoot wide open and snap down to her legs… which are beginning to twitch. She can’t even begin to describe it. She’s been paralyzed for so long she’d almost forgotten what it felt like to have working legs.

And yet, there they are, starting to move under her command. Her spine has been healed. Her body has been repaired. She’s going to be able to walk again. Not right away, she assumes… until suddenly, Dr. Luke picks her up out of the tube and instead of putting her back in her wheelchair, sets her down on her feet.

“There you go!”

“W-Wait, I-!”

As she clutches at him, expecting her atrophied lower body to completely fail her, Barbara is cut off by her own shock as she feels… well, as she feels her feet land on the floor with more surety and strength than she was expecting. In fact, beyond being a little wobbly, she feels fine… her legs have apparently regenerated right alongside her spine. She’s almost certainly still weak, but she’s able to walk again, right away.

“Heh. Well? What do you think, Ms. Laville?”

Barbara stares up into the fake doctor’s eyes with her jaw hanging open in disbelief. She has more questions than ever before… and she can’t ask a single fucking one.

[ ] Switch to Lucien's POV - 20%