Barbara Gordon - Oracle (knowsherstuff) wrote in newalliance, @ 2012-04-09 00:34:00 |
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Entry tags: | oracle, power man |
Who: Barbara Gordon and Luke Cage
Where: Le Parker Meridian
When: Saturday 3/30 (backdated)
What: Luke finds out the identity of Oracle.
Rating: SFW
Barbara sat in a chair in her fancy junior suite in this fancy hotel in New York City. The little bit of her that was a proud cop’s daughter protested at the all the pomp, but this fit with the picture that she had laid out for Luke about the elusive Oracle. (He was already going to get enough jarring surprises in the day.) She was a bit nervous that he might not take the news of Oracle’s true identity so well. Barbara was a meticulous planner who was used to moving around all the pieces in a scenario so that they worked perfectly into her schemes, but people didn’t always appreciate how effective her methods were when they were one of the pieces being moved.
She had waited until she knew that she could trust him. As a business partner, Luke had always been professional, but his branch of the operations was removed from Barbara. She could plot and position them however she liked and monitor from afar, but the nuances of a working dynamic were so much harder to track at a distance. Plus, she was never in a hurry to reveal her secret identity to people. Bruce had given her a healthy paranoia about what a liability that decision could be. Still, Luke had put up with a lot. He deserved to know.
There was a knock at the door, followed by the sound of sliding plastic on metal. The lock clicked, and Luke Cage opened the door at a measured pace. “It’s me, Cage. They gave me the card, like... you’d already know, of course.” He stepped inside, shivering quickly. “I can’t believe you got me so worked up over...”
He saw Barbara, sitting in the chair, poised. He laughed, quietly, letting the door close behind him. “Miss Gordon! This is all very cloak and dagger, you and your... our boss, moving about like this. I feel like a spy.” He rubbed his hands together, peering around the room and toward the balcony. “And trust me, I know from cloak and dagger...”
“Hi there, Luke,” Barbara replied with a tight smile. “Sorry for all the procedure, but I hate giving out the room number of meet ups over the net or phone.” She gestured to the chair in front of her. She could see him looking around. Either he was studying his surroundings in a routine way or he was actually looking for the elusive Oracle. “Have a seat. We have a lot to talk about.”
She wasn’t really sure where to begin with this. She just hoped he wouldn’t be mad about the deception. “You’ve been wanting to meet Oracle face-to-face for a long time, but it has been absolutely necessary to the security of the organization to keep Oracle’s identity a tightly kept secret. Oracle’s methods certainly toe the line of legality at times, and the massive network of information maintained includes a number of rather large secrets of the superhuman community. So you can see why we take so long to vet a person before they are allowed in. Imagine someone like Oracle went to jail or was targeted for murder or tortured for information.”
These were all unpleasant contingencies that she thought about constantly. “But you have been incredibly faithful in your service throughout this partnership, and I think you’ve earned the right to know the truth...about everything, starting with why I became Oracle.” Yep. Now it was out on the table.
Luke was glad he did take the seat. He stared at her for a long moment, then leaned back and folded his arms. “I knew there was more to you.” He bristled at the news, but Luke didn’t know how he felt. What she said about secrets... it made sense. It was never his preference, living in the open, being a public crimefighter. But Gotham worked differently. The streets seemed darker and the stakes higher. It wasn’t like he hadn’t worked with masked heroes, before. He smiled. “And here I thought I had one of those faces you could just trust.”
He offered his hand to her.
“If it’s any consolation, I’m more paranoid than almost everyone I know.” That was out of necessity and a few bad lessons she’d learned the hard way. Babs smiled, leaning forward to take his hand and give it a shake. “I know I must seem a little bit unlikely...Most people expect Oracle to be a man. I started doing this about three years ago--well, actually, I’ve been in the crime fighting business even longer than that. Oracle came about after I had gotten very injured by a criminal. I was angry and healing, and I thought that there had to be more that I could do to stop the bad guys beyond slapping a pair of handcuffs on them. There had to be more I could do for the good guys, too.
“That’s why your organization interested me so much. You weren’t just acting out. You had a plan, and I saw potential for even more. So I, admittedly, started hassling you.” She laughed a bit at that. He couldn’t have been happy with all the ways she had hijacked communication systems to reach an agreement with him and Danny.
“We were treading water,” Luke admitted. “It’s hard for me to say this, but even with a Harvard degree... you can’t make ends meet running this like a business when most of your work is charity.”
Cage laughed. “I did think you were a man... mostly because of the attractive lady crimefighters, I thought this was Charlie’s Angels. Who knew Charlie was the looks and the brains all rolled into one?” He sobered up after a moment. “Danny’s gonna need to know. For what it’s worth, I vouch for him. I have trusted him with my life probably longer than you been in the hero business. It’s your secret to tell, but...” Luke shrugged and waved his hands.
“Flatterer,” Barbara shot back with a smile. She considered his thoughts about Danny for a moment. “That’s fair. He’s your partner. However, that information is strictly confidential and shouldn’t be distributed to anyone else in your organization except at my express discretion. I think we can both agree to that.”
That had been relatively painless--especially in comparison to all the scenarios that had played out in her head. “Did you...have any questions for me?”
Cage considered the many questions he’d had for Oracle... operational procedures, deployment, resources. God knew a young woman didn’t simply have the kind of money her organization did, and he knew how much cops made, even commissioners. “Plenty of questions. Most of them can wait.” He rubbed his chin, sitting back and looking at her. “I have an offer. I’ve never liked the spying thing, so you won’t be doing that anymore. My business is an open book. You’ve got permission and access to examine everything, even the things I didn’t originally agree to... except my personal phone.” He smiled. “Unless you’re calling me. This,” he waved to the surroundings, the closed blinds and darkened room, “means we’ll be working a little closer from here on out?”
Barbara tried not to grimace. She spied on everyone out of habit. Still... “You’re right. So long as you’re transparent with me, I can definitely agree to that. I reserve the right to look if I think you’re doing something that merits suspicion, but that’s for your own benefit too. There’s plenty of reasons a good man might be acting strangely out of character.” Metahumans and regular ol’ psychopaths alike had their ways of getting under a person’s skin. That was part of the reason she wanted the Oracle network to be so closed, to make it less vulnerable to penetration by outside forces.
“And I do want us to talk more about the cases: what you’re doing, what I’m doing, what we’d like to be doing more. And if you’re not opposed to it, I thought maybe we could grow to be more flexible with the staffing of missions--you and I would have access to pull any field operative essential to a mission (so long as they agreed to it).” Different jobs just required different skills, and Barbara could easily foresee a time when all of their resources might be necessary to tackle a mission.
Cage nodded in agreement, his face even, reflecting on this young woman who seemed born to it. If he had had her wisdom and focus from the beginning, Luke wondered how things would have played out differently. “Thank you, Barbara. You’ve proven, time and again, that this partnership was the right choice. My team is yours... and we’re gonna be more than the sum of our parts.”
He sat up straight, his easy smile returning “And in the spirit of this new togetherness, do you think it’s possible to arrange a meet among all of our members? A party, to break the ice and make the integration a little smoother.”
Barbara blinked at the suggestion. She hadn’t been expecting that, and so she let out a little laugh. “A party?” Her team would definitely like that. “I don’t see why not...Team building. That makes us sound so corporate.” She gave another laugh, shaking her head. “I’d be open to that so long as you guys could come down to Gotham. I really only make the occasional trip up here for special occasions, and I hate to be far away from my base.”
Luke decided to pass on his usual Jersey comment, leaning back with a pleased look on his face. “You give us a time and place, and we’ll be there.”
“Gotham it is then...midweek,” Barbara replied, surprised it was that easy. Luke was a pretty accommodating business partner it seemed. “I’ll email you the details.” She smiled, feeling wholly certain that she had made the right decision in bringing Luke into the fold.