The Universe's Mixer

The dinner had been strange, but a little bit fun too. The more Dinah got to know Zoe, the more she liked the woman. And the more curious she was about her as well. There was more to her, Dinah was sure. Though that was a mystery to be solved another time.

Things were still a shade on the awkward side with Dean, but she supposed that was to be expected. She was ready to work on getting back to normal, which meant that she tried to keep up a steady stream of chitchat on the way out. It wasn’t perfect, but she was trying. She stopped once they got out to their vehicles.

“Thank you for coming along tonight,” she said, putting a hand on his arm.

She hadn’t really gone out of her way to touch him over the past few days. It wasn’t that she was angry, but she just didn’t want to seem like she was trying to push things. Of course, they usually did hug and touch, so her lack of touching might have seemed strange. Or he might have been oblivious or relieved. She had no idea, really.

“It would have been a lot more awkward to be the third wheel,” she said with a small smile.

( Read more... )

Jesse did the inviting. He was the only one - that Dinah and Dean knew of - who knew everyone who was to be involved in this. The invite also only really went out to Dinah directly. It felt awkward trying to contact Dean to ask him to come along. But he suggested to Dinah that she might want to bring him, since he was right there anyway.

Not knowing, of course, what had happened with the apartment.

He had not gone out to do any do-gooding, and made sure to be rested. Mostly because he didn't want to disappoint Zoe again, and partly because he really did believe that the three of them would draw on him if he fell asleep at the table. He didn't think that Dean would be nice about it, either. There would be no mostaches and goatees from Dean. It would be dicks pointed at his mouth and bad words scrawled across his forehead, and he wasn't sure that Zoe wouldn't be unamused enough to stop it.

They had cooked together, him and Zoe, for the dinner, and it was so easy with the give and take between them that everything was ready in no time. Like clockwork.

Now, all they had to do was wait.

After spending the full day in the garage attached to the Sherwood Florist, Dinah was tired, covered in grease, and she just wanted to take a hot shower and go to sleep. She’d thrown herself into upgrading her motorcycle. There was a desire to just build a new one from scratch. She’d done it before and she had a lot more time on her hands and a need to be distracted. However, the man claiming to be the embodiment of the City had said something about how she didn’t appreciate what she’d been given and there was a part of her that was afraid that Jake had been taken away because of that. Even if he’d said that he wasn’t responsible for people leaving the City, he had threatened to take away everyone and everything she loved because she hadn’t been grateful.

If she’d known that she would lose people-that she’d lose Jake, she would have stuck with whatever the City had given her. From the apartment above the shop-she could have slept on the couch and let Jake have the bedroom-to the bike the City had given her to... anything, really. She would have done anything if it would have meant that Jake wasn’t sent home to die.

The City was back to normal and in fine form as the streets shifted around her. Due to the shifting streets, Dinah had driven around for about three hours looking for her townhouse. She still wasn’t sure if the City was just being particularly cruel, but she couldn’t find it anywhere. She was sure she’d been through every inch of the City and hadn’t found it.

Instead, she kept finding herself back on the street with the Sherwood Florist. She supposed it was reassuring that at least that was still there. She sighed and directed her bike into the garage for lack of anywhere else to go. She looked at the keyring in her hand after she turned off the ignition. It had felt lighter somehow, and now she knew why. She still had the key to the apartment above the shop (she was the landlady, after all) but she was missing the key to her townhouse. That... didn’t bode well for her.

She debated calling Jensen to see if he could locate her house with the computer at the Clock Tower. She was pretty sure that was a selfish use of the computers, especially since she wasn’t even a member of the League anymore.

( The Will of the City? )

The City Hall was chosen because it held a room within it that was big enough to accommodate the droves of people that were sure to come. Plus, being inside space, there were no worries over weather that couldn't be controlled. The people could sit and listen and not have to try to hear past traffic or wind.

Even with the late notice, everything was done well before the scheduled start time, which Thomas was proud of. He was glad that the ones who were born here weren't entirely useless without him around. They were keeping their heads together, doing what needed to be done. Of course, it also could have been the fact that they believed Thomas was who he claimed to be, and with his presence there with them, they felt better about the situation they were currently in.

Thomas looked at the stage. That's where he would be standing, talking to the people he had brought here. He had no doubts that they would be the ones with the questions, the ones who demanded answers. He was ready. He could do this.

He sat in a seat hidden by a curtain, where he could still see the stage and the rows of chairs beyond, and waited.

Fred woke up that morning with a plan. She’d found out finally something she felt she should have somehow known. While she’d never had a kid, she had lost people; it was a wonder sometimes how she got out of bed sometimes. Then again, the very reason she might not get out of bed was why she was getting out of bed: Dinah had lost someone. Or more someone had been taken away. She didn’t know how one of the great leggy women of JLC was doing, but she she had decided she’d find out.

The plan was simple, consisting of very few steps.
1. Get up, do the morning thing, be presentable to go out in public.
2. Coffee.
3. Call Jensen to say ‘hi’ and ‘may not be round much today’ - she had a mission.
4. Get food.
5. Get sweets, which do not count as food.
6. Lug all the edible goodness to Dinah’s.

( The plan went well, more or less. )

When she'd moved back to her townhouse, Alfred had sent her home with tupperware containers filled with meals to last about a week. Dinah had finally managed to wash all of those and put them in bags to return to him. She appreciated the butler making sure she was well fed, especially because she'd barely had the energy to order takeout lately.

She'd left a message to let him know she was coming to return the tupperware, but it might not have been received. Whatever the case, Dinah had been expecting to find Bruce, perhaps, at home or to find just Alfred. She certainly hadn't been expecting to find anyone else at the Manor.

She parked her car on the driveway looping in front of the sprawling house and walked up to the door to ring the doorbell. She was planning just a quick visit, though she wouldn't be surprised if Alfred took one look at her and lamented how thin she was as per usual lately.

Dinah hadn't meant to put off talking to Zatanna about resigning from the League. She really hadn't. However, it was a conversation that she wasn't looking forward to. She was a little bit worried that Zatanna would try to talk her out of it, and perhaps a bit worried that she wouldn't.

She knew it was the right decision, but it still hurt to make it all the same.

She had brought a peace offering of Chinese food and wine and was hoping for a bit of time with her friend on top of the unhappy conversation that they would have to have.

She'd told her friend that she was coming and now she knocked on the door to Shadowcrest and tried to ignore the feeling that the house was watching her with interest.

After talking with Ollie about taking time away from the League, Dinah had asked him to give her a few day to tell everyone else. She really did owe each of them a personal explanation. Hank was perhaps the conversation she dreaded the most because she'd been the one to bring him into the League. She would miss working with him-with all of them, really. But she didn't think she had any business holding lives in her hands when she couldn't save herself. And when she couldn't have saved Jake either.

Giving up the League and her role as Black Canary meant that she had precious little left these days. She had again moved out of the Manor because she didn't want to intrude on Bruce's space any longer than necessary. At Alfred's urging, she was still there for dinner most nights, but she was back to sleeping in the eerie silence of her townhouse.

There were times when the emptiness would hit her as soon as she walked in the door. Worse still were the times when she would forget and expect Jake to come running out from his room when it was time for dinner, or if he needed help with his homework.

She hadn't reopened the shop to the public yet because she didn't think she could guarantee the safety of her employees or her customers. She had taken to filling her days in the garage attached to the shop, upgrading her bike and doing any repairs that she could think of. She wondered if she shouldn't seek out the parts to build a bike from scratch, but there was a part of her that remembered the words of the man who'd claimed to be the City. Remembered that he might have taken Jake away because she wasn't happy with what she'd been given, whatever that meant. She even wondered if perhaps it was angry that she hadn't stayed in the apartment she'd been granted upon arriving here. Not that she would ask Dean to move out just so she could move back in and appease the City. All the same, it was hard to keep the doubts and worries away.

It was an empty existence, though she knew that she did have friends. She appreciated knowing that they were there and there were times when she tried to find the words so she could better explain what she was going through, or better explain why she had utterly fallen apart.

Failing that, she'd just taken to mostly avoiding contact with anyone.

Save for today. She owed Hank a personal explanation, and she wanted to see how he was as well.

Which was why she stood outside the door to his lab and knocked.

Oliver felt bad--well, maybe not bad, but not good--about walking out of the meeting a few days prior, but it didn't seem like they knew anything more than they'd known when he, and Hank, and Dinah had discussing things informally when they'd all been in for their physicals. Until they could tell him what sort of arrow he needed, and until they could actually work together, he didn't really feel the need to hear the same arguments repeated.

The truth was, he was worried about Dinah. She'd essentially just lost a child whom she had fought long and hard to keep, and come to the end of a relationship that--while rocky in patches--had seemed to make her genuinely happy. And to think that playboy Dean might be taking advantage of her vulnerability in any way...

Ollie shook his head. He'd know all about playboys, wouldn't he? Or maybe he was just prejudiced. Probably. Regardless, he picked up the phone to give Dinah a call, to see if she would mind him dropping in on her.

Once Dinah had had the chance to talk to Zee about everything, she called the Justice League together for a meeting. They needed the chance to pull together as a team now because they had all been going in opposite directions since that first fight with King Kong, and that was her fault more than anyone's as well. A good leader brought people together and didn't get bogged down in her own personal issues, letting the team possibly fall apart as she did.

She didn't know if the rest of them would still want her as a leader, but she knew that they would want to discuss what could be done about the vampire that could walk in the daylight. They could also take the meeting to discuss whether or not Dinah should remain as leader.

Fred was specifically left out of the meeting because of her sympathies for Eric. It was safer that way. Jen was left out as well, but that was simply because Dinah knew that she needed to talk to Jen privately about whether or not the CBI agent wanted to continue to risk her career by associating with the League. She had told everyone that she'd been able to talk to about the meeting that Dean would be there. It was a courtesy, since he wasn't officially a part of the team. But he had information that could help them and he had as much a right as anyone to help take down the vampire.

Not to mention that Dinah trusted him as much as she did any of her teammates.

She waited outside the Clocktower for Dean. She would let him in rather than give him his own code. Because while she trusted him, it wasn't fair to everyone else to give him access without the team clearing it. She was also waiting because she wanted to have the chance to make sure that he would be able to work with Zatanna. She thought that he was capable of it, but she didn't want there to be any personality clashes once they got into the meeting.

She was in her full costume with fishnets, leotard, jacket and all. She paced outside the tower in an attempt to keep warm because the weather was still a little bit too chilly to be comfortable.

It was time to get back to work. Dinah didn't think she'd ever really be ready to get back to life as usual without Jake, but she had to do it anyway. In fact, she was overdue. If Eric had hurt anyone else while she'd been taking time to herself, that was on her head. And Dean feeling like he had to camp outside the Manor to protect her from something that she damn well needed to be protecting herself from was also a problem.

But before she called a meeting with the League, she needed to talk to Zee. She hadn't been purpopsely dodging the mystic's calls, but she really hadn't gone out of her way to talk anyone. She just hadn't been ready.

She still wasn't ready, but she missed her friend.

And more than that, she would need to talk to Zee before she brought Dean in on the war council. There was a history of dislike and misunderstandings between the two and she needed to at least try to convince Zee to call a temporary truce. She would deal with Dean too if he threw around any hostilities while acting as a guest at a meeting with her team.

Even if they might not want her as leader after she'd gone AWOL on them and had dropped the ball on things, they were still her team after all.

She had left Zee a message to know she was coming and now she stood outside of Shadowcrest and knocked. The house always put her a little bit on edge, since she didn't ever know what to expect from the sentient house. Much like the sentient City, it made her a little bit nervous.

She'd put off doing anything while she decided what exactly to do about it, but Megan had come to a decision. She needed to look for these Justice League people.

Really, how hard could it be? If they were anything like the superheros back home, she wouldn't be able to throw a rock without hitting one. Or a person who would complain about how a one hadn't been there to stop the rock from hitting, or how superheros were nuisances who ruined lives and threw rocks everywhere. She kept an ear to the ground, metaphorically speaking.

And then she just started asking people who came into the House of Coffee if they'd ever heard of the Justice League because patience was overrated.

So all right, it weirded some of the customers out, but a few were happy to give her all sorts of opinions and tell stories of where they'd been when a giant monkey or something attacked (and seriously, how had she missed that? It sounded... well, memorable, if not actually awesome, since the giant monkey sounded kind of freaky) or assorted other run-ins. She actually started skimming the newspaper that was left out for borrowing on the counter every morning for mentions.

Maybe she should just put out a personal ad, she thought. "16 y/o former superhero seeks current superheros for q&a. No funny business." Except that was probably just asking for disaster. Like, Craigslist personals disaster.

No personal ad, then. She kept asking around at work and flying instead of teleporting, because seriously, you'd think wings would be like a big beacon of "Hi there, please talk to me!" to people with superpowers.

It had been a while since Joker revealed himself - Zoe hated thinking about it in that way, but it was apt. Zoe had added wherever Dinah was living with Jake to the patrol route. When the man who was a less connected and possibly just as odd Mr. Universe sent out the memo about Jake's disappearance, Zoe continued to check on Dinah; grief made people do crazy things.

Thankfully Dinah moved to the Wayne Manor which made checking on her much easier. Zoe didn't feel that she always had to see the woman for herself, just trust Alfred when he reported. Plus, it was easier to explain why the Bat could be seen skulking, not that Zoe would ever say she was skulking, about the Manor.

( On one of the nights the Bat was definitely not skulking... )

Dean was damn glad the hospital wasn't sticking him with the bill for whatever they'd done to him. Of course, he had a few credit cards with someone else's name on them to cover if he'd needed to pay for anything. It seemed that the City had gone quiet, or at least still, and the hunter knew when things went still it was usually just the calm before all Hell broke loose.

As he walked home, the Impala was back near the apartment, Dean realized that not only was the City not moving, but it was getting colder. The chill in the air was a little disturbing. The whole time he'd been in this damned place the weather had been mostly comfortable, but now it was turning into a real winter.

By the time he got back to his apartment, he was ready to beat the hell out of the City for going dark. He was glad that it hadn't gone literally dark, but damn if it didn't find a way to screw the people in it over. He approached the shop and paused; the front glass was missing, and it looked like the inside had been redone somewhat. Something was wrong. Looked like someone had some trouble, and when he glanced across the street to see that Fred's place was there....

"Son of a bitch."

Dinah was doing the avoiding thing for the most part. Zee had tried to call and she'd sent a text telling her friend that she just needed some time and would call when she was ready. She didn't want to talk to her friends right now, but she did want to keep busy. Which meant that she'd been spending a lot of time working on getting the shop fixed up. She was currently sweeping up the glass and soon she would be installing the new windows that had just been delivered. Unlike the last time the shop had gotten trashed when the materials to fix it up had just magically appeared, Dinah had had to wait for everything to be delivered.

But it was here now, and working with her hands was exactly what she needed.

Working with her hands and... answers, really. She needed answers. She wanted to know what had happened to Jake. She needed to know if he had made it back home-even if she dreaded the confirmation of that news.

She knew how his story turned out. She knew that if he'd made it back home, he didn't have long before his death.

She knew all that.

But she still needed to know. Not knowing was driving her crazy.

Somewhere in the middle of sweeping up the last of the glass, it hit her. There might be someone in the City who could answer her questions. Someone who had shown up when they'd needed him most. She still didn't know if he was a god-or God, capital G, or just a guy with god-like abilities. She really didn't know what to believe in that.

She also didn't know how to get ahold of him, and she wasn't usually much for praying.

All the same, she did say a little prayer. She wasn't sure if she should say it silently or out loud. And she wasn't really sure if she was wasting her time or not.

"Um, Jesse. If you're out there, I could really use someone to talk to right now. I suppose if you are around, you're probably busy with more important things. Assuming you can hear me at all. But if you can hear me and you're not too busy... I could really use your help."

A tear slipped down her cheek as she admitted out loud that she needed help, but she just swiped at it and went back to sweeping. She didn't expect an answer, but she'd tried anyway.

Jake wasn't at the school when Dinah went to pick him up. She sped home taking the usual route that he might have walked, her eyes searching the sides of the road for any sign of him. There wasn't.

She was trying very hard not to panic, but flashbacks of when the Joker had taken him were surfacing quickly. She had to remind herself several times to stop and just breathe. Not that she actually took much time to do any deep breathing, but she was trying.

She was already slipping into search mode. She stopped by the townhouse first and found that his room was there but stripped bare. Almost as if he hadn't ever been there in the first place.

There was a knot forming in the pit of her stomach, but she had to find out more.

She had to find Jake.

She hopped on her bike and flipped on her commlink as she sped toward the Clock tower.

"Jensen. I need you to look for someone," she said once he answered. She gave all of the information she could, even if she was pretty sure that Jensen should know who Jake was and who he was to her.

After all, the whole team knew at least a little bit about her home life. She was doing her best to remain composed and not dissolve into tears or a panic.

Panic was useless. Fear-a little bit of fear-was healthy and could be funneled back into action. But panicking and shutting down wouldn't do Jake any good. Neither would crying.

There was a part of her somewhere that knew that that would come later. A part of her knew what must have happened, but she wasn't ready to accept it yet. And she wouldn't accept it until she could confirm that Jake wasn't still in the City and in trouble.

He had to still be in the City. He had to. Maybe he'd just gone to a friend's house after school and forgotten to tell her. Maybe...

Everything was going to hell. Fred was miserable and Dinah wasn't too happy with Jensen herself. Unfortunately, she was unhappy with him on a personal level which meant she still needed to be professional. She wasn't aware of his questions about her leadership abilities or else she would have wanted to talk about that.

No, instead she was out searching for the team's resident doctor/scientist. Hank hadn't been in his lab and he hadn't answered his comm or his phone. She'd tried dropping by his apartment and knocking on the door, but there was no answer there either.

She was doing her best not to panic and not to think the worst, but it was hard to think anything else when she knew that he had caught Eric's interest.

She had left messages everywhere, and she could only hope that he would respond to one soon. She'd even braved a computer to send an email, which was a huge step because she still loathed computesr. It hadn't been that long since she'd seen him, so she was trying very hard not to panic.

Trying, and all but failing.

In an attempt to keep her mind off her missing doctor, her heartbroken friend, and her own heartbreak, Dinah stopped by Fieri Brothers for some pasta. It was... very odd that the restaurant was here and even that the food tasted exactly the same as back home. But the staff was completely different. There was no Mr. Fieri here, no waitresses and cooks that were all related and part of one of those big Italian families. No friendly faces that knew her go-to order.

It was sort of like a jarring note in an otherwise familiar song. The City seemed to have nothing but those for her, and she was honestly not in the mood to be all too charitable.

All the same, the comfort food was better than no comfort at all so she was seated by herself at a table in the corner, trying to ignore the happy couples that suddenly seemed to be everywhere. Holding hands, stealing kisses over pasta and wine. It was something she maybe hadn't noticed during the brief time when things were going well with Harry, but now that that was all over she couldn't help but notice that nearly everyone in the City was paired off and apparently over the moon about it.

I hope that you are doing alright after our little spat. Are you? Please let me know if I can do anything to help.

-Eric.

Displaying its' cruelty as always, the City had moved the Sherwood Florist right across the street from Harry's office building a few days ago, right after Dinah had left the break-up letter for Harry. She... really wasn't ready to face him. She knew that they'd probably need to talk about it at some point, but she didn't want that to be just because there was a chance running into each other outside of their workplaces.

For that matter, she didn't really want to talk about it at all. She'd done the right thing, as much as it hurt. And she hoped that he would take the little bit of advice she'd given him regarding making things right with Murphy.

She'd waited for the City to shift things again. It usually happened fairly often, but this time it... didn't.

In fact, the entire City had stopped moving. Dinah didn't really know what to make of that, and she wasn't in the mood for yet another puzzle to solve. Not when her mind was still filled with trying to find a way to kill the vampire that had attacked her and threatened Hank.

She was a little bit preoccupied with that, and with trying not to linger too long outside of the florist shop when she left for the day. Since it was the day after Valentine's Day, there was a nice lull to recover from the holiday rush. She looked both ways and then hurried across the street to the only parking spot she could find with her motorcycle, hoping that she wouldn't run into Harry before she could get to the bike itself.

It was hard to ignore the fact that Valentine's Day was coming up, considering that Dinah ran a flower shop. She had actually closed down shop hours, because she didn't want to put anyone else in danger. Eric had visited her shop twice now and she didn't feel like she could protect anyone else if he decided to show up again.

That didn't mean that she could close down everything. With Valentine's Day coming up, she was still taking orders and still sending people out with deliveries. On the up side, she was keeping herself busy and not focusing on her relationship troubles. On the down side, it was hard to ignore the fact that she hadn't heard anything from Harry since Christmas in spite of the fact that now was the time of year when most couples were making plans to celebrate the holiday.

She had checked in on him enough to know that he was still alive. She assumed he was just wrapped up in research or a case or who knew what else. But that didn't make it okay. Her trust had been broken from everything that had happened after Murphy showed up and they just hadn't had enough time together to repair that trust. When it came down to it, the more time they spent apart the more time she had to think about things. Which meant that she'd slowly come to the realization that Murphy was always going to be the number one woman in Harry's life and that eventually he'd wise up and realize that himself.

She'd wanted to at least try to talk to him in person, but she kept missing him and he either hadn't gotten her messages or hadn't bothered to respond to them. So she settled for the only way she could get word to him (short of waiting in his apartment for however long it took him to return)

She left him a letter, along with the key to his apartment. She hated doing it, but maybe it would be easier this way. This way, he couldn't talk her out of it. And she wouldn't have to cry in front of him.

No, instead she'd leave the crying for when she was alone at the shop with the orders that needed to be filled before the holiday. She would eventually call Zee for a girl's night out, but for now she just wanted the time to herself. She was currently avoiding her friends and even her teammates and burying herself in work and attempting to find out anything she could on Eric Northman and his type of vampire. So far, she hadn't found anything but that wasn't for lack of trying.