The rain hammered against the windows, a steady rhythm that filled the quiet of the apartment. It had been pouring for days, the kind of relentless deluge that turned streets into rivers and made sneaking into warehouses or chasing cargo trucks impossible. The city had slowed, and so had they. The day passed in a pattern: sparring, reviewing recordings, combing through files for anything useful. It was the tedious, unglamorous part of hero work, made worse by the storm trapping them indoors.
The pair had dragged their sparring setup down from the roof days earlier—before the rain began—in anticipation of the storm. Helena stood barefoot on the mat in the corner of the room, her hands wrapped as she worked through a series of kicks against the heavy bag. Each strike landed with sharp precision, the dull thud punctuating the steady hum of rain. Across the room, Dick leaned against the couch, a book open in his lap.
“Drop your left on the follow-through,” he said absently, not looking up.
She shot him a glance over her shoulder but didn’t reply. The bag swayed slightly as she stepped back, unwrapping her hands and tossing the wraps onto a chair. By the time she made her way to the table for her Gatorade bottle, he’d already turned another page.
Helena took a swig of the drink as her eyes flicked to the book in his hands. Cosmos. She didn’t say anything, but her gaze caught his attention.
“You could just ask,” Dick said, turning the page without looking up.
Helena raised an eyebrow, feigning indifference. “Ask what?”
“What I’m reading.” He held up the cover briefly, then set it back in his lap. “Cosmos by Carl Sagan. It’s about perspective, patterns, and—well, life. You’d hate it.”
She snorted faintly. “Probably.”
Dick chuckled, shaking his head. “It’s not just science. It’s about finding meaning in all the chaos. Seeing how things fit together, even when they don’t look like they do.”
Helena leaned back against the table, taking a slow sip. “Sounds optimistic.”
“It is,” Dick admitted. “But it’s not naive. Sagan wasn’t saying life was easy, just... that you can find something in it. Even the hard stuff.”
Her fingers tightened slightly around the Gatorade bottle, and her gaze flicked to the window. The rain blurred the world outside into soft shapes, indistinct and distant. For a moment, she didn’t reply.
Finally, she shrugged, pushing off the table. “If it works for you.”
Dick watched her for a beat, then smiled and turned back to his book. “It does.”
Helena’s eyes lingered on him for a moment as she headed for her laptop. Find something in it. She wasn’t sure what that even looked like, but the words stayed with her as she settled into a chair, the rain continuing its tempo against the windows.
—An excerpt from an upcoming chapter of my nightwingxhuntress slow-burn, multi-chapter fic, No Saints in Blüdhaven.
If you like the work, please interact and comment. I’ll post more frequently if I get more engagement!
PS: still looking for beta readers!
