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"Is it me?" asked Dinah, finally, once they dropped off the Caretaker, the first words spoken between them for hours.
Barbara glanced over at her in apparent confusion. "What?"
"Is it my fault? Because I can't help thinking.... You were at the top of your game when I left the team. A rule-the-world scary badass, and the one thing, the only thing I was even a little worried about is you going Batman on us, getting too competent and not enough human. But six months later I hear you're running away from Metropolis because Superman yelled at you? It's not the Joker, Babs, or not just him. The Babs I knew, he'd never have been able to come within a hundred feet of. Something's been wrong since I left. It's hard not to worry that... maybe it's that I left."
"Don't think too much of yourself, do you," said Barbara scathingly, but she was staring out the window with an intensity that left her rigid.
It was a punch to the gut, and Dinah tore her own eyes back to the road. "For abandoning the woman who gave me everything? No. No, I really don't."
"Stop that," snapped Barbara. "Stop talking like you owe me. You don't owe me a damn thing. If I screw up, if I can't handle my team, if I can't protect myself, if I get people killed, that's on me, not you. You're my friend, not my — not my nursemaid. It would be ridiculous if I couldn't function without you holding my hand all the time. Ridiculous and beyond pathetic."
It was the closest Barbara had ever come to saying it, and Dinah's first instinct her first, her second, her third, the one she had always, always followed was to let it pass like she always had. To assume she was reading it wrong, to believe they were both happier if it was never acknowledged. To lie to Babs and herself and pretend she hadn't noticed, didn't know.
And that was how they got here. That was how they got to not talking and Babs almost getting herself killed and sitting around more filled with self-loathing than she'd been since they first met. And Dinah had let it happen.
Well, she was done with that.
"Not your lover, Babs?" she said, softly. "Is that what you were going to say?"
Barbara went pale, her jaw locked, her knuckles white on the handle of the door. Dinah could almost hear her brain whirring, howling at Flashlike speed through hundreds of responses, analyzing and dismissing the possibility of denial, weighing the merit of anger.
"... that seems like a fairly irrelevant question at this juncture," she finally bit out, harsh and defensive, retreating into eloquence like more syllables meant more control.
"It's not irrelevant if it means I betrayed you," said Dinah, her own voice raw. "Babs, I -- You don't cry in front of Helena or your dad. You don't listen to Dick when you're mad at him. But me -- And we both know if I were anyone else, you'd have kicked my ass for even asking that question, for saying you're at less than a hundred percent. No one has ever given me anything more rare or precious than what you've given me, Babs. You don't walk away from something like that."
"You do if you can't return it," growled Barbara, still glaring determinedly out the window, the plastic of the door handle creaking under her grip. "If it was right for you to leave it was right for you to leave. You're not responsible for my life and you don't owe me anything."
"You're wrong, Babs. I owe you everything. And most of all I owe you a chance. I never.... All this time I've known and I've always brushed it off. 'It's just a little crush, she's my best friend, I like men'," she said, unable to believe just how juvenile it all sounded in the face of what that dismissal had come to. "I never asked myself -- I never let myself really consider it. I just pretended I didn't need to. You deserve more than that."
"Yeah, well, in case you've forgotten, you're married to Oliver Queen now," Barbara snapped, saying Ollie's name with what was actually an unusually mild amount of venom for her, "so it's a bit of a moot point anyway, and why are we even having this conversation?"
Dinah stepped on the clutch, kicked the car out of gear, and pulled them to a stop at the side of the road, Barbara eying her silent and wary from the next seat. A quick twist of the key to kill the engine and Dinah turned, took Barbara's hands, and stared her full in the face.
"Barbara. You're drowning. Even Zinda can see it. Tell me I can help and I will be there. Tell me the Birds need me and I will hand my resignation with the League to those Star Chamber idiots tomorrow. And if Ollie doesn't want to follow...." She gripped Barbara's hands a little tighter. "I love him with all my heart, Babs. But he's not more important than you."
Barbara's eyes were closed, her voice hoarse. "And what if you can't help? What if I need more than you can give?"
"You didn't before. And maybe...."
The silence hung, painful, and Barbara's eyes slid open, dangerous green fire flickering behind her glasses. "Maybe what?"
Dinah leaned in and kissed her.
In the course of her life, between poorly chosen boyfriends and undercover work, Dinah had kissed many people in whom she had no romantic interest. She had locked lips with gorgeous, sexy heroes and felt only boredom, made out with brilliant lovers with artful tongues over romantic candlelit beaches and been unmoved. She was well-practiced in technically good kisses that nevertheless did nothing.
This —
This was not nothing.
A good ninety seconds later, Dinah pulled back, dizzy and flushed, her hands tangled in Barbara's hair and Barbara's fingers digging into her shoulders, and Dinah cursed herself with every fiber of her being for her stupid, wretched, miserable timing.
"... the Birds don't need you," said Barbara, her voice barely a whisper. "I need you. Nothing has made sense since you left. Leave Ollie. Come back. Love me."
Dinah kissed her again, slow and sweet, and awestruck at the truth of it, said, "I do."