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Barbara dreams of the Joker.
There's a knock at the door, and she opens it, and the Joker is there with a gun that she kicks out of his hands. She drags him back to Arkham personally.
There's a knock at the door, and she says, Who is it?, and the voice that answers, Would you like to change your phone service? sounds strange, so she doesn't answer the door, and when the Joker kicks it in, she's waiting with batons.
There's a knock at the door, but Barbara doesn't hear it because she's out for dinner with friends, and later she sees a story about the Joker's latest victim on TV.
Barbara dreams of the Joker, but she never dreams of what he did to her.
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She tells her father and Dick and Bruce over and over that she doesn't want to live in the past, that she loves her life and her work, that she is complete as she is. And it's true. But it took her time to get there.
She cried when the doctors told her she wouldn't walk again. That's something only her dad knows, and only because he was there. He wasn't there all the times she cried afterward, and she never told him. His concern was suffocating; she had her own pain and grief to deal with, and trying to handle his was too much.
Letting the people in her life, even the ones she loves the most, know about her doubt and darkness would give them space to pity her, to treat her as less capable and more damaged than she is or wants to be.
Barbara had to make a decision that first day. She could throw all her energy into trying to find some magical fix. Or she could accept her body as it was, and spend her energy on other things.
It would be so much worse to lose her time, her initiative, her goals, than it was to lose her legs.
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She doesn’t think about it much, but she knows if she could wave a wand and get the use of her legs back, she would. Sometimes she feels guilty about that. She’s always so adamant that she can be excellent in a wheelchair and that being paralyzed doesn’t diminish her. She even believes it! It’s just that when she weighs up all the inconveniences and annoyances and obstacles against her memory of just waking up in the morning and rolling thoughtlessly out of bed, she can’t help but want to ditch the difficult stuff.
Mostly, she thinks it doesn’t matter. Zatanna can’t fix her spine, and neither can science, so a magic wand isn’t coming. She’s never going to have to make that choice. She’s just going to keep living a life that she does in fact love, in a body that she doesn’t in fact hate.
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When she sees Cass in the Batgirl suit she feels nothing but pride. She started something amazing, and Cass took it and built on it and made a life for herself out of it. And Barbara gets to be Oracle, an identity and a job that she loves. She quit being Batgirl even before she was shot; she doesn't miss it, except in the nostalgic way she sometimes misses high school. Yeah, there were some good times, but she's not sixteen anymore, and she doesn't want to go back.
What she misses are stupider things. Simpler things. She misses the way her freshly shaved legs felt against clean sheets. She misses how easy it used to be to crouch down over a computer and dig into its guts, right there on the floor. She misses weaving impatiently through a slow-moving crowd. Barbara spends a lot of time these days stuck behind people until she clears her throat. Crowds part for her slowly, one at a time, as they notice and keep noticing the chair.
That’s what she misses most of all: being unnoticed. It’s strange, because she’s spent her whole life fighting for legitimacy, for recognition and attention, and only more so since she was shot. But she used to be able to walk down the street without being looked at, or carefully not looked at, and when she thinks about that time, it’s not the walking that she misses, but the simple certainty that nobody was giving her a second thought.
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There are good things about being in a wheelchair. People don’t believe it, except in a “look at those good-for-nothings milking the system” kind of way, but it’s true!
As long as there’s a space where her chair fits, she never has to worry about finding a seat. Even sold-out theaters usually have wheelchair spots open, and she’s never the one stuck reaching over two other people’s heads to cling to the bar on a packed bus.
She hasn’t worn out a pair of shoes in years. And she can wear wickedly high heels without worrying about tripping or blisters.
She hates being underestimated, but she loves shoving it in someone’s face how horribly they’ve erred. She’s been underestimated a lot since being paralyzed; she’s also done a lot of face-shoving.
And every once in a while, the fact that she’s in a wheelchair helps her help someone. There are things in life that you can’t truly understand until you’ve lived them, and sometimes, what people really need is to be understood.
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She’s different, is the thing. She was always determined, intelligent, and independent. Now she is relentless. She was always sarcastic. Now she doesn’t bother to soften her sharp edges. She used to be full of secret self-doubts. Now, she smothers them before they can take hold. She is bigger and bolder and louder and more self-assured than she ever was before, because she has to be.
She is changed, and she likes the changes. They have everything and nothing to do with her legs.
If she’d never been shot, she’d be a different person now. She thinks she would’ve liked that person too.
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Barbara dreams of the Joker. Some nights she wakes up wistful; some nights she wakes up angry.
They’re just dreams. Real life is what matters, and in real life, Barbara is Oracle. And in the morning, she wakes up each day eager to live it.