Just know that this ship now owns my ass. This is my first segue into DC and its fandom, so feedback, both good and bad, is heavily appreciated.
This fic is DCEU based, meaning that I'm writing this viewing Ben Affleck as Batman, with my image for Selina being actress Morena Baccarin. Like I said before, the story also starts at approximately a couple of months after the events of Justice League. I wouldn't consider this my take on the upcoming Batman movie (to be directed by Matt Reeves), but consider it a hypothetical sequel to that hypothetical movie. I also wouldn't consider this fic much of a love story, even though love is the central theme; more like an action-adventure that just happens to put romance at the very center of attention.
In totality, the plot takes a lot of inspiration from some comics like Hush and largely on Heart of Hush. Some story elements from Telltale's The Wolf Among Us and their take on Batman are also included. As you read, there will be some parts that are rather familiar to you if you've ever been exposed to the titles I just mentioned.
To get the noir feeling that I wanted for the story, I watched a crapton of noir films, Henry Boggart, and Alfred Hitchcock, and I'm trying out a new writing style, since this is the first time I've ever written an entire fic in the present tense. It's also has a significantly shorter word count than most of my stories, for the noir feel I'm going for.
But what are the essentials of film noir? Three things: the hard-boiled world-weary detective who takes no shit, the gruesome and mysterious murder that sets the plot rolling, and the illusive and enchanting femme fatale who may be our tragic hero's demise.
And that's how we'll open.
DISCLAIMER: I don't own Batman; that pleasure belongs to DC and their affiliates. I didn't create Batman either; that pleasure belongs to Bob Kane and Bill Finger.
The airport isn't a kind place to strangers. Bustling and pushy crowds, all from different sides of the world, speaking in strange accents and noticeable in even stranger mannerisms. Flowing with the crowd should be easy when everyone's a new brand of diverse, but she's the opposite case. Even as she descends from her plane to the cacophonic mess of Archie Goodwin International Airport, the black of her outfit and clicks of her heels calls heads to turn to her, try as she might to blend in.
She's a sight for passers-by to hook onto as she waits in front of the luggage conveyer belt, her watchful eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, a lithe body shape concealed in the most fashionable of dim coats, her wide-brimmed hat hiding in shadow what many would consider a pretty face. And since it's human nature to be attracted to something you don't fully understand, people can't help but be fascinated by the mystery that surrounds her. With her black leather purse slung around her arm, she waits between the other passengers around the conveyer belt, spewing out boxes and luggage bags from her ten-hour flight.
She doesn't know how long she'd been standing there until she spots her black luggage back emerge from the conveyer. But before even before she takes five steps in its direction, a man swoops in and takes it by the handle, placing it down on the floor in front of her. To get a better look at the stranger's face, she pushes her sunglasses lower along the bridge of her nose, a sly smile on her blood red lips.
"My, my," she drawls, "and here I thought chivalry was dead."
"It isn't while women like you exist," the man returns, with a voice that probably makes him look more suave than he usually is.
He strikes quite the figure, she can admit: tussled hair, tamed beard, crisp jawline, and striking eyes. Handsome at a glance, even more charming the more time spent around him. He holds out a well-sculpted hand, she takes it with her own gloved fingers.
"Doctor Loris Tate," he introduces himself, and the widening of her eyes doesn't shock him.
"Did I hear that right?" she asks, her head tilting and curiosity heightening. "You've just made yourself much more interesting, Doctor Tate. Catherina Dolores; a true pleasure."
"So," he begins, looking behind at a bright sign with her flight number and from where it came: Florence, Italy. "You Italian?"
"Conosco la lingua," she says, her tongue accustomed to the long consonants and singing vowels. "I've only stayed a few months for a change in scenery. Girls like me love to be adventurous."
"I can tell," he smirks, scanning her from head to foot as they begin to walk to the arrivals dock, with him carrying her baggage in one hand and his own small travel backpack in the other. "And the new change in scenery you had in mind was Gotham City?"
"You say that like it's a bad thing."
He shrugs, suddenly aware of the direction the conversation is tipping towards: not in his favour. "It's not, but this city doesn't have the most spotless reputation. This your first time visiting?"
She shakes her head. "Actually, quite the opposite. Gotham born and raised."
"Isn't that something?" his smile grows. "Lived your whole life here too? You just keep finding Gothamites on every country in the world now."
She turns her head to see from where his flight came from, and she spots the conveyer on the far left. "You've come quite a distance too."
He gives off a playful scoff. "Chicago isn't as far as Florence."
"Just means that Gotham has a charm that keeps people coming back, doesn't it?"
"That or the people in it."
There's a ghost of a smile on her face, as if she was reminiscing something. "I can agree with you there."
He notices the sentimentality in her voice and clears his throat. "So, why'd you come back?"
She seems to hesitate, but her composure is quicker than his tongue. "I have some unfinished business here." Her sly smile grows. "Does a certain handsome doctor have unfinished business here too?"
His cheeks grow red, but he tries his best to remain unfazed. "You could say that. I'm here to see if my family's doing well."
"Must be quite the family, raising a charming little boy like you."
His face completely flushes. "You flatter me too much, Catherina."
Just as he says that, they exit the arrival hall and are greeted by the warmth of the dusty and strong-scented air, taken aback by cabs and private vehicles along the road come to pick passengers up. The sun above them shines mercilessly on the large and tattered expanse of towers and shanties in the distance, floating along the waters of the harbour: Gotham City.
"Well, we best be going," she says, taking the suitcase from him. "It's been fun, but we're both here to do our unfinished businesses. It would be a sin to keep you from that."
He looks sheepish, kind of adorable. "But can't I get your number, at least? Quite a pity the conversation has to end this early, when it was just getting good."
"Oh, don't you worry," she begins sauntering away, her hips swaying as she removes her shades to reveal emerald green eyes shining beneath the shadows of her hat. "You'll find my number in the pocket where you keep your wallet. Arrivederci, Dottore!"
He doesn't want to question how she knows where his wallet is being kept; despite that, he reaches into his jacket pocket, then the shock overtakes him once he realizes the bulge of his money is missing. He digs further into it, his dread increasing as he learns there's nothing, save for a small note in a scratchy handwriting akin to a cat's claw marks:
'My number's 9, it's how many lives I have!'
A pickpocket.
When his panic settles in and rage replaces it, he looks around to confront the culprit, but Catherina Dolores had already disappeared from the airport crowd. When he asks around if any of the people ever saw a woman in black matching her description, they would deny ever even noticing such an elusive creature. It's as if she had never existed.
The night wind whips around the cold wet streets of the East End, making Commissioner Gordon's trench coat billow around him like a cape. But instead of standing mysteriously on a cornice of a tall distant building overlooking the cityscape (like a certain man he knows), he's standing in the middle of police sirens, distressed officers, nosy news reporters, and police tape.
It's less cinematic than he thinks it to be.
Chief O'Hara comes walking towards him as he smothers another cigarette on the asphalt. She's come from the crime scene, he can see it in her face; he'd only seen it once and didn't need to see it again. The apartment where the poor girl was murdered had the walls splattered with bits of her blood, her own body lying in a pool of broken bones and torn flesh in the middle of the living room, where the neighbors found her. They were supposed to report sound complaints to the GCPD; little did they know that those sounds were the screams of a dying citizen.
"We've identified the girl," Chief O'Hara says matter-of-factly, as she should when discussing crime details.
"That took a while," Gordon comments as he takes the folder O'Hara hands to him.
"Hard to do it with her face bashed in and her fingerprints nearly sanded off," O'Hara replies, and Gordon can hear her try to supress a shiver.
As he opens the folder, he's met with the dossier of another young Gothamite lost to the never-ending war on crime. Her picture looks at him blankly, her eyes still full of many years she should have used living. Gordon can only sigh in exhaustion as O'Hara continues.
"Clarissa Walker, age twenty-three," O'Hara seems resigned now, even as she doesn't mention how these murder victims keep getting younger and younger. "Cause of death could be anywhere between fractured skull or stab wounds in the torso."
Gordon closes her dossier and hands it back to O'Hara; he can't look at another victim's face anymore. "Get her body to the morgue for someone to claim. And update her record as deceased."
"Got it, Sir."
"Any updates on the husband?"
O'Hara nods. "He claims to be the one who murdered her. Might be circumstantial, but the blood splatters on his clothes do match everything else in the crime scene. He's handcuffed, waiting in one of the cars."
Gordon pulls out another cigarette and puts it between his lips, clicking his lighter and spewing out a first exhale of smoke. "He got a name?"
"Matthew Walker, age forty from what database analysis managed to share with me."
Gordon nearly chokes on his smoke at the mention of his age. "Forty?"
O'Hara gives a wry grin. "That's all they've told me, Sir."
He takes a drag on the cigarette. "Well, damn. What a helluva night this turned out to be."
O'Hara shifts uneasy, putting her hands on hips as she stares at the apartment building now sealed off by GCPD, and the few amounts of reporters trying to get their exclusive from witnesses shooed away from their good-night's rest. The police tape encasing them doesn't even seem real anymore.
"You think we should call him on the case, Sir?" O'Hara suddenly asks.
The one syllable escapes the Commissioner with some smoke. "Who?"
She looks at him expectantly, as if he's supposed to know what she's insinuating. Soon he gets the idea, and gives a shrug.
"PD doesn't answer to him, I hope you know that," Gordon clarifies. "He isn't some superior we just give information to all willy-nilly."
"And yet you trust him."
Gordon shoots her a tired look, the kind you give to a snarky daughter. "The man has a fucking car that goes at two hundred miles an hour and can beat Falcone's entire warehouse gang in hand-to-hand if he's having a good day. If he's willing to help us, I'm not backing down on that chance."
"So you hesitate to call him now because?"
"He works on the huge cases: drug cartels, mob wars, the Joker. This is just some domestic killing that we can solve in days."
O'Hara crosses her arms. "And you're still gonna try."
Gordon accepts his defeat with a sigh. "Yeah, I'm still gonna try."
"Tonight?"
"No, tonight's too soon. He'll be expecting some information on our part, and we don't have much of that right now." He looks up into the night sky. "Besides, I think he's busy."
Bryant Industries HQ is a marvel of a skyscraper, rivalling the brilliant architecture and imposing air of Wayne Tower itself. Against the night sky, its lights seem to look like stars. But as it's located in Gotham City, it's bound to be the victim of some sort of crime at one point in time.
And tonight is that particular one point in time.
An exact number of half a dozen armed and masked goons manage to get past the initial security by beating them unconscious, and destroy all CCTV cameras going up to the CEO's office on the 72nd floor. It's all amateur tactics, even to the supermarket plastic masks used to conceal their faces and machine guns from Falcone; obviously they're inexperienced, and it's commendable that they went for a huge corporation on their first hit like Bryant Industries instead of some small bank along the street. Brave in a way, but still stupid for attracting the wrong kind of attention.
Finally, they reach the CEO's office, hidden behind a safe code. The hacker of the six of them proceeds to try and break the system without the security alarms blaring. While one stands guard of him, the other four go out to scope the floor for any security cameras to take out or any potential threats to remove.
And that's when they begin to disappear.
The first one walks into a conference room and destroys the CCTV, closing the blinds of the windows from the night lights of Gotham. That's when a figure from the shadows lunges toward him, and his radio signal goes dead.
The second one walks into the secretary's cubicle, searching for any valuables the assistant could have left behind to claim for his own on the table tops and in the drawers. But a looming dread is felt behind him, and his radio signal goes dead.
The third and fourth enter the extensive pantry, opening the cabinets to try and find anything other than instant noodles and pastries. The third notices a blinking red light landing in the middle of the room, and before he could even take a step closer to investigate it, the room erupts in smoke. In an instant too fast for them to even comprehend, the darkness seems to expand, and both their radio signals go dead.
The fifth, guarding the hacker in the middle of the CEO's lobby, hears the radios of his comrades flat-lining from his own device as he tries to switch to them. "They're gone."
The hacker doesn't turn to him. "What?"
"The others," the fifth clarifies, facing him. "Their comms are dead."
"Well, go check it out then," the hacker retorts as he opens the panel of the keypad, already annoyed.
The fifth is apprehensive. "Yeah, but—"
"C'mon, man, don't be such a baby. I need to focus."
The fifth goes out into the darkness, the flashlight attached to his AK-47 quivering in fear. And just as quickly and swiftly, a specter from above descends upon him, and a sickening thud of a skull hitting the concrete echoes through the whole floor. The light disappears.
The hacker stops what he's doing and looks up from the opened keypad. The building is deadly quiet, with no noise except that of his own ragged breathing. But the uneasy tranquillity is interrupted suddenly by a strike on the CEO's door. Despite all intuition in him telling him not to investigate, he gets up anyway and walks slowly towards the sound. And to his shock and dread, he finds wedged right in the middle of the wooden door a metal projectile shaped like a bat.
The hacker turns around to get the hell out while he can. "Oh, sh—"
But he can't move before he gets a huge kick to the face, slamming his head into the doors and breaking it wide open, rendering the security system useless. Before he could even get up, the darkness grabs his shirt collar and lifts him from the floor, making his eyes lock with that of the gloom.
He's face-to-face with the Dark Knight.
Without a second to breathe, the hacker is thrown at the CEO's table, his back coming into direct contact to the edge of the desk and sending pain straight up his neck and back. Because of the ache coursing through his body and the fear that shakes his psyche, he doesn't get up; but despite himself, he still thinks he has a chance and tries to reach for his gun. But the shadow kicks it away and grinds its heel on his hand, hard, making him yell and writhe in agony as his wrist is broken into little pieces.
"Too ambitious," the metallic synthetic voice growls, and the hacker winces, now useless.
After handcuffing the hacker to the desk, the wraith scans his surroundings, not a pin out of place. Walking along the room, he notices the CEO's desk in too pristine a condition. Going through the drawers proves nothing either, but as he notices the sudden draft upon standing directly under it, his head shoots up, and the skylight had been broken into, cut into a perfect circle with incredible precision.
With a shot of his grappling gun, he zips up to the roof and lands flawlessly on the uncut skylight glass. Surrounded by the cold crisp air of Gotham's atmosphere, his cape whipping around him, further encasing him in the dark of the night, his vigilant eyes catch the attention of a figure running not too far from where he stands, dashing fast enough to be considered guilty.
It doesn't take too long for him to catch up to the fleeing criminal. After jumps over the buttresses, scaling over the scaffolding, and winding through the escalating architecture, they both reach the wide expanse of the helipad. However, the backlight of the city's nightscape illuminates the figure he had been pursuing, and it completely catches him by surprise.
A lissom, svelte figure of a woman wearing a leather cat suit, with a long appendage appearing like a tail trailing from her waist down to her knees, eyes hidden behind infrared goggles, and two animal-like ears sitting atop her aviator helmet. Her relaxed position keeps him taut, ready and wary.
"Meeeow…" she taunts.
Something inside him snaps.
One of her lithe arms extends, holding what appears to be a hard drive, and he knows very well what's in it: blueprints for a skeleton key to all of Bryant Industries technology.
"You after this?" she teases, her voice so sultry, dangerously familiar. "Or after me?"
At that, something that grips his chest. Not apprehension, not allure; it's something that he doesn't know, something he doesn't want to know.
He ignores her question. "That doesn't belong to you."
She seems to scoff at him as she tucks it into a pocket. "Does it look like I care?"
He readies his stance. She readies her own, unsheathing sharp claw-like appendages on her fingertips. The lights of the city below them seem to glow brighter, as if illuminating the spectacle of their fight, illuminating the roguish eyes from behind her goggles.
"Ready when you are, Batman."
He makes the first move.
Bolting towards her, he throws the first punch, she dodges quickly, she tries to lunge at him, he ducks. Her claws try to scratch at his face, but he manoeuvres through her quick cuts and pounces. Her kicks manage to land on his shoulders and torso, but they affect him little, allowing him holes to be able to break into her defence as he deals hits on her legs and core, creating enough space to get her away from him.
Blown back, he takes advantage of their distance and runs at her to pin her down, but she somersaults over him and manages to land a scratch on his jawline diving downward. The pain sears through his flesh, and as he hisses getting up, the skin torn open begins to let loose a small amount of blood running down the Kevlar lining of the cowl. She lands flawlessly on her feet, the grin on her lips widening.
There's a rage that fuels him now, as he turns around and throws precise punches towards her frame. Though she manages to block some and evade a few, some land on her solar plexus, behind her knees, and on her neck, slowly weakening her defense line until she's pushed to the edge of the helipad, the edge of the building, one step away from a thousand foot drop onto the asphalt below.
"Hand it over," he snarls; it isn't a friendly request, it's a demand.
She's tired, panting, injured in her makeshift stance, but she still has that mischievous smile. And without a word, suddenly she tumbles backward and leaps off the building.
The instinct kicks in and he runs towards the edge, his heart pounding out of some unknown fear. But upon reaching the tip of the helipad, he sees the hook of a grappling gun shoot upward towards another skyscraper, swinging with enough momentum to propel someone far away from him in a small amount of time. And who else is holding that gun but the thief, waving goodbye at him with a victorious light in her inaudible laugh? Chasing her now is too troublesome to go through, even with the stakes high enough of the blueprints of a powerful tool.
He looks down at his utility belt. His grappling gun is missing.
"Alfred?" he speaks into his communicator.
"Yes, Sir?" the other end replies, the lacings of a British accent around an old man's vowels.
"Rebuild another grappling gun."
"I'll begin preparations right away. Did something happen to the one you have?"
Her figure disappears into the maze of Gotham's skyline. An uncomfortable silence, long enough for him to hear the police sirens at the foot of the HQ building. Took them quite a while this time around.
"I lost it."
This is a noir fic, so that means that every little detail—every name, place, location, mannerism—is essential to forwarding the plot. Pay very close attention to everything and you'll be rewarded with making yourself feel smart, and for revealing a little more to the story that'll make it a bit more fun.