"Hey! Jayd!"
Lust stifled an annoyed sigh upon hearing the name she went by in this world, glancing at the sprinting figure of Stacy Johnson.
The elevator door slid open, and Lust turned her back on Stacy, slipping inside, hoping to evade her overly-eager colleague. Unfortunately, Lust had underestimated the effectiveness of Stacy's legs, and Lust had to jump backwards to avoid Stacy crashing into her. Dodging around Stacy's flying briefcase, Lust resisted the urge to stab some sense into Stacy with her fingernails, and instead settled on cursing the girl under her breath.
The doors slid closed, and Stacy turned to Lust. "I woke up late," she huffed, bending over and gasping for breath. "And then I forgot that my boyfriend was borrowing my car. I didn't have money for a cab," she gulped in a few deep breaths of air, and then continued, "So I had to run all the way here. Over a mile."
"Over a mile?" Lust repeated, cocking an eyebrow. She was impressed despite herself with Stacy's resilience. Who knew that such a tiny, girlish figure was capable of displaying enough physical prowess to sprint a mile through Gotham with a briefcase in business casual?
"Yeah," Stacy wheezed, not understanding that Lust had phrased it as a rhetorical question. "I'm so," she drew in a lungful of air, "not going to hold back with the junk food."
Lust rolled her eyes, marveling at the strangeness of humans. Honestly, it didn't matter which world you came from, human beings would never cease to baffle. The elevator stopped, and the door opened. Lust and Stacy walked out towards the office they shared.
"Good morning, Miss Talon," a secretary called out to Lust. A passing male leered at her. She ignored them both.
"What a pervert," Stacy complained. She turned to look enviously at Lust's figure. "Although you can see where their coming from," she mumbled, then pulled a small key out of her pocket, and stopped at the office whose brass plate bore their names. She twisted the key into the lock, and the door clicked open.
Lust snapped on the light, and nodded approvingly at the unusual display of neatness. "Very good, Miss Johnson," she complimented.
Like the weak-willed, eager-to-please human she was, Stacy blushed a bit and gave what might pass as a small bow. "Thank you, Miss Talon," she murmured.
Lust moved to her desk and sat down. "Let's get to work, then," she said, and Stacy took a seat at her own desk.
Lust opened the top drawer, and pulled out a manila folder, placing it gently on the desk, and shutting the drawer with her knee. She opened the folder and leafed through the papers inside until she found the one she was looking for. A bloated and grainy photograph, to be more accurate.
Stacy, looking over, noticed the picture, and more precisely, the dark suited man in the center. "Is that…?" she began, letting her sentence trail off.
Lust spared the girl a brief nod of affirmation. "That's right," she said. "The Batman." She stared at the photograph. "In China. Possibly the only picture of him ever taken."
"Well, the quality sucks," Stacy declared. "What's it for?"
Lust frowned lightly at the girl. "Stay on track," she chided, much as she had done with Gluttony, once upon a time. Admittedly, Stacy was quite a bit smarter than Gluttony; it was just that Stacy seemed to prefer not to show it.
"I am!" Stacy cried, then accused in a low mumble, "You aren't."
Lust seriously considered killing her. Fighting her homicidal urges, Lust looked down stiffly at Batman's picture. "He's a handsome man," she admired, adding, "Strong too."
"He killed Harvey Dent, and a bunch of cops," Stacy gagged, apparently physically repulsed.
Lust kept her eyes on the picture, tuning out Stacy's comments. She had, after all, had over two hundred years of practice for doing just that.
True, Lust thought to herself, the he was the lead suspect in Dent's murder, but that didn't dampen her high regard for the Batman. Of course, the last man she had been attracted too was Mustang, her would be killer. And look where that had gotten her… he had burned her until her core was depleted. He had exiled her from a world where she was an immortal into a world where she was an anonymous human. He had killed Envy, too, although she couldn't honestly say that she cared as much about that.
"Miss Talon?"
Lust snapped out of her musings, glancing up at Stacy. "Yes?"
Stacy had the decency to briefly avert her gaze. "Sorry," she said, "but I was wondering what the image is here for."
Lust smiled patiently. "If we want to try to Batman, we first have to find him."
"Isn't that usually a job for the police?"
Lust snorted. "Please. Gotham's police has been working nonstop on finding Batman's identity since Dent was killed and they still have nothing to show for it. It's time to take matters into our hands, Miss Johnson."
"Right." Stacy snapped a mock-salute, and Lust, once again, wanted to kill her for her insolence. "Where'd you get this image, anyway?"
"A blog," Lust answered. She pulled out a pen and carefully traced the outline of the Batman's face, then took another colored pen to line his exposed skin.
Lust wanted to scream from displeasure as she walked down the night-darkened street. She and Stacy had run the image through all of the facial-recognition software's their office had access too, and a few more. Around a thousand possible matches had been found, but the lack of good quality displayed in the photograph had prevented them from getting any more specific results. She clenched her jaw, holding back a snarl of frustration, and noticed a faint sound on the pavement behind her. Suddenly very aware that the street she had chosen was next to deserted, Lust paused, and heard the footfalls grow gradually louder. She turned around. And found a small gun pointed at her forehead. Behind it, standing an arm's length away was an average sized man with skin as pale and white as a sheet of paper.
"What do you want?" Lust asked evenly, angling her fingers towards his throat.
He grinned. "You're the pretty lawyer working on the Dent case, right?"
"Correct. Although I suppose it's more of a Batman case, right now."
The man scowled, and he stretched out his arm a bit more, so that the gun was a mere inch from her face. A sudden burst of fear momentarily made Lust's breath hitch, before she controlled herself. Just because she was mortal didn't make her human. "Yeah," he growled, apparently oblivious to Lust's personal dilemma. "And see, Miss Jade," Lust observed with a detached irritation that the man had pronounced her name wrong; "Some people don't like that."
"Your boss, I presume." Lust gave a grim smile. "Let me ask you one question- Do you intend to kill me?"
Another grin. That was all the answer Lust had needed. She allowed her briefcase to slip from her fingers. "Do you enjoy pain?" she asked impassively.
"What?"
"Masochism has always been something of an enigma for me," she continued, twisting her hand around so that her fingers were pointing towards his wrist. "Taking pleasure from pain- how intriguing. I've always found pain to be the antithesis of pleasure. And trust me when I say I've had my fair share of both. But," Lust gave a slow, cruel smile, "Whatever works." Her fingernails extended quickly, slicing through the man's wrist, and he screamed with pain, dropping the gun. It went off, and the pain howled with renewed agony, cradling his arm to his chest and stumbling backwards, blood dripping down his shirt and pouring from his ankle.
"What the hell?" he cried weakly.
"I take that as a no," Lust chuckled, and then let her smile drop from her face. "I hate rude men," she explained. She extended the nails on her other hand, letting them drag along to ground.
"What are you?" the man asked fearfully.
"Lust."
