True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.

Stendhal

I closed my cellphone shoving it into my front pants pocket.

"Okay," I said to Casey, "my friend's coming over with her hummer right now. We bust into your house while everyone's at work, grab your stuff, get out, and I beat up anyone who tries to get in our way. Sound good?"

"Perfect." The blonde beamed at me. "Although there shouldn't be any 'busting' required. I have a key you know."

I heaved an aggrieved sigh. "Jeez... take the fun out of everything, why don't you?"

Casey's father and shitty Camry had vanished by the time I checked up on them at around six that morning. Casey'd informed me his workshift at the steel mill started at seven; upon rousing he had probably beat feet back home to get ready. It angered me that he hadn't even bothered searching around for his missing daughter or reporting the incident to the police (Barbara would have commed me) but Casey didn't seem the slightest bit surprised.

That sad fact stirred my anger even more.

A soft hand made contact with my tank-top exposed shoulder.

"Do you mind if I smoke on the balcony?"

I managed a distracted shrug. "Do whatever you want."

Distracted because there was someone breathing heavily outside the front door.

I slyly observed Casey slipping through the sliding glass door to the balcony and waited until she was seated on the Adirondack chair, facing out and digging through her purse for a lighter before I casually drifted to the front door, unlatching the bolt and tugging it open in one swift motion.

"Mr. Haynes."

I smiled sweetly.

His eyes bulged comically as I grabbed him by the throat and dug my nails into the toady pouch of fat wobbling under his chin. I smirked as his beefy, sweaty fingers tugged futily against my grip.

His right foot lashed out, impacting my shin with laughable force. I struck my heel sharply against his shin, returning the favor. A satisfying crack caressed my inner ears and I fought the instinct to allow my feral side control.

"Aw, Mr. Haynes," I tsked sadly while surreptitiously maintaining an eye on the balcony, where Casey was still taking drags. "First your jaw, now your leg. Your neck'll be next if you keep this up."

I tightened my squeeze around his throat, thrusting my shoulder and jutting my palm against his adam's apple. Tight grunts were issuing from his bruised lips and it occurred to me he was trying to speak.

I loosened my grip one iota.

"...call the cops and report you, you think you can -"

Ugh – I cut off his air supply to stymy the flow of shit spewing from his mouth. I hated threats with no style. Maybe I should give him an example of how it's done.

"Here's a threat for you, padre. If I ever so much as see your sweaty face poking around here or anywhere around Casey again, I'll slit your fucking throat. I'll hang you upside down and let you bleed out like a pig, then I'll cover your disgusting body in cement and dump you in the bay. They'll be dredging up your statue a hundred years from now, there'll be some two minute scientific interest piece on the local news and that'll be the last anyone ever thinks of you."

I dropped him and he wheezingly collapsed in the hallway with a thunk. I must've unconsciously lifted him while speaking... or perhaps his body had fallen limp from lack of air a ways back and I hadn't noticed.

"Don't make the mistake of taking that as a bluff," I warned him solemnly. His glassy eyes stared up at me as he clutched at his throat, gasping to recover his breath. They were the exact same shade of cerulean blue that Casey's were. On Casey however they were earnest, honest, fiery – beautiful – whether they were hidden behind glasses or not. Yet somehow on him, the color was unspeakably ugly.

"I will kill you," I promised.

"Helena? Is someone at the door?"

"Wrong address," I hollered, tugging the handle and closing the door on his expressionless face. I twisted the bolt shut and slid the latch into place before meeting Casey out on the balcony.

"UPS with the wrong building number," I reported shrugging, slipping through the sliding glass door to join her.

I shook my head, declining her offer of a cigarette as I leaned wearily on the railing.

Memories of Barbara's voice echoed in my ears from words she had repeated time and time again.

'It makes you less.'

Killing, that was.

Barbara was of the fervent belief that the horror of taking someone's life destroyed you forever.

I knew why she believed that, too. Because for her, it was true. Barbara's soul was too decent, too human, too good not to be severely affected by the mere idea of taking a fellow human being's soul - no matter how corrupted or vile the owner. People like her and Dinah and my father, they were all like that. In fact it was the consequence Batman had feared the most when he first became a vigilante, according to Barbara: when the inevitable occurred and the Bat actually accidentally ended the life of some two-bit punk, it had crushed him.

And in being a good person and my staunch advocate and friend, Barbara believed the same of me.

True, I had restrained myself from killing Clayface. It was selfish of me, I admit – it would have been better for me to snap his neck right then and there. The fact was, if Batman had killed him before – Hell, if Batman had killed the Joker before – my mother would still be alive.

But Barbara couldn't have handled it. She couldn't have dealt with me taking care of him... so I didn't. I did her proud like a good little superhero and handed him over to the authorities, to reenter the penal system for him to plot and connive his way out of prison once more, possibly taking more lives in the process.

Future lives that I sacrificed for Barbara's sake. It might sound callous, but I hadn't quite cared enough about those nameless, faceless future lives to push my very Star Trek-y 'sacrifice one to save the many' logic that night.

Barbara's mental well-being had mattered more. Even indirectly, the loss of life under her flag of command would have been enough to wound her like a knife in her gut.

I had seen her wounded before, when the Joker'd taken away everything she'd ever lived for. I wasn't about to let that happen again, now or ever.

Barbara – she was family. Protecting my family came before anything – I didn't know if that was something derived from my meta genes or a developed complex or a combination of both – but family and protect meant practically the same thing in my mind.

Barbara and Dinah were heroes. They always would be. It was part of the reason I loved them; their intense sense of justice and human compassion defined them, defined what they were willing to sacrifice in the name of... whatever.

It was family that defined me. Family defined everything.

And fuck my life but my family was a motherfucking family of heroes. I just had to fucking deal with it.

"I haven't seen any baking equipment around here," said Casey suddenly.

"What?" I started. "Oh yeah, that shit's all at Barbara's. She's my business partner, she runs the internet side of shit. She's the one coming over with the hummer."

She squinted up at me sceptically, taking a final pull out of her snub of a cigarette. The act seemed unnatural to my eyes - I wouldn't have taken her for a smoker had I been asked before. "Those paintings I saw last night were astonishing. I bet they'd go for a lot in a gallery somewhere."

My paintings were something that no one had ever seen, something that no one had ever judged like they judged my hair or my clothes or lifestyle. I had been worried the art would lose that sacred value upon being de-virgined by foreign eyes, but thankfully that hadn't occurred with Casey.

"Yeah well," I sighed, scratching the back of my neck abashedly. "I think I like them a lot more than any old art collector would like them. Besides my mom had a thing for hoarding art; I think maybe I inherited it."

"Are you kidding?" she exclaimed incredulously. "They're incredible, Helena. Those belong in a museum where people can admire them, not stuffed in a locked room gathering dust."

I snorted back my laughter while something pleasant tugged at the oft-neglected happy center of my brain. "You sound just like my mom. Or Indiana Jones, I can't decide."

She giggled and ran a hand through wavy blonde hair. I notice for the first time the thick textbook open in her lap.

"You, uh, studying?"

She smiled shyly at me. "For the MCAT. I'm taking it in a couple of months after I graduate. My major is in chemistry but my main interest is in med research, especially microbiology and genetics studies – so, yeah." She cut herself off, cheeks pinkening delicately. Her words had sparked my interest, though.

"What kind of genetic stuff?"

"Genetic mutations are probably the most fascinating thing I've studied. I'd like to be involved in research of what exactly causes them to mutate and how, which not a lot of people are doing. Everyone's gone so crazy over gene therapy that no one seems to care –" She caught herself again, although the redness in her face now seemed to be more from indignance than embarrassment, which made me smile.

"I'm assuming you're not talking about the X-Men."

She tittered amusedly and her eyes flashed away from me. "More like mutations for breast cancer and cystic fibrosis. Nothing that interesting, sorry."

I sighed dramatically as I cracked the sliding glass door to exit the balcony. "Another woman in my life ten thousand times smarter than I'll ever be. Great, just great."

First Barbara, then Dinah, and now this. It was starting to get embarrassing. I didn't miss the flash of pleasant surprise in her eyes upon the compliment and it made it sting a little bit more. Not about the fact that I was about as educated as my refrigerator, that was an accepted given. The sting had been from the constant looks of surprise that had manifested throughout the day when I did simple things like lend her night clothes or share my cereal with her, or compliment her shoes or show the slightest interest in anything she had to say.

It made me feel like a horrible human being. Every shocked flash of her eyes piled onto the massive mountain of shame that had accumulated ever since hearing my own insults emitting from her father's mouth the previous night.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't do pity, not by a long shot, but something very Barbara-like inside me was wriggling in a flood of guilt.

It would have been easier if she had been the all around hair-brained bimbo I'd made her out to be, but it was all the worse because she was turning out to be exactly the opposite: intelligent, quirky, willful...

Although in all fairness she had told me more times than I could count to 'shut my stupid face,' 'stick it up my ass,' 'go choke on a dick' and any number of creative variations thereof.

My eyes fell on the list taped to the fridge, the one with Casey's name crossed out on the bottom. Dr. Quinzel had helped me make it – people I had to make up to for being, well, a dick. Remaining were Barbara, Dinah and the guy who had fixed my toilet last month whom I'd yelled at and thrown mayonnaise at when I caught him checking out my ass. It had took some convincing on Dr. Quinzel's part to add that last one, but she finally convinced me by commenting that if the plumber had been hot I would have checked out his ass too. True that.

I adamantly refused to add the gum-smacking cab driver, though.

That guy was a jerk.