"Kit...?
KITTY?"
Maria clapped a hand over her mouth. She really hadn't meant to shout. She could do nothing more than stare at the woman. "B-but you're Napier's...he said you...what the...?"
She paused a minute to collect herself, staring openly at the woman. They seemed to be close to the same age, but there was no other comparison between them. As short as she was, Maria stood several inches taller than Kitty, who looked like she could make a nice career as a dancer. Maria took the emptiness behind her blue eyes as amnesia; that would explain what Gordon had said about her lack of memory.
Maria's gaze shifted to the adorable little girl. It was unnerving seeing Napier's brown eyes and honey-blonde hair on a little girl, but it definitely fit the conclusion she was coming to. She looked back up at Wayne and Gordon.
"That's...that's incredible. Kitty was the name of Napier's wife." She paused, finally catching the blip in the story. "But he said you died," she told Kitty in a very confused tone.
"Napier's wife?!" Gordon exclaimed, just as surprised as Maria, if not more. "What - wait a minute, Napier had a wife?! Good god!" He put a hand to his head, overwhelmed. "The plot thickens," he moaned.
Kitty's brow furrowed as she stared at Maria. "I'm sorry, do I know you?" she asked. She decided to ignore the strangeness of someone knowing her name almost as well as she did, and went on, "I don't remember anyone named Napier. The last thing I remember is waking up in this hospital… I was about seven or eight months pregnant with Jeannie Rose at the time, and so they decided it would be best if they tried to save her… Well, I lived, too, surprisingly… then they started talking to me about someone named Jack…"
"Jack Napier," Gordon said, starting to pace, still somewhat in his own little world of self-pity. "Jack Napier's wife, and we didn't know it! Goddamn it…"
"Please!" Kitty said, reaching to cover the ears of Jeannie Rose. Jeannie Rose just looked at Gordon in interest. The offending words did not seem to affect her at all.
Gordon looked up, surprised. "Oh, I'm very sorry," he said, "I'll try to watch my language."
Kitty nodded and let go of Jeannie Rose's ears, then paused, her dull blue eyes straying. She shook her head. "I don't know anyone named Jack," she said. "They said I'd had head trauma and I had to get stitches, and I believed them, because I felt the stitches… but I didn't feel like there was anything wrong with me besides that." She looked back up at Maria. "And they asked me about someone named Jack." she repeated. "Jack Napier, like you said… But I didn't know anyone by that name." Her look turned to one of interest. "Do you know Jack Napier?" she asked.
"It's possible," said Wayne, putting his hand to his chin thoughtfully, "that they told him she was dead because they did not want him to have the pain of knowing… she didn't remember him."
"Didn't remember who? - Do I know you?" Kitty asked, looking over at Wayne. "I'm sorry, but I feel that this is an invasion of my personal life, and my rights as an individual."
"Please calm down, Miss Smith," Gordon said, "this is just something that Gotham police really needs right now. Please try to cooperate as much as possible and we'll see if we can do anything to accommodate you."
Kitty stared at him. "All right, Officer," she finally said, quietly. She turned her eyes back to Maria. "Is that all you wanted to know?" she asked.
Jeannie Rose stepped out from behind her mother and walked over to Maria, her hands clasped behind her back, staring up at the novelist. "I'm Jeannie Rose," she said. "My mommie says I haven't got any daddy, but I don't think that's true. Everybody's got a daddy."
"Jeannie Rose, come back here," Kitty said, frowning nervously. "Come on, you shouldn't go away from mommie. We don't know these people."
Jeannie Rose glanced back at her mother, then turned back to Maria, ignoring her. "I bet even you've got a daddy, don't you?" she asked. "I bet he's a nice man. I bet my daddy's a nice man, too." She paused a moment, looked away, then looked back at Maria. "Do you know my daddy?" she asked.
Maria frowned. It made some sort of sense to not tell someone that a loved one didn't remember them, but that just didn't seem fair. What if contact with Napier had sparked a memory, or even forced Kitty out of amnesia altogether? This made things a bit more complicated, too. They couldn't just offer to have Napier and this woman meet and hope that it would revert Napier to sanity; they had nothing to prove it was really her, just her looks.
She finally looked at Kitty with sympathy. She could tell that they were overstepping their bounds with this woman; she didn't seem to have any desire to remember. But they had to know. "No, I'm sorry. You don't know me at all." She glanced at Jeannie Rose. "I know...I've met Jack Napier. He told me that you two used to be...involved." She paused, and reached back through her memory for details from Napier's story. "If you don't mind me asking, do you have any other scars or marks, besides the stitches? Burns, maybe?"
She looked again at Jeannie Rose. The little girl's gaze was seriously unnerving her. Not only did it perfectly match her father's, but it was so clear and calculating (even for a child) that it reminded her of...
Stop that. This was bordering on obsessiveness.
"Umm…" Kitty thought on her inquiry for a moment, looking half-interestedly at her arm, as if the answer would appear there and she could read it off. "Well, I do have a couple of scars, but I don't know where they're from…" She rolled up her sleeve and showed one, a small scar on her shoulder. "I'm not sure where that's from, though," she said, letting the sleeve back down. "I also have a birthmark, but I can't show it to you… it's in a rather inconvenient spot." She blushed a bit. "And what I think is a burn mark… here," she showed her wrist. It looked like a common burn from a stove or oven. "But that's about it. Why? Are you from Missing Persons?"
Jeannie Rose returned to her mother's side and tugged on her skirt. "Who's Jack Napier?" she asked.
Kitty shook her head and picked up the little girl. "I don't know, honey," she said. "Maybe these people will be able to tell us." She looked back up at Maria. "I don't know anyone by the name of Jack Napier," she said. "But I don't remember anything before five years ago, so it's possible that I might have known someone by that name at one time…" She frowned slightly. "How involved did he say we were?" she asked, balancing Jeannie Rose on her hip. "Friends? Were we dating?"
Wayne cracked an involuntary smile. "You could say that," he said.
Kitty shook her head. "I haven't been involved with anyone since Jeannie Rose was born… I wouldn't expect anyone I once dated to suddenly come looking for me after all this time." She pushed a lock of curly hair out of Jeannie Rose's eyes, staring at her daughter. "I just wish I knew who Jeannie Rose's father was," she said with a slight sigh. "Hopefully he's a nice man… not one of those nutcases you always hear about on the news. That would be just terrible."
She turned back to Maria. "They gave me therapy, after Jeannie Rose was born, but it didn't do any good. They said the head trauma was most likely irreversible." She glanced over at Gordon and Wayne, who were watching her thoughtfully. "But, then again, you never know… one of these days, it might all just come flooding back to me." She shrugged, looking back at her daughter. "If it hadn't been for Jeannie Rose, I would have been sent to Arkham because of my head trauma. As it is, we had been living in the care of the hospital until just recently. They finally decided that we were ready to be sent out into the wide world… and then we got swooped up by this bat character."
"Batman," Jeannie Rose said with a smile.
"Apparently," said Kitty. "He took us here and told us that we should talk to someone named Maria, because she would help us figure out something about our past… my past," she said. "But after that, all there was, was talk about this Jack Napier fellow… I haven't heard that name in years. It was all very confusing." She turned to Maria. "I assume you're Maria," she said, "but I just don't know what he was talking about when he said you would help me figure out something about my past, and Jeannie Rose's…"
She looked back at her daughter, who stared at her. "You have such beautiful brown eyes," Kitty said. "I bet you got those from your father." She sighed. "If only I could remember what he looked like…"
"He's tall, pretty well-built..." Maria tried, then cut herself off. She'd been about to babble something about green hair and clown makeup. Like that would go over well with Kitty. She didn't seem to want to hear that her ex-husband was any sort of criminal. "He...does have the same hair and eye color as your daughter," she added, thinking while she spoke.
Well, the birthmark, scar, and burn might be good for identification. She shook her head and sighed. This was far more complicated than she'd thought. Shove this lady in Napier's face and he'd either run, shoot something, or both. It wasn't like they had a messenger they could send to him to explain the situation, and besides, he wouldn't believe whoever they sent.
A conflict suddenly erupted at the front of the station. "I said get the fuck off, you bastard!" a cracking voice said, soon followed by two yelps of pain. Moments later, a young boy sprinted into the back room through the open door.
He seemed to be about thirteen, with messy black hair that ran rampant to his earlobes and dark eyes to match it. They looked about frantically for a moment, before he caught and composed himself with a quick shake of his leg. He cleared his throat and announced, "I've got a message from the Joker." He eyeballed Gordon with a pertinent stare and added, "Teach your fuckin' guard dogs to fight better, or they'll get their asses handed to them by every punk on the street. I didn't take five seconds."
Despite the kid's tough words, two policemen, each one holding an apparently injured arm or leg, came limping to the door. They too looked to Gordon. He called the shots around here, after all.
Kitty frowned at the boy, turning away, slightly, as if angling her body that way would protect her daughter from the harmful language. "Does no one have a moral compass around here?" she asked, a bit exasperated.
"Sorry, ma'am," Gordon apologized again, "we don't know how this little punk got in… we'll take care of it." He moved forward and grabbed the boy by the arm, starting to drag him out of the station, but,
"Wait!" Kitty stared at the boy. "The Joker?" she asked, readjusting Jeannie Rose on her hip. "Who's the Joker?"
"A nutcase. Nothing that concerns you," Wayne waved off the question.
This did not seem to calm Kitty at all. "There's a psychopath free on the streets?" she asked, turning to Gordon with a slight look of panic in her dull eyes. "Well, you have to stop him! Can't you do anything about it?"
"We're trying, ma'am," Gordon reassured her. "It's just not that easy. That's why we brought you in. We thought you might be able to help."
Kitty shook her head. "I don't know anything about any Joker," she reassured him. "And I certainly don't want to be a part of a team that's chasing after a psychopath." She nervously combed a few strands of Jeannie Rose's hair behind her ears. Jeannie Rose just stared at her mother, saying nothing. Kitty shook her head. "They should never have let us out of that hospital, Jeannie," she said quietly. "It's dangerous out here. I don't know how they expect anyone to live around here…"
"Gotham is a good city," Wayne interrupted. "Batman sees to it that crime stays at a low point."
"Well, a lot of good he's doing, isn't he?" Kitty retorted to Wayne, who looked taken aback. "Swooping down on innocent citizens, scaring us to death… when there's a nutcase on the loose he should be attending to instead!" She huffed in excited anxiety, and started messing with Jeannie Rose's hair again. Jeannie Rose batted her hand away, annoyed.
"Stop it!" she exclaimed.
"Sorry, honey, sorry," Kitty said nervously, dropping her hand. "I just… I'm sorry." She fidgeted with her skirt for a moment. "I certainly hope you don't expect me or Jeannie Rose to take part in this crazy scheme of yours. There isn't a police force in the world that would put the life of a child at stake to catch a crazy person. Not one!" She tucked a lock of her hair behind her own ear, then went back to fidgeting with her skirt. "Besides," she added, a bit more quietly, "Jeannie Rose and I… we have to start rebuilding our past. We don't have time to go looking for criminals."
"We might be able to help you with that," Wayne said, stroking his chin thoughtfully.
Kitty turned to him. "How?" she asked.
Wayne looked over at Gordon, who still held the kid by the arm. He nodded, then turned back to the kid. "Where is the Joker?" he asked. "Take us to him."
"Us?" Kitty asked, her eyes widening. "You don't mean… all of us?"
Gordon looked over at her. "Ma'am," he said, "we strongly believe that if you come with us, it will help us to catch our man… and it might help you remember your past." He stared at her, his kindly eyes penetrating hers. "What do you say?" he asked.
Kitty stared at him, then looked at Jeannie Rose. Then she sighed and shook her head. "I'm… sorry," she said. "I just can't." She shifted Jeannie Rose's weight on her hip, then walked out, past Gordon, Wayne, and Maria. As she got to the door, she turned. "Thank you for your help," she said, "but I think Jeannie Rose and I would like to figure this one out on our own." She offered a faint smile, then turned and walked away.
Gordon looked at Maria, then Wayne, then back at the kid. "Well, that's not stopping the rest of us," he said. "Come on, kid. Let's go."
Maria eyed the teen coldly. Great. Now we have no Kitty, which means that Napier's totally lost. It had seemed that the woman was his last link to the past, the part of his life when he wasn't a psychopath. Now there didn't seem to be a chance for getting him back to that state. She sighed. She had to respect Kitty's decision. The woman was obviously scared; plus, she had a daughter to take care of.
And why not? Daily Maria was questioning her own involvement with this. Ordinary civilians had no reason to chase after crazy murderers. At this point she had to admit that she'd shamed herself into helping.
Because if she didn't help, that would mean she was scared of something.
And now there was the matter of this punk. She couldn't get why Gordon insisted on trusting this kid; one look at his darty eyes was enough to label him a liar.
God, it was sad to see Gotham's police led by such a stupid guy. He'd eaten up the lie like it was dinner.
The boy wrenched his arm, trying to get out of the commissioner's vice-like grip, but eventually had to settle for replying in that position. "'Course I could," he said smugly, more than a little proud of his lie. "But I'm not stupid enough to do it for free. He'd kill me for showing you guys his hideout." The boy yawned and scratched his head lazily. "I need some cash to keep me out of trouble in case y'don't find him. Say...a few thousand?"
Maria snorted. "Let me try to follow this. You come in here, some snot-nosed kid off the streets who we've never seen before, and claim that the Joker sent you. Then you say that you can lead us to him if we pay you." She looked incredulously at Gordon and Wayne. "Where's your proof?"
The boy grinned and reached into the pocket of his worn-out jeans. He withdrew a card and held it up for Maria to see. "Good enough for you?"
The card was a Joker. Once again, he wanted to give himself a hearty pat on the back for this. He'd snagged the card from the wrecked train station before the police got there. Always good to have some insurance.
Maria shook her head and turned helplessly to Gordon. "We're not actually going to trust this kid, are we?" She eyed the teenager; he was inspecting the paperwork on a nearby desk with a bored look. "He'll run the second we give him the money."
Gordon frowned and looked down at the kid. "Yeah, she's right," he said. "You wouldn't fold that easily if you were really working for the Joker." He took the card from the kid and examined it. Then he looked up at Wayne. "It looks pretty legitimate to me," he said.
Wayne took the card from Gordon and looked at it. "He's got one twisted sense of humour if it is," he said, handing it back to Gordon. He had almost agreed with Gordon, but there was no way Bruce Wayne would know about the Joker's so-called 'business card'. Only Batman and the Gotham Police Department knew about that. He shrugged. "I still wouldn't pay this shifty kid," he said. "You heard what Napier said, when we had him here. He doesn't work with anybody. He works alone."
"Yeah, but the tables have turned," Gordon said, looking at the card. "What if he knows we have the upper hand?"
"How could he?" Wayne asked. "Nobody even knew of Kitty's existence until a few minutes ago. Napier thinks she's dead."
Gordon nodded, considering Wayne's words, staring at the card. Then he pocketed it and turned back to the kid. "We're not going to pay you anything," he said firmly. "If you know where the Joker is, then you'll lead us to him. If he's actually there… then we'll see what we can do about some kind of reward." He nodded, satisfied with his plan.
Wayne watched him, then his eyes went to the kid. Of course the kid would not know where Joker was; a man like Napier would never work with some punk like this. He shook his head. If it were up to him, he would have turned the kid out on his ass, but it was not up to him. Bruce Wayne was a follower, not a leader, so he kept his mouth shut.
This was a disaster waiting to happen.
The boy made a sharp noise of protest when the commissioner tucked the card into an inner pocket. That was worth something in the underground market, damn it! He kept carefully silent, though, knowing that there was more on the line than a few petty dollars from a pawn shop.
But now he was stuck. He wouldn't be able to show them the Joker's hideout; even he didn't know that. He had to get that money somehow! He peered at the woman, feeling like it was her fault he was in this mess. If she hadn't said anything, maybe the officer wouldn't have questioned him. Then his eyes shot back to the papers on the nearby desk.
On the top were mug shots of the Joker. And mug shots clipped to other papers usually meant classified information.
He concealed a grin and finally shook his arm free, being careful to look casual. "Well, then, we'll need some goddamn transportation now, won't we?" he babbled, meandering around the room and slowly towards the desk. "It's in the narrows, which means you'll want some guns and shi..." He shot as quickly as his scrawny legs would carry him towards the front of the station, grabbed the papers, shook them at the three individuals behind him with a quick "hah!", and...
Slammed right into another police officer, causing him to drop the papers.
The man was leading a little girl by the hand through the maze of desks. Her wide brown eyes were slightly red around the edges, and one of her tiny hand's thumbs was stuck in the corner of her mouth. She wore a light blue sun dress and white sandals of a similar quality to the boy's. She looked about five or six, and very scared. When she saw the teen, though, she pulled her hand out of the officer's and wrapped her arms around the boy instead. Then she started crying.
The officer watched the two for a moment before looking at Gordon. "She came in a few minutes ago asking if we'd seen this guy," he explained, motioning towards the teenager.
The boy's panicked expression softened and he put a hand on her head. With a mean look back at the commissioner, he announced, "Fine. I don't work for the psycho or anything. Y'caught me, great job."
To the little girl, he added, "Come on, let's go."
She looked up with a few tear streaks on her cheeks. Her eyes clouded with confusion. "T-thought you said they were going to help?"
He frowned and shook his head. Then he looked down at the girl with a mild smile. "Nah, they're a bit busy right now."
