Selina's seen cats with more meat on them.

What she can see of Kid Flash, his face and hands, look like a study in skeletal figures, an artistic exaggeration made physical. When he moves, fidgeting under her gaze, his clothes fall oddly pulling too far against the unseen mass beneath them before stopping leaving the impression of a hollow container.

He looks ready to bolt, eyes wide and panicked. Considering that she's the one who just stole something it's an unsettling situation. Normally she would be the one looking for a quick exit.

She could just walk away, the Kid's obviously not going to stop her, doesn't even look like he would be a challenge if he tried it.

She could just walk away, and leave him to his own devices.

She could, but she's not going to. Nothing about this situation is sitting well with her. Damn it. Before Batman went and got a kid she had absolutely no desire to interact with the little creatures at all, and now here she is, a bleeding heart for one that she barely even knows like he's some sort of stray cat.

"So," she says, "you planning on turning me into the cops?"

"What?" His eyes snap to her, ending their quest for an escape route. Good, she has his attention.

"The cops. That's usually what you capes do when you come across a criminal, right Kid Flash?"

He swallows a little nervously at his name, but doesn't bother trying to deny it. "I'm not really a hero anymore. And.." he trails off, shoulders hunching in on themselves. His next words are almost a whisper, but they carry well in the old building. "I don't really want to be a hypocrite on top of being a thief."

She has questions - why the Kid is out here on the streets, how he got to where he is now, where any of the capes that should be watching out for him are - but she brushes them off for the time being. Things that are in the past can wait, she needs to get this right if she wants to make a difference.

"Well, now that puts me in a bit of bind Kid. See I want to believe you, but right now I have no reason to believe you're telling me the truth. Now if I knew you had a reason not to turn me in, an exchange of sorts where we do things for each other, then I could trust you not to tell. What do you say Kid?"

She is met with a blank stare of incomprehension.

"A bribe Kid. I'm offering you a bribe, and if you aren't a hero anymore there's no reason you shouldn't take it, is there?"

He's swaying a bit on his feet. Whatever reserves he may have seem to have been used up in the small scuffle, and she can see it affecting his thought process, his face scrunching up as he tries to work through what she said. "No?"

"Good. Come with me."

She kicks one of the men on her way out, making sure to keep an eye on the Kid in case he changes his mind.

Whatever is going on with the Kid that ended with him in this dilapidated building she's going to do everything in her power to help him.


By the time they make it back to her penthouse (well, Henry Brick's penthouse; semantics) the Kid is practically asleep on his feet. Selina closes the window behind them, tosses the nights accusation onto a couch, and starts peeling off her cat suit on her way into the kitchen, dancing about on one foot and leaning against the center island to peel it off her left leg. A kick sends it flying through the air where it smacks against the dining room chandelier. Freed from her work clothes she goes to the fridge and pulls down a box of Choco cereal.

The boy is still standing by the window, blinking slowly. "Your underwear is green."

"Yes," she agrees, "it is. Very good. Now sit down on the couch and eat this while I order us some food."

She calls a few take out places, trying to figure out how much food, exactly, he'll be able to eat, and wonders into the bedroom to pick out some comfortable clothes that are more appropriate for answering a door than either her underwear or her Catwoman suit.

When she comes out a few minutes later in a pair of sweat pants and an oversized T-shirt he's made his way through the cereal, and is sitting self consciously on the edge of the couch. He looks slightly more awake than he had been on the way there, and she isn't sure whether she should take that as a good thing or a bad thing. If he had just passed out she would be sure he at least spent the night somewhere safe, and she could avoid any of the difficult conversations her adult sensibilities are trying to tell her she should bring up. Things she knows could very well send him running.

She does a quick search through the kitchen to see if there is any other food, and ends up grabbing the cream (the clear superior to milk) out of the fridge for him to drink, and a beer for herself snapping the top of the bottle off against the counter top before she makes her way over to him. She hands him the cream, still in the carton, and takes a seat on the other end of the couch. Taking a swig out of her drink she motions for him to do the same. He pops the corner open and takes a long swallow leaving him with a small white mustache that he wipes off on the back of his hand.

The silence that ensues is the point and time that she, as a responsible adult (which she apparently became somewhere in the last hour or so), should ask him questions.

She doesn't. They sit and drink their drinks until there is a knock at the door. She gets the door, and comes back with the ridiculous amounts of Chinese food she had ordered, putting it down on the coffee table. She opens up one of the orders of fried rice, and grabs a pair of chopsticks sitting back down on the couch to start eating. "Help yourself, Kid"

He's not nearly as weary of her as he once was when he glances at her again, grabbing a plastic fork and one of the cartons at random to methodically demolish. "You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to," she starts. "That said, you want to tell me how you ended up squatting in a building in Chicago?"

He finishes of the last of the sweet and sour pork, and picks up a new carton, this one filled with chow mien, and shrugs. "It seemed like a better idea than crashing in Gotham."

"And I suppose not having to avoid Batman doesn't hurt."

He rolls and unrolls the noodles on his fork, and she almost expects him to deny it. "Red Tornado isn't much better, but it's easier to get stuff in big cities. Easier to blend in too."

"Kid…" she trails off. It's so damn hard to find the right words, if there are any right words. She can't think of anything good that would send a kid running like this, and if she wants to help him, which, damn it all, she does, she needs to know something about what she's dealing with here. "Did something happen? Did one of the capes-did they do something to you?" She feels a little sick just asking the question, but she's not naive enough to think that being a good person in one way stops someone from being horrible in another.

He turns to face her, and it's the first time he's looked her in the eye since they were in the old building. His face is scrunched up in disbelief. "What? No! None of them would do anything like, like that! It's," he looks away again, and his voice comes out in a whisper. "It was my fault. I'm the one that messed up."

She tries to imagine him, the Kid that laughed at some of her worst cat puns, doing something that Batman, the man who still occasionally tries to get her to reform, won't give a second chance for. Something bad enough to make him leave behind every person he's ever known.

At the moment, with him hunched in on himself over his food, a look better befitting a kicked kitten on his face, it's a pretty hard thing to picture. And to be honest, no matter what it was, she still wants to help him if she can. That's not something she can see changing.

She finishes off the last of her beer, and lays her hand on his shoulder gently. "Kid, whatever happened, you don't deserve to be out on the streets like this."

"I didn't have anywhere else to go, they couldn't-" he's panting slightly, eyes blinking rapidly, and she can feel him leaning into her touch. "None one could keep me anymore. No one can ever keep me."

The food is left forgotten and she does her best to offer whatever silent comfort she can.

"I miss them," he says.

They finished their food in silence, and Selina has him take a shower, throwing his clothes in the washing machine and laying some of Henry Brick's out for when he's done. Selina sits on a bar stool in the kitchen sipping at her second beer while he showers, and tries to get her thoughts in some kind of order.

She still doesn't really know what happened with the Kid, and probably has more questions now than she did when she started talking to him. She can offer him a place to stay, and food to eat (though she's not sure he'll take the offer past tonight) but it stinks of a temporary solution. A band aid on a broken bone.

The Kid comes out, weaving slightly on his feet, and manages to just make it down onto the couch before he falls asleep, drooling on the armrest. She gets up and spreads an extra blanket over him. She has a few things to do before she goes to bed, but whatever tomorrow may bring she knows one thing for sure; sometime soon she and Bats are going to have a talk.