A/N: Yeah, I'm goin' back to back...Well, with the self-indulgent pop culture reference out of the way...
Happy New Year! Two days in a row; sorry for getting anyone's hopes up this will be a trend and not the exception. I don't know how soon I'll be able to update again. Fingers crossed for later this week, but...If you want more in 2016, please review or favorite or follow or whatever you can do to let me know! To Byzinha: you're awesome. And guest reviewer Annie C, thank you for such kind words and I hope this keeps things interesting all over again! Cheers!
Chapter 12
Captain James Gordon came in through the back entrance the next morning, slipping into his office at half past eight. He deposited his briefcase next to the desk, set his coffee mug in its spot just to the right of his blotter, and shrugged off his coat before hanging it on the rack just inside the door. He twirled the plastic rod dangling from the blinds, opening them so he could look out on Homicide and rubbed his chin.
Gordon returned to his desk and began organizing the files he intended to review that day, loosening his tie and rolling his sleeves up. He glanced up at the clock and swore colorfully. Snatching the nearly-full cup of coffee, he took a sip, winced, and left the office. Gordon took the stairs one at a time to the loft. Just as he'd done so many years before, he'd transformed the loft from overflow office space into the Strike Force command center; their daily morning briefing should have started promptly at nine, or five minutes earlier by Gordon's tally.
As he stepped into the command center, however, and set his mug on the large table dominating the center of the area, Gordon frowned and turned in a slow circle. He chewed his lip and walked over to the railing overlooking the bullpen, trying to maintain some semblance of composure.
"Alvarez!" he shouted down at the senior detective.
"Captain?"
"Have you seen Bolton this morning?"
"No, sir. I haven't seen him. Did he come in through the back door?"
Gordon glared. "Would I be asking if I knew he did?"
"Sir!" A young officer—the duty officer for the day—came racing up the same stairs Gordon himself ascended minutes earlier. He inhaled several times trying to catch his breath.
"What?!"
The young man took a half step back, his eyes wide in fear. "None of Strike Force has arrived this morning."
Gordon slowly pivoted, looking out over the precinct, nausea rising from his gut. "I've got a really bad feeling about this."
"Smells like bacon, Alfred," mumbled Bruce as he shuffled into the servant's kitchen with one eye squeezed shut and the other squinting against the cold morning sun cutting through the nook's windows.
"That would be because it is bacon, Master Bruce. Your powers of observation are astounding."
Bruce grunted and slid onto a chair at the island, blinking as he looked around slowly. He rubbed at one eye and moved the front page of the Gazette over to his seat, glancing at the headlines.
"Are you alright, sir? You seem exhausted?"
"Late night," Bruce mumbled as he flipped open the paper and began ingesting national and international headlines. Catching up on jewel heists in Gotham over the past decade lasted further into the early morning than Bruce had anticipated.
Alfred scrambled four eggs with his back to the kitchen as he sarcastically responded, "And what was it tonight? More violent rendezvouses with Miss Kyle?"
Wayne's head jerked up in surprise. "What?"
The butler turned and served Bruce a plate of piping hot eggs, bacon, and toast. "You can imagine my surprise when I made my rounds yesterday and found your clothes from two nights ago. To sate my curiosity, I went down to the cave where you'd conveniently left the video of your exploits open for anyone to see."
Bruce chewed determinedly and, bacon clasped in his other fingers, raised his index in protest. "Now hold on a second. Nobody has access to the cave."
"No, just you, Lucius, and I. Leslie might as well be given the grand tour after your little entrance the other day. And for all I know Ms. Kyle knows too."
"Selina has no idea that was me," interjected Bruce hastily.
"Besides, you're missin' the point, Master Bruce." Alfred continued undeterred. He turned off the burners and wiped his hands on a hand towel as he stared down his charge. "The point is, you cannot just go traipsing about Gotham picking fights and be so cavalier about protecting yourself and those closest to you."
Bruce bristled in his chair. "First I was 'gallivanting' and now you think I was being cavalier?"
"I know you were! You made a bloody video of yourself. What would have happened if you couldn't handle all those men? If you and Miss Kyle were captured or killed, hmm?"
"That will never happen," Bruce insisted. "None of them were a match for either of us."
"And what happens when you meet your match, Master Bruce? Or if someone thinks you're just as much a menace as those men? That's a well uncomfortable spot you've put all of us in, innit?"
Bruce tapped the tips of his fork against his plate and stared down at his half-eaten breakfast. He sighed and looked up, folding his arms on the counter. "Captain Gordon asked me to look into something for him discretely. I didn't expect to run into so much trouble."
"And what was Miss Kyle doing there?"
"I don't know." Bruce shifted and glanced up at Alfred, embarrassment and resolve competing in his expression. "You're absolutely right, Alfred. There was no way to tell whether I was in the right or wrong. I don't just want to be a symptom; I have to be a solution. A symbol of what's good in Gotham."
"There's not much that is, sir," Alfred said dryly.
"No, but," Bruce chuckled in spite of himself and shook his head. "There's enough that's worth fighting for. Do you remember…"
A chilling scream echoed through the mansion. Alfred and Bruce exchanged a worried gaze before simultaneously gasping, "Leslie!"
The two men were on the move at the same moment, Alfred leading the way up to the foyer and then down a hall to her door—and crashed through it without bothering to knock. The butler stumbled into the darkened bedroom and whirled, marking Leslie sitting in bed with a pale expression and no obvious signs of forced entry. One of the windows on the far wall appeared to be cracked slightly—the drapes blew lightly in the breeze—but there was no way someone had slipped through the narrow opening. Faint light snuck around and below the drapes bathing the whole room in grey light.
Bruce pressed into the room behind Alfred as the butler made his way over to the bedside. He sat on the edge of the bed and extended a hand out to the doctor. She took it, her hand shaking, and tried to breathe regularly.
"Everything alright, Lee?" Alfred said quietly. His look of concern deepened as she shook her head and pointed with her free hand at the corner of the ceiling behind Bruce.
"When I woke, it was rustling, trapped, in the drapes. Then it started flying around the room. I'm scared to death of them."
As Alfred leaned forward to extend a comforting hug to Leslie, Bruce Wayne was taking slow steps towards the corner of the bedroom, eyes locked on the dark patch high up on the wall. Without warning, the dark patch detached from the molding and swooped over his head. Bruce pivoted and watched as the large fruit bat flapped leathery wings and deftly maneuvered around the drape previously such an issue and disappeared out the window. He wheeled to face the two other occupants of Leslie's bedroom for a moment, his eyes burning in the bedroom's early morning half-light. The conviction and excitement rolling off him was magnetic; Alfred released Leslie and stood, following as Bruce left the room in a rush, long strides carrying him back towards the foyer—and the study on the opposite side.
"Master Bruce?" Alfred called as he stepped into the hall.
"Can you think of a better symbol for Gotham, Alfred?" Bruce yelled back, flashing a smile as he turned around.
Alfred stood straighter and clasped his hands behind his back. There was a weight of importance suspended between them he'd not felt in a long time. "No, sir."
Bruce nodded, his eager smile slipping into a serious, determined mask. "Me either." And he shut the door to the study.
There were not many areas of Gotham in which Selina felt uncomfortable, uneasy, or like she was in danger of not having the upper hand. Unfortunately, the person she wanted to talk to worked in the heart of one of those few-and-far-between areas. She walked quickly down the trash-riddled steps, descending from the elevated train platform to the street; her hands were shoved deep in her pockets, each tightly gripping a knife. When the City Council held legitimate debates about building a wall around a certain part of the city—as they had regarding Hell's Crucible the previous spring—one could never be too careful.
Selina looked either way up and down the street, and then crossed without waiting for the signal. She dodged two taxis and some older model sedans, ignored the shouts of protest as someone waiting at the light behind her was mugged, and headed up the street on the far side. At least her destination was not even a full block from the train station.
Dr. Thompkins had at least gotten that part of setting up her clinic correct: the closer to mass transportation, the better. The reinforced vertical bars on the outside of each window also seemed prudent; nevertheless, the building didn't seem quite as foreboding as it could have—Selina noted the flower arrangements in troughs beneath each window and subsequently ignored them, but she was sure they helped lend an air of welcome to the building. A small engraved plaque on the brick wall next to the front door identified it as the 'Gotham Health Clinic for High Risk Children' with the names of its two practicing doctors inscribed directly below.
As she pulled open the door and entered the clinic, she briefly considered that if this clinic were open when she was younger, she would have fallen firmly in the target audience. The thought didn't bother Selina as much as she expected it to—and her comfort was due in no small part to her relationship with the doctor herself. It certainly had nothing to do with the two burly security guards standing sentinel in the entrance. Selina crossed a small waiting room to a reception desk, bulletproof glass rising from the counter up to the ceiling to protect the young woman currently acting as the receptionist.
"I'm here to see Doc Thompkins," Selina announced without preamble, placing a hand on her hip and leaning to one side.
"Do you have an appointment or are you a walk-in?"
Selina's eyes flashed. "I'm an old friend; do you have a spot in your little book for that kind of appointment?"
The receptionist recoiled in surprise, her hand slowly creeping under the desk, ready to depress the button triggering a silent alarm if this antagonist visitor made an actual threat.
The tension in the room was diffused by a soft, amused voice calling from the entrance to a hallway behind Selina. "Old friends come with me."
Leslie waved, pleased, though Selina could still detect a slight edge to her posture, as if she wasn't completely comfortable with her surroundings.
"Hey, Lee. Friendly staff you got here."
"They can be," the doctor laughed. She guided them down the hall and into her office, which looked out into a small, overgrown courtyard behind the building. Selina walked over and gazed outside. A cracked stone fountain sat in the center of the courtyard, vines twisting around it like garrotes. The brick walls of the clinic rose imposingly around it. Leslie sat at her desk and clasped her hands. "I have high hopes we can restore the fountain. It can be beautiful again, hopefully; a symbol of the clinic itself, really."
"Broken can be beautiful," Selina said quietly and returned her focus to her host. She began walking around the room, picking up photographs and looking at different charts and posters on the walls. Their messages passed right past Selina like faceless commuters during rush hour, her inner thoughts tormented by her evening earlier in the week at The Flea, Bruce's message, Bruce's invitation to dinner, her acceptance of said invitation…She reread a line on one poster a fifth time and finally moved on from it, still distracted.
Leslie pursed her lips, aching at how the young woman in front of her sounded so resigned to that assessment. "What can I do for you today, Selina?"
"Did you know that I got stabbed once?" she asked rhetorically. Without waiting for Leslie to respond, Selina continued. "Well, more than once, I guess. But this one time it was pretty bad."
Leslie bit her tongue to keep from commenting on how heart-breaking it was that such an occurrence would seem absolutely normal for the young woman. Instead, she opted for a sympathetic, "No, you never told me that. How old were you?"
Selina shrugged nonchalantly. "It was a couple years ago. I don't really remember when, just that it was after he left."
Dr. Thompkins leaned forward, intrigued. "Selina, you didn't come here to talk about a stabbing, did you? You came about Bruce."
"I was walking home from a bar in The Narrows. And there was this group of teenagers huddled in an alley around a stray. It was meowing really loudly and it sounded distressed," Selina ran her finger along a filing cabinet and paused, picking up a photograph of Leslie, Jim, and Barbara from years earlier. "I knew I could take them, even if there were four of them and only one of me. But I had to protect the cat, and I was distracted by it for just a second…and that's all it took."
Selina put the frame down and tugged her sleeve up, revealing a pale, thin scar on her forearm. "If you care about something, if you're not looking out for number one, you get hurt."
Leslie stood and crossed, taking Selina's arm in her hands and pulling the sleeve back down, masking the scar. She didn't attempt to hug Selina in condolence, in sympathy; her first attempt at that many years before led to a bruise on her shin that didn't abate for weeks. Rather, Leslie placed a hand on Selina's shoulder and turned her slowly, encouraging her to make eye contact.
"Selina, sometimes caring about something—or someone—is the only way to look out for number one, if they care about you in return. Aren't two people looking out for you better than just one?"
The younger woman blinked and tilted her chin up, meeting Leslie's eyes with watery ones of her own. "But it's impossible to be sure they actually care. You think they do and then—then they're gone."
Dr. Thompkins shook her head, looked past Selina at the photograph of her family. "They're only gone if we forget them. Did you forget him?"
Selina sniffled and wiped a sleeve across her nose. Blinking, she fought to regain her composure as Leslie let her hand slide down and rub up and down her arm comfortingly. "You don't have to answer that if you don't want to; it was rhetorical."
"That easy to read, huh?" Selina said bitterly.
"Only because I never forgot him either."
Selina wrapped her arms around Leslie and hugged her silently. After a long moment, she detached herself and padded softly out of the office. Leslie let her leave, her feet still rooted in place as returned her gaze to the photograph. She tried to tell herself that the 'him' to which she referred to was irrelevant, but the part of her that knew better chided her for allowing Selina to think it was Bruce.
A veterinary student from Gotham University, halfway through his semester-long internship at the Gotham Zoo, walked carefully down the narrow path behind the animal enclosures, his hands full with two large buckets of water. He sidestepped two junior staff members gossiping instead of making preparations to open the park for the day and grumbled under his breath. It astounded him sometimes just how little people actually appreciated that they had a job. He would give anything to get paid for the work he was doing now, but then again, he hoped to be doing more than just feeding animals and making sure their water was refilled every morning. The intern heard a loud baying echo through the stillness of the morning before children and tourists were streaming through the park goading animals and pointing rudely. He frowned and picked up his pace.
He followed the path around a final bend and set the buckets down so he could search a large key ring for the proper key to unlock the access to a large, crater-like enclosure. The baying was closer to a cackling now and his heart rate was picking up with each reverberation of the eerie sound. With thoughts of veterinary school and white lab coats swirling darkly with visions of the violent animals calling out to one another in his daydreams, he hoisted the two buckets and stepped through the unlocked gate into the hyena enclosure.
The student happened to look up and across the top of the sunken enclosure—its rocky floor set down into the ground to allow the visitors an opportunity to look down upon the hyenas as well as to provide a verticality for the animals to explore should they choose to do so—and the sight before him stunned him. The buckets fell from his limp fingers and splashed on the dirt-stained pathway. He slowly took two steps backwards and then spun and sprinted back towards the main building.
Behind him, the hyenas continued laughing as they circled beneath the man hanging suspended above their pit, blood dripping enticingly from his GCPD Strike Force uniform to the sand beneath their paws.