Chapter 24: The Batman Who Laughs
GOTHAM PORT - ELEVEN YEARS AGO
Batman had heard of this new thief, but he'd never seen them in person before.
There had been reports of robberies. Low-level mob guys and their mistresses. Cash and jewelry. The jobs were both discrete and thorough.
Whoever did this had talent. And this talented individual would get delusions of grandeur soon enough.
Bruce Wayne was supposed to be with his girlfriend Mallory Moxon, attending the Mad Mod fashion show at the Tynion Ballroom on Fourth, but he spotted out of the corner of his eye on the way over, a silhouette in the rain standing atop one of the boats in the port. He called Mallory, and said he wouldn't be able to make it.
And he would be tending to this mission solo. Dick Grayson had a Social Studies test in the morning.
As Batman, he watched the silhouette nimbly hop from yacht to yacht and break into, of all ships, the Lysistrata , which was owned by Mallory.
He was standing on the deck when the silhouette's owner emerged from the cabin, crawling up what appeared to be a bullwhip.
It was a woman.
And she was dressed in a skintight cat costume.
Lightning flashed behind him, sending his own silhouette as his vanguard. This "Catwoman" rounded at him and gasped.
"Batman!"
The moon shone directly in her face, and showed him she was beautiful. Full lips beneath black lipstick, high sharp cheekbones, and vivid green eyes.
"I've had my eye on you," he said. "You were the one who stole jewelry out of Rita Nunzio's apartment three months ago."
Catwoman sneered. "That jewelry didn't look good on her anyway."
"This doesn't fit your MO."
"I have an MO?"
"Everyone has an MO," Batman said. "I was more than willing to let you go on your way, so long as you were targeting other criminals. But you're here tonight taking something that doesn't belong to you."
He stepped toward her. He could see that she was breathing heavily.
"You have one chance to return what you stole," he said. "After that, you're just one more criminal I have to deal with."
Catwoman's lower lip thrust up in an open-mouthed scowl. Her green eyes narrowed in anger.
Fight or Flight?
"Listen, freak," Catwoman said, bringing her shoulders back. "I'm no one's just one more anything. And if you want this ugly, tacky crap…"
Flight.
"...you're just gonna have to catch me."
His hand was already on his utility belt when Catwoman broke for it. He fired his grapnel gun into the pale wood of the deck, and launched himself off the yacht.
Batman glided across the dock as Catwoman made it to the stairs leading up to the street. He launched his grapnel at the archway to give himself more altitude.
He made it up to street level, high above the assorted citizens having left the seven o'clock screenings of whatever movies they had gone to see, and saw Catwoman jump onto a parked car, and use her bullwhip to swing onto a moving bus. She threw the whip to the roof, scrambled up the side, and stood, a goofy grin on her face, impressing even herself with the neat maneuver she had just pulled off.
Catwoman wobbled slightly, hunching over a few inches, no doubt to maintain her balance on the moving vehicle...
...but, to Batman, it almost looked as though she was going to take a bow.
And the image, the very notion, of Catwoman taking a bow, accepting plaudits and laurels from her audience of zero in appreciation for her marvelous feat of daring, ingenuity, and acrobatics… triggered something in Batman. Something that he thought not possible on this night, on this mission, in this life, in this costume.
For Batman… laughed.
It tore out of his belly, charged up his throat, and surfaced from his mouth in a rampage. It was the kind of sudden, unexpected laugh that blasts through all veneer of manners and flimsy preconceptions of self. For Batman, who used his deep voice to intimidate and frighten, had an embarrassingly high-pitched laugh. A little more than elfin, but a little less than girlish.
He let out three sudden, shrill "HA!" s, and when he breathed in again, he clamped his mouth down in an exaggerated, showy frown, as though his face was making a grand display to his greater self that no further displays of flippancy or frivolousness would be escaping his mouth this evening.
Catwoman jumped from the bus to a fire escape on a small office building, and he knew she was going to climb her way to the roof.
Batman hooked a traffic light to give himself a bit more altitude, and glided around to the other side of the building.
He hooked to the side of the roof and rose. He saw a water tower beneath him, and the shape of Catwoman looked up. He glided the entire length of the rooftop and made landfall, kicking up gravel all over her.
He stood up straight, and surveyed her.
"The jewelry," he said. "Now."
The expression on her face didn't match the stance of her body. Her face was defiance herself, the rain pouring down her goggles as she slightly bared her teeth. But she was one unsightly case of knocking-knees away from broadcasting utter terror with the rest of her frame.
"You say I steal from criminals," she said with derision. "I just steal from people who have more than me."
"That's not an excuse."
Catwoman shifted her goggles to her forehead.
"Are you prepared to hit a woman to get Mallory Moxon's crap back for her?"
"Not first," Batman said.
Looking back on this night years later, he would consider this the one and only out-and-out lie he had ever told Selina Kyle.
He had fought women before. In fact, he had put Query (of Echo and Query, henchwomen of The Riddler) in the hospital with a broken jaw after she tried to kill Robin with an ancient Celtic battle axe during one of Nygma's museum heists.
That was the thing, though. Query held lethal intent. Catwoman, apparently, did not. She was dressed for stealth and speed. Her weapon, the bullwhip on her hip, he had only seen used for infiltration and traversal. Unless she had poisons or acids hidden somewhere on her form-fitting attire, Batman deduced that she operated in a manner that almost required violence of any kind be a last resort.
It was more than that, though.
It was less than that, though.
Catwoman gave Batman the first genuine, loud, spontaneous laugh he'd had in what must have been years, and he didn't want to hurt her.
He would if he had to. Otherwise, it was poor payment.
Catwoman smirked. "You can't believe everything you hear on the street… 'Cause they said you were smart."
He heard the click of claws extending from the tips of her gloves.
She swung at him.
And the eleven year epic of flirtation and pain, tension, and regret between Batman and Catwoman truly began in earnest.
Violence is a form of communication. It declares intent. It bespeaks a mindset. It tells a story.
And oh, what he learned about Catwoman.
Moving fluidly between fists and raindrops, he saw how well trained she was, but she fought as though she had something to prove. As though she was trying to escape from something. But not to something. The look in her eyes, the broad passion in each of her movements, spoke of someone trying to outrun a great and widening chasm in the earth, threatening to swallow her whole.
And yet, ironically, she needed to improve her footwork. Longer strides would have meant that she would have actually landed a blow during this encounter.
Catwoman lived and died in every punch and kick, and as her movement told him her story, a warmth rose in his chest. A realization became more and more apparent, and it made him feel strange.
This was fun.
Not the low and mean kind of satisfaction that he took with levelling someone who deserved it. Not the smug delight of winning, be it a fight or a bet or some foolish game that others among the wealthy elite expected him to play.
This was edifying. This was illuminating. He'd say it was joyous, but he hadn't felt something that pure in so long that the sensation would have been unfamiliar to him. This was someone declaring how alive they were to him.
This was dancing with a beautiful woman in the rain.
Catwoman went for her whip. Fearing the spell she had on him would break, he retrieved a Batarang form his utility belt, and launched it, severing the whip before it came down.
She screamed and charged him, claw held above her head, hoping to slash him to pieces.
He waited until the last possible second before he ducked out of the way of the one-woman stampede. His speed and alacrity allowed him to pilfer the belt of jewelry from her waist, but also to handcuff her to the water tower in one swift and decisive motion.
The night ended.
The spell broke.
She was a criminal.
And he was Batman.
He held up the belt full of jewelry. She tried charging at him again, only to see that she was held back by the cuffs. The rage on her face depleted instantly, replaced by a stunned wonder.
"How?" Catwoman asked, her jaw hanging open.
And the only thing Batman could say to her was:
"The police will be here shortly."
Batman turned and walked away, letting his breath out through his nose in a slow, glum sigh.
He leapt from the roof, and grapneled away.
Batman didn't get far, just two blocks, before he ducked behind a rooftop billboard advertising Soder Cola. He put his hand against the rear of the billboard, out of anyone's view, and leaned on it, trying to puzzle what all of this meant.
One of his problems that he knew about, but only vaguely, was honesty. He could be secretive with Alfred and Dick to keep them out of danger, hoping to keep them from the fallout of whatever or danger or travesty that could remotely befall Batman and Robin in a given day. But this deficiency of honesty, he knew, could spread even to himself. He'd a habit of hypocrisy that he was completely unaware of, until he was rightfully, sometimes painfully, called on it.
But in the years that followed, after he had learned who Selina Kyle was, where she came from, how she came up in the world, after the continuous game of nudges toward revelation they would eventually engage in for almost a decade, there was one fact that he was honest with himself about, no matter how much it made him feel immature and small and sentimental.
Every time he met Selina past this point, he had been trying to get this night back.
His self-loathing halted him. His responsibilities stymied him. But he wanted someone to express themselves so fully to him like Catwoman just had. To declare their humanity in such broad ways.
Batman wiped some rain from his face.
When he was a boy, he became obsessed with a movie. While his rich friends wore out their VHS copies of Star Wars, young Bruce Wayne had found in their tape library a copy of The Mark of Zorro from 1940. Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, and starring Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone.
There were weird blips in the tape at regular intervals, which lead Bruce to believe that his father Thomas had had Alfred tape the movie off of the Late Late Show, and pause the recording during the commercial breaks, only to start it up again when the movie came back on.
He didn't share this with his friends. He didn't go to their mansions, tape in hand, and tell them about the cool thing he saw. It would make it less his.
And the person who watched The Mark of Zorro the most with young Bruce was his mother Martha.
They must have watched it countless times. And every time the ninety-four minute feature ended, Martha would turn to Bruce and say:
"Alright, we watched your movie, and now we have to watch mine."
And so Martha Wayne subjected her son to all one-hundred seventy minutes of My Fair Lady.
Bruce loathed the film with the kind of intensity only found in a certain strain of self-serious young boys. The Bruce of the present, however, tried to watch it every year. Always by himself.
But even then, when he hated the movie, there was one song in its interminable runtime that always wormed itself into his head, so much so that he went up to his room to blast whatever was on the radio through his headphones to clean his brain out.
And Batman, having shared in the life of Catwoman on a rainy rooftop, had that song in his head now.
He didn't sing the title, no, but he spoke it. In a voice so soft only ghosts could hear.
"I Could Have Danced All Night..."
SELINA KYLE'S HARLOW STREET APARTMENT BUILDING - NOW
She was wrong.
She was so wrong.
Catwoman thought Poison Ivy sucked up all of Scarecrow's fear gas in that slaughterhouse.
But it must have worked on a time delay, or something.
Batman was bleeding to death at her feet, and it was the scariest thing she could think of.
She was paralyzed for a few seconds as Batman tried to get back up again. The thump on the floor when he failed convinced her she needed a second opinion. She ran to her apartment door five feet away, and started banging on the door.
"STEPHANIE, IT'S ME, OPEN UP!"
She kept hammering on it with her fist until it opened.
Stephanie, in a pair of Selina's gym shorts and her Fiona Apple shirt, her hair in a ponytail behind her, squinted.
"Where have you-"
Catwoman cut her off. She pointed down the hall to the seriously wounded Dark Knight on the floor, and said "Tell me you see that!"
Stephanie's eyes scanned the floor, then went wide.
"Ho ly shit, it's Batman!"
Catwoman sighed for what little relief she could get at the moment.
"Come on," she said, "help me get him inside."
Catwoman and Stephanie walked down the hall, and each took one of Batman's arms. Stephanie had the bad luck of grabbing the left arm that had the bullet in the shoulder, and Batman groaned at her touch.
"Oh, Jesus," Stephanie said.
"He's in plate armor," Catwoman said. "I can't do this by myself. And for the love of God, don't puke."
They both drug him into the open apartment, Stephanie grunting as she did so. Batman left a trail of blood on the hallway carpet.
And Selina's living room carpet.
And Selina's bedroom carpet.
"We're almost done," Catwoman said. "Now lift with your legs…"
Catwoman and Stephanie finally managed to get Batman's upper torso onto Selina's queen-sized bed. They pushed his lower torso up the rest of the way.
Both women had sweat pouring from their foreheads, due to both exertion and shock.
"Go on into the living room," Catwoman said. "I'll be out when I'm done."
Stephanie wordlessly nodded, and left.
"Shut the door," Catwoman said.
And Stephanie did.
Catwoman peeled off her gloves, leaving them on the floor as she tore into the bathroom. She washed her hands thoroughly, before she bent down and opened the cabinet beneath the sink. She rummaged past the toilet paper rolls, past the tampons, past the spare thing of Nutrogena, until she came up with her first aid kit.
This would not be the first time she removed a bullet from a body.
It would, however, be the first time she removed a bullet from a body that wasn't her own.
She reached into the cabinet and got her bag of cotton balls before she went back into the bedroom. In case she ran out of gauze.
Catwoman dropped the cotton and the kit on the bed next to Batman, who was breathing heavily and sweating profusely, in addition to bleeding profusely.
She leaned over and removed his gauntlets. She worked the plates on his arm guards, removing them. She found the latches on his chest plate, removing the front. She had to work him up, through pained protestations, to get the back piece of his torso armor connected to the cape off of him, and on the the floor with the rest of it.
That just left the blood-drenched black t-shirt beneath the armor…
...and the cowl.
Catwoman peeled off her own cowl, along with her goggles, and threw them over near the dresser. She opened the kit, and fished out a small pair of scissors. She cut up the front of the t-shirt, and along the arms, opening it all the way up, leaving him bare chested.
Her hands, stained with his blood, reached for his cowl. And his hands grabbed her by the wrists.
"I just need to-"
He held her wrists tighter.
She looked at him.
Slight dimple to the chin.
Square jaw.
Lips a bit on the southern side of full.
Yeah… Yeah, it's him.
Selina leaned over him, and put her lips to the right side of the cowl where his right ear would be. She whispered harshly:
"Bruce…"
He stopped struggling.
"Either I take it off," Selina said, "or you do."
His own fingers pressed plates on the side of the cowl, and they slid outward with a mechanical whine.
He took it off.
And this is how, for the first time in her life, she saw Batman become Bruce Wayne.
His face was slathered in sweat, and his cobalt blue eyes were half closed.
Selina leaned over and examined the actual bullet wound. It looked worse than it actually was. It didn't hit anything, the bullet itself embedded mere centimeters below the flesh, so shallow that she could actually see it. It may have bypassed the armor, but the material between the joints must have dulled the impact.
It was just going to be a flesh wound, but he was going to be low at least two pints of blood.
She got the bottle of disinfectant out of the kit, unscrewed the bottle, and looked at Bruce.
His pained eyes lolled over to her.
"I… am so sorry," he said.
Selina blinked. There were more delicate ways to do this.
Screw it.
She dumped half the bottle into Bruce's bullet wound. He groaned through clenched teeth.
Serves you right, you prick.
Selina got up and went to the dresser, setting the open bottle of disinfectant down on the top. She opened the top drawer.
The drawer she had specifically told Stephanie not to open.
After she did her six months in Blackgate, she went back to the rooftop of the office building where she had first met Batman. She looked over what she could see of this patch of Miagani Island and tried to reason out what it all meant. Being Catwoman, for the few months it had lasted, was the first time in the life of Selina Kyle that she had felt true power or freedom. There were no limits to going wherever she wanted. No boundaries to stealing something expensive and shiny.
And she'd gone to prison for it.
So was the good feeling she'd had being a masked cat burglar worth the potential downside?
As she scanned the rooftop, she saw something buried in the gravel near the water tower.
In the six months she had been away, no one had bothered to remove from the scene the Batarang that Batman had used to sever her bullwhip.
It was larger than the ones he'd later use: about half the size of an actual boomerang, and sharp, but not the modified shurikens that he'd utilize in the future.
She'd picked it up, examined it, checked its weight and its balance.
If Batman can go wherever he wants and do whatever he wants, why can't I?
Holding this Batarang, she'd decided to be Catwoman as long as she possibly could.
And this Batarang was the one and only occupant of this top drawer of her dresser. She'd kept if for ten and a half years.
She retrieved it, and walked over to the bed. She found a suitably blunt edge, and held it over Bruce's mouth.
"Bite," she said. "This is gonna suck."
Bruce bit down on the Batarang.
Selina sat back down on the bed, and got a pair of scissor-like surgical clamps out of her kit. She leaned over, dug in, and plucked the bullet out of the wound.
Bruce grunted around the batarang.
More blood flowed onto the patch of clean skin made by the disinfectant, but that couldn't be helped.
Selina took the Batarang out of Bruce's mouth. She threw it into the wall for shits and giggles.
She chucked the bullet onto the floor as she delved into her kit for the stitches, the curved needle, and driver. It took her a bit to get everything set to go, before she leaned over the slowly oozing wound and got in close.
"Se-"
"Shut up, I'm trying to concentrate."
The process took two minutes that felt like two hours. Bruce breathed heavily through clenched teeth the entire time.
Now that the stitching was over, she got back up, got the bottle of disinfectant from the dresser, and carefully poured some disinfectant onto a gauze swab, before doing secondary clean-up on the area.
"I thought you had a little belt that had all sorts of little goodies in there that could take care of this for you."
"I did," Bruce said, finally breathing normally. "Man-Bat got it off me."
"I thought the belt was electric, though. Shocked anybody but you."
"That," Bruce said, "would create more problems than it solves."
As she applied the bandage to the stitched-up wound, and applied a wrap all the way around the shoulder itself, Bruce asked:
"How did you find out?"
"Talia," Selina replied with no tone in her voice.
Bruce said nothing
"Y'know, Sailor," Selina said, "only you could put me in a love triangle where I'm the good girl."
"How did you escape her?"
Selina stopped what she was doing, and looked at him. "Escape her? I won, you jackass."
"Oh," Bruce said. "You improved your footwork. Good."
She remembered the full-on, open-mouthed, wide-eyed Home Alone Macauley Culkin look Talia had on her face when Selina kicked her in the crotch.
Selina smirked, and said "Yes... Yes I did."
The area of the wound was clean, stitched and bandaged. The rest of him, however, was still a bloody mess.
She wordlessly got up and left the bedroom for the living room, quickly closing the door behind her.
Stephanie was at the sink, hands in the pockets of Selina's gym shorts, apparently wondering just what the hell it was she was supposed to do.
"Done?" Stephanie asked?
"No," Selina said. "Move please."
Stephanie moved away from the sink. Selina bent over and got a mop bucket from beneath.
She went into the bedroom again, walked into the bathroom, and filled the mop bucket with hot water. While it was filling, she got a few towels off of the rack.
Towels and water in hand, she sat back down on the bed again. She dunked a towel in the water, and began cleaning Bruce off.
The display of taut, hard muscle on the upper body of Bruce Wayne did not go unappreciated by her, film of blood, or no film of blood.
Jesus, she thought. I can't stop being Selina Kyle for ten seconds, can I?
It was only after she had made some headway toward cleaning him off that she saw the scars.
Cuts, slashes, slices, burns of both the fire and acid variety. The number and variety of them, all faded save for the new bullet wound, made her want to cringe. And his handsome face was totally unblemished. The public face and the body that face belonged to lived completely different lives.
Selina wanted to say something right now. Needed to. But all she could settle on was:
"Y'know… Harley really liked that circus musical you were in."
Bruce looked at her, brow lowered in confusion.
Selina looked back down at the work she was doing.
"Finding out Bruce Wayne is Batman, is like… i dunno… the opposite of finding out Superman is just some schmuck with a day job."
Bruce didn't say anything. The look on his face, in fact, told her that he was being quite loud about not saying anything.
Selina stopped wiping him down. "Superman's just some schmuck with a day job, isn't he?"
"I won't tell you who he is," Bruce said, "but yes."
"You could just lie about who he is," Selina said, continuing her work. "Worked great for you so far."
"I didn't lie to you," Bruce said.
"Bull shit. Lies of omission are still lies."
Bruce sighed. "If I didn't catch you that first time, if Catwoman never got arrested and had her identity revealed to the public, you wouldn't have tried to protect that secret?"
Selina didn't say anything. He had her there, but she wasn't about to tell him that.
"I hid things from you," Bruce said. "But I never lied. I won't lie to you."
"Won't or can't?"
Bruce lifted his head up off the pillow slightly. "I know there's a difference, but I'm not detecting what you mean."
"Can you not lie to me because you don't lie to anyone," Selina asked, "or can you not lie to me because I'm me?"
"The second one."
"Oh, well aren't I special?"
"Yes."
Selina glanced at him without the expression on her face changing. She started wiping him down near his waistline.
"Okay, Mister Won't-Lie-to-Me… What's the most irritating thing about Superman?"
"Whenever he's out in the field with the Justice League," Bruce said, "and he becomes Superman, he always has me mail his street clothes back to him in Metropolis."
Selina smiled at this. "And he wants to pay you back?"
"Yes," Bruce said. "Jokes on him, though. I just use four dollars in stamps every time. No priority mail, no Fed Ex."
"Can't he just fly over and pick up his clothes?"
"He keeps forgetting. He's Superman. He's busy."
"And you can't just fly his clothes over to him?"
"Then he'd try to pay for the helicopter fuel."
Selina forced her smile back down. "Okay… What's the most annoying thing about Wonder Woman?"
Bruce exhaled through his nose. "Whenever someone asks me how my life is, Diana is the only one who still looks sad when I tell them."
Selina tilted her head.
"The only thing I do in my free time is this," Bruce said, "and the only person in my life is my butler, who helps me do this. People in my line of work who hear it enough times, they get the point or stop asking. But Diana still asks… and still looks sad. It makes me feel… I don't know."
Selina didn't want the conversation to get this dour just quite yet.
"What's the most annoying thing about… Aquaman?"
Bruce's brow flattened. His eyes hardened. And he said, with the grim tone of a man who faces the most outlandish evil on a daily basis:
"He's a fan of the New England Patriots."
"Oh," Selina said. "Ew."
"If it were possible for everyone in the Justice League to take a sabbatical on the first day of January, and come back in the middle of February after the Super Bowl is over, we'd do it."
Selina tossed the wet towel she had in her hand through the bedroom, and onto the bathroom floor, where it landed with a thick splat. Then she got another towel to dry him off.
"Who's the last person you slept with?"
A pause. "Talia al Ghul."
"I figured," Selina said quickly. "How long ago was that?"
"Eight years ago," Bruce said.
Selina stopped drying him off. She looked at him as though he'd admitted to a diagnosis of projectile leprosy.
"Eight years?"
Bruce nodded.
"Wow. I… Wow. I thought I had it bad not getting it in six months. How-How close have you gotten to sleeping with someone in the past eight years?"
"Diana."
"And how close was that?"
"Nowhere near," Bruce said. "We were close to dating, though."
"Then what happened?"
"We got really far apart from dating."
"Uh-huh," Selina said. "So all those times Bruce Wayne showed up at parties with socialites and models and shit, that was an act."
"Yes."
"And Bruce Wayne stopped dating three years ago because you weren't Batman anymore, and you didn't need to keep the act up.."
"Yes."
"Uh-huh," Selina said again, and decided that this painful and private revelation on the part of Bruce Wayne was the absolute perfect time to start screwing with him.
"Shame I can't say the same thing," Selina said.
Bruce looked at her.
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, you didn't know?" Selina asked. "I've been running through superheroes like Spinal Tap goes through drummers. You'd think the World's Greatest Detective would have caught something like that."
"Like who?" Bruce asked.
Selina picked a name out of a hat.
"Nightwing."
Selina didn't know what the reaction would be. But she did not expect that said reaction would be this sudden, or loud.
Bruce… laughed.
She had heard Bruce laugh before. It was kind of a quiet, wheezy thing. But this was something different altogether. It was high, and…
...and creepy.
There was something else, though. She threw the towel on the floor, thinking Screw it, let him air-dry.
"And what, may I ask, is so Goddamn funny?"
"Nightwing," Bruce said through his laughter, "is… is the first Robin!"
Selina blinked.
"He'd.. He'd have thought it was so weird!"
The first thing that occurred to Selina was Bruce's use of the term "first Robin." Thus meaning there was a second Robin, and that he was the one who was murdered by The Joker.
The second thing that occurred to her was something altogether scarier.
"Oh my God," Selina said.
Bruce laughed.
"Do you have any idea how close I came to grabbing the first Robin's ass when he showed up here a few days ago?" Selina asked. She held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart. "This close!"
Bruce laughed harder.
"It's not funny!"
Bruce rode through his laughter long enough to say "Yes it is!"
As Bruce laughed himself out, Selina looked away at the wall, the expression on her face matching the thought in her head.
Are we that old?
And Bruce, to his credit, seemed to sense this.
Laughs subsiding, smile coming back to normal, he looked at her.
"You know," Bruce said, "Wonder Woman asked if you were seeing anyone."
Selina looked at him, her face lightening. "Really?"
"I won't lie to you, remember?"
A smile curled across her lips. "What did she say about me?"
He did an impression of Wonder Woman. Not using his voice, but rather using his head and his eyes.
"'No wonder she took up so much of your time. She's elegant, and… earthy at the same time. I can't quite explain it.' Diana said she was just teasing me. Funny thing is, though, she's not one to lie, even for a joke."
Selina was still smiling.
So of course, she had to ruin it.
She gradually stopped smiling. Her eyes lost their light to sadness.
"Did you ever love me?" Selina asked. "At all?"
The eye contact Bruce held with her had its own backbone.
Without hesitation, Bruce Wayne told Selina Kyle "Yes. With all my heart, from almost the first moment I saw you."
Selina closed her eyes, and let that wash over her. She believed him. She didn't feel the need for him to clarify if it was lust. Or infatuation. Or paternal bullshit. No. It was love. It carried on his voice. It had the kind of ache to it that evaded simile or comparison.
With her eyes still closed, Selina said: "I spent three… long… years hating you for vanishing without saying goodbye. I thought I meant more to you than that."
She opened her eyes to look at him. His brows were steepled with concern.
"But… six months after you vanish, I decide to start my own business, and none other than Bruce Wayne is my first customer. Tells the world about me, and makes me a millionaire. Batman tells me I have more to offer the world than a life of crime, and the second I decide to humor him, Bruce Wayne helps me see it through."
She felt tears pricking the back of her eyes. "I was angry at you for three years for leaving me, but… You didn't leave me at all, did you Sailor? You were there the whole time. And... I'm still pissed at you, because I can't stop my emotions on a dime, but..."
Selina blinked. One tear fell down her cheek. She leaned over him.
"Why the hell didn't you say anything?" Selina asked.
"I told-"
"No," Selina said. "No, not before. After. After you stopped being Batman, and I stopped being Catwoman. For two and a half years, we were free and clear. You can't say you did it to protect me, because there was nothing to protect me from. We've lost so much time! I… Jesus, Bruce, I almost got married! And-And if you love me the way you say you do, the way you sound like you do, that must have killed you inside!"
Bruce closed his eyes.
"I was so happy when you found Josh," he said. "And I was so sad when it didn't work out between you two."
Selina opened her mouth in confusion.
Bruce used his good arm to bring himself into a sitting position. Selina didn't even try to stop him. He sat up, looking down, but they were at such odd positions on the bed, he wound up just looking at her shoulder.
"Nightwing," Bruce said. "The first Robin. His parents were murdered right in front of him. Same as me. Felt the same need for vengeance, for justice, for closure as I did… A few years after I took him in, when he was still Robin, I offered to adopt him. 'Offered,' I wanted to adopt him."
He looked into her eyes. "He said no. He said… that he was still his mother's son. I can't blame him for that, because if the roles were reversed, I'd have said no too, said the same thing, and this is something else he and I have in common. And… And in the simple process of just being myself, I drove him away. Away from Gotham. Away from being Robin. And after that, things… changed."
Bruce adjusted himself on the bed. "When he was Robin, working with the Titans, he was moody. He was secretive. He was controlling. But when he became Nightwing, he was-and this is a quote from Donna Troy- 'a lot less of an asshole.'"
A gust of breath escaped Selina Kyle in a flimsy approximation of a laugh.
"He moved to Bludhaven," Bruce said. "He started living independently. He has a woman he loves, who loves him back, and they can't keep their damned hands off of each other. This life hasn't done to him what it did to me. He's… he's amazing."
He broke eye contact, and looked back at her shoulder again.
"I'm so proud of him, and I can't tell him that. I'm afraid I'll draw him back in, and things will get worse. That I'll get him the same kind of dirty and broken that I get everyone else. So... can you really blame me if I wanted you at a distance? If I wanted you to stay away? Your happiness matters to me, Selina. It matters so much, and..."
Bruce closed his eyes, and leaned back down on the bed, his head hitting the pillow. He turned his head the other way, eyes still closed, toward the opposite wall.
"Everyone's happier the further they are away from me."
Selina's breath escaped her slowly. She just had to look at Bruce to know that the evening's conversation was over.
She started clean up, gathering the discarded resources from her first aid kit, throwing away what needed throwing away and putting back what needed put back. She threw the wet, bloody towels in the hamper, and put the clean ones she hadn't used yet back in the bathroom. She dumped the mop bucket of bloody water down the drain in the bathtub.
Selina walked over to her dresser. She opened the bottom drawer and pulled out a pair of gray sweatpants. She opened the second drawer and got a pair of black underwear. She dipped into the closet, found a red and black flannel shirt, and went into the bathroom.
She put her fresh clothes on the toilet lid. She took off her boots, and stripped off her Catsuit, as well as the sports bra and underwear underneath.
Examining herself in the bathroom mirror, Selina surveyed the damage today had done to her.
There was a ribbon of raw skin around her throat from when Talia strangled her with her own whip. The fight proper gave her a bruise along her left cheekbone, and a small cut above her left eyebrow. And yeah, there was the slash on her left forearm from when Talia used the whip on her, but Scarecrow stitched that one up.
Her leap from an imploding building into another left her with an ugly bruise on her right shoulder blade, and an even uglier bruise on the back of her right thigh.
All things considered, things could have been much worse. She stepped into the shower under water as hot as she could handle, and cleaned herself up while trying to think of nothing at all.
Her Catsuit piled into a corner of the bathroom, fresh clothes on her back, Selina stepped back into the bedroom, her bare feet padding along the carpet.
Bruce was asleep. The bed was wet and bloody anyway, so he could have it.
As she snuck to the door and turned off the light, Selina thought to herself that he must not have slept in days.
She closed the bedroom door behind her, stepped to one side of the blood stain that Batman left on the living room carpet, and sat cross-legged against the wall, staring off into space.
Selina heard someone coming toward her.
Stephanie Brown was standing above her, holding the bottle of Stolichnaya that she kept in the freezer.
She held it out to Selina, and asked "Boy trouble?"
Selina looked at the bottle, then at Stephanie, and thought to herself To Hell with it, it'll help me sleep.
She took the bottle as Stephanie sat down next to her.
Selina took a swig. She winced as it went down hard.
"Yes," Selina said. "I mean, don't say it like that, but yes."
"My dad was Cluemaster," Stephanie said. "He said if any hero were gonna gonna get with any villain, it'd be Batman to Catwoman."
Stephanie took the bottle from Selina. "My dad was smart," Stephanie said. "He was an idiot, but… he was smart."
She brought the bottle to her lips, but Selina put her hand over the mouth and stopped her. Stephanie looked back at her with surprise.
"What?"
"You're how old?" Selina asked.
"Oh, c'mon," Stephanie said. "Don't tell me you weren't drinking at seventeen."
"You wanna join the Broken-Down Supervillain Club?"
"No," Stephanie said, "I wanna join the Millionaire Hottie With A Superhero In Her Bed Club. Gimme."
Stephanie moved the bottle out from under Selina's hand, and took a swig of vodka. Selina caught herself thinking If you puke or spit it out, I'll lose whatever respect I had for you.
She did neither. Stephanie held a grimace for a couple of seconds, but she opened her eyes wide, flashed a brilliant smile, and said "Ahhhhhhhhh," like she was in an old Coke commercial.
Through such gestures lifelong friendships can be forged, and Selina Kyle found her self suddenly and genuinely liking Stephanie Brown.
Stephanie handed the bottle back. Selina palmed it, and felt the cold spread to her hand.
"If you really want a half-dead, bloody superhero with extreme self-worth issues, he's in there," Selina said. "I mean, don't, because he's twice your age, but…"
Selina shrugged, and took a swig.
"Dude, please," Stephanie said. "If I got my nurse game on with a superhero, I'd have no problems after that. If this goes tits up, it is so, so, so on you."