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Konnichi-wa Minna-san Chapter 4 is up so start
reading and start reviewing and if you do as I've said you'll get a nice
surprise in the next chapter but I'm not going to tell who its gonna be.
Bruce rang the doorbell a third time and barely suppressed a
frustrated growl.
Bruce stared at the window the girl called Helena - the girl Barbara had said was his daughter had just left through, his face unreadable. "My daughter?" He echoed Barbara's words.
Barbara nodded and tucked a stray strand of red hair behind an ear. "Yeah; Helena's your daughter."
"Who is her mother?" Bruce asked. There weren't that many women he had been close enough to, to produce a child and he was curious as to who was this girls mother.
"Selena."
Bruce felt like he had just stopped breathing. For a split second her face flashed before his eyes and he shoved it away. "Selena?" He could barely keep his voice from shaking.
"She never told you. She didn't want Helena to get hurt. If people knew that she was Batman's *and* Catwoman's daughter she would have been made a target to be used to get to the both of you."
"So that's why she left New Gotham." Bruce said.
"Pardon?" Barbara asked inquiringly.
"One day Selena was in Gotham... the next she wasn't. She completely disappeared. I didn't hear from her for... months. She didn't come back until several years had passed and never left a contact number or where she was located. She would always just call me up out of the blue with no warning at all and I could never trace the call."
"From what Helena had told me, she and Selena moved around quite a lot. Catwoman herself had many enemies and even without your presence it would have been hard for Selena to keep Helena completely safe."
"She never told me that she had a child. That *we* had a child." Bruce murmured again barely his voice barely audible yet Barbara heard each word clearly.
"She never told Helena either that you were her father or that you were Batman and that she was Catwoman. She was killed in front of Helena's eyes Bruce. It was only as she lay dying that she told Helena who she and you were."
Bruce closed his eyes wearily. It must be his curse. Both he and his daughter - how strange those words sounded - had watched their parents die in front of them.
"What happended after that?" He asked.
"You had left the city; and Helena came to live with me. She was a teenager at the time. I started training her as a crime fighter. She's twenty three now. She's a metahuman - well half metahuman by the way. Runs on Selena's side." Barbara stopped for a moment. "She's very good Bruce. Very good. But she's inexprienced and still untrained and she needs to learn to control her impulses and think things through before she does something."
"Where does she live?" Bruce asked suddenly changing the subject.
"An apartment in the North side of New Gotham. A street called Gawadir Drive."
"Thanks," Bruce rose to his feet.
"You're going to try to talk to her? I better come too." Barbara moved the wheelchair to follow him but Bruce stopped her.
"No I need to do this on my own." He told her firmly.
For a split second Barbara saw the old Bruce resurface from beneath the layers of pain and grief that had consumed him in the past seven years. She nodded. "All right then. She lives in the white apartment - you can't miss it all the others are red and her apartment number is 314."
"Thanks again." Bruce moved toward the door.
"Bruce?" Barbara said softly. She saw him halt mistep. "Good luck. Helena... she might not be in the best of moods. I'm just going to warn you."
A small grin appeared on Bruce's face for a brief fleeting instant. "I'll consider myself warned then." He closed the door behind him.
As she opened the door Helena had expected to see Barbara and her father. She instead saw no sign of Barbara and only her father.
Upon seeing him she started to close the door but Bruce stopped her with one of his hands.
"What do you want?" Helena asked shrewishly.
"To talk." Bruce replied simply.
"How wonderful for you." Helena said sarcastically. "I don't want to."
"Helena." Bruce said softly almost pleadingly.
"Yeah, that's my name, glad you know it. Amazing, considering you didn't even know you had a daughter."
Bruce refused to let it show how much her words hurt him. "Helena I *am* going to come insdie and talk to you." He shoved against the door forcing Helena to take a step back and allow him inside.
"You know I could call the police and get you arrested for breaking and entering." She grumbled but made no move to force him out.
"Would you now?" Bruce asked, he seemed amused and Helena felt her hackles raise.
"Yes." She snapped and stalked over to the phone and picked it up. She didn't dial the numbers and just stood there for a moment holding it in he hand. With an aggravated snarl she slammed it down on the holder causing it to jump.
"Say what you've come to say and *leave*." Helena put extra emphasis on the last word and stood in front of him her arms folded across her chest and her back rigid straight.
Bruce didn't reply at first and sat down in one fo Helena's mohogany chairs ( her *favorite* chair Helena noted peevishly), and just sat there for a minute or two just watching her and trying to sort out his thoughts.
She was his daughter. He thought half in awe.
It struck him how much she acted like him, at least how he had acted somewhat when he had been her age. She looked like him also, she had his coloring the black hair and ice blue eyes. But at the she had a lot of her mother's mannerisms and expressions. Helena was a mix of them both.
Him and Selena.
Barbara had told him that she was twenty three. That meant she had been what? Fifteen? Almost sixteen - when her mother - Selena - had been killed and right in front of her too.
Twenty three years of her life he had missed out on. Though he understood why Selena had hid Helena, from him, he still felt slightly angry. Helena as the daughter of Catwoman and Batman would have been made a target. A tool to be used against them both.
"Selena - your mother - never told me about you. If I *had* known about you this would have been different."
"My mother never told me alot of things. That my father was Bruce Wayne . That my father was Batman." Theer was bitterness there and also a lot of sadness too Bruce noted. She had loved her mother very much.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a pictureframe ontop of a small table near the center of the room they were in. The picture showed a younger Helena and Selena. In the photo Helena looked to be about thirteen, her black hair was longer than it was now and was french braided. Helena and Selena were both eating ice cream and laughing. Helena had chocolate and Selena had vanilla. It was a close shot so their faces filled up the photo.
"I loved her Helena." Bruce said tearing his gaze away from the picture and back onto Helena.
"And because of you she's dead." The change in Helena's mood was swift and sudden. Quickly destroying the slight connection they had made. "Because of you my mother's dead." Helena repeated. "Because of you she was killed by the Joker's lackey. Because of you there was *nothing* *I* could have done to save her!"
Helena blamed him, Bruce thought sadly. But at the same time she also blamed herself. He didn't know which was worse.
"Helena there was nothing you could have done." Bruce ment the words to be consoling.
"Oh but there was plenty you could have done!" She threw back viciously. "Get out of my apartment. Get out! Get out! Get out!" Her voice rose almost hysterically. "GET OUT!" Seeing he made no move Helena snatched the first thing she could get her hands on - the photograph of herself and her mother - and flung it at him. It missed him and landed on the floor the glass shattering.
Slowly as if in a dream Bruce obeyed. As he closed the door behind him he thought he heard the sound of crying, but he could not have been sure.