Disclaimer: Iiiiii'm dreaming of a whiiiiiiite crisis, with every crisis card I wriiiiiite. ...what is a crisis card anyway? Is it like a sympathy card with more immediacy? "Sorry your SUV rolled off the road and caught fire and you're trapped in it." "Sorry you got shot. I'm sure it's just a flesh wound." "Sorry your secret satellite gained sentience, went rogue, injected millions of people with nanotechnology that turns them into powerful mindless drone soldiers and declared war one the world's metahuman population. Better luck next year, eh?" Anyway, yeah, characters not owned. You know the drill. Thanks go out to Chris Dee, who's Cat-Tales stories (which you should all read) taught me how to write Selina.

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Partners

Chapter 3

Four months later...

One unexpected bonus of their partnership was that between the two of them, they were better able to plan ahead should they encounter Bat-trouble on a job. The boy had a devilish creativity and a knack for luring Batman into nonlethal traps that kept him off their tails. Over the last several months, they'd left Batman behind dangling from a flagpole by his cape, stuck on a speeding truck without his grapnel, dropped into a twelve-foot deep pool of styrofoam peanuts and (her personal favorite) locked in a concrete vault with a dozen stray cats. It was a good thing she'd gotten a hold of this kid before someone else did. If he was working for Joker, Batman and all of Gotham might be wearing deathsmiles by now.

In the early days, she'd always enjoyed letting a rooftop rendezvous with the Bat unfold on its own, but not long before Dick's arrival, she'd frankly gotten bored with them. Batman was clearly not going to allow himself to have feelings for a thief, and if there was a way around that, she'd yet to spot it. Spontaneity was pretty much dead. Then, Dick's entering the picture necessitated a change. It became apparent that some planning ahead was in order, so they'd both be on the same page if there was trouble. When they began to plan, he'd been surprised at how meticulously she planned ahead. He joked, "I thought everything you did fell into place because you were just that smooth."

"Oh Dick," she said, leaning forward to brush her chest against his shoulder and place one hand lightly on his wrist, "I am that smooth." His pulse racing, Dick had been forced to agree, although he did ask for continued demonstration, which elicited a playful smack to the back of the head and an amused chuckle. His crush on her was obvious, but that was what it was, an adolescent crush. She ignored it most of the time, teased him with it on rare occasions like this, and discouraged it when she had to, which wasn't often; he really was rather a gentleman about it.

After another successful heist the night before, they'd parted for the evening to celebrate on their own. Selina went to a charity event at the Gotham Museum of Art, which sounded a lot like work to him. He'd said so, with an eye towards inviting her to join him, and she'd laughed, "I'm going there to enjoy the art, not to case the joint." She'd tousled his hair, (which he'd spent ten whole minutes trying to comb into some semblance of order, but he was hardly going to object in this instance), and left the apartment in that black dress he privately thought was entirely too good for Gotham's wealthy elite.

He was on his way to his own age-appropriate celebration (well, appropriate to the age on his phony driver's license, anyway), a trendy nightclub in the Upper East Side. Mondo, the guy who'd recruited Dick into his street gang two years ago, was working as a bouncer there. He'd cleaned up after his six-month stint in Blackgate, and was going by Michael now. Dick had kept in touch, figuring he might be a good guy to know. He'd give the ID a once-over, more to see how good Dick's work was than to verify his age, and let him in.

On the way there, he heard a rough laughter coming from an alley as he was passing by. Despite the old adage about cats and curiosity, he'd never noticed any reluctance on Selina's part to poke her claws into an unfamiliar situation. Four men, all sporting gang insignia he wasn't familiar with, had cornered a young woman. "Hey now pretty girl, no need to be scared. Aint we bein' friendly?"

She didn't look all that scared from what Dick could see. She answered, "I suppose that depends on your definition of the word." She eyed them warily, moving slowly into a defensive posture. "Exactly how 'friendly' were you trying to be?"

"Real friendly," the punk assured her, leering.

"You don't seem all that friendly to me." Dick couldn't be sure who was more surprised: the men, the woman they had cornered, or himself for saying that. 'What the hell are you doing, Grayson?' he berated himself. Still, he had said it, and he didn't see any point in backing out now. Besides, she was cute. "Maybe you should work on the whole friendly thing some more. Practice on each other, y'know?"

"This fool think he funny," the banger in the tanktop said, turning to face him.

"I think I'm fuckin' hilarious!" Dick said loudly, glaring menacingly at the four of them, "Now take a hike!" This was another of Selina's lessons in cathood. Sometimes, when an alpha male growls loudly enough, lesser males will back down. As all four stalked towards him, it occurred to him that she'd also said this rarely works on people, at least not when you really want it to.

He slipped into a ready stance, and as he did, he noticed two things about the woman. First, that she had red hair that extended just a little ways past her shoulders, and second, that she was glowering at him. She was angry at him? 'Holy lack of gratitude...' He formed a rough plan for how to beat the four. He'd never fought four men on his own, but hey, if he could go toe-to-toe with Batman and walk away, this ought to be a piece of cake, right?

Whether he was correct or not, the situation changed quickly. The guy farthest from him suddenly tumbled forward, hitting the pavement face-first. A moment later, and the woman had his arm bent behind his back, her foot on the back of his neck. The other three looked at her in surprise, and Dick saw his opening. He leaped forwards, twisting his body around and slamming his food into the back of another man's head. The woman gave the guy she'd downed a swift kick to the temple, and the two of them faced off against the pair still conscious. Deciding that two-on-two, they odds weren't in their favor, the other two bolted.

The woman took a deep breath, then frowned at Dick. "I had them," she said, no longer glaring, but still mildly irked, "but I guess thanks are in order anyway."

He smiled at her. He supposed that would do for gratitude. He offered a hand to her and said, "Dick," by way of introduction.

Green eyes twinkled back at him, "That better be your name," she said, the corners of her lips curling upward in a hint of a smile, "or you're joining Sleeping Beauty over there," pointing at one of the downed men. She accepted the hand and answered, "Barbara."

Impulsively, Dick performed a florid (if somewhat comical) bow, and brought his lips to the back of her hand. "My Lady Barbara," he said in a fair impersonation of the grandiose pseudo-British accent Pop Haly used to use during the shows.

Barbara couldn't keep the amusement from her face, "Pretty charming for a guy I just met in a dark alley."

"Given the competition, it's not hard to be Don Juan by comparison," he said, indicating the unconscious pair. The reference to the famous Spanish lover was not an idle one. He'd read the book last week. Dick hadn't been a regular attendee of any institution properly called a 'school' in over a year, since he'd ran away from his last foster home. Selina didn't concern herself with schooling, but said he did not have the option of remaining uneducated. When he'd protested that he didn't need no education, she delivered the closest thing to a lecture he'd ever heard from her.

"If Catwoman is going to be seen with an apprentice," she had explained, "that apprentice is going to reflect on her. In the unlikely event that Batman ever masters the people skills necessary to make a friend, you don't think he'd allow his sidekick to dress up in bright colors and crack jokes all night, do you?" Dick laughed at the very idea. "I don't mind that you don't want to sit in a classroom six or seven hours a day. It's really a point in favor of your sanity, I would say, but I won't allow an ignorant kitten to hit the rooftops with me."

"Catwoman," she had explained, "may be seen by the uninformed as some leather-clad slut who figured out how to pick a lock somewhere along the way, but she is not. She always steals the best piece in the room. Yes, it's worth the most money, but she knows what is the best piece in the room. More importantly, she knows why it's the best piece. If I wish, I can converse on a professional level with artists, sculptors, jewelers, locksmiths, archaeologists, collectors, writers, journalists, computer programmers, art historians and admirers alike. Or even critics, although I've rarely been required to speak to them, thank whatever deity you choose for that."

At which point she had delivered her ultimatum, "I'm not going to teach you, either. I can point you in any direction you like, but it's your responsibility. If you don't, you're out." That had been more than enough to persuade him. As she'd expected, he did not enroll in the local institution of lower learning. Instead, in those times when they weren't training or prowling, he became acquainted with Gotham City's museums, galleries and libraries.

Barbara nodded in agreement with his assessment of his 'competition'. 'She's very cute...' he thought and said, "So how about getting out of this dark alley and going somewhere like..." at which point worlds failed him. 'Like where? A bar? Coffee? Movie? Taking her home doesn't seem like a good idea, even if asking her didn't get me punched.' "...not an alley?" he finished, lamely.

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Meanwhile...

Selina smiled at the turn the conversation had taken. She knew of him by reputation, of course, (who didn't?) but it seemed to her that it didn't do the man justice. Tall, dark, and good-looking enough to be trouble even if the man wasn't a billionaire, he really was quite charming. Smarter than the gossip columnists gave him credit for, too.

Chatting amiably, he'd just made a remarkably insightful point about the Rodin sculpture they were viewing, The Eternal Idol, which depicted a pair of lovers. While it was traditionally considered a sculpture of passionate love, the two lovers both had their hands behind their backs. They were barely touching. Where the reasoning generally offered was that of a worshipful love, he suggested that Rodin had held an idealized, unrealistic view of such love, and pointed out that the model for the female of the sculpture, his student and lifelong lover Camille Claudel, temporarily broke up with him not long after he finished this piece.

Most curiously, after he had said this, he suddenly seemed briefly annoyed for no apparent reason. At which point he proceeded to make a pass at her so blatant that it made Dick's clumsy gestures look like masterpieces of subtlety by comparison. There was more going on here than she could detect, and she could usually detect quite a lot.

"Indeed," she said agreeably, deftly turning aside the pass without actually rejecting it. "Tell me more, Mr. Wayne," she said, which produced a flushing of his cheesk. 'Understandable, after the crude attempt he just made, 'telling me more' would require four-letter words and body parts. He's not a boor, but is pretending to be. Why?' Her cat-curiosity was aroused.

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After months as a team, the partners handle these challenges on their own

in Chapter 4