Leslie was first to break the silence around the table.
"Yup. I called it: that blew chunks."
Everyone's heads hung low. Their clothes and hair were all murky and sopping wet and they literally smelled like shit, standing out like a sore thumb in the clean, bubblegum-pop atmosphere of the restaurant they had chosen to recuperate in.
After the heist went south, the six of them had ended up walking (and, less fortunately, wading) through miles of sewer tunnels for what felt like hours... which, as it turns out, it was. The only place they knew of that was open this late was Sweet Justice, the irony of which was hardly lost on them.
"So, what now?" said Doris.
Everyone looked at Selina, except Harley who just had her head in her hands. Selina looked around the table.
"Nothing's changed," she said. "We lost once, and that's it. We try again some other day."
Harley's head could be seen just barely shaking in her palms.
"How could it all go so wrong?"
"I know how," said Carol, staring daggers into Leslie.
Leslie scoffed. "Oh, come on! Don't blame me, I wasn't the only one who screwed up!"
"You know what, Leslie? I do blame you. Everyone else did their job, you just tried to kill us all, Harley especially—!"
Harley didn't respond.
"Uh, yeah, sure, and then you tried killing me! The fuck was up with that, huh!?"
"You WHAT?!" Doris stood up from the booth. Even without her fists clenched as they were now, she towered over Carol.
Carol rolled her eyes. "I didn't wanna kill you, idiot! If anything, you looked like you were gonna attack me first!"
"I thought I was gonna fuckin' DIE, you bitch!"
" 'Duhhh, yeah, but, uhhh, you DIDN'T, sooo... problem?' "
"You got a problem with me, you short cunt!?"
"What do you think, you skinny blue bi—!?"
"You. Are ALL. IDIOTS!"
Pam slammed her fists down on the table. Everyone became quiet. Leslie, Carol, and Doris were all still incredibly furious, but at least they were quiet. All eyes were on Pam and her disheveled hair – even Harley, who'd rolled her head in her hands so that one sullen eye was peeking out.
"Idiots! Every last one! Leslie was ready to kill us all, Carol was a bitch as always, Doris was stupid enough to go and block the stupid exit which meant she had to shrink down right when we needed her, Harley was... Harley! And Selina...!"
Selina gave her the stink eye. Facing her now, Pam went quiet as she usually was.
But Selina was having none of it.
"What? Go on, enlighten me! Tell me how I, out of everyone in this fiasco, messed up!"
Pam crossed her arms and laid back. "...despite being right next to her the whole time, you somehow didn't see the bomb which our mystery thief so conveniently had in her wherever."
"What, that? Harley does things like that all the time!"
"Yes, but she's Harley. And we're not talking about Harley, we're talking about you."
"So our mystery thief was quicker than I anticipated, so what?"
"And she was using your tech! Your goggles, your suit, the material – it's all the same!"
"Exactly what are you accusing me of?"
"Tell me why she had your things."
"Why, what do you think I did? That I gave them to her willingly, just to screw us all in a plan I would have benefited from?"
Pam narrowed her eyes, not saying anything but not backing down either.
Selina's demeanor softened. "Oh come now, I can't very well defend myself if I don't have a good idea of what I'm defending against."
"You wouldn't need to if you had a damn good reason!"
"Oookay, Pam, that's enough." Doris stuck her hand between Pam and Selina. "I think it's obvious she wouldn't be working against us—"
"No," Selina huffed. "She's right. There is a reason. And... there's something I haven't told you all that I should have."
The room waited on her as she took a deep breath.
"Last night... I was robbed."
"What?!"
"Oh my god!"
"Holy hootenanny!" Harley's head rose up for once in this conversation.
"Yes," Selina said. "I was walking to my date that night when I was jumped by a stranger whose skills rivaled my own. I had spares of everything, thank God, but the fact that I let it happen at all... I didn't like how it made me look. But now that I've kept it from you, not only do I look like a fool, but also a liar. Happy now?"
Pam's glare didn't waver.
"And the pesticide bomb?" she asked. "Why would you have that for her to steal?"
"That was hers, I had nothing to do with that."
"I didn't see it on her when I had her trapped."
"It was dark, you must not have—"
"I didn't have to see it, I felt it! Or, more accurately, I didn't! It wasn't on her when I caught her, my grass would have detected the shape of it when she fell down, or the weight of it when it dropped!"
"Pam, I know you're stressed. We all are! But blaming the fact that we lost on me isn't going to solve anything."
"No."
There was something about that 'no' that made Selina twist her head. It had come out as a soft growl, but Selina's reaction to it was as if it was loud and harsh, holding her hand just beneath her lips as her eyes maintained their concerned expression.
"Ease up, Pam," said Leslie. "It doesn't make sense she'd screw her own team, she already made that—"
"No!" Pam banged her fists against the table like a toddler. "No, no, no! She's guilty of something, she is, I just know it!"
"Pam, don't be paranoid," said Carol. "We all lost today!"
"My plants would never lie to me!" Pam's eyes were starting to look moist and red around the edges, and if that didn't betray her desperation, the crack in her voice did.
"She didn't do it," Harley grumbled.
"But you weren't there! How could you possibly know for sure!?"
"Because that'd mean Selina just left me homeless."
Pam's head snapped back.
Everyone at that table felt the air in the room flash-freeze, Selina most out of everyone. For once since this whole thing has started, all was quiet.
Leslie threw her hands up in the air. "Well, shit! This night's FULL of surprises!"
"Your rent's due soon, isn't?" asked Carol.
Harleen nodded. "End a' this week."
"Damn," Doris exclaimed. "Sorry 'bout, uh... yeah."
Pam's gaze shifted discretely between Harley and Selina.
Selina noticed.
She reached out and put a solemn hand on Harleen's shoulder.
"Harles, I..."
Harleen wiped the hand off its perch.
"It's awright." She sniffed. "I know it's not ya fault."
"I mean, I'm still the whole reason we lost this one in the first place, you can't really tell me I'm not partly responsible! I just wish there was something I could do."
Harley shook her head. "Outta ya hands, now, though, ain't it?"
"I—" Selina sighed. "I guess so."
Everyone huddled around Harleen. All they could do was comfort her. It was all they could think of, and at least they were all coming together again – for once, all their other problems seemed small potatoes.
It was sometime after midnight when they all went their separate ways. Everyone waved goodbye to Harley and wished her luck and All that. Leslie said goodbye with her back to everyone else and her shoulders over her head, as did Carol.
Pam and Selina shared a tense glance. Neither of them was sure what to say to the other, whether to send the other off or to send themselves.
Doris looked to Pam and said, "you really think I'm stupid?"
"Ugh." Pam walked off without another word.
"S'just a question," she muttered.
Selina patted her on the shoulder. "You did good, Doris. Have a good night. You've earned it."
Doris shuffled off, mumbling something under her breath even Selina and her cat-like hearing couldn't make out.
In any case, that was all of them. Selina stood in front of the last lights of Sweet Justice alone. She felt even more alone realizing no one else would wave her goodbye.
Selina sighed and started walking.
She didn't have anywhere to sleep...
...but that didn't mean she had nowhere to go.
Electric powers were awesome. In the blink of an eye, Leslie could be anywhere in the city with the only prerequisite that there was some circuit or landline connecting her to it, and in this day and age? That was everywhere.
She didn't know what came over her at that last microsecond before zapping into her room, but she felt the need to stop and look at her house as she sat perched atop the power line just outside.
It was a decent house. Not the bigger, cleaner, more minimalist kind that she wanted – her parents wouldn't let her, even if she was paying for most of it. All the "affordability" bullshit her parents fed her got on her nerves, but hey, what was a girl to do?
This was what Leslie called a "moment" – she didn't have them very often, but once she was alone with her thoughts, she... went places. It wasn't her fault her brain was always running at lightning speed, always looking at things and thinking "this could be a video," "that could be a video," that much was occupational; the constant voltage running through her brain, however, was incidental.
'I have so much money, right now, I could...'
'But my parents! Ugh, my parents, those...'
'I should just cut them out. Yeah, tell 'em to get out! In fact, I'll cut out anyone who's cramping my...'
'Maybe even cut out the Girls! Carol, too. Not Doris, though, so long as she...'
'Ugh, but the fun and the money and it's so cool and the money and the...'
'...wait, why do I hang out with them? I mean, because they're cool, of course. It's like they're the only ones who really...'
Leslie sighed. That was a nice second to herself. If she had actually checked, she would have found it was really 1.58 seconds, not that she would give two shits about it, much less one-point-five-eight of them. But it was time to go back home – back to her room, back to her porn, back to whatever would help her forget about the shitstorm she and her so-called "friends" just went through.
She came out from the socket she used to recharge her equipment (when she didn't feel like doing it herself). Her parents didn't know she was home yet, but that was another thing she didn't give two shits about.
She looked between her bed and her laptop, thinking "sleep or porn?"
Sleep won out, for the time being. She was just too tired to do much of anything, let alone herself.
Leslie hopped into bed, staring up at the ceiling while she waited for herself to feel like sleeping. Slowly, she closed her eyes, killing deeper and deeper into the comfort of the surrounding darkness...
...when the ceiling looked close enough to hit her.
Leslie bolted upright, sitting in her bed with her hand on her heart as it raced like lightning. Breathing was hard, all of a sudden. She looked at the corners of her room, checking to make sure they stayed right where they should be.
"Jesus-fuck..."
Leslie took her laptop off the ground, noting how shaky her hands were, and opened it in her lap, clicking on one of the more hidden bookmarks in her browser.
Porn it was.
Carol, unlike Leslie, was slightly more limited in terms of transportation – yes, her ring allowed her to travel at the speed of light, but that took considerable focus and a strong feeling of love, which, given the circumstances, was hard to come by.
Still, she flew home as fast as she could, wanting nothing more than a bubble bath with a glass of as much whine as she could sneak out of her parents' cabinet, and her phone so she could talk to her actual friends: the Central High cheerleading squad... and the man of her dreams. Not Hal, of course, he had still blocked her messages, both in text and on all social media platforms they shared.
And all of her duplicate accounts.
And the school's email system.
And somehow his physical locker.
But Carol had found the next best thing with one of Hal's jock friends who also played football, had a similar build, similar pension for green... similar voice and facial features, now that she thought of it...
But he had a different haircut! That was something, right? And he had a disrespect for authority she found so alluring! She had moved on from Hal, after all.
Her Hal.
But not hers anymore.
Except sort of.
But not really.
It's complicated.
The rest of the trip home saw her speed go up and down in unpredictable intervals. It was that frustrating sort of speed where she ached to go faster, but could only find it in her to do so in spurts. She hated it, but at the same time, there was a sort of thrill to it she couldn't shake. "Bittersweet" was one way to put it – another was "nauseating".
Not that she'd have that problem for long.
Only a block or two from her house, she saw the aura around her start to flicker.
"Huh?"
Her frillier outfit disappeared, replaced by her pink cheerleader uniform and ponytail as she plummeted towards the ground, screaming.
"Oh no... not now!"
She thrusted her ring arm out in front of her trying to get it to work again but all she got was loose sparks. She tried thinking of whatever it was she loved, of her mom, her dad, her pillows and plushies and vanity mirror, and her boyfriend...
Landing in the tree of someone's backyard softened her fall. It still hurt, though.
Carol moaned in pain as she laid on the crisp, wet grass, stirring slightly though the fall had knocked the get-up out of her.
She wanted to hurt someone. It didn't matter who, she just wanted to...
"Carol!?"
Her eyes went wide as she sat up and faced the familiar voice coming from the window next to her.
"Hal!?"
It was indeed Hal in the window.
For the longest time, she didn't answer. He didn't respond. Eventually, it was just too awkward. Hal spoke up:
"So, uh... (ahem) uh, why are you here?"
Carol stood up
"If you must know, my ring ran out of power on my way home. Not that you'd care about that, Hal Jordan."
"Did it hurt?"
"What?"
"When you fell." He pointed upward. "From... I mean... you know!"
Carol gave him a look like he was wasting her time. Hal sighed.
"Do you, um... need... a ride, maybe?"
It felt nauseating to hear him ask. To even consider telling him yes.
...'bittersweet,' she'd call it.
Still, she took his offer anyway,
It took longer to get there than either of them expected.
It was over, thought Doris.
She lost.
Doris didn't know how late it was when she got home. That wasn't important. She blew off her parents for the nth time today, not really paying attention to what they wanted to say to her. They sounded concerned, but that wasn't important either. She just had to get back to her room.
Once she did, she peeked her head down the hall to make sure no one was coming to check up on her. She closed her bedroom door, shut the window, drew the curtains, and once it was all done, sat down in her bed, eyes moist and focused entirely on the nightstand beside her.
Doris opened its bottom drawer and paused. She did a quick sweep to make sure that her door was still locked, her window was shut, her curtains were drawn, and no one was in her room but her. Now, with her paranoia satisfied (just barely), Doris finally reached into the drawer on her nightstand and took out the sweaty garment that no one could know she had but her: a black luchador mask with white markings covering the mouth and surrounding its blood-red triangle eyes.
Holding it with both hands, she stared deeply into its red triangle eyes. For a full minute, that's all she could bear to do: look at it. Slowly, she brought herself closer to it until it was covering her face like a handkerchief.
Doris wept.
"I'm sorry," she sobbed into the thing. Her voice was muffled by the cloth, but that didn't matter. This was just between her and the mask – her and Him.
"I kn-know I'm not the s-smartest," she choked out, "o-or even the strongest... but I'm trying. I'm really, really trying..."
She took some time to sniffle and choke out the knot in her throat, tears soaking through to the back of the mask's head where four small holes encircled one that was twice as big.
"Please."
She shook her head.
"Please," she said again, quieter now.
"Please..."
She hardly even knew what she was pleading for. Strength? Wisdom? Forgiveness? She knew the mask couldn't do anything, but the man who wore it – the legend it belonged to, wherever He was...
Doris lifted her head and looked at the time. Almost 1-o'clock. As much as she didn't care about school, she at least cared about being awake enough to get through it.
She nuzzled her face against the mask one more time before it went back in her drawer under a pile of clean socks and underwear.
"Good night, Bane."
Doris closed the drawer.
Pam closed the door behind her and stumbled face-first onto her couch. After the walk she took to get there, plus the walk through the sewer, plus the walk up the stairs to her apartment and just the general abhorrence of being wet and cold and tired being draining in its own right, the bed was just too far away.
She heard something like a 'hello' and looked at the coffee table beside her. On it stood her favorite philodendron, Phil.
"Hello, Phil," she said. "No, no, too tired. Been a long day. Selina betrayed us, today. Humans always betray us."
She shut her eyes for a moment. Then her brow furrowed. She gave Phil a somewhat annoyed look.
"If you must be nosy, yes, that is exactly what happened."
Her face brightened. She reached out to hold the plant a little closer to her as she lay down.
"Yes... yes, Phil. It is strange."
"..."
"Of course I have. Why wouldn't I?"
"..."
"Yes, I do suppose that's true... no, we've already considered that. It doesn't make... ah, of course. Tomorrow's problem, then."
She set the plant back down and rolled over with the blanket that she'd hung over the back of the couch.
In her last moments of consciousness before the morning, she muttered: "I'm glad plants are such logical creatures."
Harley (having changed back into Harleen) stood in the checkout line holding the biggest t-bone steak she could find, and looking down at her feet.
It might have just been the Jewish in her, but Harley hated to spend her own money on a splurge. This didn't exactly count as that, not by a long shot, but it sure felt like it.
At this moment, however, the world was ending. She could afford a nice, big, juicy steak for her babies, even if she couldn't afford a home for them – might as well give them something nice so they don't totally hate her when they have to live somewhere much worse. She might even have to give them back to the zoo, at the rate things were going. It would be safer for them, safer for her...
'B-but,' she would stutter to herself, 'my babies... without me?' She shoved that thought into the corner for now.
This wasn't supposed to happen. This lifestyle of hers was supposed to help her avoid money problems, not drive her into them headfirst. And Babs... the plan she had, for her... for them... this was God's punishment on her for choosing this life, she just knew it. Why else would all of this be happening to her now? Why else would God wait so long to do this except to see what choices she made with what new chances this town had given her? That corner where she shoved those thoughts was starting to look a little crowded, now. Like nothing else would fit in the rest of the space except for them. The only thing on her mind – whether her own, that of her teammates, or perhaps that of God – was disappointment.
How could it all go so wrong?
The answer to that lay far away from any of them, in the shadows of a sleepy mansion lit only by the round, green shapes resembling eyes piercing the darkness. The shadow of pale skin and black leather hardly shimmered as it steered clear of the moonlit windows, but if it didn't, one could just barely make out the platinum bob cut that sat atop its head.
The shadow danced from room to room, gaily cutting through glass shelves and display cases to take this trinket and that priceless jewel, like it was all some game the shadow was winning. Each prize further filled the bag hanging over its shoulders, though nothing seemed to deter the speed at which it took the things that didn't belong to it.
And the flow of it felt so free and unfettered, it truly was a dance more than it was a theft or a scavenger hunt... until it spotted something out of the ordinary: in one long and dark hallway, the moon shone through a doorway onto the wall opposite to it, and with it glimmered brilliant blues and greens and pinks in a twisting oval shape – some jewel hanging by a thread? An expensive wind chime? An extravagant baby mobile? Whatever it was, it had captured the shadow's kleptomaniacal heart so completely that it just had to know what was through that open doorway, so it braved the trek through the hall, risking exposure to the moonlight so as to resolve this conundrum of curiosity.
Peeking around the frame, it saw some fat-eared silhouette laying sideways on a bookshelf, twisting an opal between it's fingers while the light from the window revealed the shadow to be what it really was:
"Magpie," said the catsuit-wearing figure that now rested the opal at her hip.
"Catwoman," Magpie called back. She noted the sack at Catwoman's feet. "I see you took your own prizes."
"Oh, like you're the only collector in this town."
"Where did you get those? I didn't see a trail of stolen-anything running through here at all."
"Tsk, tsk, tsk! Oh, Maggy... still so much to learn. The best criminals can pull off a crime without anyone even knowing there was a crime in the first place!"
"You can tell your friends that."
"They also have much to learn. On that topic, did everything go smoothly before my friends and I spoiled your party?"
"Yes... but that was before. I had to jettison half the loot just to get out safely."
Catwoman shook her head in disbelief. "An entire half!? How did that happen!?"
"You caught me hauling the second load, which, might I remind you, you were supposed to be carrying. I can only lift so much, you know! But, because of your friends, my exit was swarming with police, and storm drains... well, let's just say they don't accept cash."
Catwoman sighed, defeated. "Understood."
"I know we talked about this before: three-fourths to you for the gear and half of what we both took, but, considering you weren't there to take it yourself..."
"...because of an unforeseen problem which I helped alleviate! We may have planned this together, but if it weren't for me at the very end, you wouldn't see a dime of that money!"
"And yet it's the people you chose to associate with that caused this problem – the people you failed to prevent from ever finding out there was a crime already happening there in the first place!"
Silence.
"Thought so," said Magpie. "Fifty-fifty: one-fourth for you and one-fourth for me. You'll find it in the spot we agreed on."
Selina bounced the opal in her hand with a look of disgrace, of which her partner took notice.
"One-fourth is still better than one-sixth," said Magpie.
"No, I know..."
"Besides, they'd think you were selfish if they knew."
"I am selfish."
"Yes, but they'd blame you for it. That's why it's a secret, isn't it? The early bird gets the worm..."
"...like the cat that got the cream," finished the Cat.
"And you're sure your friends don't know about this? Can't know about this? Curiosity killed the cat, you know."
"As I'm well aware. Don't worry, I have a nose for this sort of thing – if they had caught on by now, I would know. Although..."
" 'Although'?"
"...some of my cohorts were depending financially on this heist going well. They're not happy, and, frankly, neither am I."
Magpie shrugged. "And that's my problem because...?"
Catwoman glared at her like she was missing something obvious. Or maybe she was just made. "Unhappiness makes for unrest, which leads to accusations, which leads to people... uncovering things."
"Damn. So, what are you gonna do about it?"
Selina thought back to a place she had stolen from, that week.
Gold watch. Diamond cuffs. Pearls.
"I'll find some way to make them whole – put a spin on it like I'm making up for the heist..."
"...which you are."
Sigh. "Yes... yes, I am."
