Well, writing these past few days has been ugly. Believe it or not, I actually had a book due this Friday. I'm an Visual Communications major, and I got to create (endlessly create), layout, double-side print, and bind 54 pages of design principles. It sucked. Anyway, on to the much awaited Kahn part 2. Just to warn you, it's short and crappy (really crappy), but hey, I vowed I would update, and I, hey, finally did:

Sean, Terry, Batman, Pantharis, son, he really did not know anymore—he sat alone with Kahn at a round, white tablecloth table about twenty feet from the ballroom's small stage. Or he thought it was Kahn.

The imposing man at his side certainly was trying to make him think so.

Aggravation, mixed with and made worse by exhaustion, pulled at his veins. He wanted this undercover project to be over. He had Kahn, above ground and in daylight, for God's sake, but he lacked the burden of proof, and that made it impossible to do anything but sit with the last man he wanted to be near to and watch the nervous speaker fiddle with the microphone pinned to his lapel.

The speaker looked something like what Willy Watts might have grown up to be, had the accident at his father's site not messed with his powers of mind and taken his mind in the same stroke. The thick hair that fell into this man's eyes, however, was brown. The small stature and the accompanying gangly limbs were the same, though, as were the coke-bottle glasses. It was strange that, in a society where people could rewrite their DNA for the price of a used car (as Max had done to get her enviable shade of pink) or the price of a good tattoo (as Splicers had done before the practice's illegalization made it skyrocket in price), some people still wouldn't correct their vision, or at least buy contacts.

People had their reasons. For the speaker, the thick glass lenses seemed to be a protective barrier. Commissioner Gordan used them as a prop when she wanted play the craggy old bitch, usually when dealing with the press or recalcitrant police officers, and always when dealing with him. His father...

He ground his teeth. The idea of avoiding thinking about something usually meant that one thought about aimless, useless things, not old festering wounds.

'Or should I call you son?' the man had said. Kahn had said. 'Henry' had said, though 'Henry' hadn't told him to call him that. Someone else had called Kahn Henry, so it was implied that he was a Henry, but this Henry had implied that he call the man 'father.'

Damn it. He did not want to think about this. Would the speaker just start? He did not want to think about Kahn. Henry. Father?

Kahn.

Just Kahn. He barely knew who he was anymore. He didn't need the added frustration of an enemy (friend, father, personal demon?) with multiple names as well.

He closed his eyes. His thoughts were jumbled, he realised distantly, equally distantly realizing that it was because of a lack of sleep, pain, and the pain meds he was taking to keep from feeling like one living bruise. Bast (Erin, One) had done a number on him (Batman) at the construction site.

"You're rather quiet."

He turned to Kahn. It was the timbre of the man's voice, more than anything, that made him know this human was actually the tiger he was playing a deadly game with in the bowels of Gotham. There was dark skin in place of pale fur, and for that matter an impeccable Armani in place of pale fur, but the voice struck a chord, deep down. Kahn smiled when their eyes met. More of a predatory grin, really, but after you had seen the same flash of teeth with inch long fangs involved, human teeth looked downright friendly no matter what the facial expression involved.

"I thought I was always rather quiet," he said at last.

Kahn folded dark hands. "I'm afraid I wouldn't know." Because, technically, we have never met before. The silent phrase hung in the air.

With an audible sigh and a more silent thud, Sean let a mask fall and glared balefully at Kahn with exhausted, wincing eyes. The man's expression changed just slightly, and in other circumstances he would have been smug in the knowledge that he had caught the man unawares, but he was not in the mood. "I can't deal with this right now," he said in a low voice. "I'm here. These people don't want me here. I don't belong here, and we all know it. I'm still here anyway. Please, can't that be enough?"

And, thank God, the speaker stuttered into the now working microphone, and the lecture began.

The lecture was fervent but irrelevant to Sean. He knew most of the miscellaneous facts from a childhood spent with Max. The facts did not fit his cats. The three kittens were neither normal nor well adjusted and, a rarity among Isis breeds, their pedigree was suspect. The idea that three of the world's rarest purebred animals would find their way to a 3rd World genetics laboratory was laughable. His personal opinion was that the kittens had been a part of a fresh batch of the Isis strain made in the facility they had been rescued from. They weren't the first gen manufactured constructs of course. He had to admit that even Gyrados had a soul, no matter how twisted. They were at least second gen, for all that their pedigrees claimed they were twelfth and their price tags suggested they were sixteenth.

It was a highly illegal scheme but a highly lucrative one. The UN had banned the genetic creation of new species in the early twenties, causing various constructs the world over to be either sterilized or euthenized depending on the country of origin. Of course, the constructs' offspring, having been conceived and born naturally, were exempt, and these new species' rarity suddenly made them worth millions apiece. However, because of poor genetic design, most of the myriad of new breeds failed by the thirties, and...
"...today a few fruit flies and lab rats are kept for their usefulness in genetic research, but only the coveted Isis strain has resulted in a stable, sustainable population." Thus ended the speaker the history portion of the lecture.

Sean privately wondered if, despite passing History, he was doomed to repeat it forever. His class final's essay had been on the DNA Revolution, and here he was listening to a regurgitation of the same facts. He was in a private hell where boredom was the punishment of choice.

Then salvation came in the form of a calico kitten. The little thing had been playing with a mechanized toy underneath the table but, true to form, had grown bored in under two minutes and was now poking its head up between his knees. The next thing Sean knew, the kit (Dragonair) was in his lap and they were playing games with front paws.

The rest of the lecture faded away, the world shrinking to only him, the Isis Breed, and the cultist leader. In a way, it was comforting. He had Dragonair to keep him company and Kahn to keep him safe from the elite cat-loving snobs around him. In another way, it the same awkward feeling he had felt during the breakfast at the diner with Max, but taken to another level. To the outside observer the three of them appeared to have a familial relationship. Any other members of the Pride in the room would have another: here was their revered leader, the trophy kitten, and Kahn's new favored—what?

Whatever he was, Terry was lying to them all.

The problem was, there were moments when Terry faded away and Sean felt content and happy. Most of the stress in this life came from having to be Terry. Sean wouldn't be injured if it weren't for Terry's nightlife. If he weren't playing Terry, Sean wouldn't be sneaking away to make phone calls to Mary and Matt McGinnis and Dana at the oddest hours to keep up the ruse that Terry was halfway around the world. If he were just Sean, arresting Kahn and a majority of the Pride would be the last thing on his mind.

And as Sean, he wouldn't be feeling guilty about being with Max if it weren't for Terry.

He still wasn't quite sure he how had gotten himself into that mess. Yes, he was impulsive. Yes, he went with his first instincts. Yes, he had heard Bruce and father berate him for those exact things a thousand times each. Still, he had to argue back that his decisions had been right. There were just other complications that made them seem wrong.

And that hurt. Except for two things, Sean's life seemed perfect and Terry's seemed wrong. Except for two things, Sean would be tempted to abandon Terry, take Max, and find that promised haven with the Pride.

One: He may be able to give up Terry, the mother and brother he felt very protective of but little affection for, the boss and mentor who had yet to find him worthy, and the girlfriend who seemed to leave him every other week, but he wasn't so sure that Max would give up Terry. And if he told Max he was Terry, the house of cards would almost surely tumble down.

Two: He had watched Kahn—charming, charismatic, kindly Kahn—torture a detective who had infiltrated the Pride for information. That information had led to the staged accidental death of the man's partner.

His morals weren't the most upstanding in the world. He knew that. But when your world was gradated into shades of gray and you constantly ignored the lines drawn by the law and society, you had to draw your own lines or fall into madness or depravity. Torture, he could understand if he tried hard enough. It was the infliction of pain for a purpose; in his mind, it almost seemed nobler than the unnecessary pain he had inflicted in anger on the various scum he had come across as Batman. But murder. You couldn't take that back. You could return people their property, their dignity, even their limbs, but never their lives.

That was why, no matter what else he did—if he broke up with Dana, if he never spoke to Mary and Matt ever again, if he took up Dick Grayson on the man's offer to help him leave Wayne, if he told Max and let come what may—he needed to bring Kahn to justice for the murder of Detective Gupta's partner, Daniel Maxwell.

Splicing was one of the things he didn't care about. The reversible viral compound was an illegal substance, but he was starting to find that he could care less so long as its users kept themselves off the streets. The Pride was a private place, and it was careful to make sure it s business never spilled into Gotham proper. Though Wayne would ream him for it, he was fine with that. It was the methods that the Pride's leader had resorted to in order to keep things quiet that he couldn't let slide. No matter what strange sense of belonging he was starting to feel when he entered Kahn's world, he needed to do at least that.

The lights suddenly brightened, and Sean blinked. The lecture had ended. One of the hotel's staff drew the sleeping Dragonair from his lap, leaving him to look into Kahn's smiling eyes. "I thought we might take dinner downstairs," the tiger said in his quiet, gentle way. As always, it wasn't a suggestion.

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P.S.: there's a few things that will be of interest to you on my author's page.