"See the curtains hangin' in the window
In the evening on a Friday night
A little light shinin' through the window
Lets me know every-everything's all right
Summer breeze makes me feel fine
Blowin' through the jasmine in my mind"

The Isley Brothers, "Summer Breeze"

Darkness spotted my vision with sleep-deprivation and the blue-white of the computer screen bleached into my head. I didn't mind Barbara doing my hacking for me, but something about the phrase 'peeping on Lex Luthor' demanded I keep mum on the whole thing. My personal computer, the one I dumped every inch of my life into, was decrepit and probably in desperate need of an upgrade, but it did the job and right now, that's all I cared about. I knocked back the last mouthful of whiskey, let it burn the road down to my stomach and threaten to come back up. I tossed the bottle into the bin, ignored the glass breaking inside.

It'd been three weeks since I saw the clown, two since she returned, and Roy was right. Alcohol was about my only coping mechanism at this point, that and night shift. Night shift was about the only time I was really myself, leaping from rooftop to rooftop with nothing but wind in my hood and miles below my feet. I didn't care about anything or anyone, except those I murdered and those I saved. It didn't matter that there seemed to be a gap in my walls, about the size of the one I'd patched in the engine bay downstairs. Through this hole, things plundered in to take advantage and fought their way to freedom, but it didn't feel like it'd close anytime soon. The edges of this hole eroded with every day, getting bigger and sucking stuff through it like a breach in a ship's hull.

My family couldn't be handymen anymore, trying to fix the hole for me. I had recovered, from the torture and the brainwashing. I got rid of that, but the issues were the battering ram that made that hole. The trust issues, the abandonment issues, the commitment issues, the phrase "worth the trouble", the term "lost cause", the most idiotic piece of relationship advice ever "if you love someone, let them go", and taking the cake was her and the clown. She who was the cake, the sweetest and best thing that ever put me back together. And him, who threatened to take all that progress I made, the recovery, and flush it all out.

The worst part was that I couldn't help how I felt about her any more than I could kill him. I buried my elbows into the desk, and knotted my fingers in my hair. I couldn't do a damn thing about either of them.

As if my own problems weren't enough, my phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from Roy.

Come to the kitchen, don't make a sound.

Okay. Odd. I reached back into my training for the sound drills I did with Bruce, moving without any bounce so the record wouldn't skip on the turntable and rolling from shadow to shadow like they were my permanent cloak. The noise from the kitchen grew louder, and it was a wonder I didn't hear it from my computer room. Slurping, like an obnoxious teen sucking back on a straw from an obviously empty drink.

Roy was by the door, eyes wide and his bow in hand, but he didn't reach back for any arrows, didn't have one notched and ready to fire. He was just watching, his bow hanging by his side like he had decided against attack. The fridge's light crept into the hallway. I switched the grip on my knife, stood by him before he pointed to what he was staring at and my eyes followed, then grew wider than his.

All I saw was the hair at first, halfway between red and gold and from the crown almost to the thighs of the tall thing. The legs were long and muscular, ended in bare feet with painted purple toenails. I followed the hair to a pair of cutoff shorts, and a long-sleeve black shirt, and when she turned her head, a pair of pupil-less green glowing eyes stared back at me. She pushed her mane over one shoulder and lowered the mustard she was drinking from her lips.

"Starfire?" I turned on the light.

She blinked and startled as the fixture came on, but she kept the mustard as she raced over to lift me off the ground in a one-armed hug. "Jason! How good it is to see you! I apologize for dropping by like this. And taking your mustard! I will replace it, I promise, but I am here to make you a proposition."

I patted her shoulder weakly with the only hand that wasn't being crushed against her, and when she put me down, I caught my breath. I glanced at Roy by the door and Kori searched him, like she was solving a puzzle.

Roy walked in and put the bow on the table. "I don't believe it. Kori? Koriand'r?"

Kori gasped when she heard his voice, finally handed me my mustard before she held out a hand to him. "Roy, I haven't seen you in…"

"…forever," He finished. "…Since I left the Titans."

"You two met at the Tower?" I asked and leaned against the counter, arms crossed. I didn't know they'd met before, let alone at the Titans. I knew the tension between Roy and Dick was over Cheshire, and that my brother made a difficult call that he regretted, but it hadn't occurred to me that Starfire might know him.

"We did. I met him shortly after taking refuge on Earth," She said, "…Dick told me about your daughter, and when I learned of Cheshire's death, I…"

The archer stiffened, a muscle near his temple shifting. I knew for Starfire, it was a piece of news through the grapevine, but for him, it was a grief of mere weeks ago. "Don't. I have my daughter, and I'm lucky to have her, let alone a roof over her head. Jason's been great."

Kori nodded, and drew her hair down one side, her fingers braiding through the strands. "Which brings me to my proposition."

"Besides a solid pinky-swear that you won't show up at 3AM again to raid my fridge without at least a warning to stock up on mustard?"

"Of course." Her red lips spread into a bashful smile. She held the end of her hair, and looked between us. "Do either one of you have a hair tie?"

I scraped a hand over my own hair, which Roy had taken scissors to yesterday and was now cut with the top longer than the sides. He flicked his off his wrist and tossed it to her with a wary glance. She tied her hair, and played with the end of the braid. "The separation between myself and Dick is final, and I have moved out of his dwelling in Bludhaven."

"Why not return to the Titans?" Roy asked her, though it sounded more like an accusation. His damp copper hair fell around his face, the cords of muscle in his shoulders flexed in the way it got when he was torn. He wanted to treat her like he treated Dick, with a bitter frustration, but I knew some part of him recognized that she could barely order takeout with the right verb tense when it happened. She was hardly at fault, even if she used to be with Dick.

Starfire was the picture of grace, or obliviousness, perhaps. Her eyes casted down, to her hands and her nails were bitten back to the beds. "If I returned there without him, it would not feel right. I love my friends, I love them dearly and I miss them, but it is all too…fresh. Too raw. Yes. Raw is the right word."

"Join the club." I cut through the background and guessed at her proposition. "…You need somewhere to stay."

"Yes, but I will earn my mustard, I swear to you." I didn't have the heart to laugh at her; she seemed so serious, with her eyebrows together and every ounce of alien princess within her beaming. "I want to help you on your mission to bring the evil clown to justice."

"You want to patrol with me?" I saw the merits of having a Tamaranian as my help from above, but I needed a low profile. After the Battle for Gotham left me with ringing in my ears from her starbolts, something told me having her with me would bring the opposite effect. "Kori, I don't care if you stay here, but there's a bounty on my head from the President and I…"

I trailed off. Between the blank expression and how she blinked like a newborn, I didn't think she understood the gravity yet. Made sense, considering she defied gravity as well as Kent. "Listen, pick a bed and I'll hunt you a mattress. I'll see what I can give you in the way of work."

Roy shrugged, and took his bow from the table. I imagined he didn't see his need for being there, and he told us so. "I'm going back to bed, now that I'm not needed. If you two are going to be up for a while, keep it down." He combed a hand through his hair, and shot a glance at Starfire. "My daughter is sleeping."

He padded out of the kitchen and disappeared into the shadows of the hall, the sound of the floorboards creaking under his feet stopping after he closed the dormitory doors behind him. Kori pushed out her lower lip, her hands clasped in front of her. She sighed, a lock of her hair blowing out. "He does not want me here."

"Relax," I turned around and pulled out a couple of glasses from the cabinet. "He's in the same situation you are, just in a different sense. Theoretically, you can get Dick back, he can't have Cheshire back."

"We are not different at all." She said, her hip against the counter as she watched me retrieve the carton of eggnog from the fridge. It was early for it, really early, but I'd just picked it up and it seemed like a good way to welcome her into Jason's House of Lost Strays. "…I cannot have him again, any more than Roy Harper can have Cheshire returned to him."

"…What do you mean?" I squinted at her, my fingers paused on the eggnog cap. "Dick's alive."

"When our relationship was ending," She wrinkled her nose at the eggnog, confused as to what it was, but did not argue when I filled her glass. "He told me that he was in love with Barbara Gordon and had been for several years. He said that he would care about me as long as he lived, but love… he would love her forever, something I knew he had reservations about when he promised to be with me for the same length of time."

She drank from her eggnog, a tentative sip at first but then longer and deeper as she got accustomed to the taste. I watched her over my glass as I drank. I knew the odd jealousy of wanting someone, but gritting your teeth as they were happy with someone else, usually when the former did not pan out. In my case, it was a grief of choice and a mistake I could not undo, even if it was a correct mistake - as oximoronic as that sounded. The same decision weighed on her, I knew the look. She had shadows under her eyes too, the raw nail beds I saw, and the bare feet. She flew here, and behind her, tucked by the window, were the few possessions she had to start with packed in a messenger bag. A refugee, from her people and her heart.

"You let him go."

She nodded. I walked to my spice cupboard, pulled out the nutmeg and added a pinch to each glass. She drank again and hummed. "Thank you, Jason…I do not know Earth's customs well, but I understand that appearing like this was untoward and unacceptable."

"Harsh word for it, 'unacceptable'." Earnest smiles were out of my capability, but I could manage a half-assed smirk. "I'd say 'surprising, but not entirely unwelcome'. You saved my brother's life last year, getting him to the Tower as fast as you did after he was injured." The tiniest wince registered at her eyes at the memory. "Letting you stay as long as you need under my roof is easy."

"Forever?" She said into her glass, her green gaze on me.

I lifted a shoulder. "Sure."

Starfire drank the rest of her eggnog, wiped the remainder off her lips and pushed the glass towards me to refill it. She stared at me, the proud brow of a princess leveled.

"And how long is forever?"

I wish I had an answer.

She loved to touch him and had dreamed of it in the years they danced around each other, apart and together and apart again, but never more than when he was presumed dead.

Selina never thought a dead man would ever make her feel such relief that she felt the need to push it down where he couldn't sense it, but she also never thought a dead man would complain so much about being put back together. He sat in a stool, face pale in the kitchen's light, staring at her back as she laid out what she'd need from the first aide kit. Her catsuit was peeled down to her hips, and Calvin Klein had never steered her wrong in showing just enough skin, but something about the way his eyes searched for hers when she turned back around left her feeling naked all the same. Maybe it was time apart. Maybe it was something else, or the new scratches over his chest.

"Who told you I was here?" It wasn't an interrogation, like many of the other times they crossed paths. It was soft, and some hopeful part of her was reminded of the few nights they took the masks off, let themselves be human.

"Your eldest told me," She said and moved to stand between his knees.

Without looking at him, she cleaned the scratches while her own cheek bruised and his jaw colored darker. His eyes stayed on hers, the magnetic pull hard to resist. Bruce never moved so much in the suit, but here, where his mortality was painted on him, she finally felt him breathe. "Your family has been so worried about you. I've been doing what I can for Barbara and your boys, for Alfred, but…they need you."

"Selina…" He said her name in a sigh that brushed through her hair, and she met his eye for the briefest moment. "Thank you for taking care of them."

"I don't need you to thank me. I didn't do it for you. What I need is for you to come back to Gotham City with me."

He stiffened, moved away from her hands to look at her. His brows knit, and the blue of his eyes were even icier. "Was that your only reason for coming to Anguilla? To rush me north to stop Talia?"

"I know this may be hard for you to take in," Selina leaned in until their noses almost touched. "Don't take it personally, Bruce." She returned to her work, ignoring his glare. "Your beloved Talia is wrecking havoc on Gotham, brought the Joker back from the dead, the cremated kind of dead, and your boys need you. And if Alfred can't get you off your broody ass to stop it, I will drag you back to Gotham by my whip if I have to."

"I'm not taking an early retirement vacation." He watched her dress his scratches, his nails digging into the seat of the stool. "This is exile. I may have saved the city, but I'm compromised. Batman's dead."

"Bring him back," She said, as if it were that simple. "I hear coming back from the dead is all the rage these days."

"This is not funny."

Selina's nose wrinkled and her lip curled as she glared back at him. "Faking your death wasn't either. Not all of us were in on your vanishing act. I destroyed Riddler's lab and left Gotham City thinking you were dead." She set the bandages, pressed in with her fingers with more force than necessary and she pushed even harder when he didn't wince, kept his eyes on her. "Figured hey, at least I did something he might have been proud of me for. I went everywhere, staying in the rough part of town and I don't like to keep attachments, Bruce. Still don't. But I couldn't do anything about you-"

"Selina, I'm s-" He started to say, but she snarled at him.

"-I'm not finished yet, Batman."

Bruce set his lips into a hard line as she continued, fixing an ice pack for his jaw, "And then the Red Hood shows up on my doorstep, tracked me down to tell me that the Joker was back, the son of a bitch that hurt you and your kids, brings me back to Gotham only to find out that you're alive. I did my best all that time to suck it up, be a big girl, be the master jewel thief, but there I was, in the heart of the righteous and broody, because of a man that couldn't let me know he wasn't dead!"

She shoved the ice pack to his jaw and stepped away as he held it there. Her hands on her hips, she squeezed her eyes tight. She felt his eyes on her back, she always could after she said something witty or did something rash. It was the closest they got sometimes to touching, just the dark gaze over her neck and her shoulders. She heard him leave the stool, take one tentative stride to her like he wanted to take another but was waiting on her permission.

"I don't like to keep attachments," She repeated. "But that doesn't mean that it's impossible. Mourning you wasn't a lot of crying, really, wasn't as pathetic as visiting your grave to pour my guts over the grass, but…it was a lot of walking. Not running after a heist, or falling off a building. Just walking. Like I didn't care if I was caught, because you wouldn't be the one chasing me. It wasn't any fun on the rooftops anymore, not without you. It was never cold up there till you left." He took another stride and she half-turned, a hand out to stop him. "I'm not saying this to get a reaction out of you. I'm saying it for me. To get it off my chest. Nobody told me to come down here. I came because it's the right thing to do…if I recall, you often said that even if I didn't buy it, you thought I was still capable of doing the right thing."

Bruce put down the ice pack and took the hand she used to ward him off. "I didn't think it. I knew it."

His eyes were sadder than she remembered. The tip of her thumb ran long the edge of his mouth. He whispered, "I'm not ready. I need more time. I'm sorry…I'm not the man you mourned."

Her gaze fell to the scars on his collarbones. She tried her best not to think about the briefcase that Alfred had given her after she told him where she was going, and after she'd made him swear not to tell a soul. Shadows cast over Bruce's face as his lips touched her forehead.

"I'll help you find him," She promised.