Helena couldn't help but feel her heart lift when she saw Wayne Manor. Now that—that hadn't changed much. For a moment, she could have imagined that everything was right again and she was coming home.
Bruce let them in through the back door of the kitchen. Selina grabbed an apple from the fruit basket and bit into it.
"Do you have a bathroom around here?" Helena asked.
Bruce nodded. "Around the hall, first door on the right."
Helena left the room, but chose the door next to the bathroom instead- a small linen closet with a false back that led to a secret passage and staircase behind the kitchen. She slid behind the wall and through the passage. She was certain her father knew about it, but he had no idea that she ever would. If Bruce and Selina were still in the kitchen, she could listen in and see where she stood with them. She didn't like eavesdropping, but sometimes it couldn't be helped. She crept into the small attic space above the kitchen and found the peephole. Sure enough, they were both down there.
"You're smarter than this, Bruce," she heard Selina say. "I don't know what she wants, but she's hiding something."
"I think you're right. But if Strange is after something at the Lab—we can't let him get it. We both know what he's like."
"You've got security there—"
"Selina. You're smarter than that."
Selina sighed. "Point taken."
"Maybe it's just that—" Bruce stopped, and Helena wondered if he'd lowered his voice and she just couldn't hear him, but then he spoke again. "There's something about her that reminds me of you. If you were in trouble, I'd hope someone would help."
"That is the stupidest thing you've ever said to me."
"Why, because I care?"
"Yes, because you care! You always try to see the best in everyone, and it's going to kill you one day. And something tells me I'm going to have to watch it happen, to which I say 'no thanks.' " Selina stalked out the door. "I'm getting Alfred."
Bruce didn't follow her. He sat at the table with a grim look on his face. The tension between him and Selina—Helena didn't like it. It was so uncertain, as if they were walking a tightrope where one wrong move would topple their relationship forever.
Helena's existence suddenly seemed very tenuous.
The thing about her parents was that though their relationship was not what she could call placid, like a pond or lake, she'd never once that anything could ever break it. Her parents' marriage, if she thought about it, struck her as more of a river—raging, at times flooding, always changing, calmer at some times more than others, but still always reassuringly and constantly there. She remembered when she was around six or so, and she was first confronted with the concept of divorce. It had seemed so strange and foreign to her, and in a way it still did. It wasn't until a bit later she realized that most marriages didn't involve the level the life-and-death trust that her parents had. Maybe it was that reason, more than the fact that her family was ridiculously intimidating, that she'd never been in a romantic relationship—if she couldn't have one like her parents', did she really want one at all?
Helena slipped out of the passage and peeked out into the hall before going back into the kitchen.
"Where's Selina?" she asked.
"Getting Alfred. Follow me." Bruce led her out of the room, and Helena smiled at the sight of the chandelier as they passed through the foyer. She'd never seen it before except in the background of pictures; Dick had broken it longer before she'd been born. Jason and Tim still teased him about it.
Helena wasn't surprised when Bruce led them into the study; it was his favorite room in the house, and she'd spent plenty of evenings as a child quietly coloring or putting together puzzles in front of the fireplace while he worked at his desk.
She sat down on the couch and glanced at the coffee table. Brows furrowed, she ran a finger down the center of it. The crack that had always been there—the remembrance of that night—wasn't there yet. That day would shape so much of her parents, and who they were to become. She couldn't change it, but—
She couldn't help but glance at them. The newspapers had mentioned Valeska. It wouldn't be long now. She wondered what would happen when she got home, and her parents knew she'd been back to see them. Would they blame her for not warning them? Blame her for letting her mother get shot, for Jeremiah? But how could she without the risk of changing everything?
"Did you see that they've given you a name?" Dad asked.
It was one of those typical mornings when half of the family went one way and the other half went another. Helena had come down to find her dad the only one in the kitchen, still in his pajamas and eating a bowl of cereal, the boring kind that tasted like oats and sadness.
Helena reached for the paper.
NEW HERO IN GOTHAM? THE "HUNTRESS" TAKES DOWN ARMED ROBBERY
"I kind of like it," she said. It had been hard giving up Robin, harder than she expected. After all, being Robin was kind of a Wayne family rite of passage. She'd been eager to create a persona of her own, to be her own hero. But not being Robin…well, it had felt a little like being kicked out of the nest.
"I do too." Dad smiled at her, and she knew it was his way of saying he was proud of her. He wasn't always the best at saying how he felt, but Helena knew how to read him pretty well.
"So, Huntress, huh?" Jason said, walking into the room. "Told you the crossbow was cool." Jason hadn't been living at the manor for a while now, but he'd crashed there last night for an as-of-yet unknown reason. Helena was just glad to see that he and Dad weren't fighting for once.
"I didn't choose it because you thought it was cool, Jay." Helena stuck out her tongue.
"Wow. Mature. Are you sure you're ready to be out of the Robin suit?" He stole the box of good cereal right before Helena reached it.
"Hey!"
"There's enough Cocoa Puffs for the both of us, 'Lena."
"Not at the rate you're pouring."
"Please tell me I don't have to break up a fight over cereal between my two grown children," Dad said, sounding tired but not unamused.
"Grown? She's not legal yet," Jason reminded him. He looked back at Helena. "No alcohol for you."
"Man, and I was really looking forward to that shot of vodka at eight in the morning." Helena rolled her eyes, but she was secretly glad Jason was around. He was her big brother, after all. She'd missed him.
She kind of had a feeling he already knew that, even though she hadn't said so. Maybe their dad wasn't the only one who struggled with expressing feelings.
She looked back down at the paper. There wasn't a photo, but there was a description. She hadn't counted on just how different it felt to be this…Huntress instead of Robin. Robin was more of a mask, a legacy she'd been a part of and a part she knew how to play. Being Huntress, being something new—with no expectations—was both frightening and exhilarating. She wondered if it was a little bit like her father must have felt like when he first became the Batman, doing something that no one had done before. Of course, it wasn't quite the same. Her father really had been on his own, except for Alfred of course.
Jason took the bowl of cereal up to his room. His old room, rather. Helena would have been disappointed he hadn't chosen to eat with them, but at the moment she wanted to talk with her dad alone.
"Was it hard, at the beginning. When people didn't know what to make of you, I mean?"
Dad seemed to know exactly what she was talking about. "It's always hard," he said. "But at the time—" he stopped before beginning again. "I had tried being a vigilante before, but I wasn't ready. I can't say I was ready when Batman came along, either—but then, then I didn't have much of choice."
"Because of him," Helena said tentatively. Even now, neither of her parents liked saying Jeremiah's name.
"He'd tried to take so much from me. I was so focused on that, on the city, on your mother—I don't think I had time to think about what anyone else thought." He looked at her. "Is that what you're wondering?"
Helena shrugged. "I don't know. Robin already had a reputation. Huntress doesn't. Who am I supposed to be?"
"You're whoever Gotham needs you to be, Helena. That's the point of this. All of this."
But that was just the thing—right now, what Gotham needed was for her to not be there. It didn't need Huntress, and it certainly didn't need Helena Wayne. Who, then, was she supposed to be?