Disclaimer: See part one.
Note: And … we're back! Last bit of detail and debris to clean up.
Chapter 5: Wake me when it's over
Selina runs, hurtles around corners, bashes suddenly clumsy shoulders into blunt concrete edges. It's the exact opposite of waking from a nightmare, the opposite of breathing deeply and touching familiar objects and finally believing the world is right and orderly and safe from the things that live in dreams. Nothing pursues her but the knowledge that spreads like a pool of decay, like a sinkhole in the soul of the city itself: the Batman has fallen.
She runs up and out and away into a night of distant sirens that wail like a prelude of screaming yet to come. She sprints down alleys familiar with dealers and pimps and murderers, maladies not yet made mundane in context of the horrors snapping at her heels. It's coming, she wants to shout but her voice is still choking in the tunnels, her windpipe constricting around much-needed air and all the things she could have said to change his mind.
She showers, dresses, packs a bag for show, waits for dawn. Exhaustion crawls behind her eyes but she won't sleep, not tonight, not until she knows it too well to forget, even in sleep. If she sleeps she'll wake up and wonder for a few moments if it was real, if everything has really changed forever.
(*)
She would have been more surprised not to be caught. As things stand, Blake arrests her like a formality, like the last sad sandbag piled up against the tide that will make a prison of their island city. It's Blackgate for her. Once the prison was a pretrial facility, the acidic gut of Gotham that received the thousands of men and women to pass through the jaws of Central Booking every year. It housed those accused and awaiting trial for longer and longer periods as the court system buckled and rallied again and again under the everyday onslaught of drug possession and property theft.
The Dent Act did away with all that. Now a higher percentage of Gotham's citizens are in prison than in any other city in a country that jails more of its population than any nation in the world. Now Blackgate stands at the city's heart, no longer housing the thousands of innocents-until-proven-guilty but the guilty by assumption and decree.
So it's the familiar dance for her: squad car, sally port, medical exam, search, booking, fingerprinting, phone call. "Jen," she says, "Paris is wonderful this time of year."
And Jen, who saw Selina's face that last morning without ever getting a word out of her says, "Give them hell, baby girl."
She waits in a cell constructed first of bars and reaching hands, then cinderblock walls, then all the things she's ever done. She waits with the buzz in her ears that is the birthright of the criminal class, the simmering, murmuring knowledge that the walls will soon crumble into dust and those inside with rise with the smoke, the dark mirror of every fairytale ever told. She waits like an anarchy of one, immolation from the ankles up, a fractal of the city Bane will create, one given everything it's ever wanted in the worst possible way.
(*)
During the early days of the siege she thinks of Jesus in the desert, of Tom Hanks losing his mind over a fucking volleyball. She's islanded in a sea of people, awash in the din of fear and joy, clinging to guilt grounded in the knowledge that she'd do it all again just the same. Except … except maybe if she'd looked a little harder, been less fooled by everything she'd ever thought about him.
She feels smaller than she ever has in her life, walking the streets of Gotham, standing on the edge of a local apocalypse that's at least partly of her own making. She feels too small to contain the fury of emotion raging in the wake of that night in the sewers, she who had always kept things simple, who'd tried never to feel more than one thing at a time. Small, chaotic, fierce, no clarity but all purpose, all thought funneled to one end. A rebel with no cause but escape.
(*)
"Come to the party," Jen says, voice emanating from a riot of finery, a collar of silver and diamonds and mink.
"Things to do," Selina replies as if her own outfit hadn't already made that clear.
"When you say 'things' can you please mean men? Or women. Or both. Whatever."
"Sure."
"Selina."
"I'm fine."
It's one month into the siege and the patterns are already settled, how things go, who they all are in the new order of things. Just one month to rebuild Rome. Just one month since he died.
"How long's it been since you had any fun."
"A week," Selina lies. It's not the answer to Jen's question, just the cause of an itch. One week. Since the age of sixteen, Selina Kyle hadn't gone more than a week without sex. It's not like she kept a tally but when the first endless hours of Bane's siege hung like humidity in August, stretching on and on into weeks and then months, when tension settled in her belly as deep and primal as hunger and pain but duller, rubbing gently at her soft spots, calling her attention away from flashbulb memories of terrors in the dark … well, she put two and two together. Thinking back over her habits, her marks and conquests and ways to pay the rent, she had never gone longer than a week.
Somehow even that thought brought her back to Bruce Wayne these days.
"Who are you pretending to be," she'd asked.
"Bruce Wayne, eccentric billionaire." His chest loomed large in her mind's eye, solid and thick and close. She's never been shy about desire but she thinks this might feel something like shame.
"You're dead," she tells his memory. "It was self-defense."
"Come to the party," Jen insists.
"I'm not dressed for your crowd."
(*)
His voice sounds small in the chilled air. Small enough that she almost believes he's just a man. He talks and for a moment she doesn't trust her knees; doesn't move but to dig fingertips into pockets so they won't reach out for a ghost.
Even up close, she can't smell him under the patina of wood smoke, the constantly smoldering fires of Gotham's antique clocks and molding floorboards, sacrificed to Bane and the lack of central heating. His breath mingles with hers in the air like they might inhabit the same plane, like he hasn't transcended death, like she's anything more than his fickle, skittish shadow.
But as he talks, anger grounds her, her footing growing solid for the first time in months. "You don't owe these people anything." He hasn't been here to see the city eat itself alive, to watch everything anyone ever feared from it come true. "You've already given them everything."
He speaks words like sutures, stitching fast all the parts of her that only want to make it out alive. "Not everything," he says. "Not yet."
He stands close and tells her his plan, infiltrate the tower, rescue the girl, save the city. He asks for little and hands her everything in return: her escape route, her fresh start, her new life free of Bane and Blackgate and even the Bat himself. Everything she's ever wanted in the worst possible way.
She just nods. For all that, she doesn't want it any less. She doesn't take the time—not now- to wonder if she wants him more.
(*)
Including psych facilities, there are twenty-three hospitals within the Gotham City limits. Jim Gordon calls all of them, using the collective hours on hold to direct the first feeble efforts to assess the fallout of the siege. "White male," he says for the final time, "late thirties, probably multiple traumatic injuries, maybe burns, a stab wound to the right flank."
He'd already tried Bruce Wayne, now he's looking for John Does.
"We have at least one person that might fit that description, Commissioner. But he's a 'HIPAA no.'"
It's not the first time he's run into that particular red tape today, the privacy law that prevented even the police from getting information about a patient over the phone. He's too tired to curse. "How is he?"
"Currently unstable," says the voice on the other end of the line.
This time Gordon does curse. "Look…how unstable? If I make it down there in the next hour or two, is he going to be there?"
"I'm sorry Commissioner, I've told you all I can." The woman is kind but firm. He pictures the sort of nurse that's body checked him on more than one occasion for getting in the way of a resuscitation team working on a gangbanger.
"Yeah. Thanks."
Nine hospitals, seventeen John Does who are probably anybody else but who could be Bruce Wayne. The Batman.
(*)
"You want updates on your people?"
"Nah, give me the full run through, I have a trainee."
"Okay…room 18 is a Trauma Doe, male, brought in by Express Evac Air from Gotham U on Saturday. He has a stab wound to the right flank, status-post ex-lap, grade III liver with retroperitoneal bleeding. CT and x-ray revealed probable past splenectomy, neuro-trauma, multiple healed fractures, and extensive damage to cartilage at bilateral elbows and right knee. Neuro-wise …."
"…."
"I'll be honest, I missed a lot of that."
"No problem, it's your first day. The main point is the guy's pretty sick but out of the woods."
"He's been here four days and still hasn't been ID'd?"
"First day I had him, I heard we were basically waiting for someone to call from Bethesda and claim him."
"Bethesda? That wasn't in my medical terminology class."
"Bethesda, Maryland. Big military hospital there, you know. Guy clearly has a violent past but no cops are showing up, he didn't come in under arrest. So, everybody figured the military might come calling next …."
"But not you."
"Came in from Gotham U, right? I'm pretty good at faces … but, well, see if you don't recognize him too."
"Yeah … okay."
"Hey, don't worry. I won't put you out there on your own today, not even to dump a urinal and definitely not long enough to kill anybody. Ready?"
"Close enough."
"Great."
"…."
"First we have to turn down the prope drip for a few minutes so he can wake up. Hi, sir. Good morning, It's Ray, back for night shift. Can you open your eyes for me? Come on, open them up. Good, good, try again. I have a young lady with me today training to be a patient care technician, so you've got twice the attention tonight, alright?"
"So … really? No one knew when he came in?"
"We're a state away, I guess no one thought he'd end up here. But…."
"But that's Bruce Wayne."
"Yeah. MIA billionaire philanthropist who's extremely stubborn about opening his eyes."
"Well … have you tried …?"
"Now that you mention it …. Mr. Wayne … Bruce, Bruce, open your eyes. It's your nurse, Ray. Open your eyes Bruce, I want you to meet Selina."