Chapter Text
Selina has been back in Gotham for just two days when she sees the Batman again. She gets back to her hotel suite with some groceries while her new traveling companion is in the shower and his eyes seem to look right at her from the front page of a newspaper the woman left out on a table. Barely caught in a photo of police at a crime scene, his imposing shape darkens the very edge of the frame. The fact that he wasn’t more careful than to let himself be photographed seems to suggest Gotham is truly being served by a somewhat different Batman than before.
She takes the paper into her room with her and sits up on the bed staring at the page. She raises a finger across his cowl in the picture, just above the holes for his eyes where the sculpted angry brow is. With this part covered the expression looks smoother and more neutral, surely something closer to his real face, the eyes both more emphasized and less piercing. More human.
She throws the paper aside and curls up on her side, hugging her knees to herself and letting out a long, heavy breath.
Many times her thoughts have strayed to him, of course, and she has wondered wistfully who he was. Now it no longer feels like a comfortably past-tense thing. She’s back in his city, where everyone everywhere wonders who he is.
He follows, at last, all of Alfred’s urgings to let Bruce Wayne out into the light of day and try to make a difference that way. He gives his attention to the company when needed. He lets the mayor bend his ear over a long dinner. He starts getting into the sort of charity work his mother devoted so much of her time to, helping to rebuild the city where it was hit hardest by the attack.
When Alfred gets a barber over to the tower to give him a proper haircut, the casual physical contact with a stranger is jarring. It’s the same when he goes to get fitted for some new custom suits. The place has mirrors everywhere and he feels almost unbearably scrutinized, seeing himself from so many angles as the handsome friendly-faced tailor moves his hands and tape measure all over him.
He plans to host a charity auction at his home for items donated from many of the city’s old family estates. Alfred has to get out many of his parents’ effects that have been put away in storage ever since the manor was packed up and sort out valuables he knows had special meaning to them from those they can consider letting go.
One afternoon he walks by the dining room table and all his mother’s jewelry is left out in a glittering display there for Alfred to look through it all later. His eyes are drawn to a gold byzantine chain bracelet, simple and elegant, which he stops to pick up and look at. It has a gold charm, a delicately detailed Greek coin replica, dangling from where it clasps together. Hardly the most valuable piece here, but he knows she wore this a lot. It is visible in several family photos he can think of, and he has memories of the coin dangling from her wrist as he walked holding her hand. Once when he was getting restless and bored at a Christmas Eve church service, she took it off and let him play with it. In the way childhood memories can seem to stretch out forever, the time he spent staring at how it glimmered with movement in the surrounding candlelight feels like it was hours.
He can see that Alfred has taken care of all these pieces all this time, keeping the silver sealed tight so it doesn’t tarnish, taking them out for cleaning only to put them away again. The thought pains him that much of what’s left of his parents has been kept closed up in boxes. Knowing he has let them down does not make it easy now to carve something almost wholly new out of himself. He feels too much himself like something kept inside a dark box that needs more than dusting off and a polish to show life again. As if, one awkward step at a time, he is only beginning to learn how to fake it.
The light of the bat-signal has a warmer, hazier glow than usual, broken up by the light glittering snowfall in the mid-February sky. He has been on patrol for three hours already when he sees it.
Gotham is no longer under water, but the flooding left behind a dank, slightly foul smell that is still noticeable any time one steps outside all this time later. He can vaguely smell it even as he’s in the elevator, nearly at the top of the building where Gordon always waits. It lingers in every part of the city, in rich and poor areas alike. Something Selina would probably say feels fitting.
Having that stray thought makes him think for a second that he has to be imagining the figure he sees when he steps out onto the rooftop. Definitely not Gordon. Seeing her makes him stop in his steps for a moment, right as she turns to look at him approaching.
Once he gets a bit closer he can see her expression, smooth and relaxed. She’s not here because of any great danger. She is wearing her catsuit but not the mask right now. They stand still before each other, their eyes locking, the silence drawing out between them. Slowly a smirk shows on her face and he has a feeling she would torment him all night just waiting, making him be the first to speak.
For the moment he just moves to pass her, catching a glimpse of her smirk getting more pronounced at this, and goes behind her to turn off the signal. Then turning to face her again, he asks, “How long have you been back?”
“Not long.” She steps closer to him. “You look like you’ve already gotten into it tonight.” She’s glancing at some traces of drying mud on his cape over one shoulder. “Were you gentle with them?”
He knows it’s completely deliberate, how suggestive she makes it sound. She has been standing in front of him again for all of a minute and is already throwing off all his internal sense of equilibrium.
“It didn’t take much,” he answers her simply. “Is everything okay?”
Her look turns a little more serious. “I’m sure you’ve done your research on all of Gotham’s elite. What can you tell me about Eric Dunne?”
“Dunne?” A little taken aback, he thinks for a moment. “He’s some distant relation of the Waynes. A surgeon. I know he lost most of his wealth at some point and married a Bradford. She’s the one who has all the money. She was very young when they got married. Enough that it raised some eyebrows at the time.”
“Other than that, no dirt on him?”
“Not that I know of. Why?”
She hesitates briefly. “I came across Olivia Dunne in Blüdhaven. She’s staying here with me now. He’s probably been telling everyone she’s visiting family or something, but she ran away. He was controlling and abusive. She’d managed to have some cash stashed away for a rainy day that he didn’t know about. The only thing that gave her the will to finally risk leaving was she had reason to think he planned to kill her.”
This takes a moment for him to take in. “Can she prove that?”
“What do you think?”
He thinks another moment. “Where is she now?”
“Hotel. She hasn’t told anyone but me where she is since she left.”
“If I knew why she suspected—”
“I’m not gonna let you talk to her,” she says, so firm it seems clear she decided on that before ever bringing this to him.
He looks at her with a pause, not liking it, but understanding. “Alright.”
“He has evidence of adultery, and she has nothing on him,” she continues. “I’m trying to help her get out of that position so she can get a divorce and get control of her finances back without endangering herself. She’d pay me. Even if it doesn’t shake out that way, well…” She gives a noncommittal shrug. “It’s more interesting than what I was doing with myself in Blüdhaven.”
He knows the newspapers there have reported a couple sightings of a “Catwoman” connected to local burglaries. She seems to be falling into an exceedingly reckless and unsustainable pattern, but he’s not going to bring that up right now.
“So you came back to Gotham to get into his house,” he says.
“Right.”
“What kind of evidence is there?”
“A recording, supposedly. On a thumb drive somewhere. She says he stores private files in some kind of red case she’s seen once.”
“Simple enough.”
She looks into his eyes, slowly smiling, as if wondering if she imagined the subtle humor in his tone.
“You need help?” he asks.
A more deliberate smile. “Probably not. But we could make quick work of it.”
He gives her an earpiece so they can stay in direct contact while watching different sides of the house. After some complaints about feeling micromanaged, she reluctantly puts in his extra pair of camera lenses in case she needs to take images of anything inside, as they may need to split up to cover more ground.
They get lucky. Only after forty minutes of waiting, Dunne gets into his car and leaves. Neither of them saw him talking on the phone beforehand, which would have indicated he was going to the hospital and could be gone a long time, but the tracker they put on his car will tell them when he’s headed back.
It’s not hard to find the safe behind a painting in the office. Selina gets her safe-cracking equipment out of her backpack and gets to work on it while he checks the computer nearby in case Dunne is stupid enough to have left anything out of the ordinary he can access on it. Nothing there, and only cash in the safe. They expand their search into different rooms, and not long after he hears her speak up in his earpiece.
“Um. You better look at this…”
There is too much space between one wall of the study and the next room, and she noticed it almost right away judging by the short moments they were separated. He comes in to find her looking for where the false wall must open. One bookcase has fewer books arranged on it than others, perhaps deliberately left weighing less. Together they push that one slightly away from the wall at an angle, and sure enough there is a somewhat crude sliding door there.
“You’re kidding me,” Selina says, squeezing in first into the tight area between the walls.
He hears her stumble a little and says, “Be careful.”
When he follows, he sees that in the dark she tripped down the first of a flight of stairs that this narrow hidden area opens to. They both turn on flashlights to light their way down the steps, then both stand still looking around the entirely hidden room.
“Oh my God,” he hears her say faintly behind him as their flashlight beams move around the dark.
In the marble of the floor, a large gleaming medallion design shows constellations and other celestial shapes, but in a nightmarish red on black. In the center is a symbol of a dagger with a crescent moon behind it. In a gray rim circling all of this are much more ornate symbols like an unfamiliar language. He can see no electronic lights installed anywhere, only tall candelabras set around the walls.
But what their attention is drawn to before anything else is the dais, raised on three steps at the end of the room opposite where they entered. A large stone altar with a velvet covering. In a triangular niche in the wall behind it sits a small but very detailed idol of some demonic creature.
He points his flashlight toward Selina, surveying her reaction to all this. She looks back at him. “What, do you think I knew anything about…whatever the hell this is?” she asks, sounding distinctly uneasy. “I guess you’re not the only rich guy in Gotham with a messed up hobby.”
Whatever shows in his features then makes her give him a dry smirk. To his surprise, knowing she hasn’t let go of that assumption about him makes him feel a little relieved more than anything.
He pulls himself back to examining the room. She follows him, going up the steps on the opposite side of the altar, when he goes up onto the dais.
He shines his flashlight on the idol, illuminating the clawed feet, the strange webbed ears on the sides of its head. Its eyes are a dull red, unfaceted gems set in the carved stone. “This demon,” he says. “I’ve seen the image somewhere.”
“So?”
Not looking at her, he moves the beam of his flashlight outward toward the floor, further taking in the symbols with an increasingly disturbed feeling. “It’s Etrigan. He’s not a symbol commonly used by modern Satanists. This is something…specific.”
“Okay then, Private School, what the fuck do you make of this?” Selina says, nodding toward the velvet-covered surface in between them. She sounds deeply unsettled, frustrated by his calm somehow, by his partly distracted demeanor. As if maybe seeing all of this is making vague things Olivia told her before take her imagination to some very dark places now.
“It’s an altar.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” Her gaze follows his to the marble floor. “Have you seen anything like that before?”
“That’s the thing,” he says grimly. “I have seen that writing just once before. Over a year ago. At a crime scene.”
Her eyes widen a little. She watches him lean over to peer closer at the altar. One end where the stone is exposed, and the other. He meets eyes with her gravely. “Traces of blood.”
She says nothing now, holding her arms around herself like she’s starting to feel cold.
He gets out a few small vials to take some samples, takes off his gloves to do it very carefully. She sees him fumbling for a second trying to take out his knife while still holding one vial and the flashlight, and swiftly produces her own from somewhere.
“Here,” she says in a now more steady voice, handing him the knife handle first. He takes it and she moves away to begin more thoroughly searching the rest of the room. Even standing in a spot where he’s now quite sure some horrifying things have been done, he is distracted for a moment noticing that the knife feels warm from wherever it was strapped close to her body and has to force his focus back to the work at hand.
He lightly scrapes bits of dried blood off one edge of the altar into a vial, then takes two more samples from different parts of the altar and secures them in his belt. He checks the small monitor displaying where the tracker is now.
“We don’t have much time,” he says, even as he does a quick last search around the altar area himself. When he pulls aside a rug that covers most of the dais, he finds another safe built into the floor there.
“Of course,” Selina says darkly, shining her light over his shoulder.
“It needs a fingerprint,” he says. “We can get his prints from somewhere in the house. We’ll have to come back.”
They get back to where they left their bikes in a patch of darkness between two buildings. After rolling them back out into the street, they stop and turn to each other.
He says what she knows is coming. “I’m thinking there’s a lot Olivia didn’t tell you.” He steps a little closer. “Or that you didn’t tell me.”
He doesn’t say it accusingly, just giving her a chance to tell him anything more he should know. She looks at him uncomfortably. “I’ll talk to her. I can call you later tonight.” She points at his device she still has in her ear.
“That crime scene I saw before, it’s an unsolved murder. Matthew Bly. See if the name means anything to her.”
She nods and they both fall into silence. The cold, open air feels cleansing after being down in that pitch-black room. She allows herself to just look at him closely. When she reaches up slowly and touches his face, the look in his eyes softens in a barely perceptible way, like each time she has done it before.
She says very softly, “Did you think about me?”
A flicker of struggle in his face. She can hear his breathing subtly change as he keeps gazing silently at her. She becomes slowly overwhelmed by the impression she often has in his presence, that all the hardness in his expression and demeanor betrays the effort of holding so much back. Confusion and want roiling inside but always controlled.
His head bows toward her. She just about holds her breath, staying totally still as he lowers his face toward her neck as if anything more might stop him. His breath on her skin, his cheek grazing her, he hesitates, like an animal shyly nuzzling another. Then he kisses her neck. Not opening his lips but firmly, his hand holding the other side of her neck, as if this is all he will allow himself so he must do it surely. Her eyelids flutter shut and she catches the night air in a long, open-mouthed breath.
Then she feels him stiffen a little and draw back. When she opens her eyes, he is looking over her shoulder at something. She turns to see the bat-signal lit up in the sky.
“Saved again,” she says, a little teasingly, and turns back to her motorcycle.
She gets back to the suite to find Olivia already in bed, breathing slowly in deep sleep with her very dark Welsh hair partly strewn over her face. She should have known she would already be out cold. This is becoming a pattern for them: Selina’s increasingly nocturnal habits keeping her out late, Olivia usually taking a pill because she’s much too anxious to sleep otherwise and being so dead to the world that nothing Selina does when she finally gets in can disturb her.
“He made me participate.” It’s what she said once that Selina now can’t get out of her head. She was very drunk and upset when the words slipped out, and wouldn’t explain. Hauntedly, Selina stands in the doorway watching her for a moment before shutting her bedroom door with a sigh.
She presses the tiny button in the earpiece to open the channel. “Can you talk yet?”
Batman’s slightly gravelly voice comes in clear. “Yes. Gordon didn’t need me long. I’m home.”
Home. The normalcy of it sounds strange from him.
“Well, Olivia’s asleep,” she says as she heads into her own room. “I’ll have to tell you what more I can find out from her when we go back to the house. Can you meet there tomorrow night?”
“Yes.” He pauses while she sits on the bed and starts taking off her boots. “Did her husband catch up to her in Blüdhaven? Or send someone looking for her?”
“What?” she says tiredly, dropping the first removed boot to the floor. She’s not sure what he’s getting at. “No.”
“So it isn’t you in the recording.”
She laughs shortly. “No, honey.”
“But you and Annika…”
She can’t help but smile at the hint of awkwardness in his voice as she pushes the other boot off. “Yeah?” she asks nonchalantly.
“You were going to leave the country together.”
“…Yes,” she says, feeling sad suddenly.
He hears it in her voice. “I’m sorry. I…”
“It’s okay. Yeah, we were together. On and off. It wasn’t really what you think, though.” She lies back on the bed and stares idly up at the ceiling. “I never told her why I was working at the Iceberg Lounge. At the end all I was really thinking about was getting her out of danger. I guess I always knew I would get restless and bail at some point. I’m not good at making long-term plans. Going from foster home to foster home will do that to you.” She stretches out across the mattress, head rolling to one side, and smiles. “I’m looking at you right now.”
It’s actually cute to hear his confusion, the tiniest tinge of worry in his tone at the very idea. “What?”
Remembering she still has his contacts in her eyes, she takes the earpiece out for a second to press the tiny switch on them he told her would turn them on. She picks up the newspaper with his photo from the bedside table and looks directly at it.
Batman apparently is sitting where he can see the feed. “Oh,” he says with an audible huff of breath, the closest thing to actual laughter she’s ever heard from him. He must be wearing a headset to talk to her, she can hear his breathing so clearly.
She has sat up enough that she can see her own reflection in the mirror above the dresser. “Why are you asking about me and her?”
He doesn’t seem to have a quick answer.
“Have you been wondering how serious I really could have been when I asked you to go away with me?”
She rises from the bed and walks over to the mirror, staring closely at her own reflection, knowing it is practically like staring into his eyes to wait for an answer. This feels incredibly intimate in a way it certainly didn’t the first time, having his voice in her ear and knowing he is seeing through her eyes.
Even the silence is charged as he hesitates so long to answer. With the knowledge that he is looking at her. That he is alone, surely with his mask off.
Heavily and relentingly, he says only, “Selina.”
She looks down toward the dresser for a long moment. Then lifts her eyes back up resolutely to meet her own in the mirror.
She raises her fingers to the top of her zipper and pulls, slowly.
Silence from him as a part of her bralette underneath peeks out, then the skin below. Then she slowly pulls the front open and hears him make the smallest clipped utterance, as if he tries to say something but nothing will come out.
She steps back, just enough that her whole torso is caught in the reflection, before pulling the sleeves off. With a few more unhurried movements she has slid out of the whole catsuit. His breathing, if she isn’t imagining it, has grown just a little more audible. Or perhaps she’s just more aware of it, the sound alone telling her they’re still connected and he is seeing everything.
She could say something. Ask if he’s still there even though she knows. He knows she does. But she feels like it might break some delicate spell to acknowledge out loud what this is, and then he would stop it. And she knows somehow that he won’t say anything as she pulls her bra up over her head and lets her breasts spill out.
She hooks her thumbs into her underwear and pauses for an instant. His breathing has definitely changed now, picked up just a little faster. She listens to the sound intently as she teasingly pulls the waistband down a little bit, brushing it past the first hint of thin hair, then down past the rest of her.
She stands still, totally exposed, just lets him see for a moment. Then lifts her right hand to her left breast, just caressing the one. She circles her fingertips over her nipple for just a second, gently flattening it and letting it perk back out just slightly firmed.
Her own breathing, of course, is affected now too. Her whole body feels woken up and over-sensitized as if someone is actually touching her. She’s not sure she can even remember the last time touching someone electrified her like the very thought of his eyes on her right now.
He won’t say anything.
She steps away from the mirror. She slips on a robe tossed over a chair nearby and reaches up to her ear to disconnect them. “Good night, then,” she says softly, and pushes the button.
Back in her bed, staring up at the ceiling again, she draws her knees up holding them firmly together while she closes the robe across her chest and ignores the heat between her legs. She keeps recalling the sound of his voice. A disembodied thing she cannot link to a face but is coming to know so well.
In the same place where they left their bikes before, his headlights land on her dark silhouette leaning against one wall and there already seems something uncomfortable in her posture. When he leaves his motorcycle and comes up to her, she holds back from speaking. She looks deeply uneasy, her arms held close to her body.
“Are you alright?” he asks.
She can’t seem to look right at him. “She doesn’t know anything about Bly.”
He waits for something more. Then he just says, “Or the rest.” Not because he believes it, but because he has a strong feeling it’s what she will say.
She meets his eyes finally. “Can we get this over with?”
Olivia told her Eric will typically be out late on a Saturday night like this, so they feel safe enough going on in when the place looks dark inside. In the safe in the hidden room they find a variety of files and small chests in addition to the red case Olivia described, but Batman isn’t interested in any of the rest right now, and Selina is all too eager to be out of there again.
Back outside later, she leans back on her bike while he stands close by and zips open the flash drive case again to look closer at the contents. Each drive is labeled with an initial or series of initials. Selina reaches for the one labeled O.B.D. but he stops her with a hand closing around hers, not forcefully, his eyes meeting hers with too many questions in them for her comfort.
“I looked into the Dunnes some more,” he says, lowering her hand and dropping it. “Gordon only had to talk to a couple people close to their social circle to give me a pretty good picture.”
She swallows. “You took this to Gordon already?”
“You know I have to anyway. They’re known to enjoy an unconventional lifestyle. They like bringing a third partner into their home who usually stays for a few months, then supposedly moves on and isn’t seen again. Three times at least there’s been a young woman, always a certain type, dark-haired. Like Olivia, in fact. When they take her out they usually have some story about her being an old friend’s daughter or something, but people obviously have made their own assumptions.”
Selina drops her eyes down away from him.
“She was practically a kid when she met Eric,” he continues. “He must have had complete control over her for a long time. She probably helped groom these girls for what was done to them downstairs. In some kind of ritual, I assume with a group of people who are all represented on these thumb drives. She looked like them. They would have trusted a couple more easily in the beginning than they would a man on his own. And he quite possibly made her do worse things, too.”
It more or less lines up with what little she was able to get Olivia to admit to her today, but there are sides of it she hadn’t heard, and this is almost unbearable to listen to. But she understands that this is about more than Olivia now. “Yes,” she says quietly, still not looking at him.
“Cult leaders will often make sure they have something on all of their followers. Even those closest to them. There’s no evidence of adultery, is there? It’s incriminating evidence.”
She turns to him reluctantly, sadly. “I wasn’t going to tell you unless I had to,” she says after a long hesitation. “I know it’s not her fault. I couldn’t be sure that you’d—”
“You don’t have to explain,” he says.
She sees only then that he has removed the drive she needs from the case. He takes her hand again and presses it into her palm. She looks at him almost in wonder as he goes to secure the case in a compartment on his motorcycle.
She steps back toward him, slipping the drive into her pocket, and waits until he turns back to her. “You’re different now, aren’t you?” she asks him softly.
Some sort of sadness creeps into his eyes as he looks down at her, and he takes a while to answer. “I don’t know.”
She crosses her arms, the chill in the air somehow hitting her harder now. “You know, this push-and-pull is really starting to cramp my style. Especially since I’m the one doing most of the pulling.”
He closes his eyes briefly with an uneasy breath. “Selina…”
“I’ve told you things I've never shared with anyone else. You were there at the moment in my life I most needed someone to stop me, when no one else would have cared. You saved my life. Am I never gonna see what you look like?”
He inches just a bit closer. “I’m not…being fair to you.”
“Why, because of last night, you mean?” she says tauntingly. “Because you watched me, but you wouldn’t—”
“Yes.”
The forced steadiness in his voice only frustrates her more. “Whatever. Those fucking things you wear in your eyes,” she says with bitter mocking. “It’s obviously how you like it.”
He grabs her by the shoulders. It’s not enough to hurt her, but the strength of it makes her mouth drop open slightly with her alarm. For an instant he just looks at her intensely, breathing hard through his nose, his mouth a hard line.
His shoulders sink a little with some weakening resolve, and he kisses her. She closes her eyes and melts into it as he pulls her body in closer, crushing her to him. When his tongue passes into her it’s even more of a shock than she has imagined when she thought about this, and she makes the smallest whimpering sound against his mouth as the kiss quickly deepens.
After a moment he breaks away only to lower his face to her neck and kiss her there hotly. She holds the back of his neck, almost digging her nails into the cowl. “What do you want, baby?” she breathes out. “Don’t you know you can have it?”
His breath comes out a little ragged against her. “How far can this really go?”
“Do you need me to describe it to you?”
He raises one of her hands to his face and kisses the back of it, closing his eyes and holding it there a second in a gesture that disarms her, like he is pleading for her understanding. “Possibly you wouldn’t want to,” he says, “if you knew everything.”
“Come on. The reality can’t be worse than what I’ve already imagined and I’m still standing here.”
He composes himself for a moment and puts his hands on each side of her neck. “You may think it would mean getting closer to me,” he says. “But it could just mean…the end of this. Whatever this is. That you’ll find there’s nothing more to me than this.”
She shakes her head slowly, not understanding.
His tone is completely serious, and hopelessly hollow. “What if you’ve already gone as deep as you can go, and there’s just nothing?”
She slowly draws back from him, not prepared for this.
He is telling her even he doesn’t know.
She goes to her bike, sets her hands on the handles and finds herself just staring at them in a defeated way. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says finally, giving a last look back at him as she picks up her helmet. “You don’t even know what I already see.”