Apart from the luxurious furnishings, there were three
points where Ra’s al Ghul’s incarceration in Atlantis differed from its
equivalent on land. Aquaman was the final authority underwater, and the bribery
that could be taken for granted in a land-based principality was simply not an
option. Aquaman also liked to visit his prisoner once a week whenever he was in
the capital (on the pretense of checking the air filters and pressure settings,
but in reality, to be an arrogant, chatty and patronizing thorn in Ra’s al
Ghul’s side). And finally, the Atlanteans felt an obligation to those who died
or risked death in any conflict. When a battle was over, they studied it to
learn whatever they could from their failures and make sure whatever went wrong
wouldn’t happen again. Ra’s al Ghul may have failed in the end, but he had
learned of the undersea fortress called Kapheira. He had moved in and taken
over a valuable Atlantean property, and he could, in time, have posed a
considerable threat if undiscovered. Every few weeks some new official from
their university, military, or the ministry of this-or-that came to interview
him about the episode.
It was the last that bothered Batman. He was pleased that
the Atlanteans were incorruptible, and he would be the last to deny Arthur those
weekly visits to poke Ra’s al Ghul in the ego. But he did fear the example the
Atlanteans were setting with those interviews. The one thing Ra’s never seemed
to do with all those lifetimes of experience was learn from his mistakes.
Atlantis’s practice was admirable—for Atlantis. It was undoubtedly how they’d
become such an advanced society. But Batman didn’t want them giving Ra’s the
idea.
He needn’t have worried as far as the schemes The Demon’s
Head himself initiated. Ra’s was confident of his own wisdom and supremely
confident in the inability of lesser minds to best him. The months of
questioning from self-doubting Atlanteans had not led him to examine his own
failure with Kapheira, or with any other operation—but Falstaff's was another
matter. Ra’s needed no subliminal prodding to indulge that most basic
human instinct: figuring out what the other guy did wrong.
In Falstaff’s case, he decided, it was underestimating
Bruce Wayne. It was one thing to know the Detective’s name as a collection of
English letters. It was another thing entirely to understand the man. To
understand the force of will, the drive and determination, the dedication and
discipline necessary to become that man among men. Batman was not some childish
whim that was forgotten as Bruce Wayne grew to manhood; it was the work of a
lifetime building himself into that formidable creation. Shouldn’t one who
revered Ra’s al Ghul, who had sworn his life to the service of The Demon,
understand that the Detective’s pledge was just as absolute, just as lifelong
and all encompassing?
To imagine that Bruce Wayne would have simply accepted
Falstaff’s takeover—to imagine he’d simply quit after a setback? To think one
with such a lack of understanding was permitted to execute an operation in
Gotham—a very costly operation in Gotham, it was appalling, simply appalling.
And to think that Ra’s himself had awarded the fool a bowl of fruit—an
apostrophe and a bowl of fruit. That would be the first thing remedied when he
got out of here. Until then, he would have to make what he could of this
disaster. To begin, he must purge his thoughts of all Falstaff had told him.
Anything and everything the fool said must be considered suspect, as it could
not be known when the Detective began deceiving him. Any or all of Falstaff's
plan as Falstaff related it might be a fiction of the Detective’s own making.
Ra’s simply had to ignore it and focus on the only new data that was reliable:
that brief conversation in Bruce Wayne’s office when he was so openly and
obnoxiously content.
“That’s my girl,” he had begun. The Feline, obviously, who
Falstaff had so stupidly made a focal point of the operation. As if the
Detective wouldn’t be agitated enough by a slur on the memory of his parents
that further goading would only… No.
No, no, no, this would not do. He had to purge all
thoughts of Falstaff and focus solely on what he knew.
Ra’s al Ghul took a deep breath, closing his eyes and then…
as he opened them… he regarded the koi pond the Atlanteans so thoughtfully
provided to aide in meditation and reflection. He slowed his breathing… and
watched the largest of the three fish as it made its way around the small,
shell-shaped enclosure… He breathed again. And in his mind's eye, thought back
to that entry into Bruce Wayne’s office. The man seated behind the desk, legs
crossed informally, looking down at that mechanized tablet with a pleased smile,
“That’s my girl...”
Ra’s had become so engrossed in the mental picture that he
didn't hear the telltale approach of feet outside his door or the hum of the
locking system being deactivated. He heard nothing at all until the mechanical
swish of the door opening behind him. He turned, thinking it was too early for
the weekly visit from Aquaman, so this must be that minion of his: the handmaid
called Valerina. She would be introducing some new visitor, no doubt, from the
Ministry of Let's Bother the Most Distinguished Prisoner Atlantis Has Ever Been
Privileged to Capture. They would have another questionnaire–yet another
questionnaire that was really beneath his dignity to answer. (But he would
indulge them, since it gave him the opportunity to talk about himself.) So he
turned with royal condescension, prepared to meet this new individual as a
monarch equal to their own King Orin, one who had merely suffered the kind of
reversal so many great rulers had over the…
“You,” he breathed, seeing it was indeed the handmaid
Valerina escorting a new visitor, but a visitor who needed no introduction.
“Ra’s. You always know how to make a girl
feel welcome,” Catwoman said with a smile.
That's my girl, Bruce reminded him in his mind’s
ear.
So this is what the inside of a jail cell
looks like...
The words had hovered on Selina’s lips as she looked around the small but
luxurious suite of rooms The Demon’s Head now called home. They hovered, but
she squelched them. Ra’s had always been the ‘civil and courteous’ type of
villain, and she always detested the capes who have to answer that kind of thing
with aggression. It cost nothing to answer courtesy with courtesy, after all.
And once he got over the shock of seeing her, Ra’s had been nothing if not
courteous. He offered her a choice of refreshment: the tea Atlanteans
blended from specially cultivated seaweed or a kind of sangria that blended
surface wine with some mysterious ‘sea fruit’ that was apparently impossible to
peel and eat in any other form, but was too delicious to ignore.
It was as though she was the high bidder in some “Atlantis
Experience” at the silent auction: Visit the undersea kingdom and enjoy an
afternoon of tea and conversation with a land-born expatriate now living in the
capital city Poseidonis. Cough-fighting or not, she would not be the one to
break the smooth surface of civilized gentility with rude allusions to who was
in jail and who wasn’t. Instead, she complimented the furnishings as if Ra’s
had picked them himself and noted a clay pot on a side table which, judging by
its lines and proportions, looked Minoan. Ra’s praised her keen eye and,
while the tea steeped, he speculated at length whether Atlantis might have
influenced the Minoans or—more likely, in his opinion—the Minoan culture had a
hand in shaping ancient Atlantis.
“I must remember to ask King Orin when he next visits,”
Ra’s said, lifting the lid of the small teapot and sniffing the steam as if
judging its readiness. “A very arrogant man leading a very arrogant people. It
will irk him no end if a lowly land-dweller like myself suggests they may have
found something of value in the surface world they consider so inferior.”
Judging the brew ready, he poured and set down
the pot, smiling like a contented cat.
“So,” he said, oozing satisfaction that, for once, the
social pleasantries had been observed without interruption. “You have come, I
presume, to reclaim the... what is it called... the mechanized 'tablet'
which Falstaff presented me to reestablish contact with my minions?”
“You can keep it if you want,” Selina said. “It's not good
for anything but solitaire at this point.”
“Then why have you come?” Ra’s asked, still gracious in
tone but with a spark of suspicion lit behind his eyes.
Selina set down her cup.
“I wanted to see you personally to let you know, well...
Were you aware I’m in the crimefighting game now? Probably not, it’s not the
kind of thing your guys would notice, let alone care about enough to put into a
report. But, uh, I am. And, well, I’m going to be handling you from
now on.
“You see, Bruce won a bet. It’s my own fault; I was pissed
and cocky and trying to make a point. I said he could name any prize he
wanted. This is it. He chose not bothering with you anymore. You’re now my
problem.”
“This is an obscenity,” Ra’s said flatly.
“No, it’s geography. Bruce is Batman, and Batman is
Gotham. You’re not. You’re just not, Ra’s. And Gotham has plenty of
its own concerns and its own criminals to keep both the Dark Knight and
his day face fully occupied.”
“I do not accept this! I do not believe for one moment the
Detective would be so—”
“Yeah, well, geography is one of those pesky things that
exist whether you believe in them or not. Maybe you're thinking of Tinkerbell.”
For a moment, Ra’s lip trembled with unspeakable emotion,
then he collected himself, refreshed his tea cup and took a sip as if he no
longer saw Catwoman in the room with him.
“It won't be that bad,” she said coaxingly. “It’ll take
some getting used to, but I’m sure we can learn to make each other just as
miserable as you and Bruce did.”
Ra’s appeared to look through her at a random spot over the
koi pond.
“Ah,” Selina said, realizing he was ignoring her the same
way Whiskers did when he was offended. She decided not to share that
observation but figured the same response was called for: give him all the time
he needs, alone by himself, to get over it. “I’d better be going then,” she
said, rising. “Thank you for the tea.”
As the door to the prison apartment closed behind her,
Selina felt the thin, barely visible particle beams hum to life behind her,
sending an ionized buzz through the back of her hair and across the back of her
rump.
“Hey,” she squawked, jumping forward. “You could give me
two seconds to get out the door before you turn those back on.”
“Sorry,” an unexpectedly masculine voice answered, and
Selina turned. She had expected Aquaman’s assistant Valerina to be waiting to
escort her back to the transporters, not the sea king himself.
“Hi, Arthur,” she said.
Not quite “the sea king,” for there was nothing King
Orin-regal about him, and nothing Aquaman-heroic either. He was pinning some
kind of green, glowing cocoon-thing against the wall with his hip, which was
apparently why he’d jumped the gun reactivating the particle beams. He
swore (something about goldfish and the Galapagos Rift) as he folded the
cocoon-thing over itself, and as he slung it over his shoulder, he had the look
of a man who had expected to spend the day watching football but found himself
trapped at a shopping mall instead, waiting for his wife to buy shoes.
“One second more,” he said, jostling the glowing cocoon
again and then turning with a brave smile. “Valerina had to step away, so I’ll
be taking you back to the transporters myself.”
“You’re a pretty cool boss,” Selina observed. Then she
pointed to the cocoon, now pulsing through different shades of green and varying
intensity of glow. “I’ve got to ask, what is that thing?”
Arthur looked at her like a man deep into act
two of a three-act bedroom farce.
“It’s a dress,” he said—in a tone that said it was the One
Dress he had walked a thousand miles into Mordor to destroy in the fires of
Mount Doom.
“In a radioactive garment bag?” she pressed.
“Lantern energy,” Arthur explained. “The casing is
lantern energy. The contents are a dress. Selina, when I woke up this
morning, I was ‘His Majesty, Orin, by the Grace of Poseidon, of Atlantia,
Pacifica, and Dominions beyond the Reefs, King and Defender of the Seas.’
Now I am standing here with a beaded evening gown from 1936 encased in
temporal stabilizers, because my secretary had to step away, leaving me to send
you back to the Watchtower myself—which, by the way, violates about fifteen
diplomatic protocols, because those transporters are technically a Justice
League embassy. So we’re lucky today’s ‘ambassador’ is a woman who doesn’t mind
breaking five or six laws at a time—And if you asked me why all this happening,
I assure you, you would not believe me.”
As he ranted, Selina abandoned the
Catwoman-teasing-the-hero persona for that of Bruce’s sympathetic girlfriend.
“You’re having one of those days,” she said mildly.
“Something like that,” he panted belligerently.
“Tell you what,” she said, “Live through it, come to Gotham
tomorrow and we’ll have an afternoon on the Gatta. After all those
fundraisers, it will do Bruce and I a world of good to do a little entertaining
for someone we actually like.”
Arthur smiled and said he’d check his schedule. Then,
after hanging the ‘radioactive garment bag’ on the side of the transporter bay,
he helped Selina into the chamber and bowed over her hand with the formal nod of
a monarch seeing off an ambassador. Then he turned away, forgetting to retrieve
the garment bag, and moved to the control panel to send her on her way.
Only when she and the garment bag had completely vanished
from the transporter did he permit his lip to twitch.
“When I woke up this morning, I was ‘His Majesty, Orin,
King and Defender of the Seas,’” he repeated in a much different tone and with a
naughtily impish smirk. “And now I am Batman’s wingman.”
When the Justice League instituted their global transport
network, Bruce balked at the idea of having every TP station anywhere able to
teleport into the Batcave. Trusting his identity, his home, his cave and the
lives of his loved ones to the premise that no Leaguer anywhere would ever drop
the ball, it was absurd. So the Batcave transporters were on their own circuit,
connected only to the Watchtower and each other. To reach Atlantis, Selina had
gone through the usual process, changing into costume in the Manor cave, TPing
to the Watchtower, waiting a short time for her biorhythms to recover, and then
TPing again to Atlantis. She expected to return the same way. But instead of
materializing at the Watchtower, she found herself… um… outdoors.
She was outdoors on a warm night, looking out on a large,
full moon hanging low over… a pyramid… Ruins and a pyramid… Three chills of
recognition hit in a triple wave. First: she was looking at an archaeological
dig at the ruins of an Egyptian city. Second: Her arms were bare, her costume
and mask gone, and she was wearing a beaded black and white evening dress.
Third: Bruce was rising from a chair in front of her, wearing a tuxedo with a
high waist, vest and wing collar shirt that, like her gown, seemed of another
era.
“Welcome to Bubastis,” he said, stretching out his hand to
help her off the teleport pad. “Center of worship for the feline goddess Bast.”
“I’ve heard of her,” Selina murmured as Bruce offered his
arm and led her to the small table set for two, with a white damask cloth, a
basket of flowers, candles, and a bottle of wine at the ready.
“Under other circumstances, this would be champagne,” he
said casually. “But you see, we’re in what can best be described as a ‘time
bubble.’ I didn’t know how long you were going to be with Ra’s, and this seemed
the best way to provide for the variables of time and date: I wanted a time of
day and time of month for a full moon over the pyramid, and once I’d gone that
far, it only made sense to choose an era when they were more welcoming towards
Western tourists. The ‘20s and ‘30s, heyday of rich Americans and English en
vacance, a request like this for a moonlit supper overlooking the dig site
is easy enough to arrange—once you have the period currency, of course. I
mention that only because of the trouble involved. This isn’t something you can
improvise on the spur of the moment.”
“I see,” Selina said softly.
“I doubt that very much. Let’s sit down…” he answered.
He held her chair and went on to explain that champagne was
certainly the expected beverage to be serving, but with her knowledge of wine,
he figured she would prefer to take advantage of being in the past and sample an
1898 Château Latour.
She managed a nod—barely—and he poured.
“They think I’m quite eccentric anyway for arranging this
here rather than the Giza plateau,” he said, with the slightest hint of the Fop
in his tone. Which was just jarring enough for Selina to pull herself together.
“So why are we here, specifically?” she asked, swirling the
wine and taking a deep, rich inhale of the once-in-a-lifetime bouquet.
“Well, there is the obvious,” Bruce began, sitting back
with a pleased smile to explain the nuances of his choice. “Whether she’s
called Bast, Bastet or Sekh-met, the goddess is often depicted with the head of
a cat on the body of a woman. The full moon is for Selina, ‘daughter of the
moon.’ And—less obvious, but far more important to me—that square hole right
over there, that’s where, in about five weeks, they’re going to discover that
Sekhmet statue that’s in your curio in the bedroom.”
“Our first compromise,” she grinned. “The one you let me
keep when I moved into the manor, even though it’s, a-hem, stolen property.”
She attempted her throaty impersonation of his bat-gravel on the last words, and
Bruce’s warm playboy smile faded into the stern mask of a Bat-scowl… which then
flickered into a lip-twitch.
“Well, like you said at the time, it was the first time you
escaped from Batman with the loot,” he said.
“Oh, you jackass,” Selina laughed. “Even here, even now,
you’re ready to sit there and go on calling that a compromise. You lent
that statue to the museum, Bruce. They didn’t own it, you did. And now it’s
back in your house. Big compromise there, stud.”
“How did you find out?” he asked, sipping his wine.
“I ran into it at some point in the logs, it’s not
important,” she smiled, then looked adoringly across the table. “You win, this
is a perfect place for a proposal.”
“Oh, I’m not proposing,” Bruce said swiftly. “There are
three false conclusions you have about what happened at the MoMA that night, and
this is to straighten out the first one.”
“You can’t be serious,” Selina said, echoing the words from
a hundred rooftop declarations.
“Do I look like I’m joking?” he answered as he always did.
“Pour,” she ordered.
He did. She sipped, he sipped, and they looked out at the
moonlight, the dig site and the pyramid for several minutes, as if a lengthy
telepathic exchange was taking place. Then, as if by mutual agreement, Bruce
cleared his throat to continue aloud:
“You wanted a protocol because you believe my not having
planned the moment out in every detail meant it wasn’t important to me—that my
‘winging it’ meant you weren’t important. You wanted a protocol, so I’m
giving you one.
“But the truth is, Selina, my improvising wasn’t what you
think. All my life, my emotions have been… intense, powerful… and I’ve put a
lot of work into self-discipline. Control is necessary. You know better than
anyone, there is a rage that I cannot ever lose sight of. When I have Joker’s
scrawny oh-so-breakable neck in my hand, control is the only thing that allows
me to… remain human. To punch him out without smashing his skull into the
concrete.
“And then you came along. And there were feelings besides
hate and anger to be controlled. Can you imagine for one minute what it was
like for me when I felt myself attracted to a criminal? The first night—scratch
that, the first night was nothing compared to—it was months after our
first encounter when it really sunk in, when I realized it wasn’t going to go
away. It wasn’t novelty. The desire was getting more intense with
time, not fading…
“You said once that the ‘obsessive control thing’ was
‘beneath me,’ that it’s the behavior of insecure people who know they're not
good enough to handle whatever might come along. People who don’t trust their
instincts, want to have a plan for every possible contingency because they just
don't trust themselves to figure out what to say or do in the moment. And you
were right that that’s not me. I am ‘above that’ in that I have no fear
of my instincts letting me down in the face of whatever crisis might come
along. But you were also right that the desire for control, the need to have a
plan is not entirely trusting myself. The things I feel, I feel so
intensely. And I have enemies like Ra’s and Joker who will orchestrate events,
perpetrate horrors, just to provoke a reaction. Having thought through a
hundred permutations in advance and made a plan on how to proceed... helps. I
can be just that much more confident that the rage won’t take over.
“So it’s no small thing that I can ‘improvise’ with you,
Selina. And it certainly isn’t disrespect. It’s… what happened that night at
the MoMA, the first night, asking… asking about the… asking…”
“About the Monet,” Selina prompted.
“Yeah,” he said, meeting her eyes across the table. “It
was like the first time swinging off a roof on the Batline, nothing but cold
wind under you for a hundred feet. I let go, I stopped ‘being Batman’ with you,
and I just… spoke from my heart… and it turned out pretty well.”
“Yes. It did,” Selina admitted.
“The second time, not so much,” he said lightly.
“Well, in retrospect, ‘since you brought it up and we’re
here’ does sound a little different now.”
“You said ‘you don’t even want to marry me’ and we were
right there, virtually on the same spot where I ‘winged it’ the first time.
It seemed like fate. Everything we are now seemed to lead back to that moment,
so I…”
“Winged it,” they said in unison, then laughed. Then an
easy silence settled.
“You said there were three assumptions?” Selina
noted.
“Yes, but this isn’t the time or the place to go into the
others,” said Bruce.
“Oh come on, you’re on a roll,” she teased.
“Ra’s and Joker have both been mentioned at this table.
That’s definitely exhausted this setting for any further discussion of us or our
future. But… we do have the use of the time bubble for another few hours, so
since the location is already tainted, you could tell me how your meeting went.
How did he take it?”
“Pretty well, all things considered,” Selina said, sitting
forward and leaning across the table. “Well first, you were right. That ‘cell’
of his is bigger than Cassie’s apartment.”
“And furnished like the lobby of—”
“—The Star City Hilton, yes!”
“The koi pond—”
“He served me tea from this beautiful little pot—”
“With the matching cups carved from some kind of blue-green
crystal—”
“‘Sea-jade’ he called it. Now if they’d just donated
something like that to the silent auction, do you know how much we could get—”
“Next year you should go down in person and pick out what
they’re going to donate.”
“’Pick out’ like ‘window shopping on Fifth Avenue,’ or
‘pick up’ my way, like ‘meow?’”
“Six of one.”
“Did you just sanction a burglary to benefit your
Foundation, Mr. Wayne?”
“It’s not stealing if you leave him a receipt.”
The next week saw the Gotham Times, Post, Observer and
Daily News each mangle the story in their own way. Falstaff Inc. was in
forfeiture and Gregorian Falstaff a fugitive, that much was certain. Opinions
differed about what he’d actually done: if it was insider trading, tax evasion,
embezzlement, or a ponzi scheme. Whatever it was, none of the old guard Gotham
establishment voiced surprise:
“I have seen these people come, and I have seen them go,”
Mrs. Ashton-Larraby declared at the Bristol Country Club.
“What do you expect from the kind of person who spends a
million dollars on logo placement,” Ted Layne declared at the
Butterfield.
“Plastering his name all over the red carpet at
someone else’s Foundation,” Frank Endicott sniffed at d’Annunzio’s.
“I never liked him,” said Bunny Wigglesworth and her
husband agreed, adding “Whenever they come up that fast out of nowhere, you can
be sure they’ll go down just as quick.”
Richard Flay wondered, aloud and repeatedly,
what became of the Edgar Brandt fire screen Falstaff had ‘stolen from him’ at
the Crispin auction, and it was the last Selina decided to act on.
Now that Bruce had the satisfaction of answering those
insults to the Foundation with Batman’s fist, he was positioning himself above
the petty social posturing. He wouldn’t even answer Lucius’s pointed queries
with anything more than a lighthearted “I told you not to worry about it.”
Selina wasn’t that sort. She didn’t want to be above it all, to move on and
forget it ever happened. Now that Falstaff was driven from Gotham in disgrace,
she wanted to reward those people who had the loyalty, sense and judgment to
dislike him from the beginning, and now had the good grace to be dancing on his
grave. After four galas and a dinner party, she didn’t relish the idea of doing
it in the social arena, which is why Richard Flay presented such an appealing
prospect. His reward was something Catwoman could obtain, no engraved
invitations needed, no popping champagne corks required. A few hours
research had determined that the contents of Falstaff’s apartment were in
storage at the Cardmoor Warehouse, pending arbitration of competing seizure
claims from multiple government agencies. (Meow.) Further research determined that
the Cardmoor was owned by a bunch of morons who had no grasp of false economy.
They’d replaced their human security guard with an ordinary Rodman 200, never
upgraded the software, and they even let the site license expire. (Meow.)
And a quick check of the Crispin catalog determined that either the Edgar Brandt
mirror or the fire screen would fit in the trunk of her old Jaguar with enough
room left over for the Goldscheider Aphrodite. (Meow-meow-meow-meow-meow.)
The next night, she had just found her spot in
the narrow alley between the Cardmoor and its twin owned by a more reputable
warehousing firm, that perfectly situated sweet spot where she could disable the
alarm without fear of being seen—when a wedge of black metal dropped down in
front of her, suspended by the deceptively thin-looking Batline.
“Cute,” she said, shifting her balance as she wrapped her
forearm around the line a few times, then gave it a signal tug. Instantly, she
felt herself yanked upward as the line retracted. When she reached the edge of
the tilted roof, she let go of the line and stepped carefully until sure of her
footing. Reaching the top of the incline, she walked the narrow path to the
very end and stepped up, up, and up again to join him on an adjacent girder—and
survey one of the grimier and more derelict views of the industrial downtown
neighborhood.
“Not exactly a picture postcard, but it has its charm,” she
said, guessing his thought. “The Gotham only you know.”
“I’d hardly say that.”
“I would. Look where we are, only two or three flights
up. Nobody but you would ever find a spot like this. It’s an unusual
perspective.”
“You’re here,” he noted.
“Because you invited me. Thanks for the lift, by the way.”
He grunted, and they looked at the view in silence for a
minute. Finally, Selina spoke.
“If we’re here to straighten out another one of those false
assumptions about the MoMA, I’m going to need a little more to go on.”
“You were here to steal,” he remarked.
“I salute you, World’s Greatest Detective.”
“I was wondering where to do this,” he said. “It’s a low
roof, like the train station. Not quite as interesting a neighborhood, the
landscape of the rooftops and alleys, but still fitting. And you are here to
steal.”
“I am not the world’s greatest detective, stud. I’m
still going to need more.”
“The first time. Our first encounter. The top of the
train station.” He turned away from the view and looked into her eyes with all
the piercing intensity of that first encounter. “I approached too soon that
night, began the confrontation before you had retrieved the stolen items.”
“Like you did just now?” Selina grinned.
“Tonight was deliberate,” he graveled—and stepped in
closer, until they could feel each other’s breath. “Then came the second
encounter at the train station, after you’d robbed the Excelsior. Remember?”
He pressed his body against her like a lover, and grabbed each of her arms where
he’d held her down when that night’s fight went against her. “Just because
you’re done, doesn’t mean I am,” he quoted.
“I remember,” she said, lips parting.
“Then came the museum, Cartier, Gallery Blu… You know, part
of the reason things went so poorly that night at the MoMA is that we just had
that big fight about NMK and all the fundraisers stalking you, and I think… I
think that’s what I wanted. I wanted to ask you while we were fighting
because… because I’m jealous. You were always my girl, Batman’s
girl.
I found you. Bruce was wasting his time with a lot of shallow, stupid
women it was a penance to spend time with… and I had you. You were part of this
world: the rooftops and the alleys, the crazies with guns and the crazies
without guns. I’d finish the logs and climb up those stairs each night. Up to
the manor, then up to the bedroom. It wasn’t one of Bruce Wayne’s bimbos I was
thinking of when my head hit the pillow. It was the claws, the whip, the woman
in the mask…
“And after all those years, it happened. It actually
happened outside of my imagination—and we made love, what, six times before the
masks came off? Six times before he took you for himself. “My name is Bruce”
and from that moment this… takeover started. This slow, methodical takeover.
And I guess I… finally rebelled. We were in costume, we were fighting, you were
still mad at me—it was the perfect time to… take you back. That moment wasn’t
going to be ‘Bruce and Selina’ it was going to be you and me.”
“Br—um,” Selina stopped and made an exaggerated
‘patronizing the loony’ gesture, “Dark Knight, Caped Crusader, Mr. Batman, sir.
Do you have any idea how completely nuts that sounds?”
He surprised her by nodding.
“Yes. On the surface, it seems completely crazy to me
too.”
“On the surface, in the middle, and on the bottom.”
“But we both know who I am under the mask. It took the
confrontation with your Comte de Poulignac to make me realize: he thought he was
talking to a Batman who had lost Selina to Bruce Wayne. Made me realize
that a part of me feels like that’s exactly what happened.”
“Wow. So hijacking the proposal was sort of… marking your
territory?”
“Something like that.”
“I kind of like that,” Selina breathed—then her eyes grew
feline…wary…hard… and finally, naughtily playful. “You do know that, no matter
what happens with us down the line, I’m not getting that bat silhouette tattooed
anywhere. You do know that, right?”
He grunted.
The bat Walapang and his little friend, mercifully unnamed,
hung low on their favorite perch over Workstation One. Beneath, Bruce copied
the confirmation from the respective insurance companies that the recovered
jewelry belonging to Sophia Beaufort, Lily Coleman and Linda Brodland had all
been certified as genuine, and with that, he marked the file on the Wayne Fete
cat burglar CLOSED.
He typed rapidly on the console keyboard, glanced back up
at the file, and gave a light, satisfied smile.
CLOSED, PENDING FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS, he read,
double-checking the links to François de Poulignac the individual, Château de
Poulignac the vineyard, and the banking records for each. He briefly thought
through other data streams that might be worth monitoring, when the clip-clip of
Selina’s heels made it prudent to close the file.
“I brought tea,” she announced unnecessarily as
Bruce sniffed the smoky blend Alfred had taught her alone how to make.
“Someday you are going to tell me the secret to
this,” he said, sipping with the thoughtful scowl that appeared whenever Batman
put aside some line of inquiry for now, in the interests of securing her
cooperation to stop the current threat to Gotham, but had no intention of
leaving that debit in want of a credit forever.
“I’m really not,” she grinned. “I have to assume Alfred
has some very good reason for not telling you, just like you must have a very
good reason for hiding that file you were working on when I came down just now.”
He grunted and punched a button on the console,
bringing up the file on the cat burglar.
“Ah, I should have known,” she said tersely. “You should
be hiding it, jackass. We had an agreement, that was my half of the
case. You had Falstaff-the-boring, who might not even have been a criminal for
all you knew, and I had a sexy jewel thief going after cat-worthy baubles of
Gotham’s elite. I had engineered the perfect snare to smoke him out, and
you just stepped in and took over.”
“Yes, it must be terribly annoying to have someone sneak in
and take something you consider your own property,” Bruce said with a
lip-twitch.
“I did all the work for you—I lined up the shot—I loosened
the lid,” she chanted, too caught up in her own recitation to hear his joke.
“Selina, what would you have had me do when I heard
Falstaff talking about ‘the Frenchman’ when he clearly meant the cat burglar?
You don’t follow things like the international crimes bulletins, you knew
nothing of the Villon robberies in Paris—”
“You could have told me—”
“Could I?”
“Like you could have told me about all the Madisons on the
circuit snooping into my past!”
“Selina, you already thought I was imagining Ra’s
involvement behind Falstaff. If I told you a series of home invasions in Paris
was the work of Demon assassins and not ordinary thieves—and that the whole
purpose of those robberies was to scare your old boyfriend into working for them
to wind up the next wave of Falstaff’s public relations attacks on both of us—I
can’t predict your exact words, but I can be pretty sure they would have been
punctuated with a whip crack and ended with my cheek bleeding.”
“You got that right.”
“And instead of aggressively and proactively helping me
trap the both of them, you’d be off on some rampage to establish Catwoman’s
independence. At a time when I most needed you on my team.”
Selina said nothing for a long moment. The day of
Falstaff’s press conference, she had wished they were in this cave where the
silence would broken by bat squeaks. Instead, the squeaking of the bats only
emphasized the oppressive silence between the humans.
“You were right,” she said at last. “When Joker was
tracking me that time, you were right. It was necessary for you to trick
me into taking that beacon, because I never would have agreed to do it your
way. I didn’t know who you were, in more ways than one…
“But that was a good few years ago. I’m not the same
person I was then, and I honestly don’t know how I would have felt or
what I would have done if you’d given me all the information. It’s entirely
possible, if you’d trusted me and told me what you were doing, I would have
helped and then… and then we’d have sunk or swum together… We’d really be
partners. But you didn’t. And we’re not. So the answer to that question you
didn’t ask that night at the MoMA is—”
“I’m glad you brought that up,” Bruce said. “If you
remember, there were three points I said you had misinterpreted about that.”
“This really strikes you as a time to tell me how I’m wrong
about something,” Selina said, staring with disbelief.
“Where you were heading with that last sentence, Kitten, it
is the perfect time. Because you have never been so staggeringly wrong in your
life—and thank you for that. I was wondering where and when, and in what state
of costume, to get into it. And you’ve just given me the answer. Now. But not
here. Let’s go upstairs.”
“No! I don’t think you’ve been liste—” Selina began, only
to be cut off by the snap of a Batcuff on her wrist.
“Chiropteran logic, get used to it,” he graveled.
“They do not have words for how much pain you’re going to
be in when you pay for—” she began, this time, cut off by a kiss. The kiss of a
masked stranger on a long ago rooftop, a kiss that should have begun softly and
gently, the tentative moments of a first kiss that were jolted unexpectedly into
the future. The startling, naked intimacy of a lover, an angular crisp taste
with a trace of round sweetness, a shared piquant breath of spice and ginger and
flint…
When it was over, Bruce extended an open palm, seemingly to
take her hand.
“Just this once,” he offered.
Selina smiled, deposited the picked Batcuffs into his open
palm and closed his fingers around them.
“Just this once,” she said, offering her other
hand playfully like a paw.
He took it, and they walked together up the stairs to the
manor. Selina was ready to let go when they reached the study, but he held on
and led her out to the Great Hall, and across it to the ornate, curving
staircase that led to the upper floor.
“Looks like I’ve had quite the string of screw ups,” he
said as they climbed the stairs, one at a time. “I didn’t tell you about the
Datalock project before Lucius ambushed you. Didn’t warn you about the probable
consequences disposing of the NMK properties. I was sufficiently out of touch
with my own feelings that I let Batman improvise a proposal and I wound up
insulting you. I didn’t tell you when I started to suspect de Poulignac was the
cat burglar, I used your expertise and initiative to construct a trap and then
elbowed you aside at the crucial moment. Did I leave anything out?”
“Yes, but it’s not worth getting into right now,” Selina
said with a playing-along smile. “I sense there’s a point coming. Make it.”
“My point is you’re still here. You went on helping me
with the cat burglar after the mess at the MoMA. You went on helping me with
Ra’s after I kept you in the dark about de Poulignac.” By now, they had reached
the portrait gallery at the top of the stairs and Bruce tilted his head towards
the bedrooms. “You still sleep in our bed, interrupt my shower, and come down
to the cave with tea when I’ve been at the logs too long.”
“Oh come on,” Selina laughed, “Like I’m going to make you
sleep alone because you made an ass of yourself on a museum rooftop? Bruce,
this is us!”
“Yes. It is. Selina, can you envision anything that I
might say or do, anything I ‘screw up,’ some fight we have—or anything that
would happen to us like this Falstaff business—that would end in you packing up
Whiskers and Nutmeg, kissing Alfred on the cheek and leaving?”
“Bruce, that’s not funny.”
“Start dating Francois again. Or maybe Dent or Nigma.”
“NOT funny.”
“Seeing on Page Six that I was out clubbing with some
blonde.”
“…”
“That’s a no. Neither can I. I can’t conceive of going
back to climbing these stairs each night after patrol without knowing you’ve
beaten me home and are already upstairs in bed. I can’t imagine not waking up
next to you every morning for the rest of our lives. Because we are
partners, Selina. Whatever comes up, we face it together. And whatever we
screw up—and we will both be screwing up from time to time—we’ll work
through it.
“You were right about exactly one thing at the MoMA that
night, I saw asking you as a formality. I still do. Because you’re already my
wife. I’m already your husband. Looking back, I can’t point to a specific
moment where it happened. But it did, we’re here now. This isn’t my home or
yours, it’s not my life or yours, it’s ours. And I’m sorry that means you don’t
get ‘the question’ the way every woman dreams of it. If you remember, I did say
that first night that normal relationships just don’t work for people like us.
And that ‘They’ will never be able to understand what we have, and that we—”
“Will never be able to make sense out of it using their
standards,” she said softly. “Yes, I remember.”
“There are tradeoffs. We have… other moments normal people
can never conceive of.”
“The time bubble was definitely up there,” Selina
admitted. “You’d have to go a long way to top that one.”
“For my part, I don’t have to go ten feet,” he said,
pointing towards the bedroom. “Catwoman’s costume is under my bed, right now.
And in a little pouch behind the whip holster that nobody knows about are a set
of catarangs… That I made…” he said, expelling the last words with an anxious
breath.
“Just like you made the first batarangs,” Selina whispered.
“Whatever men who aren’t Batman have with…”
“With women who aren’t Catwoman…”
“It can’t…”
“It can’t…”
The words and the thought dissolved into the anxious,
pulsing silence that precedes a first kiss. Bruce swallowed, and as his
heartbeat pounded in his ears, his arm reached out uncertainly to find a place
at the small of her back. Selina tilted her head awkwardly as their faces moved
closer together, with all the tentative clumsiness of one who never navigated
that particular nose before on the way to those new, undiscovered lips. She
closed her eyes as her tongue moistened the inner ridge of her lip, timidly, in
that heady moment before contact. Then came the heat… the warmth of an
impossibly perfect mouth… and her hand rose up so that searching, curious
fingers could touch, ever so lightly, along that perfectly chiseled jaw…
Until the caress continued, up and to the side, the pads of
her fingers continued up and to the side… where the edge of the mask should be…
up and to the side… up and to the side… and instead of that cold, graphite cowl,
there was still warm, pliable flesh. Selina opened her eyes so that the masked
stranger with whom she had never shared a first kiss dissolved into the familiar
lover whose name was Bruce.
“Marry me,” he said with Bat-brevity.
“Will Batman feel cheated if I say ‘yes’ instead of
‘meow’?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then yes,” she beamed.
Their eyes met in a moment of shocked, shared disbelief.
“We should tell Alfred first,” they said in unison—then,
resisting the urge to laugh, he went on to say “Then have the kids over, and
then I’ll tell Clark…” while she said “Oh my god, no. No, we can’t. It’s going
to be an unholy mess!”
“What do you mean ‘no’?! There’s no ‘no.’ You’re
not getting out of this, Selina, I can still revive that Blackgate protocol if I
have to—”
“Stand down, jackass. I didn’t mean ‘no’ that way. I
meant—And don’t flatter yourself, on your best day that Blackgate thing wasn’t
going to happen—I just meant— Eddie, Harvey, Pammy, Oswald, Jervis, Harley,
Victor—Joker! Remember what they did last time, and it wasn’t even us getting
married! It’s going to be an unholy mess.”
“Okay, first, are you under the impression that this is
accepting my proposal? Because Nigma, Dent, Isley, Cobblepot, Tetch, Quinn, and
Fries is really not a list of names that belong in this conversation.”
“Ha, ha.”
“Yes, not to mention Joker.”
“Keep digging there, stud.”
“And second,” Bruce said with a lip-twitch. “I’ll come up
with something. I’ve authored protocols for much less important reasons than
this.”
Selina took a deep breath.
Then another.
Then another.
“We’ll come up with something,” she said.
“Partners, remember?”
He grunted.
And she smiled.
“But,” she said, “Until we have a plan, and I mean until we
have a plan—twenty layers deep, cross-indexed, cross-checked and
verified, marked with that straight-wing bat emblem you only put on keyword
clearance files that can only be accessed from Workstation One—we can’t tell
anybody. Bruce, we can’t. We have to keep this absolutely between us.”
“I agree,” he graveled. “It stays between us.”
From the Desk of Lucius Fox,
Chief Operating Officer, Wayne Enterprises
You are invited to
an informal reception introducing
RISE: Restricted Information Security Enhancement
from Wayne Tech
available to a select group of high net worth individuals beginning next month.
RISE was developed using resources exclusive to
Wayne Tech, enabling us to secure your information and property against the most
aggressive and proficient acquisition methods employed by today’s criminal
element.
RSVP: Fox
One Wayne Plaza
Randolph,
If you can come to this, Bruce and Selina are having a little cocktail thing for
the Foundation staff at the penthouse at the same time. (You know how Selina’s
been working with them so much the past few weeks, and I guess she felt a
special thank-you was called for after all the work they did with the fete.)
Anyway,
Bruce said to be sure to tell you, if you do come to the RISE preview, be sure
to stop by the penthouse for a drink after and say hello. —L.F.
© 2013
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