Dropped Stitch [DCU: Catwoman and Robin, Karon/Zoanne, PG-13]
Title: Dropped Stitch
Author: gloss
Rating: PG-13
Media: DC comics - Catwoman v.2 & Robin
Pairing/Characters: Karon NoName/Zoanne Wilkins, Tim Drake
Summary: Once Zoanne fell in love with Gotham, anything was possible.
Setting/Spoilers: Slight ones for Catwoman #69.
Disclaimer: All characters are the property of DC Comics.
Notes: Thanks to marginalia for the knitting advice, oneangrykate for the cheerleading, and thenotoriousg for the beta. And many thanks to mod_journal for running this; I'm sorry for the delay.
Before she moved to Gotham, Zoanne hadn't ever had much time for friends. She didn't expect that to change with the move; with five AP classes, Math League, the Acalympics, her two volunteer positions, and everything else, she's just a little too busy. People her age tend to confuse her; they talk all the time, about music she's never heard and shows she's never seen. Their lives sound like soap operas, which she also has never watched, the melodrama pitched high enough to crack crystal. She's never really regretted her lack of social experience, and she sees no reason to start now.
Gotham, however, has other plans. It's like nowhere else on earth, sprawling and towering, checked only by the shoreline. When she walks to school in the morning, the city's skyline shifts and twists, promises something new with each sunrise; when she lies in bed at night, the harbor whistles and shriek of congested traffic, the low thumping hum of municipal zeppelins and constant murmur of human activity, all slip under her skin and jitterbug their way into her dreams.
Gotham's supposed to be a new start. She's supposed to be reinventing herself. When her supervisor at the women's shelter learned that she could knit, she invited Zoanne to her Stitch and Bitch group. Zoanne told her parents it was a "knitting circle", lest they get hung up on the vulgarity.
She's been coming to this S&B for a little over a month. In general, she holds her own in conversation, though she's much better with deciphering patterns and debating current events than she is with anything pop cultural.
The tall East Ender named Karon comes in late today, her arm in a bright blue bandage. It started as a cast, so heavy that she could only crochet clumsily and its color changes week to week, like Karon's hair.
She takes the seat next to Zoanne. And now Zoanne does feel the heavy weight of her social dumbness: she can smile at Karon, and does, and help her with her shoulder bag, but her mind has emptied of language.
"I didn't miss anything good, did I?" Karon asks under her breath, keeping her eyes on her needles. "Did Sherry go off yet?"
Zoanne's mouth is sticky-dry. She shakes her head. Sherry's a loud, opinionated woman who's been knitting for years -- longer'n most of you been alive, she likes to remind everyone. She has been feuding with the group's nominal leader, a nice woman named Pat, vying for power.
Power over knitters, but maybe everyone needs something to care about.
"She didn't like the snacks," Zoanne whispers back. "She's trying to watch her carbs, she said."
Karon's hair is pansy-blue today, falling over the top rim of her glasses and curling a bit around her ears. She snorts softly, then curses when she fumbles a needle and drops it.
"Here --" Zoanne leans over and grabs it, barely avoiding knocking her head into Karon's. When Karon smiles her thanks, she smiles back and forgets to stop. "How's the arm?"
Karon shrugs. "Getting better. How was your exam?"
Surprised that Karon remembers her, let alone what they last talked about, it's Zoanne's turn to drop something -- a stitch in the scarf she recently started. "Oh, it was..." She holds the needles up in front of her face and squints. "Fine, I guess."
Karon has a quiet, sly sense of humor that Zoanne really likes. Everything she does seems to be infused with equal parts competence and irony; she knits quickly and evenly, but never rises to Sherry's criticisms or the comments from the more pretentious knitters in the group. She can do complicated things like cables and socks on six needles, but recently she's been working on a simple clapotis, a shawl pattern that any beginner could do.
"So trendy," Sherry sniffs when she makes her way over. She fingers Karon's clapotis like she's touching something slimy. "Everyone seems to be doing one of these."
Nodding, Karon presses her lips together. "I get my orders from the Central Committee of Yarn," she says, "and I do what I'm told. Never think twice about it."
Sherry strokes the diagonal row of markers where the stitches are dropped. When the shawl is finished, Karon has told her, all the dropped stitches get pulled clean and the pattern emerges like Jacob's ladder. "Messy, I think. No offense."
"Total anarchy." Karon lifts her needles and pulls the clapotis back, out of Sherry's hand. "Next thing you know, we'll be rioting in the streets and dropping stitches willy-nilly."
Sherry turns to Zoanne. "Whatever are you attempting, dear?"
Rather than reply -- Sherry always sounds so condescending -- Zoanne holds up her needles to show the monochrome striped scarf she's making for Tim.
Sherry sighs. "Your gauge's off."
"Yeah, kiddo," Karon says as she drags her chair closer and frowns at Zoanne. "Forty lashes with a skein of nylon-blend."
"Not flagellation with the birch needles?" Zoanne asks and Karon grins.
"Speaking of trends, birch needles!" Sherry shakes her head and edges away. "Don't get me started..."
"Wouldn't want to do that," Zoanne says under her breath.
Karon nudges her in the side. "Such a busybody."
"She reminds me of something my friend said --" Zoanne glances over and makes sure Sherry's fully out of range. When she looks back, Karon has turned in her seat and stopped knitting. "Insecurity is worst when you make it everyone else's problem."
"And how," Karon says. "Man, she's sad."
Zoanne looks down at her work. "Really is."
"You've got smart friends." Karon's voice is quiet, not whispering, just her usual tone, and Zoanne nods a bit before looking up.
"I guess, sure."
Her mother's the one who said that about insecurity.
It's not that she's embarrassed by her relationship with her parents, but Zoanne knows enough to suspect that hardly anyone is as close to theirs as she is to hers. So when she talks about them, something her dad said or her mom did, she'll refer to them "as my friend". She started doing it in junior high; at this point, it's natural.
She thinks she might be a freak. She'd ask Tim, but she tries not to mention any kind of family stuff to him.
"Don't worry about it," he told her once. They were on one of their city-hikes, all the way down by the harbor, and they'd stopped for pho in a tiny storefront restaurant. He plunged a slice of meat into his broth and added, "I'm, technically, an orphan. But I'm not somebody out of Dickens or anything."
She spun some noodles around her chopsticks and slurped. "You'd make a great pickpocket, though. You're already quiet as a ninja."
He grinned around the edge of his bowl. "How do you know I'm not already?"
"That'd make Bruce into Fagin," she pointed out. "And he's --"
"Not smart enough." Tim set his bowl down with a click.
Zoanne giggled. "I was going to say he's too handsome."
*
That night over dinner, she engages in one of her favorite activities: peppering her parents with hypothetical questions. Previous sessions have featured, what if I majored in English?, what would you do if I got pregnant?, and if I'd been a boy, would you make me play sports?
She knows full-well just how transparent this is. Other teenagers test boundaries, but she discusses them.
"What if I went bad?" she asks. Her mother just shakes her head, so Zoanne insists, "I could stay out all night, really go wild --"
Her mother grins as she crunches a bite of salad. After she pats her mouth with her napkin, she says, "But you won't."
"How do you know?"
"Because you're our child, sweetheart," Mom says. "We raised you right."
Hunching her shoulders, Zoanne pokes at her salad. "But --"
"And you're smart enough to know better."
"Smart isn't everything," she says, then clamps her mouth shut.
Her father clears his throat. "Pass the butter?"
"Are you even listening, Daddy?"
He glances up from the technical journal he has propped against his glass. "You're planning to go on a bender of some sort. Your mother observed -- rightly -- that you won't. Now, may I please have the butter?"
Zoanne hands him the dish. "Just a piece. Remember what the doctor said."
He fake-glowers at her and pretends to take the entire stick.
"Theodore, really!" Mom whisks the butter out of his hand on her way to the kitchen. "Honestly, it's like having two children."
"At least you raised us right!" Zoanne calls after her. Chuckling, her father high-fives her.
She gets along wonderfully with her parents. That doesn't mean, unfortunately, that they agree on everything. As she and her father clear the table, he says for the thousandth time, "Now, this craft-hobby of yours...."
Zoanne rolls her eyes. "It's just for fun."
"It isn't cutting into your schoolwork?"
She joins him at the sink and turns on the water. "I can read while I knit."
"Good." He's quiet then, handing her the plates and cutlery to dry, and it's only when they've finished and are drying their hands that he clears his throat again. "You know, your grandmother used to knit --"
"I know, Daddy," she says. "She taught me."
"Sewed, too. Took in piecework at night," he continues. "I can't tell you how proud I was when I got my first paycheck --"
"-- so you could buy your own clothes at the store, I know," she says as she hangs up the dish towel. "This isn't like that. I just -- it's for fun, Daddy."
"Fun is overrated, sweetheart." He softens his words with a one-armed hug around her waist. Zoanne tips her cheek against his chest and breathes in. She loves the neatness of knitting, taking two simple stitches and a length of yarn, transforming the two-dimensional into something palpable, complex, and three-dimensional. She doesn't know how to express that.
In her mind's eye, she sees Karon working at her clapotis, frowning a little, humming in time to her needle's movements. "It's just nice to see people," Zoanne says softly. "You know?"
"Just don't let it intrude on your priorities." He cups the back of her neck and kisses her forehead. "All right?"
"All right," she tells him and steps back. She's about to cross her arms when she catches herself. "Don't worry."
Her father likes to worry; her mom says he should have done his doctorate in fretting.
She also says Zoanne's a lot like him. Zoanne isn't sure she agrees.
*
In all their walks around Gotham, Tim and Zoanne haven't spent much time uptown. Though it attracts most of the tourists, the neighborhood is disappointingly generic. This is the only place in Gotham that could be in any other big city -- lots of granite and glass office towers, big plazas off-limits to anyone without an ID badge, and glittery boutiques for socialites with too much money and even more time on their hands.
After returning her mother's books to the branch library, Zoanne makes her way through the lunchtime crowds to the subway. It's not only the anonymity of the neighborhood that's bothering her; all the white faces, everywhere she looks, is starting to get to her. It's different out in the suburbs, even at school; at least there, people are more spread out. It's much easier to take them individually rather than as a sea of pink suspicion.
No one belongs on this street without a six-figure bank account. She has her head down, eyes focused on the glints of mica in the concrete, when she thinks someone calls her name. It happens a lot; both syllables sound like regular words. She slides through a gap in the crowd next to the ornate ironwork of the subway entrance and looks around.
Karon jogs up the last few steps, the subway gloom sliding off her face, her chinks reddening in the noon light as she grins. There is, of all things, a baby snuggly on her chest. With the ring in her lip and her hair zebra-striped with blue and cornsilk, she's even more out of place here than Zoanne, but the baby is the biggest, strangest surprise.
"Her name's Helena," Karon says over her shoulder as they duck and weave through the crowd and escape into a chi-chi coffee shop. Zoanne lines up behind Karon, her eyes just about level with the light stubble on the nape of Karon's neck. The baby kicks a chubby foot and waves her hands.
"I didn't --" Zoanne can't finish. She doesn't even know what she was going to say, and she needs several deep breaths before she can hope to dispel the familiar, always uncomfortable rush of nerves that Karon provokes. "She's cute."
Karon twists at the waist, showing off the baby's squashed-up, fat-cheeked profile. "She's not mine, don't worry."
Zoanne wants to know why Karon thinks she would worry, but the words still aren't coming with any sort of sense.
A Nordically-blonde woman in a severe pinstriped suit comes over to coo at the baby while Karon orders her coffee. When the businesswoman leaves and Karon has a big mug in her hand, she adds, grinning more broadly, "But, man. If I were looking to meet women, this kid'd be my golden ticket."
Zoanne orders a hot chocolate -- Gotham might be the place she's reinventing herself, but she's never going to like the taste of coffee -- and follows Karon to the back. She breathes around a flat, broad weight in her chest as thoughts zoom past and flicker out like fireworks before she can catch them.
"So glad I ran into you," Karon says, wriggling back into the armchair. "Seeing a friendly face around here happens maybe once in a blue moon."
Being called a 'friendly face' feels, just now, like Karon just handed her a full ride to the university of her choice and the keys to the city. Zoanne feels her face heat up and coughs to cover her embarrassment.
"You don't --" No, of course Karon doesn't live here. That's a stupid question. "Whose is she?" Zoanne asks and strokes the arm of Helena's soft little sweater.
Karon snorts as she sets down her mug. "Not my ex's. Just a...friend's."
"Oh," Zoanne says softly. There's too much information rocketing past her and not nearly enough time to sort it out. Exes and meeting women and she's a 'friendly face' and, behind all that, these twitching, confusing prickles in her throat and at the back of her mind. Nerves, only she doesn't know why she's getting them or where they're coming from.
When Helena starts to fuss and Karon bends over to see what's the matter, Zoanne takes a sip of hot chocolate and tries to remember how to breathe. Behind her lids, the trails of thoughts tremble and intersect, describing puzzles, and the vertigo of solution starts to turn and tessellate in her chest.
"Sorry about that," Karon says, looking back at Zoanne, tilting her head. "You okay?"
"I'm good." Zoanne puts her mug down and stretches until she's got her elbow on the arm of Karon's chair, chin planted in her palm. "You're really not looking to meet anybody?"
Karon's eyes are hazel, specks of gold shooting through green and brown like a fine cashmere tweed. They narrow and crinkle up as she smiles. "Well, I already met you, right?"
Her veins fluoresce and helium spikes through her muscles as Zoanne smiles back. "I was going to ask if you wanted to, um." She shivers and opens her eyes again. "Have coffee sometime or something."
Karon lifts her mug over Helena's head. "We've got that covered. What about just hanging out?"
*
It's not that people, and interpersonal relationships, are anything like calculus; there are too many variables, so much that you can't know about any situation, to treat it that neatly. But puzzles are puzzles, and Zoanne's still flush with having found the solution when Tim arrives for their tutoring session the next evening.
"So you just --" He frowns, his brow wrinkling up, and purses his lips. "You just asked her out? Just like that?"
Zoanne shrugs. "I did. There wasn't any point hemming and hawing."
He shakes his head back and forth, slowly, and drums his pencil against the table. "Wow."
"You sound surprised," she says and looks down at her notes to hide her grin.
"Well, yes. I --" Tim opens his history textbook and frowns at the portrait of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. "I didn't know you liked girls. Women."
"There's a lot you don't know about me," she says airily and watches his reaction, covering her mouth as his eyes widen and he shakes his head again. But when he frowns again, his whole face drawing in on itself, she relents. "I do. I mean, I like her. So that's a start. I think."
"Sounds like a start." Tim straightens up and checks over his shoulder. "What about Theodore and Marian?"
*
She could test her parents' reactions with another series of hypothetical questions. What if I were bi? It would be easy enough; they're all used to the questions by now. Without meaning to, she even revises the phrasing -- what if I dated a white woman? becomes, over several stages, how would you react to my exploring bisexuality?
All those questions, however, have been negative space, methods to describe what she isn't so she can see more clearly who she is. She isn't going to major in English or party hard all night long -- the assumptions are already present in the hypothetical. She'd never asked what if I dated a white boy? when she first met Tim. She just did so.
To ask about going on a date with Karon -- even just a visit to a gig by some of Karon's friends, which Tim agreed was a good, pressure-less first date -- would suggest that in some way Zoanne wouldn't, if her parents said no. She can't accept that negative possibility.
And her parents trust her, so there's no reason to ask. If things go well with Karon, then she'll tell them. Statements are far less fallible, not nearly so open to contradiction, than questions.
A year ago, Zoanne would never have suspected that boundaries could arise quite so naturally and quietly as this one has. She's depended too long on articulating everything to her parents, laughing with them at the absurd scenarios she dreams up and confirming, in the end, their closeness. Now, she lies in bed, remembering the fall of Karon's hair over one eye as she sang to Helena, picturing her long fingers working the stitches of her clapotis, hearing her slightly hoarse, low voice as she whispered sarcastic comments about Sherry, and all of Zoanne's thoughts are her own. It feels, somehow, like a gift, entirely unexpected and completely welcome.
*
Her dad likes to say that youth is wasted on the young; oftentimes, Zoanne is inclined to agree. She suspects that Tim would, too.
They're not like the rest of their peers. They usually hang out at the library, or go on hikes through another one of Gotham's hundreds of neighborhoods. Tim knows the city inside and out. He talks most easily when he's talking about Gotham. Every corner has at least one story, and a complicated history, from before the quake and afterward.
They're like an old married couple, save for the actually being married. Or old. But they're definitely not like other kids, so far as Zoanne can tell. Since they broke up -- if they did break up, if they were ever dating in the first place -- they've settled into a comfortably quiet sort of friendship.
So this shopping trip is even stranger than normal. Normally, she tells her mom she needs new jeans and the bag appears on her bed the next day; much more rarely, she'll venture to the mall and get in and out as quickly as possible.
Usually, she doesn't even think about what she's going to wear. But as Friday night draws closer, the thoughts of Karon have only increased in frequency, and Zoanne's starting to worry that she's going about this all wrong.
"What about this?" Tim holds up a blue shirt from the rack.
"It's kind of --" Zoanne shrugs. "Plain?"
"Okay." He nods and puts it back. "You want sequins, then?"
"Shut up," she says. "I just want to look nice." Now that she's more familiar with Gotham, she knows that Karon is East End-y to the core, hipper than anything, cool to the bone. "I mean, cool. Hip?"
Tim scrunches up his face. "If you're going that way, I'm pretty sure Ann Taylor's not the store you want. Maybe something vintage?"
"My mom'd kill me if I came home with used clothes," she says. "Keep looking."
He salutes before clicking his heels and turning to the shelves. Zoanne flicks through the rest of the rack and comes up empty-handed, just like she expected.
"How about this?" Tim unfolds a cream sweater and holds it up.
Wrinkling her nose and tilting her head, Zoanne considers it. "I think my mother has that. Wait. I have that."
His grin flashes. "I know."
"Jerk."
He ducks his head. "Thought it was funny."
"It was," she admits as she joins him. "God. I dress like someone's mom."
Tim hands her a rust-colored button-down. "No, you're just...classic."
"Boring."
"Traditional."
"Yawn-inducing."
"Timeless." He nudges her hip with his elbow and pushes another dark shirt into her arms. "Try these on."
"You're a lot better at this than I am," she says from the dressing room as she fumbles with the little buttons on the rusty shirt. "How'd you get so good?"
Tim doesn't answer for a bit, so she squirms around to check how the shirt looks from the back. She thinks it's cute, but then again, she's not sure what that means. Does she want to look cute?
"Just like clothes," Tim says finally. "Guess I got it from my mom."
As she opens the door to show him the shirt, she says, "You're a man of infinite mysteries, Tim Drake."
He scratches his elbow and shrugs. "I like the shirt."
Tugging at the hem, she checks how it hangs. "Guess this is the one, then."
On the walk to the subway, Tim's got his head down and hands in his pockets. Zoanne knows the chances of his being upset with her are pretty close to nil, but she apologizes anyway. "Sorry. I know I'm being weird. I don't..."
As she trails off, Tim shoots her a small smile. "Don't worry about it. It's normal."
"What, being a clueless nerd?"
He grins more widely, so she whacks him in the calf with her shopping bag.
"Being nervous, I meant," he says and steps neatly out of range.
"Says Mr. Cool and Collected At All Times."
Glaring at her, he swings his own bag against her leg.
"Ow," Zoanne says and punches his arm, which hurts more; she always forgets that underneath his baggy clothes, he's hard as a professional athlete. "Ow, ow."
"Hurts, doesn't it?" Tim shakes the hair out of his eyes and smirks.
"You've got books and DVDs in there!" She shakes the pain out of her fist. "Mine was a shirt."
"Sorry." He sounds innocent and perfectly sincere, which means, she has come to learn, that he's neither of those things. "But it is normal."
"Yeah, yeah," she says. "Normal's for the birds."
Tim moves close in again and kisses her cheek. "Now you're getting it." He pulls himself up. "Just have fun."
With his hair blowing over his forehead in the gust of the oncoming train, it's hard to see his eyes. "Did you just wink at me, Drake?"
He glances away, hands in his pockets, then back as he bares his teeth. "Maybe?"
"And was that a leer?" When he nods, she slaps his arm, careful to do it lightly this time. "Pig."
Shrugging, he swings away. "I'm a teenage boy, what do you expect?"
"Better from you!" she calls after him as he jogs down the stairs to the westbound platform. At the bottom, he waves back at her without turning around.
If she can put up with Tim, Zoanne can deal with anything. She just has to remember that.
*
She overestimates the time it should take to get to the East End; there was no way she could have factored in the G10 bus going express through the business core and zooming down the Aparo Expressway and all the way through Robbinsville. The other passengers pepper the driver with questions, then shout curses at him, but Zoanne just hangs on to the strap and hopes they stop somewhere before they hit, like, Metropolis.
The bus has to slow once they're in the East End; the streets are narrow, some of them still cobbled, and the driver speaks for the first time. Over the loudspeaker, it's impossible to make out what the announcement is, but the woman whose knees Zoanne keeps bumping says that they're being diverted around Newell Square.
Around the next corner, the square is lit up with red and white emergency lights. Yellow caution tape twists in the breeze as Zoanne makes her way down the side street. As the bus wheezes away behind her, panic suddenly stabs at her lungs, and she turns, watching it rumble around the corner. She's disoriented, which is normal for Gotham, and jittery with nerves like she's never felt.
She was supposed to meet Karon outside the Swizzle Stick on the southwest corner of the square. She can't even see the sign, not with all the fire trucks and cop cars filling the square. For half a second, she imagines that her parents found about her date and called in the SWAT officers. She shakes herself back to sanity and edges through the crowd of onlookers, but when she sees Batman on a third-story ledge above the square, all her paranoia surges back.
This is her second first date to feature an appearance by the city's favorite vigilante. That has to be some kind of record, even for a place as weird and unpredictable for Gotham.
"What happened?" she asks when someone bumps into her, backing up as she cranes forward.
He's a tall guy with blond hair falling in his eyes. He steadies himself with a hand on her shoulder. "Sorry. Just some Poison Ivy stunt, supposedly."
"Supposedly?"
He shrugs one shoulder and points to the spot where Batman was just a second ago. "That's the official line, but you know you can't trust the pigs."
Zoanne wants to ask him more, ask him to explain, when she feels a warm hand on her neck.
"You sure can't," Karon says, kissing Zoanne's cheek and squeezing her shoulder. The guy gives them a thumb's up and lopes away. "Hey."
"Hi," Zoanne says. Her hands feel heavy and clumsy at her sides, but she doesn't know what else to do with them, until Karon slips her arm around her shoulder. Then Zoanne's arm slides naturally -- like it knows what it's doing, far better than she does -- around Karon's waist. "Do you know what happened?"
"They're saying Poison Ivy, but no one's seen her." Karon heads down another side street and Zoanne realizes that, even though she's shorter, there's no need to hurry to keep up. Their strides match, just like that. "Can you believe this?"
"Hold on there," a cop says at the corner and bars their way with his nightstick. "You were in the hot zone."
Zoanne doesn't belong in Gotham. She knows that right now as surely as she knows the quadratic equation and the preamble to the Constitution. She's got her arm around a woman's waist, a cop is yelling at them, and she's just a little nerd from Indianapolis. This is all way over her head.
"Dude, it was a false alarm," Karon tells the cop, but he's pointing the nightstick at her chest, making her back up. She stumbles on a cobblestone and Zoanne catches her.
"Watch it," Zoanne says and that low buzz in her ears must be her mother scolding her for lack of respect. She looks around, hoping for a bystander, somebody to intervene, but they're alone with the cop. Her dad, who's much more street-smart than her mom, always told her to make sure there were witnesses when she deals with cops, even for a traffic ticket. "Sir, what hot zone?"
He scowls at her and points at Karon again. "This one, she was right at ground zero."
"Nothing happened!" Karon points at the cop and jabs her finger. The fear and worry seem to be sharpening all of Zoanne's senses, even as they slow down time; she watches the streetlight catch the ring on Karon's index finger and has time to admire the twists and braids of silver there. "This is all a huge mix-up!"
Later, Zoanne still won't be sure what happened next. The cop reaches for the radio clipped to his vest as Karon shakes her finger and yells again, while Zoanne looks helplessly back and forth between them. Something lands behind her, the noise more like a rearrangement of the air, wind folding in on itself. The cop drops his hand from the radio.
"Everything okay here?" The voice is gruff but light, and Zoanne backs away, taking Karon with her, before she realizes what she's doing. In the space where Karon was, Robin steps, and there's no more streetlight, no more ambient light, just dark blood-red and black shadows.
The cop recovers and points, with his finger this time, at Karon. "She was right at the scene and now she's trying --"
"I'm trying to enjoy my date," Karon says and Zoanne's torn between wanting to hush her and needing to cheer her courage. Karon's looking right at Robin, chin tipped up. "But this officer's got other plans."
Robin nods, his mouth as severe as his mask. He extracts a little puffer, the kind of thing used for asthma, and hands it to Karon. "If you'd just submit to a simple test, we can let you get on your way."
"No," Karon says and Zoanne tightens her hold. "This is bullshit."
"Our information indicates that Ivy's booby-trapped the ventilation system in the building. You were in the building."
"And that's a crime now?"
Robin twitches his shoulders and the cape flows around him. "Should it be?"
"This isn't even your neighborhood," Karon says, and Zoanne's never heard her voice sound so clear and sharp. "Let us go."
"No way," the cop puts in but Robin holds up his hand. His gloves are barbed down the side and Zoanne looks away.
"Catwoman would let us go," Karon adds. Her jaw is tight, her eyes narrowed, as she glares at Robin. "You and Bat-Daddy are just overreacting."
After a moment, Robin tucks the puffer back into his belt. He sweeps out his arm, nudging the cop aside. "Have a good night, then."
"What? You can't --" The cop tries to bar the way again but Robin does something -- all Zoanne can make out is a small movement of his hand -- that sends the nightstick clattering onto the cobblestones and the cop cursing as he stumbles back.
"Good boy," Karon tells Robin. She laces her fingers through Zoanne's and tugs her out of the side street, into the light of a wider avenue.
Zoanne glances back over her shoulder. She means to call out her thanks to Robin, but the street is empty. He's already gone.
Before she can say anything -- if, that is, she knew what to say or where to start -- Karon's twining their arms together and pointing out a lounge on the next corner. It's almost like touring Gotham with Tim, hearing her stories, seeing the sites that are home, except that Karon's holding her hand, chattering quickly only to break off and duck her head, looking up through her lashes and smiling silently at Zoanne.
The conversation starts and stops, ricochets off the uneven asphalt and Gothic spires, drops into shadows only to swerve back into the neon lights along the avenue. Karon is, Zoanne realizes, just as nervous as she is. Just as nervous and just as excited, too, which makes everything better, as well as more surreal.
*
That, Zoanne thinks as she rides the bus home with her cheek pressed to the plexiglass, the traffic's lights sparkling kaleidoscopically all around her, is Gotham in a nutshell. Nothing makes sense, and just about anything is possible, so long as you demand it and take it for your own.
It's not a way of living that she could have imagined, even posed negatively as something hypothetical, before she moved here. Her parents still live much as they did back in Indianapolis, going to work at Strader, even after WayneCorp bought it out, coming home, playing Scrabble together and checking in with her teachers every two weeks. Zoanne was nervous about changing schools in her senior year, determined to stay on track for Harvard and then grad school, but school had seemed to be the only difference.
Now she's hugging herself on a nearly-empty bus, tasting Karon's kisses all over again, pressing her lips together to feel them again, blinking and seeing the rosy curve of Karon's hand over the dark swell of her breast, shifting in her seat to the music in her head, the anarcho-funk set that they listened to before ducking out and finding their way to the roof of Karon's building.
Up there, the whole city was banked against the horizon, bright and intimidating all at once. Karon kissed her again, asked if she was cold, before digging a shawl out of her bag and snapping it open. She'd finished her clapotis; the russet and honey yarns glowed gold against the sky, ladders of slipped stitches letting in the city lights. Karon wrapped it around them, tucking the ends under Zoanne's chin.
"Congratulations --" Zoanne laughed into Karon's crazy hair, holding on tight, as she slipped from the known into the lacework of the clouds above and the city below.
She's riding home with a wealth of possibilities weaving in and out of her thoughts, restructuring them, making puzzle after puzzle to tackle and solve.
[end]
Author: gloss
Rating: PG-13
Media: DC comics - Catwoman v.2 & Robin
Pairing/Characters: Karon NoName/Zoanne Wilkins, Tim Drake
Summary: Once Zoanne fell in love with Gotham, anything was possible.
Setting/Spoilers: Slight ones for Catwoman #69.
Disclaimer: All characters are the property of DC Comics.
Notes: Thanks to marginalia for the knitting advice, oneangrykate for the cheerleading, and thenotoriousg for the beta. And many thanks to mod_journal for running this; I'm sorry for the delay.
Before she moved to Gotham, Zoanne hadn't ever had much time for friends. She didn't expect that to change with the move; with five AP classes, Math League, the Acalympics, her two volunteer positions, and everything else, she's just a little too busy. People her age tend to confuse her; they talk all the time, about music she's never heard and shows she's never seen. Their lives sound like soap operas, which she also has never watched, the melodrama pitched high enough to crack crystal. She's never really regretted her lack of social experience, and she sees no reason to start now.
Gotham, however, has other plans. It's like nowhere else on earth, sprawling and towering, checked only by the shoreline. When she walks to school in the morning, the city's skyline shifts and twists, promises something new with each sunrise; when she lies in bed at night, the harbor whistles and shriek of congested traffic, the low thumping hum of municipal zeppelins and constant murmur of human activity, all slip under her skin and jitterbug their way into her dreams.
Gotham's supposed to be a new start. She's supposed to be reinventing herself. When her supervisor at the women's shelter learned that she could knit, she invited Zoanne to her Stitch and Bitch group. Zoanne told her parents it was a "knitting circle", lest they get hung up on the vulgarity.
She's been coming to this S&B for a little over a month. In general, she holds her own in conversation, though she's much better with deciphering patterns and debating current events than she is with anything pop cultural.
The tall East Ender named Karon comes in late today, her arm in a bright blue bandage. It started as a cast, so heavy that she could only crochet clumsily and its color changes week to week, like Karon's hair.
She takes the seat next to Zoanne. And now Zoanne does feel the heavy weight of her social dumbness: she can smile at Karon, and does, and help her with her shoulder bag, but her mind has emptied of language.
"I didn't miss anything good, did I?" Karon asks under her breath, keeping her eyes on her needles. "Did Sherry go off yet?"
Zoanne's mouth is sticky-dry. She shakes her head. Sherry's a loud, opinionated woman who's been knitting for years -- longer'n most of you been alive, she likes to remind everyone. She has been feuding with the group's nominal leader, a nice woman named Pat, vying for power.
Power over knitters, but maybe everyone needs something to care about.
"She didn't like the snacks," Zoanne whispers back. "She's trying to watch her carbs, she said."
Karon's hair is pansy-blue today, falling over the top rim of her glasses and curling a bit around her ears. She snorts softly, then curses when she fumbles a needle and drops it.
"Here --" Zoanne leans over and grabs it, barely avoiding knocking her head into Karon's. When Karon smiles her thanks, she smiles back and forgets to stop. "How's the arm?"
Karon shrugs. "Getting better. How was your exam?"
Surprised that Karon remembers her, let alone what they last talked about, it's Zoanne's turn to drop something -- a stitch in the scarf she recently started. "Oh, it was..." She holds the needles up in front of her face and squints. "Fine, I guess."
Karon has a quiet, sly sense of humor that Zoanne really likes. Everything she does seems to be infused with equal parts competence and irony; she knits quickly and evenly, but never rises to Sherry's criticisms or the comments from the more pretentious knitters in the group. She can do complicated things like cables and socks on six needles, but recently she's been working on a simple clapotis, a shawl pattern that any beginner could do.
"So trendy," Sherry sniffs when she makes her way over. She fingers Karon's clapotis like she's touching something slimy. "Everyone seems to be doing one of these."
Nodding, Karon presses her lips together. "I get my orders from the Central Committee of Yarn," she says, "and I do what I'm told. Never think twice about it."
Sherry strokes the diagonal row of markers where the stitches are dropped. When the shawl is finished, Karon has told her, all the dropped stitches get pulled clean and the pattern emerges like Jacob's ladder. "Messy, I think. No offense."
"Total anarchy." Karon lifts her needles and pulls the clapotis back, out of Sherry's hand. "Next thing you know, we'll be rioting in the streets and dropping stitches willy-nilly."
Sherry turns to Zoanne. "Whatever are you attempting, dear?"
Rather than reply -- Sherry always sounds so condescending -- Zoanne holds up her needles to show the monochrome striped scarf she's making for Tim.
Sherry sighs. "Your gauge's off."
"Yeah, kiddo," Karon says as she drags her chair closer and frowns at Zoanne. "Forty lashes with a skein of nylon-blend."
"Not flagellation with the birch needles?" Zoanne asks and Karon grins.
"Speaking of trends, birch needles!" Sherry shakes her head and edges away. "Don't get me started..."
"Wouldn't want to do that," Zoanne says under her breath.
Karon nudges her in the side. "Such a busybody."
"She reminds me of something my friend said --" Zoanne glances over and makes sure Sherry's fully out of range. When she looks back, Karon has turned in her seat and stopped knitting. "Insecurity is worst when you make it everyone else's problem."
"And how," Karon says. "Man, she's sad."
Zoanne looks down at her work. "Really is."
"You've got smart friends." Karon's voice is quiet, not whispering, just her usual tone, and Zoanne nods a bit before looking up.
"I guess, sure."
Her mother's the one who said that about insecurity.
It's not that she's embarrassed by her relationship with her parents, but Zoanne knows enough to suspect that hardly anyone is as close to theirs as she is to hers. So when she talks about them, something her dad said or her mom did, she'll refer to them "as my friend". She started doing it in junior high; at this point, it's natural.
She thinks she might be a freak. She'd ask Tim, but she tries not to mention any kind of family stuff to him.
"Don't worry about it," he told her once. They were on one of their city-hikes, all the way down by the harbor, and they'd stopped for pho in a tiny storefront restaurant. He plunged a slice of meat into his broth and added, "I'm, technically, an orphan. But I'm not somebody out of Dickens or anything."
She spun some noodles around her chopsticks and slurped. "You'd make a great pickpocket, though. You're already quiet as a ninja."
He grinned around the edge of his bowl. "How do you know I'm not already?"
"That'd make Bruce into Fagin," she pointed out. "And he's --"
"Not smart enough." Tim set his bowl down with a click.
Zoanne giggled. "I was going to say he's too handsome."
*
That night over dinner, she engages in one of her favorite activities: peppering her parents with hypothetical questions. Previous sessions have featured, what if I majored in English?, what would you do if I got pregnant?, and if I'd been a boy, would you make me play sports?
She knows full-well just how transparent this is. Other teenagers test boundaries, but she discusses them.
"What if I went bad?" she asks. Her mother just shakes her head, so Zoanne insists, "I could stay out all night, really go wild --"
Her mother grins as she crunches a bite of salad. After she pats her mouth with her napkin, she says, "But you won't."
"How do you know?"
"Because you're our child, sweetheart," Mom says. "We raised you right."
Hunching her shoulders, Zoanne pokes at her salad. "But --"
"And you're smart enough to know better."
"Smart isn't everything," she says, then clamps her mouth shut.
Her father clears his throat. "Pass the butter?"
"Are you even listening, Daddy?"
He glances up from the technical journal he has propped against his glass. "You're planning to go on a bender of some sort. Your mother observed -- rightly -- that you won't. Now, may I please have the butter?"
Zoanne hands him the dish. "Just a piece. Remember what the doctor said."
He fake-glowers at her and pretends to take the entire stick.
"Theodore, really!" Mom whisks the butter out of his hand on her way to the kitchen. "Honestly, it's like having two children."
"At least you raised us right!" Zoanne calls after her. Chuckling, her father high-fives her.
She gets along wonderfully with her parents. That doesn't mean, unfortunately, that they agree on everything. As she and her father clear the table, he says for the thousandth time, "Now, this craft-hobby of yours...."
Zoanne rolls her eyes. "It's just for fun."
"It isn't cutting into your schoolwork?"
She joins him at the sink and turns on the water. "I can read while I knit."
"Good." He's quiet then, handing her the plates and cutlery to dry, and it's only when they've finished and are drying their hands that he clears his throat again. "You know, your grandmother used to knit --"
"I know, Daddy," she says. "She taught me."
"Sewed, too. Took in piecework at night," he continues. "I can't tell you how proud I was when I got my first paycheck --"
"-- so you could buy your own clothes at the store, I know," she says as she hangs up the dish towel. "This isn't like that. I just -- it's for fun, Daddy."
"Fun is overrated, sweetheart." He softens his words with a one-armed hug around her waist. Zoanne tips her cheek against his chest and breathes in. She loves the neatness of knitting, taking two simple stitches and a length of yarn, transforming the two-dimensional into something palpable, complex, and three-dimensional. She doesn't know how to express that.
In her mind's eye, she sees Karon working at her clapotis, frowning a little, humming in time to her needle's movements. "It's just nice to see people," Zoanne says softly. "You know?"
"Just don't let it intrude on your priorities." He cups the back of her neck and kisses her forehead. "All right?"
"All right," she tells him and steps back. She's about to cross her arms when she catches herself. "Don't worry."
Her father likes to worry; her mom says he should have done his doctorate in fretting.
She also says Zoanne's a lot like him. Zoanne isn't sure she agrees.
*
In all their walks around Gotham, Tim and Zoanne haven't spent much time uptown. Though it attracts most of the tourists, the neighborhood is disappointingly generic. This is the only place in Gotham that could be in any other big city -- lots of granite and glass office towers, big plazas off-limits to anyone without an ID badge, and glittery boutiques for socialites with too much money and even more time on their hands.
After returning her mother's books to the branch library, Zoanne makes her way through the lunchtime crowds to the subway. It's not only the anonymity of the neighborhood that's bothering her; all the white faces, everywhere she looks, is starting to get to her. It's different out in the suburbs, even at school; at least there, people are more spread out. It's much easier to take them individually rather than as a sea of pink suspicion.
No one belongs on this street without a six-figure bank account. She has her head down, eyes focused on the glints of mica in the concrete, when she thinks someone calls her name. It happens a lot; both syllables sound like regular words. She slides through a gap in the crowd next to the ornate ironwork of the subway entrance and looks around.
Karon jogs up the last few steps, the subway gloom sliding off her face, her chinks reddening in the noon light as she grins. There is, of all things, a baby snuggly on her chest. With the ring in her lip and her hair zebra-striped with blue and cornsilk, she's even more out of place here than Zoanne, but the baby is the biggest, strangest surprise.
"Her name's Helena," Karon says over her shoulder as they duck and weave through the crowd and escape into a chi-chi coffee shop. Zoanne lines up behind Karon, her eyes just about level with the light stubble on the nape of Karon's neck. The baby kicks a chubby foot and waves her hands.
"I didn't --" Zoanne can't finish. She doesn't even know what she was going to say, and she needs several deep breaths before she can hope to dispel the familiar, always uncomfortable rush of nerves that Karon provokes. "She's cute."
Karon twists at the waist, showing off the baby's squashed-up, fat-cheeked profile. "She's not mine, don't worry."
Zoanne wants to know why Karon thinks she would worry, but the words still aren't coming with any sort of sense.
A Nordically-blonde woman in a severe pinstriped suit comes over to coo at the baby while Karon orders her coffee. When the businesswoman leaves and Karon has a big mug in her hand, she adds, grinning more broadly, "But, man. If I were looking to meet women, this kid'd be my golden ticket."
Zoanne orders a hot chocolate -- Gotham might be the place she's reinventing herself, but she's never going to like the taste of coffee -- and follows Karon to the back. She breathes around a flat, broad weight in her chest as thoughts zoom past and flicker out like fireworks before she can catch them.
"So glad I ran into you," Karon says, wriggling back into the armchair. "Seeing a friendly face around here happens maybe once in a blue moon."
Being called a 'friendly face' feels, just now, like Karon just handed her a full ride to the university of her choice and the keys to the city. Zoanne feels her face heat up and coughs to cover her embarrassment.
"You don't --" No, of course Karon doesn't live here. That's a stupid question. "Whose is she?" Zoanne asks and strokes the arm of Helena's soft little sweater.
Karon snorts as she sets down her mug. "Not my ex's. Just a...friend's."
"Oh," Zoanne says softly. There's too much information rocketing past her and not nearly enough time to sort it out. Exes and meeting women and she's a 'friendly face' and, behind all that, these twitching, confusing prickles in her throat and at the back of her mind. Nerves, only she doesn't know why she's getting them or where they're coming from.
When Helena starts to fuss and Karon bends over to see what's the matter, Zoanne takes a sip of hot chocolate and tries to remember how to breathe. Behind her lids, the trails of thoughts tremble and intersect, describing puzzles, and the vertigo of solution starts to turn and tessellate in her chest.
"Sorry about that," Karon says, looking back at Zoanne, tilting her head. "You okay?"
"I'm good." Zoanne puts her mug down and stretches until she's got her elbow on the arm of Karon's chair, chin planted in her palm. "You're really not looking to meet anybody?"
Karon's eyes are hazel, specks of gold shooting through green and brown like a fine cashmere tweed. They narrow and crinkle up as she smiles. "Well, I already met you, right?"
Her veins fluoresce and helium spikes through her muscles as Zoanne smiles back. "I was going to ask if you wanted to, um." She shivers and opens her eyes again. "Have coffee sometime or something."
Karon lifts her mug over Helena's head. "We've got that covered. What about just hanging out?"
*
It's not that people, and interpersonal relationships, are anything like calculus; there are too many variables, so much that you can't know about any situation, to treat it that neatly. But puzzles are puzzles, and Zoanne's still flush with having found the solution when Tim arrives for their tutoring session the next evening.
"So you just --" He frowns, his brow wrinkling up, and purses his lips. "You just asked her out? Just like that?"
Zoanne shrugs. "I did. There wasn't any point hemming and hawing."
He shakes his head back and forth, slowly, and drums his pencil against the table. "Wow."
"You sound surprised," she says and looks down at her notes to hide her grin.
"Well, yes. I --" Tim opens his history textbook and frowns at the portrait of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. "I didn't know you liked girls. Women."
"There's a lot you don't know about me," she says airily and watches his reaction, covering her mouth as his eyes widen and he shakes his head again. But when he frowns again, his whole face drawing in on itself, she relents. "I do. I mean, I like her. So that's a start. I think."
"Sounds like a start." Tim straightens up and checks over his shoulder. "What about Theodore and Marian?"
*
She could test her parents' reactions with another series of hypothetical questions. What if I were bi? It would be easy enough; they're all used to the questions by now. Without meaning to, she even revises the phrasing -- what if I dated a white woman? becomes, over several stages, how would you react to my exploring bisexuality?
All those questions, however, have been negative space, methods to describe what she isn't so she can see more clearly who she is. She isn't going to major in English or party hard all night long -- the assumptions are already present in the hypothetical. She'd never asked what if I dated a white boy? when she first met Tim. She just did so.
To ask about going on a date with Karon -- even just a visit to a gig by some of Karon's friends, which Tim agreed was a good, pressure-less first date -- would suggest that in some way Zoanne wouldn't, if her parents said no. She can't accept that negative possibility.
And her parents trust her, so there's no reason to ask. If things go well with Karon, then she'll tell them. Statements are far less fallible, not nearly so open to contradiction, than questions.
A year ago, Zoanne would never have suspected that boundaries could arise quite so naturally and quietly as this one has. She's depended too long on articulating everything to her parents, laughing with them at the absurd scenarios she dreams up and confirming, in the end, their closeness. Now, she lies in bed, remembering the fall of Karon's hair over one eye as she sang to Helena, picturing her long fingers working the stitches of her clapotis, hearing her slightly hoarse, low voice as she whispered sarcastic comments about Sherry, and all of Zoanne's thoughts are her own. It feels, somehow, like a gift, entirely unexpected and completely welcome.
*
Her dad likes to say that youth is wasted on the young; oftentimes, Zoanne is inclined to agree. She suspects that Tim would, too.
They're not like the rest of their peers. They usually hang out at the library, or go on hikes through another one of Gotham's hundreds of neighborhoods. Tim knows the city inside and out. He talks most easily when he's talking about Gotham. Every corner has at least one story, and a complicated history, from before the quake and afterward.
They're like an old married couple, save for the actually being married. Or old. But they're definitely not like other kids, so far as Zoanne can tell. Since they broke up -- if they did break up, if they were ever dating in the first place -- they've settled into a comfortably quiet sort of friendship.
So this shopping trip is even stranger than normal. Normally, she tells her mom she needs new jeans and the bag appears on her bed the next day; much more rarely, she'll venture to the mall and get in and out as quickly as possible.
Usually, she doesn't even think about what she's going to wear. But as Friday night draws closer, the thoughts of Karon have only increased in frequency, and Zoanne's starting to worry that she's going about this all wrong.
"What about this?" Tim holds up a blue shirt from the rack.
"It's kind of --" Zoanne shrugs. "Plain?"
"Okay." He nods and puts it back. "You want sequins, then?"
"Shut up," she says. "I just want to look nice." Now that she's more familiar with Gotham, she knows that Karon is East End-y to the core, hipper than anything, cool to the bone. "I mean, cool. Hip?"
Tim scrunches up his face. "If you're going that way, I'm pretty sure Ann Taylor's not the store you want. Maybe something vintage?"
"My mom'd kill me if I came home with used clothes," she says. "Keep looking."
He salutes before clicking his heels and turning to the shelves. Zoanne flicks through the rest of the rack and comes up empty-handed, just like she expected.
"How about this?" Tim unfolds a cream sweater and holds it up.
Wrinkling her nose and tilting her head, Zoanne considers it. "I think my mother has that. Wait. I have that."
His grin flashes. "I know."
"Jerk."
He ducks his head. "Thought it was funny."
"It was," she admits as she joins him. "God. I dress like someone's mom."
Tim hands her a rust-colored button-down. "No, you're just...classic."
"Boring."
"Traditional."
"Yawn-inducing."
"Timeless." He nudges her hip with his elbow and pushes another dark shirt into her arms. "Try these on."
"You're a lot better at this than I am," she says from the dressing room as she fumbles with the little buttons on the rusty shirt. "How'd you get so good?"
Tim doesn't answer for a bit, so she squirms around to check how the shirt looks from the back. She thinks it's cute, but then again, she's not sure what that means. Does she want to look cute?
"Just like clothes," Tim says finally. "Guess I got it from my mom."
As she opens the door to show him the shirt, she says, "You're a man of infinite mysteries, Tim Drake."
He scratches his elbow and shrugs. "I like the shirt."
Tugging at the hem, she checks how it hangs. "Guess this is the one, then."
On the walk to the subway, Tim's got his head down and hands in his pockets. Zoanne knows the chances of his being upset with her are pretty close to nil, but she apologizes anyway. "Sorry. I know I'm being weird. I don't..."
As she trails off, Tim shoots her a small smile. "Don't worry about it. It's normal."
"What, being a clueless nerd?"
He grins more widely, so she whacks him in the calf with her shopping bag.
"Being nervous, I meant," he says and steps neatly out of range.
"Says Mr. Cool and Collected At All Times."
Glaring at her, he swings his own bag against her leg.
"Ow," Zoanne says and punches his arm, which hurts more; she always forgets that underneath his baggy clothes, he's hard as a professional athlete. "Ow, ow."
"Hurts, doesn't it?" Tim shakes the hair out of his eyes and smirks.
"You've got books and DVDs in there!" She shakes the pain out of her fist. "Mine was a shirt."
"Sorry." He sounds innocent and perfectly sincere, which means, she has come to learn, that he's neither of those things. "But it is normal."
"Yeah, yeah," she says. "Normal's for the birds."
Tim moves close in again and kisses her cheek. "Now you're getting it." He pulls himself up. "Just have fun."
With his hair blowing over his forehead in the gust of the oncoming train, it's hard to see his eyes. "Did you just wink at me, Drake?"
He glances away, hands in his pockets, then back as he bares his teeth. "Maybe?"
"And was that a leer?" When he nods, she slaps his arm, careful to do it lightly this time. "Pig."
Shrugging, he swings away. "I'm a teenage boy, what do you expect?"
"Better from you!" she calls after him as he jogs down the stairs to the westbound platform. At the bottom, he waves back at her without turning around.
If she can put up with Tim, Zoanne can deal with anything. She just has to remember that.
*
She overestimates the time it should take to get to the East End; there was no way she could have factored in the G10 bus going express through the business core and zooming down the Aparo Expressway and all the way through Robbinsville. The other passengers pepper the driver with questions, then shout curses at him, but Zoanne just hangs on to the strap and hopes they stop somewhere before they hit, like, Metropolis.
The bus has to slow once they're in the East End; the streets are narrow, some of them still cobbled, and the driver speaks for the first time. Over the loudspeaker, it's impossible to make out what the announcement is, but the woman whose knees Zoanne keeps bumping says that they're being diverted around Newell Square.
Around the next corner, the square is lit up with red and white emergency lights. Yellow caution tape twists in the breeze as Zoanne makes her way down the side street. As the bus wheezes away behind her, panic suddenly stabs at her lungs, and she turns, watching it rumble around the corner. She's disoriented, which is normal for Gotham, and jittery with nerves like she's never felt.
She was supposed to meet Karon outside the Swizzle Stick on the southwest corner of the square. She can't even see the sign, not with all the fire trucks and cop cars filling the square. For half a second, she imagines that her parents found about her date and called in the SWAT officers. She shakes herself back to sanity and edges through the crowd of onlookers, but when she sees Batman on a third-story ledge above the square, all her paranoia surges back.
This is her second first date to feature an appearance by the city's favorite vigilante. That has to be some kind of record, even for a place as weird and unpredictable for Gotham.
"What happened?" she asks when someone bumps into her, backing up as she cranes forward.
He's a tall guy with blond hair falling in his eyes. He steadies himself with a hand on her shoulder. "Sorry. Just some Poison Ivy stunt, supposedly."
"Supposedly?"
He shrugs one shoulder and points to the spot where Batman was just a second ago. "That's the official line, but you know you can't trust the pigs."
Zoanne wants to ask him more, ask him to explain, when she feels a warm hand on her neck.
"You sure can't," Karon says, kissing Zoanne's cheek and squeezing her shoulder. The guy gives them a thumb's up and lopes away. "Hey."
"Hi," Zoanne says. Her hands feel heavy and clumsy at her sides, but she doesn't know what else to do with them, until Karon slips her arm around her shoulder. Then Zoanne's arm slides naturally -- like it knows what it's doing, far better than she does -- around Karon's waist. "Do you know what happened?"
"They're saying Poison Ivy, but no one's seen her." Karon heads down another side street and Zoanne realizes that, even though she's shorter, there's no need to hurry to keep up. Their strides match, just like that. "Can you believe this?"
"Hold on there," a cop says at the corner and bars their way with his nightstick. "You were in the hot zone."
Zoanne doesn't belong in Gotham. She knows that right now as surely as she knows the quadratic equation and the preamble to the Constitution. She's got her arm around a woman's waist, a cop is yelling at them, and she's just a little nerd from Indianapolis. This is all way over her head.
"Dude, it was a false alarm," Karon tells the cop, but he's pointing the nightstick at her chest, making her back up. She stumbles on a cobblestone and Zoanne catches her.
"Watch it," Zoanne says and that low buzz in her ears must be her mother scolding her for lack of respect. She looks around, hoping for a bystander, somebody to intervene, but they're alone with the cop. Her dad, who's much more street-smart than her mom, always told her to make sure there were witnesses when she deals with cops, even for a traffic ticket. "Sir, what hot zone?"
He scowls at her and points at Karon again. "This one, she was right at ground zero."
"Nothing happened!" Karon points at the cop and jabs her finger. The fear and worry seem to be sharpening all of Zoanne's senses, even as they slow down time; she watches the streetlight catch the ring on Karon's index finger and has time to admire the twists and braids of silver there. "This is all a huge mix-up!"
Later, Zoanne still won't be sure what happened next. The cop reaches for the radio clipped to his vest as Karon shakes her finger and yells again, while Zoanne looks helplessly back and forth between them. Something lands behind her, the noise more like a rearrangement of the air, wind folding in on itself. The cop drops his hand from the radio.
"Everything okay here?" The voice is gruff but light, and Zoanne backs away, taking Karon with her, before she realizes what she's doing. In the space where Karon was, Robin steps, and there's no more streetlight, no more ambient light, just dark blood-red and black shadows.
The cop recovers and points, with his finger this time, at Karon. "She was right at the scene and now she's trying --"
"I'm trying to enjoy my date," Karon says and Zoanne's torn between wanting to hush her and needing to cheer her courage. Karon's looking right at Robin, chin tipped up. "But this officer's got other plans."
Robin nods, his mouth as severe as his mask. He extracts a little puffer, the kind of thing used for asthma, and hands it to Karon. "If you'd just submit to a simple test, we can let you get on your way."
"No," Karon says and Zoanne tightens her hold. "This is bullshit."
"Our information indicates that Ivy's booby-trapped the ventilation system in the building. You were in the building."
"And that's a crime now?"
Robin twitches his shoulders and the cape flows around him. "Should it be?"
"This isn't even your neighborhood," Karon says, and Zoanne's never heard her voice sound so clear and sharp. "Let us go."
"No way," the cop puts in but Robin holds up his hand. His gloves are barbed down the side and Zoanne looks away.
"Catwoman would let us go," Karon adds. Her jaw is tight, her eyes narrowed, as she glares at Robin. "You and Bat-Daddy are just overreacting."
After a moment, Robin tucks the puffer back into his belt. He sweeps out his arm, nudging the cop aside. "Have a good night, then."
"What? You can't --" The cop tries to bar the way again but Robin does something -- all Zoanne can make out is a small movement of his hand -- that sends the nightstick clattering onto the cobblestones and the cop cursing as he stumbles back.
"Good boy," Karon tells Robin. She laces her fingers through Zoanne's and tugs her out of the side street, into the light of a wider avenue.
Zoanne glances back over her shoulder. She means to call out her thanks to Robin, but the street is empty. He's already gone.
Before she can say anything -- if, that is, she knew what to say or where to start -- Karon's twining their arms together and pointing out a lounge on the next corner. It's almost like touring Gotham with Tim, hearing her stories, seeing the sites that are home, except that Karon's holding her hand, chattering quickly only to break off and duck her head, looking up through her lashes and smiling silently at Zoanne.
The conversation starts and stops, ricochets off the uneven asphalt and Gothic spires, drops into shadows only to swerve back into the neon lights along the avenue. Karon is, Zoanne realizes, just as nervous as she is. Just as nervous and just as excited, too, which makes everything better, as well as more surreal.
*
That, Zoanne thinks as she rides the bus home with her cheek pressed to the plexiglass, the traffic's lights sparkling kaleidoscopically all around her, is Gotham in a nutshell. Nothing makes sense, and just about anything is possible, so long as you demand it and take it for your own.
It's not a way of living that she could have imagined, even posed negatively as something hypothetical, before she moved here. Her parents still live much as they did back in Indianapolis, going to work at Strader, even after WayneCorp bought it out, coming home, playing Scrabble together and checking in with her teachers every two weeks. Zoanne was nervous about changing schools in her senior year, determined to stay on track for Harvard and then grad school, but school had seemed to be the only difference.
Now she's hugging herself on a nearly-empty bus, tasting Karon's kisses all over again, pressing her lips together to feel them again, blinking and seeing the rosy curve of Karon's hand over the dark swell of her breast, shifting in her seat to the music in her head, the anarcho-funk set that they listened to before ducking out and finding their way to the roof of Karon's building.
Up there, the whole city was banked against the horizon, bright and intimidating all at once. Karon kissed her again, asked if she was cold, before digging a shawl out of her bag and snapping it open. She'd finished her clapotis; the russet and honey yarns glowed gold against the sky, ladders of slipped stitches letting in the city lights. Karon wrapped it around them, tucking the ends under Zoanne's chin.
"Congratulations --" Zoanne laughed into Karon's crazy hair, holding on tight, as she slipped from the known into the lacework of the clouds above and the city below.
She's riding home with a wealth of possibilities weaving in and out of her thoughts, restructuring them, making puzzle after puzzle to tackle and solve.
[end]