when you run dry i'll flood your pain (part ii)
(part i)
~
A slightly inebriated Lois toddles off home to fuck with the GCPD officers who monitor the bugs littering her apartment (“Might as well give the fuckers some joy in their pathetic lives,” she tells Chloe. “Sometimes I turn on HVC and let ’em listen to diamond prices for four or five hours while I work. It soothes me to know I’m ruining their day.”) and Chloe turns in the opposite direction. Technically she and Lois live in the same neighborhood-close enough to Finnigan’s to reap the benefits of having a rotating door of police officers nearby, and far away enough that they won’t get shot up by someone with a beef with the GCPD-but she has business tonight.
The cold air clears her head, and by the time she reaches the outskirts of Gotham Heights, she is almost freezing and on her third rendition of why do I help Bruce with this, I could be at home and in bed with some nice John Fowles and a Chianti right now. Her heels are old favorites and haven’t started to pinch her feet, but her toes are cold and she’s forgotten her scarf at home.
Fall in Gotham Heights is much prettier than fall anywhere else in the city, mostly because only the residents of Gotham Heights can afford gardeners, and Chloe takes the time to appreciate the rare sight. It’s a little after ten, and the old-fashioned lampposts give off glows like regularly spaced fireflies, lining pavement that is actually tended-to and trees that are trimmed and loved.
She reaches the gate that leads to the grounds of Wayne Manor, and presses the buzzer. “Alfred!” she says when there is the tiny click on the other end of the line. “Hey, it’s Chloe. Can you let me in?”
“Of course, Miss Sullivan,” says Alfred. “Should I send a car up for you?”
“No worries,” she says as the gates buzz and swing open. “I walked here from the metro stop, I can handle another mile.”
A mile is a slight exaggeration, but only very slight. Chloe makes sure to shut the gates behind herself, taking the chance to sweep for any tails. No one is very interested in Chloe visiting Bruce Wayne-the regularity with which he takes her out for lunch is intriguing to no one because Chloe and Lois know every gossip reporter in the city and are slightly terrifying to 96% of them-but being overly cautious won’t hurt anyone.
The dirt drive up to the manor itself is flanked by young maples and oaks and is carefully tended to by Alfred’s terrorized team of gardeners. Chloe mostly relies on spatial memory and the light from the moon to keep her from drifting onto one of the side paths that lead to the tennis courts, pools, rose gardens, and that intense, labyrinthine apple orchard that dot the grounds.
Alfred has kindly left on the lights at the front steps, and he is waiting with the door partially ajar when Chloe finishes climbing the marble steps and navigating a set of vaguely intimidating columns that hide the door itself.
“How are you doing this evening, Miss Sullivan?” he asks, taking her coat. He knows by now to leave her bag.
“Oh, you know,” says Chloe, smiling at Alfred because Bruce may get on her nerves but she adores Alfred, just like everyone else who has ever met him. It must be some freaky English butler thing. “Exhausted from another day of scouring the streets of Gotham for the elusive truth.”
“Continue to fight the good fight,” advises Alfred.
“Until someone shoots me,” agrees Chloe, perhaps a little cheerfully for someone who has visited the University of Gotham Medical Center for gunshot wounds four times in the past six years. “And how are you doing, Alfred? Have you strangled Master Wayne yet? I promise, I’ll deliver a truly touching character reference at your trial should you ever decide to do so.”
“That is a comfort to me,” Alfred says so dryly Chloe cannot help the quick stab of envy. “Master Wayne is in his playroom, if you would like to join him.”
“Oh goody,” deadpans Chloe. “My excitement, it can barely be contained.”
As Alfred disappears back to wherever he secrets himself, Chloe takes four lefts and a right and counts Ming vases and undiscovered Monets (four Mings, two Monets) until she reaches the Dali, and then she takes another left. She then counts to the fourth door, which is the library.
In the Batcave, Bruce is drinking some vile-looking Jamba Juice wannabe and wearing sweats as he glares at his computer monitors. “Sullivan,” he barks without looking up, “what the hell did you do to my OS?”
“Ah, there’s the charming Bruce Wayne I know and love,” she says, tossing her bag onto a nearby chair and casually hip-bumping him out of the way. “Maybe I updated it from the Stone Age. I realize you have Lucius in here occasionally to meld wires or whatever he does, but seriously, I don’t care that the guy went to MIT, he knows nothing about the full potential of this system.”
“Oh, and you do?” says Bruce.
“You’re being rhetorical, aren’t you, dear?” she asks, taking the time as she types in a command line to give him an indulgent wink over her shoulder. “Give me twenty seconds to finish this and I’ll walk you through the new toys, okay? Okay. Go, like, glower at your batarangs for not being shiny enough or something.”
Bruce-who has insisted on many an occasion that he does not glower, and he certainly doesn’t do it in a manly, brooding fashion-folds his arms across his chest and watches her with what he probably thinks is an intimidating stare. It might even be; Chloe wouldn’t know. She lost her ability to be intimidated back when Lionel Luthor had a tendency to buy her coffee and subtly threaten her life over lattes when he was bored.
“Okay,” she finally says when she’s finished. “Let’s go through this slowly. I’ve just installed some new software on here. Most of it is interfacing for that new program I told you about-for the satellites I hacked last month? So let’s see if you remember how to access those.” With a few final clicks, she steps back and lets him have the keyboard. It’s probably insulting for someone of Batman’s caliber to have their hand held as they’re walked through complex government hacking, but Chloe is nothing if not efficient at making her scorn known.
He’s reaching for the keyboard and giving her the eyes that say he is very unamused when about fourteen sirens go off at once and there are a few thunderous clicks and a load roar. Bruce swears and dives for a suit on a stand nearby, and Chloe pulls out her phone to see if there’s something up on the Gazette’s Twitter. Fatima hasn’t put anything up, though, just some links a half-hour old about the arts round up for the weekend.
“What’s this-” she begins, and that’s when she gets the text.
Need you. Gazette roof. Bring a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.
“Chloe,” Batman roars over the sound of the Batmobile’s engine revving. “I need you on the comm.”
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Chloe has a half-second to make a decision, and the red flash of JOKER SIGHTING BY GCPD, WEST 87th across the console in front of her basically makes it for her.
Give me a few hours, emergency, she texts back, and reaches for the headset lying next to the keyboard. “Batman, I’m live,” she says. “Accessing GCPD radio, now.”
~
“So I was thinking,” Lois begins, throwing open the door to Chloe’s dorm room. “What if I did McNamara’s assignment on the Donovans?”
Chloe immediately throws her pen across the room and, unsurprisingly, misses Lois by a large margin. “Dammit, I was going to do the Donovans!”
“There are plenty of them,” Lois points out. “Those Irish, they breed like rats. I was thinking I would focus on-”
“-Fiona Donovan,” Chloe finishes with her. “God dammit, Lois. We could share the byline, but I think McNamara was serious when she said she’d fail us on principle if she got another assignment from Lane and Sullivan.”
Looking petulant, Lois sulks her way across the room to Chloe’s bed, where she promptly throws herself across the covers and hugs Chloe’s giant cat pillow to her chest. “She’s only doing it to make it fair to the rest of the class-we’re the only ones with even the smallest chance at an A, at this point.”
This may or may not be true; Ally Gestalt and Nina Illych both have a fair hand with the words, and Raj Pamook can pick a potential headline out of a lineup at fifty yards. But McNamara, for all her bitching, seems to like Lois and Chloe’s style-enough to let them double up on half the assignments they’ve had so far for Organized Crime and Water Gallows: Corruption and the Mob in Journalistic Politics.
“I really like Fiona Donovan,” says Chloe into the silence as Lois pulls her sulkiness around her like a little black cloud of despair and petulance. “She’s got style.”
“I know,” mumbles Lois into the cat pillow. “Did you read about Liam Murphy getting off last week? An acquittal after two hung juries? It was a piece of beauty. The lady’s a savant.”
U of Gotham offers the Gazette for free to students who live in dorms; Chloe had picked up a copy on her way to breakfast and read about Liam Murphy’s miraculous trial results over oatmeal and vaguely hazelnutty coffee in the dining hall. At the time, she’d dropped a spoonful of oatmeal and raisins onto the sports section and read the headline again-Murphy had been up for triple homicide and a few minor counts for messing around with some blues from the GCPD. The case, according to the new source Chloe was cultivating in the DA’s office mostly via cranberry muffins and excessive cleavage, was airtight against him. The DA was asking for three consecutive life sentences.
“No one else could do this right,” Chloe finally says. She pulls another pen from the cup on her desk and taps it against the edge of her laptop. “Fiona Donovan deserves top game.”
“Let’s be honest,” Lois points out, rolling onto her back and letting her hair fan out over the edge of the bed. “Fiona Donovan would probably catch anyone else. She might even catch us if we’re alone.”
“But if we’re together,” Chloe reluctantly finishes, “we’ll watch each other’s backs.”
This has Very Bad Idea written all over it, in McNamara’s red pen annotating hand. Still, Chloe can’t really keep herself from pushing her swivel chair in a half-circle and letting her fingers fall over the keys of her baby. “I guess it’s about time I see if all those cranberry muffins are paying off.”
Lois flips over again and comes to her knees, reaching for the bag she’s left on the floor. “If we want Donovan, we’re going to need to get into Jameson’s down in the Cauldron. I mean, I’ve always wanted to be a redhead.”
“Lois,” Chloe says in a vaguely long-suffering voice, but she has trouble maintaining it as she queues up her email and starts typing, “I hope you realize that not all Irish women have red hair. I, for one, am going to try to stick with the blonde.”
“That’s because you’re cute and nonthreatening,” Lois says, and steals Chloe’s absent roommate’s Internet cable. “As I am tall and a bitch, I need all the help I can get.” After a few taps, she’s blasting Flogging Molly and trying to find out if the library has a copy of The Boondock Saints they can check out by Tuesday. “We could pass for County Corkers, couldn’t we?”
“Um, you mean our ancestors, right? Because I sure as hell can’t come up with a passable County Cork accent in two weeks, and there’s no way even you can get one that will survive a Friday night at Jameson’s.” Everything Chloe needs to know about the background checks at Jameson’s Irish Pub is saved on a file in her computer, along with info on most of the other shady bars in the Cauldron. “Okay, let’s see-they’re pretty strict about the Irish thing, but there’s a bouncer on shift from nine to twelve who has a thing for the Knights, so can you borrow that skintight jersey thing from Sheila?”
“Yeah,” says Lois, making a note of it and then picking at her bottom lip with her thumb and forefinger. “I know Wendy’s gotten in there once or twice when she was dating that O’Whatever on the baseball team, and he’s got an uncle in the Donovan’s chop shop. I’m not sure I want us made for U of Gotham students, though.”
“Too obvious,” agrees Chloe. “No one actually knows what the Colby College kids look like, because they spend all their time never leaving their campus. There’s someone in the Colby student admin office who owes me a favor; I can get us some temporary IDs from there.”
“Too flashy,” Lois points out. “Colby’s at least thirty grand a year; no way some kid from the Heights is going to risk the Cauldron on a Friday night-they’ve got their trust funds to worry about. I dated the head of the admissions interns at Kleinfeld last year, though. It’s in the Village, so if we put on some determined faces and our rape whistles, we could pass for some co-eds.”
Chloe looks at herself in the reflection of her computer screen, and gives herself a mental make-over-Kleinfeld’s colors are yellow and black, she’ll need some new green eyeliner, and if she wants to look like enough of a moron to be attempting entrance to Jameson’s and not get shanked on principle, she’s going to need a push-up bra.
“Yeah,” she says, and grins at Lois, fast and filthy, over her shoulder. “Oh yeah. We can so do this.”
~
It’s way, way too late for the train out in the Heights, so Chloe clamps down the irrational fear of dying in poverty that having an apartment in Gotham inspires and heads to intersect Grand Avenue, where hopefully there will be some sort of cab at this hour. She is picked up after seven blocks and thoroughly fleeced for the drive to the Gazette building.
“Take this, you motherless scoundrel,” she tells the driver, and thrusts a twenty through the window at him. “Feed your starving children.”
“They thank you for your generosity,” says the driver with a small degree of humor. Chloe acknowledges it with a brittle grin, and then she girds herself mentally and physically, cinching the tie on her trench coat firmly and pulling out her ID card to swipe entrance to the building. She takes an elevator to the bullpen, then the last four flights of stairs to the roof.
It’s a Thursday night, and most of Gotham around the Gazette building is winding down-the investment bankers have to work tomorrow, and the college students have classes. It takes a few seconds for Chloe’s eyes to adjust to the deepness of the shadows behind generators and HVAC units. She still can’t make out the Green Arrow’s form in any of them, and she’s considering investing in glasses when there’s the slightest twitch from her peripheral and she turns quickly, mace out just in case.
“Thanks, Chlo,” the Green Arrow says in a slow, pained voice. “Glad to know that if I ask for first aid in the future, you’re probably going to respond with a crowbar.” He’s hunched over ten yards away, sitting on a cement block with his gear next to him. Behind him, the bat signal is shining from the roof of the GCPD across town. She hopes whatever the fuck Bruce flitted off to do after his smackdown with the Joker, it’s not related to the Green Arrow almost dying on her.
With that in mind, she reaches into her purse and tosses him a small first aid kit. “Do you need anything really big?” she asks. “Stitches? A tourniquet? What happened?”
“The Irish mob,” he says. “As it turns out, Gerard Donovan has even less of a sense of humor than his big sister, especially at having her jewelry forcibly repossessed.” It takes him so long to open the first aid kit, her fingers are itching by the time he’s finished fumbling with the clasp and digging through for some gauze. “Nothing bad, just a graze, but it hurts like a mother-”
“Why are you here?” Chloe finally interrupts. “Patrolling, I mean. Why aren’t you back in Star City? Believe it or not, Batman seems capable of ridding the streets of crime and pestilence. Didn’t he threaten you the last time you patrolled Gotham?”
“Maybe,” the Green Arrow says with a small grunt. He begins to strip off his vest, and Chloe turns around, crossing her arms against her chest and fighting irritation and exhaustion. “Besides, I missed you.”
“Don’t be a moron, you saw me two weeks ago,” says Chloe. “Why are you bothering Edith Donovan? She’s rotten, of course, she’s a Donovan, but she’s not exactly a Luthor.”
“The necklace”-he’s interrupted by a quick hiss, and Chloe’s fingers twitch but she tightens them around the sleeves of her coat and hunches her shoulders against the wind-“is a remnant of a very special collection of Nigerian tribal pieces that should probably be on display in the National Museum in Lagos. Which is where it will be going, tomorrow morning.”
“I didn’t realize Edith’s tastes ran that way,” muses Chloe. She ignores all of the noise behind her, and files the tidbit away into her mental safe until she can put it in her digital file on the Donovans.
“I’m done,” says the Green Arrow after a few minutes, sounding a little amused. “I didn’t realize you were that squeamish about blood.”
Chloe turns and he’s vertical now, his vest haphazardly zipped, the first aid kit mostly useless now that he’s rifled through everything. “I’m not,” she says. “Did you disinfect that properly?”
“Do you want to check?” he offers, and grins. He might even be winking at her; she’ll never know.
Which is kind of the point. “No,” she says. “You’re standing out like a sore thumb up here, you should head out.”
“Can’t I get a kiss?” he asks. He’s definitely winking. She can tell by the self-satisfied tone that his voice has adopted, even through the distorter. “Here I am, valiantly defending the streets of Gotham against the Irish menace, and I can’t even get a kiss from the Gotham Gazette’s finest reporter?”
“She’s dating Superman, I hear,” says Chloe dryly. “You’re welcome to try, though.”
He drops the first aid kit, and she takes four large steps back towards the stairs. “I don’t think so, buddy. This is Gotham-I can see everything, and I’m not up for some kinky blindfold action on the roof of my office. Especially not at two in the morning.”
“I trust you to close your eyes,” he murmurs, and reaches out for her. She takes another step, and backs into the door to the stairs.
“I don’t,” she says, gripping the door handle. “You do realize that I actively attempt not to put myself in a position to learn anything about you, I hope. I’m not an idiot, and I really don’t want the emotional drama of finding out your secret identity. Sex on the roof of the Gazette building is a really good way for me to find incriminating scars or hair color or what your voice sounds like.”
He’s stopped moving towards her, which seems like a good sign.
“I’m not your girlfriend,” she continues. “You’re not my boyfriend. We are two people who enjoy having sex with one another. It just so happens that I don’t know your name. For both our sakes, it should stay that way.”
Chloe means: She has enough trouble getting kidnapped and threatened and almost blown up just on her own merits as one of the Gazette’s star reporters; she really doesn’t need to worry about accidentally dropping the Green Arrow’s name, not when she’s the gatekeeper to Superman and Batman and Impulse.
It looks like he doesn’t understand what she means. She tries again, remembering all the things Lois has told her in the past about her abandonment issues and inability to form lasting relationships with men and all that other Cosmo psychobabble. “I like that I have no idea who you are.”
“Do you.”
It’s not a tone of voice she recognizes. “Yes,” she hazards. “It’s very relaxing.” (It’s also sexy as hell, all things considered, although Chloe might be biased because they have really, really good sex.)
“Right then,” he says, and forcibly unclenches both his fists and then in four quick steps he’s gotten her around the waist and through the door to the stairs, and he slams it shut behind them, the click of the door knob loud in the inky blackness, and the metal of the door cool against her shoulder blades.
She doesn’t even realize he’s taken the glasses off until she feels the brush of his eyelashes against the curve of her belly, and when her hands go to anchor themselves against his shoulders, they clutch at his hair instead. Fuck you, she thinks, fuck fuck fuck and she forces herself to release his hair, not to notice anything, to turn off her brain. It mostly works, because that’s when he licks a finger and slips it up her skirt.
~
When Chloe calls Lois for emergency martinis two days after the fact, all she tells her is that Batman broke into her apartment in the middle of the night and told her to lay low on the Fratelli story, lest someone intervene and lay her low themselves. Lois bitches, calls Batman a whiny little drama llama, and then gets drunk and even angrier at this insult to Chloe’s ability as a reporter.
What actually happens, the night Chloe meets Batman, is:
Chloe’s second week at the Gazette, she stumbles across a career-maker. It’s also potentially a Chloe-killer, so she makes the conscious decision not to call Lois in on it, lest it be the death of both of them. The middle of Tuesday night, Chloe wakes up from a fitful sleep in the middle of the night and goes to get a glass of water.
She never makes it, because Batman is waiting in her living room. In what feels like half a second, he has her pressed against the back wall, a hand loosely cupped around her throat. “You don’t want to do this,” he says, voice sounding like someone dumped paving gravel down a garbage disposal. “Leave Fratelli to me.”
Briefly, she considers pretending to be terrified. She’s too tired to sustain the illusion, though, so she doesn’t bother at all. “I’m going to nail Ethan Fratelli to the wall,” she tells him. It’s hard to make out his face, even the exposed lower half, in the muted glow of the lights outside her window. (Open window, she hopes. If he broke it, she’s going to kill him.)
“That’s a bad idea, little girl,” Batman growls.
“I’m too short for this pose,” she tells him, exasperated and tired, and she pushes his arm in an irritated sort of way. He lets go, and she tries to establish some personal space. It works, because he seems to prefer staying in the shadow of her couch. “Listen, I appreciate that you don’t want Fratelli murdering me or whatever, but I’ll be fine. I mean, I might die, but that’s my fucking choice.”
Batman’s cape swirls dramatically; she wonders how he’s managed to accomplish this without any hint of breeze in her apartment. It’s a little impressive, so she gives him points for showmanship. “My city,” he says. “My responsibility.”
“You’re going to need the Gazette eventually,” she tells him, heading towards the kitchen for some cold water. “I realize Gordon is your go-to man right now, but there’s only so much the GCPD can do without using the Gazette. You need for Gotham to let you do your work. Only the Gazette can accomplish that.”
At the tap, she offers him a glass. He doesn’t respond, unsurprisingly, but she’s made the tactical error of letting him crowd her into a small space, and he proceeds to use a lot of short words to describe what Ethan Fratelli is likely to do to an attractive piece of ass poking its nose where it doesn’t belong. His voice is throaty and deep and loses all of its clinical detachment, developing a cruel thoroughness.
Chloe gets fed up three sentences into her potential rape. She reaches for a folded chair from where it is propped against the kitchen table and slams it, with considerable speed, if not force, towards Batman’s face.
He tumbles back into her living room, and she finishes her water. “Listen, asshole,” she says, once she has set the tumbler down and he is waiting, alarmingly patiently, for her in the living room, “I’ve been writing front page since I was fifteen and after Lionel fucking Luthor, you’re like a vaudeville villain, okay? I’m going to write the corruption beat until I’m seventy and wrinkled and you can either let me do my job or hulk around threatening me back into my ivory tower. I’m gonna tell you, better and scarier men that you have tried the second, and it hasn’t worked.”
There is a pause, during which Chloe imagines Batman blinking slowly.
“I’m not your babysitter,” he says.
“Glad we cleared that up,” she says. “Now get the hell out of my apartment. I have to go meet with Fratelli’s PA in six hours and I’m not doing it on four hours of sleep.”
Between one blink and the next, he’s gone. He’s left her a batarang stuck in the door to her bedroom, at which she snorts before removing it and tossing it towards her bag by the door. She’ll get someone in the chemistry department in U of Gotham take a look at it; she has a feeling figuring out as much as possible about Batman is really only going to help her position over the coming years.
~
Chloe realizes when she unlocks the front door of her apartment that she doesn’t have clean underwear for tomorrow (today?). “Fuck,” she tells the black emptiness of her living room. The fish tank gurgles in the corner. With vicious precision she kicks off her heels towards the couch and then uses the flat of her foot to push the door closed. Everything is in a pile in the wicker basket by her closet door; she doesn’t even try to unearth the laundry basket, she just takes the wicker hamper and drags it out the front door and down to the elevators.
The basement of her building smells perpetually damp and of baby-sick and she is too tired to be worried about whatever the bottoms of her panty hose are picking up from the concrete floors. She can’t even get up the energy to mutter angrily to herself as she takes the top off the hamper and dumps all of its contents into the first open washer.
“Hey,” says a guy messing with the last washer on the left, looking harassed but inoffensively charming. “Do these things not take coins?”
Chloe points to the box by the door. “Card,” she says. He looks a little confused, and she empties a capful of detergent into the washer, before swearing and fishing out a sweater that is dry-clean-only. After a few seconds she continues, “Put in five dollars, it gives you a card. Use the card to wash your laundry.” She mimes pouring detergent into the machine. “You put your dirty clothes in this handy little machine, and then you apply soap and press ‘permanent press’ for your darks-“
“Very funny,” says the harassed but inoffensively charming new tenant. He pulls out his wallet and goes to inspect the box by the door. There are directions-in both English and Korean!-that should make sure he doesn’t blow up the building or something. Chloe flicks the sweater a few times to ensure that it wasn’t soiled by detergent, and then she slams the door to the washing machine shut and clicks to start.
As she tries to leave he holds out a hand, and it would be really rude not to shake it. Chloe reminds herself that it isn’t his fault that her day has been a total ass, and she forces a smile and returns his grip. It’s strong, friendly, and very definitely interested.
“Chloe Sullivan, 6A.” She does her best not to sound interested. It isn’t hard, she’s been awake for much longer than probably healthy.
“Imagine that-I just moved in to 6B. I’m Kyle,” he adds, as she nods distractedly and shuffles towards the elevators. “Kyle Rayner.”
~
fin
~
A slightly inebriated Lois toddles off home to fuck with the GCPD officers who monitor the bugs littering her apartment (“Might as well give the fuckers some joy in their pathetic lives,” she tells Chloe. “Sometimes I turn on HVC and let ’em listen to diamond prices for four or five hours while I work. It soothes me to know I’m ruining their day.”) and Chloe turns in the opposite direction. Technically she and Lois live in the same neighborhood-close enough to Finnigan’s to reap the benefits of having a rotating door of police officers nearby, and far away enough that they won’t get shot up by someone with a beef with the GCPD-but she has business tonight.
The cold air clears her head, and by the time she reaches the outskirts of Gotham Heights, she is almost freezing and on her third rendition of why do I help Bruce with this, I could be at home and in bed with some nice John Fowles and a Chianti right now. Her heels are old favorites and haven’t started to pinch her feet, but her toes are cold and she’s forgotten her scarf at home.
Fall in Gotham Heights is much prettier than fall anywhere else in the city, mostly because only the residents of Gotham Heights can afford gardeners, and Chloe takes the time to appreciate the rare sight. It’s a little after ten, and the old-fashioned lampposts give off glows like regularly spaced fireflies, lining pavement that is actually tended-to and trees that are trimmed and loved.
She reaches the gate that leads to the grounds of Wayne Manor, and presses the buzzer. “Alfred!” she says when there is the tiny click on the other end of the line. “Hey, it’s Chloe. Can you let me in?”
“Of course, Miss Sullivan,” says Alfred. “Should I send a car up for you?”
“No worries,” she says as the gates buzz and swing open. “I walked here from the metro stop, I can handle another mile.”
A mile is a slight exaggeration, but only very slight. Chloe makes sure to shut the gates behind herself, taking the chance to sweep for any tails. No one is very interested in Chloe visiting Bruce Wayne-the regularity with which he takes her out for lunch is intriguing to no one because Chloe and Lois know every gossip reporter in the city and are slightly terrifying to 96% of them-but being overly cautious won’t hurt anyone.
The dirt drive up to the manor itself is flanked by young maples and oaks and is carefully tended to by Alfred’s terrorized team of gardeners. Chloe mostly relies on spatial memory and the light from the moon to keep her from drifting onto one of the side paths that lead to the tennis courts, pools, rose gardens, and that intense, labyrinthine apple orchard that dot the grounds.
Alfred has kindly left on the lights at the front steps, and he is waiting with the door partially ajar when Chloe finishes climbing the marble steps and navigating a set of vaguely intimidating columns that hide the door itself.
“How are you doing this evening, Miss Sullivan?” he asks, taking her coat. He knows by now to leave her bag.
“Oh, you know,” says Chloe, smiling at Alfred because Bruce may get on her nerves but she adores Alfred, just like everyone else who has ever met him. It must be some freaky English butler thing. “Exhausted from another day of scouring the streets of Gotham for the elusive truth.”
“Continue to fight the good fight,” advises Alfred.
“Until someone shoots me,” agrees Chloe, perhaps a little cheerfully for someone who has visited the University of Gotham Medical Center for gunshot wounds four times in the past six years. “And how are you doing, Alfred? Have you strangled Master Wayne yet? I promise, I’ll deliver a truly touching character reference at your trial should you ever decide to do so.”
“That is a comfort to me,” Alfred says so dryly Chloe cannot help the quick stab of envy. “Master Wayne is in his playroom, if you would like to join him.”
“Oh goody,” deadpans Chloe. “My excitement, it can barely be contained.”
As Alfred disappears back to wherever he secrets himself, Chloe takes four lefts and a right and counts Ming vases and undiscovered Monets (four Mings, two Monets) until she reaches the Dali, and then she takes another left. She then counts to the fourth door, which is the library.
In the Batcave, Bruce is drinking some vile-looking Jamba Juice wannabe and wearing sweats as he glares at his computer monitors. “Sullivan,” he barks without looking up, “what the hell did you do to my OS?”
“Ah, there’s the charming Bruce Wayne I know and love,” she says, tossing her bag onto a nearby chair and casually hip-bumping him out of the way. “Maybe I updated it from the Stone Age. I realize you have Lucius in here occasionally to meld wires or whatever he does, but seriously, I don’t care that the guy went to MIT, he knows nothing about the full potential of this system.”
“Oh, and you do?” says Bruce.
“You’re being rhetorical, aren’t you, dear?” she asks, taking the time as she types in a command line to give him an indulgent wink over her shoulder. “Give me twenty seconds to finish this and I’ll walk you through the new toys, okay? Okay. Go, like, glower at your batarangs for not being shiny enough or something.”
Bruce-who has insisted on many an occasion that he does not glower, and he certainly doesn’t do it in a manly, brooding fashion-folds his arms across his chest and watches her with what he probably thinks is an intimidating stare. It might even be; Chloe wouldn’t know. She lost her ability to be intimidated back when Lionel Luthor had a tendency to buy her coffee and subtly threaten her life over lattes when he was bored.
“Okay,” she finally says when she’s finished. “Let’s go through this slowly. I’ve just installed some new software on here. Most of it is interfacing for that new program I told you about-for the satellites I hacked last month? So let’s see if you remember how to access those.” With a few final clicks, she steps back and lets him have the keyboard. It’s probably insulting for someone of Batman’s caliber to have their hand held as they’re walked through complex government hacking, but Chloe is nothing if not efficient at making her scorn known.
He’s reaching for the keyboard and giving her the eyes that say he is very unamused when about fourteen sirens go off at once and there are a few thunderous clicks and a load roar. Bruce swears and dives for a suit on a stand nearby, and Chloe pulls out her phone to see if there’s something up on the Gazette’s Twitter. Fatima hasn’t put anything up, though, just some links a half-hour old about the arts round up for the weekend.
“What’s this-” she begins, and that’s when she gets the text.
Need you. Gazette roof. Bring a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.
“Chloe,” Batman roars over the sound of the Batmobile’s engine revving. “I need you on the comm.”
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Chloe has a half-second to make a decision, and the red flash of JOKER SIGHTING BY GCPD, WEST 87th across the console in front of her basically makes it for her.
Give me a few hours, emergency, she texts back, and reaches for the headset lying next to the keyboard. “Batman, I’m live,” she says. “Accessing GCPD radio, now.”
~
“So I was thinking,” Lois begins, throwing open the door to Chloe’s dorm room. “What if I did McNamara’s assignment on the Donovans?”
Chloe immediately throws her pen across the room and, unsurprisingly, misses Lois by a large margin. “Dammit, I was going to do the Donovans!”
“There are plenty of them,” Lois points out. “Those Irish, they breed like rats. I was thinking I would focus on-”
“-Fiona Donovan,” Chloe finishes with her. “God dammit, Lois. We could share the byline, but I think McNamara was serious when she said she’d fail us on principle if she got another assignment from Lane and Sullivan.”
Looking petulant, Lois sulks her way across the room to Chloe’s bed, where she promptly throws herself across the covers and hugs Chloe’s giant cat pillow to her chest. “She’s only doing it to make it fair to the rest of the class-we’re the only ones with even the smallest chance at an A, at this point.”
This may or may not be true; Ally Gestalt and Nina Illych both have a fair hand with the words, and Raj Pamook can pick a potential headline out of a lineup at fifty yards. But McNamara, for all her bitching, seems to like Lois and Chloe’s style-enough to let them double up on half the assignments they’ve had so far for Organized Crime and Water Gallows: Corruption and the Mob in Journalistic Politics.
“I really like Fiona Donovan,” says Chloe into the silence as Lois pulls her sulkiness around her like a little black cloud of despair and petulance. “She’s got style.”
“I know,” mumbles Lois into the cat pillow. “Did you read about Liam Murphy getting off last week? An acquittal after two hung juries? It was a piece of beauty. The lady’s a savant.”
U of Gotham offers the Gazette for free to students who live in dorms; Chloe had picked up a copy on her way to breakfast and read about Liam Murphy’s miraculous trial results over oatmeal and vaguely hazelnutty coffee in the dining hall. At the time, she’d dropped a spoonful of oatmeal and raisins onto the sports section and read the headline again-Murphy had been up for triple homicide and a few minor counts for messing around with some blues from the GCPD. The case, according to the new source Chloe was cultivating in the DA’s office mostly via cranberry muffins and excessive cleavage, was airtight against him. The DA was asking for three consecutive life sentences.
“No one else could do this right,” Chloe finally says. She pulls another pen from the cup on her desk and taps it against the edge of her laptop. “Fiona Donovan deserves top game.”
“Let’s be honest,” Lois points out, rolling onto her back and letting her hair fan out over the edge of the bed. “Fiona Donovan would probably catch anyone else. She might even catch us if we’re alone.”
“But if we’re together,” Chloe reluctantly finishes, “we’ll watch each other’s backs.”
This has Very Bad Idea written all over it, in McNamara’s red pen annotating hand. Still, Chloe can’t really keep herself from pushing her swivel chair in a half-circle and letting her fingers fall over the keys of her baby. “I guess it’s about time I see if all those cranberry muffins are paying off.”
Lois flips over again and comes to her knees, reaching for the bag she’s left on the floor. “If we want Donovan, we’re going to need to get into Jameson’s down in the Cauldron. I mean, I’ve always wanted to be a redhead.”
“Lois,” Chloe says in a vaguely long-suffering voice, but she has trouble maintaining it as she queues up her email and starts typing, “I hope you realize that not all Irish women have red hair. I, for one, am going to try to stick with the blonde.”
“That’s because you’re cute and nonthreatening,” Lois says, and steals Chloe’s absent roommate’s Internet cable. “As I am tall and a bitch, I need all the help I can get.” After a few taps, she’s blasting Flogging Molly and trying to find out if the library has a copy of The Boondock Saints they can check out by Tuesday. “We could pass for County Corkers, couldn’t we?”
“Um, you mean our ancestors, right? Because I sure as hell can’t come up with a passable County Cork accent in two weeks, and there’s no way even you can get one that will survive a Friday night at Jameson’s.” Everything Chloe needs to know about the background checks at Jameson’s Irish Pub is saved on a file in her computer, along with info on most of the other shady bars in the Cauldron. “Okay, let’s see-they’re pretty strict about the Irish thing, but there’s a bouncer on shift from nine to twelve who has a thing for the Knights, so can you borrow that skintight jersey thing from Sheila?”
“Yeah,” says Lois, making a note of it and then picking at her bottom lip with her thumb and forefinger. “I know Wendy’s gotten in there once or twice when she was dating that O’Whatever on the baseball team, and he’s got an uncle in the Donovan’s chop shop. I’m not sure I want us made for U of Gotham students, though.”
“Too obvious,” agrees Chloe. “No one actually knows what the Colby College kids look like, because they spend all their time never leaving their campus. There’s someone in the Colby student admin office who owes me a favor; I can get us some temporary IDs from there.”
“Too flashy,” Lois points out. “Colby’s at least thirty grand a year; no way some kid from the Heights is going to risk the Cauldron on a Friday night-they’ve got their trust funds to worry about. I dated the head of the admissions interns at Kleinfeld last year, though. It’s in the Village, so if we put on some determined faces and our rape whistles, we could pass for some co-eds.”
Chloe looks at herself in the reflection of her computer screen, and gives herself a mental make-over-Kleinfeld’s colors are yellow and black, she’ll need some new green eyeliner, and if she wants to look like enough of a moron to be attempting entrance to Jameson’s and not get shanked on principle, she’s going to need a push-up bra.
“Yeah,” she says, and grins at Lois, fast and filthy, over her shoulder. “Oh yeah. We can so do this.”
~
It’s way, way too late for the train out in the Heights, so Chloe clamps down the irrational fear of dying in poverty that having an apartment in Gotham inspires and heads to intersect Grand Avenue, where hopefully there will be some sort of cab at this hour. She is picked up after seven blocks and thoroughly fleeced for the drive to the Gazette building.
“Take this, you motherless scoundrel,” she tells the driver, and thrusts a twenty through the window at him. “Feed your starving children.”
“They thank you for your generosity,” says the driver with a small degree of humor. Chloe acknowledges it with a brittle grin, and then she girds herself mentally and physically, cinching the tie on her trench coat firmly and pulling out her ID card to swipe entrance to the building. She takes an elevator to the bullpen, then the last four flights of stairs to the roof.
It’s a Thursday night, and most of Gotham around the Gazette building is winding down-the investment bankers have to work tomorrow, and the college students have classes. It takes a few seconds for Chloe’s eyes to adjust to the deepness of the shadows behind generators and HVAC units. She still can’t make out the Green Arrow’s form in any of them, and she’s considering investing in glasses when there’s the slightest twitch from her peripheral and she turns quickly, mace out just in case.
“Thanks, Chlo,” the Green Arrow says in a slow, pained voice. “Glad to know that if I ask for first aid in the future, you’re probably going to respond with a crowbar.” He’s hunched over ten yards away, sitting on a cement block with his gear next to him. Behind him, the bat signal is shining from the roof of the GCPD across town. She hopes whatever the fuck Bruce flitted off to do after his smackdown with the Joker, it’s not related to the Green Arrow almost dying on her.
With that in mind, she reaches into her purse and tosses him a small first aid kit. “Do you need anything really big?” she asks. “Stitches? A tourniquet? What happened?”
“The Irish mob,” he says. “As it turns out, Gerard Donovan has even less of a sense of humor than his big sister, especially at having her jewelry forcibly repossessed.” It takes him so long to open the first aid kit, her fingers are itching by the time he’s finished fumbling with the clasp and digging through for some gauze. “Nothing bad, just a graze, but it hurts like a mother-”
“Why are you here?” Chloe finally interrupts. “Patrolling, I mean. Why aren’t you back in Star City? Believe it or not, Batman seems capable of ridding the streets of crime and pestilence. Didn’t he threaten you the last time you patrolled Gotham?”
“Maybe,” the Green Arrow says with a small grunt. He begins to strip off his vest, and Chloe turns around, crossing her arms against her chest and fighting irritation and exhaustion. “Besides, I missed you.”
“Don’t be a moron, you saw me two weeks ago,” says Chloe. “Why are you bothering Edith Donovan? She’s rotten, of course, she’s a Donovan, but she’s not exactly a Luthor.”
“The necklace”-he’s interrupted by a quick hiss, and Chloe’s fingers twitch but she tightens them around the sleeves of her coat and hunches her shoulders against the wind-“is a remnant of a very special collection of Nigerian tribal pieces that should probably be on display in the National Museum in Lagos. Which is where it will be going, tomorrow morning.”
“I didn’t realize Edith’s tastes ran that way,” muses Chloe. She ignores all of the noise behind her, and files the tidbit away into her mental safe until she can put it in her digital file on the Donovans.
“I’m done,” says the Green Arrow after a few minutes, sounding a little amused. “I didn’t realize you were that squeamish about blood.”
Chloe turns and he’s vertical now, his vest haphazardly zipped, the first aid kit mostly useless now that he’s rifled through everything. “I’m not,” she says. “Did you disinfect that properly?”
“Do you want to check?” he offers, and grins. He might even be winking at her; she’ll never know.
Which is kind of the point. “No,” she says. “You’re standing out like a sore thumb up here, you should head out.”
“Can’t I get a kiss?” he asks. He’s definitely winking. She can tell by the self-satisfied tone that his voice has adopted, even through the distorter. “Here I am, valiantly defending the streets of Gotham against the Irish menace, and I can’t even get a kiss from the Gotham Gazette’s finest reporter?”
“She’s dating Superman, I hear,” says Chloe dryly. “You’re welcome to try, though.”
He drops the first aid kit, and she takes four large steps back towards the stairs. “I don’t think so, buddy. This is Gotham-I can see everything, and I’m not up for some kinky blindfold action on the roof of my office. Especially not at two in the morning.”
“I trust you to close your eyes,” he murmurs, and reaches out for her. She takes another step, and backs into the door to the stairs.
“I don’t,” she says, gripping the door handle. “You do realize that I actively attempt not to put myself in a position to learn anything about you, I hope. I’m not an idiot, and I really don’t want the emotional drama of finding out your secret identity. Sex on the roof of the Gazette building is a really good way for me to find incriminating scars or hair color or what your voice sounds like.”
He’s stopped moving towards her, which seems like a good sign.
“I’m not your girlfriend,” she continues. “You’re not my boyfriend. We are two people who enjoy having sex with one another. It just so happens that I don’t know your name. For both our sakes, it should stay that way.”
Chloe means: She has enough trouble getting kidnapped and threatened and almost blown up just on her own merits as one of the Gazette’s star reporters; she really doesn’t need to worry about accidentally dropping the Green Arrow’s name, not when she’s the gatekeeper to Superman and Batman and Impulse.
It looks like he doesn’t understand what she means. She tries again, remembering all the things Lois has told her in the past about her abandonment issues and inability to form lasting relationships with men and all that other Cosmo psychobabble. “I like that I have no idea who you are.”
“Do you.”
It’s not a tone of voice she recognizes. “Yes,” she hazards. “It’s very relaxing.” (It’s also sexy as hell, all things considered, although Chloe might be biased because they have really, really good sex.)
“Right then,” he says, and forcibly unclenches both his fists and then in four quick steps he’s gotten her around the waist and through the door to the stairs, and he slams it shut behind them, the click of the door knob loud in the inky blackness, and the metal of the door cool against her shoulder blades.
She doesn’t even realize he’s taken the glasses off until she feels the brush of his eyelashes against the curve of her belly, and when her hands go to anchor themselves against his shoulders, they clutch at his hair instead. Fuck you, she thinks, fuck fuck fuck and she forces herself to release his hair, not to notice anything, to turn off her brain. It mostly works, because that’s when he licks a finger and slips it up her skirt.
~
When Chloe calls Lois for emergency martinis two days after the fact, all she tells her is that Batman broke into her apartment in the middle of the night and told her to lay low on the Fratelli story, lest someone intervene and lay her low themselves. Lois bitches, calls Batman a whiny little drama llama, and then gets drunk and even angrier at this insult to Chloe’s ability as a reporter.
What actually happens, the night Chloe meets Batman, is:
Chloe’s second week at the Gazette, she stumbles across a career-maker. It’s also potentially a Chloe-killer, so she makes the conscious decision not to call Lois in on it, lest it be the death of both of them. The middle of Tuesday night, Chloe wakes up from a fitful sleep in the middle of the night and goes to get a glass of water.
She never makes it, because Batman is waiting in her living room. In what feels like half a second, he has her pressed against the back wall, a hand loosely cupped around her throat. “You don’t want to do this,” he says, voice sounding like someone dumped paving gravel down a garbage disposal. “Leave Fratelli to me.”
Briefly, she considers pretending to be terrified. She’s too tired to sustain the illusion, though, so she doesn’t bother at all. “I’m going to nail Ethan Fratelli to the wall,” she tells him. It’s hard to make out his face, even the exposed lower half, in the muted glow of the lights outside her window. (Open window, she hopes. If he broke it, she’s going to kill him.)
“That’s a bad idea, little girl,” Batman growls.
“I’m too short for this pose,” she tells him, exasperated and tired, and she pushes his arm in an irritated sort of way. He lets go, and she tries to establish some personal space. It works, because he seems to prefer staying in the shadow of her couch. “Listen, I appreciate that you don’t want Fratelli murdering me or whatever, but I’ll be fine. I mean, I might die, but that’s my fucking choice.”
Batman’s cape swirls dramatically; she wonders how he’s managed to accomplish this without any hint of breeze in her apartment. It’s a little impressive, so she gives him points for showmanship. “My city,” he says. “My responsibility.”
“You’re going to need the Gazette eventually,” she tells him, heading towards the kitchen for some cold water. “I realize Gordon is your go-to man right now, but there’s only so much the GCPD can do without using the Gazette. You need for Gotham to let you do your work. Only the Gazette can accomplish that.”
At the tap, she offers him a glass. He doesn’t respond, unsurprisingly, but she’s made the tactical error of letting him crowd her into a small space, and he proceeds to use a lot of short words to describe what Ethan Fratelli is likely to do to an attractive piece of ass poking its nose where it doesn’t belong. His voice is throaty and deep and loses all of its clinical detachment, developing a cruel thoroughness.
Chloe gets fed up three sentences into her potential rape. She reaches for a folded chair from where it is propped against the kitchen table and slams it, with considerable speed, if not force, towards Batman’s face.
He tumbles back into her living room, and she finishes her water. “Listen, asshole,” she says, once she has set the tumbler down and he is waiting, alarmingly patiently, for her in the living room, “I’ve been writing front page since I was fifteen and after Lionel fucking Luthor, you’re like a vaudeville villain, okay? I’m going to write the corruption beat until I’m seventy and wrinkled and you can either let me do my job or hulk around threatening me back into my ivory tower. I’m gonna tell you, better and scarier men that you have tried the second, and it hasn’t worked.”
There is a pause, during which Chloe imagines Batman blinking slowly.
“I’m not your babysitter,” he says.
“Glad we cleared that up,” she says. “Now get the hell out of my apartment. I have to go meet with Fratelli’s PA in six hours and I’m not doing it on four hours of sleep.”
Between one blink and the next, he’s gone. He’s left her a batarang stuck in the door to her bedroom, at which she snorts before removing it and tossing it towards her bag by the door. She’ll get someone in the chemistry department in U of Gotham take a look at it; she has a feeling figuring out as much as possible about Batman is really only going to help her position over the coming years.
~
Chloe realizes when she unlocks the front door of her apartment that she doesn’t have clean underwear for tomorrow (today?). “Fuck,” she tells the black emptiness of her living room. The fish tank gurgles in the corner. With vicious precision she kicks off her heels towards the couch and then uses the flat of her foot to push the door closed. Everything is in a pile in the wicker basket by her closet door; she doesn’t even try to unearth the laundry basket, she just takes the wicker hamper and drags it out the front door and down to the elevators.
The basement of her building smells perpetually damp and of baby-sick and she is too tired to be worried about whatever the bottoms of her panty hose are picking up from the concrete floors. She can’t even get up the energy to mutter angrily to herself as she takes the top off the hamper and dumps all of its contents into the first open washer.
“Hey,” says a guy messing with the last washer on the left, looking harassed but inoffensively charming. “Do these things not take coins?”
Chloe points to the box by the door. “Card,” she says. He looks a little confused, and she empties a capful of detergent into the washer, before swearing and fishing out a sweater that is dry-clean-only. After a few seconds she continues, “Put in five dollars, it gives you a card. Use the card to wash your laundry.” She mimes pouring detergent into the machine. “You put your dirty clothes in this handy little machine, and then you apply soap and press ‘permanent press’ for your darks-“
“Very funny,” says the harassed but inoffensively charming new tenant. He pulls out his wallet and goes to inspect the box by the door. There are directions-in both English and Korean!-that should make sure he doesn’t blow up the building or something. Chloe flicks the sweater a few times to ensure that it wasn’t soiled by detergent, and then she slams the door to the washing machine shut and clicks to start.
As she tries to leave he holds out a hand, and it would be really rude not to shake it. Chloe reminds herself that it isn’t his fault that her day has been a total ass, and she forces a smile and returns his grip. It’s strong, friendly, and very definitely interested.
“Chloe Sullivan, 6A.” She does her best not to sound interested. It isn’t hard, she’s been awake for much longer than probably healthy.
“Imagine that-I just moved in to 6B. I’m Kyle,” he adds, as she nods distractedly and shuffles towards the elevators. “Kyle Rayner.”
~
fin