Fic: Thieves. (Selina Kyle, John Blake, SPOILERS for TDKR)
Thieves. Selina Kyle, John Blake, PG-13ish. An extended vacation in Gotham has its side-effects. Major spoilers for The Dark Knight Rises.
There are no effective drills for the apocalypse. But apparently women and children are still first.
In the seconds after the first explosion hits, there is a guard fumbling with the lock on her cell. His fingers are shaking and he leans against the bars to steady himself. Selina puts a hand over his, looks in his eyes, and takes the ring of keys. He's so scared he's barely breathing.
"Go," he says. His voice is cracking. He's probably twenty-three, twenty-four. He trained for riots; not for the walls to come tumbling down. There are no effective drills for the apocalypse. But apparently women and children are still first. "Get out of here," he says. "Get far away from here."
He doesn't have to tell her twice.
The first night lasts forever. She sits awake in the dark, close to the window, with a gun in her hand. She's still wearing the orange jumpsuit and the itchy cotton socks. She needs a shower, and a drink. The streets are mostly empty all night, except for the patrol that goes by at one in the morning. They're carrying machine guns and kicking over the trash cans. They're laughing. They throw bricks in the shop windows and carry cheap junk away, stuffed into their pockets and draped over their shoulders. Nobody goes out after that. Nobody moves in the apartments around hers. In the morning there are announcements. Broadcasts. Notices on public loudspeakers. More bullshit. More mind games. No news about the bomb. There's looting in the luxury stores downtown; people climbing out of the windows with ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars' worth of pearls and platinum strung around their necks. That's Wednesday. By Saturday it's the grocery stores, and it's not just the patrols and the mobs. It's her neighbors. The dried-up old woman who lives across the hall goes downstairs with her market cart, bumping the wheels down the steps one at a time. She doesn't come back. Fuck this fucking revolution.
Selina is tired of sitting here, sitting indoors, eating canned food and drinking bottled water out of a jug and tensing every time there are feet on the stairs. She takes a cold shower- all there is at the moment- and dresses. She slips a knife into her boot, a gun into the shoulder holster under her jacket, a lockpick into her jeans. Jen is at the Dolphin Lounge, day drunk and wearing a stolen fur coat, breaking empty bottles. The bar is full of teenagers and thugs. Selina hides her face in her collar.
"Come with me," Jen says. "We're going up to Madison. Up to the park. We're taking the high-rises. Imagine the shit they have up there."
They pull mirrors off the walls and snap the legs off Queen Anne chairs and drink everything they can get their hands on. Selina watches. She finds a bottle of Bollinger and breaks the nose of the boy who tries to take it away from her. She drinks it on a roof deck with panoramic views of the river. Jen falls asleep on the deck chair next to her, curled up in her coat, hair fanned out, looking like the kid she really is. Selina stares out at the lights across the bay. They twinkle like stars, like glitter in blacklight, like diamonds. Across the bay they are watching back, staring at the darkness. Gotham is now the world's largest, most glamorous penal colony.
She doesn't hope. That would be truly pathetic. She killed the only hope they had. To save her own skin. She can still see the surprise on his face, the dawning fear. He'd really thought- right until that second- that she was there to help. She can't stop hearing the final snap, the crack of thunder. Batten down the hatches, she said.
What a lousy joke.
It's not hard to find John Blake. He's the only man still wearing blue and black. They must be the only colors he owns. She follows him to a shabby brownstone and puts the lockpick up against his kidneys. She makes him turn around slowly, and smirks at him when he realizes what she's holding.
"I thought you'd run," he says.
"They're looking for cops," Selina reminds him. "Not robbers." This is an uncomfortable truth. Bane's promise of protection in exchange for services rendered was genuine; his thugs don't have a lingering interest in her, nor is she being followed. Nobody cares about Selina Kyle, not anymore. Here, in hell, she's finally free.
"Are you here to help?" he asks. Single-minded to a fault. She doesn't know why, but she dressed up for this, to come and talk to the last man in Gotham who seemed to be holding it together. The last person who believes he is still working inside a system, following a plan. It would be charming if it didn't make her teeth ache. "I know what you can do. I could use you. But only if I can trust you." He says it like he wants to.
"You can't." There's a lump in her throat. Full disclosure, this time. She makes mistakes, but not the same ones, over and over. Blake says he has to go. He turns his back to her. "You can't hold the northwest," she says, suddenly. She doesn't know quite what she's saying. Or why. "You don't have enough men. You need to stay on the trucks."
"Think I don't know that?" So bitter. He's a rare one. Every lost block is a personal failure, a bruise. He thinks he owes them something: the people looting markets in panic, the ones curled up under the bed. It's an uncanny moral resemblance. Well, she could probably get him killed too, one day, if she tried hard enough.
"Jefferson up through Bridge Park," she says. "My neighborhood." He looks at her for a long second. He understands the inflection. "I can't be everywhere."
"Be somewhere," he says.
First she maps and does her homework: tools and packages stashed on the rooftops, ziplines ready to go. Exit strategies. She puts new locks on a few empty apartments on high floors; places to crash when it gets hotter. She watches the patrols and learns the routes. Identifies the local color and picks out the muscle from the bluster at a distance. She's always been good at this part.
And at least it staves off the boredom.
Second, she cleans her own house: knocks down the pimps and the petty crooks robbing the last four functional bodegas. She's never been an intimidator- the whole idea was not to be seen, once upon a time- but she works the shadows, fire escapes, dead ends in alleyways, never staying still long enough for her face or her voice to register. The lowlifes on her streets start to scurry a little faster, talk a little lower. They don't know who she is or what she wants, except that she apparently doesn't want them selling crack to middle schoolers or beating their girls in back of the Dolphin anymore. The mystery is part of the work. It closes the gaps you can't close with your fists, your gun, your broken bottle picked out of the trash. Kids are still drawing chalk outlines of bats on the walls of houses, on the sidewalks in front of their steps. He was right about the mask.
"Lady," her targets call her, when she's already busted them on the side of the head with a closed fist or the closest piece of masonry. "Lady, hey, I don't know what you want! You've got the wrong guy!" In daylight she still gets wolf whistles, come-ons. She's almost always called a bitch. But whack them twice with a baton and suddenly, you're a Lady. "I've got money! Cash money!" Their money's no good here. Literally. Some of them offer to relocate; it usually just means she has to kick them in the head again next Thursday. Some of them offer information. Most of it's lousy hearsay, an enormous game of telephone being played through the criminal element, but once in a while it's something useful.
She leaves the patrols alone. She doesn't want to give up; to admit that this new world is the only one she has to live in. She doesn't want to go back to ripping high-end stereos out of the walls uptown. But the patrols are off-limit. She also doesn't want to die.
"Tomorrow night-" she starts, and Blake almost tips over the fire escape railing.
"Jesus Christ," he says. "Don't do that."
"Don't do what?" She slides down, onto a step across from him. "Sneak up on daydreaming cops? But it's so easy."
"I wasn't," he says, and flushes a surprising pink. She laughs. Selina can't help herself; he's a chapped-cheeked boy scout with a sniper rifle, and the whole world is so upside down it may never go back together. "What do you want?"
"Well." Selina leans back. "Word on the street says Jim Gordon is not only alive, he's in the fifth ward." Blake's face hardens. "I would tell you to work on your poker face, but I'm not sure there are any good games going at the moment."
"Where'd you hear it?" he asks. "Who's talking?"
"A flabby moron named Eddie." Selina examines her nails. Shabby and split. Utterly depressing. "Currently unconscious in a dumpster on Hoyt Street. He said tomorrow night's the big round-up, but you might want to pick him up, have a chat yourself." She stands, and climbs to the top of the rail. Blake watches her. "He seems super interesting."
"Thank you," he says, seriously. She doesn't bother registering that. She's already to the roof ledge when he clears his throat. When she looks back down, he smiles at her- actually smiles, a half-moon, tentative. His eyes crinkle at the edges. "Be careful."
"Save it," she says.
Like everything, it falls apart.
She's caught at the outer edge of the park, by the overpass; she jumped the railing to put a gap between them, but someone caught her ankle, and she slammed into the wall and went straight down instead of across. Her head doesn't split on the dumpster lid but she's stunned, rolling, when she ought to be back up on her feet. Her gun goes skittering into the shadows. There's four of them, just enough to form a knot around her and start kicking. She rolls, grabs a foot, shoves back up, kicks another guy behind the knee and just misses his fall. She can't really hear anything yet, besides the sound of metaphorical churchbells. Selina ducks, dodges, plants a fist squarely in a kidney, spins, palm strike to the underside of a jaw. She gets kicked in the ribs and goes tumbling again, this time into a garbage heap.
"Gonna take that mask off," one of them says. "Gonna wreck that pretty face." Selina reaches for something- anything- and comes up with a broom handle.
Sure.
She rolls up and somersaults right between them, flips behind the tallest one and clocks him so hard the wood snaps. He goes straight down, and the next one gets hammered on the collarbones with both halves of the stick. But there's still bachelor number three, and he's a little faster than his cronies. Selina blocks and feints, but he lands a hit on her solar plexus that takes the wind out for a second- long enough to get grabbed from behind and hit once, twice, right in the side of the face. Bursts in her vision cloud everything, little shattering galaxies that are probably her blood vessels. She heaves the guy behind her over her shoulders, and goes rolling along with him, head over heels. She's face down in a puddle, gasping, when her fingers find the handle of her gun.
It's three shots and then silence, ringing silence, and the hot smell of powder mingled with the distinct Gotham stench of spilled trash. Selina lies there for a second, until her blood stops hammering so loud. She stares straight up. Maybe it's a hallucination, but she's pretty sure she can see stars. Real stars, icy pinpricks, a million miles above the city. Without a power grid, the night is black and deep blue. Limitless.
She's gone before anyone comes running.
Blake is asleep when she slides his window open and shuts it behind her. He turns over once and mumbles while she strips the suit off and rinses her split lip and skinned knuckles in the bathroom. It's clearly not his apartment, just a safe house or a squat, considering the amount of conditioner and skin cream and tampon boxes strewn around. Unless she's totally mistaken him, and the cartoon kitten shower curtain is glorious self-expression. He doesn't stir when she opens a bottle of painkillers and swallows slightly more than the recommended dose. But he wakes up when she slides into bed beside him, and groggily reaches for the gun that's so obviously under his mattress.
"Maybe later," she says, and takes it out of his hand. She sets it on the nightstand and rolls away from him, presses the cool side of the pillow into her aching face. It hurts and feels good at the same time.
"Selina?"
"No," she says. "Just a dream." He lies there stiffly for a while, like he's waiting for her to say something else. She feels him relax, finally, as she's drifting off to sleep. He's a solid, compact brick wall at her back. It's been years since she slept in the same room with anybody but Jen, and Jen's awful snoring. He's so quiet beside her, it's almost like being alone. She means to get up before him, and vanish- she really does- but it doesn't quite work that way. She sleeps until the sun is high, and when she wakes up, he's sitting on the mattress next to her, damp from a shower and wearing the same pair of wrinkled blue jeans. He's holding an ice pack. "Did you hurt yourself?" she asks, and winces, because moving her face is not on today's agenda. He hands her the ice and she puts it against her cheek, hissing. "Fuck absolutely everything."
"Are you hungry?" he asks. He's talking quietly, like the state of her brain actually concerns him. Cute. "There's juice and cereal bars."
"Fantastic."
"If you prefer nothing, I can also arrange that."
"You've convinced me," she grumbles, "o gracious host. You were well-raised." There is a deafening, pointed silence from the other half of the bed. "Oh," says Selina. Everything in her body throbs, but she turns over to actually look at him: tight jaw, but a perfectly even set to his mouth. A pretty good bluff, except for the eyes. Takes one to know one, she guesses. "You too, huh?"
"Me too," he says. He stands up and pads into the other room, and when he comes back he's got the box of cereal bars and a glass of juice. She sits up, and the sheet slips down, and Blake's eyes suddenly snap to the ceiling. "You're not- don't you have any-"
"I didn't bring a spare Chanel for my apres-fistfight." She takes the juice glass out of his hand, and he turns his back to her. "So sorry."
"I'll get you- something," he says, and disappears again. He brings her a pair of blue yoga pants a size too large, a faded t-shirt with a pair of lips printed on it, and a jean jacket with a hood. "Everything's clean." He looks so earnest and helpful that Selina doesn't have the heart to tell him he has assembled the worst outfit in all of human history. She shuffles into the bathroom, takes a quick shower, and dresses without really looking in the mirror. The jean jacket has American flag patches on the arms. It adds a touch of the surreal to this already humiliating episode. At least she can wear her own boots home. The rest of the gear- catsuit, goggles, fired gun- she stuffs into a duffel bag. "You can't go back on your own," he says, when she comes out.
"Thanks, but no thanks." She slings the bag over her shoulder, and most definitely does not wince. "I'm fine."
"You're not fine."
"I've had worse," she says, flatly. He doesn't have anything to say about that. "Thanks for the pants."
"Selina-"
"Don't," she says. "It didn't happen." She goes out the way she came in, quickly, up the fire escape and across the rooftops, back towards her part of town. She's grateful for the hood, and she keeps it up until she's back inside, behind five locks. Her own bed is covered in clothes and outdated magazines, but she lays face down on it anyway, and pretends that she can't still imagine him there alone in his apartment, barefoot, staring at the window and holding that stupid box of cereal bars.
For a few days she decides she's going to give it up, forget about it. It was madness to begin with, patrolling this shithole as some kind of stop-gap measure, when the gaps were never going to stop opening up. She stays indoors and re-reads a couple of novels and lets Jen fuss over her face and deep-condition her hair. When the bruises can be covered up, she takes walks around the block, starts running again on the park paths. It's been two months since the city collapsed, and people are starting to get used to it. They sit out on their stoops in the early evenings sometimes, and talk to each other in the ration lines. She doesn't know whether it makes her proud- that adaptable streak she's always prized- or incredibly, boneshakingly sad.
She is sad, those few days, until she realizes what is truly simmering inside her is something else. It is not sadness. It's rage. She watches her neighbors and their children line up for bags of wilted vegetables and tins of powdered milk, and she wants to rip doors off their hinges and flip parked cars. Selina wonders if this was the reason for his rules, his restraint. No guns. No killing. Maybe because if he opened that floodgate, the waters would never stop rushing.
Anyway, she puts the suit back on. It's not a tribute. It's not atonement. She does what she has to do.
Right now, it's this.
She's not thinking about Blake, or at least not frequently, but when she spots him coming up the alleyway behind Jefferson, in his blacks and blues like the good little detective he is, she wonders for a second if she's imagining things. But she couldn't have imagined him in this much detail: the short, quick steps he takes, the way he scans continually, suspiciously, bright-eyed and restless. She checks the time. God, of course. Six minutes. She has never met a cop who couldn't immediately complicate a situation.
Selina drops beside him without preamble, and it's to his credit that he has a gun up and out and trained on her before she has a chance to speak. He lowers it instantly, apologetically, and she pretends like it wasn't impressive.
"Get out of here," she says.
"Not even 'hello'?"
"Hello," she says. "Now go away." The sound of gunfire- a short, sharp burst followed by shrieks of laughter- makes her push him into a doorway and scan the street. "There's a patrol in five minutes. You cannot be caught out here, do you understand?" She shoves him away. "You cannot get caught."
"Neither can you," he returns, which is just infuriating, and so Selina hauls him through the door and leads him up a flight of stairs to the roof access door. They hunker down on the edge and watch the patrol cross the street and head north through the park.
"Why did you come here?"
"You're the only one who can make cross-town visits?" he asks. His tone's light, but his eyes are serious. "You look alright."
"You need to improve your compliments, Mr. Blake."
"John," he says. "You should be calling me John." He pulls a ski mask out of his pocket. Good, this means she's not the only one losing her mind. "Want some company tonight?"
"I don't know." She stands. "Think you can keep up?"
He very nearly can.
Blake crashes at her place that night, on Jen's futon mattress. Jen is uptown- a party at the Plaza, another free-for-all, more chandeliers to tear apart. He strips down to his jeans and sprawls out and is asleep in minutes, while she lies awake watching him. He fought angry, and hard. She doesn't think he makes arrests that way, spars with the boys that way, shows anyone else on the team what he's truly capable of. She knows what that's like. She's been punching above her weight her whole life, mostly by pretending to be a delicate flower. And there are other places to hide, like in plain sight: on the front pages, filling your yacht with Russian ballerinas. Crashing your Lamborghini.
It's almost dawn when she slips down onto the futon beside him and slings her leg over his. He smiles with his eyes still shut and reaches for her. He pulls her against him, lets her kiss him hungrily, sharply, with her teeth, and tug his hair. It's not the sweet kiss she uses on every other man in her orbit; a girl's kiss. It's meaner. More urgent. He kisses back and rolls on top, sucks a trail down her throat and collarbone, grinds down into her arching hips. She peels his jeans off and bites his bottom lip. "Selina," he murmurs, mouth at her throat. Her fingers press his back, dig into the aching muscles, and he groans either from pleasure or pain. Either is fine with her. She wraps her legs around his waist.
Afterwards, he falls into a boneless sleep so deep he seems to barely notice her weight on his chest. She follows him after, and dreams she's down in the tunnels again, walking through an endless series of loops and ladders. There's something down there, but she can never quite reach it. She's sure to be gone this time, before he wakes and rolls over and tries to talk. But she watches him leave from the rooftop across the street, and she follows him as far as the southern border.
He never looks up.
She is beating the snot out of a pair of thugs over an apple, the morning he comes back. She flattens them to the pavement and sends them running, and then he is standing there with his hands in his pockets, talking to her calmly and civilly and trustingly, as if she did not trap and basically murder him after all, like it was just a misunderstanding. The rich don't even die like the rest of us. He looks strong and healthy and tanned. Everyone in the city looks like shit- hungry, rumpled, paranoid shit- and Wayne looks like he just came back from the Mediterranean. She resists the urge to touch him, to run her hands over his arms and her palms over his face, to be sure. Everyone else she's lost, she lost for good. This is some kind of new thing, coming back.
He gives her a motorcycle. He's still the dumbest man on earth, or the shrewdest. She tells him she's going to run.
"Then run," Wayne says. "Good luck."
He says that; but then of course, when she doesn't, she finds him at city hall with a cord around his neck and a billion-pound lunatic holding the ends. If this was part of the plan, if he was counting on her aim and her timing, then he's not just dumb, he's a lunatic. They go for the truck together, and then everything goes wrong. And suddenly there is no time, no time left at all. She kisses him hard, goodbye. An apology, and an accusation, and just something she's wanted to do for a long time. He dies- again- but this time it's too bright to see. He's still her unfinished business.
Later she is packing a single suitcase- everything that wasn't ruined in the siege, which isn't a lot- when she finds it. A blue velvet box under her bed, with an envelope tucked inside it, and a string of pearls. She clasps it behind her neck, and opens the letter. It's just an address, a day, a time.
An invitation.
She finds Blake at the church downtown, herding kids around and helping tired-looking people pack stuff into cardboard boxes. He looks surprised to see her. That hurts more than it should.
"Take a break," she says, and he follows her out, down the street, his coat undone and his hair getting too long. They go to an empty safehouse, an upstairs place on a side street, and when he closes the door she pulls his coat off, then his sweater. He kisses her and lets her wreck his buttons, trying to get the shirt over his head. He laughs when she gets his arm stuck, and they tumble down together onto the bed, rolling over and over, shimmying out of their jeans and kissing and throwing the covers around. They lie there for a long time afterwards, and he tells her that he's not going back to the force. She's not especially surprised. He's smart, and dedicated, and scrupulously honest. Just the type of person systems love to screw with, chew up, spit out, and trample over. She asks him what he's going to do with his time instead, and he says he doesn't know.
"Something," he says. "I heard they're turning Wayne manor into a boys' home. They'll need help putting the place together."
"Are they?" she asks, with studied indifference. "That's nice."
"How about you?"
"How about me, what?"
"The siege is over," he says. "You can stop punching petty thieves under the bridge, if you want." He turns over, so that his eyes are level with hers. "What do you want, Selina?"
"What I've always wanted," she says. "I'm not staying." He doesn't say anything. He just lies there on his side and watches her, reaches up and tucks her hair behind her ear, strokes the tip of her earlobe and puts his hand back down on the pillow.
"What if-" he starts, and she can't hear it.
"No," she says, finally. "Not for that. Not for anything." His face stays perfectly still. "Come with me."
"Can't." He smiles, crookedly. Cryptically. "Won't." Is there something about this city, that kills the people who love it most? Good thing Selina hates it, then. Blake sighs. "Besides. You'll find somebody better. Maybe you already have." She shoves him in the chest and he just takes it, rolls back and stares at her, no longer smiling.
"Die here if you want," she says. "I'm not-"
"Hey," he says. He wraps his hands around hers, pulls her closer. "It's fine. It's fine. Go. You need to go. I want you to." She tucks her forehead against his, lets him drape a leg over her knee. She can feel his hands against her back, his arms around hers. All the places they touch. She doesn't want to memorize it, she wants to forget. She wants to start forgetting now, letting go. She'll be weightless by morning. Empty. Brand new. She's getting what she wanted. What she truly wants. She can feel the butterflies, the fear and excitement. But he's so warm and steady around her. So solid. "Get out of here. See the world. Have a real life. Get as far away from here as you can."
"I will."
"Okay," he says. He puts his face in her hair. When he speaks again, it's so quiet, it's almost just a breath. "Tomorrow?"
She can do that.
"No one here cares if you go, or you stay.
I barely even noticed that you were away."
-The Avett Brothers
There are no effective drills for the apocalypse. But apparently women and children are still first.
In the seconds after the first explosion hits, there is a guard fumbling with the lock on her cell. His fingers are shaking and he leans against the bars to steady himself. Selina puts a hand over his, looks in his eyes, and takes the ring of keys. He's so scared he's barely breathing.
"Go," he says. His voice is cracking. He's probably twenty-three, twenty-four. He trained for riots; not for the walls to come tumbling down. There are no effective drills for the apocalypse. But apparently women and children are still first. "Get out of here," he says. "Get far away from here."
He doesn't have to tell her twice.
The first night lasts forever. She sits awake in the dark, close to the window, with a gun in her hand. She's still wearing the orange jumpsuit and the itchy cotton socks. She needs a shower, and a drink. The streets are mostly empty all night, except for the patrol that goes by at one in the morning. They're carrying machine guns and kicking over the trash cans. They're laughing. They throw bricks in the shop windows and carry cheap junk away, stuffed into their pockets and draped over their shoulders. Nobody goes out after that. Nobody moves in the apartments around hers. In the morning there are announcements. Broadcasts. Notices on public loudspeakers. More bullshit. More mind games. No news about the bomb. There's looting in the luxury stores downtown; people climbing out of the windows with ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars' worth of pearls and platinum strung around their necks. That's Wednesday. By Saturday it's the grocery stores, and it's not just the patrols and the mobs. It's her neighbors. The dried-up old woman who lives across the hall goes downstairs with her market cart, bumping the wheels down the steps one at a time. She doesn't come back. Fuck this fucking revolution.
Selina is tired of sitting here, sitting indoors, eating canned food and drinking bottled water out of a jug and tensing every time there are feet on the stairs. She takes a cold shower- all there is at the moment- and dresses. She slips a knife into her boot, a gun into the shoulder holster under her jacket, a lockpick into her jeans. Jen is at the Dolphin Lounge, day drunk and wearing a stolen fur coat, breaking empty bottles. The bar is full of teenagers and thugs. Selina hides her face in her collar.
"Come with me," Jen says. "We're going up to Madison. Up to the park. We're taking the high-rises. Imagine the shit they have up there."
They pull mirrors off the walls and snap the legs off Queen Anne chairs and drink everything they can get their hands on. Selina watches. She finds a bottle of Bollinger and breaks the nose of the boy who tries to take it away from her. She drinks it on a roof deck with panoramic views of the river. Jen falls asleep on the deck chair next to her, curled up in her coat, hair fanned out, looking like the kid she really is. Selina stares out at the lights across the bay. They twinkle like stars, like glitter in blacklight, like diamonds. Across the bay they are watching back, staring at the darkness. Gotham is now the world's largest, most glamorous penal colony.
She doesn't hope. That would be truly pathetic. She killed the only hope they had. To save her own skin. She can still see the surprise on his face, the dawning fear. He'd really thought- right until that second- that she was there to help. She can't stop hearing the final snap, the crack of thunder. Batten down the hatches, she said.
What a lousy joke.
It's not hard to find John Blake. He's the only man still wearing blue and black. They must be the only colors he owns. She follows him to a shabby brownstone and puts the lockpick up against his kidneys. She makes him turn around slowly, and smirks at him when he realizes what she's holding.
"I thought you'd run," he says.
"They're looking for cops," Selina reminds him. "Not robbers." This is an uncomfortable truth. Bane's promise of protection in exchange for services rendered was genuine; his thugs don't have a lingering interest in her, nor is she being followed. Nobody cares about Selina Kyle, not anymore. Here, in hell, she's finally free.
"Are you here to help?" he asks. Single-minded to a fault. She doesn't know why, but she dressed up for this, to come and talk to the last man in Gotham who seemed to be holding it together. The last person who believes he is still working inside a system, following a plan. It would be charming if it didn't make her teeth ache. "I know what you can do. I could use you. But only if I can trust you." He says it like he wants to.
"You can't." There's a lump in her throat. Full disclosure, this time. She makes mistakes, but not the same ones, over and over. Blake says he has to go. He turns his back to her. "You can't hold the northwest," she says, suddenly. She doesn't know quite what she's saying. Or why. "You don't have enough men. You need to stay on the trucks."
"Think I don't know that?" So bitter. He's a rare one. Every lost block is a personal failure, a bruise. He thinks he owes them something: the people looting markets in panic, the ones curled up under the bed. It's an uncanny moral resemblance. Well, she could probably get him killed too, one day, if she tried hard enough.
"Jefferson up through Bridge Park," she says. "My neighborhood." He looks at her for a long second. He understands the inflection. "I can't be everywhere."
"Be somewhere," he says.
First she maps and does her homework: tools and packages stashed on the rooftops, ziplines ready to go. Exit strategies. She puts new locks on a few empty apartments on high floors; places to crash when it gets hotter. She watches the patrols and learns the routes. Identifies the local color and picks out the muscle from the bluster at a distance. She's always been good at this part.
And at least it staves off the boredom.
Second, she cleans her own house: knocks down the pimps and the petty crooks robbing the last four functional bodegas. She's never been an intimidator- the whole idea was not to be seen, once upon a time- but she works the shadows, fire escapes, dead ends in alleyways, never staying still long enough for her face or her voice to register. The lowlifes on her streets start to scurry a little faster, talk a little lower. They don't know who she is or what she wants, except that she apparently doesn't want them selling crack to middle schoolers or beating their girls in back of the Dolphin anymore. The mystery is part of the work. It closes the gaps you can't close with your fists, your gun, your broken bottle picked out of the trash. Kids are still drawing chalk outlines of bats on the walls of houses, on the sidewalks in front of their steps. He was right about the mask.
"Lady," her targets call her, when she's already busted them on the side of the head with a closed fist or the closest piece of masonry. "Lady, hey, I don't know what you want! You've got the wrong guy!" In daylight she still gets wolf whistles, come-ons. She's almost always called a bitch. But whack them twice with a baton and suddenly, you're a Lady. "I've got money! Cash money!" Their money's no good here. Literally. Some of them offer to relocate; it usually just means she has to kick them in the head again next Thursday. Some of them offer information. Most of it's lousy hearsay, an enormous game of telephone being played through the criminal element, but once in a while it's something useful.
She leaves the patrols alone. She doesn't want to give up; to admit that this new world is the only one she has to live in. She doesn't want to go back to ripping high-end stereos out of the walls uptown. But the patrols are off-limit. She also doesn't want to die.
"Tomorrow night-" she starts, and Blake almost tips over the fire escape railing.
"Jesus Christ," he says. "Don't do that."
"Don't do what?" She slides down, onto a step across from him. "Sneak up on daydreaming cops? But it's so easy."
"I wasn't," he says, and flushes a surprising pink. She laughs. Selina can't help herself; he's a chapped-cheeked boy scout with a sniper rifle, and the whole world is so upside down it may never go back together. "What do you want?"
"Well." Selina leans back. "Word on the street says Jim Gordon is not only alive, he's in the fifth ward." Blake's face hardens. "I would tell you to work on your poker face, but I'm not sure there are any good games going at the moment."
"Where'd you hear it?" he asks. "Who's talking?"
"A flabby moron named Eddie." Selina examines her nails. Shabby and split. Utterly depressing. "Currently unconscious in a dumpster on Hoyt Street. He said tomorrow night's the big round-up, but you might want to pick him up, have a chat yourself." She stands, and climbs to the top of the rail. Blake watches her. "He seems super interesting."
"Thank you," he says, seriously. She doesn't bother registering that. She's already to the roof ledge when he clears his throat. When she looks back down, he smiles at her- actually smiles, a half-moon, tentative. His eyes crinkle at the edges. "Be careful."
"Save it," she says.
Like everything, it falls apart.
She's caught at the outer edge of the park, by the overpass; she jumped the railing to put a gap between them, but someone caught her ankle, and she slammed into the wall and went straight down instead of across. Her head doesn't split on the dumpster lid but she's stunned, rolling, when she ought to be back up on her feet. Her gun goes skittering into the shadows. There's four of them, just enough to form a knot around her and start kicking. She rolls, grabs a foot, shoves back up, kicks another guy behind the knee and just misses his fall. She can't really hear anything yet, besides the sound of metaphorical churchbells. Selina ducks, dodges, plants a fist squarely in a kidney, spins, palm strike to the underside of a jaw. She gets kicked in the ribs and goes tumbling again, this time into a garbage heap.
"Gonna take that mask off," one of them says. "Gonna wreck that pretty face." Selina reaches for something- anything- and comes up with a broom handle.
Sure.
She rolls up and somersaults right between them, flips behind the tallest one and clocks him so hard the wood snaps. He goes straight down, and the next one gets hammered on the collarbones with both halves of the stick. But there's still bachelor number three, and he's a little faster than his cronies. Selina blocks and feints, but he lands a hit on her solar plexus that takes the wind out for a second- long enough to get grabbed from behind and hit once, twice, right in the side of the face. Bursts in her vision cloud everything, little shattering galaxies that are probably her blood vessels. She heaves the guy behind her over her shoulders, and goes rolling along with him, head over heels. She's face down in a puddle, gasping, when her fingers find the handle of her gun.
It's three shots and then silence, ringing silence, and the hot smell of powder mingled with the distinct Gotham stench of spilled trash. Selina lies there for a second, until her blood stops hammering so loud. She stares straight up. Maybe it's a hallucination, but she's pretty sure she can see stars. Real stars, icy pinpricks, a million miles above the city. Without a power grid, the night is black and deep blue. Limitless.
She's gone before anyone comes running.
Blake is asleep when she slides his window open and shuts it behind her. He turns over once and mumbles while she strips the suit off and rinses her split lip and skinned knuckles in the bathroom. It's clearly not his apartment, just a safe house or a squat, considering the amount of conditioner and skin cream and tampon boxes strewn around. Unless she's totally mistaken him, and the cartoon kitten shower curtain is glorious self-expression. He doesn't stir when she opens a bottle of painkillers and swallows slightly more than the recommended dose. But he wakes up when she slides into bed beside him, and groggily reaches for the gun that's so obviously under his mattress.
"Maybe later," she says, and takes it out of his hand. She sets it on the nightstand and rolls away from him, presses the cool side of the pillow into her aching face. It hurts and feels good at the same time.
"Selina?"
"No," she says. "Just a dream." He lies there stiffly for a while, like he's waiting for her to say something else. She feels him relax, finally, as she's drifting off to sleep. He's a solid, compact brick wall at her back. It's been years since she slept in the same room with anybody but Jen, and Jen's awful snoring. He's so quiet beside her, it's almost like being alone. She means to get up before him, and vanish- she really does- but it doesn't quite work that way. She sleeps until the sun is high, and when she wakes up, he's sitting on the mattress next to her, damp from a shower and wearing the same pair of wrinkled blue jeans. He's holding an ice pack. "Did you hurt yourself?" she asks, and winces, because moving her face is not on today's agenda. He hands her the ice and she puts it against her cheek, hissing. "Fuck absolutely everything."
"Are you hungry?" he asks. He's talking quietly, like the state of her brain actually concerns him. Cute. "There's juice and cereal bars."
"Fantastic."
"If you prefer nothing, I can also arrange that."
"You've convinced me," she grumbles, "o gracious host. You were well-raised." There is a deafening, pointed silence from the other half of the bed. "Oh," says Selina. Everything in her body throbs, but she turns over to actually look at him: tight jaw, but a perfectly even set to his mouth. A pretty good bluff, except for the eyes. Takes one to know one, she guesses. "You too, huh?"
"Me too," he says. He stands up and pads into the other room, and when he comes back he's got the box of cereal bars and a glass of juice. She sits up, and the sheet slips down, and Blake's eyes suddenly snap to the ceiling. "You're not- don't you have any-"
"I didn't bring a spare Chanel for my apres-fistfight." She takes the juice glass out of his hand, and he turns his back to her. "So sorry."
"I'll get you- something," he says, and disappears again. He brings her a pair of blue yoga pants a size too large, a faded t-shirt with a pair of lips printed on it, and a jean jacket with a hood. "Everything's clean." He looks so earnest and helpful that Selina doesn't have the heart to tell him he has assembled the worst outfit in all of human history. She shuffles into the bathroom, takes a quick shower, and dresses without really looking in the mirror. The jean jacket has American flag patches on the arms. It adds a touch of the surreal to this already humiliating episode. At least she can wear her own boots home. The rest of the gear- catsuit, goggles, fired gun- she stuffs into a duffel bag. "You can't go back on your own," he says, when she comes out.
"Thanks, but no thanks." She slings the bag over her shoulder, and most definitely does not wince. "I'm fine."
"You're not fine."
"I've had worse," she says, flatly. He doesn't have anything to say about that. "Thanks for the pants."
"Selina-"
"Don't," she says. "It didn't happen." She goes out the way she came in, quickly, up the fire escape and across the rooftops, back towards her part of town. She's grateful for the hood, and she keeps it up until she's back inside, behind five locks. Her own bed is covered in clothes and outdated magazines, but she lays face down on it anyway, and pretends that she can't still imagine him there alone in his apartment, barefoot, staring at the window and holding that stupid box of cereal bars.
For a few days she decides she's going to give it up, forget about it. It was madness to begin with, patrolling this shithole as some kind of stop-gap measure, when the gaps were never going to stop opening up. She stays indoors and re-reads a couple of novels and lets Jen fuss over her face and deep-condition her hair. When the bruises can be covered up, she takes walks around the block, starts running again on the park paths. It's been two months since the city collapsed, and people are starting to get used to it. They sit out on their stoops in the early evenings sometimes, and talk to each other in the ration lines. She doesn't know whether it makes her proud- that adaptable streak she's always prized- or incredibly, boneshakingly sad.
She is sad, those few days, until she realizes what is truly simmering inside her is something else. It is not sadness. It's rage. She watches her neighbors and their children line up for bags of wilted vegetables and tins of powdered milk, and she wants to rip doors off their hinges and flip parked cars. Selina wonders if this was the reason for his rules, his restraint. No guns. No killing. Maybe because if he opened that floodgate, the waters would never stop rushing.
Anyway, she puts the suit back on. It's not a tribute. It's not atonement. She does what she has to do.
Right now, it's this.
She's not thinking about Blake, or at least not frequently, but when she spots him coming up the alleyway behind Jefferson, in his blacks and blues like the good little detective he is, she wonders for a second if she's imagining things. But she couldn't have imagined him in this much detail: the short, quick steps he takes, the way he scans continually, suspiciously, bright-eyed and restless. She checks the time. God, of course. Six minutes. She has never met a cop who couldn't immediately complicate a situation.
Selina drops beside him without preamble, and it's to his credit that he has a gun up and out and trained on her before she has a chance to speak. He lowers it instantly, apologetically, and she pretends like it wasn't impressive.
"Get out of here," she says.
"Not even 'hello'?"
"Hello," she says. "Now go away." The sound of gunfire- a short, sharp burst followed by shrieks of laughter- makes her push him into a doorway and scan the street. "There's a patrol in five minutes. You cannot be caught out here, do you understand?" She shoves him away. "You cannot get caught."
"Neither can you," he returns, which is just infuriating, and so Selina hauls him through the door and leads him up a flight of stairs to the roof access door. They hunker down on the edge and watch the patrol cross the street and head north through the park.
"Why did you come here?"
"You're the only one who can make cross-town visits?" he asks. His tone's light, but his eyes are serious. "You look alright."
"You need to improve your compliments, Mr. Blake."
"John," he says. "You should be calling me John." He pulls a ski mask out of his pocket. Good, this means she's not the only one losing her mind. "Want some company tonight?"
"I don't know." She stands. "Think you can keep up?"
He very nearly can.
Blake crashes at her place that night, on Jen's futon mattress. Jen is uptown- a party at the Plaza, another free-for-all, more chandeliers to tear apart. He strips down to his jeans and sprawls out and is asleep in minutes, while she lies awake watching him. He fought angry, and hard. She doesn't think he makes arrests that way, spars with the boys that way, shows anyone else on the team what he's truly capable of. She knows what that's like. She's been punching above her weight her whole life, mostly by pretending to be a delicate flower. And there are other places to hide, like in plain sight: on the front pages, filling your yacht with Russian ballerinas. Crashing your Lamborghini.
It's almost dawn when she slips down onto the futon beside him and slings her leg over his. He smiles with his eyes still shut and reaches for her. He pulls her against him, lets her kiss him hungrily, sharply, with her teeth, and tug his hair. It's not the sweet kiss she uses on every other man in her orbit; a girl's kiss. It's meaner. More urgent. He kisses back and rolls on top, sucks a trail down her throat and collarbone, grinds down into her arching hips. She peels his jeans off and bites his bottom lip. "Selina," he murmurs, mouth at her throat. Her fingers press his back, dig into the aching muscles, and he groans either from pleasure or pain. Either is fine with her. She wraps her legs around his waist.
Afterwards, he falls into a boneless sleep so deep he seems to barely notice her weight on his chest. She follows him after, and dreams she's down in the tunnels again, walking through an endless series of loops and ladders. There's something down there, but she can never quite reach it. She's sure to be gone this time, before he wakes and rolls over and tries to talk. But she watches him leave from the rooftop across the street, and she follows him as far as the southern border.
He never looks up.
She is beating the snot out of a pair of thugs over an apple, the morning he comes back. She flattens them to the pavement and sends them running, and then he is standing there with his hands in his pockets, talking to her calmly and civilly and trustingly, as if she did not trap and basically murder him after all, like it was just a misunderstanding. The rich don't even die like the rest of us. He looks strong and healthy and tanned. Everyone in the city looks like shit- hungry, rumpled, paranoid shit- and Wayne looks like he just came back from the Mediterranean. She resists the urge to touch him, to run her hands over his arms and her palms over his face, to be sure. Everyone else she's lost, she lost for good. This is some kind of new thing, coming back.
He gives her a motorcycle. He's still the dumbest man on earth, or the shrewdest. She tells him she's going to run.
"Then run," Wayne says. "Good luck."
He says that; but then of course, when she doesn't, she finds him at city hall with a cord around his neck and a billion-pound lunatic holding the ends. If this was part of the plan, if he was counting on her aim and her timing, then he's not just dumb, he's a lunatic. They go for the truck together, and then everything goes wrong. And suddenly there is no time, no time left at all. She kisses him hard, goodbye. An apology, and an accusation, and just something she's wanted to do for a long time. He dies- again- but this time it's too bright to see. He's still her unfinished business.
Later she is packing a single suitcase- everything that wasn't ruined in the siege, which isn't a lot- when she finds it. A blue velvet box under her bed, with an envelope tucked inside it, and a string of pearls. She clasps it behind her neck, and opens the letter. It's just an address, a day, a time.
An invitation.
She finds Blake at the church downtown, herding kids around and helping tired-looking people pack stuff into cardboard boxes. He looks surprised to see her. That hurts more than it should.
"Take a break," she says, and he follows her out, down the street, his coat undone and his hair getting too long. They go to an empty safehouse, an upstairs place on a side street, and when he closes the door she pulls his coat off, then his sweater. He kisses her and lets her wreck his buttons, trying to get the shirt over his head. He laughs when she gets his arm stuck, and they tumble down together onto the bed, rolling over and over, shimmying out of their jeans and kissing and throwing the covers around. They lie there for a long time afterwards, and he tells her that he's not going back to the force. She's not especially surprised. He's smart, and dedicated, and scrupulously honest. Just the type of person systems love to screw with, chew up, spit out, and trample over. She asks him what he's going to do with his time instead, and he says he doesn't know.
"Something," he says. "I heard they're turning Wayne manor into a boys' home. They'll need help putting the place together."
"Are they?" she asks, with studied indifference. "That's nice."
"How about you?"
"How about me, what?"
"The siege is over," he says. "You can stop punching petty thieves under the bridge, if you want." He turns over, so that his eyes are level with hers. "What do you want, Selina?"
"What I've always wanted," she says. "I'm not staying." He doesn't say anything. He just lies there on his side and watches her, reaches up and tucks her hair behind her ear, strokes the tip of her earlobe and puts his hand back down on the pillow.
"What if-" he starts, and she can't hear it.
"No," she says, finally. "Not for that. Not for anything." His face stays perfectly still. "Come with me."
"Can't." He smiles, crookedly. Cryptically. "Won't." Is there something about this city, that kills the people who love it most? Good thing Selina hates it, then. Blake sighs. "Besides. You'll find somebody better. Maybe you already have." She shoves him in the chest and he just takes it, rolls back and stares at her, no longer smiling.
"Die here if you want," she says. "I'm not-"
"Hey," he says. He wraps his hands around hers, pulls her closer. "It's fine. It's fine. Go. You need to go. I want you to." She tucks her forehead against his, lets him drape a leg over her knee. She can feel his hands against her back, his arms around hers. All the places they touch. She doesn't want to memorize it, she wants to forget. She wants to start forgetting now, letting go. She'll be weightless by morning. Empty. Brand new. She's getting what she wanted. What she truly wants. She can feel the butterflies, the fear and excitement. But he's so warm and steady around her. So solid. "Get out of here. See the world. Have a real life. Get as far away from here as you can."
"I will."
"Okay," he says. He puts his face in her hair. When he speaks again, it's so quiet, it's almost just a breath. "Tomorrow?"
She can do that.
"No one here cares if you go, or you stay.
I barely even noticed that you were away."
-The Avett Brothers