Selina came down to
breakfast as she had every morning for the past week:
in a foul temper veiled behind a pleasant smile.
It was unusual for her. Like
any cat, when she was troubled, angry, or annoyed she expressed it freely,
as when she was happy, playful, or lustful.
In the case of the Gotham
Post, however, she didn’t feel exactly free to growl and hiss.
Bruce had gone to so much trouble, and probably considerable expense.
It was the most astonishing gift she’d ever received—the most
astonishing gift anyone ever received.
When she thought about what he’d actually done, it gave her chills.
For the past week she couldn’t look at him without feeling it all
over again. Like now…
She’d waited until he
was in the shower before she looked at the newspapers Alfred brought on the
breakfast tray. She bypassed the real news in the Gotham Times, and with
stomach clenched in dread she opened up the Post.
“Catwoman” was still in the East End, still carrying on like she
gave a shit about that grimy, repellant corner of the city, still consorting
with the lowlifes that lived there, and still fighting crime! First they admit that idiocy is a tissue of lies and then
they go right on doing it! Selina
was so angry she’d marched across the hall, tripled the tension on her
Bowflex, and worked out until her muscles screamed with a fiery pulling
pain. She hadn’t worked out
half her fury but she went downstairs to breakfast, still in a disgusted,
sick, ferocious, wrathful funk—
And there he was: Bruce.
Bruce, who’d done this
amazingly wonderful thing for her.She couldn’t hiss and
growl at his gift, she couldn’t.
She just couldn’t.
So she did the
unthinkable and buried Catwoman’s ire behind a sweet, loving smile and
purred “Good morning, Handsome.”
“Morning, Kitten,” he
answered, buttering toast. “If
you’re not doing anything today, Lucius is coming over with Gladys
Ashton-Larraby to discuss this fundraiser she’s putting together for the
Foundation. She asked
pointedly if you could attend.”
Images of the Post’s
goggled counterfeit and the images of Batman-the-wonderful presenting her
with a purple-Catwoman gift flickered out of Selina’s focus as this new
idea moved in behind the frozen mask of her smile.
“Why?” she
asked suspiciously.
“I’ve no idea,”
Bruce said honestly. “But
that’s why the meeting is here at the house instead of the office, so you
can sit in.”
“I do not like the
sound of this,” Selina noted, pouring herself coffee.
“Neither do I,” he
said grimly. “but it goes with the territory.”
Selina was about to
object. He might not like it
either, but for entirely different reasons.
He might chafe at Gladys Ashton-Larraby’s snobbery and pretensions,
but he was Bruce Wayne and her event was for the Wayne Foundation. As he
said, it went with the territory.
Selina’s unease was very different.
She’d acted as hostess at plenty of Wayne functions by now, so it
wasn’t that, not exactly. But being in on the planning of some Wayne Foundation
fundraiser? That seemed a bit
much. “It goes with the
territory” Bruce had said. For him, not for her.
Why was she being involved in this so particularly?
And why could that
wretched tabloid writer go so far as to print “I’m sorry about what I
did to you. I didn’t have the right, none of us did,” and then go
right on doing it?
Fury spiked again, and
Selina bit off a piece of croissant like she had a grudge against it.
A growl vibrated deep in her throat, but she bit it back when her
eyes fell on Bruce again.
“Sure,” she said
forcing the growl into a warm purr. “For
you, my love, I’ll make the time.”
He looked startled but
pleased, nodded, then grunted.
“We’ve got a few
hours yet,” he noted, dipping unconsciously into the Batman voice.
“I have some work downstairs if you want to keep me company.”
“Sure,” she agreed in
the same forced purr. It
was an unusual offer, but he’d obviously missed her while she was away,
just as she had missed him, and they hadn’t had much time together since
her return. So she accompanied
him to the cave and watched while he opened a metal chamber.
He took out a small digital device attached to what looked like a
pound of C-4, a second identical digital clock, and a bag of loose chips and
irregular scoops of the white claylike explosive.
“This is why you were
late last night,” Selina noted wryly.
“This detonator was
never activated,” Bruce graveled, pointing to the one on the left. “This
other one was, so I removed most of the explosive after defusing, but I
still wanted to store it in the coolant tank overnight before examining it
further. These guys had no idea
what they were working with. This
wouldn’t simply blast open a vault door, it would decimate everything
inside and probably the perps as well.”
“Amateurs,” Selina
sniffed, disgusted. “I never
had to blow a safe door in my life.”
“They can’t all be
you, Catwoman,” he murmured, engrossed in his work.
He meant it in one
context, but she heard it in another. There was no thief like Catwoman—ever.
She was Selina Kyle as Selina Kyle invented herself: Gotham’s greatest thief—free, independent, and purple. She
had style, wit, grace, intelligence, beauty—and Batman. That
was Catwoman. She was
Catwoman. And that disgusting
tabloid was making her out to be some insipid gutter-trash crimefighter in
goggles. Still they pretended
Catwoman was some ex-whore crimefighter running around the East End in
goggles, even if they finally admitted that idiocy was not Selina Kyle…
“C-4 plastic explosive
is a favorite,” Bruce was saying, “because without any kind of
triggering mechanism, it’s a relatively harmless compound not unlike
modeling clay. You can mold it, stretch it, cut it or shape it without
concern; without a catalyst it won’t explode-period.
You can set it on fire; it simply burns like a piece of wood, though
somewhat hotter. You can shoot it with a high-powered rifle and it won’t go
off. But add some kind of detonator, like a blasting cap or an electronic
detonator like these, and it’s incredibly destructive.”
“Mhm,” Selina
answered, her eyes narrowing.
…The Post finally clued
in that the image they’d been offering of a goggled crimefighter was
completely incompatible with the true Catwoman—something she’d
made perfectly clear all those years ago from the stage of the Hijinx
Playhouse. Yet they’d
continued all this time, stubbornly ignoring what everyone else in Gotham
knew: that’s not Catwoman.
Now, at last, they were prepared to admit the truth…
“The primary agent,
commonly called RDX for ‘Research Development Explosive,’ is mixed with
a binding agent and a plasticizer, and usually a ‘chemical marker’ like
dimethyl
dinitrobutane mixed with motor oil. The result is a completely inert
clay-like substance that needs the proper amount of energy from a detonator
to cause a chemical reaction in the compound. When the chemical reaction
begins, the C-4 decomposes to release a variety of gases, notably nitrogen
and carbon oxides, which expand at about 26,000 feet per second and
ignite.”
…But unable to come
right out and say they lied, the Post tried to explain it away with a bit of
typical Gotham Postitude. They
latched onto the Dr. Light story and decided that Zatanna—ZATANNA the
mindwiping tnuc—had done the same thing to Selina that she’d done to
Dr. Light and the Top… Well, not quite the same.
Dr. Light only got a lobotomy. “Selina”
apparently got a crappy apartment, a closet full of spare Trinity outfits, a
whiny whore hanging around like her sidekick and a Harvey Bullock wannabe
acting like her boyfriend…
“…two metal-tipped
plastic prongs sticking out of the back of the detonator. When the timer
reaches zero, a high-voltage current would pass between the two prongs,
providing just enough energy to detonate the bomb.”
Selina slammed the
nearest object on the nearest surface, which happened to be a batarang on a
mousepad—which failed to make the desired clang and instead produced a
muffled thud.
“Why tell me?” she
blurted. “I don’t disarm
bombs, Bruce, it’s not my kink. Other
than being glad they didn’t blow you up, I really don’t give a
shit whether some hopeless amateurs tried to rob the federal depository last
night. It’s got nothing to do
with me.”
He looked up,
astonishment blotting out any other reaction.
Before his anger overcame the shock, Selina’s had given way to that
lingering warmth and gratitude for the initial gift.
“Sorry,” she
murmured, strangely off-balance. “Guess
my coming down here wasn’t such a good idea.
I should get ready for this Ashton-Larraby thing anyway.”
Bruce watched curiously
as she walked up the stairs and disappeared into the clock passage.
Harvey Dent set down the
newspaper, his mouth twisted into a pucker of… of…
He was of two minds.
He hated admitting that, but he was of two minds about what he’d
read.
He was pleased, in a way. The Gotham Post, which had barely mentioned him since his face was healed,
was suddenly portraying him as a good guy.
They made him out to be a crimefighter, maybe not on par with Batman,
but out there all the same, fighting the good fight: stopping bank robbers, holding a line against criminals as he’d one
done as D.A. and… and balancing the scales, in a sense, for the crimes
he’d committed as Two-Face.
That was where the second
reaction came in. In reality,
Harvey hadn’t done much of anything with his new life except rebuild his
wardrobe, reactivate his membership at the Harvard Club, and resume a
tentative social life among people who did not appear on the GCPD’s most
wanted list. The thought of making up for the past had honestly not
occurred to him. As District
Attorney, he fought to make criminals pay for their crimes.
As Two-Face, he’d been obsessed with balance and counter-balance,
good and evil. How could he
have failed this way, failed in both his mindsets, to recognize that need
to, somehow, make up for what he’d done?
This Harvey Dent in the
pages of the trashiest, most repugnant tabloid in Gotham, in this tabloid
that made all living souls out to be monsters a hundred times worse than
their true selves, was doing what Harvey himself never thought to: making amends.
Harvey wondered if he
should do likewise. The idea
was strangely unappealing. He
felt he ought to, certainly, but he didn’t want to.
Not at all.
His hand felt achingly
empty. A decision like this, a decision like none he’d faced in
all this time since the healing—like none he’d really faced ever in
his life. What he wanted to do
and what he felt he ought to do were… were completely… opposed.
Black and white. Opposite
sides of the… This went
beyond his fingers itching to flip the coin. This was deeper, beyond habit,
beyond uncertainty, beyond anything.
He closed his eyes and,
in that dark cavern of his thoughts, he visualized the coin: the smooth
edge, the ridges just inside the rim, the raised spikes of the liberty head,
the rough crease where the deep scars cut across her face.
Visualizing the
scarred side, Two-Face pointed out in his mind’s ear.
Harvey shook himself.
Two-Face was gone. Gone
forever, just like his scars, as long as he never again used that coin, used
fate or chance, to make a decision. Two-Face
was gone. He, Harvey Dent,
had visualized the scarred side of the coin…
It meant only what he
knew before: he didn’t want to go out at night and be a
crimefighter. Maybe he should,
maybe it would be noble and right and worthy to put himself on the line that
way and make up for the harm done by Two-Face.
But he didn’t want to, and he wasn’t going to.
There. Decision made. The
end.
He picked up the
newspaper and dropped it into the trashcan in disgust.
He really didn’t know why he bought that silly thing.
It was earlier than
Edward Nigma liked to get up. Like
most rogues, he kept a late schedule even when he wasn’t actively engaged
in a crime spree. His schedule
wasn’t exactly “up at dusk/bed at dawn,” but it was such that eight
a.m. was too early to start the day. Yet
here he was, awake, dressed, and making breakfast of a cold bacon
cheeseburger he’d picked up the night before and stuck in the
refrigerator, knowing this would occur. He ate as he waited by the phone for the inevitable.
When it happened, he picked up on the first ring.
“Good morning,
Pamela,” he said wearily before she’d spoken.
“Yes, of course I knew it was you. You’ve only been calling every
morning for a week… No, you do not get anagrams.
At this hour, you’re lucky you get verbs… Because we do not all
share the plants’ love of sunshine, Ivy.”
He pulled the phone from
his ear and rested it against his forehead as it chirped into the air in an
excited female voice. Eddie
took a deep breath and returned the phone to his ear.
“Yes Pammy, that’s
wonderful news,” he said automatically.
Every day for a week, he
thought. It had been wonderful news every day for a week.
Such wonderful news that Poison Ivy had to share her joy with
someone, and evidently a greenhouse full of plantlife wasn’t adequate.
Eddie wasn’t sure why he was so “honored,” but every morning
once she’d seen her new coverage in the Post, that phone rang and the
festivities began.
“M-hm,” Eddie said at
intervals, adding the occasional “Yes,” “Good,” and “Yup” for variety.
He hadn’t seen any of the previous stories she was talking about.
As far as he knew, nobody had seen them. But evidently some little corner of the tabloid that
nobody paid attention to had falsely reported that Poison Ivy was dead, and
now they had corrected the error. It
didn’t strike Eddie as any great cause for celebration, at least not at
eight o’clock in the goddamn morning.
The cheeseburger had left
a light greasy film on its waxpaper wrapper, and on this Edward Nigma
scratched out the word POTS with his fingernail.
Followed by TOPS, SPOT, OPTS, STOP and finally the generator for
these anagrams: POST.
“Yes, certainly,”
Eddie murmured into the mouthpiece, having no idea what he was agreeing
with… apparently, that unlike previous 10ish years worth of the Post which
was an unforgivable waste of newsprint, this issue was a noble use of
nature’s most glorious creation (trees), and these gracious and dignified
wood titans (trees again) did not give their lives in vain.
GOTHAM POST would produce
a far more extensive list of anagrams, and Eddie reached for a pencil and
began scratching out HAG MOST POT, HAG MS POTTO, HAG PS MOTTO…
“Gotham After Dark?”
Selina said weakly.
“Yes, Dear,” Gladys
smiled effusively, setting down her teacup. “That amusing column in the
Gotham Post about all the night people.
Surely you know of it.”
“Yes,” Selina said
with a strange charge in her tone. “I
know it. I know all the columns in the Gotham Post, Mrs. Ashton—”
“Gladys, dear.”
“Gladys,” Selina bit
off the word with a feline snarl.
“Such a splendid idea
for a party, don’t you think? I
mean, if we’re going to insert an extra fundraiser into the social calendar
to fund these new programs, we simply have to offer something more than
another dreary chicken a la king dinner dance.”
“Y-yes,” Selina
managed, looking in panic to Bruce, to Lucius, and even to Alfred, but
finding only shocked stares as stunned and horrified as her own. “But
surely, Missu- Gladys- The rogues aren’t exactly- Nine out of ten Wayne
events get hit as it is and… Somebody help me here.”
“No,” Bruce said
forcefully. Then realizing, from Selina’s startled stare more than
anything, that there was entirely too much Batman in his tone, he began
stammering like the fop. “I
mean it’d be fun, sure, to dress up and all, but I have to consider the
safety of my guests.”
“Some other kind of
costume party,” Selina suggested impulsively.
“Some period where they wrote with feathers.”
She looked abashedly at Bruce. “That
way, only Penguin would be pissed, right?”
“Oh pish,” Gladys
exclaimed, “I don’t see why any of these ‘rogues’ or whatever
they’re called would be insulted if we used them as a theme.
Why imitation is the highest form of flattery!”
Bruce was stymied by the
need to quash this idea in the strongest possible terms and to keep any
traces of Batman from creeping into his manner as he did so—which was
almost impossible on this particular topic.
Fortunately, Selina had no such qualms about behaving openly as
Catwoman.
“I don’t fancy the
idea of being in a roomful of goggled wannabes in bikerchick catsuits,”
she snarled.
“Oh my dear, of course
not!” Gladys gushed. “What
on earth do you take us for? Why
everyone knows that you’re Catwoman and that you’re with Bruce,
so obviously Catwoman is taken… That was such a lovely picture of you too,
in that last edition; Randolph and Randy-quad both remarked on it.
How beautiful you look in purple and how nice it was that they
finally got it right.”
“Oh,” Selina
breathed, disarmed by the removal of her strongest objection.
“Well, it was nice of them to notice.”
“I’m sure Selina
agrees with me that Catwoman isn’t really the salient point,”
Bruce managed, finding a tone at last that was neither too foppish nor too
Bat.
Selina’s eyes flashed
with a gimlet look he’d seldom seen outside a bank vault.
Behind him, Alfred performed the swift and silent maneuver the Gotham
underworld called a “Bat-exit,” but which Alfred himself considered a
tactful withdrawal such as any butler knows to execute at such moments in
the interests of discretion, diplomacy, and common sense.
“No, I wouldn’t agree
with that at all,” Selina said with calm finality.
“I’d say Catwoman is very much the point.
If we’re talking about the Gotham Post, I’d say whether or not
Catwoman is in purple or not, or wearing goggles or not, or… is ME
or not, is very much the fucking point, Bruce.”
She caught herself before
going further, collected herself, and primly folded the napkin in her lap.
“Excuse me,” she said
quietly. “I’m going to check with Alfred about lunch.”
Dick Grayson emerged from
the bedroom at the crack of noon, stretching his arms in a circular motion
as he crossed the living room, as if he was swimming into the kitchen.
“Morning, sweetie,”
Barbara called, looking up from her laptop.
“Have a good night?”
“Good to be back on a
normal schedule,” he answered loudly from the kitchen.
Then he returned, drinking orange juice from the carton.
“It made a nice change working with Cassie for those few weeks, but
I’m glad to be on my own again –and really glad to be back in Bludhaven.
I’m going to go back tonight, probably every night for a week or
so, to make up for the lost time.”
“Chip off the old
block,” Barbara teased.
Dick stared as if
physically struck at the thought. Then
he took another swig of juice.
“Maybe a little, just
in this one area,” he admitted.
“Maybe a little?” his
wife countered. “You were
doing a full patrol in Bludhaven twice a week, as a rule.
So in watching Gotham those few nights while Bruce was away and
having Flash do a quick run through ‘Haven each night, you lost exactly nothing
in patrol-time. Then
partnering with Cassie since then—”
“She needed that more
than Bludhaven needed Nightwing,” Dick interrupted.
“No one is arguing that
point,” Barbara put in. “Partnering
with Cassie, and not wanting to take her out of Gotham because of the whole
Robin-ice cream sundae thing, okay. So
how much did you really fall behind in Bludhaven?”
“It’s not a
mathematical formula, Babs.”
“Three.
You missed three whole nights in Bludhaven.
The way you’re carrying on, you’d think they got bombed back to
the Stone Age.”
“I’m not ‘carrying
on,’” Dick insisted. “I
just… I feel like I’ve been neglecting my best girl and I need to make
it up to her.”
Barbara took off her
glasses, raised an eyebrow, and glared.
“You better be
finishing that orange juice and not figuring on putting it back in the
refrigerator,” she said crisply.
“Let me clarify the
whole ‘best girl’ analogy,” Dick said quickly.
“What I meant was—”
“Chip.
Off. The Old.
Block,” Barbara said definitely.
Dick let his head rock
backward until his eyes pointed to the ceiling.
“Okay, fine, you
win,” he laughed. “I’m Bruce. I’m obsessed with my city. Grunt.”
Barbara winked.
“Truth is,” she
pushed, “Bludhaven has hardly been the loser in all this.
With Flash looking in on it every single night, whereas you only
patrol twice a week as a rule.”
“Why are you making
such an issue of this?” Dick asked suddenly.
She thought about this,
and then took a determined breath before answering.
“I just think it was good for everybody.
Bruce took a little vacation, he and Selina got some time together,
Alfred is happy as a clam, you were wonderful leading the team…
I don’t want there to be any after effects that sours anybody on
doing it again.”
“The all-seeing
Oracle,” Dick said fondly.
She smiled and didn’t
deny it.
“Cyber-busybody,” he
added.
Again she smiled and
didn’t challenge the label.
“I owe Wally huge,”
Dick noted. “Thinking maybe take him and Linda to dinner.
What do you say?”
“Sounds good,”
Barbara murmured, returning her attention to her laptop.
“Oh, and the Gotham Post is at it again, bird-o-my-heart.
The Nightwing Workout.”
Dick stared.
“Why me?” he asked.
“’Cause you’ve got
the tightest tush in spandex, Dickie. The
Tattler made quite a stir with that ‘Riddle Me Thin’ idea and tabloids
copy each other.”
“Why come up with a new
idea when you can repackage the ‘Buns of Steel’ workout,” Dick
laughed.
“Something like
that,” Barbara smiled.
“She’s… a little
emotional today,” Bruce said hurriedly as he stood to follow Selina out of
the room. He caught up
with her on the second floor, at the door to her suite.
“What the hell is wrong
with you?” he hissed softly.
“Have you even read the
Post since any of this started?” she hissed back.
“I’m on damage
control down there, Selina, and I’d appreciate a little support instead
of—”
“They’re fixing
everything except me, Bruce: Batman,
Robin, Riddler, Ivy, everything they’ve made such a mess of, except
me. And you know why?”
She held up the dictaphone. “Because
of you. They know you arranged
that sale; WayneTech gave them these. Even
if you didn’t buy the Post outright, they know you were involved and they
don’t want it looking like all these changes have anything to do with you. So I get screwed. Gladys
is right, everybody knows that we’re together.
So I get left out of all the improvements just so they can make it
look like the changes can’t possibly be connected to Bruce Wayne.”
He let out a long,
frustrated breath.
“Okay,” he said
quickly. “I’m sorry; I
wasn’t aware of that, but… Can we possibly deal with this later, go
downstairs now and deal with the fresh disaster.
A Gotham Post party, God, only Gladys Ashton-Larraby could
possibly—”
“Their big editorial
revamp is now, Bruce. If
Catwoman doesn’t get a piece of it, who knows how long it will be until—Do you know how my gut clenches up when I open that paper each morning?
Do you know how sick I feel turning the pages, dreading what they
might have come up with this time?”
“Selina, please,” he
said simply.
“Yes, fine,” she
answered, then placed the dictaphone in his palm in the same confrontational
silence that he’d handed over her claw on the rooftop.
“I will come downstairs and talk to Gladys.
But this isn’t going to go away, Bruce.
I haven’t been able to keep breakfast down for three days because
of this, and it’s all your doing. Hope
you’re pleased with yourself and your big romantic gesture.”
Neither heard the quiet
click on the dictaphone. Both
proceeded downstairs, and both tried to make Gladys Ashton-Larraby
understand that her idea of a perfect themed fundraiser might as well put up
a banner that said “HELLO GOTHAM ROGUES, PLEASE CRASH THIS
PARTY!!!”
It didn’t go as Bruce
hoped. Gladys Ashton-Larraby was almost a rogue herself once
she latched onto an idea. She
had the same selective comprehension, the same unfathomable blind spots, and
the same stubborn resolve to carry on in the face of any and all opposition.
Bruce was hampered by his fear of appearing too Batlike in his
arguments. Lucius was flummoxed
by the sheer insanity of the woman’s thinking.
And Selina—Selina was his one solid hope.
She humored and handled the worst rogues in Gotham.
But she had a weak spot that no theme villain would ever find but
which Gladys could exploit without even trying:
Mrs. Wayne. Selina was
off-balance in any situation that put her in “Mrs. Wayne” territory for
the first time. As long as she could speak as Catwoman, the only person in
the room with first-hand knowledge of the real Gotham City rogues, she felt
perfectly secure. She was sure,
succinct, and persuasive, and her arguments would have swayed anybody—except Gladys Ashton-Larraby.
In Gladys’s peculiar
view, the very fact that Selina Kyle was Catwoman meant the party was
secure. Yes, of course
Wayne events might have been targeted in the past, but now that
Selina was with Bruce they were all safe as can be!
Selina was obviously
confused by the appeal. She
confirmed, with a wary eye to Alfred, that the party, of whatever theme,
wasn’t going to be held at Wayne Manor.
It was to be in the Grand Ballroom of the Robinson Plaza Hotel,
Gladys was organizing it, Gladys would be the hostess.
What did any of it have to do with her?
Gladys merely smiled a
wide, hungry smile, and stated the obvious:
“It’s to benefit the Wayne Foundation.”
“Yes, I know,” Selina
said in the same tone she’d earlier said she knew the Gotham Post.
“Well there you are!”
Gladys announced triumphantly.
To be continued…
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