Bruce Wainright has (onerule) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-09-12 15:46:00 |
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Entry tags: | batman, catwoman, door: dc comics |
Who: The Bat and the Cat
What: Bats comes to the rescue, part 1.
Where: Wonder City.
When: After the Scarecrow madness.
Warnings/Rating: Some violence and things.
It had only been a few hours, but already the shiny black of her suit was slick with blood - hers and everyone else's. She was exhausted in a way she couldn't remember ever being, even in those early days of hell with Bone. But the exhaustion did nothing to calm the escalating need to hurt that was coursing through her veins. It was a constant paranoia, a sense that the predator was alway right around the corner, right on the kitty cat's tail, and the perpetual hallucinations that put him right there, at the edges of her vision, never abated. She couldn't control it, no matter how she tried, and the best she managed was a carefully directed violence. She tried to refrain altogether, but the fear gripped her and her claws found flesh, and the frenzy wouldn't let her go until there was something broken beneath her feet.
So the Cat headed deeper into Wonder City, past the Narrows, where only demons slumbered. Somewhere, in the distant part of her mind, she knew she would regret it after. She understood these people more than she understood the "good" men and women that lived in Gotham's sunlight, but she couldn't hurt selfish debutantes and philandering husbands, and so she went deeper, where the people she fought would fight back with guns and knives and everything they had. Less chance for the kitty to do damage there.
But those thoughts only came with the moments of lucidity, the ones between attacks. When she spooked - as kitty cats tended to do - there was no thinking, no thought, and it was only dumb luck that no one had died beneath her claws yet. Dumb luck, and the lack of a firearm. Even still, she'd just broken a rapist's back, and she'd crushed his dick into nothing beneath her boot, and she was headed to one of the more disgusting brothels in Gotham's underbelly.
The rooftops still sang to her, bringing the tiniest bit of comfort, but that didn't last either. The brothel - one she knew from her own childhood - came into sight, and she saw the horrors from that place superimposed on the present. She was back there, helpless, terrified, and she wanted to tear every single man inside limb from limb. The only difference was that now she could actually do it.
She left sticky paw prints of blood in her wake as she dropped down onto the fire escape that was to be her kitty door. The window's glass was cut with sharp claws, and she climbed inside without even a wince of concern for the injury that made her side scream and shriek. Her whip was in her hand almost immediately, and then it was wrapping itself tight as a noose around the neck of a fat man with a very large belly. "Go," she told the boy on the bed - little more than a child - and, when he did, she smiled a feral cat's smile as she turned her attention back to the man.
The Bat was exhausted in a way he had not been for quite some time, though none of it showed beneath the cowl. It was a mental strain, rather than physical, the latter of which he had been fighting past for years, and was easily recovered from. This, however, was a weight that would wear at him bit by bit, a burden he and he alone had brought upon himself. There were other options, perhaps, but with limited time and a lack of trustworthy allies he could turn to, his deal with Crane had been the only way he could guarantee Selina's safety. Allowing the madman back into Arkham as a member of staff, rather than an inmate, had been extremely difficult, and even his preparations prior to Crane's arrival did little to soothe his concerns. It was not publicized, of course, and he hardly presented himself as Crane’s advocate. No, he simply did his best to explain to the staff that, due to circumstances beyond his control, the disgraced doctor would temporarily be returning to Arkham--emphasis on temporarily--and he outlined his plan to monitor the asylum, while the doctors, nurses, and few security guards watched him with similar expressions of confusion, fear, and worst of all, betrayal. Batman had been the one to free Arkham from Scarecrow’s control, after all, the symbol who fought for them, and now here he was, admitting that all that progress would be lost.
“I am not abandoning you,” he told them, voice grim in the silent, too-bright halls. “Crane will maintain the facade of being in control, but I give you my word that I will be watching, and should he go too far, I will be here.” And, truthfully, he meant every word. Once he had the antidotes, and Selina was fully cured, the Bat would be back, regardless of Crane’s threats, and he would ensure that none of them would be able to be followed through with. By the time he left the Asylum, Crane having arrived almost unnoticed, he had discussed semantics with the man, restraining the urge to simply throw him in a cell and find another solution, and while he hated himself for making the deal, he did leave with the first dosage of the antidote in hand. Let Crane enjoy his false power for now; it would not last long. There were babies to find and return to their parents as well, but that could wait until he was no longer on a time limit.
Tracking down Selina was, in comparison, rather simple. She left a trail of bodies in her wake, as well as an abundance of blood, and while all her victims were alive, some had barely survived, and he knew it was only a matter of time until the fatalities began. He supposed he could take solace in the fact that no innocents, aside from those at the summer camp, had been attacked; the men she appeared to target were certainly not deserving of retribution. Still, he could not allow her to continue, not only for their sake, but for hers.
The Bat’s chase led him into Wonder City, yet he never faltered, and while Selina had opted to use the fire escape and the window to enter the brothel, he chose a much more direct route. As the man struggled with the reality of a whip around his neck, the Bat plowed his way through those who attempted to stand in his way down below while girls and boys, all so young, cowered against the walls as he passed. He did not open the door to the room so much as he shouldered through it, and he took in the scene with surprising swiftness, his eyes little more than pinpoints behind the cowl.
“Catwoman.” He almost slipped, almost called her Selina, but caught himself just in time. “Let him go.” The antidote was hidden in his utility belt, within easy reach, yet he was not expecting this to go smoothly. No, this was not like the fear gas; the Bat knew he might very well have a fight on his hands, but he would do whatever necessary to inject the antidote, whether she was willing to accept it or not.
The Cat was so caught up in choking the life out of the fat, naked man she'd pinned to the bed, that she didn't hear the sounds below. They didn't register as anything more than things the kitty cat had to take care of once she was done here. She'd wipe the whole place out. Someone should have done it years ago. By her count, it had been standing a decade, and who knew how long it had been standing before that? While Gotham's rich and elite schmoozed and sipped champagne and raised money for this charity or that charity, these kids were left down here to suffer a fate worse than death. The kitty cat would wipe this entire place from the map. And the kids? Maybe she could scuttle them through the door. Would that work? She'd given Blondie money. Maybe Blondie could find them lives away from this place. And lost in all those thoughts, the fat man's face going blue and his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth, Selina didn't hear the Bat's grand entrance. Shame, she did like a good entrance.
But the shouldered door registered, and she looked over from where she was kneeling on the bed when she heard his voice. She didn't stop strangling the man beneath her, even though he had just stopped breathing. Though a chill did trickle down her spine. The man at the door wasn't the Bat, not as far as she could tell. No, he was the nightmare of her youth, and she wondered how many times he had to die before he stayed dead. But no, he wasn't dead. He was in Blackgate, where the Bat had put him when he kept her from killing him the last time. He must have escaped, and here he was.
The little girl in her was scared, the one that had existed that decade earlier, and the whip loosened from the dead man's throat as she slid off the bed. He could be resuscitated, of course, the dead man. It had only been a few seconds, but she wasn't worried about him anymore. The bedsheets, wrinkled and white-turned-grey, came away coated in blood when she climbed off them, the amount of slickness on her suit making the air smell of iron and copper. This close, the tear in the fabric at her side was visible, front and back, entrance and exit, and she moved around the bed with cautious care before she snapped her whip with perfect precision, letting it wind around the Bat's neck without moving the safety of the far side of the bed.
The Bat recognized the color of the now-motionless man’s face for what it was, but he did not feel his usual spike of alarm whenever he was faced with the prospect of death in his presence. Perhaps the night’s events had dulled his senses, perhaps they had made him weary, or perhaps his concern for Selina outweighed whatever concern he might have felt for the man, who certainly did not deserve freedom. Whatever it was, the result was a distinct lack of reaction. The man, like the children below, was a concern for later, when the antidote had been successfully administered. He knew from the way she looked at him that she was seeing someone else, some monster from her past, yet he had expected as much. His gaze dropped to the blood-slick bedsheets as she climbed off the bed, and his eyes narrowed in concern. It was difficult to tell how much came from her and how much belonged to others, though he suspected it was more of the latter, and the smell of iron and copper was familiar enough that he barely even noticed the sharp scent. Blood was often spilled in Gotham, and one learned to acclimate themselves to its presence.
The snap of the whip drew his gaze upward, back to her, and while he was too slow to prevent the whip from winding around his neck, it would be much, much more difficult to strangle him than it had been for the man on the bed. Given the structure of his armor and cowl, the only part of him left exposed was his chin and mouth area; his neck was very much protected, but she didn’t know that. For all she knew, as this suit was much different than one her Bat wore, the layer of kevlar could have been too thin, made to appear thicker, and the Bat decided to feint her out rather than trying for a more direct approach. Let her come to him, instead of the other way around.
He grabbed hold of the whip with one hand, as though fighting to loosen its hold, and tugged in an assumed test of its strength. “Stop,” he ordered, his usual thunder-clap tone laced with irritation and just a hint of something like concern.
Under normal circumstances, she would have realized his neck was too protected for the whip to really function. She would have gone for his ankles, used his weight against him and knocked him off balance. But the combination of the drug in her system and the injury from the gunshot made it harder to reason and, when he grabbed for the whip, she assumed it was working. The stop filtered through as Bone's voice, as something from nightmares she thought were left long behind. "No," she purred, and it was an angry, angry sound. "I've done what you said for too long," she told him, falling for his trick and moving forward, toward him. Her grip on the leather was solid, stronger than her normally capable grip, the drug lending her strength. Her step didn't falter, making it immediately obvious that she was moving forward to because she wanted to, and not out of any need resulting from his grip on the whip.
She missed the concern too, seeing only the monster the drug intended her to see. When she was close enough - too close for comfort, but not close enough to grab - she aimed a perfect kick to his abdomen, just below his ribs, the force of her steep grip boots intentionally unforgiving, even as she yanked on the whip again. Forward and back, and she intended for him to end up on his stomach at her feet, where she could snap the back of his neck under her heel. It was too good for him, but she wanted this, wanted him did. She'd wanted it since Lola, since Holly, since she'd been a little girl of 12.
The yank on the whip was unforgiving. She dripped blood on the floor as she pulled, and her bright green eyes shone with madness behind the goggles she still wore. Close like this, it was clear that she was paler than normal, a result of the wound at her side opening and reopening as she attacked.
Selina reacted just as he'd hoped she would, though the Bat still felt a distant pang of guilt at his deception. While he intended to do everything in his power to avoid harming her, he began to think it was inevitable, and as she approached he simply resigned himself to the fact that it was necessary and, once she was back to normal, she would realize that. He had sacrificed more for her in one night than he had for a single human being in quite some time. Instead of responding to her anger, he remained silent; she saw someone else when she looked at him, and nothing he said or did was going to change that while Crane’s drug still coursed through her veins. He took note of her unnaturally strong grip, and while it complicated matters, the Bat was not particularly concerned that she might overpower him. No, even with a foreign substance lending her strength, she lacked his size and bulk, and her hallucinations also worked to his advantage. She was reacting to whoever she thought he was, not to him, which meant that she was bound to underestimate him.
He was surprisingly calm as he watched her approach, though he was more focused on the way she moved, having learned how to read body language a long time ago, halfway across the world, when he was much younger. That ability, to predict an opponent’s movements in advance, gave him a split-second window to determine his course of action, which was more than enough. Rather than leaning forward, making him vulnerable to being pulled off balance, he curved his spine back, in a sort of rounded arch, and tilted his body to the right as her boot connected with kevlar. The impact was solid, and he knew there would be a bruise there in the morning, but it did not slow him down, and as he moved his free hand took hold of her ankle and pushed her leg up and to the side, pulling her with him to follow the sideways arc he cut through the air with the intention of throwing her off balance. His other hand, still wrapped around the whip, pulled in the opposite direction, against her, like some sort of bizarre game of tug-o-war. It came down to a battle of strength, his against hers, and he forced himself to ignore the way her eyes shone, the paleness of her skin, the wound at her side; he could not falter.
Selina's advantage was agility, not strength; he was right about that. She could fight, but her skill was being quicker and faster than whoever she was fighting, and even the drug in her system couldn't change the Cat's nature, not when it came to this. When he tilted and remained upright, she tipped her head in a momentary feline gesture of surprise. A huh very clearly mirrored in her expression. She hadn't been expecting that. It was enough of a distraction that she didn't catch the grip on her ankle until it was too late. She couldn't avoid the off-balance tip, but kitty cats always landed on their feet. Much like his feint from earlier, she let herself go, and she let the grip on the whip go when he pulled it, a return volley in the off-balance game. The result was a side flip that kicked over his head, caught his chin with her heel, and (hopefully) managed to slip her ankle free. If it didn't, well, at least she got a good, solid kick beneath his chin, which should daze him long enough for her to get away on the ground.
The problem, however, was that she wasn't interested in getting away. She wanted to kill him. Clean escapes were her speciality, and the kitty cat hadn't made it on the Gotham streets as long as she had without knowing when to leave a fight. But the drug did affect that, and it was only the searing pain beneath her ribs when she executed the side flip that gave her a moment of clarity. She blinked aware green eyes that were shadowed with pain and confusion, and her glove touched a side that was freshly red. "Br-" she began.
And then the moment of clarity was gone, and she was reaching back toward the bed, for the gun the dead man had set on the nightstand. If she couldn't overpower Bone in a fight, she'd just shoot him. That would slow him down.
There was no satisfaction to be derived from the surprise he saw in her expression, and even if the circumstances had been different, the Bat knew better than to assume victory so quickly. He should have realized that disrupting her balance would be much more difficult, yet he held out some small hope that the drug would hinder her ability to land on her feet. Apparently, it did no such thing. He was forced to take a step back in order to center his weight when she released the whip, as he’d misjudged the amount of force applied, and this time, he did not manage to react as quickly as he had just a few seconds prior. The blow to his chin was felt far more than the one to his abdomen, which had a great deal to do with the lack of kevlar, and he let out a grunt as his head snapped sharply upward, a painful twinge in his neck indicating it too would be sore later.
He tasted blood and another step back, this one as unintentional as the loosening of his hold on her ankle was a second later. Yes, the Bat was dazed, but only for a moment, and he managed to recover much more swiftly than a normal man would have been capable of. He had no intention of allowing her to escape, and he unwound the whip from around his neck almost irritably as he sought her out once more. The sudden clarity in her eyes surprised him, and he began to say her name, Selina on the tip of his tongue, but then it was gone as quickly as it had come, and the word died on his lips. He should have known better.
It was the reach for the gun, however, which prompted a new sense of urgency. “Selina,” he rasped, a throaty whisper, and he sought the antidote with one hand even as he lunged forward, the other closing around her wrist. Every inch of him screamed no, driven by an unyielding determination to keep the gun out of her grasp and end this before more damage could be done to either of them.
The name, her name was the only thing that earned him enough time to keep her from grabbing the gun and shooting him in the face with it. She managed to get her hand on the gun's grip, but that was all she managed before he lunged and closed his hand around her wrist. She brought her arm up, trying to at least get him across the face with the barrel, even if she couldn't reach the trigger. She twisted at the same time, back against him, her back to his chest, and she slammed a boot down on his instep, while she tried to catch him under the chin with the back of her head. Then it was all elbow to his gut and an attempt to force the trigger to fire, which it did, but the bullet went down and ricocheted, and she hissed in displeasure. She was tired, and she wanted this particular fight over. He could probably tell this close, she knew, that her strength was fading. Her muscles, beneath the layer of blood-slick black trembled with each effort at force, and terror was starting to overtake aggression.
And it was that realization that made her change her tactic from attack, to escape. If she stayed, she was going to turn into a defenseless kitty cat, entirely at his whim, and she refused to ever, ever be at Bone's whim again. "I'm not staying here with you," she insisted. "You can't make me. My parents will find you. They will. And they'll take me home. Let me go." It was a bluff, of course. Her parents hadn't cared. Hadn't done any such thing. Pause, and she reeled back and fought like a thing possessed, no more finesse, just claws wherever she could get them, the unthinking kick, scream fight of a child. "I'll kill you one day. I will. I'll kill you one day." And maybe there were tears in the angry words, a sad resignation, even as the fight continued, flailing and little more. She hissed, the pain in her side cutting through the new hallucinations, and then she sighed a shuddering sigh. "I want to go home," she added, quieter, almost effortless. "Let me go?" And that was a plea, a small, begging, plea. But there was still madness in it, and the hint that she would still grab that gun and shoot him if she had the opening.
Once his hand closed around her wrist, the Bat slipped into a sort of autopilot of action vs. reaction which required little to no thinking whatsoever. His body knew how to respond to her attacks, and he let it, without allowing the knowledge of who she was to affect his behavior. He twisted back and used his hold to maneuver her arm in the process, the gun narrowly avoiding his face as it whistled through the air, and he met the impact of her back against his chest with a shove forward, his weight against hers. The only reaction he gave to the slam of her boot was a grunt, and then he tasted blood again, more this time, but he did not dwell on it, glossing over each and every one of her efforts to thwart him as though they were nothing. He managed to hook one ankle around hers and pushed with his knee just as the gun fired, and behind the cowl, his expression darkened. His grip on her wrist tightened painfully, grinding bone against bone beneath her skin, keeping her arm held out away from himself as he slowly forced her down to the ground. “Drop it,” he ordered, and beneath him, he could feel her strength waning. It was bittersweet, that knowledge, and he regretted it ever having come to this.
What he was not expecting, admittedly, was her change of tactic. The Bat looked down at her in surprise, as this sort of insistence was not something he ever would have associated with Selina, and it made him wonder who she thought he was. Had she been like the other children here once? Perhaps, and there had been no Batman to save them then, no one who would care, who knew of couples who wanted children and had been tormented needlessly by the Joker because of that simple fact. “I don’t want you to stay with me. Calm down, Selina.” This sort of struggling was much easier to control; it was no skill and all emotion, all anger, something he knew too well. “I will let you go. I just need to help you first, and I will. You have my word,” he told her, and he wasn’t sure why, because nothing he said to her would have any meaning when she didn’t see him for who he truly was. Something about her sigh and the way she begged, that tiny plea, made him inexplicably sad, and he shook his head as his fingers curled around the syringe which held the antidote.
“It’s going to be alright,” he said. “He can’t hurt you anymore.” And then, in one swift movement which allowed no time at all for reaction, the Bat withdrew the syringe and emptied its contents into her arm. He had never been religious at all, not even as a child, yet in that moment he appealed to a power far greater than himself that it would work; that in this, at least, Crane had been telling the truth.
She dropped the gun. Not because he demanded it, but because she could tell she was weakening to the point where it could be used against her. It was her entire reason for choosing the whip all those years ago, when she'd run away from Bone and refused to be anyone's victim ever again. A gun, a knife, anyone could use those. But a whip? Even if someone took it from her, they wouldn't be able to turn it against her. But a gun, that was a different story entirely. Despite his weight above her, and despite her little ability to maneuver, she dropped the gun, and she slammed it with her claws against the floor in the same movement. It snapped three of the retractable claws off her glove entirely, and she'd be feeling it in her arm come morning, but the gun was out of the picture, a non-concern.
His promise fell on deaf ears, because any promises made back then, back where she was mentally, were just empty words or, worse, tricks to get compliance with a hundred terrible things. No, she didn't believe him, even if something wanted to respond to his voice. It was a constant battle, the no, the yes, and she wanted to give up in a way the drug in her system would not allow. Exhaustion, injury, the medication in her blood laughed at all of that, and she was helpless to give into either. It took effort, but she managed a good elbow to his stomach just as he jabbed her arm with the needle, and the sharp sting of the temporary antidote coursing through her veins made her scream. Whatever Crane's solution was, it certainly wasn't painless, and the burning made her shove to get away from him, a mad frenzy of agony that just wanted to curl up in a ball and make everything stop. It was obvious from her posture that she wasn't trying to flee, wasn't trying to fight; she only wanted to curl inward on herself, a ball of blood-slick black and nonsensical sounds of anguish that were ill-suited to her.
Behind him, someone approached on tiny and quiet feet. A second later, a lamp came down against the back of his cowl without enough force to hurt any adult. A little girl stood there, the bravest of a group of children that were collected behind her. The adults, it seemed, had all fled when faced with the possibility of encountering the Bat. But the children didn't know enough to hide, had been in that hell too long to even know who he was. "Stop hurting her!" the girl ordered, and a good dozen children lurked behind her, looking back at him with haunted eyes.
Even with the gun removed from the scenario, the Bat’s relief was short-lived. He had no intention of using it, of course, and he was confident in his ability to prevent her from using it against him; thus, the only direct result was that the near-painful hold on her wrist loosened once she’d slammed the weapon to the ground. He did not expect his words to have any effect, and once the syringe was empty, the entirety of his focus was on her, on what would happen next. The elbow to his stomach caught him off guard, but it was her scream which truly rattled him, translating into a very physical flinch which acted in direct opposition to his usual facade of cool, impenetrable stone. Very few things had ever managed to reach beneath the surface, and he was more man than dark shadow as he watched her,bent in a half-crouch, concern etched visibly into his expression beneath the cowl.
“Selina?” He cursed himself for not analyzing the antidote beforehand, for putting his trust in a madman, and anger joined his spiking sense of alarm. Perhaps this was what was supposed to happen, and it was working, but how was he to know? Was Crane foolish enough to lie to him, or was the pain merely a precursor to the antidote itself, one which the doctor had added as a sort of private joke? The Bat had no answers, and he hated the feeling of helplessness that engulfed him as he hung back, unable to stop her anguished cries. There was nothing he could do, only hope that the antidote began to kick in sooner rather than later.
Normally, he would have heard the child’s approach, but in his distraction he heard nothing, and he wasn’t even aware that he and Selina were no longer alone until the lamp made contact with his cowl. To the Bat, it was barely enough to daze him, and he spun in his crouch to face his attacker, his eyes widening just a fraction when he saw the lamp had been wielded by a little girl. He’d assumed the children would be too frightened to venture from below, but as he looked beyond the girl he saw that had most certainly not been the case. Their presence reminded him that, while he needed to get Selina out and to safety, he could not leave the children behind. It was obvious from the way they watched him, however, and the girl’s order that he ‘stop hurting her’, that they didn’t recognize him, which meant that he would have to earn their trust first. “I’m trying to help her,” he told the child gravely, showing her his gloved hands in order to reassure her. “She’s very sick, and hurt as well.” He tilted his head to the side and rolled his shoulders back, to relieve some of the tension, the movement causing a slight ripple in the cape which hung over and along his back to trail on the floor. “Is this all of you, or are there more?”
Selina heard nothing through the excruciating pain, not his use of her name, not the child with the lamp, nothing. And then it began to subside, the agony, and her screams turned into moans, and those moans turned into whimpers. By the time the pain was manageable, he was talking to the little girl, and she rolled herself into a seated position with a hiss and a hand to her side. She took in the surroundings with a sort of calm that said she recognized them, recognized him. "Have to get out of here," she said, still finding a voice gone hoarse and hard to make work. "They'll come back armed," she said of the Ivgene Clan, the mafia that ran this particular brothel. "Renald," she added, the name of the man who was in control of all of it. "He'll send people." It was a battle to get that much out, and it wasn't the pain or the bleeding from her side. The temporary antidote worked, but it still left her feeling weakened and out-of-sorts, and she shook her head, as if that would help clear it.
It didn't, of course, because the feeling of confusion had nothing to do with her mind, and everything to do with the amount of blood she'd lost. A few seconds later, though, she was steady enough to stand, even as the little girl replied, more willing to give a straight answer that didn't involve lamps now that no one was fighting anymore. "Some are hiding," she said, and Selina leaned against the wall for balance as she nodded toward the hallway. "Usually about twenty in this place," she offered, which meant there were at least eight kids missing. She knew Bruce well enough to know he'd want to get them out and, for once, she agreed with him. She didn't realize the antidote was temporary, and the bullet wound was only a threat because of the blood loss, not because it had hit any major organs. "Go. I'll wait," she offered, because the less she moved the better, and she was already looking down at the sticky slickness of her suit and wondering how she was ever going to get the antihero to let her come through the door again after this.
A second glance revealed the man on the bed, fat and naked and certainly not breathing, and she groaned and pressed her head back to the wall and closed dim green eyes. She didn't remember exactly what she'd done; she didn't want to. "The kids at the camp?" she asked, and there was dread in her voice, worry, concern. "Damian?"
The noises from behind him all blended together, screams and moans and whimpers that made panic spark beneath the surface, coming dangerously close to the line that separated all else from fear, a line which was not often crossed. While the Bat’s attention had been on the little girl, the sound of her rolling onto her side and the accompanying hiss caused him to turn, and by the time she spoke, he stared for a long stretch of silence, too long, before the relief in his gaze disappeared like a candle flame being extinguished and his usual mask of stony emptiness was pulled back up. The antidote had worked. All he had to do now was retrieve the second, permanent dose from Crane, and she would be fine for longer than just a couple of days. “I know,” he said grimly. He did not fear whoever would come, of course, but Selina and the children had to be gone before that happened. When the little girl replied, his head swiveled back in her direction, and he nodded silently as he counted the children huddled behind her in comparison to the number Selina offered. He could find them and get them all out before Renald’s men came, and he would deal with them on his own later.
He stood, rising from his crouch with ease despite the weight of the armor he wore, and regarded Selina with only a hint of muted concern as she leaned against the wall. The man on the bed had been forgotten, and it was too late now, he knew, to attempt resuscitation. There was a faint, fleeting moment of regret, but he did not dwell on it. “You need to sit,” he told her, aware that she had already lost too much blood, and he hoped Alfred had an IV ready in the cave as part of his preparation. There were minimal first aid materials in a place like this, and the damage had already been done, but the Bat ripped off a section of the sheets nonetheless and, after folding it into a fair-sized square, held it out. “Keep this against your side as well. You’ve already lost blood, you don’t need to lose any more.” He turned to the little girl, to the group of children gathered behind her, and his expression softened ever so slightly. “Stay here, all of you. Once I find the others, you will never have to return to this place again.” For if there was one thing the Bat treated with the utmost importance, it was his word.
For a moment, it didn’t seem as though he would respond, but he stopped in the doorway, half in shadow, and glanced back. “Damian is fine,” he said. “Some of the children are fine. Others are recovering. A few did not make it.” The words were blunt, clipped, and anyone who didn’t know Batman would think he simply didn’t care, when the exact opposite was true. “More would have died had it not been for you and Damian.” With that, the Bat disappeared into the hallway, and set about finding the other children. With his technology, it was not difficult, and what took the most time was not locating them, but coaxing them out from their hiding spots.
Even exhausted, even aching, she noticed that long stare. It reminded her of her Bat, of the intense look he would get on his face when things went really wrong, when he was worried and concerned, and she hadn't seen that look in so long that she almost laughed. So that's what it took to get his attention? The kitty cat should have known. The quick shuttering of emotions didn't surprise her at all. He might not think he was anything like the other Bats, hers, Damian's, Jason's, even Ivy's, but he was, and that shut off of emotion was even more familiar than the long stare. She knew what he was thinking when he looked back at the little girl. "The warehouse I stole from you is closest," she offered and maybe that was a coincidence, maybe it wasn't. Either way, it was a safe place for the children that didn't involve much travel, and she had already minimally stocked it with supplies and security. "She's old enough to help keep an eye on the others," she said of the little girl, who had obviously done something to get his attention, and she suspected it had something to do with the broken lamp on the floor, which was impressive indeed.
She watched him move, and he seemed so much larger than he normally did, which she wasn't about to say. She didn't shrink back from it, though, from all that tall, black menace, and she figured this was a sign the antidote was finishing its work. It never occurred to her there was another dose, that this was only temporary. "Since when I am domesticated, Bat? I don't sit on command," she quipped, intentionally trying to slip her bravado back into place. It was harder than normal, sliding that wall back up after everything she'd just seen, and she finally looked him over for any damage then. "How bad did I get you?" she asked as he neared her with the torn bedsheet, because she could already tell he was going to have one hell of a bruise to his chin. She moved to crouch, to get off her feet, but it made her side scream, and she stayed where she was, letting the wall support her weight. "Hope you're good with a needle," she said, because there was no way her hand was going to be steady enough to stitch herself up, and she suspected going through the door and letting Blondie handle it would be bad news.
His revelation about the children eclipsed everything, even if the emotion only flickered on her face for a second before her features hardened. Crane was done. She didn't say it, but she thought it. Done, just like the man on the bed. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but he'd made the odds too impossible, made the targets too vulnerable, made it so they couldn't do anything but fail, and that pissed the kitty cat off. And Damian, she knew, wasn't fine. There was no way Damian was fine if some of the children died. "You better keep a close eye on him. He'll blame himself," she said as he disappeared into the hall, not bothering with Damian's name; Bruce would know who she meant.