Who: Helena and Selina What: A hospital conversation Where: Hospital room When: Current, after an in-progress log with Damian and Bruce Warnings/Rating: Weirdness.
All of her memories of the past week, since the morning after the party were hazy, distant, even now. A lot of them were tempered by the memory of pain, by the feeling like her head was about to split apart and birth Athena, but no Goddess had come blooming out of her brain box, whole and ready for war. No, what she had gotten was a power drill and a small cut to her scalp, a tube fed in through the hemispheres of her brain to suction out the fluid that was pressing on her brain. It was an odd feeling, not painful, but she could feel her parts shifting around it without any sensation of actual pain. It was definitely a step up from the headache that she'd had since waking up in the hospital after the party. One hand lifted to touch the stitches that were yep, still there, small and perfectly even under her fingertips.
Definitely had to have been a plastic surgeon. Helena wasn't sure how she felt about it and in truth it seemed like one of those things that wasn't worth worrying about. With the pain of her headache gone, more of what had happened that night had filtered back in. Kitane with the -- with Crane. She remembered that. She remembered saying it had been her, too. Let Crane come after her, she had a score to settle with the Crow and she wasn't going to let him anywhere near Kitane.
But then there was what the hotel had showed her about herself that she was doing her best to ignore. A small, tiny really, microscopic part wanted to smack her head against the wall again every time she thought about it, as if she could simply beat it out. It didn't work that way, Helena knew that, but it was easier than the crushing sense of loss that threatened to steal her very breath away and pulverize her beating heart. Easier this way and it was going to have to be this way until she could get out Gotham and deal with it on her own.
Until then, it was here. Neurosurgery ICU. The nurse (Jackie this shift) and her tech ('Call me Mike'). Mike had two patients, he told her, but Jackie had only her with her one hour neuro checks and tube draining out her cerebrospinal fluid. She'd had Jackie a few days ago and liked the woman who always had warm hands. Her own fingers worked at the weave of the blanket, rooting up the strands until they threatened to snap before she smoothed it back down again with a brush brush of hurried fingers.
Selina had been listening. She hadn't liked how disoriented the kitten sounded when she'd talked to her on the journals, and she hadn't heard back from Damian after asking him to check on her. So, just like she'd done for the past seven years, she listened. It had become a habit early on, when she realized that her new-old Batfamily didn't know her and didn't want to know her, listening. The kitty cat had gotten very, very good at it, and it had only led her astray once - when Damian died, and when Bruce covered it up so very well by refusing to admit, even to himself, that it had happened. But she'd learned to listen, and it was that skill that led her to the upscale Gotham hospital where Helena was receiving treatment. Oh, the kitty cat didn't actually ask for Helena Wayne, because she knew how Bruce could be about privacy. No, the kitty cat had other ways to find what she was looking for.
The woman who entered Helena's hospital room was no Cat in tight black and a whip, and she was no girl just turned twenty and pretending to be much, much older. Gone were the shirts that showed too much skin, gone was the spiky hair, gone were the faux tattoos and the cat's eye makeup that was too dark and too bold. In the place of all those things was a pair of slim, designer jeans and a black, thigh-length jacket, cinched at her narrow waist. Her long hair was loose, and her mossy green eyes were only minimally lined. No, Selina wasn't the kitten of her youth, but she was still all Cat, sway and confidence and a visitor's pass clipped to her jacket that really shouldn't have been there. The tall heels of her black boots clicked on the hospital floor as she approached the bed, and the expression on her face was a very carefully cultivated blank.
The girl on the hospital bed looked smaller than Selina had remembered, but she hadn't actually gotten close to her version of Huntress. She'd watched from afar as the girl mourned her brother, finally, once Bruce had accepted reality, and the girl in purple had seemed much older then, more capable with her little superfriend at her side. But maybe hospital beds made everyone seem fragile. Maybe aging seven years while everyone you cared for remained a child made everyone seem fragile too.
Selina stopped at the side of the bed, and she looked down. Bruce hadn't recognized her; she didn't expect Helena - bound up in tubing as she was - to recognize her either. The smile she gave her was casual. "How are you feeling?" she asked, assuming doctors and nurses asked that question all day long. Maybe she should have stolen a white labcoat on the way up.
Maybe this Cat was unknown to Bruce, but it was the younger versions that were more foreign to Helena. The spiky hair that Selina had worn once was familiar enough as her mom had gone with short hair in later years, but she looked more like this Cat that came sauntering into her room, still all hips and clothes that most people couldn't afford. And this particular Cat was very familiar, not from Hels actually laying eyes on her, but from newspapers that carried stories of her exploits.
She looked a lot different than the Cat that Helena had come to know. Was she really seeing what she should be seeing? Helena blinked at her, wondering. As far as she knew, she hadn't had any visual hallucinations since she bounced her skull off her sink, but her memory, her memory was something else. Her fingers stilled on the blanket as she simply watched, brain working furiously to connect the dots that seemed to be moving in ways that meant she couldn't.
"Like I have a tube in my brain," Helena said bluntly, as if she was answering her doctors. It was usually followed by an assessment on her pain and a neurocheck, but she didn't give Selina any of that information (her pain was fine anyway and as soon as she determined what was going on with the other woman, she'd know how her check was going). "Are you really older than I remember?" There was a question she never posed to her doctors, or to Damian, or Bruce, and it was all for this Cat and posed in a way that seemed to carry a plea for the truth.
Selina grinned, slow and feline, and she propped a hip on the edge of the bed. She sat close enough to indicate she was staying for a little while, but with enough stiffness to her shoulders to indicate that she didn't intend to get cozy. "Your father didn't recognize me. Even with a tube in your brain, you're more perceptive," she said. She sounded older, more confident, the inflection in her voice softer, as if she wasn't try so very hard. "Something happened a few months ago. I went back to my Gotham for seven years," she admitted, because there was hardly any point in lying about it now. She'd managed to avoid everyone for months, but she was sitting there, and the chances of this not carrying were slim to none. And the kitty cat knew better than to waste energy fighting losing battles; she fought the battles she could win.
"Do you feel like telling me what happened, or are you tired of telling that story?" Selina asked casually. There wasn't any demand in the question, no pressure. She could make her own assessments of Helena's condition without the explanation, and it would be easy enough to get a look at the kitten's chart if she wanted to. No, she just wanted to hear the girl on the bed talk. And it was strange, being in any kind of position to even be sitting there. Back home, security would have been called the second she walked into this room, and it would have been called by the kitten on the bed herself. Instinctively, Selina glanced around the room for an exit that didn't involve the door. It took less than a minute to visually assess the locks on the window, the drop, and the building across the way. She looked back at the girl on the bed.
"He's used to a younger you," Helena pointed out. The younger Cat who bristled like a porcupine whenever the wind ruffled her fur and who could never resist telling the world who she was and wasn't. This Cat was different and with the assurance that her thoughts weren't entirely failing her, Helena began slowly relaxing back into the bed, less tension in her shoulders and less lines around her eyes. Once they were gone, there was only something akin to sadness. To go home -- back to the Gotham that was hers -- she would have given anything for that.
It was one of those things that hurt to think about, her gaze dropping, fingertips digging into the weave of the blanket. To go home. But her best chance of that was gone with her Kara, who could build a thing like the quantum tunneler to get them back home. For all that Hels had, for all her training and education that came on the wings of bats and the claws of a cat, she didn't have the knowledge that it took to build such a thing. "Seven years," she echoed, hollow space in her chest.
Then came the question that everyone wanted to know the answer to. What happened? It was all in her chart, but she didn't know that the doctors had asked Bruce the question after last time (Is it possible this could have been self inflicted? The EMTs said that where it appeared her head impacted the sink wasn't possible if she had fallen). What she did know was that if she didn't pull this off convincingly enough, it was only going to lead to more questions that she didn't want to answer, not while she was on this hospital bed and not when she was at home, wrapped up in her own blankets and within the safety of her own space. "You mean why am I here with a tube in my brain?" She asked, finally looking up with a wry smile. "Complications of a concussion." Shifting on the bed, she held Selina's gaze like she didn't have a damn thing to hide. Later she might feel guilty about lying to Selina when she had promised she never would, but not right now. She couldn't. Not now. There were some things her family here didn't need to know about.
"He's used to a different me," Selina replied, because that was just the truth. She could still be brash, and she could still be wild, but only when it suited her these days. It wasn't her default. Well, in truth, it never had been, but she'd been very, very good at making it seem like it was. The hotel hadn't told her anything she didn't already know, when it tried to teach her lessons about layers of false, created girl.
"It wasn't anything good, kitten," Selina said of returning home, when that sadness seeped into Helena's gaze. She knew the opinions on returning home would be split here. She suspected some people would love to return home, while others would hate it. She'd always thought returning home would be wonderful. To go back to her Bat, to her Gotham. But things changed, without her even noticing it. "I wanted to go back home as much as anyone," she told the girl on the bed. "I got there, and it wasn't home anymore." There wasn't any other way to explain. Had she stayed in that Gotham, it would have been different. But coming here, being here, it had changed the woman she was. It had made it so she didn't fit in that other kitty cat's fur. "I saw you there. You've changed too, Helena. You're not that girl in purple anymore." She said it softly, a quiet purr that was truth, and she still wasn't afraid of saying things like they were. It had always been a problem with her and the kitten on the bed, but she couldn't be someone other than who she was; she'd already tried that seven years ago.
When Helena explained why she was there, Selina met that wry gaze. She had no reason to distrust the girl on the bed, but Helena's behavior had been erratic, even before this injury, and the kitty cat had a very, very good memory. But she didn't push; she'd mention it to Bruce. And if it was an excuse to finally talk to him? Well, maybe she'd just needed a very, very good one. "How long are they keeping you?"
Helena wanted to tell her that she wasn't that girl in purple now. She was something else, something she didn't want to think about, but it led her here to this hospital bed where she'd had her skull drilled open and left everyone else tiptoeing around her. Except for Selina, who had never tiptoed around her, never held back for any reason that Helena could see.
"Of course not," she said. Maybe it wasn't the same, maybe Selina wasn't the same, but Helena knew she was changing in ways she didn't want to. Maybe it was the toxin, maybe it was this whole city that looked and felt like her Gotham but wasn't. Maybe it was too much loss wrapped up in Tim and Kara and Morgan. She didn't know and right now wasn't the time to look at it. Hels knew better than to think that it was just going to disappear, but she wasn't going to investigate it with Selina's hip cocked up against her bed. They already thought she couldn't handle herself, the last conversation that she'd had face to face with this Selina in her bedroom had been evidence of that. Better to maintain the status quo, smile like a good little marionette, a toy girl in lieu of a real one, a facsimile of a life, grit and dirt and splotches only seen when one looked close enough.
"I have to wait twenty four hours after they remove the tube to leave," she said, offered up with a smile. "I've got a day or two before that happens." Two, maybe three days and then she could fly the nest and fly she would, as fast and as far as she could go. Tokyo maybe. Or Hong Kong. Bangkok. Somewhere on the other side of the world where she could put this place behind her like a bad memory because no matter what anyone thought, this Gotham wasn't in her blood.
Selina knew she wasn't made for mothering. She had no idea how she'd done it in the world Helena came from, and she knew broken little birds well enough to know when she was sitting on the edge of one's bed. She thought, perhaps, that some other version of Bruce and herself had done a very, very bad job teaching Helena how to survive, but that was all supposition, because the dark haired girl with Bruce's eyes wasn't giving her anything at all to go on. It was all instinct, and the kitty cat was very good at instinct, but it wasn't anything she could go meowing about with any certainty. What was she going to say that anyone would believe? Nothing. She didn't know the girl on the bed, not any more than she knew any of the people here, in this Gotham. She'd known her once, but they'd both been kittens then, and Selina had never understood her.
And the kitty cat was still awkward with affection; that hadn't changed. She considered squeezing the girl's hand, but it was too far to reach, and she just gave Helena a look that said she knew better than to believe what Helena was telling her.
Four days, and Selina hoped that was long enough for Helena to tell someone what had happened. She was starting to think that even stealing the kitten's file wouldn't tell her the real story. But Bruce had always been this girl's father, and she'd never been her mother, and she didn't know how to bridge that gap. Her survival instinct told her that she didn't want to, that she didn't need to.
"Are you going to stay with your father once they send you home, or is the kitten still planning on traveling?" Selina asked.
That look told her exactly how she was doing. She was going to have to do better if she wanted to pull this off with Bruce, who hadn't gotten the nickname of Detective by ignoring anything. Time to throw some color on the pages, mask the cracks in her facade. "I wasn't planning on staying. I've been at the Manor for a week now, not doing anything. I need to get out again."
That much was at least true. Helena had her own project to work on, something she needed to do for this world before anything else happened. No one needed to know about it until it was complete and ready -- it wasn't anyone else's business until then. "And get a new phone," she said, smiling a little like it was so silly that she'd thrown it into the toilet to begin with. It had made sense at the time, like ramming her head into the bottom curve of a sink until the world had gone sweetly silent.
"Do things," she said with a little shrug and a vague motion of her hands. If she noticed anything about Selina not touching her, she didn't mention it and she surely didn't gesture the other woman closer for a hug like she'd done so often before. A very touchy bird was no longer quite as touchy, but maybe that was simply because she'd had too many hands on her in recent days. Nurses, doctors, techs, too many people hemming her into this bed with questions they asked and her family with all the questions they didn't ask. "Any big plans, Kitty?"
Selina understood needing to get out. She'd never done well with walls, and she always felt the need to roam, but she loved Gotham. The kitty cat was perfectly happy to roam within the city limits, and it was only JLA assignments that sent her afield these days. The past seven years had become habit to the kitty cat, and she was still in the process of determining her habits here, back in this strange place that smelled like Gotham, and that felt like Gotham, but that was just this shy of being her Gotham. But she knew the kitten wasn't talking about wandering within Gotham, and the kitty cat felt that same old annoyance at the dysfunction of this particular family of bats.
But Selina held her tongue, because lecturing on that subject hadn't gotten her anywhere. And, she reminded herself, she didn't care.
As for that silly sweet smile the kitten fixed on her, Selina wasn't buying it, and she gave her a perfect mirror in return, which she knew the kitten would recognize as being just as false. But Helena was old enough to make her own decisions. When she, herself, had been the age of the young woman in the bed, Selina had felt like it was her job to be a mother. She'd tried too hard, and she'd made so many mistakes. Now? Now she knew she wasn't going to be able to mother a girl as stubborn as this one. Bruce might manage it, but she couldn't. She would consider it a win if no one yelled before this visit was over.
"No big plans," Selina said easily, casual smile and absolutely nothing truthful in the response. "You know me."
Even with a tube in her brain, Helena could tell that smile was as false as her own. Momma cat wasn't buying it, which meant that Bruce wouldn't and if they managed to talk before Helena saw Bruce again? He'd only be more suspicious. She closed her eyes against the sticky, sweet false smile, the lies that dripped like honey from the Cat's mouth. She couldn't really call her out on that now, could she? Not with her own guilty conscience about just how far she was trying to pull the wool over her family's eyes. Her fingers worked furiously at the blanket.
"I know you," she murmured. However much this Cat might deny it, she always had an end game. The steps, the pitter patter of paws that it took to get there might change half a dozen times, but there was always a goal, no matter how small or slight it might seem. Her fingers stilled and grey eyes opened again.
The next smile was at least a bit more honest, but it didn't quite touch stone-walled eyes that refused to give up an inch of what might be going on behind them. "I'm glad you came, Selina. I was starting to miss your meow."
Selina heard that sleepy murmur, though she didn't know how much of it was true. She wasn't sure anyone here knew her now. Eddie came the closest, but even that wasn't like it had been before. It had all been easier when she was young, and everything had seemed much, much less important then. Even the injured kitten on the bed would have been discounted as something that could be righted in the long run. These days, the kitty cat wasn't as sure about fixing broken little bats and birds. Damian dying had given everything in Gotham a sense of finality. No pits, no bringing back little ten year olds that died at the hands of their mothers.
"Call me, anytime, if you want to hear me meow, kitten," she said, taking the dismissal for what it was.
The kitty cat stood, hands in the black leather of her coat, and she looked down at the girl on the bed. Seven years away, and she'd remembered everything about this Gotham like it was perfect. She'd painted it bright green and happy, and she realized she'd been lying to herself. It didn't make her want to go back to her Gotham, but at least things fit into place there. Whatever she meowed at the kitten, however sure she managed to sound, she wasn't sure at all. She wasn't even sure whether she should contact Bruce. She'd never doubted herself in the past. She hated that she was doing it now. And that self-hatred, it actually helped her make her decision. Enough pussyfooting around Gotham. She hated pussyfooting - unless there was a very nice jewelry store in the mix.
"Get some rest." And with that, Selina was gone, a click of heels announcing her departure for a few feet outside the door, before disappearing entirely.
Helena watched her go, all sway and swagger without so much as a hug or her head in Selina's lap. That would have been a bit more difficult considering that she had to keep said head at a certain angle so the fluid would drain off properly. There was no calling her back, no goodbye's, only the twitch of her fingers as she went back to popping threads on the blanket. Selina would say something, it was only a matter of time, if it would be now or some day in the future when Helena had already flown as far as her wings could take her.