Wren and Selina have claws (laminette) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-04-16 00:16:00 |
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Entry tags: | catwoman |
Who: Wren
What: Narrative
Where: A pharmacy, mostly
When: After this
Warnings/Rating: Some unpleasant imagery
Whether it was good timing or bad timing, well, that was impossible to know.
Wren had gone back to Caesar’s that morning (after a brief stop in Gotham for Selina) and the state of the suite left her exhausted. She didn’t even touch anything, and it made her tired. She knew the place was clear of any lingering gas, since Luke had checked, and she had cleaning staff coming in ten minutes, but looking at the mess still made her want to crawl under a blanket and never come back out. She wasn’t that little girl anymore, though, and she knew bad things wouldn’t disappear just because she wanted them to. The girl she had been would have left the suite, would have moved somewhere else, but she’d worked too hard for what she had. She didn’t run anymore. So she waited for the cleaning staff, fingers rubbing at her sore temple, and she made an appointment with a discreet doctor in Las Vegas.
Ten minutes later, the cleaning staff was hard at work, and she was in a car and en route to a medical visit that was going to involve a very pretty lie about losing her balance and falling into a pool. Okay, maybe, not a lie exactly, but she was too private for confessions, and the doctor didn’t need to know more than that. She would have avoided the visit altogether, but she knew the water that rattled her lungs needed medicine to clear up, and she couldn’t afford to get sick. She was already fighting her way back from weak, and wielding a crop was going to be hard enough without anything else sapping her energy.
The doctor droned, and all she thought about as he listened to her lungs was that she should be dead. Luke said she’d stopped breathing, and she knew from his reaction in the facility that he wasn’t exaggerating about that. She’d only let herself think on it a little while he was with her, because he was already falling apart, and she’d wanted to distract him from it. But she should be dead. She had been dead. And if she did die, what then?
The doctor ordered an MRI, just to be safe, he said. The whir of the machine did nothing to stop her from pondering her earlier question. If she was dead, what then? Roger knew about Gus, but she didn’t know his name, where he lived, what had happened. Roger didn’t even know if the baby had lived; he’d never asked. Iris knew something, but she didn’t know Luke (or at least Wren thought she didn’t know Luke), and Iris didn’t strike her as the kind of woman to rock the boat, not when she didn’t know if Gus had been given up for adoption willingly. And Silver, Silver probably had more pieces of the puzzle than anyone, but his mind worked in strangely legal ways, and Wren knew he saw a custody issue there, nothing more. And so, what would happen if she died? The secret would go to the grave with her, and she realized that wasn’t what she wanted. It wasn’t even because she hated Gus’ “adoptive” parents, not just then, but because she knew that Luke (and Gus, eventually) had a right to know - and that meant that somewhere, somehow she’d always meant to confess, even if she hadn’t planned on it.
She took the prescriptions from the doctor, after nodding agreeably at his edict that she rest for the following week, and she had the car take her to the local pharmacy. Normally, she would have Alice take care of these things for her, but she didn’t want to go back to the chaos of the cleaning staff.
The pharmacy was small and crowded, and the pharmacist told her the wait would be thirty minutes. There was a coffee shop across the way, and tea sounded wonderful just then, and Wren wound her way through the aisles, but she never made it to the exit door.
She hadn’t seen Amy Johnson up close in years. The woman was old, possibly too old to be anyone’s maman, and Wren had hated her on sight all those years ago. But here Amy was, dressed in a conservative shirt and blouse, talking to the woman at the front counter about Sunday’s church service. Wren settled sunglasses more securely on her face, not wanting to be recognized, and she would have ducked out if she hadn’t noticed the movement at the woman’s hip.
She hadn’t seen Gus since the incident with Iris, and it was the longest she’d gone without seeing him since she’d found the Johnsons after two long years of searching. He smiled at her, that tiny smile that was so reminiscent of his father, and Wren was frozen in place. His mouthed “Monkey?” was supposed to be silent - she could tell - but it ended up being a loud whisper, in the way of small children that didn’t know how to modulate their volume yet. She started to nod, because whatever her ongoing issues with Iris, she couldn’t deny him the one tiny thing she could give him. But she was cut short by a swift movement from the woman he was standing beside.
Amy Johnson obviously didn’t like children talking when they’d been told to remain silent, and her hand swung down to grab Gus’ wrist so quickly that Wren didn’t even see it coming. The other grasp on the little boy’s wrist was tight, and Amy yanked his arm up sharply to get him to look at her. Wren knew Amy was saying something, and she could almost make out the words, but they were completely eclipsed by the line of finger marks she could see on the little boy’s forearm, now that his shirt sleeve had nudged up. They were fresh bruises, she knew, because Wren knew bruises. She took a step forward, but then Steven rounded the corner and she knew she couldn’t win that fight, not right then, not there. If she tried, she’d only find an empty house when she tried to go back for round two. No, she forced herself to duck back and watch them leave.
She gripped her fists so tight that her nails dug crescents into her palm, and blood dripped onto the white, antiseptic floor of the pharmacy; she didn’t even notice.