Re: Selina K/Jason T
[...] Dunno what your family was like growing up, Cat. Mine wasn't much good. Dad was a hired gun, and mom was a junkie mess. He managed to get himself killed working his favorite trade, and I got to mom exactly ten minutes too late to keep her from overdosing. So family's not really something I can consider myself an expert in.
I do know hating. Hating so much that death seems like a blessing, and then someone takes that from you too, and then what have you got? Just the hating.
The person who taught me about what family is supposed to be was Bruce Wayne. Bruce's parents loved him. Not that it seems to have done him much good, since he ended up as fucked up as everyone else, but he had a family for a while there. He knows the shape of it, he knows how it runs, what people are supposed to do for each other, and he taught me the ins and outs of that. I knew some of it, back when I stood outside mom's room with a baseball bat, but that's not really what it's about.
A little while after that, I found out that even Bruce Wayne, who I thought knew everything there was to know about building your own family when the one you're born into dies or falls away, he was still missing a piece of what makes families families. I know you're dying to know the secret, so I won't make you ask. Loyalty. Loyalty beyond death. Loyalty beyond creed or code or petty disagreement. Loyalty beyond belonging, or membership.
I'm not a Bat. I'm not in the 'Bat Family'. I wasn't in that family the second that Bruce made the decision to put code before one of the people he'd named as his child. After that, I knew that Bruce Wayne would always put himself and his own anguish over love, always put mission before affection, at least when it came to me. That meant I wasn't in his family, not really. He stopped being the father he made himself to me by signing his name on a sheet of paper, because that's all it was. It was a piece of paper. It was words, nothing more than that.
Helena's supposed to be your daughter, or so I've been told. And anybody with eyes knows you care about Bruce, and you care about Damian even when he's a little shit. Maybe nothing I can say will change how you feel. But belonging has nothing to do with whose 'world' your in, or where you stand. Because, unfortunately, I may not be in Bruce's little family anymore, but he's still in mine. Even though I wish I could find some dark, deep place to lock him in and torture him for everything he put me through, I don't.
People kick you out of their families. They do it with what they say or with the choices they make, but so long as you don't ever stop feeling like they're yours, they still belong to you, even if you don't belong with them.
So if you don't want your kitten to stay in your life, or Bruce, or Damian, or any of the rest of them, then you cut them out and make yourself an orphan, which you've got every right to do. And if you give them up without so much as a fight when you do still want them around, then you already have. Then it's you who's decided you don't belong, not them.
Of course, we haven't addressed the possibility that they don't reconcile with you, or correct their mistake. In which case, you're on my end, and you're equally as fucked as me.