Who: Damian, Selina and eventually Tony Where: The remains of Stark Tower When: Sometime this week What: Damian and Selina go for the LazPit sample. Warnings: A leetle violence.
Despite the grogginess of the antidote that the Bat had administered those days ago in the Batcave, Selina noticed things.
The kitty cat noticed the Bat’s reaction to Iron Man’s appearance there, in the Batcave. She knew that was Blondie’s doing, but it didn’t make her any happier about it. The kitty cat noticed the sample Iron Man took of the Lazarus Pit. She didn’t know about the science or the magic behind the Pit, but taking it had to mean Iron Man would be able to create his own, right? The kitty cat couldn’t allow that to happen, not somewhere out of Gotham, and not when she’d been responsible for helping creating the existing one. And, lastly, she noticed the teeny, tiny bug Iron Man left behind to spy on the Bat. Bad, bad Iron Man.
Inviting Damian to the Marvel door was risky. Selina was pretty sure he was grounded, despite what he said. She knew it would get her trouble with the Bat, which fell into the pros column. And she knew that whatever else there might be in Marvel, there wouldn’t be Talons, and she wanted a chance to talk Damian out of moving wherever he intended to move. He belonged in Wayne Manor, and that was that. Consider this a preemptive strike before telling daddy.
Selina had been working to control Blondie for days, since her agreement with Ivy, and she’d learned it was much, much easier for the Cat to get her claws in the blonde if she did it right when the door was crossed. Getting to the Marvel door, that would be a test run, as was bringing Blondie’s Marvel key along for the ride.
Selina stepped through the door into Marvel New York with little difficulty, shiny black and her goggles atop her head. Jackpot, thought the kitty cat, and she did like the thrill of a brand new city to prowl. But she didn’t go hunting for mice and shiny things just yet. One booted foot propped the door open for the baby bird, and she used the technology she’d “borrowed” from the Batcave to figure out where, oh, where Iron Man’s little bug was whispering to. GPS did the rest, and the kitty cat tugged her goggles over her eyes and waited impatiently, ready to stretch her paws. She was deceptively unarmed - just her whip and no thigh holsters to speak of. After all, she liked tormenting the antihero about Blondie’s driver. Killing the man in the Iron Suit would deprive her of that fun.
Damian had wanted to honor his father’s “grounding” in some weird desire to appease the man, but reasoned that trouble in another door didn’t count. He was good at being quiet when he needed to be and the chances of getting told on from over here had to be slimmer than Gotham. In truth, Damian knew that if he wanted to be a man, he’d have to do things on his own. He already challenged the Talons and built his own Pit, but those were both reflections of his bloodline. So was Selina, in a way. It bothered him that it seemed as though nothing would be uniquely his.
But, here was Damian crouched next to Catwoman as he looked over the city in the Marvel door. It was warmer than Gotham, almost like Metropolis. Everyone here ran around in brightly colored costumes and fought ten different versions of Lex Luthor, didn’t they? It made him feel out of place in his new Talon suit, but in a good way. Like he and Selina were better than any of the heroes over here. “Care to explain what we’re doing here?” Damian asked, standing up slowly as he checked his new utility belt and rolled his shoulders loose.
Selina looked up, taking in the new suit without even a hiss at first. She wasn’t sure this was who the baby bird was, not at the end of the day, but she wasn’t going to be the one to take it from him, not when it was so fresh. She knew it was different for her, for the kitty cat who’d had no one’s shadow to crawl out of, no one’s name to live up to. The Cat came from nowhere, and she was entirely herself, and that could mean anything she wanted it to on any given day. A Robin didn’t have that going for him and, she thought, neither did a Talon.
She’d spent the nights after Arkham tracking down the members of the Court, cataloguing them like pretty jewels she might want to steal one day. Selina’s own research into the Talons had left her concerned in ways the baby bird wouldn’t appreciate. She empathized with them a little too much, but then Selina did always empathize with the misunderstood bad guys. The kitty cat made some exceptions - Crane, the Joker - but she did prowl that line between good and bad, and she had a soft spot for the things that lived just on either side.
The Cat stood a few seconds later, and she wound around him, close and with a sway of hips, refusal to acknowledge personal space as she came around his other side. “Nice colors,” she purred, before turning her attention to the matter at hand. “Iron Man,” she explained, handing over the coordinates to the lab where the bug was transmitting, “has a key to Gotham, a sample of the baby bird’s Pit, and he left this in the Batcave to meow all its little secrets back here.” She uncurled her claws to show him the bug in her palm, and her red lips turned up slowly at the corners.
Damian gave her a blank look to keenly mask whatever he thought about her suddenly lack of personal boundaries. She hadn’t treated him like that before Vegas and he didn’t know if it was a good thing or not. “How did he know about the pit? Or get a key?” He sounded suspicious, very suspicious. The Lazarus Pit or its location wasn’t exactly common knowledge. It would make more sense if this Iron Man tried to venture down into Wonder City for the green goop than the Bat Cave.
He gently picked up the tracking device in Selina’s hand and turned it around between his fingers. “This is extremely advanced technology. Lex Luthor advanced.” Damian held it up and then placed it back into her hand. “If some moron like Luthor got his hands on a pit, both doors would be completely destroyed.”
Selina noted the blank stare, and it made her lips curve even more. The baby bird might think he lived in daddy Bats' shadow, but all that careful distance wasn't Bruce Wayne. The Bat was all emotions shoved down, down. Damian's distance was different. She didn't know enough about the al Ghuls to know if it came from them, but she suspected it was just an amalgam of whatever made Damian Damian. Maybe he'd stay alive long enough to figure it out. At least, she decided, today he would.
"I think Blondie gave him the key. He showed up just after Arkham, in the cave," Selina admitted, a hiss in the words. The kitty cat didn't like anyone in that cave, not any more an Damian did, though her reasons had nothing to do with technology or intel or what Iron Man might do to others with the knowledge. The Cat was selfish, plain and simple, and she didn't like people playing with her shinies. "I think he was supposed to save me," she added, a scoff on those red lips.
There wasn't any hesitation before she unfurled her whip and made it sing, the tipped edges grabbing a ledge on the nearest skyscraper like an extension of her claws. It had been too long since she'd felt the wind against her face in a race across rooftops, since Las Vegas. The kitty cat didn't much want to think about Las Vegas. Instead, she raced toward the location the GPS had indicated, knowing Damian would do his best to keep up - if he could.
Damian clicked his grappling hook, a device that was a touch heavier than Batman’s so that it was more powerful and swung faster. He liked the difference between him and the other parts of Batfamily. He wanted to train himself to be a more physical threat that hit and sliced hard. That was one thing he’d keep from the Talon reputation. He took a leap off the roof, sending the hook flying towards the edge of a building just above her. Swinging through this town was different from Gotham. It lacked that dirty smell, that near sewage stench that could get as high as the rooftops.
He followed a yard or two behind, just enough so that Catwoman thought she was winning. He didn’t want to think about Vegas, either. Instead, he kept his focus on the importance of securing the Lazarus Pit. The truth he’d have to tell about the old one in Wonder City. The danger in this cross door pollination. Eventually, Catwoman came to a stop and he landed next to her. “I’m guessing you have a plan of attack, here?” Damian said sarcastically. Of course she didn’t.
“That baby bird is quiet tonight,” Selina said as she looked over at him The sarcasm was normal, but he wasn’t being chatty, and she wondered what he didn’t want her to know. As for the plan? “Get inside and take back what’s ours?” Selina asked, though the smile on her lips said she wasn’t worried about the simplicity of such a non-plan. Planning ahead wasn’t the kitty cat’s strong point. Before things went crazy, she had Gwen to check things for her, but there was no Gwen Altamont here, and she had gotten used to winging it again. Anyway, the kitty cat was very, very good at getting herself out of trouble. And, too, there was the fact that Iron Man wouldn’t kill them. “He won’t kill us. His other has a thing for Blondie. Come on,” she said, claws extended and ready to cut through whatever class stood between them and their prize. Or, you know, ready to pick any lock. Claws, they were versatile.
The top of Stark Tower was mostly in ruins, the beautiful line that used to be a graceful blade through the sky was now sparse, the turrets of the surrounding area mostly rubble. Tony had gone to no effort to repair the damage, and Pepper Potts’ efforts started from the bottom up, focusing on the more habitable areas to stabilize and then moving upward. The billionaire had been focusing his time on a new lair hidden under the Bay, but it wasn’t anywhere near ready yet, and because he wasn’t in fit shape to handle the suit longer than twenty minutes at a time, it made secret construction incredibly slow.
The elegant little device Tony had left in the Batcave had many purposes. He was counting on Batman finding it eventually, and when he did, Tony wanted him to be impressed. He also wanted to know the second he followed it back to its source, so when the signal was abruptly strong and in range of its source--the remains of the lab levels in the upper part of the damaged Tower--security systems lit up. Tony would have been pleased to know that Batman was coming to see him (this being the assumption of the plan), but he was currently flavoring some of his painkillers with whiskey so he could get more done in the lab and use the suit just a few minutes longer for the heavier lifting. Unsurprisingly, Silver disapproved, but as usual, the man hadn’ been able to argue the necessity.
The end result of this combined set of circumstances was a moderately wasted Tony pausing in his lab work and noting the approach of his listening device only in a peripheral sense. He was up to his ears in chemistry, and he didn’t even glance at the download. Batman was welcome into the ruins of this lab; there wasn’t much to see, and relatively minimal security. That didn’t mean Tony was going to go out of his way to deactivate it; Batman could get in on his own time. Most people shouldn’t have been able to get as high as the top of that tower without being able to fly, but scaling it wasn’t exactly impossible. As soon as they stepped onto the roof and under the caution tape that circled the entire ruined upper deck, an insufferably polite British voice announced, “Unauthorized entry. Please state your name and purpose in Stark Tower.”
“Baby bird is trying to focus. The kitty cat makes that very difficult.” Damian said with a scoff, moving towards the rooftop before the voice stopped him. He didn’t respond and instead just looked for a console or camera he could punch out. If this guy was like Lex, he’d be just proud enough to show a piece of his security technology without giving the entire surprise away. “This place is trashed.” He said loudly, with no regard to the voice asking for his identity. Damian was likely the worst person to go snooping with due to a heavy lack of patience, but he did like beating stuff up. He liked that a lot.
“The baby bird didn’t used to think the kitty cat made focusing difficult,” Selina said, a well-aimed poke with verbal claws, and she passed him on the rooftop a second later. She let him go prowling, knowing he wasn’t any kind of thief. If she was looking for a clandestine little visit with Iron Man’s toys, then she would have come alone, after all. “I bet Loki got to it,” she said of the state of Stark Tower, because the week in Las Vegas had made it very clear that Loki was like the Joker in his desire to create massive chaos. It didn’t make her feel any better about this not-Metropolis.
When the insufferably polite British voice spoke, she arched a brow behind the goggles and looked over her shoulder at Damian. “Did he steal Alfred?” she asked, though she and Alfred were on the opposite of good terms. “Catwoman. I’m here to claw Tony Stark to little ribbons,” she said, equal amounts of sarcasm and threat in the words. “Does that really work?” she asked the British voice. “Do bad guys just tell you why they’re here?” Then, pleasantries done, she broke into a run, looking for a place in the rubble to drop down, set on getting to the transmission location and anticipating some level of security to be still operational.
How right she was. “I am sorry Catwoman, you are not authorized,” said Jarvis. It was quite possible that Tony had stolen Alfred, because the AI’s voice had a hint of stern scolding to it that was not the neutral mark of a recorded computer message. “Please stay on the deck, as security measures are still in--” He cut off as the woman darted forward over the crunching remains of the glass walls and into the rubble that made up what obviously used to be a sitting area, wet bar and observation deck. Huge chunks of rock had been blasted out of the wall, resulting in a great deal of caution tape, but there was no warning as colorless lasers activated form the remaining structure. A piece of ceiling that blocked one of them began to sizzle immediately, betraying the presence of others, even if they weren’t immediately visible.
The elevator doors at one end of the room (on the other side of all those lasers, obviously) had been torn asunder and had fallen to either side of a gaping hole downward. Blue lights still lit the way. “I must insist you remain in place,” Jarvis said, sounding somewhat troubled.
“Alfred, make me a sandwich.” Damian ordered, kicking a piece of rubble into the room and watching one of the lasers hit it. He switched his mask to infrared, eyes lighting up in a golden glow as he saw the little lines highlighted across his vision. It would be easier to avoid the lasers by climbing on the ceiling. “Turkey, bacon, provolone. If you add mustard I’ll tape over all your old cricket matches.” He shot a line up to the unstable ceiling, flipping his body against it and took out two knives that looked more like mountain climbing tools than weapons.
“How good are those dollar store goggles of yours, Catwoman?” Damian asked, looking down at her before continuing a careful crawl to avoid the lasers. “If you can’t keep up, I’ll understand.” He added as if she were the dead weight around here.
This was more like it. Weeks and weeks of not sinking her claws into anything, and Selina just laughed at the baby bird with his tiny tricks. “If you want to avoid the fun part, then that’s fine with me, baby bird” she practically purred, intentionally ignoring his tiny old name and his borrowed new one. There was nothing like adrenaline to make everything fade away. It’s why the Cat did what she did. The money didn’t matter; the thrill did.
As for her goggles, they were made for things like pesky lasers, and she watched him dig his knives into the ceiling for leverage with a moment of appreciation at his skill, and then it was all about beating him to the other side without tripping anything. There was enough standing rubble to make swinging over the criss-crossing lines a challenge, but a challenge was precisely what she wanted. Her whip sang out, grabbing what remained of a door handle, and she alternated between swinging onto teeny tiny, safe perches of rubble and using calisthenics to go above and below the lasers. Sure, his way was easier, but by the time she made it to the other side there was a blush to her cheeks and a very satisfied smile on her lips as she looked up, waiting for the little boy with the little knives to join her. “We’re going down, in case the monkey was wondering.”
Down, several floors down, in fact, Jarvis was trying to wake his creator, asleep on his arms over one of the tables. Sadly, a half-clothed Tony had been working twelve hours and taken enough painkillers to make it possible, and he wasn’t easily jarred from the unscheduled sleep on the assumption that Batman would announce himself when he arrived. Stark’s personal computer had some substantial information on Selina Kyle that Tony had hacked from police databases the last time he was through the DC door, but nothing on Damian (who was in a new costume and had not identified himself). Though she was not classified as a lethal threat, Selina had threatened Tony’s life and the AI had decided (being fully advanced enough to do so) to keep all but the most dangerous security measures in place while he tried to get Tony into something like decision-making order.
The elevator shaft emergency lighting changed from cool blue to ominous red. “I really must protest. You are breaking and entering,” Jarvis informed the two vigilantes. “If you would be so kind as to wait, Mr. Stark will arrive momentarily.” (Jarvis was as prone to polite fictions as Alfred.) Multiple panels as sharp as Ginsu knives began to slide out of the walls on either side of the empty elevator shaft. Some of them had been torn and ripped by Loki as he descended, but some of them were in working order. All of them were dangerous. A faint hissing sound and a barely detectable taste of sweetness in the air betrayed a release of diluted amounts of nitrous oxide, just enough to make anyone coming careless. The fact that the vents closed off around them to block the escape of the gas in its conditioned form was probably an incidentally ominous sign; it’s not like it was immediately obvious Tony was simply trying to avoid contributing to the hole in the ozone layer.
Damian lightly hung from the ceiling, lowering himself to the floor before securing the knives back into his utility belt. “You first, kitty cat.” He leaned on the side of the elevator shaft, looking down at the death pit knives like it was some kind of assassin guild test. This was fun in some weird way that only a Bat kid would find it to be. But, the only sign that he thought so was a small smirk on his face.
The vents closing caught his attention. Some kind of gas along with swing blades was a pretty clever touch, Damian had to hand it to them. He clicked through his utility belt until he found a small respirator that was about the size of swimming goggles. “I don’t have a spare. Here’s hoping it’s not neurotoxin.” He said in perfect deadpan.
Selina preferred a chase, and she preferred stealth and the thrill of getting in undetected. This kind of thing was third on her list of pleasant ways to pass the time, somewhere below stealing and sex. The kitty cat had priorities. She watched the sharp panel blades slide out, and she opted for care, which the Cat was perfectly willing to use when the situation called for it. She had already dropped down into the shaft, the metal-sharp grips on her boots joining her claws for puncture-purchase as she avoided the panels. Now the vents and the gas, that could be a problem. She could only hold her breath so long and, despite possible expectations, the kitty cat wasn’t going to take the respirator from the baby bird.
Desperate times called for desperate measures. She judged the safest wall of the shaft for a clean drop, and she straightened her legs and kicked her way down, holding her breath and intending to take as many of the panels as she could with her, and sucking in her stomach when there was danger of being impaled on the ones protruding from the opposite side. “Scared, baby bird?” she called up, as if this was a funhouse ride, and not something that could require use of the Lazarus Pit as something other than a science project.
The bottom of the shaft was blocked by the elevator, a steel trap that had quite obviously been blasted open by a high-powered weapon that left tempered steel peeled and blackened like an old banana. The elevator itself, which smelled like burnt iron in a smelting factory, no doubt used to be quite pretty, with inlaid decorations and multiple mirrors. A broken speaker was playing very gentle exotic jazz, the Brazilian influence of which was ruined by an occasional spark from a short in the wall. The two pairs of doors--a set in the elevator and a set in the wall--were shut solid, blocked on the other side by something and jammed firmly. Tiny hints of music with more forward bass could be heard from beyond.
As soon as either of them dropped inside the elevator, it gave a stomach-churning lurch downward two inches. The frayed cables shrieked.
Damian floated his way down, using the swing blades as temporary platforms to jump between and hold onto. It was a quick, messy descent like a bird weathering through a tight cavern. The elevator was unstable and threatened to start diving down the shaft any moment. This didn’t really scare a bird, but he still felt the need to work in haste. “I don’t have explosives on me. Even if I did-” Damian shrugged like it wouldn’t matter. The Bat Family didn’t exactly walk around with sticks of dynamite in their pants.
The kitty cat didn’t like elevators in the first place, preferring the wide open of a roof and skyline, and she definitely didn’t like elevator that played music before dropping on screaming cables. “The baby bird should brace himself,” she said, and that was all the warning she gave before she snapped her whip up at the fraying cables, the twist making the elevator jerk back into place before the whip took the place of reinforcement as the elevator resumed its scheduled descent.
She gave him a look that could only be described as smug as the elevator dinged, the sound louder than the music, and she watched the doors open onto a level that was less destroyed than the rest. “Iron Man isn’t a very good host,” she called out as she stepped out of the elevator, a soft, secure sway of hips, one that said she didn’t actually expect anything here to hurt her. “And after we were so accommodating in the Batcave,” she added, a mock pout in her voice and an exaggerated downturn of her plump lips. She looked over her shoulder at Damian, a silent command in her green eyes. Find what they had come for.
This level used to be an elegant combination of garage and lab. There was some scattered rubble, the most damage having been done to what looked like reinforced metal cupboards along one wall beyond a row of classic and collectible cars, all small, sleek, and boasting a rainbow of colors. There were low rubber mats with a wide spectrum of engineering components, little black globes the size of Christmas ornaments inlaid in the ceiling at regular intervals, and no windows to speak of. The entire room glistened with blue light, most of it coming from a revolving three dimensional structure of a complex molecular structure hovering in a cleared space at the very back of the room.
The first movement came from a robot the height of a man but the structure of a crane. It moved awkwardly, like a motorized erector set, and turned to direct its top-most structure, which boasted a pair of screws set like eyes and a single glass-camera eye, toward the newcomers. The second was the abrupt shrinking of the blue molecule. It shrank rapidly, halving in size, until abruptly it was in the hands of Tony Stark, who came walking through it, closing his hands until the model was nothing more than bit of projected spark.
Having just broken out of his unplanned nap, Tony was stiff and irritable, and he only had time to shrug on a wrinkled black silk shirt to hide his back before they came wandering in. Now the only blue light came from the arc reactor set into the skin of his chest. He put down a bottle labeled “providone-iodine” on a counter as he moved closer, which explained the antiseptic scent in the air as he approached. It was bizarrely metallic smell that hung about him, not unpleasant, not quite electric, and not entirely the chemical. Usually he wore cologne that hid it well. “Breaking into the Tower isn’t quite the same as going spelunking, Selina,” he said, smiling at her and giving her costume a very appreciative once over. He then transferred his gaze to Damian. “Who is your little friend?”
“The Tower was open,” Selina said of the state of the exterior and upper levels of the building. “You should have locked the door, Tony,” she said, moving forward without permission, winding around him, then approaching a work table and glancing over it. “We want the sample, and we want the key, and then we’ll go,” she offered, because she could be a magnanimous kitty cat sometimes, every once in awhile. As for Damian? He was perfectly capable of introducing himself, and Selina was pretty sure he didn’t want to be introduced as a baby anything just then. She looked over her shoulder at Tony, as if she was going to share something very confidential, very need-to-know. “I don’t think he likes being called little.” She smiled, all red lips and more confidence than should fit in one catsuit, and she pushed aside all the little engineering junk and slid back onto the table, black-encased legs crossed at the knees.
Tony raised amused eyebrows at the demand. “You can want all you want, but the answer is no and no.” He didn’t twist to face her, somewhat relieved he had time to cover his back, but otherwise unthreatened by their general appearance. He wasn’t as unprotected as he seemed, and even tired and hungover, he was always willing to chat. Whiskey courage. Tony wasn’t going to trust the DC key or the goop from the Pit to anyone but Batman, not even his allies beyond his own door. Catwoman had a dewdrop’s chance in hell.
Damian stood behind Selina like a shadow, watching Tony with an unimpressed stare that rounded closer to his mother’s side of the family. The gadget scientist talked like a lost Luthor. That certainly didn’t win him any points. “Talon.” Damian said, whatever playfulness that Catwoman teased out like a mouse behind a couch was suddenly gone. He snapped his attention away from Tony, suddenly much more interested in the room than the scientist in it. He, too, knew how to build things. Knew how to hide things. And, while Tony was obviously more invested in what Damian considered a hobby, he could guess how things could be organized.
The sample wasn’t part of a machine and would likely be treated as some kind of chemical (dangerous or otherwise). He casually moved past work benches and tools, looking for a more sterile environment for testing and whatever else Tony was capable of. Damian thought it was just as likely the man was keeping the sample and the key in his pants, in which case Selina was more than capable of finding it first.
Selina had to admit to being impressed with how quickly Damian went from being her baby bird to being something dangerous. She could almost see the trained assassin in the boy just then, and it wasn’t something she got to see very often. He’d been drunk when Crane had misbehaved in Las Vegas, and all of their little games in Gotham had been just that, games. This was different, and she leaned forward at the waist, all graceful slink as she let the hands on the table bear her weight. “I don’t think he likes you,” she told Tony of Damian, and there was a dangerous little smile there. Selina always did like seeing what a man in a suit could do. After all, it was one of the perks of tussling with superheroes.
She was watching Damian case the room, and she figured the least she could do was a provide an annoying little distraction. She swung her legs up, and she stood on the table in heavy, metal-tread boots that were nothing like the stilettos that accompanied Halloween costumes in her honor. Then, with only a wink at the man with the blue light in his chest, she began stepping on things, kicking equipment off the table, making it crash just as loudly as she could manage. Selina didn’t have any real appreciation for material things - not beyond stealing them - but she assumed this man did. Most people liked their things; it was a weakness. She might have felt a tiny bit guilty, but she blamed that newfound morality entirely on the Batfamily. “Think I’ll find it eventually?” she asked Tony.
Tony liked his things, certainly. When it really came down to it, as Yinsen pointed out, all Tony had were his things. Yet the danger now, the priority, was to protect two things far more specific. Selina was destroying; she wasn’t stealing. Tony was obsessive about his tech, haunted by the things that had done in his name, even by his hand. The most famous mass murderer in America. Selina and “Talon” were not here for his tech; that was one good thing. The key to their door--the one in his pocket--he could replace. It kept him from resorting to the suit and physical attack. Tony looked up at Selina with clear dislike and anger at the destruction of his property, but not rage, not madness. He looked away from her even as she spoke, focusing on Damian.
“Talon” became the priority. The twenty-foot square glass-sheathed area furnished with microscope, extra ventilation, tile, glassware and storage, that was where the masked kid was going. The samples from the Pit weren’t labeled; Tony already had some of the sample he’d taken stored in his new facility, but the majority of it was there, a glass vial among many other glass vials. Tony could not afford to let that sample go. He didn’t know who these people were, and he certainly didn’t know that Batman trusted them. For all he knew they could go right to the blackmarket with it.
Better it was destroyed than to leave his hands, make him responsible for whatever destruction it wrought.
Tony glanced to one side. He bent down to pick up a metal arm out of a box that had recently arrived by way of Bruce Banner. Before Selina could get back to him, he slid his arm into the metal sleeve and glove. One of the free cords he attached to his chest, and he raised one palm to aim it in Damian’s direction. “I’m one of those fresh-off-the-shelves guys. If I can’t have it, you sure as hell can’t.” The palm made a zipping sound as it charged (probably just long enough to panic, like looking down the barrel of a gun), and a white pulse exploded from it a split-second later.
The carefully-aimed blast rocketed past Selina, missed Damian by inches, and impacted the lab area with a compressed schewwwOOM. The Lazarus sample went up along with some of the Loki samples he had been testing, which irritated Tony, but it was an acceptable loss. Nothing in the lab was especially explosive, so the blast was relatively contained, vaporizing everything on contact and finally going through the next wall over.
There were things the kitty cat didn’t like. Most of them didn’t matter just then, but one of them did. She didn’t like people shooting things so close to the baby bird that she had enough time to panic and imagine the smell of burnt feathers on the air. Selina didn’t like panicking; it invalidated her whole I don’t care about anyone thing, and it made the kitty very, very cranky. She had time to make it halfway to where Damian was standing during the ramp-up to the white pulse, and she had time to imagine a very real future where she had to go explain to Bats that she’d gotten his son killed. All in all, Selina was not a happy kitty cat.
But even through the anger, she realized Damian’s temper wasn’t going to take that attack lightly. No way. Not her baby bird. Instead of backtracking and showing Tony just how it felt to fear for his life, she continued forward, and she grabbed Damian by the back of his suit and kicked open the lab door, concentrating on Passages and the hallway there. Time to cut this visit short, but not without a very menacing glare to the man with the metal arm. Hurting him would make Blondie very angry, but Selina didn’t care just then. It was a warning painted bright, bright green, and she hoped he knew enough to heed it.
Damian turned, his knives brandished and ready to slice up Tony. He didn’t have a reason not to and as far as he was concerned, breaking into the batcave and shooting some stupid laser at him was enough reason to make this Luthor wannabee bleed. When Selina grabbed the back of his costume, he struggled away from her. “No.” He said at first, shoulders trying to tear away from her claws. “No! That belonged to my f-” Damian was cut short as he fell through the Passages door.