Who: Damian and Selina Where: on top of the McNally's bar When: Recently! What: Cat and Dami get a talk in real fast about the pit and the batfam Warnings: None!
Damian wasn’t drunk. Tipsy. Plenty tipsy. But, not drunk. His first instinct after leaving the cave was to go see his grandfather, but he had enough failure for one night. He was sick of being in the Talon uniform, sick of being a vigilante that used supernatural means to solve problems. Instead he just wanted to be Damian Wayne for now. Moody philanthropist. Future student at Gotham U. Business prodigy. So far, what little the city knew about him, they seemed to like. Not as lazy or dismissive as his father seemed to be. And, though he rarely was seen in public, it was usually to do something good. Which meant when he did wander into a bar, most of the drinks happened to be free. No matter what his real age was. Especially tonight where he could feel the bartender and some of the locals feel sorry for him. He was too tired to hide the worry from his face.
After talking to Selina and then Helena, he slipped out the back door and climbed a ladder up to the top of the bar. It wasn’t the tallest roof in Gotham, but it was still where he felt most comfortable talking to Catwoman about what had happened that night. He switched his comm off with Helena and waited, scotch still in his hand as he pulled his jacket around his body and waited for the kitty cat.
Selina wasn't impervious to the fever that wracked her body, but unlike Blondie, she was used to fighting through things that hurt, and she was much, much better at taking care of herself than Blondie was. She didn't have time for real medical care, and she already knew she was going to exceed the fifteen-minute window Blondie had given her (no way she was going to make it to McNally's and talk to the baby bird in the amount of time she had left), so she recorded a very apologetic note while she injected a line of local anesthetic and dissolved a few fever reducers in water. That done, she changed into loose, grey running pants and a long-sleeved shirt, snug and black and with a Bat-symbol on the front, and she set out to meet Damian looking like any college kid in Gotham.
McNally's wasn't the kitty cat's scene; not enough things that shone and glimmered in the pockets inside, and the roof wasn't very high, which she was grateful of. She climbed the fire escape slower than she normally would have, but she was only slightly flushed when she reached the top. It was a low roof, but it was still a roof over her city (though she'd never admit she considered it hers at all), and she looked out over the lights for a few seconds, before turning. She already knew precisely where Damian was; she wouldn't have climbed over the edge of the roof without that tiny bit of recon. "Tell the kitty cat about Shiva," she said, walking toward him and eying his scotch. Shiva wasn't the important thing here, but Selina needed the whole story to talk him down.
Damian was in some unfamiliar place between acceptance and frustration. He knew something didn’t fit, but he couldn’t figure out what block had set the whole thing off kilter. It couldn’t have been just one thing that threatened to send the already strained integrity of the batfamily from crumbling, but he knew that just his existence, his choices were a big factor. Things would be better if he removed himself from the equation. That was something he had always known. “There’s not much to tell.” Damian said with a shrug, eyeing signs of how hurt she was before appearing oblivious to them.
“Shiva thought he was a rabid dog and like most assassins who hang around my grandfather, didn’t bother to get all the information first.” He took a sip of his drink and looked out over the Gotham streets. Keeping eye contact with Selina was near impossible at this point. “So she killed him. And, she knew I would at least consider using the pit. Which, of course, I did.” Fleeting look her way before looking back at the city. “I put it in to fix problems like Shiva. Jason may not like it. Neither will my father. But, we don’t know what happens when someone dies here. Jason’s own mistakes shouldn’t cost the life of someone in Vegas.” A very logical and simple reason for using the pit, even if it wasn’t even close to why he did what he did.
"That's what I told the tin man," she said after considering her words. She wasn't very good at that, at considering, but even she knew when it was time to think before cracking open the safe. She crossed the rest of the way to where he was and, with more gingerness than she normally employed, she sat on the roof's ledge and glanced down at the fog-and-slumber city. "I asked him if the driver wouldn't want me dunked in the goop, if it meant saving Blondie. The driver is his person on the other side," she added, not knowing how much he knew about Tony Stark.
She was quiet for a very long time, cataloging blinks of lights in windows, lives turning off for the night, things she could steal while people slumbered. But there wasn't time for that, and she wasn't in any shape for it. In the end, she turned and gave him a very raw look, all green eyes gone too bright and the college girl that wasn't a college girl at all. "Your father set this all into motion by not telling us, Damian," she said, and the anger there was so cold that it almost chilled the air. "He didn't trust us, any of us. We would have handled this all differently, had we known. We should have contained Jaybird," she added reluctantly. "We should have killed Crane." And maybe she wasn't helping, but she couldn't have this conversation with anyone but him. If he was feeling like an al Ghul, well, the kitty cat was very much feeling like she'd strayed too far into the batfamily. "And, in case you wondered, Bruce would have dunked any one of us in that goop, if one of us died."
He hummed in thought, gulping down another portion of scotch before sitting next to her. “If we killed him, then we’d really be lost.” Damian wasn’t disagreeing with her, but there was a line in Gotham and that was crossing it. “It doesn’t matter anymore. The pit needs to be walled off and the next time someone dies, we’ll just have to accept it. Even if it’s one of us.” He hated this. Echoing his father, the one he remembered, and himself at the same time. His moral compass would always point just a little left of North. “I saw what happened to Jason. He’s never going to be the same. And, I thought it wouldn’t matter as long as part of him would still be here. But, then I started thinking about using the Pit on you and I couldn’t take it.”
Damian sighed, hanging his head a little as he held his glass with both hands. Selina had given the batfamily too much and it showed. He didn’t blame her for feeling rejected or out of her comfort zone. He sort of felt the same way. “And, it’s pretty clear we don’t belong. I’m tired of trying.”
She wasn't expecting that argument from him, and she wondered how much of that was the booze talking. "Doesn't change the fact that I want to," she said of Crane. She heard he'd gotten free, which meant they had more of this to look forward to. "I'm not the Bat. I don't see Crane changing, just like I don't see the Joker changing, and the kitty cat doesn't want to line up and wait for either of them to kill us off." But Las Vegas made it difficult, didn't it, and she just turned her fevered face up to the Gotham sky. "We can't hold them, baby bird. If we can't hold them, and there's no green goop, then do we just give in?" She was still using that perpetual we, despite her recent decision to break away. She was thinking about that when he said he wouldn't be able to use the Pit on her, and she quirked a brow as she turned her face to look at him. Devoid of goggles and cat's eye makeup, her green eyes looked nearly as young as his and, in that moment, confused. "I would throw you in," she admitted. But then she hadn't seen Jaybird go in and come out, had she?
"You belong, Damian. You always have," she told him, and she believed it. She believed in him. Her Bat was young, so much younger than the one here, and she saw all that potential when she looked at the young man beside her. "Maybe you aren't like this Bruce, but you're a Wayne. It's like I told Helena, you can't forget who you are. You belong to something bigger and older than just what happened here, now."
“I grew up around assassins. A lot of them started with good intentions, but eventually you just start slaughtering people. Shiva thought she was doing the right thing by killing Jason because he murdered half a dozen guys in seconds.” Damian turned to look at her finally, really look at her and furrowed his brow. “I’m not lecturing you. If you want to go kill him, do it. Just don’t make a habit out of it.” He finished off his drink, setting the glass down with a soft clink next to him and sighed. “And, if you saw Jason- if you saw what I did, you would want that thing destroyed.”
That was about as close as he’d get to admitting he made a mistake. It didn’t change anything, so there wasn’t a point in really lamenting over what he had done. Maybe Jason would get better, but he’d never get over it. He tried to shrug off her telling him that he belonged, but Selina didn’t lie to him and she was usually right about these kinds of things. “Where do we go from here?”
It said something about Selina's firm life in the moral grey that she didn't question his assertion about assassins. Crane and Joker, they tortured and killed for fun. But assassins, as far as she knew, did a job and that was all. It was a different level of bad, and if some of them became twisted into thinking they were doing right, who was the kitty cat to judge? "We both know I won't do it," she said of killing Crane, but that didn't change the fact that she wanted to. She'd already come to terms with the fact that her own moral greyness didn't extend that far. She still felt guilty over the deaths she'd caused while infected with the toxin, even if she firmly believed those men had deserved to die. The kitty cat was a thief, a con, a seller of information, but not a murderer, not unless it was in defense of herself or someone else.
She watched him set the glass down, and she didn't argue with him about Jason's reaction to the Pit. She hadn't seen it. She hadn't been there. She wasn't going to argue something she hadn't experienced. "You saw it, Damian. The rest of us haven't. We'd still use it," she said truthfully. She would. It wasn't that she didn't believe him, and she didn't want to end up there herself, but who said she wouldn't make the same call if it came down to it? So she concentrated on where they went next. "We destroy the goop, and then you pull the family back together, and I go back to my old ways, baby bird. Your father isn't going to do it, and someone needs to."
He laughed a little, rolling his eyes before shaking his head. “I’m the last person to bring the family together. Half of them don’t think I should even be in Gotham and the other just watch out for me like I’m a fire hazard.” Damian rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands and looked up at her. His boyish face seemed worn that night from worry and every emotion in the playbook that could fry his nerves right off. “And, you can’t go back to your old ways. You can try. I’ve seen you try, but something like this is going to happen again soon and you’re going to be right back in the brood with me.”
Damian was teasing her a little, but he knew if things didn’t change with his father, problems like this would just keep happening. And, neither of them could really fix what the old Bat was going through. If he didn’t trust them after all this time, would a couple more months really make a difference? “Helena is going to be here soon to make sure I don’t do anything else to disrupt the natural order. You better go let Wren have her time.”
"You might be the last person who should do it, but you're the only one who can," she said without hesitation. The kitty cat liked listening to her gut. It got her in trouble sometimes, and it got her out of trouble other times. But it was generally right about things. No one else in this family could do it, not as far as she could tell, and Bruce wasn't in any shape for it. All that emotion on his face stopped her in her tracks, stopped her thinking, because she just wasn't used to seeing it. "Neither can you, baby bird," she said of not being able to go back to the old ways. It was an admission, perhaps, but the kitty cat was still going to try. Maybe next time someone chirped she wouldn't come. She would sit it out, like she had before the Bat had swooped into her life, and before this tiny thing had burrowed its way beneath her chin. But he couldn't go back to being an al Ghul. He'd saved Jaybird because he cared, and they both knew that meant he couldn't go back to his grandfather.
She touched his cheek, the show of affection not an everyday occurrence, and she leaned over and kissed the corner of his mouth before standing. "Tell the kitten I'm glad she's back," she added gingerly dropping down onto the fire escape directly below them immediately after. She didn't know when she'd see him again, and so she left the farewell at that. Cutting ties meant cutting ties, and he was right about one thing - it was always him that brought the Cat running back.
Damian watched her go and touched the side of his cheek moments after she vanished down the fire escape. “Damn it.” He whispered. Sentimentality was dangerous and he thought even with Selina he could find a way to keep her at arms length. But, it never worked out that way. She was always there for him, even when he tried to keep her away and the same could be said for himself. He wanted to leave that behind because it was difficult. Obviously, the easy choice would be to go serve his grandfather. To just blindly take orders and turn from the family that he had worked so hard to be part of. But, with Selina somewhere in the darkness, with Grayson and Steph behind him, he knew that wasn’t an option.
He stood up, wobbling a little to scoop up the empty glass with him and slowly walked back towards the fire escape. Even when he was small, this was what he wanted, wasn’t? All of the hurt that Gotham brought was nothing compared to the dead, eternal mantra of his mother and grandfather. And, trying to pretend he was alone when there were so many people there willing to forgive him was impossible. But, what harm would it be to just spend one night drunk and wondering when he’d see Selina again? Damian decided he deserved at least a couple more drinks.