. (spacecowboys) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-05-25 15:43:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *log, bruce banner, selina kyle |
Marvel: Selina/Robert
Who: Selina, Banner
What: Getting Selina cleaned up for the poor person who has her for plot
Where: Chinatown, Marvel
When: In-progress
Warnings/Rating: Serious emo
He hadn't come.
Night had turned to day, and day had turned back again, and he hadn't come. She'd known, of course. She'd known the moment she'd woken up in the Cave, no looming form in kevlar. She'd known, and it had felt like the closing of a door. Key turned in the lock, and she knew she wouldn't be able to open it again. He'd changed the combination, and she hadn't realized until that moment. A safe she couldn't crack, and there was a first time for everything, and maybe she should have been expecting it.
But like all good denial, it took time to sink into the marrow. A day spent in the tunnels, the echo of Damian's memory bouncing off the walls. Two days in Gotham, an alley cat, and she couldn't sleep. Ra's lived behind her closed eyelids, and he breathed from the welts that lined her belly, wrists and ankles. She was open eyes of envy green that did not see. Envious of her life before, and wasn't that hysterical?
She breathed self-hate into her lungs, and she turned what could I have done differently? over and over on a palm that was nail-crescent gouged. And then, numbly, she began to accept. And, oh, acceptance hurt. Acceptance was five-years old, and the realization she had no parents, and that no one was ever going to adopt her, and that bruises were like breathing for normal children, the ones with mantles of pictures, smiling faces and the tooth fairy. Acceptance was hate and diamonds stuffed into the lining of a teddy bear, and acceptance was the promise of vengeance made with tear-stained cheeks and missing front teeth. And acceptance was growing older, growing away, growing alone.
Acceptance was the fact that the one person who had always been there wasn't going to be there anymore.
It sunk into her bones, that truth, and it made them brittle-fragile.
And she drew herself up, that shattered thing made of fur and loss, and she left. She wouldn't lie down and die. She was too stubborn for her own deathwish, and she clawed her way to a lab in another a door, one where there was always a can of tuna left out, always an open window. It was selfish, but she didn't have it in her not to be selfish, not then.
It was empty, the lab, and she curled herself up at the foot of the bed, filthy lounge pants and white-turned-grey undershirt from three days earlier. Her stomach was concave, starving like the space beneath her breastbone. She was dirt and Gotham on her bare feet. She was scabbed over gouges in her palms, and she was welts scratched raw.
She was exhaustion. She slept.