Narrative: Selina Who: Selina What: Narrative: Going home Where: Pirates → Gotham When: Recently Warnings/Rating: All good
She'd left her butler in charge. Of the house. Of the ship. There'd been time for one last run, and the staff would be able to get by for a year on the haul. And Selina? She wasn't sure about leaving. She wasn't sure about much of anything just then, but she knew one thing.
She was tired of wandering.
Oh, Pirates was nice, but it was escape. It wasn't a life. It was a perpetual dream that she didn't need to wake up from, and she couldn't sleep her life away in safety. She hated safety and, at the end of the day, that was all the door with the buried treasure was. No one there would hurt her. There wasn't a risk of rejection. There wasn't a risk of any kind. She could hide there when things got too scary, or when she got too close to the flames. But nothing would ever come of that, because she needed to be in the world to learn how to be in the world.
And she was doing better, wasn't she?
Oh, there was that tiny hiccup with Tony... and Stevie... and Pepper... But she didn't actually regret anything she'd said. She wasn't going to change into a declawed Cat, no matter how much the world might want her to. She was opinionated, and anyone who didn't like it? Well, that was no fur off her tail.
She had claws, and she'd always have claws. But she didn't hate like she had a month earlier. It didn't bubble over and saturate everything around her. Oh, sure, she was still hurt over things, and she still disliked things. But it wasn't something she was drowning in, and it felt nice to have her head above water again.
And most importantly? Most importantly, she was fine being what she was. She didn't need a little invite to the superheroes table. She'd spent years letting that lack of invitation eat her up, until she was nothing - inside and out. But now? Now she was done. She was who she was. She was what she was. And what she was? Was a rogue. She lived in the grey. She loved in the grey. She was grey.
And that? That was more than okay.
She stopped by Marvel, but only long enough to collect the cat, emerald and diamonds around her neck, and to leave a note for Harley (Took Martha. Be in touch after the Island).
But she had time now, before, and she used it to find a neighborhood that felt right in her bones. She didn't trumpet it, and she didn't let anyone know what she was doing. She considered a penthouse in Wayne Tower, so that Iris had to see her every time she walked out (assuming Bruce came back). But - and here was a shocker - she didn't want that. She wanted something more. She wanted something that meant something.
Gotham's East End was hookers and unwed mothers, drugs and poverty. She bought a building for next to nothing, an old crumbling thing with three floors that took up the corner of a city block overlooking the end of Crime Alley. The loft was in good shape, five separate bolts on the door, and she left a bag full of shiny rocks at Jaybird's warehouse in exchange for some elbow grease.
The building was the property of Sadie Kelowski, and the permit for the woman's center that was planned for the first floor? That was Sadie's too. She was quiet about it, no attention, and it wouldn't be as easy to get people here to give her up as it had been in Chinatown, not when she handed out plenty of those left over rocks as a little introduction to her neighbors.
As for Sadie? She was going to stick to this scratching post if it killed her. Gotham was hers, just as much as it was anyone else's. And the kitty cat? The kitty cat was home.