Holly R, narrative, Gotham Who: Holly Robinson What: Bailing. Where: Steph & Eddie's apartment --> Gotham streets When: Immediately before/after Steph and Selina go on their little shooting spree.
It took two minutes. Two minutes after hours of watching Selina pace a pattern into carpet and Steph dissolve from woman-with-really-cool-tattoos into devastation, red-eyed and locked behind closed doors and if that didn't feel more like stealing than smashing the occasional window or picking the proverbial lock to lift something to pay for dinner, Holly didn't know what would. Hours of sitting with the purple nail-polish flaking off under the sideways scrape of her nail, the pick-pick-pick at her cuticle in time with the pace of Selina's strides. This? Was not an intro into the way the Bat-family and extras worked: it was slow, torturous tension twisted wire-tight and electrified. Eddie was gone. The Bat? Also gone. And everyone was flayed open by it and pretending they weren't.
Two minutes. After hissed warnings about staying put, pets and what-ifs and Holly stood in boots and laddered tights in a home that felt uncomfortably perfect around her and looked at the both of them - armored up, ready to take the fight out instead of sitting and waiting for resolution here - as if they were insane. Stay? In a place she barely knew, the walls practically dripping with tension?
She lied. Two minutes and she barely said anything but that? Was a trend in the jail-cell of people-waiting-for-other-people and it didn't make a difference. She didn't think either of them were going to listen even if she did open her mouth. She tried. She tried sitting on the couch that didn't have tape holding patches together and she tried petting one of the animals that sniffed her and walked away, and she waited, stood at the window and watching the street below light up like fourth of July.
It took two minutes to get uncomfortable, to feel the prickle of borrowed tension and her own crawl up her arms and she couldn't wait it out. The people she knew now, the girls she worked the corners with, they weren't her friends from before but before? Was a fuzzy nothing, a forget-me-now in the past and before wasn't braiding her hair and hugging her -- or lending her a last condom before the end of the night. The girls she compared notes with didn't have friends with guns. They didn't have places with locks on the door and security systems and it was one last blast from the street that made her jump and decide.
Sorry, Steph. She loaded pet food bowls, petted one last fuzzy head and sent up a silent apology for not sticking around. She let the door swing closed behind her, locks slamming home and it felt like a gasp of air. And if finding out whether her friends were safe coincided with asking them if they knew anything? That was happy coincidence.
Holly fled warm domesticity for Gotham mayhem and ran.