40So, seeing The Dark Knight prompted my muse...it was much fun. Please tell me what you think about this chapter...and about what should happen next! As always, thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy!
Arwen
Alfred gave her a measured glance before turning away, picking up a sleek black phone from its niche in the wall of the medical room. He pressed a single button and then held the phone up to his ear. "Hello, Lucius," Selina heard him say into the receiver. To her surprise, he chuckled, just slightly. "I know, our Master Bruce seems to get into more trouble than he can handle quite often these days. But we would greatly appreciate it if you came over nonetheless." His voice turned grave. "Yes, I'm afraid it's bad this time."
"How bad?" Selina heard the echo of a deep baritone voice from the receiver with her fine-tuned ears.
"Bad enough that he had to have help from…someone…just to get back to the Cave," replied Alfred. "Thank you, Lucius." He replaced the phone with an air of unruffled calm, remarkable, Selina thought, for a man whose employer had just barely escaped death and wasn't out of danger yet. Alfred turned to face her again. "Now, Miss, there is a tray of Waldorf salad on the table by the mainframe computer, if you would like to help yourself. But please do not touch anything," he added seriously in a tone that brooked no argument.
"Are you sure you don't need any help? That suit looks difficult to get off," Catwoman said thoughtfully. She half-smiled at the butler, but her heart wasn't in the jest and it lacked her usual bite. "Just kidding, Alfie. I'll go see if your Waldorf salad is up to par. You don't happen to have any milk around, do you?"
"Unfortunately Master Bruce does not condone the storage of dairy products in the Batcave," replied Alfred, opening one of the stainless steel cabinets and beginning to set supplies on the countertop. Catwoman noted that every few seconds his gaze strayed to the supine form of the Batman laid out on the gurney. His mask was still on…but she could see that underneath that, he looked so…pale. Fragile, almost, if one could be labeled fragile while wearing the attire of the most feared crime-fighter Gotham had ever known.
"Well," she said, "give a yowl if you need me." Again reminded of the fact that no-one but her cats would miss her, she made a quiet exit, the doors of the medical room hissing shut behind her. She resisted the urge to look over her shoulder.
True to Alfred's word, there was a silver tray bearing a bowl of Waldorf salad, a dinner roll, and a dish of steamed vegetables sitting on the small round table by the Batcave's mainframe computer. Selina realized that underneath the aches from their abrupt stop in the Tumbler, her stomach was growling voraciously after the long night's work. She glanced at her watch casually: it was nearly four o'clock in the morning, and she'd left her apartment a little after midnight. It felt odd, to sit down and eat a meal while still sporting her Spandex suit…she considered taking off the mask, but then quickly dismissed the idea. Despite the fact that the Batman was currently incapacitated, she still wanted the upper hand when Mr. Bruce Wayne, playboy of Gotham City, returned to the land of the living to discover that his grand secret was crushed. Not that she'd tell anyone; oh, no, it gave her a delicious thrill to realize that she was one of very, very few people who knew the Batman's identity, his precious little game of dress-up. She leaned back in the chair and stretched luxuriously, arching her body to form a long arc between her back and her long black-clad legs. Chewing another bite of Waldorf salad thoughtfully—it wasn't bad, she had to admit, even though she didn't normally go for ritzy recipes—she considered her options. She could simply vanish, disappear from the Batcave without another word or a glance backward. The potential for trouble cropping up from prolonging this strange situation seemed pretty high. The only problem with that plan was that she had absolutely no idea how to get out of the dank Batcave, and her quickest avenue of escape, the Tumbler, was currently out of commission, still steaming against the far wall of the Cave.
She sighed and nibbled at her lip in frustration, picking at the cool vegetables with a silver fork. Why exactly had she saved the Batman's life again? Well…because he was a delicious toy, she told herself, and…she had felt bad, she had felt wrong helping Poison Ivy trick the Batman into signing his own death warrant. Batman had genuinely wanted to help Poison Ivy and she supposed it just rubbed her fur the wrong way that Ivy took advantage of the Bat's humanity. Then again, the Bat's tendency to offer help in all the wrong places kind of rubbed her fur the wrong way, too, but the fact that he tried so damn hard at everything smoothed it all out. She remembered his earnest words, his offer of succor to one of his mortal enemies, and shook her head. Obviously Bats had suffered a few too many hard blows to the cranium and a few wires were knocked out of place. She half-smiled, her crimson lips curling at the realization that she herself had planted quite a few of those blows—most of them impeccable, high-flying kicks that would put a martial arts master to shame, if she did say so herself.
But despite the fond memories, there was still the troubling fact that she had suffered from guilt, from pangs of conscience. These were all new experiences for Catwoman—not for Selina Kyle, maybe, but certainly for Gotham's friskiest feline. Usually, when the Spandex went on, the gloves came off. But not tonight. What did it mean? she wondered, stabbing a perfectly cooked green bean vengefully on the prongs of her carefully polished silver fork. Was she going soft? She growled at the thought. Was she going crazy…was her fascination with the Batman slipping into obsession, a sick fixation? Her lips curled back from her teeth in frustration. She threw down the fork and drew her knees up to her chest, encircling her legs with her arms. "I hate self-examination," she snarled to herself. "It's all the Bats' fault," she continued softly. That line of thought made sense. Yes, it was his fault, like it was always his fault. Who was she kidding, he existed to throw wrenches in her perfect plans. Granted, she enjoyed those wrenches sometimes…
"Stop it!" she growled, standing. "Stop trying to rationalize and just deal with it." And with a small nod, she realized that the argument was over. At least for now.
After carefully replacing the silverware on the tray—her feline insticts tended to perfectionism—she spun herself around in the chair for a few minutes until she began feeling nauseous. Waldorf salad didn't sit well with increased inertia. She peeked over her shoulder at the medical room. Then she perked up—unbeknownst to her, while she had been spearing steamed vegetables and arguing with her pesky internal self, another player had arrived on the scene. She spun the chair around to observe, pressing her lips together, missing. He was a fairly tall man, oak-hued skin and a head of tightly curled, abundant grey hair that tended to white at the temples. Even from such a distance, his eyes were what struck her—they were deep, dark, so full of wisdom that she felt like a child just from a glimpse. He was talking to Alfred thoughtfully, taking the Batman's pulse, looking at the many strange machines populating the medical room, crowded around the gurney just as throngs of admiring women had once pushed in on Bruce Wayne at galas and glamorous charity benefits. Her curiosity tickled, she rose fluidly from her chair and caught the eye of the stranger. He paused just for a second, eyes flickering almost imperceptibly, then bent over his patient again.
Catwoman crossed the Batcave predatorily, green eyes slicing at the glass of the medical room. She expected Alfred, or the new man, to draw the grey curtain across the front of the room. But Alfred looked up, his eyes deeply worried, caught her movement—and then he went back to rubbing the bridge of his nose as he waited by his charge's side, waiting for Lucius to tell him to do something…anything.
The doors slid open with a quiet hiss. Catwoman felt her breath catch in her throat. Her heart skipped a beat and then increased in speed, pounding into her temples. She hadn't expected Alfred to let down his guard, allow her near the man he wanted to protect so badly from criminals. She straightened her shoulders. From people like her. The one thing she had expected was Batman to be lying on the gurney, his black suit stark contrast against the crisp white sheets. But it wasn't Batman.
It was Bruce Wayne.
She took a step forward, acutely aware of the mask across her face, shielding her from their glances. He was handsome, she realized in a detached sort of way…but she had always known that, from the strong shape of his jaw, the curve of his lips beneath the mask, the flash of his eyes out of the inscrutable depths of his cowl. Yet now he looked…weak. Like a kitten. Well, perhaps not like a kitten, since, although she adored her cats, they didn't quite produce this physical of a response in her. She reached forward and touched his hair with one gloved finger, delicately, ready to spring back at a single sharp word or a glare from either one of the older men in the room. Alfred watched her expressionlessly. The man beside him peered into the microscope on the countertop and carefully marked down a few notes.
"Are you studying the inhibitor solution?" she asked, curiosity peaked.
"Yes." The response was slow, measured, almost drawled in a deep voice. The man turned around and raised one graying eyebrow. "I suppose you're Catwoman."
With half a smile, she nodded.
"Mind telling us what happened? This is a pretty complex jumble I've got under the microscope, and I'm sorry to say I haven't yet made heads or tails of it." The words were still enunciated with a proper tone, in that deep, rich voice, but there was a hint of accusation.
"What's your name?" she asked.
"Lucius."
She looked down at Bruce Wayne. Batman. "Well, the condensed version is…Poison Ivy wanted to kill the Batman."
"That much we surmised, miss," Alfred said dryly.
She gave him a look. "Calm down, Alfie, I'm not finished yet. Let a girl breathe." After a pause to gather her thoughts, she continued. "Ivy said she had a plant-based neurotoxin that would kill the Batman, and that we could have…time alone with him…if her plan went well." She grimaced. "I usually don't say this, but Red was creeping me out. Kind of off the deep end, even for an Arkham inmate. I mean, Batsy keeps Gotham fun."
Neither Alfred nor Lucius seemed to think that her assessment of Poison Ivy or the Batman was amusing in the least. They kept her pinned with their gazes. Who knew two old men could look so intimidating? She cleared her throat. "Anyway, I tried to stop her, but…" She shrugged.
"But?" Alfred prompted.
"I was too late," she replied, almost defensively. "I tried, okay? I tried for once to be a good guy and it didn't really work out. Not my area of expertise, if you know what I mean."
The room was silent for a moment.
"So, what were his first symptoms?" Lucius asked, picking up his notepad from by the microscope.
"He coughed. And then he fell. By the way, he's really heavy in that suit."
That almost got a smile out of Alfred. Lucius was definitely the harder nut to crack, she was sure. But that was alright. She could dig in her claws.
"He almost lost it right there…I gave him some of the green stuff, right in the neck, to bring him back around."
Lucius nodded. "That was good. The carotid artery is effective, if not necessarily the most comfortable of injection sites."
Catwoman shrugged. "I had to go with what I thought would work."
"And it did," said Alfred, almost warmly, taking her aback. The butler gazed down at the younger man on the gurney for a moment, his stern expression softening into one of affection and worry. He looked up at her again. "We had to use about a quarter of the remaining inhibitor solution to stop the seizures," he said quietly.
Selina closed her eyes, trying to stem the emotions beginning to whirl around her head. She didn't understand them. "It would be just like Red to create something that only she knew how to use, that only she would know how to stop." There was a tube coming out of Bruce Wayne's hand, an I.V. bag hanging on a stainless steel stand by the gurney. "How bad is it, really?"
The sound of the machines by the bed whirring away as they recorded Bruce Wayne's life filled the silence. Then Alfred nodded once to Lucius.
"If we can't find the cure for this," said Lucius slowly, "if we can't unravel what this thing is, he's going to die."
"How long?" Her lips felt numb, like she had just kissed ice.
"Twenty-four hours. Maybe two days at the most, but that's if we can stretch the inhibitor solution. That's just to keep him alive." Lucius shook his head slightly. "I don't know whether he'll wake up again."
It was a death sentence. His words settled into the pit of her stomach and she had to do something, right then and there. She couldn't throw anything, couldn't demolish something very old and very fragile and very valuable…so she destroyed the most important thing she had left. It felt small and insignificant, like flowers at a funeral, like sending a Christmas card to an old lonely aunt. But it felt right. She took off her gloves fiercely, with a determined snap, and then slid her fingers under the edge of her mask. In one movement it was off, a husk, falling to the floor from her bare fingers. She stared fiercely at Alfred and Lucius. "My name is Selina," she said, "and I won't let Bruce die."