Chapter Text
She didn’t plan to stick around Gotham. It was purely practical–if you steal from someone whose guards carry machine guns it’s best to disappear. And Falcone was dead, but someone was gonna step in to take his place. That was just what happened in Gotham. She was over it.
But there was at least one person she wanted to say goodbye to before she left and Vengeance had been making himself scarce since the rescue effort at the Garden. It was unreasonable of her to be grumpy about it–the guy definitely needed a week-long nap after what they’d been through. But she was bored and antsy and she’d wanted to talk to him.
So she decided there was time for one more score before she hit the road, and she had the perfect target in mind: Bruce Wayne. The prince of Gotham, the only one of the Riddler’s targets that had skated through without a scratch. He owed this city something and now–when it needed help more than ever–he was still completely useless, hiding away in his tower. It irritated her. She didn’t plan to take up Vengeance’s cape (she suspected he was going to let that nickname go, after the Riddler’s militiamen claimed it, but she didn’t know what else to call him. Batboy?) but it’d settle her to take something of his and sell it off for the recovery efforts.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was something to do.
The trouble was getting in. The city was swarming with news crews and helicopters. Normally she’d have scaled the side of the building, found a window and made her entrance. Or, better yet, picked a disguise and gone in through the front door. Wayne Tower had a hotel on the lower floors, which would have been the perfect entrance except that someone had already taken a shot at blowing this guy skyhigh. No way they hadn’t locked that down.
Selina had been treating Gotham as her training ground for a long time and it wasn’t all about parkour practice and disguises. She’d done her research early on. Pored through the maps you could only access in the public library’s special collections if you gave a real good story about doing your thesis on city planning. (she’d looked real good in a sweater vest and glasses, it had been fun). So she knew another way in: there used to be a subway station underneath Wayne tower.
The station was barricaded off, but if you were willing to break a few locks and track through the dark in some sketchily maintained tunnels, eventually it would lead to the Wayne station. Had their own fucking private subway station, absurd.
She didn’t see any signs of other explorers in the tunnel, but when she got to the station itself the lights came on and scared her out of her skin. A flock of actual bats stirred and swarmed up near the rafters, disturbed by the sudden brightness. She wanted to run away too–motion activated lights meant someone used this space–but then she spotted the cowl on the ground and realized who that someone had to be.
Vengeance. He had an actual cave. A shit-you-not cave. Of course he did, she should have expected nothing else. He had a car that was as absurd as his outfit, souped up like a teenage fantasy. There was a computer setup straight out of the Matrix. She could have laughed, but there was also the suit. Discarded in pieces on the floor, a breadcrumb trail leading her to the elevator. None of the care she knew that control freak definitely took with his outfit. When Vengeance got here he wasn’t okay. And he hadn’t made it back down to his den since then.
The concern that she’d been pretending not to have for him distracted her for a moment from the obvious conclusion. Vengeance had his hideout under Wayne tower. For a half second she considered that he worked for Bruce Wayne, but it was obviously untrue. Control freak like him? The pieces slotted in place and she realized that she had absolutely kissed Bruce Wayne. She couldn’t even bring herself to be mad about it. She almost laughed. Gods. She had probably been Bruce Wayne’s first kiss.
Finding his room was too easy. (What if someone had come to finish off what the Riddler had started? She wouldn’t have cared ten minutes ago, but now...) The controls for the elevator were smudged with black paint, telling her exactly what floor he’d gone to. There was only one room on that floor with a light on. It was way too quiet. She’d imagined having to slip past armed guards on every corner, staff waiting in the wings. Apparently not.
When she found him huddled up in his own bathtub, gasping for breath with his eye makeup still smeared across his face she realized he might not have anyone at all.
He heard her coming, cracked his eyes open and stared at her like she was a mystery he couldn’t solve. “Selina?” he whispered.
“That’s me,” she said, crouching down beside the tub to put her hand on his face. Not feverish, just confused. “What have you gotten yourself into, baby? Don’t you have someone to take care of you?”
He dropped his gaze. “There’s only Alfred. And he’s still in the hospital.” She’d heard someone at the Wayne household had gotten injured in the attack meant for Bruce. She hadn’t thought much of it afterwards.
“Is Alfred the one who takes care of you, when you get hurt out there?”
“Yeah,” he whispered. He still hadn’t pulled away from her hand, resting gently against his cheek. “Why are you–how are you here, Selina?”
She pulled her hand away, watched him sway to follow her and ignored the way it made her stomach flip. Not the time, Selina. She unwrapped the comforter from around his shoulders, revealing the bruises and swollen contusions blanketing his skin. His arms were laid limply across his lap, palms up. “I was getting bored of waiting for you and thought I’d steal myself a paperweight,” she said lightly. “Seemed like a fun challenge.”
“Oh. But then why are you here?”
“Because I saw the mess you made down in your mancave and got worried you might be up here dying, lying in a bathtub and refusing to call for help.”
His brow furrowed. “Not dying. Broken ribs. Can’t stand. Hand’s won’t—” he lifted his arms and flexed his hands, weakly. “Can’t get the bottle open.” He kicked at a bottle of advil that had been sitting by his feet and it rolled across the bottom of the tub, blue child-safe cap still in place.
Jesus fuck. Selina hadn’t gotten hurt that bad (though she didn’t think she was ever going to get a solid night’s sleep without seeing Falcone trying to crush her windpipe and talking about murdering her mother) and she’d been babying her bruises with all the icepacks and painkillers she could tolerate. She’d broken a rib once. It had been agonizing to breathe, they’d given her a prescription for the good stuff for the first week. She scooped up the bottle, pinched and twisted the top off. “What’s wrong with your hands?” She asked. They’d been fine, she’d seen him on the in the endless replays on the news tanding tall and helping carry the survivors...
“Electric injuries can cause nerve damage,” he said. “Sometimes doesn’t set in right away. It’ll heal. It’s just...frustrating.” He leaned his head back slightly and let her pour him a sip of water, then another to wash down the pills. He seemed thirsty, so she kept going, giving him small sips until the cup was empty.
“Frustrating seems like an understatement,” she said lightly. “Especially for a control freak like you, baby.”
He flushed and ducked his head, as if to stop her from seeing it. “You don’t have to–I know you hate me,” he said. “I understand.”
She could hardly be surprised that a guy who dressed up as a bat an stalked the streets of Gotham at night had issues. “I said some shit about Bruce Wayne,” she agreed. “But I’m allowed to change my mind. And knowing he’s you, that changes my mind. You saved my life, Bruce. Am I not supposed to care about you?”
He didn’t say anything, and she took it as a victory.
“Alright, that’s settled. Now tell me what you need so I can take care of you, alright?”
He frowned, but he didn’t argue. Vengeance would have, she thought. Was it Bruce who was different, or was it the vulnerability of being hurt? Being at her mercy? He considered her question with all the seriousness he turned towards work in the suit. “Food first?” he asked.
“We can do that,” she agreed. “But you’re going to need to lead the way, I don’t know where anything is around here.”
He was too weak to stand, which was probably mostly because he’d eaten almost nothing over the past week and absolutely nothing since crawling home after the flood. They worked around it. Selina asked where she could find a chair with wheels, and fetched one from the computer room. It seemed like most of the rooms in this place were preserved artifacts from Bruce’s childhood–the office still had a tower computer and a phone hookup for the internet. But more importantly, it had a wooden office chair with wheels. Between the two of them, they managed to drag Bruce up into it.
He’d stripped down to just his boxers at some point during his ordeal and it was too cold to be dragging him around the house like that. She found him a lap blanket, so soft she had to pause for a moment and pet it like a cat before bringing it back to tuck in around him.
He caught her doing it and smirked.
“It’s soft,” she said defensively.
“I know,” he said. Waited a moment, decided whether to let the secret slip. “It’s my favorite.”
Like she couldn’t have guessed he needed soft things, like she would be ashamed of him. “So you are capable of good taste,” she said. Then they set off for the kitchen.
In the pantry she found a a few cans of soup, a stroke of luck because she couldn’t cook for shit. She’d have expected a rich person’s diet to be nothing but professional chef health-food nonsense, but Bruce shook his head when she joked about it. “Alfred cooks fancy stuff sometimes, but mostly for him and Dory. I’m not good at...” he paused again, like he was going to offer her something shameful. “Food is hard. I’ve always been picky.”
“I’ve known people like that,” Selina offered. She was a queer lowlife hanging around the fringes of Gotham, she’d known plenty of people who had to fight their brains to live, had to swallow themselves to seem ‘normal’. “Had a friend who could only eat, like, five foods. Even if she was sick of them, couldn’t eat anything else. Shit’s tough.” But apparently he did like canned chicken soup with the stars, so she put a can of the stuff in a bowl to warm up in the microwave.
He could pick up a soup spoon, but not stop himself from dropping it. She stopped him before the frustration coiling up his shoulders could force him to ask for help, climbed up on the table with her knees bracketing his hips and fed him soup, one spoonful at a time. He flushed again, warm and pink under the black makeup and dried grit from the floodwaters. It made her feel a little less guilty about the way her insides squeezed.
They weren’t going to have sex, she reminded herself. For one thing, having sex with broken ribs sucked on a level that instantly killed all thoughts of arousal. She knew that from experience. So she was just going to file this away for the future, the way him being implacable and unknowable in the suit had turned her into jelly and the way him being so soft and gentle beneath her care was even better. Get you a man who can do both...
“What are you thinking about?” he asked. His lay his hands against her arms and squeezed–not hard, because he couldn’t right now, but hard enough to remind her that she was holding an empty bowl and was now crowding him for no reason.
“I was thinking that someday we might have fun together,” she said. “If you wanted to.”
He flushed bright red and said “Yes,” with his full voice, not the half-whisper he’d retreated to since she arrived.
“Not now,” she warned. She shouldn’t tease him, no matter how fun it would be. “After your ribs heal. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“I wouldn’t stop you,” he said. And, oh, wasn’t that beautiful?
“Good to know,” she said, setting the bowl aside. “But I’m not going to hurt you in a way that slows down your recovery. You’ve got alleyways to haunt, muggers to terrify, all that?”
That sobered him up. “I need to do more than that. I need to do better than that. I’ve been doing this all wrong.”
“Yeah?”
“People need hope,” he said. “They need to feel safe. I have to figure out how to do that.”
“One person can’t be everywhere,” she said. “You can’t protect everyone.”
“I know,” he said bitterly. Like that was a personal flaw of his, that he couldn’t stand guard outside every apartment in Gotham simultaneously.
“I can’t figure out why you care about this city so much,” she admitted. “It’s a shit city, Bruce. Everybody knows it. And you’re rich. You could go anywhere.”
“It happened here,” he said. “They died here.”
She could see the story in those words, the question she hadn’t asked. He’d called himself Vengeance–for who? For what? For his parents, the same way she’d needed to get something back from Falcone for what he’d done to her mother. Because they’d never found who killed the Wayne’s–honestly she was shocked that GCPD hadn’t strong-armed someone into confessing to the crime to cover up the embarrassment. Bruce didn’t know who their killer was, so he couldn’t turn his rage against one man. He’d squared off against a whole city instead.
“Okay,” she said. For her, Thomas and Martha Wayne wouldn’t have been worth throwing away a life of luxury to someday bleed out in the streets. But of course they weren’t. She could still understand. She would have gone to jail to avenge Annika. She would have died for her. It wasn’t healthy, but it was the truth.
She looked him over, still wheezing softly with each breath as he struggled to hold himself upright. All of that could come later. “I think we need to get you back to bed,” she said. “But first...” she brushed her hand over the makeup on his face. “How do you usually clean this off?”
He shrugged. “Soap?”
“A menace, that’s what you are. Not dish soap, I assume?”
“Whatever works.” He said.
“Well that’s one thing for me to look for. Decent facewash. The other thing...” she swung her legs off the table and took the bowl to the kitchen sink. She didn’t see a dishwasher but she refused to believe that rich people would have a kitchen without a dishwasher. “You said that this Alfred guy takes care of you when you get in trouble, right?”
Bruce nodded.
“Does he keep medical supplies around? Stronger painkillers? Because watching you tough it out on advil is hurting my heart.”
It occurred to her then that she’d just taken Bruce at his word when he said he wasn’t dying and cataloged his injuries. Chest injuries could go real bad, he should have been in a hospital. But how were they supposed to explain Bruce Wayne, billionaire, showing up with wounds that exactly matched what thousands of people had just seen Vengeance do?
“I don’t know where he keeps most of it,” Bruce said. “His office got destroyed in the explosion. I know there’s some stuff in an emergency kit down in the cave.”
She suggested that they could text Alfred and find out, but Bruce vehemently opposed that idea. Alfred was supposed to be resting. He was seriously hurt. She could have walloped him over the head with the soup bowl for being an idiot, but that wasn’t going to help anything.
“I’m going to watch you,” she promised. “And if you get any worse I’m calling someone. Alfred. 911. A veterinarian willing to operate on your dumb ass. Someone.”
He set his jaw and nodded, like he could decide not to have complications by sheer willpower. She left him in the kitchen and went hunting for supplies.
There were a ludicrous number of guest bedrooms in the place. They were all much less dusty than she would have expected considering there hadn’t been any houseguests nearly two decades. And the en-suite bathrooms (in every room!) had little trays of hand and face soap, neatly wrapped in paper and clearly from the hotel downstairs. She nabbed some, then realized her outfit was a bit low on pockets. She swung by Bruce’s room and stole one of his hoodies. It hung off her shoulders, but once she zipped it up she could use the front pocket to store the soap and anything else she needed. And the lining of the sleeves were nearly as soft as Bruce’s blanket. In a moment of inspiration she also grabbed a towel and the shampoo from his bathroom.
She didn’t want to leave Bruce alone for too long, so she took the elevator back down to the cave rather than hunting for Alfred’s room. The literal suitcase of medical supplies she found down there, everything neatly packed into compartments, was already more than she was comfortable handling. There were painkillers normal people needed a prescription for and they weren’t expired. Good enough. There was also a mini freezer full of nothing but ice packs.
Bruce was still in the kitchen by the time she got back, thank god, though he’d moved his chair over to the sink and filled it up with hot soapy water. He hadn’t taken a swing at actually washing the dishes, which was good because he probably would have dropped them. “Easier to wash if you soak them,” he said in response to her raised eyebrow. Someone had probably told him that and he’d been doing it with all dishes ever since, whether or not there was anything stuck to them.
“Thanks honey,” she said, even though that meant she was going to have to wash the dishes rather than set them aside if she wanted to follow through on her next idea. But first...she slung her borrowed backpack onto the floor and started unloading icepacks. “Now let’s see if we can get that swelling down.”
Alfred, who clearly thought ahead about these things, had kept the icepacks stored in thick cotton dressings with long velcro straps attached, which made it easier. There was too much bruising to ice everything, so she let him guide her–ribs, right shoulder, hip and lower back where the pain was worst. When she asked what on earth he’d done to himself to get the green-black bruising on his back and hip he told her he’d jumped off a building.
“You jumped off a building,” she repeated.
“GCPD headquarters,” he confirmed. “I had a wingsuit, I didn’t just jump.”
“And how did that go?”
“I didn’t die and I didn’t get arrested, so could have been worse.” He grimaced. “But I miscalculated my deceleration and ran into a highway overpass, so it could have gone better.”
“I am shocked you aren’t just a smear on the pavement somewhere,” she said. She shuffled though the items in her pocket and got out the meds. “Okay, medical genius, do you know if you’re allowed to take this along with the advil or do we have to wait?”
“It’s fine,” Bruce said. “Just one though, I don’t want to be completely out of it.”
“Noted,” she said, getting up to pour him a new glass of water.
“I can take them dry,” he said.
“Nope, that’s disgusting. And you need to hydrate anyway.”
“’s why I was in the bathtub,” Bruce said. “You can survive weeks without food, but survival time is only days if you don’t have access to water. But if you have water and no salt, that can mess up your electrolyte balance enough and kill you too. So I was trying to pace myself.”
“Did you go to medical school or something?” she asked.
He had to wait until she’d given him the water and the pill before he could answer. “Yeah? Thought that was common knowledge. I dropped out, I assume the tabloids had a field day.”
“Why’d you drop out?”
“I couldn’t be my father,” he said.
“That’s probably for the best, given what kind of man he turned out to be,” she said.
She was aiming for reassuring, but all the softness dropped off of Bruce’s face. “He was a better human than I will ever be,” Bruce said grimly.
“He had a man killed,” Selina said.
“He didn’t. Your father did,” Bruce said, then looked away. “He never asked Falcone to murder that journalist, just to scare him into giving up on the story. Falcone saw a chance to get leverage over him. When he heard, he told Falcone he would go to the police and confess, probably get Falcone put away for murder. And that’s why they died.”
“You knew that, when you held me back from killing him?” Selina asked. Maybe the public wouldn’t believe that story, but Selina did. It fit perfectly with everything she knew about her father. In his world, everyone you didn’t have a hook in was a missed opportunity. Being able to puppet Gotham’s royalty would have been irresistible to him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “about your mother. I’m sorry about Annika.”
There were tears gathering in her eyes again. Bruce was staring past her shoulder, face blank again. He understood, didn’t he? He’d been desperate for her, desperate for someone to pay for what happened to him. She begged him to understand. “Didn’t you want him dead too?”
“Not as much as I wanted you to live,” Bruce said.
She sank down into a crouch and hid her face in her arms as the sob tore itself out of her throat. The wheels of the office chair squeaked as Bruce rolled closer. She couldn’t stop crying.
Tentatively, Bruce laid a hand on her head and began to run his hand over her hair, like someone trying to soothe a skittish cat. “I don’t know,” he said, “I just wanted it to stop, I wanted everything to stop. And I thought we needed him alive to make that happen. I’m sorry,”
“Of course your parents were perfect,” she said between sobs. “Only flaw was that they were–too trusting, right? Of course you aren’t like me. I’m fucked up. I wanted him dead. I wanted to kill him.”
Bruce didn’t say anything for a long time, continuing to pet her hair in awkward strokes. The sleeves of her borrowed hoodie were wet and smeared with snot by the time she got herself under control. “We aren’t our parents,” Bruce said. “And if you’re fucked up, then–then so am I. Wanted revenge my whole life, accomplished absolutely nothing except inspiring a serial killer. But not losing you meant more to me than making him pay. I’m sorry.”
“Gods, we are fucked up,” Selina said. She sat down and scrubbed her face off with the sleeves of her hoodie. “I’m not upset about you not letting me murder him. He’s dead. Turns out that’s good enough. I didn’t need to be holding the gun after all. But I remember how much I wanted it, and that scares me.”
“Yeah,” he said, like he understood. And he did understand. He hadn’t followed through in that final moment, but he’d been three steps ahead of her down that path of self-destruction. And maybe he would have done it if she hadn’t been there, needing someone to save her. She leaned back against the kitchen cabinets and rested her head on his lap.
“That Riddler lunatic wasn’t your fault,” she said.
“He told me I inspired him,” Bruce said. “He was doing all of that to impress me. He thought we were on the same side.”
“Men are so stupid sometimes,” Selina said. “You were chasing him down with the police, how the hell did he get that idea?”
Bruce thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know.”
“People don’t design Saw-style murders because they care about truth and justice. Maybe you inspired him with the costume, but once he jumped from ‘let’s beat up petty criminals on the street’ to ‘let’s have rats eat a guy’s face’ that’s on him.”
“He told me he was an orphan when I went to see him. He’d grown up in the old Wayne orphanage, before the fire. He said to me…” Bruce paused at petting her hair, let his fingers tangle in the fabric of her hoodie, “he said that Bruce Wayne wasn’t an orphan. I wasn’t starving like them, I wasn’t suffering like them.”
“Bullshit,” Selina said fiercely. “After my mom died I went to some pretty shitty group homes. If I’d had the choice between living in luxury and having her back there would have been no choice. I would have taken her back every time. I think you might be the only man in the world who could hear someone tell them you’re not an orphan because you didn’t suffer enough and believe it.”
“I never deserved any of this.”
“Good or bad?” she asked.
He snorted. “You know what I meant.”
“I think that’s enough self pity for both of us,” she said, hauling herself to her feet. She put a finger under his chin and tilted it up. He looked as wrecked as she felt, even if he hadn’t been the one sobbing on the kitchen floor. “You didn’t make him kill people. Not by being born rich, not by having your dad hand over a chunk of cash with zero oversight to the most corrupt city government in the world, not by being dramatic as hell and dressing to match. Everything he did is on him.”
He opened his mouth to speak and she moved her finger to his lips. “You don’t have to believe me. But you’re not going to change my mind. Now–are the meds kicking in? You breathing any easier?”
Bruce nodded. “I think so,” he whispered into her finger.
“Good. You’re gonna be getting pretty sleepy soon, and I want to get you to bed. But first we need to get you cleaned up, okay?”
Bruce nodded again and she rolled his chair out of the way so she could step up to the sink. She ran the water and scrubbed her face off. Leather jumpsuits and dishwater didn’t mix, so she shucked off the hoodie and undid the center zip of the suit so she could wiggle out of the top half. She threw Bruce a wink over her shoulder since he was, as she had certainly hoped, staring wide-eyed at her in her sports bra.
She washed the dishes and set them aside to dry, then wiped down the sink. That done, she beckoned him over.
He rolled over and let her turn him around so his back was to the sink. She stopped it up and started the water again, then draped the towel around his neck. “Were you petting me earlier?” she asked.
He blushed. “Sorry, I just wasn’t sure what to - ”
She shushed him: “No no, I wasn’t complaining. It was nice. Weird but nice. Mind if I return the favor?”
“If Alfred finds out you washed my hair in the kitchen sink he’s going to throw a fit,” Bruce said. He licked his lips. “Otherwise? No. I–I trust you.”
“He never has to know,” Selina promised.
Selina remembered her mother washing her hair in the sink when she’d been a kid, back in that apartment where the shower wouldn’t drain and their piece-of-shit landlord refused to fix it.
Remembered the edge of the cabinet pressing into the back of her neck, the pointed tips of her mother’s nails running along her scalp. She could have drowned in those memories, but instead of falling into one of his habitual silences Bruce started telling a story about being a teenager and dyeing his hair bright red in one of the showers. He’d managed to get red dye all over the bathroom and his sheets, but was too embarrassed to tell anyone, leading inevitably to a panicked Alfred assuming he’d been murdered in the night when he came to wake him up.
“I should have guessed you were an emo kid,” she said ruefully. She slipped her hand under the back of his head to support it as she drained out the grey water. This sink had one of those retractable sprayers, which she used to rinse out the shampoo. “So did Alfred raise you? After?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It was in my parent’s will. I have living relatives, but we’re not close and...they trusted Alfred. He was my dad’s bodyguard for years. I spent the whole funeral dreading the moment I’d be packed away upstate, but it never happened. Was years before I believed nobody was going to take me away.”
She pulled the towel up over his head and dried off his hair. His towels were soft too, everything here was soft. Then she unwrapped the facial soap she’d taken and lifted it to her nose, breathed in the scent of apricots. She loved hotel soaps. “You know,” she said, “they have televisions in hospitals. Alfred probably saw what happened to you. Probably scaring that poor man out of his mind.”
“He knows better than to worry about me,” Bruce argued.
She wiped the black off his face, gentling around his bruised eye. “I don’t think that’s how it works,” she said.
Without the makeup and with his hair freshly dried off, he looked less like a waterlogged raccoon or an especially sad stray cat. He still looked wrecked though, the makeup had only hidden the deep shadows under his eyes. Probably hadn’t gotten any sleep in the time he’d been sitting around with his unmedicated broken ribs.
“I think my phone’s dead anyways,” Bruce said, yawning. “It wasn’t plugged in.”
“We can charge it while you sleep,” she suggested. They were going to have to get him in bed soon or he’d fall asleep in the kitchen. The pain meds were definitely kicking in now, he was finally loosening up from the rigid pain-tight tension he’d been in since she’d found him.
Upstairs, she stripped the bed and remade it with sheets had hadn’t been smeared with grime from the floodwaters. They got Bruce transferred into bed and she tucked the covers in. His eyes followed her as she circled around the room to plug in his phone. “Are you going to leave?” he asked.
“For a little bit, after you go to sleep. I need to pick up some more comfortable clothes,” she said. She was still wearing her jumpsuit with the top half undone. She’d left the hoodie and it’s sodden sleeves in the kitchen. “And I need to feed my other strays.”
“Okay,” Bruce said softly, turning his face into the pillow. “I’m coming back,” she promised. She wasn’t sure if he believed her. On impulse, she leaned down and kissed him gently on the forehead. “Be back before you know it.”
–
She could have claimed one of the many guest rooms as hers, but his bed was big enough for two. After she got back to the tower and changed into her sleep shirt and shorts, she slid under the covers next to him.
“Sel’na?” He mumbled.
“Yeah baby, it’s me,” she said. She ran her fingers gently down one arm to rest her hand on his.
“Are they–will they send Annika home? To her family?” He asked muzzily.
Her heart clenched. Annika’s body had been claimed by the city coroner and hadn’t been released back to her next of kin. But, of course, Annika had no next of kin in America. Selina didn’t even know where her family lived. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Did you love her?” He asked.
“Yeah.” She had. They’d only ever been casual, like all of Selina’s lovers, but Annika had been easy to love. She’d brushed off Gotham’s grime with a laugh, like none of it could touch her.
And she’d been wrong.
“She shouldn’t be all alone here,” Bruce said. “I want her to go home.” He sounded close to tears, the meds leaving him soft and vulnerable.
Her eyes were watering again and she squeezed them shut, pressed her face against the pillow. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll make that happen. But you gotta sleep first.”