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When Bruce Wayne comes home from a meeting at Wayne Enterprises he doesn’t expect to find Selina Kyle in his kitchen. And he certainly doesn’t expect to see her perched on top of the counters, rifling through the upper cupboards.
But nevertheless, there she is, with her black leather jacket and wild, rain-dusted curls, irreverently resting her worn boots against the expensive granite countertop and pawing through the shelves like an unimpressed cat.
He enters the kitchen soundlessly, and though she doesn’t bother to turn around, they both know that she knows he’s there.
“Do you not have any cereal in your house?” she asks in lieu of an actual greeting.
“Hi to you too, Selina,” he says, slipping off his coat and hanging it on the back of a kitchen chair.
Part of him wants to ask how she got in without triggering his newly updated security system, but he doesn’t bother. She was never one to give away her secrets, and if knowing her for years has taught him anything, it’s that if she’s determined to, she can get in even where smoke can’t.
So instead he says, “What are you looking for?”
“A snack. One that’s not weird,” she clarifies, pausing to turn her head toward him for the first time since he entered the kitchen, and he feels his breath catch ever so slightly, like it’s stalled somewhere behind his collarbone, like it always does whenever her green eyes land on him. “Do you have any cheese that doesn’t stink or is in a freaking wheel? Why is it even in a wheel? Is it a rich person thing? Doesn’t really smell any better than the kind you can get in a can.”
Bruce frowns. “You can get cheese in a can?”
“Yes, Bruce,” she says, rolling her eyes as she swivels around to fully face him. “Some of us are normal. Not all of us can be billionaires who can afford Italian castles and fancy cheeses.”
“Chalet. In Switzerland,” he says almost absently as he takes her in. He’s corrected her so many times he knows she must know the difference by now and is just messing with him. It’s become something of a comfortable old routine for them.
“Wow, I stand corrected,” she says, and he can practically hear the sarcasm dripping off her voice as she twists around again to continue her rummaging. “Chalets definitely fall under normal guy territory.”
She picks up some kind of box from the right side of the cupboard and looks it over, but whatever it is, it not must not impress her, because she wrinkles her nose and unceremoniously chucks the box back in.
He rolls his eyes.
“Get off the counter,” he says. “I’ll cook you something.”
There’s a slight sparkle in her eye that suggests that this was her plan all along, but Bruce can’t really bring himself to care if he’s taken the bait and walked right into her trap. They never seem to be able to spend enough time together lately. An hour here, a minute there, a handful of late night meetings on rooftops. All of those add up, he supposes, but not to as much as he’d like.
He stands there, waiting for her to get off the counter, his dark eyes staring into her light ones, until finally her lips curve up into a smirk and she slowly slides off the counter without breaking eye contact, as if she wants him to know that she’s only getting off the counter because it’s her choice, that she’s humoring him because it amuses her.
Such a cat, he thinks, and isn’t at all surprised when she hops up to sit on the edge of the kitchen table instead.
“You don’t really have to, you know,” she says after a moment, and there isn’t any trace of guilt or sheepishness in her voice, but there’s something in her gaze, or maybe in her tone, that tells him that she only wants him to cook for her if he really wants to, not because she’s goaded him into it.
“It’s fine,” he says as he rolls up his sleeves and heads to the fridge. There’s very little that he won’t do for the girl currently sitting in his kitchen. She really doesn’t have to orchestrate breaking into his house and rummaging through the cupboards to get him to cook for her. All she needs to do is ask, and there’s a small part of him that aches at knowing that she still isn’t used to that, isn’t used to just being able to ask and have someone willing to help. But he will. He always will for her.
One day, he thinks, glancing back at her, one day he’ll make her realize it.
#
There’s something nice about watching Bruce cook, Selina decides, watching as he flips bacon with a spatula and listens as it sizzles in the pan. It’s soothing. Soothing enough that she actually finds herself sliding off the kitchen table and onto a proper chair at the end of the table just so she can get a better view. The thing is, no one has ever taken care of her, not really. Bruce grew up with three people who loved him and cared for him and, well, Selina didn’t. She’s been looking out for herself for as far back as she can remember. Normal things, like having someone to cook for her or protect her, seem like luxuries she’s never really been allowed to have. She still remembers how shocked she was back when Bruce first cooked for her. To know that he cooked for her specifically. And though she’d rather carve out her tongue than admit it out loud, she’d be lying if she said she hasn’t taken every opportunity since then to get him to do it again.
Like today.
Bruce places the bacon onto a bed of crisp lettuce and fresh tomato and some kind of bread that she doesn’t know the name of but looks fancier and more delicious than the kind of cheap pre-sliced white bread she normally gets for herself, and slides the plate over to her. For a moment she lets her carefully crafted poker face slip and beams at him as she grabs the BLT.
She’s used to people doing her favors only because they want something in return, knows that most kindness comes with strings attached, but Bruce isn’t like that. She bites into her sandwich content with the knowledge that it was freely given, that she doesn’t have to worry about what he expects back from her. You can’t always count on that in her world, but she knows she can count on this boy. This boy who’s willing to cook for her when she shows up out of the blue to harass him, this boy who came into her life by chance and turned everything she’s ever known on its head since then, this boy that she…that she lo-
She can’t finish the thought. Can’t fully form it in her head. But it’s there, just the same. She feels it like it’s something physical, and she knows it like a fact. It’s scary and exhilarating all at once, like the first time she ever jumped from one roof to another. She remembers the exact moment she was first airborne, and it felt like time had slowed down and suspended her in the sky, and then how it felt like she was falling, even though she was really just landing. She had wanted to scream and laugh all at once and her heart had pounded in her chest and a smile had spread across her face because she’d never felt so alive.
That’s how Bruce makes her feel. She glances up from the sandwich to him, to find that he’s watching her with a slight smile on his lips and softness in his eyes. He has no business looking at her like that, she thinks. Gazes like that are meant for girls who are made of silk and softness and light, not girls like her who are made of sharp edges and dark nights and who literally wear claws at the tips of their fingers.
And yet he is looking at her like that. And there it is again, her heart pounding in her chest like she’s making her first jump again, and there’s something electric in her blood and a smile that’s threatening to spill across her face.
He cocks his head, and his eyes search hers. “What are you thinking about?” he asks.
She’s thinking that the world is full of rotten luck and unhappy endings. She’s thinking that the entire city is a flaming wreck, but if she’s happened to meet him and they’ve managed to stay in each other’s lives this long and he looks at her like that, maybe it’s proof that there are miracles after all.
But she doesn’t say that. Doesn’t say she sometimes feels like he’s the only good thing left in the sordid city. Doesn’t say that he feels like a light in the dark.
It’s too soft, too open, too vulnerable. Three things she’s never been and frankly doesn’t see the point in being. Girls like her had more in common with feral cats than they ever did with doves.
“I was remembering my first jump,” she says instead, pausing to lick some bacon grease off her thumb. “That feeling you get where you feel yourself falling, and it’s amazing, you know?”
He smiles. “Yeah,” he says, and from the way he’s staring at her, she wonders if he’s not strictly talking about rooftops either, just like she wasn’t. “I know the feeling.”