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“Are you alright?” Bruce asked her.
It… it was a fair question, Selina guessed. She had been staring into the fire for… she didn’t know how long. Something about the flames was soothing. She wasn’t certain wha—
No, no. She knew. She knew what it was she found soothing. Or maybe soothing wasn’t the right word. She didn’t know what the right word was. She couldn’t really think. But when she stared into the fire, it blinded her. When she shut her eyes, all she saw was the shadow of the flame. She didn’t see anything else. That was nice, right now.
She turned her head towards him minutely. They had gone to… God, this house had so many rooms in it. It was a living room, but she didn’t think it was a room Bruce usually used. When they’d gone in, there had been dust covers on the furniture, and Bruce had had to go looking for wood to put in the hearth, and tinder to light the fire, and a poker to stoke it with. The bookshelves were all empty. There were dark spots on the walls where she thought pictures might once have been hung. Why he’d picked this room, she didn’t know. She hadn’t been asking questions. She still didn’t feel like asking questions.
Selina looked at Bruce out of the corner of her eye, and when his face came into focus, concern showed itself in the tightness around his eyes, in the thin line of his mouth. She looked at him, conscious thought ebbing and flowing like the sea at low tide, and eventually she grabbed on to a thread enough to mutter, “…No.”
He came and sat down beside her. It was cold on the floor, even with the fire popping and crackling and burning in front of them, cold and hard. There was a couch behind them. It still had the dust cover on, but it would have been more comfortable than this. Selina couldn’t remember why she’d chosen the floor over the couch. She couldn’t remember sitting down at all.
There was a hand on her shoulder. No pressure. His fingers barely brushed against her, like he was afraid of… She didn’t know what. “Selina…” He sighed, long and hard. “About your father…”
She shook her head sharply, snarling. Suddenly, thought was easy again. Words were easy again. “Not him,” she snapped. “I told you; all I wanted from him was my mother’s name.” The name her mother had been too terrified to give the hospital when she had been bleeding to death in the maternity ward. The name she’d been too terrified to give even when she must have known she was dying, even when she must have known it was all her daughter would have of her. She could never forgive anyone who put that sort of fear in her mother’s heart—no matter who he was. “I got that, and I was done.” Her heart had jumped into her throat when he had been shot. It had felt so good to belt Dent across the face with that gun. “Not him.”
Not him, not him, not him. When she had been a little girl, she had used to fantasize about her father, whoever he might be. But when she was older, when she was old enough to really think about her mother’s circumstances, when she was old enough to listen to all of the rumors that surrounded her mother and really think about them, when she was old enough to start putting some things together… Not anymore. When she had been a little girl, she had used to fantasize about her father coming and finding her and taking her away. But not anymore. It had been years and years and years since those fantasies had turned to ash in her mouth. There was no phoenix gestating in those ashes. Just dust.
To his credit, it didn’t take Bruce long to pick up on another thread. But then, it wouldn’t have taken him very long, anyways. “Sofia, then,” he said softly.
Oh, God, the look in her eyes when she had been hanging in midair. Selina dug her fingers into her hair, fingernails scraping so hard against her scalp that stars burst under her eyelids as she screwed her eyes shut. The hot breath that escaped her mouth had the wobble of a laugh, the wetness of a sob. “And Alberto, too.”
The noise he had made after he’d been shot still came back to her at odd moments. She’d be walking down the street and someone would cough, and all she could hear would be the horrible rattling breaths he had taken after Dent had shot him again, and again, and again. She’d jolt awake after nightmares and she wouldn’t be able to catch her breath. She’d feel like there was something sitting on her chest in the dark, pinning her down so completely that she couldn’t lift herself off of the bed even an inch, and when she breathed, it was like she had his wet, rattling breaths stuck in her mouth. It had been nearly a year now since he’d been killed, and still she heard his dying breaths rattling in her ears from time to time, seeming always at moments when it would jar her most. God, when was it ever supposed to stop?
Bruce didn’t say anything. They hadn’t actually been in a relationship, a real relationship all that long, but they’d been together long enough for Selina to figure out that Bruce was almost totally incapable of actually talking about things, really talking about them. Things that involved feelings. Maybe if they’d been together longer the first time, they would have gotten to a point where he could. Maybe if she’d been willing to stick it out a little longer, he would have let down whatever walls he’d been holding up, and they could have just… talked. Really talked. Or maybe not. She didn’t know.
Bruce didn’t say anything, not now. Maybe Selina couldn’t really blame that on his seeming inability to talk about anything that involved feelings. There wasn’t… There wasn’t a whole lot you could say, if you weren’t a psychiatrist or a grief counselor or a chaplain or someone who was actually trained for situations like this.
She turned her gaze back on the fire, and let herself be blinded by it. Gradually, the image of Sofia’s face as she let go was burned away. It would come back to her when she slept. It would come back to her in dreaming, the way Alberto’s last, rattling breaths came back to her in waking. It was gone, for now.
“I stopped letting myself dream about my family finding me and taking me in a long time ago,” she started shakily. “They’re nice, dreams like that, but they aren’t anything you can live on. They don’t sustain you. There aren’t a whole lot of dreams that can sustain you in a world like this.
“I started trying to track down who my father was when I was… I don’t know, nineteen? I couldn’t do it all the time. A lot of times, focusing on that would have just distracted me from the business of surviving long enough to try and build a life. I couldn’t really focus on it until a few years later. Things were more secure, then. I had money coming in, didn’t have to worry as much about where my next rent check was coming from.”
The things she’d done to get that money were… questionable. At least where some people were concerned. Nothing on what Carmine Falcone—her father—had done to get his money, and if the law wanted to judge her, she would gladly point to him, but nothing she wanted to talk about with Bruce, not tonight. She didn’t want to get in a fight, not tonight, and a fight was surely what she would have if she went into detail. A man who’d never had to fight for everything he had wasn’t likely to understand. A man like that could never really understand.
Bruce didn’t pull on that thread. Part of Selina was grateful. Part of her was irritated he didn’t evince enough curiosity to— But that would have been counterproductive, and she already knew that. He was just… just letting her talk right now, and for that, she was undividedly grateful. “I didn’t need a family that had never come to find me,” she murmured. “That was what I told myself. It was the truth. I didn’t need them. I was looking for my father to see if he could tell me anything about my mother. Even back then, that was all I cared about. Or… or so I told myself.
“There were always rumors about my mother, but I didn’t track them down to Carmine Falcone ‘til a few months before Johnny Viti was murdered.” She leaned back on her elbows, careful never to angle her head so that she couldn’t stare still into the blinding flames. A bitter smile twisted on her lips. “I’d found out who my father was. Boy, did Mom know how to pick ‘em.” That bitter smile tasted like wormwood as it receded back into her mouth. “Though with the old man dead, I can’t say I know just how much ‘picking’ went into it.”
Who could refuse a man like that? She’d wondered about it sometimes. Not often—it hadn’t come up in her thoughts very often, and whenever it did, her skin started crawling immediately afterwards, so it had always been easier to leave it alone. But even if her mother had been enamored, and even if he had once held her in high enough regard that he could see her features in Selina’s face more than thirty years later, who could refuse a man like that? Who would ever dare to look that man in the eye and tell him ‘no?’ Who would dare to behave as if they weren’t flattered when he paid court, who would dare act like the feeling wasn’t mutual when he—
She didn’t want to think about it. It made her uncomfortable. She was thinking about it, anyways.
“For however little it may be worth,” Bruce said slowly, “I can’t remember ever hearing of the Roman being seen with women who weren’t family to him, not in our lifetime.”
Selina looked over at him. There was still firelight imprinted on her eyes; when she looked at him, he looked as if he was on fire. “’Not in our lifetime,’” she echoed, before chuckling weakly. “But you don’t know about before, do you?”
He didn’t answer, but his silence was as much of an answer as Selina could have asked for.
She breathed in, long and deep, almost gagging when she caught a cooling cinder in her mouth. “By the time I figured out who my father was, I hadn’t actually wanted a father in years. And I didn’t want to get tangled up in the shit the Falcones get up to, not the way I would if by some miracle dear old Dad actually wanted to bring me into the fold instead of just sweeping me back under the rug. I’d rather have Carmine Falcone as an enemy than as somebody trying to make me fall in line behind him. I didn’t want him as a father. I still don’t.
“But when I found out who my father was, that entailed finding out about the rest of his family. Honestly, I wasn’t interested in most of them. They sounded…” A huff of hollow laughter escaped Selina’s mouth. “…Absolutely insufferable.”
Beside her, Bruce actually snickered. “They are.” Quickly sobering, “Or… they were, anyways.”
“Yeah, class acts, the lot of them. Put me in a room with them and somebody’d be dead by noon. Do you know, it was actually kind of reassuring?” She’d never expected to feel that way when she encountered her birth family, but then, that was before she’d figured out who her birth family (her paternal birth family, and with Carmine Falcone dead, Selina didn’t have much hope of ever tracking down the other side) was. “When I was a little girl, I used to dream about my family coming and finding me and taking me away. I’d cut those dreams loose, but it was still reassuring to find out that most of them were just such… fucking awful people that I wouldn’t have been happy with them, anyways.”
That was little consolation to the kernel of that little girl that still burned in the back of her mind. Selina’s inner child was always hungry. Not just for food, but for… for everything. With the clear eyes of a woman, she could see how unhappy she would have been, growing up in such an environment as that one. Carmine Falcone’s bastard daughter would have always led a… a liminal existence in the Falcone family, at best, and that liminal existence would never have been a comfortable one. She wasn’t a child anymore. She knew how these things worked. Physical needs being seen to just… just wasn’t enough. You could be fed without being nurtured, and you could be housed without being sheltered. But she still couldn’t quite push that little voice out of the back of her head, couldn’t quite banish the desires which had once been in the forefront of her mind and her heart when she was a little girl who had yet to blow the stardust from her eyes.
Her paternal family had been made up largely of horrible people. She would certainly not have been happy growing up among them. She never would have gone hungry, never would have worried about where the next rent check was coming from and where she was going to be laying herself down to sleep—provided she managed to stay in her father’s good graces. And she would have been constantly shaping her thoughts around how to stay in her father’s good graces. Everything in her life would have revolved around that, no matter what else was true. And Selina didn’t think she could ever have lived her life like that. A life where everything hinged on what level of affection someone else held her in was a life she would have torn to pieces in frustration before she could ever find out what it was like when dear old Dad didn’t like the boy she’d brought home from school.
Her stomach turned. Speaking of stuff like that…
“Finding out who my father was entailed finding out who the rest of his family were. It also meant…” If she could have just stared into the fire for the rest of the night, she might have been happy. As happy as she could be, anyways. If she could have just stared into the fire and forgotten everything she had come to stare at it to avoid seeing, she might have been happy, for some value of happy. “It also meant finding out that I had a brother and sister I had never known growing up.”
Still, Bruce was silent. At this point, his sheer silence was starting to dig under Selina’s skin like a splinter. But she couldn’t reach it to pry it out, so she would just keep on like she had been. Talking. He wasn’t any good at talking about feelings, anyways. She’d have to do enough talking for both of them—even if it did feel like she was ripping out her own guts.
“Didn’t let myself think that either of them would actually want anything to do with me if they knew who I was.” At least, she’d not let herself dream about it after the first few minutes, when dreaming had been entirely compulsive and completely involuntary. She’d grown up around kids who had siblings, brothers and sisters; she knew it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. But still, there had been times when the idea of having a constant companion, the idea of having someone she could safely confide anything in, had been to her what dreams of freedom had been to prisoners trapped in their cells for the rest of their lives. She’d figured out soon enough that there weren’t any such constant companions, not ones who were trustworthy, but still, she had dreamed, until she’d finally figured out how to put those dreams to bed. “Far as I knew when I first figured things out, they were probably both dear old Dad’s carbon copies where values were concerned. If he didn’t want me around, why should they? And far as I knew, they were both up to their necks in the Falcone’s dealings. Not the kind of people I could really stand being in the same room with.”
Anybody who thought swiping a necklace off of a rich lady once in a while was the same as shaking down every shop owner in a neighborhood for protection money was kindly invited to get the hell out of Selina’s sight. Selina had never broken bones when someone wouldn’t give her something, not as direct punishment. Selina had never thrown someone over the side of a bridge when they wouldn’t play ball with her. They were not the same. And she still didn’t want the probably inevitable argument with Bruce.
“But the more I learned, the more I started to wonder. Sofia had gone to prison, but it sounded like her father had just… I don’t know how it went down. Maybe it was her idea. Maybe I’ve got the whole thing all wrong, and all of this is wishful thinking.” Another laugh, bitter as ash. “It’s probably all wishful thinking. Sure as hell can’t ask any of them anymore. I’m probably just spinning castles in the air, imagining everything that could have been. Seems about my speed right now.”
Now would have been a good time for Bruce to interject. He didn’t, of course. Right. His vote of confidence in the castles Selina was spinning was duly noted. She couldn’t even stand to finish the thought now. It all sounded ridiculous in her heard; it probably would have choked her if she’d tried to say it.
“I… I’d started to wonder about them after a while. Sofia and Alberto. There were signs that pointed towards them actually having some thoughts in their heads that their father hadn’t put there, which… Yeah, it was more than I had been expecting when I’d first figured out about my own father. I still didn’t have much hope that either of them would actually want anything to do with me. Wasn’t certain the revelation of some secret bastard child would be enough to break up the family unit, but most people still don’t appreciate it when others bring that sort of strife into their families.” She sighed heavily. “I’ve seen it happen. It’s a lot easier to blame the kid that came out of nowhere than it is to blame the cheating parent. But then…”
“But then,” Bruce spoke up at last, though softly, still softly, “you actually spoke to Alberto Falcone.”
Selina’s first idea, before she had understood better the way things actually stood in the Falcone family, was that making inroads with Carmine Falcone’s son was the best chance she had of actually getting within eyesight of Carmine Falcone himself. Later, when she had learned better the way things actually stood… Well, that initial plan having been bombed from orbit, Selina had still focused her efforts on finding a way into conversation with Alberto Falcone.
Carmine Falcone’s thoroughly disregarded son, who seemed to put more effort into staying out of sight whenever he could get away with it than he did anything else, that was not a road by which Selina would gain quick access to a man for whom she had many questions. He put an enormous amount of effort into staying out of sight, and no one ever really seemed interested in seeking him out. He had no influence; he wasn’t a means by which she could easily get close enough to Carmine to start asking questions. What was true, though, was that Alberto was the one Selina was most likely to catch alone, the one she was most likely to be able to speak to in private. And she had been able to catch him alone, and far more quickly than she had initially anticipated. But when she did…
First of all, she’d wondered for a little while if she even had the right man. If Selina’s information was right, Alberto Falcone was born barely a month before she was—and given Carmine Falcone’s age, for him to have children more than a few years older than that would have strained credulity close to the breaking point. But the man Selina had found alone on that yacht hadn’t looked anything like she would expect of a man in his early thirties. She would have pegged him a good ten years older than that, at least. But her information wasn’t wrong, and she had had the right man. Thin and careworn and fast growing old before his time, but she had the right man.
“I,” Selina said slowly, “have never met a more abjectly miserable man in my life. You know how, sometimes, you can just look at someone and tell they haven’t been genuinely happy in years? Not like the five-second burst you get when you get a package in the mail or you find a ten on the sidewalk, but really happy?”
This time, there was a certain character to Bruce’s silence that Selina couldn’t quite identify. But after a moment, she listened to its staticky quality and realized he was actually affronted.
Selina rolled her eyes so far back in her head that for a moment, the whole world went black. “I’m not talking about you, Bruce, though now that I think about it, I sure as hell could be.”
“This conversation isn’t about me,” Bruce asserted stiffly.
“No, it’s not. Could be, but it’s not.” The mirth that had come up on her suddenly, briefly, swam in her stomach like rancid seawater. She wanted to cling to it, even as it wanted to come back up. She wanted to cling to anything that wasn’t the sound of those wet, rattling breaths Alberto had taken at the last, before he had slipped over the railing and out of sight. But it all came back to that, one way or another. It would never not come back to that, one way or another. The fire was a reprieve. It wasn’t one that would last, but it was enough for her that she could stare into it, and not see anything else. For now, anyways. For now. “I’ve never met someone so miserable,” she mumbled. “He didn’t even have to talk about it that much; you could just feel it… bleeding off of him.” People who had no way to get out of their lives were like that. But most people at least had some hope of getting out of their lives sooner or later, and Alberto… Alberto hadn’t seemed to have any hope at all. None that she could see in his careworn face, or hear in his resigned voice. “It wasn’t what I was expecting.
“Wasn’t expecting he’d take to me, either. Wasn’t expecting I’d take to him. But we… we did.” She didn’t need a family. She’d never needed one. But even when she had told herself over and over again that she didn’t need one and she didn’t need to get bogged down in any desire for one, there had still been times when she’d wanted one. She couldn’t help it; people always get stuck wanting things they should have had, but had been denied. But she knew better than to go chasing after things that would forever slip further out of reach the further she chased after them. There were plenty of things closer nearby for her to grab onto; there always had been. But that night… “We talked a bit, and I actually… did like him?
“I really did like him, Bruce. I wasn’t expecting it. I really wasn’t expecting it. I told myself that the best I could hope for with any of them was that I wouldn’t want to throw them out a window after talking to them for five minutes. But I talked with Alberto, I talked with my brother, and I actually liked him. He wasn’t tolerable; he was actually likable. I’d told myself I couldn’t really expect Alberto or Sofia to actually want anything to do with me, but for about five minutes, I let myself think…” She let her gaze drift up to the dark, dusty ceiling. After staring into the fire for so long, it was all so dark. She welcomed the blindness. She couldn’t guess at why her eyes burned. She didn’t want to think about it. “…Maybe this family thing could actually work out? Maybe I might actually get to have a relationship with someone in my family after all? Maybe I might actually be able to have that kind of connection with someone? I hadn’t let myself dream of having a real family in years, but for five minutes…”
And for five minutes, she had listened to Alberto talk, she had felt the absolute misery and loneliness bleeding off of him, and other thoughts had she entertained. It had been wishful thinking. If she’d had her head screwed on straight, she would have understood in the moment how unlikely it was and she would have taken a step back, would have put a bit of realism back in her mind and maybe stepped a little further back, in addition.
He wanted out. Badly. He’d said as much to Bruce—to Batman—when he’d decided to drop in for a less than friendly visit, but it had been obvious to Selina even without the words spoken aloud, proven beyond all doubt. Alberto had not seemed like a man even remotely happy with the state of his life. Had not seemed like a man happy with where he was, and who he was forced to share space with. And soaking all of it was the resigned bitterness of a man who just… just didn’t see any way out.
And maybe there wasn’t any way out in this case. Maybe, when your father was the Roman, when your father was the Godfather of Gotham City, a man who had had men killed over minor insults, let alone the massive insult represented by his son even trying to walk away from the family, from that kind of life, there really wasn’t any way out. Maybe, when your name was Falcone, and that name would follow you everywhere you went, there wasn’t really any way out. Maybe the only thing you could do was sit tight, keep your head down as best you could, and wait for the old man to die, all the while hoping and praying that you’d have enough years left in you when you put your father in the ground that you actually could have some kind of life away from his shadow. Maybe… maybe even that wouldn’t be enough.
Maybe you needed someone on the outside to toss you a lifeline. By his own admission, Alberto had been a weak man. But he had had years to stew in bitterness and regret over what it had cost him the last time he had failed to rise to the challenge of standing up to his father (‘Terrible things,’ ‘terrible things,’ she did not want to think about what he meant by terrible things, but Selina had always had a fertile imagination, and she was thinking about it now), and sometimes weak people didn’t find their strength the first time it was needed. Sometimes weak people didn’t find their strength until after they got a long, bitter dose of what weakness cost them, and sometimes even after that, they couldn’t find their strength anywhere but in the assurance that they wouldn’t have to go it alone. Selina had seen it before. She could have seen it again.
Could have.
“And then…” And then, the fireworks. Then, the gunshot. Then, those wet, rattling breaths that still chased Selina at the edge of waking, at the edge of her attention. “…And then it was all over.” She could feel something like those wet, rattling breaths building in her throat even now, and though they had nothing of the death rattle in them, there was still something about them that felt like they might kill her. “I was back to square one, but worse: for five minutes, I let myself dream about having a family again, and then he was gone, it was all gone. I spent months trying to figure out how to get at the Roman…” Except she’d hated him more than before, she found herself with a newfound wealth of gnawing hate for he who cared so little for his son, that thin, careworn, abjectly miserable man, that he'd used his fucking funeral as a pretext to get at Bruce’s money. It had been hard. Between the dreams, and the waking, and the hate that bit her so deep it made her feel sometimes as if she was dying, it had been hard. “And I couldn’t figure out how I was ever supposed to get close enough to him, to even ask all of those questions. And then there was Sofia—”
Sofia, who had plainly loved her—their—father, and even if that love might have been colored by fear (Selina couldn’t imagine how it couldn’t have been), she could spy none of the poisonous, self-loathing resentment that had chased after every word that came out of Alberto’s mouth. Sofia, who couldn’t seem to imagine life without her father, and who did that, what kind of father even tried to set his children up to be unable to consider living in the world after he was gone, what kind of man would do that to his children, who…
“—And she…” Selina couldn’t remember if she’d screamed. If either of them had screamed. She didn’t know why she couldn’t remember. It wasn’t like it was with Alberto, it hadn’t been months and months, it had been hours, but she couldn’t remember if Sofia had screamed as she had fallen. If she had screamed after she had let go. “And I couldn’t pull her up.”
Maybe that was why Sofia had let go. Maybe Sofia had looked at this woman in a literal catsuit, a woman she must have known only as one of her father’s enemies, and had felt some mercy in her heart, had looked up at this woman who was nothing but a stranger to her, and she had decided that only one of them had to die that night. But Selina wasn’t that hopeful. She didn’t have much hope that it had been out of personal regard. There was no reason for it to be, and the look of resigned despair in Sofia’s eyes as she had let go of Selina’s hand did not suggest anything resembling regard.
There was no hand in hers now. There was no hand to slip from hers, there was no despair to pierce her heart that was not already there. There was a hand on her shoulder, though, tentative, as if it did not know if it would be wanted. “Selina…” There came a long, hard sigh. “Selina, I am so sorry…”
She barely heard him. She wasn’t certain it would have made much of a difference even if she had been able to devote all of her attention to him, to his reactions. She was busy with her own… She was a bit too busy drowning in the bitter soup of her own thoughts.
“Probably wouldn’t have made any difference for me if either of them had lived, anyways.” Selina felt something caustic in her mouth. She felt as if it was trying to erode the enamel on her teeth, felt as though it was trying to burn a hole into her tongue, before it just devoured the whole thing. “If I’d actually managed to tell Alberto why I’d started talking to him, he probably would have thought I was just using him to his father.”
“You were trying to get to his father,” Bruce pointed out unhelpfully.
Selina wondered for a moment why the hell she had followed Bruce back here in the first place. Then, she remembered it was because she hadn’t wanted to be alone after… after everything that had happened. She hadn’t wanted to be alone after everything that had happened, and she had wanted for company someone who actually knew what it was that had happened to her. Wanted the company of someone who knew who she was when she had that mask on, and when she had it off, and knew exactly what she had watched happen.
Because of that, she restricted herself from turning away from the fire long enough to glare at Bruce. “Please go on rubbing it in.”
He grimaced and turned his face away from her.
“It would have all gone wrong, one way or another,” Selina muttered, when she found her train of thought again. “He’d have thought I was just using him to get to his father, and he wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with me. Or even if we did get to know each other better, we just would have wound up hating each other.” And if she had ever tried to toss that lifeline, he wouldn’t have taken it, unwilling to trust that she actually meant it, or too fearful of the reprisals that were certain to follow. “Sofia definitely wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with me, not really. She wouldn’t have been able to forgive someone who set out to hurt her father, no matter who they were. It would have all gone wrong, anyways. It didn’t matter what I wanted.” She let another mirthless laugh out of her mouth. “Didn’t matter that I barely even let myself want it. It would have all gone wrong.”
Bruce was silent for so long that Selina thought he might simply let her fill the air up with words against once she found any to say. (They both would have been waiting a long time for that. She felt like she’d pried every word she was capable of out of her mouth with a pair of pliers.) She wasn’t certain how she felt about that. There was nothing in the silence to challenge her, and this was not a night when she particularly wanted to be challenged, not after—
(Her mother’s name had been Louisa. And she knew absolutely nothing else about her. Didn’t know where she’d come from, didn’t know what she’d done for a living, didn’t know what she liked to eat or what her voice sounded like or whether she would have been a particularly affectionate mother. She had a name, but it wasn’t a balm. It was an answer, but it was no balm, and it left her… unfulfilled. Permanently unfulfilled, or at least for as long as she didn’t know where else she could turn to learn more.)
—everything. There was nothing in the silence to test Selina or challenge her. But in the silence, there was nothing to stem the tides of thought and raw, unspooling emotion that rushed out of the back of her mind, yawning and hungry and ready to devour and drown. She couldn’t say how she felt about the silence. Silence felt right for the aftermath of everything she had seen, everything she had felt, but it was also an emptiness through which everything else could come rushing in, hungry for her, insatiable unless it might be sated by swallowing her whole.
At length, Bruce broke that silence, banishing the power of everything which would have sooner eaten her than let the tumult subside into anything resembling peace. “Maybe it would have all gone wrong,” he said quietly, carefully, as if he was weighing every word and checking it for traps. “Maybe nothing would have gone the way you wanted to, and there would have been nothing between you and either of them. Or maybe it wouldn’t have. Maybe Alberto would still have been interested in having some kind of relationship with you even after the truth came out. Maybe Sofia would have been interested in having a sister. Maybe—” she looked at him out of the corner of her eye, just in time to catch the troubled shadow that descended like a shroud over his face “—without their father casting his shadow over them, they would have been able to make different choices. Or any choices at all, in Alberto’s case,” he added, not quite as an afterthought—it felt too pointed to be that. “You can’t know, Selina. You can’t know for certain.”
She shook her head. “I wasn’t expecting you to be the voice of optimism tonight. That’s not really your speed.”
“What do you want from me, Selina?” he asked her seriously. Not irritated, not impatient, just… Just like it was an actual question, with an actual answer that he would actually take seriously, if she chose to give it to him.
Selina ran through about a dozen different possible answers in her head, each of them glibber than the last. But there was something else continually pushing its way to the surface with each glib maybe-response, something that took on more of the shape of a scream the longer she didn’t touch on it directly, something that burned her throat like acid and beat against her teeth like bile. The look in Sofia’s eyes, the rattling breaths that had escaped Alberto’s mouth… She wanted to scream; oh, God, she wanted to scream.
“I… I watched them both die,” she choked out, hands quivering in her lap. “Every time I close my eyes, I see Sofia looking up at me as she falls. It’s been close to a year and I still hear those fucking awful breaths Alberto took after he was shot every time I wake up from a nightmare. I…” Her eyes stung. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t breathe. “How am I supposed to just move on from that?”
She was talking to a man who had watched both of his parents die. She knew that when she said it. She’d known it before she even met him. Selina had never known Bruce to milk it for sympathy, though he’d attracted his fair share of sympathy anyways. But she knew when people were chased around by their shadows. Most people were, but Bruce… Bruce had more shadows than most people had teeth. She knew this one was still one of his shadows. She knew it was still present.
Once again, she was met with a long, long silence. Selina couldn’t decide if she preferred it this way. Perhaps at some point earlier, she had thought that she did, and there was probably some merit to that decision—when they had first embarked on their past relationship, a little over a year ago had it been, Selina had gotten used to Bruce firing off glib responses when he encountered questions that made him even remotely uncomfortable. When he had stopped being glib in the face of discomfort and actually weighed the question and his response, she had known that he was actually taking her—taking them—seriously.
But while Bruce was silent, while he sank down into shadows and thought about everything he could have strung together, everything that might have satisfied her or might not, Selina was left to wonder what he might say instead, was left to wonder… Was just left to watch her own thoughts circle around her with bared teeth and slavering jaws. She hated feeling like this. It made her feel as if she should have just left the mystery of… of herself down in the earth with her mother. At least if she had, she wouldn’t be in such pain.
Bruce finally answered her, and his reply was about as comforting as Selina had expected it to be. “I never have,” he admitted reluctantly, the words dragging on his lips. “But you aren’t me, Selina. I don’t think the grief will ever go away completely, but…”
He didn’t say anything more. The hand that he had set on her shoulder, he had let slip away at some point or another. But now, just as awkwardly, just as tentatively, as if he didn’t know what to do when actual emotions were involved (and maybe he didn’t) he was slipping his arm around her shoulders. Selina could almost crack a smile, if only because Bruce didn’t seem to remember that you were supposed to draw somebody in when you did that, but the smile wouldn’t quite come. “Is this,” she asked dryly, “the part where you tell me you’ll be there if I need you?”
“I…” When Selina looked away from the fire, she could make out just enough of Bruce’s face to see his mouth moving as though he couldn’t decide whether to smile or not. “You beat me to it. But yes, it is.”
And Selina didn’t technically need anyone to fill that role for her. She never had, not really. There wasn’t a pain in the world that couldn’t be borne alone, if it was necessary. But it was like other things, Selina had discovered. Just because she didn’t need it, didn’t necessarily mean she didn’t want it. Sometimes, there were things she wanted very badly, even if she didn’t need them.
Well, if Bruce wasn’t going to draw in closer, she would. She set her head against his shoulder, eased off into an exhausted half-sleep by the steady rise and fall of his chest. She did not know what she would see when she slept. She did not know what she would hear when she woke. Dread still stalked the borders of her waking mind. But even so, it was nice to know that she wouldn’t be going it alone anymore.