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She doesn’t linger long in Gotham after she sees Bruce gather up Miss Kitty and return to his car.
Selina wants to show herself, aches to go home with him to his castle like he offered. But Catwoman is still there, Catwoman who lashes out, who destroys stuff and blows it up because it’s interesting and fun, who is broken and does her best to break others. Selina won’t bring that into Bruce’s nice house, even if he did ask.
So she watches him drive away, and then she takes herself out of town. It doesn’t matter where, so long as she goes someplace that’s not here.
***
Her biggest fear, when she first ran away, was that she would fall apart again, come crashing down into a fall that she couldn’t come back from this time.
Surprisingly, no such thing happens.
Perhaps it’s because she ended up choosing a good place to disappear to. Bludhaven isn’t far from Gotham City, and is just about as bad in terms of crime. The difference is that Bludhaven’s crime, uninterfered with by any caped vigilantes, is of the more common-or-garden variety, while Gotham has been home to a parade of more colorful and chaotic criminals ever since the Joker incident a few years ago.
(That’s the surface difference, anyway. The real difference, Selina suspects - and she’s not alone - is that something is just twisted about Gotham. People just...snap, sometimes, in that city. It’s not necessarily a new phenomenon, just one that’s become more visible since the advent of Batman. Nobody likes to talk about it, but Selina knows .
It happened to her, after all.)
Bludhaven might not have the same kind of baseline insanity for her to camoflage her broken parts in, but it does offer a citizenry who is so worn down from the constant crime that they’ve collectively elected to strictly mind their own business and pay no attention to anything that might be dangerous.
This attitude, while being one she scorns, is nonetheless helpful. Catwoman robs a few pay phones for change and Selina gets it converted to cash at the bank, and no one tries to stop her or ask her any questions. She scans the ads and finds herself a furnished apartment, and the landlord doesn’t bat an eye at the way she’s still a little fractured and hysterical when she talks sometimes, losing her words and finding the wrong ones. He just takes her deposit and first and last months’ rent with a weary, blinkered kind of resignation, and that’s that.
Once she’s settled in, Catwoman thrives in Bludhaven. The first night, her upstairs neighbor gets drunk and starts threatening his wife and daughter, and she dons her newly-mended suit and goes slinking up the fire escape to beat the man unconscious and leave him hanging from the tenement laundry line. When it turns out, a few days later, that he’s affiliated with a local gang that knows how to hold a grudge, Catwoman dances with the grunts who come after her until it’s not fun anymore and she summarily ends things.
(She couldn’t say why, but she doesn’t kill them, even though it would be so so easy. She knocks the lot of them out and leaves them tied up outside the nearest precinct, and maybe it’s because of Bruce-the-Bat, but if it is, whose business is that?)
Somehow, this ends up launching her into some kind of trajectory as a vigilante. It’s not what she had in mind for herself, but it keeps her occupied, and when that doesn’t provide her with enough entertainment, there’s plenty of havoc to wreak elsewhere. She’s not quite so ostentatious as she once was - only one life left, after all - so even after a period of months, the police haven’t a clue about either the person who keeps delivering them heavily bruised mob toughs nor the one who will occasionally smash up a department store’s jewelry counter and pet section.
That’s all very well for Catwoman, but Selina deserves to have a life, too - after all, she spent long enough pushed aside already. So she watches the Help Wanted ads, and shortly after her arrival in town, gets a new secretary job. It’s a smaller company than her previous one, but her boss never belittles her or treats her like a glorified waitress, and sometimes even seriously asks for her opinion on some decision, and when, in the interview, Selina is asked about her previous job, she says, I worked for Max Schreck until just recently, when he died and then it turned out he was kind of scum , and her boss doesn’t dismiss any of it, just nods and says, Yes, I’ve heard some things about Mr. Schreck, I can promise you we’re not like that at this company .
Selina’s not so sure whether she trusts that affirmation, but it’s been nearly half a year and she hasn’t found anything to disprove it, so perhaps this is all right, perhaps this is safe and something she can keep if she decides she wants to.
(Here’s the thing: Bruce-the-Bat may have said that they were split down the middle, but it’s nothing so black-and-white for her. She is Selina Kyle and she is Catwoman, both at once, all the time, and while the pendulum does swing from one to the other, it’s none so extreme as it once was. Selina is bolder and tougher and burns brighter now, and Catwoman is learning a little healthy caution, isn’t quite as wild and deranged. She’s finding a balance.)
***
Selina has just celebrated her six-month anniversary of having a boss who doesn’t refer to having to “housebreak” her when she learns that Wayne Enterprises is going to partner on a long-term project with her new place of employement.
The way she learns this is by glimpsing his name on the meeting brief she’s handing out, a few seconds before he walks in the door.
She sees him just barely before he sees her, and has a handful of rapid heartbeats to decide what to do. He greets the room with a polite, “Gentlemen,” and then his eyes meet hers.
“Miss Kyle,” he says, a faint major chord of emotion in his voice, and it takes everything she has to stay put.
“I’m sorry, have we met?” she asks innocently, for all the world like on the day they met in Schreck’s office, except that she’s not nearly as hazy.
Bruce blinks, and his face shuts down almost imperceptibly. “No, I’m sorry. You must have mistaken you for somebody else.”
“Don’t you mean you must have?” escapes before she can stop herself.
But then, “Mr. Wayne, glad you could make it,” interrupts them, with her boss coming over to shake Bruce’s hand, mercifully oblivious to their interchange.
Selina takes a breath, and steps away.
***
Later, when the meeting is over and everyone is leaving, Bruce finds her and pulls her aside into a corner.
“Selina, do you really not know me?” he asks, his voice a little rough. “Is this that amnesia blur thing again? Or are you just faking because you don’t want to talk to me?”
His face softens just a tiny bit. “I’m not going to drag you back to Gotham if you don’t want to be there. I just wanted to say hello.”
And she can’t hold it back any longer. “Hello Bruce,” she says, letting a smile out that feels too fragile on her face. “It’s nice to see you again.”
***
He ends up taking her out to lunch, because now that they’ve acknowledged each other they can’t seem to break out of each other’s orbit.
Bruce asks after her new life in Bludhaven, and she tells him about some of it - she never mentions Catwoman’s activities outright, but she does drop hints here and there, simply because it’s so intoxicating to have someone there who understands , even if he disapproves. He talks the same way about his escapades as Batman, when she inquires about his life in the past several months.
“Are you happy here?” he asks, shortly before they part ways to return to their respective business.
“Yes, of course,” Selina says. Because that’s the answer she needs to give, and it’s truer than it used to be, anyway.
“That’s good,” Bruce nods, and then, “I hope I’ll see you around, what with this joint venture and all.”
“I hope so, too,” she says much more truthfully.
***
They do see a lot more of each other, over the ensuing months - at meetings, passing in the hallways of her new workplace, occasionally sharing an elevator. Every so often, he’ll discreetly take her to lunch, and they’ll talk about everything except Batman and Catwoman and what happened and didn’t happen at Christmas.
It’s clear that he can tell something’s changed in her, but he doesn’t pry.
It’s just as clear that he’s never quite stopped wanting her to come back with him to Gotham, but they never talk about that, either.
(Here’s the other thing: she may be learning to live with herself, but she still wouldn’t ask anyone else to live with her. The broken pieces that shattered apart when Max Schreck pushed her and were bundled back together all wrong by Catwoman rest easier against each other than they once did, but they still make themselves known sometimes, late at night, the jagged edges cutting her and stabbing out at the world. She’s Selina and she’s Catwoman both always all the time, but that means Catwoman is never really gone, and Bruce has enough trouble without the half-wild thing that is Catwoman under his gold-plated roof.)
Bruce’s business with her employer wraps up the week before Thanksgiving, and Selina volunteers to show him out on that last day, for the privelige of standing awkwardly next to him in the elevator trying to think of something to say.
He saves her the trouble. “You’ve got quite the head for business, Ms. Kyle,” he says almost offhandedly. “I don’t suppose I could persuade you to switch and work for Wayne Enterprises? There’s an excellent salary and benefits.”
There. He’s finally taken the unspoken thing and said it. Selina could scratch him.
“I’m afraid not, Mr. Wayne,” she says with false brightness. “But I do hope we’ll cross paths again. You’ve been such good company, a girl could go crazy without you.”
He looks alarmed at that, and Selina laughs, brushing a reassuring hand on his arm. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be just fine. I am fine.”
***
She is, too. Even without Bruce, in the weeks that follow.
But then she hears on the news that Chip Schreck is going to hold a special memorial gala for his father on Christmas Eve, to mark the one-year anniversary of Max’s passing and reiterate to the populace what a great and benificent man the fake Santy Claus was. And Catwoman just can’t sit still after a thing like that.
It’s a simple thing for Selina to request and receive a couple of days off so close to the holiday, and she packs up a couple of changes of clothes (one involving skintight black leather) and her bullwhip and takes the bus to Gotham on the twenty-third of December. Her hotel isn’t far from the site of her old apartment, and the area is scummy enough that Catwoman has plenty of late-night entertainment available.
She doesn’t at any point tell Bruce that she’s in town, for obvious reasons, but she thinks she spots a Batty silhouette on the rooftops at one point.
(She retreats before she, or he, can be sure.)
Less than twenty-four hours later, she’s choking on smoke, pierced with shrapnel, and bleeding out.
***
It’s possible that she should have considered that she wouldn’t be the only one with a grudge against the Schreck dynasty seeking to make trouble at the gala.
Her plan had been fairly simple, in the end. She’d toyed with a handful of more elaborate notions, but eventually settled on something inspired by the trick Batman had played on the Penguin. Dear old Max had liked to record his phone conversations to potentially use against his interlocutors, and had kept the tapes locked up in a secret compartment so they couldn’t be used against him. Selina had bet, successfully, that Chip hadn’t found or even known about the tapes, but she’d stumbled on the location during her tenure as Max’s secretary, and it was almost too easy to quietly break in, take what she needed, and slip out on stiletto-booted feet.
When Chip took the podium at the gala, she’d already taken over the sound system, and instead of hearing the dope expound on Schreck Sr.’s virtues, Gotham’s upper crust were presented with a mixtape of Max’s most incriminating deals, dubbed over whatever his increasingly shocked heir had been trying to say.
To be clear, she hadn’t planned on killing him. As far as she knew, he wasn’t actually evil, just stupid. It was Max she was here for - Max had killed her, more than once, and so she had killed him and had come to kill the ghost and legacy of him, too.
She finds out, just as she’s about to walk out, that not everyone is quite so picky.
Bombs burst out from the tree ornaments, from the baubles on the walls, from the podium Chip is still standing behind - and from the sound equipment Selina is just steps away from.
The blast hurls her across the room, and when she surfaces from the disorientation, her torso is littered with sharp, hot points of pain. A clumsy brush of her hand reveals that her suit is ripped, and slick with too much blood.
Then Bruce is there, because of course he was already here, and of course he found her. “Selina,” he says, “Selina, stay with me. Are you all right?” Then, almost as an afterthought, “Did you do this?”
She laughs dizzily. “With the...the, the bombs? No, that’s (hah) not my party trick. The speech was, though.” Her lashes flutter, and even she’s not sure whether it’s flirtation or a struggle to stay conscious. “Did you like it?”
“I thought I spotted some copycatting at work.”
“Sincerest form of flattery, you know,” Selina breathes.
Bruce has spotted her wounds by now, is trying to apply pressure or something. “We’ve got to get you out of here,” he says, half to her, half to himself. “Alfred’s outside, I’ll try and call him, he’s got some medical knowledge under his belt...”
“Don’t worry your pretty head about it, Bruce.” She smiles with blood on her teeth. “Or Alfred’s. Did he ever pass along that dirty limerick for me?”
It’s clear that he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but that’s all right.
“You know,” she confides, starting to laugh again even though it hurts, “I told Maxie I was going to save this one for next Christmas. The ninth life. I made it a pretty good one, didn’t I?”
Bruce says something in reply, something frantic, but Selina doesn’t catch it. She’s falling
falling
.
.
.
and then she snaps bolt upright, an unearthly caterwaul emanating from her, and she’s back .
There’s someone beside her - it’s Bruce, looking like he would be ecstatic if he wasn’t terrified out of his mind, almost reaching out to touch her but not quite.
“Selina?” he says quietly, one cautious eyebrow raised.
But Selina’s mind is flooded with six, seven, all good girls go to heaven , and it had rhymed but it hadn’t been right, she’d miscounted, she’d had two lives left after she burned up Max-a-millions, and now she still has one.
“I was wrong,” she tells him delightedly. “I still had an extra life--” and then what’s left of Bruce’s stoicism shatters entirely as he pulls her against his chest, holding her tight, and once she’s over her momentary surprise she clings onto him just as hard.
But then there’s a new commotion from what’s left of the gala, as the bomber makes himself known - a man in a truly garish green suit patterned with question marks - and Bruce lets her go just as quickly, his face hardening again.
“Friend of yours?” Selina inquires.
“By a certain definition.”
“Are we going to fight him?”
“If I can get suited up in time.”
Catwoman grins. “I think I can stall him for a bit.”
Then she’s up on her feet, backflipping into the interloper’s path. “I think you’ll find,” she croons, “that this is my party you’re gate-crashing. Didn’t anybody ever tell you it’s rude to spoil a lady’s fun?”
***
The fight is delightful, as she knew it would be.
What she hadn’t anticipated, however, is the way it becomes positively exhilarating when Batman crashes in and joins the fray. She’s only ever fought against him before, never with him, and although their styles are very different, somehow they mesh as if by design.
Irritatingly, or joyously, she can’t decide which - somewhere in the middle of all the chaos Selina realizes that she’s missed him fiercely, always, that she doesn’t want to have to walk away from this again.
In the end, when the interloper (the Riddler, apparently) has been left alive but unconscious and very battered for the police to collect and everyone else has fled the scene, she and Bruce escape to a more private alley and he rips his cowl off again and says, “Selina, please don’t leave again.”
(And here’s the thing, the one bigger than all the rest: she may be a constant balancing act, one slip away from a fall, and she may always be made of broken pieces held together and pulled apart by the howling, plummetting, lashing-out chaos that is Catwoman, but she is at her best when she is with Bruce. She always has been. She always will be. She is the person she wants to be when she is with him, and she hopes he is who he wants to be with her. Bruce-the-Bat and Selina-the-Cat, finding each other and reconciling the two truths they each carry.)
“I won’t,” she says.
Bruce clearly didn’t expect it to be that easy, as he opens his mouth to argue before realizing that it’s unnecessary.
He’s only about halfway to that realization before Selina decides she’s tired of them both having to wait, and throws herself across the small remaining distance between them, half-shoving him against the wall and stretching up to kiss him.
***
Alfred pulls up a short while later to find them slightly entangled. He doesn’t comment, just raises one eyebrow as they break apart and get in the back seat of the car.
“Miss Kyle,” he says, and Selina finds that she’s honestly not surprised that he knows who she is, “shall I set an extra place for a late supper?”
She glances at Bruce, then up towards the front. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Not at all. Your cat, which we have been housing at the manor, has missed you in the extreme.”
Selina doubts that very much - Miss Kitty was always the independent sort. But when she looks back at Bruce, she suspects that Alfred isn’t really talking about her wayward feline at all.
“The feeling’s been mutual,” she says.