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The yellow blackout curtains bracketed the wide floor-to-ceiling windows of the Robinson Park apartment. It didn’t look over the park itself, though the building abutted it; the apartment took up half the third to top floor. It gave Tim a fantastic view of the city, though; he could see all of the Upper East Side out the pane glass. The city outside was a mix of deep blue shadows and warm gold lights filtering from windows into the dark, the night sky itself an even indigo with the refracted light pollution of Gotham. And there, glowing on the bottom of the clouds, was reflected the bright bat signal being projected from Central downtown.
His birthday had been a month ago, and he had a new camera. He’d snuck out one night to take pictures of Batman and Robin, who had been running and rappelling across the rooftops, completely unaware of the interloper perched on the air conditioning unit of his building snapping photographs.
He hadn’t meant to figure it out, he really hadn’t. It was just, he’d been tormented by nightmares of the Flying Graysons for eight years, and he knew what a quadruple flip looked like, and he’d spent his childhood watching YouTube videos of Dick Grayson’s trapeze performances and watching Robin leap around outside his bedroom window. The quadruple flip on TV was really quite easy to connect when he knew there were only three people living in the world who could do one. From there, it was a hop and a skip to Batman’s identity. But it wasn’t something he was ever going to tell anybody about. It was quite possibly the best-kept secret in Gotham; he’d just had the luck of being there at Haly’s Circus to see Dick Grayson’s last performance and have a conversation with the boy himself about that specific flip right before the most traumatic moment of both their lives. It was the kind of secret that you held close in the dark and marveled at to yourself.
He’d set up his own makeshift darkroom in his bedroom closet; his parents hadn’t caught onto it yet. He had a safe he put his developed photos in that he hid under his bed; he wasn’t risking bringing his prints to school with him and his parents were never going to crack it; they weren’t home enough to do that. He’d be shocked if they ever even found the darkroom. The nice thing about his room only being used essentially three months of the year was that his parents never saw a need to go in it as long as it looked clean enough from the doorway, and no cleaning woman had ever questioned its presence.
The sitting room, however, was fully his mother’s domain. His mother had set the sitting room up as essentially a mini-museum to show off the artifacts that his parents had acquired. The curtains were always drawn during the day, to prevent light damage, and the room itself was painted dark, with glass cases next to the settees and on the end tables and a glass coffee table with bowls and necklaces displayed inside and a floor to ceiling cabinet opposite the windows with their biggest items. It was a shame that it was treated as a trophy room, because it truly had some of the best views in Gotham.
It was also dark, with huge windows, which made it perfect for his foray into nighttime photography.
And Tim had taken full advantage of the fact his parents had gone out for the night, after tucking him in bed, to sneak into the sitting room with his camera.
With the curtains thrown open, he could see everything; the yellow bat signal wavering on the clouds, the fancy art deco and the plain brutalist skyscrapers jutting into the sky like knives, the distant lights of the Fashion and Diamond districts. He could see any caped interlopers who decided to cut through the East Side as well.
He’d gotten prepped very quickly; he’d thrown on a black turtleneck (so his reflection wouldn’t show on the window) and cleaned the glass he was going to shoot through, and had cleaned his camera lens and tinkered with the settings and wondered if he could talk his parents into purchasing him a tripod for Hanukkah or Christmas. Unfortunately the window was dual-paned; he could only hope that the lights from the street below would not reflect too too much. He was enjoying the research part of it all; his search results probably looked like those of some kind of hard-boiled detective. If he ever got to talk to Batman someday, he’d have to ask him about how he took his crime scene photos for sure.
He sat, with his camera hanging around his neck, and waited, watching for any flutter of canary yellow or black to show on the skyline.
He did not have to wait long. From the corner of his eye he caught a flutter of black, and then a flutter of yellow, and he pressed the lens directly flat against the glass as his finger fell heavily on the shutter of his camera.
What he was not expecting was to hear the sound of the front door jiggling open.
He jumped up and cradled his camera in his hands. It couldn’t be the nanny; she was asleep in the guest room. She always went to bed the minute Tim was supposed to be in bed. It had to be his parents, and he was not going to have enough time to run and hide back in his room before his parents came in. And they were running ridiculously early. Maybe their play got canceled?
Heart jackrabbiting, he froze near the hallway half behind a particularly tall reproduction amphorae, watching the door swing open.
The first thing he knew was the silhouette was not his mother; the ears and the shine of the leather gave it away. The second thing he knew was he was way more screwed than he would have been for just being out of bed at twelve in the morning.
Catwoman’s heels were shockingly quiet as she stepped into the apartment, as Tim tried not to breath.
He’d seen enough of her, of course, to have enough of an idea that she probably was not there to hurt him. After all, Batman...well, not quite trusted her? Did not try very hard to arrest her? She was the best thief in the city, hands-down. She was totally here to steal from his parents, and that was...well, probably bad, but he was looking at an honest-to-goodness Gotham villain while he was supposed to be sleeping.
She walked into the room like she owned it, slotting lockpicks back into a pouch on her belt, gaze darting between cases, and Tim got a very, very stupid idea as she walked closer. She trailed her fingers down the outside of a case holding a statue of Bast, and Tim held up his camera and hit the shutter.
Which was apparently a bad idea.
He’d had the flash off, of course, because he only ever took nighttime photographs. But he’d-well, he had not forgotten that clicking on his shutter made a noise, but it was way louder in his tomb-quiet apartment than up on a rooftop in the middle of a Gotham night.
Catwoman swiveled, the yellow lenses of her goggles practically glowing in the night, as she took stock of the room and her eyes eventually landed on him.
“Oh. Hello,” she said, cocking her head sideways as she evaluated him. “I’ve never seen you in here before.”
Tim squeaked. “I’ve never photographed you before.”
She snorted across the room.
“Oh. You cased us, didn’t you,” Tim said gloomily.
Catwoman had the audacity to laugh, a musical laugh that hardly matched her status as a wanted international thief. He'd maybe had the idea in his head from too many movies that she would somehow sound gruffer. “You’re a funny one, a right Sam Spade,” she said. Tim could feel all the blood in his body draining out of his face. “Half the fun is the chase. Course I cased this place. You’ve never been around before, though.”
“I’m on vacation from boarding school,” Tim said. His hands were trembling as he held his camera. “You’re not going to kill me, are you?”
She narrowed her eyes, dark lashes cutting shadows across her face. “I don’t kill, kitten.”
“Oh,” Tim said in a voice that sounded very far away. “That’s good.”
“Yes, isn’t it,” she said, the corner of her lip turning up in a smirk, some private amusement illuminating her countenance. She plucked up the glass holding the Bast statue and cradled it gently in her hands. “This is just gorgeous, isn’t it?”
“My parents brought it back from one of their digs,” Tim said, cursing the squeak he could hear in his own voice.
“Ah. And of course it found its way into a private collection and not a museum,” Catwoman purred, her lips briefly puckering into a frown before smoothing back out.
“I think it’s Ptolemaic? If that helps you with authentication?”
Catwoman hummed in acknowledgment, and Tim watched in rapture as the claws in her gloves turned over the statue, observing every facet of it. “You’re precocious, aren’t you.” She dropped the statue into a cloth and into the bag hanging off her hip. Then she held a finger up to her mouth. “Can you keep a secret?”
He nodded rapidly, ears turning pink, acutely aware of the camera still hanging around his neck and the sleeping nanny down the hall.
“I saw you taking your pictures.” She put her fingers up to her head, miming bat ears.
Tim shook his head no vigorously.
“Yes, I did. I do know and keep tabs on my friend ‘The Night’ and his flying birdie. And you have an excellent view of my normal stomping grounds,” she said, gesturing at the window and the East End beyond. “I won’t tell if you don’t,” she said, flashing him a cheshire smile, her teeth practically glittering in the darkness.
He was struck suddenly with the thought that she knew who was under the masks too. He wondered if Bruce Wayne knew who was under the cat ears. She had an East End accent; it probably wouldn't be that hard to figure out for Mr. Wayne. “I’m good at secrets,” Tim said, clutching his camera ever-tighter.
There was a loud squeak of wood from down the hall where the nanny was sleeping, and Tim looked at Catwoman in alarm.
She tilted her head, and looked at him apprasingly, before wiggling her fingers at him. “We both can be good at secrets, can’t we, now?” He noticed a new flash of turquoise on one of her fingers right before she slipped back out the apartment door.
Tim ran over to lock it the minute she closed it, hands trembling despite himself as he turned the knob and heard the heavy metal thunk of the lock. He pressed himself up against the black paint, trembling for a moment, unsure if it was adrenaline or fright zipping through him. Then he ran back over to the window, and it was just a matter of sitting and waiting, nose pressed up against the glass.
His reward was a flash of black jumping to the building across from his, whip cutting through the air, and he started snapping pictures. He stole one last shot of her, toes outstretched as she bounded over the gap in a building, ears silhouetted in the moonlight.
One more gem for his safe.