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Before a string of other lovers, there is always someone to kindle it.
Before Selina Kyle, the one who caught the media’s attention quickly as Catwoman, there was you.
Just like all the other lovers after you, you were as special to him as he was to you. It was because you understood him truly, your intelligent eyes nearly consuming him whole from the moment you first looked at him. You knew him like the back of your own hand, and so did he. You loved him equally as Bruce Wayne and as the Batman, as there were similar dualities between yourself as well.
The media gave you a name for when you slipped into the night; an alias, just as they did Bruce, though you never liked it much, to be honest. Bruce would tease you about it, and you’d laugh and shake your head at the melodramatics of it all. It seemed ridiculous, a thing of fiction—Gotham City was not a place of magic and superheroes, of the black-and-white justice of good or evil. Everyone who lived here knew it in their blood: even the babies born in Gotham General Hospital seemed to cry with a more profound sorrow, as if they could feel the curse of the unfortunate city settling within them, their lives a predetermined tragedy.
You first met each other not as your true selves, both dancing through the shadows, hoping to stay unseen—until your shadows melded.
Fancy meeting you here, Vengeance, you had quipped, a smile dancing on your lips. Come here often?
Just doing the nightly rounds, he had responded. Be careful out there. He had clearly tried to stay professional, but his eyes did not waver, a dark attentiveness set upon you. The spark between the two of you was not unnoticed, and neither was the trail of gasoline that nearly blew the both of you up. Would it be in bad taste to say that the Joker had, in a way, ruined your first meet-cute?
When you met him again under the light of day, there was no doubt that it was him. The man within the shadows. This was, perhaps, when you knew that your life was intertwined with his, even if it didn’t last forever. Images of you appeared on both tabloids and nightly news—WHO IS BRUCE WAYNE’S NEW MYSTERY GIRL? stamped across the glossy pages by day, and WHO IS BATMAN’S NEW PARTNER IN CRIME? across the dim newsreels by night.
The two of you sometimes even spent nights in together on the couch watching some bad movie, in a bittersweet, desperate imitation of domesticity. Despite either of your lives being far from normal, it was nice to just pretend, even if it was infrequent.
Other nights were a sharp contrast, with one of you stumbling in, collapsing at the door. Blood would stain your fingers, and then his, and the first aid box would come down from the shelf again, one of you beginning again with gritted teeth and gauze and stitches, and ending with damp, dark red tissues.
You had your enemies just as he had his, those that left you with sleepless days, tossing and turning and looking over your shoulder even during sunlit hours. With the both of you so paranoid, you had even prepared tapes morbidly reminiscent of a suicide note for Bruce, with titles such as WATCH THIS IF I DON’T COME BACK TONIGHT. You hoped it would never come to that, but hope was a fool’s folly. And you were no fool.