Chapter Text
Selina has always been of the mind that good news could never arrive via phone call at 3 AM. Anyone with good news waits until a reasonable hour to call, even the people whose nights are as late as hers. The only news that arrives at 3 AM is urgent, desperate, news that cannot wait an instant, news that is a matter of life and death, salvation and ruination. Things that vital can never be all good.
So when Selina’s phone, the one she uses for her less-than-legal activities, goes off on her nightstand when she’s getting ready for bed, she prepares for the worst. When she doesn’t recognize the number, she prepares even harder.
“Hello?” she says, not even pretending that she wasn’t already awake. Anyone calling for her on this phone knows she keeps a housecat’s hours.
“It’s Ivy. Harley and I need a safe place to stay, pronto.”
As calls from Ivy go, this isn’t the worst. But it’s past her usual operating hours. Harley’s the nighttime girl. And Ivy has plenty of little bolt-holes around the city, so why would they need one of Selina’s? She’s not ready to untense yet, not ready to let go of her anxieties about 3 AM phone calls. And then Ivy says “Harl’s run away from you-know-who.”
Selina freezes in place, the hairs on her arms rising.
Is she happy that Harley’s left the Joker? Absolutely. She’s seen the bruises. The acid burns. She’s helped Ivy before with backalley medicine, holding Harley still while Ivy stitched up slashes from sharp-edged playing cards. She’s toyed with the idea of killing the Joker herself, but he’s hard to find and even harder to get near. Between his toys and his ruthless devotion to making himself the best foe Batman can have, there’s very few Gothamites who’d stand a chance against him on his home territory.
And Selina’s not sure she has a place that’ll be safe for Harley and Ivy. She deals in subtlety and misdirection, hidden things that fool anyone who doesn’t know exactly what to look for. When the Joker figures out she was involved with Harley’s flight - and he’ll figure it out, because Batman’s greatest enemy must be a detective too - he will know what to look for.
The Joker has never been gentle with people who challenge what he sees as his rightful authority, and he is always especially harsh with Harley. He’s going to use everything he has to track Harley down. He’s going to come for her, and anyone involved with her flight.
The trick, then, is to get even more people involved, enough that even the Joker will have to step back, step away. And hopefully get taken down before he can lay another finger on Harley.
“Are you being followed?” Selina asks.
“Do you think I’m a fucking amateur?” Ivy snaps. “He doesn’t know she left him yet. We’re trying to go to ground before he finds out.”
“I can get you a place,” Selina says. “You’re not going to like it.”
“I don’t care,” Ivy says viciously. “Make it fast.”
“Don’t get blown up before I call you back,” Selina says.
She hangs up.
She calls Batman.
“Talk,” he growls, because that’s the way Batman speaks. Keeping it short and sweet.
“Harley and Ivy need a safe place to stay,” Selina says. “Not Arkham.” Because for all that the people at Arkham do try, the Joker knows that place inside and out.
“What happened?”
“Harley left the Joker. He doesn’t know and he’s not after her yet, but he will be. You’re the only person I could think of who has a chance of keeping them safe.” Not entirely true. Close enough to it that he won’t push.
“Will he come after you, too?” he asks.
This one she can’t deflect - they both know the answer to that question, and any response besides brutal honest will just make Bruce disappointed and distrustful. “Of course. The Joker’s going to figure out Catwoman helped them eventually. But I should be safe in my other identity.” Gotham rogues don’t share their civilian identities with each other unless they’re public knowledge. Hers isn’t. She’d have a lot more trouble getting invited to charity balls if it were.
“Hrm.”
“Look,” Selina says, letting her concern leak into her voice, “I know you, Ivy, and Harley don’t really interact outside of punching each other in the face. But you have to believe me that Harley needs you, and Ivy’s desire to keep Harley safe is stronger than any impulse to take advantage of your hospitality would be.”
“Where are they now?”
“I don’t know. They’re waiting on me to direct them to a place where they can hide out.”
“Do they know you’re sending them to Batman?” he asks.
The million-dollar question. “Of course not.”
“Right. So am I supposed to hand over a safe house and pretend I never got this phone call?”
And now for the tricky part. “No. They don’t just need your safe house, they need you. If you can take the Joker on his home turf and win, you can defend Harley and Ivy from him.”
“I can’t watch them all the time.”
Selina sucks in a breath, the kind of shaky inhale that someone steeling their nerves would take. It’s not hard to put herself in the mindset of nervousness. It is hard to remember to display it. “You have friends.”
There’s silence. She waits, coiled. He will accept this or he won’t. There’s nothing more she can do.
Then Bruce says “Send them out of the city. Across the bridge, away from Gotham. Down the 15. Thirty-five miles out, there’s a dirt road marked with a white post that says ‘seasonal peaches.’ Have them turn on that road and follow it until it ends.”
“Ivy’s probably going to kill the road,” Selina says, relief suffusing her words. She was pretty sure she could get Bruce to call in the Justice League, and she had a back-up plan if he didn’t - call Lois, get her to get Clark to get the League - but that would have been much messier. “Cover it with trees and brambles that look like they’ve been there for years.”
“Good. The more they do to help me make them disappear, the better.”
“I’m going to give them the directions and then call you back,” she says, going over Bruce’s words in her head so she doesn’t forget them. Down the 15. Thirty-five miles. Seasonal peaches.
“If you don’t call in five minutes, I will assume that something has gone wrong.”
“That’s fair. I’ll check in in five,” Selina says, and hangs up. Her knight in bulletproof armor. She has to wonder if Ivy knew Selina would go to Batman - her close relationship with Gotham’s signature superhero is something of a secret, but Ivy knows about it. And that would explain why Ivy asked Selina for help rather than taking over a fortress somewhere and encasing it with thorns, Briar Rose style. If Ivy intended for Selina to go to Batman, that will make the introductions much smoother. Not perfect, of course. Ivy’s lesser-known superpower is superhuman cynicism, and even if she knows she needs Batman’s help, that’s not going to make her trust him. It might make her trust him less, actually. She’s a lot like Bruce that way. Maybe they can bond over their deep-seated relational issues.
“Give me something,” Ivy says when she picks up the phone.
Selina repeats Bruce’s instructions, omitting the part about who gave her the safehouse.
“Good. Meet us there,” Ivy says.
Selina is already changing back into her usual costume and loose-fitting outerwear to cover it up. “I will,” she says. “Try to leave me at least a trail when you choke out the road.”
“Only if you’re fast,” Ivy says.
~x~
Ivy hangs up. Harley is looking at the dashboard of the stolen car, fingers twitching intermittently. In the backseat, one hyena makes a sleepy grumbling noise at the other before settling down.
“Do you want to put the radio on?” Ivy asks.
Harley gives a jerky half-shrug.
“Do you want to talk?”
Harley shrugs again, but this time, it’s a little slower, more reluctant.
“You don’t have to talk about leaving him if you don’t want to. You can talk about your babies, or about Sailor Moon, or about whatever you want. It’s okay.”
Harley bites her lower lip. “I dunno. I just keep thinking… it wasn’t even anything, this time. He didn’t hit me or choke me or shoot acid at me or nothin’. He didn’t even yell at me.I just thought I should run away, and I did.”
Ivy is driving. She is driving very carefully, because she is protecting precious cargo. She is going to get Harley somewhere safe. She is not going to try to find the Joker and rip him apart from the inside out. Yet. She needs to make sure Harley will be protected first. “No one should be hitting you or yelling at you or choking you, and definitely not shooting acid at you either,” Ivy says. “You didn’t have to wait for him to do one of those things again in order to justify leaving. He never should have been doing those things in the first place.”
Harley pulls her hands inside her sleeves. She’s wearing a pajama set Ivy got her for Hanukkah last year, pink fleece decorated with tiny red lipstick prints and black buttons. It came with a matching set of slippers, though right now, Harley is wearing a set of black combat boots. The pajama top also has a big, floppy hood, and Harley’s pulled it so far down that Ivy can barely see the tip of her nose. “He’s been so nice to me, Red. I’m just ungrateful.”
“Nice people don’t try to hurt their loved ones like that,” Ivy says, taking the turn that’ll get her to the bridge. Not much traffic at this time of night. Used to be the bridge was crowded no matter how late it was, but considering the concentration of supervillains in Gotham and the hours at which they generally operate, nowadays the bridge clears out by ten. “The Joker’s not a nice person, and he definitely wasn’t nice to you. You don’t have to be grateful for a damn thing he ever did.”
“He only hurt me when I upset him,” Harley says, drawing her knees up to her chest. “An’ he bought me nice things, and said I was his girl, an’ he told me he loved me more than anybody.”
“No matter how many times you were happy with him, that doesn’t excuse him hurting you,” Ivy says. “And him hurting you was never your fault. It was his choice to hurt you, nothing to do with you.”
They’ve had variations of this conversation before, but this time feels… different. Weightier. Not like they’ll never have to have this talk again, but like it’s sinking in deeper, working roots into a new layer of soil.
Harley’s quiet for a bit, then says “You never hurt me.”
“I don’t ever want to,” says Ivy.
“Even when you’re upset at me?”
“Even when I’m upset at you.”
“Would you want to hurt me if I knocked all your potted plants on the floor? On purpose?”
Ivy tamps down on the rush of panic that question inspires. Harley would never do that. She knows Harley would never do that. But she also knows why Harley is asking. “I would be very upset. And I don’t think I’d want to be your friend any more. But I wouldn’t hurt you, and I wouldn’t want to.”
“Oh.” Harley sticks one hand back out of her sleeves and plays with a fold in her pants leg. “I never would, you know. Not on purpose. I know they’re alive an’ even though I can’t talk to them I’d like to think we’re friends.”
Ivy smiles. “They feel the same about you, Harl.”
She’s going to have to figure out how to get all of her plants somewhere safe. The Joker doesn’t know where she’s been living, but if he finds out, he’ll burn them all to the root. She may have to sell them, scatter them across Gotham. Ivy hates the thought, but she hates the thought of leaving her plants to the Joker’s mercy even more.
They cross the bridge. Ivy takes the 15.
“Can I turn on the radio?” Harley asks.
“Go for it,” Ivy says.
Harley fiddles with the dial, flips through three late-night talk channels, a country station, and five pop stations before finding one that’s playing something with a lot of bass and aggressive vocals. “They can have swears on the radio after ten, you know. They don’t censor it.”
“Makes sense,” Ivy says. “All the good kids are in bed after ten and the bad kids probably won’t hear anything new.”
Harley snickers. “What was the first swear you ever learned?”
Ivy shrugs. “Depends on how we’re defining swears.”
“Hm. One of the… the words you can’t say on TV. You know. Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits.”
“I’ve heard all of those words on TV.”
“Well, you couldn’t say them back in the seventies. That’s when the list is from.”
“Why is fuck counted twice? Motherfucker is just a derivative of fuck.”
Harley giggles. “Just pick one!”
“Shit, I think,” Ivy says. “I had a neighbor in Seattle. Always complained about the air smelling like shit. God that pissed my parents off, thinking their kid was going to be corrupted by swear words.”
Harley breaks into full-on laughter. “Were you, though? Izzat your origin story? You hear someone say ‘shit’ one too many times as a little kid and you grew up to be a supervillain.”
“Must be,” Ivy deadpans.
Harley laughs and laughs, and it’s like rain in the jungle. Ivy can feel herself opening up, unfolding and spreading to soak in the sound of Harley’s happiness.
She checks the odometer. Not long until she’ll need to start looking for the signpost.
~x~
Selina calls Bruce on the way to where she’s hidden one of the cars she uses as Catwoman. “They’re headed to the safe house,” she says. “I’ll go with, make the introductions.”
“Good.” Bruce hesitates. “Can I convince you to stay with Harley and Ivy? You could benefit from the League’s protection as well.”
Selina considers it. But… “I can’t stay in costume 24-7. And I don’t think these are really the best circumstances under which to tell them who I am in the daytime.” She taps her nails against her phone case. “I’ll be fine in Gotham, big guy, as long as I stay Selina and leave the costume at home.”
“Can I hold you to doing that?”
Selina almost says ‘you can hold me to anything you like,’ because she really had been planning on going to bed before she got Ivy’s call and is pretty tired, which doesn’t do anything for her impulse control, but she contains it. Instead she says “I’m not about to go cowboying around with the Joker on my ass. You can trust me.”
“Hrm.”
“See you there,” Selina says, unlocking the car. It’s a tiny, dinged up old Prius painted a bland, nondescript gray-blue, with a smattering of bumper stickers about the environment and peace. In other words, it’s a car she can ditch by the side of the road in the middle of the woods without attracting attention. Anyone who inspects the car will assume the owner is off camping or hiking and not look much further.
Selina rummages in the glove compartment, pulls out a beanie, green lipstick, and a set of glasses. She applies all of them with the rearview mirror as her guide. She won’t take off the baggy clothes until she ditches the car. This is a transitory identity, one that blurs the path between Selina Kyle and Catwoman. The driver’s license that goes with this car says her name is Katherine Foster. Selina has a dozen-odd identities like this one, with varying levels of credibility. Some identities are disposable, meant to be used a few times and then discarded. Others have an actual legal presence, birth certificates and passports, apartments and electronic records, the whole thing. Katherine Foster is somewhere in between. Selina only really uses this identity when she’s planning on disappearing into the wilderness, which is not as common an event as she would like.
Once she’s properly outfitted, Selina taps out a quick text to Lois, from her Selina Kyle phone.
friend ran away from abusive bf. am giving her a hand. will update you when you wake up. love you.
It still feels new, thrilling, to tell Lois she loves her. Selina has a sudden, morbid hope that she’ll live long enough for saying ‘I love you’ to Lois to become routine, a comfortable familiarity.
She starts the car. Pulls out of the garage. Aims towards the bridge and starts driving.