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She should’ve known. The realization crashes over her in the space of a breath—how could she have been so stupid? She should’ve known.
“So that’s it?” She waits for him to deny it, to shake his head and follow her like he’s done for weeks, for months, like he’s always done, but he is still and silent. She pushes down the sharp pain flaring in her chest.
“Wow.” It’s as if she’s in a dream, hearing the words but not feeling herself speak them. The cold detachment is welcome, soothing. She can’t bear to look at him for a moment longer, and fixes her eyes sharply on the balcony doors. They’re her only friends in this place, apparently. Bruce clutches onto her arm before she can tear them open; she wrenches desperately away.
“I don’t expect you to understand.”
“Right, because you’re Bruce Wayne and I’m street trash,” she bites out. She remembers the way he’d tossed the money off the roof that morning, brash and daring and unconcerned. He’d said he wanted to live like her, find out who he was without the cash, without the name, but she should’ve known better. Billionaires are billionaires no matter what they’re wearing.
“Selina, it’s not like that,” Bruce insists, but she won’t make the same mistake again. He wanted to understand Gotham, he’d told her, his face dark, as they’d walked through the night all that time ago. The only way to do that was through its criminals.
Was that what he thought she was? Had all of this been some elaborate self-serving experiment, observing Gotham and then judging all he saw? She’d thought—she’d thought it had been real. And she was wrong.
“Yeah, it is,” Selina says, staring resolutely up at him. The last time they’d been this close, she had been stitching his forehead back together. “It is.”
She’d thought he had taken that beating for her.
“It’s fine,” she says, and it is—this is her fault.
“Have a great life, Bruce Wayne,” she says, and means it.
When she steps out onto the balcony, white curtains swirling in the wind, the doors lock behind her.