For wingence | Where In Bludhaven AU

[runstheworld]

Fic: Five Times Someone Found Carmen Sandiego
And One Time She Found Someone Else

★
→ ONE

It starts when Selina reaches out to her by way of their familiar old burner number, the one in a cheap throwaway flip phone that lies dormant more often than it's used. That in itself is an oddity; nearly all of the texting history on this particular connection is unidirectional and originates with herself. It's to be expected, though, when they've largely only ever used it like a dead drop to signal that their geographic locations have happened to roughly coincide, and Carmen's always been a lot more unpredictable in her movements than Selina's more relatively settled schedule.

Selina's — well, Carmen's never quite sure if it's right to call her a friend, exactly, but they're at the very least common-minded contemporaries. Catwoman has been out of the game for a while now, though; they'd really only overlapped in Carmen's own early years, when they'd first met by pure chance after one of Carmen's unsuccessful thefts involving a pair of rare white lions, which had resulted in a wave of public awareness toward their endangered species. Selina had leveraged that social interest, assuredly, and that'd won Carmen some points in her book, and before long they had connected — and the rest, as they say, was history.

She's always had a fondness for Selina, not least of which because the other woman has never acted like a mother or a master towards her despite the relative difference in their ages. She very well could've, back in those early days; the age differential would've supported it, at least on the surface. But Selina had instead chosen to afford an ambitious up-and-coming thief in red the dignity her audacity warranted, and as a result many times Carmen finds herself outright forgetting that there's nearly a decade of years between them.

What she doesn't forget is that Selina has made her home in Batman's town, or that for some time now she's been careful about making sure any appearance of Catwoman keeps carefully to the side of the angels when she does happen to put on the cowl. That's part of why Carmen stays away for the most part, and only visits on strictly Selina's terms. Guilt by association isn't fair, but it is a reality. She likes Selina too much to risk ruining the good thing she's got going for the sake of an idle drop-by.

Still, it's not as though Selina didn't know she'd be in the area. They've exchanged messages, more than once, on the topic of her curiosity about Nightwing. And she hadn't said as much outright about her travel plans, or lack thereof, but Selina's known her for years and it doesn't take much to recall that Carmen Sandiego is a stickler for doing her research before undertaking even her idlest whim. She wouldn't have asked at all if she didn't have something in mind. Only natural to expect that a bright red coat might be witnessed on the moonlit rooftops of Bludhaven before long, and start to keep watch out for it.

The coordinates Selina leaves her, however, aren't within the Bludhaven city limits at all. They're for a rendezvous at a park in Gotham — and the appointed time falls within the daylight hours. It's not Catwoman she's meeting, then; it's Selina Kyle, reformed everyday citizen. There are directions to a particular section of a duck pond. There are instructions of where to buy a bag of breadcrumbs.

She turns up to the park at a quarter to eleven wrapped in a nondescript brown coat with smart red heels and her hair twisted tidily into a side braid. She gets the breadcrumbs and tosses them idly to the ducks and the swans. She blends in, she supposes, simply from a lack of trying to stand out.

Selina finds her at five 'til — fashionably late, and right on schedule.

Their greeting is more for the show of it than it is for themselves — light words, air kisses, clasped elbows in a posh and European fashion. Two beautiful women sharing effusive hellos merely makes them a pair of swans among the crowds of busying passerby as they duck their heads and go on their way. They're remarkable for a moment, and only a moment, and then they become as much a part of the scenery as anything else.

Selina tells her, before long, that Batman knows she's been staying in Bludhaven. She doesn't ask how Selina came to possess that information. She's not the only one who's harbored curiosity about a masked vigilante before, after all. It's just another thing the two of them have in common, even if Selina is more tolerant of the stoic types when Carmen prefers a willingness to banter.

Maybe it should bother her more than it does, the confirmation that she's managed to come under the Dark Knight's scrutiny. Selina asks her, carefully, if the news has made her inclined to run.

It probably should've, but it hasn't. Not so long ago, she'd already be halfway to Moscow.

It's just that she's got something worth sticking around for now, and it's waiting for her back in Bludhaven. She tells Selina as much, when she says she'll take her chances — but Carmen's appreciative of the advance warning anyway.

★
→ TWO

It's not the Batman who she discovers tailing her, a week or so after the duck pond in Gotham. Unless, that is, Batman is about three feet shorter than the popular reports would have one believe.

He's extraordinary, she'll give him that — a veritable shadow made flesh, to the degree that she can't quite pinpoint exactly when he'd first begun following her, and therefore it's almost certainly much longer than she's altogether comfortable with admitting. A veritable prodigy in the ways of the ninja, this one. Suhara would be impressed, save for the obvious question of what methods it'd taken to instill such mastery in a user so young. She's personally more comfortable leaving that obvious question unanswered than her old mentor would be. Call it a nod of acknowledging respect, from one child prodigy to another.

Her tolerance evaporates in a hurry, however, when she draws her grapple and aims for a swing to the next rooftop, only to have the tension in the line abruptly go slack as something small and dark and sharp whistles through the air and severs it. She's only half-turned before the next half-dozen of them come hurtling at her in a flurry, and by that point she's operating entirely on instinct as she dives for one of the protruding fixtures along the roof and tucks into a roll to get behind it before the third set lodge into the metal with an audible thunk.

"Passable reflexes," comes the dry, haughty voice in a treble that fights to disguise the fact that its owner has evidently yet to hit his teenage growth spurt. "Despite the absurd and impractical footwear."

"I was using that grapple," she replies, in part to help cover the sound of her starting to slide her way around the perimeter of the raised vent. "Destruction of property is a crime, you know."

"Then arrest me," her shadow retorts, sounding immensely proud of himself. "Not that I expect a wanted felon to be capable of anything resembling the administration of justice."

Carmen pauses for a moment, considering her options at rapid speed. "Arrest you? No, I don't think I will," she answers carefully, continuing to creep around the fixture until she can steal the barest hint of a peek past its far edge. "Rooftop justice in Bludhaven is Nightwing's department. Unless there's some reason you'd rather he not be made aware of this little encounter of ours…Robin?"

Silence follows, and follows, and follows.

Then, very faintly, she's able to make out the sound of steel returning to its sheath, and the whisper of a cape settling in the late night wind. "His involvement is unnecessary," comes the somewhat sullen reply at last, which is also how she gauges it's safe to step out from behind the vent to face her begrudging assailant firsthand. "I have everything under control."

He's almost cute, this Robin in her midst. Far too young to be chasing people like her through the city at night. Far too young to be tasked with meting out justice for adults perhaps twice his age or more. It's strange to be on the other side of it like this. She probably wasn't much older than him when she was first recruited by the ACME Detective Agency, and she was already active by sixteen, already at the top of her game a year after. She wonders if this is how she'd looked to her own rivals, back then. She's at least reasonably confident her voice hadn't sounded constantly on the verge of cracking, the way that his does.

"I appreciate you putting that away," she says by way of a peace offering, nodding slightly to his now-sheathed sword. "Seeing as how you're the only one here that's armed."

Robin's eyes narrow behind the black of his mask. He regards her silently, hard and scrutinizing. "You don't carry a weapon," he observes, seemingly more than a little incredulous.

"I've never liked them," she answers easily.

The corner of Robin's lip quirks; it's impossible to tell whether that's from approval, or something else. "But you have training," the boy continues, without taking his eyes off her. "Undeniably."

"Judo, taekwondo, Muay Thai, aikido, and capoeira," she replies calmly. If it's an interrogation he's after, she's fine with playing along for the moment.

Robin studies her at length. "Escrima?"

She raises an eyebrow at him, vaguely amused. "I just said I don't like weapons," she points out, not missing a beat. "But I don't mind admiring the beauty of the form — of the art or the artist, that is."

It's the right answer, at least so far as for what she'd guessed Robin had been fishing at. The flicker of recognition that passes across the caped boy's expression lasts only a moment before he quickly hurries to smother it, but he doesn't manage to suppress it entirely before she catches all the glimpse she needs. Fortunately, he turns away with a huff before she has to take any action to hide her own knowing smile in response.

"You've clearly lapsed," Robin says like it's a statement of fact as much as it is a pointed critique. "The lack of discipline one would expect of a common criminal."

"There's nothing common about me, Boy Wonder," she retorts, aware that he's baiting her again but unable to resist when it's a barb that goes directly to her pride. "And I suspect you wouldn't have come all the way from Gotham tonight if you didn't agree."

Robin makes an inelegant sound — the very sort one might expect of a child convinced of his own authority no matter the matter at hand. "I came to take your measure," he says without turning around, though she can tell from the slight shift of his cape that he's reaching for a grapple of his own, out of sight, from one of the pouches of his utility belt.

"And? Have I been found wanting?" she replies, dry as the Sahara.

Another of those almost comically stoic silences follows, until at last Robin offers little more than a noncommittal grunt and dives off the rooftop without looking back. He's as adept at camouflage on his departure as he'd been when he'd been tailing her; it's a matter of mere moments before the shadows have swallowed him up once more, vanished as neatly as a ghost in the night.

Her grapple is still out of commission, and unlike a caped crusader, she didn't come out tonight with a spare. Yet she's somehow less annoyed by the inconvenience of it than she probably ought to be, as she retrieves the severed pieces and heads for the edge of the rooftop to attempt to chart out an alternative way down — ideally one that involves a minimum of broken ankles upon landing.

It's hard not to wonder if she'd passed Robin's inspection, after all. He'd certainly cleared any measure of hers with bold and flying colors.

★
→ THREE

It's been the better part of ten years since the last time Carmen made use of the C-5 Corridor, but there are certain memories of it that have never faded — the crackle of energy, the displacement of air, the brief disorienting sensation of molecules rearranging in the instant before the portal yawns open and its users spill out from whence they came. She'd be hard-pressed to call it "hearing" when describing its use. It's not quite "sensing", either, except in the way that a person might sense the weight of being watched, or feel the prickle of an imminent storm along one's skin or in their bones.

She's minding her own business on the outdoor patio of a street cafe when she clocks it. Without needing to think, her awareness shifts into high alert, body tensing surreptitiously as she instinctively begins to gauge the angle of the table in her way, how long it will take to get clear of it, which direction she'll run and what path she'll take to evade the pursuit that will almost certainly follow. It's such a shame, really. She'd been enjoying her lunch. There's time enough to shove a generous tip beneath the napkin holder wobbling on the uneven surface of the latticework iron table; there's not enough time to finish her tea or shove the rest of the dessert into her mouth, and it's unfortunately just a little too messy to even consider taking it with her when she flees.

She keeps her ears peeled. One set of sneakers slapping the pavement — that will be Zack. No sign of the lighter, more deliberate footsteps that would indicate Ivy; is she going around the other side? Aiming to climb the nearby awning and make a dive at her from overhead?

The pertinent question really ought to be, how did they find her to begin with. Contrary to her usual capers, she hasn't left any deliberate clues to her current whereabouts, because for once she hadn't wanted the ACME detectives to follow her here. There's really no way they should've known —

But that's a question for another time. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches the first familiar flash of Zack's green army coat, and that's her cue to slide free of the table and run.

She's not wearing her own signature coat — she rarely does when she's out in the city for an afternoon like this — but she is still in red, and by now Zack and Ivy are more than accustomed to looking for suspicious figures in a crowd regardless of how they happen to present. It buys her a few steps of a head start, perhaps. That ought to be all she needs, with her plan to dash up the street and cut through a nearby boutique to the loading dock in the back alley it shares with a fire escape that can get her up to the rooftops. She can lose the kids in the crowd. She knows this city better than they do, by now.

"Carmen?" comes the familiar voice from far back behind her, fading rapidly on the wind. "— Carmen!"

Ivy must have gone around. She'll have to watch for an ambush, keep an eye on her flank while Zack tries to distract and pursue her from behind —

"Carmen, wait!" Zack calls again, and at first it doesn't strike her as odd, until she's weaving past perplexed and vaguely annoyed pedestrians in pursuit of the boutique and it occurs to her that what he ought to be saying is stop right there, or maybe we've got you this time.

There's a woman coming out of the boutique at the same time she darts in. It's easy enough to blend in among the racks of clothes and well-dressed mannequins on display; she's halfway to the employees-only door when she hears Zack come in, stammering apologies and excuses as he skids his way past and into customers in his haste. She's got a good lead now. She can make it. She can make it —

She pushes open the door, rushes free onto the loading dock. A deft jump gets her over the railing of the fire escape, now with a goodly bit of distance and wrought iron between her and anyone who next comes out the door. And yet — still no Ivy. She couldn't have known about this escape route, could she? That level of prediction is possible, but unlikely. So where, then, could she be?

No time to question it now. The door rattles as Zack bursts free onto the loading dock, squinting in the sudden daylight and looking desperately around at eye level as if to glimpse where she'd gone. It buys her a few seconds to check behind her for that imminent ambush until he thinks to look up and spots her, and she gets her first proper look at his face.

He doesn't look determined. He doesn't look triumphant. If anything, he looks — worried?

"Missed me again, Zack," she calls down, ready to skip up to the next landing of the fire escape and maintain her head start, but curious enough about the oddity of his expression to give herself away just that little bit. "My, it's a shame Bludhaven didn't turn out to be quite the haven I was expecting."

But where, oh, where is Ivy?

Zack grits his teeth. His shoulders drop. And then, inexplicably, he — takes a step backwards?

"Don't be childish, Carmen," he calls up to her, and in a flash a memory resurfaces — of a caper in midair, when Ivy was dangling off the side of her aircraft and had missed her opportunity to jump free to a water landing, when she'd extended her hand and Ivy had refused and yes, that's what she'd said, hadn't she, don't be childish, Ivy, I'm trying — "I'm trying to help you!"

Her heart is beating fast. It's probably from the cardio of an abrupt pursuit, especially after so long without one. That's the obvious explanation. Maybe. Probably.

"It's just me," Zack goes on, more breathless than she is — but he was never the athlete of the two siblings, Ivy was always better at a footrace. "No one knows I'm here except Chief. Not even Sis."

And it's not unheard of to see him working alone, but it certainly is rare. Rare enough that it gives her pause, because between the two of them, Zack has always been the sibling more willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Ivy is the one driven to see her captured and brought to justice, however sympathetic she might occasionally find herself. Zack...takes her antics less personally. Even comes close to enjoying them at times, she almost suspects, though of course he'd be loath to admit it.

"I'm more curious how you know I'm here," she calls back, keeping one hand on the railing but relaxing the coiled tension in her legs somewhat, no longer poised and ready to spring on an instant's notice. "Though I'd certainly love an explanation for why you've left your sister behind. It's not like you to be unwilling to share the glory, Zack."

But Zack shakes his head, leaning over his knees with his hands pressed to this thighs for support. "A tip hit CrimeNET," he replies, peering up at her through his long blond bangs. "Not just anonymous. Encrypted. Not one of our active agents, but someone familiar enough with the system to make it look like one — assuming we got so caught up in catching you that we didn't stop to wonder where it came from."

It doesn't take much to add up what Zack is implying. The silent recognition drops like ice into the pit of her stomach. "But you stopped to wonder," she prompts, buying herself a moment to process the inevitable.

"I've untangled Lee's handiwork before, when he made that decoy cyberattack on the Pentagon," Zack explains sourly. "This had his fingerprints all over it. And since I don't think he's got a lot of access to hacking environments in a cell behind bars —"

"Then he's out," she finishes, and decides not to mention she's already been aware of that for weeks now.

"He's out," Zack echoes. "And he knows you're here. And apparently he wants us to know you're here, too."

And that's just like Lee Jordan, isn't it. An anonymous tip to ACME, playing the so-called hero, baiting the agency to deploy its resources to Bludhaven and disrupt the delicate sanctuary she's been building ever since her arrival, possibly even putting Nightwing in the predicament of having to defend her or surrender her…

Zack is right. A scheme like that has Lee's grimy fingerprints all over it.

"And now you know," she says quietly, and relaxes a little further, drawing away from the flight of stairs up to the next landing and approaching the railing of the one she's on, instead. It brings her closer to Zack, making it a little easier to talk without having to raise their voices as much in the silent, echoing alley. "So what are you going to do, Zack?"

He's quiet a moment. He looks away, scuffs his toe. Sucks in a breath and lets it out again. "Warn you," he says at last. "Chief and I are going to 'lose' the tip. But when Lee figures out that we're not coming after you, you know he's not going to take that lying down."

"No," she says softly. "He won't."

Zack casts her a worried look. "Listen," he tells her after a moment. "If you give us coordinates for the C-5. Chief will give you a head start, anywhere you want to go. We'll help get you out of here, just this once."

And ten minutes prior, she would've called that a trap in the making, because it would be no trouble at all for the Chief to re-route the C-5 Corridor right back to ACME headquarters, or worse: straight into a jail cell of her own. But Zack has never been a liar, and he's always worn his heart on his sleeve right next to the sergeant's stripes on his coat. He knows what Lee's capable of, just as much as she does. And the fact that he'd kept this even from his sister, counting on no one but the Chief to help him help her…

She could run. She could. But if there's one thing that falling for Nightwing has done for her of late, it's that it's made her consider options that don't involve trying to outdistance her problems.

"Oh, Chief. Still the best old partner a girl could ask for," Carmen says, voice warm with fondness and nostalgia. "Tell him I appreciate the offer, Zack. And...that I miss him. And that I'm sorry I won't be in a position to say so in person."

Zack stills, his eyes widening slightly. "Carmen —"

"I'll see you next crime, Zack," she says, and pivots to sprint back across the landing to the stairs — and her escape — with renewed determination. "But for now, this town and I still have unfinished business."

★
→ FOUR

There's a folded scrap of paper tucked beneath the black king on the chess set that occupies her makeshift coffee table.

It could be nothing, obviously. No one knows that she's turned Jose's Cigar Bar and Bistro into her safehouse of choice here in Bludhaven, save for of course Nightwing. It wouldn't be…entirely unheard of, she supposes, that he might've gotten in and left her a charming little note to come home to, or examined the game in progress on the chessboard and left her the next move in writing. Naturally she knows full well that a text is much more his style, and breaking and entering isn't. But then, none of the entrances look forced. None of the windows are broken.

He could've let himself in. Someone else could've, too.

And she should know better than to walk right in and take the bait, just like she should've known to take Zack's offer and run, just like she should've known countless times not to indulge her own arrogance and rise to whatever challenge is set to her no matter how obvious of a trap it is. She and Nightwing have talked, more than once, about flaws they can and can't forgive. This just happens to be one of hers, and it's one that hasn't changed since the day she first crossed the threshold of the ACME Detective Agency, much less the one she steps over at Jose's Cigar Bar and Bistro now.

She crosses the room, carefully scrutinizing her surroundings for anything that seems out of place. But the interior of the bistro is silent as a grave, and the only scent lingering on the air is the same old stale cigar aroma long since soaked into the furniture. Nothing seems off, but there's something about the stillness that bothers her in a way she can't quite place. There's something nagging, yes, but that still might just be phantoms and superstition, and she's never been one to indulge irrational fears.

It isn't until she's approached the coffee table and begun to reach for the note beneath the king that her hand stops halfway to the board, and the single telling alteration to her otherwise unchanged living circumstances abruptly becomes clear.

Two pieces are missing. The black queen, and a white knight.

Before she can stop herself, she snatches up the note and unfolds it, eyes already narrowed against the threat she knows she'll find.

A told B and B told C,
Now our players number three.
But this game will end with two,
Which piece taken? Him, or you?

It's a foolish rhyme, a petty threat. It barely even scans. But in the very next instant, she learns the hard way that the real purpose of the note was in the misdirection — and in the hidden connection that had completed between the base of the black king and the wired panel beneath it on the square when she'd pulled the note free and allowed the two to touch.

Suddenly, something whirs. A light begins to blink. A sound like a valve creaks somewhere in her periphery, and now there's noise — the rapid, high-pitched beeping of an automated timer.

Lee Jordan has never been the type of monster to give his prey a fighting chance. Oh, he likes to play with his food, but only after he's certain he's exhausted all available avenues by which it might elude him. He didn't give her the benefit of a long timer to contemplate; he knows her too well for that, knows she'd sooner bolt and abandon the premises than stick around to try to find and disarm whatever it is he'd done. He also doesn't bother to afford her the courtesy of a round number of seconds on the countdown clock. She doesn't know whether it goes off after seven, or twelve, or nineteen seconds — there's no rhyme or reason to it. It's just one instant there's shrill, apprehensive beeping, and the next her world becomes an earsplitting explosion.

The bistro is an old building. Most of the shuttered, blighted establishments in Bludhaven are. And as the bombs go off one after another, the nature of the trap becomes immediately apparent — it's a lobster trap, easy to get in and impossible to get out, once she's been lured into the middle of it by her own hubris.

The secrets of her past, of the fire that orphaned her as a child, never made it into her ACME casefile. There's been no mention of pyrophobia anywhere in her dossier. But there's no escaping the fact that her father had remained in Lee's captivity for a given interval of time while he was manipulating her into completing a flurry of crimes for him, and Malcolm Avalon would certainly have known the story of the hotel fire that claimed his wife and, to all appearances, his daughter. She wouldn't put it past Lee to know by now, either. Anything that would give him an edge over her, anything that would let him torment her — of course he'd find that worth knowing.

Her ears are ringing too loud to hear the crackling of the flames as they catch. The air fills with smoke, thick and black and still tainted with the remnants of tobacco and the strangling acrid scent of gas as one by one the old kitchen appliances surrender to the blaze. The door —

— collapses, the way she came in — she hadn't seen it, he'd rigged it with the skill of a demolitions expert, this building isn't just set to explode, but to collapse —

— but there's still the window. She drops to the ground, lucid enough to think to stay low as the flames begin to spread, because smoke rises and so does the heat and if she has any chance of escaping, it's going to be from the floor — the window, Nightwing's window, she can break the glass and get out —

Another explosion. Another, like a chain reaction. The flames roar like the ache in her ears, half-deafened but there's no way to shield them when she needs her hands to crawl and avoid the shrapnel of exploded appliances and splintered wood and she's not a child, she's not, she just needs to get out —

The window.

The window!

Out, out, she needs to get out, and she drags one of the barstools with her as she makes her way to the massive pane window that leads out onto that ledge that Nightwing prefers, and it's impossible to get the leverage to hurl the thing through the glass while she's crouched on the floor so she holds her breath and grasps the legs and swings it like a major league batter until it connects and the glass shatters and she only just barely remembers to grab for her coat and wrap it around her hands and use it to clear the shards so she doesn't slice herself open as she crawls out.

She hears the sound of the hiss too late. But that's just like Lee, too — he's always known her almost as well as she knows herself. Well enough to plan every eventuality in a trap like this. Of course he'd cut off the door deliberately. Of course it'd been a force, to ensure she'd think to go out through the next obvious exit of the window.

The smoke is thick enough as it pours out from behind the broken glass panes that it's almost impossible to catch a glimpse of the gas that sprays up and into her face as she crawls free. It might have been green, or gray, or black. It's not as though it makes much difference to her in the moment. Whatever it is, it won't be poison — or if it's poison, it will kill her slowly. It's still better than the fire. Anything is better than the inferno she's leaving behind.

She drags her coat, full of glass shards, and makes herself crawl along the ragged pavement with her eyes watering and her throat choked and the cloying cloud clinging to her skin until she's not sure how far she's gone, and can only hope it's enough to be sufficiently clear of the blaze. The world is swimming, twisting with vertigo (another foot. Another. Is it far enough?) but she has to keep going, has to get free of the hotel before the roof caves in on her and her mother both —

Her mother?

Bleary-eyed, she looks back — squints, shakes, strains — and thinks she sees something writhing in the flames, howling as it immolates — what?

She's — the fire, she's — she ran, she left, but someone didn't make it —

Monster. Coward. Did she leave her own mother behind to burn?

The flames soar toward the sky, higher than any natural blaze ought to, and despite her mounting terror she can't make herself look away as they twist and gather and form themselves into a demon straight out of hell, crowned in licking tongues of flame with black pits for eyes and massive, grasping talons that curve with the wickedness of scythes and reach out to sear into her flesh —

That's not —

It's not —

She curls into a ball, arms over her head to shield it from the flames as she screams and screams like she can stop the approach of the fire by sound alone, and thinks wildly that this must be a dream, it must be, it's all just a dream and to wake up, wake up, wake up —

The next thing she knows, too deep within her insensible delirium, there's a firm grip curling around her arms. Prying them away from her face. A shadow, with a sleek black head and glowing red eyes and massive wings the color of midnight, and it wouldn't be the first time she's been haunted by the spirit of a raven in her dreams but this isn't her favorite old folktale friend who stole the sun, because the inferno is still there and the bird-creature with her arms in its talons is doing nothing to spirit the fire away.

"Carmen!" the raven says, lower and deeper than she'd expect from the caws of a bird even as it spills from its sharp ebony beak.

She shakes her head, and struggles, and kicks until she can almost get herself free, and maybe it's because of the glass and pebbles beneath her legs that she doesn't feel the needle that sinks into her arm, muting the terror until the world goes still and black as Raven's feathers itself.

★
→ FIVE

"...ere is she?!" someone calls — agitated. Frightened. Familiar.

It's hard to string two thoughts together behind the heavy seal of her closed eyes. Sensation comes back slowly, as does her awareness; thinking doesn't seem to come as easily as it ought to, muddled like she's wading through a quagmire every time she tries to shuffle from one specific thought to another.

There's a voice. No — two voices. The one that cried out, and another, more muffled. Her ears feel wrong. Things are quieter than it seems like they ought to be. Her chest hurts. Her chest...hurts in more ways than just one type of "hurt" can encompass. It's tight, her breathing shallow. It's ache, or strain, in the area of her heart.

There's something soft beneath her cheek. Her head sinks into it. Something's clipped beneath her nose. When she breathes in, it's clean and sweet.

"...m down," comes the deeper voice, drifting past her still-ringing ears. "...n't lose your...ead…"

Whatever's beneath her feels oddly cold. Or is it that her skin is hot? A sunburn?

"...on't you tell me to calm down!" the frightened voice snaps. "…ychopath…ouse into... eathtrap!"

A...breath trap? Breath...no, that doesn't sound right. It's strangely difficult to try to grasp for that thought. As though she could, if she tried, but something within her is apprehensive of it. Safer to leave it alone, to linger in the dark and quiet and let it remain untouched.

"...amien stayed behind...estigate. His findings...in shortly," says the calmer voice. "...ing to be of any help to her if...an't focus on…"

"...care about the wor...uce," insists the agitated voice. "...ot doing anything unt...et me see her…!"

"...asleep..." comes the patient, or maybe exasperated, reply. "...r rest for now."

No, she thinks. I'm not asleep. Though admittedly, she's not really sure if she's awake either. She is resting, though. It's soft. Comfortable. Safe, maybe.

"...eed to see her," the frightened voice says. It's softer now. Weaker. Pleading. "...ault, I should'v...een there…"

If she's not asleep, she should really open her eyes. Somehow, it feels like the frightened voice belongs to someone she wants to see, too. She'll need her eyes for that. If she can just open them…

Or maybe that's too much effort. It's dark behind them, closed. Maybe she'll stay there a little longer. The prospect of sleep feels like an old friend, inviting her back with open arms.

The voices stay talking. She can hear them making sounds, exchanging words, but they never seem to take a solid shape in her mind. She knows they're discussing something. The frightened one is softer now. The calm one is more tender. It's comforting in a way she can't explain. It's hard to recall if she's ever heard anyone talk like that, to her or even around her.

Her thoughts slip away, melting into a pleasant sort of nothingness. It might be sleep, or a trance, or just drowsing. Time must pass, but she has little sense of it. She has little sense of anything, really, but it doesn't feel very important to try to change that, so she doesn't.

What does change it, after an interval she couldn't hope to estimate, is the sensation of something brushing her forehead, and a ticklish feeling lifting away from her skin. Her hair? It must've fallen...yes, over her forehead, over her eyes. It fell over her eyes and something is pushing it away, gently. It's warm, that something. It's familiar. It's hers.

That idle notion feels worth the effort of remembering how her eyelids work, of devoting the focus and energy towards lifting them despite their weight. At first, all she sees is light, almost painfully bright relative to the darkness she's been hiding in all this time. Then shapes swim slowly into focus, then colors. There's white where she'd thought a pair of eyes would be. She's not certain why she'd thought she'd see them there. She's not sure why she thought they'd be blue.

"Issy," a familiar voice whispers, so thick with desperate relief that it almost startles her. "Issy, hey, I'm here. I'm here, you're safe."

Light, she thinks hazily. In the darkness. A nightlight.

His expression isn't easy to make out from the low angle beneath her barely-lifted eyelids, but he seems less terrified than he'd been before. Or at least he's feigning it better. There's a smile on his lips and her vision is still swimming enough that she can't tell whether the wobbling is real or just a trick of her tired eyes. She could ask, maybe, if she made the effort to open her mouth the way she'd devoted herself to opening her eyes. But there's considerably more pain involved with that attempt, so much so that it startles her, and the look on her face must reflect it.

"Hey, don't try to talk," the nightlight soothes, stroking his hand through her rebellious hair again. "You inhaled a lot of smoke. Ugh, though I don't want to leave you without a way to speak, either...okay, all right, how about this. Two short blinks for yes, and one long for no?"

Oh, he's clever. And all this focusing is starting to tire her out again, but she doesn't want to let go of the sight of him just yet. That's more than worth mustering the strength to blink twice before opening her eyes again, trying to focus on him.

"That's my girl," he says softly, and she finds she likes that, the way he says my so effortlessly, like it's a simple tangible fact of the world. She blinks twice, deliberate but slow, because she agrees with the sentiment. It earns a laugh out of him, albeit something of a startled one. "Don't worry, okay? You're safe. We've got you."

We? she wonders, but that's not something she can ask through a simple yes or no. Although...she could spell it, couldn't she? Somehow. Dots and dashes. That feels like something she knows, but she's far too tired to try to remember. She's all right with the thought of not worrying, though, since she doesn't think she has the energy for that either.

She blinks twice. His hand settles in a curve against her cheek.

"I should probably let you rest," her knight murmurs after a moment, and it doesn't sound like he's all that eager about the prospect, but it doesn't sound like he was asking for her opinion on the matter either so she makes sure not to blink at all, lest he get the wrong idea. "But I'm not going to leave, okay? I'll be right here the whole time. I won't leave you alone."

That does sound nice. She blinks twice. He kisses her forehead.

"Do you need anything?" he asks, in a way that seems half fussy and half like he's grasping for excuses to delay letting her slip back off into slumber by any means necessary. "Water? Blanket? Painkillers? Fluff your pillow?"

She gazes at him, steady and unblinking, because his voice is so sweet and so warm and so utterly unproductive to his stated aims, and he seems to catch that himself within a moment or two.

"Too many at once, huh," he finishes sheepishly. "Sorry. Okay, slower this time. Do you need something?"

She considers. No, maybe she doesn't — but then, well, maybe she does. She blinks twice, and he sits up a little straighter.

"Okay. You do," he confirms. "One of the things I just named?"

He'd been speaking fast. She doesn't altogether recall everything he'd just listed off, but that's all right. She's confident that what she needs wasn't among them, so she closes her eyes and holds them shut in a long, significant blink.

"No," he translates, and she opens her eyes to watch him again. "Uh, all right, let me think. Something you can eat?"

She blinks once, slow and long.

"Something you can wear?"

Another long blink, just like the first.

He purses his lips, considering. "Is it...an object? Something important to you?"

Ah, now that's getting somewhere. She blinks a long "no", but follows it with a more rapid "yes".

It takes him a second, but he quickly grasps it. "No, not an object, but yes, something important to you. Then is it, um...oh! A person?"

She blinks twice.

"You want me to get someone for you," he says carefully. "Someone I would know?"

She blinks twice, because that's technically two questions but trying a double answer like before would only over-complicate an already precarious process.

"Someone nearby, or out of town?" he asks, but this time he catches himself before she has to worry about how to handle the double inquiry. "Wait, no, sorry. Slower, I got it. Someone nearby?"

Yes, she blinks. Yes, yes, yes.

"A friend of yours?"

She opens her eyes, fixing her gaze onto his face as best she can, as though the unwavering weight of her gaze might somehow prove enough to pierce through the white lenses obscuring his eyes and find the color of his own behind them. She looks, and looks, and looks, and when it feels like she's looked enough that her point has been made, she blinks a slow and deliberate "yes".

It doesn't click for him, for a moment. But she makes herself watch long enough that she can see the moment when it does.

"You need something," he says softer, a little breathy, come full circle back to the original wording he'd used with the new added context of the thought she's holding behind her eyes. "I asked if you needed something."

Yes, she blinks. It's true, after all.

"Hey…" he begins, as a weak laugh huffs past his lips so faintly that it's hardly even there at all. "Come on. Don't make me blush, okay? We're not the only ones in the Cave right now."

"Your ham-fisted coquetries disgust me," comes a loud, pointed agreement from somewhere off in the distance.

"Piss off, you little miscreant," her nightlight calls back, without missing a beat.

His smile looks better now, though. Easier, more natural, more settled. More like how she likes it, how it's supposed to be. Like for the first time since she'd stepped into her safehouse at the beginning of this whole catastrophe, she's finally done something right.

That realization seems to sap the remaining strength she'd had left, or at least the determination to keep her eyes open for the duration. Exhaustion weighs heavy on her eyelids, and the siren song of slumber proves too alluring to resist. It's all right, she thinks hazily. She's safe, and he's here. That's what matters, isn't it?

In the last moments before she drifts off into unconsciousness, she can feel the soft touch of his lips.

★
→ PLUS ONE

There's one thing that's for certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt: the Batcave is by far the best hiding place a world-renowned thief could possibly hope for.

Carmen's never been the type to insist on overdoing her physical recovery, fortunately. She's all for pushing past her own limits, but only when that comes to the boundaries of ambition, not those of physical capacity. She's only got one body with which to pursue her lofty dreams, after all; it's an asset as much as any of her gadgets and vehicles are, so if she doesn't keep herself in as good of condition as her tools, then what use is it to begin with?

Fortunately, her host doesn't seem to mind her presence — which she has to admit is strange. She's not sure what she'd expected from Batman, exactly, when most of the reports of him are the exaggerated accounts of superstitious criminals, which makes it difficult to tell how much is the truth and how much merely myth. She'd expected him to be reserved, of course. An air of being untouchable, obviously. She'd anticipated an exacting allowance of no more than ten words per day, with all other commentary to be conveyed through significant silence or withering stares.

She's not sure why she hadn't expected him to be kind. The evidence is there — Nightwing himself is proof positive of that, for all that she's picked up on the tells of some long-smothered differences and slow-simmering issues that they've been careful not to let come to light in her presence. She supposes she'd thought he'd be indifferent to her, at best. A guest he was tolerating out of necessity, maybe. Or just one more thief off the streets thanks to unexpectedly convenient circumstances.

But he is kind. He's the one who ultimately persuades Nightwing to leave her side and take care of himself, taking up the vigil so she won't be left alone. He brings her tea and apologizes that it's not as good as it would've been if made by some other specific person that he never actually names. He brings over a chess set and offers to play her, and even though there's a moment of reflexive alarm when she first catches sight of the pieces and remembers the trap in her safehouse, she smothers it and agrees to a game. She refuses to indulge the irrational fears that come with superstition, be it about Batman or about chess.

He says she can have the white pieces. Naturally, she remarks on the pair of dark knights that the decision affords him, and he doesn't quite smile, but she thinks it amuses him anyway.

At length, Batman fills in the gaps of what had happened to her that night with the answers that he and Robin have gleaned from their investigations. She notices that he doesn't include Nightwing among that number; it must have been difficult to keep him benched about a matter he's so personally invested in, and she can't tell whether that's because Batman had actually succeeded at making him sit out or if he's just refusing to acknowledge Nightwing's insubordination in involving himself regardless.

Zack and Chief, she discovers, had done more than just bury Lee's tip about her within their own database; somehow, they'd begun digging into Lee's activities in Bludhaven in a manner just unsubtle enough that it'd caught Batman's attention. Lee'd found her safehouse by exactly the same means she'd expected Nightwing to — by checking the public title records and recognizing her particular flair for the choice of venue and false identity. There's no telling how long he'd known. Not long enough to be terrifying, it seems like, but long enough that it's not comfortable to contemplate. Time enough to learn the layout and plan out exactly how best to deploy his trap, if nothing else. That explains how it'd been so effective in the moment.

Batman's voice is even and methodical as he details the particulars for her. The placement of the bombs had, as she'd guessed, been a concerted effort to funnel her toward one specific window; Lee had rigged it with an off-brand formulation of something resembling the Scarecrow's fear toxin. He'd never expected Carmen to succumb to the fire, though of course she's sure he wouldn't have suffered any hard feelings over it if she had. The plan was always to drive her into the path of the gas, to disorient her enough that she wouldn't see it coming and prey on the fears that had exposed her to it in the first place.

She thinks back to the ache in her chest as she'd been recovering. The terrible pain in her throat. The way she'd thought she'd seen her mother immolating in the flames, and how they'd transformed into spirits and demons before her very eyes.

Lee hadn't been trying to kill her. He'd been trying to scare her. It had all been just to make her fall apart, to strip her of her poise and rationality, to give him the satisfaction of knowing he'd done it to her.

"We're not sure if the heightened concentration of the dosage was intentional," Batman tells her quietly as he castles his rook and king. "A street variant of Scarecrow's toxins wouldn't be as easy to calibrate as the original. It's possible he underestimated the potency of the amount that he used."

Or it's possible he got exactly what he wanted. She'd certainly felt like she was being scared to death, in the moment.

"Where is he?" she asks, sweeping in to take the bishop he'd sacrificed with her queen.

"Your friends at ACME have been generous collaborators," Batman answers, folding his hands as he considers his next move. "We're matching his prior history and known signatures against incidents across an area encompassing both cities. I'll keep you apprised of any items of interest; your own experience with him would be equally invaluable."

She wonders, silently, if Batman is aware that Nightwing has already crossed paths himself with Lee Jordan once. That he has a phone number — to a burner, assuredly, but still a potentially open line of contact. She's not about to mention it herself, but more likely than not she doesn't need to. It is Batman, after all, and somehow she doubts it's a coincidence that Robin has been sticking like glue to Nightwing's side every minute they've both gone out on patrol.

"When will I be cleared to leave?" she asks next, keeping her eyes on the board. There are a number of answers she might get to that question; she's curious to see which one Batman decides to answer. It presumes, of course, that she's going to be allowed to leave at all. She could hardly blame him, she supposes, if it turns out that assumption is misplaced.

And sure enough, Batman doesn't quite take her bait. "Are you in a hurry to?" he asks mildly.

She shrugs. It doesn't hurt to move her shoulders as much these days as it had previously. "I'm used to knowing where I am," she clarifies simply. "Since I don't expect you to tell me that while I'm here, I'm curious to know how long it'll be before I'm back to somewhere I recognize."

Batman stays quiet a long moment. It's less oppressive than she imagines it might otherwise be, since he seems to be mulling over his own thoughts rather than silently demanding an answer from a subject of interrogation. "I'm sure Nightwing will have an opinion on the matter, if it's your intention to leave Gotham."

He leaves the more significant meaning unspoken, for her to read where it sits between the lines. He's not asking if she means to leave Gotham. He's asking if she means to leave Bludhaven — and by extension, Nightwing.

She could run, she supposes. It's the familiar thing, the comfortable course of action. But she's had so many opportunities to leave the circumstances she's found herself in, before now. And some of them would have been sensible to take, and others would have been cowardly, and still others would have been outright irrational. All those myriad chances to choose something different, and yet every time her decision had been the same.

There's only one place in the world where someone believes in her the way that Nightwing does. And that's something far too valuable to surrender on an easy escape.

She draws her queen back on the board, returning it to the haven of her defending pieces. He doesn't ask her if that's symbolic. She wouldn't know how to answer him even if he did. A psychologist would have their thoughts, probably, but sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.

"And what about your opinion on the matter?" she asks, since it seems they're just going to keep batting implications back and forth without answer until one of them finally bites the bullet and makes their stand.

"I think it's rare to encounter a criminal as unapologetic about her endeavors as she is determined to accomplish them without violence," Batman replies. "To say nothing of being a thief consistently uninterested in material gain."

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," she says lightly.

"Act one, scene five," he answers, without missing a beat — which gets him a raise of her eyebrows, and earns her a slight and knowing smile in return. "I'm sure Robin would enjoy discussing Shakespeare with you. He's working his way through the classics."

"Then I'd also recommend him Eliot," she replies, growing rapidly more interested in their emergent conversational game than the one playing out on the chessboard between them. "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."

"I'd rather you didn't," Batman remarks dryly. "Going too far is not something he struggles with, to put it mildly."

She thinks back to her severed grapple, the flurry of shuriken and the whisper of a blade, and wonders idly what Robin would've done if she hadn't been fast enough to dodge. A test of her reflexes, indeed, but certainly one she could've failed. In theory.

That thought lingers in her mind, nagging idly. Eventually, she understands why, and gives voice to the notion it had absently inspired. "There's a thought experiment," she begins whimsically, glancing down to study the positioning of the pieces between them to reassess if her strategy is still playing out as intended. "Attributed to a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt. 'What would you do if you knew you could not fail'?"

Batman regards her quietly, seeming to sense what she's after. It doesn't take a great detective, after all, much less the world's greatest. "Can you answer it?" he asks her.

"Can you?" she answers instead, mostly just to show that two can play at that game.

It earns her another of his subtle smiles, at least. "I'm game if you are," he concedes, and without making her wait, goes on, "I would live a happy life."

She tips her head at him, curious. "You wouldn't eliminate crime?"

"I'm aware of plenty of ways to eliminate crime," Batman answers calmly. "And I already know I could do it without failing. The problem lies with everything else those methods eliminate in the process."

Like free will, she thinks. Ambition. People like her.

"I'm told being happy is worth the faith it takes to endure countless failures," Batman goes on. "But I can't deny it would be nice to replace that faith with certainty to rely on, instead."

"I suppose that's the benefit of having people who love you," she says carefully. "They might not represent a certainty, but a collective's support is still stronger than individual faith."

"So I'm told," Batman agrees, and doesn't say anything more, which is prompt enough for her to know it's her turn to take a swing.

And it's not as though she hasn't done this exercise before, time and time again. Once, it was to reach the top of her career as a detective, and she hadn't failed. Once, it'd been to be as masterful a thief as she'd been as a detective, and she hadn't failed in that endeavor either. And then for a while it had been bigger and grander crimes, flying as close to the sun as her wings of wax would allow, determined to glimpse an unparalleled sight before whatever inevitable fall would await her. But now, all of a sudden, she can feel that perspective tilting in light of the memory of cold pizza on moonlit rooftops, and enthusiastic discussions over bubble tea, and the exaggerated carping of an exasperated child in a manner that could only be called brotherly, and the realization that the world's greatest detective — better than her, better than anyone — is playing chess with her in a basement instead of putting his talents toward the good of the world, the same way his arms had lifted and carried her free of her paralyzed terror.

She knows what she wants, she realizes. She knows what certainty she craves, just like he does. And at first she doesn't know how to put it into words, until she reframes it in her mind as the thing she knows is worth the faith of enduring countless failures for, too.

"I would be as good for your son as he is for me," Carmen says at last, and knows she's gotten it right when a different sort of smile than before flickers across the corner of Batman's mouth. "I like the person he sees in me. I'd like to be her, someday."

But before Batman has a chance to reply — and maybe he was never going to in the first place — the familiar roar of an engine echoes from far down the subterranean tunnel that she assumes connects the Bat-motorpool to the cave's exit. She can't help but look toward it, trying to gauge the distance on the basis of sound alone; by the time she looks back, Batman is writing his next move onto one of the paper cards used in tournaments when gameplay suspends mid-match, slipping it into an envelope and sealing it before placing it in the center of the board.

"Go on," Batman says kindly, and rises from his chair to offer her his arm — she's still a little unsteady on her feet of late, though her balance is getting better with every passing day. "I cleared him earlier to take you out for a drive. And the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago."

He's right, she thinks with an unexpected flush of fondness, bracing on his gauntlet for support until she's got her legs beneath her and feels confident enough in putting one foot in front of the other the whole way down. The past is past, like it or not, and lingering too long in its shadowed tunnel just makes it all the harder to move forward toward the light that's waiting at the end.

She can't change who she's been, for better or for worse, or who her choices have led her to be. The best time for that was a decade ago.

But the second-best time is today.