Cat And Mouse

Once upon a time, months after their very first meeting on Fifth Street, Batman and Catwoman had become something like old friends who happened to be on opposite sides of the law.

Batman had chased a great many criminals across the rooftops of Gotham City, but none of them moved quite the way Catwoman did. By now, he had learned her patterns the way you might learn the tune of a favorite song. She struck at midnight, when the city was quietest. She never touched anything that would ruin a family's life. And she always — always — had an escape route planned three steps ahead of his own.

Commissioner Gordon wanted her behind bars at Blackgate Penitentiary, the way any thief ought to be. But Batman, in the quiet corners of his mind where he thought his most careful thoughts, wasn't so sure that was the whole story.

One night, Selina Kyle set her sights on the Gotham Trust Bank on Miller Street. Inside its vault sat a collection of rare gold coins, gleaming under a single hanging lamp. She scaled the outside of the building using the small sharp claws stitched into her gloves, climbing as easily as any cat climbs a tree. She reached the roof, found the skylight, and eased it open without a single sound.

The bank was silent, save for the soft tick of a wall clock and the whisper of Selina's boots against cold marble. She loved this part — the stillness right before a job, when the whole building seemed to be holding its breath along with her. She counted the security cameras. Two, both pointed the wrong way. She counted the guards. Just one, dozing gently in a chair near the front doors, worn out from a long shift.

She was halfway across the bank floor, moving toward the vault, when a familiar shape unfolded itself from the shadows above the safe.

"You again," Selina said, without even turning around.

"Every time," Batman answered.

And so began the chase — the same old dance, and yet somehow never quite the same twice. Selina's whip cracked out across the room and caught the arm of a hanging chandelier, swinging her clear across the marble floor and out of Batman's reach. He answered with his own grapple line, firing it after her through the shattered skylight and out onto the rooftop above.

Up there, with the whole glittering skyline of Gotham City spread out beneath them like a blanket of stars fallen to earth, Selina finally stopped running. She stood at the very edge of the ledge, breathing hard, her satchel of coins jingling softly at her hip. Far below, the city hummed along, cars threading between streetlights, entirely unaware of the two figures balanced high above them on the edge of the world.

"You could have caught me by now," she said quietly. "Why didn't you?"

Batman didn't answer right away. Because on his way up through the bank, he had noticed something small and important. Selina had tied the night guard to his chair — gently, carefully — and pinned a small note to his jacket, apologizing for the trouble she had caused him. It wasn't the first time Batman had seen her leave a scene exactly like that.

"You have a code," Batman said at last.

Selina allowed herself a small smile in the moonlight. "Everybody's got a code."

And with one graceful flick of her whip around the neck of a stone gargoyle, she swung off into the Gotham night, coins and all, leaving Batman alone on the rooftop with his thoughts.

He let her go.

Commissioner Gordon would not have approved. But Batman had begun to understand something important about Catwoman, something the newspapers never printed and the police reports never captured. She wasn't like the rest of Gotham's rogues gallery. She wasn't trying to hurt this city she called home. She had simply never been given much reason to trust it.

The next morning, on his way home as the sun rose gold over Gotham, Batman found half of those very same coins scattered across a fire escape — right outside an old apartment building in the East End, where families lived who couldn't always afford to pay their heating bills through the long winter.

Some thief, Batman thought, and for just a moment, standing alone on a rooftop in the early light, he almost smiled.

Then he pulled his cape close around his shoulders and went back out on patrol, already wondering — as he always seemed to, these days — when their paths would cross again.

They always did.