Masquerade Ball

Once upon a time, there was one single night each year when Selina Kyle did not need her goggles or her hood to move unseen through Gotham City. That night belonged to the Wayne Foundation's Masquerade Ball.

The great hall glittered with candlelight and silver masks, and everyone who attended wore one, from the wealthiest donors to the quietest wallflowers standing near the punch bowls. In a room full of masks, nobody thought to look twice at Selina's. She had come, as she often did, for the jewels — a dozen glittering necklaces circling a dozen wealthy necks, easy pickings for anyone patient enough to wait for the right moment.

But instead, Selina found herself standing quietly at the edge of the dance floor, watching Bruce Wayne move through the crowd, charming a group of donors he clearly found utterly exhausting.

She recognized the tired set of his shoulders before she even recognized his face. She had seen that exact same posture before, high above the city on quiet rooftops, cape gone, cowl gone, a man holding up an entire city that rarely thought to thank him for it.

"You dance better than you fight," Selina said, appearing at his elbow in a silver mask and a dress the deep color of midnight.

Bruce very nearly dropped his glass. "Selina."

"Relax," she said, taking his arm and gently pulling him toward the dance floor before he could think of a reasonable argument against it. "Nobody in this room recognizes anybody tonight. That's rather the whole point of a masquerade, Bruce."

The band played something slow and old-fashioned, and somewhere above the dance floor, a thousand candles flickered in tall silver chandeliers, throwing soft light across a hundred masked faces who had no idea who was truly standing among them.

So they danced.

And for once — just this once — neither of them was chasing the other across a rooftop in the rain, or trading quips over a broken skylight, or racing to disarm something dangerous before the clock ran out. They simply moved together across the polished floor, surrounded by candlelight and music, two people wearing masks that hid almost nothing from each other at all.

Bruce found himself telling her things he almost never told anyone. He told her about Alfred, who worried constantly that he worked too hard and slept too little. He told her, quietly, about the sheer exhaustion of holding two entire lives together at once, year after year, without ever letting either one crack under the strain.

Selina listened without a hint of judgment in her eyes, the way only someone who also lived two lives, in two very different costumes, possibly could.

"Why haven't you turned me in?" she asked at last, her voice quieter than before, almost lost beneath the music.

Bruce considered the question carefully before he answered. "Same reason you haven't stopped stealing," he said. "Some habits are simply how we survive being who we are."

At midnight, the great clock in the ballroom struck twelve, and all around them, guests began removing their masks one by one, laughing at faces that had honestly been fairly obvious all along, underneath the silk and the sequins.

Selina did not remove hers.

Instead, she simply looked at Bruce for one long, quiet moment, taking in the tired, careful man standing beneath the mask he wore every single day of his life, whether or not he happened to be wearing an actual costume that night.

"Goodnight, Bruce Wayne," she said softly, and turned, slipping gracefully through the crowd toward the terrace doors, gone into the cool night air before the band had even finished playing their song.

Bruce stood alone on the dance floor for a long moment, mask still in place, and understood something he had understood many times before, and would understand many times again. Selina Kyle would always know exactly who he was — in every room he entered, in every costume he wore, in every careful version of himself he ever tried to hide from the rest of the world.

Out on the terrace, under a wide Gotham City sky scattered with stars, Selina Kyle smiled to herself, tucked one borrowed pearl necklace into her glove, and disappeared quietly into the night, already looking forward to whatever came next.