Code Of The Cat

Once upon a time, on a rainy night in Gotham City, a girl named Holly climbed up onto Selina Kyle's rooftop, soaked through and shivering.

Holly was twelve years old and half-starved, and she had followed a trail of cat food bowls three whole blocks from the shelter she had quietly run away from earlier that week. She had heard the rumors that traveled through the East End the way rumors always do — whispered stories about a woman in a sleek black suit who fed every stray cat in the neighborhood and never, ever seemed to get caught. Holly figured that if Catwoman could survive entirely on her own in a city as big and difficult as Gotham, then maybe, just maybe, she could learn how to survive too.

Selina almost sent her straight back home. Almost.

But instead, standing there in the rain, she found herself remembering a rooftop of her very own, many years earlier, and a younger, hungrier version of herself who had needed exactly this kind of chance, and had not always found one.

"I'm not teaching you to steal," Selina said, wrapping a warm blanket around Holly's shivering shoulders. "I'm teaching you to survive. There's a difference, and you had better learn it fast, because Gotham doesn't wait around for anyone."

And so the training began, night after night, season after season.

Selina taught Holly to climb first, patiently, the way a cat climbs — hands and feet finding grip one careful hold at a time, never rushing, never guessing. She taught her to read an entire room in a matter of seconds: where the exits were, where the guards stood, where the shadows pooled thick enough to hide in, and always, always the fastest way out if everything happened to go wrong. And most important of all, she taught Holly the code — the very same quiet code that had kept Selina alive, and mostly out of Blackgate Penitentiary, for all these years.

Never hurt someone who hasn't earned it. Never take from someone who cannot afford the loss. And always, always feed the ones who are hungrier than you.

Holly listened to every word. She practiced for months, on rooftops and fire escapes across the East End, until her hands stopped shaking and her feet stopped slipping and her breathing stayed calm even three stories above the street.

Then, one evening, when a debt collector's thugs cornered Holly near the old dress shop where Selina kept her gear, it was that very training that saved her. Holly's whip — cheap leather, but carefully built and well-balanced, just as Selina had taught her — cracked across a wrist and knocked a weapon loose before anyone could blink. And then came the rooftop escape she had practiced a hundred times before, so smooth and so sure that it felt, by now, almost like breathing.

Batman found them afterward, sitting together on a quiet rooftop, sharing a simple dinner of takeout noodles while three curious cats circled hopefully, waiting for scraps to fall.

"Another one?" he asked, nodding toward Holly with something like understanding in his voice.

"Somebody taught me," Selina said simply, handing Holly another dumpling. "Seemed rude not to pass it on."

Holly grew up fast on those Gotham City rooftops, sharper and steadier with every passing season, learning every lesson Selina had to teach and adding a few clever tricks entirely her own. And eventually, the day came — as it always does, for every student who has learned well — when Holly no longer needed Selina's shadow to feel safe up there among the chimneys and fire escapes. She only needed her friendship, which never once wavered, not for a single night.

Selina watched her climb off into the city on her own for the first time, and felt something rise up inside her that felt suspiciously, wonderfully, like pride.

Because some legacies, Selina had come to understand, were never statues carved from marble, or fortunes locked away in vaults. Sometimes a legacy was something far smaller and far more lasting: a whip, a code passed carefully from one set of hands to another, and a girl who once needed somebody, anybody, to believe she was worth teaching.

High above Gotham City, under a sky finally clearing after the rain, two cat burglars — one still learning, one who had learned long ago — went their separate ways into the night, each of them a little less alone than they had been before.