Batwoman Begins Ch. 02

The leather chair wraps around her nicely and she takes a look around the empty apartment. Hayley knows she'll have to answer for how and why she's intruded on Kate's sanctuary. But since the other woman is acting like an overgrown child and refuses to speak to her, the woman figures it's about time they had the coming argument before Kate goes too far and does something - else - stupid.

Kate freezes outside her front door. She can't explain it but there's a feeling creeping into her body telling her someone's inside who wasn't invited. Quickly she looks around and reaches for the blade on her hip. Turning the doorknob, she prepares for a fight with the occupant of her home. With the door fully open, her eyes land on the figure in her lounge chair and she breathes again. A resigned sigh leaves her lips as she closes the door behind her, "I thought I was the queen of unannounced visits."

"Again," she smiles as serenely as possible, "you were wrong."

Throwing her keys on the table inside the door, she asks, "What do you want from me, Hayley?"

A list of items scrolls through her mind before she answers, "That's a damn dangerous question, Kane."

Caught off guard but pleasantly surprised by the innuendo-laden response, Kate manages to smile, "Then I fully expect you to answer it truthfully." Having taken off her jacket, she makes the decision to throw her visitor off a bit by dropping to her knees and crawling across the carpeted floor towards the chair, "Even if that answer makes you seem animalistic, crude, baseless, and wicked." Holding Hayley's eyes, she slips her tongue out of her mouth to almost lick the woman's thigh, "Promise me you'll be honest and as domineering as possible."

Watching the woman, who's clearly drunk, Hayley can't help by flash back to another time Kate Kane was on her knees beside her.

They were about 15 and hiding behind the Japanese screen in Bruce's office. Those same green eyes looked up at her as their bearer asked, "What's it feel like to kiss, Hay?"

Without breathing, she'd leaned over and pressed her lips to Kate's. It was painfully brief but wholly effective. After that first one, Kate's breath rushed out hot against her own lips before they were kissing again. The first few were almost laughably amateur. But as they got more comfortable, she remembers how Kate had buried her hands in her hair and pressed her against the wall. As if shocked by the sound of Hayley's groan, Kate had pulled back suddenly, eyes wide, lips red, and breath coming out in sharp pants, "Oh my God," she'd said as she touched her own lips, "I like girls."

Hayley had only been able to blink as her body slowly awakened to the changes elicited by their kissing. There was a hardness in places, a wetness in another, but mainly an ache and hotness everywhere, "I do too, I guess." She remembers being on the verge of tears at the awareness of those feelings, "Because kissing boys doesn't feel that good!"

Pretty as a picture, the ever-illusive Kate Kane had dipped her head and blushed a shade of pink that made Hayley want to kiss her all over again as she said, "Was it really good? I don't know what I'm doing."

"Oh," it was her turn to blush then, "it was just fine, Kate. You did just fine."

Looking down at the woman kneeling before her now, Hayley feels that same awe and slight sting of tears, "If I have to tell you what to do, Kate, you don't want it enough."

Kate sits back on her heels, smiling softly, "Were you thinking about the first time?"

"Why?"

"Because your face is a little red and your breathing changed," she leans forward, not touching the other woman at all. Her voice drops to a whisper, "And I can damn near smell how much you want me."

Maintaining her composure, Hayley whispers back, "I think you're smelling yourself."

Her voice softens with her expression and she almost whimpers, "Why can't you just admit you want me?"

"You're drunk, Kate."

"No," she shakes her head and crawls into Hayley's lap, "I might have had some alcohol but I'm not drunk." Her lips press against Hayley's cheek before moving to her neck, "I know what I'm doing. Please, just let me have you finally."

She grabs the woman's hands before they can grab her anywhere, "Katherine." When their eyes meet, she searches for some sibilance of the woman Hayley knows is in there, "Katie."

With their fingers intertwined, Kate looks down into those deep, hypnotic eyes. Forgetting she was supposed to convince her visitor that she's not talking out of her ass, she melts, "Those eyes are going to be the death of me but Jesus," she sighs and admits, "it's been years since I've felt as alive as I do now that I can see them again." She swallows hard and throws caution to the wind, "Why did you leave me?"

Somewhere inside her, something melts, "Oh, Kate, I didn't leave you." She tips the woman's face back up to her own, "Bruce sent me away because he was afraid of what we'd end up doing to each other emotionally." She wipes a single tear off Kate's cheek and admits just a little of what she's fought years to deny, "I didn't want to go, but I didn't have a choice." When those green eyes meet hers again, she smiles softly, "I missed you, Katie."

"Oh, Hayley," she throws her arms around the woman's neck, "I thought everyone just left me. Beth. Mom. Maggie. But the one that hurt the most was you." She pulls back and implores, "You promise you didn't want to leave? If you could have stayed you would have?"

"I promise," she replies truthfully. Every day since that last one, Hayley knew the time would come that she'd have to tell Kate Kane the truth of what happened. Being the more mature one has always been an anchor around her neck. She couldn't see Kate on the rare occasion that Bruce let her come home. He was, after all, her guardian since her parents died many, many moons ago. Before his end he'd spent countless hours talking to her about what was expected of her.

Then, as if he read her mind, he spoke a name they'd both refrained from uttering for over a decade, "As for Kate," he'd said, "there will come a day when you'll have to tell her my legacy is now her own." With that, she'd been handed a task that no one - even Bruce Wayne and Jacob Kane - would want. She didn't even have to reply. You could say she'd always known they'd come back around full circle and it'd be her and Kate against a force they'd fight against to the death - the world, or each other.

"I can't do it, Hay," Kate cries, finally breaking with the assistance of the alcohol in her blood. "I can't be Batman. I can't even be the female version of him. Some shoes just don't fit, no matter how much time you spend alone trying like hell to strap them on your feet." She'd spent plenty of time away training. But she'd always thought of herself as a soldier, not a hero. Even when her honesty got her kicked out of West Point, she was still a soldier. Her war was fought with alcohol, anger, and an endless stream of naked women. Truthfully, she doesn't remember most of it, but her body was fine-tuned into a machine that even the worst of her actions couldn't break. Her heart, though, was another matter completely. From where she is, in the darkest of nights, and even in the brightest of days, she knows she can never be as good as Batman.

"Kate," she cups the woman's face in her hands, "you don't have to be Batman. You can just be you." The woman falls away from her with a loud, almost irritated sigh, but Hayley isn't done, "Kate, you're not expected to be just like him."

She stands and walks to the door, "Hayley, you said yourself that I'm supposed to be him with boobs. How can I be like him? Do you know what all he did for this damn city?" Her voice raises a bit, "He's a fucking superhero, Hay!"

"I don't give a damn what he did for this city, Kate." She saunters to the woman as she makes her case, "He found an orphan in a damn crib after killing her parents. He took that child, renamed her, made her his ward, gave her a family, then ripped the closest member of that family away by sending her to the other side of the planet! Then, before he conveniently stepped out of life, he thrust her into a business she knew very little about, and forced her back into a family who had almost forgotten she even existed. And now, that same child is forced to tell the most precious thing in her life that everything he'd been is what she's got to copy and become. That's who Batman was, Kate. That's what he's done for me. So as long as you do better than that, then you'll be a bigger, badder, better hero than he has ever been to me." Her anger spent, she softly adds, "You've always been Batwoman to me."

"Ah, shit, Hayley," she pulls the woman into her body and holds her closer than she ever dreamed she might, "I'm so sorry." Taking deep breaths of the woman in her arms, she lets herself feel the heat of anger towards the man who shoved them together after tearing them apart, "I'm so damn sorry."

"I just wish you knew your own strength." Hayley leans back to look into Kate's face, "I'm serious. You're stronger than you give yourself credit for, Katie."

She smiles wryly, "You're the only one who can get away with calling me that."

"That's because I'm special," she smiles from behind the shadow of her beanie. She knows her eyes are glowing, that's what they do when she feels something strongly.

"God damn right you are," she manages to utter as she's utterly locked in a gaze with those bright blue eyes, "I just wish you knew what you do to me."

"Tell me."

"I'm unstitched with you. My hems are ragged and unraveled. You unlock me without a key. I can fool anyone else. But then those eyes land on me and I swear, woman," she breathes, "I fall all over again."

"So now you admit to falling the first time," she asks with a tiny smile.

For a long moment she can only blink in a fog of disbelief. When she speaks, her voice is low, almost a growl, "How can you possibly not know?" She drags a thumb over Hayley's bottom lip even as she continues to stare into those eyes, completely lost, and yet, feeling as though she's been found, "You're my Kryptonite."