[fic] 'All other fetters' (Bruce/Selina various, NC-17) 2/2
continued from 1/2
DIM BULB
The lock on Lichtman's cold-storage vault is large and pointlessly ornamental. Catwoman could probably have picked it with a bobby pin. The heavy door swings open soundlessly and she heads quickly to the last rack of furs.
Melinda "Don't call me Mindy" Sherwin-Tierney had let slip in the steamroom at the Gotham Racquet Club that Lichtman's did a brisk business in storage of valuables other than furs. "And who would think to look in *that* ratty old building? I tell you, dears, it's been a godsend."
"They've renovated the upper floors," Selina had said quietly as she added more water to the rocks.
Melinda rolled her eyes. "Into some kind of bridge and tunnel supper club, I hear. I ask you, who would travel all the way to the East End *except* suburban wanna-bes and les nouveaux?"
Melinda is a poseur of the highest order; her distinctive, braying laugh had been perfectly audible from the queue outside when Catwoman dropped down from the roof and slid into the first-floor window. Tonight's gala dinner for landmines -- for or against, the invitation addressed to Selina Kyle did not specify -- has attracted much of what passes for Gotham society.
Their presence upstairs merely adds an extra frisson to Catwoman's activities.
The walk-in safe, concealed behind the furs, sports a slightly more complicated lock. Holding her breath against the rank odor of mothballs and death, Catwoman pushes the skins out of her way and drops to one knee to pick it.
Breaking and entering -- and escaping, too -- are the showy highlights of this life, but lockpicking is subtle, cautious, almost hypnotic for her. She can dimly hear the tinkle of music from the floor above, the whisper of furs around her, but her attention is squarely on the lock before her. This one is old and plain, a respectable lock that does not give up its secrets easily.
"What's this? Some kind of scavenger hunt? How exciting!" A male, plummy voice sounds behind her. *Right* behind her.
Her pick slips. Grabbing for it, Catwoman knocks open the lock with her fist, with a great deal more brute force than she prefers.
She kicks out blindly, spins suddenly, and a heavy body falls against her own, tumbling with her into the interior vault. Before she can duck and escape, the door swings heavily shut.
And latches.
"*Damn it*," she yells.
The intruder grabs her elbow and hauls himself to his feet. "Terribly sorry, so sorry. Are you all right?" Once upright, he releases her arm. Just her luck: it's Brucie Wayne. He claps his hand theatrically over his mouth. "Catwoman!"
She glances around the narrow vault, rubbing her arms. It's a good ten degrees cooler in here, crowded with more furs and, along the back wall, safety-deposit boxes. She tests the door, but it clearly locks from the outside.
"Is this a stick-up? A hostage situation? Should I, er, 'assume the position'? I'd be happy to assume the position --"
No escape, not until she can get her wits about her.
With idiot millionaire Bruce Wayne babbling in her ear, that's going to be awhile.
"You slack-jawed, empty-headed *imbecile*, what did you do?" She knocks her forehead lightly against the unyielding door.
"What *did* I do?" he asks lightly, hand on her shoulder as he leans to study the door. "Are we locked in?"
Clenching her jaw, she swallows the urge to spin around and knee him in the groin. Instead, she turns slowly. Her back to the door, his arms bracketing her shoulders, she shakes her head. "Yes, we're locked in. Thanks to you."
Wayne looks dishevelled, his collar open and cheeks flushed, dark hair tumbling over his forehead. "You don't say! What fun!"
The urge to strike him tightens her arm from fingers to shoulder. "Not fun," she says. "Very far from fun, as a matter of fact."
He grins more widely and cocks his head. "I'm sure a fun-loving man and a restless kitty cat can find *some* way to pass the time, hmm?" Shivering ostentatiously, he adds, "After all, it's *quite* cold in here."
Before she can stop herself, Catwoman lands a right uppercut on that strong, handsome jaw. She steps free of him as he stumbles to the left.
"Ow! What'd you do that for?" Wayne slides down the wall and rubs his jaw.
Catwoman plants her fists on her hips and glares down at him. Blinking up at her like a child denied a third helping of cake, he says plaintively, "You don't seem to like me very much. Why don't you like me?"
Turning in disgust, Catwoman runs her fingertips over the top row of safety-deposit boxes. They are individually locked, but nothing looks impenetrable. "No," she says flatly. "I'm afraid I don't."
"But you don't even know me," Wayne mutters piteously. "I --"
She glances over her shoulder. "You're a dim-witted pretty boy."
"I prefer rakishly charming," he says as he rubs his jaw again. "And not pretty, really, so much as..."
"Devilishly handsome?"
He grins, then winces. "Ow. Yes."
Turning her back on him again, Catwoman unlocks the first box and checks its contents. "I'm sure you've got one, maybe two, dumb beauty queens waiting for you up there. Why don't you be a good boy and skedaddle back?"
"I can't! We're locked in!" Wayne shouts, then curses at the pain in his face. He sighs heavily, but when he speaks again, his voice is much softer. "To tell you the truth, it's nice to get away."
"Who are they?" She opens the next box. Unlike the first, with its deeds and wills, this one contains several pairs of earrings. Garnet, emerald, and, oh, yes. *Diamonds*.
"Hmm?"
"Who are Bruce Wayne's lucky bedmates tonight?"
"Oh, *them*. Tamara Tomlinson and her second cousin Terpsichore," he replies as she empties the jewelry into the satchel on her belt. "You can't imagine how..."
She crosses her arms as she turns, leaning one shoulder against the wall. "Boring, catty, and on the make they are?"
His mouth is wide, flexible, despite the slight swelling in one corner. His lips look very soft. "Precisely, Miss --. What *do* I call you?"
"Cats don't come when called."
He nods quickly. "Naturally. But it's still nice to have nicknames for them, isn't it? My mother had a cat. Terrible old bastard, Siamese, hissed like a drunken Mario Lanza if you so much as looked at him. Tore a chunk out of my hand once. And what do you think she called him?"
Catwoman empties the next box, and the next. The Bruce Wayne who has failed to call Selina Kyle in three months never speaks of his mother. Of either of his parents. He's nowhere to be found here, unfortunately.
"I don't know," she says, sounding as bored as she can. "Fluffy?"
Wayne laughs loudly. "Siamese aren't fluffy! Ahaha, no. Guess again."
"Spot."
"That's a dog's name, silly! You're not playing this right." He's back on his feet, crowding behind her, looking over her shoulder.
Catwoman shifts the angle of her shoulders to hide what she's doing, but he's much taller than she.
"I don't want to play," she reminds him, riffling through the contents of the next box.
Wayne tugs on the tail to her costume, then slaps her buttocks lightly. "Come now --"
"You want a black eye?"
That gets him to back up just enough. "No. You hit *hard*. I just -- Give it a real guess. Put your heart into it."
"Murray," Catwoman says, raking through another pile of legal papers. "Fred. Mr. Chao? Ding-a-ling?"
His breath is warm on her neck. He's close enough to *smell* her. She can nearly feel the curve of his smile on her skin. "There you go! All very good guesses. Commendable."
Catwoman slides the last box closed and twists a little to meet his eyes. "And your point, Mr. Wayne?"
His blue eyes wink and gleam in the dim safety lights. "Well, that's just it. You know *my* name -- and, please, *do* call me Bruce, everyone does -- yet I'm utterly ignorant --"
"True," she says.
"Tsk-tsk." He traces the lower edge of her mask with his thumb. "Miss Catwoman sounds so formal. Ms. Woman, perhaps? Is it an Oriental moniker? Cat Wo-Min? I really don't *what* to call you." She opens her mouth, but he adds, suddenly *very* close, "-- as for *how* to call you, I must confess I'm *fascinated*. Do you come? And how --"
"Cats don't come when --"
"-- called, I know," he says, as their feet shuffle and hands move restlessly. "So I suppose we should make the most of this fortuitous encounter, hm?"
She has a good two million's worth of jewelry in her bag, a huge and handsome -- if moronic, irritating, and damnably superficial -- man against her.
She won't be going anywhere for the foreseeable future.
"Something like that," Catwoman says, wriggling forward until they're wrapped tight around each other and his lips are brushing her bare cheek.
The skin of his cheek smells like champagne, but his mouth is clean and slick, without a trace of alcohol. He grunts when she presses her mouth against the bruise on his jaw, and the heat there is almost intoxicating. He grunts again, more softly, and she presses him downward, down along the wall, the furs parting around them before sliding closed again.
Straddling his thighs, kissing his wide mouth, she doesn't, quite, allow herself to think. His arms are trapped when she pushes the dinner jacket off his shoulders, but he's still bigger than her, big enough to reach one hand between her legs and press his palm upward.
"Is crime really *this* exciting?" His eyes are narrowed, his mouth loose and amused, as he crooks his fingers and brushes his knuckles back and forth along her crotch. He grins as he plucks at the damp material. "Oh. Apparently it is..."
With his other hand, he tugs on her tail again. "This is *marvelous*," he murmurs, rubbing harder.
Catwoman tosses her head, once, riding the sensation before bucking hard to dislodge his hand. He exhales sharply, surprised, and she pops open the first several buttons on his shirt before sucking her way down his throat, down his chest.
"Uh -- *oh* --" Wayne is stuttering, pawing at her hips with restless hands, but he goes still when she opens his fly with one hand and reaches into the tangle of his jacket with the other.
Extracting his wallet and watching him frown in incomprehension, feels -- nearly -- better than anything else.
"Don't worry," she says, flapping open the billfold and removing one condom packet from between the credit cards. "I won't steal from *you*."
"You make that sound like an insult," he says.
She gives him a tight smile. "Do I?"
He grins at her, almost blindingly in the dark between the furs, and nuzzles her neck, the rise of her breasts, as she leans back in to replace the wallet. His hands span her hips, gripping, the nails *digging* in.
She draws the claws on her left hand lightly down his cheek. "Careful, now --"
His chin planted between her breasts, he grins sharply up at her. "Somehow I don't think 'careful' is in your vocabulary."
"No," she says. "Not for *me*."
Her claws drag through his hair as she shimmies backward, up, to unbutton her tights. He looks down at the front panel of her costume, open now, and smiles. Lazily this time, passing his hand over the top of her thighs, petting her mound.
"Ingenious," he breathes.
She doesn't tell him that her old skirt got caught in too many fire-escapes and windows to be practical, that an old-fashioned button crotch was, really, the best solution. She doesn't, because he doesn't deserve to know, and he's busy touching her again, skin to skin, molding his thumb right up against her clit, and she's rocking against him while tearing open the condom with her teeth and one claw.
He *does* know how to touch a woman. She'll give him that much. He's an imbecile, spoiled beyond the telling of it, skin smooth as a baby's, but his face is handsome, his eyes narrow and glinting, as he spreads his legs and helps her unroll the rubber.
"I'm used to a bit more..." he starts to say, then bites his lip when she sinks down on his cock. "*Oh*. Oh, my --"
Claws over his mouth, a warning hiss, and, *finally*, he gets it. Shuts up and goes back to touching her, pushing his hips upward in a ragged little rhythm that lets her lean back and *ride*. She rakes her claws back and forth over one of his shoulders, working her knees and hips until he fills just...*right*, right there, thick and very warm, and she can close her eyes now.
She moans a little, enough to remind him who's on top -- no WASP ice-princess who just *lies* there -- and pulls his hand back to her mound, rubbing herself against him until his fingers pinch at her clit and make it just sharp enough, just *painful* enough that she doesn't have to think.
He's very good at this, but she's better. she's counting the diamonds in her satchel, pushing one breast against his other hand, rolling her head around until the rhythm speeds up and she just *rides* it, like dropping off the side of a high-rise, going with it as the ground rushes up at her but never touches her.
Through her half-closed eyes, she catches him staring at her. All trace of the idiot playboy has vanished, replaced by something almost -- *bestial*, in the dark light of his eyes and sneering curl of his mouth.
"Catwoman." He speaks through gritted teeth and she falls a little faster, a little steeper, whirling.
He rolls her clit between thumb and index finger, pinches her nipple in time with *that*, and she opens her eyes, breathless and lost.
"*Fuck*, Wayne, more --"
His grin is empty, orthodontia in the place of *personality*, but she doesn't need anything like understanding or sympathy here. Just the lift of his crotch and curl of his hand, pushing her down as he shoves inside, and she rocks faster and faster until she feels him freeze and gasp.
His hips move more slowly after he comes. He uses all four fingers on her clit, and she's so close, almost there, when she looks upward and sees -- there's a panel in the ceiling. Its outlines are faint, and it's narrow, just wide enough for her, and she's going to get out of here.
Soon as she comes, soon as he sucks on her breast through the costume and *bites* as she loses the rhythm.
"Will you come now?" he asks hoarsely and laughs at his joke.
She kisses him again, to shut him up, and wrenches her hips side to side to brighten, then deepen, the orgasm. It flows through her, electric-white and deliciously erratic.
"Idiot," she tells him, almost fondly, and rises off him, clenching at the aching burn inside, between her legs. Planting one boot-heel on his shoulder, she jumps for the panel and manages to nudge it open.
"Wait, where --?" he shouts as she pulls herself inside the crawlspace. "You can't take those jewels, they don't belong to you --"
"Watch me." She peeks down through the hole. "Don't worry, big guy. I'll call 911 for you. If I remember."
She wiggles backward, holding her breath against the decades of dust in here.
"Catwoman! Dearheart!"
In the duct, she pauses, just for a moment.
"Mother's Siamese!" he shouts. "The cat's name was..."
She's already well on her way.
RED SHOCK
Selina walks quickly through the cold of the spring night, her low, square heels crunching through the thin layer of frost that coats the asphalt. Her hands are deep inside the pockets of her overcoat; her head, with its cropped hair, is lowered against the wind. Dusk still comes quickly these days, gathering mossily between the buildings while the sky glows faintly lavender between massing gunmetal clouds.
She does not look forward to seeing him again.
Romantic love is an irredeemably bourgeois notion. Weighted as it is with the reduction of women to chattel, it mystifies the bare -- *beautifully* so -- necessities of social reproduction and companionship. Romantic love is a noxiously nostalgic holdover from a mythologized pre-industrial past, one that manages to hold the women of the West in thrall to men, to their whole putrid, despicable system.
Selina refuses to be mystified by *anything*. Let alone such delusions that would end, only, with her capitulation and loss of conscience.
As she moves toward the Old Andreevsky Bridge, however, she *does* feel a quiver in her gut, a shakiness to her breathing, but these are merely autonomic responses to stress.
They have nothing to do with *him*, except in the remotest possible sense.
*
The wound came to Selina and dragged her into history.
A monster appeared in her office well after everyone else had gone home. Black and huge, hulking like a demon from a Western sci-fi film, he spoke in a rasp.
"You will procure this information," he told her. He caught her looking at the door. "No one is in the building. We are very much alone."
"What do you want with me?" she asked. There was no use in *fearing* him. The Batman had been haunting the city for years now; what was important was that she survive this encounter.
"I want this information." He pointed at the dossier he'd dropped on her desk, then took a seat in the spare chair. "You can get it."
"You don't know anything about me."
He looked bored, and sounded as affectless as concrete, when she challenged him. "Selina Koshechka, neé Polozhen, daughter of Whites. Ran away to the front at thirteen, joined a women's brigade there. After the war, moved first to Petrograd, then Moscow. When the Zhenotdel was dissolved, you became, and continue as, a longtime, faultless undersecretary at --" He smirked as he gestured around the office. "-- the State Geology and Minerals Concern. No children as far as anyone knows. One sister, an Eastern rite nun who disappeared in the liberation of Kiev."
She helped herself to a cigarette from the pack lying by his hand. She could not, yet, reply.
"Why the name-change, I wonder?" he added. The metal office chair creaked slightly as he shifted his weight.
"I am not my parents' daughter," she managed to say. Her hand shook hard enough that three matches in succession blew out before she succeeded in lighting the cigarette.
"Of course you're not," he replied. "The daughter of kulaks could never have survived *this* long."
Heat filled her throat and mouth, as she'd inhaled on a bellows rather than blowing out. "They were enemies."
He leaned forward, planting his meaty hands on his knees. "So, you see, I know who you are. What you fail to understand is that I don't care."
She laughed at him, flicking the ash off the cigarette to spatter his black leather breeches.
His sneer twisted into a livid grimace. "I care nothing for who you --"
"Odd," Selina said, leaning against her desk and crossing her ankles. "If that were the case, you wouldn't be here."
His hands curled into fists. "I do not --"
"There are any number of apparatchiks and disillusioned employees in this department," she said. "Any one of whom could get you access to the information you require."
He looked away, into the dark corner, his jaw tightening. "That may be the case."
"All of them could, using your usual methods, be persuaded to cooperate," she continued.
His eyes snapped back to her. "And what do you know of my methods?"
Selina waved the cigarette. "Violence, intimidation, brute force."
He smiled thinly. "I believe you have me confused with the alien in the Kremlin."
She cocked her head as she stood up. "Do I?"
"You do."
"Ah," she said. She smoked silently for several moments, enjoying the rush of nicotine she hadn't tasted in far too long. Finally, feigning an epiphany, she slapped her hip with her free hand. "That's right, of course! He's a member of the *collective*, while you are merely an anarcho-individualist terrorist, deadset on --"
"You believe I'm alone?" He touched his mask, his palm scratching over the stubble on his cheek. "Comrade, I am many. We are no one."
She laughed again, but the sound was brittle and broken.
"We are your sister, raped by the army. Your parents, murdered in their barn, shot after a mock-trial, executed in a back alley without any trial at all. Your friends Keren and Hahlia, teaching the orphans. You, disheartened by farmboy-conservatism, yearning for the *real* revolution --"
The words resounded in her mind long after he'd gone. With that mask, he could have been anyone. The *face* makes the individual, but the mask makes the collective.
He was -- whoever he was, and she heard the light accents of St. Petersburg, of English and French tutors, of *privilege*, in his voice -- the persistent wound. The wound that would not heal, the product of collective trauma. Of a trauma *to* the collective.
"We require your aid," he said, stepping close until she was backed up against the wall. "You are convenient."
He left then, disappearing down the hall.
Selina caught her breath with difficulty.
*
She stops in the middle of the bridge, beside one of the old guard towers.
The city hugs the banks of the river, spread out in every direction, a child's fantasy gathered under the quick-falling night. From this viewpoint, everything looks miniaturized, inconsequential; even when she turns to find the Kremlin, far brighter than any other quarter, she cannot shake the feeling that it's all a toy.
She lifts her chin and sucks her lips against her teeth. *That* is how he acts; she cannot fall prey to such thinking.
I am not an übermensch, he has said. I cannot fly away. I can only fight.
When she opens her eyes, Selina gasps. The sky is white, the stars and city-lights shining black as cinders. Everything is backwards; she has to move forward.
*
He made his second visit to her apartment complex. A black shadow against the single window in the room, and she rose from the bed without waking Keren and Hahlia to press her hand against the cold glass.
"Why don't you come inside?" she asked lowly.
He looked upwards, to the roof, to the sky. She heard his reply in his expression as surely as he'd spoken: "Why don't you come out?"
In addition to the sewers, the Batman travelled on an old revolutionary contraption, the Letatlin. A sort of bicycle for the air, its wings tattered and patched, it folded away into a schoolboy's satchel when not in use.
More than anything else, it was the Letatlin that let Selina trust him, however provisionally. She blamed this trust on nostalgia -- when she was younger, when Lenin still lived, when the future hovered just before her upturned face, the skies above the city had been crowded with these vehicles. Comrades of all ages flew prone, faces turned to the horizon, beatifically aloft.
She leaned out the window and he drew upwards, one arm under her shoulders, the wings flapping wheezily above them.
Having set her down on the roof, the Batman paced a slight distance away. "Have you decided to fulfill my request?"
Selina crossed her arms and refused to shiver. He could very well be one of Roslov's agents, sent to test her.
"Well?" He turned on his heel, his greatcoat flying in a wide arc around his calves.
"I have --" She unhooked her fingers from their grip on her arms and forced herself to meet his eyes. "Reservations. The leader, he's -- beloved. He's done so much, and the people --"
The Batman nearly snarled, closing the distance between them with a single step. His gloved hands closed on her shoulders and Selina prepared herself to fight free.
But the touch became, almost instantly, gentle, his thumbs working slow circles at the base of her throat.
"When the people worship a strong-man, we call it fascism."
She inclined her head. He was right, of course. Only fear kept her from agreeing aloud. To live in fear, however, was hardly what October should have come to mean.
"Your violence," she said finally, thinking of the leaflets that had appeared in all the main avenues overnight, the fireworks display that accompanied them, his bombs that never killed anyone but high-level Party officials. "It isn't destructive, is it?"
"Shock-effects to wake the comatose," he said.
This close, she could smell the sweat that permeated his costume. He probably *slept* in the thing, like all avid revolutionaries, like the children she'd lived with during the civil war, fighting zealously on quarter-rations, every battle a brick in the edifice of the future.
Nostalgia again, and Selina found herself smiling ruefully up at him.
*
"No more reservations?" he asks now as he steps out from the shadows of the next guard-tower.
Selina is prepared for his appearance, but all the same she takes an involuntary step back. "None that pertain, no."
He has shaved for this meeting. She notes the fact idly as she pats the lining of her coat. His mouth is wide and handsome, his jaw as angular as a weapon.
There will always be, she suspects, some retrograde, unreconstructed part of her that associates attraction with romance.
Selina bites the inside of her cheek and moves toward him. "I want --"
"Something in return?" The Batman sneers and turns away, gripping the railing, staring down at the slush-filled river. "I can't say I'm surprised."
Selina shakes her head. Men's dismissal of women, their deep-running misogyny, has yet to vanish fully. She has to believe that, someday, it will. "Nothing so crude, no."
She works two fingers through the hole in her pocket, into the lining of her coat, and tugs free the small sack she'd sewn there earlier. Filled with green gems, both worthless and radioactive, the sack weighs as much as a kitten in her palm.
She hands it to him. He snatches it out of her hand, his mouth twisting into something resembling a smile. His eagerness is muted, but still palpable.
"There," she says. "You have them now. This isn't an exchange."
His smile fades into the far more familiar sneer. "What is it, then?"
"You called me convenient," she tells him, and takes another step forward. He starts to rear back, then seems to restrain himself. "You recited my biography as if it were nothing."
He gazes down at her, lips parted, and shivers as Selina's hand slip under his greatcoat and settle on his waist.
"You've been very helpful --" he starts to say. He stops when she shakes her head.
Who she was, who she had been, a moment ago and months ago and decades long-gone, no longer mattered. if she had ever *mattered*, it is now, and in the future.
"I will not be one of your toys," she says quietly. "One of your bombs or fireworks, a tool to be discarded."
He does shudder now, but when he tries to look away, she cups his cheek and forces his eyes to meet her own again.
"If we're to accomplish anything, it's as part of a mass." On tip-toe, she presses her mouth to his. His lips are hard for a moment, before they part and his hands pull her against him, and then he is soft, deep, *yielding* to her kiss.
Selina licks the width of his mouth, then tips her head back and smiles. "Comrade," she adds.
*
She makes him fly her to one of his boltholes, a single-room apartment on the outskirts of White Town in the city's central ring. His skin is cold where it was exposed, flushed and damp beneath his costume.
She sheds the black wool tights that Keren knit her and hitches up her skirt before kneeling on the bed.
He stands before her, face windburned red and scarred skin as white as bone. He hovers there before pushing back the cowl and falling to his knees, embracing her.
She recognizes his face -- one of the old intelligentsia, an architect, a friend of Tatlin's -- but it doesn't matter. Nothing of their *history* matters, as the wind blows through the room, as she twists and touches him all over, shows him what to do.
Oil from the kitchen, kisses down his chest; his hands on her are as restless and revelatory as a virgin's. She kisses the doubt off his face, reminds him that contraception may be legal, but prophylactics cannot be procured for love or money.
He nods at that, biting his lip, scared and exposed as she strokes him with one hand and slicks herself with the other.
His eyes widen into bruised shadows as he watches her work herself open, breathing out in ragged sighs around her own fingers.
"Now?" he asks hoarsely when she turns over onto her hands and knees.
"Yes."
She positions herself within an imaginary Letatlin, facing forward. The Batman rides her back as she reaches and *flies*.
As she buries her face in her arms, mouths his the back of his hand, she pushes back and open, taking him inside. There is blood, heat, and change before her eyes, filling her skin, shared with him, and he thrusts in a rhythm to match her own.
"Batman --" She is moaning, overbrimming with heat and release, and he bites her shoulder, then sucks the skin soothingly.
No one is expendable. There is no change without risk, no liberation without --.
He groans aloud, his hips moving spasmodically as he pulls her back.
"Yes?" he's asking, and "please", and "yes" again.
Assent and pleasure, freely shared.
She can change *his* mind; the strong-man alien doesn't stand a chance.
POST-HOC
Helena has had her two AM feeding and Selina is now dozing on top of her covers, book still spread on her lap, Coltrane effervescing from the radio, when the soft raps sound against her bedroom window.
Selina flicks on the bedside lamp and pulls herself up until she's leaning against the headboard.
She doesn't need to say anything; he knows the way inside, just as she knows four separate entrances to the Cave.
"Hello," Batman says, hovering at the foot of the bed. He fills the room, brings the smell of the city-air with him.
"Evening," Selina says, knuckling her eyes, finger-combing her hair. "Or is it morning?"
He doesn't reply, but he does glance over his shoulder. The door to Helena's nursery is cracked open.
"Full tummy. She's down for the count," Selina tells him. He pauses just inside the nursery, one hand on the crib, gazing down at the baby. (She'll have to remind him to stop doing that when Helena's a little older; memories imprint early.) As he returns to the side of the bed, Batman's cape swishes; that has to be deliberate. She knows just how silent he can be when he wants to be. Cocking her head, she adds, "Why don't you take off your cowl, stay awhile?"
The symbol on his chest seems to twitch as he exhales; it's the closest Batman comes to laughing. Well, *chuckling*.
The sigh he gives when he pushes back the cowl is nothing like a laugh. It is, however, a lot like relief. He unlatches the gorget and lets the cape fall to the floor. Bruce shakes out his damp hair and rubs the back of his neck before stripping off his boots and armored leggings.
He's almost human again. When he goes to bite off the second gauntlet, Selina sits forward, reaching for him. "Leave that on."
"Mm?" His eyebrow jumps.
She shrugs. "I like the texture."
When he smiles like that, dimples deepening just beyond the corners of his mouth, he looks all of twelve years old. But when he shucks off the utility belt and jerkin, then crawls up the length of the bed, she's reminded just how -- *big* he is. Selina shifts down, tilting back her head when he cups her neck, kissing him back as he lowers most of his weight on her.
It took her a while to convince him that touching a post-partum woman was not only *allowed*, but welcomed. He's getting the hang of it now, sliding his gauntlet'd hand under the straps of her nursing slip, stroking half-moons around the bottom of her breast.
"Did I -- were you awake?" he asks, pressing his mouth against the base of her throat.
Selina twists her fingers in the back of his hair and laughs. "Bit late for *that*, isn't it?"
He glances up, startled for a moment, before he returns her smile. "Ah," is all he says before closing his eyes, turning his face, letting her kiss the sweat off his hairline, down his jaw. She wriggles a little under his weight until one leg is free, then braces her foot against the bed and lets her knee fall against his waist.
When she closes her eyes like this, tasting and smelling the traces of the Bat on his skin, contradictions and oxymorons assail her. She should be fleeing, should be clawing at him, spitting curses and *fighting* -- not tipping her head back against the pillows, hitching up her slip and prolonging the kiss for just as long as possible.
And when she *opens* her eyes, sees Bruce breathing through his mouth, silhouetted against the ceiling, a halo of blue light around his hair, feels him rocking slowly against her, there are more, different oxymorons. She should be single and gaily free, dancing all night, flirting with the cater-waiters, stringing him along with a wave of her pinky. Not keeping an ear out for a baby fussing, not running her palms over his tights and the straps of his jock.
"What's so...?" He braces one arm on the headboard and looks down at her. "You're smiling."
"I am," she says, and lifts her hips, switches them side to side. His eyes flutter closed. She draws the nails of one hand up his side, thumb pausing to tweak his nipple, and meets the thrust of his hips with one of her own.
Bruce opens his mouth, then appears to reconsider whatever he was going to say, in favor of kissing her again, down her throat and across her collarbone. Selina nudges his shoulder, pushes a little harder, until he rolls onto his side and she comes with him, working her knee between his thighs.
"It's funny..." she starts to say, but he's petting her hips and belly now, massaging the flesh; she's not so vain that she can't enjoy how he traces the few stretch-marks and pinches at the scars there. "We're funny..."
They *are* funny, that's the sum of it. Bruce murmurs indistinctly as he sucks a line beneath one breast, gentling his fingers on her sore nipples, and she hums back at him, groaning a little when she finally gets his jock out of the way enough to stroke her fingers down his hardening cock.
They've come to --. An arrangement, really. Something of an understanding, something that their bodies knew long before their doltish, stubborn minds managed to catch up with the facts of the matter. They work well together, moving together like this, kissing deep and shuddering together while he cups her mound and slides his index finger down between her lips, while she grips his cock and works her thumb over the wet head.
It took some getting used to, the absence of -- whatever it was, between them, whatever the stakes of the game and spoils of the fight *were*, the things that made them urgent, desperate, violent. In the past, they only had fragments, shards of each other. Those pieces ground together, sent up sparks and catalyzed various explosions.
Now, they know each other. Which isn't to say that they'll ever *understand* each other; Selina laughs as she bites the tendon in Bruce's neck and calls him, "Batman", just to hear him growl. There's a *fullness* now, knowledge that only expands, rather than shattering apart into yet new patterns.
He grins cockily at her, licks his upper lip and rubs his knuckle against her clit. "Yes, mistress?"
"Ass --" She arches at the sensation, freeing her leg and throwing it over his, straddling him and wrapping both hands around his cock. She squeezes and watches him shiver, feels him buck. "You want to play *that*?"
He bites his lip and thrusts into her hand. "No."
"Good," she says and curls her spine, rocking into the heel of his palm as she sucks and bites his nipples. "Bruce --. *Jesus*."
"Uh --" His eyes are screwed shut, the smile fading off his face, and for a second, he looks like Batman, grim and mean, before his mouth falls open and he pants. "Selina, *God*. *Selina*, I --"
She twists her hips and pushes her chest against his gloved hand, taking shallow, shivering breaths against the heat and pleasure corkscrewing through her.
The absence of urgency and violence doesn't mean that she never feels *desperate* any more. There's always room for that, as she pushes against him, thrusts her ass in the air so his fingers reach farther back, tease the tight cleft and tighter hole.
"Are we playing?" she asks and bites his ear, sucks hard on the soft skin just behind it while he moans when she speeds her hand on his cock. "Did you want to be...what was it? Jeannette?"
He grunts, hard, and shakes his head. "We all have our..." His jaw tightens and his shoulders lift off the bed as he fucks her hand. "Foibles."
The word is a hiss through gritted teeth, barely a whisper before he starts to come. He clutches at her ass, crushes her against him, and Selina tries to hold off her own orgasm until he's finished. She tries, but it's no use, not with his thumb hitting her clit *that* hard, his finger rasping against her ass *this* irregularly. She moans into the pillow beside his head and lets go.
She mumbles into his hair as she stretches and shifts, rolling back onto her side. Warmth pulses through her, reminds her of drunken nights and slow waltzes, and it feels like much, much later when she remembers to open her eyes.
Bruce is dozing beside her, head tipped forward so his mouth and nose are pressed against her forehead. She holds her breath for a moment, listening for the baby, but hears only the usual night-sounds.
Falling right asleep after sex, she used to believe, was for the old and boring.
She is fairly certain that she isn't boring, at least.
She is a little cold, though, so she reaches behind her, loosening the quilt and tugging it over their entwined bodies. When she wakes for the six AM feeding, Bruce will probably be gone, but, then again, he might not be.
Their arrangement is flexible like that. She almost likened it to Woody Allen's with Mia Farrow, but that would make Robin Soon-Yi, and --. Well, there are always going to be things about each other that they will not understand. The Robin-issue is merely at the *top* of the list.
She might still be smiling as she falls asleep again. Sleep, these days, is much more important than diamonds, justice, or anything else.
[end]
Notes
1. I wanted the summary to read "Fuck you, Frank Miller. You too, Jim Lee" but that didn't feel...appropriate. Nor did "Marry me in a bonanza of foursome love, Loeb, Brubaker and Cooke!", sadly. But this fic is born out of several months of *wrestling* with Selina and her role(s) in Bat-canon. Hypersexualized, frequently just a mirror for Bruce's infantile romanticism, decidedly unsentimental and tough as mutton, she's always going to confound me.
The sections in this fic aren't anything like final interpretations; I'm more than comfortable with that. In addition to being provisional, these are only partial (at best) interpretations, since they're explicitly focused on Selina-with-Bruce, rather than Selina herself.
...I am a sad, sad shipper. (Except, of course, for the fact that the main ship in this turned out to be more Bruce/Bruce's illusions [or Batman/Robin (another kind of illusion)] than Bruce/Selina.)
2. Like the header says, this *is* identity porn. I actually found myself doing *algebra* to figure out the various combinations that could be made out of [(Bruce|Selina)x(Batman|Catwoman)].
2A. I am, however, still getting the hang of *good* identity-porn (like How to Marry a Millionaire and A clarification of range). This is less about the characters fooling around with their identities *consciously* and more about the necessary (insane?) opacity required to make the various identities *work*. That is, Bruce Wayne occasionally shines through Batman, but not so's you Selina would be likely to notice.
2B. The actual canonical support for who knew which identity and when is...confusing, to say the least. Immediately before CoiE, Catwoman may well have known that Batman was Bruce Wayne; post-Crisis until Zero Hour, Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle apparently did not know each other socially, though Batman and Catwoman *did*. Zero Hour screws complicates things even more.
After "Hush" (BATMAN 608-617) and certainly after CATWOMAN 32, they know each other in every guise.
2C. The specific canon references are:
Black Box (Mistress Selina/a john) - Batman: Year One/Her Sister's Keeper (Miller and Newell)
Silk Cut (Bruce Wayne/Selina Kyle) - The Long Halloween/Dark Victory (Loeb and Sale)
Cold Rain (Batman/Catwoman) - Silver Age, because she's wearing a skirt. Otherwise, *any time*, really.
Dim Bulb (Brucie/Catwoman) - Catwoman v.1 (Balent, Grayson, Ostrander, et al.)
Red Shock (Batman/Selina) - Red Son (Millar)
...as for Post-Hoc (Bruce/Selina), it could be Earth-2 or OYL'S "New Earth". It amuses me to leave it ambiguous on that score.
3. The full quotation from Engels reads "A phenomenon common to all times of great agitation [is] that the traditional bonds of sexual relations, like all other fetters, are shaken off." [Frederick Engels, "On the Early History of Christianity," (Die Neue Zeit, 1894-5)].
4. The epigraph from Shlovskii is a quotation I found in Susan Buck-Morss's Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (p.140).
Do you have *any* idea how hard it was not to title this fic "Elseworld and Catastrophe"?
5. Millar's RED SON is a mindfuck of the highest order. It's also, ultimately, incredibly disappointing. He not only reverses the order of Stalin's death and the launch of Sputnik, he's completely unsure about how *not* to make Superman anything less than Stalin, Jr. I tried to work within the general parameters of his elseworld, but actually make that scenario *work*.
5A. Once upon a time, I wrote a BtVS fic for nostalgia_lj in which the Slayer, in 1918, was a Bolshevik. Section 5 is clearly indebted to that fic, and to the amazing Nos' herself, but I should name some other influences/further reading. In addition to Buck-Morss's fantastic book, I also used:
Clements, Barbara Evans. (1992) The Utopianism of the Zhenotdel. Slavic Review 51.3: 485-496.
Engel, Barbara Alpern. (1992) Engendering Russia's History: Women in Post-Emancipation Russia and the Soviet Union. Slavic Review 51.2: 309-321.
Engelstein, Laura. (1992). There is Sex in Russia--and Always Was: Some Recent Contributions to Russian Erotica. Slavic Review 51.4: 786-790
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1992) The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Gasiorowska, Xenia. (1975) Two Decades of Love and Marriage in Soviet Fiction. Russian Review 34.1: 10-21.
Petrone, Karen. (2004) Soviet Women's Voices in the Stalin Era. Journal of Women's History 16.2: 197-208.
Schuster, Alice. (1971) Women's Role in the Soviet Union: Ideology and Reality. Russian Review 30.3: 260-267.
Turkevich, Ludmilla B. (1957). Russian Women. Russian Review 16.1: 24-36
6. "Koshechka" is transliterated Russian for "kitty cat". "Polozhen" is a corruption of the Russian for "strait or channel", based on the etymology for the Scottish "kyle".
7. The Zhenotdel was the Bureau of Women's Issues, dissolved in 1930. (Like Millar, I'm doing a *hell* of a lot of chronological telescoping.) Check this out: "The zhenotdelovki called for a world of new women building a communalized society neighborhood by neighborhood" (Clements, 488). Maybe it's just me, but that reminded me *deeply* of Brubaker's Selina in the East End.
8. 8. Oh, dude. The Letatlin! Here, here, and here.
9. Look, Ma, het-smut! You know that old canard that boyslash somehow frees "us girls" from the weight of gender stereotypes and all that? It's still bullshit, but the effort it took to write, especially, the coda without descending into heteronormative gloppy schmoop.... Well. I just hope I dodged that particular descent.
DIM BULB
The lock on Lichtman's cold-storage vault is large and pointlessly ornamental. Catwoman could probably have picked it with a bobby pin. The heavy door swings open soundlessly and she heads quickly to the last rack of furs.
Melinda "Don't call me Mindy" Sherwin-Tierney had let slip in the steamroom at the Gotham Racquet Club that Lichtman's did a brisk business in storage of valuables other than furs. "And who would think to look in *that* ratty old building? I tell you, dears, it's been a godsend."
"They've renovated the upper floors," Selina had said quietly as she added more water to the rocks.
Melinda rolled her eyes. "Into some kind of bridge and tunnel supper club, I hear. I ask you, who would travel all the way to the East End *except* suburban wanna-bes and les nouveaux?"
Melinda is a poseur of the highest order; her distinctive, braying laugh had been perfectly audible from the queue outside when Catwoman dropped down from the roof and slid into the first-floor window. Tonight's gala dinner for landmines -- for or against, the invitation addressed to Selina Kyle did not specify -- has attracted much of what passes for Gotham society.
Their presence upstairs merely adds an extra frisson to Catwoman's activities.
The walk-in safe, concealed behind the furs, sports a slightly more complicated lock. Holding her breath against the rank odor of mothballs and death, Catwoman pushes the skins out of her way and drops to one knee to pick it.
Breaking and entering -- and escaping, too -- are the showy highlights of this life, but lockpicking is subtle, cautious, almost hypnotic for her. She can dimly hear the tinkle of music from the floor above, the whisper of furs around her, but her attention is squarely on the lock before her. This one is old and plain, a respectable lock that does not give up its secrets easily.
"What's this? Some kind of scavenger hunt? How exciting!" A male, plummy voice sounds behind her. *Right* behind her.
Her pick slips. Grabbing for it, Catwoman knocks open the lock with her fist, with a great deal more brute force than she prefers.
She kicks out blindly, spins suddenly, and a heavy body falls against her own, tumbling with her into the interior vault. Before she can duck and escape, the door swings heavily shut.
And latches.
"*Damn it*," she yells.
The intruder grabs her elbow and hauls himself to his feet. "Terribly sorry, so sorry. Are you all right?" Once upright, he releases her arm. Just her luck: it's Brucie Wayne. He claps his hand theatrically over his mouth. "Catwoman!"
She glances around the narrow vault, rubbing her arms. It's a good ten degrees cooler in here, crowded with more furs and, along the back wall, safety-deposit boxes. She tests the door, but it clearly locks from the outside.
"Is this a stick-up? A hostage situation? Should I, er, 'assume the position'? I'd be happy to assume the position --"
No escape, not until she can get her wits about her.
With idiot millionaire Bruce Wayne babbling in her ear, that's going to be awhile.
"You slack-jawed, empty-headed *imbecile*, what did you do?" She knocks her forehead lightly against the unyielding door.
"What *did* I do?" he asks lightly, hand on her shoulder as he leans to study the door. "Are we locked in?"
Clenching her jaw, she swallows the urge to spin around and knee him in the groin. Instead, she turns slowly. Her back to the door, his arms bracketing her shoulders, she shakes her head. "Yes, we're locked in. Thanks to you."
Wayne looks dishevelled, his collar open and cheeks flushed, dark hair tumbling over his forehead. "You don't say! What fun!"
The urge to strike him tightens her arm from fingers to shoulder. "Not fun," she says. "Very far from fun, as a matter of fact."
He grins more widely and cocks his head. "I'm sure a fun-loving man and a restless kitty cat can find *some* way to pass the time, hmm?" Shivering ostentatiously, he adds, "After all, it's *quite* cold in here."
Before she can stop herself, Catwoman lands a right uppercut on that strong, handsome jaw. She steps free of him as he stumbles to the left.
"Ow! What'd you do that for?" Wayne slides down the wall and rubs his jaw.
Catwoman plants her fists on her hips and glares down at him. Blinking up at her like a child denied a third helping of cake, he says plaintively, "You don't seem to like me very much. Why don't you like me?"
Turning in disgust, Catwoman runs her fingertips over the top row of safety-deposit boxes. They are individually locked, but nothing looks impenetrable. "No," she says flatly. "I'm afraid I don't."
"But you don't even know me," Wayne mutters piteously. "I --"
She glances over her shoulder. "You're a dim-witted pretty boy."
"I prefer rakishly charming," he says as he rubs his jaw again. "And not pretty, really, so much as..."
"Devilishly handsome?"
He grins, then winces. "Ow. Yes."
Turning her back on him again, Catwoman unlocks the first box and checks its contents. "I'm sure you've got one, maybe two, dumb beauty queens waiting for you up there. Why don't you be a good boy and skedaddle back?"
"I can't! We're locked in!" Wayne shouts, then curses at the pain in his face. He sighs heavily, but when he speaks again, his voice is much softer. "To tell you the truth, it's nice to get away."
"Who are they?" She opens the next box. Unlike the first, with its deeds and wills, this one contains several pairs of earrings. Garnet, emerald, and, oh, yes. *Diamonds*.
"Hmm?"
"Who are Bruce Wayne's lucky bedmates tonight?"
"Oh, *them*. Tamara Tomlinson and her second cousin Terpsichore," he replies as she empties the jewelry into the satchel on her belt. "You can't imagine how..."
She crosses her arms as she turns, leaning one shoulder against the wall. "Boring, catty, and on the make they are?"
His mouth is wide, flexible, despite the slight swelling in one corner. His lips look very soft. "Precisely, Miss --. What *do* I call you?"
"Cats don't come when called."
He nods quickly. "Naturally. But it's still nice to have nicknames for them, isn't it? My mother had a cat. Terrible old bastard, Siamese, hissed like a drunken Mario Lanza if you so much as looked at him. Tore a chunk out of my hand once. And what do you think she called him?"
Catwoman empties the next box, and the next. The Bruce Wayne who has failed to call Selina Kyle in three months never speaks of his mother. Of either of his parents. He's nowhere to be found here, unfortunately.
"I don't know," she says, sounding as bored as she can. "Fluffy?"
Wayne laughs loudly. "Siamese aren't fluffy! Ahaha, no. Guess again."
"Spot."
"That's a dog's name, silly! You're not playing this right." He's back on his feet, crowding behind her, looking over her shoulder.
Catwoman shifts the angle of her shoulders to hide what she's doing, but he's much taller than she.
"I don't want to play," she reminds him, riffling through the contents of the next box.
Wayne tugs on the tail to her costume, then slaps her buttocks lightly. "Come now --"
"You want a black eye?"
That gets him to back up just enough. "No. You hit *hard*. I just -- Give it a real guess. Put your heart into it."
"Murray," Catwoman says, raking through another pile of legal papers. "Fred. Mr. Chao? Ding-a-ling?"
His breath is warm on her neck. He's close enough to *smell* her. She can nearly feel the curve of his smile on her skin. "There you go! All very good guesses. Commendable."
Catwoman slides the last box closed and twists a little to meet his eyes. "And your point, Mr. Wayne?"
His blue eyes wink and gleam in the dim safety lights. "Well, that's just it. You know *my* name -- and, please, *do* call me Bruce, everyone does -- yet I'm utterly ignorant --"
"True," she says.
"Tsk-tsk." He traces the lower edge of her mask with his thumb. "Miss Catwoman sounds so formal. Ms. Woman, perhaps? Is it an Oriental moniker? Cat Wo-Min? I really don't *what* to call you." She opens her mouth, but he adds, suddenly *very* close, "-- as for *how* to call you, I must confess I'm *fascinated*. Do you come? And how --"
"Cats don't come when --"
"-- called, I know," he says, as their feet shuffle and hands move restlessly. "So I suppose we should make the most of this fortuitous encounter, hm?"
She has a good two million's worth of jewelry in her bag, a huge and handsome -- if moronic, irritating, and damnably superficial -- man against her.
She won't be going anywhere for the foreseeable future.
"Something like that," Catwoman says, wriggling forward until they're wrapped tight around each other and his lips are brushing her bare cheek.
The skin of his cheek smells like champagne, but his mouth is clean and slick, without a trace of alcohol. He grunts when she presses her mouth against the bruise on his jaw, and the heat there is almost intoxicating. He grunts again, more softly, and she presses him downward, down along the wall, the furs parting around them before sliding closed again.
Straddling his thighs, kissing his wide mouth, she doesn't, quite, allow herself to think. His arms are trapped when she pushes the dinner jacket off his shoulders, but he's still bigger than her, big enough to reach one hand between her legs and press his palm upward.
"Is crime really *this* exciting?" His eyes are narrowed, his mouth loose and amused, as he crooks his fingers and brushes his knuckles back and forth along her crotch. He grins as he plucks at the damp material. "Oh. Apparently it is..."
With his other hand, he tugs on her tail again. "This is *marvelous*," he murmurs, rubbing harder.
Catwoman tosses her head, once, riding the sensation before bucking hard to dislodge his hand. He exhales sharply, surprised, and she pops open the first several buttons on his shirt before sucking her way down his throat, down his chest.
"Uh -- *oh* --" Wayne is stuttering, pawing at her hips with restless hands, but he goes still when she opens his fly with one hand and reaches into the tangle of his jacket with the other.
Extracting his wallet and watching him frown in incomprehension, feels -- nearly -- better than anything else.
"Don't worry," she says, flapping open the billfold and removing one condom packet from between the credit cards. "I won't steal from *you*."
"You make that sound like an insult," he says.
She gives him a tight smile. "Do I?"
He grins at her, almost blindingly in the dark between the furs, and nuzzles her neck, the rise of her breasts, as she leans back in to replace the wallet. His hands span her hips, gripping, the nails *digging* in.
She draws the claws on her left hand lightly down his cheek. "Careful, now --"
His chin planted between her breasts, he grins sharply up at her. "Somehow I don't think 'careful' is in your vocabulary."
"No," she says. "Not for *me*."
Her claws drag through his hair as she shimmies backward, up, to unbutton her tights. He looks down at the front panel of her costume, open now, and smiles. Lazily this time, passing his hand over the top of her thighs, petting her mound.
"Ingenious," he breathes.
She doesn't tell him that her old skirt got caught in too many fire-escapes and windows to be practical, that an old-fashioned button crotch was, really, the best solution. She doesn't, because he doesn't deserve to know, and he's busy touching her again, skin to skin, molding his thumb right up against her clit, and she's rocking against him while tearing open the condom with her teeth and one claw.
He *does* know how to touch a woman. She'll give him that much. He's an imbecile, spoiled beyond the telling of it, skin smooth as a baby's, but his face is handsome, his eyes narrow and glinting, as he spreads his legs and helps her unroll the rubber.
"I'm used to a bit more..." he starts to say, then bites his lip when she sinks down on his cock. "*Oh*. Oh, my --"
Claws over his mouth, a warning hiss, and, *finally*, he gets it. Shuts up and goes back to touching her, pushing his hips upward in a ragged little rhythm that lets her lean back and *ride*. She rakes her claws back and forth over one of his shoulders, working her knees and hips until he fills just...*right*, right there, thick and very warm, and she can close her eyes now.
She moans a little, enough to remind him who's on top -- no WASP ice-princess who just *lies* there -- and pulls his hand back to her mound, rubbing herself against him until his fingers pinch at her clit and make it just sharp enough, just *painful* enough that she doesn't have to think.
He's very good at this, but she's better. she's counting the diamonds in her satchel, pushing one breast against his other hand, rolling her head around until the rhythm speeds up and she just *rides* it, like dropping off the side of a high-rise, going with it as the ground rushes up at her but never touches her.
Through her half-closed eyes, she catches him staring at her. All trace of the idiot playboy has vanished, replaced by something almost -- *bestial*, in the dark light of his eyes and sneering curl of his mouth.
"Catwoman." He speaks through gritted teeth and she falls a little faster, a little steeper, whirling.
He rolls her clit between thumb and index finger, pinches her nipple in time with *that*, and she opens her eyes, breathless and lost.
"*Fuck*, Wayne, more --"
His grin is empty, orthodontia in the place of *personality*, but she doesn't need anything like understanding or sympathy here. Just the lift of his crotch and curl of his hand, pushing her down as he shoves inside, and she rocks faster and faster until she feels him freeze and gasp.
His hips move more slowly after he comes. He uses all four fingers on her clit, and she's so close, almost there, when she looks upward and sees -- there's a panel in the ceiling. Its outlines are faint, and it's narrow, just wide enough for her, and she's going to get out of here.
Soon as she comes, soon as he sucks on her breast through the costume and *bites* as she loses the rhythm.
"Will you come now?" he asks hoarsely and laughs at his joke.
She kisses him again, to shut him up, and wrenches her hips side to side to brighten, then deepen, the orgasm. It flows through her, electric-white and deliciously erratic.
"Idiot," she tells him, almost fondly, and rises off him, clenching at the aching burn inside, between her legs. Planting one boot-heel on his shoulder, she jumps for the panel and manages to nudge it open.
"Wait, where --?" he shouts as she pulls herself inside the crawlspace. "You can't take those jewels, they don't belong to you --"
"Watch me." She peeks down through the hole. "Don't worry, big guy. I'll call 911 for you. If I remember."
She wiggles backward, holding her breath against the decades of dust in here.
"Catwoman! Dearheart!"
In the duct, she pauses, just for a moment.
"Mother's Siamese!" he shouts. "The cat's name was..."
She's already well on her way.
RED SHOCK
Selina walks quickly through the cold of the spring night, her low, square heels crunching through the thin layer of frost that coats the asphalt. Her hands are deep inside the pockets of her overcoat; her head, with its cropped hair, is lowered against the wind. Dusk still comes quickly these days, gathering mossily between the buildings while the sky glows faintly lavender between massing gunmetal clouds.
She does not look forward to seeing him again.
Romantic love is an irredeemably bourgeois notion. Weighted as it is with the reduction of women to chattel, it mystifies the bare -- *beautifully* so -- necessities of social reproduction and companionship. Romantic love is a noxiously nostalgic holdover from a mythologized pre-industrial past, one that manages to hold the women of the West in thrall to men, to their whole putrid, despicable system.
Selina refuses to be mystified by *anything*. Let alone such delusions that would end, only, with her capitulation and loss of conscience.
As she moves toward the Old Andreevsky Bridge, however, she *does* feel a quiver in her gut, a shakiness to her breathing, but these are merely autonomic responses to stress.
They have nothing to do with *him*, except in the remotest possible sense.
*
The wound came to Selina and dragged her into history.
A monster appeared in her office well after everyone else had gone home. Black and huge, hulking like a demon from a Western sci-fi film, he spoke in a rasp.
"You will procure this information," he told her. He caught her looking at the door. "No one is in the building. We are very much alone."
"What do you want with me?" she asked. There was no use in *fearing* him. The Batman had been haunting the city for years now; what was important was that she survive this encounter.
"I want this information." He pointed at the dossier he'd dropped on her desk, then took a seat in the spare chair. "You can get it."
"You don't know anything about me."
He looked bored, and sounded as affectless as concrete, when she challenged him. "Selina Koshechka, neé Polozhen, daughter of Whites. Ran away to the front at thirteen, joined a women's brigade there. After the war, moved first to Petrograd, then Moscow. When the Zhenotdel was dissolved, you became, and continue as, a longtime, faultless undersecretary at --" He smirked as he gestured around the office. "-- the State Geology and Minerals Concern. No children as far as anyone knows. One sister, an Eastern rite nun who disappeared in the liberation of Kiev."
She helped herself to a cigarette from the pack lying by his hand. She could not, yet, reply.
"Why the name-change, I wonder?" he added. The metal office chair creaked slightly as he shifted his weight.
"I am not my parents' daughter," she managed to say. Her hand shook hard enough that three matches in succession blew out before she succeeded in lighting the cigarette.
"Of course you're not," he replied. "The daughter of kulaks could never have survived *this* long."
Heat filled her throat and mouth, as she'd inhaled on a bellows rather than blowing out. "They were enemies."
He leaned forward, planting his meaty hands on his knees. "So, you see, I know who you are. What you fail to understand is that I don't care."
She laughed at him, flicking the ash off the cigarette to spatter his black leather breeches.
His sneer twisted into a livid grimace. "I care nothing for who you --"
"Odd," Selina said, leaning against her desk and crossing her ankles. "If that were the case, you wouldn't be here."
His hands curled into fists. "I do not --"
"There are any number of apparatchiks and disillusioned employees in this department," she said. "Any one of whom could get you access to the information you require."
He looked away, into the dark corner, his jaw tightening. "That may be the case."
"All of them could, using your usual methods, be persuaded to cooperate," she continued.
His eyes snapped back to her. "And what do you know of my methods?"
Selina waved the cigarette. "Violence, intimidation, brute force."
He smiled thinly. "I believe you have me confused with the alien in the Kremlin."
She cocked her head as she stood up. "Do I?"
"You do."
"Ah," she said. She smoked silently for several moments, enjoying the rush of nicotine she hadn't tasted in far too long. Finally, feigning an epiphany, she slapped her hip with her free hand. "That's right, of course! He's a member of the *collective*, while you are merely an anarcho-individualist terrorist, deadset on --"
"You believe I'm alone?" He touched his mask, his palm scratching over the stubble on his cheek. "Comrade, I am many. We are no one."
She laughed again, but the sound was brittle and broken.
"We are your sister, raped by the army. Your parents, murdered in their barn, shot after a mock-trial, executed in a back alley without any trial at all. Your friends Keren and Hahlia, teaching the orphans. You, disheartened by farmboy-conservatism, yearning for the *real* revolution --"
The words resounded in her mind long after he'd gone. With that mask, he could have been anyone. The *face* makes the individual, but the mask makes the collective.
He was -- whoever he was, and she heard the light accents of St. Petersburg, of English and French tutors, of *privilege*, in his voice -- the persistent wound. The wound that would not heal, the product of collective trauma. Of a trauma *to* the collective.
"We require your aid," he said, stepping close until she was backed up against the wall. "You are convenient."
He left then, disappearing down the hall.
Selina caught her breath with difficulty.
*
She stops in the middle of the bridge, beside one of the old guard towers.
The city hugs the banks of the river, spread out in every direction, a child's fantasy gathered under the quick-falling night. From this viewpoint, everything looks miniaturized, inconsequential; even when she turns to find the Kremlin, far brighter than any other quarter, she cannot shake the feeling that it's all a toy.
She lifts her chin and sucks her lips against her teeth. *That* is how he acts; she cannot fall prey to such thinking.
I am not an übermensch, he has said. I cannot fly away. I can only fight.
When she opens her eyes, Selina gasps. The sky is white, the stars and city-lights shining black as cinders. Everything is backwards; she has to move forward.
*
He made his second visit to her apartment complex. A black shadow against the single window in the room, and she rose from the bed without waking Keren and Hahlia to press her hand against the cold glass.
"Why don't you come inside?" she asked lowly.
He looked upwards, to the roof, to the sky. She heard his reply in his expression as surely as he'd spoken: "Why don't you come out?"
In addition to the sewers, the Batman travelled on an old revolutionary contraption, the Letatlin. A sort of bicycle for the air, its wings tattered and patched, it folded away into a schoolboy's satchel when not in use.
More than anything else, it was the Letatlin that let Selina trust him, however provisionally. She blamed this trust on nostalgia -- when she was younger, when Lenin still lived, when the future hovered just before her upturned face, the skies above the city had been crowded with these vehicles. Comrades of all ages flew prone, faces turned to the horizon, beatifically aloft.
She leaned out the window and he drew upwards, one arm under her shoulders, the wings flapping wheezily above them.
Having set her down on the roof, the Batman paced a slight distance away. "Have you decided to fulfill my request?"
Selina crossed her arms and refused to shiver. He could very well be one of Roslov's agents, sent to test her.
"Well?" He turned on his heel, his greatcoat flying in a wide arc around his calves.
"I have --" She unhooked her fingers from their grip on her arms and forced herself to meet his eyes. "Reservations. The leader, he's -- beloved. He's done so much, and the people --"
The Batman nearly snarled, closing the distance between them with a single step. His gloved hands closed on her shoulders and Selina prepared herself to fight free.
But the touch became, almost instantly, gentle, his thumbs working slow circles at the base of her throat.
"When the people worship a strong-man, we call it fascism."
She inclined her head. He was right, of course. Only fear kept her from agreeing aloud. To live in fear, however, was hardly what October should have come to mean.
"Your violence," she said finally, thinking of the leaflets that had appeared in all the main avenues overnight, the fireworks display that accompanied them, his bombs that never killed anyone but high-level Party officials. "It isn't destructive, is it?"
"Shock-effects to wake the comatose," he said.
This close, she could smell the sweat that permeated his costume. He probably *slept* in the thing, like all avid revolutionaries, like the children she'd lived with during the civil war, fighting zealously on quarter-rations, every battle a brick in the edifice of the future.
Nostalgia again, and Selina found herself smiling ruefully up at him.
*
"No more reservations?" he asks now as he steps out from the shadows of the next guard-tower.
Selina is prepared for his appearance, but all the same she takes an involuntary step back. "None that pertain, no."
He has shaved for this meeting. She notes the fact idly as she pats the lining of her coat. His mouth is wide and handsome, his jaw as angular as a weapon.
There will always be, she suspects, some retrograde, unreconstructed part of her that associates attraction with romance.
Selina bites the inside of her cheek and moves toward him. "I want --"
"Something in return?" The Batman sneers and turns away, gripping the railing, staring down at the slush-filled river. "I can't say I'm surprised."
Selina shakes her head. Men's dismissal of women, their deep-running misogyny, has yet to vanish fully. She has to believe that, someday, it will. "Nothing so crude, no."
She works two fingers through the hole in her pocket, into the lining of her coat, and tugs free the small sack she'd sewn there earlier. Filled with green gems, both worthless and radioactive, the sack weighs as much as a kitten in her palm.
She hands it to him. He snatches it out of her hand, his mouth twisting into something resembling a smile. His eagerness is muted, but still palpable.
"There," she says. "You have them now. This isn't an exchange."
His smile fades into the far more familiar sneer. "What is it, then?"
"You called me convenient," she tells him, and takes another step forward. He starts to rear back, then seems to restrain himself. "You recited my biography as if it were nothing."
He gazes down at her, lips parted, and shivers as Selina's hand slip under his greatcoat and settle on his waist.
"You've been very helpful --" he starts to say. He stops when she shakes her head.
Who she was, who she had been, a moment ago and months ago and decades long-gone, no longer mattered. if she had ever *mattered*, it is now, and in the future.
"I will not be one of your toys," she says quietly. "One of your bombs or fireworks, a tool to be discarded."
He does shudder now, but when he tries to look away, she cups his cheek and forces his eyes to meet her own again.
"If we're to accomplish anything, it's as part of a mass." On tip-toe, she presses her mouth to his. His lips are hard for a moment, before they part and his hands pull her against him, and then he is soft, deep, *yielding* to her kiss.
Selina licks the width of his mouth, then tips her head back and smiles. "Comrade," she adds.
*
She makes him fly her to one of his boltholes, a single-room apartment on the outskirts of White Town in the city's central ring. His skin is cold where it was exposed, flushed and damp beneath his costume.
She sheds the black wool tights that Keren knit her and hitches up her skirt before kneeling on the bed.
He stands before her, face windburned red and scarred skin as white as bone. He hovers there before pushing back the cowl and falling to his knees, embracing her.
She recognizes his face -- one of the old intelligentsia, an architect, a friend of Tatlin's -- but it doesn't matter. Nothing of their *history* matters, as the wind blows through the room, as she twists and touches him all over, shows him what to do.
Oil from the kitchen, kisses down his chest; his hands on her are as restless and revelatory as a virgin's. She kisses the doubt off his face, reminds him that contraception may be legal, but prophylactics cannot be procured for love or money.
He nods at that, biting his lip, scared and exposed as she strokes him with one hand and slicks herself with the other.
His eyes widen into bruised shadows as he watches her work herself open, breathing out in ragged sighs around her own fingers.
"Now?" he asks hoarsely when she turns over onto her hands and knees.
"Yes."
She positions herself within an imaginary Letatlin, facing forward. The Batman rides her back as she reaches and *flies*.
As she buries her face in her arms, mouths his the back of his hand, she pushes back and open, taking him inside. There is blood, heat, and change before her eyes, filling her skin, shared with him, and he thrusts in a rhythm to match her own.
"Batman --" She is moaning, overbrimming with heat and release, and he bites her shoulder, then sucks the skin soothingly.
No one is expendable. There is no change without risk, no liberation without --.
He groans aloud, his hips moving spasmodically as he pulls her back.
"Yes?" he's asking, and "please", and "yes" again.
Assent and pleasure, freely shared.
She can change *his* mind; the strong-man alien doesn't stand a chance.
POST-HOC
Helena has had her two AM feeding and Selina is now dozing on top of her covers, book still spread on her lap, Coltrane effervescing from the radio, when the soft raps sound against her bedroom window.
Selina flicks on the bedside lamp and pulls herself up until she's leaning against the headboard.
She doesn't need to say anything; he knows the way inside, just as she knows four separate entrances to the Cave.
"Hello," Batman says, hovering at the foot of the bed. He fills the room, brings the smell of the city-air with him.
"Evening," Selina says, knuckling her eyes, finger-combing her hair. "Or is it morning?"
He doesn't reply, but he does glance over his shoulder. The door to Helena's nursery is cracked open.
"Full tummy. She's down for the count," Selina tells him. He pauses just inside the nursery, one hand on the crib, gazing down at the baby. (She'll have to remind him to stop doing that when Helena's a little older; memories imprint early.) As he returns to the side of the bed, Batman's cape swishes; that has to be deliberate. She knows just how silent he can be when he wants to be. Cocking her head, she adds, "Why don't you take off your cowl, stay awhile?"
The symbol on his chest seems to twitch as he exhales; it's the closest Batman comes to laughing. Well, *chuckling*.
The sigh he gives when he pushes back the cowl is nothing like a laugh. It is, however, a lot like relief. He unlatches the gorget and lets the cape fall to the floor. Bruce shakes out his damp hair and rubs the back of his neck before stripping off his boots and armored leggings.
He's almost human again. When he goes to bite off the second gauntlet, Selina sits forward, reaching for him. "Leave that on."
"Mm?" His eyebrow jumps.
She shrugs. "I like the texture."
When he smiles like that, dimples deepening just beyond the corners of his mouth, he looks all of twelve years old. But when he shucks off the utility belt and jerkin, then crawls up the length of the bed, she's reminded just how -- *big* he is. Selina shifts down, tilting back her head when he cups her neck, kissing him back as he lowers most of his weight on her.
It took her a while to convince him that touching a post-partum woman was not only *allowed*, but welcomed. He's getting the hang of it now, sliding his gauntlet'd hand under the straps of her nursing slip, stroking half-moons around the bottom of her breast.
"Did I -- were you awake?" he asks, pressing his mouth against the base of her throat.
Selina twists her fingers in the back of his hair and laughs. "Bit late for *that*, isn't it?"
He glances up, startled for a moment, before he returns her smile. "Ah," is all he says before closing his eyes, turning his face, letting her kiss the sweat off his hairline, down his jaw. She wriggles a little under his weight until one leg is free, then braces her foot against the bed and lets her knee fall against his waist.
When she closes her eyes like this, tasting and smelling the traces of the Bat on his skin, contradictions and oxymorons assail her. She should be fleeing, should be clawing at him, spitting curses and *fighting* -- not tipping her head back against the pillows, hitching up her slip and prolonging the kiss for just as long as possible.
And when she *opens* her eyes, sees Bruce breathing through his mouth, silhouetted against the ceiling, a halo of blue light around his hair, feels him rocking slowly against her, there are more, different oxymorons. She should be single and gaily free, dancing all night, flirting with the cater-waiters, stringing him along with a wave of her pinky. Not keeping an ear out for a baby fussing, not running her palms over his tights and the straps of his jock.
"What's so...?" He braces one arm on the headboard and looks down at her. "You're smiling."
"I am," she says, and lifts her hips, switches them side to side. His eyes flutter closed. She draws the nails of one hand up his side, thumb pausing to tweak his nipple, and meets the thrust of his hips with one of her own.
Bruce opens his mouth, then appears to reconsider whatever he was going to say, in favor of kissing her again, down her throat and across her collarbone. Selina nudges his shoulder, pushes a little harder, until he rolls onto his side and she comes with him, working her knee between his thighs.
"It's funny..." she starts to say, but he's petting her hips and belly now, massaging the flesh; she's not so vain that she can't enjoy how he traces the few stretch-marks and pinches at the scars there. "We're funny..."
They *are* funny, that's the sum of it. Bruce murmurs indistinctly as he sucks a line beneath one breast, gentling his fingers on her sore nipples, and she hums back at him, groaning a little when she finally gets his jock out of the way enough to stroke her fingers down his hardening cock.
They've come to --. An arrangement, really. Something of an understanding, something that their bodies knew long before their doltish, stubborn minds managed to catch up with the facts of the matter. They work well together, moving together like this, kissing deep and shuddering together while he cups her mound and slides his index finger down between her lips, while she grips his cock and works her thumb over the wet head.
It took some getting used to, the absence of -- whatever it was, between them, whatever the stakes of the game and spoils of the fight *were*, the things that made them urgent, desperate, violent. In the past, they only had fragments, shards of each other. Those pieces ground together, sent up sparks and catalyzed various explosions.
Now, they know each other. Which isn't to say that they'll ever *understand* each other; Selina laughs as she bites the tendon in Bruce's neck and calls him, "Batman", just to hear him growl. There's a *fullness* now, knowledge that only expands, rather than shattering apart into yet new patterns.
He grins cockily at her, licks his upper lip and rubs his knuckle against her clit. "Yes, mistress?"
"Ass --" She arches at the sensation, freeing her leg and throwing it over his, straddling him and wrapping both hands around his cock. She squeezes and watches him shiver, feels him buck. "You want to play *that*?"
He bites his lip and thrusts into her hand. "No."
"Good," she says and curls her spine, rocking into the heel of his palm as she sucks and bites his nipples. "Bruce --. *Jesus*."
"Uh --" His eyes are screwed shut, the smile fading off his face, and for a second, he looks like Batman, grim and mean, before his mouth falls open and he pants. "Selina, *God*. *Selina*, I --"
She twists her hips and pushes her chest against his gloved hand, taking shallow, shivering breaths against the heat and pleasure corkscrewing through her.
The absence of urgency and violence doesn't mean that she never feels *desperate* any more. There's always room for that, as she pushes against him, thrusts her ass in the air so his fingers reach farther back, tease the tight cleft and tighter hole.
"Are we playing?" she asks and bites his ear, sucks hard on the soft skin just behind it while he moans when she speeds her hand on his cock. "Did you want to be...what was it? Jeannette?"
He grunts, hard, and shakes his head. "We all have our..." His jaw tightens and his shoulders lift off the bed as he fucks her hand. "Foibles."
The word is a hiss through gritted teeth, barely a whisper before he starts to come. He clutches at her ass, crushes her against him, and Selina tries to hold off her own orgasm until he's finished. She tries, but it's no use, not with his thumb hitting her clit *that* hard, his finger rasping against her ass *this* irregularly. She moans into the pillow beside his head and lets go.
She mumbles into his hair as she stretches and shifts, rolling back onto her side. Warmth pulses through her, reminds her of drunken nights and slow waltzes, and it feels like much, much later when she remembers to open her eyes.
Bruce is dozing beside her, head tipped forward so his mouth and nose are pressed against her forehead. She holds her breath for a moment, listening for the baby, but hears only the usual night-sounds.
Falling right asleep after sex, she used to believe, was for the old and boring.
She is fairly certain that she isn't boring, at least.
She is a little cold, though, so she reaches behind her, loosening the quilt and tugging it over their entwined bodies. When she wakes for the six AM feeding, Bruce will probably be gone, but, then again, he might not be.
Their arrangement is flexible like that. She almost likened it to Woody Allen's with Mia Farrow, but that would make Robin Soon-Yi, and --. Well, there are always going to be things about each other that they will not understand. The Robin-issue is merely at the *top* of the list.
She might still be smiling as she falls asleep again. Sleep, these days, is much more important than diamonds, justice, or anything else.
[end]
Notes
1. I wanted the summary to read "Fuck you, Frank Miller. You too, Jim Lee" but that didn't feel...appropriate. Nor did "Marry me in a bonanza of foursome love, Loeb, Brubaker and Cooke!", sadly. But this fic is born out of several months of *wrestling* with Selina and her role(s) in Bat-canon. Hypersexualized, frequently just a mirror for Bruce's infantile romanticism, decidedly unsentimental and tough as mutton, she's always going to confound me.
The sections in this fic aren't anything like final interpretations; I'm more than comfortable with that. In addition to being provisional, these are only partial (at best) interpretations, since they're explicitly focused on Selina-with-Bruce, rather than Selina herself.
...I am a sad, sad shipper. (Except, of course, for the fact that the main ship in this turned out to be more Bruce/Bruce's illusions [or Batman/Robin (another kind of illusion)] than Bruce/Selina.)
2. Like the header says, this *is* identity porn. I actually found myself doing *algebra* to figure out the various combinations that could be made out of [(Bruce|Selina)x(Batman|Catwoman)].
2A. I am, however, still getting the hang of *good* identity-porn (like How to Marry a Millionaire and A clarification of range). This is less about the characters fooling around with their identities *consciously* and more about the necessary (insane?) opacity required to make the various identities *work*. That is, Bruce Wayne occasionally shines through Batman, but not so's you Selina would be likely to notice.
2B. The actual canonical support for who knew which identity and when is...confusing, to say the least. Immediately before CoiE, Catwoman may well have known that Batman was Bruce Wayne; post-Crisis until Zero Hour, Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle apparently did not know each other socially, though Batman and Catwoman *did*. Zero Hour screws complicates things even more.
After "Hush" (BATMAN 608-617) and certainly after CATWOMAN 32, they know each other in every guise.
2C. The specific canon references are:
Black Box (Mistress Selina/a john) - Batman: Year One/Her Sister's Keeper (Miller and Newell)
Silk Cut (Bruce Wayne/Selina Kyle) - The Long Halloween/Dark Victory (Loeb and Sale)
Cold Rain (Batman/Catwoman) - Silver Age, because she's wearing a skirt. Otherwise, *any time*, really.
Dim Bulb (Brucie/Catwoman) - Catwoman v.1 (Balent, Grayson, Ostrander, et al.)
Red Shock (Batman/Selina) - Red Son (Millar)
...as for Post-Hoc (Bruce/Selina), it could be Earth-2 or OYL'S "New Earth". It amuses me to leave it ambiguous on that score.
3. The full quotation from Engels reads "A phenomenon common to all times of great agitation [is] that the traditional bonds of sexual relations, like all other fetters, are shaken off." [Frederick Engels, "On the Early History of Christianity," (Die Neue Zeit, 1894-5)].
4. The epigraph from Shlovskii is a quotation I found in Susan Buck-Morss's Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (p.140).
Do you have *any* idea how hard it was not to title this fic "Elseworld and Catastrophe"?
5. Millar's RED SON is a mindfuck of the highest order. It's also, ultimately, incredibly disappointing. He not only reverses the order of Stalin's death and the launch of Sputnik, he's completely unsure about how *not* to make Superman anything less than Stalin, Jr. I tried to work within the general parameters of his elseworld, but actually make that scenario *work*.
5A. Once upon a time, I wrote a BtVS fic for nostalgia_lj in which the Slayer, in 1918, was a Bolshevik. Section 5 is clearly indebted to that fic, and to the amazing Nos' herself, but I should name some other influences/further reading. In addition to Buck-Morss's fantastic book, I also used:
Clements, Barbara Evans. (1992) The Utopianism of the Zhenotdel. Slavic Review 51.3: 485-496.
Engel, Barbara Alpern. (1992) Engendering Russia's History: Women in Post-Emancipation Russia and the Soviet Union. Slavic Review 51.2: 309-321.
Engelstein, Laura. (1992). There is Sex in Russia--and Always Was: Some Recent Contributions to Russian Erotica. Slavic Review 51.4: 786-790
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1992) The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Gasiorowska, Xenia. (1975) Two Decades of Love and Marriage in Soviet Fiction. Russian Review 34.1: 10-21.
Petrone, Karen. (2004) Soviet Women's Voices in the Stalin Era. Journal of Women's History 16.2: 197-208.
Schuster, Alice. (1971) Women's Role in the Soviet Union: Ideology and Reality. Russian Review 30.3: 260-267.
Turkevich, Ludmilla B. (1957). Russian Women. Russian Review 16.1: 24-36
6. "Koshechka" is transliterated Russian for "kitty cat". "Polozhen" is a corruption of the Russian for "strait or channel", based on the etymology for the Scottish "kyle".
7. The Zhenotdel was the Bureau of Women's Issues, dissolved in 1930. (Like Millar, I'm doing a *hell* of a lot of chronological telescoping.) Check this out: "The zhenotdelovki called for a world of new women building a communalized society neighborhood by neighborhood" (Clements, 488). Maybe it's just me, but that reminded me *deeply* of Brubaker's Selina in the East End.
8. 8. Oh, dude. The Letatlin! Here, here, and here.
9. Look, Ma, het-smut! You know that old canard that boyslash somehow frees "us girls" from the weight of gender stereotypes and all that? It's still bullshit, but the effort it took to write, especially, the coda without descending into heteronormative gloppy schmoop.... Well. I just hope I dodged that particular descent.