"Selina?"

I don't like the way my voice echoes in the dark, empty room. There's something about the silence that I haven't felt since... That I haven't felt in a long time. I reach, groping for the bedside light, and don't remember until I hit the switch that the light won't matter - I'll never know if it�s on or not.

My robe is draped across the back of a chair and I pull it on, picking my way across the room, trusting my memory to carry me to the other side. I make it to the hallway, where Alfred is waiting.

"Master Bruce?" he asks, his tone hesitant. I want him to move to my right, closer to my good ear. His voice comes to me as if underwater.

"What's going on?" I demand, dreading the only answer he can give at 3am on a Tuesday.

"Oracle has finally located Miss Dinah," he replies softly.

"Where?"

"The Diamond District," Alfred tells me. "There was an incident at the Iceberg."

I close my eyes, extending my arm to touch the cool grain of the wood-paneled walls. "She tried for the Penguin."

"Yes, sir. It would appear so."

He's not telling me everything. I wish I could see his face, read what's in his eyes. People were once open books to me. Now they are voices in a darkened room.

"Causalities?" I ask.

"Eleven so far," he says, touching my elbow. I jerk away, as if burned. He caught me by surprise. "Miss Barbara is on the line for you."

The line is a satellite relay system buried in a secured room on the main floor. I've been using it as my base of operations for six months now - I can no longer handle the stairs down to the cave. Leslie is still optimistic. Give it time, she always says. She's been saying that for thirty years.

I reach the study after what feels like an eternity, already settling into a chair before the specialized monitors with enhanced audio and voice-recognition software. Oracle is online; she always is, these days.

"Status?"

"Panther has located hostile."

I take a deep breath, wincing a little as my body tenses and then relaxes. Even that little movement hurts. "Has she engaged the target?"

"Negative."

"Give me audio."

The room comes alive with noise. Selina's breathing heavy, and there's background noise, traffic. I analyze the audio patterns and determine that she's in TriCorner, and she's on the run.

"This is Blackbird," I say, identifying myself, trying to sound authoritative and hoping that Selina won't pick up on my fear. "Break off pursuit of hostile."

"You're kidding," she replies in Catwoman's voice. "Witch is heading for the O'Neil ferry. We'll lose her if she makes it across."

"Break off pursuit," I repeat, anger turning my voice to crushed glass. It booms back at me over the monitors. "Selina, do not engage."

"You didn't see what she did at the Iceberg," Selina replies, the audio fizzing a little as she negotiates a leap across an alleyway or over a ledge. "This might be our only chance, and if you think I'm going to let her get out of Gotham after what she did to you..."

"Let her go," I say, quietly. "Please, Selina."

I know it will reach her, because it's the one thing I've always promised never to do. I've never asked her for anything, not even to stay. If she had left then, in those early days after the Witch took my sight and most of my physical ability, I know I wouldn't have found the strength to go on. I refuse to let her have Selina now if I couldn't drive her away then.

"Bruce," she says, her beautiful voice coming in so soft and gentle over the monitor's speakers. "She has to pay for what she's done. No more free credit because she used to be one of the good guys."

"She'll pay," I promise, latching onto the faint hope that Selina will listen to reason like the drowning man I've become. "But we won't collect tonight. Come home."

I think she saw the reason in my request. Selina knew she would never win hand-to-hand against the Witch. We're all long beyond beating her on those terms. Barbara still had hope we could reach her, at least until she saw those crime scene photos from Arkham, the Joker's heart shredded like fine paper and sprinkled over his white corpse. I'd tried to fight her in pitched battle, prepared for her sonic cry but not her speed, her brutality. I lost my sight that night. I know Dick tried, later on, armed with a picture of Roy and Lian. She'd taken the photo and Dick's right eye.

But Selina, of all of us, believed the Witch could be brought in. I speculate that it may be because she was never close to Dinah, never knew the woman we lost to a bargain with a death goddess. Selina only knew the Witch and the pain Dinah's choice brought to us all. And she found it intolerable.

"Hostile is on the grid," Oracle informs me, and before I can respond, Selina's "Affirmative" crackles over the speakers. "Hostile in sight."

"Barbara-" I begin, ready with an order to release a paralytic compound from the mesh lining in Selina's costume, ready to do anything to prevent her challenging the Witch. But it's already too late.

I hear Selina's low growl, and no response from Dinah save two sharp cracks echoing over the speakers. The sound of bone snapping, like gunfire in a dark alleyway. Then Selina's harsh breathing, and beneath that the steady beat of her incredible heart.

"Wha-" she mutters thickly, what sounds like blood bubbling up from her lungs. I'm frantic now, that emotional plateau I've trained myself to gain beyond me. There's nothing for me to do but to listen to the woman I love die.

"Why?" she whispers, and I imagine her face as I knew it in life, the light dying in her green eyes, her mouth moving to question the woman who'd ended it for her.

The Witch says something in a Hindi dialect I knew in my youth, but so soft and faint that I might have missed it a year ago. Now I can't help but hear it above everything save the slowing beat of Selina's heart. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump.

Silence, as loud and lonely as my life has suddenly become. One more sound, the pop of plastic. A nightvision lens, freed from its moorings in her goggle. I'd shattered it before, in a fight with Catwoman years ago. My brain remembers the distinctive sound even as my mind begins to shut down, unwilling to cope with this newest loss.

"Bruce? Bruce!" Barbara's panicked voice, still on the line. She heard it all, but I don't think she quite understands. "What did Dinah say?"

"Now I am become death," I repeat, still listening to the soft, fading 'thump-thump' "The destroyer of Worlds. Shiva."

*******************
THE END

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