Feathery flakes are still floating leisurely down from the sky, and from her perch high above the streets and alleys and gutters, the city looks beautiful and glittering and unfamiliar.
There's also the added advantage that even annoyingly silent vigilantes couldn't entirely muffle the crunch of snow and ice under their boots, so Selina smiles and turns to greet Batman properly for once, rather than having to hide her startled jump with sly words and swaying hips. After a moment, he joins her on the ledge, and she leans in close, like they're teenagers at a movie, and just looks at Gotham's skyline, softened and brightened by the snow.
"She looks pretty like this," Selina says, because she knows Batman won't. "Almost like..."
"Like what?" His rumbling voice always sends a shiver of curling warmth through her.
She laughs, feeling a little ridiculous, but she's never been one to shy away from her own thoughts. "Like we've gone through the looking glass, and this is what Gotham is meant to be. Beautiful and bright and welcoming. Like we've been inhabiting the darker aspect, and this is just a glimpse at what we're supposed to have."
She thought he wouldn't understand, but instead Bruce - and it is Bruce - wraps his arm around her, pulls her close, his cape like a blanket over their shoulders, and says, "I keep hoping, if I do enough, if I save enough of her, that Gotham can..."
It isn't like him to speak so openly, and she knows why he can't finish the sentence. "Heal," she finished. "From up here, it seems almost possible."
She isn't passing a judgement. She doesn't want to know if snow makes him remember the boy who might have been the way that she thinks of the girl she might have been before life (and Gotham) claimed her. It's simply reassuring that they both understand.
"This will never be paradise," he says after a pause, and Selina knows him well enough (when did that happen? A thousand thefts and kisses ago, maybe.) to hear the bitterness undercutting the words. He surrounds himself with human - and not-so human - gods bearing the brightest colors of the spectrum, who protect people whose lives would seem a dream to most of Gotham's, who gained with a quirk of fate the ability to do what took Batman years to begin to accomplish.
And none of them, as far as Selina can tell, even realize what he sacrifices, how much he cares, for this city.
"It doesn't have to be," she replies. "It wouldn't be home if it were."
She's looking at him at the right second to catch the smile, and she laughs and kisses him while snow catches on his cowl.