Curiosity Killed the Cat
Carrie Kelley taps the heel of her shoe against the brick of the building she’s sitting on. She didn’t tell anyone she’s out tonight, but they know. The trackers in her suit are annoying, and yeah, she gets that Jason getting murdered did a number on Bruce, but she wants to be able to do something secretly without having to hack, at minimum, three trackers to do it. Other teens can just sneak out, fuck around and find out, and come home. Other teens also don’t have an overprotective furry for a dad, though.
She pops a gum bubble and tunes an ear into the chatter on comms, keeping her eyes on the streets below. This is the border of Crime Alley, where Jason’s zooming about on his bike and insisting something’s majorly wrong. Carrie agrees. It’s too quiet. She’s been lurking on this building, a laundromat and psychic shop with apartments over them, for two hours and there hasn’t even been a pick-pocket. Babs says something about a camera glitch from a few hours ago in the Alley and Tim responds that her cameras in there might need replaced, seeing as they haven’t had maintenance done once since Jason popped up and threw some heads on a table four years ago. Jason’s too busy speeding to the camera glitch location to make a snarky quip about shooting anyone who dares enter his territory.
“Catgirl,” Dick says directly into her ear. She pops another gum bubble and times her foot taps to the song that’s been stuck in her head for the last week. “You’re near Crime Alley, right?”
She doesn’t dignify that with a response.
“Could you go keep an eye on Hood?”
“Can you get Catwoman to retire?” she gets to her feet, shaking her arms out.
“Just chose another theme, imbecile,” Damian interrupts. It sounds like he’s speaking through gritted teeth. She wonders who’s going to lose an arm tonight as she hops over to the other edge of the building and stares across the fake border.
“Fine,” she says. The buildings just over the street seem darker, like there’s a long shadow cast over them from some nonexistent mega-structure. “Then I want Robin back.”
The resulting insulted, furious rant about how Robin is his identity and Richard gave it to him and whatever else the baby bat has to say goes ignored. She’s got a crime lord to wrangle.
The trip from her lovely laundromat to where Jason is stalking around an alleyway that looks comically small due to his status as an undead brick wall isn’t a long one, despite not using the rocket heelys in her boots because “that’s not safe” and “they’re not optimized for rough terrain” and “if you hit a civilian you’re benched”. Bruce is such a killjoy.
She shouts, “Yo, Hood!” and flips down into the mouth of the alley. He doesn’t break stride, doesn’t even look at her. Just continues to pace and…is he growling? That’s so above her pay grade. “Nightwing’s requested that you chill the flip out.”
His head snaps to her and the green glow shining through the lenses of his helmet has her taking a step back. “There’s something here,” he growls. Literally, actually growls. Like a dog warning someone off its property.
Her heart picks up, starting to pound against her rib cage. The aftermaths of his Pit flareups are hard to miss, all blood and corpses and trailing organs. The Bats try to keep the younger members—her, Steph, Tim, Duke, and Damian—away from him when he’s like this, while they get him somewhere contained until the Pit lets go of his mind. Last time, Bruce came back with a broken wrist, Dick needed stitches in his back, and Cass hadn’t spoken or signed for a week and a half.
“Any idea what it is?” she tries to keep her voice level and body untensed while she reaches for panic button on her belt.
“No,” he snaps, green flaring with the word. She presses the button, holding her breath. Fighting him wouldn’t end well, but she can probably outrun him. If she uses the rocket heelys. Jason shakes his head like he’s trying to dislodge something. “It’s here.”
“Batman and Nightwing are on their way, ETA ten minutes,” Babs says over comms. There’s a slight static to her audio, which Carrie barely registers as Jason growls again and resumes pacing. “Move away from him slowly, Carrie. Try to get out of his line of sight.”
She doesn’t respond, just waits for Jason’s path to face him away from her and backs away, ducking behind the corner of the building. After three unbroken loops of Jason’s footsteps, she releases her held breath. Dammit. This was not supposed to be how her fuck around and find out night went. Ignore that she didn’t have any plans for it beyond “go out and fuck around”.
“Catgirl, you okay?” Tim asks, audio staticky like Bab’s had been.
“Aside from my heart trying to explode, I’m hunky dory,” she says quietly, peaking around the corner. He’s stopped under one of the shattered windows in the building she’s hiding behind, swiveling his head between it and the camera. “Y’all got any idea what he’s lookin’ for?”
“No,” Babs says, the click clack of her keyboard faintly coming through comms. It pauses as Tim whispers to her. He’s in the Clocktower with her tonight, courtesy of a fractured ankle from trying to skateboard down the banisters in the manor. He told everyone that it was from something respectable, like trying to do skateboard tricks at an actual skate park, but Carrie was there in the hallway and he now lives under the threat of blackmail. “Do you see anything strange there, Catgirl?”
“One sec,” she says, moving farther away from the mouth of the Jason-occupied alley and training her eyes on the surrounding areas.
“Don’t approach Hood,” Babs warns, echoed by Bruce. Carrie rolls her eyes, glancing over the front of the building. It’s all perfectly normal for an abandoned Crime Alley place, except for the green smudges. There’s one about at her eye level, and she gets closer to it, squinting. It’s a hand print. There’s another a bit higher than it, and another higher than that, all the way up the building and accompanied by what’s almost certainly footprints. Whoever they belong to crawled in some gnarly, disgusting green paint before deciding to scale a building, though…you can’t really climb a building with your hands perfectly flat against it. Hm.
She looks back down at the print she started with, then follows it down, down, down to the ground. She walks with the trail of odd, completely smooth, green shoe prints across the street to the old Roslin Cemetery. The rusting gate is wedged open, outermost bar smeared with green and bent to all hell. The chain is piled on the ground beneath it, padlock green and busted on top. The prints continue on past the gate, the horrible green lingering on the long, drying grass.
“Oracle,” she says, stomach sinking, “there’s a Lazarus Pit in Gotham, right?”
“Why are you asking?” Babs responds, wary. Bruce curses, just loud enough for the comms to pick up.
“Pretty sure I found it,” she says, staring at the green where it fades into the dark of the graveyard. “And,” she drags the word out, “there’s another zombie running around.”
“Shit.” The clacking of her keyboard picks up. “Get back to the cave, Carrie.”
“Or come here,” Tim says, worried.
“Yeah, will do,” she lies. They’ll know she’s not on her way back soon, considering they’re absolutely checking her trackers now, and she’d just disable them but that would make them all worry and shit so. Not worth it. She’ll just deal with the consequences of completely ignoring them later.
A quick check of the computer in her glove tells her she’s got a few minutes before Bruce and Dick show up, which is more than enough time to dash across the road and grapple up to the roof. There’s a giant hole in the back corner that’s threatening to consume the whole space, and, after a giant smear of green where the zombie presumably collapsed, the prints lead right to it. Predictably, peering into the hole reveals nothing but the vague impression of walls and a floor. She glances behind her and listens for a moment. There’s no sounds besides Jason resuming his pacing in the alley, so she drops through the hole and lands as silently as she can.
It takes a few seconds for her eyes to adjust, but the only thing it reveals is the continued path of the newest zombie shambling through Gotham. The prints are a slightly different shape where they landed, almost like they froze for a while, before they continue on a straight and steady path right down the hall. She follows them to a door around midway down the hall, having to look carefully as they only just now start to get fainter. All things considered, that Lazarus Water had some serious sticking power. She idly wonders if it stuck to Jason like that, too, or if this is a super special zombie. The door has a single foot print on it, right by the handle. The door is slightly splintered there, too, obviously having been kicked in. The print glows in the dim hallway, like a “go here!” sign in a video game. Hopefully there’s not a boss fight hiding in that room.
Outside there’s a rumble of engines that she recognizes as the Batmobile and Dick’s bike and she freezes, one hand reaching for the door the prints disappear behind. Shit. She brings up the trackers on her computer and yup, Bruce and Dick got here early.
“Catgirl,” Bruce grumbles over comms, “where are you?”
“I’m safe,” she answers quietly, hoping the zombie is passed out and won’t hear her.
“You were supposed to pull back,” Dick hisses. She can just barely make out voices as they try to talk Jason down.
“I’m fine, Nightwing. I’ll stay right where I am until you’re done,” she hisses back. A bang echoes through the building and she tenses. Dick doesn’t respond, but nobody’s screaming—yet—so it’s probably fine.
She takes a deep breath, half to dispel her frustration and half to psyche herself up, then pushes the door open.
There were many things that she thought would be lurking in the room, including but not limited to a shuffling corpse, but she was not expecting two teenagers around her age, one of which is clearly in a super suit, spooked and huddling in a corner.