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There's something sickening about the child in front of her.
Eleven years old and far too tiny for a place like Gotham, Betty gives her aunt a petulant little glare. Books on criminal law, meant to bore her down and abandon her fantasies, lie around her, and she doesn't bother to pretend to turn a page this time.
"When am I going out on a case with you?"
It's the same question she's been asking for the past month, ever since she swooped into a crime scene in a homemade costume. A little green mask she's made herself and a grappling hook she'd swiped from Kathy's own supply -- Bat-Girl isn't the type to wait around, and she's made that clear since day one.
There's only so much that Kathy can try to deny the inevitable. She can't help herself, even so.
"When you're finished training", she replies soothingly, a variation of the same old routine. "You're not ready yet."
Betty's stubbornness is a genetic trait. Kathy could trace the lineage of that glare back generations.
"You keep saying that", she grumbles. "I bet Robin didn't have to jump through this many hoops!"
"Robin has more experience than you", she says patiently. "You're a child, Betty; you can't rush into something like this. It's dangerous."
She can't tell her that it will, most likely, result in her untimely death. She can't tell her that Kathy won't survive outliving Betty the way she survived outliving Nathan. A widow is acceptable, manageable, an agony she has learned to navigate. There would be no word for the kind of survival that would have to follow the fall of Bat-Girl.
Spyral works, twisting in the background, and while Luka Netz might have died off a long time ago, that doesn't sever Kathy Kane's own lineage. That faultline leads straight back to her father, and if there is one certainty that she has, one truth that she knows all too well, it is that Spyral will spare no child, regardless of innocence.
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, Betty's too sweet a lamb to bring to that slaughter.
She presses a soft kiss against her forehead, despite her pouting, and resists the urge to hold the girl tight and never let go.
"Don't stay up too late", she says. "I'll be back before you know it."
"You always say that", Betty whines.
If Luka Netz were on the scene, she'd notice the effort Betty's putting in to pretend like this is going to be the same as every other night. Perhaps her colder self would notice the petri dish and the shoe discarded in the trash.
But it's not Luka Netz who tells her, "I love you", because Luka could never manage that. Luka was never allowed that.
It's Kathy who says it. Kathy, who gets an eyeroll and a grumbled, "love you too", back. Kathy, who comes home to an empty manor and a missing child.
It's always Kathy who falls.
The instinct to call for help is not one that she was raised with. There had perhaps been a time when her hand would reach for her sister's, but that was a mere flicker in her history. With Nathan, there'd never been a need to call -- the help would be there already, soft and gentle and kind and always unspoken.
Picking up the phone and dialing the number she knows by heart is a foreign action. She has to suppress her body and mind's rebellion to the notion; she has to push it far down within her, because there is something more important at stake.
The tightening in her chest barely lessens when she hears Batman's cold, level voice. "Batwoman. Do you have an update on--?"
"Betty's missing", the words fall out in a rush. "So is her Bat-Girl costume."
A brief pause. "Do you know when she left?"
"No", she says, and the guilt in her comes alive, a roaring beast in her belly that threatens to swallow her whole. She should've seen it coming, should've known that Betty wouldn't be content on the sidelines. She should've stayed in tonight, spent time with her niece instead of running straight into Gotham's cold embrace.
Those arms now hold Bat-Girl, and Kathy knows better than most how unsafe that grasp can be.
"Batman", she breathes out, digging her fingers into his gauntlet. "She's only a child..."
There's so much about Gotham's knight that she should not know, so much that he has chosen not to tell her. She shouldn't know how to read the silence he gives her. She shouldn't know what thoughts cross his mind -- likely of the last time a child of Kane was taken hostage.
Despite their similar names, Betty's not Beth. She's not a tragedy, not yet, not now.
Betty's been a fixture in Kathy's life for three years. Since the age of eight, she'd been venturing to Gotham to spend her summers with her favorite aunt. The brief moments with her, separated from any overbearing men and their machinations, are something of a solace in the storm.
She'd never considered herself to be maternal, and that first summer with Betty under her care, she hadn't been sure how to handle her. The Kanes aren't known for their closeness, but Nathan had adored his little niece, and Kathy can't deny the parts of him that she sees in her. How was she supposed to refuse? How could she ever tell the girl to turn around and go back to the sunny streets of LA?
She should have. A stronger woman, a better woman, would've sent that little spitfire of a child packing the first time she ever showed up at her door. A selfless woman would never have opened the door in the first place.
But Luka Netz, Kathy Webb, whatever you want to call her, is selfish. She wants. A child never seemed like a possibility without Nathan by her side, with her history weighing her down, but there one was, connected to her lost husband and entirely separated from the red in her ledger.
Innocent and bright and kind. So like her uncle in a million tiny ways.
It's not the world's greatest detective or an international superspy that finds Bat-Girl's location. It's a dozen paper bats, stubbornly pushed through a vent and out onto the streets of Gotham. With no bat-signal to light, she'd found a way to guide them on her own, and Kathy's heart tugs between pride and terror.
"It's definitely Cobra", Robin says, looking into the building through his binoculars. "But I'm not seeing Bat-Girl anywhere..."
Her heart freezes, and Batman gives his ward a short glare. "Blueprints show several rooms without windows. It's likely she's being held there."
Likely, but not definite. She could just as easily be in a windowless room, spitting out snark and bite, as she could be in a gutter.
It is not an instinct she was raised with, no, but Batwoman's hand finds Batman's anyway. The fact that he allows it without hesitation, without question, only sinks her stomach further.
"We should go in now", she says firmly. No shakes betray the terror she feels. "The more we wait, the more danger Bat-Girl is in."
"Agreed", Batman replies, as calm as always. "Robin, you stay here and --"
"No way!" The Boy Wonder argues. "I'm not sitting this one out!"
He's only a child. His ability to never leave well enough alone will haunt them all for years, in every universe. A stopped heart, a faceless spy; the beats play out in a familiar song.
A shame, then, that this world has a greater haunting coming to it.
The Cobra Gang is something of a recent nuisance. Not quite what any of Gotham's vigilantes would classify as a threat -- not in the same way they'd speak of the False Faces or Scarecrow -- but the potential lies there, simmering beneath the surface. The idea had always been to nip that potential in the bud, before it could boil over into an actual problem.
The idea had always been optimistic. Gotham has a way of nurturing her monsters, raising them up from humble beginnings, and crafting them into bespoke nightmares. Look at the Joker, just a man in a gang transformed into a cruelty like no other.
It's always best to be proactive when it comes to these things, but even that has its limits.
Kathy can feel those limitations as her fist cracks against the bridge of a goon's nose. Batman's fluid movements do little to soothe her, and Robin's wild gymnastics just bring more pain to her heart.
It doesn't matter how many lackeys they knock down. Betty's still not there.
She slams one of them against the wall, her elbow stabbing into his throat.
"Where", she hisses, "is Bat-Girl?"
She gets a spluttering little gasp as a response. The red clouds her eyes, and she throws him to the ground, getting to look up at Batman in time to see the Cobra Gang's lost leader push into the room.
The little figure with ringlets of blonde hair falling around her face is what makes her pause. The gun pressed against those tresses is what makes her freeze.
"Hold it!" He yells, and for once, they listen to what a criminal's saying. Even behind the whited-out lenses, Batwoman knows that Batman is surveying the scene, looking for any and every advantage to use.
It's a language that all three of them, Robin included, understand. The subtlety of it, the movements that seem innocuous to anyone else and mean the world to them. She's usually partaking in this secret language of theirs, just as in tune as the Dynamic Duo, but right now, all her focus is on Bat-Girl.
She's so small. Had she always been that way? Tiny and precocious and desperate to prove herself, desperate to be just like her beloved Aunt Kathy.
She's so smart. All of GCPD has yet to figure out a single vigilante's identity, but she managed it with just a hairbrush. So determined, so hellbent on being a hero, even to her detriment. Especially to her detriment.
There's an unspoken language between Batwoman, Batman, and Robin, but there's no Rosetta Stone available for Bat-Girl to translate it, if she can even tell that it's there. All her training was separated from them; all her training was focused on convincing her this wasn't the life for her.
How's she to know that they're not frozen in place, compliant to a madman's demands? That must be how it looks from the outside, from how she purses her lips, from how Cobra falls into an easy confidence.
The bravery he gets from a gun against a girl's head fills Kathy with a sickening, burning hate. What it fills Betty with is worse -- a reckless sort of abandon that she's approached everything in her life with.
The moment before it happens stretches out into an eternity. She can see Bat-Girl clenching her fist, her one free hand almost twitching in place. She can see the moment that Bruce recognizes what is going to happen -- the way he moves forward, like he can get there in time and protect them all from what's coming.
But he's just a man, and Betty's just a girl, and everything about them is just so human.
Betty moves. Her tiny, nobbly little elbow tries to jerk back against Cobra's diaphragm, and he, too high on his perceived win, too fresh-faced for Gotham's liking, reacts without question, without thought. Robin's eyes go wide a millisecond too late, and a finger on a trigger twitches a tad too much.
The shot fires. It's a sound that Katherine Kane will never forget.
Betty's eleven, and loves many things in her life. She loves her parents, she loves the beaches of LA, she loves a tennis racket in her hand, and the rush of a competition. She loves the gloomy streets of Gotham and the warmth of her aunt's laughter. She loves her weird older cousin and her weirder, older cousin too, even if they're a bit of a bummer sometimes. She loves the cold night rushing past as she swings from building to building, and she loves the challenge of something new.
All of these things, Kathy has always known. That's her job, as the favorite aunt, to know her niece like the back of her hand, and to keep knowing her.
That job is suddenly, painfully, impossible. In a moment, there is nothing new to learn about Betty Kane, beyond the way that blood stains her perfect blonde curls.
The only thing close to new knowledge that strikes her is an aching understanding for another girl with her name losing another Elizabeth.
Betty's eleven. Kathy's legs collapse beneath her. She's never going to be twelve.