003 . . . BITTERSWEET 

and sometimes I don't like myself, can I be someone else?
someone who makes their dreams come true and drinks from wishing wells
someone that they call lucky, and I never seem to fail
but sometimes, I don't like myself, can I be someone else?

metamorphosis infinity song

Franco Santarsiero, more often called The Shark, was a man of many attributes. Most notoriously, he was the Don of the Santarsiero criminal empire, but he was also a lender, smuggler and tight-fisted consoler of the unfortunate, as well as a fantastic storyteller. If you were in need of someone to appease an enemy on your behalf, you came to Franco. If you were in debt to a dangerous bully, like Black Mask, you came to Franco. If you needed something illegal or immoral, you would know to come to Franco, and rest assured you wouldn't need to answer any questions. He liked being owed favors as much as he liked being owed money.

Franco was a man of habit. He was a rich, quiet man who dressed in dark-colored suits and spoke in a brassy, low voice. He had never needed to raise his voice in order to be respected. He never seemed put off by anything, always calm and collected like the kind of person who never has any doubts about anything. His confidence in who he was and in the fear he instilled were his most valued attributes. Lili had never seen him be violent in any way. Not with her, at least. Not anywhere near her.

But she knew what he was capable of. She knew she was capable of the same things.

It was late when Joe dropped her off after picking her up at the warehouse where Lili and the girls had stashed the stolen cargo, so far away it was almost outside the city limits. In the car, she changed out of her catsuit and back into her party outfit, knowing her father would still be awake when she walked into the apartment. The golden light streaming from his office at the end of the hallway was a constant presence late at night. His voice was always there too, calling for Lili as he heard the door clicking closed. He didn't have a problem with her staying out all night, as long as she made him think she was a ditzy party girl who did not ever wonder about her father's job.

She took her heels off and left them at the doorstep. The rest of the house was dark. The curtains were drawn over the big, church-like windows in the living room. Their building was a neo-Gothic skyscraper from the 1920s in Old Gotham, made of big slabs of dark gray limestones, and their apartment was the only one in the very last floor before its tower, where the buttresses sprouted from Lili's terrace and made their way around the building until they eventually leaned against the peaked roof. Which meant the whole place looked kind of holy. Lili even had one big rose window in one wall of her bedroom, the glass tinted aquamarine and purple.

Lili waited for her father to call her name, but he didn't, although the light was on in his office. She made her way down the hallway, leaving wet footprints on the wooden floor. Even from afar, she could see her father at his desk, one hand on his chin, fingers tapping on his lips. There was an empty glass in front of him, containing only the dregs of his night cap.

Lightning stabbed the ground somewhere beyond her father's lone office window. The rain slid down the glass in thick sheets of water, every so often trembling with the rumble of thunder.

The storm had started soon after Lili and the girls arrived at the warehouse, falling all at once like a blissful breath of fresh air. It slammed aggressively against the metallic roof, the sound so deafening Lili had to yell her goodbyes before she headed home. In the short walk between the car and the entrance to her building, jumping over the dirty stream of water washing away into the sewers, she was soaked — hair clinging to the crook of her neck and the dips and valleys of her shoulder blades, feet slipping on the soles of her high heels, makeup smudged. This was the kind of rain that would last for days.

"Dad, I'm back," she said, startling him.

He quickly closed a tab on his computer and rolled his chair back away from the desk, and Lili pretended that she didn't care that he was keeping yet another secret from her, like she pretended that she didn't put her ear against his office door whenever he invited her brother in to discuss family business, as if she did not belong. Like she pretended to ignore the way her brother walked around the city with his chin held high, clearly more interested in being a Santarsiero than trying to become his own person.

"Sorry," Lili said, and she felt the corners of her face stretch into the kind of smile that becomes involuntary after you fake it for so long. A bright, world-melting smile that she borrowed from her mother. "I didn't mean to startle you."

"You're always sneaking up on me, sweetheart," he said, in the soft voice that he only ever used with her.

He loved her. Lili had never doubted it. She didn't have to turn around to see it in the portraits her father had hung in his office. The one of her posing like John White Alexander's Repose, laying on their dark-green velvet couch, looking bored and graceful in a black dress. Lili sitting on the purple carpet of her bedroom, her white cotillion dress spread around her, blooming like a flower. The close-up of her face, white-blonde hair falling in loose waves over her shoulders, her eyes green and feline-like, half-closed. Lili had spent so long sitting alone in his office, staring at her own face on the wall, basking in the attention... She had memorized every brush stroke, each way in which her features had changed over the years.

But her father's love was not like her mother's. The portraits said it all. He loved her like something that should remain speechless and lifeless in a corner — like one of those rare dolls that belonged in a rich person's collection, frozen behind a glass case, protected from harm. She was at once rendered untouchable by virtue of the power that flowed through her bloodline and made powerless by the fact of her being a woman.

"What a night," he simply said. His lips stretched thin as if he had meant to smile at her, but there was a film over his expression, making his eyes gloss over, and it lingered even as he turned off his computer and loosened his tie.

It took Lili a while to realize he looked concerned.

Lili feigned a yawn, "I'm going to take a shower and then go to bed. I'm exhausted."

Her father looked at her and then glanced out the window, as if he had only then realized that there was a storm outside. His posture was rigid, his voice coming out like he was taking part in a middle school play, where every line of dialogue had been rehearsed so thoroughly that it no longer sounded natural. He had never made it so obvious, the fact that he was hiding something from her.

He said, "Sure. Goodnight, honey."

"Goodnight," Lili replied.

She did not turn back to look at him, standing at his door like he was just waiting for her to leave before he returned to what he had been doing before, but as she stepped into the shower and then turned her bedroom lights off, tossing and turning in bed, Lili realized his light had not gone out until early morning.

. . .

Lili slept into the day, only stirring awake due to a particularly loud thunderclap. She rubbed her eyes, looking out the rose window opposite her bed. The sky cracked open with fury, drops of water battering the city below with a vengeance. It was dark, not really because of how late in the day it was, but because of the charcoal and midnight blue clouds hanging low over the city, colored in jagged shades of purple only when lightning struck.

She leaned over to her bedside table, patting around until she fumbled with her cellphone in her hands. It fell to the floor, the screen lighting up to show that it was 7 p.m., though that wasn't what first came to Lili's attention. The date, July 20th, marked eight years since her mother's death.

It snuck up on her. Lili couldn't believe it. Eight years, and she had never once forgotten about it like this. She used to spend the weeks leading up to it holed up in her bedroom, not talking to anyone, mourning, letting her sadness fester, but now... How did she slip up like this? Was she a bad daughter for being so busy with her ambitions that she forgot about her own mother's death day?

She sat up in bed, the shadows in the corners of her bedrooms seemed to crawl out in tendrils, giving her the impression that the walls were closing in. Her heartbeat picked up, and she got a feeling like she shouldn't be there, alone. It almost reminded her of the exact sensation she got eight years ago when she unlocked their apartment's door and found blood on the carpet, picture frames smashed and smeared red in the living room. Her mouth was dry, with a knot welling up in her throat.

Running into her bathroom, she retched into the toilet though her stomach was empty. When she came up and looked at her mirror, her skin was streaked with last night's makeup. It made her skin look sallow and pitted and Lili rubbed her face hard as if she could rub color back into it, but nothing happened. It just made her sore and miserable. She had to get out of that apartment.

In her closet, she rummaged in the pocket of one of her leather jackets and found a sleek black card, blank, undecipherable to anyone but her. She pressed it to the magnet hidden beneath the wallpaper, stepping back as a secret door dislodged and slid seamlessly into the wall, revealing one of her spare catsuits neatly folded next to a domino mask and an utility belt.

She slipped out of her pajamas and into her suit. Even though the design seemed complicated, each zipper and buckle had become a ritual by now, something she could do with her eyes closed. It was good that she didn't have to overthink it, because her mind was not in the right place for it. Once she had registered the date, her brain had immediately become clouded with guilt. Lili barely felt like changing into her catsuit, but she still knew that, to go to Crime Alley, it was better not to go dressed as a civilian, even if she was only going there to visit an old friend.

An hour later, Lili was sitting at Miss Holleran's table, in the decrepit building where Lili had ended up eight years ago.

Miss Holleran was one of the last residents of the building. She had offered to take Jason and Lili in when she found out they had been crashing at one of the abandoned apartments, but she had been 70 years old by then, and they didn't want to bother, and, anyways, it was too late. She had been offering them snacks most days whenever she found them sitting by the stairs, but when she found out that they were both homeless, it had been only a few days before Jason left and Lili's father found her.

Still, Lili visited her often. Miss Holleran was a lonely old lady who lived in a dangerous neighborhood, spending her days watching soap operas and baking cookies, waiting for Lili to bring her groceries because it had gotten too risky for her to go out by herself. Her house smelled of mothballs and her couch was flower-patterned with crocheted pillowcases and blankets made by Miss Holleran herself. It was what Lili imagined a grandma's house should look like, though she had never met either of her grandparents.

And Miss Holleran knew, too, that it was her mother's death anniversary. She had left a plate of cookies and a mug of tea in front of Lili at the table — for comfort, even though she knew Lili wasn't going to eat it — and she waited in silence, letting her speak if she wanted to.

But Lili didn't. It was hard to talk about it like everything was okay now, even after eight years, and especially when she had no preparation to properly think about it. Her father never talked about it with her, he'd rather pretend like nothing ever happened, but that was a hard thing to do when everyone in Gotham City knew every bloody detail about her mother's murder except for the name of the person who actually killed her. It all came to her in a rush now, all at once, the way Lili had to deal with kids whispering about it every time she started a new school, looking up pictures of the crime scene — which was once Lili's living room — on some self-proclaimed creepy website. The way her name had been on the headlines for an excruciatingly long time, always before or after the words "survivor", like she really had anything to live for after her mother was gone.

Lili did not like that feeling. All that hurt in the foreground, her chest tight with sorrow. She was not that kind of person. She didn't like when people saw her cry, she didn't like to be looked at with pity. Poor motherless girl.

She stood up from the table, suddenly sick of the bright lights in the kitchen. From the doorway, the living room looked cozier in the dark, thick curtains drawn over the window, the blankets and pillows arranged on the couch like someone had been sleeping there. A piece of paper tucked inside a book caught the light when Lili moved closer.

She sat on the couch and picked up the book. It was a battered copy of Watership Down, and the shiny thing that Lili thought was a book marker was actually a photograph, taken with Miss Holleran's disposable camera.

It was a simple, unpolished picture, but looking at it now, she almost felt like she was there again, smiling as Miss Holleran stood on the other side of the street as she sat next to Jason on the sidewalk, both with their legs stretched on the pavement. The heat had been unbearable, the kind of summer day when you don't feel like doing anything but idling, waiting for the time to pass.

"Feeling nostalgic?" Lili asked when Miss Holleran sat down next to her on the couch. She tried to hide the bitterness in her voice, but she wasn't successful.

Lili thought about how she chastised Miss Holleran about going out on her own when she saw the fridge full of groceries, though she hadn't been there that week yet. She thought about the two mugs set on the counter to dry, the rumpled covers on the couch, about how Jason had once told her that Watership Down was one of his favorite books, and it dawned on her. Had she been so selfish to believe she was the only one who still cared about Miss Holleran? Now it seemed a little too obvious that Jason had been there too.

"Sweetheart," Miss Holleran said, gathering Lili's hair and laying it all over one of her shoulders. "He told me you met again."

"Yeah? Did he tell you that I'm the biggest bitch he knows?" Lili bit back, not wanting to look up at Miss Holleran. She looked at her bare feet on the carpet, blistering from last night.

"He only had nice things to say about you."

"I bet," Lili muttered, moving to get up. "Look, thanks for— everything, but... I should go. Goodnight, Miss Holleran."

"Honey," Miss Holleran started, but Lili walked out the door without looking back. She felt guilty immediately, but she couldn't risk still being there if Jason showed up.

Like the universe was conspiring to make her life even more miserable, that visit to Miss Holleran had been a sour reminder that it wasn't only her mother's death anniversary. It was also the day she first met Jason. 

NOTE

guys, this is unedited lol I was in a hurry and also I've had the beginning of this in my drafts for a really long time and i just managed to figure out what to do next now lol so im sorry if its kinda shit, it might be but i dont know. i swear i'll try to edit later, i just needed this out of the way so i could keep writing lmaooo anyways thanks for reading, always <3 much love and kisses from meeee