Chapter Text
Her work name was Karen. She didn't deliberately have a work name, but early on her boss had called her Karen, and she'd never corrected him, and everyone had just assumed that she preferred to go by Karen. At the time she hadn't planned to stick around long enough for it to matter, and after ten years it felt like it would be weird to correct anyone. Now it was the name on the badge on her lanyard, and that was how she introduced herself to people at work. Since she didn't really meet anyone outside of work, it might be more accurate to say that Karen was just her name now. She preferred to think of it as her work name. Like a secret identity.
Karen did not have what one might call 'people skills'. She would never have chosen to end up in HR. But there'd been a paid internship at Wayne Capital while she was in college, and they'd found a place for her, sorting files and doing data entry and sorting through more files. It wasn't a job that a person could be good at, necessarily, but she wasn't bad at it and that was good enough.
Mary crossed her desk at a brisk walk, bending briefly to hiss in Karen's direction: "Mr. Wayne is passing through."
Karen kept sorting files. Her face felt hot, though she reminded herself that Mary wasn't targeting her in particular with that information. Just spreading gossip. Everyone always wanted to know when Mr. Wayne was passing through. He usually didn't.
She hated it when he did, a little bit. Some part of her always imagined that he would pass by her desk, that they would make eye contact, that it would be electric.
Half the people in the office had a crush on Mr. Wayne. Half the people in Gotham, even. There was a reason the romance novels clogging up her phone's storage were so popular.
She turned on the little fan on her desk, still warm with the mortification of a schoolgirl crush.
Karen never joined the congregating in the halls, craning their necks to try and see him. The thought of actually seeing him was terrifying. Not that he'd be mean. Just that he'd be nothing. A courteous smile in passing.
Here, she could imagine in the back of her mind that he might come by her desk for some reason (he wouldn't), where he'd find himself charmed by flat brown hair and muddy brown eyes and chewed fingernails and practical flats, a figure like a candle left burning too long. She could tell herself that the only reason he hadn't noticed her was that he hadn't seen her.
She waited for the commotion to die down before she took a late lunch break. There was a second break room not too far from her desk that no one used because all it really had was a cereal bar and a few chairs. With all the other lunch options available, who wanted cold cereal?
Karen. Karen wanted cold cereal. There was an inexplicably vast quantity of Count Chocula available, and she wasn't about to look a gift vampire in the fangs.
The chocolate cashew milk came in cartons sealed with foil under the cap. She'd learned from experience that the foil put up too much of a fight, and often gave way all at once, jostling the carton and splashing chocolate-colored droplets onto her blouse. Instead she located a blunt butter knife to stab through the foil, a well-practiced maneuver.
An attractive voice filtered in through the hallway.
Her hand slipped, knocking the carton sideways and spilling chocolate all down the front of her.
She froze for a half-second before panicking, frantically looking for paper towels that were almost directly in her line of sight. "Shit!" She grabbed too many, nearly pressing the entire roll against herself. The voice—she was sure it was Mr. Wayne, now—seemed to be getting closer. She jammed the carton back into the fridge, sopping up cashew milk off the counter and throwing paper towels away just as quickly. Getting the mess cleaned up so she could hide what had happened was her top priority.
She couldn't possibly clean her clothes. They probably wouldn't come in, that was the whole reason she'd come to this break room, but what if they did?
There was a window overlooking the street. She considered jumping out of it. They were on the twentieth floor. Was she willing to die to avoid being seen like this?
Being overweight and approaching thirty, covered in chocolate milk like a fat toddler, felt like one of her more reasonable reasons to be willing to die. Fine in the privacy of her own home, maybe, but to be seen by her hunky billionaire crush? Better to die, surely.
The neighborhood was too crowded for a jumper to go unnoticed, and would be a horrible inconvenience for whoever had to clean it up, so her fight-or-flight sent her into an empty cupboard instead. She was short enough to barely fit, her head between her bent knees, the door barely shut. She forced herself to breathe slow and quiet despite wanting to gasp for air.
"Hello?" called Mr. Lucas. She was only vaguely aware of Mr. Lucas as being the boss of her boss, or possibly the boss of someone else's boss. She definitely didn't know him well enough to want to be found hiding in a cupboard.
Being found covered in nut milk would actually be significantly more salvageable than being found covered in nut milk in a cupboard, and she no longer thought this was a good idea. But it was too late to turn back now.
"Could have sworn someone was in here," Mr. Lucas said.
"It's fine," said Mr. Wayne, and Karen held her breath. "I just wanted to see..." She heard footsteps, and the opening and closing of cupboard doors. She bit her tongue. "I knew it." He closed another cupboard, and she heard the rustling of a box of cereal opening.
"You know, we have the berry flavor," Mr. Lucas suggested.
"I like the plain," Mr. Wayne said, crunching.
"You're full of surprises, Mr. Wayne," Mr. Lucas said, their footsteps leaving the room at a glacial pace.
Her eyes were watering. She was horrified to realize that she was crying. She felt equal parts stupid and disgusting, and knew it was no one's fault but her own. It felt absurd to even be upset about it, when she should have known better. Fat gross idiot should have jumped out the window. Her real life had brushed up briefly against a fantasy, and made reality look as awful as she'd already known it was.
This was exactly why she didn't like it when Mr. Wayne came by the office.
When she'd managed to stop her quiet sobbing against her nylons, she risked pushing the cupboard door open.
"Karen?"
Sherry and Tyler were standing near the break room window, and had noticed immediately when she started to emerge. Sherry came closer. "Is that chocolate? Babe, are you crying? Like... in the cupboard?"
Karen felt something welling up in her throat again, and jammed the palm of her hand against one of her eyes. Her mascara was smudged and streaking. "I had," she explained, "a day."
"Oh, honey," Sherry said, sitting on the floor to pull Karen into an unasked-for embrace.
"We've all been there," Tyler assured her. "I mean, we've all had days. We haven't all been in the cupboard. We're not Borrowers."
Karen used a task app to get a new shirt delivered. It didn't fit right, but it also wasn't covered in chocolate. She stayed late rather than go out for drinks. There were rumors that Mr. Wayne might join them bar-hopping. She wanted to pretend that she'd have had fun if she'd gone. Couldn't do that if she actually went.
It was dark by the time she started walking home. The moon was hidden behind the thick layer of clouds that so often blanketed the sky. When it wasn't raining it was threatening to rain, and the rain became a welcome relief from all the humidity.
The Bat-signal was lighting up the clouds. Sometimes she thought about taking pictures, like some kind of tourist falling for the local color, but it never really turned out in photos. Too small, too dark. It sort of defeated the point, but who was she to tell the city how to spend its money?
Karen ducked through a side street that she used as a shortcut. There weren't actually many alleys in the city—space was at too much of a premium. But there were occasional old streets, former one-ways, too narrow in the era of minivans to accommodate real traffic. She should have stayed out of them, since she wasn't a service vehicle. But it shaved too much time off her trip home to resist.
She dwelled on the bar she hadn't gone to. The alternate universe where she went, and Bruce Wayne went, and he noticed her. She imagined a spark between them, an instant connection, and they'd talk together for hours about nothing. She'd confide in him about how she'd been in the cupboard, and he'd laugh. He'd find it quirky and cute, somehow. He had such a nice voice. I like the plain.
She was too absorbed in her fantasy to notice the man who approached her. Walking too fast, wearing too heavy a coat.
"Your wallet," he said, and she stopped, frowning at the bulge in his jacket.
"Get it out if you actually have a gun," she said, gripping the bag hanging across her body. If all he had was a knife, or his fists, she'd rather know now than waste time.
He pulled it out. She didn't know enough about guns to know anything except that it looked appropriately gun-like. "Give me your wallet," he demanded with more urgency, holding the gun conveniently closer. His finger was on the trigger.
"I'm broke you dumb fuck," she said, using both hands to grab at his hand and headbutting the gun at the same time. It went off with a deafening bang, her skull ringing like a bell.
She collapsed to the pavement, dead.
The first thing she did when she woke up was vomit. She had the kind of headache that felt like it would push her eyeballs out of her skull, and the vomiting didn't help. It tasted like cheap jewelry and loose change, blood and brain matter and bile. A single bullet clattered into it, and she rubbed her nose, leaning back onto her knees.
"Gross," she complained. Her eyes were watering from the headache. She rubbed gunpowder residue from her forehead and stood on shaky legs.
First good news: she hadn't pissed herself. There was nothing worse than soiling herself when she died. It made her regret not dying. Having to walk home covered in blood was one thing, but covered in piss? The worst.
Second good news: she wasn't dead. She'd never stayed dead before, but she assumed one of these days it would stick. If there was a trick to it, she didn't know it. She just had to die and hope for the best.
Third good news: she still had her stuff. The mugger must have run off, emotionally unprepared for murder. They usually weren't. Even aside from the gore, murder had consequences that petty theft didn't.
Fourth good news: no cops. There actually were never cops. She'd died a lot of ways, been shot at least eight times, but there'd never been cops at her body when she got up. It saved her a lot of trouble, but it didn't speak highly of the GCPD.
Then again, they could hardly be expected to know about corpses when no one told them. And who in Gotham would ever call the cops? They'd arrest you for suspicious behavior just on principle if you tried.
Getting back to her apartment was slow going. She felt weak, and her head hurt.
This wasn't the first time she'd died taking this way home. Statistically speaking, though, it almost never happened. It slowed her down when it did, but in the aggregate, she still saved time.
She snorted, spitting blood and mucus out of her sinuses.
"I'm so gross," she muttered to herself. She tried to remember where she'd left off in her daydreaming, but it had lost its appeal. Real-life billionaires dated supermodels, not office randos. What would she even have to talk about with someone like Bruce Wayne?
You know how your parents were shot in an alley by a mugger? Well, and I'm not saying this is fate, but: