It was a beautiful day in Twilight City.
Birds were singing, flowers were blooming. A cloudless sunny day. Perfect for jogging.
Dinah enjoyed jogging.
Sweat ran from her forehead and her armpits felt itchy. And she enjoyed it.
Why?
That was a question a lot of her friends and mother asked her. They were positively sure that she was insane.
Dinah explained that it helped her get away from the computer. That she enjoyed the fresh air, seeing other people and it helped reassemble her thoughts. That it helped taking her nerves away before her next show. To enjoy time with herself.
All of that was most likely true to some degree... But the REAL reason was that she couldn't forgive herself for being fat as a teenager. It wasn't that she was obsessed or anything, she ate plenty, she weren't skinny, and she didn't have any trauma caused by other kids bullying her. It was just not nice knowing that you were fat, and it had taken her so many years to get a stomach she could bear to live with.
As she jogged, people couldn’t help but look at her. Sadly not because of her outstanding beauty. She was tall like a beanstalk, slender, had messy black-brown hair and a roman nose. Dinah was by no means ugly, just… well, it was hard not to notice her.
Finishing her daily run, she went home to her apartment at King's Boulevard, took a quick shower, then gathered her pencil and papers so that she could get started on a script for her first show. She didn't have anything against her current job as call centre agent, but she still intended to follow her dream of becoming a stand-up comedian.
After three hour of writing, tearing the paper up, then some more writing, Dinah decided to go to bed. She changed to her pyjamas, and then fetched her plush-spider Gary. Was it silly for a woman who had passed 20 to sleep with a plush animal? Most likely. But Dinah had had Gary for as long as she could remember, and she had no intentions of putting him away.
As she was about to turn off the light, she realized that there was something attached to Gary's butt. It was... a piece of paper. And it was green.
It said:
Everything I did, I did for you.
Santa's Elf.
..................................................................................................
Meanwhile...
The place was a wreck.
Hard to believe that this had once been the infamous underground casino known as the Burrow. It used to be.
Now, it was just a pile of rocks, ruined tables, and a lot of colourful shattered glass.
At the other end of the great hall, next to what had once been a roulette, stood a woman that Cat knew well. But not in a friendly way. Anything but, really.
Funny how someone called the Gun Bunny could be so humourless and intimidating
She really had him this time. They had been battling for 15 years. She had been the one foe he had fought the most. She wasn't the most powerful adversary he had ever faced, but the one who wanted him dead the most. The one who wouldn't be satisfied with his death unless it was by her hands. The one who hated him the most. And when you fight and hate each other for so long as the two of them had, you end up knowing a thing or two about your enemy. And she knew too much about him, it seemed. Gun Bunny had eventually realized that she didn't need to figure out who he was to get to him. What she had to figure out was who he cared about. That, and hiring 13 snipers spread across town, each of them ordered to kill these friends simultaneously unless Cat did as he was told.
Bad sportsmanship, but hey: that's life.
And what did she demand in return for his friends and loved ones lives?
A final showdown.
Cat wondered sometimes if GB had ever realized how big of a cliché she had become. Ironic, since she had always claimed that she wasn’t a super-villain as such. But this sure felt like something a cliché bad guy would do. The fact that she still wore her bunny ears and domino mask proved this.
The two old enemies stared at each other, knowing that this would be their final confrontation. Not just because one of them might die today, but, well...
They were both toward the end of their prime, and they knew it.
Even if one of them could leave this place alive, then what would it have mattered? They were by no means old, not even middle age. But despite only being near the end of their thirties, they were getting weaker, slower, and less agile for each day there passed. The reason for this was that doing what they did, all the close calls, all the near death adventures... it wore them out. The Gun Bunny had actually started to colour her hair in order to hide the grey stripes that were the result of stress. Not out of vain, but simply so that her enemies and her clients wouldn’t notice any weakness from her.
The Gun Bunny wanted it to end like this. Cat just thought that it might be good all the same.
So many things could be said before the last of their physical confrontations. Cat could ask why she still wanted him dead, why it even mattered anymore, why she would waste her time like this, but that would be a waste of breath since they both knew that it was about more than just an old score, more than a grudge. She simply hated him so much that it practically hurt. They could take one final moment to talk things out about their relationship that had been building for 15 years. About why it all happened, how it could all have been evaded. That Cat could have been more brutal instead of insisting of being the ever-colourful wisecracking guardian of Twilight. How much more he could have accomplished through spreading fear and respect. That he had been naive. That Gun Bunny could have given up on trying to settle the score with him and instead focus on being a proper career criminal, that she was smart enough to have moved on from hired gun and bodyguard to a role of more power that she could have made more time for her cousin and her goddaughter. Giving them love instead of watching them from a distance with a riffle ready to take out anyone who might threaten them.
They could talk about how they had a sort of... friendship was NOT the word, but a companionship of a sort. That they force each other to be better, made each other feel so alive by being two opposing forces. One a cold, merciless and calculating, the other creative, unpredictable and cheerful. On the other hand, you could just as well argue that they had ruined each other.
An awful lot could be said. But why waste a thousand words when all you needed were seven?
"I hate you." Gun Bunny said while grinding her teeth. She was armed with a field knife and a revolver, and had another in her holster. Both guns were enchanted so that they could store more ammunition.
"I hate you too." Cat replied with a shrug. He held a crowbar in his hands. Not exactly an elegant weapon, but it got the job done.
How the battle went and how it ended is of no importance. What matters is that it was the end of their feud. And that no one ever saw them again.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
"How come the ‘I’ in did is written as a capital letter?" Dinah asked out loud as she read the note again.
Three years later...
It was at night that Twilight truly came alive. It was at night that all the weird things happened. It was at night that most of the illegal immigrant fair folk came up from the sewer to mingle with the humans. They didn't run around the same way they used to after the curse of eternal night had been broken and the police started to work as actual law enforcers again. At night, Twilight became truly became America’s capital city of magic.
But this night was boring. Some jerks had stolen a truck with intelligent gem stones from space, and were now being chased by the police.
Boring.
No goblin, no troll, no magical creature with any self-respect wanted to be on the surface of the street while that human chaos was going on at the moment.
That's probably why Greg the Goblin was chasing the truck along with the police cars.
Greg didn't worry about getting arrested. After Cat had... disappeared, he and the cops had made an understanding of a sort. He helped them out now and then, and they left him and his taxi alone.
Problem was that these jerks had a witch with them. She used some sort of fog spell, so Greg and the cops couldn't see where they were driving. Greg pretty much had to rely on his guts while driving, and he heard at least two police cars crash. Eventually, Greg's cab crashed into a building. Greg managed to jump out, saving his hide. As he was about to swear like a drunk sailor, but almost joked as... someone passed him at high speed. Someone riding on a green motorcycle.
How could Greg see that the bike was green despite the fog? Simple; it was glowing.
So was the person ON the bike.
"Hey! You guys!" The person on the bike yelled. He had managed to get through the fog and was now yelling at the man driving the truck. The fella dropped his jaw as he saw that A) he was still being chased, and B) WHO chased him.
"What a sweat ass truck you got!" The guy on the bike yelled. "It would be PERFECT for this movie I'm going to make! Want to hear the plot?"
BLAM BLAM BLAM
The man next to the driver opened fire with a pistol much to his friend's dismay since being part of a car chase was stressful enough as it was. Their biker didn't seem to mind and evaded the bullets by making the bike zigzagging like an Olympic ice-skater.
"The movie opens with Tom Cruise fighting a dragon with another dragon that he built out of a stolen truck!" The biker yelled. "The dragon will of course be voiced by Samuel L Jackson, and a nuclear explosion happens but they survive because they're in space!"
The truck slammed into the bike, crushing it as if it had been a popsicle stick house.
"And then aliens arrive and they try to take over the world but President Johnny Depp convinces them that this is a bad idea!"
The two truck robbers gulped. The voice came from the roof. The guy had managed to jump from his bike before they had attempted to run him over. Before they knew what was going on, they heard the witch in the back cursing (not that kind of curse), then heard her groan. In the blink of an eye, two gloved hands grabbed them in the hair from behind and butted their heads together, knocking them out.
"The plot twist is that it turns out that Tom Cruise is actually a dragon!" The Cat giggled as he took the steering wheel and stopped the truck.
“Pussy!” The wheels on Greg’s taxi screeched as he stopped the car in front of Cat. Blue sparks danced on the front of the car as it was still magically repairing itself. “Pussy, it be years! Where the hell you been!?”
“Long story, Greg.” Cat giggled. “Mind giving me a ride to King’s? My bike is a pile of junk at the moment.”
“Anything for you!”
Cat stepped inside the vertical and Greg started to drive like a lunatic. Like he usually did.
“Pussy, me been so worried! Thinking you dead or something! Where you… hey… waiting a sec…”
Greg never really thought about what Cat looked like. To him, all humans looked the same. But this time, he very much did as he watched Cat in the rear-view mirror. He saw Cat as he took off his green tux and pink cat-mask. Cat sure had changed in the three years Greg hadn’t seen him.
Like the fact that Cat wasn’t a “he” anymore.
“… Who frack you are?!”
Dinah grinned. “As I said; long story. And Greg… Calling me pussy is probably inappropriate, don’t ya think?”
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