The Changeling

He was back on the roof.

This was the last place he had followed her to, the only place where he had seen her with that boy.

Bruce Wayne that was what the red haired girl had called him.

Bruce Wayne.

The name sounded vaguely familiar, but he had committed so much information to his memory since he had escaped with his brothers and sisters that it was often hard to sort through. His mind was porous, like an unused sponge absorbing everything, the positive and the negative.

When he had been taken from his cell, the only home he had ever known and shuffled onto the bus, his confusion had stopped him from asking anything of anyone. The people beside him had not looked like him, but neither had they resembled the people beside them. Each one of them was unique, birthed or created in an image he could not begin to comprehend.

From the crinkled papers he had fished from the trash, he understood how the people of Gotham viewed him and his brothers and sisters. Monsters. That is what they had called them. Monsters. Good or bad, the citizens had made no distinction, they demanded he and his siblings be hunted down and executed swiftly.

"War is cruelty." One article had written, quoting an old army general. "There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over."

It was why most of them had separated, tried to flee the city or retreated to the comfort of the shadows and the sewers. It was on one of these excursions from the underground, that he had finally begun to understand that no one felt the way he did. Not any of his brothers and sisters and especially not the humans that flaunted their free will.

It had been an unusual feeling of curiosity that had had him follow the young human couple down the alley. He had been intrigued by the new heightened impressions he had felt from them; feelings that his siblings simply did not emote. Contradicting emotions had been rolling off of them. The woman's words and her actions had seemed as if she was enjoying herself but he could feel her... Not disgust or even apathy, but a kind of lazy detachment as if this was a chore and she had something better to do. Contrary to her encouraging words she may as well have been counting the bricks in the wall behind her. Then her feelings had changed to a sort of pity for the sweaty young man who kissed her cheek affectionately.

At the time, he had not understood how the man had not seen it. How he had not felt the woman's disinterest? Being so physically close to her, how had the man not sensed her boredom with him?

It was then that he had realized that not everyone felt the way he did. Literally. He had been living with the idea that everyone just ignored other people's emotional needs or their honest feelings, the way one might ignore a crying child that was not there own. He had not realized until that day, that he was the only one who could see them, feel them.

It was not long after that that he had found himself rummaging in the garbage cans outside of a club and a pale haired girl had forced a fist of bills into his hand. It was because of her that he had found himself back on the roof, away from his trusted shadows and baking under the relentless sun.

It was during one his visits to the roof that he had discovered her name: Selina.

Selina.

It was a whimsical name, like something that belonged to a fey creature in a fairytale and seemed appropriate to her physical appearance. She looked otherworldly, with her small frame and her pale hair and a pair of cat-green eyes that were set so symmetrically in her heart-shaped face. But it was her aggressive show of kindness that had caught his attention that had compelled him to follow her across the city and onto this rooftop.