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Penny Fleck loved like a man from the movies; bleeding for anything that would hold her right.
From the beginning she couldn't help but to cling, to latch herself into those around her like a parasite, a leech, sinking her teeth into anything she could. Her mother scolded her for it, and scolded her well. Told her not to whore herself out to the world, not to grasp the first thing that would touch her gently,
(you're the whole world's dime a fuck broad, Penny, and it'll get you nowhere, unless you learn to be a little more expensive with it)
not to bite so hard. When the train comes, her mother told her, you move, no matter who else stays. You move.
Penny nodded, because she, like most only daughters, understood the majesty a mother should command. She nodded because it was easier to bow her head and accept it than to claw herself to bits
( god knows it'd be you not her you'd shred )
Still, in the following years, anyone who had the stomach to take it could have her heart. Anyone with the stomach to rip it from her chest.
As for the man bold enough to do so…that came later—though not much later.
Despite the gaping, gushing hole in her chest, Penny could not bring herself to regret it all. She stuffed the hole full of Kleenex and cotton balls and moved along. No one else would possibly understand how pleasant the bleeding was—or, if not pleasant, how necessary it was. How necessary it was for her to keep feeling it. How she needed to know that, come what may, everything else may leave, but that gaping wound would stay forever. It was a constant companion—something Penny was unaccustomed to. She'd never been prone to socializing, and in Gotham, that was much for the best. Arthur was a pet more than anything, an odd, needy little creature, but the pain was a friend.
She'd never tell him that, of course. Unless it was forced out of her throat, she'd never admit to her son that she preferred the company of the hole right through her
( that you passed on to him you know you did )
to his company. She'd never tell. Even if she spilled everything else, even if she described the hole, she'd never admit how much she loved it.
She protected Arthur in her own way. Her own motherly way. Protected him from herself—god only knew proximity to her would only end with bite marks—and from the world outside. From the realities of the cruelties of the world. She did everything she could for him. Everything she had to, at least.
And yet, despite it all, he abandoned her here all evening each Friday. He abandoned his poor old mother for his frivolous psychological bullshit , no less, abandoned her for some doctor. Some shrink. Worse yet, Penny had asked him not to. She’d told him the uselessness of the whole practice, the senseless labels they throw against anyone who even dares to be sad in the hopes of starting a money circle, and yet he went around her.
For the first few months he went around her entirely—telling her he was going ‘out with the guys’ after work on Fridays, never elaborating which ‘guys’ or just where he was going—although when he started coming home with those telltale rattles in his pockets and, eventually, the orange bottles on the coffee table, she put her foot down. She was not stupid, and she refused to be played as if she was—or worse, treated as if she was the problem, ignored and abandoned and lied to. Treated like a bad mother, like the ones she saw on TV. The ones who left their babies in garbage cans, killed their newborns, et cetera. Things that got them dragged before the public like witches to hang, accusations thrown wildly at children, at little girls who couldn't handle having little girls of their own, the ones people called Bad Mothers, Bad Women…
She was, maybe probably, a very good mother. He had nothing to complain about—nothing of
substance
, anyway, she didn’t doubt that he could find
something
to complain about in regards to her, people always do—so she didn’t care if he was seeing some cockadoodie old therapist. He paid for it himself with his own money, he took himself there, and she watched her stories. What he bitched about was none of her business.
(
I am a good mother. I
am
. As good as any.
)
She didn’t have to hold his hand anymore. Matter of fact, she shouldn't. She'd make him dependent, clingy. If he wanted to walk straight into traffic and throw himself in front of every passing car, he should be allowed. No one could claim Penny Fleck had not done her best with that boy. If he made it to thirty-five years of age, a real young man, then whatever happened next was his own fault. A man of his age cannot be blamed upon his mother, not even by some dirty old quack.
She could practically hear it in her own ears.That kicked puppy of a man sitting across from some old bitch, whining and complaining, then said old bitch shaking her head, adjusting her glasses, and saying it is your fault. It is your own fault, now leave that poor mother of yours alone.
Penny allowed herself a touch of smugness
( unbecoming of a woman, but too delicious to truly ignore )
at this notion, knitting her fingers and relaxing into the couch as some Martha Stewart type drones on about making doilies. Christ-y, how does this woman make it onto every show? She’ll have to ask Arthur to buy more channels later—stooping to asking for something burns her mind even at the thought, but really this just can’t continue. If he has money to talk to some therapist, he has money to avoid subjecting her to this. Who wants to spend their final years learning to sew doilies, of all things? Penny Fleck was completely lucid in regard to her age—enough to make Arthur’s eyes mist sometimes, when she spoke too openly about her mortality—and that made her sharper. Less warm and soft and prone to sewing ridiculous non-necessities for her son. Either the grandmas on TV were all dirty liars, none of them knew what it was like to cave inwards like a star, or this was just yet another way Penny found herself differing from the general populace.
Grandmotherhood. Feh. Yet another thing Arthur subjected her to. Alongside the desultory channels on the tinfoil laden television, the microwave dinners, and the poor jokes, there was the utter lack of grandchildren. The lack of even a daughter-in-law
( unless, of course, Happy’s one of those, which wouldn’t be a shock but would be a disappointment )
with whom to share her old clothes, jewelry she wouldn’t let Arthur sell, her stories…Arthur himself would listen, she was well aware—hell, he might even wear the skirts, with that makeup he slathers himself in for that job. Still, though, even the notion makes her shudder. With the work she’d done to keep herself at arm’s length from Arthur
( for his sake and hers, she refused to ruin him but refused in equal measure to allow him to ruin her)
she refused to let it all be put to waste by a watery smile and two green eyes. A blatant refusal to get attached and be disappointed, and a great sacrifice to avoid allowing him to attach himself and, in turn, be disappointed. Overattachment stems from a lack of self-restraint. Overattachment breeds weakness, and worse, clinginess.
Penny Fleck could not stand clinginess, in spite of herself. It was one of the few things from her mother's speech she took to heart. Even the word evoked a sort of sickly feeling, like skin-stick leather chairs and cough syrup and the wax paper they put over hospital beds before patients lie down on them— as if I’m the dirty one, you filthy lying-
Arthur was sticky. Not physically, not except when he came home sweaty and bruised—she kept her distance then, trying not to breathe in the gooey plague of misery that seemed to hang around him like a dense fog. Sticky, in this case, substituted for clingy. Like a stain you clean a half dozen times, even getting out the good spray for it, that seems irrevocably attached to its surface. Arthur was the stain on the Penny Fleck of it all. Not an ugly stain, nothing growing mold, but a sticky one. One that collects dirt and grime like a magnet, like how Arthur seemed to collect the smoggy Gotham disease.
But Thomas.
Thomas was extraordinary. Thomas was good . Thomas was so good and so clean, so acidic he almost burnt her throat and so warm she was nearly set aflame. Thomas was everything good, and he was good to her. There was the delight that came from being loved, then the secondary (but not secondary by much ) delight of being loved by someone like him; someone high class, someone dignified, someone handsome . Thomas she would bare her heart to, even if she knew he had nothing for it but claws. He had the strength to rip it from her chest, and she'd let him. She did let him. He was worth bleeding for, even if it left her rotting from the inside out afterwards. Even if she left with stickiness dripping down her thighs, a limp in her step, and bug bites all over her body, she refused to regret it.
If only Arthur had gotten more of Thomas's graces and less of his angry tears and crooked nose. If only Arthur could have been better enough for her to hold.
She holds him sometimes regardless, even if he doesn't deserve it—and she doesn't either, she knows, she's sane enough to know she doesn't deserve another's warmth anyways—just to see how it feels. Just to check if she's still capable of holding someone. Still human and unrotten enough to hold and be held, even if her son is a clingy whiner and she is, maybe probably, irredeemably destroyed.
She conducted these little tests from time to time—she slit her wrists once to see if she could still bleed, and Arthur (fourteen, at the time) wept so badly she vowed never to do it again, but really only so he'd shut up. The last one was to submerge herself in scalding water, but her apartment's water heater wouldn't allow it, and she had to settle for tepidity. She proved herself human each time—still bleeding and burning and crying like a human, despite it all. Despite her son having come out like a lizard—sticky and clingy and animalistic—and her being the holy grail of martyrs, she was human, all the way through.
( her martyrhood is just as self inflicted as it is pushed upon her, and she knows that plenty well, thanks so much )
Still, though, her success at introspection was what had always kept therapy from being truly effective. She was simply too self-aware, too well-adapted in her maladaptation, too comfortable being impaled in a million different ways to ever pry herself off those blades of her own making. She craved Thomas's touch too much to rip the rot it left from her chest, because to do so was to fully purge him from herself. She wasn't better than that, that willful destruction. She never was better than that craving to rot. You figure out who you are, then spend the rest of your life either running from it or accepting it. In the end you die either way, and Penny would rather die without aching feet and a sweaty brow.
Thomas was a good man to the very end, and he was good now, she was sure. He was the first one to hold her up as special, a fact she’d been sure of all her life, but he felt it too. He was like the stars—bright and shining and shining back at her. She’d shined like a star all her life, and he was the first one to properly admire her. For once, even in a maid’s uniform, she was the prima ballerina, the girl next door, the Wanted. To be wanted by anyone, nevermind Thomas Wayne, was enough to hold her head higher. Her chin jutted up like a dancer’s foot, and she twirled and spun as she dusted and cleaned because she knew he was there to watch, to beg for an encore. To be wanted. Admired. Adored. The ultimate prize, ultimate goal, ultimate success. If it left her rotten, it left her proud. At least this way she could recall how it felt to be desired.
Cool arms around her. Cool, crisp fabric. Shining white enamel concealed behind thin peach lips, sharp and gleaming and in wait. Cold eyes. Fluorescent lights. Wax paper and doctors and white —
The apartment suddenly felt very empty. Empty and void and cold and faraway and wholly unlike the Wayne Manor her mind had just been in, yet not so different from that next room she’d seen— where had she seen that room? Where had she seen those doctors and that glass and that wax paper? —and Penny became vaguely, distantly aware that someone had been knocking at the door for a while now. She blinked, refocusing on the world and banishing the doctor’s
( judging )
face to somewhere deep, deep in the back of her filthy, fraying mind.
Could it all be ignored? The repeated “Ma’am?” from the door suggested ‘no’.
‘Ma’am’. Ha. Like putting lipstick on a cockroach.
There was a nasty prickle to the edges of her brain as she stood up. A familiar one, but familiar in the way that a scar is. Familiar like phantom pain, or like alcoholism. Familiar like black eyes and empty wallets and stolen IDs and broken hearts. Familiar like radiators
( you let your boyfriend abuse your son. And batter you. )
. She blinks again. So much to shove downwards into the sock drawer of her mind. So much to bury deep, deep below layers of prickling, itching, moldy fabric and cower from.
( you figure out who you are, then spend the rest of your life running from it )
The knocking did nothing to soothe this prickle, and just as she was about to shout for the offender to up and leave, before she called someone, the words “Ma'am? It’s the GPD—Gotham Police Department. We just have a few questions,” slither under the thin, surely splintering wood of her door, assaulting her ears and poisoning her stomach. A brief, jilted stab of frustration
( leave that poor mother of yours alone)
struck from her chest, though it only makes its way halfway to her mouth, as if yanked back before it could spill angry, screamed words from her shaking lips. Instead she places her weight on the back of the couch, listening again until “Gotham PD” is repeated by the men—two, she gathered, maybe three— banging on her damn door.
Worms of light danced at the edges of her eyes, cotton strangling her as she slunk over to the door, unbolting it. Bolting and unbolting. Unbolting and bolting. The ambient static she’d grown so accustomed to hearing in her ears was rising with the voices in volume. The Martha Stewart woman was far away, as was the floor beneath her and its steady creaks. Her hands shake around each twist and pull at the locks
( old bitch )
making the task take…well, long. Longer than usual, she’s sure—who bolted the door? Was it her? When was Happy coming home? Would Mama have groceries? Had her sisters taken her hairbrush, or had she just lost it?
( god is great god is good let us thank him for our food )
The men outside are blobs of color coming in uniformed packages of ‘large’ and ‘larger’ by the time Penny makes her hands wrap around the door handle, swinging it open with a flourish that takes her off her feet.
The words “What has he done now?” die in her throat.