— Anonymous: We're very disappointed.

There’s a pregnant pause as the three words really sink into Selina’s mind, and her eyes are flat. They stare at her parents sitting right there across from her at the kitchen table –– only a couple feet away, but to her it feels like a million light years. Her hands twist in her lap, fingernails gouging deep into the scars that crisscross her hands and arms like the faintest trails of starlight. It is always sharp, this constant reminder that she’s their unwanted child.

That even though Maria Kyle had suffered through four miscarriages before she’d been successfully brought into the world, that she is still a dreadful burden on their lives.

And she sees it. In the heavy lines that crease poor Maria Kyle’s face - marring her gentle beauty and twisting it into a perpetual look of pain. She sees it in the way even now, Brian’s heavy-lidded gaze on her is iron and steel and everything in the world that hates her very being. She sees it in herself; in the way she still internally flinches at every movement Brian makes toward her, in the physical marks that mark her body from countless beatings.

A bitter half-sob, half-laugh tears itself from Selina’s throat; a painful sound that grates across every synapse as she brings haunted, burning eyes up to meet her parents. “You were never proud of me,” is her hissed response. And it is true. They had never expressed anything except harsh words and disappointed down-turns of mouths to their eldest daughter. Everything was always you could’ve done better, why can’t you do anything right?

Perhaps Brian and Maria had once had the ability to love. But in the years gone by in the dismal city of Gotham, Maria’s cheer and love had disappeared too, with the ebbing tide of her health and the constant beating of Brian’s tide against her frailty. Selina had never known anything but disappointment. The word disappointment was practically branded on every inch of her skin, screaming out to the people that this girl, this unwanted waste of human kindness, was a failure. Every morning that she woke up, the word was burned onto the insides of her eyelids, a constant reminder that she was a living mistake. And thus, she bore the weight of it.