Batwoman #4 & #5 (DC 2012)

#4: HYDROLOGY PART 4 - ESTUARY While Maggie Sawyer and Kate Kane make love together for the first time, Bette Kane goes out on the streets of Gotham City as Flamebird by herself.   Trying to take out a Chinese Tong gang, she encounters the entity known as the Weeping Woman, who warns that she should not have come. The gang's leader is a strong, monstrous man with a hook for a hand. Flamebird is confident, and continuously brags about her superhero connections while she takes a beating from the heavy. Finally, he manages to slice through her stomach with his hook, and she collapses, confused as to how she allowed it to happen. He leaves her for dead, panting in a puddle of her own blood, pooling in the snow.   By morning, Agent Cameron Chase of the DEO discovers Flamebird's body, unconscious and bleeding heavily. Somehow, she is still alive, though. Chase orders that she be taken to a secure location for unmasking.   After saying her goodbyes to Sawyer that morning, Kate goes out that night as Batwoman. She visits a woman running an illegal medical clinic, who she knows was on duty at the morgue the night that two children were brought there. In exchange for information about them, she promises not to bust her for the illegal clinic operations. The doctor explains that the two kids were playing in a condemned boathouse and drowned. Batwoman had encountered the Weeping Woman there earlier, and nearly drowned, herself.   The mother had come to identify her children reeking of alcohol, and the doctor expects that she was deported. Her name was Maria Salvaje. Upon hearing the name, a Mexican gang member receiving treatment outbursts that Maria Salvaje is the risen dead.   After running all of Flamebird's identifiers through their database, Chase and her companions find nothing on her. Chase realizes that because she is associated with Batman, they may never find out who she is. However, one of her people reveals that he has deduced from the fact that Flamebird is a natural blonde that she is the same natural blonde who has been running around with Batwoman as a sidekick in a grey uniform. He has run tests, and the hair matches.   Agent Chase disguises herself as a nurse and approaches Flamebird on her makeshift hospital bed. She claims that the doctors have done all they can, but the injuries are too extensive, and she cannot be saved. She asks for a next of kin, or any contact who she can call to keep her from dying alone. With difficulty, Bette whispers her cousin's name: Kate Kane. Chase realizes that it can't be a coincidence, and orders that she be dumped at Gotham General Hospital to have her wounds actually treated.   Batwoman breaks into Maria Salvaje's apartment to find her drunken father there. He believes that his daughter is dead, having killed herself after failing to make herself feel better with alcohol. Knowing that she won't get any information from the man, Batwoman leaves him with his sadness.   While Kate researches occult texts, Agent Chase meets with Director Bones and apologizes for dragging him back to Gotham. He thinks nothing of it, excited to see what comes next.

#5: HYDROLOGY PART 5 - EVAPOTRANSPIRATION Kate Kane meditates, using free association to come to the conclusion that in order to fight the Weeping Woman, she will have to use fire.   Later, as Batwoman, she carries a canister of gasoline to the old boathouse on the harbor. This is where Maria Salvaje's children were drowned, and where she drowned herself as well. Batwoman calls out, demanding to know where the kidnapped children are, but the Weeping Woman appears, and in her anger, forces Kate to see a vision of Maria's past. Then, she gives Kate hallucinations of her regrets and heartache; namely, her sister Elizabeth Kane. Kate is forced to watch her sister drown before her eyes. However, despite her pain at having to see her sister in that position, Kate feels no responsibility for what happened.   Batwoman breaks free of the illusion and condemns Maria for having allowed herself to become a drunken, careless mother - and for choosing to kill herself. Likewise, it was Elizabeth who allowed herself to become a maniac, and Kate chooses not to feel guilty about that. Finally, Batwoman ignites the gasoline, and sets the boathouse aflame.   The fire causes the Weeping Woman to begin to evaporate. Batwoman offers one last chance to make things right by telling her where the missing children have been taken. Maria cryptically suggests that she was made into a vengeful spirit by a third party. Before disappearing completely, she states that the children were abducted by someone or something called Medusa.   Back in her apartment, Kate cuts her father out of a family photo, leaving only she and Beth behind. Taping the photo to her window, she treats it as a good luck charm in her research on Medusa. However, before she can make an attempt to hack into the GCPD's files, she catches a whiff of cigar smoke.   In her kitchen, she is surprised to find Director Bones and Agent Cameron Chase waiting for her there. Kate attempts to attack Agent Chase, but the Director jumps between them as Chase reveals that they already know that she is Batwoman. They inform her that her cousin Bette gave up the information while she was near death. Director Bones explains that due to Chase's actions, Bette's life was saved, and they will take her to her if she agrees to make a deal.   They offer her a job with the DEO. Coincidentally, they want her to dismantle the organization known as Medusa. As an additional bonus, Director Bones informs her that unless she takes the offer, her father will be put in prison for stealing military hardware, funding a vigilante, and covering up a terrorist act in order to hide his own illegal activities. If she agrees to take the job, Jacob Kane will be left alone.   Resigned, Kate accepts the offer. She visits Bette in the hospital, and tells her unconscious cousin that she has turned down Batman's offer to join Batman Incorporated. Batman had, until that point, been stealthily hiding in the room already. He steps out of the shadows and warns that working with the DEO will be a mistake that will eventually put her at odds with him. Kate responds that she is just using them to get the children back, and that she knows which lines must not be crossed. Before leaving, Batman warns that Director Bones will challenge that knowledge at every opportunity, and eventually, she will be forced to make an impossible decision.   Later, Batwoman visits the parents of one of the missing children and promises that while the Weeping Woman is gone, she will find the missing children at any cost.