Chapter Text
She tries not to get stuck in the loops. She does, even if her dad doesn’t think she does, she tries. On Monday, Barbara spends six hours of her night staring at the gray, popcorn ceiling of her townhouse, ignoring the boxes that sit in masses around her. She likes the new townhouse better than the last apartment—she was always up all night, there, listening to every sound through the paper-thin walls—but she’s definitely still being overcharged. It’s nothing much to look at, this little yellow-y townhouse on the edge of what her dad would call Respectable Gotham. Barbara has tried to convince him many times that these words are a myth he’s made up. Her dad remains pretty resistant to the idea. The overcharging doesn’t bother her, because, frankly, she’s been putting in Bruce’s credit card information at every rental she’s had since she caught on to his identity, and Bruce either doesn’t notice, doesn’t care, or some combination of the two. Barbara's guess is that it's somewhere between the two, because someone has to be sending the ostentatious sets of chocolates and flowers every time she moves—and everyone else in her life already knows she gives the chocolates to Dinah.
Barbara tries not to get stuck in the loops. At her last apartment she’d heard every life buzzing through the walls, melting through the ducts like sludge; maybe she called her dad hyperventilating about black mold on the ceiling, maybe when her dad got there the ceiling was a perfect eggshell color and she’d sobbed into his side, drinking in the familiar scent of gunpowder and Old Spice and the diner out on Neal & 5th. She checked that the stove was off five times before she ever left and six before she ever went to sleep, once a week she took a duster and inspected the ceiling, excruciatingly aware of all the places she doesn’t notice, anymore, from her chair. When she was crying into her dad’s side all she’d wanted was to be tucked under his chin, and it’s a wonder, how little things happen when you move differently from almost everyone else you know. On Tuesday, in her dusty new townhouse, Barbara only checks the stove twice before she goes to sleep, but she’s up the whole night, yet she doesn’t hoist herself into her chair to make sure the stove is off. She decides if the stove is on, at least there’s a fire between her and the front door, and the door is the vessel, isn’t it?
On Wednesday, she installs a security system of her own design. It reports suspicious activity to the flip phone she keeps in a bag underneath her chair, reads out warnings through mechanized code words, dumps it into her voicemails. She doesn’t sleep that night because, one by one, nearly every bat in Gotham swings by her house, all individually checking in, each seemingly convinced they’re the first to have the idea. Barbara realizes she forgot to mention the system to anyone. Dick trips the alarm twice, so she gets two voicemails from the system and two blurry, indistinct, hilarious photos, which will be useful blackmail if she ever needs Damian’s help with something. It should feel reassuring that even her dad trips it. It's somehow not reassuring. What really ventilates the pressure are her ceremonies; checking the stove, and checking the ceilings, and listening for jackals laughing in the night.
On Thursday, she’s back in action. Moving is nothing. The door is nothing. There’s a job to be done.
“There’s an active sweep three blocks down from the abandoned cannery, Hood,” she says. She’s started to clip her comm microphone to her shirt, so she can sound clear and type at the same time; not every night is catastrophe. Sometimes, they’re only doing chores, as they call it: repairing potholes and traffic signs the city refuses to; hauling off trash the city refuses to; distributing Narcan the city refuses to; there's a host of livid issues the city refuses to lift a finger over. It's not always Scarecrow breaking into a water treatment plant to test his newest terror chemical through the tap.
“Fuck me, why do I have to go? It smells like shit that close to the bay,” Jason whines, voice rendered tinny by the incredibly shitty microphone in his deeply silly helmet.
Barbara snorts. “Because you have built-in nose plugs, Boy Genius. You’ll be yelling at cops, you won’t even notice.”
“I think it’s noticeable even during high exertion periods, personally,” Tim says.
Jason guffaws, a snorting-wheezing noise manipulated through the helmet's voicebox. “High exertion periods? Can you talk like you’ve been alive on planet Earth before?”
“To the cannery,” Barbara intones.
“Alright, alright, alright, I’m unwanted, I got it, nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I’ll go eat worms—”
“If I tell you I love you will you stop occupying the communication lines with your insecure ennui,” Bruce snaps.
A third of the time when Bruce snaps, he’s pulled the pin and thrown a grenade into everyone’s faces, and the fallout is nuclear. The other two thirds of the time, Bruce has said the most absurd sentence with such seething irritation that laughing at him is the only possible response. The communication lines go frizzy with so much mockery at once that Barbara mutes all her idiots briefly and turns to glance behind her at Cass, who’s been in a sour, foul mood on account of being benched for a sprained wrist.
“They are in dire straits without you, my God,” Barbara says. “Cassie, they’re useless.”
Cass is in her own wheeled chair, lazily spinning it in circles with her foot. Benching goes about as well for Cass as trying to bathe a cat. She’s been in the same gray hoodie and sweatpants—which Barbara’s pretty sure were stolen from Dick, because she also used to like that hoodie, frankly—for two days. If Barbara’s in play as Oracle, Cass has been glued to her side.
“Always true,” she says, glaring at the screen above Barbara’s head. “Need me always.”
“Maybe not always. You should sometimes sleep.”
Cass flashes her teeth. “I am resentful,” she says, carefully enunciating each word.
Barbara chuckles. With her choppy hair hanging around her face, slightly greasy, framing an intense pout, Cass paints a pitiful picture. “Of what?”
“You don’t.”
Barbara frowns. “I don’t... what?”
“Sleep,” Cass growls. “You tell me to do things. Then you don’t. Then is funny when I don’t. Because I am funny.”
Barbara lets out a breath of air. “Cassie. Can I have a second to tell them I’ll be offline?”
Cass jerks her head, and twirls the chair around so her back is facing Barbara. Sometimes she’s so childish it almost makes Barbara smile, because it’s almost like her lost childhood winks back through her; of course Cass would be the fighter to claw her childhood back where she can. There’s something heavy settling in her chest, though, a dread of the conversation she’s about to have.
Barbara pivots and switches the line of communication on.
“—not, strictly speaking, definitionally, what ennui even is,” Tim is saying.
“You just used the word ‘definitionally’, son, why should I trust you?” Bruce counters.
Jason groans. “What was just done to me was a literal war crime, and the only thing you guys have to discuss is verbiage? Fuck you people.”
“I was stating the obvious,” Bruce says.
“You really just don’t stop,” Steph gasps.
“Holy shit, Bee, stop digging,” Dick hisses. “What’s the first thing you do when you’re at the bottom of a ditch? You stop fucking digging, that’s what you do, oh my God, put the shovel down. I don’t think Hood wants to talk about his feelings—”
Bruce hums. “The obvious fact was that I love him. That’s the obvious fact I was stating. I don’t know what obvious fact everyone else thought I was stating.”
“Oh my God, pops, I was trying to be funny, not go to therapy, and those things are inversely fucking related!” Jason shouts.
“Okay, you guys are officially on your own, I don’t think you need me,” Barbara says. “I’ll be offline, use emergency protocol if any of you fuck anything up.”
She cuts the line before any of them respond, because everyone in that fucking family is specifically good at drawing people into antics. There's a gravitational pull to their drama by now. Barbara takes a moment to compose herself, breathe in deeply, before she twists her chair and turns back to Cass. To her surprise, there are tears streaking down Cass’ face, glinting in the light. Barbara pumps her arms and wheels across the room, over the metal grating and the wood ramp that caps what used to be stairs, lined with sandpaper grips.
“Cassandra, don’t cry,” Barbara says, quietly, as she’s approaching. “What’s wrong?”
Cass glares at her with damp, dark eyes, and swipes a sleeve roughly over her face. Pink pinpricks of color fan across her wide, heart-shaped face, her monolids puffy and swollen. She’s crying in this arrested way, where she’s cutting off the sound; no wet gasping, no great heave of air, only this jagged, painful rhythm.
“Don’t be—don’t be sick,” Cass gasps, and then she slips out of her chair and spills onto the floor, pressing her face to Barbara’s unfeeling knees.
Most of the time, Barbara's breath catches in her throat, if anyone touches her chair or brushes her legs; it's happened a few times, that total strangers have seen her manipulating her chair in public and simply grabbed the shortened handles, moving her against her will. To the able-bodied her chair, its rich, purple paint, and the tri-colored bats Damian painted over the lightweight metal, it's an object. People feel entitled to objects. It's become an extension of Barbara's body, a nerve-less structure attached to her nerve-less legs. She doesn't mind when it's family, though. Her idiots are the people who respect her boundaries the most, meaning that, sometimes, they almost carve a space around her, anticipating an amount of space Barbara really doesn't need. Cass is, perhaps, the opposite. For a moment the only thing Barbara can feel is rage, that she can’t feel this weight, that no matter how much she screws her eyes and tries, she never will—it was stolen. It was ripped out of her spine through time.
Barbara reaches down and tilts Cass’ head up by her chin. “What do you mean, sunshine?”
“You’re so tired,” Cass whispers.
Barbara recoils as though she’s been struck. “I—I’m... in the middle of moving, Cass. Of course I am.”
“Not what I mean,” she says, curling up her fists. She knocks one against her temple. “Here. Don’t want to lose you. Please sleep. Stop.”
Barbara’s mind is whirling. “I—I... okay. If you’re scared. For you.”
Cass cries herself out, hugging Barbara’s legs to her chest, and it’s the first time Barbara realizes that, to Cass, she’s never been different—that's why Cass is different. The knowledge sears through her. The chair, the fact that her legs no longer move, they’re not to be avoided, they’re not open wounds in the conversation, she isn’t the most obvious thing in the room. There’s something disconcerting about the realization, buried in the idea that she’s lost Upright Barbara forever; but perhaps Upright Barbara is equally as false as Respectable Gotham. She wonders if Dad thinks of her Upright Barbara the same way she thinks of his Respectable Gotham.
After a long while, Barbara says, “Do you want to see the new place?”
Cass blinks at her, and nods.
Barbara drives them both to her new townhouse in her side-entry wheelchair van, chattering nervously on the way about different decoration ideas she can imagine other new-movers having. In reality, she hasn’t had any decoration ideas, she’s had ideas for places to hide weapons. She’s really only decided against glass-topped tables and the first thing she did was stick a camera over her doorstep. What Barbara’s imagined instead of a life here are new ceremonies: she’s going to check the fire alarms twice a week; on her bathroom mirror she’s weighed her weekly set of checks and balances, this list she staples her sanity to. When they pull in, Cass slips out of the passenger seat, opening the space so Barbara can unfold her wheelchair—tucked in the middle, between them—and Barbara lifts herself into it, before rolling backwards onto the side-entry lift. Barbara prattles uselessly as they take the brick path to the front door, as she fumbles with her keys, as they pass under her camera.
“It’s bigger than my last place,” Barbara says, flicking on the garish overhead lights.
“Tall,” Cass says, smiling at the peaked ceiling.
“Yeah,” Barbara says back, with a smile.
Without a couch, or a second bed, or an air mattress, Barbara simply elects to let Cass share her bed for the night. Cass politely mans stovetop ramen while Barbara turns the bed into a clutter-castle of blankets and pillows. Cass doesn’t watch her while she pulls herself into the bed, and then, Cass readily snuggles against her, burrowing close into her side, shoving ramen into her mouth with her trapped elbow. The paralysis, the pocked scars from old sores, these things don’t phase her. Sometimes Cass just needs to be a girl, in need of reminding that the people who love her aren’t going to crumble—it’s nice, to not have to be alone. Barbara even sleeps in.