Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first time Cassandra speaks to Batman, it’s in the language David Cain taught her.

They stand in a graveyard, and Batman looks at Cassandra’s body like he’s looking for something more than flesh and bone. Like he’s looking for the person who could act as a shield between Cain and Jim Gordon. Cassandra doesn’t know if he’ll find her, but she does know he won’t let her leave until he figures out how to categorize her. Two-Face and David Cain are both loose in Gotham, and someone will need to stop them. They don’t have time for this.

Barbara hasn’t taught her enough words yet, not for this conversation, so she relies on Cain’s language.

Her first swing is the same as Cain’s always is. The punch is slow, aimed high. This is the opening of a new conversation.

Do you know me?

Batman bats it to the side, the back of his right hand against the inside of her left wrist, the way Cain teaches. His eyes widen.

Yes, she reads. He will speak this language.

He draws a symbol in the dirt, a scratched coin. His body and his voice say the same thing. Cassandra hears the word mine.

Her response is fluid. Cain’s strongest defense: her stance widens, her shoulders tighten, her hands lift to block.

You cannot win, Cassandra declares, watching Batman.

Batman says something. It’s words, noise. Cassandra does not recognize enough of them. Batman’s stance is calm, confident, but it’s not answer enough.

Cassandra strikes.

She’s slow; this is a conversation, not a fight. Batman blocks blow after blow, but he doesn’t attack. He’s not listening, and Cassandra presses her challenge into the side of his jaw with her fist.

The answer is immediate after that: Batman lunges forward and digs his fingers in around Cassandra’s trachea. She lets him, because not a muscle of his body says that he’ll hurt her.

I can, he’s saying instead.

Cassandra steps back, and he lets her. He leaves, and she lets him.

The way bodies speak is simple. Cassandra watches Bruce Wayne go, and thinks that people are not.

She goes back to Barbara Gordon. Batman gives her a symbol and she takes it. She is simple, but she doesn’t want to be, and when she’s not, she’ll choose her own symbol.

Cassandra watches Batman’s allies, after they have saved Gotham, after No Man’s Land. She is quiet, and careful, because she’s learned that they will notice her faster than she’s used to.

But she didn’t grow up to be a large woman, and so Cain taught her to use that: to pass unseen, to hide. A weapon is not a good weapon if it does not match the fight, so Cassandra adapts. Gotham is an unusual city, dark and miserable, and its buildings cast shadows thicker than blood. Cassandra adapts.

She watches the way Nightwing moves. Richard Grayson lives in the suit, and even if she hadn’t heard a file on his history, she could read it in his body: the acrobatic grace, the ease of his fluidity. She understands what it looks like when someone has known something all their life, and she reads it in him.

The violence is not a part of his grace the way it is a part of hers. His agility is stronger in evading, and when it’s his turn to strike, he shifts from a Flying Grayson to Batman’s protégé. When he draws the escrima sticks, the two blend together; a weapon made for deflection of attacks, for self-defense. He ties the strengths of Richard Grayson with the strengths of Batman, and his independence from both becomes Nightwing.

Nightwing is the life and history of Richard Grayson made into a weapon.

Cassandra doesn’t just watch him fight. She watches him during the day, too. He moves differently: there is a genuine lightness to his shoulders. He puts Nightwing down. When a noise startles him, he does not reach for the place where his escrima sticks aren’t.

Cassandra watches Richard Grayson turn into Nightwing, and she watches Nightwing turn back into Richard Grayson.

She returns to Barbara’s Clocktower.

“I want,” she says to Barbara, and stops. She doesn’t know the words for what she wants.

Barbara does not push her. Barbara teaches her more words, words for physical things—for food and water and heat and cold. For asking for help.

But Cassandra wants, and she will find out how to say it.

She watches the Red Hood, when he is in Gotham.

His body is the easiest to read. There is no attempt to lie with it: sometimes Nightwing moves slower than he needs to, sometimes Richard Grayson walks heavier. Jason Todd is broad shoulders and four handguns – outside of his right and left thigh, two against the small of his back – and curled fists, and the only lies he tells are with his voice.

The Red Hood is a blunt sort of violence. He does not rely on shadows the way Cassandra does, these days. He does not evade or trick or deflect.

His strength is a strength like Cain’s, one that Cassandra once thought was easy. The Red Hood plants his feet in heavy boots and levels his shoulders and braces himself, and lets the anger of Gotham pound on his body like a waterfall, like a cascade of blows. He becomes immovable.

That, Cassandra finds a lot of in Jason Todd. She does not have to like his morals – she doesn’t agree with the murder – but she admires that they are immovable. That even Batman and his allies cannot cow Jason Todd.

She knows there will be damage. That is why the way he fights is not perfect: for all he projects undamageable will, the Red Hood collects bruises like picking lucky pennies off the ground. He has a higher pain tolerance than Cassandra, and though she admires his ability to not need Bruce Wayne, to not need a family or a father, that is not what she wants.

Jason Todd knows what he wants, knows what he is, knows what he does. He is confident. The Red Hood becomes a tool in his hands. His confidence is the only reason he can survive the pain.

It’s not confidence she wants. Batgirl is unstoppable, every inch of Cassandra’s body and muscle perfectly controlled. Cassandra is confident because she knows she’s good at what she does.

Cassandra wants, she wants, and she has no idea what the word could be.

Batman has other allies, too. Many of them do not interest Cassandra. They do not have what it is that she wants, not quite, and she wants the word so badly she doesn’t pay as much attention to them.

She watches Timothy Drake for several weeks. He is skilled, and brilliant, and Cassandra knows Robin is aware of her—he doesn’t spot her, never knows exactly where she is, but he knows she’s watching.

Cassandra thinks he’s looking for it, too, whatever it is that she’s looking for. Tim Drake has a father and a house and friends and he moves between them often, but he is too much like Batman. Tim Drake’s house has a computer with a list of supervillains. Tim Drake’s friends are Robin’s friends. He doesn’t mind, Cassandra can read that in his body, but he’s still on his way to what she wants.

Damian al Ghul – to Cassandra, he will earn the name Wayne when he does not want the sword anymore – has even less of what Cassandra wants. He is sharp all over and full of hard edges and Cassandra avoids him, because his body shouts of the League in a way that puts her constantly on guard.

Stephanie Brown has it. Whatever it is, she has far more than either of them—and Cassandra wants it, can almost imagine it lingering on her hands when she touches Stephanie, like chalk residue. It changes the way things feel when Cassandra touches them, and it makes her feel prepared, grounded. Like she is an acrobat about to jump.

She stays as close to Stephanie as she is allowed. Stephanie is prickly all over, and she doesn’t let Batgirl near her when she’s not Spoiler, which makes it hard to understand her. It doesn’t help that Cassandra still doesn’t speak well; the voice, the talk, is part of Spoiler the same way it is part of Stephanie.

When they work together, Cassandra watches Spoiler out of the corner of her eye constantly. Stephanie notices, and at first it makes her angry, the same way Cassandra knocking her out because she can’t be told to stop does, but it becomes part of how they work together. Cassandra works beside Stephanie and the chalk dust settles on Batgirl like it’s outlining the shape of a ghost.

“I want to be real,” Cassandra says to Barbara.

Barbara doesn’t understand.

There is a story Cassandra heard once. About a boy made out of wood. He said that, too.

Barbara tries to talk to her. She suggests coming to an acting class. Improvisation.

Cassandra listens to half of her explanation before shaking her head. It’s a waste of time. Cassandra can improvise perfectly: she can read a target perfectly. She knows what people want of her.

She knows what Batman wants of her.

He doesn’t say it, because he says almost as little as she does. But he throws punches, in practice, and his satisfaction with her success against him is more praise than Cain ever gave.

Barbara calls her Batgirl instead of any other name. Cassandra doesn’t know how to ask for anything else—she is Batgirl, and even when she’s not wearing the symbol, she’s not anyone else.

Barbara doesn’t understand why Batgirl spends so much time with Spoiler. Cassandra will tolerate being paired with others, but she sticks to Stephanie like a well-placed bug. Stephanie doesn’t get it, not really, but Cassandra thinks she allows it out of pity.

Stephanie doesn’t teach her nearly as many words as Barbara does. Oracle works in knowledge, and teaching Cassandra is just another part of that. Stephanie talks, and none of it is really meant to teach Cassandra, not the same way.

Cassandra learns other things. Sometimes, on the good nights, Spoiler doesn’t just talk. She laughs and she yells, high and delighted, when she leaps from tall buildings.

It’s not words. It’s sound, noise, like another type of body language. Cassandra smiles, under her mask, where no one will see it.

She takes a running start, and raises her voice to shout with Spoiler as they plummet from the skyscraper.

It’s not words, but it doesn’t have to be. The wind and the shouting make her vocal cords feel dry with overuse.

Cassandra swallows around the feeling and thinks of chalk dust.

It isn’t until Cain attempts to kill Barbara that Cassandra begins to find better words for it.

Cain hunts Barbara to Platinum Flats, her new headquarters, and Cassandra steals the Batwing and runs after him. Nightwing fights her for it, all acrobatic grace, but Cassandra understands the way bodies move too well to let him use it against her. So she steals the Batwing, and she can hear his voice calling to Batman.

She doesn’t understand all the words – “Do you want me to say I told you so?” – but she understands what he means. He’s calling Batgirl a traitor, and Batman will be coming. It doesn’t matter. Bruce will understand or he won’t, but either way Barbara will survive.

Cassandra has to stop him. This is the legacy of Cain: the blood and suffering. A trail of children’s bodies in Cassandra’s wake, all of the broken failures before Cain found perfection.

Perfection is Cain’s real mistake, Cassandra thinks. Perfection is not a thing that people are. Cassandra is perfect, and she isn’t a person. Cain took that from her: words, normalcy, being human.

He loves her, is the problem. Cassandra isn’t sure if he loves what he made of her or who she actually is, but the distinction might not matter as much as she wants it to.

Cassandra wants nothing to do with Cain’s legacy. She fights him, fights finally with the intent to kill. His face is a mess of fondness and disappointment, and he thinks only of the skill he gave her, blood and competence, and not of anything he took.

“I wanted a family!” Cassandra screams at her father, and she knocks him over the edge of the building.

She almost lets him die. She scrambles to the ledge too late, and it’s Batman who catches him, the way he’s caught a hundred people before Cain.

Cassandra wants to be ashamed of what Batman overheard. Except that Bruce Wayne steps in close to her, and anything she could think is drowned out when he says the word adoption.

She folds herself into a hug and nods against his chest. Cassandra wants, and it aches in her, like a hunger.

Batman takes her back to Gotham. Batman shows her the Cave, lets her up into the Manor above the Cave. He shows her a birth certificate: Cassandra Wayne. A fake, but a good fake. Cassandra smiles when he looks at her, because he wants her to be happy.

But she takes him back down to the Cave. Because she doesn’t have the words, but Bruce doesn’t only speak in words, he understands the way Cain taught her, too.

Dick and Tim are there. They let Cassandra move them, confused but willing. She places them beside the suits in their cases.

Cassandra says to Bruce, “You made them.”

She points at Bruce, and at Dick, and at Nightwing. At Bruce, and at Tim, and at Robin. What they were, and what Bruce made them.

Cassandra points at Bruce. She points at Batgirl’s suit, in the case next to her. And she points at herself.

“Make me,” she says.

It’s not words, not really. But it doesn’t have to be: Bruce’s face softens and his eyes fill with tired understanding.

Batman makes people into heroes.

“I’m not sure I know how,” Bruce tells her.

“Try,” she says.

Maybe Batman can make a hero into a person.

Cassandra doesn’t know the word for that. Maybe there isn’t one; Barbara had to explain that once, that some things are many words together, or no words at all.

The way bodies speak is simple. People are not.

Cassandra isn’t sure if Bruce can do it, but she reads it in him, the desire to try. She wants a family. She wants friends. These are all things people have, things Cassandra has never had. It doesn’t have to be perfect; she knows better than to ask that.

Cassandra is tired of the world being simple. She wants to be a person instead.

Bruce says, “Okay.”

Cassandra smiles, even when he stops looking at her.

Chapter Text

It’s clear within a few weeks that Bruce has no idea what to do with Cass.

Dick gave her a nickname. Cass is nicer than Cassandra. Cass is a person’s name, a person who is loved enough to be given a nickname.

Bruce uses it, after she lets herself set her shoulders in a tense slant when he uses her full name. Alfred picks it up seamlessly, the way he’s always picked up signals from her. But neither of them knew to offer a nickname.

Bruce takes her out a lot, at first. He takes her to galas, where Cass plays the perfect part of the newest sibling, the only daughter, and is sure to speak smoothly even when her vocabulary is limited. She watches the way Bruce Wayne laughs, all smile and performance, notes the imperfections.

Bruce takes her to shows. He takes her to theaters, concerts. He talks too much, and Cass watches him watch the exits, watches the shape of Batman move behind the mask of Bruce Wayne. He talks too much, and Cass does her best to keep up, but often his body says this is not important while his voice gets louder.

Bruce takes her to ballet.

That. Cass watches that, and she reads it, the bodies on stage. Their performance is spotted with imperfections; she can see a dancer favor her right foot over her left, can see the emotions they feel underneath the acting, the exhaustion and the dedication and the love of it. It’s a conversation, a story, and the entire stage moves in practiced routine, like old sparring partners, except this isn’t a fight, it’s something better.

Bruce Wayne talks too loudly during the standing ovation, and Cass tears her gaze from the stage to press three fingertips into the bend of his elbow and looks at him.

Bruce stops talking, and his body radiates you are important. He looks down at her, surprised, and she curls her hand over his forearm and whispers fiercely, “This.”

He takes her to see another ballet show, two nights after that. Cass watches them again, a different story this time, different bodies. She admires the telling of a fictional story in real bodies—it’s an intricate lie, a ritual lie, a collective lie so strong it moves a stage full of people. She admires the practice, the effort, the physicality of it, the strength and beauty.

Bruce watches her, the loud voice of Bruce Wayne submitting to the honesty of his attention, and promises to take her out again next week, for another show.

It’s not quite the right promise. That night in the Cave, before Batman and Batgirl depart, Cass frees her cape from her suit and twirls for him. Her body telegraphs as she moves, and she mimics the move of the dancers, pushing herself towards Batman’s body. She knows her form must be terrible, because for all she controls her body perfectly, it doesn’t know what she’s asking it to do, and the space for new muscle memory feels like an invitation.

Batman catches her, supports her, when she falls into him. His hands do not land like they did for the dancers in the show: he catches her like her life depends on it, like he is used to catching people, which is not the right story. He does not catch her like he intends to lift her up.

The movement between the two of them is a clumsy attempt to speak Cain’s language with words he didn’t teach either of them. Bodies are simple; what Cass wants is less so, these days.

“I want dancing,” Cass says, with his hands around her shoulders.

In many ways, Bruce is easier to talk to than Barbara. Cass learns more words with Barbara, or with Alfred, but when Cass needs Bruce to listen, he does.

“Lessons, then,” Batman says. He smiles when he sets her down, more a tightness of the muscles around his mouth than a full smile, but it holds none of the imperfections of Bruce Wayne’s lie. “I can find you the best teacher in the city.”

His body is an easy promise, a guarantee. Many people have asked many hard things of Batman, but this is not one of them.

Cass smiles, beneath Batgirl’s mask. She steps away and refastens her cape, the heavy weight slowing the next spin she does. Batman steps back to not be tangled in the edge of it as it flares out around her.

Batgirl’s cape is almost as heavy as Batman’s. Batgirl was not intended for dancing—but maybe Cass could be.

Bruce gets her the best tutor in Gotham. Two of them, actually, who arrive at Wayne Manor late in the evenings, after they’re done teaching at Gotham Ballet Academy: one on Mondays and Tuesdays, and one on Thursdays and Fridays.

Bruce clears out some of the equipment from a workout studio in the Manor itself, and Alfred lets the tutors in politely. They’re both upper-class people, used to a certain level of formality that comes with the prestige of their work.

Cass admires their skill. She has always admired the skill of every teacher she’s ever had, regardless of what they taught her – Cain would never have settled for a teacher who was not a master of something – and she has learned to hold that admiration separate from any frustration or revulsion. They have upper class manners, and it’s clear they expect something of Cassandra, something she can’t give.

Despite that, as teachers go, these are more civil. They do not hit Cassandra, or cut her. They say sharp words, but Bruce explains her limited speech – downplaying her ability, as she prefers him to do, so people will not watch what they say around her as much – and both tutors prefer to teach her through demonstration.

Cassandra prefers it that way. She understands this. She watches their body, watches which movements they are careful to emphasize, the particularities of the motion.

Their voices are so pleased. Cassandra learns quickly, the way she always has, and it helps that this is a physical talent, relies on her body. She learns the motions, and spends her tutored hours listening desperately for a story to be mentioned, on how to speak with her body like the dancers did on stage.

Her teachers explain position – first through fifth, a practiced tempo – and the shape of plie and jeté and fouetté and pirouette and tour en l’air. They’re all words Cass doesn’t know, doesn’t really care to know, and none of them tell a story despite how hard she’s listening for one.

She has been learning for two weeks when Jason, departing his weekly stealing of Alfred’s conspicuously-left-unattended snacks, pushes open the door to her studio while she’s practicing alone and freezes.

“Uh,” Jason says.

Cassandra turns her head enough to smile at him in the long wall mirror, one foot stretched elegantly over her head. The tension in Jason’s body says there’s someone coming down the hall he doesn’t want to see, but he isn’t sure if he’s allowed to intrude on Cass.

“Hi,” Cass says. “Been a while.”

Jason steps fully into the room, and the door silently falls shut behind him. “Sure,” he says. There’s a pause, and she waits, and he adds, “Is the ballet new?”

“Yes,” she says, carefully stretching her leg back down to the floor. “Two weeks.”

Jason watches as she leaps and spins when she lands, a jeté into a fouetté. She doesn’t remember all of the words, but Cassandra knows the movements. She stops in front of him, because his body radiates uncertainty and there’s something on his face that she can’t name.

“That’s scary good for two weeks,” Jason says finally. “Is it for a mission? B sending you undercover somewhere? Normally he prefers the Golden Boy for that.”

Something about her has set him on edge, and so he talks slightly too much. Cassandra narrows her eyes, before she notices, and then lets her face relax. She shakes her head.

“For me,” Cass says.

“You must pick up skills faster than Batman.”

She allows herself to frown. She might, but that’s not the point. Jason’s comparing Cass to Batman, not to Bruce.

“Not for Batgirl,” she says, watching Jason’s reaction carefully. “For me.”

His eyes widen incrementally, the tension of his jaw shifts. Realization. The slight tightness of muscles around the nose and eyebrows. Confusion, deliberation. His lips tense as if to part, but stop.

“Tell me,” she says.

“Are you enjoying it?” Jason asks, voice quiet.

Cass doesn’t let her body stiffen with the surprise, doesn’t show any sign of it. She isn’t sure what to do with the question, because it was never asked about anything she’s learned before.

Is she? She likes learning the way her body moves, at least, enjoys the training of new muscle memory. Two weeks and she can feel the difference, the way her limbs respond to her, the new ache of muscles that aren’t used to bearing her weight at new angles.

Is that why she likes ballet? It provides a new skillset for her to learn?

“No,” Cass says aloud. She’s not enjoying it.

Her body conveys no surprise, but she doesn’t have the same practice with her voice, and Jason’s eyebrows rise.

“Then why the hell are you learning it?” Jason asks. Then, slightly more confrontational, “Did B tell you to?”

“No,” Cass tells him, before the tension of his shoulders can settle into outright hostility. “I chose. I want—”

And she stops. Because this is a word she doesn’t know, again, and she bites her bottom lip in frustration. She wants the lie, the story, the emotion of the movements.

“Expression,” is what she says.

“Then stop learning ballet like an assassin.” Jason waves a vague hand at her, careful to not drop the four muffins he’s cradling in his right arm. “Take, I dunno, a class. Something. Do a show with other people.”

That would be—slower. Teachers are for training; Cassandra will learn faster if she is the sole focus of their efforts. Class would be—

“Inefficient.”

Jason huffs out a laugh, tinged with frustration. “Yeah,” he says, “that’s the fucking point.”

Cass tilts her head, a question.

Jason meets her eyes for a second, but he looks away. Cass can see his hands itch for something to do, and almost without deciding to, he begins to peel the paper off one of the muffins.

“Look,” he says. “B is—fuck. You’re not asking about B. He makes things perfect, is his problem.” Jason takes a bite of the muffin, savagely, and continues with his mouth full. “People don’t do things like this. Master ballet in two weeks. And you’re so scary good, you just—you do perfect. But ballet’s an art. You can’t do it perfect.”

Cass is abruptly hyper-aware of her body, how she’s standing. It’s perfect neutral: there is not a single cue to her physicality that could give something away. In Cain’s language, she is so silent she’s hardly even breathing.

It’s perfect silence. Cass hates it, hates that she’ll never be able to go back, that Cain made her into this. She’ll never have the easy imperfection, because every imperfection is a lie, a story, a sign to be read.

“I want,” Cass says, and she lets herself show that: she curls her hands, draws herself up straighter, lets the body language of determination take its place on her figure.

Jason reads it on her the way she wants him to. He swallows his bite of muffin and says, “Please tell me I can go yell at him for you.”

Cass smiles. She darts forward and leans up, hands curled over his muffin-carrying arm for extra height, to plant a kiss on his cheek. “A little,” she says. “Please.”

Jason can’t quite squash his own smile—and even if he could, his body language is a messy merge between fond and embarrassed. The way it should be between siblings, Cass has been told.

She beams at him and rocks back on her heels, hands clasped behind her back.

“Right.” Jason pulls himself back together, and Cass watches the shape of Red Hood settle onto his shoulders like a layer of kevlar, watches him become immovable. “See you around, then,” he adds, and turns to go before he has any chance to let himself be more embarrassed.

As soon as the door shuts, Cass takes the muffin she stole from behind her back and takes a bite. Blueberry. He’ll be too embarrassed to come back and pretend to be mad about it, so Cass thinks it was a very sisterly thing for her to do.

The tutors stop coming to the Manor. On Mondays and Fridays, Cass drives one of Bruce’s motorcycles into Gotham, to a small ballet studio. Cass is more physically skilled than her six classmates, but they understand the rhythm of ballet better, the compliments of moves.

Their teacher talks about performances. There are plans for a show, many, many months out, but Cass hums with excitement. The class talks about roles, who will tell what parts of the story. Cass listens to music, lets it fill her, and twirls into and out of the arms of other people who catch her with hands full of imperfections.

Friday nights, practice runs so late Batgirl doesn’t show up in Gotham at all. Cass likes that. She likes that Cass is allowed to be more important than Batgirl. She takes a long drive back through Gotham, at two in the morning, and grins under her helmet when capes flit along the rooftops beside her. She races the silhouette of Nightwing down twisting empty alleys until she hits a red light, and laughs at the body language that clearly matches the tongue he’s sticking out at her.

Cass eats breakfast at Wayne Manor with a rotation of siblings and allies. Friends. They don’t always talk to Cass, but she doesn’t need them to; their lips offer tired smiles, their eyes always notice her without fear or surprise, their shoulders tilt towards her when they sit.

This is what being a person feels like, Cass thinks. It’s not simple, but maybe it could be easy.

Bruce Wayne dies.

One step forward and two steps back. It’s not a step sequence from ballet; Cassandra finds herself dizzier with whiplash than a misjudged pirouette. Batman dies, and in many ways, nothing changes. Gotham is every bit as dark, its shadows cloying and clinging as ever, and they keep the secrets of Gotham’s underworld as well as they ever have.

They try to hold the city together. It’s a losing war: the streets have become so dangerous even the corrupt cops start resigning, just to stay out of the way. Every ally Batman’s ever had returns to the city to put pressure on the wound, slow the bleeding, but it’s not enough.

Gotham has Rogues, so Gotham must have Bats.

Within weeks, there is a new Batman. Cass loves Dick, but he’s not Batman. He doesn’t know how to be. She watches as he makes the cape lighter, lighter than Batgirl’s.

Batman shouldn’t know how to fly, but Dick Grayson longs for it.

There’s a new Robin, too. Cass isn’t sure why Dick let him have it, because he is far too violent, because he is still Damian al Ghul. Robin’s body is a sonnet of blood, a soliloquy, and Cass stops working with Batman and Robin because both of their body language is unsettled. They both want things they are not allowed anymore.

Gotham’s recovery from the weeks without Batman is sluggish. Cass stops her ballet classes. Gotham needs Batgirl more than Cass needs ballet. One step forward, two steps back.

Cassandra closes her eyes, and doesn’t watch her progress fade like footprints in the sand.

Tim Drake vanishes off the map. Batgirl doesn’t have time for that. Cass misses him, misses how clever he is, but Batgirl doesn’t have time.

Months slip by, unnoticed under the anesthesia of grief. Cass is no stranger to death, but for her, it has always been brief. Someone died: it was a finished event, a one-time occurrence.

Bruce died, but Bruce is dead. The continuation of his death is somehow unexpected. Cass slips through alleys of Gotham and keeps her eyes skyward, searching for the silhouette of his cowl, listening for the faint noise of his cape.

The date that was once her ballet performance passes. There’s a breakout at Arkham the same night; Cass doesn’t have to make the choice of not attending.

Occasionally, Batgirl passes by Batman and Robin at a distance. Dick smiles, exhausted and relieved and heartbroken, when he sees her. She watches him, watches Damian inevitably pull his attention away from the possibility of speaking with her.

Jason teams up with Arsenal and Starfire and skips town. Cass understands the desire: Gotham is full of ghosts, Batman like an uncanny wraith, but she doesn’t need to see anything of Dick to understand the wounds that must leave. Jason’s friends were Dick’s friends too, and they all leave Gotham behind.

Cass’s twenty-third birthday passes unnoticed.

Cass can see the breaks in everything like an x-ray revealing the hairline fractures. She can’t do anything to help Batman and Robin, but she’s Cass, too, not just Batgirl.

She moves from the Clocktower back to the Manor.

When she arrives at the Manor, a car full of the possessions worth taking with her, it’s quiet despite being only four o’clock. Alfred is cleaning the mantlepiece in the most-used sitting room, and he nods her down towards the Batcave.

Cass wishes he hadn’t looked surprised to see her. She wishes for a lot of things, these days.

Cass slips down the stairs towards the Batcave. It’s odd—Bruce has been dead for months, now, and this is the place left most haunted. Not the Manor, not the dining room or the kitchen or even his own office.

She supposes that the Batcave is the thing he built with his own hands. The shadows on the walls curl like wings, and the shuffling of the bats overhead makes her heart ache, even now.

The belly of the Cave is quiet. For a second, as she rounds the corner, she sees Bruce—dark hair and wide shoulders turned towards the Batcomputer. But he breathes in, shifts forward slightly, and the restlessness of Dick makes the lie impossible.

In silence, on the other side of the Cave, Damian works through a set of moves with his sword in hand. Cass can’t quite bring herself to disregard him—his exercises are training from the League, and she hates that she’s not willing to turn her back.

“Cass,” Dick says, when he catches sight of her approaching in the reflection of the monitors. His voice is surprised, and he spins to look at her.

“Dick,” she greets, and is careful to make sure the warm sound of his name means brother too.

The relief that splits through him is almost painful to see. He stands and is against her in a second, crushing her in a hug. It’s been months, and Cass lets him lift her, curls her arms up over his shoulder blades and presses her face into the side of his head.

The shape of his body is unfamiliar to her. She realizes when he holds her, and it’s even more obvious when he puts her down. He’s gained muscle—he’s broader, heavier. He has Batman’s silhouette, and Cass notes desperately the unhappy inward curl of his shoulders.

Cass used to admire Dick Grayson for blending Nightwing flawlessly into his life, the seamless transition. He slid back and forth like water turning into ice, like a mountain thaw joining with an ocean. Batman is an oppressive weight he doesn’t know how to handle. It flattens him out, makes him submit to the force of it.

The world can’t be allowed to notice the difference between this Batman and the first. It has to be the same Batman, if the symbol is to survive.

Dick wants nothing less than to be the same Batman. This is a hairline fracture on a bone that bears the weight of the world, and Cass aches when she looks at him.

But he smiles. “It’s been a while,” he says.

Not since the funeral, Cass thinks, because they’re all detectives, but she nods and says instead, “Sorry.”

He pulls an arm around her shoulders, a half-lean onto her with the height difference. Months ago, it would have been a casual touch, but Cass can feel the tension in it, the need. Dick has had nobody to lean into for comfort for months, and she wishes she’d come home sooner. She can’t miss the minute shake to his hand, when he ruffles her hair.

She hasn’t lost her awareness of Damian. He stopped practicing when she came in, and she can see him now, so obviously prickling with discomfort. Cass doesn’t know how Dick hasn’t noticed; insecurity bleeds from him like blood in water. He eyes the way Cass leans into Dick’s touch and she can see his hackles raise, the fear that he has become the second-best sibling.

“What’cha need?” he asks, and Cass’s heart sinks, that he assumes she’s here out of need.

“Moving in,” Cass tells him.

His expression splits so wide open Cass sees the gulf between Dick Grayson and whoever he’s pretending to be these days. He grins, but she doesn’t miss the slight shine to his eyes.

“It’ll be nice to have someone else in the house,” he says, which is a cover, with how loudly his touch is saying please. “Plus an extra pair of hands for Damian.”

Damian is moving closer with a scowl on his face. His body screams of the League, broadcasts danger and hostility so loudly it’s almost audible, but Cass can still hear just the whisper of fear.

How is she the most real person in the Cave? For a second, Cass slips, and her eyes slide over to the case of Bruce’s old suit. Beseeching, almost—she can’t be the one to teach them how to be real again. Bruce didn’t teach her enough. A person would know how to fix them, but Cass doesn’t even know where she’d start.

She has to try. Like Bruce tried for her.

“Little brother,” Cass greets, and doesn’t bend down to look at Damian, because it might actually get her stabbed.

“Cain,” Damian says coldly, and Cass is lucky that she’s skilled enough to not let the hostility towards her old name show.

She looks back over to Dick. Some of the fondness has bled out – Damian has a tendency to do that – and Cass can see the bruising that surrounds the broken bone now. All of the soft places where Dick aches.

“Early,” she says to Dick. Bruce worked a lot, but being down in the Cave at four o’clock on a weekday would have been a little odd, even for him.

Dick tries to pull his smile back on. “Damian wanted to practice,” he says, and the lightness in his voice is strained, stretched too thin.

“After,” Cass says. “Tea now.”

Dick looks to Damian, who is outright glaring at Cass. She adds, “Little brother too. Family.”

It’s the best she can do. And it works just as well as she could’ve hoped—Dick nods, tiredly, and it takes one cold look from Cass to quiet Damian’s argument. The trick won’t work forever, but it will work for now.

Dick feels threadbare under Cass’s hands. She takes one of his hands and pulls him upstairs.

It’s harder to avoid looking at the small tells in Dick’s body language, without Batman’s suit, without the distance. He talks too much, and neither Cass nor Damian is his ideal conversation partner: Cass is soft-spoken and ineloquent, her words perfectly placed rather than frequent, and everything Damian says is knife-sharp.

Damian is harder for Dick to manage, when Cass is there. He’s eleven, and Cass can see all the wounds in him: dead father, distant mother, the legacies of two families that he has no idea how to handle. Damian treats the world with every bit as much mercy as it treated him, and Dick spends so much effort trying to blunt the edge of his hate. He needs Cass’s help more than he knows how to ask for it.

Cass wants them to be a family, but every day becomes the performance of a hostage negotiation. Dick’s face and voice lie half the time, and Cass can always, always tell. She lies, too, and the performance is exhausting.

She misses ballet. She misses the beautiful, intricate, deliberate lie.

Cass has to be the perfect actress. Dick can’t see her exhaustion; she smiles and uses all the right muscles, and in exchange Dick smiles back and uses all the wrong ones and she can see how much he wants to be anything but the man pretending to be Batman.

The months crawl. Dick’s smiles become a little less exhausted, because Cass works longer so he’ll let himself sleep. Damian is a little less insecure, because Cass makes sure Dick always chooses him over her. Batman and Robin protect Gotham better, because Batgirl runs half the length of the city every night.

And then Cass gets a text from Tim.

I need you to kill me in Paris on Saturday.

Cass doesn’t realize how tired she’s been until the thought of leaving Gotham fills her with relief. Tim must have a plan, he always has a plan, and Cass buys a plane ticket and says good-bye without telling Dick where she’s going.

It feels like running away. Batman’s weight is different from Cain’s, but Cass is still pinned under the pressure of it. It feels like running away, the way Steph does on the rooftops of Gotham—loud and free, even on the bad nights, for the love of something.

She stabs Tim in the catacombs under Paris on Saturday evening. Pretends to, at least. A mechanized voice tells her, You have earned the right to immortality. It’d be a good promise for a weapon, or a hero, but Cass wants so badly to go back to being a person, and immortality is not something people have.

That’s the extent of the errand Tim needs her for. Cass stares at the return ticket to Gotham he gives her and her smile vanishes.

She doesn’t go back to Gotham.

She mails Batgirl’s uniform to Stephanie and flies to Hong Kong. Cassandra is good at what she does, and she lets herself do it again, from scratch this time, because it’s easier than dealing with everything else.

At night, Cassandra becomes a shadow, the perfect soldier. At night, they call her names in Mandarin with words she doesn’t recognize. But in the day, she is Cass. In the day, she visits shops and eats food and watches people live. She goes to classes with other people and starts learning Mandarin, which is faster to learn than English.

Tim Drake brings her a new suit with a symbol. Another bat.

It’s a kindness, an extended hand. He reminds her that she is of their family, with everything that entails.

Cass appreciates it, but she doesn’t wear the symbol. She is something in Hong Kong, and it’s not just the fight. Cass has an apartment, and she is a regular at restaurants, and there is a woman who helps her patch up her wounds and gives her stitches in hard-to-reach places and doesn’t ask Cass any hard questions.

Tim brings Bruce back to life. Cass thinks maybe that’s what he does: make symbols indestructible.

Cass is going to make a symbol of her own, and someday, she’ll ask him to help her.

It’s another few weeks before Batman arrives in Hong Kong.

He doesn’t say a word, just appears suddenly, a silhouette more familiar than her own shadow. It throws her for a second—she looks first for Dick’s tells, the way she always does, and she doesn’t find them. Hope swells in her chest like an ugly bruise.

Cass hasn’t seen the face of her father since before the funeral, and she traces the shape of it underneath the cowl with her eyes. All at once, she feels like Cassandra Cain again, begging for a family. All at once, she aches for Gotham. For home.

Bruce smiles, a little sad but genuine.

There’s a smaller shape with him. Pointed ears and the symbol of a bat.

“Duke Thomas,” Bruce says, because he doesn’t need words to say anything else to Cass.

The smaller figure pulls off his helmet. Dark skin and gold eyes. He smiles at Cass, a careful tilt of his lips.

Cass reads a lot of things in him. He holds himself in a way that makes it clear of his own doubts; he doesn’t trust himself the way Cass or Bruce does, doesn’t trust his body, his ability. He’s perhaps not wrong, because there’s rage and fear there, emotions that complicate fighting. He’s newer than the rest of them, but the angle of his body to Bruce’s says there’s trust but not the blind faith of a Robin, so maybe he’s not that new.

But Cass can see why Bruce brought him: beneath everything else, there is a sharp, gleaming kindness. Beneath the armor, he is real, and the way he stands in his suit makes Cass jealous.

Cassandra’s costumes have always felt like a concealment. That which is Cass vanishes beneath it. Duke’s suit is a mirror, a beacon: it amplifies him. The kindness catches on each edge of his armor and gleams out brighter than before.

Cass thinks that if she touches him, she’ll find chalk dust on her fingertips, the same as Stephanie. He might be the Signal, but that has never interfered with his ability to be Duke Thomas.

He makes it clear that he’s reading her, too. Cass’ body is perfect silence, the way it always is, and she watches the gleam of golden eyes as he looks at her. Cass doesn’t hold her breath, doesn’t give away the anticipation. Doesn’t let herself hope.

She doesn’t know what he finds, but his shoulders relax slightly. His body angles open towards her, comfortable, warm.

Cass doesn’t know what to make of it.

She looks to Bruce. Batman makes himself easy to read: apology and promise at once. Bruce does not know how to make Cassandra Cain into a person. But Batman is good at making heroes.

Maybe Batman has made a hero who can help Cass.

“So, like, do y’all talk, or are we just gonna stand in silence for a couple more minutes?” Duke says.

Cass laughs despite herself. The sound startles her: she hasn’t laughed since Bruce died, since she gave up ballet, since her family drifted apart. She smiles at Duke, and says lightly, “Good to meet you.”

He hears the depth of the compliment, and the release of tension in his body would be visible even to people who aren’t Cass. The extent of his relief makes more sense when he says, “Thank God, ‘cause Batman’s putting us on a team together.”

Cass lets the smile grow more tired, and she looks to Bruce.

“I’m asking,” Bruce says.

He’s both apology and promise all at once. He’s not really asking, because he knows what the answer will be even if he does, and he’s sorry, because he knows Cass can tell. But every inch of his body is a promise: you will want this.

“I’ve been going by the Signal,” Duke says. “Name’s still new.”

Cass looks at Duke, and maybe she isn’t sure what she’s wanted lately, but she thinks this might be a good step. Someone who is a hero without becoming less of a person.

The recognition of her answer is a shift to Bruce’s shoulders. Cass steps up to Duke and taps her fingertips against the symbol on his chest.

“Brother,” she says, because that’s what the symbol means, and he’s family even if she’s not wearing it. She adds, with a side-eye to Bruce, “I am… Orphan.”

It’s what they’ve been calling her in Hong Kong. She thinks it stems from the stories they tell to scare themselves, that she must be something more or less than human. That she can’t have come from any mortal parentage.

She thinks about Cain, about Shiva. About what they’ve done to her, the lessons and the scars and the perfect silence of her body.

She likes the name.

“Orphan,” Duke echoes. “Badass. Nice.”

It feels like it’s been years since Cass has smiled this wide.