Chapter Text
Cass has always assumed that if slipping out of someone’s grasp was going to kill her, it was going to be one of her family members, high above Gotham’s skyline and with the world in the balance, and not a virtual stranger. Maybe what happened wasn’t so removed from that, if she takes the long view of things, because superheroes in Gotham eventually become Bats one way or another, no matter how strictly they distance themselves in the beginning with their own missions and their own enemies and their own ways of doing things. And they have the first few drops on the marbled paper of friendship just starting to swirl, given that they’ve fought together, and eaten together, and once or twice, even talked.
There’s also the confounding factor in Cass’s complete lack of certainty that she is, indeed, dead. This is certainly a realm of the dead, but Cass has read enough books to know that the living can cross into the spaces of the dead in certain extraordinary circumstances, and Cass is nothing if not prone to falling into the extraordinary. She may not have died for the fate of the world, this time, but the fall is long and without reprieve, no familiar hope of a hand held out to her or strut for her to grapple around, and it is, as she always assumed, above the rough texture of buildings standing tall against each other’s sides, blurring into a single string of facades.
The problem is that it isn’t Gotham City’s skyline at all.
She finds herself frozen shadow still on a rooftop, instincts taking over for lack of information. Her crouch for ease of movement, senses strained for any sign of threat, mental inventory of everything at her disposal, all coming back to her as every time she lands from a height, from a slip, from an unexpected mistake, righting and reorienting herself the way she’s always been taught, no matter which teacher held her hand. She lands with barely a sound, and this, too, is familiar.
The unexpected comes in the form of the buildings, taller than they might be, and arranged in expanses that simple forms of wood and clay and steel shouldn’t be able to reach. The architecture of the human body is more natural to her, but physics is physics, and Cass knows how tall buildings ought to be able to grow to be, where they would be liable to perch, how they could shore each other up as a city grows upwards and outwards and over again, and she knows, when she looks far, far down, that the abstracted substrate beneath her is more than just a trick of the light.
She’s used to the buildings in Gotham these days, built up higher than humanity should ever need them to be, always reaching for some yet grander goal on the tip of a silver tongue. And, still, these new heights dizzy her. She tries not to look down.
But it can’t be said to be ugly, either. If she ignores the vertigo of features just a little too close to home, the surreal planes that replace the vanishing point, the script that remains illegible to her untrained eye, it’s really very beautiful. The tile of the roof clicks satisfyingly under her toes, sturdy, built to withstand weather over physical assault, guarding against the natural degradation of time and not a single too sharp insult to its surface. The slope of roofs will take some getting used to, if she plans to leap from one to another, but they’re close enough together she’s confident the learning curve will pose little risk to her person.
The arc of bridges in the distance draws her eye. There’s a kind of order to the buildings, one flowing into the next so that the sweep of designs runs almost organically into the far reaches of a space that may never end, ignoring things like gravity and curvature and the limits of the human eye. Her peripheral vision is blinding her, and still, there’s so much to see. Everything here smells of incense, and the sounds she hasn’t yet begun to sort out, but when she reaches out to brush her gloves against carved wood and molded ceramic and the slick plastic of a neon sign, they’re all just as solid as what she landed on. Still, she holds her breath, as if waiting for herself to fall again.
She may be all alone here, but Cass isn’t alone. To all sides, the landscape is patterned with what she thinks are ghosts, hopes are ghosts, because ghosts at least she has some idea how to deal with. Well. Ghosts she can guess. Demons she could guess, too, but nothing here looks like what she expects a demon to look like, too translucent and still moving in those odd trails, like smoke. Some of them have form and some leave nothing more than an impression in their wake. Monsters, she could say, if she felt the urge to pass judgement so soon. She’s been called a monster enough, herself, sweeping out from shadows and back in as if she never were.
There aren’t any shadows here. Or, at least, the ones that are are small, pitiful things, more impressions on a surface than anything given substance or weight. Shadows have more pull in Gotham, where they shield good and evil alike from the darkest depths of night, but even elsewhere, beholden to the rules of reflection and refraction and fusion in the hearts of stars, they don’t hide from themselves. Or hide from her.
She tries to step into one and realizes she can’t step at all. Her body will move, if she wills it to deliberately enough, moving her muscles individually and in strictly ordered orchestration like a child learning to walk, but it’s hard to predict where she’ll end up, careful footfalls taking her to the edge of the roof and back again, not quite to the precise location of her departure. Her proprioception is almost gone and her sense of herself in relation to the land was never here. She feels untethered, the floating smother of too many painkillers on just waking up, the unending spin of eyes closed against dehydration, static of too long spent in place. Her body is still her own, she can make it obey her, but the disquiet of unpredictability is something too unfamiliar for Cass to put a name to it. If she fights, she doesn’t know if she can win.
There’s something about everyone else in this place, too, every body she can see moving in a way that’s meaningless to her, expressions betraying nothing, a shift in stature one moment signaling nothing about the next. She can see muscle tension in some of them, the readying of stances, movements of arms and hands and fingers, and still they telegraph nothing, still she’s helpless against wherever they might go, whatever they might do. Cass is lost here.
The sting at the back of her eyes grounds her. The ache like heartburn that in another world, she’d be able to piece these clues together, to put a name to every face and a motivation to every form. Cass knows about the human body, about fire and poisons and blades, about hiding and finding and figuring out. Mythology was never part of that, not even to cultivate the dark superstition Batman employs, because Cass was never supposed to be seen. Never supposed to be caught. Never supposed to be trapped here.
Cass knows a smattering of religion from her family, she knows movie monsters from her friends, she knows books on heavy recommendation that paint portraits of their own filigreed worlds, painstakingly conveyed. This, she knows nothing of.
She had a mother once. Or perhaps she never did. But if she had – Cass came from somewhere else than here, somewhere else than Gotham, and she knows it in every stranger’s eyes. Even when their words aren’t fully breathed to life, she can hear it in the hitch of their voices, see the sudden scrabble to tuck hands into pockets and pretend they don’t want to know what they haven’t yet asked of her. The overly casual slouch of asking where she’s from, and the tightening of tendon of asking where she’s really from. Cass doesn’t know where she’s really from. She’s never known.
If she had had a mother who tucked her in at night, who told her stories about her home and her people and her past, would it have looked like this? Would these be her ghosts and her buildings and her sense of timelessness and void? Would she know how to leave? But it’s beautiful here, as she makes her way from building to building, each less familiar than the last, each glimpse of beauty reminding her she knows the curl of signs and stretch of pillars mostly from the other end of the city, the space where the looks drop away. Where eyes turn to nod at her in greeting, the way they do to Steph and Tim, and not to wonder what she’s doing there.
That’s all she knows about it. Some places look like home.
If her father had been a father to her, if he had loved or cared or tried, would he have told her of these things? Would he have reached out to her mother to ask, or brought bits and pieces to her on his own, like a bird to its nestling, weaving her into someone who was whole? Or would it have been voiceless stories, anyway, the numb facades of a global culture subsuming anything different into tolerable diversion, and never letting her delve deep into her own world, singing songs to herself and knowing what the words mean when she hears them. Worlds of the author’s own creation stacked from floor to ceiling in rooms and rooms, and twice as many debates in the mouths of the audience, but of the stories already spoken on the Earth she lives on by the people who share it with her, one grandfathered authoritative word with the seal of a respectable press.
Perhaps, if she were more than a weapon, her father would have told her nothing at all. Perhaps, if she were less than a regret, her mother would have dismissed all tales as meaningless, legends as empty as a Saturday morning cartoon. Perhaps there’s no way to tell except by living through it, time told by tick marks in a notebook every time Cass realizes she doesn’t know what she doesn’t know.
Maybe the intricacies of the world aren’t closed to her yet. Cass surveys the structures again, the skyline heartwrenchingly like home even though not a single Gotham tower exists in this place, and thinks she’d like to take her family here. They don’t know either, haven’t researched any of it any more than Cass has, they don’t know the names for the places or the feeling of displacement or the words that would make it right. It’s not the same, cold text on a computer screen, as living mythology spun in webs of consequential words, storyteller to a rapt audience’s ear. Maybe, with her family by her side, it would feel warm again. Maybe, with her family by her side, she could explain to them the need to reach her fingers out and make contact with something a rumble deep in her belly tells her she must know.
Tim would like the windows, she thinks, the intricate carvings shining space into the walls, and wonders about the meanings behind the geometry. Steph would like the lights and color, the way the buildings blend into the sky, and something more than just the simple red of luck splashed everywhere as if promising Cass a way home. Babs would want to know the physics behind the metaphysics, and Cass, Cass wants to know, too. If she knew the nature of the world where she is, would she understand it?
Her father stole more than just her words from her.
There are stories here, built up in and around this place, a foundation for it to grow as the stories grew up it like vines, a forest in human lives and thoughts and knowledge passed down to everyone but Cass. She’s not even a lichen in this scenery, she’s the angry tourist overturning rocks to try to find lost treasure, and no one even here to kick her out. Cass wishes there were some angry guard for her to fight, some too coiffed decorated symbol of what she hasn’t been allowed to touch, to let her in or eject her back into the home she’s found for herself, dug out of the carcass of the life that was stolen from her. She’s been thinking about home, the odd moment, of the gargoyles more familiar than dragons to perch on, of the buildings like needles instead of sculpted cakes. Of her family, waiting for her. Worrying for her.
Cass hasn’t been worrying. Why hasn’t Cass been worrying herself?
How long has she traveled here, traversing rooftops over ghostly streets, wandering through vistas she might want to show him or her? Comparing a new and hostile world to a truth she knows already and already resigned herself to never hearing again? How long as she been holding her breath, mouth watering over what sights would unfold before her eyes as she traipsed through level after level of unknown longing, of nostalgia for shapes she never knew stretching to the sky and beckoning her between their walls? How long has she been asking what this place is and what she’s doing here, and not wanting to know how she could get back?
How can she get back?
Cass lets out her breath to steady herself, to find that pool of still water inside her mind that lets her move her body like a scalpel, and realizes, again, that there’s some disconnect between the blueprint in her mind and the physicality of her person. Still, a steady breathing rhythm begins to reassert itself, the tremulous patter of her feet an even tempo against the ringing of roof tiles, and Cass turns around. All she has to do is retrace her steps. All she has to do is make her way insouciant and meandering back to the place she dropped like a stone from the sky, and then she’ll see the break in the heavens that felled her to this place, take hold of it, and leave. There’s nothing caging her here.
If she remembers to keep breathing, maybe she’ll believe that.
It’s difficult to track the paths she strolled to find herself lost, less well marked even than trails through trampled wilderness of one too many minds with the same rash whim. Cass wasn’t watching herself, she was exploring, groping her way through a calliope of lush sensations, like she was having fun. There’s something alluring about this other realm, if she doesn’t break away from the luxurious backdrop of it all, some dreamlike quality that makes these cacophonous surroundings more enticing than the real world. The joys more poignant and the regrets more abstract, a breath caught just before the exhale and Cass held with it, chest bursting with both or either or inability to see the way forward. Her lungs can ache with a scream held over the course of three or four streets, and Cass with too many ideas splashing across her eyes to be worried.
She’s worried now. There’s too much she has no information on, the hundreds or thousands of hours she would have had to research to figure out each touchpoint around her put off again and again until it didn’t sour her stomach, and she can’t find her way. Each time she thinks a facade looks familiar, she has to ask herself if that’s because she passed by it as she came, or just because it reminds her of a little piece of Gotham, somewhere she sat playing with string above the rising smell of sesame buns.
There are no sesame buns now. Or, there are, she can see them, she can see people cooking them and passing them along to other denizens in various states of solidity and flesh and decoration, but she can’t smell them. She can’t smell anything but the cloying burn of incense left too long, climbing up her nose with every breath and burrowing its home into her lungs, blotting out the world around her until she can’t even taste the smoke anymore.
Cass takes a wrong turn. She can tell from the way the buildings suddenly sweep away in front of her, opening on a wide plaza, a tiled courtyard giving way to a garden with the most intricately sculpted trees. Alfred would like it there, she thinks, would like to brush his hand softly against their bark and wonder how he could add them to their gardens back home, if they could survive through the biting chill of Gotham winter. It’s burning hot and Cass isn’t supposed to be here.
She tears her eyes away and lopes back through matched pillars that swing high above her head, another archway with a sign she can’t read. If she knew the characters, would this place be kinder to her? How many instructions lie around her, plain and every question answered, that swim before her eyes? There, a dragon with a charming smile, as if they’ve shared a joke, the eyes too brightly glowing to lounge on rooftops draped in smog. There, a drifting banner too long and tall to sway so easily in a more concrete and discernible breeze than the mist that slips around it. She shivers against it anyway.
It’s three times back and forth, at least, before Cass stops at the place where she started. She can’t visualize it, not in between all the buildings so familiar, so neatly matched and stacked and leaning up and into one another, inviting her to glance inside their windows again. She has to close her eyes and feel the balance of the brick, the tone exactly so low of her toes against each curve, the clack of her heels pressing them against each other. She’s been running for hours at this point, at least, and she should feel winded, she should feel the burn in her arms and legs that mean she has to compensate where she sits and stands and falls, but she doesn’t.
This is exactly where she fell, and caught herself reflexively, this slope and this stance and this view of the city when she opens her eyes again. Every muscle, every tendon, every nerve feels exactly as it did minutes or days ago, the change in circumstance not molding the sensation, and no wonder Cass’s skin feels abuzz. She can move her body, but she can’t understand it, not when it’s living by different physics here where nothing is alive. But this is the spot where she found herself standing, here in a foreign land where everything refuses to change, catching herself in a crouch as she dropped. She looks up.
There’s sky above her, and things in the sky, not empty expanse like she half expected to steal her breath away. Stars unlike any stars she’s seen, not too bright so much as lacking perspective, appearing in the depth perception she can’t trust to hang too near, too warm, too concerned with what she’s doing looking up at them. And closer than the stars, skeletons and ghosts, dead things haunting their way around her, displeased, perhaps, that she’s invaded their home. They turn their gaze from her, for now. She doesn’t yet interest them. Cass feels her lip tremble without her agreement, some small flicker of butterflies against the lining of her stomach. It shouldn’t be the pinch of rejection she feels at the rising pressure of objection to her very presence; it’s not a place for the living, after all.
Is Cass still living? There’s no exit clear under her scrutiny, anymore, if the way in was always meant to be the same way out, the ripple of sky above her silken and deep as far in every direction as Cass could bother to look. There was a portal, before, and it looked sickly on that side of the world, ominous and enraged, a warning sign in acid green to run away as the natural order of things was upset. Perhaps its closure is meant to be taken as proof that the way of things has been restored, nature reasserting herself as she’s wont to do in a vacuum. Perhaps, to keep the balance, Cass has to stay here, at least for a little while. What else can she do, when her way home is gone?
There’s still the possibility it traveled the way Cass did, not through her own volition but with an agenda not quite her own in mind, convinced she hadn’t run as far as she had, flying through the streets of a city not her own. Maybe if she looked – but Cass has run her fingers through every grain of sand on this beach, picked through every lock on the door back to her own world, and seen no evidence of any breach, sickly and unwelcoming or stable warmth of supernatural intent alike.
It’s not a common thing, not in either world, pools of ghostly green that grab for arms and legs and souls and drag you in and hold you under, and she’s honed her skill at noticing the abnormal since well before she knew why she might have cause to. It’s not a common thing in any color, any shape of contact with somewhere else not here, not if the chatter she’s offhandedly overheard on the Justice League’s interference with other worlds is anything to go by. She’s seen nothing glowing bright beyond conceptions of the human mind, or made of dragonfly wing blurs in displaced air. Nothing not quite a color she can describe or void so black or white of nothingness or the ripple of water or otherworldly molten gold. It isn’t here and isn’t anywhere, not anymore. But it might still be where it was, if she reaches out to it.
Cass clambers up the nearest edifice, and when that doesn’t quite stretch out into the stars, jumps to the next beyond, and strikes out as far as she can reach, balancing on the tips of her toes, then clinging with her knees and grasping outwards, draped back like the gentle death of a prima donna’s pride. But all her fingers swim through is air, clinging to empty wind and finding nothing. There is no thickened atmosphere to latch onto, no sudden solid space to dig a handhold into. Not even the temperature fluctuates, no freezing flash to tell her that she’s getting warmer, no cool of sudden clarity, the heat of incense here giving way to the cold wet stone smell of Gotham night.
She could hurl things. And she does, a few pebbles that laze beside her on the roof, but nothing stirs. Her grappling gun, which does little more but frustrate her, mimic the impromptu flinch of falling with nothing to grab onto, for all she’s stationary when she tries. A batarang, even as precious a commodity as they are here, which slices through nothing and lands too far away to echo back. If there were a gateway, even a closed one, shouldn’t there be ripples, here? Something that she could see, like rising through the murky water of the docks? But if Cass can’t find it, there’s no chance she can pry it open, no matter how badly she wants to get home.
Maybe that’s the point, and Xanthe locked her in here on purpose, folding her shut like one of their papercrafts to protect all the people of Gotham – the vampires couldn’t be the only thing that might get out. Or maybe Constantine forced him to slam the door behind her, scared of what it might do to them all to leave it open. Maybe the portal itself could shake the world apart. It could have fallen closed by accident, or just for a moment to shield them from some other looming horror, Cass’s sense of time has gone the way of her limbs, tingly and incoherent. Maybe they’ll open it again, any moment.
Maybe it only opens once a month, like the tides.
If nothing physical can draw it open, then maybe it’s all down to strength of will. Magic is ruled by intent, she’s seen enough movies to know that, but Cass has only so many spells under her belt, and she’s crossed her fingers and wished for her family enough times to know that only that isn’t enough no matter how high she sits on the roof.
She closes her eyes and clicks her heels together and shouts no place like home as loud as she can, but all that gets is chastising rattles in her direction, and nothing snapping open above her head. Open says-a-me doesn’t work, and abracadabra does nothing at all. She tries to speak backwards, but she stumbles enough saying the right words in the right order, and if there’s something she’s supposed to feel when she finally spits it out, then it’s not working at all.
Primal emotion is sometimes enough to do it, in a horror film, or fantasy, when some abstract threshold is all you have to meet. So Cass lets herself feel all of her fear, lets it chill her to her toes, lets it make her breaths shake and her hands clasp at the roof beneath her feet. And when that doesn’t work, she tries love, again, her whole family gathered on one flat and graveled rooftop and smiling for the camera, about to chastise Bruce when the click is done. She tries anger, but she can’t direct it well enough to know it really worked, and she tries, like the Green Lanterns go on and on about, focusing sheer force of will at it, imagining with all her might that it might pop apart and let her go.
She waggles her fingers for good measure. She even tries twitching her nose.
It’s no use. It occurs to Cass that maybe they tucked her in here on purpose, that maybe they want her down here enclosed in glass on all sides. That she did something to upset Xanthe so much they threw her down a well, or maybe that they had to because she tripped a curse and Cass was the only container they had left to keep it in. That Constantine was trying to complete some working greater than a single Batgirl, and she was the right power in the right place at the right time. Or maybe he was looking for her special, maybe Cass fulfilled some rarified criteria for human sacrifice under the glare of the moon. Or, maybe, it’s finally coming to fruition what they say about him, sometimes, when they think the children can’t hear, that he gets off on pain, that he hurts for the sake of hurting because his soul is already condemned. Cass thinks she would have seen something in the way they stood if either of them had meant that, but she can’t be certain anymore.
Cass thinks she might die down here. It’s a land of the dead, so its clawing hands tearing what’s left of her life from her forms a kind of perverse symmetry. There’s always the possibility she’s dead already, whatever separates one form of existence from another left on the other side of that threshold as she passed through it, demanding some kind of deeply fucked up resurrection ritual to bring her back, in which case no wonder her family hasn’t come through yet, or possibly at all. She might wander these streets for eternity as her body slowly withers, or, given that her body won’t seem to change enough to even let go of the hairs on her neck, maybe her soul will wisp away, little by little, in curls and whorls to join the faceless ghosts drifting through the air. And would that be so bad, really? It’s not like anyone would miss her.
Cass blinks her eyes open with a start. That’s insane. Her family would miss her, if no one else. She has friends. She has the people whose lives she’s touched, not just as Batgirl, but as Cass. Everyone at the bookstore will miss her, if she never shows up again. That barista at the coffee shop calls her order off by heart. Who will try the newest flavor of fruit filling as they experiment with the cakes, if she doesn’t stop by the same bakery as Xanthe does every Tuesday, and, for that matter, won’t Xanthe probably miss her, too? Although the jury may still be out on Constantine. There are people in Cass’s life. In her life.
She pictures a hand grasping for her, and this time, it isn’t Xanthe’s, it’s Batman’s, gloved with a strength of grip that hauls him up buildings, and Cass with him, if she reaches out. Life. In this land of death, that must be what opens the doors. If she can just remember her life in enough detail, crystal clarity of image in her mind’s eye – but nothing happens. She feels her spirit welling up underneath her fingertips the way she can usually feel the burn of a flip well executed, the thing she thinks might be the rise of magic magicians describe when tricked into too literal candor, but no door opens, no rescue party comes flooding in. Cass doesn’t know how long she can stay here. She starts to make her way down, again.
Her problem lies in the fact that every magic user describes magic differently, that every methodology finds some flaw with all the others, and begins to blatantly contradict itself as soon as you turn the page. Cass has been through some of the volumes in the library, but they were confusing and dense just as everyone warned her they would be, filled with other languages, not all of them real outside the author’s head. Diagrams drawn to perfection with a neat line underneath saying the ritual need not use a diagram at all. So Cass might be interested in magic all she wants, curious what things that TV gets right or wrong, but the tomes don’t explain things any better than Zatanna does, or Etrigan, or that boy with the screwdriver who got nervous and wouldn’t stop talking when she rescued him off the top of a building one time.
Her problem lies in the fact that, if they would admit it to each other, each set of magicians seems to be working a system wholly separate from everyone else’s.
She’s used to this in fiction. She can read a novel and enjoy the fact that werewolves call down the moon and vampires call up the blood and the fae roam around spinning nature to their fancy, and it all makes sense between the pages of a story. But then, she thinks, what part of her story, her history, got left out in the retelling of it all, that if she’d learned at someone’s knee, anyone, she’d know how to call up her qi and make it do what she wanted? Is there a magic that sings through her blood that she’d be free to use if she’d ever loved her mother? But she can’t call the feeling again, and she’s left wondering uselessly if it was all her imagination.
At least that’s good for something, then. At least if she doesn’t know the right stories, she can fill in some to tell to herself. Then, when she gets back, maybe she’ll have her own series on the bookstore’s shelves, sitting proudly where everyone says they know her, local author topping charts. She can sign them. Steph will make cupcakes to –
Well, Cass has done something, because a voiceless shriek coils through the air. She’d like to put words to the wail like inhuman scream, but it’s insufficient to describe it, because nothing here is human, not even the things that once were, and the air here isn’t really air, either, the way sounds echo across something more akin to the inner ear that Cass always pays too much attention to when she can hear herself talking, and even more when she can’t. The cadence is like nothing a living creature would make, and there’s no content in it, not in any language Cass has heard or never heard, but there’s emotion.
It’s filled with fear, but not its own fear, Cass’s fear, the fear that it expects Cass to have, and it’s not wrong about that. Cass readies herself to face it, locking her knees against the trembling, and hoping her blurred command of her own body won’t prevent her from fighting back. The first blow knocks her to the ground.
It isn’t even a blow, really, the wraith flies straight through her, a chill like icy rain just turning to sleet and her without a jacket or a hood. Knives of water drawing through her face and neck like needles. She flails against it, striking out with her fist blindly in a way that would leave any one of her instructors ashamed, even the kindest of them, even Alfred. She sweeps her arm against nothing, thick in the air.
Cass drags herself to her feet, muscles barely obeying her, sluggish like cough syrup and late nights, sluggish like pain she doesn’t feel and doesn’t have time to be grateful for. Her claws move through solid space and do no damage, not even to draw forth another taunt or laugh or feeling of discontent. She kicks, too, her leg slowing, stopping, landing again where she left it, her body shoved back away from it when she tries to grapple. She can’t hold it, or bite it, or scream it into submission, she can’t tie it or push it away.
Option two, then. Retreat. Cass feels a surge of shame and has to pause to erase that from her mind; she has no reason to want to fight this creature, and no reason to think anyone should. It hasn’t done anything to her except frighten her and call on its friends, slowly swarming to her position, but she can run and no one is left behind to be hurt by her cowardice. She wasn’t even told to end it, just slipped into its sights by accident, so it’s no harm getting away, is it?
Cass doesn’t like to run, usually, not in the streets of Gotham where failure means leaving innocents to suffer, and not before then when failure meant her father’s wrath. Failure means nothing here. Nothing means anything here, and it’s freeing, in a way, picking a direction and dashing against it, knowing that no matter which way she turns she’s never one step farther from home, never any more lost through the lens of seekers scrying. She’d like to see that lovely garden again, the one with trees reaching their branches into the river of stars overhead, like they could leap up and cup them in leafy fingers.
She’s nowhere near the only landmark she can remember, though, and she knows this because everything is becoming less and less recognizable, signposts she could almost recall melding into sharp corners and looming figures, glowing eyes in the dark slamming out at her and screaming noises that might be howls of fear or shrieks of mirth and still, still something following her, that thing inculcating creeping dread, something that wants to tear her apart from the inside and leave her hollow, eating up whatever it is that keeps her alive.
And she is alive. She is alive, still, heart pressing forward through her ribs as she tries to follow it, tries to stumble on into the dark. It is darker here. The shadows are closing in, not like the warm cloak of them that blankets Gotham, that wraps her up in its cape like an old friend, like Batman protecting her, the sharp kind of shadows too many villains hope to call forth, the ragged holes in silhouette that swallow you up and leave you forgotten. Cass hasn’t forgotten herself yet, but it’s only a matter of time, in inky pools like these crushing in.
Each street feels more anxious, more portentous, more incensed at her intrusion, the broken windows reaching out like so many claws, the eaves dripping down across themselves like the thick drool of long held hunger, the streetlights jagged and bent, looming over her. The streets themselves have come alive, watching her, waiting. Waiting for what, Cass doesn’t know, and might not want to know, no matter how much a piece of her history this place is. Best left forgotten in a dusty book at the back of some enormous library.
Best left, Cass repeats to herself, best left behind and away from her, and if the paths she takes can wind into frightening territory, they can wind out again. If they can grow more ominous, they can grow less, and with no more ghosts hot on her heels, the only question is the direction she takes out of it, away from the feeling of hot breath and tongues flicking out when she’s not looking, and back to the tranquil idyll of that marketplace vista, familiar trade in unfamiliar hands. Just a question of direction.
Well, with nothing else to tell her where to run, best left, she thinks, and turns, and there’s no sudden change, no dramatic sweep of cobwebs out of the dark, but a weight starts to slough off her shoulders, no longer quite so tense. Up, she turns, this time, the roof curving away from her, and she follows it, and it feels more tired, less hungry. Down, away, across metal and stone, and the doors and windows stop being mouths, become eyes instead, still judging, still angry, but watching to see what she’ll become.
There’s a wind of luck and Cass latches on to it, blowing where it will take her until she lands, finally, lungs burning with breath held and legs burning with remembered fear, in some place that feels hopeful. Nothing watching her from behind hidden ledges. She slows, not to a stop, she’s still afraid to stop, but Cass walks the paths eyes half shut and one hand against the wall, following jubilation and turning from hate. That’s something she’s done before, less literally, but then she had other hands to guide her, and here she doesn’t even have landmarks.
No one is following her. She really is alone.
Cass is lost, but she’s lost in a place where she started that way, which means more lost might really be more found, and she can cling to that. It wouldn’t matter if she couldn’t; there’s no way back and if she’s hopelessly lost, she’d rather not be hopeless. She doesn’t need to find a route, anyway, what she needs is a plan.
Planning comes easiest to Cass somewhere the next thing to silent, quiet enough to hear herself think, somewhere broad and open where she can move her body and heft open the floodgates to her mind. Her thoughts still flow easiest in motion, almost never out loud, and she has to wait for them, call them to her by welcoming them in dance. A space large enough to move as her instincts take her, spinning and flipping and swaying softly as she will, but enclosed enough she knows no one is stalking up at her back, ready to jolt her into action. A peaceful place. Somewhere she can regroup.
Cass needs a plan, she needs to know how to survive and how to return, how to signal to those looking for her, how to hide from the others that do the same. What she has is what she stumbles upon, a tiled walkway into a tiled room, somehow on the ground though she never left the roofs, oddly shaped stones fit seam to seam around a central well.
There doesn’t appear to be anything in the well, and she checks surreptitiously, having seen too many movies to trust it blindly, but there are no bodies down there, no ghosts. The water looks clear and the well not even particularly deep, but still – it’s the land of the dead. Cass doesn’t trust it. Her throat closes against the idea of drinking anything here, as if that will trap her like Persephone, even if that’s only a risk in other mythologies’ lands.
And even so, the well is picturesque, and the courtyard open enough for her to walk on her hands around it, and the walls high enough she’ll hear someone coming before they can see her at her task. She begins to arrange her body into familiar rhythms of blocks and strikes, and feels herself calm. The stones are all in soothing shades of gray and blue, like the bottom of a softly flowing river. The tops of the walls are carefully tiled in black, but underfoot, everything feels smoothed away by the passage of time and many feet.
Cass wonders if this was a real room in someone’s home, once, gone to the afterlife because places and things have souls as much as people do. If it was, they must have been pleased to have it. She can see the care with which each stone was laid, the practiced hand that smoothed and painted the bright white walls. The broom still neatly tucked away in the corner, waiting to shoo out any dirt that gets trailed in.
It really is beautiful, here.