Chapter Text
From the phone, Oracle's furious typing could be heard, tinny and faint. "They're taking the long way around Midtown," she reported. "The Batmobile's autopilot is set to cross the Nichelsen Bridge into the Civic District."
Nichelsen was on the west side of town. Arthur would get there in fifteen minutes, less if there wasn't traffic. Meanwhile, they were stuck without a car or any other kind of vehicle in the wrong side of town, at least twelve miles from the city hall. They certainly weren't about to cover over two hundred blocks on foot in time, and especially not on Cass's twisted ankle.
"The subway," Steph said. "If we take the subway, we can get to the Civic District in less than ten minutes. It's a straight shot underground."
She levered herself up, grabbing hold of the sides of the dumpsters. Then, with a stumble, she fell forward, her shoulders curling in on herself, and Steph rushed forward to catch her around the middle, Cass's hands coming forward around her back in an almost unconscious movement, their arms threaded through one another's.
"Easy," Steph said softly. "I got you."
Cass nodded, her masked chin finding Steph's shoulder as, together, they pushed Cass back onto her feet. Steph stepped away once, but she kept her hands firmly around Cass's waist, her thumbs resting right above the rough fabric of the utility belt.
"Can you stand like that?" she asked, and Cass straightened her spine fully as an answer, though her hips remained tilted, favoring her weight on her left foot. It was scary to see someone who moved so unconsciously perfectly suddenly have to consider the way she walked, like seeing a ballet dancer with a rock in their shoe.
Steph pulled her leather jacket off, handing it to Cass. "Put that on and zip it up," she said, "so nobody sees the bat symbol."
Cass shrugged her jacket on, the shoulders hanging just a little wide on her and the sleeves coming up over her hands, revealing just the tips of her fingers. She tugged her mask off, revealing a pale, slightly sweaty face, her hair sticking to her temples. Steph removed her own cloth mask as well, stashing it in the pocket of the hoodie she was wearing underneath the jacket. Now, if nobody looked too closely, they looked again like any two girls.
"The closest subway station is three blocks away," Oracle said, and Cass handed Steph the phone. "You have two minutes to catch the next train."
"Got it," Steph said, taking Oracle back off speakerphone and tucking her phone back in her pocket. "Come on, Cass. It's not like we've never had to run to catch the train before."
Cass's mask was off, so Steph could see just how big the smile was when they ran, half-stumbling at times, through the night. As they descended down the steps to the subway tunnel, Steph kept just slightly behind and to the left of Cass, her focus on Cass's feet and her whole body ready to leap forward to catch the other girl if she stumbled and fell.
At the turnstiles, Steph pushed her hands down over the interface and jumped the fare before turning to help Cass do the same, their movements more coordinated and practiced than it was at the beginning. Cass leaned into Steph for a few seconds as she arranged both her feet, then tapped Steph's arm to signal her to let go. She did so, and they half carried each other to the platform just in time for the train to scream into the station, carrying a wind tunnel with it that blew their hair in front of their faces and stopping with a metallic shriek that Steph could now say was the same as the sound of a fire escape collapsing in on itself. She could feel Cass flinch.
They got into a car that was thankfully fairly devoid of people, and Steph maneuvered Cass onto one of the hard yellow benches. She stood in front of her again, the way they did before, their knees knocking into each other every time the subway took a bit of a half turn. The fluorescent lights of the subway and the pure darkness outside the windows cast Cass's features in an even less flattering light than the streetlights before: she looked nearly sick, her skin sallow and her eyes pinched slightly in pain.
It had been easy to love Cass when Steph had still thought of her as untouchable, above injury. With Cass in front of her, hurt, even if only temporarily, it was impossible for her to ignore the fear that Steph had fallen in love with something that could die. How could she tell Cass that even in the relatively short amount of time that they'd known each other, she'd staked herself a permanent claim on a part of Steph's soul? What kind of bravery did it take to tell a girl, susceptible -- like anyone else -- to death, that you loved her?
"Is your foot okay?" Steph asked instead of saying any of that. Cass nodded, and Steph narrowed her eyes. She kneeled down, keeping one hand on the plastic next to Cass's thigh to maintain balance, and poked gently at her left foot. Cass sucked in a hiss and arched her back a little, pulling her foot away from Steph.
"No," she admitted.
"It must be getting worse the more weight you put on it," Steph said.
"Can still fight," Cass insisted. Steph's phone buzzed. She pulled it out: Oracle had texted. A reminder that they weren't alone, though it was more welcome than it had been before, now that Steph was freaking out, just a little.
Oracle: She cannot.
Steph raised her eyebrows and looked over at Cass. "Oracle said not to," she signed.
"You never listen to Oracle," Cass argued.
"I will right now," Steph signed.
"Don't like that." Cass wrinkled her nose. "Ganging up on me."
Steph would laugh if she wasn't so concerned. Based on what she'd felt, it seemed like Cass's ankle was swelling up, which probably prohibited some of the more rigorous activities involved in superheroics. That was a problem. That was a pretty significant problem.
They exited at City Hall and coming up the stairs to the surface was infinitely harder than going down them; Cass leaned more fully on Steph, nearly surrendering her entire agency to Steph's forward momentum. That simply terrified Steph further. If there was one word she'd never thought she'd associate with Cass, it was surrender.
Luckily, the stop was right across the street from the big, gray, Gothic Revavilistic building that was the City Hall. The hall was a cluttered mess of features, all points and spires on points and spires, hundreds of vertical lines reaching up towards the smoggy sky overhead. It had always reminded Steph less of old European basilicas and more of prison bars.
Despite the visually disarrayed mass of detail that the City Hall presented, it still wasn't too hard to pick out the figure, black against the night, pacing with his back tall. Steph spared a second to worry about how fast Cluemaster had gotten up on the roof before her heart caught in her throat again as she turned around and saw the building behind her, its door only a few feet away from right where the subway opened up. She recognized it -- the One Gotham Center -- and felt a renewed burst of horror.
On one side of the street, her father was menacing their city. On the other, somewhere four stories up in a testing center in the middle of a skyscraper, was Steph's mother, an hour into a six-hour-long test for her nursing certification. And her, down on the ground, with a girl she thought she might love in her arms.
"Take…" Cass reached back and pulled the small black device out from behind her ear. It was the same one she'd shown Steph, way back at Gotham U. "Take Oracle."
Steph took the comm system from her, affixing it to her own ear. Immediately, Oracle's voice crackled to life for her.
"Spoiler, I can't get good eyes on Cluemaster, but it looks like there's already some henchmen set up in the building itself. Batman's ETA is 3 minutes. Cluemaster ditched him in the chase, but he got a tracker on the Toyota, and he's following it right now."
"We -- I need to get onto that roof somehow."
She couldn't think of any way she could successfully get inside the building and up to the roof access without either having to face several henchmen, none of whom she had any guarantee of defeating, or taking a lot longer than the three minutes she had before Batman showed up and arrested her for criminal conspiracy and also getting his daughter's ankle broken.
"You need to grapple onto that roof," Oracle said, exactly when Steph came to that conclusion herself.
"I do not know how to do that," Steph said, panicked.
"Do what?" Cass signed. She had slid against the building across City Hall, her back to the brickwork and her bad leg stretched out in front of her. She looked so much smaller than she was, especially with Steph's already somewhat oversized jacket swallowing her more compact frame.
"Grapple onto the roof," Steph signed. Cass immediately reached underneath the stiff leather and into one of her pockets and came back with the now familiar look of her grapple gun.
"Yes, you do," Cass insisted. "... Saw me." She pushed the grapple into Steph's hand and closed her fingers around the handle. "Smart. You know what to do. You're a hero too."
Steph would not acknowledge just how much those four words from Cass affected her. She had a feeling Cass saw anyways.
"Sure," Steph said. She swallowed, standing there in front of Cass, her breathing still on the shallow side. "Sure. I know what to do. Solve the clues. Beat the bad guy." Shakily, she winked at Cass. "Get the girl."
"Try harder," Cass said back, grinning. "Have to go in order."
Well. That was her itinerary set. Steph took one last look at Cass, huddled against the side of a building in her ragged, oversized, hastily stitched up jacket, looking nothing like the iconic Batgirl of Gotham City. Just Cass. She started walking backward, keeping Cass's brown eyes in her sight for as long as possible as she fixed her cloth mask back onto her face, going from Steph to Spoiler.
Eventually, Steph had break eye contact and turn around to take a running start. She squeezed the grappling gun and it barked a shot that she felt connect against one of the various ornamental flourishes of a nearby building. Maybe the nightmarish marriage of Brutalism and Gothic architecture in Gotham had some practical use after all: the line wrapped itself around a wholly unnecessary flying buttress and Steph felt her arm nearly get yanked out of her socket as her angular momentum launched her into the air in a wide arc.
She landed, graceless but intact, on the other side of City Hall from Cluemaster. He had noticed her, clearly: she could make out the side of his face from around the fleche that stretched spikily up from the center of city hall like the stem of a rose with the head cut off.
"Hey, asshole!" Steph yelled, dropping the grapple gun back into her pocket once the line retreated. She reached back and drew her baseball bat instead. "Batman's not here! It's just you and me!"
Her and her Louisville Slugger, at least.
"Ah," Cluemaster said, turning to face her. "Batman's sidekick's sidekick."
"I dare you to call Batgirl a sidekick to her face," Steph said, tightening her grip. "See what happens."
He laughed bitterly. "I don't see her around."
Steph walked forward, her steps cautious: she was a misplaced foot away from tumbling off the edge, and while adrenaline and anger had occupied enough of her mind to drown out the fear in her conscious thoughts, there was still terror running through the marrow of her.
"Is this the part where you tell me what this is all about?" Steph asked.
"You haven't guessed?" Cluemaster said, and his tone brought her straight back to her childhood. The few times he'd ever demonstrated anything for Steph, he'd never tolerated her questions. He had always hated having to explain himself, to slow himself down so others could catch up.
"I thought it was plenty obvious," he drawled, just like he would when she was a child.
"Spell it out for me," Steph said. "I know you like doing that." She stepped forward again. She was only a few more measured footsteps away from crossing the spire to his side of City Hall; it didn't look like it had registered to Cluemaster that she was getting nearer, but in the dark and half masked, his face was hard to read. He was as inscrutable to her as he had been when she was seven, eight, nine, and could descend into screaming rages at her or her mother at the slightest trigger.
Cluemaster turned and spread his arms. "City Hall!" He said instead. "You know how many people have been arrested by Batman in front of here? How fast the response time is? And what has anyone here ever done to deserve that? They're not smarter, they're not better. They were just born luckier."
Steph was a few feet away from her father at this point. Ten, at the very most. He hadn't noticed, still talking.
"Now, what is it in Southwest Lowtown? Brideshead? What about Miller's Harbor? No, no, no protector of the innocent to come swooping down and save them there. Face it, dear. Batman, Batgirl, Nightwing, all of them! They don't care about the little guys like us! They come for the big ticket events, nothing north of Midtown."
Cluemaster laughed. "It's the beauty of the acrostic," he said. "You need to pay attention to every word. Miss one in Brideshead, and City Hall goes up!"
"And yet," Steph said. "Here we are. City Hall." She crossed the last few feet and twirled the baseball bat. "Is now the part where we fight?"
She couldn't see his face underneath the mask, but she could tell right away that he smiled. Nastily. She was close enough to see the way the corners of his eyes crinkled up, lopsided on one end.
"If you want," he said, and dramatically shook his hand out. There was something in it. "But I have a dead man's switch here, and a half dozen of my very favorite pipe bombs have been laid out all across this city."
"Ask him where," Oracle said in her ear, and Steph was wound up so tightly that she full body flinched at the unexpected interruption.
"Where?" she repeated, fear leaking into her tone despite her best efforts. She couldn't help but look over at the One Gotham Center. Did he know? He couldn't.
"Ah, ah, ah," Cluemaster said. He wagged his free finger in her place. "That would be telling. But, I'm not a monster," he said, theatrically putting his hand to his chest. Steph had a few choice words to say about that.
"I'll give you a choice. Toss that bat over the side, and whatever communication devices you have, and I'll let you take this switch from me. I'll even let you get off the roof, go see if you can find all those bombs before your hand gets numb."
He spread his hands.
"Or, I'll let you take me to jail, and some insignificant parts of Gotham will go up in flames."
Insignificant. Steph tightened her grip on the bat. It felt like cold water had been poured down her spine. She knew it was selfish and horrible, but insignificant. That meant the One Gotham Center was almost definitely safe.
Her mother wouldn't die, and she could take her father to jail. It was the best-case scenario, the wildest dream she could have had, starting this whole thing. It was her good ending. Everyone she loved or cared about was already here.
"Stephanie," Oracle's voice said in her ear. "Batman has arrived on the scene."
Gotham saw destruction all the time. It was a fact of life in this city. It was like a carnivorous perversion of a phoenix, burning itself away and rebuilding over its own bones, time and time again. What was another few fires?
"It's time to choose," Cluemaster said. "How much do you care about the people of this city?"
"You," Steph said, venomous, "do not care about the innocent."
"We were all innocent once," her father said. "We all had to be made into this. Some of us just get fewer chances than others."
"Bullshit," she snarled. "Nobody made you set up bombs all over this fucking city! To what, prove a fucking half-baked point to Batman?"
"Choose," Cluemaster said, implacable.
Steph hesitated for a few seconds. It would be so easy. So easy to hit him in the side of the head, knock him out, take him down to the police station and testify at his trial and see him locked away for good. Her mother would never have to worry again.
She thought about Harper and Cullen in the Narrows. The preacher and his burned down confession booth. Friezes with owls on them and robins chiseled onto the side, murals splashed guerilla onto the sides of walls, and the kind of people who didn't ask questions but would undercharge for a sandwich to a girl who wasn't in school.
Steph yanked the communication system out of her ear and tossed it off the side of City Hall. Oracle's voice was gone. She hesitated. Threw her phone over, next, her eyes never leaving Cluemaster's.
Hate had always come to Gotham more easily than love, and it would never be the sort of city that would ever be particularly kind to the girls who lived in it, but Steph thought, perhaps, that she loved it anyways, more than she could ever have hated any one person.
She forced herself to let go of the bat, finger by finger, until it dropped to her feet. It slowly rolled down the sloped roof and succumbed to gravity, dropping into the night below, taking the easy way with it.
"Fine," she ground out.
Cluemaster smiled and held the switch out. Steph walked forward, the closest she'd been to her father in fourteen months, and held her hand out as well.
"On three," Cluemaster said. He counted off.
Steph grabbed the switch, levering her own thumb onto the button the second her father's hand left it. There were a few seconds when her heart thudded in her throat and she almost thought she heard a phantom explosion as she swore her thumb slipped, rendering somewhere in the city reduced to rubble, but nothing happened.
Steph had made sure to grab the switch in her left hand. With the right, she tucked her thumb under her fingers, brought out the first two knuckles, and made a fist the exact way Cass had taught her. Then, she did something that she'd been dreaming about for the past fourteen months, if only she could get close enough: She punched Cluemaster in the nose.
Arthur Brown stumbled back, his hands flying to his masked nose. The orange fabric had a few spots of red on it now, corroborated by the wet crunching noise it had made underneath her fist. Steph didn't waste time, fumbling for her mace, before she realized with a start that she wasn't wearing her jacket -- she'd left her mace in the inner pocket of her outer jacket, which was currently being worn by Cass, all the way down on the ground.
Shit.
In the moment of confusion, Steph had turned slightly around and had lost sight of her father behind the hood of her jacket.
Therefore, it was a surprise when pain exploded in the small of her back like someone had taken a hammer straight to her and swung with full force. Her slow, dull aches from the fires and the running didn't even compare. It was a miracle that, in the shock of it all, she hadn't let go of the dead man's switch.
When she was five, six, seven, she remembered sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, letting her feet swing in front of her because she hadn't gotten big enough to rest them on the floor yet. She'd sit on the closed lid of the toilet and watch her mother get ready for the day, pulling tubes and flat pallets out of a small cloth bag. Fiddling with the lipstick, clicking the cap on and off again to produce that plasticky noise of it catching in place a few hundred times, Steph would only ever vaguely watch her mom out of the corner of her eyes, see her dot that shade-too-dark concealer over her throat and dab at it with her ring finger, blending away. She'd shut her teeth on what she wanted to say: Did you know, a strangulation victim can die up to thirty-six hours after the incident, even with no external injuries? Did you know, strangulation victims are seven times more likely to be victims of homicide? Did you know, when I looked this up after the last time, I was told that these were the hallmarks of an "abusive relationship" and that's when I learned from the librarian that most kids don't stay up at night, ear to the door, worrying about if their father will end up killing their mother.
Not that many kids, at least. Did you know, one of the leading causes of death in women below 25 are the men who marry them?
But all these words would always stay behind her teeth because her mom would look up, wiping the residue of concealer off her fingers with some soaked cloth, and smile at her. "He's never hurt you," she'd reassure her.
Steph would have to apologize to Oracle if she ever got off this roof. She'd been shot in the spine.
And thank Cass, because she had been very right: Bulletproof vests were fairly important in this profession.
She whirled around, her lower back screaming in pain, and rushed for Cluemaster. He had a shocked look on his face; Steph wasn't sure if it was because he was surprised he actually shot someone, or because she was still moving. She didn't care. It didn't matter to her if her father just talked a big game about being a killer or if he had already been fully committed to being the one to kill a teenage girl on the roof of City Hall. It didn't matter if he knew what had become of her mother, who didn't smoke anymore and had a hard time looking Steph in the eyes and threw herself into her work like she was asking for something deeper than forgetting.
She had spent too long with her anger and the rage had gone hollow, an abscess that didn't bleed anymore when poked, only ached. Fury had revealed itself to be simply grief under a false name. Steph was done mourning the parent she could have had, mourning on behalf of her mother and herself for the man that could have been in their lives.
She kicked out at the gun in his hand, a motion she'd seen Cass do on a henchman way back when they first met. It wasn't nearly as smooth or graceful as Cass could be, but it got the job done. Cluemaster's gun went skittering off the roof, joining her bat and falling into the yawning black below them. Arthur backed up further, a scrambling motion. Steph matched him, footstep for footstep, and reached down.
Arthur was disarmed, but Steph had thought ahead. As a result, shoved down into her left boot, pressed against her ankle this whole time, was the reassuring weight of a switchblade, blunted but serviceable for her purposes. She reached down with her right and tugged it out of its impromptu sheath, flipping it open. Her left hand maintained the death grip on the switch. She put the knife under her father's chin as she strode up to him: they were only a few inches apart in height, and she barely had to reach up.
"Turn around," Steph said. "Or, I swear to God, I will stab you."
"You wouldn't kill," Arthur said, his voice shaky. All Steph saw was a man clinging to the remains of his bravado. "Bats don't kill."
"Who said anything about killing?" Steph said. "I'll stab you in the foot and drag you down the stairs myself. Turn around."
Cluemaster turned around. It was a good choice.
Now they were both facing the city, looking down the street of the Civic District to where the skyscrapers of the Financial Center cast white squares of light into the blackness of the night. Beyond them, the neighborhoods of Lowtown. They weren't at the right angle to see it, but perhaps the Bat Signal was casting its own spotlight against the underside of the clouds, visible in the smog.
"We're gonna go down," Steph said, and these were the last things she said to her father as she navigated them by knifepoint to the roof access. "Walk down these stairs. Go out the front door. And when you see Batman, turn yourself in."
She very much wished she hadn't tossed her phone off the side of a building: she desperately needed to call Oracle. She had no idea where she herself stood in Batman's eyes, but she hoped very desperately that he'd ignore the knife and notice the father she was trussing up and delivering. Hopefully, she wouldn't get booked right alongside her dad.
There was a silent five minutes as Steph stared at the back of her father's neck as they descended the several flights of stairs to the ground floor together. The both of them moved carefully, each wary of the other. Cluemaster, presumably because she was holding a knife to his back in her right hand. Steph, because she was holding a dead man's switch in her left.
The silence and the slowness gave Steph plenty of time to worry about what she might walk out to. She hoped the Batman would give her at least a second to explain herself and why, exactly, she was holding a switch that would trigger bombs in the city if she let go.
"Open the door," Steph said and took a leap of faith. They walked out of the hall together and onto the sidewalk, and the first thing Steph noticed was the Batmobile.
Cass was sitting on the hood of the massive black car, the exact same way she treated her brother's Prius, and the image of Batgirl -- cowl back on her head and jacket unzipped -- lounging on top of the most frightening car in existence was just jarring enough that Steph momentarily forgot all the tension and anxiety and ache in her spine and had to laugh quietly.
"Batgirl," she said, and Cass turned on the car, Steph's jacket falling ever so slightly off of one shoulder.
"Spoiler," Cass said, and it sounded like a thousand different things packed into one word.
"Spoiler," a different voice said, and Steph suddenly noticed the massive man directly in front of her.
"I have something for you," she told the Batman. "Please cuff him first."
"I hope," Batman said, moving forward to take Cluemaster from her, "you have an explanation, too."
Wow. Steph could see "dad" now. She almost mentally subbed in "young lady" at the end of his sentence, in the same deep, gravelly growl.
She watched him efficiently take Cluemaster's hands and pull them behind his back, fixing a pair of handcuffs around him. They both ignored the way that set him off; Steph knew from years of awful experience that the more powerless Cluemaster felt, the louder he would get to everyone else. Instead of watching him, the man who'd haunted her family for years, her eyes went back up to the One Gotham Center, counting off the floors until she could see the fourth. She wasn't sure which of those illuminated windows was the one that her mother could be looking out of.
Motion caught her eye, and she saw Cass move forward, still seated on the hood of the Batmobile.
"Are you okay?" Cass signed.
"I need to-" Steph tried to sign, hampered by the fist she had to keep making with the switch in her left hand. She cut herself off and held up her free right hand, spelling out, "O-n-e s-e-c," before she decided, fuck it, in for a penny, in for a pound, and shoved the dead man's switch in her left hand at one of the most iconic superheroes in the world.
"Take this too," she said, and she was so distracted by her need to get to Cass that she didn't even spare a few seconds to be amused at how unquestioningly Batman wrapped his own hand around the switch and gently levered her own thumb off. The second her hand was free, cramped from squeezing so tightly for so long, her attention swung all the way back around to Cass. She signed "Stay there," before she moved forward, crossing the distance to hug Cass tightly.
Cass's arms automatically went around her back, and Steph could feel Cass's right hand move from a flat palm on her back to tucking her ring and middle finger down. Cass's signing hand tapped against Steph's back several times, and Steph made the same sign with her right hand and pressed "I love you" as hard as she dared into Cass's left shoulder blade.
They kept like that for a while, breathing against each other and melting into the hug. Eventually, she felt Cass move her head up from where it was tucked against her shoulder, her ear pressed to Steph's heart, and she moved a little, breaking the hug but leaving a hand on Cass's back.
Batman had approached them. She saw Cluemaster, rudely deposited on the sidewalk, tied by the hands and feet, and left on the sidewalk for the moment. A police car had come up to the side, judging by the way she saw blue and red lights flashing against the night and spilling onto the sidewalk.
"Robin had identified one of the bombs. They seem to be in the previous locations visited by Cluemaster. Nightwing and Blackbird are already on their way to the Uptown locations."
Steph nearly cried in relief.
"It's over?" She asked.
"It's over," Batman confirmed.
"And you're not gonna arrest me or anything?"
Cass tightened her arm more thoroughly. "Won't," she said. She turned to Steph, and despite the eyeless mask, Steph could tell she was winking. "Yelled at him."
Steph loved this girl, and the full force of that thought hit her like a sack of bricks to the side of the face. Something must have shown in her posture and of course, Cass's preternatural and quasi-psychic senses must have picked up on it, because she turned to her father and told him: "Bother Spoiler later. Want to talk in car."
Batman did not sigh, but he looked very beleaguered and helpless in the face of Cass. Steph could relate. He waved them on, and Cass gingerly hopped down from the car, still favoring her left foot.
She opened the side door of the Batmobile and slipped in, motioning Steph to come follow her.
Apparently, despite the nightmarish exterior, the Batmobile looked, on the inside, like any other minivan in existence. Painted black though, naturally. And with a stupider name.
Cass scooted over to make room for her on the backseat. As soon as Steph shut the door, she tugged her cowl off. Steph followed suit. They looked at each other for a very long second.
"He's mad… I tackled the driver on my bad leg," Cass said, looking apologetic. "Sorry… I didn't stay. Had to do something."
Steph couldn't help it. She laughed.
"You're such a hero," she said, and Cass smiled.
"He called himself Kite-Man and tried to trip me with a spool," she signed, "which is not the strangest thing to happen."
Steph blinked. "Are you okay?"
"Are you?" Cass asked back. "Not hurt?"
"No, but, uh, he did try to shoot me. Thanks for the vest, it caught it." There was still a bullet hole in her hoodie -- she'd have to figure out some way of explaining that to her mother later.
Cass winced. "We heard. Always bad when father shoots you."
"Hate," Steph signed emphatically, "that you can relate."
"Fathers," Cass signed. "are hard."
"Yeah," Steph said. "They are."
She looked out the window: it was easy enough to spot Batman's shadowy figure, now talking with what she assumed to be a first responder.
"But… not all of them. My new... father… does all he can to keep me from being in pain."
"Can't blame him," Steph snorted, looking back at Cass. "It was terrifying to see you get hurt."
Cass winced. "Scary… to see you get hurt too."
"I'm sorry."
"You're alive." Cass shook her head, then picked up her hands. "All that matters."
They were quiet for a little longer. It was a comfortable silence. Cass had always been good at those. Steph still broke it, a nervous energy fluttering in her chest, though this time, she didn't think there was any danger to be worried about at all, only the aftereffects of adrenaline giving her the courage she needed.
"You know," Steph said. "I went in order."
"Hm?" Cass asked. She had a smirk on her face.
"Solved the clues," she said, holding up a finger. "Beat the bad guy," and she put up a second finger. "Do I get the girl?"
"What does get mean here?" Cass signed, and her smirk had transitioned into a full-blown smile, her top teeth showing and eyes crinkling.
"I'd settle for a kiss," Steph signed, "and maybe a second date. For real, this time."
Cass reared back.
"Haven't we already had that?" she signed, and Steph blinked.
"When did you think our first date was?"
Cass held up three fingers and ran them in a counter-clockwise circle in the air. Wednesday. "At shop. You said it was, I believed you. You?" she asked.
"Sunday. At the museum. God, it isn't a date if it happened before 10AM, Cass."
"Slow," Cass said, laughing. Steph laughed with her.
"Well," Steph said out loud. "How about a kiss?"
"I can do a kiss."
It was a cliche for a reason. The only explosions that night were the fireworks that played behind Steph's eyes when she closed her eyes and leaned in and kissed her girlfriend for the first time.
Outside, she could hear something drumming rhythmically against the roof of the car and the pavement, slow at first, but Steph knew it would always eventually pick up speed and spin itself into a flood. The last big storm of the season had come, and the streets were wiped clean with the rain.
You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the color of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.
- Anna Akhmatova
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END