Chapter Text
As far as adjustment goes, Cass has barely learned how to pronounce their names. The monosyllabic ones are easy -- Tim, Duke, Steph (and the latter glows every time her name leaves Cass’s lips). She has trouble curling her mouth around the ‘Br,’ but he’s content with being ‘Baroose’ until she improves. ‘Alfured’ has been patient, as a teacher out to be; yet it surprises her that Damian abates his temper, just for her.
(”Adequate,” he had sniffed after she haltingly sounded out his name for the first time.)
Adjustment is a loose term, though. Any time they tell her they should do something together, they tell her they’ll ‘wait until she’s ready.’ That includes saying each other’s names. She’s appreciative, of course -- because of them, she’s gone from being David Cain’s daughter to being Batman’s ... not daughter. Ally, perhaps. She’s been given the opportunity to redeem the Orphan name, which means that she still has something to be grateful for, in addition to her freedom. In spite of all this, she still has no idea where she stands with them, even if they give every apparent indication that she’s family.
(The feeling’s too foreign.)
“Cassandra,” Bruce calls, catching her as she leaves the Cave. Post-training isn’t exactly the best time, but she doesn’t refuse, instead stopping and removing her compression gloves. She rubs her forehead with a towel and watches his measured steps as he approaches her. “I wanted to speak more with you about the idea of a potential adoption.”
Cass considers. It’ll be the same old conversation they’ve always had in the months that she’s been with him, but she can’t deny the fact that he’s become more ... convincing over time. The idea of a ‘legal’ family is arbitrary at best, but persistence has its benefits. It’s managed to put the thought in her head. “Okay,” she responds, because Alfred tells her that vocalizing more often will make it easier for her to speak.
Bruce smiles lightly, almost imperceptibly to anyone but herself. She follows him into his study, taking a seat as it’s offered to her. She tries not to look around the dimly lit room, illuminated only by a too-high chandelier and a quaint little desk lamp. Her gaze falls instead to the furniture in front of her. THere are papers littered in the desk that weren’t there before, but she tries to seem as though she’s not looking at them. It’s not like she could read the black blobs on the white sheets anyway. There were too many letters in too small print for her to decipher in a timely manner.
“I know the idea’s been brewing in our heads for a while -- at least it has in mine,” Bruce begins, sitting heavily in his black leather chair. His papers clack on his mahogany table as he straightens them and puts them off to the side in a neat pile. “I understand that this idea may also be a little frightening. You haven’t been living here long, and the idea of ... joining a brand new family may be a little strange.”
Cass nods, following along quietly. Remembering Alfred’s advice, she quickly adds, “Mm-hmm.”
“I want you to know that we’ll be here for you no matter what,” he continues. His hand twitches, like he wants to reach over but thinks better of it. She wishes he hadn’t. “What you went through, no one should have ever experienced -- in fact, I’d go as far as to say that no one should have led lives similar to our own. And that makes it all the more important that we’re here for each other.
“Now, that isn’t to say that adoption is the ... be-all, end-all for familial relationships -- part of the reason why I’m proposing this is because of the financial and civil security that it will provide for you. People are less likely to ask questions about Bruce Wayne’s newest trust fund baby -- not to say that is what you will become.”
She blinks. She’ll never admit that the idea is frightening, fearless as the Bat needs his family to be. The thought of the public scrutiny she’d have to endure as a celebrity’s newest adopted child was the stuff of nightmares. Cass barely considered the tentative, brand-new relations she had with the rest of the Bat’s family to be communication enough. It was no secret that the growing Wayne family had attracted some criticism, claiming Bruce was seeking to be the parents he never had, and she’d quickly decided that reading tabloids for practice was not something she would continue doing, which made her all the more inclined to refuse his offer.
Yes, it would make her upcoming enrollment in Gotham Academy a lot easier to have the most popular man in the whole city as her guardian, but with his name brought a degree of sociability. Duke and Tim managed to stave it off well enough, but she couldn’t find it in herself to dodge quite so artfully as her potential brothers. She shifts in her chair uncomfortably flicking to and from Bruce’s gaze. The positives and the negatives have circled in her head for weeks, and this re-opened can of worms has not done anything to solve the issue.
“Cassandra?” Bruce says quietly. His brows furrow slightly, creating a crease between them. His mouth twitches,caught between a tentative smile and an outright frown. He’s not sure what expression he wants to adopt, and he’s unable to decode her thoughts. “Can you tell me what you’re thinking?”
She nods once, jerkily. “Not,” she says, “yet.”
Bruce leans back in his chair, expression still unreadable. She can see the gears turning in his head, the infamous Bat’s brain as it works to comprehend her response. She can see that he acknowledges her apprehension, but then has to process the time frame the word ‘yet’ sets up. She doubts he’s going to get very far on that train of thought, seeing as she herself wasn’t quite sure when ‘yet’ was either. The most important thing was that the shadow in his eyes wasn’t disappointment. She’d had enough of that.
The silence between them grows less comfortable and more off-putting when she realizes Bruce has nothing more to say. He straightens his already-straight papers again and opens his mouth to gently dismiss her, before the door to the study bangs open and Cass whips her head around to stare at the intruder. A book falls off its shelf, seemingly born of comedic timing after the jarring movement.
“Oh,” says Steph brightly, “Alfred told me I’d find you two here. If you’re not busy, Cass, I was wondering if you’d like to go out on the town with me?”
They have patrol later -- as far as Cass is concerned, that’s as nice of a night out on the town as she needs. But Steph has always been one for traditional, classical romantics, often leaving Cassandra at a loss. Cass turns to look back at Bruce, whose lips haven’t yet quirked back up, but also are pointedly not turned down. He’s getting ready for his own patrol, and she can hear the squeak of Damian’s new boots on the floor as he heads to collect his father from the study as well.
“Go ahead,” Bruce says, eyes drifting downward to his work.
And with that, the two are summarily dismissed from Bruce’s attention. He resumes whatever investigative reports he’d been studying intensely, and Cass surprises him by patting him on the hand before getting up and closing the door behind her and Steph.
They make it a good ten feet down the corridor, past a speed-walking, sour-faced Damian, before Steph opens her mouth. “He was talking about it again, wasn’t he?” She casts Cass a ‘Look,’ pushing a strand of flaxen hair behind her ear. “I know it makes you kind of weirded out to think about it. It does, doesn’t it?” Cass doesn’t respond, but Steph presses on anyway. “Maybe you should tell him to stop.”
“Maybe,” Cass says offhandedly.
Steph purses her lips. Cass knows that she doesn’t like the idea of Bruce pressuring Cass to join the family, but her very occupation revealed the lack of affinity she had shared with her father, not to mention the trust her mother betrayed. A fundamental discrepancy exited between how she and Cass viewed the idea of family. There was a part of her that questioned Cass’s decision to retain the name of Orphan, but she had never quite vocalized any concerns she had, to which Cass was glad. It was good that they have their differences. It made her remember that Steph was real.
The disparities in their minds is made even more tangible when Steph takes her hand a fits her fingers between Cass’s, squeezing gently before relaxing her hold.
Physical contact was a gift, a message, from Cassandra. Love, hate, disgust, pity, all of it could be delivered with a touch. But in addition to being a creature of romance, Steph was also a creature of habit.
Rather than meaningful, long touches and strokes, it was always the same, every time, robotic in frequency but never in feeling. Cass’s heart flutters every time, and she never gets tired of it. Never gets tired of the feeling that Steph gives her every time she wants to go out, or every time cherry flavored lip gloss ends up imprinted on her cheek.
Steph continues to not speak, and Cass breathes out slightly heavier through her nose, satisfied that the subject has been dropped. It was a personal choice, not to be openly debated by an outsider. She allows herself to be the one initiating the handholding, and is reassured by the gentle pressure that Steph’s fingers return. “Where?” Cass asks, flicking quickly to peer at Steph out of the corner of her eye. “... Clothes?”
It seems that Steph only realizes that Cass is still in her sweaty workout attire only after prompting. “Oh!” she says, then laughs, shaking her head. Cass tries not to spend too much time studying the slight crinkles at the corners of her eyes as she squeezes them shut in her mirth. “I’m sorry, I didn’t even notice. I was hoping we could ... just walk around a bit, so you should probably change, yeah.”
Cass smiles. “And show-wer.”
“And shower.”
She does it just as nimbly as she does everything else -- eating, breathing, and beating up super-villains -- and they’re out the door before Bruce and Damian depart in the Batmobile. Knowing that their wandering was aimless, Cass decides it’s better to slip on the trainers that she had been wearing earlier, though a cautionary sniff had to be taken. It hadn’t been enough to make her flinch, so she settles in them and rolls on the balls of her feet.
Steph gives her that little smile from the doorway that makes Cass flinch internally, small and forming just slightly by the movement of the corners of her mouth. It’s been months, Cass reminds herself, mentally giving herself a slap to the forehead, she should not be making you feel like this. But she has a sneaking suspicion that Steph always will.
“Ready to go?” Steph asks and Cass nods, letting her fingers slip through hers again. They bid their farewells to Alfred, who is already making preparations to aid Bruce and Damian from the cave.
The streets of Gotham are seldom safe to wander at night, but their sojourn’s adjacency to the Batman’s early evening patrol makes it slightly better for the two of them -- also given the fact that they can take care of themselves just fine. So long as they stay in the brightly lit areas, they shouldn’t have any issues to deal with before their shift, which seems to be what Steph is leaning towards. The bells chime five times, and pedestrians mill about, blissfully unaware of whom walked among them.
“How was your day?” Cass asks pleasantly. She’s been employing the basic phrases that Alfred has been teaching her, gearing them towards automatic prompts that can provoke easy enough conversation. She has thoughts, can articulate them in her head, but has difficulty forming the sounds. But practice makes perfect, so she figures she ought to start. Language and mundane communication was a lot harder than she’d anticipated.
Steph dips her head, appreciative for the starter. “It was ... good. I always get these pre-school jittery nerves. Do you? -- I mean, are you? Must be a strange experience, going to school for the first time, and to a private academy of all places. I remember my first day of school, when I was little. Everything seemed so big and so scary, so many strangers, and just .. the uncertainty of ‘new people.’ But at least you’ve got Tim and Duke to help you out.” She smiles, nudging Cass with her elbow. “Better than going in there all alone, right?”
“Yes,” she responds easily. “Much better.”
“How about you?” Stephanie prompts. It’s a conscious and obvious form of getting Cass herself to talk, and she takes time to carefully construct her response. With barely names and stock phrases under her belt, she’s hoping that the progress she makes on speaking actual sentences (however short they may be) makes itself evident.
Cass tries, “It was okay too. Had big breakfast. Trained.” She pauses at Steph’s encouraging nod. “Then you.” A tentative smile graces her face, broadened when Steph beams in return, a glow to her cheeks. They don’t look nearly as warm as Cass’s feel at the two-worded phrase.
It has become a routine, this tete-a-tete. Cass tries to start a conversation, Steph answers and prompts her, then Cass responds and tries to further it along, and so on and so forth until they have nothing to talk about. Generally the tactic seems to be working so far. Her improvement at improvisation is palpable, and Alfred seems nothing if not supportive.
It’s easier to pretend her lack of speech is the foremost of her problems, but it’s also something she’s far more willing to tackle. Sometimes she’ll point out words on windows and street signs that she can read, too, though that’s coming along admittedly slower than vocalization is. It’s a bit of shock, to have not become quickly proficient at something -- but literacy is altogether a different form of combat, a language combat may be in it of itself.
(So this, she thinks sometimes, is what it’s like to be a normal person. What it’s like to learn normal-people things.)
“What... were you doing?” Cass poses. “Before.” She purses her lips, thinking the continuation tenuous at best, redundant at worst. She doesn’t like going in circles much.
“Well, I was bored, but then I realized I could come visit you.” Cass feels herself flush at the grin, returning it with equal verve. “It’s been how long since you’ve been living in Gotham? A few months? And you’ve already gotten to know it inside out by rooftop with Bruce, learned to watch it with a vigilante’s eye. So I thought you ought to get to know the city at ground level, too. After all, I’m sure the friends you make at Gotham Academy are gonna want to go out often. Makes it easier to get around if you know the city by heart, and maybe you can figure out shortcuts to impress your friends.”
It was awfully presumptuous of Steph to believe that Cassandra would be making friends left and right at the Academy, but the thought brightened her. Maybe it was possible, being as social as it was posited for her to be. The assumption could be a goal for her to set -- have friends and take them to cool places in the city. As if they hadn’t already lived in the city longer than she did, despite the nightly patrols that familiarized her to the location. She might have known the criminal hotspots, but they’d know the best burger joints.
Quid-pro-quo worked, she supposes. It was working for her and Steph so far, and even at this very moment, so it stands to reason it should be the same for others, romantically inclined or not.
“What do you like so far about living with Bruce Wayne?” The words break her out of her thoughts, and it’s not a question she can answer quickly. Something of a non sequitur, but Cass appreciates the thought-provoking ones.
Her living situation is complicated, a topic she hadn’t thought Steph would grace. The adoption debacle aside, the time they’d spent apart from each other hadn’t exactly come up beyond tangential conversation. Work and plan were things that, as Cass understood, should seldom intertwine; that wasn’t the case for either of them. As allies (and technical charges) to Batman, they saw each other almost every day -- whether the sun was up or not. But curiously, any recreational time had always voided the mention of Wayne Manor.
“Good group,” she decides after some deliberation. “Good people. Nice. Patient -- sometimes too much.” There’s only so many times she can hear the words ‘until you’re ready’ before she wants to snap and tell them that she won’t be, that no one’s ever gotten anywhere by waiting until they were ready. “Good people,” she repeats
“They are,” Steph agrees. For a moment, Cass thinks of the spark that had passed between her and Tim, but the end result of whatever had been there was Steph wanting to be with Cass, so there was little point in pondering what might have been. They would’ve, at the very least, looked good together, but Tim doesn’t seem to think very much of it, and the three of them haven’t exactly spoken on the topic. She figures it means there’s nothing to speak of anyway. “I’m glad that they’re treating you well.”
“Me too.” That comes to her easily. Her upbringing came in stark contrast with what she had experienced at Wayne Manor -- nothing but compassion and kindness and patience and respect. Rather than focusing on the art of shedding blood, she learned to prevent bloodshed, to protect. Failure was not met with sharp, painful rebukes, but rather gentle platitudes and reassurances.
No matter how many times its youngest inhabitant was prone to snapping at others, he had also felt a kinship with Cass, something she felt too, a connection between children trained to murder. Bruce, no matter his trauma,s could never quite match the affinity that was between her and Damian. A mutual respect that came with understanding.
And Tim and Duke had been so kind. While the former had something of a sourness about him, the latter had gone out of his way to provide Cass the comfort she needed. While neither of the boys, like brothers to her now, she supposes, had ever given her the same feeling of alliance that Damian had, it was more than telling that she found herself at ease with them. They were going to be good allies to have. With them around, she’d never really be alone.
Alfred was a tutor. Omnipresent and patient, he’d taken great pains to accommodate Cass’s own struggle to acclimate to her new environment, and had taken time out of his day to teach her how to speak and read. And on days when she struggled to grasp the day’s concepts, he’d set aside more time for further tutelage. She wondered often how someone with such a full schedule could possibly have subsisted on gratitude for his servitude alone. Most of the time he spent alone was while he was working on duties such as cooking or cleaning, but it meant he was always there, and he was always ready to help.
Bruce ... Bruce was the father she never had. David Cain had ben present, indeed, but the entirety of their relationship was defined by her ability to follow his orders. Love was never a factor, and though she appreciated what she learned from the man, he never gave her the sense of belonging Bruce did. With him brought the opportunity of permanence, and of love and affection. A family.
At Cass’s silence, Steph spins on her heel, heading towards the crosswalk. Everybody’s getting off work at about the same time, so Cass makes sure not to let go of her hand. Wouldn’t do to lose her in the middle of a crowded Gotham street as the sun was setting. “It makes me want to stay over more often,” Steph muses. “Seems like a good place to live.”
“You could,” Cass blurts, then blinks rapidly as she tries to come up with a follow-up. “With me.”
The thought had been a passing fancy she had entertained, the suggestion of a little microcosm of support localized in one place. She’d never have to leave the house, and honestly, it couldn’t have been unheard of for a billionaire’s children to be homeschooled, if they didn’t attend a prestigious private academy. Everything she needed would have been in one singular, centralized location. Judging by the simpering expression on Steph’s face, it was something she had though of as well.
But it probably wasn’t the healthiest way to go about dealing with her problems. The adjustment that eluded her extended beyond communication and into interpersonal ties. Although a little dream world was idealistic and pleasant, it was a reluctantly present reality that she had to encompass the big, wide world.
Following orders from a young age stifled a certain instinct in her. She was less inclined to begin thinking about the macrocosm she dwelled in and more about the small things -- what she was supposed to do and how she was supposed to go about it. Action, objective, a singular consequence. But life wasn’t like that for her anymore. She lived in Gotham City; she was Orphan, Batman’s newest apprentice. She was no longer responsible for dispatching a single individual each time she was released, but with the protection of an entire city from those who would wish to do its citizens harm.
It was a great deal of responsibility, but it was a responsibility that made her heart swell. It was the good kind of responsibility, the one that makes you feel worthy, that pushes you to keep meeting it every single day. It’s different. Perhaps a bit strange. But it isn’t bad.
And she isn’t dealing with it alone, either. There is a family for her now. Boys, who aren’t blood but good enough, and a girl who (hopefully ) loves her are there.
Steph clears her throat and scuffs her toes on the ground. She scratches at her back absently, and Cass notes that she’s left the reticence that sits between them hanging for too long. “Probably not the best of ideas,” she tells Cass. “I might be a little distracting to you.” A wink brings levity back into her gaze.
“A little?” Cass says, and Steph snorts, smacking her lightly on the arm.
“You know what I mean.”
They continue to walk in silence, absorbing the bustle of late-evening Gotham. A lot of people see the dark in the city, the cesspool of crime that it becomes after the clocks chime eight. But it’s like this, with the bright orange of the sky announcing the sun’s departure, that one can see the city as it is. It can be a sleepy city, full of people desperate to return to warm beds, warm arms, and perhaps a warm drink. Small gestures of goodwill are offered as small mom and pop shops close, offering little leftover lollipops to lollygagging children rushing home from the park, a restaurant packing up leftovers and going to the underpasses to hand out what they’ve got all stashed up.
Cass never would’ve expected this place to be the focal point of her responsibility. But then again, she never would’ve expected to be set free by the Batman, and offered a place in his home. Her father probably wouldn’t have been proud, but she figured that little she did would have pleased him in the way that she wanted to please him anyway.
So she settled for being someone Bruce Wayne would be proud of. Someone Alfred Pennyworth would like to teach, a worthy ally for Tim Drake, Duke Thomas, and Damian Wayne. Someone Stephanie Brown would like to kiss and keep kissing and someone Steph would love calling her girlfriend. It seems like an easy compromise.
“Well,” Steph says, looking up at the sky. The streets seem emptier and her words ring louder in the absence of car horns and pedestrians’ idle talk, and the sky seems dimmer than it had been before. “It’s getting late. It’s just about time for our shift.” She glances quickly at her watch, which Cass assumes confirms her postulation. “Ready to head home?”
Cass rubs a thumb over her purlicue. She turns, watching the sun as it lowers beyond the horizon and makes way for the night. There’s the electricity that arcs up her veins and spine the moment the sun sets, paving the way for their patrol. An exhilaration commenced by the uncertainty of a city after dark, the adrenaline that keeps her running in the wee hours of the night.
Orphan and Spoiler. Cass and Steph. Better partners than Clayface could ever be. Behind closed doors, even more.
“Home,” she agrees.