Chapter Text
"I have really normal reasons for being here, actually," Steph said for the third time in as many days.
Cass frowned.
The problem, of course, was that Steph wasn't lying, at least not as far as Cass could tell. She couldn't discount the possibility (however distant) that Steph had learned to lie to her. But when had Steph been capable of keeping a secret like that? But if she was capable of lying to Cass, she was capable of keeping a secret. But she'd never shown the slightest sign of—
"...and then I thought, okay, I can't really horn in on Superman's girl just because he's off-planet—there she is. Hi. You stopped listening pretty early on in that."
Cass wrinkled her nose at Steph. "Lois won six Pulitzers."
"And a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Way too good for little ol' me, you got me." No sign of hurt. The usual breezy charm. But Steph could mislead people, like this. Cass had learned. It wasn't a lie in the sense that it was an intent to deceive; it was a mask, carefully held a millimeter from her face. Hard to notice, sometimes, even for Cass, even when she was looking.
Still. Cass had known Steph for awhile now. Had learned what it meant to be a friend from Steph, among others. She understood what she could ask here. Steph had already told her she was spending time at Wayne Manor consulting with Bruce on a case, and that spending more time with Cass was a bonus. She had to respect that, even if she knew perfectly well it wasn't the full truth. Friends respected each other's boundaries. "All right."
"That's it? No more fifth degree?"
"Third," Cass said. "No." Steph would tell her when she was ready.
Only. Steph didn't seem inclined to become ready, or to tell Cass much of anything.
Cass had learned that it wasn't considered rude to ask or offer information about oneself. She had learned the subtle linguistic cues that indicated someone was ready to start talking, in an interrogation, or share something personal, in a casual social situation. She had learned the limits of interrogation and deduction, particularly when applied to loved ones.
She hadn't learned, or maybe couldn't learn, precisely where the lines were. When someone stopped being an acquaintance and became a friend. Why Bruce and Barbara loved her, why Cass would place herself at risk for Tim or Dick.
Or Steph. But not in the same way.
Sometimes Cass encountered capes who didn't think she understood any human relationships. Oliver Queen had tried to define marriage to her and he hadn't done a very good job. But Cass knew the basics; she'd experienced dating, friendship, family, brotherhood. None of that changed how startling it was, what happened when she looked at Steph.
She felt—obsessed. Enthralled. Consumed, and willing to be consumed in return. This was what the poets wrote about, the ones Alfred kept hounding her to read. (Hounding: politely referencing books and then leaving them out for Cass to peruse. But poetry had limited utility during detective work, so Cass largely moved the books around a bit, read a few pages, and smiled weakly when Alfred tidied them away again.)
Her lack of poetic domain knowledge aside, she knew what she felt. It was love, romantic love. She loved Steph, in a different way than she loved Damian or Bruce or Barbara. She wanted to crawl inside Steph and stay there forever.
Steph liked her as a friend, so Cass studiously ignored her feelings. Inconvenient, counterproductive: all of her life's training said they must be set aside. She was successful, of course. She couldn't have worked if she weren't capable of compartmentalization. But sometimes, in the soft moments, things slipped through.
Steph, in the mansion. Lying on the floor while she insisted on showing Cass television shows from ten years ago. Laughing, her sweater slipping off one shoulder. Soft, so soft, and inexplicable. A lie in her body, one Cass couldn't see past.
Steph would tell Cass when she was ready. Cass was trying not to think about what she'd do if that never happened.
In investigations, when you hit a dead end, you had to think of something new.
Thus far, Cass had tried patience, and alcohol, and interrogating Barbara. That last one went really poorly: Babs knew what Cass could do, and she was really good at sitting still and glaring while she told Cass she couldn't treat family dynamics like a case. Cass personally thought that was a little ridiculous, since her family dynamics were a case, had been a case, but when she pointed that out, Babs only crossed her arms and said, dry as a desert: "And so were Steph's, but that doesn't give you the right to subvert her privacy like this. If it were a case, you'd already know about it. I or Bruce would have told you."
Sometimes Cass really understood why Dick had left Gotham so young. But she didn't tell Babs that. Being in your mid-20s had some advantages, maturity-wise.
Anyway, that was a dead end. Cass decided she'd try Guilt next. Guilt, she knew, was a tricky tool: it worked differently on everyone, so you really couldn't depend on it to solve your problems in a predictable manner. Sometimes, it made your target angry and more determined to withhold information. But that didn't really seem like Steph, did it? They'd drifted apart over the years, a little, not nearly as close as they were when they'd both lived in the Hill loft. They were both busy, and sometimes Cass thought she was frustrating to be around now that Steph didn't hero worship her anymore. She hadn't realized how much of their earlier relationship had been driven by Steph chasing approval and belonging. She was more confident now—and that was good, of course it was, she was happy for her. It was just that, maybe, Cass had taken it for granted a little. When Steph grew up, Cass didn't know how to chase her.
A lie worked best when it was partially true. So, the next time she found Steph alone in the kitchen, sipping coffee a couple hours after the others had already gotten up and left for the day, she sighed heavily.
"Augh! Oh, Cass, hi."
She decided not to mention that situational awareness was still important, even during their downtime at home. She said, "Hi. Good morning. Do you ever think about how we used to be roommates? I miss it, sometimes."
"Ohhhh jeez," Steph said. "I've been awake for like fifteen minutes, oh wow. Are you—I mean, I miss you too?"
Cass nodded and sat down.
"Is that...why...do you want some coffee?"
She wiggled her water glass. "Just this."
Steph stared down at her own (very light brown) coffee. She squinted at Cass. She looked at her coffee again. "So like...are you mad at me?"
Uh-oh. "No? Why would I be mad?"
"Well you opened with 'I miss you', I figured maybe you were guilting me. Because you're mad at me."
It was Cass's turn to stare now. She chose the ceiling. "That...was not my intention."
"Okay but—"
A lie worked best when it was partially true. Cass said, "I just meant—maybe, tonight, when you're done with your case work. We could get pizza?"
Pizza would not be particularly conducive to interrogation, but the offer proved itself to be worthwhile right away. Steph brightened and took a sip of her coffee, legs swinging happily from her stool. "I'd like that, yeah. Yes! Of course."
Pizza revealed nothing. But what happened before pizza did.
Steph had begged off patrolling together, claiming Bruce had told her she was needed elsewhere. But she was lying, and strangely, she didn't even seem to be trying to do a very good job. Or maybe something about the nature of the lie meant she couldn't.
Cass followed her, of course. She expected Steph to leave the Manor, had braced for some kind of complicated situation with her and another Bat, or her and a villain. Maybe she even had a secret boyfriend who only wanted to meet up after midnight; hadn't they all heard of stranger situations by now? But no, Steph slipped down two hallways that Cass knew as well as her nightmares, and within moments she was in the Cave, doing something that involved lots of squinting at screens with Tim and Bruce.
"And you're sure Constantine can't come take a look at it?"
"Six months' travel time. He can, if it's still like this by then."
"Zatanna?"
"Can't take time away, might be able to soon. But the issue isn't that urgent."
"Um, hi, I'm right here," Steph said.
"Yeah you are," Tim said, flicking her nose.
And then Steph giggled. It was embarrassing, Cass decided after a few minutes. The giggle. The way Steph blushed, like she was enjoying Tim's attention. Also, the way Bruce looked away, something awkward in his body language. He didn't want to be there, Cass decided, watching him move. He felt guilty and strange.
Cass wished she knew if that was an ordinary set of emotions for a father to feel. But, well.
You couldn't stay in the Cave long and trust you'd remain completely unobserved, not even if you had Cass's training. She decided she'd seen enough, gathered some clues to think over. She was fading into the darkness that would lead to one of the escape tunnels when she heard Bruce say, "You're going out with Cassandra later."
She froze. Didn't even dare to breathe.
"Yeah."
"Oooh," Tim said under his breath.
Cass screwed her eyes shut. She didn't—why would Tim say that? She didn't know. She didn't want to know. And she couldn't see them, so she wouldn't know, in any way that mattered. She couldn't read any of them well enough, if she couldn't see.
"Two hours. No more."
Steph huffed a breath. For a moment Cass thought she was going to argue, but then Bruce added in a low, strained voice: "Please."
If she turned around, risking discovery to catch a glimpse of the tableau in the cave, she'd understand more. She knew that as surely as she knew the best way to scale the Clock Tower. But to risk discovery...what would she say to them, what could she say? Nothing, she thought, that would make herself understood, and she couldn't rely on Bruce not to chastise her, bench her—or worse, pity her.
So she left.
"You and Tim," she said a few days later, as she and Steph shared some takeout on the roof of Alysia's café.
Steph made a face around her noodles. "Um? Har's naur meyanim?"
There's no me and Tim? Not particularly believable, given everything. "You dated, though."
"Dated, uh, yeah, past tense, before..." Steph made a face. "You know, everything."
"Dying."
"Technically, no."
But she had been dead to people who loved her. Cass decided not to try and articulate the point. "Okay. But that was everything? You dated him before 'everything'."
Something was happening between them right now, and Cass didn't understand what it was. Steph's body didn't say no. It didn't say I don't trust you. But when Steph said, "Yeah, basically," that wasn't the truth, and she had to have known Cass knew it wasn't the truth. But she didn't offer more, and Cass didn't know how to ask.
She could have tried interrogating Tim too, obviously, but even thinking about it made her feel slightly queasy: Tim would ask questions she herself didn't want to answer. Instead, she decided to attack the problem in a dimension that better fit her skills.
She stalked them.
They spent a lot of time in the Cave, talking about a problem Steph was having (with a case? unclear) in shorthand too opaque to untangle. Sometimes Bruce was there and sometimes he wasn't, but Steph was never in the Cave—or the Manor, as far as Cass could tell—when Bruce wasn't there. Was it just that Bruce didn't trust her? Cass had thought things were much better in that sense, but maybe something had happened.
She did try to get more information from the source. She came to dinner one night, waited until Bruce was alone at the table (taking post-dinner tea, which he chose to glare at), and said, "Why are you monitoring Steph's activity?"
"I monitor everyone's activity."
"Oracle monitors everyone's activity."
Bruce continued to glare at his tea.
Cass bit the inside of her lip. It was meant to signal hesitancy. She suspected Bruce knew that—her intentions, the layers of deceit—but she felt that she still had to try. "I only meant...is it okay? Is she okay?"
"She's in her room. You could ask her yourself."
She couldn't quite suppress the irritation that flared in her chest. "I did. She lied. Just like you're lying. Right now."
Bruce closed his eyes, exhaling hard through his nostrils. "I apologize. Yes, she's okay."
He wasn't lying. Unless he'd learned to lie to her; she couldn't discount the possibility. But he wouldn't, would he? Not about this. Not directly. If he was lying, it was by omission, and Bruce thought it was okay to lie to everyone by omission, so guilt wouldn't help her there.
Whatever he felt conflicted about...he was still the Bat. She still followed him and cared about him. "Thank you," she said, and left him to his tea.
But she watched the exits. When Batman left to patrol two hours later, Steph was with him.
Maybe it was Tim, she thought one morning.
A bad hypothesis. She knew it. Steph and Tim spent plenty of time together, true, but in public they weren't noticeably intimate, physically or otherwise. They had few in-jokes another person didn't know; they always invited others to study time. Cass half wanted to believe they were dating, since it would be an understandable explanation for an otherwise mystifying behavioral pattern, but there wasn't much to go on. Leave aside a smoking gun, there were hardly any clues at all. She could imagine what Bruce would say: you're allowing bias to cloud your perception. Take a step back. Think. She did think, and she knew she was wrong, but—what else could it be? Steph was falling for Tim or she was behaving oddly for no reason at all, or a reason that was very serious but which she felt she couldn't tell Cass. They were all bad options.
One Sunday morning, after an unusually quiet night for all who wore the sigil, Cass grabbed breakfast in the Manor kitchen with half the household: Alfred, Tim, Damien, Steph, and Duke. The night had been quiet but not absent of Bats, so everyone was busy eating their eggs and toast, right up until Tim nudged Steph and said, "C'mon, tell them."
"Noooo," Steph said, shoving eggs in her mouth.
"They'll find out eventually anyway!"
"I don't want to say it now."
"You're pregnant," Duke said.
A stone lodged itself in the pit of Cass's stomach.
Steph made a face at him. "Gross, dude."
"Well, okay, obviously not. But what is it, then?!"
"Father has given you leave to move to London and pursue your dream career as a hanger-on slash email-answerer for an aging rock star," Damian said.
Cass bit the inside of her cheek. Steph said, "What? No, loser. Your crush on the Gorillaz guys is your problem, not mine."
"They'll keep guessing till you tell them," Tim said. Cass could assume, based on context clues, that he was speaking to Steph. But he wasn't looking at her, in that precise moment. Instead, he was looking at Cass.
"Ugggh. Okay well now it sounds boring." Steph heaved a sigh, loud and breathy. It made her chest—well, her sleep shirt was flattering. "I got a scholarship. For a master's. At Gotham U."
The room exploded.
Even Alfred made a bit of noise, a polite cheer with some clapping. Cass had seen footage of dozens of parties commemorating all sorts of events: weddings, promotions, anniversaries, baby announcements, divorces, engagements, even funerals. Celebratory events had loose security. As a child she'd rarely understood the distinction between events, and even now she sometimes had to remind herself. At this party, the birthday girl gets the most attention. At that baby shower, remember, the grandmother and mother have different concerns. etc. This wasn't anything like one of those parties, this was just breakfast at the Mansion with a surprise attached, yet Cass still felt the need to find the correct way to congratulate Steph, the safe words to tell her she was proud and happy and had no expectations or concerns beyond that.
She did a good job, she thought: she smiled, cheered, hugged Steph. Said, "Wow, that's amazing." Steph seemed truly happy, and even Damien didn't seem to realize anything was wrong.
But Tim had known. Tim had known, and Cass hadn't.
"You keep moping like that, someone's gonna take advantage."
Cass frowned at the empty, well-lit street below.
"Not me, obviously. Well, if you weren't who you are, maybe, but you're not. So. Seriously, though, what's wrong?"
Jason Todd haunted the Manor. Jason Todd haunted the Cave. Jason Todd haunted Gotham, and occasionally he was such a strong presence that he didn't fade into the background with all the other ghosts. Cass still didn't want to deal with the actual Jason Todd, in the flesh, roughly ten feet behind her. "Nothing."
"Bullshit, Black Bat."
Annoying. "I'm Batgirl."
"Whatever you say, Shiva's kid." He plopped down next to her, heavy. Based on how he was moving, he had an abdomen injury, maybe also an issue with his right thigh. And they were on the edge of a building: Cass had her grapple sites staked out, but he probably didn't. The Lazarus Pit bred laziness; she had a hazy memory of one parent, not Bruce, claiming as much.
"Right. I always forget you're not a babbler."
Cass took a deep breath of cool early-fall Gotham air. "Nothing is wrong, Red Hood."
Of course, he had the nerve to sound amused when he said, "Uh huh. And I don't feel any kind of way about what Bruce did to me, or didn't do to me, am I right?"
She thought of tall, ancient trees; proud, wild oceans; dark, cool caves.
Another beat of silence. Then: "Well, shit. Can't say I never dissociated to solve my problems. See you around, Batgirl."
Red Hood didn't disappear. He thumped off, then the sound of his motorcycle faded away. Cass let him go, though.
The the problem was—well, rewind. There were many problems. You accumulated them, with a life like any of the Bats had. But the main problem, the principal problem, the issue at hand, was that Cass had developed a Steph Problem before she even knew what that kind of problem was. Before kissing, before sex, before she'd even understood what a crush was, she'd had one on Steph.
Steph had talked past and over her. Steph had been annoyingly cheerful, annoyingly loud, annoyingly confident, annoyingly annoying. Cass's first fight with a friend had been with Steph, because Cass's first friend had been Steph. Maybe she'd never had a chance to be anything else, with Steph. She had killed before she understood what death was, and she'd fallen in love before she understood what a crush was. Timeline barely mattered, anyway. Relevant background but not central to the case, as Batman would say. It would be central to the case if Steph's behavior had changed much since they'd first met, but it hadn't. Sure, they knew each other better now. They were closer friends (though not, Cass couldn't help but always think, as close as they once had been). But they were just that, friends. Nothing less, thankfully, but nothing more, either.
Shiva had bothered Cass about this sort of thing a time or two. You need to get better at understanding people, honestly, assassinations are much more straightforward when you're capable of competent behavioral analysis, I don't know what he was thinking, stuff like that. Other villains, too: Talia, Ivy. It was why she and Steph worked so well together, Cass thought, because Steph could move through social situations like water through a fish's gills, but she couldn't do what Cass could in a fight. Together, they balanced each other out.
Or they would, if Steph could be honest with her.
"Secret-keeping impacts combat readiness," Cass told Tim one night. They'd teamed up to deal with some low-level gangsters just outside Red Hood's territory, nothing major except for how there were a bunch of them, Italians and Poles 'pretending it's the fifties', as Tim had said. No guns, just knives and hair grease. Weird, but in Gotham if something was just weird and not weird-and-deadly or weird-and-deeply-sinister you counted your blessings.
"Secret-spilling impacts combat readiness too," Tim said. He used Cass's arm as a counterweight and kicked one of the knife-wielding Poles in the face. "Ha! That's a spicy pirogi, am I right?"
"I don't find horseradish spicy." Cass lifted one Italian and threw him at another. They went down in a heap; a knock on the head and zip ties on their wrists ensured they'd stay down. "I'm talking about Steph."
"I know." More serious than he normally was, even in a fight. She looked up to see Tim grimacing, his angst clear in every line of his body. "And if I tell you it's not a big deal...?"
"I don't need to be me to know that's a lie." She threw a batarang at a guy lifting a fire hydrant over Tim's head. "But I am me."
"You never stop." There was something there, a grim kind of echo. She wanted to ask about it, but then one of the Poles was driving a delivery truck right at them, 60 miles per hour in a tight space, and that was enough of a distraction that they dropped the topic for the evening.
Tim ensured it stayed dropped, of course. Cass had been doing this—talking—for long enough to recognize the conversational avoidance. But she was scared of what she might find, stomach tight and sick when she thought about why Steph was keeping secrets for her, so she let it happen: the topic changed, the subject tabled. Mission reports and to-dos dominated the remainder of the night.
Cass went to Babs next. That was easy enough: the Clock Tower was being re-wired, something to achieve faster Internet, so Babs was staying in the Manor for a couple weeks. She had her own wing because she and Bruce got along best with some space, which meant Cass had plenty of privacy to say, "Batgirl is lying to me and I don't know why. Robin too. And Red Hood." Well. "Sort of."
"Red Hood lies to everyone about everything," Babs said. She was lying too, the line of her body. "Not that that's unusual in our line of work."
"Please."
She watched as Babs closed her eyes. When she took a deep breath, Cass breathed with her. She had no real expectation that Babs would tell her what was happening with Steph, but she couldn't keep going like this. Well, she could keep going, of course; being lied to, even by someone she loved, even repeatedly, couldn't prevent her from executing her mission.
But she didn't want to. And Babs and Steph were both people who'd taught her that what she wanted mattered.
"I can't tell you what's wrong with Steph. Not just because it would hurt Steph's feelings, or because it would be bad for the mission. I mean I can't. I've been told that discussing what we think might be happening could be dangerous." Babs cut her a firm look. Cass nodded: this was true, she could tell. "It's not something related to you, or to Tim. It's not something that's endangering anyone, for now. It could become dangerous, but right now it's under control."
Also true. But...Cass narrowed her eyes, watching as Babs shifted in her seat and swallowed. She was telling the truth because of what she wasn't saying.
"Lies by omission."
"Are still lies, I know. But I'm telling you what I can." True. "Steph will be okay." Lie. "We think she'll be okay, anyway." True. "And she doesn't want you to worry; she hates not talking about it." True.
"She could talk about it...?"
"We're not confident of that." True, and Babs didn't insult either of them by saying anything like 'I already told you that'. Cass had asked the question for a reason, after all: there was a difference between adhering to Bruce's judgement regarding the necessity of secret-keeping, and keeping a secret because some external force, magical or mundane, required it. This, judging by Babs' body language, was the latter.
Magical, probably. A curse, or some other binding. They'd been talking about Zatanna that time Cass listened in. She should have paid closer attention, probably; she'd been so worried at the time. "I understand. Thank you."
"Do you? Understand?"
"Steph is under some form of magical coercion or binding that Tim can help with but that you don't want me to know about." Cass shrugged. "It's not because Steph doesn't trust me, and it's not because Steph and Tim are embarking on a romantic relationship again."
Babs blinked. "Was that a concern you had?"
"They've been spending a lot of time together."
"Well, they're friends."
Cass crossed her arms. "It was strange that I didn't know. And they stopped talking around me, a few times."
"And you thought it was because they were dating again."
Cass nodded.
She couldn't read anything from Babs when she said, "All right. Thank you for telling me." She didn't understand why she'd be thanked, what she'd said or left out that would prompt Babs to react like this. But Babs had all but told her magic was implicated in Steph's condition, whatever her condition was, and Cass didn't want to push; she nodded and said, "Okay then, bye," and went off to the training rooms, blessedly empty this time of day but always ready to be used.
Magic. Ugh. At least she knew enough to stay out of it now.
"Soooo," Tim said, swinging his boots against the warehouse's crumbling Art Deco trim.
Cass nodded at the dust falling to the ground. "Property damage."
"Sure, the owner can thank me when he files his insurance claims. Anyway, I was just going to ask, how are you doing?"
Sometimes it was a little exciting to realize that she could anticipate a conversation. Understanding someone's motives made her a better detective. "I know Steph's issue is magical."
"Hah! Whoa." Tim righted himself from where he'd almost fallen, jolting away from Cass. "Who told you that? Why? When?"
What would Bruce say? Something that foreclosed interrogation, like That's irrelevant. She didn't think she could pull that off, though. "Detective work."
Tim's dubious look told her that she hadn't chosen much better than her first impulse. "Riiight. Okay, well, it is magic, but we'll fix it."
"What kind of magic?"
"Just, you know. Magic. I don't know, I'm not an expert."
His shoulders said I do know and his tone said I can't tell you and his fingers, gripping the decorative limestone, said I feel bad about all of this. Cass had learned that sometimes, no matter how bad someone felt, she still had to push them. No matter how much she loved them, too.
This wasn't one of those times. She knew nothing about magic, and it was Steph's injury (affliction? curse?) anyway—not Tim's, not his secret to tell, if it was actually a secret. She couldn't imagine what kind of secret Steph would want to keep from her. Maybe it caused embarrassing physical effects that were slowing her down in the field? It had been a long time since Steph had been insecure about that, but...
Well. She didn't know, and she wasn't going to know. Fortunately, there was movement in the shadows just out of the range of the warehouse's security lighting. One glance at Tim indicated he'd already seen them; they took off together, moving in sync, no discussion required.
Later, back at the Cave, Tim showered and grabbed some chamomile tea. Cass opted to skip the kitchen, but she had a good view of its points of egress from a second floor balcony. There, sipping some water, she watched Steph enter the Manor, pause and glance around suspiciously, square her shoulders, and enter the kitchen.
Magic. Just magic, something that could be fixed, something that probably wasn't killing Steph in the meantime. Just magic, a solvable problem, Cass told herself. Just also one she wasn't invited to help with.
Bruce's shoulders said I have bad news for about ten minutes before he said, "I'll be off-world for awhile, starting tomorrow morning."
They were a motley crew that evening: Steph and Tim, who'd been studying (magic, Cass assumed) before dinner; Cass and Duke, stopping by for a pre-patrol meal; Alfred and Dick, collaborating on something related to Christmas plans, which Dick was very smug and extremely withholding about. What they all had in common was finding the announcement strange. "Okay...?" Dick said. "What, are you going to miss Christmas?"
"Shouldn't be more than two months. No."
"But you will miss Thanksgiving."
"I hope not."
"Urgent business?"
Bruce's eyes cut to Dick's, then away. "Yes."
"We'll hold down the fort," Dick said. There was more to come from that, Cass knew. Probably an argument, hopefully not a bad one. Dick was the only one who could needle Bruce at all without a setdown of some kind, and he pushed the boundaries on that relationship more often than not. Right now was even stranger than the norm, though. Dick's eyes drifted between Bruce and Steph and Tim like there was something he wasn't saying.
Join the club, Cass thought, shoving a few more noodles into her mouth than she could comfortably chew.
Irony came to visit her the next morning, hand in hand with luck. Luck: Cass was set to leave the manor at the same time Bruce was. He was going in Superman's arms; she'd be going on a motorcycle. She put her helmet on and prepared to head out; Bruce turned to her and said, "Cassandra, please make sure Stephanie stays healthy."
"What," Cass said. She didn't have time to finish the thought with what do you mean or what might happen. She just said, "What," a second time, like a malfunctioning toy, and then Bruce was gone into the air, Clark's polite nod and a whoosh that happened too quickly for human eyes to track.
She realized she hadn't noticed Steph's arrival when she collapsed with a whimper. No one else was around: not Alfred, not Tim. Just Steph, in the Manor doorway, wearing a pink fluffy robe. On the ground, now, the robe askew, coffee spilled all over it. Cass rushed to her side. "Steph!"
"Ouuugh," Steph said when Cass turned her over. "Ouuugh he's off-world already. Okay. Ouuugh. The charm's not working. Crap. Okay. Crap."
"Charm, what—the magic. Bruce? The spell is related to Bruce?"
"It's complicated," Steph said. She lifted Cass's arm. Cass watched, feeling spellbound herself, as Steph pressed warm sticky lips to her wrist, right over her pulse point.
"Sorry," Steph said. She dropped Cass's wrist, though not on purpose. It was just a side effect of passing out.