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Jason rang the doorbell.
A few moments later, the door swung open to reveal a tired-looking young woman in sweats, bags under her eyes, hair up in a straggly bun.
“Dad’s at work,” she said, briskly.
“I’m not here for your dad,” Jason said, patiently.
“I’m not speaking to him.”
“I’m not here on his behalf, either,” Jason said, now mildly irritated. “Don’t you drag me into that. You have his number.”
“Oh fine,” Babs said. “Then what brings you to our doorstep today, Jason?”
“A little birdie told Alfred your sis has the flu.” Jason unzipped his backpack, and hefted an insulated tureen out of it, and handed it off to Babs. “I’m just the courier, okay?”
Babs’s face softened as she took the package. “I’m sorry. Thanks. Do you want to come in?”
“If she’s taking visitors, yeah,” Jason said, tamping down the eagerness in his voice. “Had my flu shot, so I’m good.”
Babs ushered Jason down the hall, and knocked on the door. “Hon?—it’s Jason. He brought soup. I’ll be right back when it’s hot.” She patted Jason’s arm as she wheeled past him towards the kitchen.
Jason swung open the door.
“Wow,” he said, looking at the graveyard of Kleenex scattered all around Steph’s bed. “You look awful.”
Steph tossed aside a pile of papers—the Gazette, and it looked like a copy of Time—and shifted herself carefully up on her pillows. “Hi,” she said, in a raspy voice. “Feel awful.”
“Aw, I’m sorry, Stephie. I brought you some soup.”
Steph wrinkled her nose. “I hate soup. Soup sucks.”
“It’s Alfred’s chicken and rice.”
Steph shuddered.
“That bad, huh?”
“I’m so bored,” Steph said, bitterly. “I’m bored of soup, I’m bored of being stuck at home, and I’m bored of Barbara not letting me help.”
“You’re too sick to help, Stephie,” Jason said, making himself comfortable on the foot of her bed. “You’d get snot over her keyboard. You’re a walking, talking disease bomb.”
Steph balled up one of her snotty tissues and threw it at Jason’s face. He batted it directly into the trash can. Shoo-in for the NBA.
“You can’t even get out of bed without hitting your head on the floor, am I right, Steph?” Jason asked, patiently.
Steph curled up and pulled the blankets over her head until she was a lump. The lump made a long, miserable groaning sound.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Babs didn’t bother knocking when she came back, just banged open the door and then briskly nudged Steph to uncurl herself and sit up for the tray. Jason could smell the fragrant soup, and whoa, Babs had thrown in oyster crackers and ginger ale? She was trying, today.
Probably just because of the flu, though.
Jason swallowed his feelings, and got up and parked himself into a chair at the head of Steph’s bed. He touched the side of the bowl. “Careful, Stephie, it’s hot.”
Babs had already vanished. Apparently, there were limits to how much she’d unbend for the flu.
Steph glared at Jason. “Of course it’s hot, that’s the point of soup,” she said. “It’s hot, and that’s supposed to make my fever go down somehow.”
“Yeah, yeah, sorry” he said, sheepishly. Too much time with Alfred was turning him into a mother hen. It was hard not to feel protective of Steph, though.
He knew it made her feel like they were looking down on her, and he really didn’t mean to. He knew Steph could take of herself. Jason just thought she shouldn’t always have to.
As Steph grudgingly ate more soup, Jason starting leafing through the issue of Time, which was doing a special about vigilantes. All the Batman stuff was completely wrong. It always was. Maybe he should be a journalist, like Lois or Clark. He could write so much better than this.
“You know, I think Bruce is probably right, and we shouldn’t read stuff about ourselves,” Jason said, after ten frustrated minutes. He threw the magazine over his shoulder, and enjoyed the solid thunk of it hitting the window. “Half of it is pure bullshit.”
“What’s the other half?” Steph asked. She sneezed in the direction of the window, sneezed again, blew her nose like she was emptying a fire hydrant, and then cursed a blue streak.
“The other half is stuff that’s true that we don’t want to admit to,” Jason said. “So. You and Babs. Things still not so great, I take it?”
“She’s still being a complete bitch, if that’s what you mean,” Steph said, bitterly, and then sneezed, and blew her nose.
“Babs wants you to be here,” Jason said, leaning into the voice he used as Robin with people who’d just been shot at, and hoping Steph wouldn’t recognize it. “Steph, Babs was the one who asked Jim to talk to the judge.”
Babs hadn’t been the person to call CPS on Crystal in the first place...but that was a secret Jason and Bruce were planning to keep.
“I know!” Steph wailed. “I know I’m only here because of her.” She sniffled for half a minute before she gave up and violently blew her nose again. “And I hate being sick.”
Jason was still feeling kind of sick himself, worried about the tension in the Gordon household. What had initially seemed like a happy situation—Steph getting even more one-on-one time with Barbara, and a chance to really buckle down on the CS lessons—had gotten less so when the courts started agreeing with Steph’s lawyer and caseworker that Crystal was an unfit mother. The moment Jim mentioned the word adoption, Babs had gone cool on Stephanie, which made Stephanie feel raw and betrayed and defensive. Jason knew she was scared that Jim was going to back out of it, if Babs wasn’t with him on this.
You could always come to live with us, he thought. Bruce would adopt you in a heartbeat and then you’d be my sister.
He didn’t say it; he didn’t want to put the idea in Steph’s head that the Gordons were going to let her down after all. Jim wouldn’t do that. Babs would get over herself. Eventually. Dick hadn’t much cared for Jason at first, but he’d gotten his head out of his ass eventually, even if Jason thought the adoption thing had kind of rattled him more than he’d ever admit. Whatever. That wasn’t on him to fix; Dick and Bruce were going to have to work that out between them, just like Dick and Babs were going to have to work out their thing between them.
“It sucks,” he said instead. “You want me to read to you?”
“Yeah,” Steph said in a dismal tone of voice. “Something depressing as hell. I want to wallow.”
Jason considered this for a minute, as he perused the bookshelves in Steph’s room. Oh, perfect. He pulled the book off the shelf.
“It was so terribly cold,” he began. “Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. Evening came on, the last evening of the year. In the cold and gloom a poor little girl, bareheaded and barefoot, was walking through the streets...”
***
Steph had fallen asleep somewhere in the middle of “The Little Mermaid,” so he left her, wandering the house until he found Babs in the family study, working on her laptop.
“How’s she doing?”
“She’s sleeping,” Jason told her. “Aside from that...super stressed, worried, scared, alienated, feeling rejected by you…nothing you should worry about, though.”
“Project your mother issues onto someone else, Jason,” Babs said coldly, without bothering to look up at him.
Jason gritted his teeth so hard he’d swear something chipped. “Wow. The breakup was so bad you gotta take it out on me, huh?”
Babs stopped typing. “I—oh, dammit. I’m sorry. I am sorry, Jason. None of this is about you. But this thing with Stephanie is none of your damn business.”
“The hell it’s not,” he snapped. “She was my friend first, Babs!”
“Yeah, well, she’s your friend, but I’m the one who has to be her sister!”
“Oh my god.” Jason balled his hands into fists, digging his nails into his palms. “What is this? Did you get tired of her or something, now that she’s more than just an adoring protege? You let her get invested in you, Babs. You let her learn to lean on you, let her think you’d always be around when she needed help, and now you just don’t want to deal with her anymore? Because that’s the shittiest thing I’ve ever heard of, Barbara Anne Gordon.”
“Oh shut up, you little snot,” Babs snarled. She was flushed and resting her head in her arms, refusing again to look at him. “You don’t know what this is like. If it was you, you’d be—dammit. Dammit, Jason. It’s been just us, for so long. Me and Dad. I love Steph, but all this was just supposed to be temporary.” Babs lifted her face, and wiped at her eyes; she was crying, and Jason could see from the shudder running running through her torso that she was even more stressed than she’d looked at the door.
Jason knew it was supposed to be temporary, at least at first. Temporary until Crystal Brown got her act together. Until Crystal Brown came to her senses, until she could promise Stephanie that when Arthur Brown got out of prison, Crystal wouldn’t take him back. Until Crystal Brown could swear that she would never make Stephanie live in the same house as the father who’d hurt her so many times, in so many ways.
(Jason could remember Catherine folding him up and trying to hide him in herself, like a hen covering her chick with her feathers. Just that. Catherine crushing him in her arms, when Jason was so small she could cover his body with hers. He didn’t know for sure what she was protecting him from. He could guess, but he couldn’t remember.)
Crystal lived in some delusional, drug-addled world where she and Arthur and Steph were a happy, perfect family, and all they needed was a little more money and a membership at the country club. The last time she’d seen Steph, she’d screamed at her that she was an ungrateful brat who’d ruined everything.
And that was why the courts were about to terminate Crystal’s parental rights, at Stephanie’s request, and that was why Jim Gordon’s petition for adoption was probably going to go through pretty soon.
And that was the house that Jack built.
“Any day,” Jason managed, “Any day you and your dad decide you don’t want Steph after all, we’re right here, okay?” He tried to stop his teeth from grinding. “Send her over to our place. Bruce doesn’t do temporary.”
“Ahem,” Jim Gordon said from the doorway. “I don’t do temporary, either.”
Jason and Babs both froze.
“Jason, I need to speak to my daughter. Alone.”
Jason scrambled out of the room.
***
“I don’t want to talk about this, Dad,” Babs said tightly, the second Jason was out the door. “Jason and I both lost our tempers. We had an idiotic fight. It’s not a big deal.”
“No,” Jim said, sharply. “I’m sorry, honey, but I know damn well what you two were fighting about and...I think we two haven’t sat down and talked about this the way we should have.”
“There’s nothing to talk about, Dad,” Babs said, trying not to let her lingering fury leech into her voice. “You’ve made up your mind, and I don’t get a vote.”
“You’re right, Barbara,” Jim said. “I have made up my mind, and you don’t get a vote.”
Babs flinched.
Jim sat down heavily on the couch, and Babs turned her chair so they were facing each other. “Honey,” he said, and then he stopped. He leaned forward and rested his face briefly against his hands. “I don’t want you to ever think, for a second, that I love you any less than I have since the moment you set foot on our doorstep.”
“I know, Dad.”
“You know this isn’t about you, right, Barbara?”
Babs closed her eyes. “I know.”
“I love you, honey. I really, truly love you. And I need you to—”
“Be nicer to my little sister,” Babs finished for him, the bitterness swelling up against the root of her tongue, making her want to vomit.
“Yes,” her father said. “You can’t take your feelings out on her, Barbara. You just can’t.”
The hell I can’t, she thought, and swallowed against a gut-surge of self-loathing. She closed her eyes and nodded. “I know,” she said. “I’m not…” Her face twisted in a grimace. “Dad, I’m not...I don’t want to be mean. I love Steph. But I can’t. I can’t—” her throat worked. “You’re all I’ve got, Dad. It’s just us. It’s always been just us, since mom left us.”
“Oh honey,” Jim said, his voice so gentle. “I’ve still got you, and you’ve still got me. We always will. And now we’ve both got Stephanie, too.”
Babs shook her head. “I don’t think I can do this, Dad,” she said, and when she blinked, there were hot tears running down her face. Shit.
Jim was up off the couch, and crouching next to her, embracing her. “I know you can, honey.” He released her and stood, slowly, and kissed her head. “You are the strongest person I know.” He took her hand and squeezed it. He sat back down on the couch, leaning forward. “I didn’t want to push this on you, but...I was talking to Angela, and she gave me some numbers.”
“Oh hell,” Babs said, scrubbing at her eyes. “Counselors, I assume?”
“Yes,” Jim said, the corner of his mouth crooking. His mustache did that funny little thing it did, when he smiled in that tiny way. It was the first thing Babs could remember, coming into this house. Jim, leaning over her, smiling with his crooked red mustache. Hello, Barbara!
His hair was almost all white, now. He really wasn’t that old. But he was too old for another daughter.
Babs put her hand out. “Go ahead.”
Jim put a folded slip of paper into it.
“God, they just throw you to the wolves, don’t they,” she muttered, slipping it into a pocket. “Was it like that before?”
“Yup,” Jim said. “Once the papers go through, you’re on your own.”
They hadn’t gone through yet, but nobody doubted that they would. And nobody cared what she thought anyway. That was just how this worked; you went through your whole life thinking your life was going to go one way, and them somebody else decided to change it, and you didn’t have the slightest say in that.
You didn’t have to take her in. The thought slithered around her skull. Dad didn’t even know who she was, before you opened your mouth.
Well, she hadn’t had to train Steph, either. Steph was a raw little child, when Jason first dragged her back to the Clocktower, like a kid with a stray puppy. Babs’d pinged Bruce privately after that, laughing, saying, ”History repeats itself, huh, B?” Teenage Jason’s first crush. The second Robin, hot for a wanna-be Batgirl. It was cute.
But that raw little child had brains and a lot more skill than Babs had expected, and she was relentless. Steph hated Arthur as much as Babs loved Jim, and she refused to be sidelined. She kept popping her purple hood into everything Cluemaster-related, until they gave up and officially looped her in, just to keep an eye on her. Jason adored her, Bruce had grown fond of her, and Babs…
Babs had looked at Steph, and she’d thought, well, you want to be pushed, and if I pull you—. She’d thought, this kid could be great. Like Dick had been. Like Jason was going to be.
If she had known where this was going to lead—
Goddammit.
Babs fingered the slip of paper in her pocket. “Dad, why don’t you go get a cup of coffee? There’s a pot in the kitchen.”
“Hmm,” Jim said. “Is it fresh?”
“Made it an hour ago,” she said.
“You work too hard.”
“I know,” Babs sighed. “Believe me.”
***
Steph was still asleep, and it would be weird to just hang around waiting for her to wake up, when he knew Jim and Babs were probably having a big fight somewhere else in the house, so Jason retrieved Alfred’s dishes from her room, and took them out to the Mclaren, parked in the driveway. (His birthday present from when he turned sixteen. He hadn’t been able to drive it off the Manor grounds—well, not legally anyway—until he got through Driver’s Ed and passed his test, but Bruce hadn’t seen any point in waiting. Of course, he’d thrown in a couple of modifications—GPS tracking that was on all the time, and a check on the speedometer that automatically texted Bruce if it went above seventy miles an hour—that Jason didn’t even bother protesting, given that he’d literally run away from home just a few months prior. He’d drawn Bruce’s paranoid gaze on himself fair and square; he was lucky Bruce decided to go ahead and give him the car after all. Probably only had because of the disaster with Sheila.)
He checked his phone as he buckled his seat belt, so he wouldn’t tempted to pull it out once he was on the road. Two notifications, both from...
did she ask abt me?
Ugh, Dick.
could u let her know im thinkin about her ?
UGH. DICK.
No, he texted back. do it yourself you loser
He put the phone on airplane mode in case Dick texted him again, or tried to call him to mope at him or something, and tossed it face-down on the passenger seat. He glanced back at the house and sighed, crossing his arms over the leather steering wheel and resting his face on them, suddenly feeling too emotionally drained to drive. Project your mother issues onto someone else—well, Babs could just go fuck herself. He’d always known she could be mean when she was really angry or really stressed, just like Dick, but she’d never directed that at him before. He wondered if she knew about CPS. Those calls were anonymous, but she was Oracle. Maybe she blamed him for setting this in motion.
But she knew how bad things had been, didn’t she? She couldn’t really wish Steph back into that.
For the first time in a few years, Jason really wanted a cigarette.
She’d smoked. She’d lit up, between the first blow, the one that had broken his radius and shattered his ulna and the next, the one that had broken two ribs. Jason could remember that, vividly, the sight of the flame and the familiar scent of the smoke—she smoked Pall Malls, just like he had, before he met Bruce; go figure—even though you’d have thought the Joker would have had his full attention just then.
Maybe it was a made up memory. Maybe his mind had just tried to fill in what she’d been doing while the Joker was on him, before Bruce hauled him off and turned that pasty white face into a mess of red. It was the most brutal beating Jason had ever seen, and he’d felt almost as frightened of Bruce at that moment as he had been of the Joker. He’d had to look away from it, too hurt to move away the way he’d wanted to. He’d looked at her. He’d seen the lit cigarette drop from her nerveless fingers as she stood, transfixed in terror. He’d watched it bounce along the concrete floor towards him, still burning, and he’d thought, absurdly, man, I could use a drag of that.
Shock was a funny thing.
Feelings were funny things.
She’d tried to run, while Batman was still occupied pulping the Joker, and half of Jason had wanted to tell her to go go go, to get away while she still could; the other half wanted to shout after her not to bother, because Batman would track her down no matter where she went. He might have, if he’d had the oxygen to say anything at all. It was his struggle to sit up, so he could breathe more easily, that had finally drawn Bruce’s attention, made him drop the Joker’s broken, unresisting body and come over to Jason, bloody, gauntleted hands so gentle as they skimmed over him, looking for signs of hurt. Cradling his mangled arm, Jason had croaked, “She’s in on it—don’t let her get away—”, and that, he supposed, was the moment when he made his choice.
Everything after that was inevitable. She shouldn’t have tried shooting Batman. She definitely shouldn’t have tried blackmailing them with Jason’s identity; that pissed Bruce off, even more than the shooting had. But even if she hadn’t, the mere fact of what she’d already done to Jason had damned her forever in Bruce’s eyes, and Jason expected she’d be rotting away in an Ethiopian prison cell in any case.
He was glad she was overseas. It made it easier not to think about her, easier to know he could never see her again, even if he decided some day that he wanted to, even if he decided that he could forgive her.
He didn’t want to forgive her. He didn’t want to have hope.
He didn’t want Stephanie to have hope for Crystal, either, and that was so fucking selfish of him, to want them to have another bond in this. He knew that. To want for Steph to find safety and love the same way he had, by leaving behind the people who would never change, and finding a family that would give her everything she deserved.
But it wasn’t like he planned this, when he went to CPS. After he found out how bad things still were for Steph, even after they put Cluemaster in prison. He just knew he couldn’t leave things the way they were, couldn’t leave Steph with a mother drugged out of her mind who didn’t seem to care about her. (The drugs, he could forgive. He’d forgiven Catherine for the heroin. But Catherine had loved him, and she’d tried as hard as she could, and it wasn’t her fault she wasn’t stronger than she was.) Crystal let Arthur’s old buddies hang around the house all the time—she didn’t want Arthur to be pissed off at her when he got out—never mind that Steph had told her what had happened to her when she was little, never mind that they made Steph feel so stressed out, so unsafe, that her grades were dropping, and sometimes, when they were working together on a case, she would just zone out in front of him.
He hadn’t even told Bruce was he was going to do. He’d just done it.
He hadn’t thought ahead to where Steph might end up, not really. He’d sort of assumed she’d come stay with them; Bruce wouldn’t let her languish in foster care, just like he hadn’t let Dick or Jason. All he was really thinking was that Steph needed out of that house, and nobody else was doing anything.
That was probably how it would have gone down, if not for Babs, who’d gotten awfully fond of Steph, working with her; he thought Babs was starting to think of Steph as a sort of mini-Batgirl. So she’d convinced her father to get involved, even moved back in with her dad to make the home situation look better to Steph’s caseworker, in case the “police commissioner” factor wasn’t enough to overrule “single adult man” factor. And Steph had been fine with that, so neither Jason or Bruce pushed.
Maybe they should have, after all. But it was too late now; Steph and Jim had gotten more attached than anybody expected. And that was the problem. Babs hadn’t had to share her father with anybody for a long, long time. Jason could relate. Dick hadn’t been the only person who got jealous, when he came home and found a new kid in Bruce’s orbit; knowing how close they’d once been, seeing how easily they fell back into working together—it made Jason anxious, as if Bruce might decide he preferred the original model, and kick Jason back out onto the streets.
But Bruce would never, and eventually, Jason got over it. And Jim would never, and Babs was going to have to get over it, too. He kind of wanted to tell her so. Better to let her hash it out with her father, instead, though.
In the meantime, Jason was going to be here for Steph.
***
Babs wheeled herself down the hall, and pushed open the door to Steph’s bedroom, which someone—Jason—hadn’t bothered to latch.
Steph was sprawled across the bed, her long blonde hair still in its messy braid, pajamas mussed, and her face flushed with fever. Babs laid the back of her hand against Steph’s hot forehead. It was burning hot; her fever was up again. “You poor kid,” she muttered.
“Mmm,” Stephanie murmured. “Jay?”
“He went home, honey.”
Stephanie’s eyes fluttered open. “Oh hey, boss,” she rasped. She coughed, and started to sit up. Babs pushed her back against the pillows.
“You’re still on bedrest, Spoiler. Relax.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Stephanie stopped resisting, and after a few moments, she sank back into sleep.
Stephanie listened to her so much faster when she called her Spoiler. Even when she wasn’t fever-ridden. Babs felt a sudden wave of shame crash over her, and she wanted so, so badly to talk to Dick. Because he was the only person she knew who’d been in quite this situation, and because…
...well, she missed him, dammit.
She shut Stephanie’s bedroom door tightly behind her, and went out to the deck, clutching her phone hard so in her hand she almost felt the plastic casing twinge. She stared at it for a minute, stared blankly at all the texts she’d been ignoring—she should have blocked him, but she hadn’t—and then she hit call.
He picked up before the first ring finished. “Babs?” he said. “Hon—Babs, before you say anything. I talked to Jason, and he’s worried about you—”
“He’s worried about Steph,” she said, bluntly.
“Jason is worried about you,” Dick said, just a little bit sharp. “He loves you, too. I know you guys got into it. He came home and he bitched all over me that I was the only person who knew what you were going through and that it sucked that we weren’t talking.”
Babs closed her eyes. “God, he’s obnoxious.”
Dick chuckled. “Tell me about it.”
Can I? Am I allowed??
“He’s nosy,” she said.
She’ll let the dishes go for a week, before she touches them. And Dad doesn’t say anything!
“He’s a detective,” Dick said, dryly. “I did help train him.”
“If he hadn’t—” She stopped. “Never mind.”
“What?”
“Look, he doesn’t exactly have the greatest track record when it comes to judging people, does he?”
The call abruptly dropped off.
Babs blinked.
He’d hung up on her. Dick Grayson had just hung up on her. She stared at her phone. How...how dare he.
She redialed.
It took several rings before he answered this time, and his voice was arctic. “I’m sorry,” she said, straightaway. “I wasn’t trying to pick a fight. I’m not in a good place, and you’ve been through this and I just wanted to talk to you.”
“You don’t come after Jason, do you hear me?” Dick’s voice was clipped and cold. “Teasing is one thing, but you don’t try to tell me she was his fault.”
How dare he, how dare he put her on the defensive, when she came to him asking for help!
She hung up without a word.
Four minutes later, when she was curled over herself and shaking, her phone buzzed again, and this time, it was Jason calling her. She braced herself, and picked up the call. “I’m sorry, Jason, I didn’t mean that—”
“I don’t care,” Jason said. He was lying; he sounded like he’d been crying not too long ago. She was going to have to fix things with him, later. Dammit, dammit, dammit, why did they keep doing this? “I am so fucking tired of you two trying to drag me into this,” Jason said, and his voice was starting to quiver. “Fucking make up or just get over yourselves. I don’t even care anymore.”
“Jason,” Babs said softly, “I am sorry. That was such a shitty thing for me to say, and I know it’s not true.” She thought she heard a hitch in Jason’s breathing. He wanted that apology. “I honestly only called Dick because I wanted to…” she faltered. “He and you used to be Steph and me.”
Silence.
“Your family made it work,” she said, quietly. “Help me with mine.”
A hand over the receiver, a muffled, unintelligible discussion, and then Dick was back on the line.
“Hi Babs,” he said, and the ice was gone from his voice. “Talk to me.”
Babs took a deep breath. “Hi.”