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If you were to ask Cassandra – which you wouldn’t, but for the sake of argument say you would – which of her family members were the most dangerous, she would point to her baby brother. Jason was older than her, of course – only by a few years – but she had dubbed him baby and he had not argued. He hadn’t been around to argue in the first place, and given their rather complicated relationship after, he’d never contested the title.
She could defeat nearly anyone in combat, meta or not. But Cassandra had no interest in putting her skills to the test. She craved peace, a time in which her skills would not be necessary, where a black bat could fly the sky and simply breathe without being called back to save every lost soul.
Jason did. Or, had. He busied himself by playing up his own incompetence, never going full out in a fight even when he was pit-mad and furious with their father now, but before his return he had challenged himself and found teachers so skilled she suspected David Cain had learned from them, too. And then he’d defeated them all.
But that was really only half the battle – because Jason primarily fought with words, cutting and stabbing with things intangible, things designed to hurt more than a broken bone or bullet. It was a concept Cassandra would never understand, and a method of fighting she would never learn. It made him more dangerous than her, in a world where words mattered more than the truth.
Jason was also terrifyingly honest with himself. Which Cassandra appreciated. She’d been there the minute he’d realized he valued a relationship with his family, as selfish as it was, over bettering the city. Because he believed in killing. He didn’t like it, contrary to what he told everyone – and there was another one of his lies – but he believed in it.
She thinks he’d stopped for her. Because she’d asked. And – she wouldn’t be wrong, exactly. She’d given him an easy out.
It was not one, despite it all, that she’d ever regretted.
X
Stephanie would’ve put her money on Cass no matter the odds, but she saw through Jason’s ploys with the ease only another street kid could. She’d been fortunate enough to have a roof over her head – but like him, she’d spent much of her childhood escaping that roof for as long as possible. Underestimation kept people like them alive.
He had no interest in anything greater than protecting his city and his people – so, she knew he was full of shit when he cried about lucky shots and sneaky bastards. Injuries, she’d realized, were the first thing he’d learned could bring Bruce and Dick out of their rage and disappointment.
She’d rammed herself into Jason’s life before Cassandra had, and she’d held his hand on those nights where he bled himself and broke himself for some semblance of the kind of unconditional care his family owed him. She’d spoken for him and fought for him, and she bore no love for Bruce to get in the way of that.
So, Stephanie would have said Cass. There was no situation Jason could ever be put in where revealing himself became more important than hiding himself; nothing he wanted that could draw him out like that.
She thought, sometimes, that he’d pretended long enough to become.
X
Dick would have answered Bruce, without hesitation.
He, of all his siblings, had never quite escaped that initial awe that had come with the Dark Knight holding his hand out to a grieving child. Faith unbreakable, regardless of the facts laid out in front of him. For all the hurt Bruce had done to him, Dick was always there to forgive and move on. And for all the knowledge that Bruce was far from the fastest, the smartest, the strongest of their lot – Dick was there to believe.
His sisters were right to judge him on his blindness, then. Because Dick looked at Jason and saw regret. Severed stories and happy endings long since buried.
He saw ghosts.
X
Bruce would have said any of them, because he saw all his children as such beautiful, good things beyond what he could ever hope to be. And he didn’t. Hope, that was. His self-hatred was too old and deep to really be called hate, now. And his children were so good –
He would have said so because he believed dangerous meant competent meant best.
So he would have said all of them. Damian and his spitfire temper, Tim and his calculating intelligence, Stephanie and her wicked-sharp smiles, Cassandra and her steady silences, Dick and his almost-flight.
Bruce loved all his children equally. But he did not express his love to them, equally. It wasn’t intentional. He would have loathed himself more for that fact had he realized it.
He would’ve said yes, even Jason, but only if pressed. And he would not have said that Jason was not the first face to appear in his mind’s eye, when he thought of the question. And maybe, that Jason had not crossed his thoughts at all.
X
Tim was hyper-intelligent and critical of questions like this; he would have thought it a trick question and pointed towards Damian, much to his younger brother’s glee. But that would have been a lie; Tim considered Barbara Gordon the most dangerous of his family.
Years ago he might have said Dick, years prior to that he might have said Bruce. But having endured the interim with the bone-deep exhaustion of one twice his age, Tim had grown past sentimental, emotional answers.
He would have answered Barbara for the same reasons Cassandra would have chosen Jason. She, too, worked best forgotten, worked to be forgotten. She fought with code and electricity and words, and she was the single greatest asset the Batfamily had at their disposal.
There were worse things than death; Bruce’s contingency plans all involved the eradication or injury of his compatriots. Barbara needed no violence to cause even greater harm to them; to erase someone from existence, after all, was only a keyboard away, and far more devastating. Tim hoped to follow in her footsteps, one day.
And – as for family –
Whether Bruce had intended it or not, whether he approved or not, his children had expanded their small family without his input, without his permission. Barbara Gordon had a father. More importantly, she had a father that loved her. She’d needed no Dark Knight to rescue her; no fabled hero to lift her out of the shadows. She’d built herself from the ground up, pushed herself forward through sheer force of will, and she had done impossible things. But she hadn’t done them alone. And so while Tim hesitated to call her sister, like Stephanie and Cassandra and Jason did, she was as much a part of the family as he was. She was not liminal, not in their eyes – but she was in Bruce’s, and that afforded her room to work in ways his children could not; ways that only Jason really emulated.
So, Tim would have answered Damian. But he would have meant Barbara.
X
Damian’s answer would have surprised no one, save, perhaps, the sibling of which he spoke; Dick.
He had not yet outgrown that adoration and awe Tim had seen so brutally wiped away from his own eyes. Dick was the first to offer Damian a gentle hand, unrestrained love and respect. He may have held his father in high regard, but it was Dick who came to him when memories had him shaking in the early hours of the morning, Dick who burst into every school event with a smile and warm presence. It was Dick who had been his partner, his Batman, his father, in ways Bruce had trouble being.
And Damian was not wrong to put his faith in Dick, not at all. Richard Grayson had let two of his brothers down in ways he would never forgive himself for, and he would not repeat those mistakes with the third. And that – his family, his failings on their end – was something that would always hold Dick back.
If Jason was a ghost, Tim was a stranger. And Damian was a new beginning.
X
Barbara was a realist, at her core, and so she would think of dangerous in terms of harm; which of her family’s absence would cause the most harm. And she would have had no single answer for you.
It came down, she thought, to herself, and to Jason.
They’d endured Bruce’s absences. They were exhausting and painful, but every time they sorted each other out he came barreling back into their lives dismissive of their grief and their struggles.
Tim was fleeting, dancing between the concerns of Gotham and his friends – and while Red Robin was a welcome sight shooting across the Gotham skyline, the city functioned without him. The family functioned without him.
Dick was the heart of the family, but his absences too were only a minor setback in the grand scheme of things. The world turned grey and rained and the thrill of patrol faded, but it was, after all, a job to be done – and so done it was. Bludhaven needed him more than Gotham these days, even when he was called back properly – and they’d all learned to adjust to his absence.
Damian was too young to have built himself into a force of his own, yet, and while the family seemed frailer, a little less steady, his absence would not have broken them.
Cassandra was, despite her lethality, the easiest missed. She served the cause, not the man, and after she had relocated halfway across the world – well. She was an unexpected, welcomed surprised when she appeared, but they did not depend upon her presence.
Stephanie had carved out her independence with her bare hands, and clung to it with a viciousness Barbara did not often see. She was less concerned with the Rogues and their plotting than she was the people of Gotham – and so she worked parallel to the rest of them, not really intersecting in her work.
Barbara, however, supported the entire Batfamily regardless of their location or their wishes. She’d protected the entire Justice League, once – and when her net had grown smaller, so, too, had her might. She was Lady Luck as much as she was a Guardian Angel, unseen and unnoticed unless she absolutely needed to speak to them. And if her domain was the intangible – Jason’s was the physical.
He’d not situated himself as a crime lord for nothing. Barbara handled technology, information – and Jason kept the underworld of Gotham in line. He knew of every hired killer, every lazy plot, every would-be Rogue well before they reached the streets – and, most of the time, took care of them prior to their arrival. Wayne Industries was, after all, a tantalizing prize – especially with such an airhead as a CEO – and everyone from Black Mask to the local Families had tried to take it, at some time or another.
She sent information to him. He pretended it was some anonymous tip, and she pretended he didn’t pack lead and steel.
She’d run the calculations. Without the both of them, the Bats and Birds of Gotham would cease to function in anywhere near the same way as they did now within half of a year. A full year, if only one of them vanished.
But she would never say it, of course.
Barbara was a realist; and to speak truth to something that could be so damning was to tempt fate. She would never have answered you.
X
Jason would’ve said Bruce. Not for his physical prowess, for his tactical genius or his frightening intelligence – all things any one of his children could easily outstrip him in. That would’ve been too easy.
Jason never really forgiven the man for his younger siblings. They should have been going to school, doing extracurriculars, studying for exams and heading off to college – not alternating between laying out dangerous criminals and being stuck on bedrest for the injuries that violence incurred.
The kind of charisma it took to convince not, one, not two, but seven people to – well, do what they did? (And Barbara and Stephanie would have killed him, to know he counted them among Bruce’s victims but without him they never would have donned a suit - )
Bruce loved them. Sure. Sometimes. In his own, entirely inadequate way. He’d been mostly normal for Dick, and only slightly weirder for Jason. But after –
Jason had no problem admitting Bruce had changed after his death, for the very simple reason that he had become more obsessive about collecting broken children and even more neglectful to their needs. He’d taken Tim in as Robin and left him alone in a house with parents who barely acknowledged him. He’d taken Cassandra in as another soldier and never tried to teach her that violence was not the only solution. He’d taken Damian in in much the same way – and Jason had a sick feeling in his gut, when he thought of it, that Bruce didn’t even bother play-acting a caring adult around them.
When he’d been younger, there had been movie nights and hugs and days spent together. Bonding, showing up to his school functions and showing him off to coworkers. There’d been encouragement and love and care. There’d been promises, too.
So it was with a kind of grief-stricken horror that Jason had realized that it had been a farce. The change in Bruce was the loss of his need to keep up that mask with children to whom it was not quite so necessary. Dick had has his parents, Jason had had – for a brief moment – his mother. The rest of them had had no one, nothing to compare to, to set their compass by.
It was Bruce, and Bruce alone, that could convince any of the children he surrounded himself with to die for him, for his cause, to blunt and blind themselves on his whim.
And it was not something Jason would admit; that he feared this, the thing that made Bruce so dangerous – not to Gotham, not to the city at large. But to his children. To his family.
And Jason would never be able to forgive it.