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It was a slow night in Gotham, which just… didn’t feel right to Steph. So instead of cutting her Batgirl patrol short and heading home to study for the midterm she had in two days, she hit up the comms to see if anyone else needed a hand.
Robin and Nightwing were fine, apparently eating falafels and chatting with some stray cats after interrupting a carjacking. Tim was off with Young Justice, Jason was with the Outlaws, Babs was doing some fairly intense cold-case research that Steph knew would end with her sneezing over some dusty police file and Cass was having a movie night with Alfred.
Steph finally asked Bruce, knowing that he always had something going on.
Being left out of a case is fine -- they all do their own investigations, there’s nothing at all unusual about that -- but there was something about the sharpness of Bruce’s voice when he said, “You’re not needed, Batgirl,” that hit Steph the wrong way.
It had felt personal, in a way things between them hadn’t in a long while.
So Steph did what she did best: ignored the hell out of Bruce’s pettiness and showed up anyway.
Immediately she could tell that she wasn’t actually needed. The kidnappers weren’t exactly supervillain material. The kids were unharmed and locked in a room together.
She couldn’t figure out why Bruce had tried to keep her away.
She helped zip-tie the kidnappers, who Bruce had dealt with quickly and easily while she’d still been assessing the situation and trying to find whatever hidden threat she was meant to stay away from.
And it was Bruce that she was dealing with, she realized suddenly. There was a stiffness in his shoulders, a tightness in his jaw showing that he was uncomfortable with something, and that wasn’t a Batman trait at all.
Only the fact that the kidnappers were still conscious -- albeit dazed -- kept her from asking what was up.
“You can go now,” Bruce said. He still hadn’t unlocked the door the kids were behind, even though Steph knew that they’d been there for hours.
“What? There are like five kids in there,” Steph said. “I’ll help. Kids love Batgirl.”
That strange twist of his mouth again, and then Bruce said, “Okay.”
It sounded almost like he was trying to convince himself that it was a good idea.
Steph rolled her eyes as she unlocked the door. The kids themselves were totally unharmed, and the kidnappers had clearly known what they were doing in one respect: the room was stocked in juice boxes and tablets, and the kids were for the most part calmly playing games. They ranged between roughly four and six years old, and there were loud gasps when Batgirl and Batman barged into the room.
There was no clear-cut demographic of the children -- two boys, three girls, a variety of ethnicities, though Steph noticed they all wore nice clothes, clearly no hand-me-downs, and their shoes were trendy and had clean soles. Chosen for their parents’ wallet size instead of anything more nefarious, most likely, which made Steph relieved.
Steph was checking the kids over, making sure everyone was physically and mentally good when one of the girls said, “Thank you for saving us, Batgirl!”
Steph looked at her directly for the first time and felt her heart drop. She knew that face. She’d seen it a thousand times, she’d seen it in the pictures her mom still had hanging in the hallway from her childhood. The same eyes, the same baby-fine blonde hair, the same wide smile. Other things were different -- she couldn’t stop staring, couldn’t stop seeing the shape of her mom’s jaw, her dad’s ears, and her loser ex-boyfriend Dean’s freckles and eyebrows.
It felt like she was frozen, like the way she felt in dreams sometimes, like the air itself had solidified and moving just took too much effort.
She could feel Bruce’s presence behind her, heard the rumble of his voice letting the kids knew that their parents would be so proud of how brave they were being, that the bad people were going to jail, that help was on its way.
She blinked, and everything rushed back into focus. And she was still standing there, dressed as Batgirl, while the girl she’d given birth to beamed up at Batman like he was the most amazing thing she’d ever seen.
“You’re welcome,” Steph tells her daughter.
The girl smiled and flung her arms around Steph’s waist. Her face was pressed into Steph’s belly, just inches away from the c-section scar, and Steph rested her hand on her back, wished that she wasn’t wearing gloves so that she could feel how warm and alive and present she was.
It’s a moment she never thought she’d have - that she’d never really wanted to have, if she’s honest, because she knew that if she held her daughter she might never let go -- and it’s over before she knows it. The girl let go, hurried back to the other kids, beaming and saying, “I hugged Batgirl!” like it’s the biggest accomplishment of her life.
One look at Bruce and what she already knows is true is confirmed beyond a doubt; he’s watching her carefully, like she’s something that might break. Like she’s in danger of doing something dumb.
She shook her head lightly at him, trying to show without words that she’s not going to break, that she’s not going to try to do something stupid, that she’s--
That she’s happy and sad and trying very, very hard not to think about the fact that her daughter is four years old and has survived her first kidnapping.
They lead the kids out of the room, shielding them from the kidnappers with their capes. Bruce lets her accompany her daughter, holding her hand and marveling at the way her little fingers curled perfectly into Steph’s, the way her daughter held her head high, tears unshed.
“You are so, so brave,” Steph tells her, because she’s never going to have this chance again, and she’s wearing a mask, and her daughter is looking at her with something akin to hero-worship in her eyes. Steph remembers being little and seeing Batman and the way the thought of heroes out there making the world safer had made her feel, and it twists something inside all sharp and intense to think of her daughter feeling that when looking at Steph. “Always remember that. You’re incredible, and your parents are so lucky to have you.” Quieter, because she had the chance, and she knew better than to squander a chance -- “Your mother’s so proud of you.”
“She’s gonna be, I didn’t cry hardly at all,” the girl said, and Steph’s heart twisted again, because there’s sweetness and love and pride in her expression at the thought of her mom seeing how brave she was. This is a girl who is happy, who is loved, who will have the best possible life.
Steph smiled at her as widely as she could and waved, not trusting her voice.
Before she left, she saw a woman break through the line of cops and cry out, “Hope!”
Steph’s daughter ran into the woman’s arms, and just like that, the spell was broken, and she’s not Steph’s daughter anymore. She’s someone else’s daughter, a woman who was sobbing with relief that her little girl was unharmed, who was clinging her daughter so tightly that the girl -- Hope, her name was Hope -- was pushing away at her, laughing and talking a mile a minute about her ordeal, and Steph heard her voice, crystal-clear, say, “Batgirl rescued me, Momma, she said I was brave.”
Steph barely made it out of sight before the emotions overwhelmed her. There’s a building, two blocks over, and the roof has an abandoned, overgrown garden, and Steph likes to go there, sometimes. She was standing in the overgrown garden and Bruce was hugging her, and she’s laughing and crying all at once.
“Hope,” she said into Bruce’s chest, conscious of the fact that minutes before, she’d been holding her own daughter like this. “You knew that already, didn’t you?”
“You know I’ve been keeping track of her.” Bruce’s voice was gentle. “Do you want to know anything else?”
Steph shook her head, still pressed tight against the Batsuit -- the smell of kevlar and sweat and faintly, leather -- but then asked, terrified of the answer, “That-- she hasn’t had experiences like that before, right?”
She doesn’t even really want to know the answer, doesn’t want to know if her daughter had been doomed from the start, if her bad luck was somehow genetic, but Bruce replied. “She’s never been targeted before, no. She handled herself admirably.”
“She did, didn’t she?” Steph said, obscurely proud. She doesn’t really want to but she lets go of Bruce, steps back to sit on a wrought-iron bench. In the daylight it would be scorching hot, but at night, the metal was cool and inviting.
Bruce sits beside her.
“I know I shouldn’t have gone,” Steph said, because acknowledging her own fuck-ups is something she’s used to, “and I’m glad you tried to keep me away.”
“I didn’t intend for you to find out about this,” Bruce said. “I know the topic is… painful.”
Steph opened her mouth to tell Bruce he had no idea, to try to put to words the conflicting swirl of emotions-- not regret, exactly, because she knew with bone-deep certainty that she’d made the right decision to not raise her daughter, to keep her away from the wreckage that had been her life the past few years, but a more abstract feeling of sadness that the circumstances had been necessary at all in the first place. A wish of what might have been, had she been older, had she been prepared, had she not grown up the way she had. A thought that at some point in the future, things might be different.
But then she realized that Bruce, out of everyone, actually would understand. He had children.
“My mom told me,” Steph began, unsure as to how Bruce would take this, but knowing she had to set the words free that were bubbling up in her throat, “that kids, whether or not they were yours, are the one thing in the world guaranteed to break your heart. Because you want so much for them, you want them to have everything that you never had, that could never possibly be, and that-- that it’s impossible. You can’t remake the world, can’t make it a kinder place. You just have to live with it. That loving a child meant pinning your heart to your sleeve, and having to suffer the consequences.”
Bruce didn’t say anything, but reached over and clasped her hand in his own.
“I think-- I think she might have been wrong. About not being and to remake the world, because that’s what we do every night. And she was right, but… I know she didn’t want me to go through everything I had.” Looking back, she’d been a lot younger than she’d realized when she’d been pregnant. Just a few scant years older than Damian, and he was so firmly a child in her mind that it made her reconsider all those feelings she’d had at the time of being grown-up. She hadn’t felt it at the time, but she was older now, had a world of experiences that shone a light on exactly how young she’d been when she’d gotten pregnant.
She knew that to Bruce, she likely still was a child. Right now, she didn’t feel it.
“Like, I knew she was out in the world before,” Steph said. “But now… She’s real, in a way that she wasn’t before.”
“Her life is significantly safer than ours,” Bruce said, reassuringly. She could hear the truth of it in his voice, trusted him on this. Then he said, “I knew you didn’t want to see her.” There was no condemnation in his voice, only understanding, but Steph felt compelled to defend herself anyway.
“I wanted to see her so badly,” she said. She couldn’t look at Bruce, just looked at the tangle of dying plants around them, at the Gotham skyline, all soft lights and sharp edges, beyond that. “It felt like losing part of myself at first, but I knew… I knew what her life would be if I kept her. What my life would be.” She took a deep breath. “If I’d held her, and wasn’t strong enough to let her go afterwards, I would have been condemning us both.”
Now it seemed unfathomable. She wouldn’t be Batgirl now, she knew that much. Would never have been Robin. Spoiler might have been laid to the wayside, like it had when she’d been pregnant, but she remembered how she’d longed to go out in the night even when her belly made her waddle and struggle to sit up. Likely she still would have figured out a way.
But she wouldn’t have taken the risks she had. Wouldn’t have thrown herself into things as wildly. She probably wouldn’t have died, wouldn’t have broken her mother’s heart, wouldn’t have caused all the grief she could still sometimes see in Tim and Cass’s face when it was alluded to.
Instead, she knew the path her life would have taken: trying at first to stay in school, but working long hours. Her mom being forced to babysit every spare moment, life turning into a neverending scheduling conflict. Quitting school in favor of a minimum wage paycheck and abandoning hope of becoming something greater, something more. She might have managed a nursing degree, her own mother had with an infant at home, but she’d seen that path, too.
She wouldn’t be here, now: sitting on a rooftop with Batman, filled with a flurry of might-have-beens, having just saved a roomful of children who looked up to her with something akin to worship. Wouldn’t be worrying about a midterm in biology.
And the woman she’d seen, the one who’d loved her daughter enough to elbow her way through a police line, wouldn’t have that.
“She looked so loved,” Steph said.
“She has good parents,” Bruce said. “She’s taken care of. Cherished.”
“She seemed okay, and the kidnappers were jokes, but they didn’t… this isn’t going to hurt her, is it?” Steph had been kidnapped plenty, had been involved in various criminal acts even younger, and she knew it had skewed the way she looked at the world.
“She attends a preschool,” Bruce said. “They were meant to be going on a field trip to a farm outside of town. One of the kidnappers disguised themselves as the van driver, while the others distracted the teachers. One of the other children on board’s father is the director of a medical group, I understand that there are delays with getting treatment for the child of one of the kidnappers. She was never harmed.”
Oh. That explained the juice boxes, they loved their own child enough to do something desperate to save them.
“That kid’s going to get the treatment it needs, right?” Steph already knew the answer but asked anyway.
“They’ll get a letter from Wayne Memorial this week,” Bruce confirmed.
Steph had another question, one that Bruce likely wouldn’t answer. Shouldn’t answer, but she wanted confirmation. “Did… Does it feel different, with Damian, from the others?”
Bruce took a minute to think, long enough that she knew he was answering her underlying question with care. “At first. The others, I chose. I brought them in, I thought it through, I knew them and wanted them in my life. Wanted to make a home for them. I didn’t choose him. And at first, if anything, it was harder.”
Steph listened. She wasn’t sure if Bruce had ever spoken of this out loud.
“But then it was like he’d always been a part of my life, just like the others, a part that was irreplaceable and unique but that I loved in the same way.”
That settled something within her, something she hadn’t realized was bothering her.
A long pause, then Steph broke the silence. “How do you do it?”
Bruce looked at her, waiting for clarification.
“Send your kids out there every night,” Steph said. She could still feel the way her heart had dropped when she’d realized that her daughter was in danger, and couldn’t fathom what it would be like knowing her child was out trying to punch supervillains in the face. “Doesn’t it scare you?”
“Every day,” Bruce said. “Every night.”
She wondered if he was thinking about Jason’s death, about all the close calls. About how Damian flung himself into danger so recklessly, like he still believed he was invincible. The way all kids thought they were invincible. About Dick, Tim, Cass. About all of his children, choosing the fight over safety every time.
She wondered if he was thinking about her in Leslie’s clinic, clutching his hand and dying.
Bruce continued, looking down at their currently clasped hands. “I have faith in their ability to keep themselves as safe as possible. I train them as best I can, make sure they have the best equipment. Try to always know where they are, in case I can help. But mostly… your mother was right. Having kids is putting a piece of yourself out in the world and not knowing if it’s safe or not, and being grateful for every day that it is.”
He’d been careful with his words, never said you, but Steph could feel the weight of a small fortune’s worth of equipment and technology in her suit, in her belt. The communicators that shared her location.
The way he’d tried to protect her by trying to keep her away tonight, so that she wouldn’t have to face this complicated churn of emotions.
She rested her head on his shoulder and mumbled, “Thank you. For everything.”
She felt him shift, and the slightest hint of pressure as he pressed a kiss into the top of her cowl.
“There’s a file, if you want to know more about her.”
She’d known that, from the moment she’d made him promise to keep her baby safe. She knew Bruce didn’t do half-measures, that he took each promise he made as a lifelong commitment. She’d known that, and she’d never consciously thought about it, because it was too much. “No, I think-- I think I saw enough.”
She’d seen a child deeply loved, a child that was brave and beautiful and bright. That flung herself at heroes, safe in the knowledge that they were only there to help.
She’d seen all she needed to know that her daughter was living the life she’d hoped to have herself as a child. That she was living the life that Steph had hoped for when she’d signed those papers.
That this was one glorious instance of one of her choices going exactly right.