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Chapter Text

Stephanie Brown was a Gotham girl to her core. She was so born-and-raised, she could even sort of remember a time before Batman -- or at least if she really thought back, she could kind of remember the first time Batman started showing up in headlines. He wasn't front page at first. It was tabloid shit at the beginning, the type her mom always flipped through in the checkout line of the supermarket. People were convinced the Jersey Devil had come back to roost; by "people," Stephanie generally meant the three guys who hung around in the parking lot of the 7-11, always bumming cigarettes and telling anyone who'd listen (or wouldn't) what they thought about rich jackoffs getting everyone else involved in war in the Middle East.

It was a month later, when someone caught a better-than-usual photo of the Batman, that all hell broke loose well and truly for good. Caped superheroes came with caped supervillains to fight them, and no place on Earth was quite as bad as Gotham City when it came to sheer ridiculous mayhem. It ended up being such a fact of life -- be careful with what you grow, the zoo's a lost cause, and Halloween's just asking for trouble -- that new Gothamites couldn't even begin to imagine the city BC, Before Costumes. But Steph remembered. She still remembered when people told stories about the Jersey Devil in Gotham City, not the Batman.

Crime was a steady background hum in her life, especially in the East End, but recently it'd graduated from hum to straight-up ominous horror movie soundtracking. Steph's mom started talking more and more about moving back to Bridgeton after their lease was up. Steph had been reacting with less and less disgust to the idea. Bridgeton was safer, and with more cousins and aunts and a tribal headquarters full of potential babysitters there, it'd probably be easier on a newly single mom to raise a teenage daughter. Crystal would love for Steph to spend more time with her uncle and less time worrying about her father.

Her father, who now lived on the other side of town and was a supervillain.

She knew a few things about the whole fiasco. Not as much as she'd have liked, but she knew her mom was in on it once, and she knew that the whole supervillain thing probably led to the divorce -- how could it not? -- and finally, she knew her dad was the Cluemaster.

Honestly, she felt a little annoyed. Not only was her dad a supervillain, but he was also a shitty one, too. Her father was a Riddler knockoff, and even the Riddler was only a second-rate villain. Definitely one only people from Gotham, maybe from New Jersey would know about. The Riddler was the Golden State Killer of Gotham City supervillainery, and her father was his copycat. She could never attend Related to A Psycho Anonymous, she'd get bullied by all the other kids.

And, if she fucked up one more time on the seam of this hood, she'd get bullied by the superhero kids too. She had just managed to stab herself in the thumb with a sewing needle for the third time in as many minutes and had to take a few deep breaths before pausing the YouTube video she was hunched over watching. With that breath, she sat up straight again and arched her back; her spine let out two satisfying cracks. The paused video meant that her phone had exited fullscreen mode again, and she could see that she'd been at this sewing project since well past midnight. It was now closer to 3:30 than 3 AM and definitely edging past the point of no return. Another hour awake and she'd might as well make an all-nighter out of this.

She leaned back and then looked out the window. Her view was on the side of the apartment with a straight shot to Crime Alley's Italian quarter, and sometimes she thought if she kept watching, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the night, she might catch a glimpse of one of the city's fearless protectors swooping down from above to stop, she didn't know, a mugging or something. 

It had happened once or twice, rare as watching the sky and waiting to see a meteoroid streak across it, but still. It had been a few years ago, so she probably had seen that second Robin at work. The silhouette was definitely too small to be the big old Bat himself, and Batgirl usually operated in Midtown. Stephanie knew that that Robin had moved on to Bludhaven -- in her more uncharitable moments, Steph was sure Bludhaven was swiping Gotham's homegrown heroes with a pay raise or something so they could keep their own city safer and the property taxes higher -- but in her mind, he'd always be the "new" Robin to her. The new-new Robin, this most recent one, well. She didn't know what to think of this one.

What she did know was this new-new Robin didn't think it was all that worth his time to go after the kind of small-fry that liked to plague the East End. Batman and Robin, way back in the beginning, used to spend all their time fixing up Crime Alley and the new Robin even had that accent that just screamed for the world to hear that when he was tossing around goons in the avenues, he was there to take care of his own. Nowadays though, Batman and Robin III moved down to where Batgirl usually operated, even to Lowtown. And Steph got it. It made sense. Villains had been getting bigger and badder, and they'd been turning their gaze away from the little island city of Gotham, getting international with their exploits. Stopping Scarecrow from fear toxin-ing the entire eastern seaboard, or those crazy assassin people from killing the president of the US, on balance, probably mattered more than stopping some washed-up game show host from playing a very violent scavenger hunt in the most lost-cause part of a city of lost causes. Hell, Steph definitely only cared because that game show host happened to be related to her, and also she had to live in this stupid lost-cause city. 

Steph sighed and checked her phone again. 3:32 AM. She only had a little hemming to go before she was done with this outfit, but it was a Tuesday night and she was still at least pretending for her mom's sake to be interested in not being a high school dropout. She could catch three hours of sleep and work on this when she got back from school.

Stuffing her little project into the garbage bag under her bed, Steph took one last glance out the window. Then, she closed the blinds and collapsed into her bed, shutting eyes that had gotten scratchy and dry from being awake for so long.

The thing about her father was that he wasn't always bad. Most days, in fact, he was fine. He was never the most caring father of the year or anything, and Steph rarely saw him for years of her childhood, but sometimes that was because he was going down to the docks to get a paycheck for eight hours of honest work. And fine, sometimes it was because her father had a tendency to spiral due to a good amount of narcissism, egomania, and what Steph would armchair diagnose as "the obsessive need for everyone to think he's the smartest guy in the room," but here's the thing: she remembered being seven years old, and her dad reading to her. 

He never read fiction; that wasn't a thing in the Brown household. His whole adage was that "Truth will always be wilder than fiction could dare dream," which Steph was now old enough to think was a pompous bullshit way to phrase it. But he'd read stuff out loud to her, tell her about Gotham's history, or long term potentiation in the prefrontal cortex, or common typographical tools, from a book he checked out (or probably stole) from the North Gotham Public Library. She and her father, they both had a brain for that kind of thing. A head for useless trivia, her mom called it. 

And sometimes, very very rarely, her father would sit down to do a puzzle like he usually did in the evenings, pause, and then turn slightly so Steph could see from her orthogonal end of the dinner table. And he'd go through the puzzle out loud, explaining his thinking: when to use algorithms to systematically eliminate answers, and how to use a heuristic to narrow the field. She was never allowed to ask questions, but she had been allowed to listen: if only because he liked a captive audience.

It wasn't much, but it was enough to plant seeds, and with an internet connection and the free time of an elementary-school-aged kid, Steph could practice on her own. Sometimes, she'd do it for hours; so long that when she went to sleep, she'd still be playing back a game of sudoku in her dreams. 

She wouldn't claim to be all that good with people -- another thing she probably got from her dad -- but she did know how to put together a few clues. Two years ago, when delivery drivers were talking about their trucks getting knocked over by a gang of masked robbers, the Gotham PD was checking the Warehouse District to catch them before they could fence their loot. But Steph knew it wouldn't be in the Warehouse District at all. The robbers made a habit of cutting open the locks in a distinctive triangular motion, then wrenching it open through the corner. 

It was obvious to her that the robbers were hiding their stolen goods somewhere in the piers and hangars of Tricorner Yards, right under the PD's noses, a pictographic clue that trained detectives just weren't picking up on.

Then, when her father would return with paychecks from a new job with details he was cagier than usual about, Steph crept out of her room one night to look at the checks. It only took a moment looking at the routing number for her brain to engage and crack the hexavigesimal code -- 18964803666892 became CLUEMASTER and as hard as she tried, she couldn't go back to three seconds ago, when it was just numbers.

When she went to sleep that night, she kept playing back numeral codes in her dreams.

Steph woke up that morning groggy, with a migraine and a hellishly dry mouth. Her body was punishing her severely for even thinking she could stay up late with no consequences, and it didn't intend to stop until she got some coffee right into her body. There was just enough time, too, for her to make one scalding cup of coffee to gulp down and burn her esophagus on, and still catch the train. Her mom, similarly bleary and with a similar idea, simply nodded at Steph as she got the electric kettle to heat up.

While Steph lived on the south side of East End, just barely off of Crime Alley, she got districted into one of the schools on the north end. It was right in the Little Saigon neighborhood, and close enough to Gotham Village that the rich kids and their rich kid houses with rich kid property taxes made up for having to wake up at 6 AM every day just to make it to the light rail for a school that started an hour and a half later. Plus, two blocks over from the Ridgeview High was an Asian bakery with some great bánh mì for only a buck fifty. Steph spent the whole ride mindlessly staring out her window and soothing her empty stomach with promises that it would soon get fed.

Then, Steph got to the bakery, a block away from the train station, and forgot totally and completely about her hunger. There was a girl standing just outside the door to the bakery, and Steph had never seen her before. Or really, anyone like her. She was pretty, a few inches or so shorter than Steph but with more muscle to show off in a tank top, and stick-straight, shiny black hair. Her spine was perfectly straight, with her broad shoulders back like a dancer's. Her gaze was fixed on the alleyway between the bakery and a bike repair shop, watching two swallows give each other a birdbath in one of those omnipresent puddles in Gotham alleys -- it didn't even matter that it didn't rain last night. Something about the way she held herself was fascinating to Steph; it reminded her at once of those documentaries her dad would watch at the end of the day, images of big cats in parts of the world that were only real to Steph in her books.

"Hey," Steph said, flashing her a smile. She wasn't usually this forward, but there was something about the shorter girl that had immediately fascinated her, and the part of her brain that was driven by curiosity alone refused to let go.

The girl turned to look at her and, wow, that was an intense gaze. Her eyes were black-hole-black.

"Hello," the girl said. 

Steph blinked. There was no way her accent was real. She sounded straight out of an old-timey American radio show, all rapid-fire Mid-Atlantic Movie Accent. It wasn't bad though; Steph could kind of dig it.

"Never seen you around before."

"I'm new in town."

"Well hey, 'new in town'. I'm Stephanie," Steph said, leaning forward to shake hands. The other girl had the slightest hesitation before she also leaned forward to take Steph's hand. Her grip was callused, on the pads of her knuckles rather than the tips of her fingers. Probably didn't play an instrument, but she could definitely throw a punch.

"Cassandra."

"Cassandra," Steph said, testing the name out, "are you gonna get anything?"

She looked a little startled, glancing back over her shoulder at the shop like she hadn't smelled that it was a bakery she was standing in front of.

"I'm not sure," she said.

"Ever had bánh mì? I'll get you one, on me."

Cassandra looked briefly very perplexed. "On you?"

"Yeah, you know, on me. My treat. I'll pay?"

"That's not necessary," Cassandra quickly assured her, but she didn't make a move to go inside. Steph weighed the odds in her head, then decided to take a reckless plunge and bodily pulled the girl into the store.

"You can pay for yourself, but it is so obvious you've never been here before, and it would be a crime to let you leave without knowing how great the chà bông in this place is." As an afterthought, Steph asked, "Are you vegetarian and/or in some way unable to have pork?"

Cassandra bemusedly shook her head. She seemed okay enough with being pulled along, but at some point, Steph's own sense of overfamiliarity pushed her to drop the girl's arm.

"Oh cool. Alright, see, the Nguyens do pork bánh mì the best. That one," Steph pointed at the display case, stacked with premade sandwiches, "is the bánh mì thịt nguội. It's good, so long as you're okay with mystery meat. My favorite, though, is that one." She smiled at Mrs. Nguyen behind the counter and held up two fingers. "Can I get two bánh mì bì, please, one for my friend here?"

Mrs. Nguyen nodded, bagging them up. "Three twenty-seven," she said, and Steph handed over a fiver. As she pocketed the change, she jerked her head and did a thing with her eyebrows at Cassandra to indicate that the other girl should pick up the bag. Cassandra did so, cautiously pulling one sandwich out and sniffing at it. It was a birdlike movement, graceful even in its jerkiness.

"It's pork in fish sauce," Steph explained after she had jammed all her loose change and receipts back into her wallet. "Ever had it before?"

Cassandra shook her head again, though this time with less bemusion and more skepticism. She had very expressive eyebrows. Well-groomed, too. Did "new in town" mean Mainland Gotham, or should Little Saigon be worried about gentrification?

"Then this is your first!" Steph said, her mouth running away with her a little as she got more comfortable talking to Cassandra. For once, the relative silence from the other person in the conversation didn't make her nervous and desperate to fill the void; Cassandra had put her at ease in the first five minutes, somehow. "That's pretty exciting, it's like I'm popping your cherry, but for food. Your food cherry. Well, cherries are food."

"Okay, I know what popped cherry is an idiom for." She said, wrinkling her nose at Steph. Steph privately thought it was adorable as hell.

"Oh my god, less whining, more trying."

Cassandra took a hesitant bite, chewing softly with her mouth closed. Good manners on her part; unlucky for her, Steph definitely didn't have those. Steph ducked her head, leaning in comically close to watch her frustratingly blank face. A few seconds after swallowing, Cassandra nodded her head to herself and then made eye contact with Steph again. "It's good," she said with absolutely no emotion in her voice.

"It's good! That's it? Oh come on, give me a little more."

"Smells like fish, tastes like pig. Weird, but good."

"Wow, don't stop on my account, you New York Times food critic, you."

Cassandra didn't quite smile, but her eyes crinkled up just the slightest bit. She took another bite of the sandwich, so Steph counted it as a victory.

Instead of walking off with her new sandwich, as Steph kind of expected her to do, Cassandra took a seat outside the shop window, where thin wire chairs were set out in a haphazard circle around an equally thin metal table. The table had only one leg and shook violently when used and it would overturn if any one person set their elbows on it, so it went ignored for the most part, though Steph did still notice stray springs of cilantro on the surface and other indications that someone else had sat and had a meal there. She dragged one of the chairs out and plopped down, then regretted that as her tailbone protested the hard metal of the chair. 

She instantly forgot about her discomfort when Cassandra dragged her own chair over and settled next to Steph, shoulder to shoulder.

They spent a few minutes like that, enjoying their breakfast in companionable silence before Cassandra turned to Stephanie. "Will you be here tomorrow?" she asked.

"Yeah, I always get breakfast here before school."

Cassandra smiled, for real this time, before getting up and dusting off her leggings. "I'd like to try the thịt nguội tomorrow then."

"It's a date!" Steph called out, mostly to see what Cassandra would do. Cassandra didn't turn back, but she did wave her hand, which seemed both like a friendly gesture and one that showed off the muscles in her back. 

Steph was grinning a little stupidly as she tracked the other girl's exit with her eyes. The smile slowly dropped off her face when Cassandra turned the corner left, and she noticed graffiti in her peripheral vision. In that alley between the bakery and the bike repair shop next to it, there was a mural of stylized lotus blossoms painted across the wall. It had been there for years, and it was what Steph had assumed Cassandra had been looking at, aside from the now-gone sparrows which had been having a little sewage water slip-and-slide in the alley as well.

However, as Steph got up and walked a little closer to the alley, it was clear that someone had recently defaced it, sometime in the twenty-four hour period since she'd last been to the shop. Splashed across the mural, in handwriting that Steph had a sinking feeling she recognized, were three words.

NINE DOWN: FABRYKA

Chapter Text

Needless to say, Steph did not pay a single bit of attention to class that day. She still went, since she couldn't afford detention now of all times, but all throughout Math she took her time trying to unscramble that first "clue." 

The first thing she did, fiddling with her phone in the five minutes before class would start that she could use it for, was check if nine people were murdered sometime in the past 24 hours. Luckily, it looked like all news reports in most neighborhoods in Gotham had reported a relatively quiet night, with no notably violent crimes. It wasn't that Steph thought her father would kill nine people in one night; it was just that the phrasing of "nine down" was very reminiscent of a vengeance mission, and she did trust in her father's ability to piss off nine people in one day.

The next thing she did was plug "fabryka" into Google Translate. She wasn't sure if her father knew about the Detect Language feature, but it was easy enough to determine that she was looking at the Polish word for factory. She was pretty sure her father's Polish was limited if it even existed at all -- he was standard-fare fifth-generation Irish-American, so no real personal connection to Poland there -- but even still, she worked through every possible combination of the letters that formed "nine down" to see if there were any Polish words scrambled in there.

It took her all of Math, English, and most of her lunch period to rule that avenue out as a possibility. Nothing that she could come up with made any sense, even when she added the letters of "fabryka" into it. With anagrams ruled out, she moved onto ciphers. That took her all the rest of lunch to rule out, since she had to also check if her father was cheating and mixing his anagrams with his ciphers, for added complexity. Steph may have been a puzzle purist, but her father certainly wasn't. Acrostics, too, obviously didn't work for this, even if they were his favorite. He was such a fan of "hidden in plain sight," because he was a cliche.

That left just a bog-standard hidden meaning. Maybe a pun? The obvious interpretation was a crossword puzzle; her father had a passing relationship with those. Steph remembered watching him do them ever so often when she was younger; The same trivia-knowledge-brain that made him such a good game show contestant and host also made crosswords a cinch. However, he usually derided them as too easy. She'd seen him blow through a Saturday New York Times crossword in five minutes, too, so she believed him.

Just to be sure, she ditched Chemistry and swung by the school library, asking to see all the issues from the last month of the Gotham Gazette, Jersey Post, and the New York Times. One absence wouldn't look too bad on her record, and she just needed an hour.

One very long hour later, after scouring almost 50 crosswords from the past few weeks, she could confidently rule out some kind of extra-textual media reference.

That excursion would almost have been a wash if Steph hadn't noticed a short article from a January issue of the Gotham Gazette. After having spent the past hour priming her brain to prick up at any mention of Poland or factories, all her attention suddenly locked in on that article about the shutdown of an ironworks plant in the historically Polish neighborhood of Brideshead. Shut down, after the ninth workplace accident led to a death on the job. It felt like one of those children's toy games with the plastic maze and the ball. Like she had tilted the maze just right, and the ball suddenly bounced past a bunch of walls and fell in place and all those disparate facts in her head had just clicked together.

Steph whipped her phone out to check online for a map of Gotham. Brideshead was on the northernmost edge of Midtown, with only the Sprang River separating it from her own residence in Lower East End. And, according to Google Maps, Brideshead was also noticeable on the map for being one of the few parts of Gotham on the grid system.

Steph subvocalized, "seven, eight, nine down" as she counted off the streets of Brideshead, and sure enough, on the corner of Ninth Street and Baroque, there was a defunct ironworks plant.

"Fabryka," she said, because "bingo" would be a little corny.

Steph had never been so eager to get her mom out of the house before.

"Are you sure you'll be fine? I really don't need to go, it's a totally optional event and honestly just a networking thing," her mom said, fussing a little with her purse.

"Oh my god, mom, how many times have you told me that nothing is ever really optional. You should go! Maybe you'll make friends!"

Crystal Brown paused while stirring a pot of what she called "homestyle chili" and Steph called "one pot of everything in the fridge about to expire." 

"Are you sure you'll be okay, home alone for the night?" she asked. Steph internally fist-pumped: she was considering it!

"Mom, I'm almost an adult. I'll be fiiine."

"Oh honey, the only people who thinks eighteen is an adult are eighteen-year-olds and the law," Crystal said, shaking her head. "But, you have a point."

"I am so glad," Steph said, rolling her eyes, "that you think I am capable of staying at home for a night and not burning down the building."

Crystal rolled her eyes as she turned off the stove. "I need to change out of," she gestured to the baggy bootcut jeans that were fashionable fifty years ago and her threadbare LAKESIDE COLLEGE t-shirt. "Can I borrow those new leggings you bought?"

Those new leggings she bought, a splurge purchase, were in the process of being modified to be part of her new costume. The superhero costume. The one her mom definitely couldn't know about, because then Steph would be grounded for the rest of her life. "Uh, sorry mom," she said, panicking, "I was planning on wearing them tomorrow. To, uh, meet someone."

Crystal, like a bloodhound attuned to the scent of Steph maybe having a social life, immediately perked up. "Meet someone?"

"Yeah," Steph said, fidgeting a little. She leaned a little more fully against the kitchen doorway if only to stop herself from shifting weight from one foot to another. "Some new girl. I met her this morning, and we agreed to meet up again tomorrow."

"New friend in the making?"

"Yeah. Well, hopefully."

Crystal smiled and bustled out of the kitchen, patting Steph's shoulder as she passed her. Steph felt, immediately, awful about the lies. God, was that a mom superpower or something?

"Do you think I should wear the blazer, then?" she called from the other room.

"What, with a pantsuit? You'll look like Lenape Hillary Clinton."

"Ha, ha," her mom said sarcastically. "I mean with the good jeans and that blouse I have."

"Yeah, sure," Steph said. "I think that'll look fine."

A few minutes later, when Steph had migrated over to dubiously poke at the pot of "whatever stew", Crystal came out. "How do I look?" she asked, striking a ridiculous pose in the hallway. Steph made a face.

"Amazing, Mom. Like you're a founding member of the Orthopedic League of Doctors."

"Sweetheart, I married your father. I can read between a few lines."

Steph laughed. "No, seriously, you look great. You'll knock the socks off of whatever the nursing school equivalent of college football recruiters are."

Crystal smiled, which served to emphasize the small frown lines around her eyes. "I'll be back late, stay out of trouble."

"Can't guarantee that, I have a wild night of studying for a math test planned."

Steph couldn't stop herself from picking at her hands, her right thumbnail digging away at the nail bed of her index finger. The index finger of her left hand tapped away at her bicep. Luckily, her mom was just looking at her face.

Crystal shut the door, but Steph didn't even start moving until she heard the click of the deadbolt being put in place. She took off for her bedroom, hitting the floor and extending her arm out to grab the trash bag under her bed with her costume in it. 

The leggings went on first. They were purple -- a favorite color of hers, and also a deliberate contrast to her father's preferences for yellow-brown-ish tones. She, luckily, inherited a fashion sense from her mom. Those leggings, which were nearly a hundred bucks on sale and gave her a conniption to buy in the first place, had built-in thermal heating and motorcycle kevlar weave in them. It was like buying a really fancy new car with heated seating, all in-built tricks and cupholders when she was used to public transport every day.

The rest of her outfit was a little more cobbled together.

She had managed to find a good leather jacket at a thrift store for nine bucks -- and had promptly tested its abrasion resistance out by laying it out flat, dropping a cinder block on it, and then pulling it out. The jacket had made it through Steph's makeshift wringer, with only some cracks in the pleather. Steph had spent the bulk of her last week's downtime on this costume on that jacket, sewing in all sorts of inner pockets to the torso and rollerblading guards to the elbows. With those patches, she had listened to a stuffy British man on YouTube go on about the correct way to treat tweed, and she freestyled it from there.

For her piece de resistance, a cloak and mask duo, she had to go to a craft store and buy some fabrics. She'd matched the cloak fabric to the leggings and had had many plans for a stately looking hooded cape, maybe something like the one Raven from the old Teen Titans wore. Then she fucked up the hemming and had to roll with it, tearing up the bottom of her cloak to make it seem intentional. So, maybe a little less Raven and a little more "lost a fight with three raccoons," but whatever. It was Gotham City, she'd make it work.

Finally, Steph pulled on a black cloth face mask she'd bought at the dollar store, which took her from "teenage girl with a dress-up phase" to "teenage girl about to do something really really stupid." Perfect.

She pulled on her boots -- military surplus, which hopefully would mean it wouldn't hurt her too bad if she had to stomp on someone's toes tonight -- and walked over to her bedroom window. It was a straight shot to Crime Alley from her apartment. From there, she could hitch it to Brideshead in under thirty minutes, less if she went as the crow flies and tried hopping rooftops like a real vigilante.

Steph considered her bedroom window, before sliding it all the way open. She slowly eased her foot out, her hands at either side of the window to brace herself, and looked up. They lived on the top floor of a four-story building, so she'd only have to scale a little more to get herself to the roof. The entire eastern half of Uptown was just cement block building after building, huddled together like penguins in the winter or sardines in a tin, or what the metaphorical hell ever, because buildings and fire codes meant nothing in the face of "more units means more renters." So jumping from rooftop to rooftop would be more like ambitious steps from rooftop to rooftop.

Then she looked down.

"Yeah, fuck that," Steph said, hurriedly pulling her body out of the cold and completely into the relative safety of the indoors.

She took the subway.

Most Gothamites, with customary Northern charm, did not care a single bit about the goings-on of their neighbors. This went double for anyone who had the misfortune of working the night shift, and triply so for anyone who took the subway. The only person who even said anything to Steph, holding on to the railing next to her and looking in confusion, asked:

"Are you going to a Halloween party in April?"

"Sure," Steph said. She tugged her mask a little more firmly over her nose.

Brideshead, Steph knew from fourth-grade state history, was only a primarily Polish neighborhood in the first half of the 1800s. They came looking mostly to work for a few years before returning back home, supplying labor to the factories that had been springing up everywhere in Gilded Age America. That age of industrialization was an integral part of why Gotham was the megacity it was today, well after its heyday. Somehow enough Polish immigrants had decided to stay permanently for the neighborhood to gain a reputation, even though after the mid 19th century, most of the immigrants were broadly Eastern European and Jewish rather than Polish specifically. Steph still remembers doing a poster-project on the 1989 day that brought nearly a thousand Soviet Jews to Gotham City, most of whom, she reported in purple washable marker on a tri-fold board, settled in Brideshead.

She wondered if her father had also thought of that memory when he was setting up this insane scavenger hunt.

The ironworks plants used to be part and parcel of Gotham's identity. It was a factory town first and foremost, and even as a city, you could still smell those roots in the smog. This plant wouldn't be the last to go in the city, but it was the last operating one in Brideshead. Steph had remembered the ones that came before though; the steel mills by the warehousing districts and the glass manufacturers near Cape Canaveral had all gone out in her lifetime, and she was intimately familiar with the pattern. All the lights shuttered off in the factories, the windows would be bricked or boarded up, and then there were suddenly waves of men out of work and with a good amount of downtime on their hands. That was probably, in hindsight, when her father would go out recruiting.

That familiarity had at least one -- if only one -- upside. Stephanie could say with utmost certainty that this factory, supposedly in the process of liquidation starting last month, had something fishy going on inside it. The lights were all on, and the men were inside, not out on the street.

Steph crept a little closer before she caught sight of the glow of a lighter flicking to life. She cursed and ducked back down, hiding behind a parked truck on the other end of the street. Carefully, she eased over, cautious not to make any sudden movements that would attract the eye. It was too dark to make much of anything out, and there were parked cars lining both ends of the street, but she could see the glowing ends of two cigarettes -- so, unless someone didn't smoke, that was only two guards at the entrance. The night was too encompassingly black for Steph to make out any features from a street away, but she'd guess based on the height of the cigarettes that both guards were tall, around 6' for either of them. They were both next to each other, guarding what was probably the only entrance to the building.

She considered the layout for a second.

They were in a less residential part of Brideshead. Alongside the squat, one-story factory was a laundromat on Ninth, as well as an office building on Baroque which was about a story taller than the plant. If she was a real vigilante, that's where she'd be perched, ready to dive in through a skylight to wreak havoc. But, alas, she was a normal person who had to worry about normal things like broken glass and tall falls.

The entrance was on Ninth street, so Steph just had to cross the street to get there -- without drawing attention.

"Easy," Steph muttered, reaching into her jacket pockets for anything that could help. She had a canister of mace, though its range was only five feet, so she'd have to get in close before she could use it. Also, it was a bit distinctive looking -- the only mace left in stock at the convenience store was the "Super-Cute Self Defense Set For Women," which meant she was about to fight the forces of evil with a mace canister that looked like sequins from a six year old's birthday party threw up on it. She'd gotten it in purple, of course.

The other items in that inner pocket of her makeshift utility jacket were much less useful. The ballpoint pen and post-its stayed in their respective locations. She had a keychain flashlight, though it wasn't particularly powerful and certainly would give her position away if she tried using it now, and a switchblade, which would mean even closer quarters than her mace. She'd like to avoid having to use the knife at all costs, so that stayed where it was too, stuffed into the side of her boot, but the flashlight she took out and put in one of her outside pockets. Her most prized possession, a Swiss Army knife she stole from another kid in fourth grade that had a shitton of features on it, would be similarly useless to the knife here so that she also left in an outside pocket.

She needed something wide range. A distraction, maybe, though she doubted she'd be able to get both guards to leave their posts for long enough for her to sneak in. Based on the shadows in the window, she didn't think there were too many people inside the warehouse itself, but those people inside would also still have to be a consideration.

A ball of fire was starting to form right at the base of her throat. Steph knew, from experience, that it happened whenever she was over her head. She'd felt like this when she first saw those fake checks, connected the dots between her father and Cluemaster. She felt like this when she'd gotten that horrible confirmation. She'd felt like this when she was sixteen years old, listening at the vent grate and hearing her father tell her mother that "if Stephanie figures it out, I'll have to get her killed."

What the hell was she supposed to do about any of this? Steph couldn't fight. Steph didn't know the first thing about actual physical fighting. Where the hell was Batman? Why wouldn't he come to save her?

Steph caught herself. She was spiraling. She needed to focus, focus on three things she could hear: the sound of the light rail thundering over tracks and blowing into the station a block away, the sound of an argument a few blocks over between two women, the sound of someone taking out the trash and slamming the lid of a dumpster, probably in the diner a few buildings behind her.

Three things she could smell: that trash, hot spoiled-food smell that seemed to permeate the air like water spilled on fabric. Piss, probably dried all over the street, layered upon piss dried from weeks ago. A little gasoline, probably from the truck she had her back to.

She could see the sidewalk, full of blackened gum stains and gritty cigarette butts. Beyond that, she could see a diamond link fence, torn open in several places. And beyond that, she could see a neat pile of cinder brick blocks, stacked up in arm's reach.

So, Steph reached out her arm. Good old Gotham: all the city ever had going for it was construction and medicine.

She turned back, carefully peering out to see if the situation had changed in between her panic attack antic at pack and now. The guards had shifted slightly, with one glowing cigarette still right in front of the door, and the other now pacing a little further, towards the intersection and away from Steph. She narrowed her eyes. The guard at the door put out his cigarette, and Steph lost eyes on him. She turned her attention to the guard-who-wasn't-guarding anymore and saw that he was still going strong on his smoke. Possibly they were told not to smoke near the door? 

Either way, she figured she only had this one shot.

The guard had finished pacing and was now complacently smoking his cigarette, perhaps staring up at the night sky. Steph didn't know; it was still too dark to make out anything other than silhouettes, which she was counting on. She started creeping around the back of the truck she had taken shelter behind, one heavy cinder block in her right hand, and her mace canister gripped in the left. Once she got to the other end of the vehicle, she dropped the canister to the ground and gripped the block with both hands.

She sent a prayer out to Rita of Cascia, patron saint of baseball according to her mother, and also to her softball little league coach from when she was twelve. Then she heaved, cocked her arms back, and swung from her hips.

It connected, as far as she could tell, with the man's shoulders. He shouted, regrettably, bringing the attention of the second guard. Steph was already moving, pulling her pepper spray out. She kneeled and sprayed the first man in his face, which made him shout even more, but also should induce 15 to 30 minutes of temporary blindness according to her pepper spray instruction manual. Then, for good measure, she kicked him in the head.

By this point, the other man had already started running towards her, pulling something out of the back of his jeans. Steph reacted on instinct: she took a running dive for the nearest car and cringed as she heard the sound of a gun firing. She very much hoped at the moment that cars didn't actually blow up when people shot at them. She would like it very much if that was just something Michael Bay made up.

It seemed Bay was a liar because she had heard the gun discharge three more times and metallic pings accompanied at least two of those, but she was still safe, and no explosions had lit up the night. The pepper-sprayed guard was uncomfortably quiet behind her, but she supposed that even after sharing a smoke together, there was no honor among thieves. The other guard's attention was solely on Stephanie.

After her home run dive, she had scraped the shit out of her hands, and though her knees and hips also had protested the abrupt flinging to the ground, the skin seemed unbroken there. The grit, blood, and sweat on her hands would make holding something difficult. Stephanie spared a thought to getting some kind of gloves onto her costume if she ever managed to survive this. More importantly, her best and most non-lethal weapon, her pepper spray canister, had dropped underneath the car and rolled to a stop right against the curb. The curb which led to the sidewalk which led to the man with the gun.

The remaining guard began walking around the car with slow and methodical footsteps. Stephanie could see his gun at the ready, a menacing shape in the darkness, but she was comforted by the fact that he wasn't shooting anymore. The gun was probably still a great blunt force weapon, but the man essentially had her at nearly point-blank range. He was probably out of bullets.

He shot through the window of the car, sending Stephanie ducking with a very unheroic shriek as a cascade of car door glass shards fell onto her hood. Well, shit. He definitely was not out of bullets. She hoped none of that broken glass had gotten in her hair.

Crawling still on her hands and knees, careful to avoid puncturing her already bleeding hands on more glass, Steph tried to formulate a plan. She was nearly at the other end of the car from the man when she pushed down too hard on her right palm and made an involuntary grunt of pain. Clearly, the guard somehow heard her, because he suddenly swung around to face her, gun first.

Steph grabbed the first thing near her and came up swinging. She popped up over the hood of the car and clicked on her flashlight, hoping to temporarily blind the man with a head-on burst of LED light. In the darkness of the Gotham street, which she had already gotten used to, the blue-white light of her flashlight nearly blinded her , and she was on the other end. The guard, clearly unprepared for his quarry to have fought back like this, reared back, though he kept a grip on the gun. Steph grabbed desperately for the switchblade in her boot, fumbling and dropping her flashlight as she went. The flashlight clattered to the ground, illuminating her stupidly sparkly mace canister like it was a disco ball. Gunman definitely noticed, pivoting to grab for it. Cursing, Steph launched herself across the hood of the car, hoping that the extra momentum would give her just that much more force when she brought down just the unsprung hilt of her knife right onto the man's temple. He collapsed, thankfully, with his hand just over her mace.

Steph took a few seconds to regroup herself, and get her breathing to be a little less "wild, frantic, heaving" and a little more to her goal of a relatively calm "did three hours of cardio." She collected her flashlight and then nudged the second guard with her foot, relieved that his eyes didn't blink open against the onslaught of the LED lights.

She turned her attention to the ironworks plant, shining her small beam of light onto the red-brown brickwork of the building. The entrance door was a deep brown metal thing that didn't so much reflect the light as it did disperse it, and it didn't have any markings on it. Despite her instincts screaming at her not to go in through the front door, nothing about the whole set up seemed like a trap. Even the movement inside, shadows and indistinct shapes passing by the windows every so often, seemed undisturbed by the short burst of violence outside. Perhaps what they were doing in there was loud. Perhaps they wouldn't hear the sound of gunshots through a few layers of brick.

Steph just didn't have any other option. Her things collected, and her mace as firmly gripped in her right hand as she could get her slick palms to do, she marched to the door. Everything in her, at the moment, ached terribly and stung viciously. She put her hand on the doorknob, took a deep breath, and swung it open.

She was faced with at least ten men with guns aimed at her standing in the doorway and her father in a mask.

Chapter Text

Her father looked way too relaxed.

"Well, this is a bit of a surprise," he said, smiling. "And here I thought I might have warranted Batman."

Steph couldn't speak. Partially because fear had taken over her brain, kicking logic to a corner and gibbering about the several guns pointed at her very squishy body, and partially because logic was telling her from that corner of her mind that if she opened her mouth, there was a better-than-even chance that her father would recognize her voice. And she already knew he was willing to kill her when he knew she was his daughter.

Cluemaster sighed. "You're as mute as one of them, anyways. Well, you're a bit early -- on a curfew, are we? -- so I'm sorry to say that this will have to be the extent of our acquaintance. Don't try coming after me…. sorry, who are you again?"

"Spoiler," Steph said, trying to lower her voice down to a Batman-gravel. She was pretty sure she sounded ridiculous.

"Well, Spoiler, I have a dead man's switch and that's a very big bomb behind me. So, I'd suggest, if you have any friends lying in wait, for them not to come after me. Adios, dear."

He calmly brushed by her, though Steph didn't feel any of that. Her body had gone totally numb. She was so unprepared, and she was going to die right here. She made an aborted movement to turn her head towards her father, before thinking better of it. If she was going to die, she'd like to face it head-on.

There was a very tense minute when Arthur Brown leisurely made his way to the street. She heard the slam of a car door, followed by a distinctive peal of a getaway car.

"Well, gentlemen," Steph chuckled, nervously eying the closest man. "Seems we're alone together."

Then the glass ceiling absolutely exploded.

A black shape swooped down onto the ground, somehow taking out two men as it fell. The shadow barely took a second to lift from its crouch for it to take a running leap at the next man, balletically kicking him in the face. As it touched down, it spun on one foot to face another man, taking him out with a solid punch to the face. Two men had recovered from the shock enough to try bull-rushing the shadow from behind -- those two men found themselves unceremoniously pulled by the lapels and thrown against a steel drum. The remaining four men had chosen to use their guns, indiscriminately opening fire on the shadow. The shadow dodged them all, approaching each man individually and knocking them out with a hard punch or kick to the head.

It all took less than thirty seconds.

"Wow," was all Steph could say. She was also still recovering from being convinced she'd die, thirty seconds ago.

The shadow had resolved itself into the shape of a woman dressed from head to toe in black fabric: literally, her entire face was obscured by black cloth. The only piece of color on her entire outfit was the iconic Bat symbol in a mustard-yellow on her chest.

This, Steph realized, was the new Batgirl. 

She struggled to think of something to say. 

"Do you know how to defuse a bomb?" was all she could manage.

Batgirl walked towards her with graceful, efficient strides. "Yes," she said. "Where?"

Steph scanned the room, which she would have done sooner if it hadn't been for the, you know, armed men about to murder her. "There," she pointed to what she only knew from TV to be a pipe bomb. She and Batgirl both approached it, though shockingly, the mute Batgirl was the one to immediately begin talking herself through the situation.

"Three main wires. Blue, red, green. Blue connects to motherboard in alpha-3. Red in alpha-5. Green in beta-2."

Steph pulled out her Swiss Army knife. "Here, the bottle opener doubles as a wire cutter."

Batgirl pulled out a real wire cutter from one of the pouches attached to her belt. Steph flushed a little behind her mask; she was sure, behind Batgirl's own, there was a sardonically raised eyebrow.

"Yeah okay," Steph said, putting her knife back. She hung back, tense and on edge as Batgirl slowly turned the pipe bomb over, methodically separated the green wire, and quickly snipped it. The panic in her had built up to a fever pitch and it had taken a few seconds after the snipping of the wire for Steph to even realize that nothing had happened. Anticlimactic, and the adrenaline flooding her system did not like that at all. 

Batgirl tucked the wire cutter back into her pouch and turned to look at Steph. Something occurred to her.

"Not that I'm not grateful," Steph said, "but you crashing in at the last moment seems a little convenient."

"Came when I heard guns. Watched you fight two outside men," Batgirl said. She had no discernible accent, and her voice was a monotone. Steph suspected that there was a fancy voice modulator or some other James Bond type thing going on in that full face mask of hers.

"You were watching?!" Steph spluttered. "What about helping?"

Batgirl shrugged. "You had it under control."

Steph spluttered even further. "No, I definitely didn't!"

Batgirl moves past her to the would-be-bomb, investigating the components. She turns to Steph. "Police force was notified of the scene. That--" here, Batgirl paused for a suspiciously long time. "That there is an unfinished bomb in the Ninth Street Ironworks, with ten accomplices waiting to be picked up. The mastermind ran off before he could be apprehended. Should I also inform GCPD of a masked teenager who showed up at just the right building at just the right time to interrupt a crime in progress? Seems a little convenient." 

"Who are you talking to?" pops out of Steph's mouth. She could kick herself; if she didn't seem extremely suspicious beforehand, she doid now. The vigilante rounded on her, and Steph tensed up before trying to consciously relax herself -- as Batgirl had just demonstrated, there was no point in trying to run from her.

"It's just," she attempted to clarify, in the blind hope that her rambling would prove her innocence. "Your speech patterns changed. Before you were dropping both definite articles and the pronouns in your independent clauses, and your sentences were shorter. It sounds like you started repeating what someone said to you at the end because you stopped all of that."

Batgirl was silent again for a very long time. Then, finally, she said: "You are right."

"Yeah," Steph said. "I usually am." Shit, that sounded arrogant. "It's just, I'm usually pretty good with words. And patterns. And, you know, patterns in the words. That's how I figured out something was going to happen here."

Batgirl did not move.

"You know, the clue, in the alley between Green Bakery and Ben's Bike Repair, in the High East End in Uptown. It's in the same neon yellow that the Cluemaster always uses, you can't miss it. Said 'Nine Down: Fabryka,' and, well, we're on Ninth Street and this is a fabryka, Polish side of town."

"Oracle says there is other factory on Ninth Street. On other side of town. Text-ile mill."

"Yeah, well tell Oracle that nine men weren't killed in workplace accidents at a textile mill."

"Is still suspicious that --" Batgirl paused and tilted her head, the first display of real body language so far. "Still suspicious that you knew about Cluemaster. And did not call police."

Now Steph was getting annoyed. "I know Batgirl only operates south of City Hall these days, but Cluemaster's been alive and fucking with us in Uptown. The police won't do shit about something that happened on the East End. If you name brand vigilantes won't solve this problem, I guess it's up to us knockoffs."

"How did you know that this would happen tonight?"

"I'm just a regular Cassandra, Oracle. Saw the future, and nobody believed me."

Batgirl was silent again for a while, clearly listening to the mysterious Oracle figure. Then, suddenly, her body language went from a complete blank slate to somehow conveying with the set of her shoulders and the tilt of her chin that she was amused . "Oracle did not like that I told you about her." She went into an exaggerated full-body cringe. "Is mad at me now."

Against her will, Stephanie smiled. "You totally ruined her mystique."

"Mys-tique?"

"Like mystery. I'm saying Oracle likes to be a mystery, and you messed it up."

Batgirl did something with her shoulders that made Steph think laughing . "Oracle agrees."

Steph smiled again, though her nervousness from the interrogation had not dissipated. There was also an incredible amount of leftover adrenaline screaming through her system; she was very aware that she was out of her depth and just an untrained teenage girl who had almost died at least five times tonight. 

She eyed the vigilante in front of her, then said, "Come on. There's definitely a clue around here somewhere. Look for something yellow."

Batgirl nodded and began to pick her way across the room to the corner furthest from the entrance. She methodically poked at the enormous Stassano furnace, circling the big drums for any clues. Steph left the vigilante to her weird military-style sweep and went for the center of the room. The ironworks had been rigged to blow outwards, so if Cluemaster left another written lead somewhere, it wouldn't be on the walls. In fact, it wouldn't be anywhere that could be scattered in the blast. He would be taking every possible precaution to keep the clue intact.

Steph did her own scan, her eyes falling finally on a smudge of yellow hidden under the body of one of her father's thugs.

"Batgirl," she called over her shoulder. "Come help me with this."

Steph motioned to the various planks and girders scattered over the floor for Batgirl to deal with, while Steph grabbed under the armpits of one of the out-cold goons and heaved. It turned out that that goon had been a little less out-cold than she had thought; as Steph started dragging his dead weight, he groaned and started to open his eyes. She immediately hollered, dropped him, and hit him with a right cross straight in the cheekbone. Her fist hurt very badly, but at least the combined blunt force trauma of his head hitting the concrete floor and also her punch had knocked him out again.

"Do not hit like that." Batgirl said, though she didn't sound like she was admonishing the violence. Steph looked over to see Batgirl making a fist with her right hand. "Keep thumb on outside --"

"I know that," Steph muttered, both embarrassed and irritated, "Jesus. I'm not totally useless."

"Did not say that," Batgirl said. She held up her fist again. "But remember. Keep thumb on outside. Line these --" she tapped her finger against the first two knuckles of her fist "-- up with this." She brought her finger down to indicate the bones of her forearm.

Steph sighed and tried to beat down the irritation. Lessons on how to fight from what the internet alleged was an escaped government super-soldier. She'd take it.

"Thanks," she said. "I'll keep that in mind."

They worked in silence, clearing away the detritus and deadweight until the sickly yellow spray paint could be seen.

"ZTZOZZXRMTMLMORMVZIRGRVH"

Batgirl tilted her head. "Do not think those are English."

Steph snorted. "Not yet it isn't. It's a cipher. You got any Bat-Chalk in that utility belt of yours?" 

Batgirl did. "Just regular chalk."

Taking it from her, Steph kneeled down to survey the code. "You're lucky I had a hardcore spy phase when I was a kid. I think it's a shift cipher, give me a second to crack it. It should be easy once you identify a few letters. The most common letter in the first thousand most common words in the English language is 'E', followed by 'T' and 'A'. 'I' also works well, because the letter is a word all on its own." She turned and smirked at Batgirl. "It's a pronoun, means 'yourself'."

Batgirl's body language snapped again from blank slate to slightly unamused . " I know." 

Steph shook her head. Rude, but Batgirl did it first. "Just checking. Anyways, figure out which letter you think is which and you can unravel the shift from -- hm. That's weird."

"What?" Batgirl asked.

"I just ran through all 25 shifts. It's not making sense. Maybe it's a modified cipher? It would be like Cluemaster to throw a mixed alphabet cipher in there. It's probably encoded with some stupid keyword too, I bet it's…" Steph trailed off. Something in the back of her brain was buzzing at her, the way it always did when she went too far down the wrong rabbit hole. Over the years, she'd learned to listen to that sixth sense she had for putting together clues.

"Spoiler," Batgirl said sharply, jerking Stephanie back to the present. "What is it?"

"It's the 'Z's. They're bothering me. I can't tell wha -- ohhh. Oh. That asshole. "

She marked under all the 'Z's, in chalk, a letter 'A'. Slowly, she started making her way from there, working backward through the alphabet.

"It's an Atbash cipher. It's so straightforward, I can't believe I didn't think of that first, holy shit."

"Atbash?" Batgirl said. For the first time, Batgirl's monotone had broken into something like real emotion: irritation, which was fair. Steph's mom also always hated when Steph or her father was in puzzle-solving mode.

"It's just flipping the alphabet. Z's are A's, X's are C's. It's so simple that I didn't even think of it at all, I just went straight to Caesar ciphers, and when that didn't work my instinct was it'd be more complex, not less. Jesus. I'm so stupid."

Steph leaned back, done solving her cipher.

"A GALA ACING NONLINEARITIES" Batgirl read out loud, probably for the benefit of the Oracle in her ear. She paused while Steph turned to watch what she said next.

Batgirl's masked face moved then from the cipher on the floor to Steph. "On Sunday, there is a fundraiser for Rutgers University: Gotham City campus." She said, overly correctly. It took Steph a second to place that as RUGC. That would be in Downtown. "This fundraiser is specifically for the math and physics departments. Oracle says she's sure if she looked into it, she'd find a professor of nonlinear dynamics. Don't know what that is."

"Yeah," Steph said. "Neither do I. Makes sense though: 'acing'. Like school."

Batgirl paused yet again. At this point, Steph knew pretty much to wait out whatever instructions Batgirl was getting from her handler (?). She set about tying up the thugs with some of the zip ties from Batgirl's utility belt, which seemed very very useful -- Steph was taking notes. Something about the clue was still niggling at Steph's brain. It felt, again, like when she was solving it. Something was there to be found that she hadn't uncovered yet. The phrasing was just weird.

A Gala Acing Nonlinearities. It almost spelled out AGAIN, but it would be easy enough to have intentionally added the 'I' in, so it couldn't be that. Also, again for what? It was driving Steph crazy, and furthermore, the fact that she couldn't pinpoint what she was missing was making it worse. It was like when her father would hand her locked box puzzles sometimes, when she was a child, and she had no idea how to even begin to start it. There were no clear handholds, no seams, nowhere to indicate where to put pressure for her to unravel the riddle.

Batgirl cleared her throat just as Steph finished up on the whole zip-tying thing. She looked over.

"We have a way into the gala, but only for Batman and Batg -- me. You are untrained, and most likely going to be a liability. Oops. Was not supposed to say that. But we will take case from here."

Steph grimaced. "It's fine. Nothing I don't already know anyways. I, uh, I hope you catch him. I'm glad I could help bring him to your attention."

"Thank you," Batgirl says, and something in her voice made Steph believe it. "Should leave. Police will be here soon."

Steph took the hint and headed for the entrance. As she reached the door, Batgirl haltingly called out again.

"You have good instincts. Good heart, too, I think. Thank you, again, Spoiler."

She looked over her shoulder as she eased open the door. "Anytime."

It was only 11:45 by the time the subway took Steph back to her apartment. She had ditched the cape and mask before boarding, rolling them up so she looked now like she had been to some kind of late-night roller derby session and had taken a second jacket of some sort with her. Her mom would be out for another half hour at least, which gave Steph time to deal with her myriad scrapes.

She washed her hands at the sink. In the first few seconds, the water had run pink with her blood, studded with whatever grit had been scattered on the roads of Brideshead, as Steph meticulously worried the more embedded bits out of the skin of her palm. After the water had run clear for another few seconds, she reached for the soap and pumped into her hands. Then hissed.

It wasn't a mistake, but it sure stung like one. Steph lathered up her hands, ignoring the way they stung against the loose skin and cuts. She ran her hands under the stream again, washing the foam off her hands to reveal the now-pruney skin underneath. Up close to her face, cleaned off, her hands didn't look that bad. Steph sighed and went into the kitchen to dry her hands on the rag tucked into the oven door. There was a box of bandaids up top of the microwave that she could raid, but first, she was starving.

So starving, that she didn't even care that the pot of chili had gotten cold and congealed. The big serving ladle punctured the light cover the oil and tomato paste had created in order to slop it into a bowl, its texture slightly chunky. Mechanically, she spooned it into her mouth.

She thought, ridiculously, of her old softball days. She'd always been a pretty strong kid with too much energy for her parents to deal with, so they signed her up for free after school clubs. Like everyone else, she'd been taught to pitch a ball; step one, feet shoulder-width apart, step two: glove to the chest and watch your elbows, step three, step with the right and lift the left leg and step four, twist the hips and toss the ball. Follow through. Steph wasn't exceptional at it, but she was good enough, with a good arm and aim. 

Now that she thought about it, she'd been an outfielder most of the time. A strong kid, but best at running. Good in the defensive. Good at anticipating and catching where the ball would be next. Good backup, even if it meant she would spend most of the game running around, only to be useful maybe once in a whole hour.

She didn't think she was mad about that. It was fine with her that she wasn't the pitcher. She wasn't the infielder. Whatever, fuck the metaphor, it was fine with her that she was going to do the legwork for the Batman and Batgirl to bag Cluemaster. At least she was being useful.

She finished her chili and put the bowl in the sink along with the pot on the stove. The dishes were piling up there; maybe she'd do them Sunday night with the news on.

agalaacingnonlinearities. Steph couldn't stop thinking about it, but she also couldn't think of any better fit than a fundraiser for physics faculty. What other meanings were there to the word 'gala'? Acing, that could also mean golf, right? Or did she just have sports on the brain? Steph turned off the kitchen lights and made her way to her bedroom, shucking off her jacket to lay across the back of a chair as she went. She winced.

In the sallow yellow lights of her bedroom, the bruises on her arms looked worse than they probably were. Luckily, her elbow was spared due to her rollerblading padding -- she really did have to invest in some kind of glove or forearm protection. Unluckily, all the way down the side of her arms were busted blood vessels that were definitely about to get much more noticeable in the morning. They hurt pretty bad right now too; Steph figured out pretty quickly that it was hard to avoid moving her forearm muscles, which aggravated the dull ache of the bruises.

She snuck into her mother's room, rifling through her cabinets. Steph had bought concealer a year ago that she never used because it was a few shades too light, but her mom wore makeup daily and was also noticeably deeper in skin tone than Steph. If she mixed them together, she should be able to replicate her own skin tone well enough to cover up the bruises. 

Steph huffed a laugh to herself: at this point, she might as well start making a shopping list. If she ever had to go out again as Spoiler, that is. Maybe the baton had been fully passed on, and maybe spoiling her father's plans would now fall to Batgirl. Either way, she still needed a good concealer for the next few weeks. Just another thing to blame her dad for: skin so light, any bruising would show up in vivid and arresting detail.

Absconding with her prize, foundation that looked noticeably too dark for her against her wrists, Steph flicked the lights back off and went across the hallway, back to her room. Just in time, too. She heard the sound of a key being put into the deadbolt lock and she bolted, shutting her bedroom door a little loudly and shucking her leggings right off. She kicked the pants to the side of her room, flicked the light switch off, and dove under her covers. 

Her mom's footsteps came sounding down the hallway, soft and light. Steph heard her ease the bedroom door open and shut her eyes tighter, trying to mimic the breathing of deep sleep as well as she could.

"Steph?" her mom called out softly. "You alright?"

Steph didn't respond, on account of pretending to be asleep, but in her head, she thought: For the first time? Probably.

Chapter Text

The thing they do not tell you about being a vigilante, stopping crimes in the dead of the night, is that there was a reason why you are supposed to be sleeping at that time. This was the second late night Steph had pulled in a row and the lack of hours under covers was starting to catch up to her, turning her eyes gritty and red and leaving her with aches all over her body. She thought, perhaps, that even if she'd never feel awe over Batman and Robin, she at least had a hell of a lot of grudging respect for them now. Batgirl, too, who was, if brusque and businesslike, a hell of a lot cooler than Steph ever gave her credit for.

Steph had always thought of the original Batgirl as "her" hero; the one she rooted for, defended in playground arguments over who could beat who in a fight. She didn't actually think Batgirl could kick Superman's ass, but it was a point of Gotham pride to say any of their heroes and half the villains too could kick a Metropolisian's ass. But the original Batgirl, well. Before she'd vanished off the scene, Batgirl the First was the only one who'd bust those kidnapping rings and knock down brothels and beat up pimps. When young indigenous girls were disappearing off the streets, and Steph's mom had been resigned to living in fear because nobody ever cared about little girls who looked like Steph, Batgirl had shown up and beat them all up, sent them packing, got them out of Gotham. There was some inherent tragedy to being a teenage girl, to growing up only to realize that you will be smaller and weaker than half the people in the world and that nobody in charge is all that interested in stopping horrible things from happening to you. Batgirl had told that inherent tragedy to go fuck itself.

Looking back, Batgirl had to have been young at the time. She was probably Steph's age too. Steph wondered about this other girl, way back when the only precedents were Batman and Robin, this normal, human, teenage, 5'5, maybe a little over a hundred pounds soaking wet girl got the idea to dress up in costume and beat adult men up. Steph wondered about how this other girl, years ago, was so good at it. And Steph wondered what happened to her if Batgirl was really dead.

Steph had to salute that previous Batgirl and the new one too, a worthy successor if she'd ever seen one. They'd been doing this job for years, without even a break in their stride. She bet neither of them had ever slept through their alarms.

"Stephanie, get up!"

"Wha-" Steph spluttered. Every muscle in her body was somehow bone-tired and sore and pulled, all at the same time. "Mom?" Her mom hadn't had to wake her up in years.

"Why are you so tired? Don't you have to meet your friend soon?"

That shocked Steph's brain awake. "Cassandra! Shit, what time is it?"

Crystal Brown stared down, unimpressed, at her daughter. "You have five minutes to get ready and get out the door." She left, probably to make coffee.

Steph could do five minutes. She stretched, getting out of bed still wearing the tank top she'd worn on her night out, and the stopped midway through. She'd forgotten about the massive bruises on her arms until her pain receptors very indignantly jumped to her attention. Well, fuck. She'd have to figure out the whole concealer thing on the go then.

Her leggings went back on, even if it was a little gross and she'd already sweated in them. It only took a little dusting at the knees for them to look good as new, a hundred bucks that were very, very, well spent. She switched her tank top out for a plain white T-shirt, pulled on her thickest hoodie and grabbed a black jacket to wrap around on top, all with record speed considering how her thighs were screaming at her for even thinking about standing up. All that running yesterday had not been good for her. A note for next time, if a next time ever happened: Stretch first, then punch.

Her backpack had been packed the night before because she wasn't totally useless at thinking ahead, so Steph grabbed the two concealer tubes -- both not at all her shade -- and stuffed them into the front pocket. She swung her backpack onto her back and was out the door in four minutes, thirty-eight seconds.

It turned out, Steph didn't have to hurry so much. The Gotham Rapid Transit Authority -- or 'Gerta,' as all the natives called it -- was perpetually late, and this time it was "significantly delayed" yet again. Quality service, the kind that landed them at the bottom of Forbes' Metro Area Transit Systems ranking lists, and also netted the fine city a veritable subfield of urban planning academic research dedicated to its transit system: The Gotham Paradox, in economics circles at least, referred to how Gotham City had some of the least cars per capita in the US, and yet still the most unreliable transit of any major city. 

Steph could have answered their so-called paradox for the eggheads. It was simple: Gothamites could get used to anything. When the 70's hit and Gotham took a tumble down into perpetual economic depression, with fancy terms like stagflation and supply shock in every news report, Gothamites shrugged and kept chugging along. Hell, when the mob started getting delusions of grandeur and also bomb-making kits, Gothamites didn't just get used to it, they rebuilt themselves an entire section of industry pinned on construction and housing. Best of a bad situation; the Gotham way. And finally, when the fucking bat-themed superheroes showed up to scrap with the crazies during the night when sensible people were sleeping for their morning shifts, and sometimes those scraps had collateral damage, well, Gothamites got used to their mornings being a little more about cleanup from the night before.

Apparently, when Stephanie and Batgirl had had their own eventful night, Batman and Robin were apprehending Mr. Freeze at the same time and something to do with their fight had left more of that collateral right in the middle of the stupid light rail route. Either way, Steph had to wait another thirty minutes for her ride. Frustrated, partially because how was she supposed to tell Cassandra that she'd be late, she'd think I stood her up , and partially because everything in her body hurt, and mostly because her own father tried to kill her --or, have her killed -- last night. She figured if she had a half-hour to kill, she might as well kill it. Steph dug around in her backpack for her headphones and the two tubes of concealer, hoping to cover the evidence of her wild night out to the tune of some generic pop music whatever. Nobody would care about the human art project she was engaging in; she'd seen a girl pull out a whole eyeshadow palette and do a cut crease on the train once.

In between songs, her eyes ended up settling on an abandoned red box. She did a double-take. Pall Malls were rarely a Gothamite's first choice, but in the years when Steph remembered her mother smoking and saying I'll quit, I'll quit, just not today , she'd always picked up a pack of full-flavor reds and told her Pall Malls, Shirley Jackson's poison of choice , and when her father would snort dismissively and ask who's that in that tone that told them all how uninterested he was in the answer, her mom would turn, looking more at Steph than her dad, and say one of the greats . Her mom didn't read much anymore, busy with getting that associate in nursing and her job on top of that, and she flatly refused to drink or smoke years ago, citing stereotypes as "whatever the opposite of peer pressure is."

Another generic pop song shuffled on and burst to life in her ears. The noise of the world instantly faded out. Steph blinked, then took a deep breath. She hoped that this wouldn't be a recurring experience. Thwart your supervillain dad from enacting his supervillain schemes, and nobody ever told you that there'd be weird flashbacks to your weird childhood.

Steph was more or less done with her arms anyways. The insides of her hoodie sleeves were absolutely caked in the stuff, but her bruises were pretty much covered, and nobody would be looking too hard at her wrists today anyways. She just had to survive an up-close-and-personal  friendship not-date with Cassandra and she was scot-free for the rest of the day; none of her school friends were the observant type, so she'd be fine with them.

She nervously looked down the tracks, all the way till they disappeared down the inclined slope, but there was still no sign of a train coming. She had to figure out how to tell Cassandra she'd be late as hell, but she had neglected to get the girl's number. Steph thumbed at her phone, considering her options. Then, she turned it on and pulled up Instagram.

All Steph had was a first name and a city of a million people. She hadn't had high hopes on this Hail Mary of a search, but she typed "cassandra gotham city" into the search bar. Predictably, the new Wayne girl, Cass Cain-Wayne showed up first and -- holy shit.

Steph clicked the profile and brought her phone up closer to her face. She squinted. That was… that was definitely Cassandra-from-the-bakery. Her eyes flicked to the post count -- this was a celebrity so high follower count, public profile, lots of posts -- and then started swiping to see her posts. There were surprisingly few full-on selfies, lots of random photos, maybe candids, but there were enough clearly staged and well-lit photos of Cassie Wayne in pretty dresses that Steph had to close her eyes.

Her father had just attempted to murder her last night and now, this morning, she was standing Cassie Cain-Wayne up on a friendship not-date. She'd just used up her lifetime supply of weird on the last twenty four hours. That had to be it. This was just too much bullshit at once.

When the light rail blew into the station, a good thirty-four minutes late, Steph was already on the second page of Google looking at Cass Wayne interviews and telling herself that it wasn't stalking if the girl was a C-list celebrity. Also, she DMed Cassandra, even if she didn't think it'd be that useful -- she had 2.2 million followers?? -- and told her she'd be late. And that she was the girl from yesterday.

Cassandra was waiting by the chairs with a sandwich in one hand, the other still in a white paper bag wrapping on the table.

"Hey," Steph said, breathless because she was running and also because Cass was wearing a short skirt and her position gave Steph a great view of her legs. "Sorry I'm late, I tried sending you an Insta DM over it but I dunno if you got it or not."

"Don't check my Instagram, let the PR people run it," Cassandra said, "but I did check news."

God, Stephanie forgot how crazy her accent was. She sounded like she should be reading out the news. Steph would definitely listen to that.

"Yeah, I'm so sorry, but hey. Mr. Freeze. What can you do about it, right," Steph glanced at Cassandra through her lashes as she reached across to pick up her thịt nguội, "Ms. Wayne?"

Cassandra laughed. It was a beautiful noise, soft exhalations of sound like a bird beating their wings. "Figured it out, yeah?"

"Was it a secret?"

"Not really. But I liked that you didn't know, first time we met."

Steph regarded her. She knew Cass Cain was adopted two years ago and that she was taken from an abusive home life: the details were never leaked to the press, but it was one of those things people on Twitter liked to talk about. 

"Perils of fame?" she asked with just the slightest tinge of sarcasm because she was a bit of a dick and she admitted it.

Cassandra made the kind of face people make when they drank coffee grounds along with their coffee: it was cute on her. "Like to be normal."

"Poor little rich girl," Steph said, with a smile so Cassandra knew she didn't mean it. "How come Wayne lets you hang out this far east?"

"Going exploring," she said. "Grew up used to taking care of me and Mr. Wayne knows it." She paused to take a bite of her sandwich -- she was already halfway done while Steph had barely polished off a few bites because she started without Steph -- and chewed possibly slower than she needed to. "Only thing he makes me show up to is his parties."

"Galas?" Steph said, because apparently, her brain hadn't stopped thinking about a gala acing nonlinearities , it just laid the thought to rest in a spring-loaded trap triggered by a random, innocent, encounter.

"Yes," Cassandra said. "Going to one on Sunday with my little brother."

Steph gasped. "That's right! You have siblings. What kind of big sister are you?"

"Kind with annoying little brothers."

Steph laughed. "I bet you give as good as you get." Cassandra's answering smile told her everything she needed to know. "So," she said, changing the subject, "how much exploring have you been doing?"

"Been to every restaurant in Chinatown already, and Robinson Park. Also the Theatre District."

"Wow, a whole lotta Midtown and nothing else," Steph said. "You know there are two other islands to Gotham, right?"

"Three other," she corrected, with the distinct air of banter. "Forgot Tricorner? Aren't you a Gotham native?"

Steph snorted. "Tricorner's just overflow housing for RUGC kids, and true natives know it."

"True natives have too many opinions," Cassandra declared. Steph had to laugh even harder at that. Then, she did something a little impulsive, motivated both by a need to take her mind off her problems and also the fact that Cassandra was likely to be the most fun distraction she'd ever met.

"Well, if you're free sometime this weekend, I'll help you go exploring. No point to poking around Gotham if you don't get the right opinions, straight from the source," Steph said, a smile and a theatrically flourished hand to her chest to cover up her slight nervousness over the whole affair.

Cassandra smiled, small and a little mischievous, and leaned in a little closer to Steph's space. "Then it's a date, Stephanie," she said, then pinched a little slice of pork from Steph's unfinished sandwich.

"Steph," she corrected. Cassandra nodded.

"It's a date, Steph. Are you free Sunday afternoon?"

"I sure am, but didn't you just say you have a rich people party--"

"Gala," Cassandra corrected, ironic tone and sarcastic face. Steph made her own face. "Those are always at night. Have a free day otherwise."

"Then, let's meet Sunday for lunch. Somewhere in Lowtown, I'll pick the place. You want to give me your number, Cassandra, or should I keep DMing your publicist on Instagram?"

Cassandra motioned for her phone, and Steph unlocked it to hand to her. Then she hoped very quickly that she wouldn't open either Instagram or her web browser, because she had just spent the past half hour stalking her.

"Here," Cassandra handed the phone back, "and call me Cass. Literally."

Steph looked at her phone -- contact screen simply read "Cass Wayne" -- and then quickly looked back up at the other girl. "Did you just make a pun?"

Cass smiled shyly.

"I am so proud. I am like a proud mother, but not because we're the same age. I met you yesterday and this is my greatest accomplishment."

Cassandra's laugh was beautiful.

The cardinal rule of time was this: if you were waiting for something in the future, the present drags itself on that much longer. 

It wasn't that Steph hated school. She didn't really like it either, but she definitely didn't hate it. It was just that she'd never really shaken off the fugacious quality of being "the new kid," probably on account of the whole "starting senior year at a new school" bit. Everyone had already paired off into their little cliques and best-friendships and their awkward known-you-since-middle-school on and off relationships that started in high school. Nobody was unwelcoming per se -- or at least, nobody was unwelcoming by Gotham standards -- but everyone here had a history with each other that went back too many years for Steph to insert herself in without resistance, like trying to reshape clay that had been left out too long.

She didn't think she had friends, not really, but she had people she talked to when she saw them in class, and she had a good rapport going with the guys who also hung out in the library during lunch. They were nerds, sure -- Gotham had to have those too -- but they were the kind of nerds that could pass a half-hour as easily as anyone.

The Kevins -- Tran and Pham, though everyone just used "Kevin" and hoped the right one would turn around -- were locked in some kind of argument about the merits of some Star Trek series over the other. It had too many made-up words for Steph to even consider attempting to follow the argument, though Kevin Pham seemed like he was winning. 

Steph took a sip of what had to be the most disgusting tomato soup she'd ever tried.

"I can't believe they fucked up soup," Harper complained, her own shitty paper cup of cafeteria soup abandoned next to her. She had a stack of books next to her, most about Feynman, and next to her stack of books was her kid brother fiddling with his phone. 

"No kidding," Steph snorted. "All they had to do was get it out of the can."

She would usually have her own book with her; she was still only part of the way through some book about linguistics that she picked up on a whim that was maybe less of a whim and more because a glance at the summary of the book made her immediately start thinking about a pretty smile and straight shoulders and a true-blue American accent. Then the other half of her life decided to converge down onto language again too, and she put down the book after, against her will, her brain shrieked A GALA ACING NONLINEARITIES at her and she got pissed again about how she'd done all she could, she passed it onto the real heroes, why was she still thinking about that?

Steph took another sip of her tomato soup and told Harper, "The first tomato soup recipe was published in 1857."

"Huh. I always thought they were older than that."

"Yeah, me too," Steph said, leaning back. "Probably why I remember that so well. Can't remember who published it, though. Campbell soup popularized it though, in the 1890s."

"And Andy Warhol popularized Campbell," Harper said.

"Yeah," Steph said. "That and being gay, I guess."

Harper looked at her very closely, all that Narrows-bred mistrust coming to the fore. "Why do you say that?" she asked, with a solid amount of suspicion. Something dropped in Steph's gut, the now-familiar flip flop of suddenly fearing the reaction of someone you used to trust.

"Well," Steph said, looking away. "He's just famous for being openly gay in like, the 50s and 60s. Before Stonewall or whatever. I read that somewhere." She read it in a book about famous gay people, a little list that had a foreword acknowledging the desire to know that you weren't alone, that there were people like you who were there before.

Harper stared at her for a bit longer. She looked away and something eased back up in Steph. "Yeah, sure. Hey listen, do you want to work on the Spanish essay together?"

Steph frowned, still thinking a little of Andy Warhol. "Uh, I was going to do it this weekend. It's due next Tuesday, isn't it?"

"Yeah," Harper said, her eyes still on Steph. "Well, if you ever change your mind, you know Narrows are just a ten-minute ride from Lower East End. Come over some time."

The knot in Steph's stomach didn't quite ease up. Unbidden, she thought of the other names in that book, that proof that there had been other people like her out there before her.

She wondered if her father knew that the most famous cryptographer of them all was gay. What he thought of that whole sad story. Then she told herself to stop being maudlin.

Steph had never spent so long picking out an outfit before. She didn't even know she had so many options to consider, and while she point blank refused to go up to the mirror and hold up two dresses against her body like she was in some high school movie loosely based off of a classic but palatable for modern audiences, she certainly wasn't above a little good old fashioned waffling. 

"What's it for?" her mom asked, leaning against the doorframe and not a step further into Steph's room.

"Just meeting a new friend," Steph said, "We're hanging out in Lowtown. Opera District, probably, maybe we'll hang out at a museum."

Crystal hummed. "Wear the purple dress. You'll look good in it."

Steph shrugged and went with purple. Favorite color for a reason, right? She also put a black turtleneck underneath, both because layering shirts under dresses was fashionable as hell and also because the bruises on her arms had had only a week to clear up and they were still visible, if not as painful as before. Also, it was April. Layers were necessary.

She grabbed a black jacket, just in case, and ran down the stairs to the ground floor, taking them two at a time and making the fluttery purple dress fly about a little behind her. All through the (thankfully uneventful) subway ride, she kept checking on her phone conversation, even though

Steph Brown: Meet me at the Gotham Center for Visual Arts at 12!

Cass Wayne: :thumbsup:

was pretty much end of conversation. Still, Steph felt more nervous energy than she ever had before. She barely remembered that she had to get off the subway after it crossed the Sprang River into Midtown, right at the Robinson Park stop -- which was two stops after where she got off Wednesday night in Brideshead, but she wasn't going to think about that today -- and she had to cut across the big old park to get to the light rail station on the other end of it, near the Robinson Heights neighborhood. She managed to get in and swipe her transit card against the turnstiles just as she heard the next light rail train pull into the station. She swore a little; it didn't matter if she was that late, 12 wasn't a hard deadline, but she refused to be anything but early to their not-date. If the turnstile wanted to be grumpy and reject her card (again), she was going to hop the stupid thing, fee be damned.

Luckily, the interface beeped and the doors slid open and Steph ran in, pulling herself into the uncrowded carriage at just the last second. She fumbled around a little with her card, putting it back into the front pouch of her backpack -- sue her, dresses didn't have pockets -- and slung the mostly-empty backpack back onto her shoulders. She kept glancing at her phone.

The train pulled into the Opera District basically right when Steph got the text:

Cass Wayne: I'm outside the Center .

Steph grinned and typed out 

Steph Brown: On my way, give me five.

one-handed while trying to navigate out of the station. The GCVA was just a few blocks away, and it took everything Steph had to only lightly jog that way rather than flat out sprint.

The Gotham Center for Visual Arts, which was the premier modern art museum in the city, was a neo-classical architect's daydream come to life. There were spires and gargoyles and flying buttresses everywhere; the thing had always looked more to Steph like a castle out of a history textbook than a real building that actually existed in Lowtown. This entire section of the city, the Opera District and the Theatre Row and the Civic Center was all Old Gotham at its finest, a four hundred year old city with stately stone and brick buildings. Granite and lime, actually, if the old nursery rhyme was supposed to be believed.

Steph spotted Cass perched up on one of the grey stone planters, swinging her legs and chatting with a tall man. She was wearing black jeans and a flouncy white blouse with billowy sleeves (bishop sleeve, her trivia-brain offered up), and it looked amazing on her. Steph jogged over.

"Cass!" she called when she got within reasonable speaking distance.

"Steph!" Cass called back, smiling brightly. She swung her legs again and used the momentum to launch herself off the planter, landing neatly in front of Steph. The tall man simply pivoted to observe them more fully.

"Hey, how are you? Who's this?" Steph asked.

"Annoying brother," Cass said with a little grin. "Jason."

"Annoying brother with a driver's license," Jason muttered. He gave Steph a long look, and Steph, who'd grown up punching Lowtown punks in the nose when they tried to talk shit, gave him an answering measuring look. Jason leaned back and put his hands in his hoodie pockets, and Steph had to try very hard not to smirk at him. That's right, punk .

"Good chauffeur," Cass said, affecting a haughty tilt to her chin. "We won't be needing your services for the moment. Scram."

"Pain in the ass," Jason said, probably affectionately. "I'll let you guys have fun." He ambled off, and Steph immediately stopped caring once she turned to look at Cass. Cass wasn't smiling again, but her entire face and set of her shoulders and even somehow the position of her feet said happy . It was enthralling.

"Have you ever been to the GCVA?" 

Cass shook her head, no.

"Ah, good. I know they have some traveling exhibitions on Hannah Höch, but honestly, the permanent exhibits are always gonna be the best kind."

"Which is your favorite?" Cass asked as they climbed the low steps up to the front entrance. Steph stopped to think about it.

"There's a hall of Annie Leibowitz portraits. Just, pictures after pictures of people. Every time we came here on a field trip for school or just on a day off in the city, I liked going down that hall."

"Why?" Cass asked, and there was no emotion but curiosity in her voice.

"I don't know. I'd like looking at the people, trying to see if I could figure something out about their lives just by looking at their faces."

Cass looked her in the eyes. "Can you?"

Steph met them. "I don't think so."

They checked in; admission was free for anyone who could prove they lived in Gotham, for which Steph brought her student ID and Cass brought up her Instagram again, cashing in on that celeb credit much to the amusement of Steph.

"I knew there were perks of fame," she said, grinning.

"Not that many," Cass said, in a tone that was both 'pouty' and 'ironic' at the same time.

They had spent a while in the Victorian Gothic exhibit, huddled around Eakins or Sargent paintings and pointing small things out to each other. Cass, while not brimming with art history trivia like Steph, was incredibly good at pointing out the subtle cues in the figures, with an eye for errant hands or tensed muscles. It was fun, especially when Steph started making up stories, just to see if Cass would catch her in the lie.

"The three birds in the background symbolize the Greek spirits of, uh, migraines, memory loss, and dehydration. They were called the After Party-cles. Pope Francis, the new one who's super hip with the kids, canonized them as saints last year."

"You weren't even trying," Cass said, giggling. She was wrong. Steph certainly was trying, not to fool her, but to get her to smile as much as possible. Cass had a hundred different giggles, snorts, and full on laughs, and Steph was looking forward to categorizing all of them after getting further acquainted with their distinctions.

She got another snort to add to the collection over lunch when they went to the overpriced cafe built into an overhang on the second floor: she'd made some sort of disgruntled joke about small portion sizes and Cass had quirked her lips and made a noise that was half "you're funny" and half "you're right," which Steph liked a lot. She bumped that one up to maybe her third favorite laugh, right under the half scandalized giggle Cass let out when they looked at a Simeon Solomon painting of two dudes playing a harp butt-ass naked and Steph leaned over to whisper "do you think that dude's junk is just, like, right up against the other guy's arm?"

Her favorite of the day, of course, was when they were trading lines in front of a beautiful Annie Leibovitz photo-portrait in that hall of people Steph loved so much. It was Cassandra who had started it, gazing with her head tilted at a photo of Keith Haring painted up in black lines on white background in a set full of the same. It was always one of Steph's favorites: the way that it always took her brain a half-second even to process that Haring was there, hiding in his own art.

"Who painted him?" Cass asked.

"Uh, I don't know," Steph said. She leaned forward to check the plaque, but it only told her the title: Keith Haring, New York, 1986 which, helpful, yeah thanks.

"Never mind that. Who told him to pose like a frog?"

He did kind of look like a frog, all spread legs and arms in what Steph used to think was a "who me" gesture but now, like a solved puzzle, would never be able to see as anything other than "frog arms."

"Probably the same person who painted him. If you do all that work, might as well show it off."

"Do you think the paint is all still wet?"

"Oh, man. What would be more uncomfortable, you think, wet paint or dry?"

Cass thought about it for a second. "Wet. Would be all slimy." She scrunched her nose up, like she was imagining it.

"Yeah, but dry would get flaky ."

"You're right. Now I don't know which is worse. He would have to be there for while, photoshoots take forever."

"Speaking from experience?"

"Yes," Cass said. She sounded very disgruntled about it. It was adorable.

"Which part do you think they painted first?" Steph asked. Cass leaned in close, then pronounced:

"His penis."

Steph almost choked on her own spit in surprise. She started coughing, wheezing, and laughing at the same time, which then set Cass off into bright peals of sympathetic laughter, loud and completely unaware of the attention it was bringing her. They nearly got kicked out of the hall, but Steph couldn't bring herself to care.

After they had thoroughly explored the museum and almost got kicked out again twice -- Steph really wanted to get that loud belly laugh out of Cass again -- they ended up sitting back on the low steps, another three hours to kill.

"So," Steph said in a lightly joking tone. "Since this is a date and all," and she definitely snuck a look at Cass to see how she took the extension of their running joke that Steph wasn't even totally sure why she was keeping up, "we should do a quintessential first date activity."

"First date was getting breakfast sandwiches," Cass pointed out.

"Whatever, second date. Semantics. You want to catch a Sunday afternoon horror showing? Tempting fate like that is pretty much just a Gotham tradition at this point; I bet there's some serial killer thriller showing there."

Cass's lips pressed together and Steph's stomach dropped a little, blood rushing to her ears. Shit, what if Cass had problems with serial killers? Maybe she had PTSD or something and a horror show could be a trigger rather than a coping mechanism. Maybe she had a run in with a serial killer? In Gotham, there was never any way of knowing.

"English isn't my first language," Cass finally said without meeting Steph's eyes. "Still gives me trouble." Steph blinked. That was certainly not what she had been expecting. What with the accent and all, but, honestly, it kind of fit. Short sentences, simple vocab. 

"That's fine. What do you like, then?"

Cass frowned and tilted her head, considering. There was a furrow in her sparse brows that Steph wanted to press her thumb to for some weird reason. Steph frowned herself and pushed the impulse down.

"Dancing."

"Oh! Have you ever been to the arcade in Burnside Docks?"

Cass looked at her, confused. She shook her head.

"Alright, get up, rich girl. I'm gonna kick your ass at Dance Dance Revolution."

Steph did not, in fact, kick Cass's ass at Dance Dance Revolution. They had about fifteen rematches, where Steph handily lost each one. They played a few of the shooter games together too, where Steph was a little less hopelessly outclassed, and they both drank some awful sugary sodas that Steph knew would give her a headache in a few hours. Altogether, it was a great three hours.

"Shit," Steph muttered when she pulled out her phone. "It's been three hours."

Cass kept her eyes on Steph, one eyebrow raised in question as she chugged another Diet Coke. That was definitely the weirdest thing Steph ever learned about Cass today. Seriously, Diet Coke.

"I need to get to the light rail station in like five minutes, or I have to wait for the next one to come in like, another hour."

"How far?" Cass asked, already making her way to the exit.

"Seven blocks, that way," Steph said, waving her hand a little defeatedly. She was already running through backups -- did she know anybody with a car? -- when Cass turned and flashed a smile over her shoulder.

"We can make it if we run," she said and then without even waiting for Steph to react, she turned and set off in a dead run.

"Shit!" Steph said, then took off after her. "Wait for me, dammit!"

Cass whooped a little, like a crazy person, and kept running in her impractical ballet flats and outpacing Steph who was in much more reasonable sneakers. "Catch up!" she called, her voice a little snatched away by the wind.

Steph put on speed, and it was totally worth the stitch in her side that would be absolutely unmanageable when she ended up getting to the station only a few steps behind Cass and Cass whirled around with a smile playing not just at her lips but also at her eyes and in her shoulders and hips and feet too. Cass was the only person Steph had ever met who could smile with her shoulders and hips and feet.

Steph managed to tag her transit card in at the turnstiles and as she rushed to the station, she was almost disappointed to hear the train coming in, because the noise of the light rail had slowly drowned out the best sound in the world: Cassandra Wayne and her deep, full, from-the-belly laughs.

someone will remember us
I say
even in another time

- Sappho of Lesbos

Chapter Text

On the ride home, Steph was so giddy, massaging at the stitch in her side, that when she was pretty sure she'd spotted Man-Bat in one of the subway tunnels and he held up a scaly finger to his lips, Steph shrugged and smiled back rather than calling 911. He was probably their city mascot at this point, anyways.

The cold had set in well and truly by the time Steph got off the subway station near her home. She shrugged her jacket on, her shoulders hunched up to her ears to stave off the cold and her exposed shins stinging against the cold wind. She damn near bounced up the four flights of stairs, whipping around each turn with a kind of gleeful energy she hadn't thought she still had in her.

"Mom!" she called, tossing her keys onto the stand next to their entrance and hip checking the front door shut. "Ask me about my day!"

Crystal Brown's voice floated in from the dining table. "How was your day, Steph," she asked, amused and distracted. Suddenly cautious -- distracted? over what? a gala acing nonlinearities , did her father do something? No, the gala wouldn't be for another few hours -- Steph walked into the kitchen, faux casually kneeling down to rummage through the pantry for snacks. 

"It was good. Cass and I went to the art museum in Lowtown and then hung out at the arcade for a bit longer."

"Yeah?" Crystal asked, hunched over a mess of papers. "Don't spoil your appetite, I'm going to make some pasta soon."

Steph sighed and put the potato chips back. "Whatcha working on, mom?" she asked, walking over to their small dining table and leaning her hip against it, unobtrusively craning her neck to get a glimpse at the papers.

"Studying," her mom said, leaning back with a sigh. "For the NCLEX. I'm sorry for anything I ever said to you about the SAT."

The knot that had formed in Steph's stomach loosened, but only marginally. "Oh, that's it?"

Her mom gave her a look. "It's a six hour long test, dear. There's no that's it about it."

"Well," Steph drawled, "I distinctly recall you telling me to suck it up about losing four hours of a Saturday morning to standardized testing."

"Yeah, yeah, my bad. God," her mom scrubbed her tired face with her hands, "I keep telling myself that I can do it. Rest of April, May, and then a week of June and I graduate. I've already finished almost two years."

"That's sunk cost fallacy, mom," Steph piped up with a grin, leaving the dining table to go get a glass of water. Her mom shot her a look.

"Are you encouraging me to drop out of school?"

"No," Steph said. "But maybe a break would be good. I don't want you going all, like, Nurse Ratched crazy once they finally certify you."

"Ha ha," her mom said flatly, then turned to watch her finish her glass of water. "Don't you have some of your own homework to do?"

"Yeah," Steph said. "Essay for Spanish. I have to talk about what I did on the weekend. Maybe I'll tell you all about it over dinner, en español ." She did little jazz hands. Her mom laughed.

"I took French in high school. I won't get a word of it."

"That's fine. Just smile and nod like usual," Steph said, grinning still.

Steph couldn't focus. Now that she was alone, it felt like there was a lead ball somewhere halfway between her heart and her stomach, a deep pit yawning at the place where her ribs spread away. It was fear, but she didn't want to name it.

She had scratched out several non-starters, twirling her pencil in her fingers in a way that was too fast to be absent-minded: an exhalation of nervous energy and the only thing keeping her from standing up and shrieking. That was what she thought that pit was, that lead ball under her ribs, that's what she thought that was. A scream she was keeping throttled down inside her.

Her mind kept splintering in a thousand directions. It felt like she was walking a tightrope with each breath: too shallow and she'd be hyperventilating, too deep, and she would certainly just start screaming and never stop. Her hands were not shaking, not with the monumental effort she was directing to keep them in motion, but she thought with absolute certainty that if she paused, her teeth would chatter and her bones would reverberate and she would just shake apart.

She had Twitter up on her phone, following a livetweet thread about the fundraiser by some journalist or the other -- Victoria Vale, blue check mark. Steph tried very hard not to refresh the thread more than three times a minute, though she failed more than she succeeded. She could not stop thinking about Cass, who was there in place of her adopted father; Bruce was on one of his "escape the public eye" vacations or another, according to Vale's twitter. Steph felt her stomach sink when she saw that, and her mind had started racing. Would there be a bomb again at the fundraiser? Was Cass safe? Would Batgirl stop it? She and Oracle had promised, and she thought they were true to their word, but they didn't know her father like she did. They didn't know just how far Cluemaster would go. Steph absolutely believed that if he was willing to consider killing her, his own daughter, to keep his identity safe, he was totally willing to kill a room full of rich strangers and Cass to make a point about his own importance. It may be the childish insistence that killing your own kids was the line to cross, but Steph was convinced that Cluemaster was more dangerous than the others knew.

Steph also couldn't do jack shit about that. She tried again to refocus on her essay.

Mi amiga y yo fuimos al museo de arte esta tarde. Nosotras vimos las pinturas. Ellas eran bonitas. Mi amiga se fue para ir a una gala.

Just writing the word "gala" set her off again. Steph thumbed her phone on, swiped to refresh the feed, and felt something jolt up the line of her ribs to her scapula to her fingers to see a photo pop up again. She tapped it; it was a lineup of people whom she only vaguely recognized from the local CNN station her mom liked to play in the background while she cooked, all rich and old and white and important. Steph zoomed in on the background, looking through the blurrier and more pixelated figures for the familiar dark hair on pale skin and short strong stature. She caught a glance of what she swore on her life was Cass's forearm in the corner of the picture. Steph had noticed a small scar curling up Cass's pinky finger that she had noted but not asked about, and as she zoomed in on the small hand, adorned with a subtle but expensive-looking art deco ring, she could swear she saw the same line of white curling up and peeking from around the black band of metal.

The confirmation somehow set Steph's heart racing, though it also felt like it had stitched up the deep pit in her ribs, if only a little. She was not sure if this was an improvement upon the situation. Cass was there, Cass was not safe, Cass was there. She'd be safe if Batgirl was there, too. Weren't the Waynes important to Batman? Steph recalled some sort of press release about some Wayne Foundation investment or another, and she definitely recalled hearing about Bruce Wayne's financial ties to Batman. Harper complained about how blatantly illegal funding a vigilante had to be, but who was going to say no to the billionaire? The point was: Cass would likely be fine. Probably.

Steph sighed, looking back at her essay. Then she gave in, skipped a few lines on the binder paper, and copied out:

Z T Z O Z Z X R M T M L M O R M V Z I R G R V H

A G A L A A C I  N G N O N L  I  N E A R I T  I  E  S

Slowly, her eyes drifted back to the aborted essay. Spanish and English, while using the same alphabet, had a different structures to their words. Phillip II used to encode ciphers in Spanish, during the Spanish Golden Age. He had each letter converted to a symbol. A, E, and I were the simplest, due to how common they were in the Spanish language. Her father had learned the cipher once, but he never used it, as far as Steph was aware. Her pencil rested against the first 'A' in the cracked cipher.

What had she said? The 'Z's had been bothering her when she cracked it the first time, and not just because they were throwing her off, leading her down the wrong road and trying to get her to waste her time with a Vignere or Substitution cipher once Caesar didn't work. In English, the most common letter in the first thousand most common words was 'e', followed by 't' and 'a'. But that wasn't true in Spanish. The phrasing was off: A Gala Acing Nonlinearities, the grammar was weird. Slowly, Steph pressed her pencil down on the A and crossed it off. Underneath it, she wrote down another A.

She worked for another ten minutes. She had hit dead ends a few times and had to erase and start over at least thrice, but the longer she worked at it, the more the lead ball was back, solidifying under her ribs as she began believing more and more in her hunch. She crossed off the last L and looked at what she had.

A GALA ACING NONLINEARITIES

IGLESIA NACIONAL ARGENTINE

Again, her brain raced to fill her in on the facts. Argentine, national church of Argentina, Argentinians were primarily Roman Catholic. To the west of the Warehouse District, facing the Atlantic Ocean, there was a historically Hispanic neighborhood of Miller's Harbor. The north was historically richer, Nicaraguan, some Uruguayans, most of whom were more Protestant or Atheist On Surveys. She had to get to the south side. Southern Miller Harbor, closer to the Warehouse District and the docks, more Cuban, more Argentinian, more Roman Catholic. Iglesia Nacional Argentine. 

She pulled her costume on as fast as possible, too full up on her buzzing thoughts to even remember to grab more than just her phone. It occurred to her, after she yanked herself bodily out her bedroom window and scrambled, squirrel-like, down to the ground level using window sills and an iron grip and a deep sense of fear for what her father had planned, that she had brought nothing that would be capable of stopping Cluemaster's henchmen. She didn't slow down. 

Miller's Harbor was seven miles from her home. She would never be able to get there on foot. Seven miles on foot was over an hour of running. Seven miles by car was seven minutes. Steph didn't have a car. Steph knew, theoretically, how to steal a car.

Steph stole a car.

She ran until she saw a beaten up old model -- the old ones are the easiest to steal, she'd remembered an older kid at break telling them all, a worldly affectation to his voice -- and she ran down each alley until she found a piece of plastic banding long and thin enough to be an improvised slim jim. Functional fixedness could eat its heart out.

Steph wasted three minutes on gathering the materials, and another minute accidentally breaking the lock on the first car she tried it on. For once, however, living in the lower-middle-class neighborhood of Lower East End was working out for her: none of the cars in the entire neighborhood had been bought new, and all but maybe four of them had been manufactured before the 90s. She had plenty of practice shots, but very little time.

The second car proved a little more agreeable than the first. Steph chanced a glance at the address, then she went peeling off in the car. She was rusty: the only reason she knew even the basics of driving was because of a mandatory course, junior year. Most city's public education systems probably didn't have quite as strong an emphasis on defensive driving, but then again, most city's public education systems didn't mandate that half of P.E. be spent on a self-defense unit. Steph took the stolen ride out at 100, swerving through the slow late-night traffic like a maniac, and thanked every Roman Catholic angel she could think of that there was enough gas in the tank.

As it turned out, it didn't matter that she hadn't brought anything that could serve as a weapon. Steph was too late, and she realized it a block away.

The smoke was grey against the black sky, illuminated from below. Steph ditched the car and ran.

The church had clearly not been burning long, and that was the worst of it. Fire, bright, horrifically red fire, limned the supports and rendered the wood black on the night. It looked nothing like the painting of fire on the London skyline that Cass and she had stopped in front of and leisurely commented on, just that afternoon. It looked awful.

Steph ran forward and the heat hit her next, like a slap in the face. She had to get inside though -- there was a shadow beyond the doorway, flickering along with the flames.

"Is anyone there?" Steph called, choking back on the smoke. She was thankful for the mask, though nothing was protecting her eyes from the stinging. She would close them and rub at them if it hadn't been for the shadow: if she looked away even once, Steph was afraid she'd lose sight of the figure for good.

She ran forward, even when the heat had gone blistering and the thermal heating on her leggings meant her thighs and knees and stomach felt like they too were on fire. She didn't risk a glance to check as she ran up the steps and through the entrance. The flames, dripping and hissing and spitting like tigers leashed to the corner, were still thankfully consigned to the seams of the old wood church. The stitch in her side was back. Steph hadn't realized the way dread stretched the time out; it had only been a few hours ago that she had been running through the city with Cass to catch a train.

"Is anyone here?" Steph called again, before noticing the shadow behind a collapsing door. She ran through the room, ditching her fluttery and flammable cape at the entrance. In a side room, probably an office based on the desk and papers and books that were probably all going to burn was a gagged man tied to a chair. Pastor's robes.

"Shit," Steph said, going for the desk. She knocked over several paperweights and neatly organized desk supplies in a quest to get what she needed: a pair of scissors, thankfully. She opened them and gripped it like a saw, going for the zip ties that were leashing the man's ankles to the chair legs. Freeing his legs first, she then went for his hands, clasped and tied behind his back, threading him thoroughly to the chair. As she worked, the fire from the back of the church steadily closed in. She kept half an eye on the thread of flames licking up the old bookshelf -- if all that paper went up, the ensuing lack of oxygen in the room might actually kill them.

With a snap, the man's wrists were free. He was clearly in no state to get himself out though -- his eyes were glazed with heat exhaustion and his forehead and hair looked like he'd been dunked in a pool, they were so caked in sweat. Steph swore and tossed the scissors to the ground so she could get her arms under his armpits and heave. She already knew he would be too heavy for her to carry him out -- he was a full-grown man and had to weigh maybe two of her.

It was slow, awful going. Everything burned, both on the level of Steph being convinced her skin was about to crisp up like chicken, and her muscles threatening to go on strike with every step she took. She had to readjust her grip several times as her palms started slipping and her hair glued itself to her face with sweat. They ended up barely a foot off the ground about five steps in, Steph hugging the man's torso as she pulled them torturously slowly out the entrance into the night. 

That was when she saw it, painted in what she knew to be garish yellow but was turned orange by the light.

LUX ELATA ALUMNOS TOLLIT was emblazoned across one of the walls of the office, already half-devoured by the fire. Steph, in a rhythm of heaving and inching the dead weight she was carrying, took a second to desperately hate her father. She had somehow forgotten: he wasn't just bad for her, he was bad for everyone whoever had the misfortune of being too near to him.

It probably had only taken her half a minute to pull the man across the length of the first room, a hallway with carpeting that she was absolutely terrified would burn easily, though it felt like much, much longer. The second they cleared the doorway, Steph forsook dignity and grabbed the man by his ankle, heaving him down the steps as gently as she could and depositing the both of them onto the sidewalk. She inched him, mindful of his head, down the sidewalk until they suddenly and abruptly broke through the blanket of heat.

Steph was reminded of when her mother would take frying pans off the stove and run them under cold water, and the water would hiss into steam on contact with the heated metal surface. That was how she felt, a human frying pan contacting the small cold water molecules suspended in air and making them steam with just the full force of the heat the fire gave her.

She looked down at the man, who, if not lucid, had managed to keep his eyes open throughout the whole awful ordeal. She kneeled down next to his head and felt around the back for the catch, fumbling with the knot to pull off his gag. His head lolled as he looked at her.

"Thanks," he slurred, voice husky like a smoker's.

"Don't mention it," Steph replied, her voice not doing much better. "Burning a priest alive in his own church was a bit too heavy-handed of a metaphor for me."

They both sat sprawled on the sidewalk for a bit, panting a little. "Metaphor for what?" the man finally asked, a softly ironic humor in his tone. 

"Fuck if I know," she sighed, getting up. "Are you gonna be okay?"

The man didn't respond for a bit. Steph glanced at him sideways. He was looking at the burning church behind them, though he didn't seem as outright sad as she'd have expected, though there was a tilt to his eyebrows that she couldn't quite decipher. Perhaps it was an acceptance of the temporary, a willingness to roll with the punches. She wondered if that was the religion in him, or just the Gothamite. 

"Yes," he said. "I think I'll manage."

"Okay," Steph said. "Okay. Did you see the person who did this? Was it a man, 5'10 or so, blonde hair, probably wearing orange?"

"How did you know?" the pastor asked, no shock in his voice but a good amount of curiosity.

"I'm a very good guesser," Steph told him dryly. "I always win at Pictionary and Charades. The man's Cluemaster, and he's bad news. You think you can stand up?"

The pastor slowly tried, leveraging his elbows against the ground to gain a little lift. Once he got his torso above the pavement, Steph held out her hand and let him brace himself against her to get on his feet. It was a good decision. No sooner had he put pressure on his right foot did he buckle, almost taking Steph down with him if she hadn't reacted fast, grabbing his arm and bracing it along her shoulders. The sudden movement felt like fire along her upper back. She ignored it, and slowly sunk down with the pastor to get him seated more firmly on the pavement.

"Alright, that didn't look good," she said, giving the man his arm back.

"Foot," he said helpfully. "Think the right one is burnt."

"Did I do that?" Steph asked, horrified.

"No," the pastor said. He patted her knee. "You did a good job."

"Well thanks, padre ," Steph said, intentionally mangling the accent. It got a laugh out of the man, which quickly devolved into coughing. Steph felt horrible. 

"Father is for priests, I'm just the pastor."

"Pastor, then. Maybe you can help me one last time. They teach you Latin in your fancy church training school?"

"A little."

"What does lux elata alumnos tollitt mean?"

The pastor leaned back and dropped his head, looking straight up at the night sky. "' A raised light elevates the students,' or something to that effect."

"Hm. Stay in school. Guess Cluemaster does care after all." Steph shifted and grabbed her phone out of her pocket. It was a miracle the heat hadn't rendered it unusable, but she supposed there was a reason why everyone put up with Lex Luthor if LexCorp tech worked so well. "I'm gonna call 911 and scram, on account of the whole," Steph gestured to herself, "unsanctioned vigilantism thing. Father forgive me for I have sinned, I stole a car on my way here and I gotta drive it back now."

The pastor laughed, then coughed. Smoke inhalation. That couldn't be good. "Good luck, kid," he said. "You're free to come back once the confession booths aren't on fire and tell me all about it."

Steph waved him off with a smile. She started dialing as she walked, curtly cutting off the operator's "911, what's your emergenc-" with the address and the type of emergency -- fire, subcategory: supervillain. With that finished, she hung up and jogged back to the stolen car. She got in quickly and tossed her phone onto the shotgun seat. 

As soon as she sat down, her entire body made its grievances against her screamingly apparent. She could barely muster the willpower to get her arms up to the wheel, the pulled muscles and blistered skin making themselves as heard as possible. Steph took a minute to sigh, dropping her forehead against the wheel. The whole car smelled unfamiliar, and a little like puke, which did not intermingle with the smoke smell well.

Regardless, Steph took a few deep breaths in and a few deep breaths out, trying to center herself or whatever meditative hippies told people to do under waterfalls. Her concentration was broken when her phone started ringing. Steph jerked up, then screamed a little as the first degree burns on her neck registered pain again. With short, stiff movements, she slowly picked up her phone.

It was an unknown number, which sent her already on edge nerves into high fucking alert. Then, less "against her better judgment" and more in "it can't get worse" resignation, she swiped to accept the call.

"Hello," a voice said. It was modulated a little flat and clearly run through a voice changer -- Steph suddenly had a few guesses over who this could be. "Is this Stephanie Brown?"

"Yes," Steph said, though what she really wanted to say was, Get this over with, I am in so much physical pain right now.

"Stephanie Brown, age 17, daughter of Crystal Brown nee Lewis and Arthur Brown. You must live with your mother on the Lower East End, right?"

"Supervillain or superhero?" Steph asked, tired.

"Neither. I'm Oracle. I'm the eye in the sky."

"Ah. Why, Oracle, are you calling me to tell me about myself?"

"It's not really you that I'm that concerned about, kid. No offense. But your dad, Arthur Brown. I did a little digging, and I did not like what I saw. Hope a proclivity for pyrotechnics doesn't run in the blood."

Steph stopped walking. Closed her eyes. Phone still to her ear. "I haven't seen or spoken to my dad in about 14 months."

"Now," Oracle said, "I know that's a lie. Spoiler."

Yeah. Steph figured that one was coming. "Weren't you there for that? We had like, three lines of conversation. It was a real reunion, alright. And I bet there's gonna be another one real soon that you guys won't show up to, again. Lux elata alumnos tollitt , I saw it in the church before it burned down."

"Pardon me, but your old man's whole thing is communicating in clues, and clearly, like father like daughter. The way I see it, there are two possibilities. Either you're working with Cluemaster, throwing us off the trail by sending us to the gala and honeypotting --"

"I am not honeypotting anyone, Jesus Christ!"

"-- honeypotting Batgirl, or you are just not as good at detective work as you think. Either way, I'm gonna have to nip this Spoiler stuff in the bud. You know that I know your secret, and you should know that I can get that information to anyone I want. Stop, now."

"What, like you want me to believe that if I don't give up Spoiler, you're gonna tell my supervillain dad on me?"

Oracle hummed. It came out weird with the modifier. "Probably just your mom. It'd destroy her to know that her daughter was going out alone at night, chasing down the man she married, about to get herself killed by him and be the next tragedy to read about in the morning news."

Steph laughed hollowly. "Tragedies are for white girls from Bristol, Oracle. When girls like me die, we're just a statistic."

"Be that as it may, Stephanie, trust me when I say that I really want to keep you from being a statistic for just a little longer. I don't want to see your corpse any time soon."

She was not proud of her reaction, or the words that came next, but the quiet condescension in Oracle's voice, combined with the monumentally shitty turn her day had taken, had just hit a button in her. She was full of that quiet, simmering, helpless rage; the stinging pain of knowing that bad things would happen and she was never going to be strong enough to stop it or fight back and the sharp, bone-deep hurt that that unfairness had struck in her was aching now, harder than it ever had before and before she could stop herself, that pressing desperate need to hit back had pushed the words up her esophagus and through her throat and past clenched teeth.

"You don't have a monopoly on that detective work shit either, Oracle . You know, it's not really that hard to figure Batgirl out either. No definite articles, drops the personal pronoun when she starts the sentence. Where have I heard that pattern before? I told you; I'm good with words, and I'm real good with word puzzles. It's not too much of a jump to go from Cassie Cain to Brucie Wayne either, and damn, I bet my bombshell outweighs yours."

Yeah. Like she said. She was not proud of all that. Though, maybe some of it. Mouthing off to Oracle might be the coolest thing she'd ever done, right before Oracle sent Batman to murder her, or at least make her life living hell or whatever he did to criminals who threatened to expose his identity.

There was silence on the other end of the line. Then, "Well played, kid. Hope this isn't a bad idea." Oracle ended the call.

Steph didn't remember much of the drive to Miller's Harbor, her memories whited out with adrenaline, but she remembered every inch of the seven miles in a stolen car on the way back. She took each turn slow, her foot always on the brake and her brain stuck at a conversation she ended five minutes ago with a faceless voice on the phone. Guess she wasn't Cassandra after all, Steph thought, just a girl crying wolf. 

She knew, from the way the fire had been spreading, that the residents of Miller's Harbor would wake up in the dawnbreak to a red disk instead of a sun, smoke hazing out the light particles and staining it an orange-yellow, before eventually, the clouds would reclaim their place and Gotham would be plunged back into the steel-white skies of its springs. The smoke would stay around for the rest of the day, ash suspended in the air leaving Miller's Harbor a washed-out fugue of itself. It would pass, she knew, as every tragedy in this city always did. But still: she couldn't stop thinking about the pastor and his leg, the burn, the smell, the look on his face when he looked back into the church.

Her father did that. Her father would do it again. Tomorrow, probably, if he was still sticking to his timeline.

Steph had never been able to bring herself to watch the game show her father had hosted. Quiz Bowl. The re-runs were definitely out there, especially that disastrous final episode: it went viral in the early days of the internet, so there was definitely no way of getting all the evidence back and stored away now. Like smoke in the air, her father's worst moment had dispersed on the internet and the ash settled wherever it chose. He had blown up on camera on April 15th, ten years ago. The anniversary had passed this Tuesday. Fired from his job on April 20th. Today. And tomorrow would be April 21st, the ten year anniversary of the airing of Arthur Brown's final stint on Quiz Bowl. 

Steph thought through that as she eased around the turns, the unfamiliar twists of Miller Harbor melting into the little India that was Lyle Park. Steph cut through Lyle Park and turned onto the Sprang Bridge and crossed the river back into Uptown, back into the small corner of the whole terrible city that she knew well. The night shift traffic has started, so it was even slower going. Steph thought very suddenly of her mother: she would be asleep by now, ready to wake up even earlier than usual to put in hours on the early bird shift, the way she did every Monday. Just thinking about her mother so soon after her father made Steph want to throw up the pasta with the jarred sauce and Ikea meatballs and the arcade soda and the overpriced-and-too-tiny portions of the museum cafe food and the entire rest of the shitty night up with it. Steph rolled down her window, just in case the feeling was less metaphoric than she thought. It probably would be in bad taste to vomit in her stolen car, especially since she was still planning on returning it.

The traffic stretched two miles on the highway into five minutes, slow enough for Steph to become more aware of her injuries aside from the general pain that had enveloped her. Nothing seemed permanently damaged, though it felt like she had had the worst sunburn of her life right above the back of her neck, where the pleather jacket didn't protect her. She had stripped the jacket off almost right away, wearing just the T-shirt she'd put on to wear to bed after dinner and the heat-trapping leggings, now disgustingly slick with her sweat. 

She ditched the car back where she found it, hastily scribbling out a note on a post-it pad she'd found in her inner pocket: Sorry, took it for a joyride :)

She walked back on shaky legs to the building her home was in, then stopped in front of it. For a second, she wanted to just punch in the code for the front door and walk up the stairs to the top. Open the door, wake her mother up, make up some lie about sneaking out to a wild party like a normal teenager, then shower and go to bed. Her mom would be worried, but normal-mom-worried, about normal-teen-things like getting into drugs or making bad friends. They'd have a talk, maybe tomorrow night after her mom came back from shifts at two jobs, or maybe while they both cooked dinner on the weekend together and her mom would open with "so, are you staying safe?" and she'd laugh a little at the irony.

Then, Steph remembered she had jumped out the window and forgotten to take her keys in her desperation to keep her supervillain father from wreaking havoc on their city. No normal teen problems for her.

She looked slowly up, letting the burnt skin on her neck register the sheer angle she had to crane it in order to look up at her fourth-floor bedroom window. Then, with resignation, she looked for a secure foothold. It would be just her luck if she tripped and fell off the side of her own goddamn apartment building.

Her window was still pushed open, and Steph stumbled in, inelegantly clambering over her windowsill to fall clumsily into a heap on her floor. She stripped her too-hot leggings off at once, the smell of sour sweat and woodsmoke assaulting her senses. She'd have to do laundry at some point. Tomorrow she had to go out again. She sat on the floor near the door and listened a little: her mother's breathing, through the thin walls, was steady. Asleep. She wouldn't risk a shower, that could invite too many questions.

Steph settled for pulling her shirt off and tossing it in the corner with her leggings. She slathered cold moisturizer onto her shoulders and the backs of her hands and over her thighs, for lack of anything else that could work. She hoped it would be good enough. She was too bone tired to do anything else: she fell into her bed, and the scratching of the sheets and the blanket against her reddened skin was secondary to sheer mental exhaustion she was facing.

Sometimes, she felt like she was on a tightrope, a balancing act between turning into her father or turning into her mother. Would she hurt people, or let herself be hurt?

She didn't think she really intended to let Cassandra's secret loose, she just wanted to make Oracle back off with the only weapon she had, but there was also the question: how much of Cassandra's interest in her was because of her father? Holding secrets above other people, keeping them at arm's length: how much of her was because of her father?

Chapter Text

Steph took a shower at 5 am. The cold water screamed along her burns, but it didn't hiss. It woke her mom up. She made her coffee as an apology. She dressed in layers like she was going to go to school. She took her bag with her like she was going to school. She got on the light rail at 6:30, like she was going to school.

Her brain, running on autopilot and three hours of sleep, disengaged at the station. Instead of taking the right turn to Green Bakery to buy a customary bánh mì bì, she kept straight and walked the extra two blocks. Ridgeview High wasn't too big of a school for one in the city. Cutting behind the teacher's parking lot, Steph eased open the gate and let herself into the back field where track and field would be running morning practices in the summer. Luckily, it was April and nobody was around.

Softball, on the other hand, was a spring sport. The equipment would be in the ramshackle shed with the lock that could be picked so easily, it might as well have not been there. Steph beelined for it, scanning the field just to make sure that nobody saw her. 

It only took a little jimmying with an unbent paper clip to get the lock to spring open. Steph slipped inside, softly closing the door behind her. She glanced around before finding what she needed: a repurposed garbage can full of aluminum baseball bats.

Steph slung her backpack off and plopped it on the ground, opening the main pocket. She examined the bats -- all cheap Louisville Sluggers, but good enough for what she needed them for -- and selected the one with the least dents in it. She pushed aside her mask, a pair of cheap winter gloves, and her jacket inside the main pocket of the backpack and stuffed the bat in: it was a little too long, so when she zipped her backpack up, the handle poked out from the top.

She'd been caught out twice already because she hadn't been properly prepared. While Steph didn't know any fancy martial arts, like a real vigilante, she could still take the opportunity to stack the odds in her favor before she went to go make the same mistake a third time in a row. Especially without half her costume to protect her, she had to get creative.

Weapon of choice acquired, Steph snuck out and relocked the door behind her and tried very hard not to think about the fact that her father started out as a thief too.

She had to sit on the hard green plastic seat of the light rail with her backpack behind her, using her torso and head to block the view of the stolen baseball bat. She had stayed awake nearly the entire night, running the clues back and forth and through in her head. Algorithms, like her father taught her. Consider each and every possibility, each and every possible option, and eliminate that which did not make sense.

Lux elata alumnos tollitt. A raised light elevates the students. Can be rearranged into many anagram solutions: A manilla outlet's toll tux. Lo, a littlest autumnal lox. Lull loot exits a tantalum. Lotto insult; exult a llama.

She had thought about that last one for an inordinate amount of time, because it did kind of sound like her father's sense of humor. She couldn't think of anything that it could be a riddle or reference to, though, so she abandoned that train of thought after she had sunk fifteen minutes into it. She had spent another hour going through every anagram of every permutation of the English translation, consulting Latin dictionaries on her phone as she went when Google Translate failed her. She had doubted that would be the answer though; word choice in translation was, by necessity, imprecise, and anagrams relied on precision. Cluemaster would never allow his intentions to be lost in the inherent heat-death sacrifice of transmuting one language to another. Plus, his Latin was not that good.

She thought of universities next. Rutgers University's motto, the first she looked up, was sol iustitiae et occidentem illustra. "Sun of righteousness, shine upon the West also," could maybe be interpreted similarly to "a raised light elevates students." The sun was a raised light, she supposed, but it certainly wasn't elevating anyone, unless Cluemaster just did not understand the Space Race. Plus, she thought, more than a little bitter, he probably wouldn't risk using his next clue as the previous clue's red herring. He would have wanted whoever was chasing him to know, deep in their bones, that they were outsmarted. That was why this clue was less permanent: this was him exulting in winning, and hoping to hammer a little more desperation in.

Unluckily for him, Steph hated being outsmarted. And she was plenty smart right back: her father's insecurities ran deep and she knew back when he was 21 he'd lost his scholarship to a certain prestigious college and had to quit, seven semesters in. Lux et Veritas. He'd hated that. He'd always said that there wasn't an ounce of truth in that academic review board, and they couldn't shed light on a pile of shit with a lighthouse searchlight.

The light rail thundered to a standstill at its Shopping District stop. The crush of early morning commuters moved, displacing each other in their shuffle to get on or off. The middle-aged woman next to Steph got up and disappeared into the throng, replaced immediately by a young girl with her own backpack.

"Where are we getting off?" the girl turned to ask Steph and -- holy shit.

"Cass?" Steph asked, bewildered. Then angry. "Jesus, how long have you been following me?"

"Since…. you…. went to school." Her speech was slower, more halting than it had been before.

"I didn't see you."

"Sneaky." Cass smiled hesitantly at Steph. "Good at that."

"Yeah, I bet," Steph said. She reminded herself that she was still mad. "You gonna try to tell me I should leave this up to the professionals? 'Cause you guys have been doing such a great job so far. Or are you gonna accuse me of working for a supervillain again?"

"..... I …. didn't say that," Cass said. She paused, and it was so similar to the way Batgirl would pause to look for words that Steph couldn't believe Cass ever had her fooled. "And Oracle never thought… that…. you…"

Steph cut her off. "She sure sounded like it. I see she told you about the whole conversation, seeing as you've suddenly switched up your linguistic patterns."

"Talking," Cass said, a look of pure frustration crossing her face and settling in her shoulders. "Hard… Me- I'm trying... to do… it ... right. You…. already… caught me… once." She articulated each word like it was a revelation to her, not so much stringing words into a sentence as she was individually excavating, sanding, polishing, and beading them together.

She made a few hand motions, all open palms and specific positioning of the fingers, and Steph knew just enough to regretfully say: "Sorry, I don't know ASL."

Cass looked a million different ways in the moment. Steph thought she caught sorrow though, which was what spurred her on most to dig in her pocket and retrieve her phone. She googled what she needed, pulling up an image. Hesitantly, she glanced at Cass before she held up her right hand.

" M-E-E-T Y-O-U I-N T-H-E M-I-D-D-L-E," she fingerspelled, halting and slow at first, with her eyes on the chart on her phone screen. When she looked up from it to Cass, Cass had the widest smile she'd ever seen, not just on Cass but on a person in general.

" I ?-A-? D-?????????" Cass signed, so fast the forms felt like they blurred together on her hand. Steph winced.

" T-O-O F-A-S-T."

"S-O-R-R-Y," Cass signed again, this time waiting for Steph's eyes to flick from her right hand to her phone before moving on to the next sign.

"J-U-S-T K-E-E-P G-O-I-N-G," Steph signed out. "I N-E-E-D P-R-A-C-T-I-C-E." Already her own fingerspelling was starting to pick up speed, her brain catching onto a code in use and doing what it had been trained to do best. When Cass responded, Steph had barely even needed to check against her phone to read.

"T-A-L-K-I-N-G L-I-K-E T-H-I-S I-S E-A-S-I-E-R. M-Y V-O-I-C-E I-S H-A-R-D T-O U-S-E."

"WHY," Steph signed, smoother this time.

"MY FATHER THOUGHT RAISING A CHILD WITH NO LANguage would make them fight better."

Somewhere in the middle of that long sentence, Steph stopped needing to use the chart as a reference. "That's awful," she signed with her right hand, stowing her phone back into her pocket with the left. "I'm sorry about your dad."

Cass quirked her lips into an ironic grin. "Sorry about your dad." There wasn't really a way to put a tone on fingerspelling, but somehow Cass had figured it out. Of course she had. "Do you want help stopping him?"

Steph watched her for a while. The light rail stopped again. They were about three stops away from her own, which meant another ten minutes. "When did you figure me out?"

"Wed." Cass fingerspelled. She held up three fingers and ran them in a counter-clockwise circle in the air. Steph filed that away as a sign. "You always walk the same. When did you figure out me?"

"Sunday. At museum. You don't talk much, made it harder, but after a while I heard it."

The light rail stopped again. Six more minutes. Cass looked at her again, but it was less searching than it had been in the past. Softer, somehow. "I don't like to talk. But I liked talking to you. As Cass and Steph, not --" she put her fingers up at her temples, like horns or little bat ears, and Steph didn't laugh but she did exhale harshly through her nose and quirk her lips. "You make talking easy."

Another stop. Next one was Steph's. Three minutes.

Steph made her decision. "We're getting off at G-O-T-H-A-M  U ."

"You thought you'd go through the front door?"

Cass was so angry, her fingerspelling had managed to go double time. Steph was almost impressed.

"I don't know. It worked last time," she said out loud with a shrug.

"It worked" -- and Steph was very impressed with how Cass could sign like she was talking through gritted teeth -- "because I was there to save you."

Steph uncrossed one arm to hold it up to her side, signing just below her eye line and therefore right in Cass's face. " And you're here now." Steph added a little extra flourish to her signs because it seemed like it'd get Cass's eyebrow to twitch again in irritation. It did, and Steph smiled a little brighter.

"How have you survived 2 outings?"

"I think to solve half my problems beforehand," Steph used her signing hand to gesture over her shoulder to the stolen baseball bat, still sticking half out of her backpack -- she hoped people just thought 'student athlete' and not 'teenage thug' -- and then flicked it down to encompass the general rest of her, "and wing it on the rest. Get it? Wing?" She uncrossed her other arm so she could hook her thumbs together and fluttered her fingers like she was doing a shadow-puppet for a bird. Or a bat.

Cass closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "You're not funny," she spelled, her eyes still closed.

"Aw," Steph said out loud. "You think I'm hilarious."

Cass put her hand right under Steph's nose. "N-O." Steph grinned.

She opened her eyes and scanned the area. The central portion of Gotham U's campus was a plaza and at the very center, exposed on all sides to a student population milling around in the early morning, was a very tall belltower. At the very top of it was a light, and when it was on, you could see it for miles. She wouldn't necessarily know, since she was rarely in the eastern side of Midtown, but it was pretty distinctive. Tall, and on a hill, too. Cass clearly saw something that she didn't, because she pointed with her left hand and spelled, "There," with her right. Steph followed her point to a staircase headed down into the ground. She dutifully trudged over, Cass trailing after her.

The stairway was slightly blocked by all the random plants that private colleges loved putting everywhere, their overgrown non-native leaves clambering over the grey concrete. "Service entrance," Steph said. "Sneaky."

Cass grinned. "Good at that."

Steph checked her phone. "It's --" she flashed seven, five, and eight fingers in succession --" 7:58 right now, so let's go find someplace to change and wait out the passing period."

They ended up in a public bathroom, which felt a little unglamorous, but whatever. Steph assumed she had a little less to go through than Cass, seeing as her costume, now sans legging and hood, only required gloves and her mask now. She flipped the top of her hoodie hood up, then pulled on the beat-up purple jacket. The roller-derby elbow pads felt reassuring to her, as well as when she loaded up all her pockets with her familiar tools. Sure, Batgirl had professional vigilante tools for every occasion, but so far, mace and Google hadn't led Steph astray. By much. Finally, she pulled the baseball bat out of her backpack and thought ironically of King Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, New Jersey edition. 

Steph rapped on the metal divider between their stalls. "Cass, you finished?"

Something black slid under the divider. Steph picked it up.

"Is this a bulletproof vest?" she yelped when she realized how heavy it was and what it reminded her of.

"Yes," Cass's voice floated over. "Put it on."

"These are…" Steph's brain was defaulting. "Very expensive." She'd know: she'd checked on Amazon and decided that gunshot wounds would just have to be a future her problem.

"Bruce Wayne is…. a… billion-aire." 

"Alright," Steph said, then remembered all over again that Bruce Wayne was Batman which really, really, really fucked with her head. Christ. What was next, Jeff Bezos as Aquaman? "You know they probably can't shoot us, right? It's a college campus and there's only one way out of the belltower. Fire a gun and everyone'll hear it and come running."

"...I…. didn't know…. we…  were going to a school."

Steph yanked her successive layers off and set to work figuring out how to get the heavy vest on, even if she doubted she'd need it. Hopefully, she could hold on to this.

"Wait, didn't Oracle tell you?" she asked, figuring out one hook.

"She…. felt… it might be a school. Didn't know. Which."

Steph froze with her hoodie halfway on again. "You mean, you actually didn't know where I was going on the light rail?" 

"No," Cass said.

"Jesus," Steph muttered, pulling her hoodie back all the way on. She grabbed for the jacket and tugged her arms through. "Here I thought you guys were supposed to be real professionals. Turns out you're just as clueless as I am. Reassuring."

"Not as clueless," Cass said, a smile in her voice audible past the stall. ".... Me- I ….. know how to fight."

"Hey," Steph said. "Fighting's not all there is to this gig."

"Is most of it."

"It's like, half."

"Nine-ty per-cent. Ten per-cent…. is… listening to… bad guy talk."

Steph snorted. Cass had her there. There was still one thing bugging her, however. "If Oracle already knows about the whole supervillain dad thing, how could she not know that this place is next? Arthur Brown actually got expelled from here: you don't have to be his kid to know he'd target this place next in his 'Fuck you, I'm smarter' campaign."

"Oracle didn't know. Said diplomas only on… online. Can't hack if didn't graduate."

"Huh," Steph said, swinging her backpack back on and exiting the stall. "So the expulsion stuff is all on paper files somewhere? Nowhere else?"

Cass left her own stall. She was wearing an oversized sweater over her costume and her face-covering hood was down, leaving her looking like any other yoga-pants-wearing freshman college student on their way to class. Steph assumed the utility belt was cinched around Cass's waist, therefore covered by the slouchy cable-knit outerwear. She nodded to answer Steph's question, then shrugged her own backpack -- presumably full of her normal clothes -- back on.

Steph would follow suit, but she was lost in thought. She didn't snap out of it until Cass got very very close to her face and poked her nose.

"Stop that," Steph said, swatting at Cass's hand gently. "Does Oracle just speak Latin fluently?"

Cass nodded again. "Why," she signed.

"Well, first of all, how on-brand for Ms. Delphi. And second," Steph turned, tapping her baseball bat against the floor in thought. "I don't think my dad knows Latin."

Cass raised an eyebrow. "Go on," she spelled, clearly willing to wait this out.

"The first thing I've done with these clues is to just look up what they mean online," Steph said, "but that's easier for the living languages than the dead one. I think we might have the same instincts, my dad and I."

She felt the puzzle pieces click together. "My dad's a hack. He lost his scholarship, a semester away from graduating, for plagiarism. He was the kind of kid who'd Google Translate his foreign language homework if Google was around back then. And I know for a fact, that there's a reason why you're not supposed to do that. 'Cause here, in this case, the translation is wrong: if you plug lux elata alumnos tollitt in, it gives you 'let the students take the data.'"

Cass tilted her head. "Take… the data?"

"I thought he'd target the belltower because it's this iconic symbol of a university that kicked him out but I should have known -- if the only records of his expulsion are in an admin building somewhere, that's where he's gonna go first. He wants to burn the proof down."

Steph grabbed her phone and went for the recent calls. She tapped on the first one. "Oracle," she said when the line picked up, "I'm putting you on speaker."

"You know," Oracle said, reverberating a little off the echo-y walls of the bathroom. "You're the first person who's ever tried to call back."

"Yeah, I'm one-of-a-kind," Steph said. "Come on, eye in the sky, I need to know what's going on in the admin buildings. I think Cluemaster's setting up his next move there."

There was silence for a half minute. "The Sionisis Hall feed has cameras on looped footage for the past ten minutes. Good catch."

"Great," Steph said, and tried not to feel too pleased that even Oracle hadn't figured out the whole plan. "Ten minutes -- they should just be getting started with the set up. Sounds easy en--"

"There's a building full of people, and nobody walked out," Oracle cut in. "You're looking at a hostage situation."

"Shit." Steph should have learned to stop jinxing fate like that. "Shit, okay. Can you fix the looped video problem?"

"Not how it works, kid," Oracle said. "Want my advice?"

Steph scowled. "Are you gonna tell me to leave it to the professionals again? You have to realize by now that I'm not going to."

"No," Oracle said. "Even if I think you're an untrained idiot, you have valuable insight into Cluemaster. And that's the only reason I'm tolerating this."

Steph snorted. Threats didn't work so well when Cass had already given away the plot; that 'valuable insight' was also the only reason the professionals had even gotten here.

"We have the advantage of surprise. We're early, and Batgirl has a reputation for only striking at night, while Spoiler only shows up at dusk. They won't expect you in the morning, but that doesn't mean they're not expecting regular reinforcements either, like campus police. So no, you cannot go through the front door. Something must be set up there, preventing students from coming in too."

"Any…. back-doors?" Cass asked, moving to leave the bathroom. Steph followed close by, her phone still on speaker, the volume turned down low. They hadn't seen many students yet, and the ones that they did were all sleep-deprived and unlucky enough to have 8ams, though Steph figured that that would become more of a problem the later in the day they went and the more people showed up to the campus.

"There's one, on the right quadrant. Room, connected to the main ventilation system. How does your new friend feel about tight spaces?"

Steph stared at her phone. "Are we going through the vents? Are we seriously going through the fucking vents? Like, The Breakfast Club, crawling through the vents."

Cass winced. " Close," she signed.

"Close", as it turned out, meant "in name only." Like many old buildings, there was a crawlspace underneath the foundations of Sionisis Hall that had vents connecting to outside air, and, like many old buildings, the crawlspace underneath it was absolutely disgusting. 

It smelled like all manner of things had up and died in there, even through the mask that she'd hurriedly put on after they walked through the campus without incident. She kind of wished she hadn't ditched her backpack outside the building: every time she bumped up against the foundations and felt crumbs of cobweb, or granite, or dried who-knew-what fall onto her neck and sometimes get under her jacket collar, she felt a wave of pure disgust crash over her. Cass had pulled off her sweater-disguise and pulled up the cowl, which left her in a seamless full-body suit, which probably meant she was not experiencing the same bone-deep revulsion as Steph. Steph was, at the very least, deeply thankful that she'd remembered to grab her winter gloves, even if the thickness would make any fine work difficult.

Under the building, they'd lost all cellular service, which meant Steph's contact with Oracle was gone. Cass still had some kind of unobtrusive earpiece -- she'd showed Steph, letting her tuck back a piece of soft black hair to reveal the small earbud in her left ear -- but even still, without the ability to look in on the situation, there wasn't much Oracle could help with.

Perhaps Steph was being a bit unfair. Oracle had found architect's plans for the Hall they were under, and was directing them through to the nearest stairwell: she'd also figured out that the administrative records were all held on the second floor, and therefore the most likely point of interest for Cluemaster would be up there. Steph still thought that that was all information that could be found with a brochure map of campus and a call to the university student helpline, but hey, her way would have taken fifteen minutes, and Oracle took five. Every minute, Steph had very harshly learned last night, could count in these sorts of things.

Cass paused in front of her, then twisted around so Steph could see why. There were pipes leading up to what she presumed was the first floor: this must be their entry point. Steph got the hint and shined her flashlight at Cass's hand. Cass spelled "Bring knife," and pulled out her own wickedly sharp knife. Steph reached into her boot and pulled out the trusty switchblade, springing it open and apologizing in her head for the property damage they were about to inflict on this esteemed university. Then she stabbed at the plastic piping and slowly sawed down, aiming to get a teen-girl sized hole in the thing.

It took them another ten minutes for the whole piece of plastic to be loose enough to get pulled off like a door. Steph's knife had been dulled down to the point where she wasn't even sure if it could be used to cut fruit, let alone people. She closed it back up again and stuck it in her boot anyways since it had already proved its worth as a blunt force weapon earlier in her illustrious vigilante career. With her other hand, she picked up and shined the flashlight at Cass's hand again, waiting for her to say something. Cass had done the same through their methodical sawing, though the only thing Steph had to say through the whole affair was "Gross," every time she had to touch the mildewy side of the plastic with her gloved hands.

"You go first," Cass signed after putting her own flashlight away, then pointed up as if Steph could mistake her meaning. Steph nodded, handed Cass the baseball bat she insisted on bringing, and tucked herself into a ball as she tried to shimmy into the hole they'd carved open: teen-girl-sized, while small, was not quite as small as the hole they'd made. Her shoulders had a tough time folding in on her enough to get her through. Once fully inside the thing, Steph shined her flashlight up and winced. There looked to be a solid eight or nine feet of vertical piping before the vent went horizontal again, turning into traditional metal vents along the walls of the building. Even if she stood up on her tiptoes and stretched her arms as high as they could go, Steph wouldn't be able to get her fingertips to even touch anywhere near where it leveled off. The curse of being average-female-height.

There was nothing else to it. Steph sighed as she slowly levered herself to her full, average female height, then tried bracing one foot against the pipe wall. There wasn't too much room for her to go. Steph thought, in the back of her head, of Harper and her physics problems: not enough leverage to apply decent sliding frictional force . She let her head drop back again, staring up at the cavernous black void above her. Nobody ever told her that being a superhero would come with thigh workouts from hell.

It took almost another ten minutes, a lot of muffled and inventive swearing, and absolutely killer aches in her legs, but Steph finally managed to leverage herself up to the horizontal grate and bellyflop onto it, cherishing her momentary reprieve in the fight against gravity. She slowly swung herself all the way around, looking down just in time to see her beloved stolen baseball bat being thrust up from the pipe like a knight giving his jousting lance to his fair lady to kiss, or however Cass saw Steph right now. Steph gratefully grabbed the thing by the top, pulling it safely to her side and watching with a solid amount of awe and a decent amount of jealousy as Cass easily spider walked her way up the pipe in less than a minute. Steph scooted a little, making room for Cass to perch precariously on the edge of the vent, one arm braced against the top to keep herself from falling backward.

The other hand came up, and Steph dutifully turned her flashlight to it.

"Vent opens in middle of lobby. Should be careful on way out. Stairs will be on right."

Steph frowned. "Where is front door relative to vent?" She reached inside her jacket pocket and fished around for the Sharpie she knew she'd left in there at some point. Finding it, she scooted a little further back and sketched out the general 'L' shape she knew Sionisis Hall looked like from the outside. "I'll mark it with O."

Cass studied the rudimentary diagram for a bit, her flashlight in one hand. She quietly whispered to herself: "Where is the front door?" and waited for Oracle's response. Then, she tapped her finger against the middle of the longer wing. Steph dutifully marked where she tapped with an O. "Vent?" Cass whispered again, and paused. She tapped the side of the longer wing again, this time on the wall opposite the front door and midway between the door and the corner where the two wings joined. Steph again marked it with an O, then added the annotation "vent" to it, just in case.

"Stairs?" she whispered at Cass, pen at the ready. Cass repeated it, then tapped at the furthest edge of the shorter wing from the rest of the hall. They worked quietly like that, mostly speaking with their hands, passing the Sharpie back and forth as Oracle started filling Cass in on other details. After a few rounds of that, they had a decently passable layout for the first floor. Steph leaned a little forward and picked the Sharpie up with her right, signing with her left hand instead.

"First time, there were 13 men," she spelled awkwardly, moving to tap the capped end of the Sharpie against the O where the front door was. "Assume that's the upper limit on how many goons dad can pay." He would have gone all out on the first few clues: there was no way he'd let himself be foiled early. That meant hiring as much protection as possible.

Cass nodded, studying the layout herself. "Would put more on 1st floor," she signed, "so no-one can get in. "

Steph held up two fingers and pointed at the front door again. "There were 2 guards at door at factory." She marked two X's right behind the O.

"Leaves 11," Cass signed, opening and closing her free hand twice to mark out ten, then leaving her outstretched finger hanging on the eleventh. "1 is driver."

Steph nodded, studying the outside of the hall. "Cluemaster won't be here right now," she signed, and could not think about how she felt about that. She didn't want to know if she was relieved she could put off a confrontation with her father for another day, or frustrated that he'd get away again so he could make another move in this awful game. "He and driver only stay for set up. This wasn't a long set up. The show starts at 3," she spelled with the absolute certainty of a child haunted by the ghost of a decade-old event.

Cass looked at her for a very long time, then nodded. She broke eye contact, and Steph felt like she could breathe again. "Leaves 10. O says there are 15 administrators with offices on floor 1. 2 called in sick today. 13 hostages. Probably 3 guards in," and she spread her hand over the latter half of the long wing, where Steph had scrawled "OFFICES." Steph dutifully marked out three X's there.

"He'll probably also have two on the stairs," Steph signed and added X's there. "8 left. How many do you think will be on 2nd floor?"

The second floor was almost all offices: there would be twenty potential hostages, not to mention that that was where the administrative files were held, and therefore where the real target was.

Cass gestured for the Sharpie, and Steph handed it over. She marked four X's out on the side of their first-floor plan and signed, "2 guards, 2 on bomb."

"Leaves 4," Steph frowned.

"Assume worst," Cass signed and pointed to the first-floor office wing. "You free the hostages on 1st floor. Be prepared for 3 to 7 fighters. I will take 2nd floor."

Steph studied their rudimentary layout for a little while longer. The vent would open halfway between the stairs and the front door: they'd start out sandwiched between both groups of goons if their guesswork was right. Steph had no doubts about Cass's ability to take them all down with one arm tied behind her back, though if she was right about them having both guns and hostages, it would be critical to get both sets of hostages out of the building as fast as possible. 

They slowly crawled forward in silence, and Steph used that time to try to beat down her rising claustrophobia, fear, and anxiety before it could overwhelm her again. There were thirty-three innocent people in this building. Thirty-three more people whose lives might be upturned irrevocably by her father's tantrum. She had to keep it together for them.

Steph had no illusions about her own ability to hold up in a fight. She was still sore and slightly crispy from her exploits last night, and there was only so much she could do with mace and a baseball bat against grown men who'd weigh two of her. Her best strategy would be to hang back behind Cass at first.

By the time they had reached the opening grate of the vent, Steph had gone over every possible permutation and configuration of guards that could possibly be there. She'd even thought of a game plan for at least four of them. The simple act of shuffling pieces around in her head, if nothing else, did help calm her down in a deeply repressive way that she'd maybe need to pick apart in therapy, assuming she'd ever be able to afford therapy. She'd only left something like a hundred sixty-one other possibilities unaccounted for, too. Those, she figured the plan of action would be "go for the kneecaps and pray."

They arrived at the grate. Steph had let Cass go up ahead of her, so she could only tell they had reached the end when Cass turned around and motioned for Steph to click her flashlight off. 

"Ready?" Cass signed back, illuminated only by the grate. Steph held up a hand and bobbed it from side to side, the universal sign for "as I'll ever be."

Then Cass shifted around and kicked the grate at just the right angle for it to come flying out and the world to explode. It did that a lot around her.

Batgirl came out swinging like, pun intended, a bat out of hell. Steph hung back slightly, listening to the sounds of violence -- and thankfully no rapport of guns -- and watched Cassandra twist and move in the kind of constant ethereal motion that reminded her of angels: the kind that had to open with "Be not afraid."

Cass took a sharp right and disappeared down the corner, presumably to deal with the guards on the stairs and up to the bomb. The sounds of violence followed her, acting like a sort of echolocation tracker for her position. Pun still intended. She'd also thankfully dealt with the two guards that they'd predicted would guard the entrance earlier, which left anywhere from three to seven guards on the left-side offices for her to figure out.

Steph listened intently for the sounds of footsteps and squeezed her bat and her mace tight, tensing up on her back leg in preparation. She heard a gruff male voice and the buzz of a radio, but the structure of the vent meant she couldn't hear clearly what he said. However, she could judge based on the volume of the voice that he was walking, not running, ever closer: possibly cautious after seeing Batgirl's earlier display. Steph would be too.

She waited, unwilling to even breathe in case she gave away her presence, with only a clear view from the ground floor of the wall across from her. She didn't have to wait long -- soon, a booted leg and heavy workman's jeans over an otherwise unprotected shinbone entered her limited line of vision. She saw the opportunity and she took it.

Her bat connected with his shin with a very loud and worrying crack, though Steph figured that since there weren't any essential organs in the leg, he'd be fine. Just a fractured tibia -- or fibula, she didn't quite remember. Either way, he was down for the count.

"Crime doesn't pay," she muttered, "but I hope you get workman's comp anyways."

"Wh-" the man spluttered, sprawled on the ground. "Batgirl?"

"Appreciate the comparison," Steph said, twirling her Louisville Slugger, "but only technically." 

Apparently, she wasn't the only one who learned from her mistakes: the guard was wearing a gas mask, probably to render her preferred incapacitation method of mace ineffective. She weighed the odds of irreparable damage from blunt force trauma with a baseball bat, then erred on the side of caution and spent a precious few seconds to reach down and rip off the guard's gas mask. She gave him a full blast of sparkly purple pepper spray. That would hopefully not kill him, but it would probably leave him blind and burning from the nose for, at the very least, fifteen minutes. Which was good. He had another four friends with him, and they were all running towards her, knives out. At least she was right: no guns.

"Little unfair," Steph yelped, dropping the mace back in her pocket in favor of a two-handed grip on her bat. "Mine's so much bigger."

She swung straight for the hands first, hoping to at least break a few fingers and make her job easier. While that was too much to hope for, she did at least manage to get the first man to drop his knife. She did, but now all four men had managed to converge on her with three knives between them all, and those odds weren't quite good.

Steph stopped, dropped, and rolled with the sort of precision that came from doing disaster drills in the Gotham public schooling system since she was in kindergarten. On her way, she kicked at the dropped knife, letting it skitter far down the hall toward the corner. Rolling back to her feet, she got herself in a rooted stance one more time and swung up, clocking the nearest man upside the chin. It got him stumbling back, but it only clipped him, leaving him still in the count.

Steph took several steps back towards the vent, her brain working double-time: treat it like a game of chess, or something, and maybe she'd trick herself into strategizing. She'd never survive a four-on-one or even just two of them on one of her: the only way she'd win this fight was if she could find some way to fight four one-on-one fights, but something told her honor among thieves and chivalry didn't extend to them waiting around for her to finish whaling on one of their coworkers to start on them.

She had the longer weapon, which gave her the advantage: even with the smaller reach she had on account of being at least six inches shorter on average than the men, the baseball bat had at least a good foot on the knives the other men were wielding. The hallway they were in wasn't particularly wide, and the floor space there was to maneuver was severely hampered by desks and chairs tucked along the side full of half-done paperwork. 

Steph had a plan. She turned and ran.

Well, first she bought herself a little time to run by grabbing the chair nearest to her and flinging it underhanded at the knot of men. In her experience, not many people were ever prepared for a chair to the face. Then she made a mad dash down the hall, yanking on desks and rolling chairs with her free hand as she went. She'd make it up to the school later: for now, she had bigger things to worry about. She also nearly tripped over the kicked out vent grate and the previously tied up body of a goon Cass had already taken care of, which she hoped didn't ruin her street cred.

She took the corner wide and scrambled back against the wall, getting her hands back into a grip on her bat and her feet solidly planted and shoulder-width apart just in time for the first lucky winner of her impromptu obstacle course to make his own way around the blind corner himself. Him, she hit hard enough in the knees to take out for the count for the rest of the fight. She really hoped her dad didn't skimp on the healthcare insurance.

She hopped over the man's prone body and came out swinging for the next one, notably emo-haired and surprisingly skinny, catching him right on the shoulder. She waited until mini-MCR stumbled back, putting most of his weight right on his back foot on a pile of upturned papers, before lashing out again with her bat. She hit him again in the shoulder like she was wielding a lance, unbalancing him just enough for him to topple, though he still had a knife and a willingness to stab her in the ankle.

"Jesus," Steph swore, leaping backward and instinctively smashing her bat down on MCR's knife hand like it was a spider. "Stay down or that's gonna be your face next."

She kicked the knife away again, letting it skitter underneath an upturned desk, and bent to retrieve a stapler that had been knocked off when she jerked the desk onto its side. She reared back and lobbed the thing at the next man, who was halfway across the last desk between Steph and her recent victims. The final -- and naturally, biggest -- man was not far behind him, angrily shoving a rolling chair to the side on his way down the hall. The stapler hit the shorter and closer one straight in the forehead, but only stopped him for a few seconds. He swore a blue streak at her: calling her, unimaginatively, a cunt. The banality was nearly offensive.

Steph shrugged at him and grabbed a mug full of pens to toss next. She missed cunt-guy -- sue her, this was stressful and pitching a mug wasn't quite like pitching a softball -- but the thing still shattered against the faux-wood siding of the desk he was climbing over, scattering the cylindrical pens right where they would be the biggest problem for where he could possibly put his feet. With that hopefully keeping him occupied for a little longer, Steph dropped into a squat and turned her attention back to the hurt but not out-for-the-count man still more or less at her feet. She grabbed his gas mask and ripped it off, then aimed her pepper spray right up MCR's nose. She was feeling vindictive about the knife thing.

She left him to splutter and cough. Sir Swears-A-Lot, only a few inches taller than her but at least fifty pounds heavier, had crossed over the desk and he was only a few feet away from her by now. Steph cautiously stepped around the man on the floor: MCR was crying, but luckily not twitching too hard. She needed to keep Stapler-Head from remembering that he could just team up with his coworker and beat her up that way. She had to say something that would get him to come at her angry.

"Bring it, bitch," Steph said because she already used up all her good trash talk at this point.

Luckily, it worked. He came running, his eyes on her, and not the ground he was thoughtlessly putting his weight on. He skidded on one of the stray pens, and Steph took the opportunity to push forward, mindful of her own step. 

She slammed her bat one-handed into his upper shinbone, where it met the knee. It didn't have quite the power behind the blow that it would have two-handed, but a metal pipe hitting the shinbone would hurt regardless of how much force was applied. He doubled over involuntarily and Steph rushed forward to meet him in the middle with the heel of her palm to his nose. It didn't crunch, but she felt the cartilage of his nose give with a little wet noise and she could guess that she'd at least drawn blood. That made three down. 

She rolled her shoulders and turned to face the final man down. He had to be at least twice her size, well over six feet, and with the powerful build of a career henchman. Steph was fairly sure he'd be a bit harder to beat down over the shoulders like she'd done with the one who'd called her a cunt. The legs were probably still a viable strategy: the bigger they are, the harder they fell, and most men's centers of gravity were higher up and easily toppled, so long as she aimed right.

There wasn't anything in the vicinity for her to chuck at him, so she settled for twirling her bat and waiting for him to come to her. She hoped the wreckage and the prone bodies she'd left behind were suitably intimidating, though she doubted it would inspire any hesitance.

She was right. The career henchman barrelled forward, instinctively avoiding most of the papers and pens that made it a minefield for Steph herself to navigate. He clearly also had the experience advantage over her.

Steph reared to try and swing her bat at his face, hoping to knock the gas mask off of it, only for him to parry with his knife. Stellar. Rather than try and push against him -- their size difference was nearly comical -- she suddenly slipped the bat down and let the now uncontested force of his arm swing the knife out and away from him. She got a quick cheap shot in at his gut, which probably only made him angry rather than hurt but also did distract him for the few seconds it took for her to back up several steps, dropping her mace back in her pocket on the way. She gripped the bat two-handed, and prepared for the best sliding lay out of her life.

She did not account for her father's cussing crony to have recovered from a maybe-broken nose fast enough to have gotten up to grab her from behind. He wrestled her down to the ground, pinning her with a knee to the back. Shit.

"God," the uncouth underling said, a wet aspect to his tone that made Steph a little smug. "This fucking bitch." The career henchman simply walked forward. 

"Good job, Tony," he said, and Steph had to snort at the thought that popped into her head: he's 5'6, probably nicknamed Tiny Tony by the boys. "Get her hogtied, we'll toss her in with the hostages."

Tiny Tony didn't move. "Hold her face still," he said to the career henchman. "Eye for an eye, I want a nose for a nose."

Every muscle in Steph's body tensed up. She was still gripping the bat and the mace, but she didn't have any leverage, and as hard as she tried, there was no dislodging the hundred-seventy pound weight bearing down on her. It wasn't true that she didn't have a choice, but there was only one choice worth making.

She dropped her mace and made a fist. Slammed the ground with it three times. Open hand against the ground three times. Fist against the ground three times. The sound echoed and her fist smarted: she'd hit as hard as she could.

"What the fuck?" Tiny Tony said. "Is she trying to tap out or something? That's not how real life works, sweetch-"

He was cut off by a shadow slamming into him. Steph knew the exact moment because she could suddenly breathe again -- one second there was all-consuming weight pushing her down, the next, there was nothing. By the time she pulled herself up onto her hands and knees and sat back on her heels, the two men were themselves face down, zip tied thoroughly, and Batgirl was sitting perched on the edge of the upturned desk.

"How did you know," she fingerspelled, having to enunciate the hand motions more now that she was Batgirl and wearing gauntlets, "that I knew Morse code?"

Steph smiled under her mask. "There's no way Batman's kid doesn't know Morse."

She grabbed her mace again, putting it back in her pocket. Then she turned and surveyed beyond Cass's shoulders the pure destructive mayhem they'd wreaked and the offices that lay beyond. 

"Hostages at the end of this hall?" she asked Tiny Tony. He groaned, and Batgirl kicked him in the side: hopefully lightly, but he did curl up a little more than he already had been doing. "Hey, Tony, talkin' to you. Hostages at the end of this hall?"

"Yes," he moaned out. "God, I'm gonna get fired."

Steph snorted. " That's what you're worried about? Relax, you'll get demoted at best." Cass had already lept to her feet to go take care of the hostage situation.

"Well, actually, it's a labor mon- op -sony, you see," the career said. "You gotta pay everyone the same rate, even though Greg over there was just guarding the door and I'm always the one stuck making the bombs before we transport: and we're both only getting seven an hour!"

"Sure," said Steph, slightly bemused.

"So, if the Riddler wants to buy me out from Cluemaster, he doesn't have to pay any more out of pocket. They just compete with their benefits packages. He just says, hey, Cluemaster only has you guys on a 401k, but instead of that, I can cover 100% of your health insurance, out of pocket. And neither of them ever raise the minimum wage! It's a racket!"

"You know," Steph said, "if you got a real job, the state minimum wage is ten an hour."

"Yeah," said the career, "but the retirement benefits on this gig are pretty sweet."

Steph inclined her head and thought about who Batman really was. "Between the two of us, if I knew a way to get you like, three thousand bucks PayPalled to your account, bonus, would you tell me anything else about what Cluemaster has planned?"

"Sorry, kid," the career said, and he sounded genuinely sympathetic. That or three grand was way more than what Cluemaster promised in hazard pay and bonuses. "He's a paranoid bastard, won't let anyone in on the master plan."

"Figures," Steph sighed. "What was the clue, then, this time?"

"He didn't have time to leave one," Tony piped up. Steph straightened up.

"He what?"

"He only comes in and puts the clue in at the last second. Some point of pride shit for him," Tony said, shrugging while still tied with his hands behind his back and his face to the ground.

"Huh," Steph said. "Well, that makes this significantly harder."

She made eye contact with Batgirl, who was emerging from one of the rooms with a whole gaggle of office worker hostages in tow. She jerked her head, betting Batgirl would hear her loud and clear: Let's get out of here.

Later, after they'd fully changed and Cass walked her to the subway -- lightly teasing her in that mischievously smirking way of hers about her reliance on notoriously unreliable public transport -- they had the rest of their conversation.

"You dropped your weapon," Cass spelled, and something about the way she did it made it seem like sacrilege.

"I needed a free hand to call you," Steph spelled back. Her eyes were firmly on Cass's right hand, careful not to note her expressions in her peripheral.

"How did you know I would come?"

"Easy," Steph spelled and closed her hand into a fist, waiting until Cass's eyes moved up to hers to give her the smile she wanted to. "'Cause you're a hero, Cassie."

Chapter Text

Cass had left to hitch her own ride home when Steph got the call. Unknown number. She picked up.

"Is this gonna keep being a thing," she asked flatly the second she accepted the call.

"What do you mean by ' this' ?" Oracle's voice came through, sounding amused. Less threatening, possibly.

"The whole 'unknown caller', 'I know all your secrets,' routine. It's going to get old. You know that, right?"

"It's been working out for me so far."

Steph rolled her eyes. It had not, but she'd let Oracle win this one for now.

"Don't roll your eyes at me, young lady," Oracle said mildly, and Steph froze up. 

"What." She wildly glanced around at the other people around the station. None of them were calling on their phones; that was when she caught sight of a security camera pointed not at the entrance of the station-side coffee shop, where she would expect it to be, but straight at her. 

"Jesus," Steph said. "You are really creepy." She tried to walk out of the camera's range, only for it to follow her.

Oracle hummed. "I try," she said. "Smile for the camera."

Steph scowled and flipped it off. "What do you even want?"

"Are we making pie-in-the-sky wishes? If so, I want you to forget everything you know about the nightlife of this city, masked vigilantism, and your own self-destructive proclivities that are going to get you killed."

"We've already had this conversation."

"Yeah, I know. So I'm not asking you for that: I just want to know how much you're willing to work with us. Share information. Keep us in the loop."

Steph closed her eyes. She thought about how well she was doing on her own: she still felt burns on the back of her neck and her muscles ached like she'd run two marathons in a row without any preparation. The preacher, his foot burned, and his church on fire. Her father and his getaway drivers. If they hadn't wasted time in both situations, tried to solve it on each of their own, would Cluemaster still be going?

"Yeah," she said. "I'm willing to work with you guys."

Then, because she probably inherited petty from her dad, she added, "you know, even if I am just an untrained idiot."

"You are," Oracle said, unrepentant. "But you're better than I thought. Guess I won't be sending an anonymous tip to the Gotham PD about a certain stolen car with your fingerprints all over it."

Steph snorted. "I haven't actually been booked for a crime yet, so my fingerprints aren't in any database for them to match. And they still need a warrant if they want to check my prints or home, which your anonymous tip wouldn't give them."

Oracle was silent for one stunned, incredibly amazing moment. Steph felt just the slightest bit thrilled. "Smart girl," she finally said. "Batgirl will be following up with you tonight."

It seemed a little like Oracle wanted to end the conversation there, so even though it was a non-sequitur, Steph had to cut in and ask:

"Oracle?"

"Yeah, kid?"

"What happened to the previous Batgirl?"

Steph immediately regretted her decision in the wake of the chilly silence her question left. When Oracle spoke again, her voice was calm, cold, and a little clipped.

"She was caught unaware. Even with her training, a supervillain got to her, and now she'll never walk again; so I suppose you can see, now, why I'd rather you not rush headlong in and make the same mistakes."

Steph closed her eyes. "It's my dad, Oracle. That makes it my problem. You know I don't have a choice."

Oracle was silent. "I'll let you go now, your train's coming in the station in ten seconds," she said after the pause.

Steph sighed as she heard the dial tone. Beyond it, she could kind of hear the distant thunder of steel on tracks. "Creepy," she muttered, falling heavily onto the bench next to her. She hoped she'd be able to get a seat on the train: every muscle in her legs started screaming like a death metal choir the second she got her weight off her feet.

She did get a seat on the train, even if she had to glare a guy off of it to get seated. It was shockingly crowded for about ten in the morning, though as the light rail made its way through Midtown, they slowly started shedding people. Steph considered her options: she could go back to school.

She considered that option for maybe five seconds. Then she dropped it.

She figured even if the odds were stacked against her, with a supervillain father and an address in the shitty side of town, maybe the grand tribunal of her life would cut her just a little slack and let her skip class just this once. She thought, perhaps, she'd earned a bit of a break. If worst came to worst, she could always write "helped stop a criminal plot against Gotham U" under the attendance report on her college applications.

Even if Steph wasn't a teenager, who, as a general rule, didn't particularly want to go to school in the first place, she also just couldn't: her backpack was full of a superhero costume and a baseball bat, not her notebooks and homework.

So, she didn't go.

The light rail stopped after a half-hour in Robinson Park. This was usually where Steph got off and switched to the subway in order to make the subterranean trip across the Sprang. She got off, on muscle memory again, and just stood in the station. A thought occurred to her, and she looked up at the seams where the walls of the station met the covered roof, searching for the small security cameras that she was always half-convinced were just security theatre. She spotted a few, but they were all pointed at entrances and exits, exactly where she'd expect them to be. She shook her head and walked out of the station, blending into the crush of people. She wasn't sure if the vigilante business had made her paranoid or justifiably aware.

It was called the spotlight effect, Steph recalled, standing in the middle of the park. There weren't that many people there, just a few office workers who probably came from the Lowtown financial district to enjoy an early lunch. Which reminded her: she hadn't had breakfast, and had just engaged in a lot of calorie-burning activity. She'd need to get lunch.

She wandered for a bit, looking for one of the street vendors that set up shops on the sidewalk near the park. On her way, she took note of all the cameras set up above store signs and affixed to alley corners: spotlight effect made her heart race each time she looked up at it, convinced for a second that it was about to turn to point at her. For lack of anything to do on her short walk, she googled, "how many surveillance cameras gotham city" and had to take a deep breath after reading "tens of thousands," and "one of the most surveilled cities in the world." Clearly, the surveillance didn't do shit for all the crime.

She found what she was looking for: steel trays under a rainbow umbrella and an outdoor grill and a brazen, flagrant disrespect for food vendor permits. 

"How much?" she asked the vendor, pointing to one of the sandwiches on the tray.

"Cheesesteak's a fiver," the vendor said, not looking up from his grill. 

Steph rolled her eyes and played up her accent, just a little. "Alright," she said, skipping her 'l's, "I'll pay three for a chop cheese."

The vendor finally looked up and his eyes settled on Steph, looking her up and down. "Kid," he said, "shouldn't you be in school?"

Steph responded by pulling out her loose bills and counting out two ones. "You don't care that much," she said, offering the money to him.

"Nah," he said, and handed her lunch. She took it and gave him a half-hearted salute before dropping the ones on his cashbox, careful to keep the insides of the sandwich from spilling out onto the sidewalk, and neither of them mentioned that he'd agreed to undercharge.

She sat down in the middle of the park, eyes fixed in the direction she'd come from. She thought she could make out, across the low-lying buildings of the shopping district, the belltower of Gotham University.

She was graduating high school in two months. Her eighth semester: here's to hoping she wouldn't take after her father in this instance as well. She hadn't had a conversation with her mother about it, really, but they'd both known that she'd go on to community college after high school since it would be on the state of New Jersey's dime anyways. Probably Lakeside, since it was closest; luckily her mother was graduating this year. It'd be a bit awkward to go to school with a parent. Two years, then a transfer, see if she could net a scholarship or something. She didn't think she'd want to leave Gotham, though. She wasn't sure why, seeing as the city'd never done a single good thing for her, but she supposed that's how it was with places. You could love places, even if all they did was hurt you. 

Then again, perhaps you could love people who only hurt you too. Steph didn't know. Frankly, she didn't want to think about it either. She hadn't thought this much about her future at all: she'd only been going along on vague ideas until she'd seen the news reports start to stack up and decided that going out and making a vigilante costume was going to be how she spent her second-semester-senior-hood.

She wondered, suddenly, if Cass was homeschooled. They were the same age: was Cass planning on going to college too?

She shouldn't have been focusing on this. She should have been brainstorming, thinking about where her father would strike next, why he hadn't left a clue. But, even knowing that Cluemaster had managed to keep his identity secret for a decade, even knowing he'd managed to outmaneuver them once before, Steph still didn't think she'd ever get over that childhood hero-worship, that elementary school conviction. If Batgirl was on the case, the case would be solved. 

She had finished her sandwich a few minutes ago, but her phone -- which, she noted absently, was a few percentage points away from dying -- said she still had another seventeen minutes to go until the subway would roll into the station and she'd cross the river back into Uptown. After the morning she'd had, all Steph wanted to do was go back home and see her mom again and put her father back in the past where he and all the rest of her half-repressed childhood baggage belonged.

Perhaps she'd spoken too soon about wanting to see her mom again. She meant in the afternoon, cooking dinner together or something like in the old days. She did not mean that she would like to come home to their apartment in the middle of a school day to see her mom with a pot at the stove, about four hours before she was expected back from her classes.

"Mom," Steph said warily, frozen in the doorway with her keys in her hands. She was very aware of the end of a baseball bat sticking out of her backpack, as unobtrusively as she could make it.

"Steph," her mom said back, and Steph could not read anything in her voice. "I'm making coffee, would you like some?"

"Sure," said Steph, because she couldn't think of any other path for this interaction to go. "I'm just gonna… drop my stuff off.. in my room real quick." She fled.

Her thoughts were already racing to figure it out: did her mom know about Cluemaster? Did she know about Batgirl? Spoiler? It couldn't be just the skipping school bit, that wouldn't warrant such an extreme reaction as to drop her own courses -- two days away from taking a test to get that nursing license -- and rush home on the off chance she'd catch Steph. Then again, school had suddenly become important to the Crystal Brown of fourteen months ago, fresh off a divorce with nothing but a GED. Maybe Steph was just thinking about school because of the whole Gotham U thing. Maybe that was just messing with her head.

Steph dropped her bag in her room, shoving it under the bed for good measure: her costume was still there, and while Spoiler hadn't been caught on tape or had her presence in any way known to the general public, there were very few reasons besides the obvious why someone in Gotham would own a mask.

She slunk out of her room and stopped just barely a footstep into the small kitchen -- the silence felt like a third presence in the room, and there was definitely not enough space for three between the cupboards and the stove. Steph leaned against the countertop, burying her hands in her hoodie pockets and watching.

Her mom had the jar of instant coffee out, as well as the tub of Nutella. She did that sometimes on the bad days: her homemade hazelnut lattes, where she heated up the Nutella in her ancient, scratched up saucepan and added milk and water -- always a 50/50 ratio, she'd tell Steph -- and a pinch of the instant coffee. She'd stir it with a spoon until the heat had crept all the way up the metal thing and she'd only let go when the very tip had gotten too hot to hold. That was when she'd say everything had dissolved, and it was ready to be served. 

Her mom liked fancy drinks, though she never had the spare money to go buy them. Her dad, on the other hand, always sucked down his coffee black; he was after the caffeine and not the flavor. Steph had probably learned from him at some point. She drank it black, and she made it like him too: heated the water in the microwave first, then two spoonfuls of powder and a vigorous stir. 

Steph watched her mother make the coffee and wondered if the reason she thought of silence as another person was that there did use to be a third person in a house with them who brought a tense quiet down upon them all with his moods, and even now that it was just the two of them in a new apartment in a new place, the ghost of their third still had power.

"So," her mother finally said, breaking the silence in a way she never had fourteen months ago. "there was a bomb scare at Gotham U."

Steph's thoughts were still racing, but now they'd changed direction. Did her mom know that she was involved? Did she know that her dad -- Arthur -- was involved?

"Some of my professors are adjuncts at GU, so they canceled classes to go, uh, put out fires." Steph could see her mom's side profile from her angle, and she could see the lopsided smirk her mom gave at her own words: Pun intended , she was probably thinking. "Besides, the big test is Wednesday, so they called today a study-day. So that's why I'm home early. Now, I don't know much about Ridgeview High, but something tells me a public school doesn't have teachers who also work as adjuncts at GU."

"No," Steph confessed. "I skipped school today."

"I know," her mom said, still smirking a little. It was less amused now, Steph thought. "I got a call."

Steph couldn't think of anything to say, so she watched in silence as her mom got two mugs out. They were IKEA brand, pale green, though one had been dropped a year ago and the handle had chipped off, leaving a white ceramic scar where it was supposed to be held. Her mom turned the gas off and slowly picked up the saucepan, turning it all in one quick motion and getting the liquid to splash down into first one mug, then the second. It was just one of those mom-skills her mom naturally could do perfectly: every time Steph attempted the same motion, streams of liquid would run down the side of the saucepan and drip onto the floor, or otherwise splash onto the counter and make a mess.

Her mom handed her one cup -- the one with the handle -- and took the second. She brushed past Steph into the living room, sitting down heavily on the couch that doubled as her bed. She looked at Steph expectantly, blowing on her mug.

"Well," her mom said, "why don't you sit down and tell me why you skipped school." It was not a question or a request.

Mechanically, Steph sat down on the other end of the couch, facing forward rather than at her mom. She thought through all the things she could tell her mom: the whole truth was not a possibility she considered for even a second. She knew she was supposed to find it hard to lie to her mother, but the awful truth was, well, her mother was the sort of person who'd been lied to a lot, and she'd often accepted it. Steph figured a lie of omission was not the worst thing that had ever been done to her mother.

"I was meeting someone," Steph said, her eyes still forward. One hand was on her cup, the second tracing circles onto her thigh.

"Someone," her mother echoed. She still couldn't read the tone.

Steph sneaked a glance at her mother, and suddenly, just with that look, her callousness earlier seemed selfish. A lie of omission wasn't the worst thing that had ever been done to her mother, no, but it was just one more secret adding distance, and well. Steph was still just a girl who missed her mom. She had to give her mother something, had to have at least one difficult conversation about truths that they usually danced around to keep unspoken, or she'd never get what she used to have back.

"A girl," she finally said, and her heart was racing faster than it had ever gone, more so even than on her first night out when she was facing down men with guns because her father left her to die again. "I, uh. I like girls."

"Oh, Steph," her mother said, and it was soft and heartbroken. "Why would you make your life harder ?"

She thought her own heart had just broken too.

"I- I know," she said, and she could feel tears coming on. That wasn't good. Steph was a hiccupy crier, lots of panting, and she wouldn't be able to get another word out if she started crying. "I know it'll make my life harder but, god, I don't know, I can't just ignore it. I don't think that's how it works."

"You like boys," her mom said, and she sounded like she was pleading. With her, or just the universe? "That one boy you dated sophomore year, and the one before that. Dean Owens, or whatever. You don't have to -- you like boys too, right?"

And somewhere, in a corner of her separate from the fear and heartbreak, a little piece of Steph also still managed to feel embarrassed about the whole past crushes thing, because wow, Dean Owens, really, Mom? The absurd hilarity of the conflicting emotions didn't snap her out of it, but she registered it dully; something she might laugh about later, if later ever came.

"Yeah," Steph admitted. "But I like a girl. A lot, I think."

"You're just a kid," her mom said. "You don't know what you want. God -- I'd know. Look at the mistakes I made."

"I don't think it's a mistake. It- It's definitely not a mistake. I think -- I like being around Cass. She makes me feel, I don't know, she makes me feel like I have control over my life. Like I can do anything when she's there with me. I -- I really, really like that."

"You know," her mom said softly. "In the beginning, that's how it felt with your father too."

"Yeah," Steph said. "But I can't control who I love."

"No," her mother said. She had turned to look at Steph, and Steph turned to look at her. Neither of them had taken a sip from their mugs. "No, I don't suppose you get to."

They were silent for another indefinable period of time. Steph's eyes wandered over to the dining room table with her mother's NCLEX review papers scattered across it: sheets and sheets of binder paper that were absolutely covered in her mother's cramped, old-fashioned cursive. For the first time, she thought to wonder what would make her mother, a smoker and a drinker and the willing wife of a supervillain, divorce a man and decide to go into the most thankless profession there was. Three in five nurses are always on the verge of quitting; what was driving her mother that made her think she'd beat the odds? Steph thought she had a good idea.

Finally, her mother said in a voice that was, while a little shaky, much more put together than it had been previously: "So, you skipped class to go see a girl?"

Steph laughed, and if it sounded a little panicked, neither of them commented. "Yeah."

"Was she worth it?"

"She's always worth it," Steph said, still looking at her mother. "I know I just sound like a dumb teenager right now but -- I mean -- I had to go see her. I just, I had to. She makes me feel like I can stop terrible things from happening. Being -- being with her gives me magic."

"I feel," her mother said lightly, "like we're having two different conversations right now."

Steph laughed again, less panicked this time. The worst was over. Even if her mother was a lot more perceptive than she'd like.

"You are a dumb teenager," Crystal continued, "but you're also a few months from being an adult."

"I thought eighteen was only adulthood in the eyes of the law."

"It also is adulthood in the eyes of the school. I am trusting you to make your own decisions, Stephanie, regarding your education. I know you're a good kid, and I know there's not a lot you can do to mess up your odds of graduating, which, hell, better than I could say at your age. And," her mom broke off and looked away, turning her cooling mug in her hands and running her thumb over the ceramic scar, "and if you do want to pursue a relationship with another girl, well. There's a lot worse things out there. I don't have a leg to stand on. And…. I don't have a problem with you liking girls. Not really. God, I-- I just wish that I could say the same of everyone else you'll ever meet."

Steph watched her mom for a bit. She debated, in her head, whether it was worth it to push or not, then took the plunge anyway.

"Do you think Dad would have… been okay with this?"

Crystal sighed heavily and slumped back against the couch. She took a long drain of her latte.

"Honestly, honey? I don't think so, but I guess we'll never know."

Steph mimicked her, leaning back and drinking as well. 

"You know, he always told me Alan Turing was one of his heroes. I always wondered after -- after everything happened. I wondered if he knew how that story ended."

"How did it end?"

"He, uh. After the war, he got put on trial, had his security clearances revoked. Died in, well, disgrace I guess. He never got to work on his cryptography again."

"What was he put on trial for?" her mom asked, a shadow of interest in her voice, though Steph thought perhaps it was less interest in the subject itself and more her mother hoping for a way out of the minefield of a conversation that Steph had brought them into.

Steph was tired too.

"It doesn't matter," she said, and she hadn't even realized until the words came out her mouth that yeah, it didn't actually matter to her anymore, even if it had mattered so desperately and achingly to her only a few weeks ago. A few days ago. "It's just-- It's just history."

They sat in silence like that for a while longer, though this time the silence didn't feel like a presence. It just felt like silence.

She agreed with her mom. Arthur Brown was a lot of things, but open-minded wasn't one of them, and Steph doubted that his love for his child, if it did exist, would be able to overcome his principles and prejudices. Still, though, and she sort of hated herself for thinking this about an egotistical supervillain: still, she would have liked to afford him the opportunity to surprise her.

Dinner was quiet and still until her mom handed her the jar of tomato sauce and asked her to get it open and Steph ran it under hot water and said "I read metal expands faster under heat than glass," and Crystal laughed and it was like the tension wasn't gone but it was at least years in the past, nearly forgotten about. They were like that, sometimes, which was probably the reason why they could pick up and go on with two members in a three-person household, splitting the difference on the chores.

Her mom said, "Can you swing by and get groceries after school tomorrow?" and Steph hmmed in affirmation, a forkful of noodles in her mouth. She chewed and swallowed.

"Yeah, I'll swing by the supermarket on Fifth after class," she said, tapping at her phone distractedly. Harper had texted a few times: a question about why she wasn't in class, and an update on the Spanish homework. Still due tomorrow, still hadn't been done. She'd probably have to start over from scratch since she'd already filled the first page up trying to figure out Cluemaster's last clue, though she wondered if it might have netted her bonus points if she turned that page in. Probably not, though personally, Steph thought it displayed her command over the Spanish language better than yet another essay, though it also might have invited a little police questioning as well. Such were the trials and tribulations of the American public school system.

"Good, you're planning on going to class," her mom said, and Steph groaned. She may have been more-or-less forgiven for skipping school -- after pleading and pointing to a near-perfect attendance record otherwise -- but that didn't mean her mom would stop giving her grief for it.

"Yeah, yeah," she said, texting Harper back a brief thanks .

Steph had planned to work on her Spanish essay but she quickly gave up in favor of sitting in bed doing a few Google searches on the current subject of her curiosity: Cassandra Cain-Wayne.

It was slightly embarrassing how many of the links were already purple -- she was friends with someone with a Wikipedia page? -- but the tapping quickly ended up taking her to one of the few interviews available online of Cassandra Wayne, interviewed by Victoria Vale for the Gotham Gazette. She'd already watched this one, though it was deeply strange now to see Cass next to her father and go: "yeah, that's Batman and Batgirl." Even now, with confirmation from multiple sources, she couldn't see it at all. Cass, sure, but even though Occam's razor left her no possible explanation other than Bruce Wayne was definitely Batman, she could not imagine charming and superficial Bruce Wayne as the mythical Batman, supplanting the Jersey Devil in the minds of Southern Jersey kids everywhere.

The interview led her down a YouTube wormhole, her homework forgotten beside her. She, on a whim, typed in "ASL Basics," and had already blown through several basic phrases videos. It was slower work than she was used to -- languages other than English had always, ironically, been her weakest point in school. They were too different from the ciphers she was used to, the grammar alien along with the vocabulary, and Steph could only ever handle one or the other. It was frustrating, often, because Steph wasn't used to being bad at learning.

She kept watching, anyways, even if it didn't take long for her to go hot with frustration and wish for something else to do. Rather, she picked up a discarded Rubix cube off her bedside table and fidgeted with it, taking her hands off to mimic signs as she saw them on her phone.

She had just gotten to the common family signs: two okay signs twisted towards her for family , thumb of an open hand against the chin for mother , and she clicked off her phone before the video got to the next sign.

Then she turned to the side to fumble for her charger only to nearly drop her phone in shock.

Cass, clinging to her window by the tips of fingers at the overhand, let go of one of her hands to fingerspell out "Open?" and Steph nearly started laughing, if only to get her heart to stop beating so fast.

"You scared me," she said, sliding open the window and slowly levering her legs onto the windowsill. Cass sat down next to her, and unintentionally, they mirrored each other's positions: outer shoulders pressed to the sides of the window, the other shoulder tilted inwards into the empty space of Steph's room at their backs, their torsos angled ever so slightly towards each other and their legs kicking at the four-story drop below them. Steph had never been so comfortable being such a slight push away from death.

"Sorry," Cass said, and made a face that meant she was not sorry at all. Steph made a face back. She held up her hand. "Thought Oracle said I was coming," she spelled out.

"Did," Steph spelled. "Still surprising. " Out loud, she said, "I'm surprised nobody saw you coming up," though she knew as well as Cass that there were only a few other apartments with a view of her own window, and none of them ever left the curtains open past 4pm, like good little Gothamites. It never did to give away if you were home or not, or to look out the window and witness something you shouldn't.

Cass smirked and kicked her legs out against the building, like the little shit she was. "Easy to surprise," she said, pointing at Steph. "Not sneaky."

"Not all of us can be ninjas," Steph snorted batting at her hand. "Some of us are normal."

Cass raised an eyebrow and craned her neck with exaggerated motions to look at the backpack -- still housing a stolen baseball bat -- in the corner of Steph's room. "Don't know English that well," Cass said. "But do not think you are normal."

Cass sounded unreasonably fond while saying that. Steph was melting. She hated this.

"Yeah, well, you know what they say. Daddy issues lead to girls acting out. I just chose wanton violence. What about you?" she asked, nudging Cass's ankle with her foot, "What's your story?"

Cass had been turning her head back to face the outside world again when Steph spoke, and she froze with her eyes locked on Steph's. After a few seconds, which Steph started regretting immediately -- her and her runaway mouth, as if she hadn't learned her lesson already -- Cass spelled out, "Same. D-A-D-D-Y I-S-S-U-E-S."

" Raised with no language?" Steph spelled back.

"Made me into a weapon," she responded in kind. "Dr. said I will never be able to read right. Only people need to do that." Steph felt part of her heart drop out of her stomach, watching Cass spell that out without a twitch in her expression like she didn't care, like she wasn't lying with her body. What could she even say to that? You aren't what your father made you? The only reason they'd met was because Steph was her father's daughter.

"You're a person, Cassie, " Steph spelled, and Cass's eyes were on her hands and not her face so Steph waited until those bottomless black eyes tracked away from her right hand and locked back onto her own, like the opposite poles of magnets clicking in place. She had, at some point, started leaning in way too close to Cass. They were thigh to thigh, their knees knocked together, noses only a few inches away from each other. "Weapons don't have opinions on sandwiches," she spelled and flashed a hesitant smile.

Steph didn't say the right thing all that often, but she must have said the right thing then, because the corners of Cass's eyes crinkled up just right and everything about her suddenly relaxed. They sat, breathing too close

"Can p-e-o-p-l-e have w-r-o-n-g opinions on sandwiches?" Cass spelled, and Steph laughed back.

"I can't believe you like the mystery meat bánh mì best."

Cass shrugged. "It's good," was all she said out loud. They sat in silence for a bit. Steph sighed internally: was it her turn now already?

"Well, so about my own dad," she said, "what do we do now? I hope Oracle has something, because I'm useless without a clue to go on."

"Not useless," Cass spelled. "Partner."

"We're partners now?" Steph teased and was caught off guard when Cass solemnly nodded her head.

"Oracle is trying to track down Cluemaster's hideout. She said…" Cass trailed off, then picked it back up with her hand. "it would take her 2 days to" -- Cass slammed her fisted palm against her open hand, and Steph mentally subbed in "brute force" -- "through city housing records to find where he is living."

Steph hummed. "Tell her he told my mom and I that he's still living in Lowtown, if that helps."

Cass nodded back. She didn't question Steph's preference to keep using her as an intermediary, even if it must have been annoying for her. Steph loved her just a little more for that. 

She let her gaze pan out to the now-familiar low skyline of Crime Alley, the Italian quarter she'd faced for the past fourteen months and the French quarter just behind it, spilling distinctive neon lights into the streets. There'd be Monday night football playing at some of those sports bars: she thought the Gotham Knights might be playing in this week's match. Idly, she hoped they wouldn't lose: the Knights were like their good-luck charm, and whenever they lost, it felt like the whole city was even nastier than usual.

"What are you thinking about?" Cass spelled, and Steph smirked and spelled back, "Sports."

Cass narrowed her eyes. "I can tell when people lie."

"What, with superpowers?"

"No, just good. What are you thinking about?"

Steph paused, her eyes still locked onto the faint horizon of the Atlantic Ocean. "My dad," she admitted out loud. "He liked football, I was always a baseball fan. My mom never cared about sports either way, so who even knows where I got that from. I just-- I don't know. We were close to catching him today, he's been on my mind. He liked the Knights."

Cass didn't comment on the nonsequiturs, which she would always be grateful for. She hummed and waited for Steph to keep going.

Steph sighed. "The first few months, I'd thought that he was coming back to us," she said slowly, hollowly. She fingerspelled half-heartedly as she spoke, though Cass's eyes remained firm on her face. "It'd blow over by the end of summer, and he'd come back and we'd be a family again. Turns out, the whole time raising me, he was just establishing an alibi."

She still remembered moving into this apartment. It was much smaller than their old one, but their family was suddenly much smaller than the old one. She and her mom had had to get used to working around each other, to stop making space for a third body that was never coming home.

She looked off. "It's so stupid. Can you feel nostalgia for something that hurt you?" She didn't bother to fingerspell that out: she wasn't sure if she wanted Cass to understand her anyways.

".... Yes.." Cass said, and this time Steph thought she halted less because the word wouldn't come to her and more because she truly didn't want to say it. 

Cass held up her fist again. It was how she showed it to Steph, way back when they first met. First two knuckles out, aligned with the bones of her forearm. "Father taught me to hurt. I think about him… every-time…. I fight. Same for you?"

Steph thunked her head back against her window frame, looking back at Cass. The chill of the night was slowly seeping in, past her wool socked feet and heavy clothes, though she didn't quite notice the discomfort.

"My dad showed me how to solve puzzles, but I'm the one who made myself good at it. He doesn't get to have a part of me too." Steph tried to keep talking, but she felt, just this once, like her words were going to fail her.

Instead, she held up a hand again, and if it was shaking, well, it was cold out. "He got me that cube," she spelled, then pointed at the Rubix cube, abandoned on her bed. Cass's eyes flicked over for half a second and then flicked back to meet hers. "I think about him whenever I see Star Trek reruns or when someone drums their fingers against a paper cup of coffee and. It's not always hate."

"No ," Cass spelled back. "Not always."

"Fuck," Steph breathed out. "We're a pair."

Cass shrugged. "Does your mom kill people too?"

Steph straightened back up in surprise and squawked a little, though she would never admit it. "No! I don't -- I know she knew about the stealing, but she's studying to be a nurse . Nurses do... the opposite of killing people."

"Not that bad, then," Cass spelled, and there was a sympathetic look in her eyes to contrast the teasing crinkle at their corners.

They were quiet again, still angled towards each other but both of their eyes were fixed more on the city around them. Steph cleared her throat again and waited for Cass's eyes to flick over to her.

"Well, if you're free for the next two days," and she brought up her hands and tried out one of the phrases she'd learned a few minutes ago off YouTube: "What would you like to do?" she signed rather than spelled.

Cass's didn't grin, or quirk her lips, or smirk a little. She beamed, her top lip stretched up and exposing all her teeth and her bottom lip tugging the whole thing a little lopsided to the left and her face lit fully up like the most beautiful star in the sky, a few inches away from Steph. "Learned!" she cried out, her hands suddenly reaching forward to hold onto Steph's wrists.

"F-o-r y-o-u," Steph spelled out, her own mouth stretched into an answering smile without any conscious input from Steph herself. "I am s-t-i-l-l l-e-a-r-n-i-n-g."

"Thank you," Cass said quietly, and Steph had no idea how she was doing that Disney Princess sparkling eye bullshit when the only light source they had was backlighting them, but if anyone could do it, Cassandra Wayne would be the one.

"No problem," Steph replied, and she meant it. She'd spend hours frustrating herself to tears watching ASL lessons if it meant Cass would keep smiling at her like this. "No problem," she signed.

They were staring at each other for a bit, still thigh to thigh and breathing in each other's space before something in Steph's hindbrain kicked her and went you're being weird . She leaned her shoulders back against the window frame, putting another few inches between them. She didn't break eye contact though. Cass's smile had softened down to a close-mouthed grin, though somehow the intensity of the smile hadn't been dialed down even a little.

"Will... you tell me a story?" Cass asked. "...I like when people do voices. And… I like to hear ... you talk, too. With hands. And mouth."

Steph leaned back against her window frame and let her gaze fuzz somewhere above the horizon of Crime Alley. She cleared her throat a few times to work up gravel, and started:

"Legend has it, on one dark night in the Pinewoods, in the early 1700s, Mother Leeds found herself pregnant with her thirteenth child…."

and if the devil were to see you,
he would kiss your eyes and repent

-Farouq Jwaydeh

Chapter Text

Steph finished the Spanish essay from hell in the class right before it on a fresh sheet of binder paper. In a fit of pique, she'd stolen her mother's long-discarded lighter and hung half out her window burning the previous sheet with the cracked clue on it, because, she didn't know, metaphorically casting off of her father's influence on her life or something like that. Also, if she just threw it in their communal trash there was a slight chance her mom would still happen across it, which would be a problem. 

Somehow, her Spanish-language rendition of what happened only two days ago felt like she was recalling memories from years ago. It'd been a hell of a Monday, she supposed. She probably wouldn't get anything better than a B- from that paper, but it was her last semester of high school, so she figured her standards didn't have to be particularly high. Plus, her after school activity was taking up a lot of her time, even if it might not have looked as good on her transcript as the debate team. 

She was one of the unfortunate seniors who hadn't scored a free period conveniently at the end of the day -- she only got an extended lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays -- so Steph was stuck in Spanish until 3:10 PM. They had reached the point in the school year, with four weeks left on the entire mandatory public education sentence, that only about half the class ever bothered to show up on any given day. By the time the last period of the day rolled around, Mrs. Ramirez would be lucky to have five occupied seats in the whole classroom.

With just one full month of school left, Steph presumed that even the teachers had given up just a little as well. She dropped her essay off on the teacher's desk and put her head down to take a nap, and nobody bothered her for the full hour, even if Harper did sneak a worried glance at her. She woke up only slightly blearily disoriented when the bell finally rang and Mrs. Ramirez didn't even give her a look or ask to see her after class. Steph was grateful: she figured the past year or so of being a "good kid" was probably paying off right about now.

She levered herself out of her seat and grabbed her backpack -- now full of actual school materials and not vigilante gear -- shrugging one shoulder in on her way out the door. She'd kept her head down and her thoughts focused more on the groceries she'd promised her mom she'd pick up after school, so she could be forgiven for how surprised she was when she finally looked up from the concrete low steps at the front doors of her high school and spotted the daughter of a billionaire, Cassandra Cain-Wayne.

Cass was sitting on the hood of some nondescript Prius, bundled up in several layers and a scarf so only her nose and above poked out. She would probably have been hard to recognize, even if you followed the tabloids, but luckily Steph had spent quite a lot of time with her recently. A guy was waiting next to her, a leather jacket and a Bludhaven PD cap on, which momentarily threw her for a loop because he was also pinging her vague "I've seen this face before" senses -- she assumed this was another one of Cass's D-list celebrity brothers. She had not known that Cass had a cop brother, but then again, it wasn't like she was the most up on rich people drama until she'd found out her new friend was a Wayne. Even then, most of her research was concentrated on the sole daughter of Bruce Wayne.

Cass was leaning over the guy to look at what he was doing on his phone, clearly digging her elbow into his shoulder as she did so. He was bearing it with a shocking amount of grace, considering just how pointy Cass's elbows were.

As Steph was thinking that, whatever sixth sense Cass had clearly pinged because she looked up and unerringly locked eyes with her instantly despite the throng of students swarming out around her. She signed "Hello" and turned the outward flick of her arm into a waving motion to come over. Like Steph wasn't already going to.

Lightly jogging, Steph made her way across the desiccated front lawn -- more dirt than yellow grass, but that was just the aesthetic the whole city liked to go for -- to come to a stop in front of her. 

"Hello," Steph signed herself. 

"Would have texted first," Cass said, "but he didn't want to read and type for me."

Her brother(?) next to her snorted: "Texting and driving is a fineable offense," he said in a tone that felt, to her, just a little too hypocritically "follow-the-rules-or-else" for what had to be an extrajudicial vigilante.

"Yeah," Steph said, crossing her arms. "Wouldn't want distracted drivers out there on the streets. Scum of the earth, they are," and her gaze did flick a little to the baseball cap before looking the guy in his eyes.

In her peripheral vision, she saw Cass spell out "s-t-o-p," as she hopped off the car, but she looked like she was smiling at the guy's expense too. Steph flashed back " a-c-a-b," and tried not to crack a grin. Her poker face was holding strong.

The guy, on the other hand, laughed it off. "I'm Dick Grayson," he said, holding his hand out for her to shake. Steph opened her mouth, because seriously? , and he added preemptively: "You only get one free joke about the name."

"I'll save it," she said, shaking his hand. He was wearing gloves to ward off the chill, but Steph would bet money there were calluses on his knuckles too, and they'd feel a lot like Cass's. "You her brother too?"

"Yep. She bullied me into dropping her off here."

"What," Steph said, looking at Cass, "rich folks don't got a chauffeur for all that?" Cass looked unrepentant.

"No, just a butler," she said. Steph blinked. She had no idea if that was a joke or not.

"I was going to be in town anyway. Our dad's back from a business trip, and I've been voted sacrifice to go pick him up, because none of these brats want to do it.  He gets grouchy when he's been away too long." Dick Grayson said that last sentence with an air of conspiratorial camaraderie: Steph wasn't buying it.

"Oh, a business trip? From where?" Steph asked, widening her eyes innocently. She could not believe that that was the excuse they were going with. How had these people not been figured out yet?

"Ah," Dick said, and he didn't look uncomfortable but he definitely didn't seem at ease either, "you know, I never really ask. If you meet Tim, he might know, he's a lot more involved in the family business than I am."

Family business. Steph wanted to scream. They were so, so, so obvious. She looked helplessly at Cass, who simply smiled at her serenely. She kind of wanted to grab her by the lapels of her winter jacket and yell "what does business trip mean when your dad is the Batman," and also then add afterward, "do you guys actually call the Batman 'dad'?" She was only stopped by the fact that they were in public and Oracle would absolutely arrange her murder if she leaked the identities of Batman and Batgirl.

"Sure," was what came out of her mouth instead. They all stood around awkwardly for a few seconds. Cass was still smiling gently at them, while Steph was pretty sure she looked deeply uncomfortable/a little freaked right now, and Dick also probably wanted to look that way but had the good grace to just seem blankly congenial instead. 

Her friend then took pity on her and turned back to where two paper coffee cups were cooling on the roof of the Prius. She offered one to Steph, holding the other close to her chest, and she reached across gratefully to take it. Steph inhaled the smell of black coffee and spared a second to wonder if Cass just got that because it was a default order or if the whole World's Greatest Detective schtick the JLA's marketing team always tried to stick on Batman had some merit. She stopped sparing seconds to think about that in favor of taking a sip. Cass's brother shifted, his phone back in his pocket and car keys now in hand.

"Well, you guys have fun. I'm gonna drive up to the Manor, meet Alfred there. Don't get into too much trouble, kids."

Steph mouthed "manor?" at Cass, who giggled a little. With one last measuring glance at the two of them, Cass's brother got into the car and drove off.

"Man," Steph said. "I cannot believe you guys are, like, Prius-rich-people. Priuses."

Cass tugged her scarf down and took a long slurp of her own coffee in lieu of answering. She probably didn't even realize just how weird everything about her life was. Steph rounded on her more fully.

"Also, exactly how much did he know about me?"

"Not much," Cass said, looking up at Steph through her lashes, in a way that Steph figured was supposed to be a who-me? , but definitely was missing the mark. "Is happy… I am making friends. Outside the night business."

"You little shit," Steph fingerspelled, smiling. Cass giggled. "Okay, now no bullshit -- what does 'business trip' actually mean?"

"Fighting aliens," Cass said with a straight face. "In space."

There were a few very good seconds when Steph instinctively disbelieved her. Those were good seconds. Then she remembered that one of her old friends in middle school had a hobby of collecting "APOCALYPSE AVERTED" headlines because so many alien races kept trying their hand, and on balance, yeah, Batman fighting aliens made sense.

"Wow. Cool," was all she could muster in reply. "So, you show up because you got a lead on the guy we're supposed to be fighting, here on Earth?"

"No, " Cass signed. "Oracle is still ??? on it."

"??" Steph copied the sign, furrowing her brow in question.

"W-o-r-k-i-n-g. Working."

"Got it." Out loud she said, "Then, you got your brother to drive you all the way down here just because you missed seeing my face?" and she'd intended a teasing tone that had fallen off the words at some point in that question.

"Yes," said Cass, openly and honestly. Steph had to look away, sipping on her gifted coffee to buy herself time to shove down the explosion of warm feelings that Cass's word just evoked in her chest and throat and cheeks. Also, a thought struck her:

"I can't believe your brother is a cop. Isn't he obligated to turn you in for assaulting people all night," she signed, fingerspelling what she didn't know. 

Cass tilted her head. "Not cop anymore," she said. "Got involved in…. ma-fi-a?"

"Stop," Steph said weakly. "Stop telling me things about your family. I never want to know."

"Okay," Cass smiled. "Will not tell you he is Oracle's ex."

Steph choked on her own spit. "Oracle has exes? Oracle isn't an AI?" She was learning all sorts of new things today.

Cass wrinkled her nose. "You thought Oracle was?"

"I didn't actually think she was a computer."

She did. She had totally thought for a good while that Oracle was like some weird AI gone rogue, possibly one that had Frankensteined itself into existence off the pieces of whatever online detritus Gotham left behind. The fact that not only was Oracle a real person, but Oracle was also a real person who had exes who were Batgirl's brother was rocking her world a little on its axis.

"She's a person. Grumpy, right now. Doesn't like your dad," Cass said.

"Nobody likes my dad," Steph agreed easily. "That's why he's a s-u-p-e-r-v-i-l-l-a-i-n."

Cass grinned, popped the lid of her coffee and drained the last it all in one long chug like she was a frat boy with a can of beer: Steph was slightly concerned for the state of her throat after all that hot liquid and also unreasonably fond while watching that objectively disgusting act be performed. 

"Oracle made me leave. Came to be with you today." She signed. Steph was inordinately pleased that she only had to get Cass to clarify three of those signs: she was learning, even if it was much much slower than she wished. Also, perhaps a little of that inordinate feeling bubbled up in her chest when she saw "came to be with you today." Perhaps a little.

"Well," Steph said, "I have some errands to run. You ever gone grocery shopping, rich girl?"

"Why are we going so far for groceries? No store near house?” Cass spelled, seated primly on the lip of the hard yellow plastic benches Gerta was most known for. Steph had opted to stand directly in front of her, one hand firmly affixed to a pole so she wouldn’t fall completely over each time the train jerked to a complete stop.

"Nah, I just like to go to a supermarket in Lowtown," Steph said, letting the jerky motion of the light rail push her body back and forth. Cass scrunched her nose up, and Steph had absolutely no idea what someone who's native fluency was in body language was seeing right now. "We always used to get our groceries there, so I guess we're just used to the selection by now. It's not too far out of the way, anyways."

Cass hummed and settled a little further into her seat. She kept watching Steph through her lashes and Steph held very still, the motion of the train thrumming through her bones, her heart beating in her throat. Cass should not have had that strong an effect on her.

“You never answered,” she said. “Have you ever gone grocery shopping before?”

Cass shrugged. “Told you,” she spelled. “We have a butler. ”

Rich people.

“What about before you lived with the butler and the billionaire?”

Cass frowned. “Was on my… own,” she said, slow and methodical about her word choice. “Stole food. Did not… shop.”

They looked at each other for a while. “That’s fine,” Steph said. Then she backtracked. “Well, no, that’s horrifying to learn, you’re like, my age, but like. I don’t know.” “I stole a car a few days ago,” she spelled, because apparently word vomit could happen even when she was just using her hands. “It happens.”

Cass had started giggling at Steph’s horrified awkwardness, which she’d count as a win, despite feeling all the horrible awkwardness.

“Car happens… only to you,” Cass said.

“Not everyone has a Batmobile,” Steph spelled.

They passed the next few minutes like that. It was comfortable, nice. Cass was good about demonstrating signs for her, even when she had to keep asking for the same one over and over again, and she was gentle about correcting Steph’s own atrocious grammar.

Eventually, their train rattled into the station of the Southeast Lowtown neighborhood Steph had actually grown up in, officially known on city documents as District Nine and colloquially known by everyone else as Hangman’s Wharf.

It wasn’t too different, she supposed, from the Lower East End. They were both the kinds of places Steph couldn’t claim to come from without seeing pity in the other person’s eyes. 

Hangman’s Wharf, at the very least, had style. According to local legends, it was where the old executions were done, way back in the Puritan times, when everyone gathered around to watch because that was what passed for evening's entertainment in the seventeenth century. Every Gotham kid knew that they never actually had burned witches at the stake in the town square, though.

Witches were hung.

Steph couldn’t remember if there were any high profile witch hunts in Gotham, but there must have been. She could imagine it easily: they would take young girls to the edge of the Wharf, where the land met the Atlantic Ocean, and they’d toss them in to see if they floated. The ones who didn’t drown would be branded instead, and the really unlucky girls would have their teenage necks snapped with some rope and a useful application of gravity. No wonder there was so much rage in Gotham’s bones: someone had definitely cursed this city. Gotham had never been kind to the little girls who grew up under its ogival arches, but then again, what place ever was?

Today, the Wharf was a microcosm of Gotham itself: the waterfront properties ringed the district with their high property prices and rich kid attitude, generously marketed as a “beachfront neighborhood,” while a few blocks away, narrow low-rise tenements were honest about what they were: cheap housing, so long as you didn’t mind living a few doors down from the local dealer. Different, at least, from the vertical villages she was living in now. Old Gotham had the luxury of sprawling out, while the new stuff could only go up.

Cass nudged Steph out of her thoughts as they walked and pointed to some street art emblazoned on the side of a café they were passing. It was of a bunch of stylized black birds on a telephone wire, all with red breasts.

“Robins,” Cass said. Steph grinned and pointed to what was clearly an addendum in the corner by a different, less skilled artist.

“And Batgirl,” she said, though that was perhaps a generous interpretation of the scrawled and blotchy green bat outline.

“And Batgirl,” Cass agreed, leaning a little into the alley to get a better look at it. “Too many birds,” she said, pulling her phone out anyways. She snapped a picture of the alley mural before stowing her phone back into one of her thousand pockets in her hundred layers.

“Yeah?” Steph asked, very curious but trying to play it cool. “How many Robins have there been? I always guessed three, but Harpe— a friend would put her money on two.”

“Three,” Cass confirmed, smiling at Steph.

“Knew it,” she said. “It’s the accent. The middle one always retroflexed his “r”s and the new one’s got boarding-school lock-jaw.”

Cass looked like she was humoring her. She patted Steph’s shoulder and kept moving, despite not even knowing where she was going. Steph figured that was just a Cass thing and jogged to keep up.

“The store’s coming up on the left,” she said, “Elmhurst Grocer’s.”

“What color?” Cass asked over her shoulder, and that’s right: can’t read.

“Red,” Steph signed instead. “Big red awning, brick store. Glass windows. Can’t miss it, there’s a sliding automatic door with a busted motion sensor, so you have to hit the manual emergency button.”

Cass fairly skipped over to the store the second she noticed the billowy red awning, dodging pedestrians with an ease Steph envied. She, on the other hand, had nearly been bowled over twice in as many blocks, hurrying to keep up.

They went in, the doors easily sliding open and shut behind them -- the owners must have fixed the motion sensor since the last time Steph was here -- and Cass looked around in naked curiosity. Steph was a little fascinated, watching Cass’s face move: she'd never seen such clearly displayed emotions before in her life.

"Where are the… fruits?" Cass asked, turning to Steph with wide eyes.

"Uh," Steph said, looking above her. After squinting a bit, she spied the aisle name. "Fourth from the left, in back," she spelled, and Cass grinned, taking off.

"Wait--" Steph cut herself off and went for the plastic baskets near the door, sighing in a 'what can you do?' manner to the middle aged man going for the exit. He gave her a tight and perfunctory smile, towing along a set of teenagers.

Steph caught up with Cass at the produce aisle and elected, rather than approaching her, to simply watch. Cass was examining a pyramid of apples, running her finger lightly over one of the support apples at the very bottom.

"Red ones taste bad," Cass said, not even looking at her as she spoke. Ninjas; they do it once and the mystique wears off. Steph rolled her eyes and pushed off the aisle she was leaning against, coming up behind her.

"Yeah, I like the green ones best," she said, pointing at a separate pile of Granny Smiths. Cass nodded in thought.

"Nobody likes red ones?" she asked. 

"Don't think so."

"Then why do they sell them?"

Steph shrugged. "Good question," she said, her eyes drifting to the price. This wasn't the type of store that stocked organic produce, at least not when Steph had lived here, but it seemed maybe Poison Ivy's environmentalist agenda was paying off: those were definitely organic produce prices. "Guess someone's gotta be buying it."

Cass shrugged. "I don't think I like apples."

Steph hummed, then grabbed a bunch of nearby bananas. "What do you like?" she asked, and Cass looked at the rest of the aisle in thought. She pointed to the coconuts.

"Like the taste. Texture bad. Hard to get into, too," she said, and Steph had to agree.

"You like coconut flavored things?" She asked, already moving. "We can get some kaya."

"Kaya?" Cass asked, following her. Steph paused to grab a bag of the cheapest white bread off the side of the next aisle. 

"You might like it. It's a coconut-egg jam," Steph explained, hooking a turn down the next aisle. Cass was right at her elbow, so she could see when her face screwed up in distaste.

"Coconut, and egg?"

"Hey, I was right about the bánh mì, wasn't I?"

"Right once," Cass teased. "Wrong all the other times. There is a saying Bruce has… about broken clocks?"

"Hey," Steph said, mock defensively. "I am right at least three times a day."

Cass shook her head with a wry grin. "What does k-a-i-a look like?" she signed, her fingerspelling carefully slower than usual. Steph put her hand on Cass's spelling hand and looked to her for permission; when Cass granted it with a nod of her head and slant of her eyebrows, Steph gently pulled her thumb out to turn the i into a y . Cass spelled it again, "k-a-y-a " and nodded to herself.

"It's a jar, kind of green-brown looking. Should have pictures of open coconuts on the side."

Cass nodded and set to her task with the kind of intensity Steph usually associated more with Batgirl, though it didn't exactly settle uneasily on Cass's own straight shoulders. She picked each jar up, wrapped in labels Cass's eyes skipped over uncomprehendingly, and twisted them slowly, checking for the images Steph had described. It would take only a few seconds for Steph to walk down the aisle herself and find the section with jars labeled "K-a-y-a," but she liked to believe she was just emotionally intelligent enough to know that this was something Cass had to do herself.

She also clearly enjoyed it, this small, everyday, household activity that she'd never done in seventeen years on this earth. Steph did this every other week.

Then again, Cass also went out and fought people every night like it was routine, which was definitely something Steph had only started doing recently. 

Steph had begun fidgeting again with the fingers unencumbered by the basket, which Cass of course noticed. She quirked an eyebrow at Steph, who smiled back at her. 

"Hey, would you mind holding this?" she asked Cass, holding the red plastic basket out to her. Cass gingerly took it and dropped the jar -- green-brown, Steph caught the tail end of the word COCON- disappearing under Cass's palm -- in, putting it next to the bananas and bread Steph had already left in there.

"I gotta go to the bathroom real quick," she said, then followed it up with "period cramps, you know how it is," which was hopefully TMI-y enough to keep Cass from following or asking more questions about the fact that she was lying. Judicious application of references to her "time of month" had yet to fail her so far.

She waited for a few seconds after she disappeared from Cass's line of sight to collect herself. Also, to see if Cass followed. She knew she'd never be able to out-stealth the Batgirl herself, but, as much as it killed her, she was banking on Cass's trust.

Steph slipped out the back of the store into the grocery lot where big trucks idled, most half-open with empty crates stacked around haphazard behind them. To the left was the ocean, the sea breeze carrying through the several blocks between them, wind tunnelling around the tall buildings that fringed Hangman's Wharf and cast deep, long shadows at sunset. To her right, the squat, overcrowded sprawl of Southeast Lowtown, her former home of nearly sixteen years there among them. To an outsider, locating one apartment in the urban mess of Hangman's Wharf would be less like finding a needle in a haystack and more like trying to find a dropped contact lens in a sea of identical dropped contact lenses on a bathroom floor.

Luckily for Steph, she didn't need contacts and she wasn't an outsider. She hung a right and started walking for the tenements. Of course, that was when she was grabbed by the shoulder and pulled around.

Apparently, wishful thinking could only do so much in the face of an ever-vigilant Batgirl.

"You promised, " Cass spelled, furious and fast, her eyes locked on Steph's widened ones, "that you would let Oracle handle it."

Steph recovered her faculties pretty fast. Her familiar irritation that she had begun to associate with every one of the Bat-themed vigilantes with the former exception of Cass had exploded back to life in her.

"I let her handle it last time ," she argued back, her fingers shaking. She felt heat crawl up the back of her neck, but if it was anger or just the memories her skin had of third degree burns, she couldn't tell. "It didn't go too well."

"Not for you, either!"

Steph had the brief and errant thought that they probably looked ridiculous, rapidly and silently flashing between signs and fingerspelled accusations in the back lot of a grocery store. It was hard to laugh, though.

“Look,” she signed. “He’s my dad.”

Cass closed her eyes and Steph said, out loud, “Come on, really?” Cass kept her eyes screwed shut, her chest coming up and down in deep breaths.

“You…” she said slowly. “are so angry. But… you.. are not… alone… here.”

“Lovely sentiment,” Steph shot back before consciously gentling her words. This was Cass; if anyone would get it, she would. “But what happens if aliens invade again? Batman goes to space to fight them. All hands on deck, right? Oracle strikes me as a utilitarian, and I can’t even grudge her for that: the end of the world does probably take precedent over one guy running around setting a few churches on fire. Everyone would make that decision. Except me, because he’s my dad, so I have to stop him. Wouldn’t you, in my situation?”

Cass opened her eyes again. She was quiet for a long time, while Steph tried to fight down the blush that had taken over her whole face in anger: her cheeks and ears must be bright red. And Cass must have been able to read her like a book, like she could anyone.

“Selfish,” Cass said, and it stung because it confirmed everything Steph ever believed about herself and her decisions regarding Spoiler. “But… I would too.”

They stared at each other. The breeze had picked up again, ruffling their jackets and hair in the late afternoon cold, tugging at Cass's scarf and throwing her hair in her eyes. The gray Gotham light, cloudy and wan, seemed to disappear into her black-hole eyes. Everything about Cass seemed like it should have added up to something a little left of human: she stood too straight, she moved too perfectly, her eyes were too black and her face was too still. And yet. Something had broken and Steph couldn't see Batgirl anymore, not even with the knowledge and firsthand memories of just how effective Cass was at her job. Whatever had come out of the hell that must have been Cass's childhood, that made her so competent at something so horrifying, she was still a teenage girl.

"You were lying about the period thing, right?" Cass finally signed. It was so unexpected that Steph spluttered.

"What- yeah. Yeah, I'm on Jolessa, I'm not-- what?"

Cass shrugged. "When I was nine," she said, "I had sur-ge-ry to get my u-te-rus taken out."

"A hysterectomy," Steph supplied, both shocked into numbness and also mildly confused at this turn in the conversation.

"Hih-stuh-rek-tuh-mee," Cass sounded out. She nodded decisively. "Hysterectomy. My father… decided that the in-ter-ruptions to training would be… bad. Didn't want me to have any. And, thought if... I grew up, having a child would be… bad. For what he wanted for me." She then grinned suddenly. "Did not know... I would grow up and not like men."

"Wow. We're really just team daddy issues," Steph cracked, her answering smile perhaps a little too shakily genuine to hit the ironic tone she wanted to go for.

Cass bobbed her head from side to side. "Sometimes, moms are bad too. Oracle helped me with that too."

Steph's shaky smile vanished, just like that. Old bitterness and new ones too made their way onto her face, where she knew Cass would be able to read them, clear as day.

"She keeps saying she will," Steph said. "Help me, that is. You gotta be able to see why I don't trust that though, right?"

Cass just nodded. Steph wondered what Cass's own relationship to Oracle even was: her brother's ex, so clearly not family. And it was obvious Cass loved her family but didn't know what to do with anyone outside of it -- she was quiet with Steph in the beginning, and she was still quiet with strangers, watchful and silent. Cass trusted Oracle with her life, or at least to feed her the right information. She followed Oracle's orders. But she disobeyed Oracle too, sometimes. Cass had disobeyed and came after her, but only to lend her a hand. Actually, all the disagreements Cass had with Oracle so far had seemed to come down to her: Steph didn't know if she should feel guilty about that.

"Oracle is," and Cass paused. She looked off in the direction of the tenements. "...She is afraid for us. Saw many terrible things. Never wants a bad thing to happen again."

Steph raised an eyebrow. "You want me to believe she's worried for me. And that's why she spends 90% of our conversations insulting me and my competence."

Cass shrugged. "Oracle is… like you. Good with," and she tapped her head. "Always think they are smartest."

"Hey!" Steph yelped. "I don't think I'm smarter than anyone."

Cass snorted herself. "Yes, you do. Think... you are smarter than Oracle, so sneaking off to solve case. Oracle thinks she's smarter than you, so solving case without you. Neither of you are smarter. Both just stubborn."

Steph shook her head, her mouth quirking. "And all along, you were the smartest of us all."

"Nobody ever notices," Cass said with mock exasperation. The amusement stayed on her face, but Cass was quiet for another second longer. Then, she said: "Oracle will not like it. But I think you should meet."

Oracle lived in an honest to God clocktower. It was some tackily Art Deco mock-Big Ben looking thing and it seemed like a mix of in and out of time, though primarily like it belonged in the 20s more than it did the 21st century. At least Steph now knew why the Batgirls stayed in Downtown Gotham so often: if Batman lived as Bruce Wayne in Bristol, then between the two sets of vigilantes, they had half and half of the city covered. Steph could appreciate the efficiency.

"Oracle, uh, knows I'm here, right?" Steph asked as Cass buzzed them in with what looked like a very complicated password: her brain itched to memorize it and try to crack it for clues, and Steph had to look away. She figured intruding on Oracle's privacy physically would be enough for now.

Cass pointed at an extremely unobtrusive camera. Steph wouldn't have seen it if she hadn't had it shown to her. "She does now."

"Great," Steph said, suddenly and uncharacteristically nervous. The floor of the clock tower was eerie, reminiscent of the Gotham U belltower, if only due to the mildewy scent of a place that had to deal with a lot of dry rot. It was much bigger than the service elevator they'd been in at the university, though, echo-y and cavernously vast. Still dark.

They took the elevator up, which again felt familiar. This time, though, it was just Steph who was nervous. Cass was clearly revelling in it.

"Just to be sure," Steph said, shifting her weight a little from foot to foot. "Oracle isn't also in the mafia, right?"

"What?" Cass asked. She seemed genuinely taken off guard by the question, if no less amused. "No. Why are you so stuck on the mafia?"

"Uh, because you have confirmed that one of your brothers was in it." Steph remembered the days before the supervillains had gotten their claws into Gotham City. It wasn't so long ago that the mob used to run this town. Within her own lifetime, actually, if only mostly the parts of it she didn't remember. What she did know about, though, was the stuff of her nightmares for at least a decade.

"Your father is a supervillain. My parents are assassins. Mafia is not so bad, compared to everything else we've done." Cass signed. She was smiling very widely.

"I hate this. I want to back out. I don't want to know what "everything else" is. I don't want to learn anything else about vigilantism."

"Too late," Cass signed, right as the elevator ground to a stop, like the ominous little shit she was. "We're here. Come meet the Oracle."

"What if I say I'll never go out as a vigilante again. I've been successfully scared off."

"No," Cass snorted. "You haven't."

"No," Steph sighed, agreeing. "I haven't."

They stepped out of the elevator together and into what was clearly the kind of set up The Matrix wanted to become when it grew up. There were screens everywhere . Mostly giant TV-screens, paneling every wall with surveillance footage of various parts of the city, clearly all stolen off of CCTV cams. Steph leaned in close to examine one: with a jolt, she realized it was a feed of Gotham U, pointed at the back of the Sionisis Building. 

"Universities are good for my kind of work," a voice called out from off to the left, and Steph whirled around. "Lots of cameras."

Oracle was… not what Steph expected. She was a redheaded woman, clearly well into her 20s, with glasses, a turtleneck, and a slightly no-nonsense air to her. In general, she looked like the librarian at the local public library who would tell people to keep it down, but would also take the time to help you find whatever book you were looking for. She certainly didn't seem like the all-seeing eye in the sky she claimed, though this cyberpunk backdrop was definitely making up for the first impression.

Also, she was in a wheelchair.

"You're in a wheelchair," Steph said, dumbly. Oracle snorted.

"Congratulations," she said, dry as the Sahara Desert. Now Steph could see that she was Oracle. That brand of condescension could be a calling card. "You aren't blind."

"She's smart," Cass said from behind her, a teasing tone to her voice that made Steph actually flush a little with embarrassment this time.

"I see that," Oracle said. She looked at Cass, a severe glare that in no way diminished her resemblance to a public librarian. "Regardless, we will be having a conversation about your actions. I did not okay bringing a tentative ally to the Clocktower."

Cass simply tilted her chin up and set her jaw in defiance. Steph could not figure out what they were to each other at all.

"Steph," Cass said, turning to her. "What were you looking for? When you left the store."

"Uh," Steph said, her eyes bouncing between Oracle and Cass like she was spectating a ping-pong match. "I guess, some storefront I'd never seen before. Recently opened or acquired. Cash heavy business. So whatever dirty money Cluemaster was knocking over to finance his whole operation could be cut in with the legitimate cash flow easily. Maybe somewhere that pulled a lot of tips, had lots of the same kind of guy working it. Probably would have something in the title that, I don't know, hit me in my spidey-sense. Clue-y sense. Whatever."

Cass grinned at Steph in approval, then turned to Oracle. "See," she said. "Smart."

It was. It was also a bit harder than she'd made it sound: in the crime capital of the United States, ATMs were rare, and bank tellers rarer. Most Gothamites, rather than making a trek to the real banks on the mainland at Bristol, carried cash instead: which made muggings lucrative and money laundering easy.

"Hm," Oracle said. She wheeled herself around a table that was absolutely cluttered with papers, which seemed a little low-tech for her aesthetic, but Steph couldn't fault her. If she could get away with it in her tiny shared apartment, she'd absolutely have gone full corkboards and string. "Looking for the laundering business, not the safehouse itself. She certainly does know a lot about how the criminal element operates."

"Yeah," Steph said. "No offense, but it'd be impossible to comb through every vacant unit in the city looking for his hideout. This is Gotham: there's so much construction going on constantly that at least 10% of all rental units are vacant and just waiting for a crisis to bring them some displaced renters at any given time."

"I know," Oracle said, mildly, but there was still an undercurrent of bite to it. "You don't need to explain how housing in this city works. I grew up here too."

Steph felt blood rush to her ears. She looked to Cass, who gave her a sympathetic face but clearly had decided she was going to stay out of it.

"Just trying to help," she said, and it clearly came out way too defensive. "Starting in Lowtown because my dad's from there -- we were living in his great-aunt's old apartment before my parents got divorced and we moved. Cluema- my dad was born and raised in Lowtown, so that's why I told Cass to tell you to start checking here."

"Batgirl," Oracle corrected, "And your hint was a bit redundant. Come here," she said and wheeled away to a different TV screen, this one displaying a map of Gotham. With the roadways, subway tracks, and light rail routes all superimposed over each other in lurid color, it bore a passing resemblance to the anatomy diagrams in her old biology textbook.

"The first clue was found right at the start of Bristol city limits fifteen days ago, in the most northeast corner of Gotham. Right near the mainland."

Barbara tapped something on her phone and a photo popped up, clearly professionally taken. A truck with the words " GET READY ĂN" emblazoned on the side in that signature yellow spray paint.

"Ăn?" Steph asked. She'd never seen this before.

"It means "to eat" in Vietnamese. We set Batgirl on the case, looking at restaurants and grocery stores in Little Saigon."

"Huh," Steph said, looking back at Cass. It was weird to realize that Cass had been there on a mission , that day they first met. It recontextualized everything, Steph thought. Then Cass smiled at her, and she dismissed that thought. It made a lot of sense that the only reason she'd ever even met a superhero like Cass was because her father was a supervillain, but it also didn't actually matter all that much to her. Either way, she met Cass.

"Batgirl took this photo at the Little Saigon, south of what we are calling Clue 1."

The familiar image of the vandalized lotus blossom mural popped up. 

Oracle did not look at Steph as she said, "We had relegated this to a low priority case after there wasn't any violence succeeding the discovery of Clue 1, but after Batgirl encountered a new vigilante and a bomb in connection with Clue 2, we reprioritized."

Steph had to snort a little bitterly at "reprioritize." Oracle didn't acknowledge her at all as she continued. 

"Clue 3, as you know, had been presumed to be in West Downtown, but ended up at Miller Harbor, in Upper East Midtown. See a pattern yet?" 

"He's making his way down the city," Steph said, obviously unnecessarily. "Gotham U is south of Miller Harbor."

"And each set up was successively earlier in the day. Implying that bringing the supplies and the men was probably getting easier and easier with each clue. You and Batgirl messed up his flow on Clue 5, and you struck too early, so we don't have a Clue 6, but it almost certainly would have been in Upper Downtown. And then, perhaps, a grand finale in Lowtown."

"His base is definitely in Lowtown then," Steph said. "That's good -- now we have a general location. Did you find the business he's been using to launder the money? Or… you mentioned a grand finale. Do you have a guess when that is?"

Oracle was silent for a while, watching Cass with a cool look on her face. Then, without looking at Steph, she said: "April 24th. The ten year anniversary of your father's first crime is coming up. Tomorrow."

Steph started. "I didn't know that," she said. "When he committed his first crime." Though, now that she was thinking of it, the date "April 24th" was pinging something in the recesses of her brain.

"He stole a few thousand dollars worth in watches from a Midtown luxury store in a smash and grab, fenced them for a tenth of the price, and left a calling card in the form of a numeric code that, if anyone bothered to crack it, would spell out 'Cluemaster'. Ten years ago, all anyone thought was that we had an inept Catwoman copycat. They filed a police report, all the same, and I found it yesterday."

The tone of her voice was clear: I found it without your help. Steph felt her temper flare.

"And you wouldn't even have known to go looking at stuff from a decade ago without me telling you about the game show and the firing and everything." 

"That's not a point in your favor," Oracle said. She took her glasses off. It somehow made her look even more remote and removed than before: Cass may have been the born and raised assassin, but Oracle was the one Steph could believe was something other than wholly human. There was nothing warm in her eyes.

"Tell me," she said, her voice still casually deceptively mild, still librarian-calm, "When did you get so good with puzzles? When you were a kid?"

"Yeah," Steph said, her nascent anger immediately about-facing into a cautious and already defensive manner. She realized her shoulders had hiked up to her ears when she caught a wince from Cass in her peripheral vision.

"And your interest in puzzles and ciphers, you want me to believe that that was wholly organic childhood curiosity? That it had nothing to do with your father? Ms. Brown, you were raised by a supervillain, and you clearly share a lot of his skillset. No matter how Cass feels about you, it simply would be too risky to put all my faith and trust in you."

Steph felt, just a bit, like she'd been slapped. She had no idea what she'd expected, really, and maybe on some level she'd figured Oracle didn't trust her because of how she'd grown up, but that didn't mean it didn't hurt. Her father had made his distaste for her abundantly clear, and still people insisted on tying her to him anyways. Did Oracle do this to Cass, too? No matter how Cass feels about you, did she even trust Cass?

"No," Steph said, low and venomous. "No, you're right. I got into this puzzle shit because I wanted to impress my dad. Yeah, I was a kid, and I knew that my dad was a bad person, and I wanted him to like me anyways!  Because I was a fucking child, and that's what children do! They want approval!" 

Cass had somehow gotten behind her without her noticing, and she put a calming hand on Steph's arm. Steph didn't shake her off, but she also didn't stop: Oracle was still infuriatingly calm-looking, her unshakable stoicism firmly in place. Steph kept yelling.

"I tried to learn how to be like him, because he didn't love me -- I thought he hated me, sometimes -- and I was a child, and I was desperate to be liked! So yeah, I learned how to do some of this stuff for him. Because I was just a stupid kid who wanted her dad to love her."

"And now?" Oracle asked. Her voice never even wavered. "What do you want from him now?"

"I want," Steph snarled. "To take a baseball bat to his fucking face."

Oracle raised an eyebrow. Steph was breathing hard, her shoulders coming up and down with every breath and her face flushed: she must have looked cherry red. Cass's hand migrated up to the crook of her elbow, and that more than anything else was calming her down right now. She looked down to realize Cass was tapping something into the sleeve of her hoodie. Steph's anger slowly drained away, taking the fog over her brain with it: with clarity reestablished, she looked down and realized that Cass was spelling into her arm: "It's ok."

"Thanks," Steph signed to her. She couldn't look at Oracle. Instead, she looked into Cass's eyes: in the light of all the computer screens, she could see that they weren't totally black. Just a very deep brown.

Cass turned and signed something at Oracle, too fast for Steph's paltry beginner fluency to pick up on. Whatever it was that she said, it made Oracle deflate just a little, and suddenly the untouchable statue was gone; it was surprisingly uncomfortable to suddenly see a human in that wheelchair. Oracle signed something back: all Steph could tell was that they were talking about her.

Cass glanced at her, then abruptly switched to fingerspelling. "I trust her," she spelled. "And I know what she looks like when she lies. That was not it."

It was Steph's turn, now, to seek out touch with Cass. She spelled "thank you" gently into the small of Cass's back, and was rewarded with a flash of a smile when Cass registered what she was doing.

"She's not trained," Oracle said in English. "She's a teenage girl who barely looks like she clocks in at above 130. It's a miracle she hasn't been injured past a few burns. She's lucky," Oracle said, and Steph was suddenly aware of the fact that she'd yelled at someone in a wheelchair because the implications just set in. "She won't stay lucky."

"...She doesn't need to be lucky," Cass said. "If… she has… me."

Cass turned to her, and Steph felt like she had taken five shots of adrenaline straight to the heart. Cass didn't have to get involved. She didn't have to vouch for Steph at all. She didn't have to accompany Steph again and bail her ass out of whatever situation Steph would inevitably get in over her head in, and she certainly didn't have to do so against her mentor(?)'s express disapproval. But she did. She always came through: Steph didn't think she could say that about anyone else in her entire life.

Also: she'd just realized something.

"Were you a superhero?" Steph asked, glancing at the wheelchair again before guiltily looking back into Oracle's eyes. Oracle made a face, and suddenly the puzzle pieces clicked in Steph's head again. She nearly stumbled in shock.

"You were. You were Batgirl." Oracle opened her mouth, but Steph was too lost in her own train of thought to even care past registering it. "You were the first one. Now she'll never walk again: that's what you said."

"I was," Oracle said. She was looking at Cass, who stared back. Steph thought Cass might have looked sad, though she couldn't even begin to figure out why.

In fact, Steph couldn't move. She was six again, hearing about Batgirl for the first time and thinking in wonder about the teenage girl who stopped criminals in their tracks, who cared enough to listen when girls went missing, who was strong enough to stop it from happening again.

Batgirl was hurt by a supervillain. That's what Oracle said. Because Oracle was Batgirl.

"Now you get it," Oracle said. "This is dangerous."

"It is," Steph agreed. "I knew from the start."

"I am a best-case scenario," Oracle continued. "What happened to me is the best that you can hope will happen to you."

"I don't care. As long as I can stop my dad from hurting someone else."

Oracle and Steph stared at each other for a long, silent time. Cass was smiling: Steph couldn't see her, since she was ever so slightly behind her at this point, but she knew it. That, more than anything, told Steph that she'd won this conversation. If conversations even had winners; she got the feeling that every conversation with Oracle had a loser, and it wasn't usually Oracle.

"God," Oracle finally said, throwing her hands up and jamming her glasses back onto her face. "Batman always did tell me I was a nightmare as a teen. I guess this is karmic revenge."

"Speaking of Batman," a male voice came in from behind them. He was cut off as Steph yelped.

"What the fuck!"

There was a very short boy leaning against the elevator doors who, for some reason, was wearing sunglasses indoors. This was in spite of the relative lack of lighting that didn't come from a computer screen in the gothically moody clocktower. It seemed very pretentious of him, and Steph decided to dislike him on that principle alone. Also, she was not sure how long he'd been there, and she'd just poured her heart out to one stranger, which was her quota for the rest of the year. She did not like the idea that anyone might have listened to, well, that , without her express permission.

"Language," the boy said, which cemented that dislike. Steph was not having it.

"Where the fuck did you come from?"

"I took the stairs. Hey, Cass."

Cass smiled, waving. Steph turned to her. "That's the last of your brothers, right? You don't have, like, a secret one you've been hiding from the press or anything, right?"

Cass made a face and said, "Secret brother?" at the same time that the new guy asked "How'd you know I was--"

"Are you for real? Secret super spy home camp of Oracle, and you know Cass. Cass knows, like, three people aside from her family, and I feel like Oracle doesn't let anyone into this tower that she doesn't want in here."

"I don't. Hello, Tim."

Oracle said it in the kind of casual tone that made it very obvious that Steph was the only one who hadn't noticed when the new guy came in. Which undermined her whole point on independence and that she could be trusted to take care of herself too, but it was whatever.

"Anyways," Tim said. "Speaking of Batman: you have a problem on your hands." He pointed at Steph. "He just came back from off-world and saw the news and--"

"Let me guess," she said. "He doesn't like what I'm doing, and he's gonna try to stop me."

"Huh," Tim said. "You are smart."

Chapter Text

Steph learned quite a few things.

One: Oracle had given Cass the mantle of Batgirl at some point, and that cemented a kind of hero-worship in Cass's eyes. It had become clear, from the way the younger girl interacted with Oracle, that they'd seen some shit together. No matter how Steph felt about the first Batgirl, she couldn't deny that Oracle was good to her. Every time the Oracle looked over at Batgirl, her eyes softened in a way that immediately vanished when they looked back at Steph.

Two: That didn't necessarily mean she looked at Steph with suspicion either. Apparently spilling childhood trauma was a good shortcut for getting superheroes to empathize. Steph'd have to remember that one. Oracle might not replace the current Batgirl any time soon as Steph's favorite superhero, but after an hour of hashing out plans on how to go behind the back of the World's Greatest Detective (trademark pending), Steph could also confidently say that there was something to the old adage of common enemies. Which lead her to:

Three: She'd been right at first sight when it came to Tim; he was a little twerp.

"So," he said, drawing the 'o' out. "This is where you're from."

Steph looked a little helplessly at Cass, who was walking on her other side. She shrugged. "Curious too," she said. "Never saw it from the ground." Then, Cass went back to craning her neck up at the towering vertical villages, all grey and brick-red with the occasional ornamental detail to break up the monotony. She was especially interested in the little friezes carved out of cheap concrete: some, she pointed out to Tim, had little owls tucked into the edges, and others had newer robins added in.

Tim, who was clearly the new-new Robin, snorted at that. "We really like birds here," he said, and Steph resisted the urge to snap at him about how his rounded vowels indicated that they both had very different ideas about who "we" was. Cass pushed one of her little pointy elbows into her side, and the meaning was very clear: please play nice with my little brother . The things Steph did in the name of hanging out with Cass.

"Tim," she started, clearing her throat a little. Small talk was hard. "How long have you, uh, been birdwatching?"

Tim looked at her a little incredulously; his eyebrow arched over the lenses of his sunglasses. "Birdwatching?"

Sue her. It beat "business trip."

"Yeah," Steph said, sticking with it. Loyalty was a virtue, or something. "Cass says… you like to go birdwatching with your dad?"

Cass giggled and poked her in the side. "Birdwatching," she repeated, and she and Tim grinned at each other around Steph. Steph felt a momentary pang of empathy for Oracle: clearly, Batgirl and Robin were well-practiced at ganging up on people.

"It's coming up on about four years since I started… birdwatching," Tim said, an incredibly paper-thin poker face hiding the grin he was literally biting back.

" Four years? " Steph spluttered. "Aren't you, like, twelve?"

Tim's grin vanished. "What? No, I'm seventeen. We're the same age."

"There is no way you're seventeen. You are a foot shorter than me."

"This is not a foot!" Tim gesticulated from the top of his head to around Steph's own height: she was exaggerating, but he was definitely shorter than her by enough that when he put his hand up to the crown of her own head, it was a little comical.

"No sleep," Cass said, "Makes you short."

"That explains both of you," Steph said and cackled through the pain when both of them elbowed her.

"Wait, hold on," Steph said when she recovered from her laughing fit. "You were thirteen? Man, that is so unfair. I can't believe your dad was okay with a preteen dressing up like a traffic light to fight crime but when I do it, everyone gets mad."

"He was not okay with it," Tim said, wincing. Cass grinned.

"Tim pulled a you ," she said. "Got himself in lots of trouble… birdwatching. Father had to keep rescuing him," and Cass grinned.

"Hey," Steph signed. " I did not ask you to help me."

" But you're happy I did."

"Yeah," Steph agreed. On her other side, Tim mimed sticking his finger down his throat and gagging: Cass screwed up her face at him and mock glared, looping one arm around Steph's own. Steph felt her face heat up a little, and she could not figure out why. Also, she'd been staring at Cass's face too long; she was genuinely startled when Tim cleared his throat and started talking, and she realized that they had finally ended up at her building.

"Anyways, I know a little about doing stuff that… our dad doesn't like. At night. Nighttime birdwatching," he said with an annoying smile, and Steph weighed in her mind if their relationship had progressed to the point where she could hit him for being annoying. Probably not.

"So," Tim said, "if you guys need any help for tomorrow night, uh, you know who to call." He awkwardly gave them a thumbs up, then hitched his shoulder. "I'm gonna, uh, start heading back to the station or something. Give you guys some alone ti- "

"Go away," Cass said, sounding both exasperated and fond. Tim took the hint and turned around, walking back the way they came. He pulled his phone out right away as he walked off, which Steph was immediately suspicious about -- before she could do anything, Cass caught her attention by tugging at her sleeve.

" Are you ready for tomorrow night?" she signed. Steph asked her to clarify the signs a few more times than she actually needed an explanation for, and Cass knew she was stalling, and let her do it anyway. That, right there, was why Cass was her favorite.

"Do you know," Steph spelled, "When he was mad at me, he used to lock me in the closet. Sometimes I'd spend the whole night in there. He'd forget to let me out."

Cass watched, brown eyes warm and magnetic. She held up her own right hand and spelled out: "When my dad was mad, he used to shoot me."

They broke out laughing at nearly the same moment. Steph couldn't even tell Cass why, but she had a feeling that the other girl could see anyways; the relief, at being able to talk about her childhood without the risk of empty, "oh, you poor victim," pity. Being able to talk with someone who got it. Steph ended up with one of her hand curled around Cass's shoulder, her fingers at the small hairs on the nape of Cass's neck and her weight partially holding Cass up as well.

"Can't beat you at anything, huh," Steph said, a smile in her voice. She was speaking at the gum-stained sidewalk, her temple almost pressed against the top of Cass's head.

"No," Cass said, her voice full of the kind of warmth that brought Steph back to standing in front of art museum pieces and making up ridiculous stories about where they came from, or sitting on a windowsill and trying to tell a ghost story to a girl who could see every twist coming from the shape of her hands.

"I've been angry for so long," Steph confessed. "I want to let go."

"I'll help," Cass promised. Then, on instinct, Steph pulled her other arm around Cass's other shoulder and they were hugging for real. It was an awkward, hair-in-Steph's-mouth, limbs arranged everywhere, kind of hug. Steph hadn't ever had anything like it.

"If you want to help," Steph said. "Start by helping me with groceries. For real this time, my mom'll kill me if I forget."

Steph had unpacked all the groceries fully, stowing everything away and sending Cass off with a jar of kaya jam, by the time her mom got home.

"One more day!" her mom called, dropping her bookbag right at the doorway and tossing her blazer off onto the back of a kitchen chair in an uncharacteristically messy display.

"One more day for what?" Steph asked, heating up the pan. It was a grilled cheese kind of ending to the day. Comfort food, or whatever.

"One more day," Crystal said, squeezing by Steph and dropping an absent-minded hand to the top of Steph's head to ruffle her blonde hair, "until I take the NCLEX!"

"Huh," Steph said. She'd known April 24th had meant something to her: it had been circled on their communal calendar since the beginning of the year. "Six hours, and then you're done."

"If I pass," her mom said, grinning up at Steph from where she bent over the part of the kitchen countertop permanently inhabited by her class notes, "I will officially be a fully registered nurse, licensed to operate in the state of New Jersey."

"Congrats, mom," Steph said. "I know it means a lot to you."

She'd certainly seen her mom hunched over her sheaths and sheaths of paper late into the night, illuminated by the TV or the lamp, scratching away, enough times. Steph didn't need to have been raised by a puzzle master to have put that clue together; she'd never seen her mother so single-mindedly dedicated to anything.

"God," her mom said. "I cannot wait to quit this retail job. I hate working retail. Talk about a depressing, dead-end job."

Steph smirked, leaning against the countertop. "You know," she said, "I heard nursing's a monopsony. Everyone gets paid the same, no matter how hard their individual job is. It's a racket."

Her mom shot her a look. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves. I need to get the job before I can complain about how much I'm paid. What brought this on, anyways?"

Steph waved her off. "I just heard the word monopsony the other day. I think it's a kinda funny word."

If she hadn't been watching at that exact moment, she would have missed how sad her mom's smile suddenly turned. It snapped back to normal right after, leaving nary an afterimage. "You always liked words, yeah. You and your dad. Heads full of useless trivia."

"Yeah," Steph said. She hesitated for a second, then went for broke. "Do you remember those plans he always had? He always would say that if hosting didn't work out for him, he'd open a bar, have trivia nights."

"Yeah," her mom said, with the least convincing laugh she'd ever heard. "He had this whole plan. Sports bar, Monday night football, with Tuesday and Thursday trivia nights. Had a name picked out and everything. True Mescal. I always thought it was weird, he wasn't really a tequila fan or anything."

Steph's brain acted without her permission, rearranging "True Mescal" to spell out "Cereal Smut." Then it acted with her permission and got "Cluemaster" out of the anagram.

"Well," Steph said. "He's a weird dude. Hey, want me to help you do some last-minute studying?"

"God, yes. I keep feeling like I'm forgetting something."

Stephanie Brown: Look for a bar named "True Mescal."

Oracle: Found it.

647 Knight St. in Southeast Lowtown.

Good work.

It seemed like the knowledge that it would all be ending soon meant that, rather than being unable to pay attention for all of her Wednesday classes, Steph drifted in and out. She spent a few minutes in a state of hyperfocus, taking detailed and completely unnecessary notes about her physics class: something about the gravitational constant with respect to planets that she was pretty sure was just review. She drifted out after taking down whatever her teacher said, anxiously expanding on the doodled physics diagrams on her page instead. 

She wasn't a good artist, but there was something soothing about dragging her pencil down the little down arrows to indicate gravity, expanding on the utilitarian arrow, and adding embellishments. It struck the perfect balance between mindless and artistically creative work that her brain was not particularly suited for, and she managed to pass the following half-hour in a sort of fugue state that felt like five minutes.

She snapped up to see a diagram of something completely different on the board: levers, she thought. Maybe she should have been paying attention. She resolved to do so for the remaining fifteen minutes, though it didn't do her much good -- she'd already missed too much.

Harper nudged her as they left the class together, her waiting at Steph's desk as she gathered together all her splayed materials quickly. 

"What's up with you today?" She asked, walking just behind Steph as they left the room together. "You've been acting kind of weird for, like, a month."

"Just kinda preoccupied," Steph said. She scrambled for a lie. "You know, thinking about graduation. What about you, what are you gonna do when we get out of here?"

Harper snorted. "Trade school, like everyone else. I'll probably try my hand at electricians. What, you got different plans?"

Steph hummed. Thought about her burns, still newly healed with stiff skin, and her mom hunched over the papers at the couch, lighted by whatever show was on TV at midnight that she wasn't watching.

"My mom did an ADN," she said. "I might take the other road."

It always felt like there were only two real routes to, if not success, a survivable life if you were born part of the 99% in Gotham City. Either you could learn a trade and become part of the machine that was the construction sector of Gotham, and you'd pray very hard that you didn't fall in with any of the families that fixed or controlled that sort of thing to play a rich person's game with property prices, or you learned how to be a nurse, because Gotham always needed more healers.

"You'd be a terrible nurse," Harper told her. "Your bedside manner would be shit. You'd be like, 'Did you know the fibula doesn't actually connect to the knee?' and your patient would be, I don't know, clutching their broken leg and screaming."

"If they got themselves into a hospital," Steph said back, "I don't think they get to complain about the quality of the nurses."

Harper snorted, then ducked into her own classroom with a cut off "see you." Steph waved at her back, then continued down the hall to her own class in silence.

She hadn't given too much thought, actually, to her future. Her mother had insisted that she'd apply and go to community college after high school graduation, so she had, but she'd spent nearly all of her senior year more preoccupied with trying to head off whatever her father had planned than she had actually thinking about what she'd do once she tossed that graduation cap. Getting an ADN seemed better than nothing, but Steph didn't think she wanted to spend a whole professional life based on "better than nothing."

For the rest of the school day, her thoughts were consumed alternately between her preparations for that night, errant worries about the future, and, every once in awhile, genuine attention towards whatever her teacher was talking about. Sometimes, she got a text from Oracle confirming, or elaborating on some point or another: by lunchtime, she had his location narrowed down to a block. Steph tried not to let her worry about her father distract her too much, reasoning that if Oracle saw something happen that needed immediate attention, she'd at least get Cass if not Steph, a reassurance that did wonders in keeping Steph from exploding with nervous energy at her desk. She'd even gotten it together enough to make a comment in English. Now, all the plagues that in the pendulous air / Hang fated o'er men's faults light on thy daughters!  

She had a bit to say about that.

Steph finally stumbled out into the wan sunlight at 3 pm with only really half an idea of what she'd supposedly learned that day. Harper had walked out with her, her brother tagging along behind them, his fists jammed into his hoodie pocket and his thick headphones affixed to his ears. They trudged together up the stairs to the light rail station, and Harper looked up as they waited for the inevitably late train to come in.

"You good?" Harper asked suddenly, her eyes still fixed on the middle distance.

"What?" Steph asked. "Yeah, I'm fine. Yeah. Why?"

"Dunno. You just… I don't know, you just seem kinda out of it today. Something big coming up?"

Steph almost snorted. "Yeah, kind of." She stuck her hands in her jean pockets and leaned into the bench, glancing this way and that. She watched a woman pull a red box out of her purse and thought she might have been able to make out the Pall Mall logo on them.

"I'm gonna see my dad tonight," she admitted. Neither of them was looking at the other.

"Shit," Harper said. "Sorry, man."

Steph snorted. "Why do you assume that has to be a bad thing?" It was, but that was beside the point.

Harper shrugged. "You never talk about your dad. Figured it was a sore spot."

"Isn't it always," she muttered, and Harper laughed. She tilted to look more fully at Cullen, who was still listening to his music, oblivious to the conversation; Steph could tell, because in her peripheral vision, she saw Harper's mohawk move. Matching haircuts. She wondered if that was a sibling thing.

"Do you think it'll rain tonight?" Harper asked, still looking more at Cullen than her. Steph looked up at the sky too. There was a trick to judging weather as perpetually cloudy and stifling as Gotham's, a sort of sense one had to develop for the various gradations of gray, and Steph had eventually gotten an eye for it.

"Nah," she said. "Not tonight. But I bet we're overdue for a big old Nor'Easter."

"Hm," Harper said. "Is it bad I kind of want one last big storm of the season? It always feels like the city's getting power washed."

"Yeah," Steph said. She kept looking up at the silver-lead sky.

Steph left Harper and her brother on the light rail -- their stop, a five-minute ride down south to the Narrows, was another few away from her own. She came home to an empty apartment, but she'd also expected that; her mother had said that she'd go directly from her retail job in West Midtown to the Downtown Civic District where the One Gotham Center, her testing center, would be in, and she expected to be home by a little after midnight. Steph had the apartment to herself for the last few daylight hours, and she planned on making the most of it.

She snagged a protein bar from the cupboard and nibbled at it as she set about gathering her things and, honestly, fussing with her vigilante gear. At some point the day before, she had gotten around to doing the laundry, so the Kevlar-reinforced pants were now back in her rotation; her knees, still skinned to hell from the Gotham U expedition, thanked her for that. Apparently, attempting running dives on linoleum floors hurt a lot more than when she did it on the softball field: who knew?

Her gear was still light; Steph didn't really have anything like Batgirl's utility belt, but she figured carrying a backpack with a baseball bat in it would be as close as she could get to being one of those ninjas she saw on the news every once in a while. Same concept as a sheathed sword, but hopefully a lot less likely to get Steph in trouble with the GCPD.

The next few hours passed slowly, with the occasional text between Steph and Oracle confirming that Cass was on her way over. Night would fall at 5 PM, and it would fully claim the city by 6: Steph only had about another hour to kill.

Even knowing that Cass would appear at 5:30 PM, with a helpful heads up from Oracle, it still scared Steph out of her skin when she turned around and saw a black shape blocking most of her bedroom window. She slid it open and let Cass crawl into her room, her Batgirl cape fluttering and dragging behind her like a living shadow.

"Would it actually kill you," Steph said, "to knock on the front door?"

Cass pulled off her mask, presumably just so she could shoot a raised-eyebrow look at Steph. "In costume," she said.

"Yeah, yeah," Steph said, her heart still beating a little faster than normal from the real-life jump scare that was Cass. "Do you have the location?"

Cass held up a gauntlet and tapped at it; right away, an electronic display flickered to life and she showed Steph a map of Gotham city's streets, a little red dot over the gridwork. Cass tapped at it again with her gloved hand and the street view zoomed out, resolving itself into the familiar shape of Gotham City, with a pulsing green dot over the Southeast Lowtown neighborhood, almost at the edge of the island, that Oracle had identified Cluemaster to be living in. Steph had to admit, the wordless maps were a clever workaround for Cass's severe dyslexia.

"So, what's the plan for getting there?" Steph asked. "I could always steal a car again," she fingerspelled, "but I think we both don't want that."

Cass shook her head, laughing a little. "No. We're going above."

Steph froze. "Uh, I know that you have a different concept of, like, human fear and whatnot, but normal people are not particularly comfortable doing that 'leaping from rooftop to rooftop' stuff that you guys like to do. I am a normal person, and I can confirm that for you."

Cass snorted. "Not that scary. Don't… chicken out."

"It's a four-story fall ," Steph protested. "That isn't chickening out, that's having a healthy self-preservation instinct!"

"Come," Cass said, heading back for Steph's window. "I'll show you."

She hopped out of the window lightly, like a bird -- maybe Cass was the one who deserved the moniker Robin -- and easily maneuvered to the outside of the window, clasping the top of the windowsill with one hand, and dangling the other outside. "Follow me," Cass said, and, cursing herself, Steph did.

It was a bit awkward getting her torso -- encumbered by the backpack and baseball bat -- out around the window, but Steph did manage to get herself onto the outside of her own window. She clung significantly harder, and with both hands, to the sill.

"Don't be so scared," Cass spelled with her free hand. Steph refused to get a hand free to respond -- she was busy using those to keep herself alive, thank you very much -- so she simply stayed silent. "I'll catch you if you slip."

Cass slowly demonstrated how she levered herself up to the roof, her movements powerful and graceful. Steph copied, her movements much more awkward and unsophisticated, but she managed to bellyflop her way onto the roof regardless. Cass gave her a thumbs up, then took a running leap to the next roof, and Steph sighed deeply before ignoring her waning survival instincts and copied her.

She stumbled slightly at the lip of the next building's roof and had a sudden moment of sheer, blinding panic before Cass's strong grip made its way around her hands and pulled her more firmly onto the roof.

"Thanks," Steph signed, her heart still firmly in her throat.

"Told you I'd catch you," Cass spelled.

"Yeah," Steph said and cleared her throat. "You did."

After a little practice, it did actually get easier. Eventually, Steph stopped looking down; even if she didn't trust in her own ability to make leaps, she did trust Cass's capacity to save her. Her favorite moments, though, were when they made their way to the end of a block and Cass gripped her firmly by the waist and fired a grappling hook line onto a distant building before leaping off the edge off the building; every time they swooped down into the street before arcing back up, it felt like both the most amazing and most terrifying rollercoaster ride of Steph's life. 

It also helped just how tightly Cass held them together, Stephs arms clasped around her waist in a death squeeze. Steph's head naturally found a point between Cass's shoulder and head to nestle in, her hair spilling out over both of their shoulders. Each jump took maybe five seconds, max, but memory and adrenaline stretched it out into a much, much longer period of time. At the same time, it felt like it did not last long enough before they were already touching down in Southeast Lowtown.

It was a squat three-story apartment building that Oracle had tracked the Cluemaster to, the entire second floor rented out to an alias of his using cash from the bar's "side hustle". They dropped down onto the tenement building neighboring it, and Cass let her go, though it may have been Steph's imagination how slowly Cass disengaged her hand from her waist. Steph certainly let go only a little reluctantly. Cass gave her a once over before kneeling down and then hopping all the way off the edge of the roof; Steph rushed to the edge, only to see her perched on the railing of a fire escape, squatting like a gargoyle. She gave Steph a jaunty wave before somersaulting off the railing and catching the next floor's fire escape on the way down. Show off.

In contrast, Steph slowly made her way down, feeling with her toes before she tested a foothold with her full weight, and migrated cautiously off the roof to the third-floor fire escape. Cass was already the story below her, kicking off the side of their building and landing with a flip onto the rickety iron escape on the other end.

Steph was so caught up in watching Cass move, a perfect and eloquent motion that a big cat would weep in envy to see, that she didn't notice until her eyes tracked to the window that something was wrong.

The yellow in Cluemaster's window, which on first glance from far away Steph had dismissed as part of the garish curtain pattern, resolved itself into words.

"Ca- Batgirl!" Steph called, slipping and stumbling down to the lower fire escape. "Watch out!"

It was too late: something came thudding down from above, and both Cass and Steph instinctively ducked and covered the backs of their head, which was the exact wrong thing to do.

Steph could only watch as something big and heavy fell down into what seemed to be their clearly pre-ordained positions, knocking the rickety supports of the fire escape out from under Cass. She tumbled in a horrifying scream of metal. Steph shrieked, running to the railing of her own escape and watching below. Across from her, emblazoned on the window in mockery, was Cluemaster's taunting words: CATCH IT!

Steph didn't think. She grabbed hold of the metal railing, so tight that the blunt metal still nearly bruised her palms, and tossed herself over the edge of her own railing, her baseball bat flying out of its loose position in her backpack and onto the ground as she jumped. There, she dangled for a bit, desperately using every inch of her height to toe for a firmer hold on the escape directly below her. 

With a few awkward, panicked movements of her hands, Steph managed to drop down until she was straddling the escape directly opposite of Cass. There would be bruises on her thighs, come the next day. Squinting, she could see the black Batgirl costume barely from the shadows, and in the back of her head that wasn't currently being powered by pure adrenaline and cortisol, she cursed the "terror of the night" schtick. Turned out, being the terror of the night also meant that when Batgirl was hurt, nobody would be able to pick her body out of the darkness.

"Batgirl!" Steph called. "Batgirl!"

She saw a lump move, a grated railing rolling off of its back. Behind it, on the window of the 2nd floor, the words TOLD YOU :)  were blazoned in yellow paint, framing the body of Batgirl buried under the wreckage. She had never hated her father more desperately than at that moment. It was the sort of rage that gave her empathy for first degree murderers, and she never wanted to feel it again. She shoved it away and focused instead on her fear.

Steph hooked her left leg firmly around her own railing and leaned her torso over and out into the gap between the buildings. Whatever progress she'd made in forgetting about her human instinct to fear heights had vanished with the crunch of that fire escape. She was now hyperaware of every inch of space between her and the concrete ground below her, and just how painfully and slowly fatal a fall from this height would be. Steph's every hindbrain instinct gibbered at her to pull herself back in and onto solid ground, lest she drop and crack her ribs open on the concrete, her blood smeared against the pavement like a smashed bug.

She pushed further out and reached forward.

"Batgirl!" she called again, and there: she saw the gauntleted hand of the Batgirl costume and traced it all the way back up Cass's shoulder to find her eye-less mask. "Take my hand!"

Cass pulled herself out of the wreckage and slowly got to her feet. Steph couldn't tell what exactly had happened, but Cass was moving stiffer, with less perfect movements. She levered herself over the side of her own railing and grabbed Steph's wrist. Her grip was strong; Steph wasn't sure who it was more reassuring for.

"Three... two..." Cass counted off, her voice still strong. At "one," she jumped and Steph caught her, their combined momentum sending them rocking against the railing Steph was still anchored against. Cass was now half in her arms and half clinging to the fire escape, her head cradled between Steph's shoulder and chin in a parody of how they had gotten there. It was clearer than ever that something was very wrong.

"Where are you hurt?" Steph asked, adjusting her grip to keep Cass's weight more off her feet. Cass tapped her arm in thanks, then put her own hands under her and pulled herself onto the platform of the fire escape, finally no longer dangling over the edge. Something in Steph's chest unclenched the second both of Cass's feet touched down on more solid ground.

"Foot…" Cass gasped. "Hurts." She slid down, her back pressed against the bars of the railing. Steph leaned down and examined her right foot. She tried to recall what she remembered from her mother's notes.

"I'm gonna poke you in the ankle. Tell me if it hurts," Steph said, and did it.

"Ow!" Cass responded, flinching involuntarily. Steph winced.

"I think you might have sprained your ankle," she said, and Cass nodded.

"Call Oracle," Cass signed. "Heard voices inside before--" and she gestured at the mess that was the collapsed fire escape -- Cluemaster must have messed with the supports somehow, to get it to all come away so easily like that. Steph nodded and grabbed for her phone in her pocket, hitting the recent Unknown Number almost without looking at it, her eyes glued to Cass's masked face. Her breathing had steadied, the yellow bat symbol rising and falling rhythmically.

"Oracle," Steph said as soon as the line picked up, clicking it onto speakerphone. "Batgirl's been hurt."

"Has she?" a deep, growling voice asked over the phone. Steph froze, and so did Cass, judging by the way the yellow bat stopped moving.

"Sorry," Steph squeaked out. "Wrong number."

"Where are you?" the man asked. His tone brooked no argument; it was less a question and more a statement of intention, like he was informing Steph that she would tell him. She looked wide-eyed at Cass who, despite her completely masked face, appeared the most panicked she'd ever seen her.

"Oh, you know," Steph stalled, scrambling to figure her next move out because she was 95% sure that she was on the phone with Batman, and she had no idea what he was doing on Oracle's line. Luckily, she was spared from having to lie to Batman, because he cut her off.

"Tell me what you did to my daughter."

Steph almost dropped the phone. She looked at Cass, who looked at her. Clearly, neither of them had any idea what to do; Steph suddenly understood the need for Oracle's adult presence.

"If I get the shovel talk from Batman," Steph fingerspelled, "I will scream."

Cass shakily laughed before holding up her own hands. "End the call before he traces it."

Steph ended the call right away. She was halfway through spelling out: "How do I get Oracle, then?" when her phone started buzzing again: This time, rather than the ominous Unknown Caller designation, it was an actual number with a Gotham City area code. Steph hesitated, then picked up.

"Please don't be Batman," she said very quickly into the phone.

"It's not," came the familiar tone of Oracle sans voice modulator. Steph didn't think she'd ever been so thankful to hear Oracle's infuriatingly calm cadence over the phone.

"Oh, thank god," Steph said. "Batgirl's been hurt. Cluemaster was ready for us; he dropped a fire escape on her and I think she's twisted her ankle. Also, Batman's listening in on your calls."

"Not this one," Oracle said. "It's my personal number. Give the phone to Batgirl."

Steph did so. Cass took the phone, but she didn't take it off speaker. Neither of them mentioned it, but Steph was grateful Oracle hadn't insisted on a private conversation.

Then it hit her: Oracle called through her personal number. Meaning, if she looked this number up online, she'd get Oracle's real name, and there was no way the information broker didn't know it. Steph had no idea how she felt about that, and most of her brain was occupied with concern for Cass at the moment; she put thinking about that revelation on her to-do list.

"I'm tracking Cluemaster right now," Oracle said. "He's going down 5th street; I have eyes on him. Batgirl, can you still run?"

"Yes," Cass said, and Steph very much hoped she wasn't lying but also kind of suspected that she was.

"Spoiler, help her down. If you go down Cuesta and hurry, you could cut him off."

"Got it," Steph said and started down the rickety stairs. "Keep her on the line," she told Cass, "and stay off your foot!"

"How do I get down then?" Cass asked in the kind of voice that made it obvious she was a little shit of a sibling.

"Jump," Steph said simply, turning as she stepped onto the ground. "And I'll catch you."

Cass did jump, and Steph did catch her, automatically adjusting for her bad foot. After a little reshuffling of limbs, they successfully managed to get Cass on both her feet, though she was noticeably favoring her right foot as she went. Steph grabbed her bat: dented slightly from the fall, but still a serviceable aluminum pipe to beat a man with, and they were off, tearing down the alleyway to Oracle's instructions. Cass was still moving with incredible grace and efficiency, but it was noticeably less superhuman: Steph was even running faster than her at some points as they made their way to Cuesta.

"Take a left," Oracle almost yelled from the phone, still on speaker and clutched in Cass's hand. Steph grabbed Cass by the arm and they scrambled down a narrow side alley, splashing down a puddle that immediately soaked into Steph's boots: she had the wild worry that whatever disgusting amalgamation of nightmare toxins and regular sewage congregated in Gotham's alleys would infect Cass's twisted ankle before she successfully convinced herself a second later that that wasn't how that worked.

They burst through the alley onto a sidewalk in a residential part of town: it was just early enough in the night that there was a crowd of people who saw Batgirl and a blonde girl in a mask come running out of an alleyway, cottoned on, and started running the other way. Steph appreciated that about Gothamites; it also made it that much easier to locate her father, who was the only one still running across the street. He had his own phone to his ear.

"The fucking getaway driver," she hissed, then turned to Cass. "Can you cut him off at the pass?"

Cass flexed her foot and her mask scrunched up: if Steph had to guess, she just winced. "Maybe, " she signed, one-handed.

"That's fine," Steph signed. "I'll do it. You stand and look scary."

She took off, running like she hadn't done since her days on the softball team. She took aim as she ran, then reared back and flung her baseball bat full force at Cluemaster's back. It connected, and he stumbled just long enough for Steph to get close to him and kick him in the back of the legs, sending him falling to the curb. He flopped over and caught a look at Steph, flanked on her other side by Batgirl.

"You're not as tall as the one I expected," Cluemaster said, cool under pressure.

Steph snorted. "Yeah. That's how I keep getting away with going for the knees."

Her eyes tracked their way to Cluemaster's phone, but then Oracle's voice piped up from her own phone in Cass's hand.

"Batman is three blocks away. You have thirty seconds. His priority is arresting Spoiler if he sees her."

There was silence for one of those thirty seconds, then Steph shouted "FUCK," as Cluemaster started laughing.

"Well, ladies," he said, pushing himself up to his feet. He was wearing a suit, Steph noticed dully. What was he planning? "This has been fun and all, but it looks like we both have prior arrangements."

His goddamn car, the nondescript Toyota Corolla that he'd been using this whole time, rolled up to the curb. Steph caught a glimpse of blonde hair behind the wheel.

"You know, I usually prefer leaving these clues in writing, but I suppose the big climax deserves an in-person touch," Cluemaster said, conversationally and smugly. Steph weighed the odds of her getting out scot-free if Batman came onto the scene only to witness her beating her father about the head with a bat. She figured it wasn't likely.

"Have a lovely life," Cluemaster winked, opening the car door and getting in. 

Steph would have stood there and watched them drive off if it wasn't for Cass tugging her, hard, back into the alley. Steph let herself be manhandled into a spot behind a conveniently large and disgustingly smelling dumpster, only moving to grab onto Cass's elbow to help ease some of her weight off her foot. They watched in silence as a large, jet-black car hummed down the street in pursuit. All three of them, Steph, Cass, and Oracle, waited in silence for the shoe to drop.

"He's in pursuit," Oracle's voice came in over the phone. "I don't think he saw you guys."

Steph nodded, numbly. Cass watched her, cautiously: Steph had no idea what her eyes looked like right now, but she had a guess. Her mother always told her that when she went into "puzzle-solving mode," she rocked a thousand-yard stare with the best of them.

"Bat-chalk," she said to Cass. "I need your Bat-chalk."

Cass nodded, reaching into one of her pockets to grab a fresh stick. Steph took it, thankful, and walked up to the opposite wall.

"Have a lovely life," she muttered to herself, slowly saying it aloud as she wrote the words out onto the wall. H-A-L-L. Then, she raised her voice. "Oracle, can you repeat what Clue 1 was, again?"

"Get ready ăn," Oracle said, "or, in English, get ready to-"

"No," Steph cut off, rude and uncaring about it. "Thank you, I just needed the clue."

She wrote it out, vocalizing each syllable as she went.

"You know," Steph said, "my dad had this thing he used to call his Cluemaster's code. It's pretty presumptuous of him to name it after himself because they're really just called acrostics."

She had finished printing the second clue up on the wall, and she could feel Batgirl's eyes on her, though obviously not on the words she couldn't read. "They were common in medieval literature, but they've been around for a long time before that. The Hebrew Bible has a few." She moved on past the third, onto the fourth, and pushed her memories of the burning church down. With that clue, it brought her back to where she started, the words Have A Lovely Life in white chalk and the careful capital letters of her own handwriting.

"The key thing about an acrostic is..." she said, surveying what she'd written.

Get Ready Ăn Nine Down Fabryka Iglesia Nacional Argentine Lux Elata Alumnos Tollitt Have A Lovely Life

She stepped forward and started erasing letters with the side of her gloved hand. 

"... You take the first letter of each word, and it spells out its own code."

G R Ă N D  F I N A L E  A T  H A L L

"Shit," Steph said, staring at the wall a little blankly. That wasn't quite as powerful as she'd hoped it'd be. "What hall? We missed something."

Cass looked at Steph. "Said… writes down clues," she said. Oracle was quiet. "What did he write on the windows?"

Steph almost dropped her chalk. "Cass, you're a genius ," she said, and Cass laughed.

"...I try to tell you."

Between the fourth and fifth clues, Steph quickly chalked in " Catch It Told You " and erased the letters in between. She turned to Cass, who was holding up the phone, and reported: "City Hall. The grand finale, it's going to be at City Hall."

Chapter Text

From the phone, Oracle's furious typing could be heard, tinny and faint. "They're taking the long way around Midtown," she reported. "The Batmobile's autopilot is set to cross the Nichelsen Bridge into the Civic District."

Nichelsen was on the west side of town. Arthur would get there in fifteen minutes, less if there wasn't traffic. Meanwhile, they were stuck without a car or any other kind of vehicle in the wrong side of town, at least twelve miles from the city hall. They certainly weren't about to cover over two hundred blocks on foot in time, and especially not on Cass's twisted ankle.

"The subway," Steph said. "If we take the subway, we can get to the Civic District in less than ten minutes. It's a straight shot underground."

She levered herself up, grabbing hold of the sides of the dumpsters. Then, with a stumble, she fell forward, her shoulders curling in on herself, and Steph rushed forward to catch her around the middle, Cass's hands coming forward around her back in an almost unconscious movement, their arms threaded through one another's.

"Easy," Steph said softly. "I got you."

Cass nodded, her masked chin finding Steph's shoulder as, together, they pushed Cass back onto her feet. Steph stepped away once, but she kept her hands firmly around Cass's waist, her thumbs resting right above the rough fabric of the utility belt.

"Can you stand like that?" she asked, and Cass straightened her spine fully as an answer, though her hips remained tilted, favoring her weight on her left foot. It was scary to see someone who moved so unconsciously perfectly suddenly have to consider the way she walked, like seeing a ballet dancer with a rock in their shoe.

Steph pulled her leather jacket off, handing it to Cass. "Put that on and zip it up," she said, "so nobody sees the bat symbol."

Cass shrugged her jacket on, the shoulders hanging just a little wide on her and the sleeves coming up over her hands, revealing just the tips of her fingers. She tugged her mask off, revealing a pale, slightly sweaty face, her hair sticking to her temples. Steph removed her own cloth mask as well, stashing it in the pocket of the hoodie she was wearing underneath the jacket. Now, if nobody looked too closely, they looked again like any two girls.

"The closest subway station is three blocks away," Oracle said, and Cass handed Steph the phone. "You have two minutes to catch the next train."

"Got it," Steph said, taking Oracle back off speakerphone and tucking her phone back in her pocket. "Come on, Cass. It's not like we've never had to run to catch the train before."

Cass's mask was off, so Steph could see just how big the smile was when they ran, half-stumbling at times, through the night. As they descended down the steps to the subway tunnel, Steph kept just slightly behind and to the left of Cass, her focus on Cass's feet and her whole body ready to leap forward to catch the other girl if she stumbled and fell.

At the turnstiles, Steph pushed her hands down over the interface and jumped the fare before turning to help Cass do the same, their movements more coordinated and practiced than it was at the beginning. Cass leaned into Steph for a few seconds as she arranged both her feet, then tapped Steph's arm to signal her to let go. She did so, and they half carried each other to the platform just in time for the train to scream into the station, carrying a wind tunnel with it that blew their hair in front of their faces and stopping with a metallic shriek that Steph could now say was the same as the sound of a fire escape collapsing in on itself. She could feel Cass flinch.

They got into a car that was thankfully fairly devoid of people, and Steph maneuvered Cass onto one of the hard yellow benches. She stood in front of her again, the way they did before, their knees knocking into each other every time the subway took a bit of a half turn. The fluorescent lights of the subway and the pure darkness outside the windows cast Cass's features in an even less flattering light than the streetlights before: she looked nearly sick, her skin sallow and her eyes pinched slightly in pain.

It had been easy to love Cass when Steph had still thought of her as untouchable, above injury. With Cass in front of her, hurt, even if only temporarily, it was impossible for her to ignore the fear that Steph had fallen in love with something that could die. How could she tell Cass that even in the relatively short amount of time that they'd known each other, she'd staked herself a permanent claim on a part of Steph's soul? What kind of bravery did it take to tell a girl, susceptible -- like anyone else -- to death, that you loved her?

"Is your foot okay?" Steph asked instead of saying any of that. Cass nodded, and Steph narrowed her eyes. She kneeled down, keeping one hand on the plastic next to Cass's thigh to maintain balance, and poked gently at her left foot. Cass sucked in a hiss and arched her back a little, pulling her foot away from Steph.

"No," she admitted.

"It must be getting worse the more weight you put on it," Steph said.

"Can still fight," Cass insisted. Steph's phone buzzed. She pulled it out: Oracle had texted. A reminder that they weren't alone, though it was more welcome than it had been before, now that Steph was freaking out, just a little.

Oracle: She cannot.

Steph raised her eyebrows and looked over at Cass. "Oracle said not to," she signed.

"You never listen to Oracle," Cass argued.

"I will right now," Steph signed.

"Don't like that." Cass wrinkled her nose. "Ganging up on me."

Steph would laugh if she wasn't so concerned. Based on what she'd felt, it seemed like Cass's ankle was swelling up, which probably prohibited some of the more rigorous activities involved in superheroics. That was a problem. That was a pretty significant problem.

They exited at City Hall and coming up the stairs to the surface was infinitely harder than going down them; Cass leaned more fully on Steph, nearly surrendering her entire agency to Steph's forward momentum. That simply terrified Steph further. If there was one word she'd never thought she'd associate with Cass, it was surrender.

Luckily, the stop was right across the street from the big, gray, Gothic Revavilistic building that was the City Hall. The hall was a cluttered mess of features, all points and spires on points and spires, hundreds of vertical lines reaching up towards the smoggy sky overhead. It had always reminded Steph less of old European basilicas and more of prison bars.

Despite the visually disarrayed mass of detail that the City Hall presented, it still wasn't too hard to pick out the figure, black against the night, pacing with his back tall. Steph spared a second to worry about how fast Cluemaster had gotten up on the roof before her heart caught in her throat again as she turned around and saw the building behind her, its door only a few feet away from right where the subway opened up. She recognized it -- the One Gotham Center -- and felt a renewed burst of horror.

On one side of the street, her father was menacing their city. On the other, somewhere four stories up in a testing center in the middle of a skyscraper, was Steph's mother, an hour into a six-hour-long test for her nursing certification. And her, down on the ground, with a girl she thought she might love in her arms.

"Take…" Cass reached back and pulled the small black device out from behind her ear. It was the same one she'd shown Steph, way back at Gotham U. "Take Oracle."

Steph took the comm system from her, affixing it to her own ear. Immediately, Oracle's voice crackled to life for her.

"Spoiler, I can't get good eyes on Cluemaster, but it looks like there's already some henchmen set up in the building itself. Batman's ETA is 3 minutes. Cluemaster ditched him in the chase, but he got a tracker on the Toyota, and he's following it right now."

"We -- I need to get onto that roof somehow."

She couldn't think of any way she could successfully get inside the building and up to the roof access without either having to face several henchmen, none of whom she had any guarantee of defeating, or taking a lot longer than the three minutes she had before Batman showed up and arrested her for criminal conspiracy and also getting his daughter's ankle broken.

"You need to grapple onto that roof," Oracle said, exactly when Steph came to that conclusion herself.

"I do not know how to do that," Steph said, panicked.

"Do what?" Cass signed. She had slid against the building across City Hall, her back to the brickwork and her bad leg stretched out in front of her. She looked so much smaller than she was, especially with Steph's already somewhat oversized jacket swallowing her more compact frame.

"Grapple onto the roof," Steph signed. Cass immediately reached underneath the stiff leather and into one of her pockets and came back with the now familiar look of her grapple gun.

"Yes, you do," Cass insisted. "... Saw me." She pushed the grapple into Steph's hand and closed her fingers around the handle. "Smart. You know what to do. You're a hero too."

Steph would not acknowledge just how much those four words from Cass affected her. She had a feeling Cass saw anyways.

"Sure," Steph said. She swallowed, standing there in front of Cass, her breathing still on the shallow side. "Sure. I know what to do. Solve the clues. Beat the bad guy." Shakily, she winked at Cass. "Get the girl."

"Try harder," Cass said back, grinning. "Have to go in order."

Well. That was her itinerary set. Steph took one last look at Cass, huddled against the side of a building in her ragged, oversized, hastily stitched up jacket, looking nothing like the iconic Batgirl of Gotham City. Just Cass. She started walking backward, keeping Cass's brown eyes in her sight for as long as possible as she fixed her cloth mask back onto her face, going from Steph to Spoiler.

Eventually, Steph had break eye contact and turn around to take a running start. She squeezed the grappling gun and it barked a shot that she felt connect against one of the various ornamental flourishes of a nearby building. Maybe the nightmarish marriage of Brutalism and Gothic architecture in Gotham had some practical use after all: the line wrapped itself around a wholly unnecessary flying buttress and Steph felt her arm nearly get yanked out of her socket as her angular momentum launched her into the air in a wide arc.

She landed, graceless but intact, on the other side of City Hall from Cluemaster. He had noticed her, clearly: she could make out the side of his face from around the fleche that stretched spikily up from the center of city hall like the stem of a rose with the head cut off.

"Hey, asshole!" Steph yelled, dropping the grapple gun back into her pocket once the line retreated. She reached back and drew her baseball bat instead. "Batman's not here! It's just you and me!"

Her and her Louisville Slugger, at least.

"Ah," Cluemaster said, turning to face her. "Batman's sidekick's sidekick."

"I dare you to call Batgirl a sidekick to her face," Steph said, tightening her grip. "See what happens."

He laughed bitterly. "I don't see her around."

Steph walked forward, her steps cautious: she was a misplaced foot away from tumbling off the edge, and while adrenaline and anger had occupied enough of her mind to drown out the fear in her conscious thoughts, there was still terror running through the marrow of her.

"Is this the part where you tell me what this is all about?" Steph asked.

"You haven't guessed?" Cluemaster said, and his tone brought her straight back to her childhood. The few times he'd ever demonstrated anything for Steph, he'd never tolerated her questions. He had always hated having to explain himself, to slow himself down so others could catch up.

"I thought it was plenty obvious," he drawled, just like he would when she was a child.

"Spell it out for me," Steph said. "I know you like doing that." She stepped forward again. She was only a few more measured footsteps away from crossing the spire to his side of City Hall; it didn't look like it had registered to Cluemaster that she was getting nearer, but in the dark and half masked, his face was hard to read. He was as inscrutable to her as he had been when she was seven, eight, nine, and could descend into screaming rages at her or her mother at the slightest trigger.

Cluemaster turned and spread his arms. "City Hall!" He said instead. "You know how many people have been arrested by Batman in front of here? How fast the response time is? And what has anyone here ever done to deserve that? They're not smarter, they're not better. They were just born luckier."

Steph was a few feet away from her father at this point. Ten, at the very most. He hadn't noticed, still talking.

"Now, what is it in Southwest Lowtown? Brideshead? What about Miller's Harbor? No, no, no protector of the innocent to come swooping down and save them there. Face it, dear. Batman, Batgirl, Nightwing, all of them! They don't care about the little guys like us! They come for the big ticket events, nothing north of Midtown."

Cluemaster laughed. "It's the beauty of the acrostic," he said. "You need to pay attention to every word. Miss one in Brideshead, and City Hall goes up!"

"And yet," Steph said. "Here we are. City Hall." She crossed the last few feet and twirled the baseball bat. "Is now the part where we fight?"

She couldn't see his face underneath the mask, but she could tell right away that he smiled. Nastily. She was close enough to see the way the corners of his eyes crinkled up, lopsided on one end.

"If you want," he said, and dramatically shook his hand out. There was something in it. "But I have a dead man's switch here, and a half dozen of my very favorite pipe bombs have been laid out all across this city."

"Ask him where," Oracle said in her ear, and Steph was wound up so tightly that she full body flinched at the unexpected interruption.

"Where?" she repeated, fear leaking into her tone despite her best efforts. She couldn't help but look over at the One Gotham Center. Did he know? He couldn't.

"Ah, ah, ah," Cluemaster said. He wagged his free finger in her place. "That would be telling. But, I'm not a monster," he said, theatrically putting his hand to his chest. Steph had a few choice words to say about that.

"I'll give you a choice. Toss that bat over the side, and whatever communication devices you have, and I'll let you take this switch from me. I'll even let you get off the roof, go see if you can find all those bombs before your hand gets numb."

He spread his hands.

"Or, I'll let you take me to jail, and some insignificant parts of Gotham will go up in flames."

Insignificant. Steph tightened her grip on the bat. It felt like cold water had been poured down her spine. She knew it was selfish and horrible, but insignificant. That meant the One Gotham Center was almost definitely safe.

Her mother wouldn't die, and she could take her father to jail. It was the best-case scenario, the wildest dream she could have had, starting this whole thing. It was her good ending. Everyone she loved or cared about was already here.

"Stephanie," Oracle's voice said in her ear. "Batman has arrived on the scene."

Gotham saw destruction all the time. It was a fact of life in this city. It was like a carnivorous perversion of a phoenix, burning itself away and rebuilding over its own bones, time and time again. What was another few fires?

"It's time to choose," Cluemaster said. "How much do you care about the people of this city?"

"You," Steph said, venomous, "do not care about the innocent."

"We were all innocent once," her father said. "We all had to be made into this. Some of us just get fewer chances than others."

"Bullshit," she snarled. "Nobody made you set up bombs all over this fucking city! To what, prove a fucking half-baked point to Batman?"

"Choose," Cluemaster said, implacable.

Steph hesitated for a few seconds. It would be so easy. So easy to hit him in the side of the head, knock him out, take him down to the police station and testify at his trial and see him locked away for good. Her mother would never have to worry again.

She thought about Harper and Cullen in the Narrows. The preacher and his burned down confession booth. Friezes with owls on them and robins chiseled onto the side, murals splashed guerilla onto the sides of walls, and the kind of people who didn't ask questions but would undercharge for a sandwich to a girl who wasn't in school.

Steph yanked the communication system out of her ear and tossed it off the side of City Hall. Oracle's voice was gone. She hesitated. Threw her phone over, next, her eyes never leaving Cluemaster's.

Hate had always come to Gotham more easily than love, and it would never be the sort of city that would ever be particularly kind to the girls who lived in it, but Steph thought, perhaps, that she loved it anyways, more than she could ever have hated any one person.

She forced herself to let go of the bat, finger by finger, until it dropped to her feet. It slowly rolled down the sloped roof and succumbed to gravity, dropping into the night below, taking the easy way with it.

"Fine," she ground out.

Cluemaster smiled and held the switch out. Steph walked forward, the closest she'd been to her father in fourteen months, and held her hand out as well.

"On three," Cluemaster said. He counted off.

Steph grabbed the switch, levering her own thumb onto the button the second her father's hand left it. There were a few seconds when her heart thudded in her throat and she almost thought she heard a phantom explosion as she swore her thumb slipped, rendering somewhere in the city reduced to rubble, but nothing happened.

Steph had made sure to grab the switch in her left hand. With the right, she tucked her thumb under her fingers, brought out the first two knuckles, and made a fist the exact way Cass had taught her. Then, she did something that she'd been dreaming about for the past fourteen months, if only she could get close enough: She punched Cluemaster in the nose.

Arthur Brown stumbled back, his hands flying to his masked nose. The orange fabric had a few spots of red on it now, corroborated by the wet crunching noise it had made underneath her fist. Steph didn't waste time, fumbling for her mace, before she realized with a start that she wasn't wearing her jacket -- she'd left her mace in the inner pocket of her outer jacket, which was currently being worn by Cass, all the way down on the ground.

Shit.

In the moment of confusion, Steph had turned slightly around and had lost sight of her father behind the hood of her jacket.

Therefore, it was a surprise when pain exploded in the small of her back like someone had taken a hammer straight to her and swung with full force. Her slow, dull aches from the fires and the running didn't even compare. It was a miracle that, in the shock of it all, she hadn't let go of the dead man's switch.

When she was five, six, seven, she remembered sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, letting her feet swing in front of her because she hadn't gotten big enough to rest them on the floor yet. She'd sit on the closed lid of the toilet and watch her mother get ready for the day, pulling tubes and flat pallets out of a small cloth bag. Fiddling with the lipstick, clicking the cap on and off again to produce that plasticky noise of it catching in place a few hundred times, Steph would only ever vaguely watch her mom out of the corner of her eyes, see her dot that shade-too-dark concealer over her throat and dab at it with her ring finger, blending away. She'd shut her teeth on what she wanted to say: Did you know, a strangulation victim can die up to thirty-six hours after the incident, even with no external injuries? Did you know, strangulation victims are seven times more likely to be victims of homicide? Did you know, when I looked this up after the last time, I was told that these were the hallmarks of an "abusive relationship" and that's when I learned from the librarian that most kids don't stay up at night, ear to the door, worrying about if their father will end up killing their mother.

Not that many kids, at least. Did you know, one of the leading causes of death in women below 25 are the men who marry them?

But all these words would always stay behind her teeth because her mom would look up, wiping the residue of concealer off her fingers with some soaked cloth, and smile at her. "He's never hurt you," she'd reassure her.

Steph would have to apologize to Oracle if she ever got off this roof. She'd been shot in the spine.

And thank Cass, because she had been very right: Bulletproof vests were fairly important in this profession.

She whirled around, her lower back screaming in pain, and rushed for Cluemaster. He had a shocked look on his face; Steph wasn't sure if it was because he was surprised he actually shot someone, or because she was still moving. She didn't care. It didn't matter to her if her father just talked a big game about being a killer or if he had already been fully committed to being the one to kill a teenage girl on the roof of City Hall. It didn't matter if he knew what had become of her mother, who didn't smoke anymore and had a hard time looking Steph in the eyes and threw herself into her work like she was asking for something deeper than forgetting.

She had spent too long with her anger and the rage had gone hollow, an abscess that didn't bleed anymore when poked, only ached. Fury had revealed itself to be simply grief under a false name. Steph was done mourning the parent she could have had, mourning on behalf of her mother and herself for the man that could have been in their lives.

She kicked out at the gun in his hand, a motion she'd seen Cass do on a henchman way back when they first met. It wasn't nearly as smooth or graceful as Cass could be, but it got the job done. Cluemaster's gun went skittering off the roof, joining her bat and falling into the yawning black below them. Arthur backed up further, a scrambling motion. Steph matched him, footstep for footstep, and reached down.

Arthur was disarmed, but Steph had thought ahead. As a result, shoved down into her left boot, pressed against her ankle this whole time, was the reassuring weight of a switchblade, blunted but serviceable for her purposes. She reached down with her right and tugged it out of its impromptu sheath, flipping it open. Her left hand maintained the death grip on the switch. She put the knife under her father's chin as she strode up to him: they were only a few inches apart in height, and she barely had to reach up.

"Turn around," Steph said. "Or, I swear to God, I will stab you."

"You wouldn't kill," Arthur said, his voice shaky. All Steph saw was a man clinging to the remains of his bravado. "Bats don't kill."

"Who said anything about killing?" Steph said. "I'll stab you in the foot and drag you down the stairs myself. Turn around."

Cluemaster turned around. It was a good choice.

Now they were both facing the city, looking down the street of the Civic District to where the skyscrapers of the Financial Center cast white squares of light into the blackness of the night. Beyond them, the neighborhoods of Lowtown. They weren't at the right angle to see it, but perhaps the Bat Signal was casting its own spotlight against the underside of the clouds, visible in the smog.

"We're gonna go down," Steph said, and these were the last things she said to her father as she navigated them by knifepoint to the roof access. "Walk down these stairs. Go out the front door. And when you see Batman, turn yourself in."

She very much wished she hadn't tossed her phone off the side of a building: she desperately needed to call Oracle. She had no idea where she herself stood in Batman's eyes, but she hoped very desperately that he'd ignore the knife and notice the father she was trussing up and delivering. Hopefully, she wouldn't get booked right alongside her dad.

There was a silent five minutes as Steph stared at the back of her father's neck as they descended the several flights of stairs to the ground floor together. The both of them moved carefully, each wary of the other. Cluemaster, presumably because she was holding a knife to his back in her right hand. Steph, because she was holding a dead man's switch in her left.

The silence and the slowness gave Steph plenty of time to worry about what she might walk out to. She hoped the Batman would give her at least a second to explain herself and why, exactly, she was holding a switch that would trigger bombs in the city if she let go.

"Open the door," Steph said and took a leap of faith. They walked out of the hall together and onto the sidewalk, and the first thing Steph noticed was the Batmobile.

Cass was sitting on the hood of the massive black car, the exact same way she treated her brother's Prius, and the image of Batgirl -- cowl back on her head and jacket unzipped -- lounging on top of the most frightening car in existence was just jarring enough that Steph momentarily forgot all the tension and anxiety and ache in her spine and had to laugh quietly.

"Batgirl," she said, and Cass turned on the car, Steph's jacket falling ever so slightly off of one shoulder.

"Spoiler," Cass said, and it sounded like a thousand different things packed into one word.

"Spoiler," a different voice said, and Steph suddenly noticed the massive man directly in front of her.

"I have something for you," she told the Batman. "Please cuff him first."

"I hope," Batman said, moving forward to take Cluemaster from her, "you have an explanation, too."

Wow. Steph could see "dad" now. She almost mentally subbed in "young lady" at the end of his sentence, in the same deep, gravelly growl.

She watched him efficiently take Cluemaster's hands and pull them behind his back, fixing a pair of handcuffs around him. They both ignored the way that set him off; Steph knew from years of awful experience that the more powerless Cluemaster felt, the louder he would get to everyone else. Instead of watching him, the man who'd haunted her family for years, her eyes went back up to the One Gotham Center, counting off the floors until she could see the fourth. She wasn't sure which of those illuminated windows was the one that her mother could be looking out of.

Motion caught her eye, and she saw Cass move forward, still seated on the hood of the Batmobile.

"Are you okay?" Cass signed.

"I need to-" Steph tried to sign, hampered by the fist she had to keep making with the switch in her left hand. She cut herself off and held up her free right hand, spelling out, "O-n-e s-e-c," before she decided, fuck it, in for a penny, in for a pound, and shoved the dead man's switch in her left hand at one of the most iconic superheroes in the world.

"Take this too," she said, and she was so distracted by her need to get to Cass that she didn't even spare a few seconds to be amused at how unquestioningly Batman wrapped his own hand around the switch and gently levered her own thumb off. The second her hand was free, cramped from squeezing so tightly for so long, her attention swung all the way back around to Cass. She signed "Stay there," before she moved forward, crossing the distance to hug Cass tightly.

Cass's arms automatically went around her back, and Steph could feel Cass's right hand move from a flat palm on her back to tucking her ring and middle finger down. Cass's signing hand tapped against Steph's back several times, and Steph made the same sign with her right hand and pressed "I love you" as hard as she dared into Cass's left shoulder blade.

They kept like that for a while, breathing against each other and melting into the hug. Eventually, she felt Cass move her head up from where it was tucked against her shoulder, her ear pressed to Steph's heart, and she moved a little, breaking the hug but leaving a hand on Cass's back.

Batman had approached them. She saw Cluemaster, rudely deposited on the sidewalk, tied by the hands and feet, and left on the sidewalk for the moment. A police car had come up to the side, judging by the way she saw blue and red lights flashing against the night and spilling onto the sidewalk.

"Robin had identified one of the bombs. They seem to be in the previous locations visited by Cluemaster. Nightwing and Blackbird are already on their way to the Uptown locations."

Steph nearly cried in relief.

"It's over?" She asked.

"It's over," Batman confirmed.

"And you're not gonna arrest me or anything?"

Cass tightened her arm more thoroughly. "Won't," she said. She turned to Steph, and despite the eyeless mask, Steph could tell she was winking. "Yelled at him."

Steph loved this girl, and the full force of that thought hit her like a sack of bricks to the side of the face. Something must have shown in her posture and of course, Cass's preternatural and quasi-psychic senses must have picked up on it, because she turned to her father and told him: "Bother Spoiler later. Want to talk in car."

Batman did not sigh, but he looked very beleaguered and helpless in the face of Cass. Steph could relate. He waved them on, and Cass gingerly hopped down from the car, still favoring her left foot.

She opened the side door of the Batmobile and slipped in, motioning Steph to come follow her.

Apparently, despite the nightmarish exterior, the Batmobile looked, on the inside, like any other minivan in existence. Painted black though, naturally. And with a stupider name.

Cass scooted over to make room for her on the backseat. As soon as Steph shut the door, she tugged her cowl off. Steph followed suit. They looked at each other for a very long second.

"He's mad… I tackled the driver on my bad leg," Cass said, looking apologetic. "Sorry… I didn't stay. Had to do something."

Steph couldn't help it. She laughed.

"You're such a hero," she said, and Cass smiled.

"He called himself Kite-Man and tried to trip me with a spool," she signed, "which is not the strangest thing to happen."

Steph blinked. "Are you okay?"

"Are you?" Cass asked back. "Not hurt?"

"No, but, uh, he did try to shoot me. Thanks for the vest, it caught it." There was still a bullet hole in her hoodie -- she'd have to figure out some way of explaining that to her mother later.

Cass winced. "We heard. Always bad when father shoots you."

"Hate," Steph signed emphatically, "that you can relate."

"Fathers," Cass signed. "are hard."

"Yeah," Steph said. "They are."

She looked out the window: it was easy enough to spot Batman's shadowy figure, now talking with what she assumed to be a first responder.

"But… not all of them. My new... father… does all he can to keep me from being in pain."

"Can't blame him," Steph snorted, looking back at Cass. "It was terrifying to see you get hurt."

Cass winced. "Scary… to see you get hurt too."

"I'm sorry."

"You're alive." Cass shook her head, then picked up her hands. "All that matters."

They were quiet for a little longer. It was a comfortable silence. Cass had always been good at those. Steph still broke it, a nervous energy fluttering in her chest, though this time, she didn't think there was any danger to be worried about at all, only the aftereffects of adrenaline giving her the courage she needed.

"You know," Steph said. "I went in order."

"Hm?" Cass asked. She had a smirk on her face.

"Solved the clues," she said, holding up a finger. "Beat the bad guy," and she put up a second finger. "Do I get the girl?"

"What does get mean here?" Cass signed, and her smirk had transitioned into a full-blown smile, her top teeth showing and eyes crinkling.

"I'd settle for a kiss," Steph signed, "and maybe a second date. For real, this time."

Cass reared back.

"Haven't we already had that?" she signed, and Steph blinked.

"When did you think our first date was?"

Cass held up three fingers and ran them in a counter-clockwise circle in the air. Wednesday. "At shop. You said it was, I believed you. You?" she asked.

"Sunday. At the museum. God, it isn't a date if it happened before 10AM, Cass."

"Slow," Cass said, laughing. Steph laughed with her.

"Well," Steph said out loud. "How about a kiss?"

"I can do a kiss."

It was a cliche for a reason. The only explosions that night were the fireworks that played behind Steph's eyes when she closed her eyes and leaned in and kissed her girlfriend for the first time.

Outside, she could hear something drumming rhythmically against the roof of the car and the pavement, slow at first, but Steph knew it would always eventually pick up speed and spin itself into a flood. The last big storm of the season had come, and the streets were wiped clean with the rain.

You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the color of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.

- Anna Akhmatova

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END