Work Text:
Almost every night, Batman assigns Black Bat and Batgirl as partners.
Steph doesn’t quite know why Bruce always pairs the two of them together, but she has a few theories.
Theory the first is that they’re both girls and the same age, so he wants them to be friends. The only other women on the Bat-team are Huntress, Batwoman, and Oracle who are all, like, adults. This theory is unlikely, because Steph thinks Bruce doesn’t give a lick about her, and Cass already has friends in her ridiculous number of siblings, all of whom adore her.
Theory the second is that it’s because Bruce thinks she’s the most incompetent, so to make up for it he sends Cass, ass-kicking extraordinaire, to cover for Stephanie’s mistakes. This feels a lot more likely. Steph knows her place on the team. She’s there to be the normal one, the one who pulls Tim or Cass or Bruce off the ledge when they threaten to fall into the dark pits in their heads.
She is not there because she is good at vigilantism, no matter what Tim told her when she was first inducted into the world of bat bullshit.
It would make sense to put her with Cass then, to put her with one of them who needs normal the most.
Not that she doesn’t enjoy it, of course, she enjoys it. Cass is sweet and sharp and surprisingly hilarious. It’s true what the ao3 text says- that brevity is the soul of wit- because somehow the fact that Cass doesn’t speak much makes what she has to say that much more entertaining.
It was a lesson her father had never learned.
But that’s therapy fuel for another day.
It’s one of those quiet nights when Mother Gotham has finished off her coffee supply and reluctantly gone to bed. The entire city is muted, subdued, even the helicopter and satellite stars are nigh invisible through the gloom. They run rooftops, jumping and diving and running up fire escapes, and there’s a looseness in Stephanie’s bones, one that tells her that tonight is a night she can set her heart free and enjoy the rise and the fall of leaping above alleyways. Cass is beside her and the city is silent and she lets out a whoop as she grapples to the other side of the street when faced with a corner.
She lands and turns to Cass, coming up behind her, soaring on the grapple like she was made for it. Steph will never get tired of watching Cassandra on patrol, the way she jumps like she’s dancing for an invisible audience, and rolls onto the roof like a celebrity making an entrance. Cass is the shadow of a ballerina, the part that moves without effort. She jumps, and gravity forgets her.
No one ever forgets Steph, especially not gravity.
But no, this is a happy night, a good night, and thinking about toobigtoomuchsitstill is only going to bring her down. She grins at Cass when she drops next to Stephanie, a wild smile that asks Cass to run with her.
“Hey, Cass.”
Cassandra looks up at Steph, tilting her head in response.
Steph wiggles her eyebrows and pokes her.
“You’re it.”
Cass smiles, shakes her head, and holds up five fingers. She’s giving Steph a five-second headstart, and she sure as hell isn’t going to waste it.
She’s off like a flash, darting over to the next building and running like hell. She quickly hears footsteps behind her, and she knows that’s intentional, that Black Bat is purposefully making herself audible so Steph knows her time is up.
Steph briefly wonders if being chased by a girl trained as a living weapon for a game isn’t her greatest idea, and contemplates asking Oracle to send her motorcycle.
But no, that’d be cheating, and the rare game before this one has taught her that cheating makes Cass grumpy afterward.
So she runs on, barely paying attention to the street signs below her.
Mania floods her system as she runs, and she laughs as she runs up a fire escape to the top of a building higher than the last. She knows Black Bat is right behind her, knows she’ll be caught soon, but looking back feels pointless when she has the time and the freedom to keep running.
Thank God for bat-endurance training.
It’s hard for Steph sometimes. How does one live in the moment when the past is so tangled? She had a kid and died and came back and was a superhero of all things. Hell, she’d met Superman, who some people thought was God.
So it’s only in moments like these, these rare moments when her feet don’t touch the ground, that she feels the joy of the now. She wonders if Cass feels this way when she moves like a ghost, but dismisses it. Steph doesn’t feel like a ghost, she feels like a meteor, bright and untouchable as another alley passes under her.
But meteors crash to Earth.
Because Steph knows the rooftop she’s just landed on. Knows it like she knows screaming in the living room and pillows squeezed too hard.
She stops.
Immediately, Cass is there. Not touching, but she sits on the ledge of the roof and waits.
Steph always forgets about Cass’ body-reading abilities until she’s grateful for them.
She takes off her mask and walks to the side of the roof, the side with an alley below it that she knows, that she’s peered down it a hundred times just a few years before.
It’s still there.
Scribbled in a child’s scrawl with stolen Sharpie, the ground beneath her reads
steph brown wuz here :)
It’s a simple declaration, but it makes her mad somehow.
How could she have been so stupid? The smiley face at the end, like her world wasn’t going to collapse in a year or two. Like her future was bright and childless and involved merit scholarships to good universities and jobs that paid a lot and helped people.
She kicks the ground like it’ll erase the writing, all the joy from earlier long scrapped from her mind. She wants to yell, she wants to scream as loud as she can. Wants everyone to see her, to hear her, to look and see the mess she’s become, the disaster she was still pulling herself out of.
She wants someone to see her anger and isn’t that the goddamn problem, she thinks as she sinks down to the ground. Steph is a meteor, for sure, loud and flashy and unforgettable. And she’s angry, is the thing. In a way that she isn’t supposed to be. She isn’t like Cass, who turns her anger into helping other people, into saving them. She isn’t like Kate, who wears her anger like a badge of honor. She’s bitter and she doesn’t want help, she wants to tear the world apart, the world that let her think she could be happy.
But she can’t. She can’t scream, can’t yell, can’t put her anger anywhere but inside, where it can burn through her like acid until all that’s left is an ever-burning shell. Maybe then she’d finally be good enough for Bruce to fully accept.
She can’t do anything, so she lays out, starfish style, stares at the moonless sky, and cries.
She doesn’t know how long it is that she lays there before Cass speaks.
“How can help?”
Honestly, Steph had forgotten that Cass was there, and she should’ve known better than to do that. She sits up, wrapping her arms around her knees, and thinks for a moment.
Then she gets up, walks to the ledge Cass is still perched on, and sits down next to her, wrapping her arms around the smaller girl.
Cass responds immediately, hugging Stephanie back tightly.
“Do you… want to talk about it?”
Steph sighs and pulls back from Cass’s chest to hug herself. She looks up as she talks.
“This is my mom’s old apartment building. When Dad came home and they fought, I always ran up here. The janitor liked me, so he kept the door up here unlocked for me as long as I took a blanket to keep warm,” She looks back down at her toes before continuing, “When I was 11, right before Mom found out what was really going on with Dad, I decided that I wanted to leave a mark up here, for the next kid, y’know? So, I stole one of my teacher’s Sharpies and I came up here and I wrote that.” She angles her head towards the writing.
“Seeing it now, after so much has happened, it feels so disappointing to see the person I was then, versus the person I am now. I feel like I… eroded somehow. Somewhere down the line, the girl who wanted to be a nurse so she could save lives became me, who beats up people in a bat costume.”
She moves her arms, bracing them on the sides of the ledge. Silently, Cass puts her hand over Steph’s and squeezes.
They sit like that for a few minutes before Cass responds.
“You still are her. Girl you were is not gone, just different. Didn’t erode, evolved. Still whole. Still you.”
And somehow, that helps. Maybe it’s because of the words or maybe it’s just Cass, but Steph looks at Cass for the first time since she hit the rooftop and smiles weakly.
“Also, beat people up dressed up as a bat is not so bad. I do it all the time.”
That absolutely cracks Steph up, because she knows that the worst is over now, that she’s hit the point post-cry where she can laugh through her tears, and maybe she’s okay. Kind of.
“Hey, Cass?”
“Hey, Stephanie?” That makes her nudge Cass in mock anger, and Cass grins at the reaction to her mild teasing.
“Do you think I’m too much?”
Cass tilts her head at Steph, visibly confused.
“Like, I know I talk a lot and I have really big reactions to things and I push people a lot and I feel like sometimes I’m too much to handle. Do you see that in me?”
“Not too much. Just shiny. Like shooting stars. Pretty.”
And that. Well. That makes Steph’s cheeks heat up a little, and she absolutely knows that later before bed she is going to replay this moment a dozen times, but she’s had enough feelings and even though her face is definitely redder than it should be, due to the crying, she feels better than she usually does post-cry, and even though the mania from earlier is gone, she still feels at least a bit energized.
So, she lets go of Cass’ hand, stands up, and turns to her with a smile that gets more genuine every second.
“You touched me, which means I’m it now.” And Cass smiles and falls backward off the roof, and it terrifies Steph for a moment before she sees Black Bat swing away on her grapple, already a good distance ahead.
Steph tugs her mask back on and Batgirl jumps off the roof.
It’s on.