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Cass can see the conversation pass through the safe house before the word actually crosses anyone's lips. Mia comes in, her hair windswept and her face flushed bright with blood, her muscles plumped from exertion under her tank top, which she's stripped to, swinging her arms around Rose's shoulders. Her body is singing with it. Happy hunting. It's was a good patrol, then. Her eyes are glittering as she circles Rose on the busted arm chair Steph found in an alley one night, her pupils blown.
It's the Gotham safe house they're piled into, a living room too big and a bedroom too small but theirs, not Bruce's or Dick's or Barbara's; only three cameras in the whole place. Cass knows it's Mia's favorite. She still gets a kick out of playing in Batman's sandbox. The notes she leaves with her busts are doodled with arrow-pierced hearts.
I'm my father's kid, Mia said once, with a performative leer.
Steph laughed, and Cass echoed it, smacking Mia on the cheek like in the daytime soaps they watch together.Rose spent a week trying to beat Mia's aim on the furniture. Cass touches one of the deep pockmarks on the couch she's on, circling it with her fingers. It's deeper than Mia's usually are, from the extra height and muscle Rose packs, but the angle of entry is less smooth. Batman taught her to do that, to make deduction an expansion of of her body language skill. A flexing of muscle. She runs her nails against the frayed edge of the hole, like when Steph draws her palm up and pretends to read the lines.
Mia is still moving, her hands wrapping around Rose's hands and tugging her up. Rose mutters something, her face turned away from Cass, but her body is already finding it, the bouncing rhythm Mia is moving to.
"Come on," Mia grins. "I thought you were the bad girl. Play truant tonight."
There's a little tick, almost imperceptible, in Rose's jaw, but then she's wrapping her arms around Mia's waist, spinning her around the carpet just to show off her strength. It's catching, Mia's spark. Like Steph hunting them all to the rooftops to play tag or Cass's own game of shadowing someone around their cramped space, mirroring their movements like in old cartoons. When Rose falls into step, their hips swaying together, it's not persona, the sharp-edged sexiness she used to wear like a bristling cat. It's just—feeling.
Mia meets Cass's eyes over Rose's shoulder, winking like she knows Cass is in on the secret already. Conspirator. She traces the shape of the word along her teeth. There's no music but their scuffing boots and sneakers, but it's enough. Gotham will have its fill of her the way it always does, but for now… for now they'll dance.
*
They're half ready by the time Steph gets back from her own patrol, plucking her costume off as soon as she slams the door shut. It's too warm for all the Kevlar, so many bodies in such a small place. Cass notices her flushed cheeks first, then the new bruises dotting her shoulders and thighs, like purple constellations. Steph counts them with a kind of relish that means she's pleased as she smoothes arnica gel over worst of them. A good fight. She must have dealt more blows than she took. She grins up at Cass, then, and catches the clothes she's pulled on.
"If you've been put on an undercover mission without me I might throw a tantrum," she says, dragging her gaze along Cass's body. The outfit is nothing too revealing, just jeans and a red tank top, but the cut, the shapes are a touch more… feminine than Cass would usually call comfy.
It's a costume, maybe, just a different kind to what she's used to.
"We're going dancing." Rose strolls around the corridor, slouching against the wall as she smiles at Steph, her teeth gleaming like her hair, like the silver eyeshadow she's brushed across her eyelid. Her dress is not short, but it's not loose, either. Steph's tongue wets her lip as she looks at her.
"We're going dancing," Steph repeats, slowly, dropping her utility belt to the floor.
"Yes," Mia calls from the bathroom. "So engage that cute little ass of yours and get dressed so we can leave."
Steph looks at Cass again, searches her face for a moment like she's waiting for the kicker, the business under the pleasure. They usually tag team, when there's more of them in town. Steph and Cass trading street corners and sleep schedules. But Cass just looks back at her. Cass will have her eyes and ears open for trouble, but there's purpose to this.
She can't be perfect, infallible, without an outlet. She's seen Bruce twitching from sleeplessness, voice hoarse from not speaking to anyone for hours, maybe days. Cass can be better, even if it means she has to be human.
"I like to dance," Cass tells her, as if she doesn't already know.
She hears Rose shifting beside her, boots clacking on the wood. "Batgirls gone wild," she muses, like they're circling each other for a fight and not lounging in their shared living room. "This I've gotta see."
Steph is dressed and made up (jeans, too, black ones, with a gauzy purple halter cinched around her throat) before Mia steps out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam and hairspray. She looks at Steph then rolls her eyes. "Goddamn bats. I will never get used to that presto chango crap."
Steph kisses her on the cheek for that, marks her up with pink gloss, and Cass pushes through them before they start to tussle. "We have a mission," Cass tells them, low and serious. "We're going to have fun."
They stick out their tongues in tandem, and Rose huffs, and then all four of them are moving like a single animal, fast and quiet like a habit they don't know how to break.
Steph picks the place, in the end. She knows where is safe, where edginess is a facade and they can let loose, a little bit.
"You came here when you were sixteen, huh?" Rose looks up at the rough brickwork, the light pulsing from the warehouse window. She's standing very straight as they wait in line. Her shoulders are tense, muscles twitching, a little.
"I minored in teenage delinquency," Steph beams, and grabs Rose's hand, rubbing her thumbs across the knuckle. "Don't worry, it's not all latchkey kids. My ex Dean's brother was the DJ, he used to let me sit behind his booth and drink Shirley Temples."
Mia squints at her, and Stephanie raises her eyebrows in mock innocence, but her thumb keeps moving on Rose's hand, swinging their arms gently to the thudding song leaking out from the building. Cass watches the tension drain a little bit, but notices the flicker of Rose's eye to the bodies around them, scanning for threats. She notices, because she is doing it, too.
Rose stares at Cass for a moment, then looks away. The line is moving, the pulse of the music only getting louder.
The security barely spare them a glance, just the quick punch of a stamp on the back of their hands, then the doors open, and the world rushes up to meet them. Outside in the line, the thrum of sound was like an itch under the skin, but inside… inside, Cass feels her boundaries shift, the confines of her skin fluttering away. She's not a meta, they've tested enough times that it's one of the few things she's sure of, but in the dim of the club, surrounded by writhing bodies all moving as one; one feeling, one motive, one blissful thumping desire, Cass thinks she knows what it might feel like. She's more than her body. She's a hundred different people and yet each movement is totally, wholly her own, twisting and laughing and moving, just moving , with no motive but to feel her body let go. It's like magic, the music burying inside her body beneath the blunt solidness of her bones. It's—beautiful.
Faces start to come back into focus. Steph's grin lit up by the shifting lights as she pulls Rose in close, thighs sliding together not quite in time with the song. Rose's throat tilted back, laughing and loose, her hands on Steph's hips, trying to force her to submit to Rose's rhythm. Then Mia—Mia's head thrown back and her arms reaching out, looping around Cass's neck.
"You look beautiful when you dance," Mia tells her, but her voice is hardly more than a vibration. "'s like when you fight. Like you were born on your feet ready to move them."
Cass's face feels warm, from movement and sweat and Mia's breath close enough to glance over her skin. "You dance like it's… easy."
Mia smiles, and there are a lot of words pressed up underneath it, some not as soft as the way her fingers brush the top of Cass's neck. "This is easy," Mia breathes, tugging herself in closer, using Cass's strength as an anchor. "Just us, and the music. You know."
Cass nods, and keeps dancing. Her hands span Mia's waist, feeling the certainty of muscle shifting, arching into her touch. Feeling joy pulse out of Mia's body and move up through Cass's hands, trading feeling through the vibration.
"I could do this forever," Mia tells her, rolling their hips together then spinning Cass around. Forever turns out to be about three and half more songs, then Mia starts to sway, a little. Fatigue. Cass anchors, again, holding Mia's weight, and before she's looked up Rose is there, holding out a glass of something cool and sweet-smelling.
"It's O.J.," she says, expression serious and drawn. "You need sugar."
"Mm, babysitters, my favorite," Mia barks, grabbing for the glass, and Cass's hand is on the back of Rose's neck before the bristle fully runs through her.
Rose snaps her spine straight and shrugs it off, but the tension has already passed through her. Her throat has stopped bobbing, swallowing the sour taste back.
Steph sweeps beneath them to usher Mia to a stool, shooting Cass a pointed look as she goes, which is why Cass takes Rose's hand, slick with condensation, and plants it on her hip. "Dance," she says, and Rose grits her teeth at her.
Cass moves, rolling her hips and waist with Rose's hand pinned firmly to it, and Rose doesn't try to pull away. It takes a few seconds, as the music stumbles from one track to another, but Cass has the rhythm of everybody in the warehouse at her fingertips and before long, Rose is swaying with her. It's not easy, like with Mia. Rose's hands are grabby and her movements full of force. Cass's muscles feel loose and warm beneath the touch, like she is easing under blows from Rose's fist. She can feel her breath coming harder, feel the smile split across her face.
"It's yours," Cass says, forcing Rose to meet her gaze. "If you say so."
Cass has watched Rose closely enough to guess at her response. What is it with you Gotham freaks and riddles?
But she's never been terribly good at reading Rose, which is why it takes her a millisecond longer than it should to lean closer, to meet Rose's warm mouth. The soft slide of Rose's lips and the hard grasp of her hands is as regular as the beat is— want, want, want. Not just for Cass, but for the room, the night, all of it. Cass kisses her back with a slide of her tongue and a tensing of her muscles. It's yours already. She squeezes Rose's waist, scrapes her teeth, dissolves into movement and song.
Her mouth is swollen, numb, bruised by Rose when the hands curl around her waist. Steph. She knows from the height of her, the place her wrists cross over Cass's stomach, the pace of her breath where her ribs are pressed tightly to Cass's spine. Mia, too, her hands hooked over Rose's hips, pressing them in on all sides. They move together in a tangle, Mia's elbow winging out when a man whistles lowly beside them, like an accident, a slip in the rhythm. Rose laughs, full and filthy, and Steph presses her smile, all teeth, against Cass's neck and Cass puts her hand on top of Mia's and squeezes down.
Colored lights splash across them, paint them green and blue and red. There will be plenty of time for darkness later.