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“I’m not worried,” Midnighter says unpleasantly, sliding his foot back, hands coming up, and then… freezing. Cass raises her eyebrows, and waits. “Hold on, ma’am,” he says. “One moment, please.”
His face says that this is going to take longer than a moment. Tense shoulders, stiff jaw. Cass drops into a squat, elbows on her knees.
After a minute, she picks up a twig and strips off some needles, then starts doodling in the hard packed dirt.
About halfway through her drawing of a guy with Damian’s bad new haircut falling comically down a hill, Midnighter reanimates enough to sit down on the dirt with a thump. She glances up at him.
“Ow,” he says. Heels of his hands pressed to his eyes, legs splayed out in front of him like a dropped puppet: not faking it, not about to swing. She goes back to doodling.
Three quarters of the way through her drawing of a guy with Damian’s bad new haircut falling comically down a hill, Midnighter says, “Can you believe they didn’t put an off switch in this thing?”
She looks up at him and waits for more words.
“The fight computer,” he clarifies, like he’s surprised she doesn’t know this already. “In my brain.” She doesn’t care what happens with some man’s brain outside of her city. He should not be confused.
“Fight computer?” she asks. “Does it have… a name?” People like to name things. Especially when they are fancy and technological. Oracle and her IRIS… thing, Nightwing and his wingdings, Batman and his bat… everything. They also like it when you ask about the names.
“…Fight computer,” Midnighter answers. His right shoulder shifts back by the barest millimeter: mentally tripped on her question, finding his footing. Cass nods thoughtfully, and carefully does not say anything like ‘sensible’ where Oracle can hear her. “It is off,” he clarifies again. “It just. Shut itself off.” His following silence is unhappy. Cass takes it that this has never happened before, and also that he has a migraine.
“I have Excedrin,” she offers, stabbing stray dirt clods into her picture around the person’s flailing body.
“Yes please,” Midnighter says, relief settling onto his shoulders like birds on a scarecrow.
“How many.”
“Give me six.” Cass looks up at him. “I’m enhanced,” he clarifies. She looks at him a little longer. “Four,” he says, and she grunts and starts to dig in her tool belt for the little packets.
“What’s happening?” Oracle says into her ear. “Status report?”
“We’re not fighting,” Cass starts, switching back on her mic.
“I could still fight,” Midnighter says, offense in his voice and mouth. “I could beat your ass.” He does not actually look as though he is about to get up and try it, with his stiff muscles and quiet hands.
“We’re not,” Cass repeats. Fight computer or no, she could put him in traction. But that doesn’t matter, because she doesn’t fight people with migraines. They make her feel the same way that she does when she looks at the skinny cats outside of Steph’s apartment when it rains.
“You’re not engaging?” Oracle says, surprise coming through her earbud.
“I gave him a headache,” Cass says, handing over two little Excedrin packets that Midnighter tears into, also like the skinny cats outside of Steph’s apartment when Damian leaves them entire rotisserie chickens with the skin, bones, and seasoning carefully removed. “Bad one. Like Nightwing gets.” She’s lost track of how to pronounce the word and is talking around it.
“Migraine,” Oracle fills in for her absently, then startles. “You gave him a migraine?”
“Migraine,” Cass says, making a mental note- mi like my, grain like oats, silent e, because language is a devil out to trick her. “Yes. We’ll try again later.”
“I didn’t know Dick gets migraines,” Midnighter says after dry swallowing the pills. She decides not to care about his potential throat damage.
“Blackbat, stop talking,” Oracle instructs. Cass makes an irritated face that she can’t see.
“How bad are they? Seems like his whole nighttime thing would be pretty bad for triggers with migraines.” Midnighter’s voice is thoughtful, leaning back with one of his hands in the dirt as the other scrubs his eye. “He get them a lot?”
Cass sighs. “More now that he got shot in the head.” Midnighter looks at her in flabbergasted silence.
“Blackbat,” Oracle hisses. Cass ignores her, because the only real danger Midnighter poses is to Dick and Babs’ relationship, then reaches up and twists her mask until the earbud pops out of her ear.
“That was real?” Midnighter’s not sat up or anything, but his dumb mask is moving like he’s furrowed his eyebrows under it. “He took a headshot from the-,” hands up, finger quotes-, “‘KGBeast’ for real? That wasn’t a lie to get a guilt truce from his idiot little guys in his idiot city while he goes on a fucking cruise or some shit?”
“Real,” Cass says, taking off a glove. She’s got a hangnail that’s annoying her.
“The KGBeast?” His posture is more offended at this than the whole shot in the head thing. He shuffles into a squat that almost mirrors hers- he’s got his heels up off the ground. She doesn’t care enough to tell him he should work on the flexibility in his ankles. “Damn. I can’t let that stand. Gonna have to kill that cunt,” he muses.
“You will not kill anybody in my city,” she snarls at him. Midnighter holds his hands up like she’s got a gun, though his face and shoulder set are unpleasantly amused. “There is also a line,” she adds, going back to rolling up the bottom of her mask. “Robin then Red Hood are first in wanting revenge.”
Midnighter’s upper lip curls. “It’s not revenge. He’s too fucking stupid to live. I can’t live in a world where a guy named the KGBeast is popping caps in vigilantes. Surely you understand.”
Worse things happen all the time, she wants to say. We live anyways. But she has a feeling that Midnighter will not care very much, so- slightly muffled by the way she’s trying to chew off the hangnail- she says, “I will tell Red Hood you are trying to do it before he does. And then he will bother you.”
Hesitancy for the first time, like he’s treading on ground that might open into a pit of tigers. “How much will he bother me.”
Cass is happy to be a tiger. “He has lots and lots of… Hm. What is it.”
“Guns?” He snorts. “Daddy issues?”
“C4,” Cass says, then has to stop paying any attention to him because she pulled the hangnail back too far and now it hurts. The tinny wom wom wom of Oracle trying to talk to her is also getting really annoying, so she goes and pokes it back into her ear.
“Everything is fine,” she says, two fingers on her ear like they do in the movies to talk into comms, for Midnighter’s sake. People get confused when it seems like you talk to yourself.
“Stop giving him information,” Oracle hisses at her. “He is on the Justice League’s most wanted list.”
Cass looks at Midnighter, who has clasped his hands and is looking at her with his head cocked slightly: mildly concerned, amused, not a threat. “Not worried,” she says. “You would just eat him.”
“Is that your Siri?” Midnighter asks, so Cass reaches up and pokes some more at her earbud until it bloops into speaker-mode.
“Oracle. Not Siri.” Oracle stays quiet- Cass knows she can see when she’s on speaker. “She is cranky because you and Nightwing had sex.”
Midnighter starts cackling as Oracle sputters.
“Blackbat!” Oracle finally spits out.
“That’s not a secret,” Cass says. “You do this with everybody he has sex with. Everybody knows.”
“Is she jealous?” Midnighter asks, voice bright with amusement. The Excedrin looks like it’s kicking in. Not lying about enhancement. “C’mon, we can be friends.”
“I have better friends,” Oracle says.
“But we have so much in common,” Midnighter cajoles. Cass would tell him not to antagonize her, but it’s more fun when people get scared too late. “Similar great taste in men, I bet there’s more. Dick’s very sharable, don’t be shy. We’ll have to compare notes. Have you belted him yet? You can really make him scream if you-,”
“Your nearest safehouse to Gotham is in New York City,” Oracle reads off, smooth-voiced in the way she only gets when she’s the cold kind of mad. “In Brooklyn! Flatbush area. 806 Ocean Avenue, apartment 2B. two beds, one bath, one thousand square feet. The floors are charming, but everything else is landlord special. I can make your rental payments from the last six months just- poof, disappear. Next closest is in Lancaster Pennsylvania, 941 Eden Road. Cute and very quaint, I like the big balcony over the sunroom, the inside looks nice and open, just enough vintage to have charm and modern enough to be sleek, nice pick. Do you know how much it costs to have full color pornographic magazines sent to your house? It’s free actually, all their little systems are online and all I have to do is futz with some numbers and they can be there by the hundreds for all your neighbors to see. They can even be vintage, if you want. Then there’s 11690 Bell Road, Lemont Illinois, look at all that wood and ugly carpet. I hope that’s a project house. A slip of my finger and the local excavation company- that’d be Donegal Services, by the by- has you on the books for total demolition next week. I see that you favor this place in Germany, though-,” As Oracle talks, Midnighter’s smile becomes fixed, and his nose begins to wrinkle under his weird mask thing. Cass tunes it out and goes back to drawing.
“I just want to let you know,” Midnighter says after another minute of this, when Oracle pauses for breath. “That I have a husband now. We are monogamous, and adopting a child. I’m a changed man.”
“That means nothing to me,” Oracle says. “You have another safehouse in London and it’s ugly. Take me off speaker, Blackbat.” Cass does. Oracle takes a deep breath. “Whenever later comes, put him in traction,” she instructs. She does not sound as calm as she probably thinks she does.
Cass nods, then remembers that she is not actually all-seeing like people like to say she is. “Don’t worry.” The call bloops off, which they are not supposed to do when someone is in the field, but she understands that Oracle probably needs to take some deep breaths and maybe punch holes in her walls. It’s not as though Midnighter is a threat to her. She doesn’t need to be babysat. She draws a couple of flowers onto the hillside, and then, deeming her masterpiece done, takes out her little bat-camera and leans back enough to take a photo of it to send to Damian later. She only overbalances and falls onto her ass a little.
“Some people just cannot share,” Midnighter remarks. Cass grunts, getting up and brushing herself off.
Midnighter stands as well and squares with her, cocky and broad, grinning a grin that makes him very punchable. No signs of migraine in the lines of his body, but there’s a difference in his stance than before- guarded. More focused on her. His fight computer must not still be working. His stance is still pure professional. This is going to be really fun. “Still up to fight?”
“Okay,” Cass says, and flips him over her shoulder onto his head when he rushes her.
Cass:
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dick. midnighter says to tell you he is allergic to me 👍
Most people are allergic to having their ass beat yeah
You are so good at selfies. Wait is he missing teeth
Cass:
😂
👍
👍
Cass:
👍
Damian:
Tell Cassandra to stop sending me these photos.
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Did you or did you not start this by sending her a drawing of her getting guillotined in victorian era clothes
Damian:
No.
Did you or did you not start this by sending her a drawing of her getting guillotined in french revolutionary war era clothes
Read 7:32 PM
M:
Did you tell your hackergirl that you me and my husband had a threesome. If you haven’t yet, could you not mention that to her.
Oh there is no point in that
She will know regardless
I dont tell her anything she simply knows
Sorry
M:
She’s going to annoy me to death.
She wont do that shes very regular she is all bark no bite. Be at peace
M:
You are delusional.
I would worry more about Troia she could turn you into mincemeat
Well
No
She wont do anything she likes it when I have a sex life that doesn’t involve grindr
Youre fine actually forget I said anything
M:
Troia knows?
Sorry
She has the play-by-play
Shes like my diary except she can make fun of me
Sorry
O just has what was in the Batman report from my spy era dont worry
M:
Why would you say that to him.
I was really mad at him
Psychological warfare is the only thing rhat works to make him feel regret. Im not proud of it
It was just a summary. Hold I can pull it for you
Quote: "Had sex with the Midnighter on an impromptu side mission collecting dangerous technology. Got belted. Strengthened ally bond. Did not receive any new information as a result of intercourse." end quote
Dont worry about it though he doesnt want to think about it
M:
Richard I’m worried.
No ive given you a tactical advantage he will literally never be able to look at or think about you without wanting to launch himseld into space
I have done you a service
M:
You have not done me a service.
I have done you a service
Batman will never choose to fight you he will run away. If the JL ever tries to take you down Batmans aura will be so uncomfortable that it will disable all of the telepaths on the team which are really the only people you have to worry about
The Flash wont kill you he likes that you fed me. He thinks I should eat more
I have done you a service
M:
Service this cock.
Don’t actually. I’m never fucking you again.
Ok
Can you ask Andrew to send me his lemon chicken recepie I have been craving it so bad
M:
Yeah he’ll email you.