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Cassie kept her littler weapons in Degas themed makeup bags (They were a set of three, her littlest brother had given them to her with affected nonchalance. He was so silly, thinking she wouldn't see the light switch on behind his eyes as she opened her gift, see the way his hands hovered near the package, the way he met her smile with one just as bright.), and enamel handles made pleasant clacking sounds as they shifted within. They were sounds that reminded her of home, of Steph's makeup bags in the bathroom of their little apartment.
She had, once or twice, sat on the counter in that little bathroom with one of Steph's makeup bags in one hand and a phone in the other and dad's voice soothing her across the line. She had once or twice heard that satisfying clacking as she listened to him knowing that all he had to say was nothing, that the world was his to mold for her and he planned to do that and do it gently.
Little brother- Timmy- had left a scrap of paper in her makeup bag between a pair of throwing knives. It was years old, his new phone number (which was now not even his last phone number) and a hastily scratched "lov u cass", but she kept it anyway. It's funny how moments become memories which become threads which become quilts which keep you warm at night. Or don't. Sometimes memory threads are not the ones you want to hold close, to permeate your dreams. She had been wearing pink the first time she took a life and no matter how much she had done to reclaim things like the color pink, she could never sleep on a pink pillowcase.
The edge of the counter was biting into the small of her back, her awareness of that fact was abrupt and unprefaced. Her feet tingled like she had been standing for a long time, and her phone was buzzing. Her hands were full of makeup bag, full of clack-clack-clacking. She shifted it to just one hand and reached for her phone.
"Little brother," she said.
"Oh, hello," said Damian on the other end of the line, in a voice that would have been more fitting had he been answering the phone. "Is all well?"
"Fine," she said, "what's wrong?"
"Oh, nothing's wrong here," he said. "You didn't answer the phone and father was worried, we've all been trying to get ahold of you."
Cass was still getting used to the way his voice sometimes held an implicit laugh these days, and not a cruel laugh as it had once been, a cruel holdover from a cruel, cruel childhood so different and yet so similar to hers. Her little brother was growing, a flourishing plant fed now with unpoisoned water, stretching with his face toward the sun in a way he had never been able to when he was smaller. He was a cactus flower, she thought. She was a water lily.
"It's good to hear your voice," she said.
"Yours, too. Are you sure everything's alright?"
Cass shook out her feet. She didn't know how long she'd been standing there, musing at the wall. Steph and Babs used to talk to her about it, used to see when she disappeared into her head and they used to know what to do. They seemed to, anyway. They had a word for it, and they had a teakettle on the stove, and their hands were often warm when they squeezed her arm.
It wasn't that anything was really wrong, but something wasn't right. A scrap of pink organza flashed through her mind, and her hand tightened on the makeup bag. Just listening to dad talk always used to help. Maybe her little brother would talk to her for a little while, maybe he would scare away that familiar feeling in her solar plexus, that chilly pit.
"Long day," she said, though she didn't know what time it was, "and I am feeling strange. Tell me about your night."
"Are you unwell? Or hurt? Someone could be there in a few hours."
Her only recent regret was that she lived too far from home for an impulsive hug. One of those probably would not have gone amiss.
"No. Just strange. You know how it feels. Tell me about your night."
"Are you sure?"
"Just miss you. Want to listen to you talk."
He laughed again, and it was a pure, unpracticed sound. There were so few sharp edges.
"I spent all night helping Jason with his engine. He's undercover as a street racer right now, absurd. He barely knows how to work on his turbo, and everyone on the street knows that he's Red Hood. He insisted that the car be red. It's so obvious it's almost painful to watch."
Cass put the makeup bag down. She lowered herself to the floor in the tiny hallway space between her tiny bedroom and her tiny bathroom beneath the tiny yellow light, her phone sandwiched between her ear and her shoulder. Everything was yellow, nothing had room to be pink. Nothing had room to scratch like organza. She stretched like she was about to dance, toes pointed, opening up one side of her ribcage and then the next. Every once in a great while she asked a question. The knot in her chest seemed like it might be working itself loose. Looser, anyway.
Damian told her about Jason's car. It had a lot of potential, he said, but not with Jason behind the wheel.
"When do you have to go?" she said, when she felt a hesitant thread at the beginning of a new sentence.
"Soon, I'm afraid. I have a lecture."
Lecture? Was dad scheduling them, now? She knew that her experience with him was different than the boys', even than Steph and Babs's experience, but making an appointment for chastisement seemed like overkill, even for him.
"Microbiology, this morning," said Damian, before she had the time to ask for clarification.
That was right, her little brother was a college student. Any time someone mentioned that to her she had to pause and acclimate to the idea. She had nonsensically sort of thought her brother paused at twelve years old for eternity, though she knew time was passing because she had watched in the mirror as the years moved her scars across her skin and stretched them to make room for new scars and the building of new muscle.
Her older brothers said that was what it meant to be an older sibling. That was how they felt about her, or so she was told.
"Have a good lecture," she said, "thank you for talking to me. Miss you."
"Miss you, too."
When he hung up, she was left looking at all the notifications she had missed. Dad had called eleven times, texted too many times to read. His paranoia ebbed and flowed, tidally locked to the level of tension between his temples. Last week, taking three hours to respond would not have elicited a reaction of this level, but this week it did. That meant there was more going on than Cass knew about. Even though her dad could see her location whenever he wanted, what he wanted was to hear her voice telling him that she was safe. As he had once soothed her down the phone lines, he was asking to be soothed back.
"Love you, dad," she said when he answered the phone.
"Is everything alright? Cassie, I've been worried sick, I've been-"
"I am alright. Love you, dad. Rest. Call you in the morning."
She hung up the phone. She was not in a state to provide more comfort than that. Behind the tinnitus, she heard her elder brother's voice in her head, reminding her to brush her teeth. She texted Jason to drive safe, and for once she slept dreamlessly. She was too tired to dream.