Archive of Our Own

In Cassandra Cain’s line of work, it was hard to map trajectories.

Hard, especially, to map the trajectory of meeting the Ravager: the smile that dripped along her face, her blacked-out mask. Her dual, divining-rod swords.

Hard to map their first fight in Blüdhaven, when Cass had left her impaled upon her own blade, dripping blood into her father’s fingers while he tried to scoop her up and put her back together.

Cass had beaten her; she’d beaten Cass. And there they’d begun the chase.

She remembered the glint in Ravager’s eye through the mask, every time they crossed paths, every time their wings brushed. You can run from me all you like. I’ll catch you. The call of a dove on the wind, red-feathered and grinning.

I’m waiting, Batgirl. Come find me.

The hunt. The chase.

And then the fall.

Ravager’s father had shot and drugged Cass unsuspecting and alone on a Gotham rooftop and all but wiped her mind. He’d dumped her at the doorstep of the Demon’s Head with a shark-toothed smile on his shark-finned face. 

And there she’d stayed.

She’d been chasing Ravager. And then the chase had stopped. They’d switched places; Rose Wilson running desperately away from her father and what he had made her into, and Cass standing obediently at his side, until she’d finally woken up.

Now she had to squint through the haze, lock onto what she remembered wasn’t real because then the things that were real were easier to see. Now she’d scrunch and unscrunch her own palms in front of her, staring down at them.

No blood, anymore. But she could still see the lines.

And all of it, apparently, had led them here.

“Well, this was a colossal waste of time.”

David Cain and Deathstroke the Terminator were making an army of girls all injected with the same poison their daughters had been. Cass and Ravager had caught onto the same scent, run straight into each other, and now they were hunting them down.

They were in an empty warehouse, standing as far apart as they could manage without needing to shout to hear each other. Cass had a compact-torch up and one gloved hand splayed against the wall, squinting into the blue-light circle it made on the brick for traces.

Traces of what, she hadn’t made up her mind. DNA. Substances. Blood. No such luck on all three counts. She pushed a breath out between her teeth and stepped back, letting the torch fall to light the scattered ground.

The place looked like it’d been stripped bare — stocked-up shelves had been torn off the walls, the shreds of their fixings all that remained, and the building was entirely gutted from the inside out. They’d missed them by hours, maybe even minutes: the room was a held breath. Just the walls and the steady drip of an unpatched leak in the roof, and the sound of dust. Steady-quiet.

Cass grunted belatedly, realising she’d forgotten to respond to Ravager’s little stab. Not that it had earned a response. She bit the inside of her cheek, and thought that the sooner they got their leads and got out of here and away from each other, the more peacefully she would sleep.

A lie, obviously. But she liked to think it.

Ravager sighed, a hard-done-by huff that only blew more dust into the air off the hanging shelf-shard she was glaring at. One half of her face was hidden by shadow, the orange half; the other was stark-black and shiny and held no features for an eye that was not there. The only part of her face Cass could see was her mouth. 

“So?” 

Cass grunted again, but she angled the noise up at the end so it would come out like a question. Ravager sighed again, more loudly. Cass had a feeling she was enjoying doing it.

“Any bright ideas?”

“Why?”

Ravager scoffed, and absently twirled the hilt of one of the swords in her hand like it weighed less than air. She held it in her long fingers like a fountain-pen, like a paintbrush. Like the bow of a violin. The only other person Cass knew who had strength like that in the knuckles of her hand was herself.

“You’re the detective, babe,” Ravager mocked. “Aren’t you supposed to be good at hunting people down?”

She took a step closer, swinging the sword up and catching it, and then hunching her broad blue shoulders down so they were nose to nose. She had to bend for it; she was taller than Cass.

“Oh, wait — I forgot. You only chase me, don’t you? Only me.”

Cass flushed, face hot. She’d never spoken it, aloud or otherwise; she’d barely let herself think at all about their little cat-and-mouse, fox-and-hound routine. It would’ve been another strike against her. Ravager was off-limits; Nightwing had said so.

“She’s had a really tough time, around him,” he’d said darkly when he’d heard about their encounter in Blüdhaven. “You know what he’s like, Cass. She’s trying. She’s got no allies. None.”

But Cass had chased her anyway. She was already standing in scraps, already had the strike. What was a little more?

And she was a detective, at least a budding one. She knew how to pick up clues. Look for avenues, find ways out or see paths that led to new options being uncovered. They’d been hoping for leads, traces of the drug, smashed tubes or chemicals dripped across the floor, but they both should’ve expected that Cain and Slade would know better than that. 

For a fleeting, fleeting moment Cass thought of the Clocktower, and felt keenly the nothing in her chest. Giant holographic screens that spanned entire walls, every wall, green and floating and able to talk and able to hear her talk back. With a person who’d taught her, who’d hurt her, who caught her when she fell. The person who gave her her name.

But she couldn’t go to Barbara. Couldn’t use Oracle. Not for this.

Ravager stilled the sword she was swinging again and slashed it through the air, uselessly, cutting the silence in impatient anger. Cass’s jaw clenched, but she stayed quiet. 

She’d had that sword held to her throat only a few days ago. Had it kissed right against her clavicle. She watched the metal gleam.

She hated blades.

Cass trailed a silent path across the floor for something else to do and then dropped down in a squat with her cape cloaking her, clicking her torchlight on again. Scattered pages lay on the ground at her feet in a puddle, sodden and unreadable, and every so often little splashes would glisten on the water in a steady drip-drip from above. Cass picked up the wet clump of words and peered at them, then flicked the torch up to stare at the hole in the roof where the rain had found its way in. She cocked her head.

Pages meant more pages, and more pages meant more information.

“We need to look harder,” she said.

She glanced to the side. Ravager had followed her trajectory and was looking up at the ceiling too, though it seemed more out of a pinched resignation than any real interest. Her mouth was already twisted in a taunt, and up the nerve in the side of her face ran a raised eyebrow.

“Oh, yeah, because this is going super well.” 

Cass rose to her feet.

“Then leave.”

That half-mask whirled back onto her so quickly she felt the air move with it. 

“Don’t tell me what the hell to do,” she bit back viciously. “I told you, Batgirl, remember? I know you hate him for what he did, but Deathstroke’s mine to handle. So as long as your dear old dad’s with him, we’re sticking closer than a tin of sardines, get it? I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

Good, Cass thought, jaw and forehead set hard as stone. We’re on the same page.

They were staring at each other; Cass had her chin up in defiance, and so did Ravager, her half-face wildfire-orange and ash-black, the mask of nonchalance, of derision, of power. Her slash of a smirk, and the anger underneath. Cass couldn’t look right at it, and she lowered her eyes; the skin under her suit felt itchy, exposed.

She listened instead to the rustle of pages in the cool night breeze. The groan of the walls. The leak in the roof. Drip. Drip. Drip.

She tried an olive branch.

“You’re like me.”

“Yeah. Poor little assassin-girls, aren’t we?” Ravager said sarcastically. She held a sword out in front of her, at the height of her waist, running an eye up the silver sheath. She looked up and smirked. “I just wear it better.”

Cass didn’t let herself tense. She wouldn’t give Ravager an inch. She wouldn’t give her anything. 

“No,” she said again, witheringly, “you’re like me.”

“Look. We don’t need to bond, Batgirl. I’d rather do anything else, to be quite honest. Just because we’re tracking the same people doesn’t mean we have to like it.”

And she turned entirely away. 

Cass let a hand fly faster than she could think, right at Ravager’s exposed back, and even faster than that she’d been caught in a grip so tight it was halfway to crushing all the bones in her wrist.

Ravager looked murderous; Cass smiled to herself. Same as always, then. This she could handle. Ravager had her held like a beam of iron; no push could have moved it, and Cass didn’t try. Instead she widened the lenses of her mask, and was sure Ravager could tell she was grinning a little underneath it. They held that way, arrested in the dance. The ghost-like lens opposite her flashed.

Cass stood silently and raised her eyebrows. 

Ravager had started paying attention. Her spine unfurled; she straightened in shock, and hope, a lily blooming tall in a patch of moonlight. She pulled back her hand attached to its tendril; it turned back into an arm. Only a few white wisps of her starlight hair escaped the mask.

“You’re precog too?”

Cass hummed out an affirmative. More or less, anyway.

”Since when were you powered?” Ravager scowled, though her low voice was coloured with disbelief. 

“I’m not.”

Ravager squinted. Her nose scrunched up, beneath the mask, and there was a little line alongside her mouth like she hadn’t made a choice yet between irritation and surprise.

“How do you do it, then?” she demanded. Cass grinned a little more, and blew a breath out her nose.

“I’m good.”

The two of them had eventually found enough scraps in the warehouse to draw a lead, and they’d twisted the clues together until it was a trail they could follow.

They followed it. Found them. Pretty soon, they were running away.

Explosives. Deathstroke had lined the walls with explosives, even though all the girls they’d drugged were in there, hanging like puppets on strings to their every word and charging like bulls when he called the command to go.

Cass threw herself flat to the floor on her stomach, heavy chunks of brick only narrowly missing her as she pressed her face to the ground with her hands over her head and squeezed her eyes shut.

She’d be fine if she got hit — she hardly felt it anymore. But one crack to the head and she was done, whether she liked it or not. Kevlar wasn’t enough to defend against a building-full of dynamite.

The side of the building was already collapsing after Slade had blown the structure out its sides, raining shrapnel and hellfire down on them in the blaze. Half the girls were missing, on the floor, motionless, or running far away from here, she hoped — but she couldn’t see, tried in vain to lift her head and push herself to her elbows —

And there she saw grey hair cropped sharp, a harness across the shirt, gun trained on her and lowering, and the hairs raised all along her arms.

The phantom that chased her in her nightmares, that held the dregs of her childhood memories in his stained-black hands. He didn’t deserve to have eyes so sad. He didn’t deserve to look.

In the doorway.

David Cain.

Through the smoke and flames, she saw him seek her out and find her, stare at her for one single, stretched-out moment with more pain on his face than she’d thought he could feel, before he turned away and vanished.

She turned back to the chaos. Bits of ceiling were still crashing down around them like scattered grenades; the walls were screaming an alarm, the heat-damage whistle high in the air. Even with the protective lenses in her mask tears were streaming down Cass’s cheeks with the smoke, thick and black, erupting from the building. She sprang up, looked around, and locked onto the two people left.

Ravager was standing, her back to Cass and outlined all in glowing orange, her hair and the strands at the back of her mask lashing back and forth in the whip-dry wind, facing her father like a pillar of stone. Ash streaked its way down one side of her jaw and dirtied her mask. She was bleeding from the side; not a lot, but enough — something must’ve caught her in the torso. She was favouring her left because of it.

And if Cass saw it, he saw it, too. 

The Ravager reached back and drew both swords, and they flared out beside her like she was a bird taking flight. Flame was engulfing the building entirely, and the roar was too loud for Cass to hear anything but ringing. She couldn’t hear what the Ravager was saying to the Terminator. But she could see the blood still gushing steady from her side; her suit was inky and dark-red and blooming. Cass tore her eyes away and watched Slade instead, falling back into the shadows where he wouldn’t be able to see an avenging angel hiding.

He had on again that sick shark-tooth smile, and his body was wound like a coil of steel, a cobra-king readying to strike. Ravager stood in the light, and Cass stood behind her, watching and watching and watching.

She wondered if Rose had ever loved him.

My father shot me and then showed me the stars. He sang me mourning-songs from inside of a cell. 

My mother killed me and then revived me again. My father just killed me.

She leapt. 

Cass kicked the juncture of Deathstroke’s wrist and hand hard enough that had he been anyone else all the bones would have shattered. She punched him in the gut for good measure and then spun around.

She was deafened to his cry of rage, already turning to shoot an arm out, clapping her hand against Rose’s sweaty palm; Rose immediately jerked backward in a full-body ricochet, and there was fury on her face and in her shoulders and the veins of her arms when they looked at each other.

“What are you —”

“Leave!” Cass shouted, though she lost momentum halfway through — she tried again, but her smoke-weak voice stuttered; there wasn’t enough air in the mask. The fumes were thickening. She was not going to be able to breathe.

She didn’t think twice. She ripped the mask up to her hairline and gasped in lungfuls of black-toxic air like it was the first breath of life.

“We have to leave!”

Rose was frozen and staring at her, her body half-turned, still aglow in the fire; Deathstroke was laughing, his body moving, looming — Cass could see his demon’s shadow rising to its feet for another strike. She ripped a sword from Rose’s fingers and slammed it by the hilt flat against her chest, urging Rose to take it, carry it, sheathe it, she didn’t care. They had to go. They had to go.

Rose lifted both arms and slammed the swords down behind her, and when she lowered her hands Cass linked their fingers together one by one so Rose would know what she was doing. She pulled her mask the whole way off and clutched it in her other hand.

Then she ran like the skulking shadows of her sleep were after her, and Rose ran right alongside her, hand in sweaty hand.

The two of them bolted like the flames on the walls themselves were rising upward and they were sinking into Hell. Around them pieces of ceiling fell, blazing down to Earth and earthquake-rocking the floor. The building was destabilising. There was no time. They would both go down in flames if she didn’t run, run, run; didn’t rip Rose out of there right now.

Cass let herself hurtle across the ground like her feet were flying, not thinking of how many girls had probably just died that they hadn’t saved, how many lives like hers had just been snuffed out in one fell swoop. 

They’d saved them from a different fate; she couldn’t think about anything else. She couldn’t think about the taste of blood in the back of her throat and underneath her fingernails when she licked her wounds. And none of it changed what she knew. 

That Rose would’ve killed him, in that room. And she would have died. 

And Cass didn’t know if she’d pulled her away from the fire or the killing.

She’d heard the words, too, though she hadn’t registered them in the thick of the ruin. Just a single line Slade had said, spat out with a smile like he relished it. She wouldn’t repeat them to Rose. Cass knew the cut would be far deeper than she could imagine.

You think you’re out of my shadow? You’ve built your dream home there, my dear.

Though Rose brought them up to her anyway.

They stopped streets away, choking on their own breath, in a black-lit alley littered with festering garbage. A stray cat hopped out of one of the bins and hissed at them; Cass forced herself not to coo at it.

Rose dropped her hand.

“He’s wrong.”

She was pacing, swords out and blades up, storming up and down the grime-slick concrete. Cass looked at her, following her with her eyes, and waited.

“It’s not his,” Rose said, face thunderous. She still wore her Ravager’s mask, but all along the line of her chin was the faint fracture of pain. It hurt to look at, split like a seam right down her throat. Cass closed her eyes. “The suit. It’s mine.”

“We are not our fathers,” Cass replied quietly. How many people had she met on every street in Gotham City that she’d said that to? It was a mantra. It burned like a flame in her belly. All she had anymore was to believe that it was true. 

She thought of dark alleyways, and a black blot moving. Set shoulders. Whited-out eyes. 

And to believe that it wasn’t.

She shook herself out of her thoughts, ran a hand through her own hair and frowned again at the feel of it, the grotesque crawl up her spine. She’d been doing that a lot lately. Too long. Get it off me.

But for now Cain was gone. And he knew she would come for him. He’d known for years.

Though not tonight.

“Alright, Saint Bat-spawn.” Rose rolled her eyes and made a sound in her throat like the scuff of a shoe, but when she turned away, she was tense like a bowstring, and her head was knelt to the floor. The muddy stain on her torso had spread.

Still favouring her left side.

“Did he do that?” Cass asked, and when Rose looked up warily, she touched at where the wound was on her own body, lifting her arm and brushing her side with gentle, gentle fingers. “To you?” It wasn’t bleeding anymore, but the pool was so dark that Cass knew she would be in the danger-zone if they didn’t find somewhere to hide fast.

Rose nodded once, stiffly. The crack in her jaw and her chin was back, a finger-stroke of tension and grief. She whistled out a sigh, facing the wall of the alley rather than Cass and staring into the middle-distance. The night air caught the ends of the ties of her mask, brushing them tenderly over her shoulder.

She looked back at Cass. There were still ash-flakes stuck to the side of her face like freckles. They’d stuck to her cheeks. They’d stuck to her mouth. 

“This isn’t working. We need to regroup.”

Cass nodded. “Plus more supplies. Better tech. I have… somewhere.”

Rose was still breathing hard, and then Cass blinked through a flash of movement and she was unmasked and wide-eyed; her white hair was peppery with sooty bits of building, all salt-speckled. Cass didn’t dare touch it. She’d stain it grey.

She waited for Rose. It was harder to read people in shock – their minds and movements were scattered. Erratic. And Rose was erratic on the best of days. 

It’s what kept you chasing.

Her face now was a void, one big brown birds’ eye blinking and a swan-sheened mask over the other. She lifted a sword and pointed it at Cass and opened her ash-flecked mouth.

“You know, Batgirl, you keep saying we’re alike, because of our fathers. Because of what they did. Your speech. My eye. But he didn’t take my eye, Batgirl. I did it myself.” Her voice was unsteady for the first time, her jaw split down the middle, and she looked up at Cass, dead in the eye. “So you got me out. Congratulations. But you don’t get to think this changes anything.” 

Cass felt a flare of irritation, and pushed it down. 

This. Which meant saving her life. Making her run. Making her not burn to a crisp in some nothing-building where none of her teammates would even know to look for her until she was already gone.

You don’t need her to be grateful, she told herself, ignoring the snaking twist in her gut. Just to be alive.

“However deep you think this is for you, it’s a lot deeper for me,” Rose said. Her face was lowered, looking down the length of her sword like it was the barrel of a shotgun. Her chest was heaving up and down; her head was angled, her gaze dark. “You don’t know the slightest thing about what he did to me. He cut out every bit of what I was. All of my family, except for him. My mind. My thoughts. My heart.”

Rose threw her mask angrily down at her feet and sheathed her swords once more, stalking down the alleyway and away from Cass.

“You stop me again,” she bit back over her shoulder, “and I’ll cut out yours, too.” 

Cass had stuck a tracker on Slade, in the explosion, when she’d hit him. Rose was extremely skeptical about it, and made it known the whole way to Gotham while Cass flew her stolen Waynetech plane and ignored her.

“What are we doing? He knows. There’s no way he doesn’t, genius. He’ll follow us.”

He would. He was already trailing after them, she knew, hunting. Wild. A greyhound.

Cass looked at Rose, and their eyes had held one long line between them, invisible, unbreaking.

“He won’t find us here,” she said.

She had a destination in mind, in Gotham City, and only half a hope that the place still existed. Barbara could’ve had it destroyed. Or Bruce. Or Dick. She didn’t know how much any of them trusted her anymore. They might’ve shut it down, or forgotten it was there in the first place. She was hoping it was the latter; it would make the most sense, considering the last year of her life.

She’d been right.

They got in, though she’d had to wrench open the rusted-shut entrance; she’d restrained herself from blindfolding Rose while they entered, though her fingers had itched the whole way along the street and down the ladder of the storm-drain as they climbed down into the dark.

“You know, the only reason I know you’re not luring me down here to kill me is because I know you’re too much of a teacher’s pet,” Rose commented from above. Cass ignored her again.

They both reached the bottom of the ladder and dropped to the floor. The little column of grey light they’d let through from the ceiling was reflecting in the screen of the big computer along the far wall; long powered down, now, since she never came here anymore. Only its hulking skeleton sat silent in the dark. Cass blinked until her eyes adjusted; her mind wouldn’t quite catch up.

This cave of hers wasn’t Cass’s home anymore, and hadn’t been for years. She didn’t know where home was. She barely had the scraps of one. This empty shell in Gotham, or the husk of an apartment in blown-up Blüdhaven, or her bare-boned little room with nothing in it of her in lovely, lavish Wayne Manor. She was always, always, having to run.

She looked around.

She’d been trying so hard. Hours and hours and hours drilling training exercises in the Clocktower with Oracle, running the same computer simulations, over and over and over, and then limping back here to do them all over again until she slept through the night from sheer exhaustion. Waiting for him to speak to her, for his eyes to soften. Waiting for the wall he hid himself behind to fall away.

Rubbing the blood off her hands, person by person. Digging the flesh out from under her nails. 

Trying to want to live. Wanting to live.

Cass knew that she’d had it. Her family. She didn't know if the rest of them thought of it that way, but Cass didn't mind. She’d always loved her father more than he loved her, too. Loved everything and everyone more desperately than she’d ever been loved back. 

She’d laughed with Steph. Laughed with Barbara, laughed with Dick. Tim didn’t laugh much outright like he used to, but sometimes he kind of snickered to himself, and he’d grin like a mad scientist if something happened that amused him, so she’d grin, too. She sat in companionable silence with Batman. It made her laugh that the only times he really smiled was when she’d made him bleed.

And she could read him, even if he pretended like she couldn't, even if she knew he tried to hold himself still around her so she wouldn't know what he was thinking. He was protective of her, and it surprised him. He was proud. He trusted her. He liked seeing her with the rest of them. She liked being there.

Now all she had were bullet-holes where people had been. And she had Rose Wilson. Who had bullet-holes, too.

She flicked the lights on.

The cave was laid out like a huge basin, and Rose walked gingerly out into the centre, spinning slowly in a circle as she looked around and stared up at the walls with her lips parted.

There were punching bags, dummies, climbing frames and balancing bars, weight-racks, storage cupboards, training mats, exercise machines, and coating the walls the entire way around were shelves and shelves and shelves that had once held weapons. Crumbling brick built up archways that stretched to the ceiling, and a railing around the basin-rim lined the upper level. Everything was washed out in cold, clinical light, though a couple of the bulbs had blown from age and disrepair.

“Not bad. Where’s Batsy?” Rose called out.

“It’s my cave. Not his.”

There was no sound in response, and after a little while Cass lifted her eyes. Rose was looking at her bemusedly with a hand on her hip, eyebrows crinkled in the centre. Childish. An expression she saw on a lot of kids, but nothing like it.

She’d struck a nerve. Or — not a nerve. An interest.

“You get your own cave?”

Like I’d take you to the real cave, Rose Wilson. Her mouth twitched. 

“Sit down.”

Rose rolled her eyes and swung a leg over the closest lifting bench so she was straddling it, then planted herself down on the padding.

Cass rummaged around in a few of the cupboards — her memory of the layout of the cave was hazed-over at best, and she’d never been one to go straight for first-aid if there was no one else there to make her. Once she’d found the box, she followed, and mirrored Rose’s straddle when she sat down so they faced each other.

“Need this gone,” she said, with an abstract tug at the material over her torso, carefully avoiding the stain at her side. Rose lifted her chin like it had been a challenge and shucked the top half of her suit down.

Underneath she wore a cropped sports top in the same cobalt-blue as her suit, and her torso was bare from the bottom of her ribs to her lower stomach so that all Cass could see as she looked downward was skin and skin and the grisly sight of the wound. It was nasty; shredded, but shallow, and the mess of blood around it was worse than the wound itself. If she was careful, it might not even scar.

The air in the cave was so warm it was tinting Cass’s cheeks, but Rose’s skin was cool when she touched it. She disinfected the wound, trying to be gentle and not knowing how, then cleaned and threaded the needle. Rose didn’t make a single sound at the sting.

Cass worked quickly, and for a while there was almost no noise in the room, only very, very quiet intakes of breath. 

“I didn’t know you knew how to sew.”

That was a funny way of putting it. Cass scrunched up her nose.

“Had lots of practice,” she said.

Rose smiled sarcastically. “Oh, I bet.”

She was leaning back, propping herself up with her hands behind her and her eye closed, breathing through her nose.

She was good, the Ravager. Only the innermost corners of her eyebrows and the very top of her nose gave away each lick of pain she felt, and Cass dipped her head, feeling guilty. They didn’t have anything to numb the pain, or if they did, she wouldn’t have recognised it.

Cass had her own face bent so close to the thread of the needle through her stomach that she felt it when Rose moved her head above her, her hair brushing in Cass’s eyes, and she looked up to see Rose looking sidelong at the far wall, at the computer and its unseeing monitor.

She cocked her chin in the direction of the screen. Cass huffed in exasperation and readjusted herself so she could keep working, tucking one leg up on the bench and shuffling herself a little closer.

“Are there files on us?” Rose asked. 

Cass was quiet for a moment, pinching the thread between her fingers. She’d checked this fact. She’d checked it more than once.

“Not you. Not anymore. Nightwing erased it.”

She looked up again through the fall of silver and saw Rose gazing down at her from where she’d leant back on her hands. They watched each other.

Cass ducked her head. Her face was warm.

“There’s one on Jericho,” she said.

She’d checked this too, while she’d been planning her attack, out of curiosity. When Nightwing had caught her in the cave – the real cave.

He’d walked in, arms and skin and face akimbo, his fury following the birdswing symbol over his suit, and then glanced up to the screen and stopped short, his face screwed up, little hairline fractures bursting outward from his chest. But Rose breezed by it easier than Cass thought she would. Maybe it wasn’t so surprising. Maybe she already knew to expect the worst.

She only ticked her mouth upward and watched the long-dead screen again. “Bet the one on Slade’s a mile long.”

Cass nodded, and wanted to tell her that before Dick had walked in she’d found a file on herself, and didn’t know why she wanted to.

Rose was getting a good look now, shifting her stomach to turn, swivelling her head back and forth, up at the underground roof, the jagged rock lining each of the walls, the small bedroom set-up and the few knick-knacks Cass had left there when she and Tim had run from Gotham after Steph — after Steph. All the moving jostled her half-done stitches; Cass had to grab at her waist to still her, and growled under her breath. Rose made a noise of deep approval.

“So remind me again what your argument is for not just staying in here?”

“No.”

Too many people already lived in here. Too many memories. She didn’t want to be buried with them again.

“We should… hide in plain sight.” And if they dropped off the map entirely, Cass was sure the whole calvary would come calling. She said as much to Rose. “Won’t your teammates… wonder where you are?”

Rose laughed out loud at that, one single sharp crack in the air, and let her head rock forward.

“God, you’re behind the times, aren’t you? I dropped out of the Titans. They couldn’t care less. They still don’t let me —“ She sighed, agitated, blowing out one long breath through her teeth and throwing her head back to catch the ceiling in a glare. The artificial lights trickling down made the sweat on her shoulders gleam. “It’s been months — years — and they all still think I’ll gut them in their sleep.”

Cass swallowed, and swallowed again. She opened her mouth.

“You don’t scare me,” she said. Uselessly.

Rose’s face didn’t change, but the crease of her eye moved infinitesimally, though Cass still caught it. 

It was odd, how people could smile with no smile.

“Hooray for you, Batgirl. Now give everyone else the memo.”

Rose was still staring at the ceiling, and for some reason now she was smiling. Cass tilted her head and watched her, watched the tilt of her chin, of her swan’s neck sweeping downward. 

White hair, like feathers, like silk. White hair down her back, pale lashes, pale brows.

Petals. 

“I hated you for so long,” Rose breathed out finally, letting her head fall to lock eyes again with Cass a foot away.

She was still smiling. Odd, on a swan. Cass swallowed the breath she’d taken, and the thought.

Beautiful.

“You were a worthy opponent for him,” Rose murmured. “One of the only worthy opponents for him. But he didn’t know it until we all went on our little group picnic together and you stabbed me with my own blade.”

She’d pulled one of her swords from its sheath and had it laid across her lap, running a loving hand up the middle of the blade. Cass didn’t move. It was hard to get her fumbling fingers to remember how to thread a stitch. 

“He never let me forget it,” Rose said, bitterly. “Never let me forget how I’d failed him before I even started.”

She heard what Rose wasn’t saying. Unrelenting. Formidable. If there was anything Cass knew in her stitched-together shell of a life, it was formidable. 

Rose looked at her. “That’s why he went after you. It was a fair trade with Nightwing and Robin, after everything they’d apparently done. You take mine, I’ll take yours too.”

Only Slade hadn’t had all the information, Cass thought, with a sad little tilt to her mouth. Nobody’d given him an update. She sat back with the needle and admired her handiwork, admired the sheen of her stomach. She could feel her own blood beating in her bones.

Dick hated her. Tim had put walls up against her. Bruce didn’t talk to her. Barbara was far, far away from her. 

And Stephanie Brown was dead.

“Listen,” Rose said abruptly above her. “You know why, don’t you?”

Cass hummed, a murmur in her chest. Don’t think this changes anything had changed something.

She ended the row of stitches, dressed the wound, and then bandaged it, looping her arms around Rose Wilson’s waist while she was watched by white-feathered hair. Then she sat up so they were at eye-level again, though Rose was still leaning back on her hands, stomach moving up and down as she breathed.

Done, Cass tried to whisper, only nothing came out.

“I know you’re Saint Batgirl, or the Holy Ghost, or whatever, and you’d never dream of getting blood on your hands.” Rose’s jaw tensed, and she looked away. “But you get it. Right?”

She did.

Do you?

“What he’s done. To everyone. To me and Joey. To my — my mum. All he ever does is hurt us. And you know.”

What it’s like, the unspoken end of the sentence echoed in the quiet. Cass thought of stars, and she thought of skin breaking, and of warm blood. Panic. Pain. And endless, endless, quiet.

She nodded. Rose spoke again.

“Then you know it’s not your decision to make.”

Cain didn't deserve anything from her. He never had. He deserved to rot down to his very core until he was turned inside out and faded away. She still couldn’t look Rose in the eye.

Cass knew some answers were more complicated than anybody was ready to hear; than anybody was ready to say. So she nodded again. And she pretended that she didn’t know what Rose was asking her. And she pretended she didn’t know the answer.

If I killed, would you forgive me?

She answered it instead with a question of her own.

They were here now. Might as well ask.

Cass stood from the bench, swinging her leg back over it, and after a second of eyeing the sword across Rose’s lap, offered her hand.

“You want to train?”

Rose laughed.

“Oh, you’re going to pretend like you’re not just asking so you can take me down?” But she was smirking.

Cass’s skin warmed.

They walked the lay of the room, following the curve of the basin, and Cass had to force herself not to trail her hand along the wall. Rose tapped at Cass’s belt, touching the empty slots where she kept her batarangs; she’d used them all up during the explosion.

“You got any more of those to throw?” 

Cass frowned. ”You’ll rip your stitches,” she said, and Rose rolled her eyes.

“You asked to train.”

That was true, but really she’d meant more stretching, maybe some light hand-to-hand sparring, kicking the punching bags hanging in coils from the ceiling. 

But Rose was glimmering underneath the LEDs, a cold light, a star. A moon. 

“Just want to see if I can do it,” she pushed. “I’m great with knives, but these are different. I asked Robin, once, but he just blanked me.”

“Yeah. He does that.” A twinge ran through her chest. Broken Tim. Rose had never met him, before. But they’d all been broken by now. 

There wasn’t much in here, admittedly, but a few stray batarangs had been left up on the wall, so she walked over to pull them down.

It was only when she’d gotten closer that Cass realised who they belonged to, and why they were still there.

She brought a hand up, tracing a line soft as a sunflower along the edge of the closest batarang. Or — they weren’t quite batarangs, since she’d never gotten the chance. She’d made them herself, instead, out of crappy metal scraps and fibreglass edges, and she’d shaped them slightly differently. They worked like a charm.

Cass’s fingers didn’t shake as she touched it. She had too much command over her own body for that.

She ripped the batarang down and threw it at the padded wall opposite in a single lightning-quick strike. 

It split a clean seam up the side of the padding, and the foamy beige insides gaped a wound out at the two of them. Rose made a noise of alarm, but didn’t say anything about whatever black cloud had come down over Cass so fast. She walked forwards, and Cass could feel her body behind her, the heat of her skin buzzing. She pulled another batarang down and looked at it with hard eyes.

“Why’re they purple?”

Cass’s lips parted. 

It was strange, when you disappeared, how much life you left behind.

“Stephanie.”

Rose walked around to Cass’s other side so she was in view. So she can look at my face.  

But if anyone could read the way Cass could read, Rose would have long looked away.

“Who?”

Cass didn’t answer. She grit her teeth and threw another.

They hurled the things at the wall for hours, until both their shoulders had seized up and Rose was groaning, bent over with her chest heaving and hands on her knees, clutching at a shoulder and rolling it every so often. She kept having to sweep the sweaty hair back from her face. Cass kept having to tell herself not to look.

She’d offered to check her dressings, once, but Rose had glared, and Cass left it alone.

They’d eventually stood on opposite sides of the room and practiced throwing them at each other, though Cass had training ones for this, and she made Rose put her Ravager mask and the top half of her suit back on before she let her stand in the path of a weapon. Rose had rolled her eyes but smirked at her as she slipped it on and did up the ties.

Maybe not a smirk. Maybe just an amused smile.

It was fascinating to watch her train. To watch her fly. Her body was fluid and precise, moved with ease, and her limbs were always held somehow in a way she could use to her advantage. She was always aware of exactly what she could do with her own power, exactly how to conduct the orchestra.

Rose turned away, now, mask off, and after a moment Cass saw the strap of the eyepatch come up and Rose’s hand wash over her face, wiping the sweat gathered at her browbone and underneath her eye. She’d gathered her hair up somewhere during the second hour, after biting out that she was sick to death of blowing it out of her face, and the ponytail hung like one long silver dagger down her back.

Cass shook her head to unstick her own hair from the sweat, hating it brushing the nape of her neck, sticking to her spine like creeping fingers. It was long, far longer than she’d ever worn it before, not since she was really little. She’d scrunched it up into a knot, but there were threads coming loose, and they dangled excruciatingly against her skin, like tiny white-hot needles.

Long hair reminded her of pink dresses and pigtails, and those things reminded her of hot, slick blood sliding over her hands. 

And she hated how much it told about the passing of time. What it told about how much she'd lost of herself.

It was far too hot in the cave now; Cass had pulled the top half of her suit down too and was trying and failing to pull the gloves off her oil-slick fingers. She made a noise of irritation; there was a burst of breathed-out laughter behind her, and then Rose slid her fingers deft and loose up the spikes of her outstretched arm, the jagged little crescents at the side.

“Do the gloves help?” she questioned in a disbelieving voice. Cass nodded once.

“Grip is better.”

Rose flicked one of the spikes with her fingers, and then dropped her hand.

“Scary.” 

She was smirking. The fox’s smirk. Cass swallowed down whatever it was that was bursting forth in a flood. She closed her eyes, and thought again of her father.

Cain had taken the stars. But he couldn’t take the moonlight.

Rose dragged them to Big Belly Burger and got them three peoples’ worth of food, then tore into it all like a woman starved. 

Cass ordered her fries and forgot to eat half of them. Somehow her eyes kept getting stuck on watching Rose swallow.

They’d lifted spare clothes from one of the storage cupboards in the cave — Steph’s shirt and a pair of Tim’s cargo shorts for Cass, and one of Barbara’s old Gotham U jumpers for Rose, who’d opted to keep the bottom-half of her suit on, arguing that it was inconspicuous enough, so stop nagging, you freak.

They got a motel room in the East End that looked cheap and more than a little run-down but had four walls and a roof, and Cass wasn’t picky. More than half the rooms were vacant, so they were undisturbed as they walked in with only the clothes on their backs, and their suits and weapons tucked surreptitiously under their shirts. The only things in the sad little room were two cardboard-like single beds, a desk by the door, and a broken mini-fridge.

Both of them showered quickly, one after the other, and the hot water ran out halfway through Cass’s, but she didn’t mind — since after she got out they realised the air conditioner was broken and the air inside was muggy. 

Within minutes Cass's ponytail was sticking to the back of her neck again. She could feel it like pinpricks all up and down her spine.

She twitched, and it moved, settled; she twitched again, cricking her neck, and it followed. She swatted it away and it stuck to her clammy fingers. Cass realised that her breathing was picking up. The threads were a boot on the back of her neck, a thousand boots, of black-clad acolytes, smiling eyes and sparkling sharks’ teeth that bit down on her and bled.

She itched for her own clothes, for her own skin. Baggy trackpants and tank tops or shirts that were five sizes too big and Steph had taken a pair of scissors to, and hair that was short and frayed like she liked it and didn’t touch the back of her neck. She wished she could leave it to mat and it would fall off itself. She wanted it all gone.

Her eyes were wide, and flitted around the room for a solution, for an escape hatch, anything —

There was a complimentary pair of office scissors resting on the desk, next to the little notepad and the busted phone to ring the motel reception.

Huh.

“Cut my hair,” she said into the thick silence.

“I’m sorry?”

Cass turned her head, and let her eyes lock on Rose: nose scrunched up, her moon-spill of hair slipping over her shoulders, jumper-less with the suit still pulled down to her waist and the little white nicks up and down her arms the whispers of scars from every fight she’d been forced into. Cass wore her own just like them, only less lovely.

Her neck itched, phantom pain only becoming more real. The more she thought it, the more she felt it. She was going to die if she didn’t get this hair off her right now.

“Cut my hair. Ravager, please, can you —”

“Alright! Jesus.”

Cass clumsily stumbled over to one of the beds and half-sat, half-fell onto it, sitting slumped forward with her hands gripping the end of the bed tightly, breathing through the feeling, in and out and in. Rose was moving around the room, but Cass didn’t look up.

After a little while, the bedsprings creaked behind her.

They didn’t turn any of the lights on; outside, the moon was full, and the stars were entirely alight, even if half were hidden by grimey Gotham pollution. Instead they sat in the dark — they were both used to it.

Cass, with her legs folded in front of her and her spine so stiff and straight it was starting to hurt, and Rose mirroring the stance behind her. Cass could feel the tips of her knees digging in on either side of her hips, and the warmth of the breath on the back of her neck. She could smell her fresh shampoo. They smelt the same.

Something ran soft and hesitant through her hair, and after a moment Cass realised it was Rose’s fingers. 

“You want me to do anything in particular?”

“Just… off my neck.” She wanted the sticky pads of fingers not to stick anymore. She wanted to feel the breeze.

Rose breathed out a laugh, and it flared hot along the top of her spine. 

“I can do that.”

The room was quiet as she worked, the only things audible the noise of the city, their breathing, and the chop-chop as Rose hacked at her hair. The scissors were blunted and made an atrocious shearing sound as they cut, but they kept at it, and after a while Cass could feel the little feathers falling down, falling away. She closed her eyes, and felt so relieved she almost fell out of her own body.

It was then that Rose chose to ask.

“Are you going to tell me who Stephanie is?”

Cass looked out the window. They were in the East End. How many times had she hopped these rooftops hoping for the sun?

“She’s… Was my…”

My best friend. My sparring partner. The person I play rooftop tag with. The person I see when I die. 

The only one of them who comes to find me.

“She was Robin’s. Robin’s Stephanie. She died.”

Rose was quiet for a while, and then, ”Jeez. I didn’t know his girlfriend had died.”

“It was before you were here.” She could hear the faint smile in Rose’s teeth when she replied.

“Right. When I was still there.”

Still swimming among the sharks.

Cass wondered if Tim had told any of his friends, or if they’d just found out on their own. It explained why Rose hadn’t known. Not if they never told her anything anyway.

She empathised with Tim, and it made her miss him more. I can’t talk about Steph either. This was the first time she’d spoken it out loud. Hard to stare at the sun without looking away.

Rose’s brother had died too, Cass knew. Dick had mentioned it. He was back now, but far away, and going nowhere. Locked up in S.T.A.R. labs inside the clone of a clone’s body, and Rose wasn’t allowed to see him. Cass took a stab in the dark.

“Do you miss… Joey?”

Rose was silent, and she cut, cut, cut, sometimes taking pauses, sometimes threading her fingers through the dregs of Cass’s hair like it was something delicate. She’d never known the Ravager could hold anything so gently.

Then she spoke.

“I just miss my mum. She used to do this for me.” She paused, and there was a small snipping noise, and then Cass felt the warm fingers move again. “She said I had hair like a nightingale.”

Cass didn’t say what her first thought had been, and thought instead of her own mother, hanging on a butcher’s hook, strung up by her own hand. She thought of collapsing to her knees and burying her face in Barbara’s.

It took her a shockingly long time to notice that the shearing sound had stopped.

Rose stood from the bed, causing the surface to bounce, discarded the fistful of ragged black hair with her hands cupped together, then turned to face Cass, who had her elbows up and her fingers buried in her hair.

It sat just below the lobe of her ear now, kicking upward in the smallest curl beneath it, shaggy around the front of her face but none of it touching the back.

Cass couldn’t find any voice in her throat to let the words come out. She had to settle for whispering it.

“Thank you,” she said, and Rose hummed back wearily. Cass frowned.

“You’re exhausted.”

“Yeah, no shit.” Rose looked back at her, and a strange smile flashed across her face before she turned away to adjust the straps of the holsters on her legs. “Don’t, ah — worry about me, Batgirl.”

She’d broken into a yawn in the middle. Cass bit out a curse that spiralled up into the air, and Rose smirked her way through another yawn.

“You need to sleep,” Cass said. “I can watch.” 

Rose lifted an eyebrow “And what in the hell makes you think I’d trust you enough to do that?”

Cass just kept on looking at her.

Rose breathed out a long-suffering sigh — she was great at those, apparently — and then threw herself back down onto the bed atop the ratty brown quilting, arms resting up by her head, hair fanning out like a clam-shell and even paler in the dim light. Like this, Cass could see the silvery scar pulled taut at the base of her throat, a larger nick that hadn’t gone away. She stared at it like it was her own fingerprint. 

“If you take my swords,” Rose said tiredly, already closing her eye, “I’ll find you. Don’t think I won’t.”

Cass smiled softly.

“I’ll wake you up. If something happens.”

“You better, Batgirl.”

Then — then — instead of moving up to lay back on the pillow, Rose shuffled over to where Cass was still sitting cross-legged and curled herself around so she was tucked into Cass’s side, her head in the crook between Cass’s hip and upper thigh. She looked like a cat curling up to sleep, her long hair tickling Cass’s legs where her shorts had rucked up and the skin was showing. She was burning, burning; she’d never felt so warm in her life.

“Go to sleep, Rose,” Cass whispered.

Rose. Rose. I’ll keep watch. I promise.

Watching people sleep was one of the things that intrigued Cass most, but she knew it was odd, and probably invasive, so she didn’t do it very often.

But the way people looked when all their defenses were down, when they could hide nothing. That was when there was the most to read. That told more of the story.

Rose Wilson slept with her fingers wrapped around her swords.

One in each hand. Like a conductor. They were hugged to her chest and curved down into her body, still sheathed, like she was holding her finger on the safety of a gun.

She also, Cass found out pretty quickly, slept like the dead. Mouth just barely opened, her lips parted around an exhale. Her skin was flushed, in the heat of the room, burning across her temple and down the swoop of her cheekbone. Her face was so much softer like this.

Cass pressed a hand to her own face and felt the same flush.

Rose’s eyebrows were drawn together in a frown, just a small one, and Cass wondered what she dreamt about. Whether the dreams were as bloody as her own.

And she’d taken her eyepatch off.

You couldn’t tell, that was the thing, in the dark and with her eyes closed. You couldn’t tell she’d been hurt at all.

Cass reached out, to do who-knows-what; she’d lost her mind completely and was clearly on track to losing all of her fingers to match. She just wanted to touch that finesilk hair, like spun glass, the strings of a violin, dew-lines in the morning when the grass was pale and silver-wet. Like an exhale.

Her hand faltered, and fell. Rose was trained to absolute perfection — by the Titans and Deathstroke the Terminator. She’d probably strike without thinking, especially if she already thought she wasn’t safe. Was already on her guard.

She’d have to make do with the tiny touches of it at her wrists, her thighs, her ankles. The warmth pressing into her leg. Her heart was pounding. What are you doing?

Cass bit her lip and watched the moon and didn’t breathe all night.

She slipped away, once the sky had faded to early-morning purple.

Rose hadn’t stirred; one of her blades had slipped from her hand, and Cass reached in to gently push it closer, clenching her other fingers in a fist so she wouldn’t touch anything else: the skin of Rose’s arm, the swan-silk of her hair. She was gentle silver in the dark, under the hunter’s moon. Cass climbed out the window facing inward until the very last second, and then didn’t look back.

She made quick time, grappling in full view where she might usually have stuck to the shadows. There was no one around; they were in a silent city. Silent enough for roses to sleep through.

Rose had said she couldn’t take down Slade. She’d forbidden it. Threatened Cass’s life on it. 

But he won’t tell. She’d never know.

And he would stay away.

The building was up ahead, a lone blot on the silhouette of identical stripped-back skyscrapers. The building where he’d drugged her.

Cass was glad she couldn’t remember much of it. She barely remembered the hit, or any of the days after. She remembered blurring water, and the days thickening and then thinning. She’d been a cold, empty void, black in the centre, black in her ledger, black in the places her memory used to be. 

She didn’t have to wait long.

“Batgirl.”

There was no need for stealth; she knew and he knew that both of them were too fast for it. Deathstroke dropped down onto the roof in front of her and stood like the trunk of a tree, broad, bloody forearms crossed over his chest. His daughter’s blue-and-orange was tainted on him, her white hair lined with his shark’s fins.

He loomed, but there was ease in him, a laxness; his confidence, no doubt. He stood there like a harpoon with a grin on its face.

Cass looked up at him with only her eyes, refusing to lift her head. He would earn none of her attention.

“I have to admit I’m surprised you’re still hanging around my daughter,” he mused, eyepatch lifting in a quirked brow she couldn’t see. “Your old man’s gone. He packed up and left like the spineless dog he is.”

“I know.” He looked surprised, underneath the scorn, and she smiled slightly. “Don’t need him. Just you.”

She stretched into a defensive stance, knowing she’d need one with him, with his speed, his reflexes. His hunger.

Time to fight the choir.

There were more voices in him this time even than the last. He gathered them, every time they met. Every person he hurt. But so did she.

She could take him. She’d taken him in a fight before. It had been a draw. This time, she’d give him a reason to wear eyepatches on both sides of his face.

No.

Cass closed her eyes.

Thought of Rose, whose family were either dead or awful or taken from her again and again because of what their father had done to them, whose friends were not friends, who still did not trust her after all this time, after every moment they’d all spent fighting at each other’s sides. And Cass, who’d been building herself the bits of a family and then cut it clean in two, cut herself off from it with blind sight and then woken up alone in the cold. 

His grin had widened; he looked half-ready to break out into a laugh, like he was revelling in it. He could read her, she realised, and it made her sick.

“All your anger, and it’s all for her, isn’t it? Don’t you want to get back at me yourself, Batgirl? Your pound of flesh?”

Fathers were blades pointed towards their children. They took her speech, took Rose’s sight. Broke them. Shot them. Cut them down.

“Don’t touch her.” Don’t you dare.

“Ah, so loyal. My Rose’s little attack-dog, aren’t you? But where are your usual suspects?” He looked around the skyline in a squint, as if he expected the lot of them to swoop in. Mocking her. Cass’s mouth screwed up. She weighed her odds. He had bulk, she had power, precision; he had souped-up speed, she had Batman’s hands, and Shiva’s teeth. 

“I suppose they’ve given up on you, too. Just like your dad. I told that washed-up fool he should lock himself back in Blackgate for all the trouble he’s caused me. He broke his precious little angel once and lost all his grit, but she’s still reachable.”

“She doesn’t belong to you,” she growled. 

He scoffed, throwing his hands in the air. “You think she wears that suit as a reclamation? You think she’s truly split with me? Those children abandoned her, because they don’t trust her. Because of me. Because they know. And you still seem to think that just because she hasn’t said it to you she doesn’t know, too.”

Liar. He was a liar. A monster. Still standing there with the laughter etching out his eyes and nose, tracing the flick of his wrists.

“I’ve beaten you before, girl,” he taunted. “What exactly is it you expect to go differently this time?

Cass felt her eyes crease up, and the stitched-up mouth shift in a smirk.

“We tied.”

She remembered it. Every thought. Every action. Mediocre for a lifetime, or perfect for a year.

She had to be perfect. Perfect. He would not take her again.

She bit.

In the brittle beat of a heart, he launched, lunged, and whip-fast, blink-fast, she let herself strike.

Cass wrenched aside the cave opening and groaned, half-collapsing down into the storm-drain, clanging her way down the rocky ladder and wincing at the stretch against her bruising ribs.

It was better than it could’ve been — he hadn’t been able to draw blood, and she was all in one piece. Mostly. But she was pretty sure she’d broken her hand stupidly throwing a punch with no form, wild white anger filling her stomach, her whole body, as she struck, struck, struck, and he’d laughed —

She needed to patch herself up before she headed back to the motel. She’d… wear long clothes, to hide the bruises. And make-up on her knuckles. 

Maybe she should go punch a wall before Rose woke up so the lie was believable.

Cass slipped her feet down to the floor and immediately had the wind knocked out of her with a punch.

She staggered back, and was slammed again, bodily, but this time she was ready, and she matched the move with an arm like a pillar, her back braced and her teeth clenched. She held fast against the onslaught, arm extended, and the air rolled and roiled; there were hands on her shoulders, her neck, she deflected — and then a bared forearm was pressed against her jugular and forced her backward so hard her head tipped against the wall.

This was no easy spar. No training exercise. The arm pressed harder; Cass couldn’t see properly, eyes blurry from the strain — the lights glinted, glimmered, like stars, and in the centre of her focus glowed the moon — 

She looked through lowered lids at Ravager, an inch away and baring her teeth, sword at her side, and breathed, and breathed, and breathed.

There was no way Rose could see any of the bruising she was pressing, mottled and black-purple and probably blooming ripe over her sternum, her shoulder, her stomach. But it didn’t matter. When Ravager spoke, her voice was black as a plunge, and every piece of her smile Cass had collected in the last few days was gone.

“Did you go to him?”

Cass’s sparse little half-breaths were becoming pants, still catching air in her lungs from the burst of a fight, from the pressure on her windpipe. She didn’t answer; it was an answer in itself.

She watched anger run along Rose’s shoulderblades, betrayal, shock, and pain, so much pain, and then it settled below the surface. Like biting a lip. Her fist curled and uncurled low over the hilt of her sword, like the blade was crooning softly to her for a go, for a taste.

“You little traitor.”

Rose shoved her harder into the wall, black shadows now bouncing in Cass’s line of sight; her throat was being crushed, and nails raked down the side of her throat. Cass gasped in pain, shot upward with her fists, and she whirled —

Rose hit back every single move as good as she got, her face off-kilter, dark. Her defence and her spin-kicks were still her strength — but Cass could dance, too.

Elbow. Elbow. Hand. Kick. Jump. Kick again, blade —

Both the blades were drawn, and Rose was leaping, her face a scorch of anger, every tiny line in her body hard as stone, hard as steel, an iron girl with titanium limbs and a rose-thorned face. She spread her twin swords like wings.

She’d always fought like a choir, tracked Cass like a wild fox, hunted like a perfect mirror. Now, she fought like she was in flight, like she was rising, and Cass was falling.

Cass caught her wrists, arms crossed, leaning back so they were the perversion of partners in a dance, holding her steady, and Rose let out a wild shriek of rage, her white lens flaring wide. Cass pushed her off and threw her backward, and then grit her teeth, stubborn, as the blows rained down again and again and again.

“You don’t even feel bad!” Rose screamed. “How could you, do you have any idea what this means to me, you of all people should —“

There should be guilt, and there was, so much, but only at the thought she’d made her hurt. Not at what she’d done. She didn’t feel bad, and it cracked her open to the hollow underneath. Don’t you know I’d do it again?

She’d do whatever it took. Nobody dies. Not anybody. Not Cain. Not Slade. And not… not Rose.

One sword was knocked aside with a flick of her wrist; Cass flipped it, kicked it, spun herself back to grab at the wall and launch one of the still-hanging batarangs at it to knock it far out of Rose’s reach. Rose was marching, her legs moving like a storm, hair and the ties of her mask billowing, a faint fingerprint-shaped bruise already speckling blue along her jaw that Cass had put there, and Cass felt sick, but she had to, had to. Had to.

Rose lifted the other blade with both hands wrapped around the hilt, her elbow locked, and she launched, and Cass could do nothing but catch the sharp of the sword in her hands.

She looked down, chest heaving. There was blood dripping down across the crevices of her closed fists and onto the floor, the sting dull. Cass squeezed harder and looked back at Rose.

Her body was shaking. It was crying out to Cass, and she almost let go, then, almost, at the way Rose’s arms, cheeks, collarbones were calling grief, grief, grief. Cass shuffled her stinging fingers along the blade, regripping and regripping the sword until they were closer, and Rose barely reacted.

“Rose.”

“Don’t call me that. Don’t you dare.”

“Nobody dies.”

All of her teeth pulled back in a snarl. She looked like the aftermath of an explosion. “It’s not your decision!”

One of Cass’s hands was near the hilt, the hilt Rose was holding aloft against her face as she choked out her anger. Cass lifted her trembling fingers to swipe feather-light along her cheekbone, her jaw, down her chin, and Cass watched Rose watch her, watched her track the movement and falter even as a little dart of misery streaked through her like red ink running over her feathered chest.

“Nobody dies,” Cass whispered again, not letting her eyes fall from Rose’s agonised face.

It was quick after that. A lancing cry and swing of the blade, a ducking, a leg thrown out, two hits deflected with forearms, a catch of her hair, a slow stumble, a strike that Cass watched fly up her arm before it came, and then —

— and then the sword was sinking into her throat.

It sheared through her skin, muscle, bone, nerves, and it was white, white, white —

white —

white —

Her vision cleared.

Rose was standing in the same position, a foot from Cass and no further, her grip on the sword entirely loose, her gaze blown wide. She’d pulled her mask off at some point and tossed it on the floor at their feet, or where Cass assumed was at their feet; she couldn’t look down. She lifted a hand to her throat — tried to, at first, but touched only air; the second time, her numb fingers felt the sword buried to the hilt in the hollow of her neck.

Cass thought she might’ve gasped, but she couldn’t tell. She couldn’t breathe. Rose was looking at her like she was the only thing still holding Cass upright. Looking at her with her petal face, petal cheeks. Rose-petals.

A sunflower and a rose. A moon-lily. She’d built herself a garden to die in all alone.

“Why?” Rose bit out. “Why would you do that, after all we’d been doing, after —“

She cut herself off, black flitting across her face, tensing her fists. Cass let her head thunk gently back against the wall.

“He doesn’t deserve you,” she breathed out, unable to raise her voice any further. She could feel the blood leaking steady, steady from the wound. Knew the only reason her clock was still ticking was because Rose hadn’t pulled out the blade. Without her, you’ll die.

“I told you he was mine. How could you?”

“Didn’t work.” Her breathing was starting to get lighter, and Cass made a noise in the back of her throat. She hadn’t even gotten him good enough to justify what she’d done, and Rose knew it.

“Do you think I care? You stabbed me in the back! I told you all about the Titans, why I left them, why — but you were just taking notes, Batgirl, weren’t you!”

No, she tried to croak out, but couldn’t manage it. Her head was getting fuzzy.

“He’s — a monster. Not saveable. You — are saveable.”

“How many times have I told you that I don’t need saving?”

But there weren’t words for the way Cass’s fingers itched for it, the way her whole body burned, the way she wanted to tear the wings from her own back and stitch them onto Rose. She wanted to scoop her up in her fingers and hold her to her heart and push her inside of her own chest. She wanted to snap the rotten swords in half and swallow them whole.

Instead all she did was repeat the words one more time and let them grasp the two of them like thorns.

“He doesn’t — deserve you.”

The arc of Rose’s throat was dancing up and down in the blue-ish light, her chin high, so proud, so graceful, and then she reached a bitten hand up to cup the side of Cass’s face, her palm worn and ticklish. She’d wiped blood all over Cass’s neck. She was brushing her cheekbone with her fingers.

The smell of metal was tangy and copper-sharp in the air. The smell of Cass’s childhood. Of Rose’s adolescence. This, more than anything, was the scent of home.

“Shit,” Rose was saying, for some strange reason, since Cass was pretty sure she’d said point-blank that she would slit Cass’s throat and was only upholding her end of the bargain. “Shit, Batgirl —“

“Cassandra,” Cass breathed out. Cassandra. Cassandra of the Oracle.

Hah. Not anymore.

“What?”

“It’s…” she coughed, “Cass. Cassandra.”

Rose had already seen her face. And her identity had never been worth as much as theirs, not when she was only looking through the door. She’d told Barbara that, so long ago. 

Rose lifted an eyebrow, and then she — laughed.

“Really? You couldn’t’ve had a different name to Wonder Girl?”

They were so close to each other that Cass’s blood was getting in Rose’s hair and turning the ends salmon-pink. Cass reached up and gently caught them between her index and middle fingers, fiddling with the feathers. They were sticky. Beautiful. She’d spent all night wanting to do this.

She dragged on a breath, and couldn’t quite manage it, hacking out a cough that sprayed red along the floor. Rose was still smiling her pearl-petal eye-smile, but she’d gone shockingly pale, and now both of her hands were cupping Cass’s neck, staining her pristine fingers.

“It’s alright. You’re good, you’re fine. I’ll call someone.”

“Not Nightwing,” Cass rasped, her eyes slipping briefly shut. “Doesn’t — trust me.”

“Yeah, well, he’s our one bet on actually picking up, so he can deal. I’ll guilt him into it.”

“Done it… before. It’s alright, Rose.” 

Rose was really close to her now, one hand tucked under her chin, and Cass got the sense that maybe she’d started to hold her up and that she just couldn’t feel it. Couldn’t feel anything.

“You’ve done what before?” she demanded. Cass smiled, and felt a big globule of blood leak out of her mouth, staining her teeth. 

“Died.”

Rose rolled her eyes. “You’re not going to die, you overdramatic little freak. Ten minutes, remember?”

She did. She’d said it so long ago, hadn’t she?

Another ten minutes. Unless you save her.

She remembered other things. 

I’ve never even kissed anyone before, to Stephanie. And then touches of lips that meant nothing, nothing, that felt like nothing, with boys who looked at her with their faces open and made her feel sick in her stomach.

She remembered. So she tried it. 

“I’ve never — kissed anyone before.”

She hadn’t. Those weren’t kisses. Those weren’t anything at all.

Rose smiled then, that sly thing she did that was half a smirk. “I used to want to kiss your brother,” she said.

Cass’s chest shuttered, already a fluttering heartbeat. Who? Tim? No. Dick. Would this be another strike against her? 

She hadn’t even remembered to correct Rose, to say that they weren’t really siblings. Not yet. Not ever, now. 

“Really?”

Rose smiled again, the fox’s smile, the swan’s hair, the petal face. She parted her lips, and Cass’s chest opened. Rose was a breath away from her, half a breath, the silver of her hair slipping down into Cass’s. They’d become midnight and the moon, black-and-white birds, the stars Cass had watched when she was little and the world was different.

“No,” Rose whispered quietly, and she closed the gap. 

Her mouth wasn’t like petals, it was like blades, like swan-feathers, like downy silk and the smell of her hair and the press of her head against Cass’s leg all night. Rose pried Cass’s mouth open like it was the takings of a fight and she was the victor, her hands in fists, along her collarbone, in her hair, the hair she’d cut with her own hands, that Cass had trusted her with a blade against, so close to her neck, to her throat —

Their heads bobbed; Rose bent and Cass soared upward, arm coming up to clutch at her back, fingertips against her armour, the point of her elbow kissing the crook of Rose’s waist. Rose was holding her chin in one hand and steering the way she tilted her head, the way she bent, and Cass was following, following, chasing her when she moved, chasing her when she ran, always, the two of them, always the chase. Rose pulled Cass’s lip down with her thumb, opening up her mouth, crushing it, pressing the pad of it against what Cass couldn’t tell was a split in her lip or the remnants of Rose’s thumb swiping through the blood on her neck.

And then she slowed, and it was long and lingering, lightning-storms between them. Droplets slipped their way down between their lips, and Cass felt them pebble as she opened up her mouth, salty little pearls kissing at her tongue. She thought it was more blood, at first, but the metallic taste they could both smell in the air wasn’t there. 

It was the gentle tang of a tear. And it wasn’t Cass’s.

Their lips stuck as Rose pulled away; Cass chased her, and felt her face warm in embarrassment, flush furnace-hot and blackening as her vision fogged over. The coolest, slightest wash of air fanned across her mouth, and Rose dipped her head, closed the distance one last time, pressing her closed lips against Cass’s so terribly, terribly gently.

Rose’s face was glowing when she pulled back, and she didn’t move her hand, so Cass didn’t move her head, staying utterly still as Rose lifted her thumb to swipe the underside of Cass’s lip — to clear away the blood or smear it, she wasn’t sure. There was a line in her jaw, tense and triumphant. Cass pushed on the back of her neck with her fingers until Rose was close enough again and stretched to press her mouth softly against the point between her jawbone and ear. The flush of air that was a laugh was her reward. Even if it felt like a goodbye.

She pulled back. Rose’s smile was so bitter; she looked so sad. Hunched into herself, like she’d taken a beating, and Cass’s arms were floating now, too weak to reach out to brush her beautiful hair away. She couldn’t ask what was wrong; she knew. 

She was sorry. She was. And she wasn’t. Don’t you know I’d do it again?

The world was going hazy, hazy. The dark was coming for her. She opened her mouth and tried to speak, tried to say the flower-name, Rose, Rose, Rose, but nothing came out. Her fingers brushed Rose’s collarbone, and fell.

I’m coming, Steph. The third and final time. She was a black swan falling from the sky — only when she began to slump, it was Rose Wilson who held her in her arms.

If I killed, would you forgive me?

Yes. 

Yes. 

Yes.

Cass woke up, bleary-eyed, hair a sweaty mess. Too warm in the room, and she couldn’t read the clock on the table beside her, but it was still dark. 

Her head was pounding.

Like a bat being swung against her skull sort-of pounding. Her vision was spotting in front of her eyes, blooming black-and-white in flashes of light. Cass tried to sit up, and felt a hand on her arm. Familiar. She groaned in pain, and tore the shells of her eyelids open properly. 

Standing above her was Dick Grayson.

His face was worn. Tense. There was a crack in his jaw and his forehead and a tick in his fingers that told her the whole story; he still didn’t trust her. And Ravager was nowhere to be found.

She assessed their surroundings with as little head movement as she could, still sensitive. Huge, raised ceilings stretching outward in every direction, jagged and cavernous. Tech as far as the eye could see along the other side of the room — as far as she could see, anyway. The bed beneath her was plush rather than boardlike. They were in the cave.

“Heard you fought Deathstroke,” he said, throat hoarse. Reticent. “This was him?”

Cass closed her eyes. The throbbing in the crook of her throat was growing the longer she stayed lucid. She swallowed, and swallowed every bit of pain. She swallowed the thought of roses.

The thought that their heartbeats matched, and now so did their scars.

“Yes,” she lied.

He sighed, a gust of wind out of the corners of his mouth, and fell into a chair that had apparently been beside her the entire time. He was in his suit. Where had he been?

He looked at her, and he was sad, somehow, even though he shot her a weak smile.

“You cut your hair.”

The fresh stitches in her throat were burning. Her jaw clenched so hard she felt the indents of her own teeth. She didn’t say a word. She couldn’t say no; she couldn’t say yes. She thought of petal-fingers in her hair.

Dick let his head fall to rest on his forearms against the side of her bed; his hair was greasy, and he ran a scarred hand through it, breathing out another wind-gust. Cass could tell he was tired, and she could also tell he was hiding from her. So she couldn’t read him.

“Cassie,” he said. “I’m sorry. I thought you were —”

“I know.”

“No.” He lifted his face a little, his jaw a mirror of hers. “I need to say this. That I’m sorry. Babs is furious with me.” 

Barbara’s always furious with you, Cass didn’t say. Barbara was probably angry with her, too. But Cass was angry at Dick. So they went in a circle.

“I know you, Cass. I’ve trusted you. Hell, I gave Rose a chance, and she went through the exact same thing you did. And I know Slade.” He ran another hand through his hair and breathed out something that wasn’t a laugh, looking weary, weary. “God, do I know Slade. He can’t ever leave something alone.”

Neither could she, it seemed.

He looked at her. “You’re lucky Ravager called me. You would’ve been done for if it wasn’t for her.”

Lucky. She smiled out a sad little not-laugh and looked up at Dick. His arms were crossed; he looked guilty. Lucky.

“Bruce loves you, you know,” he said quietly. There was probably a hidden message in there, somewhere, but she was too tired to find it. She thought of pearl, spilling into her fingers. She thought of tearing it away. Tearing it apart.

“Didn’t even… get to Cain,” she diverted instead, though it was weak. He’d been the absolute last thing on her mind. She’d seen him make a run for it, and she hadn’t said a word. 

Not that he’d said as much. But she’d seen it, in the creases around his eyes, the bleakness of his mouth. He was done, for now, and they hadn’t needed to stick anymore. And yet she had.

Cass felt lost at sea. Shame rocked her whole body until she was made up entirely of grief and of longing. She remembered Deathstroke’s muttered threats toward her as they leapt back and forth, that wicked-sharp grin on his face.

Your old man’s a coward, but even he still knows it. You were born to us, girl. Born to it. You’ll never be rid of it. We’ll always have you.

”Get some sleep,” Dick said. “You’re still in a bad way. He almost killed you, Cassie. Rose saved your life.”

Rose. Rose.

Yes, she thought. That was the problem.

Cass stared at the ceiling. There were no bats hiding in the hangings, today. They’d all left her alone. 

Dick moved away to fiddle with one of the gigantic screens that had always dwarfed hers for a moment before getting it to light. He turned back to her, blinking something that wasn’t quite a smile but was an aquiescence, his tension following the flight along the blue of his suit, and walked out, leaving her in the quiet. Cass still felt so woozy that she had to squint to focus on what he’d put on for her to sleep to. 

It was a documentary.

She and Dick and Tim had sometimes watched nature documentaries after one of them got back from patrol, if any of them were ever around the Clocktower and couldn’t sleep. 

They’d sit in silence in the blue of morning, side by side on Barbara’s couch with their legs crossed. Dick always picked. He liked Frozen Planet, and the ones about elephants. They made Cass sad, but she’d always been able to tell that they soothed Dick and quieted Tim, and it was a good sort of sad. Sometimes Dick would find them snacks that Barbara had stashed all over her hide-out. Sometimes he even fell asleep while Tim and Cass watched the Antarctic wash over them and Barbara murmured her commands in the other room.

She squinted a little more, grunting when it sent a sharp spike through her head. 

This wasn’t one of their usual ones, she was realising. Neither of Dick’s specialties. There was no winter or elephants. No reprieve. No familiarity.

Instead there was only a wild dog, howling at the moon.