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There’s something wrong with Jason.
Early autumn of Cass’s first full year as Bruce Wayne’s daughter. Trees droop, browned and unbearably brittle, onto the cracked sidewalks. Children skip and slouch and trudge their way back into classrooms for another dull year of learning. The exception is Cass, happily at home with Barbara and Bruce, Tim and Steph and Dick and all the new members of her new family. None of them know quite how old Cass is, and resolutely refuse to have anything to do with Lady Shiva or David Cain, the only people who could tell them. But Barbara went to bat for Cass, arguing that the American education system was not beneficial for all American children, much less Cass, who was still adjusting, as Barbara put it. Learning to come out of her shell. So there’ll be no school for Cass this autumn or any autumn. Only apple cider and hot cocoa, safely tucked away by the fifth fake fireplace of Wayne Manor, curling up in window frames just to listen to the psithurism before the rain, and a flood of scarves and mittens and boots as every member of her family tries to prepare her for the incoming Gotham winter.
Personally, Cass doesn’t get why introverts are always encouraged to become more extroverted. She thinks extroverts should be told to shut the hell up more often. Perhaps it is an American thing, she muses, but then, she loves her new family for their relentless positivity and inability to shut the hell up. From Steph, who drags her on girl’s night after girl’s night with Barbara, Harley, and all the other crazy girls of Gotham who want to paint their toenails neon purple with little stars and crack skulls open just to feel something. (Whenever Harley robs a department store she always sends Cass a dress she thinks she’ll like in the mail. Bruce always gives her a look, sends it back, then buys ten variations of the same dress). To Tim, who is hard at work learning ASL so they can communicate better and shares all of his embarrassing interests with her. Niche anime, questionable manga, decrepit video games, card games, board games, and a stash of Batman and Robin photos he swears her to secrecy over. To Dick, who remains upbeat and cheerful in the face of all her silences and stony stares. He always makes time to take her (and usually some of his other little siblings) to a pizza parlor, or an ice cream parlor, or an abandoned parking lot perfect for doing donuts. Dick Grayson is a busy man who gained most of his current family after turning eighteen and losing most of them beforehand. Yet his heart opens, bottomless and sincere, for every new orphan that shows up on Bruce’s doorstep. When he drops by Cass’s ballet studio, exhaustion crinkling in every forehead line and eye wrinkle, how can she not love him back?
So she takes it personally when Jason continues to avoid them. Perhaps she could ignore it if it was clear that he wanted nothing to do with them, no matter how much the others missed him. But everytime they run into Jason it is clear to Cass that he misses them fiercely. She may not be an expert on the standard personality and behavioral ticks of Jason Todd, but she is an expert on body language, and everything about Jason screams bad, wrong, liar, liar, LIAR–
Cass goes to Barbara.
These days Barbara spend the vast majority of her time in the Clocktower. Ever since the Joker, Cass has been told, and hung up the Batgirl cape. She rotates between the library and the tower, retreating from regular life while her law degree collects dust. And even though Dick gets sad whenever he see her, and Barbara feels guilty and helplessly furious, he never says anything. The two of them dance around in silent conversations– I love you, I know, I’m sorry –that start all over again the next time they see each other. As if Cass can’t tell.
“Cass! So good to see you.” Barbara smiles and wheels herself over to the window when Cass drops in unannounced. She’s in pain.
Cass is not a vigilante but she was trained to kill them. When she takes to the rooftops of Gotham, she wears a nondescript black mask. She shucks this mask off now so that Barbara can see her face and plods over to her dearest friend and surrogate mother. Steph tells her the term is “mom friend” and not to get weird about it, but Cass believes she’s well beyond the point of being considered weird.
“Jason,” Cass announces.
She leans down awkwardly to hug Barbara, so she misses everything that is said in response. By the time she straightens, Barbara’s face worries, deep emotional lines of someone whose loved ones spend 80% of their time in mortal peril, and her body twitches backwards, itching for the long row of computers and tech equipment on the far wall. Barbara is concerned about Jason, but she believes the trouble lies in whatever Jason’s doing right now. That she’ll know what to do with just a little cyberstalking. But Cass’s concern is more long-term than that.
“Is there something wrong with Jason?” Barbara’s cadence indicates that this is not the first time she’s spoken. Oops. Cass missed her out-loud words because she was so busy paying attention to what Barbara was actually saying.
Cass points at the computers. She doesn’t know how to explain it with words.
Barbara takes the hint and wheels back over to her computer lab, where she pulls up all the surveillance footage she can of Jason’s usual haunts until she finds him disappearing up the fire escape of an old brick apartment building in the very edge of Burnley. Any further south and he’ll be in Gotham’s Upper East Side, and Jason can’t stand that neighborhood.
As Robin, Jason had to be bullied into the Diamond District and the Upper West Side, but Bruce dragged him into Chinatown to practice his Cantonese and Jason went to Old Gotham willingly for the vibe. A lot of gargoyles, Cass has been told. Worn bricks, gothic spires, flying buttresses, and properly intimidating gargoyles for brooding. There is so much that Cass knows about Jason from other people. The reverse cannot be said, because Jason doesn’t really talk to them anymore.
Barbara boots up a drone from the Bat-hideout closest to Jason’s apartment and flies it over. It’s a lovely little three-room apartment on the third floor of an old brick apartment building. One bedroom and one bathroom, which Barbara does not attempt to enter, and a kitchen/living room area. All the furniture in the living room looks new. A comfy armchair, two bookcases overflowing with newly-purchased novels, shiny new wood cabinets and a marble finish to the kitchen island. Three wooden stools, two of them as sturdy as the day they were bought.
Remotely, she and Cass peer through the window as Jason makes his guns disappear before he reaches his kitchen island. Stripped down to a form-fitting black shirt and brown pants, Jason washes his hands, preheats the oven, and sets about making lemon and herb salmon.
“This looks pretty normal to me,” says Barbara.
Jason slides into one of the wooden stools around his marble kitchen island counter. He drums his fingers on the marble. He checks the time on his phone. The salmon, now covered in garlic, thyme, and rosemary and such, is still baking in the oven.
“He’s just making himself dinner,” Barbara observes. She won’t call Cass a liar, but this isn’t worthy of the label “trouble.”
She doesn’t see it. Cass is at a loss. If Barbara cannot see what is in front of her eyes, how can Cass possibly explain it?
“Look,” Cass insists.
After checking the time on his phone again, Jason gets up and paces. At over six feet tall, he makes his cozy apartment seems small. He picks a book out of his shelf, seemingly at random. He examines the cover. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. He puts the book back and resumes pacing the perimeter of his small home.
Barbara sighs. “I don’t understand.”
She wants Cass to be able to just spit it out, but won’t say so because she knows Cass cannot. They’ve reached a stalemate.
Jason’s pacing takes him past the window again, but this time he stops and lingers. The drone camera, positioned just to the side of the window, can only capture the left side of his face at a dramatic angle. But in the twitch of his jaw and the downturned mouth Cass reads anger, anger, anger. Eventually he disengages about a dozen different locking systems and slides the window open. Barbara navigated the drone to rest on top of the window frame by the fifth undone lock. For a long moment, Jason simply leans out of the window, eyes closed, breathing in fresh Gotham polluted air.
“Not happy,” Cass reports.
There’s nothing real about Jason’s relaxed posture. His eyes stay shut just a tad too deliberately, he inhales through his nostrils just a bit too steadily, and he flexes his hands on the window sill just a little too aggressively to be natural. This is a Jason who is about to strike.
Sure enough, Jason’s left arm lashes out, quick as a loosed arrow. Before Barbara can pilot the drone away, its camera lens stares down a grinning Jason Todd as he drags the drone inside his apartment. Barbara overheats the drone’s motor trying to escape his grip.
“Damn.” Barbara falls back in her wheelchair, abandoning the drone controls. “Don’t tell B about this, ‘kay? I can’t believe I got caught so quickly.”
It’s a lost cause, and there’s really nothing that either Cass or Barbara can do at this point. But Jason isn’t done with them.
“Well, well, well.” Jason, even when gleeful, somehow still projects a menacing air. “What’ve we got here? Another little spy, hm?” He swipes a handgun from his seemingly endless supplies of weapons and loads it without looking. “Well, Oracle or Dickface or whoever the fuck is behind this, you’re gonna take a message to B for me. Tell him that if he doesn’t leave me the fuck alone I’m gonna pay his little Robin another visit. Understand?”
All throughout his speech, Jason maintains the fierce glare. But there’s absolutely nothing behind his eyes. Or more accurately, Jason’s blue eyes glint with a type of hunger that Cass has never, in her nineteen-odd years, seen before. Of course she wouldn’t have, in the torture-training home of David Cain.
Then in one smooth motion, he tosses the drone up in the air, swings his gun up with the other hand and shoots it. The camera feed cuts.
On the glossy black computer screen, the reflection of Barbara sinks her face into one hand. “What happened to you, Jason?” She mourns the spirited fifteen-year-old boy she once considered like a little brother. “When did beating up a fifteen-year-old become something to brag about?”
Cass, whose plan to raise awareness for Jason has gone horribly awry, comes over and pats Barbara twice on the shoulder. A concrete sign of affection, she’s told. “Sorry.”
Here is what Cass cannot articulate: Jason Todd is lonely. Loneliness is built into Jason’s bones. It gathers in his bed at night like a soldier returning from war. It lashes at the confines of his self-imposed cage. When the loneliness threatens to break him, it explodes in the form of rage at anyone who dares to be near him. Ah, but what a liar that rage makes of him. Claiming he loves nothing and no one when all Jason has ever done is love. Raging against the state of his beloved city, fury at the father he will not forgive, and hate–blackened love–for those he once called family. A cruel, self-perpetuated cycle. The lonely drives him to rage which in self-delusion to hide his shame he lies about until everyone learns to stay away. Thus creating more loneliness for Jason to feast in until he inevitably withers away from eating nothing but emptiness.
And Cass fears she is the only one who sees it. But Jason is a fool for thinking no one else understands. Is Cass not the unwanted daughter of a world-class assassin and the wanted weapon of a monster? Her first months in Gotham she did nothing but drive people away because she didn’t know any better. The only reason she has good people around her now is because there is something so irrefutably good about the Bats. Barbara never withdrew her hand even when Cass bit her literally and metaphorically. Bruce took her in without a second thought for her background. Tim tries his hardest to be a good brother to her even when he’s hurting. Steph and Dick didn’t blink twice at the half-feral, non-verbal, former assassin addition to their family. They bring their good cheer out for Cass even when she can tell it’s fake, and she can always tell.
So why does Jason, who is hurting and so lonely that it hurts Cass to look at him, insist on pushing them away?
“I’ll continue looking into it,” Barbara promises. “But, Cass, I really don’t understand what you’re seeing.”
Cass nods. What else is there to say? She lacks the words to explain that which is laid bare before her. Even though she wishes every single time she steps into Barbara’s home that today will be the day she is understood.
IT HURTS TO BE HEARD, Cass screams sometimes, just in case anyone is listening. WHY MUST IT HURT? WHY WON’T YOU HEAR?
“Actually.” Barbara sits forward, elbows on her knees, hands clasped consideringly. “I’ve been meaning to bring this up.”
Cass steps back, arms crossed over her chest. Despite Barbara’s prepared nature, she betrays a nervousness in the slanted angle of her shoulders, or is it the flexing of her fingers? If pressed, Cass could not explain how she knows that Barbara is scared, and yet the knowledge has already worked its way into her bones.
“I know you don’t like to fight.” A cautious approach, Barbara gentles and softens her demeanor, tiptoeing around a dark, unspeakable past. Always hyper-aware of David Cain’s cruelties and determined to differentiate herself from both him and the absent yet disapproving Lady Shiva. So what she really means is: I know I promised you when I first took you in that I would never ask you to be a weapon or a tool for death like your father did, and I am worried that my next words will make you fear I’m taking that back.
“I know,” Cass replies, which, if she were concerned with things like the spoken word, she would realize is not actually a response to what Barbara said but rather what Barbara meant.
“Right.” Barbara straightens a little and continues. “But I see you have this drive to help people. And even though we don’t ask, you go out and fight to protect innocents. And to try and help people, like you just did with Jason.” Pride pours from her shoulders. “And I’ve been meaning to tell you. Or I’ve been meaning to offer you.”
The speech, a mess of love, pride, and self-torture, takes a commercial break as Barbara wheels over to a storage unit in the back of the Clocktower. She returns with a pile of black synthetic material folded haphazardly in her lap. Before she can say a word, Cass is already leaning towards “no.” Because somehow touching that lump of black cloth has caused Barbara both acute and chronic pain, and all Cass can think about is grabbing it and tearing it into a million tiny shreds so that it can never again cause the person she cares most about in the world so much pain.
“I think it’s time to pass this down.” Barbara lets go of the wheels and reaches, gingerly and tenderly, for the item in her lap. “If you want it.” She holds it up for Cass to see.
Underneath the Clocktower’s yellowy overhead lighting, the cloth takes on a shimmering, mercurial blue tint. Canary yellow highlights reflect back at the high, arched ceiling. It’s the original Batgirl suit. Though Barbara presents the legacy with pride, and the swaying suit hides most of her body, Cass reads instantly the wretched, agonizing torture Barbara inflicts upon herself by holding that old suit up.
“Hurt.” Cass gently pushes the suit back into Barbara’s lap.
“No.” Barbara smiles. It’s the worst lie Cass has ever born witness to. “No, this is a good thing. I can’t think of anyone who deserves this more than you. Or that I’d trust more with it. I’d be honored. Really, Cass. I’d be honored if you took it up.”
And what can Cass do but shake her head and repeat herself? “Hurt,” she insists. Does Barbara think she’s stupid? Does she really believe that Cass can’t see the terrible, bone-deep agony she’s putting herself through as she lies and lies and lies right to her face?
“Cass, I’m telling you.” Barbara fixes that thin smile of hers even tighter upon her face and carries on lying. “It’s time for the mantle to be passed on. If you don’t want it, that’s one thing, but don’t refuse it just because you think I–I don’t want to, or I have conflicted feelings, or whatever. I’ve thought about this for a while, okay? I’m certain that this is what I want. Nothing would make me happier. You make us so proud, Cass. Every single day you make us proud, and if wearing the cape when you’re on the streets is something you want to do, then.” She half-shrugs. “Please.”
Cass dutifully listens to every word, but her conclusion remains the same: Barbara hurts so terribly she can barely stand to get the words out. That she manages a thin layer of joy at all, no matter how paltry and fake, is a miracle. Cass has no choice then but to sink to her knees, right before the wheelchair, and clasp one of Barbara’s shaking hands between her own. She looks up then, right into those soft gray eyes that have witnessed the end of the world and gone right back to silent evenings in the library and an ever-growing spiderweb of lies. A life mission she poured years of blood, sweat and tears into and sacrificed her childhood for, gone in a single night. Waking up to the muted horror of a world that not only refused to care but preferred her this way. Grounded, trapped, helpless. The woman in the chair instead of an equal partner on the streets. Left in dark rooms lit by blue-screen glows, always ready and able to assist the true heroes without ever getting too personal for their liking or ever expressing a will or desire beyond their missions. A world that would rather never have to see her, or remember the hero she used to be. Unable to outshine the boys in their forever higher reaching quests of greatness and glory. Fighting off the creeping wish that she had died a hero instead of lived to become incapable. How does one persevere in such a situation? How does one survive themself?
And then Cass breaks the spell. “Hurt.”
“Yes, it hurts!” Barbara yanks her hand away. She fists the costume, elbows locked straight. “My God, it hurts,” she cries. The old, worn Batgirl suit, still half-covered in dust, wrinkles between her fingers. Anger rattles out of her even as the shout leaves her voice a strained whisper.
Barbara bows her head. Long locks of red hair hide her face. A single drop splashes across the knuckles of her third and fourth fingers. She forces Cass to kneel there and watch as the strongest, most stubborn, most courageous person she knows falls apart before her very eyes.
Cass rests her head on Barbara’s knee. “Sorry.”
“‘S not your fault,” Barbara whispers. She slips a hand in Cass’s hair and strokes it. “Oh, Cass, you’re the last person in the world to blame.”
Cass says, “okay.”
Head to knee, hand on hair, they hold each other. Anguish leaks out of Barbara like steam from a shrieking tea kettle. So the pain really dies like that. Opening a wound to drain the poison. Cass begins to believe, just barely, that Barbara was telling the truth.
“Of course it hurts,” Barbara confesses. “But sometimes it has to hurt before it gets better.”
~
“You’re one of the Bats.”
Red Hood makes this pronouncement with confidence and secret uncertainty that Cass immediately picks up on even though she can’t see his face. He’s taken aback, hesitating, wrong-footed and quickly assessing her. The truth is that he has no idea who is or isn’t a Bat these days. Doesn’t know about Steph, lost track of Barbara, and wrong about Tim.
“How many times until you people get the lesson?” Red Hood threatens Cass with a gun in a dark alley. Neither of them will ever tell Bruce about this moment. “Stay. The fuck. Away.”
Cass stares down the barrel of a gun that she knows with absolute certainty he will not fire. At least, not in her face. “No.”
“No?” Red Hood’s voice modulator betrays no incredulity, but then, Cass wasn’t listening anyways. He readjusts his grip on the gun. Against all odds, Red Hood is nervous. “Wanna try that again?”
“No.”
“Listen, kid. You may not be Robin but if you think for one fucking second I’m gonna put up with you just ‘cause you’re young you got another fucking thing coming.”
Cass cocks her head. If she could see this moment from Jason’s perspective, she would see a creepy, uncanny valley-eque version of the Batgirl costume staring back at her; a black that backbends through midnight blue depending on the street lighting, minimalist yellow highlights, and the outline of the infamous Bat symbol in the same yellow. In place of an eye mask or a hole for the mouth, her costume has large white stitch-like seams on the face mask. Absolutely no skin visible. She is a child’s giggle in a long-abandoned hospital. She is the little girl dropping her ice cream on a rotting corpse. She is the little boy playing toys that twitch in pain when he’s not looking. Cassandra Cain is quietly, patiently, and worst of all, unintentionally terrifying.
No wonder Jason is nervous.
Of course, Cass cannot see herself from Red Hood’s perspective. With a solid foot of height on her, he looms over Cass at a startling 6’2”. She stares into a blank red mask which does wonders at obscuring his emotions, though she can still read his body language.
“So.” Red Hood shifts his weight to one foot. “Scram.”
Cass considers this. “No.”
“What about this is so fucking hard to understand? I’ll never be one of his perfect little soldiers again.”
“No.”
Perhaps with more words, Cass would say something like: how dare you. Bruce Wayne is a father, not a monster. He took in his first child because he saw his worst nightmare play out on stage and swore to make sure that boy would never become like him. How could anyone believe for one second that Cass would swear loyalty to yet another man who wants to use her as a soldier, an assassin, or anything other than the girl she is? She takes the surname Wayne with pride or not at all. Cassandra Cain, weapon of Batman? No. It’s anathema to everything Cass stands for.
“Can you say anything other than no?”
“Yes.”
A startled laugh escapes Jason. Two quick barks of laughter before he regains control and reminds himself that he is not to find her funny. But he lowers the gun.
“Listen. I don’t know what they’ve told you, but I came back wrong. All twisted up and broken. I’m a murderer and a gang leader now. They miss the boy who died. Not me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Cass rolls her eyes. “Words.”
“Wow.” Jason holsters his gun so he can throw his arms up dramatically. “Unbelievable.” He turns in a quick circle then gets right up in Cass’s personal space. “I have killed people.” One gloved hand splays across the red bat on his chest. “Do you understand that. I’m a killer.”
“Me too.” Cass can play this game all day. She reaches up slowly, telegraphing her moves. One hand palms the spot on his helmet where his forehead likely is. She places the other hand on Jason’s chest, over his hand. “Eats you.”
Head and heart. Jason takes a step back. What is he so afraid of now? “Then you know. There’s no going back.”
Cass calls Jason’s bluff and presses in closer. For all his hulking menace and attempts to scare her away, Jason is the one who’s scared. Aggressive in the same way that prey animals ward off predators by appearing larger and roaring. The moment Cass rises to her tiptoes and wraps her arms around his middle, Jason freezes. Sliding from fight to freeze, and soon he’ll try flight, but until then Cass hugs him as best she knows how. She’s not afraid. She learned from the best. Although whether Jason feels the echo of Dick’s octopus hugs in Cass’s careful handling, neither can say.
“I’m here.” And there’s no other explanation for Cass to give, is there? She escaped David Cain and a childhood of violent conditioning. The unwanted daughter of the world’s best assassin, trained to hurt others, not to speak. Forced to kill, broken by the blood on her hands. Yet she’s washing it off in the grime of Gotham. She’s found a family, a true collection of miracles. People that know her and love her back.
So she says it again: “I’m here.”