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Steph tried to scream as the Sulphuric acid crept into her throat, her vocal chords, the gag once restraining her mouth falling off as it was burned away. The pain felt like more then anything. Like overstimulation and the smell of rot. It forced its way past her eyelids, the thin layer of skin doing nothing to protect her eyeballs from relentless force of nature, turning into less and less what they had been.
The pain stopped. Everything stopped. Her brain and skull and been damaged by the acid and it wouldn't come back.
That was until she woke up.
The first time she woke she figured that this was the afterlife. She could see, or she thought she could but everything seemed hazy and irrelevant. All that seemed relevant was that she was hurt, badly.
She screamed out with no voice, a silent, writhing mess on the ground.
The second time she woke up she saw the difference in the colour outside the window and wondered how long it had been. Then the sensation swam back into focus and she felt a tapping on her shoulder. Robin was tapping her on the shoulder, she could feel her body again, and the bats were here.
Her hands scrambled up to meet where her face had once lay, and was met only with a void. Her hands came away with a black sticky goo on them. She screams a further nothingness, her chest heaving from the breaths that assaulted her throat, her ever nerve on end. Her face was gone, taken from her.
She looked at robin again and suddenly everything felt alright.
She reaches up to touch her face once again and is met with skin, with real human flesh. Only it wasn't hers, it was wrong. It felt wrong. She had a mask stuck to her face, eyes of goo seeing out of a strangers eyelids.
Robin pulls out a mirror from seemingly nowhere, and the face that stares back at her is one of the bats. It was the robin that she was lying in front of. Hollowed out cheeks, an expression of pain.
"You like us" Robin croaks out, and her throat clears. She feels like she can finally speak without the sandpaper that was her throat tearing each other apart.
"What?" She shudders out in a voice not her own. She clamped a hand over the mouth, having heard robin speaking from her face.
It wasn't a flawless impersonation, it was garbled and sounded strained. But it was still robins voice.
She slowly gets to her feet, strength coming back to her. Memory starts flooding back in waves, her own father pouring Sulphuric acid that assaulted and mangled her face. She remembers the pain just before she doubles over, grabbing onto the chair she had once been tied to for support.
Robin helped her balance herself before he told her to follow him. She does, Because as a Gothemite, she trusts the bats.
For the next day her life doesn't feel like her own. She meets the other Bats, and promptly discovers that they are the Waynes is disguise.
It comes out that all of them have died, be it via gunshot, starvation, suffocation or whatever else, they had all died. And so had she. Really, she had died.
The only reason that she was still here standing here was because "Gotham wants you alive. She has given you a gift, much like us." Apparently this 'gift' was her ability to mimic faces and voices. Some gift.
She tries to replicate her own voice through recordings they have but the sandpaper is back. She pushes past and is able to croak out words and phrases, sounding more and more human over time and practice, but she still sounded wrong.
Her room had been a old storage room for ages but it was clearly a bedroom when it was made. She felt ashamed by everything in it. There was no screens, there was no mirror, nothing to remind her of her own mangled appearance. She screams, her voice still not her own, but the sound proofing good enough that even with others within the manor that no one comes to check on her.
After five days of practicing she finally said something that sounded like her. "How are you?" She asked. It sounded... not normal, but it was her voice. She found out what it was like to cry without a face that day.
Robin- or Tim Drake turned Tim Wayne was making sure she was alright daily, but after a week of relative solitude Dick had resolved to ensure that she was okay and felt safe in this new environment.
"Stephanie, can I come in?"
A beat of silence fills the room and the hallway and everywhere he could travel in that 10 seconds of nothing between them. She opens the door.
Her face still dark enough that it could be space itself, hair singed at the edges, splotches where the acid had fallen past her face and onto her neck and torso protruded from her skin like pitch black warts. She hadn't taken care of herself within the week of her being here, she had left everything she owned back at the house of her torment, not wanting to return.
She's crying and just falls into the taller mans arms. She's tired, and there's no judgment behind those eyes, no matter how much she feels like there should be.
"I- I don't remember what I look like..." A sad and bad imitation of dicks own voice rattles at him.
She was so exhausted from the constant mental battle. She cried into his arms for what felt like hours. Might of been hours.
Every touch to her skin felt like a new pain, but it was her only comfort. Like she was hugging a wall of acid but had to endure it or else her experiences wouldn't matter.
Dicks face had its eyes shut tight and was holding close against his shoulder. Neither of them were sure when he was supporting the shorter girl entirely but he carries the weight, and ensures that she's okay.
She had stopped crying and started relaying the past days events at his request, only for her to breakdown again at the mention of her voice meeting her throat again, but never to have her face again. Always a stranger to her own vocal chords and more a stranger to the world around her.
After days of carful navigation and breakdowns, Steph joined the rest of the family for dinner. No one mentioned it but she could feel what felt like a mix of intrigue and acceptance in the air. She felt uncomfortable.
After her first full meal in a week and a half she had managed to mimic her first face from memory, and she was so happy, but tears tugged on the emotion as it came crashing down. It didn't matter how good she got at controlling her new gift from the city she called home.
It wouldn't bring her face back.
It was gone.
After a month of integration to the family there was only one member she hadn't spoken to in depth. Cassandra. Or Pipistrelle.
Steph had seen her at dinners but almost never anywhere else. She knew the girl was shy but after a while it seems like Cass is avoiding her. That was until Cass approached her with a file.
Steph felt a feeling she hadn't felt in a weeks. days and days on end with no relief, nothing good had happened in the last month until this moment. She felt a rush of euphoria hit her as she tentatively hugged the girl in front of her while wearing her own face again.
The file had held a series of the blondes face in various emotions and expressions, recovered over the course of the month from all times in her life. Stephanie Brown finally smiled without assistance.
The Starling wears a Dark shimming purple cloak. Gotham shines her light on her when she can, and its always all she can muster and Starling thanks her for it.
She is loud, her screech like that of a bird of pray as she jumps across Gotham's buildings. Much like her new family.
They say you should never look her in the face.
You will wake up with your own face used against you, your voice ripped from the throat it had called home, and it screeched in warning.
You wake up to a prison cell, or a hospital bed.
Starling is seen with the Pipistrelle on most nights, the two of them wrapped in their own dance of violence and terror.
Starling calls Pipistrelle "Pipi". Gotham's first sign that they might be more then friends.
The few that see them and don't end up on the wrong end of the equation report saying that they would always hold hands and on one occasion someone said that, despite neither having the mouths to do so, they had kissed upon his buildings rooftop.