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“Would you dance with me?”
Cass is taken aback. She and Dick had just been sparing for an hour and half, they’re both exhausted, sweaty, and bruised. But they needed this. When he arrived in the manor, she could immediately see the tension on his shoulders, and she herself had been twitching with the need to move for the entire day.
“Is that some kind of metaphor?” she asks.
Dick shakes his head. “No, not at all. We still have time before patrol. Would you dance with me?”
She shrugs. “We don’t have music,” she says.
He stands up, extends his hand. “We don’t need to. Follow my lead.”
She takes the offered hand. It’s a weird feeling. She knows how to dance, but she usually dances alone. To be with someone is new.
She almost expects it to be like fighting. They just spared, after all.
It isn’t.
It isn’t like fighting at all. It’s more like talking. It’s a dialogue. But it doesn’t feel the same way talking with words, with English, feels.
He leads, in the beginning, but before she knows it, she’s the one deciding their movement. The dance is almost a tango, despite the fact that they didn’t put on music.
They don’t use words, and she’s perfectly fine with that, but they talk.
They talk about their day, about why they were both so tense, and Cass finds it more freeing than the sparing was. They reassure each other on having each other’s back, in the silence in of the cave.
They talk.
Cass often dances. But this is different. In the intimacy of the cave, this conversation is like nothing she ever lived.
She asks, in a hand move, if they will ever do that again. He answers, making her spin, that of course, as much as she wants. As long as she wants.
When Bruce gets down to get ready for patrol, they’re still dancing.
Bruce doesn’t quite understand why they do, and Cass feels almost sorry for him.
“I’ll show you,” she says, and words feels wrong in her mouth, even more than usual, now that she just saw yet another form of communication.
But she will show Bruce. Because she loves him, and what Dick and she just did, what Dick just showed her, is a communication made of love.
And she loves him, so she will show him how to dance. And she will tell him what her words can’t say.