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The wind whistles pleasantly past her ears, buffeting her as she lands in a muffled roll on her rooftop.
Usually, Batgirl would reconvene at the Cave to store the suit, but she’s tired.
It was a long night, concluding in a hold up at a Shell station that went on for hours before Batgirl managed to de-escalate.
Her apartment isn’t top floor like practically everyone else in the game, so she has to be extra careful as she free climbs down to her window. It’s unlatched for nights like this.
The sun is just starting to streak through the Narrows, cool air a balm on her sweaty skin.
Her mom is smoking on the balcony, her hair falling out of the wooden claw clip she collects it in each night before bed. The living room backlights her, the news silently playing on the TV. It’s on a local station. The volume’s keyed up, not too loud because then the neighbors will pound on their ceiling (Steph’s floor), but loud enough that she can listen for one name.
Her mom takes a drag of her cigarette, face stony and eyes contemplative. After six years, she finally got switched to day shifts, six AM to six PM, two days on, two days off, now until the end of time. There’s a determined set of her shoulders even though it’s too early to be determined about much of anything.
Steph pops her window and enters. She pats herself on the back when not even her mom, ten feet away with a crawling shadow in her periphery, turns to investigate. Cass would be proud. She doesn’t need to check her phone to know her friend still hasn’t viewed the selfie she sent of Batgirl precariously hanging from the Tricorner Bridge.
Her alarm clock—dinged up from the last time she got into a screaming match with Tim and needed something to throw—reports that it’s nearing five AM. She pushes back the cowl to more effectively scrub at her face. She can feel the gross, reddened lines where the covering sits, protecting her identity at the cost of resurging acne. Her language credit (her final gen ed because Steph took advantage of every WE-subsitized dual credit in the catalog before the Kenya-casket-dying thing she pretends never happened happened) is at eight. She groans. No sleep for BG tonight.
The suit comes off in a tangle, kicked under the bed to be dealt with later. After class, probably. There are twenty-seven steps, bullet pointed, outlining how to store the suit at home. Like she has time to trifold the cape! She’s got homework, bitch!
(Fingers crossed, Barbara will insist Steph take the night off because she’s sure as hell not gonna ask.)
(She checks her phone. Two messages. Barbara and Dick have already completed today’s Wordle. Dick took all six guesses. Barbara got it in two.) (No Cass. No Tim.)
She showers on autopilot, poking at fresh bruises and foregoing her all important curly hair routine. A sopping gathering of hair that could only loosely be classified as a bun results. Cooling water drips down the back of her neck. Maybe she’ll finger brush it on the train to campus. Not the strangest thing she’s done on the A line. The honor goes to filming herself peeling a potato. (Tim told her it was a TikTok trend. That’s the last time she’ll ever trust him about ‘knowing what’s hip.’ She’s still not certain if he was fucking with her or not.) (At least she cleaned up after, unlike some fuckwads—frat pledges, not the unhoused folks they like to blame it on—leaving their piss bottles on the seat in the far back corner of the train, her seat.)
Her winter coat is still in the storage unit in the basement, although she’s already swapped to the thermal BG suit. Instead, she layers on Tim’s green sweater, Barbara’s gray cardigan, and Jason’s Knights hoodie. Her jeans flare out, maybe a fashion cycle or two behind. Whatever.
A puff of humid steam follows her out of the bathroom. Steph runs cold so her showers run hot.
The living room is a little less cluttered than it was yesterday, milk glasses and ramen bowls expertly stacked in the kitchen sink rather than strewn around the worn furniture. The magnet on the dishwasher is flipped to clean, but the inside has been picked over for fresh dishes so now just the uncommon utensils, unwieldy mixing bowls, and an old butter container that they’ll never actually use as Tupperware remain unloaded.
Her JavaScript textbook is on the coffee table, unopened for the last two months. Really, Barbara should remove that thing from the syllabus. Save everyone a lotta time and money.
She hums. She’ll put it in the course eval.
The coffee maker’s going, layering over the scent of ash and lavender Febreeze.
She pads over to the balcony’s sliding glass door. The faded blue curtains are pulled back but not tucked behind the little hook.
Her mom’s in her yellowed robe and splotchy fur house shoes. Like always, she stubs out her half-smoked cigarette when Steph opens the door.
“Hey, mama,” Steph murmurs. She leans her head against her mom’s shoulder and feels her arm come up automatically, tucking her closer.
A light kiss is pressed into her wet curls. “Hey, Stephie.” Her mom’s voice is rough with sleep, smoke, and stress. It soothes a piece of Steph buried deep in her chest, the one that’s four years old and doesn’t know what OxyContin is.
She shivers in the early morning air. The way the clouds are gathering, she thinks Gotham’ll get its first snow today.
“You okay?”
“Mm.” With a flourish Steph wiggles her fingers before pressing them back in the front pocket of Jason’s hoodie. “Still got all my parts,” she reports.
“All eight fingers, all eight toes?” Mom teases.
Steph snorts. “Shit, I only need eight? I’m ahead.”
She can feel her mom’s muffled laughter in her own chest. She shuffles closer. Nails scritch her scalp, short and well-maintained.
“You doing alright, Stephie?” As if she knows just how heavy Steph feels these days, the past creeping in, encroaching on a little more of her mind each day another disaster doesn’t strike.
But. As hard as it all is, as high as the expectations are and as deep as there is to fall, she feels good. She feels like she’s doing good.
She knows what people think of her. That she’s selfish, untrained, impulsive. Like she was just supposed to pretend like her dad wasn’t ruining lives, to shirk the responsibility onto some Bat with a Bristol accept and waxed boots. Like she hasn’t had to seek out every goddamn mentor she’s had, training that’s been handed on a silver platter to every other Robin, but withheld from her unless it’s part of some sort of power play she’s only meant to find out about later. Like... Okay, yeah, she is impulsive. But maybe if she was looped in about the grand-scheming, tendril-plucking, synchronized mission, then she wouldn’t feel the crawling-itching-strangling urge to try to fix this fucked up city all by herself.
She doesn’t wear the cape because it strokes her ego, because it makes her feel powerful. If anything, the powerlessness sinks in more when she’s got the Batgirl ears pulled down over her tangled hair. But she’s got her dad’s wit and her mom’s strength and her own determination. There are people who need helping, that’s a task she’s always been up for.
So what if she’s the Bat Clan’s black sheep? The man who cast her outta heaven ain’t around to object to her activities no more.
She lets out the hot, buzzing anger with a sigh. “Yeah, mama, ‘m alright.” There’s a haze today, the sun catching the polluted fog. Their neighbor’s dog is whining to go out and an engine fails to start down below. She rolls her shoulders and every muscle aches in a unique, satifying way. “You gotta get to work?”
“Mm.” She holds Steph a moment longer. “Lemme make you some breakfast before class.”
Warmth spreads through her as she follows her mom back inside. She’s a proper Gotham parent, every act of care a monument to her love for her daughter.
Her nicotine-stained fingers crack an egg on the edge of the peeling counter. She checks the expiration date on the milk and sniffs it for good measure when it’s stamped with today’s date.
Steph pours them mugs of coffee, her own loaded with cream and sugar while her mama takes it black. They clink them in the pale light under the microwave.
Her mama's sharp eyes catch on the scabbing cut on Steph’s jaw and her nose twitches at the burst of Neosporin as Steph picks at a bandage on her wrist.
“You get your homework done?” Mom asks like she’s still in high school.
“Don’t got homework,” she reminds. “Got essays ‘n projects ‘n studying.”
Dick pulled out flashcards around midterms. She’s dreading what he has planned for finals.
Her mom starts to get an attitude, but she releases it a moment later. “Well, you got your essays done?”
Steph takes a long sip of her coffee. It still tastes too much like bean water and she steals a bit of the milk before Mom puts the carton away. Her planner, with its chicken-scratch deadlines and glitter-pen course times, is deep in the bowels of her backpack. She should really do an online calendar like every other modern college student, but she likes the feel of crossing things off, paper indenting under a sturdy pen. She checked before she left campus yesterday, but she’ll check again on the train today. Nothing due ‘til Sunday, long live Canvas and its 11:59 PM deadlines. “It’s all done,” she promises. “I ain’t gonna flunk out.” Probably.
Like she said, her life isn’t just hers now. Batgirl is Gotham’s and the GU student is her mom’s, who got her LPN credentials by the skin of her teeth and a whole lotta Adderall.
She can’t help the way her hands flatten against her stomach, thinking of her own daughter, wherever she may be.
“Thanks for breakfast,” she whispers when the plate of scrambled eggs is set in front of her. They’re mouthwatering.
Maybe Alfred’s a better cook and maybe Tim coulda taken her to a fancier restaurant, but her mom made these eggs, just for her. She didn’t make herself anything at all. Old habit.
“‘Course, Stephie.” Her mom hovers closer to kiss the top of her head again, but instead tuts at the state of her hair. “You’re gonna have to chop it all off if you don’t take care of it.”
“I know.”
“Sylvia’s cousin is a hair dresser. I can get you an appointment, friends ‘n family discount. Ten bucks.”
“I’ll let you know,” she grouses like she ain’t smiling.
“Alright. Take care of yourself,” Mom says again, lingering even as she starts toward the bathroom to get ready for work. This time Steph knows she means more than just the hair.
“I am,” she promises and she thinks she means it.