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It’s a short message, a short hologram. He’s in full uniform. His mouth twitches down.
Batman is dead.
Except Batman can’t be dead, she thinks. Because he’s here in front of Cass, repeating a short message.
Except it’s not him. Because Batman’s skin should be almond-inside pale and dipping with ivory scars but the man in front of her is tinged with ghostly Oracle-green (he’d hate that, she thinks, he’d want the image to be perfect). Because Batman is supposed to be solid, steady, permanent, and her hands went through air when she tried to grab him.
Except it can’t be Batman, she thinks again—couldn’t have ever been, because he is telling her to leave. He’s telling her to strip herself of everything she has. And maybe she’d understand if it was a plead to leave “Cassandra” or Barbara behind, because her father always wanted Cass to leave “Cassandra” behind, but he’s telling her to give Batgirl away. He’s telling her to leave Batman alone.
She doesn’t get it. Cass just doesn’t get it.
Batman has never thought Stephanie was ready for this. And he has always thought Cass was.
“You need to learn how to read. You’ll never take over for him if you don’t,” she hears Barbara’s voice say in her head.
Cass has been making progress. She’s learning. But her brain isn’t built for memory, not like that, not long lasting and concrete, because movement is oh-so-fleeting and feelings are gone quick. All of a sudden, Cass is reanalyzing every move Batman has ever made but she can’t remember what he looks like. She knows she believed in his faith at the time, but she can’t figure out what that faith looked like on him: she doesn’t know if she’s right, and she would know, she’d know immediately if he were here right now, talking so clearly with his body, but he isn’t. He isn’t.
Batman is dead. Hologram, hallucination, or ghost, maybe, but not steady and solid, not anymore
Cass falls to her knees. Her vision is blurry and blacked out and a flash bang, all at the same time, and she is dead on the floor.
Batman is dead. Batman is dead and she can’t redeem herself with his legacy, because he found out, he found out how terrible she is, that she isn’t worth any of this, and— and— she has to be dead.
It was supposed to happen a long time ago. She should get it over with.
Cass will be dead by tomorrow. Cass is already dead now.
Cass stares at the camera. She wonders how she’d look, repeating and repeating with a ghostly Oracle-green tinge to her.
Batman would hate it, she thinks: he’d want the image to be perfect. Batman hates her, she thinks. Hated. Loved. Doesn’t matter.
She stares at the camera and opens her mouth.
Batman was in full uniform, she thinks. She closes her mouth. Puts the mask back on.
Cass repeats the message she had deleted all those years ago into the camera when she was getting ready for Shiva to kill her. The words are short and sweet and a death null. She watches the message back a few times—watches her mouth move again and again while covered by mossy-forest fabric (it’s supposed to be night-black, but it’s imperfect because she’s imperfect and so she’s about to be dead—already is dead).
Cassandra Cain, no longer Batgirl, gets ready to die again. She makes her way to Steph. Steph, who she thought used to be in a wooden box, who used to be broken and red, Steph who used to be dead; Steph who is alive again.
Cass hopes her death stays permanent.
Wine-dark, poisoned waves crash on the shore that Cass finds Steph on. Most rocks on this cove have been broken and eroded into a fine sand tinged with iron-heavy red foam. Cass thinks of herself, dead and eroded with iron-heavy wine-dark liquid spilling out of her. Cass thinks of Steph, dead and poisoned, broken and red. She thinks of ghostly-green repetitions and six-feet-under and wooden boxes and of going down to the manor’s graveyard and putting dirt on.
Her and Steph, they’re fighting together. They’re good at it. Cass is ready for anything (For Batman, she thinks desperately) and Stephanie uses surprise to her advantage. She’s Spoiler again, even though she said she’d given it up, and she talks a mile-a-minute even as they fight bad guys.
If Cass listens to another word she’ll kill herself right here, and Steph doesn’t deserve that, so Cass stops listening. She strips down to her white undershirt, throws Batgirl at Steph’s feet, and launches herself into the roaring tides.
She swims for a while.
…
A while.
Cass washes up. Somehow. Somewhere.
She staggers out of the water like one of the zombies in the movies Babs showed her: a dead girl walking.
And walking and walking, stealing away on trains, pickpocketing enough for cabs, stealing plane tickets.
And walking.
Cass isn’t in a wooden box. She’s ash, stripped of everything and wandering around aimlessly with her very essence telling of things dangerous enough to kill.
She thought she was a bat. But she came to find she wasn’t that, not anymore.
She was only a runaway girl named Cain, dead and battered and utterly alone.