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Dick didn’t hear Cass approaching behind him. Then again, he never did.
He was standing, arms crossed, in one of the Batcave balconies. He wasn’t sulking, no matter what Tim said; he was just… analyzing the chatter below, as Tim and Damian miraculously were restraining themselves from breaking out into fisticuffs.
“It’s weird,” she said. Dick didn’t startle, due to a solid decade of vigilante training, but he turned his head to look over his shoulder. Cass was still in costume, the way the rest of them were, but she had pulled down her mask. Her hair was longer than she used to wear it, but not by a lot. Maybe an inch or two. Maybe she was just due for a trim. Still, it seemed to signal the time that’s been passing them by.
“It is,” Dick said. “I’ve never seen them so civil.”
From the lower levels, he could catch every other word of Damian screaming at the top of his 11-year-old lungs about respect and chain of command and my seat, which seemed to have something to do with the way Tim was pushing himself around in circles in the Batcomputer chair.
Cass drew closer, still soundless, leaning against the railing. She said, “Not that. Not… much has changed, here,” and she gestured to the cave with two fingers. “But a lot has changed.”
Dick inclined his head. He was still in the Batman suit. It was much heavier than Nightwing—the cowl, for one, had not been easy to adjust to. Having something over his ears had definitely been helping in muffling explosions, but he missed hearing the air whistling past him as he swung building to building.
“I don’t see him, that much,” Dick said.
“He’s paranoid,” Cass said quietly.
“Or something,” Dick said. “Where’s he now?” He knew, of course, which is why Cass didn’t respond. Bruce was in Russia, now, not making the waves he wanted to be making. International Batman. In some ways, it felt like a bad joke. Batman had always belonged to Gotham. Now it didn’t. “How was Hong Kong?”
Cass made a dismissive noise, and stretched out her fingers on the railing. Tells were not a flaw to her; she had none. When she made gestures, each one of them was deliberate, and they were all meant to communicate.
“That bad, huh?” Dick asked. He mirrored her position, elbows on the railing. The Batcave was more full than it ever had been, in some ways. Five people, in and out at all times. Sometimes more. But it seemed… empty, without Bruce. He had always carried a weight to him, a size, that seemed impossible to replicate. The villains noticed, Dick thought. Not the random people on the street, but the big ones. He thought about Cobblepot twisting his mouth into a vicious, scornful smile. You’re slipping.
Dick had outgrown the sensation that he was playing dress-up in his father’s unattended clothes, but he still wasn’t Bruce. Maybe he never would be. “Is learning another language hard? I hear Mandarin is one of the more difficult to learn if your base language is English.”
“I didn’t,” Cass said. “And they don’t speak Mandarin. Cantonese.”
“You didn’t?” Dick asked, almost startled. Cass seemed so dedicated to every other aspect of the job; but she never quite got used to reading and writing, did she.
“Most people speak English or speak some English,” Cass said. She shrugged, a slow stretch and roll of the shoulders. Each one of her muscles seemed to obey her independently. The gymnast in Dick was always a little jealous of that solitary control. “I’ve… picked up a little Cantonese. Mostly, Where is he? and I’ll drop you off this building.”
It took a second for Dick to realize she was making a joke, but he laughed.
“And you’re good?” Cass asked.
“Yeah,” Dick said, almost revealingly quickly.
Oh, who was he kidding. She could always read Bruce like a book, in moments where Dick couldn’t nail down a single emotion in that man’s face to save his life—often literally. Cass could probably see in the clench of his toes under his giant Batman boots that he was barely coping. “It’s just, there’s a lot going on.”
Cass nodded. She made no move to leave. Dick realized she had something to say that she hadn’t said yet. “Do you feel like it’s… unfair?”
Dick thought a lot of things were unfair. Dick thought it was unfair that Bruce died in the first place, and doubly unfair that he never really got him back, once he returned. He thought it was unfair that he was still raising Damian, but he thought it unfair, too, that guilt whenever he thought he would like to stop. He thought it was unfair he was probably never going to get back to where he had been with Tim, though maybe that started before—back when Tim had lost his dad—and not in the wake of all of… this. He thought it was unfair that Tim had been right, all along. He kind of thought it was unfair that Cass had left, just packed up and left, leaving Dick with a new Batgirl, another part of Bruce missing, seemingly for good.
Dick didn’t voice any of this, and never would. He asked, “What do you mean?”
Cass was examining Damian. They had fought, Dick thought he remembered. Sometime during the Gate case. She said, “I’m not Batgirl anymore.”
“No,” Dick said. “I thought you gave the costume to Stephanie on purpose.”
“I did,” Cass said. “I thought…” she trailed off. What she thought, she did not elaborate on. It was okay; Dick had felt it too, when Bruce died. The waves of grief that made it almost impossible to keep going. “Everyone wanted to be Batman.”
“Not everyone,” Dick said. “I didn’t.”
“I know,” Cass said, her tone vaguely reproachful. “But I did.”
Dick hadn’t known that. His first instinct was to protest—Cass couldn’t have been Batman, could she? It was Batman, but—but Cass had always respected the mantle so much. So she had wanted to be Batman. So she had given up Batgirl, and… “But you left.”
Cass shrugged again, that elegant shrug. “There was no place for me,” she said. It was so matter-of-fact that it was hard to tell her she was wrong. Dick and Cass had never been particularly close; it’s not like she would have been Dick’s Robin, not like Damian had been, not like Tim could have been. “And Steph… needed Batgirl.”
“Did Damian say something?” Dick asked. “I know you guys weren’t getting along.”
“He’s a child,” Cass said. Dick thought wryly that if she said that to Damian, they would have gotten into a real fight. “Afraid of where he came from. What that… means for him, here.” She tilted her head. “He didn’t really hurt me. With what he said. But I… understood.” She touched her chest, briefly. “So it hurt me.”
Dick thought that made some kind of sense. Really, though, Damian had a habit of going for the kill-shot; if nothing else, he knew exactly how to immediately sense a person’s biggest insecurity and going for it with all he had. He could hurt people’s feelings, even though he was only eleven.
“I had thought… before you left, and once it was sure that it was going to be me,” Dick said. “That you might have been Batgirl, with me. I know Batgirl is never Batman’s sidekick, but she’s sometimes a partner. I needed an equal, but Tim was who-knows-where and Stephanie isn’t… trained enough, to be my partner. Not right now.”
Cass inclined her head slightly. Her hand lingered, lightly draped across her collarbone. Her eyes were dark and sharp, and glittered in the florescent lighting of the Cave. “Stephanie needed it,” she said, again. “More than I did.”
“And you wanted to be Batman,” Dick said.
Cass smiled slightly. “And I wanted to be Batman.”
Dick tried to imagine it, what that would have looked like. There was a strange tangle inside of him that he didn’t know how to pull apart. One part was relief; another, a sense of jealousy, of possession. He was the first son. Batman was his.
After Jason had taken it, after Tim had taken it, Dick had known that he would have to preserve Batman for what it was. To live up to Bruce. He had to do it. No one else could. It was terrible, and miserable, but it also brought him closer to Bruce, in a way. He felt what Bruce must have felt, what it seemed like he never could have felt—overwhelmed, and frightened, the weight of the world on his shoulders. The idea that someone else could have done it was liberating, but the idea that someone else could have done it better made him feel… like he was a stupid little kid, playing dress-up in his father’s clothes.
It was his now. But he did feel sympathy.
“I like Black Bat,” he offered.
“Temporary,” Cass said. “Or… never felt permanent, to me.”
“Who will you be next?” Dick asked.
“I don’t know,” Cass said, that almost-smile lingering on her lips again. “Told Tim I wanted to come back. To Gotham.”
“We’d be happy to have you,” Dick said. “Really.”
Cass ducked her head. “Thanks,” she said. The word was small but the sentiment clear. After a moment, she slipped away. She had said all that she meant to say.
The fight below them was about to escalate into violence, if Dick didn’t intervene. Damian had somehow removed the chair from under Tim and was holding it over his head, while Tim sent kicks at Damian’s ankles, like he was also eleven years old.
Dick rolled his shoulders and put on his best Batman voice and descended down the staircase to get the two knuckleheads to stop fighting. Then to maybe even wrangle them into solving a case or two, one of these days.
Dick had meant what he said, to Cass. That they were happy to have her. Lucky, even.
Maybe Bruce was going to stay gone, or maybe not. There was a whole colony of Bats in his Cave, and that seemed acceptable as an alternative for the meantime. Maybe that was the point of this whole Batman Inc nonsense to begin with—that they all handle one piece of Batman. And no one person keeps the weight of the world on their shoulders.