Chapter Text
1. you know we’re gonna be legends
Courtney can’t sleep.
She tosses, she turns, she counts sheep. When that fails, she gets out of bed to grab a snack, then checks, double checks, and triple checks that all fifteen of her alarms are still set up, that they hadn’t been magically turned off since the last time she checked them about seven minutes ago. She gets back into bed, she counts some more sheep, eventually gives up and resigns herself to the inevitability of daydreaming about the culprit of her current debacle.
“Stargirl.” Superman’s voice filled the room, and she swore she could feel the pleasant prickle of sunlight on her skin just listening to him talk. They were nearing the end of a long and mundanely eventful monitor shift. There’d been a couple of small-scale incidents, quickly handled by local league members that they directed to the site, and she couldn’t help but notice that Superman had largely taken a back seat, urging her with encouraging words and bright, quiet smiles to speak directly to even the more senior members of the League. She’d spoken to Wonder Woman, for crying out loud—Wonder Woman!!—politely informing her about a hostage situation that the Cheetah was responsible for. She was not ashamed to admit that when Wonder Woman thanked her for her efforts in a lyrical voice, she’d been starstruck, flushing a little under Superman’s warmly amused gaze.
“What’s up?” She turned to him, curling her legs into the swivel chair as it spun. On the day of their initial induction into the League's probational period, he’d told them that there was no need to be overly formal around the Watchtower, then took every chance after that to invite junior members to casual conversation. It had taken some of them months to get used to Truth Justice and the American Way himself popping into their path with a decidedly Midwestern “Mornin’!” or an “Ope, didn’t see you there. Coffee?” Courtney, though, found herself warming up to a daily chit chat with him incredibly quickly, helped in no small part by the fact that the man radiated a certainly welcoming sincerity that she wasn’t even sure still existed until she met him in person.
“The founders had a meeting the other day, and we’ve decided that you have more than proved yourself in these past few months. So–” there was a twinkle in his eyes like pride– “we would like you to join us for…”
Her first official Justice League mission.
She arrives far too early, bolting out of her sheets at the first of her (now seventeen) alarms and flying to the rooftop of their rendezvous a full thirty minutes before the designated time. But as she lowers her staff in the early morning light, she sees that she isn’t alone.
Superman hovers at the roof’s edge, just a few inches off the concrete. The lines of his shoulders and back are proud but relaxed, golden and majestic and haloed by the dawn like a god—too benevolent towards a world too selfish to deserve his grace, too beautiful to be bound to humanity and the rot in its alleyways. He takes a deep breath as he soaks up the sun’s gentle rays, sending his cape rippling about his shoulders and at his ankles, fluid and heavy yet paradoxically weightless in the way it curls around his legs like a living thing.
It awes Courtney into silence, and she lingers dumbly a couple of paces behind him, wondering if this was how religions began.
But then he turns around, and his smile is all cozy farmhouse and sun-warmed fields, and like an instinct, Courtney knows that despite everything, Superman would never let himself be anything more than the simplicity of his kindness, that if anyone tried to kneel at his feet, he would just as quickly fall to his knees and bring them up by their elbows.
And, she thinks, that makes him better than gods.
“Stargirl!” He greets, and she shakes out of her trance.
“Hey, Superman!” She says in return, hopping off onto the roof as he lowers himself down as well. Even with feet firmly on the ground, he towers over her, and she has to lift her face into the sun to look at him, squinting a little against the brightness.
“Excited, I see,” he teases, guiding them away from the ledge. She blinks, the sun no longer in her eyes, and nods eagerly. “Good to hear. Did you review the information I sent over?”
“Of course!” She’d spent several hours pouring over the pages that had pinged into her email not long after that monitor shift, and she’s relatively confident in her grasp of the crucial details.
“Alright,” he crosses his arms like a stern teacher, but a lighthearted glint remains in his eyes. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
She taps her chin in thought, trying to sort through the jumble of words in her brain for a good place to start. Superman chuckles at the crease in her brow.
“Take your time,” he says. “I know it’s a lot.”
“It’s a pretty routine reconnaissance mission,” she begins. “Some suspicious characters from Gotham were seen going into a LexCorp building, and even though there’s been nothing substantial yet, it’s probably just a matter of time before they stir up trouble, so we’re here to get a head start. The goal is to gather information without tripping any alarms, so it’s a pretty small team with league members who specialize in stealth. Um…” She pauses. “Flash, Martian Manhunter, and Nightwing are going to sneak into the building to do the actual snooping-” Superman quirks a brow at her. “I mean- information gathering. And we are here to function as both air support and lookouts!” She finishes triumphantly. Superman looks pleased, so she puffs out her chest a little too.
“Very good work, Stargirl.” A deep voice says, and J’onn J’onzz appears beside her, his features impassive but exuding a sort of distant warmth that quickly puts her at ease. “Greetings, Superman.”
“Hey J’onn. And he’s right, you hit all the important points, but there’s-”
“I thought Nightwing got called away for something else last minute?” Courtney almost jumps out of her skin when the Flash suddenly appears next to her in a (ha) flash of red. He shoots her an apologetic look.
“He did,” Superman confirms. “Sorry we couldn’t get this info to you on time, Stargirl, but Nightwing had to go handle an emergency that popped up in Blüdhaven, so he won’t be coming today. Batman will be joining us instead.”
“Bat-” Courtney dissociates for a second to process this. “Batman is coming?!”
Holy shit.
The man, the myth, the legend.
Several months into joining the team, you’d think she would have met all of the founding members already. But, true to his reputation, Batman is like a mirage, a faint afterimage in a fog left behind by something that might never have been there. She’d only really seen him a handful of times and most clearly on induction day, looming at Superman’s shoulder, somehow shrouded in shadow even as he stood next to the physical embodiment of sunshine and rainbows. Otherwise, there have been glimpses, something quickly flitting around a corner or the edge of a cape sweeping out of a doorway, but never the- the whole thing, if you will. The whole- whole man…? Courtney isn’t sure, none of the newcomers are. There’s a whole betting pool about what The Batman can do.
Firestorm has his money on flight and echolocation (“He’s not actually a bat, Ronald.” “You don’t know that!”), Blue Beetle is adamant about some form of darkness manipulation no matter what the Scarab says, and Booster Gold is absolutely, one hundred percent convinced that the guy is a vampire. Courtney herself has about $30 on invisibility. She thinks the sneak peeks they’ve been getting are Batman’s idea of a test, to see if they’d pick up on how his powers work.
“—ellooo. Heyyy. Earth to Stargirl?” She reels back from her thoughts to Flash waving a hand in front of her and Superman looking a little bit concerned.
“Is everything okay?” He asks, and it suddenly occurs to her that this is her chance to do some of her own espionage. After all, they never set any rules against asking a founder for answers—especially if it’s Superman, she heard him and Batman are tight—and the hair ties she keeps snapping certainly aren’t going to replenish themselves without some extra cash. So—
“What can Batman do?” She blurts out before she can second guess herself, so abrupt that Superman looks like he just glitched into a buffering screen.
Martian Manhunter blinks.
The Flash says, “Uh.”
“Like–” she fumbles a little with her staff, hoping the question isn’t somehow deeply offensive– “Does he- can he, like, move shadows around? Or maybe turn into the shadows? Turn into a bat? You know, superpowers. He’s gotta have something, right? There’s no way a normal person can just… disappear the way he does.” Superman doesn’t say anything, but the corners of his mouth tug upwards into a smile she can’t decipher. “Fly? Echolocate? Although for the record I think that one’s a stretch- Invisibility?"
Flash is openly hiding a smile behind his hand now, and even J’onn looks faintly amused. Courtney has the sudden and distinct impression that she’s missing something.
“He’s not actually a vampire, is he?” If Booster Gold of all people is going to win this bet, she’s going to-
“No.”
“AAH-”
She whips around, her staff swinging wild in a reflexive arc so she can beat up whichever creep had just—and it gets effortlessly plucked away from her by a gauntleted hand because the freaking Batman was standing right behind her. Above her, the look Superman gives his colleague is so goddamn tired.
“None of the above,” Batman deadpans, as if the symbol of hope isn’t radiating disappointment at him, then hands Courtney her staff back and moves on like none of that just happened. She hears Superman mutter something that sounds suspiciously like He thinks he’s funny.
But holy shit, this up close, the Batman is truly something to behold.
He’s just about as tall as Superman and nearly as broad, but where Superman is all warm confidence and unyielding strength, Batman is lethal grace and controlled savagery. Every muscle is wound like a spring and carved with unbelievable precision. The harsh contours of his shoulders contract sharply with Superman’s softer, more languid though no less powerful slopes, visible even underneath the cape that billows around him like liquid night, the material so dense and dark that it’s like he’d torn off the corner of a black hole to wrap around himself. And truly, it wraps around him, cocooning and hugging the planes of his body in a distortion of his silhouette that gives Courtney an illusion of nothingness, that he’s not really there despite the fact she is staring straight at him. Then there’s the… the tension in the way he holds himself, a rope strung and pulled painfully taught from the top of his head to the soles of his feet, like he’s never truly relaxed, like he’d been coiled tight for so long he doesn’t remember how to relax. For a brief, frightening instant, Courtney wonders whether that rope would ever start to fray.
She feels small, standing next to him, humbled by something she cannot understand.
“The plan remains the same,” Batman says, and she snaps back to attention so hard she gives herself mental whiplash. “Flash, check the perimeter. J’onn, you take the bottom floors, I’ll go in from the top. Superman and Stargirl, stay at a vantage point above the building, keep an eye out for anyone coming in or out who isn’t supposed to be here.” He takes a moment to look at her, and when he speaks again, it is still low and gruff, but undeniably softer around the edges. “Got it?”
“Got it,” she echoes, determined to get this right. Martian Manhunter offers a curt nod and promptly sinks into the floor, already morphing into the visage of a security guard doing his rounds, and Flash throws them a mock salute before a crackle raises the hair on her arms and he’s gone too.
From his belt, Batman produces a grappling gun and aims it high, but before he fires, Courtney finds words tumbling out of her mouth.
“Batman?” He turns toward her the barest fraction, and she thinks he may be raising an eyebrow under the cowl. She hopes it’s an invitation to continue, or at least not a condemnation. She plows on. “What’s your superpower?”
“I paid for the Watchtower.”
The pause that follows is heavily pregnant, maybe even with triplets.
“B.”
“Kal-El.”
“You’re going to break the poor kid.”
Silence.
She must have gaped, or otherwise made some sort of face, because she swears that the ghost of a smirk graces Batman’s lips before the grapple fires with a muted bang, and the thwip of the wire takes him halfway to the neighboring building before she has the chance to pick her jaw off the floor.
“He- he can’t- he doesn’t- he’s human?!”
“Uh huh.” When she finally manages to salvage some dignity, Superman is already about a foot in the air, smiling something small and unbelievably fond. She scrambles to follow.
“Incredible, isn’t he?”
Courtney nods vigorously, and then finally registers exactly what it was that Batman had said.
“The entire Watchtower?!”
Superman actually scoffs. “Yeah. He’s rich rich.”