Chapter Text
It takes Stephanie four embarrassing tries to crack the back door to the looming manor. The rusty old lock takes a fair bit of hammering to finally give in with a heavy clunk, and she has to bite back a wince and pray that whatever eldritch entity is hiding inside is either a heavy sleeper or doesn't have super-hearing of any kind.
She shoulders the door open, quiet as a mouse, and slips through, a cautious hand on the crossbow slung across her back. The room she steps into—supposedly the kitchen—is dark, with only a couple of windows that are mostly boarded up, and she pulls the door shut behind her. The air is sticky and licking her lips leaves the faint taste of blood on them. She holds still in the doorway for a moment, scanning the room and straining her ears for any signs of life.
After a couple minutes of a whole lot of nothing, she advances into the room, dragging her gloved finger along the surface of the counter. It comes up dusty. Which, well, expected. Vampires don't cook. Riveting detective work, Stephanie Brown.
Stake in hand, she pushes the door to the kitchen open. The grimy hallways stretch out before her, rotting tapestries still against the walls, and she prowls through the place cautiously for a few minutes before giving up and heading back to the kitchen. Clearly this is an abandoned wing, and she doesn't want to wander right into the main foyer and be surrounded by a round circle of undead bloodsucking killers.
She's halfway through mentally mapping where an architect making a manor of this size would reasonably put another side door when she realises the door she came in through won't open. She's sure she left it unlocked but she picks the lock again anyway, steps back, and tries the handle again.
The latch creaks and turns slowly all the way through its arc, she pushes the door again, and it still doesn't budge.
Stephanie stares at it. Then, all the noise be fucked, she plants her boots firmly on the ground, puts her shoulder to the old wood and shoves. The door doesn't move. She moves to trying the few boarded windows, but sliding a blade through the gaps and attempting to pry them open just breaks one of her knives.
She tries the first door again, her movements more frantic this time. She tries kicking it in, and then goes back to trying desperately to strongarm it open until panic creeps into her movements and a particularly sloppy hit makes her shoulder ache.
It's cursed. There's no other plausible explanation as to why a slightly rusty door would absolutely refuse to open. Why wouldn't it be cursed? This is what she gets for messing with ancient vampires. Or, well, one ancient vampire.
She takes a breath and forces herself to think. She rests against the stubborn wood and cradles her sore shoulder moodily. It's stickier than it should be on a dry fall evening in November, the almost oppressive atmosphere of the house pushing back against her for just existing in this god-forsaken room.
Fine, whatever. She can find another way out. She scans the kitchen again half-heartedly and dumps her satchel on the dusty counter. She fumbles to light a candle, and lifting it reveals not much more than she was expecting. There's a couple of racks of rotten herbs hanging from hooks and a cavernous fireplace lined with ashes and dust, but nothing beyond a few mouseholes is worth looking at for more than a minute.
She turns her attention back to her satchel, and half-heartedly tugs out the pouch of weird green stuff that Oracle had given her that she had been fairly certain was some kind of weed. Upon closer inspection, it isn't weed, and she pulls out the small clay bowl she carries around and tips some precious water from her canteen into it.
The not-weed apparently works like some kind of magic mirror. Oracle had pressed the pouch into her hands before she left and said, this is your most serious mission yet, if you get into trouble you can't get out of, use this, and Stephanie had said, it looks like weed, and Oracle had said, I'm serious, Stephanie, Cain is a monster, and Stephanie had said, seriously, why does it look like weed, and Oracle had said with a strained patience, just take it, Stephanie.
Upon sprinkling a generous amount of strange green powder into the still water, just about nothing happens.
"Oracle," she ventures, "Hey. It's me. Come in? I'm stuck."
When the murky water doesn't light up with a projection of Oracle or shine with resplendent holy light and eradicate the desolate manor around her, she tries tipping in more powder. Probably not how it works, but she's stranded in some ancient vampire lair with no way out, and she's not planning on dying here.
She tries another hey-Oracle-get-me-out-of-here-pretty-please and drums her fingers against the table. The water smells faintly earthy and a little bitter, and the color in the candlelight is unpleasant, like if a waterlogged and slightly radioactive cat was sick in a bowl. She thinks she should wait here for a response, listen to Oracle. Then she thinks that if she's going to die in this manor, it's going to be fighting a dreadful vampire and not waiting around.
She stares back at the watery radioactive cat sick. Oracle hadn't given her disposal instructions, and drinking it, no matter how resource-effective, would probably be unsafe. So she decides to take a gamble and pour it down the drain of the very dry sink in the corner of the room, and prays the pipes don't explode with magical force before she can get out of there.
She gathers everything back into her satchel, rolls her still-sore shoulder, and—stake in one hand, crossbow in the other—heads back into the mansion once more, ready to slay a vampire.
The thing is—and she has been trying very hard not to think about the thing, but she's alone with her thoughts and there's nothing else to do other than think about the thing—Stephanie is operating on her own again. Naturally. But Batman wouldn't send her into a death trap, and even if he did, she wouldn't die in it. So forth she ventures.
—
The manor is really big. Granted, it's a manor. But once she steps out of the hallway and into what looks like some kind of defunct ballroom, her footsteps start echoing because of how high the ceiling is. She cursorily checks the rooms lining the halls, but they all look old and like they'd fall apart if anyone sneezed too hard in them. And with the amount of dust lining the place, it'd be a miracle not to sneeze all over the place.
When Stephanie hears the first squeak, she almost shoots the bat.
She’s about to squeeze the trigger before her hands catch up to her brain and she realises that it’s just a bat, and not a murderous bloodsucker that intends to leave her body drained and decomposing.
"Yeesh," she mutters, lowering her crossbow cautiously, "Watch it, little guy. Any chance you can take me to your master?"
The bat chirps, and then flies back up and vanishes into the yawning ceiling. Stephanie half-heartedly lifts her candle, but there's only so much she can see with a shitty small flame. She lowers the flame, taps her feet against the rotting wood and lets the quiet sound echo back to her.
The windows all stubbornly refuse to open. She breaks another knife trying to pry the boards off the largest window, but it remains frustratingly stuck, just like the windows in the kitchen and all the chambers that followed. There isn't even enough room for her to peer out, try to gauge how long she's been in here.
She walks the western wall of the ballroom and feels along the plaster for any give, pushing on anything that looks notable in the desolate remains of what designs once lined the walls. If she's learnt anything from her years of vampire hunting, it's not to discount the existence and subsequent use of secret passages.
Being stuck is frustrating. It's not like she was careless. She noted six potential exits on her way in, and tested them before entering. She's careful. She isn't reckless.
You're reckless, Stephanie, Batman growls in her head, don't let it happen again. No excuses. I'm giving you a fair shot. Obey orders, or you're fired.
She shakes away the voice. Batman isn't here. This is all her. He trusted her enough to send her here, to fell one of his enemies, and she won't fail.
Stephanie goes back to all six exits, and, in what feels like an hour, ends up back in the ballroom sore and having gotten nowhere. Lighting the place on fire doesn't seem like a half-bad plan. At least she'd be able to see over a few feet from her candle.
—
The rooms beyond the ballroom smell worse somehow. It's not so bad that she can't breathe, and she's certainly smelt worse, but it does make her long for the fresh air outside. The walls are lined with portraits. They're mostly dilapidated and she can't tell who's on most of them, but she can make out a young girl on one. Her face is mostly eaten away, but her hair, jet black and tied up in two neat ponytails, is still visible.
She wonders if David Cain had a family before he became a vampire. Whether he also had a wife and a daughter that he abused and abandoned just to pursue his own selfish desires. She wonders how many centuries ago they died. Whether they knew. If it was quick and painless. If nothing else, she hopes this little girl is in a better place.
Batman didn't tell her anything about Cain. He's dead, is all Batman had said. There's nothing there. Oracle hadn't given her much either. A monster. Like that helps. Vampires are monsters. Pigs are animals. It's not a very telling remark.
Nothing else? She had asked. No, Batman had said. You saw a picture of him. You don't need anything else.
The portrait lined corridor opens into another large room, not quite as large as the hopeless ballroom, but still bigger than most rooms Stephanie had ever been in. There's no furniture apart from a couple of fallen chairs, boarded high windows, and a covered instrument.
She's stepping over a chair to go see what kind of fucked-up contraption is under the white sheet when her candle flickers and two bats drop from the rafters. She swears, yanks the candle close to her chest, and whirls around unsteadily, stake in hand.
Her heart is pounding. There's a shadow in the doorway.
Her hands move with her instincts. Person in manor, person in vampire manor, vampire. Vampire in the doorway. The figure is small, smaller than Cain should be, but it's a person ominously hovering around in a vampire manor, so she drops the candle and lunges with the stake, aiming true for the shadow's heart.
The person doesn't move, or flinch, or duck. Steph crashes against the open door, which creaks and threatens to topple, and the air leaves her lungs in a rush when her shoulder hits a metal bit that's sticking out.
"Fuck," she gasps, pain shooting through her right arm as she turns back around. She's trained her whole life to get up and keep going, so she pivots on her back foot and hurls herself at her shadowy opponent again, angling right for the heart, and—
—and the person catches her wrist. Stephanie gets a second before her brain catches up to what's happening to just stare at this person who decidedly isn't David Cain.
She's a girl. She looks young, with matted jet-black hair shorn to her neck, but before Stephanie can really try to figure out who exactly this mystery girl is supposed to be, the world tilts around her. She's weightless for a second, she's flying, and her stomach swoops before the floor comes up and greets her hard.
She hits the boards already-sore-shoulder-first and her stake goes flying out of her hand, and she lets out a pained yelp. Her candle is long-gone, and she can hardly make out what exactly is happening around her. There's no sounds of breathing other than her own heavy pants, which means the tenebrous girl is definitely a vampire, as if her freaky speed and strength hadn't given her away already.
It's not the worst situation she's been in. Well, it probably is the worst situation she's been in. But if there's one thing Stephanie Brown knows, it's how to make the best of the world's worst situation. Her stake is gone, but she has a second one on her belt digging into her hip. Her crossbow is strapped across her back. Her satchel is probably lying on the ground where she was before she got personal with the floor.
Get up, Batman says in her head.
Fuck you, Stephanie thinks viciously, and gets up.
She twists, pushes herself with her elbow, yanks the second stake out of her belt and charges. Her stake cleaves through air. The girl moves like she's avoiding an unsteady toddler pawing at her, and the easy evasion pisses Stephanie off more as she spins to follow, and, for the second time in forty seconds, has her body weight work against her and ends up on the floor.
This time she gets her hands out in time, managing to catch herself against the floorboards. It's still painful, and her stake being tightly clenched in her hand means her knuckles hit the ground hard.
Her hair hangs around her face, and at the silent count of three she pushes herself back up to sit on her heels, makes a grab for her satchel, and lights another candle before scrambling to her feet and brandishing her stake.
The girl is standing in front of the covered instrument, watching her with curious brown eyes. Her head is tilted the way a confused puppy would tilt its head when shown something that it'd never been shown before. It's the expression of a person who has a very long time to observe something they've been curious about their whole life, and is in no hurry to stop.
She's intrigued. That's the first thing that becomes apparent when the candlelight illuminates the girl's face. She looks younger than Stephanie, her sharply cut hair hanging around a pale face set with brown eyes, reflecting almost golden in the light, that toe the line between endearing and off-putting.
Stephanie aims the stake at her chest.
"Stay still," she says, her voice surprisingly steady, "I know how to use this, but if you cooperate, I'll hold off. Really. Who are you? What are you doing here? Where is David Cain?"
The girl blinks at her.
"Come on," she grinds out, "Talk, or this will talk instead."
The girl's eyes trace the stake with familiarity, and then settle on Stephanie's face again.
Stephanie lowers the stake slightly. Not enough to rule her out as a threat, but maybe a fake-out olive branch will work here if nothing else will. She tries again, slightly less sharp: "Do you own this house? Did you lock it down?"
Her eyes wander the room, and then she takes a deliberate step towards Stephanie.
Stephanie takes a step back, and aims the stake at the girl's sternum again. The girl stops moving. Her eyes settle on Stephanie's face again with that same unsettling gaze that says I have all the time in the world, I have never not had all the time in the world, and I will always have all the time in the world. She's never felt more like a bug in an enclosure.
"I'll put this through your chest," she threatens again, but it falls flat.
The girl takes another step forward.
Stephanie charges again. It's not a smart move. She's got a bleeding lip, an aching shoulder, sore knuckles, and a skeleton that feels rattled to back that up. But she's running low on options, and she's not going down without a fight. The girl practically vanishes again, Stephanie's stake driving forcefully through the air. She pivots, swings again, and hits the wall.
She grits her teeth. The girl doesn't look the fazed in the slightest, as if Stephanie is less of a threat, and more of a fly she's observing before swatting flat against the wall. Stephanie has killed plenty of vampires faster and stronger than her. She is capable, and she knows she's capable, but this shadowy girl is always anywhere but impaled on her stake.
She tries to feint left and fool the girl into making a mistake in her instantaneous movements, but the girl doesn't even move, as if she knows exactly what Stephanie is going to do next.
The girl watches Stephanie's stake harmlessly hammer against the wall again. Stephanie pulls back, panting, and glares.
"Who," she repeats, praying her breathlessness isn't glaringly obvious, "are you."
She isn't graced with a response.
"Where is David Cain?"
Stephanie raises her stake.
"Answer me," she says, "Or I'll kill you. Say something!"
The girl tilts her head further. She's back in front of the covered instrument, her piercing brown eyes glinting like they're trying to say something.
"I need to find David Cain." Stephanie says, slowly, emphasising each word. Whatever language the girl speaks, the name should get through. "David Cain. This was his home. Is he here? Do you know where he is?"
The girl crouches. Stephanie instinctively readies herself to fight again, but the girl just picks something off the ground and stands up. She extends her cupped hands. There's a dead rat in them.
"Okay," Stephanie says weakly. Is there a language in which David Cain sounds like dead rat? "Um, I don't really think that's what I need."
The girl sets the rat down.
"Look, if you help me, I can help you," Stephanie sort-of-lies. The only way she can help a vampire is by wiping it off the face of the planet, but the girl doesn't need to know that, and she needs something to put on the table to avoid get mauled and sucked dry by a vampire even if she's not entirely sure whether said vampire actually understands her, "I'm not going to hurt you. Just tell me your name, can we start there?"
The girl takes another insistent step towards her.
Stephanie moves back, shoulder catching the wall, and the girl moves forward again, tries to close the distance. Her stake comes up instinctively and almost catches the girl's forearm and then she's weightless again, and then she's getting cosy with the floor again, her entire body aching.
She should be used to get face-slammed into the floor by now considering this is the third time it's happened, but she really isn't, her hands don't come out in time, and the impact painfully goes up both her arms and drills into her bad shoulder. Iron fills her mouth, and she's not sure if she just bit her cheek or one of her teeth got knocked loose. She spits a dark mouthful of hot blood onto the floor and breathes shakily before a second before realising fuck, exposed blood, rabid vampire, but her hellish adversary seems to have enough self control to not jump her immediately.
She forces her head up, and stares. The girl is standing a few feet away. Stephanie's candle is precariously sideways on the floor, the light flickering. She gets one foot under her, then the other, then uses her good arm to push herself up and grab the candle on her way up, trying to preserve the thimble-sized remnants of her dignity.
She wearily lifts her stake. It's hardly a threat anymore, and even if the girl stayed perfectly still, Stephanie isn't sure she has the strength to drive it all the way through the undead heart still in the freak's chest. But doing nothing means giving up, and she'd sooner set the place on fire and burn down in it than serve as a bloodbag to whoever this girl is.
"Back," she grinds out. Her voice is coarse and she swallows another mouthful of blood before talking, but a drop trickles past her lips anyway, "Or I'll use this. And then set us both on fire."
The girl's eyes fix on the blood trickling down Stephanie's chin. Stephanie glares back, blinks, and then the girl isn't there anymore. She instinctively whirls around, expecting the girl to somehow come out of the walls, but the room is properly empty, the bats nowhere to be seen either, seemingly having fled on the trail of their spectral mistress. She counts a minute before taking a breath.
The adrenaline is starting to wear off, and her shoulder hurts like a bitch. She straightens up one of the fallen chairs and sets her candle on it before rolling her shoulder, which she regrets immediately when a spike of pain shoots through her arm. She wipes at her mouth, blood staining the back of her hand. She considers washing it off, but water might be a limited resource, and if the vampire comes sniffing blood then Stephanie will keep her word and set a fire and kill them both.
She retrieves her satchel anyway. The weed powder is useless, and her weapons won't help her against an enemy that can toy with her like she's a mouse. Her back aches. She takes a small sip of water that goes down tasting like iron.
Her candle sputters as she picks it back up. She lights the torches on the walls of the room—there's no point trying to keep her presence a secret anymore. She limps back down the hallway, the candlelight throwing creepy shadows up around her.
She walks aimlessly for a while until she's as sure as she can be that the vampire girl isn't stalking her around the place, and then quickly ducks into a room. Lighting the torches and setting her candle on the ground reveals a bedroom like most of the others she saw while investigating: covered in dust, modestly furnished, no windows, cloth falling apart at the seams, and, most importantly, seemingly no doors other than one that she just entered through.
Stephanie drops her satchel and worn stake on the bed. There's a chest-of-drawers pushed up against the wall, and she drags it across the floor, making an awful sound, and tucks it in front of the door. She doesn't stop till everything in the room is crowded in front of the door and her shoulder is threatening to drop out of her arm.
Granted, the mystery girl could probably chew her way through all the wood like a termite somehow, but at least then Stephanie will know she's coming. A termite, she thinks, gingerly settling onto the bed, bloodthirsty murdering termite. That eats human flesh instead of blood.
Well, maybe not that bloodthirsty. She hadn't been licking blood off the floor, which Stephanie is grateful for. She eats a lot of spinach, and her blood probably tastes really fucking good. Probably good enough for vampgirl to go blood-crazy over it.
Why wasn't vampgirl blood-crazy? A regular-schmegular vampire would've been all ooh, bloooood, c'mere and let me drink your blood, but this girl just stared at her really hard. Maybe she had some kind of telepathic bloodsucking ability? Stephanie did stare into her eyes a lot, and she does feel kind of lightheaded. Maybe it's just the cold.
A murderous vampire probably wouldn't have walked out on an easy, outclassed opponent bleeding all over the floor. But maybe this girl is playing the long game. Maybe David Cain is alive in the building, and the girl is bringing him to sample Stephanie's floor blood to pregame his next meal.
She wonders how old the girl is. She looks younger than Stephanie, but for all she knows, she might be a hundred years old. She probably isn't, though. Batman would've told her if David Cain had a weird little girl as his sidekick when they clashed.
The… day? Night? She isn't sure how long she's been here, but whatever it is, it wears on. Her shoulder throbs. She closes her eyes and imagines the snippy report she'll give Batman once she's out of this place.
Not only did I exorcise Cain, I also got another vampire in the deal. Beat that, Batman! By the way, Oracle's weed didn't work. I made it all the way out of there myself. And got these sick spoils.
She'll omit the part where she got thrown into the floor thrice. Then she'll eat a big bowl of hot mashed potatoes, and go to bed. But before any of that, she'll make it out of here. Her candle looks a lot shorter.
"Fuck," she murmurs to the ceiling. A little bat stares back. She blinks at it, and sighs. "Hey. Are you on my side? The other bats all followed vampgirl away to hell."
The bat doesn't even chirp at her. She frowns, and sucks in a breath. She's talking to a bat that won't even talk back. Maybe she will die like this, and a report will get to Batman because he somehow learns everything (she's fairly certain that's Oracle's doing. Maybe it's the magic weed).
Why didn't the vampire kill her? She turns the question around in her head till vampire stops sounding like a word. Stephanie's fought a lot of vampires. When she was thirteen, she staked her father straight through the heart with a stake she carved herself with a shitty kitchen knife and one leg of the armchair in her living room. She once threw a four hundred year old vampire into the sunlight against Batman's orders (to save his life!), and she's won most of her fights against the undead. The only thing that all the vampires she's ever fought have had in common is that they were always ready to kill and drain, even the ones that enjoyed toying with their prey.
But vampgirl was less toying, and more investigating. Like watching Stephanie hit the floor over and over was teaching her something. Which wasn't much better, considering how it left Stephanie lying on half-intact linens with her maybe-dislocated shoulder feeling less wounded than her pride.
It was hardly even a fight. Which stings to admit, because Stephanie is good. She knows she is. But this girl is miles better, and all the notches on Stephanie's belt and all her years of training mean nothing in the face of a sorry excuse of a fight where one side puts in no force or effort and still leaves her panting and licking her wounds like a dog.
It makes her feel more bitter than she'd care to admit. All that work, and someone can swoop in and dogwalk her as if she'd nothing more than a untrained newbie.
Batman had once told her she was strong. That she could be better than his other proteges. You can be better than them, Stephanie. She wonders if she's better now. He never did tell her.
What would Batman do in a situation like this? Drills? He would probably find a way to communicate with vampgirl. Her refusal to say a word did remind Stephanie of Batman's stolid silence punctuated by the occasional grunt, like it'd kill him to say a word.
Vampgirl is a vampire, she reminds herself. Batman is Batman. Not bloodsucking, even if the boringness feels like it's sucking the soul out of you sometimes.
The bat on the ceiling chirps at her.
"Wanna talk now, huh," she says moodily, "What if I don't want to talk anymore?"
The bat looks back at her with beady eyes.
"Yeah, you're right. Haven't got much of a choice. Hey, you're not gonna give me rabies, right?"
Her only companion decides to ignore her. It's fine. She's a professional. She'll get out of here and find better company. For now, she can wait for a more cooperative shoulder and make a plan better than charge now, worry later.