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Cass doesn’t know what to call it. She’s been taught all of the relevant mental health terms that one would run into when saving lives: suicide attempt, psychotic break, manic/depressive episode, etc. She wouldn’t call it self-harm because she’s not causing visible damage to herself, but it’s not…it’s still not normal. It’s not suicidal behavior, either, because that would require death to be the goal, and it’s not. She isn’t cutting her wrists or hanging herself from a rafter. She’s just...been poisoning herself a little.
Not often. Every few days, depending on how long it takes Cass to recover from the prior dose. Her poison of choice ranges anywhere from pills to concentrated insect venoms to household chemicals. It all depends on what she can get her hands on at the time. If she overdoes it even a little bit, she dies, and then everyone will know her shameful secret. This kind of behavior requires the utmost precision.
Cass has never done drugs before, apart from painkillers prescribed by Alfred for minor injuries and heavier sedatives for major ones. Before she joined up with the Bats, her father never gave her a painkiller for anything. Cass’ intestines could have been spilling out of her abdominal cavity and he would still insist on making her fight through it. Be better, his body language would scream at her. Be stronger, or else die trying.
Sometimes—many times—Cass wished that she would just die. She toyed with the idea of taking the blade in her hand and jamming it through her neck before anyone could stop her. She wanted to dare Cain to do the job himself and put this rabid animal out of its misery. After Cass made that first kill and saw up close what death was really like, she had nothing left to wish for. She didn’t deserve to go out that easily. She didn’t deserve anything good.
Bruce is a good mentor. Responsible. He makes sure all of his protégés have an extensive knowledge on all of Gotham's most common drugs and toxins before sending them into the field. They learn every chemical’s effects, lifespan, and how one should act if one comes into contact with a dangerous substance. They carry antidotes for the most basic toxins and are inoculated for everything they can create inoculates for.
It’s all about keeping his brood safe first and foremost, even though Bruce claims that his priority is Gotham. Cass knows better. No one can lie to her. She knows what Batman would sacrifice to keep his family safe, even if he wouldn’t do the same for himself. Bruce wouldn’t kill for his children, but he would prioritize saving one of them over saving a stranger. He would sacrifice his own life in a heartbeat if it meant keeping them safe. He’d be wrecked if he knew what Cass was doing to herself.
He wouldn’t even give her a chance to explain her reasoning—which is logical and sane, thank you very much. She’s not crazy. Cass doesn’t ingest poison because it’s fun. It’s not fun. It’s off-putting and creepy and it tastes worse than anything she’s had before. No normal person wants to poison themselves. No normal person wants to die, either, except for Cass, but she would have to be the most selfish human being in the world to kill herself now. She’s caused so much pain and suffering to the point where every terrible act blends together in her memory. She could never make up for all of it.
She tried to turn it around by becoming a hero and saving lives, but that’s a double-edged sword. If she allowed herself the relief of dropping out of the rotation now, she would be dooming countless more lives with her negligence. It’s a no-win scenario.
So she’s not trying to kill herself, see? Cass is just curious to see how close she can get without actually dying, which is…okay, it’s not normal, but it’s not as crazy as it could be.
People take drugs for recreational purposes all the time. Heroin can kill you if you’re careless, and yet thousands of people take it every day because it feels good. Maybe most people don’t put chemicals in their body with the intention to cause damage without the bonus euphoria, but Cass is not most people. She’s always been fascinated by poisons—mainly because she’d never seen one in action before coming to Gotham. Cain’s tutelage was exclusively in taking lives with physical violence. Cassandra had no use for sly, cowardly kills. A real assassin gets up close and personal with their targets.
Among the extensive collection of chemical agents and drug samples Bruce keeps in the cave’s lab for research purposes, Cass comes across some vials of liquid cyanide, likely confiscated from a criminal at one time or other. No one will notice any missing, so Cass tucks a vial into her sleeve and sneaks the contraband upstairs to her room. That night in her bathroom, Cass squeezes a drop of it onto her tongue with a pipette, just to see what it would taste like. It’s bitter. She rinses her tongue under the faucet before it’s had time to settle. She gargles with mouthwash and spits out any residual traces, over and over.
Besides some itchiness on her taste buds, nothing happens. Obviously. One drop of cyanide, not even swallowed, won’t kill a thing. It was interesting, though. The surge of excitement in her gut was satisfying enough to warrant another try, so she does it again the following day. Same process; rinse and repeat.
After she’s finished up the cyanide, Cass steals a sample of meta-human spider venom from the Council of Spiders—a paralytic diluted enough that it’s highly unlikely to kill her, so she allows herself a full dose this time. She locks herself in her room and barricades the door, just in case. The toxin typically only keeps the target paralyzed for six hours. She’ll be up by breakfast.
Cass spends the night paralyzed atop her duvet, limbs locked and head numbed as if she’s seeing the world from under piles of foam. She blinks, blinks, blinks at the blank ceiling overhead. She doesn’t sleep. Doesn’t dream. She should be panicking at the knowledge that she couldn’t defend herself from an attack in this state, but for those hours she’s willfully incapacitated, all Cass can think is, This must be how a corpse feels.
Her metabolism is faster than she anticipated. She regains feeling in her fingers only five hours after the injection. By the time Alfred knocks on her door to wake her for the day, Cass is already sitting up in her bed and flexing her joints.
She gives herself a short break after that, but she’s back at it within the week. She traps a hornet again her arm until it sinks its stinger in her flesh. The bump swells to the size of a golf ball. She swallows a handful of unlabeled pills she finds at a crime scene, then forces herself to vomit them all up behind a dumpster five minutes later. She injects herself with one of Poison Ivy’s deadlier concoctions, waits nine seconds, and then injects the antidote. It usually kills in ten.
“Are your teeth whiter?” Stephanie asks during their weekly yap-and-sip session at Cass’ favorite boba café.
Cass locks her lips around her straw and shrugs so Steph can’t see her teeth anymore. They are whiter, though. She’s been swishing diluted bleach around in her mouth once or twice a day. Her gums sting and the taste is abhorrent, but she likes the simplicity of this approach compared to the others. No one would notice a cleaning agent gone missing from the laundry room. She swishes the bleach back and forth for a few seconds, then spits it out and brushes her teeth for five minutes until the taste is gone. Quick and easy.
It’s not the worst thing she could be doing. It’s not even that dangerous so long as she doesn’t swallow, but Steph is still prattling on about her own teeth-whitening misadventures. Cass has to come up with something to get her off the scent, so she offers an off-handed, “New toothpaste. Charcoal kind. It looked cool.”
She starts drinking coffee in the mornings and swishing that around, too, to balance out the color in her enamel. This is the problem with living in a family full of detectives. If anyone finds out what she’s been doing to herself, it will ruin her. When Bruce found out Dick had relapsed into his eating disorder last year, he was prohibited from patrolling for weeks until he’d gained enough weight back to no longer be considered a danger to himself. Bruce gets a notification whenever Tim’s anti-depressant prescription gets refilled so he’ll know if Tim ever stops taking them.
Irony, Jason calls it. The guy would throw himself in front of a bus on a whim if he could, but we’re not allowed to self-destruct, or else he takes it personally.
Ironic, if the girl who was bred from two killers were trying to kill herself, but that’s obviously not what’s happening. Cassandra Cain was custom designed to be an expert in death. She’s seen it, delivered it herself—she’s been dead before. If Cass really wanted to kill herself, she knows exactly how to go about it with impeccable results. She hasn’t stabbed herself in the heart or sliced her throat open, which means this behavior is fine, then. She’s not actively trying to die. She’s just…curious. That’s all.
Cass tries Scarecrow’s fear toxin once and only once. She’s been dosed with variants before, but never on purpose, and someone was always close by with an antidote. She goes to one of the family’s less-frequented safe houses and gives herself a mild dosage. Just enough to give her the anxiety and hallucinations without making her lose complete control. The nightmares still have her huddled in the corner of the concrete floor, clawing at her skin until her fingernails split. She muffles her screams in a wadded-up towel, damp with tears and sweat.
It doesn’t feel like dying. It feels like living, and that’s so much worse. After the gas wears off, Cass destroys the rest of the samples she stole and swears off trying again. Joker gas would be even worse, so she doesn’t bother an attempt there. She doesn’t need manic euphoria; she needs death, or as close as she can get.
During the day, Cass ignores the constant churning in her stomach and the chemical burns on her fingers. She has to switch over to basic household poisons and over-the-counter drugs after Alfred brings up the missing samples in the lab. With such a big family, it’s easy to write it off as an oversight, but it’s best she lies low for a while, nonetheless.
Cass does her research before stocking up on drug-store medications. She learns the exact amount of acetaminophen required to cause problems for someone her height and weight, so she swallows precisely that number of pills, minus one. Just because.
She does it right before patrol sometimes. Not for any good reason. Batgirl still performs just as well as always, even if she has to drop down and puke in an alley once in a while because her stomach is a furious, roiling mess from all the chemicals she’s ingested. She doesn’t lose consciousness, though. Doesn’t suffer any permanent effects. Doesn’t die. She knows what she’s doing. It’s self-preservation 101: Always be mindful of what could kill you. She keeps herself exactly one step away from that edge at all times, and that is a rush like no other. Self-endangerment and self-preservation are polar opposites, and yet, somehow, she's managed to converge them into one. She's hurting herself, but she's never felt more exhilarated in her life.
Self-preservation: Tim is allergic to walnuts, so when Duke is baking brownies for Damian’s bake sale—the result of a lost bet—Tim sits at the opposite end of the kitchen, just in case. Airborne traces won’t do a thing to him, but Alfred encourages taking precautions anyhow. Cass always found it interesting the way something as mundane as a walnut could be fatal to some and harmless to others. It’s all just stupid luck.
“Am I allergic to anything?” Cass asks around the whisk she’s licking.
Tim gives her an odd look. “I don’t know, are you?”
She shrugs. Alfred or Barbara probably know the answer. Cass herself has never paid attention to the results of routine checkups or blood tests. All she knows is she’s as healthy as she’s always been. Something like an allergy could have come up, and she wouldn’t even know it. She could die today if she ate the wrong thing or got stung by the wrong insect. It’s likely that she has been informed if there were indeed an allergy to look out for, but Cass would have tossed the information away without a care. She’s never been hung up on whether a mundane food or flower might kill her. She’s made it this far—committed hundreds of atrocities over the years, and she’s still alive despite all the bad karma she’s accumulated. The universe would never cut her slack by letting her die from a brownie.
“Do you ever get sick from something random?” Duke asks. “Like, you wear a necklace and get a rash, or you feel nauseous when you eat certain stuff?”
“Jason’s lactose intolerant,” Tim offers. “Remember when I switched his lactose-free yogurt with the real stuff after he broke my Xbox? Best day of my life.”
Cass does remember. She considers it for a moment, trying to decide if she’s ever experienced anything like that. “I sneeze a lot in the garden.”
Duke waves his chocolate-coated spatula in a loop. “So maybe you’re allergic to one of Alf’s flowers. Or it could be a hay fever thing. If you look up your medical records downstairs, I’m sure it’ll tell you.”
She could do that, except it would come across as suspicious if she suddenly started taking an interest in her medical information. Even more suspicious if she came up dead a day later because she intentionally triggered an allergic reaction.
She tests the theory out on her own, instead. Innocent experimentation. Who knows? Maybe she’s fatally allergic to daisies and she’ll drop dead on the floor. Not that she’s trying for that outcome, of course, but anything is possible.
Gotham has very little natural flora, considering that it’s the darkest and dreariest city on Earth, so Cass buys bouquets of flowers for herself at a little shop with her Wayne credit card that she knows Bruce hardly ever checks up on. She arranges the bundles all around her room in vases, old cups, and a mixing bowl or two when she runs out of containers to keep them all. She lies down in the middle of the floor and breathes, breathes, breathes.
Aside from her eyes getting itchy, nothing happens. Her face doesn’t explode. Her heart doesn’t stop. With a disappointed sigh, Cass mixes vinegar and hydrogen peroxide together in a cup and dips her finger in the homemade peracetic acid until her cuticles bleed.
“You smell like Poison Ivy’s armpit,” Jason says as he and Dick pass by Cass in the foyer, fresh from a run. Cass disposed of the bouquets in the compost pile behind the garden shed.
She wrinkles her nose at the sweat dripping down Jason’s face. “You smell like real armpits.” She keeps her raw hands carefully hidden behind her back.
In typical older-brother fashion, Jason shakes his dripping hair at her, cackling when Cass dances away just in time to dodge the sweaty rain. Jason used to wear long-sleeved shirts and hoodies when he’d exercise around the rest of the family. Too many scars, too much dark history. It wasn’t until recently that he started wearing tank tops again. His many scars are on full display now: old bullet holes, poorly healed burns, and the two vertical slashes bisecting each wrist. The scars are still pink despite it being years since his attempt.
Jason doesn’t draw attention to them. Neither does anyone else, but they are the elephants in every room. Cass has never been brave enough to ask what the final straw was for him that day.
Opportunity strikes again when a new serial killer pops up on the news. According to the police and to Batman’s case files, his MO is wiping out entire families by releasing a fast-acting poisonous gas into their homes through the central air vents. Even with the GCPD and the Bats’ forces combined, the killer takes out eight more families in the span of six weeks. The youngest was only a few months old.
He’s caught in the end, but what use is justice now? He’s already accomplished what he set out to do. The last strike is less than an hour before Batgirl tracks him to his base of operations and smashes his face into the wall so hard his teeth fall out of his head and clink against the floor like pearls. While she’s dragging his unconscious body out of the building, the news comes in from Oracle: The family members of the final house died en route to the hospital. They never had a chance.
Not a drop of blood was shed, and yet it’s on his hands all the same. It’s on all of their hands. On Cass' hands.
“Be proud,” Commissioner Gordon tells Batgirl after she hauls the handcuffed piece of garbage across the asphalt and hands him off to the awaiting deputies. “I know it doesn’t feel like a victory now, but you saved countless lives today. We found his manifesto. He already had two more houses lined up.”
Cass doesn’t say a word. She never does.
She leaves the small-talk to Batman and the rest, and she grapples away. Gordon was right about one thing—it doesn't feel like a victory. If she’d been better, tried harder, the killer could have been caught earlier. That final family could have been spared.
No, the only thing Cassandra has to be victorious about tonight is that she picked the killer’s pocket before surrendering him to police custody. He had three more vials of the toxin on his person.
The Batcave is empty when Cass returns. She showers and changes in a rush, her heart pounding as she thinks about what she's about to do. She stomps up the manor stairs to her bedroom. Yells at Alfred not to bother her. Everyone knows she’s angry about tonight’s outcome; they’ll give her the space she needs. All night, if she’s lucky.
A voice note comes in from Stephanie while Cass is twisting off the seal on the vial. Just saw the news! Great job tonight!
Cass throws her phone across the room with such force that it punctures a crater in the wall. She rips the unyielding cap off with her teeth and brings the smoky vial to her nostril. She inhales the contents deeply, letting the poison fill her lungs like perfume.
It’s a homemade concoction. Unpredictable. Bruce has been researching the compound over the past several weeks, but he hasn’t gotten far in terms of manufacturing an antidote. Reversing the toxin’s effects might be impossible, or the killer might already have his own stash of antidotes sequestered away at his base. The samples Cass stole might not be enough to kill a house cat. They might kill her instantly. There’s no way of knowing what the outcome will be, which means this can’t technically be classified as a suicide attempt, since she’s not certain that it will kill her. This is merely a science experiment. It’s recreation.
Cass’ lungs spasm on her next inhale. The more of the gas she breathes in, the more it feels like claws are scraping the inside of her chest. She doubles over with a wet, rattling cough. The empty vial slips from her fingers and falls somewhere on the carpet. Cass can’t see it past the black and white blotches overtaking her vision. Her mouth tastes like blood.
She’s not— She wasn’t trying to die, even though she wants to die so badly that she wishes she’d never been born in the first place. No matter the sins of her past or the virtues of her present, no one can see the truth but her. Her friends and family see value in this messed-up creature, this killing machine with a face. They’ll never understand that no matter how hard she tries to end the cycle, Cassandra Cain is made of death. She will always be death. She was born to be dead.
Cass writhes atop her bedspread, wheezing for oxygen past the knives jammed through her lungs. Hel— she mouths soundlessly, but there’s too much blood in her throat to get out more than a squeak. She doesn’t know why she’s so surprised. She did this to herself, after all. Just a silly experiment.
Silly but for the fact that, this time, she thinks she might actually be dying.
Hell looks like the brightly lit medical bay. It smells like Alfred’s detergent. It feels like a scratchy throat and warm bedsheets.
Cass has never seen this expression on Bruce’s face before. Through the fogginess in her head—thanks, oxygen deprivation—she wishes she could freeze this moment and keep the photo to study later. In those narrowed eyes and gritted teeth, Cass sees every emotion in the world at once. He’s a kaleidoscope of feeling: rage, relief, terror, grief, hopelessness and hopefulness rolled into one. He looks gutted.
Bruce holds up a small glass vial between two fingers. It’s still corked. Must be one of the other two samples that Cass swiped from the killer. She should have found a better hiding place than her sock drawer. “Explain.” Bruce’s voice is like granite. “Now.”
Cass stares back at him in silence. Her throat still hurts. She should ask if her lungs suffered any permanent damage from the poison, but that would imply that she cares about her health, which she doesn’t. Talking would also require something to say, of which she has nothing. There is no explanation for why Cass did what she did. The only new information she could offer Bruce is her regret that she didn’t try harder, and she already knows how that would go.
Bruce makes a huffing sound in the back of his throat at Cass’ reticence. “Fine. You don’t want to tell me? Maybe you’d like to explain these instead, then.” He picks something up from the table behind him: the old shoebox from under Cass’ bed. He tips it forward to show her the many, many empty pill bottles, baggies that once contained various substances confiscated from criminals, and cleaning solution bottles she's kept stashed inside.
Cass looks at him blankly like she’s never seen the collection before in her life.
Bruce selects a pill bottle at random and reads the label. “Extra strength NyQuil. This was your attempt at getting high?”
Cass rolls her eyes. She’d climb out of the medical bed and walk away if she were less lightheaded. She remembers the NyQuil. She chugged an entire bottle of it and spent hours vomiting up blood and bile. If she wanted to get high, there are a thousand better, painless ways to do so. This is Gotham. “Headaches,” she says, and her voice sounds like shredded metal.
“I found four empty Tylenol bottles in your bathroom trash can, all with the same sell-by date.”
“Very bad headaches.”
“Do not lie to me, Cassandra Cain-Wayne.” Bruce slams the box on the ground. Cass doesn’t flinch. “Is this a joke to you?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you have any idea how close you came to dying with that stunt? If Damian hadn’t heard you choking from the hallway, you would be dead right now.”
The concept shouldn’t sound so enticing. “It was an accident.”
“We found chemical burns in your mouth and esophagus. You have the liver of a middle-aged drug addict, and I know you were the one stealing chemical agents from the lab.” Bruce sits on the mattress beside Cass’ leg, forcing her to look at him. “What happened, Cass? Why are you doing this to yourself?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t bullshit me.” Bruce hardly ever talks like this. Cass has no idea how long she was unconscious for. The circles under Bruce’s eyes suggest it’s been a few days, at least. “You do know. Tell me why.”
“I don’t know.”
“You wouldn't poison yourself repeatedly without a good reason.”
“I might.” Isn’t simply being alive a good enough reason, anyway? Cassandra Cain is death. She should be dead. It’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s the only thing she has.
By the resignation that is slowly dawning on Bruce’s face the longer this one-sided conversation goes on, Cass knows he never needed a verbal explanation from her. He just didn’t want to accept that his daughter may possibly very much want to kill herself. He can see it in her eyes. If only Cass had a mirror so she could get a glimpse at whatever it is in her vacant stare that could strike fear through the Batman himself. “This won’t continue,” he says after a moment, his voice somehow stone solid and brittle at the same time. “Do you hear me? You’re staying here under close supervision until you’re medically cleared, and then you are going back to daily sessions with Dr. Thompkins. Or,” he adds at the look on Cass’ face, “I can contact the Martha Wayne Psychiatric Facility today and have them put you on suicide watch indefinitely. It’s your choice, but it has to be one or the other. You will get help.”
“No.”
“Yes. You don’t get to fight me on this, Cassie. Not after what you just made us all go through. Damian is distraught. Alfred blames himself for not noticing sooner. I’m terrified.” Cass has to mentally translate his words three times in her head because she’s positive she heard him wrong. Bruce has never admitted to being afraid of anything in the entire time she’s known him. “I refuse to find you like that again, Cass. We’re going to figure this out, and you are going to get better.”
Cassandra Cain getting “better” sounds about as doable as finding a unicorn and as pleasant as eating a slug. She’s not supposed to get better, she’s supposed to die. It doesn’t work if she lives. It’s not right. “No hospital,” she tries, hoping to at least negotiate a longer leash.
“You need to see a professional. If Leslie can’t fix this, then we need to find someone else who can.”
“I don’t need it. I’m not sick.”
Bruce cups Cass’ face in his hands, and the touch is so uncharacteristically gentle that she doesn’t try to pull away. “Then what is it? Talk to me, Cassie, please. Why are you doing this? What happened?”
Cass wants to hit him. She settles for a glare that packs an equally painful punch. “You don’t like being alive, either.”
Bruce can’t argue with that. They’re more similar to each other than all the rest. He can’t hide from her any better than she can hide from him. “I have children to take care of and a city that needs me. I have responsibilities, as do you. Your siblings and friends need you here. I need you here.”
Cass turns her head out of his grasp so he can’t see the tears burning behind her eyes. “It’s not fair.” She should be dead. She deserves to die for everything she’s done and everything she’s failed to do. She should rot in hell for the pain she’s putting Bruce through right now.
“What’s not fair is finding out that my daughter has been poisoning herself for this long and I had no idea. What’s not fair is the fact that you don’t believe your life has value.”
Cass scowls through the tears that refuse to dry up. “I could kill myself today. Tomorrow. You can’t stop me.” If she really tried, she could accomplish the deed in minutes. She should have gotten it over with when she had the chance.
If Cass didn’t know any better, she might think that Bruce’s eyes were growing damp as well. He takes her hand and cradles it in both of his, holding firm when she tries to pull away. “I can damn well try. I love you too much to let you self-destruct like this.”
“I hate you.”
Bruce’s resolve doesn’t waver. His gentle hold on her hand doesn’t slip. “Tough. You can spit on my grave after you’re ninety years old and have lived a long, full life.”
“Fine.” She'll hold him to that.
“Fine.”
The persistent ache in Cass’ throat has been growing worse the more she talks. It’s tempting to reinstate her vow of silence until he leaves her alone, but… “What am I allergic to?”
Bruce hesitates like he’s unsure whether he should respond to that, but it’s not like Cass’ medical information was classified knowledge before. He answers carefully, “Amoxycillin.”
Figures. Nothing easy to get her hands on, now that everyone knows about Cass’…unique coping mechanisms. “Flowers?”
“Nothing beyond your usual seasonal allergies.”
“I want flowers in here.” If she’s forced to stay alive indefinitely, she at least wants it to smell nice.
Bruce gives her an odd look, but it’s not angry or judgmental this time. More like…baffled relief. He stands up on creaking knees and presses a kiss to her forehead. “I’ll get you whatever flowers you want, Cassie.”