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“How am I supposed to talk to someone who doesn’t even talk?” Jason draped himself over the back of the chair. Bruce rolled his eyes.
“How’s your essay coming along?”
“Alfred’s taking a look.”
Bruce scrolled.
“You can look at it when he’s done with it, sheesh,” Jason said. “Dad.”
Bruce scrolled some more.
Jason removed himself from the back of the chair and pulled up a chair of his own. “Seriously, though,” he said. “I don’t know how to talk to her at all. I don’t thinks Babs does, either. She doesn’t talk, she can’t read, she doesn’t sign—Bruce, she doesn’t even know the alphabet. She doesn’t know what an alphabet is.”
“She knows body language.”
“Yeah, she’s the best fighter I’ve ever seen in my life. But I can’t figure out how to communicate with her besides sparring.” Jason did seem to enjoy that, from what Bruce could tell. He'd yet to win a match with her, but instead of resenting that, he seemed to treat the whole thing as a learning experience.
“Hnh.”
“It’s not okay, Bruce.”
“I know.”
Bruce thought Jason was going to leave, but Jason lingered, fiddling his thumbs. “You didn’t call them, right?”
“I said that I wouldn’t.”
“So that means that you didn’t?”
“I didn’t.”
Jason blew out a breath.
Bruce didn’t think it really mattered. The admissions board wasn’t going to ignore the fact that Jason was a legacy, or that his father could buy them a building—or an entire new department, for that matter—whether Bruce called them to remind them of that fact or not. Jason had the grades, and he had the extracurriculars. He’d be admitted to Princeton whether he deserved it or not. They both knew that.
But Jason did deserve it.
And Bruce couldn’t bring himself to care about how the weight of his wealth changed things, when it came to getting his adopted son into a college he never would have had even a chance at otherwise, no matter how deserving he was.
Jason pushed himself to his feet.
“Jason,” Bruce said, twisting around. “I—”
“What?” Jason asked, looked at him quizzically.
“I’m sorry I didn’t push harder for you to enrol in private school straightaway. You would have been valedictorian if you hadn’t transferred so late.”
Jason looked at his feet. “Yeah, well,” he said. “I said I wanted to go to school like before, didn’t I? It meant a lot to me to just feel…normal, back then, I’m glad you said yes.” He looked up at Bruce. “I mean, I really, really would have liked it,” and his eyes were bright. “But I’m not mad, okay? At me or at you. I did good anyway. I’m going to do even better.”
You’d have to do better than I did in college, he couldn’t help but think. For Bruce, college had been a distraction on the way to his destiny. But Jason loved school. And Jason was going to really love college. Jason was going to burn a fiery path through the sky.
When he got there.
“Jay…”
“Yeah?”
“You’re sure...about delaying things?”
“I can’t just up and leave you now,” Jason said, scorn at the idea strong in his voice. “Gotham is a mess. I’m Robin. You’re Batman. We have a city to fix.”
“You have college.”
“Wherever I end up,” it’s going to be Princeton, Bruce told himself, “I’ll tell them I’m taking a gap year to help rebuild the city I grew up in after a devastating earthquake. It’ll even be true.”
Bruce grumbled.
“Think of how it will look for my extracurriculars,” Jason said, deadpan.
“Jason,” Bruce said, turning around just as Jay was about to leave the Cave. “She likes to eat almost as much as you did.”
***
Most of the time, she was at the Clock Tower with Babs, usually only coming over to the Manor before a shared patrol with him or Bruce, but she was here today. After a word with Alfred, Jason tracked her down to the flat roof over the kitchen, where she was doing a series of slow, perfect cartwheels along the rooftop edge.
If she’d been anyone else, he might have tried to stop her, for her own sake. But it was her. She was already a better martial artist and a gymnast than he’d ever be in his whole life. She’d kick his ass for even trying to get in her way.
“Hey, Cassandra,” he said. He knew the name was still new to her, and he wasn’t sure she’d respond to it. (She had a better track record with “Batgirl”.) But she did, rolling out of her last cartwheel and looking at him intently. He waggled the packet in the air. “Do you like Jammie Dodgers?”
***
Cassandra didn’t know very many words, but apparently she knew biscuits. She’d followed him down into the kitchen like a hungry cat. She even sat down at the kitchen table without prompting.
Alfred was already heating water for tea, thank god. Jason was starting to feel like an asshole over this, a stupid, condescending asshole, trying to bribe Cassandra with food because he didn’t know to talk to her, but at least he wouldn’t be alone.
He knew Babs was trying to teach Cassandra the alphabet. She hadn’t gotten very far. He’d tried to teach her ASL himself—as much as he’d picked up in last year’s summer course—and he hadn’t made any headway either. Bruce was still obsessed with rooting out her history, and Dick—well, Dick was still tired and cranky from before, and only came back to Gotham when it was an emergency. Jason couldn’t really blame him. Last year had been hell on him. On all of them, but especially on him.
Alfred laid out the cups and plates. Cassandra tracked his motions intently, always keeping an eye on the packet of cookies.
“Oh my god,” Jason said, and he got up and grabbed an apple out the basket from the kitchen counter, and tossed it at Cassandra. She snatched it out of the air, and devoured it with a piranha-like intensity.
Jason could remember what it felt like to be that way. When you thought about the future mostly in terms of your next meal. Your next calories. They were still putting things together, but it was sounding like Cassandra had been on her own and probably thinking that way for a very, very long time.
(“Ten years?” he’d said, leaning on Babs’ console. “Ten years? I was only on my own for six months, and that messed me up for the longest time.”
“It’s not a contest,” Babs had said, but he knew that she was as disturbed and upset as he was.)
The kettle whistled. Cassandra shot up out of her seat, and then froze, as Alfred calmly took the kettle off the stove and poured the hot water over the tea egg nestled in the pot.
Jason didn’t know what Cassandra knew about time - surely not having the language to describe it changed your perception of time - but what the hell, maybe this was a teaching opportunity. He started ticking off the seconds on his fingers, and simultaneously counting them down out loud.
He wasn’t sure if she was tracking or not, but she was at least paying attention.
The alarm beeped, and Alfred fished the egg out of the pot. He set it aside, and then poured the tea into individual cups. He handed one to Jason, and nudged another towards Cassandra.
She took it up, sniffed it, sipped it, and then spat it out. “Blehhhh!” she said, and made a comically disgusted face that Jason would neither forget nor forgive, so long as he lived.
He pointed blindly at the sugar bowl. She stared at him. He took a spoonful of sugar and stirred it into his own tea, and then sipped it, hoping to demonstrate. Ugh. He hated sweet tea.
Instead of imitating him, she reached across the table, took Jason’s tea, and sipped it. And then made another horrible face, and carelessly dropped his cup back down, where it splashed all over the table.
(She had the worst table manners he’d ever seen in his life. He’d eaten out of dumpsters.
And she...she had probably done the same.)
“I don’t think she likes Lapsang Souchang, Alfie,” he said, helplessly.
He sat there for a few seconds, and then he got up, taking both his and Cassandra’s cups, and dumping them out into the sink. And then the pot, too. He dug into the cupboard and pulled out another tea tin.
He could see Cassandra watching him intently while he mixed the new blend in the tea egg, and set more water to boil. He sat back down, and handed her a Jammie Dodger.
“Biscuit,” he said.
Cassandra ate the cookie in two messy bites.
“Biscuit,” he said again.
“Biscuit,” she agreed, cheerfully.
The kettle whistled again, and again, Alfred poured the boiling water into the pot.
The scent from the pot wasn’t just the smoky scent of before, but something sweet and floral as well. Lapsang Souchang, cut with Victorian Rose. Cassandra’s eyebrows crooked.
Alfred poured her another cup. She took it, sniffed it, and sipped it. Then she put it down, and reached for the sugar bowl, and mixed in a spoonful of sugar. She sipped it again, and then her face split in a smile.
Jason sipped his own, then pointed to his cup and said, “Tea.”
“Tea,” Cassandra said. “Yes. You,” she pointed at him. Then at herself. “Me. Tea.”
“Yeah,” Jason said. “You, me, tea.”