Chapter Text
"What am I, to you?"
The Cave is quiet; empty. There is only the faint whirring of computer fans and the ventilation system to fill the silence that stretches between them.
Bruce sits quietly, slumped over in his chair by the Batcomputer. His chin is resting on his fist, his elbow propped up on the console. There is a slowly cooling cup of coffee next to him that sits untouched; he can smell the rich, bitter scent of the grounds in the still air.
“Seriously,” she repeats, slowly, quietly, “What am I to you?”
He doesn’t turn around to look at her. He doesn't move at all. He doesn't need to; he already knows exactly what she's going to look like from the tone of her voice. So he just sits there, a slab of frozen rock, a hunk of cooling magma.
There is no one else here. It’s a Friday night in Gotham, and everyone is out in pairs of twos and threes, looking to stop the cowardly and superstitious lot dead in their tracks. It is just him and her, steeped in cold, crowding silence. He wishes Dick were here, or even Cassandra or Tim; he knows how to navigate long winding corridors of their conversations, all the windows and doorways and paintings on the walls of the lives that they’ve built together.
Conversations with her are not…easy. She never learned to speak his language, and him hers. He supposes the conversation she’s initiated tonight is a repayment of a debt on his part, in return for her saving his son—one kind of pain for another. The bullets she’d taken for Tim hadn’t been through-and-through, but they hadn’t been just grazes like she’d claimed, either.
He always forgets how much starker crimson looks on purple.
“Could you look at me?” she asks, her voice dull, “Please?” There’s a rustle of Kevlar against cotton, like she’s swung her legs off the cot, and so he turns his chair around to face her. The chair doesn’t squeak; the lights don’t flicker. The electric hum of the bulbs seeps under his skin, up his fingertips and through his veins.
“I want to know,” she says. Her blonde hair is loose, strands curling up and away, flashing in the white light like her eyelashes do. She’s impressively pale; there are bags under her eyes, and her face looks pinched. But she sits upright anyway, or at least she’s trying. And that’s what she does, isn’t it? He feels a sudden thrill of anger race up his spine, frozen as he is. She tries, and she tries, and she doesn’t stop trying. His hands clench into fists, knuckles turning white.
Her eyes track the movement, and he can see the shift in her posture from defeated to defensive, the flat line of her mouth tilt towards what could be called a frown. Is she picking a fight? Is that what this is? There’s a blood spatter on the corpse-white of her cheek. He has no idea why he’s so angry all of sudden, but she’s nineteen and she has blood spattered across her face, and she never stops trying and he wants to put his fist through the table—
“I’m not your daughter,” she says, jolting him out of his thoughts, unaware of the tightness in his chest, the thrum of blood in his skull, “and I’m definitely not one of your sons.” Her eyes are blue. They look dead under this light. Maybe she’d never come back, maybe she’s still dead. Maybe he’s talking— getting angry at— a figment of his own imagination.
“I’m not even your daughter-in-law— you would’ve especially hated that.” She’s nineteen. She’s too young to get married. She’s nineteen. She had a baby at sixteen. He remembers her at sixteen. She was sharp and her smiles were sharp and she had just kept trying , and the angles in her face had only gotten more visible. She had died at sixteen. She had been tortured and killed at the hands of a psychopath at sixteen.
She’d had a baby at sixteen. She’d died at sixteen. She’s nineteen. That’s too young to get married.
“Are you supposed to be my mentor? But you didn’t want to be that either, right? You only really took me on because Tim wasn’t an option anymore.
“You don’t even like me,” she says, and the edges of her like are rounded, like she’s running her hand along the curved edge of a knife in reverse. The words are all-American, blonde and purple and leftover glitter on the bridge of her nose, “Is it pity? Do you let me in here, into the Cave, into your life, because you pity me? Because you don’t like me, and—“ her voice falters, an old express train teetering on the edge of a cliff, “—and you’ve made that plenty clear.”
He doesn’t know what to say to that. He doesn’t know if he likes her now, at nineteen. He doesn’t think he’d liked her at sixteen. Or fifteen, or fourteen or thirteen. He thinks he’d been scared for her. He remembers looking at her, a scrappy, loud, fourteen-year-old and thinking, terrified, heart in his mouth, she’s going to end up like Jason . He remembers looking at her and thinking, why can’t you be Tim? Dependable, smart, reasonable Tim. He remembers the frustration that tore his insides to burning, bleeding shreds, scraps of red hanging off his rib cage, every time she opened her mouth to speak.
He remembers thinking, why couldn’t you just be Jason . Why couldn’t you just be my son, my son, my little boy, why do you have to be him-but-not-him, why are you here instead of him—
He remembers, in his most wretched moments, hating her for being just like him.
His vision is turning unfocused now, his knuckles straining and white, the vein on the underside of his wrist jumping out at him. All he can think is Jason , even as he sits here, alone with her-who-isn’t—wasn’t—him. Her, with her vicious punches and her bony elbows, her and her heartbreakingly brilliant smile that came out in full force when you laughed at her jokes, her and her shrill voice and cruel sneer and quiet, far-reaching sorrow bleeding that need for approval and acceptance.
She was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, growing up lonely and bright and right under his nose and he always forgets how many people never liked her enough to rescue her. Enough to help her get somewhere better without destroying her in the process. Does that include him? She’s only nineteen . There’s blood on the purple panels of her suit and her jaw is set, and there is red in her hair, rust-red coating the silvery-yellow of her blonde locks, and all he can remember is wishing he’d never encountered her, wishing that for every sloppy kick she threw he could be training Cassandra instead, that for every joke she made that Dick could be there instead, that with every case solved with her he could be celebrating with Tim instead, that he could have Jason back instead of ever meeting her.
He isn’t her father, though she’d needed one. He hadn’t wanted to be her mentor, though she’d wanted one. And he’d watched her die, watched her disappear for what he thought had been forever, though she’d deserved to live.
He hadn’t liked her. But he’d loved her in a way that scared him, in the drowning, desperate way that a man loves a candle in a downpour. The kind of love that stopped him from ever training her properly in the hopes that she would turn around and go home and stay safe, and as misguided as the thought may have been, it had persisted and yet, she had resisted. He had loved her like his own daughter but his daughter knew how to protect herself, and she was not his daughter. He had hated her— hated her as someone who he couldn’t protect, someone—someone he considered his own—who would always stand beyond the reach of his cape, thanks to his own efforts, a matchstick in a snowstorm that killed little girls that dreamed of warmth and hearth and home.
She’d only been sixteen. That’s too young to die.
She takes a deep breath. The sound shudders through the dense, still air. Nothing changes. Everything changes. He hasn’t said anything this entire time.
“Good talk,” she says, her mouth curved downward at one end, her eyes lost in thought as she nods. The cot shakes slightly as she steps down off it, carefully, carefully, one hand pressed to the bandages.
“I won’t be coming back here for a while,” she announces, gathering her things, not looking at him. The electric lights hum, and a not-small part of him says to get up and stop her , tell her to stay, that she deserves to stay, that they need her here, that she needs to stay here .
He doesn’t move a muscle. “Tell Cass and Duke that if they need anything I’ll be at my apartment. I’m not—“ and she turns to look at him here, eyes blazing, “—stopping patrolling. There’s just…not enough room here for everyone.”
She says room like Alfred does. He wonders, detachedly, how he’s never noticed that before. “Oh,” she says, pausing on her way out, “tell Tim, too.”
Then Stephanie gets on her bike, opens the garage, and leaves.
He doesn’t try to stop her.
—
“It’s weirdly cold tonight,” says Robin, running her gloved hands up and down her arms, shivering. The moonlight bounces off her golden hair, turning it silver, and the lenses of her mask flash as she turns to look at the looking heap of shadow behind her. “I thought it was still supposed’ta be summer.”
“Hn,” says Batman, stepping forward to where Robin is perched on the ledge.She isn’t wrong; the autumn chill is setting in sooner than expected. “Quiet, Robin.”
Robin rolls her eyes as she pulls her binoculars back to her face. “Ooh,” she says mockingly, teeth chattering, “someone’s feeling chatty tonight. Got two whole words outta you! Dee-lightful.”
Batman closes his eyes and suppresses the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose, mouth curving up in what could be called a smile, if he wasn’t careful. Robin doesn’t get to see, of course. It would ruin his reputation forever.
“I know you’re smiling,” she sing-songs, as if she can read his mind. Her teeth are still clicking as she tries in vain to beat the cold out of sheer willpower. He sighs, and then drapes his cape over her shoulders like the world’s heaviest blanket.
“Aw— hey! I didn’t know this thing doubled as a blanket!” she says, getting comfortable.
“Hn,” says Batman.
She turns to grin up at him. “Thanks,” she says.
He just pats her gently on the shoulder, and then points back to the building they’re staking out. “Focus, Robin.”
“All work and no play makes for a super-duper lame Batman,” she concludes, eyes on the building.
He shrugs. He’s been called worse.