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Stephanie Brown has always heard the phrase, “It’s okay to talk to things, as long as they don’t talk back.” Whenever she hears it, she always gets the strangest little smile on her face, and tries to ignore the feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Her toys used to talk to her, when she was a child. They didn’t really have personalities, not until she’d had them for long enough, but they could recount what had happened while she was asleep, and wake her up if something was wrong. She used to line them up at the foot of her bed, facing the door, so that they could hear better.
When she turned eight, she scraped her knee on the sidewalk while trying to get back home in a rainstorm.
“ Hush, child. It’ll be alright. ” Gotham’s voice was thick and soothing, raspy like a smoker’s but full and rich and warm, wrapping around her as she lay on the slick sidewalk, crying because there’s blood .
Steph knew right away that this was Gotham, and she was amazed, because although she had talked to mops and dishes and teddy bears it had never occurred to her to talk to the city .
“Can you show me the way home?” Steph asks, and she feels, more than sees, a route laid out before her. From that day on, she is never lost. Gotham mothers her, carefully ushering her through her dangerous streets, helping her avoid muggers and find shortcuts, little nooks and crannies where no one can find her, guiding her home with more accuracy than any map or GPS.
When she becomes Spoiler, Gotham fusses over her, whispering caution in her ear and bringing her to Batman and Robin. Gotham can’t do much, but Steph knows it’s on her side anyway, knows it when her father trips over uneven sidewalks and when the sewers overflow into his hideouts. She knows that Gotham supports her when Batman gets stuck in traffic, when the Gargoyles he perches on creeks just enough to make him nervous.
“ My daughter, my champion, my Spoiler ,” Gotham whispers to Steph as she leans her hand against an alley-wall.
Gotham loves Batman, loves him with a strange protectiveness and sorrow that Steph can’t understand. Gotham protects Batman, even though she doesn’t like how he treats Steph. Batman is hers in the same way Steph is, and Steph has to respect that, even if she has to roll her eyes at him and his unending belief that the city belongs to him. As if Gotham could belong to anyone, let alone a single person. They belong to Gotham, not the other way around.
She visits other cities sometimes, but it makes her nervous. The other cities are different and are hostile towards her--they know she is Gotham’s child, and they don’t like her trespassing. Bludhaven is different; they are sisters, they know how to share, but Steph still clearly gets the feeling that Bludhaven views Spoiler as Gotham’s rather annoying pet dog; cute for a few moments, but after a while, one starts looking for the owner and pointedly ignoring it in hopes it will get the message and go away.
Steph talks to murder weapons and learns who held them. She talks to a little girl’s doll to learn who took her away. She listens when a car describes who used them as a get-away-vehicle. She talks, and she listens, and the Spoiler saves the day.
She doesn’t tell Batman about it; she doesn’t tell Robin either. It feels too personal; to admit that Gotham looks after her, to admit she talks to her collection of stuffed toys.
She leans against a wall, and feels Gotham hum in her veins, whispering to her about how there’s a man three streets down with bad intentions and a gun. And Steph pulls up her hood and prepares to do what she does best.
Jason Todd went into the warehouse with no powers. He dies without powers, unable to protect himself or defend himself. Bruce has powers, Dick has powers, Babs has powers but Jason didn’t, and he didn’t need them either--he could keep up just fine, no advantages needed. He
He comes out of the Lazarus Pit with a white streak in his hair and a section of his DNA humming with unrealized potential.
When he first makes a force field he thinks about how he could have used this back in the warehouse and he cries.
He wanders Europe and he learns to master his powers as well as filling in all the gaps in his education. When he gets into fights with child kidnappers he throws his shields over the stolen kids to protect them from the ensuing firefight. He protects the hostages when he fights terrorists. When he’s sent to recover a shipment in a building that’s on fire he puts the crates in a bubble that is fireproof and survives the entire warehouse collapsing on it.
Jason tries to pull it close, to make a second skin out of it, but it never seems to work. It works best protecting other people, or even other things, and he tries not to think about what that means.
He goes back to Gotham and he slaughters his way through the Gotham Underworld. He paints his helmet red and carries guns. He blows up the Batmobile and targets the Black Mask and he waits for Bruce to realize what is happening, to realize who is responsible about this.
Bruce protects the Joker and Jason sees red . Bruce says his name and reaches out towards him and Jason bares his teeth and attacks. Bruce beats Jason and the bomb begins to tick down and Jason closes his eyes.
He doesn’t use his shields until he’s trapped in the explosion again, using it to protect himself. He slips away into the night, heart heavy and anger still buzzing in his veins.
Babs knows the odds.
She knows when she fights a mugger that there’s a thirteen percent chance that a kick to the sternum will put him down for an hour, knows that there’s a fifty percent chance that if she doesn’t go low that the shot will hit her, knows that a batarang to his hand has a thirty-seven percent chance of causing the gun he carries to go off. That means that going low and then kicking only has a six-point-five percent chance of working.
Which means she’ll have to be very good.
She goes low and kicks him right in the spot that the probabilities circle around, and he goes down like a pile of bricks, and she laughs.
Her powers are officially called “accelerated probability”, but that doesn’t seem to explain it enough. It doesn’t tell about how time slows down, about how the numbers and the responses flicker in her mind, telling her what might and could happen.
It’s harder when she’s Oracle, when the odds are filtered to her through the cameras and her ear pieces.
She still fights, but now more than ever it becomes about skill, because the combinations are harder. (Sixty-three percent chance of being shot unless she veers right, forty-seven percent escrima to the neck in order to lower his guard and get him to drop his gun, seventeen percent diaphragm jab, to knock him to the ground; 2.96% of executing perfectly. She can increase her odds by using her electric baton instead--40.93%. Acceptable numbers. She goes for the baton.)
She whispers advice to Dinah sometimes, watching her from the cameras. Dinah rolls her eyes at her fondly, and tells her to cut it out.
Babs never has to give advice to Cass--Cass moves just as fast as Babs can calculate odds, and the warnings about injuries always go unheeded. Even moves that have lower probability are easy to Cass, and Cass always picks them, because it puts down the enemy faster and painlessly. Cass hates to cause pain, even if it risks her own health.
Babs watches the projectiles of bullets and tries to ignore how high the odds are that her protégé will not come home at all because of a piece of metal buried in her heart or her head.
Bruce first learns to copy himself when he turns fifteen.
He can only ever make one; no matter how hard he tries he can only have two of himself running around at the same time. It’s incredibly useful--no one has ever suspected Bruce Wayne of being Batman, not when there are so many famous photos of Batman rescuing Bruce, nor when Bruce is throwing a wild party that he never disappears from while the Batman fights the Joker.
Bruce can’t sustain a copy permanently--the longest he’s ever managed is 72 hours, but he usually tries to limit it to 12 hours for his own sake. He absorbs the copies’ memories when they fade out of existence--essentially, they are him. He is in two places at once, and it’s a very useful trick.
He keeps it under wraps, even more so than his secret-identity. Only a few members of the Justice League know, and his children and partners. He holds it close, because he knows how people will look at it. The more people who know his secret, the more people can expose him as Batman.
When he was younger, he used to try to fool Alfred, leaving one version of him in bed while the other snuck out to find fights in back alleys and in bars. The bruises would fade in the morning, but Alfred always knew, and would shake his head and lecture him. Alfred was never truly willing to punish him, but Alfred would serve Bruce’s least-favorite meals for a solid week and force him to attend charity balls until Bruce had learned his lesson.
It wasn’t until Bruce was twenty-three that he realized that the bruises didn’t fade when he merged, but when Alfred snuck into his room at night with healing hands and a rueful smile.
Cassandra Cain feels the pain in the man who she kills. She feels his fear, his confusion. She experiences it as he does, just like she experiences all the aches and pains of everyone she has ever fought.
She runs away, and she feels the pain follow her. Everywhere there is pain. She feels it even when she cannot see it; she feels it, and she tries to alieve it as best she can, when she can.
She figures out no one else can do this when she’s ten years old.
When she’s sixteen years old she realizes that she can communicate using emotions. Barbara Gordon is the first one she tries it with, projecting curiosity or happiness. Babs is curious and keeps helping Cass experiment, using her projection to communicate when the spoken word fails her.
Cass uses her powers to help people, and it’s good. It almost makes her forget the flickers of pain that courses through her body every time she gets into a fight, almost makes her forget the feeling of holding someone who is dying, or of the feeling of her own hand creating the killing blow, of feeling the death that she caused.
She is Batgirl and she feels the fear that people experience at the symbol, at the cape, but Cass knows it’s a good fear, a fear that’s needed. She feels children get excited at the same things, the awe that adults sometimes have, or the wariness of police officers. Being Batgirl seems to trigger stronger emotions in people than she ever could manage as Cassandra Cain, and it’s a curious experience. But she’s helping people, and that’s what matters. She’s making amends for the man on the floor, for a fist covered in blood.
It’s Nightwing who figures out that she has empathy as well as emotional projection. She had cried out as he had, as Blockbuster shattered his leg, and he sees how she favored her other leg, even though she was unhurt as always.
“Do you feel everyone’s pain?” He demands, gripping her arm tightly as she tries to help him to his feet.
“Yes.”
“Even the people you fight?”
“Yes.”
“ Cass .” Dick looks at her, squeezing her arm tightly. Warm waves of exasperation and fondness flow out of him.
Cass shrugs. “It’s manageable.”
“You’re amazing, you are,” Dick pants. “Also ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous, you know that?”
Cass sends a wave of fond exasperation to Dick and drags him back to his apartment.
Damian grows up speaking to the animals on the compound.
Mother has snakes that she milks for their venom, and they are some of Damian’s earliest conversational partners. He reads to them from his storybooks, and listens to them tell him the stories of their people in return. All animals have their own stories, he learns. They all have creation myths and different names for the sun and the moon, a thousand different ways to tell people apart. They call him Speaker Boy, and he always feels proud when he goes down and meets the hatchling and they have already heard of him.
Mother fosters his gift by bringing him whatever animals he asks for; tigers and wolves and kangaroos from all corners of the globe fill wherever they’re staying, telling Damian their stories and listening to him when he decides to talk. By the age of eight he has learned the languages of dozens of species and can walk into the cage of any predator and calm them with a single word.
His mother picks him up and spins him around, laughing. She has never doubted his abilities, has listened to his retellings of how the tiger cubs learn about how the sun was placed in the sky, and then takes him to his next lesson.
When he goes to Gotham City, he finds very few animals. There are the bats, but the bats aren’t interested in him or any human. They’re skittish and dramatic; they like him well enough, and they’ll do what he asks, but they’re not much for conversation. He convinces them to dive-bomb Drake a few times, but apart from that and a couple of lessons on the layout of the Cave and echolocation in general, he mostly leaves them alone.
He finds birds on the grounds of the Manor, who tell him all the gossip and a story about how the man who was also a bat scattered all the stars in the sky with the help of the boy who was also a bird. Damian proudly tells them that those are his father and his mentor, and the birds laugh at him, disbelieving. Birds do not live long, and they don’t understand that the one who spread the stars could still be alive.
Grayson gets him a dog, who tells Damian that his name is Titus. Damian almost sobs in relief; so thankful for the companionship, but he hides it from Grayson as best he can. Grayson knows about Damian’s gift for animals, but he doesn’t seem to understand the crushing loneliness that fill his Father’s house.
Titus is calm and gentle, but he doesn’t know any stories. He was taken from his mother too young to learn them, and none of the other puppies at the shelter had known the stories. Damian sneaks out one day with Titus, and together they manage to find an old Great Dane who can tell them the stories that are Titus’s by birth. She tells them about the Dog who lost the golden ball in the sky, and now chases it forever in the form of the moon, and tells them about how all dogs now howl at the moon to show their support for her.
Damian next finds a kitten who is too young to speak, and names him Alfred on Titus’s suggestion. Titus babies Alfred, watching over the kitten with a steady gaze. Alfred likes to nap between Titus’s grand paws, and Damian sometimes joins them, curled up against Titus’s side with a hand resting on Alfred’s soft orange fur.
“You really like animals, don’t you?” Grayson says, watching Damian stroke Alfred the Kitten’s head. Alfred has started to speak like an infant, halting and slow. Damian needs to find an appropriate feline to help him learn better.
“Ttt. Of course I do. They’re more intelligent than people.”
Dick laughed. “I suppose they are.” He pauses. “Y’know... Haley’s Circus is in town. Have you ever met an elephant?”
Damian looks up, excited, and he can’t hide it for a moment, before he successfully stuffs it down. “Unfortunately no. Mother said that there wasn’t room in the compound.”
“I see. Well, I’m sure Zitka will be glad to meet you. I’ll call Pop Haley, see what can be arranged.”
Damian leans back against Titus, and wonders what kinds of stories Zitka will have for him.
Dick Grayson has always seen the tiny paths of electricity crawling down people’s bodies, following the flow of their nervous systems, glimmering with a sparkling trail. It concentrates in their heads and down along their spines, flickering with the different signals that they bring with them. He sees the tiny clusters throughout people’s bodies and he understands they are more sensitive there, can see the pain that can cluster there and do what he can to help them.
He doesn’t do anything with it until Batman finds him, and then he quickly learns. He learns how to paralyze a person, to draw his strength from theirs. He learns that if he draws too much power from someone that he glows or leaves a sparkling trail behind him as he goes.
Bruce theorizes that his ability also assists in his flexibility and acrobatic ability, but Dick is less sure. His powers aren’t as important to him; they’re a slight assist that he usually doesn’t utilize, only uses if the situation is desperate.
Until the Joker kills Jason, and then nearly kills Tim.
He drains so much power from the Joker that he stops his heart, and it’s only because of Bruce that he doesn’t kill him, throwing him back roughly to keep him away from the clown. Dick glows from head to toe, and he leaves a bright glowing trail behind him as he flies backwards, crashing into the pavement.
Bruce restarts the Joker’s heart, and Dick hates him a little for that. He’s relieved, because he doesn’t want to be a killer, but he’s furious that they keep saving the Joker, that the bastard is allowed to keep living and killing.
Dick tries to stop using his powers after that, but he can never forget them. He can’t ignore how the tiny blue lines cover Babs’ skin, can’t ignore the tree-like branches of the nervous system when he sees someone’s bare hand. He watches the blue turn to red when people are hurt, and he tries to ignore how, when he’s exhausted and standing over a would-be-rapist, how easy it would be to reach down and just refresh himself. Not enough to kill, not enough to even paralyze or hurt, but... just enough. Just enough to ease the pain from his bones and to see if he can leave the glowing trail again, because a part of him misses it, misses how it feels.
He keeps going, and tries his best to ignore it.
Tim learns to speak imitating the people on TV. It’s a trick that makes his parents laugh, enjoying his mimicry of the celebrities or news hosts, or whatever guest that they had over the night before.
It’s not until he’s five when it becomes a true gift though. His mother nearly drops a plate when he imitates his dad so well that she responds to him without thinking, mistaking him for Jack.
They quietly get his DNA tested, and the results come back positive. He has a genetic anomaly that gives him this special ability. His parents look at each other and shrug, and things go back to normal.
When he becomes Robin he listens to audio tapes of Dick Grayson as Robin, and tries to use that voice in the field. Bruce tells him to stop after a single day. After careful consideration, Tim creates a new voice for Robin, one very different from Tim Drake’s but very determinedly not Dick Grayson’s or Jason Todd’s. He swaps out the polished, upper-class sound of his own accent that Steph loves to mock him for and replaces it with a bit of the harsh, clipped sound that most police officers have. He adds a bit of Crime Alley, a dash of Brooklyn, a pinch of Metropolis, and rounds it out with a handful of Coast City vowels and some Central City vocabulary. It’s his Robin voice, and he’s proud of it, almost as proud as he is of his Bruce impression that can send both Cass and Steph into stitches when he pulls it out in the middle of movie night.
He likes to make new voices, crafting them in the privacy of his room for whenever he needs to go undercover. He impersonates people on the phone, and laughs whenever he can fool Dick or Bruce into calling him the wrong name.
His voice never changes, his impersonation never falters, not until one day when everyone is dead and he’s all alone, standing by the latest in a long line of graves and Cassie is standing there, a hand on his shoulder, trying to comfort him.
“I just--” And like that, he cracks, all traces of the other cities fleeing, until it’s just Tim Drake speaking, just Tim Drake and his upper-class vowels and his butchered pronunciations of words that he’s never heard out loud, only ever seen read, and just like that he feels everything shatter.
Alfred Pennyworth has hands that heal and a family that seems determined to get as injured as possible on a nightly basis.
The first time he treats Stephanie Brown, she is high on painkillers already and is talking to the wall of the Batcave in earnest.
“No, no, I understand it. I’ll tell them.” She turns to Alfred, blue eyes blown wide with the drugs. “Alfred,” she grabs his arms. “Alfred the Cave says... the Cave says there are listening devices. Somebody got in. The Cave tried to stop them but they got in anyway.”
“Now, Ms. Brown...”
“They’re under the console!” Steph insists, “The Cave says that he was planning something!”
“The Cave told you.”
“They’re not as talkative as Gotham,” Steph said, nodding seriously. “They also don’t like a gender. I think it’s cause we call them an it so much, so it doesn’t have that part of an identity. But they don’t like whoever broke in. And they like you.”
“I’m so glad, Ms. Brown. No please. Sit down.”
Afterwards, when Stephanie is asleep, Alfred does indeed find the listening devices beneath the console. He reports them to Master Bruce, and looks at Stephanie with a considering gaze.
Before his death, Jason was willing. After his death, Alfred first treats Jason while the boy is unconscious. His hair is streaked with white now, and his eyelids flicker rapidly in a way that Alfred knows is a result of nightmares.
Alfred heals Jason’s broken leg and does his best for the concussion, although head injuries are always tricky.
At one point Jason screams “ No! ” And a force field surrounds him, and Alfred hopes that it protected him from whatever had entered his dreams.
Barbara asks him if he can heal her, if he can fix her legs.
“There are some things beyond my capacity, Ms. Gordon,” he says tiredly, not wanting to admit to her that he had come while she was in a coma and attempted to do exactly that. “I speed up the natural process, draw away the pain. Permanent damage is... permanent.”
Babs sobs, pressing her hands against her face. “It’s not... it wasn’t even about me , Alfred. It was about Dad. I was just...”
Alfred wraps his arms around her. “You will survive this, Ms. Gordon. You’re stronger than him.”
Master Bruce was always a patient who was best administered to while unconscious, but when Bruce becomes Batman, Alfred’s opinion on the subject increases. Alfred cannot heal scar tissue, and he can’t help but blame himself as he watches his son accumulate those marks on his body.
Alfred wonders if he had put a stop to it when Bruce was a child; could he have saved his son?
But then he looks at the Bat costume that stands in its case, and he wonders if perhaps is already saved.
Cassandra submits to his ministrations willingly, projecting quiet thankfulness to him as he rests his hands on her broken arm, and he feels the pained tinge ease away as he goes. She’s always so grateful, and he struggles with it because he has learned that she’s so grateful because she is used to working through the pain. He sets her broken legs and digs bullets out of her shoulders and legs, and lectures her as best he can about being more careful.
“Don’t want to hurt them,” she insists, and Alfred feels his heart go out to this girl, who is trying so hard to make amends for something that isn’t her fault. He never lets her get away with even the smallest of scrapes, determined that her days of fighting while injured are over forever.
Damian’s attitude is almost demanding, presenting injuries to Alfred with what might be described as a pout. Alfred heals all wounds anyways, trying not to smile at the young man’s fumbling attempts to be polite to him. Alfred quietly also makes sure that Titus and his young feline namesake are in the best of health, doting on them as much as he dotes on the boy, if not more--the animals, at least, do not protest.
Richard struggles more, protesting that he’s fine, really, but submitting anyway, frustrated. Dick heals faster anyway, often drawing strength and health from others with his powers, but as time goes on he uses that advantage less and less, depending more on Alfred to fix his battle wounds.
Alfred patches up the eldest of Bruce’s children, and wonders what exactly it was that had made Dick fear his power. None of the others are afraid, even Cassandra who touches the minds and souls of the darkest people that Gotham has to offer, or Stephanie who converses with murder weapons. Dick is afraid of what he can do, and Alfred worries because, eventually, Dick’s fear of his powers will turn into a fear of himself.
Tim makes light of it, but he’s always panicking internally, worrying about if anything is visible or will his parents notice? Alfred sooths his wounds and carefully helps him dress to hide the scars, tutting under his breath as he goes.
“What would we do without you, Alfred?” Tim is Red Robin now, mouth quirked upwards as he holds up a gash in his arm for Alfred’s inspection.
“I fear, Master Tim, that it would involve slowly starving to death on Master Bruce’s culinary creations.”
“He can be in two places at once but he still can’t stop the stove from catching on fire, huh?” Tim laughs at his own joke, and Alfred smiles.