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It starts with Alfred. Unsurprising: he’s long been the one to instigate emotional development in the family. Bruce saw it coming almost six months ago, and let it ride with a deliberate ignorance he knew wasn’t fooling the butler for one minute.
It’s when the catalogs start appearing in the Cave that he heaves an internal sigh. He waits until they’re alone, another three weeks and an farewell dinner to see Duke off to the Titans for a tour of duty that ended in Tim slapping baguette toast across Damian’s face as retaliation for pouring gravy into Tim’s lap. Stephanie made Damian’s resulting noise of pure rage her ringtone.
Bruce holds up the brochure for Gotham Central Community College (Go Bats!) and lets his silence form a weary question mark.
“It has been very good to have Miss Cassandra back in Gotham,” Alfred says, utterly bland in a way that manages to be accusatory. “I was under the impression you had set aside a fund for her education in Hong Kong.”
Bruce had set aside an education fund. As well as an expenses fund, a trust fund, a diversified portfolio, and season tickets to the Hong Kong Ballet. Box seats. It’s not his fault she only every really used the the last one. “She got her GED,” he offers in defense.
Alfred fixes him with a stare. His hands don’t stop restocking the mobile medical kits the entire time.
Bruce sips his coffee to busy himself. “I’ll talk to her.”
++
“College,” he says, finding her in the library. It comes out more ominously than he intended; he’s only just got back from patrol and hasn’t flipped Batman all the way off--as off as he ever does-- yet.
“College,” she parrots back. Her eyebrow arches in confusion.
“A college education,” he starts, recalling the spiel he’s prepared for exactly this interaction. She reads it in the tension of his forearms and the lines of his shoulders.
“No,” she says, politely.
He frowns. Usually he enjoys conversations with Cassandra; they’re the shortest and most to the point. Usually she has good sense. “You should keep as many doors open as possible.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You can drive,” he bargains.
She tilts her head like a bird, intrigued. “Drive what?”
Her voice is sweet, tinged with humor. College education, Bruce reminds himself, and grits his teeth. “The… Batmobile.” This is what he gets for letting the son of a circus name his equipment.
“You will teach?”
Bruce was thinking Tim, actually. But he remembers how Jason glowed when Bruce Wayne, not Batman, made time for him. “If you’d like,” he says, treading carefully. “Or--”
“Steph,” she says.
Bruce blinks. Her recovers. “I’m sure she’d be delighted.”
“One class,” she agrees. She wiggles her fingers at him. “Keys.”
He thinks she’d like a convertible. Something that you can feel move under you, something responsive. “Registration first.”
++
She settles on a study skills class. It’s worth half a credit and meets once a week. It continues being worth half a credit, even after Bruce calls the Academic Dean directly. “Even at one meeting a week, the hours alone should mandate more credit.”
“Indeed,” Alfred agrees. He pours Bruce another cup of coffee. “A great number of packages arrived this afternoon.”
“For Tim?”
“Addressed to Tim.” Alfred adds a shake of sugar. “They had smiles painted on them. If they had been green, I might have immolated them in the name of home defense. Cassandra claimed them. Something about school supplies.”
“The future is strange,” Bruce commiserates. “Did you open them to verify?”
Alfred sniffs. Bruce flutters the edge of his paper in apology.
The silence stretches, comfortable and familiar. Bruce breaks it with an idle query. “Who would you dedicate the sacrifice to?”
“Madame Diana.”
Bruce lets out a huff of amusement. He turns the page to the sports section. Duke will be coming back at the cusp of basektball season; Bruce needs to research what would be a big game to offer tickets to. “She’d appreciate it.”
“Quite.”
++
Cassandra appears at his shoulder while he’s writing up a patrol report. He doesn’t start, but she smiles and he knows she read his surprise. She’s holding a stack of binders, three ringed. Her mouth works, opening and then closing. A frown tugs at her lips.
He resumes typing. “Urgent?”
She shakes her head.
“Take your time.”
There’s a distant roar of engines down the tunnel, then the cheerful chattering of voices. Stephanie and Tim, returning. “Stephanie won’t let me drive,” Tim complains, upon finding the cave occupied. “It’s my bike.”
“Cass,” Stephanie says cheerfully, tugging her cowl off with a wince of pulled hair. She bounces over to sling an arm around Cassandra’s shoulders. “Did you finish your project?”
“Binder,” Cassandra agrees. She offers one to Bruce first. It’s on the Scarecow, clippings and spreadsheets.
“Nothing that can be traced to our means,” he reminds her. “Not if that goes upstairs.”
“Only google,” she agrees. “More… challenge. Fun.”
He flips idly through the neatly catalogued pages. “Tempted into taking another class?”
“No.”
“What bribe should I offer next?”
She smiles at him. “I’ll… think of something.” She plucks a purple binder from the stack and makes her way to Stephanie. “Present.”
Tim makes a mock offended noise. “What do I get?”
“Nothing,” Cassandra says, and giggles when Stephanie does. Tim grumbles, retreating back to the computer screen.
“It’s me!” Stephanie has opened the binder eagerly, her nose practically against the pages in her excitement. The corner pokes into Tim’s head; he ignores it with a longsuffering expression. “It’s a whole binder of me!” She leans her head on Cassandra’s shoulder. “I love me.”
“Color coded tabs,” Cass says softly, wondrously. Slowly and hesitantly, she rests her cheek on Stephanie’s hair.
Bruce’s eyes narrow.
++
He reviews footage from her first days with them in the cave, fast forwarding through the logs. Her speech is improving, he notes. Still pauses, but moving past them quicker; it’s clear the thoughts she’s trying to articulate are increasing in complexity and coherency.
He pauses when Alfred joins him to top off his coffee. “A worry about Miss Cassandra?”
“I worry about all of them.”
“You’re watching videos of just the one, Sir.”
“Her development was stunted,” Bruce says, his fist clenching where it’s hidden by the desktop. “Unforgivably so.”
Alfred says nothing, waiting him out.
“I’m concerned it was stunted in all areas.” He refuses to elaborate.
“An error that must be corrected,” is all Alfred has to add. He leaves without any further advice.
Bruce frowns at the screen: a young Cassandra, crouched under her cloak, drawn up and defensive and smaller than he remembers her being. They all start so small. “That’s what I’m worried about.”
++
When Bruce emerges into the cave for patrol, Tim is correcting Stephanie’s ASL grammar, Cass smiling as she signs back slowly for Stephanie to practice. There’s tea steaming on the table in front of them, from delicate handless cups, pale blue and patterned in neat rows of Chinese characters.
Tim stands as Bruce approaches, holding up a thumb drive. “I’m running an update on the car. It’ll be done in a few.”
“Wait,” Stephanie says, “let me show you that footage while it finishes, I’m tired.” They move to the other side of the cave, booting up another computer.
“Case,” Cassandra explains. “Second opinion.”
Bruce nods. He’d expected as much. He looks at the tea left discarded, still steaming, the matching patterns of the pot itself. He doesn’t recognize the set; it’s not something Alfred would pick out as a replacement. He touches a finger to the rim of one teacup. A new addition, probably brought with Cassandra from Hong Kong.
“Yes,” Cassandra answers. “A souvenir.”
“I worry asking you to come home was a mistake.” More brutally honest than he intended, but Cassandra has always made him speak truth he’d rather keep swallowed down. His need for control forces him to say it, so he can pretend that’s how she knows, insteading of reading messages he can’t stop sending with his body language. “I worry you will miss Hong Kong,” he offers as a softer opening.
“I missed family,” she says simply, and he nods, straightening.
He’s still looking at the teapot. There’s something more here than ‘souvenir’; the set is gorgeous, expensive in a way that doesn’t match Cassandra’s tastes. And there’s signs of loving use in the light cracks along the spout. It’s personal in a way he can’t touch, no matter that he speaks Cantonese more fluently than she does, spent more time in China over the breadth of his life than the two years she’s lived there. He curls his fingers around the handle: May I?.
“No.”
He stills immediately, then nods. His hand drops back to his side. He makes to retreat, to apologize, and is stopped by her hand on his elbow. She steps next to him, setting a clean cup out and pouring in a long even stream. She slides it towards him. “I’m… younger. I pour.”
He sips. They watch Tim and Stephanie talk, little snatches of their conversation audible. “She talks a lot,” Bruce observes.
“Yes,” Cassandra sighs. She tucks her hair behind her ear, hides a flush on her cheek with her hand.
Bruce looks at her. “You’ve regained your previous closeness? Sometimes people change.” Stephanie, who’d never been described as demure, has only gotten more chatty the more confident she grows in her place as a Gotham defender. Bruce has entertained some concern that it would prove too much for Cassandra, who for all her love for her biggest brother, can only tolerate Dick at full power for twenty minutes at a stretch, and who has always preferred Tim’s quieter presence to any of the others in Wayne Manor. But they’d clicked back together like they’d never been apart; he’s rarely seen them not physically close whenever in the same room, which is also… a deviation from the norm, in Cassandra’s case. Very faint alarm bells have started ringing in Bruce’s mind.
“She…” Cassandra trails off. Her cheeks are pink beyond the spread of her fingers on her jaw. Letting him see the blush instead of the smile. She reaches out to open the top of the teapot, letting her fingers play through the rush of steam it releases. “Feels warm.” She touches her sternum. “Here.”
The alarm bells increase in volume and intensity.
“Patrol?” he offers.
Cassandra brightens. She does a handspring on her way to her uniform. Maybe she can tolerate Dick for longer than Bruce knew. He’s apparently missing quite a lot going on right under his nose.
++
Nightwing and Red Hood are waiting for them atop a skyscraper. They don’t appear to be injured, standing nearly shoulder to shoulder against the stairwell entrance. There’s a cooler between Red Hood’s boots. “This is a kidnapping,” Jason says, smirking below his domino mask. He’s foregone the helmet, a statement of peace in itself. He twirls a gun in one hand, which is clearly designed to make Bruce twitch. He doesn’t react and Jason’s smile goes sour, a slashed downwards smirk across his face. The gun disappears beneath his jacket and Bruce steels himself for a more cutting instigatory remark. He hears Tim’s bo staff extend with a soft snap of deadly metal.
“Happy Birthday!” Dick says enthusiastically, nipping the impending blowout in the bud. He flings his arms wide open. “You only turn 21 once!”
Beneath the cowl, Bruce blinks. “She’s twenty.”
“Not at midnight,” Dick continues, determinedly cheerful. “T-Minus six minutes.”
“Her birthday is--” Bruce cuts himself off with a mental sigh. Her birthday is arbitrary, picked from thin air when he arranged her documents. It’s in August, and they all know that. “Why.”
Dick’s smile flickers into something sad before recovering, a microexpression most people wouldn’t catch. None of the people currently on the roof, but most everyone else. “All Robins are born in the spring.”
As far as Bruce knows, Dick had spent his own birthday two months prior fighting for his life against some kind of demon cult. Alfred had phrased it as ‘spending the night with his former Titan comrades’ and arranged to make Dick’s favourite cake upon his return. They’d had to blend it because Dick hadn’t been cleared for solid food following a building falling on him. Bruce hasn’t bought Dick an official birthday present since his sixteenth birthday. He remembers: the awed glow of pleasure across Dick’s face, his hands skimming the handlebars. It’s beautiful, B.
Damian arrives behind him with a quiet woosh of air, his frown already fully formed. His presence moves Bruce out of the past. “She was never a Robin.”
“Honorary Robin,” Jason says, which is surprising enough Bruce doesn’t respond. Out of all of them, Jason is the most possessive of the mantle. He crosses past Bruce, knocking shoulders as Bruce refuses to give ground, and slings an arm around Cassandra’s side. “We voted on it and everything.”
Bruce looks at Tim. Tim shrugs. “A lot goes down in the groupchat.”
Dick, motivated by physical affection happening in his vicinity that doesn’t include him, scampers after Jason to occupy Cassandra’s other shoulder. “Big brother privilege, her first legal drink!”
“It’s still illegal until August,” Bruce is obligated to remind him.
“We are all currently participating in illegal activities.” It’s Damian’s first contribution to the interaction, and his tone is too neutral, his face too shadowed, for Bruce to get a real sense of what he’s feeling. He’s never had a handle on Damian the way he did with the others. He’s learning, but it’s slow going.
Bruce grunts. He stays silent, retreating a few steps to keep an eye both on his wayward children and the streets below. To his surprise, Tim withdraws with him, crouching quietly on the ledge. He can’t read Tim well anymore either, not when Tim doesn’t want to be read.
“We’ll do the same for you,” Dick is telling Damian. “It was my idea, Jace just butted his way in.”
“I expected you to show up with caramel vodka,” Jason snipes back. “Roy poured it down the sink two seconds after you left.”
Dick glares. “You’re just a snob.”
“You--” Jason starts.
“Present,” Cassandra says reproachfully. Jason’s mouth clicks shut, his jaw clenching as he fights his temper.
“Names,” Bruce says shortly, his rebuke delayed by the squabble.
“Fuck you,” Jason says, and there’s a pause while everyone considers who he’d aimed the remark at. “He brought cider,” he continues, which either means it was everyone in the vicinity or even he doesn’t truly know. “Hard cider, like this is an after-prom party. I couldn’t do that to my favourite little sister.”
“Favourite,” Cassandra repeats, pleased. She extends her hands eagerly. “Present.”
“I’ll bring you some whiskey sometime, let you have a real drink. But it’s tradition.” Jason kicks open the cooler with the toe of his boot, then withdraws a single bottle. “First drink should be beer.”
He cracks it open using his back teeth. Damian makes a disgusted noise. “I’m going home,” he says, crossing to the ledge without looking back for permission. He jumps, and Bruce sees it in the point of his toes and the flourish of his wrists. It’s a move Dick taught him.
“North,” he orders Tim. “Surveillance only. We’ll catch up.”
Tim nods with a jerk, his grapple extending.
There’s more headlights where he’s headed than there should be; Bruce thinks it’s probably a low level smuggling deal, but it’s worth checking into to see if there are major players involved. And he likes to keep an eye on the fledgling operations. At least Tim is being productive tonight.
Cassandra sips tentatively, her mask rolled up to expose the bottom half of her face. Her nose wrinkles. “Bad.”
Dick makes a triumphant noise, shooting Jason a smug look. Jason punches him in the ribs. Dick doesn’t even try to dodge it, letting the momentum turn him into a series of pirouettes that end with pulling a second bottle from the cooler with his socked toes. Bruce hadn’t even seen him get his boot off. There are tiny Supermans flying across the heel. “Try this.”
“A twist off,” Jason says, disgusted. Who taught him, Bruce wonders. Who gave him this before unknown appreciation of alcohol. Another thing Bruce missed in his life, another small tick in the column of the ways Bruce let him down.
Cassandra sniffs the new bottle. “Pears.”
Dick beams. “Only the fanciest for you.”
“Favourite,” Cassandra reiterates, not without smugness.
Bruce sees a flutter of movement, in the near distance. The familiar swing and just there--a flash of crimson under a flickering streetlamp. His shoulders relax at the recognition.
“Not… as bad,” Cassandra is saying. “But not… good.”
“But if you had to pick one, you’d pick mine, right?” Dick does dodge Jason’s punch that time, dancing out of reach with a grin. “I win.”
Kate arrives with a ripple of her cape and the click-shutter of her grapple gun. “This is a batnapping.”
“Get in line,” Jason snipes, but it’s without the undercurrent of rage that colours most of his interactions. He likes Kate, Bruce knows, without any of the messiness that sours his liking for any other cape in Gotham. Kate is kind enough not to rub it in too much. Jason offers her the beer and Kate snorts.
“O told me there was a big birthday happening. Forget this swill, Huntress makes a mean margarita.”
Cassandra looks at Bruce, her head tilted. Bruce nods, the faintest inclination of his chin. She's never liked Huntress, but if tonight is a night of olive branches he's willing to let it ride if she is. Tim is enough backup for information gathering. He can tell by the way Cassandra’s mask moves that she’s smiling.
“This was my idea first,” Dick protests.
“Lesbian aunt privilege,” Kate says. She disappears into the night, Cassandra only a half step behind.
“I still win,” Dick tells Jason.
“Put your boot back on,” Jason responds, “so I can kick your ass without seeing your ugly socks.”
Bruce moves to the next rooftop, feeling his presence would only exacerbate the impending scuffle. He makes it three more buildings towards where he’d sent Tim, then hesitates, melting into a shadow and looking back. The visor of the cowl compensates for the distance and the lack of light well enough to see: Jason and Dick, sitting on a ledge with their legs dangling off the edge. He can’t make out their expressions with their backs to him but their feet are swinging and their shoulders relaxed.
Between them, they clink the bottles together; they drink.
++
Bruce catches up to Tim crouched in an alcove. It’s started to rain, just enough to dot the concrete and dampen the gel in Tim’s hair.
“They’ve been quiet,” he reports, as soon as Batman’s settled in next to him. “No merchandise yet, just trucks checking in and thugs chain smoking.”
Bruce nods. “Did your high school experience provide you a satisfactory sexual education?”
Tim almost falls off the building. He catches himself before Bruce has to take any action. “Are you,” he sputters. “Are you asking me if I lost my virginity in high school?”
Bruce frowns. “No. Did you want to talk about losing your virginity?”
“Please no.”
Bruce nods. He doesn’t really want to talk about that either. “I meant did you find your school’s sexual education curriculum satisfactory.”
“Uh,” Tim squeaks. “I… guess?”
Bruce waits him out.
“We learned how to use a condom,” Tim continues, the tips of his ears going pink. “And… practiced not being pressured into sex. I did my unit project on gonorrhea.”
“Hm,” is all Bruce has to offer, which is apparently insufficient.
“Why,” Tim asks, and then more urgently, “Batman, why?”
“Orphan never attended school. I’m concerned about gaps in her practical knowledge.”
Tim’s attention is completely divided away from the warehouse they’re staking out, his mouth gaping. It takes him a full five seconds for him to recover. “She’s twenty-one.”
“Twenty,” Bruce corrects.
“Whatever. She’s not a kid, is my point.”
“She’s only two years younger than you.”
“I’m not a kid either,” Tim grumbles, and Bruce thinks: oh. He doesn’t know, he realizes, who gave Tim his first official drink.
He could. He could call it a night, go back to the Cave. There’s a bottle of brandy in the last drawer of the first medicine cabinet near the hospital bed. He wouldn’t have to say anything, Tim would understand the offer and either accept it or use the refusal to send a message about where he and Bruce stand.
“There,” Tim says, straightening. “Look.”
Movement. A familiar Black Mask insignia. His mental image of Tim still in his uniform, mask discarded, little crooked smile slowly blooming while Bruce shows him to how to pour from crystal decanters... fades away. He focuses.
“How are we playing it?”
He can’t see Tim’s eyes blink under the white lenses of his mask, but there’s a sudden stillness to him that betrays his shock.
“You did the surveillance,” Bruce reminds him. “You take point.”
Tim puffs up. He doesn’t grin, not the way Dick would or even Jason, when he was young. But he glows all the same.
It’s a good fight, quick and clean. Tim’s plan was good, better than Bruce anticipated, which he should probably feel guilty about. There’s a quiet contentment to Tim when they regroup on a nearby rooftop. He’s starting to settle into himself, his abilities. Starting to develop his own style. Bruce has already caught whispers from the Titan base in San Francisco, but hasn’t addressed them yet. Maybe after more than a decade of picking the wrong way to let his children leave the nest he won’t make the same mistake a hundredth time. He’s not overly confident in his abilities to do so, but he’s also never been able to stop himself from trying to do the impossible before.
“Maybe N could do it,” Tim suggests, while Bruce surveys the damaged warehouse for loose ends. There aren’t any. Tim’s plan had been very good. “Talk to Orphan, I mean.”
Bruce turns his head very slightly.
“Yeah,” Tim says. “I realized how bad it was as it was coming out. Oh! Who talked to him about this stuff?” He sucks in a small gasp. “Was it you?”
It was Martha Kent. She’d had Dick over for two nights, took Dick on a hay bale ride, patiently answered every question he had about the facts of life, then called Bruce on his private line and read him the riot act of how raising children meaning not passing on the hard shit. He’d been considering falling on a sword of pathetic pleading and sending Jason out to Kansas, but the Joker’s crowbar intercepted those plans. “I outsourced. Let’s go home.”
Tim swings beside him, their grapple guns firing in unison, hitting the rooftops in controlled rolls, side by side. They stop above where the car is parked. Tim is very slightly out of breath, his exhales puffing out white into the chilly Gotham night. “Was it Selina? Because that would explain a lot about Dick. Ivy would explain a lot about Dick.”
Bruce glowers. “Names.”
Bruce cuts the engine, then stops. Tim, hand raised to open the doors, stops. “What?”
“Who talked to you?” Bruce asks.
Tim doesn’t pretend to not know what he’s referencing. His smile is more wry than mirthful. “I didn’t need a talk, B. I figure things out myself.” He ejects himself from his seat with the hiss of the door’s hydraulics and twist of hips. He’s bulked out, left the last remnants of the skinny owl-eyed little shadow that haunted Gotham’s rooftops with the flash of a camera behind.
++
Two nights later Batman detours into an alley to detain a mugger. The guy throws a punch at him, visibly shaking, then wets himself when Batman growls.
“It’s not a real gun,” he says immediately, falling to his knees and putting his hands up. “I swear, it’s just scrapwood I keep in my pocket.”
Bruce cuffs him, bumping his arm against the man’s pocket to verify his story. He drops him against the brick wall in the puddle of his own urine and activates a gps beacon that will intercept the local police scanner. The he pauses, lingers. The man’s accent. “You went to high school in Gotham.”
The man winces. “Dropped out.”
“Completed freshman year?”
“Y-yes?”
“Was your sexual education heteronormative?”
The man cowers, radiating terror and confusion. “Are you hitting on me?”
Bruce grapples away.
Clark calls him on his public personal line. “Mr. Wayne, a moment?”
“Mr. Kent,” Bruce grumbles at him. “How did you get this number?”
“Have you read the most recent headlines?”
“I’m sure your latest expose was as titillating as it was informative.”
“Don’t go Brucie on me. I thought we were friends.” Clark sounds entirely too gleeful about this call, which lets Bruce know exactly which headlines Clark is talking about. The mugger from the other night had taken some wild assumptions straight to Gotham’s trashiest periodicals.
Clark affects a wounded tone. “I wish you’d known you could come to me about your interest in urolagnia. I will never judge you, Bruce.”
Bruce absolutely refuses to respond to that in any way.
“Urolagnia is--”
“I know what it is,” Bruce snaps. When he hangs up Clark is still laughing.
Clark hails his League comm three minutes later. He’s gigglier than any man who could fling a freight truck into the sun should ever be. “Seriously, do you need anything? Must have been something of a something, if you’re asking parenting advice from Gotham’s purse snatchers.”
Bruce checks a kneejerk instinct to hang up again. He remembers the conversation with Tim on the ledge. “Well.”
He can hear Clark perk up over the line. “Anything, my friend.”
Bruce kicks his feet up on his desk, leaning back in his chair. “Does your mother know anything about lesbians?”
++
If Bruce believes in anything, it’s motifs.
He makes Cassandra a binder, leather bound in the same dark stitching that makes up her suit. Color coded dividers, because she’ll appreciate them, all very faintly different shades of grey. He marked what he believes the most relevant sections in purple tabs. It’s as clear of a sign as approval and good luck as he’s ever offered. He leaves a note inside, the fountain pen making his letters dark and slashed together. Happy Birthday.
When he goes to give it to her, he’s interrupted by Stephanie’s presence in the kitchen. She’s standing between Cassandra’s legs while Cassandra sits on the counter. She’s applying pink lipgloss to the tip of Cassandra’s nose. He slips the binder under his arm and out of her sight, then makes his presence known without asking any questions.
“You have to leave,” Stephanie squeaks, flapping at him with the lipgloss applicator. Bruce can smell the fake bubblegum from a foot away. “It’s Girl’s Night!” She frowns at his lack of recognition. “Alfred didn’t tell you?”
“This is my house,” Bruce points out.
Stephanie laughs. Her hand twitches, like she was moving to pat his shoulder before wisely reconsidering. Her tone is pitying. “It’s Alfred’s house.”
“My name on the iron gates.”
“Yeah.” Stephanie pulls a face. “Don’t remind people you have iron gates to your house.”
Stephanie, Bruce is reminded of suddenly, prompted by her inborn Crime Alley disgust of the rich and privileged, is from inner Gotham. She went to public school. He frowns. Operating under the assumption she has information Cassandra doesn’t could have been an error. He moves checking on the funding for sexual education in schools up on his priority list.
Stephanie misinterprets his displeasure. “Do you want to be invited to Girl’s Night? We usually only bend the rules for Tim, but he bowed out.” Her eyes go suddenly wide. “Do the Big Leaguers do Girl’s Night?”
“Sometimes Diana and Shayera have drinking contests.”
“Amazing,” Stephanie breathes. “God, I want to be them.” She sighs longingly. “They are so ripped.”
There can be no delay, Bruce abruptly decides, at the starry eyed look in her eye. He’ll give Cassandra the binder tonight.
Speaking of which, Cassandra is starting to look suspicious; he’s unsure what she’s read from his body language and reaches for something to shift her attention. “Tim’s invited to Girl’s Night?”
“Invited,” Cassandra confirms, which doesn’t offer any explanation. She refrains from elaborating.
Kate enters the room with four cartons of ice cream balanced in one hand. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s my house.” Bruce knows she came in through the front door, based on her trajectory, which means she passed under the gates with his name on them. She’s related to the Waynes by marriage. She had to have noticed.
Barbara wheels in behind her, a bag of takeout in her lap. “Girl’s Night, Big B. Out.”
Bruce goes to find Alfred.
“Girl’s Night,” he says, and Alfred doesn’t stop arranging a small caddy of brightly colored nail polishes.
“Indeed.” Alfred fluffs the throw pillows, arranging them artfully against the cushions of the sofa.
Bruce doesn’t sigh, but it’s an act of will. “Where are the boys?”
“Master Tim finally retired to his room. It’s unlikely he will so much as roll over before morning. Master Damian is downstairs, as per the rules of ‘Girl’s Night’.” His accent fumbles over the moniker, but his hands are steady.
“It’s my house,” Bruce says, because if anyone is going to back him up on this, it’s Alfred.
Alfred drizzles what appears to be truffle oil on a tub of popcorn. “Perhaps you could go out on patrol early, Master Bruce.”
Bruce retreats to the door, then stops. He puts the binder on the edge of the bookshelf, carefully straightening the edges. “Would you give this to Cassandra? When she’s alone.”
“Of course, Master Bruce,” Alfred agrees. He’s slicing cucumbers for what Bruce suspects are face masks.
++
“Girl’s Night,” Damian sneers, and Bruce really should say something about team bonding. He suspects if he did Damian would accuse him of mind control again.
“Patrol,” he says. “Just us; Tim’s asleep.”
Damian is too well trained to visibly perk up, but his tone is pleased. “As you will, Father.”
The engine roars under them as they race to Gotham. “When you’re older,” Bruce says suddenly, “I’d like to teach you to drive.” Best to get it arranged now, before Dick pulls another Big Brother Privilege birthday out of thin air.
Damian is quiet for a few long seconds. “I would enjoy that,” he says softly.
He ruins the moment not thirty seconds later. “Grayson received a motorcycle for his sixteenth birthday.”
Bruce uses a grunt to convey the magnitude of unlikeness of that ever repeating. “He crashed into a tree within half an hour.” It was a big tree too, impossible to miss. Bruce highly suspects he’d been trying to ride up the tree trunk in an attempt at a loop-de-loop.
“I’m better than him in every way.”
It’s exactly what Bruce is afraid of. “We’ll see.”
Nightwing drops in on their last skirmish of the night. “You could have left more for me,” he pouts, when they’ve recovened below the bat Signal.
“I wasn’t expecting you in Gotham tonight.”
Dick’s jaw flexes. He smiles but it’s forced. “Didn’t know I was invitation only.”
It’s not at all what Bruce meant. Seeing Dick when neither of them are bleeding is nothing but a pleasure, every time. “You can stay tonight,” Damian says suddenly. His tone is painfully without inflection. “It makes the most sense. You should not drive sleep deprived.”
Damian misses Dick’s constant presence in his life like a missing limb; Bruce is familiar with the feeling.
“Littlest wing,” Dick starts, regretful. “I don’t know if B--”
Bruce grunts neutrally and Dick’s shoulders relax.
“I know it’s late. I came to see if Robin wanted to have some fun before the sun comes up.” His smile slants into something more genuine. “Or if B had anything to confess about the latest rumors.”
Batman doesn’t sigh. “Are you ever going to forget this one?”
“Never,” Dick promises, made cheerful by the opportunity to mock him. “Jason had the article framed. It’s hanging above his fireplace. Well. On the burned out wall a fireplace might be in a real house.”
Which means Dick makes regular visits to Jason’s house. Bruce decides it’s not a priority. At least they’re united against something, even if that something is his dignity. “We’re patrolling.”
“Aw,” Dick says, “let the kid have some fun. Whaddya say, Robin? Up for a game?”
Damian vibrates with the force of not immediately accepting the opportunity. “Patrol is not a game,” he offers in an attempt to appear indifferent. “A training run, however…” He reins himself in with a darting look at Batman. “Only with tacit approval.”
“An hour,” Bruce allows. It’s not a school night anyway.
“We will perfect high speed urban navigation, and hone--”
Dick smacks Damian in the back of the head and vaults off the edge of the roof without looking, twirling into a double somersault. “You’re it!”
Damian snarls. He explodes into movement, drawing his katana and leaping in pursuit. Their chase across the roofs is pure joy: the graceful dance of the last flying Grayson and the exuberant sudden childhood of what would have been the Demon’s Heir.
++
Bruce slips upstairs, walking silently down the hallway carpet. There’s a towel slung around his neck to prevent his shower damp hair from dripping down the back of his shirt. He ducks into a doorway and lingers in the shadow of the bookshelf. The binder is no longer on the shelf, but he doesn’t see it anywhere else in the room. The sofa is empty, the empty popcorn tub is on the coffee table.
Stephanie and Cassandra are at the bottom of the stairs, under the chandelier. Bruce lingers on the upper floor in the dark, keeping his weight light and his movements silent as he finds a good vantage point.
“--I would never keep it from you,” Stephanie is saying. She’s subdued, either by the late hour or her mood or a combination; in her hands the Batgirl suit is folded with the sign of the bat facing up. “If you want it back, it’s yours.” She tries a smile. “Spoiling for a return?”
“Bad,” Cassandra says, but she’s smiling.
“I’m punny as hell,” Stephanie says, and then offers up the suit. “I don’t fill it out as well as you do, anyway.”
Cassandra’s hands falter once, but she pushes the suit away. “I am Orphan now. When I’m done… Batgirl will not be next.” Her eyes flicker to where Bruce is watching. “Bedtime?”
“Yeah,” Stephanie agrees, yawning. “Sorry to spring all that on you all of a sudden and everything.”
“Okay,” Cassandra reassures. “I like you.”
Stephanie smiles, sleep muzzy. “I like you too, Cass.” She wanders up the stairs with another yawn and a wave. “Don’t stay up too late!”
Bruce melts back, avoiding detection until she’s out of sight and earshot, then joins Cassandra at the foot of the stairs.
She produces the binder out of thin air. “Strange present.”
Bruce nods. It is a strange present. “Was it helpful?”
Cassandra touches one of the purple tabs. “How… do I tell?” Her nails are freshly lacquered; there are tiny sunflowers on each tip. Her mouth twists. “She’s good... with words, I…” Bruce thinks this faltering has nothing at all to do with her constant struggle with speech. “She’s good,” Cassandra repeats.
“Words are not your language,” Bruce agrees. “That doesn’t mean you don’t have language.”
Cassandra smiles. “I… knew already. But a good present.”
Bruce thinks he should probably hug her, or something.
She pats his arm. “No need. It is understood.”
He touches her shoulder. “It is understood,” he reciprocates.
She smiles again, then moves away to disengage the touch. “Damian… is almost big. And Duke.”
“I’m not sure they would welcome a binder.”
“Powerpoint.” Cassandra’s smile has gone sly.
Bruce makes an amused noise. “You think that would be more welcome?”
“More… funny.”
Careful, he has to tread so carefully around the ones that hold his heart. “Would you help me make it?”
“If… I can watch.”
“I think that can be arranged.”
They shake on it.
++
Tim staggers down to breakfast already clutching a coffee mug. “What day is it?” He blinks suspiciously at the table. “What are you looking at?”
“This,” Stephanie says, her tone warring between awed and horrified. “Is so thorough.”
Bruce retreated behind his newspaper the second Cassandra gave Stephanie the binder. He’s never been so thankful of Tim’s unbeatable insomnia.
“What’s in it?” Tim asks, innocent and unprepared for the answer. Bruce winces.
They’re granted a leave from the inevitable by Dick and Damian’s arrival. Dick, a morning person, is unforgivably coherent. Damian, in the throes of teenagedom, looks far more rumpled from the late night. Dick must have worn him out, because his arm is around Damian’s shoulder without a knife sticking out of it. His shoulder is leaned into Dick’s side, his cowlick untamed. Dick ruffles it absently, then bounces over to stick an entire pancake into his mouth and spew crumbs while he speaks. “What are you lookin’ at?”
“Sex stuff,” Stephanie says promptly. Tim chokes on his coffee. Cassandra butters a piece of toast, then hands it to Stephanie, who accepts without looking up.
Dick perks up. “I wanna see.” He vaults one-handed over the table, landing neatly in a crouch on the free chair to Stephanie’s right. “Ooh.”
“There’s diagrams,” Stephanie hisses. She turns to the binder to show Tim, who blanches, then throws a betrayed look at Bruce. Bruce hunches further behind his newspaper. “It doesn’t look comfortable,” Stephanie comments. “For either party.”
“That one is good though,” Dick says, pointing at something. “An ab workout, but worth it.”
Stephanie tilts her head to the side, squinting. “Really?”
“This is intolerable,” Damian says, and leaves with an irritated growl.
“What about this one?” Stephanie asks, flipping a page marked in purple. Cassandra becomes abruptly invested; Dick leans in to get a closer look.
“Well--”
The situation has escalated beyond his ability to contain it. Bruce retreats to the study.
++
Barbara calls him while he’s getting ready for patrol to tell him he’s an idiot. “Do you really think I would take a child into my house and not ensure she’s ready for every facet of adulthood?”
Bruce doesn’t see why not. He’s done it at least three times. “And you approve of this? It could end badly.”
“Everything in our lives ends badly. Sometimes it becomes something stronger.”
“Hmph.”
Barbara sighs at him. “Have a little hope. Call Metropolis if you need to borrow some.”
“I suppose.” Bruce keeps his tone flat and disinterested. He’s sure she’s rolling her eyes at him. She’s also way more adjusted to this than he expected her to be, which means--“How long have you suspected?”
“You know you’re an idiot, right?”
Bruce moves the hands of the grandfather clock, the chiming signal of the passageway opening down to the cave. “It’s been said. By you.”
“The Oracle never lies,” Barbara says, and hangs up before he can get the last word. He remembers when she and Dick used to fall asleep side by side into their post-mission snacks.
Tim is standing at the entryway to the cave, hovering just inside the tunnel. He turns his head sideways as Bruce approaches, and touches a finger to his lips. Bruce draws up beside him, then stops. Already in their suits, Cassandra and Stephanie are standing by the vehicles. Their cowls are down, their capes swish against each other.
Cassandra is putting Stephanie’s hair up in a ponytail, her tanned fingers against blonde locks. “Ready,” she says, but one hand stays, cradling Stephanie’s head. The other drops to touch Stephanie’s chest, on the center of the bat insignia and above her heart.
“Are you?” Stephanie asks, her voice trembling. “Ready?”
Cassandra tilts her head. “Are you?”
The kiss is so obviously their first, tentative and awkward and fumbling. So young, Bruce thinks, with a distant pang. So young and he’s buried one of them once already.
They’re beaming when it breaks, smiles so big it crinkles up their eyes. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand,” Stephanie says, and pulls Cassandra’s hood over her face. She yanks on her own and vaults onto one of the motorbikes. “You be Butch, I’ll be Sundance.”
They roar out of the cave, but their laughter lingers. When it fades, Tim shakes his head.
“It’ll end badly.”
“Maybe,” Bruce allows.
Tim looks at him. “Don’t tell me you think it won’t.”
Bruce shrugs. “The Oracle never lies.”