Chapter Text
He’s been hanging here for almost twenty hours now, just watching them hurt her. If it weren’t for the gag in his mouth, he’d be biting and taunting, anything to get them to focus on anything but Cass, but he can’t work the damn rag out. She hangs just across the room from him, every once in a while being dragged out of sight where he can only rely on the splashing and gurgling to tell him that they’re trying to break her by drowning her in the rotting bathtub off the living room, but she always comes back to that hook. And he can’t see her eyes, but he can feel her gaze on him the whole time.
It’s killing him.
All Jason can do is hang there. When they first started cutting into her, he tried to rip his chains from the hook. It stopped them for a second, diverted their attention for just a moment, but that moment gave Cass the opportunity to wrap her legs around the neck of one of the men. He’d turned purple by the time they got her to release him, and they haven’t turned his way since.
He’s ashamed to admit, even to himself, that he’s not sure he could have lasted this long if they were doing to him what’s been done unto her. Jason knows that Cass is strong, enough to rival Bruce in terms of withstanding pain, but he’s never seen any torture quite as vicious as this. Her suit is torn to shreds, all of the skin that should have been revealed is coated in blood and gashes. They started branding her at about hour thirteen, but her reaction to the pain wasn’t as great as they had hoped. Small chunks of flesh had been carved out and scattered on the floor around them. Bamboo splinters were hammered under her nails. The parts of her face that he can see are mottled black and purple bruises, split skin, and crusted in dried blood.
Every time he thinks she’s finally going to black out, her head jerks up to look at him, and her energy is renewed. Jason can’t make any sense of it.
The same man who sliced the bat symbol in between her shoulder blades steps away for a moment, only to return with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. Jason is screaming again, but it’s never stopped them before. He gets two hits in to her ribs when the door to the apartment comes down, immediately followed by the shattering of the two windows.
Red Robin locks straight on to him, making quick work of his shackles before Jason gets dumped to the ground. His arms are on fire and he can’t feel his legs, but he’s up in an instant, his gag is gone and he’s sprinting over to where Nightwing is trying to lower Cass as carefully as possible. He can hear Robin and Batman fighting their captors only a few feet away, but he couldn’t give a shit about them right now. For as small and light as she is, all three of them silently insist on helping to lay her down.
For a moment, there’s no sound, nobody else around them, just Jason and the little sister he failed to keep safe lying way too still on the grimey floor in front of him. Out of the corner of his eye, a hand moves to grab her, and Jason lashes out to stop it.
Before he can reach it, two arms wrap around his chest and he’s pulled against something solid. He acts before he can think, trying to flip whoever’s trying to restrain him off of his back. He shoots up, running them both backwards until they both ram into the wall. The arms loosen for a moment, and Jason looks back to where Cass was before realizing that she’s gone. He took his eyes off of her for a second and now she’s gone. A scream rips from his throat just as the arms tighten around his frame again, the sound of his name pulling his focus back to the situation at hand.
“Hood, B has her,” Nightwing soothes against his ear. “He’s taking Black Bat to the Batmobile. We’re taking her back to the cave. She’s safe, I swear. Leslie and Alfred and Steph are already there prepping the MedBay. I need to know, are you hurt?”
That question sends him reeling.
“The fuck– A-am I hu– Why the fuck would you– Cassie–”
“Hey!” He shouts, tightening his hold for just a second to get him to shut up. “I don’t have her right now, I have you. We can argue over this for as long as you want, or you can tell me your injuries so we can get back to the Cave and be with her. ‘S up to you.”
That clears his head for a moment. Dick is supposed to ask these questions, they all were trained to. Jason doesn’t look beat up, but Dick couldn’t know if they were drugging him or screwing with his mind somehow. “Just strained my arms. She never let them near me, ‘Wing,” is all he mutters.
Dick hums, a deep rumble that Jason can feel against his back, before the arms around his torso disappear entirely, then reappear to hoist him up. “Good, let’s go.”
They rip through Gotham into Bristol, roaring through the Cave entrance just in time to watch as Steph hops onto Cass’ gurney and begins chest compressions. Jason and Dick leap off the bike, letting it crash to the ground and sprint over to the scene.
“–doing great, Steph, keep going. Alfred, get me a milligram of adrenaline and prep the IV, Bruce I need shears to get the rest of her suit off. I need everyone else to stay the hell out of my way, let’s move,” Leslie barks, pulling Cass as Bruce pushes into the MedBay.
Time is moving both far too slowly and faster than he can keep up with. Jason moves to follow on instinct, because there’s no way in hell she’s about to die just after they’ve been saved, but Tim steps in his way, stopping him with a hand on his chest. “You heard her, Jay. We go in there, any of us, and we’re just standing in the way of them saving her.”
“Tim, she… You don’t know what they did to her, they don’t know, I have to–”
“You have to sit down, Jason. You’re barely standing, the adrenaline is gonna burn out any second and I, for one, am not carrying your sorry ass to rest somewhere comfortably. Just… take a breath, man. From this point on, we’re kind of obsolete. She’s in the best hands we’ve got.”
For the first time in… longer than he cares to admit, Jason takes a breath and lets it go. Tim’s right, as much as it turns his stomach. He spent the last day being forced to do nothing. Now that he’s free, it’s still the only thing he can do. Shaking hands clench into fists before he forces them back open, reluctantly shuffling over to sit at the meeting table in the middle of the cave.
His brothers follow silently, and as they all sit around him, Jason finally takes in their ragged forms for the first time. Dick is weary, still trying to calm himself down from the anxiety he must have been running off of this whole time. Tim is clearly still wired, but Jason knows that he’s just trying to occupy his mind instead of thinking about Cass. Those two are thicker than thieves on even their worst days, but that’s what being Batgirl and Robin will do to a pair. His eyes slide to Damian, and something is definitely… off.
“What’s up with you, pipsqueak? You’re quiet for someone who should be boasting about saving the day or calling us weaklings or imbeciles or whatever,” Jason comments.
Damian doesn’t even twitch at the taunt, which alerts Dick and Tim as well. Damian’s eyes are far off for a moment before refocusing and meeting Jason’s eyes. A split second later, he breaks contact to stare at his folded hands. “Cain was in the back of the Batmobile with Brown and I, and she kept asking… It was strange because… Clearly she’d suffered some kind of hallucination, because…”
“Christ, kid, spit it out,” Jason hisses after a moment of silence.
The kid glares at him, but Jason doesn’t see the usual fire behind the look. It only causes more worry to bubble up in his gut. “She kept asking if I was okay. I don’t understand why she would ask such a thing, let alone while she was collapsing her own lung. Cain was– she was wheezing and coughing and she kept asking, ‘Is Robin safe?’ I kept telling her that I was clearly uninjured, but she continued to ask. When we got her on the gurney here, Brown whispered something to her and that’s when she… Why would she ask such a thing if she wasn’t worse than they’re telling us?”
The three elder brothers look to each other, confusion plain on all of their faces. Blood loss could have been a factor, or the insane amount of trauma done to her body finally getting to her. But before any of them are able to voice theories, a voice comes from behind them.
“She wasn’t talking about you, Damian,” Stephanie says, scrubbing her hands with a bloodstained rag. Next to her is Barbara, a resolute look on her face.
Jason shoots to his feet at the sigh of her, even though the room spins as he does so. “Jesus, Steph. Is she–”
“Her heart’s beating,” she cuts him off. “She’s getting blood and fluids and they’re doing all the damage control they can right now. But she wasn’t delusional, Dames. Cass wasn’t talking about you.”
Falling back to his chair, Jason asks, “What’s that mean, Blondie? There’s no other Robin.”
It’s Barbara who answers this time, “Batgirl’s job is to protect Robin.”
The statement is still too vague according to Dick, who prods, “Babs, Cassie isn’t Batgirl anymore, and Jay hasn’t been Robin in years. He wasn’t even her Robin. That makes zero sense.”
Steph shakes her head. “Batgirl protects Robin. It’s the first thing Bruce tells us when we put on that suit. You don’t just lose that kind of responsibility when the name gets passed down, Dick.”
“S’that why you took that bullet for Dick a few months ago?” Tim wonders aloud, and Jason can see him beginning to connect the dots in that brain of his. Steph just glances at Dick before focusing on her hands.
“She shouldn’t have done that for me,” Jason murmurs. “I can’t say I’m stronger than her, because that would be a goddamned lie, but I could have taken some of that from her. Cassie shouldn’t have shouldered that alone.”
“It’s not about whether we think you guys can take it or not,” Barbara says. “We know you’re tough. Cass knows that better than any of us. She knows exactly how much any of us can handle, but you know her. She gets the job done better than any of us. She protected you from harm because she’s Batgirl, but she saved you from all of it because she loves you, Jason. She can see everything about a person. She’s too empathetic for her own good, and she was never taught how to turn it off. Cass kept you from getting hurt because it would have hurt her even more than any of those physical blows she took, and you know it.”
The cave is silent for a moment after she finishes speaking. Jason knows his brothers are thinking about everything they’ve just heard and rewinding their memories to make it all make sense.
It has to sink in for Jason that it wasn’t just some misplaced sense of duty, but it was because Cass gave too much of a shit about him to let him get hurt. He wants to scream at her, shake her shoulders and shout I’m not worth it, but deep down he knows she’d argue otherwise. Cass decides who’s worth her love the moment she lays eyes on them, and there’s no changing her mind once she’s made it.
The boys all take a look at each other before Dick pipes up, “What’s it gonna take for you three to never do something like this ever again?”
Steph snorts and rolls her eyes, “You’ll need to stop putting yourselves into insane danger all the time.”
The tension breaks for just this moment, all of them knowing that’s a promise they’ll never be able to keep.
“You’ve got a deal, Blondie,” Jason lies.
If it’s in a Batgirl’s nature to protect Robin, it’s in a Robin’s nature to lie.