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Cassandra Grayson is young and brilliant. She moves with grace in her every action; she smiles brightly and freely and laughs at everyone’s jokes. She understands five languages – Romani, Cantonese, English, French, and BSL – but doesn’t speak much in any of them. Her parents communicate with her in a hodge-podge of all five and they listen to her expressions, her silences, as much as they do to her words. She loves them more than anything and they love her just the same. Robin, they call her, with love.
When they fall, she doesn’t scream, doesn’t cry out, she just covers her eyes and refuses to look at the bodies. Someone big and strong carries her away.
“Cassandra, right?” He says, voice gruff. His accent is American. Local. “I’m going to take you outside. You don’t have to look. It was smart of you to cover your eyes.”
--
She loves Bruce because he never treats her like she’s stupid. Even if it takes him years and languages – he learns BSL from Alfred and then they both learn ASL together so she can talk to more people here – to find a way to understand her, he never assumes she doesn’t understand him. When she writes out the fact that someone murdered her parents, and who, he nods, and asks her if she wants to come bring him in.
That night, she is Robin, the title, rather than Robin, the girl, for the first time.
--
Bruce loves his daughter more than he’s ever loved anyone in his whole life, but he worries for her. She’s fast and clever and now that he’s gotten her the appropriate accommodations from Gotham Academy, she’s learning lots in school. And, as of last week, she has a hobby outside of being Robin. She’s taking ballet classes. Her flexibility and skills as an acrobat serve her well. He wonders, sometimes, if he should have been more insistent that she pursue gymnastics rather than being Robin, but he thinks she would hate the idea of the last thing she has of her parents turning into a job. Bruce doesn’t press.
His main worry, though, is that Cassandra doesn’t have any friends. She works with the Teen Titans, but they don’t really understand her. As a slight over-generalization, the Titans are loud and boisterous. They fill the space and don’t leave Cassandra with room to express herself. They’re her allies, but they aren’t her friends.
For this reason, Jason Gordon is an absolute blessing. He meets Cassandra at the library. Sheer coincidence, in spite of their adoptive fathers. Cassandra loves the library because nobody minds if she doesn’t talk there. Jason loves the library because he loves books and at the library nobody asks about why he changed schools halfway through the year or where his accent is from or why he moved to Gotham. Cassandra, who is an excellent judge of character, likes him instantly.
--
Jason has the fight in him. He’s wanted to be a hero since he was a kid, listening to Uncle Jim’s stories of the Batman, and now he’s living with Uncle Jim – Dad? – and the Batman is right here, and the temptation to do something is too much to resist.
He comes up with his own costume and name. He wants to be a bird almost instantly. Like Robin. He’s seen pictures of her, and she’s his hero. He wants to be Blue Jay, first of all, but he thinks the name is too easily spotted, so in the end he goes with Bluebird.
It takes three months for Batman and Robin to notice that they’re not the only Vigilantes in town any more. Jason is smug about that, until four months after that, when he learns that Cassandra Grayson, from the library, is Robin. Then he feels like an idiot.
--
Cass is Jason’s first real love. Not in any romantic or sexual sense. He thinks she’s beautiful, because he isn’t blind, but that’s not the way in which he loves her. She understands him like no one else, and in time, he comes to find that he understands her too. He learns two different kinds of sign language and a smattering of two spoken languages for her, but that’s not really what lets him understand her. He comes to understand her smiles, the ways she tilts her head, the different ways of holding tension in her shoulders. He knows that he doesn’t understand her perfectly, and not as well as she’d like all the time, but he loves her and most of the time that’s enough.
She loves him, too. Or trusts him at least. He’s the first person to learn that she’s a lesbian, which he’ll always be pleased about. It takes six more years, but she ends up being the first person to hear that he’s bi.
--
Jason is the one who first suggests ballet school. Cassandra is the one who picks Hong Kong. Bruce is the one whose house feels infinitely emptier, after she’s gone and Nightwing, Hong Kong’s own vigilante, takes the stage.
As a result of this, though, Cass isn’t in Gotham when Jason, in his civilian identity, is kidnapped by the Joker. It’s hard to say which of them blames themselves more for that.
--
Barbara Todd is having a really fucking long day when she has the bright idea to steal the tires off the batmobile. She’s stolen tires a couple of times before and she sees the batmobile and thinks, “why the fuck not?”
The answer turns out to be, “because Batman is coming back,” but the consequences are, actually, very minor. Batman takes her out for midnight pancakes and then asks, oh-so-politely, if she has anywhere safe to stay and would she like to stay with a friend of his.
Barbara recognizes that Bruce is Batman the second she sees him because come on, but they have a good laugh about his attempt to trick her, and she agrees to stay the night.
--
When Nightwing – the former Robin – flies in the next day to meet her, skipping at least three days of classes, and asks Bruce, “little sister?” with a thrilled expression, Barbara revises that “stay the night” into “stay indefinitely.”
When she finds out that Bruce can introduce her to Wonder Woman that seals the deal.
--
People ask a lot of questions about the fact that Bruce has adopted two young girls, with no female presence in their lives. Bruce mostly ignores them, but it gets to him, sometimes. Over the years, he tones down the Brucie Wayne persona. He’s never liked pretending to be licentious and he likes it even less when he’s keenly aware that some men do the same thing, absent the pretending, with his underage daughters.
“I don’t think I’m what they’d approve of as a female presence,” Selina purrs, when Bruce mentions as much to her.
“Cass and Babs both adore you.”
She smiles. One thing Bruce adores about her is that while their relationship is very much on-and-off, her relationship with his daughters is always on. Over the years, Selina has shouldered more of the burden of parenthood than she’s had any obligation to, and Bruce can never thank her enough for that.
“I adore them. How you and I turned out two singularly lovely young women, I’ll never know.”
“Alfred.”
She laughs, warm against his chest. “That tracks.”
--
Jason is always more Cass’s friend than Barbara’s, but the last six months, between his encounter with the Joker and hers, they grow unexpectedly close. He’s taken a year off from university to rethink his life choices now that he isn’t going to be Bluebird, and she’s graduated school early, but Bruce won’t let her go away to university at sixteen, so she’s taking time off too. He calls her “Barbie,” and she only sometimes hits him for it. They build Jason a new gaming PC and fix up a car for Barbara’s sixteenth birthday. They start a two-member book club where they only read cheap sci-fi paperbacks.
Sometimes, occasionally, they talk about the job. Jason urges her to find something else meaningful in her life. It doesn’t really work. Barbara is angry, at the city and the universe and Bruce and herself, and the job is the only way she feels like she’s making a difference. Conversely, Barbara is the one who urges Jason to find his way back into the job. She’s the one who set him up on the comms, on the police scanners. She’s the one who suggests that he find work with other heroes, who aren’t as capable of doing their own investigations as Batman is.
It’s her fault, in a way, that when she finds out that her entire family history is a lie, Jason and Cass are both off world together.
(“Brawn,” Cass explained to the rest of the Titans, pointing at her own chest, and then at Jason, “brains.”)
Barbara doesn’t call out for either of them.
--
After Barbara dies, Cass quits professional ballet and comes back to Gotham. It’s hard to know whether that’s for herself, Jason, or Bruce. (or Selina, who Bruce once finds breaking down on a roof top, unable to finish a job because for half a second she saw a young red-haired security guard and thought “Babs”.) But she’s there, and it makes more difference than Bruce can ever say. Cass being Cass, she’s never had much need for words anyways.
--
While Richard Drake is still a child, small enough that his parents feel obligated to hold him in public places, they take him to the circus.
“Watch,” Cassandra Grayson instructs him, a brilliant grin on her face. “Special trick, just for you.” She tweaks his nose, just so.
Richard watches, and he sees everything. He sees far more than Cassandra, who covers her eyes. Perhaps the greatest miracle of that night, more so even than the meeting of Bruce and Cassndra, is that the fall he witnesses doesn’t dim Richard’s newfound love of acrobatics one bit.
Two years later, he signs himself up for gymnastics lessons on his dad’s computer, at a place in central Gotham where no one knows him, and takes the bus down to class twice a week. Later, by the time he enters middle school, he goes nearly every single day.
--
Everybody likes Richard Drake. He navigates his parents’ social scene like a dream, with a bright smile and a handsome little suit. He navigates elementary school with a laugh, and makes everyone call him “Dick,” and always rides the line of being as much the class clown as he can be without getting suspended.
Everybody likes Dick. But nobody loves him.
--
He watches Cassandra Grayson, over the years. She’s still his icon and his hero. He watches recordings of her performances, when he can find them, and always keeps an eye out for her in the gossip columns. When Barbara Todd is at school with him, he watches her too. She’s nothing like Cassandra, but she’s far closer, far more real. Her death hits him like he never could have expected.
--
Dick is on the uneven bars, one morning a month or so after Barbara Todd’s death, when he hears the sound of someone new coming into the gym. He ignores them. Mrs. Pietrovich, who owns the place, is probably showing around prospective parents.
But when he sticks the landing and hears polite clapping, he realizes that the strangers are standing with his coach, Ms. Bak. Also, they aren’t strangers.
“Dick!” Ms. Bak calls, waving him over. “Come meet Cassandra Grayson. She’s going to be taking over our kindergarteners class. Mr. Gordon is her teaching assistant.” To Dick’s hero, she says, “Richard Drake is the most promising student I’ve had in thirty years of teaching.”
He just about dies right then and there, and is revived when Cassandra says, “very good,” her first words to Dick since that night at the circus. “You love it.”
He nods, too overwhelmed even for words.
She offers him that same, brilliant smile, and signs something to Jason. He asks, “have you ever tried trapeze?”
Dick shakes his head. Cassandra tilts hers slightly.
Jason asks, “would you like to?”
Ms. Bak never fully forgives Cassandra for poaching Dick out from under her very nose. But even she begrudgingly has to admit: she’s never seen him happier than the first time he successfully lands a quadruple somersault.
--
“Adopt him,” Cassandra orders one day. She’s just had her protegé, Dick Drake, over for dinner. Fortunately, she’s saved this conversation until after Dick has gone home.
“I can’t adopt him. He has two parents who are very much alive.”
(Nobody hugs Dick) she signs. (Lonely) She’s purposefully vague about which one of them is lonely.
“Lots of people are lonely, Cassie-girl.”
“Abuse,” she corrects. “It’s abuse.”
They don’t have enough for custody, not yet, but Cass and Jason start a file to document what they do see. In the meantime, the three of them look out for Dick as best they can. It’s the only thing that’s given Bruce a real feeling of purpose since Barbara died.
--
It’s Jason who inducts Dick into the world of vigilantism. He’s the one who gets busted, coming back from assisting the Titans on a mission, and has to give the explanation. He’s the one who offers Dick a costume in his own right. Jason wouldn’t do it if he had any other choice, but Bruce and Cass are both missing and Jason can’t go out to rescue them himself.
The Bluebird costume doesn’t fit, but it can be tailored to Dick’s slimmer body. Everything else it takes to fill it – grit, dedication, fight, goodness – Dick has already in spades.
--
Timothy al Ghul figures out who his father is at the age of six. It isn’t hard. Grandfather always refers to him as Ibn al Xu'ffasch, disdaining the pedestrian name Mother chose, and it is evident that the ‘bat’ in question is not Mother. Ergo, his father is someone who can be referred to as ‘the bat’. He steals a contraband cellphone from one of the younger ninja. The man will not be able to report the theft, since the item was illicit to begin with, and he will not suspect a child, because everybody underestimates children.
From the stolen device, it is easy to identify that his father is the warrior known as ‘Batman’. The more difficult piece is identifying who the Batman is, under his cowl. He follows leads in a determined fashion. Grandfather occasionally refers to him as ‘Little Detective’ for a reason.
Father is clearly a man worthy of esteem and respect in or out of uniform, because Mother would not fall for a fool. Reports online indicate that the Batman is a native of the city known as ‘Gotham’, therefore it is logical to search for powerful individuals within that city. In addition, the Batman has three known associates, Nightwing, Bluebird, and Robin. It is probable that at least one of the three is also associated with his civilian identity. Virtually, he scours Gotham-based forums and social media for possible candidates.
In the end, he finds not Batman, but Nightwing.
Just picked my little sister up from gymnastics class (she’s six, all they do is somersaults and it’s adorable), and met her teacher. It was Cassandra Fucking Wayne [edit: she apparently prefers ‘Grayson’] I went on the gynamnastics place’s website and they had a video of her on it and look at this: [link]
It takes Timothy an hour to download the two-minute video of Cassandra Grayson on the trapeze. When he has it, he watches a dozen times, and then compares the rare footage Hong Kong denizens have posted of Nightwing over the years. It’s her. He’s sure. From there the next two logical steps – that Bruce Wayne is Batman, that Barbara Todd was Robin – are evident.
--
Timothy isn’t sure what he’s going to do with that information until a year later, when he meets his mother’s current pet project, fresh from the Lazarus Pit, and recognizes in her furious features the face of Barbara Todd. He waits, to be told of his connection to this girl, that she’s his sister, but the words never come. They still do not tell him the truth of his father and Timothy is aching to know.
Increasingly, he watches clips of his father and sisters, both in and out of costume, and notices the way they treat each other, the smiling and the trust on the field and the gentle touches. He knows that Grandfather would call them weak and yet Timothy wants a piece of that companionship so terribly that it burns.
He sneaks into Todd’s cell. He has grown very good at sneaking, of late. Grandfather orders him beaten if he hears the sound of Timothy’s feet.
“Todd,” he hisses, drawing the angry green eyes to him.
“Who the fuck is there?” She snaps, before looking down and seeing Timothy for the first time. “Kid? How the hell did you get here? You need to get out of here yesterday. I’m not safe.”
The pit rage is dangerous. Timothy knows this. But curiosity is his fatal flaw. “I will remain on this side of the bars. But you will tell me about the Batman.”
The green flashes in her eyes. “I’m not telling you jack shit.”
Perhaps demands were not the way to achieve this goal. “Please.”
“Why do you want to know, short stuff?”
“He’s my father.”
Her eyebrows climb towards her hair. “Get a torch.”
It’s a risk, but Timothy obeys, and she examines him for a long moment before decreeing, “He sure fucking is. What the hell are you doing in this hell hole?”
“Talia al Ghul is my mother.”
--
Afterwards, it’s not entirely evident which one of them has rescued the other. Barbara says it’s her. She’s the one who beats the guards bloody, who steals first a car and then a helicopter to get them out. Timothy says it’s him. He’s the one who opens the cell door and places his trust in the hands of a girl he’s just met. He’s the one who leaves everything he’s ever known behind to bring her home.
“I don’t care who did it,” Bruce says, “I’m just glad you’re here.”
“Home,” Cass says, embracing them both, which just about sums it up.
--
When he’s fifteen, Damien Brown tries to kill his father. He’s thought it all out, perhaps to an excessive extent. Too much like his father, in that respect. He sees that Gotham’s prisons don’t hold anyone, that his father inevitably gets out, inevitably hurts people. The only logical solution to this problem is to ensure that Arthur Brown never has the chance to hurt anyone again.
He makes himself a costume, he buys himself a set of knives, with cash – a birthday gift for my mother, he explains to the cashier – and he tracks his father’s schedule dutifully. If he accosts his father on the way to or from a meeting with his criminal associates, they’ll be blamed for it.
And then one day, he creeps through the shadows, prepared to do the deed, when a slender hand closes around his wrist and presses hard enough at the pressure point that he drops his knife.
From the shadows emerges Bluebird, the new bluebird, costume like a paint swatch going from navy blue at his chest to a pale colour, almost white, at his fingertips.
“You don’t want to do that,” Bluebird says, voice gentle but certain.
“I do,” Damian informs him, pulling a second knife from his belt.
“He’s your father,” notes Bluebird, seemingly unperturbed by the knife. He grabs Damian’s wrist with his other hand, twisting his arms behind him and pinning him against the wall with ease.
Damian, tasting brick, decides that he fucking hates Bluebird. “What’re you gonna do? Tell Batman on me?”
“Worse,” says a woman, landing gracefully in the alley behind them. “He’s going to tell me.”
Since Nightwing doesn’t speak, this is presumably the new bat, the one everyone calls ‘Red Robin’ because of the red helmet she wears to hide her face and hair. Damian isn’t sure if that’s the official name or not.
“Fuck you,” Damian says, and is treated to her hand on the back of his neck. Oh shit.
“Play nice,” she orders him, voice cold and deadly. “This is a second shot, you little shit. Killing isn’t something you can take back. You don’t want your father’s blood on your hands.”
“You don’t fucking know what he’s like.”
She scoffs. “Do you think anybody ends up a teen vigilante without at least one shit parent under their belt?”
“Nightwing,” Bluebird points out, immediately.
“One shit parent or two murdered parents,” Red Robin amends. “And that covers B too. But my point, knife-boy, is that you don’t want to be a shitty criminal like your dad. You want to be better. If you stop trying to stab us for two fucking seconds, we can help you.”
Damian opens his hand in surrender – he’s outnumbered, for now, so there’s no point in fighting – and Bluebird lets him up off the wall. He turns around and leans up against the bricks, trying to maintain an air of dignity even though he’s pretty sure his nose is bleeding. He can taste copper.
“What can you Bats do? Send him back to Arkham? He’ll be out by next Tuesday and he’s not even good at being a criminal.”
Red Robin’s eyes flash a dangerous green. “Arkham isn’t going to be a revolving fucking door anymore. We’ll see to that.”
She looks so dangerous in that moment that Damian can’t help but believe her.
--
They settle into a rhythm, after Damian is awkwardly coerced into the family. Cass teaches gymnastics and sometimes ballet. She looks for students who love it the way she and Dick do, and occasionally she finds them. Sometimes Jason serves as her assistant, and sometimes Dick does, after Jason finally goes back to school. He’s going to get a degree in literature, he says, which Bruce pays for as a quiet thanks for everything Jason’s done for them.
Barbara forges an entirely new identity for herself. She can’t ever be Barbara Todd again, but she manages to turn herself into an obscure third-cousin of Alfred’s called ‘Bernice Catherine Pennyworth’. She takes a lot of anger management classes and starts looking at university applications. She wants a degree that will help her fix Arkham, but hasn’t decided what yet.
Timothy, who finds himself quickly rebranded as ‘Tim’ by nearly everybody, finds himself a little overwhelmed by the family that now surrounds him. It’s hard to say whether he’s more scared of rejection or of one of them hurting him. In time, they each find their own ways of making him feel welcome. Barbara plays rough with him, the same way she does with the others. She teaches him about noogies and throws him over her shoulder and pushes him into the pool, making sure that she never hurts him so in time he learns the difference between play and torture. Jason, by contrast, introduces Timothy to a rather less violent side of childhood. He takes him to the library, and to plays – Tim likes the ones with swords, so they end up seeing a lot of Shakespeare, which suits them both – and then to movies. Tim loves movies. He loves learning about cameras and the tricks they play and how people frame the world through them. So much of his world has been consumed through other people’s lenses for so long that the idea of shaping narrative with a camera of his own is breathtaking. Jason comes back one evening and tells Bruce “buy that kid a camera,” and Tim is absolutely lost in a world of his own making.
Cassandra and Dick are Tim’s favourite subjects. He loves watching them move. He takes pictures, and videos, lovingly framing them from every possible angle. He has one camera for pictures in costume and one for pictures out of costume. His favourite picture, though, is something in between. They’re in the cave while the others are out on patrol, and Dick is hanging upside down from the monkeybars in the training course. He wraps one of Bruce’s old capes around himself.
“Look, Tim,” he calls, “I’m Batman!” Tim raises his camera and shoots, and, much to Dick’s later embarrassment, the picture ends up framed and hung up near the giant penny.
--
In some ways, bringing Dick home is the hardest of any of them. Bruce’s other children have more or less been dropped into his lap over the years, but he has to fight for Dick. He has evidence, he has money, but the Drakes draw the court case out, fighting tooth and nail for the son they’ve never shown any of the love he deserves. There are lawyers and psychologists and an army of reporters. There’s a tearful Wayne Family interview with Clark Kent where young Timothy Wayne calls Dick his ‘big brother’.
And then there’s eyewitness testimony and all eyes inevitably turn to Cass. She’s the one who reported the abuse, after all, the one and only time Jack Drake ever hit his son. She saw the whole thing, after Dick missed a gala to train instead. She stood in the doorway of the women’s change room, silent in her sports bra and tights, and Jack didn’t see her. She has to testify. Jason can’t go with her, and neither can Bruce. He offers to demand a translator for her, so she can sign, but she declines.
Cassandra clutches the podium with both hands so hard her knuckles turn white and, with determination that makes Bruce so fiercely proud he has no words for it, she tells her story.
“I suspected,” she tells them. “Emotional abuse was obvious, so was neglect. But hard to prove. So I tried to protect Dick. I brought him home. I was adopted and so was my sister. She had abusive parents.” Barbara couldn’t come to court, but knowing her way with computers, she’s probably found some way to watch this. “Bruce is good with kids. Experienced. Him and Dick connected right away. They come from similar places.” The words so clearly hurt her but she fights anyways. It’s as impressive as anything she’s ever done as Nightwing. Likely harder for her, also. “Dick was my student first, but now he’s family. He is sunshine. We love him. When I saw Mr. Drake in my gym, slap my brother, I… reacted.” She broke his nose. It didn’t exactly help their case, but Bruce was still proud of her.
The judge interrupts, makes her specify, and she says, “I hit him back, in the face. I should not have. I forget my training makes me strong.” She forgets that she isn’t always Nightwing. “I am sorry.” She isn’t. “I should have taken Dick away. He should not have had to stay there with his abuser one second longer.”
There are questions, and Cassandra answers all of them. When she’s done, and court is in recess, she sobs into Bruce’s shoulder while Jason rubs soothing circles across her back.
They get custody of Dick and he bakes Cass a cake and it’s drier than the Sahara. Bruce has never seen her happier than when Dick sets it in front of her after dinner.
--
“We have the best kids in the universe.”
Selina crosses her legs around the gargoyle’s ears. “I agree, obviously, but what’s brought this on?”
It’s a lot of things, really, but, “Red Robin is going to give… Robin to Spoiler. She got into Berkeley and she’s taking it.”
“And this is making you weepier than I’ve ever seen you? Last I heard, you thought Spoiler was a loose cannon.”
His opinion of Spoiler has been improving, lately. The kid is Dick’s new best friend, and he’s been picking up a lot of Dick’s optimism. In turn, he seems to make Dick feel grounded. It’s a little like those early years of Jason and Cass, but with a lot more knives. “She’s growing up. I never thought I’d get to see her grow up.”
“You were about due for a miracle, after everything.”
“I’ve had a lot of miracles.”
They’re ‘off’, right now, but with half a dozen kids who all think of Selina variously as Mom, Step-mom or Aunt, it’s a little difficult to turn the relationship off. Bruce has nightmares about trying to make custody arrangements.
In spite of the fact they aren’t dating, she pats his thigh gently. “It’s good that you know that. But don’t feel undeserving of them. You give the kids just as much as you get from them.”
“So do you.” Selina came to Jason’s graduation and took all the photos so Alfred could be in them. Selina broke into the Drake family home to get Dick’s things. Selina taught Babs how to braid her hair. Selina has been dancing at Galas with Cass since she was a little girl. Selina is taking Tim camping next week with Black Canary so that he can get a chance to take some nature pictures while still feeling relatively safe from his Grandfather.
She reaches up to flick at his nose, fortunately protected by the cowl. “And don’t you forget it.”
--
Stephanie Cain hoards words like they’re treasures. Her father never gives them to her, but from her earliest memories, she collects the treasures of human speech where she can, holds them as close to her heart as possible. Sometimes, in the dark where she feels safest, she imagines opening her mouth, letting the quivering impulse in her throat, in her chest, take control. She thinks of all the sounds she could form, and resists, only barely, the urge to let them fly.
She picks the name ‘Stephanie’ for herself, on a whim. She learns from her listening that other people, not her father, call each other words that don’t seem to mean anything. Names. It takes her more listening to know what makes a name, although she never quite figures out what makes a good one.
She picks hers because she finds a name tag, dropped in a gutter. She’s been teaching herself to read, as best she can, and she takes the tag because it says ‘Hello’ on it and she knows that word is a greeting. She thinks it might be a note. When she can finally read the whole thing she thinks to herself ‘damn right it is.’ (Damn is a word she’s very proud of.)
--
Different people have brought home children to Wayne Manor over the years. Bruce brought Cassandra, and she brought Jason and Dick. Bruce brought Barbara the first time, but the second time she and Tim brought each other. Nobody will accept the blame for Damian, but Bruce is pretty confident it wasn’t him. He’s also not entirely sure when Damian moved in, but he’s pretty sure that he has.
Even more so, he’s confident that this is the first time Selina’s brought home a child before. His first wild thought, in spite of the fact that the girl doesn’t look anything like either of them, is that they’ve had a secret child all along. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all.
“Bruce,” she greets him, with some relief. Bruce wonders if Alfred let them in or if Selina broke in, as she’s sometimes wont to do. Bruce doesn’t have the heart to tell her that Barbara has taught the security systems to recognize the difference between a Selina break-in and a real break-in.
“Selina?” He turns to the girl. She flinches under his gaze, and he revises, kneeling on the ground to give her the position of control. “And who might you be?”
She glances up at Selina, who says, “she doesn’t speak. I was wondering if Cass was around?”
Unfortunately, “she’s out of town.” Introducing Damian to the Titans, which would either do him a world of good or be a disaster.
Signing along with his words, and making sure he’s enunciating clearly so she can read his lips, Bruce says, “take all the time you need. I would like a name to call you, please, but there is no rush. You’re safe here.”
She tugs at Selina’s sleeve and makes a gesture like a finger gun going off. It’s just plain mime. Selina says, “she was running from a gunman. He’s not shooting to kill, and he appears to be alone. They interrupted a robbery of a private collection I’d been planning for some time.” She doesn’t seem too upset about it. “I secreted Kitten away and took a short detour on the way here. Even if the shooter does manage to track us, he’ll probably get caught up with Harley and Ivy for some time.”
Neither of Selina’s sometimes-friends will take kindly to a gunman pursuing an unarmed, plainly traumatized young woman.
To the girl, Selina adds, signing as Bruce had, “this is the safest place in Gotham. You can stay as long as you want. You don’t owe us anything.” She’s always felt comfortable taking, or even giving away, things that aren’t hers.
The girl looks between them, chews her lip for a long moment before she murmurs, with the unusual cadence of someone unused to speaking. “Hello. My name is Stephanie.”
--
Stephanie, it turns out, is not like Cassandra at all. She loves the sound of her own voice, the myriad ways she can use it. She loves the curses that Barbara and Damian teach her. She adores accents in general and Alfred’s and Tim’s in particular. She loves the snipits of Arabic and Cantonese and Romani and Spanish she picks up from conversations around the manor. She loves the French names of Cass’s ballet moves and the Shakesperian and Regency-era terms that Jason occasionally throws into everyday conversation just because he can, and the internet slang and memes she learns from Dick.
But she also has the capacity for silence, the understanding of it, and it draws Cass to her almost instantly. After all these years, Cass’s second family understand her silences almost as well as her parents did. Alfred understands her in the same way he understands Bruce, who so often speaks without saying anything. Bruce understands her, in a way that goes beyond all the languages they speak for each other. Jason understands her profoundly, to the very core of her. They’re still each other’s better halves, even all these years later. Brain and Brawns.
What sets Stephanie apart, though, is this: while the others all have the capacity to listen to Cassandra, she’s never before met someone who has the capacity to speak to her. Stephanie prefers to speak aloud, but in the quiet of the early morning when they pass each other in the halls and don’t want to wake anyone, they can arrange their bodies into ‘slept-badly’ and ‘offering comfort’ and ‘accepting offer’ without any words.
Falling in love with Stephanie comes as naturally to her as anything.
--
Jason and Barbara are the Best People at their wedding. Bruce and Selina walk them down the aisle. Dick and Cass have a dance they do together where they nearly seem to achieve flight they move so fast. Damien catches a paparazzo sneaking in and throws him out a second-storey window.
Tim takes pictures of everything and his favourite one is this: Cass and Bruce’s father-daughter dance, caught at just such an angle where he can see Selina and Stephanie in the background with identical looks of affection on their faces. That one ends up framed in Bruce’s office. The picture from the next evening, of Nightwing kissing Flamebird on the roof of the Crime Alley Taco Bell, ends up right at the centre of the ever-growing Tim’s Photo Wall in the Cave.