Chapter Text
August 13th, 1999
Steph
The clock reads 7:36 when she gets into Babs’ car. The heated interior is a relief from chilly night air. Already, the sky outside is a void-black dome.
“Hey. So we’re looking for another homeless kid?” she asks. She already knows the answer, but she’ll take any excuse to talk.
“Pretty much. My contact says she doesn’t speak though.”
Steph scrunches up her face at this. “Like, at all?”
"Yep. No speech at all."
"How'd a kid who can't speak English end up in Gotham of all places?"
Babs sighs.
“It’s not unheard of for people to move to a new country without being fluent in the local language. She also could’ve been orphaned or kicked out of home after arriving here with someone who did speak English.”
“Why would anyone want to move to Gotham?” Steph asks, only half-joking.
Babs tightens her grip on the steering wheel.
They drive in uncomfortable silence for the next few minutes.
“Alright boss, give me her description!” Steph chirps as she steps out of the car.
“Female, late teens, black hair, mixed race or Asian.” Babs lists.
“Late teens? You said she was a kid!”
“I’m not arguing with you, Steph. Just go find her.”
The girl is wearing tattered, loose-fitting clothing that obscures her form. She is about Steph’s height, with a mop of greasy black hair.
If Steph had to pick her most defining feature, she would choose her eyes. Those hazel eyes have a strange hunger to them. They seem to greedily suck up all available information.
Analyzing and exposing her in an instant.
Already, she feels as if she is not at all in control of the situation. As silly as it is, she’d be much more confident in her Spoiler costume.
This is stupid. She shouldn’t be getting worked over this.
Steph swallows her anxiety and speaks.
“Hey. I’m Steph. You probably don’t trust me, like, I’m just some stranger who walked up to you late at night, I mean… creepy, right?”
Steph flashes a smile. The other girl gives no response.
“Uh. Anyway, I’m with the Martha Wayne Foundation, and it’s going to get really cold in the next few nights… and that is… not good… So I’m going to help you get some warm clothes and a place to stay, okay?”
She pauses for a moment to allow the other girl a chance to respond.
Nothing. Guess Babs was right about her being non-verbal.
Not willing to give up so easily, Steph tries motioning for the girl to follow her.
To her surprise, that works.
Barbara
The drive back to her apartment is uneventful, other than the mute girl leaving crumbs all over the backseat as she voraciously devours a bag of chips.
“Babs? You know you're driving away from the East Side shelter, right?”
“Second-hand accounts suggest that our kid back there doesn’t do well with crowds. It’ll go even worse if we can’t explain to her what’s actually going on.”
“Okay. Where are you taking her?”
“I'm taking her to my place. She might be disabled or injured, so I’m going to take her to Doc Thompkins’ in the morning to get her checked out.”
The kid warms up to her pretty quickly after being let indoors and given a hot meal.
She doesn't react to any language Babs talks to her in or plays recordings of, but she knows how to clean and dress herself, which rules out the possibility that she’s some sort of feral child.
She gets Steph a cab home, and spends the night with the kid.
Barbara notices a lot of abnormalities about the girl in a very short time. Firstly, the girl seems very at ease in her apartment. She carries herself with grace and confidence that is out of place for a malnourished teenager living off a stranger’s hospitality.
After the girl comes out of the bathroom, dressed in the oversized clothes that Barbara provided her with, she notices another oddity.
Scars. A concerning number of them.
A long, pale scar across the girl’s left cheek, and a noticeable groove in her nose where a second, shorter scar cuts across it. Her forearms, exposed by the short sleeves of the T-shirt she wears, are knotted with scars of varying sizes.
Almost immediately, the girl notices her staring and tenses up, revealing something else unusual. She shifts, seemingly unconsciously, into a practiced fighting stance.
Barbara gives her a smile and motions to the couch.
No point wasting words where they aren’t needed.
The girl relaxes.
The scars and fighting stance are concerning.
She would guess human trafficking is involved.
She might have to get Bruce involved. That is not something she looks forward to.
August 14th, 1999
Everything at Thompkins’ goes much better than Barbara expected.
The girl continually surprises Barbara with how trusting she is. She follows Barbara into the clinic and takes a seat at her insistence. She waits patiently while Barbara talks to Dr. Thompkins. Even the blood test goes along with no issues.
As Oracle, she searches databases around the world for this girl’s face. She finds nothing. Maybe she’s from some country that hasn’t digitized their records yet. Maybe the girl doesn’t officially exist, born in some drug den and never taken to a hospital.
Barbara elects to foster her for the time being. The girl already trusts her, is almost self-sufficient, and it’s nice to have another person in the house. It reminds her of the year she lived with Dick.
Things enter an uneasy rhythm. During the day, Barbara works as Oracle. She gets home at 6:00, and the girl is already waiting for her. They eat, watch TV together and go to sleep.
After the first night, the girl doesn’t seem interested in TV anymore. But she still likes to sit with Barbara. It’s cute.
The girl goes out of her way to avoid physical contact, and Barbara certainly isn’t going to push her boundaries.
She picks up the phone to call Bruce.
She puts it down.
She picks it back up again.
He'll try to recruit her into the Crusade. That's what Bruce does every time he comes across a kid with issues.
She remembers Jason’s memorial plaque. The secret one in the cave.
A GOOD SOLDIER
1978 - 1994
He was a kid. Once again, she puts the phone down, this time in disgust.
August 18th, 1999
She names the girl Cassandra. Barbara has long been fascinated with Greek myths, and something about the girl’s sad eyes remind her of the tale of the prophet.
Cursed to know all, but never be heard.
She’s not entirely sure why, but the name feels right .
August 21st, 1999
The weekend allows her to see what Cassandra spends her time doing. The answer is exercising.
This scares the shit out of Barbara.
Not the act itself, but the implications.
Cassandra cannot speak or read. But someone has taught her a grueling routine consisting of dozens of exercises. One that makes heavy use of Barbara’s gym equipment. It must have required exhaustive training to master. Cassandra does it perfectly.
For hours.
Barbara can’t help but wonder if she’s stumbled across the victim of some kind of fucked up experiment.
Several times throughout history, powerful men have had children raised in an environment deliberately deprived of language to see what would happen.
Psamtik I. Frederick II. James IV. Could such a thing happen in the 20th century?
Four sharp raps on the door unmoor Barbara from her thoughts. For half a second, she thinks that Jason is coming by again.
Steph’s muffled voice rings out from beyond the door.
Barbara pulls herself over to the door and opens it. Steph nearly trips over her on the way in.
“Hey, Babs.”
“Hi. Cassandra’s in the living room.”
“Cassandra? That’s what we’re calling Spookygirl now?”
Before Barbara can answer, Stephanie starts talking again.
“Do I just talk to her or what? I don’t think that’ll help her learn to speak faster.”
“She’s missed every critical learning period for language acquisition. I don’t know if she’ll ever be able to speak.” Barbara snaps, surprising herself with the harshness of her voice.
“Oh.” Stephanie cringes. “That sucks.”
In a gentler tone, Barbara continues: “Right now I’m just trying to get her used to human contact. Talk to her all you want, just keep her company. She’s probably bored as hell with nothing to do all day.”
Steph
“Hey! Remember me?”
Stephanie rounds the corner and stops.
The girl - Cassandra, looks much better. Her feathery black hair is parted on either side, allowing a clear view of her face. While the two deep scars across her face are pretty distinctive, Steph still thinks her creepy stare is her most distinguishing feature.
About an hour later, the situation has devolved into Steph trying to read Barbara’s copy of The Iliad while Cassandra - Cass as Steph decided to call her - practices fighting thin air.
Fuck it. She thinks.
“Hey! Babs! I didn’t know your kid could do karate!” Steph shouts, hoping to provoke a reaction.
“Neither did I!” Babs calls back. To her amusement, Babs doesn’t comment on Cass being called “her kid”.
Stephanie opens her mouth, and then closes it again, her brain makes the leap between Barbara’s relationship with Cass and her own past.
Grief, guilt and shame build up inside her.
She can’t stay alone with her thoughts like this.
Something needs to happen.
So she makes something happen.
---
About two seconds later, Steph finds herself on the ground, stunned. Her chest aches. She takes in a struggling gasp of air.
Cass stands over her… Smiling?
It takes Steph a few seconds to right herself and reconstruct what just happened: she tried to tackle Cass, and the girl floored her too fast to properly perceive.
Huh. That’s about the best reaction she could hope for after such a stupid stunt.
Cass is now watching Steph eagerly, awaiting her next move.
Steph gets to her feet.
The pair are interrupted by Babs’ accusatory voice.
“Steph! What did you do?”
Babs wheels into view.
“Nothing. I’m just goofing around with Cass.”
Babs sighs. “You sho-”
“Come on, Babs, She needs to do something!” While Steph is willing to admit to herself that tackling Cass was a dumb move, she’s not about to let Babs lecture her about it.
“This isn’t a game. This is somewhere Cassandra feels safe. You could’ve scared her off.”
“It absolutely is a game! She’s bored! She wants to do something, you said so yourself.”
“Stephanie. You volunteered to socialize with her. Not roughhouse .” Babs explains tersely.
“Barbara. I’m pretty sure those are the same things to her.” Steph parrots the older woman’s tone back at her.
Cassandra watches the pair argue with a frown.
“That’s it. Get out.”
“But-”
“I’ll call you a cab. Out .”
“ Stop. ” The voice is whisper-quiet, bone-dry and crackling from years of disuse.
This is followed by several seconds of stunned silence, broken at last by Steph.
“You can talk?”
Instead of answering, Cassandra jabs a finger in Steph’s direction. “ Want. ”
“That’s Steph. What do you want with Steph, Cassandra?” Barbara asks gently.
Steph suppresses a laugh at the abrupt change of tone.
Cassandra points to the gym. Barbara looks at Steph and gives a subtle shrug.
Steph thinks about this.
On one hand, she’s still pissed at Babs, and if Babs wants her to stay now, that inclines her to leave. But if Cass is saying she wants to spar with her, and she thinks she is, she doesn’t want to pass up an opportunity to prove that her earlier defeat was just a fluke. She’s been trained by Robin . No way she loses to some random kid.
Steph spends the next forty minutes being humiliated by Cass. She stops counting how many times she gets knocked down after the 22nd time. Which probably happens around the fifth minute. What’s worse, she fails to land a single hit. After Steph nearly vomits because of over-exertion, she decides she should stop for the night.
Just for tonight.
She’s going to keep coming back here until she beats Cass.
“Hep gud.” Cass croaks at her before she leaves. She’s too tired to try and figure out what that means.
Barbara
Cassandra can speak. It feels like a betrayal. She doesn’t know how much the girl understands, but she must have realized that everyone wanted her to talk.
Cassandra seems to know she’s mad. The girl hovers around her, giving her a look somewhere between pity and guilt.
“Why didn’t you talk to me?” Barbara asks.
“Words?”
“Yes. Why didn’t you use your words?”
“Hurted.”
Barbara thinks about the scars. She thinks about Cassandra’s surprising martial skill, and her knowledge of gym equipment. She thinks about human experiments. A picture starts to emerge.
“Did someone hurt you when you used words?”
“Yes.” rasps Cassandra.
It’s a grim confirmation. But despite that, Barbara feels a burst of satisfaction.
A wall has been broken.
This has suddenly become a problem she can solve.