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Cassandra had not seemed caught out when Dick asked her to join him during patrol. She merely shrugged in acknowledgment and slipped seamlessly behind him as they cut through the Diamond District, scalloped cape ribboning through the sky behind her.
You couldn’t tell it was their first night out together, as Batman and Batgirl, since...since.
It was a decent performance on his part.
Sometimes he got the feeling that she was a shadow, quietly cutting through the city. She was so quiet, and she was so hard to get a bead on. Which felt so unfair, because sometimes she would look at him and he got the itchy under-the-skin feeling that she was flaying him alive. Her understanding sometimes felt like a betrayal, especially when she had such a hard time voicing it. He’d had a decade and a half of Batman, had learned Bruce’s quirks and tells better than he knew himself. She was Bruce if Bruce had been dialed up to eleven.
And she wasn’t on the list of people he actually wanted to understand him.
He could feel the cowl sitting awkwardly on his head, blocking his peripheral vision, a weight still to heavy, still too caustic. To think that there had been a time he had been mad that Bruce hadn’t wanted to give this to him. A weight that was bowing him, a weight he still was not sure he’d be able to bear.
How had he done it the first time? How had he been so mad that Bruce had passed him over when Bane had broken his back? Had Bruce felt the same, had Jean-Paul been an attempt to spare him?
He’d had Tim then, for starters. The routine of showing him the ropes, of chalk on their hands from practicing catches on the trapeze during their downtime in the Cave. Maybe having a bubbly Robin had made it manageable.
In the nighttime, Cassandra wore her bat ears like a crown.
He had had the vision, once, briefly, as they’d been fighting Jason, that it really should have been her in this cape, that somehow she’d snuck in and in a matter of years figured out some bone-deep understanding of Bruce and his ethos that had eluded Dick for nearly his entire life. Something about the way she looked at the bat on his chest, the way her eyes crinkled behind the black fabric of her mask, like it held the answers to life itself.
It had taken Deathstroke kidnapping her and dosing her with god knows how many drugs to stray from Batman’s mission, not just a moment of weakness.
He’d needed backup. That was what he’d needed, backup that wasn’t a ten year old with a katana or a brother who was grieving or the butler on comms.
Cassandra was also probably not his best option, given their...well, he didn’t think she was over it. He’d been pissed at Bruce for adopting her, he’d been opposed to letting her back in the field after Deathstroke. Bruce had overridden him that time. Things hadn’t been right between them for quite some time; she’d been mad at him for...something, back when his entire life was falling apart. Her anger had been an unpredictable sidenote in all that misery. He really didn’t want to know if she knew about Blockbuster or not. With the Outsiders, he knew full well she wasn’t cut out for that sort of teamwork. Him and Roy had failed dismally; little miss shadow was not exactly the type of leader covert ops teams coalesced around. She’d be fantastic as a solo asset. She was not a team leader, no matter how much Babs had mentored her. He’d told her as much to her face.
He wasn’t either, but his failures were probably not the way to convince her.
(Cass just takes everything as her fault. He remembers what it feels like, to have the weight of a team resting on his shoulders, the haunting sword of Damocles waiting to come down on him. The friends that died on his watch. After Donna, he didn’t think he could be responsible for that ever again. If anyone doesn’t need that burden, it’s Cass. He had been right to relieve her of that stipulation from Bruce’s ghost, at the very least. He had.)
They were maybe, maybe, if he wanted to be truthful, and the guilty, shamefaced part of him that wanted to be honest but would never voice it felt this way, a little too resonant to really get on with each other properly. They were weird warped reflections of Bruce, the both of them, Dick shaped by a childhood with the man and Cass showing up perfectly formed already in his image. The same ethos, the same mission. God, the people they rotated around; Bruce and Babs and Tim. That they could be so close to those same people individually and so unable to be...well, friends.
He wasn’t quite sure when things had curdled between them, and that was really the rub.
The idea that she had seen him do something, or had heard of him doing something, and had completely written him off as morally incapable of stepping into the cape.
(Forget the fuzzy idea he’d had since he was eight years old and first looking at that cape that he’d either die first or have to someday wear it.)
She was amazing in the field; that had always been undeniable. He’d never taught her any acrobatics, not like he’d taught Tim or the Titans, but she was grappling after him with practiced ease, letting him set the pace as they glided through downtown.
He could feel her watching over his peripheral.
He finally stopped when he reached the roof he wanted, one primed to look in at an office that Black Mask had been operating out of. The dark of Gotham felt dank and oppressive up here, draped in black. It felt darker than ever.
A thing that he had been trying to not think about; Cass had been lurking more than she used to. It was her default state, of course, but it was much worse than it ever had been previously. There was an energy about her, like she was about to explode into action any second. Dick had been gritting his teeth against it for days, praying she’d stop soon.
She’d already beat two robbers during patrol, and that energy was still crackling around her.
Maybe the problem was that he knew how to deal with grief when it was coming from Tim, and faced with Cassandra, who like Damian was another kid of Bruce’s he’d barely built a relationship with, he had no idea what to do.
Bruce had been an anchor, the center of a black hole, for nearly all the important bits of his life. He himself was unmoored. He had the crawling feeling in his gut that the same was true for Cassandra, and he had nothing to offer her, no olive branch. Just a cavernous breach where there was supposed to be a pillar. And Tim was acting weird, and he was trying to field a Damian who was prepared to be an assassin and not an elementary schooler, and he was trying to step into shoes that he’d never permanently wanted and Cass had been casually eyeing with the assumption that someday, of course, the Bat would fall into her hands to do with as she pleased.
He wasn’t sure her coveting the sigil would be bad; she was a better fighter than him, if less experienced with world ending events.
Maybe she could be the glue that could hold things together.
He was not sure that he could be, not now, not ever.
Cass landed gracefully on the rooftop, ahead of him, tucking into a somersault before skidding across the gravel. He could almost imagine a grim little smile under the stitching of her mask as she lounged against an air conditioning unit.
Some days, days like today, he was so glad that she was so different from Barbara. There were enough ghosts of the past haunting him right now than to contend with another.
He handed her a pair of binoculars, and they settled into their watch.
There’s a somberness in the air.
Dick can feel it, pressing in on him, the sudden feeling that everything is too thick, too heavy. Cloying.
It’s a Gotham night; they’ve moved from gloomy fog to a fine mist of rain, the kind that beads up like dappled starlight on the kevlar of his suit, almost like the stars spangled on Donna’s uniform.
He’d like her reassurance, about now.
He’d like an awful lot of things.
The rain’s not putting out the electric green flames encasing the person screaming in front of them.
The vision is refracted in the glass of the tower behind them, the glittering lights of the Diamond District at night illuminating the green, the noxious smoke, the dancing of the limbs. Refracting Batman’s frozen form.
He wasn’t sure what it was, that had caused this; he’d heard a boom, and a wail, the kind of pitched wail that made you want to cover your ears.
He’d sprinted around the corner, as fast as he could.
The sight caught him out for a second, and he froze, breath caught, hands trembling as he played with the magnetic catches that let the cape simply slink off in case of potential capture.
Have to douse the flames, he thought numbly, belatedly.
Batgirl pulled a wrench from one of the yellow pouches on her waist and busted open the nearby fire hydrant, sending water spurting into the air with a schink.
And then there was a tug, a proper, steady tug, and the cape peeled off from around his shoulders, and there was a vision in black darting forward, encasing the figure in flame-retarded nylon weave and pressing them into the stream.
He was frozen for another half-second, watching as the figure writhed, helped with surety to the gum-ridden concrete of the sidewalk by Batgirl, before he pressed a finger to his cowl and started putting in the call to emergency services.
He’s not sure he can remember what he says; unknown chemical attack, a person on fire, they need EMS, the fire department too, probably.
He hates that he knows enough to catalogue, to see the soot under the nose, to know that based on the pattern of the char and the flames he saw earlier it’s a circumferential burn at best.
Batgirl is still pressing her hands, urgently, across the cape, as Dick watches, shoulders growing cold, feeling both more and less himself than he has in weeks, hands trembling and the acrid stench of chemical burns reaching his nose.
He can remember that smell.
He closes his eyes, briefly, and everything is still limned in an awful, horrific green.
He wants to usher down the rain, bank the flames, stop this poor person’s screams.
Finally, finally, he gets his jellied legs to walk to a prone figure that should not be lying on the ground in Gotham, and walks over to where Batgirl is hovering over the figure, pries her cape from its catches, and brings it to the person’s burn-pocked ears. The skin is sizzling as he presses it to the flesh and tries to tame the flames. He swears he can feel radiation in the bones of his hands.
Batgirl merely flashes her face to his, one second of beseeching black eyes, before turning back to the effigy on the ground.
He might just be imagining the desperation in her gaze.
He doesn’t even notice the water soaking through his suit; he pulls out a pair of shears after some fumbling with his utility belt and starts steadily cutting open the man’s clothes, peeling them away from the white and char on his chest.
The person finally, finally stops struggling beneath them, wails turning to a steady, quiet, agonized keen.
Bruce had briefed him on burns, a decade ago, when he was Robin, as part of his preparedness for anything. Under the fluttering of a flock of bats, they’d gone over partial and full thickness burns, how the serous fluid would build up under the skin and lead to shock, how the airway could get charred and choke up, sometimes so bad the paramedics couldn’t intubate, how when burns are particularly deep the nerve endings get fried and the patient only feels the pain around the outer edges of the wound.
He knows the feeling of gauze pressed to blistered skin, knows Batgirl knows it too, knows this is on a scale much worse than anything he’s had before.
He sits pressed shoulder to shoulder with a stone-quiet Batgirl as he babbles a steady stream of pointless reassurances that help is coming, help is coming, help is coming.
Dick’s hands, the steady hands of Batman, do not stop trembling the entire time.
Batgirl is a stiff black line on the roof of the building they’ve retreated to, its mirrored turrets poking into the sky, the blue and red of lights strobing below casting off the clouds.
They’d split up and scouted the roads and roofs around the site, to no avail. He was standing there, sticky with sweat, shaky from adrenaline, and winded from a futile search.
He knows he’ll have to give in and ask Babs to look for any signs of the perpetrator.
Dick feels something sick curdling in his stomach.
He can still see the green, as if it were burned into his retinas, and he feels shaky, adrenaline rushing out of him, leaving something worse behind.
Batgirl stands next to him, rigid, muscles taut beneath the black of her suit. She looks wrong without the cape, as if she’s shrunken, suddenly, and he can’t help but think of the girl from before, before whatever stupidity had shaken their relationship, the quiet girl with the wide black eyes who laughed when he acted out Cinderella, the one who had shared his horror in ever having thought Bruce guilty of anything when they were investigating him for murder.
Neither of them are those people anymore, and he can’t read this girl through her mask.
“You’re upset.” It’s dropped bluntly into the quiet of the rooftop, among the drizzle of rain and the gloom of the darkness. Apparently the cowl did not hide as much as he hoped, and he turns to face her, to take in her slouched form, the way her boot drifts over the roof, the way her face strays towards the red and blue lights and the muffled noise below. Water is still dripping from her arms onto the gravel, soft blunt plinks.
“We didn’t even see who threw it. I have no leads. There wasn’t anyone to even chase,” Dick grits out, feeling his molars gritting in the back of the mouth.
Is it just something about the cowl, that turns you into an inveterate asshole?
“I didn’t see either,” Batgirl says, sharply. “He just burned.”
“You see people burn, in this line of work.”
He almost regrets it, thinks of a grave, recently covered, and wants to take the words right back.
“I know,” Batgirl said quietly. She stalks around the periphery of the roof, looking down at the streets, and he can tell she’s hunting for the person who did this without her having to say anything.
“I messaged Babs,” she says.
“That saves us one thing,” he says, pressing his quaking fists into his thighs. He can’t get angry at her, not up here, not now. It’s not her fault the man’s dead. It’s not her fault that Bruce is dead, either.
Her lenses flicker to his hands, and then searchingly up to his face. "Blüdhaven," she says.
"What?" he asks, startled.
“I saw Blüdhaven burn,” she says quietly, turning to look away from the skyline, eyes unerringly clicking to look straight at the lenses he has in the cowl. “When I was dead.”
He has some free-fall moment where his heart drops out of his body and into the basement of the fifty story building beneath him. Cassandra, seeing Blüdhaven burn when she was dead. Had she known, all the way back then?
He can feel it all of a sudden, again, the blaze of the heat simmering in the air, the nausea of the radiation that Chemo had pumped out into his city. He’d thought he’d been failing, with Blockbuster, and then he thought he’d been getting one over on Deathstroke, and then the city he’d sworn to protect had gone up in nearly the equivalent of a green-tinged nuclear bomb.
Had that been part of Shiva killing and resurrecting her, some drug that had granted her some unerring sense of the future?
“I saw the bodies. And the flames. And I was burning.”
He can feel it under his skin again, the scars from the fires, the ash in the air. The bodies. Always the bodies.
“Batgirl,” he says, aiming for gravel. His voice cracks instead.
“I need you to...” She breaks off, shaking her head. “This is hard. Understand. Please.”
He’s not sure he can. He’s not sure he wants to.
“Steph died. Tim and I went there. I wanted away,” she says urgently.
He isn’t quite sure what she is trying to convince him of.
“It was your city,” she says, voice breaking. “Everyone says so,” she spits. “It was my city too.”
He can maybe remember it, lost in the haze of all the bad of those weeks training Rose, trying to outwit Deathstroke, trying not to combust in the wake of Haly’s and his apartment and Blockbuster. Tim and Cass, translocating themselves to Blüdhaven. It had been right after Spoiler’s death, hadn’t it? Right when he got shot in the leg. He had been so low himself it had barely registered, the new Batgirl and Robin sliding into his place, replacing him once again. It had been their city too when it had gone kaboom.
“Batgirl, please let’s not talk about this,” he says. “I know I failed Blüdhaven. I’m going to do everything I can to not let the same thing ever happen again. Never to Gotham.” He can feel his hands shaking at his sides, prays Cass will write it off as tremors from the cold, knows she won’t. Cain trained her too well for that.
He’d helped Rose. He’d helped her, and a city had burned as his penance.
“Not what I said,” she keens.
“I don’t get what you mean,” Dick growls.
“You...not that you’re guilty. But the...body, Ni-” She cuts herself off, and looks down angrily. It’s been awhile since he’s seen her so at odds with her words.
Dick has nothing to say; all he can picture is Cass, at Deathstroke’s side, drugged to the point of obedience, just one more victim of what he’d done to help Rose.
He can’t help but just get everything around him burned to a crisp.
“The pit. It burned. And I could see it. Dead. I could see Blüdhaven. My friends dead, too.” She looks away, anguished. “The body down there...it looked like Chemo.” There's nothing but pure grief in her voice.
He has such a sudden rush of anguished understanding, that she is trying to tell him that she understands too, she understands what he’d seen down there, that she understands his loss and it is her loss too. She is seeing the same ghosts in Gotham that he is seeing, the exact same. She lost the same city that he lost, that nuclear wasteland that is cordoned off mere miles from Gotham. And somehow she saw it burn too.
And then the part about the Pit registers and he has a sudden feeling that there are reports that she has never filed in the Batcomputer. He wonders if this was something Bruce knew. He wonders if this is something Babs knows.
Her stint with Deathstroke really makes him doubt.
He can’t see her face, still shrouded in her cowl, but he knows that she’s barely a touch older than Rose, and something churns in his gut, a feeling like he’d missed a step somewhere, that he’s falling, like somehow he’s failed her worse because of this.
“It...yes, it looked like Chemo.” His hands are still shaking, and he knows it’s not because of the wet kevlar glued to his skin.
She nods, a small motion, and Dick tries to gear up for her to say more.
“You don’t…they were worried about you, then,” she says softly.
“Me?”
“You. Death wish too,” she says, stepping forward and poking her finger into his chest. He feels like she’s stripped him to his core.
He remembers Bruce’s face, then, the dark planes of it in the light of the cave. He’d seen Bruce angry before, that came part and parcel with Batman, but he’d hardly ever seen that particular anger directed at himself, had thought their blowups during his Titans years to be the worst of things and was suddenly, excruciatingly proven wrong. “You lost sight of the value of Roland Desmond’s life. If you need me to forgive you for that, I probably can.” He can still see Bruce turning, the back of that black cape, the fact that Bruce couldn’t even face him without the cowl. The smarting of the radiation burns on his jaw. He can still feel the anguish in his chest, and it burns, that he remembers these words from Bruce as well as he remembers those of his candlelit oath. “But it won’t mean anything until you forgive yourself. And you have no right to expect me to excuse you-for losing sight of the value of yours.”
A couple hundred thousand people died in his attempt to atone for Roland Desmond, Wayne Pharmaceuticals radiation cure or not.
Bruce could never understand his need to atone, his need to fix his mistake. How far he’d been dragged out of his depth and the realization that he couldn’t escape the disaster that he’d caused. The queasy feeling that he had cheated death, and he had not been meant to survive. Or worse, Bruce could understand, he could absolutely understand, and he wouldn’t permit Dick the dignity of fixing his own worst mistake. The last thing he remembered before passing out after Chemo was Batman suddenly looming over him.
Death wish, indeed.
Cassandra is still looking at him with such intensity that he’s glad she has on her cowl.
He remembers the time she’d died when she’d fought Shiva, how uncharacteristically anxious Babs was in the wake of it, how off-kilter Bruce seemed at the time, their constant hushed conversations before that fight.
The way she walked around after, as if the earth had been lifted from her shoulders.
Death wish.
“Yeah,” he finally says, and he can see some sort of relief in her, an easing of her shoulders. “It’s a highwire act, isn’t it?” He flashes her a wry smile.
(He doesn’t have to tell her about that bleakness, that awful feeling that the world is caving in and it is all your fault. That any second you could tip over the edge into the abyss. She already knows it. She knows the delicate balancing act, the putting one foot in front of the other. She knows the finding things to live for, and the feeling that you can’t weather it, that the blackness is more than you can possibly ever bear. She’d willingly turned herself over to death, once, too.)
“Batgirl, what do you mean about the Pit?”
A stillness settles over him, and she looked away, back towards the flashing lights.
“Shiva...I had a brother. And he killed me, and they brought me back in Nyssa’s pit. The Balkans. When Chemo hit.”
He suddenly feels overwhelmed. It’s not fair, that the universe keeps giving people back, has given back Jason, has given miracles like Cass and Donna. It’s an unfair hope, to want someone to come back to life, to be used to a world where it’s possible. People die, and they stay dead. (His parents, splayed in the center of a spotlight.) That is how the world works.
The sky behind her is lit up, electric; the city looks like it’s on the edge of a storm, like lightning’s about to burst forth any second, like the atmosphere’s about to bloom into viridescent light any second.
“Everybody dies. But not like that,” she says somberly. “And I let them kill. All those people, and I was dead when Blüdhaven needed me.” She reaches out her hand, like she’s trying to grab onto something.
“The pit. It felt like burning.”
Batgirl looks at him, almost swaying in the drizzle, and he feels flayed by her eyes.
“I couldn’t stop them either. Chemo burned too.”
They lapse into silence, and Dick takes in the sound of the sirens below, blinks his eyes against the strobing lights.
A pair of white doves land on the TV antenna several feet away from them, and Dick listens to them coo as the downpour starts coming down around them.
“I miss him,” Cassandra finally says.
They are sitting in the Batmobile, Cass curled up in the passenger seat, knees under her chin. He doesn’t have the heart to say anything to her, not while he’s sitting in the driver’s seat, hands clamped around a wheel he shouldn’t be holding.
He doesn’t know what to say. He knows platitudes, but what do you ever genuinely say?
He should turn on autopilot, but he needs something to do with himself, to keep his mind from going places he thought he had already escaped.
Bruce had taught him many things. But they'd never needed the words for grief.
“Me too,” Dick says.
“I...the symbol was more important, always.” He can see her fist move up to cover the outline of a bat on her chest. “But I loved him too.”
Dick could never get a proper understanding of their relationship, just that they cared about each other, and they had the same intensity about the mission.
And all Dick can picture is the late adoption papers, and the nights in the cave with Bruce bent over the Batcomputer skimming through casework, the cowl pulled back and pooling on his shoulders, and the way that Bruce would pull up his covers when he was little and laying in bed pretending to be asleep, trying to hide the dampness of his pillow. The gentle weight of one of those hands on his shoulder, as Bruce called him “Chum”, the same hand he’d seen driven into Two-Face’s nose earlier that night.
He can see her, a girl whose father failed her, who just wants to help, more than anything in the world, so badly it bleeds out of her.
He wonders if their relationship was anything similar.
He knows that feeling, the blazing feeling to correct all that is wrong with the world, riding the rising tide of tragedy.
Bruce knew that feeling, better than anyone he’s ever known.
The feeling, standing over the grave, dirt piled on top.
He would have died for Bruce. Had tried to, multiple times. He knows Cass would have, too.
Bruce had stood in front of enough knives and bullets for him.
Batman, who had made an art form of escaping death, burned to a crisp up in space.
He doesn’t know if he can ever make sense of it.
“I miss him too.”
The Batmobile hums underneath them, and Dick is glad for the darkness, glad that he’s staring at the road with its street signs stretching in glowing reflections on the wet pavement ahead, instead of the piercing claws of those eyes.
He doesn’t know that he can keep going back to the Manor, keep going back to the quiet of that house where he keeps expecting Bruce to wheel out of the shadows at any minute. Bruce was a man who had mastered silence, which is only lending strength to his ghost.
“How can you stand it?”
The cowl, soaked through, burning cold against the skin of his neck, the suit that should never have been his in the seat that should never have been his to sit in.
He takes a deep breath. He doesn’t know that he has any answer for her.
The road rushes past, and he clicks the wipers onto a higher speed.
“You just have to live with it. He wanted you to live. You have to do that at least for him.”
And now he wishes he could see her eyes, properly gauge how she’s taking his words, and not just see the black pits her eyes make behind the mask out of his peripheral vision.
“How? Everyone I love dies. How?”
He wishes he had an answer for her.
He sees the crusted rimes of salt under her eyes and the quivering dimples in her chin when they get back to the cave and she finally peels off her mask.
He ignores the lump in his own throat.
Neither of them need to say anything.
When he finds Stephanie Brown in the Batgirl uniform a couple of days later, busting up an illegal street race, facemask ripped off, an eager bounce he doesn’t remember in her step, he remembers his conversation with Cass, remembers her telling him how after Stephanie died her and Tim moved to Blüdhaven, and he wonders what he’s going to do with a self-directed Batgirl who prefers her fists in fights, when he’s already trying to balance Damian, and Tim is gone, and Cass has done what she said she does when faced with loss and run.
He gets it, almost, the six feet of dirt and the Manor which he cannot face. (He can't judge much; his first real coping mechanism with grief was Robin.)
He wishes he could understand Cassandra, that he had anything close to the instinctive relationship she had with Bruce or the closeness she used to share with Barbara.
He’s already lost Tim. He doesn’t want her to run away too.
He’d told her, after their blowup over the Outsiders, that they’d need to work together to fill the void that Bruce had left, in the shadows of a rainy alleyway. Somehow he’d thought they’d been on the same wavelength, that they had both finally cracked that shell and reached an understanding.
He wants to catch her, but he knows throwing out a hand to snatch someone from the air is a very different proposition to extending a hand to someone who’s drowning. He’s taught Tim and the Titans the former. He never taught Cass.
He was a Flying Grayson. He knows how to fly, and he knows how to fall. He’s not sure he knows how not to sink.
And now it’s just him in the cowl, the wrong set of wings emblazoned on his chest. He has Stephanie and Damian to play Batgirl and Robin instead of Cassandra and Tim, and he’s had to step back from the Titans again, and him and Babs are on the outs.
It feels like the net has been pulled out from under him.
And he understands, he does, the need to escape, how cloying that six feet of dirt and the stone feels.
It has been a long, long time since it had happened, but he misses the warmth of a hand on his shoulder, guiding him in the right direction.
He wishes, really and truly, that Bruce was still here to chastise him for all his mistakes.