Chapter Text
People tended to assume that Cass didn’t get injured.
It was the way she fought, fluid and unflinching. The way she ducked and wove, threading her way through opponents like they were standing still. The way she carried herself, like she knew she was the most dangerous person in the room.
Most of the time, she was.
People tended to forget one key thing—she’d tried to explain it to Steph, before, who’d beamed with recognition-delight and pulled out her physics textbook.
“Newton’s third law!” She’d exclaimed. “You’re not just about fighting, Cass, you’re calculating everything you do, I told you so—“
Cass felt that explaining that when you hit something with your fist your fist was also going to hurt wasn’t all that amazing of a revelation, but she wasn’t going to try to take away the sheer admiration-joy Steph was displaying. She just appreciated that it wasn’t pity.
The trouble with using one’s body as a weapon was that your weapon was made of flesh. And blunting it had…consequences.
She tested her weight against her leg again, grimacing.
The kick she’d used to take down Killer Croc would not have been her first choice. Nor her second. Nor her fifteenth, really.
It had, however, been the quickest way to take him down, and there had been civilians at risk.
Their body language had been stuck in adrenaline-fueled freeze, and they would never have moved in time.
So.
She was tucked away on a rooftop—situation handled, Croc in meta cuffs, civilians staring somewhat shellshocked at police—and her right leg was refusing to hold her weight.
Well.
She could probably walk on it anyway, but it was informing her that that would be a profoundly terrible idea. Of the healing-incorrectly, altered future motion variety.
And she’d been on patrol alone.
Usually she welcomed the silence, the simplicity of melting away from herself and into a pure observer, watching and admiring and completely absorbed in the people she saw, instead of the awkward way she interacted with them.
Usually she got to slip back into the Cave afterward, or cross silent, comfortable paths with Bruce when he was out alone.
She was going to have to call for backup.
She felt—like the teenage shop worker she’d watched spill ice cream mix across the machine and countertop last week, shoulders slumped in defeat, face already contemplating the mopping and apologizing she’d have to do as she watched the viscous fluid drip slowly onto the floor.
This was going to be…horrifically inconvenient.
—————————————————————
Barbara ached to be out, sometimes.
She’d loved the wind through her hair—impractical as it was, oftentimes, to leave it loose and flowing—she’d loved the adrenaline of hopping rooftops, the satisfaction of landing a good punch, the thrill of competition as she went toe-to-toe with the most stubborn people she’d ever met.
They knew supers. She’d done her fair share of flying, even after she’d lost all motion in her legs. Hell, Dick had insisted on swinging around together, giggling and unbalanced on each other and reclaiming just a little of the magic.
She had hella arm strength, and she could swing if he could land them.
It was just—different when she could do it whenever she wanted. When the tantalizing call of rooftops wasn’t locked behind stair-only access doors, when her battles were fought face-to-face, instead of through levels of obscurity.
She’d almost been pleased when her sanctum had been broken into, and she’d gotten to kick ass directly. It was amazing how stupid people could be, ignoring a bat-trained opponent just because she was in a wheelchair.
She didn’t—Oracle wasn’t a consolation prize.
She was an amalgamation of experience, a chance to take the analytic skills she’d learned as Batgirl and spread their impact, a chance to take the little teams scattered through Gotham and make them something formidable.
The Bats’ strength had always been their ability to pull the rug out from under their foes; not just to punch them out, but to weed out the sources of the power they abused.
Oracle took that goal and expanded it—she did more to stop crime in Gotham now than she ever had on the streets.
It just—didn’t always quench the nostalgia, the thirst for more physical adventure.
Then again, the surge of adrenaline that lurched through her body when Cass , of all people, sent a request for extraction was immensely unpleasant.
She really hadn’t missed the sensation of the rug being pulled out from under her.
Heart pounding, she turned to examine her map of trackers.
She hid a grimace that almost wanted to turn to a grin.
She wanted eyes on Cass now —and that meant sending the closest person she had available.
Even if it wasn’t… ideal.
—————————————————————
Cass watched Red Hood’s uncomfortable stance, wondering if an outside observer would see it mirrored in her own posture.
Jason was fine. At the manor all bets were off; he was just another piece of the family, tentatively testing frayed connections and eternally surprised to find them steadfast. He’d even started loosening the tension in his shoulders, lately, when he was in the manor. Like he didn’t need to be on high alert anymore.
Red Hood… well. She had stopped him from killing someone earlier this week, and her methods might have, potentially, been seen as… aggressive. A tad extreme. She’d just—she’d seen the fear in his would-be victim’s eyes, she’d seen the depth of thought, the complexity, and Hood knew she wouldn’t allow him to kill.
He…may have walked with a limp for a while afterward.
Afterward, she’d read bluster and regret in the set of his shoulders, and wondered if he might have stopped himself anyway, if only out of respect for her.
It was still.
Very tense. And uncomfortable.
It was probably too late to request different backup.
—————————————————————
Jason felt a little like he was trying to approach a spooked cat.
A spooked cat that could absolutely one-shot him, leaving his dignity somewhere in the alley behind them, but still a puffed up cat.
It was odd—he’d seen Cass taken down in a fight she couldn’t win, seen her calmly decide to hawk a loogie in the face of death (Props, honestly. What a legend.).
He didn’t understand why she seemed so unsettled around him tonight.
“Hey,” he said quietly to the eerie shadow across the rooftop. “Oracle passed on your distress call.”
The shadow shifted, slightly off kilter, and he wondered if something was wrong with her leg.
He stepped forward and the shadow melted back, white cowl gaze boring into his soul.
He put his hands up and stopped walking. “I’m just here to give you a ride.” He felt oddly like he was facing a firing squad. “And maybe help you down if your leg’s fucked.”
He took another tentative step forward—and stopped, hurriedly moving back, when Cass wobbled as she tried to step backward.
He’d caught a glimpse of her leg, and holy fuck she should not be walking on it.
She relaxed a little as he backed off, and they returned to their little staring match.
Jason was feeling a little out of his depth here. Steph would already have an arm under Cass’ shoulder, implicit trust in place.
Jason had gotten kicked in the balls hard enough to feel it through his cup the last time they’d worked together. He fundamentally disagreed with one of the things that Cass saw as a pillar of the universe, and they were both uncomfortably aware of that fact any time they worked together in the field.
“Can you—sit down, maybe? That doesn’t look like you should be walking on it.”
The eyes stayed fixed on him, and he took another step backward.
“I’ll stay over here unless you tell me otherwise, okay?”
The eyes didn’t move, and he sighed into the helmet.
Okay. This wasn’t working.
He’d just… have to find something that did.
—————————————————————
Cass didn’t want anyone near her right now.
This, she recognized, was not helpful when she needed first aid.
It was just—when she’d seen the large, gun-toting figure crest the rooftop, something in the back of her mind had curled up and gone still, like—like the kids she’d found huddled together in last month’s trafficking bust, too quiet for their ages and levels of injury.
He’d—loomed slightly, streetlight gleaming off of one of his pistols, her leg had given a particularly sudden wrench, tendons screaming, and her brain had quite suddenly decided it would not be helpful anymore.
(She was reasonably certain that the bone in her upper leg wasn’t lined up right with the bones in her lower leg. But she wasn’t thinking about that right now.)
She was—tracking Hood’s movements more carefully than she usually would, guarding her leg, poised to attack if she needed to. Some part of her knew that Hood wanted to help, but she didn’t—she couldn’t ease her posture out of its defensive set, she needed to be ready, she needed to—
She didn’t want backup, anymore. She could maneuver acceptably. She could go lick her wounds, somewhere, like a good little weapon, she’d adjust if it healed poorly and altered the way she moved.
She’d done it before; one could argue that it had only made her a more unpredictable fighter, even if she missed some of the moves she’d been able to pull off before those injuries.
Hood was talking, again. She should focus on the words, but she was busy watching his raised hands, watching the way he moved back, watching the way he carefully avoided putting his hands anywhere near his weapons.
He seemed to catch where her gaze had landed, and slowly unbuckled his gun belt, sliding it across the rooftop away from them both.
It shouldn’t have helped.
She saw some of the tension release in his shoulders at whatever changes he’d seen in her posture anyway.
She’d been right to suspect that walking on her leg was a bad idea. The all-too-familiar wave of pain and nausea was receding some, now, as she held her weight entirely on her left foot. The right was already swelling with displaced fluid from higher up in her leg.
She glared down at it.
And snapped her head back up at a movement from her peripheral vision.
—————————————————————
Jason was so not equipped for this.
He was so not equipped for this, and sliding his guns away made him twitchy; he was incredibly vulnerable to an ambush right now, and his enemies loved long-range weapons.
But.
The tension in Cass’ shoulders dipped, just a little, as the gun belt slid away from him.
And, well, he knew gun-related trauma wasn’t exactly a rarity in this family.
It had. Sort of been why he’d chosen the weapons in the first place, though he’d stuck with them because he was effective with them.
“Hey, O,” he muttered quietly, watching Cass watch him as he unholstered and dismantled another gun. “Can you send a Batmobile our way? I don’t think my bike’s gonna be very helpful.”
Cass was staring at his calf, where the hidden pistol was definitely not visible, and he sighed and took it out as well, skating it across the rooftop with a mental apology. He’d buff it later.
“Is Orphan alright?” Oracle’s modulator buzzed in his ears, and he winced a bit.
“She’s definitely still willing and able to take me down.” He said lightly, gaze flicking between what he could see of her leg and the shadows that held her face.
“Hood.”
He was pretty sure that knee was dislocated—kind of impressively so, in a way he’d mostly seen in motorcycle accidents and car crashes.
“She’s not dying, but something’s definitely wrong with her leg.” Jason could feel Oracle zooming in on his helmet feed, like a phantom stare over his shoulder.
He bit his lip, taking his helmet off and setting it down to watch them both. He turned his gaze as nonthreateningly as he could toward Cass, hands still up.
“I think we’ve got to relocate it.”
He really hoped this didn’t land him next to her in the medbay.