Archive of Our Own ^beta

Now a shaft of astonishing light, and

laughter     that cheap tambourine.

--You and I must     have a talk. And

I shiver: let's be brave, shall we?

-Poem of the end, Marina Tsvetaeva

Despite their accommodations in the Batcave being old news, Steph still isn’t used to the ersatz feeling of sitting before the computer without her shoulders hunched. Bruce might unfold from a shadowy corner to give her a dressing down at any moment.

She doesn’t share these anxieties with Barbara – doesn’t need to see the pursed mouth and the unimpressed attempt at patience. Barbara had never chased after a pat on the back like Steph had, a fact that hangs on the air between them. She’d gotten it nevertheless, another layer that ripples with the breeze of their arguments.

Then again, I’ve been friends with Cass. At least Barbara’s been willing to let her throw herself into a fight. Even if she makes up for that with giving her the worst assignments known to mankind.

“Can you two patrol without killing each other?”

“You know, Barbara,” Stephanie says, cheerful tone at odds with how anger is steadily rising inside her. “I should be really freaking offended you are asking me that, since I haven’t tried to kill him.”

Barbara gives her an unimpressed look.

“Train-tracks bridge incident two weeks ago?”

“I just dodged him,” Stephanie shrugs. “He didn’t even fall, not my fault he still hasn’t grasped Vigilante 101’s know the turf you’re intruding in. It was my case trail to sniff.”

Behind her, that snotty little harrumph, the childish tick you’d expect a fifteen-year-old would have nipped in the bud to avoid peer scorn. Stephanie breathes in and reminds herself she’s the mature adult with Bat experience.

Then again, the way he acts, you’d think he’s good enough to have stuck that landing better.

“You talk about possession in my father’s city? Unbelievable.”

Damian Wayne: literal mutant teenage ninja. Probably. Steph’s a bit iffy about the teenage part, but she would put good money on him being a Troyan horse for the League of Shadows, no matter how invested he seems to be in the whole Robin business. He hasn’t earned it, the voice dripping bitter inside of her says. Where might Tim have slunk off to? He hasn’t bled for it yet, the memory of Cass says.

Bruce would have locked him in the basement before he thought of handing him the cape. Steph bets it must have eaten away at him while he died and beyond.

His dad’s gone and his mom dropped him off and he’s fifteen, Steph, she tells herself in the way her mother would. He’s fifteen – he has everything he might need, he has nothing he might want.

Cry me a river, she can’t help but hiss in her thoughts, meanness easy when she’s not wearing the cowl, when she’s Steph and not Batgirl.

“Seems I’m gonna teach you all about it during our patrol.”

Damian sneers. “Will the lesson include any other attempts on my life?”

Stephanie doesn’t flip him off. She has to restrain herself, but she doesn’t. If you manage to take out the mother and the cape and the nightlife, he could be any sheltered, edgy teenage boy. The Wayne nature exhibition, there’s the memory that’s going to get her through this. Damian caught off-guard, improved VR glasses on his awed face as a swarm of digital monarch butterflies fluttered around him. There had been nobody else to go with him and, for a moment, Stephanie’d been sure he’d forgotten her accessory presence. He’d smiled, and in it had been the remnants of a boy forced to grow up too soon, too wrong.

“Just suit up,” she tells him. “We’ll see how it goes.”

It doesn’t go awry at first, which makes Steph more wary than if it had. They lope around Old Gotham in an easy patrol routine, bikes acting as the perfect excuse not to talk, just do. One attempted robbery at a firm in the Finance District – she thinks it’s about information, not money, and she asks O to keep an eye on it as she oversees her side of things.

A drag race, which she might excuse if it weren’t taking place in the middle of a busy neighbourhood and there wasn’t a bonus for running people over. Gotham’s just delightful like that. Damian takes his job as a distraction seriously – some crazy manoeuvre from his bike onto the car roof, holding on with his grapple gun as they try to throw him off and shoot him dead.

“That was such an overkill,” she says after doing her humbler part of blowing the tires off and freezing the car.

“I didn’t get to kill any of them.” He stores the grapple away – had leaped off the car as soon as she’d thrown the first batarang, won’t let her forget about being accidentally frozen. His landing had been pretty good – perhaps he has practiced.

Stephanie keeps her poker face on and hopes it’s his idea of a joke.

If she were in any way inclined to offer any feedback, she’d tell Damian he risks it too much. He’s good – far better than she’d been at his age, likely better than she is now if he fought her for real – but he’s overconfident and maybe that’ll get him dead. He’s already had a brush with it; after all, the Incident-that-shall-not-be-brought-up should be recent enough for the phantom pain to linger as a warning. Still. He’s too reckless for someone who’s only alive because Alfred is a trooper.

Boy, am I glad to have avoided that particular clusterfuck.

She’d been, of course, pretending to be dead while searching for her life’s meaning and dreading the return to Gotham as much as she’d been yearning for it. Still better than the absolute Ptolemaic bullshit that went down after Bruce kicked the bucket.

Stephanie brings her focus back to the present. She never managed to decide where she stood with Bruce while he was alive; now it’s not the moment to try.

Once general patrol’s over, they stop at the last Northern edge of the island, just past the Griffins’ Stadium. The water laps, deceptively calm, black as oil.

“Okay. Now I guess we keep an ear on the police radio and another on O’s channel in case there’s something they need us to handle.” Damian curls his lip, which is as good as a yes. “Great. About those lessons, it’s case time. Yours first – got anything interesting?”

He puffs up. Teenage boys. Dick’s been trying to push him towards cases that require more detective-ing than ninja-ing – trying to give the less-developed half of his genes a fighting chance, probably. Cases without danger.

She can give Dick credit where it is due, no matter the rest. She doesn’t think Damian will see it that way, but it’ll keep him safe.

“I’m looking into Ivy.”

Screw everything she just said.

“Poison Ivy? That Ivy?” If he thinks she’s light work… maybe he would have benefitted from one of Bruce’s patented put-downs.

“I didn’t know there were others.”

They stare at each other for a long moment. What Stephanie wouldn’t give for the ability to call Talia al-Ghul and ask her to come pick him up.

“She’s been MIA since your dad… disappeared.”

“You can say died.” His voice is very flat, his face expressionless – not that the domino helps. She can’t begin to try and tell how much he means it. “It was a fighter’s death, well earned.” She decides not to bother. Got enough family issues of my own to figure out someone else’s. “I believe Ivy has grown bored of resting, and she’s preparing something big.”

Stephanie tries not to pull a face. Her cowl allows for a lot more expression than his. “You get that from a fortune cookie or…?”

“I’ve been cross-examining the data on air level of spores and seeds collected by both the City Hall and the Wayne measurement systems.” Someone might have to take him out to that exhibition again, God, he needs a hobby, or at least something civilian to do. She spends a moment too long considering what he might think of Fast & Furious and she misses some of what he was saying. “…the composite levels are rising again, which has never failed to correlate, statistically speaking, with a large-scale attack by Poison Ivy.”

For a moment, she can’t help but think fuck, Tim would love this. She instantly hates the thought. Tim would have made it a little more cheerful and a different brand of condescending, defaulting to overexplanation instead of skimming through the facts. This fifteen-year-old in front of her almost killed Tim.

Where is he? It’s easy to throw her hands up and say he made his own bed. But where is he?

Favours were called, the best hounds consulted. They still can’t figure it out and Stephanie would kind of like to settle her issues with her ex before he can get himself killed trying to get a Jedi ghost conference with Bruce Wayne. Then again, Bruce shouted at her for forty minutes on a row and she tried to tear Gotham apart; she can’t imagine what she would have done if Dick had totally benched her, a robotic fifteen-year-old who had attempted to stab her got the Robin mantle just like that and the guy whose Shakesperean death and resurrection had haunted the Bats generally and the following Robins specifically had tried to offer her a job and then kill her. Put like that, Tim’s backpacking hermit world tour sounds reasonable.

In the meantime, she’s stuck with said robotic fifteen-year-old who is fully willing, ready and able for murder and he wants to pick a fight with Mother Nature’s self-proclaimed paladin. Life’s great.

“Just in case you’re even more of a teenage boy than I thought – you know we couldn’t beat her, right?”

The look he throws her is corrosive.

“I’m not a boy.”

“Sure thing, chum. Vigilante 101: if you can’t win a fight, don’t fight it.” How’s Dick keeping him in line? Is the babysitting his and Barbara’s twisted idea of a punishment for not being Cass? “What do you even want to do to find her? Something involving these spores?”

“Well, obviously. You didn’t think I bothered to go through that explanation just to provide some ambient context, did you?”

She fights the impulse to smile a little at that, mean, amused. “I don’t think you realize vast amounts of my vigilante career have consisted on masked men, a large portion of which are somewhat related to you, explaining things to me so I could clap and feel appropriately awed by their intellect.”

Stephanie doesn’t add that she had, that she’d burned to be as good, as clever, as effective. Doesn’t add she’d all but set herself on fire for it without ever quite managing.

“Why would I require applause from a subpar, barely-tolerated, barely-older colleague?”

“You want to keep talking about seeds or you want to go back to the Cave?”

Damian scoffs. “By all means, faff off. I can keep going on my own.”

He wouldn’t have dared talk like this to Cass. Also, I’m pretty sure you don’t use faff like that.

“You are well aware that Dick gave me chain of command over you tonight, right?” He shrugs. “Oh, to think I have heard such wonders about the League of Assassins. Can’t even teach the slightest discipline to what’s supposed to be one of their brightest, it seems.”

He arches an eyebrow, unimpressed.

“Do you believe this blatant attempt at emotional manipulation will achieve any results?”

Stephanie grits her teeth. Brat.

“Not really, but you gave your word to obey orders and I imagined someone with a mouth full of ‘honour’ and ‘duty’ would be self-aware enough to follow through.”

Damian’s brow creases in a way that not even the domino can hide. Then, he lets out a great sigh.

“Shut up. I thought of scoping out Robinson Park first.”

Stephanie doesn’t need him to tell her that Robinson Park’s been so touched by multiple Rogue attacks its configuration and botanical make-up are irreversibly changed, that some sections are dangerous, cordoned off for research that will probably produce some new sort of biochemical weapon in the next five years. He tells her anyway as they head there, while she zones in and out to think not only of what they will do if they by any chance come across the Poison Ivy – Steph’ll probably be fine with some begging for her miserable human life and small talk about Batman’s death and replacement, which Doctor Isley will surely have noticed; Damian will be if he shuts his mouth, so Stephanie’s either going to need some extra begging or a very good excuse for why he’s been eaten by a geranium – but of the best way to warn Dick about this absolutely mad plan of Damian. Upon arrival, they enter through one of the shrubbery-covered fences, leaving the bikes somewhere dark and safe.

“Cordoned section,” Steph calls out the second her flashlight beams on a sunflower that is both growing out of season and cerulean blue. “Anything you see is probably poisonous, venomous, both, or likely to grow sudden fangs and try to kill us, yadda-yadda. Don’t. Touch.”

He scowls at her.

“Isn’t this isolationist approach a complete underestimation of the potential these mutated plants might hold?”

Stephanie gives him her most disdainful once-over, making sure her every feature conveys it through the darkness and the cowl’s distortion of her face.

“Sure, like your Daddy and every single one of our mad scientists have never thought of that.” Despite his earlier claims of indifference, he purses his lips and pointedly steps away from the sunflower. She chooses not to comment on it. “Even if we don’t find anything on Ivy, there’s always some dumbass thinking that this part of Robinson is a fine place to get up to shady stuff. We can cover that while we’re at it.”

Please, let it be a night where the drag racers are the worst thing we find.

After a bit of an aimless stroll following the clearer paths – pine trees with sap dripping too much like blood, neon-bright hydrangeas and a corridor made of trellised roses that smell so strong they get their gas masks out just in case – they arrive at a small clearing that looks suspiciously untouched. A loose circle of benches and hedges forming a small round square of dusty, untiled earth. There are three flickering lampposts spilling orange light in the center, looking entirely too normal, if a bit shabby.

“We made it out of the cordoned area. Or maybe someone thought this would make for a nice meeting point.” Do we have a map of this? Bruce likely did, even though the landscape must shift constantly. If only the big bat had managed to foresee the likelihood of his death and arranged the Batcomputer files into a system easier to work with… Dick and Barbara might manage better if they weren’t having a bit of a Cold War about working together, she’ll give him that. “What do you think, Watson?”

“That my analytical nature and superior expertise make me Holmes and you Watson,” Damian clips out.

“Any other brilliant commentary?”

“There’s something strange taking place in this location.” He glares at her when she opens her mouth for a very apt No shit, Sherlock. “Spare me the wit and get your weapons out – the comm link is jammed.”

Her staff is ready to unfurl in her hand at a second’s notice, her muscles tense. She’s seen him focused before, never after been caught unaware enough to worry. It takes less than a second to drag her onto the edge of fighting-ready.

“How can you tell?”

He taps his earpiece. “The high-pitched frequency coming from it has just gone dead.”

Stephanie decides to bite back any questions about superhearing and takes his word for it – he’d need a sense of humor for this to be a joke in bad taste.

“Any guesses?”

“I’ve seen disruptions this sudden and this focused before.” He darts looks around the perimeter, more coiling snake than bird. His cape has jagged, spiky edges. She’d thought they looked silly on a sullen teenage boy. Not so much with a straight-edged katana in one hand. “Don’t get on my way, I’ll find the source faster on my own.”

She lengthens the bo stick in time to bar him from walking away.

“Didn’t we establish that I give the orders?” He pushes the staff away from his chest with two gloved fingers, disdainful. “You are not going to run off in the middle of Robinson Park’s curio sections, so God help me.”

“Or what?”

Stephanie thinks of Bruce and Dick’s fights before he left, of Jason Todd’s famed insolence, of Tim’s hot-and-cold terms as Robin. Of her own, unceremonious sacking. All of us killed ourselves over the mantle for a prep school boy with a British accent to come and throw it on like a coat. Her spine goes ramrod, cape dropping around her. It doesn’t matter they are practically the same height, or that he is Bruce’s son. She’s the bigger Bat here.

“Then you take the cape and the R off and go. I cannot force you to be Robin if you are not fit, but I will not let you claim the name while you spit on everything it stands for. You haven’t been here for a year. You don’t get to school any single one of us on how to do the job of our lives, no matter how skilled you might be. It is the first time you are here – we’ve seen the earth crack open at the snap of a finger, half of this city claimed by the vines.” Damian is rigid as a stick but gives her a tight nod. He steps back, his grip on the katana shifting to a defensive stance. That’d be yes enough in other circumstances, but she needs him to understand what his place is right now, if he won’t respect her any other way than this. “Capice?”

He breathes in slow, loud enough to make her hear. “I apologize for my overstepping in account of the oaths I have sworn.”

A bit snide, reminding her it is Dick he has promised obedience to, not her. It’ll do for tonight.

“Accepted. Now, where did you say you had seen this sort of thing?”

“Not bad.” A voice rings out in the dark beyond the clearing, muddied with a tinge that Stephanie doesn’t quite place. Voice distortion of some kind? “I would say I’m surprised, but Talia does train for docility.”

Stephanie doesn’t like the casual namedrop. She doesn’t like how the voice seems to come from all directions. She definitely doesn’t like the sudden steps of heavy boots too close for comfort. They should have heard them way before.

“Get back,” Damian tells her, no insult or flourish added at the end, and unease rolls over her.

Before she can do something dumb – like tell mystery perp to show up – he comes into the streetlamp light. If Stephanie had been calmer, she would have noted the military bent to his clothes, the weapons strapped to him and likely hidden all over his person, the dark oil gleam to the guns at his thighs. As it is, the red helmet steals her attention and her head goes into panic overdrive, a litany of fuckfuckfuck she hopes doesn’t show through. I thought I’d managed to avoid this shitstorm.

“Todd,” Damian grits out.

“Aw,” Red Hood answers, mockery all over his voice. It was the helmet, Stephanie realizes, that gave his voice that metallic hue. “You do remember me.”

Damian tenses up even further by her side, wound so tight she can tell despite the cape. And Stephanie hadn’t been there at the time, but she’d seen the reports. Second worst beatdown of the Batboy Royal Rumble for the Batman mantle, a bullet straight to the middle of the chest… placed an inch in any other direction and Damian would be divvying up the keyboards with O. Or his pierced suit would be in a case next the one the man before them died in. She had wondered if Jason had chosen the placement because or in spite of the kevlar’s reinforcement in that area while tiptoeing around the subject. Neither her nor the Squire could agree on what had aggravated Damian the most: the damage he sustained, or the fact that it was all a show to rile Dick up.

“You could have sent a postcard home, you know?” She says, the need to break the silence winding up with tension stronger than common sense. It’s not like he’s going to forget she’s here too. “I’ve returned from the dead, again. Kisses and love, Jason.”

“We should have imagined a cockroach like you wouldn’t lie down and die,” Damian adds and, for all his usual bluster and indignation, Stephanie hears real fear in his voice.

He is good. She is scrappy. Jason Todd isn’t likely to break a sweat disposing of them.

“So the cold open didn’t do it for you two. Okay, since we’re all being honest. You,” here he points at Stephanie, “are not the formidable Batgirl in the stitched costume I was expecting and so my one chance for a good fight has been spoiled.”

He doesn’t have the deference to make a significant pause on ‘spoiled’ for her to deduce whether he knows who she is or not. Better to err on the side of caution and get a new switchblade to keep under her mattress when she gets home. Because she is getting home tonight, and so she doesn’t goad him by telling him it would have been a good second and a half against Cass.

“You,” he says, turning to Damian, “are the worst consolation prize for a Robin since Batman took pity on Drake and let him have the cape.”

“And you still offered him a place by your side,” Damian clips out in answer. “How pathetic is that for a man who claims to reject my father’s every action, then?”

The air between them goes thick, a thread of violence that knots in her guts. If Damian and Jason Todd get into a fight, would she be of any help to him? If push comes to shove, more likely, how fast can she get some distance from the jammed area and call the Batcave? How much can Damian last in a serious fight against a man who left him with almost eighty stitches to make a point? She shifts her weight from one foot to the other carefully, trying to measure how much shit she has in her utility belt. Not enough if going up against the Red Hood.

“That’s what I was hoping we could talk about.” He doesn’t have anything that could get him out of an ice bomb, right? Flares, but if ours are non-heat to prevent explosions, his should be too. “See, I realized I was presumptuous. Rash.” He’s fast, fought Bruce almost to a standstill. Hairpin reflexes. But if Damian’s keeping him busy… “I admit shooting you was nasty work, in account of me owing your mom a favor and all that. But then again, I haven’t been keeping up with the League news. I didn’t know you’d gotten good good, and you didn’t make enough of an effort last time.” God, he loves a monologue. If they both get caught… not enough distance between them and the ice gets easier to break through. Even disoriented, I’m not sure he’ll take more than a minute to be through with me. “We underestimated each other. That is why I wanted to talk shop with you, man to man.” Wait, what? She’s surely missed something among the posturing. “You follow me?”

“The only reason I’ve let your verbiage go unchecked,” Damian answers, even more incomprehensibly, “is the inexplicable fondness that my mother holds for you, which I’d believed forgotten upon the last time we met. You are in the League’s debt, Todd.”

The tension veers off course, violence turning to diplomacy, to business. Damian’s stance has stopped being one ready to spring into combat. Just what is this meant to be, if not a vendetta? She’d assumed Jason was here hunting, finishing what he’d started after Bruce’s death, goading Dick and Barbara.

“Agree to disagree,” the Red Hood shrugs. “When I saw you in Gotham, I believed she’d… tossed you out. Hadn’t realized this would be a necessary part of your training one day. I’m afraid I can’t see straight when it comes to bats.”

“Your petty apology is accepted, if that’s what you came for. Now, if you excuse us –” Damian nods his head at Stephanie and turns away from Jason.

She follows suit, too busy trying to make the pieces fit together, too numb with the beginnings of relief, and the sound of a gun sliding free from a holster freezes her where she stands. She presses her eyes closed for a moment before turning to face him again, which is a bad idea because Tim’s medical files from their fight resurface in her mind. A cut any deeper would have punctured so many important organs. It’s hard to guess if there was any invisible mercy holding his hand back or if he just enjoyed letting us know we lived by his choice, Dick had said.

The gun isn’t pointed at them yet.

“Listen, wunderkinds.” Stephanie thinks she can hear frustration bleeding into his voice. It might be her own fear running interference. “It is hard enough to schedule a meeting where I get the Robin without the Batman. We will have this conversation one way or the other. Stay. Still.”

“Talk, then, Todd.” Damian’s too calm. Why is he that calm now? “The longer you keep us here, the likelier it is our partners will notice our absence.”

The three of them know it to be right, but it doesn’t bring Stephanie any relief. Jason has better chances against the two of them than he has against Dick Grayson. Pushing him won’t make him any sloppier.

A laugh, metallic, that gives her chills. The gun is back in the holster.

“I didn’t consider you enough. After I found out, I was so sure Drake would take my offer. He has always been the one with the potential to surpass Bruce in his own game. He should have been intelligent enough –”

“Tim’s been the only one among us who has never struggled to keep to the code. Fuck you, you should have guessed before stabbing him.”

The words burst out of her. Tim’s always been on Bruce’s metaphorical leash, for all the good it has done him. Always holier-than-thou, always scheming sideways to find another way that let him keep his moral high ground. Jason had almost killed him because he didn’t like getting a ‘no’ and Stephanie would have never known. She would have woken up on the other side of the world and maybe felt a strange twinge in her chest as she got breakfast. She would have found out, eventually – she would have laughed because she wouldn’t have believed it.

No matter everything else, Tim is the boy who kept coming back after she decked him with a brick.

“Already heard that, already admitted he’s the better man, yadda, yadda. Pity we can’t nominate him for the Nobel Prize.” Stephanie clenches her fists and wishes she had another brick handy. Doubts it’d do much against the helmet. Red Hood chuckles like he knows what she’s thinking. “I tried with Dick. He left Gotham of his own volition, so I believed we could have an understanding. Forgot how much of a proud bastard he is.”

“And you shot me,” Damian says, hand coming up to rub against the center of his chest. He’d done that too when she’d taken him to the exhibition, a reflex of awe, like he couldn’t keep it in.

His voice falters the slightest bit. He’d been a prince, not a war dog like Cassandra. He hadn’t the thousand scars that stitched her fighting ability to her skin, not only because of enhanced healing or whatever wacky science his mom had done on him.

“Heh,” Jason says. “Bruce tried to kill me when I came back, Dick and you too, Drake maybe.” That’s not the way Stephanie’s heard it told. “You wouldn’t be Bruce’s if it had taken the one shot to do you in. But you aren’t just Bruce’s, right? I’ve dug around. Brutal, skilled, lethal. I’ve watched you work and I’ve been beating myself up. How come I didn’t ask you?”

Fuckshitfuckshit. Stephanie should have seen it coming. Of course this is a job interview. Damian isn’t reacting, which doesn’t surprise her because, truth be told –

“When I floated in the aftermath of my operation, I wondered the same thing.”

Yup. There it is. Whenever she interacts with Damian, he is abrasive, rash, a bit immature for fifteen despite the vocabulary. Doesn’t mean she doesn’t hear his remarks, hasn’t heard the stories. His instinctive use of excess violence, his lack of regard for life. Bruce had to walk him back from crossing the line a few times right after he came to Gotham, didn’t know what to do with him. Barbara worries Dick’s bitten too much to handle; Dick himself has been playing his hopes close to his heart.

Stephanie had heard of the battle for the cowl and thought Jesus fuck, this Jason tool couldn’t tell what the best option for a murder Robin is if it started dancing the hula in front of him.

“You’ve had more time to settle in. To see how little hope there is to Gotham, and how little of it Batman provides. How it feels to be leashed by the memory of a dead man.”

“So you would have me be leashed to you, instead?”

Yup. Stephanie is not surprised to hear Damian consider it. That just makes her chances a lot worse, what if Todd wants proof of his turn of heart? What if that’s why they’ve met him on a day it was the two of them? Dick’s better than Damian, the person who is closest to him right now. Stephanie is expendable – he’s made it very clear to her.

She shifts again. The staff is accessible, the gooperangs available in the electric, ice and plain goop variants. A couple sharp Batarangs, a few lines. Jason Todd and her have never met and, if he wants her dead, he’ll want Damian to do it.

Freeze Damian and run for it.

The cold speed of her thought process makes her ashamed of herself.

“I’m not looking to get high on the Bats and Robs power trip, Damian. I’m offering you a true partnership, one where I won’t corral you or have you always surveyed and watched.”

She’s spent a long time preaching about overcoming personal circumstances, rising up, all of it. The technical answer, the one Bruce or Barbara or Tim would give, comes easy. The real question is this: Is she willing to fight Damian? To hurt him?

Again, his hand on his chest at the exhibition, just now. The way he watches everything warily, out of his depth in a Gotham that is barbaric and too-modernized at once. The startled teenager that bubbles up to the surface now and again.

Stephanie can’t. She doesn’t want to have to.

“Sure thing, pal,” she interjects. Maybe it’s a coward’s way out, or an idiot’s. She’d rather take on the Red Hood by Damian’s side than fight Damian for real. “We’ve all heard that line before. There’s literally no guarantee to anything you’re saying. Right, Damian?”

Jason Todd’s gaze turns to her – or at least, his helmet swivels around enough to suggest it. Maybe he’s been more aware of her this entire time than she thought.

“You are quick enough to try and find guarantees for your own self,” he says. “If that’s a real worry, come and watch out for him.”

Stephanie bristles at that. “What, am I suddenly a part of this? You’ve been ignoring me the whole time, now you want my curriculum?”

“Apologies for the offence,” he says, something almost earnest in his tone. Stephanie really hates the lack of read from the helmet. And Damian is quiet. “I thought you’d assume the offer was extended to you as well – Robin here might be my best candidate, but you’re a close second.”

“Sure. We both know I’m not the formidable Cassandra Cain.”

It comes out acidic, and she apologizes to Cass in her mind. She hasn’t – and won’t probably ever – finished untangling envy from love from frustration when it comes to her.

“Doesn’t mean there’s not potential or room for improvement. Come on, does Dick even know your name?”

That stings. He’s probably half right.

“Do you?”

“So Fatgirl was also a priority for this meeting?” Damian says, a slight sneer on his face. “You display an offensive lack of taste.”

Okay, no need for the names. Also, if that is what makes him go back to the Cave, I’ll be relieved but offended myself.

Todd doesn’t turn back to give Damian his focus just yet.

“I did say Robin was my priority, didn’t I? But I wouldn’t be averse to you joining us,” he says. Stephanie can’t tell if he’s going off-script or if this is part of a plan designed to pluck at their buttons, if he’s thoughtful or entertained. “Come on, don’t say it wouldn’t be something to watch. Batgirls gone bad.”

The way he says it makes her lip curl. “Sorry, pal. We do our thing.”

Jason Todd chuckles and looks her up and down, pointy ears and Bat symbol and utility belt. If she weren’t afraid he might kill one or both of them, if he wasn’t wearing that helmet, even after everything, she might have blushed a bit.

“Why’s it, then, that the big original Bat is gone and you’re still swinging playdates with little Robin here?”

“Don’t call it a playdate!” Stephanie is almost proud of how they say it at once. And then Damian adds: “As if I’d stoop to patrol with such an inept affront to the mantle.”

It stings, taking into account she’s the one to have kept its tenets the most faithfully out of the three of them and knowing Damian is fully aware of this.

“At least they let me patrol without a sitter.”

“Well, maybe they’re hoping you don’t come back one day.”

Stephanie sweeps his legs from under him before he’s done talking. All the emotional conflict she has just gone over for this murder-prone little asshole. Ever agile, he flips and lunges for her. She dodges.

“Why don’t you skip town and crawl back to mommy?”

She despises him and she feels sorry for him and ugh. One day, he is a shut-off, surly teenager marveling at VR with stars in his eyes; the next he storms off in a flurry of insults or pretends she isn’t there or treats her like a medieval serf. Trying to see who Damian is underneath his multiple acts is as frustrating as befriending a feral cat and nowhere near as rewarding.

They exchange a few blows – not enough to dispel tension, all blocked without much effort on both parts. His full focus isn’t on her, but she senses the animosity at her remark. Wishing her death is fine; mentioning Talia al-Ghul warrants aggression. Fucking brat.

A hammer cocks. In a second, Stephanie’s put herself before Damian, cape splayed to give him better cover. One of his arms bars across her torso, ready to flip her over and behind him. The Red Hood looks up from reloading his gun.

“Don’t mind me, really. Thought I’d get my business sorted while you manage yours.” He spots the tangled stance they’ve settled in. If his helmet was off, Stephanie thinks she might be able to count all his teeth. “I hope you don’t do this in every stand-off you get in.”

“Just this one,” Stephanie retorts. She drops to a more relaxed position and gives him her most infuriating grin. “You know, being among family and all.”

Red Hood laughs. “I like you, Batblonde. Sure you don’t want to come swing for my team?”

It’s getting a little harder not to feel any type of flattered. Steph thinks of Tim crumpled in the depths of the Batcave system, bleeding out. Of Damian at his best, never mind how conflicted she might feel about his presence in Gotham, in the vigilante part of her life. “You shouldn’t proposition a girl without taking her out for dinner first. And we don’t even know each other that well.”

Damian makes an affronted sound in the back of his throat. Stephanie wishes she could turn around and glare at him. I’m not considering it, dummy, it’s called stalling!

He doesn’t get to throw a hissy fit after he almost gave her a heart attack.

“Sure we do. We’re adjacent types of Park Row trash, both kids of crooks, both too interested in doing our own thing to lick the Batboot. Both a new approach to the Gotham Crusade. I’m sure we could find enough common ground to reach a compromise.”

He’s tugging at reasonable heartstrings there. He’s good. He knows what it is to be crushed in the race for Bruce’s approval. And he’s a killer.

“As long as you’re a trigger-happy creep? Sorry, honey, don’t think so.”

Damian bristles on her left. Stephanie knows she’s going to get a telling-off punctuated by ‘harlot’, ‘wench’ and other such delightful adjectives. Paragon of maturity sure likes his tantrums.

“Think on it, sweetness. And you too, kid. Let go of the bad blood. We could do great things as a team.”

“We are not running off to… play house with you.”

Hallelujah.

Damian looks at her out of the corner of his eye. She gives him a tiny nod – she’s had worse one-liners and brainstorming a better one is not an option right now.

Red Hood laughs again. “Of course not. Wouldn’t want to admit you’re not good enough to be Daddy.”

Stephanie moves to bodily intercept Damian. He’s almost taller than her, solid. He pushes at her for a moment before she can glare at him. That insult cut in multiple layers, and the ones she can guess at are infuriating enough on their own.

“After all this, don’t give him the fight he wants now,” she whispers. You know we can’t win it, she doesn’t add.

“See?” Red Hood says from behind her. Stephanie hopes Damian’s ready to shove her aside if a bullet comes to find it, because her back couldn’t be more open to danger. “Exactly what I meant.”

“Jason,” she calls out, gambling on the supposition that he’ll like his name on her mouth. “You’ve made your point. If you want to kill us, get on with it. If not, get out. This is enough for one night.”

She doesn’t get an answer, so she reaches for the ice gooperang. Damian’s hand around her wrist stops her.

“He’s gone.”

Stephanie whips her head around. No trace of him.

“We should do the same.”

Damian drops her hand. “He might not show up again in months.” His jaw is clenched, and he seems to be torn by a number of emotions only a teenager can experience at once. “I at least should give chase.”

Her heart somersaults. “No way. The only reason we’re not fighting for our lives in this moment is that he found the Laurel and Hardy schtick amusing.”

And he might be more convincing in private. Stephanie likes Damian less than a third of the time, but she’ll be damned if she hands him over to Jason Todd on a silver platter. He knows how to paint a picture with words and Stephanie feels lucky Damian doesn’t seem entirely convinced that he’d make for a stellar killer Robin.

“You shouldn’t have taunted him.”

“Excuse you?” He’s been raised as a feudal warlord, Steph. He isn’t aware the words thank you exist.

He steps back from her and crosses his arms. “You know what I mean. That crass taking-you-out-to-dinner thing. What if he kidnaps you to make good on it?”

Ridiculous Boy Wonder. She wants to have never met him, she wants to ruffle his hair. He could be nicer about his worry.

“Hope he pays for it like a real gentleman. Kidding,” she adds when he opens his mouth. “I’m Batgirl, okay? You have to trust I’ll take care of myself and let you all know if I can’t.”

Damian turns around and starts walking the way back to their bikes. Stephanie hurries after.

She glances behind and, for a moment, thinks she sees red glinting in the shadows. She doesn’t stop and focuses on getting the gas mask out for the roses; she doesn’t want to see how persuasive Jason Todd could be if he catches her on her own.

They don’t say a word on the way back to the Batcave.

“We’ll tell them in person, tomorrow,” Stephanie says after they log in the night’s debriefs, both of them excluding their encounter with the Red Hood. “They’ll be pissed anyway, at least we’ll get some sleep.”

She doesn’t want to tell the full truth. That would make it real. To be forced to admit, at least in her head, that some part of her is still the surly girl who had lit Gotham on fire for a pat on the back. Who isn’t enough to fill in Cass or Babs’ boots, a fraud Batgirl who should perhaps ditch the pretense for someone who knows what it is like to be the disappointment, the example not to follow. To hear Damian falter aloud in his recounting and have to wonder every night after whether he’ll stab her on the back before leaving. To hear the pit-patter of rain or birds on her roof and feel her throat clench in anticipation of a red metal gleam through her window.

“Stay in the Manor tonight,” Damian says suddenly, eyes fixed on the Batcomputer. “Guest rooms are always prepared. It would be humiliating to get nabbed less than twelve-hours after this, and he didn’t address you for most of it. I’ll need your spectator’s perspective, and I want it fresh.”

She wants to argue, but he has a point. And Bruce is no longer there to forbid it.

“You’d better give me something to eat before you kick me out tomorrow.”

“Like a real gentleman,” he drawls. “Go get some rest, Brown.”

She won’t.

She thinks he won’t either.