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Chapter Text

It’s almost impossible to navigate Gotham at the street level, these days.

It doesn’t slow Nightwing and Batman. If anything, Bruce has become more proficient at flying soundlessly over the city - every time Dick catches a glimpse of the dark shape at the edge of his vision, it looks like an angel of death, a massive winged shadow printed against the gray sky.

Gotham wasn’t the only casualty in the massive, reality-altering battle against the Book of the Black and its sadistic keeper. With the help of Lanterns from across the star system, the Justice League was able to take out Lyssa Drak - but not before she shaped much of the East Coast into her sick vision. Now Metropolis glows with radioactive energy, and Gotham shifts like a labyrinth under the cover of darkness… to say nothing of their people, who seem to either sink into the architecture and become part of the twisted landscapes, or else tear themselves apart trying to escape their new living nightmare.

Dick could leave, in theory. He wasn’t born in Gotham, so whatever dark magic imprisons its natives, he could slip through it, escape the net.

But Damian won’t leave Bruce, and Dick won’t leave Damian. So here they are.

“Four o’clock,” Bruce hisses in his earpiece. Dick adjusts his next grapple swing in the indicated direction.

Even Gotham’s most mundane, day-to-day criminals have become twisted over the months. This one is very busy tearing the intestines out of his latest victim with his teeth, and when he turns to grin at them, blood gushes out of his mouth.

“Pretty bird,” he coos. “So pretty. Come here, bird. Let me taste you.”

Dick starts forward with his escrima out, but Bruce beats him to it - literally. He’s on their quarry in seconds, pinning him down to the ground and slamming a heavy, guantleted fist into his face over and over again until his jaw is pulp.

“Batman,” Dick chokes, frozen for a moment, hypnotized by the ground-meat appearance of the man who was alive and speaking to him seconds ago. “B, stop - Bruce!”

Batman rises, looming over him, dark cowl and white eyes and a snarl splitting his face.

“What,” Dick says, still breathless with shock, “the fuck.”

Bruce is on him faster than he can blink, shoving him into a wall and penning him in with both arms.

“He can’t have you,” he growls, low and threatening as a roll of thunder.

Dick feels like he can’t quite get enough air. He swallows hard. “I’m not a kid anymore, B. You don’t have to protect me from every jackass who wants to make a comment about my tights.”

Batman’s fist closes around his throat. Dick hiccups in confusion and fear as Bruce leans in, tips his head to one side, nuzzles down his neck.

“You’re mine,” Bruce says, and sinks in his teeth.

When he wakes up, he’s on the alley floor with his Nightwing costume crumpled up around his naked body. Bruce, still masked and uniformed but with his heavy cock poking out of his breeches, is kneeling over him, grunting as he strokes himself roughly with one bare hand. With he other, he pins Dick to the ground.

“Bruce?” Dick whispers, and Bruce comes with a groan, hot white fluid splashing up Dick’s naked belly and chest. A drop lands on the corner of his mouth, and Bruce leans in to lick it up. Dick feels the expectation of a kiss that doesn’t come.

“Good boy,” Bruce whispers back against his cheek. “My little Robin.”

When he slips his bare fist around Dick’s cock, Dick whimpers, but he doesn’t fight.

They both go back to the Cave. Dick is shocked, numb, unable to bring his nervous system back under control; he staggers over to the medical bay, a rag pressed to the wound on his neck that won’t stop bleeding.

“Dick?” Red Robin is there, jogging toward him. “What the hell - ”

Dick seizes Tim’s arm, pulls him in close. Whispers: “Tim, you need to get out of here, now.”

“But - ”

“Go. Find - ” Who will be safe? Who wouldn’t hurt Tim even under the influence of the corruption leaking into their world from the Book of the Black? “ - Barbara. Stephanie. Someone.”

“Did Bruce do this to you?” Tim’s always been too smart for his own good.

“Tim.” His voice breaks. Maybe he’s imagining it, but he can already feel something happening to him. Like an infection taking root. “Get out. Don’t come back.”

“What about Damian?”

“I don’t know.” Dick’s throat constricts. He can feel his eyes burning, moisture gathering in his lashes. “I’ll try to keep him safe. But I can’t protect you both.”

Tim glances toward Batman, still cowled, hulking over the Bat Computer and typing rapidly. As if sensing his scrutiny, Batman turns toward them, eye lenses flat and cold. Dick’s blood still stains the inner corners of his mouth where he couldn’t easily wipe it away.

Alarm flutters in Dick’s stomach. He reaches out to catch Tim’s jaw in a gloved hand, turning Tim’s face back toward him.

“Timmy, he’s going to lock down the Cave if you don’t go now. Now.”

Tim looks at him, domino lenses flipped to show his dark blue eyes, desperately searching Dick’s face.

Dick wants to kiss him goodbye. But there’s blood in his mouth, and Bruce is watching them both, and Dick would do anything to protect him from the infection he feels spreading under his skin.

So he does what he has to do.

“You don’t belong here,” he hisses. “You’re not Robin anymore. You can’t stay here. Go.”

The shock and hurt that crosses Tim’s face only lasts for a second. Then the shutters come down over his expression. He steps back, out of Dick’s grip, and reaches up to flip the lenses of his domino back to white.

“Right,” he says, and turns away.

Dick hopes he makes it out in time.

Chapter Text

Someone - maybe Dick, or maybe Bruce himself - changed all the passcodes after Tim left, even the one to the Belfry, which Tim has always thought of as his. He’s pretty sure he could figure out the new ones, but he’s done trying to insinuate himself where he’s not wanted.

Even if it’s starting to feel like that might mean everywhere.

He tries the Clocktower, thinking Babs might put him up for a few days until he figures out his next move. But he can tell before he even draws close that the place is in ruins, crushed in the grip of the kind of giant vines that scream Poison Ivy.

He goes inside anyway, careful to put his rebreather in place. Ivy’s pollens have always been potent, and there’s no telling what effect the Book of the Black might have had on them.

Oracle’s computer system is still alive, humming quietly, screens glowing soft green in the silent dimness of the Clocktower’s remains. Text blinks on the screen of the main console.

Confirm Identity: | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Tim puts in the pass phrase that usually lets Bats into the system.

Access Denied.

Confirm Identity: | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

He puts in something different, something he and Barbara agreed to keep just between them, just in case Batman ever went a little too far.

Welcome, Red Robin.

A video comes up on the screen: Babs, tired and wan and hunched over oddly, waves into the camera from the destroyed surveillance room.

“Hi Tim,” she says. “I thought you might be the only one who could get away. The system power won’t last long, so I hope you get this message before everything shuts down.”

She pauses for a second, sucking in a pained breath, and then shakes her head and continues.

“I’m… part of it, now. The system. Pam and Harley tried to get me out, but… I needed to stay in it, to find Steph. And now I can’t…”

She lifts one trembling hand into the camera’s view, staring at her wrist, where threads of green glow beneath her skin like veins.

“I can’t leave,” she says softly, her gaze moving back up to the camera. “I wouldn’t have been able to leave Gotham anyway. Steph can’t either. I need you to find her for me. I got close, but I lost the trail, and now I can’t…”

She shudders, and takes a second to remove her glasses, passing a hand over her eyes. Tim can see where wires slip under the skin of her inner elbow like an IV.

“I can’t find her. Cass took her and I don’t know what happened.” She puts her glasses back on, her mouth firming stubbornly. “Cass changed, Tim. Like Bruce. Please find her. Jason might be able to help you, if he’s still out there. And…” she hesitates - “...if Cass can’t be helped, then… help Steph.”

She looks like she’s about to say something else, but the words catch in her throat, and she just reaches out to put her palm against whatever internal recording device must have been a part of her computer setup. Tim can’t help reaching back, pressing his fingers against the cool screen of the console.

“I need you to find my girls,” she says. Tears start to spill down her cheeks. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t do more, I - ”

Then the power cuts, and the screen flickers off. The hum of the servers all around him goes dead.

He must’ve made a mistake, or maybe Ivy’s Book-boosted pollen was just too strong for the rebreather; by the time he stumbles into Steph’s apartment and shuts the door behind him, he’s shivering and shaking, flushed and cold and desperate for touch.

Cass appears from the hallway. “Tim?”

“Cass?” Her name slurs out from between his numb lips. Babs told him to watch out for Cass, that she changed, but - she doesn't look like a monster. She just looks like Cass.

Cass’s dark eyes rake over him. They’re reflecting the light strangely - the only visual indication that anything has changed. “What’s wrong? Hurt?”

“Pollen,” he says, leaning back against the door. His teeth are chattering.

She steps toward him. “Can I help?”

He wants her to touch him, wants her to kiss him, fuck him, help him burn off the pollen. But -

But he has to know, first. “Did you… did you do something to Steph?”

Cass’s face scrunches up. “I helped. She asked me to.”

Tim feels like he can’t get enough air. Whatever Bruce did to Dick to make him look so deeply haunted - is that what Cass did to Steph?

“And you’ll… help me?” He shivers. “Like you helped Steph?”

She takes another step toward him. “If you want.”

He shouldn’t say yes. Babs warned him about this. Dick tried to save him from it. But he’s losing coherence, losing brain function. The pollen is going to kill him if he doesn’t let Cass help. And…

And Bruce doesn’t want him, has never wanted him. But Cass does.

“I want,” he says. “I want you to.”

She closes the distance between them and kisses him, just a press of her mouth against his, just enough that he can feel the fangs starting to peek out between her lips. Then she presses on his shoulders and says, “Down.”

He kneels in the plush carpet of Stephanie’s living room. Cass doesn’t hover over him like he expected - she drops to her knees and curls into his side, her head on his shoulder, one arm around his waist. Her lips press to his collarbone, then his neck, warm and soft. A moan slips out of him. He can feel the texture of a scar that crosses her mouth.

Everything starts to slip sideways. The view of Steph’s living room, the scattered, well-loved CD cases and the couch where they used to curl up to watch reruns of Leverage; the kitchen just beyond, with the air fryer Steph always insisted was critical to her survival.

Tim closes his eyes to try to lessen the vertigo. “Cass,” he whispers. “Was Steph… scared? When you…”

“Before,” Cass murmurs against his throat. “Everyone… changing. Babs gone. Steph’s mom… something else now. She was scared.”

“And now?” Tim asks, and swallows against the press of her lips. “Not scared anymore?”

“No,” Cass says, “not anymore.”

And she sinks her teeth into his neck.

Chapter Text

Richard has grown wings, in the weeks since Bruce put the bite on him - but Bruce doesn’t like him to be too mobile, so his wings, Nightwing-blue at the flared edges fading to Robin-red closer to his body, are cinched tightly behind him with a length of parachute cord that he couldn’t have placed himself.

It makes Damian furious… and sick. But there’s little he can do, when the punishment for his every wrong move is now taken out on Richard in a twisted facsimile of “training.”

Which is why, after a screaming match with the suit of body armor that used to be his father, Damian finds himself caring for his brutalized brother in his own room, as far as they could get from the Cave where Bruce now seems to live. His hands are shaking as he splints Richard’s broken arm.

“Damian.” Richard’s voice is barely a whisper. He reaches out to catch Damian’s chin with his good hand, tipping his face up so their eyes meet. “You have to go.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Richard’s eyelashes flutter, and his hand slips off of Damian’s jaw. The way his chest rises and falls is labored, shaky. “I don’t want him to infect you.”

“He won’t.” Bruce has multiple times declared him not ready, which Damian knows to mean not worthy. Not worthy of the bite, not worthy of Robin. And the only reason Damian is still here at this point is because Richard can no longer leave.

But…

Damian wraps Richard’s good hand in both of his, holding him gently, like he’s something precious. “You could.”

“No.”

“Grayson - ”

“No.”

“Richard, please.” Damian holds Richard’s hand to his chest, over his heart. “I want you to. I want to be yours. Your Robin. Make me yours before he makes me his.”

Richard’s fingers curl into his shirt, and he pulls Damian in to press a soft kiss against his mouth. He keeps it chaste, pulling back when Damian chases him, lips and teeth and tongue, begging him not to go.

“Damian,” he says, pressing their foreheads together, quiet and sincere. “I don’t want you to be here when he kills me, or when I turn into something I can’t come back from.”

Damian shakes his head, gripping Richard’s wrist in both hands. “Don’t. Don’t send me away from you. I can be your Robin, I’ll protect you, I - ”

“Stop.” Richard is looking at him with the kind of pain that sinks into the marrow, the kind that permeates the very air of Gotham these days. “I don’t want that for you.”

“Don’t you want me?” Damian pleads. “Don’t you want me here, don’t you want me to - ”

“No.”

“Richard, please, give me a chance to - ”

“I won’t hurt you,” Richard cuts in, his voice stronger than it’s been in days, if not weeks. “I’d die first.”

Damian tries to breathe past the knot in his throat. “I won’t let that happen.”

Richard pulls his hand out of Damian’s grip to comb it softly through his hair. “Then go, baby bat. I love you.”

Chapter Text

Jason checks all the usual haunts - the Clocktower, Babs’ place, Steph’s apartment. The only sign he finds of anyone is a large bloodstain in the apartment carpet. Portable DNA tester says it’s Tim’s, not Steph’s. So now he guesses he’s looking for the bodies of two Batgirls and a Robin.

He still doesn’t know which two Batgirls might be in pieces versus which one mutated along the same lines that Bruce did, but if he had to guess -

“Jason.”

Shouldn’t have been caught off guard. Jason whirls around with a gun in his hand. Bruce is standing behind him, mask off; Bruce’s face is the color of Gotham concrete, gray speckled with white and black, and his eyes are the shifting blue-green-red-yellow of an oil slick.

“Bruce,” Jason says, his voice filtering harshly through the mask. “You look like shit.”

Bruce takes a step toward him. He takes a step back.

“Come here,” Bruce orders.

Jason sneers. “You can’t control me like you can Dick.”

“I don’t want to control you,” says Bruce. “I just want to bring you home.”

“Fuck off,” spits Jason.

The standoff lasts for another few moments. Jason, ever impatient, is the first to move - but Bruce is faster, stronger, maybe due to the mutation. He has Jason wrapped in construction-grade tensile wire on the floor in seconds, his full weight born down on his second son as he reaches up to grip Jason’s bottom jaw in his mask.

“Take off the mask,” Bruce intones.

Jason lunges up to headbutt him. Bruce yanks him back with a handful of his hair.

“The mask,” Bruce says again.

“Go fuck yourself.”

Holding his face with both hands, Bruce slinks his fingers around to the back and undoes the locking mechanism. Jason feels sick to his stomach. How long has Bruce known how to disarm the traps and explosives in his muzzle?

Tossing the muzzle mask aside, Bruce takes a fistful of Jason’s hair in one hand and places the other along Jason’s jawline to keep him from moving. Then Bruce leans in and kisses him softly.

“It won’t hurt for long,” Bruce promises, lips moving against his mouth, then his cheek, then the side of his neck. “I’m sorry for your discomfort.”

“I’m not sorry for yours,” says Jason, and squeezes his ring finger and thumb together to activate the panic button in his glove.

The bomb in his mask activates, and the world dissolves into fire and heat and the ringing in his ears.

Jason escapes. He’s sorry that he blew up Stephanie’s apartment. He’s not sorry that he blew up Batman.

Now he just needs to track down whichever Batgirl has been turned into a crazy freak - well, a crazier freak - and killed Tim. And blow them up.

Chapter Text

Jason finds Cass in a warehouse. He’s never really thought he could beat her hand-to-hand, but he thought that maybe rage and desperation would carry him through somehow. Thought that maybe Gotham would favor him the way it favored Bruce and Cass, poisonously and obsessively - would sink its teeth into him and let him at least get justice for Tim and Steph before tearing him apart. He would let it ruin him if it meant he could at least take Tim’s killer down with him.

But it doesn’t, and he doesn’t, and now he’s on his knees with his mouth full of blood, waiting for Cass to eat him alive just like she - and Bruce - did to everyone else he gave a shit about.

Cass still looks like an eldritch nightmare, but that isn’t unusual for a Bat in uniform. He can’t tell if she’s changed more than that, the way Bruce has.

“Jason,” she says. Cass has never needed a voice modulator to sound frightening; the way she forms words, like she has to assemble them syllable by syllable, Jay-son, is uncanny enough.

“Batgirl,” he sneers back, and spits a gob of phlegm and blood at her feet. “Gonna do me like you did Red Robin?”

Her head in its stitch-mouthed cowl tips to one side. “Red Robin?” The words are an uncertain warble, an approximate imitation of his.

Everything in Jason twists with pain and rage. “Tim. You remember Tim, don’t you? You remember what you did to him? What you did to Steph? Stephanie, your girlfriend?”

“Yes,” says Batgirl, “Tim. And Steph.”

His lips curl into a sneer under his muzzle. He lifts one gauntleted hand and waves vaguely, exhausted. “Get it over with.”

There was so much blood on the floor where Tim had disappeared. He never did find anything left of Stephanie. He wonders if Cass will kill him clean.

She takes a step closer to him, stopping when he flinches, then taking another step, slow and careful. She crouches in front of him… and reaches up to pull off her cowl.

It almost hurts, how much she still looks like Cass. How her eyes have that oil-slick black rainbow effect, but the rest of her face is just warm brown skin, nothing like the cracked concrete of Bruce’s.

Her brow furrows as she swishes words around in her mouth, formulating them with lips and teeth and tongue. “You want. To be like Tim?”

Does he want to be dead? He set out for revenge, and he hasn’t gotten it. But he’s tired. He’s been tired for a long time already. And everyone he used to hang his identity on is gone now.

“Yeah,” he says. “I do.”

Cass reaches out, cradling his muzzle in her palms.

“Okay,” she says, and tips forward, burying her face in the crook of his neck.

Be with you again soon, Tim, he thinks; then, the deep stab of her fangs. And he’s out.

Jason doesn’t expect to wake up, after that. But when he does - the stuffy feeling of his head and the everything-everywhere pain of his body trying to drag him under again - he opens his eyes to a dim bedroom, and Tim’s warm, sleeping body close enough to touch.

So he does, stretching out his hand to brush his fingertips against Tim’s arm, just to see if he’s really real. And Tim opens his eyes (oil-slick rainbow, but still blue underneath it all, like whatever Cass did to him just… enhanced him somehow).

A smirk curls the edge of Tim’s mouth. “Yeah. I can read your mind now, too.”

Jason immediately crafts an image of the apartment where he found Tim’s blood, the futile hunt for any trace of Stephanie, and pushes it toward Tim with a question overlaid on it.

“Oh,” says Tim, “yeah, I was confused too. It doesn’t help that Cass didn’t want Bruce to know where she and Steph were. So they were avoiding us, too.”

“I wouldn’t have told Bruce,” Jason says petulantly.

Tim shrugs. “If you’d found her first, she might’ve told you the truth. I don’t think she knew that we all thought she went crazy.”

Jason opens his mouth to ask if Cass and Steph are here, but then he closes it. Because he knows.

“Yeah,” Tim says, “we can all do that now. That’s part of why you feel like crap. Your mind and body are still adjusting.”

“I feel like ‘crap’ because Cass kicked the ever-loving shit out of me when I tried to corner her.”

Tim’s mouth curls at the corner, and his eyes glitter. “That’s the other part.”

Something faint touches Jason’s - not his mind, because it isn’t just in his head, but everywhere inside of him: Tim’s desire.

Jason hikes up an eyebrow. “What? You like seeing me fucked up?”

“What if I do?” says Tim. His eyes gleam like blue opals. “I know you wanted to kill Cass because of what you thought she did to me.”

“And Steph,” Jason reminds him. “Alley kids stick together.”

“That’s sweet,” says Stephanie from the doorway. “Welcome back to the world of the living, Hood.”

“Good to see you in one piece, Spoiler,” he acknowledges.

She smirks, but doesn’t comment. “Cass wants to talk to us. You good to walk?”

“I’ll manage.”

She disappears, and Jason and Tim look at each other for another long moment. Jason catches flashes of himself through Tim’s eyes - bruised, bloody, and beautiful, with eyes that shift color in the light and scars limned in gold like kintsugi.

Tim wants him. Wants to put more bruises on him. Wants to have some bruises of his own.

“Is this normal for you,” Jason asks, smirking faintly, “or is it because you got…” (turned? taken?) “...Cass’d while you were also pollen’d?”

“Who cares?” says Tim, and kisses him.

They’re squatting in an abandoned apartment on the lower west side - as far from Wayne Manor as possible while still being technically within Gotham city limits. Jason is pretty sure that Cass and her group are no more capable of leaving town at this point than anyone else is. Although maybe it has nothing to do with that and they’re all just too damn stubborn, he thinks, as he emerges into the living room and looks around.

Cass sits on the back of the couch with her feet on the cushion; she’s still in her Batgirl regalia, minus the cowl. Steph takes up a seat at her side, more straight-backed and serious than Jason has ever seen her before. She looks like the second-in-command to a queen, hard-eyed and wary, regal in her own right. Tim takes up a position at Cass’s other side, his posture more relaxed. And, surprisingly, Damian is there too - perched on a windowsill with his back to all of them, staring out at the gray fog blanketing the city.

Jason tries to reach out to Damian with his new, clumsy empathic ability - and gets nothing back. Damian isn’t connected to the network, it seems.

Cass meets his eyes, oil-puddle black, and offers him a tiny smile. She looks like herself. Awkward, and uncanny, and human nevertheless. He can feel her brushing against his consciousness - cautious, because for all the time they’ve known each other, they’ve never quite managed to be on the same page - but warm.

He blinks back, slow, reassuring. We’re in it together now.

“I’m actually really glad you’re here, Jay,” says Stephanie. “We could use your help. We’re gonna try to do something that you have more experience with than we do.”

Jason already knows what she’s going to say. Their neural network is lit up, circulating, sharing thoughts among the four of them. Still, he prompts, “Oh?”

Steph and Tim both look at Cass, who nods gravely.

“We are going to kill Batman,” she says.

Chapter Text

Dick is waiting for them. Cass can feel the horror shuddering through her little party when they see him, his wings, the rubbed-raw-pink visible in glimpses beneath the paracord. Clipped-wing bird.

“He’s inside,” Dick says softly, addressing Tim. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Tim looks at Cass. She senses that he’s uncertain. The last time he saw Bruce, the man was still mostly a man. But Cass knows what he’s become, can feel it in the bones of Gotham.

Stephanie stands on her other side, stone-still - but Cass knows that she’s prickling with excitement. She’s always known Batman couldn’t control her. Now she gets to prove it to his face.

Cass can feel Jason behind her, too - the heat and weight of his body, the roiling hostility, barely contained. Steph isn't the only one who's been waiting for this for a long time.

Damian stands between Dick and Cass, staring up at his former mentor with his hands clenched into tight fists at his sides. Maybe before, he would’ve been hard to read - but the others have her eyes now, Cass’s, and she knows the meaning of every twitch, every flicker. Damian is grieving.

“We are going in,” Cass intones, low and firm.

Dick’s wings flex against their bonds. “It’s different than you remember. He’s different.”

“We all are,” growls Jason.

Dick’s eyes flicker down to Damian. Damian looks away from him.

“Just be careful,” he says, and leads them inside.

Bruce is everywhere. His shadowed visage haunts the house, dogs their every step. But there’s a version of him waiting for them in the Cave - a massive, hulking specter of shadow, with barely anything human left of him - that seems, if nothing else, more closely coalesced.

He and Cass stare one another down across the Cave. Damian shifts at her side when Dick steps backward into Bruce’s shadow, his gaze full of pain.

Batman seems to notice Damian’s shift as well; its gaze moves and settles on him, weighing heavily there for a moment before a rumble as low as thunder rolls through the room: “Damian.”

Damian stiffens. Tim reaches out to touch his shoulder; Damian shakes him off.

“She hasn’t marked you.” The pits of what used to be Bruce’s eyes continue to bore into Damian. “You can still be saved.”

“I don’t need to be saved.” Damian sounds more bitter than confident.

“You can still be mine.” The last word hisses, shudders, reverberates in the darkness. “My Robin.”

Jason’s hand drops on Damian’s other shoulder; Jason is scowling. Damian shakes him off, too.

“Bruce,” Dick says softly, “don’t - ”

He chokes on a whimper when Bruce’s massive gauntlet shoots out from the dark shape, closing over his strapped wings and yanking him into a kneeling position.

“Richard!” Damian jolts forward. Jason’s arm is a bar across his chest, stopping him from crossing the room. Damian fights him. “Let go of me!”

“Damian, stay there,” gasps Dick, sharply enough that Damian goes still.

Cass shifts, her eyes locked on Dick, appraising what’s been done to him. What Bruce has done to him. And suddenly she’s furious, ice-cold and shaking, overcome with the urge to destroy.

She can kill him. She’s the only one who can.

In the end, Gotham chooses her champion. Cass kills him the way she killed Shiva - broken neck, easy and clean. And he falls soundlessly to the floor, the third of her parents to die by her hand.

She doesn’t register words being spoken around her until she feels the concerned press of Stephanie’s mind, reaching out to make sure she’s still with them.

Cass looks around. Tim and Jason have broken off to secure the Cave, which Cass knows is now hers. Damian has his face buried in Dick’s chest as Dick murmurs it’s okay, it’s okay to him. And Steph is sauntering up to loop her arm around Cass’s neck.

“You know what this means, right?” Steph asks, openly watching Dick and Damian embrace.

“What?”

“Well, you know how Dick was Damian’s Batman for a while? And Jason was also trying to be Batman and wanted Tim to be his Robin?”

“Yes,” Cass confirms, unsure where this is going.

Steph grins at her. “Well, now you’re Batman. Which means I get to be your Robin.”

Cass grins back. “Mine,” she agrees, and leans in for a kiss.