Chapter Text
Cass wastes no time. “Rose is here?”
Dick nods, raising his eyebrows at Cass. “Yeah, she is. Slade is kicking around. Up to no good, per usual. She thought she’d give me a heads up.”
“Bludhaven,” Cass presses. “She’s… here? Right? Bludhaven?”
“Yes, Cass,” Dick laughs. He leans against his countertop. “I promise she really is in Bludhaven, unless she’s already skipped town. She’ll be headed back to Jump City before long.”
“I heard she’s… reserve. Not as active, right?”
“That’s what that means, yeah.” Dick seems amused by Cass’s questioning. “When I was a Titan, back when we got big enough, we always had an active team and a reserve team. Always training people and cycling them through, yeah? But no one was ever left behind. Rose didn’t exactly volunteer a lot about her status with the Titans these days.”
“Tim,” Cass says.
Dick shrugs. “Tim doesn’t tell me a lot, either. He’s worried old habits will kick in and I’ll take over. Can’t say I blame him.”
“You wouldn’t,” Cass says confidently. She picks up a banana and throws it at Dick’s head, who ducks dramatically, flinging his hands up by his head. “You’re… too alone, now. You wouldn’t.”
Dick’s smile falters. Just for a moment, but Cass notices. She notices everything.
But she doesn’t say everything. Not about the way that even Dick’s–bright, white, almost pearlescent, blinding and sort of annoying–smile cannot disguise his exhaustion. Some things, Cass knows, are best left unsaid.
Her family think: see, then say. Detectives. All of them. But Cass is a detective too. Not eighteen anymore. She knows how to find clues and track down criminals.
She hunted Slade, once. Nearly beat him, too. In her own way.
“Right.” Dick clears his throat. “Well, if you’re looking for, I’m pretty sure she has a bolthole in the east side. That’s where I’d have mine, anyway.”
“Thank you,” Cass says, because she has manners and because Dick has been helpful.
Dick turns around to pour the cup of tea Cass had asked for. She is gone before he turns back around.
Rose Wilson kicks at her door.
“Stupid, motherfucker–” she curses. “Piece of shit.”
The door finally flings open. The door handle bangs against the wall, embedding another crack into the deeply flawed plaster. Her neighbour bangs his fist against the wall.
“Fuck off,” Rose calls back. She stumbles inside her doorway, using her foot to slam the door shut behind her. Arms filled with bags upon bags of groceries.
She isn’t a teenager anymore. She needs to cook, sometimes, and not just order Thai food when she’s tired. Her mother would kill her if she knew how much takeout Rose ordered when she first started living by herself. Lillian Worth rarely cooked for them. Even after she fled Cambodia, she managed to reconstruct her business in Vietnam. Everywhere in the world, there are men willing to exploit women’s bodies, and women who have nowhere else to go.
Lillian was one of those women, once. She took care to personally train Rose in self-defence. Taught her how to shoot. How to grapple. Made certain that Rose always slept with a knife under her pillow in case one of the Johns made his way through the six rows of guards and into the wrong, locked room.
Rose’s mother was always busy, so the other women took turns cooking. Sometimes Vietnamese food. Sometimes Thai. Mostly–nearly always–Cambodian food. Rose’s mother never talked about fleeing. None of the women did. But sometimes they would frown at the food being wrong.
Rose never knew the difference. Cambodian food was Cambodian food, served to her by the people in her home. Her mother told her that good nutrition is the basic to everything. She would have hung Rose by her ankles if she caught so much of a whiff of Rose giving up on cooking from scratch.
“You know who can’t afford to be picky?” Lillian often said. “Hungry people. If you are being picky, you are not hungry enough.”
Rose sets her groceries away. She has never stayed anywhere long enough to develop a system she likes. In the Titans Tower, they placed a bulk order that got dropped–because they’re idiots like that–off to the tower each week, and the groceries, along with whatever snacks the assorted teenagers had picked up, would get shoved haphazardly into the fridge.
She’s heard that it used to be more organised, when there was Troia and Dick. But now it’s just them.
Rose grabs the remote and sets herself up on the lounge to watch another episode of Grey’s Anatomy. She props her feet on the sofa. Shoes off at the door – she’s not a monster. Her mother would have hit her with a slipper. Rose was a good Cambodian child, thank you. She hit all her targets without sights.
Someone knocks at her door. Rose instantly tenses, eyeing it curiously. She sets the TV remote to the side but lets Grey’s Anatomy continue, “he’s dying of butt-worms, oh my god!”, in the background. Rose silently gets to her feet and ready to attack, moving slowly to the door.
It could be her neighbour putting in another petty voice complaint over Rose kicking her door open, but hey, it’s a shitty pre-war apartment. The hinges don’t work. The windows don’t open. Nothing works in the building block.
After all these years, Rose has a pretty damn good sense for danger. It’s kept her alive. Something tells her that her visitor isn’t a neighbour.
Her father’s voicemail is still saved on her burner phone. The one she keeps just for family. She doesn’t think he would go through the effort of tracking down one of her safe houses just for a word, but she doesn’t know much about what he gets up to these days. Something came unscrewed after the chemo incident. He helped Rose become embedded with the Titans in his own, twisted way, then disappeared.
Her teeth are on edge. Rose picks up the knife she keeps in a flower pot by the door, and tucks it into her sleeve. She opens the door a crack.
She immediately slams the door.
“NO,” Rose says loudly through the door.
“Mean,” Cassandra Cain says back. She knocks on the door again. “Rose. Ravager. Let me in.”
“WRONG ADDRESS.”
“No. Right address. You’re just blocking me.”
“WRONG. ADDRESS.”
Cassandra Cain knocks, and then there is no more door. Cain steps through the doorway then looks at the poor, broken, never-did-anything-to-anyone door, laying half off its hinges.
“Oops,” Cain says, because she really is a bastard beneath it all. She looks up and smiles hopefully. “You have time?”
“Sure,” Rose says, gesturing behind her. “Loads. All the time in the world, just for you.”
Cain snorts. “Don’t be rude. It doesn’t suit you.”
“Wow.” Rose kicks at the door. It gives ahhh, I’m broken! creaks. Rose abandons it as a lost cause and flops back on the lounge. “Y’know, sarcasm doesn’t suit you. I thought you didn’t talk.”
“Old news.” Cain strides into the apartment. Rose’s apartment. “I can read. Write. Talk.”
Cain levels Rose with a pointed glance, as if reminding Rose of her original request.
Rose throws her hands up. “Will you leave me alone if I kill you? I’m no Shiva, but I’ll stick your ass.”
Cassandra Cain bares her teeth.
“You can try,” she says.
Rose clicks the TV remote off.
“You asked for it,” she says, and does exactly that.
“Ow,” Rose says an hour later. She holds an icepack to her head.
Her apartment is trashed. At least one window–Rose wasn’t counting–is broken. The TV has a fist-sized hole straight through its centre. Her coffee table is now missing a leg, and Rose has a wicked headache blooming.
Somehow, there is blood on the ceiling. Rose doesn’t remember who bled there. Maybe her. Maybe it’s some other tenant’s blood entirely.
Next to her, Cain is radiating smugness.
“Told you,” she says. “You can try. Never said I would let you kill me.”
“You don’t need permission to kill someone,” Rose answers back. “That’s not how murder works. It’s not consensual.”
Cain cocks her head. “Mine… was consensual.”
“Your murder?”
Cain wiggles her palm. “Less murder. More… killing? Helping? Had a point to prove. Dying helped me prove it. Shiva… undid it.”
“Right,” Rose sighs. “Of course. You’re too good to stay dead. Sounds about fucking right.”
None of her brothers had bounced back from dying.
Cain frowns. She drops her hand from where she was nursing her own sprained ankle. Rose had gotten hold of it at some point during their fight and refused to let go, even when Cain sent her through the dining table. And Rose means through.
“You’re angry,” Cain observes, watching Rose roll her eyes. “About what?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Rose mumbles, mostly because she doesn’t know.
Something. Anything. Everything.
That’s what happens when your father makes you dig out your own eye as punishment for not killing your sort-of-brother’s spirit, and then replaces it with a rock that would have killed you if not for the weird, sort of enviable hero temporarily attached to you.
Rose props her feet on the broken coffee table. Her fight slowly drains out of her.
Beside her, Cain carefully watches Rose then copies her motion. Rose immediately sits upright.
“Take your fucking shoes off,” Rose barks. “Right fucking now. Christ. Who raised you?”
Cain makes direct eye contact. Rose waves her off.
“I mean metaphorically, jesus, not your dick of a dad,” Rose says. “Lighten up.”
Because Rose met her, just the once, before Slade got his hands into Cassandra. The Cassandra that came out the other end–in one piece, more or less–was not the same Cassandra that first went in.
It makes Rose a little uncomfortable, still, that her father used the same serum on her that he used for a paying contract on Cain.
Whatever. What’s done is done. Her eye is gone, her brothers are gone, her mother is gone, and her relationship with her father is mere water under the bridge now.
“You lighten up,” Cain throws back. She wrinkles her nose, disgruntled. “Why... remove shoes? Your house is already dirty. Can’t make it worse. Besides, you put feet on your table. That’s worse.”
“Aren’t you Chinese or something?” Rose pretends to grumble some more. “Just take your shoes off. It’s weird. Avoid the broken glass like the rest of us mortals.”
“You’re less mortal than me.” Cain points her finger in victory. “You… super soldier. Serum. Me? I’m normal.”
Rose snorts. “You aren’t normal, Cain. There isn’t a person in the world who could do what you do, except Shiva. And she’s too busy trying to die to do something with that.”
Cain sinks a little into the lounge.
“Yeah,” she says, abruptly sullen. “Waste of life. Shiva should do something. Be better. I’m not… how I was.”
“What, when you were mute?”
Cain shakes her head. “Not about the speaking. It’s about the seeing. I… see, now. All the time. But I was better when I only saw.”
“Disagree.” Rose reaches underneath the lounge and flicks the cap off a bottle of vodka. “But sure, be self-deprecating. Whatever.”
Rose has seen it enough with the younger heroes she now, unfortunately, plays a small role in mentoring. Most of them know her through the Titans. They hear her name and think of swords and staffs in the gym; they think of sparring knowledge that Rose can share, even if she has no patience for the rest of their petty problems. They have never had reason to fear the sight of white hair.
Rose likes it that way. Even if the Titans… well. She thought she would have left by now. Even her reservist status is more than what she was arguing with Tim over, all those months ago.
“Fuck it,” Rose decides. She motions to Cassandra. “You’re already here, using my peas and taking up space. Tell me what you want so I can get you out.”
Cain rolls her eyes. Besides the sprained ankle, she had a pack of frozen peas resting on her side to help her inflamed–but not ripped–stitches. Apparently, Clayface managed to get a lucky kick in and planted her right onto an exposed piece of piping. Shish-kabob. Rose winced when Cain told her. It’s a little insulting that Cain still managed to fight Rose to a standstill with a hole in her side.
“Need to talk,” Cain says. She makes a rude gesture at Rose. “You need to listen. Stop acting like a child.”
Rose bristles. “You’re the one who broke into my apartment. Be lucky I didn’t shoot first, ask questions later. You’re not faster than a bullet, Cain.”
Rose is deadly serious. She knows how Cassandra was trained, because it wasn’t all that different from how Rose was trained. Both modelled on the combined genius-dickery of Slade Wilson and David Cain.
Cassandra is a brilliant fighter. Probably unparalleled, if Rose is honest. But she isn’t bulletproof, and she isn’t faster than Rose and a semi-automatic.
Rose is uncomfortably aware that Cain took it easy on her during the fight. She needs something from Rose. That is not a position that sits easy with Rose.
“Don’t need to be,” Cain says. “Doesn’t matter if you hit me. I just can’t flinch.”
Rose squints. “You realise that sounds like our childhood dickery.”
Cain rolls her eyes. “Not all of it was bad training.”
“It was all bad, trust me.”
“No.” Cain visibly searches for the right word. She taps the side of her head lightly. “Still learning. I mean, not bad, but useful. Everything was useful, somehow.”
“Whatever.” Rose scoffs and drops her legs from the coffee table. She studies the bag of peas that seem progressively less frozen. “I think it’s time for you to leave. You’ve crashed on my couch long enough now.”
Predictably, Cain bulldozes straight through. There goes the point, and there goes Cain, a solid five fields away from it.
“You’re suspicious,” Cain sighs. “You don’t trust me. That’s okay. I don’t trust you either.”
“Get to the point.”
Cain shoots her a dirty look but continues. “Need your help. Deathstroke… he’s here. Nearby. Moving away quickly. I need help tracking him.”
“And you think his daughter will help you?” Rose says just to be contrary, despite having volunteered her help to Nightwing literally a matter of days ago. “Wow. Great idea, Cain.”
“Blood isn’t family.” Cain looks Rose in the eye. “You know that. You just want to make me… frustrated. I saw how he treated you.”
“Well.” Rose takes a long swig of her vodka, ignoring Cain looking curiously at the bottle. “You can ignore that like you ignored everything else. Easily, in case you missed the point.”
“You’re better.” Cain pauses. “I’m better too. We can better this time, together. Get Deathstroke properly.”
“I don’t think Batman would approve of you asking me to pull off a hit on my father,” Rose says pointedly, trying to needle at Cain’s weak spots. Rose doesn’t have a moral compunction against killing. Just an acknowledgement that it would significantly complicate her current standings in their community. “And I already knew he’s in town. Had a lovely chat with your… someone. Nightwing about it.”
“Brother,” Cain offers, but it takes her a second to think. “And Batman knows. We won’t kill him. But the Justice League… want Deathstroke. They can keep him now. Permanently. Space jail.”
Rose laughs, but Cain’s face remains serious.
“Space jail,” Rose repeats dubiously. “You realise how ridiculous that sounds.”
Cass sits up straight. She drops the bag of peas from her side.
“Not the best words,” Cass says, frustrated, “but it’s true. They have… a special station. Jail. For people too dangerous for earth. I’ve seen.”
“Nothing can hold Slade for long. Your Cain, maybe. He’s getting older and slower. But my father? No way.”
“They can hold him,” Cain says again. “If we can catch him. They prepared. Have special things to help us. Can beat Deathstroke’s super soldier-ing.”
Rose spares a moment of concern for the thought that the Justice League developed a serum that could also bring down her, then dismisses it. She isn’t big-league. No one goes looking for her anymore. The Justice League could care less what she gets up to, so long as she stays away from her father.
Rose looks into her half-empty vodka. Cain trashed her apartment and fought Rose to a stand-still for, what? Her help on a fruitless goose chase?
Her skin crawls at the thought. Rose scratches at her neck. Fucking bugs.
But Rose’s blood is also singing at the challenge. A Justice League-approved, endorsed, and presumably funded attempt at finally bringing her father in?
It might be the best chance Rose will ever get for something like justice.
Still, she hesitates.
Cain pounces at the chance. “Think, Ravager. No more Cain… and Deathstroke. Can’t train anyone. Can’t find anyone. Can’t have children. Means… no more little girls.”
Rose’s fingers tighten around her vodka, then loosen. Fuck it. She throws back the last of her vodka and looks Cain in the eye.
“No more little girls,” Rose says back firmly.
Cassandra meets her calmly.
“I know where to start,” she says.
Cassandra’s idea of starting turns out to be bumming a ride from Rose.
“You’re kidding,” Rose says when Cain tells her. “You can’t drive?”
Cassandra shrugs, unbothered. “I can drive a motorbike. Never had use for a car. Gotham, remember? And Hong Kong.”
“What did you do before?”
Cassandra makes a non-committal noise. “Walked.”
“No bicycle. No moped. No scooter. Nothing.”
“No one to teach me,” Cassandra says again, this time slightly annoyed. “I would have liked… riding a bike. Being taught."
Rose clicks her tongue. She feels bad for Cassandra. Just a little. But Cassandra also once ran a sword through Rose’s thigh, leaving her to bleed out as a distraction for Slade. Hence, Rose’s sympathy only extends so far.
“Pack your shit,” Rose says.
Cassandra raises a plastic bag. “Here.”
Rose runs a hand over her face. “You’re kidding.”
But Cassandra simply shrugs again. “I used to have more. But moved from Gotham to Bludhaven… apartment got bombed. Moved to Gotham. Lost that too. Got sent to Hong Kong. Couldn’t take much. Now, I’m back. So, empty.”
“Fuck. I hope you have a toothbrush, at least. I’m not sharing a car with you if you don’t.”
Cassandra silently raises her toothbrush. It’s purple.
Rose reluctantly unlocks the car and lets Cain step inside. Rose’s car is a secondhand Volkswagen she was most definitely scammed into buying. Rose thought she was getting the deal of her life with the white Beetle. She was so excited she even called her boyfriend at the time–before he took her father’s contract to kill her–to tell him about the purchase.
Rose got her car five metres down the street before the piece of crap gave up.
Jokes on them. Rose spent a week watching YouTube mechanic playlists then fixed the damn car herself. Now, it’s still a piece of shit car, but it’s a functioning piece of shit car, which is all the difference when you’re not a Justice Leaguer goody-two-shoes who can zeta beam themselves around the country.
Rose momentarily dreams of the Titans creating their own zeta network, then shakes the thought away.
She has always had to make do with what she has. Always.
Rose gets behind the wheel and waits until Cassandra climbs into the passenger’s seat to comment.
“You really expect me to drive cross-country to hunt down Slade,” Rose summarises. “Because you can’t drive.”
Cassandra shrugs. She climbed in neatly. She has her plastic bag sitting on her lap and is slouching back into the seat, but besides that, she seems oddly tense.
“I can bike behind,” Cassandra says, “but need to get a bike. Isn’t it easier to hunt together?”
Rose rolls her eyes and ignores the point.
“You’re paying for fuel,” Rose says. “Use that gold Batman credit-card. I know you all have one.”
Cassandra arches an eyebrow. She relaxes a touch.
“Who said that?” she asks. “Jason?”
But she doesn’t deny having a Bat-approved credit card, which means that Rose is already mentally planning how to expense everything back to Batman.
But part of her is scared of him tracking her down and forcing her to pay it all back. Gotham was the one city that she and Slade never took jobs in. He respected the Bat. Always did. He warned Rose to be wary of the Bat and the things he could do.
There are worse things than dying, Slade always said.
Rose has met nearly all of the Bat’s children. Dick, firstly. Jason as an obvious second. Then Cassandra and Tim, nearly at the same time. She figures he can’t be that bad if none of his children seem even moderately scared of him… but then again, she was never scared of Slade. She was too busy trying to impress him.
Rose turns the keys in the ignition.
“Put your seatbelt on,” she snaps at Cain, “or I will turn this car around.”
Cassandra stares at her blankly. “We haven’t even left the driveway.”
But she buckles in anyway.
Cass is pleased that Rose agreed. She hadn’t been completely sure. Cass knew Rose would want to say yes to trying to find her father again, but family is complicated, and it has been a long time for Rose.
Time doesn’t heal wounds, but it does fade them. For Cass, a little. For Rose, maybe a lot.
Cass isn’t as angry as when she was first rescued from the brainwashing. Not as blindly furious. She didn’t want help. Didn’t want to talk to anyone, and no one wanted to talk to her. Even Dick… tried to fight her. Test her. Figure her out.
But no more.
Bruce died and told Cass to hang up the cowl. Become something else. He sent her to Hong Kong as Black. Bat. And thought that was enough for her. Living… alone.
No friends. No family. No one in Hong Kong except Tim — who came for a mission but didn’t stay.
It was better than when Bruce made her stay in the cave all day. But not by much.
How can you get angry at a dead man? Cass wanted to respect his wishes. She went away, and stayed away, and only came back not-long ago.
She couldn’t be Batgirl anymore. Needed time to figure out what to become. Cass was still too mad to be grateful when Tim brought her a new costume, but she didn’t throw it away.
It was okay that Alfred was the one who helped her enrol in classes to speak. It was okay that Bruce died, in a way, and it was okay that the Outsiders fell apart, and that they didn’t trust her, and that it was hard to reform them. It hurt but was okay when Nightwing wasn’t on board with her plan to help Gotham. It was all okay.
But Cass will finally be okay if they can get Deathstroke and David Cain locked away.
Cass thinks of Marque. Her half-sister. Too angry to do anything else with her life, and too angry to succeed.
“We do this right,” Cass says aloud to Rose.
“Of course.” Rose doesn’t miss a beat, eyes still focused on the road. “I’m not an idiot. Killing them would be stupid if I can watch their ass rot in jail.”
Cass hesitates. “That’s not… what I meant.”
“What did you mean, then?”
“I don’t know.” Cass looks out the window. She fights to try again. Even after all this time, she still hates how many words everything needs. Like Cass is permanently locked out from the world, still tapping on the glass. “We need to find him… but I don’t want it to destroy us.”
Rose is silent.
“Well,” she says eventually, “we’ll just have to be better.”
What does better mean? Cass thinks but does not say.
The car sputters violently as Rose coaxes it along the road. She slams her fist against the dash, quickly flicking her eyes to check that the light went out before diverting her attention back to the road.
“Need help?” Cass asks.
“Nope.” Rose pops the p. “My car is fine.”
Said car makes another aggressive growling sound. Cass cocks her head at Rose.
“You sure?”
Rose waves Cass off. “Shut up and let me drive.”
“Don’t crash.”
“I won’t, jeez. You make sure Batman foots the bill, and we’ll be peachy keen. Swear.”
“No scout’s honour?”
Rose grins, teeth sharp. “I was never a scout, was I?”
Something clicks in the back axel. Cass decides to ignore it. Can’t die… three times, right?
Rose turns her blinker on and finally enters the freeway. She slams the car into maximum speed, screaming across two lanes to settle into her preferred position. Rose drives almost hunched over the wheel. Knuckles tight, fixed with concentration.
Cass sights upright.
“Hang on,” she says, squinting at Rose. “Can you drive with one eye?”
“Yes,” Rose says, as the car rattles. “Now shut up and stop distracting me. Put on some music.”
“That would be more distracting,” Cass mumbles to herself, but she locates a CD under her seat and slots it into the player.
Rose flips off a car honking at them.
“Already going the limit, asshole,” she snaps.
She’s Kerosene blasts through the speaker. Cass blinks in surprise.
“~I’ve been burned for the last time~”
Rose lays on the horn at another car. Cass doesn’t feel safe anywhere, but she trusts Rose enough to close her eyes and draw a blanket across her lap.
Cass settles back for the ride.