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Cass is angry at Bruce. She doesn’t know why.
Bruce is angry at Cass. He knows why, but he doesn’t know how to say it.
They’re like this, sometimes, when all their words have gone away. Most of the time, they communicate with ease. Neither of them requires words to speak. But sometimes—sometimes, there’s this chasm between them, wide and uncrossable and filled with silence.
It’s rare that Cass and Bruce fight. Jason joked that he wasn’t even sure it could happen because Cass and Bruce are “basically the same person.” Cass knows it was half a joke, half not, but all wrong. They ended up in the same place. Vigilantes. No killing. Family. But Bruce functions on lines and rules and patterns, while Cass slips through the world guided by her heart. And yet, there’s an understanding between them that doesn’t need to be voiced. So, yes, this silence between them—not just of voices, but of bodies, of thoughts—is unusual. And because it’s unusual, everyone in the family has noticed.
Jason jokes. Alfred politely suggests that ‘perhaps the pair of you should discuss your grievances, Miss Cassandra.’ That makes Cass bristle, though she doesn’t know why. But most of the family don’t say anything, because they have nothing to say. They don’t know why Cass and Bruce are fighting. Cass doesn’t know why Cass and Bruce are fighting.
Barbara calls Cass to the Clocktower after patrol. “Maybe you should stay with me for a little while,” Barbara suggests. “I think you need some space.”
“No,” Cass says sharply. She does not need space. How is she supposed to fix this if she can’t see Bruce, can’t read him? Cass needs to understand. She can’t understand from the Clocktower. And she does have space at the Manor. Bruce is almost never around anyway.
“Being around Bruce when he’s like this is stressful. I can see you two giving each other death glares. If you stay here, things will calm down and then you can talk about it.” There is a twisting feeling in Cass’s stomach. She hates it. Why would Barbara even suggest this?
Cass clenches her fists. “No!” she shouts with her eyes closed. And then, she leaps out the window.
The next night, Cass stands in the cave across from Bruce. She had been assigned to patrol on her own yet again and got back to the cave far later than Bruce, but he waited for her. Their uniforms are off, but neither of them has gone upstairs. They both know what happens next.
Cass steps forwards. She can see the anger radiating off Bruce like a neon sign. Yes. Tonight will be the night. “Tell me,” she says.
Bruce’s jaw clenches tighter. “Let’s spar,” he says.
Cass grins.
The two of them walk past the bench and to the training mats. The label of “Cassandra Cain” on the case with her weapons taunts her. Cass turns away. Neither vigilante takes any of the weapons. Instead, they simply face each other and slide into fighting stances as easily as breathing. And then, they begin.
There are two ways to spar in this family. There’s sparring, where you fight to train. Blows light, stopping before they hit. Gentle. Safe. And then there’s this. It started when Cass and Bruce were drugged, and it worked then. It works when they do it now, too. This is called a spar, but it’s really a fight—and a conversation.
Bruce starts this time. When Cass is the only one angry, she moves first. But she’s still trying to get a read on Bruce, so this time, she waits until Bruce’s kick flies towards her face, hard enough to break her nose. Angry. He’s angry. But Cass already knows that, so she needs more.
She ducks the kick. Easy. Cass leaps into the air with a kick of her own, landing on a hand and springing up to send a second kick flying towards Bruce’s face. He blocks with his arm. No pain shows in his body. Before Cass can flip back onto her feet, Bruce’s knee catches her in the back, sending her sprawling on the training mats, the breath knocked out of her.
Cass stands, just barely dodging out of the way of Bruce’s palm strike on her way up. She sees Bruce’s next punch before it even begins, blocking his punch and redirecting its motion. Cass’s counterstrike hits with a dull thud. Bruce reels back, then works his jaw and spits to the side, his saliva tinged with red. First blood.
Cass is angry at Bruce, but it’s a sick, tired sort of anger. Anger that pools like poison in her gut. Not anger that burns like fire. Cass doesn’t like the pain that she reads in Bruce’s body.
But it’s not just pain there. There’s also satisfaction. Bruce is satisfied. Cass doesn’t understand. But it’s something. It’s more than she knew before the fight began.
Cass lunges towards Bruce, exchanging a flurry of blows with him. She blocks his every strike and he blocks hers. They are getting nowhere with this, so Cass throws a roundhouse kick, leaving herself open. Bruce takes the opening. Cass reads his punch as it chambers and dodges it, only for Bruce’s elbow to strike her just below the neck. She stumbles, and then Bruce’s feet slam into her chest, throwing her back.
She needs to recover. Cass is already falling—she can’t stop it. But she spins as she topples over and launches herself forwards, sliding past Bruce. It gives her enough of a delay to get back to her feet. Her chest aches as she stands.
It’s on. Cass’s next move is a nerve strike. If it hit, it would temporarily paralyze Bruce. It doesn’t hit. She curls her hands into fists.
Bruce lands a punch to her cheek, but she repays it with two blows to his jaw and a two-legged acrobatic kick to his chin. Her bare feet hit with a crack! that echoes through the cave. When Cass springs to her feet, Bruce catches her in an armlock. Her bones creak beneath his hands. Cass pauses a moment, lets him think he’s won. Then she twists, reverses the lock, and flips Bruce over her head. The moment he hits the ground, he’s already springing to his feet and catching Cass with a hard blow to her ribs. On Cass’s next punch, he catches her off guard and topples her to the ground at the edge of the training mats. Stupid. Cass wasn’t paying attention to her surroundings, too focused on Bruce. Her skull bounces off the stone floor, sending a wave of pain through her head.
“Fight harder,” Bruce grunts. His body echoes his words. Please, it says. It screams. It needs. Fight harder.
Cass understands now. She understands what Bruce was trying to say. But she still doesn’t know why she is mad.
“Angry,” Cass says as she lands a palm strike to Bruce’s chin that forces him back and allows Cass room to get up. She stands, dizzy. “Scared. You think I’m reckless.” Bruce kicks. Cass dodges. “I am not.”
Bruce tries a spinning kick, but Cass knows early enough to catch him completely off guard. She could land a nerve strike. She could end this fight. Instead, she shoves him away with all her might.
Cass thinks she is beginning to understand. A smile starts to work its way onto her face as she dodges Bruce’s next punch and gives herself fully into the fight. She strikes again. Bruce parries. Blood drips from her nose. Side kick. Punch. Dodge. Duck. Flip kick. Elbow. Blood stains the mats. Careful not to slip.
This is good. This is working.
And then Cass hears the sound of boots slamming on the cave’s stone floor and, before she can react, Bruce is stumbling away. Not from her, but from Dick.
Dick, who is standing there eyes blazing, knuckles white as his hands clench his escrima sticks. He thinks—he thinks he is protecting, Cass realizes. He doesn’t understand.
But before Cass can find the words to explain, Dick shoots forward, twisting around and hitting Bruce in the neck. And then, Bruce is on the ground, hands raised as Dick stands over him.
“Dick,” Bruce says. “Listen, it’s—”
“Stop talking,” Dick orders. He points an escrima at Bruce. “I don’t want to hear you speak.”
Cass needs to explain. But she’s still in fighting mode. Body mode. Motion mode. Not word mode. She doesn’t know how to tell Dick what she and Bruce were trying to do.
“We were sparring,” Bruce tries.
Cass knows immediately that he has made things worse. “Sparring?” Dick spits. “That’s really where you want to go, Bruce?”
“Stop,” Cass tries to say, but the sound doesn’t cross her lips. She breathes heavily, raising one hand to press against her head and dull the pain.
But Dick turns to Cass anyway. “Go upstairs,” he says. “I’ll deal with this.”
Cass shakes her head. How does she say this? How does she explain? There is blood on her face and on Bruce’s. One of her ribs is bruised. She thinks she may have fractured Bruce’s jaw. But she’s beginning to understand, and that’s worth all of this.
Bruce is scared. Bruce thinks she’s putting herself in danger. Bruce wants to keep her safe. That’s why he’s angry. He didn’t know how to say it with his words until they were fighting, until he told Cass to try harder to protect herself. And Cass was so close to understanding her own anger before Dick stopped the fight.
“We were talking,” Cass says. She gestures to herself and Bruce. “Sparring. To understand.”
Dick looks away from Bruce. The anger remains in his body, but his face grows softer when his gaze falls on Cass. “That’s not sparring. If it was sparring, you wouldn’t be bleeding.”
Bruce starts to get up. Dick’s attention switches to him in an instant. He slams a boot into Bruce’s chest. “Stay down.”
“Stop it!” Cass insists. She rushes at Dick, striking his chest hard enough to send him stumbling away from Bruce. Then, she reaches out a hand to Bruce. Bruce takes it. She pulls Bruce to his feet and reaches to wipe away the spot of blood at the corner of his lips. “Him too. Bleeding.” Dick’s grip on his escrima sticks loosens. Just a little, but to Cass, it’s clear as day. “We didn’t…have any words,” Cass says. “So we spar.”
When Dick speaks, he sounds lost. That gets across to Cass more than the words. “Babs thought you would pull something like this, Bruce. She told me to be here. And she was right. I can’t—I can’t believe you’d do this to Cass.”
“She grew up with no human contact,” Bruce says quietly. But there’s confidence in his voice. Good. Bruce listens to Dick, but he can’t listen here. Cass doesn’t want to lose the only way she knows she can talk to Bruce. “Just violence. Fighting is Cassandra’s language. We needed to fight to understand each other. This—” Bruce gestures to the sparring mats. “It was a conversation, Dick. Nothing more.”
“Babs told me you’d say that.” Dick shakes his head violently. “You don’t talk to your daughter by hitting her.” Dick is—scared. Angry. Protective. He thinks Bruce is hurting Cass. That’s wrong. Cass needs to fix this.
And Dick is still talking to Bruce. Not Cass. Even though she is the one he thinks he is protecting.
“Bruce is right,” Cass says, angling her body so she’s between Dick and Bruce. She hates playing mediator. Especially when she’s still angry and doesn’t fully understand why. But she can’t bring herself to hate Dick for forcing her to do this. Because he cares. He’s trying to help her. Cass is Jason and Tim and Duke and Damian’s big sister, but she is Dick’s little sister, and that matters. “It works. You fight to hurt. I fight to understand.” Cass reaches out, turning her back to Bruce, and places a hand on Dick’s shoulder. “This is good.”
“You can’t work out your issues like this. It’s wrong, and—”
“Then how? I don’t have words. Bruce doesn’t have words.” There’s silence between them. Cass can’t let the silence be between their bodies too.
“Well, I have plenty of words,” Dick says. “Words like, ‘Bruce is a bastard’ and ‘What the hell?’ and ‘Are you freaking crazy?’” He directs the last two at Bruce, anger momentarily flaring in his eyes once again.
Hand still on Dick’s shoulder, Cass turns him gently away from Bruce.
“This isn’t right,” Dick says.
“Silence isn’t right,” Cass counters.
She doesn’t think that’s quite the right word, but Dick seems to understand. He finally replaces his escrima sticks on his back and sits down on the bench a few feet away, burying his head in his hands. “You two can’t resolve your arguments by attacking each other,” Dick says.
“Do you have a better idea?” Bruce challenges.
“Don’t think you’re off the hook,” Dick says. “And yes, I do. If you can’t find the words to talk to each other, then you both talk to me. And I’ll help.” But Cass doesn’t have any words at all. “And if you can’t do that, then you—I don’t know, you dance battle or something. Or you just stay angry. But this? This isn’t okay, Bruce. I think you know that.” And Bruce hangs his head. Guilt. He shouldn’t feel guilty. “If this happens again—” Dick swallows. “If—You can’t do this. Do you understand?”
Dick is the one who doesn’t understand, though. He’s taking the way Cass has learned to talk since birth. He’s stealing her voice. Just because he doesn’t like the idea of— Cass doesn’t even know what’s making Dick so upset. “Why?” She asks. There is anger in her, and grief, and frustration. If she were looking at herself, she would see it. But Dick can’t.
Dick looks Cass in the eyes. “Because he’s your father,” Dick says.
And Cass realizes why she was angry. She turns away from Dick, stepping towards Bruce. Then, she throws both hands out and pushes him, hard. Just like she did in the spar. “You push me away,” she says. “I patrol alone. Too much space.”
“I’m trying to—”
“Stop it,” Cass says. Her voice is calm. Her body is not. She thinks Bruce can see that, at least. “Please.”
“Okay,” Bruce whispers.
Cass closes her eyes. The fight is finally over. She leans forward, wrapping her arms around Bruce’s chest and holding him. She will never stop feeling awe at the fact that she is allowed to do this now. Allowed to hold him close.
When Cass pulls back, she points at the weapons case where her not-name sits. “You changed it,” Cass says. “You said you changed my name. Cassandra Wayne.” Cass sees her older brother watching them from his reflection in the cases. He is still angry and scared and hurt. But less, now.
Bruce’s gaze falls on the case. The guilt returns. “I’m sorry,” he says.
Cass doesn’t want him to be sorry. She just wants to hold him again. Not fighting, just arms and warm and safe. “No sorries,” Cass says. “Just fix it. I am Cassandra Wayne.”
“Yes,” Bruce agrees. “You are.”