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“Something’s wrong with Cass.”
Tim Drake-Wayne sits at the table, his hands clutching a steaming mug of chestnut-brown coffee. He sips from it, body held forward at the edge of the seat, and Bruce’s gaze flickers up to take him in.
Too pale, crescents of shadow under his eyes. His shoulder blades jut out from packed muscle under his thin shirt; he’s not too skinny but there isn’t an extra ounce of fat on him. He’s too tense for his usual deceptive slackness, the way he slouches like he’s just a haphazard jigsaw puzzle of limbs and bones and curves.
Bruce takes all this in with an impossibly bright swell of fondness in his chest and then returns his gaze to the newspaper. He sips his own coffee, imagining he can feel his hair actively graying. The worry for his children is a familiar thing, a burden carried and coddled and worn smooth with constant handling— at times, it grows heavier, at other times lighter, but it hasn’t ever really gone away. Not since he bundled a little, shivering acrobat wrapped in his overcoat into the backseat of his car.
“I know,” he says to Tim, who minutely relaxes over his coffee.
The boy is curled over it now like it is his only sense of warmth in the wilderness.
“Oh. Good. Stephanie wasn’t sure you…okay. You’re taking care of it?”
“I am keeping an eye on the situation,” Bruce says, which is his way of saying I’m still puzzling this one out because I have no idea what the hell went wrong. He peers at Tim briefly over the rims of his reading glasses. “Do you have any pertinent information?”
Tim’s face screws up into something sharply frustrated, brows knit and lips slightly pursed and parted. It smooths out almost as quickly as it came, with some obvious effort.
“Do I have any pertinent infor— I just told you something was…” Tim sighs and doesn’t move. Dick would rub a hand over his mouth, but Tim’s never been one for agitated motion. He prefers stillness when upset, as if he wants to blend enough with the furniture to maybe be left alone.
“Tim,” Bruce says. “I’m listening.”
That’s all the signal Tim needs to go forward.
“I don’t know when it started. She’s been on edge. She’s been avoiding me, and Stephanie.”
This is actual news to Bruce, who has his own concerns but assumed Cassandra’s frequent absence from the Manor was the result of her spending more time with Stephanie or others.
“She’s not been with Stephanie,” Bruce says flatly. The worry grows exponentially, swelling until he has no appetite for breakfast or coffee or any of the day’s necessary plans.
“No,” Tim says. “She hasn’t been here?”
“Hn,” Bruce says.
“We thought she’d been here instead.” Tim is like a statue. His frown is etched deep, a jagged rift across the marble of his smooth face and chin.
“I’ll look into it,” Bruce says. “Get some sleep, Tim.”
“It’s seven in the morning,” Tim protests, pulling the coffee close to his chest.
“Then you’ve been up long enough, I’d say,” Bruce counters. He reaches out and pries the coffee mug from Tim’s grip, and it’s reluctantly surrendered— but surrendered all the same.
“You can’t know that I didn’t sleep,” Tim says.
“Did you?” Bruce asks.
Tim’s jaw works while he stares at him, considering.
“No,” he says crisply. “I was busy.”
“Sleep,” Bruce says. “I’ll find Cass. And give her some time. She needs space to deal with things.”
This reassurance seems to sway Tim more than direct questions about his health or sleep habits, and his shoulders sag.
“Okay,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “Let me know if you need help.”
Bruce watches him shuffle out of the dining room and he looks down at his own breakfast, and abandons it for the Cave.
There’s no sign of his daughter downstairs, where she often lurks if she’s upset. She used to flee to random rooms around the city, boarded up spaces full of dust and broken drywall and rotting wood. The closer she grew to Batman and then to Bruce, the more she used the Cave instead.
He pulls up recent activity logs and files. The language barrier initially meant she never filled out patrol or case reports like the others, but when she was given language, the habit was presented as training: typing, cataloging. The jumble of run-on sentences full of typos and— when’d she’d discovered it— dozens of clip art files, gradually took shape into reports that were terse but factual and useful.
Her recent days are suspiciously empty, with short patrols and entire nights off. There’s a single note about using the VR machine with Tim’s assistance to practice Mandarin several weeks prior that is barely a cause for concern. She’d taken a trip to New Orleans tracking a cold lead on an old case and had come back empty handed— Bruce suspects this was an excuse to burn off restless energy.
Other than the absence of activity, there is no clear pattern or single event to trigger upset. Where another kid might try to hide something obviously triggering, or upsetting, by denial or aversion to revisit it through typing, Cass never does. She’s ruthless with herself when it comes to logged reports, once she accepted their function, and more than once Bruce has found an explanation for her spiraling bluntly on screen.
Close to noon, he accepts that he’s not making it into work— even late or for a half day— and retreats to find lunch and clear his head.
He finds Cassandra upstairs, at the table with Duke and Damian and Tim.
“I got three hours,” Tim says, before Bruce can even open his mouth.
He debates engaging in the argument that will result if he forbids patrol in favor of recovering sleep deficit, but he catches Damian’s predatory expression and decides it can wait.
Bruce knows he’s not a natural at this, at juggling sibling conflict, but he’s learning.
“I need some eyes on a stakeout,” Duke says, watching Bruce as he joins them. “Someone who knows the Diamond District.”
“Suck-up,” Tim mutters, kicking at Duke under the table.
“What? I do!” Duke protests, his grin quick and crisp. “I’ll bring snacks? And a twenty-sided die?”
“Fine, fine,” Tim says, putting his head down on his crossed arms, body leaning across the table. “Bribery is a cheap shot, you jerk.”
“Cassandra,” Bruce says, and she flinches. “I need to speak with you after lunch.”
“Busy,” she says. “Going to Steph’s.”
The truncated sentences alone are a cause for concern. If she bolts, he’ll have a hell of a time tracking her down, and he doesn’t believe for a second she’s actually going to Stephanie Brown. There’s a guilty hunch to her.
“It’s important,” he says. “Then you can go.”
Cassandra growls, a little irritated huff far more like an appropriate teenage display than most of her other behavior. She nods but won’t look at him.
When Alfred brings lunch in, Damian monopolizes the conversation with a discussion that’s more like a college lecture on wild canine behavior that reflects his recent reading material. Bruce lets him talk, watching Cass, while Tim and Duke whisper to each other when Damian won’t pause.
Damian has barely touched his food when Bruce finishes, and he catalogs this reminder to himself paired with an internal scolding: the kid is so desperate for his attention, so eager to keep it. He needs to stay home from work more often when he’s not injured. Damian won’t press or ask, like Dick would.
The consolation to his self-recrimination is that Cassandra is staring at Bruce and she seems…relaxed. Whatever he’s telegraphing about enjoying just sitting with them has put her at ease.
Then, Duke whispers something to Tim that makes Tim’s equal quiet crack— he laughs, a choked and loud sound, while trying to keep from spewing a mouthful of water across the table. Damian turns to him with an affronted fury, and snaps, “One would think your actual parents had spent at least enough time with you to instill manners, Drake.”
“Damian,” Bruce snaps, though he suspects the cruelty is out of a desire to keep Bruce’s attention.
It’s like juggling feral cats sometimes.
Tim has gone white as a sheet with hurt or rage, but before he can respond, it is Cassandra who literally hurls herself over the table knocking glasses over and slamming Damian and his chair back onto the ground.
Surprised howling fills the room and Damian is fast, his whole life has been combat training and it is a language more native to him than English— but he is not an equal match for Cassandra.
Bruce and Tim and Duke are motionless for one shocked second and then Bruce moves, like lightning, sticking his hands into the middle of the fray to pull them apart. One of them bites his hand and he shouts, and tries again.
It is barely a fight. Cassandra is on the offensive and Damian, smaller and on his back, is merely blocking wild blows. Bruce stops trying to grab both of them and catches Cassandra around the waist, using his own weight as leverage to fall back and get her away.
Tim hauls Damian into the clear, and the younger boy is so bewildered and terrified he doesn’t even turn on him. Duke helps them both up while Bruce, sitting on the floor beside the head of the table, snakes arms and legs like clamps around Cassandra while she shrieks and writhes.
He wants this to be toxin. He wants it to be mind control or a flashback or anything, anything that isn’t Cassandra this hurt and angry in the present moment. It’s been a few months since he’s had to put any of the kids in safety holds and he hates it every time.
She breathes hard, struggling against his iron grip, and if this were a real battle she probably could escape. But she’s aware of just enough to not want to stab him or fracture something, so she wrestles while the boys creep out of the room. Tim, in the hall, says something about cleaning Damian’s lip while Damian apologizes stiffly to him.
When she finally goes slack for two seconds, Bruce lets her go. She springs out of his grip, whirling on him with fire in her eyes, and his suspicion is confirmed: she knows exactly where she is and what she’s doing.
“I hate…this family,” she pants. “Hate, hate, hate.”
“Cassandra,” Bruce says, rubbing his wrist. She didn’t fracture but spraining was within her accepted limits, apparently. “We need to talk.”
“No,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. She picks up a toppled over glass and hurls it at the wall with a scream. “No! Talking doesn’t fix anything! It’s just stupid words!”
Then, with another ragged cry, she stomps out of the room and slams the door. Bruce knows before he climbs to his feet that even if he runs, she’ll already be gone. He sighs, runs a hand through his hair, and turns to survey the damage.
Alfred joins him from the doorway, one eyebrow raised.
“I don’t know,” Bruce says, to the unspoken question. “Cancel my meetings for the week. I’m going to be busy.”
Four days pass without any signs of Cassandra.
The story trickles from Tim and Duke through the reaches of their family, so Stephanie and Barbara are looking, too. Dick and Jason spend an entire night sweeping old haunts. Damian is silent while he helps Bruce search, and it is the second day and a gentle reprimand from Alfred and text from Dick that lead Bruce to finally reassure Damian that it’s not his fault, even if he shouldn’t talk to Tim like that.
“I know, I know, Father,” Damian says sharply to both points, but he unwinds a little and Bruce swears at himself for not seeing guilt for what it was sooner. He thinks he should recognize it in his own son when he is so familiar with it himself.
The search lets up when cases demand attention, when patrol cannot be neglected. Bruce, oversensitive to the pattern of disaster whenever a child runs away, does not sleep.
He reminds himself she is capable, left under her own power, is probably fine. Or, fine enough to survive until she’s cooled off enough to return.
A nagging fear says, but what if she doesn’t want to?
Pie with Clark and a long conversation he doesn’t think he should need, but does anyway, helps quell this and keep it small. It doesn’t entirely vanish.
When Cassandra wants to return, and Bruce has to trust she will, she will do so.
Exhaustion and helplessness force him into bed eventually. He sleeps like the dead for six hours, hardly enough to make up for his massive slept debt, but his desperate body responds to this as if he’d given it an entire weekend of lounging.
He wakes suddenly, completely alert, to a body beside him. He stills, quiets his breathing, and she might be the one with high natural empathy but he can feel the hurt in the room.
It tightens in his throat.
“Cassandra,” he says, his voice lowered to a soft whisper. “Cub. What’s wrong?”
She sniffles in the dark and when she turns her face up to him, he can see tear tracks on her cheeks. He twists and turns on the bedside light before settling back down. The burnished bronze of her skin is ashy, and tinged with pink.
With a hunch, Bruce holds his wrist to her forehead. She closes her eyes briefly and leans into the touch. She’s burning up.
“You’re sick,” he says, pushing himself back up. “I’m going to get water and medicine.”
“No,” Cassandra pleads hoarsely. “Wait. Need to show you.”
Masking his frantic panic, Bruce does a visual sweep of the sheets in the lamplight to check for blood. There’s nothing.
Cass sits up and crawls out of the bed, and takes his robe off the back of a nearby chair. She puts it on and waits for him to follow. Her short cropped hair is tangled and matted with sweat, and she brushes it out of her eyes listlessly while he throws on a t-shirt.
They don’t speak while she leads him down to the cave, though he almost insists on a stop for medication and fluids. She leans against him in the elevator with a tiny sigh, and then trudges ahead of him around the perimeter of the cave.
There are various smaller passages that offshoot the main cavern, some of them blocked or netted off, some sealed completely and others used for backup storage. She’s noiseless as she slips down a narrow tunnel leading to an old, collapsed portion; Bruce has to wriggle with his chest and back against stone to fit through.
After twenty feet of darkness and sidling, they come to a little cave that’s little more than an 8x8x8 box— it’s a cell of stone, essentially, with one wall of jagged, piled rock. It’s lit with battery-powered lanterns and there’s a sleeping bag on the floor with a thick pile of blankets. A stack of non-perishable snack foods and dozens of discarded wrappers line a smoother wall.
Beside the blankets sits a simple box and goggles set.
The VR machine.
The one Tim had helped her set up for Mandarin practice.
Bruce frowns, and Cass drops to the pile of blankets like she’s reclaiming a nest or den. She kneels there and holds out another pair of goggles, and shakes it at him, until he lowers himself to sit with her and takes the second pair.
“Is this where you’ve been?” Bruce asks, forcing himself to sound calm when inside he’s a whirlwind of shrieking anger at himself. She was right there in the Manor, the whole time, and his anger is creeping to include her because she should have known better…
Until she glances at him, with a nod, and cringes back from whatever she sees in him.
Bruce closes his eyes, utilizes one of his many relaxation techniques to clear his head and heart. Later. Later they can talk about how to ask for space.
When he opens his eyes, she’s staring at him. She coughs.
“Not your fault,” she says, and he swallows against the way this unfurls in his gut because it’s not just Damian he can’t see it in, sometimes— the guilt is so prevalent sometimes he forgets it’s there, the way he doesn’t have to think about breathing.
She fiddles with the box, overly familiar with it and its dials and controls. It surprises him. Cassandra has never intuitively adopted technology the way some of the others respond to it.
With an impatient tug at his arm, she motions for him to put the goggles on. She slides the other pair on and the matted spots of her hair make sense now; it’s exactly where the band presses it down, the headset swallowing her ears.
Bruce adjusts his own goggles and waits, curious and full of dread at what horror she’s been reliving that she now feels compelled to share.
There’s a hum of machinery and then blinding brightness.
It’s immersive, it was designed to be immersive and convincing and it still nearly takes his breath away.
He’s standing at the edge of a field, the Manor in the distance. The field is vivid, vibrant yellow tulips for a hundred feet. Cassandra, beside him, sighs and stoops to cradle a blossom in her palm. She plucks it and sniffs it, then hands it to Bruce.
“Your favorite,” he says.
“Yes,” she answers, starting to walk.
They approach the house and Bruce is tense; he knows it isn’t real but he’s still wary of the emotional whiplash, braced for the fire or the explosion or whatever is bound to go wrong.
He’d packed this machine away because Alfred insisted, because he couldn’t stop watching his son die. Somehow, watching him die was easier than living without him.
Cassandra tiptoes to the window. She’s wearing jeans and a hoodie, and he stands beside her to gaze into the sunroom. The floor to ceiling windows aren’t glazed with reflective material on this side of the house, and the interior is so easy to see it’s tempting to forget the glass is even there.
Inside, Bruce himself is there, in a chair. He looks younger, but not much, and there is a child on his lap. A child with dark hair and oaky brown skin and eyebrows like his own.
He’s reading to him, from a book of animals.
“Damian,” Bruce realizes, watching his younger self hold a younger Damian. This is a moment they never got to have. The boy cuddled securely on his lap can’t be more than three. He cannot help how choked he is when he demands, “Cassandra, what is this?”
Some sort of bizarre apology? A manipulative attempt at cruelty? Neither seem like Cassandra— she’s capable of both, not likely to use either.
“Watch,” she says, a little dreamily. She coughs.
Inside, the figures don’t notice them. Voices approach, joining the reading of the book and then drowning it in playful shouts. A young girl and another boy, probably nine or ten, tumble into the room and their shouts die off while they lean on either side of the chair.
Cass.
And Tim.
When the teenager joins them, he sweeps Damian off Bruce’s lap and Bruce recognizes him immediately: this is Dick, the way Dick looked his last year at home before his disastrous attempt at college.
Small Cass and Tim tug Bruce to his feet and he’s protesting something, but laughing, and it is like a knife in real Bruce’s chest.
The twist of the blade is the young teen who flies into the room next, and in a fluid leap is on Bruce’s back with a wolfish howl of triumph.
Jason.
Real Bruce, watching from outside, feels his knees go weak. He puts a hand on the glass to hold himself up. This is Jason the year he met him, the year he adopted him.
“Cassandra,” he says, his voice a low warning.
Inside, they’ve cajoled Bruce into something.
“Fine, fine,” he’s saying. “Ice cream after dinner. Only if you eat vegetables.”
The collective groan is loud but he holds his ground.
“I like broccoli,” tiny Damian chirps from Dick’s arms.
“Because you’re a baby,” Tim shoots back.
Some things, it seems, do not change.
Except here, the insult is smoothed over within seconds— a cuddle with Dick, a smiling apology from Tim. It’s easy. It’s quick. It ruins nothing.
The twist of a knife in his chest drags down into his stomach with cold certainty.
This isn’t an apology or a punishment for whatever Cass has been doing or wherever she disappeared to while angry.
This is what she’s been doing.
This isn’t for him— she’s showing him the thing that is for her.
There’s a soft click and the scenery fades out and back in, except this time they’re inside, in a room with a crib and decorated with soft, cheery colors and full of stuffed animals. A night light shaped like a ballerina casts a gentle haze over the nursery, and by the windows, Bruce is there again, even younger.
He paces back and forth, humming, a baby with wisps of black hair cuddled against his shoulder. She’s blinking sleepily, his shirt clutched in one tiny hand, while he walks with her and begins to sing.
Just like in real life, his voice is rough and low and then transitions to a smooth baritone. Has Cassandra ever heard him really sing? He can’t remember.
Baby Cassandra shifts and coos contentedly and falls asleep. Younger Bruce keeps ambling back and forth with her, rubbing her tiny back.
His throat has a lump in it when he turns to look at Cassandra, who is watching the scene with tears in her bloodshot eyes and a reverent expression.
“Cassie. Princess,” he says, barely able to get the words out.
“Normal,” she says, not taking her eyes off her fictional infant self secure in fictional Bruce’s arms. “This is a family. A normal family.”
Another click and the scene fades, and Bruce nearly cries out in protest. He holds it back on his tongue, reminding himself that this isn’t real and it never was. It’s a siren song to stay, to soak it in and pretend. His face is wet with tears and his heart is cracked in two, because he should have been able to hold her like that; someone should have and he knows that nobody did.
The room is flooded with sunlight now, the same room but with a twin bed and more toys and pictures pinned on the wall. Tiny ballet shoes hang from a hook, and a cup of crayons and markers are spilled on the desk over a Batman folder.
Cassandra is seven or eight, he thinks. Her hair is still short but there’s a yellow hair clip pinning her bangs back, and the bobbed ends swish to the side when she turns and offers her playmate one of the walkie-talkies she’s clutching.
It doesn’t take any effort to identify her companion. He’d know that jutted, determined little face wreathed with messy blonde anywhere. It’s Stephanie, with an overstuffed backpack she’s shrugging off onto the floor while she takes the walkie-talkie. They’re discussing spying on Alfred, but Bruce hardly hears it— he looks at his own Cassandra, the real Cassandra, again.
She’s watching the girls run from the room with a wistful smile.
“A sleepover,” she says.
Bruce walks to the window to watch them tear out onto the lawn, where Tim and Duke are darting around in hooded capes with bows and staves in hand. Jason is trying to do handstands with Dick, and then tackles the older boy and abandons him to chase the younger boys like he’s a monster. There’s screaming and Stephanie and Cass fling themselves into the chaos, four against one.
Jason is laughing.
Bruce uses his sleeve to dry his face, turning from the window, before something catches his eye. It’s himself, walking across the patio with an infant Damian in his arms.
The cry he’d held back earlier strangles him now, and he puts his hands over his face. He cannot fall apart in front of his sweet and wounded daughter, he will not let himself be torn apart by this false reality, but it is so cutting and precise.
Cassandra links her arm through his and there’s a series of clicks.
Opening gifts on Christmas.
Alfred bandaging her knee while she sits on the counter with an ice lolly.
A fight resolved between her and Tim.
Snuggling in fleece rabbit pajamas for a bedtime story.
Bruce carrying her again, from the foyer to bed in a party dress.
In every vision, nearly all of them are accounted for, everyone smiling or bounding back quickly from small slights. It’s homey and cozy and warm, saccharine sweet, so Bruce hungers for it at the same time it sets his teeth on edge.
Then there’s a final click and they’re simply back in the dully lit cave. Cassandra removes her goggles and folds herself into a tight knot of limbs, her head buried.
“Sorry,” she mutters, sullen and miserable.
Bruce sets the goggles aside and takes a moment to compose himself, to dry his face that is actually damp from crying. He inhales slow and steady, filling his lungs and then letting it all out.
He scoots around in the small cave and folds her into his arms. She weeps then, a desolate and thin sound.
The idea of what they could have had, should have had, is a mere fantasy to Bruce— a dangerous indulgence. He suspects for her it was a hope, an addictive peace that was easily won and rarely tarnished. No wonder she fled from real life, with its conflicts and misunderstandings and cruelty.
Her attack on Damian now makes perfect, ugly sense: the insult was friction in a meal that was otherwise close to the easy-going fiction she had begun to judge everything by.
The part that destroys him, that makes it hard to speak, is knowing that she isn’t wrong to want it: it isn’t real, but that fantasy represents years of security that were stolen from her, just like Jervis Tetch had once given him a dreamlife that replaced the safety stolen from him.
Finally, he manages.
“Cassandra,” he says, planning on a explanation of why this can’t keep happening, of how life is flawed even when children are young. Damian is proof of that. His early days with young Dick were not without conflict. Instead, he remembers the way she sees people, and that she doesn’t need reminders about how real life is hard. She weeps harder at her name and he settles on dropping his chin into her hair and tugging her closer.
“I know,” he says while she cries. “I know.”
She’s seventeen and not a baby and once upon a time, she was, and someone didn’t hold her and rock her to sleep at night.
He can let her have this without a lecture.
When Cassandra stops crying, it’s because she’s coughing. She coughs and coughs until he’s patting her back and gently pulling her to her feet because they have to get out of this box.
She needs rest and medicine and he’s not going to let her languish, ill, in a chilly nook of the cave.
“Dad,” she says, her voice hoarse, when they get out of the tunnel. He tries not to startle at the address. “Can you lock it up?”
“Yes,” he says, firmly, relieved he won’t have to convince her.
They take the elevator up and step off into the parlor and the smell of honeyed tea. Alfred’s sixth sense must have alerted him.
“I installed a program,” she says. “You can delete it. Mad Hatter wrote it for me.”
“You saw Tetch?” Bruce asks, frowning.
“Yes,” she says, with no effort to hide or minimize it. There’s apology in her tone but it’s blunt; she doesn’t shy away from it now that she’s speaking. “I traded him. Program for a book he wanted. Very old.”
“New Orleans,” Bruce guesses.
She nods.
Alfred greets them in the kitchen with tea. Bruce rummages in a cabinet for regular over the counter meds and pries two out of a blister pack. Cassandra sits at the counter and drinks the tea with noisy slurps, giving Alfred a trollish smile when he displays scolding irritation.
“Goblin child,” he mutters fondly, putting the canister of tea away.
When she’s perched perfectly balanced on the stool, her eyes bright and unfocused, Bruce sets his own tea down.
“Cassandra. You need sleep.”
She nods, and slides to her feet, staggering gracefully like a drunk cat— she manages to sway without ever looking in serious danger of falling. Even if she did fall, she knows how to land.
Bruce, all the same, steps forward and slips a hand under her elbow. It’s hard to stop acting on his instinctive response, just like he still can’t keep himself from telling Dick to put a sweater on when the temperature drops.
“My skin hurts,” she says, more a statement than a complaint or whine.
“The meds should kick in soon. It’s probably a virus,” Bruce says. He forgets sometimes how confused she is by illness, how random and disconnected it must seem to her. If David Cain provided vaccinations or medicine, he certainly didn’t explain them, and muddled with wordless treatment for training injuries or outright abuse parading as discipline, the times she feels bad and what to do about it if she notices have not yet settled into an intuitive pattern.
She can grasp it, certainly, but the things she doesn’t know and the things it occurs to Bruce or anyone else to preemptively explain occupy a relatively small overlap.
Once, he found her fevered and listless in a safehouse, uninjured but whimpering from a headache. It had scared him, dead bodies creeping into his nightmares for days. The solution had been simple: it had been raining and she hadn’t felt thirsty, so she’d barely had any water for half a week. Massive dehydration.
It was one reason he’d started pushing for her to live full-time at the Manor. She is so capable and such a small thing could be her undoing. He tries not to think about how many close calls she’d had before reaching Gotham, before finding Barbara, because there’s nothing he can do about those but feel guilty and desolate. It doesn’t help her now.
He walks with her to her bedroom and she climbs into the neatly made bed, drags the covers up to her chin and stares up at him.
“Sorry,” she says, after a moment. “For making you hurt.”
“It’s alright,” he says, brushing her hair back. “That’s what I’m here for. To help you handle things.”
For a long moment, they’re silent, and Cassandra shifts around trying to get comfortable. His joints ache in sympathy for that fever-sore feeling.
He thinks, and thinks, and presses his lips together.
“You’re afraid,” she says, frowning.
He is. He’s so afraid of fucking this up, of saying the wrong thing, of leaving words burned into her that they can’t erase even with apologies.
“I can’t…” he begins. He pauses and sits on the edge of the bed, and holds her hand.
He never held me, she’d said once.
“You deserve that life,” Bruce finally says, looking at the bedside table. Rage at David Cain, at Shiva, bursts into hot flames like his words were the pump of a forge bellow. “You deserved to have someone treasure you from your first breath. I can’t give that time back to you. I’m sorry.”
There’s a gulp and her hand yanks away from his but then her fingers climb up his arm, pulling.
“Dad,” she says, pleading. “Dad. I don’t hate you.”
He lies down with her, holds her in his arms, lets her burrow her hot face into his shoulder.
“Shh,” he says. “Being sick is making everything feel worse. I’m not angry at you, Cub.”
“Why didn’t he see me?” Cassandra begs. Earlier, she wept and now she sobs, harsh and wrenching. “He never saw me.”
“Shh,” he says again, helpless. “I don’t know. It’s not your fault. You’ve always deserved better.”
The memory of pacing with her in the nursery, singing quietly, fills his mind. It was never real but it is a kind of memory now, and even if he can’t give her those years back, he can make sure she doesn’t have to lose herself in fiction to find any comfort or solace.
There are some things it’s not quite too late for.
His voice is scratchy with disuse. He doesn’t even remember the last time he sang anything, but Cassandra stills completely and then relaxes, so he keeps going.
“Hush little baby, don’t say a word,
Papa’s going to buy you a mockingbird.”
After years of being hauled up and thrown by his throat, his voice isn’t ever going to be the smooth baritone it used to be. He doesn’t think Cassandra particularly minds how awful he probably sounds. He hopes she doesn’t, anyway. It almost makes him falter, this other way in which reality cannot measure up to a computer-generated perfection. He doesn’t stop singing, because reality has to be enough. It can even be its own complicated, messy, painful kind of good.
Her breathing smooths out and by the end of the song, she’s asleep.
The worry, fed and coddled for days, shrinks back down to something manageable. She did, after all, come to find him.
Bruce presses a kiss to her warm brow and stays there, holding her. He can’t give her back the years she should have had. It’s the bitter agony of parenting any adopted child— he’s learned this over and over.
But he can give her now.