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Stephanie focuses on breathing in and out through her nose, rather than swallowing the blood that bites at her tongue. If she could, she would lean over the side of the backseats and spit it out onto the ground, but the duck tape pressed to her mouth prevents it. With every breath she does take, her head spins with pain. She thinks she might throw up.
Her shirt- a lilac, spaghetti strap top- rides up past her belly button and she wriggles to smooth it back down. With her wrists and ankles bound, she looks more like a fish than a supposed vigilante. Her captors had even tied a blindfold onto her head, preventing her from seeing how utterly stupid she must look. Around her, the car jostles after hitting another pothole, and she ends up swallowing that mouthful of blood. She’d bitten her tongue, earlier, and wishes more than anything that it would stop bleeding.
Well, okay. There’s many things she’d like more than for her tongue to quit bleeding. She’d like to be in her own car, driving back towards the manor with Damian safely sitting in the backseat. She’d like to be at the manor, with Dick and Tim and Jason. Much more realistically, she wishes that she knew where Damian was and that she wasn’t tied up like a wild hog.
The two of them had been out grabbing something for dinner, when they’d been nabbed. Alfred had asked someone to drive down to a Mom-and-Pop store in the city, and with Damian looking like he needed an escape from his overbearing siblings- cough, cough, Dick, cough cough- Steph had offered to take Damian along as she ran out. Damian had obliged easily. He had been having a rough week in terms of back pain, or something, and Dick had rarely left his side for the length of it. Every time Stephanie had seen the kid, he’d had either a hot pack or a cool washcloth pressed to his scarred back.
Today was a better day, hence why she’d even thought to take Damian out. If he were still lying on the couch, face buried in the cushions, she wouldn't have let him leave. Stephanie would have left him under Dick’s supervision without looking back.
And then, at least, she wouldn’t be here.
Which- no, that wasn’t fair. Even if these crooks were going after Damian, that didn’t make it Damian’s fault. They would have snatched him up a different time. At least, now, Damian wasn’t alone. To an extent, anyways. They’d been separated as soon as they’d been caught. Steph had been thrown into one car and Damian into another.
The thing was, Steph hadn’t even realized they were in danger. Damian had pretended to stumble into her side while in the store in order to whisper in her ear, League operatives, seven o’clock . It was only then that she’d noticed the completely normal looking men behind them, browsing the chip aisle.
Ten minutes later, and those two men were slamming Damian into the sidewalk and hiking Steph against the wall, roughly binding their wrists and slapping tape on their mouths.
Steph’s not sure how much time has passed between then and now. She’s still in the car and her head is ringing. Time isn’t even a concept right now. All she can think about is how uncomfortable she is and how worried she is about Damian. These men are after him, not her. They could have captured him to kill him, torture him for information, or to bring him back to Ra’s for some nefarious plot.
That also means that Stephanie’s expendable. She’ll be used as leverage against Damian so these men can get Damian to do whatever they want- and the scary thing is, she knows Damian will do whatever he can to make sure she makes it home safely. If it had been a few years ago, he wouldn’t have hesitated to chuck her under the bus to save his own skin, maybe. But, now? Damian has changed. He’s better, kinder, stronger.
He’s also thirteen, and Stephanie is scared to death of what these men are going to do to him.
Again, her top rolls up. It makes her wish that she weren’t in her civvies. At least as Spoiler, she’d have the tools to break out of her bonds and then have the protection to slide out of the car and onto the black top. The mask, at this point, doesn’t even matter. Their kidnappers know who Damian is, and by extent, they know who Steph is, too. Until she knows where Damian is, though, it’s not like she’s going to try anything.
Like a switch being flicked, the car screeches to a stop and Stephanie goes tottering forward, rolling right onto the floor of the car. She gets wedged between the front seats and back seats, her legs still thrown up on the leather cushions. As loudly as she dares, she protests against the bonds and struggles to right herself.
Steph hears the door open, and pin pricks of light bleed through her blindfold. In seconds, she’s being yanked out of the car and pulled to her feet. Her bare legs catch against the side of the car door, scraping up the skin as she stumbles out into the world again. Rough hands grip at her forearms, tugging and pulling. Her head spins as she tries to make sense of what’s happening as she’s dragged away from the car.
Her captors- at least, she assumes it’s plural, there’s only one set of hands on her, but someone had to have been driving the cars in addition to the two goons who’d kidnapped them- half-carry her along. The gravel and pavement beneath her feet gives way to metal, and then to tiled floors. There’s the sound of a door swinging shut behind her.
They take turns that Steph can’t make herself memorize before she’s shaken to a stop. Her head’s trying out for the Olympic swim team, apparently. She can barely get a grasp on the sound of another door opening before she’s being thrown forward, spilling out onto the ground. Steph lands on her side, before she rolls onto her back and draws in another sharp breath.
God, she can’t wait until Batman breaks them out of this and she gets to go home.
The hands return, this time pulling her into a sitting position. Fingers prod at the knot keeping the blindfold in place before it falls off of her face entirely. She blinks back the haze in her mind and tries to focus on her surroundings. The crook in front of her has a slight stubble and brown eye that bore down on her like daggers. He grins, a smile that’s missing a tooth and presents a chipped canine, and cuts through the bonds on her ankles like they’re nothing more than melted butter.
He pulls away when he’s done and Steph sweeps her gaze over the rest of the room. Ugly blue walls stare back at her. Blue and grey tiled floors sit beneath her butt, and a single, barred up window lets light leak through. Outside is harder to see. Stephanie can’t stop herself from reflexively leaning away from the brightness, her eyes squinting whenever she happens to turn towards it. Besides that, she can see what looks like a medical set up before her. There’s heart monitors and bulky computers pressed to one side of the room and a medical cot in the center. A rolling table presents medical utensils of all kinds.
Stephanie’s gut rolls.
She turns to look at the door, and catches another two men walking in. One of them has his arms full of something black and green, and the other is wearing surgeon scrubs and bright, blue, latex gloves. The surgeon steps through first, barely casting Stephanie a second glance before he starts opening up drawers on the rolling table, determinedly looking for something.
The fear boiling up in her throat forces her to turn away, and her gaze lands on the second man, who drops the bundle in his arms onto the floor- and the bundle grunts, limbs flaring out. Realization blooms in Steph’s mind as she stares, watching as the second man leans down over the bundle and tears his blindfold free.
Damian’s wide, green eyes flicker around, alarmed, until they land on Steph. He stops his struggle and goes pliant under the man’s large hands. The man pulls away as soon as Damian’s own ankles have been freed, before retreating to the doorway alongside the brown-eyed man who’d carried Steph in. Unable to communicate in any helpful way, Steph extends her leg and carefully taps Damian’s knee with her foot.
Slowly, Damian wiggles into a sitting position on his own, and scoots over to Stephanie’s side. She scans him over as he does the same to her, both looking for any obvious injuries. Steph isn’t bleeding, beyond a few tiny beads on her leg from the car and her tongue, but Damian has a thin cut along his temple that’s crusted crimson and scabbing. Other than that, they’re both fine.
Frightened and scared, but fine.
A third man- a thin, lanky, blond- steps into the room, pulling along another table. Steph has to crane her head to really see what’s on top of it, but as soon as she sees it, she pulls back, horrified.
Two, bright red branding irons sit on the gleaming metal surface. The surgeon looks over at them and smiles, plucking one up and turning towards Damian and Steph. Stephanie tries to position herself just so, so that Damian’s half-hidden behind her. She’ll be damned if she lets this man touch Damian with that thing.
She can feel Damian tense up as he leans against her shoulder. He reaches out with both hands to grab at one of hers, squeezing them as if to reassure her. Of course he can see them- and yet, here he is, trying to comfort her when he’s surely scared out his mind. She makes a note in her mind to tell Damian out loud what a good kid he is when all of this is over. Hell- she’ll preach it to Tim and Jason until they tell her to shut up. She’ll sit with Dick and go back and forth with him about how amazingly sweet he is until she gets tired-
The surgeon steps forward and the three men move to restrain Steph and Damian. Steph starts flailing without even thinking about it as the men work to separate the two again. She does her damnedest to slam her heel down onto the blond’s foot, but she misses and ends up having Brown-eyes restrain her legs to prevent her from carrying on. The third man slams himself down onto the ground, Damian’s legs trapped under his. His arms bind Damian’s down to his sides, and Steph can only watch in horror as the surgeon approaches him.
She screams through the duck tape and wriggles harder, keeping her eyes locked with Damian’s. His are wide, shaking and quivering as he stares up at the smoldering metal. The surgeon brings it in close, holding it by Damian’s dark skin for a moment, letting him feel the heat sinking into his skin. Steph can only imagine how uncomfortable that must be as her skin prickles in discomfort and fear-
And then the surgeon presses the iron down onto the skin of Damian’s left collarbone.
Even through the tape, Steph can hear his scream break in the air. He spazzes, muscles flexing and eyes bulging at the pain. Something drips down Stephanie’s face as she watches in horror, watches as Damian’s eyes roll back and he goes slack in the goon’s hold.
The iron is held against Damian’s skin for no more than half a minute before the surgeon withdraws. He moves back and begins bustling around, grabbing gauze and bandages. Slowly, and carefully, the doctor cleans the brand-wound he’d given him. Steph would almost say it’s tender, with the way that the man smooths down the creases and folds, but then Damian’s eyes fly open again and he gasps.
He’d only been out for a few minutes at most. Stephanie wishes it’d been longer- wishes Damian hadn’t woken up until Steph had gotten her brand, until Bruce came storming through the halls to save them. Instead, she gets to see Damian struggle to draw in level breaths against the pain, fists clenching and unclenching, skin probably itching and writhing. Again, she wishes hard that she didn’t have the duck tape over her mouth. If she didn’t have it, she could scream herself sore at these men, demand answers and reasons, tell them that they’re messing with the wrong people and that she’s going to murder these men when they let her go.
She twists in Blondie’s hold, struggling to free at least one of her legs in order to kick Brown-eyes in the face. Her voice strains against the tape and she throws her head back, but the back of her skull only thumps against Blondie’s chest.
The surgeon abandons Damian and grabs the second iron. It’s still red hot and Stephanie can almost feel the heat from all the way over here.
As the surgeon creeps closer, Steph thrashes harder. Blondie wraps a hand up in her hair, pulling her head taut. She squeezes her eyes shut as the heat nears her neck- she hears Damian yell somewhere off to the side as something burning touches her skin-
Stephanie screams.
When she wakes up, she’s lying on the cool tile floor. Damian’s wrapped up at her side, chest rising and falling, eyes open and staring blankly at the bulky white bandage sitting on her collarbone. He’s wrapped himself on top of one arm and under the other, his head using her upper arm as a pillow.
Even when her eyes open, he doesn’t pull away. He moves his hands down to hers and gives them a squeeze. Stephanie makes another note to ask him if there’s some meaning behind the single-squeeze method. She’s heard of plenty of people who have hidden meanings behind how many times they squeeze someone’s hand. She herself doesn’t have any secret language. The “talking-out-loud” method is tried and true.
Her eyes brush around the room. The surgeon is still there, sitting in a plush office chair that hadn’t been there before. His attention has been cast down onto a paper file in his hands. Around him, computers and machines beep and flash, blue and red lights flickering on and off. The light filtering through the window is gone, and now the only thing illuminating the room is a small ceiling light that glows an ugly, horrible yellow.
Stephanie rolls her head and presses her duck tape-covered mouth to Damian’s temples in the imitation of a forehead kiss. There’s a million reassurances that she wants to give him, but without use of her mouth, there’s not much that she can do. Instead, she focuses on tapping It’s okay onto the back of Damian’s hand, over and over, glad that Bruce had forced her to learn Morse code during her sprint as Robin.
Are you okay? Damian taps back.
She takes a moment to catalog her person. The skin at the place where her neck and shoulder meets feels angry and on fire, but not as bad as it had been earlier. Maybe. How long have I been out?
Damian turns his head and hides it in the flesh of her arm. I don’t know.
How are you feeling?
As Damian takes his time deciding his own response, Steph reflects on how tedious Morse code is. It’s not even really like she knows how much time they have. If Damian doesn’t know how much time has passed, he must be more out of it than she thought.
And then Damian carefully taps out, I had a flashback, and Steph’s heart shatters in her chest. The heat and burning sensation brought him back to something- from the League? From patrol out with Batman? Does she even want to know? She pulls herself out of her musings as Damian adds, Something’s wrong with my back.
What?
She doesn’t get a response. Either Damian’s too caught up in figuring out how to word it, or one of his many mental walls is preventing him from continuing. She wishes that he was able to speak- wishes that he could go on and say what he wanted to, because he’s come leaps and bounds from the scared, pompous little boy who’d arrived on Bruce’s doorstep and deserves to be able to voice it when something’s wrong instead of keeping it locked inside.
It’ll be okay, she slowly returns.
They don’t make it a promise. Damian only curls in smaller, and Stephanie only holds on tighter.
Sunlight streams in through the window when she opens her eyes again. She blinks hard and hopes she’ll adjust quickly to the difference in light, twisting her head back over to Damian’s head-
But he’s not there.
There’s no weight on her arm, no body against her side, no hands holding hers. It throws her into a panic, enough that she forces herself into a sitting position so fast her head spins. Something white rears its ugly head in her mind, burning and scalding her shoulder. Her hands fly up to press against the white bandage resting underneath her lilac shirt strap, and carefully, with the pads of her fingers, she swipes over the edges of the tape holding it down.
She looks around the room, wildly, heart thudding in her chest. The surgeon in his chair, head leaned back, the shut door and the blinking lights- And then there’s Damian, pressed up in the corner of the room, head stuck in between his knees.
The surgeon lifts his head up and blinks a few times. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches as the doctor’s gaze flickers to her, and then traces her line of sight over to Damian.
When he stands, she jolts, slapping the bottoms of her shoes down onto the floor in protest. Touch him, she dares with her burning gaze, and I’ll make you wish you were never born.
The surgeon doesn’t understand it. Or, possibly, he just doesn’t care. He takes a few quick strides across the floor and kneels down before Damian as Stephanie begins to make a racket- slamming her feet against the tiles and yelling beneath the tape. She wills the doctor to leave Damian alone- they haven’t shown their motives yet, and she’s afraid to find out what they are.
Besides, the kid’s obviously having problems with his back. Is the doctor going to help, or something? If he dares to hurt Damian, she’ll-
She’ll-
She doesn’t know what she’ll do.
Leave him alone, Stephanie wills, as the surgeon reaches out for Damian. Damian flinches back with a keening noise, muffled by the tape, and the surgeon smiles, a terrible, horrible, demented smile.
Steph’s gut does a triple flip as if it’s participating in some sort of gymnastics tournament. The surgeon stands and then walks to the door, slowly opening it. He peeks his head out into the hall and says something that Steph can’t make out. When he withdraws, Blondie and Brown-eyes step into the room after him, letting the door slam shut with a loud bang.
Blondie moves over to Damian and pulls him to his feet by his wrists, and Damian lets out another wail through the tape. Roughly, he’s carried over to the examination table and nearly tossed down onto the cot, right down onto his stomach. Hearing him cry out again drives Steph to clamber to her feet, ready to tackle one of the men. She’s held back for long enough, but this time they’ve left her unguarded, and she’s not letting them do anything to Damian.
None of the three men see her as she stands unsteadily. The surgeon has his back to her and the other two are busy strapping Damian down onto the table, using thick, leather straps to keep him in place. Damian wriggles and fights it, but whatever’s wrong with his back is still hindering his fighting power.
Blondie peels back Damian’s shirt, exposing his back, and the surgeon runs a finger over Damian’s spine. Stephanie thinks back to what Dick had said, way back when Bruce had been ‘dead’, about how Damian had been shot in the spine.
Talia replaced his spine with a metal one, Dick had summed up. She controlled him with it, a few weeks later.
Talia was League, back then. These guys are League, now.
Stephanie has a really, really bad feeling about all of this.
As the surgeon reaches over for a scalpel, clearly ready to perform whatever operation his heart desires without any sort of anesthesia, Stephanie lunges. She slams into Blondie’s side, sending him wobbling off to the side since he hadn’t been expecting it. When he staggers back, she reers on the surgeon, slamming her elbow into his face with a war cry, feeling tangy crimson on her tongue. The scalpel falls from his hand and she scrambles for it, lashing out with her foot to catch his ankle and send him to the ground.
Just as she turns the scalpel on Brown-eyes, Blondie wraps his arms around her waist and hoists her off the ground. She kicks out with wild abandon, driving the scalpel down into the flesh of Blondie’s forearm. He drops her with a startled shout and she slams into the ground, a shock of white hot pain sliding up her left wrist.
She curls in on it without thinking, and she knows that this is her undoing.
Brown-eyes grabs her ankles and yanks her away from the bed as the surgeon claps a hand over his nose. He brings his hand away after a moment, staring at the red blood that comes away with it. She’d gotten his nose with her elbow, and she feels horrible satisfaction bloom in her chest at the fact she drew blood.
The surgeon swings around for the table and tears a paper towel off of the roll he’d had beside him, rolling it up and sticking it in his nose like it’s no big deal. He gestures for Blondie to go wild with the bandages, and grabs a new scalpel, returning to Damian’s side.
Stephanie, who’s watched all this occur upside down, watches with horror. She hardly notices that Brown-eyes is binding her ankles together with rope as she concentrates on Damian’s shaking form.
The scalpel comes down onto Damian’s back, drawing a fine line over his spine. Red wells up at the sight as the surgeon carefully peels the skin back, using a handful of gelpi retractors to hold it in place. It’s at this point that Stephanie has to turn away, closing her eyes and trying to ignore Damian’s prolonged, choked sobs. She can feel hot tears streaming down her own face- she wants to curse these men out, to tear them down and kick their knees in, she-
She’s so full of anger that she doesn’t even think anymore. Her brain goes white with the lingering pain radiating through her body and the rage that’s flooding her veins.
The way that Blondie’s positioned over her makes it easy for her to bring her knees up and slam them between Blondie’s legs. Blondie crumples at the force of it, face going white, and Steph rolls over onto her side so she can swing her bound feet at the man’s face, sending him completely to the ground. It’s hard to maneuver herself over top Blondie so she can pummel his face, using her thighs and legs to keep his arms at his side and using her elbows and hands to lash out at his skin.
If her wrist twinges with pain, she doesn’t feel it. If her brand burn stings, she doesn’t feel that, either.
All she can do is sit back in her own mind as her body moves on auto pilot. Peach skin gives way to crimson, and even when her hands start to come away stained, she can’t stop herself from continuing on. Her hair hangs in her eyes and she hardly wants to know what they look like, but she only turns them away from Blondie when she sees the surgeon’s shoulders tense and Brown-eyes move away from the cot.
Before, the only thing keeping her from tearing the duck tape off of her mouth with her own two hands had been the inherent fear of what they would do to Damian if she acted up. Now she could hardly give a shit. Even if it’s hard to tear it off with her wrists bound the way they are, she manages to pull it away from her face. The grey comes back with strands of hair, flecks of skin from her lips and cheeks, and spots of crimson.
The pain doesn’t register with her. She bites down on the binding on her wrists and tears at it, keenly aware of how close Brown-eyes is getting. When she realizes the restraints aren’t coming off, she abandons the task and bares her teeth at the man standing before her.
She barely realizes how feral she must look.
Brown-eyes shoots forward to grab at her, but she fakes to the left, and then rolls off of Blondie to the right. She lifts herself to her knees and swings out with her elbows to catch the back of Brown-eyes’ knees, making him stumble enough that by the time she manages to fall onto her back and swing her legs around, he hits the ground like a sack of flour. She does the same thing to him that she had done to Blondie- climbs on top of him and strikes out with all of her sharpest corners.
Unlike with Blondie, Brown-eyes puts up much more of a fight. He rolls so that he’s on top of her, legs bearing down on her’s. She wriggles and screams, making the surgeon flinch and Damian sob again. Brown-eyes grabs a fistful of her hair and yanks her head around, but let's go after thrusting the back of her skull into the ground. Stephanie, taking a page from his book, slams her head upwards and bashes it right into Brown-eyes’ forehead. Instinctively, he reels back and brings a hand up to the wounded spot like the surgeon had done, and she takes this as her chance to surge up again and sink her teeth into the fleshy base of his neck.
The feeling of having her teeth sink into a living body is disgusting. Brown-eyes spazzes out beneath her, eyes flashing the whites. His hands fly out for purchase and grip at her shoulders, but she keeps pressing her teeth into his skin until blood spurts into her mouth. As soon as she thinks it’ll be enough to keep him down, she tears her teeth out, taking his skin with her. She pulls away and spits out what she can, wiping at her lip and choking at the metallic taste.
Stephanie doesn’t bother to test his pulse. She lets her hands flicker over Brown-eyes’ body, and then over Blondie’s, searching for a blade of some kind. She finds a switchblade and struggles to flick the knife out, putting the handle into her mouth and shakily bringing her wrists to the blade. The surgeon still hasn’t pulled away from Damian so she tries to rush herself, which only ends with her cutting her skin up as she slices herself free. When her wrists break apart, she drops the knife onto the ground and fumbles for it again, quickly cutting through the ropes binding her ankles.
Completely free now, and with a weapon in hand, she snarls at the surgeon. Her adrenaline is running too high to allow her to spit out any actual words.
The surgeon finally pulls away from Damian, leaving behind his messy job and grabbing a tablet that had been laying on the surgical table. With his teeth he strips off his bloody gloves and rounds the table, placing Damian between him and Stephanie.
Like a rabid dog, Steph growls again and flashes her bloody canines.
(She wants to throw up. She wants to cry and scream, to hold Damian tight, to fall to the ground and tear herself apart. She feels disgusted with herself, but she knows that this is the only thing that she can do. Survival is hell. That’s the one thing she’s learned, throughout her life.
Survival is hell.)
Almost like he knows what Steph was going to demand, the surgeon holds his hands up in surrender, before he sets the pad down on another table. He grabs a needle and thread for the stitches and flashes the two of them to Stephanie, telling her, I’m going to patch him up for you.
She nods, one quick, jerky movement, and settles back to watch. The surgeon is quick and smooth with his hands, easily molding Damian’s skin back into place. When everything’s settled in the right way, he begins sewing the incision closed with the thread. Damian continues to moan into the tape. From what Steph’s seen, he hasn’t opened his eyes since the surgery began. All of her hopes that he isn’t awake. She wishes that he weren’t awake- that he didn’t have to go through all of this, just because people are fucked up and shitty.
When the surgeon is done with the stitches, he takes a long span of bandages and plasters them over Damian’s back, before moving to undo the leather straps keeping him down. Damian doesn’t move when they’ve been completely removed- Stephanie hadn’t expected him to.
Instead, when the doctor steps back, Stephanie leans over Damian- carefully, of course- and socks him across the face. He doesn’t crumple, he just staggers back and blinks like a doe.
With cautious hands and overwhelming anxiety, Steph taps on Damian’s cheek. For a moment, she can’t help but be afraid that he won’t wake up. The amount of pain he must be in must be overwhelming. Hell, Steph is sure that when her adrenaline fades away, she’ll be nothing more than a bundle of bruises and nerves.
Damian’s eyes fly open on her fourth tap. Steph lets herself sigh in relief, draping herself over top Damian so she can press her bloody lips to his forehead like she’d wanted to do earlier. Without sound, she mouths, you’re okay. Then, once she pulls back, she slowly helps Damian swing his feet over the edge of the cot and then helps him sit up.
He leans his weight onto her, slumping like a puppet with all of its strings cut. She wraps her arms around him and sticks her nose into his hair, slick with sweat and still smelling faintly of oranges.
Before she can slump into him, too, she forces herself to pull back. Without realizing it, she’d closed the switchblade and had closed her fist around it. Now she has to pry her fist open and carefully withdraw the blade, trying her damnedest to steady her hands before slicing through the binding on Damian’s wrists. When that’s over, she reaches up for the duck tape, carefully pulling at it. Damian lets his eyes squeeze shut as she works on it, before eventually opening them again as Steph lets the tape fall to the floor.
With one final surge of adrenaline, she brings Damian back into her arms-
-misses it when the surgeon picks up the tablet-
-and then drops to her knees when Damian’s fist lashes out at her.
Stephanie remembers, with sudden clarity, how destroyed Dick had sounded as he’d told her the story of Talia taking control of Damian’s body. Damian hadn’t trusted himself around Dick for days, even after they’d torn apart the machines that Talia had used. Punching Slade, Dick had admitted, wasn’t nearly as satisfying as the idea of killing him in cold blood. In that moment, as Dick had peered over Slade’s hospital bed, all he had wanted to do was to tear the man to shreds. He’d wanted to do the same to Talia, when walking away from the base, Damian tucked to his side.
Back then, Steph hadn’t really blamed him. Losing control of your body sounded like a scary situation. But, at that point, she hadn’t been Damian’s biggest fan. She’d thought he was a brat- could hardly see what Dick found so appealing about him. Damian was all sharp edges, fine lines, the kind that would cleave your finger in two if you ran the pad of it across it’s corners.
How could you want to kill for this child? she had wondered.
And then she and Damian had teamed up. Over and over, they worked together in tandem, and Stephanie found herself looking down at a complicated sculpture- rounded corners, still sharp like a blade, but soft as dough if you knew how to play your cards right. Damian lived to please those around him. He thrived off of attention and praise, would mold himself into whatever you wanted in order to stay by your side. Dick was one of the first people to want Damian to be himself.
Steph would like to consider herself one of the second.
She saw behind the careful mask Damian had built, and she’d seen him for the child he wasn’t allowed to be. Letting him be a child was her top priority, and as she'd striven to achieve that goal, she learned what made Dick love him so much.
Damian loved with a fierce, twisted kind of love that few had- the kind of love Bruce carried. At the same time, Damian loved wholly and completely, with his whole body and soul like Dick. He wasn’t the best at showing it. That was the Wayne in him. But, that love bubbled up in subtle ways, like when he memorized how Tim liked his coffee, or his favorite shows and movies to watch when stressed. It came up when he learned every single one of Jason’s safe houses so he could check on them from time to time and keep them stocked up with new books and Jason’s comfort foods. It was so clearly there when Damian helped Alfred in the kitchen, or sat with Bruce after patrol; when he let Cass poke and prod, when he danced with her; when he curled up on the couch as Duke blared his music so the two could quietly co-exist and draw.
Dick always got the brunt of that wayward adoration Damian carried with him. Stephanie and Dick noticed all of this, and then figured it was time that Damian got to experience the same thing.
Because- because. Individuality was so important for Damian to have. So Dick and Steph went out of their ways to get Damian to experience life like anyone else would’ve got to, so he could learn what he loved and what he loathed, so he could begin to define what made Damian Damian, besides a last name or a title.
And yet, here these men were- here this doctor was, worming his way back into Talia’s tech in order to use Damian’s metal spine to play him like a puppet. Suddenly, Steph realized why Dick had wanted to kill Talia and Slade. It was because Damian deserved so much better than to be forced to be someone’s toy soldier. It was because no one, especially Damian, deserved to have to play by someone else’s rules.
Now, more than ever, Steph wants to kill. She wants to sink her teeth into this doctor like she’d done to Brown-eyes. She wants to tear her hands into Talia forever thinking of doing this in the first place. More than anything, she wishes that she didn’t have to see Damian’s face screw up in repulsion for his actions as his body’s forced to chase after her.
As Damian keeps trying to attack her, Steph remains on the defensive. She doesn’t dare land a single hit on Damian’s body. He’s working with too many wounds as it is and she’s surprised that his body hasn’t just given out on it’s own yet. Her’s sure is close- her adrenaline won’t take her much further, anymore. She can already feel how bad her wrist hurts. Her head spins when she slides to the side. Beneath the bandage, her collarbone screams.
It’s nowhere near as close to how bad Damian must be feeling. He just had surgery performed on him. His back was cut open while he was still awake. No one had put him on pain meds or anything of the sort- And oh, what Steph would give for pain meds right now.
She realizes how she’ll have to end this fight a lot later than she would’ve liked. While it could only have been in the span of a few minutes, Stephanie feels like she’s been dodging Damian’s choppy attacks for hours. She’s starting to drag- which means she needs to end this fight as fast as she can.
If she’s not going to attack Damian, that means she has to go for the surgeon himself.
Doing just that proves to be much harder than Steph had intended. At some point, when Steph goes to roll under the medical cot, Damian gets his hands on one of the surgeon’s scalpels. Stephanie knows that if she lets Damian clip her with that, the end of this won’t be pretty. She does her best to dance out of Damian’s way while simultaneously attempting to leap over the cot, but Damian somehow presents a bigger obstacle than Blondie and Brown-eyes.
Eventually, she decides on a new tactic.
Instead of attacking, Stephanie falls back, letting the surgeon- who’s oddly good at controlling Damian with only the tablet, which is a horrible thought, Steph decides- choice whether to keep up the defensive or opt for a different tactic. She pretends to lean down to adjust her shoes, keeping a careful eye on the tablet in the surgeon’s hands, and then pulls off both of them one by one.
Faking a ‘this is better’ sort of sigh, she adjusts her weight on her now bare feet and tests how heavy the shoes feel in her hands-
The surgeon sends Damian forward, and Steph chucks her shoe at the tablet.
Now- besides learning Morse code from Batman, Steph had learned other things. Namely: “How to throw a batarang (or literally anything else)” and “How to use everyday items as weapons”. When you molded those two together and added a little practice, you got very good at learning how to throw things with the intent to cause harm, no matter what that thing is. She’d once thrown a pencil case at someone in school, and they’d ended up with a broken arm.
That’s why she doesn’t try to dodge, when Damian’s hand reaches out for her wrist, shoulders rolling in, in preparation to throw Steph to the ground and then to drive the scalpel right through her eye.
Her shoe arches up in the air as Damian’s fingers wrap around her arm.
The heel beams down onto the tablet as Damian’s shoulder presses into her gut, lifting her off the floor as he starts to straighten out.
The tablet falls right out of the surgeon’s hands and onto the ground, shattering, as Damian stills.
For a moment, Steph freezes, legs spread apart in preparation for Damian’s attack. She stares at the tablet and watches it’s screen go dark, the glass covered in spidering cracks. The surgeon’s mouth falls agape. His eyes grow wide, horrified at the new development.
Gotcha, she thinks.
Using her stance to her advantage, she helps Damian straighten up without sending Stephanie to the ground. Both of their legs threaten to give out beneath them- Damian slumps into Steph, and Steph only remains standing out of sheer willpower as she stares the surgeon down, daring him to try anything else. She wraps her arms around Damian protectively, trying not to flinch when his hands find a grip in her shirt.
If she’d had a little more strength, she’d step over and sock him one last time- hard enough to send him toppling to the floor over his two goons. As it is, it’s all she can do to keep her and Damian standing-
And then the door swings open behind her.
Stephanie’s body goes tense with fear and Damian goes rock-solid in her hold.
Originally, she’d assumed that there were four men, not including the doctor. There had to have been two drivers and then the two kidnappers. But, in her time in this horrid building, she’d only seen three of them. One, Blondie, who lays on the floor, face bloodied and bruised. Two, Brown-eyes, who’s splayed out on the ground, neck a butchered mess. Three-
She’d never seen the third one, since waking up after the branding. (Remembering it makes her entire spine tingle. While she’d seen the irons, she never actually paid any mind to the design she was going to have burned onto her skin. Oddly enough, now she takes the time to wonder.) That meant that Number Three- and a possible Number Four- was still patrolling the halls. There was no way that they hadn’t heard the racket in here-
Steph doesn’t think she can take on another crook. Not tonight. Not this week. Maybe- hell, not this month.
Very, very, slowly, she turns around, keeping Damian pressed to her back.
A swath of black peers back at her, a blue stroke crossing their chest. Behind them, to their left, a man with a bright, cherry red helmet stands, gun cocked and ready. To their right is a lanky teen, hair messy and suit haphazardly pulled on.
Nightwing. Red Hood. Red Robin.
Steph falls to her knees.