Chapter Text
This wasn’t Stephanie’s best idea.
It wasn’t her worst , which probably said something about the trajectory of her life and choices, but she can admit she probably had more angles to consider before committing to world travel and what could possibly look like a vendetta from an outsider’s point of view.
It’s not, for the record. A vendetta. She has a goal, maybe two, and none of this was supposed to be some kind of spiteful tour of revenge. Ambitious. Overeager. But she’d assumed the responsibility of risk the moment she’d stepped onto the gate at the airport and had followed through with her half-baked plans.
There was a part of her that hadn’t thought it would be real. She was good, a decent tracker, but she’d thought a world renowned fighter and assassin would be harder to find. That there’d be false leads. Cold trails. That she’d get fed up after a few months and some brawls outside of her home country and return maybe a little defeated but maybe a little more rounded, too.
If she’d known that her very first trail on Lady Shiva would lead her to Lady Shiva well…she’d probably at least have practiced a speech a little first. She couldn’t blame that on the break-in, though. Couldn’t quite name what propelled her to infiltrate the home dojo of the most lethal human on the planet outside of a refusal to retreat.
Knew, fatalistically, the encounter would end with a blade to her throat if she was lucky.
Knew, also, that if there was any chance of surviving she’d only have one.
Stephanie couldn’t even call it a whirlwind. She was simply creeping carefully through a simple carpeted hall one moment, and flat on her back with pain in her arm and her leg and cold steel cutting her throat. The woman before her is almost like looking into the future, she can see the shape of Cass’s face, dark eyes with the kindness Stephanie is so used to seeing washed away by a sharp frown. Lady Shiva’s hair is longer, the same black that loosely curls only at the ends, and Stephanie’s breath catches at a rush of embarrassment and adrenaline.
Lady Shiva and Batman must not keep the same hours: she’s dressed in a nightgown, white and slim and probably silk, loosely tied and barefoot, fabric slipping open at her chest and angled almost off of one shoulder, displeasure clear in the low ambient light.
“You overestimate yourself,” Lady Shiva says, cool with a professional level of disgust that Stephanie is so intimately familiar with she can’t even call it painful.
“Regularly,” Stephanie bites out, “but your daughter’s birthday is in four weeks and if I have to watch her get hurt over her shitty mom’s absence one more year in a row without even trying to do something about it I’m losing my best friend card.”
It’s definitely not how Stephanie meant to broach the topic.
It is, in retrospect, probably what saves her life.
Lady Shiva stills, blade angled a little more dangerously along her carotid, foreboding and ephemeral in the dark starlight of the hour and low light bleeding through a few closed rooms.
“You are here,” she says slowly, “on behalf of Cassandra?”
“I.” Stephanie blinks. “I mean, why else would I be here?”
She flinches when the sword pulls away, not quite ready or willing to sit up with the slow drag of Lady Shiva’s gaze. The way it lingers on her chest, still with a faint air of derision, and the unsubtle emblem there.
“You would not be the first student of a student I killed for presumption,” Lady Shiva says. Sighs, a little exhale of sound, before she turns her back completely and gestures with her sword. Stephanie stays still a few seconds more before scrambling to her feet, following after the woman with no small hint of bewilderment and hesitating only another moment when she realizes the room she steals into - the one Stephanie had bypassed entirely on the assumption it was a closet like the last three doors she had checked - is a bedroom.
“You should know,” Lady Shiva continues, sweeping her hair up in an elegant movement, twisting in short brutal looking movements, “that if you are, in fact, here on behalf of Bruce Wayne I will return you to him in pieces.”
“Uh,” Stephanie says, mouth drying out in what she sincerely wishes was fear as as Lady Shiva plucks a metal stick from a strange looking stand on the large dresser and stabs it through the bun she’d made, twisting again and hooking more hair until it stays in a messy hold, a few strands falling to her shoulder and past her chin in the front despite that. “You and him, huh?” she asks weakly.
Lady Shiva looks over her shoulder, and Stephanie is the butterfly pinned in a case when she walks back. Her fingers are warm, surprisingly so, and expectedly rough with callouses when she lightly grasps Stephanie’s chin and tilts her head back.
“No, dear,” Lady Shiva says, her thumb firm against Stephanie’s trembling lips, solid at the corner of her mouth. “He was a student, not a lover. It takes more than ambition and obsession to earn such meaningful history with me.”
So what was Cain ? Stephanie isn’t nearly suicidal enough to ask, still feels a nervous mix of hot and chilled with how close Lady Shiva stands and the hand on her face. The moment doesn’t last, and Stephanie lets out a long, slow breath when she pulls away again. “I hadn’t expected Cassandra to send anyone.”
“She didn’t,” Stephanie says, quick and unsteady. “She - that’s not - she doesn’t like to complain. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck.” That’s probably too frank. She should probably try to make an effort, if not at censorship than to at least sound a little more formal. But - well. Between the break-in and way her face still feels hot, Stephanie thinks maybe this is the least of her sins tonight.
“Hence, your course of action. To - what? Chide me?” Bizarrely, Lady Shiva sounds more interested than amused, like the entire concept is so novel it caught her off guard. It doesn’t mean that she’s taking Stephanie seriously, but her chest flickers with traitorous hope anyway.
“I mean is a card and like, twenty bucks, really that unreasonable?” Stephanie asks bravely.
“Is waiting until morning and knocking on the door truly so unreasonable?” Lady Shiva returns dryly.
“That is completely different. I assumed you’d kill me.”
“I still might,” Lady Shiva says like a joke. Then, with much less humor, “The armor: strip it.”
“What?” Stephanie tears her eyes away from the simple decor, the low bed with rumpled covers and the blade that Lady Shiva had put up on a stand in time to catch the bundle of dark cloth tossed at her. Squeaks and half-turns away, flushing hot as the white robe slides down strong shoulders and drops to pool at Lady Shiva’s feet.
She has a scar, a single long line diagonal from hip to shoulder, and Stephanie’s mind catches on it even when she’s no longer looking. Who the hell managed to do that?
“Dress in that, girl,” Lady Shiva orders, pulling out fabric herself.
“My name is Stephanie,” Stephanie grumbles, entirely habitual. She clutches the clothing she’d been given tighter to her chest when she notices Lady Shiva is looking back at her again, dark eyes bright in the low ambient lamp light of the bedroom, shadows playing over her legs and the shape of her breasts limned in that same gentle light.
Lady Shiva’s eyebrow arches, and Stephanie takes a half-step back out of self preservation knowing she’s been caught staring at- just staring, really.
“Get dressed, Stephanie,” Lady Shiva orders.
Stephanie, abruptly, wishes they could go back to Lady Shiva not knowing her name.
Then she gets dressed.