Work Text:
Tim is a child, so his hands are of-child, child-like. His hands, his face, the way he holds himself, which runs as follows: with bravado (unearned but environment-learned, good rhyme, same-sound) but trembling slightly, looking her dead-eyed in the eyes, breathing hard and breathing fast and shifting uneasy back-forth from foot to foot, like a rabbit set to run.
He wants to run. He wants to- badly, so, so badly- but he does not want her to know that, and so her official diagnosis is: overcompensation, due to fear or maybe… unease? Baby-fear, discomfort. Posturing in the way that poses no threat to her. Child-like; connect the head to the neck to the body to the little, little hands, add in the bravado and compensation and join it up to get: childlike.
And alone, all all alone, with his hat and little hands and little rabbit-heart. Doesn’t know what to do next, or what to do from here, and too busy crumpling soft and sweet beneath the weight of revelation to care. Stuck in the in-between, in their shared downswing- the quiet, tepid aftermath of a smoking gun, or else the familiar buzz of bleeding out. She’s seen it before and she’ll see it again, and so sympathy twinges in her stomach and sends a signal to her head; synapse-fire and she reaches out a hand, and after a moment of hesitation, Tim takes it.
His fingers are clumsy as they work around her own, baby fat clinging to those bones with the stubborn strength of a body’s last-ditch efforts. He doesn’t eat enough, she thinks idly. Can’t eat enough, not won’t , and if he could - if he were able - he would eat more. She knows this for certain. She reads it in the little nervy twists of his joints and his uneasy shifts in balance when the wind blows, in the hungry hollows that shadow his joints and the occasional jut of those little baby-bones. A Pyrrhic victory: he’s sharp, beneath it all. Hungry.
He’s also… unprepared for this, for the alley in the cold. That jacket of his is too thin, too worn through, and so another gust of wind leads to another nervy little twist leads to baby-fat twisting and turning and melting butter-soft into divots where he worry-worry-worries at his knuckles.
He is very small. He is very small, and even as twinges of that post-mission malaise begins to creep in- her job’s not done quite yet, but she can see the end and she won’t be able to rest until there’s something new to do, something next, something other than waiting around and staring at that stupid smoking gun- she thinks that she ought to get him somewhere else.
Home, she’d said, she’d told him. She’d said they’d go home. But where, where on earth is home? Is it close? Is it safe? He is very small. She wants him to be safe.
Want is not enough, she thinks as he shifts his fingers around hers again and stares up at her with those big, baby eyes. Want is boring, boring, boring, and it’s not enough to beat the boredom back. The dread. This is not a big enough problem. This is too small, in scope and in practice and in feeling, from head down to toe to toe, as in: to stare down, or otherwise face off. This is not a big enough problem. The bad men from earlier were not a big enough problem. She is not doing enough . She needs to get Tim safe, she needs to wrap this up, and then she needs to do more.
And so:
“The station,” she says, and Tim startles. She doesn’t like that. She doesn’t like scaring him- turns her stomach, makes her feel sick, sicker, sick enough to vomit. She wonders if she ever looked like that, wide-eyed and anxious and very, very small. She thinks that she must have, and she thinks that she kind of hates that.
Fuck.
“Station, first,” she says, shaking herself back to the present and giving the words a sympathetic downtwist-somersault. “The police will want a statement.”
And then, after a rabbit-quick moment of waiting: “…Sorry.”
She’s not surprised to find she means it.
“Right,” Tim says, scowling nice and even, back to gnawing at the knuckles of the hand not wrapped around her own. “I need to tell them about my dad.”
His dad. Worry, worry, at his hands, and skin splits clean in two under the weight of the world-ending-rending revelation, as follows: Tim’s father is a bad, bad man. Many men are. Many men are not. Many many more are somewhere in-between. And that’s where she comes in- once her father’s secret weapon, often a smoking gun, stuck for the moment in the aftermath, in-between inaction. She hates in-betweens. Her hands are idle, uncomfortable, and her mind is going dull and she needs something to do.
“I can carry you,” she says, syllabic-acrobatic. Can and carry: C- sound (hard) tongue high in the back, low in the front. Click, puff, click- ck- ck. Those wind-sibilants are harder, not as fun and no real weight to them, not worth her time.
Also she sometimes whistles like the wind, the sweet-sibilant-cold hiss wind, and Barbara laughs and it’s embarrassing .
“I can carry you,” she repeats, pushing all that aside. Waste of time. She has things to do, people to save, children to protect. On and on and on. “You’ll be safe.”
A moment of silence, breath held and wind whistling, though there’s no anticipation. She already knows what he will say; after all, he believes her.
“Okay,” Tim whispers, right on time. He’s better with his words than she is, but not near loud enough to be heard against the wind- that’s okay, that’s okay. She can read the shape of it on his mouth and on his baby-face, which is nervy and wide-eyed and pulling puppet-string at his cheeks as he goes through the motions. He is still small, much smaller than she is, and so swinging him up onto her back is the easiest thing on earth; he makes the little noise of surprise that lives in the back of the throat, and digs his fingers into her shoulders.
She does not startle. He is low level no-threat, which has nothing to do with his being child-like or childish or child, though it might to anyone else. She was a threat-child, and she was very, very good at it, and so her familiarity with the… idea, with the concept is absolute. She would have hurt, even if she didn’t want to; and he does not want to hurt her, and even if he wanted to he could not because she is much bigger/stronger-slash-faster, and much too good at what she does. Thick skin.
Thick skin. Tough, twisted. Confidence well-earned and well-learned. She will not drop him.
“Hold on,” she says anyways, just in case. “Be careful.”
And then she aims her grapple, and up they go.
She is efficient about it, quick as anything but careful all the same. She doesn’t want to hurt Tim, or jostle him- the safety is the point of it, the point sharp enough to hurt, and it needs to look right. It needs to look like that. She doesn’t want to get caught up in another in-between interlude, not when her stomach is already roiling with the unease of a job well-done but done all the same. Her father never liked in-betweens either, always one thing after the other, bam-bam-bam, no in-betweens, no middlemen. For someone who built his life on being an intermediary, Cass’s father very much disliked middlemen.
That’s okay. She doesn’t like them either- more obstacles, points between A and B, between in danger and safe. More things to knock down, a waste of time. She doesn’t have the time for those in-betweens, those downswings. She’s not moving fast enough. Her father would’ve shot her by now.
Bad, bad men. They come and go, you know, and they like to try and do all sorts of things and some things are forever no matter how fast you run but if you are good at what you do- and she is the best at what she does- then you can throw them off at least. Throw them off the trail. Throw them off.
She speeds up.
Another jump, then another, and another and another and they’re about halfway. Her unease is rising; her father has begun to dog at her footsteps, rushing in to fill the empty space- silence after tragedy, after gunshot. Batman is somewhere behind that, watching, waiting, urging her on, and somewhere beyond-beneath that, Lady Shiva and her impatience, her ultimatum on the sidelines, Barbara and her own unease, her discomfort. They are all much more alike than they like to think. They could never stand that smoking-gun moment either; everything has a place, a purpose, and there is no time to lose.
She speeds up again, gravel crunching beneath her boots, spinning to the sides. It’s no matter. List of effects caused by sentiment, sediment, and middlemen: muddying. She has a job to do, and she is damn good at her job. She speeds up.
The next building is taller than the ones before. Tim gasps, sharp in her ear (little intake air-puff) as the brick bears down on them, and his childlike baby-fat fingers clamp down tight on her shoulders, and Cass- part of whom is still back on that rooftop behind them, back in that bank, back in that bunker, back with that man - remembers a child, little childlike fingers, baby fat and long black hair and a big, bad man bearing down like that brick building, and she remembers the quiet click of a gun locked and loaded, and-
She lands on top of the building, thrown off balance, and Tim’s fingers give one last ready-aim pulse on her shoulders. A jolt runs up through her leg and up her spine, straight to the neck, happens to the best of us, consequence of human-body-middleman. Pain sends a signal; danger, behind and above and below you. Ready, aim, burning. Burning; ready, aim, fire.
“ Woah, ” Tim whispers, giggling and burying his face in the back of her neck which is fine because he couldn’t-wouldn’t hurt her. They don’t have the time for that. They need to get this done.
“Okay?” she asks him anyways, a formality. He’s okay, of course; she would know already if he wasn’t.
“You’re super fast,” Tim tells her, matter-of-fact. Baby confidence. Unlearned.
“Not fast enough,” she answers. “Not yet.”
She can’t see his face, but she gets the feeling that if he were, he’d be staring.
“You mean we’re gonna go faster? ” he asks, incredulous, and Cass can’t help but smile a little, just a little bit at that.
“Yes,” she says. “Almost there. Hold on tight.”
He nods, wraps his arms around her neck. Brushes up against her shoulder-blade bullet-scar, earned at seven years old because she wasn’t fast enough, wasn’t thinking, got to caught up in her downtime, in-between.
It was a lesson she only needed to learn once. The sin of the father, the smoking gun, the proof of the danger of waiting too long. Moving too slow. Not moving. She’s not moving. Her unease at inaction has begun to trickle into panic, the frantic push of needing to do something to go somewhere, to cancel out the past or her father and to get away, as far away as possible. She does not want to be here. She does not want to be anywhere.
But there is a job to do, easy as that job may be, and she will do it right. So Cassandra takes all that fear, that bullet-wound and her upset, the in-betweens and the middlemen and anything other than the here and now, the wonderful sibilant wind-hiss of the rooftop and Tim, dependent, depending, and she pushes it far, far away. As far as it can go without letting her forget, because she can’t forget. Never, never, ever.
She can’t forget, but she can move, and she can move fast. So she ready-aim-fires her grapple, and she jumps.