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Cass asks, sometimes, when the silence stretches too long, in the quiet of darkness where it doesn’t feel like it casts so long a shadow, if other people listened to their fathers, when they were small. Before they knew any better. If they heard instructions and did what they were told and felt proud of themselves for making their fathers proud.
Bruce and Dick aren’t good ones to ask. They’re still proud of making their fathers proud. Jason helps, sometimes, but everything his father asked him to do that wasn’t just fatherly affection was running, hiding, sometimes taking something that by all rights he should have had anyway. Jason’s father never pushed him to violence, even when he taught him how to hit.
Babs helps more, when she asks these questions. Jim was a good dad, always caring for her when she was small, Babs makes sure to tell Cass, but one of the ways he cared was worrying too much. He’d seen things, so many things already at that point, on the streets of Gotham, and he assumed anything in the world that came near Babs intended to hurt her. He taught her to fight first and ask questions later, and she thought, at the time, this was a good approach. He egged her on, sometimes, she says, although she flounders when she says it, as if that’s not quite the exact idea she means. He taught her to be more violent than she needed to be, but she forgives him, because he was trying to save her life.
It’s easy to understand, when she puts it like that, and Cass wonders if her father ever was trying to save her life. He wanted things from her that could never be defended, but that never meant he didn’t want her safe. He taught her to avoid every injury, not just the ones that were hard to treat, as much as possible, which must mean something. Maybe, second to everything else, her father was trying to save her, too, a little bit.
Tim tells her things in metaphor. They aren’t really metaphors; they’re his own life. But it’s a mathematical shift from one life to the other, and she has to understand them in metaphor, so it’s always important to time those questions right. He tells her all the things his father expected to reflect on the family – grades, posture, the shininess of his shoes, and she can apply them to her own life, if she has enough space to think. Necessary, sometimes, but overly emphasized, and other times not necessary at all. He wasn’t always incorrect, Tim says, but that doesn’t mean it mattered as much as anyone said it should.
There’s no real violence in it, or the violence there is – Cass feels like violence is happening, every time she goes to a gala, but it’s not the kind she’s trained in, and she neither knows how to aim nor dodge. Tim was taught too much of that as a child, and he only forgives his father for some of it. That part is resonant, to Cass, and she almost feels like if she could decipher the rest of it, she’d find the answers she needed.
So much of it, though, is about how much Tim was hurt by all of it. That’s what Duke says, too, about how his father spanked him as a child, making sure the lessons he was imparting always stung enough to remember. That he never understood it as a child, but being too scared to do one thing or another was sometimes what saved him until he was old enough to learn for himself. Duke says it wasn’t the only way, probably wasn’t the best way, but was the way his parents knew, and it worked the ways it needed to work, and it protected him.
Cass knows what protected her. She’s already forgiven her father for all of that. Every dodge he taught her, every method of sensing someone’s ill intent, every hurt he visited on her so she knew how to work through it – it wasn’t the only way, or the best way, but it worked. That, at least, it’s a relief that other people understand.
Even growing up without a father, Damian tries to give her advice. He had father figures, he tells her, people who were not always close to his mother, but were primarily responsible for him. They punished him, too, in these necessary ways, or sometimes unnecessary, and he thought he understood it at the time, and he judges them for it now, the way Cass judges her own father. They also taught him to fight. They taught him to aim for the kill, always, because he was so small that any lesser strike put him in danger.
Cass isn’t sure it’s exactly the same. They taught Damian, even at that young age, what death was. It was never about being the best. It was always about keeping himself alive, whole, safe from every danger in the world.
She can ask Alfred, sometimes, about needing to be the best. Alfred tells her all about how no pain to him ever mattered as much as reaching higher and higher, about no harm ever mattered as much as some abstract end goal, about all the people he had to sabotage along the way. His father ruined lives, trying to reach above his station, Alfred says, and there’s more there than Cass understands, but she knows that he pushed Alfred to hurt people. She knows that Alfred’s father put him somewhere that he had to kill, and he couldn’t leave until he’d killed enough. He says it with pain in his eyes, but he never tells her whether he can forgive his father for it, and she doesn’t have her answer.
Steph never gives her an answer, either, but she fails to give an answer in a way it’s easy for Cass to understand. Steph’s father loved her, too, in his way, but he never wanted a child. He, too, wanted someone to be the best. Cass’s father honed her into a weapon, and Steph’s father was trying to carve a different style of tool, but it was whittling away at their edges just the same, trying to turn them into something to hurt whatever they were aimed at. Steph was hurt like Cass was hurt, and she forgives what she can, out of love, and she was pointed outwards, too, intended to target anyone their fathers wanted them to harm.
There are things that are unforgivable, even for family, and it always overshadows the love. It’s still there, though. They talk about it, sometimes, is whispers over flickering flames, because it’s worth talking about. Not everything there was evil, and no one understands why it’s worth rescuing, just because it was there. Steph had her games just the way Cass did, and even if the word tastes bitter, now, it was still joy in a child’s laugh.
But, yes, Steph listened to her father. She always listened to her father, when she was small. She did what she was told, and people were hurt for it, and she believed it was allowed because her father was the only authority in the world. She understands what Cass means. Cass, at least, Steph thinks it’s fine to forgive.