Blood...
Her Father’s blood...
Her hands were covered in her Father’s blood...
With her bright eyes wide, Stephanie couldn’t stop herself from shaking as her palms were bathed in crimson, sticky with the sickly scent of copper, warm and dripping from her fingers. She wanted to scream, her throat choking as her lungs heaved, her chest hiking sharply with panicked breaths as terror coursed its way through her system, both heightening the world around her whilst also blinding her from it. Her vision blurred, narrowing to a point, the young girl scrambling as she lay upon the floor, lights flashing before her eyes as vertigo convinced her that she was falling...
Falling...
Falling...
“Breeeeeeath” the viper whispered from all around her, as intoxicating as the vapour that sank into her senses, “breeeeeeeath!”
“No!” Stephanie managed to gasp out loud, swinging wildly with one hand and striking nothing but fresh phantoms, the warehouse she was in replaced by the mirages of a home lost long ago. She almost shrieked as the goblin found sharp focus, the creature born from children’s nightmares, sharp red eyes and fanged teeth, ragged cloth and rotten hay, a crooked facsimile of a man stinking of the grave.
“Scarecrow,” she managed to exhale, giving voice to fresh despair as the creature grasped her by her colour, yanking the teenager up to vertical, feeble within its grip, all thoughts of courage drowning beneath a toxin, “Scarecrow!!”
“Noooooo,” the apparition sneered, hissing over the vowel with a hideous drawl, raising its left hand closer, palm fully enclosing her lips, her own hands beating meekly at its wrist, the sound of gas escaping a fresh vial, “not Scaaaaaaarecrow.”
“BATGIRL!!”
Her pupils narrowed to a point, some part of Stephanie Brown latching onto those two syllables as though they had been shouted across an abyss, a life raft thrown into the ocean. Her heart beat sharply and, with adrenaline surging, she shouted through the hand that sought to gag her and RAMMED her knee deep into the gut of her apparition.
With a sharp spasm, Stephanie was released from the mouldering grasp of her assailant, landing on unsteady feet and stumbling, almost collapsing over a table. With her vision spinning, the teenager continued to breath erratically, fear overwhelming all of her senses as the world turned upside down, the young blonde falling to her hands and knees.
“BATGIRL!!” that voice shouted again, urgent and insistent, filled with exertion, “GET UP!! GET UP NOW!! MOVE!!”
Stephanie rolled to the side sharply as a meat hook slammed into the floorboards where she had been lying, splintering the wood as easily as it would have impaled her spine. She rolled again and scrambled, finding her feet and backpedalling, her eyes both wide and blinking.
With a clanking of chains, the scarecrow inexorably retrieved its weapon, jerking its head to stare upon her as it advanced without hesitation, clouded by a miasma of pestilence.
Blood...
Her Father’s Blood...
Her hands were covered in her Father’s blood...
“NO!” she shouted, Batgirl surging forwards and unleashing a wild haymaker, sloppy, clumsy, but one that sent her fist whistling through the air and forcing her startled tormentor to backpedal. “I’m not afraid!!” she insisted, even as her body trembled, her knees threatening to collapse even as she pushed forwards, a further swing, a leaping knee and wicked elbow strike forcing the lopsided scarecrow into a retreat.
“I’m not afraid, I’m not, I’m not, I’M NOT!!”
A savage boot to her right knee halted her assault in a single heartbeat, Stephanie barking out a pained yelp as her limb folded, dropping her stature down to penitent.
“Yeeeeeeees,” the Scarecrow drawled, “you are!”
With a cruel grip, the ghoul grasped the intoxicated teenager by her exposed throat and squeezed, throttling the girl for her impertinence, right hand raising the meat hook high.
“No,” Stephanie wheezed, her voice gurgling through his iron grip, her eyes wide as she drowned in memories she only half remembered.
Blood...
Her Father’s Blood...
Her hands were covered in her Father’s Blood...
“I’m not... I’m not afraid,” Stephanie was forced to push the words out from between her teeth, the meat hook rapidly descending towards her features...
Batgirl’s left arm shot sharply up in a cross guard above her head, slamming it against the descending limb with a painful yet deft block, preventing the tip of the weapon from reaching its destination.
“I’m not... I’m not afraid of YOU!!” she yelled as she shoved her entire frame upwards, bundling all of her fears up into the tightest of balls as she swung her right fist skywards as the pinnacle of defiance. She slammed her fist into the jaw of her assailant with a blistering and pitch perfect uppercut, ripping the scarecrows head backwards and sending the ghoul scrambling.
Stephanie stumbled, still reeling from the toxins that were surging through her system, robbing her of any sense of up or down. Only this time she didn’t tumble, this time she fell straight into the arms of someone she knew, who she recalled from years ago in a memory she could not recollect, someone who could make nightmares run away.
“...not of you.”
“Easy Batgirl,” Nightwing coxed the intoxicated teenager in the right direction, even as he cursed inwardly upon witnessing the upended scarecrow beating its own hasty exit. The impulse to follow the ghoul was powerful, but he knew he couldn’t leave his charge for the evening to find her own fate.
Not with who was waiting for her outside.
“I’ve got you,” he eased her onwards, taking the weight of her slight frame with little difficulty, the sounds of sirens urging him to hurry. “The GPD can take it from here.”
**********
It seemed to Stephanie, as she lent forwards and heaved violently, that the only thing that she had managed to retain within her small body was her lungs. The entire contents of her stomach was forcibly ejected as the young woman wretched, all manner of foul substances emptying out onto the rooftop as her physiology fought against the toxins flowing throughout her frame, the teenager both shaking and sweating from head to toe.
“That’s it,” Nightwing encouraged without even a hint of derision, firmly rubbing the girls back as she suffered throughout the tail end of the poisons that she had been forced to inhale. “Don’t hold back. Believe me, that crap is better out than in.”
Stephanie nodded in understanding, feeling wobbly on her feet, and yet already she was starting to feel better, her head feeling light and woozy as opposed to being on fire. “Bad” she muttered with shaky exhales, “bad medicine.”
“The worst,” Nightwing agreed, putting his other hand on Batgirl’s shoulder, “do you think you can stand?”
After a moment’s thought, Stephanie nodded, her churning stomach not feeling a fresh need to vomit, “I think so.”
“Good,” Nightwing uttered, helping her to do so before leaning in close and dropping his voice down to a whisper, “because tonight is the night to do so. Don’t back down, don’t lie.”
Batgirl blinked in confusion, questions forming on her lips that she wouldn’t vocalise, instead turning about to find someone else waiting. A man she had meant before, a man who had saved her life.
A man who had told her to stay in her room.
Silence reigned as Stephanie swallowed, Batgirl stood opposite a phantom shrouded in night, a figure who had become the absence of light. Gotham’s first protector. Batman.
Neither spoke for long moments, deafening in their absence, the Narrows closing in all around them suffocating away the air. One moment, two, several more until, finally, the tension was broken.
“Why?”
Stephanie blinked, caught off guard by the question, suddenly at a loss for what to say before, on compulsion, she reached up and removed the domino mask that Nightwing had given her. Batman knew who she was, they had met before, and if she were to give an answer, she would do so without hiding.
“Why?” she muttered, struggling to form a reply, “why?” she looked up, her thoughts suddenly tumbling into a stream, thoughts and feelings boiling within her roiling gut as a lifetime of repression and frustration collided into a combustible and violent mix, angered by the bluntness of the question.
“Why do you think!?! Look around you, look at my home,” she swept out her arms, encompassing Gotham’s forgotten district, “this is what we have to live with!!”
Stephanie exhaled sharply, feeling her temper rising, fighting back the tears that threatened to stain her cheeks, “Do you even know what it’s like, to be crippled by fear!?! I do, I’ve spent my entire life hiding beneath my bed, closing my shutters and hoping, praying that the bad people will stay away.”
She dropped her arms, resisting the urge to pace as her fingers clenching into fists, discovering truths about herself that she had never possessed the courage to face.
“I’m terrified; I’m terrified of something I don’t even remember, I’m terrified that it might all happen again and so is everyone else, and you know what, do you know what makes it all really sad?” she questioned, not really expecting an answer, “They should be!! They have a right to be, because living in the Narrows is just waiting to be shot, or stabbed, or robbed or murdered or being left to rot by the rest of Gotham who don’t even want to admit we’re still here!!”
Her posture became accusatory, her manner aggressive as she strode towards the Dark Knight, thrusting a finger against the emblem embezzled on his chest. “No-one is going to help us, no-one is going to save us from the terror on our streets, even the Batman doesn’t care!! The only reason, the ONLY reason you’re here now is because of ME!!”
There was to be no rebuttal to her accusation, his gaze unflinching, his scrutiny unyielding.
Stephanie swallowed, her own eyes unblinking, her breathing ragged as over a decade of pain had been allowed to find its voice, her whole body shaking. She blinked, pulling back ever so slowly before she blinked again, feeling that aggression bleeding out of her as Stephanie found her focus, her temper redirected, her voice becoming softer.
“I don’t blame you,” she confessed, “I don’t, it’s not fair to.”
Stephanie turned away, looking across the river that separated her home from the city proper, the glimmer of a thousand lights lost amidst the fog. “I can see Gotham from here, I can see how big it is, and I know, for all of this, you are just one man. I know you can’t save everyone, you have to make a choice, and why would you choice us? What is there about the Narrows that’s worth saving?”
She resisted the urge to sit down, demanding that tonight, of all nights, was to be the night that she stands, “It’s my home.”
The young woman turned back around, finding Nightwing now stood beside the Batman, his own arms folded as he made the slightest of nods.
“I’m tired” she continued, her aggression now replaced entirely by rationale, “we’re all so tired of being afraid. I don’t want to be afraid, they don’t want to be afraid, they want, we want; we NEED something to believe in, anything, just one thing to remind us that we can be something more, that we shouldn’t have to be afraid.”
She moved back up to Batman, acutely aware that, beyond his first word, he had not spoken, her arms out at her side. “People want to brave, I believe that, I do, they just need a reason to be. I don’t want to be afraid anymore, I don’t want them to be afraid anymore and... and Batgirl makes me brave. It makes them brave, they are the ones who named me, they are the ones who want to believe. I can’t take that away from them now, I can’t take it away from myself. I won’t. I can, I will make a difference. I am asking you, please, don’t try to stop me from doing so.”
Silence.
Impenetrable and unyielding.
“There are other ways,” the Batman offered.
“This is mine,” was the reply.
**********
The Batcave was never idle, a fact that Dick Grayson had been acutely aware of since he had been a teenager, the hum of activity ever present as he marched his way through the central hub, past the giant penny to where the Batman was waiting. Nightwing had taken a longer root back to Wayne Manor than his former mentor, ensuring that Batgirl had found her own way home safely, and that her Uncle had been duly informed.
If Dick were to hazard a guess, he would say that Ted Grant had a few more grey hairs than the last time they had spoken.
Bruce, as was to be expected, was sat before the nerve centre of his operation, monitors beyond count reeling through information, forever upon the pulse of Gotham, overwhelming in what it encompassed, hands held in a steeple before him. With his cowl pulled back, the intensity of his stare could no longer hide the empathy often hidden beneath his duel guise, an empathy that few were truly aware that he possessed.
Dick wasn’t surprised by what he found to be at the front and centre of his former mentor’s attention, images, photos and folios of Stephanie Brown scattered across the monitors, a lifetime of discreet surveillance encompassing the near entirety of the girl’s lifetime. The teenager, the child, the infant...
The infant with wide eyes sat in a pool of her own Fathers blood, staring into an abyss that no child should ever have to witness. Even now, years after the event, the image captured in the photo left Grayson feeling uneasy, his arms folding across his chest.
“I sure do hope you don’t spend this much time watching me,” Dick injected a sense of levity as he diverted his attention elsewhere, an older, happier, gap toothed Stephanie Brown staring back at him from another photo as she posed beside her Uncle, one dollar in hand left by the ‘Tooth Fairy’.
“You outgrew my concerns a long time ago, Dick,” Bruce responded, a flicker of pride perhaps passing across his features, “You’re the last person I would monitor.”
“Well, that’s good to know,” Grayson broke half a smile before letting it slip away. “She’s not going to stop, you know that.”
“That’s what concerns me,” Bruce murmured, almost to himself, his gaze only for one image, the one of a child with eyes he had seen reflected back at him all too often, those he could not escape, even as his closed his own.
“I had hoped that she would forget...”
**********
One Week Later...
Upon final evaluation, Stephanie was not entirely satisfied, the tip of her finger trailing about a small hole that remained stubbornly lodged in the load supporting pillar. She frowned, the detail bothering her, especially being as the bullet responsible for its existence had nearly taken her head off.
“They missed a spot,” she declared with a reluctant sigh, the teenager turning about to address her Uncle.
For his own part, Ted Grant appeared to be nonplussed, the grizzled veteran of far too many things his Niece didn’t need to know about chewing on a cigar. “Adds character,” he dismissed, looking about his soon to be reopened gym with an air of satisfaction, “phew wrinkles never hurt nobody.”
Stephanie smirked in his direction, opting to forgo the obvious ribbing the old man had left often, instead turning her gaze to the rest of the Wildcat’s, her smile growing with every moment. By all accounts, the renovation was otherwise a complete success, even if the Gym did look like it had been time displaced from the fifties. If She didn’t possess such vivid memories of the event, it was almost as if nothing had occurred on that fateful evening a Detective had come to call.
She released a deep, relieved sigh, sticking her hands deep into the pockets of her hoodie as she spun a sharp one eighty and marched on over to her Uncle, “At least I can sleep in my own bed tonight.”
“About that...”
“I’m not moving out,” Stephanie ended the debate before it could begin, “the Narrows are my home, not the city.”
Ted huffed in dissatisfaction, but let the matter drop, no doubt to be returned to in about a year with the same results. “Suit yerself.”
“I will,” Stephanie replied with a reassuring nudge from her elbow, feeling invigorated as she bit down on her bottom lip, focused ever on the future ahead, giddy to her core. “Besides, I can’t leave you to buy your own groceries; you’ll be dead within a week.”
Ted huffed a second time, only willing to take this amount of guff from the girl he had adopted.
“You really didn’t want to change anything, did you?” Stephanie observed looking about the room again and recognising every inch of it from even her earliest memories.
“Nope,” her Uncle affirmed, pacing off in his own direction, his short, stout stature built as solid as a mountain, “comes with age kid, gotta keep some things the same, ‘cause some things can’t help but change. Ain’t nothin’ you can do about it ‘cept hope its fer the best.”
As he stopped by a open door, he motioned for her to follow.
“Something fer yer to see, kid.”
For her own part, Stephanie couldn’t help but feel confused as she looked into the small room before returning her gaze to her Uncle, perking her brow in a perplexed fasion. “It’s the broom closet; I’ve seen it many a time before. If this is about the one I broke...”
Ted held out his fist and, without warning, slammed it against the closets back wall. With an ominous thud followed by a grinding of gears, the wooden panel slotted back before sliding away. A gust of chilling air swept up and into the waiting Wildcats as the unexpected stood suddenly exposed, the removal of the false wall revealing the brickwork beyond.
Momentarily stunned beyond the ability to form coherent sentences, the teenager stepped past her Uncle and into the unknown, gazing into the chimney stack of a hidden room which housed a fireman’s poll at its centre. Her gaze followed its inevitable destination, the gleaming steel delving deep beneath the floorboards of her home, disappearing into the dark.
“Where does it go?” she queried, feeling giddy from vertigo, blue eyes wide as the world fell away from her perception, leaving nothing but the hole before her, a place from which there was no turning back. She could almost hear a whispering, the abyss staring back...
“You tell me, Steph,” was Ted Grant’s only answer, “I ain’t the one jumping in.”
Her Father’s blood...
Her hands were covered in her Father’s blood...
With her bright eyes wide, Stephanie couldn’t stop herself from shaking as her palms were bathed in crimson, sticky with the sickly scent of copper, warm and dripping from her fingers. She wanted to scream, her throat choking as her lungs heaved, her chest hiking sharply with panicked breaths as terror coursed its way through her system, both heightening the world around her whilst also blinding her from it. Her vision blurred, narrowing to a point, the young girl scrambling as she lay upon the floor, lights flashing before her eyes as vertigo convinced her that she was falling...
Falling...
Falling...
“Breeeeeeath” the viper whispered from all around her, as intoxicating as the vapour that sank into her senses, “breeeeeeeath!”
“No!” Stephanie managed to gasp out loud, swinging wildly with one hand and striking nothing but fresh phantoms, the warehouse she was in replaced by the mirages of a home lost long ago. She almost shrieked as the goblin found sharp focus, the creature born from children’s nightmares, sharp red eyes and fanged teeth, ragged cloth and rotten hay, a crooked facsimile of a man stinking of the grave.
“Scarecrow,” she managed to exhale, giving voice to fresh despair as the creature grasped her by her colour, yanking the teenager up to vertical, feeble within its grip, all thoughts of courage drowning beneath a toxin, “Scarecrow!!”
“Noooooo,” the apparition sneered, hissing over the vowel with a hideous drawl, raising its left hand closer, palm fully enclosing her lips, her own hands beating meekly at its wrist, the sound of gas escaping a fresh vial, “not Scaaaaaaarecrow.”
“BATGIRL!!”
Her pupils narrowed to a point, some part of Stephanie Brown latching onto those two syllables as though they had been shouted across an abyss, a life raft thrown into the ocean. Her heart beat sharply and, with adrenaline surging, she shouted through the hand that sought to gag her and RAMMED her knee deep into the gut of her apparition.
With a sharp spasm, Stephanie was released from the mouldering grasp of her assailant, landing on unsteady feet and stumbling, almost collapsing over a table. With her vision spinning, the teenager continued to breath erratically, fear overwhelming all of her senses as the world turned upside down, the young blonde falling to her hands and knees.
“BATGIRL!!” that voice shouted again, urgent and insistent, filled with exertion, “GET UP!! GET UP NOW!! MOVE!!”
Stephanie rolled to the side sharply as a meat hook slammed into the floorboards where she had been lying, splintering the wood as easily as it would have impaled her spine. She rolled again and scrambled, finding her feet and backpedalling, her eyes both wide and blinking.
With a clanking of chains, the scarecrow inexorably retrieved its weapon, jerking its head to stare upon her as it advanced without hesitation, clouded by a miasma of pestilence.
Blood...
Her Father’s Blood...
Her hands were covered in her Father’s blood...
“NO!” she shouted, Batgirl surging forwards and unleashing a wild haymaker, sloppy, clumsy, but one that sent her fist whistling through the air and forcing her startled tormentor to backpedal. “I’m not afraid!!” she insisted, even as her body trembled, her knees threatening to collapse even as she pushed forwards, a further swing, a leaping knee and wicked elbow strike forcing the lopsided scarecrow into a retreat.
“I’m not afraid, I’m not, I’m not, I’M NOT!!”
A savage boot to her right knee halted her assault in a single heartbeat, Stephanie barking out a pained yelp as her limb folded, dropping her stature down to penitent.
“Yeeeeeeees,” the Scarecrow drawled, “you are!”
With a cruel grip, the ghoul grasped the intoxicated teenager by her exposed throat and squeezed, throttling the girl for her impertinence, right hand raising the meat hook high.
“No,” Stephanie wheezed, her voice gurgling through his iron grip, her eyes wide as she drowned in memories she only half remembered.
Blood...
Her Father’s Blood...
Her hands were covered in her Father’s Blood...
“I’m not... I’m not afraid,” Stephanie was forced to push the words out from between her teeth, the meat hook rapidly descending towards her features...
Batgirl’s left arm shot sharply up in a cross guard above her head, slamming it against the descending limb with a painful yet deft block, preventing the tip of the weapon from reaching its destination.
“I’m not... I’m not afraid of YOU!!” she yelled as she shoved her entire frame upwards, bundling all of her fears up into the tightest of balls as she swung her right fist skywards as the pinnacle of defiance. She slammed her fist into the jaw of her assailant with a blistering and pitch perfect uppercut, ripping the scarecrows head backwards and sending the ghoul scrambling.
Stephanie stumbled, still reeling from the toxins that were surging through her system, robbing her of any sense of up or down. Only this time she didn’t tumble, this time she fell straight into the arms of someone she knew, who she recalled from years ago in a memory she could not recollect, someone who could make nightmares run away.
“...not of you.”
“Easy Batgirl,” Nightwing coxed the intoxicated teenager in the right direction, even as he cursed inwardly upon witnessing the upended scarecrow beating its own hasty exit. The impulse to follow the ghoul was powerful, but he knew he couldn’t leave his charge for the evening to find her own fate.
Not with who was waiting for her outside.
“I’ve got you,” he eased her onwards, taking the weight of her slight frame with little difficulty, the sounds of sirens urging him to hurry. “The GPD can take it from here.”
**********
It seemed to Stephanie, as she lent forwards and heaved violently, that the only thing that she had managed to retain within her small body was her lungs. The entire contents of her stomach was forcibly ejected as the young woman wretched, all manner of foul substances emptying out onto the rooftop as her physiology fought against the toxins flowing throughout her frame, the teenager both shaking and sweating from head to toe.
“That’s it,” Nightwing encouraged without even a hint of derision, firmly rubbing the girls back as she suffered throughout the tail end of the poisons that she had been forced to inhale. “Don’t hold back. Believe me, that crap is better out than in.”
Stephanie nodded in understanding, feeling wobbly on her feet, and yet already she was starting to feel better, her head feeling light and woozy as opposed to being on fire. “Bad” she muttered with shaky exhales, “bad medicine.”
“The worst,” Nightwing agreed, putting his other hand on Batgirl’s shoulder, “do you think you can stand?”
After a moment’s thought, Stephanie nodded, her churning stomach not feeling a fresh need to vomit, “I think so.”
“Good,” Nightwing uttered, helping her to do so before leaning in close and dropping his voice down to a whisper, “because tonight is the night to do so. Don’t back down, don’t lie.”
Batgirl blinked in confusion, questions forming on her lips that she wouldn’t vocalise, instead turning about to find someone else waiting. A man she had meant before, a man who had saved her life.
A man who had told her to stay in her room.
Silence reigned as Stephanie swallowed, Batgirl stood opposite a phantom shrouded in night, a figure who had become the absence of light. Gotham’s first protector. Batman.
Neither spoke for long moments, deafening in their absence, the Narrows closing in all around them suffocating away the air. One moment, two, several more until, finally, the tension was broken.
“Why?”
Stephanie blinked, caught off guard by the question, suddenly at a loss for what to say before, on compulsion, she reached up and removed the domino mask that Nightwing had given her. Batman knew who she was, they had met before, and if she were to give an answer, she would do so without hiding.
“Why?” she muttered, struggling to form a reply, “why?” she looked up, her thoughts suddenly tumbling into a stream, thoughts and feelings boiling within her roiling gut as a lifetime of repression and frustration collided into a combustible and violent mix, angered by the bluntness of the question.
“Why do you think!?! Look around you, look at my home,” she swept out her arms, encompassing Gotham’s forgotten district, “this is what we have to live with!!”
Stephanie exhaled sharply, feeling her temper rising, fighting back the tears that threatened to stain her cheeks, “Do you even know what it’s like, to be crippled by fear!?! I do, I’ve spent my entire life hiding beneath my bed, closing my shutters and hoping, praying that the bad people will stay away.”
She dropped her arms, resisting the urge to pace as her fingers clenching into fists, discovering truths about herself that she had never possessed the courage to face.
“I’m terrified; I’m terrified of something I don’t even remember, I’m terrified that it might all happen again and so is everyone else, and you know what, do you know what makes it all really sad?” she questioned, not really expecting an answer, “They should be!! They have a right to be, because living in the Narrows is just waiting to be shot, or stabbed, or robbed or murdered or being left to rot by the rest of Gotham who don’t even want to admit we’re still here!!”
Her posture became accusatory, her manner aggressive as she strode towards the Dark Knight, thrusting a finger against the emblem embezzled on his chest. “No-one is going to help us, no-one is going to save us from the terror on our streets, even the Batman doesn’t care!! The only reason, the ONLY reason you’re here now is because of ME!!”
There was to be no rebuttal to her accusation, his gaze unflinching, his scrutiny unyielding.
Stephanie swallowed, her own eyes unblinking, her breathing ragged as over a decade of pain had been allowed to find its voice, her whole body shaking. She blinked, pulling back ever so slowly before she blinked again, feeling that aggression bleeding out of her as Stephanie found her focus, her temper redirected, her voice becoming softer.
“I don’t blame you,” she confessed, “I don’t, it’s not fair to.”
Stephanie turned away, looking across the river that separated her home from the city proper, the glimmer of a thousand lights lost amidst the fog. “I can see Gotham from here, I can see how big it is, and I know, for all of this, you are just one man. I know you can’t save everyone, you have to make a choice, and why would you choice us? What is there about the Narrows that’s worth saving?”
She resisted the urge to sit down, demanding that tonight, of all nights, was to be the night that she stands, “It’s my home.”
The young woman turned back around, finding Nightwing now stood beside the Batman, his own arms folded as he made the slightest of nods.
“I’m tired” she continued, her aggression now replaced entirely by rationale, “we’re all so tired of being afraid. I don’t want to be afraid, they don’t want to be afraid, they want, we want; we NEED something to believe in, anything, just one thing to remind us that we can be something more, that we shouldn’t have to be afraid.”
She moved back up to Batman, acutely aware that, beyond his first word, he had not spoken, her arms out at her side. “People want to brave, I believe that, I do, they just need a reason to be. I don’t want to be afraid anymore, I don’t want them to be afraid anymore and... and Batgirl makes me brave. It makes them brave, they are the ones who named me, they are the ones who want to believe. I can’t take that away from them now, I can’t take it away from myself. I won’t. I can, I will make a difference. I am asking you, please, don’t try to stop me from doing so.”
Silence.
Impenetrable and unyielding.
“There are other ways,” the Batman offered.
“This is mine,” was the reply.
**********
The Batcave was never idle, a fact that Dick Grayson had been acutely aware of since he had been a teenager, the hum of activity ever present as he marched his way through the central hub, past the giant penny to where the Batman was waiting. Nightwing had taken a longer root back to Wayne Manor than his former mentor, ensuring that Batgirl had found her own way home safely, and that her Uncle had been duly informed.
If Dick were to hazard a guess, he would say that Ted Grant had a few more grey hairs than the last time they had spoken.
Bruce, as was to be expected, was sat before the nerve centre of his operation, monitors beyond count reeling through information, forever upon the pulse of Gotham, overwhelming in what it encompassed, hands held in a steeple before him. With his cowl pulled back, the intensity of his stare could no longer hide the empathy often hidden beneath his duel guise, an empathy that few were truly aware that he possessed.
Dick wasn’t surprised by what he found to be at the front and centre of his former mentor’s attention, images, photos and folios of Stephanie Brown scattered across the monitors, a lifetime of discreet surveillance encompassing the near entirety of the girl’s lifetime. The teenager, the child, the infant...
The infant with wide eyes sat in a pool of her own Fathers blood, staring into an abyss that no child should ever have to witness. Even now, years after the event, the image captured in the photo left Grayson feeling uneasy, his arms folding across his chest.
“I sure do hope you don’t spend this much time watching me,” Dick injected a sense of levity as he diverted his attention elsewhere, an older, happier, gap toothed Stephanie Brown staring back at him from another photo as she posed beside her Uncle, one dollar in hand left by the ‘Tooth Fairy’.
“You outgrew my concerns a long time ago, Dick,” Bruce responded, a flicker of pride perhaps passing across his features, “You’re the last person I would monitor.”
“Well, that’s good to know,” Grayson broke half a smile before letting it slip away. “She’s not going to stop, you know that.”
“That’s what concerns me,” Bruce murmured, almost to himself, his gaze only for one image, the one of a child with eyes he had seen reflected back at him all too often, those he could not escape, even as his closed his own.
“I had hoped that she would forget...”
**********
One Week Later...
Upon final evaluation, Stephanie was not entirely satisfied, the tip of her finger trailing about a small hole that remained stubbornly lodged in the load supporting pillar. She frowned, the detail bothering her, especially being as the bullet responsible for its existence had nearly taken her head off.
“They missed a spot,” she declared with a reluctant sigh, the teenager turning about to address her Uncle.
For his own part, Ted Grant appeared to be nonplussed, the grizzled veteran of far too many things his Niece didn’t need to know about chewing on a cigar. “Adds character,” he dismissed, looking about his soon to be reopened gym with an air of satisfaction, “phew wrinkles never hurt nobody.”
Stephanie smirked in his direction, opting to forgo the obvious ribbing the old man had left often, instead turning her gaze to the rest of the Wildcat’s, her smile growing with every moment. By all accounts, the renovation was otherwise a complete success, even if the Gym did look like it had been time displaced from the fifties. If She didn’t possess such vivid memories of the event, it was almost as if nothing had occurred on that fateful evening a Detective had come to call.
She released a deep, relieved sigh, sticking her hands deep into the pockets of her hoodie as she spun a sharp one eighty and marched on over to her Uncle, “At least I can sleep in my own bed tonight.”
“About that...”
“I’m not moving out,” Stephanie ended the debate before it could begin, “the Narrows are my home, not the city.”
Ted huffed in dissatisfaction, but let the matter drop, no doubt to be returned to in about a year with the same results. “Suit yerself.”
“I will,” Stephanie replied with a reassuring nudge from her elbow, feeling invigorated as she bit down on her bottom lip, focused ever on the future ahead, giddy to her core. “Besides, I can’t leave you to buy your own groceries; you’ll be dead within a week.”
Ted huffed a second time, only willing to take this amount of guff from the girl he had adopted.
“You really didn’t want to change anything, did you?” Stephanie observed looking about the room again and recognising every inch of it from even her earliest memories.
“Nope,” her Uncle affirmed, pacing off in his own direction, his short, stout stature built as solid as a mountain, “comes with age kid, gotta keep some things the same, ‘cause some things can’t help but change. Ain’t nothin’ you can do about it ‘cept hope its fer the best.”
As he stopped by a open door, he motioned for her to follow.
“Something fer yer to see, kid.”
For her own part, Stephanie couldn’t help but feel confused as she looked into the small room before returning her gaze to her Uncle, perking her brow in a perplexed fasion. “It’s the broom closet; I’ve seen it many a time before. If this is about the one I broke...”
Ted held out his fist and, without warning, slammed it against the closets back wall. With an ominous thud followed by a grinding of gears, the wooden panel slotted back before sliding away. A gust of chilling air swept up and into the waiting Wildcats as the unexpected stood suddenly exposed, the removal of the false wall revealing the brickwork beyond.
Momentarily stunned beyond the ability to form coherent sentences, the teenager stepped past her Uncle and into the unknown, gazing into the chimney stack of a hidden room which housed a fireman’s poll at its centre. Her gaze followed its inevitable destination, the gleaming steel delving deep beneath the floorboards of her home, disappearing into the dark.
“Where does it go?” she queried, feeling giddy from vertigo, blue eyes wide as the world fell away from her perception, leaving nothing but the hole before her, a place from which there was no turning back. She could almost hear a whispering, the abyss staring back...
“You tell me, Steph,” was Ted Grant’s only answer, “I ain’t the one jumping in.”