Archive of Our Own ^omega

Steph yanks her key out of the lock and kicks the door open with a tap of her foot. Her bruises and stitches aren’t pleased with her moving at all, but she does her best to ignore that. All she needs is to crash in bed, and things will feel more manageable in the morning. 

The lights in the kitchen are still on. Steph drops her bag and uses her toes to pry her sneakers off without the use of her hands. As she goes, she calls, “Mom? I’m home.”

No response comes. The light must have been left on by accident. It’s far too late for Crystal to be awake, and Steph would prefer to skip the lecture on the dangers of vigilantism anyway. They already fought earlier this evening, a verbal brawl including Crystal’s remarks on Steph’s career choices, body, and relationship status, and Steph returning the same amount of thinly-veiled insults before stomping out and slamming the front door on her way. If anything can come between Steph and the reprisal of this argument, she’ll take it.

She drifts further into the apartment, rubbing her eyes as she goes. Things weren’t any more hectic than normal on patrol, but there was still a baseline of adrenaline that she’s now crashing from, which means she craves sodium. If her mom hasn’t eaten her leftover chow mein, Steph’s about to have the best early-morning snack of her life. 

Eyes half-closed, Steph pulls the fridge door open. The leftovers are gone, and the shelves are bare enough that she would be embarrassed to have her friends see. Steph heaves a sigh and settles for a handful of cheese sticks and a can of Dr. Pepper instead. 

It’s only when she’s closing the fridge door with her elbow that she notices anything about her surroundings. Steph opens her eyes after a yawn and they land on a puddle of spilled ice water, broken glass, and a bare foot sticking out from behind the kitchen island. 

The can of soda hits the tile and bursts open, spraying brown liquid all over the glass of the oven door. Steph bolts forward, leaving the mess behind.

Crystal is in one of her pajama sets, pink satin with white piping. The front of the top is stained with dried vomit, and the fabric is thin enough under Steph’s fingers that she knows her mom’s skin is cold to the touch. Steph can see blue-tinged lips and glassy, vacant eyes. 

“Mom?” Steph demands, heart hammering in her fingertips. She crashes to the ground on her knees and her hands find her mother’s shoulders, and she shakes Crystal, hard. “Mom!”

No reaction. Steph presses her fingers to the pulse point in Crystal’s neck and finds only stiff skin there. Steph hears herself shaking her head and saying loudly, “Mom, get up. It’s late.”

Steph sits up on her knees and stacks her hands and drives them down onto her mom’s sternum, starting compressions and counting out loud. The continued pulse of the CPR jostles a near-empty bottle of Vicodin from her mom’s hand, and it rolls lazily across the tile while Steph counts eighteen-nineteen-twenty. 

“Mom,” Steph goes to say again, and finds her voice warbling and thick and wrong as it comes out of her mouth. “Mom, I told you to check your dosage. I told you.” 

Crystal’s head lolls to the side, her mouth half-open, her chin still covered with vomit. Steph knows what death looks like. Still, she wipes Crystal’s face off and does two breaths in before going back to her original task. 

The compressions aren’t doing anything. Steph still does three rounds of them, breaths too, before she forces herself to sit back. 

Judging by the faint, rapidly-disappearing warmth of her mom’s skin, Steph is at least an hour too late. There are steps to take in an emergency, Steph knows what they are. 

She closes Crystal’s eyes gently and then takes out her cell phone and calls 911. 

“My mom overdosed,” Steph tells the operator when they ask, voice flat and businesslike so she’s sure she’ll be understood. “I found her just now. Can you send someone?”

They tell her to stay on the phone. Steph thinks they probably think that she’s in shock, or that she needs companionship. Maybe they’re right, but Steph doesn’t know. Mostly she just feels stupid, sitting on the kitchen floor and just looking at her mom, who still has curlers in. 

Crystal would be embarrassed to be seen like this. Though Steph has never been spared the ugliest of her mom’s lows, everyone else has been. This is why Steph puts the phone down and gets to work untangling the curlers from her mom’s slightly-damp hair. She makes a neat pile of the pink plastic rolls and lays her mom’s hair around her shoulders, and combs her hair through the curls until they aren’t such intense ringlets, until her hair is styled just like the one picture Crystal has of her, Steph, and Arthur where they’re all smiling.

The ambulance takes about ten minutes to arrive. Steph gets up to unlock the door and let the paramedics in, and there’s a police officer with them who Steph saw when she was out on patrol an hour ago. He doesn’t recognize her. He just bags the leftover pills as evidence and asks Steph questions while the EMTs take Crystal away. 

“Do you have someone you can call?” he asks last. 

Steph thinks about the team of vigilantes she just left behind. Not only are they all asleep by now, but she thinks it would be absolutely untenable to sit and endure their comfort right now. 

“Yeah,” Steph says, with no intent to follow through. “Um, could you ask somebody to clean up the floor? I think we’re out of bleach.”

When her apartment is empty, Steph goes to her mom’s room and crawls into the bed and curls into the blankets. It’s like being five years old and missing her mom when she worked double shifts, waking up from a nightmare and not having anyone at home to calm her down. The big empty bed felt safer than Steph’s own, where creepy shadows danced outside the window and the big half-open closet door loomed with a threatening darkness, with the memory of getting shut inside.

The bed still holds some of that power. Steph pulls the comforters up over her shoulders and curls up, keeping her feet and hands off the edges of the bed so no monsters can reach her from under the bed. 

It feels so absurd, that Steph can just lie down and shut her eyes and that’s it. But she does that, and she goes to sleep, and she doesn’t even dream. Things will be okay once Crystal’s back from work.

Her eyes are open. Maybe they’ve been open for hours, and that’s why they’re so watery. Steph puts bread in the toaster and pushes the lever down. The toast pops back up. She pushes the lever down again. And again. And again.

Something smells bad. It’s not the bleachy smell of her kitchen. She frowns at the toaster, wondering why she has to keep pushing the button, and finds that the bread she put in is already blackened and smoke has begun to spread through her kitchen.

A shriek of a smoke alarm startles her out of her daze. Steph flinches and then runs towards the kitchen window, flinging it open and fanning a newspaper around in the air to disperse the smoke. She manages to avert a building-wide fire evacuation, which would definitely not do anything to endear her to her neighbors. 

When the smoke alarm has shut off, Steph is in an empty apartment that stinks like burnt toast. Her eyes land on a pile of pink hair rollers and her chest gets all cold and empty again, all traces of toast-based panic gone and replaced with feeling nothing. 

Steph takes a shallow breath and doesn’t even freak out when her sock sticks to a dried puddle of spilled Dr. Pepper. She just picks up her mom’s address book and the landline and gets to work tracking down all the shitty aunts and uncles and estranged family friends that Crystal rarely spoke to. 

She tells everyone what happened, minus the sordid details, and has the same conversation so many times that she starts being able to rattle it off like a robot without having to devote conscious thought to it. She calls her mom’s parish and they promise to hold a small service for her. She calls the coroner, who refers her to a mortuary, where they tell her some options and Steph gets overcharged for a cremation. 

Steph puts her phone down after three grueling hours, with eight hundred dollars charged to her credit card and without a mother. 

Something that would ease this just a little bit would be having company, like someone who could tell her to do the dishes or snipe at her to order dinner for the two of them. She’s absolutely not going to invite anyone over, though. 

Having the others find out about why Steph’s falling apart is the nightmare scenario. Considering how everyone else on her team has lost their mothers in far more violent and-or traumatizing ways, she gets the feeling that they’ll start to side-eye her. 

Dick is way too nice to her to ever say it out loud, but he’ll be thinking, check out this little bitch who can’t manage making toast even though she didn’t watch her mom plummet to her death.

“That’ll go really well,” Steph says aloud, mocking herself, dragging herself back to that safe state of unfeeling. “Have any more fun things you can cry to him about? Like how your dad is super alive?”

The mommy issues of everyone in her life aside, Steph still doesn’t want anyone else to be let in on this terrible secret. It feels safer, less vulnerable, to curl tight around the knowledge and guard it against her chest, where she won’t have to face concern and open worry that will make all of this more complicated than it needs to be.

Mind made up, Steph gets up and showers and gets in her car and goes to lecture, even though her head is too fuzzy for her to learn anything. 

“Hey, B,” Steph says, curled tight in the cocoon of her mother’s comforter the next day. “Could I get out of work tonight?” 

“…Why?” he asks, audibly suspicious even over the phone. 

“It’s a yes or no.”

He sighs. “It’s your decision. I can’t force you to come in. I will say that Kate and Tim are still sick, and I’d like some more backup than I have, but if you have other obligations we can make do.”

It’s reasonable. Jason, Damian, and Dick are all out of town, and Steph doesn’t have anything else to do except sit in her now-too-empty apartment and stare at the wall. Steph usually tries not to cancel last-minute. She knows that if she flakes out she’ll have to answer questions about why, eventually. 

“Okay, never mind,” she says. Her voice stays steady. “I’ll be there. No worries.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yup. Gotta pick up Timmy’s slack. That’s my job.” 

Bruce snorts, just a little bit. He’s nearly inaudible. “Alright.”

Steph hangs up. She gets up and robotically changes into non-pajamas and then puts on water to boil some noodles. She can’t manage to eat them once they’re done, but it’s the thought that counts.

Duke has also been conscripted to fill in for his numerous absent siblings, and he’s the first to raise his hand in greeting when Steph enters the Batcave. He gives a tired smile, and then elbows Harper next to him, who throws up a peace sign. The two of them are the only ones in sight.

“How’s it going?” Steph asks, slinging her backpack off of her shoulder. It’s the first time she’s been around people who aren’t strangers since…what happened, and she feels sort of like an alien. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands, or her face, or her voice. 

“Good,” Duke says, at the same time Harper yawns and says, “Bad.”

“Cool,” Steph says, having not listened to either of their responses. “Where’s Cass?”

“Still upstairs.” Harper clips her belt on, and then shoves her arm through the first of her jacket sleeves. “Duke, are you ready?”

“Yup.” Duke looks back to Steph. “If you and Cass wanna meet us, we’re getting churros at midnight.”

“Cool,” Steph says, not grasping any of the words Duke’s saying. Her head hurts. Her heart hurts. Nobody’s noticing, and she doesn’t know if she’s okay with that. 

“Good luck tonight.” Harper gives a brief smile and then heads towards her bike, Duke following behind to find his own.

“Thinking a lot,” Cass accuses her, poking her in the middle of her forehead, a couple hours into their patrol. 

Even if Cass wasn’t…Cass, it would probably be fairly obvious that Steph’s mind is on other things. She’s not fighting at her best, and she hasn’t been talking all that much. Steph’s not known to be particularly solipsistic, when things are all hunky-dory.

“Sorry,” Steph says, laughing sheepishly. “It’s been a long day. Would you snitch on me if I dipped out early?”

Cass shrugs, not seeming to care either way. “I have…some leads to check up on my own.”

Steph slumps with the relief of not needing to pretend for much longer. “You’re the best, C.”

“I know,” Cass says. She doesn’t look deeper into Steph’s flakiness. Steph always pulls this kind of thing during exam season anyway, she’s established a pattern.

Steph takes a shortcut back to her building and climbs in the bathroom window. She doesn’t even bother changing out of her suit before crashing into her mom’s bed and pulling the blankets tight around her again. 

The blankets hold her softly, safely. Steph has dreams about sitting on the bathroom counter painting her nails, about Blondie playing too loud from the shitty CD player Crystal bought Steph for her seventh birthday, about Crystal folding laundry and laughing at whatever her friend was saying over the phone.

Steph wakes up and the apartment is silent, and the pillow is soaked with tears.

Tim calls to hang out. Steph hasn’t been spending time with anyone for the last several weeks, though she’s not sure if Tim’s noticed. The two of them go through phases, an ebb and flow of seeing each other too much and not enough.

“I can’t do Saturday,” Steph says plainly. “I’m going to a funeral.”

“Oh, okay. Sunday, then?” 

Steph’s never had so many complicated, conflicting emotions about Tim’s inability to ask follow-up questions about her life. She clamps down on an overwhelmed laugh that threatens to break out of her, and instead says, “Sure, at eleven?”

“Works for me. See you.”

“See you,” Steph says. She hangs up, the absurdity of the situation enough to overwhelm anything else she could possibly be feeling. She lays back down.

The blanket she’s been wrapping herself in for every spare moment is beginning to lose its scent. Steph knows the perfume that Crystal wore, and the laundry detergent she bought, but washing the blanket will almost certainly take away this particular scent altogether. Steph doesn’t know how she’ll be able to sleep at night once it’s gone.

The memorial is short. Steph doesn’t want to say a little speech in front of the priest and the sparse family members and the four gathered old women who Steph recognizes from church fifteen years ago, so she just listens to the fluffy religious words that feel impersonal and offensive. Steph wore a dress for this shit. She imagines Crystal smacking her hand away from her hair when she starts to fidget with it. 

Steph doesn’t understand where the fuck these people were when Crystal and Steph were in a shelter for a few months, or where these people were whenever Arthur swung in or out of prison. There are a lot of distant aunts and uncles standing around, all in black, and none of them come near Steph at all.

There are people that tell Steph where to bring her mother’s ashes, and more people at the mausoleum who tell her which slot is Crystal’s. There is nobody who sticks around after the service to hug Steph and tell her that she’s not actually alone in this.

Steph sits down on a bench next to where her mom’s ashes are put, after everyone leaves. She sets her old rosary down on the handle of the slot in the wall and wonders if she’s fucked up for not having the slightest urge to cry.

“I hope that was what you wanted,” Steph says aloud, feeling stupid for talking to someone who’s not listening. “Last time I asked about what kinda funeral you wanted, you hit me for implying you were gonna die soon.”

The memory makes Steph laugh. She wraps her arms under her knees and rests her forehead on top of them, curling up so the sun above her head will stop making her eyes hurt. 

“Bye, bestie,” Steph murmurs. “I’m sorry I’m not the kid you wanted.”

After a while, she stands up and walks home. Her dress goes in the garbage, and Steph climbs back onto her mom’s bed, and she doesn’t think about anything for a while after that.

She cancels on Tim. He doesn’t ask why. Steph is glad she’s not dating him, so she doesn’t have to be upset about this.

Compartmentalizing is never a skill that Steph’s had to flex this hard. Now, considering how good she is at it, it’s something she’d put on her resume. She puts all her emotions in a box and only opens the box when she’s at home alone, and it works. Her grades don’t slip, her cases get solved, and nobody asks her what’s wrong. Things are fine until the end of the month rolls around.

Steph pulls down on the top of her screen to refresh her banking app one more time, desperate, and finds that no, in fact, her paycheck hasn't been processed, and she’s going to have to drop her plans to go delicately ask Bruce for money without being desperate about it.

Steph’s credit card is already maxed out for this month. The cremation, the funeral, the processing fees, the-- everything. All of it added up so quickly, and Steph needs to pay rent. If Steph sees her mom’s stuff thrown out on the sidewalk to rot, she’ll lose her tenuous grip on sanity.

She’s going to have to ask for money, and to get the money she’ll have to explain what happened. The combination of these two undesirable situations is what has kept Steph in her huddled position against the wall for about two hours now. She can’t get up. Every time she thinks about it, she thinks about the terrible, horrible, no-good very-bad inevitability of Bruce finding out about what happened to Crystal, and the pitying look on his face when his suspicions are confirmed that Steph is a poor little lost lamb who needs handouts just to keep afloat.

Asking for money is the worst thing about Steph’s relationship with Bruce. 

He’ll never say no. He’s always, in fact, bothering the fuck out of her by trying to offer her things, like a new car or a year of tuition or help with rent. Steph never wants it. She’ll accept some help when it’s between that and starving, because she’s not stupid, but it always feels terrible. She always does it shamefaced, avoiding everyone else in that stupid family with Ocean’s Eleven -level maneuvers while she does so. Admitting that she can’t do everything all by herself is worse than being beaten nearly to death with a hammer.

The credit card section of her banking app helpfully shows how high the interest on her payment is going to be if she doesn’t get her shit together, financially. Crystal, in Steph’s head, sharply admonishes her for taking after her father by plunging deep into debt.

Steph reflexively thinks shut up, Mom, and then breaks down into tears.

An hour later, Steph’s still crying. 

By now, she’s sick and wrung-out, her sweatshirt is warm and itchy. After sitting on the hard floor against her mom’s bedroom wall for so long, her butt is sore, too.

Steph drops her phone onto the floor and curls tighter, keeping her face buried in her folded arms, and intermittently sobs so hard that her aching head threatens to pitch her into unconsciousness.

Between one heave and the next, her ears prick up at the sound of something scrabbling at her front door. Life with a team of mentally unstable vigilante crime-fighters has prepared her for this--she knows it’s someone breaking into her apartment.

She doesn’t have her security system armed. If someone wants to bust in here and fuck up her apartment and maybe steal her TV, whatever. If a Wayne is here to bother her, she’ll ignore them until they go away. The odds that it’s someone actively trying to hurt her aren’t low, but they’re low enough that Steph doesn’t worry about it. 

Steph mops at her face while she listens for more commotion out in the living room. The ends of her sleeves are soaked and heavy by now, and aren’t doing much to dry her tears and snot anymore, but she ran out of tissues a while ago.

The front door opens.

“Steph?” a voice calls.

God fucking damn it. 

“Steph, I know you’re here. Are you good?” 

Ignoring Babs won’t make her go away. Steph’s too far from the bed to fling herself onto it and pretend to be asleep; Babs will definitely hear the creaky floor or bed frame.

“I’m fine,” Steph calls, defeated. Her voice is little more than a croak.

“Yeah, you sure sound like it,” Babs says, voice immediately shifting into big-sister mode. Christ, concern from Babs is going to make Steph’s crying worse, definitely.

Before Steph can pull herself together even a little bit, the door to Crystal’s bedroom is pushed open and Babs wheels partway in, leaning forward to catch sight of Steph’s crumpled spot on the ground. She’s not only worried, she’s in half-vigilante mode, eyes darting over Steph for injuries or other signs of misfortune.

“Hey,” Steph says, and sniffles.

“Hi, Girl Wonder,” Babs says, completing her survey of Steph’s visible limbs and finding nothing life-threatening. Her eyebrows crease deeper as she takes in the tear-streaked disaster that is Steph’s face. “What’s going on?”

“Not much,” Steph says. She wipes at her face with the soaked end of her sleeve. It does nothing to clean her up. “D’you need help with something?”

“...No, obviously not,” Babs says, with a look that says you’re a moron. “I only need help figuring out what’s wrong with you.”

Steph laughs wetly. She winces at a spike of her pressure headache, and then she slowly starts putting her mask back on, pulling herself together and finding a collection of lies she can begin to tell. 

“I had a late night,” Steph says. She mops at her face with her wet sleeves again. “And I need to pay rent, but I’m too tired to think about asking B for help. That’s all.”

Babs relaxes, just a bit. She leans back, no longer folded forward in her attempt to reach out to Steph. “How much do you need?”

Steph grimaces. “Like, fifteen hundred dollars.”

This isn’t enough of a sum to phase Babs. There’s no reaction whatsoever on her face, reminding Steph that only one of the two of them have ever gone to bed hungry. Babs just gives her a slight smile and nods. “I can get that from him for you. Is that it? I can get some extra for groceries too, if you need it.”

Babs must have seen the barren state of Steph’s kitchen. Steph hasn’t been spending a lot of time in that room, because putting her feet on the tile makes her lungs stop working.

“Yeah, just a little bit.” Steph tries to smile. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.” Babs studies Steph’s face for another long minute. “How long until your mom gets back from work? Wanna watch something?”

Steph can feel her expression freeze. She hides it by coughing hard to clear her throat, and then she peels herself off the ground and uses that brief period of not-making-eye-contact to respond, “It’ll be a while. What do you wanna watch?”

Steph falls asleep during their second episode of Leverage. When she wakes up five hours later, feeling like she’s surfacing after a years-long coma, there’s a notification from her bank app. Babs has transferred five thousand dollars from Bruce, with a kiss emoji in the transaction notes.

Too groggy to cry again, Steph just pays her credit card bill and then her rent with a few swipes of her thumb. It’s a massive relief, but Steph can’t help but be paranoid that Babs never asked any questions. It’s even weirder that Babs had gotten Bruce to sign over five thousand dollars without Bruce reaching out and demanding answers from Steph.

Steph isn’t going on patrol tonight, but she is tomorrow. If Bruce hasn’t already started digging around Steph’s life for clues, he’s going to corner her with an interrogation when she gets there. 

As she’s weighing her options, her anxiety from earlier redirects itself from rent to the potential conversation Bruce is going to want to have. She gets up and takes an edible and then crashes back onto the couch to go back to the point in the show she’d seen before falling asleep.

Half an hour later, she’s not feeling anything. The weed isn’t creating a proper buffer between herself and her stress, so she goes back to her bedroom to eat two more gummy bears. She’s just shut the drawer of her nightstand when her phone starts vibrating with an incoming call in her pocket.

Steph takes her phone out. It’s Tim. He avoids phone calls like the plague, and reacts to being called like someone’s shooting at him with poisonous darts, so this isn’t a good sign. Steph’s stomach flip-flops.

She swipes to accept the call, because she’s not a coward, but her throat is dry. With false cheer, she says, “What’s up?”

“Where are you right now?” Tim asks, without preamble.

“Um, at home?” 

“Are you not coming to dinner?”

Oh, fuck.

There are only a few evenings a month when Alfred has blocked out time in people’s calendars for a “family” dinner. Steph’s been invited to all of them, despite otherwise being successful in bucking the not-so-subtle advances the Waynes have made vis-a-vis formal adoption. Part of Steph acting normal is not missing stuff like this. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have to be reminded--under normal circumstances, Steph cares about not turning down free food more than she cares about keeping her distance from her coworkers. 

Bruce is definitely going to make this a conversation.

“Shit.” 

Tim’s voice sharpens with incredulity. “What? Did you forget?”

Steph does quick math, checking her alarm clock and then tallying up the dosage she’s taken. If she gets in her car now, she’ll be able to make it to Wayne Manor before she’s a danger to other drivers. 

“No,” she bluffs, “but time got away from me. I’m coming. You can start eating without me.”

“You know Alfred won’t let us.”

“Sucks to suck, then.” Steph pushes her feet into her Crocs and picks up a sweatshirt from the floor. The Waynes are going to have to deal with her in her pajamas. “I’ll be there in ten or fifteen.”

“Make it ten, I’m hungry,” Tim says, and hangs up.

Steph hits a few too many rolling stops to be quite comfortable, but she gets to the house in twelve minutes, so it’s worth it. There are bigger fish to fry than her traffic infractions: one, that at least five of the smartest people in Gotham are going to be sitting at a table with her for an hour while she tries to lie about her life; two, that she’s becoming hyper-aware of the dryness of her mouth. 

She lets herself in through the side door, the only entrance she has a key to. Immediately after opening the door, she hears the light clicking of Titus hurrying to find her.

As Titus rounds the corner into the mudroom, Damian’s head also sticks out to catch sight of her. He narrows his eyes at her, where she’s sitting on a bench to set her shoes down somewhere out of the way. 

“Brown is here,” Damian yells back down the hall. Steph is just high enough not to jump at the loud noise.

“Hi to you too,” she says, and holds her hands out to greet Titus. 

Damian accuses, “You’re late.”

“Barely.” Steph scratches Titus under the chin. The dog snuffles around her face and then at both of her palms. “Chill out.”

“You’re late,” Damian repeats, more irritated.

“Oh my god, fine.” Steph stands up and shuffles after the kid, taking small strides. Damian walks purposefully towards the dining room, casting intermittent annoyed looks back Steph’s way to tell her to get a move on.

“You’re late,” Damian says a third time.

Steph’s brain, scrambled and slow, takes a minute to catch up. He’s most likely asking why she’s late, this time. “...Yeah. I was working on a project and lost track of time.”

Damian shoots her a judgemental glare, but it’s not like he’s never done the same. They’ve reached the dining room, so he doesn’t bother responding to her. He leaves her at the mercy of the Council of Repressed Freaks instead, all of whom stare at her as she comes in.

Duke and Cass are clustered at the far end of the table, whispering to each other. Tim pauses in the middle of an impassioned bitchy comment to Dick to look Steph’s way with confusion on his face. 

“Hi, Steph,” Dick says, as though he isn’t analyzing everything about her with calculating eyes.

Steph raises a hand to flash a peace sign at him. She’s underdressed, like she always is, with her sweats and sweatshirt and unbrushed hair. “What’s up.”

Bruce grunts. He’s looking critically at Steph too. This entire family is lucky that Steph’s immune to judgemental looks from rich assholes, or she’d turn and leave the house right now. 

Steph has lots of practice pretending to walk normally. She’s floating around above her brain, and her limbs feel heavy, but she walks completely naturally to an empty seat between Tim and Duke, and she sits down like a normal person, and stares at her plate while she waits for the room to move on from her entrance.

Finally, after a beat of silence, they do. Alfred appears in the room and sits down and they start to eat, the plates of food starting to make the rounds. Steph zones out until Tim deputizes himself to put mashed potatoes on her plate.

“I can do it myself,” Steph mutters to him, annoyed, out of the corner of her mouth.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” he mutters back, under his breath. “You look like a zombie.”

“Yeah, you would know, wouldn’t you ,” Steph says.

Tim kicks her in the shins under the table. Steph kicks him back as hard as she can.

“Master Tim,” Alfred says sternly, at the same time Bruce says, “Steph, cut it out.”

Steph glares at her plate and the mountain of potatoes Tim gave her while she waits for Bruce to start ignoring her again. Yes, she’s very hungry, but she’s not quite remembering which fork she’s supposed to use to eat them. There are two next to her plate, and she’s not willing to fuck this up. Steph’s still smarting from the side-eyes she got from the six trust-fund babies in this room when she walked in.

“Steph,” someone says. She looks up, confused. Dick is waving to get her attention, bemused. “I said your name four times. Are you alive?”

“Sorry,” Steph says. Out of the corner of her eye on either side, she sees Duke frowning at her, and Tim making a face like Steph’s being an absolute idiot, like he’s never shown up to dinner high before. It’s normal for people to be bitchy at this dinner table, but right now Steph wants them to focus on someone else. Anyone else.

What goes around comes around. All of Steph’s stored-up credit from being the rudest bitch at dinner every time is coming back around. The bad feeling of this almost makes her regret that.

Dick’s face twists, like he’s thinking about trying to be worried about her. He says, “I was asking if you’re still going to go to Boston with your mom next week. The trains have been wonky lately.”

Shit, Steph needs to cancel those tickets. Maybe she’ll get her money back. She’d completely forgotten that Crystal’s birthday is next week, and the two of them were going to go out of town and try not to murder each other during a weekend of forced interaction.

Steph blinks slowly, stupidly. “Oh. I’m not going.”

She looks down at her mashed potatoes. They look very inviting. She knows that they’ll taste good and be soft and salty and warm and that’s everything she can ask for in a dish when she’s as stoned as she is right now.

Steph finally picks up a spoon, abandoning the fork debacle entirely. She scoops up some mashed potatoes. She begins to shovel them into her face with a speed akin to tossing handfuls of water into her mouth.

“Steph,” Duke says, and elbows her. Steph looks up from her carnage and finds that she’s missed another question from Dick. God. 

“Sorry,” Steph says, feeling many pairs of eyes watching her over-enunciate the word. “My brain’s…um. Bad. Right now.”

“What’s up? Are you and her…okay?” Dick asks.

Steph’s brain synapses stop firing. She looks to the end of the table where Duke and Damian are unabashedly staring at her. Then she glances in the other direction, where Bruce is looking at her out of the corner of his eye, just as intent on observing her odd behavior. Cass can read every bit of body language Steph’s had since birth, and Tim’s primed to kick her again, she can sense it. Alfred’s the only one with the decorum to keep eating, like a normal member of society. 

“No,” Steph says, barely able to put any volume in her voice, “she just can’t make it.” 

She tries to take another scoop of mashed potatoes off her plate. Her arm moves too slowly. She knows she’s not moving at the correct speed, but she’s starting to remember how she’ll never get to eat the weirdly-textured instant mashed potatoes that Crystal made for dinner all the time before Steph learned how to cook for herself. Mashed potatoes are only good when her mom makes them for her. These ones are unfamiliar.

Steph can hear snickering from the end of the table. Likely Tim or Duke, who have been aware of Steph’s high state since she walked in, the two of them amused by how she can’t even eat her food normally.

She sets her spoon down. Her throat is tight.

“Can we talk about something else?” she asks.

“...Sure,” Dick says, somewhere between amused and worried. He moves on, reluctantly moving his eyes from Steph and refocusing them elsewhere. “Damian, how was school?”

The conversation shifts. Damian’s glad to have Dick’s attention on him, and Steph fades into the background with no small amount of relief.

After dinner, Cass grabs Steph’s arm and pulls her out of the room, sweeping her away from the inevitable questions from Bruce that Steph’s been dreading the entire time. Steph can barely keep her feet under her at the pace Cass is taking, but somehow Steph ends up on Cass’s floor, with Duke and Tim sitting next to the two of them in a little circle.

Steph doesn’t want to be here. She can’t drive home for another couple of hours. 

“Are you sick?” Cass asks her, pressing.

“No, she’s really high,” Tim answers for her.

“Could be both,” Cass snaps. She puts a hand on Tim’s face and pushes it away from her.

“Yeah, people can be stoned and have something wrong with them,” Duke says to Tim. “I mean, you exist.”

Ignoring Tim’s indignant reaction, Steph says to Cass, “I just need to pass out.”

Cass puts a hand on Steph’s forehead next, feeling for an imaginary fever. If anything, Steph should be cold and clammy to the touch. She’s certainly less alive than she was a month ago. 

“Are you and your mom fighting?” Cass asks, when the fever’s been ruled out.

Steph leans back, abruptly unable to stand the idea of anyone touching her. “Why do all of you keep asking about my mom? Jesus.”

“Because you’re being super cagey and weird about it,” Tim says. He squints at her. “What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with you?” Steph retorts. “Got tired of thinking about your own mommy issues?”

“Woah,” Duke says, like he wants to leave the room immediately. 

“Fuck you,” Tim says, actually meaning it, judging by the bite to his tone.

“You’re hiding something,” Cass says, not allowing herself to be distracted, leaning forward like Steph’s an interesting bug on the sidewalk.

Steph pushes herself further back. She gets her feet under her and stands, wobbly. “Stop fucking staring at me,” she tells Cass, forcing herself not to care when she can see the words hurt. 

She only feels like broken glass when these people threaten to dig her feelings out of her, when all Steph wants is to move on with her life and have things go back to normal. These three are all for ignoring their problems and acting like things are fine until Steph needs them to do that for her . It’s not fair.

“I shouldn’t have come at all, I knew you were all going to be annoying as hell.” Steph can’t remember where she took her shoes off. They aren’t on her feet. She starts for the door, taking a swerving path around the three people sitting criss-cross on the rug. “You’re all so fucking creepy, like you can’t just mind your own business when I’m trying to eat, Jesus Christ.” 

Duke says, “It’s not creepy to ask two questions about your life. What the fuck else are we supposed to ask about?”

Steph’s just aware enough to take an evasive step around Cass’s hand when it shoots out towards her ankle. She resists the vicious urge to stomp on Cass’s fingers. Instead, she swings the door open.

“It’s probably something embarrassing she’s hiding,” Tim says. A rational part of Steph’s brain says he’s laying it on thick so Cass will be distracted from her hurt, so that the tense air created can be easily shoved aside if Steph turns and plays along and apologizes. Another part of Steph’s brain tells her to rip Tim’s trachea out with her fingernails. “Maybe she had to borrow money for Plan B.”

Steph steps into the hallway and slams the door hard enough that a painting on the wall crashes to the ground. She doesn’t care who hears. She’s not coming back here for a while after tonight, anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

Her shoes end up being in the mudroom, which is where she left them and forgot. The Waynes read the room well enough not to come after her, or maybe Alfred tells them to leave her alone. Either way, Steph crawls into the backseat of her car and curls up on the floor wrapped in her emergency blanket, waiting for her high to go away, and nobody bothers her for an hour.

After that hour, her luck runs out. Someone taps on the window, and Steph looks up from her cocoon to see Dick standing there, squinting his eyes to see through the tinted glass. Steph ignores him. Eventually, he tries the handle of the door and finds it unlocked.

“Hey. Can we talk?” Dick asks, when the door is open.

Steph grunts. She pulls her blanket tighter around her, disappearing into the hood of her sweatshirt.

“Alright,” Dick says. “Cool.” She hears some shuffling. When Steph peeks his way, he’s sat down on the floor of the garage, his back against a support column, looking at his hands and not at Steph. At least he didn’t try to get in the car to have a Car Conversation. Nothing could have stopped Steph from physical violence if her personal space was invaded.

He doesn’t say anything for a while. Steph gets tired of ignoring him, and mumbles, “Is Alfred mad at me?”

“No.” Dick is amused at the prospect. “He’s worried that you’re sick.”

“Sick of your bullshit,” Steph says.

Dick snorts. 

“I heard from Babs,” he says. “She told me about rent. Mentioned she was worried.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“Okay, I might’ve snooped. But she did say I should check on you. I wanna talk to you about something.”

Steph tries to make herself smaller. 

“If your mom isn’t working right now,” Dick says, “or isn’t…in town, and you need a place to stay for a while, you could crash in Blüd with me.”

Pressure starts to threaten the back of Steph’s throat. Dick must be remembering the last time things were too bad for Steph to live at home. This time is different--Arthur is still in prison, Crystal doesn’t need help paying for rehab, there is no chance of things ever being put right ever again.

Steph pulls on the strings of her hoodie to cinch the fabric around her face. She says, “It’s fine.”

“Are you sure? You shouldn’t have to--”

Steph says, more strangled than before, “I’m handling it.”

Dick sighs. “Will you let me help?”

Steph thinks about it. She loosens her grip on her hoodie strings after a moment so she can see just a little, emerging enough to look at Dick out of the corner of her eye. “I need to be off the patrol rotation until next week.”

“Okay, I’ll cover you.”

“Also tell your siblings to shut the fuck up if they start talking about me.”

“That one will be harder, but I’ll do my best.”

Steph shifts around a little bit. Her shoulder fell asleep a long time ago and her right arm is numb from her uncomfortable position on the floor of her car, but she also refuses to go out into the open, vulnerable air of Wayne Manor where anyone could see her.

“Okay bye,” Steph says, because Dick has continued to just sit there looking at her.

Dick gets to his feet. “You’re going to sleep out here?”

“Maybe.”

“Nobody does it like you,” Dick says, which is just neutral enough of a statement to not be an outright insult. He reaches out and shuts the car door with a, “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” Steph says to nobody, her voice swallowed by the restored silence of the inside of her car.

A few days later, Steph leaves her night class early because the professor starts talking about painkiller doses and Steph stops being able to feel her hands. Her flight instinct puts her books in her bag and sprints her out of lecture towards her car, where she can start fighting for air again.

Steph struggles. It takes her ten minutes to decide she’s not going to calm down, and she drives herself home, hyperventilating all the way. She tips through her front door with cold sweat on the back of her neck and a shake to her hands, and her feet carry her into her mom’s room, which she’s been living out of for over a month now. It’s the only spot in the world that still feels untouched by real life, like Steph will wake up to her mom nudging her awake so Steph will go sleep in her own bed.

“I shouldn’t have picked a fight with you,” Steph says, while she smears clumsily at the sweat and tears on her cheeks, on her palms, in her field of vision. “I shouldn’t have--I shouldn’t have--I shouldn’t have--”

She hugs a pillow to her stomach and curls around it as tight as she can, desperately pushing her face into the fabric. The pillowcase doesn’t smell like her mom’s hair products anymore. It just smells like Steph’s been using it with her unwashed hair for far too long. 

“I didn’t mean any of it,” Steph babbles, taking back words like she never used to do when Crystal was around to hear an apology. Steph did mean it, back in the heat of the moment, when she and Crystal were shouting at each other. She’s lying, and that’s why Crystal’s not listening to her when Steph begs, “Just come back, I didn’t mean it, I swear, I was just b-being--being, being a bitch for no reason, I just--”

One of her next breaths drags a low wail out of her chest. She muffles it as best as she can with the pillow and then she screams, air jerking in and out of her so roughly it shakes her shoulders. 

Steph’s throat gives up on her all too soon, and she subsides back into just panting, streams of tears still bathing her face. Steph loosens her vice grip on the pillow at her stomach, and she slumps fully onto the sheets in the shape of a lonely parenthesis. 

Laying down, her congestion makes it hard to breathe. Steph rubs a small circle on her chest with her fingertips, like Crystal would apply vaporub there when Steph’s nose was stuffy, and cries herself to sleep.

Warding Tim and Cass and Duke off in such a direct way has a chilling effect on everyone else getting up in Steph’s business. She goes another week without hearing from any of them at all, which is a relief in some ways but unnerving in others. Without constantly being bothered by that family, she has a lot more spare time to get deep in her own head, which is not always a good thing but it’s what she needs right now. Probably. At the very least, it means she gets her homework done on time.

Today, Steph is curled up on Crystal’s bed--the bed doesn’t even smell like Crystal anymore, and Steph hates lying here all the time but she hates being anywhere else, too. Her brain feels foggy and bad, either a result of not exercising much these days or of the stagnation that comes with not talking with anyone but the walls for about three days.

Her phone rings, and she has no choice but to check the screen to decide whether to answer or not. 

It’s a testament to how unhinged Steph had seemed at the house that the person who’s calling her is Babs, meaning even Bruce hadn’t wanted to get in Steph’s way.

“Hi,” Steph says. Moving her mouth around the single word is a chore all of its own. 

“Hey, babe,” Babs says. “Got a minute?”

Steph grunts. 

Babs takes this as permission to keep talking to her. “Cool, I’ll only be a second. You sound like you were in the middle of a nap.”

Steph grunts again. Babs sighs and pivots from the pleasantries. “Alright. Are you alone?”

Steph blinks feebly around the shadowy, empty expanse of her mom’s bedroom. Obviously, there’s nobody there. 

“Yup,” she says tonelessly.

“A few of us heard Cluemaster’s name mentioned on patrol last night,” Babs says. “He hasn’t escaped, but he’s up to something, and you might be a target.”

Great. Awesome. Absolutely something Steph needs on her plate. She sighs and tries to come up with something to say, but Babs isn’t done.

“Is your mom working tonight?” she asks. “We can have someone check on her.”

Babs stops talking. Steph rubs her face with one hand and lets the call go silent for almost ten seconds before Babs prompts, “Hello-oo?”

Steph has forgotten that she was meant to respond. Steph opens her eyes again and searches for a way out of this, and comes up with nothing. The easiest route is to sidestep.

“She doesn’t need anybody to watch her,” Steph says. “Thanks anyway.”

Babs pauses, then carefully says, “Dick said something a little while ago. Is she still…out of town?”

Dick must have done some damage control on Steph’s part, which was nice of him. And Babs is being considerate, not outright stating that she thinks Crystal’s in rehab. On an unrelated note, hot tears have started to slowly creep over the bridge of Steph’s nose, splashing onto the sheets.  She knows her next inhale will come with a sniffling sound, or some other audible tell of misery, so she resorts to holding her breath.

“It might be good if she is,” Babs says, giving Steph an out from the last question. “She’s safer there than at work.”

Yeah, that’s true--Crystal will never have to worry about her shithead husband showing up to smack her around in the middle of a shift ever again. That really is a silver fucking lining.

Steph’s chest pangs, reprimanding her for not breathing. She tries to breathe in silently and instead her tears make her breath rasp.

Babs voice hardens, somehow, maybe not angry but definitely more intense all of a sudden as she says, “Steph. Talk to me.”

Steph abandons her attempts to suppress her struggles with composure. She scrubs at her face with her knuckles, smearing tears around her eyes until her vision is irreparably blurry. “You don’t need to send anyone to tail her. It’ll be fine.”

“How long has she been gone?”

Steph says, not even lying for once, “Month and a half.”

“Shit,” Babs says, sympathetic and hushed, like she thinks Steph actually has it hard. As though Steph’s a tragically orphaned child who deserves to make people feel bad for her, and not a full cringe adult with a terrorist for a father. “Have you gotten any updates on how she’s doing?”

Another sharp pain behind her ribs reminds Steph that she’ll never get one of those shitty, half-personal update emails on her mom’s progress, or a rushed five-minute phone call from Crystal reminding her to pay the electricity bill, or even an invoice for whatever the insurance refuses to cover. 

Steph would murder someone with her bare hands if it meant she could get another one of those handmade construction-paper cards Crystal sent Steph in the mail, before the shine came off the rehab apple and it became too much work to scrawl out reassurances and affection in Crystal’s popular-girl handwriting every few days.

“I’m sure she’s fine. She just never calls or writes,” Steph says, and then laughs sharply enough that black spots show up in her field of vision. The laughter doesn’t stop after the first burst, either; Steph struggles for air but the giggles keep coming. 

“Yikes,” Babs says. “You sound rough. I’ll get someone to check on her.”

Steph chokes, her blood turning to slush. She props an elbow under her as though sitting up will give her more authority in the conversation, and she says, “No, you don’t have to do that.”

“It’s not a problem.”

“Don’t,” Steph insists, and briefly coughs to clear her throat before continuing, “I’ll--I’ll just go check on her myself. It’ll mean I’m not here if Dad gave anyone our address. Is that good enough for you?”

Babs sounds dubious as she asks, “Are you actually gonna go, or are you just trying to keep me from doing things to help you?”

“I’m actually gonna do it,” Steph lies. “And I don’t need your help.”

“Sure you don’t.” Babs isn’t put off by Steph at all, it seems. She has more tenacity than Tim in that regard. “You sound like you’re really going through it, babe.”

“Um, I’m good.” Steph sniffles, feeling aches in her sinuses, her brain, even her throat from her brief manic laughter. “It’s just my hot girl winter. I’ll be fine again soon.”

She actually needs to be better sometime soon. Steph told Bruce to put her back on the patrol schedule at the beginning of next week, after her midterms are over, and that’ll put her back in the swing of things and she’ll have to look Cass or Tim or Duke in the eyes without flinching and act like everything she said last time she saw them was a prank.

“...If you say so,” Babs says, not quite believing Steph. “Call me if you need backup. Got it?”

“For sure,” Steph says, though by the time she hangs up, she’s put that promise completely out of her mind.

Steph puts herself back on patrol the next week, and shows up in the Batcave like nothing ever happened. She is greeted by Bruce raising his eyebrows at her, and Cass scrunching up her face like she looks like shit, and Tim pointedly turning his gaze away as though he wants to pretend Steph doesn’t exist.

Most of the last month-ish of Steph’s life is fuzzy. She’s not quite sure what she did or didn’t say last time she was over here, and thus can’t make a very coherent apology. Instead, Steph changes into her suit and shoves her change of clothes into an empty locker and goes straight to one of Dick’s old motorcycles that she’s all but legally claimed for her own.

“Spoiler,” Bruce says from behind her, and Steph turns her head expecting to have to put up a fight but instead has to catch the set of comms Bruce has lobbed at the back of her head. 

“Thanks,” Steph says, and leaves without looking back at Tim and Cass. She’s respecting their right to be mad at her, and not just running away from an uncomfortable conversation with them.

Rather than a welcome return to something that gets her mind off of the wreckage of her civilian life, patrol is uncomfortable. It feels off right away, like during the early days when Steph was barely Robin and had to berate Bruce into giving her any kind of responsibility at all. A familiar, sickening drive to prove herself creeps up her back, making it hard to drive straight.

She has literally no active cases going at the moment, after her extended break, so she all but begs Babs for something to work on. Babs sends her to a couple of spots with some vaguely promising leads, and nothing surfaces there. After the third place falls through, Steph sighs and says, “Another dud, unforch. Do you have anything good?” 

“I’m so sorry,” Babs says, “did you want a good lead? I’ve just been giving you shitty ones on purpose.”

Steph’s latent headache flares. Her limbs have felt heavy all evening, following the disappointment that came when her return to patrol hasn’t filled her with the freedom and anticipation and satisfaction that it usually does. 

“How about you piggyback with Black Bat or Hood,” Babs says, as wrung-out and frustrated as Steph feels. “I have other people to babysit.”

“What’s your damage?” Steph asks, ready to turn this into an actual fight, if only so she can feel something. She’s speaking to an empty channel, though; Babs is gone, back on the main feed to coordinate everyone else, maybe finding someone who isn’t a whiner. 

After patrol, Steph gets back to the Cave to find Cass pulling Tim into the elevator, both of them skirting Steph’s presence. 

She passes out on a cot in the corner and wakes up that afternoon with a blanket laid carefully over her, and the Cave is dark and empty. After sitting up long enough to take her mask and boots off, she lays back down and falls asleep underneath the quilt, which smells like the sweatshirts Tim used to let Steph borrow before Steph made being a fuckup her full-time job.

The next night on patrol is much the same. After another brush-off from Babs, Steph gives up on getting help from her and drives towards Hood’s territory to bother him instead.

Things are instantly more interesting here. Steph follows the sound of gunshots until she catches sight of that dumb red helmet, and she tails him on foot until he stops and asks, exasperation evident through his voice modulator, “What do you want, Blondie?”

“Bored,” Steph says. The main comms channel has been silent for almost half an hour now. Bruce and Damian are both fairly quiet on a good night, and Tim and Cass have probably moved to a private channel to avoid Steph.

“Do you want a job?” Jason asks.

Steph sighs, accepting that she’s about to get whatever shitty grunt work Jason isn’t interested in. “I guess.”

Jason needs someone to run backup as he sneaks into a shitty-looking office building that’s allegedly a front for…something else, Steph doesn’t care. She accepts this job even though it’s one step above a stakeout, just watching either side of the building for any sign of silent alarms being tripped.

“Are you in position?” Jason asks her over the comm, fifteen minutes later.

“Jesus, James Bond, calm down,” Steph grumbles, sinking lower into her chosen fire escape perch. “Just get a move on, I’m cold.”

She sees a shiny helmet slip through the side door. Steph rests her forehead on the metal railing in front of her and peers down through the bars, tiredly watching what she was told to watch.

It’ll be a few minutes before any action happens, even if Jason happens to trip something. Her eyes travel over the individual darkened windows of the office building, drifting lazily until something dark moves behind one of them, all the way on the top floor, and her gaze snaps to it immediately.

“You have friends on the fifth floor,” Steph says into her comm. She uses the railing to pull herself up to her feet, her arms and legs heavier than they were fifteen minutes ago. “You want me to check it out?”

“There shouldn’t be anyone inside,” Jason whispers, irritated. “Yeah, go look. Don’t go in.”

The silent trip down the fire escape and across the street is unremarkable; Steph barely recognizes herself doing it. She’s all the way up on the office building’s roof before she comes back to herself, tired as she is, and even then her hands and feet feel disconnected from her brain. Like her brain is running on a lag, and her limbs are moving on someone else’s command. It gives Steph just a little pause as she searches for the right spot to lower herself onto the small balcony running around the outside of the top floor.

“Okay, I’m looking,” Steph says. She touches down on the gray concrete-adjacent material, her feet quiet. This building looks old. Not historic-preservation-worthy old, though, just old like in a way that says there’s definitely nothing but asbestos in the walls. 

The windows aren’t very big, giving Steph space to hide beneath and between them as she creeps around the side of the building. When she rounds the corner, she sees through the first corner that there’s a light on, in the hallway past the office the window opens into. Whoever’s here is deeper in the building, not where someone spying from across the street could watch their movements.

“I can’t see them,” Steph breathes. “I have to go in to see.”

“Careful,” Jason warns. “The top floors are probably booby-trapped.”

“Heh, booby,” Steph says, not listening. 

She opens the window nearest her, slides in sideways, and her boot immediately hits a tripwire. 

By the time Steph is deposited on a table at Leslie’s clinic and left alone with the doctor, she’s been screamed at by everyone. Steph’s ears haven’t stopped ringing, and her right one is currently devoid of any hearing ability whatsoever, so she can’t make out any particular disappointments being expressed at her. She listens to the din of people angry at her while her eyes struggle to focus on anything but the smears of white, dark gray, and black of different ceilings she passes under. 

Leslie doesn’t lecture. She’s smart; she can probably tell by the vague drift of Steph’s attention around the room that Steph isn’t listening. Instead, Leslie pulls a nurse in to clean up the burns up Steph’s leg while Leslie starts an ear exam. She moves Steph’s hood just enough to start the check, her hands steady and strong.

If Leslie finds anything super concerning, she doesn’t say a word about it. Steph declines painkillers, and Leslie doesn’t make any comments about Steph being an idiot for that, so it must not be that bad after all.

After her brief exam, Leslie produces two warm, damp cloths that she helps Steph press over her ears, both softening all sound in the room and soothing Steph’s nerves. Over the next few minutes, the high-pitched buzz in Steph’s left ear fades to something that can almost be ignored. Steph’s right ear is still very fucked up, but one functioning ear is better than none.

The nurse leaves, giving Steph a parting smile and some inaudible words. Steph waits for her to close the door behind her before lowering the cloths from either side of her head, sitting up, and pulling her hood all the way down so she can start to take her mask off.

“I haven’t heard from you in a while,” Leslie says. She’s found a perch on a stool next to Steph’s exam bed, and she’s efficiently scratching some notes on a clipboard. “Have you been patrolling more safely than normal? Before tonight, anyway?”

Ignoring that attempt at getting answers out of her, Steph peels her mask off and scrubs at her sweaty skin with one of the washcloths. The inside of her mouth tastes like concrete dust, so she tries to sneakily wipe her tongue off too. 

“Hey,” Leslie chides. She leans over to pick up a paper cup from the bedside cabinet. “No, drink this. Don’t lick that.”

Steph sheepishly relinquishes the cloth. When she tries to accept the cup, she finds that her hands are shaking much worse than she thought they were.

Leslie steadies her hand, keeping all the water inside the cup and helping Steph drink. Steph manages a couple of sips before Leslie’s careful, slightly-disapproving attention makes Steph’s throat start closing up and she has to stop drinking or she’ll choke.

The water is taken away from her and set back down. Leslie’s frown has deepened, and she won’t stop looking at Steph. 

“I was told to check on you, so I’m going to,” Leslie warns. “Your blood sugar is low and it’s been a while since you got dragged in here with everyone mad at you.”

Steph mutters, “Did you have a question or anything, or is this just constructive criticism?”

Leslie doesn’t fidget at all, just keeps staring like a statue with a surveillance camera hidden in it. “How’s your appetite lately?”

“Fine.”

“So you eat at least two meals a day?”

Steph doesn’t monitor her tone at all when she blurts an incredulous, “Fuck no.” 

“Right, so the correct answer was not ‘fine’,” Leslie says. She sets her clipboard down, only giving Steph a split-second of reprieve from the full weight of her attention. “Is this something I can help with, or can I tell Bruce to leave me out of this?”

“Second one,” Steph says. “Can I leave?”

“Not yet, alright?”

The exasperated tone is familiar enough to evoke a deep, deep ache in her. Steph feels like she’s coming home with a shitty report card or something, like she’s glaring at the stupid kitchen tiles and biting back the urge to say something heinously disrespectful.

At this point in her hellish year, Steph’s able to recognize the signs of an oncoming fit of crying. She asks, voice rasping, “Can I just Uber home?”

Leslie’s head tilts. Steph’s not looking directly at her, so she can’t see Leslie’s expression, but she knows she’s being examined.

Finally, Leslie sighs an undoctor-ly sigh. “I’m not putting you in an Uber, Stephanie.”

Steph blinks hard. Her throat is burning.

“Considering your injuries, a normal hospital would keep you under a few more hours of supervision. Your mother’s a nurse, though, right?”

Feeling like she’s getting stabbed in the side of the head, Steph says, “Used to be, yeah.”

“Is she around tonight to watch you?”

“She can definitely watch me,” Steph says, giving general permission to her mother’s ghost and then straining her busted ears for any audible signals from across the veil. 

“How about I give her a call and let her know what happened?”

“You can try.” Steph hasn’t heard anything since she started trying to hold a seance ten seconds ago. “Let me know if she answers. Haha.”

Leslie doesn’t laugh. The problem is that Steph can’t stop laughing. The sound is thin and manic and fills the room with a creepy uncanny echo but Steph can’t stop; it’s taken her over like a fit of hiccups.

“Stephanie, look at me,” Leslie says. She moves her stool closer and takes both of Steph’s hands, prying them from the tight fists that were starting to be painful. Her thumbs rub over Steph’s palms, a more personal comforting routine than Steph’s seen her roll out for anyone. 

Realizing slowly that she was given an order, Steph lifts her chin and sees serious brown eyes staring back. 

“Breathe with me. Let’s go, come on.” Leslie inhales an exaggerated breath, and lets it out in a whoosh that breezes against Steph’s face. Steph follows directions as best as she can, but it’s only two semi-regulated breaths before a switch flips in her brain and a breath of laughter turns into a lurching sob instead.

Her face crumples, her mood flipping on its head.

“Oh dear,” Leslie says, alarmed.

Steph tips forward and her forehead falls on Leslie’s shoulder. For a moment, Leslie doesn’t move, but then one of her hands moves and pats lightly on Steph’s back.

“Okay,” Leslie says. “It’s okay. Alright.” She keeps patting her hand there, like she’s burping a baby. Steph chokes on a failed attempt at another laugh, and one of Leslie’s pats hits slightly harder, either attempting to help clear Steph’s airway or chastising Steph for being stupid. It could be both. Leslie has the range.

“What happened?” Leslie asks after a while, her hand still uselessly pattering on Steph’s back. Leslie is not a gifted hugger, and Steph knows that both of them are wildly uncomfortable with this arrangement, but Steph can’t fathom showing her face right now. Leslie’s shoulder is at least a shield.

“She’s not home,” Steph chokes out. 

“Okay. Okay. Where is she?”

“Gone.”

“Gone?” Leslie echoes, her tone making it clear exactly what she’s asking.

Steph nods.

Leslie exhales like Steph’s punched her in the stomach. Just like that, it’s not Steph’s secret anymore. Her aunts and uncles knew, but nobody in her real life did, until now. It feels irreverent, to just casually admit to it like that to the woman who gives Gotham vigilantes free first aid. Like Steph’s letting her know what medications she’s taken in the past forty-eight hours, or if she has a family history of heart disease.

“When did this happen?” Leslie asks. “Do you need--?”

“I don’t need anything,” Steph says. She can’t make herself let go, even though Leslie has long since stopped reciprocating the hug. “It was like two months ago. I’m fine.”

“Stephanie.”

“I’m serious.”

Leslie takes hold of Steph’s shoulders and pries her off of her, forcing an end to the one-sided embrace. Her eyebrows are furrowed and her lips are pursed. “How long did they let you take a break? I can tell Bruce to leave you alone--”

“No,” Steph protests, her voice splitting in half. She shakes her head hard enough that the latent ringing in her ears gets louder again. “Don’t. He can’t--he doesn’t--”

“He doesn’t know?” Leslie asks.

“It’s not his business,” Steph says. She lifts her hands to both hide her face and wipe away the endless tears that are dripping from her chin by now.

“Are you doing this all by yourself?” 

“I’m handling it.”

Leslie lets go of Steph. She crosses her arms. When Steph looks up, she finds deep concern and worry, the exact thing that Steph had been doing her best to avoid. She knows by that look that Leslie knows that Steph hasn’t told anyone except Leslie, and that Leslie thinks Steph is a complete disaster.

“How are your ears?” Leslie asks.

Steph takes a moment to catch up to the change of subject. She wipes her face one more time and it stays dry, if significantly more puffy and sensitive than before. 

“They’re fine,” Steph says. She grits her teeth and says, “Listen. Ugh. I didn’t…want any of them involved. They’re nosy.”

“People are allowed to be nosy about this kind of thing,” Leslie starts to say.

“I just want to go sleep,” Steph pleads.

“Stephanie…” Leslie sighs. She’s not looking directly at Steph anymore, and she relents a little bit. “Fine.”

Steph perks up, daring to be hopeful.

Leslie says, “I’m going to go tell someone your care instructions, and then they can take you home. Who do you want to keep an eye on you?”

“Cass,” Steph reluctantly decides. Cass is pissed at her, so there’s a chance she might just absorb the care instructions and then ditch Steph to die, which is preferable for all parties.

“Okay. I’ll be right back. Put that rag back over your ears, it should help with the ringing.”

Steph acquiesces. Then, as soon as Leslie leaves the room, Steph puts all parts of her suit and mask back on and books it for the back exit.

She feels like shit, but that’s not going to stop her from getting home. Leslie’s clinic is near enough to Steph’s apartment that she figures she can just walk, if she’s fast. And she will have to be fast--if Cass decides at any point to run after her, Steph will be dragged back to the clinic within the next ten minutes and Leslie will imprison her more permanently.

Steph slips out the back door and closes the door behind her as quietly as possible, knowing that the metal clack will be a dead giveaway if it echoes down the hallway. Then, alone out in the freezing Gotham air, Steph hustles down the back steps and tries her best to melt into the rush of late-night traffic.

It’s perhaps one of five times in her life that the location of Steph’s apartment has actually made her more safe. Considering how spotty her vision becomes during the journey, she wouldn’t have been able to make it another block on her own. As it is, she trips and falls in the back alley behind the dumpsters and wriggles pathetically out of the incriminating parts of her suit until she’s just in spandex and a t-shirt. Once her balance is back and she can see out of both of her eyes at the same time, she gets back up, tucks the bundle of tactical armor under her arm, and lets herself in the back door of the building.

Approaching her apartment’s front door still causes an irrational surge of anxiety, several weeks after that night. There’s nothing left to be scared about, because the worst has already happened, but Steph still starts breathing shallowly as she fumbles for the key to her front door on the third floor.

She turns the key, but the door is already unlocked. 

Steph pauses for only a moment before deciding she doesn’t give a fuck if someone has broken in, or if someone’s just waiting around to kill her. 

She pushes the door open, and the lights are on inside. Steph swallows hard, unsure if she’s nauseous because of ear trauma or because she’s scared for some reason. It doesn’t really matter; the door squeaks loudly and if there’s someone inside it’s too late to be sneaky.

She steps inside and shuts the door before lifting her eyes to the living room.

Her dad is sitting on the couch.

Babs did warn her that this would happen. Steph thinks she remembers, somewhere in her foggy head, that she was given the opportunity to avoid this outcome, but she cares just as little about that now as she did then.

Arthur sits like he owns the place. Steph can’t remember if his name is on the lease. He definitely hasn’t been paying a fair share, either way. 

Still, his relaxed posture amidst the detritus of the past couple months--rotting takeout trash, half-empty watered-down milky clear plastic cups of to-go iced coffees, scattered discarded dirty laundry, all of it--is familiar, somehow. Arthur has a can of Dr. Pepper cracked open, and for some reason it’s the soda that makes Steph pissed off.

“What the hell?” Steph asks, anger sharpening her focus for the first time in half an hour

Arthur bares his teeth, perhaps an attempt at a smile. “Needed a place to crash. Didn’t think you still lived here.”

“Where else would I be?” 

“Thought you’d have found some boy or another by now,” he says. He looks around the living room, a judgmental glint to his eye. “Is Crystal off the wagon again?”

Steph stares at him, dead-eyed. She realizes, finally, that she never called Blackgate to tell him anything, so it follows that he never heard the news at all.

“Dad,” Steph says. Her skin crawls; she doesn’t know which direction this situation could go in, and that uncertainty is worse than knowing her dad will kick her ass. Arthur is haggard, which could mean he’s unstable. Or it could just mean he needs a night of sleep outside of prison.

“What?” Arthur demands. He stands up, anticipating something bad.

Steph imagines roots growing out of the soles of her feet and anchoring her to her spot. 

She’s not going to run away. This is her house and her dead mom.

“She’s,” Steph says, and then the words leave her and they’re impossible to take back: “She’s dead, Dad. She died.”

The apartment is still. Beyond the ringing in Steph’s ears, there’s nothing to hear while Arthur takes in these words.

After a long pause, Arthur asks, his voice a register deeper now, “When did it happen?”

Steph’s skin prickles again as her hair stands up on end. He’s pissed, and she doesn’t know if he’s armed. She clears her throat and says, “Um, a little bit ago.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s been almost two months,” Steph says.

Arthur looks around the living room, taking it all in again with new eyes. Then his mouth twists unpleasantly. “You should have told me,” Arthur says. “And It shouldn’t have been that difficult to keep her alive."

She doesn’t recognize the surge of fury she feels until she already has her throwing knife between her fingers and she’s flinging it at him as hard as she can.

Arthur moves just enough that it clips his upper arm, leaving a thin slit in its wake that quickly starts seeping a red stain into his shirt. He looks from the knife to Steph in complete, unguarded shock for a moment, and in that short time, Steph finds her voice.

“You fucking asshole,” Steph seethes. She’s in no state to fight hand-to-hand, but her keyring has a pocket taser and she’s able to fumble with it to pop the cap off and start charging it up. As Arthur starts to rush at her, Steph drops her bundle of clothes and waves the taser in an uncoordinated arc in front of her, the electricity already charging up.

“She was sick because of you!” Steph is sickeningly pleased by the momentary fear that the taser inspires in her father. She presses the buttons and lets the device snap a loud series of snaps as a warning. “You made her like that!”

“Stephanie,” Arthur says, attempting to flex some kind of authority in this conversation. He lets go of the wound he’s clutching and swipes for her wrist to make a grab for control of the taser. Steph knocks his arm aside with a solid strike and the taser snaps again, warding him off for the time being. Arthur puts his hands up, wincing when the movement aggravates the slice through his bicep.

“Sorry if you came back expecting a hot meal or something,” Steph snarls, “but she’s not here and she’s not coming back.”

"Did you do it?" Arthur asks, because he's her father and they fight in the same way. He knows that it'll knock the air out of her lungs to ask. He jabs closer, enjoying how she has to snap the taser at him again.

Steph growls in frustration. She kicks his outstretched wrist and aims her taser at the side of his neck.

Arthur accepts the kick too easily. Steph realizes the feint only when his open palm slams over her shitty eardrum and her skull reverberates with an earthshattering slam.

Steph staggers, gagging with the vertigo the strike causes. Arthur's hand comes at her neck, and she's dropping the taser before she can actually use it because she automatically grabs at his wrist, as though there's anything she could do if he wanted to strangle her to death, or drag her by her hair to the closet, or, or--

He leans closer. "Was it your fault?"

The look in her eyes must tell him what she’s thinking. His expression darkens. A dull thud reverberates through Steph’s torso, telling her she’s been slammed into the wall behind her.

Steph’s eardrums rumble, even the one that isn’t capable of hearing right now. The sound is compounded by a flash of movement behind Arthur’s back. She sees more than hears the window shattering in a shower of glass, and the dark figure that barrels through is too fast for any of Steph’s senses to keep up with. It glides over the puddle of glittering debris and drives into Arthur’s side, one hand jabbing under his ribcage with the force of a charging bull.

Arthur’s grip falters, and Steph hits the ground in a sloppy pile. She coughs and gasps for breath, of no help whatsoever to the altercation happening two feet away. 

Sound comes back into sharp focus for a moment, but it’s delayed—Steph hears the rippling crash of breaking glass, and then the pained grunt that Arthur made when someone hit him. 

Relying more on her wavering sense of sight, Steph gets enough of her wits about her to lurch forward and hook an elbow around one of Arthur’s ankles, ruining his plan to back away from his attacker.

He trips and falls, rattling the ground so loudly that Steph knows she’s going to have to send a Harry and David cheese basket to her downstairs neighbors—maybe the neighbors on either side, too, just to play it safe—to apologize for the disturbance. 

He rolls onto his back. His boot swipes up the side of Steph’s face, finding the hollow under her cheekbone. Steph grunts and recoils again, flopping into a useless pile, leaving the fight to Cass.

—Because of course it’s Cass. That’s who Leslie wanted to foist Steph onto, and Steph was stupid to think Cass wouldn’t take that seriously. 

She’s a blur, and she would be even if Steph’s vision was working properly. As soon as Steph withdraws again, Cass pins Arthur to the floor with a knee on his sternum to finish the fight. Her arm swings back, a fist primed for a punch that will make a Pollock tribute of Arthur’s dental work.

The next stretch of time moves in fragments, every single one moving faster and more sharply than everything in the last two months of her life. 

First, Cass’s fist sending blood and a flash of broken tooth spurting out of Arthur’s mouth, her lip curled in disgust--she doesn’t have her mask on, and—

—Then, alien voices and hands prodding Steph, moving her to a spot on the couch but not hurting her to do so, where—

—Someone’s holding her hand. 

The couch is so old that it sags an embarrassing amount. Steph’s always avoided having friends over here, where they might see that the Brown household hasn’t bought a new sofa in eighteen years. Steph’s knees are bent too deeply; it’s just this side of difficult to stand up from the low sag of the couch cushions. 

In front of her, the coffee table has been kicked out of alignment. That stupid can of Dr. Pepper is overturned, coating the dusty coffee table, dull brown fizzing liquid spreading across the scratched-up flooring. It’s dripping, slow drops that say the spill happened more than a few minutes ago. Then, another blink, and—

The soda’s stopped spreading, and the bubbles are slowing. Steph turns her head and looks through a gaping hole in her wall out at the dizzying strobe lights of multiple police cars—

—the lights of an ambulance—

—the shadows of EMTs trooping through her apartment, lights in neighboring buildings flicking on and curtains twitching so people can peek for clues—

—Broken glass, broken glass, broken glass.

Steph should be getting to bed. The sun is threatening the horizon. She’s not usually up this late, just to lurk around her apartment, so she must be forgetting something. Or something’s wrong, and she’s zoning out just because her head hurts.

She blinks hard and looks down, past her wringing hands and scraped knees. The floor is a disaster, and there’s soda everywhere. Steph’s too late.

She jolts forward off of the couch, fighting gravity to overcome the sag of the twenty-year-old cushions. It should only take her a few seconds to get to the kitchen, skirting the sofa, but she feels like she’s moving through turpentine.

The spot on the tile is already empty. The throbbing blue-red lights outside imply that the ambulance is already here, but there’s no point in an ambulance coming at all, because Steph is too late. The kitchen tile is slick with shards of glass and Steph’s too late.

Steph’s foot crunches into glass. Her toe catches on the edge of the tile, the uneven transition between normal floor and kitchen floor. Before she can end up face-down in the mess of glittering shards, some hands catch her elbows and drag her upright.

The skin contact is so warm and firm that it hurts. Steph shudders and tries to pull away. She should be in the ambulance, so Crystal won’t be alone. Crystal was alone when it happened. Steph should have been there--Steph should be there.

“--At me, hey, Steph, it’s me. Come on, look at me. Eyes up.” Part of the humming in her brain is a voice coming from next to her left ear as she weakly struggles in someone’s hold. Another part of the din is someone crying, loud and embarrassing about it, and another part is a screaming siren outside on the street below.

Steph’s tongue feels too big as she makes a rasping sound on her next inhale, and on the exhale she hears someone making a keening sound like a dying animal. Steph subconsciously recoils from the noise--nobody who’s a grown adult should sound like that, ever. 

“Deep breaths, come on,” the person is still saying. “It’s me.”

Steph looks and finds Tim there.

He’s not in his suit. He’s just Tim, not Robin or any variant thereof. He’s in his normal Tim look as of late, a hoodie paired with unwashed limp hair and dark shadows under his eyes. 

Once she pieces together that the hands on her belong to Tim, it feels marginally less like someone’s sandpapering Steph’s skin off. It’s still not comforting to be touched, but she at least recognizes the feeling now.

Steph slows in her struggling. She keeps staring at him, waiting for something to make sense about this. 

Tim wasn’t there—isn’t here. It was Steph alone, Steph with a body on the tile that used to be her mom. A body with curlers in her hair and manicured hands that used to fix Steph’s hair in two French braids before Steph went to school, where she would lie about doing it herself. 

Tim’s here, though, and his hands are holding Steph so tight that she has to accept that they’re real. 

“There you are,” Tim says, eyebrows pinched together. His arm around her back tugs her away from the kitchen.

They get to the hallway. Steph abruptly digs in her heels and jerks sideways when Tim tries to pass Crystal’s bedroom. She knows somewhere in her gut that this room feels safe whilst her own does not. 

The bed is unmade and the room smells stale. They sit down anyway, side-by-side on the edge of the mattress. Steph is shivering, and the visible skin on her thighs and arms prickles with goosebumps.

“Babs told us he’d gotten out,” Tim says, rambling into the silence, “while you were getting fixed up. Then Leslie came to get Cass and we found out you had made a run for it. Which was stupid, by the way. You knew he was making moves.”

Steph’s head is stuffed with cotton. Tim’s voice is far away; she can only hear it out of her left ear, not the right one that he’s closer to. She blinks slowly and frowns and wipes at her drying-out cheeks with her wrist. “Who was?”

Tim says, falsely casual, “Your dad, Steph.”

Steph shakes her head, trying to reboot her brain. The inside of her nose still smells like soda. Steph sniffles and shakes her head again. The room tilts like the deck of a fishing boat. “My…dad.”

“Yeah,” Tim affirms. It feels like he’s having a completely different conversation than Steph is. 

A new silhouette fills the doorway, five feet in front of Steph. It’s Cass, head cocked to the side and eyes locked somewhere to Steph’s right, where Tim’s sitting. They’re probably doing their freaky telepathy thing while Steph’s brain skips around like a broken record, stuck on the confusion about where and when she is.

Steph wraps her right arm around her middle, shrinking into herself so her skin will stop brushing Tim’s. She says, “Did the ambulance leave?”

“What ambulance?” Tim asks.

Cass studies Steph’s face, picking up far more than Steph is comfortable with. Cass says, “It left.”

Steph nods. This makes sense. It’s not her fault that Tim is ill-informed. She tightens her arm around her waist, like it’ll hold her guts in. 

It was too late for anyone to help Crystal, by the time an ambulance could respond. Because Steph was out playing superhero, triggering her mother’s panic spiral and then running away for hours like a really good fucking daughter. Leaping from rooftop to rooftop and letting her mom take as many pills as could fit in her mouth. 

She’ll have to call…someone, about a funeral service. 

…She already did. Nobody came and Steph wore that stupid dress. 

Why the fuck is Tim here, then? She said she was busy and Tim didn’t even bother to ask whose funeral Steph was going to. 

Cass has blood under her fingernails when she scratches at her jaw. Steph’s eyes zero in on the dark brown crumbling off of Cass’s skin. 

“It was too late,” Steph says aloud.

Cass nods again. 

Steph’s head is full of concrete. She rubs one of her hands against her cheek, and it feels too hot and sort of sticky, like four hours’ worth of tears has evaporated and left the salt behind.

Cass and Tim do another telepathic exchange, Cass’s eyes flicking to Steph’s right and then her chin nodding up and down slightly. Tim stands, and steps away from the bed. He says, “I’ll be out…there, if you need anything.”

He leaves. Steph watches Cass climb up onto the bed in his place and she feels Cass take hold of Steph’s arm, pulling at her so that she’ll move to a more comfortable position.

Cass’s hand is eight times warmer than Tim’s; her circulation has always been much better than his. It burns Steph’s skin. She still complies, letting Cass coax her towards the head of the bed, where Cass has sat cross-legged. 

Steph’s skin buzzes, audibly. She can’t hear anything over the feeling of Cass touching her, guiding Steph to recline with her head on Cass’s thigh, one hand on Steph’s forehead and the other one taking Steph’s hand in hers. 

It’s a lot of contact at once, abrupt in a way that unlaces Steph completely. She takes a short, surprised breath, and then tightens her hold on Cass’s hand into a vice--now that this is established, she thinks she’ll die if Cass leaves. 

Steph has never been good at being touched, no matter who’s doling it out. It always feels like a threat, or a promise too big to keep. 

Cass’s dark eyes fill Steph’s vision. Her thumb moves over one of Steph’s eyebrows.

“You lied,” Cass says.

Steph doesn’t remember what in particular Cass is referring to, but it certainly doesn’t sound out of character. She blinks heavy eyelids. “Did it hurt anybody?”

“It hurt you,” Cass says.

If Steph wasn’t battling vertigo, she’d roll her eyes. She instead closes them, trying to memorize the feeling of Cass’s warm palms on her skin. With her eyes shut, it’s almost like Crystal’s the one smoothing her hair down—Crystal’s the only one who touches Steph. Even though they haven’t had a full conversation without devolving into screaming in three years, Crystal’s the only person who regularly touches Steph without it being a threat of something worse to come. 

“You don’t have to stay,” Steph mumbles. The warm thumb traces another unbearably warm arc over her eyebrow, softly passing over a forming scab without making it sting. 

The soft huff she gets in response is the last sound that Steph’s left ear hears before she passes out. It’s not a sound of affection or compassion, but that means it’s real. Steph curls towards it, like it can keep her safe.

Steph sleeps like…well, like the dead. It’s a level of slumber she hasn’t reached in a long time.

The return to the waking world is just as unusual. For once, what rouses her is not an emergency alarm on her phone telling her she’s late for class, or a raised voice telling her to stop being a lazy piece of shit, or a halfhearted jab with the edge of a batarang nudging her from a mid-patrol doze. 

Instead, a dull pounding inside her head thrums her into wakefulness, in a manner that would be peaceful if it didn’t hurt so much. Steph rides the muted wave of her headache towards something like consciousness, until she’s aware of a human-body warmth under her head, a post-cry tautness on her cheeks, and the soft hum of speaking voices like NPR is playing just a bit too quietly to hear.

Fingertips comb through Steph’s hair, finding a familiar path from her hairline up over the crown of her head, smoothing imaginary flyaways into place. Steph turns her head as slowly as she can, trying not to reaggravate her baseline headache, and her forehead eventually comes to rest against someone’s side. Steph can feel the movement of their breath.

The humming continues. The ear that Steph has smushed against someone’s thigh catches only the vibration of a speaking voice, and the ear tipped up towards the room catches nothing at all, not even an echo. If someone’s trying to talk to her, that’s a them problem; Steph’s preoccupied with more important things. Namely, that she’s still tired, and the fabric pressed against her nose smells like her early days of Batgirl; Babs’s laundry detergent and the cheapest bottom-shelf deodorant one can shoplift from the Fruth’s.

Steph knows without opening her eyes that Cass is holding her. Cass, or someone wearing Cass’s clothes.

An odd sound intersperses the buzz of voices, a snick like a lighter failing to catch a spark, or a chip clip clicked open and closed like a crab claw. Steph rolls her head off of her left ear just enough to realize it’s a snapping of fingers above her head, meant to get her attention.

“--You alive?” a voice asks, echoey and far away, coming through a wrapping-paper tube. “Steph?”

Steph pushes her face further into Cass’s stomach, memorizing the dark warmth there for the brief moment she’s allowed it. Then she lolls her head to the side so she’s facing the ceiling, and she starts to crack open one sleep-crusted eye, and she braces for Cass to wiggle away and leave her lying here alone, now that she’s awake.

A sharp mid-morning light stabs through Crystal’s broken blinds, highlighting a fair amount of dust swirling in the air. Above her, Cass’s face peers down, framed by oddly-shaped hair that hasn’t been washed since she crammed it under her cowl for her last patrol. 

It only takes a second of eye contact for Steph to understand that her secret is out.

“Good morning,” Steph mumbles. She wants to make a joke about sleeping with Cass in her dead mother’s bed, but she’s not sure that one would land right now. 

“My leg is asleep,” Cass says.

Steph slowly sits up. Tim is here, lurking by the bedside, close enough to Steph that it constitutes a jumpscare.

“I ordered food,” Tim says. He watches her cautiously, like she might explode if he says the words in the wrong order. “Are you hungry?”

Steph slowly asks, “Was my dad here?”

Tim looks at Cass. Then he says, “Yeah. Not anymore, though.”

Steph turns her head, like seeing Cass will expose whatever secrets the two of them have. Cass just looks normal, though, if a little sleepy. “Can you guys stop?”

“Stop what?” Tim and Cass both ask at the same time.

Steph sighs. She thinks she’s getting a new headache, to add to the old one. “Just be. Normal. Say what you’re thinking. Please.”

“Are you sure you want that?” Tim asks. “We should probably eat first.”

“Agree,” Cass says. She pushes at Steph’s shoulder. “Food first.”

Steph gets up. She’s dizzy, but hides it pretty well--she only runs into one wall on her way out to the living room.

It’s been cleared of trash and broken glass since she was last out here. A couple bulging plastic garbage sacks have been shoved into the corner of the kitchen, stuffed full of the remnants of the destruction Steph brought onto this apartment over the past few months. Someone has taped a billowing thin plastic sheet over a missing windowpane, which isn’t quite enough to keep out the wind and the sound of traffic. 

A couple of paper grocery bags are on the coffee table. Steph can smell diner food--it’s from Frank’s down the street, according to the cheery checkered logo on the side of the bag. It’s where her dad used to take her and her mom, whenever he got out of jail and wanted to pretend like they were a normal family again. Steph would order a side of cut-up fruit and a single plain pancake so her parents wouldn’t make any comments about her weight, and Crystal would only drink coffee and smile like she was made of plastic so Arthur wouldn’t get angry with her.

Steph doesn’t mention this; she’s been told in the past that it’s a mood-killer anecdote.

It’s a ton of food, but between the three of them, they take care of most of it, sitting on the ground in a ring around the coffee table. At her level of exhaustion, feeling her level of shitty, it’s all Steph can do to keep chewing, swallowing, breathing, and blinking.

They get through half of the meal before anyone says anything. Tim nudges a disposable cup of coffee with a black plastic lid towards Steph, and says something like, “Leslie said you should stop by again tonight. For, um, you know.”

Sound comes to Steph through a long toilet-paper tube, tinny and echoing in odd ways. Her right ear picks up nothing at all, even after her nap. 

…Probably not anything to worry about. Steph keeps working on her scrambled eggs.

Her left ear strains to compensate, clinging to every syllable of Tim’s voice even as he tries to thwart her by speaking through a mouthful of hashbrowns. “Also, I called someone to come clean. They’re coming this afternoon.”

Steph’s stomach rolls. She shakes her head so hard that her ear starts ringing again.

“Steph, it’s gross in here,” Tim says, unyielding.

“There’s bugs,” Cass mumbles through her food, bobbing her head in agreement. “And mold.”

Steph looks around the living room, at all the disturbed dust and dirty footprints and bags of trash that had to be moved for them to eat here. She’s noticed a smell, a sharp something in the air that implies there’s something bad growing, but she’d rather inhale a million mold spores than come back to find this apartment smelling like bleach again.

“You can stay at my Gotham place,” Cass offers. By this, she means that Steph can stay in Babs’s spare room, boxed in with no elbow room while Cass starfishes across the mattress in her sleep and Babs snores where she’s fallen asleep in front of her computer. 

Steph already feels claustrophobic, just thinking about it. 

“Or mine,” Tim says. 

Steph sits back against the side of her couch, the coffee held between her hands. She hasn’t had hot coffee in a long time. Probably because it’s repellent. She takes the lid off to let it cool off for a minute, and then says, “Pass.”

Tim starts, “You shouldn’t--”

“I’ll figure my own thing out,” she says stubbornly. She doesn’t know what that “thing” will be yet, but if she ends up using one of their suggestions, it’ll be because she decides to.

They both accept this, albeit uneasily--Cass probably knows that Steph’s only doing it to be difficult, while Tim is a control freak who hates relenting on stuff like this.

Cass is the one who jumps into the real conversation. Ten minutes later, she stops in her task of demolishing a breakfast sandwich to lick sauce off of her thumb, and then says, “You didn’t tell us that your mom died.”

Steph looks down into her drink and wonders if it would be dramatic to pour it all over herself to have an excuse to leave the room. Then she inhales the bitter, flat smell of cheap coffee and says, “Yup.”

After Steph doesn’t say anything more, Cass prods at her again with, “Why not?”

Steph says, “Sorry, I didn’t realize I should’ve sent out a fucking newsletter.”

Cass and Tim both exhale identical short, irritated breaths through their noses. They exchange an exasperated glance that makes Steph want to be angry. She’s still too burned-out from whatever crying she must have done last night to work up a temper.

“Dude,” Tim says, “why are you mad at us for caring?”

“You don’t care,” Steph says. She rolls her eyes to the ceiling. “Don’t pretend like-- ugh. Forget it.”

“What are you talking about?” Tim demands.

“What?”

“Of course I care.”

“Okay. Sure.” Steph sets her coffee down on the table. She rubs her palms together, focusing on that instead of how much she wants to laugh in Tim’s face. “Now you do.”

“What are---?”

“When it happened,” Cass says, “why didn’t you say anything?”

Steph shrugs. She remembers a lot of that night, a couple months ago--more than she remembers of the time between then and now, anyway. There was never a point where she thought that someone being around would help. Letting someone see her so raw and disoriented and sad was the nightmare scenario.

“I definitely told one of you I was going to her funeral,” Steph says. 

“Are you--” Tim thinks about her words, and when he remembers what she’s talking about, he flings his hands up. He’s acting a lot like his mother. Now that Steph’s mom is dead too, she thinks she could make a joke about Tim’s dead mom, but she doesn’t get the words out in time. “I’m supposed to read your mind?”

“You’re nosy about everything else,” Steph says. “Why not that?”

Tim sputters.

With Tim derailed, Cass jumps in. She says, dissecting Steph’s deflections, “You think it’s your fault.”

Steph’s brain stutters to a stop. Dead air whistles through her working ear; blood thrums inside the busted one. Tim looks at Cass with a startled look, Cass watches Steph’s face without any kind of malice, just blunt honesty.

“You’re…sitting, like you’re guilty,” Cass continues, with a short frustrated gesture indicating that something about Steph’s posture is indescribable but so, so obvious. 

Steph swallows, with difficulty. Her throat is dry.

“You can’t just say things like that to people,” she croaks. 

Cass, without missing a beat, parries with, “You aren’t telling me I’m wrong.”

Tim shifts uncomfortably, a crease appearing between his eyebrows. Before he even opens his mouth, Steph knows he’s going to say some kind of bullshit platitude about how it can’t be Steph’s fault, trust him, he’s the expert on that--but in his case, it legitimately wasn’t his fault, because evil people murdered his parents and Tim was a kid. 

Steph was all Crystal had, and she left her mom alone with enough Vicodin to kill an elephant.

What comes out of Tim, though, is, “Can we go visit her with you?”

The sudden shift throws Steph far off-balance. Maybe that’s exactly what Tim wanted out of her, to take her off the defensive. Steph hasn’t gone to the mausoleum since the funeral.

The plastic over her broken window flutters. Cass and Tim are both holding their breath.

“Ugh,” Steph says. She rubs her eye, just for an excuse not to look at Tim and Cass as she slumps, gives up. She says, “Fine.”

Divine intervention is the only explanation for how Tim and Cass get Steph to shower, dress, sit to have her wounds dressed, and then climb into Tim’s car to drive to the cemetery without losing steam, losing her patience, or losing her mind.

Cass drives; Tim makes her pull up by a curb halfway to the cemetery to let him out by the nearest grocery store. Cass makes a loop in around the block and picks Tim up again, now with him holding a bouquet of flowers. 

Steph watches him get into the front seat with a paper-wrapped spray of white lilies. He gives her a brief look in the rear view mirror, barely smiling, and doesn’t say anything. Steph doesn’t either. She just watches the lilies bounce their heads as Cass pulls the car back into the flow of traffic. 

Her hair is still wet when Cass parks them in the main parking lot, finding a spot near the front gate. Steph wrestles the soggy mass of hair into a crunched-up bun that will leave it creased and kinked in weird ways for a week. She gets out of the backseat without losing her balance or throwing up from motion sickness, in a rare stroke of good luck. 

“Where’s she at?” Tim asks, tipping his head towards the small map of the grounds posted near the gate. 

Steph knows Tim’s parents are buried in the most expensive segment of this cemetery, under a stately black marble headstone with both of their names on it. She’s been through too much this month to be particularly embarrassed when she points to the mausoleum twenty yards from the entrance and says, “Just right there,” though she still lowers her eyes to avoid seeing any reaction when she mumbles, “Cremation was, um, cheaper.” 

Tim reads the room and doesn’t respond to that. Cass starts walking, drawing Steph along with her gravitational pull. 

They get to the mausoleum. It’s not like the building is teeming with visitors, but there are several people standing in there. Despite them, it’s quiet, save for a vague rustling of wind in the rafters.

For a long, embarrassing moment, Steph can’t remember which slot is her mother’s. She barely remembers that day at all. Her one surviving memory is sitting on a bench in front of the slot by herself, so she very surreptitiously walks past the row of spaced-out benches, scanning name plates out of the corner of her eye, until she sees CRYSTAL MICHAELA BROWN.

“Here,” Steph says tonelessly.

She steps backwards a couple times, until the bench nudges the backs of her knees. There, she sits.

Cass sits next to her. Tim finds one of the small divots in the wall meant for flowers, set into the stone between the columns of slots, and he carefully slides the bouquet into place.

Then, he sits on Steph’s other side, and they all stare forward in silence.

After almost ten minutes of just sitting, it seems like they’re waiting on Steph to move, or speak, or do anything at all. Neither of them even knew her mom that well at all--only Tim met Crystal, once, and it didn’t go super well. 

Steph doesn’t do anything except look at the slot where her mom’s ashes lie. Not counting the few hours during and after the funeral, this is the longest Steph has been in Crystal’s presence without getting body-shamed.

“You guys can have my apartment cleaned,” is how Steph breaks the silence a while later. Her back is beginning to hurt from sitting slouched on this marble bench, so she sits up and pops a couple of places in her spine as she goes. “I’ll stop being a bitch about it.”

“Not a bitch,” Cass says, and then amends, “about this.” 

Steph snorts. She rubs her eyes and makes a sound that would probably be a laugh if she could put any feeling into it at all.

“We can go,” Steph says. “It’s been a while.”

“Are you sure?” Tim asks.

Steph considers the mausoleum around them, with the shuffling quiet footsteps and hushed voices and shadows casting oddly on the domed ceiling. It’s claustrophobic somehow, even with all the elbow room. Steph has done enough of making Tim bring flowers for someone else’s mom, and enough of making Cass listen to her morose rambling. Cass should have already told Steph to shut up and count her blessings; after all, the closest thing Cass has ever had to a mother is Babs. 

Or Bruce.

“Let’s get out of here,” Steph reiterates. “I’m good.”

She doesn’t stand up. Her legs won’t move. Cass and Tim stay seated on either side of her, waiting for her to lead the way. 

The concept of another car ride is nauseating to her. Sitting here in a cemetery is the only place where Steph can just sit and aimlessly stare and look depressed and everyone will accept that as normal behavior. Outside of the wrought-iron fence, there are things like deep-cleaning and checking her grades and paying rent and medical procedures.

“Uh, if it makes either of you feel better,” Steph finally says, when the bated-breath quiet from Cass and Tim gets unbearable, “my dad didn’t find out about this until last night either.”

Tim mutters a darkly amused “oh my god” while Cass says, “Maybe you should have actually put out a newsletter.”

Steph presses the heels of her palms into her eyes and laughs helplessly, unsure if she thinks that’s funny or if she’s just trying not to cry again.

Back at Steph’s apartment, Tim steps out to schedule the cleaning service. Cass sticks close to Steph’s side to keep her company but also to make sure Steph doesn’t collapse on the ground or try to escape out the window or lose focus. 

Steph keeps trying to engrain memories of the apartment in her brain, looking past the mess and dust to cement what the place looked like when her mom lived in it. The last remnants of Crystal are in the pile her wallet and keys were left in, and in the mess of makeup and skin products on her bathroom counter, and the clothes left in her laundry hamper, and the dust collected on all the shelves. 

By some miracle, or perhaps by means of Cass continually herding Steph forward in the process, Steph ends up with an overnight bag packed. Tim takes the key to Steph’s apartment and Steph doesn’t let herself look back into the living room as Cass leads her out towards the Lyft they called to Leslie’s clinic.

“Anything I should tell them when they show up?” Tim asks, pressing the phone to his shoulder to muffle his words.

“I don’t care,” Steph says. She shifts the weight of her bag so the strap doesn’t dig into her skin as much. 

“Steph,” Tim says.

“Whatever,” Steph says, with more exasperation. If she starts giving special instructions, she’ll never stop. Crystal isn’t in the apartment anymore, so it doesn’t matter what’s thrown away or moved around or dusted off.

She resumes walking. Cass follows, and radiates a weird energy that Steph interprets as disapproval. Steph decides not to care about that either. 

Leslie is less than pleased when Steph shows her face at the clinic again. Cass gives a wave of greeting before finding a corner of the waiting room to haunt, with Steph’s bag at her feet, and Steph’s left to go to an empty exam room on her own with a silent Leslie leading the way.

Steph sits on the chair sheeted with crinkly parchment paper. She reciprocates Leslie’s icy silence while the latter takes her vitals. 

Finally, when Leslie’s done making sure nothing’s emergently wrong, she sits down on her chair by the computer monitor and rattles words into the ever-growing Stephanie file. She finishes and looks over and asks, “Can I trust you to answer me truthfully this time?”

Steph tries not to squirm. She doesn’t necessarily feel guilty about how she handled things last time she was here, but Leslie’s gaze is terrifying. 

“Probably,” Steph says.

“I realize you rarely choose to come in here. But I cannot do my job if you lie to me, or run away. Am I understood?”

Steph nods sullenly. 

“Wonderful.” Leslie swivels her seat to face Steph and raises one eyebrow. “With that in mind, what do you need from me?”

Steph’s brain is basically made of cotton and yarn at this point in the day, but she does her best to think. Haltingly, she admits many things--first, that she may need a doctor’s note for school; second, that she only left last night because she hoped she would die before Cass would have to come take care of her; third, that her ear may be legitimately fucked up. It’s embarrassing and it makes her want to break things and it feels just as vulnerable as letting strangers come in to scrub her apartment clean.

Leslie handles it with calm efficiency and poise, which is how she handles everything except for Bruce. For the first problem, she looks up contact information for the community college’s Access office. For the second problem, she renews Steph’s medley of antidepressant prescriptions, which all ran out four months ago when Steph forgot to refill them. For the third, she finds an audiologist in town and schedules Steph for an appointment in a couple of weeks before Steph can protest, with the reassurance that Leslie will coordinate payment on Bruce’s dime.

By the time the visit finally wraps up an hour and a half later, Steph is using her sleeves to keep wiping unstoppable tears off of her face, intermittently sniffling. Leslie pulls the tiny basket of stickers out of the desk and offers them out to her with a slight smile. Steph takes the basket and tries not to cry into it.

“What have we learned?” Leslie asks.

Steph mutters, shoving Gotham Knights stickers out of the way, “Lie better and faster next time.”

“No,” Leslie says. 

“Then I didn’t learn anything.”

Leslie’s eye roll is practically audible. Steph doesn’t need to look up to know it’s happening. “Take some time to think about it.” She hems and haws for a second before adding, awkwardly, “Do you want another hug?”

Steph quickly says, “No.”

Relieved, Leslie says, “Okay. I think Cassandra is still in the lobby. Is she keeping an eye on you?”

“For now.” Steph doesn’t want anyone to be kept on babysitting duty, no matter how much she’s proven that she needs supervision. She picks out a Twilight Sparkle sticker and hands the basket back. Then she follows Leslie back out to the waiting room to find Cass contorted into the least comfortable sitting position imaginable on one of the chairs out there, half-asleep.

Seeing them, Cass sits up and opens her eyes and yawns, preparing to stand again. An odd lull passes before Steph remembers herself and says, looking at her shoes, “Thanks, Dr. Leslie.”

“I’ve got your back,” Leslie says, like Steph isn’t a nuisance. “Take care, kid.”

Steph sticks with her previous knee-jerk aversion to staying with someone else in Gotham. She texts Dick to ask to crash with him, and he enthusiastically agrees. This is a win-win, because Steph will be out of Gotham, of her own volition, with someone with the social clout to make everyone else fuck off and leave her alone for a few days.

Between here and then, though, is still a half-hour trip.

Cass takes her responsibility of watching Steph seriously, enough to buy a twin bus ticket with her up to Blüdhaven. The two of them don’t talk to each other a lot, though Steph knows she should be apologizing to Cass for everything she’s pulled, but the words don’t show up. An unfriendly part of her head keeps telling Steph that she doesn’t have anything to apologize for.

Steph falls asleep gradually, until her head rests on Cass’s shoulder. When she wakes up, they’re in a new city, Cass is holding her hand, and the air feels easier to breathe in.

In the end, Steph stays two weeks in Blüdhaven, far past the time when she starts feeling guilty for being all up in Dick’s space. It’s not like she has to try hard to keep to herself, though. He’s at his day job during work hours and then his night job as soon as dark falls, and Steph can easily fake being asleep for the five or six hours when he could potentially stick his head into the guest room.

The guest room must be the one that Damian uses when he visits. There’s an Among Us poster on the wall that Steph always sees first thing when she wakes up from a nightmare. It’s hard for her brain to pretend that she’s back in her mom’s apartment with the video game creatures staring back at her.

Over the course of the two weeks, Steph withdraws from her classes. She only understands about half the process, but has been told at least that Leslie’s note will let her jump back in when she’s a full person again. She spends a lot of her days just lying down and only rarely going out to the living room, with her phone turned off. Dick has to knock on her door and poke his head in to deliver a message that Babs tried to send Steph by text--the message being that Babs and Tim are handling any and all expenses and rent for Crystal’s apartment while Steph takes her sabbatical.

The only thing that assuages Steph’s guilt about imposing is that Dick seems to like having a roommate. On her first day, Steph saw his fridge basically empty except for some half-empty condiment bottles and cold brew, but Dick’s been having groceries delivered for both of them, and some takeout meals appear in the evenings too. When Dick gets word via Leslie that Steph’s prescriptions are all ready, he bundles Steph up and takes her down to the drug store at the corner like he’s taking a poodle for a walk--and the next morning, he puts two pill caddies on the counter, one purple and one red, and tells Steph that they’re going to keep each other on track because Dick hasn’t taken his own meds in probably four months.

Things are easier when she’s not living alone anymore. Steph sleeps and sleeps and wakes up to eat a couple times a day. At four every morning, Dick stumbles in from Nightwinging and sticks his head in to wish her good morning if she’s awake, and at five-thirty he stumbles in from being bullied by grade-school gymnasts all day and tells her what he’s doing for dinner if she’s awake. Steph lives like a slug, only sometimes getting up to stretch so her joints don’t lose all the elasticity they ever had.

“I think I can get out of your hair tomorrow,” Steph tells Dick on the night of the second Sunday she spends there. They’re both on the living room couch, Dick messing around with something Titans-related on his laptop while Steph pretends to care about the Homeland marathon that the television is subjecting her to.

Dick looks up for the first time in an hour, face perfectly neutral. He’s doing his creepy “I spent my formative years wearing mirrored lenses and forget to blink” stare, watching Steph’s face for clues. 

“Are you sure?” he asks. 

Steph nods.

“I don’t mind having you.”

“I’m a delight,” Steph agrees flatly. She hugs a throw pillow to her chest. “I might just, like, check on the apartment. Um. And I have an ear appointment.”

Dick reaches up to close his laptop halfway, giving her more of his attention and finally remembering to put on a facial expression. The one he chooses is concerned, yet supportive. Steph doesn’t care if it’s fake. “I can drive you.” 

“You don’t have to.”

“Correct.”

Steph snorts. “Okay.” She sits in silence with Dick watching her watch the TV for a few minutes. Then she says, more shyly, “If I can’t handle it, or something, could I…?”

“Obviously.” Dick opens his laptop again, letting the moment end. “I’ll keep the room open for you.” He gives Steph a look over the top of his screen. “I’ve never met anybody who could stay their whole life in Gotham. Everyone needs a breather.”

Steph nods. Her break from real life has softened her, it makes her say stupid and honest things like, “That’s probably what killed Mom.”

Dick stops clicking keys on his computer. Steph can’t look him in the eye. She starts messing around with a loose thread in the side of her sock. 

“I mean, it was mostly me,” Steph says. She breathes in unevenly, and on the exhale manages to keep talking. “It was. I mean.” She wishes she could stop talking, at this point. “I did it.” She hiccups. “But if she’d gotten to leave, I mean if she’d been able to take a break, or I don’t know, see her parents in New York, she probably would’ve…”

“Hold on,” Dick says. He sits forward and sets his laptop aside. Thankfully, he doesn’t try to touch her or anything, but his scary intense gaze is the next worst thing. “Look at me.”

Steph makes a face. The thread is starting to unravel on her sock.

“Steph.”

Steph sullenly lifts her chin, ready for whatever disgust has dawned on Dick’s face with her confession. She wonders if he’s still obligated to snitch on stuff like this, given his stint as an officer of the law. If she’s going to go to jail, at least she got a couple weeks of good sleep beforehand.

Dick’s eyebrows have pinched together, and he’s looking at her with horror, but it’s not an angry horror. Not the look of a bitch cop who’s going to cuff her and haul her in, either.

“The autopsy said she overdosed,” Dick says. His unblinking detective eyes have fixed on her, immovable. “On hydrocodone.”

Slowly, Steph bobs her head. A couple of errant tears spill with the movement. Steph sniffles and wipes her face on the knee of her sweats, too afraid to break eye contact. She doesn’t even bother questioning how he’s possibly become familiar with Crystal’s autopsy--once Cass and Tim figured her out, it was probably a matter of minutes before everyone with Batcave clearance had a copy of all the police records.

“Did you force her to take all those pills?”

“No.”

“Did you stage a poisoning after you killed her in some other way?”

“No, but I--”

“I know it feels bad,” Dick says. “I’ve been wanting--wishing, I’ve been fucking praying since I was eight that I’d saved them. I was the only person who could’ve, but I didn’t.”

Steph says, “You were a kid. There was no way--”

“You’re a kid to me, too,” Dick says. He sits forward even further, bending in half over himself. If anything, his intensity increases--he doesn’t even crack a smile when his last comment brings a flicker of irritation onto Steph’s face. “That’s not what I’m saying, though. I’m saying that you might feel guilty for a long time, and I understand that. But you didn’t kill her.”

“Dick,” Steph says.

“You didn’t.” Dick shakes his head. “You don’t have magic powers and I don’t either.”

A laugh catches in her throat, and transforms itself into something more like a wail as Steph all but dissolves. Her left ear picks up the wet sniffle that warns her further breakdown, and Dick hears it too. He scoots forward onto his knees to offer a hug.

Having already fallen this far from grace, Steph tips forward and muffles her next sob into the front of his shirt. He’s too far away from her for it to be comfortable, with her all stretched out and her neck at the worst angle, but she clings onto him anyway. Dick is just the wrong place, wrong time--and the first to offer Steph a real hug since…

Well, disregarding Leslie’s painful pity-hug, since Crystal.

Dick’s not much better than Leslie at hugging, as it turns out, but there’s no uncomfortable professionalism in the way with him. He squeezes tight around her shoulders and rocks the two of them back and forth for a long time, not saying anything--though his mouth is nearest Steph’s busted ear, so maybe he’s saying many things she doesn’t hear.

At least, at this point in the year, Steph knows how to pull herself back together in a timely manner. She’s sick of crying. She’s done too much of it, recently, but at least that means she’s getting better at it.

While she starts taking longer, hiccup-filled breaths, Dick’s embrace slowly loosens so he’s not crushing her anymore. He starts rubbing a small circle around between her shoulder blades, and that’s what makes Steph finally pull away. It’s unpleasant having any part of her back rubbed.

None of the shame that Steph felt around Tim and Cass resurfaces when Steph sits back and lets Dick see the full extent of her tearstained mess of a face. She wipes clumsily at her cheeks and Dick sits back against the arm of the sofa while she catches her breath.

“No wonder you made yourself so sick, thinking stuff like that,” is how Dick breaks the silence.

Steph manages a pathetic twitch of the corner of her mouth, which could only be considered a smile if she was a marble statue.

“If something like this happens again, you can call me,” Dick says. “I won’t tell anyone else that something happened.”

“Okay.” Steph mops at her nose. “I mean, I only had the one mom. It probably won’t happen again.”

“Oy,” Dick says, sounding exactly like Kate when he does it. He shakes his head, but Steph’s gotten him to break his scary bird-of-prey glare, at least. “Alright, funny. Let me get you some water.”

The rest of the evening is serene, after that outburst. Steph watches shitty reality TV until her vision blurs, and Dick keeps her company. He even entertains Steph’s feeble conversation starters, coaxing genuine communication out of her in a way that very few other people could handle.

She’s almost asleep when Dick starts moving around, closing his laptop and standing from the couch. Steph only cracks her eyelids open a tiny bit, but it’s enough to recognize that Dick picks up a handmade quilted blanket from the armchair and drapes it over her before he goes to his bedroom to change for his night job.

Custody of Steph changes during her audiology appointment. Dick drops her off, but when Steph returns to the waiting room, Tim’s sitting there instead.

Steph’s holding a thick ream of paperwork in her sweaty hand and still cringing from the tight pinch of headphones that had sat over her ears during the exam. When she sees Tim, she experiences a mixed bag of emotions, none of which overrule her exhaustion.

“Ready to go?” Tim asks, standing up.

Steph shrugs. She folds her take-home papers in half so Tim can’t snoop on the make and model of the hearing aids that are getting sent to her. She’s going to talk to Babs about figuring out where to get ones more suited to combat, anyway--she knows Black Canary uses something like them, that aren’t designed with civilians in mind. 

In the car, Tim is unusually quiet. He’s doing his annoying thing where he can’t tell if she’s mad at him, so he drives extra-carefully and keeps changing the station on the radio because he won’t directly ask her what she wants to listen to. Steph gets tired of it three-quarters of the way to her apartment, but thankfully Tim picks up on her irritation and talks first.

“I should’ve asked,” Tim says.

Steph’s head is resting against the seat; she slowly lolls it towards him, raising an eyebrow.

“About the funeral.” 

“Hmm.”

After Steph doesn’t say anything else, Tim says, “I’m sorry.”

It’s a hollow victory, if it’s a victory at all. Steph bumps her hand against the side of his arm and says, “Don’t sweat it.”

It’s hard to tell if Tim looks reassured. His face is pinched. 

He parks them in a stall a block away from Steph’s building. It’s the closest they can get, even with Tim willing to pay the obscene price of street parking. As the two of them jog across the street in a lull of traffic, Tim tries talking again. 

“What did they say about your hearing?”

Steph begins patting her pockets for her key, before remembering she lent it to Tim to deal with the cleaners. “It’s fucked. Do you have my key?”

He jangles her keyring at her, having already pulled it out. “Are you going to have to have surgery?”

“They’re gonna wait and see.” Thinking about it too much makes Steph’s skin crawl, actually, so she changes the subject. “How bad was it?”

Tim hands her keys over. “The apartment?”

Steph nods. She unlocks the front door and walks through ahead of Tim.

“It was…” Tim is picking his words too carefully. “It took them a while. I told them to keep things as close to normal as possible.”

When Steph opens her front door, it’s the smell that hits her first.

The musty smell of mold and dust wasn’t obvious before, but its sudden absence is. A soft scent of something like a candle from Target has replaced both dirty and bleachy smells, and that’s what gives Steph the courage to step over the threshold and flip the light on.

She looks down. The mess of shoes by the front door are cleaned up and pared down--only Steph’s shoes remain in a neat row on the shoe rack.

“Is…?” Steph starts to ask.

“They packed up all of your mom’s stuff,” Tim says. “It’s in boxes, and they didn’t toss anything. You can take it back out or do whatever with it, but it’s out of the way until you’re ready.”

Steph’s throat squeezes. She kicks her shoes off and wanders further into the apartment to continue her inspection.

It’s hard to even recognize the place. The sink is empty and clean, with all the dishes put away. A new windowpane has been set into the frame, perfectly clear. Steph sticks her head into her own bedroom to find the bed made and her floor clear of clothing. Crystal’s room is just as pristine--even her bathroom has been scrubbed clean, and all the old shampoo bottles and hair products have been packed neatly into two big cardboard boxes.

Steph sits on the edge of Crystal’s bed and catches a whiff of the clean sheets. The smell is like it was before Steph slept a month in them--that specific combination of shampoo, perfume, and laundry detergent she didn’t think she’d ever smell again. 

With her eyesight blurring, Steph picks up the nearest pillow and shoves her face into it and curls over onto herself. She inhales. Exhales. Mutters, “Sorry, Mom.”

When she sets the pillow aside fifteen minutes later and wobbles back out to the living room, Tim’s in the kitchen with his head in the fridge. The shelves are stocked with food that Steph definitely didn’t purchase--the last time she was here, the only thing she remembers being in there were some cans of Dr. Pepper that made her hands go numb to look at directly.

“Tim,” Steph says. Her voice is froggy; she clears her throat and sniffles. When he looks over his shoulder at her, she doesn’t pretend like she hasn’t been crying. “Thanks.”

“Uh, yeah. I mean, no big deal.” Tim nods. He stands up with a couple of bottles of fruit juices, the bougie kind Steph used to steal out of his fridge when she still visited him regularly. “Do you want to talk?”

“I don’t,” Steph says.

“Fair.” Tim makes rare eye contact as he holds out a pink bottle of juice for her. “Should I leave?”

Steph rubs her nose with her sleeve, and then accepts the guava juice handed to her. “You don’t have to. Just. Don’t be annoying.”

Tim snorts. 

“I know that’s hard for you.” Steph can’t help but smile, too. “Do you want to watch something?”

Tim nods and follows her to the couch. Steph has settled and found the remote on the coffee table before she notices the cluster of photo frames on the mantel has been rearranged and cleaned up. Up front and center is no longer the photo of Crystal and Arthur and Steph ten years ago, with its collection of gritted-teeth smiles. 

Instead, the photo front and center is the one Steph would have picked for the funeral if she’d had the ability to pick anything at all: Crystal and Steph more than a decade ago, when Steph was maybe eight, the two of them wearing rollerskates at the city rink. Steph has a black eye from a softball game and jagged bangs that she cut herself. Crystal has her college sweatshirt and mom jeans that were far ahead of their time, and she’s actually smiling. 

Crystal isn’t wearing makeup, which was rare for her, and her hair isn’t blown out in the style she spent many, many collective hours on. Steph remembers that day--it was Crystal’s birthday, and Arthur was in jail, and so Crystal took Steph out for the evening and taught her how to do a twirl on rollerskates. It was Crystal’s talent back when she was in beauty pageants, and Steph was obsessed.

“Where did they find that?” Steph asks. She wipes at her eyes again, realizing she’s been silent and still for a little too long. “That photo.”

“Oh, um.” Tim’s kind of hiding behind his starfruit limeade juice. “Babs and I found it. Is that okay? Sorry.”

“No, it’s fine,” Steph says. After a long moment, she adds, “Tell Babs thanks, too.”

The TV is on, but her eyes stay on her mom’s face, creased in its smile as she looks down at little Steph. Little Steph smiles back up at her, missing two teeth. For a moment, as the smell of the apartment and her mom’s unguarded smile both overwhelm Steph, the loss is brand-new, visceral and unending--and then Steph takes a breath and looks over at the window, where the view of Gotham traffic in the sunset tells her that the world is bigger than that feeling, whether she likes it or not.