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A body is pulled from Gotham River, dressed in a home-made copy of the Batgirl suit.
The first thing Stephanie thinks to herself, when she hears about this, is whether her foot has caught on the stairs leading to her bedroom - causing her to miss a step. It would explain the lurching feeling in her stomach.
The second is I wonder who Babs will show her autopsy photos to.
*
Babs gave Cass, Cassandra, her name from the Greek myth. It’s where Oracle came from too. A girl who could not speak but sees the truth outlined in people’s smallest movements and a woman of legend who was cursed to be disbelieved despite the prophecy that she spoke. It’s poetic. It’s symbolic. It belongs to the same grand tradition as men who dress in bat costumes to enforce justice and acrobats who swear at candlelight to never stray from the path of righteousness.
The name Spoiler has a simpler lineage. She spoils. That’s it. First it was her father’s schemes, then other villains, then Robin’s trust and Batman’s belief, then a whole city while she was smuggled away to Africa in near tatters. Nothing particularly grand or awe-spiring about it. No one is going to ask Stephanie how she possibly could have come up with that one.
She’s Batgirl now. Not Spoiler any more. So it doesn’t matter.
Stephanie shares it. Batgirl is not hers and it never really was. At one point, there was only a singular and no plural. Some ancient tradition has been shattered because now there are two Robins and two Batgirls and multiple people who have been Batmen even if they are not Batman. It no longer feels like the closely guarded fist that it had been at some point: the dark secret that locked Stephanie out of the cave and harangued her to stop at every opportunity. Instead the collective has grown, the shadows welcoming instead of harrowing and embracing instead of enveloping. Batman gains trusted allies every day.
Stephanie’s not bitter about this. She’s not.
She’s in a good place with Cass, Tim, Babs, her mother, her old college friends who she has to restrain from giving Tim a piece of their mind whenever his name pops up on her phone, Harper, Duke, even Damian the little shit (said with love and affection.) She’s taking a break before she enters medical school. She has Black Canary’s personal number and she texts Courtney Whitmore regularly. She’s saving people every night. She wears the bat insignia on her chest, the one that she earned through blood and sweat. Stephanie is the inferior copy but people have largely stopped saying that to her face.
If she moves a little rougher, hits a little slower, seems to glow with purpose a little less than the others, wonders about her place amongst Gods and aliens who can level a skyscraper with a punch… well, that’s always been the case. She didn’t get a name from a story. She had to make it herself.
I want to be part of the legend, she had said once.
She only got there once she died.
*
“I think I would like to go to the funeral,” Stephanie tells Babs.
Babs pulls a face. “Did you even know her?”
“No.” She could have. “I could have.” The girl went to Gotham U. “We went to Gotham U.” Steph may have passed her by during patrol. While Steph was stopping a robber with the latest Oracle tech instead of a pen-knife and cheap boots and craft-store materials. While Steph was eating at a late night diner with Cass. Or laughing with Francisco and Jordanna at the mall. “We were all part of the same cause.” For just a moment at least.
“You know that’s bullshit,” Babs says, eyes narrowing a bit behind her glasses.
“I want to…” Ease something that’s buried deep in her chest. From the look Babs is giving her, Steph probably doesn’t need to say it out loud.
“Steph, seeing her family members there grieving for her won’t make the guilt any less.” Babs' tone is not unkind. “Take it from someone who knows.” She doesn’t face Steph when she says it, her eyes scanning the monitors, the endless Oracle network continuing on as it always does.
“The suit was purple.” Steph is aware she sounds a little ragged.
Babs sighs. “It was probably the only fabric she could get.”
“She didn’t even have a mask.” Her face was nearly unrecognizable.
Babs hand twitches on her chair. “That young woman clearly didn’t think any of it through at all. She paid the ultimate price.”
The girl came from a good family according to the papers. No dad in prison. No mom addicted to pills. Nice middle class house. The news featured a cute elementary school photo of her in pigtails and a prom picture gleaned from Facebook where she’s huddled up with about five of her friends. An additional photograph of her dorm room set-up, her older brother with his hand around her shoulder. She was majoring in Spanish literature. She did volunteer work at the soup kitchen. There’s no clues or answers. No reason that makes sense as to why she decided to dress up in a costume so she could come face to face with the bad guys.
What Steph could say but doesn’t is that the life they live is not about thinking or reasons or logic. It’s about seeing someone who needs you and being unable to turn away.
Babs, who lives her life buried in code and information, is not going to get that.
“That happens to us a lot, huh?” Steph says it. Barbara winces. Steph regrets it.
“We have the training and the skills to make sure we survive,” Babs responds. At least there’s a “we” there. There wouldn’t have been a few years ago.
Of course, Barbara means the Bat collective. The people who Bruce Wayne has gathered under his cape and personally approves of.
Steph thinks she means something different personally.
*
“It’s sad,” Cass says quietly.
“I’m fine,” Steph returns absent-mindedly.
“I… I do not think I am.” Cass hunches up her shoulders. Cass takes on the feelings and the cares of the entire world but admitting her own inner-most thoughts is still difficult for her.
Right. Self-centered much there, Stephie? Nothing is more important to Cass than Batgirl and the life of a human being. Both long-held tenants have been shattered this week.
“I’m sorry.” Steph means it. “It wasn’t your fault.” Steph can say it a thousand times and Cass will still not believe her.
“I keep thinking… thinking of what I could have done. To save her. Stop her.”
“Absolutely nothing.” Steph knows that Cass will not find comfort in this statement. Cass is the best there is. Cass is the true heir to the Bat. Cass can do anything.
Sometimes, other people need to learn hard truths on their own. Not from their betters.
Cass stares at something on the wall. “I am Batgirl so no one else has to be.”
Ouch. Steph knows that Cass doesn’t mean it that way.
“I do this so no one else needs to,” Cass continues.
Steph puts a hand on her best friend’s shoulder. “You can’t absorb the suffering of everyone else. It’s just… going to happen.”
A little girl is left alone with a friend of her father’s and she runs for her safety. A baby is born and she’s given up for adoption. A husband hits a wife. He locks his daughter in the closet. No diabolical plans to end the world, no Joker venom, no crazy schemes. Mundane stuff that occurs every day.
Who stops that exactly? Is it something that can be stopped?
“What is the point?” Cass is almost at a whisper now. “If we can’t save everyone?”
We can’t be everywhere for every single person. Steph wants to say.
There are too many human beings and too few heroes in this world.
And heroes die.
*
Babs takes Steph and Cass to the same restaurant Babs meets her father at every week.
Steph decides to switch it up and order an omelette. Cass gets the double-burger. Babs has two steaming mugs of black coffee in front of her.
“My treat,” Babs says heavily.
“I should hope so,” Steph jokes. “You’re the only one out of the three of us who has a job.”
Steph is treated to two laughs in response but they’re pretty weak.
“Figured we could use a girl’s night.” It’s 5:00 in the morning and they’re sitting in a plastic booth next to a guy smoking a half-burnt cigarette and being attended to by a waitress with the thickest mascara Steph has ever seen. This sounds about right.
Steph decides to try to further lighten the atmosphere a bit. “Last I heard, it wasn’t just girls you brought around here.”
Babs raises her eyebrows. “Weird way to refer to my dad but okay.” Cass stifles a snigger beside her.
“Oh c’mon.” Steph grins. “You and Detective Gage?”
Babs snorts. “I haven’t talked to the guy since my dad tried setting us up here and I yelled at him that I didn’t go around wearing a sparkly shirt saying that I’m disabled.”
“Oh.” So much for a happier mood. “That would probably do it.”
“I don’t know if I was exactly fair to Nick Gage but it can absolutely be a turn-off,” Babs replies casually. “Helps me sort through the jerks and I make sure to get a jab in but some people definitely see the chair more than they see me.”
“Give me their address,” Cass says darkly. She cracks her knuckles for emphasis.
“Easy there.” Babs smiles at her. “I don’t need a protection squad. Oracle usually leaks their most embarrassing baby photos anyway a week or two later.”
Oracle always gets the last word.
“You’re kind of our protection squad if you think about it. We can certainly return the favor,” Stephanie tells Babs. Oracle watches the skies and the skies can watch for her back.
Babs looks at her for a long moment. “Thanks.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “I can take care of myself.” Very clear dismissal.
“I will still throw any man out the window who is mean to you,” Cass says. Babs throws her head back and giggles delightedly at that.
Steph joins in.
It’s not Cass’s fault that Babs will always have a different fundamental reaction to her than to Steph, no matter what Steph does to bridge the gap.
*
Steph does not have a memorial in the Cave.
Babs does.
Steph wonders sometimes if that weirds Babs out, if she feels like she is staring at a monument of herself while she’s still alive. That was the official reason given for why Steph didn’t get one even though the person who told her and Steph herself knows that it’s a lie. Steph wonders if Babs wishes they could trade places the same way that Steph does (shamefully): Steph can have some sort of acknowledgement that she mattered in the most perverse of ways and Babs can finally leave behind the suffocating shadow of her past. Steph knows better than perhaps anyone, with the exception of Cass, how much Babs hates to be reminded of certain things.
In life, one does not always get what they want.
Steph studies the original suit occasionally, forever frozen in time. It’s blue and yellow and black with a long flowy cape and high ears. It looks a little more staid and traditional than Cass’s striking full bodysuit with the stitching across the masked face or Stephanie’s bright purple gloves and utility belt. It’s of an older era, one in which boys wore scaly painties and Bruce exclaimed things like “Great Scott!” “Holy, (Noun) Batman!” or some other silly saying that Stephanie may just be making up.
It’s like a BC and an AD. Before the Joker shot a retired librarian. After Batman lost a son. Before villains like Black Mask and Professor Pyg roamed the city. After a child and a successor said goodbye to everyone they had ever loved. Before a woman took up residence in the clock-tower. After a silly girl sat on the roof of her suburban house and imagined that she could see the Bat-signal.
Steph thinks that the boys might take Oracle a bit for granted. They don’t recognize the seismic shift that created her.
Steph does.
Bruce and Dick didn’t always have an Oracle but they never had to fight for her or her skills either. They never had to prove that they deserved them.
Steph did.
Steph went to the temple at Mount Parnassus and was found wanting.
Steph knows that Bruce avoids these memorials when he can help it. Steph is alone when she sees the suit languishing in the glass. She’s not entirely sure that she’s imagining the blood stains there at its waist.
Maybe it is an honorific to the dead.
A recognition that something died that night.
*
Sometimes, Steph gets really mad at Babs.
Sometimes, Babs likes to insinuate that Steph doesn’t deserve to be here.
Babs and Bruce are really similar people.
“That was an inexcusable call and you know it!” Babs yells at her.
“O, you realize that I’m sorry,” Steph pleads. She’s apologized in three different ways at this point. She’s not sure what more Barbara can possibly want.
Babs is seething. Steph has not mollified her in the slightest. She whirls her chair around. “Sorry doesn’t erase the cold hard facts of the situation! Sorry doesn’t turn back the clock! You could have gotten yourself and Bluebird killed!”
“I made a decision.” Steph’s breath hitches. “It seemed like the right choice at the time.”
“You turned off your fucking comms!” Barbara yells back. “I had no idea what was happening there. All I could hear was a round of gunfire and then nothing! You could have been shot and I would be none the wiser!”
“They had a meta,” Steph defends weakly. “He could have hacked the line.”
“And I would have dealt with it! What the ever living hell do you take me for?”
“I dealt with it too, Babs.”
“Barely,” Babs snarls.
When is she going to stop scolding Stephanie like a child? Steph blows a piece of hair out of her face. She tries again. “Look, the important part is that we’re all alive and the bad guys were defeated.”
“No.” Babs voice is ice cold. “That’s not the important part.”
“It is to me.” Steph restrains herself from folding her arms across her chest.
“I need to be able to trust you.” Babs rubs her temple with her index finger. “You give me so little so much of the time, Stephanie.”
“I give you everything.” Steph feels something hot in the back of her throat. Is that really what Babs believes?
“Everything you have maybe.” The emphasis on the “you” from Babs scalds her. What did Steph do to earn this disdain? That thought immediately obliterates itself the second Steph has it. Steph has accumulated this scorn and derision through years of messing up. It doesn’t take a great detective to figure this out. It’s not rocket science. It’s not hard.
“I’m not you. I’m not Cass.” Steph grits. Steph’s only telling Babs what she already knows. “I’m doing the best that I can.”
The look Babs gives her is loud and clear. It’s not good enough.
“I worry one of these days I’ll be reading about you in the newspapers,” Babs says. “Any line of communication will be off and I’ll be reaching out again and again and your vitals will be missing and I won’t know anything until I see those photos taken at the morgue.”
“Like the ones of me you used as a warning?” Steph asks. She sounds defeated and tired. It’s not even meant to be a jab. Steph wishes she could change the past but she can never erase those pictures, the ones that showed her stripped of everything she held sacred and dear. The ones that dissuaded a girl with literal powers from walking down a similar path.
“Like the ones that were taken of me and used to torture my father,” Babs responds.
*
Steph gets up every day.
That’s the important part, right? You get knocked down and then you rise up, as good and new as ever.
Steph is not as good as she ever was. She’s better in a lot of ways but worse in others. She didn’t used to have nightmares. She didn’t used to have scars.
Her mom lays a kiss on her forehead each morning. Like there might come a day when Steph doesn’t return and the bed is left empty.
That’s the risk you run. You accept your place among the greats and you accept that the fall might be even more catastrophic than the rise.
Steph passes by a memorial to the girl they found in Gotham River, located near the entrance to Gotham U. It’s her smiling face, adorned by flowers and little candles. A teddy bear with a stitched heart. Brightly colored notes. Letters. Steph doubts that she received the same accolades. She kind of doubts anyone really noticed she was gone outside of her mom and the man who held her hand as she closed her eyes. The thought doesn’t make her feel jealous. It just makes her feel sad.
She found an old newspaper clipping at the library the other day. Police Commissioner Kidnapped! Joker Captured. It wasn’t front page news. Lex Luthor had apparently teamed up with Darkseid to lay waste to the entire East Coast around the same time so it was relegated to second-string. The police commissioner’s daughter is only found in one sentence at the very bottom.
She watches a movie with Cass, late at night. She traces the muscles of Cass’s arm and the bullet holes left behind by her own father.
She wonders if the girl was afraid. Did she stare into the eyes of the man who killed her? Did she cling to the hastily drawn Bat Insignia on her purple felt dress and feel any sort of comfort? Did she scream? Did she cry? Did she beg? Did she know that this was it? Was she in horrible pain or did it all wash away into empty nothingness, shock overtaking the living organism?
Does Babs think about that night, opening the door randomly for a man with a bleached white face and a huge grin?
Steph thinks about it all the time.
You don’t know what you agreed to, Bruce told her once. You will feel differently once you learn.
Steph’s learned a whole lot over the years.
Steph fires the grapple gun and she leaps.