She considers the question, both whether she wants to answer it or not and what it is in and of itself. She's not the detective he is, except in the sense that he had called her one, which really is the only way she needs. She's enough of a detective. She understands the important parts.
That that would be the first question--
Either the Joker has done something horrible to her or horrible to him. And he is almost certainly dead in his world. There's a way that people say the word 'dead', even if the sentence doesn't actually intend to tell you whether someone is or not. That was one word, one inflection, the body language around it, she'd learned well before the others.
She knows what the Joker did to Barbara, after all. She knows enough, has seen enough of the videos, looked into enough to know that the Joker is one of the worst. It hadn't ever really come up, but she knew that if there'd been a mission to deal with the Joker, her Bruce would have sent her away. And that, perhaps, she would have understood.
Perhaps.
Her answer is a single shake of her head. She could provide the basic information he'd requested.
That's too bad, his body language says. No disappointment or regret someone hasn't taken him out - for all his flaws these days, he doesn't wish becoming a murderer on anyone. It's just a shame that he hasn't slipped on a banana peel and snapped his neck, or something. Not that it would save anyone any suffering, given the way Joker's managed to send his shadow over Gotham even after his death.
Still, that's too bad.
"What he does to everyone."
Ruins lives.
Bruce takes a sip of the tea, a little too hot still since he hasn't been disturbing it. Something about the slight burn is grounding. He'll need pinpricks of reality; he's been thinking about it since she asked him for his location. She'll be out of the loop otherwise, or she'll end up with sensationalized half-truths, from one Jason or the other or nosy third parties wanting to stir up a soap opera.
He starts at the beginning - the end of Joker's life, and the illness he'd accidentally created, Talia's death. (He misses her. He shouldn't, but god, he does.) Giving up his civilian persona as his mind started to play tricks on him, isolating himself as he realized what was happening. The mysterious adversary who turned out to be Jason, destroying the steps forward they'd made in Gotham without the Joker. Barbara being taken, Tim being taken.
So he's here. Because he fucked up spectacularly, and Gotham needs to be free of the Joker.
It becomes abundantly clear, as he talks, that the man in front of her is as much her Batman as the one she left at home. Her hands clench and her focus on him is absolute, absolute enough that Bruce has to be able to tell that her anger isn't at him as much as it's for him. She thinks of his friends. She thinks of Dick and Tim at home, and the distant Jason she's heard about from the others. She thinks about her own suffering, her time under the serum, when her hands hadn't been her own, and the time after the serum, when she was never quite sure whose hands they were.
She thinks about her father, the girls he and Deathstroke had tried to make. The weapons. She thinks about the man who'd raised her to be a weapon, about his face in the rain as she stood over him.
About the arms that pulled her in after she'd made her choice. The man who'd helped her find her way as a hero.
He'd built a family, taken in all of them in his own way, taken them literally under his wing. But whose wing was he under? Had he had anyone to run to when things like this were going on? She knew he had friends, but even among those friends...
She thinks about why she's here. And why he's here. And ultimately, they sound very similar to her.
She finishes her tea, puts the cup down, and unfolds from the couch in a single smooth motion. He's not far, so it's only a few steps to walk around to stand in front of him, stare down at him, hear the story in his muscles and his bones and the way he sits, the shame.
She presses her lips together, determined, and leans over to carefully place her hand over his heart. She leaves it there for a moment, looking into his eyes, willing the words she can't find in her awkward second language. Then, slow and deliberate, she leans further and presses a kiss to his forehead.
His hands were dirty. So were hers. And they were both doing the only thing they could to try and fix what could never be fixed, death and suffering that could never be erased. But she'd known this pain since she was eight years old. She'd been avenging her own soul since the day she'd first reached over and ripped a man's throat out with her tiny hands. This is her place. This is her pain. And for this, her wing is large enough for one.
I never wanted you here. But you're not alone here. I'm here too.
To explain that story takes a lot out of him - not as much as it used to; since getting it out to Clark the first time, and allowing bits and pieces of it to be shared for the purposes of potential exorcism, and from therapy, he's become more numb to it. But it still leaves a cold, nauseous feeling in his center, and it makes him want to withdraw from everything. It's not that he's afraid - after his overdose on the toxin, he's not sure he can feel fear - but a kind of scrambling anxiety he doesn't have words for. Like his defense mechanisms are so worn and so tired that there's nothing else to do but try and leave.
Cassandra's acceptance moves him, but it confuses him too. (If one person's embrace could fix him, wouldn't that be a lovely world.) He looks at her in silence, and there's nothing much to read off of him. He's tired, and for a while, his brain fails to come up with any response at all. He doesn't understand why the fuck she would accept him. He's not some lost child who needs guidance, he's a grown man who put himself in every single one of these situations, he's Batman, and he doesn't have any excuses. He's not sure if he even wants acceptance-- and that's the thing, isn't it. Bruce doesn't know how to do anything but torture himself over his mistakes. He can forgive others, but never himself.
He's just explained himself and there are... so many words there. So many words and her own story will be so many words too. She steels herself, breathes in deep, considers again, and sits on the ground across from him.
"David Cain made me a weapon," and this he knows, but-- "and when I wouldn't give in to be that weapon, he and Deathstroke used a chemical to take over my mind. Control me."
She closed her eyes.
"I killed. I killed and I led the League of Assassins. My hands were not my own. That was the only thing I'd ever had." And she's so angry about that. So quietly angry. "And they took it." Like he tries to take everything else. "Destroyed the trust I'd built with you. With the others. And even after it was neutralized, there were lingering affects."
She opened them again, looking up at him.
"Red Robin trusts me. Nightwing does not trust me. You trust me." Adopted me. Took me in. Showed me love. "I trust myself... but I trust myself more here. My contract will make me immune to mind control of any kind, magical, meta, or chemical.
Bruce listens, his attention grave. He knows words are difficult for her, that every one is agonized over in some way, and that words for this must be costing her. Admitting so much to him shows so much trust and faith it cuts cleaner than her acceptance of him (if he could accept himself, it'd be easier, but since when is anything about Batman easy). He is who he is-- most people would think that odds were better than even he'd reject her for allowing herself to be taken over, for the failure of it. And maybe she does think that, but is trusting him not to.
It makes him so angry that they did that to her. Will Cain try it in his world, too? Can he, without Deathstroke? (Because surely that idiot has different clientele, being shacked up with Jason's militia.) How low, how cowardly, like a child having a tantrum and destroying a toy because he's been told he has to put it back on the store shelf. If he treated Cassandra like a weapon, maybe he'd treat her with some measure of professional reverence; what he's done to her now is worse than that.
Silently he extends his own hands, offering to hold hers.
And after what she'd said, what she'd admitted to, the blood he knew was on those hands--
It wasn't the first time he'd taken her back, knowing that she had been tainted. It wasn't the first time, and she'd had to fight so hard, so hard to show him that she did truly understand. Understand why they did not kill. Why they acted as they did. Why she was worthy to be Batgirl, to wear a name tied to both him and Barbara.
Her hands aren't clean. But they are hers. And it's both of these reasons that make it mean something more as she puts them in his. And yet--
"I hunted him down," she says quietly. "I intended to kill him, as he intended to kill Barbara. But... I didn't. And you locked him away."
She seeks out his eyes again.
"That was when you said... I had a family. When you gave me your name."
Bruce holds her hands, the both of them capable of such violence and the both of them feeling so fine-boned and mortal. She fought her way back, and is making sure it can never happen again. It's how a person gets back up after being thrown down that matters - a vital part of why Bruce can't reconcile with Jason. He'd begun the walk to his death with hope, but here ... it's been shattered. Cassandra and her dogged hope are a comfort.
"I'm not that man," he says quietly. He'd pushed them all away. If his Cassandra has to go through this with David Cain, she'll do it without Bruce to look over her shoulder. He doesn't know her as well, and he hasn't made those steps forward with her; his relative gentleness now is one born of being so shattered on his own. "Anything you need of me here, is yours."
And he would know, should know that she's not talking about how he speaks out loud. She's talking about his body, about the way he moves, the language of his muscles and bone. It's hard for her to try and differentiate him from the one at home when they seem so similar. The only difference is that here, the pain is held much closer to the surface. But it's the same sort of pain.
"But there's only one thing I've ever wanted from you."
Which is when she pushes herself up on her feet and, keeping her hands in his, sits beside him. Then, eyes closed, she lets herself lean against his side.
It takes him a long moment to settle in a way very few people would be able to detect - he wasn't properly on guard or even on edge around her, but the strange anxiety that grips him is always present. It eases finally, as though he needed time to process this and decide to accept it as reality, and he squeezes her hand.
Bruce tips his head back over the edge of the sofa and closes his eyes, letting his breathing move towards something more meditative - something closer to how he is when he isn't trapped in whatever vortex of suffering he's currently in.
The quiet is a relief. The townhouse doesn't have the tomblike silence of the manor, or even the removed distance of the penthouse - too in the middle of a contained city, built for budget and not citadel privacy - but there's a kind of peace about it that the two of them make. The dog doesn't invade; at some point Ace slunk out the small door to patrol the yard, hopefully shooing off any lurking red birds.
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no subject
That that would be the first question--
Either the Joker has done something horrible to her or horrible to him. And he is almost certainly dead in his world. There's a way that people say the word 'dead', even if the sentence doesn't actually intend to tell you whether someone is or not. That was one word, one inflection, the body language around it, she'd learned well before the others.
She knows what the Joker did to Barbara, after all. She knows enough, has seen enough of the videos, looked into enough to know that the Joker is one of the worst. It hadn't ever really come up, but she knew that if there'd been a mission to deal with the Joker, her Bruce would have sent her away. And that, perhaps, she would have understood.
Perhaps.
Her answer is a single shake of her head. She could provide the basic information he'd requested.
"What did he do to you?" is her real answer.
no subject
Still, that's too bad.
"What he does to everyone."
Ruins lives.
Bruce takes a sip of the tea, a little too hot still since he hasn't been disturbing it. Something about the slight burn is grounding. He'll need pinpricks of reality; he's been thinking about it since she asked him for his location. She'll be out of the loop otherwise, or she'll end up with sensationalized half-truths, from one Jason or the other or nosy third parties wanting to stir up a soap opera.
He starts at the beginning - the end of Joker's life, and the illness he'd accidentally created, Talia's death. (He misses her. He shouldn't, but god, he does.) Giving up his civilian persona as his mind started to play tricks on him, isolating himself as he realized what was happening. The mysterious adversary who turned out to be Jason, destroying the steps forward they'd made in Gotham without the Joker. Barbara being taken, Tim being taken.
So he's here. Because he fucked up spectacularly, and Gotham needs to be free of the Joker.
no subject
She thinks about her father, the girls he and Deathstroke had tried to make. The weapons. She thinks about the man who'd raised her to be a weapon, about his face in the rain as she stood over him.
About the arms that pulled her in after she'd made her choice. The man who'd helped her find her way as a hero.
He'd built a family, taken in all of them in his own way, taken them literally under his wing. But whose wing was he under? Had he had anyone to run to when things like this were going on? She knew he had friends, but even among those friends...
She thinks about why she's here. And why he's here. And ultimately, they sound very similar to her.
She finishes her tea, puts the cup down, and unfolds from the couch in a single smooth motion. He's not far, so it's only a few steps to walk around to stand in front of him, stare down at him, hear the story in his muscles and his bones and the way he sits, the shame.
She presses her lips together, determined, and leans over to carefully place her hand over his heart. She leaves it there for a moment, looking into his eyes, willing the words she can't find in her awkward second language. Then, slow and deliberate, she leans further and presses a kiss to his forehead.
His hands were dirty. So were hers. And they were both doing the only thing they could to try and fix what could never be fixed, death and suffering that could never be erased. But she'd known this pain since she was eight years old. She'd been avenging her own soul since the day she'd first reached over and ripped a man's throat out with her tiny hands. This is her place. This is her pain. And for this, her wing is large enough for one.
I never wanted you here. But you're not alone here. I'm here too.
no subject
Cassandra's acceptance moves him, but it confuses him too. (If one person's embrace could fix him, wouldn't that be a lovely world.) He looks at her in silence, and there's nothing much to read off of him. He's tired, and for a while, his brain fails to come up with any response at all. He doesn't understand why the fuck she would accept him. He's not some lost child who needs guidance, he's a grown man who put himself in every single one of these situations, he's Batman, and he doesn't have any excuses. He's not sure if he even wants acceptance-- and that's the thing, isn't it. Bruce doesn't know how to do anything but torture himself over his mistakes. He can forgive others, but never himself.
Quietly,
"Why are you here?"
no subject
"David Cain made me a weapon," and this he knows, but-- "and when I wouldn't give in to be that weapon, he and Deathstroke used a chemical to take over my mind. Control me."
She closed her eyes.
"I killed. I killed and I led the League of Assassins. My hands were not my own. That was the only thing I'd ever had." And she's so angry about that. So quietly angry. "And they took it." Like he tries to take everything else. "Destroyed the trust I'd built with you. With the others. And even after it was neutralized, there were lingering affects."
She opened them again, looking up at him.
"Red Robin trusts me. Nightwing does not trust me. You trust me." Adopted me. Took me in. Showed me love. "I trust myself... but I trust myself more here. My contract will make me immune to mind control of any kind, magical, meta, or chemical.
"My hands are mine. And they'll stay mine."
no subject
It makes him so angry that they did that to her. Will Cain try it in his world, too? Can he, without Deathstroke? (Because surely that idiot has different clientele, being shacked up with Jason's militia.) How low, how cowardly, like a child having a tantrum and destroying a toy because he's been told he has to put it back on the store shelf. If he treated Cassandra like a weapon, maybe he'd treat her with some measure of professional reverence; what he's done to her now is worse than that.
Silently he extends his own hands, offering to hold hers.
no subject
It wasn't the first time he'd taken her back, knowing that she had been tainted. It wasn't the first time, and she'd had to fight so hard, so hard to show him that she did truly understand. Understand why they did not kill. Why they acted as they did. Why she was worthy to be Batgirl, to wear a name tied to both him and Barbara.
Her hands aren't clean. But they are hers. And it's both of these reasons that make it mean something more as she puts them in his. And yet--
"I hunted him down," she says quietly. "I intended to kill him, as he intended to kill Barbara. But... I didn't. And you locked him away."
She seeks out his eyes again.
"That was when you said... I had a family. When you gave me your name."
no subject
"I'm not that man," he says quietly. He'd pushed them all away. If his Cassandra has to go through this with David Cain, she'll do it without Bruce to look over her shoulder. He doesn't know her as well, and he hasn't made those steps forward with her; his relative gentleness now is one born of being so shattered on his own. "Anything you need of me here, is yours."
no subject
"You have the same voice."
And he would know, should know that she's not talking about how he speaks out loud. She's talking about his body, about the way he moves, the language of his muscles and bone. It's hard for her to try and differentiate him from the one at home when they seem so similar. The only difference is that here, the pain is held much closer to the surface. But it's the same sort of pain.
"But there's only one thing I've ever wanted from you."
Which is when she pushes herself up on her feet and, keeping her hands in his, sits beside him. Then, eyes closed, she lets herself lean against his side.
no subject
Bruce tips his head back over the edge of the sofa and closes his eyes, letting his breathing move towards something more meditative - something closer to how he is when he isn't trapped in whatever vortex of suffering he's currently in.
The quiet is a relief. The townhouse doesn't have the tomblike silence of the manor, or even the removed distance of the penthouse - too in the middle of a contained city, built for budget and not citadel privacy - but there's a kind of peace about it that the two of them make. The dog doesn't invade; at some point Ace slunk out the small door to patrol the yard, hopefully shooing off any lurking red birds.