A/N: First Cass fic, yay! Be gentle please.

No one lies to Cass.

This is something Bruce has learned with absolute certainty. There are always tells, always that little twitch or glance or thrum of pulse that gives them away, and Cass is well versed in the language of the body.

He is, perhaps, most honest with her out of all his children. Truth is simple with Cass. They don't need words, they need only be. Just as he does not lie to her, neither does she to him. It is their unspoken agreement, because Cass is fair and she knows she is the most dangerous of all of them. They all know it.

But sometimes, every once in a while, they like to pretend, he and his lone daughter. It is a game, a rarity, and though neither of them have been children for a very long time, they enjoy it.

Cass sits in the smallest window seat in the manor, framed by the bright light of mid afternoon. Her knees are drawn to her chest, chin digging into the left. She wears a sloppy ponytail contained by an obnoxiously pink scrunchy, courtesy of Dick's brotherly whims, and a pair of Tim's sweats, rolled only once as they are nearly of a height.

He finds it endlessly endearing, that she lets her brothers play living Barbie when she visits.

He settles further into the overstuffed chair he occupies, book in hand. She had glanced up once when he first came in, but now they carefully ignore each other. He watches, from the corner of his eye as his daughter runs a thumb across the screen of her iPod, earbuds in.

This is their game.

Bruce opens the book–a battered favorite of his mother's, long ago–and begins to read aloud where they left off the last time she was home.

"There must be something in books, something we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing–"

And still he watches her, because this is what they do.

She gives no sign that she hears him, continuing the rhythmic stroking across the screen, earbuds still in place. But he knows that she is listening.

Later, he will carefully crease the page, leave the worn book lying on the shelf in plain sight, get up and leave the room with not a word between them. Later still, he will return, pick up the story again and find the pages a little more touched than before, a careful C marking each bottom corner, proof of what his daughter has accomplished in silence.

He will turn to the dog-eared page, casually begin reading aloud to himself as she sits in the wan light of the window, again wearing some article of her brothers' clothing. His children like to share amongst each other. It is a novelty for them still, having siblings.

He will read and read, until the words blur, because it is something his daughter never asked of him. It is something he thought he'd never get to do.

How very, wonderfully wrong he was.

This is what he will remember, one day when he is old and gray and his eyes can no longer focus on the page. Then perhaps they will trade places, he and his daughter.

They all play games. It's how they show they care.