*warnings. violence. assault. rape (small part of a scene but it happens and is referred to). trauma.
This is dark, in that they survive a horrible situation together, but there's no character deaths or sad endings here. This is a romance forged in fire.
Alarms sounded over screams and gun blasts—all distant now. They'd crawled up into the rafters and through the long canals of air ducts and when she couldn't crawl anymore—he dragged her.
His muscles screamed, raw pain warning with the dull agony of exhaustion.
He pulled them all the way to the end of the narrow duct where moonlight pressed back the darkness. He kicked, pushing his back to the cold metal wall and pulling her into his arms. He tipped his head back and stared up, tears gathering against his vision when he saw the night sky up that long rectangular shaft. The air was colder, cleaner, and his breath shivered from his lungs with pained longing.
"Go," Cassandra whispered. "I'll follow."
She said it but her limbs didn't move. Her muscles didn't even flex with the thought of moving.
Her arm was broken—that he had seen clearly before complete chaos had broken out and they'd finally made their move to escape. Neither of them had been in any condition for it, but it was the last chance, the last hope—their last move.
If it was just her arm that was broken, he wouldn't doubt her ability to climb out of here. If anyone could do it, Cassandra Cain could. But Nightwing had gathered her into his lap, her back to his chest so that maybe she would smell the cold air too. Her blood oozed across his naked abdomen and soaked into his pants.
"Leave me," she urged, as though he'd said all the things he'd been thinking. "I would have left you."
The tears spilled over his lashes and a grim smile pulled the gashes in his lips apart wider. "Liar. If you'd left me this wouldn't have happened. If you'd left me…" he choked on the last twenty-minutes of his life. It was too much. They'd been circling their own deaths for three months, clawing to survive, fighting together against everyone else in this nightmare of a prison, but the last twenty-minutes had been the worst of it all.
"Go," she said again, quietly, but with the persistent nudge of a friend urging him onto a plane to see the world. Like he was making a big deal of nothing and would laugh later at how he almost didn't go. "It won't change," she said it so matter-o-factly but it made swallowing hard because he knew what she was saying—after months in this place with her, he everything about her. She didn't use many words, be he heard her now—in her movements and her stillness. And now, broken and bleeding out in his arms, she was promising to love him the same even if he left her here to die.
And she meant it. He knew she did. She would think no less of him and it would not tarnish her understanding of his feelings for her. She would not hurt if he left her now. She would understand.
Dick Grayson looked up at the sky far above, stars looking back mercilessly. "I can't." He was so tired. When had he last slept? Last eaten? One hand throbbed, crushed, and one side of his face was swelling up under a split of flesh. He was filthy, caked in blood and sweat.
Cassandra gave a tired grunt. "You can make it," she said.
He could make it. But he curled his arms around her, hand still pressing over the largest gash in her side, determined to hold her together as long as he could. "I won't."
-3 months earlier-
"You are the worst!" Grayson shouted. He'd been abducted and dumped into this prison only four days ago. All he had managed to figure out so far was that no one else knew where they were, possibly underground, or why. The maze of rooms, both small and large open stretches, caged the worst assortment of psychopaths and supervillains he'd ever seen—many he'd never even heard of. And it wasn't exclusively villains and criminals. Heroes and the random civilian were tossed in.
The prisoners called it The Oubliette, because it was a place to forget people. They were wild here, killing as they pleased. Gangs rose and fell. A war of sorts had happened on his second day. He'd had the sense to climb the rafters and get away. That was when he'd seen her—Cassandra Cain. Last he'd heard, Black Bat had been in Europe. He tried to ask her how long she'd been in this place but she answered with a shrug. And he'd tried to stick with her since but already he was fed up.
She blinked at his rage and then held up the apple she'd just stolen from a blob of a man five times her size.
Grayson bared his teeth at her, but his stomach gurgled embarrassingly, and her eyebrow quirked at it. Someone had pushed Dick and she'd broken the man's arm. There were no doctors here, no order or reason and damned if she wasn't getting along just fine. "You belong in this place!" he yelled at her, furious that she could be just like the people here—no care to the consequences of her violence—and so casual about it. She was comfortable in this place. He backed away from her, wondering if maybe she really did belong here.
But he didn't. He couldn't. It wasn't fair. He was a hero and this was a place for monsters.
She stared like a wild animal, not quite understanding him, and he hated her even more for that. She had barely said a word to him since he found her. It was worse than just being alone. "Stay away from me," he said with a curl of his lip and turned on his heel, his walk turning to a run and launching himself up to scale a wall and climb. Off the ground was the safest place to be here. Not everyone was acrobatic. Small blessings, he supposed, feeling brutally alone and in need of someplace to think and figure out what to do.
The next day Grayson spotted Cass climbing the wall on the opposite side of the large room, finding her own perch out of reach of the wild inmates prowling below. It was never quiet in this place, never completely dark or light either. He would never be able to keep track of time, not really, and so what he thought of as a day was sometimes two or three or only half of one.
Scavenging was tricky. There were at least a dozen water spouts in this section of the prison but most were claimed and protected by gangs. Food was dumped into the rooms without rhyme or reason, causing fights to break out.
After a few days, he noticed that Black Bat would regularly drop down into the fray—putting herself right in the middle of the main floor. She didn't even have to start a fight for one to come to her. He watched for the first ten minutes before realizing she had gone for training. She went through routines, using people like punching bags all too willingly throwing themselves at her. She was staying strong, often returning to her perch with scraps of food and scabbed knuckles.
Grayson did things differently, skirting the big room to talk to the calmer inmates. According to them, this wasn't the main room of the prison. They could point him in the right direction, but no one suggested he go through the narrow halls to get there. But as the days melted together and he found no other means of escape from this room—he became convinced there was no other way.
That day, a man hung himself. Black Bat climbed in the rafters to the top of the rope. Nightwing watched, transfixed like many others. She swung herself down the rope, all the way to the dead man at the end—and then cut him loose. For one strange second he wondered if it was mercy to put away the body, but then she climbed to the top and collected the length of cable. She stuffed it into her bag and he made up his mind to leave this part of the prison. If there was an escape to be made, he would need to see the main room of this building and maybe he wanted to get away from her too.
He waited until the horn sounded and food came rolling down a narrow shaft into the room, drawing everyone's attention. He climbed down, dropped onto one of the catwalks, and sunk into the hallways winding through the interior of the prison. The air was worse here, stuffy and putrid and what little light there had been dimmed. He heard voices, raspy and laughing. Or maybe crying? And then footsteps, too many of them, shuffling after him. Grayson ran and they ran after. He almost reached the light on the other end when a big man came out ahead of him, blocking the way.
He leaped up the wall but there wasn't much of it—not much room to move at all. Still, he felled the big man but couldn't get past before someone else caught his ankle in the air and jerked him back. There were too many of them. He kicked and elbowed and even bit. He heard bones breaking but they weren't his and under the wild thrum of adrenaline, he didn't care whose they were. He was inching toward the light—toward the next room—when he was finally tackled to the ground, arms up behind his back and a knee digging in to his spine.
A man squatted in front of him. He'd never seen him before so he must be from the main room of the prison or from these tunnels. His teeth seemed to glow in the dark, smile wide and canine's pointed. "Look at you…" he hummed, reaching down to run his dirty fingers through Grayson's hair before fisting his hand and jerking his head back and up, straining his neck. "I think I'll keep you for a while." He barely said it, before a shadow thrust through the air over Grayson's head—over the pile of men pinning him to the ground—and right into the man with the terrible smile.
Cassandra Cain latched on to him and tumbled him to the ground, just enough surprise to startle the men pinning Grayson and give him the chance to twist free. On his back, he kicked them hard. The bones in his hands throbbed and air came out in heaves, but he walked through the last stretch of hallway and into the circle of light. Cassandra had ridden the man with the terrible smile out ahead of him, her narrow fists pummeling one side of his face until some of those teeth broke into shards.
"This is your warning," she spat, jerking back and on to her feet over him. Grayson knew, just knew, that she was letting this monster live because Nightwing wouldn't have killed him—because he would be upset if she did. It wasn't like her to give warnings.
Her arm moved and a blade flicked out. The man with the smile reached up, fingers fanning in the air as though to block her but she swiped the knife through the air and he screamed when three of his fingers were cut clean off. They had earned an audience, Grayson realize, a huge room spread out ahead of them with a well of water in the center and a new group of prisoners. Cassandra didn't look up at them yet, though they all watched her. She pointed the bloody knife at the no-longer-smiling man's face. "Touch him again and I'll take your whole hand. Look at him too long, and I'll pluck your eyes from their sockets," she snapped, just loud enough for other people to hear. Was that intentional? Was she giving a message?
Grayson almost smiled. Maybe he really was losing his mind, because this was somehow cute.
That was how they became partners. They did everything together after that. They found a new perch. They slept in turns. One sat with their back to the wall, eyes to the rest of the rooms, and the other curled against their chest, using their heartbeat to block out the sounds of screaming and singing and fucking in this place. The steady drum was a lullaby and a promise. When it quickened at the sight of danger coming, before even their muscles could jump, it stirred the one sleeping.
They prowled the grounds together, always on alert, and climbed higher than anyone else could up to the ceiling of the room—at least five stories high. They fastened ropes and cables to the rafters and used them to fly across the room, catching one another on second nature. They used that system to get to one of the water pipes high above, syphoning off their own source so as to avoid going through any of the ground gangs.
It worked. Until it didn't.
They were safe. Until they weren't.
-Present Day-
Grayson woke with a start, shooting upright. His body sang with pain, the patter of rain against glass making his face scrunch with confusion. The first thing he registered—the first thing he knew—was that he couldn't hear her heartbeat.
"You're okay," came that all too familiar voice. Strong and certain.
He blinked at the room. He knew this place. His bare back pushed against the wall, standing on his bed. He looked down at himself, bandages wrapped around his stomach and most of his left arm and leg. Lightning flashed outside and he saw the bruises painted across his thin body. Thin. He had never seen himself that way before—not lean but malnourished.
"Where…" he croaked the word before coughing on it.
"You're home," Bruce said. He was standing beside the bed, holding a hand up either to calm him or to coax him down.
Grayson grimaced, sliding down the wall to sit at the head of his bed, staring at his otherwise empty bedroom at the manor. Tears burned in his eyes, heart hammering at his chest as though calling out for hers. It wasn't here. He couldn't hear it. He remembered her bleeding out in his arms in that duct. Had he left her there? "Where is she?"
Bruce sighed, sitting next to him. "She's okay."
He jerked, staring at the man as though he'd slapped him. "Where?" he almost shouted.
Bruce looked honestly surprised. This wasn't the reaction he'd expected from his first prodigy, was it? No. Grayson was the kind one, the gentle one—the funny one. "In the infirmary, in the cave. She's patched up. I'll get an alert when she wakes up but you know how she can be, it's safer this way."
"You locked her up?" Grayson was sliding out of bed and moving toward the door, his father close on his heels.
"She'll understand," Bruce said, and Grayson could already hear him compartmentalizing—trying to think of a way to steer this conversation back to getting Dick to rest.
"She won't." He knew that now. She would accept it, but she never really understood why they treated her different.
Bruce had to catch his arm more than once to steady him on the way down into the cave and to the infirmary. The dark lights gave way to clean white where a lair became a hospital room with a sealed plate-glass door. Grayson sighed relief when he saw her, pressing his hands to the glass and watching the slow rise and fall of her narrow chest under the thin white blanket. Her arm was in a sling against her chest, her cheeks gaunt and bruised. More bruises collared her neck and the shape of an ugly bite mark bled through a bandage on her shoulder. His hand moved on its own, brushing the bandages over his own matching wound. Jagged teeth had made that bite. Angry teeth from a man with an angry smile.
"She's going to be okay," Bruce said.
"Yes."
"We need to talk," he added.
"Yes," Grayson conceded, certain he could endure anything after this—even talking about it.
"What happened?"
"We were escaping…" he said, watching her breathe. "How long were we in there?"
"A little more than three months?"
Grayson almost laughed, tears in his eyes. It felt like years. "What was it?"
"An underground prison of sorts. People pay to have someone removed—no body or bloodshed—just gone. Some for a while and some permanent from what we could tell. I didn't know Black Bat was there until we came for you…" he explained, regret and pain making his voice lower.
Grayson marveled at that for a moment. He'd never even thought to ask how long she'd been there before him. He had just assumed she came with him somehow—his partner from the start. But thinking back, it couldn't have been long. "I wouldn't have survived without her," he said quietly. "No one could climb as high as us or get through the air ducts. It took time to find a way out though and just getting food from the ground every day was a battle." He could hear himself rambling, tired.
Bruce put a heavy but comforting hand on his shoulder.
"We were pretty sure we'd found the right one, but it had an electric security grate blocking it. I found a basic systems control panel through one of the duct walls."
"What made you sure that was the right way out?" Bruce interrupted gently, truly curious.
Grayson blinked at him once before smiling a little and turning his gaze back through the window to Cass. "She swore she could smell rain that way."
"I needed the interface from one of the security drones to hack the control panel, but those only came out when a real riot broke." Grayson stopped talking for a long second, staring blankly at the rise and fall of her chest in that room. He couldn't hear her heartbeat but somewhere, far away, he still heard the screaming and drone gunfire.
"So, you caused a riot?" Bruce encouraged, careful not to judge.
"Yes." The ghost of a smile pulled at his busted lip. "And the drones came out and we swung down from the rafters and tackled one onto the third-floor platform… I got the interface but the riot was growing all around us. We scrambled up the terraces and back toward the ducts. At some point I was ahead of her. We were almost there. And then I was in the duct and crawling but I couldn't hear her behind me. When I went back, I could see all the way down—five floors of chaos and the main floor packed—but I couldn't see her anywhere."
Grayson went quiet for a while, remembering sitting there for what felt like forever, muscles burning to move—to do something, anything. But he didn't know where to go. He looked and looked but she had just vanished. A part of him was terrified she was under one of the fallen bodies on the ground floor. It was easy to forget how small she was sometimes. He'd sat up there, looking, for what felt like hours—until the riot ebbed and the wounded and well crawled away—leaving only the dead behind to be dragged away by the drones. Still. She wasn't there.
"But you found her," Bruce prompted, trying to keep Grayson going.
"No," he said, voice hushed. "He found me."
-Two Days Ago-
It had been hours. Water had gushed from the pipers, overflowing the usual allotment for drinking water to spill across the metal floors of the bottom level, sweeping blood and guts away into the grates along the sides.
Grayson was frozen—between what he wanted to do, what he needed to do, and what he could do. He wanted Cass to show up, perfectly fine, and ready to leave with him. He could use the interface panel, set off the security system, open the duct, and escape. He needed to find her. But he had no idea where to start. This place was a maze and they had stayed out of the halls and tunnels. He didn't know them.
The main room emptied and he dropped to the puddled floor, looking down the halls for her. He couldn't call for her, could he? They'd never spoken down here, where others could hear. All their words had been whispers to one another in the rafters and he'd been shocked to realize how much she said without words—how much she was always saying with her expressions and the way her shoulders shifted or her fingers curled. After those months that felt like years—he could practically hear her thoughts in his head. But not now. Now he heard nothing but the groaning, grunting horror of this place echoing from every tunnel.
And then he turned and saw him—the man with the horrible smile, teeth now jagged from when Cass had broken them that first day in this area. He'd lost three fingers to her that day too and done nothing but watch them since.
He grinned wide, flashing Grayson his teeth. They were bloodied. A chill ran down Nightwing's spine. His hands were coated in blood, red splattered on his chest and neck and face. His hand moved at his side and Grayson looked to see that slender bit of metal Cass had used as a blade—the one she'd sliced this man's fingers off with.
"Where is she?" Grayson asked, voice hoarse because it had been months since he spoke above a whisper.
The smiling man licked blood from his lips. "Dead."
"Liar," he barely got it out.
"She called for you, I think…" the man went on, moving closer, flicking the knife back and forth at his side like a cat's tail.
Grayson was shaking his head without realizing it. He wouldn't believe it. He wouldn't be bated. It would end him if he believed it.
"Nightwing," he tested the name.
Grayson froze, gaze snapping up to meet the man's. He looked like he'd been in a fight, not just bloodied but bleeding himself from shallow wounds and a couple bitemarks bleeding lazily down his arm. Small enough to be hers, deep enough to be hears. No hesitation—straight for the bone.
It would be like her wouldn't it? To use his hero name and not his real one even in a place like this—where they would never escape.
He didn't know he was crying until his vision blurred. She'd died without him? He felt a jab of betrayal and then the wave of guilt and despair crashed over him, breaking his heart.
That was when the rest of the gang had rushed him. It had been a sloppy fight, a blur. He'd broken a man's leg and distantly remembered a day when he'd been mad at her for breaking someone's arm in this place—practically a death sentence. He didn't care anymore. It wasn't that he wanted to hurt anyone—or wanted to kill anyone—but he didn't care if he did. All he wanted was to escape this place with her and now he couldn't. He would never get out.
Eventually there were too many of them and he took a blow to the head. When he woke seconds later, he was pinned, face down on the wet floor, his arm twisted against his back at an angle that threatened to pop his shoulder from the socket with the slightest pressure. The smiling man pressed his weight down on him and his shoulder gave with a violent pop. The man laughed and rubbed himself against Grayson's ass, sending a new wave of shock and fear through him. He leaned over him, mouth brushing Grayson's shoulder. "You're going to die like her," the man promised, biting into his skin with those broken teeth, one hand running down his side to claw fingers under the waistband of his pants, pushing them down.
Grayson cringed, pressing his forehead against the concrete floor, trying to squirm away.
She had died like this. Exhausted and hurt, with this man on top of her, weight pushing the air from her lungs? No. She had died worse, hadn't she? Because she would have known he was still alive—waiting for her. He had nothing. Dying would be easier.
He ground his teeth to bite back a scream when the smiling man pushed against him, ripping him. He swore lowly, jerking in a spastic effort to get free.
And then he was.
The weight was gone completely, and someone was screaming.
Grayson got his good arm free from under his chest and rolled. A hand was on the floor, one with three fingers missing. He blinked at the smiling man, confused. He wasn't smiling now—he was the one screaming. And there she was between them, right arm broken, the bone sticking out of her forearm, and that slender piece of sharp metal in the blood wet fingers of her left. She looked like a nightmare but to him she was a dream come true. She was barefoot, pants gone and shirt ripped in gashes that oozed blood, painting her legs and dripping on the floor. She shouldn't be standing—shouldn't be alive—but she was. Cassandra Cain had refused to die and Dick Grayson felt like a fool for ever thinking she'd go without him.
He pulled himself together, slammed his shoulder back into place, and got on his feet in time to barrel into another brute running at her.
Cassandra curled her lips at the smiling man on the floor in front of her, clutching at the bleeding stump of his hand. "I warned you," she said, as though remembering now. "I told you not to touch him… Not to look at him…" she sounded far away, tired beyond reason.
Grayson inched toward her.
She slashed out with the knife before the man could try to speak—to threaten or plea or explain. The blade cut through his eyes, both in one slice.
Their acts of violence sent shivers through the inhabitants of the prison around them. One of the gangs had fallen.
Grayson hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her up against his side, her broken arm between them, and pulled her with when he started climbing. That was how they'd gotten back to the ducts. It was the messiest, hardest climb of his life. But they'd both mad it that time. He'd set off the security alerts, all of them, and the prison went into a flood of sound and chaos. And then he'd shut off the electric fences in the outer airducts and they'd crawled. And when she couldn't crawl anymore, he dragged her.
-Present Day-
Bruce was quiet for a long time, standing with him in that hallway outside the infirmary.
Dick had watched her the whole time he told the story. He hadn't left anything out. He hadn't tried to save face or hide the ugly parts. He trusted Bruce with the truth and he wasn't ashamed of it either. He'd survived in a place where so many didn't.
"You should go up and rest," Bruce tried again.
Grayson shook his head slowly. "I don't think I can sleep without her."
There were a hundred thoughts in his father's silence. It wasn't healthy that they be this attached. It was bad coping. It was a flawed and dangerous union built on necessity, but it couldn't be out here. It wasn't who Grayson was. It wasn't the way they had been before. Only three months. That was all it had been for everyone else. Three worry-filled months. It had been a lifetime for him.
"Tim's on his way. He's going to sit with her," Bruce said.
Grayson wasn't sure how to feel about that. He remembered how things had been before the prison. He had barely been on casually friendly terms with Cassandra. Tim had been her friend.
"And people have been looking for you."
He looked at his father then, not sure if he was talking about friends or enemies.
"Dick Grayson is officially missing. Your friends have been looking for you. I let them know you had returned but nothing else. Starfire has been to see Batman more than a few times looking for you. She's been scouring the planet for you…"
He didn't understand at first and then he sighed and nodded. Yes. Life before the prison. He and Kory had moved in together months ago. It must have been awful for her when he disappeared. He nodded tightly, tearing his gaze from Cass. "Okay. I'll go see a few people."
Bruce frowned. "I was trying to get you to go back upstairs and rest…"
Grayson cocked a smile and started for the door. "You sucked at it. Let me know as soon as she wakes or if anything changes."
He didn't look back—afraid if he did, he wouldn't be able to go. He had people in his life—that far away, long ago life—and he owed them assurances.
His apartment felt strange to him now. He stood in it, trying not to look around at it too much. Everything felt a little surreal, like an illusion or a memory come to life. Not quite read.
He'd changed from the clothes at Bruce's into his own and packed a bag of his belongings. He tried not to linger long on what had been their bedroom—still full of their things and their photos and their memories. It felt like a lifetime ago. They had been good memories, but they had not been what kept him alive in that prison. He had forgotten them until now.
He closed his eyes, listening to his own heartbeat and thinking of someone else's.
The air shuddered and he opened his eyes just before the window opened and Kory flew in. Her face rippled emotions and she threw herself into his arms. He winced, bruised and battered and stitched together. But he hugged her back.
She flooded words and he smiled softly at the familiarity of her. She had been so worried. He assured her he was okay now and told her the bare minimum of what had happened. She realized there was something more—something wrong.
He broke up with her.
Not her fault. Nothing had changed for her. Time had been short. But his time had been long and everything had changed. He wasn't the same person and he wasn't sure he wanted to be.
She was stunned. Hurt and then angry. She thought he was keeping more from her—a mission or a villain—something he was trying to protect her from.
He promised her there was nothing like that. He just couldn't go back to his old life. He couldn't stay in this apartment. He couldn't date anyone.
She forced herself to calm, nodding slowly and kissing him sweetly. She offered him time to think, to heal, and said they could find each other again. She made it sound amicable and okay but there was a fire in her eyes that suggested she hadn't entirely believed him.
He was too tired to smother those flames.
He would regret it someday.
She waited.
The seconds ticked by. No literally. Nothing ticked at all. Tim's watch was digital. She hadn't opened her eyes, hadn't let her pulse change on the monitor, hadn't moved, but she knew he was there. She'd known even before he tapped at the screen on the wall and read her medical records. It was the smell of him and the sound of his stride across the room. She could identify anyone she knew without actually seeing them.
He'd gasped a little when he was scanning her report and let out a low "oh my god" on his breath. She couldn't know if it was the physical damage, the amount of blood loss, or her malnourished state that earned the response.
She hadn't seen him in half a year. She had a habit of disappearing, of going on far away missions and adventures and coming back when she liked. She wasn't Batgirl anymore. She was something else. Something solo. Black Bat. But Tim always treated her like they were still friends—like no time had passed. Or maybe that was wrong. Time passed for him too. He changed like the rest of them. But he never let go of his friends.
He sat beside her bed for a long time. At least three hours.
He spoke to her sometimes, asking her to wake up. Complaining about the food. Suggesting they could train together because with half her stomach in stitches, he'd definitely win sparring.
She heard the way his words tapered at the end of the joke, worried it wasn't funny, worried it wasn't okay to say. Worried. She almost sighed and opened her eyes then and let him off the hook.
But she didn't. Cassandra Cain lie there like a coma patient and waited.
And, at last, he slipped out of the room either to take a leak or trade off with someone else.
In that window, she opened her eyes. The machines continued to hum, unchanged until she ripped the needle from her wrist and tore off the sticky nodes that monitored her pulse.
She flung back the covers and hopped out of the bed. Her legs buckled and one shaking arm caught her in a crouch—the other in a cast. She tasted blood. She pushed herself to her feet, swaying and opened a drawer of medical supplies. She found a scalpel and tore it from the packaging, alarming going off and making her head pulse and her vision blur. She used the blade to force the panel beside the door open, pulling at the wires, cutting two and striking them together. The door opened and she slipped out into the hall just as shadows were darting down it, toward her.
She kept the scalpel but turned the other way, limping away. Her body felt heavy and everything hurt with a rawness she hadn't felt in weeks—maybe months.
"Cassandra!" a familiar voice called down the hall at her. She recognized it, but kept going, faster, wincing at the feel of skin pulling against staples or stitches.
A gun popped, not the heavy sort with a bullet but the lighter kind—a dart. It hit a wall, needle breaking.
"What the hell?" Damian snapped.
"If she falls, she could be hurt worse!" Tim yelled.
She reached another door and used the scalpel on this one too, trying to pop it open. It wasn't as simple as the one in the infirmary. It opened and she jerked back, because she hadn't been the one that opened it.
Bruce stood in the doorway, head turned down, chin against his chest to stare at her.
Her knuckles, scabbed over, broke open when she squeezed the scalpel tight and slid another step back, and another, back against the cold wall when the robins reached her from the right.
He gestured toward Tim and Damian, stopping both of them where they stood in the hall, blocking that direction but not quite crowding her.
"Cassandra," he said her name carefully, like maybe she wouldn't recognize it.
She tried to keep an eye on all three of them, but they were spread out and her vision blurred at the edges. Her legs were shaking. Fuck. She was going to collapse. And then what? What was the plan? Oh yeah, escape. She was escaping. Wait. She'd already escaped, hadn't she? This wasn't the prison. This was the cave.
Tim had taken something from his pocket and was tapping his thumb against it. A phone? He was sending a message.
Her mouth pulled into an almost smile, huffing a breath that wanted to be a laugh. They didn't need backup. She was screwed. She understood that.
"Cassandra," his even voice again, hand low and pushing out into her space.
She wasn't going to cut him, but he wasn't 100% sure, so she kept the blade—because it bought her seconds of this conversation, before they locked her away in a medical room to recover again. It made sense. Logically, she understood. She needed to recover. She couldn't even get out of here on her own. On her own. That was why she'd gotten up, wasn't it? She was on her own. She'd woken up in the tunnels of the prison alone, so close to dead, and she'd dragged herself back to find Grayson—because she couldn't go without knowing if he was okay.
"Where…" she croaked out, language strange on her tongue the way it had been years ago.
"You're in the Batcave," Damian snapped. He sounded angry. He was worried. She heard it, the way his voice shuddered, a little too hurried.
She shook her head once, staring up at Bruce and waiting. Waiting. He understood. He had to.
He nodded slowly. "He's fine. He'll be back any minute."
Cassandra meant to nod but didn't have the energy for it. She leaned her head back against the wall, soaking in the cold, and waited.
Bruce realized a second later and his shoulders relaxed. "We might as well get you back to the infirmary," he suggested but didn't move.
She stared back at him and rolled the scalpel in her hand. Of course, she couldn't win if he decided to haul her back down the hallway, but he didn't seem to want to force her. He was being careful. They all were. Was she that wounded?
He nodded slowly and waved the robins off. "Go find Dick."
"I already sent him a text. He's on his way," Tim whispered.
Bruce still waited.
Tim and Damian finally sunk away, leaving them in the hall alone.
"Do you want to sit?" Bruce asked, voice patient and almost gentle. It didn't suit him.
She didn't sit. Not entirely sure she could with all the stitches and bandages hugging her under the thin cotton dress.
"Okay," he leaned against the opposite wall, waiting with her.
Silence stretched comfortably between them.
She tried not to think about how far underground they were. If she did, it started to feel like she'd never made it above ground.
"He told me everything," Bruce said quietly.
She hadn't realized her gaze had moved to the ceiling until she dragged it back down to look at him. Her whole body hurt. Legs locked to keep from falling.
"How long were you there before him?"
Cassandra shook her head shortly, not sure. Maybe a week?
"We found the facility. Red Hood helped," he said it with a sort of laugh, like "go figure". But Cassandra wasn't really surprised. She suspected Bruce wasn't either. "But we couldn't figure out how to breech it until their systems went haywire that day you escaped."
"Knew you'd come for him," she ground out the words, whispers dragged up in her throat. Everything hurt.
"You saved his life—kept him alive," he continued, voice to deep and even that it almost lulled her back to sleep.
Had she done that? Saved Grayson? She thought about it and supposed she had, in the same way he'd saved her. She would have died down there without him.
She tried to squeeze the handle of the scalpel, but it was gone. Her head rolled to the side, eyes downcast to see it on the ground. She'd dropped it. How long ago had she dropped it? Her heart beat picked up. She couldn't bend down and get it. She knew she couldn't, but she still tried to convince herself she could. Bend, snatch it up, escape.
Escape.
Escape.
There was no where to escape to now. She was out. Wasn't she?
"It's okay," he said.
She looked up at Bruce.
"You don't need it," he explained. "I'm not going to move unless you pass out. And you wouldn't have cut me with it anyway…"
She raised a brow, like maybe she would have. "Then why…" she croaked out words.
He hesitated and then answered, "You survived something terrible. I don't want to make it worse. I don't want you to think you need to get out of here too."
She stared at him, surprised by the offering of sentiment and explanation. And that was the direction she'd been going, wasn't it? She had been trying to escape.
Footsteps hurried down the hallway and she sighed, almost losing her legs under her because she recognized the near soundless, stride. It was set off with a limp and a wheeze of pain, but it was him. Her head rolled to the right, taking her eyes off their mentor to see Grayson coming out of the shadows, down the hall. He was wearing street clothes and if it weren't for the bandages and bruises—if he weren't a little too thin with shadows under his eyes—she might have thought he was memory dashing toward her.
Her eyelids were heavy and finally she couldn't fight them anymore. They were closing, she was letting go, legs buckling out from under her. It was okay. He was okay. They were okay.
Dick caught her just before Bruce could, one arm around her back and the other hooking under her legs to lift her.
For a second his son just stood there, catching his breath and listening. It only took Bruce a moment to realize what he was looking for. Dick sighed when he found her heartbeat, a steady drum against his senses that he'd attuned his life to over the last three months.
He spared his father a look, with a hundred questions and pains.
"Do you need help getting her upstairs?" Bruce asked, somehow understanding that she couldn't be kept down here, though not sure if it was because it was underground or just because it was away from Dick.
His son sighed, more relieved than he'd expected and shook his head once before starting the walk down the hall and to the elevator in the cave. "I've got her."
Bruce followed and didn't say anything, even when one of the cuts in his son's back opened up, spotting blood through the gray cotton of his shirt. They'd deal with it upstairs. They'd piece both birds back together in Dick's room—already stocked like a hospital room.
Something fundamental had changed in them, but considering all the possible outcomes—as he always did—this was far from the worst.
Thanks so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed it. I have plans to write another part to this, about them coping with being in the open world again and developing their relationship.