But he gave us freedom to be fools
if we needed to, which we certainly
would later, which we all do now and then,
perhaps a father's great gift—
that blessing.
- "What Kind Of Fool Am I?" by Naomi Shihab Nye
Victor Sage finds himself a daughter in a dumpster.
They're both in the dumpster, to be clear.
He's in the dumpster looking for clues about a chemical plant that's faking their environmental reports. She's looking for food.
After chatting at her for a few minutes, he realizes she doesn't have a single clue what he's saying.
He gives her his sandwich, his phone number, and twenty bucks, and makes a note to keep an eye out for her in the future.
The way he figures it, adopting a kid is going to be like taming a cat.
He leaves out food for her, clothes when it gets cold. He leaves the window to his apartment open.
He's not sure it's working, however, until he gets jumped by a couple of off-duty cops who are pulling an extra shift as security for a CEO who he's pissed off, and a tiny little ten-year-old jumps off a fire escape and kicks their asses.
"You're… familiar," he tells her woozily.
She tries to pick him up. Unfortunately, even for her, he's too heavy. So she settles for poking him until he gets to his own feet, and she escorts him back to his apartment.
He makes her an omelet and gives her his bed for the night.
He wakes up to find her having made herself a blanket nest in the closet, which… shows a certain amount of trauma, there. He'll make a note of that, on the burgeoning corkboard about facts about his new kid.
He names her Cassandra—the seer who no one believed.
It seems fitting.
She has been running for a long time when she finds him.
He is a man who smells of strange, sweet things. It clings to him like a cloud. He has no face. He wears a hat, and a big coat. But he doesn't have a face.
He's… kind.
She has met other people who are kind. He is not the first person to give her food, or money, or pieces of paper with black markings on it.
But his hands, when he gives her those things, have scars on them. Fighting scars.
She watches him on fire escapes. She follows him on rooftops. He fights. He fights well. He doesn't fight like Father or any of her teachers, but he's good. Not great. But good.
He knows she's following him. He leaves her more food.
No one has ever been able to tell she's following them before.
She takes the food, the money, the clothes. She exchanges the money for more food. She layers the clothes on top of what she's already wearing.
She ignores the open window. It's an invitation. But it could be a trap. It's that much harder to run away inside. What if Father finds her?
No, it's best she doesn't get close to him.
She holds onto that until she realizes that he might die. That he is stubborn, stupidly stubborn, and he keeps getting into fights, and he does things that makes people angry at him, and… he's going to die.
There's no way she's going to let that happen.
She interferes.
He wants to keep her.
She… thinks she wants him to.
She doesn't need him.
But she does like him.
He talks to her, even though she doesn't know the words. He knows. But he keeps talking, rather than raising his voice or treating her like she's stupid. Sometimes, she'll tug on his arm to get him to slow down, or point at things when he's talking about them, but she can usually figure out what he's asking from context. He also sometimes talks to himself, to figure out his thoughts.
One day, he takes her hand and takes it to his arm. He's got a name for something.
She looks at him, and he points at her.
"Cassandra," he says.
She touches her own chest, and there is something strange there, hot and fast and confusing and—
Tears start pouring down her face. "Cass—Cassandra," she gasps out. She usually doesn't like to say the words back to him, because they feel stupid and heavy and wrong and—
But this one.
This one is her.
She knows, as he hugs her, as he brushes her hair with his hands, as he says her name, over and over again, along with other words that she doesn't know.
She knows. He's Father now.
Teaching someone to speak isn't exactly anything that Vic's ever learned to do… but hey, he's a researcher at heart.
He borrows books from the library, calls in a few favors, gets flash cards and children's books and adult literacy stuff and everything else he can think of.
He talks a lot by nature. He takes his time to gesture at things when he's talking about them, tries to use proper nouns a bit more often.
Because she's listening, he can tell that much. She stares at him with those huge, so-familiar eyes of hers, and he knows that she's soaking it all in like a sponge, waiting until it all… clicks.
He leaves the television on when he's too tired to talk; easy, children's programming that he's been suspecting contains subliminal messages for a while now and he's been meaning to watch anyways.
She watches, she listens, she takes it all in…
And one day, when he's rambling again, talking to her without any real expectation of a response, wondering what they want to do for dinner, she suddenly speaks up.
"Pizza," she announces. "From… Kay's."
It's not the first words he's heard her speak.
But it's the first time she's used her words to express a preference, rather than just saying something when prompted, and so he hugs her, and even though rent money's a little tight this month, he orders the pizza.
Her big, beaming grin as she tackles the delicious greasy pepperoni with gusto is absolutely worth it.
"Charlie!" Tot calls. He blinks. "Charlie?"
Vic grins at him. "Hey Tot. This is Cassandra."
"A stray, Vic?"
Vic shrugs. "Why not?"
Tot looks at him. Vic looks back.
"Well," Tot says, slowly. "Guess it's about time you gave me grandkids." He gets to his feet and holds out his hand.
She reaches out, and folds his hand into a fist, and then presses her own fist against it.
"She doesn't speak English that well. Or any language, really, that I can tell. Not very vocal. Possibly trauma, I'm still working on it."
"Well," Tot said. "Good thing you talk enough for five people, Charlie."
Vic laughed. "Right?"
Cassandra tilted her head. She pointed at Vic. "Charlie? Not Vic?"
Vic held up two fingers. "Both."
"Charles Victor Szasz. Vic Sage. The Question. That faceless bastard. The pain-in-my-ass. No-Face," Tot rattles off. "You'll get used to it, Cassandra. Your new father picks up names the same way that other people pick up keychains at tourist traps." He goes over to make coffee. "So, if she's non-vocal, how's her literacy?"
"Non-existent," Vic says. "We're working on it. She's good with violence, weapons, technology. She understands the concept of sound and video recording. She's a master of stealth. Someone raised her."
"Raised her selectively, it seems," Tot places a cup of coffee in front of Cassandra, along with a bowl of those butterscotch hard-candies he had used to keep in his office, back when he was a professor. "It sounds to me like that's a very specific curriculum, Charlie."
"I know."
"A weapon," Cassandra says. She points at herself.
"No,' Vic says, surprised by his own ferocity. He grabs her hand. "Not anymore."
Cassandra looks at him, her grey eyes fascinated. "Not a weapon?"
"No."
"Then… what am I?"
She's eleven, maybe even younger.
"My kid," he says. "Cassandra Sage."
She mouths the words. "I get… two names?'
"More if you want them," Vic promises. "We'll get you as many names as you want. Because you're a person. Not a weapon."
She looks at him, and then points at Tot. "Tot Sage?"
"Close enough," Tot says, with a wry, smile, the kind that Vic used to see when he came into Tot's office right before office hours ended, nursing a black-eye, with an over-due paper clutched in his fist.
Vic ruffles Cassandra's hair, and she melts into it. She's touch starved, soaks up affection like a sponge, and Vic just… if he ever finds who raised her, who tried to turn this bright, sweet kid into someone who only thought of herself as someone who was a tool of violence, who taught her to sneak past security and climb through air vents but not to speak or read…
He wasn't a murderer. He had fought, long and hard, to avoid that choice, to avoid becoming like those he fought, here in Hub.
But if he ever met the people who had hurt Cassandra…
He had never understood Myra more, than in this moment. Cassandra could defend herself. Jackie… Jackie couldn't. Myra's rage at the man who had threatened her daughter, the way her face had contorted with unbridled rage as she had killed the Black Preacher… he had never judged her. She had judged herself, had hated herself, more than enough for both of them.
But there was definitely a new understanding now, as he showed his daughter how to unwrap a butterscotch candy and how to hold it in the side of her cheek to savor the sweetness.
He was eating a lot more hard candies these days. His cigarettes made Cassandra cough, and she hated the smell, and wouldn't hug him if he came home smelling too strongly of them. The candy helped.
But when Tot put on a record, she leapt to her feet and began to dance, and Vic forgot all about his nicotine cravings, watching her enjoy herself, completely and without conditions for once.
One of the first things Cassandra learns about the man who is her new father is that… he gets hurt. A lot.
She does her best to stop most of the people who are out to hurt him before they find him, but…
He's hurt. Again.
She frowns at him.
He's delirious, but he's still talking. She doesn't recognize any of the words he's saying, but the patter of it is… soothing. She likes his voice.
She's been living with him for… a few months now.
It's annoying because he can fight. He's good at it. But he's not good enough, because there are always more bad people who want to hurt him, and he never stops because he's hurt.
She sighs.
She picks up her dad and slings him over her shoulder.
He chatters more, and she recognizes gratitude words and her name, and she smiles, still pleased at having a name.
"Dad," she says. "Babbling." She has started to call him "Dad" out loud, sometimes. It gets his attention better when she says it. It's a title, but it's not his name. His name is "Vic" and "Charlie" and "Sage" and "Question." But only she calls him Dad, and that makes it her favorite one.
"Yes," he says cheerfully. "Wait! Check his pockets."
Words to tell her where to look for clues were one of the first things that he taught her.
She gets the papers out of the bad guy's pockets, hands them to her father, and then walks them back to the apartment.
Things aren't… easy, in Hub. And it's not always safe. Cassandra's a tough kid, but the first time she takes a bullet for him…
No. That's not going to happen again.
He loads her into his shitty Volkswagen Beetle, and then drives out into the country to find Richard Dragon.
"Vic?" Richard looks surprised to see him, which… is honestly a fair reaction, given that Vic didn't call ahead.
Richard's shitty cabin in the middle of nowhere has been improved somewhat since the last time that Vic visited.
"I might have accidentally adopted a kid," Vic blurted out.
"What, did you and Myra make it official?"
"That wouldn't be an accident!"
"Knowing you?"
"I'd argue, but… Cassie, come out and say hi."
Cass comes out and waves. "Hi."
Richard stares at her. "Ben!"
"Who's Ben?"
"My husband."
"… congratulations?"
"Don't you—yep, okay, that's her for sure."
Vic blinks as the man who was definitely the Bronze Tiger emerges from the cabin in nothing but a pair of boxers and an undershirt. And then he blinks some more as he realizes that his daughter is no longer standing next to him, smiling earnestly at the stranger he has introduced her to, but instead is high-tailing it to the woods.
"Cassandra!"
"Was that—"
"It was!"
Vic chooses to ignore the clearly very important thing that he isn't picking up on in favor of chasing after Cass.
He finds her deep in the woods, up a tree. She's good, but he spent ages in these woods, learning to track from Shiva and Richard both, and also, she was clearly in a hurry, so she hadn't covered her tracks as well as he knows she knows how.
He sits down at the foot of the tree.
"Are you okay?"
Cass has her legs pulled up against her chest. She's young; about eleven or so by his guess, even if she's a bit on the smaller side, but right now she looks even younger.
"I knew him," she says. "I… my… you're my…"
"The man who looked after you before," Vic says. He knows the man exists. Cass has referred around him, more than spoken of him. He knows the man taught her to fight, knows that the man was an abusive jackass. And, just today, he learned that he taught her to take a bullet. "He knew Ben?"
Cass nods, jerkily.
"We can leave," he says immediately. "We'll go home, and never come back. You won't have to see him again."
"I—" Cass bites her lip, like she does when she's trying not to cry. The bastard—the name that Vic has assigned to her father—never let her cry. Not with sound.
Vic decides to climb the tree.
He wraps his arm around her. "We can stay here as long as you want," he says. "Or until I fall asleep and then become intimately familiar with the grass below. Whichever comes first."
She lets out a small giggle that turns into a hiccup, then a sob, and soon Vic has his arms full crying, snotty daughter.
But he's getting better at this. He hugs her tight as he can, keeps himself relaxed, and listens to the words that she tries to say in the middle of the tears.
He's going to make this okay. He's going to look after her, because no matter who raised her or what he did to her, or what he tried to make her into, she's his kid. He's lost enough people in his life. He's not going to lose her too.
Eventually they come down from the tree, and go back to the cabin.
Richard and Ben are waiting on the porch.
Ben kneels in front of Cassandra, almost like a genuflection, and begins speaking to her in low, quiet tones that Vic can't quite hear.
"Her father," Richard says to him. "He was… not a good man."
"I gathered. You know him?"
"His name is David Cain. He's one of the most dangerous men in the world."
"And a shitty father."
"Yes. You… named her?"
"You act like I shouldn't have," Vic says, his spine straightening.
"No!" Richard blurts. "No. I just… she didn't have one." He looks down. "Cain referred to her as the One Who Is All. She was to be the ultimate fighter. I heard she had gone missing but…"
"I found her," Vic says, without prompting.
Cass has her hand on Ben's shoulder.
"Ben was brainwashed," Richard said. There's a tattoo on his finger now, where there wasn't before. It wraps around his ring finger where a wedding band would be. "Cain knew us, before. I think he found it amusing. To force Ben to train her."
Vic nods.
Ben hugs Cass. She lets him.
Vic tries not to be jealous. He mostly manages.
Cass hugs him after she's done hugging Ben anyways. She must have noticed.
He's got a good kid.
Richard Dragon looks at Cassandra fighting with Vic on the front lawn, and then looks at Ben.
"She's Shiva's, right?"
"Oh yeah."
"Do you know where she is this week?"
"Star City I think? She said something about convincing Black Canary to fight her. Which probably means she's trying flirting again."
"Do you have Connor Hawke's number? Let's see if we can't get in contact with her."
"Why would I have Hawke's number?"
"I don't know, didn't you train him?"
"No, he was trained at Ashram!"
"I think Onyx is in Star City as well. She knows Hawke."
"That continues to not help us, since we don't have her number either."
"We need to set up a phone tree," Richard sighs.
"Or we could start a groupchat. Like normal people."
"We're not normal people, we're a network of the world's greatest martial artists. Also half of us are paranoid recluses who don't have cell phones."
"Fair enough," Ben has to admit. "I could try Waller?"
"She's probably our best bet." Richard watches as Cass flips Vic over her head, and the man laughs, spread out on his back. "We… we should tell her, right?"
"She deserves a chance, at least," Ben says, quietly.
Hub City is a horrific place to visit.
But Shiva is fond of it, in her own way. For all the poor air, awful food, and foul water, it is the home to one of her favorite amusements.
Victor Sage has moved. This isn't surprising; the man can barely keep a lease, and ever since he has decided to move out of the home that he shared with Aristotle Rodor, he changes apartments faster than she can blink. She tracks him down to his new place easily enough, and enters through the fire escape.
She does not expect to be attacked by an eleven year old girl.
… it seems that Vic has decided to become even more interesting.
"I thought you were in Star," Vic says. He offers her a cup of coffee.
Shiva is… a friend.
That's a strange thing to say about the deadliest woman in the world, but it's the best that he's got.
She killed him. She brought him back. She saw something in him, back then. He'd been angry, so, so angry, and he had been out looking for fights and saying it was justice. But somewhere, in that smug, self-satisfaction, that anger, she had seen something worth saving.
Shiva had killed so many that she had never bothered to keep track.
But she had decided to save him.
He wasn't special, he wasn't one of the world's best fighters.
But he had interested her.
She had taken him to Richard, and Richard had taught him to channel his anger, to work through it.
With Richard, he had found peace. Or… close enough.
He had found curiosity, again, his drive to learn, to ask the questions that no one would.
She'd saved him. She'd helped him exist again.
They keep finding each other. She keeps circling back. She finds him interesting. That's her word for it,
He likes her, most of the time, when she isn't being too much like herself.
Lady Shiva is a woman who lives in a state of perpetual boredom. All she seeks is entertainment, things that break the monotony of life. He had hated her for it, sometimes, at her way of evaluating people by their value in that way.
But he knows she cares.
She tries not to, but she cares, in her own, strange way.
She keeps saving him, even when he didn't earn it by her standards. When he had been falling apart, stretched so thin by this city he thought he might crack, she had sent Richard to him. When he had been forced to flee, she had come and taken his place. She had kept Myra alive, for all that she would deny it. And when Jackie was dying, in Brazil, she had sent him Marco, who had helped him get Jackie back to her mother so she could die at home.
So they're friends. He knows that now.
She takes the coffee, and she stares at Cassandra.
"Who…"
"My daughter," he says.
She freezes.
"Adopted," he adds.
Cassandra and Shiva are staring at each other.
"Her name is Cassandra," he says. There's something to Shiva's body language right now, something he's never seen.
The unflappable woman… is…well, flapped.
She gets up, abruptly, and climbs out of the fire escape.
"Shiva!"
But she's gone.
He sighs. "Stay here, okay?"
He climbs down the fire escape himself.
The lamp outside his building is busted. His night vision's good; good enough that he can't see anyone lurking nearby.
But with Shiva, that means nothing.
"Are you okay?"
He's compared talking to Shiva in the past to praying. Sometimes it is like that; saying empty words to a wall, a presence that may or not be there, but is uncaring at best.
But sometimes, she listens.
"I've never seen you like that before," he says.
"You shouldn't concern yourself with this." She's by his side, her hands in her pockets, her head bowed.
"You're my friend." A fact that baffles most people, himself included most days. "And I'm curious."
There's a small smile. "That is in your nature."
He takes a breath. "She's yours, isn't she?"
She jerks away from him so hard that he thinks she might fly away, scream, or vanish into the night forever and never return.
"How?"
"I've noticed she looks like you," he said. "And when I took her to meet Richard, he and Ben spent ages on the phone, trying to call someone who they couldn't find. You're the only person who gets Richard like that. And they said they knew her birth father."
She stares at him.
"It is easy to forget, sometimes, how clever you are when you wish to be," she says.
He grins at her.
"I don't… she's not. Mine. I carried her. I think. I think she looks like the child I gave Cain, she looks just like—" she cuts herself off.
"So… you were a surrogate?" Vic knows he's wrong. But he wants to be right, just this once. He would like the world to be a little kinder, a little gentler.
Shiva's lips were thin. "I lost. She was the price."
"That's—" There are so many words that he wants to say. If she was anyone else, he would hug her. But she's Shiva. "And he's alive?" She hasn't—Richard hasn't—
"He's dangerous. And he has powerful friends," she says, skirting around the questions. Then her eyes widen. "You have her—you took her?"
"She ran away, I think. I found her."
Shiva stares at him, and something settles into her eyes. Fear? Determination?
"He will come for you," she says, and he thinks there is horror in her voice. "He will come to take her back."
"No," Vic says, immediately "I won't let him touch Cassie again."
She stops.
"Cassie?"
"Cassandra. The oracle no one believed. It seemed… fitting."
Shiva stares at him. "My name is Sandra," she finally says.
"… oh." He hadn't known she has another name.
She looks up, towards the fire escape, where they can see Cassandra, leaning over the edge, looking at them curiously.
She looks away. "Does she have a middle name?"
"We're looking for one. She wants more. Says she wants to be like me."
"Carolyn," she says. "That's… it was my sister's name. Before Cain killed her."
"You should come up," he says. "Get to know her."
She shakes her head. "I'm not her mother."
"You don't have to be. But she's great. I think you'll like her."
She looks up, again.
"Maybe later," she says. "Maybe one day."
She turns away.
"Stay safe," he calls to her back. A stupid farewell, given that she's Shiva. But it's the only one he can think of.
He goes back in the building through the front door.
"Is she coming back?" Cassandra asks.
Vic shrugs. "Yes. But I don't know when. She's always hard to predict."
Cass nods. "Are we going out tonight?"
"Not tonight, little Query," he says. Query is the name she has picked for herself, for when she dons the Psuedoderm mask for herself and follows him on his adventures. She loves names, loves hoarding them, loves picking them out and trying them on.
Sbe never had one before. And now, he'll give her all of them, if she wants.
"Got a new one for you," he says. "A middle name."
She beams at him, and he waits until she's asleep to make his calls. One to Myra, to ask her to look into one David Cain. The other to Richard, to tell him that Shiva stopped by.
Shiva goes to the cabin.
Ben and Richard are waiting for her.
"I have to kill him," she says. "Before he kills Vic. Before he… she doesn't deserve that."
She waits for them to judge her, for them to remind her that the little girl, that Cassandra had never deserved it. That she should never have given him anything, that she should have fought harder, done more, done everything in order to stop him at every single stage.
He had taken everything from her, and she had, in turn, given him a child, and she had turned around and tried to forget about him.
But now, the child was real, the child was alive, and she was in Vic's care. And David Cain would show no mercy. He would slaughter Vic for ruining his perfect vision, he would take Cassandra back and—she didn't know what he'd do to her.
Shiva is selfish enough not to want to live in a world without Vic Sage.
"We know," Richard says.
"We're coming too," Ben says. "For Carolyn. For you."
"For Vic," she insists. "And… Cassandra."
The name is strange. The child having a name, is strange. She never allowed herself to name her, tried her best not to deal with the reality of the pregnancy.
But the child is real, and she is now Vic's.
Perhaps… perhaps she can focus on that, once David Cain is dead. Not her child. Vic's.
That's a thought for… later.
After he's dead.
"Then let's go," she says.
David Cain is protected by the League of Assassins. There will be consequences for this.
But Shiva does not care.
She will not let Vic die, not for the kindness he has offered, not at the hands of David Cain.
Coda
Batman stares at Query.
Query stares back.
Or at least, he has to assume she's staring back. It's hard to tell, with that mask of hers.
She can't be any older than fifteen. Her costume, if one could call it that, is a pair of overalls over a buttoned up short-sleeved collared shirt, and a baseball cap. Someone has taken the time to carefully cross-stitch a large question mark onto the chest of her overalls and onto the baseball cap.
He's heard rumors about her. But he didn't expect to find her at a crime scene, holding up a small baggie of evidence.
She waves. "Hi," she offers.
He sighs. "Hi."
"Dad says you're Batman. You're… a detective?"
"That's right." The girl has the heaviest Hub City accent he has ever encountered.
"Cool," she says, approvingly. "So am I."
She goes back to examining the body.
"Where is your father?"
She shrugs. "Busy."
"Why are you in Gotham?"
"Helping."
"Helping who?"
It's at that point that Spoiler climbs through the window. "Okay, so I tied up the guys outside—ohcrapit'sBatman."
"It's okay," Query stands up. "He's nice."
"Nice?" Spoiler squeaks.
"Yep." Query walks over to Spoiler and puts an arm over her shoulder. "We need to go. The next killing will be in twenty minutes, and you won't let me drive."
"That's because you're a horrible driver," Spoiler says immediately, which raises so many questions about how long Query has been sneaking into his city and hanging out with Spoiler.
He resolves to spend more time with Spoiler in the future.
Renee Montoya has been hired by a faceless man to investigate a warehouse.
When he shows up in her car, she's not entirely surprised.
The young woman who shows up with him… now that's another story.
"Hi," she says. "I'm Query."
Oh no.
There's two of them.
"You want me to be the Question?" Renee asks. "Not Cass?"
"Why does there only need to be one Question?" Charlie asks. A lot of other people call him Vic. He's asked her to call him Charlie. She's not… entirely sure why. "And besides… you need it."
"Do I?" She challenges.
"You're like me," he says, grinning. "And some questions… they can only be solved by wearing a mask."
Cass nods. "Plus," she says. "I need a partner."
Renee takes the mask from Charlie's hands. "Well, when you say it like that…"