Steph took a deep breath, straightening her spine and squaring her shoulders. Her hands rested on her knees, and she felt every muscle in her body relaxing, the tension rolling out of her shoulders. The yoga video playing on her phone was winding down, and after a half hour of stretching and poses she felt somewhat more comfortable in her skin again. She uncrossed her legs and got to her feet, closing the app and tucking her phone in the pocket of her yoga pants. She rolled up her purple mat, tucked it in the nook behind her apartment's door, and gingerly touched the leaves of her slowly-wilting houseplant.
Classes started back up tomorrow, and she didn't feel ready.
She had a pile of textbooks sitting on her coffee table, acquired mostly through secondhand bookstores and former classmates who were selling them on campus. It had been hard to get books this year. She still had her Wayne scholarship, but most of it had gone on paying the rent on her apartment, the rest on a new laptop after her old one had finally called it quits. She felt awkward and ill-fitting and out of place, like she didn't belong at Gotham U, and worse still, she knew it was true.
Steph shivered and checked the time. Almost five. Still too early to turn on the heating, despite the storm raging outside. It hadn't stopped raining in days, and it showed no signs of letting up any time soon. She flopped on the couch, picking up one of her textbooks and flicking it open.
Scribbled in messy handwriting in the upper right-hand corner of the first page was a little price, denoting it as being worth almost thirty dollars.
Steph hadn't paid more than ten for it.
In truth, she hadn't been able to stop thinking about the cute bookstore boy, with his crooked smile and his dark, shaggy hair. He'd been kind, literate and well-read, he'd given her a discount, and although she knew a lot of that was a ploy to get her to come back and spend more money - there was no way in hell he actually liked her, he didn't know her - she couldn't help but find herself be a little charmed by it.
He'd said his name was Jason.
She opened her laptop and logged in to her student portal, scrolling through her assigned reading list and required materials. From the bookstore, she had gotten Fundamentals of Psychology, Fifth Edition, and Principles of Socioeconomic Theory, Third Edition, along with some supplemental reading that her professor had recommended. That was what the list had said to get.
Or at least, that's what she had thought the list had said, but when she checked it once more, in little letters beside Fundamentals of Psychology, it said:
SIXTH EDITION.
"What?" Steph said aloud. "No."
She checked once more, and then grabbed her textbook and flipped it open. Its edition had not miraculously changed. She had been sure it had requested the fifth edition - she'd checked the list twice!
Either they'd changed it, or she was so stressed by everything going on she'd gotten careless. Either way, classes started tomorrow, her first class was Psychology 107, and she was fucked.
The campus bookstore had sold out weeks ago. She'd meant to be more on top of getting her textbooks this year, but between her money woes and her laptop breaking and her mom's relapse, she just hadn't been able to get her shit together. Her only hope, and it was a slim one, was to go back to the secondhand bookstore tomorrow before class started, explain her mistake, and beg Jason - cute, charming Jason - to check his storeroom for a current edition of the textbook.
It was a longshot. It was a hell of a longshot.
It was the only hope she had.
She groaned, and got up to make dinner.
A cursory scan of her pantry and refrigerator revealed very little. Some deeper digging revealed rotten carrots in the crisper and a thin piece of steak that had a discount sticker and a use-by date of tomorrow. With a sigh, Steph dumped the steak on her lone cutting board and started slicing it, depositing the thin strips into a frypan.
As the steak cooked, she broke up some ramen into a bowl and added hot water to it, sticking it in the microwave and punching in a couple of minutes. She gave the pan a shake, letting the meat brown, and scrolled through her phone while she waited for the microwave to beep. After finding nothing of note on social media, she opened a dumb puzzle app and started answering riddles for the hell of it. The corner of her mouth twitched upwards when she earned four gems and moved up to the next level, a crossword level.
She took the ramen out of the microwave and gave it a stir, the noodles soft and falling apart. She sighed and drained some of the water out of it, flicking off the stove and tossing the meat into the ramen. She stared down at it, her sad little bowl of discount steak and mushy noodles, and dug in.
Her phone started buzzing on her fourth mouthful. She chewed faster, grabbed it off the counter and glanced down at the screen. She swallowed and brought it to her ear.
"Hello?"
"Steph? Hey."
"Hey, Babs. You need me for something?"
"I've got some action starting up downtown." As always when on a call with Babs, Steph could hear the familiar, almost soothing, sound of Barbara's fingers tapping away on a keyboard. "I know it's your first day of classes tomorrow, but I wouldn't be asking if I didn't need you out there. Bruce and Damian are on something else, Dick's offworld, and Tim and Cass-"
"Are still in Hong Kong," Steph finished for her, twirling some noodles around her fork. "Yeah, I know."
It had been hard without her best friend being around. It had been easier without Tim around, without his constant doubts and hot-and-cold behaviour, but at least she knew where they stood, now. He'd made his choice pretty clear when he'd accepted the mission in Hong Kong.
Whatever, he was living it up as the Wayne Enterprises golden child over there.
"Stephanie, are you listening?" Babs asked. Steph blinked.
"Sorry," she said. "I was just thinking about - it doesn't matter. What were you saying?"
"I'll need you suited up and in Bowery by nine. From there, you'll make your way down-"
Steph wasn't trying to tune Babs out. She wasn't. She caught most of what Babs was saying, which was that she needed to move down Gotham, across the rooftops, and look for suspicious activity surrounding some up-and-coming gangster wannabes who'd been trafficking in drugs, selling to children. But her mind was still drifting. She was still stuck on her textbooks, the stress of starting sophomore year tomorrow. What if she didn't fit in? What if she made no new friends in her new classes? What if she made an absolute fool of herself on her first day?
"Did you get all that?"
"Yeah, Babs, I got all that," Steph said, relieved this conversation was almost over. "I'll be suited up and out in Bowery by nine."
"Good," there seemed to be some relief in Barbara's voice, and Steph started to get that sinking feeling again, like the older woman was relieved Steph wasn't fucking this up right off the bat. "I'll be on comms all night, alright? I'll be there the whole time."
"Okay," Steph replied. She didn't need a babysitter, but Oracle's grip was tight as ever. "I'll talk to you later. Bye."
She hung up, and set the phone on her counter, closing her eyes and exhaling through her nose. She speared a piece of steak on her fork and brought it to her mouth. It was cold. The noodles hadn't fared much better. She forced herself to finish it, aware she couldn't waste food, not with the state her finances were in.
She left the bowl in the sink, half filled with hot water and a squirt of dish soap, and made her way to her room, where her suit was in a gym bag under her bed. She pulled it out and suited up quickly, throwing a coat over the top and zipping it up, leaving her cowl and cape in the bag. She shouldered it, grabbed her keys from the dish by the door, and stepped out into the hall outside her apartment. It was three floors down to the street and no elevator.
She didn't mind, for the most part. Viewed particularly busy days as leg day.
Steph drove to her base, pulling her car into the underground garage attached to it. She made her way into the locker room and finished pulling on her cape and cowl, clipping the cape to the little clasps on the shoulders and neck of her suit. She stopped to stare at her reflection, for a moment, and then turned, pulling her cowl on and obscuring her features.
"Bowery," she said, climbing onto her motorcycle. "Not too far."
The drive to Bowery was quiet, her motorcycle skirting the streets with ease. The rain that had pelted the city for days had let up, though the sky above was heavy with grey cloud, only the barest glimpses of the stars above between them. Steph was paying no notice to the sky, however, her mind settled firmly in the streets of Gotham.
She had no time to have her head in the clouds, when what lived on the ground needed her.
Steph pulled her motorcycle into an alleyway and killed the engine, dismounting slowly. The motorcycle had anti-theft preventatives the likes of which no Gotham criminal could get into, so she felt fine leaving it here, in the darkest corner of Bowery. She took to the streets, cape flowing out behind her, her jaw set and her fists clenched.
As Stephanie, she was nothing. As Batgirl, she was everything.
The streets were quiet. Steph knew what she was looking for, though, so her eyes darted around, watching street kids pull each other into darkened stoops. There were older men about, in a rough semicircle by the old cinema, gold chains hanging from their chests as they smoked and laughed. Steph huffed, looking around. Nothing so far. No dealers. Nobody overtly suspicious.
She had to get higher.
She fired her grapple and swung up on top of the rooftops, looking around. The group outside the cinema was dispersing. One broke away, tall and gangly, his tracksuit ill-fitting, pale ankles on show. She watched as he headed into the darkness, the cherry red of his lit cigarette dangling from his hand. Steph followed, knowing this had to be a lead.
He grabbed onto a fire escape and started climbing, and Steph dropped down behind a HVAC unit, peeking around it as the gangster got to the rooftop and turned. He met with someone up there, and she couldn't hear their voices, but she could see the way their hands moved, the way they clasped together for a moment.
She took that as her cue and swung across the buildings, sprinting towards them.
"Der'mo," one barked, turning and taking a dive from the rooftop. The tall one, the one she'd seen actually make the deal, froze in place.
"Gotcha," she hissed, skidding down and using one leg to swipe his legs out from underneath him. He toppled, bags upon bags of white powder spilling from under his jacket, and Steph straddled him, zip tying his hands together.
"I did not do anything, you stupid bi-"
"Shut up," Steph snapped, throwing his head into the concrete. She put one hand to her ear. "O, this is BG. I just caught one of those drug peddling fuckwits in Bowery. What next?"
"Good work, BG," Oracle's voice came through her ear. "Leave him where he is. I've contacted the authorities for an intercept. Can you get two rooftops over, see if you can spot the buyer?"
"On it," Steph said, and she took a running leap across the buildings, back towards where she'd seen them all meet up to begin with.
An explosion sounded behind her, and Steph was propelled forward by the shockwave. She skittered at the edge of the building, struggling to retain her balance on the precipice. She planted her feet just before the edge and bent her knees, squaring herself in place, breathing heavy. She turned her head to see the old Gotham cinema building up in flames. Plumes of smoke filled the night sky, obscuring the moon and the stars. Her heart squeezed for a moment at the sight. A piece of history, lost forever.
She turned her head again, so she was facing forward, and caught movement out of the corner of her eye. She straightened, clenching her fists, and dropped her gaze onto the figure standing on a rooftop two buildings across.
There was no mistaking from the shining red helmet, the leather jacket, the holsters strapped to each hip, who this was. The Red Hood. Scourge of the Gotham underworld.
He raised a hand, whether in greeting or taunt she did not know, but something compelled her to wave back.
"Good job!" His voice came from his helmet distorted and staticky, like it had been run through a modulator one too many times. He gave her a thumbs up, and she would have sworn, based on his body language alone, he was smiling at her.
What she would give for even half of Cassandra's gift of reading people.
He took off into the night, leaving Steph standing there as downtown Gotham burned around her.
