The air in the cave was heavy, it had been heavy for a long time already, emotions sticking to the rock even when there weren't any people there to radiate it. Cass didn't like it, missed the warmth that she'd started expecting whenever she came back from China.

She didn't like it all; the times she'd walked into the cave and found that someone was watching the tapes of the man strapped to the table, screaming out his pain and desperation even when he was silent. She didn't like seeing those emotions reflected off the ones watching the tapes. Only, with them, it didn't go away when the screen turned black. They carried it with them wherever they went, out in the field, or around their home when they tried to pretend it didn't hurt anymore.

Eventually they didn't pretend anymore and just tried all the time to make it stop but it would only stop when they found him. It stayed with Cass too, even when she left Gotham to look back in on Hong Kong, it stayed. Eventually Cass couldn't bring herself to leave either. She wanted to find the man, and make him stop hurting, so her family would stop hurting. She stayed in Gotham, and she tried to help, but they never found him.

Not until Scarab hurt Stephanie. Cass had been following, but she had been late by a short time. The man caught them first.

Cass remembered watching him fight Marque, vicious and familiar. It was so familiar, Cass had watched, unable to move herself forward even when the rest of them, getting closer, told her to get closer. There was no pain or desperation this time.

When she saw him move to kill, Cass had prepared to move in, but Stephanie appeared from the smoky doorway before she could. Cass didn't want her friend to get in that man's path, but she was too far away to even call out, she couldn't stop it.

She didn't have to.

He didn't lash out when Stephanie reached him, when she spoke to him and touched him, he stopped, every screaming thing about him, he was still, and then he 'melted'. She wondered if Stephanie saw it, the, Cass didn't have a word for it falling off him, like the bitter, bad tasting icing she'd had to take off her cake the last time one of Bruce's business partners took her to lunch.

Still there was no pain, just relief, and something else, something she didn't get to see much of when she worked. It was… nice.

She shouldn't have wanted to watch it, not when Marque was still moving, and Scarab was somewhere nearby. But she had, and not he was gone again, and the tension in the cave was back.

It wasn't as bad as it was before, but that didn't mean she liked it, she wanted it to go away completely now.

Dick and Tim were fighting, softly, even if they thought they were alone. She didn't do anything to tell them they weren't, she was half-asleep in Bruce's big chair in front of the humming computer, but she watched them through her half lidded eyes anyway just in case they tried to hurt each other like Bruce and Dick had before.

"I said it was too dangerous, do you 'know' by how much her bounty went up after that?" Tim was pacing, his hands gripped tightly behind his back as he struggled to keep himself from flailing them about.

"We weren't expecting to hear back this soon anyway." Dick was sitting in another chair, letting it spin his round in slow, lazy circles. "If she saw someone following her, she wouldn't have gone to find him."

"If she hasn't found him anyway, if someone found 'her'?" Tim paused, his thumb disappearing between his teeth. "If she did find him?"

"Cass said…"

"Cass isn't omniscient." Tim did flail his arms out this time and Cass, though she wasn't sure of the word exactly, was mildly offended anyway. She was just too tired to get up and do something about it. Maybe the next time they sparred.

Jason wasn't going to hurt 'Stephanie', of that much Cass had been sure, sure enough to voice the belief to the rest of them, sure enough that they'd all believed her. The others though… Cass curled a little tighter into the chair, buried her face in the soft leather that stilled smelled of kevlar, and very faintly of blood. Her sleepy eyes drifting to the knife she'd wrestled from Marque, dropped besides the console where it had been left, no one either caring, or daring to move it.

Eventually both Dick and Tim went upstairs, taking their words with them, leaving Cass to try to continue her nap in peace.

It took hours for the Batmobile to pull into the cave, the roar of the engine sending the few bats that remained at night shrieking. By the time Bruce made for his chair, Cassandra was already drooling over the armrests, dead to the world.

He sighed, and carefully rolled the chair to the side, turning it from the glare of the computer and pulling out one of the smaller ones before he got back to work.

o

o

o

Stephanie hadn't been expecting some monumental change when she'd gone looking for Jason. She didn't know what it was she had been expecting, and truthfully, she might have tried her hardest not to think about it at all beyond him needing to know that Bruce was calling in help to find him. That and her needing to know that he hadn't bled out in some filthy street somewhere – his blasé attitude concerning that last part wasn't comforting in the least.

A part of her, the part that remembered the dangerous glint in his eyes and the almost casual way he'd stalked over to kill Scarab in that bar, might have needed to see for herself that this was her Jason and not that one.

But when she woke up in that tiny, sparsely furnished room, hidden deep beneath Gotham's oldest, lead-lined streets, she hadn't expected the déjàvu either. For a panicked moment, she worried that he'd disappeared again, run of despite his promise – and this time there 'had' been a promise – not to.

Then she made out the shape of him in the near dark, outlined dimly against the pale, bluish glow of the screen propped up on his knees. He was turning a big brown envelope over in his hands, his lips silently mouthing out words she didn't hear, and there was a muted, tapping that turned out to be his heel against the base of the bed he was nestled at the foot of, the warmth radiating off his leg, reaching through the blankets that covered Stephanie.

Steph shifted and pain shot through her leg, pulling a hiss from her lips. In a second, the laptop was down, and light flooded the room, Jason leaping up of the bed to kneel besides it.

"You okay there Sunshine?" He asked, as she pulled herself to a sitting position, bringing along her pillow to hide her face from the brightness with a groan. "Feeling the stairs you shouldna run up with that leg?"

"Shut up Jason." She brought the pillow down just enough to glare at him, with his stupid messy curls and the bright, playful gleam in his teal eyes, confidence undercut with just a smidgen of uncertainty that made itself known by the crease of his brow. "You feeling the popped stitches form being an idiot and picking up your stupid duffle bag the knives you took to the gut?"

"Was the same knife." He snorted and stood, an arm crossing over his torso where he was wrapped up with an amount of bandages she knew he was unhappy with. "My knife, hope they caught her so I can get the thing back. 'F they don't shove it in a case."

"So sad." Steph untangled the blankets from her legs, wincing at the stinging that came along with so much as twitching the limb. "Toss my jacket here." She made grabby hands at the damp parka draped over a self near the door and way too far for her to think about retrieving it herself if she didn't have to.

Her shoulder pain was still within the easy to ignore range, but her leg was screaming at her. Jason turned way when she pulled the bottle of pain meds she'd gotten out of the pocket and filled a glass of water at his little sink. She hummed her thanks as she quickly swallowed the pills and stashed the bottle away.

"Did you…" She paused, hugging the jacket to her chest, and not bothering to meet his eyes when he was looking at the floor. "Y'know, need anything?" She was pretty sure Jason wasn't supposed to be up with how he'd been hurt, even if she wasn't quite confident enough to think she could make him lay down. Whoever patched him up had to have given him 'some' kind of medication.

"Had it when I needed it." He shot her a quick smile. "Was wearing a crap ton more armor than you." He took the two steps back to the narrow buck and dropped down to sit beside her.

Slowly Steph brought her hands up, watching him for a reaction before she let them wrap around his chest, above the bandages, and press her body up against his. "I burned down the dive." She admitted her face buried in his shirt. "Now you're gonna have to live off cans of spam forever."

"I hate spam." Jason said, bumping his forehead against hers. "But, ya know, I got… I got priorities and you're… Mighta been too late 'f ya hadn't." He returned her embrace, his body trembling as he held on to her, one hand cradling her head and the other settling against the small of her back. "Thought I was too late when I saw you and you were so…" His breath hitched and his hold on her tightened. "So still. Was almost too late, 'm so sorry."

Before Steph could say anything, could remind him how there wasn't much he could have done to prevent what had happened, his posture shifted, not by much, but it was enough to be noticeable, and when he spoke next his voice was steely, determined.

"I'm gonna find that poser and drag him screaming through a fucking snow blower for pulling that. Make every insect that crawls outta these sewers see what they get if…"

"Jason no." Stephanie pulled away and placed her hands on either side of his head, holding it between them and making him look at her, his eyes wide and startled. "If you drag anyone through anything, it won't be for me, I don't 'want' that, okay, I don't want you to do that." She fought back the prickling of tears at the corners of her eyes, refused to let them fall, to let her fall to far back into the thought of how terrifying witnessing something like that would be, of knowing it was for her… "Please don't do that."

He studied her expression, eyes scouring for any cracks in her conviction, a sign that she wasn't sincere, it took him a few seconds, but the tension in his shoulders slipped away and he nodded once, took her hands from his face and cradled them in his bringing them to his lips. "Okay Sunshine." He said. "Figure Batgirl can fight her own battles there huh?"

There must have been something, something she didn't have time to catch when that little reminder sent a stab through her chest that pain meds could do nothing for, that caught his attention, because his head shot up, sharp focus jumping to the surface when he fixed his eyes on hers again. "What did they do?"

"Not Batgirl anymore." Steph said, a sad smile curling up the edges of her lips, and wow, it was getting time to process that now, wasn't it? She wasn't taking the suit off until she found Jason, that was what she had said, and now she had, and the suit was gone.

"Be, is it because I showed up at The Dive, or…" He ran a hand through his hair, making even more of a mess of the already mussed curls, his eyes flickering rapidly back and forth.

"Wasn't anything you did." Steph chuckled mirthlessly, getting his eyes focused on her again. "S'okay, I knew they wouldna let me stay on after everything." There was so much going on already, so much they already had to process, Steph didn't want to deal with that yet, didn't want to think about it, or all the things she could have done differently to change the outcome, if any of them would have been worth it. Worth, the trust, and the place in the group that she'd worked so hard for so long to get into, she couldn't find many that were, and even then, the risks were just...

"S'not okay." He said, running his thumbs over her palms, his head hung low. He met her eyes, just briefly before turning away, and releasing her hands. "They're all dumbasses, you were the most kickass Batgirl ever, 's their loss."

"You're biased Jay." She turned away too, her cheeks heating up and a more genuine smile finding a place on her face anyway. "You don't even know the others."

"I've never been biased in my life." He scoffed, affronted the gleam flitting back into his eyes. "You're the second most kickass person, an that makes you best Batgirl by default."

"And I bet 'you're' the most kickass person ever, huh?" Steph raised an eyebrow and folded her arms over her chest that almost ached with something that was almost giddiness.

"Aw, you're makin' me blush Sunshine." Jason grinned at her, so confident and boyish with his messy hair and his bright eyes, he was there with her, neither of them bleeding, or locked away, and he'd… Oh god she still hadn't processed that he'd kissed her yet either had she?

She covered her mouth to hide her returning grin and turned away from him again, the aching in her chest having doubled as she fought down the laughter she could feel building up.

"Hey." Jason leaned over to see catch her eyes; worry having crept back into his, one hand stopping just short of reaching for her again.

There was still so much they had to go through, so much they needed to talk about, to work through and deal with, so much they didn't agree on and so many people who would have stood in their way. Steph didn't want to think of it all right them. She planted her hands behind Jason and pulled him forward, pressed her lips against his again.

And this time there was no hesitation before he snaked his arms around her in return.

They'd have to deal with it all soon.

Just not right that moment.

o

o

o

Jason had a hard time believing it when she stuck around, when she was happy he stuck around. He almost had a hard time sticking around himself, and pushing down the anger that built up whenever he thought about finding her in The Dive, or of Bruce, ripping Batgirl away from her. There was never a part of him not shrieking at him to go out and 'do' something about it. But there was another part to beat that one down.

From where he'd forced it to the back of his mind so long ago, it was creeping forward ever so slowly, pushing the other down. Turning the man who'd taken those hits out on her into a bloody puddle wouldn't undo what he'd done to her, wouldn't make her feel safer, not when she didn't want that. It would stop him from doing it again though, discourage others from trying.

He couldn't get Batgirl back for her, on that front there was absolutely nothing he couldn't do. Even going as far as destroying everything the bats stood for, or locking them in a room with guns to their heads wouldn't fix that that, there was nothing. There he was more than useless and he hated it. For all their claims of family, they were just as…

'We're happy you're alive Jason…'

His thoughts screeched to a halt as they flashed through his mind, Bruce and Dick stepping forward and pulling him away from the wall, towards the car, back to the cave…

"Jay." Stephanie tugged on his hair and he looked up from the pages of the book he'd been staring blankly at for who knew how long. Her face appeared above his, brows creased with worry and the thigh his head rested on shifted, reminding him of its presence as she set aside her notebook. "You haven't turned a page in like an hour." So that was how long.

"Thinking." He mumbled, gaze drifting to the once blank notebook she'd been doodling on, using his head as a table. Her frown deepened and she kept it on him, it took him a couple seconds to realize she was waiting for him to elaborate. "They shoulda made a movie bout this one." He wiggled his book and blinked up at her.

"There's like, a ton of movies about the 'Count of Montecristo'." She huffed.

"I meant a good one," He set the book down as he sat up so she could stretch her legs out. Jason yawned, stretching his arms above his head that was feeling just a little foggy, sleep tugging on the edges in a way it normally only did when he was actually deprived of it and not when he'd just spent an afternoon doing nothing and wanted a nap. He shook the thought away and reached for the laptop he'd stashed under the bed.

"All the movies are better than that book." She rolled her eyes. "There was this cool series I watched with Tim a couple…"

"Huh?" Jason looked to her from the loading screen, surprised at how suddenly she'd cut herself off.

"Nothing." She scratched out some of the scribbles on the note pad and Jason tapped down on the enter key hard enough that if it weren't made of steel he would have broken it.

She sighed and flopped back onto the mound of blankets and pillows she'd piled on the bed, Jason hadn't even known he'd had that many in this bolt hole, but then, it wasn't like he'd ever had much of a need to check. Jason leaned back next to her, supporting his weight on his elbow so he could look down at her. Again, he wracked his brain for 'something' he could do, and again he came up empty.

Without her being Batgirl, really finding the new Red Hood wasn't much more than busy work. Sure Jason could slap the bastard around a little, but he couldn't really trust himself to do just that once they did find him. It wasn't like he cared much about the drug lords dropping like flies under his reign, and with any luck the bats would get their asses in gear now and find the poser soon on their own anyway.

"They'll have to get over themselves eventually." He said, idly wrapping a golden lock of hair around his finger. "I can still convince 'em you were coerced, get your mom some tickets to Hawaii and say I kidnapped her. There's this great hotel where they feed you…"

"No Jason." She shook her head with a smile and a roll of her eyes. "As much as she'd love that, I'm not letting em think that."

"They think it already." He shrugged. "I can take over the underworld again, maybe dump the little monster in desert somewhere with couple 'guards' to get em outta the way. You clean that up and I bet…"

"No hurting Damian, he's a prat but he's a baby prat." She glared at him, but it was halfhearted at best.

"Wouldn't hurt him." Jason paused, eyes drifting to the ceiling. "Much." He amended. "Might do it anyway." Jason mused aloud, watching the hair unwind itself from his finger before he picked up another lock. "Let him dig his way out an show off his lesser used skills, bet he'd love it, little tough guy. See how 'happy' they are I'm alive then." The last part came out a growl and he dropped her hair so he wouldn't accidentally tug at it too hard.

"You 'want' people to want you dead?" Her tone was 'too' casual as she chewed on the end of her pen, a deep crease forming between his brows. A snide comment was on the tip of his tongue. But he reigned himself in, pushed back the memory of that second after he'd fallen that Bruce had rushed towards him, before Dick had appeared between them.

"I'd take that over having them being borderline 'nice'." Jason scoffed, flopping flat on his back and turning his gaze to the faintly humming air vents on the wall opposite them. "Fucking creepy's what that was. I'd take 'being' dead over that."

"You would, wouldn't you?" she rolled her eyes. "God you're an asshole. She peered up at him, you're an asshole that won't admit to dyeing your hair and doesn't even have freckles anymore. Why do I still like you?"

"Overexposure." Jason shrugged. "Like people who like caviar."

"Caviar's gross." Her face twisted in a grimace.

"I know." Jason frowned, thinking back to the times he'd been forced to eat the stuff and smile. "You can draw the freckles back on if you want."

She hummed her head titling back and forth as though she were debating with herself.

"I'm kidding." Jason said, pulling away from her.

"No take backsies." She uncapped her pen with a flourish.

"Fuck." Jason grabbed the nearest pillow and covered his face with it, knowing he couldn't twist out of the way without pulling at least a couple stitches. "I'm injured, lost 'so' much blood; ya can't do this while I'm down an out. It's unethical."

"Too bad you don't like people being nice to you." She tried to wretch the pillow out of his arms. "I wouldn't wanna creep you out."

"Stephanie I swear I will…" He bemoaned the loss of his ability to curl into a ball to protect his face. "I'll eat your pets."

"Don't have pets, and no you wouldn't." She turned the pen over in her hands. "Come on, you're being overdramatic here, look at you, running away again, and from a stupid marker." She pulled her face into something that could have looked serious if she hadn't so obviously been fighting off the curling up of her lips. "Can't say I'm surprised, seeing as how you tried to run away from a little girl."

"You're setting a bad example." Jason tried. "You're not supposed to be holding things over me."

"Your fault, you 'are' the bad example." The grin split her face here, and Jason could feel his resolve at wanting to keep his face free of ink crumbling. It wasn't like any of the people whose opinions he actually cared about ever saw him without a mask anyway.

"Be serious for a second here Stephanie, that argument holds 'no' weight." He folded his arms, waiting just a second before he sighed and stepped forward. "What idiot would ever follow 'my' example?"

o

o

o

'RED HOOD AND SCARLET SAY: LET THE PUNISHMENT FIT THE CRIME.' The bold letters of the headline were pinned to the clear white wall, a rare picture of the Red Hood lined up alongside one of Batgirl, grinning brightly for her camera; a knife wedged in the space between her eyes.

There wasn't much left over from that time. Someone had gone so far as to take to the internet and scrub the videos and just about anything that could have been in anyway useful, but he'd looked, oh he'd looked.

Among scraps and the few video's he himself had downloaded. He'd spent so many nights reading that one newspaper headline. The article itself was stupid, but he liked the headline. It was simple, so easy to understand and yet it seemed like no one ever did.

If they had, then someone would have done something to help, wouldn't they?

'Let the punishment fit the crime.' Apparently believing that was a crime in itself, and the punishment for being caught was even worse than the one you got for being any of the evil, corrupt monsters that crawled all over the city everyday with nothing in their way.

A ghost made of blood and mist that disappeared without a trace when it's work was done. Whatever that work may have been, and for a while it had been cleaning out some of that evil.

After everything, the ghost had been just a man. One who'd been locked away as easy as any other.

At first, he'd been disappointed. Just a man, just like anyone else, until he'd read the book, and he'd realized, it was more to be just a man and hold those convictions. To never stop fighting for it, even when you were beaten down, right up until you were killed for it.

He didn't have them anymore, the books. They were gone, but that was okay, because he had them memorized, knew every stroke of the pencil that had been left in those pages. He clung to them, the way he'd rarely ever clung to anything.

Bats had put the Red Hood there, had locked him away and had him killed, and he'd never so much as laid a finger on the one who'd come to hoard it over him. It had taken a while to figure out why, but she must have been different, cared for him the way the rest of their family 'hadn't'.

He yanked the knife out of the picture and glared at it. Only that wasn't true either. She did nothing when he was dead, didn't care to help the legacy along, to continue his work or make his murderers pay. She sneered down at the only one who did. She didn't deserve it.

She shouldn't have been his family, didn't have the right, and now… He drove the knife back into the picture and yanked it down, ripping it in half. Now she refused to die for it, had gotten someone to protect her from the consequences.

It was her fault he was dead, the punishment had to fit the crime, it had to. He pulled out a canister, thumbing the release gently, almost lovingly. And it would, he thought, thinking of the crimson fluid within the container that all his work had been building up to. All of his work, going to those stinking room, having to work with all those dealers, it had all been worth it to turn the poison that had killed the Red Hood into this.

They would all suffer seven times what he had, all of them, starting with her. This time the punishment would most assuredly fit the crime.

It was just too bad the Hood wouldn't be there to see it for himself, he would have been proud of his successor.