Chapter Text
She never went to prison for what she did.
She thinks about that sometimes, at the end of the day. Every time they put someone behind bars.
It all started with one case.
Tom Lavino. Fifteen years old. Son of Tony Lavino, bookkeeper for the Gabrini Family. Son of two corpses, the people inhabiting them gunned down in the parking lot of La Pace restaurant. Barbara called it a cold case.
Cold, she already knew, from years of aimless wandering. Cold was not a good thing. It made her body unreliable, shivering into another form when it should have been solid. Cold, she had learned, was a killer of its own. One who did not like granting her its ear. She had rested in it anyway, leaning into iced tendrils on tree branches rather than accept the scorch of human hands. They had become strange bedfellows that way, understanding one another. Two not-good-things clasped together.
But after coming to Gotham, she had been forced to learn it again. Here, it meant something else.
A cold spell was disliked, a duration of uncertain length when everyone had to cancel their plans and grumbled indoors about it later. A cold shoulder was more personal, with a bite more fierce. She had been accused of having one herself a few times, whenever she decided she didn’t want to see anyone.
A cold-blooded killer, she had learnt, was a serious threat. Mr. Freeze was apparently not the only one with a frozen body. Barbara told her that others just did a better job of hiding their inhumanity.
Inhumanity. That was one of the trickier words Barbara had explained, prompted by reading Cassandra’s confusion as soon as she had finished speaking. Some people were not people. Cass was not sure how this was the case, and Barbara’s explanation had not helped much. It seemed cold blood was the indicator of a not-person, but since it was buried under the skin, it was not always clear who was a person and who was not.
‘Can you… become. Like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘Cold-blooded?’
Barbara’s eyes narrowed behind her glasses, wondering whether explaining any more would lead to Cass bleeding herself in order to measure the temperature. She was worried that Cass would try to hurt herself, as though a cut hurt anymore. Barbara was very expressive. She would not like hearing how easy she was to read behind her screens.
‘Some people are born that way. Others get there by making one bad decision after another. Most only freeze when they choose to freeze, which is why it’s so important that we stick to our principles—making sure people follow the law without killing anyone. And why we offer our hands to people who might be about to freeze so they can take it and warm up.’ She stared at Cass very intently for this last line, and clasped her hand where it rested on the arm of her wheelchair. ‘So long as you don’t choose to give that principle up, and I know you won’t, you won’t freeze.’
To freeze in Gotham was to accept there was no salvation coming your way.
Salvation—that was another word she learned, after Barbara explained cold-blooded to her. The two words fit together nicely, she thought. This one came from a cluster of people in rags, huddled on the street corner beside Barbara’s place, ringing bells and crying the word again and again. Sal-Vay-Shun. When the sun was high, and when it was gone. Barbara rolled her eyes at them whenever she saw them, but she also dropped a handful of coins into those red buckets they swung back and forth whenever they crossed paths.
It must have been a complicated word, she thought. To wring such a reaction from Barbara.
Late one evening whilst she was on patrol by herself, she passed the group and decided to stop. It was a split-second decision, but once she made it, she stuck to it. She dropped to the ground beside them and pointed, and asked, carefully, what the word meant, sounding out the three parts carefully. Somehow it was easier, to ask questions of strangers, her face that of the one who had dedicated herself to their protection. Her face its true self, its bravest self.
‘Salvation is deliverance. From sin,’ they said, which didn’t help at all.
So she shook her head, and asked again. A fair number frowned, displeased by her response, but then one lone figure called out: ‘It means to save. To be saved.’
‘Like Batman,’ she said, the words chased out of her mouth in a puff of cold smoke.
‘Yes, like Batman. But also like Batgirl,’ the stranger replied, a wide grin across their face. ‘You save the people of this city everyday, you helped bring order back to the city during No Man’s Land. You are our salvation.’
The adoration in their eyes was suddenly too much. It engulfed her, the enormity of feeling, the expectations and… admiration. Cass had fled.
But later that night, dodging a bullet from a rusted machine gun at an encampment near rushing water, she returned to that word. If salvation was another word for hero, then what happened when the heroes did as she did? When they ran away? Wouldn’t it lead to that day from all those years ago? When nobody had been around to stop her?
If someone had reached out to her, as Barbara had said, would it have stopped that young girl from thrusting her hand into that man’s neck? From letting his blood splash over her hands? Letting her own blood freeze at the sight?
Could someone have saved her from becoming a not-person?
She was the one to catch Tom Lavino. There was a stand-off, five bare-faced men in suits pointing guns at a smaller figure carrying a similar weapon. His face was masked, like hers, but there were small cutouts for his eyes and mouth—unlike hers. The first disarming hadn’t been enough, so she struck harder the second time, snapping one man’s lower arm when he pointed the muzzle of his pistol in her face. He howled.
Tom—though she had not known he was Tom then—walked up to her in a daze, and she responded by pulling off his mask. Beneath it she saw pudgy cheeks and auburn hair. And tears.
‘Please… please… just… make it quick.’ His hands were braced in front of his face, afraid of what she might do despite his words. He lowered himself to the floor and curled up in a position she herself had once adopted during many nights amongst the trees, trying to fit into their grooves. ‘Just kill me quick.’
She waited with him in silence until the uniformed policemen arrived in their noisy cars. When the sirens were a ways off, she patted the boy’s hair and fled the scene.
She asked Barbara to look him up afterward. She read out the case to Cass, from her computers, and that was when Cass heard the boy’s name for the first time. It was then that she wondered if there was a reason he had armed himself in that parking lot where his parents had been killed. The deaths had only been a month ago. Barbara seemed like she knew everything, but she hadn’t even known about them until she’d looked it up. She’d called it a cold case.
Cold meant giving up.
‘Young Tom obviously has his own ideas about who was responsible,’ Barbara said, pushing away from her desk. ‘Jeez. You can really feel for the kid.’ When Cass cocked her head and asked why, Barbara hesitated. ‘Well… Because he lost his parents. That’s something we all have in common, right?’
Cass hadn’t considered that before.
It wasn’t unusual then, that she rushed into the large house where the man who had maybe killed Tom’s parents was staying. He had many guards, but none of them could fight. At the end, she stood in front of the man and told him, ‘Tom Lavino. Don’t… touch him.’
He scowled. ‘That’s what this is about? Oh, the poor baby—lost his mommy and daddy. Well, you know what? He tried to kill a bunch of people tonight. Sound like an innocent little kid to you?’
No, not innocent. They could never be innocent.
‘Listen,’ the man went on, reaching for the gun in his blazer pocket, ‘what you’re doing, it’s very nice. But he’s a killer. And once a killer, always a killer.’
She hadn’t seen any bodies around the boy. But maybe there was one she had not noticed. Did that matter? Did one body change what Tom had intended to five others? The murder in his heart? When the blood freezes in order to do something, is that the same as when the blood freezes in the aftermath?
Did it change what she was doing right now?
‘It’s only a matter of time. A leopard don’t change its spots. And the apple never falls far from the tr—’
If the blood freezes, can it ever be unfrozen?
Cass seized his arm. It was not difficult, he moved with the speed of a dandelion clock. On a day without wind.
She grabbed the gun and thrust its muzzle toward him, and fired all its rounds into the wall behind his head. She watched his eyes widen, his head flinch so fast his neck would have hurt the next day—had Cass not been holding him up against the wall.
‘Don’t,’ she repeated, and then, she fled.
She went to Tom Lavino. He was in a slab-like building surrounded by several fields and a perimeter fence buzzing with electricity. It was on the outskirts of the city, where there were no tall buildings to leap between, and the low-levelled buildings caused her feet to itch.
She kept out of the way of the patrolling guards outside long enough to spot him through a window, and clamber inside his room. It was small and grey, with a bed, a toilet, and a sink. He’d been under the covers when she snuck inside, and she motioned for him to keep his voice quiet when he realised she was there. He followed her instruction without objecting.
Standing opposite Tom, she told him she knew, and he didn’t believe her. Not that she had a Dad. One she’d looked up to. One she’d come to learn had done terrible things. One she still cared about. But when she scared off the bigger boys amassing at his door, some belief trickled into him, and he moved on to asking why she was doing this. Why she was saving him. If it was because she’d lost her parents too. She hadn’t been sure, but something within her urged her to say yes, so she did. The admittance was like a shot, silencing the room. They each hung their heads.
His father had been murdered. Her father was a murderer.
His father had been bad, and that meant no one thought there was any reason to find the ones who had hurt him. Her father was bad, but it was enough that no one could ever hurt him.
Nobody had cared about Tom’s family. So Tom had picked up a gun. Now he was locked away.
Nobody had cared about the man Cass had killed. So Cass had wandered the world, on foot, across water, on the backs of animals and smuggled inside large cars. She’d done that for years, until she’d ended up in Gotham. She had not been chased by people. The man she had killed had been flanked by many guards, but they had dispersed soon after she left the site of his death. No policemen had ever accused her of murder—only loitering in public areas. No, what stalked Cass, what kept her moving, had only ever been the stench of blood.
She had paid for his life with her own, taken by Shiva’s hand. That meant she was free.
Somehow the air in this room was still heavy with the stench.
‘Am I going to have to go to prison?’
Prison. She’d only visited one before, and she still didn’t really understand them. Who made them, and who agreed which people had to go in. What stopped some of Batman’s enemies from staying in their cells, when that man she had tried to save from the toxic gases had been condemned to die. If one person could be killed there, why weren’t all the others?
And why had his death been scheduled in advance? Announced to the world like nobody would try to stop his would-be murderers. Why had she been the only one? Why had she not…
Would she have ended up in that man’s place if she'd never become Batgirl?
Who would have released the gas that killed her? Ba—?
‘I… don’t know.’ She didn’t know enough to say anything. She thought about what Barbara would say. What Batman would, even if he never would have ended up in this position. ‘Probably.’
He went quiet, and she watched his face grow paler. What little remaining sparks of energy lay behind his eyes started to spurt, as though she’d poured a bucket of water over them.
Was this his blood freezing?
‘But not… forever.’ He was sitting on the edge of his bed, and she was standing, and she leant over him. She forced her skull to meet his, and tried to put as much force behind her words as she could. ‘You… need to remember. You did… one bad thing. But you’re… not.’
He’d turned up his face and met her eyes. A small ember remained within them.
Would that be enough?
‘Do you really believe that?’
She stared at this boy, her unlikely mirror. She sensed that when she left, as she must do, some part of herself would remain here. She wondered if that would be enough to ward off the frost.
‘I try to.’
When she got back, she asked Barbara, ‘Will Tom freeze?’
A little puzzled, but mostly bemused—one of her favourite moods—Barbara laughed. She patted the back of the hand Cass rested on her wheelchair’s arm. ‘The prison’s heating system is perfectly operational. It’s actually quite new. Batman paid for it to have a complete system overhaul after No Man’s Land ended.’
‘No. I mean…’ Cass struggled for the words. ‘He is all alone. There is… no one there to save him.’
‘What are you talking about, Cass?’
‘His parents are gone. There—’ she stared at Barbara’s hands on hers ‘—are no hands to hold his. How can he stop his blood from freezing if he’s all alone?’
‘That’s not—’ Barbara sighed. ‘That’s not our job.’
Cass made a frustrated sound. ‘We save.’
‘And you’ve done all the saving you need to! This is our part, getting everyone into custody with their organs still nicely packed up inside their bodies. We take them in and give them the chance to cool down, to think everything over. It’s all up to Tom now. If he wants to keep his head down, and waits for the courts to process his case, he’ll be out eventually and he’ll have the chance to make something better of his life than what he’s been doing so far. If he wants to kick up a fuss—’
‘He doesn’t!’ Cass insisted. ‘But, it isn’t. It isn’t… fair.’
She looks at Cass over the rim of her lenses. ‘If you start looking for fairness in what we do, you'll end up hating the law for everything it decides. Tom knew what he was doing when he picked up a gun. He should have trusted in the police, to handle the case for him.'
'But, you said... yourself. Cold case.'
'That doesn't give people to right to chase a resolution themselves. Raising your sense of justice above society's is a path you must never go down. That means no breaking Tom Lavino out of juvenile detention, do you hear me? Cassie? Can you promise me that?’
Cass frowned, and if Barbara knew why she was really displeased, she didn’t linger to find out. She snatched her hand from Barbara's hold and ran away toward the window she always used to enter and exit. She ignored the cries that followed her, knowing they were not invitations for her to change Barbara's mind. Knowing that she only wanted to dismiss Cass. Dismiss her concerns.
As she leapt into the night sky, she twisted her body round to stare into the enveloping darkness above. Stars didn't shine in Gotham. She wondered if they ever did.
Batgirl would have to be the one to get answers.