Reading and Literacy
by betty

Reading and Literacy

betty

Summary

He dislikes his body sending messages he doesn't intend or even necessarily endorse.

Notes

Fits into continuity just after War Games.

[info]jamjar betaed, much thanks.

Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 95034.

Chapter One

He's not sure how long she's been standing on his window-sill before he notices her. When he sees her, she slips inside, and he slaps the override on the alarm before it lights up a panel in the cave. She's in uniform, but she pushes her cowl back as soon as she's inside.

"Batgirl."

She nods, and pads across the floor in a way that seems a little... There's something he's missing. She doesn't just understand body-language; she also speaks it, and Tim dislikes coming against his own inability to understand her. She wants something from him, he can tell that much.

"Do you need something?"

She paces around his work centre, seeming interested in the maps he has laid out.

"I need a... disguise," she says, settling on the word she wants.

"For what? The disguise has to fit the situation."

She pulls a chip out of her utility belt, the memory from her cowl-cam, and slots it into his console. Tim calls up the footage.

"Beginning, middle or end?"

"More middle. Than end."

He speeds through it on fast forward, while she paces behind him, slowing down as he reaches the mid point.

"There," she says, so he lets it play out. The footage is low quality, indoors, poorly lit, with pools of light cast by flickering candles. He adjusts the balance a little, and manages to get a little better view. It seems to be some kind of club. Looks like a Halloween party, but the date stamp is for yesterday night. Groups of people- kids, gathered around tables, looking like they're waiting for something. They're dressed extravagantly. The boy the camera is focused on now is wearing a leather corset and a kilt. The camera pans, and the girl next to him is wearing a very good replica WWI sailor outfit, that's bright purple. Or possibly blue. The light is poor. Everyone seems to be likewise dressed up. One person whose gender he can't be sure of is wearing what looks like a costume stolen from the backstage of Cats, with a jockstrap worn over it. Another is a perfect Pierrot clown. Cass has carefully stayed still when she's looking at them so that the footage is as good as possible. Obviously she was planning to bring this footage to... well, someone.

"You need to infiltrate this group?"

"I have a... ticket. But I don't, um, look right."

Tim looks up at her from his chair. "Lets go shopping."

Tim has an idea in mind before he hits the first antique store. He wants her to look like she's a slightly derivative Harajuku girl. Clichéd enough for people to dismiss her, but expensive enough that she'll draw the attention of anyone looking for kids who need to earn extra cash. He goes through the shops looking for things in the colours he wants.

"Here. This, too. And try this one." Cass holds it uncertainly. "The neck is the other end."

He finds the shoes at a bridal store, the bandeau at a lingerie store, and in the end goes to a sewing shop for the buttons he needs. Luckily, he does know how to sew on buttons. They can't talk in the shops, because the salesgirls are overwhelmed by the ease with which Ms. Adrienne Kahn flashes her gold card, but between shops he draws details of the case out of her.

"Can we send someone to help you carry your parcels, Ms. Kahn?"

Cass flicks a glance at Tim, sees the negative without him twitching a muscle, and says very sweetly, "No thank you. He'll help me."

The saleswoman's smile becomes a touch less professional, and a touch more wistful. "Ah, to be young again."

Tim suppresses a smile. Batgirl's constructing a persona quite effortlessly. When they step out of the shop and he shoulder checks to make sure no one is in listening distance, she's already speaking before he can say anything.

"The kids sell drugs. I need to know. Where do they get them?"

"They all have this costume club in common?"

"Not all. But on Tuesdays, a woman sings there. A lot go then."

"Sounds like detective work." Tim knows he couldn't have got into that club unseen, no matter how bad the lighting was. Sometimes he wonders what would have happened if Batgirl had come along before him. Bruce wouldn't have needed a Robin if he had Batgirl.

"I'll have this ready for you... Do you need this for Tuesday?"

"I think... yes."

"Okay, come by early on Tuesday, and I'll do your makeup before my patrol."

On Tuesday, he keeps an eye on the clock while listening to his surveillance tapes, and is already putting them away when Batgirl shows up at the window.

He does her hair first, putting in the extensions, and twisting it up into frivolous curly ponytails with blue streaks, high on the crown of her head. She tips her head side to side, seriously, getting used to the weight.

Helping her with her makeup is like doing it to himself. When he needs her to tip her face up, she already has, and she presses her lips together, lowers her lids, and tilts her head before he has to ask. Batgirl is probably the best partner a crime fighter could have. He thinks Bruce will regret sending her to Blüdhaven.

He holds up a mirror for her last.

"I look like... not a person. Like a doll."

"If anybody asks, tell them you took your inspiration from Geisha." Tim's proud of the effect. The costume is all cream: the brocade jacket, the pants, the boots, and her bandeau. The indigo buttons, lipstick, and hair pull everything together. For a moment, he wants to take a picture. But there's no reason he would need to, it's just a whim.

"Good luck," he says.

Four days later he comes home from patrol to find her already waiting in his apartment.

"Hello." He's exhausted, and has been reminding himself all the way back that he needs to write down his observations before he falls asleep. "Do you need something?"

"You need sleep. I'll wait."

"Is it important?"

She hesitates. "It could be. But not... I don't think it will make a difference when."

"Wake me up in four hours," he tell her, and then strips off the heavily armoured and lumpy parts of the uniform, and crawls into bed. While he's waiting for his brain to realize it can let go, he makes point form notes on the pad he keeps by his bed. When his dizzy mind can't come up with anything else, he lets the pad slip from his fingers, and...

He wakes up disoriented, because the angle of the block of light the sun throws through his window is wrong. The sun isn't where it's supposed to be. He comes bolt awake at this incongruity, and then realizes that he's slept in. He's still got the pen he was making notes with clenched in one fist, and across the room Cassandra is curled up in the armchair, sleeping. She doesn't sleep as most people would in a chair, slumped down, but rather seems to be trying to tuck her nose under her knees like a cat. The chair is too small to really permit this, so her legs are hanging off the armrest.

He wants to wake her up and accuse her of letting him sleep in, but that's not really a rational impulse, so instead he gets up and finds his notepad under the bed. The notes still make sense in the morning, which means he got them down in time. He can't enter them in on the computer without dislodging Cass, and they're not too time sensitive anyway. Might as well take care of his physical needs first. Since he's not sure how soundly Cassandra sleeps, he finds a change of clothes, and takes them with him into the shower.

Peeling the uniform off feels like shedding his skin, and leaves him feeling scraped, naked and vulnerable. He showers quickly and changes into his civilian clothes as soon as he's towelled off.

He's pulling cereal out of the cupboard when Cassandra comes awake. She unfolds herself, and stretches, almost exactly like the cat she was sleeping in the form of, and then makes a disgusted face, still catlike. He realizes he's smiling at it, and it feels funny. It doesn't feel like the smile he produces when one is socially necessary: it feel different. He is certain that he's doing it wrong, and that if he looked in the mirror it would look like he got a face-full of joker gas. But it just feels like smiles did, before.

She meets his eyes across the room. "Hungry?" he asks. Evidently the smile looks normal to her, or- no wait. It's gone anyway. She wouldn't have seen it.

She scrunches her nose up again. "I need to... Do you have... I need a toothbrush."

"I think- " he remembers the manor guest bathrooms. "Alfred bought everything. Check behind the sink."

Cass disappears into the bathroom, and Tim looks at his kitchen. Eggs. He knows eggs. And toast.

They don't talk during breakfast. Afterwards, Cass helps him clear up the detritus, working so smoothly with him that it's as if he had an extra set of hands. When he's wiping his hands on the dishtowel, he finally says, "So what was it you needed my help with?"

She looks at him, and it seems as if she's asking a question, are you sure you're ready?, but that's ridiculous, and he tells her so with his eyebrows. She shrugs, and goes to get her utility belt, which she hadn't been wearing when he came home. It was shoved under the chair she was sleeping in. She looks minuscule in the sweats and t-shirt he found for her and the unwieldy belt draped across her lap, but her hands go to the right pouch first time, and she pulls out the camera, and tosses it to him. He feels like he's her Alfred, keeping the minor concerns out of her way, so that she can stay focused on her work. Although Bruce would have taken care of his own equipment.

He connects the camera to the computer, and the very first shot is of a sheet of paper.

"This is it?"

Cassandra scowls at it, which he takes as a yes. It's easy to forget she can't read, because she's so competent in every other way, but this paper doesn't make any sense. It's a tightly packed chart that looks like it came off a mimeograph or typewriter. The columns don't contain words, but numbers, or numbers and letters. No. There's a word: "of." "Flg of Arb." is tightly packed into a box. Below it, "Est Sun," and below that, "Mhp Shh." which isn't helpful at all. But they look like contractions. And the capitalization is a bit suggestive of... well, book titles, but that seems unlikely.

"Is it English?" asks Cass.

"Let me... just a second." Two columns over, there's an entry that says "fava," which is an English word. Below that, the next entry says "2C2x4" which he's going to skip over, but after that an entry says "mustard." Book titles, and ingredients. He briefly wonders if Batgirl has brought him a printout of a recipe database. He discards the thought as soon as it occurs. Not a fruitful avenue of enquiry, and besides, two below that it says "sulphur," not an FDA approved foodstuff.

Okay, assume Flg of Arb is a contraction for Flag of something. Arabia. Sounds like a ship. Then the other column is probably cargo. And the number column could be tonnes, or times, or... Given the fact that the number column varies between two and four digits, and when four the second is between zero and two inclusive, and the third one or two, it's probably dates.

"Do you have it?"

"Yeah, I think so. It's a list of ships, the time they come in, and with one particular container of cargo noted. Is this connected to that thing you were following with the kids who were dealing drugs?"

"Yes."

"Makes sense. This looks like the kind of list you'd need if you had so many mules you couldn't keep track of them. Look; name of ship, date of arrival, I think this would be the container number, and it's location on the ship, supposed contents, this is probably amount, although its odd that's not standardised... no, I think it would be a code for what substance it's actually carrying. Smart not to write that down."

Batgirl is frowning at the screen. "This isn't- I need to be a better detective."

"Are you kidding? This is awesome. It's huge. There's no way this is being moved out by a network of kids playing dress-up, Blüdhaven couldn't absorb this much if everyone between fourteen and forty were shooting up. This must be a distribution hub for the eastern seaboard. You-- " He boggles for a moment at the enormity of what Batgirl has found.

Batgirl strokes the screen. "Thank you."

She takes her camera memory back with her when she leaves. He writes out his notes and report.

She returns the next night with photos of containers, warehouses, men. "I'm not supposed to be noticed. When I talk, people notice. I need to give this to Amy."

"You mean Captain Rorhbach."

"Yes."

"Okay, I can do that for you."

It's interesting that Batgirl thinks of the Captain that way. As if she were... an ally. Or maybe she doesn't understand the implications of the usage of first and last names.

That night, (morning) Batgirl borrows a shirt from him and sleeps on the couch. Tim's not tired enough to be insensate, and he finds it bizarrely hard to sleep with her lying so near wearing his old gym shirt.

He's perched on (not a gargoyle, this city doesn't have) a building corner, listening to a moderately tedious conversation via a bug placed two buildings away when another voice interrupts. At first, he thinks she's actually present with his surveillance subjects, because in Blüdhaven, no one ever uses that channel. There's no one here but him and-

"Robin. Are you busy? I need help."

"Position?"

"Two blocks west and three north of the museum. A big building with an arch." Robin makes a note that he's going to have to teach her street names. "There's a bomb, and children, and the bad guy is escaping."

"Two minutes. Describe the bomb to me."

"I don't- He said there's a bomb. He wasn't lying. But I can't find it."

"Are you evacuating?"

"They- The kids are, um, injured. With canes, and things. But the building. It's not like the clocktower is. was. The doors are stupid, and there are stairs, and the elevator- " Batgirl sounds angry. "I'm using the line, to make a, um, to lower people. There are children in the elevator. It's too small- "

"It's okay. I'm here now." Robin hangs back to look at the building, the Jeremy Osner Pediatric Orthotics Center, trying to see it from a demolitions point of view. Load-bearing wall... well, assuming the bomber knows anything about demolitions. "You keep evacuating, I'll look for the bomb. What's the bomber's connection with this location?"

In his ear, Batgirl recites information, interspersed with the count of people saved, and Robin tries to think like a cafeteria cook turned criminal. Batgirl has already looked in the kitchens, but... What place would a cafeteria cook most like to see blown up?

He finds it in the incinerator, no timer, rigged to blow when the door opens. Apparently a grudge against whoever dealt with garbage. "I've got it. I'll let you know when it's disarmed." He has to work using a mirror and tweezers, through the hinge of the oven door. It takes forty minutes. He lets Batgirl know when he's done, and then leaves it carefully disassembled for the education of the bomb squad, when they show up. It might be useful later, so he takes a picture.

Batgirl shows up nearly a week later, and makes herself a sandwich in his kitchen. She eats it, sitting cross-legged on the counter. "The drugs. Amy did it. She had police, lots of them, here, and here and here." She maps out the port using the bread knife, the butter, a tomato and spoons for detachments of officers.

Tim waits for her to explain what she's doing here, but the story ends with everyone in jail, seizures made, Batgirl on the side-lines, no intervention necessary.

"So... what are you doing now?"

"I patrol." She looks at him as if it was an odd question. "I think maybe, I could... We could do good for this city."

"What do you need me for?"

She looks a little sad, which is a funny reaction to the question, so he must have been telegraphing something else with his body. He dislikes his body sending messages he doesn't intend or even necessarily endorse.

Batgirl drums her heels on the cupboards. "I um, need someone. Who will talk to me. I need to learn to read, someone to teach me to read. I need... I miss Steph. I need a friend."

The news of Batgirl's unhappiness is like a physical blow. Not the crippling kind, but the kind that knocks the breath out of you, or knocks you off your centre of balance for a second. Hard. Goddamn Bruce, sending her out here, never thinking that people have social needs as well as physical ones. Barbara's loss wasn't just a blow to their intelligence network; Batgirl relied on her for emotional support. He holds Steph selfishly close in memory, but Batgirl once- He's not the only one who-

He breathes. Distances himself. Examines the problem rationally.

"Have you considered meeting new people by joining an adult literacy class?"

"I don't want to meet new people." She frowns at him, and it's the frown of boys-are-clueless-sometimes, and it's not her frown, she took it from-

He looks away. "Well, give it time." He makes a note to mention Batgirl's loneliness to Alfred.

When Batgirl shows up at his apartment again, it's almost three weeks, and he'd begun to miss- to wonder what was keeping her busy. Seeing her is... a welcome relief from the tedium.

"Robin."

"Batgirl. Can I help you?"

"No." She pauses. "No. You can't help. Not... now. But I think maybe, someday, you can."