Work Text:
Actions Which Bring Results
When Steph first sees the blood, she thinks she’s having her period. Then she remembers that she’s pregnant.
Three hours later, in Doctor Leslie’s clinic, she finds out she isn’t – anymore.
Stephanie Brown has had a miscarriage.
For weeks she isn’t sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, she was going to have to give the baby up for adoption – even if she didn’t want to, it would be what was best for the baby. Now she doesn’t have to.
On the other hand, her baby is…dead, before it even got a chance to live.
Knowing she didn’t have any choice in the matter doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. In fact, it makes it worse; she’d chosen, but didn’t get to follow through. Stephanie tries journaling for a while, but while it helped her deal with her (lack of) parents and the problems of being a teenage vigilante (and for a while, a teen mother-to-be), it doesn’t help. She can’t find the words to write, and when she does, they don’t matter.
Steph decides that if she can’t find the words, maybe someone else has found them. She goes to the Gotham City Library and checks out books on post-partum depression, fetal fatality, and, of course, miscarriage.
Three months after it happened, Steph has moved on, past books on pregnancy in general (she read enough of those in the few months she was pregnant) to books on child development, on gynecology, on bones and tendons and blood and how to fix them.
She finds she’s actually interested in learning about healing people, and that interest is the first thing that’s felt real since she miscarried. Even her nascent relationship with Robin had fallen by the wayside in her grief, he unable to do anything to help her heal.
Steph had to do it herself.
Steph starts studying harder in school (her grades hadn’t dropped while she was pregnant, but during the few months afterward when she wasn’t, they’d slipped quite a bit), and asks Leslie if she could help around the clinic.
Leslie is hesitant, but she says yes anyway. Steph wonders if it has anything to do with the rumors that Leslie knows Batman.
Probably. Batman knows everything that goes on in Gotham. Especially about people that once wore a cape.
It hits Steph, six months after it happened, when she should have been giving birth, that she’d stopped being Spoiler. She hadn’t really thought of it before, which worries her. Spoiler had been such a big part of her life for years, and now…
Now she wasn’t.
Steph looks at her old costume one night after getting home from the clinic. She smells like disinfectant and there’s a Band-Aid on the second finger of her left hand where she scraped herself on a shelf in the clinic’s storeroom when she was restocking tongue depressors.
The Spoiler suit smells like leather and sweat, and a little bit like Gotham night winds and fabric softener.
It’s not her anymore.
The night life is, though. Steph’s starting to feel restless, even as she grows more sure that the path of healing is one she wants to take. Not just dealing out punishment, but helping the people those punished have hurt. Leslie’s told her (when she asked, point blank) that physically she’s as healed as she’s ever going to be, and she seems to be as well mentally too.
Only one way to put it to the test.
One month later, a week after applying for a scholarship to John Hopkins, Steph steps out the backdoor of Leslie’s clinic into Crime Alley. Her new costume is the same midnight blue as her old costume’s mask. It’s a one-piece leotard with a convenient zipper near the waist. It’s styled a bit like Robin’s around the gauntlets, boots and belt, but more like her old suit on the thigh-holsters, cut and padding.
The cape is slimmer, has more Kevlar (thanks to Cass, who was always willing during the past half-year to hang out with her and not make her talk), and is indigo, with a half-mask that covers from her nose upwards.
She needs to breathe in the night.
Taking a deep breath of that air, Steph shoots off her grapple. With one quick tug and heartfelt prayer, Nightingale takes wing that night.