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Peja's Wonderful World of Makebelieve Import
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Published:
2020-11-05
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1,275
Chapters:
1/1
Kudos:
10
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976

Playing To Win

Summary:

It isn’t a game. But that doesn’t mean Steph can’t win.

Work Text:

Playing To Win 

 

It wasn’t a game.

 

But that didn’t mean she had to lose. She was going to win.

 

With those thoughts in her mind, Steph carefully aimed the gun, and when Black Mask’s focus switched, she hit him with her patented uppercut.

 

Knocked him out cold.

 

Cold…she was so cold. The gun trembled in her hand, and fell to the floor. Her last waking thought, muddled by the pain and the last dregs of adrenaline leaving her body, was to kick it away, so he couldn’t use it if he woke up.

 

***

 

When she woke up, Batman was there. And his cowl – his mask – was off.

 

Steph’s vision was too fuzzy to really make out his features, but he looked familiar…

 

“Di’ you catsh ‘im?” Steph slurred out through what few of her teeth were left, eyelids falling closed. She absently noted the feeling of bandages covering her face, and vaguely recognized the feelings of drugs coursing through her system; morphine or something else she’d had during her delivery. It probably explained why even though she hurt, she didn’t feel like she was dying.

 

At least, not until she thought about what Black Mask had done to her. She almost wished he hadn’t been so crippled he’d had to use…implements. It might have hurt her less.

 

But he had, and he had, and she was. So she’d deal.

 

“Yes,” Batman said.

 

“Good,” Steph said, and closed her eyes.

 

***

 

It was a week before Steph found out that Batman was Bruce Wayne. It was only when Tim came by, and referred to him as ‘Bruce’ that it clicked.

 

Steph had no idea what it meant. Batman – Bruce – hadn’t been back to see her at Leslie’s clinic since he’d brought her in. And she couldn’t really blame him. He had to have figured out that it was all her fault that Gotham was in the midst of the worst conflagration it had seen since No Man’s Land.

 

But why would Batman have shown her his face? Why would be have let Tim know it was okay to tell her his name?

 

She wasn’t good enough to be Robin, right? Hell, she’d barely been able to make it as Spoiler.

 

And she wasn’t sure if she’d go back to it after she healed from this – if she was even able to. She didn’t want to think that Black Mask had won; that he’d taken her out of the game. But on the other hand…she didn’t want to end up dead, either.

 

If she had training… But even if she had all the training that Tim had, that didn’t guarantee anything. Not if that case holding a Robin uniform – one that wasn’t Tim’s, and that Nightwing had never worn – was anything to go by.

 

***

 

Cass was the one to help her home. Her mother already knew Tim, but she also thought that they’d broken up. Not that they had, but she’d had to tell her mom something while Tim was grounded.

 

Her mom seemed a bit leery of Cass, but that could have just been because she was so worried about her. Steph had never seen her mom that stressed and strung out unless she was…strung out. Strung out and needing a fix.

 

It was kind of nice, seeing her mom’s concern.

 

What was even nicer was when Tim came by to visit that evening…in his Robin suit. She’d always known that Tim belonged in it, in a way she never had. She wasn’t great with following orders, or giving them. She couldn’t be a sidekick that would eventually grow into a mentor. She could barely handle partnering either Tim or Cass on patrol.

 

But being there for both of them to talk to once patrol was over was something she could do even from her sickbed.

 

***

 

One week after the casts on her arms came off, Bruce Wayne dropped by her house. On the one day that her mother worked the nightshift, and Steph was alone in the house.

 

He didn’t say much, other than, “Maybe I was a bit hasty…sometimes it’s justifiable to break the rules,” and, “I should have given you more training before I let you out on the streets.”

 

She didn’t need Tim to tell her that that was as close to an apology and absolution as she was going to get from Batman. Even with the Bat staring her down, she breathed a bit easier.

 

When Bruce left, Steph found a folder on her desk. It contained bits and pieces of a case that someone was working on: Batman or Oracle, possibly even Tim. It had that economy of emotion and richness of detail that she’d come to expect from the detectives amongst them.

 

Steph wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box, but she knew what was what. She couldn’t kick ass or bust heads, but she could still exercise her mind. And this was another test that Batman wanted to see if she’d pass.

 

She spent her free moments, of which there were quite a few, working on the case notes, ones that concerned an assassination in Paris several years previously. Steph read the reports over and over, trying to glean a clue here, a connection there; something that would tell her what was going on. It took her three hours to figure out who did it; it took her three days to figure out why Batman would have held onto those particular reports.

 

Steph wracked her brain for every iota of information she’d ever heard about Lady Shiva, and pointedly did not ask either Tim or Cass about her. In the end, she felt she’d been able to come up with more concrete than circumstantial evidence, even if she couldn’t prove it.

 

She went to sleep on Friday with the finished folder lying by her bed. She woke up on Saturday to two new folders, and a bat-shaped note that said Good work, Stephanie.

 

After that, every week a new packet would arrive on her windowsill. Sometimes it was case notes, sometimes it was supervillain dossiers; once it was exercise regimens designed to be incorporated into her physical therapy for her newly-healed legs.

 

On the day she sent in the paperwork to take her GED – no way she’d be able to attend high school for awhile – the folder contained college brochures and scholarship applications.

 

Steph considered it a point of pride to throw away the Wayne Foundation ones.

 

***

 

It was eight months after the gang wars swept Gotham, and two weeks after Steph finally got a clean bill of health from Doctor Thompkins, when she finally came to a decision about her life.

 

She could start training again, though it would take at least another eight months before she was street-ready, or…well, she was finally realizing that she had options for her future. Good ones, and ones that didn’t involve spandex and Kevlar.

 

She’d become Spoiler to stop her dad. It had evolved, somewhere along the way, into wanting to make Gotham better for kids like her, so no more little girls grew up with dads that spent more time breaking the law than fixing their kids’ broken bikes. She could do that without wearing Kevlar.

 

All she needed was a diploma from Hudson U. She could be a teacher, or a social worker, or maybe even a doctor. And she could help everyone in Gotham City.

 

Steph wasn’t Robin. And if she went back to crime-fighting, it probably wouldn’t be as Spoiler.

 

But she wasn’t out of the game. Not by a longshot.