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Dick is the one who takes her to her first ballet.
It’s one of those times where the hours stretch for days and her voice is caught in her throat, small and frustrating and gone, gone, gone. Cass breathes around the clog and tries to let loose all the frustration building in her chest. She is improving, she is learning, and this is enough, for now.
But still, still- she wishes sometimes that the words flowed easy, a river of conversation pouring from her mouth without a dam to block its way. She watches her siblings and her friends as they converse, as Tim rambles on with his eyes alight and Stephanie watches with something small and warm in the crinkle of her eyes. She watches Duke make Damian laugh without sound, that little uplift of her younger brother’s shoulders that will always mean so much more than anyone expects.
They are talking all the time. With their words, with their bodies, with the way their eyes light up and dim. And Cass sees all this, the way they light up and fall apart and burst into thousands of stars, and has to stumble her way through talking in a manner they understand.
There is an entire world at her feet, no secrets hidden from her keen eyes, and yet still there is a barrier between her voice and anyone else who cares to listen.
And it aches. It aches. Cass has been silenced before. Once. Twice. A thousand times. She has been diminished into nothing but a weapon, and she will never be that again.
But weapons do not speak, and sometimes even now the words are dammed in throat, blocked from everything and everyone and anything at all.
It makes her want to scream. It makes her want to weep.
But she does not. She keeps her chin high and measures her progress in intervals, stumbles her way through words and sentences and growth.
She has been bruised, not broken. She has carved herself anew and she will do so a thousand times over if it came to it.
Sometimes the frustration builds, but she assures herself that it is only human. Weapons are not allowed their own emotions, and so she will embrace each and every one she comes across now that she knows she can.
The weekend drags long and her voice drags slow, and Cass feels annoyed and exasperated and full of energy with nowhere to go, but also proud and awed of her own range of feelings.
Funny, that.
She is spending the weekend at Dick’s, because it is her turn and because her room smells too much like baking soda. They eat breakfast at her favourite cafe, a tiny hole in the wall run by a Trini lady with only three tables to its name and the best cheese toasties one could ask for. They go to the park, and he pushes her on the swing, and at the top of her arch she leaps off into a flip, delicately kicking the high hanging leaf the children besides her were trying to reach.
They gape. She grins, and behind her Dick laughs.
On Saturday, they finally finish the last episodes of Avatar the Last Airbender, and both of them cry. Dick gesticulates helplessly at the T.V. and Cass wipes at her eyes and thinks of the joy that is being not alone with her lack of words.
They make stir fry that night and he shows her how to spin dry the cabbage after washing it. She accidentally breaks the handle with how fast she spins it, but Dick waves off her non verbal apology and pops it back into place with ease.
And all the while, she watches him, because he is hiding something from her, a surprise. His dancing fingers sing of his excitement, and whenever he thinks she is not looking he grins at her.
He is silly. She is always looking.
She wants to ask what he is excited about. She wants to pester him, to tease him, to complain when he will undoubtedly waggles his eyebrows and proclaims, “Secrets!”
She wants.
The words do not come.
But finally, on Sunday, he approaches her with two tickets in hand, his eyes alight with happiness and something like nerves, and says he’d like to take her to the ballet.
And she agrees. And they go.
And-
Oh.
They are speaking. On the stage. They are speaking with their bodies, with the music, with the way they turn and gesture and lift their chins. There is such life in them even without a physical voice and-
She takes Dick’s hand and watches the stage. He is smiling at her, eyes soft, but she does not focus on this. Just the stage, the ballerinas, their movements back and forth and round and round. An entire theatre full of people and there is such life in this, such beauty, and she breathes it in and she breathes it out, and it is more than she can name with her meager words.
But the words are not needed. Not here. Not now.
When Dick shows up next week with an email declaring her official enrollment in ballet class, she leaps into the air and kisses both of his cheeks, and he laughs and he holds her, and there are no words needed to express any of this most momentous joy.
Tim is the one who gets her into videos online. She’s out of commission with a twisted ankle and a headache that refuses to leave, and the slump of his shoulders says tired and the twist of his thin lips says caring and the way his hands ever so faintly tremble says anxious.
“Hey, Cass, how are you feeling?”
She shrugs, buries her head into her pillow and peers up at him from the strange sideways angle.
“Can I join you?”
She hesitates, her ankle sending little angry messages to her brain and her heart screeching that she isn’t safe, but she breathes around the fear and scooches over anyways, pulling the blankets close to her side.
Tim sits besides her, back against the headboard, and opens up his computer on his lap. He taps at the search bar for a minute, each press of his thumb humming thinking, thinking, thinking to her tired brain, and then he pulls up youtube.
A few deft strokes of his fingers- and how easy it is for him, to write as automatic as breathing- and suddenly there is a stream of videos to choose from, all labeled with different things she cannot bother her attention enough to read.
He clicks on one.
It’s some sort of show, she thinks. A talent show, where everyone comes and tries to impress the judges, show them their worth. There is singing. There is joking. There are dogs doing tricks.
…..there is dancing.
Not ballet, no, but dancing nonetheless. Wild, crazy dancing. Dancing with stories, about love and history and energy and life. Dancing about movement, with flips and jumps and leaps. Fast paced and slow paced and twirls round and round and round.
And Cass watches. And her eyes feel so wide. And there is so much emotion gathering in her soul, so much she does not even know how to name it in all its beauty.
Look at me, they are all saying on that stage, look at me, I am here, I am here, I am here. I am alive with a voice you cannot hear.
Cass watches. Tim clicks through videos. If she lets him sit there long enough, he will probably fall asleep, passing out with his head pitched forward onto his chest.
Good. He needs to sleep.
Sometimes, when an act is particularly good, a judge hits a button and golden paper comes raining down, and the dancers laugh and cry and gasp, reach their arms out to gather all those shimmering lights. And she is being filled by this, by this most wonderful and awed and magical golden light.
She thinks, if she could, she’d hit the golden buzzer for every single dance, because there they are, on stage, filling this world with nothing but life.
The videos begin to play automatically, one after another after the next. Her head aches, but she cannot tear her eyes away. As she watches, Tim’s breathing evens out in intervals until he begins to softly snore.
Her eyes catch on a title of one of the video compilations, and she sounds out with a wordless mouth the words b-e-s-t and d-a-n-c-e . Her arm is not the thing that is injured.
She reaches out and clicks on it.
When she shows up at Bruce’s office with the papers Barbara neatly printed for her, all containing neatly listed hip-hop classes, he sighs and pulls up a chair for her, and together they begin sorting through them for the best choice.
And that night she opens her tablet, so often unused, and slowly, carefully, looks up videos on dancing, watching with her eyes completely lit up.
Alfred schools her in reading and writing and speaking, measures her words and is patient when she shoves the books away and runs to her room, blasting music and practicing dance routines because somehow it is better than punching, better than fighting, because she is a blank slate when she is under the mask but never here, never with the music, never with this movement thrumming through her soul.
She trains in the late evenings, with her family and when she is alone. She sits on gargoyles in the deep dark of night and watches the world spin round round, disappears into alleyways and banks when she notices something going wrong. She is not a weapon, she is a warrior, and all her battles are ones she chooses.
She takes ballet three times a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays, and she learns positions and she moves her fingers with grace and she spins round and round and round. On the weekends she takes classes on hip-hop, and she moves in sync with her classmates and learns how to create an illusion with nothing but the way her body rolls and shakes, flipping and breaking and coming back together, moving with all the unspent emotion she has stored in her chest.
She visits Stephanie at her apartment, which is crummy and small and warm in a way her childhood never was. The blonde complains about her biology exam the next day, hemming and hawing over flashcards and quizlet and her made-up study guide that Tim had helped her compose. When frustration gets too much, the young woman sighs and stands up, fiddles with her phone, and tinny music begins to play.
Stephanie pulls Cass to her feet and spins her round and round. Cass wants to tell her that this isn’t how you do it, that there is a technique to this, a skill, a way of holding your body and preventing yourself from getting dizzy.
This is none of that skill. It is full of sloppy lines and unpracticed movement. It is graceless and wobbly and all over the place. It doesn’t belong to a single division she’s ever heard of. There is no structure, no rules, no nothing.
But the other girl is laughing, laughing, and the way her chin tilts says relief and the grip of her fingers says happy, and Cass lets herself relax into it, lets herself fall into gracelessness and calls it joy.
When she tries it with Damian some days later, this strange dance without any form but always so much joy, he scoffs.
(But he lets her spin him round nonetheless, something small and endeared caught in the upturn of his lips.)
Duke catches her practicing in the ballroom, pauses on his way to the kitchens. She senses him freezing in the doorway, the way his hands linger on the doorframe says longing and the way his eyebrows lift says interest. His foot angles away from her, twitches and falters, and whispers of his hesitancy.
He lets her finish her set before he speaks.
“You dance?”
She nods, grabs her water bottle, and sits cross legged on the floor. It was a gift from Harper, bought second hand from some thrift shop or another on their “girls day out.” It was double layered, and when she shook it deep blue glitter swirled up and down.
Harper had bought it, pressed it into her hands, and winked. “I love having an allowance,” she crowed, and laughed when Cass had shaken the bottle hard enough to get water on her face.
She doesn’t do this now. Just sips and watches the glitter idly twirl, patting besides her to encourage Duke to sit.
He does.
“I don’t suppose you know any contemporary…”
She tilts her head at him.
“Con--temparay?”
The word fumbles on her tongue and spills out not quite right. She mouths it again, and again, until it feels smooth between her teeth.
He shrugs, clasps his ankles.
“Contemporary, yeah. I think- I think my mom used to take it in college.”
He falls quiet, and his eyes stare long and far away, the way they do when he talks about sad things he cannot help.
Cass wants to comfort him, wants to offer emotions and words and support she cannot speak with her lips. Instead, she reaches out and settles a small pale hand against his wrist, squeezes gently, and offers a smile when he raises his head to meet her gaze.
“You could learn. With me.”
Duke blinks at her. She blinks back. There is a decision in his eyes and it twists and turns like a storm, round and round and round.
“You think?”
“Yes,” she says, and holds on tighter.
The next time she shows up at Bruce’s office, Duke in tow, the older man doesn’t even bother sighing. He reaches out for the papers- this time compiled and organized by her brother’s steady hand- and digs out a pen.
“Contemporary?” he asks.
Cass nods, nudges Duke’s elbow.
“Uh, yeah, if that’s okay...?”
And Bruce looks up with a gaze that shines with all the love he keeps in his impossibly large and scarred heart, and it feels like sunshine.
“Of course it is, chum. Now, just looking at this list I can tell that you have some preference for the south side of Gotham, so why don’t we start there….
Next Thursday, Jason gives them both a ride to the small dance studio a few blocks down from Duke’s old home, and is there to pick them up when they stumble out afterwards, moving with half learned steps and laughing as they trip over each other.
The young man shakes his head at them, rolling his eyes, and takes them out for ice cream.
It becomes a weekly ritual. It becomes a little more warmth gathered in her soul.
“Dance with me.”
Cullen looks at her with wide eyes, shying away into his claimed little corner of the ballroom.
It is no longer empty, like it is when she and Duke practice their dance routine. It is filled with people, with socialites and gold diggers and bored children, a gala halfway through and it’s in full swing.
Cullen does not like galas. He does not like people. He sits and he stands and he exists with all of himself tightly packed into the bounds of his body, never taking up more space than what he has too.
And Cass knows what it is to be diminished. To be made small and then smaller still. To be torn and shattered and bruised in a thousand little ways, until your voice is nothing but an endless silent scream and there are no words and there is no sound.
She knows.
Her brother shifts, his hands coming up to curl around his elbows. Let me be invisible is written into every line of his skinny frame.
“Cass,” he says, and his voice falters and strings along steady, “Cass, I’m really not a dancer.”
She shakes her head, reaches out a hand but does not touch. It is an offer.
(It is a choice. She knows, too, what it is to be left without options.)
“Don’t have to,” she promises, and she means it.
Cullen eyes the crowd gathered in the center of the room, presses further back into the wall.
“With all those people? Cass, I really don’t think-”
“Here, then.”
And he looks at her, and she looks back, and she wonders how you can quantify bravery, when some things come so easy for some and so hard for others. Most wouldn’t count dancing in a quiet corner of a distracted room bravery, but it is, it is, because dancing is just emotions you’ve brought into movement, and Cass knows that this is a boy who holds all his cards so close to his chest because far too often they have been taken and beaten and burned.
But Cullen looks at her, and she looks at him, and he carefully takes her hand.
They dance in the corner, far away from prying eyes, and this is strength and it should not be denied. One day, they will spin out into the crowd, and they will take up enough room for giants, will break apart the masses with their sheer presence as they spin and sway and laugh in time with the music. They will be a phoenix, rising from the flames that burned them and being born anew.
One day.
But for now they are but the embers, glowing warm and golden in the night. They are not diminished, and this will never be nothing.
They spin, and in their small corner of the world, they are larger than the sun.
Cass breathes. She lives. She dances.
There is an entire universe in her chest. She collects moments and wonders and feelings and she calls them her own, cradling the warmth in her heart and it breathes like a flame.
She trains, she fights, she stumbles her way through words and sentences and through life. She falls and she gets up, and then she tries harder.
Childhood did not treat her kindly. It treated her with harsh pains and bitter truths, and a silence so pressing she was left without any voice at all.
But still, she speaks. But still, she grows.
She is so much more than all her broken parts.
Alfred smiles at her and shows her most recent spelling assignment, not a single error in sight. She laughs and she kisses him on the nose, watches his eyes widen at the sudden affection, and his smile soften all the same.
“Tell me, Miss Wayne, have you ever learned to waltz?”
And she will shake her head, and he will offer his hand, and they will dance. Alfred counts steps and measures them against the music, slow and stately and calm in his joy. There is a message in this, a brightness in this, and the kitchen window slants patterns from the setting sun and she traces her steps through the orange glow.
There are so many emotions and she holds them in her chest, lets them move her, lets them move the entire world. She spins and she leaps and she bends, her body is a story and she writes it in her skin, inch by inch, word by word. She carved herself anew and she is nothing less than magnificent in her rebirth.
The next time she shows up at Bruce’s office, she holds a stack of papers she compiled all on her own, word by fumbling word and line by shaky line. She wants to learn how to dance jazz, wants to learn it all, wants to learn everything, because before it was never a choice.
Bruce raises his eyebrow at her.
“Are you sure this won’t be too much?”
And she shakes her head and grins, kisses him on the cheek, and his smile says love and his eyes say care.
They pick an instructor, and every Tuesday she bikes herself down to a tiny hole in the wall to meet with a woman who curses like a sailor and dances with so much passion it spills out and over and into everyone and everything and anything that surrounds her.
Cass is not dammed, her voice is not blocked forever in her throat. Perhaps she will never speak like a river, but she speaks, she flows , and her body is an ocean crashing against cliff sides and sandy beaches, untamable and unstoppable and impossible to be ignored.
She may never talk with ease but she speaks, she speaks, and her words are a siren.
Days and weeks and months, Cass dances. She dances in kitchens and studios and on abandoned stages. She dances with her siblings, with her peers, with instructors. She dances with a thousand meanings and a thousand tones, and her emotions burst into life all around.
She takes all she’s learned and all she’s grown and puts it into a dance of her own design. She picks the song, listens to it over and over again, chooses the steps and the pace and the way she bends and does not break.
It’s a song about starting again. It’s a song about bravery, about stepping forth in the face of fear and broken histories. It’s a song about life, and starting anew, and giving and loving and all the things she was once denied.
Her family gathers in spurts and spots, finds their seats in the crowded auditorium. Cass thrums with a nervousness that is not being afraid and breathes through it. She thrums with emotions she could hardly name and grows ever more into herself.
If she closes her eyes, she can hear them, can see their faces. Can see Dick and his soft warm eyes, the way his fingers thrum with excitement. Bruce’s proud jaw tilted towards the stage lights, his eyes measuring the stage. Harper, laughing with Jason and nudging Tim’s shoulder as he flicks through his phone. Stephanie with her brilliant smile, leaning over Tim’s shoulder and absentmindedly playing tic-tac-toe with Duke as he quietly talks with Damian about different kinds of dancing. Alfred, fussing over Cullen’s hair as he gently bats the old butler’s hands away, Babara watching with an amused smirk, glasses flashing and fingers tapping on her chair.
She can see them all. Her family, her beautiful, wonderful family, coming together to watch her perform, to watch her speak in a way that is all her own. This is something she has gone without, but no longer, never again.
Cass is not a weapon. She is a dancer. And her soul is nothing but warm and brilliant and bright.
She hears her name announced, and she smiles into her palms, breathes in and breathes out, and steps into the glow to the sound of applause.