Archive of Our Own ^beta

There’s no standardized vigilante experience. Stephanie knows this— she’s met a lot of people as Spoiler and every single person she’s met has had a different thing going on. Still, there’s landmarks. There’s type of war stories. Origins, first life saved, first bad guy, first time getting hurt. First time seeing a friend hurt. First time getting tortured. She’s been down her path, though. She’s got all the achievements, with a few exceptions— she doesn’t know if Cassandra counts for being trained by assassins, for example.

She didn’t think there’d be that much of a difference between Spoiler and Robin. She hasn’t changed, after all. She hadn’t exactly advertised that connection, but she thought it’d be obvious— that Spoiler had disappeared from the skies at the same time the new Robin started flying. And Bruce knows, obviously. She’s teamed up with him before. It’s just a difference in colors. Not in her heart.

It is different, though, in a way that’s hard to articulate. It’s not that he’s warmer to her, at least not in any measurable way. Maybe it’s that he lets her see him bleed just a bit more. He’s always seen through Spoiler, treated Stephanie like just another person to save, but when he looks at her as Robin— well, he sees Robin, doesn’t he?

He sees Tim, and he sees Dick, and he sees — the other one. The dead one. So he lets his guard down ever so slightly. She gets to borrow the trust they’ve built up over years as his partner, as opposed to an annoying colleague. She gets to see some of Bruce Wayne. Not the rich playboy he pretends to be at parties and golfing trips with Lex Luthor, but the kid who watched his parents get gunned down in an alley. The kid who’s just as scared as she is.

She should be grateful, that he’s finally letting her in. This is what she wanted, right? She didn’t have to take up this mantle. Someone else would have, on a long enough timespan. She doesn’t need to be the one to talk Bruce into bed when he’s too hurt to stand, let alone fight. She doesn’t need to be the one to watch him. She knew this mantle was a responsibility as much as it was power. She dated Tim, for god’s sake. She’s listened to his endless worries over Bruce, she knew how hard it would be to keep this man from getting himself killed, and she chose this.

But she’s not going to admit she can’t handle it. Not after how hard she fought to get here. So she buries her fear, pretends she doesn’t wake up screaming from nightmares of finding Bruce dead, and she plays the part. She’s the Girl Wonder now, and for all the experience she has as Spoiler, she finds only half of it seems to matter. It’s like she’s reset a clicker game— she’s starting at the bottom, but with some boosts. Some experience that’s carried over.

And it’s fine, it’s really fine, until she finds herself in one of those nightmares but she can’t wake up. Batman isn’t where he said he’d be, and when she tracks his route back to the cave, she finds blood. She tries to call Oracle, but they’re busy managing some crisis response. Have been for hours.

“I’ll try to help when I can catch a break,” Oracle says, but from the tone of their voice, Stephanie knows it’ll be a good while. There’s no point waiting, anyway. Not when the blood is only kind of dry, and she’s trained for this. She can find him. She can save him.

And she does. It takes her four hours. Maybe the others could’ve done it faster, but they aren’t here, and it’s good enough. She tells herself it’s good enough when she tracks him to the secret base, when she kicks a very surprised Scarecrow’s ass, when she sees Batman on the ground in front of him—

Not dead. Not even unconscious, but— beaten, in a way Stephanie’s never seen him before. Not even when she kept him from bleeding out in an alley the once. She tells herself it’s fear toxin, making him take that position, making him have that look. Not only that she’s going to hurt him, not that she’s going to make him fail to save someone, but she’s going to hurt him in a way he’s used to. That he’s in some way prepared for.

“Please don’t—“ he says, looking at her but seeing someone else entirely, and he chokes on the words. It’s fear toxin, of course. He’s been pretty obviously dosed. She’s gotten hit with it herself, though, and she knows the way it works. It’s not mind control or magic. It’s like a really potent PTSD trigger. Goes through all your repression and coping mechanisms and normal defenses, but it doesn’t add anything. “Please—“

It doesn’t — it can’t—

She needs to restrain the unconscious Scarecrow. Give him the antidote. She can’t keep standing here like an asshole wondering what he’s seeing, half hoping he’ll let a name slip so she knows. Knows who to hate. Who to be afraid of. She thinks maybe for a moment maybe he’s remembering something like watching his parents die, which doesn’t fit with the body language, but it makes more sense than whatever the fuck this is. And then he says, “please, sir,” and that kicks her into motion.

She makes extra sure she’s not mixing up the fear toxin antidote with the epi pen or Joker venom antidote, then crouches and tilts his head so she can get to a good vein. He’s way too pliant for her to at all feel comfortable with, but she’s shifted into Nurse’s Daughter Mode. She can worry about the implications later. His cowl is torn, revealing another injection site— Stephanie assumes Scarecrow probably captured him the normal way then gave him something more concentrated than the gas form, which explains the severity of the symptoms, she guesses. Sort of.

It takes him a few minutes to drop out of… whatever the fuck that was. Stephanie looks over to where Scarecrow was to make sure he’s still there, and she’s only kind of surprised that he’s not there. She should be more concerned that he’s still on the loose, but that’s tomorrow Stephanie-and-Batman’s problem. For now, he slumps to the ground, and she ends up holding his head in her lap.


It’s not even that he’s like a scared kid she’s rescued from a burning building. That’s how Tim gets after fear poison. She’s talked him through it before. This isn’t something she’s seen before. She’s out of her depth. There’s no point of reference from Spoiler stuff, and it terrifies her. He wasn’t even tied up.

He pulls himself together, eventually. He gets to his feet, pulling away from her, and pulls the cowl back into place. He checks all of his equipment, notes the absence of the utility belt. Stephanie hands it over— she found it in the trash a few blocks away from the site of his ambush. He nods in acknowledgement, puts it back on.

“Good work, Robin,” he says in his typical gruff Batman voice. She’s still on the ground, and now it’s like the roles are reversed. She’s the one reeling. She’s wanted to hear him say that for as long as she can remember, but right now, her own stupid ego is the farthest thing from her mind. He can’t just expect her to forget about whatever the fuck that was.

“B,” she starts, and he looks at her expectantly. Like he’s waiting for her to follow him. She guesses it’s best to go back to the cave, he probably needs more medical attention than she can provide here, but he can’t expect her not to have questions. “What was that?”

“You’re familiar with the effects of fear toxin, aren’t you.” It’s technically a question, but his tone makes it a statement.

“Yes, but—“ 



“Crane ambushed me on the way to our rendezvous point. It won’t happen again, now I know to look out for him.” He doesn’t say, end of discussion, but he doesn’t need to. She hears the warning in his words, and it’s almost laughable coming from him. How often has he pushed her to talk about personal shit when she didn’t want to, only to ignore her when she did? Why does he get to shut down like this? “Let’s go.”

She doesn’t get up. She can feel her hands shaking still, and it feels like she’s the one that got hit with the toxin instead of him. Is it always this easy for him, slipping from whatever that was back into Batman?



“I—“ He glares at her, and she shuts up. She wonders if Scarecrow released a low dose into this place or if it’s natural terror running through her veins. Her heart is still pounding from the desperate search. “B, I thought you might’ve been dead.”

“I’m not,” he tells her, like that should be enough. “We’re wasting moonlight, Robin.”


“You can’t— you can’t seriously just expect to go back to patrol.” That is an actual surprise. Sure, he’s always obstinate about continuing to patrol even when hurt. Sure, she’s needed to talk him into taking care of himself before. But this is different, right? He was clearly remembering something of an order of magnitude she hadn’t realized was possible. Not with him. He’s supposed to be a little fucked up, not broken. She didn’t sign up for that.

“We need to find Scarecrow.”

“He’ll show up again sooner or later, B, you can’t just...” He can, though. And he will. She wonders how long ago whatever that was. There’s been gaps in his appearances, gaps where something fucked up could’ve happened, though most of them before she knew him. Hell, most were before she even knew Tim, and those tended to get chalked up to Justice League shit. Off world. Whatever that was, it could’ve been at any point. Maybe even before he put on the cowl for the first time. “You can’t just shut me out like this.”

It’s really none of her business, if he doesn’t want to tell her. Still, she thinks back to last summer. Tim worrying because the League was gone for longer than Bruce said they would be. She’d told him that Bruce was Batman, plus, he was with the rest of the heavy hitters, and so it would be okay. She remembers the dark circles under his eyes, the fear in his voice when he’d said, ”but he doesn’t have me.” Those fears only seemed to grow more justified as the months went on.

This was before he’d quit, obviously. Maybe the prolonged absence was part of why. It’s not like anyone told Stephanie what had happened, when Bruce was finally back.

“I’m not shutting you out.” She almost laughs at that. Of course he is. Maybe it’s nothing special, maybe he does this to everyone, even Alfred. But that doesn’t make it any less shutting her out. “Robin, do you need to go back to the Batcave?”

And of course, now it’s about her. What she needs. She’s pretty sure there’s an implicit threat there too— if she says yes, then he’ll think she can’t be Robin anymore. And she wants that, right? He needs her, at the very least, even if he won’t admit it. So she shakes her head, gets up, and tries to burry her fears. If he doesn’t want to talk about it, she can’t make him. He’s Batman. He can save himself, except when she needs to save him.

She can’t save him if he doesn’t let her. So she just has to hope he doesn’t need her to.

She doesn't really know what to categorize this as. She doesn't want to put it down as the first of anything, because that means there'll be more, and that scares her almost as much as anything.