#I continue to chug along on the spooky tim-centric case fic (which also ft. a lot of cass!) but I wanted to post a new entry

[weekend-conspiracy-theorist]

a cassandra cain detective story (technically set in the tim&steph role swap au)

"Look," Nightwing said. His voice was perfectly pleasant, even as he crouched, somehow menacing, near the shoulders of the man prone on the ground. Nightwing's black and blue toned fingers curled in the man's shirt, drawing it uncomfortably tight around the man's neck and holding him a few inches off of the ground. "The quicker you talk, the quicker this is over."

Cassandra melted out of the shadows, her footsteps silent and the tattered ends of her cloak swirling about her knees. Her Black Bat costume was not quite as hauntingly terrifying as her old Batgirl costume, a deliberate choice she had made in its inception, but she knew that the figure she cut remained... unnerving. Still, the man's eyes flicked, beseechingly, over Nightwing's shoulder towards her.

The expression that flashed across Nightwing's face in answer had too many teeth to be a smile. "Trust me, buddy," he said, his voice sinking into a lower register. "I'm the cuddly one. Where's the kid?"

"I don't--" He swallowed hard against the rasp of his voice, but Nightwing's hand only twisted tighter in his shirt. "Don't know what you're talking about," the guy rasped. His hands hovered in the air as if he wanted to grab at Nightwing's wrist but didn't quite have the guts.

"I don't believe you."

Neither did Cassandra.

Her eyes raked over the room; raked over the other groaning kidnappers that Nightwing had already bound and zip tied. The scene was not, for once, set against the backdrop of an abandoned warehouse--merely an abandoned storefront. By the empty plastic cylinders and bright but faded paint on the walls, she thought perhaps it had been a candy shop, once upon a time. Her gloved fingertips drifted through the air as she moved through the room, trusting the interrogation to her brother.

He had well over a decade of practice at being intimidating, even if he was the cuddly one.

Cassandra didn't try, actively, to figure out what was striking her as so odd about the tableau in front of her; she simply let the details wash over her, eyes dark behind the lenses of her mask, boots silent against the linoleum. The fight between Nightwing and the kidnappers was spelled out in scuff marks over the dusty floor, in the glitter of glass from the window he'd launched himself through, but--

This spot did not belong, she thought. She leaned forward at the waist, the ends of her short hair just long enough to brush against her shoulders as she read the story written in the dust. Someone had sprawled awkwardly to the floor here. They had scrambled for their feet. There were four streaks at the further edge, the desperate tracks of fingertips as someone clawed themselves into motion.

The streaks were quite thin. Too thin to have been left by adult hands.

"Nightwing," she said, her voice quiet but cutting easily through the nonsense ramblings of the kidnapper. She did not say anything else, did not even wait to see if Nightwing so much as glanced up at her as she followed the desperate, flighty footprints--

Cassandra vaulted the counter much as the girl had, her own hand set deliberately to the side of the smudged handprint the child had left behind, leaving it intact, and raced, silent and fleet-footed through the backroom and out into the alleyway at the back of the building. There was no dust here to preserve the child's path. There was a security camera on the building across the street.

She tapped the comm in her ear. Oracle was busy with the Birds tonight, but she was not the only member of their team capable of accessing camera footage. "Agent A, pull any footage you can find of my location from the last half hour. Please," she added, belated, as she leapt up to catch the smooth metal pipe of a piece of scaffolding and pulled herself up onto the platform. The tarp attached to the next level up flapped in the chill Gotham breeze.

"What am I looking for?" Alfred asked crisply, forgiving her slip in manners without comment. They worked urgent, desperate jobs, which often left little room for niceties. Besides, even at her worst Cassandra was still more polite than Bruce.

"Thirteen-year-old girl, African American. Barefoot. Her mother said she was wearing a purple shirt and blue jeans when she was taken. She probably still is."

The child did not appear to have been pursued, based on the dust trail through the store; Cassandra believed she must have broken herself free in the chaos of Nightwing's appearance, unwitting or untrusting as to his ability to help her. She was unlikely to have made it far. Her dust trail showed clearly that she was no longer wearing the black converse her mother had described, though Cassandra had no way of knowing what had happened to them in the last six hours.

From the higher vantage point of the scaffolding--left behind after an ill-fated attempt to rennovate the building behind the old candy shop--Cassandra studied the nearby intersections of the alleyways. So many directions the girl could have run. Too many.

She was smart enough to use a distraction to run, and probably smart enough to head for her mother, but did she know where she was? Did she know which direction would take her back to her apartment?

Cassandra let the scene wash over her, trusting her body to sense more than her conscious mind could notice. It was different from how Bruce worked a crime scene, from her brothers and Stephanie and even Tim, though his deductions sometimes seemed similarly instinctive because of the speed with which his sharply analytical mind moved.

But then, Cassandra herself worked differently than they did. With effort, she could always puzzle out her own thought processes, painstakingly convert them to causes and effects and trains of logic which another could understand, but she was rarely conscious of them happening that way in the moment. The others saw the landscape with its subtle details and its clues; Cassandra saw how a person could, would, might move through it.

(For example: the child was thirteen, intelligent, brave, panicked. She would pursue distance first, before she slowed down to try and figure out her plan. She would avoid open space; empty streets. She would avoid the broken glass of the beer bottle shattered across the ground, and if she had failed to, there would be the sheen of blood in the distant light of the street lamp. All Cassandra could see was green.

Those many potential escape routes whisked themselves away, one by one, until Cassandra had just a few left to contemplate.)

"I'm heading east," Cassandra told Nightwing over the comms, her voice a murmur in the night. "Take the north when you're done inside, if Agent A hasn't turned up anything by then."

The comm double-clicked in confirmation, and Cassandra climbed swiftly and silently from the scaffolding to the rooftop, heading east along the alleyway, eyes sharp and ears sharper. The night washed over her, its chill seeping insidiously beneath her body armor but held at bay by the burn of her muscles from a hard night of patrol.

Nightwing was in Gotham for the week while Batman was out of town with the Justice League; he'd been flagged down by the stolen girl's determined, terrified mother even before the Bat Signal had lit the night sky. Tasha Martin said she was glad she'd found him and not the Bat, because she'd always found that Batman to be a very suspicious character. Forty minutes later, Commissioner Gordon had been briefly lost for words when Robin informed him, tartly, that Nightwing was already in hot pursuit of the men Leila Martin's father had hired to kidnap her two days before the custody hearing, and unless there was something else he needed to talk about, then Robin was too busy with his own cases to waste any more time talking to him.

(Oracle, always multi-tasking, had unmuted herself on their comms just long enough to laugh her ass off before she returned to whatever mischief Huntress and the Black Canary had become embroiled in.)

Nightwing had requested Black Bat for back up when the night stretched onwards with little progress. Kidnappings were incredibly time sensitive, he'd said, and clearly he needed another detective on the case. The words still glowed in Cassandra's chest, hours later. Even after years spent in this life, even having held down the entirety of Hong Kong on her own for months the way Nightwing held Blüdhaven and Batman had once solitarily held Gotham, it felt sometimes as if her value was located solely in her fists and not her mind.

She couldn't blame that feeling on her family; her own doubt was too insidious. She knew she was observant and intelligent, more than capable of making the leaps of logic required for detective work, but she also knew that she struggled with the soft skills. She didn't have the network of informants that Red Hood had or the well-established, well-trusted aliases of Batman. She wasn't as effortlessly charming as Batgirl or Nightwing, or even as sharply meticulous as Robin.

Cassandra knew that she had her own talents. That she'd been the primary Bat of Blüdhaven, Hong Kong, and Gotham alike at various points, that she'd clawed together the clues to Batman's disappearance and simultaneously dismantled a large portion of the League of Assassins with minimal assisstance. It was still too easy at times to fall back on the first language she'd ever known and let someone else take point on the detective work.

But not tonight.

The red Impala caught her attention because it stopped for a stoplight. It had been close enough to the intersection when the light turned yellow that a brief, minor increase of speed could have easily kept it from being caught at the light--but it stopped, gently and easily and inconspicuously.

("Smart criminals," Bruce's voice murmured in her subconscious, a lesson from her Batgirl days, "don't drive like get away drivers. They do the speed limit. They use their blinkers. They don't give cops reasons to pull them over.")

Cassandra came to a stop, crouched on the corner of the roof overlooking the intersection. "Agent A," she murmured, "can you tell me what kind of vehicle Howie Martin drives?"

(She had covered several blocks now. It had been just over thirty-four minutes since Nightwing had crashed into the candy store. If the child had thought she had put enough distance between herself and her kidnappers, she might have ventured onto the main street, hoping for a landmark to turn her back towards her home. With the one way streets between here and the closest major interchange, her father would likely have ended up on this street on his way to the candy shop from another part of the city. How long would it take him to subdue a thirteen-year-old girl?)

"A red Chevy Impala," Alfred answered. "License plate--"

"C87 XJU," Cassandra murmured.

"Precisely."

"You have eyes on it?" Nightwing asked sharply.

"Yes."

Alfred rattled off Cassandra's location so that Nightwing could rendezvous, knowing that she had already tuned them both out.

The traffic light turned green. Before Howie Martin could take his foot off of the brake, the Black Bat had dropped from the sky to land neatly on the crosswalk, directly in front of his car.

They stared at each other through the windshield, Martin's eyes wide and bloodshot; the Bat's shadow stretching ominously across the ground from the single, flickering halogen street lamp that illuminated the street. The figure she cut was unnerving. Silent. Tattered cloak and bandage wrapped hands, dark hair, sharp mask.

Martin attempted to point his car around her, and the Bat stalked, silently, to keep herself directly in front of him. He swallowed hard.

His hand shook as he rolled the window down, but he did a decent job of holding his voice steady as he called out, "Look, I don't want no trouble, all right?"

"Where is your daughter, Mr. Martin?" Cassandra asked. She did not have to raise her voice for it to cut like a knife through the night. "Is she in your trunk?"

Startled, frightened, Howie Martin slammed his foot down on the gas pedal--

Black Bat was already moving, her leap taking her to the hood of the car and then sliding neatly to the roof, her fingers digging into the lip between roof and windshield to keep her in place as the vehicle lurched underneath her. She leaned over, fearless in her trust of her own grip, and reached through the open window to unlock and then open the car door--

Martin shouted something that she was too focused to parse, scrabbling to grab the door before it could swing too far open, and Cassandra obligingly slammed it back towards him. His elbow bent strangely when the door contacted solidly with his reaching palm, and Martin howled with pain and rage but had the forethought to slam on the brakes.

Black Bat rolled neatly as her momentum threw her forward off of the car, the rubber tread of her boots biting into the asphalt as she skidded to a stop. She sprang back towards the car, faster than any human without a metagene had any right to be, and bounced Martin's forehead off of the steering wheel before handcuffing him to it. Then she threw the car into park and stole the keys.

"Subdued," she said, simply, and Nightwing huffed a laugh over the comms. She could see the lithe shadow of him in her periphery, still several buildings away.

"Of course he is."

Cassandra moved to the trunk of the car, where muffled banging and groaning was clearly emanating from, now that the engine had cut off. It was an older vehicle, maybe from the nineties or 2000s, requiring her to manually insert a key in order to open the trunk.

"Hello," she told Leila, as the child blinked up at her against the sudden light. Her hands were bound behind her, and she was gagged with a rag and duct tape. "Your mother is very worried about you."