#this is EXTREMELY unpolished and idk if I'm fully happy with it but what the hell you're getting it anyways

[storm-and-starlight]

This is a very short thing that was supposed to be about Steph talking about her experiences with Robin and ended up about me being completely unable to articulate my feelings about Robin as a concept and the way the role has been passed on and then shoving that inability onto a fictional character! It might be completely incoherent but here you go anyways, I had fun writing it.

"Listen," Steph says, "no, no, listen. I was Robin for like, two months--"

"One and a half months," Cass says, dryly amused in that way she has, and Steph swivels around to point at her, somehow managing to keep the wobbly top scoop of her ice cream from toppling fifteen stories down to Jefferson Street -- Bat-balance-training! Surprisingly useful! -- and says "not the point, you pedant, you're as bad as Damian."

"Ouch," says Duke from where he's lounging comfortably back against an AC vent.

"Red Robin knows better," Steph says primly, even thougheven one and a half months is being extremely generous with her time as Robin. "My point is that being Robin is..." and then she abruptly runs out of words, sitting there on the roof of a not-quite-condemned apartment building decked out as Spoiler in broad daylight, staring at nothing in particular. "It's..." How the hell does she say this? "It's like nothing else in the world."

"Yes," says Cass, still amused in that deep-down way, and Steph says "no" because Cass is still being a pedant for the hell of it, and Black Bat tips her head at her, quick and birdlike.

"Is this some secret Bat-code I don't know about?" Duke asks, jokingly, and Steph puts both her hands to her forehead, ice-cream and all, and says "no."

"...okay?"

"It's--" Steph says, and then "here, hold this," and Duke rather confusedly accepts her cone in his free hand. "It's like nothing else in the world. It's-- look," and she's rambling, she knows she is, but she's not Jason, she can't just whip out some random quote from some famous dead guy at the drop of a hat, and she doesn't know how to put this into words, "look," she says, and breathes deep, eyes shut. "I've been Spoiler since I was like, fifteen, I've been part of the whole-- capes and crimes and vigilantes thing since -- actually, since I was a kid. I was fucking Batgirl, okay, I had the freakin' Bat on my chest and everything, I pulled off Spoiler solo for like three years straight, and none of it--" and she winces around the sudden shocking ache in her chest, "None of it was like being Robin."

Cass is looking at her, she can feel it. Looking at her and knowing exactly what's curling up in her chest, even if she doesn't know why. Cass is a Wayne, sure, adopted and everything, but she was never--

God, how does she explain this to someone who's never been a part of it?

"When I was a kid," she starts, still with her eyes closed and the smell of Gotham's back alleys on her tongue, "even just getting to see him was like-- like magic was real, just for the night. Like getting to know a secret, the good kind. Like being part of a secret. And being Robin was-- was all of that, all over again, except I got to be Robin." She opens her eyes, shoves her hood back, looks up at the patchy blue-and-white of the Gotham summer sky. "Being Batgirl was really, really cool, and Oracle's way nicer about, like, everything, and I kicked ass--"

"Yes," Cass says, and Steph holds her hand out for a fistbump without even looking.

"-- and I'll be real, I sucked at being Robin and everyone knew it, but I'd still-- I'd put on the costume and go out on the streets, and--" and she flings her hands up, because she can't find the words for the way everything felt like the best kind of dream and hyperreal both at once, for the sheer impossible pride of standing there at Batman's side looking over the city, for the way it felt to know that everything Robin had ever been to anyone, that was her. "-- and it was just. Me. My life. I'd wake up in the morning and eat breakfast and go over to Batman's house and go be a superhero, and for a while it was all that magic and I got to be a part of it for a little while." She doesn't look at Duke's face, at Cass's, at the endless stretch of the city in front of her. She looks at her hands in their armored purple gauntlets and sees, for a moment, red and green and gold. "I got to be Robin."

"Yes," says Cass, and Steph squeezes her eyes shut and breathes out. They still don't get it, she knows -- this all started out as 'so working with Batman sucks sometimes, right?' because basically everyone, former Robins included, bitches about Bruce sometimes (or all time, if your name starts with J and ends with ason Todd) and they probably won't get it -- she doesn't get it, because she was only Robin for a month and a half, how can she possibly know what it's like to grow up in the cape and colors -- but she was still Robin for a month and a half and it was like nothing else in the world.

(Note: In the setting of this fic, Steph didn't actually suck at Robin, she was already good in the role and would have gotten even better, but 1. she struggled with the step up in intensity from Spoiler (being Robin requires the same level of mental, intellectual, and physical commitment as being Batman, and that's a lot) and 2. Bruce struggled with the transition from hypercompetent, highly independent Tim Drake to equally-independent-but-a-lot-louder-about it Steph Brown and was. not great to her about it. very little outright but a lot of silently implied "Tim would have already been done with this task" or "what do you mean you don't know how a grignard reaction works?" It left some marks, and she's a lot happier as Spoiler and less directly-connected to Bruce.)