Chapter Text
It started small, as large, dangerous things are wont to do.
Steph can't remember it first happening. But she remembered being twelve in gym class, loathing the yearly jog-a-thons because of how her knees would ache for days afterwards, shooting pain in the hours immediately after making her long to sit and be still.
She remembers mentioning it, offhandedly, to a boy in her class. It's a fancy school, some hoity toity private school she'd won a special scholarship too, and she hated being there with every fiber of her tiny being. She wasn't like the other kids, beautiful or genius level smart or rich. She was beginning to get acne and pimples and talked either too much or too little and always sat on chairs like she was ready to leap out of them or sat and twitched in ways that irritated her teachers.
So she really hadn't meant to say anything to the boy with the blue eyes, but after he'd lapped her again he'd slowed and checked on her, and it had slipped. And he had frowned and raced off and then the next time she passed the coaches she was pulled aside and looked over before her coach, the gym teacher, sighed and lectured her on acclimating herself to physical exercise. A little pain was no excuse to try to escape running laps.
Steph's cheeks burned, and she glared at the boy as he jogged past, eyes lingering curiously. After all, this wasn't anything she hadn't heard before.
A year later, she still hates her school and most her classmates. They are still beautiful and untouchable in a way she will never be.
But always by her side is that tattle-boy, eyes still blue and concerned when they try to race up the stairs after gym class and suddently, startlingly, her left hip gives out and she falls with terrified gasp as her heart skips a beat and she waits to tumble down the steps.
But Tim doesn't let her fall, catching her wrists with big, terrified eyes before helping her scoop up the papers that have scattered all through the stairways now.
"I-I tripped," she lies for reasons she doesn't completely understand. But she knows, somehow, that he wouldn't understand if she'd told him the truth, that her body had been locking at the joints on cold days and giving out in ways that joints aren't meant to.
"I know," Tim says, voice still shaking. "I've got you."
He doesn't leave her side the rest of the way up the stairs, sticking by her as they're both scolded by the teachers for running late to math.
She is glad to escape to high school. Its a small charter school, where she doesn't have to take gym and the focus are on the arts so she isn't the only one who takes it a bit slow when she goes up and down the stairs.
Tim is, still, right next to her the whole way, although he goes to a different school. Something more prestigious, better befitting of him. She'd been accepted too, and had thought of it, thought of the swim team and of the college opportunities and her friend with the big blue eyes--
And then she'd been asked by Cassandra, with big brown eyes and an unexpected closeness that last year of middle school, not to be left alone and "Please Steph, I've never had to go to a new school before or meet new people."
And Steph was, admittedly, a weak bitch.
Tim understood, had been there to join in the chaos that was the three of them on the school yard. The three of them playing and tumbling about until Steph's knees and hips ached and then they'd sit in the sun and be still and quiet.
A part of her longs for it, the stillness and the warmth of the hot summer sun on her joints, as she gets stuck in the library because the room is overly air conditioned and her knees have locked in place. It's painful and confusing and when she mentions it to adults she always gets told how she's too young to have "those sorts of problems" yet.
But that doesn't make them go away.
That winter is the first time her hands ache.
It catches her off guard, one day, as she goes to grip a pen just for her hand to ache like she'd thrown a bad punch and the pen to go tumbling to the floor. Cass, bless her, leans over to grab it, eyes trailing quietly over Steph. But she doesn't ask, the same way she doesn't ask when Steph leans over into her side quietly after a long day because it hurts too much to hold herself up.
It is the same way Cass leans into her in the mornings, as they sit there together and don't mention the bruises around her wrists or neck. The same way they sit together and don't talk as the court cases start, and they both get dark circles from nights staying awake (from stress, from homework and part-time work, from midnight texts "what's changed?" "u good?" "come get me?" and all the words and conversations that feel to fragile to say out loud, and sneaking out to crawl into Tim's room where he's waiting up for them with hot cocoa mugs).
With the warmth of spring the ache fades, and Steph wonders if it was all in her head.
But spring brings other changes as well.
Spring brings court rulings and adoption papers, and a happy-yet-painful twinge in Steph's knees and hips as she helps move Cass's boxes into the room next to Tim's, because legally they're both Waynes now, and isn't that just something?
Steph had never really given much thought to Tim's adoptive father other than her general "eat the rich, instill anarchy, make a dog mayor" narative (gotta have those big life goals, after all). He was a very rich man, and they'd gotten along fine, each existing in the fringes of each other's lives. But he'd known what Cass had meant to them, wasn't willing to let her go into the uncertainty of the foster system or lose herself trying to emancipate herself.
So. That was that settled. And Steph was grateful. They study for finals together all spread out on Cass' new, big bed. Tim and his brothers--Cass's brothers too now--stampede in the halls like wild bulls, and they giggle as they hear screeching when the baby inevitably trips over a lego Tim's left in his way.
Cass always winces though, just a bit, when they go to settle on the bed. Her mattress is still new and plushy, and every time Steph goes to lay on it, her back pops in a few spots along with her hips. It's loud more than it hurts, feels like nothing more than popping your knuckles after writting a long essay. Sometimes it feels good, even, if it's a spot that's been bothering her during the day. But Cass' body doesn't do that, nor does Tim's when he comes in with a snack and complaints about his own school day.
Steph gets a job when summer comes. It's nothing fancy, just a receptionist-type gig. It's fun work, even if her coworkers are overly intrusive and excessively catty. She just puts her head down and tries to live without getting pulled into the drama.
If she resents them for it, then that's for herself and Tim and Cass to know.
Her hours are long, but she still goes to see her friends when she isn't too exhausted. They've worked it out so she can work full time in the summer, and after school part-time during the other seasons. And that's exhausting and overwhelming but it's fine because she has to save for college somehow, right? And she's so looking forward to that, has always looked forward to that escape from Gotham. Her chance to go and live.
The thing is, she has to do a lot of lifting, at her job. By the time August comes round her shoulders ache and feel as though they're grinding in their sockets.
She only tells Cass and Tim, because when she'd mentioned it to any adults in passing, they'd laughed and told her she was too young to hurt, at fifteen.
Things get worse from there.
Turns out, fifteen is a hard age to be. Fifteen year olds are mean with sharp tongues and pointy elbows. Steph tries at first, but since she has to work after school she can't join clubs and doesn't really ever have time to just casually hang out anymore. People learn to stop asking, and she tries not to let it bother her.
Her hands start aching again in the late fall, by the time winter proper rolls around, she hardly has the motivation to write notes anymore. But her classes are hard and she needs her grades to stay up. For college.
Sometimes, when Cass isn't too busy with her new art friends, she sneaks Steph warming packets. They loosen her fingers, and help keep the pain at bay.
But it's only sometimes, because Cass doesn't have the same responsibilities that Steph has. Which is fine. They still talk, Cass is still her best friend. She might not be Cass'. But that was to be expected. She and Tim live together now, are closer than ever. And she spends the night over there half the time anyways, because her mom isn't usually home and when she is they're always getting into fights.
Other parts of her life are getting worse too. She remembers, in the vague way any teenage girl does, that she hated getting her first period. It was gross and it hurt, and she'd tucked herself up in her bed panicking over it that first day. But when she reaches fifteen she comes to the startling realization that since the age of thirteen she's had one maybe... every third month? And that's fine, hormones and what not, she'll regulate as she gets older. But when there is one coming she can feel it in her bones. Her ovaries cramp as she ovulates, and her hips become especially loose and sore. And if it wasn't for Cass, petting her hair worriedlied as she laid scrunched around a hot pad, she'd have thought it was normal.
Life moves on.
Junior year is better. She does well on her ACTs, not perfect, but a 30 on her first try. 32s in Reading and Language, 30 in Science, 29 in Math. It'll have to be good enough, she decides, because unlike Cass and Tim she can't really afford to take it more than once, and her inconsistent/flakey coworkers make it hard to request time off.
She finishes almost all her requirements to graduate, and thinks about doing so early. But then she'd miss Tim and Cass, who are enjoying high school to it's fullest extent, so she doesn't.
That winter, Cass gets a heated blanket. Steph almost purrs the first time her friend turns it on, the heat seeping into places that Steph hadn't even realized were sore.
A few things happen that December.
After a few rounds of arguments between Steph and her mom, she finally goes to see a doctor. He tells her she has scholiosis and wide hips that are messing up the alignment of her knees, that's all. She isn't sure she believes him, because he tells her all this in that placating, annoying old-white-man voice.
She also is forced into getting a car when her mom makes an agreement with a friend without telling Steph. She nearly cries when her bank account is drained of all her savings for a clunky Jeep that starts breaking down a week after she purchases it.
But at least it's safe.
Safer than several of Bruce's tiny fast sport cars, which they all find out crumple like a coke can on impact. It comes on an icy day, when a drunk man in a mini van runs a red. He's fine, because alcohol always loosens people up and why wouldn't he be fine, and it makes Steph see red from the moment she picks up Tim's call and hears Cass crying on the other end because Dick and Dami are in the hospital because they weren't drunk and loose and they aren't ok.
She drives herself over to their house where they all crush against each other, and against their other brother Jason who has gone white and silent in a way she isn't used to. All these years the older boys had seemed infallible. She'd gotten countless head pats and teasing advice and pulls to her ponytails from these boys and had, in some ways, forgotten that she wasn't part of the family at all.
A few days later she's still there, in the kitchen helping Jason and Alfred bake a cake, when Dick comes home. He'd been lucky, they'd been told, just some bruised lungs, minor trauma. He scoops them all into his arms and cries into their hair, and for a moment she feels awkward, but mostly she feels like family, so she cries too.
Damian doesn't come home until after school starts again. He'd been on the side of the car that had been the initial impact point, and several spots in his spine had effectively been shattered. But his mom is involved with some fancy medical people and his dad is Bruce Wayne, so instead of a life of paralysis he's given cutting-edge prosthetics in his spine. After a while more, he starts to slowly move again, looking less and less like a kicked puppy and more and more like the little gremlin child she's long since known to be her little brother.
That spring when she and Cass try to study for finals, they realize they're in entirely different classes. It's late when they finally give up, nearing two in the morning, and their bodies are heavy with the dread over their nearing AP exams.
When they finally head up to Cass' room Steph hears her knees and hips protest the whole way up and groans loudly at the top of the stairs. Jason pokes his head out of his room to glare at her and she flips him off, knuckles popping at the sudden movement. He snorts, Cass does not, narrowing her eyes.
"Is it getting worse?"
"Dunno," Steph shrugs. "Hard to keep track anymore. I can always tell you when it's about to rain though, I could make up a whole percussion section in an orchestra."
Cass takes her hand and gently rubs at her fingers until they enter her room and find Damian stretched out over her heated blanket. Steph giggles behind her fingers as Cass shoos him away like he's a grumpy little kitten, and she gives him a sympathetic little pat on the head as he's hearded towards his own room.
They settle in for the night, and Steph thinks Cass is asleep until warm arms tighten around her and the other girl buries her head in her shoulder. "I don't think you're ok, Steph."
In the morning, they stare at each other awkwardly, coffee in their hands and sleep in their eyes until Tim walks in. Steph tries to get up to say hello, only for the symphony that is her body to protest the movement. Tim stops and stares in horror, and when she turns her neck there's a loud pop from just below her skull and then a smaller one in her jaw. The spinal one doesn't hurt, but her jaw does, and she tries not to make any noise. Outside the sky is dark and lighting crackles. Figures.