Chapter Text
The orphan was motionless, silent, feeling time slip by as though it didn’t really exist. Only a moment ago, only an eternity, she had shouted herself hoarse against the padded walls of her cell, screaming out the mantra that defined her life in every kick, every punch, every motion of every muscle. It had sung in the metal of her swords, cried out in the impact of her wooden bō against the swinging bag that had been freshly installed that morning, but that had already spilt its matted padding out onto the floor.
The words without speech served to focus her mind and body; phrases, motifs and metaphors repeated throughout her life until they defined her, becoming a declaration of all she was.
Combine the subtext and deeper meaning, the sentences that trained her eyes and ears, the phrases that had become the reflex actions of a weapon waiting only for a hand to wield it, and you would find they form a single word. Assassin.
An assassin must think, an assassin must adapt, must speculate and understand the intentions of others, but only when she is given permission to do so. Only with orders, a target. Without them, all she has to do is keep herself ready.
Even when the initiates stopped coming to bring food or water or change the bag, the orphan kept herself in readiness for her orders. She maintained her mantra, abbreviating paragraphs to suit her reduced circumstances, managing the gradual decline in muscle mass as her caloric intake dropped.
The decline into that state had been a slow one; delayed meals, collapsed routines, a growing distraction in the initiates, their unspoken speech filled with worries about concepts far grander than an assassin need concern herself with. Its end was abrupt, the routine resuming as if it had never stopped. The initiates were still worried, but their cause was new. The fear of the unknown.
Through it all, the orphan persisted. Waiting to be used.
‘Used’ meant many things. Most of the time, it meant training. Instructor after instructor, each gagged, each speaking of different places, different cultures, different philosophies. From each she learned how to move, how to fight, how to kill, gaining fluency in all the languages of violence.
Sometimes, she was used through outside necessity. She was brought before doctors to treat the injuries she sustained in her training, or for inspections carried out in their own family of languages – the tongues of the body’s functions, rather than its motions. She knew they monitored what she ate, how she exercised, the secrets of her blood and her cells, but she didn’t understand it. She wasn’t required to.
Occasionally, she was moved, her world upended in the transit from one cell to another, passing through any number of spaces in-between. Sometimes she was brought back; her current cell was one she had inhabited before.
Rarely, however, she was sent out into the world beyond. The towering city built of layers upon layers, the new smothering the old as it climbed up out of the ocean. She was given tasks; targets she had to follow through its twisted streets. Most crawled through the city like lumbering animals, toddling along the pavement in a graceless, almost voiceless gait. Sometimes, however, she was sent to follow the ones who moved above the streets in a masterful performance; a silent opera for an audience of one.
She knew they were important. Knew he was important. She didn’t ask why. If she needed to know, the information would be conveyed to her.
Two knocks at the door. Curt, quick raps that were nevertheless quiet enough to be barely audible. A second later the door opened, electronic bolts sliding back into their housing as dull light flooded into her cell.
The orphan was already rising from her bed, taking a moment to adjust the fit of her attire before directing a bow at the assassin in the doorway, silhouetted by the harsh electric light that was overwhelming the dull glow of the space beyond. Her body was clad in lightweight armour, her torso in wraps that left her midriff exposed. A purple headscarf veiled her face, leaving only her eyes and fringe bare. The orphan listened to those eyes as they assessed her with the clinical attention of a professional, the dubious glance of a doubter and, undercutting it all, the gaze of a zealot that colours all it sees in faith.
“The Demon’s Head awaits,” she spoke, lips flapping and chest constricting as air was forced through her throat. The orphan didn’t struggle to hear the core of the message; the sounds meant little to her, but she knew the motions a mouth made when it pronounced her master’s name.
She also knew something was wrong. The motions were correct, but the bottomless and unimpeachable well of devotion that typically accompanied them was torn, frayed. Uncertainty warred with certainty in the assassin.
Nevertheless, the orphan clasped a fist in a palm and bowed. It was the only response her training allowed.
She crossed the threshold of her cell, out into the wide, dank corridors of the subterranean sanctuary, with faded electric lights casting a greenish tinge through glass bulbs clouded with age. Through long habit, the orphan stepped soundlessly through the sections where rainwater had seeped through the ground to pool on the floor, her sandal-style boots barely rippling the surface.
She wore much the same uniform as the assassin, a symbol of their shared devotion to a cause greater than themselves. It held no special significance to her; she’d worn many uniforms throughout her life, reflecting the changing minders and locations that had shaped her.
Leather gaiters connected her boots to armoured kneepads, open on the inside leg in a way that exposed her footwraps. Above the pads, the wide silk fabric of purple harem pants shifted soundlessly with ever step, belted with a band of leather that supported webbing straps for the sheaths of the two stiletto knives resting on her thighs.
Above the waist she wore a tight halter top beneath a short metal breastplate, its gleam hidden beneath a grey leather cover. The emblem of the Demon’s Head sat proudly upon it, a monstrous grey head with angular ears. Her hands were gloved, with strapped bracers stretching down from above her elbows, ending in inch-long metal spikes that jutted out from her knuckles. Three throwing knives sat in sheaths on each of her forearms, ready to be drawn at a moment’s notice.
And she would draw them, at the first sign of a threat. She’d been tested that way before, sudden attacks shattering some familiar routine until she had internalised the need to always be ready, to never feel safe. The strangeness of the situation only sharpened a mental blade that never left her hand.
Warily, the orphan took an almost unconscious half-step back from the great metal doors at the end of the hall, embossed with depictions of the ancient machine-totems of their sanctuary. The assassin hit the electrical switch bolted to the wall, activating the diesel generator embedded in the floor. As the doors were hauled open through the brute application of electric force, the orphan was confronted by the full sights and sounds of a shocking rush of activity that seemed entirely out of place in the decayed ruin of Wonder City.
The subterranean avenue that ran parallel to the Temple was almost crowded by the work of two dozen initiates, assassins and agents of the League. The dead tree that blocked the doors to the ruins of the underground city itself was being sawed apart, the long-desiccated wood stacked neatly out of the way, alongside refuse sacks filled with waste gathered from the ruined businesses that lined the avenue.
In its place, initiates in leather aprons and blunt metal welding masks were in the process of raising a more formal barricade, with great steel girders being wedged into place to prevent the doors from opening or being forced open by anything less than explosives. A single assassin supervised the work, her arms folded as she looked up at the men with disdain.
Three more assassins were unloading supplies from a trailer attached to a forklift truck that must have been driven in through the secret entrances in the Tower’s surface structure, or through the accessways of the old TYGER Security complex. Some of the crates and cases still bore their logo, the sight of it bringing old memories to the forefront of the orphan’s mind.
At the far end of the avenue, the metal doors were sliding open with the squeal of a mechanism only recently coaxed back into life. A wiry old Sikh stepped warily across the threshold, as though he was expecting an attack. The orphan recognised him immediately; a surgeon sworn to the League.
The assassin on sentry duty quickly spoke into the doctor’s ear, her throat barely contracting as she pitched her voice low enough that only he could hear her. The orphan could see the tension in her posture; if the doctor gave the wrong reaction to her words, she was prepared to pounce in an instant.
She watched as the doctor’s posture shifted, a momentary surprise being quickly smothered beneath indoctrinated acceptance. He’d passed the test. The assassin gestured with a hand, pointing the physician towards an abandoned shopfront lit from within by sterile white lighting, where a pair of initiates were unloading green boxes of medical supplies.
As he left to attend his station, another figure limped through the doors, an assassin clutching a field dressing to her wounded chest. They must be answering a recall order, the orphan realised; messages left in dead drops across the city with markers pointing to this sanctuary in particular, calling the League of Assassins back.
Her escort strode purposefully through the organised chaos, casting glances at each new change as though she was unsure what to make of it. As though there could be doubt or uncertainty in the League’s actions. That wasn’t new. The orphan wasn’t so isolated she hadn’t known about the League’s internal conflict, but it seemed some strange change in purpose had risen from the victory.
Or the defeat, she considered.
She was led off the avenue, through the doors to the Temple’s antechamber, lined with basins that had once promised life-giving liquid to those deemed worthy enough. The greenish fluid was long gone, had been gone ever since she had returned to this place. Now the omnipresent pipes carried brackish water with only the faintest glow, pumped through the system by the mechanisms that had been in motion for over a century.
There were two assassins guarding the doors to the Temple itself, straight-backed and armed with staves. The sight of it caught the orphan short as she finally noticed the absence it signified; none of the assassins had been carrying their swords. They saluted her escort, bringing clenched fists to their chests before hauling open the ornate doors to the lair of the Demon’s Head.
It had been a Temple, yes, but that phrase alone could not encompass everything the space was. Once it had been a laboratory, where the Demon’s Head had unpicked the mysteries of Lazarus; the formula for eternal life. It was his residence, a palace and a sanctuary where he had withdrawn into seclusion, ignoring the petitions of Gotham's city council as his chemical experiments slowly drove Wonder City insane. It had even been a tomb, in the periods between his resurrections. It had been lost, when Wonder City descended into a final, pandemonic madness and the city fathers of Gotham called in soldiers to drive out the Demon’s Head.
But that had been a long time ago. The orphan knew the Temple as a mouldering palace, filled with the faded finery brought over from Arabia when Wonder City was still being built. The ancient carpets and furniture competed for space with tarnished brass instruments, worn-down tiled floors and decayed bookshelves that had once contained all the wisdom of a bygone age.
Here too, the strange metamorphosis that had overtaken the League was reshaping the space. Cabling had been strung from the vaulted ceiling, descending down to dozens of server stacks spotted with a constellation of lights, while a myriad of screens hung from the supporting pillars on metal brackets newly driven into the stone.
The Demon’s throne still sat proudly at the head of the hall, but it was empty and coated in a fine layer of brick dust. Instead, the orphan was led into a side room, an old operating theatre whose tiered wooden seating now served as brackets for a whole wall of monitors clustered around an immense central screen. The system flickered into life just as the orphan crossed the threshold, lines of white text giving way to a light blue logo.
Not a demon. A bat.
There was a man standing in front of the computer, cowled and shrouded in a cape that fell to the floor. He watched the screens with a passive gaze, but even through the cloak the orphan could feel his attention on her. When he turned, it was like being exposed to the eyes of some cold predator.
He was armoured in a full-body suit of reinforced fabric, the chest sculpted to emphasise the musculature beneath. The orphan recognised the suit; he'd been wearing it as she followed him throughout the city, after she was transferred from TYGER’s custody but before the League’s troubles saw her confined to her quarters.
His eyes were hard, beneath his mask. His jaw shifted as he assessed her, taking in the full measure of her worth almost as naturally as she did his. It felt like being pinned to a board, her every outward appearance catalogued in perfect detail before the scalpel came out and he began to dismantle her entirely, leaving nothing but a perfect understanding of the thing he had just destroyed.
“Who is she?” he asked her escort, without looking away.
“We were instructed to call her ‘Orphan’ until her training was complete,” the assassin answered. “It is the only name she has ever known.”
“Who is she?” She could see anger taking hold of his body; a simmering well of rage pressing up against his outward rigidity. Unconsciously, a hand started to drift to her knife.
Why is he here, she wondered. Why have I been brought before him?
“Cassandra Cain,” the assassin answered, a meaningless sequence of sounds. She kept speaking, but the orphan struggled to follow along.
“Her father was David Cain, a League assassin, her mother Lady Shiva. She is an experiment to create the perfect warrior, capable of mastering all forms and methods of combat. The ‘One Who Is All.’ After birth, she was raised in a soundless environment, learning to interpret body language as her primary method of communication. Martial arts come as naturally to her as speech does to us.”
Her words had been almost rote; a dutiful answer in response to authority.
“Where was she raised? In Gotham?”
“Professor Hugo Strange oversaw the project. It began in the catacombs of Arkham Asylum, before the facility was formally reopened, then moved to Arkham City after the Asylum was condemned. On our return to Gotham, the League took custody of her for final conditioning.”
There were words in her speech that brought out reactions in the man in front of her. Words she knew. Strange. Arkham. Asylum. City. They were the words that defined her life, but they caused him pain.
“And Ra’s Al Ghul left her for me?”
“She was to be-” the assassin paused, her shoulders shifting as she skipped over some uncertainty. “She is a gift, for your ascension. Intended to serve as a bodyguard and a hand for you and his late daughter.”
Those last words were spoken with a mix of sorrow, shame and failure that the assassin couldn’t entirely manage to suppress; a raw wound, freshly re-opened. Interestingly, they had the same effect on the man.
The orphan hadn’t been able to follow their conversation, but through their body language she had come to understand an impossible truth. It was in the relationship between the two, the uncertain deference in the assassin’s attitude. She opened her mouth, trying to remember how the muscles in her throat worked. The voice that emerged was stilted, uncertain and without intonation.
“Demon’s Head.”
His reaction was confirmation enough. The words struck him like a dagger, a twinge of pain cascading through his body in a flinch so subtle that the orphan wondered if even he had noticed it. Once it had passed, all that was left was the immense weight pressing down upon him from all directions; the force of a title he did not want, that did not fit, but that was still inescapably his.
The orphan dropped to her knees, bowing her head before the successor to Ra’s Al Ghul, the unquestionable master of the League of Assassins by the only right that mattered.
“Get up,” the Demon’s Head snapped and she moved swiftly to obey, straightening her back and clasping her fist over her chest in a salute. She could stand like that for hours. She had.
For a moment, the Demon’s Head just looked at her. She could see something like disgust in his face and wondered in what way she had fallen short of his expectations. She expected a reprimand, but instead he turned back to the assassin.
“Leave us,” he ordered.
With the assassin gone, a comfortable silence descended on the room. This was how it was supposed to be; clear, uncomplicated. No dialogue she couldn’t understand, no speaking of her in a way she couldn’t follow. Just a hand waiting to be used.
The Demon’s Head stepped backwards and to the side, pacing away from the bank of monitors and out into the open space of the operating theatre, all the while keeping his eyes locked on her. She understood at once, letting her hand fall to her side and turning to follow his motion. When they stood five paces apart, they bowed to each other in perfect synchronicity.
The Demon’s Head began to pace around their circular arena, the orphan matching him stride for stride, feeling out his gait for herself. Even through the fabrics of his suit she could see the constrained power in his body, the mass of muscles she’d never be able to match. But her instructors had known that; her entire life had been spent training against men who were larger and stronger than her.
So she watched, her eyes listening to the motions of his suit. It was flexible, but it would have its limits. With his immense bulk more limits emerged as his muscles themselves began to interfere with his range of motion. She might not be able to punch through, but she could move around.
She watched too the language of his equipment, remembering the nights she’d spent shadowing him across the city, watching him fight. The distance had been too great to truly hear him, but it was enough to give her an opening.
She pounced, eating up the distance between them with almost weightless strides before ducking into a roll under a blow that would have knocked her off her feet. He was a giant of a man, so she drew in close enough she was almost under him, shifting out of the way of his tree trunk legs before driving a kick of her own up towards his side.
He responded with a fluid grace that belied his mass, moving back with the blow as it connected even as he drove his elbow down towards her shin. But she’d seen it coming, using the force of her own kick to roll backwards onto her feet then somersaulting backwards again as he whipped his cape around, the trailing edge passing a hair’s breadth from her face.
She dove back in, denying him the reach of his arms as she jabbed at the flexible surfaces of his armour, where the reinforced fabric had been softened for the motion of his joints. All the while, he was talking to her through every movement he made. Combat made people honest, baring their souls to her as their bodies were pushed to the furthest extent.
But as she ducked and weaved around blows that could have knocked her unconscious, she saw that the Demon’s Head wasn’t being honest. He was holding back, limiting himself as if he were teaching a child, rather than assessing a resource. She couldn’t even read if it was meant as an insult. After all, she was holding back too, out of ingrained deference.
Something burned within her at the realisation that she was being toyed with. It was anger, but she wasn’t allowed to be angry at him. If he wanted to toy with her, to use her as a simple training dummy, that was his right. But perhaps he thought she was a failure, or some mad experiment of the old League that had no place in his new vision. He hadn't been raised like her; he couldn't hear her, which meant he couldn't know her.
That was enough, a paper-thin rationalisation that pierced her own surface of duty and deference, allowing her anger to flash to the surface. She would prove herself worthy of her training in the eyes of the Demon's Head, then serve in whatever capacity he required, knowing that he was fully aware of just how capable she was.
So she drew her daggers and lunged at his throat.
He reacted, but it was slow, surprised. He reeled backwards, her first blade lightly scoring his cheek while the second – the true attack, aimed at his armpit – slammed into the reinforced armour underneath his black sigil, the force of her own blow almost breaking her wrist.
She didn't let it slow her, ducking and weaving as she directed her blades towards every vulnerability in his armour, even carving a line through his cape that was arrested on a wire-thin strip of metal. She hadn't yet killed – it was the only trial she had yet to face – but she made herself want to kill him. It was how she fought; to embody the fight in her very soul, until will and action became one and the same.
She looked beyond the kill, to the victory. To standing over his bleeding corpse and watching the light drain from his eyes. She pictured herself leaving this theatre and taking her seat on the throne in the hall beyond, her League gathering before her in anticipation of her new purpose.
She would throw herself at them, anointing her blades with fresh blood again and again until she stood alone among the dead, knowing she would join them soon.
Abruptly, the Demon’s Head batted her blade away with the spikes on his gauntlet, pulling her arm with it and using her momentary disorientation to plant a kick on her stomach that knocked her across the floor, sliding back eight feet along the tiles before she could kick herself upright.
She rose just in time to see the follow-up attack; a grapnel hook fired at point blank range from a handheld launcher, the blade passing only a hair's breadth from her armoured breastplate as she frantically leapt aside, only to almost end up caught in the detonation of a grenade that exploded into a crystalline lattice of ice. Then the boomerang was flying towards her, its bladed edge glinting in the electrical light even as she caught its flattened side between her fingers and whirled around, using the momentum of his own throw to fling it back at him.
She responded with a shot of her own, looping two fingers through the throwing knives in her gauntlet even as the rest kept a death grip on her blade. The knives flew straight and true, the Demon's Head whipping his cape up to batter them aside, shielding himself behind a wall of purest black, but the orphan was already running.
She flung her legs out in front of her, falling into a slide that carried her under the cape, blades poised to carve out his hamstrings, plunge into his groin. Instead, she felt her foot connect with a small round object left abandoned on the floor and knew the fight had reached its inevitable end.
A wall of cold consumed her legs, turning her pants rigid and seeping through her footwraps as though they weren't even there. The only grace was that it was a dry cold; crystals of an ice-like substance forming directly from a gas, rather than soaking her through as a fluid before expanding to crush her limbs.
But she was pinned, immobilised below the waist. She made to attack anyway, only to be forced back down with the crushing weight of a knee pressing into her chest, holding her in place even as a hand gripped her forearm tight enough that she almost dropped her knife in shock, then twisted it to the very brink of breaking.
The pain was almost an afterthought. It was inescapable, but the crippling effects of agony on the mind had long since been trained out of her. Instead, as the killing intent within her mind collapsed against the impossibility of victory, she found herself remembering the strange song he had been singing after she had forced him to take the fight seriously.
He'd still been holding back, but it wasn't the whim of a master testing a prospective student. The chains wrapped around his body had been old iron, unbreakable and sunk so deeply into his flesh that to remove them would be the death of all he was. It wasn't a handicap, it was the only thing holding him together. It was his core, his nature, and so his League must accept it.
With her free hand, the orphan flipped her offhand knife in the air and caught it by the blade, offering it hilt-first to the Demon's Head, to be banished from his sight as the swords of his assassins had been. He took it, releasing her dominant hand and accepting that blade when she offered it to him as well.
With a few kicks of his boot, he cleared the ice from her legs. The orphan rose to her feet again, ice shards falling from her pants like snowfall, and bowed deeply to the chained man. Already she was wrapping those chains around herself, rethinking a lifetime of study and layering a new ideology over the indoctrination that had shaped her psyche.
Although he could not listen as she did, she could see that he understood what she had just done, the commitment she had just made. He took a step towards her, turning her blades over in his hand until she was once again presented with the paired hilts. She took the gesture of trust for what it was, reaching out and sheathing her blades once again.
As she did, his other hand reached up to grip her shoulder, one of the hooks in his gauntlets catching on the cape so that a wall of black shrouded them both.
“Cassandra,” he said, and Cassandra understood.