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Before they left, Jason made Stephanie drink a full glass of water, since she had dehydrated from crying so much. He confiscated her gun, as well, which was humiliating.
They rode to her house on his motorcycle. She sat behind him, hugging him like a koala, not really feeling much of anything.
Stephanie had accepted the pain she was in. There were seven stages of grief, right? Steph was just speed running them. She should get an award for how good she was at healing.
But she was going to see her mom soon, and that helped, too. Even though historically, their relationship hadn't been the best. It had always been Steph taking care of her, instead of the other way around, like it was meant to be. She used to have to
The house came into view. Jason pulled into the driveway and they got off the motorcycle. She felt uneasy when she looked at her mom's house. Also relieved to see her soon, but like she might throw up at the same time.
Stephanie hated her mom's house. Well, not as much as she hated the first house they lived in. The first house, she actually didn't remember much of. Though sometimes she had nightmares about the place.
“Kid,” said Jason calmly. “You're scratching again. I need you to stop.”
Stephanie realized he was right: she was trying to get at her filth through the kevlar. She stopped. “Sorry.”
“S’okay,” he said, shifting his weight awkwardly. He looked out of his depth. “Want me to go in with you, or wait here?”
“You can wait in the living room.”
“Okay.”
They went up the steps together. Stephanie still had the key, which she took everywhere with her, but the door was unlocked. Not a good sign.
The creak of the door opening screamed at her that she wasn't safe. It echoed a thousand of her father's arrivals, a thousand arrivals which turned the house into a war zone.
Jason took a seat on the couch. “I just…” he gestured vaguely. “I don't wanna overstep, because it's your mom and all, but I'm here if you need me.”
“Yeah,” said Steph, “I know.”
“Good,” he said, and she ventured outside the blessedly safe tidal pool of his presence and into the ocean of her mother's house.
Steph began to venture down the hall. The lights were off, but she didn't care enough to turn them on. She didn't need to. Perks of the Lazarus pitt.
There was her bedroom on the left. She'd taken most of her things from there in carefully scheduled trips during her mother's shift.
There was the closet her father used to lock her in. Suddenly, Steph remembered every time he dragged her by her hair and threw in her so hard it left bruises. She remembered every panic attack she'd ever had over being stuck in a tiny space.
Her memories of childhood were janky, incomplete, terrifying, and not always entirely trustworthy. Stephanie’s memories on most matters were very good, but when it came to trauma, her mind did its best to protect her. She was grateful for that.
She remembered every bruise she got from her dad, but not every blow that caused it. She remembered how her mom would take her pills and sleep unnaturally well, so that even her daughter crying for her didn't wake her. She remembered her dad screaming that she was a whore whenever she wore spaghetti straps or a short skirt or anything for fitting.
Once, when she saw her wearing a crop top, he made her strut up and down the hallway while he called her a whore and slut. Once she started to cry, he made her say she was “asking for it, dressing like that”. It went unsaid what “it” was.
Her mother did not protect her. Her mother had swallowed her pills and was dead asleep while Steph learned that no one was ever going to save her.
Despite what Tim and Bruce said, she thought she kept up with them pretty well when she started out, even though she had no training at the time. Because Steph didn't learn how to fight in a Batcave or a dojo or a boxing ring. She learned to fight in a house where fists were hurled like insults and it was every girl for herself.
You ate fast, or you didn't eat. You memorized which floorboards and hinges creaked. You didn't make eye contact with an angry man. You learned to take a beating without crying. That was how you survived when no one was coming to save you.
That was what Steph was thinking as she opened her mother's door. She was starting to wonder why she came. She had learned over and over and over again that her mommy wasn't coming to save her. Why should now be any different?
There was a stupidly hopeful part of herself saying that this time might be different.
Her mother was on her side in the bed, shaking. She was facing away from her. Steph crept closer. “Mommy?”
At first she thought her mother was crying silently. Then she saw the needles, and the bottle of pills and vials labeled: Fentanyl.
Distantly, Steph remembered that this happened once before. Maybe three or four years back. Daddy was in jail, so while Mom went to the hospital and then rehab, she got shipped off to a group home for a month. That month was so bad, she doesn't have a single memory of the home, except for what others had told her.
Similarly, she didn't remember much of what happened with Black Mask. She remembered pain and fear and some of the things he said. But she didn't remember every wound being inflicted. Once, she had tried to make a timeline in her head of what happened, and quickly found that chunks of time were missing from her memory.
But now wasn't a memory with chunks missing. Now was the present, and Stephanie knew she had to act. She grabbed her mom and rolled her onto her side. “JASON!” she screamed as she pulled her mouth open and pulled out her tongue.
Footsteps pounded behind her and then Jason was there. “Fuck!” He swore as he knelt beside her, and then he was spraying Narcan in her mother's mouth.
Steph had seen Narcan administered before. She knew it made people bolt straight up. But it was still a surprise to see her mother do it. She gasped and flinched as she came back to herself.
“Mom? Mommy?” Stephanie whispered.
“Spoiler?”
Spoiler. Not Steph. She didn't remember. It had to be the drugs, right? What if it was permanent? What if she had wanted to forget her daughter?
Jason began punching numbers into his phone. Stephanie heard a woman's voice say: “911, what is your emergency?”
“This is Redhood speaking, I have an overdosed woman in her forties, she's had a seizure and is in a postictal state, narcan was administered. We are at…”
Stephanie wasn't listening. This was all her fault, she realized. Her mom relapsed because she wasn't there. Because she stupidly, idiotically thought she was doing the right thing by staying away. She thought her mother would be better off without her.
And now she was pissed. Why did she get to stop hurting when she wasn't allowed?
She grabbed the vials and the bottle of pills and headed right to the bathroom. “I’m flushing everything!” Steph announced.
She began to sweep through the medicine cabinets grabbing every bit of medicine there was. She didn't care what kind it was in her frenzy, she just wanted to eliminate any possibility of her mother hurting herself.
She didn't care if the toilet clogged. She didn't care what it did to the pipes. She just wanted her mom to stop with the drugs.
“Get me a thermometer!” Jason demanded, snapping Steph out of her rage.
Suddenly, she remembered that her mom was in danger. Running like a bat out of hell, she grabbed the thermometer and brought it to Jason.
He immediately stuck it in her mom's mouth and pulled it out to read the second it beeped. “102.5° fever,” he said into the phone. “Steph, she says the ambulance is five minutes out.”
“Good.”
“We’ll follow it on motorcycle,” he told her.
“I don't wanna go,” Stephanie said without thinking, displaying her callousness for all to see. She knew it made her a horrible daughter, but she just didn't wanna see her mom this way. “I want her to be okay, but I just can't see her like this.”
“That's fine,” said Jason, “I'll go with her and make sure she's okay, and I'll call someone to get you.”
“I don't need a babysitter,” she replied indignantly.
“Stephanie,” he said seriously, “if you think I'm leaving you alone right now, you're out of your
mind.”
She looked away, embarrassed. This was what she got for letting him see her scars. This was what she got for not jumping fast enough.
Jason then did something shocking. He hung up on 911 and made another call. To his brother.
“Dickiebird, how fast can you get to Gotham?” He paused. “That's not fast enough. I'll explain later.” Then he hung up abruptly and punched in another number.
“Hey, Bird Boy,” Jason said irritably, “I need you to come to Steph's house right now. It's an emergency, so hurry. “
“Tim?” Steph exclaimed, feeling quite betrayed. She raised her hackles. “Are you talking to Tim?”
“Hold on.” Jason pulled away from the phone. “Look, I'm sorry. But Dick's too far away, Cass and Babs are busy and I'm not calling Bruce.”
Steph looked back at her mother. She was laying down again. She was still confused and not fully back. She hated to say it, but she really didn't want to be around her right now.
Then she started seizing again. “Mom!” Stephanie exclaimed.
Jason dropped the phone and rushed over, but Steph had already picked up the narcan and was administering a second dose. Once more, her mother came back.
The ambulance arrived soon after. They got her loaded up pretty quickly, spouting medical jargon Stephanie would have understood if she cared enough to listen. She didn't. She felt disconnected.
Tim became visible coming in on his motorcycle from the end of the street just as the ambulance was leaving. Seeing Robin again made Stephanie feel something again: the desire to curl in on herself and die.
“Please don't make me hang out with him,” she begged.
Jason looked heartbreakingly sympathetic. “I'm really sorry, but your choices are him or the hospital.”
“Fine,” she huffed. “Anything's better than seeing my mom like this.”
Tim pulled up at the curb and parked his motorcycle. “Hey,” he said, in a somewhat friendly tone. It sounded practiced.
Steph pantomimed throwing up, just so it would be clear she hadn't forgiven him.
“Good, the Boy Failure is here,” Jason snarked. Tim looked hurt, but he ignored it. “Listen, your job is to get her home, without shitting on her, and not let her out of your sight for a second.”
“Uh, got it,” he said.
Jason stepped closer, so all six foot five inches of him were looming over Robin. “You better get it. Because if I come back and find out you somehow managed to make things worse, I'll make you wish you were never born.”
Stephanie did not enjoy being talked about like she wasn't there. She didn't appreciate being treated like a baby that couldn't be left alone. But she knew it was because Jason didn't trust her not to kill herself. That was her own fault, really.
It didn't matter. It was so, so easy to steal a razor from the bathroom and stash it in one of her many pockets while she flushed all her mom's pills. Stephanie had already decided she was going to die tonight, and finally stop hurting.