dchellparty | round 2: DC hell party 2025

2025-04-02: i am several days late because of Life but that's a wrap! thanks to everyone who prompted and filled! see you around

stephanie brown and cassandra cain as batgirls climbing a building, cass says to steph 'you're the most fun. always'. the image is highly saturated and the art style is cartoon inspired

WE'RE BACK!!!!!!!!!

rules

this is about DC comics, anything goes if it's related to DC and their characters and worlds
one prompt per comment
anon allowed, comment off anon if you want though
i reserve the right to delete prompts if they're weird. this is 100% up to me but i won't delete what i find personally uncomfortable unless i feel it could hurt others
NSFW is allowed
prompts can be filled multiple times
content warn as needed please; if your fic is explicit warn for that regardless of anything
crosspost anywhere
multimedia works are allowed make icons or edits or whatever ya want
self fills allowed
post fills in the comment body OR link to it elsewhere, either can work. if your fill is long, consider using an HTML details tag, which creates a clickable show/hide element, with a summary tag inside to put a name/title to the element.
runs until 30 march 2025, 60 days from today

prompt examples

format is character/ship, prompt

cass cain/rose wilson, in a moment you and i

raven, it's like biting an apple

any, in no mood to find another

fills

off-site collections

superlove

CFAA

promo if you want

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

any female character, arrested girlhood

and still into experimenting - stephcass, ~1.1k words

superlove

-

"You're looking at me like you want to jump my bones," Stephanie says.

Cass looks at her and sharply inhales. Was she that obvious?

But Stephanie looks away, closes her eyes, and Cass watches as the corners crinkle with her laugh. It's light, but tired, all too knowing, these paths treaded once before.

The rooftop is cold beneath her, as it always is on Gotham nights. She and Stephanie used to rule these nights, just the two of them, Batgirl and Robin against the whole city. Sometimes, Cass could even pretend it was always just them, that there was no Batman or Oracle to return home to, no demands or expectations of her to be fulfilled; across the skyline, just the two of them, Batgirl and Robin.

Cass doesn't pull her eyes away from Stephanie as the woman beside her dryly laughs. It's not mirthless, Cass knows, but it's the kind of laugh she's heard from Tim, from Dick. Perhaps she'll hear it from herself in time.

Will she recognize it by then? Has it already happened, and the space to notice it slipped past her, through everything she had been through in the years since Stephanie died and came back into her life?

"You're thinking again," Stephanie says, then. Cass focuses back on her, eyes having slipped towards the ground.

Stephanie's stopped laughing. Cass wasn't smiling much but the corners of her lips feel frozen in place where they're slightly upturned.

There's a cigarette between Stephanie's fingers; Part of Cass want to tell her it's bad for her, but she knows Stephanie could hit back with all sorts of things, hurtful or not. The other part wants to ask Stephanie to pass it to her, so Cass could finally know the feeling.

It's a habit Tim picked up years ago. He said it was to "take the edge off" and Cass believed him with a raised eyebrow. Years later, to now, Stephanie looks at her the same way Tim looks at her now, that exhausted, knowing expression, at the end of your rope with the people you spent your exciting, gift-wrapped life loving, only for the paper to be ripped at the seams, for all of it to be torn to shreds.

They were all gone after Stephanie left. Cass barely heard from them, in the time before her sordid deal with Deathstroke.

She looks at Stephanie now, plumes of smoke rising into the air, cigarette clutched between tightly held fingers like a lifeline, and sees Tim, last year, as she opened her eyes in his grasp, mask abandoned and a syringe in her shoulder. She sees Stephanie, years and years ago, still Spoiler, still electric and alive, offering Cass a smoke that she refused because she always had to, because it was bad for her, because Bruce and Barbara would disapprove.

There's a lot she's done that they would disapprove of. Not then, she knows, images of too-tight pigtails and flouncy, puffy dresses in her mind once more; no, there's lots more on her hands that she has yet to pull apart like long, overgrown hair in her face.

"Pass me the cigarette," Cass says then. Stephanie coughs.

"I'm— what?" She says, after a longer fit of coughing. Cass could hear the way Stephanie hacked up phlegm as she coughed. How long has she been doing this, since she came back?

"I want to try it," Cass tentatively says. She looks Stephanie in the eye and pours as much genuine feeling as she can into it. It's careful, the way she does so, the way she looks at Stephanie with her breath hitched and eyes narrowed, head tilted in a question.

Cass acts before she thinks, feels before she moves. From the day she was born, fluency in the fluidity of bodies came as naturally to her as the Earth orbiting the Sun.

There was a lot Cass had lost when she first fell in with Deathstroke, from the beginning to the first syringe in her neck. Most of all, she misses how natural these things used to come to her, how normal they felt.

Cass looks Stephanie in the eye and feels all in her chest down to her curdling stomach how manipulative she has become.

Stephanie studies her in return with a careful eye.

"First you look at me like you want to eat me," Stephanie starts lightly, "and now you want a smoke. Jeez, Cass, you never asked me for a smoke. What's gotten into you?"

A lot, Cass wants to say, but it wouldn't make much sense. Instead, she tilts her head once more, a silent question. Stephanie sighs.

"Alright, fine," she says, and Cass watches as she inhales and blows out smoke through her lips, watches as the smoke dissipates in the cold Gotham air, autumn winds sharp but not strong enough yet to whisk it away.

Cass tries to mimic Stephanie, holds the cigarette between her fingers as she had watched her and Tim do for years. It slips between her fingers briefly before she's able to catch herself and balance it.

"It's kind of funny seeing you do this," Stephanie says, watching Cass as she carefully mirrors Stephanie in how she smoked, bringing the cigarette to her lips and inhaling sharply, until she pulls the cigarette away suddenly, a cough seizing her.

She looks back to Stephanie, who quietly smiles; it's sharp, playful, but soft around the edges. Knowing.

After her coughs die down, Cass wheezes, and asks what makes it funny. Stephanie shrugs.

"I always thought you were so straight-laced. Goody-two-shoes, sworn to the cause and all that," Stephanie starts, pushing her hands behind her and leaning back. Cass watches her biceps flex as she moves. "I guess I always had you wrong."

"What's that mean?"

Stephanie pauses for a moment. Thinking.

After a beat, she sighs again.

"I had a lot of people wrong, a lot of things twisted," she says, introspective. "And look where that got me."

Cass doesn't respond. She waits for Stephanie to continue, looks her back in the eye as Stephanie waits for a response she knows she won't get. She continues.

"They never gave you much of a chance, did they?" Stephanie says as Cass tries the cigarette again. She doesn't cough as violently as she did before, but she rips the cigarette from her mouth just as sharply.

Cass looks at her and Stephanie only has a soft smile to offer.

"I never did, either," she says. "Maybe that's what got us here," and at that, Stephanie turns her head to look at the dark Gotham skyline.

Cass mirrors the motion, looks out at the vast, run-down city, illuminated by the lights on in flimsy, illegal apartments through dirty windows.

Cass inhales softly, feels a wheeze in her chest. She keeps her eyes on the city and doesn't say a word.

round 2: DC hell party 2025