a collection of theories, prompts, shorts, and oneshots, with our favorite character and her interactions with various bats (and others!)
everything is free for you to continue or elaborate on if you wish, but please give credit if you do!
originally posted on Ao3 under the name phis_corner and Tumblr @phis-corner.
written for the Maribat? Get In! Discord's shipping civil war.
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Batgirl didn't know when, exactly, she'd noticed the girl with the dark hair and darker past creeping up her shoulders on the balcony, only that she had.
It was a building she'd passed countless times on patrol, but she'd never seen the girl out before that night. She looked like she needed a friend, and there was no one else around. (Of course. It was twenty stories off the ground, and the dead of the night in Gotham.)
So Batgirl had landed silently on the other end of the balcony, and yet the girl somehow sensed her presence anyway when even the Man of Steel couldn't, turning around to face her.
(The girl's eyes were a brilliant, brilliant blue.)
Wordlessly, Batgirl waved, unsure of what to say. Her language skills were improving, but she still didn't know how to express what she was thinking.
(Really, what was she thinking? She still had half her route to cover. But this girl was someone she could help too, and Batgirl never turned away from helping someone. Even if she couldn't figure out how to make the darkness weighing on the girl's shoulders recede.)
The girl blinked at her, eyeing Batgirl up and down and taking in her costume – the torn black cape, the full-face mask with the mouth stitched closed and bat ears on the top, and the yellow bat outline on her chest.
Then she smiled, bright yet toned by sadness, and silently offered Batgirl a cookie.
She accepted it.
(The cookie is better than anything she's ever tasted.)
When she loses track of how many times they have the wordless exchange, wave for a cookie, Batgirl tries something new.
Bruce had been teaching her sign language – using hands and facial expressions to form words that others could understand. They were words, but they were also movements, and she took to it with much more ease than verbal language.
Instead of leaving to eat the cookie on a nearby rooftop like she did in the past, Batgirl lingers, hesitating for a moment. She forms hooks with both index fingers, linking them together before unlinking and reversing it, back and forth, back and forth, and tilts her head in a question. Friends?
Something painful flickers through the girl's blue, blue eyes, but it is gone just as fast as it appeared.
"Yeah," the girl says softly, and it is the first time Batgirl ever hears her voice, silvery and weighed down by memories. "Yeah, I guess that makes us friends, doesn't it?"
The routine changes, but continues all the same.
The girl would be out on her balcony every night, and like clockwork, Batgirl would appear behind her, and they would trade a wave for a cookie. Batgirl would sign friends? and the girl would sign it back, silent words that spoke louder than any verbal ones ever could. Then Batgirl would lift her mask, just high enough to expose her mouth, and she'd eat the cookie in the girl's company, both enjoying the quiet comfort the other gave them.
Friends?
Friends.
Friends?
Friends.
Friends?
Friends.
(And maybe, just maybe, someday they might be something... more.)
