Image: three panels from Batgirl 2000 issue nine, zooming closer into Cassandra Cain’s pe

Image: three panels from Batgirl 2000 issue nine, zooming closer into Cassandra Cain’s pensive face each panel. In the last Lady Shiva’s reflection is visible in Cass’s iris.

Cass’s thought boxes read: “I’ll never take another life. Not even hers. So I’ll pretend to go all out… and then I’ll die.

I don’t have to do this. I can still study Batman’s method. I can be good enough for the costume. I can be…

Mediocre for a lifetime.

Or perfect. For a year.”

This page is directly after Shiva offers to re-teach Cass the body-reading skill she recently lost. The one that made her one of the best fighters in the world. The condition was that one year later, Cass engage Shiva in a death match.

Cass chooses perfection.

I have never seen any work of fiction so perfectly encapsulate a teenager’s relationship to the concepts of death and forever. The need to be good at what you do, to be exceptional. The way being a prodigy can get so tied up in your identity that you’d self-destruct to get that lost spark back.

Cass is struggling with guilt over the one life she took as a child, but doesn’t come up here. It’s a subtler part of her arc, that’s mostly discussed by other characters. Here, in this moment, she’s thinking about herself. About how she wants to live.

Cass understands death more intimately that most people around her, but that doesn’t mean she can really grasp her own mortality the way an older character can. It doesn’t mean the downside of Shiva’s offer is going to feel real.

Mediocre for a lifetime. Or perfect. For a year.