Headcanon that when Cass first joins the family only she, Bruce, and Jason know sign language. (Cass taught it to herself while on the run because it was easier for her to remember shapes of her hands than trying to speak.) Cue the entire batfamily trying to learn a whole-ass language in as little time as possible:
Dick accidentally signing ‘fuck you’ instead of ‘thank you’ to Cass one day and Cass not saying anything bc she understands what he was trying to say, meanwhile Jason is CACKLING
Dick: What??? WHAT?? OH MY GOD CASS I’M SO SORRY OH MY GOD I DIDN’TMEANITLIKETHAT
on the opposite side, Jason and Duke cuss solely in ASL to avoid getting the bat-glare
Jason knows ASL because of a hard-of-hearing girl he befriended in middle school before he died. The whole situation convinced him to reach out to her and check in (She’s doing great as an electrical engineer)
Bruce, continuing the tradition of ‘language days’ where they can only converse in one language the entire day, quickly adds ASL to the list
Dick finger spells EVERYTHING bc his brain goes a mile a minute and it’s easier for him to reuse the same 30 signs
Except conversations with him take forever
The signs for drinking water and drinking alcohol are slightly different so Jason will consistently use the opposite sign for whichever one he means
Tim is the quickest to learn ASL but also when he’s tired he gets a little bit sloppy with it
The signs for Coca Cola and shoot up narcotics are homophones (practically the same motion), and this interferes with Tim’s love of soda
Alfred: you want what master tim???
Tim, who just wants a coke: ):
Bruce is a bit rusty on his signing and he does automatic signs sometimes without really thinking about it, and sometimes they’re slightly off
Bruce, to Cass, after she asks him if he wants to spar while he’s busy working with Superman on a case: sorry - sweetheart - we - work
What he actually signs: sorry - sweetheart - we - making out
This, naturally, leads Cass to believe that Clark and Bruce are in a relationship
Bruce claims that he forgot that the signs ‘work’ and ‘make out’ were similar but Clark just smirks and calls it a Freudian Slip
Bruce is extremely precise with every sign he makes after that
Tim and Damian start getting into an unspoken competition to see who is more fluent in the language
It escalates into a fight completely in ASL, which is unnerving because usually their fights involve more swords (Damian) and screaming (Tim)
Cass also knows CSL, which is much more different because of the different form structure of the Chinese language.
She’ll randomly switch from ASL to CSL in order to completely confuse the family
Steph pops in one day with around twenty sign language textbooks that she needs to return to the Manor Library
Bruce: wait when did do you even take those in the first place
Steph fingerspells ‘idk’ and bounds away to talk to Cass and Tim
Duke, upon discovering no sign language resources at his school, starts a club to learn with other people. He brings in Cass and Jason to teach them the basics every Friday
The first lesson: HOW TO CUSS IN SIGN LANGUAGE 101
immediately every kid in Duke’s school is hiding their cursing in sign language
Bruce gets a call from the school and (tired!dad) tells Jason and Duke that maybe next meeting he should teach something a little more... pg
Jason is absolutely unremorseful and laughs throughout the entire lecture
Until Alfred enters the conversation
(Next club meeting, a humbled Jason and a delighted Cass teach lesson 2: how to say please, thank you, and sorry)
A random kid in the club: ‘hey isn’t Jason Todd the name of Duke’s brother that died’
Jason: *signs* sorry I don’t really know how to to answer that in sign language
The kid:
Also Barbara is easily the most fluent out of all of them
She and Tim set up a special pair of gauntlets that would translate any sign language into spoken audio so that Cass could sign while on patrol and the team on comms would still understand her
I’m learning ASL right now and I cannot stop thinking abt the mess that is the batfam trying to learn it as quick as possible
