Chapter Text
By the fourth morning, Peter had a routine.
It wasn't much of one. But it was his, and after everything, that felt like a small miracle.
Wake up at six forty-five, when the light through the broken window turned from gray to pale gold. Check the street through the gap in the boards. Hood up. Down the back stairs, through the alley, around the block. Get in line at the yellow building across the street, and let Doris wave him to the front, because apparently that was a fight he was never going to win.
Breakfast at seven. Twenty minutes of dishes after, because Doris's back was still acting up and Jay swore Marcus was useless. Dinner at six. In between, as little movement as possible, as much sleep as he could get, and every single granola bar Jay kept sneaking into his paper bag.
And a few hours, some nights, that Karen still wasn't speaking to him about.
It worked.
That was the part that still surprised him. Two real meals a day, a couch, and a door that locked, and his body had done the rest. On the second morning, he could take a deep breath without seeing white. On the third, he'd pulled off the tape around his ribs and found nothing but a faint yellow shadow where the bruise used to be. The cut on his shoulder was a thin pink line. His head had stopped pounding.
He was healed. Completely.
Mostly.
The fevers still came every evening, around the time the streetlights flickered on, and they still stayed well into the night. Some mornings, the sound of the griddle hissing in the kitchen was so loud he had to count his breaths before he could walk through the door. Twice, his fingers had stuck to the counter, and he'd had to pretend he was just leaning on it until they let go.
Day four, he thought every time. Twenty-four more, give or take.
But the fevers broke by morning. The noise faded by noon. And for a few hours every day, in the middle of the afternoon, he felt almost normal.
He'd decided to use them.
The water had been an accident.
On the second day, out of sheer, desperate hope, he'd turned the handle on the bathtub faucet. The pipes had groaned, and coughed, and spat out a stream of brown sludge that made him jump back, and then, after a long, gurgling minute, run clear.
Cold. Freezing, actually. But clear.
Peter had stood there staring at it like it was the Sorcerer Supreme in person.
The electricity had taken more work. Most of the outlets in the apartment were dead, but the refrigerator in the kitchen had a tiny standby light that blinked on and off when he jiggled the plug, which meant there was power somewhere. Karen had traced it to the basement: a breaker box nobody had bothered to shut down when the building was condemned, half its switches flipped off, the other half rusted in place.
"I don't recommend touching that," Karen had said.
"I'm not going to touch it. I'm going to fix it."
"That's touching it, Peter."
It had taken him an hour, a flashlight held between his teeth, and one small, alarming spark that made him yelp and nearly fall off the crate he was standing on. But when he flipped the last switch, the hallway light upstairs buzzed to life for the first time in six years. And three of the outlets in the apartment came back with it.
Three outlets. One working water heater, it turned out, if he waited forty minutes. And a shower with water that was, by the end of the third day, almost warm.
The first time he stood under it, he didn't move for a very long time.
He just let the water run over his head and down his back, washing away dust and dried blood and the smell of rain and rooftops. He didn't think about anything. Not Gotham. Not the spider. Not May, or MJ, or Ned, or the message in the lab.
He just stood there, and breathed, and felt clean.
When he finally got out, he pulled on a clean pair of jeans and a soft blue T-shirt that still smelled faintly of somebody else's laundry detergent. Jay had handed them over on the second morning, folded inside a paper grocery bag. Crate overflow, he'd called it.
The crate had been half empty. They'd both known it.
He caught his reflection in the cracked bathroom mirror. Thirteen years old. Wet hair sticking up in every direction, still too skinny, still with dark circles under his eyes.
But he didn't look like someone who was dying anymore.
He looked like a kid.
Okay, he thought. Okay. We can work with that.
"You look better," Jay said on the fourth morning, sliding a plate across the counter.
"I feel better." Peter picked up his fork. "I took a shower."
"Thank God. Doris was starting to talk about you."
"She was not."
"She was. Very kindly. In the way that means somebody needs to give that boy a bar of soap."
Peter laughed, and nearly choked on a pancake, and Jay leaned on the counter with that small, crooked almost-smile he did sometimes, the one that never quite made it all the way to his eyes but tried.
It was easier now. Talking to him.
Peter couldn't have said exactly when that had happened. Sometime between the first morning and the fourth, between the third granola bar and the fifth, between the first text at night, home?, and the first time Peter had answered with something more than yes. They didn't talk about anything important. Jay never asked where he slept, or where his uncle was, or what his name was. And Peter never asked why a cook had moved like a soldier when a pitcher fell.
Or about the hand.
On the second morning, the day after the pitcher, Jay's knuckles had been wrapped in white tape, the skin around it swollen and purple, the kind of bruising Peter knew very well. The kind you got from hitting something a lot harder than it hit you back.
The chimney won, Jay had said.
That had been two days ago.
This morning, the tape was gone. The swelling was gone. The bruises had faded to a faint, greenish yellow, the kind that should have taken a week, maybe two. Not two days.
Peter knew what fast healing looked like. He'd been doing it since he was thirteen, the first time.
This wasn't as fast as his. Not even close.
But it wasn't normal, either.
He looked away before Jay could catch him staring and filed it away under things that don't make sense about Jay, which was turning into a pretty long list.
No questions. That was the deal. And somehow, inside the shape of that deal, they'd found a way to talk anyway: about the terrible radio station Doris insisted on playing, about whether pineapple belonged on pizza (it did, and Jay was wrong), about a book Jay had been reading on his breaks, which turned out to be Pride and Prejudice, which Peter had not expected and which Jay refused to discuss further.
Peter still didn't know his last name. Jay still didn't know his first.
It was the closest thing to a friend he had in this entire universe.
"So what's on the agenda today?" Jay asked. "Big plans?"
Peter hesitated. Then he decided that one small truth couldn't hurt.
"Library," he said. "The big one. Downtown."
Jay's eyebrows went up. "Yeah? What for?"
To find out what this universe's chemical suppliers are, and how much ethyl acrylate costs, and whether there's a way to synthesize a shear-thinning polymer without a lab or money or ID.
"School project," Peter said.
Jay looked at him for a long, flat second.
"You don't go to school, kid."
"…Personal school project."
That got an actual laugh. Short and surprised, the way it always was, like Jay hadn't expected to be laughing either.
"Okay," Jay said. "Personal school project." He reached under the counter, and Peter braced himself for another granola bar, but instead, Jay came back up with a folded bus pass and slid it across the counter. "Downtown's forty minutes on foot. Take the twelve. It stops right in front."
Peter stared at it.
"It's got like three rides left on it," Jay said, already turning back to the griddle. "Somebody left it in the crate. Don't make it weird."
Peter picked it up, very carefully, like it might break. "Thanks, Jay."
"Don't thank me. Be back for dinner."
"I will."
"I mean it."
"I know," Peter said, and he was smiling when he said it.
Gotham's central library looked like a cathedral someone had built for books and then forgotten about.
It was huge. Gray stone, tall windows, two enormous stone lions on either side of the steps, both of them missing pieces of their noses. Inside, the ceiling was so high it disappeared into shadow, and the reading room stretched out under it in long rows of wooden tables and green glass lamps, half of them working.
It smelled like old paper and floor polish and radiator heat. Peter took one breath of it and felt, for the first time in days, something close to home.
He'd spent half his life in libraries. Midtown's. The big one on Fifth Avenue, where May used to take him on Saturdays when he was little, and where he'd once, at nine years old, gotten lost in the science stacks for three hours and been found asleep on a pile of physics textbooks. Libraries had always been safe. Quiet. Full of answers.
The computers were in a row along the back wall, under a brass plaque that said Donated by the Wayne Foundation. Peter picked the terminal in the far corner, with his back to the wall and a clear view of both exits.
Okay, he thought. Let's get some answers.
He glanced around. Nobody close. The nearest person was an old man asleep over a newspaper three tables away. Up front, behind the long wooden reference desk, a woman with red hair and glasses was typing on a laptop, not looking his way.
He slipped the little silver bead out of his ear, cupped it in his palm, and pressed it against the USB port on the side of the computer. The metal rippled and slid inside. A second later, Karen's voice came back, small and tinny, through the cheap headphones plugged into the terminal.
"Connected."
Peter checked his fingers before he took his hand away. Clean. No blood. Not even a smudge.
Learning, Parker. Learning.
"Same rules as the school," he murmured. "Keep us invisible. And download everything that might be useful. Maps, news, public records, building plans. Anything."
"Understood. I'll mask the session. To anyone watching, this terminal will look like it's running a normal search." A pause. "I'll store what I can. My storage is limited, and so is my power."
"I know." He pulled the list out of his pocket and smoothed it flat on the desk. "That's what we're here for."
He'd made it the night before, lying on the couch with a fever, scrawled on the back of an old electric bill with a pen he'd found in a kitchen drawer.
- The suit.
That one was bad.
Karen had run a full diagnostic on the second night, and the results had been about as cheerful as a hospital bill. The nanotech itself was intact. That was the good news. The bad news was everything that made it work.
The power cell had been damaged in the crossing, whatever the crossing had been. Something in the jump between universes, or the fall, or the fight on the first night, had cracked the casing and fried half the charging circuits. It still held a charge. Barely. And it was draining faster than it should, every single hour, whether he used the suit or not.
Which meant Karen had been running on the absolute minimum since the moment Peter woke up on that rooftop. Every extra function cost power she didn't have. And the nanotech, without power behind it, was just very expensive, very smart metal that couldn't do half of what it was built for.
That explained a lot. Two micro-repulsors in the left boot, dead. The heating system, offline, which was why he'd been freezing on every rooftop in this city. The repair systems, sluggish and weak, unable to patch even the small tear at his shoulder. And the resizing on the first night, the one that had saved his life, had burned through so much of what was left that the suit had almost nothing in reserve.
He'd tried charging it from the outlets in the apartment. It had worked, sort of. A trickle. Enough to keep Karen from going dark. Not nearly enough to bring anything back.
"I need a stable power source," Karen had said. "And raw material. Specific alloys. Carbon nanotubes. Without both, every hole you put in the suit stays there, and every night I'm a little weaker."
- Web fluid.
Two full cartridges. One at maybe a third. That was everything. He knew the formula by heart. He'd invented the formula. But he'd made it in a high school chemistry lab, and here, he didn't have a lab, or money, or an ID, or a single legal way to buy anything stronger than dish soap.
- A network.
Somewhere Karen could connect and stay connected, twenty-four hours a day, without anyone noticing. Right now, she only had what she could grab in the few minutes he could sit at a terminal like this one. It was like fighting with one eye closed.
He started with the second one, because it was the most urgent, and because he already had a feeling where the answer was.
"Karen, pull up every place in Gotham with a working chemistry lab. Schools, universities, research companies. Anything with the supplies I need."
The list came up fast. Peter skimmed it, crossing things off in his head almost as quickly as they appeared.
High schools: too small, too poorly stocked, too many teachers who lived on campus.
Gotham Academy.
He stopped. Looked at it for a long moment.
He knew that building. He knew the vents, the roof, the nurse's office on the second floor, the library on the third. The Academy had one of the best-funded science departments in the city, according to its own very smug website, with a chemistry lab that had won some kind of regional award three years in a row.
It was perfect.
It was also the one place in Gotham where people knew someone had broken in. Where someone had found his blood. Where, if he were Nightwing, he'd have put at least one very small, very hidden camera in every single vent.
"Risk assessment?" Karen asked, like she could hear him thinking.
"High." He moved on. "Too high. For now."
Gotham University. Bigger. Older. A whole science campus on the north side of the city, with three separate chemistry buildings and a materials science department that, according to a press release from last spring, had just received a grant to research next-generation polymers.
Peter's eyebrows went up. Polymers. Okay. Hello.
Universities were good. Universities were big, and messy, and full of tired grad students who left doors propped open and passwords taped to their monitors. Nobody looked twice at a kid in a hoodie on a college campus. They just assumed you were somebody's little brother.
"Add it to the list," he whispered. "Top of the list."
"Added."
Then the companies.
S.T.A.R. Labs. Peter didn't recognize the name, but the website looked like something Mr. Stark would have rolled his eyes at and then secretly read cover to cover. Scientific research. Advanced technology. A small Gotham branch, according to the directory, mostly materials research. Alloys. Composites. Exactly the kind of thing the suit was starving for.
Security: heavy. Very heavy. Armed guards heavy.
"Very high risk," Karen said.
"Yeah." He bookmarked it anyway.
And then, at the very top of the list, because of course it was, a name he'd already seen twice since he'd walked through the door. Once on the brass plaque over his head. Once on the sides of half the buses in Gotham.
Wayne Enterprises.
Peter clicked on it, and his jaw slowly dropped.
It was everything. Pharmaceuticals. Aerospace. Shipping. Defense contracts. Energy research. An Applied Sciences Division whose public page was so vague it practically screamed we are building things we are not allowed to talk about. Communication satellites. A research campus downtown. Labs in three different states.
It was Stark Industries. A Gotham version of Stark Industries, with a different name and a different logo and, from the photos, a much less dramatic CEO.
It also had more security than every other place on his list combined.
"Extreme risk," Karen said.
"I know. I know." He rubbed his eyes. "Okay. University first. S.T.A.R. Labs if we get desperate. Wayne Enterprises if we get really desperate."
"And the network?"
"Still working on it."
"Actually," Karen said, "I may have something."
Peter sat up.
"This terminal is part of a network installed by the Wayne Foundation. All of the library's public computers are. The security software is excellent. Much better than a library needs." A short pause. "It also has a direct line to Wayne Enterprises' commercial infrastructure, for remote maintenance and updates. Including their satellite network."
Peter stared at the screen. "Their satellites?"
"Their commercial communication satellites. Not military. Not private. The ones they rent out to phone companies and television networks." Another pause. "They're very powerful, Peter. More powerful than anything I've had access to since we got here. And there's a maintenance channel in the system that hasn't been used in over four years. I could build a small, quiet connection inside it. Something nobody would notice unless they were looking for it."
"Twenty-four seven?"
"Twenty-four seven. From anywhere. Even from your earpiece, once I set it up."
Peter let out a long, slow breath.
It was a terrible idea. Piggybacking on the satellites of the biggest company in Gotham, without permission, through a back door in a library computer. If anyone found it, if anyone traced it back-
But no Wi-Fi password in the world was going to get them that kind of connection. And he was so tired of fighting with one eye closed.
"Do it," he said. "Quietly. Really quietly."
"Starting now. It'll take about twelve minutes."
Twelve minutes. Peter could do twelve minutes.
He opened a new window, just to look busy, and typed the first thing that came to mind.
Red and blue vigilante Gotham.
Three results. A short article from the night he'd arrived, about a mugger found webbed to a dumpster in an alley downtown. An anonymous post on a local message board: Saw someone swinging between buildings last night?? Like on a rope?? Is this a new bat thing?? And a comment underneath: lol no the bats don't do red.
And under that, another one: also if it's a meta they're not gonna last a week. Bat doesn't do metas either. Ask the guy who tried to set up shop downtown last spring. Oh wait, you can't, he's in Blackgate.
And under that: it's not a LAW, it's more like a strongly worded suggestion
the suggestion is a fist
Peter stared at the screen.
Meta. That was him. That was the word for him here. He'd learned it three nights ago.
He typed, very carefully: Batman metahumans Gotham.
It wasn't written down anywhere. There was no law, no city ordinance, no official statement. But it was everywhere, in every corner of the internet that talked about Gotham's vigilantes at all, the way an old rule is everywhere: in the jokes, in the warnings, in the things people didn't bother to explain because everybody already knew. Metas didn't operate in Gotham. Not the heroes, not the villains. Not without the Bat's say-so. The ones who'd tried had found out why.
Peter sat back slowly.
Great, he thought. Fantastic. I fell into the one city in the multiverse with a no-spiders policy.
At least nobody had connected the webs to a person yet. So far so good, he told himself. It didn't feel as good as it should have.
Then, because he couldn't stop thinking about it, he typed something else.
Red helmet vigilante Gotham.
That one came back with a lot more than three results.
Red Hood. That was the name. Grainy photos, mostly from security cameras: a figure in a leather jacket and a smooth red helmet, guns on both thighs.
And he wasn't a vigilante. Not exactly. Not according to the news.
According to the news, he was a crime lord. The articles were years old, some of them, and they all told the same story: a man in a red helmet who'd walked into Gotham's underworld one night and simply taken it. The dealers on the south side paid him now, a cut of everything. The gangs answered to him, or they stopped existing. A police spokesman, quoted in three different articles, called him the most dangerous man in Gotham who isn't wearing makeup.
But there was something else, buried in the same articles, that didn't fit.
He had rules. Nobody seemed to know all of them. But everybody seemed to know one. Dealers on his streets didn't sell to kids. The few who'd tried had disappeared, and nobody had tried again. One op-ed, written by a woman who ran a shelter on the south side, called him a monster, and then, two paragraphs later, the only one who has ever kept the needles out of our playground.
Peter read that line three times.
A crime boss with guns, who protected kids. He didn't know what to do with that. In New York, the bad guys had been the bad guys. Here, apparently, it was more complicated.
The guns themselves didn't scare him. Natasha and Clint had made sure of that, a long time ago, over Mr. Stark's very loud objections. What scared him was not knowing who this guy pointed them at, or why.
And every single article, every map, every sighting, was in the same part of the city. The south side.
Crime Alley.
He's watching my street, Peter thought. And I don't know whose side he's on.
"Karen," he murmured. "The list. The masks. Add all of this. Name, territory, everything."
"Already done. He's still at the top."
He was about to close the window when something caught his eye in the sidebar. A link. Gotham's Urban Legends: The Stories Your Grandparents Told You.
He shouldn't have clicked it.
He clicked it.
It was an old page, badly formatted, clearly made by someone who'd loved the city a lot more than they'd loved web design. Ghost stories. A haunted subway line. A woman in white who walked along the river on foggy nights. And at the very bottom, under a heading in faded gray text that just said The Court, a children's rhyme.
Hush now, little sparrow, don't wander after dark. The owls sit on the rooftops and they watch the city's heart.
Beside it, a small, blurry image. An old engraving, scanned from some forgotten book.
An owl. Wings folded. Eyes very round, and very wide.
Peter went very still.
He knew that owl. He'd seen it on his first night here, embossed in the bottom corner of a faded orange notice nailed to the door of the building he was living in.
They know your name, they know your door, they know which stair will creak. So close your eyes and hold your tongue. The Court hears all who speak.
The back of his neck prickled.
"Karen. Save this page."
"Saved." A pause. "Peter. Someone's coming toward you."
His spider sense hummed a half-second later. Not a warning. Just a soft, low buzz at the base of his skull, the kind it gave him around people who could be dangerous if they wanted to be, and then, almost immediately, quiet.
He looked up.
It was the woman from the reference desk.
She was in a wheelchair, rolling down the aisle between the long tables with the easy, unhurried rhythm of someone who'd done it a thousand times. Red hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, glasses pushed up on her nose, a stack of returned books balanced on her lap. She stopped beside the empty table next to his and started sliding the books back onto the shelf behind it, one by one, like that was all she was doing.
Peter's hand moved, very casually, to close the window with the owl.
"Seven minutes on the connection," Karen murmured in his ear. "Don't log off."
"Hi," the woman said, without looking up from the books.
"Um. Hi."
"Don't mind me." She slid another book into place. "I'm just being nosy. It's part of the job description."
Peter didn't know what to say to that, so he didn't say anything.
She finished with the books and turned her chair to face him. Up close, she had a warm, open face and sharp green eyes behind the glasses, and a small, friendly smile that looked like it was used to getting smiled back at.
"I'm Barbara," she said. "I'm the head librarian. Well. The head librarian, the IT department, and the person who yells at the copier, all at once."
"Oh. Cool." He winced at himself. "I mean. Hi. Nice to meet you."
"You too." She tilted her head. "I haven't seen you here before."
Peter's stomach tightened.
"I'm, um. New. To the neighborhood. Kind of."
"I figured." Barbara smiled again. "I know all my regulars. That's not as impressive as it sounds. There aren't that many. Mr. Halloway over there." She nodded at the old man snoring over his newspaper. "Comes in every day at ten, reads the sports section, falls asleep by ten-fifteen. A couple of students from the university who like the quiet. A woman who's been researching her family tree for six years and is very close, apparently, to proving she's related to a duke." She shrugged. "Not a lot of new faces in here anymore. Most people just use their phones."
"Oh," Peter said. "That's… kind of sad, actually."
"It is." She looked around the huge, echoing room, at the empty tables and the half-lit lamps, and something fond and a little wistful crossed her face. "So when someone new walks in, I like to say hi. Make sure they know where things are. Make sure they come back."
Peter looked at her for a moment.
Then, before he could stop himself, he smiled. A real one. Small, but real.
"It's a really nice library," he said. "We had one like it. Back home. My aunt used to take me on Saturdays."
"Yeah?" Barbara's smile softened. "Then you know the important stuff already. Libraries are for everyone. No membership required to sit and read. No questions asked."
No questions. Peter almost laughed. Gotham seemed to be full of people who said that.
"So," Barbara said lightly, nodding at the screen. "School project?"
He'd closed the owl. What was left was the list Karen had pulled up: universities, labs, chemistry departments.
"Kind of," he said carefully. "Science. Chemistry. I'm trying to figure out where people actually do chemistry around here. Like, real labs."
"Ambitious." She looked genuinely interested. "What kind of chemistry?"
"Polymers," Peter said, before he could think better of it. "Adhesives. Stuff that's strong but flexible."
Barbara's eyebrows went up a little. "That's a pretty specific project."
"I'm a pretty specific kid."
That made her laugh, a warm, surprised sound that echoed a little in the big, quiet room.
"Okay, specific kid," she said. "Then here's some free advice. The university has a public science library on the north campus. Anybody can walk in, and they've got journals we don't. And on Thursdays, we have a homework help table right here, by the windows, from three to six." She pointed. "Usually it's just me and a very bored volunteer. You'd be doing us a favor."
"Two minutes," Karen whispered.
"Thanks," Peter said. And he meant it. "Really. That's really nice."
"That's what we're here for." Barbara reached into the pocket on the side of her chair and pulled out a small paper card. A guest pass, with the library's logo on it, and a blank line where a name should go. She held it out. "You don't have to put your name on it. It just gets you into the reading room after hours, if it's cold out. Which it will be. It's Gotham."
Peter took it. He looked at the blank line for a moment. Then he folded it carefully and tucked it into his pocket, right next to Jay's phone.
"Connection established," Karen said in his ear. "We're in."
Barbara was already turning her chair back toward the reference desk.
"Come back soon," she said over her shoulder. "I'll be here. I'm always here."
"I will," Peter said.
And to his own surprise, he thought he might actually mean it.
He waited until Karen had pulled herself back out of the port and into his ear. He logged off. He pushed the chair in, neat and square, the way May had taught him. Then he pulled his hood up and walked toward the exit at a perfectly normal pace.
He made it as far as the reference desk.
Then he stopped.
He didn't know why. It was a stupid thing to do. The smart thing, the safe thing, was to keep walking. She hadn't asked. Nobody here asked. That was the whole point.
But she'd said come back soon. And she'd meant it. And it had been four days since anyone in this entire universe had known what to call him.
Barbara looked up from her laptop. "Forget something?"
"Um. No. I just." Peter shoved his hands deeper into the pocket of his hoodie, wrapped one of them around Jay's phone, and made himself look up. "I'm Pe-"
He caught it. Half a second. Less.
"Pete," he said. "I'm Pete. By the way."
Barbara's whole face softened.
"Nice to meet you, Pete," she said.
Pete. Not a lie. Not the whole truth, either. May had called him that. Ned. Mr. Stark, when he was being nice.
It was the first time anyone in this universe had said his name.
He ducked his head, gave her a small, embarrassed wave, and fled down the steps before his face could finish turning red.
Barbara made it all the way back to the reference desk before she let the smile drop.
It wasn't that she hadn't meant it. She had. Every word. It was nice to see new faces, and the kid was sweet, in a shy, polite, slightly awkward way that made her want to put a cup of hot chocolate in front of him and a stack of science books beside it.
But she'd been watching him for twenty minutes before she rolled over there. And she'd learned a few things.
He'd sat in the one corner of the reading room where no camera could get a clean look at his face. He'd checked the doors, both of them, before he sat down. He'd checked the old man. He'd checked her. And when she'd come down the aisle toward him, he'd closed a window on his screen with the smooth, unhurried motion of someone who'd done it many times before.
And then there was the network.
The library's public computers ran on her system. Hers. Quietly, under the Wayne Foundation's security software, where nobody but her and Bruce knew to look. Most days, it caught nothing more interesting than a man looking up his ex-wife's new address, or a teenager researching how to fake a doctor's note.
Today, it had caught nothing at all.
That was the problem.
Terminal fourteen had been running for almost forty minutes, and in all that time, her program had registered exactly what it expected to see. A normal session. Searches. Pages. Nothing out of place. Every click clean, every page textbook.
Too clean.
Nobody is this clean, Tim had said once, unless someone wants to hide something.
She pulled up the log. Chemistry departments. University libraries. A news article about a mugger downtown. A children's encyclopedia page about owls.
A kid doing homework. Exactly what a kid doing homework would look like.
Barbara looked up.
The kid was walking past the reference desk now, hood up, hands shoved in his pockets, eyes on the floor. He stopped, said something shy and quick, and then all but ran for the doors. She smiled after him.
She watched him go. Down the steps. Past the stone lions. Out into the gray afternoon, where he turned left toward the bus stop and disappeared into the crowd.
Thirteen, maybe. Fourteen at most.
Small.
And there had been something about his face.
She hadn't let herself think about it while he was standing in front of her. She'd been too busy being the friendly librarian, too busy watching his hands and his eyes and the way he kept the computer screen half-turned away from her. But now, alone at her desk, it came back. The moment he'd smiled. Really smiled, shy and surprised, when she'd told him the library was for everyone.
She'd known Dick Grayson since he was fourteen years old. She'd seen that smile across a hundred rooftops, at a thousand terrible jokes, on the night he'd kissed her for the first time and on the night he'd left for Blüdhaven. Lopsided. A little crooked on the left. The kind of smile that showed up before the person wearing it had decided to let it.
The boy at terminal fourteen had smiled exactly like that.
Stop it, she told herself firmly. You found out three days ago that Dick has a son somewhere in this city. Of course you're seeing him everywhere. Every small, dark-haired kid in Gotham is going to look like Dick to you for the next month.
The kid's hair had been brown, not black. His eyes had been brown, too.
But the bones of that face. The jaw that hadn't finished deciding what it wanted to be yet. The way it was all going to settle, in a few years, into something that made people stop mid-sentence.
Barbara had watched that happen once before, to a skinny fourteen-year-old in a Robin costume. She remembered exactly how it had gone.
God help Gotham, she thought, if it happens twice.
It didn't help.
It's a kid, she told herself. A sweet, careful, slightly strange kid who likes polymers. You've been doing this too long. You're seeing ghosts in every terminal.
But she was already pulling up the security footage.
The reading room camera had him from behind for the whole forty minutes. Hood up. Head down. Not one clear shot of his face. And when she rewound to the moment he'd sat down, she watched him glance once around the room, at the doors, the cameras, the old man, her, before he did anything else.
Like he'd been counting.
Barbara sat back in her chair and stared at the frozen image for a long time.
It wasn't proof. It wasn't anything. A feeling, and a gap, and a kid with very good instincts.
She saved the clip anyway. She gave it a name, so she'd remember it.
Terminal 14.
Then she picked up her phone and scrolled to Dick's number, and stopped.
Three days ago, she'd watched Dick Grayson stand in the middle of the Batcave with his back to all of them, shaking, trying not to make a sound. She'd watched him touch the edge of a screen and say a name like it was a word in a language he'd only just started to learn.
She wasn't going to call him over a feeling. Not now. Not about this. If she was wrong, it would be the cruelest thing she'd ever done to him.
I met a kid at the library, and he was polite, and he wanted to know about polymers, and he was too careful.
She almost put the phone down.
Then she thought about the word again. Polymers.
Adhesives, he'd said. Stuff that's strong but flexible.
Barbara went very still.
Then she pulled up a second window, beside the frozen image of the gray hood. The GCPD report from four nights ago. A mugger in an alley downtown, found stuck to a dumpster by something the responding officers had described, in their very unscientific words, as like a giant spider web. Strong enough to hold a grown man. Flexible enough that he could still wriggle. Gone, dissolved into nothing, by the time forensics showed up two hours later.
She looked from one window to the other. The web. The hood.
No, she thought. That's insane.
She pressed call anyway.
"It's insane," Tim said, a few hours later.
The library had closed. The sun had gone down. Tim was in the cave, slumped in a chair with a bowl of cereal balanced on his knee, his face on the left side of Barbara's screen in the clock tower. Dick was on the right, somewhere on a rooftop in Blüdhaven at the start of his patrol, mask on, the wind turning his voice to static every few seconds.
He hadn't said much since she'd told them. Just walk me through it. Twice.
"I know it's insane," Barbara said. "That's why I'm calling you two first. Not Bruce. Not yet." She hesitated. "Dick, this is yours. Whatever we do next, it's your call."
"Walk me through it," Dick said again. Quieter. "One more time. Slowly."
Barbara pulled up the clip and shared it to both their screens. The reading room. Terminal fourteen. The small figure in the gray hood, sitting down, glancing once around the room before he touched the keyboard.
"Watch his head," she said. "Doors. Cameras. The old man. Me. In that order. Before he even turns on the screen."
Tim leaned closer to his monitor. The spoon stopped halfway to his mouth. "That's a sweep."
"That's a sweep," Barbara agreed. "A good one. And then the session. Forty minutes on my network, and my system didn't flag a single thing. Not one typo. Not one dead link. Not one page he opened and closed again." She let that sit. "I've had you on my network, Tim. Even you leave fingerprints."
"Rude," said Tim. "Accurate. But rude."
"And the log says he was researching chemistry labs. Universities. Research companies. He asked me about polymers. Adhesives. Strong but flexible. His words."
The line went quiet except for the wind on Dick's end.
"The web on the mugger," Tim said slowly.
"The web on the mugger."
"Okay. Okay, but." Tim set the cereal down. "That's a big jump, Babs. Lots of kids like chemistry. Lots of kids are paranoid about cameras. This is Gotham. Half the kids in this city know where the cameras are by the time they're ten."
"I know. That's what I keep telling myself." She hesitated. "But there's one more thing. The night of the break-in. Whatever was fighting me on the Academy network didn't feel like a person, it felt like a system. Something really, really good. And today, sitting under my nose, something on terminal fourteen was hiding that kid's session so well I couldn't see a single seam in it." She took a breath. "It felt the same."
Tim didn't say anything for a long moment.
On the other side of the screen, Dick had gone very still. Not his usual quiet, the kind he did when he was listening. The other kind.
"How old?" he asked.
Barbara looked at the frozen frame. "Thirteen. Maybe fourteen. Small for it."
Dick closed his eyes.
"Did you talk to him?" His voice came out rough. "Babs. Did you talk to him?"
"I did."
"Is he okay?"
The question was so quiet, and so raw, that for a second Barbara couldn't answer it.
"He's thin," she said finally, gently. "Tired. But he was clean, and he was wearing decent clothes, and he didn't look hungry. Somebody's feeding him." She paused. "He's polite. He's funny. He made a joke about being a specific kid. He's scared of something, and he's trying very hard not to show it." She swallowed. "He smiled at me, Dick. Once. When I told him the library was for everyone."
Dick pressed the back of his hand against his mouth and didn't say anything at all.
Barbara hesitated. Then she said the thing she'd been trying not to say since the library closed.
"Dick. He smiled like you."
His head came up.
"I know how that sounds. I know you want it to be true, and I know I want it to be true for you, and that's exactly why I almost didn't say it." Her voice was very quiet. "But I've known your face since you were fourteen. And when that kid smiled at me, for one second, I wasn't looking at a stranger." She swallowed. "Different eyes. Brown. Different hair. But that smile, Dick. Crooked on the left. Like it got there before he decided to let it."
On the other side of the screen, Dick closed his eyes. His shoulders shook, just once.
Nobody said a word for a long moment.
Then Tim cleared his throat, carefully. "Okay. So. If it's the same kid. If." He glanced at Barbara. "What's his name?"
Barbara hesitated.
"I'm not sure," she said. "Not for certain."
Tim stared at her. "I'm sorry. You're not sure? Oracle? The woman who once got a mob accountant's mother's maiden name out of him by asking about his cat?" He was trying, Barbara could tell, to make Dick smile. "Somebody mark the calendar."
It almost worked. The corner of Dick's mouth twitched behind his hand.
"I said I'm not sure," Barbara said dryly. "I didn't say I didn't get it. I got part of it."
That shut him up.
"I never asked him," she went on, more quietly. "I gave him a guest pass with a blank line and told him he didn't have to write his name on it. And he didn't. But on his way out, he came back to the desk. I hadn't said anything. He just stopped, and stood there for a second like he was working up the nerve, and said, I'm Pete. By the way." She paused. "Except he didn't start with Pete. He started with something else. Pe- And then he caught it, and fixed it." She looked at the frozen gray hood on her screen. "Like it mattered to him that somebody here knew his name. Just not all of it."
Nobody said anything.
Then Tim pulled up a file, and a single frozen frame appeared on all three screens. The Academy library. The search bar. One word, typed at 3:17 in the morning, before everything else was wiped.
Peter.
Dick made a sound. Small. Like something had hit him in the chest.
"Could be a coincidence," Tim said, very softly. He didn't sound like he believed it.
"It could be," Barbara agreed. She didn't either.
"Pete," Dick said. Just that. He said it the way he'd said Peter in the cave three days ago, like a word he was learning. Then he said it again, quieter, like he was trying to see how it fit. "Pete."
Barbara looked away from the screen for a moment. She had to.
"For what it's worth," Tim said after a while, gently, "B's been out every night since the Academy. All over the city. Rooftops, rail yards, the docks, anywhere someone could swing from. Nothing. Not a web. Not a thread."
"And Jason?" Dick asked.
Barbara pulled up a different set of feeds. A row of grainy rooftop cameras, all from the same part of the city. "Out every night, too. In Crime Alley. Earlier than he usually goes out, and he barely moves. Same few blocks. Same rooftop, most of the night." She zoomed in on a blurry figure in a red helmet, sitting with his back against a chimney across the street from a little yellow building. "Right across from his kitchen."
Dick stared at the image.
"He's guarding something," he said slowly.
"Or waiting for something," said Tim.
"There's more." Barbara pulled up another feed. Time-stamped last night, 2:31 a.m. The same rooftop. The same red helmet. And then, suddenly, the figure was on its feet and gone, running north across the rooftops at a speed that blurred the frame. "He left that roof and ran eleven blocks at a full sprint. I lost him at the train yards." She paused. "He was chasing something. My cameras never caught what."
Dick went very still.
"He saw him," he said quietly. "Jason saw him."
Nobody answered. Nobody had to.
A blonde head popped into the corner of Tim's frame, hair in a messy ponytail, a waffle in one hand. Steph leaned over Tim's shoulder and squinted at the screens.
"Sorry, sorry, I've been listening from the stairs, I'm a terrible person." Her voice softened as she looked at Dick. "He gave you his name? Babs. A kid like that, living like that, doesn't give anyone his name. That's huge."
"Part of his name," said Tim.
"Part of his name is huge, Timothy." She looked at Dick again, and her face went gentle. "Hey. Boy Wonder. You okay?"
Dick let out a long breath. "Ask me tomorrow, Steph."
She nodded, like that was a real answer. Maybe it was.
"Where did the kid go? When he left the library."
"Left, toward the bus stop." Barbara pulled up the street camera, the angle that caught the bus shelter, and zoomed in on a blurry frame. A small gray hood, climbing aboard. The number glowing orange on the front of the bus.
12.
Tim pulled up the route before she even finished saying it. A long, crooked line across the map, from downtown, through the old theater district, all the way down into the south side.
Into Crime Alley.
To within two blocks of a little yellow building with a free kitchen and a red helmet sitting on the roof across the street.
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
"He promised me," Dick said finally.
His voice was very quiet. Not angry. Something worse than angry.
"In the cave. He said if the kid was in Crime Alley, he'd find him. Carefully. And I'd be the first one he called." He looked at the frozen image of Jason on the rooftop, sitting in the same spot he'd sat for three nights straight. "First one, he said. He swore."
"Dick," Barbara said carefully. "We don't know that Jason knows anything. He might just be watching the neighborhood. After what Bruce told him-"
"He feeds half that neighborhood, Babs. Every morning. Every night." Dick pulled his mask back down over his eyes. His voice steadied. Not calmer. Just decided. "If there's a skinny thirteen year old in a gray hoodie living somewhere in Crime Alley, where do you think he eats?"
Tim opened his mouth. Closed it again.
"You're going to see Jason," Barbara said.
"In person. Not on comms. Not a text." Dick was already on his feet; she could hear the wind shift as he moved toward the edge of the roof. "If he's been sitting on this, I want him to tell me to my face. And if he hasn't…" He stopped. "If he hasn't, then I need his help. Either way, I'm going."
"Dick." Barbara leaned toward the screen. "Listen to me. If it is him, he's smart. He'll see you coming a mile away. And if he runs, we lose him. Maybe for good."
"I know."
"So you don't go in as Nightwing. And you don't go in as a guy looking for his son." Her voice softened. "You go in as Jason's brother, who wants to wash some dishes."
Dick was quiet for a long moment.
"Okay," he said.
"And Dick?"
"Yeah?"
"He's a good kid." Barbara looked at the gray hood one last time. "Whatever he is. Wherever he came from. He's a good kid first."
Dick let out a long, unsteady breath.
"Yeah," he said. "He's also mine."
The line clicked off.
Barbara sat alone in the clock tower for a long time after that, the image of terminal fourteen glowing in front of her, the city humming in the dark beyond the windows.
She didn't notice, deep inside the Wayne Foundation's network, beneath the layers she checked every day, a tiny, silent thread that hadn't been there that morning, running quietly up into the sky.