Chapter Text
Bruce found Tim by accident.
He didn’t usually patrol his territory in the middle of the day because of the unrelenting sun of Bristol in the summer. Fur got hot and his dark black coat especially seemed to soak up the heat of the sun. Usually, he could patrol for hours without stopping, but now after just an hour and a half, he felt himself beginning to pant and wish for water.
Silently, a part of him wished he had taken Dick’s suggestion to patrol together that night. He did enjoy patrolling with his boys. He loved Dick’s enthusiasm and the boundless energy of a young Wolf shifter eager to get his paws into all the trouble he could find. He adored watching Jason meet his brother’s enthusiasm, the Coyote finally trusting them enough to let his full brazen personality shine.
It filled his heart to watch his boy romp and play through the forest, nipping at each other and chasing each other’s tails. Sometimes they could even goad Bruce into their games and they would spend the entire evening on four paws running and howling into the night.
But Jason had felt a little under the weather this morning so Bruce decided to patrol early so he could spend the entire night with his pup curled up into him. It was frustratingly common for Jason to get sick, a remnant of his time spent in a furrier’s cage and pressed against a hundred other sick, starving puppies.
They had had a couple of scares when Jason was younger. A lot of long nights spent with Bruce panicking and trying to figure out how he could ever keep going on if the pup at his belly passed during the night. A lot of tears and longing howls as he clutched the Coyote pup to his chest and prayed to anyone who would listen to let Jason live. A lot of mad dashes to Leslie’s office as Jason took a sudden downturn and Bruce and Dick were left in the waiting room, wondering if they would see Jason alive again.
Over the years, as Jason received steady food and adequate medical care, he got stronger and the illnesses became less frequent.
His illness this morning really wasn’t anything too concerning. It was a light cough, some chest congression, some sniffles. Jason had even insisted that he was well enough to patrol, something that Alfred cut down really quick.
No, his pup would stay curled up against Dick’s belly until Bruce came home to lick the distress from his fur or wipe the sweat from his brow. He would stay warm and safe and cared for until the scratchiness left his voice and he was back at full form.
Bruce didn’t take risks with his pups, even if they complained endlessly about his overprotectiveness for it.
Bruce quickened his pace, eager to finish the circuit of his patrol route and return home to his boys.
He was about halfway through his patrol and right at the edge of his territory. The tree line thinned and became a meadow that marked the property border with the Drakes.
Usually, he didn’t go right to the border, but something inside of him urged him forward. He followed his instincts, looking out across the meadow.
The Drake’s Manor sat proudly in the distance, far away and empty like a relic. It always looked like that, as if the Drakes had built it just because it was what they were supposed to do.
Bruce almost turned to retreat back into his forest, but a flash of movement caught his eye.
He stopped, tilting his head as he watched for the movement again and…
There.
Some kind of animal was chained to a post outside of the Manor, pacing at the end of its leash.
He watched as the creature, probably a dog, sat down and panted, looking expectantly into the Manor for someone to come out.
In his head, Bruce cursed the Drakes. It was way too hot to leave a dog leashed outside. Hopefully, the poor thing hadn’t been outside for long and the Drakes just forgot to put it inside.
Bruce loped into the Drake’s territory, intending on going to their house to remind them that they needed to put their dog inside.
As he came closer though, his stomach flipped in his belly and disgust began to rise in his throat. He couldn’t help but freeze as the horrifying scene began to come into focus.
It angered him when he thought that it was a dog being left in the heat.
It made him absolutely furious to see it was a shifter.
The “dog” at the end of the metal chain was actually a Fox kit, young enough that he hadn’t begun to grow his adult coat yet. He had been leashed to a stake in the ground, far away from any shade or relief from the sun. The boy walked back and forth at the end of the chain, whining and yipping towards the house
He was panting furiously, his tiny chest heaving for air and desperately trying to cool him down. Occasionally, he would pad over to the bowl that was obviously supposed to have water in it but had already been licked dry.
It broke Bruce’s heart to watch the kit try to search for water that wasn’t there and cry for parents who weren’t answering.
This couldn’t stand. Bruce would never leave a child in these cruel conditions, especially when it was so clear that he was suffering in the heat.
The Wolf padded forward, forcing himself not to run.
The Fox was in mid-step when he heard Bruce coming. His ears swivelled towards the Wolf, his tail tucked between his legs, and his blue eyes widened to the size of dinner plates. Bruce stopped, as the boy began trembling and barking in fright. He was struggling at the end of the leash, trying desperately to pull his head out of the iron collar around his neck, but was nearly suffocating himself in the process.
When it became clear that the collar wasn’t going to let him escape, the Fox kit pushed his belly to the ground and began growling.
The Fox obviously thought Bruce was a feral wolf and he was here to pray upon the trapped kit.
The fury in Bruce’s stomach flared and made him what to sink his teeth into the kit’s parents.
He wasn’t going to hurt the kid, but his parents didn’t know that. The Kit was completely vulnerable out here, with no way to hide or defend himself. If Bruce was a feral wolf, then the kit would have been in danger. A real true danger that could have left the child dead.
How could parents leave a child like that? If either of his boys were chained to a pole and left vulnerable to predators, Bruce would be furious and out of his mind with worry. Why didn’t this Fox’s parents feel the same?
Bruce shook his head and shifted, approaching the kit as a human.
“Hush, puppy. You’re okay. I’m not going to hurt you,” he crouched, holding his hand out and trying to appear as small as possible.
The Fox stopped growling but didn’t stop baring his tiny milk fangs to the Wolf.
“It’s okay,” Bruce assured the Fox, “I know you’re a shifter and I just want to help you.”
Slowly, the kit straightened, dropping his tense stance and shifting from aggressive to cautiously wary.
Now that Bruce was close he could see the true pain the kit was being put through. The Fox was panting again now that he wasn’t growling. He was obviously miserable in the direct sun, dehydrated and overheating through his fur coat.
The collar was too tight, rubbing off the fur around his neck and digging into the sensitive skin there.
“Oh puppy,” Bruce said, his heart breaking as he reached out. The Fox’s ears flipped back against his skull and he dipped his head as Bruce’s hand petted between his ears. The velvet-soft fur was far too warm under his palm.
The Fox whimpered, leaning into Bruce’s hand and gazing up at him with large, hurt eyes.
He petted the kit again, stroking down his head and intending to pet his back, but his hand hit the metal collar on the Fox’s neck.
Bruce pulled his hand back with a hiss. The metal collar was hot, painfully hot, and it must have been baking in the sun with the kit. It had burned Bruce just by touching it for a moment, he couldn’t imagine the pain of having it wrapped around his throat and impossible to get off.
It had to be searing the Fox’s skin, burning through the thin protection of his fur.
The kit yelped when Bruce tried to shift the collar a bit, trying to move it off the already burned skin.
“I know, baby,” Bruce whispered to the whining puppy under his hands, “I know it hurts. I’m going to help you, I promise.”
The Fox’s heart-breaking whimpers increased and the kit shoved himself into Bruce’s lap. The child was begging him with his eyes, silent and desperate.
It reminded Bruce so much of two other pups who had looked at him, broken and terrified.
One pup, a Wolf like Bruce, had hidden in a hollow log while his parent-led poachers away. He had still insisted that his parents could still be alive when Bruce found him when he patrolled his territory. But Bruce had heard the crack of shotguns earlier that night and it was cruelly easy to figure out what had happened. He had taken the pup home with him and the next day, he went out, hoping to find the pup’s parents alive and escaped.
Instead, he found two blood smears and the noxious mix of gunpowder and cruelty.
Bruce found his second pup in the deep in the depths of a Shifter fur ring. Bruce had broken up the trafficking group and the Coyote was the only child he could get out alive. He remembered crying as he saw the puppy curled in a too-small cage, growling at every movement and trembling in terror.
He had nearly sobbed when he finally got the puppy out of the cage and into his arms. The tiny, starved Coyote had quivered against his chest and collapsed into the only kind touch he had received in years.
That was years ago, and both his boys were cared for and loved, but their terrified, hurt looks of when they first laid eyes on him still haunted him.
Bruce carefully put the Fox on the ground, petting his head when the kit keened in protest.
“Can you shift for me? I’d like to talk with you.”
The Fox hesitated, but then shifted, revealing a small, thin boy.
He was younger than Bruce expected him to be. He had thought the pup was about Jason’s age, but he actually seemed to be a couple of years younger. He would have been pale if it wasn’t for the sunburn that blazed across his skin. He had the same sad, blue eyes.
It was terrible to see the metal collar wrapped around a Fox’s neck.
It was even more disturbing to see it shift with the boy and be around a human neck.
Without fur, the burns on his skin were even more prominent and painted an angry red rash across his collarbone. The skin was raw and weeping, painful with every movement, and Bruce couldn’t help but be physically angry at seeing the boy in such agony.
“Hello,” the boy said through a scratchy parched throat, before trying again. “Hello, Mr. Wayne.”
Recognition struck Bruce like a punch.
Timothy Drake.
He hadn’t seen the boy in years, not since his parents stopped bringing him to galas. He’d actually assumed that the boy had been sent away for schooling.
“Hello Tim,” Bruce said through all the questions that were beginning to fill his head. “Why are you out here? Where are your parents?”
The boy’s eyes shifted to the house. He shuddered nervously and traced a thin finger in the dirt.
“They are inside. I’m getting punished. I didn’t listen to Mother yesterday and she said if I acted like an animal then I would be treated like an animal. I’m not supposed to shift human until Mother says it’s okay for me to come back inside.”
Bruce tilted his head. “And when will it be okay to come back inside?”
“She didn’t say. Only that I could when I was acting more obedient.”
The word ‘obedient’ made Bruce wince. There had been lots of abuse put onto canine Shifters because of the word ‘obedient'.
“Alright. Well, how long have you been out here?”
The Fox kit hesitated, before turning his face to the sun. The direct light made the vibrant red of his sunburn all the more glaring.
“What time is it?”
The question sank dread deep in Bruce’s stomach.
“It’s 3:34 P.M.”
“Oh,” the pup said blandly. “About ten hours then.”
Bruce couldn’t help the horror on his face.
They had left him out here… for ten fucking hours.
The thought almost made him want to hurl. To think about collaring Dick and roping him outside… to think about leaving Jason chained somewhere to bear the elements…
Just the thought of it sent him on edge.
What if it rained? What about when it got dark? What about when Tim needed more food and water? What about when Tim needed to use the goddamn bathroom?
A stinking corner as far from Tim as physically possible told Bruce exactly how Tim was forced to deal with that need.
Bruce snarled, more Wolf than human, and the boy in front of him flinched back. If he was in his Fox form, his ears would have pressed flat against his head and his tail would have curled between his legs.
Bruce didn’t mean to frighten the pup, but his treatment and the obvious abuse made Bruce want to rip someone’s throat out.
“Mr. Wayne?”
Bruce stood, glaring at the house. Its picture-perfect white walls and gleaming windows belied the ugliness of what had happened inside it.
“I’m going to talk to your parents, Timothy. If it hurts less you shift back, you may.”
Tim nodded, watching silently as Bruce strode in front of him. Bruce didn’t see him shift, but he heard the painfully young whining of a Fox kit in distress as he approached the house.
He knocked once. Mostly because of Alfred’s teachings instead of an actual desire to be polite. When he received no answer, he shifted, put his jaws around the metal door handle, and bit down. He put all his biteforce into the knob, heard the metal of the lock groan, and ripped it from the door. Shatter pieces of lock fell around his paws and a smug sense of satisfaction raced through him at the thought of the Drakes having to replace it.
He entered the house on four paws and snarled. The sound echoed through the halls, deep and threatening. It bounced across the walls, filled every corner, and reverberated into every empty room, but it wasn’t met with an answer.
Bruce paused, cocked his head, and swiveled his ears to strain for a sound but the house was silent.
No… it couldn’t be.
Bruce sat and lifted his head, filling the manor with a howl that no one could possibly ignore.
And he still got no answer back.
He shifted, standing on two legs and felt his pocket for his phone.
“You better not have,” he whispered in pure fury. It was common knowledge that the Drakes were constantly travelling and rarely at their home in Gotham. “You better fucking not have…”
“Hello?”
“Jack Drake,” Bruce snarled into the phone. “You better have a good fucking reason I found your son chained to a pole outside your house.”
The man on the other line sighed heavily. “What did Timothy do now?”
Bruce blinked, shocked for a second by the man’s complete lack of concern at Tim’s condition. A small part of him had still hoped that maybe this had been some kind of mistake, some kind of big misunderstanding.
“He didn’t do anything,” Bruce snapped. “Your boy is chained outside. He’s hungry and thirsty and overheating and he’s suffering out there.”
Jack Drake laughed, light and indifferent. “Don’t you think you’re being a tad dramatic, Bruce? Timothy is fine. Someone is coming to put him back into his kennel tonight. He will get fresh food and water then.”
“Kennel…” Revulsion welled up in Bruce. Memories of his own Coyote pup, caged and left trapped for hours, flashed in his head like lightning.
“He doesn’t need a goddamn kennel. He’s a Shifter!” Bruce was yelling. He didn’t even care that he was yelling. He was so fucking angry that Jack Drake was lucky he wasn’t here in person to get the true show of Bruce’s fury.
The other man tutted, sounding distracted by something in the distance. “He’s only in the kennel at night, the housekeeper lets him out into the garden during the day.” There was the far-away crackle of a speaker and Drake sounded like he was speaking to someone else. It was a minute before he was talking to Bruce again.
“Mr. Wayne, you’ve obviously not been a parent to a Fox before. They are destructive buggers when they’re little. They are always looking for trouble, and you need a heavy hand to train obedience into them. If you’re too loose, they learn they can get away with anything and you don’t want that.”
Bruce didn’t answer. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Jack Drake was trying to justify hurting his son with… stereotypes? With outdated caricatures of what being a certain species “meant”?
Timothy was just a child. He wasn’t a criminal. He wasn’t an animal that needed to be “trained into obedience”. This was just cruelty. Plain, ugly, and simple.
“Brucie, I’m sorry to cut this call short, but our plane is about to board. If you want to discuss something further with me, then please direct your calls to my secretary. She will relay the message to me. Alright? Goodbye.”
And before Bruce could even hope to answer, he was cut out and left staring at the black mirror of his phone screen.
Fury rolled through him, just like in all those times he had broken up Shifter trafficking rings and brought down furriers with a taste for Shifter coats. The world could be a ravenous beast to those it thought vulnerable and too many children had fallen prey to those teeth.
And some people still thought Shifters were the monsters.
Bruce sighed, suddenly heavy with the weight of Timothy Drake.
Right in his backyard. The poor kit had been suffering right in his backyard and he hadn’t even known it.
He looked around and, by some stroke of mercy, found a shining golden key on the kitchen island. It was purposefully convenient and sitting next to a well-worn, leather collar and a leash. In the corner of the kitchen was a black, metal cage, with another lock specially designed to resist human hands or Shifter claws.
The sight of the items, items specifically designed to restrain and dehumanise, solidified what Bruce had already wanted to do.
Tim was leaving with him and he would never come back to this place again.
He grabbed the key and returned to the panting Fox kit.
“I’m going to take you to my house, Tim. We’re going to get you some food and water, and do something about the wounds on your neck.” Bruce paused, suddenly unsure about his decisions.
He had no doubt that he wanted to save the pup and get him the care he truly deserved but was it the right thing to bring the kit home?
Would his other pups accept the kit? He had heard that some canine Shifters got territorial around their family, and Bruce certainly felt that when something threatened someone he considered his own. He didn’t think that his boys would get aggressive, but Bruce couldn’t quite be sure.
And the Fox needed them so badly. He obviously wanted a family, he had whined after his abusive parents, desperate for a scrap of attention even after they put him in the sun to bake for hours.
Tim gazed up at him as he knelt down and the sight of the key made him instantly bare his throat.
The instinctiveness of that action made Bruce’s heart ache.
He unlocked the collar from the kit’s neck, taking it off carefully. Removing it exposed the raw, burnt skin on the pup’s sensitive skin, but at least it wasn’t burning him anymore.
Bruce shifted and licked at the puppy’s velvet-soft fur. He licked the sadness that clung to his skin. He licked the loneliness that hung from his muscles. He licked the neglect that rose with the knobs of the kit’s ribcage, way too prominent on his body.
He licked his newest puppy and pressed a promise into his fur with every swipe.
Mine.
The kit slowly leaned his head up, licking the bottom of Bruce’s chin just like any puppy would do to an adult wolf.
Yours?
The question mark was obvious in the pup’s action, but Bruce was willing to be patient. None of his sons accepted him right off the bat.
He whuffed and then put his mouth carefully over the kit’s thin frame. He was careful to lift by the child's back and avoid his abused neck. Bruce wouldn’t cause the boy more pain, especially when he had experienced so much already.
No, Bruce would do the opposite. He would give him love and care and everything he needed, and then maybe the kit would want to stay.
Maybe, in the future, when the Fox was healthy and whole and far away from the collar of his past, Bruce would ask Mine?
And the kit would answer: Yes.