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Janet Drake is seventeen years old when she gets pregnant with the son of her best friend. He is dark haired and dreamy and so very smart and while she hadn’t wanted a baby she is glad it’s his. They marry in a shotgun wedding and she moves from her rundown hole-in-the-wall home in the older part of Gotham to a great big manor in Bristol. It should be a dream, but she and Jack always were better off as friends, and Janet had Plans (with a capital P) for her life. The two of them had been planning to leave Gotham since they were little kids. She, a dingy dirt covered girl not from Crime Alley, but not far off either, and he a dirty runaway from Gotham’s richest. The baby throws a wrench in Janet's plans. Still, she loves the tiny squalling child that is placed in her arms. He looks like Jack with Janet’s nose. But he hasn’t got either of their eyes or hair. Janet and Jack both have light light gray eyes and while Janet's hair is red, Jack’s is a soft light brown. Their son has black hair, like shadows or pitch, and Gotham blue eyes. Both of them grew up in Gotham, and they both know what eyes like those mean. Timothy Jackson Drake will never be able to leave Gotham.
They try anyway. They take the first flight out of Gotham headed to Malta, there’s a fascinating archaeological find there and both are very excited to see it. They step off the plane into the sunlight and Timothy screams. He’s turning intangible in Janet’s arms. They fly back to Gotham an hour later and Janet despairs. She tries to accept the fact that she will spend her life trapped in this spooky old manor with a kid who will undoubtedly turn out Wrong. She tries not to hate her best friend as he runs off to country after country. He brings her home trophies and trinkets and fun facts. And Jack loves her, he does, but he wasn’t meant for settling down and staying put.
Neither is Janet.
Janet lasts six months. She is a month shy of nineteen when she runs. She calls a nanny and stows away on Jack’s flight. She knows it’s wrong, her baby who she loves is far away from her, but Jack laughs when he finds her, and they run together. It’s like nothing has changed. And anyway, they won’t be away from Timmy for long (Janet had always been a master at lying to herself.)
They return home three months later and find that their son has learned to crawl. Timmy looks at her with deep, empty eyes. He doesn’t know who they are. Timmy is fast, even at nearly a year old. The darkness of Drake Manor, one of Gotham’s five ancestral homes, swallows her son whole. He bounces from shadow to shadow, giggling. Janet shivers when he turns his too intelligent eyes on her. Janet brushes it off. Timothy is a baby, her baby, nothing weird about him at all.
They leave again a month later, leaving the Nanny with instructions to tell them if he starts speaking or walking and to update them each day, but reception is spotty in the mountains of
Chile and those reports come something closer to once a week. Janet's baby burbles over the phone to them and calls her mama from an ocean away. Janet and Jack both smile before returning to their dig. Their Timothy is such a sweet boy. They’ll bring him something nice for his birthday.
Janet returns to Gotham three days before her son’s second birthday. She brings him a little toy from a city nearby the dig site and a little good luck talisman that she had bought to keep him safe (not that she really believed in such things, but it was the thought that counted). The next morning, when she goes to pluck her little son from his crib, she finds that talisman shattered as if someone (or something she pointedly doesn’t think) had taken a hammer to it. She doesn’t know what to think.
( She knows exactly what to think. Janet grew up in the bad part of Gotham, deep in the belly of the beast. Janet grew up where the shadows were dark and the people a little more wild. Janet knows Gotham is possessive; Janet ought to have known better than to bring another city’s magic to protect her child. )
They glue the pieces of the talisman painstakingly back together and place it on a shelf too high for Timmy to reach, “When you're older, darling” she says. Jack ruffles his son’s hair, “Good lad,” he laughs, “Didn’t like mum’s ugly talisman.” Timmy scrunches his nose, and Jack laughs.
A week later, they leave for Italy, there is a particularly exciting excavation going on, and they’re both aching to go. Janet kisses her son on the forehead and tells him she’ll call every day. She’s written a list for the nanny and…
She has a nagging feeling that she is forgetting something important, it is exacerbated by the look in her little son’s eyes. Janet sits for a long moment, reaching for something. It’s gone. It’s nothing. Janet walks out the door.
Timmy’s third birthday marks the first time they take him to a gala. He’s old enough now that the squalling of an infant won’t be a problem or an irritant. Jack says that as soon as a child is toilet trained, they are old enough to attend a Gala. Janet is unsure of that, but she bundles her baby into a tiny suit and combs his shadowy hair, and presses a happy kiss to his forehead. Timmy smiles at her sweet and adoring. Janet averts her eyes, trying to remember the expression without the white glint of sharp teeth slicing through gums. It’s not the Gala itself that is notable, it is the appearance of Bruce Wayne. Janet remembers Bruce from the headlines when she was young. The tragic story of his parents’ deaths had been plastered across the city, but Bruce hadn’t been seen in years.
She sees him now. Bruce Wayne sweeps down the stairs with a charming grin. He twirls across the ballroom, wooing ladies and laughing drunkenly. Janet shudders, she’s forgotten that Bruce, too, was a Gothamite. All his posturing and drunkenness could only hide that from the detached wealthy. Janet plasters a smile across her face as charming and false as Bruce’s, clinging tightly to her child.
(There are sharp white teeth and deep shadows in this ballroom. There is the whisper of a child long dead in Janet's ear, whispering things she shouldn’t know. Things like the Waynes had always had darker shadows than the rest, like Gotham loved them best. Things like that night, the night that would change an impoverished Park Row to a filthy crime ridden alley, Bruce Wayne had fallen with his parents to the ground, a clean gunshot wound to the head. And then he’d stood back up and gone home.)
When she gets home, she shudderingly asks Jack if they could be gone for the next Gala. Jack knows her better than anyone; he looks her in the eye and softens. Janet won’t catch a glimpse of their neighbor for another six years. It won’t save her.
They leave for Siberia the next morning. Janet is still so shaken she can’t bring herself to do more than brush a trembling finger across the cheek of her sleeping child. Then she stands up and leaves.
Timothy wakes two hours later and sobs great salty tears for his mother. On the plane, Janet feels suddenly light. She sleeps for the rest of the flight, and when she awakens she feels like there’s too much empty space in her head. It worries her, but when she says as much to Jack, he just laughs and tells her they’d better fill it up with all the facts about Siberia they can.
A week later, Janet startles out of a dead sleep and calls her son. She can’t figure out why she hadn’t called him already. Her sweet boy is as bubbly and happy as ever. There’s a warm glow over his face like he’d eaten a particularly good meal. Janet smiles. He really is a wonderful child. In the silence of her tent, after the screen goes dark, Janet feels the emptiness return. Not so badly as before, but persistent, like she’s beginning to go hungry.
She feels so awful about forgetting to call him that when they go home, Janet decides to take him to the Circus. They take pictures with a family of acrobats and Janet and Jack indulgently listen to their baby ramble and buy him cotton candy and peanuts. They sit in the very front of the stands close enough that the view is breathtaking and gravity-defying. And then it isn’t. Two forms lay crumpled in the dirt. There are screams and cries and wails. Little Timothy watches curiously from Janet's arms and asks to walk. Janet is so flustered that she doesn’t notice the small satisfied smile on Timothy's face as he gazes at the young boy who has just been orphaned.
Much of the next few weeks will remain a mystery to Janet. The Doctors said she had some form of shellshock. Janet thought that was a ridiculous idea. Janet had watched too many people to count die terrible, gruesome deaths. This wasn’t a new thing to her, but.. But… ( there is the tiny form of a little boy crumpled on the ground beside his parents. Moments ago, he was flying through the air, and now Gotham’s soft soil is cradling him. Her darkness blurs his edges, filling his still lungs and turning his brown hair an inky shade of Black. He sits up. And then he cries like the cries of a newborn colt, bloody and standing on new legs.) She’s not sure why this time was different; perhaps it was because they were Outsiders, or maybe it is the first time death has touched her since she’d had a son. She’s forgotten how cold his hands were.
She thinks as she reads a newspaper across the world of Bruce Wayne adopting an orphan circus boy, that death’s hands were not only cold but kind. Kindness is hard to come across in Gotham. Janet had certainly never seen much of it. Only darkness and starvation and violence.
Timothy grows like a weed in their absence. In that, he grows oddly and a little out of place. He is small for his age, a little wispy. Hard to catch when he’s hiding and hard to find when he’s quiet. They play hide and seek with their son exactly once. He is five years old, and it takes them a whole ten days to find him. As the days pass, it gets harder to remember what they were doing. The fear fades. Everything feels white and blank. When Timothy finally emerges with a bright smile, launches himself into her arms and asks, giggling, if he’d won. Janet clings to him as tightly as she can and sobs.
She knows she’s losing time now. She knows she’s losing him. The feeling of empty hunger intensifies even as it turns her empty. She wishes she knew what was happening ( she does, and she should have listened better as a child, she thinks). Jack passively mentions a dig in Peru. Janet nods and watches her husband book the tickets. It really is an excellent opportunity, she thinks. Her body feels light and floaty in Peru. Like she’s watching someone else’s life. Jack smiles and runs a finger over her hand, and everything jolts into place. She widens her grin and presses a kiss to his lips, watching his gaze sharpen, his lips twitch into a grin.
When they go home, Janet jumps as a child emerges from the shadowy corner of the room, and then relaxes the next moment, scooping her baby up and ignoring the way his bones shift under her hands. She grins proudly at him as he shows them his report card and tells them that his teachers say he might be able to skip a grade. Jack ruffles Timmy’s hair and tells him they’ll have to go out for ice cream to celebrate. Tim smiles back happily, but there is an odd dark knowing in his eyes that Janet can’t quite understand.
The ice cream goes forgotten as they have to run to catch a flight. “Raincheck, kiddo,” Jack says distractedly. Timothy nods, the sharp angles of his face catching on the shadows and glinting off the glow of his eyes. He doesn’t look nearly as surprised as he should, but she is too preoccupied with packing and leaving to pause too long on it. Lingering on such things had become tiring of late. (besides things always stick better when you don’t look at them too close a dirty blue eyed little girl whispers)
Time begins to pass strangely from there. Janet wakes up in a country she can’t remember arriving in. She stares blankly at a talisman she has no memory of digging up. Jack congratulates her on a paper that she didn’t write, and yet she must’ve because there's her name in black ink looking more solid and real than she. Days pass with the strange detached reality of a dream. She can't quite catch hold of what is happening now and what already is. It's disappearing just out of reach.
She returns home for the first time in, she doesn’t know how long (really she doesn’t and she’s terribly frightened and.. and... emptiness)
Janet’s eyes sweep the room pausing for a split second on the child curled up in the chair for a long terrible moment she doesn’t know him. Then he turns to her with a glowing satisfied smile a flies into her arms. For a moment everything is right in the world. The shadows are safe and her son is in her arms. Timothy watches her with fascination drawing sharp fingernails across her skin until she bleeds just a little. Janet feels her strength sap from her. (she is reminded that the children of Gotham are fascinated by blood, fascinated by the steady beat of a heart) . Jack pulls her away with a frown and Janet tries to protest that she doesn’t mind. She’s missed her son and this is normal. Jack doesn’t seem to agree, although as he walks out the door he can’t quite seem to remember why.
Janet doesn’t see Tim for the first week that they are home. There’s a strange feeling like her home is too empty. Like the shadows are watching, looking, seeing. It makes her shudder in fear. The manor is colder and darker than she remembered it being. And when she looks in the mirror she thinks she looks sharper and paler than she can ever remember being before. When Tim finally appears there is relief and a little worry, because how could she have forgotten her son? How could she have spent an entire seven days in the manor without once thinking of Tim ( The girl bright eyed and sharp nailed, looks on disdainfully in her mind. Lips curled and dark hair shaking)
They’d promised once to never play another game of hide and seek with Timothy again. Tim does not seem to get the memo he disappears into the depths of the manor with an echoing giggle and Janet blinks. She thinks she was looking for something. It must not be important she decides. Jack and Janet leave before they remember there is another living being in the manor. This trip is nearly sixteen months long.
Timothy turns nine and then ten alone in the manor.
They return and Janet frowns, there was something very important about being home, her eyes slip past the child in the room unseeing. If only she could remember what it was.
For the first time in Six years, Janet attends a Wayne gala. There is tinkling laughter and bubbling drinks and Brucie flirting his way through the population. A woman she almost knows asks her a question, Janet was always a clever girl, it should be easy to answer. Something is pulling at her mind shadows in the corners are dancing. Janet gives a dull nicety in return. What fun she is having. There is an eerie calm in her head. Soothing and almost mocking as she sips her drink. ( the girl in her head tosses her dark hair scornfully and scoffs in satisfaction. Gothamites are not merciful to traitors, not even themselves).