Chapter Text
The house looked… a little odd. Portar hadn’t been around long enough to oversee the construction of the house, but the massive blue block of a home looked… very out of place in between the grey and black apartments surrounding it.
He’d been watching the house for a few days after an anonymous person had called in, citing that “there were too many kids for such a small house”.
Personally? He agreed with that statement. Over the course of a week, he’d counted at least 8 kids and 7 adults- it was a genuine wonder how they’d all fit in there. At least five of them all went to Gotham Academy, and two of them had the tendency to leave incredibly early. 5:50am was the latest he’d seen the two girls leave.
The rest of the kids took public transportation- why the split, he had no idea. The Gotham rule with kids was to group them together as much as possible, because it made it easier for the adults to find them during a rogue attack. But then again, these were Outsiders, so maybe they just… didn’t know yet.
An uncomfortable feeling settled into his gut. If they didn’t know now to group the kids together outside of the house, they’d end up learning the hard way.
Or maybe it was intentional the back of his mind whispered. Falls under child neglect in Gotham Law to keep kids isolated from each other- he cut off the thought before it could go any further. To assume this early was just asking for complications to arise.
Today he’d seen pretty much all the kids leave, except two, and he couldn’t get rid of the thought that this could be a repeat of the Basement Chains case from Crime Alley.
He swallowed whatever nerves he was feeling, and rang the doorbell, making a note of the state of the yard- there were bikes of all sizes scattered all over the place, as well as a random softball caught in the hedges and a hole in the corner. It hadn’t been raked.
The door opened, and whatever spiel he’d originally planned to say died in his throat as a sniffling child wrapped in a blanket and a scarf opened the door.