Work Text:
There is a bird tucked away in the rafters of the abandoned building he’s investigating. Hanging rather precariously; one knee cradling the wooden beam, her torso dangling upside down and an arm waving enthusiastically.
He stops short in the middle of the room, gazing up to give her a long, baleful look. Because she knows exactly how to get under his skin, his most impatient Robin smiles sweetly at him and waits diligently for him to speak first.
Bruce sighs. “What are you doing here,” he asks, long-suffering.
Her face explodes with glee. “I’m your backup!” she insists, before swinging her body in an admittedly impressive flip (I’ve told Dick to stop encouraging the young ones, he grumbles inwardly,) and landing in an upright perch on the beam. “Since Damian’s sick. Obviously.”
“No names in the field,” Bruce says, because it’s automatic, instinctual. He kneels down to study the cracked floorboards beneath him. The lack of dust suggests the house wasn’t as abandoned as it was supposed to be. “And your parents are home this weekend.”
“Yeah, and they’re way worse at keeping track of me than Safi is. So.”
Bruce glances up at her, giving her a look that he hopes is chiding and discerning. Maps just shrugs. She somersaults through the air, landing gracefully on the wooden floor and coming over to squat next to him.
“You have to go home,” he says, a bit pained.
“What?” Maps squawks. “No way. You’re Robin-less. I can’t just abandon you like that.”
“Mia.”
“No names in the field,” Maps sings, and grins happily at him, face full of freckles and the glitter she dips her mask in because it makes Damian roll his eyes. “So. What’s the story, boss?”
Bruce gives her a long, long look. And sighs.
“Double homicide,” he says. “Don’t touch anything in here. And stick close.”
They look through the house, together. Bruce tries to remember a time in which he only had to worry about one child at once.
***
It’s late afternoon. The dining room table is packed full of residents. Bruce sits at the head of the table, laptop open in front of him, attempting to work through some of the uncountable number of emails he’s accumulated this week. Damian sits to his right, and then Cass, fiddling with a bottle of nail polish, and then Olive, hunched over several books and notepads. On the other side of the table Tim is sprawled out on his back, head resting on one chair, torso on another, legs propped up on a third. He’s holding his phone aloft, scrolling absently. Bruce blinks and he’s fifteen again, nowhere near adulthood, nowhere near tw- well, the age he is now. Bruce doesn’t like thinking about it, really. His bones ache.
“Black would be better,” Cass says, for the tenth time. “We should switch.”
“You like black,” Damian corrects. “I’m not depressing. I like color.”
Damian had wanted his nails painted, and Cass had for some reason resolved to do it for him. Bruce is relatively sure they’re just bored. The polish itself had been scavenged from the back of a drawer in one of the sitting rooms. Olive thinks Pom had left it lying around, Damian thinks it had been Maps, and Tim insists it’s his from six years ago.
Cass mumbles something about not being depressing, but sighs. “Fine. Up to you. Bright, bright blue.”
“Blue,” Tim quips drily from the other side of the table, not looking up from his phone. “What an inspired choice.”
Damian huffs. “Oh really, Timothy. You’re going to say something.”
“Guess it’s a sad time for both of us,” Tim says mournfully. “On account of him not loving us anymore and everything. I never see him now that he’s got a boyfriend.”
“Preposterous,” Damian squawks in response. Cass fusses at him to keep his hands still. “You are such a liar. As if you and Cassandra don’t see him every Monday for your little cooking club. Which was formed for the malicious purpose of excluding me.”
Tim props himself on his elbows and half-sits up, head popping over the lip of the table. “Now this is just slander,” he insists. “Point one: we’ve been doing this for years. Point two: you already know how to cook. Point three: you come half the time anyway. Jury rules bullshit.”
“Behave,” Bruce chides, but the whole display makes Olive giggle, so he leaves it at that.
Tim’s grinning now. “Cass? Back me up?”
“Hm.” She pauses in her painting and smirks, while Damian makes a face at her. “We…did not know how to cook. Dick did. Wanted to learn. He wanted to teach. Verdict…innocent.”
Tim holds up his hand in a triumphant thumbs up. Damian grumbles unintelligibly.
“I was not aware I was in a family of lawyers,” he sighs. “How dreadful. Cassandra, are you done yet?”
“Patience,” she hums, painting a coat over his left pinky. “Hmm. Now I am. Wait for that to dry.”
“Solid work,” Bruce says appreciatively, glancing over at his youngest son’s blue fingernails, and Cass grins at him.
“Want yours done next?” Cass asks, nudging Olive’s elbow gently.
Olive, perpetually surprised to be included, startles and glances up from her notes like she’d forgotten the others were there. Her eyes travel instinctually to Damian’s. “Oh! I don’t know,” she muses, half a nervous smile pulling at her mouth. “Can I trust her?”
(Bruce’s heart seizes around how much time it took for her to feel comfortable joking with them at all.)
“No,” Tim chimes in automatically, and Cass slides all the way down in her chair to kick him under the table.
There’s a gentle brush at his arm, then. Bruce turns, and Maya is standing behind his chair. Of course it would be Maya, the only one of his children who can still manage to sneak up on him.
“Bruce,” she says, grasping at his shirtsleeve, and the lazy ease of the afternoon falls away the instant he sees the serious pinch to her face. He’s already standing from his chair.
“What is it?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she says quickly, noting his worry. “Nothing- nothing bad. I just…I wanted to let you know. I haven’t seen Suren in a while.”
Bruce pauses. Frowns.
“How long is a while?” His words are steady and even and firm.
Maya’s lips pinch further. She swallows. “I can’t find him,” she says, softly, and her green eyes are worried, and Bruce is already leaving for the corridor.
Because he had learned, in the past few years, to blindly trust Maya Ducard in all matters pertaining to Suren Darga. He tries not to think about teenagers huddled in hotel rooms, hopping trains, clinging to each other’s fingers and otherwise adrift in a completely uncaring world. He tries, instead, to think of Talia, of his beloved dragging brushes through Suren’s tangled hair and wrapping her own scarves around Maya’s head just to see her fuss and smile. Not alone anymore, he tells himself, not for a long, long time. We both made sure of that.
Bruce searches the Manor, bypassing places he knows Maya has already checked. He wanders into the bowels of the house, the vacant areas that see no foot traffic at all anymore. When he ducks into what used to be his parent’s art gallery, he freezes in the doorway.
There’s not much of anything here anymore, except for a few worthless old sculptures and empty frames. There are beige tarps thrown over every item, a thick layer of dust on each surface. On the far wall, the faint outline of a boy stands out against all the dust. The edges of him blur, like an oil painting. Like something else to throw a tarp over.
Bruce blinks, again, and then again, and eventually can make out his boy’s pale face and long black hair in the midst of all the stillness.
“Suren,” Bruce says quietly.
The last heir of the Dargas, who runs on a baseline of coolness, who can never understand why everyone else is so dramatic, blinks back at him. He looks at Bruce with wide eyes.
“Fine,” he says breathlessly, and it comes out too quiet for Bruce’s liking. “I-I’m fine, I think.”
“Maya was worried,” Bruce says hesitantly, stepping forward into the room. It sometimes helped to ground him. To remind him that the outside world existed. That other people existed.
“Ha. She always is.” Suren shivers, then, involuntary and violent, and Bruce steps closer.
“Can I touch you?”
Suren winces. “Give me- just a moment.”
Bruce waits, perfectly still.
Nothing happens, really, nothing to warrant Suren’s look of strenuous concentration. But Bruce blinks yet again, and he looks more solid. Suren gives him a tiny nod.
Bruce wraps two arms around the impossibly small, skinny boy and Suren slumps into him. Bruce’s breath catches as the weight of him falls into his chest. He’s real, alive, flesh-and-bone.
“Sorry,” Suren gasps, still shivering. “Got a bit- lost, in here. So many shadows. Didn’t mean to.”
There had been…adjustments. Bruce felt the loss of control sharply, like a jackknife in his ribs. The supernatural was something that took place out there, something that the League dealt with, something that needed to be stamped out whenever it showed its face in Gotham’s borders. But now there was Olive, and Tristan and Katherine, and there was Suren. A dead thing that wasn’t dead, not anymore, but had trouble sometimes remembering how to be alive. Bruce’s logic, his contingencies, his foolproof safeguarding of those in his care…it was all a bit useless now, wasn’t it. He was out of his depth when it came to Calamity, to children cursed with Clayface’s blood and Langstrom’s mistakes. But he tries. God, he tries.
Bruce hoists him up into his arms. Says, “Let’s go find your sister.” Suren nods into his neck. Nestled in Bruce’s arms, he doesn’t feel much like a dead thing.
***
He’s on a rooftop over Robbinsville, watching the street below carefully. It’s been weeks since his last proper stakeout. He had missed it, the coolness of the night air, the way it clears his head. The sharpness of the mission.
Bruce leaves regular patrols to Cass more often than not, these days, like he leaves the League to Dick. Retirement in phases, he’d called it, mumbling into Talia’s jasmine-scented hair. I won’t give it up yet, and Cass is still learning. But I need more time, now. I need-
Our kids, she’d nodded. You’re practically sentimental in your old age, beloved.
And he’d smiled against her neck, stupidly, because our kids, our kids. He’s past fifty, now, and still amazed at his capacity for joy.
So he flinches, a bit, when his comms buzzes. “Batman,” Barbara’s very familiar voice announces in his ear. “Do you have a minute?”
“What’s wrong?” he asks hoarsely. He always assumes the worst, has trained himself endlessly to. It’s just easier that way.
“Nothing, old man, don’t worry. I’ve just- got someone who wants to talk to you. If that’s okay.”
His brow pinches together. “That’s- fine.”
“Patching her through. One sec.”
A click, a few moments of silence, and then a small, unsure-sounding voice.
“Hi. Um, Bruce? Can- can you hear me?”
His mouth tugs up into a half-smile, almost on instinct. It’s a small voice belonging to an equally small girl, who spends most of her time these days skipping around the Manor and riding on his shoulders and quizzing him on how trains work.
“Elizabeth,” he says. “Are you alright?”
“Oh! Yes. Yes, I’m fine, sorry.” (His Birdie, who knew how to be serious, how to comfort others, who understood all too well the urgency of an Are you alright. Bruce fights down the nausea that threatened to surface every time he remembered). “It’s just that I woke up and it was all dark and I went to find you but you weren’t there so I got worried. And I wanted to find the book you were reading to me but I couldn’t. And Maya was awake so she said if I called Barbara she would find you for me so-”
“Birdie,” Bruce says, resting his foot on the ledge that surrounded the roof. “Slow down. Is your sister awake?”
“No. I just wanted to- are you okay?”
It was said anxiously, quietly, like she was huddled around the phone’s speaker and clutching it with both hands. Bruce wishes, suddenly, that he were home.
“I’m just fine,” he says, in a hopefully assuring tone. “I’m…working late. I didn’t mean to worry you.”
“That’s okay,” Birdie answers quickly, and he can hear the relief in her words. “Sorry for calling. You just said I could, so I did. And I wanted to ask where the book was.”
Bruce squints, for a moment. “I put it on the bookshelf,” he remembers. “The one in the sitting room.”
“Oh! Oh. Okay. Thank you.”
“Is Maya still awake? Do you want her to read to you?”
“Yes, she’s right here. But no, it’s fine. I’ll just read by myself, for a few minutes, and then I’ll go back to sleep.”
Bruce thinks, idly, of nights spent terrified of sleep, of poring over chapter books with cracked spines in nothing but moonlight to stave off the nightmares. He thinks of Dick, of Tim, of Cass, of gasped screams and tangled bedsheets and lamps flicked on at four a.m.
I should be home, he thinks, and curses to himself.
“Birdie,” he says, without really planning to say anything at all, “you know that- that even if Maya hadn’t been up, you could wake up anyone in the house? If you were scared? Damian or Olive or-”
“I know,” she replies, hesitant. “I know I can. Sorry for calling you.”
That wasn’t the lesson he had intended to impart at all. He grimaces, rests an elbow on his bent knee.
“No, listen, Elizabeth. I am very glad you called. Always call me.”
It takes her a minute to respond.
“Okay,” she says eventually. “You only call me Elizabeth when you’re serious.”
“I’m serious all the time.”
It makes her giggle. “Sure. Mister Serious.”
Bruce blinks in the wind. Says, “I’m sure Frankie wouldn’t mind if you woke her up. If you get scared again. She’d read with you.”
“Bruce,” she says, almost a gentle reproach, a you know better. “She needs sleep.”
It was true. One day, with all his allies and friends and connections, all his genius constituents, he’d find a cure for the nightmares. He’d give his children restful sleep. One day.
“I love you, sweetheart,” he says instead. “Enjoy the book. Sleep well.”
“Love you too. Thanks for answering.”
***
He never has to search for Olive like he does with the others. She doesn’t hide, doesn’t venture off into hidden nooks (well- as long as Mia isn’t around to encourage her). It took him months to convince her that she could go anywhere in the Manor she liked, nowhere was off-limits, and still she usually frequents the same few parts of the house.
Bruce finds her, as he’d expected to, in the library. He sees a head full of white hair huddled over a book and smiles to himself.
“Is it alright if I join you?” he asks, stepping inside and reaching for the book he’d left on the side table last time he decided reading was something he wanted to try.
She glances up, blinking at him. “Oh! Um, sure. Of course.”
Bruce sits on the opposite end of the couch, opening his book to the dog-eared page (Damian would have been furious at him for that). He glances over at the book in Olive’s hand.
“Frankenstein,” he observes. “Do you like it?”
Olive gives him a wry smile. “You know me and gothic literature,” she says. “I love it so far, of course. What about you?”
Bruce chuckles. “Never read it.”
Her face pinches in surprise. “Oh. Really?”
“My work didn’t leave a lot of time for leisure reading,” he explains, wincing. “And when I did have a free moment, I was usually reading nonfiction.”
Didn’t, he thinks, belatedly. You used past tense, Bruce. Look at that.
A shadow crosses Olive’s face, for a microsecond, before clearing up. He still catches it. Olive and Batman had been such a mess, for so long. There was plenty of blame to go along, plenty of guilt, God knows plenty of hurt. But Olive Silverlock and Batman are on better terms nowadays.
“I just thought,” she says, then bites her bottom lip.
“You thought…what?”
Olive sighs, cheeks turning pink. “Because you came from…well, money, you know? Didn’t you go to fancy boarding school? And a fancy university? And- and you never read Frankenstein?”
“I did go to the Academy,” Bruce agrees. “But, well, I also had notoriously poor grades. And subsequently dropped out of university.”
This startles a laugh out of her. “Wait,” she says, searching his face for a joke. “You really did?”
Bruce closes the book in his lap and sighs. “Is this the one thing my elder children haven’t mocked me endlessly for in front of you?”
Olive snorts. “Guess not. Or else I just wasn’t paying attention. Wow, a college dropout. I mean- I mean, it isn’t so bad. You had all that disgusting wealth to fall back on.”
“My one saving grace,” Bruce says drily. “Go on, keep reading, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
She laughs a little more to herself and then turns back to Frankenstein. Bruce thumbs through his own book. They sit, in comfortable silence, and read.
Olive isn’t like most of his other children. She doesn’t have a separate name, a uniform, a calling. She doesn’t jump rooftops with him and send him field reports. She just…is. Normal, almost, except for the entity lodged in her psyche. He hadn’t known how to do it, at first. How to be a parent without all the extra parts. But he’s tried to learn. He likes reading with her, asking her about her favorite books and which author she prefers over another. In a way, books were the same thing for her as the cowl had been for him. One day, after months of coaxing her out of her shell, she’d whispered I had to teach myself because my mom wasn’t doing well and it was the one thing that made me feel better, back then. That showed me things could get better one day.
Bruce had gone out of his way to read more, after that.
When about twenty minutes have passed, Olive says, “Hey, Bruce.”
“Mm?”
“Just wanted to ask. When’s dinner?”
Bruce looks up from his book, glancing at the watch on his left hand. “Damn. I didn’t realize it was that late. I should go- make. Something.”
Something he definitely has a plan for, along with all the ingredients.
Olive laughs under her breath, leaning her head back against the couch. “I could come help, you know,” she offers. “We could find something to make together.”
Bruce chuckles. “I accept your lifeline. You’re much better than me, anyway.”
She smiles. “I had a lot of practice.”
His heart sinks, dropping steadily all the way to his toes. Little Olive, alone in the world, nothing but a mother’s rage and her own two hands. I should have been there, he thinks, for the thousandth time. I should have gotten there earlier.
He blinks when Olive reaches her foot over to kick gently at his shin. “Don’t look all sad,” she insists. “I like cooking. It wasn’t- one of the sad things.”
Bruce closes the book in his lap, stares at the cover. He tries to school all the sorrow out of his expression and doesn’t quite succeed.
“It’s just,” he says, helpless, “you were so…small.”
Olive’s fingers curl around Frankenstein. She sighs. “Yes. But she was the one who taught me how to cook, in the first place. I think- I think because she knew, when things got bad, I’d have to do it for both of us. So it was like a little gift she gave me.”
After Alfred- after, Bruce hadn’t hired a new butler. Of course he hadn’t. It meant he spends far more time in the kitchen these days, stumbling his way through handwritten recipes, driving back and forth to the grocery store more times than he can count. He thinks of his mother, thinks of John Grayson, of Janet Drake. He doesn’t usually think of Sybil Silverlock. But then again, he tries desperately not to think of Sybil Silverlock at all. It’s always hard for him to conjure up anything but anger towards her. Because he remembers Olive, young, terrified, soot-stained. He remembers Sybil shouting, blaming him, when she had kept her little girl in that apartment that she knew would inevitably burn to the ground.
But, then again. Sybil? Or Calamity?
A little gift she gave me.
Mothers are such a complicated thing.
“Then it’s a gift she’s given to all of us as well,” Bruce ends up saying. “Let’s go find something to cook?”
***
Thursdays were movie nights for the twins. Despite tonight’s film being fairly high energy (Frankie: Let’s watch something awesome! Like with dinosaurs! Birdie: You say that every week, we’ll run out of movies soon) twenty minutes in Birdie was sound asleep, head in his lap. Frankie was a maelstrom of giggles. Bruce several times had to shut down the idea of drawing on her sleeping sister’s face. Remember, he thinks, your silent, reticent twins, who wouldn’t speak to anyone but each other. Look how much has changed.
Thirty minutes in: “Bruce,” Frankie hisses, poking at his right cheek. “Hey, hey, Bruce.”
“Yes, Frances.”
“Is it true Birdie called you in the middle of the night Monday?”
Bruce frowns. He turns to look at her, all innocent eyes and curious eyebrows. While Birdie was all honey, all tact, all logic, her twin had gotten all of the bluntness (and, Bruce thinks ruefully, a good bit of mischief.)
“It is,” he says, not sure yet where this is going. “She had a question.”
Frankie thinks for a second, chewing on her thumbnail. “I don’t think I’d have done that,” she says, words careful, and the way she says it makes Bruce think this is some kind of test.
“And why not?” he asks, toneless.
“Well,” Frankie says. “Nothing was really wrong. And you were busy. You’d probably be mad, or annoyed, at least a little.”
Bruce squints. He never knows what will work with Frankie. Her sister takes him at his word, but she- doesn’t. He knows it’s based on experience, of not trusting the people that Birdie did, just to cover their bases. To make sure they were safe. “Was I annoyed with your sister?” is what he ends up saying.
Frankie clicks her tongue. “Well, no, but everyone likes Birdie.”
This is a troubling comment that gives Bruce pause. He realizes a half second later that she said it just to throw him off balance. He sighs, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.
“Frankie, work is just…work. I want you to call me, even when it’s not an emergency. That goes for you and your sister and all of you.”
She settles against him, but her little face still doesn’t look convinced. “You say that,” she says dubiously. “But you’re just being nice now. If we call in the middle of something important-“
“Let me ask you something, Frankie,” Bruce says, his final tactic. “Do you think I would lie to you?”
She makes a pondering face, lips scrunched up and eyebrows drawn together. “Maybe,” she decides. “If you wanted to make us feel better.”
This startles a deep chuckle out of him. “Hm. Well, then let me ask this. Do you trust me?”
At this, she nearly recoils. “Of course I do,” Frankie says, like it’s natural, obvious. “Of course. Batman said so, and he saved us.”
One day, Bruce thinks, heart clenching around a million secrets much too big for their little heads, one day, soon maybe, and says, “Then trust me when I say that I love you and your sister very much-”
“Well yeah, I love you too, but-”
“And making sure that you are safe is more important than any work I could be doing.”
Gotham needed him, for so long. Needed him desperately, like an open wound. She needs Cass, now. Needs Duke and Damian and Maps and so many others, his legacy, his children. He’s one man. Gotham will learn to give him up.
Frankie gives him a very long, discerning look. And sighs, defeated. “Alright,” she mumbles, eyes glancing back towards the TV. “Alright. I believe you.”
“Good,” Bruce says, and means it. He doesn’t know what he has done in this life to be trusted with this. But he is glad of it.
It’s quiet, for a moment. Birdie hums softly in her sleep.
“Batman was right about you,” Frankie says with a yawn, head thunking against his shoulder. “I wasn’t sure at first but I am now.”
They fall asleep to the sounds of the movie. Gotham is still there waiting for him in the morning.