Chapter Text
There is a hill in Gotham, upon which stands three houses. At the top of the hill, overlooking the city, stands Wayne Manor, the oldest house in New Jersey. To its left stands Moone Hall, the second oldest house in the state, home of the Moones for over a century. To its right, meanwhile, stands a mansion that has been named and named again, but is currently known as Drake Manor, home to the Drakes, the most successful New Money Gotham had seen in generations.
It has a few names, the hill, depending on who you’re talking to.Those within the township of Bristol, or who occupy similar social strata, as well as those within professional media call it Crest Hill. To others, however, it is Orphan Hill, home to the most famous orphans of Gotham, thirty-four year old Bruce Wayne and sixteen year old June Moone, former home of Wayne’s two adopted sons, both orphans themselves (one moved out as an adult, the other dead), and the mostly empty home of fourteen year old Tim Drake, whom many with connections to the elite of Gotham murmured was functionally an orphan even if not legally or literally.
And as is so often the case, it is the three orphans of Crest Hill with which our story is primarily concerned. Let us begin.
OoOoO
“...hmm.” Bruce murmured, staring up at the Batcomputer monitor in conflict.
“What seems to be the problem Master Bruce?” Alfred asked, stopping behind his chair.
“I’ve been tracking the flow of stolen art and artifacts here in Gotham.” Bruce said slowly, gesturing. “About half of it leaves Gotham fairly quickly, just stopping in the port or being stolen from our own museums or from private collections. Of the remaining half, most of it winds up in the hands of Cobblepot or Sionis, with a small amount trickling out to other corrupt buyers, but the rest has been going to a new, unknown party, one that’s been successfully muscling out the smaller fish to compete with Cobblepot and Sionis directly.”
“And they’re eluding you, Master Tim, and Miss Gordon?”Alfred asked, raising an eyebrow. An eyebrow that climbed higher when Bruce shook his head.
“They were, but we finally peeled back the last few layers of their shell companies, VPN, and firewalls. No, the problem is that I don’t know what, if anything, to do about it.”
“Might I ask why you’re considering inaction as an option Master Bruce?” Bruce sighed and typed something in, pulling up a picture of a teenage girl with a diamond face, thick, dark brown hair and equally thick glasses over green-blue eyes.
“Because this is the new buyer. June Moone, sixteen years old, sole living member of the Moone family, daughter of Howard and Cara Moone, the former owners of Moone Corp, orphaned in…”
“Master Bruce, I am well aware of who the Moones are.” Alfred drawled. “They live next door, and have done so for almost two centuries. I have seen Miss June on more than one occasion, albeit less since the murder of her parents.” He paused. “Please tell me you knew who she was before beginning this investigation.” Bruce remained silent, and Alfred let out a small sigh. “I blame myself.” At that Bruce’s shoulders tensed slightly. “Why are you discussing the Moones now though?”
“Our new buyer is June Moone.” Bruce said, eager to get away from the prior topic. “Acting through a variety of shells and proxies, but it all eventually winds up at Moone Hall.” Alfred raised an eyebrow again.
“Indeed? Well, I suppose in so far as illicit teenage spending goes, better art and artifacts than drugs, even if she is getting them off the black market.”
“She’s not even keeping them.” Bruce murmured. “Once she gets them they spend a period of time in Moone Hall and then get sent back to their country of origin, to the most reputable museum there.”
“Ah, now I see the dilemma.” Alfred said, nodding. “It’s illegal, but well-intentioned. Not unlike your own nightly activities with Master Tim.” Bruce grunted with a nod of his own.
“I’ll monitor it for now to see if she’s driving up demand to a substantial degree.” He said after a long moment of silence. “If she’s doing no harm then I’ll let it slide, if she’s increasing the amount of stolen art and artifacts getting trafficked she’ll get a polite visit from the Batman. There are worse things for a teenage billionaire to be spending their fortune on.”
“Indeed.”
OoOoO
Tim frowned as he examined the manifest again. A single crate of artifacts his parents had shipped back for donation to the Gotham Museum had been stolen, and it was a quiet enough week that he felt comfortable in spending time tracking it down. Bruce and Barbara had been doing their own digging into the black market of art and artifacts that lingered in Gotham, and so by piggybacking off of that he’d been able to get a leap on figuring out who’d bought what.
The problem was that there was an artifact missing, but the only evidence the thing even existed was deduction. His parents packed their crates full using a formula, he knew this from experience, an assortment of boxes with layers of padding in direct proportion to weight, quantity, and volume. Taking the weight of the artifacts listed in the manifest, the weight of the padding, and the weight of the crate against the reported weight of the full package told him that there was something missing, but there was no record of it. That wasn’t like his parents, they were passionate and academic about their digs. Twenty pounds wasn’t a rounding error.
He’d checked the financials, there wasn’t any reason for his parents to be engaging in smuggling, Drake Industries was doing fine. It wasn’t Wayne Enterprises or Moone Corp, but it was still competitive and profitable. And at the level the company operated on, twenty pounds of drugs wouldn’t be enough to move the needle anyway. None of the other crates had this sort of discrepancy after all.
It was possible that someone had turned the crate into a mule, but he couldn’t find any player in Gotham who had connections to the Amazon at present. And there were easier ways to smuggle things than sneaking something into a highly guarded crate of artifacts and then stealing the whole damn thing.
And the contents of the crate hadn’t all gone to one source, so he couldn’t even just go break into a place and solve the puzzle. Sionis had gotten a mask (of course), Cobblepot had snagged a few jeweled weapons, and June Moone had snatched up the rest. That might make her a likely suspect, but given the girl’s entire thing was sending stuff back to where it’d been removed from, partaking in that sort of smuggling seemed out of character. He sighed and stood up. Maybe some coffee would make everything clear.
OoOoO
June stared in consternation at the box. She had not bought the box. She kept meticulous records of everything she bought for her…side project, to make sure she knew exactly where her monthly stipend was going. The box had not been up for auction. It had not been mentioned when things had been transferred to her current warehouse, nor throughout the shuffling game that quietly got the things she acquired to Moone Hall.
But here it was. And she didn’t know what to do about it.
j u n e...
It could be a bomb. She didn’t think so, she never drove up the prices on the things Sionis or Cobblepot bid on or tried to get their favorites from them, and most of the others who participated in these sorts of auctions were purely white collar. But it could be. She didn’t know what she’d do if it were a bomb though. She couldn’t exactly call the cops on it, cause how would she explain why she had it? It was still in a wooden shipping crate, stamped with the marks of Drake Industries. She couldn’t explain the origin of the damn thing without explaining her illegal activities.
j u u u u u n e...
After another moment of thought June stood up and grabbed her mini crowbar, carefully opening the box. Sitting there in a bed of packing materials was a clay figurine, a representation of a human woman that was either crude or stylized, she didn’t know enough about Amazonian art to tell. She was working on it, but there was only so much research she could do on the side while still keeping up with her homework, and there were a lot of places she needed to research to properly handle the art she was returning. It could be very old, or a rare example of amateur work surviving the centuries…or it could just be a stylistic choice. She definitely didn’t recognize the woman’s head, with her half-circle headpiece and upturned crescent crown. The green eyes were also a curious choice, was that a genetic trait among the indigenous people of the Amazon or was it like when Western art depicted someone with red or purple eyes? She’d need to do more research, clearly.
J U N E
June shook her head, then blinked. The figurine was in her hands. Why was it in her hands? When had she picked it up? She knew better! Her hands were clean, but oils were always there and old earthenware was incredibly delicate. She shouldn’t be touching it without gloves.
When had she picked it up?
…was that a seam in the neck?
M I N E
June stared numbly at the broken seal of the figure, an urn apparently rather than the statuette she’d initially assumed. At the head in one hand, the rest of the body in the other, and the black smoke billowing out and into the room. She startled at the sound of laughter, low and raspy and exultant, and turned to follow it and the smoke as the black coalesced into a figure. A woman, Western European pale and dirty, draped in silks and chains, the crescent moon crown of the figure adorning her head.
The stranger moved towards June with jerky movements, uneven and unsteady, eyes bright with a wicked delight as she stared up at June. No, wait, that was actual light from her eyes, burning, smoldering, entrancing embers as the dark swelled and grew around them both, filling the room, a fluid, liquid thing dispelled only by the paleness of the stranger, the flickering green light across the crescent, and the ember glow of her eyes. Then suddenly she was standing, exactly as tall as June, and leaning in, eyes hungry, lips open, pressing them to June’s. June jerked, gasped, and then inhaled.
She inhaled, and kept inhaling until there was no more smoke in the room. Until there was no more stranger, just her.
But it wasn’t really just her. She could feel something, someone. There was…more now.
And then she felt it, the feeling of luxuriating, of glee and satisfaction and smugness and triumph, and she had to sit down. Because either there had been some very concerning mold in the figurine that was actually an urn that she needed to rush to the hospital about or…
Mine. A voice purred, feminine, pretty, husky and proud and terrifying, coming from everywhere at once. Coming from inside her head. Centuries of waiting and here you are. June Moone. My June. All mine. As you were always meant to be.
“W…who are you?” June managed, looking around, hoping against hope for something physical, something tangible. The voice chuckled.
You know my name. It’s in you already sweet child. Mine, marked from creation. My vibrant moon, my summer storm, my sun drenched sky. June swallowed and shoved down the word that tried to slip from her tongue. She’d read enough fantasy and horror to know better than to say it. The act of swallowing the word made the voice chuckle again, a bit of pride in the sound this time.
“What are you?” June asked instead.
A much more interesting, and complicated, answer my June. I am magic, I am power, I am deity. I do not live, I exist. I was here when your kind made their first tool, and you and I will be there when the last draws their final breath.
“...are you going to destroy the world?” June asked. Fuck, was she going to get punched by Superman now? She’d just wanted to help return stolen artifacts!
No June, nothing so crude or violent as that. I am eternal. And now that I am here, so are you. You were made for me, for this moment. We were meant to be. My perfect vessel, my prize. June swallowed and decided that the majority of that was a problem for later June. For a rested June who wasn’t on the verge of a screaming breakdown.
“Well…what are you going to do now that you’re here then?” There was a long moment of silence at that.
I do not know. June blinked.
“You don’t know?” She repeated incredulously.
The original plan was for you to find me eight years from now. But the butterfly flapped its wings and diggers and scholars from this glorious pit of darkness came close and I could not resist the opportunity to find you instead. And now I am here.
“You, the eternal deity, magic and power and whatever, she who does not live but exists, got impatient?” June demanded.
You have never spent centuries in a jar by yourself. The time is nothing, but that is not the same as it being pleasant.
“If you’re so fucking powerful how did you wind up trapped in a jar?”
I am deity, but I am not the sole deity. There are others. We will avoid them until you are ready to channel my full might. One day we will stand before the world, brilliant and powerful, my bloodspawned majesty and your worldly glory, and we will be worshiped and own much. But for now, for now we will grow and build and bide.
“They beat you last time and you’re planning on dragging me into a rematch?” June asked, voice high pitched.
My last hosts were not you, they were ill fitting, ill suited, temporary. You are different my June. You are MINE.
“...right.” June swallowed and decided that was enough shouting at the voice in her head who may or may not be a primordial being of magic and power about questions she didn’t want the answers to.
The more you give me, the faster you will be ready. The voice purred, cajoling. We could fight.
“Who the fuck are we going to go fight?” There was another pause, and then a sly noise.
Those who compete with you for your art and artifacts. I see your mind, my summer storm, I see your quest, I see your fears that you make things worse. Let me help you. We can end the demand, at least here in your home. Send it to places where there are authorities who care, where the protectors can take the time to care about stolen art rather than fighting the never ending void. June froze, mind turning over the option.
She had been concerned. The problem with buying the art to return it was that she was ultimately still funneling money to the black market that provided that art, that she was driving demand. Ultimately it was something she’d had to live with though. Her parents had been nigh saintly before their murders, and she’d had to find a way to live up to that legacy, some way to put her immense wealth to good use. She’d funneled what she could of Moon Corp’s profits back into charity, but she didn’t control the company yet and Wayne was already pouring millions into every corner of Gotham he could, making it hard for her to feel like her contributions were meaningful. She had to do something that meant something, and the best thing she could think to do was get art stolen from the rest of the world back where it belonged. Not a perfect solution, but it was something.
“...I don’t want to kill anybody.” June whispered, staring at the two pieces of urn in her hands still.
And you won’t. You don’t even have to be awake for it, my vibrant moon, not if you don’t want to be. the voice purred, and June felt arms draped around her, resting on her shoulders and wrapping around her front, a chin on her head. I will do it. I will bring the actual end to your quest that you never could. All you have to do is say my name and I will begin. I will pace it, you have my word, your body is too precious to risk my sun drenched sky, my June. June swallowed, then closed her eyes, licked her lips, and spoke. Just one word, the word that had been sitting on her tongue her whole life, the word she’d been running from ever since the black smoke escaped the urn in her hands.
“Enchantress.”