Chapter Text
Bruce has noted that in the past five or so years, crime fighting has become duller. Lifeless.
When he had first become Batman, decades upon decades ago, when he himself had been a teenager— the crime underbelly of Gotham had been at an all-time high. Every day, dozens of murders were being reported. Theft and robbery were simply parts of everyday life in the city.
It was disgusting. He had become Batman to do something about that.
His very existence seemed to stir something up, and suddenly fanatics were appearing, with flashy costumes and villain names and grand declarations of motives. It had gotten a little worse, before it had gotten better.
Duke had come into his life twenty years ago, and everything had changed. The boy’s parents had been victims to the Joker, and while they weren’t murdered, they were victims of crime in a way that reminded Bruce so starkly of his childhood. He had taken the boy in at once. He was a teenager, older than Bruce was when his parents had died, which made it both harder and easier in some ways, to grieve.
He had slipped up, one day, and creeped through the house in costume thinking the boy was asleep. He was not. Duke had realized just who his guardian was.
Of course, that was when Duke revealed to him that he was a meta. That he sometimes went around helping his neighborhood with a few other kids from his block. He did not want to let Duke help him fight crime. That had never been the plan. It just sort of happened that way.
Slowly, but surely, Duke had become the Signal. A beacon of light, and hope, for Gotham.
In the end, Duke may be his only accomplishment, amongst his dozen of other failures, when it comes down to it.
There was Damian. Roughly the same age as Duke, it was a year after when he had entered their lives. The boy had been seventeen when he arrived in Gotham. Damn near fully grown and trained under the League of Assassins. There was no way to undo that amount of training. Somehow, the childish affair he had with Talia at nineteen had fathered a son, that she kept in secret and raised amongst assassins. He shuddered at the thought.
Damian was violent. Aggressive. Deadly. He bickered with Bruce and Duke, and attempted to kill common criminals, and nearly sabotaged everything they were working on.
Prickly, and so close to being an adult, there was no way of getting to him.
Bruce did not know what to do with him. Even now, years later, he did not know what to do with his son. He admits he should’ve tried harder, in hindsight, but it was too far late now to build any type of relationship with his son.
They weren’t close. Damian spent more time with his friend Jon, and in turn Superman, than he did with Bruce. He found out weeks after it happened, his son had become some type of hero named Respawn. And Respawn was considered more of a Metropolis hero, than a Gotham vigilante.
Cassandra entered his life, a few years after that.
She stumbled into his life by accident. He gave her a home because he saw she had none.
She was also trained to be a killer, but she knew right from wrong, and she did not test the waters like Damian had. She was effective without being deadly. She made for a great crime fighter, and he sensed her need for his approval, but he found it hard to give it. He could not entrust her with detective work. She could not read, lacked any education, and Bruce commonly had to restrain himself from getting frustrated when she couldn’t properly relay thoughts or clues. No. She worked best when very simple following orders. Bruce didn’t trust her with anything beyond that.
Then, the Spoiler entered the crime fighting ring, with her acquaintance (partner? friend?) Oracle appearing a few weeks later. Stephanie Brown and Tim Drake, he uncovered when he dug into their identities. Stephanie and Tim didn’t concern him in the slightest. They were hardly heroes, just some college kids pretending to be something greater. He did not care for them much, but he kept track of them, as a precaution.
And then there was Jason.
He had loved Jason in a way he did not love anyone else. He had opened his heart up in a way he never expected. The others— Duke, Damian, Cassandra, they had all been nearly grown when he took them in. Between sixteen and seventeen years old, they didn’t need someone to raise them, as much as they needed someone to show them the right paths to take in life. They were grown, and already steadfast in their ways. It’d been too late to change them.
But, Jason?
Jason was a child. Twelve, and attempting to steal the tires off the batmobile to afford food. Bruce took him in. Raised him, in a way he wasn’t able to raise the others. Jason took to Bruce like a duck to water. The boy was incredibly easy to care for.
Jason was desperate to help him, somehow. He worried for Bruce. He couldn’t let him get involved with crime fighting in a hands-on manner. So, he had asked Oracle to show Jason how to do what he did, as a favor to him and the boy. And Oracle did, with only a few negotiations (trading weapons and gear for training the young boy).
Jason couldn’t help him on the streets, with the villains, but the boy enjoyed giving him directions through traffic and searching through their databases for names. It made him feel useful, and Bruce was happy to let him do so if it made the boy feel secure. There was no harm in sitting behind a computer.
But, then, the Joker had seen a way to hurt Batman.
He targeted the young boy on his communications line. He found out who Jason was, and he baited the boy with a perfectly laid out trap. He was fifteen, when he died.
He had adopted Dick out of pity, and nothing more.
He did not have it in him to love another child, not so soon after Jason. But he was sitting in the circus stands and saw what happened, and he suddenly felt himself transported to decades prior, when he himself watched his parents die. Bruce had been the same age as Dick was. Both of their parents were murdered because of petty crime. Both forced to witness the tragedy. When he looked at the corpses of the Flying Graysons, he saw Thomas and Martha Wayne laying there, heads bashed in on the ground.
Bruce could not undo what has already happened, but he could at the very least keep the boy safe from the cruel foster system.
(Batman, and orphans.)
He took Dick into his home. But he could not love another child. Just as quick as he took him in, he sent him away to boarding schools, where he wasn’t forced to acknowledge the boy’s painful existence. He chose good schools and summer programs, where he knew the staff would do their jobs. He’d be safe. Over the years, he only saw the child a handful of times, during the gaps between school and summer camps, or the mandatory home visit. He didn’t have much of a relationship with him. He was quiet and calm, but Bruce knew it was only a farce, because the schools had always reported him as a violent troublemaker. Dick reminded him of Damian. Perhaps he was another lost cause.
Nonetheless, Bruce would continue keeping the child safe, and kept funding his education.
In that time, crime began to slow. He had been Batman for decades, which meant many of the other heroes and villains had been doing it for an equally long time. It is hard to have as much energy about things twenty years later. Bruce was content to focus on work, and content to leave Dick alone. Things seemed to be improving in the world.
Bruce never really considered Dick, until the boy went missing.
Regret hit him, and he suddenly wished he had taken the effort to get to know the boy. Horrible, horrible self deprecating thoughts as he was forced to realize how terribly he had treated the boy throughout the years. He wished so badly for the chance to redeem his actions. But what has been done cannot be undone.
So, Bruce focuses on the work he can do. He focuses on being Batman.
In recent years, there’s been a new generation of heroes popping up, and with the creation of the Titans (the only superhero team aside from the Justice League to ever exist), there has been an explosion of supervillains and criminals. Like a chain reaction, his workload has doubled in the past few months.
Currently, Bruce is trying to figure out Gotham’s newest villain, a crime lord by the name of Red Hood. The man has appeared one day out of the cold air, with not one trail or scrap of evidence providing a clue to who he is, or what he wants. Bruce had been working overtime trying to figure it out. The man needs to be taken down.
An alert suddenly interrupts his work— Deathstroke is dead, from a fight with the Titans. That is surprising.
That is the other thing Bruce had been trying to figure out. The Justice League is very protective of the Titans, the younger protogees of his colleagues and associates. He finds it a bit silly. You never saw him breathing down the necks of the Signal, Respawn, or Orphan. He couldn’t care less about the Spoiler or Oracle. But his colleagues were much more… naive, than him, and so they asked Bruce to help them with the situation. He had been asked to help figure out why Deathstroke and Renegade, and some mysterious third party who had died shortly after, attempted to target the Titans specifically.
He is a detective, and so he agreed begrudgingly to help investigate a bit behind the scenes.
And now, Deathstroke seems to have suddenly died.
The man was thorn in Bruce’s side for several years. He cannot say he is grieved. But, it is mysterious. Deathstroke was a tough man, a violent soldier who on the few times Batman fought him (not in recent years, but roughly a decade or so ago), he struggled to keep pace. Deathstroke dying was indeed quite curious.
Bruce pauses his research on Redhood— he supposes he can focus on Renegade, for a moment.
My name is J-O-E-Y W-I-L-S-O-N. Death-stroke was my dad. I came here looking for you.
Dick stares at the stranger, brain buffering between thoughts.
His mind suddenly recalls a photo he had accidentally found, years ago. A polaroid. With Slade, looking happier than Dick had ever been allowed to see him. Beside him was a woman, his wife, holding two chubby babies in her arms. Adeline, Grant, and Joseph, the words under the polaroid helpfully labeled.
“Oh.” Dick says. His brain catches up to the situation. This was that baby, that child, he had seen in the old photo he found years ago.
Then, he smacks himself and goes to sign it instead, but Joey shakes his head and waves his hands at Dick, signaling to him that it’s alright.
My ears are fine. Joey tells him. His curly hair bounces with every subtle movement. He gestures to his neck, where a thin scar trails the entirety of the limb. Someone slit my throat when I was younger, because of my father. So I can’t talk. But I can still hear well.
“Right…” Dick says. He isn’t sure what to do in this scenario, how he should be replying or reacting. His voice sounds unfamiliar to him after a week of living in pure lonely silence. “I’m sorry for your, uh, losses.”
Joey shrugs, an attempt at indifference, but his eyes harden just the slightest. My father and brother were not good people.
Dick doesn’t know how to reply to that, for he isn’t a good person either.
But. I know someone killed them on purpose. Joey continues to telegraph. His eyes are a shade of green Dick had never seen before. They were unnatural. He stared at Dick with determination. I want to go after them. I want you to help me.
“Me?” Dick asks. “Why me? How did you even find me?”
Joey looks at him. He gives Dick a long look, like he knows exactly who Dick is down to his very soul. It was equal parts reassuring, frightening, and peaceful.
“Um… okay.” Dick says after a moment. “Yeah. I can help you.”
Joey nods like he already knew that would be the case. He has a kind look to his features, as he peers at Dick. He has to be the same age as Dick, and Dick wonders what the other boy thinks of him— his father had essentially abandoned his own family, his own children, to train a protegee the same age as him. But Joey didn’t look at him with hatred or anger. He held no ill will in his eyes.
“Where do we start?” Dick asks aloud, but mostly to himself. He doesn’t expect Joey to actually reply to him, so he’s surprised when the guy begins to respond, hand spelling out an acronym.
H-I-V-E.
“Hive?” Dick says. He’s seen the name before, on the contracts Deathstroke had him read regarding their mission to kill the Titans. That was the name of their employer. He had almost forgotten.
Joey nods at him enthusiastically, a small smile creeping on his face.
“Okay.” Dick says. “Okay. Let’s start going back through Sla-Deathstroke’s databases, and see what we can find.”
There isn’t a computer in this safehouse. They’re going to have to go to New York City again, to the house he had left in Brooklyn, to grab all the technology they needed. Damn it.
“We have to go to Brooklyn.” Dick sighs. “That’s where all our tech is, and the contracts from the H.I.V.E.”
Joey nods, then looks at Dick, and asks Sleep? with a curious tilt to his head.
Dick has slept far too much this past week, he isn’t necessarily tired. But Joey continues to stare at him with his too-green eyes, and Dick finds himself crumbling under the pressure.
“Uh, yeah.” Dick says. “Let’s sleep for a few hours, then we can take the bus to New York City, after.”
Joey stands up, and gestures to the second bedroom, a question to his movement.
Dick nods, “All yours.”
Joey flashes him a smile, then enters the room and shuts the door behind him. He is very, very odd, Dick decides. He had never met anybody as contradictory as Joey.
Dick retreats to the other bedroom, feeling off-kilter, and collapses into a few hours of restless sleep.