NIGHTWING and all related characters, names and indicia are TM & © DC Comics.

Author's Note: This was a challenge by a writer's group to choose a fandom which does NOT normally include ghosts (i.e., Harry Potter, Scooby Doo, X-Files, BTVS, etc. are NOT options) and introduce a ghost. We were required to include the words "kingpin," "lope," and "field mouse." We got bonus points if we could integrate poetry by Lord Byron without seeming too contrived. Hopefully I managed with SOME degree of success. Cross-posted here from the private group.

Rating: Er... PG for very mild gore?

The Gift Of Redemption

Halloween. The night all the crazies come out. It was bad in Gotham, and it's worse in Bludhaven. The Bat crew has been going nonstop for two days now.

It was late. So late that most would call it early. I had a few hours before sunrise, a few hours in which I should have been sleeping. Amy tended to go ballistic when I showed up for my shift on patrol looking like I hadn't had any sleep. But I couldn't bring myself to go home yet.

It's been about an hour since I've heard any communication from Robin, Oracle or Batman. I snapped at Robin last time he came through. Poor kid. I'd heard the gunshot as soon as he came across, and I cut him off.

Bludhaven was hardly the paradise Gotham now seemed to me to be. By day, I'm a cop in a town where most of the cops are worse than the criminals, and the rest are the criminals. By night, I uphold Bruce's vigilante dream in a town downriver, both literally and figuratively, from Gotham. At least while I was in Gotham, I had a partner. If Bruce was out, Alfred was there. If they were both busy, Barbara wasn't far away, or Tim was around. In Bludhaven, I'm alone.

It doesn't help my mood to be so tired all the time. Though no amount of sleep could change the fact that I am more alone than I've ever been in my life. My apartment is mine alone. My city is home to no friends. I used to be surrounded by people all the time. More and more frequently, now, I feel like I'm slipping into the realm of the perpetual darkness of Batman.

No. I can never let myself become that cold. I'm different. I have a heart. It might be a little broken, but it's still there. If it weren't, it wouldn't hurt so badly to be making the delivery I'm currently procrastinating.

An hour ago, I chased a hoard of mooks away from a dying man, shot in an alley a few blocks back south. He was no one in particular, a messenger mixed up in the wrong crowd, and who outlived his usefulness to Blockbuster, the kingpin of most of Bludhaven's underworld.

I couldn't save him, just like I couldn't save dozens of people over the past several weeks. It feels like crime has taken an upturn. He died, wheezing a final wish to me. This brown-paper-and-twine-wrapped package I'm holding. He wanted me to bring it to his wife and kid. I've been delaying. I don't feel like telling some little boy that his dad isn't ever coming home. Not tonight. Not ever. But I don't have much of a choice, now, do I?

I sight along the roof of the building on my left. This alley is narrow, but I should be able to get a 'rang around the flagpole and get up to the roof. As I look up, the brush of a hand against my leg made me jump backward.

An old woman I hadn't seen crawls out of her conglomeration of cardboard boxes, plastic garbage bags and discarded furniture pads to reach out to me. From the look of her, she is not at all well. She wheezes and chokes, a wet, hacking cough. I flinch, then sink to a crouch in front of her.

"Gone..." she whimpers, and I cock my head, not understanding. Truly, I don't expect to understand. I've run into far too many on these streets who were beyond the capability of making sense. "My baby..."

I'm only half as alarmed as I'd be if those words had come from another person. The chances of this woman having a baby younger than thirty were slim. But the possibilities of a missing or dead child were alarming enough on their own. "Your baby?"

The woolen gloves on her hands have the fingers cut out of them, and she opens them to me, her palms cupping a tiny, dead rodent. Tears roll down her ashen, shrivelled cheeks. "Help..." her dry, brittle voice quavers as she holds the lifeless thing out to me.

"I... can't..." I try to stand. "There's... there's nothing I can do... it's dead..."

"Nnnnoooo!" she's wailing now, doubling over, her forehead to the concrete. I can't think of anything else to say, and even if I could, I doubt I would be heard over her weeping. I grit my teeth against the swell of pity I feel for her. Not now.

I pause on the rooftop to wind up the 'rang and tuck it back into my belt. Sighing and slumping at the ledge, I procrastinate a little longer. Got to shake that woman from my mind. Probably has no family left alive to care for her. In that respect, I realize, staggeringly, she is a lot like me.

The package looks like a book. It isn't mine to open, but I open it anyway. Bruce would be so disappointed in me, sitting on a rooftop feeling sorry for a field mouse and hiding from the victims of a violent crime. But I just need a minute or two.

It is, in fact, a book. Old. It even smells old. Like dust and mildew. The pages are yellowed at the edges. The binding is fabric, fading, burgundy. The letters pressed into it are gold, or they were once gold. The Collected Works Of Lord Byron. Not exactly a last will and testament. I flip open the front cover. The inside cover was inscribed in black ink. "Deborah and Kenneth-- You are my life. I never meant to hurt you. If you have this now, it is because I am gone. I have made dreadful mistakes, and poor choices, but all in the hope of a better life, a better world, for you. Trust is frequently mislaid, so I pray that this gift means you have to rely on no one but yourselves."

It isn't signed. I exhale and close the book, pressing the hard covers tightly between my hands. What does Babs call this thing...?, I wonder as I slowly open my hands, letting the book fall open to whatever page it would. Bibliomancy. That's it. Some nonsense she researched when they went up against the mimic crimes based on Obeah Man, the guy who killed Tim's mom.

I open my eyes and look down at the book. It's a page of poetry. But then, I expect they're all pages of poetry. I read the first stanza that catches my eye.

"Fain would I fly the haunts of men— I seek to shun, not hate mankind; My breast requires the sullen glen, Whose gloom may suit a darken'd mind. Oh! that to me the wings were given Which bear the turtle to her nest! Then would I cleave the vault of heaven, To flee away, and be at rest."

Well. That's the last time I try that. Little too close to home for tonight.

The wind picks up just now... and for some reason, there's an erie, cold chill up my spine. I'm not alone. I know the feeling by now. I'm being watched. I slowly close the book and there's a shuriken in my hand as a drop the book and spin, standing, to face whomever had snuck up behind me.

Before me is a woman, irridescent, her face impassive, her eyes like stars of sorrow and love. Her hair is moving lightly about her shoulders. She is slim and strong, and diminutive... exactly as I remember her. I stagger a step backward and gape at the vision.

"Mom...?"

My mother, Mary Grayson, had fallen from a tampered wire over ten years ago. She and my father are dead. But here she is. Her gaze is turned downward at the fallen book, then lifts slowly and meets mine.

I'm shaking. Somewhere between terror and foolish hope, I'm stuck. How many times over the past ten years have I wanted to run to her, to cry on her shoulder, to hear her hush me and tell me everything was going to be all right? How many times have I needed her, have I prayed just for one last chance to see her, knowing how unfair her death was, how untimely, how sudden? Now she is here, and not here, and I am frozen.

A slow, sad smile crosses her face, not as if muscles move, but as if memory imagines it. Mom leans down and clasps the book in an incorporeal white hand, then passes it to me.

You do more good than you know.

She hadn't said that, at least not that I could see or hear, but it is immediately in my mind, in my mother's voice. She reaches a hand out toward me, and I lift my hand to touch hers, taking the book with my other hand. To my surprise, my eyes are stinging beneath the starlite lenses of my mask.

Do that again, she 'said,' glancing at the book. And so I open the book again. This time, it falls open exactly to the middle, where there is an envelope. Bonds. A cashier's check. A will. Enough money in one form or another to sustain a woman and child comfortably for countless years. I can't imagine why the book didn't fall open to the thick envelope the first time I tried.

Out of curiosity, I glance at the page holding the envelope. "Oh! who is yon Misanthrope, shunning mankind? From cities to caves of the forest he flew: There, raving, he howls his complaint to the wind; The mountains reverberate Love's last adieu! Now Hate rules a heart which in Love's easy chains, Once Passion's tumultuous blandishments knew; Despair now inflames the dark tide of his veins, He ponders, in frenzy, on Love's last adieu!" I am, again, immediately sorry I looked. Pain translates itself into guilt, for all the people I couldn't save, first and foremost, Bruce.

I look up and Mom has knelt down before me. Save them, she slides misty fingers over the names inside the front cover. And know that you have done well. I love you.

I put the envelope back in the book and look up. "I love you, t--" She's gone. "Mom?" I jump up and lurch forward, trying to catch what isn't even there anymore. "Mom!"

"Dick?"

I whirl around and both my wrists are immediately caught, mid-attack.

"Robin!" I breathe in shock. Robin looks a little shocked, himself.

"Didn't mean to startle you. It's just that... you haven't been answering on the Comm. We thought something happened. Had to track you with the GPS." Tim puts a hand to his ear. "He's here, Oracle. Something wrong with his radio is all."

"I didn't... I didn't hear you..." I stammer, trying to puzzle this out.

"You okay, Nightwing?" he asks me. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

"Yeah." My mood was lightening already. Save the ones I can. "Yeah. I just have a delivery to make."

"If it's all right with you, I'll help..." Tim seems a bit hesitant. "I... Idon't want to be alone anymore tonight."

I let myself smile at him. Me neither, kiddo. "Sure. C'mon."

I turn and head back down the alley toward Main, and Tim falls into a steady lope beside me. We'll take to the rooftops before we hit open road.

"Nightwing?" Robin pauses to yank on the test line for security before jumping. "Do you ever feel like we aren't doing any good?"

I watch him for a minute before answering. He's fifteen. Some scared kid who's trying to balance school and a dad and a stepmom and a superhero girlfriend with being a vigilante, but upholding more laws than he breaks. He's got the world on his shoulders, way more so than I did when I was his age. "We do enough," I answer. "As much as we can."

And that seems to be a good enough answer for him, for now.

END