Barbara didn't learn about the Court of Owls from her father.
He never spoke of it when she was a child. Not once. Jim Gordon took effort into keeping the legend from their house, instructing his colleagues to never speak of their Talon related cases in front of their daughter. When he would come home after seeing a body skewered with claw shaped knives, he would wipe the fear and worry off his face, if only to keep his daughter's smile plastered on her face.
It would have worked if Barbara wasn't such a bibliophile.
The girl read everything she could get her hands on. Instruction manuals, newspaper clippings, worksheets her little brother brought home from school. She poured over books like she needed them to survive, taking in the small type piece by piece. Storing it. Jim ended up maxing out their family library card more than once.
It was a gift, they told Jim. His baby girl was a genius with the memory of an elephant. It was something he should be proud of.
He was until he came home to find her flipping through one of his old cold case files.
"Barbara!" He ran towards her, scooping up his baby girl from the gruesome details. The Wayne case, one of his firsts when dealing with the Owls. The case was both remarkably simple and complex. The simple part was the murder; Alfred Pennyworth, butler and ex special ops, found dead with five knives into his chest. The complex part was the boy; Bruce Wayne, seven, stolen away the same night without a trace. It'd been a case that haunted Gordon for years. Pennyworth had been a good friend. And Bruce, well, he'd been a thoughtful kid.
The seven year old girl in his arms reminded Jim of him some days.
She was squirming to get her arms around him, which Jim quickly obliged by lifting her up higher. She wrapped her arms around his neck, burying her face into his neck. Jim could feel hot tears run down his neck and soak his shirt. He couldn't see the file below, but given how far she'd been into it, it was likely she'd seen a few of the pictures.
He should have known to get a better lock system on his file cabinet once she'd read that book on lock picking. He'd have to go out the next day and buy something more complex. Like a safe.
"Is that real?" Her voice was quiet. Jim reached up to stroke his hand through her red hair, something that always helped her calm down.
"Yeah, it is sweetie." He couldn't lie to her. She was just as sharp as he was. "I thought I told you not to read my stuff from work."
She made a soft sniffling noise. "I know but I finished my books and I wanted to read something else." She turned to look down at the file, pulling one hand away to point to the label. "It said owls. I like owls." Her face scrunched up, a flush of red spreading across her cheeks. A few more fat tears poured down her face. "I liked owls."
"I know you did, kiddo." She reached back up to wrap her hands around his neck again. She was starting to get too big for this, something that made Jim's heart hurt. "Look, it's gonna be alright. That was a long time ago. You're safe."
It took a bit of rocking and reassurances to break her out of her crying fit. When she started to settle down, he placed her in one of the kitchen chairs and ushered the file out of sight, locking it away once more. After that, he went back to attending his daughter, who was still teary but not outright sobbing. He began to cook up some pancakes, her favorite, hoping that some breakfast for dinner might distract her from information of blood and gore.
He doubted it would work, but it was worth a try. At least until he found a good therapist for kids whose Dad's were idiots.
He made up a triple stack and placed it in front of Barbara, adding extra butter just how she liked it. He considered waking up James to give him a few as well, but then decided better of it; his son needed his rest. Barbara looked down at her pancakes, the butter melting down the sides.
"Not hungry?" Jim asked. Barbara shook her head, reaching for a fork.
"No…I just…" She made one cut through the middle of the stack before looking back up at him. "Did they ever find him? Bruce?"
Jim felt his heart sink. That was his girl; always worrying about others before herself. She took after him more than he liked. "No. We didn't."
"You think he's still out there?"
Jim's heart caught in his throat. Honestly? No, he didn't. Bruce had been missing for seven years now. The chances of him being alive were slim. "I don't think so, sweetheart, but it's possible."
"I think he is," Barbara said, taking a big bite of her pancakes. The next time she spoke, her mouth was almost full. "I'm gonna get big like you and I'm gonna find him."
Jim felt fear strike his chest. Barbara, a cop? Going against the Owls? He could never let that happen. "You're gonna give me a heart attack with that talk. How about you start smaller? Like eating your pancakes."
Barbara nodded, digging into the stack with vigor. But Jim didn't miss the edge that had appeared in her young eyes, the look she always had when she was thinking about something.
At that moment, Jim wished that his little girl didn't have such a perfect memory.
Barbara didn't forget about the Owls. Or Bruce Wayne.
It was impossible, even if she didn't remember every word of that file she found at the tender age of seven. The city was rife with reminders; the owls statues that decorated occasional rooftops, the yearly coverage of the Wayne murders and kidnapping, the song schoolchildren sung during sleepovers to give each other nightmares.
Barbara knew the rhyme by heart now. When he father wasn't watching, she picked up books on the subject, big tomes on Gotham's history that she was forced to sneak out of the adult's section of the library. There wasn't a lot in each of those texts, snippets of information really, but combined all together, it gave Barbara a good frame of reference. Here was what she knew about the court at eleven.
1. They were old. Really old. Older than Gotham really.
2. They liked Owls and they called their agents Talons.
3. They'd been confirmed responsible for a quarter of political killings in the city since the 20's.
4. They liked knives. Tacky ones, in Barbara's opinion. Who put owls on the end of their throwing daggers? Losers. That was who.
5. Their targets were focused on public officials. Politicians. CEO's. Cops.
6. Her father was absolutely a possible target.
It wasn't the most lighthearted information for a kid to collect.
Her father worried about it, of course. When he found her scraps of newspaper clipping on the topic, he'd rushed her into therapy before she could even protest. Her doctor, the same one who treated James, was a nice woman, soft and caring, but she couldn't get a grasp on Barbara's focus on the group. "Obsession" was thrown around, along with "childhood trauma" and "anxiety."
Barbara thought she was way off. She was anxious, but she didn't have anxiety. She wasn't traumatized. And obsessed, while somewhat accurate, was still off the mark. She was just dedicated.
There was a mystery out there. A real one. One outside of the detective novels she could always predict and the Nancy Drew books she found entertaining but disappointing. An actual real mystery with people to save. People like her. How was she supposed to let that go?
Especially when the court disappeared.
It happened all at once, though it was hard to spot. Court murders only happened once or twice a year. But the sudden lack of threatening messages from their leaders and the lack of owl coins being found in politicians wallets was enough to tell the GPD that the court managed to suffer a major shakeup. When a group of kids found a pile of cracked owl masks underneath the docks, they knew something had gone wrong for the secret society. When a politician made a speech directly attacking the Court and didn't die, it was pretty much confirmed.
The department took it as good news. Not having a court to worry about freed their time up for other things, like tackling the mob, or some of the more eccentric criminals who'd taken to Gotham like pests. The files on the matter were sealed tight, locked away, only looked through by a couple of cops, Jim Gordon being one of them.
Despite begging his daughter to let the issue go, Jim found the idea impossible for himself. A secret society didn't vanish overnight. The Owls didn't just throw down their masks of their own free will to integrate into society like normal people. Something must have happened. Something gruesome. Something bloody. And soon enough it would turn away from the corpse of the court to focus its sights on the rest of Gotham.
The question was when.
The answer turned out to be two years later.
It started slowly. Street crime showing up dead, for the most part. Small fry. Murders that could easily be mistaken for garden variety mob activity. A few crooks there, a few drug runners there. Nothing too unusual. The cops marked down the multiple stab wounds to a routine shanking and left it at that.
But then bigger folks started falling. Huge ones. Mob lieutenants. Gang leaders. Entire crime families found wiped out in a night. The media began to gossip. A new serial killer? A new crime lord? A metahuman?
They got their answer soon enough. Jim got the first call for the case, a ring in the middle of the night. His kids were fast asleep, and Jim picked up the phone as fast as possible to avoid waking them. He almost tangled himself up in the cord. He didn't have to look at the caller ID to know who was trying to reach him; only his job called this late at night.
"This better be good."
There was a long pause before Harvey, in a voice so terrified that Jim didn't even recognize it, spoke.
"They're back."
That was all Jim needed to know to leap out of his bed.
The scene wasn't too gruesome. As far as Owl standards went, it was almost clean. Most of the blood had been cleared away and the wounds on the corpse wrapped up. It was only the pale shade of the corpse and the bloodstains that showed the man was dead at all. He was tied to his balcony, a sweet spot just over the harbor, his pool lights turned to illuminate him to the entire coast. As the wind blew in, the corpse swung ever so slightly.
Out of all the ways Jim expected Carmine Falcone to go out, it was never like this.
"Tour boat spotted him," Harvey said, tapping Jim on the shoulder. They were standing across from the scene of the crime, just a foot away from the now tarp covered pool. The coffee Jim had brought to keep himself awake was long forgotten on one of the beach chairs. "God knows how many others did before we got there. It's already made the news."
"Of course it did. That was the point," Jim said. All this work, tying him up, cleaning the wounds, making sure to position him where everyone could see across the harbor; it wasn't for anything other than a display. Jim looked down at the white tarp that was thrown across the pool. The message that was painted on the top would have likely been visible from a distance as well. He knew the words well. God knows how often he'd heard crooks singing them to scare the new prisoners. It was the same old rhyme, just with a new addition.
"Beware the Court of Owls, that watches all the time-"
Ruling Gotham from a shadowed perch, behind granite and lime.
They watch you at your hearth, they watch you in your bed.
Speak not a whispered word about them, or they'll send the Talon for your head.
From this moment on- none of you are safe."
"Think there's a chance of this being a mob stunt?" Harvey didn't sound quite as terrified as he did over the phone, but it was still there, hidden under the gruffness. Jim bent down to get a closer look at the paint. The corners of each letter still weren't dry.
"I wish it was," Jim said, pushing up his glasses. "I wish it was."
The next day the court's message would end up plastered on every front page paper in Gotham. For the first time in two years, Jim would walk into his kitchen to find his daughter cutting of newspaper clippings with scissors. Barbara had grown into a smart teenager, popular, social, and outgoing. But she still hadn't given up on the mystery she stumbled upon at age seven. Just like her old man.
Jim hoped that their obsession wouldn't end up getting them killed.
Neither Jim nor Barbara would end up being the first Gordon to fall to the Court of Owls. That honor went solely to James.
He'd been fourteen at the time. To this day, Barbara had no clue exactly what happened. One of her best friends had gone missing on a camping trip. James had been silent on the matter. The police couldn't find a body. And a week later, James had turned up dead, a Talon knife in his neck right during his walk home from school.
Barbara never liked her brother. He creeped her out, and she had been almost positive that her friend's disappearance had been at his hands. But he deserved prison, some medical help. Not a cold death on a lonely sidewalk.
Her father was devastated. He'd never given up on James, not like Barbara had, never dared to consider his son was worth saving. He tended to visit James room once a day since the funeral to pour through the objects, to find a hint of why the Court would take his boy.
Barbara knew. She knew the new Court rules. She'd been studying them too long to be oblivious at this point. The Talons that flocked over rooftops slaughtered only a certain type; criminals, thieves and most often, murders.
They got a letter in the mail after James murder. It wasn't signed, a blank envelope with just a simple red pressed seal. Barbara knew who it was from at once. She managed to sneak it out of the main pile, to save her father from the contents, and brought it upstairs. Inside was one sheet of paper, typed with a font that looked close to cursive.
"I'm sorry for your loss. It was necessary. We apologize for causing you pain."
There was no signature.
Barbara took a deep breath through her nose. Her freshly painted nails dug into the paper in her grasp, causing slight tears. Unlike her father, she wasn't devastated. She was furious.
Barbara had been trying to bust the Court for years. That day was the start of her trying to destroy them.
Barbara wasn't dumb; she knew she couldn't beat a Talon in hand to hand.
She was a seventeen year old girl, not a trained assassin. She knew gymnastics and karate, not how to kill a man 17 ways with her bare hands. Compared to whoever was running the court, she was small fry in the physical department. She wasn't going to be able to overpower them by force.
Overpowering them through sheer wit? Now that she could do.
She had a system. Every night she would figure out who the Court would target next, who was likely to try a heist that night, who had just gotten released from jail with a scam in mind. Simple work with the hacked police data-base under her fingers. Then, once she got her targets in sight, she would lace up a pair of yellow boots, throw on all black including a ski mask and take to the rooftops with one plan in mind; catch the criminals before the Court could kill them.
It was a hit and miss process at first. It was hard to figure out why one man would be targeted over another, why one night they wouldn't strike at all only to strike three times the next. But as she spent more and more time on the streets, she had more successes. More saved lives. More men in prison than in graves.
It wasn't a perfect but it was all she had.
The news got a photo of her eventually. It made the front pages when she turned 19 at college. It wasn't a good photo, a blurred shot of black and red, but it was enough to make out some basic details. She'd been sloppy. For some reason, looking at the headline, she didn't mind.
"Hawk Saves Lives, Captures Crooks."
Hawk. It was a terrible name.
She loved it.
She meet the Owl her first semester into her freshman year.
She was running across rooftops at the time, taking care to do her normal pre-patrol routine. It was child's play by now, a simple route she barely had to think about. Take a right here. Jump here. Tuck your knees here on the triple flip to avoid knocking them on the flagpole.
In hindsight, it was a stupid routine. It'd stopped being practical the first time she ran it, given her photographic memory. That and it made her predictable.
She didn't have any time to react before she saw a boot flying for her face.
Barbara fell sideways onto the rooftop, her elbows scraping against the concrete. She could feel her sleeves tear, small cuts opening up on her skin. In a quick recovery, she used the momentum from her fall to flip herself back up on her feet. She reached for one of the small stun bombs she kept in her belt. Whoever hit her was going to pay with a trip to-
Juvie apparently, since the attacker standing in front of her couldn't be older than thirteen.
"What-" Barbara said, thrown off guard. The kid in front of her was a least a foot shorter, his combat boots likely adding a couple of inches. He wore what looked like a combat suit, thick material that was both flexible and sturdy. His hood, one Barbara recognized as the signature Talon mask, was thrown off, the goggles strapped to the top of his head.
That would have been enough of a shocker if not for his face. Because despite his dark skin, Barbara could see blue veins pulse underneath his skin. Something she only ever associated with the dead. The smirk on his face, the same kind she'd seen on smug kids, compounded the sudden terror in her veins.
When the Owl ran up to punch her in the face, she only had enough reaction time to dodge it by a fraction.
The Owl, now that was what she expected from a Talon. Tall and bulky, the Owl was both a tower of muscle and grace. He hit hard and fast, dodging most of her counter attacks with ease, avoiding her kicks by barely moving a muscle. It was like she was fighting air. By the time she managed to get a solid hit on him, his Talon had already found his opening to shove her to the ground and pin her there with a few knives.
"Hello Hawk," the Owl said, looking down at her given the tilt of his head. She had no clue what his face looked like under the mask, his goggles tinted to hide his eyes. "It's about time we've met."
Barbara glared at him through her mask. To her surprise, neither Owl or Talon had decided to remove it. "If you're going to kill me, get it over with. Save the monologue for someone else."
"I promise it'll be short," Owl said, in a voice that sounded almost amused. Barbara hated him for it. "And I'm not going to kill you. It'd be a waste of talent." He reached into one of his belt pockets and pulled out one of the signature Court throwing knives. Balancing the tip on his finger, he began to flip it back and forth between his two hands. "Do know why I do this, Hawk?"
"Because you're an ass?" Barbara tried desperately to keep her fear and rage at bay. Neither of those would help her now. If she panicked, the enemy would know. If she was going to be weak, it wasn't going to be for his eyes. The Owl laughed.
"I see why you like her," he said, turning back to the kid behind him. The Talon nodded, a large grin spread across his face and he waved at Barbara from his position behind the Owl. Barbara rather wished her hands were free so she could flick the kid off. "No, though I will admit, you're correct on the ass accusation." He knelt down, flipping the knife on one finger now. Barbara was sure that he'd managed to cut himself at least once already. There was no way he could avoid it otherwise, and she could see the cuts in his gloves. Just not the blood. "I do this to protect people."
"By killing them. Seems foolproof." The kid Talon snickered, hiding his smile behind his hand. He shut up quick when his boss turned back to glare at him. The Owl looked back at her and cleared his throat.
"Not by killing them. By killing those who wish to harm them." He threw the knife up in the air, letting it do three twirls before landing back on his finger. "Before, the Owls used to be another method of terror to the citizens of Gotham, another bad guy to make kids fear to walk down a street. I aspired to make them something greater. Something that shined a light in those dark places." He waved a hand out towards the city, where they could both hear traffic from below. "Think about the city now. Crime is down. Families can be safe again."
Barbara tried to hide her frown. He wasn't wrong there; she followed the statistics. Since the Owl's reappeared, crime in Gotham had plummeted. Street robberies and simple homicides were a thing of the past. She closed her eyes. Pictured James. Pictured a father of a four year old girl who was killed for stealing from an electronics store. Pictured a woman who killed her abusive boss stabbed in the throat. Did they deserve freedom? No. But they didn't deserve a grave either.
"But at what cost?" Her voice was somewhat more somber than she'd been expecting.
To her surprise, the Owl laughed, a short bark that sounded far more like her father than a massive killer. "Good point, good point." He turned to the kid behind him. "Talon I think we're done here."
The talon's shoulder's slumped at once, his face turning into a comic frown. The Owl laughed again. "She's given us her choice. I'm afraid you'll have to wait longer to get a playmate." He flipped the knife once again this time catching it by the blade and burying it inches from Barbara's neck. She'd be lying if she said she didn't flinch. "Well let me know if you change your mind, Hawk. We could use a brain like yours." He reached for something in his belt and threw it down on the concrete, gas flowing out in a billowing stream. By the time it cleared, Barbara was alone, the knives holding her down gone, the only trace of the encounter the one by her neck. She sat up and plucked the knife from the concrete, tearing it out in one firm motion. Being careful not to cut herself, she placed it in a plastic bag and tucked it into her belt. Evidence was evidence.
Later that night, when every one of her blood scans came up empty, she ended up hurling the thing into her apartment floorboards.
Her transformation into Oracle wasn't caused by a bullet from a gun.
In her world, there was no Joker to lurk outside her door, no clown prince of crime to barge into her home. He didn't exist, didn't breath, killed years ago with five knives to the back before he could even consider applying any face paint. Barbara Gordon would not fall from a home invasion.
She would fall from an assassination attempt.
Here was the thing. The Owls were merciful when it came to the police on their trail. They kept their distance. Didn't bother them even when they got rather close. The Owls preferred the crime of Gotham as their prey; the city's finest could breath as long as they never tried to pull off their mask. It was an unspoken rule among the GPD; touch the Owls and you die.
Jim Gordon had never been good with rules.
Barbara wished she could forget it, the day a Talon broke through her father's window. The day she fought tooth and nail to save him. The day she tried to tackle her father to safety to receive a knife in her lower back. The day her sacrifice got her nothing but another dead family member and a card on her hospital bed.
It was on the same kind of paper she received after James death, the same printed type, the same font size. The message was almost identical as well. Barbara picked up the crisp paper from her bedside table and rubbed her thumb over the corner of the page. The sharp edge cut through the skin on her finger, dripping blood onto her sheets. She read the line that differed from the last letter she'd received.
"Your medical bills have been paid for. You have been a great opponent over the years. We are sorry this came to pass."
It was the tone that got her. The finality. Like she was done, she was over. All because of a knife. Barbara threw the letter into the trash and reached over to grab a tissue to wipe around her thumb. Her brother was dead. Her father was dead. She was here.
The Owls were wrong. She wasn't done. Not yet. Not ever.
A week later, Barbara Gordon would be assumed dead, the wheelchair she rented from the hospital found in the Gotham harbor. Two weeks later, a redhead under the name of "Barbara Jones" would rent a large amount of space in a clocktower in the center of Gotham. Three weeks later, Oracle was live.
She kept the knife. The one that stabbed her.
She hung it up in her headquarters, inside a small display box, the handle's icon visible. The blade was clean, the blood wiped off after the surgery. Getting her hands on it had been difficult, but worth it.
"They won't take mercy on you," she said, wheeling away from her computer to face her three visitors. "They don't care about your age, or your family, or your skill. They don't want to kill you, but if it comes down to your life or the Court's, they will aim for your heart without a second thought. Do you understand?"
Standing across from her, Duke, Stephanie and Harper nodded.