Author's Note: I am not affiliated with DC comics or Warner Brother's Studios. The work below is based off of character's and events from the Christopher Nolan film adaptation of the Batman franchise. Please post your thoughts in the form of reviews. I appreciate constructive criticism and am not beyond making major changes if merited. Thank you all for reading and enjoy!

"Absolutely not, Barbara. You're too young to go traipsing through Gotham on your own."

"I'm four-teen, dad. I can walk a couple of blocks on my own."

"A couple of blocks in this city scares me to death, and I'm a police officer. Just wait here at the station until I finish working, and then I'll take you to practice. I'm almost finished, I swear."

Jim Gordon felt the lie leave his lips. His work never seemed to be finished, lately. He was a good cop. Maybe the last good cop Gotham had left. If he didn't process the arrests made today, who knew what might happen? But he was also a father. And the last thing he wanted was his daughter getting impatient and running off on her own.

Barbara must have read his mind.

"You are not!"

"Not what?"

"Almost finished. You'll be in your office filling out cop-forms all night and I'll miss practice – again! What's the point of putting me in Aikido if I never train? If these streets are so dangerous the least you could do is give me a fighting chance."

She reminded Gordon so much of her mother. The fiery red hair; the intense green eyes; even the way she set her jaw in a certain way when she was bracing for an argument. And, also like her mother, she seemed to be right ninety nine point nine percent of the time.

"Alright."

"Alright, I can go? Or alright, that's enough; you're going into a cell?"

"I promised you I'd never do that again, and I won't. Besides, you said you wanted to see what jail was like."

"I was eight, and you locked me up by myself in a cell with nothing to do. No one would let me out, even when I had to use the bathroom!"

"That's what jail is like." Admittedly, Gordon wasn't particularly proud of the way he had gone about that. It had sort of gotten away from him.

"Ha ha. Lesson learned. I got it the first time, but it was still mean – wait a sec. Are you letting me go?"

Gordon sighed a father's sigh of lost battles. How did the saying go? You have to let them fly on their own some time?

"Yes, you can go. While it's still light out. But call me to come pick you up. I'm nervous enough about this during the day; don't push your luck after dark."

"YES!! I'll be so careful dad you don't even need to worry I've got my pepper spray and my whistle and my phone and my wristlocks are getting better so I promise you have nothing to be…." her voice faded as she crossed the crowded police station. Gordon smiled as he watched her turn and practically bolt for the door.

He had done the math long ago, before her mother had passed away. Back then, he was trying to calculate his chances of winning an argument with his wife. He was no statistician, but the way he figured it, he stood a chance of winning an argument with either of those women about once every three years. This was no time to start a losing battle. Besides, he had a feeling this town was taking a turn for the better.

Gordon picked up his phone, and he dialed.

The number he had been given had a local area code. Fake. It was patched to a phone company in Canada, which forwarded the call to a number in the Philippines, where it bounced back to a basement in Stamford, Connecticut. That was as far as Gordon had been able to trace the call. There, it was fed into a voice-over IP internet phone service via proxy server to Guam, where it rode submarine fiber optic lines back to the west coast. A San Luis Obispo radio station unknowingly rebroadcast the encrypted call over the airwaves, while a computer on the edge of town processed, decrypted, unpacked, and re-encrypted the call, sending it as a security software feed to a satellite TV provider in Los Angeles. The call hitched a ride with a rerun of Cheers to a satellite in orbit over Texas, where it was broadcast back down to Gotham City on a secure line that only one man had access to.

Bruce Wayne's left breast pocket began to vibrate. He had given Lieutenant Gordon this number in case something happened during the day, when the signal wouldn't do any good. They had only used it a handful of times.

"If you'll excuse me, gentlemen, I need to take this. Lucius, would you mind….?"

"Not at all, Mr. Wayne." Lucius Fox sorted through the stack of quarterly reports in front of him, and prepared to continue the meeting in the owner's absence, as the board had become quite accustomed to. "Try not to let this one keep you up all night." The boardroom filled with chuckles from the men and disapproving sighs from the women.

"I'll do my best." They would have to come up with some other alibi eventually, but for now the ruse of rushing off to meet actresses and supermodels was proving quite effective. "Don't wait up for me though." Bruce wondered for a moment what it would be like to actually have a supermodel or an actress waiting for him on the other end of this phone.

Stepping out into the hallway, Bruce checked for observers, then pressed a panel between two columns and slipped into a side passage known only to himself, Lucius, and Alfred.

He pulled out the sleek maroon com-device he had had Lucius put together for him. It was simple – no screen, no numbers, just one black button in the center to answer a call. James Gordon was the only man in the world who had this number.

"Gordon?" Bruce took care to use the low, gruff voice he had adopted as part of Batman's persona. "What's wrong?"

"Sorry to call you on this line again so soon, but this probably shouldn't wait until after dark."

"Go ahead."

"We picked up a middleman for one of the newer gangs last night, and I have strong suspicions he can lead us to a much bigger fish. Problem is, we don't have any physical evidence against him, and we're getting close to the 24-hour detention period before we have to either charge him or let him go."

Bruce was already on his way to the secret elevator to the basement of Wayne Tower, where the applied science archives had become his temporary headquarters until the mansion was rebuilt.

"And you need me to get you some evidence?" This had become pretty routine work for Batman. The Gotham City Police were tied down with red tape, and what should have been a simple process of turning arrests into convictions often fell through due to the technicalities of the legal system.

"We picked him up at the scene of what looked like a drug deal. A citizen phoned in some suspicious activity and we sent an officer to check it out. He was a rookie beat cop, though, and rather than calling in backup so we could bust the whole deal, he tried to deal with it himself. Shots were fired, the two cars drove off, and our boy managed to bring in the one guy on the scene who wasn't shooting, and who now claims he was just passing by."

"The officer didn't catch any plates?"

"Phony. If you can find out anything, anything at all we can leverage this guy with, we can charge him, or at least make him panic into saying something he shouldn't."

"How long do we have before you have to let him go?"

"We booked him at…" Bruce heard Gordon shuffling through paperwork. It sounded like there was a lot on his desk. "…2:38 this morning. If you can get me something on him in the next ten hours or so, we'd have a chance at taking down a pretty sizable drug ring."

"I'll see what I can do…"

"Here's the address. Thanks. I owe you one more." One more what, Gordon didn't really know. He seemed to be the one needing all the favors in this partnership they'd developed. What he did know was if this bat character ever needed anything from him, he wouldn't hesitate for a second.

Twelve minutes later, Batman was on the scene and making progress. He was at the same time surprised and unsurprised to hear that the drug deal had taken place at Thomas Wayne High School. He couldn't put anything past the criminals of this city, and that included bringing drugs to the school his father had helped to get rid of drugs twenty-five years ago. The school was abandoned now, a perfect place to keep away from watchful eyes. According to Lieutenant Gordon, the officer on scene had spotted four men exchanging goods near the basketball courts, not too far from their cars. Not wanting to risk revealing himself in the fading daylight, he surveyed the scene from a discreet spot on the roof of the school, between two gargoyles. One of them seemed to be looking at the same spot that Batman was.

"What do you think?" He joked to the carved beast. Its stone eyes continued to stare at the same place on the road below.

"That's what I thought, too." Parts of the area where the cars would have been parked seemed to be… shimmering… in the light of dusk. Pulling a pair of modified compact binoculars from his belt, he cycled through the filters while viewing the area in question. The UV filter showed him what he needed. Two strips of faintly glowing blue appeared along the sidewalk and trailed down the street in both directions. The binoculars sent a hi-res image of the tracks to his private server back at Wayne Tower. Within seconds, it matched the tire and track pattern to the make and model of the car Gordon's rookie had reported seeing. One of the cars from the drug deal must have driven through a UV reactive substance at some point. There were a handful of phosphors just off the top of Batman's head that might create these glowing tire tracks, and probably as many more he didn't know about. It was a good thing he had made it here before dark; the sunlight was what was illuminating the trail; the goggles only helped him to see it. If a forensics team had been on the scene, they would have picked this up even sooner than he had. Unfortunately, forensics wasn't usually dispatched for almost-drug-busts.

After glancing thoughtfully back and forth between the two directions the tracks led a few times, Batman turned to his stone sidekick, "Well, let's hope they were driving on the right side of the road."

He fired his grappling gun at a nearby building in the direction of the logical 'forward' path of the car, slightly taken aback at how simple it had been. Gotham PD must have really been stretched thin. Any seasoned detective should have been able to handle this, if Gordon had been able to spare one. The retractor on the gun snapped taught just as Batman fastened it to the balance point on his belt, and he was pulled forward and upward. Spreading his arms and activating the electrolysis pad in his glove stiffened the memory cloth in his cape to help stabilize his ascent. As he approached the building, he sped up the ascender and prepared his body for one of the riskiest aerial tricks he had developed in the last few months. In one motion, he slackened his cape, put his feet forward to run along the wall, and stopped the ascender, letting his momentum propel him upward just long enough to retrieve the magnetic grapple from the drainpipe it had fixed itself to. For a fraction of a second, he stood horizontally against the side of the building, trapped between his upward momentum and the laws of gravity. After a moment of gut-wrenching weightlessness, he twisted his body around, pushing off the wall into a dive. Once he had begun falling fast enough, he spread his wings to glide a few blocks, finding a place to land and do it all again. Traveling this way was considerably less conspicuous than taking the Tumbler, he had found.

Half gliding, half swinging above the streets of Gotham, he followed the tracks to a warehouse in the shipping district, not far from where he had taken down Carmine Falcone a few months earlier. Batman made his way to the roof silently. It hadn't taken long for a bigger, badder drug ring to spring up in Falcone's absence. Inside, the warehouse was crowded with gang muscle. At least thirty men, all with automatic weapons, patrolled between the crates and massive shipping containers. The car that had been at the school, along with half a dozen others, was being loaded with small wooden crates stamped in Arabic. One of the crates was open. Batman moved to a different window, peering in at a better angle to see… not drugs…. guns. Eight Uzis neatly nestled in a bed of straw. There were dozens of crates in various shapes and sizes waiting to be distributed.

Gordon didn't know how right he was; if they could bring in whoever was in charge of this operation, they could save a lot of civilian's and police officer's lives. Removing the sonic emitter from his boot, he activated the new feature he had added. In addition to the one that attracted bats, the device now included a frequency that was audible to humans on the subconscious level. A dampener in his mask's earpieces protected him from the mild but debilitating headache that was slowly incapacitating the men below. For now, each of them thought he was the only one closing his eyes and rubbing his temple in pain. Batman had a few seconds before they noticed that everyone had momentarily dropped their guard. As discreetly but as quickly as possible, he broke one of the glass panels in the window, fired the magnetic grapple at the open crate, and reeled back an Uzi. After replacing the emitter in his boot, he took a few more hi-res photos, trying to get as many faces as possible. Two hours after he had gotten the call from Gordon, he was on his way back to the precinct to deliver the evidence he had asked for.

Barbara watched from the street as the dark figure flew – actually flew! – to the rooftop of her father's station. She was glad she hadn't waited back at the dojo for her father; this was too cool to miss. This bat man really was real, and he was working with the police! She wondered if her dad knew. She had been standing still on the street wondering about Gotham's new knight in blackened armor for approximately twelve seconds. Too long to be ignored by the gaunt figure in the alley ten feet away…