The Black Book
By: RavenHeart101
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Summary: Seventeen years ago, Selina Kyle stepped onto a toy police officer and changed a little boy's life forever. Years later, the Red Hood is hired to kill a conman and the FBI gets a case involving Bruce Wayne.
A:N - I'm a terrible writer. Don't read my stuff. I'm crap at updating. I'm crap at writing. My brain comes up with shit crossovers. Kay gonna hide now.
Selina Kyle wasn't a fan of kids. No, that wasn't quite right, she didn't hate kids, but they were never a part of her future. They never had been part of her future and they never would be part of her future. Her heeled boots clicked against the pavement, echoing down the empty alley way. Her hips swayed and her dark hair brushed down her shoulders. For once, Selina was going out, and not as Catwoman, but as Selina Kyle. Possible girlfriend of Bruce Wayne, not as Batman. Selina smiled indulgently and rubbed her lips together, reveling in the waxy feel of the lipstick rubbing together. Her jacket was tight around the waist, cut at the elbows and showing off her forearms, her pants skinny and black. Silver necklaces were layered around her throat and Selina may or may not have stolen them, may or may not have stolen the whole outfit, but she knew that Bruce would simply shake his head with a fondness that he would try to hide.
They were going, oddly enough, to the circus. Selina wasn't entirely sure why she had let him rope her into the whole thing but Selina didn't get many chances to get dressed up and Bruce knew that she sort of enjoyed being paraded around for all the paparazzi to photograph.
Selina turned a corner, her heels cracking and her purse swinging against her hip bone. Bruce made a promise to her as well, he would not run off as Batman in the middle of their date, and Selina had made a similar promise, of course, after some prodding. Under the yellow lighting from the single street lamp that marked the transition between the "rich Gotham" and the "poor Gotham" Selina stumbled, tripping over something small and delicate, feeling it snap beneath her heel.
She paused, for a moment, to consider that it was something almost deadly stepping there. With the way Gotham went sometimes you could never be too sure that you weren't stepping onto a grenade. "Officer Joe!" A tiny voice said in distress and Selina picked up her foot in surprise.
Selina hesitantly picked up the toe of her boots, her brown eyes narrowing down on a small, plastic, toy police officer. "Oh." She said dimly, noticing from the corner of her eyes a small boy, a little bit shorter than her hip, and with the bluest eyes she had ever seen.
17 Years Later. New York.
Jason Todd was used to warehouse meetings. He was used to the echoing footsteps and the crisscrossed beams that hung from the rafters, and he was used to the disgusting stench they all seemed to hold inside them, permeating the air and trying to suck all the things not touched by pollution out with it. Jason felt at home in the dusty, dark warehouses. They reminded him of Gotham, and even if New York felt awfully like her sometimes during the night in the right parts of the city, there was always something more... hopeful about the city of New York. The "Eternal City" as Tim called it sometimes in that wistful voice of his. The kid would love it here, Jason thought with a sardonic snort. The city would probably love him back.
But Jason wasn't here to muse about warehouses and Gotham and New York and his strange attraction to all things damp and dewy. He was here to get a job done. Or to at the very least be offered a job that paid for once. It would be nice to actually make some money. Sometimes Jason wished he hadn't said no to Bruce's offer to take him back in. But then he remembered that Bruce thought that something was fundamentally broken inside of him, and maybe something was, but there was a part of Jason, no matter how big or small, that really enjoyed that he didn't have something like Batman's morals to hold him back from making actual progress in crime fighting anymore.
The man he was meeting preferred to sit with his face in the dark. Jason would have rolled his eyes and shot him once he got his money if he wasn't sure that the man would have the full force of the police out to get him. And Jason already had that problem, thank you very much, he would hate to add senseless murder to his rap sheet. He was happy enough with mass murdering terrorist with a small conscience, he didn't even want to think about the kind of elation "senseless murderer" would add to his life.
Jason, even if he was a mercenary and a killer, didn't exactly want to become on the same level of insane as the Joker.
The man had graying hair and dark glasses obscuring his eyes. He was well built, strong and stocky, but he favored his left leg over his right and wore a suit that would have cost less than a hand-me-down suit from Dick. Jason figured law enforcement of some sort, or a kicked out of the throne business man. The man held himself with some sort of grace, though, so Jason could give him brownie points for that.
There was a twitch to his smile that seemed familiar but Jason couldn't place it and after a moment of staring just a little bit too long and thinking just a little bit too hard on it, Jason slipped his gun back into its holster at his waist, secured the hood over his face and jumped down from the rafters.
The man jumped at his sudden appearance and swore so loud Jason had to fight back a laugh. He didn't quite have the cackle that Dick had down and he wasn't sure he wanted to. Sometimes that laugh - which only showed up when Dick was being absolutely vindictive - gave Jason the creeps. "Good to see you've arrived." The man recovered with a shake of his shoulders and a straightening of his tie with a bright yellow dot of a mustard stain near the end tucked into his suit coat.
"You're the one who was late." Jason pointed out evenly. The man flinched when Jason waved his hand around to prove his point.
"I had... business to attend to."
The man was too shifty for his own good. Jason felt a twinge of suspicion but shook it off. The guy probably had a 9-5 job that was allowing Jason to make the money he was due to deserve. Who was Jason to complain about having to wait just a little bit longer? It wasn't as though Jason wasn't used to be left to pass the time. He had gone on plenty of stake outs in his time.
"Good for you." Jason walked closer, keeping his arms loose at his sides in case the guy decided to pull something funny. Like try to arrest him. Believe it or not quite a few stupid cops had tried that before.
It hadn't turned out well for them.
"What's my job?" Jason chose to get straight to the point, rather than let the barely masked tension settle in the already darkened air pollution.
"I need someone... taken care of." The words even sounded funny coming from the man's mouth, as though he had never tasted them before in an actual conversation. They were obviously rehearsed and phrased many times over and over again to be as vaguely obvious as possible.
God, Jason really needed to stop letting himself be hired by amateurs. "Like babysat? Cuz that's not part of my pay grid, pal." Jason egged on for the hell of it. Sue him, he was bored. And he liked having a confession on tape so that he didn't seem nearly as narrow minded after he shot the guy (after they paid him, of course. Jason had to make sure he got paid or the whole flying out to New York thing would have been pointless).
The man visibly fumed. "Taken care of. I need him out of my hair."
Him. While Jason wasn't exactly picky on his kill targets he did tend to have more of a reason to not kill someone if they were a woman. Usually, if Jason was sent to kill a woman, it was because she had scorned her ex, or some other stupid bull shit like that. Jason tended to fake killing her just to get paid and then shoot the guy in the most painful place he could think of. Jason's least favorite guys were pedophiles or rapists that tried to hire him to kill their victims. Idiots apparently hadn't gotten the memo that Jason had a type. He killed criminals and only criminals, not innocent people that just walked around in broad daylight.
"What did your hair dresser give you a bad cut?"
Jason snarked and rolled his eyes behind the molten red mask.
"The why doesn't matter." The man snarled, spit flying from the corner of his mouth. Jason narrowed his eyes in disgust.
"The why does matter, actually." Jason preferred to be up front about things, rather than dance around the issue. Get all the information and then do the job. Maybe it was a little bit of training left over from the Batman. "I don't kill innocent people."
"He's not a person." The man growled.
Jason's interest was piqued. "Is he a meta?" Meta humans were another category altogether. Jason got along with many meta-humans, on both sides of the law, left over from his exploits as Robin and his adventures as Red Hood. If the meta hurt someone on purpose, however, Jason wouldn't hesitate to bring him or her down. Things got tricky with Meta's involved, though. With them tended to come the League and with the League was Batman and Nightwing and Red Robin and Robin and everyone that Jason would much rather just avoid except for rare family gatherings, thank-you-very-much.
"He's a thief." The man spit. "And a pain in my ass." He produced a file from the back of his pocket, throwing it onto the floor with a swish of his wrist. Pictures flew out, scattering with paper in the stiff air. "I want him gone. He made one mistake too many and now my daughter is dead."
Jason didn't kneel down to pick up the papers, but he did stomp one large combat boot over a picture that nearly floated away from him. He was sure the back of it would have a very large outline of the soles of his shoes but Jason couldn't find it within himself to care. "Did he kill her?"
"Without even a damn excuse." The man growled and pulled an envelope out of his pocket, his eyes not missing the way Jason's hand floated to his gun and his muscles tensed when he couldn't see where his limb had gone. The man barely contained a smirk. "Half your payment." He held it up as though to show it off. "The rest will be delivered upon the arrival of a body."
Jason nodded and reached out to take the manila envelope. The man just let his fingers graze it before dropping that, too, only the floor. Jason raised an eyebrow, even though the man couldn't see it, and stared him down.
The man didn't say anything else, but his footsteps echoed against the empty hollow room of the warehouse.
When he had fully disappeared (and after ten minutes just to be sure), Jason knelt down to pick up the envelope and folder, moving his foot just an inch to look at the picture.
Sure enough there was his footprint, dark against the pale white of the back of the picture. Jason shook his head and thought through what the man had told him. Whoever this was had killed his daughter (supposedly) and had done so without a second thought (apparently) and was a thief (most likely). Jason would do some investigating of his own before acting, he couldn't be too trigger happy or he could kill someone innocent and then, once again, Batman and the entire force of the Batfamily would be upon him like a rat with cheese.
He opened the file before turning the picture around. The name rang familiar in his mind, but Jason couldn't place it. The file itself was a standard police file, if it wasn't for the black lettering that read FBI in the corner of it. Jason skimmed the details, bond forgery, art theft, money laundering, conterfeiting... the list went on and on for three pages. Nothing to suggest a violent criminal, though. In fact, there was a memo written in by hand (that had been copied, it seemed since Jason couldn't see any indents in the paper. This whole file was probably copied illegally and given to him. This employer had a lot more balls than Jason had originally assumed, it seemed) that went as far as to state that the criminal didn't even like violence.
And then there were three words that stood out like a knife in a gun fight. Confidential Criminal Informant. The guy was a CI for the FBI.
Jason narrowed his eyes and turned to a page with a list of aliases. Maybe one of them would ring a bell. Was the guy ever in Gotham? Maybe Jason and the Bat had run into him and the guy had somehow managed to escape their grip. Sure few people had done it before but some had.
None of the names rang a bell... but Jason could have sworn he knew the person. Could have sworn that the list of crimes were eerily familiar, as though Jason had read through them multiple times before.
If only his mind still wasn't all messed up from dying and coming back again. If only Jason didn't find it hard, sometimes, to focus on something so simple.
A name should be easy to pull up!
Jason growled low in his throat and clenched his fists around the pages before he remembered the picture he had deliberately stepped on.
He turned it over. Blue eyes were the first thing he saw. Brighter than Dick's but familiar in the same way Nightwing's were. Wavy black hair. Devil-may-care smile. Expensive suit and silk tie.
Danny.
The name jumped to his mind and Jason almost froze in shock. Danny? But the name didn't say Daniel. The name at the top of the file said...
No it didn't say Daniel Brooks.
What was it that Bruce had told him about Danny all those years ago when Danny had left? Corrupt cop for a father, drunk hooker for a mother, the kid was lied to his whole life and the only person to tell him the truth without their hands red from guilt was... Selina Kyle. Marshalls. Witness protection.
Gotham.
The FBI had nothing on file for Neal Caffrey before he was 18.
New York.
Daniel's real name had been Neal Bennet. His best friend had been Batman's sidekick.
Shit.
Neal didn't want to think of what Peter would say to him if he was late to the office when he said he could get there on time himself. He would have sped up his trot a little if he thought it was necessary. Well, he was only a minute late, which was ten minutes earlier than most of the other staff members of the White Collar Division, and he had brought a peace offering of June's Italian Roast with Peter's name on it.
Perhaps he had gotten a little bit too easily distracted by the news and answering his email, Neal thought as he shouldered his way through the clear doors and stopped at his desk to shrug off his jacket and toss off his hat. He sighed at the pile of files waiting for him. He had a feeling that over half of them were mortgage fraud.
He really hated mortgage fraud.
Selina had sent him a message - coded obviously (in legitimate computer code, condensed over and over again and so hard to crack that Neal was pretty sure she had "borrowed" some Wayne Tech in order to complete it to her liking) - asking him to skip out on his anlket for just a few nights and stop back "home". Gotham wasn't home, but he wasn't idiot enough to admit that Neal missed Selina in a way that he missed very few people. And he sort of missed the corruption of the City and the scary things that would go bump in the night.
Neal would have to come up with some very good excuse in order to get a few days off, though, and even if Gotham wasn't very far away Neal would rather stay a night there than have to catch a train or taxi back in time for work the next day. Maybe he would play sick... But no, that was too elementary...
Perhaps he could make a deal with Peter. Do good on all of these mortgage fraud cases with very minimal complaining, stop by and help El with dinner prep, and in return get a few days off from FBI work.
Mozzie would keep an eye on things, make sure the FBI wasn't sniffing around his apartment. Even though Neal was pretty sure that Mozzie would be a little too spiteful if Neal told him who would be skipping out to see.
But he couldn't just say no to Selina. She was like a mother to him, after all, and she had trained him. The least he could do was visit her every now and then. And visiting her usually meant seeing Alfred and Barbara and Tim. Dick was too busy in Bludhaven but maybe even he would be able to stop by for a Danny Brooks and Alfred Pennyworth dinner party. He would definitely be able to convince stoic mister Bruce Wayne to show up.
It could be like a regular old family dinner. Neal hadn't had many of those growing up but he did remember the dinners he shared at Wayne Manor to be rather... lovely if he was in the right mind to admit it.
He sighed and straightened up, squaring his shoulders and waving up at Peter as the older man glanced down at him. Peter nodded and waved back, his phone to his ear and his lips twitching up in a smile. Either Peter was hot on the case of some unfortunately white collar criminal or he was being ridiculously adorable with El again. Hoping that it was the latter, Neal began the trek upstairs, stopping to leave a steaming cup of coffee on both Diana and Jones' desks (the two of them had been nice enough to save him from desk duty two nights previous and Neal owed them for even going so far as to keep him out of the van).
Lightly, he knocked against the glass doors that opened to Peter's office. His friend (boss, partner, handler, enemy... sometimes the words seemed too poisonous and dark in his mouth and friend seemed so much lighter and more likely to encompass all of those things, if Neal were to be honest about just who his friends actually were) waved him in, his laugh letting Neal know that it was, indeed, Elizabeth on the other line, and not someone from some other division that was as much dedicated to their work that Peter was and made to come in a half an hour earlier than everyone else. "Hon," Peter began with a sly look to Neal that had him curiously worried. Almost nothing good ever came out of that look. "Neal's here," Neal placed the coffee in front of him and Peter took a large gulp before letting out a positively... wrong sounding noise as the liquid hit his taste buds. "And he brought me coffee."
"You're welcome." Neal shuddered in a silent laugh, dropping elegantly down the seat opposite Peter and studying him over his own cup of coffee.
"Wait, wait." Peter said after a moment. "I'll put you on speaker." He pressed the button to do so and placed the phone on the counter top.
"Good morning, Neal." Elizabeth's sweet voice echoed in the office.
"Good morning, Elizabeth." Neal greeted back. In a way, Elizabeth reminded him a lot of the person Selina was when she wasn't robbing buildings and teaching him a life of crime. She was soft, yet strong, heavy in her words, yet understanding in her touch. She was beautiful and elegant and free in a way that Neal didn't see many women as being. If it was another time and another place Neal would have gone as far as to call her maternal, parental, and protectively stern. He had seen Bruce like that with Dick and Jason and Tim every now and again, and Selina was so rarely not a mother figure to him. But she didn't have the same nature as Elizabeth. She was harder, but Neal guessed that was what Gotham did to people. It made them hard.
"I have a question for you." She sounded a little bit too excited to even get out the words and Neal traded an amused look with her husband.
"Your wish is my command."
"I've been asked to plan a gala here for a very important business man and I was wondering if you wouldn't mind being my taste tester for the event?"
"Oh," Neal had almost not expected that. He wasn't sure what he had expected. Elizabeth to tell him that she had a case for them, maybe? Elizabeth so rarely asked favors of him in a way to better her own business. Neal saw no reason to deny her the favor. Maybe it would actually put him in better books for when he asked Peter for those few days off to go visit Selina. "Of course, El. You know you don't have to ask."
"Of course I do, silly. You're not my husband I can't force you into anything." Neal made a face that said, true, and traded a lightly amused look with Peter before Peter took back his phone, switching speaker off and bidding his wife a quick goodbye.
"Did she ask you first?" Neal asked with a small smirk.
"No," Peter shook his head with a tiny laugh. "El won't ask me for anything like that anymore now that we've got you around." Neal tensed just a little bit.
Peter kept doing that.
Almost every time they talked nowadays Peter kept slipping in hints that Neal was in his last year of working as a CI with a leash. Neal knew Peter wanted him to make New York permanent and Neal almost wanted that for himself too, but when Peter pushed like this...
He knew better than to make Peter suspicious of him again, though, the two of them very recently managing to pull their trust back together after the incident with Adler and the treasure and Keller kidnapping El. It was all as though it was a scene from something was very much not Neal's life, but rather the life of Danny.
Neal remembered the kidnapping with vivid detail. He remembered the times he had to switch Danny on and off. He remembered the itch to call Dick and ask for help. But he couldn't allow those two lives to cross. He couldn't allow them too. It was too dangerous for everyone involved.
Lord knows the kid of shit storm that would have been rallied had Peter found out that Neal knew someone like Richard Grayson. A cop and the ward of Bruce Wayne. The questions that would have raised would have been too much and Neal knew Peter too well to think that he would miss out on the implications that Neal was originally from Gotham. So far he had been able to avoid that sort of suspicion altogether. Peter didn't have a clue where Neal was from and he was curious, yes, but Neal had been very careful not to leave hints about where he had grown up, or the people he had grown up with.
He had severed the ties to Danny Brooks very near almost permanently when he had left and the only two that regularly kept contact were Dick and Selina. Neal would send Alfred a Christmas card every year and he tended to receive one back, even if he was increasingly sure that the older man knew exactly where Neal was at all times in his life, even when Neal hadn't known himself. He knew Alfred didn't necessarily approve, but Neal was equally as sure that from the rather tiny pin that Alfred had sent him in his last Christmas letter the year before that he was proud of Neal's... well, his attempt at rehabilitation.
"Who's the gala for?" Neal asked nonchalantly, leaning back in the chair and appreciating the idle chatter for what it was as every other member of the division slowly trickled in.
"This rich socialite." Peter paused as though the name had escaped him. "Bruce Wayne, I think she said."
Bruce Wayne... Neal's breath almost shot out of his lungs in short, painful gasps. He would definitely be able to help out Elizabeth more than the three of them had originally thought, anyway. He may as well be positive, anyway. Or at least as positive as he could be. It wouldn't do to let the negative fear overcome his rational mind. He wouldn't have to go to the gala. He wouldn't have to see Bruce Wayne. And even if they did run into each other it wasn't as though Bruce didn't know how important it was to keep some things, like a secret identity, private. He wouldn't let it slip. Neal could trust him.
"Well if El pulls this off enough to please someone like Bruce Wayne she'll be working for socialites everywhere." Neal stood up and tossed his cup in the trash. The news of Bruce's upcoming arrival was enough of a shock to his system to wake him up without caffeine involved. "I'll be at my desk drowning in mortgage fraud." Neal dismissed himself and pretended to miss the look of concern Peter sent when he noticed Neal's cup wasn't even halfway gone.
Neal made it seem easy to hide who he really was and what he really felt. No one in the office seemed to even notice the slight twitch to his left finger. He sat down and made it seem like restless energy, popping open the middle desk drawer and pulling out the seemingly random business card placed there.
Clark Kent. The Daily Planet. Reporter. Dial 855-093-0239 Ext. 14.
Neal twirled it between his fingers, narrowing his eyes at the blank computer screen and running his fingertip over the pin he kept hidden stuck into his suit pocket. The only one to even know it was there was Mozzie. Sarah had found it once, but Neal had shrugged it off as simply something that an old friend had given him and not something that actually had much of a meaning. He dropped the card back into the drawer. Neal shook his head and grabbed at the top file, flipping it open and beginning to work.
He could stress about it plenty later. For now, though, Neal would only gain suspicion by worrying.