Thank you to everyone for the support so far, especially to a2zmom for the helpful advice last chapter. And a special shout out to my main buddy, Effar, for all the work she does behind the scenes.

Batman and related characters © DC Comics
story © RenaRoo

Fathers and Sons
Chapter Four: Pulling Strings

It wasn't entirely unusual for the Red Hood to approach her, especially when she was patrolling on what could be appropriately called "his turf." Nightwing even prided herself on the fact that she was one of the few individuals in Gotham who could successfully not flinch under his full attention, as well. Still, there was just something about his approach that was almost too casual for the night.

Instantly, the eggplant crime fighter assumed trouble.

"Solo night?" the older vigilante questioned with an easy smirk.

"Some people have semester exams," Nightwing said with a simple shrug. She had made it clear to Batgirl from the beginning that if she was going to be wearing the crest of the Bat at night, it couldn't effect how well Nell Little performed at school in the mornings.

"Ah, I remember those," Hood said, rubbing roughly at his chin with a gloved hand. "Remember 'em being a bitch. Man. Talk about things I don't miss at all."

Nightwing laughed at the absurdity of the situation. "You remember my day job is a juvenile councilor, right? I feel like, for the sake of my profession, I should be sitting down with you and drawing up a career path."

"You can do those for Hoods?"

"Every day," she said with an arch of her brow. "But skip the small talk, Rojo. I'm way more interested in the real reason I have the pleasure of your company this evening."

He looked over her with feigned disinterest and then checked the surroundings. "How much of the news have you been paying attention to since last night?" he asked.

"Enough to guess correctly that tempers were too hot to chance a fated encounter between our current Batgirl and Robin," Nightwing sighed. "Is 'A-Team' tackling the murder case with the McGinnis family?"

Red Hood whistled in an exaggerated fashion. "Well, look at you. It's like you're getting good at this whole vigilante thing!" he exclaimed, grinning widely. "But, you're right. I come with a message from on high - possibly because our mutual friend has concerns about throwing bricks - that certain people would be appreciative if you and I looked out for the city while the rest of the clan works on other things."

She sighed. "Oh, ex-boyfriend," she said, looking in the direction of Wayne Towers. "You should know by now that if I want to brick you in the face, I'll damn sure find a way to do it: one way or another!"

"Kinky," Hood mused before giving his newly assigned partner a look. "You still have my frequency?"

Waving dismissively, Nightwing smirked at him. "Of course."

"Alright, and keep an eye out for wandering Robins. The Demon's not got anyone to hold his leash with the others distracted so it'll be up to us to reign him in," Hood explained.

"And you are going to make Robin play nice?" Nightwing asked skeptically.

A dangerous gleam from the Hood's teeth proclaimed mischief unspoken and Nightwing had to sigh.

"I don't deal with children all day just so I can put up with you all on the night shift, you know!"

The Hood was already gone and, with a smirk of her own, Nightwing followed suit. It was their city tonight.

Benign satisfaction filled Barbara Gordon as the director of Children Protective Services himself came into their offices. He looked flustered, his face red with embarrassment which meant that the commissioner's spent favor on the mayor had done wonders.

It also probably helped that she allowed a leak to the fervent presses of Gotham that an unprecedented twenty-four hour stall had been seen as allowable to CPS when a poor little boy's welfare was on the line.

Terry McGinnis' hand was in her own as he stood by her. He was looking apprehensively as the director approached them. Babs gave his tiny hand a squeeze.

An uneasy smile grew on the man's face. With practiced finesse, he dropped to one knee and proceeded to engage Terry in a very one-sided conversation.

The way the boy's face hardened said quite plainly how little of this formality he was willing to put up with. He was dressed in clothes Barbara had sent one of the precinct's secretaries to the nearest dollar store to collect and his face was pink from being rubbed raw with tissues.

As the CPS director talked the boy into taking his hand, Barbara scanned the floor for two reactions specifically.

Dick was halfway between the nearest window exit and the scene itself. He was hesitating his exit just long enough to assess the situation and whether or not he would need to intervene. The man did not look haggard by the standards of anyone in the department, but Barbara knew him well enough to see the physical drain of his day-long vigil. And, knowing Dick, he wasn't about to sleep before he moved on to his second job either.

If Dick ever bothered to cash in his checks, Barbara would suggest a raise for him.

When Terry seemed to ease into the concept of leaving Central, Dick glanced to the shadows meaningfully. When his silent order was apparently intercepted by Terry's newest shadow, Dick expertly began to disappear as well. His departure would go unnoticed with how the entire floor of detectives and officers were concentrating on their former charge.

With Dick gone, Barbara looked to the Federal agents who had stuck around despite the earlier altercation.

The displeasure written so clearly on their features was something that filled Barbara with an inexpressible pride.

To ensure further tricks were not pulled, she was going to pull strings quite a bit more powerful than Gotham's petty mayor. It would all be very much worth it to make sure that no one else got the idea to interfere with a little boy's fleeting chance at recovery and happiness.

Barbara was going to get on it as soon as CPS and Terry were out of her building.

"Hmm."

"And they really want a press release from Bruce. Dad said that he's handled as much before on his own, but since you've become more of the face of the company Tiffany thinks you should be there with him. I agree. We'll need to make a small statement - more hopeful than condemning. Even despite the funding we gave the police department recently for a new crime lab, I get the impression they still don't like you very much."

Tim stared at the connections on his tablet. He had been drawing them up all day, allowing files to build up on his desk which he then took to the apartment and dumped unceremoniously on the kitchen table. It wasn't like he used it for eating. He pressed the face of the tablet to link to another article. It was a digital copy of the diploma Warren McGinnis had earned at Gotham University. Double major. It was impressive.

Probably why he was hired at Wayne Enterprises.

"Hmm."

"I went ahead and moved your morning appointments - all of them. Even if we won't have the interview for you and Bruce until ten, I figure you could use the extra time. Possibly sleep for an hour or two. I'm pretty much ready to start calling you 'caffeine boy' these days."

Mary McGinnis was more enigmatic. Tim minimized the diploma and pulled up her minimal files up for a second review.

She had become a stay-at-home mother after the birth of their son, Terry McGinnis - enrolled at Thomas Wayne Elementary. When he turned five and began school, Mary presumed work at a middle tier real estate agency. She had started as a receptionist. It looked like after a while she had moved up in the office and was on her way toward earning certification as a realtor when she left her job again just four months beforehand. Tim had yet to uncover why.

The mystery in Mary's profile presented enough holes that could hold answers. Perhaps she had made an enemy, was in some sort of trouble they couldn't find on paper yet. Tim would find it soon enough if it existed. Warren was certainly more concerning, finding out that morning that Warren had been an employee of WE had ignited both Tim's suspicions and the prying of multiple reporters.

Tim had a list of reporters to expose some dirt on for bothering the family. He would do little with it, just enough to toe the line of passive aggressive.

"Hmm."

"I fired you this morning. I decided to declare myself Queen of WE and kick all Wayne stocks to the curb. Call Daddy Warbucks and tell him I'm moving into the palace and I expect to keep Alfred on staff. He needs to find somewhere to live. Probably your apartment. The whole family gets along well enough to sleep in your cozy place, don't they?"

With a flick of his finger, Tim closed the files and looked at the phone laying by him on the desk. He liked the freedom of speakerphone. It was a bad habit according to everyone who knew it came from his "Night Job."

"I was listening," Tim clarified. "You can't have Alfred, it's the only way anyone will stay alive - in my apartment or otherwise. But you can keep Damian. We contend that access to the basement must be kept available for our operations or else we might have to pull dirt on you."

He could almost see her beautiful smile as Tam laughed. "Smart ass."

Tim grinned. "Smartest in the family," he responded easily. "Everything's fine, Tam. Thank you for arranging it all. I maintain that I don't like giving the press a statement, but I understand why we have to. I don't like the Wayne name being tied to this tragedy for any reason. But most of all, it feels like we're losing sight of the fact that it wasn't the Waynes who were murdered again. It was a different family, and it's that little boy's loss. Not ours."

"That sounds good," she said lightly. "You should get Bruce to use that line more or less. But I guess he might not feel the same, huh?"

He frowned, sat back in his chair and glared at the family picture currently on his tablet. Tim knew every feature of Thomas and Martha Waynes' faces from years of looking on the family portrait in the study. They all had. Their ghosts had walked the halls years before any of the current Wayne children had been born. Looking at the family picture of the recently deceased told Tim very clearly that they were no Thomas and Martha Wayne.

Didn't mean either couple deserved to go in such a terrible and vile way.

"I think it's hard to see any tragedy with families involved," Tim said, not sure if he was waxing philosophically or speaking specifically of his mentor and adopted father. "But, the fact that Vicki Vale thought it was poetic to remind the public of the Wayne murders, and because Warren McGinnis was one of our companies' engineers, puts us in the limelight. We have to say something."

Even if they really didn't.

The Wayne Family was Gotham. And she thirsted for their tragedies the way a wolf cornered lambs.

Tim stared harder at the family portrait. He leaned forward toward the tablet and desk again. "Tam?"

"Yes, O' Sage One?"

"When did you take Genetics?" he asked as he began to plug into Oracle's network and dive immediately into hospital records.

"Sophomore year in college. I won't say the year. You're being impolite." Tam had taken it upon herself over the years to inform Tim of when he was unintentionally missing social cues or behaving otherwise uncultured. It was her contribution to keeping the secret. It was only slightly more annoying than her nicknames.

When he stared at the certificate pulled up, Tim rubbed his chin thoughtfully. It wasn't making any sense. "Do you remember Punnett Squares?"

"Is this a clue or are you making fun of me?"

Tam was a sharp girl. She remembered Punnett Squares.

"If a woman was a natural red head," Tim hypothesized, pushing off the floor to roll his chair to his preferred position in the sea of monitors, "and had a child with a man who was naturally a brunette, what are the odds said child would have black hair?"

"None?" she questioned, her critical tone raising slightly. "Am I missing something?"

Tim scowled as he began typing furiously. "No," he responded, his voice edging into the darker tenor of Red Robin. "But you could always join me in hoping that Mary McGinnis has been faithfully receiving a dye job for the past eight years."

Something told Tim that she hadn't, that this was their first real clue. That the murders hadn't been senseless.

It didn't make them any less cruel.

"Is there a toy or anything from home that you would want us to get for you, Terry?" Mr. Michael asked, his smile stretch a little too thin as he led Terry down the hall.

Terry stared at him levelly before shaking his head. He clutched the strings of the sweatshirt and pulled them tight, closing the peep hole until the peep hole almost closed around his nose. He could feel the eyes of the man still on him, but at the very least Terry couldn't see those thick framed glasses.

They were rapidly approaching the end of Terry's patience. The nice woman in the toy room who talked to him for the past several hours was alright. Until she asked him about if he thought going back to school was a good option.

If anything, Terry felt like he had safely earned the right to never enter Thomas Wayne Elementary again. He didn't have that many friends there anyway, and he was fairly sure that his teachers thought he was stupid. It was okay, Terry didn't think they were that smart either.

The building they had brought him to smelled like his school. They had the same tile, too. Terry idly wondered if this contributed to the smell somehow.

For a fleeting moment he had the urge to ask his dad about it. It was immediately beat down and sunk to his gut.

"We'll be taking you to a nice place across North River," the man chatted over the click of their footsteps. "There are other children there, you'll have plenty of time to get to know them. We'll get you anything you need to be comfortable from home, you just need to tell us what you want."

Terry scowled at the tile. His vision was becoming bleary and he didn't want to be walking.

Officer Dick probably would have carried him.

When they came to an oak door with a thin window - convincing Terry he was, in fact, in a classroom setting after all - Mr. Michael stopped, turned, and dropped to one knee in an almost mechanical fashion. The way he placed his hand on Terry's shoulder did not invoke comfort. Mr. Michael let it slide when Terry rotated his shoulder to shrug it off.

"Terry," Mr. Michael said, seriousness drawn on his face despite the blithe way Terry was treating him. "I want you to know that if you want or need anything, someone will be around. You let us know. Alright?"

They locked eyes for only a second before Terry yanked the draw strings closer until only his nose poked out. They remained that way a little longer before Terry felt a half-hearted pat on his head and was promptly turned and guided toward the door.

Mr. Michael carried on a little longer, but Terry opened his hood enough to look around the room, find what could be loosely identified as a bed, and proceeded to make his way for it. The sheets were stale, but Terry didn't find it in himself to care. It had been the first bed he had the chance to sleep in since the night before the movie. He climbed onto the bed, noting its creeks, before curling up over top the covers, face first on the pillow.

The way Mr. Michael hesitated before drawing a blanket over Terry irritated the boy more than anything else, but soon after the lights were turned off and the door carefully closed.

By himself, Terry somehow realized that he did have it in him to cry again. Everything going on around him was too big and too much.

He exhausted himself into a blessedly quick slumber.

Dick remained quiet, allowing the dreamlike quality of the moment take hold in favor of interrupting his mentor and father.

It felt like it had been a long time since he saw Bruce wear the cape. Despite severe injury and a notable stiffness, it was still intimidating to see how the cape draped over Bruce's shoulders. It was daunting and stirring all at once. It made Dick feel like he was in the Robin suit again, following Gotham's own shadow.

He still wasn't sure if he appreciated that feeling yet.

The crime scene had been cornered off and marked by the police - checked over by the Gotham CSI and trampled subsequently by detectives and attending officers alike. Ideally, the Bats got to the crime scene before it was interfered with that way. Bruce's Batman had always had the knack for that type of unobtrusive detective work: there and gone without a trace. It was how he earned his merits with the PD to begin with, and why Jim Gordon learned to take Bruce's hunches on faith alone.

Even if the rest of the family, Dick included, was happy to have Bruce retired and resigned to cold case work, there was no denying that, by its very nature, the forgotten cases of the GCPD failed to give Bruce what he needed most: the scent of the hunt.

"When did you look over the scene?" Bruce asked, his voice never shaking from its Batman tenor, as he inspected the still present stains of blood. He bent, careful not to tip too far in either direction, moving only with his knees. The reinforced kevlar was almost as unforgiving as the back brace.

"I only got a casual look over in uniform," Dick admitted as he stepped up behind Bruce. He pointed to the alley. "That was the direction of arrival as well as the escape route. It's been combed, but the PD didn't find any leads. Not even a shoe size. Considering how cold it's been, the sediment should have been compact enough to preserve some sort of imprint once the assailant got to part of the alley where the pavement's broken, but there wasn't anything. And there wasn't another way to leave the alley before then."

Bruce's vision was locked on the stains. Dick thought for a moment that he hadn't been heard, that his words were lost on Bruce as he relived the defining night of his life. The younger Batman reached for his mentor's shoulder only for Bruce to rather suddenly stand back up.

"Unless they were able to climb," Bruce surmised, looking to the rooftop. "The McGinnis family wasn't robbed and there weren't any demands according to the statement taken from the son."

Dick frowned. "Terry. But there wasn't much of a statement we were able to get out of him to begin with - he was in shock. And his description of a Grim Reaper could either mean we're dealing with a Costume or a very traumatized little boy," he reminded Bruce. "Let's not be too hasty to jump to one conclusion or the other."

The original Batman moved toward the alley, studying the brick wall facing them. He then reached toward the grime of the wall and struck his finger against it - smelling it.

At such a curious sight, Dick could only raise an eyebrow beneath the cowl. "B?"

"This residue smells like ethanol," Bruce enlightened him before turning to face Dick more directly. "In his description, did the boy say there was a thick fog?"

"Yeah, he did," Dick responded before stepping up to examine the wall for himself. "Do you think some sort of fog machine was used? Using a glycol like ethylene?" Dick asked before looking back. "That'd be difficult to do on such a cold night. You'd have to use a heated fog to get the effect. But it being such a cold night would explain why residue was left on the surfaces it touched. And why our suspect didn't use something that left less of a trace like liquid nitrogen."

"It's also very theatrical for a basic mugging or a senseless murder," Bruce responded before reaching for his grappling gun. Dick followed suit. "But if those add up to a Costume, that increases the chances that something is on the roof. Something the police would miss."

They grappled in near silence, gliding and landing with perfected ease. Once on the rooftop, their scouring of the properties began, with delicate steps taken to make sure nothing was disturbed if it could be helped.

It didn't take long for the silence to wear thin, however.

"I can't think of anyone we've come across recently to fit this," Dick admitted as he ran his hand over the ledge. He narrowed his gaze as he began to theorize that this was the point of ascent. "They must have some nice equipment. On par with ours - the scrapes on the ledge are hardly noticeable if you aren't looking for them." He turned to look as Bruce examined an indent on the rooftop tarmac. "Awfully expensive for someone new. Might travel around. An assassin maybe. Fit any descriptions you've come across through Interpol?"

Bruce leaned down, examining the imprint better for his cowl to take a shot. "No one with a size eleven."

Standing up, Dick moved toward his mentor. "You sure? You're being rather quiet."

"I'm allowing you the chance to be chatty without retort," Bruce responded as he looked to his son. "From my understanding, Robin rarely gives you the luxury."

Dick grinned. "He's not that bad."

Before the moment could carry on much further, they both stiffened instinctively at their cowls being hailed. Automatically, they reached to the radios.

"Batman," they both shot out quickly, though only Dick glanced to the other in the aftermath.

"I've got an interesting… well, it's a possible lead," Red Robin's voice said without hesitation over their cowls. "I'd rather give it to you in person, though."

The younger Batman waited for the executive decision of the elder. Bruce barreled through with orders like he had never left the streets to begin with.

"We'll be there in less than twenty, Red Robin."

End Notes: Just some general notes on this one: Stephanie and Jason are somewhat important to a secondary plot element and I realized, with quite a bit of horror when I was planning out the pacing last week, I had done a dumb and not brought them into the narrative until like... chapter six-ish. It's an oversight that has been corrected, but also brought up something about myself I really don't like: I really worry I don't do a good job with either of these characters. Which is a terrible, terrible shame on my part and I'm working hard to correct it. If someone would like to give me advice on either of them I'd greatly appreciate it!

Secondly, I really enjoy writing Tim, and I'm also a huge fan of Tam Fox. She, unfortunately, will not be a major player in this story, but if I plan on expanding this little AU I've got going, we might see some more of the goings-on in the WE offices ;)

NEXT TIME (which might be either Saturday or Sunday dependent on how long it takes for me to move back into the apartment Friday): Tim's got a clue that could turn this investigation on his head! And the "Bad Robins" Club unites, meeting an unexpected "old friend" of the family! And Commissioner Gordon confronts an old nemesis when the White Queen of Checkmate comes to Gotham Central! Stay tuned! SAME BAT TIME, SAME BAT FIC!