'Cold Trail'

A/N: o.o Wow. I was blown away by the reviews this week. :D I still love all you lurkers…and everybody who recently awesomely de-lurked, and all of you long-term reviewers, and the folks who just joined us! ^^ You are swell. Digital hugs. And possibly cake.

This seems like a promising note on which to close out one year of posting. Thank you! (And to anon DarkSeraphim1, good lord! Thank you for pointing out Jason hasn't actually appeared since chapter 20! How did that even happen? There will probably be a high concentration of Jason chapters in the near future.)

My timeline informs me 'Beware the Court of Owls' happened in early summer 2001. It is now autumn. This is the DCU and the #1 threat to America is supervillains, and I already made Adeline responsible for knocking heads together in her husband's administration to make the spooks share information, so we'll say 9/11 was foiled and the White House murders are the Bad Thing that happened to America that year.

(Due to my not paying close enough attention to Grayson while finalizing various important details, my timeline also claims that the fourteen years he spent as Talon somehow took from 1980 to 2001. Eheh. I consider this bizarre relationship with time to be a semi-canon superpower of Dick's anyway, and it's too late to change it now. If this infuriates anyone into ragequitting, I completely understand.)

"A child created to be a plaything for men—such a thing has existed; such a thing exists even now."

It was the September of the year 2001.

Grayson, who had been Talon, had set himself one task before he left the continent: he would discover where his sire and dam had taken themselves in the years since selling him to the dark, and he would go to them and look them in the eyes and ask them why.

And if they could give no sufficient reason, he would cut their hearts out, because they did not deserve them.

It was not a wise goal, he was aware. He was a wanted man. The government, at least, was looking in all the wrong places, because he had so obviously been a professional backed by a powerful organization, and they had no reason to suspect he had broken with his patron that same night and gone fleeing the District of Columbia on foot, relying for disguise entirely on a hooded sweatshirt and a minor change of hairstyle. Still, Slade Wilson had looked him in the naked face and seen him all too well, and the resulting police sketch was unsettlingly accurate.

It was fortunate in this case that he had no particularly recognizable feature, such as a slanted eye or drooping lip. So far as he could determine, the most striking quality of his face was considered to be its beauty, and that was not a quality that inspired doubt in his motives. The face had grown a short, messy beard while he'd been in the Canadian wilderness, which had technically concealed it, but made people regard him with suspicion, so he'd done away with it.

Except for a small patch at the end of his chin which, in combination with steadily lengthening hair (he felt rather ridiculously rebellious not keeping it to a constant length, considering how many other ways he had defied his training recently) allowed him to give the impression of an artsy student, roadtripping cross-country.

He had allowed others to put this story together for him, piece by piece, fellow bus passengers and motorists daring enough to accept a hitchhiker. The overweight man in the pickup truck who had been so convinced that he must be studying art had turned out to be a predator of some kind; Grayson was not sure what he had intended to follow upon his attempt at strangulation, but he was dead now. It had been a wrench, not stealing the truck, but driving a dead man's truck was too likely to draw attention once the body was found, a factor he could not control without more time and resources than the vehicle was worth. Escaping the scene without being observed had been enough trouble.

The fat man was the first person he had ever killed because he wanted to—Grayson was not sure whether he would have spared him, given the opportunity, but once he had broken the man's wrist and pinned him helpless to the seat of his own truck in instants, it had been impossible to let him go spreading the story. The act did not trouble him, but the fact that he had made his choice for reasons of survival niggled slightly, as though it was a bone healed crooked, in need of rebreaking.

His freedom was incomplete, so long as he was in hiding, but what could be done? It was what it was.

In spite of the beard, he had had one or two people think they recognized him, in diners and at rest stops across the country, but in each case they had been certain he was an actor of some sort, that they had seen him in some picture or TV special, hang on, it was on the tip of their tongue. (The beard helped, but his true secret was smiling. The face of his line-drawing was dead, more so than many corpses he had made, and as long as he did not hold their eyes too long the smile he had developed removed his living face far enough from that of the assassin Wilson remembered to fool any average observer entirely. Careful practice in public washrooms had allowed him to learn a natural-looking expression that provoked no fear; he felt strangely accomplished when he determined the technique adequately mastered. It was, he realized eventually, the first thing he had ever taught himself because he wanted to know it.)

Even if he ever was recognized, however, he was confident in his ability to evade at least the first few waves of response, and almost certainly to outdistance the rest. Going unseen was his specialty.

No, barring a stroke of particularly ill fortune, it wasn't Wilson's search he was wary of, despite the vast mechanisms of law the President had grinding in his service.

Owlman, though. His former master would have noticed his absence within days; within weeks determined to some degree of certainty that no one had captured his weapon and proceeded to secretly hold it, as he queried his sources embedded in various bureaus and syndicates. By now he would have confronted the likely probability that his Talon had betrayed him.

And if he had done that, then it was not any great stretch to presume that some spark of the Richard-Grayson-that-had-been survived. So wherever the Graysons Sr. had betaken themselves, it was likely the Owl had an agent in place awaiting his approach. Though now, eleven weeks after the fact, that watch would probably have slackened. He would approach with all due caution.

Once he found out where they were.

His skills for tracking a target through his or her paper trail were mostly oriented toward recent relocations. Additionally, they had usually relied to some degree on Owlman's resources, and had never been particularly hampered by the possibility that his search might draw undesirable attention. This trail was over ten years cold, and his quarry's last known location was in Gotham City, a place which by his own will he would never approach again.

After some thought, he used a computer in a public library to investigate the recent careers of several circuses, including (the only one he was actually interested in) Jack Haley's, which turned out to be currently touring North Africa, for some reason. He was oddly heartened to see it was still doing well. To his utter lack of surprise, the Flying Graysons were no longer with them.

To his rather greater surprise, he could not find any sign of their having been at any time in the last thirteen years.

"Mary," John said, his voice pitched low so that it carried a long way, but had almost lost the shape of her name before it reached her. She turned, from where she'd been standing over the narrow foldaway bunk that had had no occupant for seventeen days, to see him silhouetted against the door. "Jack's packing up," he stated.

Hands chafing against one another, as they had been so constantly for so long they had begun to peel free the thick callus where the trapeze rubbed, she nodded. "Of course he is," she said.

"He wants to stay."

Mary nodded.

"He does. We're practically family to him, you know that. There's a patch of trailer park with utilities out on the outskirts that we've got for free for the next three months if we need it, because of a call he made. It's just…you can't eat good will."

For the first time in days, she smiled, though it was a thin, washed-out thing. "I'm not the one you have to convince," she said.

"Yeah," John admitted, climbing inside the narrow caravan, shoulders slumping. There was exhaustion in every line of him, but still even now grace, unconscious, unthinking, in the way he took each step up, and the way he reached back to close the door. "But Jack sure isn't going to listen."

"This circus is his family legacy," said Mary. Who understood that, even if it was her husband who was circus by birth; she'd been raised to be aware of legacies, and what it meant to squander them. "It's what he loves most in the world." And he loved them for being part of it, and would love them still when they weren't anymore because they had been, and were therefore (unless they ever betrayed him) family always, but he couldn't let the circus come to bits just for one part of it. He'd find new fliers before long, and work around the lack until then.

John almost reached out for her hand, but pulled back at the last moment. Mary closed her eyes, but didn't reach out to complete the connection. Not right now.

Grayson left town hurriedly after that library visit, knowing he might have aroused some suspicion and needing to be well away before the King of Owls could get eyes on the spot. Not that the Court had much presence in Wisconsin.

It was a comfort, in some ways, that it had not yet been a whole three months since his defection; even if there was a new Talon in training, they could not yet be prepared to be sent hunting him. So long as his trail was only unclear suspicions, Bruce Wayne would not spare the time to chase such vague leads in person, and that was the only possibility he truly feared, anymore.

The Courtiers had been dangerous when he was small and to some degree terrifying ever since, but they had made a razor-keen weapon of him with their roughness as whetstone, and he knew full well he could kill any dozen of them, and outrun any mercenary they were likely to send.

In an Applebee's in South Dakota, he managed to get the crinkling around the eyes close enough to right to make his waitress blush.

Chicago Public Library archived seemingly every newspaper in the country. Delving into their microfiche collection was more likely to cause him to be remembered by the librarian than merely using the internet, but less likely to ping any Owl monitoring software, so unless the woman was some sort of embedded operative the trade-off was acceptable, and in his professional opinion, she was not.

It took a while to find the right Gotham Herald back issues, even knowing that he could ignore the last thirteen years.

Eventually, tucked deep in the Entertainment section for September of the year he was six, he found the colorful quarter-page Haley's Circus ad featuring 'The Flying Graysons!' as the banner-header, with a dynamic line-drawing of a family of three.

Was he really so small, when that life ended?

(He thought that if this were a real paper instead of microfiche, he'd steal that page. Was that weakness? And if so, what kind?)

Usually, John was the talker. Mary was perfectly capable of conversation and presentation, but it was John who had a knack for patter, words rolling off his tongue to charm and tease, tailored by instinct to his audience. And sometimes he talked too much, or talked around and around his intended subject, but the fact remained: at least until Dick got old enough to make use of the instincts he'd clearly inherited, John was the family front man.

Since—what had happened—though, Mary had come to the fore. It might have been nothing but the fact that a worried mother made better television, to begin with, but over the weeks John had fallen more and more into the background, a washed-out shadow at her shoulder.

Until one day, after they left the police station with no news to speak of, she turned around, sharply, looked the few inches up and said, "Which of us is it?"

John blinked at her, no answer coming to his lips.

"Are you blaming me, or yourself? Don't think I don't know you, John Maxwell Grayson."

Her husband's eyes closed against her expression, and he folded his arms in toward his stomach like he was going into a forward roll, the way Dick always used to do when he was scared. It probably came from flying before you learned to crawl.

"I wish I knew."

His disappearance, Grayson found, had been a news item. Much more prominent than the arrival of the circus; in fact, he made the front page, though top billing was lost to some sort of political scandal in which he had no interest. There was a photograph of him, not the smiling headshot common in kidnapping cases but a picture captured in motion with what must have been a very fast camera, plunging feetfirst toward a trampoline as he straightened out of what had clearly been a midair flip, the positioning of his arms almost, but not quite, perfect.

Grayson had never seen such a happy child.

This might not signify greatly, since a majority of the children he had had occasion to observe had been cowering, dying, or, more recently, in the midst of the stressful parts of road trips, but he had spied on family units in peaceful circumstances in the past. This…how could that ever have been him? He tore his eyes from the hateful image to read the two hundred words accorded to the story on the front page, and then followed instructions to turn to page A5 for further information.

From the news story he learned that the event of which he had only the haziest recollections had come to pass on an August 17, fourteen years earlier. According to their own testimony, his parents had left him alone in their caravan for half an hour, coloring, while John helped the Santistas with a balky horse and Mary was out picking up groceries. In that time, 'Dickie' had vanished.

Police reported signs of a struggle.

Grayson didn't remember struggling. He only remembered—

"Who are you?"

"Your fate."

—the white Court masks, round white barn-owls with round dark eyes, and something thick with the smell he now knew had been chloroform, and the determination to get-away, springing tension in his legs as he leapt back, leapt aside, jumped—twisted—kicked off the side of the top bunk—landed by the door long enough to turn the handle but that meant staying still long enough that one of the masked men seized him by the arm, shook him—the heavy sickly-sweet smell in his mouth—

Grayson came to himself to realize he had been hyperventilating in a public library, with a news story containing his full name on the projector in front of him. As if he'd never had the slightest training in subtlety. Luckily the 'A/V Room' was screened apart from the rest of the library, so no one seemed to have seen.

He'd forgotten how hard he'd tried to escape, when they first came for him. Forgotten…

Hadn't quite forgotten that he'd wept, at first. Or how he'd told the Court that Daj o Dad would come rescue him. No matter what.

Had never forgotten when they'd laughed at him, and told him he'd been sold like a trick pony. No one was coming.

No one was ever going to save him again.

"Cold?" Mary repeated. Like there was any chance she'd misheard.

"That's right." The sergeant looked bored. Defensively bored, like someone manning a complaint counter who didn't give a fuck whether the customers were satisfied as long as they went away.

So even though she wanted to fly into a rage and lean across the counter and demand to know what kind of department they were running here, she shouldn't. "You're declaring Dick's case cold. He hasn't even been missing for a month!" Okay, so her voice had started to rise a little toward the end.

The sergeant blinked, once. It seemed vaguely reptilian. "And we haven't got any new information in over two weeks. Sorry, ma'am. We've got other cases that need the manpower."

If the 'sorry' had only been sincere. Just that, and she might have forgiven him. Him, not the department, because sure, let the detective assigned to it shuffle Dick's case to the bottom of his stack while he tried to help other people; she might not like it but she knew her family were hardly the only victims in Gotham. If they had run out of ideas, of leads to follow, then yes, she understood that their time had to be dedicated to other things.

But declaring it cold? That they weren't going to look for him anymore, not even a little?

Giving up on him?

Mary leaned forward. Not enough to be threatening. Not enough to get her out of her seat, even, but enough that she was holding the man's eyes from across only eighteen inches of air. "My son is still missing."

"You know most kidnapping cases are solved in the first forty-eight hours if they're solved at all," he reminded her with only the barest hint of interest.

Mary breathed. She wished John were here. He had much less of a temper than she did; either he'd be helping her keep her cool or he'd snap, and if this was enough to push John over the edge she could scream herself blue and feel justified. "That doesn't mean," she said coldly, "that Dickie is dead."

The sergeant sighed. "Look. I hope you find your kid. Really. I do. But the department's shelving the case for now, and that's just how it is. It's already done."

Mary tried to smile unpleasantly as she stood up; overshot, and produced a sort of threatening grimace. Her face felt stiff, but that was no excuse for missing her mark. She went with it, though. She was a performer. Trapeze and life were the same. You made whatever was in the show part of it, somehow, and kept going, because you didn't get to stop in the middle to try again. "Nothing's done, sergeant." She picked up the leather carrybag that had seen her across three continents, even that time when she'd had to get from Belgrade to Zagreb on foot and left all her other luggage behind, and left without looking at him again. She certainly wasn't going to thank him for this.

He forced himself to finish reading the story, with the Graysons' tearful pleas for any possible information and the protestations of helpless ignorance from every member of the circus who should have had line of sight to the raided caravan.

Then, because coming twice in two days to view Gotham Herald microfiche would be too likely to imprint him on the librarians' memories, he made himself follow the story, on and on through the weeks as the updates became smaller and drier, and finally vanished altogether. And then he searched on another half-hour longer, just in case, because he had discipline.

Then he put everything away, walked out of the library and several blocks further, before turning out of sight down a blind alley, climbing a wall, and reclaiming his hidden rooftop surveillance point, where he had left the duffle bag containing most of his possessions.

If this had been a mission, the way things used to be, he would not even have noticed the briskness of the autumn wind off Lake Michigan. But this was his current campsite, with his back against the concrete foot of a water tank, and he dug his blanket out of his bag and wrapped it around his shoulders before letting himself think.

Something was off.

Selling children was not permitted by law, so of course it would play as a kidnapping. And of course the search would come to nothing; even when he had been a new-forged Talon, the Owls had already had enough influence to bury any line of investigation that led to them, so long as it was a relatively subtle transgression. Especially if no one really cared.

Six weeks of news coverage was too long. Of course, the Graysons might not have known there was no need to pretend so hard…but where were they now?

He needed more information.

"John, look at this."

Mary's notebook was thick with notes, heavy block print in felt-tip pen pressing close against every margin, notes of periodical and issue and page number crowded against the names of people she'd phoned, with their useful comments in quotations. But the conclusion she was sharing across the cluttered library table was marked out clean and clear, marching down the middle of the page, each entry on its own solemn line.

Alton Carver, acrobat, Haley's Circus, 1962.

Mary Turner, Hapshaw's Freak Show, 1948.

Wei Qi, contortionist, Barnum & Bailey's, 1911.

Patrick McGillicudy, high wire, 1873?

William Cobb, Haley's Circus, 1841.

Alexander Staunton, acrobat, 1831?

René Joaquin, trick shooter, 1829?

Fabio Spelterini, high wire, 1811.

Aleksander ?, tumbler, 1805?

Sukey Badi, acrobat, unspecified Roma caravan, 1777.

Anette Feingilt, dancer, 1760.

Unnamed tumbler, 1734.

Benjamin Ayres, 1710?

Unnamed Rom boy, 1693.

"They're the same," she whispered—less out of library etiquette than from the growing understanding that this was bigger than they'd realized, that anyone could be listening. "Children, between the ages of four and ten. Performers, skilled ones, especially the agile. Taken, blatantly, so that it's obvious they can't just have wandered off, like someone wants people to know they're taking them. Every twenty years or so going back as far as I can…"

Her husband's face was set and grey, struggling between horror at the implications, fury at the kidnappers, and anger at her for chasing shadows when their actual flesh-and-blood boy was lost somewhere in this awful city.

"Mary…" he whispered, and then slowly his hand reached out and brushed across the back of hers, where she was still holding the notebook up for him to see. Tore his eyes from the list of names (and the hidden, unwritten name at the top, throbbing and glowing in its inklessness, Richard Grayson, and how had nobody known, how had nobody warned them not to bring their beautiful boy here to perform for whatever eyes had caught on him, how had Jack not known, when Dick was the third child his family circus had lost here in a hundred and forty years?) to hers, his soft heather meeting her deep indigo in perfect sympathy. "We have to…"

"Do you think there's anyone who would listen?" she asked, ever so softly, hoping he would say yes, and name a name.

He sighed, and dragged a hand across his rumpled hair. "There's got to be some reporter in this city hungry enough for a story, if nothing else," he said, but they both knew that was a last resort. If They didn't know they were onto Them yet, they didn't want to tip Them off.

Besides, it wasn't as though the papers weren't aware of these kidnappings. They'd been one of her main sources, all the way back. She might not have dug deep enough to realize the size of this, if it weren't for the fact that she couldn't seem to get another story about Dick published without a new angle, which was almost as infuriating as the way the police had declared Dick's case cold on the twenty-fourth day, even if the slacking attention from the press wasn't actually a failure of their duty, the way the police indifference was.

The extra color of his being an acclaimed professional acrobat had sparked initial interest, but his parents were circus, rootless and thus irresponsible, and that seemed to suck much of the pathos out of his disappearance, somehow.

The only article covering the Badi case had contained tasteless jokes about the remarkable reversal of someone stealing children from gypsies. Sometimes it seemed like two hundred years had hardly changed anything.

It was too late for the others, but her Robin was still alive—must be, had to be—and she…and they would find him.

In the end, Grayson had to hire a private investigator. It took a rather more dedicated approach to theft than the lackadaisical mode he'd been using to pay for bus tickets and keep himself fed and clothed and groomed enough to avoid drawing negative attention, but he acquired the two thousand dollars necessary to get one Nolan Burton, Philadelphia P.I., to take a train up into Gotham and query police files and public records on his behalf. (Be careful, he'd told the man, because while it would hardly keep him awake at night to send an employee to a death he earned by carelessness, he couldn't afford for Burton to be questioned by the Owls. Don't get noticed poking around.)

Burton had raised his eyebrows and looked Grayson up and down again. He had begun to regret not wearing a mask of some kind to the meeting; it would have made it obvious he had something to hide, but at least there would have been less chance of matching him to his wanted poster. He wasn't paying nearly enough to buy silence. The PI could hardly have complained about the melodrama of the disguise; the man wore a long coat with a fedora, and black leather gloves, as though he'd stepped out of a period movie.

Grayson didn't particularly care if the man lacked practicality, unless it got him taken up for questioning, but the outfit annoyed him anyway, because it reminded him of Harvey Dent, who had always been irritating and had once (while wearing the stupid hat) put a rusty length of rebar clear through Talon's shoulder. It had taken three days for all the rust fragments to work their way out. Owlman had taken notes.

"Yeah, okay, kid," Burton said. Scooped his hat up by the crown, pressed it onto his head, and left to catch his train.

Then Grayson got to wait (outside Philadelphia itself, of course, and never anywhere Burton might direct any pursuit) to see if he came back with the required information, nothing useful, Court agents, or not at all.

Two days into waiting, the anonymous e-mail account he had created just to give Burton some way to contact him received a message, and he scheduled a rendezvous in two hours.

He was there an hour early, and lay in wait in the steady autumnal drizzle to watch Burton arrive a quarter of an hour before the specified time and stand beside the small memorial to an unimportant war. His body language was closed, even more than usual; if it said anything it was only 'I am standing in the rain but at least I have a hat and coat.' He didn't seem tense.

At three in the afternoon, Grayson showed himself on the sidewalk across the street, waited until Burton noticed him, nodded, and slipped into the small diner next door to the building who roof he'd been using for surveillance. He claimed a window booth—he was far less concerned about the possibility of snipers than he was about giving up his own sightlines—and asked the waitress for coffee, having learned from experience that even if one did not care about standing out as unusual, such establishments tended to strongly discourage occupancy of their premises by non-patrons.

By the time the coffee arrived, Burton had appeared in the doorway. Grayson met his eyes across the room, which should be acknowledgment enough for any reasonable person.

Burton slid into the booth, taking his hat off with one hand, with the other setting down a sealed white-plastic bag that flexed like a stack of unbound paper. He would have been so astoundingly easy to kill, in that moment, half sitting down, with his line of sight partially blocked and both hands occupied. Of course, most people were so easy to kill all the time that it really made no difference. But with Burton, Grayson was sincerely unsure whether such moments were normal stupidity or calculated shows of non-hostile intent, and that made them unsettling.

His…contractor pushed the package across the table, and Grayson laid his hand on it with a nod. Laid a small manila envelope with the second half of the fee down in response. Burton reached out and dragged it closer, but neither opened it to count the bills or stowed it away. He wished to talk. It might be important. Grayson waited.

"So," Burton said. "Answer one question for me."

Grayson sat very still.

"Just for me," the man reiterated. "Curiosity. Hazard of the trade."

Grayson continued to wait. If Burton was so determined to ask his question, he would.

"Taking that as a yes," he said easily, drumming his fingers contemplatively on the tabletop beside his hat, raindrops beading perfectly round on the dense grey felt until one by one they sunk abruptly away. He seemed to be looking at the stack of strawberry jam packets, but Grayson's face was most assuredly in his line of sight, and he had no doubt that he had the bulk of the PI's attention. "You wouldn't happen to be named Richard Grayson, would you?"

He'd given the name Roger Merriman, since going conspicuously nameless was exactly as subtle as walking around in a mask—and only slightly worse than a trench coat and fedora. Burton had declined to call him by it, which he had suspected all along meant the man knew it was a pseudonym.

Once again, he said nothing, and if it could be told externally that this was a tenser, more cornered nothing, it was entirely accidental.

"You can't have expected it not to occur to me," said Burton. Nodded toward the packet. "Most of what I found with those names involved them harassing the police about their missing kid."

He shrugged one shoulder slightly, still apparently absorbed in the stack of jam. "Not that they got charged for harassment, or anything, but you read between the lines and they were riding the detectives pretty hard. Which, you know, that's pretty much normal, especially considering their job left town without them, so they didn't have much to keep them busy. The kidnapping case got shelved about three weeks in—it's all in there," he flicked his fingers toward the package of papers, and for the first time brought his eyes around to meet Grayson's. The drumming fingers slowed to a stop. "Listen, kid," he said. "I'm really sorry."

Grayson was not particularly practiced at discerning one non-hostile emotion from another, but he could find no falseness in the look of sympathy. Felt himself bristle inside. "I'm alive," he stated. Burton knew nothing about him, or his life. He needed no one's pity.

Burton drew a breath through his nose and flattened his hand against the table, and then seemed to think better of whatever he had been going to say. "Yeah," he acknowledged. "Piece of advice? Don't say your cover ID like you just read it out of a briefing packet, if you want people to believe you. Everybody's got some kind of relationship with their name, love it or hate it or what."

Grayson blinked. It was good advice, if he could manage to follow it. He doubted most people he spoke to were as observant as this, but giving obvious pseudonyms was only slightly less memorable than refusing to share a name at all. "Richard Grayson," he said aloud, to listen for any differences in his own voice.

Burton's lips twitched in a slight smile, and his eyes brightened in a way Grayson was trying to learn. "That's the idea. Maybe a little less like the world's about to end, if you're trying for blending in, but that's a lot better."

Discomfited, and glad he generally expressed no inadvertent emotion, Grayson lifted his mug for the first time since the waitress had brought it, and took a sip of the no-longer-hot coffee. Speaking of blending. The waitress had rather conspicuously not come to offer to sell Burton anything. Presumably their exchange of envelopes was so obviously some kind of shady business that she wanted to stay out of the way.

Put the mug down again, unimpressed by the bitter taste, and reached out to break the seal on Burton's package.

He had no intention of perusing the information publicly—he had, after all, hyperventilated in a library in Chicago over newspapers—but in the unlikely event Burton was blatantly attempting to cheat him, he would prefer to find out now, so that he could kill him and take the money back without having to track him down again, possibly after he'd visited his bank. Grayson hated wasted effort.

"About your parents," his contractor forestalled him, with that tone like pity audible again. Grayson spared him a second's calculated glare. Burton did not back down.

"I'm sorry," he said again. "They found them together. He matched your description. She wasn't exactly recognizable, but she had ID for Mary Grayson."

Grayson's eyes fell to the papers in his hands. Clipped together, at the top of the stack: two death certificates—and a police report.

"I'll just toss my wallet over, nice and easy…" John suited word to deed, his perfect sense of trajectory landing the billfold precisely at the gunman's toes. Mary's pounding heart turned over when she noticed the way the man's eyes didn't flicker to it even for a second. She'd worked as a street performer, when she was younger. Ignoring the money itself, except for the occasional correctly-timed thanks, was an important skill, and you had to learn to do it even when you hadn't eaten all day and your dinner was riding on today's take.

Not taking his eyes off the marks had to mean the same kind of professionalism in a mugger.

That was good, really. Professionals kept a cool head. He wouldn't pull the trigger in a panic. They couldn't really afford being mugged, but getting through it without getting hurt was the priority.

"Good," he said. "Handbag," he ordered Mary. She bit her tongue and unslung the strap from her shoulder. If he just grabbed it and left she'd get to keep her cards and ID as well as her money, since she kept her wallet in an inside pocket of her coat in case of purse-snatchers, but she'd rather lose all of those than the contents of her bag, which included all her research on Them.

She hadn't actually intended to try to MACE a man with a gun, but she didn't like giving up her only self-defense weapon, either.

"There's nothing valuable in there," she told the man, as she set it on the ground and took a step back.

He didn't have much in the way of distinguishing characteristics, though Mary had memorized his face, for what good it would do her, with the police in this town. He shrugged, disinterested in her editorial commentary on the contents of her purse.

She took another step back, and John stepped with her. They'd been forced five meters deep into the alley at gunpoint, too far to bolt, but the gunman hadn't bothered getting between them and the exit. Almost like he wanted them to try running—and as Mary thought that he said, "Stop," and raised the gun an inch, and she saw her death in him. In the way he was holding his gun, calm threat but also the certainty of shooting. The way he was looking at them.

This wasn't about the money.

He was standing comfortably, utterly without nerves, taking his time lining up his shot because there was nothing they could do, no way to resist him, no way to escape, because long before they could be close enough to touch him or far enough to evade him, he could have shot them dead.

And he was enjoying that.

They shared a flicker of a glance, just enough to confirm that they both knew, and then John moved forward. Not sharp enough, or close enough, to startle—just enough to put him closer than Mary. He raised his chin, just a little, and looked the gunman in the eye. Go ahead, then, kill me if you're going to, he was saying. Me. Not her.

It was gallant and probably pointless, and if it worked she would never forgive him for as long as she lived, but she understood. It was all he could think of to do.

No one was going to run toward the sound of shots fired. They were on their own.

She took a few small, nervous steps to the right, distancing herself from where her husband was daring the mugger to kill him. The man had raised his eyebrows, and there was a pull to his mouth, half smirk and half sneer. "If you're in such a hurry," he said, and pulled the trigger.

John dodged the bullet.

Mary felt like she had all the time in the world to notice that, the way he'd used his lifetime's understanding of how to already be moving in time to be where safety was going to be; the way the mugger's eyes widened and he reoriented onto the acrobat's new position, further left but not quite trapped against the alley wall, with something like fear; the way John was tensing to jump up, like he hoped getting onto the fire escape would help; the way the mugger was ignoring her and she was almost close enough to tackle him around the neck now and if she could just get hold of the gun the two of them could probably overpower him and—

Deeper in the shadows of the alleyway, a second gunshot sounded.

Mary watched the eruption of blood from John's back. The pained surprise in his eyes as he fell. Endless milliseconds dragged over her raw nerves as the shot still rang and buzzed through her bones and teeth.

The original mugger was roughly between her and the hidden gunman, and she flung herself across the last meter to slam against his back, got an arm around his neck, and squeezed with everything she had.

Mary Grayson had done daily handstand pushups since she was sixteen. She professionally lifted more than her own body weight at high speeds. Everything she had added up to a lot.

His free hand came up to scrabble against her at once, but she had the advantage in leverage, and hung on as he battered at her elbow with the gun-barrel, then dropped the weapon outright to free his other hand. When he bent forward, lifting her feet off the ground, she clamped her thighs around his sides and squeezed tighter.

The shooter had come forward out of the shadows, passed John's body without the slightest acknowledgement, and was standing several feet back, trying out angles to shoot her dead without hitting his partner. Mary only noticed him when he said something, amused and mocking, something about a little lady that she had no time to decipher through the blood rushing in her ears.

The enemy in her grasp growled.

If she had had a knife, she probably would have stuck it into his neck—less out of an animal desperation to survive than out of sheer outrage, that her already-wounded family should have been torn apart like this, for the amusement or convenience of these men. At least she had hurt this one, frightened him; disrupted that casual predatory confidence that they had the power to do such thing without ever paying a drop of blood. They deserved to die for this, but all she had was her bare hands, and her weak human fingernails. And her teeth, and she had sunk them into the top of the gunman's shoulder before the thought really occurred to her, holding on with everything she had and making him give a strangled shout through her grip and tear just a little more desperately. She could feel his strength failing even before his knees buckled.

That was enough to make his friend stop laughing at him, unfortunately, and put away his gun and come closer to help pry her arms loose. She clung with the strength of desperation, but there were two of them, and once the shooter dug into the tendons of her right wrist and dislocated her pinkie finger in the course of making her let go of her opposite elbow, leaving her with only the strength of one arm to pit against him, it was only a matter of time.

By the time they tore her free, slammed her into the alley floor hard enough to rattle her brains and knock out her breath, the first man was on the brink of unconsciousness, and that bought her seconds as he dragged deep lungsful of air, crouched on hands and knees. Seconds to catch sight of a single dim star through the light-polluted smog, to feel to cold dirty pavement at her back, to try to get herself upright again or at least sitting, to think she should try to get a glimpse of John and decide that no, it was bad enough for her last memory of him to be the light going out of his eyes, without looking at him dead. To take in a thousand details of the worn bricks in the far wall, as though she had studied them for hours rather than instants, and the features of the man who had killed her husband, taller and darker than the one she'd strangled, and the way she could see from this angle that each of them had a black feather tattooed on the left side of his neck.

And by the time she had managed to draw a single shallow breath and get her elbows under her and sit up, the first man had swiped his gun up and staggered to his feet, swaying, gasping, red with choking and fury, and brought the barrel level with her eyes.

Little bird,she thought, to the little boy somewhere in the world counting on her to save him. I'm sorr—

Mugging gone wrong, the report said. Common occurrence in Gotham; stupid out-of-towners went down the wrong alley, no one left to miss them, case closed.

The officer in charge did note the blood type (B-) of the foreign traces found on the woman's mouth, and his recommendation that samples be kept for possible DNA analysis, since the ballistics on the bullet that had killed her were a possible match for a gun since seized during that same officer's arrest of one Luc Gaspiardo, blood type B-, who had had a peculiar deep bite mark on the back of his shoulder at the time.

This recommendation had not been followed, or the implication pursued in any way. Gaspiardo had not been charged with anything, although he had not gotten his unregistered weapon back.

Grayson stared at the papers, alone in his attic squat. He knew Gaspiardo, or had. The man had been killed in a raid on a rival organization's heroin distribution headquarters when Talon was fourteen; one of the Owlman's oldest loyal followers, and one of his captains. The man had always resented Talon's assumption of responsibility for the majority of important and sensitive killings once his training was complete, and his own relegation to what he perceived as lower-status tasks. Had in fact been assigned to lead the raid that had killed him in part because his discontent had seemed ripe to blossom into some form of treachery.

Gaspiardo would already have considered a casual mugging beneath him when Grayson was born, never mind six years later.

It wasn't unheard-of for Wayne to kill people he'd already bought off, especially if they made themselves annoying or represented a loose end, but.

But.

So many details not quite aligning.

He wondered how inappropriate normal people would consider it, to hold in your hands documents detailing your parents' murders, and feel this…

Hopeful. Relieved.

Glad.

Because death certificates or not, this wasn't losing them. If anything, this might be getting them back.

A/N: I didn't originally intend to have a fight scene toward the end there, but the Graysons are very different people with very different reflexes from the Waynes, and this is what they decided they wanted to do. Mary got steadily angrier as she went, which I don't know why I didn't expect. Nolan Burton also went and gave himself a speaking role. Characters, man.

All the Anglo-sounding names on Mary's list except Ayres are canon Talons, by the way; Wei Qi is the name I gave the unnamed Asian female one. Sorry to anyone who actually liked the idea of Dick's parents selling him; this universe is not that kind of backwards, and these are essentially the same deeply affectionate people who shaped Nightwing's basic personality before he ever met Batman. The Court has bought kids in the past, since some parents just suck, and it helps a lot in the early stages of conditioning to assert that the Talon is owned, and furthermore has nowhere to go home to. So they always tell them they were sold.