Gifts From the Sea, a Batman fanfic by Raberba girl
Batfam Bingo 2019: AU: Zoo
Part 53 (rough draft)
Bruce woke up a few hours later. The sky was lightening, but the sun had not yet risen. Jason was fast asleep on his chest; Dick and Tim were out of sight, likely drifting asleep below.
Bruce quietly paddled to the edge of the pool, his movements half-waking Jason, who grumbled unintelligibly and slid away into the water. Bruce went to shower and put on some fresh clothes, then ventured toward the kitchen, both hoping for and dreading the possibility of seeing the baby. He wished...he just wished it wasn't his baby. If she was just some stray, he could relax and enjoy her presence, but she wasn't. He still hadn't really gotten used to the idea of Damian being his, but now this new little one, and...and the others, the lost ones...
Bruce veered away from that line of thinking; he felt like he might cry or throw up if he pondered it too hard. It was difficult to think of anything else without a distraction, though.
He went to the training room instead, put on some music, and spent nearly two hours going through exercises. Showering again afterward, he leaned his forehead against the wall and let the water run over him, feeling comfortably numb and empty.
o.o.o
"Did you ever go to bed?" Bruce asked in concern.
"I don't need as much sleep as I used to," Vic said absently, clicking busily on the computer as he arranged files on multiple screens. "Okay, so I've been working to get everything sorted out. Over here is all stuff I sent to the Justice League, human rights violations and projects they should probably be looking into. A lot of them are incomplete and the most recent dates are around the time Jay and Damian joined us, so I don't know if they're still active now that Ra's is out of the picture." He paused. "I made a subfolder for ones that are definitely inactive, Talia canceled them when she took over. I didn't know if you guys would still find them relevant or not."
Bruce made a non-committal grunt.
"Then over here, if you're up for it, these are the files that...you might be particularly interested in." Vic eyed Bruce, who refused to look at him. Bruce reached out silently and tapped at the keyboard. The first thing he saw was that the canister indeed contained exactly what he thought it did. He hadn't realized that the result of Athanasia's paternity test was on display, too, but it was. It wasn't like either was news at this point, so he wasn't sure why he felt a fresh pang.
He closed the files quickly, planning to find the canister and destroy whatever might be left of its contents as soon as he walked out of this room. "These are...the other children?" he grunted, clicking through reports.
"Yeah. The first couple of tries turned out to be girls, but Ra's...uh...apparently wasn't interested in females." Bruce's jaw tightened as he clicked through the termination orders. "Yeah," Vic said quietly. "Besides Athanasia, only one other girl in the project came to term, and she wasn't even-"
"Where?" Bruce asked sharply.
"She wasn't yours, Bruce," Vic said, but he was already pulling up a specific file.
"A commission?" Bruce read, his brow furrowed. Judging by the dates, the girl would be around the same age as Damian.
"Yeah, for some guy named David Cain, who's also the sperm donor."
"What happened to her?" Bruce demanded, searching in vain.
"Dunno. There are a couple of reports from Cain after she was delivered, but there's no other record of her in the data we stole."
Bruce exhaled slowly, committing Cain's name to memory. "What else?"
"So back to your DNA, once they got a base male embryo, they started cloning it for their gene-altering experiments. There was some mumbling about a future goal I couldn't find clarification on, but the goal at this stage was to make kids who could activate 'oceanic robes' - that's what they call selkie pelts, though I think it applies to other kinds of sea people, too. Took 'em...a lot of tries to get it right."
Bruce's throat felt tight and his eyes stung with tears of rage and grief as he read descriptions of deformities and disorders that had led to even more terminations.
"Ra's went crying to Talia at one point - here's the email - and there weren't any terminations after she took over. Simulations ramped up for a few months, then they made another clone that's actually Damian, the first successful one." Vic tapped at the screen. Bruce stared at it. "I don't know where the base embryo is; if it's still alive, it might be back at the League base 'cause we didn't know about it in time to bring it."
Bruce absently nudged Vic aside so he could sit down and read the files more carefully. All the cloning attempts before Damian, regardless of whether surrogate mothers or artificial wombs were used, had ended in either miscarriages or terminations due to defects and other traits Ra's deemed undesirable. He had, indeed, finally emailed his daughter in frustration, who had responded with a scathing outrage that didn't make sense if she'd been following the project all along. She had to have known about parts of it, but her name and designations were scarce until she began to helm the project after her father's complaints. "Where does Athanasia come in?" Bruce finally asked.
"Here," Vic said, leaning over to bring up the files. "There's a lot less info on her, just some modified data copied from Damian's conception and development. Either Talia was super-secretive about Asia or Asia wasn't an experiment like the others were, or both." He eyed Bruce, who spent a while contemplating.
Bruce finally drew in a breath and checked the dates. "What else do we have from after Ra's got overthrown?"
"Here," Vic said, indicating another screen. "That's all stuff Talia recently initiated or signed off on. Most of it has nothing to do with sea people; she's been working mostly on cleaning house and securing streams of information and money. The actual forward-looking stuff is mostly environmentalist projects."
Bruce spent a while skimming through files, his eyes automatically catching on the few mentions of sea people. "She's tracking down selkie pelts within the League?"
"Yeah, there's an old database of pelts here, but it doesn't do a great job of sourcing. Like, it's got bio profiles and geographical info, but not much in the way of personal identification. This other list here is more recent and looks like it might be...severance payments? Something like that. About 80% of the selkies who got their pelts back have dollar amounts that match the payments, so maybe they got sent home with some money."
Bruce read through the lists, sorting the data in different ways. Only a fraction of selkies in the old database had had their pelts restored, but that was mostly because the bulk of the pelts had been obtained decades ago. The majority of pelts that had been obtained more recently were matched to names, and as Vic had pointed out, about 80% of those names had dollar amounts next to them. Some of the ones that didn't were annotated with the word 'refused.'
"Refused what?" Bruce murmured, thinking out loud.
"Refused to leave?" Vic shrugged. "Some people's lives really suck. Could be even the League of Assassins looks better in comparison."
Bruce sighed and rubbed at his eyes. He was getting distracted; this really was business for the Justice League or even more mundane organizations.
"You okay?" Vic murmured. "I know it's a lot."
"Sometimes I wonder how this is my life," Bruce muttered. He'd studied to be a special education teacher. Growing up as the son of Thomas and Martha Wayne of Gotham, he'd thought his whole life had been more-or-less mapped out: a college degree, a job of passion rather than necessity, a wife and kids in the vague and distant future, obligatory social networking, and a life spent trying to use his wealth and privilege to help people who were less fortunate.
Instead, he'd somehow ended up as a mentally ill unemployed single parent of a pod of sea children and den mother for a pack of teenage superheroes while the Justice League held meetings at his beach house and his ex-not-quite-girlfriend turned out to be the assassin daughter of, if some of these dates could be believed, a centuries-old environmental terrorist slash mad scientist. It was bizarre, like something out of a freaking comic book.
Bruce's stomach rumbled. Vic's mouth quirked. "You hungry?"
"No," Bruce grumbled. It wouldn't have been a lie five seconds ago.
Vic sighed, then got up and stretched. "Think I might take a nap after all. You're welcome to the computer, but maybe don't hole up in here if your kids come looking for you."
He had a point. Bruce had neglected all his children enough; the last thing they needed was for him to have no time for them if they came looking for him.
He very reluctantly forced himself away from the computer, took care of the canister, then went to the kitchen.
Garfield was there, looking a little frantic as he rummaged through the refrigerator.
"Good morning," Bruce said.
"Oh, hi, Bruce!" Gar babbled in a rush. "Is there anymore fish?"
"Alfred would know. I only keep track of the live fish for Dick and Tim."
"Yeah, we're out."
"...Garfield." Bruce's voice rumbled ominously enough that the boy actually paused to look at him. "The live fish are meant to feed my children. What do you mean we're out?"
"Uh...oh...because I maybe might have...fed it to the newbies...?"
"What newbies?!" Bruce exclaimed a little wildly, picturing Garfield trying to shove live fish into the baby's mouth. Surely Ravi wouldn't have allowed such a thing?
"You know. All the animals we rescued from the lab."
Bruce abruptly remembered the little menagerie from last night, and realized that the animals hadn't been in the communications room. Garfield must have moved them. "Where are they?"
In the boy's bedroom, as it turned out. The room was stuffed with tanks and cages, some of which had been opened so that the occupants could crawl around at their leisure. Bruce groaned and rubbed at his face. He was not up to this. "Garfield, you know you're not keeping them, right?"
"I know," the boy huffed, "but they're still hungry and I gotta feed them."
Bruce's children came looking for him before the matter had been sorted out. Tim soon lost interest, retreating into his suitcase with his tablet, but Dick 'helped' and Jason actually helped. Once all the animals had finally been taken care of, Bruce wearily collapsed by the wall. He spent a minute watching Jason and Gar pet a seal and Dick croon at a trio of octopuses, then took out his phone.
"Bruce?"
"Hi, Arthur. We have a lot of ex-lab specimens here whom we can't release or keep, and I was wondering if the aquatic ones could be looked after in Atlantis."
"It sounds doable, but I'm going to need a lot more details than that, Bruce."
Bruce explained the situation and worked out the details. At one point, Tim crept out of the suitcase and into his lap. The child watched him for a while, then reached up to rest a hand and a tentacle over his throat and mouth. Bruce nudged the limb over his mouth aside so could keep speaking, but allowed it to remain on his face. When he finally hung up, he looked down at Tim. "What are you doing?"
Tim gazed at him impassively.
"Are you feeling me talk?"
"B'ss tah'kk."
"That's right. I'm talking."
"Tmm tah'kk."
"You...want to learn how to talk?"
"Hheyuh- Hhew- Wuhll... Hhe'llo."
Bruce smiled and softly ran a hand over the boy's hair. "Hello, kiddo."
"He'llo."
He spent a little while coaching Tim's whispered speech, but eventually distracted the boy by accident. Tim stared at Bruce's stomach, then poked at it when it growled again. "I never did get around to breakfast," Bruce said ruefully. He really was hungry now. "Want to go with me to find something to eat, kiddo?"
Dick and Jason came with them, and after they'd all eaten, the four of them spent a few hours together. Damian stopped by briefly, but once he'd studied his father's face, he nodded in satisfaction and left for a flight with Goliath.
Bruce tensed when Ravi came outside with the baby at one point, but other than a few worried glances from Jason, no one addressed Bruce or even looked at him, making it clear that there was no pressure to engage. He relaxed slowly as he watched Dick and Jason cooing at Athanasia and taking turns holding her.
Tim inspected the child, but then retreated and cuddled with Bruce again, displeased enough that the emotion was discernible in his face. "What is that?" he signed.
"It's a baby." Tim already knew the word, but mostly in reference to himself rather than its literal meaning. "A baby is a very young human. Her name is Athanasia. Do you want to make a sign name for her?"
Tim glared suspiciously toward the baby. "Person or toy?" he finally asked.
"She's a person," Bruce said firmly.
"Small and ugly."
"Are you jealous of Athanasia, Tim?" He tried to explain what 'jealous' meant, but Tim pushed his hands away and kept watching his brothers with the little one, gripping Bruce with more tentacles than usual.
"They like her?"
"Yes. They like you, too, Tim. Dick and Jason love her but they also still love you."
Tim continued watching suspiciously until Bruce called, "Dick, Jay, I know she's new and very cute, but I think Tim would appreciate some affection as well."
Once the older boys realized the issue, they came romping over. Tim ducked into Bruce's shirt, signing "No, no, no" with a couple of flipping tentacle tips, but his brothers dragged him out again and started to playfully fuss over him. "Go away, I don't like you," he signed with his hands, but his tentacles made the pleased skirt-twirling gesture and then a couple of them signed "Yes, yes," the tips bunching up to approximate the shape of a fist. One tentacle drifted in front of his chest to sign "Happy," and he knocked it away.
Dick burst into laughter. "Your hands lie, your tentacles tell the truth!"
Tim attempted to flip him off but couldn't quite figure out how to arrange his fingers correctly. Now it was Jason who laughed, then he and Dick dragged their little brother into the ocean.
"Play nice!" Bruce called after them. He sighed in exasperated affection, then his eyes slid almost against his will toward the baby. Athanasia was sitting under Ravi's supervision, intently watching the waves approach. She jerked her feet out of the way of the water, but once the wave had retreated, she frowned and patted at the wet sand left behind.
After a while, Bruce moved closer, drawn to the tiny girl despite himself. Ravi nodded at him and shuffled aside, leaving room for him to sit down on the sand. Athanasia glared at him suspiciously and shifted backward. "Hello," Bruce said softly.
Another wave came in and then drew back. Athanasia poked her finger into a bubbling hole left behind. Bruce scooped up some sand and set it down in a pile nearby. Athanasia stared at it, then closed her fist on the displaced sand. She studied it for a while, then opened her hand and watched the sand drop. She stared again, then started digging both hands into the sand.
"She's beautiful," Bruce whispered.
"Yes," Ravi agreed.
TBC
A/N: I accidentally made yet another Batkid the same age as the others, so I guess Tim, Cass, & Damian will be adoptive triplets in this AU. X'''D
