Gifts From the Sea, a Batman fanfic by Raberba girl

Batfam Bingo 2019: AU: Zoo

Chapter 47 - The Cavalry Arrives (rough draft 2)

Bruce awakened slowly because someone was shaking him. His eyes cracked open and it took him a while to register that Tim was sitting on him and Dick, Jason, and Wally were leaning over him in concern. None of them belonged to the hand on his shoulder, though.

"Ah, there you are, Master Bruce."

"Alfred," Bruce whispered.

His limbs and joints didn't want to work. With Alfred's help, he struggled to sit up in his blanket nest and saw Damian and Victor watching anxiously from the doorway. He looked at Alfred again. "You're here."

"Indeed. A friend of yours was kind enough to convey me. Your parents and I rather wish you had informed us that you are personally acquainted with the Justice League." Bruce cringed at Alfred's raised eyebrow. Honestly, introductions had never really occurred to him, and he would have been cautious, anyway, for the sake of secret identities. Clark and the Waynes must have found out about each other from Dick and Jason, who certainly looked worried enough at the moment to have made such a call.

Then he realized that the League's help would have been invaluable if he'd known Jason was missing instead of dead- Jason might, even now, still be a missing person as far as the police knew. Bruce wanted to throttle himself for his own stupidity.

"Superman landed on the roof carrying a car!" Wally reported. "And a butler was in it! Except Dick calls him 'Grandpa,' and he's not wearing butler clothes anymore." Alfred was, indeed, wearing a nondescript dark outfit rather than his uniform.

"Bruce, you slept all day!" Jason burst out. "Raven said not to wake you up, but you were crying in your sleep. And then Alfred came."

Bruce was too tired to think of anything to say, so he didn't say anything.

Clark poked his head into the room. "Everything all right in here?"

"Make Bruce come eat dinner!" Jason called over his shoulder.

"I'm not hungry," Bruce mumbled, his arm around Tim and Alfred's hand on his shoulder the only things making him feel real.

"Nevertheless, you need to eat, Master Bruce."

Bruce lay down again, wrapped around Tim. The mer touched his face, exploring the tear tracks that had dried there.

"You don't look too good, Bruce," Clark said, coming in and kneeling down on the opposite side from Alfred. "Are you all right?"

Bruce opened his eyes and looked at his older sons. "Dick. Jay. Am I all right?"

"No," they said in unison.

"Um," Jason added uncomfortably. "I'm sorry for asking about Damian in front of everyone. I forgot you were already...having a bad day."

"I love Damian," Bruce said, because he did, and Damian was right there and he didn't want the boy to think he was unloved, and caring about Damian was a lot easier than thinking about what had happened to make the boy exist.

"Then why are you ill?!" Damian demanded, his anger a clear cover for anxiety.

Tim's face was very close. Bruce gazed into his eyes, and the child gazed back steadily. Tim was the only one who never made any demands of him. Well, except to stay alive and give him toys and food, but toys were easy and the rest was bare minimum. Tim never made him talk.

"I love you," Bruce freed a hand to sign quietly.

"You're sad," Tim signed back.

Bruce closed his eyes.

Clark took hold of him and carefully got him standing. There was a lot of super-strength involved, because even though Bruce didn't help much, the action looked easy and simple. Bruce almost gingerly settled onto his own feet, and Clark kept an arm around him as they followed Alfred and the children.

"Father," Damian said determinedly, "my parentage is in dispute. If you do not set the record straight with Jason, I will duel him."

"Wait 'til after dinner, at least!" Jason hissed, with a guilty glance at everyone around them.

"Damian is my son," Bruce said wearily. "I didn't know about him until yesterday, but...yes. He's mine."

Jason frowned in confusion. "But you said you never-"

"Jason." Bruce paused and looked at him, praying the boy wouldn't make him spell it out in front of everyone. "After dinner."

"Okay..."

Bruce was very quiet throughout the meal. Tim, hiding under the table with his own food, kept at least one limb grasping him at all times. Jason was quiet, too, eating mechanically as he ruminated, and Clark kept glancing at Bruce in concern. Thankfully, the rest of the kids kept up a noisy stream of conversation, and unlike at the manor, Alfred actually sat down to eat with everyone.

"This is very good, I like it," Kori said happily. "You found quibstone, Alfred! I looked and looked, but can't find it, but you found it!"

"I beg your pardon?"

When she tilted her head in confusion at the unfamiliar phrase, Dick interpreted, "He doesn't know 'quibstone.' I don't know 'quibstone'! It's Tamaran?"

"Yes. Only quibstone does this good taste. You found it and made it good."

"Hmm," Alfred mused, "perhaps the particular spices I used in this dish happen to resemble the ingredient in question."

"So, hey, Superman!" Garfield was saying, "What's the story on that yummy blonde who's been showing up in Metropolis lately?"

"My cousin, you mean?"

"Uh...oh, is she your cousin...?"

At one point, amidst a debate about a video game series at one end of the table and shop talk about Amazonian and Atlantean magic at the other end, Alfred asked for 'young Roy' to pass the green beans, and Speedy picked up the bowl to hand over.

Bruce blinked, a glimmer of interest slightly parting the fog of depression. "Your name is Roy?" he asked.

The archer froze for a moment, then rolled his eyes and slumped when his friends laughed. "Yeah, I'm Roy. You're not getting a last name, though."

"Fair enough," Bruce murmured, glad to finally have a real name for the last holdout of the team. (Not counting Raven, who did the secret identity thing backwards - she was Raven from the beginning, and 'Rachel Roth' was the alias she had come up with when Bruce helped her create a civilian identity.)

Once everyone had eaten, Donna volunteered to clean up and Alfred relentlessly organized Garfield and Damian into helping her. Some of the others gravitated toward the living or training rooms, and Bruce took the other sea kids down to the pool, accompanied by the two extraterrestrials. Dick and Kori immediately flung themselves into the pool with Garth right on their heels, all of them making a ruckus of laughing and splashing. The others hung back, and Bruce found himself the center of attention again.

"Come on, Tim, it doesn't feel nice to be all dry and itchy," he coaxed. Tim finally allowed himself to be dipped underwater, saving Bruce from having to get into the pool himself, but the boy drifted close, peering up at Bruce and clinging to his legs with three tentacles.

"Clark," Jason ordered, "go away so he can tell me about Damian."

Bruce cringed. He'd hoped Jason would forget. "He has super-hearing, Jay."

"I can tune you out if you need privacy," Clark offered.

"I don't care," Bruce mumbled, resting his face in his hand. It wasn't even nine o'clock yet and he'd already done a lot of sleeping, but he wanted to go to bed already.

Jason huddled close and said uncertainly, "So? Were you lying earlier, or what? It's okay if you did, I just...I wanna know for Dami. He's so frickin' proud of being your kid. And if he's not but you're secretly adopting him so he feels better, that's okay, too. I just want him to be happy. He's happy being your kid."

"He is mine," Bruce said in a low voice. "And I didn't lie."

Jason leveled him with a look, silently demanding.

"I never slept with his mother, and I didn't donate anything. But she got it anyway. Because she needed to make a perfect child, apparently."

Clark drew in a breath. After a pause, he tentatively rested a hand on Bruce's back. Jason's eyes suddenly widened. "She got it anyway?"

Bruce couldn't muster up the motivation to speak, but the answer must have been in his face.

"And you...didn't like it?"

"I didn't even know it had happened until I called her last night to confirm."

Jason swore and yanked his hood down, plunging into the pool. Tentacles reached curiously for the clothes left behind; Bruce fished out the underwear but let Tim examine the pants. There was some yelling from the other end of the pool as Dick and Garth turned to chase the seal who'd aggressively rammed them, and Kori flew overhead, aiming mostly-harmless jets of light.

Bruce sat very still, watching the chaos. "I'm sorry," Clark murmured.

"We were friends," Bruce whispered, his throat tight. "She was my only friend in college. We went out together almost every weekend, we hung out together during the week, working on our own projects... I liked her. She could be pretty elitist sometimes, but she...she had a good heart, and she tried. I never in a hundred years thought she'd do anything like-"

He paused, realizing something for the first time. "And she kept it up after she did it. The night after she drugged me, I saw her the next day and she...she acted like everything was normal. She was concerned because I thought I'd been sick. I never- I never had the slightest clue what she'd done until yesterday...it's been years, Clark!"

Then an even more terrible thought struck him. "What if...what if Damian wasn't the only one?" He felt sick, but before he could throw up, Jason launched out of the pool in human form, mouth open to yell something, but suddenly realized he was half-naked. The boy flung himself back into the pool, then, red-faced, surfaced again, snatched his pants away from Tim, and struggled to put them on underwater.

"Let me talk to her," Jason demanded. Dick and Garth surfaced behind him, looking a little confused as they realized he'd been venting rather than playing, and Kori sank down to sit cross-legged in midair, just above the surface of the water.

"To...Damian's mother?" Bruce said warily.

"Yes! What's her number?!"

Bruce barely heard it because yet another sickening realization had just hit him. Damian's mother was the one who had held Jason captive. And Damian's mother was Talia. Which meant that on top of everything else, Talia had kept one of Bruce's children imprisoned.

"Bruce!"

"She's...she's the one who held you captive, Jay..."

"So?" Jason said sullenly. "She can't get me anymore."

"I don't want to remind her you exist."

"What's happening?" Dick demanded.

Bruce exhaled carefully, watching the flickering ends of Kori's hair. His relationship with Dick had only just started to recover, he couldn't keep things from the boy. "Damian's mother hurt me a long time ago. Jason is angry and wants to tell her he's angry, but I don't want him to talk to her."

Dick looked at his brother. "She won't be better if you yell at her."

"I just-!" Jason said in frustration. In the background, Garth murmured apologetically and slipped away, giving the family a bit of privacy.

"If you want to make your dad feel better," Clark said to Jason, "talking to that woman won't help."

"But she fuckin'-! B, aren't you mad?!"

"I feel a lot of complicated things. Jay-" He reached out, but Jason backed away and sank down sulkily, then hugged Tim like a teddy bear. The octo-mer, who had six tentacles around Bruce by now, went very still in surprise.

"Jason, this isn't your battle." He wanted to point out that Jason was just a child who shouldn't be worrying about this sort of thing, but he knew that the boy wouldn't take well to that. "Please leave it to me, and...and to Alfred and Clark. All right? I only told you so you could rest easy about Damian."

Jason looked like he was trying not to cry. "But you're not just...gonna let her get away with it, right?" Before Bruce could answer, Jason turned to Clark. "You're gonna have his back, right?"

"Of course," Clark said firmly.

Jason looked down at the now-squirming Tim. "Hey, this is a hug. Get used to it."

"I've hugged him before," Bruce protested in a murmur, but then paused. He didn't really hug Tim so much as use Tim as a security blanket or humor the child when Tim reached out for reassurance. Tim didn't really ever...get embraced simply because he was loved.

Bruce buried his face in his hands, feeling like more of a failure than ever.

"What's wrong?" Dick asked in concern.

"I'm just really tired," Bruce mumbled. "I need to go to bed."

As if on cue, Alfred walked in with Damian on his heels. "Master Bruce, I have been informed that you don't have a bedroom."

"I do have a room."

Alfred leveled a stern look at him, then at Dick, then back at him. "You have a pile of blankets in a former office. That is not adequate accommodation."

Dick sheepishly hauled himself out of the water, and the next half hour or so was taken up by sleeping arrangements. Jason and Damian each had their own rooms that they were territorial about; Dick didn't have a room of his own, content to scatter his stuff all over the Tower and sleep either with anyone who didn't mind keeping a tub in their room or in the pool. A proper bed was moved into Bruce's room, and another bed and some shelves and cabinets into a nearby room for Alfred.

Clark left at one point, quietly promising Bruce that the Justice League would start investigating the al Ghul family, especially any projects that had anything to do with Bruce.

"Be careful," Damian popped up to warn. "The only reason Mother does not know where I am is because we have kept the Titans' base secret. I...am not ready to return to the League of Assassins. I am particularly uninterested in my whereabouts being betrayed by any oafish mistakes made by the Justice League."

"We'll be careful," Clark promised.

Bruce couldn't say anything. All he could bring himself to do was put his arms around his mildly surprised son and hold him, as if Bruce could protect anyone he loved from anything.

o.o.o

Bruce opted to retreat to his own room that night, alone except for Tim, but even though he was tired, he couldn't sleep. After tossing and turning for a while, he finally got up, checked on the sleeping Tim, then looked at his neglected phone.

Although he had blocked the number Damian had given him, Talia had used a different phone to leave several messages: three short texts, a very long one, and a couple of voicemails.

The short texts were angry in tone, but the long one was a mixture. Bruce cautiously skimmed it. Some of it was more half-apologies for the drugs and secrecy, though she still didn't seem to understand the consent issues or the idea of being permanently denied something she wanted. The rest of the text was a slightly manipulative attempt to get information about Damian.

Bruce sat there for a long time, debating about whether or not to even respond. He finally decided against it and deleted all the messages, including the voicemails he hadn't listened to. He didn't bother to block the number, since Talia clearly had the resources to contact him, anyway.

He spent a while going through the therapist recommendations his father had sent, and was grateful when he finally felt sleepy. This time, when he lay down, he managed to drift off after about twenty minutes.

TBC