Chapter 2
AN Enjoy. :)
Dean's eyes widen in fear and he suddenly throws his weight in the direction that the other cop is pulling his brother, who is doing the same thing, and they both realise with dread that the cops are now the ones with smirks on their faces.
"Jason!"
"Dean!" they call for each other, but aside from a few bored glances, they are ignored as they are dragged to opposite sides of the station, suddenly unsure about what's happening.
The only information that the cops get when they attempt to interrogate the two boys is questions about the other, and the only prior information that they have is their first names, because they were yelling for each other when they were separated.
The boys don't know to fight when Dean is sent to an orphanage and Jason to juvie.
They try to fight when they realise that their other half isn't where they were sent, like they were expecting, hoping. By then the damage is done. Aside from birth certificates, which neither the police nor Dean and Jason have, there isn't anything connecting the boys.
They've never been arrested before, they don't have doctors records because they never went, they don't have family to tie them together because their mother doesn't own a phone, and most likely wouldn't pick up if she did. They can't get DNA testing done on each other, because they don't know where the other one is, and the only people to know that they were arrested together, are the cops that separated them.
Dean knows to fight when the orphanage tells him that somebody came forward and claimed him, that there was a man who didn't know that Dean's mother had been pregnant with him, but had found an old letter addressed to him at his mother's house, hidden in a box under her bed, telling him of her pregnancy.
He had apparently been searching for his child, the letter didn't mention twins, for years, and since Dean was put into the system, and eventually gave his last name to the lady running it, John Winchester was alerted to the fact that his son was in the system.
He took his newly pregnant wife Mary, and they drove down to Gotham.
It was an awkward first meeting, Dean didn't know what to do with a father he knew nothing about, and John didn't know what to do with a son that he didn't know about.
Mary was their saving grace, breaking the tension between them and asking Dean how he came to be in an orphanage.
"There was a cop who was trying to hurt one of our friends and me and Jason stopped him, but then the cop had a friend and we got arrested, then we tried to run away and we made them mad and then they took me away from him and I haven't seen him since" Dean spills out all at once, those words being the first that they've heard from the young boy.
"Wait wait wait, Dean, who are you talking about? Who did they separate you from?" Mary asks, wondering who he's talking about.
"My brother. I haven't seen him in three weeks and everyone keeps telling me that i'm making stuff up but i'm not, I swear i'm not. The cops were mad at us and they hurt him and then they took us to different rooms and I haven't seen him since and nobody will listen to me!" Dean rants, becoming hysterical the longer he talks to the strangers that walked into the room.
"What's his name?" John asks, speaking up for the first time since he walked into the room and said hello to his son.
"Jason Todd, his name is Jason Todd! My name is Dean Todd and nobody will listen to me and they keep saying that they don't have any kids under that name and that they've never had any kid come in under that name. They-they won't listen to me and I just, I want my brother" Dean pleads, thankful that somebody is listening to him, something that hasn't happened in the last three weeks.
"How can this happen? Shouldn't Catherine have come and gotten you by now?" John asks, trying to keep Dean calm, even in the face of his own un-calmness.
"Jason wouldn't have given them his name, and they probably won't even be able to find mom. She doesn't have a phone, and she's been living in her dead ex-boyfriends apartment for the last year, nobody knows where she is and she doesn't even pay rent on the apartment, her new boyfriend does. I'm not making it up" Dean says meekly, hoping that they believe him.
"We'll try to find him, okay?" John says, not really knowing how he'll go about doing that, but knowing that he needs to try.
"Really?" Dean asks, peering up at him through too-long hair, his soft green eyes full of hope.
"Really" Mary answers, reaching out and taking the boys hand with a smile.
"Thank you" he murmurs.
The next hour or so is spent signing papers and collecting the few things Dean had on him from his 'room' at the orphanage, and after that, Mary and John drive Dean to where he says that his mothers apartment is.
He feels his chest tighten in anxiety when he uses his key to open the front door, and he feels his whole world breaking apart when he sees the empty apartment, everything of value moved out, and he sees both his and Jason's things inside their closet, the only things left behind being their clothes.
"No" he says, his voice cracking as he tries to push down the tears, his efforts are null though, and he seemingly melts to the floor as the tears stream down his face, his breath getting stuck in his throat along with a tight ball of fear.
His hands shake as he shoves this things into the small duffel bag on his side of the closet, Mary and John watching him break and not knowing what to do, they watch as he takes half of the clothes before moving over to the middle of the room and prying up a loose floorboard, revealing a Batman lunchbox.
He opens the box and pulls out a picture of him and another smiling boy, leaving the copy behind, he takes out a leather bracelet and same as with the picture, leaves the copy in the box, the last thing he pulls from the box is one of two batarangs. He leaves the stack of money in the box as he closes it up, putting the picture into his bag with the batarang and slipping the bracelet onto his wrist, he wipes tears from his cheeks before nodding at the two adults behind him.
They stay in Gotham for another month, looking for a raven-haired boy named Jason Todd, but they don't find any traces. Dean sneaks away from the hotel room that John and Mary have at night to go check all of their usual places, he asks their friends questions, but none of them have answers. He finds Maryne with her sister, and she thanks him for helping her, but again, hasn't seen or heard from Jason.
John and Mary search all the legal routes, and come up with nothing, not able to find Catherine or Jason Todd, aside from a few records for Catherine renting an apartment. They are laughed out of the social services office when they decide to ask them about the boy, being told that if he was never in their system, that they won't be able to find him. They were told that there were so many kids living on the streets, that they were more likely to find a certain rat than a certain child.
Dean destroys the hotel room when John tells him that they have to go back to Lawrence Kansas, that Dean is coming with them, and that they can't find Jason, that for all intents and purposes, he doesn't even exist.
John finds himself crying for the first time in a very long time as he watches his son sit in the wreckage of the hotel room and sob, pleading to stay, for them to just leave him so that he can find Jason.
The next day, Dean is sitting red eyed and angry in the back of a 1967 Chevrolet Impala as it drives away from Gotham, leaving his brother, his twin, behind.
AN Thoughts? Good? Bad? Meh? Lemme know what you think. :)