The Birds Who Smile, a Batman fanfic by Raberba girl
Deleted sequence: General Foster Care - Part 5 (rough draft)
A/N: I'm starting to have trouble with the choreography, so I decided to just say "Screw it." This is a deleted sequence, so there's no point in forcing things to happen as smoothly or plausibly as they'd need to if it was a genuine part of the story.
o.o.o
Leaving the boy in Nightwing and Red Robin's care, Batman hurried to the cave ahead of them, checked in on Peter and found no progress on the boy's situation, then set up a background soundtrack to make it sound like he was at a club before calling the Reynards.
"Mmn...hello...?" Ginny said sleepily.
"Gabbyyyy! Where are you, hot stuff?"
"Hello?" Ginny repeated in bewilderment.
"Gabby! It's Bruce! Can you hear me? Let me step outside, the music's so loud~" He lowered the soundtrack.
"I think you have a wrong number."
"Wrong number? This is Bruce Wayne, I'm trying to reach- Who is this?"
"This is the Reynard residence," she said impatiently.
"Reyn- OH! Oh, you're Jack's foster mom! Sorry, I think I hit the wrong name in my contacts list or something. Hey, so how is Jackie, anyway?"
"Mr. Wayne, it's nearly midnight! My husband and I are in bed!"
"Oh, wow, I'm so sorry! So Jackie's doing well, huh? Settling in okay?"
"He's fine, Mr. Wayne."
"I don't suppose I could talk to him, could I? I'll be real quick, I promise."
"Mr. Wayne, it's MIDNIGHT. Jack is SLEEPING, like normal six-year-olds do at MIDNIGHT."
'He is not sleeping, you stupid woman, get out of bed and go look-' Bruce worked to calm himself down. He couldn't let even a hint of his anger and frustration seep into his tone. "You could just peek to make sure, though, right? Maybe he can't sleep because he's in a new place all alone. Poor kid, I hope he's not lonely. He's got Bear the bear with him, right? His teddy?"
"Uuuugghh, Mr. Wayne..."
"It's very important, you know! Why, when I was a kid, I couldn't get to sleep unless I had my bear Zorro with-"
Ginny hung up. Bruce sat there, hand pressed to the headset, trembling a little with suppressed outrage. Then, after a long moment, the camera in the hallway showed the door to the master bedroom open. Bruce relaxed for a moment, then clenched his teeth when Ginny shuffled right past Jack's room and went to the kitchen to get a glass of milk. She puttered around for a few minutes, and Bruce wanted to throttle something. At last she headed back toward the bedrooms, and he was literally on the edge of his seat, willing her to stop and check inside Jack's room.
To his intense relief, she paused outside the door. Then she pushed it open and peered in.
He relaxed a little when he saw her body go rigid with tension. She stood there for a moment, then snapped the light on. She began rushing through the house, calling frantically for Jack, then woke her husband.
"Oh, thank you so much, Sherry, that's wonderful!"
Bruce's attention was abruptly pulled away from the Reynards when he realized that the agency must have found someone who'd agreed to take Peter for at least one night. He nearly jumped at Tim's gentle hand on his shoulder. "I'll keep an eye on the Reynards. Dick's got Jack."
Bruce stared around the cave. Jack was in Dick's lap, one hand holding the chew fidget he was sucking on and his other hand clinging tightly to the Nightwing uniform. As Dick sang to him, he stared over his oldest brother's shoulder, tears trickling down his face, intently watching Alfred mend his bear. Duke was still on duty for Cassandra and Damian, so Bruce moved over to a different computer to resume tracking Peter.
Sherry Henderson. Bruce looked up her records and got a bad feeling almost at once. Although none of the accusations had been proven or pursued, there were several claims of abuse or neglect involving the children in her care. 'I can't let Peter-' Short of kidnapping, though, which would just make things worse in the long run, there was nothing he could do to get the boy into a better home. 'It's just for one night.' Presumably. He still needed to get to that address. "What's the status on the Reynards?" he demanded.
"They've reported him missing," Tim said. "I nudged some evidence, so the police will hopefully look up the taxi records and security cam footage from the convenience store near where Jack got picked up."
Tim had it covered. "I'm going to deal with Peter's placement. How is John?"
"Give me a minute."
While he waited, Bruce looked over at Jack again. The little boy had fallen asleep in Dick's arms, with the repaired Bear nestled in his own. "...Good?" he signed hesitantly.
Dick shifted a little so he could sign back, "My baby."
"They are desperate now, so they might let us keep him." Unless the Reynards were insistent. "Take him to bed."
"Other birds?"
"Tim is checking on John. I'm going to see Peter soon."
Dick frowned disapprovingly.
"I will not let him see me. I'll guard only."
"I hate this."
"...Should we have kept them?"
"Yes!"
"They were frightened. John is a suicide risk."
"They're MORE scared now! J is STILL a suicide risk! They're separated! We screwed up!"
Jack, disturbed by Dick's emotional signing, stirred and whimpered.
"Bed," Bruce demanded, and this time Dick stood up to carry the child upstairs without protest.
"Trouble," Tim said.
Bruce came to at the screen showing camera views from John's group home. Apparently the boy was throwing another fit; most of the night staff had converged on him, and the other children in the home were standing around in their sleepwear, watching. Chase, unnoticed by anyone but his roommate, was having another panic attack. "What happened?"
"Hard to tell from just the hall cam, but I guess John wasn't sleeping. When one of the night staff checked his room, she went inside for a while. She came back out to get a drink for him and what I'm guessing might have been a sedative. She brought it to him, and then seven minutes later, all hell broke loose, and now here we are."
On the screen, John had stopped fighting, though whether because he was unconscious or mentally checked out or for some other reason, there was no way to tell. Two staff members remained to get him into bed; the others started trying to disperse the other children. One of them finally noticed Chase's plight, then others hurried to tend to him, and the children continued either watching the show or occupying themselves during the commotion.
"Keep an eye on the situation," Bruce said heavily. "I'm going out after Peter."
o.o.o.o.o
It was long past midnight when a tired-looking woman showed up. "This him?"
"Yes, Sherry. Really, thank you again, thank you so much, I can't tell you how grateful we are-"
"Yeah, that's fine. Hey, kiddo." She bent down to shake Peter roughly. He woke up with a shriek and took a swing at her, but she slapped his arm away in time to protect herself. The night secretary gasped and hastily looked away as if she hadn't seen. "Let's go, you wanna sleep somewhere better than this floor, right?"
"[chirp-chirp] [warble]," Peter demanded.
"That's nice. Come on, pick up that bag, I'm not carrying all your luggage for you." In the car, she slapped Peter a few times while she was forcing the seatbelt on him, and deftly dodged his retaliatory strikes. He hissed and snarled and crowed, but once the car started moving, he got distracted gazing in fascination out the window at all the passing street lights in the darkness.
When they arrived at the apartment, Peter struggled the whole way up the stairs as a matter of principle, retaliating for all the times she hit him to try to keep him moving. She practically threw him through her front door and shoved his bags in after him. She slammed the door shut and then went to sit in front of the TV and light up a cigarette.
"What the hell," her daughter's boyfriend complained, having just drained his third beer can.
"Some punk kid they couldn't find a home for. Real little monster; keep away from him."
Meanwhile, [caw] rescued Dog and hugged him, then, because the woman wasn't hitting him or making him do things anymore and hadn't tied him, he went to explore. There wasn't much food in the refrigerator or food room, and the woman and man yelled at him and tried to hit him when they saw him looking, so he hissed at them and swiped at them and ran, clutching the little bit he'd managed to steal. They didn't chase him. So this was a food-finding place, not a food-giving place. That was okay, he already ate lots and lots today.
He went on looking. This was the water room, so small and ugly; he liked This Bat's water rooms much better. Another room had lots of kids in it, all bigger than him. Two of them were sleeping; one was playing a game like the ones on [warble]'s phone; two more were kissing. Boring. [caw] went to another room, and there was a woman sleeping in it, and a baby. [caw] petted the baby, it was soft.
He went into the last room, and it smelled bad but the bed was very big (there was food in it, but it tasted bad, so he stopped eating it). He would have played with the ants in the bed, but there was something much better to play with in the corner, it was a dog. A Titus dog, not a Dog dog, except it was little like Dog instead of big like Titus. It was white and smelled like poop and very sad, and probably hungry. It cried and licked licked licked [caw]'s fingers while he tried to break its cage. He pushed his hands on the little sticking out things, it was very hard to push hard enough the exact right stupid way, but finally he did it. Sad Poop was immediately in his lap, licking and licking and licking and whining "Frantic/sad/happy!"
[caw] kissed and pet and played with Sad Poop, and gave her some of the food in his pocket to eat. Her fur was stiff with dried muck, but that wasn't her fault, so he kept petting her. When she finally calmed down, he picked her up, her and Dog squeezed together in his arms, and carried them very carefully to the room with the baby. He crawled under the bed where he and the dogs would be safe, and they all fell asleep.
o.o.o.o.o
Tim called the agency. "Heeeeyyy, this is Timothy Drake, my clone Jack is in foster care. Just wondering why he showed up in Crest Hill a little while ago, unaccompanied."
"Jack- Wait, you mean the little Joker ki-?! I mean, Timothy Jackson Drake, Ctr.?"
"Yup. I'm not complaining or anything, I'm just wondering-"
"He's with YOU?!"
"He took a taxi. Like, an honest-to-God taxicab. He called us from the driveway of Drake Manor, and we went to pick him up. I think he stole his foster parents' credit card."
"Hold on, hold on just a second, Mr. Drake, please don't hang up!" She put him on hold, and Tim almost leisurely eavesdropped on what she was saying out of his official hearing. "Diane! Diane, that was Tim Drake on the phone, that was Jack's prime being!"
"The kid's a clone?"
"Diane, he's at DRAKE MANOR! Or Wayne Manor, or something; he's all the way in Bristol!"
"You're kidding me."
"They Reynards, Diane, call the-! He said, Mr. Drake said Jack went there in a taxi."
"That's ridiculous! The kid is, like, five."
"Diane, just tell them he's been found so they'll stop panicking!"
"All right, all right!"
The Reynards were intensely relieved for about two minutes, then angry. Tim watched the lengthy phone tag between them, the agency, and the police, quietly intervening whenever the timing seemed right, and it was eventually worked out that Jack had, indeed, used Gina Reynard's credit card to pay for a taxi ride from the thoroughfare near their neighborhood to Drake Manor.
"Mr. Drake," the night secretary said, sounding nervous about passing along the message Tim had just heard, "the Reynards...they- Well, is there any chance you can keep Jack at least for the night?"
"I actually want to keep him indefinitely. We had second thoughts about putting the kids into foster care, and Bruce's lawyers are working to get us custody back."
"Oh, good! I mean... It's just, the Reynards have always had a strict preference for younger children, this whole thing about running away and stealing money, that's exactly the sort of fostering experience they wanted to avoid."
"It's fine. Like I said, we want Jack back, he's actually already asleep in his room here."
"I'm so glad... To be honest, I don't know where else we could have placed him, especially so last-minute. We're already having enough trouble with-" She abruptly cut herself off.
"With what?" Tim asked, trying to keep the sharpness out of his tone. "We're also trying to get hold of John and Peter again, too, you know."
"Yes...yes, well, I'm very glad that Jack is safe, I hope everything works out for you! Their new social worker should be stopping by the Reynards' tomorrow, they'll bring Jack's things to you. Good night, Mr. Drake!" She hung up before he could ask anything else.
To be continued...
A/N: Bruce putting on the Brucie act to explain why he's calling in the middle of the night was originally supposed to be for Peter's foster family, but I did not expect for Peter to behave so badly that he didn't even make it through a single night at his first placement. X'''''D
Apparently it's Batfam Week. I think I heard about that being a thing and wrote a note to myself about it, which I promptly lost and forgot about. X''D I wish I could have participated, and I have nostalgia for the days when I used to write stories for tons of pairing days and holidays in the Kingdom Hearts fandom, but unfortunately, I don't think I'll be able to do Batfam Week this year. Even if my responsibilities didn't get in the way, my muse is 100% obsessed with TBWS at the moment. It's cool to see so many other people writing for it, though!