Chapter 1
Tommy sat on the hard chair and swung his legs back and forth while he waited for the doctors to fix his Daddy so they could go home. He didn't like the hospital very much - there were too many people and it smelled funny – but he wasn't scared anymore like he had been at the beginning. Daddy had said that everything would be all right, and Daddy was never wrong. But there wasn't anything to do, and he was bored. He'd tried playing the watching game, but it was no fun to play alone. Every time he tried to go in and talk to Daddy one of the nurses brought him back to the waiting room. The last nurse had finally thought to order him to stay there; all the others had asked him nicely, which didn't count. His Daddy had told him to obey the nurses when they told him to do something, so now he had to stay in the room all by himself, and the television was broken.
Daddy was always telling him to focus on what you could do, not what you couldn't. Tommy stood up and walked around the room. The nurse had said to stay in the room until someone came and got him. She didn't say anything else, which meant he could do anything he wanted as long as he stayed in the room. And the only thing in the room to play with was furniture. He tugged on one of the couch cushions, but it stayed in place. Then he tried to move the couch itself. With a few minutes of effort, it moved a couple of inches before catching on the carpet and refusing to budge further.
Playing with the furniture was out. Maybe he could play on it? He kicked off his shoes (his previous times in waiting rooms had taught him that most grown-ups don't like shoes on the furniture) and stood on the couch. He walked from one end of the couch to the other, and then stepped onto the table next to it. Could he go around the whole room without stepping on the floor?
He did three laps before deciding that it needed to be more interesting. It was much too easy to walk across the couch cushions and step onto the next piece of furniture. The boy surveyed the room from his perch on the arm of a couch, and then stepped up onto the back. It squished a little beneath his weight, but not nearly as much as the cushions. He stood there for a moment, finding his balance like his Daddy had taught him, and started around again, this time staying on the backs of all the couches and chairs. This was sufficiently tricky enough that it took seven trips around the room before becoming commonplace. He took the tables out of the game, making it so he had to jump across, and was finishing his first complete trip when the door opened.
Barbara sighed as she looked at the nurses' station. When she had gotten the call, she had been surprised, worried, and a little irritated. She hadn't spoken to Bruce in fifteen years (three months, one week and six days), and that particular discussion had ended in an argument with him about giving up Batman. She'd had no idea she was still listed as his next of kin, and being called because he'd had a heart attack was not the best way to find out. Straightening her shoulders, Detective Gordon walked to the desk and showed her ID to the young, harried-looking woman. "I'm Barbara Gordon. I'm Bruce Wayne's listed next-of-kin."
"Thank goodness you're here. We were starting to think we'd have to call social services."
"Or the circus," another nurse muttered.
The first nurse ignored the comment. "Mr. Wayne's doctor is still working on him. Perhaps you should look in on the boy while you're waiting."
Barbara frowned but nodded. It was one of Batman's cardinal rules: act like you know everything, because people will fill you in unintentionally. The young nurse led the way down the hall to a waiting room. "Don't mind Mason. The boy's been something of a handful. Keeps popping up in Mr. Wayne's room unexpectedly, wanting to know what's happening. The first time he showed up behind the nurses' counter Mason dropped her coffee, so now she's in a bad mood." An electronic chime interrupted the woman's cheerful patter, and she pulled a pager out of the pocket of her scrubs. "I have to go. The waiting room is on the left." With that, she bustled away, leaving Barbara on her own without having answered her questions. What boy? No one in his right mind would ever trust the crazy old man with a child.
Putting a little steel into her spine, she turned the corner and opened the door. The small boy tumbling in a controlled fall at her feet was unexpected, but when he looked up and she saw Bruce's eyes in that incredibly young face things suddenly clicked into place and the blood froze in her veins.
He didn't. He Iwouldn't./
But the evidence suggested he had.
The child recovered first. "You're not a nurse," he said, his chin coming up in a painfully familiar manner. "Can you take me to my daddy? I'm bored and I want to go home."
Barbara loathed Bruce Wayne in that moment, both for what he had done and for making her pick up after him. "Who is your father, young man?"
The expression on his face shifted into something remarkably opaque for someone so young. "If you don't know, I'm not supposed to tell you."
She sighed. Of course Bruce would subject the kid to his own special brand of paranoia. It came as a shock that he didn't whip out a child-sized Batarang. "Bruce Wayne is your father," Barbara said. It came out resigned. Bruce Wayne was this boy's father, and she was now stuck with a mess that could bring down untold amounts of trouble onto her head. If Dick found out, the resulting explosion would probably level both Gotham and Bludhaven. "Let's go talk to him."
The boy beamed, an expression he definitely didn't get from his father, and grabbed her hand in an odd show of trust. Apparently anyone that would take him to see Bruce went to the top of the clearance list. He pulled her down the hall and into a large private room, making the turns without error or hesitation. Obviously he'd been this way more than once.
Once he was in the room, the child let go of her hand and ran to the figure propped up on the bed, pushing past the doctor and climbing into the chair nearby.
Barbara spent several long moments wondering who this old man was in Bruce Wayne's room before it clicked. The frail man with lines on his face and thinning white hair, smiling almost gently as the young boy chattered away at him, was the indomitable Batman.
She stepped further into the room and both sets of pale blue eyes were instantly on her. "Bruce."
"Barbara." His face gave nothing away, as usual, but the hand on the boy's arm tightened briefly before relaxing. "I see you met Tommy."
"We were never exactly introduced." Barbara clenched her fists at her side, suddenly furious with the man before her. How could he do this to this boy? For that matter, how could he put her in this situation in the first place? "So where'd you get him, Bruce?"
The old man (old, for heaven's sake, old and frail and just wrong wrong wrong) looked down at the boy. "Tommy, can you go to the nurse station and get us both some juice? I need to have a grown-up conversation with Detective Gordon."
There was a familiar stubborn expression on those small features, and Barbara was struck yet again by the notion that she was looking at Bruce Wayne in miniature. "I just got here."
"You can come back in a few minutes. Maybe one of the nurses will give you a snack as well."
"I don't want a snack," the child said, and scratch the miniature Bruce Wayne, she was looking at a mini-Bat with a full-on glare. "I want to stay here with you."
"Tommy." The boy's defiance wilted at his name. "I need five minutes alone with Detective Gordon. Go to the nurse station." Tommy trudged reluctantly from the room, Bruce watching him with a look of mixed exasperation and fondness that seemed utterly out of place on the old man's face.
"I need someone to watch over him until I get out of the hospital," Bruce said calmly once the boy was gone. He didn't address the question she had asked before.
Barbara stared, amazed at the nerve of the man. "I was thinking more along the lines of calling Family Services about the both of you," she bit out. "There's no way you should be allowed near a child, especially not this one this young. God knows how badly he's already been screwed up."
Bruce looked at her, the same irritatingly implacable calm on his face as before. "You can't do that."
"Give me one reason why not."
"Kent." The name was said with that annoyingly even, seemingly reasonable tone, but Barbara was well-versed in both Bruce Wayne and Batman and she could hear that slight crack in a veneer that masked worry and even a little fear. "If you publicly connect Tommy with Bruce Wayne, no force on earth will be able to protect him. Kent will find him and kill him. He'll probably take out whatever happy, normal family the boy's been placed with as well."
It was the tinge of desperation underlying his words that brought the woman up short, rather than his dire prediction. Bruce Wayne was a master actor who had managed to fool an untold number of people into believing he was nothing more than a billionaire playboy, but she had been trained, by him no less, at seeing through those kinds of facades and discerning the truth. This was the truth, lying behind a mask of control and equanimity: He was terrified of losing the boy, either to death or the well-intentioned people behind Social Services.
"I'll do it," she said, even while a part of her mind cried out in protest. She'd been free of Batman and Bruce Wayne for more than a decade, built a life separate from her identity as Batgirl, and this particular complication was not something she wanted back in her well-ordered life. But as she watched Bruce relax for the first time since she'd come into the room, Barbara realized that once again, what she wanted didn't matter as much as what he needed.
Damn it, this is why she should never have taken the call from the hospital in the first place. She knew she was getting sucked into Bruce and his goddamned aura and the way he could simultaneously be the greatest man she knew and the biggest dick in existence. She knew that by giving him what he wanted, she was giving up some of herself. And she couldn't stop.
What the hell was she going to do with an eight-year-old boy?
Tommy was both everything she expected and nothing like she would have believed, just like his father (and Barbara had to believe that this child was the biological son of Bruce Wayne, despite the man's determined avoidance of the question). He was controlled, far more than any kid his age had the right to be, self-contained and disciplined to a fault, and so unbelievably quick on the uptake that if she closed her eyes and ignored the pitch of the voice Barbara could have been speaking to Dick Grayson, back when he was a teenager and the job and life hadn't turned him cynical.
Then he would follow up some insanely insightful observation with a round of bright, cheerful chatter that she would have previously called the sign of a healthy, well-adjusted kid.
It didn't make sense. Barbara knew the signs of a child in trouble, how a boy who was in some form of abuse should act or react. Tommy was practically a poster-child for how to raise kids in a non-traditional fashion, when he should have issues visible from space. Somehow the most broken adult she knew had raised a normal, happy child, and she had no idea how he had accomplished it.
Well, not exactly normal, she amended after walking into the living room to find him executing a one-handed handstand. Tommy smiled brightly and fell into a roll that neatly avoided all the furniture. "Can I have lunch now? I haven't had anything to eat since this morning, and I'm really hungry."
Lunch. She could handle food. It wasn't that hard, even though she hadn't gotten much in the way of groceries over the past couple of weeks. Had it been three? She wasn't really home much, had most of her meals at the station.
It might be four weeks. Damn.
There was some uncooked rice in the cupboard, a remnant of her aborted attempt to learn how to fix Chinese, and a door full of half-empty condiment bottles and three containers of mold-spotted leftover takeout in the fridge. "How about pizza?" Barbara reached for the phone and a flyer.
"What's pizza?"
Barbara blinked. She wasn't sure why she was surprised; Bruce probably had the kid on some macrobiotic organic diet that prohibited the delights of pizza and macaroni and cheese and other childhood goodies. He probably wouldn't appreciate her corrupting his son, but he probably should have thought of that before he shanghaied her into babysitting. "Kid, I have so much to teach you."
Tommy ended up spending a week with her before Bruce managed to finagle his release from the hospital and bring home a nurse, and the close calls and near misses perpetrated by the boy aged Barbara five years within that time frame. It was no wonder Bruce had a heart attack; trying to keep up with this particular eight-year-old was more than enough for any two people, let alone an elderly billionaire with a heart problem.
It had been hard to walk into Wayne Manor after such a long time. They'd come over briefly so that Tommy could pack a bag, but she'd had a goal and something to focus on then. This time she didn't have such a welcome distraction. Once they'd gone through the door and Tommy had raced off to his father's room, Barbara found herself at loose ends and ended up following him up the familiar stairs.
The old man was settled back against the pillows of his own bed, and Tommy curled up next to him in an oddly gently fashion as the boy filled his father in on everything that had happened during his week-long stay at her apartment. Something about the way they both radiated contentment brought a lump to her throat, so she cleared it and stepped out of the room to talk to the home-nurse that had been arranged. Deirdre had been here earlier in the week to arrange the bedroom and had struck up an odd kinship with Barbara as one of the few people who could put up with Bruce's bullshit. "How's he really doing?'
The nurse set the tray down on a table that Barbara remembered from the old days. She wondered what had happened to the Egyptian urn that used to grace the polished wood. "He's doing as well as can be expected," the woman finally said. She was dressed in practical, colorful scrubs and looked out of place within the confines of the gloomy mansion. "There'll be a long way to go as he heals, and there's no telling if he'll ever be where he was before. Damage to the human body is cumulative, and this wasn't his first time around."
Barbara nodded like this was what she expected, although she planned to corner Bruce later and find out why he hadn't seen fit to share this bit of information. "What does he need?"
"More consistent help," the nurse answered immediately. "Someone to help with the household tasks, do most of the driving, and take care of the boy. There's a reason that people usually have children when they're younger and better able to keep up." She did a remarkable job of not asking about the boy's mother, which was a good thing since Barbara couldn't answer those questions. "Once he's back on his feet, he won't really need a nurse so much as an assistant, someone who can fit into his routine and make the adjustments necessary."
"I'll talk to him about it." It was the most she could promise, although she was hopeful that Bruce would see the logic of it and make the necessary concessions. The real problem would not be convincing him; Bruce had a way with cold logic that she could bend to her purposes. While he had little interest in caring for himself when he was the only one at stake, Tommy's presence altered things considerably. He would agree eventually.
Finding someone qualified for such a unique position would prove far more difficult. A regular nurse wouldn't be enough for Bruce's needs: the only way she would be able to truly sell it would be as a bodyguard and teacher for Tommy. The usual resources would be entirely useless when someone connected to a former hero found out that they would be taking care of a man who participated in the subjugation of a chunk of the free world, and it would be pointless to hope that such a person wouldn't find out. Better to bring someone in that they knew could be trusted from the start. She would have to think about it. "What about for right now?"
"I'll be here for a few weeks, helping Mr. Wayne get back on his feet." She hesitated, glancing at Barbara out of the corner of her eye as she straightens items on the tray, and Barbara's internal alarms start blaring. This woman is about to ask for something. "Can you help with the boy, if we need it? I'm not very good with kids."
INeither am I,/I Barbara thought. Except this particular one seemed to like her, had managed not to piss her off too much in the seven days they spent together, and was already on his way from annoying kid to interesting person. Damn it, when did she become such a pushover? "I'll help out if you need it, but he's a pretty good kid." Barbara debated about handing over a piece of hard-earned knowledge before deciding that the woman was spending forced time with a cranky Bruce Wayne and could use all the help she could get. "The trick to making the kid cooperate is to be specific and make it an order. He'll sneak around the spirit of any request you make." That had been made evident when she'd woken up the first morning with her living room converted into a set of tents, courtesy of the boy's bedding.
The list of people who were qualified to help Bruce and his young protégé started out quite long and grew quickly and progressively shorter as Barbara went along. The Justice Lords had caused a great deal of damage to the world in general, but they'd done even more harm to the hero community. People didn't trust heroes anymore, thanks to the Lords. If you wore a cape or had a superhuman ability, you kept it locked down tight. Even Barbara, with her extensive ties to the old hero underground, had only a slight notion of any current capes. Luckily, she wasn't looking for anyone currently fighting the good fight, though that didn't make her quarry any easier to find.
When it was all said and done, she had to adjust her parameters to people who the Lords had hurt the least, and who had no specific grudge against Batman. That list was a little more promising than the end result of the first one, but only barely. Barbara Gordon had been cleaning up the Justice Lords' mess for the last thirty years, and even she had never quite understood the scope of their actions until now.
In the end it came down to a handful of names, with one in particular at the top of the list. This one would be good at keeping secrets, had no particular feelings toward Batman, and would claw out her own eyeballs before she'd give Kent the satisfaction of knowing about Tommy. As a bonus, she was one of the few who knew Batman's secret identity.
Barbara settled her shoulders, took a deep breath, and called Chloe Sullivan.
It took time and cunning and the kind of sneaky maneuvers the bat-family was known for, but Barbara eventually managed to get a chance to talk to Bruce in private. Tommy, after all, was still an eight-year-old boy and the need to move and run and release all his excess energy was hardwired into his system. Even Bruce Wayne's child had to leave his side to play sometime. Normally she was the one who monitored his time in Bruce's home gym and made sure that he didn't hurt himself while using anything there, but she'd asked Deirdre to handle it while she had the discussion she'd been putting off for a while.
"This is going to be one of those conversations, isn't it?" he asked when she closed the door and came over to sit beside the bed. There was a faint sheen of sweat on his face from the most recent round of rehab and a slight tremble in his hands, but none of that diminished the man propped up in bed.
Barbara nodded. "You're going to need someone around all the time, Bruce. Deirdre is leaving as soon as you're back on your feet, and I can't be here anymore than I already am."
"I can't replace Alfred." His eyes were shuttered off, cold, and she had a feeling that he was equal parts Wayne and Batman right now.
"I'm not asking you to. Alfred can't be replaced, but that doesn't mean you can't have anyone else here ever again." She closed her eyes and prepared to strike the low blow. "It isn't fair to Tommy. Heart damage adds up, and you might never be back up to par. Someone has to help protect him."
Bruce sighed. From anyone else, it would have sounded petulant. "Who do you have in mind?"
Barbara told him, and Bruce considered the name for a long time, long enough that Tommy came back into the room and eventually settled back down with his Japanese lesson. "Call her," he said finally, and turned his attention to the boy.
Barbara wisely didn't mention that she already had. Chloe was on her way.