"I'm going to give you a pretty complete tour," Annabeth told him. "Any questions you have, just ask. I can't promise that I can answer them, but I'll try. I'm going to introduce you to the staff, such as we are. And I'll also introduce you to some of our clients here."

"Why do you call them 'clients'?"

Annabeth said simply, "Client is a dignified word. It gives them more dignity than 'welfare recipient' or 'victim' or 'battered woman.' These women and children, they need dignity, and they need to learn to demand it for themselves. The second they walk through those doors, they're under our protection, and that means that we help them achieve the dignity that they've been denied."

She led him out of her office, and down the hall to the elevator. A moment later, they stepped inside; Annabeth positioned herself in the corner farthest from Bruce. "We'll start from the street level and work our way up."

Bruce glanced over at her, not failing to notice that she was certainly keeping her distance from him. "Don't like elevators?"

Annabeth gritted her teeth and lied. "I'm claustrophobic." Conveniently, the doors slid open, saving her from any more intrusive questions.

They stepped out into the waiting room. "Why isn't anyone here?" Bruce asked.

"The waiting room is really just a front," Annabeth told him. "Safe Haven is, officially, a Women's Issues Consulting Firm, which is a big, fat lie. The women that come here don't make appointments, they're not here for consultation, and they don't have the luxury of waiting. They're here because they need help." She led him out to the lobby, where Thomas was sitting. "Thomas, this is Mr. Wayne. Mr. Wayne, our daytime security guard, Thomas."

Bruce reached over and shook Thomas's hand. "So, you're what...like…a rent-a-cop?"

Thomas grinned good-naturedly. "Hell, no. Rent-a-cops are wusses."

That was all Thomas would say, but after studying him for a moment, Bruce was fairly certain the security guard was packing a lot more protection than a taser. What the hell kind of outfit was this, anyway?

As if she had heard his thoughts, Annabeth explained. "The women and the families that come here are usually in some sort of danger. Sometimes they're just terrified young women, being stalked; sometimes it's mothers who have run away with their children, and they know the dads are going to come looking for them. And sometimes their men are just…evil. And we have to make sure they're protected."

And so the tour went, Annabeth taking him through the various levels of the beautiful old brownstone, showing various rooms and offices, explaining, talking, showing. Her voice grew hoarse, but since Bruce Wayne wasn't saying anything—thank goodness—she kept talking.

"So the delivery room and some storage are in the basement. The first floor is the lobby and the faux-waiting room. The second level contains all our offices and storage rooms. And here's the third floor—the common floor." Annabeth led Bruce out of the elevator and into a long corridor. "I'm going to take you into the library; you're going to meet a few of the clients." She held open a door. "After you."

Bruce stepped inside. When Annabeth said library, she hadn't been kidding. The room was enormous. All of the walls were lined with bookcases, crammed with books. There were several small worktables scattered throughout, as well as a few shabby armchairs. In the middle of the room was a long work table. "This is where a lot of the classes take place," she told him.

"Classes?"

"We have an adult literacy tutor who comes in several times a week. We also have a computer tutor, a life skills coach, and a Parenting Counselor."

"Why?"

Annabeth was on firm ground here. She had explained this to many people, many times, and this was her cause. "A lot of our clients end up here because they were never adequately equipped for life to begin with—roughly forty percent of our clients are functionally illiterate. And even if they are able to read and write, usually they just don't have enough education to get by in a competitive workforce, particularly these days. Safe Haven is more than a battered women's shelter—think of it as a halfway house. Our clients come here for shelter and protection and help in becoming self-sufficient."

Bruce nodded. "That makes sense to me."

She led him to the work table. "Have a seat. And don't touch anything.I'll be back in a moment." Annabeth spun around on her heel and exited the room, leaving Bruce to gather his thoughts. Playing dumb was really rather exhausting, and it was hard to continuously dissemble to people as sharp as Annabeth. But regardless, he was learning something—

His thoughts were interrupted as the door opened again, and Annabeth returned, leading a group of people. Six women, three children. They stared at Bruce, and he stared right back.

"Missy," Annabeth said gently to the woman nearest to her. "This is Mr. Wayne. He wants to know about some of the folks that come in here. You want to tell him a little about yourself?"

The woman nodded, and sat down across from Bruce. Following her lead, the other women and children sat, too. Annabeth positioned herself by the door.

The room was silent.

"Hi, Missy," Bruce finally said. "It's alright that I call you Missy?"

The woman nodded. She was very nervous, and her large blue eyes constantly darted about the room. Finally, she seemed to calm down, and spoke. "I came here about three months ago now."

"What brought you here?"

Annabeth frowned slightly. Bruce Wayne had altered his voice, dropping it down to a lower octave…it was almost hypnotic-sounding. Soothing, actually.

Apparently, it worked on Missy. "I was a prostitute, down in the Narrows. My pimp—he kept getting rougher and rougher with me. I wasn't making enough to keep him happy. One night, he took a switchblade, started carving me up." She pulled her hair back to reveal several faint scars along her left cheek. "Two other girls managed to pull him off of me, and I took off. I ended up in the emergency room, and one of the nurses told me to come here."

From where she stood, Annabeth prompted: "What are your plans?"

"I want to become a nurse," Missy said promptly. "That nurse in the emergency room who helped me, she was so nice. I can't remember the last time someone treated me like a human being. I think it would be so wonderful to save lives like that, just through basic kindness."

Annabeth walked over to Missy and squeezed her shoulder. "Right now Missy's learning basic secretarial skills, and next week we're going to put her in touch with an employment agency. Once she gets a job, we're going to get her set up with her college entrance exams, see about scholarships; once she's standing on her own, we'll see about finding her an apartment."

The woman sitting next to Missy spoke up. "It's going to be harder for you, Missy. We're really lucky." She was holding a child in her lap, a boy who couldn't be more than four or five. She turned to Bruce. "Missy's working hard to get to where she needs to be. She doesn't say much, but it's been an uphill struggle for her sometimes, I think."

"What's your name?" Bruce asked her.

"Brianna." She kissed the top of the boy's head. "This is my boy, Luke. And my daughter, Caitlin." She nodded to a girl sitting next to her.

"What brought you here?" Bruce was transfixed by the silent children. They regarded him with big, fearful eyes.

"My husband. He'd been hurting me for years…but then he started in on the kids. Caitlin…show the nice man your hands."

The girl slowly walked over to where Bruce sat, and slowly extended her arms, stretching out her tiny hands. Angry burns covered her palms and fingers. In some places, the skin was beginning to grow back, but there would be scars. Caitlin looked up at him, her eyes pools of fear and misery.

Annabeth watched him closely as he stared at Caitlin's hands, and then at Caitlin. He reached out, almost touched her hand, but then reconsidered. He turned back to Brianna. "How did that happen?"

"I was working late at school one day. Caitlin and her father were at home…he told her that she had to make dinner since I wasn't home. Caitlin didn't know how to make dinner…she's just a little girl, you know? But she tried. And of course, the food was burnt—so her father took her to the stove and pressed her hands into the hot burner. He said that she would remember not to let the food burn in the future."

"Daddy hurt Caitlin," the boy, Luke, confirmed. "And now Caitlin doesn't talk."

Brianna's voice trembled. "When I came home, I found their father drunk, passed out. I packed a bag for us, and I took Caitlin to the hospital. And I came here."

Annabeth finished the story: "Brianna's an elementary school teacher, in one of the suburbs. But she can't go back to work, because she knows her husband's looking for her. They're staying here until we can relocate them to a different city, with different identities. Once that happens, they should be okay."

A young woman in the corner spoke up. "I'm Gillian." She was beautiful, Bruce could see. Strawberry blonde hair and grey eyes. "I came here about five months ago. I'm an emancipated minor."

"Gillian's staying with us until she graduates, next summer," Annabeth informed Bruce. "She's sixteen now, and she'll be seventeen then. We helped her petition for emancipation when she came here."

"Why did you come here?" Bruce asked her.

"My parents are dead, and I lived with my aunt and uncle. My uncle's a junkie. My aunt barely makes enough to support his habit. One night, his dealers came by, looking for payment. He didn't have the money, so…" her voice caught, and she looked away, unable to meet Bruce's querying gaze. Annabeth finished for her. "Gillian's uncle gave Gillian in payment."

"You mean…?" Bruce didn't want to vocalize what he thought they were trying to say.

"Yes. The dealers raped Gillian in lieu of payment."

Slowly, the day slipped into afternoon, and early evening. Annabeth continued showing him the building—the kitchen, the common room, the dining room, the private study rooms, the infirmary. Finally, they came to roost in the playroom. Annabeth sat down at an undersized table, ignoring the amused look that Bruce gave her. After a moment of assessing the lack of adult-sized furniture, Bruce gave up and squatted down beside her. As unsubtly as possible, she scooted her chair back a few inches.

Bruce watched as Brianna's son, Luke, played with building blocks. His sister, Caitlin, hovered anxiously nearby, watching as he began to stack the blocks up, and told her a fanciful story about the castle he was building.

"The women and children who come here...is it always this awful?" Bruce finally asked.

"Usually," Annabeth sighed. "Mondays are the worst—we usually get a fresh batch of clients on Monday; the husbands and boyfriend and fathers and pimps usually get rougher by the end of the weekend."

"Have you ever had to turn anyone away?"

Annabeth closed her eyes, an ineffectual attempt to block the memories. "Yes. Twice I've had to do it, right around Christmas. It always gets crowded at Christmas. That particular Christmas, we were simply over-full. We could have gotten in serious trouble with the fire marshals. We normally have some contacts, informal partner agencies or sympathetic people that can take in our clients for a few days, but since it was Christmas, they were all gone, or else filled to capacity themselves. A family turns up—a mother and her three daughters. They were absolutely terrified; the father had been on a drinking binge, and was out to kill them. There was no room, and I was trying to find a place where they could go…but they left before I could."

"What happened?"

"The police found their bodies two days after Christmas. They never did find the dad."

"What about the second time?"

"That was a prostitute, Betty. She was an older woman… had to be in her fifties. I think she was just fed up with the street life. Christmas comes around, and folks get pretty desperate to make some changes. Again, we were overfull. She stayed for a meal, and then thanked us and left. She died of exposure that night. That was a really cold winter."

Bruce shook his head. "I never imagined life could be so horrible." That was a lie if ever there was one, but Annabeth didn't need to know that. Although, he had always thought of life's horrors on a larger scale—world hunger; mobs trying to keep a police force corrupt; megalomaniacs trying to purge the world of its decadence. Concentrating on the big stuff, it was easy to forget about the domestic horrors.

"There's one of our clients that you didn't meet, and that you won't meet. I won't tell you her name, or even her age, other than to say that she's a minor. She's here with us."

"What's the problem with that?"

"She's here without her parents. Unless they come here with a parent, or unless they are emancipated, we're required to turn minors over to the tender mercies of the Department of Social Services. She came to us because she was pregnant."

Bruce shook his head. "I'm still not following."

"In Gotham, if you're under the age of eighteen, you need parental consent in order to terminate the pregnancy."

"And so…? Most Gotham parents are pretty liberated, I would guess."

"In this case, it's more complicated. This girl's father is also the father of her unborn child. She's staying with us so we can find a way to get her to the more enlightened city of Metropolis."

No amount of training, discipline, or emotional distance could keep the look of revulsion off of Bruce Wayne's face. "Why are you telling me this?"

"You know, I'm really not sure," Annabeth shrugged. "I'm still not sure why you are here, so I suppose I'm trying to get a measure on you. Maybe to see how you react." She sighed, and for a brief moment, the cold exterior and defensive posture she had maintained all day began to slip, just a little bit. Bruce saw it in the slump of her shoulders, the dull look in her eyes. Annabeth was exhausted. "It's a war out there. And we have so few troops to fight it."

For a few moments, the only sound was the soft murmur of Luke's voice. After a moment, Bruce sat down on the floor beside the boy and picked up a block. "Watcha making?"

Against all odds, it seemed that Annabeth had brought in a donor. She allowed herself one brief moment to marvel at the sheer luck of it—fortunately for her, for all of his quirks and eccentricities, Bruce Wayne was a fairly amiable person. Shallow as a kiddie pool, of course, but at least he was trying. Donna would be thrilled.

Her thoughts were abruptly interrupted at this point as Maya darted into the room, her eyes wide. "Annabeth! Thank god! I thought you'd already left. I can't find Donna, and we need your help downstairs."

Annabeth was already on her feet. "What's wrong?"

"A new girl showed up…she's getting hysterical, and she doesn't speak English. Annabeth, it looks like she's hurt pretty bad."

The peace of the playroom was shattered. Annabeth was aware of Bruce Wayne watching her. "I'll be back when I can. Wait here." And like that, she was gone, following after Maya.

Wait here. Bruce could be a patient person...but only when it suited him and his agenda. And now was not one of those times. He got to his feet, gave a final smile to Caitlin and Luke, and headed after the two women. Time to do some digging.

As soon as he was certain Annabeth had left, Bruce poked his head out into the hallway and looked both ways to make sure Annabeth had left, and to make sure there were no Safe Haven clients about. It wouldn't do for anyone to catch their newest benefactor snooping. If they did, of course, Bruce could just claim that he had gotten lost—most would take that explanation in stride.

Fortunately, the hall was clear, and so he moved quickly towards the elevator, where he recalled that Annabeth used a security code to move between the floors. He paused, giving himself a moment to recollect the numbers that he had seen her punch in—good thing he had been pretending to check her out when she keyed them in. It had distracted her from the fact that he had actually been memorizing her code.

Where to go? Annabeth's office was the logical starting point, although he wondered if she would keep any incriminating information in there. Of course, he was also beginning to doubt the existence of any incriminating information, period—but he had to make sure. The elevator opened onto the second floor, and he cautiously poked his head out. Again, the hallway was clear. He checked his watch, and realized that it was almost seven in the evening. No doubt those who weren't trying to be nosy about the latest arrival were clustered around the table in the dining room.

Moving with silent swiftness, he approached her office. The door was closed and locked, but it only took a few moments of tooling about with it for the door to swing inward, without protest. Bruce smirked to himself and allowed himself to revel in his good fortune; Safe Haven may be trying to protect their client's identities, but they had to do it on limited funds. He'd have to make sure they could afford some deadbolts in the future.

The office was as cluttered as it had been when Annabeth had first invited him in that morning. He looked around quickly, taking in the shelf of textbooks, the piles of notes and papers, the stacks of files. No time to sift through any of that. He moved to her desk, the only area that was reasonably uncluttered. A few moments' rifling turned up an address book, which he swiftly pocketed, but little else. He turned his attention and efforts towards the desk drawers.

As he slid the last desk drawer closed, Bruce frowned as a thought occurred to him. What was the most telling of Annabeth's office was the lack of things. Specifically, her desk was completely devoid of personal items. There were no pictures, no trinkets, no objects that indicated that Annabeth had any sort of identity or existence beyond Safe Haven. Not even so much as a tube of chapstick. Which, when he thought about it, didn't say much; his desk at Wayne Towers was equally bare, although he spent a surprising amount of time there. The more he thought about it, the more confusing Annabeth became. There was more to that efficient, cold woman that met the eye, and he was willing to bet anything that she was hiding something.

Just not in her office, dammit.

When Bruce emerged back into the hallway, he became aware of a babble of voices echoing from down the hall—he heard both Maya and Annabeth, their tones low and urgent, and a third voice, higher pitched, catching with sobs. As he slowly made his way down the hall, the voices grew louder, and he saw that they were coming from one of the private meeting rooms. The door was open, and their voices spilled out into the hall.

"…called Doctor Galop; she said she'll be here in fifteen minutes."

"Poor girl." That was Annabeth. "She's terrified. I'm not even sure what language she's speaking."

"Shoam mitooni ke komakam konid?"

Bruce peered into the room. Maya and Annabeth were standing by one of the chairs, their backs to the doorway. A young girl sat close to them, huddled tightly against herself, rocking slowly back and forth, crying. Briefly she lifted her head to speak imploringly to the women, and Bruce felt a sharp wave of surprise, and then disgust, as he caught a good look at her face—one side bore the evidence of a severe beating; the eye swollen shut, the lip bleeding. She held her arm at an awkward angle, and he saw that it was broken.

Maya was saying to Annabeth, "It sounds like a Middle Eastern language. And she does look like she could be Arabic."

"Where could we get a translator?" Annabeth began pacing. "We can't go to Immigration. Who else?"

"What about that one girl, over at Social Services? She's pretty discreet."

"Kami Engilisi."

In hindsight, Bruce knew that that was the moment that changed everything, for everyone. It was the moment that he got personally involved with Safe Haven, and more to the point, it was the moment when Safe Haven got personally involved with him. Perhaps the motivation was the poor girl's pain and terror; perhaps it was his own inability to do nothing when he could do something. He could do something, and so has a moral obligation to do so. Unnoticed by either of the women, he slipped into the room and squatted down so that he was level with the girl. She regarded him with her one good eye wide with fear; brown depths swimming with tears. Up close, she looked incredibly young.

"It's Farsi," he said, almost to himself. And then, louder: "She's speaking Farsi."

"How'd he get in here?" Maya had just noticed him.

He ignored both of them, and reached for the girl's hand that wasn't broken. When he spoke, it was in the voice that Annabeth had heard him use earlier, when he was talking with the children. And when he spoke, his words caused both women to stare at him in disbelief.

"Salam. Ese e man Bruce. Esm e shoma chist?"

"Esm e man Marjane Saberi. Shoam mitooni ke komakam konid?"

Bruce turned to them. "Her name is Marjane Saberi, and she's asking for our help."

"For the first time in your life," Annabeth said, "You are going to be useful. Can you speak her language, then?"

"My Farsi's pretty rusty, but I think I can manage." Bruce flashed them his trademark grin. "I went to Princeton for a couple of semesters, and the Persian girls were incredibly cute. That's how I learned the language." Fiction is the better part of valor.

"I want you to translate—but do it directly, first person. Ask her how old she is?"

He nodded, and turned his attention back to Marjane. "Chand salet hast?"

"Shānezedeh. "

"Sixteen." he told them for her.

Maya and Annabeth exchanged a worried look, and Bruce remembered what Annabeth had said about minors. To Marjane, he began to ask a string of questions, gently probing for her story. As soon as she began to talk, Bruce translated, the first-person words sounding almost absurd coming from him.

"I come from Tehran. I arrived here four months ago. My parents are secular Iranians, but they wanted me to have a better life. They had me smuggled into the country for an arranged marriage. My father said that life in America would be better. But he was wrong. It's much worse." Bruce paused as Marjane began crying again, her small body shuddering. "I married a man who is much older than me. He's forty-two. He's awful." She kept speaking, but Bruce fell silent.

"What's she saying?" Annabeth asked him. "Please, you have to tell us."

Bruce looked back at them, over his shoulder, and Annabeth was momentarily shocked to see that his blandly handsome, cheerful face had been replaced with a visage as hard as stone. "She says that he hurts her, every night…" he swallowed. "That he makes her bleed. And that he hits her when he's done with her. Sometimes he hits her before, too."

Marjane yanked her good hand out of Bruce's, and covered her face with it. Her sobbing began again in earnest as she cradled her injured arm, and she choked out her next words. Bruce resumed translating directly.

"This morning I found out I was pregnant. I told my husband and this is what he did to me. He was angry with me, and told me that it was my responsibility to make sure this didn't happen. But how could I know? No one ever told me. And now I am sharing my shame with strange men and women, because I have no where else to go."

She continued sobbing, rocking back and forth, as the three adults stared at each other. Maya and Annabeth looked resigned; Bruce was aghast. Even though he knew this happened all the time, this was the first time he had ever been exposed to it. He was shocked not only at what he had learned, but also, that it had cut at him so deeply.

In his early twenties, after he left Gotham but before he had begun spelunking the depths of his own darkness, Bruce had done a fair amount of fairly innocent globe-trotting. He wandered alone, disdaining the company of his equally privileged peers who were more intent on broadening their sexual experience and closet contents than they were on their minds and horizons. In those years before he became one with the criminals, he was fairly unhappy, but also fairly naïve. He was on a quest, a quiet, unobtrusive quest, searching for something—he knew not what—and wouldn't stop until he found it.

One of the places he came to roost at for a few months was a curious little settlement in a remote region of India. Men and women lived there, communally, secularly, yet mainly devoting their efforts to maintaining a Spartan existence of meditating and little else. Bruce stayed with them for a few months, seldom speaking, often listening, sometimes participating. He grew close to a wizened and wise old woman, a widow who had long ago decided to tend to these strange, remote people. Day in and day out, he watched her go through her chores, of which there were many, and he would help her with the manual tasks which were slowly becoming to be too much for her.

Right before Bruce left, the monsoon season began. One day, as the storms were sweeping through the region, he had suddenly begun to talk. He told her about himself—his past, his parents, his anger, his grief. She had never interrupted him, only listened as he talked. Finally he fell silent, the effort of revealing his pain having exhausted him. He looked over at the old woman, who continued on with her methodical basket-weaving, occasionally glancing up and looking out at the torrential rains that beat down beyond their flimsy hut. When she finally spoke, she uttered words that stayed with Bruce long after: "Fortune presents gifts not according to the book."

As soon as the monsoons cleared away, Bruce had left. But the old woman's words lodged themselves into his head, and arose at odd—yet somehow telling—moments in his life. And as Bruce looked across at Annabeth, and then at Marjane, he realized that fortune did indeed present gifts not according to the book. He didn't deserve all he had been born with, and yet here it all was in his possession, a charmed life by any outsider's standards. He had approached Safe Haven as a way to investigate Annabeth, and while he would still do that, he had also become committed to helping Safe Haven, regardless of what Annabeth was involved in. Fortune was indeed odd, but he would not question how he came to this point.