Chapter Text
There’s a situation down at the fire station on Ninth. Bruce gets the info from Jim, the two of them standing on either side of the light of the batsymbol, blazing like a wildfire across the smoggy Gotham skies. It’s small fries, Jim says, compared to the things they normally bump up to the Batman—but there’s something about it. Could he just… take a look?
Bruce doesn’t bother to agree before he disappears. He’ll check it out on his way to do surveillance on the Chinatown mobsters. They’re planning something big, he knows it, but it won’t go down until early in the morning. He’s got time.
When he gets to the station, all the trucks and ambulances have been moved out of the garage and parked in the street. Most of their crews are with them, long since past craning their heads at the only open doorway and the light spilling out there. The whole place is on lockdown, but not the kind for armed gunmen—it’s not to protect people from the person inside, but rather to protect that person from the people.
It’s easy enough to guess the scenario. This place is near the Narrows, the part of the city with the highest density of homeless omegas—one must have gone into heat nearby. Most of the shelters and clinics offer free heat suppressants and scent patches, but occasionally someone won’t take them, due to various mental or physical health restraints—the best the community can do when they inevitably go into heat is corral them into the nearest safe space and call a heat welfare service to come and get them.
Bruce cranes his neck around a gargoyle, taking in the spread of emergency response vehicles until—there. That’s CHS, Community Heat Services, the largest of the heat welfare services. The head responder is out talking to the fire chief, hugging a foam cup of steaming coffee to their chest.
Bruce’s first instinct is to walk away. He’s even reaching for his grapple gun when he rethinks it. Why they need Batman when a community expert is already there, he’s not sure, but there must be a reason.
He sighs, thinking of Tim, currently stuck at home with a sore throat. Tim believes that he’s better than that, better than his darkest impulses, like doing nothing but bloodying his hands on the faces of crooks. He knows he was, once; with Ja—
No. Bruce stops the thought there, excising it from his mind, surgically removing it before it can fully form. He can’t face that, not now. Still… if there’s something he can do here to help, he should. He will. So that maybe, one day, he can stand to look himself in the mirror again.
Thus, gathering his resolve, he drops silently down behind the chattering CHS responder and, interrupting her mid-sentence, says, “What’s the situation?”
It’s been a long time since making people startle has given Bruce any satisfaction, but the small shriek she lets out, fumbling her coffee cup, almost gets him there.
He doesn’t smirk. It will be fleeting, anyway, any satisfaction he feels. It always is. Except the rage. The rage… and the grief.
“Jesus,” the beta says, a hand over her heart, eyes wide. “Sorry, I mean—Batman. Sir.”
He doesn’t bother asking again, turning instead to the fire chief. Thankfully, they’ve had dealings before, and he’s prepared to answer.
“Omega minor in heat,” he says, succinct. “Nonverbal, non-responsive to attempts to talk to him, maybe some kind of intellectual disability. Became combative when we tried to physically move him.”
Bruce grunts. “I’ll see what I can do,” he says, grappling off before the community expert can put up a protest. He’s read all the same manuals she has, and probably more—he’ll figure this out. He always does.
It doesn’t take long to get up to the roof of the fire station. There’s a door there that leads down into the depths of the common areas—he uses it, expertly picking the lock and slipping inside. As soon as he does he strains his ears, listening for—ah.
It’s easy to pick out once he knows what to look for. A low voice, trying to be soothing but rough from overuse—and below that, sounds of bird chatter coming from a low, tinny speaker—and below that, the thick, rumbling growl of an unsafe omega, wordless and uneasy.
They’re young, heat-sick, maybe even presenting for the very first time. Voice has a slight uptick at the end of every breath, and each breath is shorter than it should be, signifying a decreased lung capacity, maybe due to illness or injury. Most likely it’s an injury, as there isn’t the distinctive wet crackle of fluid in the lungs. The echo places them at the very back end of the open garage, probably tucked right up against the equipment cabinets there. They feel cornered, trapped—the buzz of their growl signifies an omega that is ready to lash out. From the sound of it, they’ve done it already—Bruce wonders idly if whoever got hurt has already been treated. Most likely, if they made it outside to the ambulances.
But the kid… if they’re injured…
…all alone, on the streets…
…god, they sound about as old as J—
No. He needs to stay on track, get this sorted out, and to do that he needs more information. He needs to gather intel before he goes in—the last thing he needs is to startle an omega in sick-heat.
Taking care, he scales the railing of the open second floor, hooking a line and lowering himself down until he can get a look at the garage. Inch by inch he goes, eyes sharp and the tech in the cowl’s lenses focused on the far end of the room.
He catches sight of the second CHS responder first. They’re crouched down, nonthreatening, a scent-blocking patch displayed plainly on their neck. They don’t seem to have triggered any attack reflexes, but neither are they making headway. Most of these teams don’t have tranqs in their standard gear—it’s generally considered detrimental to an omega to be moved from one location to another while unconscious and in heat—but they may have another team on the way who are more suited to circumstances like these. If the kid truly is nonverbal—possibly deaf or otherwise impaired, as well—then it’s unlikely they’ll get anywhere without sedating him first.
Bruce, of course, has tranquilizer darts in his gauntlets, but he’d rather not use them unless there’s no other way. The city likes to chew up omegas to spit them back out, but that’s never been his way—the Wayne Corporation funds services like CHS for that exact reason.
The irony that he’s here to do what they can’t is not lost on him. Life is messy, as they say.
Lowering himself the last few feet to the ground, Bruce unclips the line, allowing it to soundlessly retract into its casing. The responder is doing well, all things considered—they’re saying all the right things, keeping the right distance away, pulling all the correct submissive behaviors. The problem is that the kid isn’t responding to any of it—not in a way a regular omega would.
Bruce edges forward, going the long way around the equipment between him and them. He catches sight of pale skin and dark hair, half hidden from view, from the corner of his eye before he lowers his head in a non-threatening peace display. The scent of heat is strong on the air but he can’t tell much more through the cowl’s filters. He allows his footsteps to make sound as he steps forward, careful and precise.
He expects the growling to ramp up, in all honesty. A second stranger in an unsafe space, especially a rather large alpha, would be enough to get an increase in hostile behavior from any omega. But again, the kid doesn’t display the right reaction, the expected reaction—he has, in fact, no reaction. No increase nor decrease in his endless growl, no movement, nothing.
Bruce does, at least, get a response from the CHS responder. “Are you here to help?” they ask, in the same soothing tone, now directed at Bruce.
“I’ll be taking over from here,” Bruce says, kneeling down. He picks up the phone playing the bird calls, holding it out to them. “This yours?”
The responder hums, grabbing it. “I don’t think it was helping anyway,” they say, with a small, hoarse laugh. They turn to start moving away before looking back at Bruce. “The omegas we get called to have it rough, going into heat when they have no safe place to go. Just… be gentle, all right?”
“Understood,” Bruce says, curt.
There must be something in his voice that he can’t hear, something that gives them the certainty that he does actually understand, because they only nod, beginning to head back toward the open door at the front of the garage. They crawl along the floor until they’re out of sight, taking their phone and the noise with them.
In the silence, Bruce clears his throat. He’s not sure how to approach this, which angle to try—but there must be one. The kid is huddled under a work table, hunched up with his knees to his chest—this close he sounds like he might have been crying, a hiccup to his voice. Bruce wonders if talking will get him anywhere but quickly decides against it—he’s never been much of a talker, but especially not recently. Instead, he does the only other thing that comes to mind—he makes the chirping call that a pack elder might make to a hurt pup.
Whatever reaction he was expecting, it wasn’t for the growl to die off almost instantly in the kid’s chest. Encouraged, Bruce calls again—and at the second call there’s a shuffle, the kid shifting forward, groping for the front edge of the table with one slow hand.
Bruce notices the scars first—scars upon scars upon scars. Burns, mostly, with the occasional healed puncture wound scattered across them, consistent with the heat and shrapnel of a relatively small bomb. His wrist is stiff, several fingers bent crooked as he grips. He’s breathing heavier now, and Bruce is willing to bet now that it’s a badly-healed rib or two.
He calls a third time, encouraging the boy to keep coming even as a sick dread drops in his stomach—dread, because no child should have scars like those. No person should have scars like those. People don’t have those marks… not because nothing inflicts them, but because people don’t survive the wounds.
But one did. Against all odds, this one did. And as he slowly makes his way out of the shadows and into the glow of the fluorescent lights, Bruce feels suddenly like he’s in a dream because—because—
—say it, say his name, croons a vindictive voice inside him—
—because the boy has a face that he recognizes—
—older and more scarred now than when he last saw it—
—more expressionless, even vacant—
—but still the same, ever the same, down to the very freckles on his nose.
Bruce feels like he’s choking, like he’s left his body, like he’s filled head to toe with electricity. He wants to tell the boy to stop, to go back, to come here—he wants to rewind time, to stop himself from leaving a child all alone in the Ethiopian desert. He wants everything, he wants nothing—he wants to go to bed and never wake up, wants to wake up and know it was all a dream.
He can do none of these things. Instead, he hears himself as he calls again, hears the call pour from his chest the same as it did when he held his broken child in his arms, but this time—oh god, this time—
The first thing he feels is heat. The boy is a line like fire, even through the batsuit’s armor. Heat-sick, Bruce reminds himself—and then he’s weeping, curled around the boy because under the heat-scent and the varied scents of Gotham streets, even through the filters of the cowl, he still smells exactly the same.
“Jason,” Bruce says, unable to hold in the name any longer. It floods out of him, coming out like a tsunami—and in response the boy keens, lower than his pup voice but still just a child, still Bruce’s child, right until the very goddamn end.