Work Text:
GCPD and CGFD, national guard contingents, and the Batman have swept roughly three-quarters of the depopulated areas of Gotham in the weeks since the Deluge. There's only a tenuous and shifting delineation between human and vermin, especially in Gotham.Like rats, people keep skittering and slinking back into the abandoned zones. Cleared and reoccupied only to be cleared again. Logistics and deployment of personnel become nightmares, to say nothing of the basics of disseminating disaster relief supplies and suppressing vandals, looters, and predators of all stripes.
Wayne Enterprises has found its civic pride revitalised; stock prices plummeted on optics and rebounded within only a handful of news cycles, and then disaster relief efforts aided by Waynetech, and some deft manipulation of public sentiment in the window of opportunity, sent them soaring higher than that, all thanks to Alfred and Lucius' deft hands on the corporate wheel.
It's left Bruce free to work.
Nonagenarians who'd refused initial evacuation or slipped through the cracks because they had no families, all barricaded inside already ramshackle tenements, almost collapsing with rot even before the floodwaters came in and left every slumlord's basements and foundations rotted out and reeking, everything festering with burgeoning mold.
Punk kids on dares, getting lost in the tangle of decaying complexes or taking a spill and fracturing a leg or cracking a rib.
The omnipresent homeless, destitute, drug addicts, and low level criminals out of work but with plenty of opportunities for looting the remnants of departed people's lives, and the human runoff of Arkham, set loose on the streets to ooze their way into alleys and entryways below street level, anywhere the shadows stretched out, because of budget cuts, downsizing.
All stinking into dangerously condemned buildings.
Weeks spent grappling with all of them, breaking and binding up when appropriate.
Now, a little black shape, all spindly limbs coiled up in the dark. Almost luminous eyes in the dark recess of an abandoned bedroom in an apartment complex that should have been scheduled for demolition before the flood. Long mould stained.
Were it not for the low light optics embedded into his cowl, he might not have seen her. Just a heap of discarded flesh in a city that bought and sold and squandered it so very easily.
Strips of soiled gauze wrapping, faintly stained with blood that's seeped through the fabric, is coiled about her forearm - and it is a her under the shaggy black mop of hair that brushes the shoulders of her begrimed tan shirt. As he reaches for the pouch with hydrogen peroxide and gauze, hands moving on instinct, he's the one who stumbles.
Keen eyes fixate on him, the girl unmoving. Not paralyzed at the faint impression of a nightmare shape looming in the dark, or jolt of animal panic.
Batman doesn't scare her in the middle of a pitch dark night and city-wide crisis.
Not a dollop of fear or modicum of instability; no assessment of the room for exits or weapons because it's already been read.
Deep calls out to deep, and he recalls the echo.
Bruce is not good with kids.
Batman is terrible with kids.
And this one is ... different.
So small, too, like a little mouse, tucked up under to a mother's belly, nursing. Arms like the emaciated bones of a bat's membranous wings.
So, caught on the back foot, looking her straight in the broad and blow-wide eyes that don't flit about, steady and sure and keen and piercing down through the leather and Kevlar and plate, he's at a loss.
What does Vengeance say to a child?
What does a man say to a little lost girl, gazing at him, unflinching, unsurprised?
Nonplussed.
Something riots in his belly, trickles upwards, against gravity, against nature, into his throat and then washes back down his spine, a shiver under insulated body armour.
It's not a foreign feeling, but never with a child.
So he stands there, having eased himself out of the shadows beyond the entryway to what he'll think of as her room. Rusted hinges on the broken frame, the pressboard door itself laying on the rent and partly sodden, unstable floorboards next to the windows. Slats of illumination phase in and out on the carpet, next to a bedframe with no mattress, as a searchlight sweeps the window and moves on.
For a moment, the light catches them and they're bared to each other.
No.
That's not right at all.
They allow themselves to be caught by it. The light can't catch him if he borrows deep enough, runs fast enough without pause, without sleep, without thought.
Not a hint of sound from her, the head quirking infinitesimally at the flicker of proper sight.
Her face upturns, smeared with soot and grime that's caked into every wall of the partially burnt out apartment complex. Tattered and soiled bedsheets and a comforter lay under her in a frumpy, musty heep.
She's nesting.
There's really nothing for it at this point; every stalemate has to be broken in one way or another.
"Hey," he says and it sounds so insipid he almost bites his lip. Like he's been thrown back twenty years and is trying and failing to learn how to talk to other kids like they were the same species.
Her head cocks, but she doesn't withdraw further.
Assuming, in hope, that's an invitation, he takes a deliberate step into the room.
"It's alright," he continues as gently as he can. "Let's get you home."
God. Clomping to an abandoned bedroom in combat boots and tactical gear, "The Batman" can't say that without sounding ridiculous.
Blatant confusion twists up her face rather than laughter. Tiny fists clutch at one of her blankets and heave it aside.
Another step closer.
"Do you not know where your home is?" Doesn't sound any less stilted, unnatural.
No. That wouldn't provoke confusion. He stops, halfway to her, trying to make himself small. It's more difficult than he would have thought.
The eyes narrow into something semi-feral.
He thinks.
He's never worked in studying children.
"Do you- can you tell me your name?"
Nothing.
No reaction.
No sign of registering.
Not even a suggestion of trauma or shock.
"Come on-" he extends a hand slowly. "Let's get you back to your mom and dad."
Then she stands - leaps up. Instantly, without time for thought, a flurry of movements, quick and exact, striking out at him like she's shadow boxing, running a kata.
He doesn't understand at first, backing off half in confusion and half due to the impression that she's warding him off.
A retreat, and she repeats the motions more slowly.
Something flickers through his memory, from months better forgotten and lessons engraved into his muscle memory, immune to failures of recollection.
Old homilies. An oily, sardonic whisper of a joke.
He recognizes the stance, the mercurial shifting, the echo of an old voice.
The mark of Cain.
A stutterstep backwards, foot curving in a flowing arc to allow the body to pivot; her stance shifts.
He glides forward, shoulders turning to open himself with a kind of subtlety that's alien to Gotham. No direct line of attack; hands unclenched, palms half visible.
There's reciprocation, move and counter-move, muscles coiling and releasing, footwork more elaborate than any dance he can recall from childhood Wayne galas he was forced to attend in stiff, coarse dress suits.
They're free and strangely, perfectly bare to one another. Without pretense.
No masks, despite the heavy smears of black greasepaint slathered around his eyes, leaving them sunken and bruised under his cowl.
It's gentle, sweeping and slow.
Surreal as he takes his cues from a child who can be no more than seven. Looks like she's five.
Defects litter his fluid motions. Openings, unexpected withdrawals that she adapts to with almost musical, antiphonal gestures and postures, allowances.
He shows that he knows her. In a way. That it's okay.
She tells him that she already knew.
The whole conversation was finished long ago.
He, like a dullard, was listening to it on replay, slowed down to a fraction of the speed, slow as oozing honey over snow.
The tight, spiralling manoeuvres draw to a close without genuine contact. Just a brush. A whisper. Theatre.
A very old performance with a thousand new questions that will have to wait.
The distance has been closed, though, and, with a stab of electric flame shooting from his spine into his belly from new bruising acquired last night and the crunching of leather, he kneels before the girl who barely reaches his hip.
It puts them on a level.
His smile is wrong. Not reassuring the way he tries to make it. The rest of his body can be mastered. Beaten into form. All it takes is training and will.
Too broad or maybe too many teeth, lips peeled back and quirked, and in no way gentle.
Awkward.
Something he knows he should feel often as Bruce Wayne, but he rarely does.
Perhaps she mimics him, and that's why the dimples that form in her cheeks and the pinching around her eyes makes her look no less awkward than him.
Maybe more, the contrast so jarring between the wide grin, all excess, and diminutive head, almost small enough for him to cup in his palm, he thinks.
With her hand, slender and delicate, lost in his gauntlet, they walk out of the derelict room.
Lot of maybes.
Though, glancing down at her still grinning face, her expression baldfaced and earnest as they thread their way towards a stairwell, he is sure that, even if that smile is as awkward as his feels...
Hers is undoubtedly cuter.