#acab but the veil of fiction lets us pretend there are Some cops really truly trying to make things better etc etc

[weekend-conspiracy-theorist]

an entry in the tim&steph role swap au

"Bullock," Jim said, just pointedly enough to drag his detective's attention away from the shitty breakroom coffee he'd just spilt on his eternally hideous tie. They'd paused in the bullpen on their way out of a conference room, where they'd been discussing the kind of case that made Jim feel ever closer to retirement.

God, he missed Montoya. She'd have had something incredibly crass to say that would at least have made him want to laugh, even if he wouldn't. He couldn't say she hadn't seemed to be happier with whatever it was she was up to these days (he, very purposefully, did not know what that was), last time she'd caught him for a drink, but he still missed her on the force.

Harvey grunted, glancing up as he snapped his fingers at a nearby officer and made a hand gesture that could easily have meant something rude rather than "go get me some paper towels." Luckily, Marquess caught his drift, and with a roll of her eyes she set aside her pen and rose from her desk. "What?"

"Who is that." Jim tipped his chin across the bullpen, sipping from his own terrible paper cup of breakroom coffee.

Harvey looked over. Squinted. "Berkowitz, I think," he said, and then caught Jim's unamused glower out of the corner of his eye. He squinted again--this time not focusing on Officer Piper Berkowitz, who Jim knew at least by sight because Jim made it a point to know all of his officers (and also because she was taller than every other person in the bullpen), but on the maybe-teen with the big camera and the piercing eyes who was inducing that look of begrudgingly amused annoyance on her face. She had her arms crossed over her chest and her hip propped against her desk; closed body language, unwilling to be convinced by whatever had her conversational partner gesturing so passionately, yet where he looked combative, there was an answering tick of a smile on her lips.

Even as Jim watched, his officer unfolded her arms, sighing, and there was a flash of smug victory in the kid's eyes.

Harvey grunted again. "Some kinda PI. He's popped up a few times recently. For one, he was at that club Supergirl and Wonder Girl busted up, few months back."

It was Jim's turn to grunt. What a headache. It made him appreciate the Batman all the more whenever he had to deal with the young adult super powered set. Even if most of the Bat's brood weren't metas, he had no idea how the man handled that many teens and twenties vigilantes at once.

He sipped more of his coffee. Watched the PI lean on the back of Berkowitz's chair as she pulled up what looked like a license plate search on her computer. "Why's he here and what's he want with Berkowitz?"

"What do they ever want?" Harvey asked dryly. "Information he's supposed to be asking for through official channels, I'd assume."

Sure. But why Berkowitz? was the more important part of the question. She was a beat cop with no particular pull in the department; he only even knew her name because he made it a point to know all their names. He hadn't thought she was crooked, or easily bribed or cajoled--no more than anyone else, anyway--nor especially brilliant at her job. He'd know more than just her name, if she stood out from the crowd, either positively or negatively.

Marquess returned from the bathroom, one hand full of paper towels which she shoved into Harvey's chest. "You're welcome," she said, pointedly, and Harvey scowled at her.

"Keep an eye on it," Jim said.

"Sure," Harvey grunted. He was already more focused on blotting coffee off of his tie.

Jim sighed.

***

The PI--the junior PI, he learned--wasn't any kind of priority for Jim. There were a couple dozen private investigators floating around the city, most of them attached to three or four larger detective agencies, most of them getting their work from law firms and bond agencies. The kid's age and his attitude made him an oddity, but--

Jim was a busy man, with a horrible, thankless job. Oddities were just--

Oddities.

Harvey brought him tidbits occasionally, when he bothered to remember that Jim had asked him to be paying attention. Tim Drake had recently turned 21; he worked for Red Bird Investigations; he owned controlling shares in Drake Industries, a company formed and previously run by his now-dead parents, but he had as little as possible to do with the business; one week, he brought in enough evidence to close the case on a string of robberies that had stretched across the East End, after a young woman grew frustrated with the GCPD's progress and hired him on; the next, he broke the nose of one of Jim's officers after getting in between him and one of Gotham's many sex workers. (The incident was under investigation; no charges were being pressed until it was determined whether the officer had in fact attempted to sexually extort the young man as was alleged.)

Most of Jim's rank and file officers seemed to dislike the kid, and the feeling was clearly mutual. Harvey said it was because Drake made himself easy to dislike, but Jim knew it was deeper than that. He was fighting a constant, losing war with his own people to remind them that they were not above the law; that they were public servants; that just because the man or woman beside you wore the same badge as you did, didn't mean you automatically trusted their word above that of the civilian on the other end of their gun. He just could never seem to convince them not to blindly close ranks around each other--even the clean ones seemed to think camaraderie trumped the need for objective detective work.

Tim Drake afforded Jim's officers none of the respect that they believed they deserved for wearing their badges, and that was what they disliked. Berkowitz, Jim assumed, was one of the few officers with her head on straight enough to recognize the kid could be a useful source of information, if an annoying one.

Jim told Harvey to shut it down, next time he heard anyone talking shit about any private investigators, but he knew even as he said it that he was wasting his breath.

***

"Piper."

It wasn't a shout, but the sheer command behind the name had every head in the bullpen whipping towards the door, including Jim's--

He saw disheveled black hair and wide, pale eyes, a swollen nose and heavy bruising blooming across a tense jawline, and then Officer Miles Franklin threw up his arm and stepped in between Tim Drake and the rest of the bullpen. Berkowitz was pushing her way out of the breakroom, but even her lofty height and broad shoulders had a hard time parting the sea of gawking policemen.

"What are you doing in here, Drake?" Franklin demanded. "This isn't open to the public--"

"Out of my way, pig," Drake snarled, actually snarled, and brushed his arm out of the way. "I need to talk to--"

"The fuck did you just call me?!"

Jim had been halfway out the door into the stairwell on the opposite side of the room when Drake burst into the bullpen, but he still found himself shouting and his feet moving the moment Franklin grabbed the front of the kid's shirt, knowing Drake was about to get shoved bodily into the wall--

Drake moved, faster than anyone Jim had seen without a mask over their eyes, and Franklin was the one plastered against the wall as Drake twisted his arm up behind his back.

Half the room was yelling, but Drake's voice carried. "I don't have time to play games with you when there are kids in danger, you self-aggrandizing scum of the earth goddamn poli--"

Berkowitz yanked Drake backwards by the collar of his tshirt. His feet actually briefly left the ground. "What kids, Tim?" she demanded. Steady; calm; a distinct counterpoint to Drake's trembling fury.

"Fuck," he cursed, with feeling, and even before his toes touched back down he was fumbling in his messenger bag for that same massive camera Jim had seen him carrying the last time he was in the precinct. "Piper, I found Carrie Prentiss--"

"The runaway?" Franklin asked scathingly, as he yanked his uniform shirt back into place.

Drake and Berkowitz ignored him, though she shifted between the two of them to break his line of sight on the PI. "It's a fucking trafficking ring, at least ten kids involved, and I think they're moving them tonight. I've got--"

He barely had to shove the camera into her hands before she was already flipping through the pictures in the gallery, her own jaw tightening.

When she noticed a presence leaning over her shoulder, she whipped her head around, something nasty on her lips--but it died when she realized it was Jim. Neither of them had noticed him telling the rest of the room to shut the fuck up and stand down.

"Where is this?" he asked Drake, gruffly, as he took the camera out of Berkowitz's hands; Drake rattled off an address down near the docks, his hands flexing at his sides and nearly vibrating in his boots. Had to have taken him thirty minutes just to get here. "You couldn't just call 911?"

"And have them send a marked cruiser to check my story? Make them move those kids immediately?" A trickle of blood had begun to leak slowly down his upper lip, and he swiped it away with his shirtsleeve, adding sardonically, "I also may have stumbled into some of Falcones' boys in my haste to put enough distance between me and their people to safely make a call to Berkowitz. I was three-quarters of the way here before I shook them."

"Your fucking luck," Berkowitz said flatly. "That's got to be the third time this month you've 'stumbled' into some kind of enforcement bullshit."

"It's a talent. Comissioner, please--"

Jim had seen enough. License plates; faces; identifying marks. Zip ties on wrists too small for handcuffs. "I need SWAT on the phone yesterday," he snapped. "Simmons--"

***

It was a long night.

Most of them were long nights, but this was--

It was a long night.

"Thank you," he said, gruffly, and resisted the urge to give Berkowitz a side eye. She was a full head taller than him; he wouldn't get much out of it.

Berkowitz was the one to bring him coffee, looking tired and faintly apologetic, as he observed Drake's after-the-fact questioning. Jim suspected he wasn't the only one on an adrenaline crash; despite his typical standoffish and abrasive demeanor, the kid had turned over his SD card readily, additionally offered up the case notes he also had shoved into that messenger bag, and was at least neutral, though not quite polite, as he walked Simmons through the work that was going to result in fourteen reunited families, by the time they finished tracking the rest of the kids' parents down.

(Carrie Prentiss's mother was out in the bullpen, holding her daughter tightly and sobbing, comfortable in the knowledge that her decision to hire a private investigator had saved over a dozen lives.)

She just sighed, staring through the mirror at Drake. "He been behaving himself this whole time?"

"More or less."

"Minor miracles."

Jim snorted. He sipped the coffee. "How'd you end up in the middle of this?" he asked, keeping his tone neutral. "Not exactly your beat."

"No, not my beat at all," Berkowitz agreed, and there was something in her tone that had Jim turning, his eyebrows rising. She scrubbed a hand over her face. Left it pressed against her cheek as she watched Drake through the mirror.

"Four years ago," she said quietly, "I'd had my badge just long enough to think I knew a little bit about what I was doing, when me and my partner of the time got dispatched to the aftermath of a home invasion. The paramedics were already there, and it was--well. There've been way nastier murders in Gotham, but not ones I've personally been on the scenes of. The guy's sixteen-year-old son had got home right after the perps left, tried to do CPR; he was covered in blood, had been going so long he'd broken some of his dad's ribs, was refusing to let the paramedics pull him away. Turned out I actually had absolutely no goddamn clue what I was doing, that had become clear the second I stepped into that house, but someone had to get that kid out of there. So I picked him up under the armpits and carried him right out the door." She held her arms out straight, demonstratively. "Kid cursed up a blue streak, fought like a demon, and I just held him there on the front lawn, let him go at it until all the fight just... left him."

Berkowitz breathed in slowly through her nose, letting her arms fall. "When the tabloids came knocking, wanting the scoop on the most violent murder in Bristol since the eighties, straight from the lips of the first responders who had pulled Jack Drake's son off of his lifeless body, I was the only one who told them to go to hell. Guess Tim appreciated that. There are a few other officers he's willing to work with when he has to, but I'm the only one he ever seeks out willingly. He's a perceptive little brat, probably knows I have a hard time holding his attitude against him when I know where it comes from. When I don't always disagree with him."

Jim, as deliberately obtuse as he ever was, definitely did not think about a coat draped over a young boy's shoulders or a black cape that may have one day replaced--

He didn't think about it. "This goddamn city," he said, instead, and Berkowitz snorted.

"Every day I wake up and I think, 'This is it. The day I finally fucking quit.' But I never do it." She scrubbed a hand over her face. "Sometimes I think Tim's probably right, when he gets frustrated with me for acting too much the cop and starts getting nasty about my life choices. I don't know if we can really change things from the inside. But what the hell else am I supposed to do?"

It wasn't like Jim had never asked himself the same question.

"The best you can," he told her gruffly, and drained the rest of the coffee she'd brought him.

***

Jim had added new data points to his list about Tim Drake:

The kid was, objectively, a genius. He was also, objectively, an asshole, and a trouble magnet, and suffering from a terminally self-important case of "being twenty-one years old." It all formed a picture of a brilliant, traumatized teenager who was growing up into an ewually brilliant adult with a massive chip on his shoulder, but Jim didn't--

There were still questions.

Where the hell the kid's boss ever was, for one. It had been a minute since Jim had brushed up on the State of New Jersey's training requirements for private investigators, but he was pretty sure Drake shouldn't have had as much free rein as he did. Why even a traumatized millionaire's son would turn to private investigating instead of running the company he wanted nothing to do with and nonetheless refused to let go of. How he got half the information he turned up with, because even a genius didn't have encyclopedic knowledge of Gotham's crime families because he "liked to keep his ear to the ground," as Berkowitz reported, making scare quotes and rolling her eyes.

The oddity was becoming a genuine concern, low in Jim's gut. Drake only seemed to be blunt and standoffish; Jim became more certain, every few and far between time that he watched the PI move around his precinct, that Tim Drake was a man who played his cards close to his chest; who never gave up more than he got back; who was pulling strings to get what he wanted even when it wasn't clear what that was.

It was time for a second set of eyes.

***

Jim wasn't surprised that Drake figured out what was happening before they made it to the roof of the GCPD. Those sharp, pale eyes of his didn't miss much; they certainly didn't miss the ROOF ACCESS sign or the keycard Jim swiped to open the door.

"Gee," Drake drawled, massive coffee cup in one hand and the other tucked nonchalantly into his pocket. "I don't think I'm supposed to be up here, Commish."

Jim had been amused to realize, the first time he had an actual talk with the kid, that Drake was utterly torn between his instinctive dislike of police officers and his begrudging personal respect for Commissioner Gordon, and he tended to compromise by alternately being sarcastic or quiet, rather than boldly rude and antagonistic like he was with most of the department.

An expression twisted across Drake's face, there and gone before Jim could identify it.

"Special circumstances," Jim said gruffly. He didn't even have to look to find the switch for the Bat Signal; his fingers found it on autopilot. He'd summoned the Bat on accident more than once when he'd come up here to smoke and didn't notice himself going through the motions. "You've helped us close a few big cases recently, and I like to make sure all my resources are familiar with one another."

"Makes sense," he said, with another unidentifiable note in his voice. Amusement, maybe. Not that that made sense.

The Bat wasn't going to take long to show up--Jim had given him something of a heads up in advance--and so Jim was particularly on alert as he lit his cigarette. He didn't go so far as to peer directly into the shadows, but he kept his attention on his lighter and searched his periphery. He felt the shift in the air when he arrived, but wasn't sure yet where he'd landed. Was that corner there darker than normal?

"Batman," Drake greeted calmly, turning his chin to gaze at a different shadowy corner, and Jim felt his eyebrows raise as Gotham's Dark Knight stepped slowly into... well, not into the light. But out of the worst of the gloom.

"Tim," Batman returned, as unflappable as ever.

Jim took a drag of his cigarette, fighting back the surprise that wanted to blossom across his own face.

"OH MY GOD!"

The excited shriek split the night, and Drake--who Jim had yet to see wearing any expression that wasn't some combination of stoic, smug, or pissed off--lit up like a Christmas tree. His coffee cup sailed towards the trashcan by the door (missed, barely) and he sprinted towards--

Jim took an involuntary step forward, a gasp strangling his voice, as Drake leapt off the roof.

He seemed to hang in the air for a moment, and then a second figure, blonde hair and a grapple line streaming behind her, slammed into him. Drake's arms flung around her neck, Batgirl's arms flung around his waist, and she spun him in a circle once her boots touched down on the rooftop, laughing delightedly. In a move too fluid to be improvised, their grips reversed as she was setting Drake down, and then he was spinning her around instead.

"Tim!" she cried, throwing her arms up as she leaned back into his grip. "What the hell are you doing here?!"

"When the hell did you get back from space?!" Drake demanded.

He tried to put her down, but Batgirl was suddenly clinging to him, octopus-like, with all four limbs. "God, check your messages. Literally, I had walked into the Cave when B was like, 'Oh, I've gotta go to the GCPD,' and I was like, 'Fuck yes, it's been forever since I got to hang with the Commish,' and stowed away in the Batmobile. Wonder Girl and Impulse say hi, by the way, and--"

Batman cleared his throat.

His expression, even through the cowl, even through the gloom, was long suffering. Jim--remembering the migraine he'd gotten from dealing with Supergirl and Wonder Girl--felt an uncommon surge of pity towards the man in the cape.

"Go find another roof for your meeting, B, we're busy," Batgirl told him sternly, but she did disentangle herself from Drake, leaving only one arm possessively curled around his shoulders.

"I take it you've all already met," Jim said, with nominal good humor and just enough bite to remind the Bat that their flow of information was meant to be a two-way street.

Batgirl's eyes got big behind the cowl, reflected in the way it pulled at her cheeks. "Ooh, is that what this was supposed to be?" she stage-whispered to Drake. "What'd you do, huh? Break another cop's nose?"

"Another?" Batman repeated.

"Don't worry about it," Drake said calmly. Batgirl cackled as Batman's expression grew further pained. "Officer Pickens has bigger things to worry about. Like the IA investigation." He paused, squinted at the Bat, and added, "Don't give me that look. Unlike all of your little minions--" he flinched as Batgirl pinched him in retaliation-- "your disappointment has literally no effect on me."

Batman, visibly, took a breath. "Honestly, Jim," he said, just a hint more exasperated than gravelly, "I was trying not to jinx you. You don't deserve to have to deal with this."

"What am I, Beetlejuice?" Drake asked dryly. "You say my name three times and I'm summoned from the ether?"

Batgirl pressed her nose to Drake's ear, whispering something that made his mouth curve up in a wicked smirk. He tilted his chin towards his shoulder, telling her quietly, but not quite quietly enough, "Robin and I bonded while you were gone. I think it's giving him a better idea of the kind of shit we used to pull, and he wishes he was still oblivious."

Used to pull, Jim thought. (Didn't think, not really, because he didn't want to know.) They'd clearly known each other a long time. He couldn't remember any male, black haired, teen vigilantes in Gotham when Batgirl had been Robin, which meant--

He wasn't thinking about it. He genuinely, deliberately, would not be looking for 5'8"-5'11" blondes in Tim Drake's personal life.

(Especially not ones who intersected with his own daughter's.)

Jim took a drag off his cigarette. Although...

"There was a kid," he said slowly, "who used to 'run messages' into the precinct on behalf of some anonymous tipster. Montoya always suspected he knew more than he was letting on. Kid had such a baby face, wonder if he's lost it now that he's an adult."

Neither Drake nor Batgirl reacted, in a way that was a reaction in and of itself.

"Sounds irresponsible on behalf of the tipster," Drake managed, keeping his face as straight as possible. "Getting a kid involved like that?"

Batgirl coughed.

"I'm gonna stop asking questions before the answers keep me up at night," Jim decided, stubbing his cigarette out on the side of the Bat Signal--there was a bare spot in the black paint, just there--and tossing it into the trashcan. It stuck on the coffee splattered against the lip, drawing attention to the cup on the ground next to it, and Drake looked faintly embarrassed.

Batgirl cocked her head to the side. "You could've almost looked cool if you'd actually made that."

"I hate you," Drake told her.

"You wish you hated me," Batgirl told him.

"I wish I'd never had children," Batman told Jim.

Batgirl brightened, even as she picked Drake up in a fireman's carry--he yelped, scrambling to hold on--and grabbed her grapple gun off of her belt. "Good thing I'm not your kid!" she said, cheerfully, and for the second time tonight someone jumped off of the GCPD roof.

Jim tucked his hands in his pockets, surveying the living gargoyle in front of him. He waited long enough he thought the kids were out of earshot, then waited some more until the Bat gave him a slight nod. Figured they'd tried to hang around to eavesdrop. "I take it that whatever ulterior motives I'm detecting in him, they're probably nothing to worry about."

"Hngh." Batman shifted, and his cape brushed gently against the concrete rooftop. "I recently found out she's been manually deleting him off of my World Domination Predictive Algorithm spreadsheets for years," he admitted. "There's a lot of uncertainty to those anyway, of course. And I... trust her judgement."

"You trust his?"

"Nominally." The barest hint of a smile. "As far as I can tell, he hasn't ever tried to take over the world."

Jim snorted. "Your opinion has been noted."

"Anything else you needed me for?"

Jim crossed one leg over the other, leaning back against the wall. "Word on the street is Black Mask has been making moves into Triad territory. Any ideas why."

"Mm. Three weeks ago..."