#and cause i just couldn't justify cutting out all the batfam friends

[antebunny]

Only Children

Barbara has been the last Bat in Gotham for two weeks when her surveillance finds Jason. It is a long-forgotten but somehow still operating security camera in a grainy corner of Gotham that tips her off. Settling in for another long day in, ironically, the Jason Wayne Gotham Public Library, founded almost ten years ago, Barbara immediately receives a notification that one of her searches found a match.

Usually she keeps her day work separate from her night work, for both security and personal mental health reasons. Lately she’s been slipping. For the past two weeks, her mind has slowly been consumed by a burning call to find them find them find them bring them home.

“Please be real,” Barbara says to anyone, any higher power listening. Her laptop itches in her lap as she abandons her desk in the library and heads to a back room, where she can conducts her investigations with more secrecy. 

The stale air of the back room greets her with a swirl of dust as the door slams shut behind her. Barbara wheels herself to the low desk and boots up the desktop. If this notification is a trap from someone who knows or suspects her identity, she wants her personal laptop safe. From the desktop, she opens the surveillance footage that tipped off one of her automatic searches. 

Last night, 4:34 am. West Murray Road. A southbound van (white, no license plate) pulls to the curb. People dressed in all-black clothing spill out of the east-facing doors. There are no distinct features amongst any of them, save for one. He is wearing a white workout shirt, stained deep brownish red in too many places to count, and ripped jeans. The footage is incredibly blurry and grainy due to the time of night and the quality of the camera, but the man’s arms are behind his back in an awkward position which indicates that they are being forcibly kept there. Two of the people wearing black press close to his sides, adding credence to this theory. 

Over his head is a black bag. 

Barbara isn’t one for fits of emotion, but the past few months are driving her to extremes. She pauses the video. Breathes in. “Please be real,” she repeats. “Please.”

A mantra that reveals her worst fears: if she’s hoping that this kidnapped, endangered individual is one of the Bats, what’s the worst-case scenario? 

4:35 am. The hooded man suddenly drops to the ground and rolls backward. His arms flash to the sky. They contort out of something bright and silver. Dislocated joint, Barbara thinks while the horrible, fearful hope mounts. His hands slide around his neck until they find something. A moment later, the bag is off his head. His feet are carrying him backwards. 

But the people in black are coming. And the man’s blind, backwards flight has carried him into a brick wall on the opposite side of West Murray Road. His head scans the street. His eyes find the camera, which the people in black missed, and for one dreadful moment Barbara’s surveillance footage has a perfect 480p view of his face. This is the moment that flagged the searches currently running on every camera that Barbara has access to. 

Jason’s mouth makes the very distinct shape of the letter O. The people in black pile on him like wolves on a wounded deer. He goes down fighting. 

4:54 am. The people wearing black drag him across the street and disappear into a building on the east side. 

“Oh God. Oh my God.” Barbara pauses the footage and allows herself twenty-three seconds of resting her face in her hands and just breathing. Then she gets to work. 

The basic problem is as follows: Barbara has no idea who has Jason. 

The building on West Murray Road is an abandoned liquor store; Barbara can find no sign of legal use since 2019. She can, however, find a long history of mysterious white vans dropping off mysterious customers at that very spot, for at least a year. Clearly, it’s an organized crime group that has Jason. But most Rouges of Gotham are leaders of organized crime groups, including Jason. Red Hood’s band of merry men are slowly falling apart with the sudden disappearance of their leader, but that’s the least of Barbara’s worries. Hell, even the Bats fall under the category of “organized crime.” 

The underlying problem is that Barbara has absolutely no support. She is the last Bat left in Gotham since Jason disappeared. Before that, it was Barbara, Steph and Jason. Steph disappeared on an ill-fated solo rescue mission to save Cass. Right now the best Barbara can hope for is that she’s still alive. 

If Barbara runs a rescue operation now, it’ll be blind, alone and chair-bound. If she fails, she will be exposing the last remaining hidden member of Gotham’s Bats–Oracle–to the criminal world. To date no one has come looking for Oracle, which means none of the Bats have given her up. 

She doesn’t know who has Jason, what state Jason is in, or what obstacles she can expect to face. These are the exact reasons why she and Jason told Steph not to rescue Cass just yet. Now the situation is even worse: Barbara is the last one left free, the last one still in Gotham. 

But what other choice does Barbara have? 

--

Izzy stumbles upon the package on a dismal Sunday afternoon. It’s a black box large enough to hold a pair of shoes, resting in a suspiciously-colored puddle on the side of the street. The surface is shiny, and when Izzy pokes it, she can’t tell what the material is. Izzy turns the box over, ignoring the suspicious liquid running down the sides. It’s not poisonous. Probably. There’s a button built into the bottom side of the box. Immediately, Izzy is suspicious; nothing this nice sticks around the Bowery for very long. 

Against her better instincts, Izzy presses the button. She leans back as the lines appear along the sides of the box and it hisses open. Inside the box is mostly empty, save for a small pile of cash in $20 bills, and a tiny metal something.

“I have a job offer for you,” says a mechanized voice.

Izzy grabs the cash and kicks the box away. Heart pounding, she stands up, backs up, and watches in morbid fascination as the box bumps harmlessly against the curb. That’s good, right? There’s no person, just a voice and an empty box which is far enough from Izzy that she could probably run away if gas starts coming out of it or something. She turns over the wad of USD in her hand. Maybe it’s coated in a poisonous substance. Anything could happen in Gotham, and Batman hasn’t been seen in months. The villains are getting bolder and bolder. 

“It’s just cash,” says the mechanized voice. Whatever filter that voice is using makes it clear that the voice belongs to real person, but also obscures any identifying features. 

Izzy’s head jerks up from the cash. She narrows her eyes at the box. “Are you watching me?”

“Yes,” says the voice, refreshingly honestly. “It’s just upfront cash. If you take the job, there’s a lot more on the other side.”

The thing is. Just because Izzy knows better doesn’t mean that she doesn’t need money. 

“What’s the job?”

“Let’s take this inside,” requests the voice.

Izzy glances up and down the street. On one side is an abandoned dock house where Izzy spends too much of her time. On the other side are a couple of run-down buildings which may have real stores or may have fronts for less-than-legal businesses. Who’s to say. 

“What’s the job?” Izzy repeats. She approaches the box again, lying innocuously open on a cracked Gotham curb. Gingerly, she reaches into the box and picks out the tiny metal thing. When she puts it in her ear, the mechanized voice speaks up again.

“Delivery,” says the voice succinctly. It is much quieter in her ear. Izzy supposes this is one way of making sure no one is eavesdropping. 

“What’s the catch?”

“It’s dangerous,” the voice says promptly, continuing the trend of suspicious honesty. Izzy sincerely hopes that this honesty is not a cover-up for a worse truth. “Both the handling and the drop-off.”

“How much you offering?”

“Ten thousand grand.”

$10,000 just for an errand. Izzy thinks she might be sick. Surely this is too good to be true. Really, she just needs some medical bills covered. The problem is that she doesn’t yet know how much money she’ll need. If she tells this mystery person, maybe she can get all her expenses covered rather than get $10,000 in cash. On the other hand, that’ll hand her identity over to this person. Who has already admitted to watching her. Ah, screw it.

Izzy picks up the empty box. She brushes her hair in front of her shoulders, so that it covers the earpiece. “Can you cover medical bills or does it have to be in cash?” 

Familiar Gotham sewage smells follow Izzy onto the next street. She hears the very faint sound of typing from the earpiece. So there really is someone on the other end.

“I can get someone to lend a hand.” 

Izzy squeezes her eyes shut and pictures it. Every inch of stress that’s been weighing her down, every worry, down the drain, wiped away. It’s ridiculous. This is Gotham. Even it it wasn’t, it’s too good to be true. Izzy knows better than this. She had her dumb teenage years but this would be the stupidest thing she’s ever done. 

It is an unusually warm November day, but Izzy pulls her fuschia sweater in tight. “What do you need me to do?”

--

Brian doesn’t believe in second chances or coincidences. Nevertheless, he’s taking this thankless, illegal guard duty grunt work because he’s fully out of options. They say his employer doesn’t give second chances. It’s also awfully coincidental that this off-the-books guard duty has him loitering outside some run-down storefront off West Murray Road. He used to live on this street, though much further north. 

“What d’ya think we’re guardin?’” Asks Rocky, Brian’s fellow guard who named himself after the movie. 

“None of our business.” Brian throws some sort of pebble at Rocky, who only looks at him in some mixture of boredom and disgust. 

“Heard someone screamin’ last night,” Rocky continues. 

“Shut the fuck up and don’t ask questions if you wanna live,” says Brian, keenly aware of how Rocky’s voice echoes through the abandoned street. West Murray Road doesn’t get much love from Gothamites, and even less at night. The most entertainment Brian has seen all this time is two rats fighting. 

“Alright, calm your tits, I’m just bored as hell, man,” Rocky defends. “Nothing interesting ever happens–”

“Hey.”

Both Brian and Rocky jerk out of their distracted, half-asleep slouches. There’s a woman with a purple(? Pink? Red?) sweater standing right in front of the door they’re supposed to be guarding. She’s wearing a mask, but that’s pretty normal. It’s Covid-19 season, after all. They fail to look down and see the small package at her feet. Their attention instead falls to the black box in her hands. 

“I have a delivery?” The woman motions with the box in her hands. 

Rocky and Brian both jerk back, hands fumbling for weapons while they attempt to get a clearer picture in the near total darkness. 

“This some kinda joke?” Brian snaps. 

“Uh.” The woman backs up a step. Maybe Rocky took out his gun. “Listen, I–”

BANG.

A horrible, indescribable scent slams into Brian’s nose so hard it shoots all the way into his skull and rattles his brain around. Vaguely, his eyes observe the woman adjusting another mask, a gas mask, under her K95 mask as he collapses to the sidewalk. Then he blacks out. 

Barbara is moving her drones before the two guards hit the ground.