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The image of it was awful.
Bruce had seen alot of things in his day… alot of awful things.
Really this shouldn’t be much different than the rest.
Still… seeing all those women and kids in cages, half of them beaten half dead, the rest looking like they wish they were.
The least those bastards deserved was death… but it wasn’t for him to decide.
No matter how much some of his kids wished he would take that leap even once…
No matter how often Khoa called him weak…
Of course if he sent a few of them to the hospital with a few shattered bones, that was nobody’s business but his own.
He’s been all through what counted as an office to get the paper files. Khoa downloaded everything digital and popped it into Icon. The hunt for the victims’ files went nowhere. The few they found were mostly unhelpful, mostly just half-assed notes about which woman got knocked up when and dates that might have been abortion appointments…
Especially when Khoa showed him some birth records and bills of sale for newborns.
It was all so… heinous.
They finish up in the office and then separate to clear out the building.
Well Bruce is set on clearing the building. He’s not entirely sure what Khoa’s doing. The alarm alert on the Batmobile goes off in one of his lens but Khoa’s clearance shuts it down pretty quick. Bruce just internally shrugs and keeps up his mission of breaking the locks off the cages.
“The building’s rigged to blow in five. We need to go.”
“Not without them,” Bruce wacks another one and rips the bits off before swinging it open and moving on to the next one. “The building’s going up-! Get Out!”
Some of the better off women have grabbed their own weapons and bust a few open themselves. There’s a few cries of joy… and few not so much…
The hard ones are the few he comes across that have already died or are so bad off they won’t make it to the hospital.
He pauses at one, a little boy with blond hair… reminds him of Tim's Bernard… The boy can’t even get up so Bruce gently hauls him out and holds him as tightly as he dares for a moment. He goes to put him down and move to get the rest and… the blond head flops, the green eyes half open. His heart shatters a little and he curls around the body. He’s not sure if it’s rage or desperation that moves him after that, but he gets up.
And he busts locks like they’re the faces of the people who trapped Tiny-Bernard in that damn cage.
Khoa shows up and helps, which gives Bruce time to actually grab some of them and get them out. Jim Gordon’s been rung so they’re expecting both cops and every ambulance Gotham and Blüdhaven can spare. The victims are ushered a ways away into another brick building so they’re not caught up in the blast when it does blow.
“They’re all out. I’m leaving.”
“Meet you at the point,” he replies-
-and then ducks when the building goes up.
Once the coast is clear, he’s gone. Khoa’s waiting for him by the Batmobile, body language looking vaguely annoyed. Bruce ignores him in favor of opening the car and-
Screaming.
“Oh yea… forgot about that.”
Angry little screaming.
Bruce’s face contorts under the cowl, “How did you forget a baby?”
Khoa shrugs, “Had other stuff going on. Just kinda grabbed it and moved on.”
Bruce picks up the bundle, stares at the little, splotchy, red face, “Where’s his mother?”
“Possibly dead now. She wasn’t looking like she’d last long and told me to ‘give him to Batman’ so,” Khoa shrugs.
“I… So you put him in the car?”
“What else was I supposed to do with him? Carry him around?”
“I-”
“The cops are about to show up.”
Bruce nods and grabs one of the plastic boxes under the seats, dumps it, stuffs his cape into it, and puts the little thing in it before fastening the seat belt. Khoa’s very clearly rolled his eyes and headed off for the Ghost-Racer. Bruce ignores him and hops into the Batmobile, carefully zooming off so as not to jolt anything. The baby starts crying again, but there’s nothing he can really do until he gets home.
Once he parks, he grabs the box and heads upstairs. The gloves and cowl come off, left on the table so the baby has a face to look at. The poor thing doesn’t look that old, a couple of months at the most.
Alfred would be such a help right now.
He shoves that thought away and focuses on what he’ll need to survive the night. Two in the morning meant he wasn’t getting anything tonight so he’d have to make due with what he had in the house. Thankfully Jason’s need to experiment in his kitchen meant he had goat milk which he set up to warm.
Next comes him stripping the top half of his suit off and washing himself off in the sink the best he could. He remembered something Clark had said right after Jon was born about skin-to-skin. Whether that was still relevant to this baby’s age, he had no idea, but figured it couldn’t hurt.
And that’s how Khoa found them.
Topless Bruce holding a naked whimpering baby in the sink as he tries to wash him.
“Can’t say I ever expected to actually see you play nanny.”
“Didn’t exactly expect to be one tonight.”
“So,” he comes closer, looking over the goat milk heating up, “What’s the plan.”
“Still working on it… Probably try to- I don’t know… I thought maybe I could find the mother’s family and take him to them but… her body’s gone now so the best we could hope for is dental records after they sweep the place but there’s no telling how many bodies were left so that’s probably not possible.”
“The firehouse is though,” Khoa commented.
“Can you go get one of the towels out of the bathroom?”
Khoa does and brings it back. Bruce dries the kid off and holds him while fiddling with the blanket. He’d noticed something on it earlier, maybe some writing, but hadn’t studied it in favor of getting the baby clean. Now… now he kind of wished he had looked at it before unwrapping the kid. The smudged lettering was difficult, at best. He moves it around, buching it back to the way it was the best he could until-
Khoa peeks over his shoulder, “‘Robin.’”
Well that… pretty much sealed the deal then, didn’t it.
“Can… you have Icon order a list of things?”
“What is she? Your personal shopper?” Bruce dead panned at Khoa who sighed, “Fiine. What do you need.”
“Everything.”
“You’re being serious? In what world are you in any condition to raise a baby…?”
“Most would say the same about my other kids,” Bruce cradled the tiny thing.
"Yea, sure. They could also shit in the toilet by the time you got them which-" he gestures, "-makes my point much more the point."
“Which is?”
“You’re old.”
“We’re the same age.”
“And I’m not the one holding a baby I met five minutes ago and already making plans for a college fund.”
Bruce pauses, staring at the tiny squirming thing, “So what am I supposed to do?”
“Give. it. to. the. cops.”
“And have him end up in a place like Jason did?”
“Good news-! Giving him up means you’re not responsible for him. It won’t matter where he ends up because. he’s. not. yours.”
Tiny Robin rubs his eyes with tiny fits and yawns, his face scrunching up again. Bruce grabs the goat milk, temp checks it, and fills up a shot glass. Khoa watches him, looking very much annoyed, as Bruce sets up at the table to spoon feed him. It’s slow going and they spill half of it before Robin gets the hang of it. He does eventually and then Bruce wipes him down again before putting him over his shoulder. It was something else he vaguely remembered Clark talking about in the very early Jon days though he doesn’t remember why it was important.
Robin falls asleep, grumbling if he’s so much as shifted. Bruce sits with the laptop and tries to type out his reports. It’s slow going… and then Khoa’s there, gently- for him- taking the baby.
“Your one handed tapping is annoying. Get it done,” he readjusts Robin and walks away, humming some lullaby or something. Bruce vaguely remembers it from their training days… when he was down with a serious bout of flu and Khoa had to check on him, humming the same song as he applied the compresses to his forehead and forced water down his throat.
He finishes in forty-five minutes, double checking the flashdrive to make sure it has all of the information they’d gathered last night on it, and shuts it all down. He pauses to warm up more milk and takes the whole deal upstairs. Khoa’s in his- their- room, watching TV on mute… babyless. Bruce glances around in a mild panic only for Khoa to snap his fingers a couple of times and point at the bed without looking away from the screen. Bruce goes over, looking in on the little nest of blankets. Robin’s still sleeping, bottom half wrapped in another towel. He nods to himself and starts to shift everything to one side to give him and Khoa both room. Robin stirs, face scrunching. Bruce tries to soothe him back but the damage is done.
So he sits and feeds the baby and then cleans him up and tucks him back into bed… once he’s burped and spit up all down Bruce's back.
Right… that was a thing.
Khoa’s very clearly amused by that and Bruce strips to shower. Once clean, he finds a pair of sleep pants and slides into bed. Khoa’s soon after him, the big spoon, with an arm over Bruce, his sleep muddled brain possessive. Bruce reaches out, lightly touching Robin’s face… down to his little hand.
The tiny little fingers wrapped around his pinky.