Archive of Our Own ^beta

There was a time when Peter thought that Mozzie was Neal’s weirdest acquaintance. Then, the kids showed up. Well, it started with a young adult.

“Alright, Gotham’s sending two of their detectives over to meet with us today. Neal, I want you on your best behavior.”

“Peter, I’m hurt,” Neal said with a too-innocent grin. “I’m always well-behaved.”

“Uh-huh,” Peter said, barely refraining from rolling his eyes. “Just tell me you haven’t done anything I need to worry about. No alleged crimes coming back to bite you?”

“I promise you, Peter,” Neal said, widening his painfully sincere blue eyes, “The detectives and I won’t have a problem.”

If not a problem, Peter wasn’t sure what to call Neal’s interaction with Detective Grayson of the GCPD. The young detective was a bundle of wide smiles and enthusiastic greetings – until Neal gave him a disgruntled look of the variety generally reserved to tell Peter he was uncultured.

“Tuck in your shirt, Detective. This is supposed to be a professional meeting.”

“Seriously?”

Neal gave him a dry look.

Detective Grayson tucked in his shirt.

“Sorry, Dad.”

“I’m sorry,” Peter asked, “Dad?”

Detective Grayson grinned while his partner rolled her eyes.

The next time it happened, Peter was already having a terrible day. Their case had ended up in a shootout that had been merrily crashed by the Red Hood – who had shown a frankly unsettling interest in keeping him and Neal alive. So, the young man whispering urgently with Neal while they sifted through the mad collage of evidence was an unwelcome surprise.

Neal looked up at Peter as though sensing the agent’s eyes on him, then traded an unreadable glance with the young man before raising his voice.

“Oh, for the love- Jason, I can handle a gun without imploding.”

“I know,” the kid – Jason – said. “But you don’t have to.”

Then, Peter saw the gun in Jason’s ungloved hands – the gun they had recovered from the scene after Peter had seen the Red Hood drop it. The vigilante’s own hands having been bare, this might be the F.B.I.’s first real chance to discover his identity.  

“Hey, you can’t touch that! Neal, who is this kid?”

“Sorry. My son hasn’t quite grasped the concept of contaminating evidence yet,” Neal said, taking the gun with his thankfully gloved hands and glaring at the young man.

“Another one?” Peter couldn’t help asking.

Jason snorted.

“You thought he stopped after one?”

Peter closed his eyes and counted to ten.

When the gun came back from the lab with only one set of prints, Peter decided that his memory must have been faulty. The Red Hood must have worn gloves, after all. He staunchly ignored the part of his brain that reminded him that, for all his distaste for the weapons, Neal could easily have taught his son to shoot well enough to make the F.B.I.’s top ten most wanted list.

The third one, thankfully, was just weird.

“Tim, what are you doing here?” Neal asked in what Peter had unfortunately come to recognize as his Dad voice.

The teenager pointed to the coffee maker.

“My secretary cut me off.”

Neal sent the kid a flat look.

“And you thought I would help you cheat?”

“I thought you might be gone – you know, working a case or something.”

“You vastly underestimate the number of hours I spend at my desk, inspecting paperwork for signs of mortgage fraud,” Neal said dryly. “Come on. You get chamomile tea, and if you are very well behaved, I might not drug it.”

The teenager wrinkled his nose but didn’t argue.

“How many children do you have?” Peter asked.

“Legally, biologically, or emotionally?” Tim asked without missing a beat.

“Too many,” Neal said simply before guiding the kid away from the coffee machine.

Peter thought he saw other suspiciously young strangers speaking with Neal from time to time, but he didn’t have time to worry about it as their off-the-books investigations turned up startling evidence of corruption high enough above them that they had to tread very carefully. They stayed at the office way too late before Peter took Neal home, walking him up to his room at June’s place. He doubted either of them were going to get much sleep that night; they may as well discuss their plans.

Neal opened the door and froze. Looking past him, Peter saw a shocking number of people – most of them unfortunately familiar – lounging on every viable surface in the room. Neal heaved a tired sigh.

“I am going to close this door,” he said, “And when I open it again, you will all be back in Gotham, where you belong.”

The sudden outpouring of sound meant nothing to Peter, but Neal simply nodded along as though he followed every word.

“You all make fair points. You know I’ve missed you, too,” he said, softening. “But you couldn’t have waited a little longer? I’ve almost wrapped things up here.”

This time, Peter caught snippets of the conversation.

“-wouldn’t kill you to have some help, old man.”

“-faster with us here.”

“-get home sooner.”

“-too stubborn for your own good.”

“-a friend. You don’t have enough-.”

“-know you want him to know.”

“Alright,” Neal said, the corners of his eyes crinkling with amusement. “Peter, you might want to sit down for this.”

Neal guided Peter to the couch, where he saw an impossibility.

Looking quickly from the woman back to Neal, he said, “That’s not- Kate’s dead.”

“Kate never existed,” Neal said gently. “This is my wife, Selina. She helped me give you a reason to investigate OPR. Faking deaths is a rather standard skill in my line of work.”

The introductions and explanations washed over Peter like waves. Dick, Jason, and Tim, he’d technically met. Cass, Steph, and Damian, he’d glimpsed in the chaos of the recent weeks. Kate was Selina, and she was alive.

Oh, and Neal was some local Gotham celebrity who was actually Batman.

“I knew the F.B.I. was filthy. I decided to infiltrate the New York office because it’s closest to Gotham. And I’m glad to have met and worked with you.”

“Really, we think he just missed the carefree playboy role,” Stephanie said with a smirk. “No one in Gotham has seen him as anything but a tired dad since he adopted Tim.”

“It’s nice sometimes,” Neal- Bruce admitted with a shameless smile, “to pretend to be someone who doesn’t have the worries I do.”

Smiling at his children, he continued, “But at the end of the day, I can’t wait to go home.”

Peter shook his head. Could he really believe all this? If so, how had he missed it? How had Bruce not let anything slip? I mean, the number of times Peter had seen him drugged to the gills…

“Oh my God,” Peter groaned. “The- the singing, and the weird rambling whenever you got dosed with something. That wasn’t you losing your inhibitions, it was a trained response to interrogation.”

Bruce just smiled.

There were more questions, and more answers, but in the end, only one really mattered.

“What now?” Peter asked.

“Now,” Bruce said, “We let my family help us with one last case. Then, I go home.”

“Keep in touch?”

“I promise.”