Chapter Text
prologue
Melaine Carter had been working for the state of New Jersey for two weeks when she got sent to her first orphan response case. She had studied plenty about how to help a child who’d just lost their parents during her time at Gotham University. But when she stood underneath the stripped circus tent, all of that went out the door.
They told her it had been a freak accident. The wire had snapped, sending two-thirds of the Flying Graysons to their deaths, all in front of a packed house. John and Mary had left behind a son, a little eight-year-old with wide eyes and slouched shoulders, dwarfed by the ambulance’s shock blanket.
Everything she’d learned in the classroom felt useless. She was twenty-two, but in that moment, she felt like she was the same age as the kid.
The ringmaster had informed her that he had no relatives that they knew of. The police had wanted a statement that night, but she fended them off. It was late and it was more important that they got him placed in a home.
He didn’t say anything as she took him back to the trailer and helped him pack his belongings. The trailer had been one big suitcase, so everything was loaded into trash bags. She grabbed a few family photos for him on the way out.
Her supervisor gave her the address of a Ronald and Elaine Cooper. They’d become a certified foster couple only a few weeks before Melanie had accepted the job. Given the hour, she hadn’t expected Elaine to pick up the phone, but it only took two rings to reach her.
Melanie had her cell phone positioned between her ear and neck as she explained the situation. Elaine had taken it in stride and was willing to take the newly-orphaned Richard Grayson that night. When Melanie got off the phone, she looked in the rearview mirror. The boy was staring out the window, still in his acrobat uniform.
During the drop-off, he didn’t say a word. She smiled at him as she gave him her card and told her he’d be in touch to check on him. He just nodded at her. When she got back in her car, she cried until she couldn’t breathe.
-
She’d been hungover from celebrating her roommate’s 24th birthday when she got the call about Jason Todd. He’d apparently been picked up by the cops after getting caught stealing hubcaps off of a car in Crime Alley.
There was a little part of her that applauded his skill. Pretty impressive for a nine-year-old.
After the cops had been unable to locate any living caretaker of the boy, Melanie’s phone had rang off the hook. The cop she met at the station characterized him as “mouthy” and “a right little shit,” hardly professional.
When she entered the interrogation room they were keeping him in, she was met with a little ball of anger. His arms were crossed over his ratty hoodie and she thought he was probably the dirtiest little white boy in the entire city, maybe the state.
After making a hundred phone calls and spending an hour talking the cops down from trying to send him to juvenile court, she had a family that had offered to take him in.
She tried to explain the Coopers to Jason on the way. He perked up a little at the news of a brother. It was enough of a smile for her to consider the placement a win.
-
Melanie had been in a haze for days. She thought that her and Nick had something special. She’d been giddy since the first date and the next few months had passed in a heart-fluttering, laugh-filled, heavy-lipped blur. Something she thought had the potential to last forever had ended over a phone call when Nick had been in Central City visiting his mother. It wasn’t her first break-up, and it certainly wouldn’t be her last, but it hurt, more than she had ever expected it to.
Timothy Drake was technically her coworker’s case, but she was so distraught that all she wanted to do was work. She’d always been a workaholic, she found clocking hours to be more therapeutic than a pint of ice cream and the newest Taylor Swift album. Eliza had been kind enough to hand her the case with a sad smile.
The alarm had been raised by the housekeeper, who noted that Jack and Janet Drake had been out of the country for over three hundred days in the past year and did not employ a nanny. The housekeeper’s tri-weekly appearances was expected to be enough care for the child.
When the couple became aware that there was a child neglect case against them, they’d hopped on a private plane to a far, far away island that happened to have no extradition treaty.
After getting all of the money out of the bank, of course.
The result had been little Tim Drake, underweight and alone, sitting in the back of Melanie’s new car (well, new to her, it was heavily used, she’d totaled the last one on a rainy day). He seemed relatively okay for a child whose parents had left him to avoid jail time. She made conversation with him about light topics, he replied with the cadence of an adult. It made her sad.
It had taken going through fifteen different families before she found out that Ronald Cooper had put in a request for a third child. Melanie didn’t know much, but Elaine had left about a year prior, three months after taking Jason Todd in.
Normally, she wouldn’t have been so sure of the placement, but all of Ronald’s house visits had been fine. Emphasis on “fine.” Melanie would’ve liked for the apartment to be a little bigger, a little cleaner, and for Ronald to make a little more money, but Gotham didn’t have nearly as many foster parents as it needed, and Melanie would do whatever she could to keep the little boy out of a group home or orphanage.
So Ronald was fine.
-
Melanie’s going-away party was on a Friday. She originally felt bad about leaving the world of government social work, but her boss had actually congratulated her.
“Most don’t make it to thirty, don’t feel guilty about it. Turning over is practically part of the job.” He told her.
She was going to get her master’s. Maybe she’d work in the schools or in the private sector, but she couldn’t keep busting her back to barely scrape by each month. She was tired of worrying about late water bills and how much produce cost.
Plus, Metropolis would be a fresh start. It would give her a chance to see somewhere new, to meet new people.
She had been enjoying one of the cupcakes they’d brought in when her coworker brought up the baby that had been left on the steps of an office building that morning. He’d been left in a basket like some sort of cliche, swaddled in a blanket labeled with his name: Damian. They were finding a placement as they spoke.
She thought about the kid as she cleaned out her desk, pawning off her trinkets onto her coworkers. An office building? If the mother was going to dress him like a cliche, why not one fo the safe haven boxes at the fire stations? An office building just felt stupid.
After she said her final goodbyes, she took a ride-share to the airport. After going through security, she purchased a bottle of water, a bag of chips, and a gossip magazine from the least expensive gift shop.
She was early to her gate. She tried to read the magazine, some article about the sexual escapades of Bruce Wayne, but she couldn’t focus. She kept thinking about the past seven years of her life and the memory of a little boy in an acrobat uniform, sitting in the back of her car. His eyes trained on the raindrops on the window.