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After twenty years on the force, Officer Jessica Perez could taste when a morning was brewing to be trouble. Three steps into the bullpen she heard the captain’s door click open and knew it was going to be That Kind of Day.
“Perez,” the captain said. “A word.”
There went her first cup of coffee.
“Something I want to show you,” he continued as she shut the door. There was a thin file on the desk in front of him, open to a photograph and a name. He pushed it toward her with one hand. “Take a look.”
The label read Richard John Grayson and Detective . The kid in the photo looked like he was about fourteen. “Greener than green,” Jessica said. “Should pluck his eyebrows. What do you need from me, sir?”
“He’s out of Gotham,” the captain said carefully.
“Jesus,” said Jessica, because there wasn’t much else to say about Gotham. She scanned the picture again, aware of the captain’s eye on her. It was an easy enough guess what the file meant. Rodriguez was dead, the DPD was always hiring, and their employment numbers were at record lows. Low enough to start accepting lateral transfers without shifting rank or seniority. “He's our new hire?”
The captain leaned back in his chair, stalling. “You read the tabloids at all?”
“It’s been a while since I opened Tiger Beat , sir.” The kid did look naggingly familiar in the way of a long-ago child star, but the name rang no bells.
The captain finally cracked a smile. “Too bad. His daddy’s a bit of a socialite where they’re from.”
Once it clicked, Jessica mostly wished it hadn’t. Behind serious eyes and a gray suit, Grayson looked nothing like circus-orphan-Richie, the grinning teen she’d occasionally seen gracing paparazzi shots at his vapid father’s elbow. Goddamn, but she was old.
“We’re not spreading it around,” said the captain, catching her expression. “He’s a lateral in. Aced his classes and tests, starts here next week.”
“Wayne money will do that, I guess.”
“He aced our classes, our tests. He scored off the charts on the waiver exam.”
And by this time next week he’d be sitting at Rodriguez’s old desk, a little east coast trust fund prince from the bloodiest city on national soil.
“So he’s got a hundred-thousand dollar education,” Jessica said, and she knew it wasn’t anything the chief hadn’t already considered, but the thought rankled. “What do we want him for?”
“We want him because he applied ,” said the captain. “We want him because he was a detective in a psychopath clown’s stomping ground, so maybe our fine metro area won’t make him wet his pants too fast. We want him because he has a big enough bank vault that he won’t leave for higher pay or better healthcare benefits, because his daddy could buy the whole damn hospital if he wanted to.
“Take the file.” He tossed it to her. “Look it over. You’re on the welcoming committee.”
The file was a decent introduction to Richard Grayson. Better was her friend Charlotte, who worked in records at the GCPD and quietly faxed her some extra information after hours. Because being the welcome party was Jessica’s job, so she might as well read up on the kid. Because the veteran he’d be replacing had been a good friend. Because she was curious.
On his name, below Richard , there was a handwritten sticky note. Prefers to go by “Dick.”
“Jesus,” muttered Jessica again.
The GCPD had its own law enforcement academy, much like Detroit, and the broad strokes were familiar. Six months of basic followed by a year and a half of field training, though hell knew what that meant in a city like Gotham. Looking the other way while your mentor took bribes from a freak in greasepaint, maybe. Leaving parking tickets on the Batmobile.
Grayson had entered training with grades from the prestigious Gotham Academy that ranged from excellent to mediocre seemingly at random, and a few half-hearted college credits. He had the top qualifying marks in his class.
He’d taken the physical twice - accidentally broken some sort of Olympic record on his first runtime due to a faulty stopwatch, if the notes were to be believed - and his final score was still comfortably high. Firearms ranking just above average, with Grayson’s lack of enthusiasm for the discipline fairly vibrating off the page. Special acclaim from teachers for leadership potential. Medical exam passed with flying colors, besides a collection of injuries from his time as an acrobat and, apparently, amateur capoeira and boxing enthusiast.
Grayson had graduated with exceptional scores, and passed the licensing exam with ease - though if money had massaged those results, there was no telling. He’d been fast-tracked to detective, again on what Jessica would have sworn was his daddy’s money, except -
It was Gotham. Half of their cops turned up dead after a couple of years, and the other half were corrupt. A turnover rate like that, and maybe they’d just appreciated having someone who was too rich to be bought.
A ping lit up Jessica’s phone.
Charlotte
9:27 PM
did you get to the part from his fto yet
The handwritten notes from Grayson’s field training officer were more informative, in a way, than anything above them. They were written with the brusque, unprofessional hand of a seasoned mentor irritated by his own fondness for the subject.
Good kid, always honest. Avoids using his weapon, shows courage and agility under fire. Rare outbursts of temper. Textbook memorization of the law. Real leadership skill. Bad jokes.
Grayson had a minimum of formal complaints on file from his time as a probie, mostly centered around getting caught dead asleep at his desk after a long day. A lot of late nights studying for the detective exam, apparently.
And then, from roughly one year ago, a different hand and a new tone.
Use of excessive force in the field. See disciplinary record.
The instances of random narcolepsy had ceased entirely, and letters of reprimand started to pepper an otherwise stellar record. Nothing about improper sexual conduct, or driving drunk. No fatal shootings. It just seemed that once in a blue moon, when out from behind his desk and chasing down a maniac in a mask, Detective Grayson beat the everloving shit out of his suspect.
None of the infractions had lead to suspension, pressed charges, or required training sessions - all allegations been dismissed after the GCPD’s investigation. It wasn’t surprising. Murder and crime were epidemic in Gotham, and they could hardly afford to punish someone getting the job done.
Still, it rankled. Jessica had seen bad cops offend again and again without their department batting an eye, and Grayson came off like just another spoiled boy with good connections, coasting on a privilege that enabled his darker impulses and left them unchecked -
Or maybe, living in Gotham with a higher concentration of capes and painted psychopaths than the rest of stateside combined, even good cops found the vigilante mindset hard to escape.
Officer Ross had a decent history of avoiding the office scuttlebutt. It was with some mortification, then, that she found herself dawdling in the break room and typing grayson circus into the Youtube search bar on her phone.
Charlie from the morgue had put it into her head, when she went to check on his newest acquisition - age thirty-two, stab wounds - and that was Ross’s own damn fault. No good ever came from talking to Charlie.
“You seen it yet?” Charlie had raised his eyebrows like he was talking about the New Year’s countdown in Times Square, or a birthday cake in the break room.
“Seen what?” Whatever it was, she’d already been pretty sure she wasn’t going to like it.
“The video from the circus accident - it’s all over Youtube,” he added, as if assuming she’d looked but been unable to find it. “Forty feet in the air, falling maybe thirty feet per second, must’ve hit the ground like that .” His hand slapped down next to the stiff’s head.
“Gonna write that on the kid’s welcome card?” Ross asked in lieu of anything else to say.
Charlie shrugged, going back to trimming hair samples. “We had one of those in a few years ago. It’s fucking fascinating stuff. A construction fall, but they thought there was foul play. Blood vessels burst, the skull cracks to pieces, the organs just get pulverized. Was a hell of a day.”
The clips on Youtube didn’t show such graphic detail, because not everybody had an iPhone in their pocket back then, but the grainy videos showed enough. Three figures high in the air in elegant silhouette, then two of them plummeting to the ground, and the crowd screaming.
The titles were mostly shit like Trapeze Act Goes Wrong (real footage) and shocking moment gypsy acrobats plummet to they’re deaths and Circus Disaster Caught on Camera .
The last one had been uploaded half a dozen times, because it was the clip used on the GCN report. It ended with a close up of a young boy standing, pale and shocked, face wet, as police and paramedics swarmed around. Shockingly invasive, for a pre-teen about to be adopted by one of the most recognizable celebrities on the east coast, even if no one knew the kid’s name yet.
There were other videos too, though, from years before, on presumably happier days. Trapeze trio - Halys Circus. Stunts on Tightrope. Top Ten Performances from the Flying Grayson’s.
A particularly enthusiastic one simply screamed AMAZING ACROBATIC KID . The thumbnail was a still frame of a small, brightly-costumed boy in the middle of what surely couldn’t be a backflip on a tightrope over no safety net, but sure as hell looked like it. The picture shifted, and the boy landed to a standing ovation, arms stretched high and graceful, huge smile visible even from the cheap seats.
Officer Ross swiped out of the screen and went back to her desk.
Charlie from the morgue was a creep.
When it was finally time to perform her welcome duties, they went about as well as Jessica expected. She and Grayson shook hands, she showed him his desk. When she called him by his full name he said, “It’s Dick,” and, hell, if that was a target he wanted to paint on his own back, she wasn’t going to stop him.
Officer Ross seemed weirdly soft on him and kept out of the usual hazing, but Grayson had made it clear he wasn’t there to make friends, and got a pinched, prissy look on his face any time there was talk about him getting a partner.
They kept comfortably out of each other’s way for a few days, until the Desmond murders left Jessica with a messy case and a grieving family. She had a hunch about it, about the who and the how, but they needed a basis for a warrant and their only witnesses were the traumatized wife and daughter, who understood bare scraps of English. Which meant -
“Hey Grayson, you speak Arabic?”
Under Languages Spoken in his personnel file, the entire available space had been filled with a neat list - Spanish, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, ASL, Farsi, Ursari Romani - ending in a completely infuriating ‘etcetera,’ and she still wasn’t sure whether or not it was a joke.
“Not very well,” he’d replied, looking apologetic.
She’d sent him to interview the remaining family members anyway and he'd gone, uncomplaining.
So far Dick Grayson had had a general air like someone recently shot his dog, and he carried the gloom with him from room to room. He hunched, or maybe his expression just made it look like he did. He disappeared into the back of the bullpen, his pretty, glum face somehow blending in with the crowd like wallpaper.
Now he was nodding as he wrote, eyes wide and empathetic, as the woman gesticulated and recounted events in her native language. The young daughter was chattering away at the same time, scribbling blue crayon all over a spare notebook. When she finished each drawing, she pushed it across the table at Grayson, who accepted it with a playful smile and added it to a growing stack by his elbow.
“Damn, and I thought he’d be bad with kids.”
Jessica glanced over at Manny, who had come to stand beside her at the observation window. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, there’s some shit in his file about that.”
The thing was, Gotham had always been a joke for Officer Manny Wolf. It was Detroit’s own personal “Thank God for Mississippi,” consistently making rank as the nation’s felony capital despite being one of the most financially influential cities in the world. The GCPD sagged under the weight of responsibility and its own corruption, and with its laundry list of the capes and masks -
It was just hard, Manny felt, to take crime stats seriously when the murderer was in a onesie and had been arrested by Tweety Bird.
So when Detective Grayson showed up on their doorstep, practically still wet from the womb and acting like he’d lived through a war, Manny welcomed him with a handshake and a quip that the Bat Man wasn’t around to make his collars for him anymore.
It hadn’t exactly made them friends.
After the Desmond case, though, after Perez’s comments and the release of mother and daughter into witness protection, he might have done a reluctant Google search.
Manny had always been decent with kids. He had a good relationship with his daughter, was well-liked by her friends, and had done training with the Child Abuse Unit.
There wasn’t much on the internet about Dick Grayson, but Bruce Wayne and his soft spot for orphans was on a whole other level. The Martha Wayne Foundation had apparently been propping up kids’ charities for the last few decades, and the billionaire made at least a passing effort to keep his adoptees’ names and faces out of the tabloids. Still, he popped up next to Brangelina and Madonna on internet trash lists like 17 Celebs Who Adopted Children! and White Celebs Raising Kids of Other Races. Grayson looked Caucasian, but the blurb under his picture lead to links about ethnic minorities in America and, distressingly, the IMDB page of some piece of shit called My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding.
There were decent articles too, like the one out of the Gotham Gazette , by an N. Schloss. Circus Family Slain, Sole Survivor Sheltered by Billionaire Philanthropist: Bruce Wayne . They wrote it like a modern fairytale, with Wayne as a latter-day prince of Gotham. The billionaire do-gooder adopts a poor boy with no family. Small wonder that boy had grown up to be a law enforcement officer with a soft spot for yet more poor kids with no families.
Then Manny looked at the articles again, with his police brain this time, because a richer-than-God bachelor with a predilection for blue-eyed orphan boys -
But none of the signs were there, despite what the National Enquirer seemed to enthusiastically imply when the fake news cycle was slow, or none that he was able to read. Money like that could wash any number of sins away, but Grayson, at least, seemed to be on the straight and narrow.
According to Perez, he’d worked with the Children and Family Services Unit as a rookie, and liaised with CPS as a detective. He was on record as saying that it was important, for kids to have someone to trust. For them not to trust the wrong person. He even had a few certificates of thanks from the Gotham City Child Advocacy Multi-Disciplinary Team, whatever that was. They had given him nothing but glowing praise.
Which is why Grayson was with a few female officers in the interview room right now, talking to a traumatized nine-year-old while they waited for the CAU to arrive.
A kid had walked in all on her own, covered in bruises, and calmly announced that she wanted to speak to a police officer. Then she’d thrown up all over the carpet and not said a word since. The janitors were having a field day.
The system said that her step-dad was a man called Tyler Hackett, proud owner of multiple drug convictions and one previous accusation of assault and battery of a child under age fourteen.
If the kid wouldn’t talk, if they couldn’t find DNA evidence tying the man to the crime, the charges would be dropped again.
Maybe justice would find Hackett anyway, but Detroit, for better or worse, wasn’t a city of vigilantes.
It was late. Jessica had been in the office long enough to see the early shift go home and the late shift arrive, broken up by a grizzly crime scene. She’d nearly been knifed by a perp hiding in a bathtub and high on PCP, and the resulting struggle had ended with both Ross and Grayson smeared in blood, shattered glass, and God knew what else. It had been cold and dark by the time they made it back to the station, aching for home and showers.
Ross and most of the team were clocked out now, like any sane people would be. Grayson was still around, because he was probably a masochist.
They’d worked well together, but Jessica wasn’t a detective and he’d only just thrown his latest hissy fit about having a partner. Still, there he was walking out of the break room holding two coffees, and she was pretty sure who the second one was for.
“Nice control on that temper back there,” Jessica said. “I’ve seen cops do a lot worse than a judo hold when an addict ruins their favorite suit.”
Grayson did a sort of shrug with his head. “A badge is an easy thing to hide behind, but it isn’t an excuse to hurt people,” he said, like a dork giving a lecture at a pre-school.
He looked tired, hair wet from the locker room showers, and a bruise on his jaw was beginning to blush purple. His suit had clearly been given up as a lost cause, and he looked rumpled and soft in sweatpants and a black t-shirt. Its faded gold lettering read Gotham Knights .
He still held out the second coffee in his hand with something like a smile.
“Thanks.” It was loaded with milk and sugar, the way she always took it. “Is that a caped neighborhood watch group, or a sports team?” She nodded at his front.
“The shirt?” He was still smiling, bemused now. Maybe all the gloominess had been beaten out of him for a while. “They’re a baseball team. Could be a few of them moonlight on the side, though.”
“I took my niece to see a Gotham Girls derby game on Temple Street a few years ago,” Jessica offered with a grin. “Your city’s got spirit, I’ll give it that much.”
Grayson crooked another awkward smile at her. “Not my city anymore,” he said, like he was trying to convince himself.
A month passed. One more long night, two, three.
“Hey Grayson,” Manny said, as they stepped out of headquarters and under a chilly, drizzling grey sky. The next day they’d get news that the charges against Tyler Hackett had been dropped, that Robin had reappeared for the first time in over a year, that a girl with purple hair from Traverse City had run from the scene of her mother’s murder. But not yet. “Resolve a bet for me. Why’d you choose Detroit? After Gotham, I’d have thought you at least wanted a town with better weather.”
Grayson turned to look at the city seal that decorated the doors behind them, and the curling lines of Latin that inscribed its motto.
The City of Detroit - Wayne County, Michigan
Speramus Meliora, Resurget Cineribus
“Nothing,” he said, but his mouth was curled in a smile as he ducked away. “Just a feeling.”
We Hope for Better Things, and We Shall Rise From the Ashes