Archive of Our Own ^beta

The trouble started on Tuesday morning.

“What do you mean,” Neeti exhaled into the phone, headache already pulsing behind her eyes, “there’s a hole in the ground?”

“Exactly what I said,” Abel responded, not sounding any more pleased about it than she was.  “There’s a hole.  In the ground.  I can see the coffin inside.”

Neeti pressed her fingers to her temples.  Across the room, the sales associate from the Gotham Memoriam, who insisted she wasn’t going to leave until she had an update on what the damage was and when the cemetery would open again, looked up in interest.

“And?” Neeti exhaled.  “Why are you calling me?  Just fill it in and smooth over the grass.”

There was a long silence on the other side.  “Neeti,” Abel said slowly.  “Rain doesn’t carve a six-foot hole into the ground.”

Oh.  Oh crap.

“Are you saying we have a grave robber?” Neeti nearly shrieked.  The sales associate definitely looked interested now.  Neeti turned away from her and hissed into the phone, “Are you sure?”

Her manager was in the hospital after a Scarecrow attack, the groundskeeper was listed as a missing person, the director had been implicated in a LexCorp scandal, and Neeti had found herself the senior-most person in the office.

Sometimes, responsibility sucked.

“I mean, it doesn’t look manmade, but it was also pouring all last night,” Abel said, voice crackling through the phone.  She could hear the sounds of the maintenance workers clearing the lawns in the distance.  “It’s your call, Neeti.”

“…Whose grave is it?” Neeti asked.  Maybe it wasn’t a grave robber.  Maybe it was just a determined groundhog or something like that.  After all, what kind of grave robber worked on the wettest, muddiest day Gotham had had all season?

“Uh…it says Jason Todd.”

Neeti typed the name one-handed into the search bar, the other one still calculating how much money this was going to cost them.  Dealing with the insurance company was an ongoing nightmare.  Why, why did Gotham have to be full of lunatics?

The results loaded.  Neeti looked at them and cursed.

The sales associate looked very interested now.

“…It might’ve been a grave robber,” Neeti conceded.

“So,” Abel said, and then stopped.  Neeti just stared.  “This—this is a problem.”

Neeti made a noise that could’ve been a whimper.  The sales associate—Claire Chu, with a slightly fascinated expression like she’d sauntered up from hell to witness the monumentally horrible day Neeti was having—patted her shoulder, perfectly put together on the muddy grass.

“This is a really big problem,” Abel said.

Neeti closed her eyes.  She imagined taking a couple steps forward, jumping into the six feet hole the backhoe had carved out, and sliding into the coffin inside.  It looked empty anyway, the gaping hole in the middle of the coffin lid showed nothing but empty satin.  They could just shut it and shove the dirt back on top of her.  It would be a kinder death.

“Are we,” Neeti began slowly, “are we, actually, really, one hundred percent sure that the coffin had a body in it in the first place?”

“Neeti,” Abel gave her a reproachful look.

“The funeral was covered by the Daily Planet,” Claire hummed.  “They said that it was closed-casket.”

Neeti cracked open her eyes in hope.

“Neeti,” Abel said sharply.  “No.”

“There was a report in the Inquirer that the whole thing was manufactured by Wayne because the kid found some other relatives and ran away,” Claire said.

She was swiftly becoming Neeti’s new favorite person.

Abel shot her an irritated look.  “Why would Wayne bury an empty grave in a public cemetery?  He could’ve made up a story and had fake ashes in an urn.”

“Maybe he was keeping something else in the grave,” Claire pointed out.  “I didn’t say that it wasn’t robbed.”

“Bring it up,” Neeti said tiredly, interrupting them both.  “Let’s see what actually happened to it.”

Abel began tying a harness around the coffin to prep it for lifting, and Claire eyed it curiously.  “If it’s a grave robbery, shouldn’t we call the police?” she asked.

Neeti snorted.  “The GCPD?” she said darkly.  “They can’t help the living, you think they’re going to chase after the dead?”

“I mean, this is Wayne’s son’s grave,” Claire pointed out.  “You could go tell him.”

“Yeah, absolutely not,” Neeti asserted as Abel climbed out of the grave and attached the harness to the crane to pull it out.  She and Claire both stepped out of the way as the machine started up.  “I am not calling Bruce Wayne to tell him someone stole his kid’s bones.  I’d rather quit.”

The crane made an alarming creaking noise and mud sloughed off the sides of the coffin as it came out.  “Alright!” Abel called out as he set the coffin down on the grass.  “You can check it out now!”

Neeti picked over the slippery grass while Claire Chu did so more effortlessly and in much higher heels, and pulled open the splintered coffin lid as all three of them crowded around it.  Abel and Claire were staring down at the satin lining—the mud-stained interior was waterlogged and smelled funny but was unmistakably expensive and unmistakably empty—while Neeti was focused on the coffin lid.

The satin was ripped and the lid itself was splintered.  Something niggled at Neeti.

“It’s strange,” Abel mused, frowning slightly.  “There’s…nothing.  The kid’s been dead, what, a couple of months?”  He glanced over at the headstone.  “But someone came and broke the coffin lid and took his body and left nothing behind?”

“Told you,” Claire said smugly.  “There was never a body in the first place.”

Some of those splinters were rust red.  Like blood.  Neeti poked at it, but the wood was soaked through with rain, warped out of alignment.  She wasn’t sure if even the police could get something out of this.

“Or,” Abel countered, “there are some really sick people in this city.”

There was something about the wooden lid that was bugging her.  Neeti crossed to the other side to examine it more clearly.

“It’s Gotham,” Claire snorted.  “But still.  Stealing a dead kid’s body?  That’s crossing some kind of line.”

“Dead rich kid,” Abel pointed out.

There was a lot of blood on the wood.  Like someone had scraped up their fingers on the splinters.

“Yeah, but even Bruce Wayne isn’t ditzy enough to forget that his kid is dead if he gets a ransom demand—”

“Maybe they wanted the jewelry.  I’ve seen graves dug up for diamond cufflinks.”

“Why bother to steal the entire body for cufflinks—”

That was a fingernail.  Bloody and clinging to the inside of the coffin lid.  The inside.

Neeti pressed a hand to the coffin lid and felt the grooves under her fingertips.  Like something had tried violently to get out.

“Guys,” Neeti said, cold all over, stepping away from the coffin.  “What if no one dug up the grave?”

Abel and Claire both stared at her like she was insane.  “Neeti,” Abel said slowly.  “There was a hole in the ground.  There’s a hole in the coffin.  And the body’s gone!”

A hole just wide enough for the body.

Who decides to dig up a grave in a thunderstorm?  Neeti felt like laughing, high and hysterical and choked.

“Yeah,” Neeti said. “The body’s gone.”  She pointed to the lid.  “That doesn’t look like someone broke in.”

Abel and Claire turned to the coffin lid, and both of them inhaled sharply, seeing the same thing.

“That looks like something broke out.”

“Is this the point where we call the police?” Abel asked.  Neeti was sitting down next to the crane, head in her hands.  Claire was still poking around the coffin.  Sales associates truly feared nothing.  “Or Wayne?  I mean, we have to tell someone, right?”

 “I’m sorry,” Neeti said, voice muffled.  “You want to tell Bruce Wayne that his kid is a zombie now?”

“I don’t think zombies bleed,” Claire said with far too much confidence in a world where there were aliens that shot lasers from their eyes.  “And there’s a lot of blood.”

“We should still tell the police,” Abel asserted.

“Great idea,” Neeti said to her hands.  “Tell the GCPD that Jason Todd is a zombie and crawled out of his grave.  No, really, go ahead.  I’ll visit you in Arkham.”

“Well, we have to do something,” Abel huffed.  “There may or may not be a zombie child wandering Gotham, we can’t leave this grave unfilled for anyone to stumble upon, and there’s still a whole bunch of damage to the cemetery we have to fix.”

Neeti made a strangled noise and pondered if she could just sink into the ground right here.  Why had this happened when she was in charge?

“Are you okay?” Claire said from somewhere above her.

“Am I okay?” Neeti repeated, voice climbing with each word.  “Am I okay?  I have no idea how much money this damage is going to cost to fix, Cordelia’s still in the hospital, Bruce Wayne is going to come for all our heads, and we’re going to be the first ones to die in the oncoming zombie apocalypse, because we work in a graveyard!”

She was screaming by the end of the rant, breaths high and fluttery, face prickling and chest tight.  Her next breath cracked and then she was sobbing.

“Hey, hey,” Claire sounded awkward but there was a hand on her knee and the smell of jasmine perfume.  “It’s going to be okay.  Just take a deep breath.”

Neeti tried to take a deep breath and choked.

“We’ll fix this, okay?” Claire said, quiet but sure.  “One step at a time.”

“Well, at least we can confirm that it wasn’t grave robbers,” Claire said.  Neeti paused the security footage and played it again—that was unmistakably a child in a suit, stumbling across the grass and hauling himself over the gate.  “Jury’s out on whether that’s a zombie, though.”

“At least there aren’t more of them,” Neeti grumbled.  She had an ice pack to her forehead to stave off the headache.  “Thank god for small mercies.”

“So now what do we do?” Abel asked.  “We have proof, right?  We can call the cops.”

“They’re still going to laugh us out of the station.  Or they’ll tell Wayne, who’ll sue us into the ground for desecrating his dead son.  We need to actually find the kid first.”

“You want the three of us to search for a single child in Gotham,” Claire asked flatly, nose wrinkled up.  It was kind of cute, actually.

“Oh no,” Neeti replied immediately.  “No, what we’re going to do is tell Cordelia.  She can figure out who to tell.”

“Isn’t she drugged on fear gas?”

“Look, at the moment I’m not convinced that I’m not hallucinating,” Neeti pointed out, “so there’s not a whole lot of difference.”

“…You just want this to be somebody else’s problem, don’t you.”

“God yes.”

Neeti didn’t know who designed hospital floors to be mazes, she really didn’t, all she knew was that Claire was having a terse and pointed phone call with someone that didn’t appreciate their funeral service being pushed back a week, Abel was faltering with every wrong turn they made, and her head was aching so badly she was tempted to break into the pharmacy and steal some drugs.

The intercom went off over their head, one of the rooms lit up with an alarm, and somewhere a baby was shrieking at a pitch calculated to grate on her eardrums.  Neeti, having already sobbed once today in front of co-workers and pretty sales associates, had had enough.

“That’s it,” she said, opening the next door they came across and walking inside.  The bed was ringed with curtains and its occupant was silent, so Neeti could sink into one of the chairs and focus on deep breaths.

Gotham was stressful all the time, but it wasn’t usually this stressful, and Neeti felt like she was splitting apart at the seams.

“What are you doing?” Abel asked, following her inside.  Claire’s snappy tone came after him, and she shut the door, expression angry and voice a low hiss, still on the phone.  “I thought we were going to talk to Cordelia.”

“You said you visited her before!” Neeti accused.  “You said you knew where to go!  We’re wandering around in circles.”

“I do know where to go,” Abel crossed his arms and frowned.

“Tell me what floor we’re on.”

Abel opened his mouth and raised a finger—and then closed it again, drooping.

“Ugh,” Neeti said, flopping back in the chair.  “This day sucks.”  Abel exhaled heavily and dropped into the chair next to her.  “You think if we cross the ocean, we’ll be safe?”

“What does the ocean have to do with anything?”

“You know.  Zombies can’t cross running water.”

“I think that’s vampires, actually.”

“Huh.”

“—very well.  Take your services elsewhere.  Gotham Memoriam will be deleting your package and all assorted services.  Goodbye,” Claire hissed into the phone before hanging up.  Neeti would swear her eyes were glowing.

“You think an ocean can save me from her?” Neeti whispered to Abel.

“The way you’re looking at her?” Abel snorted.  “No.”

“Well,” Claire said, taking a deep breath and somehow returning to calm and collected.  “I apologize for that.  Just some difficult clients.  Is this Cordelia’s room?”

“No, we’re just taking a break,” Neeti explained, “and this room was empty—oh, hello!”

There was a kid peering through the curtain to stare at them, and Neeti flushed.  Oh god.  This was so embarrassing.  She was really losing it today.

“I’m sorry,” Neeti said quickly, getting up and poking Abel to get up too.  The last thing she needed right now was some suspicious parent wondering why they were in their child’s room.  “We thought this room was empty, we didn’t mean to disturb you—Jason?”

She regretted the word the moment it came out of her mouth.  An instance of insanity, of seeing something that couldn’t be real, because she’d been looking at countless pictures of Jason Todd earlier to try and match it to the grainy security footage.  Claire and Abel froze and turned too, and the teenager, who’d been slowly withdrawing behind the curtain, poked his head out again.

“Holy Mother of God,” Abel breathed out.

“He doesn’t look like a zombie,” Claire whispered.

He didn’t.  He really didn’t.  He looked like a normal kid, dark hair and pale skin and blue eyes, with spots of dirt beneath his ears.  He had on a hospital gown and his fingers were wrapped.  Several of them were splinted.

Neeti remembered the bloody coffin lid, and swallowed.

“It says John Doe on the file,” Claire said, already reading through the notes.  “Hasn’t spoken.  Injuries to his fingers, mild hypothermia, dissociation.”

“Hi, Jason,” Neeti said, daring to step closer.  Not a zombie, she told herself to stop her heart rate from hitting the stratosphere.  “Are you okay?”

“Neeti,” Abel groaned.

“What?” Neeti asked, flushing deeper.  “What are you supposed to say when someone comes back from the dead?”

Jason made a sharp, pained sound, eyes wide and terrified.

“Oh, sh-shoot,” Neeti moved to the side of the bed, crouching next to it.  “Hey, Jason, I’m sorry, it’s okay.  No talking about the d-word.  How are you feeling, kiddo?”

He looked…young.  Younger than he’d looked in any of the scowling photos Neeti had dredged up, the ones attached to articles that unsubtly pointed out that Jason Todd was a Crime Alley street kid before he’d been picked up by Wayne, probably because he was eyeing the camera like he was going to knife its holder.  Right now, he looked lost and confused, and some part of Neeti couldn’t help melting.

Jason opened his mouth, and with what sounded like great difficulty, managed to hoarsely grind out, “Br-Broooose.”

“Bruce?” Neeti blinked.  “Bruce Wayne?”  Oh, right, kid probably wanted them to call his dad.  “Don’t worry, we’ll get your dad here,” she smiled at Jason, before turning towards Abel and Claire.

“Don’t look at me,” Abel said immediately, “I don’t have Bruce Wayne’s phone number.”  Claire also shrugged.

“I guess we can call the cops,” Neeti mused.  Now that they had tangible proof, they’d have to be taken seriously.  “Or tell a doctor?”

“Doctor might be the better option,” Claire decided.

“Great!”  She turned back to Jason and beamed at him, “You’ll be with your dad soon!”

She wasn’t entirely sure if he could understand her, but his mouth ticked up in a small replica of her smile.

Apparently, it was not that easy to convince medical staff that their patient was the formerly dead son of Bruce Wayne.  Claire brought up pictures and Abel explained the broken coffin, but Jason himself did not like the nurses.  He’d retreated to the corner of his room and looked like he would bite anyone that came near him.

“So, you want me to believe that our John Doe is Jason Todd, son of Bruce Wayne, who died nearly six months ago,” the head nurse, Sammi, said dryly.  Another nurse was lurking at her shoulder, looking extremely interested in the conversation.  “Furthermore, that you know this because you work at the cemetery, where our John Doe supposedly crawled out of the grave last night.”

Well, when she put it like that.

“Look, I’m aware it sounds ridiculous,” Neeti conceded.  “I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I didn’t see the security footage.  But it is him.  Look at the pictures!”

Sammi did not look at the pictures Claire helpfully held up.  Sammi looked like she had been on shift way too long and was now being forced to deal with Gotham’s special brand of lunacy.

“And you just, what, miraculously found him here?  By coincidence?”

“We’re actually here to visit our boss,” Abel chimed in.  “We got mixed up, and accidentally went into the wrong room, and stumbled upon him.”

Sammi looked deeply unimpressed.  Honestly, Neeti didn’t blame her.

“Look, is it any crazier than the other stuff that happens in this city?” Neeti asked, appealing to the innate resilience in every Gothamite.  “Just—get his prints or DNA or whatever checked out.  What’s the worst that could happen?”

“The worst that could happen,” Sammi said grimly, “is that Bruce Wayne gets upset that we dredged up the memory of his dead son for a lookalike, and he pulls his investment in this hospital which, between his company and his personal donations, is at least thirty percent funded by him.”

Neeti snapped her mouth shut.  That was…a lot of money.

“We don’t need to tell Wayne, though,” said the other nurse, the one who hadn’t introduced herself.  There was a gleam in her eyes that Neeti didn’t like.  “Just run the prints against the system and see.  Then we can decide who to tell.”

Sammi exhaled heavily and opened her mouth, but before she could speak, she was cut off by her name shouted by a nurse at the end of the hallway.  “We are not done with this conversation,” she said sternly before heading in the direction of the shout.

The other nurse left too, heading to the nurses’ station and leaning over the counter to talk to the guy there.  Both of them darted a look at Neeti before turning back to their whispered conversation.

“Is it just me,” Neeti murmured, “or are you getting bad vibes from that nurse?”

“Definitely not just you,” Claire said, watching them with narrowed eyes.

There was a tense silence.  Abel had retreated inside the room to calm Jason down by telling him an exaggerated story of his last barbeque party and snippets of the story reached Neeti’s ears as dread coalesced in her gut.

“I think that nurse believes us,” Neeti said quietly.

“Yeah,” Claire agreed.  “And I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.”

Neeti looked at Claire and saw her understanding reflected on Claire’s face.  Jason was Bruce Wayne’s son.  Wayne had no clue he was alive, much less where he was.  If someone else got their hands on Jason in the meantime…

“We need to leave,” Neeti said as everything went cold, like a wave of ice sweeping down to her toes.  “Take Jason and get out of here.”  Claire had the best chance of passing as Jason’s family and Abel was awful at dissembling.  “I’ll distract the nurses.”

“Wait,” Claire grabbed her hand before she could head to the nurse’s station.  “Where do I even take him?”

Neeti was getting really tired of people asking her questions like she knew the answers.

“I don’t know,” she hissed back.  “Find out where Bruce Wayne lives!  Just make sure to get out of here.”  She won her hand back from Claire and marched to the nurses’ station.

“Hello,” Neeti smiled, ducking around so the nurses would have to look away from Jason’s room to face her.  “So, do you guys do DNA analysis here or send it to a lab?  Like paternity analysis and things like that?  My brother—well, it’s a long story, but we’re looking for some options, you know?”

Her voice was too high and she gripped her fingers tight to stop herself from fidgeting, but kept her focus as she watched Claire and Abel coax Jason from his room and down the hall.  He was wearing Abel’s sweatshirt and Claire’s leggings instead of his hospital gown, which was all Neeti managed to catch before she swung her attention back to the nurses, who were looking at her with raised eyebrows.

“So, uh, in-house?” she asked again, hoping her laugh didn’t sound as fake as it felt.

“No,” one of the nurses answered, drawing the word out.  “We get it done at Diagen Labs.  They’re a couple of blocks away.”

“Oh, cool,” Neeti said brightly.  Too brightly.  She could feel her face heating up, she hadn’t really ever lied like this before.  The last time that she improvised a story directly to someone’s face was when her mom caught her coming home from a party in high school and Neeti spun some bullshit about a friend emergency.  She still remembered her stuttering voice.  “Could you give me the info on that place?”

“Sure,” the nurse rolled his eyes and began writing down the information.  The other one, the one that had been too interested in Jason in the first place, was watching her with growing suspicion.  Neeti hoped her guilt wasn’t visible, it felt like a blaring sign on her forehead.  She could hear every beat of her heart.

Before the nurse could hand over the information, they were interrupted by a cleared throat.  “Ms. Rao,” Sammi said, expression changed from exasperated and tired to cold and furious.  “Where is our patient?”

“I’m sorry?” Neeti blinked at her.  “Is he not in his room?”

Sammi narrowed her eyes.

Neeti now both knew what a Code Pink was, and what happened when someone kidnapped a teenager from a hospital.  It had been fascinating how quickly the hospital had shifted into high gear, if by fascinating she meant pants-shittingly terrifying.

She could also add ‘getting arrested’ on the list of new things she’d experienced today, which in theory seemed like it should rank lower than ‘finding a zombie child’ but in practice had been enough to reduce her to tears.

Neeti had had a very high-stress day.  She had a headache which had now reached head-splitting proportions, had to deal with a major emergency at work, and had essentially engineered the kidnapping of a zombie child.  It still didn’t make her feel better about crying when the one of the officers, the one the size of Bane, read off the list of punishments for kidnapping and followed it up with a disturbing story about realities of Blackgate.

Everyone knew that Gotham’s justice system was crap, but like, in the offhand way where they groused about it over their morning coffee as they read about a gang war in the news, not when they were handcuffed inside a claustrophobic interrogation room while two men bigger and stronger did their best to intimidate them into a confession.

Neeti had waveringly asked for a lawyer.  They had laughed.

They’d left her alone after they finally realized she wasn’t going to say anything—it wasn’t just common sense, Neeti was pretty sure her voice was going to crack if she tried to speak and she had been humiliated enough for one day—and now Neeti was sitting in an empty room, keeping her breathing as steady as she could, trying not to spiral into full-blown panic.

At least Claire and Abel had gotten away with Jason.  That was good.  The officers would’ve mentioned something if they’d caught them.  Right?  Right?

Or maybe they wouldn’t, if they wanted to—to trick them or something.  Get one of them to crack.

No, there was nothing to crack.  The police didn’t have anything.  Claire seemed resourceful.  Abel had driven them here.  They could hole up somewhere while they found a way to contact Wayne.  How difficult was it to track down a billionaire?

Neeti made a sound that was a cross between a sob and a whimper.  Her head was pounding from the stress and anxiety. She had to stop freaking herself out.  It would—it would be fine.  They would find Wayne and sort this whole thing out.  Neeti wouldn’t—she wouldn’t be convicted.

Unless the police wanted to make an example of her.

No.  She hadn’t even done the actual kidnapping!  They had no evidence.  It would be fine.

Unless the boy wasn’t Jason.  Unless they’d actually kidnapped some random child that looked like Jason but wasn’t, and Wayne was furious enough to take it out on them.  If Gotham’s richest man had a vendetta against them, then he could do all sorts of things, plant evidence, pay off judges, just have them murdered in the streets—

No.  The coffin.  The security footage.  It was real.  If Neeti had been hallucinating this whole day, she had bigger problems than prison.

She had to calm down.  Stay quiet.  Wait.  It would—it would sort itself out.  Neeti took a deep breath to relax.

The lights went out.

The first second passed by in surprise, the second one shifted shock to something more paranoid, and the third second lasted just long enough for her to start feeling scared when the lights switched back on.

Neeti shrieked and instinctively tried to fling herself back, which when attempted in a bolted-down chair, accomplished absolutely nothing except the tightening of Batman’s jaw.

Oh fuck.

She hadn’t—

This had never been—

She hadn’t expected Batman to get involved.

“Neeti Rao,” Batman growled, low and deep.  A tiny part of her head piped up that he’d pronounced her name correctly on the first try.  The greater majority was still stuck in shock.  “Junior Caretaker at Gotham Cemetery.  Under arrest for accessory to the abduction of a minor.”

She had never met Batman before.  The closest she’d ever gotten was that time when the Sprang Bridge had blown up and she’d been stuck in a taxi in completely stalled traffic and saw a flutter of a black cape heading towards the bridge, brightly colored Robin in its wake.

“Where is the child?” Batman asked.  Demanded.  Neeti took shallow breaths, frozen still like a rabbit who couldn’t help hoping that it was invisible from the angry wolf.

Batman.  Batman, here.  Batman, in front of her, looming on the other side of the table.  Batman, and no Robin, and there were rumors that Robin hadn’t been seen in months, rumors that Robin had died, rumors that Robin had been the only thing holding Batman’s sanity together—

Batman slammed his fists down on the table and Neeti shrieked again at the harsh screech.  “Where is the child,” he snarled, and Neeti cowered back as much as she was able when she was handcuffed to the table and in a bolted-down chair.

“What,” she tried, because the majority of her brain was stuck on that article that she’d read on the subway two days ago, about the homeless man that had been delivered to the ER barely breathing because Batman had beaten him to a pulp.

“The child,” Batman growled.  “The one you abducted from a hospital.  Where is he.”

“I didn’t abduct a child,” Neeti said automatically, because her brain was still stuck on holy fuck, it’s Batman.  He didn’t look like a ghost or a spook or a creature made of shadows like some of the stories said.  He looked like a man.  A very angry man that could definitely pulverize her bones.

Neeti liked it better when she believed that Batman was a ghost story.

“You and your co-conspirators stole an innocent child from the hospital as part of some scheme to extort Bruce Wayne in the name of a dead child,” Batman ground out, fists creaking.  “You will give them up and tell me where the boy is, or we will do this the hard way.”

His voice promised pain, but Neeti’s attention was caught on the first part of his statement.

“Wait, it wasn’t a scheme!” she retorted indignantly, belatedly realizing that she’d essentially confessed and also that she’d just contradicted Batman.  “It wasn’t—” she swallowed, shrinking back under Batman’s glare, “we weren’t, we were just trying to keep him safe.”  Her voice was small.  “We wanted to take him to Wayne.”

“To what?” Batman snarled back, jaw tight and voice furious.  “To reopen old wounds?  To further distress a grieving family—”

“No!” Neeti cut him off, straightening in her seat.  “No, it’s—it’s Jason!  Jason Todd, Wayne’s son.  It’s really him!”

Batman stared at her, utterly silent.

He didn’t believe her.  No one had believed them.  There was a lost, hurt child out there who’d come back from the dead, and Neeti was struck with the sudden, terrifying thought that maybe no one would believe them.

Not even Bruce Wayne.

“It—it’s him,” Neeti stuttered, cold all over.  If Batman thought she was delusional, she could get locked up in Arkham, and Claire and Abel too, and maybe even Jason himself, and she couldn’t let that happen.  “Look, I—I work at Gotham Cemetery and it was raining and we saw him on the security footage and—no, wait—” she shook her head, panic slowly tightening around her lungs.  “He—he dug himself out of his coffin, there’s a hole, we saw the coffin, it was broken from the inside, you have to believe me!”

She was leaning forward, against the table, and Batman had taken a step back, like he was afraid of catching whatever she had.

“We saw it,” Neeti repeated uselessly, her face prickling hot, and she didn’t even sound convincing to her own ears.  The handcuffs clinked and the room was small and dimly lit and she was facing the one of the most terrifying people in a city full of monsters.  “We—we found him at the hospital,” she swallowed painfully against her closed-up throat, “and—and we tried to tell the nurses, but some of them looked—too interested, so we just—we weren’t trying to kidnap him, I swear, we were just trying to keep him safe.”

Her voice cracked as the first tear slipped down, hot and wet.  She blinked furiously but she couldn’t stall them, and she had to squeeze her eyes shut when her vision got blurry.

“Please,” she said, voice broken, ducking her head.  “Please, you—you have to believe me.  It’s really Jason, he was calling for his father, we’re just trying to get him home.  Please.”  She had never felt the weight of fear so acutely.

He didn’t believe her.

She would be sent to Arkham.

She’d have to live the rest of her life in a prison for the criminally insane, surrounded by the very worst villains Gotham had to offer, and she had dragged three innocent people down with her.  This was definitely the worst day she’d ever had.

Neeti took a shuddering breath and ducked her head to wipe her face against her arm.  There was a sound like a displeased grunt and when Neeti looked up, blinking against waterlogged eyelashes, it was to see Batman standing right next to her, holding something out.

“Here,” he growled.

Neeti blinked again, squinting at the item.  Her hands were still cuffed, she couldn’t reach out to take it, and Batman seemed to reach that conclusion as well, because he reached out to unlock her cuffs before proffering the item again.

She took it slowly, half-expecting it to slice through her hand, but it was just cotton cloth.  She blinked again, and the cloth resolved itself into a dark handkerchief.  “Oh.  Thanks,” she said numbly, dabbing at her eyes and blowing her nose.  There was a tiny yellow bat symbol in the corner that felt hand embroidered.  “Is this customized?” she asked, looking up at Batman.  Everything felt surreal and strange, like she was in a dream.

“My butler made them,” Batman said in his gravelly voice.

Neeti stared at him.  He didn’t sound like he was joking, but it was a very odd thing to mention.  Did Batman even have a sense of humor?

“Oh,” she said again, for lack of anything else to say.

Batman settled on the other side of the table.  He looked less like he was looming.  “Tell me what happened,” he growled, voice slower and calmer than it had been at the start.  “From the beginning.”

Neeti looked down at her uncuffed hands and the handkerchief with its tiny little yellow bat.  And took a deep breath.

“There was a lot of damage from the storm yesterday,” Neeti started slowly, not looking up at Batman.  She felt wrung out—her headache had migrated down from her temples and the light pierced the back of her eyes.  “And Abel reported a hole in the ground above Jason Todd’s grave.  It didn’t look natural, so we—we had it excavated.”

She blew her nose again, trying to remember exactly how they’d pieced it together.

“The coffin was empty, there was a hole in the lid.  It looked—it looked like it was broken from the inside, there was a lot of blood—”

Batman made a sound and Neeti snapped her gaze up.  The vigilante’s jaw was tight and he was clutching one hand into a clenched fist.  “Continue,” he said, voice toneless.

Neeti did, eyeing him warily.  “We saw him stumbling out of the cemetery on the security footage,” she said, “and we went to the hospital to ask our manager who to report it too.  I—we didn’t think that the police would listen to us.”

Judging by the police’s reaction, they’d been right about that.

“At the hospital, we ended up in the wrong room and—it was Jason,” Neeti said, voice rising again.  Batman had to believe her.  He had to.  “He recognized his name.  He—he asked for Bruce Wayne!  We were trying to convince the nurses to run a DNA test, but they—they were skeptical, and some of them wanted to run the tests but not tell anyone, so we—we didn’t mean to kidnap him, I swear, Claire and Abel were just trying to get him back home!”

Batman stared at her, expression impenetrable.  The silence stretched, warping oddly around them—Neeti could hear her heartbeat, could contrast it with the sheer stillness in Batman’s figure.  He looked like he wasn’t even breathing.

“And where,” Batman said, growl cracking oddly, breath almost ragged, “is Jason now?”

“I—I don’t know,” Neeti winced.  “Claire was supposed to find out where Wayne lived and take Jason there.”

Batman immediately twisted around, muttering something too quiet for her to hear.  He paused and muttered something again, and she realized he was having a conversation.  She wasn’t sure with who.

If he believed her, did that mean she was going to be released?  Batman wasn’t a cop, and the police had clashed with him enough that she knew there was bad blood on both sides.  He had no power to let her go.  And, Neeti realized, her whole plan of waiting for her lawyer had been derailed by her confession.  They’d probably been recording the whole thing.

Fantastic.

The light abruptly shut off again, and when it switched back on to show an empty room, Neeti wasn’t the slightest bit surprised.

She dropped her head against the table and fought the urge to scream.

Neeti was suspicious of the abrupt shift to letting her go—she still hadn’t gotten her lawyer—up until she saw Claire and Abel outside the station.

“Neeti!” Abel called out, and even Claire’s impassive expression flickered to relief as she joined them.  “Are you okay?”

“When you said you were going to distract them,” Claire said, less enthusiastic but still warm, “I didn’t think you meant by getting arrested.”

“I didn’t choose to get arrested,” Neeti glowered as Abel led them down the street to a nearby restaurant—night had fallen and the streets were beginning to empty.  “What happened to you guys?  Did you get Jason back home safe?”

She assumed they had, she couldn’t think of another reason why the police would’ve let her go, but she was reassured by their nods.

“It took us a couple of hours to find out where Bruce Wayne lived,” Abel started, “and apparently Jason still knew the gate code, so we didn’t have any trouble getting in.”

“Wayne wasn’t at home, but his butler was there, and accepted our story,” Claire said, frowning.  “Really easily, actually.”

“I mean, he knew Jason, so obviously he’d recognize him,” Abel shrugged.  “And Jason seemed to recognize him too.”

“When Wayne did get back, he informed us that you’d been arrested and he was working on getting the charges dropped, so we came straight to the station,” Claire finished.  She looked…concerned.  It was nice.  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” Neeti smiled at her.  “Well, aside from Batman showing up to give me a heart attack—”

“You saw Batman?” Abel inhaled sharply as they reached the restaurant and ducked inside.

“What did he do?” Claire asked, voice edging into a snarl.  Her gaze was fiery, like she was prepared to go and fight Batman on Neeti’s behalf.  It was kinda hot.

“Nothing,” Neeti said hastily, because she didn’t actually want Claire to go fight Batman.  Probably.  Maybe.  Well, when she really thought about it…  “He listened to my explanation.  I think he was talking to someone?  Maybe he told Wayne what happened.”

Claire still scanned over her like she was looking for a mortal wound Neeti had failed to mention, lips pressed into a thin line.

“At least Jason got home safe.  And hopefully this doesn’t happen again,” Neeti said, slumping into the booth.  “I don’t know about you two, but this was way more excitement than I wanted today.”

Claire rolled her eyes as she took the seat opposite and picked up the menu, but Abel just made a noncommittal sound, hovering next to the booth.

“Abel?” Neeti asked.  “Everything okay?”

“Actually, I just got a text and I need to head home,” Abel said, which would’ve been a believable lie had he not winked at her.  “Sorry for ditching, but you two have fun!”  Neeti flushed as he waved goodbye and jogged out.

She tried to stall by looking at her menu, but when she glanced up, Claire was leaning her elbows against the table, chin cushioned on her hands, staring at her.  And smirking.

That was a dangerous smirk.

Neeti fought the urge to hide under the table.  “So,” Claire said, slow and quiet.  “Have I mentioned yet that you’re pretty cute?”

Neeti had discovered a zombie child, been arrested for kidnapping, and been interrogated by Batman, and yet it was talking to a beautiful woman that made her mind go completely blank.

“Um,” Neeti said.  “No?”

Claire’s smile widened.  “Well, that’s an oversight that should definitely be corrected.”

Neeti was paying more attention to her phone than the computer when the door chime went off.  Claire wanted to go to some new, trendy, pricey restaurant and Neeti was trying to talk her down to boardwalk ice cream—she still didn’t know if she was going to get fired the moment Cordelia came back and found out what had happened—and she finished her text extolling the virtues of ice cream flavored with sea spray and pollution before she looked up to greet the visitor.

“Welcome to Gotham Cemetery, how can I help—you,” she finished weakly as she recognized the client.  “Mr. Wayne.”

The news had gone crazy with the news of Jason Todd returned to life, and Bruce Wayne himself had practically disappeared from public.  She didn’t blame him—the cemetery had been inundated with requests to check other graves, and they’d finally had to hire security to watch the gates and stop people from coming in with shovels.  And Wayne might’ve dropped the charges against her, but that didn’t mean he didn’t blame the cemetery for the frenzy surrounding his family.

But Bruce Wayne merely smiled as he walked further into the office, expression softer than the sharp-edged one he’d worn at the press conference and more real than those overly cheerful ones he wore in interviews.  “Hello, Ms. Rao—may I call you Neeti?”  Another person that pronounced her name correctly on the first try.  At her stupefied nod, he continued, “Neeti, I wanted to express my gratitude for what you did.  I apologize for not meeting with you sooner—”

“I—what—” Neeti stood up from her desk, flustered, “Mr. Wayne, really, you don’t need to—”

“You brought my son home,” Wayne said, voice soft and solemn.  Neeti remembered reading several different profiles that cast the man as a ditzy airhead, but none of them matched up with the almost painful, disbelieving joy she could see now.  “I don’t know how to even begin to express to you how grateful I am.”

“I was just,” Neeti swallowed, feeling her voice climb to a squeak as her face turned hot, “I was just doing my job.”

Wayne gave her an indulgent smile.  “Nevertheless, you did a very brave thing,” he said.  “If you hadn’t—if you hadn’t found him—” Wayne’s expression abruptly went haunted, and his voice turned shaky, “if he was just—on the streets—not remembering—”

Neeti looked around her in alarm, but there was no convenient sign marked what to do if Gotham’s richest man starts crying in front of you.  “I’m sorry,” Neeti said desperately as Wayne’s voice broke entirely on a sob, “I—do you want a tissue—”

Wayne had already drawn out a handkerchief to dab at his face.  “I apologize, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s okay,” Neeti said hastily, “it’s perfectly understandable.”  Wayne gave her a watery smile.  “I hope Jason is feeling better?”

“He’s improved a lot,” Wayne said, brightening further.  “He—it’s a miracle.  My miracle.”  Wayne looked somewhere between awed and disbelieving.  “He’s going to make a full recovery.”

From being dead? Neeti bit her tongue to stop herself from clarifying.  Weird things happened in Gotham all the time.  She just hoped no more clients rose from the grave, because it would be an awful lot of paperwork and Neeti did not want to relive that awful day of stress and tension and fear.

“There is no amount of riches in the world that would be equal to my joy and gratitude,” Wayne said, stepping forward and removing an envelope from his pocket, “but I hope that this will be a token of my appreciation for all that you’ve done.”

He extended the envelope out to her with a warm smile.

Now Neeti was fully red, stammering in embarrassment, “Mr. Wayne, I can’t—I’m not the only one who—I didn’t—”

“Mr. Sanchez and Ms. Chu will be receiving their own checks,” Wayne reassured, “and I’ve made a separate donation to the cemetery, which I understand will show up by the end of the week.”  He smiled at her.  “Think of it as compensation for your experience with the police, if you like.”  He kept smiling, but something about it seemed just a little bit sharper.  “I won’t be taking no for an answer, Neeti.”

Neeti reluctantly took the envelope.

“My card is in there as well,” Wayne added.  “If you have any issues at all, don’t hesitate to call.  Thank you, again, for helping my family.”  His voice got a little choked up and gravelly at the end.  It sounded vaguely familiar.

“I—I’m happy I could help,” Neeti said softly.  Wayne inclined his head in acknowledgement before he headed out and Neeti watched him leave, wondering about the strange sense of déjà vu she could feel.

She absently opened the envelope to check its contents and promptly choked.

That.

That was a lot of zeros.

Neeti sat down in her chair, knees weak, and took a shaky breath.  No good deed goes unpunished, she thought, more than a little hysterically.  She reached for her phone to text Claire that they could go to that new restaurant after all.

Something about Wayne’s mannerisms hadn’t stopped niggling at her, though.

“Oh my god.  Bruce Wayne is Batman.”

“Darling, please go back to sleep.”