Revelations

A/N: A bit more exposition for you guys. It should be the last chapter of this before things pick up. Oh, and don't own.

Gotham City.

Millions of people living in what had once been described as a city of the future. Towering skyscrapers. Large public spaces. Sprawling suburban enclaves, cheap tenements, construction sites sharing space with each other.

Underneath their feet lay another world. A heaving, seething mass of people and beings, living in the detritus of the world above. A society driven underground by necessity. Getting ever larger as more and more refugees came pouring in from all across the world, fleeing wars, famine, discrimination and slavery. Housed beneath sewage outlets, subway lines, abandoned facilities, smuggler's tunnels, they built their own world with the dregs of the old. Block Towers, each more populated than a European wizarding village, filled to the brim by enterprising slum lords. Markets where anything and everything was on offer. Blood. Flesh, innards from every species imaginable. Food stolen from the city itself. Water collected from underneath a leaking supply pipeline. Drugs. Potions. Weapons.

People.

And patrolling them all, fighting crime where possible, was a force that numbered less than a hundred. Aurors, hitwizards, agents from all over the country, theoretically charged with stemming the tsunami of debauchery below their feet but reduced to keeping the existence of magic a secret while their trainees desperately fought for justice in a dark and savage world.

This is the magical side of Gotham City, an anonymous, unofficial slum larger than any other wizarding settlement on earth.

Her home.

The City above, where she was raised. Gotham high. Private tutoring in science, music and magic. The slums below, where she grew up. Raids on drug dealers, fighting slavers, murderers, rapists. Standoffs with Dark Mages, corrupt Goblin bankers, dwarven supremacists, desperate refugees. Recruiting orphans, the abused, the hopeless to the cause, reasoning that the hell she was signing them up for was kinder than the one they lived in.

She was one of the few who regularly dared to venture down here. Most of the Aurors who'd tried in the past had ended up in one of either two situations-captured or dead. Whenever that happened, the MPD sent someone to retrieve the LEO before the victim, alive or dead, was auctioned off piecemeal.

Standing against those that sought to profit from this venture was the Search & Rescue/Retrieval squad. That's the division Barbara Anne Gordon started in.

Five successful retrievals later and she was automatically re-assigned with a promotion. It was not for nothing that Retrieval was known as the 'suicide squad' amongst the veterans on the Force. You started off there as a rookie or ended up there as a disgrace to your uniform. It was hard work. It was demanding work. It was as likely to kill you as it was to make you a name in the force-and the slums.

She got out with a recommendation for promotion to junior grade shit-kicker and a couple of easily concealable scars.

And that's when the fun really started.

Four years & two time-turner burnouts later and she was cruising down the underground highway on the back of her motorbike. It wasn't much to look at, being little more than a massive engine on wheels, but the enchantments on it made up for the lack of aesthetic appeal.

Between her bike, her outfit and her guns, she more than once had wondered if the ICW-certified supplier getting her this stuff was staffed by Judge Dredd fanboys or Batman fanboys. She bet on Judge Dredd more than Batman though. Fangasming after a real person was... harder. Especially when said person was wanted for multiple counts of murder, vigilantism and breach of the peace.

Plus, Dredd was cooler. He had guns and wasn't afraid to use 'em.

The highway was a series of pipelines that'd had a lattice of magical metals enchanted to fit around them. Whenever one of the Gotham City Council workers came down to work on it, all the worker would see was a lot of extra support struts keeping the piping from falling into the depths below. But whenever a car, a bike, a horse or a being hit the entrance ramp and paid the five cent fee, the struts morphed into a long, large metal road that was absolutely perfect for breaking all kinds of speed limits on.

Babs gunned her engine, hitting Electric Station eight at full speed. She took the turnpike, emerging into one of the many abandoned metro tunnels, her helmet feeding her all the information she needed to make it to her destination. Three miles, left turn, two miles, left again, emerge on highway heading into Gotham proper.

She looked to either side of the tunnels, spotting some of the more affluent districts available underground. Dwarven forges, Veela restaurants, Gringott's-run shopping malls, actual magical day-schools, all clean, proper, well-maintained. Nothing like the slums down below, with its very literal approach to the term 'tourist trap'. Most of the kids travelling with their parents to visit the 'picturesque' sprawl below now resided in the orphanages on this level, their parents gone missing, their future one of being kicked down into the very slums that had cost them whatever life they might have had otherwise upon reaching the age of seventeen, assuming they weren't adopted or recruited by some criminal organisation or another first.

And those were the lucky ones. Those kids who'd accompanied their parents on a daytrip rarely, if ever, made it back to the centres up here.

Barbara sighed. Fucking city.

Her engine roared, morphing into something approximating a 'muggle' design. The engine shrank, the seat elongated itself, her magical HUDlink turned into a set of dials and the tyres grew ridges.

She emerged in the daylight on a matte black bike cruiser that had GCPD stamped down the side of it. Barbara frowned. This was new. As was the set of red, white and blue light fittings on the front and back of her vehicle.

She flicked on the siren and sped up even further, hoping she wouldn't be late for her meeting with Dad.

Hey, if you got it, flaunt it. That went for dresses, shoes, automatic shotguns and bikes. That's just how Barbara rolled.

The heavy growl of her bike entering the GCPD's main HQ parking lot attracted its fair share of attention. Some of the officers looked at her in confusion. The biker cops looked at her ride in envy. And the officers looked at her with surprised recognition when she finally parked and took her helmet off.

Red hair fell down her armoured jacket's back in a crimson cascade. Her glasses, the ones she normally wore when on patrol (enchanted to buggery, not to mention acting as a secondary defensive shielding system when the going got tough), evaluated her surroundings and came back with a firm negative from the IFF charms. No hostile intent whatsoever, which was kind of surprising to her. She got higher hostility scores in the MPD's break room than she did in a building filled with people who either knew her or her dad enough to 'know' that she was both too young and not enough of a copper to be allowed GCPD property for personal use. Wireframe overlays appeared in her vision, the structural scans of her surroundings confirming what she'd seen from previous visits-minimal background magics, a bit of stress in the building's superstructure that needed looking at, piping and insulation that needed either drastic refurbishment or outright replacing.

A second later, a map appeared in the corner of her glasses, displaying the interior of the building alongside the names and locations of all its inhabitants. She smiled. Barbara'd come up with that little addition herself after she got a hold of some of Dad's old school notes. The number of times that thing had come in handy was simply phenomenal.

Silently, she tapped her hidden wand against her armoured uniform, the bulges housing weapons and other, weirder devices disappearing without a sound. She decided against engaging her armour's morphing systems, knowing that too many people had seen her come in on a bike to make turning her get-up into a standard police uniform a valid tactic. Going from running around in what looked like heavily modified biker gear to a beat get-up in a second flat would probably make her even more conspicuous. Maybe. Probably. It was weird, what Gotham's finest did and didn't notice sometimes. Ignore magic, fiiine, but smoke a spliff in an abandoned warehouse on the very outskirts of the suburban redevelopment projects and you're more likely than not to end up behind bars.

Weird.

The entrance lobby was quiet-a few officers lounging around, some in uniform, some still out of it, eyeing the clock on the other side of the hall much like a goblin eyes a pot of unclaimed gold-that is to say, nervously and with twitchy fingers. Must be that bank robbery in progress downtown. Highway six, her preferred approach vector, had been blocked off because of it. Standard procedure when the police deal with a big-time heist these days was to seal off the area, evaluate the situation and evacuate if the perps turn out to be of the... unstable kind.

These guys were the GCPD's version of the MPF's general protection squad, the guys that charge into the fray in order to get civilians out of the way. In her experience, these were the kind of people that charged into burning buildings to save kittens and/or oblivious tourists from the predators that would eat them-if they were lucky. Unlike the MPF however, the GCPD had five separate squads, two on call in daytime, two at night with the fifth rotating in and out as a reserve unit, ready to rock any time, anywhere.

The squad at GCPD central was the reserve unit, meant to play back-up in case it's someone like Mister Freeze or, god and heavens above forbid, Poison Ivy. She'd seen the aftermath of some of Poison Ivy's attacks back at Gotham High after the Principal threw out a crowd of environmentalists preaching Miss Isley's special brand at us. Never again. Hopefully.

She stopped at the vending machine and got out two iced coffees. Opening the can and chugging it down in one long gulp, she turned around and tossed the other can at a particularly haggard-looking officer who was struggling with the idea of staying awake. Nodding at the muffled thanks, she moved towards the elevator and ran into her second-favourite Gotham detective. "Hello, Uncle Bullock." She greeted warmly.

The fat man glared at her. "What the hell did you do?" He snapped at her.

She blushed, which was a frankly disturbing sight in someoneone decked out in 'biker gear'. "Well, a lot of things. Can you be more specific?"

"Jim's fucking mad at something. Has been all goddamn day. And I'm willing to bet it's your fault." He continued.

Barbara smiled up at the tall, corpulent man. "Conjecture, detective. You ain't able to prove nuthin'" She stated with a smirk.

Bullock turned white, then adopted a shade of puce before snorting and patting her on the shoulder. "Spoken like a true cop, kid. But yeah, daddy's mad at you, so better prepare for a shoutin' match. A fucking long one too."

"Thanks for the heads up, Uncle. I'll see you later." She said, stepping out of the elevator.

"Take care, kiddo!" He shouted out before the doors closed.

A scorched desk lay in the middle of the office. A faint magical signature came from the wreckage, making Barbara snort. Looks like someone mistook magic for technology again. She sure hoped that the evidence wasn't that crucial- while self-destruct mechanisms were a standard addition in American magical items, the public knowledge of how to cook up such mechanisms and implant them on incriminating materials such as papers or even weaponry had made it easy for criminals looking to escape the Aurors' notice to set up shop up top. She would have to find a way to get to the perp before the GCPD got them. Wouldn't do for a scaled-up version of just such an enchantment to take out a city block like it had in the Pureblood People's Republic of Fresno.

The office was both similar and completely different to her own. Evidence bags, report papers and computers were scattered around, but there was none of the frenetic activity that seemingly defined the MPF. Whatever the people here were working on, be it crimes, requisitions, after-action reports, they were going at it slowly and methodically.

In other words, they had one task to do-and they did it.

Barbara was jealous. Whenever she was put to work, she ended up juggling five things at once in three different places before someone knocked on her door with yet another emergency. Braining dark witches with combat shotguns was the relaxing bit.

The cool, off-white colouring scheme did little to soothe her nerves. There was none of the features you'd expect in a cop shop up here-no detention methods, such as chains or cages, were handy. No weapons were in evidence, even though her glasses had picked up an armory's worth of .45 pistols stashed in everything from desk drawers to supply closets. One worker had three different shotguns and SMGs stashed in a duffel bag hidden under his or her desk. Whoever they were, Babs applauded them. With some of the more violent crazies running around with weapons that weren't supposed to exist, even a little more firepower went a long way.

She herself had a Milkor stashed under her desk. No high explosive rounds, but six rounds of 40mm buckshot that could stop quintuple-X and even some sextuple-X Dark Creatures dead in their tracks. It had never happened before, but the crazed gunman that had snuck into her charges' MPD bunks had literally pissed himself when she'd casually expelliarmused him without a wand before sticking the big-ass gun down his trousers.

And, well, the airburst shells she'd had the MPD armourer make for her could handle the rest. Villains. Monsters. Tall buildings. Six cans of whoopass, her kids called it.

Hey, the Gotham cops lived in a world where the worst they could expect to face was a madman that'd snuck in underneath Batman's radar. The slums, on the other hand, were located almost dead centre above the old dumping grounds the mad scientists had used back in the day. Clockwork tanks and killer robots were not an everyday thing, but they came close. Slimy, evil monsters, though, they weren't all that rare. The voodoo guys paid good money for the carcasses. Slimy, evil gumbo was a Gotham delicacy, apparently, known for its spicy aftertaste. Also known for driving people mad, but hey, when you voluntarily entered the slums, madness was part of the experience.

She knocked on Dad's office door, hesitated, braced herself then entered. "Hey Dad." She said with fake lightness.

His chair was pointed towards the skyline. It didn't budge around.

"Uh, so my boss told me to come and talk to you..." She said, shifting around nervously. "Well, uh, so yeah..." She ran her hand through her hair, twitching as she spotted the open file on his desk. Her open file. "Guess you know."

"I do." Jim's voice stated neutrally from behind the chair. "Good service record-decisive factor in a number of investigations, recommendations from superiors praising your stellar performance in the field, highly valued team instructor and mentor of the MPD-you've made a name for yourself out there."

Barbara blushed. "Well thank you."

"So why am I finding out about all this now? First I get that ICW fuckwit giving the me whole story instead of you. Then I get orders from on high to take you on as a liaison officer. Then I get told that you've been given carte blanche in the use of GCPD assets, involvement in ongoing investigations, the works. I had no idea why, at least, not until I read your file. You're basically one of their best officers, and they're letting you go, practically throwing you at me." He enunciated calmly.

"Well, not really." Barbara replied. "Liaison, remember? Basically, that's about as high as I can get within the ICW's current framework."

"Really?" Jim asked, turning around to face her. "Because, from where I'm standing, they pretty much told you to fuck off with these." He said, slapping a set of papers down. "Full time liaison, retains MPD rank until situation normalises, free for promotion within GCPD ranks. Either you excel and someone from one of the smaller countries gives you a job in their office or you fuck up and are fired from both sides of the divide."

"Which, realistically, is probably going to happen." Barbara observed wryly. "I mean, the mission they gave me, gave us, it's... big." She finished. "Plus, I'm into computers. Crime fighting's more like a weird-ass hobby I can't walk away from."

"A hobby." Jim said, deadpan. "You hunt these guys... as a hobby."

"Uh, yeah?"

"According to your service jacket, you wiped out at least three separate slaver gangs operating in this city... as a hobby."

"Well, they were targeting people and I couldn't just let them, so, well..." She shrugged.

"You call patrolling the magical version of downtown Mogadishu a hobby."

"Well, I never said it was a good one. Besides, I'm getting extra credit for my computer forensics courses because of this." Barbara pointed out.

"Jesus Babs! Why didn't you tell me?" Jim asked.

Barbara cringed. "Well, it wasn't meant to last this long. Just long enough to get what I wanted and get out. Then it became a steady job where I helped others and... well..." she trailed off. "It was either that or flipping burgers downtown." She offered.

Jim facepalmed. "You're so much like your mother it's not funny. 'Oh no, there's someone in trouble, let's go help!', 'You can't treat house elves like that!', 'What do you mean by prank?', 'hey, guess what, I joined the Order of the Phoenix! Ain't life grand?'..."

"Wait, house elves? The Order of- no way! My mom was a hero?" She exclaimed.

Jim cringed. "Please don't say that."

"But-but the Order! They're like really famous! Albus Dumbledore put them all together and... and... oh."

"Yeah, oh." Jim said sarcastically. "Not that cool now, huh?"

"So that's where you get your stories from! The marauders, the Longbottoms, the Weasley clan, the Prewetts... damn, and there I thought you were talking about work... friends... from when you were... in Britain..." Barbara trailed off. "I don't remember a Gordon in the line-up there." She pointed out.

Jim sighed. "You know how I'm not screaming at you right now despite really, really wanting to?"

"Yeah." Barbara conceded dryly. "I was wondering about that actually."

"Stones, glass houses." Jim offered.

"What?" Barbara asked.

"Pleased to meet you! The name's Black. Sirius Black." Her Dad said, extending his hand.

Barbara fainted.

He looked down at his daughter with a faint smile on his face. She was dressed in black motorbike gear, carried two wands, a pistol and what looked like a telescoping baton... and yet she still looked the same as she had last night, wearing her patently ridiculous pyjama and sneakers get-up.

Jesus. A lot like her mother and father, but a bit too much like him. Joining a freaking police/peacekeeper force in an ICW-mandated terra nullius magicus without telling him. Man, that was dumb. What if she'd run into one of her guys? Hell, what if she'd run into Batman?

What if she'd died on the job?

Maybe that blood adoption thing hadn't been that good an idea after all.

He shook his head, looking around his office. There wasn't much in the way of decorations. None of the richly appointed furnishings his predecessor'd left behind, apart from the desk & chair. Everything else was in the evidence locker, pending the man's much-delayed trial. He had a desktop monitor & keyboard on display with a dummy tower shunted underneath. The real computer was a laptop concealed in the desk drawer's fake bottom. The same fake bottom his predecessor had used for his personal money & drugs stash... God, Gotham was fucked up sometimes. Anyway, the laptop ran things. Anyone dumb enough to break into his office for information would steal the tower and leave the actual computer alone.

Batman'd taught him that trick.

He sighed and lifted his daughter into the visitor's chair. Hmm, plastic zip ties with runes engraved into them for handcuffs. The bullets didn't look like the standard-issue set he would get. The pistol was a browning hi-power mk 3... Impeccable, if expensive, tastes there girl. The leathers themselves were heavily enchanted. If he tried the revelio on her, he would probably blind himself doing so.

He pondered that. The file marked her out as a competent & capable field Auror despite having neither the rank nor the age, better suited for training & investigation than as a political go-between. Her load-out seemed to corroborate that. She had the kind of gear Mad-Eye would have killed for and, if he didn't miss his guess, that included glasses acting much like the eye of Vance did. He had no doubt that hitting her with a car would do little more than leave a rather large dent in the vehicle's hood. She probably wouldn't even notice.

He'd seen gear like that before. Batman's suit acted like it, capable of stopping anything short of an RPG round dead. His old Auror gear was similar, if significantly less effective, than what she was sporting. Hell, his old Order gear was nowhere near as good as this. This was the kind of stuff you wore when you expected heavy combat, not just a night-time patrol down a couple of dark alleys.

He turned to Babs's file and looked over the arrests she'd made.

The Mortician-slums. Dark Wizard that specialised in collecting corpses and turning them into inferi on commission. Barbara's team tracked him down in Tower 6 when he and The Scum were discussing business.

The Scum-slums, Gotham peripheral suburbs. Hags, feral weres, pureblood raised squibs that were exiled from the wizarding world and decided to gang up. Black market trading, weapons dealing, drug trafficking, potions manufacturing were their specialty. The hags and weres acted as muscle while the squibs did the planning and the legwork. After their aborted talks with The Mortician, The Scum attempted to 'deal' with the MPD by planting bombs around Gotham Alley. Barbara was 'instrumental' in curtailing the threat, though a block of slums wasn't so lucky. Final tally-300-odd dead, close to a thousand wounded and an ICW 'merit badge' for Babs and her team.

He chuckled at the thought of getting a merit badge for stopping citywide bombing attacks. That would definitely raise the game at the local scout meeting if Babs ever deigned to return there.

Thus ended the reporting period for January last year. One month and she'd done all that. Jim had known entire departments that would have failed where she and a handful of teenagers won the day.

Jim sighed. Why oh why couldn't she have gotten into normal trouble like a normal teen would?

The list got bigger the older she got too. It was weird, how often criminals adopted code names for themselves in the magical world. His brief sojourn into peacetime Auror work had put him face to face with a guy that called himself King of The House Elves, the Hagsterhood, the Monkey Wrenchmen... Basically, in the wider scheme of things, Voldemort was on the low end of the weirdness scale. He had been terrifying because he was effective, not because of his name or credentials.

So to give up their rising star? Didn't make sense. The bureaucrat that'd come by would have done just as well, if not better...

He looked at the orders he'd been given. Wizarding Britain was a shell. They needed people to come back or immigrate. They were giving people titles and land to do so. Criminal elements were bound to try and take advantage of this. But that was a magic-side issue. No matter how bad things got, it wasn't like the ICW to risk blowing a hole through the statute of secrecy. Even Gothamites had a weirdness threshold, no matter how skewed it was.

So why draft his daughter into what was clearly a political issue? Why risk exposing magic to the general public, or worse, The Joker? Talia al'ghul? The Riddler? Two Face?

Bane?

If any of those guys started recruiting the kind of mooks his daughter encountered, things would be well and truly fucked.

There had to be a reason behind this.

Training & field-work... Could it be?

He snapped out of his thoughts. Barbara was waking up. And she didn't look happy. "Goddamn... Dad?" She asked, looking up at him wearily.

Jim sighed. "Sit your ass down, oh daughter mine. Let's have a talk."