DC – I am Batman

Commissioner Gordon shook hands like a cop. Firm, two pumps, eyes on your face the whole time, reading whether you were going to be a problem. He had gray at the temples and a mustache that had been in style once and come back around and the tired posture of a man who'd been carrying Gotham's caseload on his shoulders for longer than he'd been wearing the rank.

"Bruce. Good to see you again. Your father around?"

"Getting a drink. He said to tell you the proposal's on your desk Monday."

"It's always on my desk Monday." Gordon's mouth twitched under the mustache. "I've been telling Thomas that the community policing initiative needs more than funding, it needs bodies. Actual officers on actual streets. Money buys equipment. It doesn't buy trust."

"He agrees with you."

"Then he should tell the mayor that instead of writing checks." Gordon looked at him with cop eyes, steady and evaluating. Then the evaluation softened. "You look good, Bruce. How's school?"

"Engineering keeps me busy."

"Keep it that way. Gotham needs engineers more than it needs another Wayne on a board." He said it like a compliment and a warning folded into the same sentence.

The gala was in the GCPD precinct building's event space, which meant a room that had been a gymnasium until someone hung streamers and brought in a catering company and tried to make cop-shop fluorescents feel festive. It didn't entirely work. The food was good though. Thomas had insisted on that.

A woman in a uniform was arguing with a caterer about whether the shrimp was supposed to be on ice or in chafing dishes. A group of detectives in ill-fitting suits were clustered near the bar trading stories that made their wives look uncomfortable. The jazz trio in the corner was playing softly enough that you could hear the precinct dispatch radio bleeding through the wall from the room next door.

"I want you to meet someone," Gordon said. He turned and scanned the room and found what he was looking for near the dessert table. "Barbara. Come here."

She was already walking over. She'd been watching the conversation and had started moving before he called.

Red hair, pulled back. Glasses that she wore like a tool, not an accessory, thin-framed and functional. She was wearing a green dress that looked comfortable rather than expensive and flat shoes because she'd chosen practicality over the event's dress code, and she moved through the room with a quick, efficient stride that ate ground without looking rushed.

"Dad, the shrimp situation is getting political."

"The shrimp is fine."

"The shrimp is on ice when it should be warm and Sergeant Alvarez's wife is about to stage an intervention." She turned to Bruce. "Hi. You're Bruce Wayne. I'm Barbara."

"Commissioner's daughter."

"Among other things." She shook his hand. Quick, like her father's, but lighter. Her palm was dry and her fingers were long and she had calluses on her right hand from typing that pressed against his skin. "My dad talks about your dad a lot. Mostly in the context of 'why does Thomas Wayne keep calling me about community policing at eleven PM.'"

"He's passionate about it."

"He's relentless about it. There's a difference." She grinned. "I like him."

Gordon was watching this exchange with the expression of a father who was simultaneously proud of his daughter's social skills and already planning how to end the conversation if it went somewhere he didn't like. The cop and the parent running in parallel.

"Barbara's finishing her degree at GU," Gordon said. "Computer science."

"And forensic analysis. And I'm interning at the GCPD's cyber unit." She said it fast, no pause between items, because she didn't think the list needed emphasis. "What about you? My dad said engineering."

"Engineering and political science."

"Poly-sci." She pushed her glasses up with one finger. "Interesting combo. The engineers I know don't care about politics and the poly-sci people can't do math. What's the overlap?"

"Systems. How to build them and how they break."

She looked at him for a second. The grin picked up an edge.

"That's a better answer than I get from most people at these things," she said. "Usually it's 'I'm keeping my options open' or 'my advisor recommended it.'"

"Those are true too."

"But they're not why."

"No."

She picked up a napkin from the table behind him and her arm crossed his chest on the way and stayed there a beat longer than it needed to and she didn't apologize. She grinned. "Sorry, you're just very in the way."

"I can move."

"Don't."

She folded the napkin and wiped a spot of something off her glasses and put them back on and the whole operation took about four seconds and her arm was still close enough to his chest that the warmth came through his shirt.

Gordon watched this happen with the squint of a man who had seen his daughter flirt before and didn't enjoy it.

"Bruce, have you seen the crime statistics report the Mayor's office released last week?" Barbara said.

"The quarterly?"

"The quarterly is garbage. They aggregate by precinct and weight by population density, which sounds reasonable until you realize that three precincts cover areas with transient populations that the census doesn't count. The Narrows, Coventry industrial corridor, the docks district. The real per-capita violent crime rate is twenty-three percent higher than the reported number. I sent a corrected analysis to the Mayor's statistical office and they thanked me and didn't publish it."

She said this quickly, with energy, annoyed about the parts that didn't work out.

"You corrected the city's crime statistics."

"Somebody had to. The data was wrong and nobody was fixing it." She took a sip of water. "The bigger problem is case clearance rates. Gotham PD clears forty-one percent of violent crimes, which is below the national average. But if you break it down by type, homicide clearance is actually at sixty-two percent because my dad runs a good Major Crimes unit. The number gets dragged down by assault and robbery, which nobody investigates because the precincts are understaffed and the officers who ARE there spend their shifts on paperwork for cases that are already closed."

"You've analyzed the entire department."

"I've analyzed the data. The department is just where the data lives." She pushed her glasses up again. "Your father's community policing proposal would help. More officers on the street means more initial response coverage, which means more evidence collected at scene, which means higher clearance rates downstream. But it only works if the officers have the right training and the right tech, and right now GCPD's digital forensics infrastructure is running on systems from 2003."

Gordon cleared his throat. "Barbara."

"What."

"You're lecturing."

"I'm informing. There's a difference." She looked at Bruce. "Am I lecturing?"

"You're being thorough."

"See? He doesn't mind." She turned back to her father. "I'm going to get more shrimp. The warm kind." She looked at Bruce. "Come with me. The shrimp situation needs a witness."

He went with her. Gordon watched them cross the room and his jaw worked once under the mustache and he took a drink.

The shrimp situation had been resolved. The ice had been replaced with a warming tray and Sergeant Alvarez's wife was eating contentedly. Barbara looked at the tray and said "justice prevails" and took a plate and loaded it with shrimp and cocktail sauce.

"Your dad's protective," Bruce said.

"My dad's a cop. Protective is the factory setting." She ate a shrimp and pointed at him with the tail. "He runs background checks on anyone I have lunch with. I'm not exaggerating. He literally runs background checks."

"What did mine say?"

"Clean. Boring, actually. Engineering student, family money, traveled abroad during high school. The interesting parts aren't in the file." She ate another shrimp. "The interesting parts are never in the file."

She was looking at him with steady attention, cataloging. The same kind of look he'd gotten from Harleen and Alexis, except Barbara's version ran faster and had a spreadsheet behind it.

"You want to know what's interesting about you?" she said.

"Is this going to be like the crime statistics?"

"Better. You walked into this room and you identified every exit, the security detail, and the three detectives near the bar who are carrying off-duty in under forty-five seconds. That's either training or paranoia. Your posture says training. Your eyes say you're still doing it." She ate a shrimp. "Also you keep glancing at the dispatch radio bleed from next door, which means you can hear it, which means you're listening to police frequencies at a charity gala while making small talk. That's a specific kind of weird."

He kept his face neutral. She was good. She was very good.

"I'm observant," he said.

"You're beyond observant. Observant people notice things. You're cataloging." She grinned again. Bright, direct, unafraid. "I catalog too. Occupational hazard."

"I thought you were a computer science intern."

"Intern is the word my dad uses so he doesn't have to explain to the Commissioner's oversight board that his twenty-year-old daughter has access to federal databases." She lowered her voice. "I'm not an intern. I'm the only person at GCPD who can do what I do and my dad knows it and it scares the hell out of him."

She said it flat. A fact.

A woman from the catering company approached to ask if the dessert table should be refreshed and Barbara said yes and called her by name and the woman looked surprised that anyone at the event remembered her name and Barbara smiled at her and it was a different smile than the one she'd been giving Bruce. Warmer. Softer. The smile of someone who noticed service workers because she'd been raised by a public servant.

"I should get back to my dad before he sends a squad car to escort you home," she said.

"Will I see you around?"

"I'm at GU three days a week and GCPD the other four. Our orbits overlap." She pulled a card from her pocket. Handwritten on the back of a business card from a coffee shop on Miller Street. Her number in small, precise handwriting. "In case you want to talk about systems."

He took the card. "Systems."

"How to build them. And how they break." She threw his own answer back at him and grinned and walked away eating shrimp.

He watched her go. Red hair, green dress, flat shoes, fast stride. She reached Gordon and Gordon put his hand on her shoulder and she said something that made him shake his head and she laughed and the laugh was quick and sharp and completely unselfconscious.

Thomas appeared at his elbow with two drinks.

"Making friends?"

"Barbara Gordon just corrected Gotham's crime statistics at me for five minutes."

Thomas handed him a glass. "Sounds like Barbara. She's brilliant. Jim's terrified."

"Of what?"

"That she's going to outgrow every institution that's supposed to contain her. Including his." Thomas drank. "He's probably right."

They stood and watched the room. The jazz trio had switched to a faster number. The dispatch radio was still bleeding through the wall. Barbara was talking to a uniformed officer and pointing at a laptop the officer was holding and the officer was nodding and Barbara was typing one-handed while holding a plate of shrimp with the other and nobody in the room looked surprised because this was apparently normal.

Bruce put the card in his wallet. Next to Harleen's.

His wallet was getting crowded.

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