Chapter Text
It was a little known fact that Bruce Wayne hadn't only fostered his boys. As one of the few above-the-board trained and highly experienced foster parents in Gotham, Bruce had actually fostered dozens of children from all kinds of situations over the years. The only kids the press ever actually found out about were the ones he legally gained custody of, in one way or another, due to stringent privacy policies set in place back when he'd applied to be a foster parent for Dick.
Sometimes Bruce is able to keep in contact with his former foster kids, and he's always happy when that's the case, but other times he loses complete contact with them and can't legally track them down again. It's those children, outside of the ones he's legally able to claim as his own, that he worries about relentlessly. But even among those kids, there's two he worries about the most.
Jasmine Madeline Fenton and her younger brother Daniel Jackson Fenton had come into Bruce's life and home when Dick was thirteen. They weren't the first kids he'd fostered since adopting Dick, but they were the most impactful. Jazz was six, her hair was freshly cut and washed, her clothes neat and a bit on the baggy side, and her backpack still had a tag on it. Danny was three, he, too, had freshly cut and washed hair, his clothes were brand new, and his diaper bag was fully stocked.
Jazz was six and her clothes hung off her frame. She had bags under eyes and didn't know how to brush or wash her own hair. The backpack she had when she walked in his front doors was the very first new thing she'd ever seen that her parents hadn't immediately cannibalized for their experiments.
Danny was three and hadn't been given a real bath in almost a year. His clothes were all either too small or his sister's hand-me-downs. His diaper hadn't been changed in over six hours.
Bruce had been so sure he was going to be awarded permanent custody of the two. There had obviously been criminal neglect going on in that household at least, it should have been child's play to gain permanent custody of them. His lawyer and the children's case manager had assured them their case was practically airtight.
The kids had only been in his custody for two weeks before the state awarded full parental rights to the Drs Fenton. Jazz had only barely started getting used to eating three times a day again. Danny had just started smiling whenever Dick played peekaboo with him. And the courts sent. Them. Back. A month later and the Fenton's moved without a word, leaving behind not a single trace. It was almost as though they'd vanished.
Dick had been devastated. Alfred was crushed. And Bruce? Bruce experienced the five stages of grief for the second time in his life twice over. For years, he had private investigators searching everywhere he could think of for the siblings, desperately hoping to find even the slimmest glimmer of hope that they were alright, that they were still alive.
Jason coming into the household lessened some of that pain and desperation, especially after Bruce obtained full custody of him, but the tension between Dick and Jason drove the lingering tension between Dick and Bruce to critical levels. Argument after argument, fight after fight, all about the same topic: Why did Jason get adopted when Jazz and Danny were still out here?
Eventually the tension exploded in one of the worst ways possible, and the family was reduced back down to three. The first six months after Jason's funeral, Bruce refused to take on any new children. He even asked the private investigators to only contact him if they definitively found proof of the kids. The pain, the grief, the guilt was just too much for him. He'd failed Jazz and Danny, and he'd failed Jason, too. He couldn't handle failing yet another child.
Then Tim showed up, too tiny and too determined to get his way. The shock of seeing the obvious evidence of yet more criminal neglect from his own neighbors drew Bruce out of his downward spiral just enough to realize he needed help. Tim was right, he had been killing himself with his work, and doing so was the exact opposite of what Jazz, Danny, or Jason would have wanted from him. He notified CPS of a possible situation he was keeping an eye on, as well as the fact that he was pulling himself back together so he'd be able to reapply to be a foster parent, and then sought the help of a therapist sworn to absolute secrecy with the help of multiple NDAs.
A year later, he was reinstated as a foster parent, awarded first temporary, then later full, custody of Tim. He fostered a pair of blonde little girls for a few nights before an aunt was found in Vineland, New Jersey, who got custody instead. About a month after them, he fostered a ten year old boy for a week before his dad regained custody. He even fostered Tim's friend, Stephanie Brown, for two months while her mom went through rehab.
And then Red Hood came to town.
Between trying to track down and figure out who Red Hood was, Bruce also took on twin eight year old boys for about five days, a fifteen year old girl for two and a half weeks, a pair of cousins for ten days, and three siblings for a night. When Red Hood was finally revealed to be a revived Jason, angry at the thought that Bruce had replaced him and missing a few key memories, it had been two years since the last time he'd heard from the private investigators he'd hired eleven years prior. After weeks of careful negotiation and peace talks between Bruce and Jason, the family of four was well on their way to being the family of five they legally were, when Bruce decided it was time to get back in contact with the team he'd left in charge of the investigation looking for the Fentons. They only had a potential sighting of the Fentons at a class reunion in Wisconsin a few months prior, but any sighting was better than what they'd had for most of the eleven years prior, so Bruce asked them to double down and see what came from it.
Two weeks later, there was a knock on the manor door. It was the middle of a torrential downpour, one of the worst thunderstorms Gotham had seen in years, yet there was undeniably someone knocking at the door. Bruce, who'd been passing through the entry hall on a late evening stroll through the manor, was the one to answer the door.
She was in her late teens, her hair was long, wet, and stuck to the side of her face, her clothes in poor repair with splotches of dark red and neon green on them, and her backpack was worn and frayed. He was in his early teens, he, too, had long, wet hair that stuck to his face, his clothes were rags and barely hanging onto him with more of those dark red and neon green splotches, and his duffle bag was stuffed to the gills.
"Mr Wayne?" Jasmine Madeline Fenton asked, voice quivering as the two of them huddled on his doorstep, Daniel Jackson Fenton's eyes drooping to half mast from exhaustion. "We need your help. Our parents are trying to murder us."