Ask To Be Unbroken (Batfamily x reader)

Chapter 2: A New Life and a New Home

*** 1st POV

Working alongside my brother was super fun. Working alongside my new dad, who I really should just be calling dad, has been an adventure, to say the least. A learning experience too. We stalk the creepy people at night and we get to use our grappling hooks to glide around town like flying bats, minus Jason who was a bird. Stopping villains was also very gratifying because I felt like I had regained a purpose once I had this costume on. The press had a field day when Batgirl made her return which was fun. I'm only human, I like attention. I may only be eight or nine years old, but the streets hardened me, and my brother and I wanted to save people's lives so they wouldn't know what a bad life feels like or know what terrible experiences feel like. I would know. I have lived there a few too many times. Jason and I would sometimes go in alone when Bruce had to do something important for work, though this was rare, when it was just me and my brother it would always be super fun. Cracking jokes while sitting like gargoyles watching over the city at night. Giggling about school and how much it sucks. But how could I forget the fact that we tease our adoptive father when we are on patrol. I may be little, but I always have people to look out for my back. Though it's not always rainbows and sunshine. I have matured a lot for my age. Like kids at my school swear that I'm a very short middle schooler. I want to reverse it sometimes, but then that scares me and makes me think of living on the streets when I was that little, and stealing tires for a living wasn't very fun.

A few years into my working with my dad and brother, things get more serious. I finally turned ten too, and I've started to notice a lot of things. I think Jason finally hit puberty because he got pants for his costume now. He also has become moodier and maybe even sulkier and has started to distance me a bit. I don't know why though. I don't know what I did wrong, and it's starting to bother me because I always relished the times when Jason would give me attention. Though I soon figured out why he wasn't giving it to me. I was sneaking down to the kitchen, trying to avoid Alfred, when I heard Jason talking to Bruce. He was telling him about his mother, not mine, and saying how he wants to meet her and how he has to go on a journey. Bruce asks why and asks who my mother was if the woman that Jason was looking for wasn't her. Jason explained the story, but he explained it too well. I think it's because he keeps reading all those books that he steals from Bruce's library. I was starting to remember it again, but it was not like I wanted to. I would get nightmares of seeing my mother's glossy eyes surrounded by what I have learned are really dangerous drugs surrounding her. The reason she ended up dead. I loved my mother and she cared for me when she could, but finding her dead, not breathing, reaching for more of her drugs, and full of scars and dirty was just too much for me. It's still too much for me, and I've grown a lot since then, even though I'm still in the elementary building at Gotham Academy. I don't even realize that Bruce came up to me because I wasn't being sneaky anymore.

"(Y/n), are you okay? You look a little pale?" Bruce asked, very concerned.

"Oh, that. It's nothing. I'm fine." I answered, trying to get him off my case before he started asking questions.

"You are not ok. Did you have a nightmare? It's ok if you have nightmares, we all do." Bruce admits.

"No, I wasn't even sleeping, but it was something like that," I say, sort of giving in and telling my dad the truth.

"What was it then? An old memory? What's going on (Y/n/n)? You have to tell me if you want me to help you." Bruce utters to me, resting his hand on my shoulder.

His using the nickname that my brother uses for me felt very nice and endearing so I decided to tell him, "Well, when I was little, my mom made some mistakes."

"She was a drug addict and she died," Jason stated, bluntly of course.

"Jason! Let the kid finish!" Bruce exclaimed.

"What it's true..." Jason muttered.

"Continue your story (Y/n), I'll listen," Bruce told me, in his quiet voice while he got on his knees so he would be at my height.

I tell him the story. When I found my mother dead on the floor. The woman I loved and who cared for me. I started to get upset, but before anything could fall out of my eyes, Bruce hugged me and told me I should be heading to bed. So I start to make my way back to my room, but Bruce stops me and picks me up to take me to my now unshared room to tuck me in for bed. After that, he and Jason sped off into the night. Now, to clarify, since I'm little, I don't patrol as often, just for bigger and slightly less dangerous missions. I never get to fight the big baddies like The Joker or Two-Face. I am stuck with the henchmen and the drunks and drug addicts on the streets that harass the women of Gotham. I work hard just as much as they do, but I'm younger and I can only handle so many nights of missing sleep with my little body. Plus it gives me time to spend time with Alfred and get to eat his amazing cooking for breakfast instead of sleeping in and claiming that I have a severe illness of some sort. Dad and Jason pulled that a lot, especially after a really dangerous mission. This lifestyle that I was living wasn't that bad though. I mean the constant harassment of being Bruce's first adopted daughter, and third adopted child swarmed around me a lot. Kids teased me for being both rich and poor at the same time which was bothersome, but I made sure not to break their noses for Jason's sake. But the crime-fighting at night, investigating really interesting cases that happen around Gotham, and taking my anger out on thugs and rapists and other people as part of the mission is fun and thrilling. I feel like being Batgirl has shaped me into a better person. Though people mistake my age a lot for it, I thought it was kinda cool that I looked older than I was so I could do cooler stuff. Though all of this started to end when dad and Jason told me that Ra's al Ghul was getting involved in arms deals and Joker escaped prison again.