#votive!jay

But ..... but but but ........ the hungry fox???? Her pups NEED MEAT!!! And .... and she asked first ....... really nicely ....... and told Bruce where the body was ..... I just ..... geheufudhb ����������������������������������������������

The fos got told to stop being lazy and go hunt a rabbit or somethingXD

Well, it’s a Summer night, so it isn’t that cold, but the child isn’t in a good shape. 

Bruce takes him home where Alfred instantly begins fussing over the boy - Jay gets washed and put into new clothes, and put into a bed. When he wakes up, he’s confused and scared, he’s in a house that is very dark and the walls look like they’re made of living trees and there are bats overhead and this isn’t where he went to sleep:O 

Mom left him in the shrine and told him to wait on her - and he did. He waited and waited, and he was so hungry that he ate a bit of the stuff that was left there, but she didn’t return... he was waiting a really long time. What happened to him? Was he kidnapped by the fairies? He wanted his momTT And he was still so hungry, but they were always hungry, so he got used to it...

Meanwhile, Bruce went back to the shrine to ask the nearby creatures if they’ve seen something and yeah, the squirrel living on the close-by tree saw a woman bringing the child to the shrine. The woman didn’t look good, the squirrel said, she was very sickly and barely had the strength to put the boy inside of the shrine. Then she walked away and her shoulders were shaking, like she was crying. 

Alright, Bruce thought, so it wasn’t a kind of a heartless sacrifice, didn’t look like it. 

And just as he was about to leave, a fox ran up to him to tell him that there was a dead human close to the village that no one has found yet - can she eat it? Her pups need meat. 

With a bad feeling, Bruce followed and, indeed, there was a women curled up on her side in a tall grass, not visible from the road. Her hair was red, but shorn close to the skin in uneven patches and her face bore the sigh of an illness. Her clothes were just as worn out as the boy’s were. She was doubtlessly the woman the squirrel spoke about. 

So that was it. She was sick and, in the last effort to protect her son, left him for the gods to find. That would mean there was no one in the village she felt was safe enough option, a truly desperate move.  

Bruce, saddened by the loss of life, asked the earth to take the body and, once the dirt closed over it, planted a hawthorn tree over it, to mark the place so that the boy could visit his mother.

Now the boy was Bruce’s responsibility. 

Wait wait wait anon, let me untangle this, because there’s a lot of ideas here I like:O

Bruce is a King, okay, but is he a King people leave babies as votives for?? :O

So, how about he’s some mystical King of the land - maybe a dark, dark Gotham forest. He’s something like a fae king, or maybe just a very old being that punished harshly these that exploit his woods and these that enter them and are not respectful and these that are criminals. No better way to figure out if someone is a criminal bastard than have them walk thought the forest and see if they get out on the other side. Innocents do, but only innocents. 

And so there are shrines build for the Bat around the woods for the villagers living close to leave gifts and votives and so on for the being they wanted to keep on their side. And they were usually fruit&veg, toys, clothes, some silver trinkets, etc. whatever the people had they could live without. And Dick loved these. He loved to go around the shrines after the harvest and see what the people had left for them to play with - he loved the trinkets above all else. Alfred appreciated the fruit and Bruce was generally wishing people could stop leaving the things they so obviously needed and focus on their own situation - people of the villages were not rich, he wanted them to live good lives. 

But then one night, because Dick was older now and moody and they had an argument, Bruce was the one to visit the shrines - he needed to show the people that he respected their gifts. 

And that’s when he finds that one shrine was, well, occupied. By a toddler. 

A human child laying under a small rickety awing, thin like a rail and dressed in a used-up rag, shivering in the night cool. 

Bruce was struck. What was happening? What was this? He’d never even implied that he’d accept this sort of a sacrifice! Did the child simply stopped to sleep in the shrine when the night came? No, it was too small to come all the way from the village, it was more than two miles. A baby this small and weak, and why would it even be there? 

The conclusion was singular - the child was left there. Someone brought the child there and left it with the rest of the gifts. Some of the gifts - fruit and veg - were eaten, some of them had chunks missing - was the child so hungry? 

Bruce wasn’t angry, there was no better way to use the produce than to feed this tiny starving being. 

Still in shock and confused to boot, he decided to take the child with him. In the morning he’d ask the birds living nearby if they’ve seen what occurred, but the boy could not be left alone in the night, he was shaking already, even asleep. He bundled the child into his long, warm coat and took off for home.