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The thing was—well. Peg doesn't exactly believe the rumors about Batman being bonkers until he starts showing up with a kid in a sunshine yellow cape calling herself Robin, unashamedly neon in the grim shadow of the cityscape. Sure, Peg has her own thoughts about the whole dressing up as a bat thing and how it's a poorly designed coping mechanism and that BJ maybe should have resorted to something else; but then again BJ was great at pretending he was perfectly fine, at avoiding being persuaded, and at dismantling Joker's latest schemes on the weekends. Plus, she could shoot lasers out of her eyes and fly, so.
"Oh my God," the kid says, excited as anything. "B, that's Superwoman!"
"Yep," BJ says, and Peg thinks he’s definitely too blasé for some guy who stalks around New Jersey in a freaking batsuit. Then again, Peg's the last survivor of an alien planet who crash landed in a tiny town in Oklahoma about twenty eight years ago. She's doing a great job of keeping her Daily Planet colleagues off her back with a pair of glasses and a different hairstyle—fiction is apparently easier to stomach than Peg Hayden being even remotely close to being the Woman of Steel.
Peg blinks at him, then at the kid bouncing next to him with a boundless energy that makes the Flash look bad. Erin, if she remembers right. They haven't met yet, which is definitely BJ's fault.
"Accidental child acquisition," Peg says, wry. "That's a new trick. And you said you didn't have any super powers."
“I don’t,” BJ says in that stupidly casual voice, and Peg, not for the first time, wonders how the hell half of the Internet is so scared of this guy.
Peg had met BJ years ago when she'd moved to Metropolis, and found Batman skulking around because Frank Burns had decided that he was going to start a synthetic kryptonite plant there. Peg had been approximately two months in this whole superhero thing and contemplating that maybe she should have thought this through more, before she’d ran into BJ trying to hack into FCorp's power grid, swearing under his breath because apparently Frank Burns was too much of an idiot to use legitimate security measures.
Anyway, now Batman doesn't try to kick Superwoman out whenever she shows up in Gotham anymore (and vice versa, because the least he could do was give her some damn notice), and Peg has brought BJ over to meet Ma and Pa that first year they met, after she found out that BJ was going to spend New Year's Eve doing "holiday surveillance", whatever that was. It sounded like bullshit, but so did a lot of things BJ said, when he wasn't trying to be intimidating.
Except now Batman has a child. BJ has a child. BJ, who dropped out of med school to do whatever the hell he did for a few years—she wasn't asking—and then started scaring the shit out of Arkham's finest as a man sized bat. But he was also remarkably kind in the way you could find if you knew him well enough, brilliant in a way that was alternately scary and irritatingly useful, good at what he did, not to mention mostly in love with his best friend, who Peg had met at the Batcave while he yelled at BJ for using himself as bait to lure Killer Croc out as he lay a neat line of sutures at BJ's wrist.
"Honestly, Beej," Hawkeye had muttered, wrapping a bandage over the sutures. "They don't pay me enough at my day job to make me deal with your extracurriculars. Couldn't you have done something normal like rock climbing? Skydiving?" BJ looked at him dopily, unabashedly tender, even apologetic—Peg found it hilarious.
So, Peg does what she does instead of asking what the hell BJ was doing, because she'd done that a few times in the beginning, and started to realize BJ was just lying to her every time. Besides, she could figure him out later. That's how it works; he's obscure as hell and she figures out what to do with the parts she can see.
She crosses her arms, her cape fluttering around her in the night breeze and says, “So, if you’re named after a bird, you won’t mind a flight or two?” Robin—Erin stares at her, and breaks out in a huge grin.
"No kidding!" she says. "I can't actually fly, which, uh—sucks, but grappling does the trick. Mostly. I could get a glider—"
"Maybe when you're older," BJ says, in a way that sounds like he's thinking of anything but.
"Yeah, when I'm 100," Erin mutters, then brightens.
"I'm going, right?" she says to BJ. BJ had been almost impossible to read under the cowl for the first six months—he was even harder to read as a civilian, but Peg could read his smile in the minute quirk of his lips on one side, fond and warm.
"I'm not picking her up in the Arctic," he says, wry but good-natured, and she rolls her eyes. "Or wherever your Fortress of Solitude is these days." He looks down at Robin.
"Have fun," he murmurs, soft in a way Peg has never heard before, and it's well—yep. Batman—BJ is kind of a dad. It's kind of adorable. Robin gives him a hundred-watt grin back.
"You act like you don't have a cache of caves under your house," Peg points out, but grins anyway, touching down on the rooftop. "But don't worry, B; I'll have her back before midnight."