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flyrobinflyy · 2 days ago

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Everyone was going to die because of him.

“Everyone’s going to die because of you!”

OKAY. PARTY FOUL.

that was BRUTAL. unbelievable ☹️🫵🏼.

standing with my arms crossed looking at rockie… feeling very conflicted right now… but the scene of them reuniting 😭💔

Project: Killcode

batfamily + oc insert

tw: graphic violence, death

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

so... redemption arc???? yes???? does he even get a redemption arc???

part fifty-one

❝ VICTIM ❞

MONDAY — OCTOBER 31 — 12:02AM

“WAKE UP, BABYBIRD. LET’S PLAY A GAME,”

Bentley blinked rapidly when he was suddenly forced back into consciousness against his will. He was surrounded by white — but it wasn’t the white abyss where the Secret Keeper took him. It was a room; with walls and a floor and a ceiling, all white, and a big metal door off to the side that had two keypads next to it.

Bentley, with a jolt of panic, jumped upright and looked down at himself. He was in one of the white jumpsuits from the facility, and both of his wrists were shackled to the floor on opposite sides of the white room by big, thick chains.

He couldn’t feel the water. He couldn’t see anything but the walls. He was trapped.

"No," He muttered, pulling against the chains, which did nothing more than make noise. "No!"

His head was absolutely pounding, throbbing with every passing second, and he felt like passing out and throwing up and dying.

“Good morning! Glad to see you’ve finally woken up!” The Secret Keeper’s voice chided, sending a stab of pain through his already throbbing skull. “I’ve made up a game I think we should play. Y’know, just to pass the time. It’s called: guess which of Bentley’s friends is going to die first!”

Bentley squeezed his eyes shut, shifting around on the white floor until he could pull his knees up and bury his head in them. He couldn't move his hands very far, so he rested them on his legs. “Leave me alone.”

The Secret Keeper laughed. “Don’t you wish it was that easy.”

And suddenly, a feeling came, almost like vertigo even though his eyes were closed. The brightness of the room changed against his eyelids. He forced his eyes to stay shut, forced his body to stay eerily still, forced his focus to remain on the legs of the jumpsuit he had balled up in his hands.

“Let’s introduce our contestants, shall we? There’s a whopping ten of them! I didn’t know Bentley Whittaker was able to make so many friends!”

“Wayne,” He corrected quietly.

“Look up!” The Secret Keeper suddenly roared, and Bentley felt a tug in his chest that drew his head up even though he didn’t want to. The chains were suddenly gone, and he was standing. He was standing in… the hallway of Gotham Academy? It was empty, and all the doors were closed but one, a few feet to his left. “Our first contestant, the obvious fan favorite, the one and only of the ten who’s been with you even longer than myself… Asten Evans!”

Two pillars of smoke were kicked up in the hallway, spinning for a few seconds before they became people. One of which Bentley would’ve been thoroughly pleased to never see again.

Jesse Todryk.

“Looks like someone found the Wayne. Doors open,” Jesse said, glancing back at whatever minion was following him with a smirk. His voice was louder than Bentley remembered, and it sort of echoed. He remembered him saying that exact sentence. Way back when Jesse had-

“Probably Damian,” The minion replied.

Bentley stepped forward, glancing into the open hallway door only to see… himself. His little self — what was he, ten? Eleven? — trembling on the floor of the school’s closet. Nico was right by his side, holding his arm but panicking all the same, his wide blue eyes stuck on-

Asten. He looked a lot younger. (How old was he when Bentley met him? Twelve? Thirteen?) He was on Bentley’s other side, but he rose slowly from the floor, moving for a nearby shelf and sliding a thick, heavy textbook off of it.

Jesse Todryk stopped in the doorway, spotted Bentley and Nico, and laughed sinisterly.

“Well! Isn’t it little mister-“

Bentley saw his little self flinch hard when Asten swung the book with absolutely no hesitation, the spine colliding with Jesse’s head with a terrible thunk.

“Vá queimar no inferno, seu filho da puta!” (Go burn in hell, you son of a bitch!)

Bentley watched in silence — his now self and his little self — as the bully slammed into the closet door and hit the floor with another thump.

“Jesse!”

“Oh my God, you’re going to get so suspended!” Nico exclaimed, still holding onto little Bentley, looking at Asten like he might cry.

Asten shrugged, letting the textbook thud on the floor. “It was self defense.”

“He wasn’t hurting us!”

“He was gonna!”

“The first friend little Bentley Whittaker ever had who was willing to hurt someone for him,” The Secret Keeper’s voice chided, sounding sickeningly sweet. “How cute, am I right?”

The school scene faded into a large swirling mass of smoke, only to be replaced with… the woods?

Bentley did a spin, glancing around. He was standing in a forest, a dark, nighttime forest. Smoke spun in the distance until it became people. Three of them, running full-speed through the trees, right at him.

He stepped out of the way when they got close — it was them. Little him, and little Asten, and little Nico. He and Nico were both bawling their eyes out, and looked like they were on the verge of absolute panic attacks, while little Asten was ushering them on from behind.

Was this when they were escaping the cabin? Didn’t Asten get caught in a-

Bentley flinched when a resounding metal SLAM! came, and little Asten hit the forest floor behind little Bentley and little Nico with a scream so shrill and agonized it still made his skin crawl even today.

The other Bentley and Nico rounded on him immediately.

“Oh my God!” Nico shrieked.

Asten, bear trap clamped down tight on his leg, only muttered under his breath: “Get it off.”

Bentley watched himself self stand uselessly off to the side, before dropping next to them, holding Asten up to the best of his ability.

He remembered being shocked that Asten wasn’t crying. If he had known back then just how much Asten cried to him now, how much closer they were, that they’d become brothers and lived together-

“These are freaking illegal-“ Nico muttered. Big and little Bentley watched him fiddle with the trap with nearly identical cringes on their faces, blood absolutely everywhere, coating everything.

That’s when the beam of a flashlight started panning through the forest. Glancing up, big Bentley saw a figure that looked freakishly like Dr. Keene stalking through the woods. (What would’ve happened if they were faster? Or if Asten had missed the trap?)

“Oh my God, oh my God,”

“Just…” Asten mumbled Portuguese under his breath. “Just take it out of the ground, and… and we’ll get it off later.”

“You’re going to drag a bear trap on your foot where? Onto a bus? A taxi maybe?!”

Bentley watched Asten pull the crowbar out of the tool-belt he’d been wearing and hand it to the other Bentley.

“Bentley,” Asten said seriously. “When he gets here, beat the hell out of him.”

Little Bentley stared at the crowbar with his eyes blown wide.

“The first friend to ever trust Bentley Whittaker with his life,” The Secret Keeper cooed. “Asten Evans was a lot of little firsts for you, Babybird. First partner at school. First sleepover.”

The forest faded away, and he was left standing in the white abyss, alone.

“But the question remains: will he be the first to die?” She giggled sinisterly. “He dies in so many ways across all of your futures, Bentley. Which do you want to see? Maybe simply freezing to death in his cell?”

Smoke swirled in front of his feet, spinning until it turned into Asten, laying on the floor, his lips purple, skin white, green eyes staring but unseeing. He had chains on his wrists that disappeared into the white, and a jumpsuit that matched Bentley's.

“Or maybe he’ll die right next to you, when they start extracting all of your blood to get what they need out of it,”

A stretcher appeared next to the frozen Asten. A stretcher with him laying on top, his eyes wide but unseeing, both of his arms hooked up to machines that were whirring, sucking blood out. They were spluttering now, like there wasn’t much left. There was a heart monitor off to the side, sounding a steady, long beep.

Bentley’s eyes started burning. He’d almost gotten them out of that place, but he didn’t. Then he’d almost gotten them out again, but he didn’t. What if this was really it? What if everyone really was going to die now? What if he'd failed for the last time?

He looked down at the white floor, distorted through the tears that gathered at the bottom of his eyes. “Please stop.”

“What? We’re only one contestant in! Let’s move on!” Both of the Asten’s swirled into smoke and vanished. “Why don’t we jump to… Valor!”

The white around him melted away, replaced by the blissful campus of Redwood Academy, outside of their building. The fountain and willow trees that he’d talked to Chloe under were there, in the distance, far enough that he could see it, but couldn't hear the water running. Smoke swirled on the benches there until himself and Valor took its place.

“All he ever wanted to do, all he ever did, was be a support system. He cares too much. Always has,” The Secret Keeper chided. Bentley watched Valor rise off of the bench and turn to past-Bentley. That Bentley stood, and Valor held out his arms. (Why did he think it was so stupid back then?) Valor hugged him.

“He was the strong one. The protector. You never got to see what went on behind closed doors.”

Suddenly, the campus moved and swirled and changed colors until it became a really fancy house, bustling with teenagers and loud music and bright lights. There were kids everywhere. It took a moment for Bentley to find Valor in the chaos, but he was there. In the home’s lavish living room, on the floor with his back pressed hard against the side of the couch, his wings wrapped around himself… shaking. The music died down and faded into the background so Bentley could hear the way he was gasping for air, the way he kept choking and coughing on sobs that no one else in the massive place seemed to hear. He was trembling, he couldn't breathe, couldn't seem to gather himself. A panic attack?

Bentley almost stepped forward to him, but she continued-

“He was the first friend to ever take a bullet meant for you,”

The scene swirled and changed to when they were in their dorm a short week ago, Valor standing in front of everybody with his wings outstretched as a shield against all the white-armored men. One of said men shot their gun, and Bentley hadn’t noticed then, but he was peeking out at the armored guys around Asten’s head and if Valor's wing wouldn’t have been there, it would’ve hit him.

“Maybe he’ll die when his blood gets drained,” The Secret Keeper started, and the scene faded away and the white nothing returned. A stretcher that looked just like Asten’s appeared, but with an unmoved Valor on top, staring, with the beep of a flatline next to him. “Or maybe he’ll go down fighting. That’s more his style.”

Another Valor appeared a few yards away. His wings were solid red and wrapped around himself, and the deafening, constant bam, bam, bam of assault rifles came, hitting his wings and ruffling the feathers. Blood was going everywhere. Bentley couldn't see who was shooting him.

His wings finally seemed to give out, and they fell completely limp, leaving his whole body exposed. For a second, he looked scared. He was already covered in blood and scrapes and bruises, and his jumpsuit was crimson. And then this... expression crossed his face. Something like realization. Like contentment.

Bentley looked away and covered his mouth when the sound of the assault rifles came back, more than one of them, sending probably over twenty or thirty bullets directly into his exposed body with no hesitation. Bentley flinched hard when he heard the thud. Valor’s whole body turned red in his peripheral.

Bentley choked on his own sobs, not even trying to make the tears stop flowing now. (Were they all going to die because of him?)

“Please stop," He choked, and his legs seemed to stop working, his knees buckling so he ended up on the white floor again. "Please stop."

“Let’s move on, shall we?” The Secret Keeper completely ignored him. “Contestant three — Summer!”

The Valors melted away again, and the white morphed until Bentley was sitting in the hall of Redwood Academy.

He blinked the tears down his face and hiccupped, trying to get ahold of himself. It was getting kind of hard to breathe. This wasn't real, she was just scaring him. This wasn't real, it wasn't real, it wasn't-

“Poor little Summer. What a precious little girl,”

Two pillars of smoke spun far off in the Redwood Academy hall, and past-Bentley and Summer appeared there. They were the only two in the corridor, and she was touching his face, gently. “All she ever wants to do is save.”

The scene swirled into a different Redwood hallway, but Bentley and Summer were there, too — it was near the art classroom, after Tyler had attacked him.

“Wanting to save will be her fatal flaw. It always is with people like her,”

Bentley watched her move just like she had that day — gently touching his wrists, his neck, asking if he was okay. He lied to her. Why had he lied to her? Why wasn’t he just honest?

The scene melted away and changed to one of Summer running down the halls of the facility they were trapped in, kneeling next to various bodies and students laying around, healing them one by one, telling them where to go to escape and to yell if they needed her. She was crying, too — because lots of the kids she tried to heal, she couldn’t get to wake up.

Her blonde-ish hair was a wreck, half stained with red, and her hands and jumpsuit were, too -- though she wasn't injured. Maybe it was the blood of everyone she was trying to heal. She knelt down next to a limp girl on the floor, in a jumpsuit, too, and touched her, moved her hands around. When after a few quiet moments, the girl didn't move, she stood up with a defeated scream of: "Shit!" Muffled and thick with tears.

That's when four armored men rounded the corner into the hallway, where she was standing, alone.

They wasted no time.

Summer didn't even have time to turn and look at them. One of them lifted a pistol, and BANG!

Bentley closed his eyes when the bullet hit her right in the left temple, and a few seconds later, there was a sickening thump that made Bentley gag.

“She never gives up,” The Secret Keeper said. “She always tries to make everything better. Like you.”

Bentley sobbed into his hands, wiping rigorously at his eyes, trying to force the urge to vomit away. “Why do you have to torture me when... I’ve already lost?”

“Because it’s fun!”

Suddenly, the scene died away and the Secret Keeper materialized in front of him, sick and twisted looking, alone with him in the white. She reached down and grabbed his hair, forcing his head up to look at her. “Because you’re the reason my family keeps failing! You’re the reason my father is in prison! I’m not going to leave his goals to rot when I could be carrying them out myself!”

She was screaming merely three or four feet from him, but he hardly paid any attention, just looking at her from where he was sitting. Crying quietly, trying to make sure he was still breathing, quieting the urge to throw up on her shoes.

“You ruined my life! You took my dad away!” She roared. “Contestant four — little Vera Levante!”

The Secret Keeper shoved him so hard he almost fell over, vanishing from his sight again. Their surroundings changed without his consent -- the white room slowly becoming their dorm. His and Asten’s bedroom.

“You two certainly have something special,” The Secret Keeper's voice crooned, sounding especially twisted now. “No matter how much you want to deny it. No matter how innocent and inexperienced and detached from it all you claim to be. I can read your mind, Bentley. I know parts of you that you don’t even know.”

Bentley said nothing as his and Asten’s bunk beds faded into view. He and Vera were sleeping in his bed, her arms closed around him even though he’d been a disgusting sick disaster back then.

“You saw each other at some of the lowest, hardest times,” She continued, and the dorm fizzled away, replaced by another dorm. An empty one, where he and Vera were sitting on the couch, taking a selfie. “She’s the reason you’re here. The reason you met your friends.”

The dorm melted away.

“The reason you’re going to die,” She chuckled. “Maybe she’ll die protecting you. Maybe I'll kill her myself, right in front of you, just to torture you even more."

Three pillars of smoke swirled and spun in the white a few yards from Bentley. Two became him and Vera -- and the third, a little ways away from the others, became the Secret Keeper.

Vera was in front of him, between him and the Secret Keeper -- she was twitching oddly, like she'd been electrocuted. Was Vera in her head again?

Vera was in a white jumpsuit, too, her black and purple hair in a half-fallen ponytail that kept brushing the other Bentley's face. Vera's hands were behind her back, and it took him a second to realize its because she was holding both of his.

The Secret Keeper only twitched for a second.

Then, with a laugh that sounded more like an animalistic growl, she stalked over to them and grabbed Vera by the face, and her brown irises turned a sickening amber.

"Stop breathing," The Secret Keeper muttered.

"No!" The other Bentley shouted.

Bentley looked down at his hands when Vera started to choke, tugging at her clothes and clawing at her throat, trying to get whatever was blocking her airway out. He saw the Bentley in the scene trying to help in his peripheral, but it didn't seem to work. And that Bentley just held her until she choked to death.

The real Bentley, the now Bentley, the only Bentley, sobbed pitifully, bringing up his knees to his chest and wrapping his arms around them, burying his head there to cry.

Everyone was going to die because of him.

"Everyone's going to die because of you!" The Secret Keeper screeched, probably reading his mind. The scene disappeared, leaving just her and him together in the abyss. "Everyone you love is going to die and there's nothing you can do to stop it! It's all your fault! LOOK AT ME!"

Bentley's head was forced up again. The Secret Keeper turned away from him and began to swing her arms wildly, in a manic, almost psychotic manner. Smoke began to billow and blow everywhere, and hundreds upon hundreds of little scenes began to materialize as far as the eye could see. Hundreds of little scenes of people... dying. Varian getting stabbed. Koa getting shot. Asten jumping in front of a bullet. Bellamy getting drained of his blood. Damian falling off a roof. Valor getting his head beaten in. Rockie getting his blood drained out. Bruce getting in a crash in the Batmobile. Jason getting his throat slit. Layla getting thrown off a Redwood Academy balcony.

Gently, someone grabbed Bentley's hand.

He flinched and whirled around, choking on his own tears and panic. Charlie was there. Crouched a mere foot from him, and as soon as their eyes locked, she lifted her finger to her lips in a shh motion.

Bentley stayed quiet, forcing his sobs down, his gaze flicking to the Secret Keeper, who was still flailing wildly in the distance.

He turned back to Charlie, her blue eyes only meeting his brown ones for a split second before she lifted her hand, a small tornado of smoke materializing in her palm.

He watched it spin there for a moment before it floated away from her, settling only a foot or two in front of him, on the floor. It spun and warped until it looked exactly like him, exactly like he did now -- sitting on the floor in his jumpsuit, crying, head tucked in and knees pulled up.

"I'll simulate your thoughts and reactions to stall her for as long as I can," Charlie said softly, reaching forward and grabbing Bentley's face to force him to look at back her. To lock eyes with her. "There's not much time, Bentley. He's coming." She said quickly.

"Who?" Bentley hiccuped, bringing a hand up to grab her arm. "Who's coming?"

Charlie looked up at the Secret Keeper in a panic, like she was waiting for her to turn around. "Listen to me, Bentley. He's coming, okay? I'm going to let you out of here. He isn't a bad guy, you have to trust him, okay?"

"Trust who?!"

"Just promise me you'll go with him, Bentley!" She shouted, frantically, eyes flicking back up to the Secret Keeper. "Promise!"

"I promise!"

As soon as he said that, he jolted back into reality with a small shout of terror, the white room coming into focus around him.

He was choking on his own sobs and could hardly breathe, forcing himself to sit up off of the white floor. It felt like forever that he coughed and spluttered and sobbed and choked and cried until a slam came from his door.

He looked up at it, dread pooling inside of him. Was this who Charlie told him to trust? Or people coming to kill him? Was he about to die or was he about to be saved?

Slam!

He forced his breaths to slow, his heard to calm. He forced his tears to stop and he sat still in the center of the room. If someone was coming to kill him, he'd have to fight back. Somehow, he'd have to.

Slam!

He couldn't let everyone else die because of him. He wouldn't. He was going to get out and he was going to get everybody out and everything was going to be fine.

Slam!

The screen next to the door, the one that scanned keycards to open the cells, suddenly glitched out, the screen malfunctioning and flickering a bunch of different colors until it finally went black.

The door slid open.

Bentley wasn't sure what he expected. He wasn't sure if he expected some random scientist, under Charlie's influence, or one of his friends that had been captured alongside him, or an armored guy coming to shoot him, or Dr. Keene's brother, or Batman, or The Secret Keeper herself. He didn't know who was coming, or how much longer he'd be alive, or if he was going to be tortured, but...

The person that came inside was the last person he ever thought he'd see again.

Bentley's eyes followed him carefully. He had a fire extinguisher in his hands, and he quickly made for the screen that opened the shackles on Bentley's arms and beat it and beat it and beat it with the metal canister until it was nothing more than a useless heap of metal on the wall. The shackles let go of Bentley's arms, hitting the white floor with a clack.

He rounded on him, then, his inhuman green eyes bright in the whiteness of the room. "Bentley..."

Bentley forced himself off of the white floor, every emotion he'd just shoved away coming back full force as he all but throttled himself forward, hugging Rockie so tight he thought he might strangle him. "I hate you!" Bentley sobbed into his shoulder.

"I know," Was all Rockie said, his metal-gloved hands coming up and holding onto Bentley, too. It felt so good at the same time it felt so... so...

"I hate you!" Bentley all but sobbed, choking on his own tears, balling up the back of Rockie's black hoodie in his hands. "I hate you... I hate you..."

"I know,"

Bentley couldn't even begin to comprehend everything happening inside of him. The sheer rage he felt being next to the one who betrayed them, the overwhelming relief that washed over him when he learned Rockie was okay. The far off urge to punch him across the face, and the more prominent one to hold onto him and never let go ever again.

"I'm so sorry," Rockie muttered, voice thick, muffled from the shoulder of Bentley's jumpsuit. "I fucked up. I picked the wrong side because I'm stupid, but I'm back now. I'm back now and I promise I'll get you out of here. I'll die to get you out."

"I hate you," Was all Bentley could manage to say, dissolving quietly into a crying disaster, and Rockie only held him tighter.

"I know,"

tag list that KINDA works lmao

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun

@xiaonothere

@skylathescholarly @flyrobinflyy @bookwarm0-0

@custommadeazula

#fic rec #batfamily #batman

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flyrobinflyy · 2 days ago

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What's a book written by a woman that changed your life or that you consider a classic? Any genre, any language.

#if we were villains by ml Rio #firekeepers daughter by angeline boulley #my beloveds

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flyrobinflyy · 2 days ago

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YOU can write whatever you want whenever however forevrr. i have to write something perfect and earth shattering and i have to do it perfectly the first time or else

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flyrobinflyy · 2 days ago

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debating on posting this fic tonight…hmmmm

opened a WIP i haven’t touched in a while and wow, past me, great work on leaving clues as to what the hell this means

#cade speaks #it’s not that long.. prob 3k once i finish the ending and edit #but it’s something!

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flyrobinflyy · 3 days ago

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OH MY GOD??? HELLO???

Project: Killcode

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

the girls are back in town 💃🏻💃🏻

part fifty

❝ ESCAPADE ❞

SUNDAY — OCTOBER 30 — 4:57AM

“BENTLEY. Bentley, wake up. Bentley,”

With a subtle groan, he did.

He peeled his sticky eyes open, blinking rapidly when a terrible brightness assaulted them.

He was in the solid white room. And Charlie was sitting on the floor a few feet from him, legs criss-crossed, just kind of looking at him. She was in the same purple dress as always, her blonde hair loose and sort of wavy behind her shoulders. Her neck and wrists had bruises that he hadn’t noticed until now, probably from the chains pulling on her earlier.

Bentley blinked a few times more, bringing his hands up to rub at his eyes. He felt absolutely exhausted, like he needed to sleep for, like, two months. Every muscle in his body seemed to be tired and sore like he’d run a marathon, and his head was sort of floaty, like he was coming out of anesthesia.

With a wince at the pain that was thumping dully in his skull, he carefully sat up with a soft grunt of effort.

He glanced around at the empty white, then over at Charlie. There was nothing in the room. Just her and the white abyss. No Secret Keeper, no scary scenes, just… nothing.

“Why am I here?” He questioned softly, rubbing his eyes and glancing around again, then back at Charlie.

“Because your subconscious is awake, but your body isn’t. So, voila,” She said quietly, gesturing out to the room around her. She seemed… content, for now. Nonchalant, off her guard, like she knew the Secret Keeper wouldn't find them there.

Bentley glanced at her but didn’t say anything, just looked down at his hands. He was wearing the same hoodie and sweatpants he had been in when he was awake.

“I’m proud of you,” She spoke quietly. When he looked up, she had the faintest of smiles tugging up on her lips. “You did it. You broke through the EM field and saved Koa.”

“I think you mean you did it,” Bentley sighed, rubbing at the back of his head when a sharper pain surfaced there. “I just freaked out.”

Charlie shrugged. “I might be able to control you, but I can’t force your body to do something it isn’t capable of. That kind of power is inside of you. You just need to learn how to use it.”

Bentley lifted a brow at her, glancing down at himself. “I’m pretty sure using it almost killed me.”

“Well,” She trailed off. “You have been unconscious for over thirty-nine hours. But who’s counting?”

“What?!”

“You weren’t exactly at your peak strength to begin with. I may have pushed your body a little too hard,” She sighed lightly, her blue eyes flicking away from him guiltily. “Sorry...”

“It's… okay. It needed to happen, and I obviously wasn’t going to get it done myself,” Bentley sighed, glancing down at his hands and tapping his fingers on his sweatpants. “Hey, maybe if you control Valor, you can use his strength to break the door.”

Bentley glanced up at her, hoping she might say: wow Bentley that’s an amazing idea you just saved the world, but instead, she shook her head. “Even if he has the power to break through the EM, I… can’t control him like I can you.”

Bentley furrowed his brow, blinking once. “What? Why not?”

Charlie shrugged with the shake of her head. “I don’t know.”

His eyes drifted off in thought.

“To a human, other human’s minds are like… a room, I guess. There’s locked windows, and there’s locked doors, you can even see the inside from outside sometimes; but there’s no real way for you to get in. But… to a telepath, like me… I have no walls, and everyone else’s doors and windows are unlocked. I can force myself in if I want to, maybe even by accident,” She explained softly. “But The Secret Keeper keeps tabs on when and how much power I use. Any effort I make to open doors and windows, she can feel. And that’s just the thing.”

Bentley blinked at her.

“It’s so easy for me to enter your mind that… she can’t always feel it. It’s so easy it’s like you have no walls at all,” Charlie shook her head. “But I don’t know why. It would make sense if you were a telepath, too, but you’re not.”

Bentley blinked, glancing down at his hands, at the white floor. “Has it always been like that? Easy to get into my mind?”

“I’m not sure. I only recently started taking full advantage of her powers,” Charlie shrugged. “But since I started… yeah, I’d say so.”

A moment of silence passed.

“You’re really the only one I can talk to without her noticing. Even helping Valor wake up in the lab, she felt,” Charlie sighed. “I’m lucky she’s cocky and stupid.”

Bentley creased his brow. He understood cocky, but stupid? The Secret Keeper could see the future. How in the world was she stupid? “What do you mean?”

Charlie smirked faintly. “Well, she can see every single detail of every possible future. It would be absolutely impossible for you to win against her, theoretically,” She explained quietly. “She knows that. And over time it's gone to her head. She only focuses on her futures and making sure everything falls in line with them… she doesn’t look at the ones where you win.”

Bentley said nothing, just listened closely, trying to wrap is hazy mind around it all.

“The future she’s working toward, where you all fail, and the one where you beat her, where you get the best possible outcome -- they’re only separated by a single choice made by one person. And she’s so caught up in her own world that she won’t see it until it’s too late,” Charlie smiled faintly. “Hubris. It’s always the fatal flaw of people like her.”

Bentley hummed lightly, tapping his pants again. “Whose choice is it? That saves us?”

Charlie looked up at him with a faint smile that looked kind of sad, maybe? “I can’t tell you.”

Bentley looked back down at his hands.

“But I can tell you…” She trailed off lightly, reaching out and resting a hand on Bentley’s shoulder. “That you will be okay.”

Bentley looked back up at her. “All of us?”

Charlie’s expression darkened significantly. She frowned and removed her hand, and Bentley blinked once, a sort of dread settling in the pit of his stomach.

“Charlie…” He said lowly, looking her in the eyes so purposefully that she looked away. “Is someone going to die?”

Charlie said nothing.

“Tell me who,” Bentley ordered.

“I can’t,”

“Maybe I can save them!”

“You can’t,”

“Charlie-“

“Their death is the choice that saves this school, Bentley. If you change it, everyone will die,”

Bentley shook his head, looking down at the floor, his hands. “There has to be another way.”

“There’s not,” Charlie said, a sort of broken sounding firmness in her voice. When Bentley looked back up at her, she had tears glistening at the bottoms of her eyes. “I’ve searched and searched through future after future, countless, countless hours, and I can’t find a single other future where only one of you dies. It has to be this way.”

“Tell me who,” Bentley demanded, reaching out and grabbing her arm. “Charlie, please.”

“Don’t you understand? Telling you will change the future. I won’t give up your best chance of survival,” She brushed her hair back out of her face, and a few tears fell down her cheeks. “I did this and it’s my job to fix it.”

“You can’t just tell me someone’s going to die and then not tell me who!” Bentley ordered. “Is it me? Because I’ll do it.”

Charlie said nothing, bringing a hand up to wipe at her eyes with a subtle shake of her head.

Bentley’s heart started to hurt like someone had stabbed him. “Let me do it instead. I’ll die instead.”

“It doesn’t work like that,”

Bentley shook his head, and his eyes started to burn. “Please let me die instead.”

“If you die, everyone dies!” She said loudly, wiping her eyes again. “I know you want to, but you can’t save everyone this time.”

Bentley shook his head lightly, looking down at the floor and wiping his watery eyes. “I can’t let them die.”

“You have to,” She replied simply. “It’s going to hurt like hell, but it gets better. You’ll be okay even if it feels like you won’t. I promise.”

Bentley shook his head, a few sobs he choked down trying to force their way out. He wouldn’t die, but one of his friends would — Valor or Asten or Varian or Koa or Summer or Rockie or Layla or Vera or… God forbid it be Bellamy. How was he going to be okay after that?

Bentley shook his head. “You always talk about how many different futures there are… There has to be one where we all survive.”

“There isn’t,”

“There has to be!”

“There’s not!” Charlie almost yelled, sniffing lightly. “Trust me, Bentley, I’ve looked for so, so long. There’s not. This has to be it.”

Bentley looked down, and a few tears fell down his face that he immediately wiped away. “At least tell me who it is.”

Charlie smiled faintly at him. “You’re waking up.”

“What?”

With no more words, the white room started to fade slowly into darkness, taking Charlie and Bentley with it.

And then he groaned.

Someone’s hand immediately landed in his hair, but it only made him wince — the whole headache and exhaustion thing from the white room seemed amplified tenfold, and it kind of made him want to cry. He felt like he needed to sleep for seven years straight.

He lifted a hand up and brushed the other one off of his head.

“Hey, B. Can you hear me?”

He knew that voice. It was Asten’s voice.

He didn’t open his eyes, but groaned again. He was lying on something soft and warm, the weight of what was probably a blanket draped over his shoulders.

“Can you hear me?”

With another groan, Bentley went about peeling his excruciatingly heavy and sticky eyes open. Several dull colors floated and spun around in his vision before each blur settled into its place, slowly clearing up the longer he kept his eyes open.

He was laying on the same couch he’d passed out on. Now, he had a pillow under his head and a white blanket draped over him, and Asten was sitting near him. He had a book in his hand but was looking down at Bentley instead.

On the couch across from them was Valor, curled up small against the armrest with his wings wrapped around himself like a blanket. Bentley was glad he was sleeping -- he didn’t sleep much anymore.

He glanced around for signs of Varian or Koa, but neither of them were there. The dorm looked just the same as it had before — a pile of furniture near the door, the whole thing burned and messy with crystals growing from various places around the room.

“Yeah, I can hear you,” Bentley mumbled after a long time. His voice was sort of hoarse from not using it for so long. “Mm. I feel like death.”

“I bet,” Asten replied, and Bentley saw him close the book and lay it off to the side, glancing down at his hands and fiddling with his fingers. “You can go back to sleep. Not much is happening.”

"What time is it?"

Asten looked over at the windows. They were vaguely lit. "I dunno. Maybe five or six in the morning? I think it's Sunday."

Bentley exhaled heavily, pushing himself up on the couch, stretching out his sore muscles. Why was everything so sore? “Jesus. I’ve slept enough. How’s Koa?”

“Valor spent like, all day yesterday blending stuff up and force-feeding it to him like a hospital patient. It was gross,” Asten cringed. “He’s still weak, but better. He wanted to sleep in his bed, so Varian’s in there with him.”

Bentley nodded once, to himself. “I was so afraid he was going to die.”

"I was afraid you were gonna die," Asten piped up, and Bentley glanced over at him suddenly. "You've been out for two days. Unresponsive to sound or touch."

Bentley looked down at his hands. "I think I just needed the rest. Bad enough that my body shut down, I guess."

A few moments of silence passed.

With a deep yawn, Bentley rose from the couch and stretched. Black dots danced in his vision like he’d gotten up too fast, but they passed soon after. “I’m going to go change.”

He glanced back at Asten, who nodded lightly, rising from the couch, too. “Okay. Since you’re awake, there’s something I wanted to ask anyways.”

With a soft sigh, Bentley made for their room. It was kind of weird. He hadn’t been in there since before Bellamy and Rockie were taken, and it seemed almost stale, like a place of bad nostalgia even though it had only been a week or two since he stepped inside. It seemed colder and way less inviting — like he didn’t want to be there at all.

He heard Asten close the door softly behind them. (Did he really have a question, or was he just trying to keep an eye on him?)

“When you saved Koa’s life…” Asten spoke quietly, an edge of something Bentley couldn’t identify in his words. “Your… your eyes. They were amber. Was she controlling you? Why would The Secret Keeper save Koa?”

Bentley shook his head lightly as he peeled his hoodie off, cringing at the grey t-shirt he’d been wearing for at least a month, probably. “It wasn’t her.”

A moment of quiet passed. “Then who-”

“It was Charlie,” He continued, opening his wardrobe and changing into a new shirt, throwing the other in their overflowing laundry basket.

“Charlie?” Asten asked, scrunching his face up. “Charlie who? Charlie Reins? Like, The Secret Keeper Charlie?”

“Yeah,” Bentley replied, glancing back at him for a second before he changed into new sweatpants and a different hoodie. “I don’t know how it works, but The Secret Keeper is, like… an alter ego, or something. Attached to the mind control chip thing that's still in her head. Charlie, the real Charlie that we saw in the video at Dr. Keene’s cabin, is still inside of her. Trapped inside her own subconscious while the Secret Keeper uses her body.”

Asten furrowed his brows, sitting down on the bottom bunk of their bed. “How do you know that?”

Bentley shrugged as he closed the wardrobe up again. “She told me.”

Asten breathed in and out, then nodded, skeptically. “So they essentially… put a whole separate personality into her?”

“I have no idea,” Bentley shrugged. “All I know is that… she has access to The Secret Keeper’s powers, too. She can see the future and everything. She’s been helping me.”

Asten raised a brow at him. “Helping you?”

“Yeah. When I managed to get you all out of the facility -- she was telling me where to go, what to do,” He explained, making his way to the bunk beds and sitting down next to Asten. “She led me to you all and told me how to get you. She even got Titus to teleport us out.”

Asten didn’t say anything, he just looked down at the floor in deep thought. Bentley could practically see the gears turning in his head.

“I was supposed to save Koa on my own, but I couldn’t do it. So she had to step in,” Bentley replied. "That's what you saw."

Asten shook his head lightly. “No. How do you know it's really her and not just The Secret Keeper playing with you?”

Bentley shrugged, glancing down at his socked feet, white against the dark hardwood. “Remember when I was sitting with Koa and I… passed out, or whatever?”

Asten nodded.

“I went to the white place where the Secret Keeper shows you stuff, and they fought there. Charlie said The Secret Keeper was wasting time because I was supposed to save Koa, and she chained her down and let me out so I could.”

“But… it could still be her, making you see that,” Asten replied, looking up at him. “There’s no good way to tell.”

“If it was the Secret Keeper, I don’t think she would’ve let us escape that facility. She would’ve led me down there and taken me, too.”

“She loves to play with her food, B. You know that,” Asten replied, shaking his head again. “There’s no way in hell you can trust this girl, no matter what name she goes by.”

“Why? All she’s done is help,”

“Because The psycho supervillain whose body she’s inside can control your mind and make you see and hear and think whatever she wants,” Asten said firmly, as though Bentley had forgotten that part. “If she can see the future, and she wants to help, why doesn’t she just tell us step by step exactly what to do? Why hasn't she done that already?”

Bentley looked down, and Charlie’s voice echoed in his head: Don’t you understand? Telling you will change the future.

“Because if we know, the future will change,” Bentley replied, meeting Asten’s green eyes again.

“Okay, sure…” He trailed off, looking across the room at nothing in particular. “But If she wants to help so bad, why is she only talking to you? Why doesn’t she talk to me or Valor, especially when you’re incapacitated or sleeping? And the body control -- if she did that to Valor, we could be out already. Why hasn’t she done that?”

“I said the same thing,” Bentley replied, looking down again. “I just spoke to her -- right before I woke up. She can’t reach anybody but me… and she doesn’t know why.”

Asten glanced over at him, something cold rippling across his features. “She’s manipulating you.”

“What? No she’s not,” Bentley argued. “She explained how it works to me -- like, our minds are rooms with doors and windows, but a telepath’s mind doesn’t have walls and the doors and windows on everyone else’s can be opened. She said my mind is like I don’t have walls at all -- it doesn’t take effort for her to talk to me, so The Secret Keeper won't feel her using the power.”

Asten blinked at him, blankly. “I’m not even going to pretend to understand what you just said.”

“I can’t explain it like she did,” Bentley shook his head. “But the gist is, she can only talk to me without the Secret Keeper finding out. Because she’s a telepath and her mind doesn’t have walls. And for some reason, neither does mine.”

“Oh-kay,” Asten chided, blinking a few times. “So, what you’re saying is, she oh-so-inconveniently can only speak to the one of us she knew would trust her immediately, and without question. Because he doesn’t have mindwalls. Like a telepath, even though he isn’t a telepath. Sounds real convincing to me, B.”

“I don’t know how it works, okay?” Bentley questioned. “But I trust her. All she’s done so far is help me.”

“She can do all this stuff to you, but she can’t control Valor or talk to me or speak to anybody outside of this dorm because they all have so-called mindwalls? Isn’t it obvious, B? She doesn’t want us out. Because she’s just the Secret Keeper in disguise,” Asten replied. “She’s preying on your hope, B. On the fact that you trust too easily. Don’t let her.”

Bentley huffed, looking down at his sweatpants.

And then suddenly, something inside of him clicked.

“Mindwalls,” He said.

Asten looked over at him. “What?”

“Mindwalls. Mindwalls!”

“Are you going to keep saying that over and over, or actually tell me what you’re thinking?” Asten asked.

“You said she can’t talk to anybody outside because they all have mindwalls. But they don’t,” Bentley replied, standing back up from the bed. “Charlie, can you hear me?”

A moment of silence passed, and he heard Asten rise, too. “Bentley, don’t talk to her.”

“Charlie?” He continued, completely ignoring Asten’s warnings. “Charlie, can you hear me?”

“Bentley? Yeah, I’ve got you,”

Bentley turned when Asten touched his shoulder. Bentley held a hand in his direction with a quiet: “Hold on.”

“What?” Charlie asked.

“Not you,” Bentley replied. “You said you can’t break through peoples walls without the Secret Keeper noticing, right? But what if they never had any walls to begin with?”

A few moments of quiet came, from both Asten and Charlie.

“Vera is a telepath. You should be able to talk to her. If she’s not trapped or in the facility, you could tell her what's going on. She could come get us.”

Another few moments of quiet came, and Bentley looked up, locking eyes with Asten, who was just watching him with a contemplative look on his face.

“The facility is moving fast to load kids there from the dorms, because you jeopardized the system -- but they’re trying to keep it as quiet as possible. All the remaining students still think they’re just in quarantine,” Charlie explained. “Lucky for you, I think Vera’s dorm hasn’t been reached yet. I’ll confirm and be back.”

Bentley looked back at Asten, with a faint look of relief settling on his face. “She’s getting Vera.”

Contrary to Bentley’s relief, Asten scrunched his face up. “But she knows the future. Why didn’t she just get Vera herself? She could’ve done it days ago. Before Koa had any problems, before everyone nearly had heart attacks and you went catatonic for two days.”

“Maybe I needed to have the idea for it to play out the right way,” Bentley replied, shrugging. “Or maybe it needed to happen at this specific time.”

“Bentley… I don’t trust this,” Asten sighed, wiping a hand over his face. “It’s too risky. She’s inside of the Secret Keeper, there’s no way we can trust her.”

“There’s no way you can trust her. But I do. She helped me save you,” Bentley replied. “She’s the reason I didn’t lose you once already. I have to trust her now. Wouldn’t you? If the roles were reversed?”

Asten opened his mouth to speak, but nothing really came out. His gaze just flicked around the room, settling, finally, on Bentley.

“Do you trust me?” Bentley questioned.

Asten looked at him, a deadpanned look on his face, and sighed softly. “Yes.”

“Then trust me,”

Asten didn’t say anything.

“I told Vera. They’re coming, and they have a way to get you out,” Charlie’s voice came. “Get ready.”

“Thank you,” Bentley replied, then looked up at Asten. “They’re coming.”

Asten breathed in and out, nodding to himself a few times. “Okay,” He muttered, shaking his head lightly. “Okay. I’ll tell Valor, then. You get the others?”

“Okay,” Bentley breathed, a small smile quirking up on his face. “Thanks for trusting me.”

Asten merely sent him a half-hearted smile as they made for the door. They split directions, Bentley heading for Varian and Koa’s bedroom, and Asten going to the couch where Valor was all curled up in a ball of wings.

Bentley opened Varian and Koa’s door with a soft creak, glancing into the room. Their curtains were drawn, making it nice and dark inside, and both of them were dead asleep on the bottom bunk, next to each other but facing opposite directions. Koa was facing outward, and in the light shining through the door, Bentley could see the markings left on his face and around his mouth from the muzzle…

But he was there. And he was breathing. And he was alive. And that was what mattered.

With a soft sigh, Bentley made his way to the bed, reaching out and gently putting a hand on both of their shoulders. “Hey, guys. Wake up.”

Varian stirred quickly, tossing and turning for a moment, but Koa didn’t even move. Bentley shook their shoulders gently. “Guys, wake up. We’re about to get out of here.”

Varian’s eyes flicked open that time, and he looked around with a groggy: “What?” Koa moved around in the bed, but only enough to shove Bentley’s hand away.

“We’re about to be broken out of the dorm. We’re gonna leave,”

“Oh,” Varian said, sitting up and rubbing his eyes, reaching over and shaking Koa’s shoulder way more vigorously than Bentley had been. “Koa, wake up! We’re leaving!”

Koa finally roused, his seafoam green eyes flicking open with a groan. “What?” “Bentley says were going to get out,”

Bentley backed up as they both climbed quickly out of the bed, stumbling around and muttering to each other.

“Who’s breaking us out?” Varian asked, looking over at him as he grabbed a green hoodie from the top bunk and pulled it on over his black t-shirt.

“Vera,” Bentley replied. “She’s coming, and maybe the other girls.”

Varian gasped suddenly. “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?!”

“Of what?”

“Layla. She can destroy anything she wants at will. And put it back together!” He replied. “She can just shatter the whole door! If only we could’ve contacted her-“

Bentley blinked. He actually… now that he thought about it, he’d never actually learned what Layla’s powers were. Not that it would’ve made much of a difference before now, though, he guessed.

“Wait, how did you contact them? With no phones and that power-field?” Varian continued, furrowing his brows over at him.

Bentley shook his head, ushering them both toward the door. “It doesn’t matter -- what matters now is- oof!”

He made a noise of surprise when something slammed into him, and it took him a few moments to realize that it was Koa. Hugging him.

With an exhale, Bentley hugged him back, taking a second to really revel in the fact that he was there.

“Thank you,” Koa said quietly. “You saved me. Twice now. And it's about to be three.”

Bentley smiled faintly, rubbing his back a little. “Yeah, well, what’re friends for, am I right?”

Koa pulled away from him with a faint smile. He still looked tired, and maybe thinner than he had been, and scarred around his mouth, but he was okay. “I’ll never be able to repay you.”

“You don’t have to,” Bentley replied. “You being okay is enough.”

Koa smiled faintly at him and then hugged him one more time, quickly before they both made their way into the living area. Valor was awake now, he and Asten now standing near the door, looking completely alert and ready and not at all like he’d been dead asleep a mere moment ago. He looked at Bentley for a few seconds when they entered — it made him wonder if Asten had told him about Charlie.

“I hear Vera is coming to our rescue,” He said, making a subtle expression in Bentley’s direction that made his face turn a little red, for some reason.

Or maybe that was why he was looking at him weird.

“Keep everybody away from the door,” Charlie’s voice came.

Bentley glanced up. “Get away from the door.”

Asten and Valor backed up near the couches, and Bentley, Koa, and Varian followed suit. For a few minutes, no noise or movement came.

And then there was a small crack.

Bentley scoured the wall with his eyes, and only after a moment of examination did he spot the crack — in the drywall, right near the trim of the door.

And then the crack grew.

It went up and around the door, cracking and spreading out like arcing electricity. It touched the floor again, on the other side, splitting the trim and-

The entire door, including the trim and parts of the wall around it, cracked and fell toward them with a deafening crash, some debris breaking off and flying across the room.

Vera, Layla, and Summer were on the other side, looking at them. They all looked like they’d just rolled out of bed. Vera was wearing black leggings and those same black boots she had on when she was drunk, a pink Redwood Academy crewneck on top and her hair tied up into a messy ball on her head. Layla’s blonde hair was braided and she had on a set of pajamas with cats all over them, and Summer was wearing hot pink leggings, some short brown boots, and white shirt that didn’t look much bigger than a sports bra. Her hair was loose and sort of wavy, like curls that had fallen out.

“Hey, guys!” Layla announced with a small wave. Bentley watched all three of them look around their dorm, eyeballing the burns and the crystals and the mere disaster it had become.

“What the hell happened in here?” Vera questioned suddenly, her brown eyes flicking around the room, landing on Bentley.

As few moments after the wall was down, Bentley felt something like a surge of power or energy, tingling his fingertips and making his head spin for just a second. All of his roommates moved and looked around, like they felt it, too.

Asten lifted his hands up, and they caught on fire. “Oh hell yeah.”

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” Valor ordered. He ushered them all into the hall, staying close by as they all climbed over the debris. He came out last, turning and glancing back into their tornado of a dorm with a sigh.

Bentley suddenly remembered that this had been his only real home, ever.

Once they were on the other side, Layla reached down and touched the fallen wall, and the entire thing sat back up into place, the cracks filled themselves in, and it was like nothing ever happened.

“Holy shit,” Someone said.

“Bentley,”

Bentley turned just in time for Vera to wham straight into his chest, hugging him so hard around the neck it was kinda difficult to breathe. “I’m so glad you’re okay. When that other telepath told me what was really happening here…”

With a soft sigh, he brought his arms up and around her, too. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

Vera pulled away and smiled at him, squeezing his shoulders and then stepping away.

“We have to get out of this school,” Valor spoke. “Does anyone have anywhere we can go?”

“My house!” Layla piped up, rising from the floor with a little bounce. “My parents aren’t home. It’s the penthouse of the big apartment building near The Bordeaux hotel, where we went all the time last year to watch the sunset on the roof.”

“Okay,” Valor was quick to agree. “We-“

“Wait!” Bentley spoke up. “What about Bellamy?”

Everyone looked at each other.

Bentley drew in a breath, looking down at his hands. “You guys go to Layla’s house. I know how to get into the facility, so I’ll stay back and look for Bell.”

“Like hell,” Asten replied, crossing his arms and raising a brow at him. “If you’re staying in this shithole, so am I.”

“Me too,” Vera’s voice came from next to him. Quiet, but audible.

“Me too,” Koa said. “We can’t leave anybody behind in this place.”

“I’d wager that we’re probably all staying, then,” Valor said with a soft sigh, glancing around and getting various nods and replies that mounted to a resounding yes.

“Alright,” He gestured toward Bentley. “Get us in there, then.”

“Hey, where’s Rockie?” Summer piped up, her dark eyes flicking back to the dorm door.

Everyone sort of went quiet.

“He’s working with them. The facility,” Valor spoke up, a bit quieter than he had been. “It doesn’t matter now. We just need to get Bellamy and leave. Bentley, take us there.”

With a nod, Bentley turned and made for the stairs at the end of the hall. But right before he got to the door-

“Oh, how cute. You’ve found your little dream team!”

A stab of pain shot through Bentley’s skull, and he stumbled. As quickly as he’d gotten his powers back, the telltale wave of weakness and exhaustion washed over him again, and Bentley had to grab the wall, nearly falling flat on his face as his only defense was sucked right back out of him.

He turned around. His friends were all near the walls, too, now, from the dizziness, and through the middle of the group, he saw her. Standing at the end of the hallway with her crooked smile and bloody platinum hair, staring right at him. There was no one with her — just her in her black and yellow, looking like she’d just murdered twenty people, like she always did.

“Too bad your little escapade ends here,” She spoke. Everyone looked back at her, and he realized she was talking to them all, not just him. Layla screamed when she saw her face, stumbling back slightly only for Koa to catch her.

Valor righted himself and stepped out at the front of the group, between her and the rest of them. “Who the hell are you?

“Aren’t you cute?” The Secret Keeper raised her hand and pointed at him. “Go to sleep.”

A silent moment later, he hit the floor.

Layla screamed bloody murder again, and the Secret Keeper laughed and pointed at her. “Go to sleep.”

She fell limp in Koa’s arms, who was too weak to actually hold her, so he lowered her down to the floor.

The Secret Keeper giggled, pointing at Asten. “Go to sleep.” Then Varian. “Go to sleep.” Then Summer. “Go to sleep.” Then Koa. “Go to sleep.”

One by one, they all hit the floor, completely incapable of doing anything other than what she ordered. Vera sort of stumbled away from her, back toward where Bentley was, rushing toward him and standing directly in front of him, as though she could protect him from her.

“Stop it!” She ordered loudly. The Secret Keeper laughed again, her amber eyes staying locked on Vera’s face.

“Go to sleep,”

Bentley waited on her to fall, but she didn’t.

On the contrary, The Secret Keeper blinked a few times, shaking her head like a fly had landed on her nose. She opened her eyes, and with this look of pure determination in her amber irises, she walked forward until she was mere feet from Vera’s face.

“It’s going to take more than a little telepath rooting around in my head to take me down,” She giggled. “So… Go to sleep.”

Vera fell, and Bentley caught her under her arms, guiding her down to the floor.

“Charlie!” He half-shouted, glancing up at the Secret Keeper, gauging if she had any kind of reaction.

“She can’t come to the phone right now,” She muttered, her voice sending a spiking pain through his skull. “I think you’d rather… go to sleep.”

The world faded into darkness.

tag list that KINDA works lmao

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun

@xiaonothere

@skylathescholarly @flyrobinflyy @bookwarm0-0

@custommadeazula

#fic rec #batfamily #batman

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flyrobinflyy · 3 days ago

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If you are planning on getting a dog sitter. PLEASE for the love of god have your dogs trained. Recall at a bare minimum.

#seconding this #or just like. boundaries. what no/knock it off/stop means. how to drop items.#if you have to do some out of wack dealio to live with your dog (that is not caused by behavioral or medical issues)#please just train them #it makes everything so much easier i promise #just five minutes a day people 😭😭#have previously said i wouldn’t bring my dog autism on main and here i am again #cade speaks

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flyrobinflyy · 4 days ago

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opened a WIP i haven’t touched in a while and wow, past me, great work on leaving clues as to what the hell this means

#batman #jason todd #tim drake #red hood #red robin #cade writes (sometimes)

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flyrobinflyy · 4 days ago

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“why would i be afraid of something that’s already afraid of me?” YES BENTLEY YES

god you had me STRESSED with koa. i dont know how ill survive one of them dying D: poor bellamy too oh my god

charlie coming in clutch 🤞🏼 we love to see it

Project: Killcode

batfamily + oc insert

tw: mentions of death, angst

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

so yeah if you can't tell charlie is the mvp 🫡

part forty-nine

❝ PRISONERS OF WAR ❞

FRIDAY — OCTOBER 28 — 11:32AM

EIGHT DAYS PASSED WHERE NOTHING REALLY HAPPENED.

Bentley, Asten, Valor, Varian, and Koa stayed central to the living area and kitchen of their dorm for the most part, sleeping in various arrangements and positions scattered across the two couches and, occasionally, the floor. No one really ever said anything about it, it just sort of… happened, like none of them really wanted to go off and be alone.

There had been various attempts at slamming the door open, at breaking it down, at shattering the windows, at forcing them open, but nothing seemed to move or break at all, and the more they tried, the more hopeless they felt. Without superpowers, they were just… defenseless children again. Trapped, scared, and completely disconnected from anything that existed outside of their dorm room. Even their own families. They were prisoners, locked up inside their own school.

(A school that had been fine until Bentley got there, mind you.)

There had also been various attempts at getting Koa’s muzzle off his face, which never succeeded either. They briefly tried prying it off, but it hurt him way too bad, and they tried cutting the thin metal straps but ended up being too afraid to put something sharp against his skin. They tried pulling it over his head and down over his chin and breaking the whole thing, but it was just so tight and so solid that nothing seemed to work to get it off.

Bentley was fairly positive he could get it off... if he had his powers.

Which he didn’t.

And that whole ordeal gave them all another layer of anxiety to stack on top of the rest — the fact that Koa wasn’t able to eat or drink, and hadn’t been for eight whole days. Plus, he’d hardly eaten anything the week before due to being sick…

He had just sort of taken to laying on the couch for the past four days, facing away from the rest of the room, not doing anything. Sleeping in intervals. And it made Bentley worried. Was Koa going to starve to death? Were they going to watch Koa starve to death?

They just kinda took turns sitting with him, y’know, trying to make him feel better… but it never really worked. Not that they really expected it to, given the very extreme circumstances they were living through. It was hard enough for them to be sorta okay, and they weren’t the ones starving…

Valor had fallen almost completely silent after the whole spell he had in his bedroom. Asten tried his best to at least keep it kind of light in the dorm, but it didn’t really work, and he’d pretty much given up by day two. Bentley and Varian couldn’t keep their emotions in check to save someone’s life…

And of course, Bentley had no idea what to do to fix it all, so he just… was.

And they all just were. They hardly talked, they didn’t do much, and perhaps the most brutal part of it all, was that they were all just kind of worrying their days away waiting for Koa to… not wake up when they sat next to him anymore.

And it was terrible. Bentley and Varian ended up being the ones that needed to be babied, because they both had some kind of emotional breakdown like every other day, and everyone was upset and mad and sad and angry and worried and scared and everything sucked.

And there was absolutely no way Bentley could fix it.

Which made it all, like, ten times worse.

He’d caused this, he’d tried his absolute hardest to fix it, even got the help of the Secret Keeper’s real self, and still, all he’d done was screw it up worse and worse. Like he always did.

He decided he should’ve never come to Redwood.

Currently, he was the one sitting with Koa. It was a rainy outside, and probably noon. Thursday, Bentley thought. Or maybe Friday. Or maybe Wednesday. He wasn’t sure anymore. The day was just as quiet and somber as the rest, and Bentley almost couldn’t fathom how bad he hated it.

He’d convinced Koa to sit up enough so that he could lay his head on Bentley’s lap, but the strain he displayed from even that simple of a movement was enough to let them know he wasn’t doing very well at all.

He wasn’t usually so touchy, Valor had told him, but he mentioned that he probably didn’t care anymore because he wanted to be comfortable and not alone if he… didn’t… wake up. So, right now, he had his arms wrapped tight around Bentley’s middle and his face wasn’t visible, because he’d ducked it down into the front of his hoodie and fallen asleep.

Knowing that even Koa realized he was slowly starving to death made it so much worse. Bentley couldn’t imaging knowing he was eventually going to die, let alone not being able to do anything about it…

For now, Bentley just sat, carding his fingers through his hair, watching the rise and fall of his breaths so intensely he thought his eyeballs might roll right out of his head. Varian was currently showering in his bathroom, and Valor was sitting in the adjacent bedroom because Varian didn’t want to be so far away from everyone else. Asten was sitting on the couch across from Bentley, and every time their eyes locked, he gave him an encouraging smile that, over the days, had started to look more and more like a cringe.

Private school was supposed to be fun and exciting. He was supposed to make friends and hang out and be a teenager. Why was it that every time Bentley tried to live his life, something traumatizing got in the way? Something from his past came crawling back to haunt him? He was thirteen, he didn’t even have that much past, but still, he couldn’t seem to have a single moment without it.

“Asten?” He mumbled. The Brazilian’s green eyes flicked up to him from across the room, empty and… dull. Like they were slowly losing their color. Like everyone’s was.

He didn’t say anything, but his attention was there.

“What if we really do die here?” Bentley asked quietly, glancing down at his hands, at Koa. “What happens if we never go home?”

Asten was quiet for a few moments. So long Bentley thought he may not respond, but eventually, shook his head slightly. “We will. We haven’t communicated with Bruce in over a week or two. He’s probably on his way right now.”

Bentley’s chest tightened at the mention of Bruce. “And if he’s not?”

“It… it’s his job to find out when something isn’t right, B. He will. But… if he doesn’t, we’ll find a way. We always do,” Asten fell quiet for a second, his eyes drifting down to the floor. “I mean, we’ve managed to survive probably an entire trilogy’s worth of horror movie shit so far. We’ve got plot armor so damn thick you can’t hear what’s on the other side.”

Bentley forced out a fake little snicker. “You think so?”

“I know so,” Asten replied, his irises bouncing across Bentley’s face, searching his eyes. “It’ll be okay, B.”

But would it?

“What’s that, Babybird? Feeling a little… hopeless?”

Bentley winced lightly when a stab of pain shot through his skull. He drew in a breath and glanced down at Koa, bringing a hand to his left temple.

I’m not dealing with you right now, he made himself think. Go away. You’ve done enough.

“Oh, so you finally grew the balls to talk to me face to face? Or should I say, mind to mind? Hm?” The Secret Keeper hummed with a fluttery, borderline frightening laugh. “I think someone deserves a little punishment for talking to the other me, and, well… it’s not fun to punish someone who’s inside my own head. But I can punish you.”

The last thing Bentley saw was Asten glance over at him, his brows furrowing in confusion. And then the world turned white.

He blinked at the sudden brightness, bringing his hands up to rub at his eyes. He was sitting on the floor in the white abyss. Koa had vanished, and there was nothing there. It was all just… white. And empty.

With a soft, irritated sigh, Bentley ran a hand over his face.

Not this. Not now.

“… ley… ar me?”

He glanced up at the strange voice. It was soft, quiet, and breaking like a phone with bad service. He glanced around the white room until he saw something faint in the distance.

He glanced over at it, expecting something horrible that the Secret Keeper had concocted just to make him have another panic attack, but instead it was…

Charlie? In her purple dress and blonde hair? She was translucent, and kept flickering, appearing and disappearing again like a screen that was having trouble staying on.

“Don’t… er get… you… ract… Koa…”

Bentley squinted at her. “Charlie?”

Suddenly, someone grabbed a fistful of his hair and jerked his head back so he was looking at the ceiling instead, and a twisted, stitched smile was staring down at him.

And for the first time in a long, long time, Bentley didn’t even want to run. He just sort of wanted to punch her in the face. Really hard.

She leaned down eerily close to him, her short blonde hair brushing his forehead.

“I thought we just covered not talking to that little bitch,” The Secret Keeper growled, her mangled mouth close his ear even though her voice wasn’t actually coming out of it. “You play with trash and you get dirty, babybird.”

Suddenly, with brute force and a growl of rage, she slung Bentley by his hair. He probably flew ten whole feet before he hit the white floor with a small oof, tumbling to a stop right in front of the base of something big and wooden.

He looked up. It was a large wooden table with a shiny, black, closed casket on top.

He pushed himself onto his hands and knees and forced himself off the ground, his head rising above the wooden mass only to find that there were people gathered on the opposite side.

One was Artimi — he knew because it was the same guy he’d seen Koa with in a previous Secret Keeper nightmare. He looked the same as he had in that one; young, with brown hair and brown eyes that were red rimmed and so dull they almost looked fake. It was obvious that he’d been crying recently, but now, he was silent. Still.

He had another child on his hip — Bentley hadn’t known Koa had a brother (if that even was his brother.) But the boy was about four or five, with black hair and eyes that Bentley couldn't see. He had his face buried in his shoulder of Artimi’s black blazer and never lifted it up, his arms wrapped around tight around his neck and little fingers tugging at the back of his collar over and over.

A few feet away stood Varian, and behind him, a man Bentley had ever seen. He looked familiar, though — similar to Varian, with the dark eyes and sandy hair and even had little machine on his arm, too. Was it his dad?

Varian was about two shades paler than usual, and sort of green… and looked kinda like he might pass out if he as much as took a step. He was crying, silently, his whole body shaking and tears streaming down his face with no sound at all. The man — his father? — put his hands on his shoulders from behind.

Bentley averted his eyes. The top of the casket had flowers on it, red and white, and a little printed picture that he didn’t really want to see but did anyways.

It was a picture of Koa. On a blindingly sunny beach, probably in California, next to the ocean with a massive surfboard standing next to him. He was smiling widely with his tongue sticking out of his mouth, doing the rock and roll symbol with one hand and holding the board up with the other. It looked like a recent picture — maybe the summer right before Bentley started at Redwood Academy.

“Don’t… to… ley, she… ting… time…”

Bentley glanced over the top of the casket, between Artimi and Varian, catching a glimpse of Charlie flickering in the distance again. He mouth was moving but he couldn’t always hear her, and she looked… almost like she was struggling to stay visible, to stay audible.

Bentley went around the casket and took maybe two steps in her direction-

And he was grabbed by the back of his hoodie and jerked so hard he landed flat on his back. The air was knocked straight out of him and he gasped for it, tugging at the front of his hoodie.

The Secret Keeper took a step over him, so one foot was on either side of his torso, her amber eyes boring into his skull, his soul. He sat up and tried to scoot away, but she brought one foot up and pressed her boot against the center of his chest, pinning him uselessly down to the floor.

“You already lost, Babybird. There’s no way out. You know this is the end. For all of you. Even him,”

The funeral scene dissipated into a cloud of smoke, and at once, spun and began to create something new.

It was Bellamy.

“This is him right now,” The Secret Keeper cooed, moving her foot and pulling Bentley up off the floor by the scruff of his hoodie. “Look! This is the future you unlocked by failing him again and again!”

There was a large white stretcher sitting in the middle of the room, and Bellamy was lying on it, his wrists, neck, and ankles all strapped down with metal clamps. He had IV’s attached to the crooks of both elbows, drawing his blood, which went into a little machine and was separated — the red blood going back into his arm at the wrist, and the green poison moving through a separate tube that disappeared into the white abyss at the bottom of his stretcher.

He was wearing a white jumpsuit, but the sleeves were rolled up to his shoulders so his arms were fully exposed for the machinery. There was a gash on his right temple that was bleeding all down his face, and his lip was split and bleeding. The whites of his right eye were bloodshot compared to the left. And his irises…

Were a bright, horrible amber.

He was writhing against the restraints to no avail, and crying, hard, a quiet, pitiful sound that made Bentley kind of want to kill the Secret Keeper all over again.

“Look what you did to him!” She shouted, grabbing Bentley’s shoulders from behind. “He trusted you so deeply, and look where your choices got him…”

“Don’t… her… buying… time! She… red of… you!”

Bentley glanced to the right when he saw Charlie flash and flicker there.

The Secret Keeper roared in anger behind him, latching onto his shoulders and spinning him around to face her. “I will make sure he dies, and then everybody in your dorm, and everybody in your house, and everybody-“

Suddenly, Charlie faded into view behind her from the white, not transparent anymore, and not flickering.

“She’s buying time, Bentley. She’s scared… she’s buying herself time by scaring you... so Koa will die,” Charlie’s voice came as a mere whisper under the Secret Keeper’s shrieking. “You have the power to undo all of this, I’ve seen it. Starting with saving Koa’s life. She’s trying to keep you in here because the exact moment you come through for him is only mere minutes away-“

“SHUT UP!” The Secret Keeper roared, her scream so shrill and piercing that it kind of hurt Bentley’s ears. “YOU HAVE NO AUTHORITY HERE!”

The Secret Keeper rounded on Charlie in a mere millisecond. Before Bentley could think, shackles shot out of the white abyss behind Charlie, chains that latched onto each of her wrists. A third one came and wrapped around her neck, four, five, six times, and the chains pulled her backwards and backwards until she disappeared into the white again.

“What a useless little bitch!” The Secret Keeper suddenly rounded on Bentley quickly, backhanding him so hard he hit the floor with a wham. “If I weren’t using her body I would’ve killed her already!”

Bentley hardly had time to touch his stinging cheek, a few old, ugly memories of his father rearing their ugly heads, before The Secret Keeper picked him up by the back of his hoodie with a roar and threw him across the room, again. He seemed to fly and fly until his back cracked against a wall that didn’t exist, and he hit the white floor headfirst, a small sound that was kind of like a whine escaping him as pain absolutely exploded in his skull.

“I’m going to make you wish you’d let me hang you three years ago,” The Secret Keeper muttered, with some sickly, toxic kind of glee in her voice. “I’m going to ruin your life until you have nothing left to live for.”

Bentley pushed himself up on his hands and knees with a grimace, glancing across the white space as she drew closer. There was two of her, sometimes three, sometimes one, a blob of black and yellow. “I’m not afraid of you.”

The Secret Keeper giggled at him as she walked like he’d said something funny. But, immediately after, she made her way to him at an uncanny speed and grabbed him again by the collar of his hoodie, lifting him up and slamming him into the wall that wasn’t really there.

“What?” She barked. It sounded maniacal. Deeper, guttural, animalistic.

“Why would I be afraid of something…” He mumbled, his hands coming up in a bid to pry hers away, his toes barely brushing the white floor. “That’s already afraid of me?”

The Secret Keeper’s expression twisted into one of pure, unbridled psychotic rage, and her eyes changed like something inside of her had come absolutely unhinged. She held her hand out to the side and smoke spun in her palm, and in the blink of an eye, that smoke became a huge, thin dagger that looked straight out of a storybook. With a shout of rage she reared back and plunged it straight at his chest, and-

WHAM! Chains shot out of the white abyss behind her, curling around her arm and jerking it back with so much force the knife flew out of her hand and clattered a few yards behind her.

She looked over at the chain, bewildered, before it jerked her arm so hard she flew a couple feet and hit the floor with a thump and a quiet little shout.

Bentley, eyes wide, brought a hand up to his chest where he would've been stabbed.

“What the hell?!” The Secret Keeper screeched. With a myriad of unsettling metal-on-metal sounds, chains came up out of the white from every direction and circled around her, again and again, like she was strung up in a spider's web. "What the hell?!"

“I’m not a bitch!”

Bentley glanced to his left as Charlie’s blonde head came into his view. She had her left hand lifted up slightly in the air, her eyes glowing a striking amber as she used The Secret Keeper’s own power against her. She glanced over at Bentley, reaching toward him with her right hand.

“I’m gonna let you out of here, Bentley, and you have to save him, okay? The next, like, ten minutes is your only window,”

Bentley looked at her hand, then back up at her amber eyes. He only had ten minutes to save Koa's life?! “Wait, but how?!”

Charlie reached over and placed her hand on top of his head, and as soon as she touched him, he jumped awake so hard he nearly threw himself off the couch.

He was no longer on the couch with Koa, but lying on the opposite one with Valor and Asten both hovering anxiously above him. Their eyes were wide, and Asten's hand was resting on his head, just like Charlie's had been.

Bentley turned and glanced around the dorm, his eyes immediately landing on Koa, who was laying, unmoved like always. Varian was beside him now, his hair floppy and wet, eyes wide and nervous — and laser focused on Bentley.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Asten started, moving his hand from Bentley's head and holding them both in his direction. “It was just a dream.”

Bentley didn't say anything. He knew that Asten knew damn well that hadn't been a dream, but the morale in the dorm was so low that clueing everybody in on a psychotic telepath that liked to visit Bentley and co. personally might have just been some kind of final straw.

So Bentley went with it. He ran a stressed hand over his hair, taking a second to breathe in and out. Asten watched him closely, eyes lingering even after Valor looked away to glance at Koa and Varian.

I'm okay, Bentley signed subtly, making sure to lock eyes with Asten. I'm okay.

Asten didn't look too convinced, but he moved away a little anyways.

Bentley glanced back over at the other couch; at Koa, who's head was resting on the cushion right next to Varian's leg.

She’s buying herself time by scaring you... so Koa will die.

“Wake him up,” Bentley said suddenly, and all three of his conscious roommates glanced at him in confusion and alarm. He pushed himself up on the couch, pointing over at Koa. “Varian, wake him up.”

Varian suddenly went about doing exactly what Bentley ordered like he was spitting fire or something, turning and shaking Koa’s shoulder gently. “Koa, hey… wake up.”

Bentley righted himself on the couch, watching Varian continue to gently shake Koa’s shoulder. “Koa.”

Something like dread settled in his chest.

“Koa,” Varian continued, shaking a little more vigorously, becoming visibly distressed when Koa didn't rouse in the slightest. “Koa? Koa?!”

“Move,” Valor said suddenly, making his way to the couch and kneeling down near Koa. Varian shot off of the cushions like a wounded dog and was already crying. Asten settled an arm around his shoulders and glanced back at Bentley, a knowing look crossing his features. He knew Bentley had seen something. He knew there was more to it all.

Ten minutes. Bentley blinked and averted his eyes from Asten's gaze. How long had he been unconscious for? He had a ten minute window to save Koa’s life, she’d said. But how? How was he supposed to do anything if he didn’t have his powers? How was he supposed to get that muzzle off if all he had was his fingers and an ever-dwindling will to live?

“Shit,” Valor muttered, a strange sense of fear in his voice Bentley had never really heard before. He had Koa's wrist tight in his hand, pinching it between his fingers, moving it this way and that. It looked really small. “Damn it. I can’t find his pulse.”

Those words hung in the air for maybe five seconds as several wheels turned in processing; and then Varian’s legs gave out and, though he was fully conscious, Asten had to carefully guide him down onto the floor to keep him from crashing there.

Ten minutes. Ten minutes. What was Bentley supposed to do in ten minutes? Valor said he couldn’t find his pulse… did that mean he was already out of time? That Koa was already…

Bentley’s world spun, and Valor and Asten were talking urgently to one another, but he didn’t hear them. How could he save Koa if he was already dead?

The room spun again and he dipped his head down into his hands to keep from tipping over. He felt a familiar cold creeping into his chest, tightening around his lungs, making it hard to breathe, seeping into his veins, making his heart pump five times faster than it should’ve been. Something heavy settled in his arms and legs like they were chained down. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. He was having an attack and he couldn’t-

“Listen,”

Bentley was in the dorm, but he felt a phantom hand on his head, and he knew it was hers. Charlie’s.

“Channel this into your hands. The fear. The rage. The hopelessness,” Her voice continued. “Think about the ice cubes Koa put in your palms. Pool everything down there in your fingertips like the melting ice.”

Bentley inhaled, but it was fast; almost like a gasp for air. He shook his head and whispered: “I can’t.”

Asten looked at him when he spoke aloud, but Bentley didn’t notice.

“Yes you can. Remember when you tried to kill her, when she was hanging you, how you directed every inch of your power straight into her. Do it now. Into your hands,”

“I can’t!” Bentley mumbled, and he choked on his gaspy-wheezes and coughed. “I can’t, the EM field…”

“Yes you can, Bentley, I’ve seen it!” Charlie said. “The desperation you had then is the same you have now. Channel it! Channel it or he is going to die!”

Bentley looked down at his own hands with a strangled sob, trying to route the power he couldn’t feel and didn’t have.

He glanced up at the kitchen faucet and thought really, really hard about water coming out, but it never did.

“Bentley, listen to me, okay,” Charlie said. “If Koa dies, the whole future goes off the rails. When the domino effect of his death is said and done it’s just going to be you and Rockie left. You have to save him to save everyone else. You don’t have much time.”

Oh shit. Oh shit. What was he supposed to do? And how much longer did he have? She said ten minutes but that was a few minutes ago and how long had he been knocked out? What was the point if Koa’s heart was already not beating? Now everyone was going to die because Bentley…

With some little sad sound, Bentley pitched forward and dropped his head into his hands with a few pitiful, quiet sobs, pulling at his own hair. He couldn't do this. He couldn't. He wasn't built for this. He wasn't built for any of this and still life threw it at him at every opportunity. Why was it always him?

“Shit. Okay… Bentley. Do you remember when the Secret Keeper made you step off the side of the building, by controlling your body?” Charlie questioned. “I’m gonna have to do that now, okay? There’s no more time. I’m sorry.”

Mid-existential crisis, Bentley suddenly calmed, glancing up and across the room, his head, his eyes moving even though he hadn’t told them to. His gaze drifted over to the sink in the little kitchen and stayed there, one of his hands lifting up just the slightest bit in the air.

And for a while, he stayed like that, until he started to hear something, faintly, in the back of his head.

Water… moving.

It suddenly felt like every tiny drop of energy was literally being siphoned directly out of him, like Rockie was sucking his powers out right before his eyes. His head swam, but he heard more water, too, louder. A large wave of vertigo crashed over him and he made a sound akin to a whine, gaining Asten’s attention, who was immediately by his side and looking very worried.

The colors around them all morphed into one big blur — and the only thing he could really see for a solid ten seconds was his own hand, lifted slightly. It was shaking. It felt like his blood was being sucked out through his fingers. Like there was a plug on his foot that had been pulled and the life was literally draining right out of him.

Asten spoke, but he didn’t hear it. After a minute his swimmy vision vaguely returned. Enough for him to realize no one was looking at him anymore.

They were all looking at a teeny, teeny tiny sliver of water that was floating through the air. Probably no more than a cumulative two or three drops, thin as thread, floating across the room like smoke.

Bentley's gaze followed it without his command. It warbled and floated over to where Koa was laying on the couch, a mere foot in front of Valor's face, sliding effortlessly into the nearly nonexistent space between his skin and the strap of the muzzle.

The water circled around the strap like a knot being tied around it and began to spin, faster and faster and faster until it was like a tiny pressure washer. It was moving so fast it sounded like a bee buzzing across the room, and after a few quiet moments, it cut right through the metal strap. Didn't even leave a scar on Koa's skin.

The metal muzzle hit the hardwood floor with a deafening clack.

Suddenly, Bentley’s ability to control his own body came back, and, like someone had hit resume, it was hard to breathe and think again. Every drop of energy had been drained out of him simply by moving that tiny sliver of water -- he'd moved so much more before. Did that have something to do with the field? He didn't know. He couldn't think.

He hardly even had the energy to hold up his head, and he tipped to the side, Asten quickly reaching forward and catching him by putting a hand on the side of his head.

And then, the ability to control his own body left again.

Because he passed straight out.

tag list that KINDA works lmao

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun

@xiaonothere

@skylathescholarly @flyrobinflyy @bookwarm0-0

@custommadeazula

#fic rec #batfamily #batman

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flyrobinflyy · 5 days ago

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Undead and Ghost Jason

Part two | Part one

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flyrobinflyy · 5 days ago

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contrast

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flyrobinflyy · 7 days ago

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1. father whittaker comeback soon (heavy sigh)

2. hmmmm… i feel like it’s gotta be something with bellamy or rockie

3. don’t you DARE make me even think about that

HI FRANS!

TALK TO ME!!! What are your predictions for P:K???? What do you think is going to happen next, and which roommate do you think is going to die? (We all know it’s happening since my tumblr LEAKED IT BY ITSELF)

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flyrobinflyy · 8 days ago

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“sad little wet cat” that’s my son ‼️

brotherisms i say rocking back and forth in the corner

Project: Killcode

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

ME 🤝 USING VALORS WINGS FOR EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION (im obsessed with it actually)

this is kinda short but everyone is having emotional breakdowns so its okay

#when asten is the okayest one in the room you know theres a problem

also QUIET PLACE AU IS OUT

part forty-eight

❝ HOMELESS ❞

THURSDAY — OCTOBER 20 — 6:58AM

WHEN BENTLEY WAS PULLED BACK INTO THE LAND OF THE LIVING, HE FELT LIKE HE'D BEEN RUN OVER BY A CAR.

The world faded into view slowly, and he could've sworn with less color than it typically had. His senses came back one by one -- the smell of something burnt, the sound of soft inhales and exhales somewhere close to him that weren't his, the feeling of a heavy, warm something laying over his shoulders.

He forced himself to sit up slightly. He was sitting on one of the couches that had haphazardly been shoved back into their rightful places in the dorm. His head had been pillowed on Asten's side, who was curled up against the armrest and dead asleep, his arms looped lazily around Bentley's shoulders. There was a blanket on top of them.

Bentley glanced around. There was still a pile of furniture at the door, though without the couches. The floor there was covered in blood and burn marks from Asten and Varian using their powers to hold off the intruders.

Sitting directly across from him on the other couch was Valor. Varian and Koa were on either side of him, Varian's head resting on his lap, and Koa's on his left shoulder (muzzle still on), both of them soundly sleeping. His crimson wings were looped around them comfortably, sort of like built in blankets.

Bentley glanced over at the windows.

The sun was up.

He blinked a few times, rubbing at his eyes and sitting up more, causing Asten's arms to fall from around him. The movement caught Valor's attention -- his grey eyes flicked to Bentley, dull and unreadable, but he didn't say anything.

Bentley breathed in and out, asking softly: "What... time is it?"

Valor glanced over at the window, his eyes traveling across the broken curtain rods. "I don't know. Sun hasn't been up long. Six, seven?"

Bentley didn’t do anything more than hum in acknowledgment.

Bellamy was gone. Rockie was bad. They were trapped. The Secret Keeper was going to kill them all.

Maybe, if he’d actually killed her the first time, none of this would’ve happened, and Bentley’s roommates would be fine. If he had actually been able to finish the job, Bellamy wouldn’t be in the hands of people who were going to punish him, and Valor wouldn’t have lost his best friend, and none of them would’ve been kidnapped or tortured or scared or hurt.

As usual, it was all Bentley’s fault. Like it always was. Like everything bad always was.

He looked down at his hands, balling them into fists and flexing them, then glancing back up at the window.

This time, he really couldn’t do anything else to fix it. His terrible luck had driven him into a pit too deep for him to claw his way out of, like he normally managed, and he’d dragged a whole half-dozen roommates down with him.

“What happened?” He continued quietly, glancing over and catching Valor’s eyes again. “After I…”

Valor might’ve shrugged, if Koa wasn’t sleeping on his shoulder. “Not much. We shoved some furniture around so you guys could be comfortable. Got some food into Varian. Tried to get Koa’s muzzle off again and failed miserably,” Valor took a long look back out the window. “That’s about it. The doors completely unmovable, the windows won’t break. We are a hundred percent stuck.”

Bentley exhaled lightly, looking down at his hands.

They were trapped, with no way out, no way to contact anyone, and no superpowers.

Silently, Bentley just wrapped his arms around himself and laid back down, tucking himself into Asten’s side like he had been. The Brazilian stirred at the movement, bringing his arm back up and around Bentley’s neck in his sleep.

“You’re one brave son of a bitch, Bentley,”

Bentley glanced up at Valor, meeting his eyes with a questioning gaze.

“What?” Was the only response he could seem to come up with in the moment.

“You heard me,”

Bentley shook his head. Brave? He wasn’t… he never was. He was actually always terrified — the complete opposite of brave.

“I’m not…” He muttered with a soft inhale, eyes drifting downward. “I just stood in the middle of the room like an idiot earlier while everybody else was trying to figure out what to do.”

Valor cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, was that before or after you infiltrated a base full of murderers and broke six different people out of it through sheer force of will? After being bedridden for an entire week?” He asked with an amused edge to his voice, raising a brow at him. “You’re so damn resilient it’s kind of scary.”

Bentley glanced down at his own hands. “It doesn’t feel like it. It feels like I take one tiny blow and I can’t get off the floor for days. Physically andmentally.”

“But you know how to stand back up when the situation calls for it,” Valor replied, looking back out the window. “That’s a talent not a lot of people are lucky enough to have. Now, stop being so sad and accept the compliment. You deserve it.”

Bentley inhaled lightly, fiddling with his fingers. “Thanks…”

And then he realized:

“Wait, they shot you!” He stated suddenly, sitting up again. “Did anyone-“

“Don’t worry about me, Bentley. You’ve done enough of that already,” Valor replied softly, though the crimson on his wings that was also splayed across his jumpsuit and couch told Bentley that no, no one had tended to them.

“I’ll be fine,” He continued, smiling a tight-lipped, fake looking smile. “Rest.”

“Valor-“

“Bentley, it’s okay. Just rest, alright?” He said, glancing at both Varian and Koa where they were sleeping. “I can’t exactly move right now anyways.”

Bentley, with a soft sigh, forced himself to lay back down, tugging Asten’s arm back over himself gently.

He listened to all four of his roommates pulses until he fell asleep again, trying really hard not to think about the two heartbeats that were missing.

—

Bentley hummed sleepily when Asten moved next to him.

“Sorry, B. Go back to sleep,” He mumbled softly. Bentley was laying on the warm couch cushions now, the blanket that had been over the both of them now only draped over his shoulders. He felt Asten’s hand smooth over his hair once as he spoke, threatening to send him directly back into a peaceful slumber, but he fought it in favor of peeling his eyes open.

He wasn’t sure how long it’d been, but the sun was still up. Valor was gone, and his bedroom door closed, leaving Varian and Koa sleeping sprawled on the couch opposite him.

Bentley pushed himself until he was sitting up, rubbing at his eyes with one of his hands. “How are you feeling now?”

“You’ve been awake for three seconds and you’re already checking on me,” Asten snickered, apparently abandoning whatever he’d been getting up to do, because he sat back on the couch next to him. His green eyes were dull in a way Bentley hadn’t seen in a long, long time. “Better. Not freezing anymore. What about you?”

Bentley shrugged, glancing down at his hands. “Less exhausted… in some ways. And more in others, I guess…”

Asten smiled a little split second grin full of pity and something sad. It didn’t reach his eyes. “It’s not your fault, y’know…”

Bentley turned his head away, glancing over at the pile of furniture near the door just to keep from meeting Asten’s eyes. If he did, he just knew he’d start crying, and he had done quite enough of that recently.

“Okay,” Was what he said. He didn’t know what else to say.

Asten’s hand found his back and rubbed it lightly, and Bentley clenched his jaw, forcing himself to think about anything else.

Then, luckily, a muted voice came from behind Valor’s door: “Ah, shit.”

Bentley glanced up at it, then over at Asten, who was looking at the door, too.

Distractions — perfect.

Bentley pushed himself onto his feet before Asten even had the chance, striding across the room to the bedroom door. Without thinking twice, he lifted his hand and knocked lightly, desperate to get away from whatever cold and mean thing was trying to weasel its way into his head and make him into the same little unmovable puddle of despair he had been earlier.

“Come in,”

Bentley slowly pushed the door open.

The bunk beds had been haphazardly shoved back into the room, though not exactly in the same place they were before. Valor was standing next to the bathroom door with his back to Bentley. He was wearing a hoodie and sweats now, his hair and wings a little wet like he’d recently showered.

The feathers were now tinted slightly pink instead of full-blown crimson like they had been. Bentley could see several places where feathers had been mangled and lost among the platinum — it looked like Valor was finally doing a mediocre job at dealing with the gunshots. He had first aid stuff spread across the counter, and the sink was full of bloody toilet paper.

Bentley stepped inside and closed the door softly, suddenly unsure of what to say.

“Hey — will you come spray this on here?” Valor questioned, holding a spray bottle in Bentley’s direction with a funny brand name on the front.

Bentley, relieved that he didn’t have to come up with what to say, walked over to him, taking the bottle out of his hands it looked to be some type of antibiotic. (Bentley had never even thought about spraying medicine on wings. But he guessed it was kinda hard to put bandaids and bandages on them.)

“I can’t reach the back of my wings,” He continued, turning so his wings were facing him.

Bentley, with a shrug, just took a minute to spray whatever medicine spray across the back of Valor’s wings, being sure to do a little more where the feathers were gone.

Valor twitched a few times (because maybe it burned, Bentley guessed?) but neither of them ever spoke.

He exhaled heavily once he was fairly sure he’d done a good job. “Okay.”

Valor turned on his heel, taking the bottle from his hands with a quick: “Thanks.”

And they didn’t say anything else.

Bentley stayed quiet as Valor went back into their bathroom, putting away several first aid products and supplies he had sitting around the counter and sink. He seemed more… Bentley didn’t know. Fumbly than usual? He dropped a couple things while he was cleaning up and it was only after he’d been in the bedroom for a few minutes that he realized Valor wasn’t really looking at him, either.

Bentley tapped his hands on his pants. “Valor?”

“Hm?” He was quick to hum, still shoving stuff under their sink. The mirror was still broken, and it might not have bothered Bentley so much if it weren’t Rockie who’d broken it.

He sighed lightly, glancing down at his hands. “…Are you okay?”

Valor stood back up and closed the cabinet doors, inhaling heavily and rubbing a hand across his forehead. Then he leaned forward, resting his hands on the edges of the sink with a long exhale. “What the hell am I gonna do, Bentley?”

Bentley didn’t say anything, but watched him closely. The way his grey eyes lingered on the bowl of the sink way too closely.

“I don’t have anywhere else to go. If… when Redwood gets shut down,” He explained quietly, shaking his head. “I don’t have a family, I don’t have a home. The only other place I’ve ever actually lived was an illegal fight club.”

Bentley blinked twice, glancing down at his hands. He promptly remembered what Charlie had said, about his wings being tied. Was he forced to fight like that?

“Is the fight club… where Enzo was from?” Bentley asked softly.

Valor’s eyes flicked over to him with a sudden sense of urgency, something… different surfacing in his grey irises. His wings twitched on his back in a way that kinda made Bentley regret saying anything, tucking in and sort of curling uncomfortably around him, almost like a shield, or some attempt at comfort.

“What?” He asked, his voice eerily soft.

“I… you… were talking. When you were knocked out at the facility, you… said his name,” Bentley stammered. “…I’m sorry, I…”

Bentley trailed off, very excruciatingly and suddenly aware that he had crossed some sort of line.

Valor didn’t say anything. His gaze just sort of fell and traveled back to the bowl of the sink. Bentley stayed silent.

He just sort of stood there awkwardly, not knowing whether to leave or stay, to speak or not. He never seemed to know what to do anymore.

Valor brought one of his hands up to his eyes, wiping away some wetness Bentley hadn’t seen until then, and it made him feel really bad. And he did it again, and again and again until Bentley realized that he was really just crying.

Well shit.

He hiccuped lightly, non-stop wiping the tears away in an attempt to make them leave all together. “Jesus. Sorry, Bentley.”

Bentley didn’t say anything, but took a step forward. Every single means of comfort that had ever been used on him seemed to flee from his mind at that moment, and he stood there dumbly, feeling like an absolute trash can of a human being.

Eventually, he stepped forward. “Valor…”

Valor glanced over at him with watery red-rimmed eyes, wiping every tear off before they dared fall down his face.

Bentley outstretched his arms, one to either side, sort of diagonally. “Do this.”

Valor looked up at him with a sort of unreadable expression, still wiping at his eyes. And then he seemed to remember. “Bentley…”

“Please?”

For a moment, they both looked at each other.

Without saying anything at all, Valor grabbed him and pulled him into a hug. Bentley was shocked, for a moment, but then he sank into the embrace like a sad little wet cat.

For a long time, they stayed like that. Valor was dead silent, but by the way he was trembling slightly and the slight dampness of Bentley’s right shoulder let him know that he was still crying. His wings came forward and looped around them both seemingly on their own.

“Rockie was all I had for a long time…” He muttered softly, after a while. “And now…”

“You have us,” Bentley replied, trying his best to sound like he was smiling, though he was anything but. It was taking every single ounce of willpower inside of his body not to cry, too; so much so it had been his sole focus for nearly the entire time he’d been in the bedroom.

“This is so fucked up,” Valor mumbled, his voice close to Bentley’s ear. “Once we find a way out of this dorm, I’m gonna burn this shit to the ground.”

Bentley didn’t say anything, but just sort of stood there and kinda rubbed Valor’s back.

He was right. This was so fucked up.

tag list that KINDA works lmao

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun

@xiaonothere

@skylathescholarly @flyrobinflyy @bookwarm0-0

#fic rec #batman #batfamily

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