#just the image of Clark sobbing on Bruce’s chest

[frownyalfred]

me: I hate writing Injustice!Clark. He’s so dark and different from his normal character.

my brain:

me:

my brain: anyway. have you considered how it might feel for Clark to lose his parents during the Regime and still turn to Bruce before everyone else for comfort? and despite being the Regime’s prisoner, Bruce still comforts him when he sobs?

[moonlight0934]

Tear-Stained Cheeks

Dick turns to Bruce.

“How long has he been gone again?”

It feels like we’ve been looking for him forever, but it can’t have been that long, right? There’s no way he’s dead either. That’s just not possible.

“Almost seven weeks now.”

It’s definitely possible, even probable now.

“Where else is there to look?”

“We’ve searched all of Gotham, so we have to expand from there. Joker hasn’t uttered a single peep since he took Tim, and has given us nothing to go off of. I’m not sure what to do at this point.”

“Have you asked Clark to-”

“Yes, and he can’t find him either. I don’t know why, I didn’t stick around to ask. I had better leads to follow if he couldn’t help.”

“That’s fair, I guess. So, where do you want to start?”

“I’m going to start in this area right outside of Gotham, and I want you to start in this city to the North of us,” Bruce says, pointing out a specific spot on the map. “I’ll give you details about the city, and where we’re more likely to find something. Where to start, and where to go from there. I stayed up doing research on both of these cities, so I have everything we could possibly need to know.”

Dick doesn’t say anything since he didn’t sleep last night either. He takes the papers that Bruce offers to him, and he starts reading through them as he heads out to his car. Bruce gets into the Batmobile, and speeds away. Dick continues to his car, reading all of the information that Bruce compiled. It’s everything he might need to know about the city, the crime there, and none of the extra stuff that he doesn’t need to know.

He gets into his car, and drives there, going way over the speed limit and getting there in less than half an hour. He’s searching his third warehouse when his comm crackles.

“You need to get down here. I think I found them,” Bruce says, his voice shaking.

“Ok, just send me the coordinates, and I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

He races to meet Bruce, but it still takes him almost an hour to get there. The place ends up being a crumbling building with almost all of the windows broken. The quiet dissipates the closer Dick gets to the building. Laughing and crying could be heard, and it’s almost enough to stop Dick in his tracks. He considerably slows down even though he’s dealt with the Joker enough to know how bad it could be.

That’s part of why he slows down. He’s not quite ready to see what’s going on yet. However, he continues following the laughter, which is dwindling into more tears. It’s startling to realize that the person who’s crying is also the person who’s laughing, and it sounds just like the Joker.

What could that possibly mean?

He reaches a door, and he can hear soft words. Not loud enough that he can tell what they’re saying, but enough to know that it’s his dad saying it. He opens the door quietly, and takes a quick look around the room. Joker is in one corner of the room, his face almost nothing more than blood and Dick can definitely see a bit of his skull where his forehead is supposed to be.

Bruce, still in full costume, is in the middle of the room, cradling a child to his chest. The child has green hair, and a face full of makeup. He’s the spitting image of the man who’s killed so many people, and while the laughs are almost fully gone now, those sound just like him too.

Why is there a child here? He’s so small, and he looks young too.

It doesn’t dawn on Dick immediately. He steps forward, wondering what’s happening. The child is just sobbing now, holding onto Bruce’s cape. Bruce continues to whisper reassurances, even as tears fall down his own face. That’s when Dick finally sees it.

“Tim?” Dick whispers, his voice breaking at the end. His eyes fill with tears too, and they quickly slip down his face. “No.”

Bruce’s voice cracks, and he trails off, still cradling Tim as close as he can. Dick drops to his knees beside them. He reaches out, and brushes the stray hair off of Tim’s face. He’s done that so many times, but this time it isn’t soft black hair under his fingers. Tim also normally glances up to give Dick a smile, or leans into his hand, but he doesn’t do that this time. He flinches, his breath catching.

Bruce is shaking, but he’s trying not to jostle Tim too much, and Dick’s hand is still just an inch away from Tim. He’s shaking like a leaf, and already feels like he’s going to throw up.

“What did-?”

“I don’t know,” Bruce whispers, clutching Tim just a little bit tighter.

Tim has started to go limp in Bruce’s hold, his eyes unfocused. They stay like that for a long time before Bruce finally rises onto shaking legs.

“Is he?” Dick asks, looking at Joker.

“I don’t know, but it’s likely at this point. There’s too much blood. Can you call Gordon? I don’t want Tim to be here when he shows up, but I don’t want to take any risks with them.”

“Where’s Harley?”

“She’s in the kitchen. I slammed her face into the counter, and I don’t know if she’s still ok. Normally I’d have worried about medical assistance before now, but I just-” he trails off again, looking back at the child in his arms.

“I get it. I’ll handle Gordon and those two. Just get him home, and call Leslie, ok?”

Bruce nods, and slowly makes his way out of the room. Dick approaches Joker slowly, and leans down to check his pulse. He finds Harley and does the same thing before grabbing his phone. Gordon answers almost immediately since he’s been working on finding Tim with them too.

“Nightwing, did you find something?”

“Yeah. I’m going to send you an address, and you need to get down here.”

Gordon picks up on his tone immediately.

“Is there a rush?”

“No rush. You won’t even need men for an escort, or anything.”

“Robin isn’t…”

“Robin is not dead.”

“Oh thank God.”

“Joker and Harley are though.”

“What?” Gordon’s shocked reply is breathless and quiet.

“They’re dead. Robin is in bad shape, but Batman already left with him. We’re going to do what we can, and I’ll fill you in on the details later. For now, I just need you to come deal with their bodies.”

It’s quiet for a minute, then, “Ok, I’ll be there as soon as I can. Just send me the address, and I’ll get started.”

“Hurry, I want to get home.”

Gordon hums, and hangs up. Dick sits on the ground, trying to process what happened until Gordon shows up. Dick leaves almost immediately after that, ignoring Gordon’s questions regarding Tim. It’s not like he really has that much information to give him in the first place, but he wasn’t in the mood to talk even if he did. So, he just keeps walking until he gets to his car. Then he goes home to meet Bruce and Tim. Bruce is sitting alone in the main area of the cave, so Dick sits next to him.

“What did Leslie have to say?”

“She said that he doesn’t seem to remember us. He was drugged, and tortured. He’s convinced that his name is Joker Junior, and that Joker and Harley were his parents. He’s confused, and can’t seem to grasp what she asks him. His cognitive function is not great, and his mind is shattered. She doesn’t know how much of it is fixable, but apparently she has some hope for the situation. He’s sedated, and she’s looking into rehabilitation places that could do this on the down low.”

“So what do we do from here?”

“We support him, and we do whatever we have to for him to get better.”

Dick leans against Bruce.

“I can’t believe we failed another one.”

Bruce hums.

“I’ve been thinking the same thing since I got here. We have a chance to make this one better though.”

“I hope so.”

[fishfingersandjellybabies]

Whumptober 2020 Day 2 - Kidnapped

Characters: Lois Lane, Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Damian and Jon Summary: Damian and Jon were kidnapped by the one you’d least expect A/N: It was some evil space magic shit, obviously. And was mitigated by the pain/sudden shock to his system.

Ao3

~~

Lois rarely calls Bruce.

And it’s even more rare for her to call Bruce sobbing.

“He took them.” She gasped, screamed, wailed. “He…I…I don’t know what happened. He was on a case. The boys were helping me clean the house and…and the barnyard. He-He came back, he didn’t say a word-”

“Lois, slow down.” Bruce tried, already clicking through the Batcomputer to get to the satellite images of the Kent farm. Damian had just been there for the weekend. The boys having a sleepover. “He who?”

Just to confirm. Just to be sure. He knew who she was talking about but he just had to be sure.

“Clark.” She cried, and Bruce’s heart sank. “He pulled Jon up by his hair. Dragged Damian by his neck. I-I tried to stop him, tried to make him put them down. He just threw me across the yard.”

“Okay.” Bruce breathed. “Okay, I’m on my way. Which direction did he go, did you see?”

“North. I think.” Lois offered. “Bruce, you have to pick me up. I have to come with you.”

“Lois, it’s not safe-”

“My son isn’t safe.” She spat, even through her tears. “And I’m not leaving Damian. He was in my care, it’s my fault he was taken. I’m going to help get him back or I…I…”

She collapsed back into tears.

“…Fine.” Bruce sighed. “Just…just know, Lois. This obviously isn’t Clark, something happened. But to save the boys…to get our boys back…I may have to use Kryptonite.”

“…I know.”

“I just want you to understand.”

“I know.” Lois repeated. “I know you won’t like it either. But I know you’ll do anything to get Jon and Damian to safety. Even that.”

“Good.” Bruce huffed nervously. He grabbed for a bag of weapons, pulled his cowl over his face. “And Lois?”

“What?”

“I don’t blame you.” Bruce whispered. “I know this isn’t your fault.”

Lois didn’t answer the statement. Instead just sniffed and said, “I’ll be waiting by the mailbox.”

As the Batmobile sped through the streets, Bruce continued to work on the computer. He’d found the tracker in Damian’s cell phone, cross-referenced it with a tracker Bruce had put in his shoe.

Metropolis.

The car barely slowed on the old dusty road before Lois was opening the car door and dropping in. Bruce relayed any information he had to her as they drove towards the city. Lois manned the computer then, checking security cameras on various buildings that might have meant something to Clark.

“There.” She whispered eventually, tapping her finger on the screen. “Bruce, there!”

They were on top of the Daily Planet. It was a camera from another building nearby, so they couldn’t see details. But they could see enough.

The boys were huddled together against the rooftop door, and there were jagged lines of scorch marks around them, clear indicators that every attempt at movement was thwarted by heat vision. Superman was under the golden globe that labeled the building, using that very same heat vision to slice the statue’s mount.

“Is he…” Lois tilted her head. “Is he going to drop it on them? Crush them to death?”

“Let’s hope we don’t have to find out.” Bruce responded tightly. As they made it to the city, to the street where the Planet was, they could see a crowd gathering on the street below, watching with curiosity what they could see of the situation above them. “We need to sneak up the side. He needs to not know I’m there.”

“Why?”

“Because we don’t know what he’s doing, or what influence he’s under.” Bruce murmured, trying to find another camera angle himself. “So right now, to get the boys out of danger, our only move is to incapacitate him.”

Lois glanced over. “The Kryptonite.”

Bruce nodded solemnly. “If I can sneak up behind him, it’ll limit any damage to Jon. Give me the element of surprise.”

Lois swallowed the lump in her throat and looked back down to the security feed. She watched as Jon rubbed at his eyes, as Damian tried to say something to him, as Clark turned and shot heat vision in their direction.

“Okay.” Lois whispered. “Put me near the boys, I’ll try to distract him, or…or get between him and the kids, at least.”

Bruce nodded. They waited in silence as the Batmobile slowed and ducked into an alleyway. “…You know I don’t want to do this.”

“Of course I do.” Lois tried to give him a smile, but it came out pained. “But anything for the boys. I know that. Clark knows that.”

Bruce nodded, looked at the camera feed himself.

“Anything for our babies.” Lois repeated softly. Suddenly she kicked open her door. “Let’s go.”

Bruce slowly exited the car himself, and watched as Lois began to climb the fire escape of the near-skyscraper. She made it up two or three layers before glancing back down at him.

“Well, get going, Bats.”

Bruce couldn’t help but smirk at her courage, but ducked around the corner of the building at her command anyway, pulling his grapple gun out of his belt.

Lois was out of breath by the time she reached the top, but she didn’t care. She only cared about her son and his best friend. She glanced over the ledge, searching the roof, gaining her bearings.

She was thankfully closest to the door the boys were crowded against, but it made her heart immediately sink. Both boys had injuries on them. Blood seeping from cuts, bruises. A black eye on Damian and a bruise blossoming on Jon’s jaw. Jon was also cradling a limp arm between the two of them, and Damian’s jeans were ripped enough to reveal a swollen ankle.

Clark had hurt them. Jesus Christ, Clark had hurt them.

Clark, meanwhile, was still working on the base of the newspaper’s monument, humming cheerfully as he moved.

Her heart pounded, but she knew. She needed to remind herself.

Right now, that wasn’t her husband.

And Jon’s silent tears made that easier to believe. His pain fueled her fury. Husbands didn’t exist when her baby was scared.

So she crawled over the ledge, and silently walked to stand in front of the children. Damian noticed her first, and she quickly held her finger to her lips, asking for quiet. He attempted to situate himself more in front of Jon, and nodded.

Once Damian and Jon were behind her, she cleared her throat. “Clark.”

Clark stood upright and turned around, frowning at the sight of her. “Oh. You.”

His eyes were dark, almost black, the shadow of red lining his irises. His face was tight, like he was straining, even though everything else about him screamed relaxed.

It was him, but it so wasn’t.

“Give me my kids back.” Lois demanded.

“No thank you.” Clark grinned. “I need them.”

“For what?”

“To destroy them.” Clark shrugged pleasantly. Jon whimpered behind her. Damian shushed him. “They are a waste of life.”

“Says who?” Lois snapped. In the corner of her eye she saw a shadow move behind the globe. She kept her focus on Clark anyway.

“Says me.” Clark pushed back. “My eyes have been opened. It’s the only conclusion. The legacy of the World’s Finest deserve better than…” He frowned, waved his hand mindlessly towards the boys. “Them.”

“Even if that were true, and it’s not.” Lois spat. “That doesn’t mean they deserve to die.”

“It absolutely does.” Clark grinned. “After all, you dispose of trash, don’t you?”

“You’re the only garbage I see.” Damian shouted angrily. Clark’s eyes instantly became red, and Lois quickly backed up a step.

“Don’t.” She warned. “Don’t you dare touch them.”

“Move or be destroyed with them.” Clark decided.

“Then kill me.” Lois countered. “But I won’t let you kill our son.”

Clark grimaced, then sighed. He turned and slowly began to pick up the globe.

“I wish he was never born.” Clark mumbled, but they all heard him loud and clear.

But before he could lift the monument even an inch, Batman dropped out of seemingly nowhere, a green, glowing blade in his hand.

Without preamble, he shoved the dagger into Clark’s side. Reluctantly, he resisted the urge to twist it.

“And I wish you didn’t open your goddamn mouth.” He hissed as Clark dropped to his knees. He ripped the knife out, kept it tight in his fist as he backed towards Lois. When Clark didn’t move, other than to drop painfully onto his side, Bruce risked turning, kneeling in front of their sons.

Jon still had tears streaming down his face, and Bruce knew it was Clark’s words that stung the most, more than any injury. Damian was just watching, muscles tense, like he was ready to jump into action at Bruce’s command.

So instead, he softly reached his hand out to hold Damian’s face. “Are you alright?”

“We’ll live.” Damian murmured as Lois engulfed Jon in her arms. “So long as you continue to stop him from throwing that stupid globe.”

Bruce gave him a smile and leaned forward to hook an arm under Damian’s thighs. He stood with Damian tight to his chest, and kept his grip on the Kryptonite knife as he backed away from Lois and Jon, and turned back to Clark.

Clark, who was still groaning, green coloring his skin and veins. Clark, who was blinking, that mysterious black disappearing more and more every time his eyes reopened.

“Wha…? Why…?” Clark murmured as he struggled to sit up, hand clasping over the bleeding wound in his side. “Bruce? What happened? Did you…?”

Jon whimpered at the sound of his voice, and Bruce glanced back. Jon was clinging to his mother, sobbing into her shoulder even as she tried to whisper reassurances into his hair.

His father was possessed, she offered. He didn’t mean anything he said. He didn’t mean anything he did. He loves you, Jon, she pleaded. He loves you so much.

“Diana and a few of the Lanterns are on their way.” Bruce called to her. Lois glanced up. “I called them for assistance, see if they can help us figure out what’s going on, while we get the boys home.”

Lois nodded.

“What…what happened, Batman?” Clark asked again, his voice shrinking with every word. Bruce looked back, tightening his grip on Damian. Damian, who was still trembling slightly, whose breathing sounded like it hurt. And Clark was smart. Despite what people thought, Clark wasn’t naïve at all, not even a little bit. He could read the room, he could decipher evidence. He looked at Bruce, fear in his eyes. “…What did I do?”

Bruce glanced between the Kents, sighed as Damian leaned his head exhaustedly against his shoulder. And when Clark shifted to move towards his wife and child, Bruce found himself stepping between them, standing protectively in front of Lois and Jon, knife still tight in his hand as he kept Damian turned away.

“You don’t want to know right now, Clark.”

[what-if-i-imagine]

Stay Alive

Based on this animatic.

Ao3

It was snowing outside as Bruce ran up from the batcave, still half in costume.

“What a cliche,” he could almost hear Jason say as he ran up the stairs, his toes barely landing on every other step. “At least it’s not raining.”

“You like the rain,” he would have said in return.

“Only when I’m reading. It’s a bit much when I’m bleeding out.”

Jason was bleeding out. He was bleeding out, and had third degree burns and broken bones littering his body. A collapsed lung and an extreme concussion too from what Bruce had been able to see before Clark arrived and flew the boy back to Gotham. Bruce couldn’t stop the images from flooding his mind for the hundredth time since the events of earlier that day transpired. For the hundredth time he was holding his son’s broken body, waiting on Superman to arrive and save what he had lost.

Alfred was waiting for him at the top of the stairs by the time he reached them, removing his bloodied medical gloves.

“Where is my son?” Bruce demanded, trying to get past his Butler but being stopped by a firm hand. Bruce’s eyes drifted past to the cart filled with bloodied medical supplies, the sight making him light headed.

“Master Wayne, Mr. Kent brought him in an hour ago. He lost a great amount of blood on the way-”

“Is he alive?” Bruce interrupted, the panic becoming too much to stay inside. Everything he held in fell molten hot from his eyes.

Alfred sighed and gripped his shoulders, “He is, but you have to understand. His heart was not beating when they arrived. I was barely able to bring him back-”

“Can I see him, please?” Bruce interrupted once again.

“Just this way,” Alfred led him through the hallway, his ever calm persona cracking to show his own worry. Before he opened the door, he turned back to Bruce, “I am doing everything I can, but I don’t know how much longer he has.”

The door opened and the air filled with the heavy metallic scent of blood and it’s acidic partner of disinfectant. Bruce rushed to the bed, the shaking in his bones worsening the moment he saw his son.

“Jason,” he barely breathed the name as he reached out.

“B,” Jason smiled as if he didn’t have painful tears running down his face to match Bruce’s own. He leaned into his touch and for a second Bruce’s heart wished to forget death standing at the window and try to ground him with the ever adoring glint in his son’s eyes.

“I did it just like you said,” Jason said, closing his eyes. “I held my head up high. I stared that clown down even when we got to ten.”

Bruce pressed his fists and head into the mattress to try and ground himself again. Quickly he looked back up and shook his head, a sob building in his throat, as he wiped Jason’s tear, smearing them with the drying blood, “I know, baby, you did everything just right.”

“I stared him down and I covered her-”

“Shh, I know,” Bruce was almost begging, torn between longing for his son’s voice and wishing for him to rest.

“Dad,” Jason sobbed out, the smile slipping into the fear he rarely let show. Bruce came undone and pressed their foreheads together, holding Jason in his arms for what might be the last time.

“Shh, save your strength,” Bruce hushed him, kissing his head through the pain.

The scream that came from the doorway dug the knife deeper into his chest, pulling him out of the embrace. He turned just in time for the second scream, this one calling out Jason’s name. Barbara and Dick stood in the doorway, out of breath from the same run Bruce had made up the stairs. Barbara’s face twisted in horror, her shaking hand raised to clasp over her mouth, and Dick’s eyes were that of a freshly broken man.

“Dick, Barb,” Bruce stood to meet them.

Barbara pushed right past him, falling to her knees where he had been. Jason closed his eyes again at the contact of her hands cupping his face.

“Is he going to survive this?” Barabara asked, almost begged over her shoulder.

Dick burst into actition from her words, surging forward to grab Bruce by the collar of his suit. He sometimes forgot just how strong Dick had gotten over the years until his fits of rage like the one they were going through now.

“Who did this?” Dick demanded through his tears. Before Bruce could answer, Dick yelled, “Did you know?”

“Dick-”

“Answer the damn question Bruce! Did you know she would do this?” Bruce could hear Barabara shouting for Dick to stop behind them and Alfred telling them this wasn’t what Jason needed, but it was drowned out by the sound of his heart beating in his ears.

“I didn’t know,” Bruce managed to get past his lips.

“Bull shit!” Dick cried, his grip tightening the way it did before he threw a punch. No hit came though, as a small voice interrupted the exchange.

“Babs? Dick?” the small voice called, so much more broken than it had been just moments before.

Dick let Bruce go in an instant and joined Barbara, one of his hands overlapping hers to fully ingulf Jason’s hand and the other finding his brother’s hair.

“Little Wing,” Dick whispered the same time Barabara said, “Baby Bird.”

“I’m so sorry,” Jason whimpered, chasing both of their touches as his chest wracked with sobs of breath. “You taught me how to- I should have been able to defuse it.”

“Little wing stop,” Dick shook his head.

“I forgot so much,” Jason pushed on despite his brother’s plea and his straining voice. “You taught me so much and I forgot. You taught me violin…”

“When his voice started to trail off, Barabara squeezed his hand, “You hated playing by the rules. You could never sit still.”

“You would put your hands on mine,” Jason reached out his free hand as if to prepare a fingering on an invisible violin. Dick caught the hand as it fell back down under its own dead weight and pressed his lips to it.

“You changed the melody every time,” Dick said against his hand.

“I would always change the line,” Jason said, his voice giving out at the end of the sentence. Dick gently laid his hand back down onto the mattress and kissed his head next to where Bruce had.

Bruce covered his mouth to not cry harder as he stared at his three children. Frames of Jason’s days in the manor flashed through his head, drowning out the frames of his bloodied body.

Jason standing on a stool because he refused to sit as he played while Dick stood behind him, hand on hand to show the proper fingerings and posture, Barabra in front of them explaining pieces of the music.

Jason in the kitchen with Alfred, dutifully learning all of the recipes the Butler kept so close to his chest.

Jason hanging off his back, arms wrapped around his neck and legs around his torso while they listened to Commissioner Gordon after a long night’s work.

Jason curled in this very same bed as Bruce read his favorite classical novel as a bedtime story,

Back in reality, Barabara begged Jason to save his strength. Dick begged him to stay with them. Jaosn, as stubborn as ever, refused to listen to either, his voice going on no matter how weak and tired it became.

“I’m not afraid,” he promised, eyes going in and out of focus.

Bruce carefully climbed up onto the bed and gently lifted Jason up so that he was laying in Bruce’s lap without Barabara or Dick breaking their contact with him. Alfred sat at the foot of the bed, now openly crying with them as he rested his hand on Jason’s ankle.

“I’m not afraid,” Jaosn repeated, gentler this time. “Not with you here. Is that bad?”

“Not at all baby,” Bruce promised, lips pressed to his hair.

“We don’t want you to be afraid,” Barabara said.

“I won’t be afraid then,” Jason decided with the biggest smile his strength, or lack thereof, would allow. “I’m so tired though.”

“Master Jason, you must try and stay awake,” Alfred said, his voice steady despite the emotion written all over his face. There was a defeated slump to his shoulders that Bruce had never seen before, even after his parents’ deaths.

“Alfie, thank you,” Jason whispered, closing his eyes. Alfred had to turn away and cover his eyes with his freehand.

“Babs, don’t let Dad or Dickie do anything dumb when I’m gone,” Jason continued.

“You can make sure they don’t, because you are staying right here,” Barabara heaved, squeezing his hand. “Do you hear me Jason? I am giving you a direct order to stay with us.”

“I’ve never been good at following orders,” Jason hummed. His body became heavier on top of Bruce, each muscle releasing one by one instead of all at once as he tried to hold on.

“Jason, please,” Dick’s voice shook. His head fell onto his shoulder where his hand had been before, said hand now gripping the bed sheets tight enough to tear them.

“It’s so hard holding on. It hurts so much,” Jason let out a pitiful sob. “I want to let go before I get scared again.”

“Then let go,” Bruce said. Both Barabara and Dick looked up at him in betrayal, but his focus was solely on the weight on top of him.

“You need me,” Jason tried to shake his head but winced at the attempt.

“We do,” Bruce nodded, letting himself cry into his hair. “But if you need to let go, then let go baby. We will be okay.”

“I love you.”

“We love you too,” Bruce said.

With Bruce’s words, the boy went completely still and all of his muscles relaxed until all his weight had fallen onto Bruce.

There was no telling how long they stayed in the room. No telling who was the first to move.

They left the body in the bedroom for that night. It felt wrong to move it right away, but Alfred convinced them all to still sleep in their own beds.

Little did they know that in the dead of night, one of Talia al Ghul’s men lurked outside the window, waiting for them all to be asleep to make his move...

[lerdm]

More On The Tim/Diana AU

Okay, so since my post on rare ships, I did get a few messages about how I thought this would look like, so here is an outline of what that universe might look like.

Bruce is older now, like actually old, like 65-70ish. Alfred died a few years back and the way Bruce dealt with it drove Jason away for good. Dick is still Nightwing, although he’s also getting up there in years. His 40′s weren’t kind to him and he and Damian got into a huge fight at his 50th birthday party because Damian was almost certain that he was going to get himself killed. Damian doesn’t talk much with Bruce or Dick anymore either, which is a shame, because he’s the only one who Jason will speak to. Then there’s Tim. 

He’s in his early thirties, he was the one who took over being Batman after Bruce retired, much to Damian’s chagrin. Diana being basically immortal and Clark not ageing quite the same as a human man, are still the pillars of the League. At first, Batman wasn’t quite the image that he was when Bruce was in the role, but he made a name for himself soon enough.

He’s been Batman for a few years now, and the other day, he noticed a grey hair. He held it in his hand and stared at it for a while in front of the large window that looked out on Earth in the Watchtower. Diana came up behind him and asked if he was okay.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just... getting old I guess.”

“Is that troubling you?” Diana asked.

“Yes, more than it probably should,” Tim answered completely honestly.

This took Diana off guard, although, it shouldn’t by now. She should be used to the idea that Tim wasn’t his father, he didn’t bottle things up, not anymore. He had grown emotionally. And Diana would be lying if she didn’t notice how he had grown physically.

“Is it something that’s bothering you?” Diana asked.

Tim smiled a little at her and she smiled back. “Not really, not right now. But I’ve seen what doing this does to someone’s body. Bruce can barely walk now and it kills him. I figure I should probably stop before it gets that far.” He paused. “I probably won’t. Maybe I’ll go the same route as Jason and Damian and use a Lazarus pit.”

Diana looked concerned at this, “Would you? Consider that?”

“No. I think I’d rather die naturally than hurt the people around me with... everything that comes with the Pit.”

“I know it’s not my place, but I am relieved to hear you say that.”

“Maybe it is your place. I mean... you’re my friend.”

Diana looked at the man in the eye, they were the same height. 

“Just friends?”

A slow smiled crept onto Tim’s face, “I don’t presume to know what you’re feeling, but if you’re asking...”

“Which I am.”

“I don’t see any reason why we can’t... explore... this relationship. Beside perhaps your feelings for my father,” Tim said.

Diana shook her head a little. “You’re nothing like him.”

Tim grinned, “That’s more of a compliment than you know.”

“May I kiss you?” She asked.

“Of course,” Tim said.

<><> Years Later <><>

Tim was standing at the end of a long aisle. It wasn’t a big wedding, mostly family and friends from the superhero community. Tim’s best man was Conner Kent, Diana’s man of honour was Clark.

Bruce was sitting in the front and watched, his heart shattering, as Diana married his son.

There was a small reception outside the manor, where the wedding was taking place. Tim was chatting with some of the guests when something on the treeline caught his eye. He smiled and excused himself and walked over.

Jason was leaning against a tree, smoking. He looked the exact same as the snarky 19-year-old Tim had known what felt like a lifetime ago. Except for the hair, it was shock-white, and his eyes glowed in the dark slightly unnaturally.

“You know, you were invited,” Tim said.

“I know, but I didn’t want to make trouble for you,” Jason said. “Damian sends his best.”

Tim laughed, “No. He didn’t.”

Jason grinned, “No. He didn’t.” He took another drag. “Some things never change.”

“Yeah,” Tim agreed, giving Jason a look.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Don’t go all Bruce and give me a lecture.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

Jason rolled his eyes and reached into his jacket, pulling out an envelope. “Here, a wedding present.”

Tim looked inside and saw that it was packed with photographs. And not just any photos.

“Jason... how did you get these, I thought Bruce destroyed them after Alfred died,” Tim looked through them with tears welling in his eyes.

Jason smiled bittersweetly, “Alfred gave me all the old photo albums.”

“Thanks, Jay. I-” Tim looked up from a photo to see that Jason was gone. He chuckled slightly, put the envelope in his suit jacket, and went back to the party.

“Where’d you sneak off to?” Diana asked slightly teasingly, though there was a hint of real concern under it.

“Jason stopped by,” Tim said.

Diana smiled a little.

<><> Ten Years Later <><>

Funnily enough, Tim and Diana only had little girls. Tim had thought that the universe was going to mess with Diana by making them have only boys. Not that Tim was complaining. He loved those girls.

He and Diana left them with Conner when they were going out on League business that day. It was a hard fight. Diana was protecting Tim, who was trying to hack into the hidden files in their latest adversary’s computer. Unfortunately, a bomb was set off when the other members of the Justice League were battling the drones on the main level, and the building began to crash around them.

The next thing Diana knew, she was opening her eyes. She seemed to have landed in an air pocket. And then she remembered who else she had been with. “Batman?!” She called. She sat up and looked around until she saw a glint of light bouncing off something. But she couldn’t tell what it was. She reached out to touch it, and her hand came back sticky.

“Timothy?” She asked the darkness, her voice wavering in a way that it hadn’t in a long time.

She crawled over to where he was laying. No pulse to be found. She cradled his body against her chest and sobbed until Superman finally dug them out of the rubble.

<><> <><>

Telling her children that their father was gone was one of the hardest things she’d ever done.

All she could think about as she stood at the grave of Timothy Jackson Drake-Wayne, was how she was so lucky that she still had pieces of him in the world.

She smelt the smoke before she heard him speak.

“I could bring him back, if you’d like.”

She turned to look at Jason, ever the same man, frozen in time.

“He told me he didn’t want that,” Diana replied.

Jason just nodded, “Yeah, I figured.”

There was silence for a moment before Diana spoke her mind. “Why are you here?”

“I... just thought I’d come to tell you that I’m sorry. And that you and the kids were the things that made his life worth something to him, not Batman.”

Diana stared at Jason tearily. “Thank you.”

He nodded and was about to turn away when he remembered something else he had wanted to tell her. “And... Damian’s taken this hard. He, uh, I think he has people following your girls just to make sure nothing happens. I tried to call him off but- well, it’s Damian. I know they can handle themselves, he’s just worried.”

Diana wanted to be angry, and snap at him that she can protect her children on her own, but then she remembered that she wasn’t the only one who lost someone.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

Jason nodded once and then went back to his motorcycle, revving away.

[nightofnyx8]

I’d Still Choose You (Part 1)

Well, I didn’t exactly participate in Dickkory week because well, life happened. But I did want to create something to celebrate these two, so I wrote this little short story for this week. It has three parts, and this is the first (and probably the longest). I post the other two parts...mmm, later. But I hope you enjoy it nonetheless! Let me know what you think!

*****************************************

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”

-Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

*****************************************

Dick Grayson paced quickly around the cramped, stuffy room, running his hands nervously through his hair. She had been in there too long.

“Dick, will you sit down?” Garfield called down from the coach. “You’re making me dizzy.”

“It’s been two hours, Gar. Something’s not right.”

“I’m sure she’s fine.” Rachel chimed in. “There’s no point in worrying when we don’t have all the facts yet.”

The large oak doors opened, and Alfred stepped out.

“Master Dick, Miss Kory is—”

But he was already running past Alfred, into the small room that had been the established “hospital” in Wayne Manor for as long as he could remember. There she was, her beautiful crimson hair spreading out on the pillows like a fan.

“Kory!” He ran to her and stroked her hair away from her eyes—eyes that held confusion and surprise. Taking her face in his hands, he sighed in relief to see the woman he loved alive and well. “I thought I’d lost you.”

He pulled her gently towards him for a kiss, but she shrieked and backed away, her green orbs now filled with fear.

“Kory, are you alright?” He gripped the edge of the bed, panic rising in his chest. “It’s just me.”

And then she stared at him in a way she never had before, almost…almost as if he were a complete stranger.

“Who are you?”

*****************************************

“I don’t understand, how can she not remember me?” Dick sat in the back of the examination room, the neuroimages of Kory’s brain projected on the screen.

“Physically, she’s perfectly fine.” Clark responded, musing at the images.

"Agreed.” Bruce stated from the back. “No broken bones, no internal trauma. But it’s her brain that’s been affected.”

Dick wasn’t really sure why Superman was at the Batcave, but given the circumstances at the moment he didn’t really care.

“What’s wrong with her brain? Did she hit her head?”

“We’re not sure.” Bruce responded. “But something definitely happened between when she was kidnapped by the Psions and before you rescued her.”

“Well then, fix it.” He got up impatiently, making his way to the side of the window, watching the sun rise over the orchards that surrounded the estate. He didn’t want to hear whatever lecture Bruce would give next.

“Dick, you know it’s not that easy.” Bruce’s voice didn’t sound angry this time. “The brain is very complicated and unpredictable.”

The doors opened to reveal Rachel running in, Gar at her tail. Dick had to only take one look at her expression to know whatever news she had wasn’t good.

“Rachel, what happened?” Clark stepped off the platform and drew up a chair. Rachel sat down, holding her head in her hands.

“I was able to look into her mind.” She said quietly. “It’s…it’s bad. There’s a dark hole in her mind, meaning she’s literally lost all of her memories from her time on Earth. The last memory her mind holds is being taken by the Gordanians from Tameran.”

“But, Rachel.” Dick stepped away from the window to meet her. “That was ten years ago.”

“I know.” She said sadly. “She doesn’t know who any of us are on Earth.”

Bruce turned back towards the computer monitors, his expression contemplative. “If she had lost all of her memory from the past ten years, then why can she still understand English? Wouldn’t have she forgotten that as well?”

“That’s the weird part. She remembers the language, what things are called, even where certain places are. Her knowledge is perfectly intact, but her memory is completely gone.”

Dick steadied himself on the back of Rachel’s chair. “Can you bring at least some of them back?’

Rachel shook her head. “I can only do that in minor cases. And even if I did have that power, there’s nothing I could do. Our minds can hold memories in the deep subconscious, and sometimes I can bring them to the surface. But with Kory’s mind it’s different. There’s nothing there. Just a big, dark, empty blank.”

“Nothing there.” Dick repeated, letting the words hang over them.

“Yes.” She stated dejectedly. “Which means whatever happened was deliberate. Whoever or whatever took her memories didn’t want her to get them back.”

*****************************************

The great clock in the grand hallway struck seven o’clock as Dick made his way to the hospital room. He didn’t care if they all said it was impossible. He wasn’t about to sit back and do nothing. He had to see her again.

He stopped as he reached the door, taking a deep breath. He couldn’t lose her, not like this. He knocked softly then stepped into the occupied room. She was sitting upright in the bed and looking out the window, the fading light turning her hair to fire.

“Hey.” He stated simply. He didn’t want to scare her this time.

She turned to look at him and he felt his voice catch in his throat. What was he supposed to say now? He took a step towards her. “How are you feeling?”

“I am well.” She looked understandable tense.

“Hey um…look, maybe we could start over?” He held out his hand. “I’m—”

“Dick.” She stated emphatically. “The one called Alfred has informed me of who you are.”

Dick.

Never had she called him that. She had always preferred his full name, and she was the only person besides his own mother that he had allowed to do so.

“Yeah.” He choked out. “Did Alfred mention anything else?”

She looked down at her left hand, the wedding bands wrapped around her finger gleaming slightly in the afternoon light.

“We are…married?”

He felt his chest tighten. “Yes. It’ll be three years this December.”

She took a deep breath, letting the silence suffocate the room.

“How long have I been here on this strange planet?” She finally said. “The last I remember…I was on Tameran.”

“Ten years.” He replied, leading to another long silence. Kory looked as though she had forgotten how to breathe.

“I have to go back.” She said suddenly, flinging herself out of the bed. “My people need me! I cannot just stay here and…and…”

“Kory!” Dick caught her as she stumbled to the ground, clutching at her head. “You’re not well enough to stand, calm down. Your planet’s safe, I promise.”

“But my planet is under attack!”

“No, listen. Tameran’s fine. It’s safe. You appointed your K'norfka Galfore as the Grand Ruler a while ago. You don’t need to worry about it, just please lay back down, Kory.” 

She looked up at him, her glowing orbs absent of the happiness that normally occupied them.

“Why do you call me that?”

“What?”

“Kory. It is not my name.”

“Oh well,” How to explain this? “I guess it’s what your friends call you here on Earth. I know your name, Koriand’r. I guess I’ve always just shortened it.”

She sighed, falling back onto the bed. She put her head in her hands, Dick kneeling at the foot of the bed.

“I do not know what to do. I do not even know my own name anymore.” She sobbed. He sat down next to her and put his hand around her shoulders, pulling her closer to him in comfort. She stiffened, drawing back. She locked eyes with his, her gaze tinged with doubt.

“I am…sorry.” She stated. “I know we are, together. But I—”

“It’s okay.” He said quietly. He felt like an elephant was standing on his chest. But he removed his arm and brought in down awkwardly at his side.

“I uh, I thought you might like this.” He pulled out a large photo album, well-worn with use.

“It’s pictures of you, of us, of everyone here. Maybe it’ll jog your memory a bit.”

She took it with hesitation, letting her curiosity win out in the end. She flipped through each picture, staring at photos of herself. He stayed silent and looked at the pictures with her, from their first days at the Titans Tower, to missions with the Justice League, late nights at the carnival, playing on the beach with their friends…

She pulled out a photo from one of the slots. She stared with interest to the woman in white, smiling brightly next to Dick on the happiest day of his life.

“I look happy.” She noted.

“You were.” He blurted out. “You said you wished you could pause that moment forever.”

“I did?” She questioned. “I...I do not remember.”

She closed the book and tried to give it back to him, but he pushed it gently towards her.

“Keep it.” He said. “It’s really yours anyway.”

The afternoon light had faded into twilight, the moon rising slowly outside the large window.

“It’s getting late. We should probably be getting you home.”

“Home?”

“Yeah, our home.”

She bit her lip. “Listen, Dick. I know this is difficult for you as well, but…I need time.”

“It’ll probably help you get your memory back faster. You do want that, right?”

She looked down, and Dick felt his heart sink. Of course she would be uncomfortable. And he wouldn’t make her. 

“Look, I’m sorry.” He said, getting up from the bed. “I’m sure Alfred wouldn’t mind you staying here for another night.”

She nodded. “He is very kind. I feel…comfortable here.”

He smiled, turning to walk out the room. He stopped right before the door, looking back at her.

“Goodnight, Kory.” He said softly, letting her face illuminate his mind before he stepped out.

“Goodnight.” She answered back. She let out a small smile before the door closed softly, leaving her alone again.

*****************************************

The nightmare was all so familiar. He must have dreamt it a thousand times, continuously playing back the details. The eerie sound of the wire snapping, his mother’s scream, the last moments of a child’s innocence still hanging in the air.

He had woken up pale and sweaty. It had been a while since he had dreamed of them. No matter how many times the nightmare surfaced, it always took a while to breathe normally again.

His arm reached over to the other side of the bed, searching for the familiar warmth that always accompanied it. Nothing.

He turned over, finding the bed to be empty. Maybe she was in the bathroom, or just out on the—

Oh.

It took all but a few seconds for the events of the past day to come crashing down on him, the sight of her guarded eyes burned into his mind.

He did not sleep for the rest of the night, staring only to the other side of the bed that he used to share with the woman he loved.

[terresdebrumestories]

Clakr Kent, of Krypton - 3/4: Superman

FANDOM: DC’s cinematic universe. RATING: Mature. WORDCOUNT: 29 999 (Fic total: ~98k words) PAIRING(S): Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne (main focus is on Clark, though). CHARACTER(S): Kal-El | Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, Jor-El, Lara Lor-Van, Kara Zor-El, Zor-El, Martha Kent, Alfred Pennyworth, Diana Prince, Barry Allen, Arthur Curry, Victor Stone, John Stewart, J’onn J’onn, plus a quick cameo by Lois Lane. GENRE: Alternate Universe (canon divergence), transition fic with romance. TRIGGER WARNING(S): A great deal of anxiety and self loathing, especially in parts one and two. Some descriptions are heavily inspired by my experience of dysphoria-induced dissociation. SUMMARY: Batman crashes on Krypton a few days before the Turn of the Year celebrations and Kal-El's life takes a sharp turn to the left, on a path that will ultimately lead him to becoming Clark Kent.

OTHER CHAPTERS: [I. Kal-El] [II. Shadow] [IV. Clark Kent] ALSO AVAILABLE: [On AO3] [On Dreamwidth]

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thank you, still, to @stuvyx​ for the wonderful illustrations and to @susiecarter​ for the beta :D

Healing pods are designed to be a blank space. A place where the body can heal and the mind be left idle, bathed in warm fluids and soft bubbling noises. There is nothing else, in a pod, save maybe the dizzying feeling left behind by the abrupt disappearance of pain. Kal floats in that warmth forever—or maybe just a minute—and the silence around him is occasionally broken by a deep sound, muffled, as if it comes from far away.

Then there is a vibration, a great noise of suction like the emptying of a sink, and Kal finds himself thrown headfirst into the bone-deep cold of reality, shivering and with half a mind to scream. He struggles, blind and disoriented, against the burning things trying to pull him—up? Down? There is no telling. Kal gasps, blinks against the veil that will not let him bring the world into focus. Twists away from the burn and ache of something else on his skin—and sinks into darkness.

The world comes back in snatches. Shivers—cold, then hot, then cold again. Gray-green so dark, it is nearly black. Voices overhead, talking...to him, perhaps. Or rather about him. Then there is dark, a vast emptiness that lasts for a long time, until Kal’s mind reaches the surface once more. Smells. Something dry, warm on his clammy forehead. A voice, deep and gravelly. The abyss.

The cycle continues for a while, though Kal could not say how long if his life depended on it. Several times, he almost wakes—brings images of what happens then into the next attempt—until he can finally open his eyes, blink, and know that he is in a spacecraft. More blinking, a painful twist of his neck, and he learns that he is in a Kryptonian spacecraft, most likely the one some El ancestor had the forethought to smuggle under the Citadel when space travel was banned, after the Lanterns’ war.

Pain and remembrance come to him all at once, then, as if one had called the other, and he gasps around them—breathes in, deep and hard, until his lungs hurt, his throat aches, and there are burning lines running from the corners of his eyes. His body aches, too, muscles still sore around the scar where he was shot, and his neck feels rigid under him, painful enough that his one attempt at raising his head tears another pained gasp from him. He tries to focus on this, and not the rest, but the memory of it—Kara’s face as he was lowered into the pod—rushes back, and back, and back every time he tries to push it away, until he has no choice but to surrender to the sobs or choke on them. There is a hand on his forehead, then, cool and dry and a shade too strong to be entirely comforting, and Kal wishes he could stop himself from leaning into it, but does not have the strength for it yet.

“Stop moving,” Batman says, something stern in his tone even after he tries to soften his voice. “You’ll make things worse.”

The snort escapes Kal’s throat before he can even think of stopping it, neck twisting again in the vain hope of catching a glimpse of Kryo’s silvery form. Hunits like it were never meant to pilot a ship like this one, let alone on an intergalactic journey. It makes sense that it would be keeping its entire attention on the task, added programming or no...yet Kal’s throat tightens again when he cannot find it, homesickness so strong for just a moment that it threatens to engulf him again.

He forces himself to swallow instead—accepts the water Batman presses to his lips, and asks, “How long was I—?”

“You were in the pod for about four days,” Batman says, “and unconscious for the next thirty-six hours.”

Kal manages a nod, throat tightening despite his best efforts. Six days away from Krypton—six days since he saw a glimpse of it for the last time in his life. The thought feels strange, in his mind—overpowering yet not quite there, like an obnoxious mirage waiting to be dismissed or reveal itself as reality, and Kal breathes in deep, tries to ignore the call of it. It is not an easy task.

“Well,” he forces out in the end, hoping against hope that a new thread of conversation might be of some help redirecting his thoughts, “I suppose it could be worse.”

“Hardly,” Batman replies, and Kal’s mouth clicks shut, what little resolve he’d managed to muster vanishing in an instant.

“Batman,” he starts, but, not for the first time, Batman snaps:

“Do not ‘Batman’ me. You have been walking around sick and sleep-deprived—you endangered countless lives with your recklessness, including your own. That shot could have killed you! You are lucky the healing pod was well-maintained, or you might be paralyzed by now.”

“I am sorry,” Kal mumbles, stomach slowly sinking to somewhere beneath his recovery bed.

Guilt presses at his chest, at his temples, at the corners of his eyes. Batman is, after all, perfectly right. In point of fact, he is being remarkably restrained about this—he could be much, much harsher on the topic and still say nothing more than Kal deserves, nothing more than the truth. Kal knew, the second the cycle began, that there would be no excuse for it.

“I knew you were green,” Batman continues, hissing more than speaking now, “but had I known you were such a reckless idiot—did you think yourself immortal? Did you think death would not take you?”

Kal looks away, biting the inside of his cheek until his focus narrows down to the pain and not the burn of words he would never be able to take back—until his eyes close of their own accord, lids burning as if someone were trying to seal them with melted wax. Overhead, Batman takes a sharp breath in, and Kal wishes he could fall out of existence as easily as dust from a shelf.

“Did you even care that it could?”

Kal does not answer. Eventually, Batman’s hand comes to rest on his shoulder, squeezing tight—too tight: the skin might bruise, but the gesture is a comfort nonetheless.

“Kryo says we should reach Earth in a few hours,” Batman says in a voice gone from furious to entirely blank. “You should take the opportunity to rest.”

There is the barest of pauses, as if Batman had inexplicably faltered, before he turns on his heel and leaves. Kal remains alone in the healing chambers of the ship, unable to bring himself to open his eyes. Batman might be right: perhaps Kal will like Earth. Perhaps he won’t. There is no way to be sure, but the one thing that is certain is that he will not see Krypton again for a long time, if he ever does. Tears gather in his eyes as fast as memories in his mind, and he makes no effort to repel either. His arrival on Earth—his installation, as far he can tell—will require his full attention, after all. If he is to lose himself in grief, he might as well do it while there is nothing else to do.

Krypton...the Citadel may not have been the best home, for Kal, but it was his home. He knew every wall, every room, every tapestry of it. The Citadel was a vast cocoon of familiarity and a—tenuous, but real—connection to a family he could never help but feel removed from. It was not an ideal home, but it was home, and now that Kal has left, the list of things he must mourn seems to go on forever. No more sunsets setting the mountains aflame with red light. No more standing on the balconies of the Stateroom of Peace and admiring the Lords and Ladies’ Citadel residences below. No more comforting himself with the knowledge that, whatever else might happen, there would always be his labs and his plants—and Kara—to return to.

Who can tell whether there will ever be that sort of space for him on Earth? The ship, he supposes, might be kept...but it will not be on Earth. What if Kal never truly adapts? Batman survived Krypton without much trouble on the physical side of things, so Kal is not too worried about that. But what if he never finds a way to fit in? And what will it cost him to even attempt it? He is willing to make the effort; that is not the question. But he does know all too well that sometimes, even doing one’s best is not enough...and what then?

There is no way to know. Kal lies there, on a small medical cot in an ancient spaceship, with nothing for company but the icy emptiness of space and an alien who must be overjoyed to come home, until exhaustion claims him and he finally falls into an uneasy sleep.

Kal wakes up with a shout of pain on his lips, the entire left side of his abdomen tingling as if with static. Most of his muscles ache, complaining over their disuse, the skin around them too tight and too dry for comfort. Kal breathes in deep, taking stock. The cot under him is moving—not in the smooth hovering glide of Kryptonian equipment, but rather with a regular rattle of small wheels on a smooth, hard surface. It sounds like the sort of cabinets Kal has encountered in the older corners of the Palace, antiques meant to store documents too precious to be traded for digital copies. A brief flash of himself as an antique—left in a glass case and surrounded by two or three conservation-specialized hunits—makes its way into Kal’s head, and he snorts against the hard material of something like a mask pressing on the lower half of his face. There is a blindfold on his eyes, too, but the feeling of the air on his face speaks of cool darkness rather than sunlight. The smell of water is in the air.

Kal raises a hand to pull his blindfold off.

“Do not,” Batman says overhead. “You are not to exert yourself until you are both healed and used to Earth’s atmosphere.”

Kal does not have it in himself to chuckle, even grimly so. Healing, he knows, will take time, but adapting to Earth’s characteristics...who knows how long that will take? Just because Batman stopped panting like an ox every time he moved after three weeks does not guarantee Kal will achieve the same. Even if he does, there is no saying what other problems Earth may pose to him. The planet shares a number of characteristics with Krypton, it is true. Batman would have died, otherwise. But it is also much smaller and much younger—as are its sun and its lone, undamaged moon. Who knows what that will do to his body?

“Would you at least remove the blindfold?” Kal manages. Then, when that provokes no response: “The fabric on my eyes?”

Batman speaks again, but over Kal rather than to him. Someone else—deep voice, steady tone,a different cadence to their words—answers him, and Kal’s tired brain somehow manages to recognize English, although he cannot make out any of the words he has learned. He sighs, trying to let the two voices lull him to sleep—he trusts Batman, after all, not to lead him into a trap—but in vain. He is grateful when, after a while, Batman’s hand—Batman’s naked hand!—brushes against his temple as it finally pulls Kal’s blindfold off.

“Thank you,” Kal manages, even as he blinks.

They are, as he suspected, not outdoors: a smooth, geometrical ceiling about twenty feet high blocks his view, light rippling over it with gentle irregularity. The lights are dim but clearly artificial, and while the space is too full to really echo, there is still a hollow quality to it as Batman and his companion discuss something or another over Kal’s bed.

A twist of his head reveals nothing but a rough wall of untouched stone to the right, the edges of Batman’s cape floating into view as he guides Kal’s bed along what must be some sort of walkway. To the left, a vast empty space, part of a large cavern that hasn’t been colonized by Batman’s vigilantism just yet. Kal stares at a large rock, jutting out of the water like Vohc rising from the depths of his very first creation, and follows the line of it into the darkness on the other side where a wall must be hiding. The walkway’s ceiling blocks his view when he tries to look further up, and he does not have the strength to twist enough to get a good look at the back of Batman’s cave; but he does catch a glimpse of a brighter area further in, the space built around—a statue, maybe. A column of some kind, in any case, and something Kal is reasonably sure is person-shaped, though whether it is meant to be an altar or a more profane sort of display, he does not know.

“Are these your headquarters?”

Batman remains quiet for a moment, while he and his—companion feels too impersonal. ‘Friend’ does not quite encompass the feeling in the air between them, much more reminiscent of Kal’s conversations with Kryo than the ones he used to have with Batman...and of course ‘hunit’ would be a wildly appropriate term to apply to any living being, especially one Batman addresses with that level of familiarity and respect. Whoever he is, he and Batman wheel Kal to a stop, the silence between them almost stony.

“Batman,” Kal manages, and is met with an explosive sigh.

“Yes. More precisely, you are now in the infirmary. Which I have, because I am not entirely foolish.”

Batman’s company speaks from somewhere on Kal’s right, and he sees Batman’s cowled head turn to look at them, the edge of his jaw squeezed tight. He does not answer, however, and turns back to Kal with a glare that makes Kal wish he could sink into the bed.

“Batman—”

“You deceived me.”

“What?” Kal protests. “No, I—”

“You told me you wished to help the citizens of El. You presented yourself as a man with a mission—not a death wish!”

Kal swallows, hands finding the edge of the medical cot and squeezing them as he blinks a sudden blur out of his eyes.

“I was not trying—”

“Were you not? You ignored every warning your body had to give, put everything you and your cousin had built in jeopardy—and all for what? To preserve your ego?”

Kal opens his mouth to protest—closes it. ‘That is not why I did it,’ he had been about to say, but would it have been true? He spent so much time focused only on putting one foot in front of the other—he never truly stopped to ponder his motivations for it. He wants to say ego was not the answer, but can he swear to the truth of it? Or does he only want to be seen in a better light than he deserves? He does not know—does not know that he wishes to know. Besides, does the answer truly matter to anyone but himself? His attitude the past few weeks constitutes either a dangerous inability to do what must be done, or a dangerous attempt to preserve undeserved pride, neither of which Batman should accept.

How could he? Kal may only have had a limited look at the man’s headquarters, but they are vast. They are full, too: full enough that even in such a cave the echo remains quite low, almost inaudible. Whether this cave is Batman's main lair or a secondary base, it must have taken years to assemble. Years of successful secrecy, years of building things Kal would never even have dreamed of accomplishing on Krypton.

Whatever Batman may be to his planet—however right Kal’s assumption that he and Shadow strove toward the same sort of goal, despite dramatic differences in their levels of success, turns out to be—it is quite clear that he has been working at it longer, harder, and far more competently than Kal ever managed.

“I apologize,” Kal says in the end, turning his face away from Batman, from the infirmary—from all of it, if he could.

To his right, Batman draws a breath in, ready to pursue the conversation—stops when his companion speaks. Four words, maybe five, and with no more steel in them than there had been before, but it is enough to shift the air in the room. At first the tension grows, as if on the verge of explosion—and then there is the scuff of a foot, the soft sound of fabric on concrete. Batman departs with the click of a door. For a few blessed seconds, all is quiet, and Kal swallows and blinks. Brings himself back under as much control as he can manage before the sound of Batman’s companion tinkering peters out. Kal keeps his gaze averted when the person steps nearer, focusing on the large rock in front of him, until the feeling of a hand on his shoulder—brief, soft, impersonally kind—makes him close his eyes again.

He is alone by the time he reopens them.

Kal must have fallen asleep without quite meaning to: he opens his eyes to the ceiling of Batman’s infirmary again, just in time for the door to click shut somewhere to the right of his head. His side is still quite sore, the skin itching with returning health, but his muscles feel mostly functional. With a huff of breath, Kal rolls over until he can prop himself up on his right elbow and take a more encompassing look at the cave.

He looks past his feet first, blinking at the sight of large metal doors set deep into the wall of the cave, the mechanisms necessary to have them move all but invisible. Whatever their purpose is, they look like the sort of things meant to withstand a siege. To the left, the walkway Kal was wheeled in on, flanked with two wheeled vehicles—ancient things, by Krypton’s standards, but Kal is starting to suspect they might not seem so to the average Earth citizen—and some sort of bulky aircraft. Kal studies it for a moment; notes the build of it, the disposition of its rotors, the way it is clearly meant for a lone pilot, before he moves on to the rest of the cave. There is the boulder he noticed on his way in—somehow larger and more menacing now that he is awake to see it. Behind it, glittering in the dark, an underground lake explains the damp coolness of the air.

It takes some effort to keep looking—Kal has to pull on still-tender skin in order to twist and follow the rough lines of the cave’s natural ceiling and find the bright white light of yet another glass case...a weapon room, perhaps, though it is difficult to say for sure. Kal has spent quite a lot of time poring over old books and microscopes, after all, and while his vision is not poor, it does show signs of use most Kryptonians' eyesight would not. It is difficult, in these conditions, to ascertain whether the shapes on the walls are truly objects or simple swaths of paint.

The display case, however, is easy to identify, and the armor inside unmistakable from that angle. Kal is still frowning at it when someone clears their throat behind him.

He turns around—too fast: it makes him hiss, flesh still tender. Healing pods have extraordinary properties, but it is a well-known fact that it does no one good to leave all the burdens of recovery to them. Kal takes a second to wish that were possible before he looks at the newcomer.

They are of average height, lean but not scrawny. Gray hair, cut short, parts on the side of their skull, and despite the scruff on their chin both the—visual aids, perhaps—and their clothes are immaculate, though the cuts and fabrics are foreign. But the care—the posture, the careful refusal to intrude—is familiar enough. Hunits, after all, are not the only sort of servants to be found on Krypton.

Kal watches as the domestic deposits a tray bearing water and a bowl of what seems to be broth—lukewarm, Kal assumes. It wouldn’t do to put his body through more effort than strictly necessary at this stage...especially not when they have no idea whether he will even be able to digest much of Earth’s food, if any. Batman’s ability to handle Ellon dishes with barely any discomfort is encouraging, but it does not, in the end, guarantee a similar outcome for Kal in any way.

“Thank you,” he tells the servant in English, flushing when he has to repeat himself.

Fortunately, terrible pronunciation is not enough to deter the alien—the human. Kal is on their planet, now: he is the alien. In any case, mangled phonetics or not, Batman’s servant does not seem to think less of Kal, smiling as they watch him dig into his predictably lukewarm yet delicious meal. At least he is lucky enough to start his days on Earth with a good meal. So good, in fact, that he waits until he has scraped every last drop out of the bowl before he thanks the servant again and, touching his forehead, says:

“My name is Kal.”

He repeats his name for good measure, and smiles when the human touches their chest rather than their head—"Alfred," they say. The oddity of the gesture is as charmingly incongruous in them as it was in Batman. The smile dims when Kal realizes he will need to adopt that same gesture in the future, and a number of other things he has yet to imagine but might very well find much more unpleasant than this.

He does not understand what Alfred says next, but the tone is easy to decipher, and Kal dismisses the concern with a practiced smile and a shake of his head. Then he asks:

“Where is Kryo?”

“Kryo?”

The corner of Alfred’s mouth twitches when Kal mimes Kryo’s shape in the air, but Kal ignores the urge to shrivel—squeezes his knee tightly enough for it to hurt—and watches the human point at the ceiling with one finger rather than their whole hand. Kal thanks the human in shaky English again, and is in the middle of wondering how to initiate something of a conversation when Batman appears at the door, Kryo hovering a step behind him.

He swallows, tensing without meaning to, and forbids himself from looking at Alfred for reassurance as Batman steps into the infirmary proper. There is something stiff in the way he moves, and when he speaks, it is with the grammatical forms of a noble and the familiarity of an equal.

“I was—harsh. This morning. That was...unnecessary.”

“Think nothing of it,” Kal says, heart hammering against his ribs without any good reason.

“I would,” Batman says, “but Alfred would disapprove.”

Alfred’s clothes rustle, when they recognize their name, but they do not comment, and Batman continues:

“He is pushier than he seems, but he is—not entirely wrong.”

“Please,” Kal says, voice somehow thinner and firmer at the same time, “there is no need to—”

“Look, you didn’t deserve—”

“Stop!” Kal all but shouts, blinking in surprise at his own outburst.

It takes him several seconds to bring his breathing back down to something bearable, to beat the urge to block his ears into submission. When he manages it, eyes stinging with vanishing pressure when he opens them, he finds his knuckles white on the coverlet. He has to work some more to swallow the sudden knot of tears in his throat, but once he does—once he feels his voice will remain steady enough—he ignores Batman’s renewed stiffness, pretends to forget about Alfred entirely, and asks Kryo:

“How long have I been in this cave?”

“Twelve hours and fifty-six minutes,” Kryo replies in its usual monotone. “The pod’s sedatives are all but out of your system by now.”

“Good. How long, do you think, until I recover?”

“You should be able to leave the bed in the next few days,” Kryo says. “Complete recovery is expected in one to three months, depending on the way you tend to your injury, and barring unforeseen complications.”

It is a good thing, Kal thinks—though he does not say it—that he will have little to do but recover in the upcoming days. Weeks...who knows how long, really. He knows little of Batman’s life for the present, the man incredibly discreet about it even when he still considered Kal a friend, but he knows enough to realize it will not afford Batman much time to take care of Kal. Should he even wish to. Whatever the road ahead may have in store for him, Kal had probably better prepare himself to face it alone.

“Thank you,” he tells Kryo, relieved when he manages to keep his sudden dread out of his voice.

And that is not his only source of reassurance: he has been done with his broth for ten minutes or so, now, and has yet to feel any adverse effect from it.

“Please set yourself up in language acquisition mode, and begin preparations for a learning course as soon as you gather enough data.”

“I did not know it could do that,” Batman says from his spot near the door.

Kal musters a tired smile.

“I suppose it is never too late to learn. It is a pity circumstances made this function useless to you, but I hope it might at least save you the trouble of finding me a tutor and explaining my presence on Earth, at least for a while.”

Besides, this way, Kal should be able to communicate with all relevant parties until he finds a place to settle in, whether on Earth or...elsewhere. Coming here was, after all, never part of the initial plan—that would have been the version of events in which an injured Kal left with a fully qualified physician as a companion, in addition to Kryo. But the moment came, and Batman was there, and why would Kara have deprived the Dark Sun of a most valued asset—and set herself up for the trouble of having to smuggle them back—when anyone could listen to a ship’s instructions and manage a well-functioning pod? It might have meant further gambling with Kal’s life, but he would have insisted on it, had he been conscious. He might have been reckless, and idiotic and—and a number of other things Batman has been too polite to call him, but Kal does have a certain sense of priorities, if nothing else.

“It should,” Batman says with a nod.

Kal watches him turn around and busy himself with the medical readings—some in the English alphabet, some in Ellon. The pointed ears of his cowl glint like teeth even in the darkness. Things remain quiet while Kal musters the will to speak, the broad expanse of Batman’s back more frightening now than it used to be back on Krypton, back before he tried to apologize, like he’d done something wrong, and Kal—swallows, ignores the tightness of his throat, and asks:

“Is there any way I might sit up?”

Most beds on Krypton are at least equipped with a positioning mechanism, designed to ease the daily life of the elderly. A bead mattress such as Kal is used to would most likely be too much to ask, but perhaps a bend in the bed’s frame...Kal bites on a hiss when Batman turns back around and fiddles with a small white remote, the bed lifting Kal’s upper body in a way that makes his left side twinge. Batman’s lips thin.

“I apologize,” Kal says, and feels his teeth click together when Batman cuts in:

“You nearly died. Pain is to be expected.”

Kal blinks, struggling to breathe for a few seconds. Then, in an effort to take the focus away from himself, he asks:

“Does Alfred know your face?”

“Yes,” Batman says.

His face—what portion of his face Kal can see, at least—does something rather complicated, his jaw tensing for the briefest moment before he says:

“I’m afraid I’m quite unused to sharing that secret with people.”

It takes Kal a few seconds longer than it should before he realizes what Batman is saying, what the raising of his hand means. This time, it is easy to ignore the pain in his side when he pushes himself off the mattress, hand outstretched, and says:

“Oh, no, there is no need—”

But Batman breathes in once, sharp and determined, and unclasps something in the neck of his suit, and suddenly there he is, staring at Kal with an expression—Gods. Kal is—he knows himself well enough to realize he would be transfixed by Batman’s face no matter what expression it bore. The strong jaw, the slight dip in the chin. The way his hair falls into his eyes, mussed from the cowl. It would, Kal is sure, take very little for a face like this to enrapture him completely.

But the way Batman looks at him is—there is something in it that pulls at Kal’s insides, something wild and raw—frightened, almost, but then...no. This is—why would Batman be afraid of him? He has seen every inch of Kal so far, a side of him so pathetic he never even dared to allow it into the light of day in front of Kara. How could a man like Batman be scared of—of that? Ridiculous. Kal blinks, heart hammering against his chest, and when he is done he finds Batman composed once more, face as neutral as it ever was under the cowl.

Somewhere at the bottom of Kal’s stomach, a shamefully perverse part of him misses—whatever made Batman’s face look like that, and he is still trying to figure out what to say when Batman clears his throat and turns away to inspect one of his displays with a look of intense focus.

“Kryo says you have undergone a fifteen percent amelioration,” he tells the display in a painfully neutral tone, and Kal—

“Thank you,” he blurts out, using the most respectful forms he can think of.

Batman pauses—so brief, so swiftly smoothed—and fiddles with the display screen in his hands.

“You helped me before,” he says without looking at Kal. “It seemed fair to return the favor now that you were injured.”

“Yes,” Kal makes himself say, the heat of a flush all but setting his neck and ears on fire. “Thank you for that, too.”

He is almost entirely certain he does not imagine the click of Batman’s teeth when he closes his mouth again.

Three days come and go, although Kal would not know that for sure if it weren’t for Kryo’s help. He spends most of that time sleeping and, once the suit is returned to him, using part of the material as a reading screen to lose himself in one of his favorite Flamebird myths. Not that there is nothing else for him to do; far from it. He must learn English, for one, and it wouldn’t go amiss for him to try and discover more about Earth’s cultures—or at the very least, the one Earth culture he is most likely to encounter in the near future.

He does not, however, have the slightest idea of where to begin, no true study plan—as this particular function of Kryo’s relies on the quantity of audio samples it can gather, and both Batman and Alfred are rather sparse with their words. There is also, of course, the matter of Batman’s six-month-long unplanned absence to deal with, and while Kal cannot possibly be of any help to them in that regard, he does at least know how to make himself unobtrusive during times such as these.

It is this skill of his that threatens to send him and Batman into their next argument. Kal, after all, does not only possess a functioning sense of when he is not wanted, but also a state-of-the-art multi-function military suit. In the end, it takes him comparatively little effort—although it does require a healthy dose of irritation at being forced to use a bedpan—to ignore Kryo’s injunctions not to leave the bed, slip into the suit and, having adjusted it to his needs, make his own way to the nearest bathroom.

The distance between said bathroom and Kal’s infirmary bed is irrelevant: by the time he is done with his business, all it takes is a couple of steps—three, if he is feeling particularly generous towards himself—before he has to sit down, winded beyond even making use of the suit. He is still sitting there, breathing deep and trying to keep the pain at bay with an archaic prayer to Rao, the cold of the stone seeping into his back, when Batman happens to pass by.

He has discarded the uniform this time, clad in a simple white shirt similar to Alfred’s usual uniform—and a style of pants that reveals much more of his backside than Ellon clothing did while somehow making the definition in his thighs much harder to discern. Not that Kal spends all that much time looking, but Batman is a beautiful man, and it would quite possibly be harder not to notice these things. Besides, with Batman refusing to do anything but stand by Kal’s side and look down at him with an expression Kal finds himself incapable of deciphering, there actually is little for him to do besides admire his host’s physique. Until, that is, the silence becomes unbearable.

“May I help you?” Kal blurts out.

He has enough time to stammer through half an apology at the ridiculous nature of the question before Batman nods at his legs.

“You kept the color.”

Kal looks down at himself, where the white cotton of his night shirt—Batman’s eyebrows rose when he heard the request—gives way to the skin-tight crimson of Shadow’s uniform, the material thicker than usual but still utterly recognizable in design. He feels himself blush.

“Restructuring it takes some focus,” he admits, one hand coming up to rub at the back of his neck. “Altering the color for this seemed like a waste of energy.”

“By ‘this’, I presume you meant getting out of bed before you were supposed to?”

Kal blushes harder, but does not deny it. What would be the point? The evidence is more than damning. What he does instead is brace himself for the return trip, making the suit prop his legs through the motions of standing up, and then blink in surprise when he wobbles and Batman catches his elbow with a bare hand. Kal might well be slightly more aware of the contact than is entirely appropriate.

“Thank you,” he mutters, and focuses on his feet rather than look up at Batman’s face when he hums.

“I have been meaning to ask how you built it for some time, actually,” Batman says after a few steps, glancing down at the suit just long enough for Kal to catch the movement from the corner of his eye.

“Oh, uh...I—I didn’t, actually,” Kal admits. “It’s Zodri technology. I became quite lost during a visit to their Citadel and stumbled onto a prototype of it—it was a genuine accident,” he adds, when Batman’s lips quirk upward.

Before then—six months before then, to be precise—he had been doing what he could with more traditional equipment. The abandoned elevator shaft in his lab had been a pain to go through, and swinging between roofs far scarier than anything Kal would ever care to experience again. That is not a time he will ever truly miss, but it would feel wrong to take credit for a miracle he had no part in, save perhaps being his pathetic self and growing distracted by reflected light in the luckiest of places.

“I think they’d accounted for just about every method of stealing their new technology save for someone strolling through the door and cutting some of the nanites off the prototype. Kryo did more to turn that suit over to my service than I ever did.”

“Criminal oversight on their part,” Batman says, and this time Kal allows himself to smile down at his feet.

“Pride makes a fool of many a man—and you might have noticed the great Houses of Krypton have no shortage of it.”

“Except you.”

Kal remains quiet until they reach his bed again and he can fall on the mattress with very little dignity. He knows the pinch of his lips is too pronounced for Batman to miss it, how unsubtle he is being—how unsubtle he is, as a rule—but there is little else he can do against the wave of shame and tears threatening to submerge him. He looks around the cave instead; the back of it is quite familiar at this point, although Kal has yet to be allowed near the front, let alone the upper level.

None of what he sees seems remotely achievable by one man, let alone quickly, and he forgets to look for a minefield before he asks Batman:

“How long have you been using these facilities?”

“Twenty years,” Batman replies—smooth, controlled. Convinced, possibly, that Kal missed the breath he took before he spoke. “Give or take.”

Kal turns back toward Batman, unable to hide the awe that seizes him—nor anything else, for that matter, though at least Batman is kind enough not to remark on it. There is a pause between them while Kal debates on the merits of asking his next question, but then it becomes apparent there is precious little of his dignity left intact, and Batman was already dismissive of him long before meeting Shadow. Kal might as well ask.

“How did you survive all of this for so long?”

“I am a better fighter than you are,” Batman replies.

Kal’s mouth opens and closes, treacherous heat crawling up his throat and into his eyes like lava bursting out of a reluctant volcano. He turns around, then. Refuses to yield to Batman’s hand on his shoulder.

“Get out,” he manages through the tight fit of his throat.

The mix of relief and disappointment at how easily Batman complies is a bitterly familiar sensation.

Ten days after his hasty departure from Krypton, Kal is allowed to walk under his own power again. He wears the suit, still—although in the form of dark gray slacks rather than Shadow’s form-fitting leggings—and he has to brace himself on Alfred’s arm for it, but his legs are actually up to the task, and that is all that matters.

Kal has not had any significant conversation since his latest attempt to leave the infirmary, for Alfred suggested the day before yesterday that Kryo attempt connecting itself to something the old man called ‘the internet’. The hunit has since been quite busy attempting to download it all and, judging from the fact that it has yet to emerge from the task or send any kind of distress signal, is still at it. As for Batman...he has, so far, kept his distance, a fact Kal found himself altogether more and less bothered by than he would have thought, both at the same time.

“He’s just so—opaque,” Kal tells the old servant when they reach the front of the cave, and Alfred has to make it clear Kal is not to go up the stairs. “I—I understand why he wouldn't want to associate with me, and I don’t intend to force it once he sees fit to have me out of here. I just—well, he is the only person I can talk to around here. Could talk to.”

Of course, ‘have a conversation with’ would be a more appropriate way to phrase it, but still. Being used to a certain state of isolation does not necessarily make it more agreeable to bear. Still, with Batman apparently out of reach for the time being, Alfred remains Kal’s only company, and it would not do to antagonize him. Kal lets himself be steered back toward the rear of the cave, where Batman’s vehicles and medical equipment reside, but does not resist a glance back as soon as the artificial ceiling gives way to the natural width of the cave. (Nor, he notes, does Alfred seem too keen on preventing it.)

It is a weapons room up there—the weapons lined around the walls make that clear—but it is one in name only. In the glass cases in the wall, old armors glare at the void, previous versions of Batman’s uniform preserved like trophies, mementos of what could easily be confused for past glory, if it weren’t for the centerpiece. Kal does not recognize the design. Has no context for the different colors, not enough knowledge of English to recognize the words scrawled in bright yellow all over the torso. He does know a memorial armor when he sees one, though—has walked by his grandmother’s often enough to know the signs. The way the room is oriented around the case; the slight falter in Alfred’s touch when Kal pauses. The way Batman purposefully avoids looking at it as he comes down the stairs wound around it and locks eyes with Kal instead.

He is much less surprised than the would have anticipated when Batman comes down to his level of the cave and relieves Alfred of his duty. For a while, they walk. Their footsteps do not echo, the cave too well-engineered for that, but the silence between them is so absolute that Kal almost imagines that they do. The more frightened side of him longs for small talk—an update on Kryo; a remark on his outfit, oh-so-similar to what Batman himself wears.

What he gets instead is silence. A short breath—the last one before drowning—and then Batman’s voice, almost offensively casual:

“It seems to me like I came across as quite—cavalier during our last conversation,” he says.

Kal has not bothered with the royal forms of Ellon since he was on Earth, Shadow’s words simpler to maintain and devoid of the ghosts attached to Kal’s more formal speech. Batman however, has either failed to notice—unlikely—or refused to acknowledge the change, sticking to the ones Kal first taught him. They do not make the gap between them quite as wide as it was when the man insisted on addressing Kal as a prince—merely enough to tell a Citadel Lord apart from a Mountain Lord of equal riches—but they do imply some form of superiority on Kal’s part; and tonight, more than any other night, Kal wonders whether they are a misguided attempt to preserve his pride or a form of deliberate mockery.

He does not dare to ask, however, and only hums in response, eyes still firmly on his feet as he follows Batman’s lead down the walkway.

“I did not mean to offend you when I compared—”

“That was not the problem,” Kal retorts, anger flaring with the abrupt certainty that Batman is fully aware of that, even though those words die in his throat before he can truly consider saying them. “Your superior skills were never in contest. But I have—I was only Shadow for eight years. Eight! And it nearly—”

Kal breaks off. Pauses to breathe through the enormity of what he has just said. What he does not want to think about. He did not mean for things to work out in such a way, but then Batman—Kal did not exactly care enough to put much effort into preventing that outcome, either.

“I am not—I was not trying to—” Kal pauses again. Breathes in the scent of chilly water and underground moisture. Then, keeping a tight leash on his tone: “I was not working toward a particular goal, but I know what I risked, and I know what I did or did not do. I—I tried to be more like you. I wish I could be more like you—that I could...help you, somehow. But I cannot be Shadow anymore. I wish I could but I—”

Kal hisses, swallowing against the hard stone in his throat, but does not find it in himself to say the rest. To acknowledge what Batman figured out days ago. He takes the last few steps to the infirmary doors instead, leaning on the threshold to get away from the unbearable heat of Batman’s hand on his elbow.

(Away from the bone-deep wish that he could afford to lean into it as much as he wants to.)

“I already have help,” Batman says after a heavy pause. Then, when Kal can’t help but glance toward the cave’s upper level: “Had help.”

Batman does not turn around, and so Kal does not look at the empty armor again. He looks at Batman instead—the wrinkles in his brow, around his eyes. The lines around his mouth that might follow suit soon. He sees the tension around Batman’s mouth, and the very tip of a scar peeking out of his shirt collar—the rough lines of his hands so at odds with the fine fabrics he favors when not in his nightly uniform. How many years of climbing rooftops in the night does it take to create a man like him? What sort of will? Nothing that Kal possesses, that much has been made clear, but that does not make him any less desirous to figure the answers out.

“I trained him,” Batman says after a long pause, angling his body away from the armor at the front of the cave, his gaze away from Kal. “Worked with him. Then he died.”

Kal makes himself hold Batman’s gaze, though the gesture costs him more than he would have thought. It is the first time time Kal sees that sort of harsh resolve on Batman’s uncovered face; but not, he suspects, the first time it has graced the man’s features.

“We will bring you back to full health,” Batman says at last, the tone of his voice leaving no room for discussion, “and then I will help you reach a destination of your choosing. Our contacts within the Green Lanterns have to be good for something.”

Kal nods, and wonders why admitting that he would very much like to remain on Earth feels too momentous to voice.

It comes as a rather significant surprise, to Kal, that that particular conversation with Batman should make things easier for him, but that is still the end result. After all, if even the partner Batman trained himself was not skilled enough to survive, how was Shadow—with his minimal training, his isolation, his poor grasp on the prerequisites of a vigilante’s life—ever going to do this for much longer? It is luck, pure and simple, that allowed him to survive that long, and realizing he never truly had control over it is—it makes it easier to focus on the present, if nothing else. When Kryo finally finishes downloading the internet after three days spent on the task, Kal throws himself into learning English with the energy of a man with absolutely nothing else to do.

It goes both faster and slower than Kal would have expected—the grammar is much simpler than Council’s, to say nothing of Ellon, but English phonetics are...well, they exist. Kal keeps stumbling on some of them, and no amount of self-quizzing or perusing the resources Kryo managed to compile can erase the fact that he does not actually have that many occasions to practice spoken English, except during Alfred’s visits around mealtimes. On the upside, Kal is getting fairly good at distinguishing the nuanced tastes of broths and soups.

“What do have?” he asks Alfred that evening while they set the table.

There is little doubt, in his mind, that Alfred would rather be performing domestic tasks alone—the Gods know no servant on Krypton would ever allow a noble to help them in their daily work—but Kal is not a prince anymore, and he does have some practice with pretending not to understand a rule so he can get what he needs. All he has to do is to think of this as a mission—call up some of Shadow’s strength of will—and here he is, twenty days into his indefinite stay on Earth and almost able to set a table. He tries not to think too much about what his family would think if they realized how much he is enjoying this.

“‘What are we having’,” Alfred corrects as he brings his tray carrier over to the tiny table.

Kal recognizes the word ‘soup’ and some form of negation, which, combined with the new eating implements, give him some grounds to hope for solid food...a wish fulfilled when Alfred lifts the cover for the main dish, and Kal discovers an array of colorful vegetables with a simple sauce, most of which—he assumes—he has had as a soup before. He takes his seat at the table just as Batman enters the cave, and doesn’t let his smile drop until after they have both started on their salad.

“Is there a problem?” Batman asks after a couple more bites.

“I think that will depend on you,” Kal admits, voice growing too thin for his taste. He clears his throat, and makes himself continue: “I was...well, in all honesty, I’ve been growing rather bored here, so in an effort to distract myself and learn more about this planet, I asked Kryo—”

“You had it search for information on the Batman,” Batman says, voice gone entirely flat.

Kal has to steel himself for it, but he nods and keep his eyes level with Batman's anyway. He may not have had the intention to do any thorough reading—all he wanted was the name of Batman’s city, since the subject has only rarely come up between them and, when it has, has brought more grunts than answers. Still, snooping is snooping, and there is no point in denying it now.

“What I failed to anticipate,” Kal tells Batman, knuckles tightening on his cutlery, “was that Kryo would take Batman to mean you as a person rather than just your vigilante persona, so—”

“You know who I am.”

“I know what your civilian name is,” Kal corrects. “I didn’t read further than that. I also had Kryo destroy the file, and gave it firm instructions never to share that information with anyone unless you explicitly permitted it. I have no intention of exposing you, you have my word. But I thought you should know.”

There is a long, long silence while Batman chews on his salad with the sort of care that used to have politicians on their toes when Kal's aunt and uncle displayed it. Kal watches the man’s precise movements, the deliberate absence of tension in the line of his shoulders—his neck, his mouth—and fights the urge to curl in on himself as if he truly thought Batman would hit him.

“So,” Batman says eventually, tone so even Kal has to wonder if it is truly natural, “you know—”

“I know your name is Bruce Wayne,” Kal says, glad for some reason that Alfred isn’t here to overhear, “but nothing else.”

“Good,” Bru—Batman says.

Then he sets his fork and knife down with infinite care, dabs his lips clean with a delicate napkin, and excuses himself from the table with his plate only half finished.

“I talked to a friend,” Batman says as he enters the infirmary the next day. “She is willing to take you in.”

Kal blinks, entirely unprepared for this conversation, although he does have a sneaking suspicion that he knows exactly what prompted it.

“You are well on your way to recovery,” Batman continues without even a hint of hesitation, “and we have vetted enough Earth foods you can eat for you to survive outside this cave. There will be things to watch out for as you decide where you wish to go next, but short of keeping you here for another six months, this is about as safe as we can make you for the next step of that journey.”

“Of course,” Kal murmurs with a nod, not trusting his voice to come out right.

He has been getting a little stir-crazy, lately, and it will do him good to see other parts of Earth, especially if he wants to stay here. It will be nice to meet this friend of Batman’s, not to mention make new experiences for himself. Nevertheless, the timing of it is—it stings, just a little. But then Kal does not have any ground to stand on here, and so he listens as Batman tells him about a place called Kansas and a woman named Martha Kent.

“She helped me when I had nowhere to go,” Batman says in lieu of explaining how they met, or what he was doing several hundred miles away from his city in the first place. “We stayed in touch afterwards.”

Kal nods, wondering whether—and if yes, how—Martha Kent knows the name of the man she saved. It is possible; Kal can’t imagine Batman accepting anything less than absolute privacy, unless he were unconscious and cut off from Alfred entirely. But it sounds just as likely that the vigilante would have kept his face a secret even after Mrs. Kent helped patch him up. Kal will have to wait and see.

“Obviously, you do not have to agree,” Batman says, when Kal, lost in thought, misses his cue, “if you would rather not risk the security breach—”

“I’m sure everything will be fine,” Kal cuts in, blinking once at the statement. “I trust your judgment. If you trust her, I am satisfied.”

Batman pauses to stare at Kal, lips pursed and eyebrows drawn down, and this time Kal widens his eyes in question. He does not truly expect a response—is not really surprised when Batman shakes his head rather than answer—but he would be lying if he said he was not curious about the reaction. Though with the way things have been going the past few days, Kal is starting to suspect this will merely join the long list of things he will never understand about Batman.

“The only problem,” Batman says after a moment, tone almost circumspect, as if he expects Kal to do something entirely outlandish any minute now, “is discretion. There is a shapeshifter in the Justice League who made sure Batman’s absence remained unnoticed, but Bruce Wayne has only been back on Earth for a few weeks. Transportation is not a problem, but—”

“Oh,” Kal cuts in when he catches Batman’s meaning, “my suit has a stealth function.”

He chuckles when Batman raises an eyebrow, but orders the suit to switch mode anyway. The camouflage is far from Kal’s favorite feature—he has yet to go through something as unnerving as being unable to distinguish the shape of his own body, even with floating hands—but it is efficient, and, once Batman tests it, proves decently resistant to basic scanning methods.

“Well,” the man says once he has gathered all the information he needed about this particular feature, “that solves a few problems.”

It takes a bit of time for Batman to organize everything—some of it spent verifying Kal’s affirmations regarding Kryo’s anti-gravitational properties—but on the twenty-fifth day of Kal’s stay on Earth he, Batman and Alfred finally depart for Kansas.

The first leg of the trip is entirely silent, owing as much to Kal’s current invisibility—and the subsequent need to pretend he doesn’t exist, lest someone think Bruce Wayne is losing his mind—as to Batman’s foul mood. Why that should be, Kal has no idea. Didn’t the man want him gone, after all? He should be happy. There is, of course, a chance that he is simply unhappy Kal gets to see the inside of his house—glass and metal everywhere. Not a spot of dust, not a single personal object left in view. Kal’s knowledge of Terran homes is practically nonexistent, but even then he fails to see what Bruce could find so embarrassing about it. It is almost as if no one lived there; what harm could possibly come of Kal seeing this? Still, it is clear Batman is uncomfortable the whole time it takes them to cross the house, and so Kal does not linger, nor attempt to strike up a conversation.

The sky outside is overcast, pewter gray rather than the deep ocher Kal is used to; but the smell of water in the air is the same, and the wind feels almost as cool on his skin as it did back in the Ellon mountains. The first fat drops of rain spattering on Batman’s car—a sleek black vehicle, which, if it weren’t for the wheels, would not have stood out too terribly on Krypton—are like a balm to Kal’s soul, the sky at least trying to match itself to the heavy feeling in his chest. He is, after all, leaving the first home he has ever known on Earth...which may not have been much of a home at all, not in the traditional sense, but it was a familiar place, and comfortable, by now. It is only to be expected that Kal would feel something like a pinch of nostalgia when forced to leave it.

Despite all that, things progress smoothly until they reach the airport itself. It is not so much the look of it that poses a problem. The pale gray shade and blocky shape of it are a far cry from Kryptonian architecture’s organic lines and darker colors, but that was only to be expected. The aircraft, however...Kal shudders.

“When you said ‘ jet ’,” he tells Batman under his breath, “I imagined something a little more advanced.”

“Are you scared?” Batman asks at a similar volume, angling himself so it looks like he’s talking to Alfred.

“At the risk of offending you,” Kal replies, unable to stop himself from sounding cross, “these look positively primitive to me.”

Batman’s snort is quiet, but the earpiece he wears makes it more than easy to pick up on. Kal, if he is honest with himself—which he tries to be, as a rule—is perfectly capable of admitting the fear seems ridiculous. He has made jumps far more dangerous than this, after all. Gods, if nothing else, Kal himself finds his own fear ridiculous...but the fact remains that he would much rather be swinging between the roofs of El than about to board one of these things. Even riding a h’mori as ill-tempered as H’raka seems abruptly preferable to flinging himself into the air on the back of what is, essentially, a spacious missile.

There is nothing to be done about it, though. Even were Batman willing to consider a last-minute change in plans, which seems unlikely given what Kal knows of the man, he did describe his jet as being at the forefront of technology. There is no smoother ride to be found on the planet, at least not on such short notice, and so Kal swallows the discomfort and follows Batman across the tarmac and up the steps with a weight in his stomach.

“Do you truly feel that uncomfortable with it?” Batman asks once he is seated, several rows away from Kal. “I’ve seen the beasts you ride on Krypton. Those can hardly be any less uncertain a ride than this."

“You’re right, for the most part,” Kal has to admit.

He still has vivid—and terrifying—memories of his first ride, seven years old and clutching the pommel of his mother’s saddle with white-knuckled fingers as the wind blew through his hair and swallowed his screams. But he had strong arms to hold him in place then, and a harness...and on the one occasion when he did fall, a trained animal with significant fondness for him that wasted no time in snatching him out of the sky.

“I would still prefer to fly on a living animal.”

“I am afraid we do not have any of those available,” Batman says, and Kal smiles under the helmet, thinner than he would like.

There is a pause, and then Batman says:

“You should take the opportunity to read up on Kansas while we fly. It would do you good to know some things about your new place of residence.”

“What is it like?” Kal asks, eyes drifting to where Batman is doing an excellent impression of a man hard at work—although for what reason, Kal can’t quite figure.

“Not this rainy,” Batman retorts with a jerk of his head toward the window, where the storm has picked up in intensity, streams of water gliding over the tiny windows. “And very flat.”

Nothing like El, then. Kal, abruptly glad for his invisibility, hums and braces himself for the pressure of takeoff.

The sky when they land is, if at all possible, even more uniformly gray than it was back in Gotham. Batman and Alfred both assure Kal the weather—although not the humidity—is usually better in the summer, but it does nothing to prevent Kal from longing for El’s dry mountain air. Earth, so far, has felt strangely like a soup, and Kal makes a mental note to include that in his next letter to Kara. It is a comfort to think this, in that it alleviates the loneliness of the place and allows Kal to remain quiet and composed as he climbs into Batman’s rented car. It still doesn’t quite make up for the foreignness of the landscape—the endless swathes of yellowed crops waiting for harvest, the ruler-straight lines of roads that have never had to find their way through knife-sharp rocks.

There is a turn, eventually—well, there are several turns, on several roads sitting at ninety-degrees angles from each other, but this one is an actual curve. It weaves through two fields: one mostly empty save for the yellowing grass on the ground and a four-legged mammal with a rather long neck; the next much wider and more trampled, filled with at least fifty adult mammals of a different sort. They are much rounder, for a start, brown where the other animal is black, and obviously heavier, even from a distance. The horns, though proportionally much shorter than a hurak’s, add to the impressive ensemble, and Kal can’t resist asking—in Ellon, for the sake of his own comfort—“What are these things, on the left?”

“Cows,” Batman replies. “Do you like them?”

“I think so,” Kal says with a shrug he knows Batman can’t see. “They look majestic.”

Batman chuckles at the word, and Kal is about to ask why when Alfred announces, “Here we are.”

Kal turns around and, taking advantage of his invisibility and the impossibility of his wearing a seatbelt while camouflaged, leans forward until he can fit most of his torso between the front seats and take a look at his home for the next undefined period of time.

He notices the red building—a barn, Alfred calls it—first. It sits to the left of the land, next to a larger blue building. Both are made of wood, both could probably use a new coat of paint, but only the blue one seems to have direct access to the left-hand field with its many cows—a shed of some sort, then? Behind them, a field of gray-golden plants lines the horizon, a few green trees sprinkled in the distance in a stark contrast to the pewter-gray sky. Kal follows the lines of it to the right, where the other animal—a horse, Batman says—grazes with a certain nonchalance, and from there to what must be the house.

It must have been white, originally, though age and the ambient light have turned it gray. A cubic building, two stories tall, with symmetrical windows on the facade and a comfortable front porch with a cushioned bench on the left. Golden light spills from inside, the sky overcast enough to make mid-afternoon feel like evening, and while Kal’s stomach hasn’t quite stopped lurching since he got off Batman’s plane, the sight of the open door makes something warm curl in his chest, and he smiles as he wills his suit into the shape of more ordinary clothes...and then, as he walks, there is a click of wood, the front door opens, and Martha Kent emerges from the depths of her home.

She is a fairly tall woman in a flower-patterned shirt and faded jeans whose loose black-and-gray hair floats in the wind even as she opens an umbrella against the first fat drops of rain. Kal, a step behind Alfred and two behind Batman, watches her push her hair out of the way and hurry towards them in plastic clogs, raising her umbrella high over her head and bypassing Batman entirely in order to shield...Kal. He blinks, surprised, and blushes when he fails to understand what she’s saying.

She laughs it off though, fussing gently at Kal’s shoulder and exchanging what he can only assume are remarks about the weather—he thinks he hears the word "rain" in there—with Bruce and Alfred. Together they hurry inside and shed their muddy shoes under the porch, Mrs. Kent’s eyebrows rising when she notices the nanobots starting in on the cleaning process. Then Kal is ushered inside the house and steered to the right toward a low couch upholstered in blue, a coffee table made of pale wood sitting in front of it. He stands just past the threshold, not daring to go further yet, and watches Mrs. Kent all but force a towel on Bru—Batman and Alfred each, the three of them amiably chatting all the while.

Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say Alfred and Mrs. Kent are amiably chatting. Bruce—Kal was really trying to keep calling him Batman, fairly sure a switch wouldn’t be appreciated, but the man trying to finesse his way out from under Mrs. Kent’s attention is clearly far too flustered to be Batman. He loses the fight, Alfred and Mrs. Kent clearly having decided to team up and lovingly bully him into self-care, and is about done toweling himself dry when there is a loud bang and the sound of metal crashing to the ground, and then Kryo appears on the other side of the screen door. Kal hides his face in his hand.

“I’m so sorry,” he tells the assembly in English, “I forgot...stop?”

All three Terrans are looking at him, now, and he switches to Ellon in an attempt to at least spare himself the embarrassment of not knowing how to convey a simple thought.

“I forgot to turn off the proximity protocols—they kept it stable in the trunk, but—”

“But now my car is ruined,” Bruce sighs—and yes, it is still Bruce.

It is...uncertain, whether this change happened before and Kal did not notice it, or whether Bruce was unable—or unwilling?—to be anything other than Batman while Kal was in the cave. Regardless, there is something different in the slant of his shoulders now, a—not a relaxation, exactly. Kal doubts, sometimes, that Bruce even knows how to truly relax—not that he is one to pull the first feather. Still, from the outside it seems like a certain lessening of tension has taken place, and it isn’t something Kal remembers seeing before. The contrast is subtle, but real, and it’s enough for Kal to only mildly panic during Bruce’s five-second pause.

“Well,” Bruce says afterwards, already gesturing toward the door, “I suppose we might as well let it in.”

He does, and Kal is grateful for it, as it means the rest of the conversation, though in rapid English, is perfectly understandable for him.

“This is Kryo,” Bruce tells Mrs. Kent, “Kal’s personal supercomptuer-slash-butler. It’ll handle translations as long as they’re needed.”

Kal gives Mrs. Kent a polite nod, and can’t stop himself from blinking when she turns to him with a wide grin—the kind that makes people’s eyes crinkle, even. The force of it is enough of a surprise that Kal misses Mrs. Kent’s words entirely, never mind Kryo’s superimposed translation. He’s still trying to collect himself enough to ask his new hostess to repeat herself when he finds himself gently but inescapably directed to an open kitchen and its well-worn table, its wooden cupboards and the smell of freshly-brewed coffee. On Mrs. Kent’s instruction, Kal sits down on one of the pale wooden chairs, and tries not to scowl when a look at Bruce reveals the man all but smirking at him. Kal blinks, blushes, and then does his best to convey ‘I know you’re just glad not to be the main focus anymore’ without opening his mouth.

“I was thoroughly briefed on your food restrictions,” Mrs. Kent says as she deposits a thick slice of apple pie and a mug of coffee in front of Kal, forcing him to turn away from Bruce—who he could swear is starting to look a little nervous at the edges.

“I may have sent along a few allergy warnings,” Bruce says, and Kal doesn’t need to turn around in order to picture Alfred’s face as he deadpans:

“Six pages of them.”

Kal...has some practice, controlling what sort of emotions he lets other people see. Bruce-as-Batman may have been witness to more slips than anyone else in the world, but for the most part Kal has managed to keep the worst of his inadequacies to himself—often by design, but sometimes also thanks to happy accidents. It’s the same thing that happens now: Kal’s nerves burst out of him in a short, sharp bout of laughter before the blush blooms in his cheeks—his forehead, his ears—and spreads warmth all through his chest. Out of every new thing he has tried since he came to Earth, after all, only two ingredients have caused him any trouble, and even then nothing worse than a long sneezing fit and a slight bout of nausea...nothing to fill six pages with, really.

(But then, he notes, he is sipping on a coffee with just the right dose of sugar, and Mrs. Kent didn’t have to ask him how he took it.)

“Your coffee is excellent,” Kal tells Mrs. Kent once he’s mostly recovered from his surprise. “Thank you very much for having me here."

He doesn’t think he imagines the way Bruce seems to relax on the other side of the table, but before he can make sure of what he’s seen, Mrs. Kent all but beams at him, and Kal doesn’t hesitate before answering in kind. In all honesty, he wouldn’t have thought twice about it, even if his body hadn’t barreled into the response without consulting him: how could he not smile at someone who feels like a small sun took a kryton form and decided to warm him specifically? It feels too good here, too warm not to smile—and then blush as red as the sun when Mrs. Kent all but coos at him.

“Well,” she says, “aren’t you a sweetheart.”

“Why, Mr. El,” Alfred murmurs, “it seems you have been adopted.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Kal retorts, and then he takes a deep breath in.

Alfred—he doesn’t know. Of course he can’t know, or something of it would have shown, but the reminder—the reopening of that particular wound here, of all places—Kal blinks, throat tighter than he thought it would be.

“I...apologize,” Alfred says, clearly perplexed by Kal’s reaction, which is evidently not as subtle as he wishes it were. “I didn’t mean any offense—”

“There’s nothing wrong with being adopted,” Mrs. Kent says, gentle but unyielding, and Kal blushes harder, stares at the green material of his coffee mug.

“I know,” he admits, relieved when his voice doesn’t quite break on the word. “I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. It’s just—I wasn’t, and—I thought you knew,” he finishes lamely, barely daring a glance at Bruce.

“Knew what?”

Kal blushes harder than he remembers blushing in his entire life before now, the heat of it prickling at his armpits and the palms of his hands. It is bad enough to know this about himself—bad enough to know what the rest of Krypton thinks of it—but to have to explain it here—

“That I’m—that I was...not adopted,” he says, cowering in the face of the revelation.

There is a long pause, during which Kal is quite sure significant glances are exchanges over his head, before Bruce asks, “Kal, what exactly does it mean to you when you hear ‘adopted’?”

“Well,” Kal manages through a tight throat, “properly grown, of course.”

He dares to look up, then, and can’t help a frown when he realizes all three of his companions look utterly puzzled.

“In the growing genesis chambers, in Kandor?”

Another pause, and then Bruce’s features shiver through half a second of shock.

“Wait,” he says, “grown, as in...growing a plant?”

“Well, yes,” Kal replies, nerves turning his shame to impatience—if he is to go through this humiliating an ordeal, he might as well get it over with as quickly as possible. “Normal families put in a request to the Wise Council specifying their social status, their respective Guilds, and the child’s chosen Guild; wait for the the engineering to be done; and pick their child up three weeks after harvest. But my parents were—they decided to—to—grow me at home,” Kal finishes with a dejected sigh, unable to remember the words to describe what he is.

“You mean your mother got pregnant with you,” Bruce says after a short, stunned silence.

The archaisms sound even worse than they usually do in Kryo’s electronic voice, and Kal wonders if having this conversation entirely in Ellon would have been better or worse. He nods.

“And then she gave birth to you.”

Kal nods again.

“Kal,” Bruce says, more careful of his words than Kal has ever heard him, “that’s how everyone is born on Earth.”

Kal raises his head so fast he actually does pull a muscle, and winces at the pain. From the other side of the table, Bruce gives him something that’s almost a smile, though his eyebrows are still caught in a frown, and Kal swallows, unable to figure out what, exactly, is pressing so hard at his throat. He thinks, briefly, of the whispers that used to follow him back in El—and then breathes a long sigh of relief when he realizes he’ll never have to deal with that here. No matter how he may feel about this whole thing—and that is definitely something he will need to pay some attention to in the future—this is an undeniably wonderful thing to learn about Earth, and he has to wipe at his eyes before he can say:

“Well, that’s—that’s good news.”

He doesn’t dare try to say more right away, not when he has no idea what he even wants to say; but fortunately the other three, if they have questions, keep them to themselves. Silence settles between them. It is not uncomfortable, exactly, but it is heavy with the strange tension of high differences in emotional states in a group—until the oven beeps.

“Right!” Mrs. Kent exclaims, rising from her seat and reaching for a towel on one of the cupboard handles, “I’d forgotten about dinner.”

Kal goes to offer his help when she turns to take a dish of what she calls lasagna—‘approved ingredients only!’—out of her oven, but finds himself promptly shooed back, while Alfred uses the confusion to retrieve plates and cutlery from a different cupboard. Kal smiles almost despite himself when Mrs. Kent gives the butler a playful glare, but otherwise allows himself to be served.

He shouldn’t—really, he shouldn’t. He isn’t a prince here, and if he is going to live as a regular person, he has to learn how to perform regular tasks, too. He is, however, aware that he has no idea how to actually help in this situation, and still reeling from the things he learned tonight besides. Perhaps it is best if he sits down and processes things for a while. He can always learn to wash dishes later on, after all. He’s no Batman, but he did survive as Shadow for a while: he can probably out-stubborn Mrs. Kent if he needs to.

In the meantime, Kal watches his companions set the table. Bruce, clearly used to Alfred and Mrs. Kent’s bickering about menial tasks—playful, but with an edge—has sat back too. Kal is abruptly struck by the realization that this, all of it, has been tailored specifically for him. Not for a prince, not for the House of El, but him, Kal. And what’s more, out of the people who were instrumental in creating this entire situation, the only one who even knows for sure that Kal is of royal blood—Alfred, he’s quite sure, has made an accurate guess based on Kryo, but hasn't said anything—has never paid any more attention to that than external circumstances required.

That is a first, in Kal’s life. Oh, he can’t claim to have lacked any material thing he might have wanted, of course! But if there was ever a time when all the people in his life worked together to make a situation more agreeable to him, without any other considerations in mind, Kal has forgotten it. This time, he has to sniffle when he wipes his eyes again.

“Oh, honey,” Mrs. Kent says as she sits down, “is everything okay?”

Kal, eyes still firmly glued to his plate—and frankly unwilling to raise his gaze for the time being—nods.

“Yes, thank you,” he says after a shaky breath. Then, because English has yet to prove capable of conveying the full meaning of what Kal wants to say, he adds in Ellon: “You are very kind to me. Thank you.”

Kryo can’t, of course, translate the grammatical forms Kal used—there is nothing in English grammar to indicate the respect due to a benefactor—but Mrs. Kent pats his hand anyway.

Once dinner is finished and the dishes done—again, without Kal’s help, owing to Alfred’s absolutely devious use of the phrase ‘are you questioning my abilities?’—Kal tries to have a hand in making up his room, at least, but finds himself turned down again. Mrs. Kent’s mouth quirks into an amused smile as she tells him, “Stop acting like this is going to be a permanent situation. Tonight you’re a guest and I’ll be treating you like one—tomorrow you become part of the household and then I’ll put you to work.”

Kal, if his host’s smile is any indication, doesn’t quite succeed in hiding his relief at the words, but that doesn’t bother him in the least. In fact, the satisfaction of knowing he won’t remain an imposition on Mrs. Kent for much longer is enough to settle his nerves for the most part, and he goes back down the stairs to the living room and then the front porch, where Bruce is watching rain fall down on the land.

“I told you so,” he says in Ellon when Kal joins him, “you cannot win against her.”

“We shall see,” Kal replies.

In front of them, the steady drizzle has turned storm-dulled greens and grayed gold even darker, puddles slowly growing in the front garden. It’s quite unusual to have that much rain at once, Mrs. Kent said during dinner, sparking a conversation regarding Earth’s climate change. That is a topic Kal wants to look into, eventually, the dangers of changing an entire planet’s composition as far beyond measure on Earth as they are on Krypton...right now, however, the rain does a good job of masking the landscape’s best features and promises, thus admirably mirroring his mood. That, however, is another thing he chooses not to look at too closely for tonight, acutely aware that he may not have that much else to worry about in the upcoming days.

“You should know,” Bruce says after a bit, “that there is a significant chance she will not allow you out of her office until she has built a space dedicated to you.”

Kal protested, at first, when Mrs. Kent mentioned rearranging her study. He is more than capable of—and entirely willing to—sleep on the couch. Mrs. Kent, however, looked offended when he suggested it, ordering him to stop his nonsense and insisting that she was not yet old enough to have forgotten the proper way to treat people, especially when they’re going to live with her. Kal suspects the surprise he felt at Mrs. Kent's vehemence didn’t play as big a part in his inability to tell her no as he would like to think.

“Was she like this with you?” Kal asks after a while, sticking with the comfort of Ellon for now. “When you first came to her, I mean.”

“Yes and no,” Bruce replies, leaning sideways into one of the porch’s support beams. “My injuries were worse than yours when she first brought me here, and she put a great deal of effort into caring for me until I could be moved back to Gotham.”

“But?” Kal prompts when Bruce’s pause lasts longer than anticipated.

“I am not as...disciplined a patient as you are. Or an exile.”

Kal breathes in, more sharply than he meant to, at the reminder, but Batman is not wrong. He is an exiled man. It would take a tremendous change in Krypton’s governments—both local and planetary—before anyone would consider even pushing back against what is sure to be a call for his death. And even were that to happen, Kal highly doubts they would allow him back anyway—not without debating it for several years, at any rate. The chances of him seeing Krypton again are…slim.

“Did you receive any news from your cousin?”

Kal nods. Even with Krypton's considerably advanced technology, it takes time for messages to travel from there to Earth, and then back. Writing to Kara—letting her know he was alive and on the way to a full recovery—was one of the first things he did when he woke up, not ten days after leaving Krypton. From there it took almost five Green Lantern Coalition Days—roughly the same length as Kryptonian days, and no more than three hours shorter than Earth days—for his message to travel through a multitude of relatively short-distance channels and reach Kara. Based on this, and knowledge of Kara’s constraints and habits, Kal isn’t expecting her second letter for another four or five Earth days, at best. Still, it makes for a piece of home to look forward to, and the thought is enough to bring a small smile to his lips.

“She’s doing fine,” he tells Batman. “The official version of evens is that Kal-El’s decision to elope—”

“Elope?”

“To run away,” Kal says, and doesn’t allow himself to falter before he adds: “Generally with the intent to marry—or at least live with—whoever you are eloping with.”

Bruce nods once, sharp, stiffer than he was a minute ago. It’s a bit of a surprise, considering how unruffled he usually is, and even Kal realizes the cover story is nothing more than a convenient way to leave Kara free to continue her work with the Dark Sun directly. Yes, it makes Kal want to blush, but it isn’t like his threshold for blushing is as high as it should be in the first place.

“I assume by ‘official version of events’, you mean the government is covering up your identity,” Batman says, several seconds late but in a steady voice.

“A fair assumption,” Kal says, stomach twisting, gaze falling on his hands.

Kara didn’t share any details about that—she didn’t share much of any detail at all, in fact, most of her letter dutifully comprised of reproach and lamenting his terrible life decisions, the feeling of betrayal that filled her when she learned of his secret identity. The shame it would bring their family, if any of this were to be made public. It was hardly the most pleasant thing Kal had read in his life, but at least it had allowed Kara to signal that she was safe, and that’s really all Kal could have hoped for. Given the circumstances, his present situation is, quite frankly, clearly superior to what he used to assume discovery would bring.

“And Shadow?”

“Soon to be tried,” Kal says, fingers squeezing harder at the railing. “Then...the death penalty, I imagine.”

There is no guessing who the man who will play his part in the trial might be, and no room for Kara to tell him, either. That, and any other question Kal has—how Kara managed to keep her involvement a secret even after the bug’s pilot saw her face, what the Wise Council will do to El after all of this—will most likely remain unanswered forever, or until they can meet one another again.

He is bracing himself for the moment when he needs to explain all of that to Bruce, but, whether because Bruce has reached that conclusion himself or because he is trying to be considerate—most likely the former, Kal thinks with unexpected amusement—Bruce doesn’t ask.

“It...might sound callous,” Kal confesses after several seconds have passed with only the sound and smell of rain between them, “but part of me is glad to be here.”

“It is perfectly normal to rejoice at being alive,” Bruce points out in a soft voice, and Kal smiles.

“You’re right. But I’m particularly glad to be alive here .”

He doesn’t have the time to check whether he imagined Bruce’s blush or not before the front door opens and bathes them both in golden light.

“The room is ready,” Alfred tells them, nothing but a dark silhouette in the light from the house, and the sight makes Kal smile.

“Thank you, Alfred,” Kal tells him. He turns back to Bruce then, nerves tingling without knowing why, and says in Ellon: “I believe that’s my cue to retire for the night...I assume the two of you won’t be long here after that?”

“No,” Bruce confirms. “I have things to deal with in Gotham.”

“Of course,” Kal agrees, the smile easier to summon than the end of his career as Shadow ought to permit. “We’ll stay in touch, then?”

Bruce nods. Kal waits a beat, but no further words come, and so he shuffles his feet a little before saying:

“Goodnight, Bruce.”

“Goodnight.”

A smile for Alfred.

“Goodnight, Alfred. Thank you for everything.”

“You’re quite welcome, Mister El,” Alfred replies with a small smile of his own.

Kal nods again and steps inside, climbing the stairs two at a time to get to the landing. There are only three doors there: the bathroom at the end of the corridor—open and lit, as if in waiting—Mrs. Kent’s bedroom door, and, to the left, the smallest room. Kal steps inside to find it crowded with rows and rows of shelves filled with binders and what Kal assumes must be boxes of files. A large black desk and its accompanying wheeled chair have been pushed to the not-so-far left of the room to make way for a brown fold-out armchair currently in bed position. Kal takes in the sun-faded pale yellow paint on the walls, the plaid blanket folded at the foot of the bed. There are pictures and other documents in frames on the walls, trinkets on the shelves...and, comfortingly enough, a potted plant on the windowsill.

“I know, it’s not much,” Mrs. Kent says in a rueful tone, probably mistaking Kal’s silence for disappointment, “but at least it’s comfortable.”

“Oh, no,” Kal protests, surprised himself at his sincerity, “no, it’s perfect. Really,” he insists when Mrs. Kent’s eyebrows rise high on her forehead, “it is. Thank you very much, Mrs. Kent.”

Mrs. Kent bursts out laughing at that, growing three shades pinker in the space of a second.

“Sorry,” she says immediately after, “I’m sorry. You’re quite welcome, but Mrs. Kent was my mother-in-law—you have to call me Martha.”

“Oh,” Kal says, pleasantly confused, “of course. Thank you, Martha. And please, do call me Kal.”

Martha nods again, still smiling—it makes it impossible for Kal to do anything but smile in response, even when Kryo all but buzzes in protest.

“Well, I have to go see Bruce and Alfred off,” Martha says after a puzzled look at the hunit, “but please make yourself at home—I’ve left you a toothbrush and something to sleep in on the toilet seat. Goodnight, Kal.”

“Goodnight, Martha.”

Kal watches her make her way to the stairs with a smile on his face, then turns back to Kryo, unable to restrain himself from frowning.

“Kryo,” he tells the hunit in Ellon, “I understand this is not part of your usual protocol, but you’ll have to get used to people calling me by my first name here.”

“You have lost the diction of a prince,” Kryo starts, but Kal shrugs it off.

“So? In case it escaped your notice, I also lost the status of a prince. Krypton has no relevance here, and even if it did, Earth would be Green Lantern territory. On this planet, I’m just an ordinary man, and people will address me like one. Please don’t protest unless I tell you to.”

“Very well, Kal-El,” Kryo says, and Kal sighs.

Hunits are not, generally speaking, programmed to emulate emotion, but that has never stopped anyone from feeling like they have expressed some, especially Kal. Still, he ignores the perceived disapproval to look inside his bedroom and sigh.

“I don’t believe you’ll fit in there,” he tells Kryo. “Not comfortably, anyway. Would you mind staying above the stairs for the night? You’d be free to wander, but the corridor is too small for you to stay there.”

“Of course,” Kryo says.

It bobs in place and goes to settle itself in the one place where it won’t bother anyone, and Kal nods at it before going to prepare for the night. The bathroom is small—barely the size of his closet back on Krypton. In fact, Kal is quite sure he could fit the entire floor in his old rooms. The equipment is foreign, and the shade of blue on the walls would be considered excessive and gauche on Krypton...yet he looks at it all—runs a hand over the worn-soft fabric of the nightclothes Martha picked out for him—and smiles harder than he remembers smiling in a long time.

Despite both Bruce's and Martha’s promises of sun-kissed summers, the next week is made of rain, rain, more rain, and the occasional light drizzle. It has the potential to become a real problem for the crops, and Kal, still something of a botanist even this far away from home and the reasons he started studying plants in the first place, spends more than a little time staring at the pouring skies by Martha’s side.

She didn’t lie at all, that first night: rain or no, there are things to be done on the farm. They feed the cows in the rain—and discover, to everybody’s surprise, that the animals have an inexplicable fondness for Kal and specifically for trying to lick his face. They repair a damaged section of fencing in the rain, and drive to the vet’s clinic and back in the rain—subsequently spending a good half-hour out of the the rain but in the shower to clean up Martha’s newly neutered dog. They spend so much time outside under the downpour Kal’s skin itches afterward, pinker and tighter than it should be on his cheeks and shoulders. They put it down to the cold, at first; then when the feeling doesn’t fade, Martha clicks her tongue and says something about polluted rain.

Thus limited to the inside of the house—despite Bruce’s insistence, on the phone, that Kal should consider coming back to the cave for a round of testing, even if it means Bruce has to send Alfred and the jet to collect him—Kal shifts his focus to household tasks. He learns, in no particular order: to bake a cake, to make his own bed, to play checkers, to sweep the floor, to play Chutes and Ladders, to do the dishes, and to never question Martha when she affirms Kansas has the only football team worthy of her support.

(Bruce, when Kal shares this discovery in a text, sends another team’s logo back, and Kal decides he doesn’t know enough about Earth sports to get into that debate.)

Kara’s reply arrives sooner than expected: barely a day after Kal’s arrival on Martha’s farm. He leaves the itching out of his response, but goes over everything else in as much detail as he can—it takes him two days before he is satisfied with it—and, when the exercise proves to be more difficult than he would have liked, asks Martha for a notebook and takes to writing down as much of the things he thinks and feels as he can. It might lengthen his letters to Kara, but if it means he can come back to his notes later on and remember what it felt like to watch Jeopardy for the first time, or to discover the taste of dark chocolate chip mint ice cream, Kal is willing to take it.

On Kal’s second Tuesday at Martha's farm, he wakes up much sooner than he thought he would, something different in the air compared to all the other mornings he’s spent there. He opens his eyes with a reluctant sigh, gaze falling immediately to the blinds and the pale gray light filtering through the cracks, and blinks until his brain finally catches up. Scrambling out of bed, he jumps over a stack of cardboard boxes labeled ‘Jonathan’—the clothes now mostly waiting in the hamper for him to wash them and wear them again, while Shadow’s suit sort of...stands there—and rushes to the window. He struggles with it somewhat, making what must be quite the racket, but finally manages to unstick it with a triumphant noise, pushes the blinds open, and doesn’t even try to stop the awed ‘oh’ from leaving his lips.

The world is still shrouded with mist at this hour, lending the air a cool, silvery sheen sharp enough to remind Kal of home when he inhales. To the right, the orchard’s trees stand vigil in the pre-dawn mist, indistinct shapes waiting for the world to wake up like children still caught in dreams. Kal sweeps his gaze over the fields, still all but impossible to tell apart from the sky, and then to the storehouse and the barn, standing still as mountains while the day rises out of yesterday’s rain.

Kal watches, fascinated, as the long streaks of brighter light overhead incline far enough to kiss the top of the barn’s roof and turn it from gray to a vibrant maroon, the trimmings pale gold until sunlight catches the red paint and turns them almost orange with it. Slowly, softly, like a flower blooming, Kansas emerges from the mist, blue at the top and gold at the bottom, Martha’s barn the sort of vibrant vermilion even Krypton with its red sun and red moons and red dust has only ever dreamed of. It draws the eye at first, but the slope of its roof leads back down to the wheat below and then farther, and farther still, trying to catch a horizon so vast it makes Kal sway with the force of a feeling almost like standing on top of the Citadel, back in El, and pretending he could catch sight of its neighbors far in the southern mountains.

“Do you like the view?” Martha asks behind him.

Kal, still quite unable to close his mouth, nods and whispers, “I’ve never seen colors like these.”

“It sure is something,” Martha agrees, making her way over to the window so she can stand by Kal’s side. “I forget, sometimes, how beautiful it looks.”

“Krypton has a red sun,” Kal explains after a short silence. “It doesn’t look anything like this.”

Chances are, too, that the Melokariel Proposition will put enough dust in the atmosphere to turn Krypton's sky darker than it already is. What used to look like fire catching on the mountains will disappear, eventually, lost to time and failing memories. The thought puts an ache in Kal’s chest even as the beauty of what is before his eyes soothes him, and he’s still trapped between the two emotions when Martha asks, “How do you feel about working outside today? I’m sure the cows would enjoy a visit from you.”

Kal joins in Martha’s laughter at the thought, chest possibly warmer than it really ought to be. She did explain that cows sometimes enjoy licking the salt off people’s skin, and it’s possible Kal is different enough that he tastes like a treat to them. Even so, it is hard to ignore how soothing their affection is, how much a part of Kal’s soul will never tire of that sort of unconditional love. It would, perhaps, sound a little sad if he were to mention it to anyone else—he has, at any rate, carefully avoided any word of it in his letters to Kara and his phone calls to Bruce—but it is what it is, and Martha treats him to a fond grin as he makes his way out of the room and down to the kitchen.

Besides, if nothing else, it does have the potential to make both Martha’s and her dog’s jobs easier for a while.

Martha leads the way outside after breakfast, and Kal sinks into her routine with a delight even he couldn’t have anticipated, the repetition soothing enough that he can ignore the growing itch under his skin without much effort. There are, after all, so many things to discover! So many new things, new words, new colors and smells and sounds—an entire world of concepts just waiting for Kal to apply his mind to them, and no one to deny him the right to satisfy his curiosity because he doesn’t have the genetic code for it! Everything he does here he does for his own sake, because it pleases him, and Kal cherishes the novelty of it with enough enthusiasm that the soreness in his left side seems to evaporate within a few hours. By the time Kal follows Martha away from the barn and storehouse, he is no more than an inch away from substantiating into pure, distilled delight.

He’s savoring the bright burn of it in his chest and on his neck when the first explosion comes.

Kal throws himself to the ground with a shout of surprise and fear before he can control himself, and only then does he remember he isn’t alone here.

“Martha!” he shouts, as loud as he can manage, and prays to be heard over the cacophony. “Martha!”

There is another sound, just as close and devastating as the first, and Kal slaps his hands over his ears. Another boom. Another one—louder. Heavier. Kal whines. Boom, boom, boom—something else, fast, getting impossibly closer, shaking through every inch of Kal, and he wants to look for Martha, he does, but he can’t—it hurts! It hurts! Kal can’t hear, can’t breathe, can’t think—where’s Martha? Gods, he has to—what if she—another explosion, and Kal falls to his knees in the late asparagus, screams harder when even the ground provides no relief. There’s too much noise there—scratching and falling and digging and so many other things Kal can’t possibly tell apart and he screams and screams and screams and—

—quiet, just for a moment. A single second of answered prayer. Kal blinks. Blue sky, darker. Martha, her lips moving. Kal loses himself in the infinity of her voice and—

—blinks, eventually, groggy and scared and still lying on the ground in a crushed batch of asparagus. He breathes in, shallow at first. Waits from the implosion he’s sure will come, sooner or later. How he took control of this, Kal doesn’t know. It’s easy to tell, however, that the barest second of inattention now could be fatal. Send him back to the excruciating space where he lost a whole day—more, even, judging by the growling of his stomach.

Kal pushes himself to his knees with infinite care, and pauses there, just in case. If he is going to fall over again, he might as well mitigate the damage, even if the last time didn’t so much as leave him feeling sore. He sighs in relief when nothing terrible happens, and blinks up at the stars. If he knew them better, he could figure out for himself how long he spent...wherever his mind went all that time. He doesn’t, though, and so he makes himself go the rest of the way up and turn toward the house.

The journey there is both too long and too short, and Kal doesn’t notice the sleek black car in the lane until he steps onto Martha’s front porch and Bruce opens the door with an unreadable expression on his face.

“How are you feeling?” Bruce whispers.

Kal takes stock. Nothing feels broken, or bruised, or even sore. He’s exhausted, yes, and hungrier than he remembers being in quite some time, but overall...not bad, considering.

“Not too bad,” he tells Bruce, voice hoarse despite keeping his volume at the same level as the others.

He sends a smile to Martha over his friend’s shoulder.

“Surprisingly well, actually.”

“Good,” Martha whispers, clearly restraining herself from sighing.

“How long was I—out?” Kal asks, fumbling for the right words in English, and jumping when it’s Kryo who answers:

“Almost eighteen hours.”

Which puts the time at—Gods. Almost four in the morning. No wonder Kal is famished, though it is a wonder he isn’t equally as sore.

“We couldn’t move you,” Martha said. “You just seemed worse every time we tried to touch or talk to you.”

“We would have at least monitored your vitals,” Bruce whispers in Ellon, “but you weren’t wearing your suit.”

The words are little more than a breath on the air, and yet Kal hears the flat disapproval in them as easily as if Bruce had shouted it. He blinks.

“Well, I hadn’t exactly anticipated that particular situation,” he admits, and knows it was the wrong thing to say when Bruce’s expression goes from skillfully neutral to outright flat in less than a second.

“Of course you did not,” Bruce says in chillingly controlled Ellon. “Why am I surprised?”

Kal gapes this time, stunned out of his mind just long enough to hear the tail end of Kryo’s translation and Martha’s shocked exclamation. Honestly, he’d be lying if he said he disagreed. As if he could have planned for this!

“I couldn’t possibly have guessed,” he protests, forgetting to keep his voice down in his haste, “how could I—”

“You should have anticipated something like this. You are the very first Kryptonian to ever set foot on Earth—”

“That we know of—”

“You should have known better than this!” Bruce insists, voice raised to ordinary volume in its turn. “Now we have no idea what caused any of it—”

“Fine,” Kal concedes, although if he’s being really honest, it’s more out of a desire to end the conversation before it gets worse than true acceptance of Bruce’s point. “I’m sorry. You’re right, we don’t know what’s out there—I’ll wear the suit again.”

“Oh, don’t you take that flippant tone with me,” Bruce warns, switching back to English in his annoyance. “Do you have any idea of the sort of danger you put yourself in?”

“I said I’d wear the suit!” Kal protests. “What more do you want?”

“I want you to take basic measures of self-preservation and care about your own survival,” Bruce retorts, volume held to a normal conversational level by what Kal assumes is sheer force of will. “Otherwise I don’t see why I should.”

“Bruce!” Martha exclaims while Kal gapes.

He breathes in deep—in and out, in and out, the way he used to try and push Shadow’s nights out of his mind—and counts to ten as slowly as he dares...and, when that isn’t enough to calm him down, he closes his mouth and heads for the stairs.

“Martha was wondering if you’d stay for dinner,” Kal says when he finds Bruce in deep conversation with Kryo an hour later, half-hidden behind Martha’s ancient blue tractor.

Bruce’s head rises so sharply at that, Kal almost fears the man is going to give himself a stiff neck. He narrows his eyes as soon as he realizes who’s talking to him—Kal barely manages to catch the split-second look of surprise on his face—and straightens up to his full height, shoulders squared and jaw set. Kal carefully doesn’t sigh.

“Listen,” he says in English, hoping to keep Bruce more relaxed by sticking to his native language, “I’m sorry. I will wear the suit again. I’m wearing it now.”

Bruce remains silent. Kal counts to five.

“I know I wasn’t careful enough. I’m sorry. Please come to dinner?”

Bruce huffs and starts toward the house, but his shoulders don’t unwind, and it feels to Kal like the man takes special care not to touch him. It’s...not a pleasant thought. That Bruce would be upset is understandable, and Kal is willing to admit—albeit with some effort—that he was too quick to dismiss the man’s concerns, but to flinch away from him? Really? Maybe it shouldn’t sting, but it does. Kal stays quiet, though, determined to keep the peace as long as possible...which is probably why it surprises him so much when Bruce says:

“Previous data was encouraging.”

Kal blinks. What is that even supposed to mean? Data is absolutely not the topic here, especially when Kal already apologized—and even then, if Bruce wanted to harp on this subject, why would he pick Kal’s own argument to...oh.

Kal resists both the urge to roll his eyes and the impulse to speak, opting for a smile instead. No reason to ruin a good thing after all.

Bruce does stay for dinner, but he is a terribly wealthy—and proportionately busy—man who also moonlights as Gotham City’s very own vigilante. Kal hasn’t made the mistake of using Kryo or the suit to look Bruce up again, but he is getting better at English far faster than he’d anticipated despite the violent headaches he gets when the sounds of the world grow too loud again, and it’s easy to get a general picture from news articles. All in all, it’s a surprise Bruce lingered in Smallville as long as he did, so Kal doesn’t allow himself too much disappointment when the man leaves.

There are still chores to be attended to, a language to learn, and far too many hours spent wandering through Wikipedia—not to mention the task of responding to Kara’s newest letter, and the long process of explaining both what happened to Kal’s ears and what Kryo and the suit have found out.

“I think it would be easier to deal with if I knew what to expect,” he confides over breakfast about three days after the hearing incident.

The Ship is still in orbit around Earth—and that’s another thing Kal will need to worry about soon. Even a vessel as ancient as this one should be able to evade most of Earth’s technologies for years to come, but that doesn’t mean Kal feels comfortable leaving out there for anyone to find. None of the simulations it has run for him have hinted at any negative change in Kal so far, but even so it’s difficult to predict how much or how fast he will change as he stays on Earth.

Krypton has been orbiting its sun for far longer than the Earth has existed, and where Rao was once a golden youth, age has long since shrouded him in calmer—and wiser—red. Life on Krypton has had a long time to adapt and make the best use of what little light it can get. In every corner of Krypton, even the deepest recesses of the most forgotten Principalities, people have learned to consume other living things to make up for the lack of nutrients given by the sun, the nourishing power of its light negligible enough that turning the gene for absorbing it dormant has been standard practice ever since it was found the act lowered the risks of dying from k’luris...but, of course, artificially dormant genes mean nothing to someone who was gestated rather than grown.

The Ship’s models have found nothing alarming, that’s true, but what resources does it have? There are almost no records left from the time when Krypton’s inhabitants routinely gestated and gave birth to their offspring, and what remains is all but useless once climatic changes are taken into account. Any simulation anyone could run on that basis is nothing but pure speculation and, quite possibly, wishful thinking.

“That’s understandable,” Martha answers over the rim of her coffee mug, one eye lingering on the sports section of her newspaper before she turns to Kal. “But on the other hand I think you might have been surprised even then. This way, at least, you get to brace for anything.”

“That’s sort of the problem,” Kal mutters. “The last time I got tense for an extended period of time, I ended up here.”

Sure, Kal likes Smallville better than he did the Citadel in many, many respects, but the move still hurt like nothing else, and he’s not done mourning the life he might have built for himself there by any stretch of the imagination. He sighs without meaning to, and flinches when he realizes Martha has fallen into an uncomfortable silence. He’s stammering through an apology, trying to reassure Martha that he does like it here on the farm, but instead of answering she takes his hand in hers and guides him upstairs to the office.

Kal remains silent while Martha goes straight to the corner, where the ‘Jonathan’ boxes have been stored out of reach of Kal’s clumsy feet. They haven’t—Kal has mostly been pretending he didn’t notice them, so far. He knows the top two boxes are where his first sets of clothes came from—and those are the main inspiration for the way he shapes the suit every morning nowadays—but other than that...Martha hasn’t offered any information and Kal, sensing a delicate topic, hasn’t asked. Martha gets the bottom box out now, though, and after some rustling she extracts a small black frame and hands it to Kal.

Kal recognizes Martha in the picture: perhaps thirty years younger, wrapped in a fluid, half-sleeved white dress. Her long dark hair flows from under a veil, and her smile is so wide it stretches Kal’s mouth into a smile of his own before he even realizes what’s going on. In the picture, Martha holds hand with a young, dark blond man whose hair curls around his ears. He looks just as radiant as Martha, his free hand holding a small white cap on the top of his head as he speaks to someone outside of the picture—sharing a joke, maybe. The white shawl on his shoulders is half slipping off, but it must not have been that important if it is left unfixed. Both Martha and the man have one foot raised, ready to step on a white glass laid on some kind of handkerchief.

“That’s my Jon,” Martha says, quiet and tender from her precarious perch on Kal’s folded bed. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him talk as much as he did at our wedding.”

Kal isn’t surprised, when he glances up, to find Martha looking wistful, gaze lost in a past she clearly misses. In her hands is a thin blue booklet, white curls and swirls framing words in an alphabet Kal doesn’t recognize.

“It’s a book of songs,” Martha explains when she catches Kal looking, “a book of hymns. They’re meant for the guests, usually, but Jon insisted we keep one for ourselves. He loved singing—was terrible at it, but it never stopped him.”

Kal smiles, but Martha doesn’t see him, too caught up in her memories.

“We were married for eighteen years,” she continues. “Eighteen years of handling everything life had to throw at us—the farm, my father’s death, the stupid fertility treatments that never worked, giving up on that dream...and then one day there was a storm when we were driving home. A tornado. I followed the crowd beneath the underpass. Jon—I swear, he was right behind me, and then…he must have realized we’d forgotten the dog in the car. I turned around and he wasn’t there anymore. I saw him by the car, opening the door—he could have made it, I think. But then he fell down, and—”

Kal doesn’t try to catch Martha’s eyes when she lowers her face, black-and-gray hair obscuring her expression. He does reach out to squeeze her hand though, holding just a little tighter when she sniffs and takes a deep breath. Then she lifts her gaze again, not trying to hide the glistening of her eyes as she says:

“It’s been twelve years, and I still cry over it sometimes. I’ve never been exiled, but I know what loss feels like. So don’t you ever feel like you have to pretend you’re not grieving with me, you understand?”

“I understand,” Kal says, rougher than he expected but unwilling to do anything about it. Then, after a quiet moment: “Will you tell me more about him?”

“Oh, he would have loved you,” Martha says, her smile genuine if far wetter than Kal has ever seen it. “Especially the bit with the cows.”

Kal and Martha laugh together and, for the better part of the morning, Kal listens to her story—how she met Jonathan Kent at their local synagogue, how they fell in love, how they lived together after they were married. He hears happy stories and sad stories and everything in between, including that one time Martha and her husband fought so hard over their inability to conceive a child Jonathan got blackout drunk for the first and only time in his life.

“I imagine that isn’t the sort of thing people fight over, back where you’re from,” Martha says a while later, when she’s done brewing coffee for the both of them.

Kal allows himself a huff of bitter laughter.

“People would have to even consider gestating their children for that to happen,” he says. “I’m—there’s no one else on the planet who did what my parents did.”

Besides, as far as Kal is aware, his parents never did fight about the lack of a second offspring. The Gods granted them only one son, and that must have been that. Kal’s failure to live up to his divine destiny and attain the leader’s position Rao must have intended for him was, he is sure, of far greater importance to them, especially after they’d promised so many people they would regret their harsh words when Kal came into his true potential.

“I’m sorry,” Martha murmurs when Kal is done explaining all of that, eyes red and nose still stuffy with tears. “That sounds like a lot of weight to put on one person’s shoulders.”

Kal shrugs.

“I mostly wish I’d been able to fulfill it—I wish they’d seen me as more than a disappointment.” He scoffs. “The frustrating part is—I still miss them. I don’t think we’ve had a meaningful conversation in over ten years but now I’m here, and they don’t want to talk to me, and—”

He cuts himself off, hunching over on himself, one hand coming up to cover his face even as he bites his lip and tries to stop fresh tears from falling. He breathes in, harsh and strangled, when Martha’s free hand comes to rest on his shoulder, and after a while he clutches at it like it’s the only thing preventing him from falling over.

“Sometimes, we mourn things we never expected to,” Martha says in the quiet of mid-afternoon, the cows mooing quietly outside. “I never used to care about family names, even when my father complained that once I got married and he died there wouldn’t be any Clark left in Smallville. Then Jon and I realized no treatment was going to make us able to have children together, and suddenly I was crying in my mother’s arms and asking her if she thought my father would still love me.”

Martha snorts, just a little, when Kal looks up at her. The expression on her face is more rueful than anything else, now, but Kal still offers the best smile he can muster, both grateful for the offering and sympathizing with Martha’s past pains.

“I’m no expert, and I’m sure Bruce would have something to say about sample sizes, but it seems to me like grief in Kryptonians isn’t any more rational than it is in humans.”

“I think you’re right,” Kal agrees.

Then, after a long pause—and in a rather sheepish tone:

“I’m so sorry, but...what’s a Clark?”

Kal blames the long time it takes for Martha to stop laughing and explain on their nerves.

Kal was expecting his body would keep changing. He was . That doesn’t make the first time he sees the cows’ internal organs any less of a shock.

“Deep breathing,” Bruce tells him through the phone half an hour later, once Kal has managed to make his way back to the house and focus long enough to locate Martha’s landline. “Find something else to focus on.”

“I can see my bones every time I look down,” Kal feels compelled to point out, faintly proud at how steady he manages to keep his voice.

Oh, the edge of panic is easy to hear—more so for someone like Batman—but at least it hasn’t tipped into the realm of hysterical shrieking. And, frankly, that’s about the best Kal can hope for, because he is seeing his skeleton through his hand and he’s fairly convinced even Bruce wouldn’t be able to just take that in stride. He would probably at least blink. Maybe even stare a little bit. Kal...well, Kal is staring a lot.

“Kal,” Bruce says in a tone that suggests it isn’t the first time he’s said it, “this isn’t an apnea contest. Breathe!”

“I am breathing,” Kal protests, “just...more quietly than I thought I would be.”

He couldn’t possibly be feeling as good—relatively speaking—if he weren’t breathing. He might have grown up in the mountains, but still. It’s been minutes, he doesn’t have that kind of training.

“Good,” Bruce says. “I have been looking at the files Kryo sent me. According to this morning’s readings, your eyes are still mutating, though I cannot tell what the trend is toward—”

“Well,” Kal says when he...squints the wrong way, or something, and suddenly he has a more detailed view of his hand—and his cells—than he ever thought he would, “I...might have an idea.”

At least, he thinks as he describes what he’s seeing to Bruce and tries to figure out what all the grunting means, it’ll make studying the structural composition of Terran life much easier for him. And if the thought prevents him from panicking too much when he tries to explain what’s going to Martha, or tries and fails to reach a maximum distance he can see at—lead blocks him, but, as he discovers through trial and error, the planet’s core doesn’t—well, it’s just a really nice bonus.

(He does stop experimenting when it turns out that he can see ridiculously far indeed, but cannot, in fact, see Krypton.)

About one month into his stay on Martha’s farm—fifty days, to the day, since he came to Earth—Kal decides it’s high time he started thinking about what to do with his ship and immediately proceeds to let Bruce know via the brand-new phone Batman insisted he have. It...hasn’t been used much. Kal is still a little—reluctant—to disturb Bruce, and despite the progress they have made towards being friendly again, he has yet to find his footing in this new world of theirs, where Kal is nothing at all like Shadow and Batman is not his mentor anymore. There are—some shades of that remain, of course, what with all the things Kal has to discover, but Martha handles as much of the teaching as Bruce these days. It isn’t as if their connection is even half as vital as it was on Krypton, and considering Batman doesn’t call...Kal shakes his head. No need to dwell on it.

Both Kryo and Shadow’s suit have been made to resist extreme temperatures and depressurization, so it’s easy to wait for the right time—dusk, conveniently enough—to put the suit in stealth mode, and let Kryo carry both of them up. From there, navigating the default security settings is a breeze, and in less than five minutes Kal is inside with Kryo trailing behind him and his helmet off.

The inside of the ship is impressive, if unsurprising. It was Kara who found it, abandoned in a secluded hangar by an El ancestor who clearly disagreed with the Wise Council of their time on the topic of space travel. Kal understands the decision, though he doesn't agree with it: if he’d perceived space travel as the sole reason one of his planet’s moons had been destroyed, he’d have wanted to ban it, too. Given the circumstances, though, it’s hard to feel anything but grateful for that nameless El person and their refusal to let go of their colonial vehicle.

“Perimeter intrusion,” the ship warns about half an hour after Kal boarded it, not a minute after he’s taken full command of it. “Earth vessel, uncategorized. Should I contact?”

“Show it to me,” Kal says, relieved to find out the Ship has kept itself apprised of what is happening on the planet.

It’s a clear residual subroutine derived from its primary function—to assess local life and help devise the best way to colonize and, if necessary, kryptoform the new planet. But if it means the Ship won’t have trouble understanding English, Kal is willing to take it. Meanwhile, in front of him and under his feet, the hull shifts, reshaping and recoloring itself to give the illusion of transparency, like a vast window opening on the universe. Earth is so huge like this, so blue, Kal doesn’t even notice the spacecraft right away. He blinks when he does, but in his defense he really wasn’t expecting to find Batman’s plane—the Batplane?—hovering right there in front of his nose.

“Grant access,” Kal tells his ship. “And please add the pilot to the list of authorized personnel.”

The ship obeys, and not ten minutes later Kal watches Bruce exit his vehicle in a ridiculously bulky variation of the Batman suit. He tries to cover his amusement, but he must fail because Bruce gives him a glare potent enough to be felt through the full-face mask.

“Nice suit,” Kal dares in English, and presses his lips tight when Batman only grunts in response. He gives himself a few seconds to sober up before he says, “I wasn’t expecting you to come along.”

Not that it isn’t appreciated, but, well. Bruce is a busy man. It would have been understandable for him to stay down on Earth.

“If this ship is going to stay in orbit,” Bruce says in Ellon, “I want to know what it can do.”

Kal feels his smile turn rueful. Of course it’s a purely practical visit. There shouldn’t be any surprise there. Still, it’s good not to be alone for this. The first few minutes were—Kal was—it’s easier, not to be alone for this. Counterintuitive though it may be, it seems less crowded here, in these walls so close in color to those of the Citadel, when he has a—an ally beside him. So, with a smile, he gestures for Batman to precede him and, armed with years of clandestine readings on the topic of space ships, proceeds to give Batman the grand tour.

“You have quite the impressive setup,” Bruce comments two hours later when they’re back in the command center, Kal hoping he’s done an adequate job of keeping his explanations as short as possible. “What do you intend to do with it?”

Kal shrugs.

“I haven’t thought about that.”

That’s a lie, of course, and he’s fairly sure Bruce knows it. Kal has...had a lot of time to think, in the past two months. About himself. About his life—what it was, what it is. What it could be. About the way Earth is changing him, and all the things he can do now that wouldn’t even have been dreams back on Krypton. About the television in Martha’s living room, crackling to life with news reports about the Wonder Woman, the Flash, the Aquaman. The Green Lantern, singular, as if there weren’t hundreds of thousands of them throughout the universe.

Kal has thought about all of that and about Kara’s letters, all the things they say about Krypton’s situation—and all the things they don’t say, but Kal can guess anyway. About what the news reports must sound like in their sector of the universe, and the things he will never be able to do for his planet. About the uses someone like Batman could have for a ship like Kal’s.

None of that has solidified into anything concrete though, each element bringing more questions than answers, more doubt than certainty, and Kal sighs when, sure as anything, the set of Bruce’s mouth turns skeptical.

“I’m...not sure yet,” he amends. “I don’t know that I should make that sort of decision before I’ve...stabilized. Somewhat.”

According to his latest readings and the sheer quantity of everything he consumes these days, that isn’t exactly a close benchmark. He still has...time. Time to absorb the world a little better, to inform himself; to understand, maybe, a fraction of what he’ll need to survive on Earth, let alone blend in. More time to...adjust, too, to a life where Krypton is a distant memory, where Kara is nothing but a bi-weekly letter and Kal might be better liked than he’s ever been in his life but is also even more of an anomaly than he was back there.

Bruce makes a noise in the back of his throat, the significance of which escapes Kal entirely, and then, rather than offer advice, asks, “How is your cousin?”

He uses formal grammar to refer to her, a stark contrast to the more casual grammar he uses with Kal nowadays, and Kal can’t help but tense at it, just a little, feeling his face pinch before he can stop it. He makes himself relax—though too late, as always, to hide the emotion before Bruce sees it, and he isn’t surprised when the man’s mouth tightens in turn, just a bit. Kal can’t blame him for it, either: who wouldn’t find it frustrating, to try to be polite and considerate, only to be judged for their grammar? Kal wouldn’t like it either.

“She’s fine,” he says, careful to keep the sudden spike of loneliness out of his tone. “Still in a precarious position—I’m not to expect any news for the next month, at best—but nearly into Tu’an’s arms, as the saying goes.”

Bruce nods. Kal, unsure of the appropriate etiquette in this sort of situation, nods in return, and they both turn to stare down at the Earth below. It’s strange, Kal realizes, to see it like this. He never did get to see Krypton this way, and unless the planet undergoes drastic changes, he never will. His family may have kept his role as Shadow a secret from the rest of the world, but they know about it—and so does the Wise Council, and Kal knows for a fact they don’t always act aboveboard. They might not be in a position to try and condemn him openly, should he return, but Kal has no desire to fall over a balcony’s railing in his sleep.

Gods, he can almost hear the whispers already—nobles sharing his birth story between them, maybe attributing the apparent suicide to that finally catching up. A noble sacrifice for his family’s sake, at best, yet another pathetic move at worst; Kal’s jaw clenches at the thought, fingers tightening into fists before he can remember he’s not alone.

Batman, when Kal looks up, gives his clenched hand a pointed look and Kal takes a breath, musters a strained smile.

“I think I’m ready to go back down,” he tells Bruce in English. “I...I think I’d like to talk to a friend now.”

“You don’t think we’re friends?” Bruce asks, and tenses immediately.

Kal blinks. And blinks again. By the third time, Bruce has retreated into Batman’s stance entirely, mouth pressed into a thin line, a faint pink bleeding out from under his cowl. It’s the sight of him closing his eyes—the sound of his teeth grinding together, loud enough for Kal to hear even without opening his senses to it—that spurs Kal to blurt out, “Are we?” He clears his throat. “Are we really friends?”

Under the cowl, Bruce’s eyes widen.

“We’re not—not,” he says.

Kal doesn’t know what it means, for Bruce’s mouth to fall open when Kal smiles, but right now he feels happy enough that it doesn’t matter.

For the next week or so, it feels like Kal’s body is taking some kind of break, in that no new abilities—powers, as Martha calls them—seem to develop. Oh, sure, the tingling in his skin is still there, but it’s weak enough now that Kal can ignore it most of the time, and the violent, burning headaches of the past few days are almost gone. Which is a good thing, because Kal did not enjoy the feeling of having fireballs behind his eyes, thank you very much.

Kal enjoys the respite, frankly, and continues to learn everything he can, ranging from the history behind Martha’s Shabbat rituals to the proper way to change a car tire, how to milk a cow, and why it’s a bad idea to try to investigate unknown buzzing sounds in the bathroom. He sets up exercises for himself after that, trying to gauge how far his hearing goes—New York, to the east, but somehow it feels like he might be able to hear further—and how precise his sight can be. He trains himself to mix the X-rays and the insane zooms, to combine his abilities in different ways. The sheer range of what he can see or hear is—it’s exhilarating. Terrifying, too. All-around breathtaking, really, and Kal finds himself getting lost in it more than once, much slower to pull himself out of the chaos around him than he should be on the rare occasions when he still zooms in by accident.

It’s not a problem, though. Not really. Sure, it makes him look like an airhead, and it makes Martha laugh when he just freezes in the middle of a task, but really, that’s harmless, and so Kal doesn’t pay too much attention to it. After all, it isn’t like he couldn’t control it. He could. He can, now that he’s really applied himself to it—with a dedication even Bruce seems to approve of, if Kal interprets the tonality of his grunts over the phone correctly. It’s just that there are so many things to see, so many things to understand, and observation has always been the best way to understand something, and—there’s just so much! And it isn’t like Kal can tell himself ‘this is mud, you’ve seen mud before’, because every patch is unique, its own microcosm at any given moment, the changes in scale so dramatic it always takes him a few seconds to adjust anyway so why not let himself take the time to watch? After all, there’s no reason not to.

Or at least, there’s no reason not to stop and watch whatever he accidentally gets caught up in, until he freezes while Martha is maneuvering her tractor back into the shed and Kal doesn’t realize he’s standing in her blind spot until the sound of bending metal tears him back to the world’s regular scale.

“Ah,” Bruce says somewhere to Kal’s left. “I believe Martha might have downplayed the extent of the damage somewhat.”

Kal, who sat down on the floor the instant he and Martha realized what happened to the tractor and hasn’t dared to move since, curls up a little tighter, bringing his arms up to cover the burning back of his neck. There is a pressure building in his eyes, hotter than tears, hotter than anger, and Kal desperately doesn’t want to know what it is, what new levels of freak he will reach with this one.

“Please,” he manages in a croaking voice, “leave me alone.”

“I do not believe that would be a good idea,” Bruce replies, still in Ellon.

Kal can’t help snorting.

“If the tractor couldn’t hurt me—”

“You cannot stay in here forever, Kal,” Bruce cuts in. “You will have to move at some point. That might as well be now.”

Kal takes a deep breath and, when the heat recedes from behind his eyes, he raises his head to glare at Bruce.

“I think you and I can agree I’m not very safe to be around right now.”

“No, indeed,” Bruce replies. “But staying here is not helping matters.”

“Well,” Kal starts, well on his way to peeved now, “I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be sorry,” Bruce cuts in. “Be better.”

Kal gasps, shame flooding his guts and clawing at his throat. He closes his eyes again, unwilling to watch Bruce survey the damage—not just the tractor, but the shed’s outer wall, too, where Kal stumbled away in surprise, and at least one stool, plus another metal beam...and then Kal did go the cowardly, childish route and sat down, refusing to move, refusing to even let Martha touch him until Bruce, having already planned to come and visit, got there.

And it’s...stupid and useless and probably not the sort of thing Batman would have done but what else was Kal supposed to do? Walk to Martha’s house and risk breaking it down? Risk injuring her, or worse? No. No, there’s no way he could have done that, and if it means he was...naive, or stupid, or anything of the sort, well, then Kal is going to have to learn to live with it, because there is no way he’ll risk hurting anyone again, thank you very much.

“But you did not hurt anyone,” Bruce says, sounding uncharacteristically puzzled, once Kal is done explaining that as best as he can.

“I haven’t hurt anyone yet,” Kal retorts. “I destroyed a tractor, Bruce! And I wasn’t even doing anything—can you imagine what would happen if I—”

Kal knows he sounds self-pitying. Gods, does he know that. But what else is he supposed to do? Walk out there and pretend he isn’t inches away from fatally injuring anyone—any living creature within reach? Everything that came before—the hearing, the X-rays, the super vision—that was—that was weird, but it was a useful kind of weird, and Kal—he knows how to be weird. He’s done it before. It isn’t fun, and he thought—he’d hoped to leave that back on Krypton, for the most part. But he knows how to be weird.

But this? Being dangerous? He has no idea how to do that. He doesn’t want to be that. And if that’s what he is now, if that’s the price he has to pay to stay on Earth, then maybe—

“Breathe,” Bruce tells him, and Kal glares again.

“I am breathing,” he says.

Bruce’s mouth tightens for a second, but he doesn’t push the matterwhich is a surprise, but in this case a welcome one. There’s enough on Kal’s mind without adding a Bat-lecture to it all. Still, Bruce does have a point, in that staying where he is and not moving will do nothing to improve Kal’s situation. He should do something, but the thing is—

“I don’t know what to do,” he admits, face growing even warmer than it already was. “I don’t—what if I—I mean, Martha—”

“Martha would be perfectly fine if she did not have to worry about your mental state,” Bruce interrupts. “Do not waste your energy crying over something that has yet to happen—especially when you can prevent it.”

“And how do you propose we do that?” Kal asks, picking overly respectful forms of Ellon on purpose. “Have you trained someone not to crush a skull by accident?”

“Do not use court grammars with me,” Bruce warns with a snarl. “And in case you forgot, I do work with Wonder Woman and the Aquaman on a regular basis. If they can control their strength well enough to live normal lives, so can you. Now stop sulking and come have dinner.”

Kal feels his ears redden again, and his stomach still feels lined with lead, but he does get to his feet after a while, brushing dirt off the seat of his pants. There is no denying, after all, that it is a comfort, knowing Batman is going to help with all of this.

With a deep breath, Kal gets to his feet to follow Bruce, and freezes in shock when he realizes they are not, in fact, going back inside the house.

What they do instead is sit down with Martha on a large, checkered blanket in the middle of the garden, a varied assortment of candles and electric lanterns set around the blanket, ready for use. In the middle, three bowls of soup and a golden loaf of challah bread wait for them, flanked by long thin tubes of plastic. The whole thing looks like it jumped out of one of the movies Kal has taken to watching with Martha every other night, and the sight of it settles over his heart like an affectionate smile. Kal sits down with infinite care, unsure what might happen if he just fell to the ground, and then looks up to find a strange expression on Bruce’s face.

“I haven’t celebrated Shabbat in a while,” he says with a tone of wary apology, “ever since—”

“That’s okay,” Martha says when it becomes clear Bruce won’t finish his sentence. “To be honest, I wasn’t very diligent with it myself before Kal came around...a lot of things seem pointless when you have no one to celebrate them with.”

Kal nods in silence, unwilling to disturb the sudden atmosphere of quiet grief that has settled over the blanket. He didn’t know Bruce and Martha shared a religion, and he knows this particular moment isn’t meant for him, but that doesn’t mean he can’t relate to the sentiment, to some degree.

He blinks when he catches Bruce’s gaze though—lowers his eyes for an instant, glances back up, and when Bruce’s eyebrow rises even further, he sighs.

“Some of our ceremonies in El...they are meant to be celebrated with family, too. Especially for the worship of Rao. He was—he was the helping God, you see, before he was the leading God.”

Long, long before, it’s true; many Ellon people have forgotten it, but it is easy, when one looks, to find the root of some remaining ceremonies in the ideas that honoring Rao is to help, and one’s inner circle is where one can have the most impact...thus, the emphasis on celebrating these moments as a community rather than alone.

“These aren’t—I don’t think many people keep those particular rituals,” Kal says after he explains—or tries to explain—the sort of God Rao used to be. “I...I’d have liked to, I think, but...well, like you said, what’s the point of a collective celebration when you’re alone?”

He thinks he’s done a decent job of keeping his voice stable—hopes so, at least, even though the way Martha smiles and Bruce just looks at him indicates he might not have been as successful as he wanted. Either way, the subject comes to a close, and Kal watches Bruce and Martha go through the various rituals of Shabbat. When they are done, the three of them sip on their broth in silence; Kal declines Martha’s offer to feed him some challah directly. Kal feels himself oscillate between lingering embarrassment at all the damage he has caused—“You’ve read enough press to know I can pay for that,” Bruce says with a dismissive hand gesture. “But you shouldn’t have to—” “Kal. It’s pocket change to me. Let me.”—and the suffusing warmth of knowing both Martha and Bruce care enough about him to endure a frankly unexciting meal for his sake. It’s almost—it’s well worth the embarrassment, actually.

“So,” Bruce says after they’re done with dessert, fireflies dancing around them in the now-complete night, “before I came to get you Martha and I had a talk about how to deal with this newfound strength of yours.”

Kal nods, tensing despite himself. He manages a smile in answer to Martha’s, but doesn’t really relax until she says, “Mostly, we were considering ideas for how you could try and learn to control your strength...and I think we’ve come up with something that could work.”

“You came up with it,” Bruce says, blank-faced.

Martha grows a little pink, but catches herself quickly.

“Anyway,” she says after clearing her throat, “we thought about trying to find something you couldn’t break to start with, but given the state of the tractor and how that happened, we’re not sure how long that would take.”

“Or if it’s possible at all,” Bruce says.

“Or that. So, at the risk of making things more frustrating for you, we thought we’d cut to the chase and start with smaller things right away.”

“These,” Bruce explains in English in the middle of the next afternoon, “are medicine balls.”

He’s helping Alfred and Martha unload a truck full of them as he speaks, sweating through the T-shirt he’s wearing while Kal tries to stay focused on the task and not on...things he shouldn’t be focusing on. He’s not sure how successful he is at that, but at least no one seems to have caught on, and Kryo isn’t here to point it out.

“They’re exercise equipment for humans,” Bruce continues, either unaware of or ignoring the bead of sweat making its way down his neck, “and impossible for us to break with our bare hands. If you can learn to handle them without breaking them, it’ll be a significant step in the right direction.”

“Plus,” Martha adds, rubbing at the small of her back after unloading yet another ball, “they’re only filled with sand, so you won’t have to worry about debris.”

That, Kal has to concede, is good news. It’s...it isn’t the same as a guarantee the exercise will work, but at least it mitigates the risk of injury quite a lot. Kal keeps himself out of the others’ way while they finish the job, exchanging the occasional few words with Bruce, until Bruce asks:

“Where’s Kryo?”

“I sent it up to the ship,” Kal replies with a little smile. “I haven’t needed it to translate anything for a while now, and it’s too big to fit in the house comfortably.”

Not that Kal himself can fit in the house, period, until and unless he manages to curb his own strength, but at least he’s somewhat less austere-looking than the hunit.

“You don’t need translation anymore,” Bruce says, voice flat.

Kal blinks.

“Not really, no. I understand enough to deal with new words on my own.”

“After two months.”

“...Yes?”

Kal blinks again when Bruce all but scowls. From the corner of his eye, he can see the way Alfred’s eyebrows have risen on his forehead—the press of Martha’s lips, trying not to laugh, but he doesn’t dare join her. Surprise, he would have understood. He didn’t expect to learn English that fast either; the memorization has always been the hardest part of language learning for him...but for Bruce to scowl? That he really doesn’t get—not when Bruce hasn’t seemed to be the envious type before.

“Sorry?” Kal tries after a few seconds, but Bruce’s only response is a twitch of his fingers against the medicine ball Alfred just tossed at him—the last one.

“Now that that’s done,” Bruce says after a short pause, giving Alfred and Martha time to retreat toward the house, “let’s begin.”

It makes sense, really, to begin right away. Every ball Kal destroys by accident will be one less his three companions will need to transport to the storehouse...but that doesn’t make the explosion of sand that hits Kal in the face when he tries to catch the ball any more pleasant. It doesn’t make much noise when it pops, which is a relief, but it does leave his ears even more freedom to pick up on Martha’s aborted snort of laughter, for the back of nis neck to flush hot even as he wipes the worst of it off his face.

He looks at Bruce, then, expecting to find him with something like triumph on his face—a revenge taken upon the man who didn’t have to put all that much effort into learning the local language? But instead what he sees is the way Bruce’s shoulders have relaxed just a little, the looser tilt of his mouth, almost like...well. Almost like relief.

Not for the first time today, Kal blinks in question, and then yelps when Bruce tosses the next ball at him with the same results. Oh, boy.

“This is useless,” Kal grunts as he sits down two hours later, Bruce finally too tired to keep going or resist all of their not-so-gentle suggestions that he take a shower.

Kal hasn’t even come close to breaking a sweat.

“It’s only the first day,” Martha tells him as she picks up one of the balls and goes to carry it to the storehouse. “Give yourself some time.”

“I don’t have time!��� Kal protests, forcing himself not to flail in case he accidentally hit Martha and maim her—or worse. “I need to be safe to be around now , but I—urgh.”

This—it’s the most petulant Kal has ever been. He knows that. He knows he should stop, too. Preserve what’s left of his dignity and wait until he’s alone to indulge in the pressing urge to sulk—but then, he never did claim to be a perfect man, and in the end what he does is sigh again and say:

“I hate this. All the rest—I can deal with being a freak, but a dangerous one? I can’t—”

“First of all,” Martha says as she turns back toward him, face genuinely stern for the first time since Kal has met her, “I don’t like that word, so I’ll thank you not to use it while you’re on my farm. And secondly, I for one am very glad you've developed this ability, because if you’d been anyone else, you’d never have—”

Kal stares, dumbfounded, while Martha cuts herself short and takes a deep breath, dropping her medicine ball so she can rub at her temples with the tips of her fingers.

“I thought I’d killed you,” she says at last, voice catching in her throat. “For those first few seconds I was so sure you’d died! But then there you were, completely unscathed, and if that isn’t good news, then I don’t—”

This time it’s Martha’s turn to end her sentence with a frustrated grunt, and Kal finds himself blinking at her for a moment, before he hangs his head.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, “I didn’t—I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Well, of course not,” Martha says, wiping at the corners of her eyes with, perhaps, just a little more force than necessary. “You’re like Bruce that way.”

“I don’t think I’m—” Kal starts, but he cuts himself short—and holds himself very, very still—when Martha rises to the tips of her toes and gives him what should be a crushing hug.

“No one else could have survived this,” she whispers fiercely. “So you might not like what the sun made you, but I’m damn glad for it, and you won’t be able to change my mind on that.”

She pulls out of the embrace and picks up her medicine ball before Kal has any time to respond, and he just...stands there, speechless. Because—Kal isn’t anything like Batman, clearly, but...he really didn’t think about that. About what really happened there, and how his body would have been affected back on Krypton, and what a miracle it is that he survived the accident, let alone unscathed. How many times, as Shadow, has he wished he could push past the aches and pains inherent in the mission? How many times has he wished he were able to do more, bear more, help more? And Earth...Earth is not Krypton, that much is true, but help is help is help, no matter where you go in the galaxy, and Kal...well. If he does get his strength under control, he has the potential to help on a much larger scale than most.

“...Did you even sleep last night?”

Bruce looks wide awake, but very reluctantly so, one hand firmly clutching a mug of coffee while the other readjusts the waistband of his pajama pants. His voice still has some sleep-induced gravel in it, and the whole thing makes him sound so much like a grumpy m’lo, Kal can’t help but smile. Granted, the fact that he did not, in fact, sleep last night may make the expression just a tad more manic than he was aiming for, but the whole thing proves entirely worth it when he can pick one of the last medicine balls off the ground, toss it in the air like it weighs nothing—which it doesn’t, for him—and grin at Bruce.

“Not a wink. What’s phase two?”

Phase two, as it turns out, begins with Bruce breaking his stoic facade in order to grumble a lot of things Kal doesn’t really want to catch—he does overhear the words ‘when’ and ‘timid simpleton’, though, and surprises himself when he...actually doesn’t mind that much. It isn’t—the words are still accurate, in many ways. There’s a reason Kal has yet to meet anyone who isn’t Martha, after all. The farm is spacious, the landscape fascinating, and the streets of Smallville, not thirty minutes away on foot, look awfully tempting...until Kal tries to picture himself having a conversation with any of the inhabitants, and quietly retreats back to Martha’s farm. It doesn’t matter how familiar Kal has gotten with the surrounding fields and the nearby river: people still stump him. Which is kind of ironic, considering his project. But try as he might, no matter how much he changes—and oh, Gods, is the Kal he is now much more confident than the Kal he was then—there is still a part of him that balks at the thought of letting itself be shown, shying away from the light and easy way Martha has of chatting with her friends on the phone, the attempts she’s made at taking him into town.

He doesn’t—there’s no real hope, in his mind, of him ever shedding any of that completely. But, for what might be the first time in his life, Kal is...almost okay with it. Or, at the very least, he feels like he might be able to deal with it, even if it is in a weird way.

So, all in all, it isn’t that hard to spend the day waiting for a couple hundred basketballs to be delivered to Martha’s farm, or the day after that making said basketballs explode between his hands for two hours straight. And then, when Martha—sweaty, short of breath, and most likely sore as anything—asks him if he wants a break, it’s no big deal to say yes.

“I think I’ll go for a quick run while you rest, if that’s all right with you?”

It isn’t like he’s gained enough control over himself to help with the farm yet, unless there’s a need to move heavy machinery. Since that isn't required at the moment and Kal doesn’t really feel tired, he might as well keep pushing his limits.

He isn’t really prepared when he ends up running a thirty-mile circuit in less than five minutes, though.

(“Just you wait until you’ve got fine motor control again,” Martha tells him that night as they sip on their soup in the garden. “I intend to make full use of that super speed of yours.”

Kal laughs and says, “There’s something I’d like to discuss with you.”)

So this is actually mostly accidental. Kal will say ‘mostly’ and not ‘completely’, firstly because it is true—he hadn’t counted on actually being able to run to Gotham, but he did pick Bruce’s voice as a honing beacon on purpose, just to see if he could track it efficiently. And then also because with a little luck, or a lot of it, the honesty might decide Bruce in favor of not murdering him. Maybe.

Kal is, after all, probably not supposed to barge in on four ordinary strangers while they get a tour of the Wayne Manor renovations.

“Oh,” Kal manages intelligently. “Uh...hi.”

He waves a hand in the air, pleasantly surprised when one of the strangers—a lithe young man in a red plaid jacket—returns the gesture, open mouth or no. Behind him stands a tall, dark-haired woman whose pose and surprised expression echo Bruce’s. Then, to Bruce’s right: a tattooed giant in a t-shirt with a rather feral grin on his face, and—oh. Oh. Not so ordinary strangers, then, Kal thinks as he nods at the one the news reports name Cyborg.

“Kal,” Bruce starts, but he’s interrupted by a loud:

“Oh my GOD!”

There’s a crackle of electricity and a loud bang that makes Kal flinch, and then the lithe man—the Flash, then—is at his side, bouncing on his feet and firing questions so fast Kal doesn’t even catch one word out of every ten he speaks. Fortunately for Kal, he’s saved from having to answer any of it by the sight of a man in a Green Lantern uniform landing not six feet away from the group and asking, “What’s going on?”

“Flash has a crush,” Cyborg says, and the aforementioned speedster crackles to his side in an instant.

“Dude! He got there before I could see him! I don’t even—how fast were you even going?”

Kal looks down to check the display of his suit, still switching between numbers at the tail end, and says:

“Around two thousand and two hundred miles per hour?”

The Flash makes a high-pitched noise, and behind him the giant—Aquaman, then, since all the others are accounted for—sneers and warns, “If you even think of having a nerdgasm—”

“Ew! Gross, Arthur!” Flash protests.

Kal ignores the two of them as they descend into bickering, and walks up to Bruce and the others instead, one hand uselessly trying to rub the embarrassment out of his neck.

“I’m sorry for barging in,” he says. “If I’d known you all were here, I’d have—”

“Oh, it’s quite all right,” Wonder Woman tells him with an amused smile and a pointed look at Bruce. “We’ve been wanting to meet you for a while now.”

“Oh,” Kal says, feeling his face grow pink, “well I—it’s an honor to meet you all. And uh—thank you, sir, for helping with the whole...administration. Thing.”

A little to the right, Kal can feel Bruce all but trying to burn a hole in the side of his head, and he clears his throat in response, scratching at his neck again.

“Anyway,” he says, “I’m sure you’re all very busy and I don’t—I just wanted to talk with Bruce but that—I’m sure it can wait until you’re done doing...whatever you’re doing.”

“We’re deciding if we really want to have our headquarters here,” the Flash says, popping up next to him with another blue crack, “seeing as it’s Bruce’s house and all.”

“Barry!” Cyborg snaps, only for Flash—Barry—to turn back to him with an offended expression.

“What? It’s true! He doesn’t even look like he wants us here.”

“Also, he’s a rich asshole,” Arthur-the-Aquaman chimes in.

Kal chances a look toward Bruce, and is absolutely not surprised to find him clenching his jaw, eyes briefly closed against what Kal can only assume is a strong wave of frustration. He’s fairly sure Shadow would have felt...well, roughly the same, really, and it’s only the patience that came with his new environment allowing Kal to deal with all of this any more serenely.

“I think it’s more the part where people aren’t supposed to find out Bruce Wayne is Batman, and that’ll be easier to do if the Justice League doesn’t settle on his private property,” Cyborg says, only for the Green Lantern to add:

“And we’re not entirely sure we’re comfortable with giving the US government grounds to claim us as part of its jurisdiction. We are agreed on that, right? We’re either working with every country or none of them.”

The others nod with various levels of focus—Barry and Cyborg are still bickering to one side while Diana settles a sympathetic hand on Bruce’s shoulder—and then Bruce releases a small sigh. From what Kal has seen of him so far, he’d say this is the Batman equivalent of slapping a hand on the table in frustration. He winces, just a little, in sympathy, and then Bruce says, “Again, if anyone has a more practical alternative—”

“Actually,” Kal blurts out before he can start overthinking it, “I might be able to help with that.”

Bruce gives him a suspicious glance, while the others stare in confusion.

“I mean,” Kal explains, “I do have a giant spaceship I’m not using.”

Bruce seizes him by the collar and drags him away from the other five.

“Meeting adjourned,” he tosses over his shoulder, and Kal barely has time to wave goodbye to the rest of the Justice League before they reach Bruce’s car.

Bruce peels off the gravel road before Kal is done buckling himself in, and before long they pull over in front of a long house made almost entirely of glass...Kal doesn’t even have to use the x-ray vision to see to the other side of it, which in turn allows him to catch the exact moment Alfred notices them.

Kal follows the old man to the kitchen—or rather, the counter that serves as a kitchen, considering there don’t seem to be any actual walls to partition the various rooms here—and helps himself to a cup of coffee accompanied by a helping of cream and another of sugar. Then, when Bruce fixes him with something that would be a full blown glare on anyone else, he clears his throat and says, “So. That was actually part of what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Giving your ship away to the League?”

“Well, no,” Kal admits. “That part was a bit more...spur of the moment. But I’m not just—”

He cuts himself off, frustrated and flustered by the way this conversation came about. He didn’t even mean to have it today, exactly. Or rather he wasn’t sure he’d be having it today—he thought maybe if the whole ‘hi, it turns out I can also run ridiculously fast’ conversation went wrong, then he could keep the other two things he needs to share with Bruce for a later time. It would—he’d probably feel a little less panicked that way. Hopefully. But then he actually got there, and the League was there, and they don’t really have a place to go; and so here Kal is, with absolutely no way out except through.

Oh, Gods.

“Kal,” Bruce says after a while.

He’s about to say more, Kal’s sure, but at this point it’s probably best to just get the first part over with, and deal with the consequences later.

“So,” he blurts out before Bruce can get another word in, “obviously the fact that I’m willing to let the League use my ship wasn’t what I was here to talk to you about, but it is related to...uh. Topic number two.”

“I assume,” Bruce says after a beat, “that topic number one was the speed.”

“Yes,” Kal confirms. “The other two are...somewhat related to one another, and to the reason why I offered the use of my ship to the Justice League.”

Bruce’s posture is impeccable under most circumstances, but he does still manage to give the impression of someone straightening up as he says, “I’m listening.”

Kal breathes in. This is, he knows, a key moment for him going forward. It isn’t that he won’t go on with his project if he doesn’t have Batman’s blessing; it is that he wants it—wants to prove, to both of them, that’s he’s evolved and changed enough to do this. That he’s ready for it, and won’t fail this time. With another breath in, Kal lets a little bit of Shadow settle onto his shoulders, slip into his voice. His spine straightens almost on its own, his eyes rising. He feels the change on his face, too: more solemn, more solid than his usual demeanor, but without the harsh tension of Shadow’s expressions.

“I want to help,” he says in a voice deeper than usual, and feels dimly rewarded when Bruce slides into Batman’s body language without missing a beat. “I...won’t be Shadow, here,” he adds, using the Ellon version of the name. “He was made for Krypton, and he should stay there...but I do want to help whoever I can here, and given your position—and everything you’ve done for me in every aspect of my life, I thought it would be only fair to let you know.”

“I didn’t—”

“Yes, you did,” he cuts in, firm but not harsh. “I wouldn’t be here if not for you.”

There is a pause, during which Batman’s features remain as neutral as they ever are—but he thinks he can still see something...touched, perhaps, in the tick of the man’s jaw. Eventually, the silence passes, and Batman says, “You realize you can’t just jump into that?”

“I do have some experience with this sort of business,” he retorts with a chuckle. “Enough to know I can’t possibly prepare for everything on the first try. But I did get started.”

“How?”

“Well, first of all, I wanted to assess the state of my resources,” he explains. “I asked the ship to scan for and network with any Kryptonian tech it could access.”

Batman's tensing is so subtle, he’s tempted to think he’d have missed it if he didn’t have especially keen vision.

“There’s something on Earth you didn’t bring with you,” Batman says.

“Yes,” he replies. “A pre-settlement fortress in the Arctic. Part of the last wave, judging by the technology, but still more than enough for my personal use.”

“So you’d just give the ship up?” Batman asks.

He smiles.

“I was thinking more of a long-term lending plan. The League would have full use of the ship, but I would remain in command of it. The offer stands whether I am allowed to join or not, by the way.”

“How generous of you.”

“Like I said,” he replies with a shrug, “you would have more use for it than I will.”

“If we can get there,” Batman points out. “You should be aware by now that going to space is a little complicated for us humans, and we can’t just yell ‘beam me up, Scotty’.”

“Of course not,” he agrees with a chuckle. “I don’t think Scotty is a very dignified name for a spaceship, anyway. But there are technologies that could allow for teleportation, and I’m sure between your Green Lantern officer and I we could either build or obtain some.”

Batman stays silent for a moment, only moving to bring his hands up and steeple his fingers over the table, assessing him with a piercing gaze. He doesn’t move—doesn’t even really feel the need to squirm here, confident in the merits of his idea, if nothing else.

Then Batman says, “I’ll need more details before I put it up for consideration before the League. As for your membership...we generally wait to see what someone is capable of before we invite them in.”

“That’s not exactly what I understood from the news reports,” he says, without restraining an amused smile, “but that sounds fair enough.”

“Do you plan on...helping...in jeans and a t-shirt?”

His face still feels a little like Shadow's; but the smile that cracks across it is Kal’s, full of pleasant surprise at how fast Batman seems to have come around to the idea.

“Now,” he says, slipping back out of Kal, “that would be a waste of an exceedingly smart suit, wouldn’t it?”

Batman’s face remains entirely blank, and so he rises to his feet.

“Martha and I had a long talk about it the other day...let me know what you think.”

“Aren’t the colors a little...bold?” Martha asked in a careful tone when Kal finished sketching what he had in mind. “Not that the other heroes don’t have colorful costumes, mind, they just aren’t usually that….”

“Saturated?” Kal asked, and smiled when Martha gave him an embarrassed nod. “I guess you’re right, but...I like them. There’s Kansas’s blue sky,” he explained, pointing at the body, “Krypton’s red...and here, gold for the sun, and for Rao.”

If he was going to help, after all, he might as well bring something of his patron God into the uniform.

“And that?” Martha asked, pointing at the diamond shape and flowing crimson line on its golden field. “What does that mean?”

Kal couldn’t help the bittersweetness of his smile as he looked down at his sketch and the El family’s coat of arms over the uniform’s chest. It had, after all, started off as a symbol for Rao, and had only been incorporated into the El crest several centuries after the birth of their lineage. But it would have been a lie to say that Kal hadn’t kept that in mind when he chose the symbol. It was a piece of his world, after all; not only a part of Krypton and El’s history but a part of his childhood, too. Years of distress, of dissatisfaction, of disappointment for every member of his family...and here, finally, he’d found a way to reclaim it all. To make the crest his, rather than cower around it in every part of his existence.

Adding this to his design—even just putting the first curve of it to paper—had felt like figuring out a key piece of a puzzle. If there was only one part of this costume that wouldn’t change, it was that one, no doubt about it.

“That’s my family’s crest,” Kal explained, then. “It used to be an ancient symbol for Rao and the light he brought to Krypton. See how the line comes and goes, but never disappears?”

Martha hummed.

“It is supposed to represent the power to do what is right by those you care about. The power to help where you are needed, and the strength to ask for help when you need it. It’s also—it’s supposed to tell you that powerlessness, helplessness, they’re only temporary states. Sooner or later, you will have the opportunity to help others—or help yourself—again.”

“Oh,” Martha said, her smile brimming with affection, “so it means hope, then.”

“So?” he asks, when Batman remains motionless too long for comfort. “What do you think?”

“You look—”

Bruce—because it was Bruce’s voice there, not Batman’s—cuts himself off with a sharp inhale. Clears his throat, a faint pink dusting his face for some unfathomable reason, and corrects:

“It’ll do.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me I need to wear a mask?” he asks, surprised.

“You’ve seen the people I work with,” Batman says, something almost dejected in his tone. “I try to pick my battles.”

He laughs, but Batman doesn’t join him.

On the second of August 2019, a little over two months after his arrival on Earth and about two days after he told Batman about his intention to join Earth’s growing League—Guild?—of helpers, there is a fire on the outskirts of a city called Metropolis. It isn’t the first one he's heard burning during those two days, of course, but people know how to handle fire, most of the time. And when they can’t, well. Flash does operate mostly around the Midwest, so he can take care of these things, when needed.

On that day, though, Flash is busy dealing with a hostage situation up north in Star City, and the firefighters called to intervene are discussing the difficulty of the operation before they even get there...so, obviously, he changes into his uniform and runs to join the rescue efforts.

It’s a residential building he finds when he arrives. Old; filled with dry wood, old paper, and more than a dozen elderly residents trapped on the last floor, too slow to escape the flames and too frail to get out on their own. He slows to a stop next to the firetruck and filters the screams out as he walks up to the man who seems to be in charge and asks, “How can I help?”

“Stay out of the way,” the man replies with barely a glance at him. “This is a delicate operation, and I don’t have time to shepherd a clown in leggings!”

He follows the man’s gesture to where the truck’s ladder is malfunctioning, and sucks in a breath. No wonder everyone looks panicked—even if someone makes it to the third floor through the inferno, there’s no way they’ll be able to get everyone down that way. Not with human speed or strength, at any rate. Stepping aside from the firefighters, he opens both his hearing and his vision until he figures out where to go first.

Using his speed, he climbs up to the correct window, punching and kicking holding points in the old brick. Once there, he blocks the interstice under the door with his cape, scoops the elderly man and his poodle up in his arms and, taking care not to jostle them too much, climbs back down to the ground in order to leave man and animal to the care of emergency services. Immediately, he can hear the firefighting chief redirect his people’s efforts so they can take the residents in charge sooner and aim their streams of water toward the newly-opened window.

He repeats the rescue process for each of the twelve residents trapped in the house, taking the time to reassess who is most in danger between each round, then goes back for two wheelchairs, a pair of canes, and, despite the firefighters’ inquietude, the ashes of the first resident’s husband. The man takes them from him with a grateful sob, and he smiles in return, wishing him and his neighbors a speedy recovery as they are taken to the nearest hospital.

A small crowd has gathered around the building while he was working, concerned neighbors and gawking bystanders alike, several smartphones raised to capture the scene—which can’t have lasted more than twenty minutes, including the time he took to chat with the resident who broke her arm in her panic, trying to relax her as much as he could. When he turns around, flashes erupt all around him, and a red-haired woman waves her arm high in the air.

(She mutters between her teeth as she does so, something about finally having a ticket out of the doghouse if she can get a statement, and he allows himself a smile as he walks up to her. Help, after all, can take many different forms, and it isn’t like this is going to cost him anything.)

“Good morning,” he says, though at this point they are veering towards lunchtime. “May I help you?”

“Yes,” the woman says in a determined, no-nonsense tone. “Lois Lane, Daily Planet. Could you tell me what you were doing here?”

“I heard people calling for help,” he says truthfully, “and I knew I could help, so I did.”

“Can you tell me your name?”

He was expecting the question—even tried to come up with an answer for it, back when he first discussed it with Martha, but nothing he could think of seemed quite right, either too arrogant or too banal. So, in the end, he does what he’d decided on and evades:

“It seems to me like naming helpers is traditionally the press’s prerogative.”

He smiles a little, but Ms. Lane doesn’t return the expression, tilting her head to the side instead.

“Helpers?”

“People like me, who have certain...unusual abilities, and who use them to help where they can.” He pauses, curious, careful not to frown. “Is that not what you call them?”

“People like the Wonder Woman or the Flash get called heroes,” Ms. Lane says. “Do you think you should be called a hero?”

“I don’t think that’s my decision,” he admits, forcing himself to ignore Kal’s urge to blush, “but I’ll certainly do my best to be worthy of the comparison.”

“One last question,” Ms. Lane starts, but she has a look on her face that makes him fear the sort of question he really won’t know how to answer, and so he tilts his head to the side, pretends to listen for something for a second, and says:

“If you’ll excuse me—I’m afraid I have to go.”

He takes a step back to scan his surroundings—far too many people on the sidewalk for a dignified exit that way, even if he were to speed away immediately after, and there’s nothing behind him besides the burning building where the firefighters are only just getting the flames under control. Without a better option—and, more importantly, without the time to look for one—he sends a quick prayer to Rao to make his legs as strong as his arms, something he has yet to put to the test, and jumps away from the crowd. He lands on a nearby building with a much louder crash than he would have liked, though at least he manages to roll enough to avoid cracking the rooftop; and when he realizes the crowd can still see him, he jumps away again.

His second landing is even less dignified than the first: he lets the suit stretch downward as he falls, redistributing material from his cape to the bottom of his feet, but because he now knows he can manage the jump, he forgets to prepare for the roll on the landing. He hits the roof face-first as a result, startling a cage full of pigeons and getting more or less tangled in his cape, which is embarrassing enough on its own and becomes worse when he hears someone laugh above him.

He gets back up too fast, trips over his own feet, and stumbles off the building all in the same movement, Wonder Woman gasping in surprise and reaching for his hand...until they both realize that he isn’t, actually, falling to—well, not to his death, clearly; but someone like him falling from that kind of distance could easily kill whoever happened to be passing by. So it is still a relief when he manages to right himself up and find his footing on the roof again.

“Good catch,” Wonder Woman tells him with a smile.

“Thank you,” he replies, allowing himself to blush a little. “That has to be the best timing for a moment like this so far.”

She tilts her head to the side. In her uniform, she looks younger than she did in her jeans and leather jacket, but also more dignified somehow. She reminds him of Kara—the way she carries herself is just as confident, if not more so, and it speaks of someone used to commanding people’s attention without effort. No wonder the press seems to hold her in such high regard.

He wonders if they’ve ever seen her look like this, though—just a little puzzled, but smiling in a way that makes it look like she’s anticipating nothing but a good answer.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I couldn’t exactly—do that, on Krypton,” he admits. “Though I guess I’d have had less trouble with vertigo, if I could have.”

Wonder Woman laughs, striking a delicate balance between the dignified laughter of a queen and a delighted giggle, before she says, “Well, I wouldn’t have guessed you’d never done this before if you hadn’t told me.”

He smiles, just a little too nervous for the man he’s supposed to be right now.

“You weren’t half bad down there, either, you know,” she says with a conspiratorial smile.

She turns her head to the left then, eyes unfocused as she listens to something in the distance, back where he came from, before she offers him a hand to clasp.

“It seems they have decided what to call you. Welcome to the helpers, Superman.”

[camsthisky]

mental image of the day: a very concussed bruce seeing one of the younger boys and thinking its dick and calling him champ or sport or chum. tbh... this is how they know dick grayson got spoiled the most out of the batkids.

“Dick?” Bruce groans, and Tim lifts his head to look at him.

“No,” Tim says, his voice soft. “No, it’s Tim, remember?”

Bruce stares up at him blankly from the cot. “Where’s Dick?”

Tim swallows. This is not what he’d been expecting when Clark had called for someone to pick Bruce up from the watchtower. “He’s not here.”

“Where is he?”

It’s a hard thing to not start crying then and there, but Tim closes his eyes and breathes through the burning tightness in his chest. When he speaks again, his voice holds none of the softness from before. It’s rough and hoarse from grief and loss. “Not here.”

“Can’t be right,” Bruce murmurs to himself, and there’s a haze over his eyes. He closes them, and for a moment Tim thinks that Bruce is going back to sleep.

Which is fine with Tim. He doesn’t think he can handle another question like ‘Where is Dick?’ again. He knows exactly where Dick is, but he doesn’t think that Bruce—as concussed and confused as he is right now—can handle that information. Can handle knowing that Dick isn’t just a press of the comms away anymore.

But a few moments later, Bruce opens his eyes again, looks over at Tim, and he reaches out a hand in a rare show of need for touch. Tim grabs hold of his father’s hand and grips it tight, hoping he can ground Bruce in this reality. In this time.

“Don’t scare me like that, chum,” Bruce murmurs, and Tim closes his own eyes and grips Bruce’s hand even tighter. Bruce has no grasp on this reality. He’s back in a completely different time. A time that only Alfred, Jason, and—well. Just Alfred and Jason know. One that Tim hasn’t been privy to. Where Bruce will show affection and crack jokes and even laugh, or so he’s told.

“I’m not Dick,” Tim whispers, because there’s no one that can ever replace Dick. He speaks again, and his voice cracks, and he feels like he’s going to shake apart with the force of his own grief. He’s lost too much in too little time. “It’s me. It’s Tim. Your son.”

But Bruce isn’t understanding. He’s too concussed. Too hazy. Too caught up in the mental labyrinth of his own mind. And Tim can’t lead Bruce out. It seems like it’s only Dick that can lead Bruce out of that darkness.

“Love you, Dick,” Bruce breathes, and his eyes flutter closed. “Please don’t leave again.”

Tim bites back a sob and his breathing hitches. Bruce thinks he’s Dick, but Dick is six feet under, and Tim doesn’t know how to tell Bruce that his son is dead. Not like this. So Tim shoves back his grief, shoves it under that special rug where all the feelings he can’t quite deal with yet stay, and he says what he thinks Dick would say if he were able to. If he were alive.

“Love you, too, Bruce,” Tim says. “And I’m not going anywhere.”

[nancybyeers]

i feel you're closer every time i call you // a wondertrev secret santa gift

title: i feel you’re closer every time i call you pairing: wondertrev wc: 1994 words notes: it’s my secret santa gift for @poetic-pathetic ! hope you will sob ao3

Wonder Woman was a name code, an alter-ego but most of the time, it was a ghost.

(A ghost from the World War One, from the World War II, from the Viet War and from the Cold War. Wonder Woman was the blurred shadow of the human wars, but more than that, it was the ghost of an immortal oasis. Themyscira. After all these decades of crawling in the black streets of the mortal world, the name on her tongue was foreign. Crashing like waves, burning like sunburns, aching like only home can be but –)

And Diana Prince was a woman with voices screaming inside her head, bruises and scratches on her heart rather than on her almost bulletproof skin, pencil skirt and golden jewelry (she loved being this kind of woman who was powerful in every outfit because it was her mind that was praised by the gods when her body was only begged for by the mortal foolish men.)

She was an old woman with too many inches of hard skin, indestructible bones, and tired glim in the eyes.

But being a ghost was not what made her feel like the world was slowing down in the course of time, giving her the odd impression that she was aging when she was clearly not.

It was Steve’s ghost who made every decade without him feel like another coat on her shoulders. A painful and true and dead ghost.

It was the ghost of his lips, his smile, his golden hair, his era.

His world. (After him, Etta was gone followed by Charlie then Sameer. One by one, buried.)

Humans stayed humans, and when Diana had saved them, she had sworn to protect them, to love them. But sometimes, it was harder.

When she had to watch their bodies going down into the ground, without songs for helping them to find the next world or without any escape for their soul but a roof of soil. Rooting, their chest filled with dust. Forgotten.

She outlived them all.

“Diana? There is someone on the phone for you.”

Working in Paris is easier for her. It was a neutral ground. It was not the painful memories of Belgium or the shimmering-veil feeling of England. They had not left marks where she walked, slaloming between the glass pyramids of the Louvre, or in the air she breathed.

(A time had come where she preferred to breathe pollution of cars and factories than feelings, and somehow, they kept considering her as wise…)

She rose up from the chair where she was sitting since this morning as her assistant, a young so young lady with red hair and pinkish cheeks, made her way to her.

Her name was Helene and she was a really pretty girl. Sometimes, Diana thinks about getting a coffee with her one day, just talking and laughing, but then she can clearly see this juvenal face overwhelmed by wrinkles and by the inevitable burden that is age.

She had to love them, humans. It was her duty. When her smile trembled, she convinced herself that it was because of emotion (love made people do incredible and crazy things, she knew that as much as mortals.) but, deep in her chest, she knew.

Oh, how strong she was, demigoddess, fearing of attaching herself to these foolish weak and lovely creatures.

She watched her assistant leave the office, the phone in her hand, cold and soulless.

She wondered if she would go to Helene’s funeral. Would she weep tears from her face? Put a bouquet of flowers on her tombstone, in memory of her dedicated assistant?

Compensating by hunting down criminals and monsters of flesh and bones at night. The blast of her aura burning the pure idea of grief, every strike of lasso burying deeper her own feelings.

For the greater good, for the human’s race.

And sometimes she wondered about him: how his voice could have sound on the phone? Would he have loved sports and online newspapers?

She picked up, lost in her thoughts, and for a second, she expected to hear his breathing.

“Diana Prince?”

“It’s me.”

“We found it. We found him.”

And, deep in her chest, she knew that she had no expectations. She could not have any.

Him. It must have been Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne or Hades or a dangerous and veracious secret ready to destroy her world.

Steve Trevor was dead. And she did not know exactly who is on the other side of the line, a scientist, a powerful man without any doubt but not a god.

Only a god can bring back a mortal (even a heroic one) from the realm of death.

She laughed hard and harder. She did not know that she had this kind of laugh in her: bitter.

She wanted to take it back. But she could not.

“Have you listened to a single word that I have said, Diana Prince?”

No, she did not. Wonder Woman hated liars. She fought for the truth.

“Yes. I did.”

Yet, there she was, telling the biggest one, lying to herself. It’s better that he was dead.

Not able to see the damages of the WWII and the radioactive blast of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not able to be a hero and to die as a hero a second or a third time.

Selfishly, she thought that it was better. She had not had to bury him after a lifetime spent together, counting grey strikes in his hair while they brushed their tooth every morning.

“The plane was in the ocean. The explosion occurred in two phases, one in the sky, the second once he entered into the ocean.”

She remembered everything: the heatwave, her own scream sounding like the agony of a stranger, and the pain. But the most horrifically accurate image in her mind was the vibrant color of the fire, the cruelty of the flames while they were licking the metallic bones of the planes and the fresh flesh of her lover.

A fire was so different from the cool water around Themyscira and yet, if ocean failed to let drown Steve Trevor, flames took his life away.

Was it a possibility that fire had failed too to end this soldier, this pilot, this lover’s life?

“The deflagration created a submarine earthquake, destroying the plane almost immediately because of the force of pressure and of the intensity of the explosion. Marine rift is a common reaction in this kind of case, you know, Diana. Aspiring everything in a perimeter of a hundred miles. Essentially water, most of the times, but if there was a body deriving….”

“He could have been alive” she whispers.

There is a silence, only filled by fear and terror.

(agape.)

“He could have been alive” she repeated, her voice more stable. “However, it’s been a hundred years. Even if he had survived to the explosion. Humans – we – cannot win against time”

“We haven’t found his body, Diana. Even if Steve Trevor was in this cavity for a time, he could not have survived.”

“But…”

She was no longer rationalizing.

“Diana, I agreed, me and my unity, to look after this veteran because you have connections with Wayne and that you are quite persuasive…but no matter what Steve Trevor represents for you, you need to let him go.”

Her breath was harsh and for a second, she thought about protesting, denying.

(The story began like this: Bruce Wayne owed her a favor and a photography. The plane where Steve was in when he died had never been found and they had to watch and cry over an empty casket, decorated with ribbons of liberty’s color. She wanted him back. She wanted him to be where he belonged, with his ornaments. In a cemetery where modern heroes belonged to, just like gods belonged to the pantheon.)

But the scientist – she did not remember his name. It was more than five years since Wayne had contacted him and they had never spoken before – was right. Steve Trevor was dead.

Ocean had swallowed him.

“I let go.” She said with an empty voice, her hand contracted on the phone, so strong that she could have taken it to pieces so easily (so so easily. As easily as the world had reduced to nothing the presence of Steve Trevor.)

This night, Wonder Woman was too tired to fight. This night she decided that criminals could run a bit longer, could spread their evilness a bit further like tentacles. She could always catch them again the next night or the next, the next after that and the next and –

She had eternity to catch them again.

This night, Diana Prince was too tired to fight, so she slept instead.

She dreamt of her first meeting with Steve Trevor.

She dreamt of home. Sand turning into ashes, laughs and swords smashing turning into screams, rushing sound of bullets.

Dream turning into a nightmare.

She woke up before the sun, with the lingering confidence that she would only find closure with waves licking her heels.

Confronted to the sea that had destroyed the only hero that war was not strong enough to take.

She booked a one-way ticket for the coast, she painted her nails white and put on her darkest suit.

The golden lasso is in her suitcase, her tiara hidden behind her bold locks of dark hair, she entered in the airport like if she was underwater.

The coast was savage. She fell on her knee, hands jointed, lips sealed.

Staring at the sea with a thunderous look.

In her mind, the last word of the scientist in lieu of a goodbye ringing like bells: “the only thing you can do is praying, miss Prince.”

It was what she did. Praying her mother, Hippolyta, and the spirit of Antiope to let her pass.

To let her come home.

She dove into the water, swam and swam and swam. Fever in her bones, hope in her mind.

(Finally, Themyscira was more beautiful than in her memory and the embrace of her mother was warmer than expected.

“You are so human, Diana. I can smell their odors on your skin. Pollution, lies, hypocrisy.”

But her speech was as cold as the breeze was the night she left. With him.)

She was a weapon. The destroyer of Gods. Her words bounced on her immortal skin.

She held her mother tighter.

“I love you, mother. Only the force of my faith, my grief and my love made me come back to you.”

Diana closed her eyes, inhaling slowly the earthy perfume of her godly mother, ignoring the deep gaze of the immortal woman on her. Hippolyta was a gold digger looking the secrets of mortal world in her long-absent daughter’s heart.

Diana went to the shore.

Diana went to the shore where Antiope died.

Diana went to the shore where she met Steve Trevor.

But she did find neither the blood of her general on the sand, probably washed over and over by the sea since a century, nor the clear and bright voice of her lover calling for an angel, thinking he had found heaven.

She buried her feet in the sand like roots of the island, and screamed.

(For a whole week, she did not move, she did not lower her voice, her rage. She was

a god.

She claimed

her prize, her birthright. Even if for it, she needed to be Atlas for a whole week.)

With the dawn, came a body. Uniform soaked and eaten by the salt, blue cold lips and swollen face. A corpse.

She noticed she had lost her voice when she tried to pronounce his name.

“Steve”

SteveSteveSteveSteveSteve –

She reached for the sky, blue and endless.

SteveSteveSteveSteveSteve –

He opened his eyes. Blue like the sea.

“Hey, angel.”

Without taking her eyes off his weak smile, she addressed a strange prayer to higher deities.

“thanks gods.”

[jade4813]

The End of All Things

I just kind of got an idea to write a bittersweet/sad shortfic today, so here it is.

Title: The End of All Things

Rating: PG

Synopsis: Even speedsters and their lightning rods grow old and die. When he loses the woman he loves, Barry knows there is no Flash - or Barry Allen - without Iris West.

Chapters: 1/1

He couldn’t say exactly what had awoken him, but the first thing Barry saw when he opened his eyes was the picture on his nightstand – his favorite from their wedding day. He’d just scooped Iris into his arms when she complained about her aching feet, and the photographer caught the moment that he bowed his head to press a soft kiss against her forehead, just as she laughingly reached to adjust his tie. She was just as beautiful to him now as she was then, but that moment caught her as he always remembered her best: full of life, laughter, and love.

Under the sheets, he stretched slightly, mentally taking stock. An old familiar twinge in his joints greeted him; even speedsters couldn’t entirely run away from the effects of old age. The dull ache in his chest was new, but for the moment, he pushed it away and refused to consider what it meant. With a soft groan, he stretched again, working out some kinks. Then, unable to escape the inevitable, he turned towards his wife.

The moment he saw her, he knew. She was laying on her side, facing him, her legs curled up and one hand resting under her cheek. She looked so calm and peaceful, lying there so still. Too still.

In truth, he’d known before he’d even turned to look at her. This morning was so like every other, but for that pain in his chest. The connection they shared, the love that tethered them together even through the speed force, had become such a part of him for so long that it was notable now by its absence. “Oh, Iris,” he moaned, leaning forward to brush a kiss against her soft curls. “You weren’t supposed to go first.” The lightning that so often sparked between them was gone.

Though he was tempted to linger, he knew what he had to do. It pressed against him with an urgency he couldn’t ignore. Blinking back his tears and turning away, he rose into a sitting position and stretched one more time before rising to his feet. He could get through this as long as he didn’t think about his loss, and so he focused instead on the mundane details of getting dressed. He took a long look around the room as he pulled on some clothes, his eyes lingering on the mementoes of the life he and Iris had shared. Old photographs and scraps of paper. Her most comfortable sweater – worn most nights, as she grew cold easily – thrown over the back of a chair. A hair tie had fallen off her nightstand onto the floor. He paused and lifted the picture taken the previous Christmas, taking the image in. In it, he and Iris were sitting in front of an absurdly large tree, flanked by their children (the twins still mischievous, even as adults), grandchildren, as well as Wally, Linda, and their children.

He stroked a finger down the image of Iris’s cheek. When he heard the soft sob that escaped his lips, he had to pause a moment to pull himself together. It took him longer than usual to tie his shoes, he fingers, swollen with arthritis, shaking. Then he stood and moved to his wife’s side. His vision blurred as he swooped and pulled her into his arms, lifting her as easily as he had on their wedding day. Her hand fell into her lap and her head rested against his chest as he adjusted his hold. “It’s all right, Iris. I’ve got you,” he said, but his voice broke off with another soft sob.

Sucking in a deep breath, Barry tilted his head back and blinked, trying to clear the tears from his eyes. They would see each other again. Then, holding Iris’s body even tighter, he started to run. The wind flying past his face whipped his tears away.

It had been a long time since he’d run fast enough to go into the speed force, and for a moment, he was afraid old age and grief would prevent him from gaining the necessary speed. However, perhaps it was pity or the love it shared for Iris, when Barry reached for the speed force, it reached back. As it drew him in, he saw images flicker past – past, present, and future. He saw him and Iris as they were when they met. The gangly awkward phase they’d gone through as teenagers. Iris, breathtaking at senior prom.

He saw her in front of a Christmas tree years before, hugging him in her blue and white shirt as he confessed his feelings to her. Their first kiss. Him kneeling in front of her ask he asked her to be his wife. An image of their wedding flickered past, the tear on her cheek as they leaned forward to share their kiss as man and wife.

He saw her pregnant with the twins, then holding their children for the first time. The twins as toddlers, with the odd, top-heavy stumble of children learning to take their first steps. The day they discovered their own speed powers for the first time. The gangly awkwardness of their own teenage years, so reminiscent of their parents. He saw them on their wedding days, when Iris and Barry both cried happy tears. He saw the birth of their grandchildren, when he and Iris stood and marveled at all the miracles their life together had brought.

He saw other things, too. Joe, as he was the day he took in a little boy who had just lost his parents. The day he married again. His pride on the day he was promoted to captain. His last day in the hospital, and the moment he slipped away.

Barry saw the friends they had made and lost over the years. Eddie, Cisco, Jesse, and Caitlin. Hal, Diana, Bruce, Clark, and so many others. All of this raced past him faster than a heartbeat, and then he was pulled into the speed force and the images faded.

“Barry, are you sure?” the speed force wore his father’s face and asked gently. He was glad it hadn’t taken the form of the woman he held in his arms. He would have resented the lie in that moment.

“It’s time,” he said with a nod. “I want to be with her.”

“You will be,” it promised, placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

For the first time that morning, Barry smiled as he let go of the world outside. He felt the moment that the speed force wrapped itself around him and greeted him as an old friend, drawing him further in, and he sighed softly as he felt the connection he shared with all the other speedsters fall away. He’d always wondered if it would hurt, giving himself up to the speed force, but it didn’t. It was peaceful – warm and comforting. Or perhaps that was Iris’s laugh.

Barry looked down at the woman in his arms, and this time, she looked back. Her eyes twinkled with happiness; her face was as bright and youthful as it had been the day he proposed. When he looked at the hands that held her, he saw that they, too, were smooth and unlined.

“Iris, is it really you?” he asked, but in his heart, he already knew it was.

She nodded, and he put her on her feet, keeping her tight against his body. “I’m here,” she murmured, wrapping her arms around his neck. She brushed a kiss across his lips, and he felt that old, familiar spark arc between them. “I’m not going anywhere.” Barry grinned and spun her round, her laughter echoing with his own.

It was the last gift of the speed force, offering both speedster and lightning rod peace together for all eternity.

[whelmedtobehere]

Bruce shouldn’t have been here. Everything about it was wrong. The sky was too blue and the grass was too green and Mrs. Kents smile was too bright. Bruce was like a black hole that sucked all color and light out of everything he touched. He didn’t want to come. He’d tried to tell Alfred but the butler had insisted. 

“Come on dear. Why don’t we go put your stuff up in Clark’s room.” Mrs. Kent wiped her flour dusted hands on her white apron, then removed it to hang from a hook on the wall perpendicular to the cupboards. 

Bruce clutched his bags tighter. “It’s okay Mrs. Kent. I know where Clark’s room is. I can carry these myself.” He was only staying for the weekend, but between the things he thought he might need and the things Alfred insisted he take, they had managed to pack two moderate sized duffle bags.

“Oh nonsense! Those bags look heavy.” She reached for the black and blue bag containing his books and a small first aid kit, sliding it off his arm and into her own and effectively ending any arguments. Bruce followed her up the stairs past family photos - the Kent's wedding photo, a baby picture of Clark, and a family photo of all three of them a few years back. “Clark should be back from school soon and then you boys can play outside until dinner time.” Mrs. Kent went downstairs and Bruce put away his things which only took a few minutes as it mostly consisted of putting his suitcases under the bottom bunk. He was sitting on the floor reading - The Hounds of Baskerville - when a breeze ruffled his hair and flipped half the pages over, causing him to lose his place. 

“Clark! No superspeed in the house!” Mrs. Kent’s voice floated up the stairs, the end of her sentence reaching his ears at the same time Clark did. 

“Bruce! You’re here!” 

“Hello Clark” Bruce said as he calmly closed his book and placed it on the bed. Then stood up. Clark reached out to give him a hug. He usually tolerated Clark’s typical embrace of greeting, sometimes even returning it, but his skin felt thin and brittle like a touch might break the surface and let the poison beating in his veins burst, so he carefully sidestepped it. Clark frowned briefly, but quickly brushed it off, putting a huge grin back on his face.

“I got a new baseball and catcher's mitt. You wanna go outside and practice?” Bruce almost said yes automatically. Practicing with Clark sounded fun, but he picked his book back up and sat on the bed. 

“I was actually in the middle of something Clark.” Though he started reading he could make out Clark’s look of hurt in his peripheral. He tried to ignore the tightening in his chest as his darkness cast its shadow on his best friend, despite his best efforts. 

“Well okay then.” Clarks chipper voice sounded more forced than earlier. “I have homework I should probably get started on anyway. Bruce only hummed in response. Despite Clark’s best efforts, they remained relatively silent until dinner during which Bruce said as few words as possible. Mr. and Mrs. Kent, normally inquisitive in their friendliness, didn’t push him and Bruce knew by the look they shared when they thought he wasn’t looking, that Alfred had told them the real reason for his forced visit. And he could feel their pity. Or maybe it was scorn. Maybe Alfred had told them about the black hole, how his darkness sucked every bit of light in. He knew Alfred knew. It was why he’d sent him away. He tried to force the thoughts away. Clark at least liked him but how long would it take him to figure it out too. 

Bruce barely finished the food on his plate despite Mrs. Kent’s gentle encouragement and afterwards he followed her into the kitchen to help clean up. He washed dishes while Clark dried. The water was too hot but he didn’t turn it down, scrubbing the dishes with a focused intensity, determined to get every spot off. Mrs. Kent’s and Clark’s cheerful chatter became a faint buzz in his ears. He only faintly registered when their tones turned to concern. 

“Bruce.” Mrs. Kent called his name sharply bringing him back to reality. He stared at the shattered glass in his hand for a moment, uncomprehending. His eyes drifted to the blood now seeping out of his hands. He closed his eyes and the image of blood in a dark alleyway came forth unbidden. He was shaking now and he squeezed his eyelids shut tighter, trying to force the image away. There was a warm hand on his shoulder and he opened his eyes to meet Mrs. Kent’s concerned blue ones. “Bruce. Honey. I’m going to take the glass okay.” Bruce nodded and she carefully grabbed the pieces in a towel and tossed them into the trash can underneath the counter. Just then Clark came careening in (at a normal speed) a gray plastic case clutched in one hand.

“Ma. I got the first aid kit.” He handed it over as if it were going to explode in his hands. His eyes darted back and forth between Bruce and Mrs. Kent as if unsure what to do.  Bruce knew with certainty that this was the moment that he’d been dreading, when Clark would finally realize what kind of person he was - the kind that couldn’t help but break things and hurt himself and other people - and decided he couldn’t be friends with him anymore.

“Clark.” Mrs. Kent opened the kit on the counter and started rummaging through it. “Why don’t you go help your father outside.”

“But Ma! Bruce-”

“Now Clark.” Mrs. Kent didn’t raise her voice in volume but her tone didn’t allow for any argument. Clark glared, eyes narrowed in a look of fury Bruce had never seen on Clark’s face before, but he left, casting one more glance over his shoulder before walking out the door. 

Mrs. Kent had poured rubbing alcohol on a cotton ball, which she held in one hand, and she gently took hold of his bleeding hand in her free one. “I’m going to clean up your cut but it's going to sting a little okay?” Bruce nodded in response and Mrs. Kent started dabbing at his cut, wiping the blood away. It did sting a little but he didn’t make a sound. 

When he opened his mouth a little bit after she started cleaning his hands, what came out of his mouth surprised him. “Clark’s mad at me.”

Mrs. Kent looked up at him in surprise. “No dear. He’s mad at me because I made him leave. He’s worried about you.”

“Alfred’s mad at me too.”

Bruce thought that she would immediately contradict him, but she finished wrapping his hand in a bandage. Then she looked him straight in the eyes, her own eyes full of concern and kindness. “Why do you think Alfred’s mad at you? Did you get in a fight? Did he tell you he was angry with you?”

Bruce looked away from Mrs. Kents persistently kind gaze and studied his newly bandaged hand as intensely as if it had been cut off and grown back, instead of just being disinfected. “He didn’t have to tell me. He’s angry and sick of me. That’s why he sent me away. He doesn’t want to deal with me anymore.”

“Bruce if you’re feeling like this you should tell Alfred. I don’t want to speak for him but I will say that anyone who knows him knows that he cares about you. He wanted you to come for a visit-” She put a careful emphasis on the word visit. “Because he’s worried about you. He thought it might be good for you to be somewhere different with friends.”

“It’s not. Being here doesn’t make me forget. I can’t just pretend I’m okay.” Every word shook with a fury he was familiar with, but still didn’t understand, that he couldn’t quite control but instead of getting louder his voice only got softer until it dropped almost too low to be audible. He raised a shaking hand to wipe off a tear that had escaped from his eye.

Mrs. Kent knelt down and placed her hands on Bruce’s shoulders.. “No one is asking you to be okay Bruce and you never have to pretend here. You don’t have to forget, but there is a difference between living with grief and living in it. Sometimes being somewhere different, especially during times when it’s harder not to dwell and get stuck, can give you some room to breathe. You don’t have to forget, but it's okay to think about other things and the other people that you care about.” Bruce was crying in earnest now, silent sobs shaking his shoulders as tears streamed down his face. “If you truly think you’ll be better off at the Manor we can call Alfred to come pick you up tomorrow. But think about it seriously Bruce and make what decision you think is best for you okay?”

Bruce thought as his sobs slowed, as he wiped the tears off his face with the sleeve of his shirt, and then he thought about it for a few minutes more, frowning as he stared down at the tiles on the floor. He enjoyed being at the Kent’s house and on a normal week he would have been looking forward to the visit for weeks leading up to it. Maybe it would be good to be here instead of at the Manor where everywhere he turned he saw all the ways his parents were missing, all the places they should be which perhaps was not what he needed during the anniversary of their deaths. “I want to-” He stopped, his voice sounded foreign and ancient to his own ears. He cleared his throat in an attempt to dislodge the cobwebs that seem to have resided there. “I want to stay here. If that’s okay?” The question came out uncertain. Maybe she was already regretting being so nice to him and offering to let him stay.

Her warm smile banished that fear. “Of course it's okay sweetie. We don’t make it a habit of inviting people we don’t want to stay.” She teases, placing a hand on his cheek. “But you Bruce, you’re always welcome here anytime you want or need. Okay?”

Bruce nods. “Thank you Mrs. Kent.”

“Of course sweetie. Now you can stay in here and help me in the kitchen if you want, but I’m sure Clark is worried about you so whenever you’re ready you can go outside.”

“I’m ready.” Bruce said.

“All right then. Go tell Clark I said he’s free from chores for the rest of the evening so you  boys can go and play.” 

Bruce stepped outside and took a deep breath of fresh air. He pushed all his negative emotions, his anger and fear and other things he’s not sure he can name, into his lungs and imagined them sitting there, turning the fresh air black. Then he lets the breath out, releasing them out into the world to be carried off by the cool breeze. It didn’t make all the feelings disappear, but it helped a little. He started headed toward the barn just as Clark was coming out. He couldn’t have been out there more than twenty minutes, but had already managed to get dirt all over his hands and some across his forehead and rip open the right knee of his jeans. As soon as Clark saw him, which was almost instantly, he supersped over to stand right in front of Bruce.

“You okay Bruce?” Clark asked, an anxious tilt to his lips as he looked Bruce up and down, as if assessing his condition. “How’s your hand?”

“Your mother bandaged it.” He answered, holding up his hand so Clark could see.

“And how are you? You seemed upset.”

Bruce didn’t answer for a moment, trying to find the right way to explain what he was feeling, but it was a complicated, nebulous mass that slipped out of the grasp of words. He grabbed at the center of it instead. “My parents,” He stopped. “On Monday. It’s the anniversary-” He stopped again. It was harder to say than he had thought, but fortunately Clark seemed to catch on to what he was saying. 

“I know. My ma told me. That’s why you’re upset.” It wasn’t a question exactly, but said it in a way that allowed him to speak or to remain silent. 

“Last year I didn’t leave the Manor for the entire week and I visited their graves every day.”

“Are you upset? Because you can’t do that this year?” Clark’s tone was more curious and he drew back a bit as soon as the question was out of his mouth, as if he wasn't sure that was the right thing to say.

Bruce didn’t mind the question. They didn’t talk often about his parents or their feelings often, but Bruce found that when they did Clark’s questions often helped him process what he was feeling. “I was.” He admitted. “But I’ll visit them Monday. For now I’ll stay here.” Bruce wasn’t sure if that made sense, if it accurately expressed his desire to try and let himself breathe a bit like Mrs. Kent had said, but the answer seemed to satisfy Clark who nodded. They stood there in the quiet for a little bit longer, a silent understanding between them that Bruce didn’t think he would ever be able to put into words, before they went to go find the ball, bat, and catcher’s mitt for a game of baseball that lasted until it was time for bed.

[fishfingersandjellybabies]

Unreal - unforgiven series

Characters: Dick Grayson, Tim Drake, Damian Wayne, bits of Bruce and Barbara Summary: None of this was real, so he needed to focus on the only thing that was. A/N: Dick is obviously Nightwing and masked up throughout this, even in the apartment. The ‘demons in his ear’ is his communicator to Batman and the family. The driver never sees Dick, or hears Damian shout his name, so his identity is still safe. Sorry this is like 50 years late. A few days after Unacceptable. 

Unforgiven series.

~~

“…I think it’s time you and I talked.”

He kept that in his mind, that sentence. Kept repeating it. To himself, out loud. In any way he could.

Because he couldn’t. He couldn’t die until he talked to Tim. Until he saw his little brother again. He couldn’t let the fear toxin win until he at least begged for forgiveness in person.

And it shouldn’t have happened, this. He’d been vaccinated against every strand of toxin, serum and poison known to man. But Jonathan Crane was still smarter than them, objectively. Kept easily making more, differently, thanks to that degree of his. He was still a doctor, even if he was using it for evil.

But still – Dick was trained. Dick was used to this. Yes, he’d been hit. Yes, he was affected. But he was still lucid enough to be aware of what it was. Knew the hallucinations around him of blood and death and loneliness were fake.

He just had to keep Tim’s voice in his mind.

The gas still was doing its job though, and Dick fought against if with everything he had as he ran down the sidewalk. With every repetition of Tim’s decision, his voice was warped. Angry, sad, cold, distant. But Dick had to keep it real. He had to keep Tim’s voice as what it truly was on that phone call.

“…I think it’s time you and I talked.”

Tired, hesitant, warm. That’s what Tim’s voice was. Not angry. Not distant. Tim wasn’t giving up on him, toxin. He wasn’t. He was giving him a chance. A chance he didn’t deserve, but a chance. And he had to make it. So you can’t lie to him, toxin. He had to beat you and see his brother. And he would; there was nothing you could do about it.

He stumbled in his run, slammed into a brick wall. He looked up into the rain, but couldn’t see street signs. Just saw demons overhead, the same demons that were yelling in his ear, trying to talk over Tim.

But Dick smiled, because they couldn’t. His brother’s voice was louder. His chance at redemption was louder.

He looked back to the sidewalk. It was covered in blood and dead bodies. People he knew. Donna, Wally, Bruce, Clark, Roy, Dinah. But they weren’t real. Of course they weren’t. So he splashed through the blood. Kept on running.

Beside the thought of Tim’s voice, he realized he didn’t have a destination. Or, at least, his mind didn’t. His body seemed to know where it was going. And even if it didn’t, Dick was too weak to tell his body to stop. So he just let it go.

Because along with seeing Tim again – he still had to escape the bad guys. He’d almost forgotten about that part.

Still, as more time went on, his body started to wear down, and the pain of his muscles began to be louder than the shrieks and whines around him. Began to appear in his eyes, literally. Bubble letters in front of him appeared with every stomp of his foot. Ow! Pain! Hurt! Ouchie! Stop! You’re killing me! You’re killing yourself! Pain! Pain! PAIN!

“Tim…” He breathed out, and his lungs ached. But he couldn’t stop. He had to get there, even though he didn’t know where there was. He had to go. He had to escape. He: “…gotta talk to Tim…my…”

He stumbled again, tripped over a curb and went sprawling into the gutter. He heard the blood swish around him as his spine slammed against the pavement. Felt it hit him, but knew he was dry. Knew, if there was liquid, that it was the dirty rainwater of Gotham City.

His body still wanted to move. His mind was still supplying him with fake terror and images. His heart was in overdrive. He couldn’t breathe. The blood-water rain hitting his face was not cooling him. But he had to go. He had to-

“Grayson?”

The voice was like an angel, almost as sweet as Tim’s and that hope that he could still fix one of his greatest mistakes.

His head jerked to the side, face bouncing off the curb he’d tripped over, and it was like magic.

There was a bubble in front of him. A normal scene untouched by the demons and death and shrieks. There was no blood on the ground, or falling from the sky. It was just rain. Just water hitting an umbrella, and snapping off the side of an open car door.

And under the umbrella was his youngest brothers. Was Damian and Tim.

It was Damian who had spoken. Damian, who was stepping away from the car he was about to get into, out of the safety of the umbrella, and Tim’s arm.

Dick said his brother’s name. Or tried to. He felt his mouth move, but all he heard was a rasping gurgle, and suddenly Damian was running to him.

“Grayson,” Damian whispered, first jumping from the sidewalk to drop to his knees in the street. There was another splash, and this time Dick felt it. Felt the water – not blood, not blood, not blood – hit him on the chest. An arm wrapped around the back of his neck, and suddenly he was being held to a tiny chest. “Grayson, breathe. Please, breathe for me.”

Dick blinked, and looked up into the sky again as his body relaxed into the hold.

Oh. This is where he was going.

Tim and Damian’s apartment building.

“Grayson, what happened?” Damian hissed, brushing the water or blood or vomit – whatever – off his face. He felt Damian’s hand run down his body, and hit the injuries that were very much real. “Your eyes are dilated. Your heart rate is spiking…”

“Fear toxin.” Dick’s head spun around on instinct. Tim and his umbrella was standing over him. His hair was sticking to his face – he was holding the umbrella over him and Damian instead of himself. And the fear told him Tim would look furious. Be furious. Would hate him and leave him here to die, while dragging Damian away from him forever. But instead, Tim was still in that bubble of normal. Still Dick’s saving grace in this madness, along with Damian. His eyes were calculating and thoughtful. But most of all – they were worried. “It looks like he’s been hit with one hell of a dose, too.”

“Sirs!” Dick glanced past Tim’s bent body. A driver had appeared out of the car. And objectively, Dick knew it was just a man. But right now, he looked like a werewolf, with blood and bits of meat hanging from his teeth. “The gala is starting soon. The two of you cannot be late again-”

“We’re not going.” Tim said over his shoulders. “Send our regards.”

“What?” The driver spluttered. It came out as an inhuman growl, and his eyes glowed red. Dick felt himself give out another groan in panic. “B-but Mr. Drake, you said…what…what are you boys doing over there…?”

“I said we’re not going.” Tim stood and turned to face the driver. “Send my sincerest apologies to the board, but something’s come up.”

“But-”

“It’s a family matter.” Tim said simply. Dick heard Damian murmuring to him, but couldn’t make out the words. He did notice now, though, that Damian was dressed nicely. As was Tim. In their fanciest tuxedos. “Now, I apologize for dragging you out here on such a terrible night, but please go.”

There was a pause, and then a huff. Then the sound of a door slamming closed, followed by a car driving away.

Suddenly there was a hand on his face, gentle and warm. And Tim’s voice – his real voice – was right there.

“We need to get him inside.” Tim hummed softly. Instantly there was another arm around his neck, and one slipping under his knees. “I’ll carry him. You take the umbrella and get the doors.”

Damian’s presence disappeared, and Dick almost cried, because that probably meant Damian was being taken from him forever. But then there was a noise, and he was being lifted, slumping into Tim’s chest.

“Don’t fall asleep just yet, Dick.” Tim grunted as they started to move. “You’re dead weight enough. If you become actual dead weight, I don’t know how we’re going to get you upstairs safely.”

Dick felt himself let out a sob as he reached up and clung to Tim’s collar. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Tim. I know I fucked up. I-I know…”

“Later.” Tim said softly. “Let’s just get your fixed up for now, okay Dick?”

Under the continuing wails and shouts that his mind was supplying, he heard the ding of an elevator, then the sound of their doors opening. He didn’t feel Tim step in, but he felt Damian gently grab his hand, and hold it as the lift moved upwards.

And even though he was trembling, from panic and fear and the rain, he felt a sense of peace wash over him, under the devils and demons. Because here he was, with Tim and Damian.

And that was all he wanted.

He closed his eyes, in what felt was a blink, but when he reopened them, they were no longer in the elevator. In fact, they were already back in the loft, and Tim was lowering him onto a bed.

“Go call Bruce.” Tim said to Damian. Damian nodded and sprinted away as Tim grabbed a first aid kit and sat on the edge of the bed, placing it on his lap and opening it. Dick opened his mouth, but Tim immediately waved him off. Smiled, as he hummed, “Later, Dick. When the drugs wear off.”

Dick allowed himself a small whimper before following Tim’s instructions. Settling back as Tim began to clean and stitch everything up.

It was only five, maybe ten, minutes later when Damian suddenly called from the kitchen.

“Drake!” Damian yelled. Dick thought he heard a roar from a wild animal after it, but squeezed his eyes shut against the idea. “We’ve got a problem!”

Tim smiled and rolled his eyes. “Be right back, Dick. Try to get some sleep in the meantime, okay?”

Dick didn’t respond. Kept his eyes closed, and took a deep breath, trying to drown out the toxin’s tricks. And he didn’t have to bring up a memory of Tim’s voice this time.

Because he could hear him talking in the kitchen…talking to Damian…Damian talking back…Damian’s dog barking…suddenly a crash…

Wait…

His brows furrowed and he tried to open his eyes, but it was already too late, and he was tumbling into darkness as he heard his brothers shout out.

~~

When he came to, he was already lurching upwards, like his body was completing an unfinished thought.

“Tim!” He screamed. Silence followed, and, as he jumped from the bed, it was an afterthought that the toxin appeared to have worn off. No more shrieks. No more wailing. No more demons and blood and death.

Or at least, no more hallucinations of it.

“Damian!” He continued, stumbling into the living room. He froze in the doorway, heart dropping at the scene.

It was ransacked. Everything was upturned or broken. T here were bullet holes and knife marks. The couch cushions were slashed. Damian’s tuxedo jacket was on the floor. Tim’s torn bowtie was on the kitchen island. Titus was curled up in the corner, covered with a blanket, bandages already across his legs and body, looking haunted.

There was blood on the floor. A large blotch of it. Batman was staring down at it.

“What happened?” Dick near begged. He couldn’t get closer. He couldn’t. “Whose…whose is that?”

Please be the bad guy’s. He prayed. Please be Crane’s, or one of his thug’s.

“Damian’s.” Oracle whispered from the communicator in his ear. Batman’s tightening fist confirmed her statement. “Security footage shows he took a few hits from a knife trying to block the hallway that led to you.” A pause. “…Tim’s is in the kitchen, and there’s a trail leading back to the window. He was shot in the leg.”

“…No.” Dick breathed.

“It was Crane.” Bruce said monotonously, knowing Dick already assumed that. “You weren’t able to get far enough away in your state, and they were able to follow you. Saw the boys bring you in. Came in through the window to get you. Tim and Damian tried to protect you, so Crane took them instead.”

“He took them?!” Dick demanded.

“Well, they’re not here. And there’s…there’s no bodies.” Bruce muttered, like just the idea of his sons being dead pained him. “So it’s the only theory we have.”

“Why?” Dick continued. “What would he gain?”

“Well, they helped you.” Barbara said thoughtfully. “And Scarecrow’s always looking for new test subjects. Not to mention, I think Crane ended up recognizing them as Bruce Wayne’s sons. Might get something he wants for their safe return.”

“No.” Dick hissed. “No, he won’t get shit but the worst ass kicking I can give.”

Bruce looked up now. Pitifully said, “Dick…”

“I know. I know, okay?” Dick snapped in frustration. In pure and blatant fear. “I know this is my fault. I know they were taken and hurt because of me, but I’m going to go after them right now, and I’m going to fix it.”

And he tried to make it look like he was kneeling, but really, he was collapsing. Falling beside that puddle of his littlest brother’s blood – spilled to protect him, even when he was estranged, because he’d hurt them already, before all this happened. Because he’d abandoned them.

Well, he wouldn’t abandon them now. At this point, forgiveness and amends were the last thing on his mind. The only thing on his mind was getting his brothers back, even if it was the last thing he ever did. Even if they still hated him afterwards.

He reached out, and pressed his fingers into the blood. The oversaturated carpet seeped, and red ran over his gloves. He let his mind wander back to his toxin-induced state, and the image of Tim and Damian under that umbrella, untouched by the darkness.

He curled his now-bloody hand into a fist and whispered angrily to himself: “I’m going to fix this.”

[camsthisky]

Break Me Down and Build Me Up

< day 3 | day 5 >

This is day 4 of the 30 Day writing challenge, but it turned into a massive mess. It’s 7k+ and I might come back to it and clean it up a little later.

Prompts are listed here.

4. Write the worst possible way that your (BR)OTP could have met

Summary: What if Robin: Year One took place in the Young Justice world? A story how Robin and Kid Flash first meet. (This does differ a lot from the comic)

This wasn’t the worst possible way they could have met, so I didn’t quite fulfill the prompt. I had when i first wrote it, but four rewrites later and the story had changed quite a bit.

ao3 | ff.net

There was blood dripping into Dick’s eyes from his forehead, but all he could do was squeeze them shut. He couldn’t move his arms, couldn’t move his body. He hurt, he hurt so much that it was almost unbearable, but worst of all were the images. Two-Face bearing down on him with a baseball bat, Judge Watkins dropped to his death.

Dick just wanted to cry into Bruce’s arms and pretend that none of this had ever happened.

“Hang in there, Robin,” Bruce murmured, and Dick couldn’t help but cry out when someone lifted him up, his cape wrapped around him like a blanket. Bruce was carrying him, he realized, taking him away from this horrible place, from the man he’d just killed, from the man who’d almost killed him, and Dick’s breath hitched in his throat.

He didn’t deserve to have Bruce’s arms cradling him like this. He deserved to drown with the judge he’d just sentenced to die because he’d thought he could outsmart Two-Face, and he’d been wrong. He’d never been so wrong in his life.

“Stay with me, Dick,” Bruce demanded, and Dick felt it with every pain in his body as Bruce set him in the backseat of the Batmobile. “Just—keep breathing. Don’t die.”

Dick would keep breathing. For Bruce, if for no one else.

Dick woke up sobbing. Okay, so he wasn’t quite awake, awake, but he was coherent enough to realize that his whole body was on fire, the pain so fierce that he could barely breathe, and all he wanted, all he needed, was Bruce.

Where was Bruce?

“Here,” Bruce said, and when Dick opened his eyes, Bruce really was there, holding Dick’s hand with a death grip, sitting next to Dick’s bedside, and Dick sobbed harder—in relief this time. Thank God. Thank God. “I’m here, Dick. I’m right here.”

And that was enough.

The next time Dick woke up, it was with a bit more coherency. He was in his bedroom, he was alive, and Bruce wasn’t there. There was a muted pain humming just underneath his skin, and he thought he should probably be in more pain than he was in, at the moment. That question was answered when he turned his head slightly to the left and spotted the IV.

Pain killers. Of course.

Dick wondered if that meant Leslie had been by. Probably. Dick’s last memories of being awake were tinged with the red burning of indescribably pain that even a miracle butler couldn’t quench on his own. So, he couldn’t say for sure, but it definitely wouldn’t surprise him.

The door opened then, interrupting Dick’s attempt to figure his thoughts out, and Dick heard a few soft footsteps that could only be one person. Bruce paused when he saw that Dick was awake, and Dick tilted his head towards him—the furthest he could without making the pain sing in his veins, that is.

(It wasn’t very far.)

“Dick,” Bruce said, and his voice was thick with grief that Dick didn’t quite understand, because Bruce was the one who had told him to stay alive. He wasn’t dead, so Bruce shouldn’t look like that.

“Wha—?” Dick tried to ask, but he cut off in a hoarse cough. His throat was sore, swollen, and he couldn’t manage to get the words out. Bruce patiently helped him drink from a glass of water with a bendy straw in it. But when he was finished, when Dick opened his mouth to speak again, Bruce interrupted him.

“You shouldn’t speak,” Bruce said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Alfred had to intubate you.”

Oh.

He blinked, but his eyelids were heavier than normal when he tried, and he ended up with his eyes half-open. Bruce noticed, and he sent Dick a sad smile, tinged with bitterness and grief at the very edges, and Dick wished that he could stay awake, that he could talk so he could understand why Bruce looked like he’d just lost someone again.

“Go back to sleep, Dick,” Bruce told him, brushing his hair back. “I’ll be here when you wake up again.”

“—of all times to not pick up—oh. Hi.”

Wally peered over the top of the couch to where Uncle Barry was sitting at the dining room table. The TV was on mute, since Barry had told him he needed to make a “work” call. Yeah, Wally wasn’t stupid enough to believe Barry was calling anyone from the CCPD, especially since Barry was using a phone Wally had never seen before.

“I need your—wait. What? What happened?”

Wally wondered which superhero Barry was talking to, though, because his uncle looked super pale. Like he was about to pass out, and Wally didn’t like the look of it.

“Well, is he okay?” Barry asked the person on the phone. He paled even further at whatever answer he received, if that was even possible. “Hell. Do you know how long it’s going to take for him to recover, at least?” There was another pause, this one at least twice as long as the one before, and then Barry was speaking again. “Is there anything I can do? No, it’s not urgent. I just needed your computer to look up someone’s identity, is all. I’ll ask Clark, instead.”

Wally tuned out, not really interest in the rest of Barry’s conversation. He didn’t know who Clark was, and he didn’t know who was hurt, but Barry was going to put him on the backburner during runs if Wally interrupted another “work” call.

And if by the time Barry got off the phone Wally forgot to ask about it, well, that could all be put down to his stomach. He was curious, but he was also starving.

Bruce wasn’t there when Dick woke up again, even though he said he would be, and Dick had to push away the stab of betrayal, because he didn’t even know how long he’d been asleep. Maybe Bruce was in the bathroom, or eating dinner, or even patrol. Dick didn’t know the circumstances, and he wouldn’t think the worst of one of his most important people.

So Dick sat there for a few hours, waiting for Bruce to come back, but when the sun peeked through his curtains, Dick couldn’t take it anymore. He’d go find Bruce himself if he had to. There was no way he could sit there staring at the ceiling any longer.

He pushed himself into a sitting position slowly, careful not to jostle anything. His chest was completely swathed in bandages, his right arm was in a brace, his head was wrapped, and he felt like one big giant bruise. On top of that, Dick didn’t want to ruin whatever careful work Leslie and Alfred had done to save him. It was only when he was sitting up that he pulled the IV out with a slight wince, and then slowly started the process of getting out of bed.

It was just as he had stood upright that Dick’s door opened, and then a voice cried, “What are you doing?”

Dick blinked up at a pale Bruce, and sure, he was swaying a little, but he’d gotten to his feet with minimal damage, and it didn’t hurt that much. Dick was just about to tell that to Bruce, too, but the swaying turned into falling without his permission. Bruce dove forward, catching Dick just before he could fall forward and crack his head on his own bedroom floor.

“What the hell were you even thinking? “Bruce asked, and he sounded angry, just the barest undertones of worry in his voice. “You’re not in any shape to be out of bed, Dick!”

“I was fine,” Dick argued as Bruce tucked him back into bed, resolutely not telling Bruce that he’d only been up to find him. “Besides, I’ve been up for hours. It was just going to be a stroll around the bedroom.”

“Not until Leslie takes you off bedrest,” Bruce snapped.

Dick huffed, watching as, despite Bruce’s harsh word, he refitted the IV into the cannula as gently as possible. “I’m okay,” Dick said. “I promise.”

Bruce’s gaze snapped to his, his dark eyes glinting. “You’re not okay,” he growled. “Not even a week ago, you were lying downstairs in the Cave dying, Dick. You’ve been in a coma for days, and it’s only been two days since Leslie said that you were stable enough to move to your bedroom. That is not okay.”

Dick was taken aback. “But I will be okay. Just give me a few weeks and I’ll be swinging from buildings better than even before!”

“No, you won’t,” Bruce told him, a cold finality to his words that had Dick’s stomach sinking to his feet. “As long as I have something to do with it, you won’t be going out there again.”

Dick couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t draw in any oxygen, and his chest was so still that he feared that this was all some weird hallucination of death. To be tortured with his worst fears as he lay dying in the real world, because Bruce would never do that to him. He knew how much Robin meant to Dick, so he would never snatch it away.

“What are you saying?” Dick croaked out.

Bruce met his eyes, and Dick searched for some sort of sign that this was all some kind of sick joke—but no. Bruce looked nothing but cold as he broke Dick’s heart in half.

“Robin is finished,” Bruce told him, and Dick finally took a breath and proved that this was reality. He was alive, and this was really happening. Robin was being snatched from his very hands. “You’re fired.”

Dick didn’t speak again. He dropped his head, he gritted his teeth, and he cried silently. Bruce got up from his chair and left the room, left Dick, and Dick couldn’t understand why this was happening to him. First, he’d bargained Judge Watkins’ life and lost, then Two-Face had almost killed him, and now Bruce didn’t want Robin anymore, didn’t want him anymore?

How was any of that fair?! He’d already lost his parents, his home. He’d lost it already once, and now it felt like it was being taken away once again. One mistake. That was all it had taken, and now, Robin was finished.

Batman didn’t need him, and neither did Bruce.

“What?!” Barry yelled, startlingly Wally from his phone. From the other couch, even Iris looked bewildered, and they both looked over to the door Barry had just walked in, talking into his superhero phone. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Why would you do that?!”

Wally met his aunt’s eyes worriedly, because Barry sounded really stressed, and not in a good way. It was the same tone he used when the whole planet was about to get blown up or something. Wally wondered, not for the first time, if he could go with.

Probably not. Barry had a list of things of things he was allowed to do as Kid Flash barring some emergency—the same one that Robin had used when he first started out, if a little modified to adjust for Wally’s powers.

“No,” Barry hissed, and was that venom in his voice. Just who was he talking to? “No. No way in hell. Go talk to him and apologize for being a fucking ass before you lose him. He’ll forgive you, even if he shouldn’t.”

Woah. Barry didn’t swear. Like, ever. And here he was, so angry that he was cursing into his phone. Over apologizing? Wally was definitely missing the context of this.

Barry sighed into the phone, the tension falling from his shoulders as he plopped on the couch next to Iris. Wally’s aunt moved her laptop to the coffee table and intertwined her fingers with Barry’s free hand, and all Wally could do was watch. He hadn’t realized how tired Barry looked before.

“Of course I think he’s going to run away!” Barry snapped suddenly, sitting up ramrod straight and glaring at the floor. “He’s an eleven year old boy, and you just shattered his whole world! God, push past your ego for two seconds and go tell him you’re—he hung up on me!”

Barry stared at the phone in disbelief, his eyes moving to meet Iris’ gaze.

“He just hung up on me!”

“I don’t know what’s going on, Barry,” Iris reminded him gently, “and I can’t help you unless you tell me.”

“Is everything okay?” Wally asked hesitantly. “I mean,” he tried again when Barry’s weary eyes settled on him, “that didn’t sound too good, but not it’s not, like, the end of the world, is it?”

Barry slumped back into the couch again. “It might as well be,” Barry sighed, “because Batman just lost his partner.”

Iris paled and Wally sucked in a sharp breath. “You don’t mean…?”

Barry’s eyes widened, and he seemed to realize that he’d just implied that Robin was dead, and he waved his hands frantically in an attempt to backtrack. “No, no. It’s not—I mean, it was a close call, but that was over a week ago, and he’s been stable for a few days now.”

“So what did you mean, then?” Iris asked, and she looked concerned.

Barry looked grim, and he didn’t meet anyone’s eyes when he said, “Batman fired Robin.”

“You’re kidding,” Wally said. Then a sudden fear swept over him, because—because— “You’re not going to me, right? Fire me, I mean?”

“No!” Barry said, standing up and running a hand down his face. “God, no. Wally, you’ve got to believe me. I didn’t force you into this. This was your own decision, and I know I could never force you out of it. It’s your choice.”

Wally let his shoulders slump in relief. “Oh, thank goodness.”

“So what does that mean for Robin?” Iris wondered, her eyebrows furrowing. “Batman just decided that he’s done, so he’s done?”

“It’s complicated,” Barry said. “Of course he’s not going to roll over and take this, but he can barely move right now, and from what I heard, Batman and Robin weren’t able to save a hostage during the last fight, either. He’s not in any shape to fight for his costume, right now, and the longer that Batman sits on this decision, the more stubborn he’s going to get.”

“You said Robin was going to run away,” Wally breathed, his eyes wide. “Will he?”

“Probably. When he can move.”

“So what do can we do?” Iris asked.

Barry looked defeated. “For now? Nothing.” And it looked like it physically pained him to say it.

Well, Wally supposed he would have to take Barry’s word for it, because short of going to Gotham and finding the two people that most people in the city they protect had never seen, Wally wasn’t sure what he could do.

So, he did nothing, and he hated how helpless it made him feel.

Finally, finally, Leslie approved Dick for physical therapy, and Dick put his heart and soul into it. He hadn’t quite pushed past that feeling of feeling like Bruce didn’t think he was good enough, but Dick had a plan now. He’d get fit enough to go out as Robin again, and he would go out.

He’d done it before. He’d struck out on his own while searching for Zucco, so why not now, when he was properly trained? He’d prove to Bruce—to Batman­—that he could handle being Robin, that it was a mistake to fire Robin.

In the meantime, though, he and Bruce were on pins and needles. Neither of them talked to each other, only Alfred, and Dick did his best not to be angry. Bruce just didn’t think Robin was good enough to be Batman’s partner, but Dick would show him.

It was a Thursday morning, just a week after Bruce had fired Robin, that Dick decided he couldn’t wait a minute longer. He was still a mess of bruises, and the brace wasn’t coming off anytime soon, but the sooner he got out of Bruce’s way and figured out what he was going to do, the sooner that he could prove his worth. He could already do a double-flip, after all. He was okay enough to do this.

So while Bruce was at work for an emergency meeting with Lucius, and Dick packed a bag, walked to the nearest zeta tube, and then he was gone, the only trace of him left behind a note to Bruce.

He could do this. He would prove himself.

Barry’s phone was ringing. It was the third time in the past ten minutes, and Barry was currently laid up in bed after a nasty encounter with a robber. Wally hesitated to answer it, though, because it was Barry’s “work” phone, and Wally wasn’t sure who’d be on the other line.

Whoever it was, they were persistent, and Wally wondered if there was something catastrophic going on. If that was the case, they had to know that Barry was too hurt to help them, and if they really needed a speedster, he would offer his services. He was pretty sure that this would count as one of those emergency times, and the list didn’t matter all that much.

He answered the call.

“Where is he?” a voice growled in his ear, and Wally froze, because that didn’t sound like a superhero at all. That was—Was that a villain? Had someone figured out how to contact the superhero cell phones? “Answer me! Where’s Robin?”

Oh. Oh. Wally let out a relieved breath, because he got it now.

“Uh, Batman?” Wally started, unsure how he was supposed to address the scariest hero in the Justice League. “Flash is hurt, so he can’t talk right now.”

There was a pause, and Wally waited nervously for Batman to start talking again. God, this was nerve wracking. From just the few words exchanged with the Dark Knight, Wally’s knees were starting to shake, and he couldn’t imagine what it would be like for Robin to work with Batman all the time.

“Kid Flash, I presume,” Batman said, a touch calmer than before. “Is Robin with you or the Flash?”

“Uh, not that I know of,” Wally sighed. “Can I ask why?”

“No,” Batman said, and then he hung up, apparently having gotten all the information he needed. Wally stared at the phone for a few minutes, and then gingerly set it down on the coffee table, because he could probably go a thousand years without hearing that growly voice and it’d still be too long.

“Thanks for that.”

“HOLY—” Wally jumped back and looked at the ceiling where there—holy shit. Robin was hanging from the ceiling like some kind of spider. There wasn’t even anything there. How was he even staying there?! Wally thought that Robin didn’t have any powers. “What the hell, man?”

Robin shot him a sheepish small and dropped down to the floor like a normal person—not that Wally was normal, but at least he didn’t hang from the ceiling like sort of ninja.

“Sorry,” Robin said, straightening up, and Wally realized that Robin looked really small. Didn’t Barry say that Robin was eleven? He looked more like nine or ten. Robin dropped down on the couch and sighed. “Man, that was a close call.”

Wally blinked. “What was?”

“The call.”

“Oh,” Wally said, realizing what Robin was talking about. “You’re—Batman’s looking for you.”

“I know,” Robin said, and he said it so easily, like he was so unaffected, that Wally was thrown for a loop. Because even running away, Wally didn’t think he would not feel anything if he heard that Barry was looking for him.

“What’s your problem?” Wally asked, feeling a little heated, because no one looked that apathetic about running away. They felt something.

Robin tilted his head towards him. “What do you mean?”

“Batman’s looking for you, and you’re acting like you don’t even care!”

“You don’t know me,” Robin told him, his voice calm but his fists clenched, and Wally took a step back, because now he got it. He got how someone like Robin was able to work with the terrifying Bat. He was just like him. “You don’t know anything about me, so how would you know if I cared or not.”

“Well you’re not showing it,” Wally argued.

“Doesn’t mean that I don’t feel it.” Robin relaxed suddenly. “So, the Flash is hurt?”

Wally huffed an annoyed breath. Robin was younger than him, and yet here he was, controlling the entire situation here, and Wally understood what Barry had been complaining about before. About Batman. This kid was kind of annoying, the way he took charge of the conversation, changing the subject like that.

Still, Wally didn’t know how to direct the conversation elsewhere, and he thought that maybe Robin would just go bother Barry if he didn’t get an answer from Wally, so he decided to take the easiest route.

“Yeah,” Wally told him, plopping down on the other couch. “He took a few bullets when he tried to move a group of people out of the way. He just got home like an hour ago.”

“Where were you?”

“At home,” Wally scowled. “It happened at work, so I wasn’t able to get there before he was already shot.”

Robin hummed contemplatively. “Sounds rough. So I guess you’re Kid Flash?”

“Yeah, so what?”

Robin smiled, but it was sort of empty, like he was forcing it on his face, and Wally couldn’t help but shiver. Maybe the ninja thing wasn’t the superpower. Maybe it was that creepy smile. It wouldn’t surprise Wally that just terrifying people was Robin and Batman’s power.

“Nothing, just happy that there’s another kid out there doing the crime fighting thing with me.”

Wally licked his lips. “Barry said that Batman fired you?” Wally asked more than said, and when Robin didn’t say anything, Wally kept going. “You don’t have to answer, but—why? You were the kid that inspired me and Speedy to even become superheroes. Why would Batman think it’s a good idea to fire someone like you?”

“I messed up,” Robin said quietly, and he wasn’t looking at Wally anymore. Or at least, Wally didn’t think he was. Hard to tell with that mask. “Judge Watkins was killed because of me, and Batman had to hurt himself to save me. He doesn’t think I’m good enough to be Robin.”

“So you ran away?” Wally asked, eyebrows furrowing, because this was the realest the kid had been since he’d ninja’d his way in. “What does that solve?”

Robin shrugged. “I was trying to prove to Batman that I could be Robin, with or without him, but I was hoping that I’d have a bit more time. It’s only been a couple of hours, and he’s already trying to track me.”

“Obviously he still cares about what happens to you,” Wally said. “So I don’t get why you don’t just sneak out of the house every night after he’s already gone out. Why run away?”

“I didn’t say he didn’t care about me,” Robin pointed out. He sent Wally a wry smile, like he was trying to laugh at something that used to be funny but tasted bitter at the edges. “As for sneaking out, you don’t know the security B has around the house. Batman’s super paranoid about everything. I’d never make it past the entrance to the Cave.”

“Oh,” Wally said, and he felt kind of sad for the kid. He had to run away in order to prove himself? That sucked. Batman sounded like a real tool. “Well, you can probably stay here for as long as you want. I know Iris won’t mind. Barry might, but he probably won’t even know you’re here until morning.”

“Why?”

“Oh, well speedsters have super fast metabolisms, so Barry’s on a lot of painkillers, right now. You could probably blow an airhorn in his ear and he won’t do much more than smile at you. I’ve tried it before.”

That startled a laugh out of Robin, and Wally smiled. The kid was kind of okay, when he wasn’t being a jerk. And as long as he didn’t put on that air of apathy, Wally didn’t mind hanging around him. Besides, being Batman’s partner had probably done something irreparable to his personality, so Wally didn’t think he should blame Robin too much.

“Well, Rob,” Wally said, clapping his hands. “What say you and I go upstairs and set up a sleeping bag for you?”

Robin, still smiling, stood up. “I’d like that. Thanks.”

“KF?” Wally asked him, standing at the stove with a blank look. The eggs were starting to burn, but Wally looked too out of it to care, so Dick didn’t bring attention to it. “Why KF?”

Dick shrugged. “Well, you gave me a nickname, and Kid Flash is a mouthful, so I shortened it.” Wally seemed to think about it for a second, and Dick supposed that he couldn’t let those eggs burn any more than they already were if he wanted anything edible for breakfast. “Kid Flash. The stove.”

Wally blinked. “The stove…? Oh! The stove!” He turned back around and switched off the gas, saving the eggs just in time. Wally grimaced down at the pan. “Well, I hope you like your eggs super crispy, because those were the only eggs we had in the fridge.”

Dick snickered. “I’m fine with whatever.”

Wally sent him a dark look. “I swear I can cook.”

“I believe you.”

“You don’t!”

“I do, too!” Dick said, grinning. “Just show me later.”

“Fine,” Wally grumbled. “But you’re not allowed to talk to me. You keep distracting me.”

“Who keeps distracting you?” Barry asked, looking not at all shot, and very coherent as he walked into the kitchen. He wrinkled his nose at the burnt eggs smell that permeated the room, and he rushed to open the window. “How the heck did you burn eggs?”

“With great skill,” Wally snapped. “They would have been fine if I hadn’t been distracted.”

Dick sniggered again, and Barry whirled around, catching sight of him sitting on top of the kitchen cabinets, ten feet up in the air. “It’s training,” Dick told him. “You know, multi-tasking. If you can talk and cook at the same time, you can do anything!”

Wally rolled his eyes, scraping the eggs onto two plates. “Yeah, yeah. You and your Bat-training.”

“Dick,” Barry breathed, and both Wally and Dick froze, because uh-oh. Dick was still in his Robin costume for a reason. And that reason had been that he had not told Wally anything about his secret identity. Of course, Barry’s speedster mouth had run ahead and gave Dick away before he could think about it. “Oh, shoot. Sorry, Robin. We’re usually in the Cave when…Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Dick said, jumping to the floor and peeling off his mask, trying not to show how nervous he felt. “I trust you guys.”

Wally was staring at him, two plates of scrambled eggs in his hands. Dick sent Wally a wobbly smile, and Wally sent an equally shaky one back. Then he turned his back on the kitchen and walked into the dining room.

“We should eat breakfast,” Wally announced. “Like, now.”

Dick laughed a little, because who knew that Kid Flash could be so awkward? He followed Wally into the dining room, and settled down in the chair across from Wally. Barry followed him out, looking contrite, but he didn’t look too put out.

When their pretty silent breakfast was over—which Dick and Wally spent the majority making silly faces at each other—Dick followed Wally back upstairs to the guest room (Wally had been staying with Barry and Iris for the past few weeks, but Wally wouldn’t tell Dick why. Which was fine. Dick was already intruding majorly, and he didn’t want to pry into anything Wally didn’t want him to).

“I think I should change,” Dick said, turning to Wally’s closest to pull out the bag he’d hidden in the hamper—which had been empty when he’d put the bag into it, but Dick had just pulled a few clothes over it and it was completely hidden from view.

“When did you hide that?” Wally asked, sounding bewildered.

Robin winced. “Uh, after you fell asleep. I left in the garden before, but I didn’t want anyone to steal it and look through it.”

Wally made a “huh” sound, but he didn’t sound anything other than a little weirded out, so Dick took the opportunity to slip into the bathroom, change into his jeans and hoodie, and slip back out. Wally was changed, too, and they went back downstairs. Wally wasn’t giving his face weird looks anymore, so Dick assumed that Wally had moved on from learning his secret identity.

Either that, or he didn’t recognize Dick. Dick honestly didn’t care about which it was, though. It was just nice to have a friend—at least, he hoped Wally was a friend—his age that he could share his secrets with.

“Why did you do it?” Wally asked quietly a little while later. They were the only ones home right then, since both Iris and Barry had to work, and Wally couldn’t help but be curious about Robin’s life, about his roots. “Why did you become Robin?”

“I’m originally from the circus. An acrobat,” Robin said, and it sounded like he was choosing his words very carefully. “And it was my first show on the trapeze without a net, performing with my parents. This guy, Tony Zucco, was trying to blackmail the ringmaster, scam him, or something. Maybe he wanted money, maybe he wanted something else, I don’t know.”

Robin sounded so miserable remembering, and Wally immediately felt guilty about asking. “Hey,” he said. “If you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to. We’ve all got our origin stories.”

Robin smiled, and even though it was tinged with sadness, it looked real and genuine. “I like you, KF, and I really want to be your friend. I want to tell you. You’d be one of three people who know this story, and I trust you.”

Wally could nod. “Okay. I—I want to be your friend, too.”

“So, Zucco wanted money,” Robin said, and Wally listened intently as Robin recounted the story of how his parents fell to their deaths, of how Bruce Wayne saved him from rotting in a juvenile detention hall, of how he snuck out of the house to avenge his parents. “Batman found me before I could do anything I would regret,” Robin ended. “We caught him, and then we became partners.”

Wally was dumbfounded. “Wow. That’s a lot to take in. Batman is a lot different than the stories I’ve heard about him.”

“Yeah,” Robin agreed. “Bruce can be a lot to handle sometimes, but he’s like a second father to me. We’re partners, you know? We know each other.”

“So why are you running?” Wally asked.

“What do you mean?” Robin asked. “I already said that—”

“I know what you said,” Wally told him. He leaned forward on the couch, eager to make Robin understand this. Maybe impart some wisdom that being two years old could give. “I mean, I’m a speedster. I know all about running. But it just sounds like you’re running from Batman more than you’re trying to prove you can be Robin. Why?”

Robin seemed to think about it, and they sat in silence for a long time. Wally could see the gears turning in Rob’s head, and he wasn’t eager to interrupt him.

“I don’t know,” Robin breathed after a while. “I just—I don’t know.”

He came at night, when Wally was softly snoring on the bed and Dick was just about to fall into a good sleep, even if he still sort of ached and he was sleeping on the floor. It was just a shadow in the window at first, plunging Wally’s room into darkness for a few moments, the streetlight blocked as the shadow search the room.

Dick froze, hardly daring to breathe. He was so glad he was on the other side of Wally’s bed, the furthest from the window. There was no way he could be seen from the window at this angle.

It was only when the light returned to the room that Dick pushed himself to his knees, his heart beating in his chest. It hadn’t even been two days, and he’d already found Dick? Was it a sure thing, or was he just guessing? Covering his bases before he started searching random alleys.

“Wally,” Dick hissed, and Wally’s snoring stuttered to a stop. “Wally!” Dick called again.

“Rob?” Wally murmured into the darkness, squinting over the side of the bed at him. “Wha’s going on?”

“He’s here!”

“Who’s here?”

“Batman!”

“Holy crap,” Wally breathed, sitting upright in his bed. “Where?”

“I don’t know,” Dick said, worried. “He was at the window a little bit ago, but it’s definitely him. I thought I’d be able to swing at least one more day here before he found me, but I think I was a little too naïve.”

Wally sighed. “Look, Rob,” he said, trying to sound all wise again, and Dick struggled to keep a straight face. “You said before you don’t know why you’re running away from him. Why not just face him and tell him you won’t take no for an answer? You chose to be Robin, so he can’t take it away.”

He thought that he’d been doing that by running away. Bruce hadn’t wanted a partner anymore, which was fine. Dick could handle that. He was smart enough to put two and two together, and Dick had messed up too big this time. He’d accidentally killed Judge Watkins, and Batman didn’t need a partner like him.

But Dick was Robin, and Bruce couldn’t take Robin away from him. By running away, Dick had thought he was going to prove it.

But Bruce didn’t just not want a partner, he didn’t want Dick to be Robin. He proved that by coming after Dick, and maybe Wally was right. Maybe Dick just needed to stick it to Bruce. The my way or the high way approach.

The door opened with a creak, and Dick stiffened, because there he was. Batman, hidden in the shadows, and Dick, who should have been used to after two years living with the man—who was used to it—squeaked in fright.

Bruce sighed—and Dick froze, because it was Bruce more than Batman that was standing in the doorway. Bruce pulled back the cowl and kneeled down next to Dick.

“Are you alright?” Bruce asked.

“Fine,” Dick breathed, his eyes wide. “I’m fine. Barry, Iris, and Wally have been taking care of me.”

“Speaking of Barry,” Wally said from the bed, his eyes just as wide as Dick’s when Bruce’s attention settled on his, “does he know that you’re in here?”

Bruce grimaced. “Probably not.”

“They have to still be awake,” Wally argued weakly. I mean, it’s barely awake, and Iris has that article due in the morning that she’s been freaking out over all day. How did you get past them?”

“I’m Batman,” Bruce said, like that explained everything, and even though it did, Dick couldn’t help but laugh at Wally’s gob smacked face. Bruce turned his attention back to Dick, and the laughter died on Dick’s lips.

Dick cleared his throat, his stomach a ball of nerves. “Hi, Bruce.”

“Hi, Dick,” Bruce said, not missing a beat. “Care to explain what that note was about?”

Dick winced. “Uh, you read that?”

“Of course I read it,” Bruce told him, settling tailor-style on the floor in front of Dick. “I came home from work to find my son missing and a note explaining pretty much nothing other than that you were running away.”

“Sorry,” Dick said softly. “I didn’t mean to make you worry or anything.”

“How could I not?” Bruce said. “I’ve been searching for you for two days, Dick, nonstop. You can’t seriously believe that just because I fired Robin that meant I didn’t want you.”

“Well, that’s what it felt like!” Dick argued, his temper flaring. “Every time you’ve benched me before it’s been as a punishment! Why should this time be any different? You said Robin was fired, and to me that sounded like you didn’t need me anymore!”

“So you ran away? Dick, I’ve been worried sick about you!”

“I was trying to prove that I could be Robin, with or without you,” Dick told him, glaring at the floor. “You wouldn’t listen to me before, so I thought that it would be better without me.”

Bruce settled a hand on Dick’s shoulder, both of them ignoring the way Wally was creeping out of the room to give them some privacy. “Dick, look at me,” Bruce demanded, and Dick did, but it was with some resentment. “Robin or not, I’m always going to need you.”

“That’s not—”

“Robin or not,” Bruce repeated, “I’m always going to need you. You’re my son, Dick. I know I’m not John, but I care about you, and you got really hurt a few weeks ago. I was terrified, Dick.”

“But being Robin is my choice,” Dick told him. “I know the risks, Bruce! Just like you do!”

“You’re a child,” and Bruce looked angry now. “I’m an adult. I can take a hit. You’re eleven, and you almost died.”

“So let’s work on more evasion maneuvers! More training!” Dick cried. “But this is my choice! Robin is my name, and you can’t take it away from me anymore than I can take Batman away from you! Robin is a part of me!”

Bruce was quiet for a moment, his lips thin as he stared down at Dick, and Dick realized he was trembling with emotion, tears spilling down his cheeks as he fought for the very thing that kept him alive sometimes.

He loved being Robin. He got to help people, he got to fly. Working as Batman and Robin, it was more than most people could ever dream of, and Dick absolutely loved making a difference. He loved giving people hope, and Bruce was trying to take that hope away. And Dick just didn’t understand why.

Bruce let out a slow, controlled breath. “Dick, I want you to listen to me, okay?” Dick nodded, biting his lip. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for trying to take Robin away from you, and I won’t do it again. But,” Bruce said before Dick could do more than suck in a sharp breath, “after your physical therapy, I’m not going to immediately put you back in the field. I was too naïve before, thinking you could get away with the basics.”

Dick blinked, his eyebrows furrowing. “What do you mean?”

“You know I trained around the world for years,” Bruce told him quietly. “I trained you for a few months and then set you loose, thinking that giving you practical experience would be the best option for you. And it was, but I think I let you out a bit too early.”

“But I’ve trained as an acrobat my whole life,” Dick argued. “It’s not like I don’t have any training.”

“Yes,” Bruce said slowly, “and that training has helped you a lot. But you’re also an eleven year old kid. So, I propose two more months of combat training, of simulation training for Gotham’s brand of criminals, and we can call this a deal. You in?”

“Yeah,” Dick breathed. It sounded fair. Bruce was worried, Dick got that now. He didn’t want Dick to get hurt, and Dick could last two months of training, because he’d done it before. “Yeah, I’m in.”

“Wait a minute,” Barry said, standing up in alarm. “Are you telling me that Batman is upstairs right now? In my house?”

“Uh, yes?” Wally tried. “Him and Rob are talking things out, I guess. Not sure how it’ll turn out, though. It didn’t sound very good.”

“Well,” said Iris, setting her cup of coffee down on the coffee table next to her laptop, “If it doesn’t work out with Batman, Robin’s always welcome here.”

Wally grinned. “Thanks, Aunt Iris.”

Barry sighed. “You know what, I’m going to go tell Clark what happened, and then Bruce is going to get in trouble. After that, don’t involve me anymore. I don’t think I could take it.”

“KF!” Robin called, vaulting over the banister and landing in the living room in a crouch. Wally could only watch with wide eyes as the grinning kid tackled him in a hug. “Hey, thanks for your advice, KF. It worked!”

“Um,” Wally said as Robin detangled himself from Wally, “glad to hear it?”

“You going home, kiddo?” Iris asked, looking properly amused. Wally shot her a betrayed look, because she knew he wasn’t big on hugging. “We definitely wouldn’t mind another night with you here.”

Robin smiled shyly. “Thanks, but Bruce is going to take me home now. Thanks for letting me stay here.”

“Anytime, apparently,” Barry said, and Iris slapped his arm playfully. “What? You said you’d take him if Batman didn’t want him.”

“Oh, Batman says he wants me,” Robin said to Iris innocently, and Wally had to squash the urge to ask where that charm had come from, because it only seemed to come out around Iris. Which, Wally didn’t mind much, since he found it a little annoying, but still. “Sorry, Iris.”

Iris laughed. “That’s okay. You gone on home, then. I’m sure Batman has missed you.”

“Bye, KF,” Rob said.

Wally smiled back at him. “Bye, Rob.”

Robin laughed, waved, and ninja’d back up over the banister again, disappearing upstairs—probably leaving out Wally’s bedroom window.

“Can’t they just use the door like normal people?” Wally complained as he collapsed on the couch.

Barry snorted. “Have you met Batman?”

Wally sighed. “Unfortunately.”

“It’s good to see you, Master Dick,” Alfred said when Dick and Bruce had appeared in the zeta tubes, and Dick almost started crying right then and there. Dick leaned into Bruce’s side, who’d taken the cowl off again, instead of running to hug Alfred since the butler wasn’t the biggest on physical contact. “I am glad to see that you are alright.”

“I’m okay,” Dick confirmed as Bruce wrapped an arm around him. “It’s good to be home.”