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maccreadysbaby · 9 months ago

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A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

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

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

i did so much “how to break into a house” research for this one my fbi agent is probably on his way :,)

also I was peer pressured into picking face claims for bentley, asten, and nico. here they are

part twenty-seven

❝ BREAKING AND ENTERING ❞

MONDAY — AUGUST 17 — 7:34PM

OKAY, SO MAYBE THIS WHOLE CATCH THE SECRET KEEPER THING WASN’T GOING EXACTLY TO PLAN.

Nonetheless, they persisted.

After the second massive breakdown of the night (Asten was now the odd man out because he hadn’t had one.) they pulled the remains of themselves off of the concrete and pushed on. Turned out, Somerset was, like, extremely far to walk. Strolling around in the daytime wasn’t exactly what they’d intended on doing, but it was what they ended up doing, anyhow.

Asten conned some old man from a burger joint into giving them leftover food (he was strangely good at conning people.) that was at least partially out of date. They moved all the way from Crime Alley back to the mainland — and by then, it was nearing four in the afternoon.

Bentley had been floating ever since the Secret Keeper got him. He couldn’t stop thinking. Thinking about Asten’s parents dying because of her, about all the futures she showed him, wondering which one he was unlocking by continuing on the search. He couldn’t stop thinking about the Wayne’s. About Dr. Keene. About his father. About getting found by a wandering vigilante. Part of him wanted to go home, but the rest of him knew he couldn’t. That he had to see this through.

The sun was down when they made it to the outskirts of Somerset. (Or what Asten called the outskirts of Somerset.) It didn’t look much different from the Bristol area — they’d passed many suburbs full of nice houses and large Manor-like homes that were already quiet for the night. The streets were peaceful, and nothing was happening there. Almost like time was at a standstill.

They had been on a rather long, foggy, seemingly empty and dark road that Asten had been insisting was the right way for a while now. It was still pouring rain. There were only a few street lamps on the right side, lighting the sidewalk they were on, and the left side of the road was lined with woods.

They were, more or less, lost.

Asten was still charging ahead of the younger two, a map that he’d printed out clutched tightly in his hands, trying to shield it from rain with his jacket. It had the route from Nico’s all the way to the Cabin scribbled across it in red ink. If they weren’t lost, surely, they were close. They were in Somerset — Asten said the Cabin was in Somerset.

Bentley was walking quietly, side-by-side with Nico, their heads down and hoods up to avoid the rain. They hadn’t spoke much since the whole Secret Keeper thing; none of them had. Asten just kept to his papers and maps, only talking occasionally about where they should go or what they should do. Nico didn’t talk unless he was antagonized. And Bentley… well, he just didn’t talk much anyways. The three of them had taken to fiddling with their fingers and pulling their jackets closer as the night drew on. It was very cold. And very wet. And very cold.

After what seemed like an eternity on the creepy road, Asten sighed lightly, squinting through the darkness at the paper. Bentley could barely see the deep blue tips of his hair through the dark and rain and fog. “Alright. If my intuition isn’t failing me, we should be getting close to-“

“Arkham,” Nico said, nearly breathless. Bentley paused when the blonde fell out of step with him, hanging back, his eyes trained on something in the distance.

Bentley followed his gaze into the foggy downpour past Asten, where the faintest image of a walled-off area came into view.

“I was gonna say the cabin, but Arkham is also accurate,” Asten shrugged, glancing down at the map. He drifted toward them so they were standing in a triangle. “The cabins not that far past it, actually.”

“Past it? Past Arkham? You do realize that’s where insane magical supervillains go, right? People that, like, kill people? You do realize the Jokers in there, right?!” Nico rambled, bringing his arms up and around himself. He was staring so intently at the walls in the distance that Bentley thought his eyeballs might roll out of his head.

He couldn’t see very much through the fog and rain. All he could see were the walls. Sure, Bentley had heard of Arkham — that’s where many of Batman’s adversaries had ended up. But to be right next to it was kind of… weird. Was his father in there? No, his father wasn’t crazy. Was he?

Bentley startled when Asten elbowed him lightly. “Nico is embarrassingly terrified of the Joker.”

“I am not!” Nico argued, punching Asten in the shoulder. Bentley had heard about the Joker, too — a creepy clown that did all he could to destroy Batman. Bentley was pretty sure… he was even the one who killed Jason when he was Robin. And he’d kidnapped Tim, too, he thought, back when hewas Robin.

Apparently the Joker didn’t like Robins.

Asten snorted, glancing at Bentley momentarily. “I dressed as the Joker for Halloween last year-“

“It wasn’t funny!”

“-and Nico cried for like, three hours,”

“You jumped through my window!” Nico defended, an exasperated look on his face, his blue eyes wide with layers of swirling emotion Bentley couldn’t even begin to decipher.

“Your parents said I could!”

Nico huffed, crossing his arms over his chest, and his gaze fell to the wet sidewalk under their feet. He dragged the toe of his shoe across the pavement below, mumbling softly to himself:

“Did they?”

Bentley caught the underlying meaning.

Asten’s green eyes flicked between the both of them oddly for a moment, and then he turned. “We’re almost there, you guys. This case is almost closed.”

Nico huffed again, tossing his hands to the side. “The case is barely open, Asten. This whole thing is balancing on a conglomerate of coincidences, conspiracies, and spite.”

“My entire life balances on those things, and I’m not dead yet,” Asten replied with a shrug, his eyes trailing back down to the soggy map in his hands. “Seriously — we have maybe another half hour to walk, tops.”

“You do realize people have broken out of Arkham, right? Like the Joker…?” Nico muttered, and all it earned him was an are you serious? look from Asten. “What? He’s killed people!”

Asten continued down the road, the other two following reluctantly behind. “So has the girl we’re going after, bucket-head.”

Asten and Nico continued to bicker as they made their way down the dark road. Bentley’s eyes lingered on the massive, walled building that they were approaching. ARKHAM ASYLUM, the gate said, and the storm only worked to make it creepier. He wondered how many bad guys were in there. There could’ve been a ton. All different kinds with all different superpowers, waiting for something to happen so they could get out again.

Surely his father wasn’t in there.

Exactly thirty-six minutes later, much to Bentleys disbelief, Nico’s disdain, and Asten’s relief, they paused at a gravel drive with a little wooden sign sticking out of the ground right at the end. The words PINEWOOD CABINwere carved into it, with a big arrow that pointed down the road. Arkham had long since disappeared behind them, replaced with forest on either side of the road and rain pouring from above.

Asten clicked his tongue, turning back to them with a triumphant look spread across his dimly lit features. “Am I awesome or what?”

Nico, from Bentley’s right, deadpanned: “Or what.”

Asten gave him a pointed glare, then began to peel the black backpack off of his shoulders.

To be best friends, they sure were sort of mean to each other. It was confusing. Because, in all the time Bentley spent with them, they were hardly nice. They teased each other and called each other names and said stuff that would probably make Bentley rethink his whole life if it were directed toward him.

But Bentley also knew that Asten would probably throw himself in front of a moving train to shove Nico out of the way. And that didn’t make sense. Why were they not nice if they cared about each other so much? He guessed it was kind of like Jason and Dick, maybe. They were brothers, but not exactly the nicest brothers.

Neither Asten or Nico had ever been mean to Bentley.

Did that mean they weren’t actually friends with him?

“Here,”

Bentley snapped out of it, dumbly reaching for the definitely-too-large black gloves Asten was holding in his direction. He dug around in the backpack and pulled out an identical one for Nico. Then himself.

“When we go inside, we’re gonna keep our hoods up incase there are security cameras, so don’t look up at the ceiling like a bunch of ding-dongs,” He ordered, pulling a large flashlight out of the backpack, too, and shoving his map inside. “We have to assume cops will be on the way. From any of the surrounding police stations, it would take at least fifteen minutes for them to get here. So we’re going to tear the place apart in ten. Leave no fingerprints, no DNA, and for goodness sake, don’t look at the ceiling.”

Bentley quietly pulled the gloves on as Asten spoke. His former assumption was right — they were kind of huge on his hands, but his ice-cold, basically numb fingers were grateful. He could see Nico doing the same in his peripheral.

“We’re looking for anything suspicious about the place. Literally anything. Rat poison in the kitchen, creepy computer in the bedroom, splatter of blood on the carpet — I don’t care. We just have to find something.”

Bentley hummed, glancing around at the dark forest that was towering over the three of them in every direction. “And if we don’t?”

“We’ll hunker down at my place and then do it again,” Asten shrugged, tugging his gloves on, too. “It wasn’t my intention for everyone to think we’re missing, but it works. You guys can’t go home until we’re done. The police will be crawling all of Gotham for you nosebleeds. But me? They won’t take a second look at my place if they can help it. That, plus the fact that there’s no risk of Sam coming home, makes it a good place to lay low.”

Bentley blinked. Sam. Who was Sam? Was that the uncle that Asten lived with?

“You sound like you’ve done this before,” Bentley commented, glancing up at Asten in the darkness.

The Brazilian merely shrugged, eyes trained on the gloves. “I live in Crime Alley, kid. You have to do what you have to do to keep yourself alive.”

Bentley said nothing.

“Oh, and when we get there, don’t talk unless you have to. Whisper. We don’t want our voices or intentions being realized if the place is bugged,” Asten continued, zipping up the bag and throwing it back over his shoulders.

Bentley creased his brow. “Bugged?”

“It means, like… that there might be little listening devices hidden around the cabin,” Nico explained softly, his attention turning to Asten. “So the dimbo with the Portuguese accent is gonna have to keep his mouth shut.”

Asten snorted. “We all have to keep our mouths shut. You have a weird Bristol lilt and Bentley has not an ounce of Gotham in him. If the police are any good at their jobs, our voices will give us away instantly. That is, if they’re dumb enough not to link our disappearances to the three kids on the security cameras first.”

Bentley cringed. This was going to be a disaster, wasn’t it?

“If they’re doing crime in that cabin, though, don’t you think there wouldn’t be any security cameras?” Nico piped up, blue eyes bouncing from Asten to Bentley a few times.

Asten shrugged. “Good thought. But it’s still smart to act like there is.”

Bentley wondered how many places Asten had broken into. He already knew one — Nico’s house. Why had Asten broke into Nico’s house, anyway?

Asten clicked the long flashlight on, peering down the gravel road. The cabin was buried deep in the woods, out of their sight, which meant they’d be taking a long walk through foggy, creepy woods in the freezing cold rain.

Yay?

“Asten,” Nico spoke up, shivering under his jacket, tugging the wet material closer to fend off the cold. “We’re going to get arrested. If we don’t die of hypothermia first. It’s cold.”

“Then let’s go. A dry cabin awaits,” Asten announced, setting off down the gravel road with his flashlight.

So they went.

—

The cabin was not as pretty as the pictures made it out to be.

Maybe it was the fact that Bentley couldn’t really see it through the pouring rain and fog and darkness. It looked just… like an old cabin. None of the lights were on, and there were no cars, which was good. At least they knew that there was actually nobody home.

The woods had grown up a bit around it and sort of closed it off from the rest of the world. Massive trees towered over it, swaying in the wind and the storm. (At least it wasn’t thundering.)

Asten turned to them as they neared the building. His expression was a strange mixture of excitement, surprise, and maybe doubt. “Hoods up. Heads down. No talking.”

Bentley, with nothing else to do anyways, obeyed.

They walked, Bentley in particular looking straight down at his feet, until they made it on the red-painted front porch and the rain stopped tapping him on the hood. The porch itself was long, with a few rocking chairs and a swing. The floor was fading, some paint chipping off near the edges of the stairs, and moss was beginning to creep up around the perimeter.

The front door was bright green, and each window had curtains pulled over them so weirdos couldn’t see inside. (Weren’t they technically the weirdos, though?)

Asten dropped his bag on the porch, unzipping it and pulling out a ziplock of… metal wedges?

Bentley and Nico both watched in varying levels of confusion and interest as he pulled a rubber hammer out of his belt and began to wedge the metal triangles into the crack between the door and the frame.

Nico cringed, whispering: “I feel like I’m seeing something I shouldn’t be.”

“Sh!” Asten ordered. Once he had at least six wedges in place, he pulled out the crowbar, jammed the flat end into the crack, and shoved it with his entire body weight.

The door popped open, swinging inward and banging against the wall behind it, and all the wedges clattered on the floor.

Nico and Bentley stood in silence until Asten turned to look at them, calculating, waiting. No alarm. No hiss. No beep.

Asten gathered his wedges, put his tools back in his belt, threw his bag over his shoulder and walked inside.

Oh God. They really, literally had just broken into a house. For real.

Bentley was so dead.

Nico seemed to come to the same conclusion, because he paled dangerously and stayed rooted to his spot.

Bentley stepped inside behind Asten.

The front door opened straight into a living room. Directly ahead was a stone fireplace, flanked by nice, cozy couches and a few chairs. They were sitting on a large, animal-pelt rug that looked extremely expensive. There was a kitchen off to the left, a dining room to the right, and a hallway right next to the fireplace that led to what Bentley assumed was bedrooms. The warm air washed over him, and he sighed.

Ten minutes.

Ten minutes had never passed so fast in Bentley’s life. They tore the place apart. Not one part of the cabin went unchecked — cabinets were emptied with stealthy and calculating hands, cushions were removed from furniture pieces, curtains and paintings were checked behind, closets were sifted through, and, by minute eight, they’d turned the entire place upside down.

By minute nine, they still hadn’t found anything.

Not that Bentley really knew what he was looking for. Sure he could find, like, blood or something, but he wasn’t even sure what else would be considered suspicious for the most part. Sure, like, weapons and stuff, but Asten’s examples were rat poison. A computer. Why were those things suspicious?

When minute ten struck, Asten told them it was time to leave.

Bentley pulled himself out of the guest bathroom floor (he was checking cabinets there.) and made his way back to the front of the cabin.

They hadn’t found anything. Which meant they were going back to Asten’s house. Maybe they could stay somewhere closer — he’d have to ask about that. Crime Alley was a long way away for them to come back another time. (And kind of scary, too. And a place vigilantes spent too much time in.) Yeah. He wasn’t sure he wanted to stay there.

(He was also trying to ignore the disappointment that lingered when he realized they’d done all of this for nothing.)

The three of them were corralling toward the front door when a Wham!followed by a little “Ow.” Erupted from behind Bentley.

Both he and Asten pivoted, eyes landing on Nico, who was on his hands and knees in the floor. The corner of the animal skin rug in the living room was bunched up like he’d tripped on it.

Bentley instinctively knelt next to him. “Are you okay?” His whisper was so soft it was hardly audible — he didn’t want his voice caught on a bug.

Nico nodded, only glancing up at him for a moment before he started to pull himself out of the floor. The simple motion pulled the animal skin rug more.

Asten gasped.

Bentley was blissfully aware of what was going on as Asten basically careened toward them, ushering Nico off the rug as quickly as he could.

Instead of flattening it back out, he pulled the whole thing to the side, and Bentley’s heart skipped.

In the deep hardwood floors, there was a crevice. A crevice that made a square, like someone had pulled out a saw and cut a perfect little shape in the wood. One end of the square had hinges — the other, a tiny metal rung for someone’s fingers.

A trapdoor.

Asten looked at Bentley, his excited, triumphant attitude gone, replaced by something like shock and nerves. His green eyes had something swirling in them.

Bentley glanced over at Nico. He sincerely looked like he was about to pass out or throw up — one of the two. His face had gone paper pale. His eyes met Bentley’s, and something in them was pleading. Begging for them to just go home.

“Asten,” Nico said through clenched teeth, in the smallest voice he could muster. “I don’t want to go down there.”

Asten’s green eyes floated between his two friends. “Then stay. I’ll be back.”

“No!” Nico suddenly exclaimed, glancing around the room like he was nervous someone would walk in. “You don’t know what’s down there.”

“Which is why I’m going to figure it out,” Asten whispered back, in a soft duhtone. His eyes shifted to Bentley. “Are you coming?”

Silently, he nodded.

If Asten was going down there, he sure as heck wouldn’t be going alone, that was for sure.

“Please, let’s just go,” Nico continued, rubbing a hand over his face. “This isn’t our problem. We’re not the cops. People get straight-up murdered in creepy basements like this. I… think I’m gonna puke.”

Bentley let his hand drift up to rest on Nico’s shoulder, but it only helped to make him jump. When he looked over at him, his blue eyes were on the verge of glassy, and he really did look like he might throw up.

“Just stay up here. We’ll come right back up and tell you what we see. Promise,” Asten said with a forced little smile.

“No. You can’t,” Nico argued, a familiar thickness coming over his voice like he was only moments away from being in tears. “Please, can we just go home? I’m so freaking scared.”

“We can’t give up now,” Asten stated, sending a glance to Bentley. “Everything will be fine.”

Asten pulled the trapdoor open, revealing a long, deep, pitch-black abyss with old wooden stairs that seemingly led to nothing. Bentley heard Nico’s breath hitch beside him, and he squinted to try and see the bottom. He couldn’t.

Asten didn’t hesitate to step inside.

Bentley didn’t hesitate to follow.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

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maccreadysbaby · 7 months ago

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A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: anxiety attacks

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

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

yall this is the chapter i’ve been waiting for

part thirty-eight

❝ AIR AND FIRE AND WATER (OH MY) ❞

THURSDAY — SEPTEMBER 3 — 1:00 PM

BENTLEY WAS SILENT ALL THE WAY HOME. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself. Other than the fact he was pretty much at a standstill regarding his father and the Secret Keeper and all that jazz, he was starting to feel strange. Like a part of him had been ripped out and thrown into the Gotham Harbor. Like one of his organs had been removed and replaced by one that didn’t fit quite right — like something wrong was inside of him now.

It was like he could feel his blood pumping in his veins. The entire car ride, he could hear it in his ears. He could hear the gasoline swishing in Jason’s gas tank. He could feel the windshield washing liquid like it was a part of him when Jason cleaned the bugs off the window. He could feel Jason’s blood pumping through Jason’s veins.

What the hell was wrong with him?

The wrongness just kept getting wronger when they pulled up at the Manor, because it went from Jason and Jason’s car to feeling the water moving through the whole house. Like he had an ear against every pipe in the Manor, listening to the liquid swish and move. He knew where it was. Where it was going. He knew where each and every toilet and sink and shower and fridge was from exactly where he was sitting in Jason’s car. Where every saline bag and liquid medicine and electrolyte drink was sitting in the cave. The drip Asten was on, how much was left in it, and every single time it dripped.

Why the hell did he know that?

Jason said something to him when he got out of the car, but he didn’t hear it. It sounded like there was a waterfall inside the Manor. When he went through the door, it just got worse — he could hear every bead, droplet, every liquid in the house screaming and sloshing and moving and churning and bubbling. He could feel it like it was all inside of him, like it was him, like he was made out of water. He could hear his blood moving. He could hear Jason’s blood. Asten’s blood. Nico’s blood. Bruce and Alfred and Dick and Damian and the animals and Duke and everything — could feel the blood, the water, everything. He could feel everything.

He walked up the stairs one step at a time, every rational thought — every thought at all — literally drowned out by the sound. The feelings. He felt like he was going to explode. Like he was going to die. By the time he got to the top of the stairs, he was shaking, and breathing wasn’t as easy as it should’ve been. Why did he feel so wrong? So wrong? So wrong?

His mind kinda-sorta came back to him when he ran face-first into someone in the hall. Someone with a purple hoodie and black sweatpants.

When Dick Grayson looked down at him, Bentley started crying.

“Whoa, hey there, kiddo, what’s wrong?” Dick questioned, kneeling down to the child’s height, his crystalline blue gaze bouncing around Bentley’s face. His hair was wet and floppy like he’d just showered, and it reminded him of the first night he ever met Dick Grayson in the pouring rain.

Bentley could hardly think enough to make a coherent sentence. Air wasn’t coming in or out right, and he was crying and sad and so overwhelmed, why could he hear everything? “I-I don’t fee-feel right.” Was what he ended up saying, wiping frantically at his eyes. (Stuttering, more like.)

Dick breathed in, a sad expression coming across his features. “I think you’re having a panic attack, buddy. Just breathe with-“

“No! Not that,” Bentley argued, batting away Dick’s hands that had been coming for his arms. “Something inside of me. I-I feel like I’m going to die. I think I… I- think I’m about to die.”

A few words were shared between Dick and someone else, and in one fluid movement, Bentley was picked up and deposited on a bed. But hadn’t they just been in the hallway? He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything. The only thing he did know was that everything hurt and he couldn’t breathe and it was so loud.

“Bentley, buddy, tell me what doesn’t feel right,” Dick ordered. Bentley was sitting on the edge of a bed (whose bed? No clue.), halfway in reality, half in his own world of blurry confusing pain. Dick was in front of him, his hands were searching Bentley’s frame for anything abnormal. Jason was near the closed door.

Between the crying and the panicking and the not working lungs, he couldn’t breathe. “Everything. Everything feels wrong.”

Jason said something about Bentley’s dad, but he didn’t really hear him. Dick was touching his shoulders.

“Bentley, keep talking to me,” He pleaded, rubbing Bentley’s arms lightly. He turned to Jason with a subtle: “Go get Bruce.”

Jason left the room.

Bentley couldn’t focus enough to do much of anything. With a groan of… desperation, maybe? He brought his hands up and covered his ears, trying to drown out all the noise. There was so much noise. Too much noise.

After an indecipherable amount of time passed, someone else was touching Bentley. Bigger hands, stronger grip. He peeled his eyes open just long enough to see Bruce’s face in front of him, icy blue eyes scanning him mechanically, robotically. His mouth moved but Bentley couldn’t hear him over the crashing waves in his own head.

Gently, his hands were removed from his ears. “Hey there, chum, it’s Bruce. Do you think you can tell me what’s going on?” He was doing a pretty good job masking the concern in his voice, but Bentley heard it anyways.

“I-I can… I…” Bentley choked on a few words and sobs at the same time, his hands shaking like leaves where they sat in Bruce’s grip. “I can… hear… I-I can feel… everything.”

Bentley thought he heard something in the room bang or pop, but he wasn’t sure, he couldn’t exactly hear very good. Bruce suddenly got a strange look on his face, and Jason and Dick, who were behind him, looked stunned.

“B, his eyes-”

“Shh,” Bruce ordered, one of his hands coming up to rest on the side of Bentley’s head. “It’s okay, chum. You’re going to be okay. Just look at me.”

Bentley looked at him as best he could through the tears and panic. He tried not to pay attention to Dick, who walked over to the bathroom door looking really, really confused.

“Breathe with me,” Bruce tried. He took a deep, calculated breath, and Bentley tried to follow suit. It only sort of worked. The roaring in his head wasn’t fading. If anything, it was starting to sound more… real?

“What the f-”

“Jason!”

Bentley’s attention broke away from Bruce just in time for him to glance at the closed bathroom door — was he in Dick’s room? — and see water. Water, just gushing out from under the door like the crack at the bottom was a pressure washer, straight into the bedroom and all over the floor.

“Bruce-“

“Bentley, just look at me,”

Bentley did. He just looked at Bruce, tracing the fractals of blue in his eyes, focusing on every hair in his eyebrows, every shade of his skin. Bentley just looked at Bruce as the water started to climb the legs of the bed like a slithering snake, curling and wrapping around until it made it onto the mattress. Dick and Jason were standing off to the side, stunned into silence. Bentley just looked at Bruce.

Bentley continued to just look at Bruce as the water started floating — yes, floating, actually suspended in the air — around the room. Some of it crawled up the walls like vines, some spun and danced in the middle of the air like trees in the breeze. It was getting easier to breathe. The roaring was getting quieter.

“That’s it, you’re okay,” Bruce uttered, his hand moving gently in Bentley’s hair. “You’re okay.”

Bentley finally broke his gaze to glance upward. There was water on the ceiling, spinning and churning in intricate swirls and designs there, and water floating through the air in strands like string. It was moving on the walls, the floor, the furniture like snakes.

Bruce rubbed a hand over his hair. “That’s it. There you go.”

Bentley breathed in deeply, hiccuping lightly, his brown eyes tracing the flying water. “Bruce…”

“It’s okay,”

He wasn’t… this wasn’t… he wasn’t doing that, was he? He couldn’t be. He wasn’t a metahuman. He hadn’t been in the machine long enough, Davis had said so. He was just Bentley. Just normal Bentley.

Normal Bentley focused on one specific snake of water on the ceiling. He imagined it moving left, and it went left. He imagined it moving right, and it went right. He imagined an intricate, beautiful chandelier, hanging from the ceiling, made entirely of water, and the liquid morphed and moved until it became that. Chains, dangling crystals, and metal galore, all shaped from crystal clear water.

“Oh my God,” Jason muttered. He and Dick were staring at the chandelier made of pure water, but Bruce wasn’t. Bruce was still looking at Bentley.

The water slowly moved from the chandelier back to its spot swirling on the ceiling.

There was absolutely no way Bentley was doing that. Right? There couldn’t be. He couldn’t be.

As a last ditch effort to prove that he wasn’t controlling the water, he imagined it going back where it came from.

And the water, ever-so-slowly, started to crawl off the bed, down from the ceiling and the walls, across the floor again at a glacial pace. Dick swung the bathroom door open. Bentley watched in a mixture of awe and terror as he watched the vines of water slither back into the toilet and faucets.

When all the water was gone, nothing was wet, not even the mattress, and the room was eerily silent. And Bentley was oddly drained.

Fire, Air, and Water. How clever, Mr. Whittaker.

Bentley looked back up at Bruce, who had a reassuring smile on his face.

“Are you going to get rid of me now?”

Before he heard the reply, everything faded to black.

—

The first (and pretty much only) thing he got back was his hearing.

“-telling you, this is different. The whole structure of his DNA looks strange. It’s different from the last blood sample we have from him — It almost looks like a whole new strand,” That was Tim’s voice, he was pretty sure.

“So you’re saying that whoever kidnapped him changed his human DNA into metahuman DNA?”

“It looks like they… tore apart his original genome and spliced other parts in… like they manufactured synthetic DNA with the genetic mutation of a metahuman and replaced pieces of his own with it. It looks like… whoa,”

“What is it, Timmy?”

“It’s changing. The synthetic DNA is actually… turning the rest of his DNA into metahuman genomes. Spreading… like a virus,”

“Will that hurt him?”

“Let’s just say… I understand why he thought he was dying,”

“You think that could be why Asten-“

Bentley, had he been any more lucid, would’ve flinched at the absolutely gut-wrenching scream that ripped through the air. He was laying on something soft — it just sort of felt like his bed. A bed, at least. And the scream sounded strangely close to him.

“Well, his genes are being ripped apart and replaced, so, if I had to guess, yeah. That’s probably why he’s screaming,”

“What about Bentley?” He was pretty sure that voice was Dick, now that it said his name.

“It seems to be the beginning of the change. I don’t think there’s much we can do to help,”

Suddenly, Bentley’s eyes began to burn even though they were closed. He moved a hand to rub them, but as soon as he moved his fingers, his entire arm erupted into a blazing, fiery pain that made him whine.

“Are they going to be okay?” Came a third voice — the voice of Nico. Bentley felt a hand land on his shoulder, but instead of being soothing, it left a ripple of burning agony that made him choke out a strange sound. The hand jumped away.

“Yeah, they will,” Replied Dick. “We just have to get them through this. How are you feeling?”

There was a silence where all Bentley heard was his own bated breathing.

“Well, I… I was already a metahuman, so…”

“Oh… okay,”

Bentley tensed, gripping whoever’s covers he was under hard when a surge of absolute burning agony washed over him. It felt like when he was poisoned. Worse than when he was poisoned — like someone was searing his veins closed with a blowtorch. Another choking sound made it's way out of him, but he couldn’t produce words.

“You’re okay, kiddo. You’re going to be okay,”

Asten screamed again. Nico was suddenly crying.

Another wave of absolute searing agony came and went, and Bentley fought it good — he really did. He kept his whining to a minimum for a solid ten minutes.

But then the fire reached his head, and suddenly, two children’s screams were ripping through the halls of Wayne Manor.

And everyone inside just had to listen.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

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maccreadysbaby · 7 months ago

Text

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

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

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

and john’s back at it again ALSO one of his lines is FORESHADOWING babdmdkdkfjsn

part thirty-seven

❝ PLAN B ❞

THURSDAY — SEPTEMBER 3 — 12:00 PM

BENTLEY WAS PRETTY SURE HE’D NEVER MET ANYONE, NOT EVEN THE PUPPET MASTER, WHO COULD PULL STRINGS LIKE A WAYNE. Because, less than four hours later (with Bruce’s blessing), Bentley Whittaker and Jason Todd were waiting to get called into the visitation room at Blackgate Penitentiary to see his father.

Bentley hadn’t expected to be so nervous. Maybe he should’ve, since he was going to talk to the man who’d abused him for ten years, kidnapped him, poisoned him, and was now turning people into terrifying monsters whose only soul purpose was to murder his family. Not to mention that he’d just been patted and scanned and checked all over by people who, he was pretty darn positive, were carrying guns. And he was in a prison. Full of, like, murderers and stuff.

Before they’d left the house, he’d been a normal amount of nervous, but now, sitting in the empty prison hallway, he was downright horrified. He and Jason were sitting in uncomfortable metal chairs, staring down at old tile. Bentley’s knee was bouncing at a pace that might rival Nico’s superpowers. Honestly, as dreary as it was, he’d rather be back at the Manor sitting on the same loveseat watching Asten puke his guts out every ten minutes. (Because, yes, that was happening again.)

Bentley heard Jason breathe in and out. “You know, it’s not too late to back out.”

Bentley glanced over at him. They were both a little more presentable now, mirroring one another in varying colored jeans and hoodies. Jason had fixed his hair in its typical upward fashion, putting the white streak on full display. He was looking back at Bentley, a serious look on his face, his greenish-blue eyes gleaming oddly under the fluorescent lights.

Bentley looked down at his ratty red tennis shoes, at his vigorously bouncing knee. “No.”

He felt Jason’s eyes on him, and could practically feel the smirk on his face when he replied: “You sure? Because you look like you’re trying to pedal a broken bicycle.”

Bentley forced his knee to stop moving. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Jason said, patting Bentley’s knee once, quickly. “Just… really think about it. I can’t come in with you, so it’ll just be you, him, and a cop. If you really don’t want to do it, that’s okay.”

Bentley let out a puff of air. “I’m going to do it.”

“Okay,” He saw Jason nod in his peripheral, and after a moment of silence, he leaned in close and continued: “But if anything happens, I’ll blow that door off its hinges before the cops even know what’s happening.”

Bentley cracked a smile at that, and Jason sat back with a triumphant smirk.

Waiting felt like both an eternity and a split second. One minute, he and Jason were sitting alone in the hall, the next, he was being ushered through a big, thick door by a female officer who was relaying ground rules and reinforcing the fact that Bentley only had twenty minutes to talk to his dad.

“You don’t have to stay for all twenty,” Jason interrupted as Bentley was whisked down the hall, which the officer didn’t really appreciate. The woman kept talking but Bentley couldn’t really focus; he was too busy trying to peer into the visitation area.

The long, barren hallway turned into a long, barren room, lined with plexiglass booths. There were no other people in there. Each booth had a phone and desk on either side, separated in the middle by a wall of glass. There was a sign above every window that said: please don’t scratch the glass!

Bentley steeled when he spotted a mop of red hair that matched his to the tee, sitting behind one of the windows. He breathed in and out. His father couldn’t get to him behind the glass, right? Bentley didn’t see any holes or doors or ways for him to get into the room. The police officer, whose hair Bentley could now see was black, closed the door to the room and went to stand along the wall.

With a final quick glance up to her, Bentley made his way to the rickety spinning stool across from his father. Third booth from the right.

He looked… different. Not so clean cut. His hair was longer — he’d always been so anal about trimming his hair that Bentley was thoroughly shocked at the sight of the shaggy red mop that looked a lot like his own now. He had a little facial hair, too, patchy and strange looking. He was wearing a matching set of gray clothes, not a pressed suit, and when Bentley sat down, his shiny brown eyes bored into the child’s head like an electric drill.

Bentley, when he sat down, moved his feet up to the highest rung on the stool in an attempt to make himself smaller. Cut the head off the snake, right? That’s what he was here to do; stop the operation in its tracks. So… how was he supposed to manipulate the manipulator? (In hindsight, maybe he should’ve thought a little bit more before he decided to go to the prison.)

His father picked up the black wall-phone on his side of the glass and brought it up to his ear. Talking openly about, like, crime and stuff was pretty stupid, though, wasn’t it?

Bentley lifted his hands, finger-spelling: sign.

His father put the phone back.

A moment of silence passed where Bentley’s father just sort of watched him closely; contemplating. His eyes scoured what had to be every inch of his son’s appearance before he lifted his hands and signed: ‘You’ve grown.’

Bentley thought long and hard about how he should respond. He considered saying: Yeah, food helps with that, but decided against it. Instead, he just bobbed his fist yes. This was already way harder than he’d thought. How was he supposed to talk to him? After he’d… you know. After all, his father never really gave up, even in jail.

Bentley kept his gaze trained on his father’s hands like he used to, avoiding eye contact like the plague. He didn’t want to see his face.

The hands moved. ‘How is school?’

Bentley breathed in and out, fingerspelling: ‘Fine.’ Well, besides having a murdering mad scientist (who moves at his father’s command.) for a teacher, and a bully who thought it would be funny to lock Bentley in the janitor's closet. That and the fact that he was now in the public eye for living with Bruce. He didn’t even want to know what the news reports looked like lately. Bruce Wayne’s newest child, gone without a trace?

John nodded. Another brief moment of staring ensued, before he brought his hands up again. ‘Made any friends?’

Not besides the ones you tried to kill. Bentley blinked a few times, moving his fingers calculatively. ‘Yes. But you already knew that.’

His father’s expression grew curious, in an arrogant sort of way, like he was raising his brows to say oh, really? Bentley only looked at him for a second before his eyes drifted back to the table his father’s elbows were resting on.

‘I know you’re still talking to Dr. Keene,’ Bentley signed subtly, glancing at the officer behind them, who looked anything but engaged. ‘And I’m sure you know by now that he had us at the facility. Then he didn’t.’

His father said nothing. Typical, and a great way to piss off an already sort of simmering-in-his-own-silent-rage kind of child.

Bentley kept his hands moving, lest they stop. ‘You’re hurting innocent people just to get back at me? I never did anything to you.’

John lifted his hands, his fingers twitching oddly for a moment before he signed: ‘It wasn’t about you. It was about Bruce.’

Bentley fought the urge to roll his eyes. ‘But-’

‘Bruce is the reason your mother and sister are dead. And then he came along and took you away from me, too,’ His father’s hands were sort of trembling, now, his expression intense and hard. Bentley could feel his eyes but still wouldn’t look right at them.

‘You didn’t even want me. What sense is there in attacking someone who got the kid you never wanted? Now you don’t have to deal with me,’ Bentley signed, looking at his father’s hands, shaking his head subtly. ‘You hate me, and now I’m somebody else’s problem. You should be happy.’

‘I don’t hate you,’ Was his father’s reply. Bentley saw his expression change. ‘I love you.’

The child breathed in through his nose. Not this, not again. Get the conversation back on track — control it. ‘No, you don’t.’

‘You can’t tell me what I do and don’t love; you don’t know,’ His father signed. ‘I love you.’

‘No, you don’t, and I don’t care. That’s not what I’m here to talk about,’ Bentley tried, but his signs went unnoticed.

‘I do, Bentley. I love you,’

Bentley inhaled sharply, looking down at the table with a few blinks. The last time his father had said that, it was a big fat lie. What had Bentley ever done to deserve all of that? All of this? What did he do not to deserve his father’s love?

Still, he caved for the patented back-and-forth arguing game. ‘You don’t.’

‘You just don’t want to accept the fact that maybe you’re wrong.’ His father signed, lowering his head so it was more in Bentley’s view. ‘You don’t want to accept the fact that I can change. That I can be more than the monster under your bed.’

What if his father could change? Not that Bentley thought he was. He was still a crazy psycho killer. But what if, one day, he wasn’t? What if, one day, he really was more than the monster from Bentley’s past? What if one day he really wanted to love him?

What if he wanted him back one day?

Bentley tried to push the thoughts out of his mind — he was on a mission. He was the Puppeteer. Right? His father couldn’t really love him. Right?

‘You asked me in the warehouse why I didn’t love you, and I’m telling you now, that I do,’ His father continued to sign, and Bentley’s eyes began to burn. He tried to push it away with everything in him, but something didn’t want to let go of the hope. The hope that maybe his real dad could love him again. ‘I did some awful things to you out of my own pain. Terrible things I would never wish upon any child in this world. I don’t know if I’ll ever do enough good to make up for it, but the one thing I can make damn well sure I do is let you know that I do love you.’

Bentley looked down at the table. It had been almost a year. Could someone change so fast? A year was long enough, wasn’t it?

‘You’re not lying this time?’ He signed in return.

‘No, Bentley. I didn’t see it before, but I see it now — getting you taken away, coming here, spending my time thinking, reflecting… It helped me realize that you were the best thing that ever happened to me. The only thing I really wanted. Needed.’

Bentley shook his head, blinking away the beginnings of tears. Rational thought and logic said he was lying. Hope said something else. ‘I don’t believe you.’

To the child’s surprise, his father smiled. Actually, literally smiled. With teeth and all. Teeth. Bentley’s father never smiled, let alone at him. ‘That’s okay. I’ll just keep saying it. I love you.’

Bentley shook his head, breathing in, swallowing thickly. ‘Stop.’

‘I love you, Bentley. I love you so much,’

‘Stop lying,’ He tried again.

‘I love you,’

‘Stop it,’

‘Look up at me. Please?’

That strange little sliver of hope had Bentley lifting his head on command, his brown eyes meeting the identical ones of his father. His father had tears — actual, honest tears — beginning to glimmer at the bottom of his eyes, a smile playing on his lips.

‘People can change, Bentley. You’re surrounded by them. Damian Wayne went from being a murderer to a superhero. Jason Todd went from rage-killing to a full-time older brother,’ He explained with his hands, smile staying all the while. ‘I can change, Bentley. I want to change. I just need you to have faith in me.’

Bentley stared, dumbfounded, vision slightly obscured by the liquid in his eyes.

‘I,’ His father separated the signs for emphasis with a smile, and an honest to goodness tear went down the man’s face. ‘Love. You.’

All that reliable rational thought and logic went out the window, and Bentley brought a hand to his mouth. Of all the things he expected to do while talking to his father, crying was not one of them. But here he was. Crying. (He probably should’ve expected to cry anyways. He was basically a professional at it.)

For a moment, he just rested his elbows on the table and put his head in his hands. So many red flags were waving in his mind, alarm bells sounding, lights flashing, telling him his father was lying, deceiving him, but he couldn’t really bring himself to accept it. He couldn’t. Not when his father had just told him he’d loved him ten times in one conversation. Not when Bentley was so close to feeling what he’d always wanted to feel. His father loving him was different from Dick or Bruce, it was… more. It didn’t feel the same. Different, long overdue, and… really, really, really, really good.

So, there he sat for a solid five minutes at least, his palms buried in his eye sockets in an attempt to keep the tears in. (It didn’t work. When did it ever?) He was biting his tongue to keep silent in fear Jason really would hear him crying through the wall and come break it down.

Logic told him to stop. To pay attention. To use his Puppeteer mind to see through everything his father was saying. That if he really had changed, if he really loved him, he wouldn’t be doing all of this.

The part of him that wanted so badly to be loved didn’t let him.

Because what if his dad really did love him?

There was a subtle peck on the glass, and Bentley looked up again, finally letting his (watery, and red.) brown eyes meet his father’s and stay there. He was still smiling, kind of like Bruce always did.

‘It’s been a year, and you still crumble under the weight of three small words. I thought I taught you better than that.’

Bentley sat up, wiping at his eyes, and glanced around the room warily. His father’s smile fell into nothing — something cold, like Bentley was used to. This wasn’t… he hadn’t… again?

‘You were lying?’

‘I thought you lived with detectives, Bentley,’ He signed, one eyebrow raised in a triumphant manner. He leaned in close to the glass, and Bentley instinctively moved away. ‘Listen, and listen closely, because this is the last thing I’m saying to you.’

Bentley looked down at his shaky hands. That strange feeling came again, the same one he felt at the Manor. He heard water moving through the pipes in the ceiling. He felt his blood pumping.

‘Even if you get Dr. Keene arrested, even if you kill Charlie and release the other children and destroy this entire operation from the ground up, you’re going to lose. If I can’t destroy the Wayne’s alone, I’ll just watch all of Gotham burn instead,’ He signed, a strangely competent look coming across his face like he was having a normal business transaction. ‘We have a plan B that you won’t touch, that you won’t even know about until it’s too late. Think of it as a boss fight in a video game. It’s coming. And you can’t stop it.’

Bentley exhaled a shaky breath, wiping at his eyes.

‘If you find a way to stop this — if you make us change to plan B, all the thousands of lives lost here in Gotham are on your head,’ His father smiled a crooked smile, different from the last. ‘There’s no way for you to win, Bentley. This is the end. It's your choice how many people come out of it.’

Bentley’s hands were shaking when he signed: ‘You’re not going to win.’

His father laughed. Literally laughed, out loud. ‘If you really think so, then keep your eye on the news channels. If you keep your ears open you might hear the warning call before the end comes.’

Bentley looked down at his own lap.

‘And Bentley…’ His father signed, and the child looked up one last time. ‘Just to clear things up… not a single atom of my very being has ever loved you… and not a single atom ever will.’

That was the moment a part of Bentley… died. Something inside of him shifted. The little boy that wanted his dad to love him so badly faded away to nothing, and left something oddly empty and wrong in its wake. Something like rage, but muffled by something else he couldn’t place right then.

Bentley stood up from the stool, letting out a breath of air. ‘That’s okay. Bruce loves me better than you ever could. Don’t you ever get tired of being second best?’

He didn’t wait for his father’s reply, but turned to leave the room.

“Oh, and Bentley…”

He turned back to his father one last time, who was standing now, with a smile. “When the elements are pitted against one another, fire always wins.”

Bentley said nothing. The officer led him out of the room.

When Bentley made it back into the hallway and Jason noticed his red rimmed eyes, he looked like he was going to kill someone.

“Bentley?” He questioned, standing up when they got close. “What happened?”

“I think they had a heartfelt conversation. I couldn’t really hear it, of course — I didn’t know the boy didn’t talk,” Said the officer, patting Bentley’s shoulder. “He’s all yours. Make sure you check up with security on your way out.”

Jason took Bentley’s shoulder and replied with a: “Yeah…”

The walk out of the prison felt like an eternity. Somehow, Bentley was feeling everything and nothing at all. It felt like everything negative inside of him — rage, sadness, despair, desperation, terror, loneliness, disappointment, frustration, a whole entire life’s worth of guilt — it was like it was all broiling and fighting to get out, but the lid of the pot was closed too tight. Like it was seeping out of crevices and waiting for the day Bentley Whittaker breaks.

“What did he say to you?” Jason practically demanded, his hand staying firmly on Bentley’s left shoulder as they walked through the not-very-crowded parking lot. He had a very deadpan, sort of pissed off look on his face.

Bentley looked everywhere but at Jason, dutifully shutting down the urges to cry or throw a tantrum or punch something or burn down a house. “I just… can we just go home? Please? I don’t want to be here anymore.”

“Did he threaten you?” Jason continued, squeezing Bentley’s shoulder as they split to go on either side of the car. Jason climbed in the driver’s seat, and Bentley hopped into the passenger’s side.

“No,” Bentley replied once they were both in Jason’s car, buckling his seatbelt. Not directly, anyway…

“Why have you been crying?”

Bentley looked down at his lap as the car started up. “Can we just go home?”

Jason didn’t argue.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @flyrobinflyy @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun @xiaonothere

36 notes · View notes

maccreadysbaby · 7 months ago

Text

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: angst?

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

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

YOU GUYYYSSSS

part forty

❝ THE BEGINNING OF THE END ❞

THURSDAY — SEPTEMBER 10 — 3:47 PM

WITHIN TWO DAYS, DR. KEENE HAD BEEN ARRESTED, AND JOHN WHITTAKER WAS MOVED INTO ARKHAM.

And two days after that, no plan b had been set into motion. The Secret Keeper hadn’t been seen, and neither had any metahumans or missing children. It was like time froze; like they were all hunkering in the labs no one knew the location of. Stalking. Waiting for something. A signal. A word.

Bentley had been spending most of his time recovering. He couldn’t remember a thing from his sickness, not a second of it, but he sure could feel it for a few days. His whole body was sore and he slept a ton. Life was largely… still sort of normal. Apart from the newly acquired superpowers, which Bentley was slowly getting the hang of. The hard part wasn’t controlling the water, it was controlling his emotions so the water didn’t, like, kill people. Which had been going pretty okay.

Asten and Nico were doing good. Both were healthy and at home, living their own lives. Turned out, Asten hadn’t been so pissed about Nico taking him to the Manor. What he had been pissed about, however, was Bentley spilling the entire truth to Bruce, which he had confessed to them over text. Nico was fine with it; he probably would’ve done it already. And he knew Bruce was Batman, which made it better. (It had also slipped that Nico knew everyone’s superhero identities, which went strangely, strangely well.) Asten, however, promptly stopped texting Bentley and hadn’t since. (Queue a spiral of Asten hates me thoughts at a family dinner that ended with most of the table's drinks levitating. But, on the bright side, Bentley got them all back in the right glasses.)

But that was okay. Bentley was okay. Everything would be okay.

“Check,”

Bentley looked down at the chessboard with a sigh. “I’m not very good at this.”

“You’ll get it. It’s complicated at first,” Tim replied from the other side of the table. He seemed… good. He was allowed to monitor the Batcomputer again, and looked way better. Less sick. Bentley was thankful — he’d missed Tim.

In the last three hours, he and Tim had played over a dozen mean games of checkers at the den’s board game table, and were now trying their hand at chess; a game Tim was very good at, and Bentley had little to no idea how to play. He was told it was easier to learn as you go. He didn’t think so.

Tim turned out to be freakishly good at chess, actually. He’d already beat Bentley twice and was trying his best to explain, but the poor kid just wasn’t getting it. (He was more or less moving his pieces exactly like Tim was. At least it wouldn’t be wrong!)

“Did you see anything on the computer last night?” Bentley questioned, moving one of his pieces completely randomly. Tim seemed like he wanted to correct the turn, but ended up just going with it instead. “Nope. No Secret Keeper, no metahumans. Only petty crime and gang activity.”

Bentley nodded to himself. “What about the news?”

“Nothing concerning or suspicious,”

To say Bentley was a little stressed out about the infamous plan b would be an understatement. He was told not to watch the news or Batcomputer, but he wasn’t told not to ask. Gotham burning because of him was pretty much directly his business. (And his fault. Queue a late night bathroom flood that he managed to fix before anyone else noticed just a few nights ago.)

“Here — let’s start over,” Tim suggested, moving all of his pieces back to the beginning of the game. Bentley followed suit, lining them up just like he did.

“May I take over, Drake?”

Bentley and Tim both craned their necks to glance over at the door of the den, where Damian was standing. Bentley hadn’t really seen him outside of family meals and times when everyone was together.

He was wearing a deep green hoodie and black sweatpants, leaning against the door, and he and Tim seemed to have some kind of weird, thirty-second staring contest in which they spoke with their eyes before Tim finally stood up and made his way out of the den.

Damian made his way to the other side of the chessboard and sat down there. “Did he teach you how to play?”

Bentley glanced up at him, meeting his greenish-blue eyes for the first time in a long time. “Sort of, I guess. I’m not very good.”

Damian hummed in response, moving one of the pieces on the board. Bentley simply copied the movement with one of his.

“Father told me you ran away because of what I said, and that I should apologize,” Damian spoke up, a strange expression taking over his features, like talking that way was literally paining him. “I… did not mean for you to get so upset.”

Bentley said nothing, watching closely as Damian moved another piece on the board and trying to move one of his own correspondingly.

“But… you did not do anything wrong to make me angry at you. I… guess I was… jealous. Of how much everybody loves you. Drake and Richard and Todd — they all flock to you. They acted like brothers to you way faster than they did for me; I still do not think Drake likes me. I understand that I am different from you, but seeing such a stark difference in my family made me… upset. After all, I am a Wayne by blood, and I felt… inferior,” He explained quietly.

Bentley watched as Damian blinked, glancing around with a sigh. “I… am not very good at talking about this type of thing.”

“Me either,” Bentley replied honestly. “But I think you’re doing a good job.”

Damian glanced up at him, and with a exhale, moved another piece. “I guess I… I saw the way my father treated you, and… and Richard stopped spending time with me and started spending it with you instead. Watching your relationships with everybody around me flourish and become better than mine… losing the interest of my family to someone else… it hurt.”

Bentley breathed in and moved another piece on the chessboard. “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“It was not your fault. Being jealous was my mistake — I have been taught better than to let it cloud my judgment, and yet, it got the better of me,” Damian moved another piece. “I have always felt like an outsider in this family, due to my upbringing and differences from everybody else. Being Robin after Drake made it worse. I have always felt like I had to work to make them love me. You went to school and had friends on the first day. I suppose… watching another child join the family and get everything I had worked so hard for handed to him made me overreact.”

Bentley said nothing, but kept watching the pieces on the board move.

“I am sorry, Bentley. I said a lot of inappropriate things to you. The truth is, your spot in this family is not built on pity or sympathy, but something much, much more… real. And it made me feel threatened. It was not right for me to take it out on you. And I sincerely apologize for all of my behavior recently,” Damian said softly. “The truth is, I have never had a real family before this one. I had my mother, of course, but this is very different… better. And, in all honesty, thinking about losing them to someone else, to anything, it… scares me. A lot.”

At that, Bentley snickered. Damian’s head snapped up, and his gaze grew cold. “Why are you laughing?”

“Nothing bad, it’s just… we’re a lot more similar than I thought, that’s all,” Bentley explained, moving one of his chess pieces. “Losing all of this has… I guess… kind of became one of my worst fears. And I do stupid stuff, like run away, to try and keep that from happening. We’re doing the same exact thing, just… differently.”

Damian nodded slightly, taking his turn. “I suppose we are.”

A moment of silence passed.

“Perhaps we can find a way to… deal with it… jointly.”

Bentley looked up at him. “You mean, together?”

“It’s not my typical behavior, I do admit, but I believe that would be the most beneficial course of action. We have the same motives; working together to not do, quote-on-quote, stupid things, would be the ideal solution.”

Bentley nodded. “Okay.”

They both moved another piece. “And, since I am being honest… I… miss doing things with you.”

Bentley smiled slightly. “Me too.”

Damian moved a piece on the board. “I don’t expect you to forgive me, I do not deserve it; but… perhaps we can… still try and do things like we used to?”

“I already forgave you,” Bentley said, taking his turn.

“What?”

“I already forgave you,” He repeated, glancing up at Damian. “I never blamed you. I knew you probably didn’t mean to hurt me, and that something else was going on. Plus, when anything around here goes wrong, the only person I’m trained to blame is myself,” He said, shaking his head. “I’m not upset at you, Damian. And I do miss you, too.”

A long moment of silence passed where no one said anything until Damian uttered: “Checkmate.”

Bentley snickered again. “I’m terrible at this.”

“You are pretty abysmal, yes,”

He and Damian made eye contact and started laughing, for the first time in what felt like a literal forever.

Maybe everything would be okay.

—

SATURDAY — SEPTEMBER 12 — 6:51PM

Okay, so Bentley was really loving the whole superpower thing. Not only could he make water go where he wanted, but he could also make it do what he wanted. For example, he could use a little stream of water to pick things up, like an extra hand, or break things, or cut things. (Yes, the fallen tree in the backyard was from him. It was experimental.)

Currently, though, his favorite thing to do with it was wrap the water around his own feet and use it like a skateboard. He could make it go really darn fast. It was pretty much the funnest thing he’d done in his entire life. And, when he was done, he wasn’t even wet!

Actually, that was exactly what he was doing right now, at sunset, in the backyard with Damian, Nico (who had slept over), Titus (the dog), and Ace.

Now that Bentley and Damian were friends again, life felt normal. Like actually normal, all except for the fact that Asten still wasn’t talking to him. But that was fine, he guessed. He didn’t let it bother him that much.

Nico had acquired a new power over the past few days — and it was manipulating the air beneath him so that he could fly. Straight up levitating-in-the-air fly. Which was awesome and sort of unbelievable.

Now, the three of them were playing with the dogs, throwing toys from the sky and making the trusty Wayne canines chase their impossibly fast movements, and had been for almost an hour.

“Bentley, I am not sure this is the safest means of travel,” Damian stated. He was across the yard from Bentley, also standing on a platform of water and pretty much hating it. He was struggling to balance (which was odd considering he was Robin), and even though he literally wouldn’t hit the ground if he fell, was surprisingly unsteady.

Bentley chuckled, moving across the yard on the water seamlessly and quickly with a chew toy that Titus was chasing. “Don’t you trust me?”

“You, yes. Magical levitating water, no,”

“C’mon, we won’t let you fall!” Nico announced, dropping low to the ground and flying in a few circles around Damian. “This is the safest you’ll ever be!”

“I seriously doubt that. Although I assume I appreciate the sentiment,” Damian replied, wobbling slightly when the water lifted him up a bit higher in the air.

“Lean where you want to go like you’re on a skateboard. It’ll move when you want it to,” Bentley announced, demonstrating by taking a steady but sharp u-turn that threw Titus for a (literal) loop.

Damian scrunched his nose. “How do you know?”

“Because the water does what I tell it to,” Bentley deadpanned. “Duh.”

“I presume-“

In the distance, there was a loud, thundering crash that made everybody jump. Loud like hurricane loud. Loud like atom bomb loud.

Nico promptly landed back on the grass, and Bentley made the water seep back into the dirt and leave him and Damian on dry ground.

“What the heck was that?” Nico questioned, blue eyes wide, flicking around warily. Bentley looked around the grounds surrounding the Manor, but couldn’t come up with much.

“I don’t know,”

“It sounded like-“

“Dami!”

The three of them turned to face the porch, where Dick was standing, an urgent look spread across his face. “C’mon, we need you!”

Oh, so something really serious was happening? What was happening?

The three of them made for the house at once, and Bentley assumed it was really, really serious when Dick went straight into the cave in front of Nico with no discretion at all.

They followed him closely, and halfway down the stairs, Nico nudged Bentley’s shoulder. He had his phone in hand. “I missed four calls from Asten.”

Bentley glanced down at his pockets, patting them and then withdrawing his phone. On the lock screen, there sat Asten’s name. Four times.

“Me, too,” He muttered. Nico tapped on Asten’s name and brought it to his ear. Bentley heard it go straight to voicemail.

“That can’t be good,” Bentley muttered, and Nico shook his head.

When they made it to the cave, it seemed to be crunch time. Tim was all Red Robin-ed up, sitting at the Batcomputer, typing furiously, and Bruce was but two feet away in his full Batman gear besides the cowl. Jason was about halfway into being Red Hood, Dick ran off to get ready, Cass and Steph zoomed out of the cave on guttural sounding motorcycles, and Damian made for the locker room, where his suit was.

“Holy shit,” Nico muttered, breathless.

Bentley, amused by his cursing but not enough to crack a smile, made for the Batcomputer in record time. “What’s happening?”

In the center of the massive screen was an aerial view of Gotham from what looked like a drone. Bentley’s question was answered indisputably by a building — an entire actual building, with a bunch of floors and all — rumbling and shaking at the base, the entire thing collapsing from the bottom up with a loud crash that rumbled the sides of the cave, smoke and dust pluming up into the sky and making it hard to see. The city was indeed glowing, but not in it's normal sunset lights way.

Gotham was burning.

There were flames everywhere; licking out of the windows of buildings, vehicles burning on the streets, trees and plants and flower beds charred, entire multi-story buildings engulfed in flame. How many people had… how many people were…?

Bentley’s father had warned him about this, and still, he told the truth anyways. (How stupid was that? Bentley Whittaker was still on his ten year streak of doing absolutely nothing beneficial.)

“I’m trying to triangulate the epicenter of the destructive energy, but I’m struggling. It’s powerful everywhere,” Tim said, more to himself than Bruce, still furiously typing away on the computer. The keys he was pressing were showing up as lines of code in a box in the bottom left corner of the screen. The top right corner also had a little box in it, cycling through what looked like the most prevalent news channels and stories.

“I’m going to have a heart attack,” Nico whispered, drifting up next to Bentley and looking at the computer. “I’m in the Batcave.”

“Bentley, are you positive your father didn’t say anything else about this plan b? Anything at all?” Bruce questioned, moving away from the computer to a different part of the cave.

“No…” Bentley muttered, watching the news stories flick to pictures of charred bodies and immediately looking away. “All he said was… when the elements are against each other, fire always wins. That’s all.”

Bruce got a calculating look on his face and pulled his cowl up.

“There! Make that bigger!” Nico exclaimed, pointing at the current news story that was running in the top corner. Tim blew the tab up to twice it’s normal size and put the volume on.

On the screen was a video of a semi-truck, upside down in a deep, deep ravine, burning and smoking. The headline read: semi-truck failure in Somerset.

“-unfortunately, driver Samuel Evans was killed almost instantly in the windshield-first impact. There were no witnesses around to see exactly what caused the truck to swerve off the road-“

Samuel Evans. Where had Bentley heard that name before?

“Oh my God,” Nico muttered, bringing his hands up to his mouth. “That’s Asten’s uncle.”

Bentley blinked, looking at the upside down semi-truck. Asten’s uncle was dead, and they’d missed all his calls.

When the elements are pitted against one another, fire always wins.

“This is it,” Bentley muttered. Nico looked over at him, furrowing his brows.

“What?”

“The Secret Keeper showed me you finding your adoption papers. In that dream I saw a big door in your house that had the Greek gods on it. Hephaestus, god of fire, was destroying everything, and the gods of water and air were trying to save him… and… and in the videos, Dr. Keene talked about powers becoming volatile under emotional stress… The Secret Keeper could see the future, they had it all planned out…” Bentley muttered, swallowing thickly. “This is it — the end my father was talking about.”

Nico swallowed thickly, too. “And you’re saying…”

Bentley looked back at the screen, at the rapidly crumbling buildings behind an upside down semi. The drone moved to a tall building Bentley had seen before, not too long ago, in a dream, with a small figure with blue hair and orange eyes standing on top of it.

“…We have to fight Asten,”

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

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maccreadysbaby · 6 months ago

Text

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

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

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

THIS IS THE LAST CHAPTER THIS IS THE LAST CHAPTER THIS IS THE LAST CHAPTER. Get ready for a bittersweet ending my friends 🥹 THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR LOVE AND SUPPORT ON THIS PROJECT. It means so much to me🥹

part forty-six

❝ EVERYTHING IS OKAY? ❞

SUNDAY — SEPTEMBER 20 — 3:04PM

LIFE WENT LARGELY BACK TO NORMAL (IN IT'S TYPICAL STRANGE WAY).

The Secret Keeper was dead. The metahumans were released from mind control. Gotham was cleaning up, getting ready to rebuild. Everyone was okay.

For a while, Bentley was nothing more than a whole lot of sore. Everything hurt, like his internal organs and all. He was practically living off of ibuprofen and other painkillers. He wasn’t allowed to eat anything super hard to digest, so he’d been inhaling soup and jello and tea in favor of being in the least amount of pain possible.

Nico’s parents came to get him a few days after Bentley’s surgery. It was a dramatic reunion, as expected, and Bentley was glad about it. Nico seemed glad about it, too. They thanked Bruce for his help and took Nico home without a moment, to maybe, hopefully, talk things over.

Asten was staying at the Wayne Manor until further notice. Bruce had been talking to the right people and already had some kind of court date or something set up. Bentley wasn’t sure what that was all about (maybe something about sending Asten back to Brazil? Which would suck), but he did know that Asten was doing pretty good for a kid who’d been dead. He was more closed off and quiet than normal, and had refused a guest room in favor of sleeping on the other side of Bentley’s bed, but it was okay. Nico made sure to call them nearly every single day and talk about everything and nothing, which Asten seemed to enjoy. He’d be okay.

The Wayne family was there in full force to make sure Asten and Bentley were okay and taken care of and happy. Not a single Wayne stayed hidden, not a single one left — they all made sure to come to dinner every night and tell stupid stories, to have their nightly time in the den watching movies they’d all seen too many times already, to coax Alfred into playing games around the table with them, to hang out in the backyard with the dogs, to have huge spontaneous sleepovers downstairs when their movie marathon got a little out of hand. The Wayne’s were back to how they’d been when Bentley first got there. They were the real Wayne’s again.

And for the first time in a long time, everything was okay.

Until it wasn’t.

Until Nico showed up on the doorstep of Wayne Manor a week and one day after Bentley’s surgery with bad, bad news.

“You’re what?” Asten growled.

Nico looked down at the concrete beneath his shoes. His parents were behind him in their car, doors closed but windows rolled down, talking to Bruce, who was standing out next to the vehicle. Nico’s eyes and nose were red. The sun was shining and the birds were chirping — it was a nice, not freezing Monday afternoon. But that didn’t matter.

Nico scraped the toe of his tennis shoe across the concrete, not bringing his red-rimmed blue eyes up. “We’re moving.”

Bentley (decked out unabashedly in his sailboat pajamas) and Asten (also unashamedly wearing the same pjs he’d had on for at least two days) stared blankly; one shocked, the other on the edge of livid.

Nico was… leaving? Like really leaving and never coming back?

Bentley muttered: “Where?” At the same time Asten spat: “When?”

Nico still didn’t look up, but instead, stared at the bottoms of his black sweatpants. “Missouri. A week from today. My… parents don’t think it’s safe here anymore. They have friends there.”

Bentley glanced over at Asten, who was staring, calculatively. His green eyes flicked back to Nico’s parents’ car with the same fire in it that he had the day he knocked out Jesse Todryk. “Your parents' friends can piss right off.”

“Asten,” Bruce warned from the car (he really does have Batman ears). “Don’t make this harder than it already is for him.”

(Oh yeah, did Bentley mention that Bruce had already eased into dad-mode with Asten? Because he had. No one in the Manor expected much less, really.)

Nico kept staring dutifully at the ground.

“I’m sorry.” He whispered, hardly audible, voice wavering slightly. He brought the sleeve of his blue hoodie up to rub at his eyes. “I… I don’t have a choice.”

As it became prominent he was crying, Bentley stepped up and hugged him. Nico didn’t bother putting his arms around him, choosing to instead keep covering his face, but Bentley didn’t mind.

One of Bentley’s only two friends was really leaving? For real?

Don’t. Freaking. Cry. That would make it so much worse for him. Bentley blinked back a dull sting behind his eyes and forced it away.

They were all quiet for a minute.

“I told them everything. It’s my fault we’re leaving,” Nico muttered, bringing his arms up and around Bentley after a moment. “They-they said there’s someone in Central City that will train me. The same guy that saved my life when I was a baby.”

Bentley hummed. Didn’t the super fast guy who was on the Justice League with Bruce live in Central City?

There was no way Nico was going to train with The Flash, was there?

(Was the Barry from the adoption letter The Flash?)

Bentley rubbed his back lightly. “That’ll be good for you.”

He and Asten shared brief eye contact, during which Bentley made his best please just be supportive face, and after a moment, Asten walked away, disappearing back into the manor without a single word.

Bentley sighed lightly.

“Asten’s pissed,” Nico muttered, and he felt Nico grab onto the back of his shirt. “I knew he would be.”

“He’s just sad,” Bentley tried, rubbing his back a little again. “He is your best friend.”

“And so are you. It’s like they don’t even care that I’m having to leave you guys behind. That this affects more than just me,” Nico groaned in annoyance.

Bentley breathed in, glancing at Nico’s parents’ car. They were smiling, chatting with Bruce. “If it’s going to be better and safer for you, then… I’d rather you go.”

Nico pulled away from him, giving him a deadpan look. “No offense, Bentley, but if you were told it would be better for someone if you cut off your own legs with a handsaw, you’d do it.”

“I would not,” Bentley argued, and Nico wiped at his watery eyes. A moment of silence passed.

“This isn’t really something we can change, so we should make the best of it, right?” Bentley questioned. “Maybe you can come over one more time before you leave.”

“Maybe… I’ll ask,” Nico replied, sighing lightly, running a hand through his hair. “I hate this.”

“It’ll be okay,” Bentley reassured. (But would it really be okay?) “We can talk to you on the phone every day.”

“But Asten-“

“Trust me, we’ll take care of Asten,” Bentley replied, attempting the patented Bruce Wayne reassuring smile. “You’re going to a new place to train with someone who has superpowers, away from creepy Gotham and Jesse Todryk and supervillains. I think it’ll be great. And you can call us whenever you want to.”

Nico sniffled, then stared at the ground. “But, Asten’s whole family got killed and now his best friend is leaving. What if this, like, pushes him over an edge? Again?”

Bentley shrugged lightly. “We have a Jason for that.”

“Bentley, I’m serious,”

“So am I,” He replied, glancing back at the car momentarily. “Everything will be okay here.”

“What if I don’t want it to be okay?” Nico questioned, catching Bentley off-guard. Their eyes met and there was some level of hurt in his blue irises. “What if I want you guys to need me here?”

Bentley sighed lightly, blinking a few times, looking around. “You’re our friend. We’ll always need you.”

“You can say that now, but we’re all just going to forget about each other in a few years. That’s what happens every time I move,” Nico muttered, crossing his arms.

“We broke into our teacher’s cabin, got kidnapped and turned into metahumans, and went into a war zone together. I don’t think there’s much of a risk of us forgetting each other,” Bentley stated, snickering lightly. “It’ll-“

“Yeah, but one day you’re going to have a bunch of new friends and just say something like oh yeah once me and this blonde kid played superhero. That’s always what happens when someone moves. And I’m just going to be stuck at home being homeschooled and doing nothing forever.”

“Nico, we’ve gotta go, bud!” His father called from the driver's side window.

Bentley sighed lightly, glancing back at Nico, whose eyes were watering again. “Nico, I promise I will not forget about you, okay? None of us will. We’ll talk all the time.”

Nico nodded in response, but didn’t say anything else. Instead, he turned and silently made for the car, passing Bruce on the way, who patted his shoulder reassuringly.

Bentley watched Nico climb in the car, and Bruce made his way back to the manor, settling with him in the doorway.

The car pulled off.

One of Bentley’s first ever friends was leaving.

Bruce’s hand landed between his shoulder blades and rubbed his back there. “You okay, chum?”

“I don’t think so,”

(He didn’t cry until Nico’s car was long gone.)

—

SUNDAY — SEPTEMBER 27 — 2:23PM

Asten was pissed for the whole week. Whatever small progress had been made to pull him out of his shell and help open him up after his uncle’s death disappeared completely. He was back to hardly talking to anyone, like he had been right after he’d started staying there. (Bentley pretended to be asleep when he heard Asten crying the night after Nico told them.)

He still came to dinner and the den and everything, but he just wasn’t talking. Not when Bentley tried, not when Jason tried, not when Bruce or Dick tried.

But, even with Asten in silence, time went on too fast. Days passed where Nico called just to cry and Asten never said anything, so Bentley took up the comforting role as best he could. Astern didn’t talk again until Nico came over on Sunday afternoon, to spend some time with them before he left on Monday morning.

Bruce was in town for the court time he had set up. Dick had gone back to Bludhaven for the day and would be back for dinner. Damian was very obviously hiding and avoiding the emotional mess. Jason and Tim had gone somewhere (Together? Which was weird. And suspicious. Bentley was pretty sure they were trying to avoid an explosion, too.) which meant that, besides the dogs and Alfred, who appeared occasionally, there was no mediator. So the time Nico was over was mostly spent in the front courtyard in silence. The dogs were playing with each other in the sunny grass in front of Wayne Manor, running the driveway and having the time of their little lives, but Bentley, Nico, and Asten were sitting quietly on the stairs. Saying nothing. Doing nothing.

Nico was obviously not taking the move well. As soon as he’d arrived, it was obvious by the flushing on his face that he’d been crying again. Bentley would be lying if he said it didn’t hurt a little. After all, Nico was literally one of his first friends ever. They’d been through a lot of crazy crap together, and he was being dragged away because of it. (Did that mean it was technically Bentley’s fault he was moving?) Not to mention how much Asten had been through with him.

It didn’t matter anymore anyways, they couldn’t change his parents' minds.

For now, they settled for sitting on the steps. In silence.

For a while.

Until Nico exhaled shakily, on the verge of crying again. “This is torture.”

Bentley, completely clueless as to what he should say, scooted closer to him and squeezed his shoulder instead.

“It’ll be okay,” Was what he settled on whispering.

“No it won’t,” Was Nico’s quick response. “It’ll be a nightmare. How am I supposed to just leave? Asten’s practically lived with me for two entire years. We’ve gone through so much crap in these past few months and they just want to take me away? Without asking? Most of my life has been in Gotham and now they want to change that?”

Bentley hummed. “Have you told them that?”

“Yeah. They’re all like we understand honey but it’s not safe here anymore,” Nico mocked. “They don’t even-“

At that very moment, Nico’s parents drove through the gate of Wayne Manor.

It suddenly hit Bentley that he might never see him again.

As soon as Nico saw the car, he started full-on crying, hard.

The three of them stood up as Nico’s parents approached like they were about to get sentenced to prison. Nico turned on a dime and hugged Bentley, hard, and Bentley hugged him back.

“I’m so sorry,” Nico muttered. Bentley blinked a few times, trying to be strong and subdue the faint burn that was surfacing behind his eyes.

“It’s okay,” He replied, in a whisper, just in case his voice were to break.

After a minute, the car pulled up to the house, and Nico pulled away, glancing over at Asten. “I… I’m so sor-“

Before he could finish, Asten grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him into a tight embrace.

“You’re going to be the most epic superhero ever,” He said, though his face was mostly hidden, and Bentley assumed it was because his voice was a little thick. “I’m... gonna miss you.”

As if Nico wasn’t crying hard enough already. He pulled an arm out of the embrace and extended it toward Bentley, offering him one last hug.

Bentley accepted, engaging in the very first group hug of his life. (He liked it. He would’ve liked it more if they weren’t all almost crying, though.)

“Nico, bud, it’s time to go,” Came his father’s voice.

They all separated, looking around with slight horror on their features. Asten was crying, too — only a little, but he did have real, actual tears on his face. Nico was sobbing and kept hiding his face away in his hands. Whatever will to be strong in front of them that Bentley had kept up cracked, and he started crying, too.

Nico didn’t say anything else on the way to the car.

Bruce pulled into the driveway.

There was a long time where no one said anything. Bruce parked and went to Nico’s parents’ window to bid them goodbye, and Asten and Bentley stood on the steps, silently.

The car left.

Bruce approached the manor with that same sympathetic look on his face that he always had when something like this happened. He was in a nicely pressed suit from his time at court, his hair sleek and perfected. He climbed the stairs and settled between Bentley and Asten, watching Nico’s car go down the driveway and disappear down the road with them.

Now their trio was down to two.

Bentley hiccuped lightly, and he felt Bruce’s hand land on the back of his head.

What were they going to do now?

—

Dinner was only a little quieter that night. Everybody was aware and considerate of Bentley and Asten, that they might not be up for much talking, which was nice, because everybody was still talking to each other. Sometimes it made Bentley feel better just to listen.

He and Asten had been at a loss pretty much all day, settling down for the most part in the den to sit and halfway watch movies. It was weird, knowing that they wouldn’t see Nico anymore. And it kind of really sucked?

At the dinner table, Bentley was sitting between Asten and Damian, directly across from Dick, who was between Jason and Tim. Duke, Steph, and Cass were on the end of the table, Steph at the head opposite from Bruce. Of course, it was Dick who was doing most of the storytelling and joke making. Alfred had made spaghetti for dinner again (given that it was both Bentley and Asten’s favorites.) and it was really good.

It would be okay. It would — his family was alive and fine and happy. It would be okay.

“I have an announcement to make,” Bruce said suddenly, and the table quieted, everyone’s eyes drifting over to him. His icy irises flicked around the table warily. “As you all know, I went to court today to address the issue of sending Asten back to Brazil, to be put in the foster care system there. There were Gotham and São Paulo officials there who were… mostly inclined to send him back to his home country.”

Bentley deflated like a balloon.

The trio couldn’t turn to one already.

He saw Asten deflate, too, immediately hanging his head.

“…And I won,”

The table suddenly burst into excited chatter, and both Bentley and Asten’s heads came up with a snap. Bruce was looking straight at Asten now, that Bruce Wayne smile on his face.

“I won emergency custody of you, Asten,”

Asten cried at the dinner table.

(Everything was okay.)

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @flyrobinflyy @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun @xiaonothere @beatyoutothatusernameloser

thank you all SO MUCH for supporting me and my boys🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹 I could never ask for better readers and friends🥰

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maccreadysbaby · 8 months ago

Text

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: death and gore

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

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

here’s bentley and his friends going through it™︎

part thirty-one

❝ HOMEBOUND ❞

MONDAY — AUGUST 17 — 10:42PM

BENTLEY, ASTEN, NICO, AND DAVIS DIDN’T MOVE AN INCH. Instead, they all stared at the bodies of the guards that had just choked to death on nothing.

Nico’s glowing white eyes faded back to their normal blue, rolled back into his head, and he fell over without a warning. Thankfully, Asten was quick and close enough to keep his head from hitting the white tile of Dr. Keene’s screwed-up child experimenting facility.

Bentley blinked, taking several moments to look back and forth between the pile of dead guards in the doorway of the sterile white room, and Nico. Had he just… killed them all? With superpowers?

He turned back to Nico and Asten — the latter now had the former’s head on his lap, and he was staring at him, stunned. So many people were… dying. Bentley had to have seen at least twenty people die right before his eyes in the past, what? Thirty minutes? And each one at the hands of people he knew as friends. The thought made him kind of dizzy. He’d seen so many people die.

He flinched when Davis’s metal glove landed on his left shoulder, and when he met his eyes, the green orbs were dancing worriedly across his face and bloody frame. Bentley looked away and sniffled quietly. “You think you can walk so I can carry your friend?”

Honestly, Bentley was running on nothing more than fumes and fear, and had been for at least a solid few days. The added pain and terror from the gunshot was almost inconceivable, blending into one big blur of full-body agony that he couldn’t stop crying over. Even though Davis said the shot wasn’t that bad (he knew it would be a very different situation if he had been shot in the chest or head), keeping himself from falling over seemed to be the most laborious task he’d carried out in a long time.

But… Nico was passed out, and Bentley wasn’t yet. He wasn’t sure how many steps he’d get in — but if worse came to worse, he was probably small enough that Asten could get by with dragging him or something. So, as much as he wanted Davis to keep carrying him around, to hide his face from the world and pretend he was in Bruce’s arms, he wiped at his furiously leaking eyes and nodded for him to carry Nico instead.

With that, Davis moved across the room to pick him up, which he did while enduring the longest death glare Bentley had ever seen Asten throw in someone’s direction. He didn’t argue, though — much to their surprise. He just stood up once Nico was securely in Davis’s arms, eyes flicking over to Bentley, around the sterile white room. He also sent a glare to the Synchronizer that surely would’ve made it wither had it been anything but metal and machinery.

“We have to get to Titus. He’s on the other end of the facility,” Davis said, shifting Nico around until his head was securely against his shoulder. He was holding him bridal style like he’d been carrying Bentley, and Nico looked really small in his arms.

Asten breathed in, brushing a hand over his blue and black hair. He was still standing ahead of the Synchronizer where Nico had hugged the life out of him. “Titus. The one who can teleport?”

“Yeah. He can get you guys out of here, if we can get to him. If. I’m not sure how far we’ll make it with no self defense. I would offer up my hands, but they’re kinda full,” Davis glanced down at Nico momentarily, something like the vaguest hint of nostalgia or deja vu swirling in his green irises. “We-“

“I can help with that,”

Bentley, Asten, and Davis all flinched in tandem when a fourth voice came — a disembodied female voice that had no obvious user. The voice had come from near the back wall, across from the door, but… there wasn’t anybody there.

Bentley wasn’t, like, losing his mind, was he? The thought made more silent tears slide down his face. He’d lost so much blood he was losing his mind.

“Who’s there?” Davis questioned, taking a few steps past Bentley in the direction of the mysterious voice. Asten moved toward them, ever so slowly inching away from the Synchronizer and ending up at Bentley’s left side.

Suddenly, eliciting a flinch from Asten and a gasp from both Bentley and Davis, the redhead girl that they’d ejected from a Synchronizer on their search for Asten and Nico appeared out of thin air. She was standing against the back wall of the room in a hospital gown that mirrored theirs, picking at her nails. Her light blue eyes seemed to be an odd mixture of color that made them look silver, and her red hair was long and wavy down her back. Her face had much more color than it had earlier.

Davis glowered dangerously at her, tugging Nico closer to himself. “Who are you?”

She stepped forward, a ghost of a smile growing on her petite face. “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna hurt your little sheep. I’ve been following you since you let me out of the machine, which I’m here to repay you for. That is, if you can get your teleporty friend to get me out of here, too.”

“How are you going to help us?” Davis questioned, his voice layered thick with uncertainty and doubt. The girl smirked — smirked.

“I might be straight out of the mad scientist’s oven, but I have a pretty good handle on this whole superpower thing,” She explained, glancing down at her own blank nails, strangely nonchalant now — way calmer than she was earlier. “The names Lydia. Lydia Venice. And with me at your disposal, you’ll be able to walk your happy selves straight to the other side of the compound without a hitch.”

Her freakishly calm demeanor didn’t go unnoticed by Bentley. Either she was adapting extremely well to being kidnapped and experimented on, or…

“And how am I supposed to know if you’re being mind controlled?” Davis questioned, mirroring exactly what Bentley had been thinking. The thought sent a shiver down his spine. What if she was just going to take them back to Dr. Keene? Put them back in the machines to finish the process?

“I guess you don’t… but I feel like myself right now. Making my own choices and all that,”

Bentley would’ve been intrigued in the conversation, had the blood loss been taking less of a toll on him than it actually was. The floating feeling was now putting a fog over everything in his mind, and he was really cold. He could hear his heart beating in his ears, and it seemed to be going way too fast even though he was literally just standing there.

That’s about when his legs decided to give out beneath him.

Thankfully, a pair of arms looped around his middle in a rather un-graceful way, catching him in a position that made his shoulder momentarily set itself ablaze with agony. He let out a cry. Why? The pain? The trauma that was being burned into his head for the rest of his life? He wasn’t sure. But he was pretty sure it was enough to cry about.

“Whoa, whoa. I’ve got you, red,” Whispered probably the most comforting voice in the room.

Voices were running in the background, Davis and Lydia, but the Bentley was too focused on the fact that Asten had wasted no time pulling him gently back onto his feet. He slung Bentley’s arm around his shoulders, looping his own arm around his torso so he could hold him up. Nearly all of his (minimal) weight was leaning into Asten’s right side, which might’ve felt bad about if his mind wasn’t floating like he was fresh off of anesthesia. He noted the fact that he kind of felt like he wanted to hurl. He also noted the fact that everyone was suddenly looking at him.

Davis stared at him for a solid ten seconds, before he huffed and looked back at Lydia with a tense: “Fine. How are you going to help us?”

She smiled. “Observe.”

She walked over to the Synchronizer in the room, and with the cock of an eyebrow, put her hand on it. She disappeared. The entire Synchronizer disappeared with her.

“Whatever I touch turns invisible, too. If you hold onto me, no one will see us,” Her voice came from the nothingness in front of them.

“Alright…” Davis sighed to himself, blinking a few times to right his mind. “But if you try anything-“

“You’ll kill me?” The girl reappeared and cracked a strangely genuine looking grin, cocking a hip to the side. “I’ve seen quite the spread of bodies you’ve left in your wake, Reaper. This time and last.”

Davis scowled, a far-off look growing in his eyes momentarily. Bentley remembered hearing about the last time Davis had killed a bunch of people — if his brain wasn’t so foggy he might’ve even remembered what Dr. Keene said the reason was. But he couldn’t. He felt like he was drifting away into darkness. Like the agony was fading and so was he. Even the crying he’d assumed would be endless was tapering away due to the haze he couldn’t get out of.

“Asten,” He whispered, breathing deep despite being relatively still. The Brazilian immediately whipped his head around, his hold on him tightening the slightest.

“What is it?”

Bentley sniffled, batting away the wetness in his eyes to no avail. “I don’t feel good,” He muttered, but he couldn’t bring his gaze up to look his friend in the eyes. How was Asten so warm and everything else was so cold? Bentley was freezing.

The blue haired boy grimaced, glancing back up at Davis and Lydia. “As much as I love spitting empty threats at people, you seem to have forgotten that ginger over here is literally bleeding out. Let’s get this trainwreck on the road, yeah?”

Davis and Lydia’s eyes flicked between each other, Bentley, and Asten, before the former nodded. “It’s now or never.”

Lydia walked toward the door, grabbing onto Davis and Asten’s hospital gowns as she went, tugging them along. Bentley and Nico didn’t have much of a choice but to join them. “You’ll still see yourselves and each other, but no one else will. They can hear and feel us, though, so don’t be idiots.”

Bentley walked along, and he was thankful for Asten baring most of his weight — the strangely dull agony of the gunshot was sending waves of pain pulsing through his muscles, and it made his legs not want to work. It made nothing want to work, really — not even his brain, which was still getting fuzzier.

They left the Synchronizing room and moved into the long, sterile, white hallways, Lydia’s hand staying on the others’ gowns all the way. For now, the corridors were empty, but they branched off into other halls and areas not too far ahead of them, and Bentley wasn’t sure those would be so vacant. Red alarm lights were flashing in the halls, but there were no alarms.

“Titus is in the medical sector,” Davis nodded to the left, down the long hall. Thankfully, they weren’t facing all the dead people left in Davis’s wake. Bentley wasn’t sure he could stomach staring at them all again, black growing and writhing under their skin like a parasite.

Lydia nodded. “Don’t pull away from me, and keep your mouths shut,” She ordered.

Bentley had no problem with that. The rag-tag group of five, one shot, one unconscious, all supposedly invisible, wearing matching hospital gowns made down the white hallways with Lydia at the lead. Bentley was hardly able to focus on anything except keeping his own two feet under him as Asten walked. Why was it so hard to move his feet the right way?

At one point, a group of guards with guns walked right past them without batting an eye, which meant they really were invisible. And Bentley had never been more grateful in his life.

For a long time, all Bentley saw was bright white and flashing red moving around him. The occasional guard or few passed every now and then, paying them no mind at all. Lydia’s plan was going, dare he say, good. Maybe he would actually make it home.

They were just about to pass a group of six, solid white, armored and gunned guards when Nico decided to wake up.

Screaming.

“No! No, I didn’t mean to! I didn’t mean to!”

Bentley was shocked back into reality at the noise, and everyone began to move. The guards whipped out their weapons, Nico flailed in Davis’s arms, Lydia whipped around to see what was going on and Asten flinched so violently he nearly dropped Bentley on his face.

“Hey, hey, shh, shh, shh,” Davis tried to hush Nico. He was squirming to the point where Davis had to set him down in favor of not dropping him, his eyes wide and brimming with tears, and the guards were aiming their guns around the hallway in a blind panic. Lydia hadn’t let go of them, and the men in white looked confused, which was a good thing, Bentley thought.

…Until it wasn’t.

Until they began to pull the trigger of their guns blindly, one shot after another, each one aiming in the group’s general direction. There were probably ten or twelve gunshots that erupted from the group, at least two of which were aimed pretty darn close to Bentley and Asten. Lydia let go of everyone in a panic, making them visible to the world.

Bentley was overtake by dread at the realization that he was really dead now. And so was everybody else.

There was a flash of yellow lightning.

Everyone stood, frozen, unmoving, unblinking. The guards didn’t move. None of Bentley’s group moved. Not a single one of the five captives hit the floor, screamed, or started bleeding like he’d anticipated. Bentley looked down at himself and Asten, examining for blood or gunshots hidden by adrenaline, but there was nothing. At least a couple of those guns had been aimed freakishly close to them.

Nico was now standing directly in front of Bentley and Asten, his chest heaving and eyes sparking with an ever present yellow electricity. His right hand was balled into a fist.

When opened it, all of the bullets that had just been shot fell through his fingers and dinged on the tile.

Suddenly, it all seemed to make sense in Bentley’s only half-working mind. Nico’s hands moving so fast he couldn’t see them, the yellow lightning, the letter from his real parents talking about the Speed Force — Nico had super-speed. Super-speed that was so fast he’d just caught a dozen bulletsthat had been shot not ten feet away from them.

The guards were stunned, and Davis used the moment of confusion to his advantage, flicking a glove off with one resounding click.

Bentley jumped when more gunshots rang out — directed right at Davis. There was another flash of yellow lightning and Nico was in front of the men with the guns. He dropped another handful of bullets on the floor.

Bentley made sure to look away when Davis used his hands to kill the guards — just like he’d told him — but Asten watched in some mixture of horror and intrigue. Bentley saw Davis move in his peripheral, heard the dull thuds of the guards against the tile.

Nico stumbled back away from Davis, knocking into Asten, who almost dropped Bentley again.

“Dude, that was awesome! You’re like the freaking flash!” He heard Asten mutter, like he wasn’t literally shot at twenty seconds ago.

Suddenly and silently, Lydia hit the floor in front of the three of them.

They all flinched and peered down at her — she had small streams of blood dripping from her nose, her eyes, her ears. She was staring at them… but wasn’t really looking.

Bentley inhaled sharply when he realized that she wasn’t looking at all. That her chest wasn’t rising or falling, that she was laying eerily still. In his peripheral, he could see someone standing a ways off in the hallway. Someone with platinum hair and glowing yellow eyes, a twisted stitched smile that would forever be engraved in his mind.

Nico let out a strangled whine at the sight of Lydia’s body, and then promptly threw up in the floor. Asten had a grip on his shoulder with the arm that wasn’t around Bentley.

Davis was suddenly in front of them, obstructing their view of the Secret Keeper. He thrusted the keycard he’d been carrying around toward Asten. “You’re almost there! You just go to the next hall and turn left — you’ll be looking right inside his cell. That should open it. Go!”

Bentley’s heart was hammering in his ears, threatening to split his ribs clean open. Nico looked so pale he might pass out, he was crying again, arms wrapped around himself and looking really tiny. Asten took the hand off of his shoulder to grab the keycard.

Davis un-latched his other glove, but didn’t let it hit the floor yet. He pointed down the hallway when not one of them responded, glancing behind them. “Go!”

“What about you?” Bentley croaked, the sting of tears behind his eyes starting up again. He didn’t have much of a response when Asten rubbed his back. He wasn’t sure he could take any of the self sacrificial bullcrap — he wanted to survive and he wanted Asten to survive and Nico to survive and Davis to survive. Davis had to survive. He’d saved Bentley so many times and death was how he’d repay him?

“What’re you gonna do?” Bentley choked.

Davis turned, moving just enough so Bentley could see the silhouette of the Secret Keeper standing eerily still at the other end of the hall. Then the waiter smiled fondly, green eyes sparkling a little even despite the circumstances. “I’m going to try and have a conversation with my girlfriend.”

Bentley blinked. They all blinked, and he looked at Asten, who look at him, and then at Nico, who looked at them.

“Charlie?” Asten muttered, eyes falling to the tile. “My God, you must’ve thought she was… for two years…“

“You guys need to get out of here. Get to safety,” Davis replied, agilely avoiding Asten’s statement. “Remember, the first hall that branches left, Titus will be straight ahead.”

Bentley pulled himself out of Asten’s hold and managed to stumble forward just far enough to wrap his arms around Davis’s torso with a poorly stifled round of crying. “Please don’t die.”

Davis patted the top of his head with his still-gloved hand. “You heard it yourself, kid — I am death. Now go.”

Bentley was gently pulled away by Asten’s hand, and despite everything that was screaming for him to stop, they ran. (Well, as much as Bentley could. He was more or less being dragged around by Asten, who had resumed their previous position.) They booked it down the sterile halls and turned down the first one to the left. This one was different — lined with large viewing windows that were accompanied by metal doors. At the end of the hall was a window and door, larger than the others. There weren’t any guards or scientists around. Not that they could see, anyway.

The three of them slowed to a walk, peering into the windows as they passed. Most of the rooms were empty, filled with cabinets of medical supplies and gurneys, but every now and then the gurney would have a human shaped bag that Bentley refused to look at any longer than he had to. Each room had a little plaque on the front, but none of them had any words on them.

Not that he would be able to read them anyways. His crying had ramped back up to a ten at the very prospect of Davis going head-to-head with the Secret Keeper. He wasn’t… he couldn’t… Davis… he had to touch to kill. As far as Bentley knew, the Secret Keeper — Charlie — didn’t even have to seeher victim to kill them. It was a battle that was already lost, and Bentley already knew the winner.

He could barely breathe.

Asten dragged the heap of crying disaster until they made it to the dead-end, to the largest room. Bentley managed to see that, through his tears, the plaque on that door read: Titus Lancaster.

But the room was empty.

Asten stepped right up to the widow, so close that it fogged up the glass under his breath. “Merda.”

Any shred of hope Bentley had dissipated at the sight of the empty cell. Dr. Keene said on video that had to make it especially so Titus couldn’t teleport out — why would they take him somewhere else? It wasn’t time for his mind control surgery yet, unless Bentley had been in the Synchronizer for a longtime.

They were all going to die.

Nico anxiously ran his hands over his hair, a few quiet sobs wracking his whole body. “This is hopeless!”

Bentley hiccuped, trying his best to choke back the endless crying, trudging through the fog in his brain to try and remember anything else that might help them. Nico plunked himself down against the wall and cried unabashedly, just like he had at the bus stop. Asten stared into the room like, if he looked hard enough, Titus would materialize there.

Even through the crying and agony looming over his head, Bentley managed to remember Dr. Keene talking about when Titus got sick. He remembered seeing him in the hospital bed on the video, and he remembered the second video, where he made him perform his abilities so Bentley’s father could see. And at the end of the video, he said…

Bless him; he prefers to stay in the rafters of his enclosure like some kind of bird at the zoo.

Bentley suddenly leaned forward, peering through the glass up at the ceiling. There were metal beams that spanned the length of the room, and there was a dark blob resting on one. “Titus,” Bentley said, pointing toward the ceiling.

Asten followed his finger with his gaze, and Nico threw himself off of the floor, both peering through the glass. They seemed to visibly relax when their eyes landed on the blob.

“Good eye, red,”

If Bentley were more lucid, he might’ve replied.

Just like all the other doors, there was a blue light next to the entrance to Titus’s cell — the one Davis had always tapped the keycard on. Below that light was a little screen, no bigger than Bentley’s hand, that read: EM Field Activated.

He and Asten shuffled toward the door, and the latter tapped the keycard on the light just like Davis had. After a moment, it turned green, and the words displayed on the screen changed — EM Field Deactivated.

The door slid open.

None of them moved for a moment, peering around, checking if there was a chance anyone had seen that. Through his own tears and now-slightly-blurry vision, Bentley couldn’t see much of anything except white.

Asten cleared his throat. “Titus?”

Quickly, the blob in the rafters shifted around, presumably to get a good look at them.

“A guy named Davis sent us. He… said you can teleport us out of here,”

In a whoosh of wind and color, Titus appeared in front of them. He looked worse than he had in the video — he was twelve, Bentley remembered, but looked like he didn’t even weigh sixty pounds soaking wet. The hospital gown swallowed him. He was only a little taller than Bentley, Nico’s height, but really frail looking. His skin was pale as a sheet of paper, and his deep gray eyes were sunken into his face, his nearly-black hair frizzed up in all directions.

Bentley wasn’t sure which of them was worse off.

Titus’s eyes flicked around warily, from Asten’s calculating stare, to Nico’s sobbing form, to Bentley’s half-red hospital gown. Then he looked at the door behind them, taking a few steps to comprehend if it was actually open or not. He seemed almost… afraid of it. Like he’d been tricked before, or something.

“Yeah, hey, we kinda need a fast exit here,” Asten said, glancing between Nico and Bentley, then looking back at Titus. “Will you help us? You’ll be able to escape, too.”

Titus’s deep gray eyes flicked between the three of them. “Don’t lie.”

“Wha- I’m not lying! We were kidnapped and put in a freaking oven and my friend got shot and we need to go!” Asten replied. Titus flinched backwards at the smallest raise of Asten’s voice, which Bentley didn’t much like.

Asten noticed and took a breath. “Please, Titus. We won’t hurt you. We need your help.”

“You’re just another test,” Titus muttered, backing up until he came in contact with the wall, sliding down until he could curl up on the floor and lacing his hands in his hair. “I’m not gonna try and escape, you can stop making me see things now.”

It made Bentley kind of sad how absolutely… broken Titus seemed. Like a kid that had been stripped of his entire personality and left with nothing but dread. What did he mean by seeing things? Had Dr. Keene been training him into submission like some kind of dog?

“Titus, hey,” Asten tried, looking to Nico for help. “We aren’t a test, we aren’t. You see the alarm lights in the hallway? We need your help getting out of here before guards come.”

Titus looked back up at them warily, his gray eyes watering. “Please go away.”

Gunshots came, making all four boys jump violently in their spots. There were no guards in their hallway yet, but Bentley could only assume the worst — that those had been aimed at Davis.

“Please!” Asten begged, looking out the window into the halls. “Please, please, please. Nothing bads going to happen, I promise. Just… please. We need out of here. Bentley needs a hospital.”

Panic shot through him like an arrow at those words, and he exclaimed: “No! Not a hospital — Wayne Manor.”

Asten didn’t seem to find it in him to correct him.

“Please, you’re the only one here who can save us. Our friend Davis — you know Davis? — he’s fighting the Secret Keeper right now and-“ Asten breathed in, glancing into the hall anxiously. Bentley was getting so floaty it got kind of hard to tell what he was saying. “-take Bentley to the Manor, and you can take me to Crime Alley. Nico-“

“I’m going to your house,” Nico replied firmly, hazy gaze fixed on Asten. “I can’t… I can’t let my parents see me like this. All screwed up and played with. I can’t.”

Titus stared at them, and Asten huffed. “Okay. Bentley to the Manor, us to Crime Alley. Then you can go wherever you want. Please. Please.”

That was the moment Bentley promptly remembered that Titus’s parents were dead.

“Please?” Nico added, a desperate attempt at getting Titus to oblige.

“I… can… only go where I’ve seen before,” Titus said softly, carefully unraveling himself from the ball. “I can do… Wayne Manor. Not Crime Alley.”

Asten huffed. “That’s fine, that’s fine. We can figure that out after we get Bentley home.”

Titus let out a puff of air, then stepped forward slowly. He reached out, hesitantly, like they would bite him, and then he grabbed onto Asten and Nico’s wrists. “Don’t let go of him,” He ordered softly, gesturing to Bentley. “It’s gonna feel weird. Might hurt. Ready?”

Bentley wasn’t sure if he could survive any more hurt in one day.

Right then, a group of guards — probably ten — turned the corner into the hall. Bullets clinged wildly against the window of the room, not even making a dent in the glass.

“Go now! Go now!” Asten ordered. Titus closed his eyes, squeezed Bentley’s friend’s hands tighter, and then the world swam.

Bentley squeezed his eyes shut. It felt like he was falling, like he was spinning and whipping around in the air with zero control of where he was going. It felt like he had pins and needles across his entire body — the burn of his atoms being ripped apart and put back together in another location.

It only lasted for a split second, before there was a loud whooshing sound, and the ground seemed to rush into Bentley’s feet so hard he stumbled. It was cold, and Asten wasn’t holding onto him anymore, and he was laying on wet grass. He winced when the impact sent waves of pain pulsing through his whole body.

The only things that kept him conscious were the muted groans came from around him, so he looked up. The first thing he saw was the nights sky — big and black and cloudy. He, Asten, and Nico were sprawled on the dewy grass of Wayne Manor’s front courtyard, and Titus was in the middle of them, just standing there like nothing happened. He was spinning around, though, looking at the sky like he had never seen it before.

The Manor was there, glowing against the darkness of night. He didn’t know what day it was, what time it was, but he was home. Bentley had never wanted to bawl his eyes out more.

He used all of his remaining strength to haul himself out of the grass, his friends doing the same with grumbles of discomfort. His entire body seemed to be throbbing and screaming and he pretty much felt like a balloon with the amount of floating his head was doing.

“Want me to come with you?” Asten questioned, brushing dirt off of his hospital down. Bentley shook his head.

“No,” He replied, bringing his hand up to rest against his injured arm. God, he looked like a disaster. He felt like a disaster.

And Davis might’ve been dead.

“You guys go. I don’t want you to get in trouble,” He forced the words out of his mouth, looking back at them, probably some of the hardest things he’d done. He wanted to pass out so bad. So bad.

“You’re planning on telling them?” Asten questioned, his voice laced with a little tinge of venom.

Bentley blinked, glancing between Nico, who looked terrified, and Asten, who looked suspicious. Even Titus, who was crying now (Bentley guessed it was because he was free?) turned to look at him.

“I… uh…” He did not have the capacity to make a case right then. He just wanted to go inside.

“You can’t tell them, Bentley. You’ll never be allowed out of the house again, and you’ll probably be banned from seeing us for the rest of your life,” Asten stated, throwing a hand to the side. “Plus, you’ll never see the Secret Keeper destroyed.”

“Are you kidding me?” Nico questioned, crossing his arms and peering over at Asten with a dull glare mixed with tears. “We just got kidnapped. Bentley got shot. I got turned into some kind of monster… how can you still care about that?! We could’ve died.”

“Because the Secret Keeper killed my parents! I’m not resting until she’s underground.” Asten shot back, and the lot of them went still. Bentley wasn’t sure if he should pretend he didn’t know that or not, so to play it cool, he just stood there.

“You can’t tell Bruce, Bentley,” Asten directed his attention back to the redhead. “Lie to him; tell him you just got kidnapped and never saw us. We’ll be hiding out at my house, and no one will find us there, so we’ll still technically be missing. It won’t be so suspicious if we don’t show back up at the same time.”

A pit formed in Bentley’s stomach when he thought about lying to Bruce again, after all of that. It made him want to cry. All he wanted was to let them handle it.

He breathed in, stumbling faintly to the side. “I… I don’t…”

“You can’t tell him not to tell his dad, Asten. He got shot,” Nico spoke up, crossing his arms lightly. “That was freaking traumatizing and you’re asking him not to tell his family about it?”

“You’re hiding out at my house to avoid yours!” Asten argued, flicking a hand toward Nico.

“Because they’re not my real family!” Nico exclaimed, and Bentley blinked. Apparently they’d entered into truth-telling hour. “I’m adopted, and I can’t freaking look at them, okay?”

There was a brief moment of silence where Asten sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“I know you’re into the whole can’t-tell-anybody-how-upset-I-am-so-I-bottle-it-up-and-act-broody thing, but not everybody is you, Asten. Some people will destroy themselves doing that,”

Asten huffed, looking back at Bentley and tossing his hands to the side. “Fine. Tell them whatever you want, Whittaker. I’m going to beat her with or without you. Let’s go. Gotham Heights.”

On command, Titus put a hand on both Nico and Asten’s shoulders, and without another word, they whooshed away in a mixture of color and wind. Bentley was left alone.

He breathed in the cold outside air, turning back to look at the Manor. He really had intended on telling Bruce everything, but now, he wasn’t sure what to do.

For now, he settled on dragging himself to the front door.

What was he going to say? How was he going to explain? He was pulling himself shot and half dead up to the door of Wayne Manor after hours, maybe days of being missing. He’d run away, broken into a cabin, gotten kidnapped, experimented on, watched one of his friends get turned into a metahuman, and got teleported home by a boy with superpowers. How was he supposed to tell them that?

Plus, he was pretty sure as soon as he saw somebody’s face, he’d start crying.

He made it onto the front entrance, facing those massive wooden doors just like he had the night Nightwing brought him to the Manor for the first time. Why were those doors scarier now than they had been then?

Bentley glanced down at himself. At his half-red hospital gown, his botched shoulder, his bare feet and bloodied skin. He looked like a disaster. He felt like a disaster. He was a disaster.

What was he going to say?

With not much more motivating him than the fact that he felt like death, he lifted a hand and tried the doorknob. Locked.

With a puff of air, he knocked.

A few terrible moments passed where he stood alone on the front step, waiting to see if salvation would come.

And then it did.

The door to Wayne Manor swung open.

“Bentley?”

Like that was the exact moment his body had been waiting for, the darkness he’d been fighting all night finally swept him away. And he let it.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

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@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @flyrobinflyy @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun @xiaonothere

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maccreadysbaby · 6 months ago

Text

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

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

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

sorry this is so short, AGAIN, I’m STILL having trouble deciding where to cut these chapters off 😭 we’ll be out of the medbay in the next chapter i promise

part forty-five

❝ AWAKE AND ALIVE ❞

SUNDAY — SEPTEMBER 13 — 4:04PM

ASTEN DIDN'T WAKE UP UNTIL FOUR THE NEXT DAY.

Bentley had been drifting in and out of consciousness for hours. Every now and then Alfred would run a test, or give him some more pain medicine, and every single time, Bruce was there just like he said he’d be. A few times, Dick was there with him. Once, Jason was. It was a blur up until somebody started screaming, at which point Bentley was suddenly very much awake.

He was disoriented and didn’t even have time to realize who was screaming until the screaming stopped, and a few people were grouped around Asten’s bed.

Bentley blinked and took hold of his surroundings again. Jason and Alfred were near Asten’s bed. Dick and Damian were in the other room, along with Barbara. Tim, Duke, Steph, and Cass weren’t there.

Bruce was right next to Bentley, where he said he’d be. And… something warm was right next to Bentley.

He glanced down at himself and realized that he wasn’t the only one in the bed, but that, since they were both so small, Nico had curled up on the end of the mattress like some kind of cat and was sleeping there, completely unaware of the sound or movement around him.

Suddenly, Asten wasn’t screaming anymore, but crying. Crying so pitifully and terribly that it reminded Bentley of the night his parents died.

“It’s alright,” Bruce said, and instinctively, his hand came up to rest on the top of Bentley’s head, drawing his attention away from Asten.

He looked around again, his eyes landing on future Nico, who was standing strangely in a dim corner, watching Asten closely. With a glance around and a wink in Bentley’s direction, he zoomed across the room with a blip that made him disappear in a warp of light.

Bentley and Asten were both awake. Did that mean his job was done? That he was gone?

“How are you feeling?” Bruce questioned. Bentley took a second to focus on his body. His head was hurting pretty bad, and so was his whole abdomen where he’d been stabbed. His ankle was sort of throbbing as well. He was still kind of floaty and loopy, though, which meant some pain medicine was probably working.

He ended up shrugging. “Everything kinda hurts.”

Bruce’s hand began to move in his hair. “I’m sorry. You’re due for more pain meds in about an hour.”

Bentley said nothing, but glanced back over at Asten, who was being quietly consoled by Jason. He wasn’t just crying anymore — he was hyperventilating and shaking and looked a whole lot like Bentley thought he looked during an anxiety attack.

Bentley inhaled. “Will he be okay?”

Bruce’s hand continued to move through his hair and kind of really reminded him of Dick.

“Yes, bud. He’ll be okay,”

A few moments of silence passed where Bentley could only sort of make out what Jason was saying to Asten. He gave up halfway through listening because it was too quiet.

In the midst of the quiet, Dick came into the room with a bright (but at the same time dull?) look on his face and in his eyes. Bentley attempted to push himself so he was sitting up, and while it was still very painful, it was successful this time — Bruce situated the pillows behind him and whatever little pain meds were still working were doing a very good job for a kid who’d been impaled.

Dick walked over, and in one swift movement, hugged Bentley as gently as he could.

“I love you so much, kiddo,” It sounded like his eyes were misty — Bentley didn’t say anything about it. Instead, he relaxed into the familiar embrace, bringing his arms up and around Dick’s shoulders in return. This sure does beat dying alone in a pile of debris.

“I love you, too.”

When Dick moved (which took a long time, but no one had expected any less.) Damian was standing behind him, near Bentley’s bed.

Dick moved out of his way, and a moment of silence passed where no one did anything. Bentley was just happy to be there — happy everyone was there. Happy to be breathing.

Damian moved quickly toward Bentley, like he was ripping a bandaid off, making a decision before he could convince himself not to.

Damian hugged him.

Bentley was frozen and tense for a solid three seconds before he decided that might make Damian not want to do it again. Then he hugged him back. Had Damian ever actually… did Damian even hug people? Bentley wasn’t sure he’d ever even seen Damian hug someone.

“I am glad you are alright,” Damian said, stiffly removing himself from Bentley’s embrace. “I am in your debt.”

“No you’re not,” He replied, searching Damian’s face for any tinge of emotion. There might’ve been a layer of something clouding his eyes. Might’ve.

“You saved my life,” Damian replied simply, crossing his arms. “I can not take generosity like that for granted — I owe you.”

“I already have everything I need,” Bentley replied, and he saw Bruce smile in his peripheral.

Damian sighed. “One day, you will need me. Then we will be even.”

Bentley said nothing, but nodded in response.

Just then, the other someone curled up on the medbay bed began to shift.

Bentley glanced down at Nico, who was laying next to his legs, just in time to see his blue eyes flutter open and bounce around. They landed on Bruce, on Damian, on the bed, the walls, on Dick, who was off to the side.

When they finally landed on Bentley, you’d have thought he was a parent coming home from deployment. Nico nearly fell off the bed at the speed that he moved, whamming into Bentley in a way that definitely would’ve hurt worse if he wasn’t hyped up on so many drugs.

“Whoa, Nico, easy,” Bruce started.

“I was so scared. I woke up when you were having surgery,” The blonde muttered, hiding his face away — probably because he was nearly in tears. “I was afraid you wouldn’t wake up.”

Bentley, although stunned, hugged him back. “It’s okay, I’m fine.”

Nico made a funny sound. “You need to learn what those words mean.”

Bentley said nothing, and after a minute, snickered. “I guess so. Are you feeling better?”

“A lot,” Nico replied, finally letting go of him. “Y’know, less pukey and sick and stuff.”

“That’s good,”

A moment of silence passed. Nico glanced over at Asten, so Bentley did, too.

He was still crying, but not as badly as before, and Jason was standing next to the bed, facing away from Bentley, talking.

In a flash and a blip, Nico crashed into Asten, too.

Jason backed off, turning on his heel and letting his eyes rest on Bentley with a little fond look.

“Hey, kid. How are you feeling?” Jason questioned. He ruffled his hair for only a second, to which Bentley smiled.

“It still hurts,” He replied honestly. “But I’m okay.”

Jason smiled faintly. “I’m glad.”

Bentley smiled, and the room fell into quiet again.

He glanced over at Asten and Nico. Nico was still hugging the life out of him, and Asten was simply letting him. Bentley met his eyes over Nico’s shoulder. They shared a faint smile.

Everything would be okay.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

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maccreadysbaby · 7 months ago

Text

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: gore

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

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

shaha… nico makes me sad lmao

part forty-three

❝ IMPOSTER ❞

SATURDAY — SEPTEMBER 12 — 8:56PM

THE WORLD WAS MOVING WITHOUT BENTLEY, AND IT WAS THE MOST TERRIFYING THING HE’D EVER EXPERIENCED.

He couldn’t move. He was pinned to the debris by the massive shard of metal that was protruding from his chest, and all of his pain meshed into one strange feeling of numbness. The only thought that was bouncing around in his head was the last statement he heard from Jason.

That Asten wasn’t breathing.

Asten wasn’t breathing.

Asten couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t. That wasn’t how this was supposed to end. None of this was supposed to end like this. The world could go on without Bentley Whittaker. Everything would be fine without Bentley Whittaker. But how could the earth keep spinning without Asten Evans?

He guessed he should’ve expected it. Nothing he does ever goes right. Only this time it went so, so wrong. Death wrong.

(Was Asten dead because of him?)

There was no one around him. No one that knew where he was except maybe Nico, who was unconscious. All he could really see were the tall buildings and night’s sky over his head, the end of the metal sticking out of him. He couldn’t lift his head, couldn’t really move.

He twitched his fingers on his right hand, which caused a jolt of pain that ran through his entire body and made him whine.

Was there a point in calling for help if he already knew he was going to die?

His eyes began to water at the half-realization that he was literally living out his last moments alone in a pile of rubble. The thought helped him force his hand up a little more, up toward his pounding head. His muscles were trembling from the effort, and it hurt so bad to move anything… but he didn’t want to die. He didn’t. (But he was going to, he knew. What was one last streak of denial?)

He clicked his earpiece on, and was greeted by a low, constant, staticky hum.

“Help,” He muttered, his voice coming out strangely hoarse and soft. “Help.”

The static continued, melding with the low sounds of the remaining crackling fire and shifting rubble.

“I’m… dying,”

Static.

Bentley’s stinging eyes spilled over down his face, but he couldn’t really cry, it hurt too bad — all he could do was let his eyes water. “Help me. Please. Please, help me.”

Nothing.

“I don’t… I don’t… I don’t want to die,” He muttered, sniffling lightly, staring at the sky. “I don’t want to die alone.”

Silence.

“Batman,” He tried, wincing when he sobbed a few times anyways. “B, please. I-I don’t want to die by myself. Please.”

The only response he got was a shift in the rubble beneath him, and the twinkle of the stars above him.

He coughed, which sent a ripping pain through his whole body that made him cry out in agony — and now there was blood on his face. Had he coughed up blood?

“Bruce... Bruce, please. Please. I-I want to go home,”

The static in the earpiece didn’t budge.

Bentley was going to die here, and alone.

He would’ve wiped the tears off of his face, but even the thought of moving produced agony, so he didn’t. “Bruce, please. Please, please, please… Dad, please.”

Silence.

(How was he supposed to come to terms with dying? How did people do this? How did Jason…? Damian?)

There was an oddly familiar whooshing sound, and Bentley could’ve swore he heard feet hit the ground not too far from him. If he had the willpower to move his head, he might’ve tried to look at whoever was there to mock him.

Not a second later came a shrill: “Oh my God! Oh my God no way! I did it!”

The voice wasn’t one he knew, but it wasn’t not one he knew. It was a guy’s, and he didn’t recognize it. (But he kind of did?)

“Screw you, space-time! Barry’s gonna lose his mind when I tell him-“ There was a pause. “Oh, shit, right.”

There were footsteps that came oddly close to Bentley, but he only saw the figure they belonged to when it was practically looming over his head. It was a tall guy -- maybe Jason’s age, maybe Tim’s -- in a bright yellow, white, and red jumpsuit. The majority of it was yellow, with red and white stripes on the arms and legs, accentuating a large white lightning bolt in the center of the chest. The suit went all the way up to his head and stopped, sort of like Tim’s cowl but with the top cut out so his hair was showing. He also had a utility belt around his waist, with only one small, yellow pouch on it.

This guy looked just like Nico.

Okay, so, yeah, Bentley was dying and probably hallucinating, but this guy had Nico’s eyes that looked so much like Dick’s. Not to mention that he had the same exact dirty-blonde mop on his head, dangling over the edges of the suit.

Bentley really was losing his mind.

“Hey… Hey there, bud,” The Adult Nico Imposter said, kneeling down next to him, his hands hovering unsurely over Bentley’s wound. His blue eyes very quickly turned misty and watery, getting bluer in that weird way only Dick’s and Nico’s did when they cried. “I never saw...”

Bentley’s half-hearted response was a soft, simple: “Huh?”

The Adult Nico Imposter rubbed his hand over his hair, exhaling heavily. “Okay. Okay. Hi. Hi, Bentley, uh, it’s me… Nico, but, uh… not yours. I’m Nico from the future, and I’ve just broken the space-time continuum to be here. So, here I am. God, great job explaining, you idiot,” He muttered to himself, his eyes still blown wide and staring at Bentley’s abdomen. “In the timestream I came from, you died tonight, and now I’m here to make sure you don’t, uh, like Barry did for me. But, uh, I’m not taking you to a new universe, just… yeah. Anyways. Can I pick you up?”

Bentley blinked. He was literally losing his mind.

Since speaking to a hallucination couldn’t really hurt anything, and he didn’t want to die alone (even if his company was blood-loss-generated), he nodded as much as he could force himself to.

With a nod and a deep breath, the Nico Imposter opened the little pouch on his belt and pulled an inhaler out, shaking it and puffing on it a few times with that telltale rattle-rattle-hiss-hiss.

And it was strange, because everything, down to the material of this guy’s suit to the pain caused by movement of the metal piece, Future Nico picking him up felt really… real.

“You’re… from… the future?” Bentley muttered, watching the buildings and stars move above him. Future Nico was really warm, and it felt nice. (Was it even real?)

“Yeah. But saving you is about to make a new one. I’ll have to go back to mine when I’m done here,” He explained lightly, sitting Bentley in his grasp, cupping his head with one hand.

Bentley hummed. “Did Asten live?”

There was a moment of silence. Future Nico’s gaze fell to the ground, his eyes going distant for a moment.

“No. It was just me,” He replied, shaking his head. “I’m about to run. It might feel weird.”

Bentley said nothing, but closed his eyes and waited. Going super fast couldn’t feel much weirder than being impaled and then picked up by a guy from the future, could it? He was pretty sure his life had reached the maximum amount of weird. Either that or his hallucinations had?

There was a split second (or three) where Bentley couldn’t breathe, and it was really cold. It felt kind of like he was pinned down for a moment, like his whole body stopped moving and then started again.

When he opened his eyes, he was in a medical bed in the Batcave.

The only explanation Future Nico gave was a stammery: “Sorry, Mr. Pennyworth… yeah, hi, um… I’m Nico, but from the future, and I brought Bentley here so he can… Y’know! I… I’ve gotta run, I’ll be right back!”

There was a flash and a gust of wind, and the Future Nico was gone.

Bentley was surely losing his mind.

He was in the cave. (But was he really, if he was just hallucinating?) Barbara was now at the computer, and Bentley very vaguely saw Alfred toss an earpiece to her and abandon his spot at the massive screens to run into the medbay toward him.

“Oh, my dear boy…”

Bentley opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Alfred seemed so real. He touched Bentley’s arm and it felt real. He sounded real. There was no way he… that Future Nico was…?

Maybe Bentley really wouldn’t die?

(There surfaced that unhinged, deep, unmistakable hope and determination again that Bentley Whittaker was so famous for.)

Maybe he really wouldn’t die.

—

Okay. So the worst part about the entire situation at hand actually wasn’t that Bentley had a giant piece of metal protruding from his chest.

It was the fact that Alfred couldn’t get him unconscious enough to start surgery.

He typically had the opposite problem — his body seemed to love passing out at every opportunity, even at the worst times. But right now, Alfred had already administered nearly twice the typical amount of sedatives recommended. And while Bentley was pretty loopy, he just wasn’t going out of it. He’d had two small injections, and was now rocking an oxygen mask with an anesthetic pumping through it constantly to get him in a state where Alfred could help. And it still wasn’t working.

But, even worse than that, was the fact that he had to see Asten.

It wasn’t long (probably three minutes after Bentley arrived) before Future Nico (who had to actually exist because Alfred was talking to him?) zoomed back into view and laid Asten on the bed next to Bentley.

He was limp, and already extremely pale. Bentley wasn’t lucid enough to focus on whether his chest was rising or falling, but he didn’t guess it was, since Jason said it wasn’t. Asten looked… strange. Different from unconscious or sleeping. It was colder. Stranger.

Maybe three minutes (and more sedative) later, Future Nico swooshed back into the cave with Current Nico, who was still unconscious and bleeding at the nose, and put him on the other side of Bentley. But Future Nico was very persistent about Alfred not worrying about him, that he ended up being okay even in his own reality where no one came to his aid.

That was about the time the Batmobile came squealing into the cave, followed by bike after bike with different Wayne’s on them each time. After that, the cave turned into a mess of shouting and yelling and panicking and loud noises and chaos and Bentley still couldn't go to sleep. He couldn’t really comprehend what was going on, but he was awake, which was too awake for the operations he needed.

He didn’t really know what to focus on (or if he could focus) until Nightwing came into his view, over his head, peeling his domino mask off. He was crying — hard. Bentley couldn’t really talk through the oxygen mask (not that he could talk anyways.) but he was able to twitch his fingers and get Dick to grab his hand.

“You’re going to be okay, Babybird. You’re going to be just fine,”

A beat passed.

“I love you,”

Bentley felt a pinch on his arm, likely meaning someone had injected him with something else.

He couldn’t seem to create any coherent thoughts. He liked that Dick was holding his hand. He was glad to be home, even if he died. At least he wasn’t dying alone.

He opened his mouth in an attempt to speak, but coughed instead, and the inside of his oxygen mask got splattered with something dangerously red.

Seeing that color seemed to spark a wave of panic, and he blinked away a new wave of tears that threatened to come.

“…Dad,” He managed to just barely rasp, coughing again, splattering more red on the mask. “Dad.”

Dick said something, he didn’t really hear it. Someone else said something.

He managed to turn his head just far enough to see someone (he couldn’t tell who) put a defibrillator on Asten’s chest, and with a loud bang! he convulsed terrifyingly.

After a moment, someone turned Bentley’s head away. Bruce’s face appeared in the empty space in his vision.

“Everything’s going to be okay, chum,” He said, putting on that same stupid reassuring smile that he loved to plaster on and keep there with his life, even in the worst situations. He touched Bentley’s forehead like he always did.

“You’re going to be okay. Just breathe. Rest,”

Bentley wasn’t going to die alone.

Bruce kept brushing his hair back, smiling all the while, and for the first time since he’d been home, Bentley relaxed enough to let the sedatives take him under.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @flyrobinflyy @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun @xiaonothere @beatyoutothatusernameloser

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maccreadysbaby · 7 months ago

Text

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

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

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

sorry this is so short, I’m having trouble deciding where to cut these chapters off 😭

part forty-four

❝ AFTERMATH ❞

SATURDAY — SEPTEMBER 12 — 10:21PM

THE FIRST THING THAT REGISTERED IN BENTLEY’S SUBCONSCIOUS WAS PAIN. A great and terrible pain, in the center of his chest and radiating out to the entire rest of his body like fireworks. Everything seemed to be throbbing, from his toenails to his eyeballs. Throbbing with an agonizing bum, bum, bum.

The second sense that came back was hearing. Mainly because he heard himself make a pitiful, raspy little sound in response to the fireworks.

He felt someone touch his arm.

“Bruce, he’s waking up,”

Bentley couldn’t really tell whose voice that was. He couldn’t tell much, actually — he was very hyped up on drugs and everything sounded a bit like he was underwater. He felt a bit like he was underwater.

Bentley peeled his sticky eyes open, and he was ever-grateful that the lights in the medbay were dimmed. Not that it stopped his head (or entire body) from pounding.

It took a minute for the world to swim into focus. He was staring at the ceiling of the medbay, at the lights. He could see an oxygen mask on his face. He moved in a very vague attempt to sit up, but all it did was make the pain ten times worse, and he made a shrill little sound that would’ve been embarrassing if he hadn’t nearly died.

“Easy. Easy, bud, just relax,”

There was a hand on his forehead, and Bentley turned his head just far enough to meet Bruce’s icy gaze.

No one spoke. Bruce smiled. His eyes got a little misty. He wasn’t in his Batman suit anymore, but normal clothes.

“Hey there, chum,”

Bentley lifted his head just enough to look down at himself — it wasn’t much use, he had a blanket thrown over him and he was pretty sure the Robin suit wasn’t on anymore. Replaced by what he thought might’ve been a hospital gown. One of his feet was bigger than the other — a boot. Again.

He turned his head side to side. Nico was still in the bed to his left, curled up in a ball beneath some blankets and sleeping soundly. There was a metal-looking splint on his nose, and he was connected to an IV. Future Nico was over there, too, sitting awkwardly on the edge of the bed that Present Nico was on.

Asten was on Bentley’s right, laying flat and stiff on his bed. He was attached to several machines, including one that had an oxygen mask and was whirring each time he breathed. That was the first time Bentley heard the heart monitors — his and Asten’s, beeping steadily.

He looked forward again.

He blinked when he realized more people were around. The one who’d told Bruce he was awake seemed to be Tim — he was closest, sitting in a chair between Bentley and Asten’s beds. Bruce was between Bentley and Nico’s beds, still pushing Bentley’s hair back, and Barbara was at the Batcomputer talking to someone on the comms. He could see Damian (Looking pretty okay for the most part?) on a rolling stretcher right outside the medbay door, and Alfred was stitching up a cut that went from his right shoulder almost down to his belly button. Dick was right next to him. Everybody was in civilian clothing now.

Bruce reached down and gently took the oxygen mask off of Bentley’s face.

Bentley breathed in. Breathed out. Both hurt.

“I’m sorry,” He rasped, his voice strange and wrong and painful. “Please don’t… get rid of me.”

Bruce only chuckled wetly. “Not in a million years, bud.”

Bentley looked around the room again, his thoughts nothing more than a blurry haze. People were missing but his tired brain couldn’t work out who. He looked around again, turning his head from Asten, to Damian, to Nico. His gaze finally settled on Future Nico.

“Can… you see him, too?”

Bruce looked over at the pair of Nicos. “Yeah, kiddo. He’s real. Just waiting for you and Asten to wake up.”

Bentley hummed lightly, turning to look back at the ceiling, blinking back a stubborn sting in his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay, Bentley,” Bruce reassured, pulling a chair up to the edge of the bed. “Everything is okay. Asten’s okay. You’re okay. Nico’s okay — everyone’s okay.”

Bentley sniffled, which hurt like a son of a gun. “The Secret Keeper showed me-”

His words died on his tongue when he remembered the Secret Keeper. That he’d… that she was… dead.

Batman’s one rule was no killing.

Great, now Bentley was really in prime get-rid-of-him territory. The stinging in his eyes doubled, tripled, almost. He stared at the ceiling because he didn’t want to see Bruce’s disappointment. “I… I didn’t mean to, Bruce, please believe me. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t-“

“Hey, Bentley, hey,”

“-I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,”

“Bentley, bud, look at me,”

Bentley didn’t. A moment of silence came and went before he worked up the courage to shift his gaze to Bruce’s features — he didn’t look as disappointed as he thought he would.

“The Secret Keeper is dead, but it wasn’t you,”

Bentley blinked a few times, and the tears fell, but Bruce wiped them off. “It wasn’t?”

Bruce shook his head. “No. She woke up after you were already in surgery. We aren’t exactly sure what happened — if her mind control gave out or what, but she… did it herself.”

Bentley blinked some more. “Oh.”

(Did Dr. Keene know? Did Davis know?)

Bentley looked back down at his uneven feet. (What was this now, his third time almost dying? The poison, the gunshots, the metal, and he wasn’t even eleven yet. It hadn’t even been a full year since he was poisoned!)

“Where’s Jason?” Bentley muttered.

Bruce hummed. “He and the others stayed behind to help with the metahumans.”

Bentley exhaled. “And Asten? Is he okay?”

Bruce nodded slightly. “He’s going to have some recovering to do — but yes. He’s okay.”

“What’s going to happen to him now?”

Bruce said nothing, but glanced over at Asten. Bentley did, too, his eyes trailing around on all the machines he was hooked to.

“I don’t know. International fostering and adoption issues like this — especially since all of his guardians are dead — are really complicated. He has no more traceable family in America or in Brazil,” Bruce explained, sighing lightly. “But I’m willing to fight to keep him here.”

Bentley hummed lightly. “Nico?”

“I’ve already spoken to his parents. They're rushing back from overseas,” Bruce explained quietly. “He’s okay, too. Just a few bumps and bruises and a case of over-exertion.”

Bentley said nothing, but looked back up at the ceiling. Maybe everything would be okay.

“And you, buddy, are going to be resting for a while until you heal up,” Bruce continued, brushing his hand over Bentley’s head again. “So no hardcore water gymnastics or leaping out second story windows in the near future, please.”

At that, Bentley cracked a tiny smile, so Bruce did, too.

“Get some rest, chum. I’ll be here the whole time,”

It wasn’t hard for Bentley to let the remaining sedatives make his eyes heavy. He’d hardly been all the way awake anyways.

“I love you, Bruce,”

“I love you, Bentley,”

A beat passed.

“You really are the best dad,”

Bentley faded away after that.

(Just in time to not see Bruce cry.)

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @flyrobinflyy @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun @xiaonothere @beatyoutothatusernameloser

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maccreadysbaby · 7 months ago

Text

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: gore, contemplated su*cide, more gore

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

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

so the big chapter is here… bentleys plan goes about as good as you’d expect

part forty-two

❝ REALITY CHECK ❞

SATURDAY — SEPTEMBER 12 — 8:01 PM

ONE THING BENTLEY HAD NEVER, EVER, EVER IMAGINED, IN HIS WHOLE ENTIRE LIFE, WAS FOR HIM TO ACTUALLY HAVE SUPERPOWERS AND ACTUALLY BE SUITED UP AS ROBIN. (But he was! And he did! And he had no idea what he was doing!)

It only took him about fifteen or twenty minutes to make it to the heat of battle with his water for transport. Most of downtown Gotham was a disaster. Everything was burning — literally, on fire, with flames licking out of piles of rubble that used to be buildings, and especially in the pitch black of night, everything was glowing. Two dozen buildings had to have been flattened, probably more — the destruction was moving and swirling in a circle around a tall, untouched building in central Gotham (the same one Asten tried to jump off of), which had a huge dome of fire on top of it. Bentley assumed that’s where he was. Every sound, the crackling of the fire, the crumbling of buildings, the shouting of metahumans — it all meshed together into one insanely loud, menacing rumble that never seemed to end.

Bentley stood (hovered) off to the side for a few moments, out of the radius of the chaos, kind of terrified. Firstly, Damian’s armor didn’t fit him right, especially on his arms and legs, so a nicely placed blow could probably knock it straight off. And his cape kept getting all in the way and whipping around, and while it looked cool, he wasn’t sure how much he liked it. (The answer was he didn’t. He didn’t like it.)

Secondly, he had no idea where anybody was. He was simply hovering on water a whole lot of feet in the air, high enough to be above the crumbling buildings, and he could hardly see down far enough through the smoke and fire to make out people on the ground. So he had no clue where his family or any metahumans were.

Thirdly… he was about to, like, fight people, for real. The only people he’d ever, quote-on-quote, fought, were Dick and Damian and occasionally Jason and Tim when they were training him in self-defense. Y’know, people without superpowers who weren’t actually trying to kill him.

But… there’s always a first patrol, right? Robin always had a first patrol. He just guessed this would be his. (He couldn’t back out now.)

As he drew ever-closer to the epicenter of the destruction (slower than Christmas, because he was pretty horrified), he turned his earpiece on so he could hear what everybody was saying. His line of sight was slowly getting clearer, so he was starting to see all the multicolored metahumans moving around on the ground through the smoke (and in the sky, in a few cases), with flashes of light and so many different… colors, and sounds, and things. He could see what he was pretty sure was Mandy Todryk flying through the air with her massive raven wings, and he knew exactly where The Void was due to the blinding flashes of purple.

“Robin,” Bruce’s Batman voice came through his earpiece, gruff and serious and not happy sounding in the slightest. The tone was just sour and flat enough that Bentley knew he meant him and not the real Robin. “You are not permitted to be on the field.”

Bentley looked around from his spot in the sky, levitating on water, until he spotted the big black blob that was Bruce on the ground, fighting against a metahuman with blue hair.

“Sorry, B! Please don’t be mad!” He replied shortly, his eyes darting every which way. Bentley wasn’t sure how good he’d do in an actual fight against any of these metahumans, but he was pretty sure he could help his family when they needed it. So that’s what he would focus on — helping them. When they needed it. “I just want to help!”

“You need to return to the cave immediately!”

Bentley cringed. “I’m sorry!” And then he clicked the earpiece back off.

Bentley didn’t have time for a lecture just then — he was too busy trying to figure out who the little figure was flying in repetitive circles around the giant glowing bubble of fire on the center building. It was a small person, with no wings or anything, and it only took another second for him to realize that… he was pretty sure it was… Nico, trying to get to Asten.

“I found him, Charlie!”

Bentley shouted in terror when someone grabbed him by the arms and violently ripped his feet out of the water that’d been holding him up. The beating of loud wings filled his ears — Mandy Todryk’s wings.

She laughed maniacally, and Bentley nearly threw up on queue as he watched all of the destruction move under his feet. The feet in question were dangling uselessly hundreds of yards in the air, and the far-off ground was moving at least sixty or seventy miles per hour below him. “Let go of me!”

“You’re choice!” Mandy chided. She let go of Bentley and, before he could react any more than another shout of horror, dove down and grabbed him by his feet instead, so he was dangling upside down. His cape whipped around and covered his face, making it impossible to see. (Seriously, how did they wear those things?)

Bentley only narrowly missed slamming his head into the top of a building (that Mandy had to have dipped toward on purpose.) He couldn’t seem to think, couldn’t seem to breathe — the water he’d been standing on was following them, but he could only see half of the time and it wasn’t fast enough to catch up.

“Let’s test if little bluebirds can fly!” Mandy chorused, waving Bentley back and forth as she flew in a way that made him so very nauseous.

“It’s a Robin, loser!” Bentley looked up just enough to see a blob fly into his vision from the other direction, going at least the same speed as them. It and Mandy collided in the middle, and the little figure latched onto Mandy’s wings and jerked them with all of their might, twisting her entire body and sending her veering off-course like a broken plane. Bentley slid from her grip and was suddenly freefalling.

And then he was very suddenly not, but someone was holding onto his torso very, very tight. (Which also made him want to hurl.)

“Jesus, your suit doesn’t even have blue on it,”

Bentley was only halfway breathing, watching the ground move what seemed to be miles beneath them, but much slower. “Nico?”

“Yeah, buddy, it’s me,”

They hovered around in the sky for a few moments before Nico found a suitable, not-falling-apart or burning rooftop to set Bentley down on. It was on the outskirts of the circle of destruction where Asten’s power hadn’t reached yet.

He sat Bentley down (mostly) on his feet, and the redhead immediately sat down on the tar rooftop, relieved to be on something solid again. He was sucking in air like he’d never breathed in his life. “I’ve only been here five minutes and I already want to hurl.”

Nico landed next to him, panting like he’d been running a marathon. His t-shirt and sweatpants were both soaked through with sweat, and his hair was a floppy wet mess, probably from flying so close to the fire. He held up three fingers. “Three times already.”

Bentley furrowed his brow, pushing himself off the rooftop and peering off the building at the destruction around them. “You’ve thrown up three times?”

“These powers are trying to kill me, I think,” Nico stated, waving Bentley off. “It’s fine. It happens every time I use them.”

“You can go to the cave if you need to,” Bentley replied, watching a few metahumans move around on the ground, a couple losing a fight pretty badly to who Bentley was pretty sure was Red Hood. “Have you been able to get to Asten?”

“Nope,” Nico started, drifting up by his side and peering off the edge of the building. “The dome thing he has going on is way too hot to get close to. Air only makes it hotter. But you know what definitely doesn’t make fire hotter?”

Bentley looked over at Nico, who had a dorky look on his face. “I have a pretty good idea.”

“Maybe you could get us in there so we can talk to him,”

Bentley looked over at the dome of flame that was spitting and spinning like some kind of lava. “I could try. It looks pretty hot, though.”

“It is insanely hot, yes,” Nico agreed. “But getting through it is pretty much our only way to him.”

Bentley nodded, peering over the edge of the rooftop toward the dome. He could feel the water sloshing and moving in the pipes below them, and not a second later, there was a small pop, and water began to seep from the cracks and crevices in the tar roofing and slither over toward his feet.

“That’ll never look normal,” Nico muttered, and Bentley shook his head as the water wrapped around his feet and began to lift him up.

Get to the dome. Put water on the dome. Calm Asten down. A foolproof plan. (Mediocre at best, really.)

“Ready?”

With a heavy sigh, Nico shook his hands out by his sides and began to levitate. “As ever.”

Bentley looked at the ground below to find his family. It didn’t take long — Dick was the first he found, fighting hand-to-hand with a metahuman who kept throwing bolts of electricity at him. (It wasn’t the metal controlling guy, which was good.) Jason was still fighting a group of metahumans that were losing very badly. (No vines.) The Secret Keeper was standing on top of a turned-over car, doing nothing but watching and tugging on Davis and Titus’s collars every now and then. (Which meant she wasn’t with Tim or Bruce.) Damian was sword fighting a girl that had a sword made of green light coming out of her hand?

With an exhale, Bentley let the water carry him off the edge of the building and over the deafening chaos and destruction again. Buildings that hadn’t been touched yet were starting to fall now, the circle of terror was getting bigger. Bentley knelt down on the little surfboard-like oval of liquid and tried to focus really hard on the dome and not the war going on beneath him that was all his fault. All his fault. All his fault.

As he and Nico drew nearer to the dome of fire, the temperature raised exponentially, and a sound like a blowtorch grew ever-louder. It went from bearable to magma in a split second, and he still had to be at least half a soccer field away.

Suddenly, a strange, shrill thunder-like noise sent them both whirling in the complete opposite direction of their objective. Bentley’s eyes darted around wildly, combing through the fire and rubble and fighting until he spotted a swirling purple portal high in the sky above them, in the center of the destruction with no buildings around it at all.

Not three seconds later, Damian fell out of it.

There weren’t any buildings for him to grapple to. At the bottom of the drop waited nothing but concrete and rubble and ash.

She wasn’t lying.

Bentley didn’t even hear his own shrill “No!” Before his instincts took over. And his first instinct was to absolutely throttle himself in that direction as fast as his water would let him move.

By that direction, he meant toward the ground. Damian was far away, falling really fast, and the only way Bentley would be able to reach him was if he somehow went even faster. But closer to the ground meant closer to all the metahumans. And that meant…

That something really tight grabbed Bentley’s ankle before he could make it to Damian’s landing spot, ripping him off of the water with enough force to make his ankle pop and spike with pain. He only felt air for a split second before he hit the concrete and rubble, back-first, with a dull thud and an embarrassing noise.

With a groan at the sudden dull pain that was radiating through every bone of his body (had he really been that high?) he looked up (why was he seeing two of everything?) just enough to catch a glimpse of some gnarly looking, deep green vines wrapped around his ankle.

He didn’t even get to turn over before they pulled on him again. They drug him through the rubble and debris without remorse, scraping up his exposed skin and tugging at his Robin suit until the vines decided to pull him off the ground and dangle him in the air, upside down. (Again.)

He could see Damian falling. He could see buildings cracking. He could see a random, bright red fire hydrant, jutting out of the ground.

With as much power as he could muster (even with his whole body being in a state of pain, and being upside down, again.) he willed the water up and out with such force that the entire fire hydrant was ripped from the concrete and shot into the air with a dull thunk.

Hundreds of gallons of water came spewing out, straight up into the night sky, and Bentley used them to make a massive pyramid-shaped cone of water what he was pretty sure was beneath Damian.

But he didn’t have time to see if it worked. Instead, the vines around his ankle moved and crawled up his whole body in a split second, curling around him like ropes and tying his legs and arms down so they couldn’t move. The vines continued to move, to wrap around his face, his eyes, his mouth, like a blindfold and gag. He tried to make a sound, but all that came out with a muffled mmm.

“I’ve got the little runt, Charlie. He ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Said a guy’s voice, only a little ways away from Bentley. He could feel himself moving, but he couldn’t tell what direction. He couldn’t shout, couldn’t see, and couldn’t hear anything but roaring destruction.

He felt Damian moving in the water. But he couldn’t see it, which meant he didn’t know what it looked like, which meant he couldn’t imagine it doing something else, which meant his powers were pretty much useless.

Amidst all the chaos, he heard something akin to a shnnk.

Three seconds later, there was a shout of pain, and the vines loosened around Bentley, sending him crashing onto the concrete again. Head first, of course, and so hard that for a minute, he couldn’t see anything but stars or hear anything but a skull-piercing ring.

A moment (or a few? He couldn’t tell.) later, someone pulled him until he was sitting up. They were talking, but he couldn’t hear good, and he was pretty sure it was Damian, but it looked more like two Damians.

Finally, as his vision and hearing started to come back fully, he forced himself onto his feet with a groan. His ankle (the same ankle he’d hurt by jumping out the window last year, by the way.) gave out halfway and he fell forward into Damian, who was literally Robin, (which wasn’t embarrassing at all.)

(Yes, it was.)

(Being a superhero was so freaking hard.)

Thankfully, Damian didn’t do anything like shove him or scoff at him. Instead, he helped him stand, and as Bentley’s cognitive abilities returned, he realized that Damian was squinting at him through his domino lenses. “It is absolutely idiotic for you to be here.”

A beat passed. Bentley’s eyes flicked down to the bloody katana in Damian’s hand.

“I suppose I should not have expected anything less,” Damian muttered, and he brought his empty hand up and touched Bentley’s forehead, which twinged with a sharp pain. “Your head is bleeding.”

“I’m fine,” Bentley stated, looking back at the bloody sword, and Damian did, too. Bentley then scoured the nearby rubble for bodies, but the burning debris came up empty. There were no vines and no metahumans.

“I only cut some of his fingers off. Then The Void took him away,”

“Oh,” Bentley muttered, blinking twice. “…Thanks.”

“You kept me from hitting the ground. I believe we are even,” Damian replied. “You-“

Before he could speak again, a purple portal opened right over Damian’s head, and The Void fell out of it right on top of him, pinning him to the rubble below. Her purple hair was cut weirdly, shorter on one side like Damian had gotten it with his katana. “Got you, you little rat!”

In one quick movement that Bentley could barely comprehend, she ripped a batarang from Damian’s belt and lifted it over her head.

“No!”

In another quick movement that Bentley could hardly comprehend, a massive column of water flew over like a battering ram, whamming into The Void and literally sending her flying at least a few yards away from them. She kept the batarang dutifully clasped in her right hand until she stopped tumbling and settled in the debris.

“You’re a little nightmare!” She screeched. A portal appeared beneath her, and she fell into it and disappeared.

Bentley didn’t even have time to make it to Damian before a portal appeared right in his face, an arm came out, and something pinched Bentley’s chest. The portal disappeared.

It took him a solid five seconds to look down and realize what had happened.

She’d stabbed him instead.

One half of the shiny batarang was protruding from the center of his abdomen, and his red suit was getting suspiciously redder. It didn’t even hurt that bad. Why didn’t it hurt that bad? It only felt like when Damian kicked him during a spar, but he could clearly see that half of the batarang was inside of him. He was stabbed. He’d been stabbed.

(Superheroing sucked!)

“Batman, Robin is compromised. I repeat, Robin is compromised,” He could’ve sworn that was Damain talking, but he couldn’t exactly hear right. His blood was pumping too loud.

He lifted a shaky hand and grabbed the batarang, jerking it out with a nearly inaudible whine. “It's okay. I’m okay.”

Bentley vaguely heard Damian giving Bruce a location, but he couldn’t hear very well over his own blood. Did blood have water in it? Bentley looked down at his own abdomen and focused really hard on the blood that was leaking out. Blood had water in it, didn’t it?

The bloodstain started getting smaller. Going away. Going… back in?

It was a strange sensation -- although, so was being stabbed -- that wasn’t exactly painful but definitely wasn’t comfortable. Bentley’s heart was pounding in his ears and he could hardly believe what was happening, even though it was literally happening.

“It… it's okay. I can keep myself from bleeding,”

Damian looked at him like he was stupid. “You have been stabbed in an area that houses many vital organs.”

In the distance, Bentley saw Batman coming.

If he went back to the cave now, they could still die.

What had he been doing? Trying to put out the dome of fire? To get in it, if possible? To stop this? To save his family?

He had to do this.

Water came up and around Bentley’s feet and picked him up, bloody batarang still in his hand.

“Don’t you dare,” Damian threatened, but Bentley was already off the ground and floating toward the dome.

…Sort of. His floating wasn’t all it used to be since he was having to focus so hard to keep his blood in his body. It was taking double the focus it usually took to keep himself in the air, and the punched feeling was starting to turn into searing pain, which made the focusing even worse.

Damian yelled. Bentley ignored it.

“You’re psychotic!”

Bentley turned until his eyes met Nico’s wide blue ones. He was flying down from the building with the dome, face panicked, gaze locked on Bentley’s abdomen. “You were stabbed!”

“I’ll be fine,” The redhead replied, floating past Nico at a glacial pace. “I just need to get to the dome.”

“I don’t think you’re comprehending the severity of this situation correctly. You were stabbed,”

“I know,”

“Stabbed,”

“I know!” Bentley replied, wincing at the pain caused by the effort. “I’ve been shot. That was worse.”

“You’re losing your mind!”

Bentley said nothing as he grew close to the dome of fire, the heat washing over him and making him feel ten times closer to dying. He held the batarang out just a little farther when he got as close as he dared. He had to be here to save them.

“You need to- wha… what are you doing? Oh, God, don’t tell me you’re…”

Bentley kept the batarang out there until it started to turn red hot (which took an alarmingly short amount of time, during which he was very thankful for the fireproof gloves.) and as soon as it was ready, he tore the Robin suit a little more at the hole and pressed the metal against his skin with no hesitation.

He wasn’t sure who screamed first — him or Nico.

Everything was a blur of white-hot agony, and for a second, he couldn’t see, the next second, someone was holding him under the armpits. The water wasn’t under him anymore. “Stop, no, no, I forbid you from passing out while we’re in the air. Absolutely forbid.”

A second (hour?) later, he was laid down on a rooftop.

“Bentley, dude, buddy, stay awake. How do I work your earpiece? How can I talk to them without leaving you here?”

Bentley’s senses vaguely started to come back to him for a second time. “I’m okay.”

“Shut up,”

“I’m-“

“Shut up! Just tell me how to talk to your dad!” Nico ordered. His face was hovering above Bentley, along with a smoky, starry sky, but there were about three Nicos at the moment.

“Am I bleeding?”

Nico looked down at Bentley’s stomach. “I-I… guess not, but-“

Bentley pushed himself upright.

And it was a horrendous idea. A wave of pain so absolutely devastating seared through his abdomen like he had gasoline for blood. It reverberated through every bone in his body, and the world went dark. He didn’t hear himself scream.

—

He wasn’t sure how long it was before he came to, but when he did, he was still on that rooftop, and Nico was crying next to him.

He blinked and let out a groggy groan.

“Bentley? God, dude, stop passing out! You’ve done it, like, five times!”

Bentley blinked some more. Five times? He’d woken up and passed out five different times and he couldn’t even remember it?

Everything was starting to feel like a mixture of pain, pain, and more pain. His whole body was sore from being thrown around, his head was throbbing, his stab wound was still blazing with a fiery agony, and he was really tired.

Nico sniffled. Bentley was pretty sure his head was on Nico’s lap, because his face was upside down and right over Bentley’s own. “Jason has been talking to Asten. I think the dome is cooling down a little bit, if you think you can-“

Someone thudded on the rooftop next to them.

“So close, yet so… far, Whittaker. You really thought you could change the future I put in place,”

Bentley pulled himself upright with a grunt of pain, just so he could get a good look at The Secret Keeper. She looked giddy as ever, her bright, excited amber eyes making her twisted stitched smile look even more twisted. She no longer had Davis and Titus with her.

“You’re so… naive. I show you one little lie and you move forward without question. You don’t understand, Bentley, that I control you,” The Secret Keeper held out her hand, and Bentley felt something in his mind change. He started to move, but his brain wasn’t telling him to move, her’s was. “It’s all been games until now. Watch what Bentley picks, it’ll be fun. But now is the time that I get to win.”

Bentley watched Nico’s eyes turn amber, and not a second later, his nose began to bleed. “I have dominion over everything. I can control you. I can control your thoughts. I can control your powers.”

Water started seeping out of the tar roofing of the building they were on without Bentley telling it to. It floated into the air in a stream, like a rope, and began tying itself in a knot. Bentley tried to say something but the words wouldn’t come out of his mouth. She couldn’t just… control him like that. There was no way.

“I’m going to kill you… and then I’m going to kill everyone you love. I’m going to watch this city burn,” The water rope twisted and swirled itself into a noose. “And you’re not.”

As hard as Bentley tried to fight, he couldn’t. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t control the water. The noose came and went over his head, and then he walked to the ledge of the building even though he was telling his body to stop, even though his agony just got worse with every movement.

This could not be how it ended.

He was facing the building with the dome in the center, overlooking all of the destruction. He could see faint figures moving below. He saw The Void appear behind Damian and kick him in the head, sending him thudding into the rubble. He saw the guy with half-white-half-black hair shove Dick into some debris. He saw Tim and Bruce, back to back, with at least twelve metahumans around them. Duke and Steph and Cass were doing something similar with even more metahumans around them, far off.

The dome of fire flickered, then went away.

“Aw, pity. They were so close,” The Secret Keeper muttered, running a hand through Bentley’s hair from behind in a very creepy manner that he wasn’t allowed to move away from.

Asten and Jason were the only two on the center building’s rooftop, talking, but Bentley couldn’t hear them. Asten fell on his knees and more buildings shook, one in particular right next to them collapsing from the bottom up with plumes of smoke and a deafeningly loud crash.

The Secret Keeper’s breath brushed against Bentley’s face when she whispered: “Listen.”

Time seemed to move slower than normal, and Bentley could suddenly hear Asten and Jason even over the massive distance between them.

“-this out,” Was the tail end of Red Hood’s sentence that Bentley caught. Asten shook his head, his eyes still glowing a bright orange and overflowing with waves after waves of tears.

“I-I can’t control it. I can't make it stop,”

“You can, I know you can,” Jason tried. He stepped forward and, ever so slowly, took off his helmet. “I believe in you.”

Asten’s eyes widened, but only for a second, because he flinched again when another building fell, looking off the roof. “I can’t. I can’t, Jason, I’m killing people.”

“You can,”

Asten’s eyes flicked up to Jason, and in one sharp movement, he jumped off of his knees and ripped one of Red Hood’s pistols out of a hip holster, pressing the barrel against his own blue hair.

“I’m murdering people and I can’t make it stop!” Asten shouted, a few violent sobs wracking his body.

“Your death is not the answer. It’s never been the answer,” Jason shouted, moving closer, one hand out. “You’ve lost so much, but you still have so much to live for.”

“I’m killing people that have so much more to live for than that,” Asten replied, the gun shaking against his temple, tears streaming down his face. “I deserve it.”

“Asten, please, listen to me. I know how bad this world can hurt you, but giving up isn’t the answer. Kicking it's ass is,” Jason explained, stepping closer. “Please, give me the gun.”

Asten didn’t move. He just stood there.

“We’ll help you through this, but please… please don’t give up,” Jason moved his hand closer. “Give me the gun, kid.”

Instead of handing it over, Asten passed out. His eyes rolled back into his head, and the gun clattered on the rooftop. Thankfully, Jason managed to catch Asten before he hit.

“Poor little thing. It’s a real shame he won’t make it,”

Won't make it? The Secret Keeper was a dirty liar. How on earth would Asten not make it? His powers couldn’t kill him, could they?

Bentley watched Jason perform a few procedures that grew more and more frantic. Then he reached up and turned on his comm. “B, this kid isn’t breathing!”

And suddenly, Bentley couldn’t hear them anymore. All of the fire in the city died down, the destructive roar fading to a dull hum now that the source was gone. Everything seemed to still in a very eerie way, even the metahumans on the ground, who all looked around in confusion.

There Bentley was, stood on the edge of a building with a noose of water around his neck, and the Secret Keeper’s hands on his shoulders. Strangely numb, feeling rage and desperation and vengeance that he couldn’t display, not even in a scowl, because his body wasn’t his own. It was her’s.

“Forward,”

Bentley’s foot moved closer to the edge, tauntingly. He closed his eyes and focused hard on the Secret Keeper, but he couldn’t — he couldn’t sense her, or any water, or anything. He was blind.

“Go on,”

He stepped closer.

In the back of his mind, he heard something so softly he could’ve missed it. Something moving. Blood pumping. Bum, bum, bum, over and over, moving through veins. The Secret Keeper’s blood.

“Over the edge,”

Bentley, mustering up every tiny bit of willpower he had left, muttered through clenched teeth: “No.”

The Secret Keeper shoved him anyways.

Bentley wasn’t sure what he expected it to feel like, but he didn’t exactly expect it to feel like his whole head was going to explode. He very suddenly couldn’t breathe, and it was difficult to move his arms to try and tug at the noose. The whole thing spun around with him in it so he was facing the Secret Keeper, who was smiling maniacally.

Bentley was about to die.

Bentley Whittaker was about to die.

With one last push of energy, he channeled everything he had into her. Every little drop of rage he could muster from anywhere in his mind, from the pesky nightmares, to this, to chasing Asten the first night, for tormenting his family — every ounce of raw emotion and power he could force his body to give, he focused it all on her, on the blood in her veins, for one last, final hoorah.

(If he was dying, he wasn’t doing it alone.)

The Secret Keeper doubled over and vomited crimson all over the rooftop. But Bentley kept pushing. He kept going until

it was pouring out of her nose, dripping from her ears, running from her eyes like tears. The world was getting darker. He could feel her heart pounding, pounding, pounding well over double or triple the speed it was supposed to, but he didn’t stop. She hit her knees and started screaming. Nico’s eyes turned blue again, and he fell unconscious behind her.

“You’re going to kill me!”

The screaming got loud and torturous then. Like someone was cutting her up piece by piece, as every once of blood was drained from her body, she screamed and she screamed and eventually… she stopped.

The water went slack, and Bentley started freefalling.

With whatever he had left, he formed a bubble of water beneath him that he could land in.

When he hit, everything was black. He couldn’t think. He was only just remembering how to breathe, and his head was throbbing like nothing he’d ever experienced. The water he landed in went slack around him and left him laying on a pile of wet rubble.

His body was in so much pain at the same time that it was so numb. He could feel everything and nothing, all at once. He felt that his stab wound had reopened, and was now pouring a warm liquid all over him that he didn’t have the willpower to stop. His neck was sore, maybe even bleeding, too. He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t really feel it. He wanted to yell for Bruce but he couldn’t.

“You killed her,”

Bentley peeled his eyes open just enough for a hazy, tilting, doubling picture of a metahuman to come into view. It was the guy with half-white-half-black hair. There were metahumans behind him, looking around strangely, like they didn’t know where they were. Was Charlie really dead? Did that mean the mind control wasn’t working anymore?

The rubble beneath him shifted, and a large, mangled piece of metal began floating out of it.

“You killed Charlie,” The metahuman repeated. The mangled metal made it's way to Bentley, hovering in the air straight above him. “You’ll pay for that.”

Was the Secret Keeper really dead?

The mangled piece of metal was thrusted into Bentley’s chest with force so strong that he felt it hit the rubble on the other side.

It was only then that he realized, this was what she showed him.

Him and Jason, in the lazarus pit, him dressed as Robin. Dead, impaled by a piece of metal debris.

This…

This was the reality where Bentley Whittaker died.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @flyrobinflyy @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun @xiaonothere @beatyoutothatusernameloser

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maccreadysbaby · 7 months ago

Text

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: gore

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

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

I’m so hyped you guys I’m so hyped

part forty-one

❝ ROBIN (BY FORCE OF WILL?) ❞

SATURDAY — SEPTEMBER 12 — 7:01 PM

“WE DON’T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING,” Was the first thing Batman said.

“But-“

“No buts,” Bruce ordered, completing his suit by clipping on the gauntlets. “You are staying right here in the Manor with Alfred. We’re going to do everything we can to ensure the safety of your friend, but I have to make sure you’re safe, too.”

Bentley deflated like a balloon. “But I have superpowers now. I’ll be useful!”

“You can be useful to Alfred here,” He replied. He had more of his Batman voice on than his Bruce voice, which made it… slightly harder to argue with him, if Bentley were being honest.

“Please, Bruce, this is what I’ve been waiting for! To prove that I-“

“You have nothing to prove, Bentley. You belong here,”

Bentley groaned dramatically. “But it’s just Asten! What if he won’t talk to you?”

“He’ll talk to Jason,”

“He’s mad at Jason,”

“Bentley, I’m sorry, but you’re not going. And that’s my final answer,” Bruce ordered, and Bentley quieted, looking down at the floor with a quiet sigh. Not a second later, Batman’s glove was resting on the side of his head. “I love you.”

Bentley looked up at him, and despite not being able to see his eyes through the lenses of the cowl, he could imagine the famous Bruce Wayne glint they had in them.

“I love you, too,” He replied, looking down at his ratty red tennis shoes next to Batman’s boots. “Be careful.”

Bruce moved quickly. He, Dick, Tim, Duke, Jason, and Damian were all ready in a flash, Batman and Robin taking the Batmobile while the others readied motorcycles. Bentley and Nico sort of just stood off to the side and watched the chaos unfold. Alfred had come downstairs and taken over the Batcomputer, which now had a map of Gotham with all the vigilantes’ trackers displayed. The cave was superhero free in minutes.

“I think I’m having a brain aneurysm,” Nico muttered, shaking his head side to side. “I’m in Batman’s secret lair, where Batman was getting ready to go fight my best friend, and before he left he told my other best friend that he loves him. Batman told you he loves you!”

Somehow, Bentley found it in himself to snicker, glancing over at the blonde with an amused look on his face. “He’s my legal guardian.”

“My life feels like a tv show,” Nico pulled his phone out and glanced down at it, exclaiming suddenly: “And… my parents are blowing me up, saying they’re coming to get me. Better not keep them waiting! Thank you for having me, Bentley. Mr. Pennyworth.”

“Anytime, Nico,” Alfred called from his station, a bit preoccupied by his duties.

Nico then began back up the stairs toward the manor, and Bentley followed him all the way.

“I thought your parents were out of town?” Bentley questioned, trying his best to recall the reason Nico had come over in the first place.

The blonde said nothing.

“Your parents aren’t coming, are they?”

Nico sighed heavily, his blonde hair bouncing as he ascended the staircase. “Asten’s my best friend, and Batman isn’t my dad. Sorry, dude.”

“Seriously? You’re just going to leave me here?” Bentley grumbled as they came out of the grandfather clock in Bruce’s office. “I thought you’d be terrified of something like this.”

“Oh, trust me, I am. But Asten has been my best friend for years, and if he won’t listen to the Red Hood, someone needs to be there just in case. I’ll be fine. No need to worry about me,”

“You’re running… flying into a warzone,” Bentley stated flatly. Nico scrunched his face up.

“Yeah… but I prefer not to think about that and focus on the fact that I have awesome superpowers and my best friend’s dad is Batman,” He replied, walking through the Manor briskly, all the way to the front door. “I wonder if I can use my speed to fly super fast. Like double powers.”

Bentley huffed. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

“Sorry, Bentley, but I’ve gotta run. I’m sure there’s something super important for you to do here. I’ll see you later,”

And with that, a gust of wind came, and Nico was gone in a flash. Bentley didn’t even see the front door open.

With a deep inhale and exhale, he returned to the cave.

“I trust Nico’s parents were pleased to see him?” Alfred questioned as Bentley turned the corner, grabbing a rolling chair and dragging it to the Batcomputer.

“Oh, yeah. Thrilled,” He replied flatly, plopping down in the office chair. “Why won’t Bruce let me do anything? Damian was Robin when he was ten. Dick was Robin when he was nine! And they didn’t even have superpowers!”

“Those were both very different circumstances than your own, Master Bentley,” Alfred explained, typing on the Batcomputer and bringing his hand up to the earpiece that was in his right ear. “Three blocks to your left, sir,” He stated, then removed his hand. “Times were very different when Master Dick was Robin, and Master Bruce was very different. As for Master Damian, his former training and skill-set makes his role as a vigilante the most optimum outlet for him.”

Bentley exhaled, sliding down into the chair. “I feel useless.”

“That’s nonsense,” Alfred replied, his eyes flying across the screen at a pace Bentley could only dream of. “You’ve had a very important role in this family, even without the vigilante passtime. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them more harmonious than when you started living here.”

Bentley tapped his thumbs on the arms of the office chair. “Really?”

“Yes, my boy. Even with the occasional hiccups with Master Damian, I have to say, this is the most unified the Wayne household has been in a long time,”

Bentley said nothing. It did make sense, though… maybe Bruce just needed a (mostly) normal kid that wasn’t defying death every night? Maybe that could help him? With what, Bentley wasn’t sure. But the idea made sense in his head. Sort of.

“I have a question for you. What would you say makes Master Bruce, Master Bruce?” Alfred questioned, looking at Bentley for only a second with his eyebrows up. “Would you say the cowl and cape makes him Master Bruce? Or would you say his endless devotion to his children does? His astronomically large heart that makes him unable to avoid adopting any deserving child he comes in contact with? His willingness to do anything it takes to keep his family safe and secure?”

Bentley looked down at his own hands. “Um… the way he loves, I guess.”

Alfred nodded and hummed simultaneously. “Indeed. So, Master Bentley, what would you say makes you, you? Surely you’re not missing an identity simply because you’re not behind a domino mask.”

Bentley blinked a few times. “I… I don’t know.”

“Well, I’d say you’re very determined. Brave. Loyal,” Alfred continued, typing a few more strings of code. “Devoted to this family, similarly to Master Bruce. You have a big heart.”

Alfred brought his hand up to the earpiece in his ear. “Yes, sir, I’m looking into it now.”

Another tab came up on the Batcomputer, this one was the same view from the drone that Tim had been watching. It flew around until it focused on a… massive… floating ball of purple light, in the center of a rubble-filled street?

“I have my eye on it, sir,” Alfred continued, zooming in on the strange light. There were a few dials and charts on the right side of the screen that were fluctuating. “It’s putting out an entire nuclear power plant’s worth of energy.”

Bentley creased his brow, scooting a bit closer to the screen. “What is that?”

“I’m not sure, my boy,”

He watched it closely. It was sort of spinning and spitting and moving — like a star or the sun. There seemed to be a whirlpool of air around it that was blowing flame and debris around. Right in front of Bentley’s eyes, the purple things doubled in size, the center turned black, and someone began to step out of it.

Bentley had seen that before. When they fought The Void — when she’d sent Duke through a portal to Australia.

Confirming Bentley’s suspicions. The Void in question stepped out of the portal first. She looked different from last time Bentley saw her. Her hair was purple now, a dark, royal purple that matched her glowing eyes. She was wearing an honest supervillain suit — a solid black, skin tight jumpsuit with neon purple lines at the seams, and massive, neon purple heeled boots that couldn’t be comfortable to do anything in. When she stepped out, she looked around at the destruction and smiled.

“It seems to be that Void we sent to Arkham, sir,”

Bentley’s jaw unhinged slightly when lots of people started stepping out of the portal. The second was the Secret Keeper, in her full suit get-up with the yellow cape and bloody platinum hair. Next was Mandy Todryk, who’s hair was now a deep Raven black. She was wearing what looked like a black shirt and green tactical pants, and on her back sat massive, raven-black wings. Whole entire wings that looked straight off of a giant bird.

After her came a bunch of people — metahumans — Bentley had never seen, all with glowing eyes, multicolored hair, and strange suits. There had to be at least three dozen, and they all looked fairly young. Only a few looked to reach Dick’s age.

At the very back of the group were Davis and Titus. They had huge, bulky chains that synched around their necks and wrists, and these gnarly looking metal muzzles over their noses and mouths that kept them from speaking. They were both beaten to the high heavens, bleeding in various places and bruised all over, with the worst of it on their wrists and necks where the chains were being jerked on. Davis was still wearing his giant metal gloves, and Titus had what looked like metal cups over his hands that kept sparking with blue electricity. Did that keep him from teleporting away?

A strong wave of relief washed over Bentley when he saw that they were both alive.

And something similar to rage came crashing immediately after. Why were they chained up?

“Babybird,”

Bentley turned when the Secret Keeper’s voice echoed through the cave, looking toward the locker room, the launch pad where the Batmobile usually sat. Nothing moved, and nothing looked out of place. Nothing at all.

“In the locker room,”

Bentley’s eyes flicked to the locker room door, and he saw the hem of a purple dress move just out of his sight.

“Charlie?”

“C’mon, Bentley,”

“What was that?” Alfred questioned, turning to look at Bentley, who blinked a few times.

“I’m… going to the bathroom,” He replied, rising from the office chair and heading toward the locker room.

“Alright…”

Bentley crept across the cave quietly, checking for anything out of the ordinary, but he couldn’t find anything. He inched into the locker room and peered around. Nothing out of the ordinary was in there, either — a few lockers, display cases with suits, the showers and bathrooms. It all looked… normal.

And then Bentley was in the white room of nothingness again.

Stunned, he blinked a few times to get used to the brightness. He’d never been taken into the white nothingness without being knocked out or asleep first.

“Hello?” He questioned, spinning around. “Anyone?”

“Bentley,”

He whipped around, and flinched when Charlie was only inches from his face in her purple dress. She didn’t have the shackles or muzzle on anymore, but was free, aside from bruising left from the metal.

“Charlie,”

“You have to go,” She said, a downright urgent look crossing her features. “You have to go now.”

Bentley looked around at the white nothing. “What do you… you mean go fight?”

“Yes. Yes, I mean go fight. You’re the only one that can beat this,” She announced, and she grabbed onto his shoulders, shaking him a little. “They’re all going to die, Bentley.”

“Wha- who?”

“Everyone. I… the Secret Keeper, she can see the future, this is how they planned it…” Charlie ran her hands through her own hair, obviously stressed and obviously stressing Bentley out, too. “This is their plan. Your family is going to die at the hands of these metahumans. But I’ve seen the other outcomes, and you can stop it. But you have to leave now.”

Bentley breathed in, rubbing his eyes. “Are you sure?”

Charlie groaned. “Look!”

Smoke came — not the Secret Keeper’s black smoke, but more colorful smoke, moving slower, too — and swirled in the middle of the whiteness until there were figures all over the room. The closest ones to them were Robin and The Void, engaged in combat. Damian was better with a sword, and the Void was losing.

“This is the future you’re heading toward, if you don’t leave!”

Bentley watched as The Void, purple hair and all, summoned a portal right beneath Damian’s feet that sucked him in and disappeared. Then an identical one showed up in the sky, what had to be thousands of feet above her, and Damian fell out of it.

And kept falling.

He fumbled for his grappling gun and shot it, but the end didn’t hook on anything.

And he kept falling and kept falling until he hit the ground with a sickening noise and a poof of smoke — smoke Charlie probably put there so Bentley wouldn’t have to see the aftermath.

“It’s all of them. Every single one,”

Behind where Damian had just fallen, Nightwing and a metahuman Bentley hadn’t seen before — a guy with half-white half-black hair — were fighting hand-to-hand near a massive pile of rubble. The metahuman guy shoved Dick into the debris, and with the flick of a hand, metal barbs from the pile moved and bent and snaked around his wrists like vines, pinning him there. Could that metahuman control metal, like a human magnet?

Tauntingly, the metahuman guy backed away and lifted his hand in the air, palm out. Then he smirked at Dick and made a fist.

Three huge shards of metal came out from the pile of debris straight through Dick, from his back all the way through his front, and Bentley looked away with a strangled noise.

That image dissipated into smoke, and behind that was Jason being held in the air by actual vines that were wrapped around his neck, choking him to death. He was fighting them, clawing and ripping at them with his hands, but they were too strong, too powerful. They didn’t stop squeezing until Red Hood went still.

That image faded away, and the next was Red Robin and the Secret Keeper. They were standing right across from each other, just looking, like some kind of standoff. It was fast — her eyes glowed, Tim’s ears and nose and eyes bled, and he hit the ground.

The last image in the line was Bruce. He was on his knees, his suit ripped up and destroyed, the cowl torn off of his head leaving his identity completely exposed. He was bleeding everywhere, from his nose to a gash on his torso, and the Secret Keeper was standing in front of him.

“You lost, Batman,” She crooned. She had a chain in her hand that led to Davis’s neck and wrists, and she kept tugging on it maniacally. “Let’s finish this with a bang, shall we?”

She jerked on Davis’s chain until he was right in front of her. “Please, Charlie, please, please, please, please.” He was begging, and Bentley was pretty sure he was crying, but it was hard to see past all the dirt and grime on his face.

Charlie unclipped one of his gloves and let it hit the ground with a clack, revealing a withered, black hand.

“You’re kids are all dead. You have nothing to live for. You’ve lost, Mr. Wayne,” She ordered, pulling tight on Davis’s chain when he began to fight, choking him. He reached his black hand toward her, but before he could touch her, he shouted in pain and hit the ground, on his knees in front of Bruce.

“Touch him,” The Secret Keeper ordered.

Davis’s eyes began to glow amber, and his arm began to move. It was shaking, trembling, actually, like he was using everything in him to fight the control she had over him. He was bawling his eyeballs out, now. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,”

Bruce did one of his reassuring smiles. “It’s okay, Davis.”

Davis touched a spot on Bruce’s arm where the suit was torn, where skin was showing. The light left his eyes.

Bentley was crying. When had that started? “Okay. Okay, I-I’ll go. Let me out of here!”

On command, the white room disappeared, and he was back in the locker room with no one more than lockers and old super suits.

He took a few moments to gather his thoughts, take a few breaths, stop crying, and try to make a semblance of a plan. He was going. He was going into the destruction to help his family, to save them. He couldn’t just go out into a war-zone looking like Bentley, though, then everybody would know who he was, and in turn, could figure out who Batman was. Right? So he needed a disguise. Right? That made the most sense. That’s what Bruce did.

He glanced around the locker room. There were display cases with old suits in them, from some of Dick’s Nightwing suits all the way to the old Robin ones. One of the newer displays was the Robin suit Damian had just stopped using, when he switched from the red to the gray one Bruce had shown Bentley.

Being stupidly devoted to this family was starting to become a Bentley Whittaker trademark, wasn’t it?

He backed up and peered out the locker room door, back into the cave. They kept their earpieces for communication in a drawer at the Batcomputer, Bentley knew that much — he’d seen them get them out a bunch. Alfred was still typing and talking away, with several tabs pulled up on the massive screen.

He needed a suit, and he needed an earpiece so he could hear what was going on. And he also needed a means of escape, but that was something that he would get to at the right moment. Suit. Earpiece. Save the day.

With a deep breath and a deep determination that couldn’t be very healthy, Bentley summoned a tiny stream of water from the bathroom and made it crawl across the cave floor toward the computer like a little worm. It was only a little thicker than a strand of hair, and virtually (hopefully) incognito to a Butler that was knee deep in a mission. Bentley focused as hard as he could to make it subtly slither itself up the leg of the Batcomputer’s desk, and even harder to make it squeeze into one of the drawers without drawing too much attention.

He took a moment to breathe, and then watched closely as the water slithered out again, pushing the drawer open just enough to fit one of the earpieces out. It made its way back to the floor the way it had made it's way up, and began to slither back to him.

With an exhale, he turned back toward the display cases. The only thing in them close enough to his size (that had pants) was either Damian or Tim’s Robin suits. But, looking at them now, Tim’s smaller Robin suit was a little awkward (it looked like a girl’s swimsuit?) So really, Damian’s was the only option.

Was he actually about to steal a Robin suit? (Was it still stealing if he lived there?)

Nevermind that. Now, his obstacle was getting the case open. He didn’t see any keyholes or buttons or doors or hinges or anything on them. So… how did they open?

Surely you didn’t have to open them with the Batcomputer, did you?

“Hurry, Bentley!” Said Charlie’s voice in his head.

Bentley exhaled heavily. He had to leave because he had to save his family. From, like, dying. Literal death. Stuff like how he got the case open didn’t actually matter when he was saving his family from death. Right? Right?

With that sorted out in his head, he summoned water from the bathroom and made it levitate right in front of him, spinning it into a large sphere. Once he decided the circle was big enough (and before he could change his mind away from the incredibly stupid thing he was doing.) he pressurized it and shot it at the glass case like a pressure washer on steroids.

And within a second, the whole thing shattered.

Then it was crunch time.

“Master Bentley?”

Bentley quickly made all the water wrap around his feet and lift him up (careful not to collect any broken glass.), jerked the suit out of the case as quickly as he could, and shot back through the door of the locker room. The water that had the earpiece in it shot it into his hand when he went through the door.

“I’m sorry,” He said as he passed Alfred, who looked rather miffed and had already been halfway to the locker room. “I’ll clean it up when I get home!”

And with that he flew (floated?) up the stairs on the water as fast as he could make it go without flying off, and into the Manor. He stopped at the front door, but right when he got there, the security panel next to it turned red.

Alfred had turned the security system on, just so Bentley couldn’t get out.

In a moment of panic, Bentley forced water into the lock and handle of the door, trying his best to turn the system off. When that didn’t seem to work, he forced the liquid into the button panel and made it spark. (Oops?)

On the bright side, when he opened the door, the alarm didn’t go off.

And just like that, Bentley Whittaker ran away from the Manor for the third (fourth?) time, Robin suit and superpowers in hand, to save his family.

… and not for a second did he stop to consider that the Secret Keeper may have been lying.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

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maccreadysbaby · 7 months ago

Text

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

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

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

the one chapter in this whole fic where bentley makes a rational decision

part thirty-nine

❝ UNLOVABLE ❞

TUESDAY — SEPTEMBER 8 — 11:07 AM

BENTLEY WOKE UP SO DISORIENTED AND FUZZY AND CONFUSED THAT HE JUST STARTED CRYING.

There were bright white lights in his face, and he wasn’t in his bed anymore, he was somewhere else. There were people moving around him, but he didn’t pay attention long enough to decide who, only long enough to decide he was terrified and wanted Bruce. What time was it? No idea. What day was it? No idea. Was he at the hospital? Was something really wrong with him?

“Whoa, hey… hey there, chum. You’re okay,”

Bentley relished in the familiar voice, peeling his heavy, kind of sticky, newly-wet eyes open to glance around the room. It took a solid minute for his brain to catch up to his vision, but when it did, he realized he was in the cave, and Bruce was sitting right next to the bed he was laying in.

He tried to bring his hands up to hide his crying eyes, but paused mid-movement when he realized he was attached to a drip.The movement also seemed to trigger a wave of soreness that washed through his whole body.

“Hey, hey, you’re okay. Just relax. You’re here, with me, in the cave. Everything’s okay,” Bruce spoke in his typical level, gentle tone, one of his hands landing on Bentley’s forehead like it always seemed to. Though, for some reason, he looked… really tired. Worn down.

Bentley breathed in and out shakily, gathering his bearings, trying to stop crying for no reason for the five millionth time in his short life. (Seriously, he had to be setting a record at this point.) Instead, he relaxed back down onto the bed and let Bruce card his fingers through his hair.

“Where’s… Nico?” Was the first thing he managed to whisper.

Bruce got a strange look on his face, before he replied: “Bentley… you’ve been down here for five days. Nico and Asten went home. It’s Tuesday.”

Bentley blinked a few times. It was Tuesday? He had been… he had been completely out of it for five whole days?

He looked around the empty room warily. “What? What happened?”

Bruce sighed softly, brushing his opposite hand through his own hair. “Someones been fiddling with your DNA, and it made you pretty sick.”

Oh. Right. Superpowers. Bentley looked down at his own feet under the cottony blanket, exhaling subtly.

“Bentley,”

He looked back up at Bruce, who had a little smile on his face.

“I will never, ever, ever get rid of you,” He reassured, sighing lightly. “I promise.”

Bentley looked down at his hands, exhaling shakily before he muttered: “My… my father told me… he never loved me. And, uh, that he never would.”

Bruce stayed silent for a moment.

Bentley breathed in and out. It was now or never, wasn’t it? The hard questions had to be asked so things could be fixed, right? “Will you tell me the truth?”

“Of course, bud. Anything,”

Bentley twiddled his fingers, purposefully keeping his eyes away from Bruce when he whispered: “Why is it so hard for people to love me?”

Bruce’s blue eyes grew grim, and he scooted his chair closer to the bed with a squeak. “Bentley Whittaker, you are not hard to love. In fact, you’re almost impossible not to love.”

Bentley looked away, breathing in to force away the urge to cry. “Then why doesn’t he love me?”

Bruce sighed lightly. “That’s his own choice, his own problem. It has nothing to do with you. You are an incredible, brave, amazing kid, Bentley, and I loved you the very first day Dick brought you to me.”

A moment of silence passed.

“Hey,” Bruce continued, his hand moving through Bentley’s hair again, and the child finally looked over at him with slightly glassy eyes. “You could set the whole world on fire and I’d still tell everybody you’re mine.”

Bentley looked down at his feet, blinking rapidly as his eyes began to burn. Did that mean that maybe Bruce wouldn’t hate him for all the things he did? And he wouldn’t get rid of him? And he could stay and keep living with them even though he was an emotional, irrational trainwreck of a child?

Bentley sniffled. “I’m…” Cold? Lonely? Tired of lying? “Can you hold me?”

In one smooth movement, minding the IV tubes, Bentley was with Bruce in the chair.

A few moments of silence passed.

“I wish you were my father,”

A few beats came and went, and Bruce kissed Bentley’s hair.

“I am,”

Oh, God — there it was. The one statement that utterly broke Bentley. That changed something inside of him just like his real father’s statement had. Something cracked. Something moved.

And so Bentley did what Bentley had been so determined not to do for literal weeks.

“You promise you won’t hate me?” He muttered into Bruce’s shirt, making himself small there, tucking his knees up.

“I could never hate you, Bentley,”

Bentley breathed in and out. Once. Twice. Three times. Maybe it really was the right time. Maybe he really should do it — just get it over with. Nico would’ve done it. It was good. It would make everything better, right? Right?

“I wasn’t kidnapped,” Is what he started out with, but then backtracked, because that was not a great place to start. “I mean, no, I was. I was. But, the… uh… the night you guys thought I went missing I actually… uh… I ran away.”

Bruce said nothing, but didn’t make a disapproving sound or expression, either. So Bentley continued.

“I guess… uh… I guess it really started back when… right before school. Or right after, I can’t remember. Something was wrong with Damian. And I tried to talk to him but he got mad…” Bentley cleared his throat. “He told me I wasn’t worthy enough to be a Wayne. That I didn’t belong here and you only had me because you felt bad for me.”

At that, Bruce let out a little sigh.

“I think he was kind of sad, I dunno… I know he didn’t really want to hurt me. I think. But he did anyways,” Bentley shook his head. “And I started looking at everybody, at Dick and Jason and Tim and Damian and Cass and Steph and Duke and… Y’know. They’re all superheroes. Really cool superheroes. And a bunch of them were Robin, and I obviously can’t be Robin, but… I… I had to do something, you know? I wanted to be good enough. So… uh… Asten and Nico and I decided that… uh… we were going to go after the Secret Keeper. Because I could prove that I belonged here if I caught a villain like you guys do.”

“So you left, in pursuit of her?” Bruce inquired gently.

Bentley nodded. “Yeah. Asten found some connections between the missing people and the Areopagus and Dr. Keene, my teacher, and found this cabin in the woods that he owned that a bunch of the victims had stayed in, so we went to check it out. Which… sounds pretty random and dumb, now, I guess…”

Silence passed.

“Uh… he found all that out by finding all the locations of where the people went missing and… uh… well. We kinda… stole Dr. Keene’s phone to get to the cabin schedules and stuff…” Bentley fiddled with his fingers awkwardly. “I know it was bad… but we wanted to help. So, uh, we met up at Nico’s house and started going to the cabin.”

Bentley exhaled heavily. Telling the truth felt strangely… good.

“We walked for a long time, and stopped by Asten’s house in Crime Alley for him to get something, and that was when Nico told me he was adopted and when I realized he had superpowers. Real ones — he has superspeed. And, well, that didn’t go over so well. He was… is really struggling with it. But, uh, anyways, Asten came back and then the Secret Keeper knocked me out and showed me all kinds of futures. Ones where I die, where I work with my father, where I was Robin… and she told me my choice to go to the cabin would lock me in and out of some. So I chose to keep going.”

Bruce still didn’t respond, keeping the door open for Bentley to continue.

“We broke into the cabin. And, uh, it looked pretty normal… at first. And then we found a trapdoor that led to the basement. Asten told me it was called a morgue,” Bentley shivered at the thought. “We opened up one of the fridges and… it was scary. I had an anxiety attack. Nico threw up in the floor. But Asten was fine, I think, and there was this computer down there that had tons of videos on it. Of our teacher, Dr. Keene, working in these labs, turning normal people into metahumans. The first one he did was his own daughter, Charlie Reins… who became The Secret Keeper. And he mind controls them all.”

Bruce exhaled.

“A bunch of the missing kids were in those videos, like Titus Lancaster and Davis Henderson. And we learned that… that… Dr. Keene was… is working for… my father. Trying to destroy you. That’s why the Secret Keeper has been attacking us. Because of me…” Bentley inhaled sharply. “Anyways, we were down there and we heard someone coming, so… we… hid in some of the fridges. Which wasn’t fun. I don’t remember much from then because I was freaking out. We ran out of the cabin and everyone was scared and Asten got his foot stuck in a bear trap and we were trying to help him and then there was a grenade and we all got knocked out.”

Bentley exhaled, sort of shaky, cringing at himself. Word vomiting wasn’t usually something people liked, but Bruce didn’t seem to mind.

“And I woke up in a warehouse, but I wasn’t actually there because it was just the Secret Keeper. I saw Jason die, and it… was really scary. I… I saw you. And I begged you to bring me home but it wasn’t really you…” Bentley fought back another round of stinging in his eyes and forced himself to get it together. “Then I woke up. Davis Henderson, the waiter that got knocked out at that bar because of me, he was there and he got me out of the machine before they could do mind control, he said.”

Bruce nodded slightly. “I remember hearing about Davis.”

“Yeah. He has to wear these super huge metal gloves now, because he kills anything he touches. His mind control was broken. So he got me out, and then we went to get Nico and Asten. And I got shot. Which was scary. And… he told us about Titus Lancaster, who can teleport, and he was going to have surgery to get new mind control so he didn’t have it then. And Davis told us to find him and that he could teleport us out,” He explained. “So we ran for a while. Lots of people were killed. Davis killed a lot of bad guys that were shooting at us, and… Nico did, too, but he didn’t mean to. He has air powers now that can make you choke.”

Bruce hummed.

“But when we were running out the Secret Keeper showed up. So Davis told us to run and he fought her. I’m not sure what happened but I hope he’s okay. He saved me…” Bentley cleared his throat. “But we found Titus, who was really scared, and he teleported us to the manor. And Asten told us not to tell anyone so I… didn’t. And you know everything that’s happened since I got home. Oh — except… I went to see my father to try and convince him to stop, but he said no. And that if I told anybody anything I knew he’d use a plan b that would destroy all of Gotham. But I don’t know what it is. Oh, and Asten has fire powers. And… I guess that’s everything you didn’t know.”

Bentley sighed and looked up at Bruce, who looked near-emotionless, processing all of the information he’d just had dumped in his lap.

“I… I know those things were bad, and that I should’ve told you, and that I did a lot of things I shouldn’t have done, but please, please, please don’t get rid of me. I’ll be better — I won’t do anything bad again. Please don’t-“

“Bentley,”

The Bentley in question was starting to cry again. “Please don’t get rid of me, Bruce. I promise I’ll be better. I promise. You can get me in trouble and yell at me and lock me up or hit me like my dad used to, but please just don’t get rid of me.”

“Bentley. Look at me please,”

Begrudgingly, Bentley looked up, his brown, watery eyes meeting Bruce’s icy blue ones.

“Please don’t get rid of me. I love you,”

Bruce breathed in and out. “Here’s what I have to say, okay? You’re right. Some of those things you did were risky, reckless, dangerous, and wrong, and you were impressively, almost stupidly brave to do them. All because you want to be loved and accepted and validated.”

Bentley looked down, wiping at his furiously leaking eyes with his non-dripped hand.

“Do you want to know what one of the most defining traits of a Wayne is?” Bruce questioned, glancing down at Bentley with a smile that threw the child for a loop. “Being impressively and stupidly brave, and doing things that are risky, reckless, dangerous, and wrong, all because you want to be loved and accepted and validated.”

Bentley said nothing.

“Every single person in this family, Bentley, has done something like this. Even me. Some of us more than once. And while I can’t say I’m thrilled about what you did or what you went through… You survived, you told me the truth, and you were trying to do the right thing. And, I’d have to say, all things considered, I’m pretty proud of that,” Bruce stated with a smile. “I am proud of you, Bentley. And I love you. So. Much. You’re pretty much stuck with me whether you like it or not.”

Bentley had never felt more relieved in his entire short life. Bruce loved him, and he wasn’t going to get rid of him, and he wasn’t mad at him… what kind of fever dream was this? How was it going just like Bentley hoped it would?

“Hey, bud, I want to ask you something. And I want you to be totally, completely honest, okay? Your answer needs to be yours and only yours,”

Bentley nodded slightly, still wiping at his eyes.

Bruce breathed in deep, running a hand over the child’s head with this fond gleam in his eyes that before now, Bentley could have only dreamed of.

“You’ve been living here for almost a year. Fostering for over half of it,” Bruce exhaled. “I think this is as good of a time as any to ask… how do you feel about being adopted, like Dick, Jason, and Tim?”

Bentley freaking lost his mind.

(In the arms of his dad?)

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @flyrobinflyy @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun @xiaonothere @beatyoutothatusernameloser

35 notes · View notes

maccreadysbaby · 7 months ago

Text

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: angst

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

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

terrible bad plan number 19284728 is brewing (and so is something else)

part thirty-five

❝ ARSONIST ❞

THURSDAY — SEPTEMBER 3 — 7:00AM

ASTEN WAS… REALLY, REALLY, REALLY SICK. Just within four hours of arriving at the Manor, he’d thrown up three fever medicine attempts, gone up to a hundred-and-four temperature, and hadn’t been able to say a coherent sentence the entire time.

Bentley and Nico had taken up residence on a loveseat situated in the corner of the dim guest room, and Nico was curled up across it, dead asleep with his head on Bentley’s lap. Alfred kept checking his temperature frequently with a forehead scanning thermometer. The screen always turned green, which meant good. Asten’s always turned red.

Surprisingly enough, Jason had taken it upon himself to stay in the bedroom basically the whole time. Bentley wasn’t really sure why — maybe he cared about Asten because they were both from Crime Alley? He didn’t really know, and he wasn’t going to ask and ruin it. He liked having Jason around so much, even if it wasn’t for him. Dick and Bruce kept going in and out to fetch things they needed and to give Nico’s parents updates. (Asten’s uncle, Sam, didn’t seem to care much about updates. He never picked up Dick’s calls.)

It had taken a while for Nico to stop crying. Everything seemed to be taking more of a toll on him than Bentley realized. Especially distancing himself from his parents; that was the worst part. With the whole adoption surprise and now the superpowers, he wouldn’t even begin to let himself near them. And for a kid who had never really been away from them to start with, it was pretty hard. Sleeping was the most peaceful Bentley had seen him in a while, so he stayed dutifully still as to not disturb his slumber.

The guest room had been silent for a while, apart from Alfred checking Asten and Nico’s temperatures every now and then. Currently, he was out of the room, searching with Bruce for a medicine Asten might be able to stomach better, and Jason went with them to get more liquid for the drip, leaving Nico and Bentley the only two in the room.

It seemed like absolutely everything that could go wrong, was going wrong. And Bentley was always to blame.

“Remember Titus?”

Bentley flinched with a gasp when Nico spoke, very nearly whacking him in the face. He glanced down, and Nico was looking up at him, blue eyes glazed over a dull. “I didn’t know you were awake.”

Nico sat up with a small, forced snicker that didn’t really reach his eyes. He ran a hand through his fluffy blonde hair and sighed, rubbing his face. “Sorry. Apparently I’m so tired that sleeping is hard.”

“I’m sorry,” Bentley mumbled, glancing over at Asten. “And yeah. I remember Titus.”

Nico pulled his knees up on the maroon loveseat, rubbing at his eyes with his hands. “He ran… or, teleported away after Asten told him about his parents. Never showed back up. Didn’t this happen to him before he got superpowers? The sickness?”

“Uh…” Bentley glanced over at Nico, who was waiting expectantly for an answer to the question he already knew the answer to, and then back over at Asten’s limp form. Only his head was visible beneath the beige quilt. “I guess so…”

“It’s all there. Fever, throwing up, delirium, vertigo, fatigue, sweating, loss of consciousness. The only thing Dr. Keene talked about that we haven’t seen from him was burning pain,” Nico explained in a whisper, fiddling with his pajama pants. (Bentley’s sailboat pajamas, actually. They had him change after he admitted that Asten had indeed thrown up on him.)

Bentley blinked a few times. “But Titus was sick as soon as he came out of the synchronizer. It’s been over two weeks since we were there.”

Nico shrugged, resting his head on his knees. “I dunno. It was just something I thought about.”

“Didn’t Titus’s sickness just go away after five days?” Bentley questioned, glancing over at him, and Nico replied with a simple nod.

“It’s starting day six for Asten.”

Bentley turned back toward their sick friend. He watched in silence as Asten turned his head with a groan, making the cool washcloth Dick put there flop off onto the mattress.

With a soft exhale, Bentley stood, stretching and making his way to the edge of the bed. Asten still looked terrible — his face was fever flushed and he was sweating like no one Bentley had ever seen. That and the wet washcloth made his black and blue hair soggy and stick to his face. His lips were pale and Bentley didn’t think he’d seen his eyes open once since he’d arrived. It reminded him of when Tim was sick — scary.

With a pang of pity that moved through his veins, he dipped the washcloth in a bowl of cold water, squeezed it out, and put it back on Asten’s forehead.

An extremely dramatic groan was the first real reaction they got out of Asten all day. He didn’t say any words, but turned his head to the side to make the washcloth fall off again.

“I know it's cold,” Bentley started, grabbing the cloth and putting it back, keeping his hand over it so it wouldn’t move even if Asten did. “But it’s helping you.”

Asten turned his head from side to side trying to get it off, and Bentley apologetically held it there. Nico drifted up next to him with a quiet sigh.

“I wish he would be better already,” He muttered, huffing and crossing his arms. “He’s going to hate me.”

Bentley momentarily glanced at him, catching the calculating way he was looking at Asten. “Why would you say that?”

Nico shrugged, his dull blue eyes bouncing around the room. “On the third day, when his fever was really bad, I said we should probably call you or my parents or an ambulance or something, but he wouldn’t let me. He said he didn’t want any help. And now I brought him here.”

“You… did the right thing,” Bentley replied, looking back at Asten, who was still moving his head side to side. “The best thing for him.”

Nico nodded in silence.

Asten groaned unintelligibly, and one of his hands came up from under the quilt and pushed weakly at Bentley’s wrist.

“I know it’s cold,” The redhead repeated. Asten began to squirm slightly on the bed, his eyebrows pinching together in discomfort.

“G’off,” He halfway grumbled. Nico shifted by Bentley’s when an actual word came out of Asten’s mouth for the first time in a whole twenty-four hours.

“Not until your fever breaks,” Bentley replied, holding the cloth firmly in place. “I’m sorry.”

Asten didn’t like that.

“G’off!” He begged in his not-awake-but-not-unconscious limbo, and he pinched his face together in a way that Bentley knew all too well — that he was about to start crying. “Please… please…”

Bentley sighed lightly. “Okay. Just for a minute,” And then he lifted the cloth off of Asten’s forehead again. The older boy’s features softened, and he fell peaceful.

There was shuffling by his side, and before Bentley could turn to see what was happening, Nico scanned Asten’s forehead with their thermometer. Bentley counted to ten and then put the cloth back, to which Asten groaned dramatically again. Only a few seconds later, Nico moved Bentley’s hand and scanned Asten’s head again. And then again.

“What are you doing?” Bentley questioned, glancing over at him. Nico was staring at the glowing red thermometer screen like it had a picture of a unicorn on it, his blue eyes blown dinner-plate wide.

“He should be dead,” Was Nico’s muted mumble.

Bentley furrowed his brow and stepped closer to Nico, peering down at the thermometer.

The screen was bright red, displaying a large hundred-and-eighteen-point-four.

Bentley blinked, and then rubbed his eyes. Bruce had talked about Tim’s hundred-and-four being bad…

“Do it again,” He ordered. Nico reached forward and repeated the process, swiping the thermometer across Asten’s forehead. A hundred-and-eighteen-point-seven.

“This thing has to be broken,” Nico suggested, lifting the thermometer up and scanning Bentley’s forehead with it. It came back green — ninety-eight-point-four. He reached over and did Asten’s again.

A hundred-and-nineteen-point-six.

“You better put that cloth back on him. This is insane. Impossible, really. He should literally be burning alive inside his own body. Like, vegetable territory,” Nico muttered, scanning his own forehead with the device. Ninety-eight-point-seven.

“He can hear you,” Bentley muttered, dipping the cloth in the water bowl again.

“He shouldn’t be hearing anything! He should be dead!”

Bentley said nothing, wringing out the cloth. Nico checked Asten’s temperature one last time. A hundred-and-twenty-point-one.

“It’s literally getting higher by the second!”

Bentley pressed the cloth back on Asten’s forehead, to which he protested by screwing his face up and squirming around on the bed some more.

“The highest internal temperature a person has ever survived is a hundred-and-fifteen-point-seven!” Nico exclaimed, tossing the thermometer on the table and staring at Asten with a strange look on his face. Bentley glanced over at him without a word. “What? I looked it up when Asten started getting sick.”

Bentley said nothing, but continued to hold the cloth down on Asten’s forehead. He could feel the heat radiating from him through the cloth. If a hundred-and-four was bad, how was Asten still alive at a hundred-and-twenty?

Asten groaned dramatically again, pushing at Bentley’s wrist with more force now. He grumbled, “Get it off,” coherently, like he was actually starting to wake up.

“I know you don’t-“

“Get it off!”

“But you-“

“Get it off!” Asten’s eyes snapped open that time, but they weren’t green anymore. They were…

They were…

Glowing orange.

Bentley and Nico both jumped backwards, and the cloth slid from Bentley’s fingers and splatted on the floor next to his feet. Asten blinked a few times and looked around the room, a bit disoriented, his orange irises bouncing here and there.

“Hey,” Bentley greeted nervously, sending a quick glance to Nico. Asten looked over at them, eyes flicking between the pair incredulously. “It’s okay, you’re at my place.”

Asten said nothing, but kept blinking like he wasn’t sure what was going on. Bentley bent down and picked up the washcloth from the floor, dipping it back in the water bowl and wringing it out. “And your fever is really really really high, so I need to put this back on you.”

Asten blinked, the glowing in his eyes unrelenting, the orange pulsing and moving like flames. “But I feel fine.”

“But you-“ Bentley started, but Nico elbowed him lightly. Their eyes met before Nico whispered: “He’s delirious. He was saying the same thing the other day, but he couldn’t even tell me his own name.”

Don’t argue with someone who is delirious, Bentley knew that much from helping with Tim. He nodded to himself and then glanced back over at Asten, who was now sitting up straight, looking around like he’d never seen and bedroom in his life.

“That’s great. I’m glad you’re feeling better, but your fever is still really really high. The cool cloth is good for you,” He reasoned, wringing it out again and folding it in half to fit on his forehead.

“No it’s not,” Asten argued, shifting away from Bentley on the bed. “It hurts.”

“It’s just cold, buddy. Lay back down,” Bentley tried, holding the cloth up. Asten pushed himself farther away until he was on the far edge of the bed, glaring at the cloth like it had assaulted him.

“No! Stop it! Get it away! It burns!”

“Shh, shh, stop yelling,” Bentley muttered, glancing at the door in a spurt of panic. If someone heard them, they were screwed. “It's okay, Asten. It’s just a little cool.”

“No it’s not, it burns!”

The washcloth in Bentley’s hand burst into flames with a loud whoosh when Asten said it burns. The redhead cried out in terror, dropping it on the floor with another strange splat.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” Nico shouted, spinning around in a circle for reasons unbeknownst to Bentley. “Put it out! Put it out!”

Bentley, in a blind panic, grabbed the water bowl from the nightstand and dumped it all over the cloth (and the floor.) The fire went out with a low sizzle.

No one spoke for a solid five seconds. Bentley looked at Nico, who glanced at him with his blue eyes blown wide, a terrified but awestruck look on his face. Then he looked back at Asten, whose eyes were slowly turning from orange back to green.

Had he just…

Set that on fire?

With his mind?

With a grimace of discomfort, Asten laid back down in the bed, satisfied that the cloth would no longer be attacking him.

“Asten, do you-“

Before Bentley could finish speaking, Asten’s eyes rolled backwards into his head, and he fell unresponsive again.

“Oh my God! He is a metahuman,” Nico mumbled, glancing around the room warily. “We… we should clean this up before your family gets back. Like, now.”

“If they didn’t already hear you screaming,” Bentley muttered, grabbing the singed and blackened cloth out off of the floor. He sent a quick glance to Asten, who was unmoving.

Nico hurried over to the bathroom and opened the sink cabinets. “I thought it was crazy that I had superpowers. And now he does too?!”

Bentley said nothing, but instead, grabbed the empty water bowl and carried it into the bathroom to refill. He tossed the old rag in the trash and covered it with some toilet paper.

“You know, if he has fire based powers, maybe the cold really does hurt,” Nico suggested, grabbing a towel from the cabinet and heading back into the bedroom to mop up the floor as Bentley filled the bowl in the sink.

“Maybe,” Bentley replied. Everything comes with a downside, doesn’t it? Everything good?

Bentley brought the full bowl back into the room and put it on the nightstand. Nico handed him a new washcloth, and he dipped it in the water just in time for the bedroom door to swing open.

Jason was wearing a blue hoodie and gray sweatpants now, his hair slightly messy with the white part hanging down toward his eyes. He was carrying a few fluid bags in his hands for Asten’s IV. He paused abruptly after he closed the door, glancing between the three children (one unconscious and two rooted to their spots.) for a few seconds with his greenish-blue eyes narrowed. “What’re you up to?”

Bentley blinked, and with a cringe and a quick glance to a terrified Nico, replied: “Nothing, he just… woke up for a second. He… said a real word, too. A few.”

Jason, after a moment of silence and a few way too detective-ish glances, nodded in approval, making his way to the drip stand and unscrewing the old bag from the IV tubes. “That’s good. Will you hand me the thermometer?”

With a grimace, Bentley grabbed it from the bedside table and handed it over.

He and Nico watched in quiet terror as Jason finished changing out the IV bag and scanned Asten’s forehead with the thermometer. The screen turned red, and he looked at it inquisitively, then set it down on the bed with a sigh. “Looks like the fever might be going down, too.”

Bentley blinked once. Twice. Glanced over at Nico, who looked completely bamboozled but was trying not to. There was no way… what?

“What was the temperature?” Bentley questioned, dipping the washcloth back in the water bowl as a way to look like he wasn’t excruciatingly confused.

“A hundred-and-three-point-nine,” Jason replied. Bentley nodded slightly and wringed out the cloth, folding it and placing it gently on Asten’s forehead. He scrunched his face up, but didn’t wake.

And now the question was: had his temperature actually gone down that far that fast, or was Jason lying so he didn’t freak them out?

“Hey, Bentley,”

Bentley and Nico glanced over at the door that was sitting only slightly ajar, and Bentley shifted awkwardly at the voice that had come through it. Damian hadn’t spoken to him in weeks, why would he be calling for him now?

“Yeah?” He questioned.

He waited for Damian to open the door, but he never did. Jason didn’t say anything about it — probably because the assassin actually wanting to talk to somebody was a sign that he was finished hibernating.

“I’ll be right back,” Bentley said to Nico, who nodded.

Bentley moved from Asten’s bedside to the door and swung it open, glancing out into the hallway. It was completely empty, but Damian’s bedroom door was cracked open. No one else’s was.

“Damian?”

“Bentley,”

His voice was echoing from down the stairs, the foyer. Bentley gently swung the guest room door closed behind him and made for the stairs, thumping down them softly. He couldn’t see anybody at the bottom.

“Damian?”

“Bentley,”

When he reached the bottom of the stairs and could see the entire foyer, there was no one in it. The pale sunrise was illuminating outside the windows, making the whole house glow dimly, but there was no Damian anywhere.

“Bentley,”

The redhead turned on a dime, glancing down the hallway that led to the library and den. That’s where the voice was coming from.

His heartbeat was picking up. Why was his heartbeat picking up? Why was he sort of freaked out? “Damian? Are… you okay?”

“In the den,”

Bentley hesitantly made his way down the hall. He checked each room on the way — the office, the library — and they all came up empty, just like the family had left them. When he finally turned into the den, Damian was standing in the middle of the room in a green hoodie and black pants, looking completely and utterly normal. The room was normal, too — messy from movie marathons with an ever-burning fireplace that gave the whole thing a warm glow. Not a pillow was out of place, everything was just how it was the last time Bentley saw it.

He sighed in relief at the sight of Damian, stepping inside and glancing around. His fear quieted, replaced by something like, maybe, happiness? Shock that Damian was actually talking to him? “What is it?”

Damian looked down at his own socked feet for a few moments, fiddling with his hands inside his hoodie pocket. He looked alright. Good, even. “I just wanted to make sure you are aware… that… I do apologize for my previous behavior towards you.”

Bentley blinked, his eyes wandering around the den awkwardly. Right; Damian didn’t like apologizing in front of people, just like when they were in the car. “Uh… it's…”

“I… have to get used to how words affect you. You are different from my brothers. Richard and Drake and Todd — they can threaten one another and say the most crude things all day and still be friends at dinner. I… am still not sure how to effectively communicate with you,” Damian admitted, glancing down at the carpeted floor. “I am sorry for all those things I said. I did not mean them.”

Bentley breathed in and out, blinking. Damian wasn’t really one to go changing his mind, so maybe he actually hadn’t meant it in the first place? But it had sounded so sincere…

Bentley inhaled, muttering softly: “Do you really think everything would be better if I was gone?”

“No,” Damian sighed, shaking his head. Bentley glanced down at his own socks. Why did he feel like he was about to cry?

He heard Damian shift. “I think everything would be better if you were dead.”

Bentley glanced back up at him, and he had a strange, twisted smirk on his face that looked forced, mangled, even. So grotesque that it reminded him momentarily of the joker. Damian’s eyes weren’t blue — they were amber.

Bentley inhaled sharply. “You’re not Damian.”

He took a few steps back. The fake Damian cackled strangely, and in a blink, it wasn’t Damian anymore — it was The Secret Keeper, standing in the den, in the Manor, right in front of him. Her crooked stitched smile was bleeding, and the tips of her platinum hair were stained crimson. Bentley shouted in fear and stumbled backwards, fell over his own two feet, and hit the floor of the den with a dull thud.

“I can make you see what I want you to see!” The Secret Keeper shouted in a somewhat manic manner, spinning around, her stringy hair whacking her in the face. The den around them melted away into a stretch of the white hallways from Dr. Keene’s lab, sterile and bright and terrifying. Davis was laying at the end of the hall, straight in front of Bentley, covered in something scarily crimson.

His heart jumped. “Davis?!”

“I can make you hear what I want you to hear!”

“Bentley!” Someone screamed — a girl. Bentley turned around on the cold white tile and, at the opposite end of the hall from Davis, stood a small girl with long red hair. She was wearing pink overalls, holding a purple teddy bear. She was crying. “Bentley, help! He’s coming!”

“Vivienne?” He whispered. How did he know her name?

The Secret Keeper laughed, but he couldn’t see her. “I can reach into every future in every universe and show it to you. Your past, present, and future are mine!”

Bentley’s father suddenly appeared behind the redhead girl, running at her and scooping her up from behind. Vivienne screamed, dropping the bear and kicking and flailing as he carried her away.

“No! No, father, I don’t want to go to the closet! No! Please! Bentley, help!”

Was Vivienne Bentley’s… sister?

The white hallways faded and melted into a white room of nothing. Bentley had been there before.

“I can make your family hear or see anything I want. Why else would they ignore Nico’s windstorm? The screaming? Because they didn’t hear it,” The Secret Keeper stepped out in front of Bentley from nowhere, smiling twistedly at him, her eyes wide and wild. “Their minds are mine to guide. I’m building the foundations of a future where we’re guaranteed to win. Your family won’t know what happened to you until it’s too late, and if you try to tell them?”

She smiled at him with serious, dead eyes. “I’ll kill you. And all of them. And everyone.”

Bentley breathed in a shaky breath. “Please-“

“I can see everything that’s going to happen tomorrow, the next day, the next day. And if I play my cards right, if I keep the Wayne’s in the dark, Batman and his whole team will be gone in a few short weeks. Days,” She spun around again like she was talking to herself, tugging at her hair like she was going kind of crazy. “I can see everything that’s coming and it’s all mine!”

Bentley’s heart was pounding out of his chest, and he breathed in shakily. “Charlie-“

“I’m not Charlie!” The Secret Keeper screamed, and suddenly, she had Bentley by the throat. She slammed him into a wall he couldn’t see, his toes barely brushing the ground. She was only inches from his face. “I’m not Charlie!”

Bentley gasped for air, tugging at her hand with both of his. Why was she so strong? “You… were.”

The Secret Keeper stared at him blankly for a solid ten seconds, silent, squeezing his throat. Her amber eyes went unblinking for so long they began to water. She was shaking. “Help me.”

Bentley tugged and scratched at her hand. “Let… go,” He gasped, struggling against her strength. “Pl…ease.”

“Help me,” She whispered, but it sounded like her voice was doubled. Bentley’s eyes began to blur from the lack of air. Someone popped out from behind The Secret Keeper — someone purple. Bentley saw that their hands were encased in metal capsules, chained to the ground by huge, thick chains. He blinked twice, and the image cleared.

It was Charlie. The real Charlie, with blonde hair, with blue eyes, in the royal purple dress she wore the day she was turned into the Secret Keeper. She had a huge metal muzzle on her head that kept her mouth locked away like a dog. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face red from crying.

“Save me,”

In a literal flash of yellow lightning, Nico blipped into Bentley’s vision and slammed a metal fire poker into the Secret Keeper’s head like he was hitting a home run. The white room immediately turned back into the den, the voices faded, and Bentley hit the carpeted floor with a thump.

He fell into a coughing fit, his hand floating up to his throat. He was shaking, he could feel it — and his heart was pounding out of his chest.

Nico dropped the blood-splattered fire poker with a clang. The Secret Keeper wasn’t there anymore. Had she vanished into thin air?

“Are you okay?” Nico questioned, grabbing Bentley’s arms and tugging him out of the floor. He was breathing really fast, too, and he touched various places on Bentley’s shoulders and head. “Did she hurt you? Is your throat okay? Where did she go? Did I kill her?!”

Bentley stayed silent, focusing on getting air in and out of his body. His throat was going to bruise — how would he hide that?

Nico pulled Bentley into him, hugging him tightly. “Where did she go?”

“I dunno,” Bentley mumbled.

Nico sighed. “That was so weird. Charlie, she…”

“You could see Charlie?” Bentley questioned, and he felt Nico nod.

“After you came downstairs, everything turned white and I saw her. Like, really her, before the Synchronizer. She told me that the Secret Keeper was attacking you,”

Bentley sighed, his mind struggling to keep up with everything. “But… what?”

Nico pulled away with a sigh, running a hand through his fluffy hair. “I don’t know. All I know is that I saw her, not the Secret Keeper, and she warned me.”

A moment of silence passed where they just stood there. Was Charlie inside the Secret Keeper, like a passenger along for the ride? Doing everything against her will? Was she trying to get out?

“We have to tell your dad,” Nico finally muttered, shaking his head. “This is insane.”

“No,” Bentley ordered, shaking his head urgently. “We can’t- we can’t tell anybody.”

Nico cringed, furrowing his brows, turning to leave the room. “She’s just trying to scare you into silence. We have to tell them.”

“No!” Bentley grabbed his shoulder and tugged him backwards. “We can’t. She’ll hurt them.”

“We can’t just keep letting this happen!” Nico exclaimed, locking eyes with him. “She’s harassing you.”

“I’m not going to risk their lives. I’ve seen her kill people with one look,” He replied, exhaling heavily. He drew his hand back and looked down at the floor. “This is all my fault. The least I can do is stop getting other people involved.”

Nico blinked a few times. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s true. Their life was fine before I got here,” Bentley muttered. He sighed and walked over to the couch, plopping down on it and running a hand through his hair. “I should just go back to my dad. This is what the whole war is about anyways.”

Nico said nothing, but made for the couch, sitting down beside Bentley. He could feel Nico’s eyes on him but he didn’t look up from his socks.

“I… I’ve seen… some memories. Of your father,” He said softly. “You can’t go back to that.”

Bentley sniffled. When had his eyes become so watery? “I’d rather go back to that than watch them suffer for me. I survived ten years of it.”

“You can’t do that. They love you here,”

Bentley groaned, dropping his head down into his hands. “This is a disaster. She was right. Everything would be better if I was just dead.”

The den fell eerily silent and still. After a long while of nothingness, Bentley glanced up at Nico, who was staring at him in a mixture of shock and despair, his ocean blue eyes gleaming with crystal clear tears.

“Please don’t say that,” He whispered, almost inaudibly. A pang of guilt rang through Bentley at the sight of him, and he sighed.

Not a single thing that Bentley ever did went right, did it?

He cleared his throat softly. “Nico, I…”

“Stop. Talking. Just stop for a second,” Nico ordered, looking away and breathing deep, gathering his composure. He looked back at Bentley with glossy eyes. “The Secret Keeper is and has been tormenting you for weeks. Weeks she’s spent on you and the people around you. Ruining them to ruin you. And you’re letting her. You’re letting her ruin you.”

Bentley opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

“You know what I see when I look at that? When I see her trying to keep you in this constant state of terror and anxiety and loneliness?” Nico questioned, a hand floating up to land on Bentley’s shoulder. “She’s scared of you.”

Bentley blinked. “What? No she’s not. She can kill me.”

Nico squeezed his shoulder. “They said in the video diaries we saw in that morgue that the whole goal of this operation is to destroy Batman — Bruce. Your family. Damian, Robin. Dick, Nightwing-”

Bentley’s mouth fell open. “You- I- what?”

“Don’t worry, Asten doesn’t know, just me,” Nico continued with a shrug. “It’s not that hard to figure out. If you look at the number and ages of the main superheroes in Gotham, they all line up with this family. Not to mention that Dick Grayson goes between here and Bludhaven, and so does Nightwing. And the connection between your father and the Secret Keeper and Batman — it just makes sense. Not to mention you look really awkward whenever we mention superheroes at all.”

Bentley exhaled. So, he put the whole family in danger, got himself kidnapped, lied about a billion times, and now his best friend knows Bruce is Batman. “Bruce is going to die.”

“I won’t say anything. Promise. Anyway, here’s what I was getting at-“ Nico moved his hands around in the air. “They could do this entire evil diabolical plan without involving you at all. They could go straight for the throat and take out Bruce and the family for vengeance and revenge and blah blah blah and never spend a second on you, but they’re not. The Secret Keeper is going through hell to keep you on your knees. You know why?”

Bentley blinked.

“Because there’s something in you that can beat them, and they know it,” Nico said. “They’re expending all this energy toward keeping you down when they could be using it on Batman and his crew. You’re not the same kid that bowed at his father’s feet and they know it.”

Bentley looked down. “But-“

“The Secret Keeper can see the future, and the only one she’s completely hellbent on keeping quiet is you.”

Bentley said nothing.

“And maybe you don’t want to tell your family. That’s fine. But I still believe that you can get the upper hand if you take it. You said it yourself, this whole war is about you. So climb out of the hole she’s trying to bury you in and end it,”

Bentley breathed in and out, glancing around the room. He could hear something moving, above them, in the ceiling, like water in the pipes. He could feel it pumping like blood in his veins.

“I might not be the best at using superpowers yet, but I’ll do anything you need me to do. We’re a team, and Asten is part of it too, okay? You’re not alone,”

Bentley swallowed thickly and nodded to himself.

How many ten year olds could say they’d started and stopped a war?

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

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maccreadysbaby · 6 months ago

Text

Project: Killcode

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

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

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

yall once this kid hits high school his innocence is gonna be GONE 😭

part four

❝ DREAM SCHOOL ❞

SUNDAY — JULY 15 — 4:28PM

“IS REDWOOD ACADEMY YOUR DREAM SCHOOL?”

Bentley, Bruce, Dick, Jason, and Asten were huddled around the kitchen island not two hours after the school was mentioned, Bentley’s laptop sitting open on the countertop to the Redwood Academy website. They’d been tearing apart the webpage for at least an hour now, picking out every detail they could find, and had just stumbled upon an so called introductory video that Dick insisted they play.

Sunny drone shots of the (very nice) campus came and went from the screen for a few moments, with soft but happy music playing over top, and faded to a red-haired lady in a black pencil dress walking down the campus sidewalks. She had a nearly infectious smile on her face, and all the colors around her, like the sky and the grass, were bright and happy. “I’m headmistress Donna McCall, and I’m thrilled you’ve stopped by our website!” She chided.

“Oh, yeah. Thrilled,” Jason muttered. (He’d been skeptical and quiet the whole time Bentley had been telling them about the school. Most people would think he was concerned, but Bentley thought that, maybe, just maybe, Jason didn’t want them to leave.)

(He had been at the Manor a lot more than he used to. Like, literally almost every day. For a while.)

The video cut back to aerial videos of the campus. Redwood Academy was massive, comprised of what looked like over a dozen buildings that were built with an almost castle-like architecture. Bentley had seen places like Wayne Manor and Drake Manor and Whittaker Estate, but not even those places compared to the school. “Welcome to Redwood Academy; A year-round boarding school that offers a high-end education to metahumans all the way from grades pre-k-through-twelfth — without the stress, anxiety, or bullying that comes along with being a metahuman in other schooling institutions.”

The video cut to a shot of several perfectly manicured soccer fields, with what looked like tennis fields in the background. (Or maybe not tennis. Bentley didn’t know much about sports.) “The Redwood Academy Campus covers over one thousand acres of Manhattan, New York City, with a view of the water and a clear sightline to the coasts of New Jersey.”

Bentley blinked as it cut to another very bright video of the redhead woman, who was now walking in front of one of the big castle-like buildings with her blinding smile and excited as ever persona. (Didn’t Vera say she was friends with this woman’s niece or something?) “Redwood Academy offers over two-hundred-fifty interactive, unique, in-classroom courses that can be chosen to fit your child’s interests, including over thirty unique fine arts classes. With well over two hundred teachers and professors working here at Redwood, over two-thirds of them have a PhD in their field and are solely dedicated to watching and helping your children excel.”

“That’s a lot of teachers. This place seems huge,” Dick commented, leaning closer to the computer.

Bentley nodded in response. “It looks huge.”

“Here at Redwood, we want your children to have the fullest school experience they can have, without the negativity that comes with being different,” The video switched to the smiling woman walking on a perfectly pampered football field. “That’s why we offer twenty different team sports, from the commonly-known-and-loved football, to more personable sports like competitive gymnastics and dancing. Each sport offered here at Redwood has its own fully trained coach that will journey through the training seasons with your students and help them to build a family within their teams. Whether they’ve been playing their whole lives or are just starting out, our lovely sports staff are wholly committed to nurturing your child’s mental growth and physical development, while still maintaining the challenging and rewarding nature of sports.”

The scene changed to her in a massive library. The walls and shelves were all a deep wood, with thousands of multicolored books lined on the shelves. There were also massive chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. “Are sports not your child’s favorite? That’s alright! We offer other extracurriculars and clubs as well, ranging from book clubs, mathletes, and scholastic decathlon, to theatre and music clubs, ran by the students and staff alike.”

Bentley scrunched his face up. What the heck was a mathlete?

The shot changed to the woman walking through beautifully wainscotted hallways. “Here at Redwood, your child’s well-being is our first priority. That’s why we have twenty-four hour campus security all seven days of the week, and a fully stocked medical staff prepared to treat everything from a common cold to broken bones. Three square meals a day are served here in our high-end cafeteria, and if your child has allergies or needs special food accommodations, our cooks here will happily supply them with various delicious and nutritious options. There are twelve on-campus counselors who can help to guide your child through life, emotions, and relationships as a metahuman, and we perform routine intruder, fire, and severe weather drills twice a year every year to prepare your child to keep calm and stay safe in emergency situations.”

Asten breathed in and out. “She is way too happy about school. Like, why is she smiling like that?”

“Undoubtedly, one of the toughest parts of school for your youngsters is making friends and finding their built-in-family. That’s why our campus offers apartment-style dormitories that house eight students each,” The video cut to a pan of what looked like a living room, with two doors on the left and two doors on the right. “If your student is eleven or older, they will share a bedroom with one roommate, which you can choose when you register! Don’t know anybody here? Fill out a survey at registration and we’ll choose a roommate for them based on age and personality. And as always, to prevent stress, roommates can always be changed once the school year starts. if your child needs specific sleeping accommodations, whether that be due to medical conditions, their metahuman powers, or something else, we will happily accommodate them no matter the circumstance.”

Bentley hummed. He guessed he pretty much had a built in roommate with Asten.

“Each bedroom has its own, full en-suite bathroom to prevent sickness or undue illness from spreading,” The camera showed a bedroom with a set of bunk-beds, two wardrobes, and two desks. “Your student will share a small living and commons area with three other pairs of roommates, who will also be paired with your child based on age range and personality. If your child is ten or younger, they will stay in a separate building with qualified caretakers, individual bedrooms, and a large community bathroom.”

The scene cut to the redhead woman sitting at a massive wooden desk. “Our mission here at Redwood Academy is to equip metahuman children and young adults to usher in the future they wish to achieve, and provide them the education and support they need that may not be provided by typical school systems. Many staff members, including myself, are here year-round for students who may not want or can’t afford to return home for times like holidays or summer break.”

She woman leaned forward slightly, propping an elbow on the desk with a smile and sparkle of her green eyes. “We never want to deny a child an opportunity at a great school and life experience. That’s why, if you can’t afford tuition, Redwood Academy has over four dozen local and international sponsors that would be more than happy to sponsor your child year by year, for as long as you need. Make sure to fill out the corresponding tuition form at registration and we’ll get applications out for your child as soon as possible. All registration forms for this school year must be submitted, either online or in person, before July twentieth to enroll your student this year. You can find registration forms at the bottom of our website.”

She smiled brightly, contagiously.

“If you have any further questions, you can email or call us at the email and number listed on the website. If you wish to request a campus tour, meet a few teachers, or speak to graduates, please visit the explore our campuslink at the bottom of our website. I’m headmistress Donna McCall, Thank you so much for choosing Redwood.”

And the video faded to black.

“Well, I’m sold. NYC here I come,” Asten stated, shoving his hands in his hoodie pockets. “When do we leave?”

Jason scoffed, glancing over at him. “Really? Just like that?”

Asten stared, deadpanned. “You’re asking me if I’d rather be in Gotham or Manhattan.”

Bruce’s hand found Bentley’s back and rubbed it a little. “What’re you thinking, chum?”

Bentley shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, it sounds pretty cool. And it would be nice to go somewhere else for a while.”

“I think that would be great for you two! Meet new people, try new things. It’s perfect for your first year of high school,” Dick explained, reaching over in both directions and ruffling both Bentley and Asten’s hair. Bentley chuckled, but Asten scoffed and tried to push him off.

“I’m sixteen and a freshman. Isn’t that kind of embarrassing?” Asten questioned.

“Not unless you make it embarrassing,” Jason replied. “If you don’t make a big deal of it, no one will care.”

“And you’ll get to know other kids with superpowers! I think it sounds great,” Dick said with a smile, his arm finding its way around Bentley’s shoulders.

“I think you’re more excited than they are,” Jason shot back, smirking at him.

Bruce hummed, and everyone turned to look at him. He was still looking at the computer with a bunch of tabs pulled up.

“All of the resources and links point to it being an actual institution. There have been a bunch of graduates over the past few years. But here’s the important question,”

Both Asten and Bentley peered over at him.

“If this is the route we’re going, are you actually prepared to be in Manhattan alone? That’s over a two and a half hour drive from Gotham,”

“Yes,” Was Asten’s immediate answer.

Bentley glanced down at his socked feet. He hadn’t really been alone alone since, well, his father, he guessed. But that still hadn’t been alone. He supposed he was alone when he was missing, too, but he had a sneaking suspicion that didn’t count.

He really hadn’t been without an adult before. Or at least a family member.

Was he ready to do that for a whole school year?

Bentley glanced up, and cleared his throat when he realized all eyes were on him.

“I mean…” He started, blinking at the computer screen that had statistics about the school on it. “I’m almost fourteen. With Asten there I should be fine.”

Bruce nodded. “But is it something you want to do? Because we can get you into a school closer, if public is what you want.”

Bentley didn’t speak for a moment.

“Why don’t we do this,” Bruce suggested, closing the tabs on the laptop. “I’ll run some threat tests on the school and its staff on the Batcomputer. If it comes back green, and you decide it’s really something worth looking into, then we can talk about maybe going down for a campus tour.”

“Registration has to be done within the next five days,” Asten pointed out.

Bruce shrugged. “I guess we better hurry, then. I’ll be in the cave.”

Bruce moved from behind the kitchen island, and Bentley breathed in and out, looking at the posh dark green and gold decorated website.

Was leaving for Manhattan really what he wanted to do?

—

SUNDAY — JULY 15 — 8:13PM

“Manhattan? Seriously? That’s so cool,” Nico exclaimed from the other end of Bentley’s phone. “I’d love to go to Manhattan.”

Bentley and Asten were both against the headboard of Asten’s bed, playing some hardcore survival Minecraft on his PlayStation. (Aka the only game ever that Bentley was actually sort of okay at.) All of the lights were cut off besides the strip of LEDs that were glowing blue where the ceiling met the walls.

Bentley’s phone was propped up near their feet by a pillow, and Nico’s face was on it. He was on his bed, too, and judging by the reflection in his eyes and funny faces he kept making, he seemed to be watching tv.

He was fourteen, and if he were in Gotham, would probably be taller than Bentley and maybe even Damian by now. He’d gotten a haircut to make his hair go upwards instead of downwards, and was going into his freshman year of homeschooling. He also had something no one else had.

A girlfriend.

Which Bentley and Asten didn’t know much about, if they were honest. All Bentley knew was that her name was Delainey. That was literally it. He hadn’t even seen pictures of her.

“Yeah. We aren’t sure if we’re going yet or not,” Bentley replied, placing a few blocks on the game. (Asten was so much faster than him.)

“He means he isn’t sure if he’s going. I’m getting myself out of Gotham,” Asten butted in. Nico snickered at him.

“Yeah. Honestly, Gothams kind of sad,”

Bentley snickered, and Asten nodded. “You’re not wrong.”

“Oh, guess what? Barry taught me how to phase through stuff the other day. Then he got all jealous because it took him way longer than me to get the hang of it,” Nico explained proudly, smiling down at the camera momentarily. “And I- oh, Lainey’s calling me. Gotta go. Talk to you later!”

Before Asten or Bentley could respond, Nico hung up.

Asten shook his head. “He’s obsessed with her.”

“He is,” Bentley agreed. He would by lying if he said he didn’t find it strange that Nico already had a girlfriend. He was only one year older than Bentley, after all. But then again, Bentley was pretty new to all this normal life stuff anyways. Do all boys his age have girlfriends?

Clearly Asten didn’t, and Damian didn’t. Not even Duke or Tim or Jason or Dick did. (Okay, well, maybe Dick did. It wasn’t exactly official and all that, Bentley didn’t think, but the way he and Babs looked at each other was a little telling.)

He decided to ignore it. If he was supposed to, someone would tell him. Right? Yeah. Surely they would.

Not five minutes later, someone knocked on the door.

“Come in,” Asten called.

The door swung open, and the hallway light was blindingly bright in the dark room. The silhouette standing in the doorway was none other than Bruce, but Bentley hadn’t really expected anyone different — most of the Wayne’s didn’t knock.

“Hey,” He started, stepping inside, glancing at the screen on his entry. “I finished the scans on the Batcomputer.”

Both Asten and Bentley broke their gazes away from the game to look at him, instead. (He was still wearing the pajama pants, which Bentley thought was funny.)

“And?” Asten inquired.

Bruce took a few steps and sat down on the end of the bed. “And everything came back green. It has a very low threat level, almost nonexistent.”

Bentley sat up a little straighter, laying his controller to the side. That meant the school was safe?

“Let’s talk about if you actually want to go or not,” Bruce said, and Asten laid his controller down, too. “You’ll be in Manhattan for almost ten months, without any of us.”

“B, I’ve been in since we started talking about this,” Asten said with a soft smirk.

Bruce’s icy irises flicked to Bentley. “What about you?”

Bentley blinked.

Okay, so, yeah. Moving to New York City for an entire school year was a big decision for a kid who was pretty sure he had developed some kind of attachment issues to at least two thirds of the Wayne’s. And it was even bigger for a kid who’d never been out of Drew or Gotham, and still had panic attacks when a glass broke, and still didn’t know the fundamentals of life, like when he was supposed to have a girlfriend, but…

He kinda really wanted to.

Don’t get him wrong — he loved the Manor and his family, and leaving that for so long would probably be a little hard. But, the chance to have another attempt at making friends, being able to get out of the Manor, and Gotham all together, was pretty enticing. Plus it just sounded… Y’know. Fun, going off somewhere for high school with a bunch of other kids.

Bentley breathed in and out, and both Bruce and Asten were staring at him, awaiting his answer.

“It’ll be different, but… yeah. I think I want to go,”

Bruce smiled lightly, then nodded, pulling himself off the bed and moving for the door. “Alright. If that’s your answer, I’ll call the headmistress and get a tour set up, then.”

Bentley and Asten smiled, one a bit more sheepish than the other.

“Love you,” Bruce called behind him as he left.

“Love you,” They replied in unison.

The door closed, and the room was dark again, with LED lights and Minecraft on full display.

Bentley was basically moving to Manhattan. (What?)

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld ❤️

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

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maccreadysbaby · 8 months ago

Text

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

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

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

the name for this chapter in my notes was “bentley hates having feelings but he loves having jason” yes it’s short but it’s setting up for the next more intense ones :) also the title of this chapter is totally foreshadowing

part thirty-two

❝ DROWNING ❞

SUNDAY — AUGUST 23 — 6:51PM

THE WAYNE HOUSEHOLD WAS SO COMPLETELY SCREWED UP THAT BENTLEY ALMOST DIDN’T RECOGNIZE IT ANYMORE.

Over the past five days since he’d arrived back at the Manor, he’d done a whole lot of nothing. Most of his days had been spent in the den with Dick, watching old movies cuddled up on the couch. Dick hadn’t as much as let Bentley out of his sight since he returned home — he’d even been spending the night on the foot of Bentley’s bed. He didn’t mind. Dick still hadn’t talked, but Bentley didn’t mind that, either — because he was home. If he and Dick weren’t in the den, then the could be found in the library, listening to Jason read. They were working their way through The Outsiders again.

Jason had been having nightmares. Bad ones — ones where Bentley could hear him screaming from down the hall in the middle of the night. Dick was usually the one to get up from Bentley’s bed and hurry to his aid, quickly followed by Bruce. Bentley could only imagine what he was dreaming about — if he had to guess, he knew what it was.

While Jason had been more consistently present than ever, Tim had been practically nonexistent. He was holed up in his bedroom, where Bruce, Alfred, Steph, and Cass had been going in and out of for days. Bentley wasn’t even sure if he’d seen Tim’s face since he got home. He wished he could do something to help — at least before he left he could hold a barf bucket. Now he just sort of felt useless, but he’d rather be useless than annoying. Right?

Damian had more or less resigned to his bedroom, as well. Bruce went in and out often. Bentley could hear Damian talk and had seen him through the doorway on a couple of occasions — he seemed okay, as in, not bedridden. Bentley wasn’t so sure about how okay the rest of him was. Since they were graced with rooms only one wall apart, Bentley had heard him tell Bruce to leave and close him out several times without any more words.

Duke had, very reluctantly, started going back to school, only because his SAT was coming that week. Bentley thought there couldn’t be a worse week for the big test he’d been studying for for months — he was stressed out about his family and the test, now. Bentley hadn’t even considered going back to school. Especially without Nico and Asten.

To top it all off, Bruce was running himself rampant. Bentley knew it. Dick knew it. Alfred knew it. Everybody knew it — the Batman ping-ponging back and forth and back and forth and back and forth all day long. From Dick and Bentley, to Tim, to Damian, to Duke, to Jason, back to Tim, to Bentley and Dick, to try again with Damian, to Cass, to Duke, to Steph, to Tim, to Jason, to knock on Damian’s door, to bring Tim some water, to ask how Bentley was doing, to see if Duke needed help studying — Bentley didn’t think Bruce had slept or even sat down since they’d left the cave.

Patrol was nonexistent, everyone was struggling, and Bentley had only really seen two out of eight Wayne kids in the past five days.

And all of it was happening because of him.

To say he was drowning in guilt was an understatement. It felt more like he was becoming it. Like if someone looked up guilt in a dictionary, his picture would be on the page. It was so bad he couldn’t seem to think, to breathe. Like it was tearing him apart.

Asten and Nico hadn’t texted much since Bentley had returned home — only enough to let him know that Asten had told Titus about his parents' deaths, and that the three of them were staying at Asten’s apartment for now. He was instructed to delete the messages right after; they didn’t want anyone to know they weren’t missing anymore.

Bruce had gone about telling Bentley they were missing, too, a few days after he got home, which he had to fake a reaction to. (Not that his crying was fake, he had plenty to cry about.) All it did was make the list of things that he felt bad about longer.

And to make everything just a pinch worse, Dick had gone back to Bludhaven that very day. So Bentley was holed up in the library with Jason instead.

“I was trembling. A pain was growing in my throat and I wanted to cry, but greasers don't cry in front of strangers. Some of us never cry at all. Like Dally and Two-Bit and Tim Shepard--- they forgot how at an early age. Johnny crippled for life? I'm dreaming, I thought in panic, I'm dreaming,”

Bentley wished he were dreaming just like Ponyboy wished he were dreaming. He wished he would just wake up on the day after last Christmas and live a happy, normal life with the Waynes. No supervillains, no monsters, no trouble, no problems for him to cause. Just life — like it used to be. Life before they knew he was a traitor and just thought he was a kid from the street.

Bentley was coiled on one end of the long library couch, knees pulled up to his chest and arms wrapped around them, red hair in a mess on his head. Jason was on the other end, hardcover in hand, reading ever so softly.

Bentley breathed in, brushing a hand through his red hair. Everything was wrong.

“Hey, Jason?” His voice was so quiet it broke off at the end, making it sound more like he’d said Jay than Jason. But he didn’t seem to care all that much.

“Yeah?” He saw Jason’s head turn in his peripheral, deep blue eyes coming to rest on the side of Bentley’s head.

Bentley tapped his fingers on his knees. “Do you think Ponyboy’s life ever went back to normal? After Johnny and Dally died?”

Jason looked over at him, letting the book rest on his lap with a deep breath in and out. His eyes drifted away.

“I’m sure it did, kid,”

A moment of silence passed.

“Do you think ours will? After all of this?” Bentley questioned softly, shaking his head. The familiar sting of tears came but he used all of his willpower to force it away.

Jason scanned him quietly, calculatively.

“I… can’t say our lives have ever been very normal, but… yeah. I do,” Jason replied, deep blue eyes dancing across Bentley’s face. “Everything’s gonna be alright, kid.”

Bentley sighed deeply, shrinking further into himself. “Maybe it would be better if Bruce got rid of me.”

“What?” Jason questioned suddenly, closing the book and laying it aside, a faintly alarmed expression creeping across his features. “What’re you talking about, kid?”

“Everything’s gone wrong since I got here. It was all fine before,” Bentley replied with a huff. “The only thing that changed here was me.”

He heard Jason sigh, then shift toward him on the couch. “None of this is your fault, kid.”

If only Jason knew the truth — that it quite literally all was.

Bentley felt something forming in his throat, and he looked away. “It is.”

Jason moved closer to him again. “How are supervillains ransacking Gotham your fault? How is you getting kidnapped your fault?”

Bentley felt a familiar feeling — the intense urge to spill the whole truth, the urge that he always felt before the Wayne’s knew about his dad. But he couldn’t, Asten told him not to. He shouldn’t. Right? He should respect Asten’s wishes. Right?

“I can’t tell you,” He finally whispered, hiding his face away in his knees. “I can’t tell you...”

He heard Jason huff. “Look, kid, if… if someone threatened you to keep you quiet, they aren’t going to get to you again. Promise.”

Bentley shook his head, pressing his knees into his eye sockets to keep the tears inside. “No one threatened me. I just… I can’t tell you.” But I want to tell you so bad.

“Bentley-“

“I feel like I’m drowning,” He piped up suddenly, eyes burning spectacularly. “Like I can’t… I can’t move, I can’t think, can’t breathe, can’t hear, can’t see, can’t-“

“Hey, hey,” Jason was suddenly right next to him, and there was a warm hand on his back. “Just breathe, kid. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“I’m so tired of feeling like this all of the time,” Bentley said with a pitiful hiccup that sounded almost wheezy. “I’m always so scared. It feels like I’ll never be happy again.”

There was a moment of silence.

“I’ve felt like that, too,”

Bentley pulled his head from his lap just far enough to look up at Jason. He was peering at him with his deep blue eyes, white streak hanging down over his forehead, his hand still resting on Bentley’s back.

“Like everything was so bad there was no way it could get better. Like I was just… ruined… and would always be that way,”

Bentley said nothing, but took a shaky breath, forcing the tears to stay inside. Jason breathed in, too.

“When I came back, kid, I was a wreck,” Jason explained quietly. “I was a different person. I felt betrayed, and angry, and hopeless and full of rage, but at the same time I was so… broken. Like I was lost, just someone else trapped in Jason Todd’s body, not the Jason everyone wanted back. So I spiraled. Hard. I hurt people. And I didn’t let anyone help me. I didn’t let myself get help because I felt so… worthless. Empty.”

Bentley said nothing.

“For a long time I kept trying to fix myself. To do it all alone. Because I was scared to let anyone else close enough to see that I was tearing myself apart,” Jason explained quietly, shifting uncomfortably on the couch. “I won’t get into the details, for your sake, kid, but… it took me finding myself only inches from death again to realize that I needed help.”

A moment of silence passed.

“I want you to know that anyone here will listen to you. I had to teach myself that. I’m still learning it,” Jason sighed, rubbing Bentley’s back a little. “And they’ll be here for you even if you don’t want to talk. You’re not alone.”

Bentley breathed in deep. “I feel alone.”

“You’re not,” Jason said surely. “You’re never really alone, kid. You just have to reach for somebody.”

Who in the world should Bentley reach for when he couldn’t tell them anything? If he told them, they’d hate him. He’d get in so much trouble.

Just like he had done to Bruce all those months ago, after his first nightmare in the Manor, he moved his hand slowly and carefully until he was holding onto the sleeve of Jason’s black hoodie.

Maybe he’d understand that Bentley was reaching for him.

—

Nico and Asten were ‘found’ seven hours later, by returning to Nico’s house.

Bentley hadn’t had to speak to the police — Bruce made sure of that. But Asten and Nico did. Asten said they both played the amnesiac card; which meant they told the cops they couldn’t remember anything. Lied to them. Which Bentley understood, he guessed — he wasn’t much for talking about all of that either. Plus, Asten said Nico cried the whole time and had a well-timed asthma attack, so it made it pretty believable.

Bruce woke Bentley up to tell him they were home. It wasn’t hard to summon a few tired, fake tears of relief, and it wasn’t hard to get Bruce to stay with him for the rest of the night (to ensure he got some sleep, but mostly because Bentley just wanted him to.)

When Dick was gone and Bruce was preoccupied with his other children for the night, a certain white-streaked Wayne found his way into Bentley’s room.

And for a while, with Jason around, Bentley’s life was okay.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

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