Chapter Text
Pethar stares at the clock.
That is one thing that is the same, be it on Earth or Varos.
Time.
Time always exists.
Sometimes Pethar thinks time is nice. Like when he gets extra toaster strudels, or when people laugh, or when Big Man puts a hand on his head and calls him kid.
But sometimes — Sometimes time is cruel.
Because time passes even when you do not want it to.
Because one day you are on the beaches of Varos with warm sand under your feet and Haryx laughing beside you, and then suddenly that time is gone forever, and you did not even know it was leaving while it happened.
It will never come back.
The clock ticks louder.
Pethar frowns at it from where he hangs upside down from the ceiling.
The second hand jerks forward again.
Angry thing.
Loud thing.
Time had moved so fast earlier. Too fast. One moment, everyone was there, and then suddenly they were gone, and the cave had swallowed them, and Gotham had swallowed them, and Pethar had been left behind with promises in his hands.
Now time feels slow on purpose.
Cruel on purpose.
Alfred had tried to keep him occupied.
They had colored for a while, and Pethar did like coloring, especially the markers that smelled weird and the glitter pens that Steph had left out. Pethar had drawn Noxi fighting a virellith.
The virellith lost.
Obviously.
But even coloring had not stopped him from looking at the clock every few minutes.
It had been six when they left.
At 6:25, Alfred allowed him to have toaster strudels as a snack.
At 7:30, he had dinner.
At 8:11, he asked Alfred if “a few hours” meant human hours or superhero hours.
Because he was sure there was a difference, sometimes Toryn said a few hours too, and then he would be gone for days.
Now it is later still.
Pethar scrunches his face harder, pacing across the ceiling beams before hanging directly in front of the clock again, like maybe intimidation will make it move faster.
Pethar could be very intimidating, very scary.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Pethar narrows his eyes.
Alfred clears his throat from behind Pethar.
Pethar does not really understand why humans do this.
Pethar already knows he is there. He can hear Alfred’s heartbeat, slow and steady, can hear the careful sound of his shoes against the floor, the rustle of fabric when he shifts his weight. Humans announce themselves anyway, though, so maybe it is important to them.
Pethar lets go of the web, holding him upside down from the ceiling, and drops onto the floor with a soft thump.
He turns immediately, eyes wide. “Are they back yet?” he asks hopefully.
Because they should be.
Surely they should be.
Hero things could not possibly take this long.
Alfred pauses for only a moment before answering, and somehow that tiny pause makes Pethar’s stomach twist. “I’m afraid not, young master Pethar.”
Pethar’s face falls immediately.
“But,” Alfred continues gently, “it is well past your bedtime.”
Pethar whips around to glare at the clock.
The horrible clock. It blinks back at him uncaringly.
8:37.
Pethar huffs, arms crossing over his chest. “It cannot be bedtime. I am not even a little tired yet.”
Maybe it is true.
Sort of.
His body does not feel sleepy. His brain feels too loud for sleepy.
Sad, scared! lonely…
Alfred’s expression softens slightly. “Young sir, you have spent the better part of the evening hanging from the ceiling and staring at the clock.”
“I was supervising it.”
“Yes, of course.”
“And waiting.”
There it is. The words slip out quieter that time. He's waiting and waiting, and Pethar has spent a long time now waiting, much longer than almost four hours.
Pethar looks down immediately after saying it, fiddling with the sleeves of his pajamas.
Alfred is quiet for a moment. “They will return,” he says carefully.
Pethar’s mouth twists a little. “You do not know that.”
Alfred stills.
Pethar stares hard at the floor. Because he knows promises happen.
He knows people mean them sometimes.
But he also knows worlds end anyway.
“They pinky promised,” Alfred says after a moment, voice lighter now. “And from what I understand, young master Dick informed you that such promises are inviolable.”
Pethar sniffles softly. “Dick says lots of things.”
Alfred actually hums at that, suspiciously close to amused. “An entirely fair observation.”
Pethar glances back toward the clock again.
8:39 now.
Cruel.
“They are taking too long,” he whispers.
Alfred steps closer then, resting a careful hand against the top of Pethar’s head.
“They are very good at what they do,” he says softly. “And more importantly, they very much wish to come home to you.”
Pethar swallows hard.
The feeling in his chest does not go away, even when Alfred’s hand rests lightly on his shoulder and guides him away from the clock and the waiting and the empty hours that feel too long to be called “a few.”
Pethar frowns, lingering awkwardly in the doorway before finally looking up at Alfred.
“Just a little longer?” he asks. It is not entirely clear if he is asking Alfred or the clock.
Possibly both.
His voice is small in that careful way it gets when he is trying very hard not to sound like he is asking for too much. Because really, he is not asking for very much at all.
Just time. Just enough time to know they kept their promise. Just enough time to hear footsteps, voices, and heartbeats returning through the floors of the manor. Just enough time to know everyone is safe.
Because he cannot sleep.
Not really. Not until then.
Alfred studies him for a long moment, and Pethar can practically see the exact moment the older man gives up on the idea of enforcing bedtime.
He sighs, “Very well,” Alfred says at last.
Pethar straightens immediately, eyes brightening.
“But,” Alfred adds, lifting a finger.
Pethar stills.
“Only for a little while longer.”
Pethar nods so quickly it is almost concerning.
“And,” Alfred continues, eyeing him pointedly, “only if you promise not to spend that time glaring at the clock.”
Pethar blinks.
Looks at the clock.
Looks back at Alfred.
“That is a difficult rule.”
“Yes, I suspected as much.”
Pethar considers this gravely, “Yes,” he says quickly. “Yes, yes, yes, I can do that.”
Alfred raises one brow. “Can you?”
Pethar pauses. “…mostly.”
Alfred pinches the bridge of his nose briefly, though there is the faintest hint of amusement there now. “That shall have to suffice.”
That is apparently all the permission Pethar needs.
His face lights up immediately, all previous misery temporarily forgotten as he practically launches himself at Alfred in a sudden hug.
“Thank you!” Pethar says brightly, squeezing tightly around his middle.
Alfred startles only slightly before settling one careful hand on Pethar’s back. “You are quite welcome, young master.”
Pethar pulls back just enough to grin at him, then very importantly announces, “I will not stare at the clock.”
A beat.
Then quieter, “I will only look near it.”
Alfred sighs, but doesn't say anything in retort.
‧₊˚🕷‧₊˚
Whenever Pethar wakes up, the first thing that comes to mind is always the smell of smoke.
Of fire.
It clings to everything now, even when there is none.
The second thing is always hope.
Small, childish, and stubborn.
The tiny expectation that maybe, just maybe, when he opens his eyes this time, he will be home.
Back in his room on Varos.
Back in his nest.
Back in the large dome room with walls painted soft blue like the stones scattered across the sands beneath his home. Back beneath the silky, pearlescent webs draped across his ceiling, glowing faintly when the morning light touched them. Back with the wide open windows, the salt in the air, and the sky beyond it all split by two rising suns.
For one tiny, hopeful second, he expects it every time.
And every time, it is wrong.
Instead, he wakes to Dick standing over him.
Not Varos.
Not his nest.
Not home.
Dick.
Still dressed in that strange hero suit, that pethar thinks looks just a little funny.
It looks worse than before, a little torn, dirtied with soot and ash, and something metallic underneath. Burnt fabric. A little blood.
Just enough to make his stomach twist before he remembers to breathe.
But Dick looks fine otherwise. Whole.
Standing, smiling, and here.
Pethar does not trust it for half a second. Because he has woken up before and been somewhere else entirely.
Because sleep has been mean lately. Cruel and tricksy and full of pictures that feel real until they are not.
Like moving holophotos in his head.
So for one strange little moment, Pethar just stares at him suspiciously, like maybe Dick is not real either.
Then Dick smiles wider, soft and tired and so very Dick.
“Hey, buddy,” he says, voice a little scratchy from smoke and Gotham and being alive too long in both. “What’re you doing sleeping on the couch?”
And that — That sounds real.
His sleep is very rarely kind.
Dick is, and that is enough.
Pethar is moving before he really thinks about it, launching himself off the couch and directly into Dick’s arms.
Dick barely gets his arms up in time, stumbling back a step with a startled little noise.
“Whoa — okay, hi, missed you too.”
Behind him, Pethar hears Damian click his tongue. “You cannot even properly catch a child as small as Pethar?” Damian says dryly. “Embarrassing.”
Dick shifts Pethar more securely onto his hip. “I caught him, didn’t I?”
“Barely.”
Pethar ignores them both. He buries his face into the crook of Dick’s neck, arms tight around him, breathing in deeply just to prove to himself this is real.
Smoke. Burnt fabric. A little blood.
And underneath it all is Human. Warm and strange and familiar now.
Pethar has started not minding the smell of humans. Not Dick’s, not Bruce’s, not any of theirs.
(Sometimes he even likes it.)
Not that he would ever tell them that.
‧₊˚🕷‧₊˚
Tim often thinks his family conveniently forgets that, despite all evidence to the contrary, he is still technically human.
Which means he has limitations.
Real, unfortunate, deeply inconvenient limitations.
This is made especially irritating by the fact that the same people who somehow expect him to do seventeen things at once are also the first to remind him that caffeine is apparently “not a food group,” and that sleep is, according to literally everyone around him, “not optional.”
Tim disagrees.
Violently.
But even he is starting to admit he might be approaching his limits.
Between Joker escaping Arkham, again, and behaving in ways that are honestly more irritating than dangerous, which somehow makes it worse.
The gas attack on the Fashion District should have been catastrophic. Should have been a mass casualty event, the kind Gotham is depressingly familiar with.
Instead, it was mostly chaos. Property damage. Panic. Mild toxin exposure. No deaths.
No real objective. And, most annoyingly, no Joker by the time they got there.
Just enough destruction to force all of them out, to occupy every available hand, and then, Nothing.
Which, coming from Joker, is somehow more suspicious than outright murder. Tim has been trying not to obsess over that.
Keyword: trying.
As if that was not enough, there is also the issue of Pethar, or more specifically, making Pethar legally exist.
Which, it turns out, is much harder than simply finding a six-year-old alien child and deciding he lives with you now. Shockingly, the legal system is not built for this.
So while Bruce handles the broad strokes of adoption paperwork with the kind of billionaire efficiency that makes Tim slightly ill, Tim is left handling the details.
Constructing an identity from essentially nothing.
Birth records he does not have.
Medical history that does not exist.
Not to mention, the fact that while Pethar is six, he's the size of a small toddler, with the intelligence of someone a lot, lot older.
And on top of that, he is also trying to learn everything he can about said, alien child.
Because Pethar is fascinating.
Complicated.
Concerning.
Occasionally horrifying.
And honestly? Kind of adorable in a really weird, alien way.
There is also, of course, the crash pod. The ship, the giant hulk of metal that Tim has been trying to figure out.
Currently occupying an unreasonable amount of Tim’s mental bandwidth and physical lab space.
Tim hates it.
Not because it is broken.
(Which, to be fair, he is fairly certain it very much is.)
No, Tim hates it because it is advanced.
Very advanced.
Offensively advanced.
Now, don’t get him wrong, Tim loves a challenge. You do not get to call yourself a genius without occasionally needing some absurd intellectual problem to drag you out of bed in the morning.
A little difficulty is healthy. This, however, is not that.
This is the kind of challenge Tim finds personally insulting. The kind that makes his head hurt.
The kind that makes him question what it even means to be smart in the first place.
The kind that has him staring blankly at a piece of technology and wondering if perhaps intelligence is actually a social construct designed specifically to humble him.
And Tim likes to think he is the smartest person in any room he walks into.
Not in an arrogant way. Just in an objective, factually supported way.
A simple acknowledgment of reality, really.
And yet here he is.
Hunched over a piece of alien technology at three in the morning, eyes burning from lack of sleep, squinting at circuitry so incomprehensibly advanced it may as well just flash a message across its surface telling him to go fuck himself.
Honestly, at this point, that might somehow be less insulting.
Tim sighs and lets himself fall backward onto the floor with a soft thud, one arm flung over his face.
This is not his forte. Which is deeply irritating, because usually everything is at least adjacent to his forte.
Honestly, part of him wants to just give up on it entirely.
Because what exactly are they even hoping to find? They already know the obvious facts.
It is not Earth technology.
Not even close.
The materials alone are enough to make Tim spiral every time he looks at them. The metal, or whatever it is pretending to be, is unlike anything he has seen before. Lightweight but absurdly durable, with structural properties that seem to actively ignore several laws of engineering, Tim was previously very attached to.
“Thought you’d still be down here.”
Tim tilts his head just enough to see Dick leaning in the doorway, one shoulder braced against the frame, mug in hand, looking far too awake for someone who just came back from a night dealing with Joker and dealing with a very clingy and tired pethar.
“Please tell me that’s coffee,” Tim says immediately, pushing himself up onto his elbows.
Dick grins, lifting the mug slightly. “Haha, no, you wish. It’s tea. I’m not contributing to your ongoing caffeine addiction, pretty sure Alfred would take me out back and bury me.”
Tim groans quietly, but takes the mug anyway when Dick walks over and hands it to him.
Not coffee.
A tragedy.
But it does have caffeine, so Tim is not about to argue.
He takes a sip, then leans back against one of the consoles, eyes flicking briefly back to the ship.
Dick drops down beside him, legs stretching out in front of him, shoulders slumping just slightly now that they’re somewhere quiet.
“Not making any headway with the ship?” Dick asks, nodding toward it.
Tim huffs out a breath, gesturing vaguely with his free hand. “Not really making any headway with anything, if I’m being honest.”
Dick hums softly at that, not pushing yet.
Tim stares at the ship for a moment longer before continuing, voice a little quieter now.
“Joker’s acting weird,” he says. “Too weird. That whole Fashion District thing, no casualties, no follow-up, no actual objective? That’s not him.”
“No,” Dick agrees easily. “It’s not.”
“And I can’t figure out why,” Tim adds, frustration creeping in around the edges. “Which means I’m missing something, and I hate missing things.”
Dick nudges his shoulder lightly. “You’ll figure it out.”
Tim doesn’t respond to that right away.
(because he always figures things out)
(That’s what Tim does, he figures things out)
Instead, he looks back at the ship again.
“And this thing,” he adds, tapping the side of it lightly with his knuckles, “isn’t helping. Here I thought I'd love to figure out what makes an alien ship tick.”
Dick glances at it, then back at Tim. “You usually like that kind of challenge.”
“I do,” Tim says immediately. Then, after a beat, more grudgingly, “Just… not when everything else is….” he gestures vaguely.
There’s a small stretch of quiet after that.
Dick leans back on his hands, gaze drifting up toward the cave ceiling. “For what it’s worth,” he says lightly, “kid didn’t sleep.”
Tim glances over. “Pethar?”
“Yeah. Camped out on the couch. Refused to go to bed until Alfred let him stay up for us, I mean, I guess he did fall asleep on the couch, but he refused to actually go back to sleep until like thirty minutes ago.”
Tim snorts softly into his tea.
“Guess the whole ‘we’ll be back in a few hours’ thing didn’t land,” Dick adds.
Tim’s expression shifts slightly at that, something softer threading through the exhaustion.
“…yeah,” he murmurs.
Because of course it didn’t.
Because Pethar doesn’t hear promises the way they mean them.
Tim exhales slowly, rubbing at his eyes before taking another sip of tea.
“So,” Dick says after a moment, glancing sideways at him, “what’s actually bothering you more right now? The clown, the alien tech, or the fact that you’re just a little in over your head?”
Tim considers that.
Then deadpans, “Yes.”
Dick laughs quietly.
Things are silent for a moment, maybe longer than Tim had really registered.
Dick nudges Tim with his shoulder once, like he’s testing whether or not Tim is still conscious.
Apparently deciding the answer is debatable, Dick stands and grabs him by the elbow, hauling him up with zero warning.
Tim nearly spills the tea all over himself.
“Jesus — Dick.”
“Wow,” Dick says, entirely unbothered. “A full sentence. You’re doing better than I thought.”
Tim gives him a look. “I was thinking.”
“No,” Dick says, steering him away from the pod before Tim can root himself back to the floor, “you were spiraling.”
Tim exhales hard through his nose, allowing himself to be dragged along mostly because fighting this would require energy he no longer possesses.
“This is ridiculous,” Tim mutters, taking another sip of tea as Dick herds him toward the lab door. “I’m in the middle of something.”
Dick glances back at him over his shoulder. “You’ve been ‘in the middle of something’ for, like, eight straight years.”
“That is both inaccurate and deeply rude.”
Dick ignores that. “Well, sitting down here in your little cave spiral isn’t helping anybody,” he says. “And if you stay down here any longer, you’re gonna hit that weird stage where you stop making sense and start talking like a Victorian orphan.”
Tim frowns. “I do not do that.”
Dick raises an eyebrow. “Last week you called Alfred’s soup ‘fortifying.’”
Tim goes quiet. “That was one time.”
“That was one time too many.”
Tim rolls his eyes. He really didnt need dick trying to go all big brother on him right now.
Dick keeps going because, unfortunately, once he starts, stopping is not part of the process. “We need you functioning at, like, minimum acceptable Tim levels right now,” Dick says. “Not whatever this is.”
“This is me being productive.”
“This,” Dick says, gesturing vaguely at Tim’s general existence, “is you being one skipped REM cycle away from seeing God.”
Tim opens his mouth, closes it, then decides arguing specifics is probably a losing battle. “You’re dramatic.”
Dick grins. “And yet.”
Tim sighs.
The sigh of a man who has suffered greatly, and specifically at the hands of his own family.
Then Dick adds, “And,” he says, way too casually, “you have school tomorrow.”
Tim physically recoils.
“No.”
Dick laughs. “Yes.”
“No, actually. I’m pretty sure at this point Gotham Academy legally owes me an honorary diploma for effort.”
“That is absolutely not how education works.”
Tim points at him with the hand not holding the tea. “Counterpoint: I am smarter than most of the faculty.”
Dick snorts. “Probably true, still not how it works.”
“I have more important things to do than pre-calc worksheets.”
“You say that now, but if you miss one more day, an actual truancy officer is gonna show up here.”
Tim narrows his eyes. “Pretty sure Bruce has enough money to make that not a problem.”
Dick gasps, scandalized. “Timothy Drake-Wayne. Are you suggesting bribery?”
“I would never suggest such a thing.”
Dick laughs so hard he has to stop walking for a second.
Then he throws an arm over Tim’s shoulders and starts steering him down the hall again.
“Nope. Bed. Shower if I can convince you. Then sleep.”
Tim sighs, giving the ship one last sideways glance.
Maybe Dick was right.
Which was something Tim would never admit out loud.
“…fine,” Tim mutters under his breath, mostly to himself. Then, louder, “I hate this.”
“Love you too,” Dick calls back cheerfully, leading him away.
Tim allows it.
As soon as the two of them step out of the lab, the door slides shut behind them with a soft mechanical click, and the room falls quiet again.
For a moment, nothing changes.
The ship sits there, the lights in the lab turn out.
Everything is still, everything is silent, everything is dark.
A light near its surface flickers.
Blue.
Off.
On.
Off.
On.
The ship hums faintly, a sound too low for most human ears. A pause.
The ship clicks softly.
Not loudly.
The blue light steadies for half a second, then deepens.
“Information protocol for the tiny spawn initiating.”
There is a pause, filled only by the low hum of systems rebooting.
“Subject designation: Pethar.”
Another pause.
A faint flicker across the ship’s surface, like a scan passing through its surface.
“Status: relocated.”
The light blinks again.
“Current environment: Earth. Atmosphere: compatible. Threat assessment: variable.”
A brief delay, then:
“Directive: maintain continuity of survival parameters until protocol even dead im the hero initiates.”