Chapter 1: Chapter 1
Chapter Text
These were by far the least attentive parents I’d ever had, and that had worked out pretty well for me up until tonight.
When I’d realized what universe I’d landed in, and that I’d reincarnated yet again (fifth time; fingers crossed I can finally make it to twenty-five), I’d had a bit of a breakdown. Literally stressed my little seven year old body to the point I still had strands of gray in my hair to this day, and scared the hell out of my nanny. She quit without notice, resulting in my parents coming back early from wherever they’d been.
They stuck around long enough to pull me out of school after receiving one too many concerned calls from Gotham Preparatory Academy’s guidance counselor. A week later I was being homeschooled by a private tutor who came three days a week, four hours a day. The work set aside for my downtime was easy enough; fuzzy though my early memories may be, I’d done similar enough work four (three and a half, really) times before. A housekeeper came twice a week to restock the fridge with prepared meals and do basic chores. A normal child might’ve been bothered by the isolation, stuck in the Saxon-Vogel’s drafty old house with a credit card and aloof staff for company, but it gave me time to work on my primary objective: consuming media.
This is my fifth time, my fourth fictional world (As far as I know, I guess; who’s to say the first isn’t written down in a book somewhere? It was dramatic enough that there certainly could be an ironic political novel out there detailing those misadventures), and while I’ve vaguely recognized parts of the last three, my main take away was that I wasn’t reading nearly enough. This whole reincarnation thing hasn’t shown any sign of slowing down, and the most important thing I’ve learned? Some media is transitive. There are stories that are spread across multiple universes, and if I can find the right ones, remember the right plot points, I’ll be better prepared for the next mess I land in.
This one seems pretty straight forward, though. I vaguely remember seeing the movies back in the 2000s, and I had no plans on getting involved with some psycho who dresses up like a bat in his spare time and beats the shit out of people while calling it justice with zero regard due process. I can understand how he reached that point, the character development was fairly cut and dry, but that kind of black and white thinking, innocent and deserving of protection or guilty and deserving of pain, wasn't something I was interested in getting involved with. As long as I didn’t date the guy running around on the rooftops or go wandering around bad parts of the city, most of the city, alone, I had a pretty decent chance of survival here. My last name would’ve put a target on my back if anyone knew who I was, but my parents seemed content to let me be. Or so I thought.
The first sign of trouble was a text from my mother’s personal assistant, Dominic, informing me that my presence was cordially requested at the annual Wayne Christmas gala on December 24th. I’d responded with a string of question marks, and Dominic had sent an unhelpful thumbs up. The second sign was a tailoring appointment added to my calendar, kindly marked as a home visit. A weathered older woman had appeared later that day, taken a flurry of measurements, and left with hardly more than five words strung together. The third sign was the strapless, floor length silver gown delivered to my front door, along with three inch heels and a dainty white gold jewelry set. A suspicious amount of effort was being put into my appearance and I wasn’t thrilled with the implications. The fourth was that my parents actually came home, presumably to make sure I made it to the gala. Normally they stayed at the townhouse in the city. I hadn’t seen them in over a year and suddenly my mother was curling my hair and doing my makeup, studying my face with the eye of an expert appraiser.
“Not that I’m not happy to see you,” I said, doing my best not to move my mouth too much as she dabbed gloss on my lips. “But, what’s the point to all of this?” I didn't mind them as people, honestly, but that was because they left me alone. This was a breach of contract. Unspoken, sure, but I thought we were all on the same page!
She sighed, shaking her head at me, her own dark curls swaying gently.
“Really, Elsie, I would have thought you’d be more excited. I was talking to Annamaria,” her psychic, of course, “And when she heard you weren’t dating yet, well, she was aghast, truly. She could not believe I'd neglected to have you introduced! And she's right, you know. This, this is an astronomical problem. You're just so quiet, I completely forgot. Why didn't you say something!"
I’d heard Annamaria’s name come up before, mostly in loud arguments with my father during one of their few trips back here, but I’d never truly given a shit about her until now. In my opinion a good psychic, and a good actor who's whole job was pretending to be a psychic, shouldn't act surprised by anything, and Annamaria should mind her own business.
“I’m sixteen, it’s not like I have to be dating or anything,” I said, placidly letting her tilt my head from side to side as she checked the angles on my eyeliner.
“Oh, hearing that just proves my point! I’d already met your father by your age. But that was at GA, and, oh, are you certain you don’t want to finish up school at the Academy? It would be better for you to be familiar with the right kinds of people. I can’t believe I let things go this far!” She pursed her lips, clearly upset. I felt for her, I really did, I knew it was distressing to realize you’d made a misstep you couldn’t take back, but she was an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ kind of person, and the second they left town again, she’d be fine.
“I’m sure.”
She sighed and shook her head.
“That’s what I thought you’d say. That’s why we’re all going to the gala together. It’s one night, you can handle one night. And who knows, maybe you’ll meet someone you like and you might change your mind about Gotham Academy. I know it would be good for you.” She bent down to my level, placing a cool hand on the back of my neck. “Before you’re a Saxon, you’re a Vogel. We do not feel shame. We do not show weakness. Not for anyone, or anything. I know you’re different, others will too, and you will not bend. Understood?” That was probably the closest she'd come to acting like a parent in the entire time I’d known her, and I loved her a little bit for it. For trying to help, as best she could. I got the feeling both her and my father were raised by their own absent-minded staff members, so I couldn’t really fault them for not doing better than what they were shown. Plus it made my own life easier.
“No shame, no weakness,” I repeated softly. Her eyes were a chilling, arctic blue, the same as my own. She smiled, and smoothed down a few remaining stray hairs before spraying yet another cloud of hairspray over me.
“Perfect,” she said.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the gala. I knew there was a party in one of the movies where the joker showed up and held people at gunpoint, but the chances of that being this one were slim. Not impossible, though, but I wouldn’t have an issue handing over my valuables in exchange for my life and otherwise keeping my head down.
The size of Wayne Manor had some interesting and alarming implications for the wealth disparity in this universe, but that was something to ponder if I survived long enough to make it to grad school. My mother kept a steady hand at the small of my back as we made our way through the crowded ballroom, determined, I assume, to make introductions as quickly as possible so that she and my father could make their regular rounds and be seen by the right people.
“Bruce!” My father called out, a tall, broad shouldered man with dark hair turning around mid stride. He grinned at us, his dimples giving him a cheery aura. This was Bruce Wayne? The dark knight? He looked more relaxed than I expected, and, I don’t want to be rude, but I really thought he’d be younger.
“Gregory! Louisa! Good to see you both!” He gestured to a waiter with a tray of champagne glasses and they scrambled over. My father grabbed two, passing one to my mother.
“So glad we could catch you tonight, you’re always so busy at these things,” my mother said with a tinkling laugh. “How are you? I've been hearing good things about the company.”
“Quite well, quite well. Business is certainly isn't bad. Who’s the lovely young lady you’ve brought with you tonight?” This was obviously the question my mother had been waiting for.
“Oh, you haven’t met, have you?” She said with shock that, had I not known better, I would’ve sworn was genuine. “This is Elsie, our daughter. She just turned sixteen.”
“Oh?” Bruce said, his left eyebrow twitching just the slightest. If I hadn’t been watching his expression so carefully, I might’ve mistaken it as surprise. He was irritated. At what, I wasn't sure, but he wasn't happy to see me. “I don’t believe we’ve met, no, but I’m sure she knows Dick. He should be a grade or two above her, is that right?” He asked, directing the question to me. Dick? Was that supposed to be a person? That seemed rude.
“Oh, um, I-” Clearly, I haven’t been talking to enough people if this is what my social skills had devolved into, “-I’m not enrolled at GA. Sorry.” I tucked a loose curl behind my ear and tried my best at a smile. I'm sure it looked... adequate. “Who is Dick?”
Bruce gave my parents a look, one that spoke volumes. Something along the lines of ‘what have you done to this child,’ and ‘has she been living under a rock.’ My mother shook her head indulgently.
“All she does is read,” she said with a hopeless sigh, bringing the hand she had on my back to clutch my shoulder, pulling me in for an unfamiliar side hug. “We figured it would be good to get her out and about for once.”
He cleared his throat and pulled his face back into the polite façade he’d had running smoothly before. “Not to worry. I can introduce them to each other now.” He pulled out his phone, presumably to text the mystery stranger. The hand on my shoulder squeezed gently. This had been my mother’s goal.
We were joined shortly by a dark haired teen, almost as tall as Bruce but narrower in the shoulders. “I was just coming to find you,” he said, grinning the same megawatt grin Bruce had greeted us with.
“Dick, this is Elsie Saxon-Vogel,” Dick raised his eyebrows at Bruce’s introduction, looking me up and down. “Elsie, this is Dick, my son.”
Hold up. Who gave this maniac a child?
Chapter 2: Chapter 2
Summary:
Elsie and Dick have a polite conversation they both feel good about :))
Chapter Text
Dick (it didn’t feel right to me, but if that’s his name, that’s his name) was trying awfully hard to be nice. Despite being paired with a stranger without warning, he seemed completely at ease, snagging two glasses of champagne from a floating staff member and passing one to me without my having to ask. I wouldn’t have asked, I would have just grabbed one (the etiquette concerning children and alcohol was a little different when you reached a certain tax bracket), but it showed familiarity with the social protocol and consideration for me by following it.
That was the thing about manners. They seem meaningless, most of the time, but it’s not about how much sense they make, it’s about what you communicate by bothering to take the time to use them. And Dick’s were telling me that he was confident I would like him.
Frankly it was giving me the ick. But I had questions of my own, and he had answers. Obviously I wasn’t as informed as I thought I was, which could mean a number of distressing things that I was doing my best not to think too hard on. I could always break down later.
“-with them?” Dick said, jolting me from my train of thought.
“Hmm?”
“Your parents, do you travel with them?” He asked again. He really was good. Head tilted slightly, body angled towards me, the steady eye contact, his own drink held slightly below my field of vision presumably so I wouldn’t notice he wasn’t actually drinking it; masterclass in attentiveness.
“No,” I said. “Not really my thing.” He blinked.
“Not your thing? You don’t like travelling?” It was probably a fair question. I didn’t mind travelling on my own, but I wasn’t interested in doing it with this set of parents. They were still very much in love and had no issue making that heard.
“Maybe when I’m older,” I amended. A good middle ground. “My turn, now-” He smiled at that, a small, real one. He looked a little less like his father when he did that, but the hair color, the eyes, and the height were all very Mr. Wayne. The tan skin, full lips, and the curls must be from his mother.
“We’re taking turns?” Ooh, bad form. Never interrupt a lady.
“Yes. How old is Bruce?” I asked seriously. The thing was, Dick had to be about eighteen based on Bruce’s statement concerning grades, give or take a year. Bruce, however much he did look older than I expected, had to be a solid decade younger than my own parents. Dick recoiled slightly, giving me a very different kind of look, like he’d smelled something off but was trying not to let it show.
“He’s thirty.”
I choked on my drink, spitting into my glass as I tried to cough the champagne from my lungs. Dick placed his glass onto the tray of a passing waiter and folded his arms.
“Which is it?” He said dully. “Too old? Too young? Richest man in town, if you can bag him I’m sure you won’t be complaining.”
“Too young,” I said hoarsely, wiping my mouth on my wrist. The pale pink gloss my mother had so carefully applied smeared across my inner arm. Ugh. I’d have to be conscientious of it for the rest of the night or I’d end up with it on my dress, and on silk this fine it would definitely show. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath in, releasing it slowly. His faint snarl of disgust shifted into a sardonic smirk.
“Hoping to hitch yourself to someone closer to a coffin? You do know you’re not even legal, right?”
“No,” I wouldn’t be making the mistake of marriage again, much less to that man, “He’s too young to have had you. He would’ve been what, eleven? Twelve?”
“He would’ve been twelve,” Dick confirmed, looking at me curiously. “Does it matter?” That felt like a polite way of telling me to mind my own business. It wasn’t unreasonable. Something horrible happening to this universe’s Bruce Wayne didn’t mean I was owed the details of a traumatic event via interrogation of the man’s child. I winced at my own behavior. I really had needed to ask, but I didn’t have the right to anything further.
“No,” I said, staring down at my glass for a moment. “It’s- well, I’m sorry. I-” Should I say I shouldn’t have asked? But I didn’t regret asking, and I wasn’t big on lying. “I’m just sorry.” I looked up at him, his head cocked to the side like a puppy trying to figure out what the sounds coming out of your mouth were supposed to mean.
“Ooh,” he said suddenly, “Oh, do you really not know?”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you honestly expect me to believe you don't know?”
“You have to tell me what I 'don’t know,' first.”
“Literally everyone in the city knows,” he insisted, propping both hands on his hips.
“Apparently not me.”
“It made headlines!”
“Again, I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is a little repetitive.”
“Bruce took me in, after my parents died?” He said the words slowly, like he still wasn’t sure he’d solved the puzzle.
“So he’s not your biological father?” I clarified, a little relieved.
“He’s not my father at all, he’s just Bruce.”
“Is he your uncle? Cousin?” They looked so similar. Was it really a coincidence?
“No relation whatsoever, and the world is better for it,” Dick said with a smile, slowly readjusting himself back into the happy go lucky persona he’d been wearing prior to the conversation.
“Huh.” Bizarre.
“My turn now, yes?” He said.
“What?” I asked, still trying to piece this together.
“We were taking turns, now it’s mine.”
“Go ahead.” That worked for me, it meant I’d get to ask mine, which was why I’d suggested it.
“How did you not already know this? I know for a fact that your parents know. I don’t think there’s anyone in the city that doesn’t.”
I shrugged, “I’m not sure what to tell you. I don’t get out much, I guess.”
“This is a bit more extreme than ‘I don’t get out much.’ It made headlines for a month straight and it was all people would talk about for half a year. Are you really trying to say you missed all of that? And that you somehow never heard anyone mention it during the decade that followed?”
“Are you insinuating I’m not being truthful?” I arched an eyebrow at him. The fucking audacity. I was reliably even tempered as long as no one called me a liar. I was careful about that kind of thing, too. Being angry was a lot of work, and I did my best to avoid it. I’d rather not speak at all than not be believed.
“I-” he looked to the side, lips pressed tightly together, “I’m not insinuating anything. It’s just a little hard to understand, that's all.” He drummed his fingers on his thighs and looked back at me. “Do you not get out at all? ”
“Now you’re getting it."
“Is that something your parents prefer? Gregory and Louisa are your parents, right? Not extended family, or anything like that?” He asked carefully.
“Isn’t it supposed to be my turn next?” He huffed, and gestured for me to go on.
“Thank you. Tell me, how did you end up with Bruce?”
“I told you, he took me in after my parents died.”
“And I heard you,” I said patiently. I narrowed my eyes. “But how did the richest man in the city, in the country, depending on who you ask, end up with an unrelated child?”
He narrowed his eyes right back and we stood there, staring at each other suspiciously.
“Okay, now I think you’re the one who might be insinuating something-”
“I am. Is it true?”
“It’s not. Not even a little bit.”
“Good. Happy to hear it.”
“Yep. Is it my turn now?”
“Nope.” I relaxed my posture. “If it wasn’t, well, that, then how did he end up taking you in?” I paused. "He would’ve had to be a legal adult, and CPS wouldn’t have placed a child with an eighteen year old, so the youngest you could have been-”
“I was eight. My parents were… We were acrobats, and-” He shut his eyes and took a breath. Oh dear. This was sounding like the beginning of a traumatic backstory.
“If you’re about to tell me how they died, don’t. There’s no need to do that to yourself. I’m just curious about the odd choices of a billionaire, and if it’s too sensitive to share, I’ll drop the question.”
“And still give me my turn?” He asked playfully, the ghost of a memory still flickering on his face. I mulled it over. He’d tried to answer, at least. Had to respect that.
“Sure. You can still have your turn.”
“Much appreciated.” He went solemn for a moment. “For what it’s worth, I’m not sure why Bruce took me in. But I’m glad he did.”
I nodded. Did he want a response to that statement?
He moved on. “I still have the same question. Is the whole ‘recluse’ thing something that your parents prefer from you? And are they actually your parents?”
“They didn’t seem to care much one way or the other before tonight. And yes, they are my parents.” That was technically two questions, but given my own interrogation about his guardian I’d give him the second one for free.
“Can I ask another question?”
“We’re taking turns,” I said dryly. “You’re familiar with taking turns, correct?”
“This is just so slow,” he said, a tinge of a whine in his voice. Again, a puppy. And I had a thing with dogs, a hard time saying no to them. I was such an indulgent pet owner that they always ended up more in charge than I was.
“For every question you ask out of turn, you’ll owe me one and a half later,” I compromised.
“One and a half?”
“I’ll keep track, and I won’t forget,” I promised. “Even if I don’t ask the questions you owe me tonight, I will eventually, and I’ll expect you to answer.”
He wavered for a moment, eyeing me. “What’s half a question?”
“It’s almost a question but not quite. Let’s just say I’ll round down.”
“Hmm. Deal.”
“Ask away, then.”
“They don’t care if you go to school?” One and a half.
“My parents? No. Not before tonight.”
“Do you want to go to school?” Three.
“No.”
“Why not?” Four and a half.
“Because I can do a week’s worth of school work in two days on my own schedule.”
“That’s not the only point of school,” he pointed out, shifting his weight to his front foot. “It’s about other things too.”
“General socialization, adhering to a routine, following instructions, teamwork; I’ve heard it all. My old tutor wasn’t thrilled either,” I admitted. There was merit to the argument I’d handed over, but I had a solid understanding of most of those concepts. My main frustration was waiting for my teenage brain to catch up in terms of development. I’d rather not be sucked into the struggles of the social learning curve of high schoolers if I could avoid it.
“And you don’t agree with your tutor?” Six.
“I agree with the points he made, and if I were raising a child I’d probably put them in school unless there were convincing reasons not to.”
Dick went silent, obviously debating the value of his next question. He mouthed the word ‘convincing’ to himself and hummed lowly.
“But your parents want you to go to Gotham Academy now,” he stated. Ah. No more questions. I wasn’t going to be petty about it. Not even sure what I’d do with the six questions I had.
“They do,” I agreed.
“And you don’t want to.”
“I do not.”
“So you won’t be going.”
“Correct,” I agreed.
He checked his phone briefly and glanced back at me, “I apologize, Miss Saxon-Vogel, I do believe I’m needed elsewhere.”
I nodded and waved him off. He hesitated.
“Can I see your phone?” He asked. I tilted my head questioningly. “If, by chance, you change your mind about GA, it might be nice to have a friend there.”
“I don’t really know you, though,” I said, confused.
“Humor me?”
“I suppose.” It’s not like I was going to text him either way, and I could always block the number later. I handed him my phone, he entered his information and handed it back.
“I’ll be seeing you,” he said.
“God, I fucking hope not,” I murmured as he walked away. “That was exhausting.”
“I don’t know, Bruce. She seems fine, just a little intense.”
“She was pulled out of school in first grade after multiple red flags were raised and never seen again,” Bruce said seriously.
“And she’s fine! She likes how things are.”
“She didn’t say anything alarming to you?”
Dick paused. She did, but he knew what Bruce was looking for and it wasn’t that.
“Nothing. Just that her parents didn’t mind what she did. Which might have been a concern if she wasn’t sixteen now.”
“Dick.”
“What?”
“...” Bruce looked at him.
“No. No! Don’t pull that with me.”
“...”
“Ugh. Fine.” He took a deep breath. “She was a little suspicious of you.”
“Did she say why?”
“The usual reasons.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
Notes:
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Chapter 3: Chapter 3
Summary:
Elsie makes some decisions about her future.
Chapter Text
I sat in the kitchen, elbows on the table and my head propped in my hand, drumming my fingers on my cheek. The skirt of the silver dress pooled in my lap, my bare legs propped up on the edge of the seat. The clock above the stove read 04:23. My parents were dead asleep up on the third floor, both heavily sloshed by the time we’d finally left, far from coherent enough to interrogate me about my conversation with Bruce Wayne’s son but drunk enough to grope each other in the back of the town car without sparing a thought for my presence. A small mercy, despite the eyesore, given that I wasn’t sure what I’d tell them yet.
Their concern (my mother’s concern, really, but she spoke for my father in all things; that was how they both preferred it and how their relationship had worked since before I’d been born) implied a mutual obligation that I wasn’t too keen on, but they meant well. They weren’t cruel, or even cold, really, just absent and unprepared for a human child. It… It did kind of bother me that they were gone so much, on behalf of the little Elsie that existed before I remembered things. I vaguely recalled a bone-deep loneliness, crushingly heavy, and crawling into my parents’ empty bed on bad nights. I almost appreciated the new effort, because, while their focus was an unwanted interruption, I’d learned something important.
Dick was evidence of a critical misstep in my understanding of what was happening to me. Which, like, fair. I’ve been basically guessing this whole time anyway. Clearly I’ve been going about this wrong, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t adjust my approach. If non-canon characters were showing up out of nowhere, then the multiverse wasn’t predictable based on canon and no amount of media I consumed would ever be enough. What a cheery thought. I dug my pinky nail into the thin skin below my eye. Maybe it was time to branch out. Gotham had been tame enough as long as I’d been able to keep my head down and remain in Bristol, but given that Batman had tasked his son with interrogating me (because what else could that conversation have been), I’d failed at my secondary objective of remaining unnoticed. So I’d spent the last three hours building a new one, and it went something like this:
There was definitely magic in this universe. My online curriculum had touched on the Justice League, and Wonder Woman was supposed to be a demigod or something like that, which meant the mythological, and potentially the supernatural, had a place here. It had been a bit of a shock to me, but given that none of them had shown up in the Batman movies I’d figured it was a convenient media merge for the DCU, and that I wouldn’t run into any other heroes, or their enemies, as long as I stayed put. It’s easier to survive the unknown and unfamiliar if you don’t go looking for it, but it always seemed to find me anyway so I may as well take a more proactive approach. There had to be a way to get in touch with a god, one local to this universe at the very least.
I was still sitting at the counter when my parents made their way downstairs later that afternoon. My father wore a faded Gotham U sweatshirt and my mother had a silk robe tied tightly at her narrow waist, her hair mussed and tangled.
“Hello darling,” she murmured, as she beelined for the espresso machine; staff had Christmas off so we were on our own for the day. “Rest well?” I glanced down at my rumpled dress and back at her. She wasn’t even looking at me.
“Yeah,” I said. She probably meant sleep but a dead meditative stare at the moonlight shifting across the tiled floor was about the same.
“Lovely,” she said as she fiddled with the steamer, “Happy Christmas, and all that, yes?”
“Yep.”
My father grunted in agreement as he wandered to my mother’s side, leaning against her. She reached up behind him to stroke the back of his neck. She handed him the first cup as the machine finished and started on a second for herself.
“So,” she said, as the drip started, “Did you enjoy yourself last night?”
I shrugged. “Marginally, I suppose.”
“And your company? Did he seem like he had a nice time?”
“For the thirty minutes we spoke, sure.” Hmm. I didn’t like where this was going.
“Really, Elsie,” she said with a glare, “Only thirty minutes?”
“Was I meant to keep him entertained the entire night?” I asked dryly.
She huffed. “Well you could have tried.”
“Was I supposed to?” I didn’t even know him.
“You’re both, well, different , I thought you might at least make an effort. He’s the eldest son of one of the wealthiest men in the world and you really couldn’t be bothered to keep his focus for the night?”
“It’s not just up to me. There were two people in that conversation,” I said, a little confused now. She seemed convinced this was all a matter of my choice. Why was she assuming I had powers of seduction? I barely talked to people in general, much less in any romantic sense. “He had to go.” Thankfully. She narrowed her eyes, searching my face for signs of deception. I rolled my eyes and tried to reign in my temper.
“Have you at least changed your mind about the Academy?” She asked with a sigh.
“No,” I winced at her expression, “But,” I interjected quickly, “I’ve decided to graduate early.”
She pursed her lips, quiet for a moment, and shot a look at my father who shrugged in response.
“I don’t see how this helps you make connections.”
“University!” I said. “I can make them at university, I’ll just start a little early. I'll go eventually anyway, so why not now?”
“I suppose,” she said grudgingly, “If you promised to make an effort with the right kind of people.”
“Of course,” I agreed. The ‘right’ kind of people was a little subjective, but if it satisfied her I’d go to a dinner party or two. She’d lose interest in what I was doing at some point. She muttered something to herself about Annamaria and ‘signs’ before pulling the second cup of coffee from the machine and wrapping both hands around it.
“I suppose,” she hedged, “Early graduation could be arranged. Did you have a school in mind?”
I’d put some thought into this. It had to be somewhere prestigious enough that she would be on board, somewhere they could brag about to their friends, somewhere far enough away from Gotham, and preferably the US as a whole, to give me freedom of movement and the fewest potential prying eyes from my parents’ associates, and somewhere with a large enough, and old enough, library that I might find a starting point for seeking out or summoning gods.
“Oxford,” I said with a smile. There was no way she could argue against that. She blinked, lifting her eyebrows.
“Acceptable,” she relented, giving me a gimlet stare, “On one condition. Your father and I will make some calls, and you will finish up the year with Gotham Academy’s senior class. I trust you can take supplementary courses for graduation on your own time, yes? And we will take care of your admission to university.”
“Counteroffer: I’ll take courses with GA’s senior class until I collect enough credits to graduate, online or otherwise.” My online program was fully asynchronous and flexible enough that I could take as many courses as I wanted as long as I stayed above a 3.7 GPA. All I had to do was enroll, submit essays, take the final exams which were available at any time, and repeat. No way was I staying in Gotham until June just to graduate with the rest of the class.
“Deal.” She held out her hand. I shook it.
“Deal.”
“Miss Saxon-Vogel’s parents have enrolled her in school,” Bruce said, scrolling through alerts for active cases on the batcomputer. His cowl lay folded to the side, a bruise blooming on his cheek.
“Elsie? Huh,” Dick responded as he applied custom solvent to the edges of his domino mask. The adhesive they used was almost impossible to remove without it. “I guess she changed her mind about it,” he said. “Kinda surprising, given how set she was on not going, but she said they left the decision up to her.”
Bruce leaned back in his chair and angled a look at his son. “They put her in your year.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that one. That’s a little odd,” Dick said, shedding pieces of his own suit as he headed to the decontamination chamber. He’d had a pleasant but ominous conversation with Ivy early that night, and it always paid to play it safe when it came to her.
Bruce gave him a pointed look.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll keep an eye on her,” he said, waving off the older man’s concern.
“Wait.”
Dick tilted his head back and groaned but paused his movements, his suit half open. “What is it now?”
“I need to know you understand why this could become a larger issue for you.”
“I get it! I do. Her parents very obviously want to set her up with me-”
“More like to set you up with her,” Bruce grumbled.
“-But this girl has zero interest in me,” Dick defended vehemently, “Like, absolutely none . She could not give less of a shit.” Bruce looked at him skeptically. Everyone liked Dick. Bruce had been quietly but assiduously filing sexual harassment suits for the sexualization of a minor in the press since the boy turned fourteen, and he knew for a fact that his child had fended off advances from grown heroes in the justice league. Bruce couldn’t do anything overt about those without risking their civilian identities but that didn’t mean there wasn’t retribution.
“It could be a ploy.”
“I don’t care if it is, nothing would happen anyway. You need to trust me to handle it.”
“...”
“Bruce.”
He sighed, rubbing his face with his palms. “I do trust you, Dick.”
“Then prove it.”
“...”
“And while you’re at it, figure out how you’re going to explain things to Jason. I’m sick of fielding questions. He lives here, he’s going to figure it out eventually.”
“...I’ll think about it.”
“Good talk.
“You didn’t text me.” I looked up from my bag to see Dick sitting on my desk, leaning back on his palms.
“No,” I agreed, “I didn’t.” He tilted his head, pouting slightly.
“Why not? Don’t like me?” I bit back a smile. Ah, puppy.
“Nope.” I turned back to my bag, shuffling things around. He’d have to take his own seat in a minute when the bell rang, all I had to do was ignore him.
“Really?” He leant down, contorting his body until his face was back in my field of vision.
“Really.”
“Really, really?”
“What are you, five?” I asked, covering up my small laugh with a cough. Fuck. “Yes, ‘really really.’ Go sit down.”
“I am sitting down.”
“Go sit down somewhere else.”
“But I have questions,” he persisted, tapping the desk for emphasis.
“No,” I corrected, “I have questions. Six of them. You have none.”
“Fine. I have statements for you to confirm or deny.” He sat back up and crossed his arms. I huffed in frustration, looking up from my bag.
“And I will be doing no confirming or denying, so please go be somewhere else,” I waved him off. “Shoo.”
“But-” he looked at me, brow furrowed, eyes big and oh-so-blue. Shit. I glanced at the ceiling and started counting tiles.
“Nope!”
“Elsie!”
“Fine, I’ll move.” I gathered my things and shifted to a different desk. He followed, slipping into the seat beside me. Had I been-? I looked back at my old seat, up against the window in the back corner, surrounding seats occupied. That fucker herded me. I glared at him and he just smiled, full teeth.
And so it went.
It took me six weeks to finish collecting the credits I needed. I probably could’ve done it in a month if I hadn’t had to allocate half my energy to avoiding Dick Grayson. Noise cancelling headphones became my new best friend during break periods, and I learned quickly to avoid eye contact and my classmates at all costs. His puppy eyes were deadly and his social web was like a steel trap. All roads of friendship led back to Dick, I don’t know how he did it, but without fail fifteen minutes into any conversation with a classmate and they’d be promoting him like he personally cured cancer. ‘Oh there’s this party this weekend and Dick will be there- you should totally come!’ ‘He’s the nicest guy, I swear, I think you two would hit it off.’ ‘Hey have you met Grayson yet? He was an honorary mathlete last year and won state for our team single-handedly, it was amazing.’ Propaganda of the highest order, but I persevered. In the beginning I was a little worried about hurting his feelings, but I quickly learned he was the emotional equivalent of Teflon and needed no such consideration.
I did send him a quick text reading ‘bye’ before blocking his number and leaving the states in late February to set up my apartment in the UK. It was probably stupid to engage with him at this point, but he appeared, at least, to be bafflingly attached to me, and I didn’t want him to think I was kidnapped or whatever and ask his dad to hunt me down.
“That’s it,” Dick groaned, flopping down to lay flat on one of the embroidered sofas in the library. “She’s dead. She’s going to die.”
“Who is this, Master Dick?” Alfred asked over his shoulder, a dusting cloth in his hand. He was checking some of their more delicate books for damage and cleaning as he went.
“Elsie!” Dick pulled the throw pillow out from under his head and yelled incoherently into it. “She’s just, just- Ugh. Dead. I can feel it.”
Alfred looked at him skeptically. “Surely if such a dear friend were deceased, you’d do more than moan and recline like a layabout.”
“Well she’s not dead dead, but look at this!” Dick shoved his phone in Alfred’s direction. The butler took it gingerly, reading the single word on the screen. He placed it gently back in Dick’s waiting hand.
“I suspect you may need more substantial evidence before making such claims, my boy,” he said, unconcerned.
“Alfred! Did you even read it? ‘Bye’! All lowercase! That’s a cry for help. It has to be. She didn’t even come to school today, and she’s blocked me!”
“It sounds as though she doesn’t want to be contacted.”
“Yeah, by me!” He whined. “Alfred, help.” Alfred patted him on the shoulder kindly. Dick thwacked himself on the head with the pillow. “I shouldn’t have gotten attached.”
“Likely not,” Alfred agreed.
Notes:
Comments will receive a random fortune cookie quote; leave an asterisk if you'd like to avoid being fortune-ized. Please lmk what your thoughts are if you're up for it! I appreciate the feedback.
Just a reminder, this is a slow burn (chronologically speaking, not necessarily by word count but we'll see how it goes), and John Constantine has been added to the tags (he'll be coming up shortly).
Chapter 4: Chapter 4
Summary:
Timeskip forward, Elsie is learning new skills, Dick isn't having a great time but his coping skill (singular) is super good and not concerning at all.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
It was hard to predict what would snare Dick’s singular level of attention. It wasn’t every case, or even most of them, but it was that single-minded focus that had an eight year old in an acrobat’s costume on a warpath for Tony Zucco’s head, it was that focus that had nineteen year old Nightwing carving a bloody gash through Gotham after returning home from an intergalactic mission to discover his little brother had been brutally murdered, and it was the same focus that had Dick back in the batcave once a week, looking at any and all alerts for Elsie Saxon-Vogel.
It was easy enough to avoid Bruce, just a matter of tracking his patrol routes, which helped immensely with limiting their interaction as much as humanly possible, but he knew the old man had clocked what he was doing a while back. The POI report was pinned near the top of the alert chain for easy access on the batcomputer—the sole reason he came near the manor anymore—and Dick hadn’t been the one to do it.
He could feel his shoulders relax, his jaw unclench, tension bleeding out of his spine as he settled into Bruce’s chair. It felt good to focus on something that wasn’t about revenge or an oncoming apocalypse. For one person in his life, whether she knew she was or not, to be safe and healthy and secure across a fucking ocean from the trainwreck that was Gotham, and to be unconnected from the chaos that came from vigilante work. She was like a low maintenance house plant.
Digging through the bottom drawer of the desk, he pulled out a family size bag of sour gummy worms he’d shoved in the back of it a week prior and settled in to review the updates. He set the program combing CCTV footage of the entrance to her apartment building to speed run on a separate monitor and queued it to stop on any unfamiliar figures or faces. It was generally best to review footage manually but unless you were looking for something specific, it just wasn't practical.
Her purchases for the week were all average for her routine, mainly food and travel expenses with exorbitant charges at small bookstores, easily explained by her course selection, and her ATM withdrawals, while large, were inconsistent amounts, never above five grand, and not technically worth flagging. The most likely explanation was that her parents tracked her credit card history and she didn’t want to field questions from them, hence the cash. He browsed through her recent grades, all fairly high, and refreshed the background checks on her professors. Her middle eastern theology professor was in the middle of a messy divorce, and her primary advisor had obtained their second DUI of the year. Nothing worth concern.
He crammed a handful of gummy worms into his mouth, chewing absentmindedly. Would it be worth the lecture to ask Babs to hack her phone? Bruce had never opened a formal case on her, but since she was still listed as a POI in the system he might be able to justify it, but he knew how it looked. The whole thing might be seen as a little stalkerish, or it would have been if Dick wasn’t a vigilante. Bruce kept surveillance on Selina, god help him if she ever found out, but that was arguably closer to crossing a line than what Dick was doing, because Bruce had a personal stake in what she did. He loved Selina, as much as he could love anyone. That sounded like a mess. Dick didn’t love Elsie, he was just a little invested, but he had her best interests in mind. It wasn’t weird. He was just checking in on her. She was the weird one, intense and quiet at the same time, popping into his life so suddenly and leaving without warning like it was nothing. He wouldn’t lose track of another person again, if he had any say in it.
The program he had combing her CCTV footage beeped upon completion, a report popping onto the screen:
0 new visitors
0 deliveries
Subject’s average time exiting location 08:15
Subject’s average time entering location 02:23
The return time was almost a full hour later than last week, and two hours later than the week before that. Should he track her through the city’s cameras? That was a little harder to justify. She was allowed to stay out late, and she wasn’t injured or showing signs of distress.
His comm buzzed in his ear and he tapped it, opening the waiting line.
“Nightwing!” Kori chirped. “Urgent mission off-world. How soon can you be ready to leave?”
“Eight minutes,” Dick said, already closing his tabs and resealing the bag of gummy worms. “Duration?”
“Conservative estimate of eighty to two-hundred hours.”
Likely to run over a week, then. He’d miss his next check in for Elsie, unless a miracle happened. She’d have to be alright in the meantime. “Got it. See you soon.”
This was meant to be difficult. I pursed my lips, reviewing Vera’s notes and comparing them against the photos I’d surreptitiously taken of a faded 13th century diagram on energy channels in the human body. The Bodleian Old Library was a godsend, but their security policies required a fair bit of finagling for the more secure materials.
Magic required a surprising amount of math, for something so fantastical, but perhaps that was par for the course in a reality where it stood its ground alongside the concrete certainty of physics. The only issue was, well, me. Drumming my fingers against my thigh in frustration, I made up my mind and pulled out my phone to call her. I would have preferred to have been able to sort this out on my own.
She answered quickly but said nothing. “Do you have time to see me tonight?” I finally asked.
“Do you have cash to pay me?” She asked, mimicking my tone.
“Be here in an hour.” She hung up in response and I sighed. The brevity was familiar by now, but the frustration of relying on someone so transactional grated on my nerves. Expecting loyalty would’ve been unreasonable, and I knew she was providing me with the service I was paying for, but I couldn’t help the uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. No security, no control; it was galling, in a way, and I ached for the day I could solve my own problems.
I first met Vera in a wiccan book shop when I was picking up an anthology of firsthand accounts of individual practice for my Western Neo-Paganism class. She was manning the cash register with a thick, leather-bound tome splayed on the counter in front of her that looked like it had been handwritten a few hundred years ago. Her hair was wrapped high on her head in a blue scarf and she’d been chewing on the pencil in her hand for so long she’d nearly gnawed the end off. The fine lines on her face caught the light, but her hands wouldn’t have looked out of place on a twenty year old, baby smooth and unblemished. The book was what had initially caught my interest, but the hands were the real tip off.
I hadn’t had a solid plan on how to find a mage or a non secular priest to accost. It wasn’t like I could approach a Christian pastor and say I needed to commune with a god. They would tell me to pray and look for signs, or something equally unhelpful. Everything I’d found thus far indicated that I needed more than Oxford’s libraries; I needed a bonafide practitioner of something , anything, as a place to start from. There was nothing online about magic support groups or genuine practicing pagans, they probably either operated on the dark web or through personal referrals, which was great for security but unbelievably frustrating.
But there had been Vera, with an old face, young hands, and a book that most certainly wasn’t commercial. I never asked her what she was hiding from, or why, but I did offer her a truly obscene amount of money to teach me the basics. On occasion she was even amenable to hand copy selections from her private collection that might be helpful, her willingness clearly stemmed from the fact that the notes were elementary enough in nature to be nearly worthless on a grander scale. In the community of sorcery and witchcraft, no one wanted to arm someone they could later find a nuisance. In the same vein, she knew little of my personal goals, and I imagined if she did she would be significantly less accommodating.
She arrived in time to see my eighth attempt go up in flames, having let herself into the empty warehouse I’d commandeered for practicing. I was sitting on the concrete, a box of unused candles to my right and a mess of wax and charred wicks in front of me. I glanced over my shoulder at the sound of her heeled boots tapping on the floor, waving with my free hand while I kept my other stretched out towards the mess of fire in front of me. It gave a brief roar, blooming into the shape of a bird, before sputtering out as my focus split.
“Is it supposed to be this easy?” I asked Vera. She was staring at me with an appalled look on her face. “Because everything says,” I gestured to the mess of notes to my left, “That this should have been…” Harder. Vera herself had warned me that, while everyone has the theoretical ability to cast, few have the power to bring more than sparks. Getting the sparks often took years of meditation. Inflicting your will on the fabric of the universe was not a faint undertaking.
“What are you doing? ” She sounded horrified, reaching out to me in an aborted movement, her gaze stuck on the mess on the ground.
“I don’t know,” I said helplessly. “Nothing makes any sense.” I waited, watching, as she gathered herself, regaining a modicum of her usual composure and crossing her arms.
“Do it again,” she ordered, nodding her head towards my box of fresh candles. I shrugged, pulled out a new one and jammed it in the mound of soft wax before me. It took a moment to center myself, finding that sweet spot I was still getting used to. I pictured what I wanted: heat, light, excitation of molecules and an insatiable burning hunger. It was like learning to use a muscle you never knew you had, only it wasn’t a muscle at all. The line between thought and action was thin and thick at the same time. I reached out for the same thrumming string of power I’d flexed before, following the ache of infantile exhaustion. It snagged and snapped on the wick of the candle, a spark, a flame, a wave of warmth fanning across my face and in an instant the candle was a runny puddle of wax, the wick curling in the air, a bird of fire soaring upwards until it extinguished in on itself.
I looked up at Vera hesitantly. “Thoughts?”
Her lips were pressed in a thin line, brow furrowed. She circled around me, tracing the path the bird had taken with her eyes.
“Is the bird deliberate?” She finally asked, voice tight.
“Definitely not.”
She nodded to herself. “Your intention is over-translating, then, maybe. Something to keep an eye on if your abilities have their own interpretations of direction. Wiliness is never auspicious in these things. As for whether or not it should be easy at this point, you obviously already know the answer. Otherwise you wouldn’t have called me.” The pointed look in her eyes had me cringing.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “I figured.”
“It’s never easy without a reason.” She turned to face me, frowning. “I asked you when we met if you were a meta.” The question at the time had been accompanied by a long lecture on the importance of honesty and the perils of mixing unknown and unpredictable abilities with sorcery. “I’ll ask the same thing of you again now.”
I threw my hands up in frustration. “I don’t think I am! I’m pretty sure I’m not.”
“But are you positive?” She pressed.
“Wouldn’t I know by now? At this age? Especially if I had fire powers?”
“One would think, but-” She gestured towards the ceiling.
“-the bird,” I finished for her. “But I still think I would have seen some sort of sign of it by this point.”
“Are you-” She paused, grimacing.
“Just ask.”
“Are you certain you’re fully human?”
“Now what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’m just trying to cover all possibilities.”
“What else would I even be?” I asked, waving my hand over my body. “Look at me. Human.”
“No extraplanar blood of any kind, anywhere in your family tree?”
“Extraplanar meaning what, exactly?”
“Anything demonic, angelic, or other.”
“That’s an option?” Gods were real here, sure, and from that, along with the research I’d done, demons were pretty apparent as well, but they mingled?
“Through a number of ways, I assure you,” she ground out.
“I don’t know,” I said plaintively. “I could ask my parents-” but where would I even start? Hi, how are you, did someone somewhere in the line fuck a demon? “-but I don’t think so.” Wouldn’t that have elicited a larger response than a flaming bird, anyway? It sounded like another thing I would have noticed by this point in my life.
“If I’m going to continue to help you, I need to know what I’m working with.”
“To the absolute best of my knowledge I am one-hundred percent human,” I insisted.
She smiled, painfully kind for the first time since I’d met her. “And I wish that meant something, I really do, but unfortunately it’s worthless. Something is different here, and whatever you are, whatever is going on with you, is absolutely not normal. The options are one, you and I cut ties, or two, you pay me an obscene amount of money to bring in the most obnoxious man in the world as a consultant.” Well that was an easy choice.
“Vera, you’ve been great, and I will pay you right now for today, but under no circumstances am I bringing in a sorcerer I’ve never met, even one with such a glowing recommendation.”
She looked at me shrewdly. “That’s that then.”
“I suppose so.” I stood, wiped my hands on my pants, and flipped open my wallet to pull out her usual fee. “Any chance I could convince you to forget you met me? I’ll pay triple,” I offered casually. Her eagerness to bring in a third party didn’t sit right in my gut. This had gotten out of hand.
She laughed bitterly. “Not a snowball’s chance in hell, but if you pay double I’ll forget where your little warehouse is located.”
“No need,” I sighed, handing over the regular amount. “I’ll find somewhere else.”
“You should reconsider,” she said blandly, pocketing it. “This isn’t the kind of thing you want catching you by surprise.”
“I’m more concerned about catching the eye of any expert in ‘odd’ circumstances, to be honest.”
“If you stay in this field you’ll run into him sooner or later anyway,” she muttered under her breath, shaking her head. “ Valedicere , then. If you survive your learning curve, I’m sure we’ll meet again.”
I was on my own.
The last thing Dick expected to see when he finally made it back to his Bludhaven apartment, limping, with a laser burn on his shoulder and three fractured ribs, was a small child leaning against his door with a death grip on a manila file folder. For a moment he considered turning around and asking Kori if she’d mind him spending the night with her, she’d say yes, she always did. But the kid looked up, catching Dick’s gaze, and he was screwed. He knew those blue eyes. The hair had thrown him for a sec, messy and longer than he’d ever seen it, but he knew who that was. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, but the kid was faster.
“I need to talk to you!” He whispered, sending a furtive glance up and down the hallway.
Dick groaned internally, sending a prayer towards the ceiling. “Just, wait a minute,” he said, pulling his keys out of his back pocket with a poorly hidden wince. He unlocked his front door and ushered the kid inside, directing him to sit at the counter. He pulled two glasses of water down from the cupboard above his sink, filled them both and slid one over. “I don’t know what you could possibly need to say to me, Tim, but please tell me you didn’t come here alone, all the way from Bristol.”
Little Timothy Drake, Dick’s twelve year old ex-neighbor, rolled his eyes and glared. “Of course I did. This is serious.”
“You’ll have to walk me through the logic on that one,” Dick said with an arched brow, “Because it sounds more to me like it’s dangerous.”
“I go everywhere alone, don’t worry about it.” A horrible answer. Should he call CPS now or later?
“I- you know what, we’ll circle back to that. Why are you here?”
Timothy smacked his folder down on the counter and flipped it open. “I know who you are, I know you were Robin, and you need to go back.” Tim looked up at him, gaze hard, daring him to deny it. Dick stared at the photos splayed out, of Robin and Batman crouched on a ledge, Robin swinging through the air with his head tilted back in exhilaration, and overhead shot of Batman stalking through an alleyway with his cape flared out behind him and Robin hanging above him from a fire escape; there had to be more than fifty. Who even took these? Was there a parkouring reporter to watch for now? Were they still out there?
“I don’t know why you think I was Robin, but these aren’t me, Tim. Is there someone I can call to come pick you up?” Please say yes, please say yes, please say-
“Well yeah, obviously those aren’t of you,” Tim said, as he shuffled through the photos, pulling ones from the bottom of the pile out to slide on top. “Those are Jason. These are you.” Dick froze.
“Excuse me?” He said faintly.
“Listen,” Tim said, not unkindly, “I understand this might be, um, what’s a good word?” He frowned to himself. “Shocking? No, not that. Alarming? Distressing? No-”
“Those are all good words,” Dick interrupted, slowly sinking to his kitchen floor, stretching out his bad leg. Tim peered down at him over the counter, concerned. “Will you tell me where you got those?”
“Got what?”
“The photos, Tim.”
“Oh!” Tim perked up. “I took them.”
“You stole them?” Dick asked, praying his suspicions were wrong.
“No,” Tim said, drawing out the word. “I took them. With a camera. My camera.” Dick sighed, and patted the spot next to him. Tim hastily gathered the photos back into the folder and scrambled off the bar stool to join him on the floor.
“That’s what I was hoping you wouldn’t say.” Sure, it limited the security risk, but Tim was twelve. One of those photos of his time as Robin, where he and Bruce were sitting on top of St. Sebastian’s cathedral with bat burger shakes, was from at least three years ago. The shakes had the old logo on the side. At best, Tim started doing this when he was nine. There was a chance the kid was lying, sure, but the sinking feeling in the pit of Dick’s stomach said otherwise. “How’d you figure it out?” He asked, tired.
“Oh, um,” Tim leaned into him a little, pulling out a photo of Dick in the Robin suit, mid flip. “There’s this thing you do-” Bruce could never find out. “-the quadruple somersault, you’re like, one of three people on the planet, and, I mean,” he shrugged, “You live in Gotham, Robin lives in Gotham, everything else kind of fell into place.”
Dick thumped his head back against the cabinets. “Right,” he swallowed roughly, “So you know everything.”
“Well not everything ,” Tim said, tilting his head to the side. “Like, I don’t know what happened to Jason. And I sure would like to-” Dick let out an involuntary shudder, closing his eyes at the reminder, “-But you don’t have to tell me! That’s, that’s alright,” Tim mumbled. “I don’t need to know.”
“And you want me to be Robin again.”
“You have to be Robin again,” Tim said forcefully. “You have to.”
He swore he’d had this nightmare before. Jason had been the one saying it instead of his neighbor, but goddamnit. God fucking damnit. “I can’t,” he said softly.
“You have to! Look,” Tim said, pulling out actual, printed graphs. “Look at this spike here, and,” he flipped to another page, “here, and, and this one here!” He pulled out a third graph, this one just labeled ‘Permanent Injuries and Severe Hospitalizations.’ There were more words on the page, but they were too small to read with the way his concussion had his head swimming. He took the pages and held them closer to his eyes, squinting.
“You’ll have to help me out a bit, buddy. What am I looking at here?”
“Bruce is out of control!” Tim hissed, pointing emphatically and the papers. “I’ve had to call an ambulance for victims nine times in the last two weeks. Gotham needs Batman but at the rate he’s going I’m not sure she can survive him.” Dick wasn’t unaware of this, Alfred had brought up the issue twice before, but every time Dick spoke with Bruce they ended up in screaming matches that left his ears ringing for days. He also, privately, wasn’t entirely sure Gotham didn’t deserve some sort of reckoning for birthing the Joker and failing to kill him.
“And you think me being Robin again will help?”
“It has to! Look at the numbers from before-” Tim looked at him cautiously, “-From before, when, he was-” he bit his lip, hesitating.
“Before Jason died.”
“Yeah.”
“Tim.” How was he supposed to explain this to a child? “I can’t be Robin.”
“You have to!”
“It won’t help.” For so many reasons, it wouldn’t help. He and Bruce were likely to kill each other. He first put those colors on with his parents, then they died and he wore them to chase their killer, then he wore them with his sort-of-father, then they were passed along to his baby brother without asking (along with his name), and now his baby brother was dead and wearing them once more as a vengeful wraith wouldn’t do anyone any good. There was no justice in grief, Dick knew that now, just a black pit in the soul and he refused to feed his; he’d seen what happened when grief was fed and nurtured and tempered like a steel blade, and there was no way for him to make Tim understand that Bruce’s grief wasn’t Robin shaped, it was a festering wound the size of a fucking city and Bruce lived there full time in a goddamned batsuit. He had since his parents were murdered in front of him, Jason’s death just blocked out the sun.
Tim sputtered, “But- but what do I do, then?”
Dick exhaled slowly, ribs on fire, feeling unbearably old. “You go home. This isn’t your problem.” He wanted to check on Elsie.
“I have to do something ,” Tim insisted, eyes wide and glossy. He grabbed Dick’s arm, voice trembling. “No one else is doing anything! Why isn’t anyone doing anything?” He blinked rapidly, wiping at his cheeks with the heels of his palms. Dick pulled him into a hug, burying his face in the kid's hair. It smelled vaguely of unwashed preteen. He ached for a moment, desperately reminded of Jason. “It’s just me,” Tim cried into his shoulder, “Why doesn't anyone else care?” Dick hugged him harder, rubbing his back.
“It’s not just you, buddy, I promise,” he whispered.
“But you’re not doing anything!” Tim insisted, voice muffled and strained. Dick could feel his t-shirt getting wet.
“I can’t be what you’re asking for, I’m sorry,” he said tightly. “But it won’t be like this forever.” Bruce was burning out, and sooner or later he’d put himself into an early grave or a wheelchair. Dick couldn’t fix him, he knew that, and it broke his heart, but who could stop Batman? If he wouldn’t accept help, wouldn’t even listen to Alfred, if he was determined to die in a back alley, then that was what would happen.
He held Tim until the boy stopped crying, gave him his phone number for emergencies, and personally put him in a cab back to Bristol.
His hands shook as he closed himself back in his apartment, trying his best to breathe in even increments. He needed to check on Elsie.
Notes:
Eyyyyyy I'm back. This chapter was a bit delayed, I think I rewrote it four(?) times before getting something I was happy ish with. Constantine is coming, I swear. I thought it would be in this chapter but things kind of got away from me. But the good news is I'm getting back into my flow. Depending on how I feel, I may redo the first couple chapters at some point if they feel clunky to people.
Also under consideration- how are we feeling about the title? Debating changing it, not currently super attached, but I don't want to confuse anyone. Does it really matter?
As usual, comments will receive a random fortune cookie quote; leave an asterisk if you'd like to avoid being fortune-ized. Please lmk what your thoughts are if you're up for it! I appreciate the feedback.
Chapter 5: Chapter 5
Summary:
Elsie's learning curve gets some heat, Constantine enters the periphery, and the stage is set for a meeting on two fronts.
Notes:
This A/N is kinda long but it’s got some relevant info.
First: Title has changed from ‘I prayed my mind be good to me’ to: ‘RINGS OF BLUE.’ The original was always meant to be a placeholder and now it’s served its purpose. We applaud follow through. Progress.
Second: The timeline around the Haly’s Circus arc might seem a little odd, just ignore it. I got bored trying to write it and imo if you’re bored writing something, people will be bored reading it.
Third: I changed Anna’s name (reference in chapter 4), it’s too similar to Annamaria, and Annamaria came first so she gets seniority. Anna is now Vera, Vera was once Anna.
Fourth: I’ll add this at the end too, but I’ve made a playlist for this fic. I promise it was made with intention and care, runtime is 46 minutes rn, and the order of the songs is mildly relevant in the sense that I didn't want certain ones to set the tone for the whole list, but shuffle to your heart’s content if you really wanna. There’s some fun foreshadowing in there. (This isn’t a ‘songs I listened to while writing this,’ btw. That would be LET’S DO IT AGAIN by Angrybaby on loop).
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/42wmpno8Rv6OsR3ZTE7DjV?si=ccd1330f63e9468b
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The first time I died, it was by fire. Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d forget, but each new life made the rest feel a little more distant. I remembered that little tidbit as I stood, laughing under my breath in disbelief at the flames licking the walls of the newest warehouse I'd found, support beams groaning under the strain of the collapsing roof, smoke curling upwards in thicker and thicker clouds. I’d burned alive and it was happening again. I could feel the phantom pain of my flesh sizzling, my stomach twisting against the smell of burnt meat and the sour taste of bile in the back of my throat. I dodged a falling support beam, staggering back from the summoning circle partially charred into the concrete, segments still glowing hot. Part of me wanted to look down at my body, check it for damage, but I was too scared of what I’d see. I knew this was worth it, no matter what, the opportunity to ask someone with real power what the fuck was going on with my lives was too big to pass up for anything, but the smell of smoke had my chest trembling like a pressure cooker with a bad lid. Another beam hit the ground. It wouldn’t be much longer before I was trapped in here.
I fled the warehouse, the building collapsing behind me with a thunderous crash as I jumped straight off the dock into the Severn. I let the current push me along, swimming diagonally towards the other side, focusing on the silky balm of the icy water and the growing numbness in my hands. I wasn’t burning. I wasn’t. I was alive, I could taste the river brine on my lips, could feel tears stinging my eyes. Muck squished between my fingers as I clawed my way to dry land, and I crawled up the bank on my hands and knees, spitting river water onto the cobblestones before collapsing onto my back, panting. Sirens rang out from the other side, presumably Gloucester’s fire department rushing to the scene. My heartbeat throbbed palpably under my skin, my head pulsing in tandem waves of nausea as I fought to slow my breathing.
I held my hand up against the inky sky, fingers splayed wide. They were normal, pale and unharmed. Filthy, like the rest of me at this point, but not burned by any means. My sleeve, however, was another story. I sat up with a grunt and frowned, holding out my other arm for comparison. Both my sleeves were charred, crumbling away as I fingered the cloth. My jeans were in slightly better shape, but they were also a thicker material. My hair- I pulled it over my shoulder, squinting at it in the dim light. Completely fine. Split at the ends and soaking wet with no sign of damage.
My hands hadn’t fared so well the last time I’d been in heat that strong; I could remember it now clear as day. They’d gone red first, then blistered, then the blisters burst, skin bubbling beneath before slipping and sliding along my bones. It had melted off. I’d gone blind at that point, the pain an all-consuming white-hot monster rolling through my body in an unrelenting flood. I lurched forward, shaking as I scrambled back to the river and shoved my hands deep in the water, letting the cold shock me back to the present. In, out, in, out again. I could breathe. The air was clear, the night was warm and humid, expected for August, but not hot. I was okay. And possibly fireproof.
This was a good thing. At the very least, I’d never burn again. Maybe each time I died I gained some immunity towards the method? Or was it a normal trait for magic users here? It didn't matter. I dragged myself to my feet, shedding the remains of my top, and started heading towards where I parked my borrowed car. I had a spare set of clothes waiting in my trunk, and warding off attention was an easy spell to hold for half an hour or so. The drive back to Oxford was long enough to shake my ghosts and pull myself together. I needed to figure out where I’d gone wrong.
Tim was a stubborn child. Dick could see that, hell, Bruce could see that and Bruce barely saw shit when it came to the people around him. Not unless they had a case number and a proclivity for felonies. But it had taken getting rescued from Two-Face for Dick to realize how serious Tim was about this whole thing. They’d have to lock him in a cell to keep him from doing what he thought was best, which was the kind of attitude you needed to be Robin, but… Was it selfish to want the legacy to end with Jason? The idea that someone could pick up where his brother left off, and the idea that Bruce could call a third child by that title, just didn’t sit right. Jason’s death had carved a chasm in his soul, and the thought of it ever being filled in made him want to jump inside of it and start digging, just to make sure it stayed deep.
He had a feeling, watching Bruce knock Tim down again and again and again in training, that the older man was hoping he could discourage the kid from his current course. But, Dick fought a grin, Tim wasn’t backing down. The skinny feral gremlin might just be a match for the grumpy bat. It was endearing in a way he didn’t want it to be.
There wasn’t much else for it, since they clearly couldn’t scare him off; when it came to Dick’s turn to train the kid, he’d just have to make sure he had a fighting chance at survival. By any means necessary. Plus, the whole thing gave him a good excuse for dropping by the cave more often so he could check on Elsie more than once a week. It looked like she was going out with friends or maybe dating, regardless she was out late more frequently than he would prefer, and it was taking all of his self-restraint to not follow her steps through city cameras. As long as she kept coming home unharmed, that had to be good enough (for now). Babs would definitely notice if he borrowed her software to access government CCTV in another country and he still wasn’t ready to have that conversation with her. He could hear it now, the words ‘privacy,’ ‘ethical standards,’ and ‘consent’ echoing back from the future. He heaved a sigh. If she didn’t move home after graduating, he might have to do something drastic.
The summoning circle, the one I’d copied from an older text in my university library, had sixteen sigils, three inner rings, and one outer ring of protection. On my first attempt I’d managed to get four sigils, the ring of protection, and the first inner ring to light before the whole thing had gone to shit. The sigils had started sparking, one alighting into a blaze, and it was like the air itself caught fire. The circle itself was Roman, so it was tricky to tell what exactly it was meant to contact. They preferred a shotgun approach when it came to religion, so while I was fairly certain it was a fire deity, I couldn’t say what pantheon. It was the most comprehensive circle I’d found, though, with built-in protection, and that seemed like the kind of thing you’d want if you could get it. But the point was, it was a well constructed circle. If it worked at all, it should have worked entirely. And based on the fact that some of the sigils had lit, if I could get it to complete itself, then it would work. It was potentially just a matter of power. If I kept feeding into it, instead of lighting it up and watching it go, that might be enough to solve the issue.
The location I’d found was less of a warehouse and more of an abandoned barn. I’d been lost on the way back from Gloucester after my first summoning fiasco, the roads dreadfully dark, when I spotted it in the distance, and I knew there was potential. Upon closer inspection, it had stone walls and a patchy thatch roof, with strong wooden beams that looked like they could withstand some heat. There were abandoned bottles on the ground that spoke to some occasional habitation, but they were all covered in a thick layer of dust. I wasn’t likely to be disturbed out here, and if anyone saw smoke they would assume it was a bonfire (hopefully). It was out of the way enough that I doubted there would be an issue, anyway, and there was a working well close to the entrance, so I was fairly certain I’d be able to extinguish things if they got out of hand.
I arrived a little after sunset, giving myself enough time to store my clothes, keys, and wallet in a fireproof lockbox by the entrance. I had a box of unbleached chalk, half a kilo of rock salt, and a battery powered lantern. All in all, if this worked, summoning a deity cost less than a hundred pounds. Well, less than a hundred pounds along with access to rare antique books and a modicum of training in the supernatural arts. I paused for a moment, mid-reach for the chalk to start drawing out the circle. Would a deity be put off by nudity? Should I look into a fireproof poncho or something? No, it should be fine. Any primordial being was more likely to be unnerved by polyester than a naked body.
I carefully drew out the sigils and three inner circles in chalk, then enclosed the whole thing with a thick line of salt and marked the cardinal points with additional salt piles as focal points. If the protection line were somehow broken, the focal points would give me an additional few moments to run like hell. I hadn’t used them last time, but some additional research had indicated it might be a good idea.
I crouched down, putting both palms on the dirt floor, and focused my will in a straight line through the earth to the circle. Instead of letting up after the three rings were lit, I kept the connection running, increasing the strength as the sigils started to glow. First, second, third, fourth, fifth, already better than my first attempt, and onto the sixth, the seventh, and then the eighth. I coughed, my throat dry from the heat, and blinked back tears. Sweat was dripping down my face, stinging my eyes, and beading along my spine. I glanced up, careful not to break the delicate balance of concentration. The straw piled in the corner of the room was smoking. No time to worry about that, though. I fed more power down the line, the ninth and tenth sigils alighting, and I grinned and doubled down. The eleventh sputtered roughly before lighting into a blaze, a pillar of fire shooting straight up through the roof. Every sigil went dark and the power I’d been forcing into it surged outwards, crackling across the dirt, crawling up through the stones and into the roof. The whole building surged with heat, stone glowing, flames licking the underside of the roof as flaming chunks of thatch fell down. I gaped in horror at the walls, so hot the stone was melting like slag. The room spun slightly as I struggled to breathe.
I reached out behind my body, blindly grabbing for the reservoir the well drew from and yanking it from the ground. A slosh of water surged against the outer wall, hissing into steam on contact, a fraction of it making its way through the entrance. I brought the meager amount forward, coughing, wincing at my cracking throat. I spun it into a thin disk as quickly as possible, conscientious of the fact that I was losing more of its mass every moment it was in the barn, and dropped it down over the circle. The sigils went dark, but it was too late to do anything more.
I fled the barn, beelining for my car and throwing open the driver’s side door, snatching my water bottle from the cupholder and chugging it down, spilling a good amount in the process. That was less than optimal. I rubbed futilely at my chest, smacking it roughly as I struggled for deep enough breaths. My throat hadn’t stung like this after the last one, but the fire in the barn had been hotter than the one in the warehouse. Either the air was too dry or… Shit. I pulled my clothes on and collapsed into the front seat, turning on my overhead light and flipping down my visor mirror. I opened my mouth and stuck out my tongue. There, at the back of my throat, was an angry red hue that definitely wasn’t the natural state. So I could burn on the inside? I thumped my forehead down on the steering wheel. Great. Not that I wasn’t grateful for semi-fireproof-ness or whatever, I was, really, but being halfway fireproof brought more questions than total immunity. I sighed, bone tired. A problem for later.
The damage wasn't clear yet, but the structure would be unrecognizable come morning. The barn was going to have to burn itself out. Thankfully,the surrounding area was more dirt than grass and the wind wasn’t strong, so the risk of a wildfire was low, but I could tell from here that the walls were sinking down on themselves, slumping towards the earth. I’d have to find another location for attempt number three, and maybe a ventilator? Or a gas mask? Something for the heat. I coughed roughly into my elbow, hacking out coal colored phlegm, my throat giving a great impression of broken glass. Yikes.
There was a lot to be said for being as nosy as possible as often as possible. As a child who was hardly ever given information, Tim was well versed in proactive knowledge acquisition, having hacked his parents’ emails, along with their secretary's, at the tender age of seven. It was the only way he could keep track of their schedule, and not knowing when they might return from whatever fantastical lands they visited without him always left him with a thrumming sort of nervousness. How was he supposed to know when he had to be home, when he had to sleep in his own bed instead of his favorite squishy window seat in the first-floor library?
So Tim looked into anything and everything. He knew the work schedule of his favorite baristas around the city; he knew every bus schedule (you’d think gotham buses were run by the Navy with how seriously they took their jobs) down to the minute; he knew enough of Bruce Wayne’s expected society appearances and recycled excuses to tell when he was off-planet or just recuperating even before he met the man in person; but knowing things took work. It took upkeep. It took being a deliberate nuisance and digging his hooks into every database, every calendar, and every news site he could until no one he cared about breathed without a record.
That was why his favorite time was Unsupervised Batcomputer Time (UBT). He had it labeled in his personal calendar, right when Bruce did his own cool-down stretches and hit the showers post training. Technically Tim was supposed to be cleaning his equipment and putting it away, but he had that optimized to the second and all in all he had a window of about ten minutes. He didn’t have a way to prevent his keystrokes from being logged, so he couldn’t look into anything too unusual, but he could browse reasonable material until Bruce came back to tell him to go home (it was a school night, and despite the fact that he’d been putting himself to bed at a reasonable time of three in the morning for years now, Alfred insisted on an eleven o’clock curfew; ridiculous).
All to say, he was currently browsing the POI files for updates on active cases and to see what kind of people Bruce preferred to flag for potential problems. The interesting thing was, person of interest number one, pinned to the top of the list, was eighteen year-old Elspeth Saxon-Vogel. No criminal record, no relation to anyone with a criminal record, and currently residing overseas. What on earth had she been flagged for? The case log notes listed some concern over her education history, but that had been marked as resolved, along with concern over her parents' behavior towards her, also marked as resolved. There were no further notes, and Bruce wouldn’t leave someone pinned for no reason. Tim was missing something here. He tilted his head. What could the interest in her be? What was Batman interested in when it came to children? Oh. Oh no. That was the wrong question. What was Bruce Wayne interested in when it came to children? Black hair, blue eyes, and above-average intelligence. Twice was a pattern, especially given that there was a resemblance to the man himself, and it was a leverage factor Tim had acknowledged as useful when he’d gone to make his own case for becoming Robin. She still had parents, decent parents, according to the notes, but he wouldn’t have known that until after he looked into her. Maybe he’d gotten invested and was keeping tabs on her?
A firm hand came down on his shoulder. He craned his neck backwards, looking up at Bruce’s unsmiling face. The man wasn’t frowning, but the quirked eyebrow certainly demanded an explanation.
“Just looking,” Tim said with a perfectly pleasant smile. Bruce grunted, not moving his hand. “It’s good to stay on top of things.”
“She’s not an active case,” Bruce muttered.
Tim bit his lip, debating with himself before giving in to the urge. “Were you going to adopt her?”
Bruce heaved a sigh, looking as though the full weight of the world was on his shoulders. “No.”
“But-”
“Tim, it’s time for you to leave.”
“In a second,” Tim promised. “I'm just curious why she’s pinned.” It always took a bit of pressing to get any non-critical information out of Bruce. Whether or not he relented at all would also be a good indicator of how important the girl really was. “If you have her at the top of the list, there’s gotta be a reason, right?” Bruce closed his eyes briefly, praying for patience. He didn’t want to make this into a bigger deal than it was, and he certainly didn’t want to see how his temperamental eldest child would react to Tim infringing on his business.
“You’ll have to ask Dick,” he finally said before turning towards the elevator. “Go home; it’s late.”
Tim hastily pulled up the user history on the page, eyes widening as he scrolled through the log, dozens of entries, ranging from twenty minutes to an hour, all under Dick’s username.
“Now, Tim,” Bruce’s voice rang out, not bothering to look back. Tim would’ve sworn he had eyes in the back of his head if he hadn’t seen Dick catch him with a surprise wingding to the noggin in a spar the week before.
The latest location was another Gloucester warehouse, in an abandoned shipyard right on the water. I stowed my lockbox away just outside the entrance, and secured my KN95, which wasn’t a perfect solution for the smoke but the internet had assured me it was better than nothing, and there was an oxygen tank and attached mask in my trunk in case of emergency. This time, things had to work. I’d set a ‘pay no mind’ ward about a block from the building in every direction, which would last at its strongest for the next few hours and linger faintly for the next day or so.
Based on my past two attempts, it looked like the problem was connected to the energy flow. I had three primary variables to adjust: intensity, consistency, and tone. I’d brought a carved cylinder of quartz to use as a focal point at the center of the circle, which should, in theory, act as a bit of a magical ‘heatsink' and let me pour power in without burning through any of the sigils, and regulate the consistency of the output by virtue of having its own maximum limit for channeling. I also brought two pints of my own blood that I’d siphoned off earlier in the week, which I used to paint a spiral extending out from the middle of the circle, beginning at the crystal and ending at the spot I’d be placing my hands from outside the protection line. Hopefully it would let me yank the cord by acting as a channel I could reabsorb the energy through if necessary.
I drew the chalk sigils and the inner circles, laid out the salt protection line and the cardinal points, and knelt down, placing my hands on the tacky red puddle at the beginning of the spiral. Nice and even, even and strong, straight to the center. The crystal glimmered faintly before sputtering into a blinding shine, every shadow in the room struck in stark relief. I shuffled on my knees, readjusting my weight. It was too quiet.
The beat of my blood echoed in my skull. “Row, row, row your boat,” I whispered, “gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life-” all sixteen of the sigils lit at once, “- is but-” the crystal cracked, “-a dream.” The room exploded with light, a dark figure hovering for a millisecond, a spiked halo above its head. I blinked, and my back hit the floor, air knocked from my lungs, my ears ringing, the taste of iron heavy on my tongue. I was looking up at the sky. The roof was gone.
The world faded in and out.
I breathed. Something in my chest twinged.
The ringing was what brought me back to reality. Separate from the ringing in my ears, I knew that tune and it inspired an immediate pang of annoyance. My phone. Dammit. They would call back if it was important. I waited, the ringtone fading out for a moment before starting anew. The number of people with my phone number was limited, and the number of people who would spam like that was even smaller.
I rolled to my side, propping myself up on my elbows, then my knees, and crawled my way to the entrance, wincing with every movement. I don’t think I’d ever been in more pain in this lifetime than I was right now, and the idea of how much this would hurt tomorrow made me want to cry.
I dug my phone from the lockbox, letting it ring a little longer so I could check the call logs. My mother. Six missed calls. I picked up the call.
“Hello,” I answered hoarsely. I cringed, cleared my throat and tried again. “Hello?”
“Elsie, darling, I was beginning to worry you were dead,” my mother said dryly. What? I checked the time on my phone, just to make sure, but I wasn't mistaken. “It’s the middle of the night? I was asleep.”
“Is it? Well, if it takes six calls to wake you, maybe you should see a doctor. Or turn your ringer up. Regardless, you need to come home,” she said, barreling on.
I took my phone from my ear for a moment and stared at it. She never failed to stun me. “I have classes. I can’t come home right now. It’s the middle of the term.”
She huffed. “You can make up exams, I’ll have my lawyer speak with your professors-”
“Do not do that.”
“-if I need to, but you are coming home for Labor Day.”
“This is about Labor Day?! What's supposed to happen on Labor Day? That's not even a real holiday!”
“Elsie,” she started slowly, “do you really think I don’t know you haven’t been socializing? I spoke with Azalea Walton just last Monday, and she said she hasn’t heard a word about you from Charlie. Not one word.”
“Who is that?” I asked, flabbergasted. “Literally, who is that?”
“You would know if you’d been socializing like you said you would.” I was screwed.
“...”
“I knew this would happen. I knew it. Are you talking with anyone over there? Anyone at all?”
“Obviously, yes, I speak to people. This is college. I have group assignments, I go out for drinks with classmates, and I meet with professors. I’m socializing more now than I ever have before.”
“But not with the right people!” She cried.
“That’s a little harsh,” I defended. “Maybe not with this Charlie person specifically, but I’m meeting plenty of people.”
“I’m worried about you! Can’t you understand that?”
“I understand,” I said softly, trying to shift to a more comfortable position. There were no comfortable positions for my body right now. Her concern came from a good place, even if it was a little tiresome, but I did understand.
“So you’ll come home for Labor Day, you’ll come to the Harbor Party?” She pushed on. “It’ll be good for you! I’m thinking about your future; you have to start getting established.”
“Have you been talking to Annamaria again?” I groaned. She wasn’t going to let this go.
“Will you come?” Ignoring my question meant yes, this had come from her psychic, a woman who might just be my archnemesis. She’d be the first stop on my villain arc, I swear. “Never mind, you have to come. This isn’t a request. I’ll send the plane; you can leave the second the party is done. You’ll have the weekend to deal with jetlag upon your return, but you’ll have to tough it out on the way over.”
“Mother.”
“I’m ordering you a dress from Harrod’s as we speak. They’ll handle the tailoring but you’ll have to pick it up. I don’t trust their courier service. Your measurements haven’t changed, yes?”
“I- I don’t think so?”
“You don’t know?!”
“No, Mom-”
“I’ll just order something with a bit of give. You have to pay more attention to these things, darling. They matter.”
“Mom-” I tried again.
“The plane will pick you up this Thursday at eight, in the morning, darling. Let me know if you can’t get your classes sorted. I’ll handle it if it’s beyond you.” Ouch. Also, over my dead body.
“Mom, I really-”
“I’ll send a car when you land. We’ve been renovating the Bristol house so we’re downtown at the moment. You’ll love it, it’s been such fun. See you in a bit.” She hung up, and I stared at my phone once more. Somehow, I'd been betrayed by its existence.
Alfred found Bruce much as he often did, sitting at his desk, slouched over a cold cup of coffee, cradling his head in his hands. The older man stood for a moment, knowing it was more a matter of patience than anything else when it came to his ward.
“I-” Bruce started, then stopped, his mouth pinched.
“Yes?” Alfred prompted.
“The Dumonts sent over their RSVP list for the yacht club party.”
“And?”
“She’s coming. Her parents are bringing her.”
“I see.”
Bruce rubbed his face with both hands, dragging his fingers back through his hair. “Where did I go wrong with him?”
“Would you like me to count the ways?”
“Really?” Bruce asked, a little incredulous.
“My apologies, Master Bruce. I will be more cautious of your sensitivities.” Alfred smiled, serene as ever. “You were a flawless caregiver. This has nothing to do with you as an individual. I could not possibly begin to fathom how things have come to be the way they are.”
“So this was my fault?” He asked, hopelessly.
Alfred looked at him archly. “I suppose the similarities between Master Richard and yourself are escaping you at the moment.”
“Alfred!”
“It’s not as though you tend to focus on certain individuals beyond reason. Tell me, how is Miss Kyle?”
“...” Bruce buried his face in his hands once more.
“Master Bruce, that was a question, was it not?”
“She’s doing well,” Bruce said, his voice muffled.
“I’m glad to hear it.”
Just once in his life he wouldn’t be in the wrong place at the right time. If he’d managed to be anywhere else, any other country, this problem would have been passed to someone else.
John nudged one of the sigils burned into the floor with his foot, frowning when the mark didn’t smudge. It was burned straight into the concrete floor, and he’d bet his last coin it was burned straight down through the bedrock. Just like the other two circles he’d looked at, all in the same fifty-kilometer radius.
The police thought this was the beginning work of a serial arsonist, but someone a little more in the know had passed a message along to the Justice League, who’d tapped JL Dark, ergo, him, since he was already in the UK, to come take a look. He wished, even more than he had at the beginning of the mess, that anyone else was dealing with this. He’d figured it would be a little tedious but nothing serious, maybe the work of a new cult, maybe a baby Satanist messing around, but this was worse. The person doing this was getting closer and closer to what they wanted. The other two circles had only been partially successful, but this one, this one had broken through to the other side. Nothing came through, if he had to guess he’d say it wasn’t open long enough, but that didn’t really matter. What mattered was that they’d been able to do it in the first place. What mattered was that there was someone walking around with the potential to become the equivalent of a magical nuclear bomb, someone with a deadly learning curve, evidenced by the fact they got the circle working in three attempts with no sacrifices, and someone smart enough not to run around shouting their grandiose plan from a rooftop. Not a combination John liked. The last thing this mess of a country needed was a genuine practitioner who could summon archdemons. It was a shame, really; he wasn’t fond of getting his hands bloody, but this wasn’t the kind of person you could leave alive and not regret one day. His softer counterparts might argue for imprisonment over permanent retirement, but you can’t mitigate the risk behind this kind of skill, the temptation of power ever-lingered, and with no way to unlearn this sort of ability, there was no hope for rehabilitation. Keeping that sort of person locked up meant one day they'd be free, at the worst possible time. It was an inevitability.
So he’d hunt them down like a dog. Blast it all. He scowled and grabbed a squashed pack of cigarettes from the inner pocket of his ratty trench coat, lighting one with a snap of his fingers. Maybe they’d burn themselves alive from the inside out next time they made an attempt. Sometimes he got lucky.
Notes:
Alright, that's a wrap for chapter 5.
Up next: the party (Dick and Elsie get some interaction, woooo), Red Hood rumors abound, Constantine and Elsie finally meet, Constantine has some Realizations. I intended to slap the party into this chapter but it was already running longer than any of the previous ones and I wanted to give it the focus it deserved. We’ve made good progress, though.
Same drill as always; if you comment I'll respond with a fortune cookie message, if you'd rather not be fortunized, then leave an asterisk at the end of your comment. I always appreciate the feedback. Lmk what you think if you're up for it.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/42wmpno8Rv6OsR3ZTE7DjV?si=ccd1330f63e9468b