Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The thing about fighting Angstrom Levy was that you never knew which version of him you were going to get.

Sometimes it was the grieving one — the man who had loved children, who had genuinely believed he was going to build something beautiful before Mark's father had destroyed it. That version was almost harder to fight. There was a heaviness to it, a tragic weight that pressed against Mark's chest even as he was throwing punches that could crack tectonic plates. He didn't want to feel sympathy for Angstrom Levy. He'd seen what the man had done. He'd felt what the man had done — specifically, to his face, repeatedly, in the most literal possible sense.

But then there was this version.

This version was just rage, distilled and weaponized and wearing a human being like a costume.

"You think this is the worst I can do?" Angstrom screamed, and his voice had that quality it always got when he was really gone — layered, like multiple versions of him were speaking at once, all the alternate selves bleeding through. His face was a ruin of scar tissue, the twisted topography of what Omni-Man had done to him. His eyes were incandescent with something that wasn't quite sanity. "You think I've been trying? I've been holding back, Grayson. I've been patient. Do you have any idea how many versions of this conversation I've had? Do you have any idea how many times I've killed you?"

Mark spat blood. His lip was split — again — and he could feel at least two ribs grinding against each other in a way that suggested they'd prefer to be somewhere that wasn't inside his body. His suit was shredded at the left shoulder, the fabric peeled back to reveal a bruise that was already cycling through colors like a sunset on fast-forward.

"You haven't killed me yet," Mark said. "In any of them."

It was probably not the smartest thing to say. He knew that even as he was saying it. There was a version of him — the version Cecil wanted him to be, the version his dad had occasionally tried to hammer into shape — that would've kept his mouth shut, stayed tactical, looked for the opening and taken it clean and efficient with minimum unnecessary escalation.

That version of him was not currently present.

"You want to test that theory?" Angstrom said, very quietly.

They were hovering about four hundred feet above downtown Chicago, which meant that when Angstrom's fist connected with Mark's jaw a half-second later and sent him spinning sideways through the air, there was a substantial amount of falling involved before he got his bearings back. Wind shrieked past his ears. The lake glittered far below, a sheet of hammered pewter in the afternoon light.

Mark righted himself, shook his head, felt something rattle loosely in a way he was going to try very hard not to think about.

Okay. He took stock. Ribs — bad, but not catastrophically. Head — ringing, but functional. Left shoulder — the bruise had graduated into something that might be a hairline fracture of the clavicle. Right hand — probably fine, though the knuckle he'd split on Angstrom's modified chest-plate three exchanges ago was complaining loudly about his life choices.

And Angstrom was coming back at him, hands trailing dimensional rifts like afterimages, like tears in the fabric of the world that hadn't quite had time to heal.

That's the real problem, Mark thought, tracking the anomalies. That's always been the problem with him.

It wasn't the strength. Angstrom Levy was not, by any meaningful measure, a physical match for Invincible. He never had been. Mark was Viltrumite — half, anyway, but that half went a long way — and what that meant in practical terms was that he could take hits that would liquefy a normal human being and keep fighting, that his strength was measured in units that didn't have convenient names, that his speed in the upper atmosphere left most aircraft looking like they were standing still. On a purely physical level, this fight should not have been close.

But Angstrom could cheat.

Every time Mark thought he had him cornered, every time his fist was already moving on the trajectory that would end this, a portal would open — right there, between his knuckles and Angstrom's face — and the punch would sail through into somewhere else and Mark would be momentarily off-balance and Angstrom would use that half-second to do something deeply unpleasant.

It had been going on for forty-seven minutes.

Mark was beginning to feel it.

"You can't win," Angstrom said, circling now, hands raised. The dimensional rifts orbited him like electrons, opening and closing, tasting the air with their impossible geometries. "You understand that, don't you? I've done this before, Grayson. So many times. I know every move you have. I've catalogued you. Every timeline where you beat me, I've studied what went wrong. This version of me has access to all of that. I am every version of Angstrom Levy who ever lost to you, and I have learned."

"Great," Mark said. "Are you gonna monologue at me or are we actually doing this?"

Angstrom's eyes went flat. Cold. It was somehow worse than the screaming.

"Both," he said.

He moved.

And Mark moved to meet him — and this was where it happened, where the whole world came apart.

Because Angstrom had feinted. The attack Mark tracked was a shadow, a decoy, a version of a punch that was never going to land. The real attack was the dimensional rift opening inside his guard, impossible close, pressed right up against his chest like a hand — and something Angstrom was wearing on his wrist activated, a modified version of his usual mechanism, and the rift didn't just open.

It grabbed.

Mark felt it. A tearing sensation, not physical, not quite — more like the universe deciding he needed to be somewhere else. An overwhelming sense of wrongness, like the moment before you realize you've stepped off a curb that wasn't where you thought it was, stretched out to infinity.

He had time for one coherent thought, which was: not again, not like this, I just want to go HOME—

And then he was gone.

The dimensional transit lasted approximately four seconds and felt like four years.

Mark had been through Angstrom's portals before. He knew what they felt like — the vertiginous sensation of passing through membranes between realities, the nauseating wrongness of existing in the space between spaces, the way colors didn't quite behave correctly and sound moved at angles it wasn't supposed to. He knew all of that.

This was worse.

This was deeper. Whatever Angstrom had modified in that device on his wrist, it hadn't just sent him to a parallel Earth. It had sent him far, through multiple barriers he could feel tearing past him like cobwebs, or like walls, or like something that had no good physical analogy, each one slightly more disorienting than the last.

When he came out the other side, he came out fast — no graceful transition, just a sudden violent arrival into regular spacetime that felt like being thrown through a window. He tumbled, lost his orientation entirely, had a brief and chaotic view of sky-buildings-sky-buildings before instinct and years of hard practice kicked in and he got himself upright.

He hung in the air, breathing.

Breathed again.

Checked that he was, in fact, breathing — because with portals, you could never entirely rule out the possibility of emerging in the upper atmosphere or the vacuum of space — and yes, there was air, normal-tasting, slightly urban-gritty air, and below him was a city.

A city.

Mark floated there for a long moment, cataloguing it.

It was a big city. That was the first thing — genuinely large, the kind of sprawling urban mass that suggested millions of people. He could see the waterfront on one side, a river carving through downtown, towers of glass and steel catching the afternoon light at angles that seemed slightly off, somehow, slightly not quite right in a way he couldn't immediately articulate.

The second thing he noticed: the architecture. Not drastically different from Chicago or New York, but different enough. Something in the style of the buildings, the way certain structures were shaped, suggested a city that had developed on a slightly different aesthetic trajectory. Older bones with newer skins. Something almost Gothic about some of the older buildings, a darkness to them that seemed less like grime and more like... intention.

The third thing: a billboard. Large, glossy, advertising something called 'Gotham City Finance — Your Future, Our Priority.'

Gotham City.

Mark stared at the billboard.

He had absolutely no idea where Gotham City was. It was not a city he had ever been to or heard of, which was — odd. Mark Grayson had spent a significant portion of his young adult life dealing with threats both domestic and extraterrestrial, had worked alongside a government organization with reach into basically every corner of the world, had flown over every continent. He knew cities. He was good at cities.

He did not know Gotham City.

The specific quality of the not knowing settled over him slowly, like cold water. Not the casual ignorance of someone who'd simply never been somewhere. Something more fundamental. Something that felt like—

No, he thought. No. Let's not jump to conclusions.

His ribs were screaming. His clavicle — yeah, that was definitely fractured, he could feel the bone shifting when he moved his left arm, a sensation that occupied the intersection of unpleasant and deeply concerning. His head was still doing that low-frequency ring that had started after Angstrom's fourth really solid hit to the skull. His suit was a mess.

Priorities, he told himself. Land. Get your bearings. Figure out where you are. Then figure out how to get back.

Simple. Clear. Achievable.

He descended toward the city.

Landing in an unfamiliar place while you were visibly injured and wearing a distinctive superhero suit that was currently shredded at the shoulder was, it turned out, not the low-profile experience Mark had been hoping for.

He came down in what appeared to be a park — he had aimed for green space specifically to avoid immediate crowds — but even so, three separate joggers stopped and stared at him with an intensity that he found slightly alarming. He was used to being noticed. He was not used to the specific quality of the looks these people were giving him, which was less oh wow, a superhero! and more what in the hell are you doing here?

"Hey," he said, to the nearest jogger, a middle-aged woman in a yellow running jacket who had frozen in place like a prey animal. "Sorry to bother you. Is there — is there like a superhero headquarters or something nearby? A Hall of Justice? Anything like that?"

The woman blinked. "The...what?"

"Hall of Justice. Or if not that, just... any hero base? Local hero contact? Anything?"

She was backing away now, slowly, with the careful movements of someone who had decided that whatever was happening, she didn't want to be part of it. "I don't — you should probably just — the League is in—" She pointed vaguely upward and to the northeast, which was not especially helpful. Then she broke into a jog and left.

Mark looked up and to the northeast. Sky. Just sky. And more of Gotham's slightly oppressive skyline.

He tried the other joggers. One of them took a photo of him before speed-walking away. The other said "wrong city for capes, buddy" in a tone of profound weariness and continued his run.

Wrong city for capes.

Mark stood in the park and tried to organize his thoughts.

He had been transported by Angstrom to somewhere unfamiliar. Angstrom's dimensional transits moved between parallel Earths — that was established, that was known. The Sequids thing, all of that. So the working hypothesis had to be that he was on a parallel Earth, one where Gotham City existed and people responded to superhero questions with the affect of someone who found the whole topic vaguely embarrassing.

Except.

The portal had felt different. Wrong. Whatever modification Angstrom had made to his device — that additional something, that deeper tearing — it hadn't felt like his usual cross-dimensional work. It had felt like something further.

Stop, he told himself. You don't have enough information. Stop spiraling and get information.

Okay. Okay.

His phone had not survived the transit. He checked his pocket and found a cracked screen and an absolute absence of signal even if the thing would have turned on, which it wouldn't. No connection to anyone — not Cecil's people, not his mom, not William, not Atom Eve.

Eve.

Don't think about that right now.

He needed to find someone who could tell him where he was. Not a scared jogger, but an actual contact — someone in whatever local hero infrastructure existed here. The jogger had gestured northeast, had started to say something about a League. Maybe there was a local hero team or—

His train of thought was interrupted by a sudden sharp pain in his ribs that was significantly worse than the general ongoing background radiation of pain he'd been managing, specifically triggered by the breath he'd just taken. He stood still for a moment, waiting for it to subside. Two ribs or three? Definitely two, possibly three. He'd had worse — he'd had much worse, in the most literal possible sense, there had been a period of his life when he'd had every bone in his body broken — but that didn't mean this was comfortable.

He needed to sit down. He needed to think. He needed to find a quiet place where he wasn't going to be photographed by joggers and where he could get his head clear enough to actually work the problem.

He floated a few feet above the park and looked for quiet. Gotham City, he was beginning to understand, was not a city that did quiet particularly well, but the older neighborhoods — and this place was old, he could see it in the bone structure of the buildings — had the kind of narrow side streets and forgotten corners that might offer at least relative privacy.

He drifted toward one such neighborhood, following the geography of age. Older stone. Narrower streets. Buildings that had been built before the city knew how large it was going to get, and which had survived through a combination of stubbornness and historical accident.

He landed in an alley.

An alley that — he noticed, with some bemusement — had a small memorial plaque on one wall. Just a modest thing, bronze gone green with age. He couldn't quite read it from where he was standing, and honestly, reading commemorative plaques was not high on his priority list right now. He found a recessed doorway that was dry and out of the wind and lowered himself into it, pressing his back against the old stone, and made himself breathe carefully — shallow, because deep breaths were now actively punishing.

He closed his eyes.

Okay, he thought. Okay. You've been in worse situations than this.

The list of worse situations was, genuinely, substantial. He'd fought his father to the edge of survival. He'd dealt with the Viltrumite War. He'd handled Conquest, which was an achievement that still gave him complicated feelings when he thought about it. He'd dealt with Angstrom before, multiple times, and he'd dealt with being displaced before—

But he'd always, always, had a way home. Cecil. Eve. Someone with a fix, a portal, a coordinate. Something.

Right now he had none of that. He had a dead phone, a fractured clavicle, two or possibly three cracked ribs, a headache that was beginning to make him wonder if Angstrom had given him a concussion, and an address that told him nothing (Gotham City, unspecified, population: apparently people who found the word superhero mildly embarrassing).

The anger came up slowly. It had been there throughout the fight — the ordinary operational anger of fighting Angstrom Levy, which was its own specific flavor — but this was different. This was the deeper kind, the kind that lived below action and urgency and got to speak when there was nothing left to do but sit in a doorway in an alley on a world that might not even be his own.

He sent me here. The thought was very clear, very precise. He did this on purpose. He stood there and looked at me and decided the best thing to do was rip me out of my world and throw me into somewhere I don't know, without a way back, hurt and alone, and he thought that was a win.

The anger didn't help. Mark knew it didn't help. He had, over the years, gotten somewhat better at recognizing the moments when anger was a tool and the moments when it was just weather — something moving through him that he had to let pass if he wanted to think clearly.

This was weather.

He breathed. He sat. He let the anger move.

He thought about his mom. He thought about his friends. He thought — carefully, deliberately, as something he was choosing to do rather than something that was happening to him — about the fact that even if Angstrom had sent him here intentionally, the transit mechanism existed, which meant a portal could be opened again, which meant he could get home. It was a solvable problem. It was just a question of resources.

He thought: First, I need to find someone who can help. Someone who knows this world and can orient me. And then I need to find a way to contact—

"Hey."

Mark's eyes snapped open.

The voice had come from above and behind him. Very slightly above — maybe eight feet — and directly behind, which meant someone who was standing on, or attached to, the fire escape that ran up the building behind his doorway. The voice was male, low, with a very particular quality to it that Mark recognized immediately and categorically: the voice of someone who was armed and knew how to use what they were carrying and had, at some point, been trained by someone who took training extremely seriously.

He held very still.

"You gonna tell me you're fine?" the voice continued, "Because you are very visibly not fine."

Mark turned his head slowly and looked up.

The man on the fire escape was wearing red and black.

That was the first impression — the color scheme, bold and deliberate, a matte red domino mask covering the upper half of his face, black tactical gear below, layered and professional-looking in a way that suggested this wasn't cosplay. There was a helmet clipped to his belt — red, matching the mask — and Mark could see the shapes of weapons at his hips and across his back. His arms were crossed over his chest with the studied casualness of someone who had trained the pose until it looked natural.

He was maybe mid-twenties. Hard to be certain with the mask, but the jawline, the set of his shoulders, the general geometry of him said young but not new to this.

His eyes — brown, sharp — were moving over Mark with a professional assessment that was taking in the damage.

"Red Hood," Mark said. Not a question. The symbol on the chest, the color scheme — he'd heard the name, obliquely, from Cecil's briefings on various parallel-Earth configurations he'd once had to sit through. Or wait, no — had he heard it? He wasn't sure. The name felt half-familiar, like something from a dream.

Red Hood's eyebrow moved. Just slightly. "You know who I am."

"I know the name." Mark shifted, and immediately regretted it — the ribs announced themselves loudly and he made a noise that he would have preferred not to make.

"Yeah," Red Hood said, dropping from the fire escape in a smooth controlled fall that landed him five feet away from Mark's doorway. He crouched slightly on landing, absorbed the impact with easy expertise, and straightened. Up close, he was bigger than he'd looked above — broad through the shoulders, built like someone who had been training hard for a long time. "You need to tell me what happened to you."

"I need to not do that," Mark said. He was calculating — distance, angles, his own current capability. Red Hood was armed and clearly capable and Mark was injured enough that he wasn't at anything close to his operational peak. But he was still Viltrumite enough that if this went sideways, he could move faster than anything unpowered, and—

Stop. He didn't want this to go sideways. He was sitting in an alley in a city he didn't know, hurt, displaced, alone. The last thing he needed was a fight.

"You're bleeding through your suit," Red Hood said, nodding at Mark's shoulder. "Your left shoulder. And you're holding your ribs like at least two of them are cracked. And you came down out of the sky and sat in an alley, specifically Crime Alley, which is either a choice made by someone who knows this neighbourhood and what it is, or someone who doesn't know and got unlucky."

"Which one is worse?" Mark asked, despite himself.

"Depends." Red Hood studied him. "What's your name?"

Mark hesitated.

"Invincible," he said finally. Using the name felt — strange, in this context, with this person he didn't know in this city he'd never been to. But it was his name. It was who he was. "My name's Invincible."

Something moved across Red Hood's face. Not recognition — Mark watched for that, specifically — but something else. Interest, maybe. Calculation.

"Never heard of you," Red Hood said.

"I get that a lot today." Mark shifted again, carefully, and managed to get his legs under him and push himself upright in the doorway. His head swam briefly, which he did not enjoy. "Look, I'm not looking for trouble. I'm just — I need to get my bearings. I'll be out of your neighborhood in five minutes."

"That's not really an answer to what happened to you."

"No," Mark agreed. "It's not."

Red Hood looked at him for a long moment. There was something measured about it — not the simple assessment of a threat, but something more complicated. Something that felt, weirdly, almost like concern.

"Okay," he said slowly. "You don't want to talk, that's fine. But you're hurt, and whatever hurt you might still be in the area, and I would like to know if I need to worry about my neighborhood in the next hour. So. Is whatever did that to you still active?"

Mark thought about Angstrom. About the portal. About whether the device on Angstrom's wrist could track where it had sent him, whether Angstrom could follow.

"I don't know," he said honestly. "I don't think so. I think I'm the only one who came through."

"Came through what?"

"A portal." Mark met his eyes. "Look, it's a long story and I really — I just need to find someone who can help me figure out where I am and how to get home, and I don't think you're that person, and I don't want to waste your time or mine—"

"Where are you from?" Red Hood asked.

"Chicago." Then, because the specific blankness of what he'd experienced all afternoon was forcing a level of honesty he wouldn't have otherwise volunteered: "I think. I mean — I'm from Chicago, but I don't think this is the same Earth."

Red Hood was quiet for a moment.

"No," he said finally. "It's probably not."

Something in Mark's chest moved. Not the ribs — something else. The small, carefully managed space where he was keeping the panic. "You sound very calm about that."

"I know some people who deal with that kind of thing. It's not as rare as you'd think." He tilted his head. "Come on. I know someone who can—"

"No," Mark said.

Red Hood stopped.

"I don't— " Mark pressed his hand against the doorframe, steadied himself. His head was doing the thing again, the low-frequency ringing that suggested the concussion was real and not politely going to wait for a convenient time. "I don't know you. I don't know this city. I don't know anything about where I am and you're a stranger with guns telling me to come with you and I just want — I just need a minute, okay? I need a minute."

He heard his own voice and recognized the edge in it — the fraying. Not anger, not quite. Something rawer. Something that was going to become embarrassing if he let it.

Red Hood took a small step back. The gesture was deliberate — an acknowledgment of space, of boundary. Mark had not expected that.

"Okay," he said quietly. "Okay. You don't have to go anywhere. But at least let me—"

"I'm fine," Mark said. Automatically. Reflexively.

"You're bleeding and you can't take a full breath and you just told me you don't know where you are." Red Hood's voice was entirely matter-of-fact, without edge or mockery. "That's not fine. That's like the dictionary definition of not fine."

Mark looked at him.

Something about the directness of it was — it landed in an unexpected place. No performance. No attempt to reassure him or to pressure him. Just: you are not fine, and here is the evidence, stated plainly.

"I need to go," Mark said.

He stepped forward and Red Hood — to his credit, to his considerable credit — stepped aside. Didn't grab. Didn't block. Just stepped aside and let him pass.

Mark walked three steps out of the doorway into the alley proper, and the movement reminded him comprehensively of every injury he'd accumulated in the last hour, and the ringing in his head increased sharply, and for one vertigo-spiked moment the cobblestones of Crime Alley seemed to tilt toward him.

He stopped. Breathed. The moment passed.

"There's a med bay," Red Hood said, from behind him. His voice was careful. "Not far. People there know how to handle powered individuals. There's no registration, no report, nobody calls the government. You could get your ribs looked at and—"

"I said I'm fine."

Silence.

Mark looked up — up at the narrow strip of Gotham sky visible between the buildings, dirty gold with afternoon light — and understood with sudden, clarifying certainty that he was not fine. That his ribs were cracked and his clavicle was fractured and he had a genuine concussion and he was on a world he didn't know, in a city that apparently had a neighborhood called Crime Alley, which was not exactly confidence-inspiring, and he had no way to contact anyone, and Angstrom was back on his Earth and—

What if they can't find a way back? What if whatever Angstrom's device did was too deep, too far, and no one can trace it? What if I'm just— what if I'm just here—

"Hey," Red Hood said. Very quietly.

Mark shut it down. All of it. He had a mechanism for that — he'd developed it over years of dealing with things that were too big to feel in the moment. He compartmentalized. He put the thing in a box and he closed the box and he functioned.

He functioned.

"I appreciate it," he said, and his voice was steady, which he considered a personal achievement. "I'm going to find my own way. I'm sorry."

"You don't have to be sorry," Red Hood said. "Just — take this."

He held something out. A card — matte black, with a symbol on it. A stylized bat.

Mark stared at it.

"If you change your mind," Red Hood said. "Or if you need help and I'm not around. That's a contact frequency. You can reach — people. People who deal with exactly this kind of situation."

Mark took the card. It was real in his hand, solid and slightly cool.

"Thank you," he said.

He went up.

Not dramatically — he didn't have the energy for dramatic. Just a controlled ascent, straight up, ten feet then twenty then fifty then high enough that Gotham's skyline spread around him in all its dark-towered complexity and Red Hood was a small figure in red and black at the bottom of a narrow alley, face turned up, watching him go.

Mark hung in the Gotham sky and looked out at the city.

Okay, he thought. Different problem now. New problem. You know how to do this.

He looked at the card in his hand. A bat symbol. People who deal with exactly this kind of situation.

He closed his fingers around it.

He went to find them.

But first — and he was deeply reluctant to admit this even to himself — he needed to find somewhere to sit down that wasn't in a strange man's medical bay, preferably somewhere high up and out of sight, and let the worst of the head-ringing pass before he attempted any further navigation.

He found a gargoyle on the facade of one of Gotham's older buildings — and yes, this city actually had gargoyles, of course it did — and settled behind it, out of the worst of the wind, and closed his eyes for a few minutes.

He thought about his mom.

He thought about what she was doing right now. Whether the Guardians had arrived at the fight site and found him gone. Whether they'd know what happened — whether Angstrom had bragged, or whether there was just a blank space where Mark had been and a lot of confused eyewitness accounts of a portal.

He thought: she's going to know something's wrong. She always knows.

He thought: I'm going to get home.

He held onto that.

Jason Todd had been called many things in his life.

He'd been called a ward of Bruce Wayne back in the days when that was all he was, before the cape and the name, a kid from Crime Alley with fast hands and faster instincts and the specific brand of reckless courage that either got you killed young or turned into something useful. He'd been called Robin, which was a name that had its own whole complicated relationship with his personal history that he was still, at age twenty-three, actively working through in ways that he tried not to examine too closely. He'd been called Red Hood, which was his name now, the one he'd built and owned and made mean something.

He'd been called a lot of other things, by people who disagreed with his methods or his choices, and he didn't spend much energy on those.

What he was not often called — by anyone, including himself — was shaken.

He was shaken.

He sat on the roof of his safehouse in the Narrows and turned his helmet over in his hands and thought about the kid in Crime Alley.

Kid. That was the word his brain had reached for immediately, and it kept returning to it even though the figure in the alley hadn't been a child — had been, by any external assessment, a young man, probably eighteen or nineteen, built like someone who had spent serious time at serious training, with the bearing of someone who was used to operating in dangerous situations.

But there had been something about him.

Something about the specific quality of lost that Jason had read in his body language, in the way he'd held himself against the doorframe, in the voice that had started to fray at the edges before he'd visibly, deliberately pulled it back. Jason knew that quality. He'd had it himself, at twelve years old, at fifteen, at various points afterward when the world had rearranged itself around him in ways he hadn't consented to.

The kid — Invincible — had said he'd come through a portal. Had said this probably wasn't his Earth. Had said it with the careful steadiness of someone putting a very heavy thing down very gently because if they dropped it they weren't sure they'd be able to pick it back up.

And then he'd flown away. Flown away, which meant the injuries were serious enough to compromise him but not serious enough to ground him, which meant whatever had put him in that alley had been genuinely formidable by the standards of someone who could fly.

Jason had watched him go.

He'd watched the small shrinking figure of Invincible disappear into the Gotham sky, moving northeast with a destination that probably wasn't actually fixed — the slightly unfocused direction of someone who was moving not toward something but just away — and he'd stood in Crime Alley with the smell of old stone and cold air around him and thought:

He's going to be alone out there. He's going to be hurt and alone and he doesn't know this city or this world and he's going to try to handle it himself because that's what his face said.

He'd seen that face. He'd worn that face. He knew it from the inside.

He pulled out his phone.

He didn't call. He didn't text. He pulled up a specific application that looked, to anyone who encountered it, like a fairly standard photo-editing tool, and he input a code, and then he started moving.

The cave was, as always, both impressive and deeply excessive.

Jason had been here enough times, in the years since the complicated process of reconciliation and re-integration with the family that he'd fought so hard against initially, that he'd stopped being struck by the physical scale of it. The stalactites and the computers and the plane and the car and the whole elaborate apparatus of it — he'd processed all of that, it was just background now.

What he still noticed, every time, was the feeling of it. The particular atmosphere of the cave. Something about the combination of stone and moisture and the sound of the waterfall and the smell of bats — an irony that was always present and never quite became funny — that was unlike anywhere else in the world.

Bruce was at the main console when Jason came down the stairs. Of course he was. Bruce Wayne had many settings; away from the cave was one of the rarest.

"Jason," Bruce said, without turning around. Because he always knew. The footsteps, probably. Maybe something else. With Bruce, it was usually footsteps plus approximately seventeen other inputs that his brain processed simultaneously and presented as a single certainty.

"B," Jason said. He came down the rest of the stairs and dropped into one of the secondary chairs. "Where is everyone?"

"Dick's in Blüdhaven. Tim is upstairs, working. Damian is on patrol. Alfred is—" a slight, unreadable pause— "managing a situation with the kitchen that I've been advised not to ask about."

"Okay." Jason crossed his legs, leaned back in the chair. "I need to show you something."

Now Bruce turned. Something in Jason's voice — he didn't know what, but Bruce always caught it — had triggered a shift in his attention.

"What happened?"

"Not a threat," Jason said quickly. "Not a current emergency. Just — something weird. I want your read on it."

He pulled out his phone. He had footage — not from his helmet camera, which he'd had clipped to his belt, but from one of the micro-cameras he kept in Crime Alley specifically. After that place had that particular history and he'd made a decision, years ago, that he was going to be the person who watched over it when no one else did. The cameras were small, discreet, comprehensive in their coverage.

They'd caught everything.

He passed the phone to Bruce.

Bruce took it with the same careful gravity he applied to everything, and watched.

Jason watched him watch. It was a habit — reading Bruce's responses. The tells were subtle but they existed, if you knew what you were looking for, and Jason had been studying Bruce Wayne's tells since he was twelve years old, which gave him a substantial database.

The tell this time was: a very slight stilling of the face. The kind that happened when Bruce was processing something that genuinely surprised him, which was rare enough that Jason noted it.

The footage was about ninety seconds long. It started with the figure dropping from the sky — imprecise, not the clean descent of an experienced flyer, more like someone who was moving on automatic rather than with intention — and landing in the doorway. Then Jason's arrival. The conversation. The moment where the boy had almost lost it, the slight tremor in his voice that the camera's audio had caught even though it was subtle. The card. The ascent.

Bruce watched all of it.

Then he watched it again.

"No insignia I recognize," he said, which was Bruce for this is interesting and I'm going to be careful about that.

"His name is Invincible. At least that's what he said."

"I've heard the name." Bruce set the phone down. Crossed his arms. "Not locally."

"Not locally," Jason agreed. "He said he came through a portal. Said this probably wasn't his Earth."

"His Earth." Bruce picked the phone back up and zoomed in on a specific frame — the moment where Invincible was standing with his back against the doorframe, left arm held slightly out from his body, the careful hold of someone trying to protect a compromised shoulder. "The injury pattern is consistent with prolonged physical combat. Multiple impacts. The shoulder is more serious than he was letting on."

"I know."

"He's young."

"I know."

Bruce was quiet for a moment. "Crime Alley," he said, and there was the weight that word always carried when Bruce said it.

"Yeah." Jason met his eyes. "He didn't know it. He wasn't there for any reason related to the history. He just landed where it was quiet."

"And you gave him a card."

"I gave him a card."

Bruce studied him. Not in the interrogating way — in the other way, the one Jason had taken longer to learn how to read, which was the way Bruce looked at people when he was trying to understand what they were actually saying rather than what their words were saying.

"You're worried about him," Bruce said.

"He's hurt and lost on a world he doesn't know," Jason said, carefully even, "and he refused help and flew off and I have no way to find him. So, yeah, I'm — I think it would be appropriate to be concerned."

"The card."

"The card just goes to the main emergency comm. He'd have to use it."

"And if he doesn't."

"Then he's alone out there." Jason reached across and picked up his phone, looked at the paused footage on the screen — the frame he'd zoomed to, the boy's face turned slightly upward in the alley, that particular expression. "And I'd rather he wasn't."

Bruce nodded slowly. A decision-settling nod, the one Jason had seen his whole life.

"Call Dick," he said. "Get Tim off whatever he's working on. I'll reach the League's contact network and see if any of them have encountered anyone matching that description in the last few hours."

"And Damian?"

Bruce considered. "Let him finish patrol. We'll brief everyone when he's back." He turned to the main console. "If this person came through a dimensional transit event, there will be an energy signature. I want to find where he arrived and work backward."

"To find where he came from," Jason said.

"To understand what we're dealing with." Bruce paused, hands over the keyboard. "And yes. To find where he came from. If we can identify the transit point, we can potentially establish a return path."

Jason felt something in his chest ease, just slightly. "You think it's possible?"

"I think we've dealt with interdimensional displacement before," Bruce said. "I think Cisco Ramon owes me a conversation. I think Barry has resources that might be applicable." He glanced over his shoulder. "I think a boy who came through a dimensional portal while injured and fighting someone with the apparent capability to open those portals is not someone we leave alone in Gotham if we can avoid it."

"He might not want our help," Jason said. "He was — he was pretty clear about that."

"People who are hurt and frightened and alone often resist help," Bruce said. "That doesn't mean we stop offering it."

He said it completely without irony, which was, Jason reflected, something. Considering.

He pulled up his own comm unit and started making calls.

Dick Grayson arrived from Blüdhaven in thirty-four minutes, which was fast even for him. He came down the stairs still in the Nightwing suit, mask pushed up on his forehead, and he had that particular expression that meant he'd been pulled off something in the middle and was currently recalibrating.

"Okay," he said, dropping into a chair. "What are we looking at?"

Bruce played the footage on the main display. Full size now, which emphasized things the phone screen hadn't. The scale of the injuries more clearly visible. The specific way Invincible moved when he thought he wasn't being observed — carefully, conserving, the movement patterns of someone who had trained extensively and was currently operating on pain management.

Dick watched without speaking until it was done.

"He's fast," he said. "Even hurt. When he came down from the fire escape, he — did you see the way he tracked the exit angles? He was assessing the whole time."

"Trained," Jason confirmed. "Or something equivalent to it."

"Or both." Dick leaned forward, elbows on knees. "Invincible. I've heard the name."

"Where?" Bruce asked immediately.

"Coast City, two years ago — some kind of incident report that came across the League's shared network, something about an engagement with a large-scale space threat. There were names in the after-action report, heroes involved. I think Invincible was one of them." He shook his head. "But that was from a different — if it was the same person, it was from a different reality. The geography didn't line up."

"Different Earth," Jason said.

"Different Earth." Dick nodded. "Which would be consistent with what you're describing. Interdimensional traveler, doesn't know this world, came through under duress during a fight."

"The person he was fighting," Jason said. "He said there'd been a portal. Whoever opened it — that's the threat we need to understand. Someone with the capability to transport a superpowered individual across dimensional barriers during combat."

"Not a small capability," Tim said, from the stairs.

They all looked up. Tim Drake was descending with a tablet in hand and the focused expression of someone who had been, in the approximately seven minutes since Bruce had pulled him off his other work, running search threads. He was still in civilian clothes — jeans, a slightly rumpled sweatshirt — but his focus was total.

"I've been running the unusual event logs for the last twenty-four hours across every network I have access to. There's a signature — Chicago, approximately four hours ago. Major dimensional event, civilian witnesses, significant physical damage to surrounding structures. I'm pulling the data now." He reached the main console and started transferring his work to the large display. "The event was preceded by an aerial combat engagement between two individuals. Local authorities have reports. One of the individuals has been identified by witnesses as—" he paused, scanned the data, "—Invincible."

"And the other?" Bruce said.

"Unidentified. But the event signature is — look at this." Tim pulled up a dimensional frequency graph, a complex visualization that looked like an audio waveform and was not. "This isn't local. The transit didn't go to a nearby parallel. The frequency depth here—" he indicated a section of the graph— "is significantly beyond anything I've seen in our files. This went far."

"How far?" Dick asked.

"I don't know yet. That's the problem. Our instruments are calibrated for the scale of transits we typically deal with. This is off the chart in a fairly literal sense." He looked up from the display. "Whoever opened that portal either has an extremely sophisticated device or access to dimensional mechanics that we haven't encountered before."

"Or both," Bruce said. He turned to Jason. "When he arrived — did you see any kind of transit residue? Dimensional distortion?"

Jason thought back. "Nothing visible to the naked eye. But I didn't see him arrive. I saw him in the alley."

"The micro-cameras. Do any of them cover the aerial approach?"

"The one on the building corner does. It's got about a sixty-degree upward angle." Jason was already pulling up the secondary footage. "Let me check the timestamp—"

The footage was less clear than the alley camera — grainy, wide-angle, the sky over Crime Alley from a low corner perspective. But there was a moment, twenty-three seconds in, where something happened to the air. A shimmer. A distortion, like heat-haze but vertical and specifically localized, a column of wrongness in the atmosphere that lasted approximately three seconds.

And then Invincible fell out of it.

Not a graceful transition. A fall, catching himself mid-drop and converting it to controlled descent with the automatic reflexes of someone who flew constantly. Still — a fall.

"That's the transit point," Tim said, already drawing coordinates on the display. "I can work with that. The residual signature should still be detectable if we can get a sensor array over that location within the next few hours."

"Do it," Bruce said.

Tim was already on it.

Dick had been quiet for a moment. He was looking at the paused footage — the frame where Invincible was in mid-descent, the distortion above him, his posture in the air. "He didn't know where he was going when he came through," he said. "Look at the angle. He came out of the transit and just — fell. He oriented himself in the air but he didn't have a destination. He was disoriented from the transit itself."

"Which means wherever he came from and however the transit worked, it wasn't voluntary," Bruce said. "He didn't choose to come here."

"No," Jason said. "He said something like that. Said the portal had — grabbed him. His word."

Silence.

"So someone attacked him," Dick said, "and as part of the attack, used a dimensional transit device to send him somewhere else. Somewhere he couldn't come back from."

"Yeah," Jason said.

"That's not just a weapon," Dick said. "That's a disposal method."

The word landed heavily.

Jason had been sitting with that thought for several hours. He was glad to have it named.

"Which means whoever is on the other side of that transit," Bruce said, "may believe they've solved their Invincible problem. May not be pursuing." He turned back to the display. "Or may be trying to follow. We need to know which."

"And we need to find Invincible," Jason said.

"Yes," Bruce agreed. "We need to find him."

He said it in that specific way he had — not dismissive of anything, not casual, but with the quiet gravity of a thing decided. Jason had heard that voice countless times over the years, aimed at various problems and people and situations, and he knew what it meant. It meant: this is now a priority. This is now something we're going to resolve.

He leaned back in the chair and let some of the tension in his shoulders go.

Damian arrived back from patrol with the air of someone who found arriving at caves after missions that had already started without him to be a recurring injustice in his life. He descended the stairs with his Robin cape furled, scanned the assembled group — Dick, Tim, Jason, Bruce, all around the main console, Tim's tablet and three secondary displays all active — and said:

"What."

Not a question. A statement of awareness that something was happening and a demand for information.

"Sit down," Bruce said. "We need to catch you up."

Damian sat. He watched the footage with the focused stillness he brought to everything, which Jason had once found annoying and had gradually come to recognize as Damian's version of taking something seriously.

"He's powered," Damian said, when the footage ended. "Not a gadgeteer. The flight is innate. The injuries suggest he can take damage that would kill a standard human and continue functioning, but he has limits. He was at or near them when you encountered him."

"Yeah," Jason said.

"He didn't see you coming," Damian continued, looking at the footage. "Which either means you're better than him at stealth, which seems unlikely given your suit—" a barely-noticeable pause that was Damian's version of a fraternal dig— "or his senses are primarily physical rather than enhanced in the perceptual sense. He heard you, not saw you."

"That's a useful distinction," Tim said. "Normal visual range, normal smell and taste, but potentially enhanced strength and durability and flight. Maybe speed. That's a fairly specific power profile."

"It would explain a lot," Dick said. "He took the hits, kept fighting, but the fight was long enough and hard enough that even his durability has a ceiling."

"We need to find him before he hurts himself further or does something that causes a larger problem," Damian said. His voice was flat, which was his voice for I am saying a practical thing and also I am slightly concerned but won't be mentioning that.

Jason heard it. He suspected everyone heard it. No one mentioned it.

"Tim's running an aerial sensor sweep over the transit coordinates," Bruce said. "We should have dimensional frequency data within the hour. From there we can potentially establish a return path."

"If he'll accept help," Jason said.

Everyone looked at him.

"I'm just noting that he was resistant," Jason said. "He might not — he's not necessarily going to trust us just because we show up with a solution. He doesn't know any of us. He turned down help from me."

"You're you," Dick said, with the particular tone of an older brother.

"Thank you, Dick."

"I just mean — you're not always the most immediately approachable person. No offense."

"Significant offense."

"I'm just saying that there might be a more—"

"I gave him a card," Jason said. "He took it."

"He took it," Dick repeated.

"He took it and he listened to me. He didn't love it, he pushed back, but he listened." Jason turned the memory over, examining it. "I think — he's in a situation where he's trying to handle everything himself because he doesn't know who to trust, and I think part of him knows that's not sustainable, and I think the card was — he took it as an option. Not a commitment."

"So he might use it," Tim said.

"Or he might not, and we need to be ready to find him either way." Jason looked at Bruce. "Can we track him from the transit signature?"

"Potentially," Bruce said. "If his physiology has any unusual qualities — energy output, specific genetic markers in his biological residue — we can cross-reference the transit signature with environmental sensor data across Gotham. The city has significant surveillance infrastructure." He paused. "Most of it ours."

"Most of it," Jason agreed. "Some of it GCPD."

"We have access to GCPD feeds."

"Legally?"

Bruce looked at him.

"I just like to ask sometimes," Jason said. "Keeps things interesting."

"I'll run a city-wide visual analysis," Tim said, already typing. "If he's still in Gotham — still flying, still in the suit — we should be able to locate him. If he's gone to ground..." He shook his head. "Then we wait for him to use the card, or we find another approach."

"He'll stay in Gotham," Jason said.

Everyone looked at him again.

"I just—" He thought about the face. The voice. The boy who had flown northeast without a real destination, who had been moving away from help rather than toward something specific. "He'll stay close to where he arrived. Because going further away feels like giving up on the idea of getting back. He'll stay close."

A beat of silence.

"That's good reasoning," Dick said, and this time there was no fraternal dig in it.

"I know this neighborhood," Jason said simply.

He looked at the display — Gotham's city map, overlaid with Tim's sensor data, with the marked coordinates of the transit point in Crime Alley. The city spread outward in all its complicated geography: the Narrows, Robinson Park, Old Gotham with its gargoyles and Gothic bones, the waterfront, the bridges.

Somewhere out there, a kid from somewhere else was sitting on a rooftop, or in an alley, or on a gargoyle — Jason would not have been entirely surprised by the gargoyle option, it was the kind of place that would appeal to someone trained to find high ground — and trying to hold himself together long enough to figure out what came next.

"We'll find him," Bruce said. Again. The second time was for different reasons than the first — the first had been operational, the second was something more.

"Yeah," Jason said.

He stood up and moved to the secondary console, pulling up his own interface, starting his own threads of analysis. Somewhere in Gotham's vast surveillance architecture — the cameras and the sensors and the watching dark eyes of the city — there would be a record of where Invincible had gone.

He was going to find it.

It was Tim who found him first.

Forty-seven minutes into the search, Tim's third sensor array pulled a hit from one of the older cameras in the East End — a partial image, partially obscured by a water tower, of a figure in a distinctive torn suit sitting behind a gargoyle on the facade of Gotham's old city hall building. The image was low-resolution and partially blocked, but the suit was identifiable, and the set of the shoulders, and the face — turned slightly upward, looking at nothing specific, just looking.

"There," Tim said.

They all looked at the image.

Jason had called it right. Gargoyle.

"He's not moving," Dick observed.

"Resting," Jason said. "Or the concussion is worse than I thought."

"The concussion?" Bruce said sharply.

"He took hits to the head. The way he was moving in the alley — there was a moment where his balance was off. It could just be the ribs, but I thought concussion was possible."

Bruce's expression did something complicated. "If it's a significant concussion, he might not be safe to fly. He might not be capable of making good decisions about accepting help."

"We need to go to him," Damian said, with the directness that cut through the way everyone else was circling the point.

"Carefully," Dick said. "If he's already refused help once, showing up in force is going to—"

"I'll go," Jason said.

Everyone looked at him.

"He talked to me," Jason said. "He didn't attack me, he didn't run immediately — he stayed, he listened, he took the card. That's more than he'd have given most people." He spread his hands. "Let me try again. Just me, no one else. If it doesn't work, we go to the next option."

Bruce held his gaze for a moment.

"Don't push too hard," he said finally. "He needs to be able to make a genuine choice."

"I know," Jason said. And then, because this was a truth Bruce needed to hear: "I know because you gave me the same option, eventually. It took a while. But you left it open."

Bruce said nothing. But something in his face settled in a way that Jason recognized as the closest Bruce usually got to saying I know, and I'm glad.

Jason went to get his helmet.

The roof of old city hall was twenty-three stories up and accessible, if you knew Gotham well enough, by a maintenance staircase on the building's north side. Jason knew Gotham well enough. He'd been climbing things in this city since he was twelve years old, and he'd been making a specific study of the East End since he'd come back to it as Red Hood. He knew this building's skeleton, its access points, its quirks.

He came up through the maintenance hatch and crossed the roof quietly, no announcement. There was a faint glow from the city below — Gotham's particular amber-orange nighttime ambience, the light of millions of lives — and the stars above were largely invisible through the light pollution, which Jason had always found faintly melancholy.

He could see the gargoyle from here. The figure behind it.

He sat down on a ventilation unit about twenty feet away and said, conversationally: "It's just me."

A pause.

"I know," Invincible said, from behind the gargoyle. "I heard you on the stairs."

"Oh." Jason looked at his maintenance hatch. "I was going for quiet."

"You were quiet." A pause. "I just hear really well."

"Useful."

"Sometimes." Another pause. The figure shifted slightly and came around the gargoyle — moving carefully, Jason noted, and his assessment of the ribs and clavicle sharpened. Sitting still had not improved things, maybe. "How did you find me?"

"Cameras," Jason said honestly. "My team runs a city-wide network. I told them to look for you."

Invincible settled onto the roof, sitting with his back against the gargoyle's base, and looked at him. His face was — something. Tired. But the fraying quality from earlier was different now, changed. He'd had time. He'd sat with it, processed something, put himself back together in whatever way people like him put themselves back together.

"Your team," he said.

"Yeah." Jason gestured vaguely downward. "They're watching. I asked them to let me do this part."

"How many people are on this team?"

"Right now? Four, plus support. Maybe more, depending on how you count."

Invincible looked at him steadily. "And they want to find me because...?"

"Because I told them what happened and they decided it mattered." Jason met his gaze. "That's kind of how we work. Someone needs help, we help. Even if they say they don't need it."

"Especially if," Invincible said, flatly.

"Yeah. Especially if." Jason kept his voice level. "You're hurt and stranded on a world you don't know. Whatever you think about whether you need help, you're in a situation where help is objectively applicable."

"Objectively applicable," Invincible repeated, with something that was almost amusement.

"I've been told I have an unusual communication style."

The almost-amusement faded. Invincible looked out over the Gotham skyline — the dark towers, the distant glow of the financial district, the complicated shadows of the older neighborhoods. "Your team. They know about dimensional transit? About parallel worlds?"

"We've dealt with it before." Jason paused. "Not exactly like this. But enough that we have resources. People who know this field."

"People who might know how to open a portal back."

"People who might be able to help figure out how," Jason said carefully. "I don't want to promise something and then not deliver it. But the people I know, the people I'm connected to — they're serious, and they're smart, and they're not going to leave you here if there's any way to get you home."

Invincible was quiet for a long moment.

"Why?" he said finally.

"Why what?"

"Why does it matter to you? You don't know me. I showed up in your city hurt and confused and I refused your help and flew away. Why does it matter?"

Jason considered several answers. He discarded most of them — too much, too personal, not the right register. He landed on the simplest version of the true one.

"Because you came out of that transit and landed in Crime Alley," he said. "And I know what it means to land in Crime Alley with nothing and need someone to give a damn."

The quality of the silence changed.

Invincible looked at him for a long time. His face was hard to read — he was good at the controlled thing, the not-showing-it thing — but Jason was very specifically good at reading faces under control, and what he saw was something unguarded and genuine making a tentative appearance.

"Mark," the boy said. "My real name's Mark."

Jason nodded. "Jason."

"I know." Something moved across Mark's face. "You said Jason when — you didn't say Jason. But the card. The name on the emergency frequency." He gestured vaguely. "I was looking at it."

Jason glanced at the card, which Mark still had in his hand, fingers curled loosely around it. "We use the same comm infrastructure."

"So your name is Jason."

"Jason Todd," Jason said. "Yeah."

Mark looked at the card. Then up at him. Something in his expression made a decision Jason couldn't entirely read, but which felt — significant. Like something being set down that had been heavy to carry.

"Okay," Mark said. "Tell me about your team."

Jason took a slow breath.

"Okay," he said. "So. This is going to take a minute."

Back in the cave, the remaining members of the family watched the camera feed from the old city hall roof — the figures of Jason and Mark, small and distant, sitting on either side of the gargoyle, Jason talking, Mark listening and occasionally responding.

"He's talking," Tim said. With the air of someone who had assigned this a probability and was watching the probability come true.

"He is," Dick agreed.

"Jason," Damian said, and then stopped.

Dick looked at him. "What?"

"Jason is—" Damian seemed to be working with the precision of someone choosing words carefully. "Jason is good at this. Specifically. This particular situation."

"Yeah," Dick said quietly. "He is."

Bruce stood slightly apart from them, looking at the feed. His face was still in the way it was when he was processing something.

"Get me Barry Allen," he said. "And Cisco Ramon if he's available. And I want a full analysis of that transit signature in front of me within the hour."

"On it," Tim said.

Bruce looked at the feed a moment longer. Two figures on a Gotham rooftop, one of them talking, one of them listening. Both of them, in their specific ways, people who had landed somewhere they hadn't meant to be and had to find a way forward from it.

He turned back to the console.

There was work to do.

On the roof of old city hall, Jason talked and Mark listened. The city turned slowly below them, all its million lights and its dark histories and its complicated ongoing project of existing against significant odds.

Mark learned about a team. About a family that wasn't exactly a family but was, in the way that actually counted. About a man in a cave who had decided that the work of protecting people was worth doing even when it cost everything, and who had built something around that decision, and who would — Jason said it without inflection, which somehow made it land harder than emphasis would have — use every resource he had to help someone who'd been pulled out of their world through no fault of their own.

Jason didn't make it a speech. He just talked, direct and practical, about what they had and what they could do and what the realistic possibilities were.

Mark listened. He sat with his back against a gargoyle on a Gotham rooftop, on a world he'd arrived at through a dimensional tear in the middle of a fight, hurt and alone and angry in the deep quiet way that didn't have anywhere to go yet, and he listened.

And when Jason had finished, he held the card out — the black card with the bat symbol — and looked at it.

"This guy," he said. "This Batman."

"Yeah."

"He's good?"

Jason paused. "He's the best I know," he said, and he said it without any of the complicated weight the history behind the statement might have suggested, just plainly. "He'll help if he can. And if he says he can — he can."

Mark looked at the card.

He thought about his mom.

He thought about home.

"Okay," he said.

He let Jason lead him off the rooftop and into whatever came next.

Chapter Text

BEFORE GOTHAM

Another thing about Angstrom Levy was that he had never stopped being right.

That was the part that made Mark's stomach turn when he let himself think about it clearly, without the defensive layer of anger that was easier to live inside. Angstrom Levy had been right about almost everything he believed, at least in the abstract. The multiverse was real. There were alternate versions of Earth — infinite ones, stacked against each other in configurations that the human brain wasn't really built to comprehend. On many of those Earths, children suffered. Specifically, many of those children suffered because of people with power, because of the grinding machinery of circumstances that powerful people could, if they chose, actually fix.

Angstrom Levy had wanted to fix it. That was where he'd started.

The trouble — the always-present trouble, the thing that had seeded everything that came after — was Nolan Grayson. Omni-Man. Mark's father, who had gone to Angstrom's convergence site and done what Omni-Man did, which was to treat problems that could be solved with overwhelming force as invitations to use overwhelming force. Nolan hadn't stopped to ask what was happening. Hadn't assessed the situation as something other than a threat. Had walked in and in the space of minutes turned a man with a genuine moral vision into something that wore the ruins of that vision like a mask over a wound that would never, ever close.

Mark had not been there.

He'd been a kid when it happened — still new to the suit, still learning what he was, still in the thrilling and terrifying early months of being Invincible. He hadn't known about Angstrom's convergence. Hadn't known what his father had done until Angstrom had come back, changed, monstrous in his own way, and decided that the person who owed the debt was the one still alive to collect it.

This was the shape of the thing, when Mark let himself look at it straight on: his father had created Angstrom Levy. Not entirely — Angstrom had made choices, had done things that could not be laid at Nolan's feet, had crossed lines that were his own to cross. But the foundation of it, the original wound, was Nolan. Was a Viltrumite's casual disregard for whatever got in his way.

Which meant, at a certain uncomfortable angle, that Mark's existence was part of the problem. Being Nolan's son. Carrying the name. Wearing the family face.

Angstrom had said that to him, the first time they'd met in real combat. He'd said it in the specific way someone says a thing they've held for a long time and finally, at last, are letting go of — not to release it but to weaponize it.

You are your father's son. Like a verdict. Like a sentence.

Mark had been working on his rebuttal ever since.

The events that precipitated the fight had begun, as many things in Mark's life began, with a phone call.

Cecil Stedman called on a Tuesday morning in late October, which was a thing Cecil did with the frequency of someone who had decided that Mark's time was a resource belonging partially to the government. Mark had been eating cereal. He had a morning class in forty-five minutes. He was very specifically trying to have a normal Tuesday, the kind that didn't require him to fly at supersonic speeds toward an emergency, the kind where the biggest problem was a lukewarm bowl of cereal and a professor with a policy about late arrivals.

"I need you in Chicago," Cecil said.

"Good morning to you too, Cecil."

"There have been three incidents in the last five days that match Angstrom Levy's signature methodology. Dimensional distortions, targeted, in populated areas. No casualties yet, but the escalation pattern—"

"I have class."

"Mark."

"I know," Mark said, setting down his spoon. "I know. Give me the coordinates."

The first two incidents had been, in hindsight, reconnaissance. Mark understood that now, looking back at them from the other side of the portal. Angstrom had not been trying to do anything in those moments — had been testing, calibrating, measuring. The third incident was the one that went active: a dimensional rift opening in downtown Chicago at 2:47 PM on a Wednesday, Angstrom Levy stepping through it in the middle of a crowded intersection with a look on his face that Mark had learned, over the course of their history, to categorize as resolved.

The resolved look was the worst one. The grieving look, the screaming look — those were terrible in their ways, but they had vectors, they had energy that could be read and anticipated. The resolved look meant Angstrom had stopped being emotional about something and started being mechanical about it, which meant he'd run through his grief and his rage and come out the other side into something colder and more purposeful.

Mark had arrived at the scene forty seconds after Cecil's alert. Which, by any reasonable standard, was fast.

He'd found Angstrom standing in the middle of an intersection that had been cleared by the shockwave of his arrival — cars pushed aside, civilians scattered, a bubble of empty space around the man who stood at its center with his hands at his sides.

"Grayson," Angstrom said.

"Levy," Mark said. "You want to tell me what the test runs were for? Because the pattern Cecil's team identified was—"

"I wasn't testing your response time," Angstrom said. "I was calibrating the device." He lifted his left wrist slightly. The mechanism there — modified from his original design, clearly, heavier and more complex — glinted in the afternoon light. "It needed to be precise. It needs to be precise now."

"What are you trying to do?"

Angstrom looked at him. And in his eyes — in the landscape of scar tissue that was his face, which Nolan's hands had made — there was the resolved thing, yes, but underneath it something else. Something that Mark had not seen in Angstrom before, or if he had seen it had not properly identified.

It looked, at a certain uncomfortable angle, like grief that had aged into something practical.

"I'm tired," Angstrom said. "That's what I'm trying to do. I'm tired, and I've been patient, and I've tried every version of this that I have access to, and now I'm trying this version."

Mark understood, in the flat precise way you understand something that you wish you didn't: "You're going to try to kill me."

"No," Angstrom said. "I've tried that. I know how those timelines end." He looked at the device on his wrist. "I'm going to try something different."

The fight had started then.

It was, as Mark would later try to explain, a fight of the kind that could only happen between two specific people with their specific history — not clean, not tactical, layered with everything they knew about each other and everything they couldn't stop knowing and everything that had been said and done and couldn't be unsaid or undone. Angstrom fought with his dimensional rifts as always, opening portals to redirect Mark's strikes and create openings for his own, and Mark fought with the accumulated experience of having done this before, knowing the patterns, knowing how to account for the rifts.

Forty-seven minutes.

It had lasted forty-seven minutes, which was long. Mark's ribs had started complaining around minute twenty and had escalated steadily through the remaining time. His clavicle had become an issue around minute thirty-five when Angstrom had caught him with a strike that was redirected through a rift at an angle that a normal approach wouldn't have been able to land. The head hits had accumulated. The suit had deteriorated.

And then the feint. The modified mechanism on the wrist. The rift that opened inside his guard, pressed up against him like a hand, and the overwhelming sensation of being grabbed.

Not again, not like this, I just want to go home—

And then: gone.

That was the shape of it. That was the backstory. The full version, the one with all its weight and history intact.

The version Mark Grayson told Jason Todd on the roof of old city hall was significantly shorter, and left out a number of things.

The sky over Gotham had settled into a proper night by the time Mark started talking.

It was a specific quality of dark that he didn't entirely recognize — back home, city skies had their own light, that orange-amber glow of millions of watts burning upward into the atmosphere. Gotham had that too, but differently. Darker in the shadows between lights, somehow. More deliberate about it, as though the city had architectural opinions about the dark and had designed accordingly.

Mark sat with his back against the gargoyle's stone base and looked at the skyline and talked.

"There's a guy," he said. "Where I'm from. He's got the ability to open portals between dimensions. He's done it before — used it as a weapon, used it to travel, the whole thing. He's been — we have a history." He paused, choosing words. "He blames me — my family — for something. Something that happened to him. And we've fought before. Multiple times."

Jason was sitting on the ventilation unit six or seven feet away, helmet in his lap, arms loosely crossed. Not taking notes. Not making sounds of acknowledgment or encouragement. Just — present, in the specific way that Mark had clocked as being different from passivity. Active listening. The kind that noticed things.

"So he came at you again," Jason said.

"He came at me again. With a — he'd modified his device somehow. Whatever he usually uses to open portals. The version he was using this time, when it grabbed me, it felt deeper than usual. Like it went further." Mark looked at his hands. The knuckle he'd split on Angstrom's chest-plate had finished bleeding but the dried blood was still there, a dark stain in the creases of his fingers. "I don't know the technical specifics. I'm not — that's not my department. I fight. I leave the technical specifics to other people."

"Other people," Jason said. "You have a team?"

"Yeah." Vague. True but vague. "I work with people. Not going to go into the whole structure of it right now."

Jason didn't push. Mark noted that and filed it — the way Jason consistently declined to push, leaving space, not filling silence with follow-up questions. It was either very good social instinct or deliberate technique, and given everything else about Jason Todd, Mark suspected it was both.

"How long were you fighting before he sent you through?"

"About forty-five minutes." Mark rolled his shoulder — his left one, the compromised one — and stopped when it reminded him why he'd been holding it carefully. "He's hard to pin down. The portals make it difficult to land a clean hit. Every time I think I have him, he opens a rift and redirects and I'm off-balance and he uses the opening." He paused. "He's done it enough times that he knows my patterns."

"He said that?"

"He said it, yeah. Said he had access to — other timelines. Other versions of the fight. That he'd studied every version where he lost."

Jason was quiet for a moment. "That's a terrifying tactical advantage."

"I know." The understatement was considerable. "So the fight was long, and by the end of it I'd taken some hits, and then he used the modified device and it sent me here. And the transit felt wrong from the start — deeper, further, not like his usual — and I came out over your city and didn't know where I was."

"And landed in Crime Alley."

"And landed in Crime Alley," Mark agreed, "because it was quiet and I needed a minute."

Jason looked at him steadily. "What's your background? I'm asking because you move like someone who's been trained. The way you tracked the exit angles when I came down off the fire escape, the way you held your ground without escalating — that's not self-taught."

Mark considered the question. "I've had training. Some formal, some — circumstantial. I've been doing this for a few years."

"Doing what, specifically?"

"Superhero stuff." He felt the inadequacy of that answer even as he said it. "Protecting people. Responding to threats. The usual."

"The usual," Jason repeated, with a faint quality that might have been amusement. "What's your power set? If we're going to help you, it's useful to know what we're working with."

And here was the moment. The specific moment Mark had been aware was coming since he'd agreed to come down off the gargoyle and talk to this person. The moment where the question of how much do I tell him stopped being theoretical and became immediate.

He didn't know Jason Todd. He knew the name Red Hood the way you knew names in the abstract — registered in some briefing somewhere, or almost-registered, the half-familiar quality of someone whose existence had been referenced at the edge of something he'd been told about once. He didn't know the person. He didn't know whose side he was on, in the deep sense — not just the question of villain-or-hero but the more complicated question of what this person's priorities were, what they would do with information, who they would share it with.

He was on a world he didn't know. He was injured. He was, in the most fundamental sense, vulnerable in a way he was not used to being and was not comfortable with.

And Jason was looking at him with that steady brown-eyed attention, waiting, and the question was still in the air between them.

"I fly," Mark said. "I'm tougher than a normal person. I can take hits."

Jason nodded. A neutral nod, accepting the answer as the answer being offered rather than as a complete answer. "Like — bulletproof? More than that?"

"I've never been shot, so I genuinely don't know the exact specs on that." He paused. "More than that, probably."

"Okay." Jason didn't push. "The shoulder — that's a fracture?"

"Clavicle, probably. And the ribs are cracked. Two, maybe three." Mark looked at his hands again. "I heal faster than normal. Not immediately, not like some people have, but faster. If I can sleep and not take any more hits in the next twenty-four hours, the ribs will probably be significantly better."

"And the concussion?"

Mark looked at him sharply.

"I've had concussions," Jason said. "I know what they look like from the outside. The balance compensation, the way you're holding your head — slightly forward, slightly down, which is what you do when the ambient light is too bright." He nodded toward Gotham's skyline. "You've been squinting at that since we sat down."

"The lights are bright," Mark said, which was not a lie. "Gotham has a lot of lights."

"Gotham has exactly the same number of lights as last week," Jason said. "Which you wouldn't know because you've never been here. But the principle stands."

Mark looked at him.

Jason looked back.

"Yeah," Mark said, after a moment. "Concussion. It's been fading."

"How many today?"

"First one." Which was not entirely true — he'd had a couple of ding-and-recover situations during the fight — but this was the first one that was behaving like an actual concussion rather than a brief disruption. "I'm fine."

"You keep saying that."

"It keeps being the answer I have."

Jason almost smiled. It was a very small thing — a slight shift in the corner of his mouth, quickly controlled — but it was there. "Okay. So. You fight, you fly, you're durable. The person you were fighting — Angstrom — he opened the portal and you ended up here. What were you fighting about, specifically? What set this particular fight off?"

And here was the second moment. The other place where the vagueness had to be maintained.

Because the answer — the real answer, the one Mark carried — was: My father. My father who was a Viltrumite sleeper agent sent to Earth to conquer it, who killed thousands of people in the process of revealing himself, who tried to kill me when I refused to join him, who then left for space and left behind the wreckage of everything he'd done, and whose actions directly created the monster who sent me here.

That was the answer.

But saying it out loud to a stranger on a rooftop in a city he'd never been to meant exposing things that were — not secrets, exactly, not anymore, it had all come out — but personal. Family. The specific combination of shame and grief and complicated love that was the Nolan Grayson situation, which was something Mark had learned to manage privately because managing it in public was too exhausting.

So he said: "History. Old stuff. His problem is with my family more than with me personally, but I'm the one still — present. So he came at me."

"Your family."

"My dad." Flat. Factual. Leaving the door closed.

Jason's expression did something that Mark couldn't quite read. Not pushing against the closed door, but — registering it. Noting it.

"Is your dad—" He stopped. Started over. "Is this a situation where your family's history is something I need to know to help you, or just context?"

"Just context," Mark said. "The important thing is the portal and how to get back through it. Not the reason the portal happened."

"Okay," Jason said. Simply. No argument.

Mark breathed. The ribs commented on it, which was becoming a sort of rhythmic annoyance — every third breath landing a little wrong, a little sharp. He'd learned to breathe shallowly enough to manage it, but there was something about sitting in the cold night air on a strange world that made him want to breathe deeply, the way you did when you were overwhelmed, the full-lung press of trying to oxygenate your way out of something.

He didn't.

"You said your team can help," he said. "Tell me more about that."

And Jason had told him — the overview, the structure, the relevant capabilities. The man in the cave, the family around him, the connections to people who knew about dimensional mechanics. Mark had listened with one part of his brain while another part ran its own separate thread, cataloguing what he was being told and what it implied and what it didn't say.

A family. That was the shape of what Jason described, even if he didn't use the word frequently. People who had been brought together around a shared project — the city, the work — and who had, in the process, become something more than colleagues. The dynamics Jason described between himself and the others had a specific texture to them, a history and friction and occasional exasperation that was unmistakably familial.

Mark thought about his own family. His mom. Cecil's organization, which was not a family in any warm sense but was a structure. The Guardians. Eve.

He thought about Eve.

"You said Batman," Mark said, interrupting something Jason was in the middle of.

Jason stopped. "Yeah."

"Batman is real here."

"Very much so."

Mark absorbed this. "Okay. What's he actually like? Not the reputation, the actual person."

Jason was quiet for a moment, which was itself an answer. "He's — " He turned his helmet over in his hands once, a slow rotation. "He's the most capable person I know. And I don't say that easily because I know some people who are — he's capable in ways that aren't about power or strength or any physical attribute. He's capable in the way that someone is when they've decided that being capable is the only thing they're going to be and they've spent their entire life on that decision."

"That sounds exhausting."

"It is," Jason said. "He is. Being around him is exhausting." He paused. "He's also—" another pause, shorter— "he'll help you. If he says he's going to do something, he does it. I know that's the thing everyone says about everyone who's supposedly reliable, but with him it's — I've tested it, in various ways, and it's consistently true."

"You've tested it."

"I was not an easy person to have around for a while," Jason said, with a completeness of understatement that Mark found oddly resonant. "We had a rough stretch. I did things he disagreed with. Fundamental disagreements. And he still—" He stopped again. Something was moving across his face, controlled but visible to someone who had been watching his face carefully for the last hour. "He still left the door open. He could have shut me out and had principled reasons for it. He didn't."

Mark looked at him.

"The others are easier," Jason said, and something in his voice lightened. "Dick is — Dick is probably the opposite of me in temperament. He's the kind of person who finds a way to see the best version of whatever's in front of him, which is occasionally irritating and is also genuinely useful. Tim is smart — aggressively, almost alarmingly smart — and he will want to ask you a lot of questions about the dimensional mechanics of where you came from, which you should be prepared for."

"How many questions?"

"Set aside a few hours," Jason said.

Mark found himself almost smiling. Almost.

"Damian," Jason continued, "is — Damian is young and he's very precise and he does not suffer what he perceives as stupidity or unnecessary caution. He'll have an assessment of you within about thirty seconds of meeting you and he'll share it without being asked." He paused. "He's usually right, which is the annoying part."

"How young?"

"Fourteen, fifteen. Somewhere in there."

Mark blinked. "He's — "

"Don't let the age be the thing you focus on," Jason said. "Just don't."

"Okay."

They sat for a moment in something that was almost, tentatively, the beginning of a comfortable silence. The kind that had some ease in it.

Then Jason said, carefully: "Can I ask you something? And you can tell me it's none of my business."

Mark looked at him sideways.

"The fight with Angstrom," Jason said. "Forty-five minutes. You said he knows your patterns — he's studied timelines where he lost. But you were still fighting him. Still going." He paused. "You took three cracked ribs and a fractured clavicle and a concussion and you kept going for forty-five minutes. What's that like?"

"What's what like?"

"Getting hurt like that and not stopping."

Mark opened his mouth. Closed it. The question was — it was too specific. Too direct. It was aimed at something that wasn't the fight.

"I've had worse," he said. It was true. It was also, he recognized even as he said it, not the answer to the question Jason had asked.

"I know," Jason said. "That's what I'm asking about. The having had worse." He kept his voice entirely even, no pressure in it. "I'm not asking to pry. I'm asking because — the way you held yourself in the alley. The way you were holding the ribs and the shoulder and doing the breathing thing — I know that thing. Where you stop breathing all the way in because you've learned to manage the pain by keeping your lung capacity smaller. That's not something you develop from one fight."

Mark looked at him.

He was very aware, in this moment, of exactly how much this person had read from watching him in an alley for four minutes. He was also very aware — and this was the thing that was harder to account for — that none of it felt intrusive. The reading was accurate and it was precise but it didn't have the quality of someone picking at a wound. It had the quality of someone who had seen the wound before, from the inside.

"No," Mark said. "It's not."

"You've been doing this a while."

"About three years."

"Starting young," Jason said. Not a judgment. An observation.

"Seventeen," Mark said. And then, because something in the honest quality of this person's attention was making it difficult to be evasive in the usual ways: "Some of the early stuff was — I was figuring out what I was capable of. Which meant I sometimes found the ceiling the hard way."

"The hard way," Jason repeated. Quietly.

"Yeah." Mark looked at Gotham's skyline. "I don't love talking about it."

"You don't have to," Jason said immediately.

Which was, of course, the thing that made it harder to not talk about it. Mark had an extensive internal catalogue of the ways people pushed you toward disclosure — the persistent questioners, the concerned faces, the carefully timed silences — and he had responses calibrated for all of them. What he didn't have a calibrated response for was someone who consistently, immediately, without any visible effort, simply backed off when he said he wasn't comfortable.

Because it turned out that someone backing off completely was its own kind of pull. It left a space that his own voice wanted to fill, which was somehow more dangerous than the pushing.

"My first real fight," Mark said, and stopped.

"You don't—" Jason started.

"I know. I'm choosing to." Mark breathed, carefully. "My first real fight — the first one that was actually serious — I didn't know what I was going up against. And I got hurt badly. Not — I didn't die, obviously, but the kind of bad where you spend a week in a hospital bed wondering if some of the things the doctors are saying about your recovery are going to turn out to be true or not. I was seventeen."

Jason said nothing.

"And the thing was," Mark continued, and he didn't know entirely why he was continuing, except that the night and the gargoyle and the strange removed quality of being on a world that wasn't his own made it feel like something that happened in a different context, something with less weight on it, "the thing was that I went back the next time. As soon as I could move properly. Not because I had to — nobody made me. I went back because." He stopped. "I don't know, exactly. Because it felt like the only way to — to make it mean something. The getting hurt. If I stopped after getting hurt badly, then what was it for?"

"So you kept going," Jason said.

"I kept going."

"And the next time you got hurt badly, you thought the same thing."

Mark looked at him.

"And the time after that," Jason said.

"Yeah," Mark said, after a moment. "Pretty much."

Jason looked at his helmet. "I know a few things about that," he said, and the very flatness of it — no elaboration, no invitation, just: yes, this is something I know about from the inside — was more communicative than a detailed explanation would have been.

Mark looked at him. Looked at the scar that was partially visible at the edge of the domino mask, curving from somewhere near his temple down toward his jaw. Looked at the way he held himself — not with a soldier's rigidity but with something that was integrated deeper, the body's own memory of having learned to be ready.

"You're younger than you seem," Mark said.

Jason looked up at him, something briefly unguarded in his expression. "What?"

"When you're talking about Batman and the others. The way you talk about history, how long things have been going on — you sound older. But you can't be that much older than me."

A pause. "Twenty-three," Jason said.

"I'm nineteen."

Another pause. Something shifted in Jason's face — the calculation of it, the four years and what they contained.

"You're doing pretty well for nineteen," he said.

"I don't know if that's a compliment or a condolence," Mark said.

"Both," Jason said honestly.

And that, unexpectedly, was the thing that almost got him. The honest both of it. Because it was right — it was the exact correct answer, the one that acknowledged the contradiction instead of papering over it — and the accuracy of it pressed against something in Mark's chest that was adjacent to the thing he'd been managing since he'd come through the portal.

He made himself look away. Back at the skyline. Back at Gotham's dark towers and amber-lit windows and the complicated geography of a city that wasn't his and wasn't home.

"The fight today," he said, and his voice came out more controlled than he expected, which was something. "Before the portal. He said — he said he'd been patient. That he'd tried every version of this he had access to. That he was tired."

"You mentioned that."

"What I didn't mention—" Mark stopped. Looked at the dried blood on his knuckle. "He didn't look like he was trying to win. When the fight started. He looked like someone who had already accepted a particular outcome and was just — executing the last step."

Jason was still.

"Like it wasn't about beating me," Mark said. "Or even killing me. Like he'd moved past all of that into something else. Something that looked a lot like getting rid of a problem permanently." He paused. "And I'm sitting here thinking: that's what I am to him. Not an enemy. A problem. Something to be solved and filed and never thought about again."

He had not meant to say that. He had specifically not meant to say that, and yet here it was, out in the night air between them, and there was nothing to do about it now except sit with the fact that he had said it to someone he didn't trust yet, which was—

"That's a terrible thing to be to someone," Jason said, interrupting Mark’s inner thoughts.

Very quietly. Very simply.

"Yeah," Mark said.

"And you've been — since you got here, however long that's been, you've been carrying that."

Mark said nothing.

"While also being hurt and alone in an unfamiliar city," Jason said. Still quiet. "And trying to figure out if you can trust me."

"I still don't know if I can trust you," Mark said, which was honest and also defensive.

"I know." No offense in it. "That's okay."

Mark looked at him. The honest simplicity of the response — the complete absence of any push or appeal — was doing that thing again, where the not-pushing created more space than pushing would have.

He was tired. He was genuinely, deeply tired, the kind that lived under the physical exhaustion and was about something more fundamental. He'd been managing this since the portal, keeping it at a functional distance, using the operational requirements of the situation — find help, orient yourself, gather information — to stay above the waterline. But it was late now and he was on a gargoyle and his ribs hurt and the concussion was still singing its low quiet song in the back of his skull, and somewhere back on his world, across whatever distance separated them—

His mother didn't know where he was.

That thought arrived with a clarity and a weight that cut through all the management.

His mother. Debbie Grayson, who had already lived through one version of the world rearranging itself around her without her consent when Nolan's truth came out. Who had rebuilt herself on the other side of that, not easily but genuinely, and who loved Mark with the specific fierce practicality of a woman who had learned that loving someone completely was both the most dangerous and the most necessary thing a person could do.

She didn't know where he was.

She would know that something had happened. She would know because the Guardians would have arrived at the fight scene and found him gone and someone would have made that call, would have used that voice, and she would have received it and understood what it meant. She was smart and she had been through enough to know exactly what an absence like this could mean.

Mark turned away from Jason.

He pressed his knuckles against the gargoyle's stone base and breathed. One breath. Two. The sharp edge of the third one, which he'd been managing for hours, caught him differently this time — not just the ribs, but something else, something that was riding the physical pain like a current.

He breathed again.

He was fine.

He was—

"Hey," Jason said.

And the gentleness of it was somehow the worst thing. It was the same word he'd used in the alley, in that same low careful register, and Mark recognized it this time for what it was — someone who had learned, specifically, the exact tone of voice that was most useful for someone who was about to lose the grip on themselves.

"Don't," Mark said. His voice came out wrong. Too rough. "I'm fine."

"Mark."

"I said I'm fine."

He stood up. Too fast — the movement pulled at the ribs and the head-ringing spiked briefly and he put a hand out to the gargoyle to steady himself, which was humiliating, which was not the kind of thing he wanted to demonstrate in front of anyone let alone someone whose assessment of him he was already concerned about.

"I don't need—" he started.

"I'm not doing anything," Jason said. He'd stood too, but he was keeping his distance, hands loose at his sides. "I'm just here."

"I don't need you to just be here." Mark heard his own voice and it had the quality it got sometimes, the edge that came when the management was slipping — not grief, not exactly, but the thing that lived next to grief, that had the same face. "I don't need any of this. I don't need a stranger on a rooftop being — being kind, I need someone to tell me how to get home. That's what I need. That's the only thing that's relevant right now."

"I know," Jason said.

"And everyone back there doesn't know where I am and my mom doesn't know where I am and Angstrom is just—" he pressed his free hand against his sternum, which was not useful but was something to push against— "he just solved his problem and went home, and I'm here on this world that isn't mine with a fractured clavicle trying to have a conversation with someone I don't know about the mechanics of dimensional transit and I'm so—"

He stopped.

"Angry," Jason said softly.

"Yeah," Mark said, and it came out with a lot more force than he'd intended, and the force of it was the final pull on something that had been under tension for a long time.

"Angry," he said again, and that was the whole sentence, and inside that sentence was forty-seven minutes of a fight with someone who should never have been a problem, who should never have been turned into what he was, who was turned into what he was by Mark's father's hands and Mark's father's casual violence and the whole long legacy of the Grayson family's complicated relationship with the concept of damage. Was every fight with Angstrom Levy, all the accumulated injuries and the knowledge of what had been done to start all of it. Was the portal opening inside his guard, the feeling of being grabbed, the transit tearing through dimensional barriers that weren't meant to be torn. Was landing in a city called Crime Alley, of all places, and not knowing where he was. Was this whole impossible situation.

The anger moved through him like something physical.

He looked at Jason — at the steady, careful face of this person who had been nothing but decent and perceptive and patient and who he still didn't trust, who was still a stranger, who had still — regardless of his genuine apparent decency — collected more information about Mark Grayson in the last few hours than Mark had intended to give anyone.

"I need to go," he said.

"Mark—"

"I'll use the card." His voice was back under control, barely. "I'll reach out. But right now I need to—"

He needed to not be on this rooftop.

He went up.

There was going fast, and then there was the other thing.

Jason had seen fast. He'd grown up in a world of fast — the Flash was fast, Dick Grayson was fast in his own way, there were metas in Gotham occasionally who moved quickly enough to create the sensation of things happening out of order. He understood fast as a concept.

The sound was what he wasn't prepared for.

Invincible — Mark — went up from the rooftop with no windup, no preparation, just one moment standing on the stone and the next moment gone, and the displacement was violent. Not the clean departure of someone managing their speed against their environment. A departure that was full-throttle and immediate and total, and the air rushed in to fill the space where he'd been with a crack that wasn't quite a boom but was adjacent to one, lower and more percussive.

The windows went first.

The old city hall building shuddered. One of its upper-floor windows — already old, the glass probably original to the building, imperfectly sealed in its frame — went in a single flat explosive report, the glass not shattering inward but popping out in a spray of fragments that caught the Gotham light and fell in a brief glittering cascade. Then the building across the street, its newer glass flexing and snapping in three separate panes on the upper stories, a staccato sequence that moved along the facade as the shockwave caught each one.

From further away — three blocks, maybe four — Jason heard the sound of at least one car alarm starting.

He stood on the old city hall roof and looked at where Mark had been.

The air was still moving. The minor turbulence of rapid departure rearranging itself back to equilibrium. A piece of paper that had been sitting on the ventilation unit where Jason had been perched — a wrapper, nothing important — had been knocked off and was drifting slowly, catching the light, settling.

Jason looked at it.

He looked at the broken windows.

He stood very still for a long moment, doing the mathematics.

He had, from his own experience and from the training he'd received and the database of metas and powered individuals that had been accumulated over years of this work, a fairly good general sense of what different levels of capability looked like from the outside. He could estimate acceleration and velocity from the physical effects of departure. He understood what forces were required to create what damage.

The three cracked ribs. The fractured clavicle. The concussion. The forty-five-minute fight against someone who opened dimensional portals.

And this. This departure, this going-straight-to-full-speed-from-standing, this casual demolition of the immediate acoustic environment.

He had been, he realized, significantly underestimating.

Not the broad strokes — he'd known from the beginning that Mark was powerful, had read that much from the way he moved, from the injuries it had taken to bring him to the state he was in, from the general category of what Angstrom Levy must have been to keep him occupied for forty-five minutes. He'd known that more than normal was an understatement.

But this was — this was another category. The departure of someone who, at full capacity, undamaged, not managing pain and a fractured shoulder and a concussion, would create effects that were not in the scale of the powered individuals Jason usually dealt with. This was someone whose baseline was somewhere in the range of things you called the League about. Things that made you think about geography differently.

He's been holding back, Jason thought. The whole conversation, the whole time on the roof — not lying, not performing, but genuinely and substantially editing the picture. Flying but not fast. Using strength but in a contained way. Not because he was trying to deceive but because—

Because he didn't trust him yet. Had said so explicitly. And someone who didn't trust the situation they were in and who was operating at a fraction of their usual capacity because the situation was unfamiliar was someone who was, by definition, incredibly careful about what they revealed.

He told me he fights and flies and is tougher than a normal person. The words came back, now re-examined. I've never been shot, so I genuinely don't know the exact specs on that. More than that, probably.

More than that, probably.

Jason sat back down on the ventilation unit, somewhat heavily.

His comm unit was in his left gauntlet, the device that connected him to the family's network. He activated it.

"Bruce," he said.

A pause of approximately two seconds. "I'm here. We saw the departure. Tim's trying to track him."

"You saw."

"We had the camera on the roof. We saw the windows." Another brief pause. "Jason. What is he?"

"I don't know specifically," Jason said. "But I know it's more than he told me." He looked at the drifting paper wrapper, finally settling on the rooftop floor. "He wasn't lying. He was just — selective. He doesn't trust us yet."

"Given what he's dealing with, that's reasonable."

"It is," Jason said. "And it changes the calculus. If he can do that from a standing start while injured — if that's his compromised capability — then his full operational capacity is."

He stopped. Let the silence finish the sentence.

"Yes," Bruce said. "It is."

"He's not a threat," Jason said, and was aware that he was saying it with more certainty than the evidence strictly required, which was its own kind of data. "He's not dangerous to us. He's — he's a kid who doesn't know where he is, and he's scared, and the way he's handling the scared is the way somebody handles it when they've had to handle everything alone for a long time."

"You got all of that from two conversations."

"I got some of it from two conversations and the rest from being the person who handles things alone for a long time."

A pause. Not a silence of processing, but a different kind — the kind that existed when Bruce was saying something without using words.

"Where is he now?" Jason asked.

"Tim lost him." Bruce's voice was flat. "He went north at a speed that our tracking algorithms are not calibrated for. We had him until he crossed into Old Gotham's coverage gap and then — nothing. He's not appearing on any camera system we have access to."

Jason closed his eyes briefly. "How big is the coverage gap?"

"Significant. Old Gotham has inconsistent surveillance infrastructure — historical preservation requirements limit what can be installed on certain buildings, and several of the key relay points have been down for maintenance for—"

"Bruce."

"We don't know where he is," Bruce said. "He effectively disappeared."

Jason sat with that.

The cold settled around him more fully now, with the movement of the air and the adrenaline of the departure fading. He became aware of how long he'd been out, of the way the night had fully arrived while he'd been sitting on the roof talking.

"He said he'd use the card," Jason said.

"Did you believe him?"

Jason thought about Mark's face. The moment before he'd gone up — the anger in it, and underneath the anger something that wasn't weakness but was the thing that lived adjacent to weakness, the thing that happened when you'd been managing a weight for long enough that the management itself became part of the problem. He thought about the careful editing of the story, the deliberate vagueness that was not hostility but caution. He thought about I still don't know if I can trust you, said with the honesty of someone who was naming the situation accurately rather than hiding behind it.

"I believe he wants to," Jason said. "Whether he will — that depends on what happens to him tonight."

"Then we need to find him."

"Yeah." Jason stood. "Yeah, we need to find him." He looked out at Old Gotham's skyline — the Gothic bones of it, the gargoyles on the older buildings, the places where the surveillance network had gaps. Somewhere in that complicated geography, a boy from somewhere else was flying through the dark carrying a weight that he'd been carrying alone for too long and had not yet decided he was willing to put down.

"Dick is taking the northern corridors," Bruce said. "Tim is rerouting sensor coverage where he can. Damian is redirecting his patrol route toward the eastern edge of Old Gotham."

"And me?"

"I need you to think," Bruce said. "You've talked to him. You've read him. Where does someone like him go?"

Jason thought about it. The specific parameters of the question — not where does anyone go when they need to be alone, but where does this person specifically go. What he knew: Mark went up, instinctively. He sought altitude. He found quiet places but high ones — gargoyles, rooftops, things that kept him above the street level. When he sat, he sat with his back against something solid. He faced outward. He watched the skyline.

He would go somewhere high. Somewhere with a long sightline. Somewhere that felt — not safe, because safe wasn't available, but elevated. Above the problems, even if only physically.

Old Gotham had buildings that fit that description. The Cathedral, obviously, but the Cathedral was monitored. The old clock tower, but Tim had contacts there and it was complicated. There were older buildings, though — buildings that predated the city's expansion, that had height without the associated infrastructure, that sat in the coverage gaps for exactly the reason Bruce had described. Historical preservation. No cameras permitted.

"I have some ideas," Jason said.

"Good," Bruce said. "Start with those." A pause. "Jason."

"Yeah."

"He said he'd use the card." Bruce's voice was careful. "He took it. He didn't have to take it."

"I know."

"That matters."

"I know it does," Jason said. "But it matters more if we find him before he decides not to."

He moved toward the maintenance hatch. Below him, Gotham breathed its complicated nighttime breath — the cars and the sirens, someone's music from a window too high up to identify, the distant sound of the harbor. The broken windows of the buildings around old city hall were dark rectangles in the facades, the jagged edges of the broken panes catching light when the angle was right.

He went down into the city.

He started looking.

He checked the Cathedral's spires first — quickly, from a distance, scanning with the helmet's optics, and no. He checked the water tower cluster on the east side of Old Gotham, a spot he knew from personal use, and found nothing. He checked the roof of the old Gotham Bank building, the narrow ledge above its colonnaded facade, and nothing.

He worked methodically, moving through the geography of altitude in Old Gotham, the map of it in his head built from years of moving through this city at height. He moved in the way he moved when he was searching — not patrol-pattern, which was designed for coverage, but something more instinctive, following the thread of his read on a person he'd spent two hours talking to.

High. Facing the skyline. Back against something solid.

He found nothing.

After forty minutes, he widened his search north, toward the parts of Old Gotham that abutted the older residential neighborhoods, where the buildings changed character — less civic, more domestic, the Gothic sensibility softened into ordinary Victorian and then into whatever the early twentieth century had contributed to Gotham's architectural personality.

He found nothing.

He found a man attempting to mug a woman outside a pharmacy and dealt with that briefly and efficiently and moved on.

He found an alley that smelled like a crime scene and tagged the coordinates for GCPD and moved on.

He found two teenagers doing something that was probably minor enough to leave alone on the roof of a parking structure, and left them alone, and moved on.

He did not find Mark.

At the ninety-minute mark, he checked in with Bruce.

"Tim?" he asked.

"Nothing." Tim's voice, over the comm, had the flat quality it got when he was frustrated with his own tools. "He's either staying below roofline consistently — which seems unlikely given the pattern you described — or he's in an area where we genuinely have no coverage, or he's left the city."

"He hasn't left the city," Jason said. He was certain about this in the way he was sometimes certain about things without being able to fully articulate the evidence. "He'll stay close to where he arrived."

"You said that before," Tim said. "What's the reasoning?"

"Because leaving feels like giving up," Jason said. "And he's not ready to give up."

A brief silence.

"Okay," Tim said. "Then he's in a blind spot. And I can't—" a sound of typing, fast— "I can't get coverage into those areas without physically placing sensors, and I don't have the time tonight."

"Then we stop for tonight," Bruce said, on the comm. His voice was steady. Not resigned — Bruce didn't really do resigned — but calibrated to the reality of the situation. "We know he's in the city. We know he's choosing not to be found at this moment. We've established contact. We give him the night."

"Bruce—" Jason started.

"He's not in danger," Bruce said. "Not from us, and given his apparent capability, not from Gotham's standard threat environment. He needs the night, Jason. You said yourself that he's been managing everything alone — he needs space to do that before he can accept help."

Jason stood on a rooftop in Old Gotham and looked at the city around him. Somewhere in the coverage gaps and the dark spaces and the high places of this impossible city, a boy from somewhere else was sitting with the weight of what had happened to him.

The card was in Mark's hand.

Jason had seen him close his fingers around it.

"Yeah," Jason said. "Okay. We give him the night."

He stood there a moment longer, looking at the dark skyline, at the gargoyles on the old buildings standing their silent watch.

"Dick," he said, into the comm.

"Here," Dick said, from somewhere in the northern search area.

"You can stand down."

A pause. "You sure?"

"Yeah. I'm sure." He looked at Old Gotham's rooflines one more time. "We're not going to find him tonight. Not because we're not good enough. Because he doesn't want to be found, and he's somewhere we can't reach, and—" he stopped.

"And that's okay," Dick said quietly.

"And that's okay," Jason agreed. "For now."

He turned and started back toward his own part of the city. Behind him, Gotham continued its nighttime business without him — indifferent and intricate and alive in the specific way that cities were alive at 2 AM, with all their dark corners and their people and their hundred thousand simultaneous private lives.

Somewhere in it, Mark Grayson sat alone and held a card and tried to decide.

Jason Todd went home, and sat in his apartment, and thought about a seventeen-year-old kid putting on a suit for the first time and not knowing what he was flying toward, and about what it cost to find the ceiling the hard way, and about the particular kind of tired that accumulated when you'd been handling everything alone for long enough that alone started to feel like the only option.

He thought about the broken windows. About the paper wrapper drifting. About the shape of a departure that was full-capacity and immediate and total, from someone who had been, the entire evening, trying very hard to take up exactly the amount of space he needed and not one fraction more.

He sat for a long time with those thoughts.

He didn't sleep well.

In the cave, Bruce Wayne pulled up everything he had on powered flight, on dimensional transit mechanics, on the specific frequency signatures that Tim had pulled from the Crime Alley cameras. He cross-referenced. He made calls to people who owed him — the kind of calls that got answered at 2 AM because the people being called understood the currency of what was being asked. He built a picture, carefully, with the systematic patience of someone who had made a practice of preparation.

He looked at the footage from the old city hall roof, the moment of departure. Ran the calculations he'd been running since Tim had flagged it.

He thought: This is someone who, at full capacity, belongs in a very specific category of conversation. A conversation about scale and capability and what the world looks like when someone at that level is operating inside it.

He thought: He's nineteen.

He thought about what Dick had been at nineteen. About what Jason had been. About what those years cost, and what they built, and what they required of the people who cared about the people living them.

He thought about a boy sitting alone on a rooftop on a world that wasn't his, holding a card with a bat symbol on it.

He went back to work.

The problem of getting Mark Grayson home was solvable. He was not yet sure how, but he had the shape of it, the outline of what was needed, and he had people who knew things and resources that applied and the specific kind of patience that had been built over decades of solving problems that had initially seemed unsolvable.

He would find the way.

He always found the way.

Chapter Text

The cave at 3 AM had a specific quality to it that was different from the cave at any other hour.

During the day it was a workspace — clinical, purposeful, a place where problems were brought and dissected and solved. During patrol hours it was a hub, a nerve center, something always happening at the edges of it even when the main console was quiet. But at 3 AM, when the active work was done and sleep was either not possible or not yet chosen, the cave became something else. The dark was fuller. The sound of the waterfall was louder. The bats in the upper reaches moved in slow irregular patterns that you only noticed if you'd been still long enough to look.

It was in this 3 AM quality that the family assembled.

Not formally. Bruce hadn't issued anything so structured as a summons. It had happened the way family things happened, which was by gravitational accumulation — one person came down to check something, found another already there, and the third and fourth followed in ways that were only coincidental if you didn't know how this particular family worked.

Dick was already at a secondary console when Jason came down, still in his Red Hood gear minus the helmet. Tim was cross-legged on the floor with a laptop, because Tim treated chairs as optional furniture and had for years. Damian was sitting on the stairs with his arms on his knees and his chin slightly raised, which was his posture for I am present and listening and you should all be aware that I have opinions and will be sharing them.

Stephanie had arrived with the energy she brought to everything, which was to say: immediately and without preamble, a purple cape still clasped at her throat, her Spoiler cowl pushed back on her head because she'd been in the middle of coming back from patrol when Tim's alert had hit. She was perched on the edge of one of the secondary consoles with a granola bar she'd produced from somewhere in her suit, eating it with the focused practicality of someone who had learned that food was a resource and resources were for using.

Cassandra was standing near the far wall. She did this — stood at the edge of things, in the places that were technically part of the room but offered the best sightlines, which was a habit so deeply integrated into who she was that most people stopped noticing it after the first year. She wasn't eating anything. She was watching everyone with the specific quality of attention that was Cassandra's default mode and which, if you didn't know her, could read as unsettling and which, if you did, you understood as the most complete form of listening she was capable of. Her Orphan suit was slightly dusty at the knees from something that had clearly happened on patrol and which she had apparently decided not to mention.

Duke was at the equipment table at the far end of the cave, still in his Signal suit, the amber lenses of his mask pushed up. He had a tablet in his hand and was reading something on it with the focused frown of someone who had already been gathering information before he arrived, which was Duke's habit — he showed up to conversations with research, which Jason had come to regard as one of his better qualities.

Bruce was at the main console.

Alfred had materialized a tea service on the console's edge at some point and had then removed himself from the situation entirely, which was Alfred's way of attending meetings while officially not attending them. It was a skill Jason had genuinely come to appreciate.

"Okay," Jason said, dropping into a chair. "Where are we."

"Tim lost him forty minutes ago," Dick said, without looking up from his screen. "North, into the Old Gotham coverage gap, and then nothing. He's been dark since."

"I know. Bruce told me."

"We've run two drone sweeps over the coverage gap," Tim said, the glow of his laptop screen making the shadows under his eyes more pronounced. "The resolution isn't good enough. The building density in Old Gotham is too high — the Gothic construction, the way the rooflines overlap at different heights, it creates blind corridors we can't thread the drones through without significant risk of losing the hardware."

"Tim," Jason said.

Tim looked up.

"Tell me something useful."

Tim considered this with the seriousness he applied to every request. "He's still in Gotham," he said. "Almost certainly. The departure vector from old city hall was north-northwest, which is into the city, not out of it. If he'd wanted to leave the metropolitan area entirely, east over the harbor or west through the sprawl would have been more logical — the suburban geography would have made him effectively invisible to anything we can deploy. Going north-northwest means he was heading somewhere specific within city limits."

"Which we can't find," Damian said, from the stairs, "because of the coverage gap."

"Which we can't find because of the coverage gap," Tim confirmed, without inflection.

"What did he look like?" Duke asked, from the equipment table. He wasn't looking up from the tablet. "When Red Hood talked to him. Physically. The footage is one angle in the dark — I want the direct read."

Everyone looked at Jason.

"Fractured clavicle," Jason said. "Two, maybe three cracked ribs. Concussion — real one, not a ding, he was compensating for light sensitivity the whole conversation. His suit was shredded at the left shoulder. Dried blood on his right knuckles." He paused. "He was managing all of it. The injuries and everything else. The whole conversation he was managing."

"That's a significant injury profile to be walking around on," Stephanie said, around the granola bar. "For a normal person."

"He's not a normal person," Jason said.

Stephanie looked at him. "No, clearly. I just mean — even for someone who can take those kinds of hits, that's a lot to be carrying without treatment."

"I know."

Bruce turned from the main console.

He had the look he got when he'd been running sustained analysis — not tired in the ordinary sense, because Bruce Wayne had a complicated and somewhat adversarial relationship with the concept of physical limitations, but carrying the specific quality of someone who had been thinking very hard for several consecutive hours and whose thinking had arrived somewhere significant.

"Let's establish what we know," he said.

"We know he's extraordinarily strong," Damian said, immediately. Like a student who had prepared for this exam specifically.

"We know he was holding back during the conversation on the roof," Bruce said. "Which is consistent with someone who doesn't trust their environment and is actively managing what they reveal about themselves. The departure was not tactical — it was emotional, uncontrolled — and it showed us what happens when that management fails."

"The windows," Dick said quietly.

"The windows. The acoustic displacement. The blast radius from the departure. The time between his feet leaving the roof and his disappearance from the longest-range camera we have, which I've used to calculate a minimum velocity." Bruce paused. He turned back to the console and pulled up a set of comparisons — flight speed data, force output estimates, the kind of analysis that normally lived in files marked with names that carried a certain weight. "I've been cross-referencing against our existing database of powered individuals. He's not in it. The closest analogues I have—" another pause, deliberate— "are not in the local operational category."

Dick had gone still at his console. "What category?"

Bruce looked at him. "Kryptonian-tier capability. Possibly beyond."

The silence that settled over the cave was not stunned — these were not people who stunned easily — but it had weight. It had real, physical density. Everyone in the room understood, with the immediate practical clarity of people who had worked alongside that tier of power long enough to have very specific reference points, what that comparison meant. What it meant for conversations. What it meant for plans. What it meant for the very pointed question of what happened when someone at that level was hurt and alone and under sustained emotional pressure in a city that was, by any charitable metric, aggressively unkind to people in that state.

"He's nineteen," Jason said.

"Yes," Bruce said.

"He's been operating since seventeen. Which means he has been carrying that level of capability since he was essentially a minor, and from everything I got from talking to him, he's been doing it largely without the kind of infrastructure we built specifically so none of us would have to do it alone." Jason was not looking at anyone. He was looking at a point on the cave floor. "And now he's here, injured and displaced, and he's keeping a lid on all of it. On the capability and on everything underneath it."

"Until the roof," Dick said. Very quietly.

"Until the roof."

Damian descended the remaining stairs and came to stand at the edge of the group. It was a small movement but a deliberate one — his version of committing to the conversation. "The departure was emotional, not tactical," he said, precisely echoing what Bruce had said but with a different implication attached. "Which means the lid is under significantly more pressure than he's showing. He managed to hold the conversation on the roof. He managed the presentation of himself. But the management is not stable."

"That's my read," Jason said.

"Someone under that kind of pressure, in an unfamiliar environment, with that level of capability—" Damian stopped. He chose his next words with visible precision. "He's going to find a release point. Whether he intends to or not. The only question is what form it takes."

"Which is why sitting here and waiting for him to use the card is insufficient," Bruce said. Not asking. Stating.

"I was going to say that," Damian said, with mild reproach.

"I know. I said it first." Bruce turned fully from the console. "We need to find him. The question is how we do that without making him feel pursued, which will compound the problem significantly. We need someone who can cover the Old Gotham gap faster than our drone capability allows. Someone whose presence reads as search rather than manhunt."

"Wally," Stephanie said, immediately.

Dick looked at her.

"What?" she said. "It's obviously Wally. Fastest man alive, doesn't read as threatening, Dick has his number. It's not a hard equation."

"She's right," Dick said, to Bruce.

"She is," Bruce confirmed. "I was going to suggest the same."

The proposal landed and Jason was on his feet before it had fully settled.

"No."

Everyone looked at him.

"I told him nobody was going to chase him down," Jason said. He leaned forward in the chair, elbows on knees. "I told him that coming with me was his choice. That we weren't going to crowd him. And now three hours later we're talking about deploying the Flash to run a search grid on him. I don't care what we call it — that's what it is."

"Jason," Dick said carefully.

"He explicitly said he needed space—"

"He's hurt," Dick said. "He's been alone in this city for hours with a fractured clavicle and cracked ribs and a concussion, and he's in an emotional state that Damian just described as a pressure looking for a crack." Dick's voice was quiet but it was not gentle in the easy surface way — it was the other kind of quiet, the kind that had weight behind it. "Sometimes people say they need space and what they actually need is someone who cares enough to look anyway. You know that."

The room was very still.

Jason looked at Dick. Dick didn't look away.

"He won't approach him," Jason said. It came out less like a demand and more like the beginning of a concession.

"Wally finds him," Bruce said. "Notes the location. Reports back. No contact."

"And if something happens—" Jason stopped. Reformulated. "If Mark decides to move before Wally reports back. If he does something."

"Then we're better positioned to help than we are right now," Cassandra said.

Everyone looked at her. She didn't say a great deal in group settings — not because she had nothing to say, but because she was selective in a way that meant when she did speak, it landed with more weight than words from people who spoke constantly. She was still standing at the edge of the room, arms loose at her sides, watching them all.

"He's alone," she said simply. "He's in pain. He's very strong and he doesn't trust us and he's been trying to hold everything by himself." She looked at Jason. "You found him the first time because you were there. If he needs someone to find him again, we should be able to do that."

Jason sat back down.

He pulled out his phone.

"I make the call," he said. "And if Wally sees anything that suggests Mark is in real trouble — physically — he makes contact. That's the one exception."

"Agreed," Bruce said.

Jason stood and walked toward the vehicle bay. The number was in his contacts — put there eight months ago by Dick with the addendum do not use this to complain about his coffee order, which remained the most baffling instruction Jason had ever received.

It rang twice.

"Jason Todd," Wally said, with the energy of someone who operated as though sleep deprivation was a concept that applied to other people. "3 AM call. Give it to me."

"I need a favor," Jason said. "Significant one."

The surface energy dropped a register without disappearing. The focused version. "Tell me."

Jason told him. The shape of it: displaced individual, unknown world of origin, injured, wrong emotional state, somewhere in Old Gotham in a coverage gap. The suit. The departure vector. The injuries. The age.

"Nineteen," Wally repeated, when Jason said it.

"Yeah."

A pause long enough to mean something. "Rules?"

"You find him. Note the location. Come back. No approach, no contact, don't let him see you. If he's in physical danger, that changes. Otherwise you're invisible."

"I can do that." A pause. "What do you actually want out of this, Jason? Not the brief."

The question landed usefully. "I want him found," Jason said. "I want to know he's okay. And I want — when he figures out we looked, which he will — I want it to be something he can understand as care. Not control."

"Those are different things," Wally said. "I know how to do one and not the other." He paused one more time. "Send me the coordinates."

Jason sent them. He stood in the dark by the car for a moment before going back.

"He'll look," he said to the group.

Bruce was already back at the console. "Good. While we wait — tell me everything about how he described the fight. Every detail."

Jason sat back down. He told them.

Stephanie asked questions with rapid-fire curiosity. Duke made notes on the tablet. Tim's fingers moved over the keyboard, cross-referencing everything against dimensional transit data. Damian listened with focused silence. Cassandra watched everyone, reading the room the way she always did, which was the way a person read a language they'd been fluent in since birth.

Bruce listened to all of it with the attention of someone building a structure out of raw material.

The building Mark had found was not beautiful.

It was tall — that was its primary qualification, along with the complete absence of the surveillance hardware he'd come to recognize in this city. He had checked every sightline from the roof, scanned every visible surface for the small red indicator lights that meant cameras, and found nothing. The building sat in one of Gotham's genuinely forgotten zones — not the dramatic, story-generating kind of forgotten, not Crime Alley with its weight of meaning, but the ordinary forgotten. A building too old to be relevant and too structurally sound to have been demolished, stranded on a block where the street-level development had moved on without it.

He had been sitting on its roof for somewhere between two and three hours.

The ribs had settled into a consistent background complaint — less sharp than the first hour, more something he existed alongside than something that happened to him. He was choosing to interpret this as progress even though the more likely explanation was simply adaptation. The clavicle was quieter when he held still. The concussion had faded to a residue: light sensitivity, sounds arriving with a slightly too-present quality, nothing that prevented function.

He was, by the technical definition, functional.

He was not, by any honest definition, fine.

The anger had burned through itself somewhere around the ninety-minute mark. This was the pattern he'd come to know — anger came up, ran hot, consumed whatever was feeding it, and left behind the thing that had been underneath it all along, which was always more complicated and always more honest and always harder to manage than the anger had been because the anger had direction and the thing underneath it didn't.

He thought about the story he'd told Jason.

He'd built it carefully — not lying, he didn't want to call it lying, but shaped. He'd given the edges without the weight. He'd talked about Angstrom without talking about his father. Had talked about the fight without talking about what three years of accumulated fighting had actually cost, what it had built in him and what it had taken from him and what it had made him capable of that he didn't always want to be capable of. Had presented himself as someone who handled things, who was in possession of the situation.

It was the only way he knew how to present himself. He'd been doing it for three years.

He thought about his mother.

He'd been thinking about her all night in the way you thought about something you were actively trying not to think about — constantly, in the breaks between everything else, in every gap in the operational management of the situation. His mom. Debbie Grayson. The woman who had rebuilt her entire sense of the world when Nolan's truth had come out, who had done it without falling apart and without pretending it wasn't as devastating as it was, who had made it through the other side of something that would have ended most people and had emerged from it somehow more herself rather than less.

She didn't know where he was.

She would know something was wrong. She always knew — not psychically, not with any power that came from anything other than being his mother and knowing him completely, but she would know. Someone would have called her. Cecil, maybe, with that particular flat professional voice he used when he was controlling a situation by managing the information around it. Or maybe the Guardians. Maybe she'd found out from the news, from the footage of the fight site, from the specific absence where Mark had been.

She would be sitting in that kitchen right now — he was almost certain of it, she did this when she was worried, she drank coffee and sat at the kitchen table and thought in the practical, organized way she had — and she wouldn't know.

He pressed his knuckles against the parapet stone and held them there.

He thought about Eve.

Atom Eve. Samantha. The person who had been — who was — he didn't have a clean word for what Eve was to him that covered all of it, that covered the history and the present and the thing he'd been trying to articulate to himself for the better part of a year. She was important in a way that the word important didn't remotely contain. She could handle herself — of everyone in his life she was possibly the most capable of handling herself, her power was extraordinary and she was smarter than him about almost everything — but she would be worried. He knew she would be worried because he knew her, because he'd had enough conversations with her where the real content was underneath the words they were using to understand the real content.

She would be looking for him. She wouldn't be sitting still.

That thought was simultaneously the most comforting and the most painful thing he had, so he set it aside.

He thought about William.

William Clockwell, who had been his best friend since before all of this, who had known him as Mark Grayson before he was Invincible and who had kept on knowing him as Mark Grayson while he was Invincible, which was rarer and more important than it sounded. William, who was completely ordinary and completely irreplaceable, who had no powers and no combat capability and who was currently on a world that had just had its primary heavy-hitter removed from it without warning.

That was the other thing. The thing that had been sitting below even the thoughts about his mom and Eve — the one that was colder and harder to look at directly.

Mark Grayson was gone from his Earth.

And his Earth still needed someone to be Mark Grayson.

He thought about the Flaxans. About the Sequids. About the various space-level threats that had a tendency to cycle through his world's atmosphere on an irregular schedule, the ones that Cecil's ground-level teams couldn't handle alone, the ones that required someone who could take hits in the upper atmosphere and keep going. He thought about Conquest, who might not be a current active threat but whose existence meant there were others like him, others who had already been sent or who would be sent, others who were operating on the assumption that the Viltrumite schedule was on track.

He thought about the ordinary threats. The everyday architecture of protecting a city — the things that Invincible handled, the calls that came in at 2 AM and at noon and at dinner, the situations that would happen regardless of whether Mark was available to respond to them.

He wasn't available.

He was on a building in Gotham City on a world that wasn't his, with cracked ribs and a fractured clavicle and a concussion that was fading but still present, and somewhere on his Earth the machinery of the world was turning without him and he didn't know what it was going to hit when it did.

Stop it, he told himself. You can't do anything about that from here. You can only do what you can do from here.

Logical. True. Completely insufficient.

He pulled his knees up and rested his arms on them and looked at the Gotham skyline and thought about Oliver. About the kid he'd been mentoring — or trying to mentor, the relationship was complicated in the specific way that trying to teach someone something you were still learning yourself was always complicated. Oliver, who was young and reckless and funny and who reminded Mark of himself in ways that were alternately touching and alarming. Oliver, who had no one else who was doing what Mark was trying to do for him.

He thought about Cecil. About the organization. About all the moving parts of a system that had been designed to work with Invincible as its primary response asset, and what happened to all those moving parts when the primary response asset disappeared.

He thought about the people he'd let down. Not abstractly — specifically. The old man he'd promised to check on after a fight near his neighborhood who he'd never gone back to see. The kid in Baltimore who'd somehow figured out he was Invincible and had cornered him outside a 7-Eleven to ask for help finding his missing dog, which Mark had found, and who he had told call me again if you need anything and who had absolutely no way to call him now. The small specific failures of being a person who was too many things to too many people and not enough of any of them.

He pressed his head back against the parapet stone.

Stop, he told himself again. You're spiraling. You know what spiraling looks like. Stop.

He breathed. The ribs caught on the third breath, the familiar sharp edge of them. He held the breath instead of completing it, let it dissipate slowly.

The thing was — and this was the thought he'd been avoiding, the one at the bottom, the one that the anger had been covering and the operational management had been covering and the careful presentation of himself to Jason had been covering — the thing was that he was afraid.

Not of Gotham. Not of the Batfamily or Batman or any external situation.

He was afraid that this was what it felt like to stop. That being put here, on this world, in this condition, was what stopping felt like. That Angstrom had been right that there was no winning this, that the only possible resolution was removal, and that the removal had been clean enough and thorough enough that there was no coming back from it.

He was afraid that the card in his hand was all he had.

He was afraid that it wasn't going to be enough.

He pressed his knuckles against his sternum.

You are going to go home, he told himself. You have done impossible things. Getting home from the wrong Earth is not the most impossible thing you have done. You are going to use the card and you are going to find a way and you are going to go home.

He held that.

He was still holding it when Wally West ran the search.

Mark didn't register it at all. The displacement of air was negligible — less than the passage of a cab on the street below, less than the water tower oscillating in a gust of wind from the harbor. It was nothing. A fraction of a second of nothing in the Gotham night. Wally's perception at speed was another matter entirely: a tenth of a second of genuine observation that gave him the rooftop, the parapet, the figure against it. The careful stillness of someone managing injuries. The posture of someone holding something very heavy and trying to make sure nobody could tell.

The face. Young. Genuinely young, younger than the held posture suggested, younger than the professional composure. The kind of young that showed in the particular quality of the tiredness, which was different from adult exhaustion — rawer. More personal.

Wally was back at the cave in eleven seconds.

He did not feel good about those eleven seconds.

"Found him," Wally said, arriving at the cave entrance with the particular ozone quality of his rapid stops. He gave the coordinates immediately — spatial recall at speed was automatic. "Northwest edge of Old Gotham. Rooftop, against the north parapet. He's sitting still — the shoulder. He's awake."

"Physical presentation?" Bruce said immediately.

"Managing," Wally said. He stopped. He looked around the room — registered Stephanie and Cassandra and Duke who he hadn't expected — and then something moved across his face. "He's young," he said. Not as a data point.

"You said that on the phone," Jason said.

"Seeing it is different." Wally looked at Jason directly. "He looked like someone who's been holding something very heavy for a long time and has just realized they can't put it down."

The room absorbed this.

"Okay," Bruce said. He turned to Dick. "You and I take the eastern approach to the Aster—"

His console lit up.

Tim's laptop alarm fired simultaneously. Duke's tablet made a sound.

Three different data streams, same geography — southeast, the commercial boundary at Aster Street.

"Explosion," Tim said, already pulling feeds. "Structural. Sixth floor of a commercial building on Aster." His fingers moved. "Chemical signature in the air quality data. Broad-area organic compound." He looked up, and his face had gone to the specific expression it got when something was both bad and familiar. "That's fear toxin."

"Scarecrow," Bruce said. The word was flat and complete.

"Wide-area release," Tim continued. "The explosion is a dispersal mechanism — people flee toward the toxin distribution zone."

"He's been in Arkham for eight months," Cassandra said quietly, from her wall. "He will want to remind people he exists."

"Civilian density?" Bruce was already moving.

"Two to three hundred in the immediate blocks. Restaurants, late-night retail."

"Go," Bruce said.

The cave moved. Dick to his bike. Duke heading for the Signal cycle. Stephanie sliding off the console and pulling her cowl down. Cassandra was already at the equipment bay, already suited for departure.

"Cassandra," Bruce said.

"I'll go ahead," she said. She was gone before the sentence was finished.

"Duke, northern approach. Stephanie, the civilian corridor on the west side."

"On it," Stephanie said, and the purple of her cape disappeared up the stairs.

Wally was looking at the map on Tim's display — the Aster Street marker and the Old Gotham marker eleven blocks apart. He was doing the calculation that anyone standing in this room would do.

"He'll hear it," Wally said.

"Yes," Bruce said.

"He'll go."

"Yes."

On Tim's secondary monitor, the location marker for Mark's rooftop sat still for forty seconds.

Then it blinked out.

"He's already moving," Tim said, to the diminishing room.

The screaming reached Mark before the light.

He'd had his eyes closed — doing the breathing exercise, the one he'd developed for situations where quiet was the only available resource — and the screaming came through the dark behind his eyelids as pure signal, bypassing the deliberate management entirely and arriving at the part of him that handled threat assessment before anything else had the chance to wake up.

Multiple voices. Not one person's panic. The kind of sound a crowd made when it became afraid all at the same moment.

He was on his feet before the classification was complete.

The light was southeast. Orange, moving — fire, unmistakable — and the smoke column rising above Old Gotham's rooflines, and below it the sound growing more complex by the second, more voices joining it, more layers of distress stacking on top of each other.

He had a conversation with himself that lasted approximately two seconds.

Not your city, said the part that had been sitting alone on a Gotham rooftop for three hours cataloguing everything that had gone wrong. You're hurt. You don't know this place. You have no idea what you're flying into. You have enough problems.

People are screaming, said the other part.

The other part had been winning this argument since he was seventeen years old. It won again, and he was already airborne before the conscious decision had fully formed.

He came in from altitude, which gave him the read before he was inside it.

Two buildings. The taller one — ten stories, mid-century, good bones — with a blown-out section at the sixth floor, smoke pouring from the wound in the facade. Structural damage readable from above: northeast corner column system failed, adjacent load-bearing elements carrying weight they hadn't been designed for, progressive cracking moving up the face in a pattern with a clear destination.

Below: the street. Dozens of people. The disorganized geography of sudden emergency at night — some running, some frozen, some on the ground.

And a smell.

He noticed it during descent, pulling his breath back to shallow before he'd fully registered why. Chemical. Organic-chemical. Not combustion. Something that had a presence beyond scent — a marginal quality of wrongness at the very edges of his perception, a faint sense of things being slightly more than they were.

Don't breathe it.

The ribs were, accidentally, useful for this.

He didn't pause. The building first — the countdown was already running.

He went through the blown-out sixth-floor facade without slowing. Inside: smoke, structural sound, the deep groan of a building discovering the limits of its own engineering. The failed column was in the northeast corner, sheared at its base, the lateral load transfer already cracking the adjacent column. He found it and put his hands on the ceiling above it and pushed.

The weight was considerable. The clavicle reported this with immediate force and he breathed through it — shallow, managed — and focused on the people above him.

"Anyone above the sixth floor! Move to the center of the building — stairs at the core, away from the northeast! Now!"

Movement above him. Purposeful, responding. He counted to forty-five and then transferred the load — improvising a path for the weight through the intact structural core — and came back out through the facade into the night.

The street was clearing. The organized part of the emergency response was asserting itself over the initial chaos, establishing perimeters, directing movement. He could see the geometry of it working.

Some people weren't moving.

That was the smell. The chemical. The frozen people weren't in shock — this was active, internal, experiential. A woman curled against a wall with her hands over her face. A man standing in the cleared zone staring at something only he could see. A teenager pressed against a shop front making a continuous sound that had passed through fear and come out the other side into somewhere more fundamental.

The chemical is doing this.

He looked at the second building. Eight stories. Restaurant on the ground floor. Its windows blown in by the overpressure wave. And inside: movement. Purposeful movement. Not escaping.

Managing.

He went toward it.

The ground floor was dim and wrong. The tables were still set, menus still in their holders, the entire ordinary apparatus of a restaurant existing in a context it hadn't been designed for. The chemical smell was thick here. Close. Concentrated. It pressed against the shallow ceiling of his breathing with more insistence than the ambient street distribution had, and the wrongness at the edges of his perception was sharper, more present.

The figure was at the far end of the space.

Mark registered the details in the time it took him to cross half the room: burlap mask, theatrical and crude, designed to register as fundamentally wrong. A long coat. A pressurized device in his hands, venting through a hose that ran to the cracked window behind him. The source.

He was already moving.

"Turn it off," Mark said.

The figure turned. Pale eyes behind the burlap — too bright, carrying the specific quality of an intelligence that had stopped connecting to ordinary human calibrations of appropriate interest. Those eyes moved over Mark with the rapid, delighted assessment of someone who had received an unexpected variable in an experiment they'd already thought they understood.

"Well," the voice said. Thin. Precise. Academic in a way that had decoupled from any institution that word was usually associated with. "You're new."

"The device," Mark said. He was four feet away. "Turn it off. Now."

"You've been breathing the compound for some time," the figure said, as though the instruction had not been issued. As though the instruction were itself a data point. "Since you entered the area, at minimum. And yet your presentation is — controlled. Directed. You're issuing coherent demands rather than experiencing the primary response. Your pupils are dilated, yes. But your motor function is intact." The burlap mask tilted, birdlike, examining. "What are you?"

"I'm the person who is going to turn this off if you don't," Mark said. "Last chance."

"The compound finds the fear response," the figure said pleasantly. Completely untroubled. Completely interested. "In subjects with extensively conditioned fear architecture — individuals who have spent years overriding the mechanism through genuine repeated threat exposure — it can't find its primary pathway. It locates adjacent ones instead. Affects different emotional substrates." The pale eyes were very specific. "What pathway is it finding in you? I'm genuinely asking. The academic value of—"

Mark crossed the remaining distance and ripped the canister out of his hands.

He did it fast — too fast for the figure to react, too fast for anything deliberate — and the hose coupling tore with a sound of metal separating from metal and the pressurized cylinder came away in his grip and he closed his hand around it and the steel compressed, the cylindrical structure collapsing inward under the force of his fingers the way a paper cup collapsed, and the hissing stopped.

The silence where the hissing had been was its own presence.

Mark held the ruined cylinder in his hand and looked at the figure and said, with a flatness that was below anger — what anger became when it had been stripped of everything except its irreducible core: "You're going to come with me. Outside. You're going to tell whoever needs to know how to help those people, and then you're going to go wherever it is people like you go."

"People like me," the figure said pleasantly, as though this were a dinner party. "That's a fascinating framing. I'd argue the people outside are experiencing a kind of radical honesty — the compound removes the filters between reality and the genuine signal of the fear architecture. Most individuals walk through their lives suppressing a continuous low-level terror response that socialization—"

"I said come with me."

"— has taught them to treat as pathological when in fact it is the most honest response available to—"

Mark grabbed him by the front of the coat.

He lifted him. One foot off the ground, enough to make the point entirely clear, and looked at the face behind the burlap and said, very quietly: "Stop talking."

The figure looked back at him from one foot off the ground, and in those pale eyes was the brightest thing Mark had seen in them — not fear, not the primary compound response, not anything that looked like self-preservation — but excitement. The genuine, pure excitement of a scientist whose specimen had done something they hadn't fully accounted for.

"Your grip force," the figure said, with the quality of someone narrating their own dissection, "is extraordinary. Not baseline-enhanced. Not even the enhanced enhanced. You're something I haven't catalogued." A pause. The pale eyes were very focused. "You're carrying something very heavy right now, aren't you. Not the physical weight. The other kind. The compound is finding it — I can tell by the quality of your jaw tension, by the specific — yes. You're somewhere between despair and rage and you have been for some time." The academic voice was almost gentle. Almost. "How long have you been carrying that?"

Mark put him down.

He released the coat and stepped back and pressed his hand against his sternum and breathed and made himself not do the thing his hands wanted to do. The figure had found something. He didn't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing how precisely he'd found it, but he'd found it, and the finding of it was sitting in Mark's chest alongside everything else it was sitting next to.

He released the coat.

"Come with me," he said again. "Outside. Now."

The figure smoothed his lapels — actually smoothed them, restored them, the gesture of someone briefly disheveled at a social function — and then his hand went to the base of the wall beside the emergency exit. Fast. Faster than the measured academic performance had suggested he could move.

The secondary canister was there. Ankle height. Bracketed. Aimed inward at the center of the room, at Mark, who had not been looking for it because he had not known to look for it.

The valve opened.

The concentrated burst hit him in the face from two feet away.

Full concentration. Not the ambient distribution he'd been managing with shallow breaths. A directed, deliberate, maximum-dose delivery at point-blank range, the kind engineered to penetrate involuntary respiratory suppression. The kind that was intended for exactly this situation.

The figure was moving for the emergency exit.

The compound hit.

And the edges of Mark's perception did not expand into fear.

He needed to be exact about this — it did not expand into fear. His fear response had been tested. He'd been tested against Conquest, twice. Against his own father, with everything that entailed. Against the Viltrumite War. Against the specific, shattering experience of dying and coming back and understanding in the aftermath exactly how final that had almost been. The compound could not find purchase there. Could not locate the architecture it needed to do what it was doing to the people in the street outside.

What it found instead was the bottom of everything.

The thing that had been there all night. The thing that had been there since the portal. The thing that the anger had been covering and the operational focus had been covering and the careful presentation of himself to Jason had been covering and the hours alone on the rooftop had been barely, barely covering. The thing that had no clean name — not grief, not despair, not fear, but the specific compound emotional weight of being cut off from every person you loved and every responsibility you carried and every piece of evidence that you mattered.

The compound found it and turned the volume up until the volume was all there was.

His mother. Eve. William. Oliver. Everyone on his Earth who was going to wake up tomorrow and have the same problems they went to bed with and no one to call. The old man he'd promised to check on. The kid with the missing dog. Cecil's organization running the numbers on what a world without Invincible cost. Angstrom's face, patient and resolved, the face of someone who had made a practical assessment. I've been patient. The portal opening inside his guard. The tearing. The wrongness of the transit. The specific sensation of his world pulling away from him as he was pulled away from it.

All of it. At full volume. In the body of someone who was already carrying injuries and three hours of containment and had no more room.

The figure reached the emergency exit.

Mark moved.

He moved without thinking — he would not be able to say later whether he'd decided to do anything, because the decision machinery had been bypassed entirely, the thinking part that had spent three years learning the line between this will stop a threat and this will end a person was simply not in the loop. What moved was the thing underneath that. The Viltrumite part. The part that had grown up unmanaged and that he'd spent three years building a cage for.

His hand closed around the figure's arm.

He didn't mean to grip like that. He didn't mean to grip at all — the intent was to grab, to stop, to prevent the exit. But the compound was at full volume and the cage was not in the loop and the grip that closed was not the grip he used in the field, calibrated and controlled.

It was the other grip. The real one.

The sound was wrong. The quality of it was wrong. He heard it and felt it simultaneously through his hand — not the sound of fabric, not the creak of a coat — something structural. Something that had no business making that sound.

The figure screamed.

It was the first genuine emotional response Mark had heard from him, the first thing that had broken through the academic register, and it was not an intellectual sound at all. It was a very basic sound. The sound a person made when something happened that was beyond any framework they had for processing experience.

Mark released.

He released and stepped back and looked at his hand and looked at the figure and—

The arm had not come free entirely. The coat — heavy wool, a thick winter coat — had held structural integrity above what the limb inside it had managed. But the shoulder joint was catastrophically wrong, the arm hanging at an angle that had nothing to do with human anatomy, and the figure was making sounds that were continuous and not stopping and was against the wall beside the emergency exit and was not moving toward anything anymore.

Mark stood in the restaurant with his hand still open at his side.

He stood there.

The secondary canister finished venting. The compound began to dissipate, his physiology clearing it the way it cleared most things — faster than baseline human, but not instant, not immediate. The volume dropped. The thinking part returned, slowly, like something surfacing from deep water.

The thinking part looked at what the hands had done.

He crossed to the figure in three steps and crouched down. He checked the breathing first — present, ragged, high and fast with pain and shock, but present. The pulse at the throat: strong, rapid, the physiology of someone in severe pain rather than someone dying. The arm — he looked at it only long enough to confirm the severity of what he was seeing, which was enough, more than enough.

Alive. In the worst pain a person could be in and still conscious. Badly, badly hurt.

The sounds coming from behind the burlap mask had stopped being words. They were just sounds now.

You did this, the thinking part said. Very precisely. Very clearly.

Mark pressed his knuckle against his sternum and crouched in the dark of the destroyed restaurant and let the full weight of what he had done be present. He had done this. The compound had found the thing underneath everything and turned it all the way up and he had done this and there was no version of what had happened that changed that, and the reasons — the compound, the pressure, the portal, the hours, all of it — were real and true and did not make the figure on the floor any less hurt.

He had done this.

He had to get medical help here. Immediately. This was beyond soon — this was a timeline measured in minutes. He had to get someone who could help into this building and he had to make sure they knew what they were dealing with and he had to—

He straightened. He turned toward the emergency exit. He was going back to the street. He was going to find whoever was organizing the response and he was going to tell them there was a man inside who needed immediate medical attention, and he was not going to fly away, he was going to stay and deal with what he had done, because flying away was the option he kept almost taking and he was not going to take it.

He pushed through what remained of the emergency exit door. The explosion had done something to it — the frame was warped, the hinges partially separated — and it scraped against the ruined floor as it swung.

He stepped into the alley.

The building had not been kind to its own back wall.

The structural event that had taken out the sixth floor facade had done things to the building's overall integrity that were visible on the exterior — the alley-facing wall had cracked in several places, sections of the old mortar between bricks gaping and pale, one window frame at the second floor hanging at an angle that suggested the wall around it had shifted. The fire escape on the north side was accessible but unreliable, creaking against its brackets with each gust of the alley wind.

Two figures were in the alley.

They had not landed in front of a door. There was no clear landing point — the alley was narrow and cluttered with the ordinary debris of a Gotham back alley, bins and ventilation units and years of accumulated irrelevant infrastructure. They had grappled in, using the building's own compromised exterior as their access. The taller one's grapple was still extended, the line running up to a secure point on the third floor where a window frame had held. The shorter one had used the crumbling fire escape — there was a small scatter of old mortar on the alley floor directly below where he'd planted his feet on the lowest rung.

They were standing now, looking at him.

The taller figure: grey and black, the cowl with two points at the crown, a cape that shifted in the alley draft. The symbol on the chest was a bat, black against grey. The eyes behind the cowl were white lenses. The stillness of him in the alley was not the stillness of someone who had not yet decided what to do — it was the stillness of someone who was doing several things simultaneously, all of them internal, all of them building toward a response that had not yet been released. Batman had seen things. You could tell that about him, even at distance, even behind the cowl. The stillness was the stillness of experience, of someone who had held the composure of their response against situations that warranted composure being lost.

He was holding it now. But it was being held.

The shorter figure: blue and black, Nightwing insignia across the chest, no cape, domino mask. The grapple launcher at his hip. A face behind the mask that was young and mobile and that was, right now, not succeeding at neutrality. Dick Grayson's face was something Mark had heard described — Jason had said, on the rooftop, Dick is the kind of person who finds a way to see the best version of whatever's in front of him — but he was looking at Nightwing's face now and the best version was not what it was finding.

What it had found instead was shock.

Not theatrical shock, not the exaggerated response of someone performing their reaction. Real shock — the specific quality of someone whose expectation of what they were going to find had been comprehensively replaced by something they had not built any framework for. His mouth had opened slightly. His eyes were moving between Mark and the interior of the restaurant visible through the open, scraped-open emergency exit and the warped wall beyond it, and the movement was not tactical assessment. It was a person trying to process something quickly enough and not quite managing.

Batman was holding his composure together.

Nightwing's composure had genuinely broken open, and he was watching it happen to himself.

They had grappled in from above, had come down the exterior of a damaged building in a back alley, and had arrived in time to see — through the warped gap of the emergency exit as it scraped open — what was inside. The cracked wall. The figure on the floor. The angle of the arm. The boy in the shredded suit standing over it.

Mark looked at Batman.

Batman looked at Mark.

Nightwing was looking at both of them, and at the restaurant interior, and his mouth closed and then opened again slightly, and he said nothing because there was nothing that was going to come before the situation had been more fully absorbed.

The alley was completely quiet.

Beyond its mouth, Aster Street continued its emergency — sirens accumulating, the organized noise of response arriving in force, Stephanie's voice somewhere to the west directing civilian movement, the near-silent rush that was Cassandra covering an adjacent block. The rest of the world was being handled. In the alley itself, between the three of them, nothing moved.

The alley wind shifted.

Inside the restaurant, the figure made a sound.

Mark did not move.

He was standing in the warped emergency exit frame with what he had done visible behind him and two people in front of him who had seen it. The bat symbol on Batman's chest was the bat symbol on the card in Mark's left hand — the card Jason had given him in Crime Alley, which he had been carrying since then, which he had not put down once. Jason had said: he'll help if he can. If he says he's going to do something, he does it.

He was aware of this. He was aware of it in the specifically terrible way of being aware of something that made the situation more complicated, in a way he could not alter because the awareness changed nothing about what was behind him.

He had not flown away.

He was still standing here, still in the doorframe, still with his feet on the ground, and he didn't know if that was enough or what enough looked like from where he was standing, but it was what he had.

Batman opened his mouth.

The sound happened first.

Not dramatic. In the context of Gotham City at 3 AM, it was barely a sound at all — the specific pressure-shift quality of someone arriving from very high speed and stopping, the brief crackle of displaced air finding equilibrium, the nearly-inaudible impact of footsteps on alley concrete. The kind of thing that was background noise near certain people.

Wally West materialized at the mouth of the alley.

He was in the Flash suit, red and gold, and he was wearing the expression of someone who had completed an assigned task and was arriving to report its completion with the genuine satisfaction of a job efficiently done. He had been given a job — find someone — and he had found them and he had come back and he was going to report that finding and everything was going to proceed from there in an orderly fashion.

He was slightly out of breath, which was unusual for him and suggested he'd come fast even by his standards.

"Found him!" Wally said, with the forward energy of a sentence that had been loaded and ready since he'd left the cave. He turned to Batman and Nightwing, presenting the information, the delivery on the promise. "Northwest edge of Old Gotham, building with the water tower — he's on the roof, he's okay, he's—"

He turned to face the alley fully as he spoke.

His sentence stopped existing.

He saw Batman first — still, white lenses, the quality of someone managing a response. He saw Nightwing — open expression, shock doing visible work on his face. He started to track the direction of their attention and then he found it, found the point everything was aimed at, and his own expression did something involuntary and immediate.

He saw Mark.

He saw the emergency exit, warped on its hinges, the frame bent.

He saw through it. The interior of the restaurant. The far wall and what had happened to it.

He saw the angle of the arm.

The forward energy of Wally West's arrival — the completion-of-task satisfaction, the momentum of I did the thing you sent me to do and here I am reporting it — stopped.

Completely.

It did not taper off or wind down. It stopped, like something cut.

Wally stared.

His face went through things. Not one thing — a sequence, rapid, none of them landing on an expression that resolved into something he could hold. His eyes moved from the restaurant interior to Mark, and the look he gave Mark was nothing like the confident delivery of mission-accomplished. It was slower. More careful. It was the look he'd had on his face on the rooftop — the one he'd described to Jason as someone holding a very heavy thing and trying to make sure nobody could tell — but now he was seeing that same face here, in this alley, in the aftermath of something, and the alley was telling a different story than the rooftop had.

He looked at Nightwing, who was looking back at him. Dick's face was doing the thing it did when it was trying to communicate through the domino mask at full capacity — the eyebrows, the set of the jaw, the small controlled movements that were Dick Grayson's version of a very loud sentence.

Wally looked back at Mark.

Mark looked at Wally.

The alley was very quiet.

Wally opened his mouth. He closed it. He tried again.

"I was—" he started. Stopped. "I came to tell you—" He looked at Batman. "I found him," he said, and the sentence had almost none of the energy it had arrived with. It was flat now. Just the content, stripped of everything else. "He was on a rooftop. He looked—"

He stopped for the third time.

He was doing what Wally West did, which was process things at a speed and completeness that most people couldn't match — assembling the rooftop and this alley and the angle of the arm and the quality of Mark's face into a single picture, and the picture was assembling itself in real time and it was visible doing it, because Wally's face never successfully hid what was happening behind it.

The picture finished assembling.

The expression that was left on Wally West's face after the assembly was complete was not something he was performing. It was not constructed. It was the expression of someone who had found a kid on a rooftop twenty minutes ago holding something very heavy by himself, and who had run back to report it as a simple completed task, and who had arrived at the completion of that task to find something that was not simple at all.

"Oh," Wally said.

Very quietly.

He looked at the arm. He looked at Mark. He looked at the card in Mark's hand.

"Oh, man," he said.

Bruce looked at Wally. Wally looked at Bruce. Then Bruce looked back at Mark, and the white lenses gave nothing readable away in the ordinary sense, but the quality of the stillness had something in it — not judgment, not quite, or not only — the quality of someone who had held their response through worse things than this and who was now, carefully and deliberately, deciding what the response was going to be.

He had not spoken yet.

He was going to speak.

Mark was still in the doorframe.

His hand was still on the card.

He had not flown away.

Chapter Text

He was aware of things in pieces.

Not coherently. Not in the organized, sequential way that awareness was supposed to work, where one moment followed the next and you could trace the thread from where you were to where you'd been. It wasn't like that. It was fragments. Impressions. Things that arrived and then were gone before he could do anything with them, before he could locate them in a sequence or assign them meaning or do anything except register that they had happened and then let them go because holding onto them required a kind of mental organization that he did not currently have access to.

He was aware of the alley.

He was aware of the card in his hand.

He was aware of Batman's voice — not the words, not the content, just the voice, which was low and controlled and which had a quality to it that he had not expected, which was that it did not sound like judgment. He had been bracing for judgment. The shape of what he'd been bracing for had been assembled over the minutes he'd stood in the doorframe — the look on Nightwing's face, the specific frozen quality of Wally's expression when his sentence had stopped — and it had taken a particular form, which was: what did you do. Said with the weight of people who had the authority and the history to say it and mean it.

Batman's voice had not said that. He could not reconstruct what it had said. But he knew it had not said that.

He was aware of someone's hand on his arm — not gripping, not pulling, the light purposeful contact of someone directing rather than restraining. He was aware of walking. He was not aware of having decided to walk, which meant the walking was happening somewhere below the level at which he was making decisions.

He was aware of the building being very bright.

He was aware of the building not being bright at all, of the lights being low and specific, of it being his own eyes that were wrong, the concussion's remaining sensitivity turning ordinary light sources into something more than they were.

He was aware of Nightwing saying something to someone who was not Mark. He was aware of the quality of it — careful, fast, compressed, the tone of someone exchanging information efficiently — and then it was gone.

He was aware of a car.

He was aware of not being in the car anymore.

The blur was not frightening, which was itself something he registered with the distant part of him that was still tracking things. He was accustomed to the blur being frightening — he'd had concussions before, had experienced the specific quality of awareness degrading under physical damage, and it had always carried fear with it, the fear of not being functional, of not being able to respond. But the blur he was in now was different. It was not the blur of physical damage. The concussion was contributing, yes, but the concussion was a minor note in a much larger composition.

The compound had elevated what was already there. The thinking part — the part that had spent three years building and maintaining the careful architecture of being Invincible — had been bypassed, and what was left was everything underneath it, running at full volume, and it had not turned off when the compound dissipated. That wasn't how it worked. The compound had not created anything. It had only found what was already there and removed the management from around it.

The management was trying to rebuild itself.

In the meantime, the underneath things ran.

His mother. He thought about his mother in the specific way he'd been thinking about her all night, but more so now, without the partial buffer of operational clarity. He thought about the kitchen table and the coffee cup and the specific sound she made when she was worried, which was not a dramatic sound — she didn't cry, she didn't raise her voice, she went quiet in a way that was worse than noise because the quiet meant she was managing something that was too large for ordinary expression. He thought about the fact that he could not call her. He thought about the fact that she did not know where he was and that she would know something was wrong and that knowing something was wrong without knowing what it was or whether it had an end was a specific kind of suffering that he was responsible for and could not fix.

He thought about Eve.

He thought about Eve the way he'd been avoiding thinking about Eve all night, which was completely and with nothing held back, which was not something he could sustain for long under normal circumstances because it required a level of honest acknowledgment of what she meant that he had not yet successfully managed to translate into words or actions. She would be — he knew what she would be doing. She would be moving. She would have been moving since the moment someone told her what had happened, and she would still be moving, because Eve did not process crisis by sitting still and she would not accept the absence as something permanent to be grieved, she would treat it as a problem to be solved and she would throw everything she had at solving it.

Which meant she was somewhere on his Earth right now, with the full weight of everything she was capable of, trying to find him.

And he was here.

He thought about William. About the conversation they'd had two weeks ago — Mark could not now have said what the conversation was about, something ordinary, something that had felt completely inconsequential because ordinary and inconsequential things were the texture of conversations with William, who was the primary person in Mark's life who didn't treat him like a variable in an equation — and about the way William laughed. The specific laugh. The one that was completely unself-conscious, that had no performance in it, that was just the sound William made when something was genuinely funny to him. Mark had not thought about William's laugh in — he didn't know how long. He thought about it now with a clarity that felt like pressure behind his eyes.

He thought about Oliver. About whether Oliver was doing something stupid right now, and the high probability of that, and whether there was anyone in a position to stop him, and the lower probability of that.

He thought about the Flaxans and the Sequids and the Viltrumite Empire's timeline and the things that were coming that his Earth was not ready for, that required someone who could take hits in the upper atmosphere, that required Invincible. He thought about the people in those situations who were going to look for Invincible and find nothing and have to handle it without him and about what handling it without him would cost.

He thought about Angstrom.

He thought about Angstrom with the specific intensity that the compound had unlocked and that had not fully relocked, which was the intensity of something very close to hatred — not the clean operational version that he'd used in fights, the anger that had direction and function, but the other kind. The kind that had his father in it and Angstrom's scarred face in it and three years of consequences in it and the portal and the tearing and the way the air of Chicago had disappeared from his lungs and been replaced by the air of a world he didn't know.

The hatred sat in his chest and was hot and had nowhere to go.

He was aware of being horizontal.

He was aware of a surface that was softer than any surface he'd encountered in the last several hours, which had all been stone and concrete and the cold metal of fire escapes. He was aware of the ceiling above him, which was stone — dark stone, the specific texture of a cave, with the organic quality of something that had not been manufactured but had been here before the building above it and would be here after. He was aware of the sound of water, distant and continuous. He was aware of the smell of the air, which was cool and faintly mineral and slightly different from the Gotham night air, which meant he was somewhere underground.

The cave.

He was aware — suddenly, sharply, the awareness arriving all at once rather than in the gradual assembled way the other awarenesses had — that he was in the cave.

He was in the Batcave's medical bay.

The medical bay was a clearly designated section of the cave, separated from the main area by equipment rather than walls — the clean geometry of monitoring hardware and supply cabinets and the specific quality of overhead lighting that existed only in spaces where people needed to be able to see injuries clearly. He was on a medical bed. He was not restrained. His suit had been partially removed — the upper section, the damaged left shoulder, the area around his ribs — and someone had done something careful and professional to the clavicle and the ribs, had applied pressure and position correction that suggested real medical knowledge rather than improvisation.

He was in the cave.

He had not consented to being in the cave.

The awareness of this arrived in his chest with the specific, cold quality of a thing that had been waiting for him to notice it, and what it felt like was not gratitude and was not relief and was not any of the things it probably should have been, given that the cave was exactly where Jason had been trying to get him all night, given that being in the cave meant he was among people who might be able to help him get home.

What it felt like was trapped.

He was off the bed before he'd fully formed the decision to move.

The movement was fast — not flight, not yet, but the reflexive physical response to the awareness of an enclosed space and an unfamiliar situation and a body that was still running the underneath things at something above their usual volume. He was on his feet, his weight distributed wrong because of the clavicle and the ribs, compensating automatically, scanning the space.

Medical bay. Cave. Equipment. Dim overhead lighting. The distant sound of the waterfall. The smell of the mineral air. No immediate threat.

He was still scanning. His eyes moved across the space in the organized way of someone who had spent three years scanning spaces for threats, and the organized scan was finding nothing that registered as threat but was continuing anyway because the part of him running the underneath things was not listening to the organized scan's findings.

He needed to — he needed to—

He didn't know what he needed to do. That was the problem. The problem was specific and clearly defined: he was in the cave, which was not his choice, which had been done to him while he was in the blur, which meant someone had made a decision about his body and his location without his consent, which meant—

He pressed the heel of his hand against his sternum. His ribs caught the movement and reported it loudly and he ignored the report. He pressed harder and breathed — tried to, the shallow automatic breathing of someone whose body was running faster than its circumstances required, the rapid chest-level breathing that went with adrenaline responses and that he knew, from three years of having adrenaline responses in situations that required something other than adrenaline responses, was not useful and was making things worse.

He needed to breathe from his diaphragm. He could not currently access his diaphragm, because his diaphragm was behind the ribs and the ribs were very loudly present and the alternative pathway to diaphragm breathing that he'd developed for rib injuries was requiring more conscious access than he currently had.

He was going to—

He needed to get out.

The thought was flat and immediate and overrode everything else. He needed to get out of the space he was in, to get above it, to get altitude between himself and the situation, because altitude was where he could think and where the walls were not walls and where the ceiling was not stone and where he was not on someone else's territory making someone else's decisions about where he was going to be.

He stepped toward the main cave area.

The equipment of the medical bay was arranged in a way that was both orderly and slightly labyrinthine — designed for function rather than easy egress, the kind of space that had been built by someone who thought about access in terms of what you needed to get to rather than how quickly you might need to leave it. He moved through it carefully, one hand out for balance, his weight still distributed wrong.

The main cave area opened in front of him — enormous, the scale of it larger than he'd had the context to appreciate when he was in the blur, the size of it catching him slightly off guard. The waterfall was real and large. The stalactites were real. The vehicle bay was real, the car enormous and low and matte black. The main console was lit, multiple displays active in the apparently never-off quality of a system that someone was always monitoring.

The stairs.

He could see the stairs.

He was moving toward them.

"Hey."

He stopped.

Not because the word commanded him to stop — it hadn't been said with command in it. It had been said with the same quality it had been said with twice before, in an alley and on a rooftop, which was the quality of someone who understood the specific texture of this particular kind of distress because they had been inside it themselves.

Jason Todd was at the base of the stairs.

He was in civilian clothes — jeans, a dark sweatshirt, the kind of unremarkable clothing that made him look younger than the Red Hood suit did, which was itself a disorienting piece of information. He was holding two mugs. He was looking at Mark with the expression he'd been wearing in the alley — not the careful assessment, not the tactical read, but the other one. The one that was underneath those things.

He did not block the stairs.

He was standing beside the stairs, with the mugs, looking at Mark.

"You're awake," Jason said.

"I need to get out," Mark said. His voice came out rough. He hadn't heard his own voice in a while and the roughness of it was information he hadn't expected, information about the state of him that was easier to read from the outside than from the inside.

"Okay," Jason said.

Not: you can't. Not: you should stay. Not: we need to talk about what happened. Just — okay, in the specific register of someone who was not, in fact, going to stop him.

Mark looked at him.

"You can go," Jason said. "The stairs go up to the garage and then to the grounds. Nobody's going to stop you." He paused. "I just came to check you were okay."

Mark looked at the stairs.

He looked at Jason.

He looked at the mugs.

"What's in them," he said, which was not the question he'd intended to ask, which was not a question that had anything to do with what was happening in his chest, but which was the question that came out.

"Tea," Jason said. "Alfred made it. He makes tea when he doesn't know what else to do, which is not very often, so when he makes tea you know the situation is considered significant."

Mark looked at the mugs for a moment.

The thing in his chest was still there. The underneath things were still running, still hot, still present. The need to get altitude was still present. But the specific edge of the trapped feeling — the walls-not-walls urgency of the past several minutes — had dropped slightly at the contact of Jason's voice, in the way that things sometimes dropped when they encountered something that understood their frequency.

"I didn't—" Mark started.

He stopped.

He pressed his knuckles against his sternum and breathed — managed it from the diaphragm this time, the shallow ribs-only breathing converting into something with more depth to it, which cost more in terms of physical pain and gained more in terms of function. He breathed again.

"I didn't know I was here," he said. "I didn't — choose this."

"I know," Jason said. "It happened fast. You were —" a pause, in which he was clearly choosing words— "not fully present for a while after the alley. Bruce made the call. He was going to put you somewhere that wasn't a Gotham alley at 3 AM." Another pause. "I would've made the same call."

"You should have asked me."

"You weren't available to be asked," Jason said. "That's not an excuse. It's what happened."

Mark absorbed this. He was aware, with the part of him that was still functional enough to track such things, that the response was not defensive and was not apologetic and was not attempting to manage him. It was just the situation as it had been. Stated plainly.

"I need to sit down," Mark said, which was not what he'd meant to say either, but which his legs had apparently decided to communicate on his behalf, because they were in the process of making the decision without consulting him.

He sat on the cave floor.

Not on the medical bay bed. Not on a chair. On the cave floor, because the floor was where he was when his legs decided and the floor was solid stone and solid stone was what he needed to be against right now, the specific groundedness of something that was not going anywhere.

Jason sat down too.

Not next to him — across from him, a few feet away, the same distance he'd maintained on the rooftop. Not crowding. Just present.

He set one of the mugs on the floor and pushed it toward Mark with his foot — a gentle, practical push, the mug sliding an inch closer, well within reach.

Mark looked at it. Then picked it up. The ceramic was warm against his palms in the way that warm things were warm when you'd been cold for a while without registering that you were cold.

He held it and didn't drink it and that was fine.

"The person in the restaurant," he said.

"Getting treatment," Jason said. "He's alive."

"His arm—"

"Getting treatment," Jason said again. Not cutting him off — completing the sentence in the way of someone who has the information and is offering it at the right speed. "You didn't kill him. He's going to have a very bad few weeks and probably longer than that, but he's alive and he's in a hospital and the people there know what they're doing."

Mark pressed the mug against his sternum. Added it to the knuckles, the layered self-pressing that he did when there was no other pressure available. The ceramic was warm.

"I didn't mean to," he said. And then, immediately: "That's not — I know that's not — I know what it sounds like."

"It sounds true," Jason said.

Mark looked at him.

"The compound does that," Jason said. "What the fear toxin does to people who've been exposed before, who've conditioned their system against it — it finds a different pathway. Goes deeper. The medical team here has files on it." He paused. "I'm not saying it excuses what happened. I'm saying you didn't walk into that building planning to hurt someone."

"I still did it."

"Yeah," Jason said. "You did."

The honesty of that — the complete, unhedged honesty of just yeah, you did — was somehow easier than anything qualified would have been. Mark sat with it. He sat with the warm mug and the cave floor and the sound of the waterfall and the underneath things running at their slightly-reduced-but-still-present volume, and he sat with the honest yeah, you did, and he let all of it be real.

"I thought about everyone," he said, after a while. His voice was different now — not the rough urgency of the first minutes of being awake, but something flatter. Tireder. "On my world. My mom. My friends. People who—" He stopped. Started over. "There are threats on my world that need someone who can handle them. And I'm not there. And I can't—" He pressed harder with the mug. "I can't do anything about it from here. I know I can't. But knowing I can't doesn't stop me from—"

"Thinking about it constantly," Jason said.

"Yeah."

"Yeah," Jason said. "I know what that's like."

He said it the same way he'd said things the other way — simply, without elaboration, without making it about himself. Just: I know this thing from the inside, I'm not guessing at it.

Mark looked at the mug. At the steam rising from it in the cave's cool air. At his own hands, which were the same hands that had been on Scarecrow's arm in the restaurant, which were the hands that had built a career on the principle that force had limits and limits were non-negotiable and he was the person responsible for maintaining them.

"I'm going to go home," he said. It came out with more force than he'd planned, the force of something that was being stated as a load-bearing fact rather than a hope. "I don't care how long it takes or what I have to do, I'm going home."

"I know," Jason said.

"And when I do, I need—" He stopped. The sentence had more in it than he was ready to put into words, which had to do with what he'd been carrying and what he was going to do differently with it when he got back, what three years of keeping the lid on everything had cost and what it was going to keep costing if he didn't do something about the architecture of it.

He didn't finish the sentence.

Jason didn't push him to.

They sat in the cave together, on the stone floor, with the waterfall and the dark and the two mugs of Alfred's tea, and Mark held his and eventually drank some of it, and the underneath things did not stop running but they ran at a slightly lower volume than they had for the past several hours, and that was what was available, and for now it was enough.

Jason pulled out his phone, sent a message to the group, set the phone back down.

He's awake. Give us a minute.

He waited.

Mark had stopped trying to leave. He was sitting against the cave wall now — he'd migrated from the floor to a position where his back was against the stone, which Jason had noticed he consistently preferred, the specific comfort of solid things behind him. His knees were up. His left arm was positioned carefully. He was drinking the tea.

He looked exhausted in the way that went past physical exhaustion into something more fundamental, something that had been running as a background process for a long time and had finally been given no more reason to keep hiding.

Jason's phone buzzed.

Dick: give him as long as he needs. We'll be here.

Jason looked at the message and then at Mark and thought: yeah. We will.

The sitting room on the ground floor of Wayne Manor had seen many things in its long life as a room. It had hosted dinners and fundraisers and the various social obligations that the Wayne name required its bearer to perform with periodic regularity. It had been a space for grief, more than once, in the way that rooms absorb what happens in them and carry it in their walls. It had been, in more recent years, increasingly occupied by a rotating cast of young people in various states of physical damage who had the particular quality of people who had been trained to do difficult things and who were currently between doing them.

Tonight it was occupied by a specific assembly of those people, plus one who was technically not a young person anymore but who occupied the psychic space of one in most gatherings he attended.

Wally West was sitting on the rug in front of the fireplace, which was lit, because Alfred had lit it when Wally had arrived and had said nothing, but it was 4 AM and the night was cold and Alfred's version of I see that you are all in distress was lit fireplaces and tea. Wally was sitting cross-legged in the way he sat when he was not moving, which was the way of someone whose default state was motion and who experienced stillness as something to be arranged around, like temporary scaffolding. He was still in the Flash suit, which had been the suit he was in when Jason called and which he had not thought to change because changing clothes had not been anywhere in his top hundred thoughts since arriving in that alley.

Dick was on the couch closest to the fireplace, elbows on his knees, looking at the space between his feet. He had showered and changed — the Nightwing suit had been exchanged for his civilian clothes, a worn grey long-sleeve and sweatpants that suggested he'd grabbed whatever was closest. His hair was slightly damp at the edges. He had the quality he got after difficult nights, which was a kind of compressed stillness that was different from calm — the difference between something that was settled and something that was holding its own weight.

Tim was in the armchair near the window. He had a tablet and was not using it, which was unusual enough to be notable. He was holding it the way people held things when they needed to be holding something, the tablet as object rather than tool.

Damian was on the window seat. He sat with his spine very straight, his feet on the cushion, arms wrapped around his knees, looking at the fireplace with an expression that was doing the work of being neutral and was mostly succeeding. He did not like this room usually — it was a room where the family performed its civilian identities, and Damian had a complicated relationship with his civilian identity at the best of times. He was here because it was where everyone was.

Stephanie had found a throw blanket and wrapped it around herself with the efficiency of someone who had learned to take comfort when it was available. She was sitting in the other armchair, legs tucked under her, the purple of her Spoiler suit partially visible at the collar below the blanket. She had tried to eat something — there was a plate with crackers on the coffee table that Alfred had produced — and had managed approximately two of them.

Cassandra was at the edge of the room. She was always at the edge of rooms. She was in the Orphan suit still, which she often didn't change out of after patrol because changing clothes had never been a primary preoccupation for her, and she was standing near the door in the way that could mean I might leave but which, in Cassandra's specific body language, meant I am staying. I am staying at the edge, but I am staying.

Duke was on the footstool. He had his Signal mask off and his face was the one Mark had not seen — younger without the amber lenses, more openly uncertain than the suited version of himself had been. He was looking at Wally with the expression of someone who was processing a data point that was changing the shape of their understanding of the situation.

Bruce was standing near the fireplace. He was in civilian clothes — dark trousers, a dark shirt, the Wayne uniform of someone who was technically not Batman right now and who was finding the distinction somewhere between difficult and irrelevant. He was looking at the fire.

The room had been mostly quiet for about seven minutes since Jason's text had arrived.

"His arm," Tim said.

Wally looked up from the rug.

"Tell me exactly," Tim said. "What the hospital said. I want the precise language."

Wally was quiet for a moment. He had relayed this once already, in the first minutes after they'd arrived at the Manor, but Tim's version of processing things was to hear them more than once and extract more precision from them each time.

"They used the phrase catastrophic soft tissue and structural damage," Wally said. "The shoulder joint — the whole socket assembly is compromised. Cartilage, tendons, the joint capsule. The clavicle on that side is in five pieces." He paused. "The attending surgeon told the responding officer that in his twenty-three years of emergency medicine he had never seen a traumatic shoulder injury with that specific profile in someone who was alive to present it."

The room absorbed this.

"He'll never use it the same way," Dick said, to his feet.

"If he can use it at all," Wally said. "That's what the surgeon said. If. The nerve damage is —" He stopped. "It's significant."

Dick looked up from the floor. He did not say anything immediately. His face was doing the thing it had done in the alley — not settled, not resolved, the complicated work of holding multiple contradictory things simultaneously and not letting any one of them override the others.

"He was nineteen," Dick said.

"He still is nineteen," Stephanie said, from her armchair.

"That's not what I meant," Dick said, quietly.

"I know," Stephanie said.

Bruce turned from the fire.

He moved to the armchair across from Stephanie and sat down, which was notable in itself — Bruce standing was his default operational position, Bruce sitting was him making a choice to be in a conversation rather than above it. He looked at Wally.

"Walk me through it," he said. "From the beginning. From when you found him on the rooftop."

Wally did. He described the rooftop in the northwest coverage gap, the posture, the face, the quality of someone maintaining something at significant cost. He described coming back to the cave. He described the Aster Street alert and the departure marker on Tim's screen. He described arriving in the alley.

He described arriving in the alley.

The room was very quiet when he finished that part.

"The toxin," Bruce said.

"It found something different in him," Tim said. "Not the fear pathway. The adjacent one. The emotional substrate underneath the conditioned responses." He looked at his tablet without seeing it. "In someone who has suppressed everything as comprehensively as he apparently has, and then had all of it amplified simultaneously at concentrated dose—" He stopped. "The loss of fine motor control under that kind of emotional flooding is — it's consistent with what we know about extreme acute stress responses in enhanced individuals."

"It didn't weaken him," Duke said.

"No," Tim said. "That's the thing. It didn't weaken him at all. It removed the part of him that was calibrating. The part that does the math on force output. And without that—"

"You get what happened in the restaurant," Stephanie finished.

Silence.

"He didn't mean to," Wally said. He said it looking at the fire, not at anyone specifically, in the tone of someone making a statement of record rather than an argument.

"I know," Bruce said.

"I'm not — I just want that to be clearly part of the conversation. He was breathing fear toxin concentrated enough to drop a room full of people at distance. He was already in a state that was —" Wally stopped. Organized himself. "I saw his face on that rooftop before any of this happened. Before the Scarecrow, before the restaurant, before the alley. I saw his face when he didn't know anyone was watching, and—"

He didn't finish that sentence.

He didn't need to. Everyone in the room had seen the footage from the old city hall roof. They had all seen the departure. The broken windows. The displaced air.

They had all seen the face in the alley.

"The question," Bruce said, "is what we do with the information we now have."

"Which information specifically," Dick said. "There's several kinds."

"The capability," Bruce said. "We know now, not from inference but from direct evidence, what he can do without intending to. We know that he has been operating near populated areas. We know that he is in a significantly compromised emotional state." He paused. "We know that his presence in Gotham, in his current condition, is a variable that requires management."

Dick looked at him.

"You want to restrict him," Dick said. It was not an accusation. It was a statement of what he'd heard, offered for confirmation.

"I want to ensure that what happened tonight doesn't happen again," Bruce said. "That is not the same thing as restriction."

"The mechanism through which you ensure it might be," Dick said.

"Dick—"

"I'm not saying you're wrong to think about it," Dick said. "I'm saying that if you put restrictions on him — on what he can do, where he can go, how he moves — you are going to make it worse. You are going to take someone who is already in the worst emotional state of his life, who is already carrying the specific particular hell of being completely out of control of his own situation, and you are going to add to that." Dick's voice was very steady. "He already tried to leave the cave tonight. He came up out of the medical bay and he was heading for the stairs. He nearly flew away from us three separate times. If we add restrictions to everything else—"

"I'm not talking about caging him," Bruce said.

"I know you're not. I know the distinction you're making." Dick looked at him. "I'm saying he won't experience it as a distinction."

"Then what do you suggest?" Bruce asked. Not dismissively — the genuine question.

"I suggest we don't add anything," Dick said. "I suggest we take what happened tonight and we treat it as information about what he needs rather than what he needs to be prevented from doing. He needs treatment. He needs the toxin's emotional residue to clear his system. He needs—" Dick stopped. Something moved across his face, something that was not just strategic analysis. "He needs someone to not be afraid of him. That's what he needs more than anything. He's just hurt someone badly and he knows it and the worst thing that could happen right now is for him to look at us and see fear."

The room was quiet.

"The compound will clear his system within twenty-four hours," Tim said, carefully. "The elevated emotional state should reduce as it does. It's not going to fix what's underneath it, because the compound didn't create what's underneath it, but the acute amplification will diminish."

"Twenty-four hours," Bruce said.

"Give or take."

"And the risk in that window—"

"Is real," Tim said. "I'm not going to pretend it isn't. But Dick's right that restriction is likely to increase rather than decrease the risk."

Bruce looked at the fire.

Damian had been quiet throughout most of this. He spoke now, from the window seat, in the precise way he spoke when he'd been listening carefully and had reached a conclusion. "He stayed," he said.

Everyone looked at him.

"In the alley," Damian said. "He didn't fly away. He knew we were there, he knew we had seen what happened, and he stayed." He paused. "He had every opportunity to leave. He did not take them." He looked at the fire with the specific expression that was Damian’s version of meaning something more than he was saying. "Someone who was going to be a continued problem would have left."

The room sat with this.

Wally was looking at Damian with an expression that was reading as slightly surprised, which was the expression a lot of people had when Damian said something that was precisely right in a way they hadn't expected from a fifteen-year-old. It was a common expression in this room, and most people had learned to be less surprised by it.

"He stayed," Stephanie said quietly. "He was holding the card when we — he was still holding it."

"Jason gave him the card," Cassandra said, from the doorway. A single sentence, but it carried more weight than it contained.

"Yes," Duke said. "And he kept it through everything."

Bruce was looking at the fire again. He had the quality he got when he was making a decision rather than still in the process of making one — a slightly different quality of stillness, the stillness of something that had landed rather than something still in motion.

"We don't restrict," he said. "We support." He looked at Dick. "You're right. I'm not going to pretend the risk isn't real, but you're right about what restriction would cost." He looked at Wally. "Jonathan Crane's medical situation is being managed through channels that won't trace back to here?"

"Anonymous report to the ER," Wally said. "They know what they're dealing with, they don't know where he came from or how he got there. He's in surgery."

"Good." Bruce laced his fingers together. "Tomorrow — when he's ready, when the compound has cleared and we've given him time — we sit down with him and we explain everything we know about the dimensional transit signature and what we can do about it. We give him the full picture. We treat him like someone who is part of finding the solution, not someone we're managing."

"That will be easier," Wally said, "if Jason can keep him talking tonight."

"I know," Bruce said.

His phone buzzed. He looked at it. Everyone looked at him.

The expression on his face did something small and controlled but visible.

"Jason," he said.

"What does it say?" Stephanie said.

Bruce turned the phone so the room could see.

He's awake. Give us a minute.

Dick exhaled.

It wasn't a dramatic sound — not a sigh of relief, not anything theatrical. Just a quiet release of breath, the sound of a person who had been holding something and had just, for a moment, been able to put part of it down.

"Okay," he said. Quietly. "Okay."

"Give them the minute," Wally said.

"We'll give them the minute," Bruce agreed.

The fire popped. Somewhere in the house, very far away, the old building settled the way old buildings settled at night — a creak of timber, a minor thermal shift, the sounds of something large and patient existing.

The room waited.

Cassandra, at the edge of it, watched the fire.

Damian had put his chin on his knees, which was not a posture he often used, which was the posture of someone who was younger than they usually let themselves look.

Stephanie was holding the throw blanket tighter.

Duke had set the Signal mask down on the coffee stool beside him and was looking at his own hands.

Tim had put the tablet face-down on the arm of his chair.

Dick was looking at the door to the hallway that led to the cave stairs.

Wally was still on the rug. He reached out and picked up his tea mug — Alfred had provided a full service, because of course Alfred had — and wrapped both hands around it and held it.

He thought about a face on a rooftop. A tenth of a second. The quality of someone maintaining something at significant cost.

He thought about the alley.

He thought about nineteen years old.

They waited.

The door to the hallway opened.

Jason was in the doorframe, still in the civilian clothes, still holding the empty mug that had been his tea. He looked at the assembled room — at all of them, taking the roll call of it — and his expression had the quality it had when he'd come back from difficult situations and was not yet finished with them but had set them down temporarily in order to function.

"He's awake," Jason said, confirming what the text had said, making it real in the room with his voice.

"How is he?" Dick said.

Jason thought about this with unusual care. Not performing consideration — actually considering. Finding the right words for something that did not have easy words.

"He's—" He stopped. Started over. "He's not okay. He's not going to be okay for a while. But he's awake, and he drank the tea, and he's still here." A pause. "He didn't leave."

Wally's hands tightened slightly around his mug.

"Good," Bruce said. The word was simple and complete.

"He's going to need—" Jason looked at his mug. At the room. At Dick specifically, for a moment, and then at Bruce. "He's going to need people to be honest with him. About Scarecrow, about what we know about getting him home, about everything. He doesn't— he can't handle being managed. He's spent three years managing everything himself, and being managed is—" He stopped. Thought about it. "It's the one thing that's going to push him all the way out the door."

"I know," Bruce said.

"I just want to make sure we're—"

"I know, Jason," Bruce said. And then, with a quality that Jason had learned over years to recognize as the closest Bruce came to saying I hear you and you're right: "We'll do it right."

Jason looked at him for a moment.

Then he nodded.

"He's in the main cave area," Jason said. "By the console. He's just — sitting there, looking at everything. I think he's trying to get his bearings." A pause. "Maybe give him another few minutes before anyone comes down."

"We'll give him the minutes," Dick said.

Jason looked around the room one more time. At Wally, still on the rug. At Stephanie with her blanket. At Damian on the window seat with his chin on his knees. At Cassandra at the edge of everything. At Duke with his mask in his lap. At Tim with his face-down tablet. At Dick.

"He said he's going home," Jason said. "He said it like it was something he was going to hold onto until it was true."

The room was quiet.

"Good," Wally said. And then, with the specific quality of someone for whom this word meant something beyond its simple content: "He should."

The fire popped.

The house settled.

Outside, Gotham's night continued its long transit toward morning, the city's millions of simultaneous private lives proceeding without reference to a cave under a mansion or a boy from somewhere else who was sitting in it, looking at a bat symbol on a card that he was still holding.

The card that he had not put down.

Chapter Text

The cave was very large.

Mark had registered this before. He registered it again now, alone in the main area with Jason's footsteps fading up the stairs, and the alone-ness made the size of it land differently. Not background-large. The kind of large that pressed in around a single person.

The stalactites went up into real dark. The waterfall kept doing its thing, indifferent.

He stood in the middle of it and breathed.

He was, technically, functional.

He was not, honestly, okay.

Those were different things. He knew what okay felt like — the settled quality of it, the sense of the world being legible and yours. He knew it the way you knew something by its absence.

Right now the absence was very present.

Eight people were upstairs waiting to meet him.

Eight people who had been talking about him while he was in the blur. Who had made decisions about his body and his location while he was out. Who had assembled a picture of him from what Jason had said and what the cameras had caught and what the evidence in that restaurant had left behind.

He was going to have to walk into the room where those people were.

He was trying to decide how he felt about that.

The honest answer was: badly.

He knew that wasn't rational. By every measurable thing, these people had been trying to help him. Clean clothes. Medical bay. Alfred's tea. Time in the cave before the meeting. All of it care, all of it real.

Knowing the right response wasn't the same as having it.

He looked at the medical bay.

The clothes were on the side table — grey sweatshirt, black sweatpants, plain white t-shirt. Someone had left them without making a thing of it. No announcement. No checking he'd found them. Just there, available.

The same quality as everything else so far. Care that didn't require acknowledgment to be real.

He looked at his suit.

It was a disaster.

Two days. Forty-something hours in the same suit, through a forty-seven-minute fight, a transit that felt like being peeled, a landing that was mostly organized falling, Crime Alley, two rooftops, a ten-story building he'd held up with his hands, a restaurant, and an alley.

The left shoulder was the worst. Fabric peeled back, the tear stiff with dried blood that wasn't all his. Long tear at the hip. Scorch mark on the forearm.

He changed.

The clavicle required a specific sequence of movements. The ribs required him not to exhale too fast during the t-shirt. He managed both, set the ruined suit on the medical bed, and stood in the borrowed clothes.

They were large on him. Not Dick's — when the sweatshirt fell past his hips he corrected the assumption. Jason's. It smelled of fabric softener and the mineral quality of the cave.

He was standing in Jason Todd's sweatshirt on a world that wasn't his.

He pressed his palm flat against his sternum and held it there.

He needed to decide what version of himself was walking into that room.

He could bring Invincible — lid down, controlled disclosure, nothing unstrategic. Three years had built that version. It was reliable. It could sit in a room with eight strangers and give them exactly as much as he decided to give them.

Or he could bring Mark Grayson. The one who'd been on the cave floor forty minutes ago saying I didn't mean to and I'm going home like it was something he needed to say out loud to make it real.

He stood with the question.

It didn't resolve.

Then footsteps on the stairs.

Jason came down audibly — enough to announce himself, paced to give a moment between someone's coming and someone's here. He'd been doing that since Crime Alley. Mark had noticed every time.

He reached the bottom. Looked at the sweatshirt.

"You found the clothes."

"Yeah." Mark glanced down. "They're yours."

"How'd you know?"

"You're the tallest person I've met in this house."

Something shifted at the corner of Jason's mouth. "Dick would object to that."

"Dick can object. I'm going with what I've observed."

"He's not going to let it go."

The exchange was so normal it was almost disorienting. Mark let it exist anyway. It was better than what it was replacing.

Jason crossed the cave and stopped at the usual distance — close enough to talk, far enough to not crowd. He looked at Mark with the direct attention that was just how he looked at people.

Then his eyes went to Mark's arms.

Mark had pushed the sleeves up — habit, sleeves always felt wrong at his wrists — and the forearms were out. Three years of being Invincible had left marks on them. Not dramatic scarring. Just the texture of skin that had been through things and healed fast and imperfectly. A discoloration on the left from something very hot. A thin raised line at the right wrist from something edged that had gotten through before he'd fully understood where his defenses were.

Jason's expression changed.

Fast — the kind of fast that happened when something got through training that had been built specifically to stop things getting through. It moved through his jaw first. Then his hands, which had been loose at his sides and were now — not fists, but the shape of something becoming fists and stopping just short.

And his eyes, just for a moment, caught the light differently. A faint green, there and gone.

Mark watched it happen.

He watched the pull-back. The careful reassembly. He recognized the mechanism from the inside — he'd been using his own version of it for years.

Jason looked up mid-reassembly and found Mark watching him.

They looked at each other.

Jason didn't explain. Didn't redirect. He held it for one honest moment and then let the expression settle into something neutral-adjacent, and said:

"The others want to meet you. When you're ready."

"What does that mean," Mark said. "When I'm ready."

"When you decide you are. Not when anyone else decides."

"What if I decide I'm not?"

"Then I go back up and tell them that, and we figure something else out." No hesitation.

Mark looked at the stairs. At the waterfall. At the suit on the medical bed.

He pulled his hands from the sweatshirt pocket.

"Mark," he said.

Jason waited.

"My name. Just — Mark. Not the other one. Not yet."

Jason looked at him for a moment.

"Okay," he said. And then: "Mark."

Just the name. Just that.

"Alright," Mark said. "Let's go."

The cave was insanely big.

He kept finding new ways it was bigger than he'd thought. The vehicle bay extended further back than it looked. The equipment along the walls was more extensive. The ceiling at its highest point was taller than some buildings he'd been inside.

"This is insane," Mark said.

"The cave?"

"The cave is insane. The house is also insane."

"There are degrees," Jason said.

"What are the degrees."

"There's Wayne Manor." A pause. "And then there's everything else."

The stairs were stone, properly built, with a railing — someone had looked at a cave full of combat-trained people and decided safe stairs were worth the investment. They went up through more cave than expected and came out into a garage with vehicles that suggested significant operational requirements.

Then a hallway.

Wayne Manor was old in the right way. Walls with paintings in frames that had been maintained over actual decades. Floors worn smooth at the high-traffic lines. Ceilings with plasterwork someone had spent real hours on a long time ago.

Mark noticed it. He wasn't going to pretend not to.

He thought, briefly, about his mom's kitchen table. The slightly uneven leg she'd shimmed with folded cardboard and never got around to properly fixing. The smell of that house — coffee and something cooking and the specific combination that only meant one place.

He pulled his attention back to the hallway.

Jason led him to a door with warm light under it. Muffled ambient sound of multiple people in one room.

Mark stopped outside it.

Jason stopped beside him. Didn't fill the pause.

"The Flash guy." Mark started. "He found me on the rooftop without me knowing."

"Yeah."

"And he was in the alley."

"Yeah."

"I don't know how I feel about that."

"You don't have to have it figured out," Jason said. "He knows you know he was there. He's not going to pretend otherwise."

"What's he like?"

Jason thought about it. "He's a lot," he said. "In the good way. He'll say the first thing that comes into his head and it's almost always the right thing, which is genuinely unfair." A pause. "He gave a damn about you from the second he found you on that rooftop. I could hear it when he came back."

Mark looked at the door.

"And Batman— er, Bruce?”

"He'll look at you," Jason said. "Completely. Most of it invisible, which is somehow worse than if you could see it." He paused. "He'll also help. Those two things coexist. Don't let the first one crowd out the second."

Mark pressed the heel of his hand against his chest. Breathed through the ribs.

He pushed the door open.

He tried.

He gave it a real attempt — the walk, the posture, the expression that said I've handled worse than a room of people.

Eight pairs of eyes turned to him.

The confident walk made it four steps before something in his posture conceded. Shoulders moving slightly inward. Chin dropping a fraction. What had started as Invincible walking in had become Mark Grayson arriving, which was not what he'd planned.

He noticed it happening and couldn't stop it.

And then — because bad realizations tended to cluster — he remembered the alley. Batman and Nightwing grappling in through the broken exterior. The restaurant through the warped exit frame. The arm.

They all knew.

His stomach turned.

He stopped somewhere in the middle of the room.

Fire going in the fireplace. Tea on the coffee table. Eight people looking at him. None of them hostile. All of them paying the specific attention of people who paid attention for a living and hadn't switched it off.

He recognized two from the alley. The taller one — civilian clothes, dark shirt, sitting in an armchair and choosing to fill less of the room than he could. And the one on the couch nearest the fire, damp-haired, with the most open face in the room and the expression of someone doing careful work to keep it that way.

The rest were new.

On the window seat: a kid, maybe fifteen, spine straight, arms around his knees, running an assessment and not fully hiding it.

In the other armchair: a girl wrapped in a throw blanket with something purple at the collar, holding a packet of chips, watching Mark with bright direct eyes like the whole situation was interesting.

On the footstool: a young guy, mask in his lap, openly uncertain in the way of someone who'd decided performing otherwise was a waste of energy.

At the edge of the room by the door: a figure in dark operational gear who was reading the room the way Mark read rooms — not looking at it, reading it.

In a secondary chair: reddish-brown hair, focused quality even at rest, tablet face-down on one knee, visibly restraining something.

And on the rug, in front of the fire, cross-legged with an empty tea mug balanced on one knee:

The Flash.

Still in the suit.

Red and gold and completely unguarded, looking at Mark with the most open expression in the room. Which was saying something. The room contained Dick Grayson.

Mark's eyes went to the suit.

Wally looked down at himself.

"I know, I know," he said, with the energy of someone who had pre-processed this conversation. "I was going to change, but then you woke up, which seemed like an important development, so—" He gestured at the suit. "Flash suit it is. Very on-brand. Zero regrets."

Mark looked at him.

"Ninety percent regrets," Wally amended immediately. "Ten percent committed to the bit."

"Wally," said Dick from the couch, with the tone of someone who was very fond of a person and trying not to enable them.

"He opened with it," Wally said, pointing at his own face. "Nonverbally."

"He was looking at the suit—"

"He opened with it," Wally repeated, with absolute conviction.

Mark stared at this exchange.

Something in his chest did a thing that was not quite laughter and not quite not-laughter. Adjacent to both. Unexpected.

"Bruce Wayne," said the man in the armchair, and the room reorganized slightly around it — not loud, not demanding, just the specific weight of a voice rooms tended to orient around. "Thank you for coming up."

Two words. That was it.

"Dick Grayson," said the one on the couch, raising a hand briefly. Up close, his face was doing a lot of work — trying to be open without being too much, warm without pushing. The face of someone genuinely worried about making this worse by trying too hard. "Nightwing. You saw me. In the alley."

"I know," Mark said.

Dick nodded. Something in him released slightly — like he'd been bracing for a different answer and could let it go now. "Okay," he said.

"Tim Drake," said the one with the tablet, sitting forward. Clearly deploying restraint. "Red Robin. I've been running analysis on the dimensional transit signature." A pause. "I have questions." Another pause. "I'm going to try very hard not to ask all of them at once."

"How many are there," Mark said.

Tim considered this with genuine seriousness. "Conservatively? Forty. But some are linked, so you could argue twenty major ones with sub-questions, which sounds better—"

"It's worse," Jason said, from somewhere behind Mark.

"It's comprehensive," Tim said, with the dignity of someone defending an indefensible position.

"Stephanie Brown," said the one with the chips. She said it like the situation was interesting and she'd decided to approach it that way. "Spoiler. I was on the civilian corridor during the Scarecrow thing. You probably didn't see me." A pause. "Do you want chips? I'm stress-eating communally, if that helps."

"I'm — I'm okay."

"You don't have to be okay," Stephanie said, reasonably. "That's what the chips are for."

"Damian Wayne," said the one on the window seat. Precise timing. "Robin. I'll tell you what I think when I have enough information to think it accurately. Until then I'm observing."

"That's the most reasonable thing anyone's said to me in two days," Mark said.

Something very faint moved at the corner of Damian's expression.

"Duke Thomas," said the one on the footstool. "The Signal." He paused, and something in him shifted into something quieter. "For what it's worth — I'm glad you're here. That came out more intense than I meant."

"It's fine," Mark said. "It landed right."

"Cassandra Cain," said the figure at the edge of the room. Three words, efficient, complete. Her eyes on Mark were the most thorough thing in the room. He had the distinct, odd feeling of being actually seen — not assessed, not observed. Seen.

He didn't entirely know what to do with that.

"And you've met me," Wally said, from the rug, with the energy of someone arriving at a conclusion. "Wally West. Flash. Good at running, moderately okay at sitting still." He held up the empty mug. "Alfred's tea is genuinely incredible, by the way. I had three cups. Thought you should know."

The room had shifted. Not dramatically — nobody moved. But the texture of the attention was different. Less formal. More like people and less like a panel.

Mark was still standing.

Jason was in the chair by the fireplace. The empty one beside it just happened to be there.

Mark didn't sit.

He understood why. A seated position was a committed position. It announced a decision to stay that standing didn't. He was probably going to sit. He wasn't ready to communicate that yet.

The fire popped.

Somewhere in the house, a clock said 5 AM in the way old clocks did.

Wally looked at Mark.

"So," he said. The so had the quality of a door held open rather than anything pushed through it. "Your name is Mark."

"Yeah."

"Just Mark, or—?"

"Just Mark for now."

"Totally valid," Wally said. "I've been 'just Wally' before. It's a phase." He tilted his head. "How are you doing? Actually — not the version where everything's under control."

"Wally," Dick said quietly, monitoring.

"He can tell me it's none of my business," Wally said. "I'm just asking."

Mark opened his mouth.

And that was when the questions started.

Not one at a time.

Not organized. Not sequential. They came the way questions came from eight people who'd been waiting for hours and were no longer waiting.

"The dimensional transit device—" Tim started.

"—you said it felt different from—" Tim continued.

"Who sent you here?" Stephanie cut across him. "Like, actually. Who did this?"

"—he's someone I have history with," Mark said. "His name is Angstrom Levy. He—"

"Angstrom," Wally repeated, like he was testing the name. "Don't know an Angstrom. Local to your world?"

"Yes, he's from my world—"

"What's his deal?" Stephanie asked.

"He can open portals between parallel worlds. He's been doing it for years, collecting information from other timelines. He had a reason — something was done to him, by my—" Mark stopped. "By someone in my family. And he's been—"

"Your family hurt him," Bruce said.

"Yes."

"And this was retaliation."

"It's more complicated than that, but — yes."

"How long were you fighting him?" Duke asked.

"Forty-seven minutes."

"And he gave you all of—" Wally gestured at Mark's general state.

"Most of it."

"The clavicle," Damian said. "Was that from the transit or from Angstrom specifically?"

"Angstrom. The transit mostly—"

"The transit signature showed an anchored terminus," Tim said, leaning forward. "Which means getting back isn't just reversing the same mechanism, it's—"

"Hold on," Stephanie said. "Does he know where you are? Is he going to follow you here?"

"I don't think so—"

"But you don't know for certain," Damian said.

"No—"

"Have you eaten?" Wally asked.

Everyone looked at him.

"What?" he said. "It's a legitimate question. Alfred made food. Real food. I'm just asking."

"The fight," Dick said, quiet and careful, trying to find a gap. "The forty-seven minutes — how does someone keep fighting for that long when they already—"

"The portals made it hard to land anything," Mark said, turning toward Dick, trying to answer properly. "Every time I thought I had him he'd redirect through a rift and I'd be—"

"He knew your patterns," Damian said, from the window seat. "You said he had access to other timelines."

"Yes—"

"So he'd studied every version of the fight where he lost," Tim said, picking up on it. "That's an extraordinary tactical—"

"How strong are you?" Damian asked.

"Damian," Bruce said.

"It's relevant—"

"I don't know the exact numbers," Mark said, because the question was there and he was just going to answer it and move past it. "Strong enough that the numbers don't usually—"

"Is there anyone on your world who's working on finding you?" Dick asked, quietly, from beneath all of it. Still trying. "A team, people who know what—"

"They'll know something happened," Mark said, turning toward Dick. "They'll have seen the evidence of the fight, the portal. Someone will have—" He stopped. "Someone will have called my mom. She'll know something went wrong."

"Who else?" Wally asked.

"What?"

"Who else are you thinking about? On your world."

Mark looked at him.

"Friends," Wally said simply. "People. Who else?"

"The transit endpoint—" Tim started.

"Mark, does your world have—" Stephanie began at the same time.

"The anchoring mechanism specifically," Tim pushed through, "was it something the device did actively or a—"

"What is Angstrom's current threat level on your world?" Damian said. "If he's still there and you're not—"

"Is there a you here?" Stephanie asked. "Like, a parallel you? Have you thought about that? Because that could get—"

"The metabolic demands of your physiology during extended—" Tim started.

"Have you actually eaten?" Wally said again.

Mark turned toward Tim.

Turned back to Wally.

Turned toward Damian.

Turned toward Stephanie.

Turned—

All of them. All at once. Every face a question. Every question needing an answer. Every answer interrupted before it arrived. The fire too warm now. The room too full. His pulse in his ears again, loud, getting louder. His hands closed without his permission, white-knuckled at his sides.

He kept turning from face to face to face and there were too many of them and they were all looking at him and he couldn't—

"I need—" he said.

The word came out wrong. Too clipped. The voice of someone whose management wasn't managing anymore.

He looked at the room. Tim's mouth still moving. Wally gesturing with the mug. Stephanie reaching for the chips. Damian watching from the window seat, fully still. Dick going very still too — the specific stillness of someone who had just recognized something and hadn't realized it was happening until it already had.

Mark moved.

Not toward the door he'd come through. Toward the other one — the one across the room he'd catalogued during the threat assessment. The one that didn't require going back through where he came from.

He didn't run.

He walked, quickly, and pushed the door open.

The room on the other side was tall and quiet and smelled of old paper.

Shelves on three walls, floor to ceiling, full of real books. A window at the far end with grey morning light coming through it.

A library.

He closed the door behind him. Not a slam. Just closed.

He pressed his back against the nearest shelf and slid down until he was sitting on the floor, knees up, hands over his face.

He breathed.

The pulse in his ears was very loud.

He breathed again.

The walls weren't moving. That was good. He breathed through the rib situation, worked around it, breathed again.

The library was quiet.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

He thought about his mom.

Not the managed version — not she's probably at home, she'll be worried, I'll address it when I can. The real version.

His mom with her coffee mug held in both hands the way she held it when she was worried. The garden she'd started after all the shit that had happened with his dad. God, he doesn’t want to think about his dad right now. The kitchen table with the uneven leg she'd never properly fixed. The smell of that house — coffee and something cooking and the one specific combination that only meant home.

She didn't know where he was.

He let that be present. Let it hurt the way it hurt when you stopped managing it.

Then: I am going home.

He held that. Not a hope. A commitment. A future fact he was treating as true until it was.

I am going to hold it together long enough to let these people help me. And then I am going home.

Outside the mostly-closed door, the sitting room was quiet. Not fine-quiet. Processing-quiet. He could hear the low texture of it — one voice, brief. Then nothing. Then another voice. The creak of a floorboard as someone stood.

He didn't try to make out the words.

He pressed the card in his pocket. Felt the shape of it through the fabric — the weight of something he'd been carrying since a stranger in Crime Alley put it in his hand.

He breathed.

He was going to get up in a minute.

He was going to go back through that door, sit in the empty chair beside Jason's — actually sit, actually commit — and let these people do what they were clearly going to keep trying to do regardless of what he did.

In a minute.

First he was going to sit on the library floor and breathe, and the library was going to be quiet, and the books were going to be old and patient on their shelves, and the grey light was going to lie flat on the wooden floor and ask nothing of him.

He breathed.

It was enough.