Midnight

Sarcasm is life

[midnight-khaos]

🐘🪣 Little Explorer

Summary: Three-year-old Jason Todd-Wayne wakes before dawn, grabs his stuffed elephant and trusty bucket, and sets off on a grand backyard expedition. What he finds is wonderful. What Bruce finds is terrifying.

Chapter 1: The Great Before-Breakfast Adventure

The manor was still dark.

Not the scary kind of dark—Jason had decided this a long time ago, back when Daddy first brought him home and the hallways were big and echoey and made his tummy feel weird. That had been the nervous dark. This was the quiet dark. The kind that meant the birds weren’t even awake yet, and Grampy Alfred’s kettle wasn’t whistling, and Daddy was still sleeping in the big bed with his arm hanging off the side like a noodle.

Jason knew all of this because he’d checked.

He’d climbed out of his toddler bed—the one with the bat-shaped guardrails that Daddy had built himself, even though Grampy said he could have simply purchased one, Master Bruce—and padded down the hallway in his dinosaur pajamas, dragging his stuffed elephant, Stompy, by one well-loved ear.

Stompy had been Jason’s first present. Not from a birthday or Christmas—just a because present. Bruce had taken him to the store three days after the adoption went through, and Jason had stood in the toy aisle for twenty-seven minutes without touching anything because he hadn’t believed he was actually allowed to choose. When Bruce had finally crouched down and said, “Anything in the whole store, Jay, anything at all,” Jason had reached for the smallest, plainest stuffed elephant on the lowest shelf—not the big sparkly ones, not the ones that played music, but the little grey one with the floppy ears that looked, in Bruce’s words, “like it needed a good home.”

Jason had held it against his chest and whispered, “This one’s been waiting the longest.”

Bruce had bought it immediately and had also gone to the car and sat there for ten minutes pretending he wasn’t crying.

Stompy went everywhere now. Stompy had his own place at the dinner table (Alfred set it without being asked). Stompy had been through the wash fourteen times (Alfred kept count). Stompy had a tiny bathrobe that Alfred had sewn by hand from leftover fabric, because Alfred Pennyworth’s love language was acts of service performed with military precision and Victorian attention to detail.

Jason peeked into Daddy’s room first. Bruce Wayne, billionaire, philanthropist, and Gotham’s most terrifying creature of the night, was face-down in his pillow, one sock on, one sock missing, making a sound that was definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent not a snore, because Daddy said he didn’t snore, and Daddy was always right. Except when Grampy said he wasn’t.

His hand was dangling off the side of the bed, and Jason could see the bruise on his knuckles from patrol—the one Bruce had told him was from “bumping into a door” and that Jason had accepted because he was three and doors were unpredictable.

Jason considered waking him up. Daddy needed sleep. Grampy said so all the time, in that voice that meant he was being patient but was actually a little bit mad. “Master Bruce, the human body requires rest, a concept you seem determined to disprove through sheer obstinacy.”

Jason didn’t know what obstinacy meant, but he knew Daddy didn’t sleep enough, and when Daddy did sleep, his face went soft and un-worried and he looked like a regular daddy instead of a daddy who carried the whole city on his back every night.

So he didn’t wake him up.

Instead, he looked out the window at the end of the hall—the tall one with the pretty colored glass that made rainbow puddles on the floor when the sun came through—and he saw it.

The outside.

It was doing that thing. That thing where the sky wasn’t dark anymore but wasn’t light either, and everything looked blue and sparkly, and the grass had those tiny water drops on it that Grampy called dew and Jason called grass tears, because that was a better name and he would not be accepting criticism.

The outside was calling him.

Jason pressed his face against the glass, and Stompy’s face too, so Stompy could see.

“’Tompy,” he whispered seriously. “We gotta go ’sploring.”

Stompy’s button eyes stared back with an enthusiasm that Jason chose to interpret as a resounding yes.

The preparation was meticulous.

Jason went back to his room and got his yellow bucket—the good one, the one with the starfish on the side that Daddy had bought at the beach, the day Jason had seen the ocean for the first time and stood at the edge of the water with his mouth open so wide that Bruce had worried about seagulls. He put Stompy inside the bucket, because Stompy’s legs were too short for adventures and he needed to ride. He tucked Stompy’s tiny bathrobe around him, because mornings were cold and elephants got chilly.

He found his rain boots by the front door, the red ones with the frogs on them—each frog had a different expression, and Jason had named all of them (left boot: Herbert, Francesca, and Little Greg; right boot: Queen Ribbit, Chomps, and Steve)—and he sat on the floor for a very long time getting them on the right feet.

They were on the wrong feet.

He did not notice this, and would not have cared if he had.

The back door—the one in the kitchen, not the big fancy one in the front that Grampy said was for guests—had a handle that was very high up. But Jason had solved this problem before. He pushed a kitchen chair over, climbed up, and turned the handle with both hands, tongue poking out with concentration.

The morning air hit him like a cool, wet kiss.

It smelled like grass and dirt and the flowers Grampy planted along the walkway—the lavender ones that Grampy said were “soothing” and that Jason said smelled like purple, which wasn’t a smell but felt like one.

Jason Wayne-Todd breathed in so deep his whole chest puffed up like a little balloon, and then he grinned—a grin that showed the gap where his left front tooth was still thinking about coming in—and stepped out into the blue-grey world with his bucket, his elephant, and his frog boots on the wrong feet.

The great expedition had begun.

The first thing Jason found was a rock.

It was a very good rock. It was grey on the outside but when he turned it over there were tiny sparkly bits inside, like someone had hidden glitter in it. He held it up to the barely-there light and turned it this way and that, watching the sparkles catch and flash.

“Lookit, ‘Tompy,” he said, showing it to the elephant in the bucket. “It’s got magic in it. Like Daddy’s cave, ’cept smaller.”

Into the bucket it went.

The second thing he found was another rock. This one was flat and smooth and warm-grey, perfect for skipping, which Jason couldn’t actually do yet, but he’d seen Daddy do it at the pond last Saturday and it had looked very cool. Daddy had shown him how to flick his wrist, and the stone had bounced four times across the water, and Jason had yelled “AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN” and Daddy had skipped stones for forty-five minutes until his arm was sore, and he’d done it smiling the whole time.

Jason kept the rock for future skipping purposes. Practice made perfect. Grampy said that too.

The third thing was a beetle.

Jason crouched down in the grass—wet grass soaking into his pajama knees immediately, a problem he registered and dismissed in the same heartbeat—and watched the beetle with the kind of intense, unblinking focus that only very small children and very dedicated scientists can achieve.

“Hi,” he said to the beetle.

The beetle waved one antenna, which Jason took as a greeting.

“You’re very shiny,” he told it. “You look like Daddy’s car. The good one, not the one that Grampy says is a—” He paused, trying to remember the word. “A mid-life crisis.”

He leaned closer, nose almost touching the grass. The beetle had tiny little legs that moved in a pattern, and its shell was dark and gleaming, and when the light hit it just right, there were rainbow swirls in the black, like oil in a puddle.

“You’re doing a really good job walking,” Jason told it encouragingly. “Keep going. You’re doing great.”

The beetle, uninterested in motivational commentary, trundled away into the grass.

Jason didn’t put the beetle in the bucket, because the beetle was busy and it would be rude to interrupt. But he did find a roly-poly bug a few steps later, curled under a piece of bark, and when he poked it gently with one finger, it curled up into a perfect little ball.

“Oh!” Jason’s eyes went huge. “Oh. You’re a ball bug.”

He picked it up very, very carefully—Grampy had taught him about gentle hands with small creatures, had sat with him in the garden and shown him how to cup his palms and move slowly, because everything alive deserved to be treated with kindness, even the things with too many legs. “We are stewards of the small, Master Jason,” Alfred had said, and Jason didn’t know what stewards meant but he liked the way Grampy’s voice sounded when he said it, all serious and important, like Jason was being trusted with something big.

He set the roly-poly on his palm.

“You can ride with ‘Tompy,” he decided, and placed the roly-poly on Stompy’s head, where it sat in its little ball and did not object.

The expedition continued.

He found a worm (“Hi, you’re long. You’re like a noodle. A dirt noodle. I like you”), a caterpillar on a leaf (“You’re gonna be a butterfly and I’m gonna come back and see you, I promise”), and a ladybug that landed on his nose and made him go cross-eyed trying to look at it. He sat very still for a whole minute, barely breathing, while the ladybug walked across the bridge of his nose, because he didn’t want to scare her and also because this was the most magical thing that had ever happened to anybody ever in the history of the world.

“You’re so pretty,” he whispered.

The ladybug flew away, and Jason waved goodbye.

Into the bucket went: three more rocks (one shaped like a heart, one shaped like a triangle, one that was just “a good one”), a particularly beautiful leaf that was red and gold even though it wasn’t fall—“Maybe it wanted to be special early,” Jason reasoned—a feather that was black and shiny like oil, and a piece of bark that had a pattern on the inside that looked like a tiny river map.

“‘Tompy, we’re gonna need a bigger bucket,” Jason said, surveying his collection with the satisfied air of a museum curator.

He was having the best morning of his entire life, and it wasn’t even breakfast yet.

He found the mushrooms near the big oak tree at the edge of the garden.

They were growing in a little cluster at the base of the trunk, pale and delicate, some of them with caps that looked like tiny umbrellas and others that were round and puffy like little marshmallows. The morning dew sat on them in perfect droplets, and they looked, to Jason’s eyes, like something out of the fairy tale book Grampy read to him before bed.

Jason crouched down and studied them with great seriousness.

He knew about mushrooms. Grampy made them sometimes in the pan with butter and that herb that smelled sharp and green—thyme, Grampy called it, even though it wasn’t a clock, which Jason still found confusing. And they were so good, all soft and squishy and they tasted like the earth smelled after rain. And these ones were right here, just growing, for free, and wouldn’t Grampy be so proud if Jason brought him breakfast ingredients? Wouldn’t Grampy smile that special smile, the one that made his eyes go all crinkly, and say “Well done, young sir”?

He reached for one—

And then stopped, because another thought arrived, as thoughts sometimes do with three-year-olds, completely unbidden and with great authority.

Ask first.

Grampy had said that. About the berries on the bushes last summer. They’d been in the garden together, and Jason had reached for a cluster of bright red berries that looked like candy, and Grampy had caught his hand—gently, always gently—and crouched down to his level and said, “One must always ask before consuming anything found growing wild, young sir. Some of nature’s prettiest offerings are also her most inhospitable.”

Jason had understood approximately forty percent of that sentence, but the forty percent he’d understood was ask Grampy first.

“Okay,” he said to the mushrooms. “You stay here. I’m gonna ask.”

He did, however, pick one and put it in the bucket, so he’d have a sample to show. That was just smart science. Daddy had a whole cave full of samples. Jason was practically doing research.

A little further on, near a mossy patch by the garden wall, he found something even better.

It was a shell. A snail shell, perfect and spiraly, sitting empty in the dirt. The outside was brown and plain, but when Jason turned it over, the inside was smooth and pearly and caught the light like the inside of the fancy dishes Grampy only used when “company of consequence” came to dinner.

Jason picked it up and held it to his ear, the way Daddy had shown him with seashells at the beach—the same day as the bucket, the same day Jason had tasted salt water by accident and made a face so dramatic that Bruce had laughed until he wheezed.

He couldn’t hear the ocean—because this was a snail shell and they were in Gotham, not the beach—but he pretended he could, and honestly, the pretending was better because he could make the ocean sound however he wanted.

“The snail moved out,” he told Stompy, peering into the empty shell. “Maybe he got a bigger house. Like when Daddy said I could have the room with the window seat ’stead of the first one.” He paused, thinking. “Maybe the snail got a window seat too.”

Snail shell: bucket.

Then—and this was the discovery that made Jason gasp out loud, both hands flying to his cheeks—he found a sea star.

It wasn’t a real sea star, of course, though Jason didn’t know that. It was actually a dried starfish-shaped piece of something—it might have been a very strangely shaped leaf skeleton, bleached white by sun and rain. It might have been a decorative thing that had blown in from a neighbor’s yard. But it had five points and it was star-shaped and Jason had just watched a documentary with Daddy about tide pools—curled up on the couch under the big blue blanket, his head on Daddy’s chest, listening to Daddy’s heartbeat and the narrator’s voice and the sounds of waves all mixed together until he’d fallen asleep and Daddy had carried him to bed without waking him up.

So as far as Jason was concerned, this was a genuine sea star that had traveled all the way from the ocean to the Wayne Manor garden specifically to be found by him.

“’Tompy. ’Tompy. Look.”

He held it up reverently, both hands, like it was made of glass.

“A sea star.” His whisper was hushed with wonder. “She came to visit us. She came all the way from the ocean.”

Into the bucket, very gently, nestled between the sparkly rock and the snail shell, given pride of place because she was a guest and guests got the best spot.

Jason beamed at his collection. The bucket was getting satisfyingly full. He had rocks and bugs and shells and mushrooms and a feather and a leaf and bark and a sea star.

This was, without question, the greatest bucket in the history of buckets. He was going to show Daddy and Daddy was going to be so impressed. Maybe Daddy would put the sea star in a special case, like the things in the cave. Maybe Daddy would say, “Wow, Jay, you found all this by yourself?” and look at him with that face—the proud face, the one where his eyes went soft and his smile went quiet and Jason felt like the most important person in the whole entire world.

He was about to head toward the pond—because the pond had frogs and frogs were outstanding—when something in the grass caught his eye.

Something rusty.

Jason picked up the first nail without thinking about it.

It was long and brown-orange with rust, and it had a satisfying heaviness to it, heavier than it looked. He turned it over in his small hands, fascinated by the texture—rough and flaky, like the rust was trying to become dirt.

“Huh,” he said, which was his all-purpose word for things that were interesting but didn’t have names yet.

He found a second nail a few inches away. Then a third, then a fourth. They were scattered in the grass like someone had dropped a whole pocketful, and Jason—who was three and had the collecting instincts of a very small, very enthusiastic magpie—put all four in his bucket.

He’d ask Daddy about those too. Maybe they were for building things. Jason liked building things. Last week he and Daddy had built a birdhouse, and it was lopsided and the roof didn’t quite fit, but Daddy had hung it up in the tree anyway and said it had “character,” and a bird had actually moved in, which Jason considered the greatest architectural achievement in Wayne family history.

What he found next, he did not put in the bucket.

Mostly because he couldn’t lift it.

It was metal, round-ish, about the size of a dinner plate, half-buried in the earth near the tree line where the manicured lawn gave way to the wilder part of the estate grounds. It had been covered by leaves and grass, but Jason’s frog boot had kicked the edge of it, and when he’d crouched down and brushed the debris away with his hands, he’d found it.

He didn’t know what it was. It was heavy and green-grey, like the color of army things he’d seen on TV, and it had a thing on top that looked like a button but wasn’t a button because buttons were friendly and this wasn’t friendly—

He reached for it.

And something in the back of his very small brain—something instinctive, something that lived in a place deeper than words, something that had nothing to do with being three and everything to do with being Jason, who had survived things no three-year-old should even know about, who had learned before he could read that some things in the world were shaped like help but built to hurt—made him stop.

He pulled his hand back.

He sat very still and looked at it for a long moment, head tilted, brow furrowed in an expression that was eerily, heartbreakingly reminiscent of Bruce Wayne studying evidence in the cave. The same intensity. The same careful distance. The same instinct that said understand the threat before you engage.

“That’s a weird rock,” he said finally, slowly. “That’s a bad weird rock.”

He stood up, took three deliberate steps backward, and moved on.

He didn’t put it in the bucket. But he didn’t forget where it was, either.

He found the second one near the pond.

It was better hidden than the first—deeper in the soil, almost completely covered—but Jason’s frog boot caught the edge of it when he stepped off the path, and the metallic clink was wrong, different from the sound of stepping on a regular rock, and Jason stopped.

He crouched. He brushed the leaves away, just enough to see the same green-grey metal, the same not-a-button shape.

His stomach felt funny. Not sick-funny. Scared-funny.

“There’s another one, ’Tompy,” he whispered.

He backed away from this one too.

The third one was under the garden bench. The pretty white bench where Grampy sat in the afternoons with his book and his tea, where Jason sometimes climbed up and sat beside him and put his head on Grampy’s arm and listened to Grampy read out loud in his Grampy voice, the one that made everything sound important and safe.

Jason saw the edge of it poking out from under the bench and his face crumpled for just a second—a flash of something that looked too old for his face, too knowing—before he smoothed it out and kept walking.

He was going to tell Daddy about the bad weird rocks.

But first, he had something more important to investigate.

The garden snake was his favorite discovery.

He found it sunning itself—or trying to, since the sun was barely up—on a flat rock near the garden wall. It was small, maybe a foot long, with beautiful scales that shifted between green and brown and had a faint stripe of yellow running down its back like a tiny racing stripe.

Jason sat down in the wet grass approximately eight inches from the snake and regarded it with naked adoration.

“Oh,” he breathed. “Oh, you’re so pretty.”

The snake, because it was a common garter snake and therefore not remotely dangerous but also not remotely interested in toddler opinions, flicked its tongue out and stayed where it was.

“Your scales are like… like…” Jason searched his three-year-old vocabulary for the right word. His face went through several expressions as he considered and rejected options. “Like Daddy’s tie. The green one. The fancy one that Grampy picked out for the gala.”

The snake flicked its tongue again. Jason took this as agreement.

“But you’re prettier than the tie,” he added, because it was important to be specific with compliments and because he had standards. “‘Cause your scales got that shiny part, see? Right there?” He pointed, very carefully not touching, because Grampy said you could look without touching and that was called respect. “Where the light goes and it looks like a rainbow, all green and gold and a little bit blue? The tie doesn’t do that. The tie just sits there being a tie.”

He leaned closer, chin on his knees, bucket beside him, and studied the scales with an intensity that would have impressed a herpetologist.

“And your stripe,” he continued, gesturing at the yellow line. “That’s so cool. It’s like someone painted you. Like someone really tiny got a really tiny brush and went—” He made a painting motion in the air. “—all the way down. That’s art, that is. You’re art.”

The snake appeared neither flattered nor offended. It blinked its dark little eyes and flicked its tongue at a passing gnat.

“Do you got a name? I bet you don’t got a name. Nobody probly ever asked.” Jason’s face went serious. “That’s sad. Everybody should have a name. Even snakes. Especially snakes. Can I name you?”

He didn’t wait for permission.

“I’m gonna call you… Noodle. ‘Cause you look like a noodle. A really pretty noodle with rainbow scales and a good tongue and a racing stripe.” He nodded, satisfied. “Hi, Noodle. I’m Jason. This is ‘Tompy.” He held up the bucket so the elephant was visible. “And this is Gerald.” He pointed to the roly-poly. “Gerald’s a ball bug but he’s nice, don’t worry.”

Noodle, indifferent to introductions, began to slowly slide off the rock.

“Wait—wait, where you going?” Jason scrambled forward on his knees. “You should come with me! I got a bucket! You can ride with ‘Tompy! ‘Tompy’s an elephant but he’s very nice, he won’t squish you, I promise. And I’ll find you bugs! You eat bugs, right? I saw that on the TV with Daddy. You eat bugs and mice but I don’t got mice but I got bugs, I’ll find you the best bugs—”

Noodle, apparently deciding that this particular patch of morning sun was no longer worth the monologue, slithered smoothly into the grass.

“Noodle! Noodle, come back!”

Jason followed on his knees, pajama bottoms now thoroughly soaked through both layers, tracking the snake’s path through the grass with determined focus.

“I’ll give you a rock! I got a really good sparkly rock, you can have it! It’s got magic in it! Noodle! We could be best friends! I don’t got a lot of friends ‘cause I’m three and I don’t go to school yet but Daddy says I’m gonna make lots of friends and you could be the first one! Noodle! NOODLE!”

Noodle disappeared under a bush with a final flick of its yellow-striped tail.

Jason sat back on his heels. His lower lip trembled for exactly one second—a wobble, not a cry, because Jason Todd-Wayne did not cry over snakes leaving, he didn’t—before he pulled himself together with a fortitude that was, frankly, remarkable for someone who hadn’t yet mastered the letter R.

“Okay,” he said, sniffing once. Twice. “‘S okay. Maybe Noodle’s got stuff to do. Noodle’s probly got snake stuff. Snake meetings. Snake… errands.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “I’ll come back tomorrow, Noodle! Same place! I’ll bring you a worm! A really good worm!”

He was picking up his bucket to continue the expedition when he heard it.

A tiny sound. High and thin and desperate, almost too high to hear, like a whistle from far away.

Cheep. Cheep cheep cheep.

The bat was tangled in a spider web.

Not a small web, either—one of those massive ones that spanned between two branches of the old elm tree near the eastern wall, thick and sticky and glistening with morning dew, built by a spider that clearly had ambitions above its station. The bat was small—so small, smaller than Jason’s hand—brown-furred with delicate membranous wings, and it was caught and wrapped in silk threads that wound around its body like tiny ropes. It was screaming—tiny ultrasonic chirps of distress that Jason could barely hear but could definitely feel, like a tugging behind his ribs, like the sound was pulling at something inside him.

“Oh no,” Jason whispered, bucket dropping from his hand. “Oh no oh no oh no—”

He ran to the base of the tree and looked up. The web was above his head, stretched between branches, and the bat was in the middle of it, wings stuck, body twisting weakly, getting more tangled with every movement.

“Don’t move!” Jason called up. “Stop wiggling! You’re making it worse! Just—just hold on, I’m coming, I’m coming—”

He set Stompy carefully on the ground (“Guard the bucket, ’Tompy”), assessed the situation with the gravity of a three-year-old who had just found a Crisis, and looked for a solution.

A stick. He found a stick. Reached up.

Too short.

He found a longer stick. Reached again, on tiptoes, frog boots wobbling on the uneven ground. The tip of the stick brushed the bottom of the web, and the bat chirped louder, more frantic, its tiny body jerking.

“I know, I know, you’re scared, ’s okay, I got you, I promise I got you—”

He stretched as high as he could—arms trembling, calves burning—and very, very carefully used the stick to pull the edge of the web down, lowering it inch by inch until the bat was within reach. Then he dropped the stick, reached up with both hands—his small, careful, gentle hands, Grampy’s hands, steward-of-the-small hands—and began picking the silk threads off the bat’s wings.

It was slow work. The web was sticky and strong, and the threads were fine, and Jason’s fingers were clumsy with cold and care. But he didn’t rush. He didn’t pull. He worked each thread loose one at a time, murmuring the whole while.

“There you go. There you go, you’re okay. I got you. You’re okay, little guy. You’re so brave. You’re being so good. Just a little more, okay? Just a little more and you’re free.”

It was the voice Grampy used. The nightmare voice, the 4-AM voice, the voice that came with warm milk and a hand on Jason’s back that moved in slow circles while the shaking stopped. Jason didn’t know he’d learned it. He didn’t know he was using it. He just knew what scared and stuck felt like, and he knew what it sounded like when someone was gentle with you, and that was enough.

The bat went still in his hands. Its tiny heart hammered against his fingers—so fast, so fast, like a hummingbird, like a drum being played by the world’s smallest, most terrified drummer—and its dark eyes blinked up at him.

Big eyes. Scared eyes. Trusting eyes.

“There.” Jason peeled the last thread of web off its left wing, then the right, holding his breath as each membrane came free, intact, undamaged. “See? All better. You’re all free.”

He cupped the bat in both palms and brought it close to his face, examining it for injuries the way Grampy examined Jason’s knees after a fall—thorough, gentle, frowning with concentration.

The bat’s fur was soft. Softer than Stompy, even, though Jason would never say that to Stompy’s face. Its ears were tiny triangles. Its nose was a miniature button.

“You’re very cute,” Jason informed it. “You look like a little bean.”

The bat blinked.

Jason expected it to fly away. He opened his hands wider, giving it room, giving it the sky.

It didn’t fly.

It sat in his palms, wings folded, and chirped. Not the scared chirps from before—a different sound. Softer. Almost… conversational. Like it was saying something. Like it was saying hello or thank you or I’m staying.

Cheep.

“You’re welcome,” Jason said, because manners were important, Grampy said so.

Cheep cheep.

He gently set the bat on his shoulder, thinking it would fly off. It adjusted its grip, tiny claws hooking into the fabric of his dinosaur pajamas with surprising delicacy—not scratching, not pulling, just holding on—and settled in against his neck like it had always been there. Like that spot, right there between Jason’s jaw and his collarbone, had been empty this whole time and was only now complete.

Cheep.

Jason turned his head slowly. The bat was right there, inches away, its dark eyes blinking at him with a calm that seemed wildly inappropriate for something that had been wrapped in a spider web thirty seconds ago.

“…You wanna come with me?”

Cheep.

Jason’s face broke into the most radiant sunrise of a smile—wide and bright and gap-toothed and incandescent with joy, the kind of smile that could power a small city, the kind of smile that Bruce Wayne would sell his entire fortune to see and consider it a bargain.

“Okay! Okay, you can come! You can come forever! Your name is—” He thought very hard, scrunching his whole face up with the effort. “Your name is Bean. ‘Cause you’re small like a bean. A bat bean. A bat bean.”

Bean chirped approvingly and snuggled closer to Jason’s ear, and Jason giggled—a real giggle, bubbling up from his belly like champagne—because the bat’s fur tickled and the bat’s nose was cold and the bat’s tiny claws were scritchy and this was, officially, better than the sea star.

And so the expedition continued: a three-year-old boy in soaked dinosaur pajamas and wrong-footed frog boots, carrying a yellow bucket full of rocks and shells and mushrooms and rusty nails and a roly-poly bug riding on a stuffed elephant in a tiny handmade bathrobe, with a freshly rescued bat perched on his shoulder like a tiny, furry pirate parrot.

The sun was just starting to turn the sky from blue to gold.

Inside the manor, two people were about to have the worst morning of their lives.

Chapter 2: The Worst Morning

Bruce Wayne woke up because of the silence.

This was a skill he’d developed in the weeks since Jason had come to live at the manor—an unconscious, bone-deep awareness of the quality of quiet in the house. There was the good silence, which meant Jason was sleeping peacefully—breathing soft, body warm, occasionally murmuring something about elephants. There was the bad silence, which meant Jason was having a nightmare and had gone so still and small in his bed that he’d stopped making any sound at all, curled tight like a fist, and Bruce would find him with his eyes squeezed shut and his hands over his ears and it would take ten minutes of slow circles on his back and “I’m here, Jay, I’m right here, you’re safe” before the shaking stopped.

And then there was this silence.

The suspicious silence.

The silence that meant a three-year-old was awake, unsupervised, and doing something.

Bruce’s eyes opened.

He stared at the ceiling for approximately two seconds—running a rapid threat assessment with a brain that could analyze crime scenes while hanging upside down from a gargoyle—time of day (early), location (home), last known position of child (bed, 11:47 PM, post-story, post-warm milk, clutching Stompy, Bean hanging from guardrail), probability of mischief (high, always high, this was Jason)—

He threw the covers off and was in the hallway before his feet fully registered the cold floor.

Jason’s room was empty.

The bed was unmade. The sheets were still warm—Bruce touched them, felt the ghost heat of his son’s small body, and his heart rate spiked. Stompy was gone. The yellow bucket was gone. The frog boots were not in the room.

Bean was gone.

Bruce’s heart rate, which was normally a resting fifty-two beats per minute even when people were actively trying to stab him, hit ninety.

“Alfred.”

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. He was already moving down the stairs, bare feet silent on the hardwood, and Alfred—because Alfred had a sixth sense about these things, or possibly because Alfred existed in a state of perpetual surveillance that would put most intelligence agencies to shame—appeared at the bottom of the staircase in his dressing gown, already holding two things: a cup of tea and an expression of mild concern that, on anyone else, would have been screaming panic.

“The young master is not in his room,” Alfred said. It wasn’t a question. It was never a question with Alfred. It was always a statement delivered in the tone of a question, the answer to which was already known.

“No.”

“His boots are not by the door.”

“I noticed.”

“The kitchen chair has been relocated.”

Bruce was already in the kitchen. The chair—Jason’s chair, the one with the booster seat attached, the one that Alfred had modified with non-slip feet because Jason had once pushed it across the tile floor with such enthusiasm that it had nearly gone through the glass patio door—was against the wall, pulled up to the back door. The back door was unlocked.

His blood went cold.

“He’s outside.”

“So it would appear, sir.”

Bruce’s hand was on the door handle. Alfred set down the tea. The mild concern upgraded to something sharper—not panic, because Alfred Pennyworth did not panic, Alfred Pennyworth had field-dressed wounds under mortar fire, had performed emergency surgery in a cave with no anesthetic, had once talked a twelve-year-old Bruce Wayne down from a ledge using nothing but his voice and an unshakable refusal to let go—but a focused intensity that meant Alfred’s internal threat assessment had gone from amber to red.

“The grounds are extensive, sir. The east garden, the pond, the tree line, the access road—”

“I know.” Bruce was out the door, barefoot, in sleep pants and a grey T-shirt with a bleach stain on the collar, hair standing up on one side, looking nothing like Batman and everything like a terrified father. The grass was cold and wet under his feet and he didn’t care, didn’t feel it, didn’t feel anything except the jackhammer of his pulse and the single thought beating through his brain like a drum:

Where is he. Where is he. Where is my son.

“Jason! Jason!”

Birds startled out of a tree. The morning air swallowed his voice. The grounds stretched out in every direction—acres of garden, lawn, woods, pond—a beautiful estate that had never once felt this large, this dangerous, this full of places where a three-year-old could—

“JASON!”

And then—distant, cheerful, utterly unconcerned, carrying across the dewy grass like a bell—

“Hi, Daddy!”

Bruce found him by the garden wall.

His son. His baby. His three-year-old baby who was sitting cross-legged in the soaking wet grass in his dinosaur pajamas—the ones with the T-Rex on the front that said “RAWR MEANS I LOVE YOU”—frog boots on the wrong feet, yellow bucket overflowing with unidentified objects, a bat—a living, actual, real bat—perched on his shoulder like a tiny guardian, and his entire attention focused on a bush where, presumably, something fascinating was happening.

He was wet. He was muddy. He was beaming.

Bruce’s legs almost gave out.

The relief hit him like a physical blow—like being punched in the chest by someone very strong, except the opposite, except the fist was made of thank God thank God thank God—and his knees went liquid and his eyes went hot and for one terrible, wonderful second he couldn’t breathe.

“Jason.” His voice came out wrong—too tight, too raw, scraped thin with relief and terror and a love so enormous it had actual weight, like carrying a planet inside his ribcage. He crossed the remaining distance in three strides—long, unsteady strides, not Batman’s strides, a father’s strides—and dropped to his knees in the grass in front of his son.

The wet grass soaked through his sleep pants immediately. He did not notice and would not have cared.

“Jason, buddy—”

“Daddy! Daddy, look!” Jason thrust the bucket toward him with both hands, nearly tipping it, presenting his treasures with the pride of a dragon showing off its hoard. “I found so much stuff! I found a sea star! A real sea star! And a magic rock with sparkles in it! And Noodle was here—Noodle’s a snake, Daddy, she’s so pretty, her scales are prettier than your tie, the green one—but Noodle left but I told her I’d come back tomorrow, and look, look, LOOK—”

He pointed to his shoulder with a finger that was shaking with excitement.

“This is Bean! Bean’s a bat! Bean was stuck in a spider web and I saved him! I picked all the sticky off and Bean didn’t even bite me and now Bean is my friend and Bean lives on my shoulder and Bean says cheep!”

Bean chirped, right on cue, as if providing character testimony.

Bruce stared at the bat. The bat stared back. It chirped again, more assertively, as if daring him to object, as if saying yeah, I live here now, what of it.

“Hi, Bean,” Bruce said faintly.

“Bean says hi back,” Jason translated.

Bruce put both hands on Jason’s shoulders—gently, always gently, always always gently, because the first time he’d touched Jason, the boy had flinched so hard he’d fallen off the chair, and Bruce had sworn on everything he was and everything he would ever be that his hands would never be anything but safe.

“Jason.” He made himself breathe. “Jay, you can’t—you can’t just go outside by yourself. It’s—you have to tell me, or Grampy, you have to tell someone before you—”

“But the outside was doing the sparkly thing,” Jason said, as if this explained everything. As if the dew and the blue light and the promise of discovery were an invitation no reasonable person could be expected to decline.

“The spark—” Bruce closed his eyes. Opened them. His son was looking at him with those big blue-green eyes, earnest and confused, and there was a smudge of dirt on his nose and a leaf in his hair and a bat on his shoulder and Bruce loved him so much it was actually, physically, medically difficult to speak.

“Jay, it’s not safe to go out alone. You’re three.”

“Three and a half,” Jason corrected with great dignity. “My birthday was lots of months ago. I’m almost four.”

“You’re not almost four, you just turned three in—that’s not the point. The point is—”

“I was careful, Daddy. I was so careful. I was gentle with the bugs and I didn’t eat the mushrooms and I didn’t touch the bad weird rocks—”

Bruce’s brain, which had been operating on RELIEF mode, slammed back into THREAT ASSESSMENT.

“The what?”

“The bad weird rocks. There’s three of ‘em. They look like army stuff and they feel funny. I didn’t touch ’em. Well, I touched the first one a little bit but then I stopped ’cause it felt grumpy.”

Bruce’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

Alfred arrived then, slightly out of breath—which for Alfred was the equivalent of a full cardiovascular crisis—and took in the scene with a single sweeping glance that catalogued: child (present, intact, filthy), parent (kneeling, pale, barely functional), bat (inexplicable, seemingly permanent), bucket (full of God-knows-what), and pajama situation (catastrophic).

“Master Jason,” Alfred said, in the voice that was warm as fresh bread but brooked absolutely no argument. “We appear to have embarked on an unauthorized expedition.”

“I found treasures, Grampy!” Jason scrambled to his feet, nearly dislodging Bean, who chirped in protest and clung tighter. He thrust the bucket toward Alfred with both arms extended, offering it like a sacrament. “Look! Look what I found! I found a sea star and a magic rock and a snail house and a feather and Gerald—Gerald’s a ball bug, he’s in the bucket, be careful don’t squish him—and I got mushrooms! Can we eat ‘em, Grampy? They look like the ones you cook! The butter ones! And I found nails, see the rusty ones? And there’s bad weird rocks by the trees and the pond and the bench, they’re like army stuff, and also can we go find Noodle tomorrow, Noodle’s a snake and—”

Bruce looked into the bucket.

His blood ran cold for the second time that morning, but this time it went Arctic. This time it went past cold into that crystalline stillness where fear and fury fuse together into something with edges.

There, nestled between a sparkly rock, a snail shell, and a roly-poly bug named Gerald sitting on a stuffed elephant’s head, were four rusty nails, a mushroom of indeterminate species, and—

Bruce reached in and pulled out a small, black, circular device.

A camera.

His hand didn’t shake. His hand refused to shake, because Jason was watching him—Jason watched everything, Jason noticed every flinch, every tightening of a jaw, every shift in tone, because Jason had learned to read adults the way prey animals learn to read predators, and Bruce would eat glass before he let his son see him afraid.

But behind his eyes, something vast and dark and volcanic woke up.

“Jay,” he said, and his voice was Batman’s voice, though he didn’t mean it to be, though he’d built walls between the two and this one just punched right through. “Where did you find this?”

Jason blinked at the sudden shift in tone. He tilted his head—studying Bruce the way Bruce studied crime scenes, with the same unsettling acuity—and answered carefully.

“The little round thing? It was in the bush! By the fence! It was stuck in the branches like a berry but it wasn’t a berry ‘cause berries don’t have blinky lights. I thought maybe it was a robot berry. Is it a robot berry?”

Blinky lights.

It was active.

Bruce turned the device over in his hand. It was small, matte black, professional grade. A wireless micro-camera with a high-resolution lens, built-in transmitter, and an estimated battery life of seventy-two hours. Weatherproofed. Magnetically mounted. Designed to be invisible.

It was not Wayne Tech.

He looked at Alfred. Alfred looked back. And in the space between their eyes, an entire conversation happened—silent, instant, the way only two people who have survived thirty years of war and loss and love can communicate.

Someone is watching the manor.

Yes, sir.

There are cameras. There are—he said “bad weird rocks.” He found explosive devices. He found THREE of them.

So it would appear.

He’s been out here alone for at least forty minutes. He’s been WALKING AROUND explosive devices for forty minutes. He TOUCHED one.

Yes.

Alfred, he could have—

Yes, sir. I know.

If he had pressed the—if the trigger mechanism was pressure-sensitive rather than remote—

Master Bruce. Not now. Not in front of the boy.

Bruce breathed. In. Out. In. Out. He looked at his son, who was now trying to coax Bean the bat to sit on the edge of the bucket so Bean and Stompy could “be friends”—carefully arranging them face to face, making introductions—and felt something in his chest crack along a fault line he hadn’t known existed, a fissure that went all the way down to the foundations of who he was.

“Jay.” He made himself smile. It was the hardest thing he’d done all week, and on Tuesday he’d dislocated his own shoulder and popped it back in without anesthetic. “Can you show me the bad weird rocks? The ones that felt funny?”

“Yeah!” Jason grabbed his hand—small sticky fingers wrapping around Bruce’s index and middle fingers with total, devastating, obliterating trust—and tugged him across the grass. “This way, Daddy! The first one’s by the big tree! I found it with my boot! Queen Ribbit found it, actually, ’cause it was the right boot—”

“Queen Ribbit?”

“The frog on my boot. She’s the leader.”

“Of course she is.”

“—and I almost stepped on it but then I didn’t ’cause it felt funny in my tummy, you know that feeling? Like when the elevator goes down too fast? It felt like that but in my brain.”

Bruce’s hand tightened around Jason’s fingers. He loosened it immediately.

His instincts. His survival instincts from before. From—

He couldn’t finish that thought. Not right now. Not while holding his son’s hand in the morning sunlight, walking toward a buried explosive device that his three-year-old had identified by gut feeling.

They reached the tree line. Jason pointed.

“That one.”

Bruce saw it from ten feet away and his heart stopped.

Not figuratively. His heart actually stuttered in his chest, missed a beat, clenched, and then slammed back online with a force that made his vision white out at the edges.

It was a mine.

A Claymore-derivative antipersonnel device, military-grade, modified for concealment. Partially buried under leaves and soil, positioned at the base of a tree along the path that Jason walked every single day to get to the pond. The kind of device that, depending on the trigger mechanism—pressure plate, tripwire, remote detonation—could—

Could—

Don’t.

His son had been standing right next to it. His son, who weighed thirty-one pounds and had a gap-toothed smile and named his boot frogs and talked to beetles, had been standing right next to it in his dinosaur pajamas.

“That’s the funny rock!” Jason announced proudly, pointing with his free hand. “See? It’s got the army color and a button but it’s not a button. I didn’t touch the button part. It looked grumpy.”

“Grumpy,” Bruce repeated.

“Yeah. Mean grumpy. Like it didn’t want friends.”

“That—” Bruce’s throat was made of sandpaper. “That’s a very smart observation, Jay.”

“And there’s another one by the pond,” Jason continued, tugging Bruce’s hand in that direction. “And another one under Grampy’s bench. The one where Grampy reads. That one made me the most sad ’cause what if Grampy sat on it? Would it hurt Grampy?”

Bruce went to one knee.

Not because he meant to. His body just did it. His knees buckled and he was on the ground and his hands were on Jason’s arms and he was pulling his son against his chest—gently, gently—and Jason came willingly, tucking himself into the space between Bruce’s chin and his collarbone, small and warm and alive.

“Daddy?” Jason’s voice was muffled against Bruce’s shirt. “How come you’re squeezy?”

“I just—” Bruce’s eyes burned. His throat burned. Everything burned. “I just really love you, Jay. I really, really love you.”

“I love you too, Daddy.” A pause. “You’re squishing Bean.”

Bruce loosened his grip. Bean, who had been compressed between them, chirped indignantly and rearranged herself on Jason’s shoulder.

“Sorry, Bean.”

Cheep.

Alfred appeared beside them, and Bruce looked up and saw something on Alfred’s face that he had seen exactly three times in his life—the night Bruce’s parents died, the night Bruce first put on the cowl, and now.

It was fear.

Real fear. The kind that Alfred kept locked in a vault behind forty years of composure and protocol and perfectly pressed cravats. The kind that only came out when the thing at stake was the one thing Alfred Pennyworth could not survive losing.

“The bench, sir,” Alfred said, very quietly, his voice perfectly steady, his eyes absolutely not steady at all. “He said there is one under the bench.”

“Yes.”

“My bench. Where I sit. Every afternoon. Where he—” Alfred stopped. Swallowed. Continued. “Where he climbs up and puts his head on my arm and asks me to read aloud.”

“Yes, Alfred.”

A beat.

Alfred’s jaw set with a precision that could cut glass.

“I see,” he said, and in two words communicated a depth of fury that would have made seasoned intelligence operatives take a very large step backward. “I see indeed.”

Chapter 3: Fort Knox

Bruce made two calls.

The first was to Oracle. “Barb. I need you. Now.”

Barbara Gordon, who could read Bruce Wayne’s voice the way a seismologist reads fault lines, didn’t ask questions. “What happened?”

“Someone’s been surveilling the manor. Cameras—non-Wayne Tech, professional installation. And explosives. At least three that we’ve found. Buried in the grounds.”

Silence. Then, very quietly: “Where’s Jason?”

“With Alfred. He’s safe. He’s—” Bruce pressed his palm against the cave’s console. “He found them, Barb. He went outside by himself this morning and he found them. He walked past the devices. He touched one. He’s three years old and he walked through a minefield in his frog boots—”

“I’m already in your security network.” Barbara’s voice had gone blade-flat. The sound of keys clicking filled the line. “Give me thirty minutes. I’ll have every signal in and out of that property for the last sixty days.”

The second call was to everyone else.

The family alert—the one that bypassed phones and went straight to the embedded comms, the one that was reserved for genuine emergencies, the one that Bruce had used exactly four times in the last five years—went out with three words:

“Family meeting. Now.”

In Blüdhaven, Dick Grayson stopped mid-bite of his cereal. The spoon clattered into the bowl. He was out the door in ninety seconds, not bothering to change out of his pajamas, because the only thing stronger than Dick’s sense of fashion was his sense of something is wrong with my family.

In the Drake penthouse, Tim looked up from his laptop—he’d been awake for thirty-one hours on a case, running on caffeine and spite—and his fingers went still. The tone of that alert. The specific frequency. He saved his work, grabbed three hard drives and a field kit, and was in his car in two minutes.

In the manor’s east wing, Damian set down his sketchbook. He’d been drawing the gardens—the exact gardens where, unbeknownst to him, his baby brother had been walking through a minefield ninety minutes ago. He sheathed the pencil, unsheathed the sword, and moved toward the cave with a silence that would have made his mother proud and his grandfather nervous.

Duke Thomas was at the breakfast counter in his apartment, reading the morning news. He heard the alert, looked at the ceiling, said “Well, that’s not good,” grabbed his gear, and was on his motorcycle in the time it took his coffee to finish cooling.

Stephanie Brown was mid-workout, hanging upside down from a pull-up bar, when her comm buzzed. She dropped, landed, and was moving before her feet fully hit the mat. She texted Cass on the way: You get the alert?

Cass replied with a single emoji: a knife.

Which meant yes.

Within the hour, the cave was full.

Seven people stood around the central console—still in various states of undress, because the alert hadn’t exactly left time for wardrobe planning. Dick was in flannel pajama pants and a Blüdhaven PD hoodie. Tim looked like he hadn’t slept since the Clinton administration. Damian was fully armored, because of course he was. Duke had managed actual clothes. Stephanie had a protein bar in one hand and a grappling hook in the other. Cass was just… there, having appeared at some point without anyone seeing her arrive, which was on brand.

Bruce stood at the head of the table and laid it out.

Clinical. Precise. The way he delivered case briefings. The way he kept control when control was the only thing between him and the screaming.

“Jason went outside alone this morning.”

Dick’s face went through four emotions in two seconds—surprise, confusion, alarm, fury—like a slot machine landing on big brother rage. “He what? He’s a baby, B, how did he get past the—”

“He pushed a chair to the door, climbed up, and unlocked it.” Bruce’s voice was flat. A sheet of ice over deep water. “He was outside for approximately forty minutes before Alfred and I noticed.”

“Forty—”

“During that time, he collected several items in his bucket. Rocks, shells, insects. A bat. Normal exploration.” Bruce paused. “He also collected four rusty nails, a mushroom that I’ve since had analyzed—”

He pulled up the toxicology report on the screen.

“—it’s Amanita phalloides.”

Tim went pale. Dead pale. The color left his face like someone had pulled a plug. “Death cap. That’s literally called a death cap, Bruce. That’s—ingestion of a single cap can cause fatal liver failure in—”

“He didn’t eat it.” Bruce cut in before Tim could finish the sentence, before the words fatal and Jason could exist in the same airspace for one second longer. “He was bringing it back to ask Alfred if it was edible. He remembered Alfred’s rule about asking first.”

Silence.

“Smart kid,” Duke said softly.

“He also found and removed this from a bush near the eastern fence.” Bruce set the micro-camera on the table. It looked small and harmless under the cave’s lights, like a button, like a toy. “Wireless surveillance camera. Non-Wayne Tech. Professional installation. Active transmitter. He identified it because he noticed the blinking indicator light and concluded—correctly—that berries do not blink.”

More silence. The kind of silence where everyone is thinking the same thing and no one wants to say it.

“And he found these.” Bruce pulled up the images on the main screen. Three photos. Three locations. Three buried devices, marked with Jason’s boot prints in the soft earth nearby.

“Antipersonnel mines,” Bruce said. “Military-grade Claymore derivatives, modified for concealment. One near the tree line—the path to the pond. One by the pond itself. One under the garden bench where Alfred sits every afternoon.”

The silence that followed was not the good kind. Not the quiet kind. Not the thinking kind.

It was the kind of silence that happens in the millisecond between the lightning and the thunder.

Dick’s hands were fists at his sides, knuckles white, the tendons in his forearms standing out like cables. His jaw was clenched so hard the muscles jumped. “Someone. Put. Mines. In. The. Yard.”

“Yes.”

“Where Jason plays.”

“Yes.”

“Where our baby brother—our three-year-old baby brother who names snakes and rescues bats and puts his boots on the wrong feet—walks every single day.”

“Yes, Dick.”

“I’m going to kill them.”

“You’re not going to kill them.”

“I’m going to find them and I’m going to—”

“Dick.” Bruce’s voice snapped, not with anger but with the sharp crack of command, of focus, I need you to focus, I need all of you to focus because if I let myself feel what I’m feeling right now I will not be able to stop. “You’re going to help me sweep the grounds. Every inch. Every centimeter. Every sensor, every camera, every device. Grid by grid. We don’t stop until the estate is clean.”

Damian, who had been silent—dangerously silent, silently silent, the kind of silent that meant calculations were being run behind green eyes about exactly how many ways a human body could be disassembled—spoke.

“The child. Where is he now?”

“With Alfred. In the kitchen. He’s having breakfast.” Bruce’s voice did something complicated on the word breakfast. “He doesn’t know what he found.”

“He found three explosive devices and he doesn’t know?”

“He’s three, Damian. He thinks they were weird rocks. He’s eating oatmeal with dinosaur sprinkles and there is a bat on his shoulder that he named Bean and he is telling Alfred about a snake named Noodle and he does not know—”

Bruce stopped.

The room was very quiet.

“He does not know,” Bruce said, and his voice was steady, his voice was steel, “that someone tried to kill him this morning.”

Tim’s laptop was already open. His fingers were already moving. His eyes had that look—the look that meant Timothy Drake had found a problem and the problem was about to have a very, very bad day.

“The camera’s transmitting on a 2.4 gigahertz encrypted channel,” Tim said, not looking up. “Commercial-grade encryption. Rotating keys. Someone spent money on this. Give me twenty minutes.”

“Make it ten.”

Cass moved first.

She didn’t speak. She rarely did when it mattered. She put her hand on Bruce’s arm—a touch so light and precise that it said everything words couldn’t, said I am here and I am angry and whoever did this will learn what that means—and then she was heading for the stairs.

“East side,” she said.

Stephanie was right behind her, protein bar abandoned, grappling hook still in hand. “West.”

“Tim and I will handle the perimeter sensors and the network,” Duke said, already pulling up schematics. “If there are cameras transmitting, they’re sending somewhere. I want that signal pinned to a physical location.”

“I’ll need access to the satellite feeds,” Tim said.

“Already requested,” Barbara’s voice came through the speakers, crisp and focused. “You’ll have them in four minutes. I’ve also flagged every vehicle that’s come within two miles of the manor in the last thirty days. Running plates now.”

Damian sheathed his sword.

Everyone looked at him.

He unsheathed a different sword.

Bruce opened his mouth, thought about proportional response, looked at Damian’s face—at the cold, precise, ancient fury in his youngest-oldest son’s eyes—and closed his mouth again. Some battles were not worth fighting.

“Dick,” Bruce said.

Dick looked at him. His eyes were bright and hard and incandescent, the way they only got when someone threatened the family—not the abstract family, not the idea of family, but this family, these people, this house, this small sticky-fingered boy who had looked up at Dick the first time they met and said, completely unprompted, “You do flips! Can you teach me flips?” and Dick had thought, oh, I would die for you, immediately, right now, without hesitation.

“North quadrant,” Dick said, his voice rough. “Tree line, pond, access road.”

“And Dick—” Bruce hesitated. Swallowed. “Check the areas where Jason plays. The sandbox. The swing set. The—”

He couldn’t finish.

Dick’s jaw tightened until the bones showed white.

“I’ll check everywhere, B.” His voice was quiet. Not calm. Quiet the way a blade is quiet in the instant before it cuts. “Everywhere.”

They went.

Chapter 4: The Sweep

The sweep took eight hours.

Eight hours.

They found twenty-three cameras.

Twenty-three. Not fourteen. Not a dozen. Twenty-three surveillance devices positioned throughout the Wayne Estate with a thoroughness and precision that spoke of planning, patience, and a terrifying degree of access.

They were everywhere.

In the trees along the main drive, angled to capture every vehicle entering or leaving. In the bushes near the kitchen door—the door Jason had walked out of that morning. Wired into the garden wall, disguised as stones. Tucked under the eaves of the greenhouse. Hidden in the decorative stonework near the front entrance, in the ivy on the east wall, in the branches of the oak tree that Jason climbed with Dick on Saturday mornings.

One was mounted behind the swing set.

Pointed directly at the swing Jason used. The little one, the low one, with the rubber seat that Bruce had special-ordered with extra safety straps. The one where Jason pumped his legs and shrieked “Higher, Daddy, higher!” and Bruce pushed gently—always gently—and Jason’s laughter rang across the yard like bells.

Someone had been watching that.

Someone had been recording that.

Dick found that camera. Dick removed it from the tree with his bare hands, crushing it in his fist until the components cut his palm, and then he stood there in the yard, bleeding, breathing, for a very long time.

Cass found nine cameras on the east side alone—hidden with expert precision, placed at angles that covered doorways, windows, paths. She dismantled each one in silence, her movements clinical, her face unreadable to anyone who didn’t know how to read her.

Stephanie knew how to read her.

Stephanie saw the way Cass’s hands went still after finding the camera hidden in the flower box outside Jason’s bedroom window.

Outside. Jason’s. Bedroom. Window.

“Cass,” Stephanie said.

“I’m fine.”

“Cass.”

Cass’s jaw tightened. Her eyes, for one moment, were not unreadable at all. They were furious. “Someone watched him sleep.”

Stephanie’s hand found Cass’s. Squeezed.

“We’re going to find them,” Stephanie said, and it wasn’t a reassurance. It was a promise with teeth.

They found seven explosive devices.

Not three. Seven.

The three Jason had found—the tree line, the pond, the bench—were just the beginning.

The fourth was in the flower bed along the front walkway, buried under six inches of mulch, positioned to detonate at the point where Bruce and Jason walked every morning to check the mailbox. (Jason insisted on checking the mailbox every day, even though nothing ever came for him, because he lived in hope of receiving mail, and Bruce had started writing him letters and mailing them from the office so there would always be something in the box with Jason’s name on it, and someone had put a bomb under that path.)

The fifth was near the greenhouse—wired, not buried, attached to the door mechanism so that opening the greenhouse door would trigger the device. Alfred kept herbs in the greenhouse. Jason helped him water them on Wednesday afternoons, standing on a step stool, holding the little watering can with both hands, tongue poking out with concentration.

Wednesday afternoon. The greenhouse door. The watering can.

Alfred found that one himself.

Alfred’s hands did not shake as he disarmed it. Alfred’s hands never shook. But when it was done—when the device was safe, inert, just dead metal and dormant chemistry in his steady palms—he set it down on the potting bench and stood with both hands flat on the surface, breathing, for four minutes and thirty seconds.

Nobody interrupted him. Nobody spoke.

When he straightened, his face was composed, his cravat was straight, and his eyes were the eyes of a man who had once been the most dangerous butler in the British Special Air Service, and who was remembering, with perfect clarity, that he still was.

The sixth device was under the back porch. The porch where Jason sat in the afternoons and drew pictures with chalk—pictures of bats and elephants and families, stick figures holding hands, the biggest one always labeled “DADY” in shaky letters.

The seventh—

The seventh was in the sandbox.

Dick found it.

Dick found it because Bruce had asked him to check the places where Jason played, and Dick—who was thorough, who was meticulous, who had been trained by the best and driven by something that went deeper than training—had started with the sandbox because it was Jason’s favorite.

He’d dug carefully, methodically, sifting through the sand the way he’d seen Jason do a hundred times looking for buried treasure that Dick secretly planted for him—plastic coins, little toy dinosaurs, a particularly exciting marble.

His fingers hit metal six inches down.

He stopped.

He brushed the sand away, slowly, the way Bruce had taught him to handle evidence, and there it was. Same type as the others. Same green-grey casing. Same modified trigger mechanism. Buried in the sand where his baby brother built castles with a blue plastic shovel and a concentration that could have cracked diamonds.

Dick sat back on his heels.

He looked at the sandbox—at the half-finished castle from yesterday, the moat Jason had dug with his hands, the stick flags planted on the towers, the scribbled “J” scratched into the sand wall because Jason had just learned to write his initial and put it on everything—and something inside him made a sound like a wire snapping.

He didn’t cry. He wasn’t going to cry. He was Nightwing, he was the first Robin, he was—

He was sitting in a sandbox holding a bomb that someone had buried where his three-year-old brother played and his hands were shaking and his eyes were burning and—

“Richard.”

Damian’s voice. Behind him. Quiet.

Dick didn’t turn around. “I’m fine.”

“You are not fine. Nor should you be.” A pause. “Is the device stable?”

“Yeah. Same as the others. Remote trigger. Not pressure-activated.” Dick’s voice cracked on the last word. “If it had been pressure-activated, Dami. If it had been—he plays in here every day. He digs with his hands.”

Damian was quiet for a moment. Then he crouched beside Dick, his armor creaking softly, and looked at the sandbox. At the castle. At the little “J” in the sand.

“I will find who did this,” Damian said. His voice was calm. His voice was the calmest thing Dick had ever heard, and it was terrifying. “I will find them, and they will understand what it means to threaten this family.”

“Damian—”

“He is my brother.” Damian’s jaw set. “He is small. He cannot defend himself. That is what we are for.”

Dick looked at him—at this boy who had been raised by assassins, who had arrived at the manor full of sharp edges and sharper words, who had once claimed he didn’t care about anyone and now stood in a sandbox making promises of violence over a three-year-old’s sand castle.

“Yeah,” Dick said, roughly. “Yeah, Dami. That’s what we’re for.”

While the family swept the grounds, Jason had the best morning of his entire life.

He was in the kitchen with Grampy, perched on his booster seat at the table with a bowl of oatmeal (dinosaur sprinkles, extra banana, a drizzle of honey in the shape of a smiley face, because Grampy loved him and expressed it through food presentation). Bean was on his shoulder, occasionally chirping at the oatmeal with what appeared to be professional curiosity. Stompy was in the chair beside him, propped up with a cushion, wearing his tiny bathrobe.

Alfred had set a place for Stompy.

Alfred had also set a place for Bean.

Bean’s “place” was a small dish with a few blueberries on it, because Alfred didn’t have mealworms on hand—“An oversight I shall rectify at the earliest opportunity, Master Bean”—and because Alfred Pennyworth refused to allow any member of the household, regardless of species, to go without a proper breakfast.

Bean had eaten two blueberries and was now grooming herself on Jason’s shoulder with the fastidious attention of someone who took personal hygiene very seriously.

“Grampy,” Jason said, through a mouthful of oatmeal. “Can we eat the mushrooms?”

Alfred—who had identified the mushroom within thirty seconds of seeing it, who had recognized Amanita phalloides with the kind of instant, sick certainty that came from having spent three decades memorizing every conceivable threat to the people he loved, who had set the mushroom on the counter and then turned away and gripped the edge of the sink until his knuckles went white—turned back to his grandson with a perfectly composed expression.

“No, my dear boy,” he said, his voice perfectly even, perfectly warm, perfectly steady. “Those particular fungi are not suitable for consumption. They are, in fact, rather unfriendly.”

“Unfriendly like the bad weird rocks?”

Alfred’s hand tightened on the tea towel. “Precisely, young sir.”

“Unfriendly like the Joker?”

“…Precisely like the Joker.”

“Oh.” Jason nodded sagely, oatmeal on his chin. “Good thing I asked.”

“Indeed.” Alfred turned away—to check the kettle, ostensibly, actually to close his eyes and press his hand against his chest and breathe through the realization that his grandson had been carrying a lethal mushroom in his bucket like a souvenir. “A very good thing indeed, Master Jason.”

“Grampy?”

“Yes, young sir?”

“Can we keep Bean?”

Alfred looked at the bat. The bat looked at Alfred. It was perched on Jason’s shoulder with an air of permanence that suggested this was not a negotiation.

“I believe,” Alfred said carefully, “that Bean has already made that decision for us.”

Bean chirped.

Jason beamed so hard his face couldn’t hold it all—the smile spilling out of his eyes, out of his whole body, his feet kicking happily under the table, his hands flapping with excitement. “Bean! Grampy says you can stay! You can stay forever! You can sleep in my room! You can—”

“We will,” Alfred interjected gently, “need to establish appropriate roosting arrangements.”

“—sleep on my head!”

“…We will discuss the specifics, young sir.”

Chapter 5: The Conversation

The grounds were clean.

Sixty-two hours of work. Twenty-three cameras recovered. Seven explosive devices safely deactivated and catalogued. Tim and Barbara had traced the surveillance transmission through four layers of shell companies and encryption to a relay station two miles northeast of the estate, which led to a mercenary outfit operating out of a defunct shipping warehouse in the Narrows.

That was being handled. Bruce was handling it. Not tonight—tonight was for Jason—but it was being handled, with the kind of thorough, methodical, utterly implacable focus that meant every person involved in this operation was going to wish they had chosen literally any other career.

But right now—this moment, this afternoon—Bruce and Alfred had to do something arguably more difficult than disarming seven explosive devices and dismantling a surveillance network.

They had to talk to a three-year-old about safety.

Jason was in the living room, sitting cross-legged on the big rug—the soft one, the one Bruce had bought specifically because Jason liked to lie on the floor and it had seemed important, deeply and irrationally important, that the floor be soft if his son was going to lie on it—with Bean on his knee and his bucket of treasures spread out around him like a museum exhibit.

He’d organized everything into categories with a system that was simultaneously chaotic and deeply logical, the way only a three-year-old’s organizational system can be:

Rocks (subcategories: “sparkly/magic,” “flat/for skipping,” “heart-shaped/for giving to people I love,” “triangle/for science,” and “just a good one”).

Nature Stuff (leaf, feather, bark with river map pattern, snail shell “empty because the snail got a bigger house,” and “sea star who came from the ocean to visit”).

Bug Friends (Gerald the roly-poly, now residing in a small jar with air holes and a piece of leaf “for snacking,” as curated by Dick, who had spent twenty minutes helping Jason construct what he called “Gerald’s apartment” and what Jason called “Gerald’s mansion”).

Ask About (the empty space where the mushrooms and rusty nails had been, which Jason had noticed and catalogued as “stuff Daddy took for research”).

Bean (Bean, who had her own category because she was special and also because she refused to be categorized with the bugs, chirping indignantly when Jason had initially placed her there).

Bruce sat down on the rug across from his son. Cross-legged, mirroring Jason’s posture, because he’d read somewhere that matching a child’s body language made them feel safe, and also because his legs were tired and the rug was, in fact, very soft.

Alfred stood nearby, hands clasped in front of him, having had a brief and intense conversation with Bruce in the hallway about approach, tone, and the delicate art of impressing upon a very small child the seriousness of a situation without traumatizing him.

“Firm but gentle, sir,” Alfred had said. “He must understand the danger without being made to feel that the world is unsafe. The goal is awareness, not fear.”

“I know.”

“And perhaps—” Alfred had hesitated, which was so unusual that Bruce had actually looked up. “Perhaps it would be prudent to emphasize that his instincts were correct. He found the devices. He chose not to touch them. His caution should be praised, even as his unsupervised expedition is addressed.”

Bruce had looked at Alfred for a long moment. “You’re a good grandfather.”

“I should hope so, sir. I’ve had rather extensive practice at the parenting role.”

Now, on the rug, surrounded by rocks and shells and one very opinionated bat, Bruce began.

“Jay. We need to talk about this morning.”

Jason looked up from showing Bean a rock. (Bean was not interested in the rock. Bean was interested in a moth that was circling the lamp. But Jason was undeterred.) “The ’sploring?”

“Yeah, buddy. The exploring.” Bruce leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “You know Daddy loves that you like being outside, right? And that your treasures are really, really cool?”

Jason beamed. “The sea star is the best one. She came from the ocean, Daddy. The whole ocean.”

“It’s an amazing sea star.” Bruce smiled, and this time it wasn’t hard, because his son was right here and safe and smiling and the rug was soft and Bean was chirping and the world, in this moment, in this room, was okay. “And I want you to know—the things you found? The way you explored? That’s incredible, Jay. You were careful with the bugs. You remembered to ask about the mushrooms. And the… the bad weird rocks—”

“The grumpy ones.”

“The grumpy ones. You didn’t touch them. You trusted your tummy feeling. That was really, really smart. I’m proud of you for that.”

Jason sat up straighter. The praise landed on him like sunlight—you could see it, physically see it, the way his shoulders lifted and his chin came up and his eyes went bright, because Jason Todd-Wayne was a child who had spent the first years of his life in a place where no one ever said I’m proud of you and every single time Bruce said it, it was water on dry earth.

“But,” Bruce continued, and Jason’s face shifted into cautious attention, because but was a word that three-year-olds understood instinctively, “we need to make a rule about the exploring. Okay? A really important rule.”

“Like the mushroom rule?”

“Like the mushroom rule, but bigger. The biggest rule.”

Jason’s eyes went wide. Bigger than the mushroom rule was very big indeed.

“You can’t go outside by yourself,” Bruce said. “Not ever. Not even when the sky is doing the sparkly thing. Not even when you really, really want to.”

Jason’s face fell. His lower lip pushed out. Bean chirped sympathetically.

“But Daddy—”

“I know. I know you want to explore. And we’re going to, Jay. We’re going to explore so much. Me and you, every single morning, first thing. We’ll bring the bucket and we’ll find rocks and bugs and maybe even Noodle—”

“Noodle!” Jason’s face lit up momentarily before the gravity of the conversation reasserted itself. “But… but what if you’re sleeping? What if the sparkly thing is happening and you’re sleeping and it goes away?”

Bruce’s heart performed a complicated maneuver that involved simultaneously breaking and swelling with tenderness.

“Then you wake me up,” he said. “You come into my room and you pat my face—like you do, with the little pats—and you say, ‘Daddy, it’s sparkly outside,’ and I will get up. Every single time, Jay. I don’t care if it’s four in the morning. I don’t care if I just fell asleep. You wake me up and I will always get up and go outside with you.”

“Always always?”

“Always always.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Jason considered this. The lower lip retracted slightly.

“What about Grampy? Can Grampy come?”

Alfred stepped forward and crouched down to Jason’s level—his knees cooperating through what appeared to be sheer force of British willpower—and met his grandson’s eyes with the steady, warm, unshakable gaze that had been Jason’s anchor since the first night he’d come to the manor, when he’d woken up screaming and Alfred had been there before Bruce, sitting on the edge of the bed, hand on Jason’s back, voice low and calm: You are safe, young sir. You are home.

“Master Jason,” Alfred said. “I would be delighted to accompany you on any and all expeditions. You need only ask.”

“But why can’t I go alone?” Jason’s voice was small now. Not defiant. Genuinely confused. “I was careful.”

“You were very careful,” Alfred agreed. “Extraordinarily so. But the reason, young sir, is this—” He paused, choosing his words with the precision of a poet. “You found some things today that are dangerous. The mushrooms. The nails. The… grumpy rocks.”

“The bad weird rocks,” Jason corrected.

“Indeed. And you handled all of those situations with remarkable intelligence. But some of those dangerous things—” Alfred’s voice softened. “Some of those things are so dangerous that even being near them, even without touching them, could hurt you very badly. And if you were outside alone and something happened, nobody would know. Nobody would be there to help.”

Jason’s face went quiet. Not upset. Thinking. Processing, with the solemn intensity of a child who has, at some deep level, always known that the world has sharp edges.

“What about Bean?” he said finally, softly. “Bean would know.”

Bruce looked at the bat. The bat looked at Bruce. It chirped once—firmly, decisively—as if to say: I’m doing my best here, man, work with me.

“Bean is the bravest bat I’ve ever met,” Bruce said, and meant it. “But Bean can’t call for help. Bean can’t carry you if you get hurt. Bean is an excellent friend, but Bean needs us to be the backup plan.”

Jason looked at Bean. Bean tilted her tiny head and chirped softly.

“Okay,” Jason said. And then, with the devastating simplicity of a three-year-old cutting through adult complexity to reach the heart of the thing: “You were scared. Weren’t you, Daddy?”

Bruce’s eyes burned.

“Yeah, baby,” he said, and his voice was rough and honest and completely undefended—not Batman’s voice, not Bruce Wayne’s public voice, just a father’s voice, just the voice of a man who had been terrified that morning. “I was really scared.”

“I’m sorry I made you scared.”

“Jay—no. No. You didn’t do anything wrong. You were curious and brave and careful and I’m proud of you. I’m just—I just need you to be safe. That’s the most important thing in the whole world to me. You being safe.”

“More important than the cave?”

“A billion times more important than the cave.”

“More important than Batman?”

Bruce reached out and cupped his son’s face in both hands—small face, round cheeks, dirt smudge on the nose, leaf still in the hair.

“Jason,” he said. “You are more important than everything.”

Jason’s eyes went huge and glassy, the way they did when something big landed in his chest—too big for three years old, too big for a small body, a feeling that needed a whole lifetime to understand but hit all at once.

His chin wobbled.

“Even more ’portant than the Batmobile?”

Bruce choked on something between a laugh and a sob. “Yes, Jay. Even more than the Batmobile.”

“That’s… that’s really ’portant.”

“The most important.”

Jason launched himself forward.

Small arms around Bruce’s neck. Face pressed into Bruce’s shoulder. The full-body, full-commitment, zero-hesitation hug of a three-year-old who has just learned that he is the most important thing in the world to someone, and isn’t that something, isn’t that everything, after a life that started in a place where he was the least important thing in every room.

Bruce caught him. Of course he caught him. He would always catch him.

He wrapped both arms around his son—gently, gently, always always gently—and held him close. Jason was warm and damp and smelled like grass and oatmeal and the particular indefinable scent of small child who has been on an adventure, and Bean chirped softly from his shoulder, and Stompy was somewhere on the rug, and Gerald was in his jar, and the sea star from the ocean was sitting on the coffee table, and the bucket was full of treasures, and the world was big and dangerous and full of mines and cameras and people who meant harm.

But right now, in this room, on this soft rug, it was just a father and his son.

“Deal?” Bruce whispered into Jason’s hair.

Jason nodded against his neck.

“Can we go tomorrow?”

“First thing in the morning.”

“Can we find Noodle?”

“We will scour the garden for Noodle.”

“Can Bean come?”

Bean chirped emphatically.

“Bean can always come.”

“‘Kay.” Jason’s voice was getting small. Sleepy-small. The adrenaline of the morning and the emotions of the conversation and the sheer density of being three years old in a world this big were catching up with him, settling into his bones like warm sand.

“’M sorry I went outside, Daddy.”

“I know, baby.”

“’M glad I found Bean though.”

“Me too.”

“’N the sea star.”

“The sea star is beautiful.”

“She came from the ocean,” Jason murmured. His eyes were closing. His body was going heavy and loose against Bruce’s chest, the way it did when he fell asleep during movies—gradually, then all at once, like a dimmer switch turning down. “‘Cause she heard there was a… good bucket… for visitin’…”

Bruce shifted carefully, leaning back against the couch, settling Jason against his chest. Jason’s head found the spot—the spot, his spot, the place over Bruce’s heart where he always ended up, ear pressed against the steady thrum of Bruce’s heartbeat, the sound that meant safe.

Bean hopped off Jason’s shoulder and onto Bruce’s knee, then up to the back of the couch, where she hung upside down from the cushion and chirped once, softly, like a tiny sentinel taking the first watch.

Jason’s breathing evened out.

Slow. Steady. Deep.

His fist curled into Bruce’s T-shirt—the one with the bleach stain, the one he’d thrown on in his panic that morning—and held on, even in sleep. Even unconscious, even dreaming, his hand found his father and held on.

Bruce looked down at him.

At the dinosaur pajamas, damp and grass-stained. At the frog boots, still on the wrong feet. At the leaf in his hair and the dirt on his nose and the tiny, perfect fingers gripping his shirt. At the flutter of his eyelashes and the soft “o” of his mouth and the way his chest rose and fell in the rhythm that Bruce had memorized the first week—the rhythm that he checked every night, standing in Jason’s doorway, counting breaths, because some part of him still couldn’t believe this was real, that this small person was his, that he got to keep him.

Alfred appeared in the doorway.

He looked at the scene—father and son on the rug, the boy asleep on the man’s chest, the bat keeping watch, the bucket of treasures scattered around them like offerings—and something moved across his face. Something too deep for words.

He brought a blanket.

The soft one, the blue one, the one Jason called “the cloud blanket” because it was light and warm and felt like sleeping in the sky. Alfred draped it over both of them—over Bruce’s shoulders, over Jason’s small body—with the care of someone handling something infinitely precious.

“You should sleep as well, sir,” Alfred said quietly. “The upgrades can wait an hour.”

“I’m not sleeping.”

“You’ve been awake for thirty-one hours.”

“I’m not sleeping. I’m—” Bruce looked down at Jason’s face, peaceful, trusting, safe. “I’m just going to sit here for a while.”

Alfred looked at him.

“Very good, sir,” he said, and did not point out that Bruce’s eyes were closing.

Dick found them twenty minutes later.

He came in from the north sweep—exhausted, dirty, wrung out—and stopped dead in the living room doorway.

Bruce was asleep.

Bruce was asleep. On the floor, leaning against the couch, with Jason on his chest under the blue blanket, and Bean hanging upside down from the couch cushion above them like a tiny gargoyle. Bruce’s hand was on Jason’s back—large hand, small back, palm spread across the dinosaur pajamas like a shield—and Jason’s hand was fisted in Bruce’s shirt, and their breathing had synchronized, two sets of lungs rising and falling in the same rhythm, like they were sharing the same dream.

Dick pulled out his phone and took a picture.

Then he took six more, because the first one didn’t capture the way Jason’s cheek was squished against Bruce’s chest, and the second one didn’t get Bean’s full upside-down silhouette, and the third one was slightly blurry because Dick’s hands were still not entirely steady from the sandbox.

He sent the best one to the family group chat with no caption.

Responses came within seconds:

Steph: 😭😭😭😭😭

Duke: Protect him at all costs.

Tim: Security upgrades will be done by tonight. No one is getting near that kid again.

Cass: ❤️

Damian: …Acceptable.

Damian: The blanket should be tucked more securely around his feet.

Damian: His boots are on the wrong feet.

Damian: Someone should fix that.

Dick looked at the boots. He crouched down, very carefully, and slipped them off Jason’s feet without waking him. He set them by the couch. Right foot, left foot. Correct, this time.

He looked at Jason’s face—at the tiny, sleeping, ridiculous, precious face of the three-year-old who had walked through a minefield and found a sea star and named a snake and rescued a bat and fallen asleep on his daddy’s chest.

“We’ve got you, little wing,” Dick whispered. “We’ve always got you.”

He pulled out his phone again.

He texted Barbara: How’s the mercenary trace going?

Barbara replied: I have names. I have addresses. I have their dental records. They’re done.

Dick smiled. It was not a kind smile.

Good.

He sat down in the armchair across from the couch, leaned back, and kept watch.

Bean chirped approvingly from above.

Chapter 6: Transformation

Over the next seventy-two hours, Wayne Manor was transformed into the most secure private residence on the planet.

This was not an exaggeration.

By the time the family was done, military installations would have looked at the Wayne Estate’s security grid and felt inadequate. The Pentagon would have taken notes. The Swiss National Bank would have wept openly. Fort Knox would have seen the comparison, quietly packed up its gold bars, and retired in shame.

It started with Tim and Barbara.

They rebuilt the entire digital infrastructure from scratch. New encrypted network, triple-layered, air-gapped from any external system, with redundant backup servers in three physically separate locations and a self-healing protocol that could detect and isolate intrusion attempts in under four milliseconds. Every window, door, gate, and access point was fitted with biometric sensors that could identify authorized personnel by heartbeat pattern, gait signature, thermal profile, and—after a particularly inspired 3 AM session by Tim—individual breathing rhythm.

The system didn’t just detect intruders.

It could distinguish between a deer, a delivery person, a journalist, and a threat actor at three hundred meters. It could identify a human being by the sound of their footsteps on gravel. It could determine, based on micro-fluctuations in body heat, whether an approaching individual was calm, agitated, or armed.

And it had a setting—added by Tim, labeled in the code as “TINY EXPLORER PROTOCOL”—that sent an immediate alert to every family member’s comm if Jason’s bedroom door opened between the hours of 8 PM and 6 AM.

Cass and Stephanie installed the physical sensor grid.

Seismic sensors under the lawn—not just along the perimeter, but in a comprehensive grid that covered every square foot of the estate grounds, capable of detecting footsteps, digging, even the vibration of a tunneling tool. Infrared laser grids along the tree line, the garden wall, the access road, invisible to the naked eye, overlapping in patterns that left no blind spots. Pressure-sensitive plates along every pathway, calibrated to distinguish between the weight of a child (alert: where’s Jason going?), an adult (alert: who is this?), and an animal (no alert, because the deer had rights too and Stephanie was firm about this).

Motion-activated cameras were positioned at every angle, covering every inch of the property—Wayne Tech cameras, designed by Lucius Fox himself, who had arrived at the manor within fifteen minutes of Bruce’s call, had looked at the evidence, had set his jaw, and had said, “What resolution do you need?” in a voice that meant he was about to make something that cost more than most satellites.

The cameras had night vision, thermal imaging, facial recognition, and a zoom capability that could read a license plate from half a mile away. They were weatherproofed, tamper-resistant, and equipped with their own independent power supplies. If the manor’s entire electrical grid went down—if every power source in Gotham failed simultaneously—the cameras would keep recording for seventy-two hours on battery alone.

Duke calibrated the electromagnetic detection array—a new addition, installed in a grid pattern across the estate’s perimeter and throughout the grounds, capable of identifying any electronic device within range, active or dormant, down to a transmitter the size of a grain of rice. If someone brought a cell phone onto the property without authorization, the system would flag it. If someone planted a camera, the system would triangulate its position within seconds. If someone even thought about bringing surveillance equipment within two miles of Jason’s swing set, the system would know, and the system would tell Bruce, and Bruce would handle it.

Damian—who had channeled his fury into productivity with an efficiency that Alfred found both impressive and deeply alarming—handled the grounds themselves.

He inspected every square inch of the estate. Every tree, every bush, every stone, every patch of dirt. He used League of Assassins sweep techniques that had been developed over centuries to detect hidden threats in terrain, and he used them with the intensity of someone who had recently discovered that his capacity for protectiveness was approximately seven thousand times larger than he’d previously estimated.

He found three more dormant devices that everyone else had missed.

Three. After eight hours of sweeping by seven trained operatives. Three devices, buried deep, shielded, designed to be invisible to conventional detection.

Damian found them.

He deactivated them with bare hands and a focus so precise it was almost meditative, and then he stood in the garden, surrounded by the evidence of what these people had planned, and he made a decision.

He went inside. He went to Jason’s room. Jason was napping—curled on his side, Stompy under one arm, Bean hanging from the guardrail, the cloud blanket pulled up to his chin—and Damian stood in the doorway for three minutes and forty-two seconds, just… looking.

At the bat guardrails Bruce had built.

At the glow-in-the-dark stars Alfred had put on the ceiling.

At the drawings taped to the wall—crayon drawings of bats and elephants and stick-figure families, “DADY” and “GRAMPY” and “DIK” and “TIM” and “DAMIEN” (close enough) and “DOOK” and “STEF” and “CAS” all holding hands in a row, with a yellow sun and green grass and a big house that looked nothing like the manor but somehow captured it perfectly.

His name was on that wall. Spelled wrong, in green crayon, but it was there.

Damian turned and went back outside and swept the grounds a fourth time.

Dick handled the perimeter—new fencing with integrated vibration sensors, reinforced gates with multi-factor authentication, and a series of security zones that created concentric rings of protection around the manor. Zone 1: the outer boundary, passive monitoring. Zone 2: the grounds, active monitoring plus automated alerts. Zone 3: the house itself, real-time biometric verification at every entry point. Zone 4: Jason’s wing, which included his bedroom, the bathroom, the hallway, and the playroom, and which had its own dedicated sensor array, its own alert protocol, and—Dick was not apologizing for this—a direct feed to his comm unit that was always on, always live, always listening for the sound of a three-year-old pushing furniture toward a door.

Dick also installed deadbolts on every external door at a height of six and a half feet.

And then, because this was Dick and Dick believed in redundancy, he installed a second set at seven feet.

Alfred upgraded the doors as well.

Every external door in the manor now had a lock that required adult-height biometric activation—a palm scan, recessed into the door frame, positioned at a height that Jason could not reach. Jason could not push a chair to them, because the scan was above chair height. Jason could not stack two chairs, because the scan was above two-chair height. Alfred had tested every possible combination of household objects that could be used as improvised step stools—chairs, stools, books, boxes, the decorative ottoman from the east drawing room that Jason had once used as a sled—and confirmed that none of them provided sufficient elevation.

“The system is, to my cautious satisfaction, toddler-proof,” Alfred reported to Bruce. “Though I maintain a healthy respect for the young master’s ingenuity and will revisit this assessment at regular intervals.”

“How regular?”

“Weekly, sir. The child is resourceful.”

Bruce did all of this—coordinated, supervised, installed, tested—and also, in the quiet hours of the night, hunted.

The shell company led to a mercenary group. The mercenary group led to a contractor. The contractor led to a network, and the network led to names, and the names led to a series of very unpleasant evenings for people who had thought that Wayne Manor was a soft target and its occupants were wealthy civilians playing at philanthropy.

They were wrong.

They were catastrophically wrong.

Batman visited each of them.

He didn’t rush. He was methodical. He started with the installers—the technicians who had placed the cameras, who had buried the devices, who had wired the greenhouse door and put a mine in a sandbox—and he explained to them, in a voice that several of them would later describe to federal investigators as “the worst sound I have ever heard,” exactly what they had done.

“You placed an explosive device,” Batman said to the installer, “in a sandbox. In that sandbox, every afternoon, a three-year-old boy builds castles. He has a blue shovel. He writes his name in the sand. He just learned the letter J.”

The installer started crying.

Batman had not yet raised his voice.

“The bench by the pond,” Batman continued, “is where his grandfather sits to read. The greenhouse door was rigged to detonate when opened. His grandfather keeps herbs in that greenhouse. On Wednesday afternoons, the boy helps water them. He uses a small watering can. He stands on a step stool because he can’t reach the basil.”

The crying intensified.

“The path to the mailbox,” Batman said, and his voice was barely a whisper now, “is where the boy walks every morning with his father. The father writes him letters and mails them from the office so there will always be something in the mailbox with the boy’s name on it.”

The installer’s legs gave out entirely.

Batman leaned close.

“You put a bomb under that path.”

The information Batman extracted—names, locations, communication channels, the identity of whoever had contracted the operation—was comprehensive. People tend to become very forthcoming when they realize they have endangered a child and the child’s father is a six-foot-two apex predator who is personally, viscerally furious.

The contractor was next. Then the handler. Then the money.

By the end of the week, every single person involved—from the planners to the financiers to the lookouts—was in federal custody, delivered to Commissioner Gordon in neatly organized evidence packages that were so thorough, so airtight, so comprehensively documented that the DA’s office called it “the easiest prosecution in Gotham history.”

Gordon had looked at the evidence. Looked at Batman. Looked at the photo Barbara had quietly included—the one Dick took, Bruce and Jason asleep on the rug, Bean keeping watch.

“Someone targeted your kid,” Gordon said, and it wasn’t a question.

Batman didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

“They’re done,” Gordon said. “I’ll make sure they’re done.”

“I know you will, Jim.”

Epilogue: Tomorrow Morning

The next morning, Jason woke up at dawn.

The sky was doing the sparkly thing.

He climbed out of bed—Bean waking with a chirp, stretching tiny wings in a yawn that showed miniature teeth, hopping onto his shoulder with the easy familiarity of someone who’d been doing this forever instead of two days—and padded to the door.

He stopped.

He looked at the door. He looked at Bean. He remembered.

Wake Daddy up.

He went back. Got Stompy. Got the bucket. Checked on Gerald (still alive, still balled up, still an excellent tenant). Found his frog boots by the bed, where someone—he didn’t know who, but it had been Dick—had placed them, right foot and left foot, correct this time.

He put them on.

Wrong feet.

He walked down the hall to Daddy’s room.

Bruce was asleep. One arm hanging off the bed. One sock on, one sock missing. Face soft and un-worried, the way Jason liked it best.

Jason reached up and patted Bruce’s face with one small hand.

Pat. Pat. Pat.

“Daddy.”

Nothing.

Pat pat pat pat pat.

“Daddy. Wake up. It’s sparkly outside.”

Bruce’s eyes opened.

And there was his son, standing beside the bed in the blue light of early morning, frog boots on the wrong feet, bucket in one hand, Stompy under the other arm, bat on his shoulder, gap-toothed smile already in full force, practically vibrating with excitement.

“It’s ’sploring time, Daddy.”

Bruce looked at him. At this small, bright, irrepressible, magnificent person who walked through minefields without fear and named snakes and rescued bats and organized rocks by emotional category and fell asleep on his father’s chest with one hand fisted in his shirt.

Bruce smiled.

And it wasn’t hard. It wasn’t hard at all. It was the easiest thing he’d ever done.

“Give me two minutes, little man.”

“Can we find Noodle?”

“We are going to launch a full investigation into Noodle’s whereabouts.”

“Yes!” Jason pumped his fist. Bean chirped. “Can we bring Grampy?”

From down the hall, already audible, came the sound of a kettle beginning to whistle and the quiet, precise footsteps of a man who had been awake for twenty minutes, who had already prepared two thermoses of tea, who had packed a small bag with wet wipes and sunscreen and a first aid kit and a field guide to local flora and fauna and a container of blueberries for Bean, and who was standing in the kitchen in his gardening coat, waiting.

“I believe Grampy is already ready,” Bruce said.

Jason’s face—his whole face, his whole self—lit up like the sunrise that was just now breaking through the tall windows at the end of the hall, painting everything gold.

“Let’s GO!”

Bruce pulled on his boots—right feet, because he was an adult and could manage that—and took his son’s hand.

Small hand. Big hand. Sticky fingers wrapping around strong ones.

Bean chirped.

Stompy stared with button-eyed enthusiasm.

Gerald, in his jar on the nightstand, remained balled up and excellent.

The morning was blue and gold and sparkly and full of things to discover—rocks and bugs and leaves and feathers and snail shells and sea stars that had come all the way from the ocean—and the grounds were clean and the cameras were gone and the mines were evidence in federal lockup and the house was a fortress and the family was a wall.

And somewhere out there, in a bush near the garden wall, a small garter snake with rainbow scales and a yellow racing stripe was sunning herself on a flat rock, not knowing that she had a name, not knowing that she had a friend, not knowing that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, a small boy would come looking for her with a worm and a bucket and a heart so big it made the whole world wider.

“Let’s go exploring,” Bruce said.

And they did.

Together.

fin 🐘🦇🪣🐍​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

[midnight-khaos]

🐣 First Easter

The Manor had never looked quite like this before.

Alfred Pennyworth stood in the grand foyer at precisely five-forty-seven in the morning, a cup of Earl Grey in hand, surveying his work with the quiet satisfaction of a general reviewing his battlefield. Pastel streamers hung from the chandelier in cascading ribbons of lavender, mint green, and buttercup yellow. Hand-cut paper butterflies dangled from fishing line at varying heights, catching the early morning light through the tall windows and casting delicate shadows across the marble floor.

He had been up since three.

Worth it.

A sound from upstairs caught his attention — the unmistakable pat-pat-pat of tiny bare feet moving at a speed that suggested either great excitement or imminent catastrophe. With Master Jason, it was often both.

“ALFIE! ALFIE, ALFIE, ALFIE!”

The shriek preceded the child by approximately four seconds. Jason Peter Todd-Wayne came barreling around the corner of the upstairs hallway in his pajamas — little blue ones covered in tiny rockets that Bruce had bought him two weeks ago and that Jason had refused to take off for three consecutive days until Alfred had gently but firmly intervened.

His black curls were a disaster. His teal eyes were enormous. He was missing one sock.

He hit the top of the staircase at full speed, and no fewer than three hearts in the Manor stopped simultaneously.

“Master Jason, we do not —”

Jason grabbed the banister railing with both hands, which was the only thing that kept Alfred’s blood pressure from requiring medical intervention, and began his descent with the careful, one-step-at-a-time determination of a very small person who had been told approximately four hundred times that stairs were not for running.

Each step took roughly a century.

“Alfie,” Jason whispered, as though the volume control had simply broken and reset to the opposite extreme. “Alfie. Is it. Is it today?”

Alfred set down his teacup and moved to the base of the stairs, crouching down just as Jason reached the last three steps and launched himself into the butler’s arms with the absolute trust of a child who had never once been dropped.

“It is indeed today, young sir.”

Jason pulled back, both small hands on Alfred’s cheeks, squishing them together. “The bunny came?”

“I believe the evidence speaks for itself.”

Jason’s head whipped toward the living room so fast his curls bounced. His mouth dropped open.

“Oh,” he breathed. “Oh.”

Dick Grayson stumbled downstairs at six-fifteen, which was inhumane on a Sunday and he wanted that on the record.

He was twenty-two years old. He was a grown man. He was Nightwing. He did not need to be here at — he checked his phone and winced — six-fifteen in the morning for an Easter egg hunt.

Except Tim had texted him a photo twenty minutes ago of Jason standing in front of his Easter basket with both hands pressed to his cheeks like that painting of the screaming guy, and Dick had broken approximately nine traffic laws getting here from Blüdhaven.

He found the family in the living room.

Bruce was sitting on the floor. On the floor. In sweatpants and an old Gotham University t-shirt, legs crossed, with his phone held up and recording video like every other suburban dad in America. Dick almost walked into the doorframe.

Tim was curled up in the massive armchair with his laptop, because of course he was, but even he had abandoned whatever case file he’d been working on to watch Jason, a helpless grin on his face that he would deny under oath.

Cass was perched on the arm of the couch, silent and watchful, her dark eyes soft in a way that made Dick’s chest hurt because Cass didn’t look at just anything like that.

Damian stood in the corner with his arms crossed, doing his level best to look bored and failing spectacularly, because he kept glancing at Jason every four seconds and his mouth kept twitching.

Duke was sitting on the stairs with a mug of coffee, openly smiling, not even pretending to be cool about it.

Steph had arrived at some point with an entire bakery box of pastries and was eating a croissant while filming Jason from a different angle than Bruce, because “backup footage, obviously.”

And Barbara was on a video call on Tim’s tablet, propped up on the coffee table, watching the whole thing with the kind of expression that suggested she was already planning to use this footage for emotional leverage at some future date.

And Jason —

Jason was vibrating.

His Easter basket was magnificent. Alfred had outdone himself in a way that made Dick suspect the man had a secret Pinterest account. It was a large wicker basket lined with soft green fabric, overflowing with gifts that had been carefully, lovingly curated for a three-year-old who was allergic to eggs and most conventional Easter candy.

There were marshmallow Peeps made from scratch with a egg-free recipe Alfred had spent two weeks perfecting. Little bags of gummy bears — the fancy European kind that were gelatin-based and egg-free. Tiny boxes of raisins, because Jason was the only three-year-old on earth who genuinely loved raisins and no one understood it but everyone respected it. A stuffed bunny with impossibly soft fur and a little bow tie. Three new picture books. A set of watercolor paints. Sidewalk chalk in every color. And tucked in the very back, a pair of tiny rain boots patterned with ladybugs, because Jason had been obsessed with ladybugs since February and showed no signs of stopping.

But the pièce de résistance was the eggs.

Not real eggs. Not chocolate eggs. Not any kind of egg that would send Jason to the emergency room with hives and a swollen throat and that terrifying whistling sound that haunted Bruce’s nightmares.

Alfred had made art.

Each “egg” was actually a hand-molded, egg-shaped treat made from a base of egg-free sugar cookie dough, baked to golden perfection and then coated in a smooth shell of egg-free royal icing that Alfred had formulated himself using aquafaba and meringue powder. They were the exact size and shape of real Easter eggs, and they had been decorated with the kind of painstaking detail that suggested Alfred had not slept.

There were twelve of them nestled in the basket. Swirls of pastel color. Tiny hand-painted flowers. Delicate polka dots. One had a miniature Batman symbol on it because Alfred knew his audience. One had a little robin. One was covered in tiny ladybugs.

Jason held up the ladybug egg with both hands, turned to Bruce, and said, with devastating sincerity:

“Daddy. Daddy. Look. It has the babies on it.”

Bruce Wayne, the Batman, the Dark Knight, the man who had stared down Darkseid without flinching, made a sound like he’d been punched in the sternum.

“I see that, Jay,” he managed. “It’s beautiful.”

“Alfie maked them,” Jason said, as though this was the most extraordinary fact in human history. “Alfie maked them so I can eat them and my froat won’t get owie.”

Dick looked at Alfred, who was standing in the doorway to the kitchen with his hands clasped behind his back, and saw the old man’s eyes glistening in a way that would never, ever be acknowledged aloud.

“Indeed, Master Jason. Every ingredient was selected with your specific needs in mind.”

Jason carefully set the ladybug egg back in the basket, walked over to Alfred with great purpose, and wrapped both arms around the butler’s leg.

“You’re the best cooker in the whole world,” he said into Alfred’s knee.

“I endeavor to give satisfaction, sir.”

“I love you, Alfie.”

Alfred’s hand came to rest on top of Jason’s curls. His voice was suspiciously rough when he spoke.

“And I you, young master. Very much.”

The Easter egg hunt was, by any objective standard, the most over-engineered operation in Wayne Manor history, and this was a household that had once coordinated a three-continent takedown of an international weapons ring.

Alfred had hidden two hundred eggs across the Manor grounds.

Two hundred.

Every single one was either a plastic egg filled with egg-free candy, small toys, or stickers, or one of Alfred’s handmade cookie eggs, carefully wrapped in cellophane and tucked into safe, weather-protected spots. The plastic eggs ranged from comically easy (sitting in the open on a garden bench) to genuinely challenging (nestled in the hollow of the old oak tree twelve feet off the ground, which was for the older kids, obviously, obviously, Tim).

Jason had been given a small wicker collection basket with a ribbon handle, a pair of his new ladybug rain boots (because the grass was dewy), and what appeared to be a hand-drawn treasure map that Alfred had made using watercolors and aged with tea staining.

He looked like a tiny explorer setting out to discover new continents.

“Okay, Jaylad,” Bruce said, crouching down to Jason’s level at the back door. The grounds stretched out behind him, sparkling with morning dew, the gardens bursting with spring flowers. “Are you ready?”

Jason bounced on his toes, clutching his basket to his chest. “Ready, ready, READY!”

“Remember the rules?”

Jason held up his fingers, counting off with great seriousness. “No eating outside. No climbing the big tree. No going past the — the —” He looked at Bruce for help.

“The stone wall.”

“The stone wall! And if I find a pretty bug I show Alfie before I touch it.”

“Perfect.” Bruce pressed a kiss to Jason’s forehead. “Go get ’em.”

“CHARGE!” Jason screamed, and took off across the lawn at a dead sprint, his little ladybug boots flashing in the morning sun.

What followed was forty-five minutes of pure, unbridled chaos.

Jason found the first egg in approximately eleven seconds. It was purple and sitting on the bottom step of the garden path, clearly placed there as a confidence booster, and Jason reacted as though he had discovered buried treasure.

“I FOUND ONE! I FOUND ONE! DADDY, I FOUND — DICKIE, LOOK, I FOUND ONE!”

He held it above his head like a tiny Olympic champion.

“Way to go, Jay!” Dick cheered from the patio, where the family had gathered with coffee and pastries to watch the show.

Jason opened it, found three gummy bears inside, gasped as though they were diamonds, carefully placed them in his basket, and took off running again.

The second egg was under a rosebush. Jason spotted it from six feet away, dropped to his hands and knees, and army-crawled through the mulch to reach it with the tactical precision of someone who had definitely been watching too many action movies with his older siblings.

“He’s going to be covered in dirt,” Bruce said, not moving to stop him.

“He’s already covered in dirt,” Tim observed, not looking up from his coffee.

“He’s perfect,” Dick said firmly.

Jason emerged from the rosebush with mulch in his hair, a scratch on his cheek, and an expression of transcendent joy, holding up a green egg.

“This one has STICKERS!”

He found eggs behind flowerpots, tucked into the hedge maze (the easy part — Alfred had blocked off the deeper sections with ribbon), sitting in the bird bath, nestled among the daffodils, and hidden inside the little playhouse Bruce had built him last month.

Each discovery was met with the same explosive delight, as though the concept of hidden surprises had not yet lost even a fraction of its magic.

“Do you think he knows there are a hundred and ninety-three more?” Steph asked, watching Jason celebrate his seventh egg by doing a little spin that was probably meant to be a dance.

“Let him live, Steph,” Duke said, grinning.

The truly epic moment came at egg number fifteen.

Jason had been working his way along the garden wall, checking behind every stone and under every bush with the methodical thoroughness of a tiny detective, when he spotted something in the fountain.

The fountain was off — Bruce had made sure of that — and sitting right in the center of the dry basin, surrounded by smooth river stones, was a golden egg.

Not plastic. Not cookie.

Golden.

Alfred had taken a wooden egg, sanded it smooth, and painted it with actual gold leaf. Inside, when opened, was a small folded note in Alfred’s elegant handwriting and a tiny, perfect charm for a bracelet — a little golden book, because Jason loved stories more than anything in the world.

Jason approached the fountain with the kind of hushed reverence usually reserved for holy relics.

“Daddy,” he whispered. “Daddy, come here.”

Bruce was already moving. He reached the fountain and lifted Jason up so he could reach the golden egg, and when Jason’s small fingers closed around it, his eyes went so wide that Dick could see the whites all the way from the patio.

“It’s gold,” Jason breathed.

“Open it, sweetheart.”

Jason opened it with trembling hands. The charm glinted in the sunlight. The note read, in Alfred’s perfect script: For Master Jason, whose heart is more precious than any gold. Happy First Easter.

Jason stared at it for a long moment.

Then his lower lip wobbled.

“I’m not crying,” he announced, even though he was, in fact, absolutely crying. “My eyes are just — they’re just doing water.”

Bruce gathered him up, golden egg and all, and held him against his chest while Jason sniffled into his neck. Over the top of Jason’s curly head, Bruce locked eyes with Alfred, who was standing at the kitchen window.

The look that passed between them needed no words.

By the time the egg hunt was officially declared complete, Jason had found sixty-three eggs. The other hundred and thirty-seven would be found over the next several days by various family members, groundskeepers, and in one memorable instance, Titus the dog.

Jason’s collection basket was overflowing. His ladybug boots were caked in mud. He had grass stains on both knees, mulch in approximately seventy percent of his hair, and a smear of dirt across his nose that made him look like a storybook character.

He was sitting in the middle of the living room floor, surrounded by his treasures, sorting his eggs into careful categories — “gummies here, stickers here, toys here, SPECIAL here” — with the intense focus of a jeweler cataloging precious stones.

The family had migrated inside. Dick was on the couch, pretending to scroll his phone but actually filming Jason from a subtle angle. Tim had given up on work entirely and was helping Jason sort, which meant Tim was handing him eggs and Jason was bossing him around and Tim was allowing it. Cass was sitting on the floor next to Jason, close enough that their knees touched, and every time Jason showed her an egg she nodded with deep seriousness, as though evaluating the work of a fellow artist. Damian had produced a sketchbook from somewhere and was drawing — and if anyone glanced over, they would see that he was sketching Jason in his ladybug boots, surrounded by eggs, with more detail and care than he usually gave his commissioned pieces.

Duke had found the robin egg — the cookie one with Alfred’s hand-painted robin — and brought it to Jason as a gift from his own search, and Jason had received it as though Duke had presented him with the Crown Jewels.

Steph was braiding Barbara’s hair via video call instructions while Barbara cooed over Jason from the tablet.

And Bruce —

Bruce was sitting on the floor again, legs stretched out, leaning back against the couch. Jason had migrated into his lap at some point, arranging his favorite eggs on Bruce’s legs like they were display shelves.

“Daddy, this one is the best because it has a tiny car in it,” Jason explained, holding up a blue plastic egg. “And THIS one is the best because it has the ladybugs Alfie painted. And THIS one is the best because —”

“Jay, buddy, they can’t all be the best.”

Jason looked at Bruce with an expression of profound pity, as though Bruce had said something enormously stupid.

“Yes they can,” he said. “They’re ALL the best. That’s the point.”

Dick made a strangled sound from the couch.

“He’s right,” Cass said quietly. “That is the point.”

Jason picked up the golden egg, the one with Alfred’s note and the little book charm, and held it against his chest with both hands.

“Daddy?”

“Yeah, Jay?”

“Is Easter every day?”

Bruce’s arm tightened around him. “No, buddy. Just once a year.”

Jason considered this with the gravity of a philosopher confronting a fundamental injustice.

“That’s not enough,” he decided.

“No,” Bruce agreed, pressing his lips to the top of Jason’s hopelessly tangled curls. “It’s not.”

Jason was quiet for a moment. Then he wriggled around in Bruce’s lap until he was facing him, and put both hands on Bruce’s face the way he’d done with Alfred that morning, small fingers pressing into Bruce’s cheeks.

“But it’s okay,” Jason said, “because I get to live here every day, and that’s even better than Easter.”

The room went very still.

Dick put his phone down. Tim’s hands stopped moving. Steph’s fingers froze in mid-braid. Damian’s pencil hovered over his sketchbook. Duke’s coffee cup paused halfway to his mouth. Cass’s eyes shone.

Bruce Wayne looked at the three-year-old in his lap — this small, miraculous, resilient boy who had known hunger and cold and loneliness before he’d known this family, who approached every kindness as though it were a miracle, who loved so fiercely and so completely that it left everyone around him breathless —

“Yeah, Jay,” Bruce said, and if his voice cracked, not a single person in that room would ever mention it. “That’s even better than Easter.”

Jason beamed, kissed Bruce on the nose, and went back to sorting his eggs.

Alfred appeared in the doorway precisely forty-five seconds later with a tray of egg-free hot cross buns, warm from the oven, and if he paused to dab at his eyes with a handkerchief before entering the room, well.

That was between him and God.

Later that evening, after the hot cross buns and the egg-free lemon cake and the enormous Easter dinner that Alfred had prepared with meticulous attention to every ingredient label, Jason fell asleep in the middle of the living room floor.

He was curled up on his side, still in his muddy clothes, one ladybug boot on and one kicked off, his collection basket pulled close like a teddy bear, the golden egg clutched in one small fist, and the stuffed bunny from his Easter basket tucked under his chin.

Bruce lifted him without waking him — a skill he had perfected over the past several months — and carried him upstairs.

Dick followed, because of course he did.

“B,” Dick said quietly, as they stood in the doorway of Jason’s room, watching Bruce tuck the blanket around the sleeping boy. “You know I have like forty minutes of footage, right?”

“I have an hour and twelve minutes,” Bruce said, without looking up.

“So you’re finally admitting the phone is for baby pictures.”

“The phone is a multi-purpose tool.”

“It’s for baby pictures.”

Bruce carefully extracted the golden egg from Jason’s grip and set it on the nightstand where he’d see it first thing in the morning. Jason made a small sound, scrunched his nose, and burrowed deeper into his pillow.

“Dick?”

“Yeah?”

Bruce straightened up and looked at his eldest son, and there was something raw and open in his expression that Dick rarely saw outside the worst nights.

“He said living here is better than Easter.”

“I know, B.”

“He meant it.”

“I know.”

Bruce looked back at Jason, who had found the stuffed bunny in his sleep and pulled it closer, a tiny smile still on his face.

“I’m going to make sure that’s true,” Bruce said quietly. “Every single day. I’m going to make sure that’s true.”

Dick put his hand on Bruce’s shoulder and squeezed.

“You already are.”

They stood there for a long moment, two men who wore masks and fought monsters, watching a three-year-old sleep with a stuffed bunny and a basket full of egg-free treasures and a golden egg on his nightstand and a whole family downstairs who would burn the world to keep him safe.

Downstairs, Alfred began washing the dishes, humming an old hymn.

In the living room, Tim was uploading photos to a shared family album titled “Jay’s First Easter” that would eventually contain over three hundred images.

Cass was carefully pressing one of Jason’s found wildflowers into a book.

Damian was finishing his sketch, adding the last detail — a tiny, perfect ladybug on Jason’s boot.

Duke was texting his own mom a photo of Jason mid-egg-hunt, captioned: This family, I swear.

Steph was ordering a custom frame for the best photo of the day — Jason holding the golden egg, sun in his hair, joy on his face, looking like every good thing the world had ever promised and finally, finally delivered.

And in his small bed, in his big room, in the house that was learning to be a home, Jason Todd-Wayne slept soundly, dreaming of golden eggs and ladybug boots and a family that had hidden two hundred treasures in the garden just for him.

Just for him.

fin 🐣​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

[midnight-khaos]

Daddy, Can You Fix My Book?

The Wayne Manor library was quiet in the late afternoon, sunlight streaming through tall windows and pooling in golden patches across the hardwood floor. Jason Peter Todd-Wayne, all four years and thirty-two pounds of him, was on a mission.

He’d found something fascinating.

It had been tucked inside one of Dick’s school books — a thick, glossy thing that had slipped out when Jason had pulled the textbook off the shelf in Dick’s old room, trying to find something with pictures because Alfred had said he needed to practice “quiet time reading” before dinner, and Jason took that very seriously.

The thing was, this book was weird.

It didn’t have a proper cover like his picture books. It was all shiny and bendy, and when he’d opened it, the pages were full of ladies, which wasn’t unusual — his princess books had ladies in them too — but these ladies weren’t wearing princess dresses. They weren’t wearing much of anything, actually, which Jason found deeply impractical because it was almost November and Gotham was cold.

Also, some of the pages had come loose from the staples in the middle, and that was the real crisis.

Jason knew a broken book when he saw one, and broken books made his chest feel tight and his eyes sting, because books were precious and you were supposed to take care of them. His mama had told him that, before. When they’d still had books.

So Jason tucked the magazine under his arm — it was big and floppy and kept trying to slide out from under his elbow — and padded barefoot down the hallway toward his daddy’s office, because Daddy fixed things. That was what daddies did. Dick had told him so.

Bruce Wayne was reviewing case files on the Maroni family’s latest shipping operation when he heard it.

Thump. Thump. Scuff. Thump.

Tiny footsteps, moving with tremendous purpose.

He glanced up from his desk just in time to see the heavy oak door swing inward — slowly, because Jason still had to use both hands and all of his body weight to push it open — and a small dark head appeared in the gap.

“Daddy.”

Bruce’s mouth twitched. “Jaylad.”

Jason squeezed through the door and marched across the office with the kind of grave determination that usually preceded either a profound philosophical question or the announcement that Alfred’s cat had done something unspeakable on the stairs. He was carrying something under his arm, pressed tight against his ribs, but Bruce couldn’t make out what it was from this angle.

Jason reached the big leather chair across from Bruce’s desk and stopped.

He stared up at it.

The chair stared back.

It was, to be fair, an enormous chair. It had been selected for board members and visiting dignitaries — grown men in expensive suits who expected a certain standard of seating when they came to discuss quarterly earnings. It had not been selected with a thirty-two-pound four-year-old in mind.

Jason was undeterred.

He shoved the magazine onto the seat first, pushing it up and over the edge with both hands. Then he grabbed the arm of the chair with his small fingers, planted one bare foot on the decorative crossbar at the base, and heaved.

He made it approximately four inches off the ground before sliding back down.

Bruce pressed his lips together very hard.

Jason tried again. This time he got one elbow hooked over the seat cushion, legs dangling and kicking in the air, making a small, fierce nngh sound of effort that Bruce was fairly certain constituted the most adorable thing he had ever witnessed in thirty-four years of life.

He should help. He knew he should help. He was already half out of his chair—

But Jason let out a grunt of pure stubbornness that sounded exactly like Bruce, got his knee up, and scrambled onto the seat in a graceless tumble of small limbs, landing on his stomach before righting himself with immense dignity, as if he had planned to do it exactly that way.

He sat up straight. His feet didn’t come close to the edge of the seat. He looked like a very serious doll placed in a very large chair.

Bruce felt something crack open in his chest — that warm, aching thing that kept happening around Jason, the feeling that he had somehow been given something unbearably fragile and impossibly precious, and if he held it wrong it would shatter, and if he held it right it would grow into something that would rearrange every priority he’d ever had.

“Okay,” Jason said, all business. He picked up the magazine from where he’d shoved it and held it out across the desk with both hands, arms fully extended, leaning forward so far he nearly slid off the chair again. “Daddy, I finded a book.”

“Found,” Bruce corrected gently, reaching across to take it. “You found a—”

His hand closed around it.

His brain registered what it was.

Bruce Wayne — the Batman, the Dark Knight, the man who had stared down Bane and the Joker and Ra’s al Ghul without flinching — went absolutely, perfectly still.

It was a Playboy magazine.

A Playboy magazine.

In his four-year-old’s hands.

“It’s a picture book,” Jason continued earnestly, completely oblivious to the fact that his father’s soul had just left his body, “but it’s broken, Daddy. See?” He pointed at the loose pages with one small finger, his brow furrowed with genuine distress. “The middle part came all apart and the pages are fallin’ out, and I tried to fix it but I don’t got tape, and Alfred says I’m not allowed to use tape without supervision ’cause of the incident—”

“The incident,” Bruce repeated faintly. His voice sounded very far away, even to himself.

“With the cat,” Jason confirmed solemnly. “So can you fix it? ‘Cause books shouldn’t be broken, Daddy. That’s—that’s not right.” His lower lip trembled slightly, and Bruce realized with a start that Jason was genuinely upset. Not about the content — Jason had absolutely no framework for the content — but about the damage. About a book being torn and neglected and falling apart.

Because Jason knew what it was like when precious things weren’t taken care of.

Bruce set the magazine face-down on his desk with the careful precision of a man defusing a bomb, then pressed the intercom button.

“Alfred.”

“Sir?”

“Could you come to my office, please.”

“Certainly, sir. Is everything—”

“Immediately, Alfred.”

There was a pause. Alfred had known Bruce since birth and could read fourteen distinct emotional states from the word “immediately” alone. This particular iteration apparently communicated the necessary urgency, because Alfred simply said, “On my way, sir.”

Jason, meanwhile, had gotten distracted by the desk. He was peering over the edge at Bruce’s papers with open curiosity, standing on his knees on the chair to get high enough.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at a surveillance photo of Victor Zsasz.

“Work,” Bruce said, smoothly sliding the file under a stack of financial reports. “Jaylad, where did you find this… book?”

“In Dickie’s room,” Jason said. “In his big school book. The one with the boring cover.” He wrinkled his nose. “Cal-cu-lus. That’s a silly word. It sounds like a dinosaur.”

Bruce closed his eyes.

The door opened and Alfred entered, composed and immaculate as always, and took approximately one and a half seconds to assess the situation: Master Bruce looking like he’d swallowed a grenade, Master Jason kneeling on an oversized chair with his usual air of cheerful intensity, and a face-down Playboy magazine sitting on the desk like an unexploded ordinance.

“Ah,” Alfred said.

“Alfred!” Jason lit up. “Daddy’s gonna fix my book!”

“Is he indeed,” Alfred murmured, crossing to the desk and lifting the corner of the magazine with two fingers as if handling biological evidence. His eyebrow rose approximately one-quarter of an inch, which was the Alfred equivalent of falling to the floor in shock. “And where, Master Jason, did this… publication… originate?”

“Dickie’s room! It was inside his school book, like a secret. But it’s all broken, Alfred, the pages—”

“WHAT’S in Dickie’s room?”

Dick Grayson appeared in the doorway, seventeen years old, home from Blüdhaven for the weekend, hair still damp from the shower and wearing a Gotham University hoodie that was two sizes too large. He’d clearly been passing by and heard Jason’s voice — Jason was, after all, the most effective Dick Grayson summoning device ever created, because Dick was physiologically incapable of hearing Jason’s voice and not investigating.

“Dickie!” Jason bounced on the chair, which was alarming given that the chair was still much too large for him. “I finded— found — your friend’s book! In your calculus dinosaur!”

Dick grinned, stepping into the office. “My calc textbook? Oh, yeah — Mark was looking for his book, he said he left it at the Manor last week when we were studying. I told him I’d—”

Dick’s gaze landed on the magazine.

The grin evaporated.

The color drained from his face in a way that was genuinely impressive — a full six shades of pigment, gone in under a second, like watching a sunset in reverse.

“That’s—” Dick started. Stopped. Started again. “That is not—I don’t—that’s not mine.”

“It was in your textbook, Master Richard,” Alfred observed, with the particular tone of a man who was already composing the lecture but wanted to gather all available evidence first.

“Because Mark left it there!” Dick’s voice cracked on the name, which would have been humiliating under any circumstances but was especially devastating at seventeen, when vocal consistency was a matter of desperate personal importance. “I don’t—I would never—I’m seventeen, I don’t read—” He gestured wildly at the magazine. “I don’t read those!”

“You read picture books too, Dickie?” Jason asked with genuine interest.

Dick made a sound like a man who had been punched in the soul.

“It is not a picture book, Jay,” Dick managed, scrubbing both hands over his face. “It’s — Bruce, tell him it’s not mine. You know I don’t — I wouldn’t—” He pointed at Jason, whose enormous blue-green eyes were watching this entire exchange with fascinated confusion. “He’s four. I would never leave something like that anywhere he could find it. I didn’t even know it was in there!”

Bruce studied his eldest. Dick’s horror was genuine — the kind of panic that couldn’t be manufactured, the visceral terror of a seventeen-year-old who would rather fight Deathstroke blindfolded than be accused of exposing his baby brother to adult content.

“I believe you,” Bruce said.

Dick’s shoulders dropped approximately six inches.

“However,” Bruce continued, and the shoulders shot back up, “you will be returning that to Mark, along with a conversation about appropriate material and where it is stored, particularly when children are present in the household.”

“I will destroy Mark,” Dick said with absolute sincerity. “I will end him. He is dead to me. I’m going to—”

“You’re going to have a mature conversation,” Alfred interjected smoothly. “As befitting a young man of your age and station.”

“Daddy?”

All three of them turned to Jason, who was still kneeling on the enormous chair, small hands resting on the desk, looking between them with the patient confusion of a child who understood that something significant was happening but could not for the life of him figure out what.

“Yeah, buddy?” Bruce said softly.

“Are you gonna fix the book or not?”

Bruce looked at his son — this tiny, fierce, tender-hearted boy who had been upset not by anything inappropriate, but by the simple, devastating fact that a book had been damaged. Who had carried it so carefully to his father’s office, climbed an impossible chair, and asked for help, because that was what you did when something precious was broken.

You brought it to someone who could fix it.

“The book,” Bruce said carefully, “belongs to Dick’s friend. So we’re going to give it back to him, and he can fix it himself.”

Jason’s face scrunched. “But what if he doesn’t fix it? What if he just leaves it all broken?”

“Then that’s his choice, Jaylad.”

Jason considered this with the gravity of a Supreme Court justice. Then he shook his head.

“That’s dumb,” he declared. “Books are important. You’re s’posed to take care of ‘em.” He looked at Dick. “Tell your friend he’s gotta take care of his books, Dickie. That’s the rules.”

Dick, who looked like he might actually cry, crossed the room in three strides, scooped Jason off the chair, and hugged him against his chest so tightly that Jason squeaked.

“You’re the best person I know,” Dick said into Jason’s hair. “You are the best, purest, most perfect human being on this planet, and I will protect you from everything, including Mark’s disgusting reading material, forever.”

“Dickie, you’re squishing me—”

“I don’t care. I’m never letting go. You live here now.”

“I already live here!”

“In my arms. You live in my arms now. This is your home.”

“Dickie!”

Alfred allowed himself the smallest of smiles, collected the offending magazine with the tips of his fingers as though it were a dead mouse, and turned to leave.

“I shall dispose of this in the appropriate receptacle,” he said. “And Master Richard — do inform young Mark that his literature is no longer available for retrieval, and that any future study sessions will be subject to a brief inspection of materials at the door.”

“Alfred, I swear I didn’t know—”

“I believe you, Master Richard. I also believe in preventative measures.” He paused at the door. “And Master Jason?”

Jason peered over Dick’s shoulder, still trapped in the hug. “Yeah, Alfred?”

“If you would like a proper picture book, I believe there is a new edition of Goodnight Moon waiting for you on your nightstand.”

Jason’s entire face lit up. “The one with the bunny?”

“The very one.”

Jason immediately began squirming out of Dick’s grip with the urgency of a boy who had just received the best news of his entire life. “Dickie, let go, I gotta go read the bunny book—”

Dick set him down, and Jason hit the ground running — literally running, bare feet slapping against the hardwood, disappearing around the corner with a flash of dark hair and a trailing shout of “BUNNY BOOK! BUNNY BOOK! BUNNY BOOK!”

The three men stood in the silence he left behind.

“I’m going to kill Mark,” Dick said conversationally.

“No,” Bruce said.

“Maim?”

“No.”

“Strongly worded text?”

“That,” Bruce said, “is acceptable.”

Dick pulled out his phone and began typing with the furious energy of a man composing a declaration of war in iMessage.

Bruce leaned back in his chair and let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. His gaze fell on the empty oversized chair where Jason had been sitting — this tiny boy who had climbed a mountain of leather and mahogany because he’d found a broken thing and believed, with absolute certainty, that his daddy could fix it.

His daddy.

Bruce pressed his hand over his eyes and breathed.

Some things didn’t need fixing. Some things were already exactly right.

Downstairs, Jason Todd-Wayne read Goodnight Moon three times in a row, then fell asleep on top of the book with his thumb in his mouth and his bunny tucked under his chin.

Dick checked on him fourteen minutes later, took a photo, and sent it to every contact in his phone with the caption: PROTECT HIM AT ALL COSTS.

Mark did not get his magazine back.

He also did not get invited to the Manor again for three months.

Alfred considered this an appropriate consequence.

[midnight-khaos]

No Christmas Until December

The Watchtower security system chimed — a soft, routine ping that no one paid attention to anymore. Access codes rotated on a strict forty-eight-hour cycle, known only to the founding members and a handful of trusted operatives who had undergone background checks so thorough that the FBI had once called them “excessive” and then been gently informed by Batman that the FBI’s own internal security had fourteen exploitable vulnerabilities and perhaps they should focus on those.

So when the zeta tube announced an unscheduled arrival on the observation deck at 8:47 AM on a Tuesday, every head in the monitoring station turned.

The security officer on duty — a woman named Lieutenant Vasquez who had served two tours in Afghanistan and once arm-wrestled Hawkgirl to a draw — pulled up the feed and stared at it for four full seconds.

Then she pulled up the secondary feed, because surely the primary was malfunctioning.

It was not malfunctioning.

“Sergeant Torres,” she said.

“Ma’am?”

“Is that a child?”

Torres leaned over her shoulder. Blinked. Blinked again. Adjusted the resolution, because the Watchtower’s cameras were designed to track interdimensional threats moving at relativistic speeds and surely they could handle one small person on an observation deck.

They could.

It was, in fact, a child.

Six years old. Three foot seven. Approximately forty-six pounds, though twenty of those pounds appeared to be concentrated in the sheer gravitational density of his personal disapproval.

He was wearing a charcoal peacoat buttoned to the throat — every button, all the way up, the top one straining slightly against a red scarf that had been wound around his neck precisely twice. Not once. Not three times. Twice. With the ends tucked in. The coat had been brushed. The scarf had been lint-rolled. The dark trousers beneath them bore a crease so sharp and so deliberate that it looked less like an article of clothing and more like a statement of philosophical intent.

His shoes were polished.

He had polished them himself.

He had stood on a step stool in the manor foyer at six-thirty that morning — a full ninety minutes before the event that would necessitate this visit, though he did not know that yet — and applied black shoe polish to his oxfords with a rag and a level of focused intensity that Alfred Pennyworth, watching from the doorway with a cup of tea and an expression that could only be described as emotionally compromised, had later described to Dick Grayson as “the most dignified thing I have witnessed in forty years of service, and I once watched your father negotiate a hostage crisis in a tuxedo.”

The shoes gleamed.

But the shoes were not the important thing.

The important things were the glasses and the briefcase.

The glasses were round. Black-framed. Perched on the bridge of a small, slightly upturned nose with the practiced ease of someone who had been wearing them for months — adjusting them, pushing them up with one index finger, peering over the rims with an expression of learned skepticism that he had, though no one had been able to prove this conclusively, almost certainly copied from Alfred.

He did not need glasses.

This had been established. Repeatedly. By medical professionals.

His vision was twenty-twenty. Possibly better. Dr. Leslie Thompkins had tested him twice, because after the first exam Jason had looked at her with those enormous teal eyes — magnified slightly and unnecessarily by the lenses he did not need — and said, “Dr. Leslie, I think you should test again, because I definitely can’t see the board at school,” and she had tested him again and his vision was, if anything, better than the first time, and she had looked at Bruce Wayne standing in the corner of the exam room and Bruce Wayne had looked back at her and the look between them had contained the following information:

He does not need glasses.

I know he does not need glasses.

Are you going to tell him that?

I already told him that. He said, and I quote, “Dr. Leslie, with all due respect, I need them for business,” and then he put them back on and asked if I had any lollipops.

Did you give him a lollipop?

I gave him four.

The briefcase was leather. Real leather. Italian. The kind of briefcase that showed up in catalogs targeted at investment bankers and senior partners at white-shoe law firms, the kind that cost more than most people’s monthly rent, the kind that absolutely no six-year-old on earth had any business owning.

Jason Todd Wayne owned it.

He had seen it in a store. Not a children’s store. Not a toy store. A leather goods shop on the Upper East Side that Bruce had ducked into during a trip to Metropolis because he needed a replacement strap for his watch and Jason had been holding his hand and looking at everything with those big, round, serious eyes that missed nothing and judged everything, and then Jason had stopped walking.

Bruce had felt the tug — the sudden anchor-weight of a small person who has ceased forward motion because something important has happened — and looked down.

Jason was staring at the briefcase.

It was on a display shelf. Mahogany. Spotlit. The leather was a deep, warm brown, the color of old libraries and serious decisions.

“Daddy,” Jason had said.

“No,” Bruce had said.

“I need it.”

“You are six.”

“I need it for work.”

“You don’t have work. You have kindergarten.”

Jason had looked up at him. The unnecessary glasses had caught the shop’s lighting. Behind them, those teal eyes — eyes that could communicate more emotional complexity per square centimeter than most adults managed with their entire faces — had gone very wide and very earnest and very quietly devastating.

“Daddy,” Jason had said again, and his voice had been low, and reasonable, and utterly, catastrophically persuasive. “Sometimes a man needs a briefcase.”

Bruce Wayne — the Batman, the Dark Knight, the man who had resisted Poison Ivy’s pheromones through sheer will and once stared down Darkseid without flinching — had bought the briefcase.

It was monogrammed.

J.T.W.

Jason Todd Wayne.

In gold.

He marched.

There was no other word for it and no other word was necessary, because the English language had, in this instance, provided exactly the right term for the way this forty-six-pound human being moved through the most secure facility in Earth’s orbit. His polished shoes struck the Watchtower’s reinforced paneling in a rhythm that was — and Lieutenant Vasquez would swear to this under oath — exactly the cadence of a military quick-march. Left, right, left, right. Shoulders back. Chin up. Briefcase in his left hand, swinging slightly with each step, the monogrammed initials catching the overhead lights.

He did not look around.

He did not gawk at the viewports showing the curvature of the Earth below, or the weapons systems lining the corridors, or the various superhuman beings who stopped in their tracks as he passed. He did not slow down, speed up, or deviate from his path by so much as a single inch.

He knew where he was going.

The monitoring station officers watched him pass their window. One of them — a young man named Kowalski who had been hired three weeks ago and was still in the phase of his employment where everything about the Watchtower filled him with breathless, starry-eyed wonder — stood up from his console.

“Should we — should someone—”

“Sit down, Kowalski,” Lieutenant Vasquez said.

“But he’s—”

“I know what he is.”

“He’s a child. In space.”

“He’s Batman’s child in space. There is a difference.”

Kowalski sat down. Then stood up again. “Shouldn’t we at least—”

The child paused outside the monitoring station window. He turned his head. He looked at Kowalski through the glass — looked at him, directly, with those big, round, unnecessary glasses and those teal eyes that contained, in Kowalski’s later description to his therapist, “the entire weight of a disappointment so profound it made me want to apologize for things I haven’t even done yet.”

Then the child pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with one small index finger.

The gesture lasted approximately one point four seconds.

In that one point four seconds, Kowalski understood three things: that the child was supposed to be here, that the child had more authority in this building than Kowalski would ever possess, and that the child was on a mission and God help anyone who got in his way.

Jason turned away from the window and resumed marching.

Kowalski sat down.

He did not stand up again.

He turned left at the junction corridor.

Then right.

Then left again, past the commissary — where two off-duty technicians who had been arguing about whether Superman or Captain Marvel would win in a footrace stopped arguing and stared — past the medical bay, past the armory, past a supply closet that he noted with a brief, dismissive glance contained improperly stacked inventory (he would address this later; it was not today’s priority), and around a final corner to the main conference room.

He had memorized the floor plan.

It was in the briefcase.

It had been in the briefcase for three weeks, ever since Jason had discovered that the Watchtower’s architectural schematics were stored on the Batcomputer’s tertiary server — the one Batman thought was adequately firewalled — and had downloaded them to a USB drive and printed them out on the manor’s color printer and folded them into precise thirds and placed them in the interior pocket of his briefcase, next to a granola bar (oats and honey, his preferred variety), two pencils (sharpened, because you never knew), and a laminated card that read, in careful handwriting:

JASON TODD WAYNE

SON OF BATMAN

OFFICIAL BUSINESS

He had laminated it himself. Alfred had provided access to the laminating machine without comment, because Alfred Pennyworth understood that some things were beyond the reach of adult intervention and the best one could do was ensure the lamination was even.

The Justice League was twenty-two minutes into a briefing on Intergang weapons proliferation in the Baltic states when the door to the main conference room slid open.

Superman stopped talking.

This was notable. Superman did not stop talking during briefings unless something required his immediate attention — a seismic event, an alien incursion, a distress signal from a League member in the field. He had once continued a presentation on Kryptonian mineral exports while simultaneously using his heat vision to disable a malfunctioning drone that had breached the Watchtower’s hull. He was, by any measure, a man capable of maintaining focus under extraordinary circumstances.

He stopped talking because a six-year-old in a peacoat walked into the room.

Wonder Woman’s hand moved toward her lasso. Instinct. The response of a warrior who had spent three thousand years on an island where unexpected arrivals were treated as potential threats until proven otherwise. She recognized the child in approximately point-six seconds and her hand stilled, but the instinct had fired, and Diana would later reflect on the fact that her combat reflexes had been triggered by a first-grader and find this both humbling and, in retrospect, entirely appropriate.

The Flash — Barry Allen, forensic scientist, fastest man alive, currently on his fourth cup of coffee and vibrating at a frequency that made the table hum — dropped the pen he’d been spinning. It hit the table, rolled, and fell on the floor. He did not pick it up because he, like everyone else in the room, had become temporarily incapable of voluntary motor function.

Aquaman leaned forward. His trident, propped against the wall behind him, caught the light.

Hawkgirl tilted her head. Her mace, resting across her knees, shifted slightly.

Green Lantern — Hal Jordan, test pilot, intergalactic peace officer, a man who had faced down the entirety of the Sinestro Corps and once flown a plane into the sun — blinked.

J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter, did not move. He did not blink. He did not react in any visible way because J’onn had known the child was coming since the moment the zeta tube activated. He had felt the small, incandescent consciousness materialize on the station and had tracked it through the corridors with the passive attention of someone monitoring a weather system — not because it was dangerous, but because it was interesting.

The child’s mind was remarkable.

J’onn did not use that word often. He had lived for centuries. He had touched the thoughts of beings across galaxies, had drifted through psychic landscapes that would break a human consciousness like glass. He had felt minds that burned like supernovae, minds that whispered like deep-ocean currents, minds so vast and ancient that time itself bent around them.

This child’s mind was none of those things.

It was small. Compact. Dense. It burned like a coal fire in a cast-iron stove — contained, controlled, and absolutely, immovably certain of itself. It was a mind that had decided what it believed and organized those beliefs into categories and assigned them color-coded tabs and was prepared to discuss them.

It was the most structured six-year-old mind J’onn had ever encountered.

It was furious.

Jason Todd Wayne marched into the conference room of the Justice League of America, and he did not look at any of them.

Not Superman, who could see through walls and hear heartbeats from orbit. Not Wonder Woman, who had been sculpted from clay and blessed by gods. Not the Flash, who could evacuate a city in the time it took to blink. Not Aquaman, who commanded the oceans. Not Hawkgirl, whose mace could shatter magical barriers. Not Green Lantern, whose ring could construct anything his mind could imagine. Not the Martian Manhunter, who could read every thought in the room.

He looked at Batman.

Batman sat at the head of the table. He always sat at the head of the table. This was not something that had been discussed or voted on or negotiated. It had simply happened, the way gravity happened, the way the sun rose in the east, the way certain forces of nature arranged themselves into hierarchies that everyone understood and no one questioned. Batman sat at the head of the table because the alternative was chaos.

The cowl revealed nothing.

It never did. That was the point of the cowl — to be a surface without features, a mask without expression, a wall of kevlar and ceramic plating behind which the most dangerous human mind on the planet could operate without broadcasting its conclusions to the room.

But.

But.

Beneath the cowl — in the space behind the white lenses, in the place where Bruce Wayne lived, where the father existed inside the soldier, where the man who had once sat on the floor of a child’s bedroom at two in the morning reading Goodnight Moon for the eleventh consecutive time because a small voice had said “again, Daddy” and he had been constitutionally incapable of saying no — something shifted.

Something warm.

Something vast.

Something so ferociously, devastatingly tender that it would have made every villain in Gotham reevaluate their life choices, their career paths, and possibly their entire philosophical framework if they could have seen it.

His son was here.

His son was wearing the business glasses.

His son had brought the briefcase.

This was serious.

The corner of Batman’s mouth — the only part of his face visible beneath the cowl, the two-inch strip of jaw and chin that criminal psychologists had written papers about — did not move. Did not curve. Did not so much as twitch.

But Clark Kent, sitting four chairs away with the benefit of superhuman vision that could detect muscular contractions at the cellular level, saw the jaw soften. Saw the tension leave it. Saw the microexpression that lasted a tenth of a second and contained, compressed into that fraction of a moment like a universe folded into a point, something that Clark could only describe as joy.

Jason reached the chair next to Batman.

This chair — the chair immediately to the left of the head of the table — was technically reserved for whoever was presenting threat assessments during the current briefing cycle. It had been occupied, at various times, by generals, intelligence directors, heads of state, and, on one memorable occasion, a Thanagarian ambassador who had later attempted to conquer North America.

It was currently empty because Superman had been presenting from the front of the room and no one else had claimed it.

Jason claimed it.

Or rather, Jason attempted to claim it, because the chair — like everything else in the Watchtower — was designed for adult humans. Adults who were, at minimum, five and a half feet tall and possessed the leg length necessary to sit in a seat that was approximately three feet off the ground.

Jason was three foot seven.

He set the briefcase on the floor. Positioned it carefully, making sure the monogrammed initials faced outward, because presentation mattered. Then he placed both hands on the seat of the chair. Sized it up. Calculated the angle. Bent his knees.

Jumped.

He made it approximately halfway. His chest hit the edge of the seat. His little polished shoes dangled in open air, scrabbling against the chair’s base, finding no purchase. His peacoat rode up around his ears. His scarf unspooled slightly. He hung there for a moment — suspended, stranded, a small dignified person marooned on the cliff face of an office chair — and then slid back down to the floor with a barely audible fwump.

His glasses were crooked.

He straightened them.

He did not look at any of the adults in the room, because looking at them would acknowledge that they had witnessed this, and acknowledging that they had witnessed this would be an admission that the chair had defeated him, and the chair had not defeated him, because Jason Todd Wayne did not get defeated by furniture.

He jumped again.

This time he made it higher — his elbows hooked over the seat, his feet kicked in open air, his face pressed against the cushion. He grunted. It was a small sound, a determined sound, a sound that communicated effort and resolve and the absolute refusal to be condescended to. He kicked harder. His right shoe — polished, gleaming, scuffing — caught the chair’s pneumatic cylinder. He pushed. Gained an inch. Lost it.

Slid back down.

Fwump.

His glasses were on the tip of his nose. His scarf was trailing behind him like a defeated flag. A curl of dark hair had fallen across his forehead.

The entire Justice League was watching.

Barry Allen’s hands twitched. His instinct — the instinct of a man who ran into burning buildings and caught falling children and moved faster than the speed of thought — was to help. To reach across the table at super-speed and lift the child into the chair before anyone could blink. It would take less than a millisecond. The child would barely feel it.

He did not move.

Not because he didn’t want to, but because Diana had placed one hand — very gently, very firmly — on his forearm, and the pressure of that hand communicated, in the universal language of people who understood children, do not.

Because there was something in the set of that tiny jaw — in the way it clenched, in the way the muscles along its miniature edge tightened — that said, with absolute clarity: I will do this myself. I will do this myself or I will die on this hill. And anyone who helps me will be dealt with.

Jason grabbed the armrest. Both hands. Set his feet against the chair’s base. Pulled. Climbed. His face went red. His glasses fogged slightly from the exertion. One shoe slipped. He recovered. Pulled harder. Got one knee on the seat. Then the other. Then he was kneeling, and then he was turning, and then—

He was sitting in the chair.

In the chair next to Batman.

At the table of the Justice League.

He was breathing hard. His glasses were askew. His scarf had come almost entirely unwound and was hanging off one shoulder like the aftermath of a wrestling match. His peacoat was bunched around his midsection. One pant leg had ridden up, exposing approximately two inches of a sock patterned with tiny bats.

The bat socks were new. Alfred had bought them. Jason had cried.

He did not know anyone had seen the bat socks. He would have been mortified.

Everyone saw the bat socks.

Hal Jordan bit the inside of his cheek so hard he tasted copper.

Jason straightened his glasses. Rewound his scarf. Smoothed his coat. Tugged his pant leg down over the bat sock with the swift, practiced discretion of a man who has just committed a social error and is correcting it before anyone notices.

Too late.

Diana had noticed. Diana, who had been blessed by Aphrodite with the ability to perceive beauty in all its forms, looked at the bat sock and felt something in her ancient, immortal chest crack open like sunrise over Themyscira.

Jason reached down — a precarious operation that involved leaning sideways in a chair that was much too large for him, one hand gripping the armrest for stability — and retrieved the briefcase from the floor.

He set it on the table.

Thunk.

The sound echoed through the conference room. It was not a loud thunk. It was not the thunk of a heavy object striking a hard surface. It was a purposeful thunk. A thunk that said: I have arrived. I have materials. We are going to discuss things now.

He unlatched it.

Click.

Click.

Inside the briefcase — and Clark, who was trying very hard not to use his X-ray vision because the child deserved his privacy but who could not help the fact that his regular vision was operating at eleven times normal human acuity, saw everything anyway — was a composition notebook.

The kind sold at every drugstore in America. Black and white marbled cover. Wide-ruled. Seventy pages. One dollar and forty-nine cents at the CVS on Robinson Avenue, where Jason had bought it himself with quarters from his allowance because “Daddy, if I use your money it’s not independent journalism.”

It had been modified.

There were color-coded tabs along the edges — red, yellow, green, and blue — each one a precise rectangle of construction paper glued to the page edge with the meticulous care of a person who understood that organizational systems were the foundation of civilized society. The cover bore a label, handwritten in careful, slightly wobbly block letters that had been gone over twice to make them darker:

NOTEBOOK OF GRIEVANCES

OFFICIAL RECORD — DO NOT TAMPER

PROPERTY OF JASON TODD WAYNE

DO NOT TOUCH

THIS MEANS YOU DICK

Below this, in smaller letters, added later in a different color pen:

TIM, THIS ALSO MEANS YOU

ALFRED YOU CAN TOUCH IT IF YOU NEED TO

Jason opened the notebook. Flipped to a red tab. Smoothed the page with the flat of his small hand — once, twice, making sure it lay flat, making sure it was right — and adjusted his glasses one final time.

Then he looked up at Batman.

And the expression on his face — the expression on that small, round, deadly serious face, behind those unnecessary lenses, above that overwound scarf — was one of such concentrated, focused, righteous fury that Clark Kent, who had once stared down Darkseid without blinking, who had held dying stars in his hands, who had stood at the edge of reality itself and not flinched, felt his throat close.

Not with fear.

With something worse.

With the overwhelming, muscle-weakening, thought-destroying urge to laugh.

He could not laugh. He knew he could not laugh. Laughing would be an act of war. Laughing would be a betrayal of such magnitude that this child — this small, furious, bespectacled child who had traveled to space to have this conversation — might never forgive him, and Clark had the horrible, wonderful, dawning suspicion that Jason Todd Wayne’s forgiveness was not something a person could afford to lose.

He held it in.

It almost killed him.

“We have a problem,” Jason said.

His voice was high. Small. It had not yet decided what it would become — it was still a child’s voice, soft at the edges, prone to occasional cracks when it reached for emphasis — but the tone. The tone was a hundred years old. The tone had seen things. The tone had been let down by institutions and was here to discuss it.

Batman regarded his son.

The cowl regarded Jason. The white lenses — blank, featureless, designed to be unreadable — regarded the small person in the oversized chair with the briefcase and the notebook and the unnecessary glasses and the bat socks.

Beneath the table — out of sight of the room, out of sight of the cameras, out of sight of everyone except J’onn, who felt it happen in the warm, golden shift of Batman’s psychic signature — Bruce Wayne’s gauntleted hand moved from the table’s edge and came to rest, very gently, on the back of his son’s chair.

Not touching the child.

Just there. Behind him. Close enough to catch him if the too-big chair shifted. Close enough to steady him if he leaned too far. Close enough that the warmth of the hand, even through the gauntlet, even through the chair, even through every layer of armor and distance and performance, might reach him.

“Tell me,” Batman said.

His voice was the same low, gravel-roughened rasp that made criminals confess unprompted and had once caused a seasoned Interpol agent to involuntarily stand at attention. But the timbre — the harmonic beneath the fundamental, the frequency only people who knew him could hear, the note that only sounded in the presence of his children — was different.

It was warm.

It was patient.

It was the voice of a man who would sit in this chair for the next six hours if that’s how long it took, who would listen to every word in that notebook regardless of what other global crises were unfolding, because the person speaking was the most important person in any room Bruce Wayne had ever entered.

The League had never heard this voice before.

Several of them would need time to recover.

Hawkgirl — Shayera Hol, a woman who had been trained from birth to suppress emotional responses in tactical settings — felt the bridge of her nose sting.

Jason looked down at his notebook.

He had notes.

There were bullet points — actual bullet points, drawn by hand, each one a small, careful circle filled in with pencil. There were underlined words. There were words that had been underlined and then circled, which in Jason’s organizational system denoted maximum urgency. There was, in the upper right corner of the page, a pie chart drawn in crayon.

Hal Jordan’s ring — which, among its other capabilities, could enhance his visual acuity to near-microscopic levels — confirmed the pie chart’s existence. It was divided into two sections. One section, colored in red, was labeled “BAD” and took up approximately eleven-twelfths of the circle. The other section, colored in green, was labeled “OK” and occupied the remaining sliver.

There was a title above the pie chart.

MONTHS WITH CHRISTMAS MUSIC

Hal closed his eyes.

“This morning,” Jason began, and his voice trembled — not with fear, not with sadness, but with the barely contained outrage of a soul who has witnessed an injustice so profound, so systemic, so fundamentally offensive to the natural order that the English language groaned under the weight of expressing it — “Alfred was driving me to school.”

Batman nodded. Listening. His posture — the rigid, controlled posture of a man for whom stillness was a weapon — had not changed, but something about the angle of his head had shifted. He was leaning in. Slightly. Fractionally. The way he leaned in during interrogations when the suspect was about to say something important.

“We were on Robinson Avenue,” Jason continued. “By the bridge. The one with the gargoyles that you said look like Mr. Pennyworth.”

“I did say that,” Batman confirmed.

“They do look like him.”

“They do.”

“Alfred said that was ‘flattering,’ but I think he was being sarcastic.”

“He was.”

Jason nodded, satisfied that the record was accurate, and made a small notation in the margin of his notebook. Then he looked up again, and the fury returned — it had been momentarily displaced by the gargoyle tangent, but it was back now, filling those teal eyes like a tide.

“The radio was on,” he said.

“Yes,” Batman said.

“WGOT. 97.3 FM. It’s Alfred’s preset number four. He listens to it for the classical hours on weekday evenings, but in the morning they do a general mix.”

“I’m aware of the programming schedule.”

“Good. Then you’ll understand why what I’m about to tell you is a crisis.”

Batman inclined his head. The room waited.

Jason placed one small index finger on the notebook. On a specific line. On a specific word that had been underlined three times and circled twice and starred.

“They were playing Christmas music,” he said.

The words entered the silence of the conference room and detonated.

Not loudly. Not with fire or force or the physical destruction that the people in this room were accustomed to confronting. They detonated the way a truth detonates — quietly, irreversibly, rearranging the landscape of the conversation so completely that everything said before them became preamble and everything said after them would be response.

“It is November third,” Jason said, and his small hand came down on the notebook, and the smack of skin on paper echoed off the walls and the ceiling and the reinforced windows that looked out over the slowly turning Earth, and Barry Allen — the Flash, the fastest man alive — flinched.

He flinched.

He would think about this later. He would lie in bed in his apartment in Central City and stare at the ceiling and think about the fact that he, a man who could perceive events at the attosecond level, had been physically startled by a six-year-old slapping a composition notebook.

“Halloween was four days ago,” Jason continued, and now he was leaning forward, one elbow on the table, his glasses sliding down his nose, his voice rising in pitch and volume and moral conviction. “Four. Days. I still have candy in my pumpkin bucket. The pumpkins on the porch haven’t even gone soft yet. I have glitter — glitter, Daddy — in my hair from my costume. I’ve washed it three times. It won’t come out. Alfred used the special shampoo. He used the conditioner. He used the thing with the comb. There is still glitter and we are still in Halloween and they—”

He jabbed his finger at the notebook. At whatever damning evidence he had transcribed there. At the record of the atrocity.

“—they are playing Mariah Carey.”

He said the name the way a prosecutor says the name of the defendant. The way a historian says the name of a tyrant. The way a very small, very angry person says the name of a woman who has, in his professional assessment, overstepped.

“On WGOT 97.3,” Jason specified, because he believed in citing sources. “At seven forty-two in the morning. ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You.’ The original version.” He paused. “Not even a remix, Daddy. Not even the one with the bells at the beginning where you have a second to change the station. The original. It just starts. You can’t escape it.”

He pushed his glasses up. They had slid to the very tip of his nose, which was slightly pink from the exertion of the chair climb, which made the glasses look even more ridiculous, which made everything worse and better at the same time.

“Seven forty-two in the morning,” he repeated, in case the temporal dimension of the offense had not been adequately registered. “I hadn’t even had my juice box yet.”

Batman’s mouth — the visible strip of jaw beneath the cowl — remained absolutely, perfectly, heroically still.

Clark saw the muscles in it contract.

He had never seen Batman’s jaw muscles work this hard. Not during the Darkseid invasion. Not during the Thanagarian occupation. Not during the eighteen-hour standoff with the Joker at Arkham when the building had been rigged with enough explosives to level midtown and Batman had stood in the dark with nothing but his voice and his will and talked a madman into surrendering.

This was harder.

This was the hardest thing Bruce Wayne had ever done with his face.

“That is early,” Batman said, and his voice was level, and controlled, and absolutely devoid of the seismic emotional event occurring behind it. “Walk me through the timeline.”

Jason walked him through the timeline.

He had a timeline. It was on the next page of the notebook. It was drawn in pencil, with dates marked along a horizontal line, and it was, considering that it had been produced by someone who had been alive for approximately seventy-eight months, shockingly competent.

“October thirty-first,” Jason said, tapping the leftmost point on the timeline. “Halloween. A sacred holiday. A holiday about candy and costumes and the fundamental right of every child to dress up as something scary and receive chocolate from strangers.”

“Agreed,” Batman said.

“November first. The day after Halloween. A day for eating leftover candy, sorting your candy, trading your candy, and recovering from your candy. A day of rest.”

“Reasonable.”

“November second. Also still part of the Halloween recovery window. Acceptable activities include: more candy, watching the Halloween specials you missed, and taking down decorations at your own pace.”

“Sound policy.”

“November third.” Jason’s finger stopped on today’s date. His voice dropped. “Today. Three days after Halloween. Seventy-two hours. The pumpkins. Are still. On the porch.”

He looked up from the notebook.

“And Mariah Carey,” he said, and the name landed like a gavel, “is on the radio.”

He flipped the page. There was more. There was so much more.

“But it’s not just today,” Jason said, and now his voice had shifted — from righteous fury to the deep, systematic anger of someone who has identified a pattern and intends to dismantle it. “This is a systemic problem, Daddy. I have been tracking it.”

He had been tracking it.

There was a log.

“April fourteenth,” Jason read from the log, adjusting his glasses. “CVS on Robinson Avenue. Easter candy still on the shelves. Christmas wrapping paper appeared in Aisle Seven. April, Daddy. It was still Lent.”

Batman nodded.

“May second. Target on Brideshead. Memorial Day section: normal. Two aisles over: inflatable Santa. Five feet tall. In May. I measured it.”

“You measured the Santa.”

“I always measure the Santa. It’s getting bigger every year. I have a chart.”

He did have a chart. It was in the briefcase. It was labeled SANTA SIZE CREEP — ANNUAL TRACKING and it contained three data points — the only three years of Jason’s life during which he had been sufficiently organized to conduct retail surveillance — and the trend line, while based on a statistically insufficient sample size, was going up.

“July nineteenth,” Jason continued. “Hobby Lobby. Full Christmas aisle. Ornaments, garland, stockings. It was ninety-three degrees outside. I was wearing shorts, Daddy. I was eating a popsicle. And there was tinsel.”

“In July.”

“In July.”

He flipped another page. “September eighth. Costco. They had a twelve-foot Christmas tree. Fully decorated. Pre-lit. Next to the Halloween costumes. So you’d be standing there trying to pick out a Batman costume — which, by the way, none of them look like you, the ears are always wrong—”

“I’ve noticed,” Batman said.

“—and you turn around and there’s a Christmas tree. In September. While you’re holding a bag of fun-size Snickers. It’s — it’s psychological warfare, Daddy. They’re trying to make you forget what month it is. They’re trying to erase the seasons.”

He closed the log. Pressed both small hands flat on the notebook. Looked at Batman with the expression of a man who has presented his evidence and is waiting for the verdict.

“And now,” he said, softly, terribly, “they’re playing Christmas music on the radio. On November third. Before I’ve had my juice box. Before the glitter is out of my hair. Before the pumpkins are soft.”

He swallowed.

“It’s not right,” he said.

The silence in the room was unlike any silence the Justice League had experienced.

It was not the silence of crisis — not the held-breath, coiled-muscle silence that preceded a battle. It was not the grim silence of bad news, or the respectful silence of mourning, or the tactical silence of a room full of people waiting for Batman to tell them what to do.

It was the silence of eight adults who were experiencing, simultaneously and without warning, an emotional event of such magnitude that their collective cardiovascular systems were under genuine stress.

Hal Jordan had stopped breathing.

This was not a metaphor. He had actually stopped breathing. His ring, which monitored his vital signs, had begun preparing a medical intervention before he remembered to inhale.

Diana’s eyes were shining.

Arthur’s hand had tightened on the table’s edge until the reinforced surface creaked.

Barry was vibrating. Not the normal, caffeine-enhanced vibration that was his baseline state — a new vibration, a resonant frequency that originated somewhere in his sternum and was, if he was being honest with himself, perilously close to what a less disciplined person might call getting choked up over a first-grader.

J’onn — who could feel every emotion in the room, who experienced the collective psychic output of the Justice League like weather — closed his eyes briefly. The emotional atmosphere in the conference room had shifted from “routine briefing” to “eight extremely powerful individuals trying not to cry or laugh or both simultaneously,” and the combined psychic pressure of that much suppressed feeling was, even for a centuries-old telepath, a lot.

Shayera had put her mace down. She never put her mace down.

Superman was looking at the table. Just — looking at the table. Examining its surface with the forensic focus of a man who understood that if he looked at the child right now, if he made eye contact with those teal eyes behind those unnecessary glasses, he was going to make a sound, and the sound was going to be audible, and his reputation as a stoic pillar of justice would be finished.

Batman picked up the notebook.

He read it.

He read it carefully. Line by line. Word by word. The way he read forensic reports and toxicology panels and encrypted intelligence briefings from agencies that technically did not exist. He turned a page. Read the timeline. Turned another page. Read the retail surveillance log. Turned another page.

Read the pie chart.

The pie chart — two colors, eleven-twelfths red, one-twelfth green, “MONTHS WITH CHRISTMAS MUSIC,” drawn in crayon on wide-ruled paper by a six-year-old who believed, with the unshakeable conviction of the genuinely righteous, that December was the only acceptable month for Mariah Carey — received the same analytical attention that Batman gave to Joker’s psychological profiles.

He studied it for nine seconds.

“You’ve done your research,” Batman said.

“I always do my research,” Jason said, and the faint offense in his voice — the slight narrowing of those teal eyes, the microscopic tightening of that tiny jaw — communicated, with devastating clarity, that his thoroughness was not something that should ever require acknowledgment because it should be assumed.

Batman set the notebook down.

He reached into his belt. Not the compartment with the batarangs. Not the one with the smoke pellets, or the encrypted comm devices, or the remote detonators, or the seventeen other instruments of precisely calibrated violence that made the belt a war crime in a cummerbund. A different compartment. A smaller one. One that no member of the Justice League had ever seen him open.

He produced a pen.

A regular pen. Black ink. Ballpoint. The kind you’d find on a desk in any office in any city in the world.

Clark stared at it.

He had never seen Batman carry a pen. He had seen Batman carry batarangs in fourteen different configurations, grappling hooks rated for four thousand pounds of tensile stress, a rebreather that could filter oxygen from methane, a field medical kit capable of performing emergency surgery, and — on one occasion that no one discussed — a granola bar.

He had never seen a pen.

The pen had been in that compartment for three weeks. Since the day Jason had gotten the briefcase and the notebook and the glasses, and Bruce Wayne had understood — with the same clarity he brought to crime scene analysis — that eventually, inevitably, his son was going to bring him something to sign.

He had been carrying the pen ever since.

Just in case.

He uncapped it.

He signed the petition.

The petition — the handwritten, painstakingly formatted petition on wide-ruled composition paper, with a title in block letters that read PETITION TO BAN CHRISTMAS MUSIC BEFORE DECEMBER 1 — SUBMITTED BY: JASON TODD WAYNE, AGE 6 — SUPPORTED BY: EVERYONE WITH SENSE and numbered signature lines drawn with a ruler — received the signature Batman in sharp, angular script, on line two, directly beneath his son’s name.

“I’ll have my people look into the FCC angle,” Batman said, capping the pen. “But we should consider a multi-pronged approach. Public awareness. Social media. Direct engagement with station management.”

“I was thinking flyers,” Jason said, and reached into the briefcase — the briefcase — and produced a second notebook.

This one was smaller. Spiral-bound. It appeared to contain draft flyer designs. They were — and Clark could see this, because his vision was what it was — extensively illustrated. There were angry jack-o’-lanterns. There were turkeys holding protest signs. There was a drawing of what appeared to be a radio with a big red X through it, and beneath it the words: NO CHRISTMAS MUSIC BEFORE DECEMBER — IT’S THE LAW (IT SHOULD BE).

“I made these at school during free time,” Jason said. “Mrs. Henderson said they were ‘very passionate.’”

“They are,” Batman said, examining the flyers with the critical eye of a man who had designed fear-based psychological warfare campaigns and recognized solid instincts when he saw them. “The turkey with the picket sign is particularly effective.”

“That’s Gerald,” Jason said.

“Gerald.”

“The turkey. His name is Gerald. He’s the mascot of the movement.”

“The movement.”

“The No Christmas Before December Movement.” Jason looked at his father as though this should have been obvious. “Every movement needs a mascot, Daddy. We learned that in social studies. Mrs. Henderson said mascots build brand recognition.”

“Mrs. Henderson sounds like a strategist,” Batman said.

“She has a master’s degree,” Jason said, with the reverent finality of someone invoking unimpeachable authority.

The conference room door slid open for the second time.

Dick Grayson came through it at a speed that suggested he had either sprinted from the zeta tube or had been fired from a cannon — and knowing Dick Grayson, either was equally plausible. He was twenty-two, Nightwing, currently in civilian clothes — jeans, a Gotham University hoodie, sneakers that had seen better days — because he had been in the middle of a late breakfast at his apartment in Blüdhaven when his phone had exploded with a priority alert from the Watchtower’s secondary monitoring system, which he maintained separately from Batman’s, which tracked specifically and exclusively the biometric signatures of his family members, because Dick Grayson had anxiety about his family and dealt with it through surveillance.

The alert had read: J. WAYNE — WATCHTOWER — UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS — VITALS NORMAL.

Dick had left his eggs burning on the stove. He would not remember them for six hours. By then, the pan would be unsalvageable, and his apartment would smell like charcoal for a week, and he would consider this a reasonable price.

Behind Dick, moving with considerably more composure — because Tim Drake moved with composure the way other people moved with legs, it was simply the mechanism by which he traveled — came Tim.

Thirteen. Robin. Also in civilian clothes: a black hoodie with the hood down, dark jeans, the kind of nondescript outfit that a thirteen-year-old genius wore when he wanted to be invisible and didn’t realize that the hypercompetent alertness in his eyes made invisibility impossible. His laptop bag was slung over one shoulder, because Tim Drake did not go anywhere without a computer. He slept with a tablet on his nightstand. He showered with his phone in a waterproof case on the shelf. He had once brought a laptop to a Wayne Foundation gala and worked on it under the table during the salad course, and Bruce had looked at him and seen himself and been so unsettled by this that he’d gone to the balcony and stood in the cold for ten minutes.

Behind them — behind the sprinting acrobat and the composed teenager, moving at a pace that suggested neither hurry nor delay but rather the precise speed at which Alfred Pennyworth had decided the universe should unfold — came Alfred.

He was carrying a tray.

On the tray: a teapot (bone china, because Alfred did not acknowledge the existence of inferior materials, even in space), five cups (matching), a small plate of shortbread (baked that morning, before dawn, because Alfred Pennyworth had somehow known — the way he always knew, the way he had known for forty years, through some preternatural butler’s intuition that operated on frequencies science could not measure — that today was going to be a day that required shortbread), and a juice box.

Apple.

Jason’s preferred variety.

The juice box had a straw already punctured through the foil seal, because Alfred had done it in the zeta tube, because Alfred understood that when a man is in the middle of presenting critical intelligence to the most powerful people on the planet, he should not have to struggle with a juice box straw.

“Jay!” Dick was across the room in three strides — long strides, acrobat’s strides, the kind that covered ground the way a thrown grappling line covered distance — and dropped into the chair on Jason’s other side. His hands came up, hovering, not quite touching, performing the rapid visual scan that he had perfected over years of being an older brother: eyes clear, breathing normal, color good, no injuries, no distress, tiny bat socks, glasses he doesn’t need, oh God the briefcase, oh God the notebook—

He pulled Jason’s chair closer to him. The chair rolled — the small body in it swaying with the motion, the briefcase sliding slightly on the table — and came to rest with Jason positioned between his father on one side and his eldest brother on the other, bracketed, guarded, flanked by the two people who would, without hesitation and without limit, burn down anything that threatened him.

“Buddy, you can’t just — you can’t just beam yourself to space without telling anyone, you scared me half to—”

“I told Alfred,” Jason said.

“He did tell me,” Alfred confirmed, setting the tray down on the Justice League’s conference table. He positioned it between a holographic projector and a stack of classified Intergang files. He began to pour tea. “And I approved the expedition.”

“You approved — Alfred, he’s six, he’s in orbit—”

“Master Dick.” Alfred looked up from the teapot. The look was mild. It was always mild. It was the mildness of a man who had raised Batman from a traumatized child and could convey, through the slight adjustment of one eyebrow, enough emotional information to fill a novel. “The young master had a matter of some urgency to discuss with his father. I assessed the situation, deemed the Watchtower an appropriate venue, and provided transportation. The access code was entered by my hand. The journey was supervised. And if I may observe — you are currently standing in the same facility, having arrived by the same means, with rather less preparation.”

Dick opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Sat down.

“What matter?” he asked, turning to Jason with the careful, focused attention of someone who had learned — through years of practice, through trial and error, through the slow and occasionally painful process of becoming the kind of older brother a child like Jason needed — that the only correct response to Jason’s concerns was to take them with absolute seriousness. “What matter, Jay?”

“Christmas music,” Jason said. “On the radio. Before December.”

Dick’s face performed an act of heroism.

It did not smile. It did not twitch. It did not crumble, crack, or in any way betray the thermonuclear detonation of tenderness and hilarity that was occurring behind it. It remained grave. Engaged. Concerned.

It was the single greatest performance of Dick Grayson’s career, and he had once convinced the Joker he was a corrupt cop.

“Tell me everything,” Dick said.

Jason told him everything. The timeline. The retail surveillance log. The pie chart. The Mariah Carey incident. WGOT 97.3. Seven forty-two in the morning. The glitter still in his hair. The pumpkins still on the porch. Gerald the turkey.

Dick listened to all of it.

“That’s — Jay, that’s messed up,” Dick said, and the conviction in his voice was so genuine, so complete, that Jason’s entire body relaxed by approximately fifteen percent — a release of tension that J’onn felt from across the room, a small internal unclenching, the psychic signature of a child who has been heard.

“It is messed up,” Jason agreed fervently. “It’s very messed up. And I think — I think we need to do more than just the petition.”

“More than the petition?” Dick leaned in. “Like what?”

Jason pushed his glasses up.

The gesture — the small index finger, the practiced motion, the slight adjustment of frames that did not need adjusting on a face that did not need glasses — was, in Dick Grayson’s professional assessment, the most adorable thing that had ever happened in the known universe, and he wanted to die.

“I think,” Jason said, “we need to organize a strike.”

The word landed in the room like a flashbang.

“A strike,” Batman repeated.

“A strike,” Jason confirmed. “A listener’s strike. Nobody in Gotham listens to any radio station that plays Christmas music before December. We shut them out. We hit them where it hurts — their ratings.”

He pulled out a fresh page in the notebook. He had already started drafting this. There were headers. There were action items. There was a section labeled DEMANDS in red marker.

“We make signs,” Jason said, ticking off points on his fingers. “We march. We get people to sign a pledge that they won’t listen to any station that plays Christmas music before December first. And we — we picket.”

“You want to picket a radio station,” Dick said.

“I want to picket every radio station that starts Christmas music before December,” Jason corrected. “But we can start with WGOT because they’re the worst offenders.”

Tim had his laptop open. He was already running numbers. “Okay, so WGOT 97.3 switched to a Christmas-adjacent format on November first,” he said, his fingers moving across the keyboard at a speed that suggested either exceptional typing skills or a mild dissociative state. “They call it ‘Christmas in November.’ They’ve done it for the past six years. Their ratings spike by twelve percent in the eighteen-to-thirty-four demographic, but — interesting — they actually lose about seven percent of their over-fifty-five listeners.”

“The over-fifty-fives are on our side,” Jason said immediately.

“Potentially,” Tim said. “And if I cross-reference social media sentiment—” He paused. Typed. Typed more. A graph appeared on his screen. “Yeah, there’s a significant negative response. Hashtag ‘TooEarlyForChristmas’ trends every year in the first week of November. Last year it had about forty thousand posts.”

“Forty thousand,” Jason breathed, and his eyes — behind those ridiculous, wonderful, heartbreaking glasses — went wide with the light of a revolutionary who has just discovered he is not alone. “Forty thousand people, Tim. That’s an army.”

“It’s a hashtag,” Tim said. “But yes, there’s a base of support.”

“We need a website,” Jason said. “Can you make a website?”

“I can make a website.”

“With Gerald on it. Gerald has to be on the front page.”

“Who’s Gerald?”

Jason showed him the turkey with the picket sign.

Tim looked at it for three seconds. “I can digitize Gerald. Clean up the lines, vectorize him, make him scalable for different media formats. He’d work as a logo.”

Jason stared at Tim with an expression of such profound, luminous admiration that Dick — who was watching this exchange from two feet away with a hand pressed over his heart — made a sound like a punctured tire.

“Tim,” Jason said. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. I’ll have a mockup in twenty minutes.”

Alfred set a cup of tea in front of Bruce. Another in front of Dick. A third in front of Tim, positioned precisely beside the laptop at an angle that would not risk the keyboard in the event of a spill, because Alfred Pennyworth had spent four decades anticipating catastrophe at every scale from geopolitical to beverage-related and he was not about to stop now.

He placed the juice box — apple, straw pre-inserted, foil seal punctured — next to the notebook of grievances, within easy reach of his youngest charge’s left hand.

Then he pulled out a chair.

He sat down at the Justice League’s conference table.

He adjusted his cuffs.

He poured himself a cup of tea.

“If I may,” Alfred said.

The room turned to him.

The entire room. Eight members of the Justice League, three members of the Wayne family, and one six-year-old revolutionary with a briefcase and a turkey named Gerald — every single person turned to Alfred Pennyworth, because when Alfred Pennyworth said “if I may,” what he meant was “I am going to speak now, and you are going to listen, and this is not a request.”

“I believe Master Jason’s concerns, while expressed with his characteristic vigor, touch upon a broader cultural phenomenon that warrants serious consideration,” Alfred said. He sipped his tea. “The premature commercialization of the holiday season — the systematic erosion of seasonal boundaries in pursuit of consumer spending — has been documented extensively by cultural critics, psychologists, and economists. The phenomenon of ‘Christmas creep,’ as it is commonly known, represents not merely an inconvenience but a fundamental disruption of the natural rhythmic cycle by which communities mark the passage of time.”

He set his cup down.

“I raised Master Bruce in a household where Advent began on Advent and not a moment sooner,” Alfred continued. “Christmas decorations appeared on the first of December. Carols were sung in their proper season. The integrity of each holiday — Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas alike — was preserved as a matter of domestic policy. I see no reason to abandon these standards simply because a radio station in Gotham has decided that commerce supersedes tradition.”

He paused.

“I have, in fact, taken the liberty of drafting a letter to the management of WGOT on Master Jason’s behalf,” he added. “It is in the car. I shall retrieve it presently. I believe the phrasing is — if I may say so — devastating.”

Jason turned to Alfred with an expression that could only be described as the face of a general who has just learned that his most trusted advisor has already outflanked the enemy, anticipated his strategy, and prepared the ground for total victory.

“Alfred,” Jason said, and his voice cracked — not with fury this time, but with the specific, overwhelming emotion of a small person who has found that the people he loves are on his side. “Thank you.”

“Always, young sir.”

Jason picked up his juice box. Took a sip. Set it down with the focused deliberation of a man who is fueling himself for a long campaign.

“Okay,” he said. “So here’s what I’m thinking for the strike.”

He flipped to a new page. He had drawn a map. It was a map of Gotham — crude, schematic, but recognizable — with X marks at various locations.

“These are the radio stations,” he said. “WGOT is here, on Fifth and Chambers. WGTH is here, on Robinson. WKGM is here, by the waterfront. I don’t know if they’re all playing Christmas music yet, but we need intelligence. Tim, can you monitor all of them?”

“I’ll set up an automated audio scraper,” Tim said, without looking up from his laptop. “It’ll flag any track that appears on a standard Christmas playlist database. I can have real-time alerts within the hour.”

“Good. Dick, I need you on flyer distribution.”

Dick blinked. “You — you want me to hand out flyers?”

“You’re Nightwing. You can cover the whole city in one night. I need flyers on every telephone pole from Crime Alley to the Palisades by Friday.”

“Jay, I can’t — I mean, technically I can, but—”

“Can you or can’t you?”

Dick looked at Bruce. Bruce looked back. The cowl was impassive, but somewhere behind the white lenses there was something that might — if you squinted, if you knew him, if you had spent twenty-two years learning to read a face that didn’t want to be read — have been amusement.

“I can,” Dick said.

“Good. Alfred, I need the letter hand-delivered to WGOT’s station manager. Not mailed. Hand-delivered. In person. By you.”

“Naturally,” Alfred said. “I would not entrust correspondence of this significance to the postal service.”

“And Daddy.” Jason turned to Batman. His glasses caught the overhead lights. His jaw was set. His small hands were flat on the notebook, on the map, on the battle plan. “I need you to make a public statement.”

“A public statement,” Batman said.

“As Batman. On the record. That Christmas music before December is unacceptable and that the people of Gotham deserve better.”

Clark Kent — who had been holding his composure together with the psychic equivalent of duct tape and prayer for the last fifteen minutes — felt it slip.

Not much. A fraction. A microexpression. A slight widening of the eyes, a barely perceptible tightening of the mouth, the facial equivalent of a structural crack in a dam that was holding back an ocean.

He covered it by taking a sip of the tea that Alfred had somehow placed in front of him without his noticing.

“I’ll draft something,” Batman said.

“I already drafted something,” Jason said, and produced — from the briefcase, from the seemingly bottomless briefcase — a folded piece of paper. “You can edit it if you want, but I think the key messages are solid.”

He unfolded it.

It read, in careful block letters:

OFFICIAL STATEMENT FROM BATMAN

PEOPLE OF GOTHAM,

IT HAS COME TO MY ATTENTION THAT CERTAIN RADIO STATIONS IN OUR CITY HAVE BEGUN PLAYING CHRISTMAS MUSIC IN NOVEMBER. THIS IS WRONG. HALLOWEEN IS BARELY OVER. THANKSGIVING HAS NOT HAD ITS TURN. MARIAH CAREY SHOULD NOT BE ON THE RADIO UNTIL DECEMBER.

I AM BATMAN AND I APPROVE THIS MESSAGE.

ALSO PLEASE SUPPORT THE STRIKE.

GERALD THE TURKEY SAYS: NO CHRISTMAS BEFORE DECEMBER.

Batman read the statement.

He read it twice.

“I have some minor edits,” he said.

“That’s fine,” Jason said. “It’s a draft. I’m open to collaboration.”

“The core message is strong.”

“I know.”

“‘Gerald the Turkey says’ is a particularly effective closing.”

“Gerald resonates with people, Daddy. He’s relatable. He’s a turkey. Everybody likes turkeys. Turkeys are Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the holiday that Christmas is stepping on. Gerald is the voice of the voiceless.”

Barry Allen excused himself from the table.

He said he needed water. He said this in a voice that was approximately one octave higher than his normal speaking voice and that contained, compressed into two syllables, the entire desperate urgency of a man who was about to laugh so hard he would vibrate through the floor of the Watchtower and plummet through the vacuum of space toward the Earth below and he would welcome it.

He made it to the corridor.

The door slid shut behind him.

From the other side of the door, muffled but audible to Clark’s superhuman hearing, came a sound. It was the sound of the fastest man alive sliding down a wall, sitting on the floor of the Watchtower’s main corridor, pressing both hands over his face, and losing it.

It went on for some time.

Back in the conference room, the strike was being organized.

Tim had pulled up a spreadsheet. It had columns. It had categories. It was the kind of spreadsheet that Fortune 500 companies used to plan product launches, and it was being used to coordinate a six-year-old’s protest against premature Christmas music.

“Okay,” Tim said, turning the laptop so Jason could see it. “I’ve broken this down into phases. Phase One: Intelligence Gathering. That’s the audio monitoring I mentioned — we track which stations are playing Christmas music, when they started, what percentage of their programming is Christmas-related. I’ll have data within twenty-four hours.”

“Good,” Jason said.

“Phase Two: Public Awareness. That’s the flyers, the website, the social media campaign. I’ll build the site tonight — GeraldTheTurkey.com, if the domain’s available—”

“Check it,” Jason said.

Tim checked it. “It’s available.”

“Buy it.”

Tim bought it. With a Wayne Enterprises corporate credit card that he technically was not supposed to have but that Bruce had never revoked because — and this was a level of parenting paradox that Bruce tried not to examine too closely — the things Tim purchased with the card were invariably either (a) crime-fighting equipment, (b) technology upgrades for the Batcave, or (c) domain names for his six-year-old brother’s protest movements, and none of these felt like things a responsible adult should discourage.

“Done,” Tim said. “Phase Three: Direct Action. That’s the picketing, the strike, the petition delivery. We need to coordinate timing, location, signage—”

“I have sign ideas,” Jason said, and pulled another notebook from the briefcase.

Dick leaned over to look. His face performed another act of extraordinary valor.

The sign ideas were illustrated. In crayon. Each one featured Gerald the Turkey in a different pose — Gerald holding a megaphone, Gerald on a picket line, Gerald standing in front of a radio station with his wings crossed and a speech bubble that read: “WHERE IS THE RESPECT FOR THANKSGIVING?”

“These are — Jay, these are really good,” Dick said, and his voice only wobbled slightly.

“Thank you. I’ve been working on Gerald’s character design for a while. He’s got range.”

“He does. He’s got real emotional range.”

“He’s angry but he’s dignified, Dick. That’s important. You can be angry and still be dignified. Alfred taught me that.”

Alfred sipped his tea. His eyes, above the rim of the cup, were suspiciously bright.

“Phase Four,” Tim continued, because Tim Drake did not stop until the spreadsheet was complete, “is Escalation. If the stations don’t respond to the petition and the strike, we go bigger. Press coverage. Open letter in the Gotham Gazette. And—” He hesitated. Glanced at Bruce. “—potentially a Wayne Enterprises corporate statement.”

“A corporate statement,” Bruce said.

“Wayne Enterprises is one of WGOT’s biggest advertisers,” Tim said. “If we threatened to pull ad revenue—”

“Tim,” Jason said, and his voice was hushed, and awed, and filled with the dawning wonder of a revolutionary who has just been handed a weapon of devastating power. “Tim, that’s brilliant.”

“It’s just leverage.”

“It’s beautiful leverage.”

“I want it on record,” Batman said, “that I am not committing Wayne Enterprises to a corporate boycott of a radio station over Mariah Carey.”

“Yet,” Jason said.

Batman looked at his son.

His son looked back.

The glasses glinted.

“Yet,” Batman conceded.

The conference door opened for the third time.

Barry Allen came back in. His eyes were red. His face was composed with the fragile, careful composure of a man who had just experienced something profound and was not entirely sure he had survived it.

He sat down.

He looked at Jason.

Jason looked back.

“I’d like to sign the petition,” Barry said.

Jason’s head swiveled toward him. The glasses caught the light. Those teal eyes — enormous behind the unnecessary lenses, framed by dark lashes, above cheeks still slightly pink from the chair-climbing exertion — swept over the Flash with an evaluative intensity that a less secure person might have found unsettling.

“You’re serious,” Jason said. It was not a question. It was a test.

“Dead serious,” Barry said. “One hundred percent. You want to know why?”

Jason waited.

“Yesterday,” Barry said. “Yesterday, I was at the grocery store. In Central City. Buying Halloween candy. On clearance. Half-price Reese’s. The big bags. I had four bags in my cart and I was having a great day, and you know what was playing?”

“What,” Jason said, and his voice was barely a whisper.

“‘Jingle Bell Rock.’”

Jason’s mouth fell open.

“On November second,” Barry continued. “While I was holding Halloween candy. In Halloween packaging. Little pumpkins on the bag. And ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ was playing over the store speakers, and I stood there in the candy aisle and I thought — this isn’t right. This isn’t right. I’m holding a pumpkin bag and Bobby Helms is singing about jingle bell time and it felt — it felt wrong, Jason. It felt fundamentally wrong.”

“It is fundamentally wrong,” Jason said, and his voice had gone thick with the particular emotion of a person who has been alone in their conviction and has suddenly, unexpectedly, found a kindred spirit. “It is. That’s what I’ve been saying.”

He snatched the petition notebook. Flipped to the signature page. Slid it across the table with the precise, urgent energy of a man closing the most important deal of his life.

Barry caught it. Signed it with a flourish — The Flash, Barry Allen — and slid it back.

Jason looked at the signature. Looked at Barry. Looked at the signature again.

“You wrote your real name,” he said.

“You earned it, kid.”

Jason carefully, reverently, added Barry Allen to the ALLIES section of his notebook. He wrote it in pencil first, then traced over it in pen, because allies of this caliber deserved permanence.

“Anyone else?” Jason asked, looking around the table.

He pushed his glasses up.

The glasses he did not need.

That he wore for business.

That he had purchased at a pharmacy for $9.99 with his own allowance money because “Daddy, I can’t use your credit card for these, it’s a conflict of interest” — a phrase he had learned from a courtroom drama Alfred had been watching — and Bruce had stood in the pharmacy aisle and looked at his six-year-old selecting reading glasses from a spinning rack with the focused discrimination of a jeweler examining diamonds and had fallen so far into love that he wasn’t sure he’d ever find the bottom.

Diana took the notebook next.

She held it for a moment. Looked at it. At the wide-ruled paper, the careful letters, the numbered signature lines drawn with a ruler by small hands. Then she looked at Jason, and her eyes — the eyes of an immortal, the eyes of a warrior who had walked the fields of ancient battles and held dying soldiers and seen empires rise and fall — were soft.

“I would be honored,” she said, and signed: Diana of Themyscira, Princess of the Amazons.

And then, beneath her name, in Ancient Greek, she wrote a notation that roughly translated to: The child speaks with the wisdom of Athena. The music shall wait. Let no man play carols before the first frost of December, or answer to me.

“What does that say?” Jason asked, peering at the Greek.

“It says I agree with you completely,” Diana said. “And that anyone who disagrees will answer to me personally.”

Jason considered this. “Can you put that on the website?”

“I will have it translated for Tim.”

“In a cool font.”

“The coolest font.”

Jason nodded, satisfied, and wrote in his notebook: WONDER WOMAN — ALLY — WILL FIGHT PEOPLE ABOUT THIS.

Clark signed. He signed Clark Kent and then, beneath it, added the Kryptonian symbol for El, and Jason studied it and asked what it was and Clark explained and Jason said, “So your whole family agrees?” and Clark said, “My whole house of El agrees,” and Jason said, “Good, that’s at least two more people,” and Clark did not have the heart to tell him that the House of El was, at this point, more or less just him and Kara.

Arthur signed. He used a pen that he had to be given because Arthur did not carry pens — he carried a trident and the authority of the seven seas — and he wrote Arthur Curry, King of Atlantis and then added, in Atlantean script, a formal declaration that the oceanic kingdoms stood with Jason Todd Wayne on this matter.

“Does the ocean have Christmas music?” Jason asked.

“The ocean has whale song,” Arthur said. “And whale song is seasonal. You wouldn’t hear a humpback singing its winter migration song in July.”

“See?” Jason said, turning to the room at large. “Even the whales get it.”

J’onn signed. His signature was in a script that was not of this Earth — angular, fluid, beautiful in the way that very old languages are beautiful, carrying in its curves the weight of a dead civilization’s written tradition. Jason studied it for a long time.

“What language is that?” he asked.

“Martian,” J’onn said.

“What does it say?”

“It says: ‘The seasons must be honored in their time. To rush one is to dishonor all.’”

Jason stared at J’onn. His lower lip trembled — minutely, almost imperceptibly, a vibration of emotion that J’onn felt in the child’s psyche like a bell being struck.

“That’s exactly what I’ve been saying,” Jason whispered. “That’s exactly it. Mr. J’onn, that’s — can I use that? As a quote? On the website? Under Gerald?”

“You may use it,” J’onn said. “I am honored to contribute to Gerald’s cause.”

Shayera signed. Her signature was a sharp, angular mark — Thanagarian military shorthand, the equivalent of a commanding officer endorsing an operation — and she added a small drawing of her mace next to it.

“What’s that?” Jason asked.

“That means if anyone gives you trouble about this, I’ll handle it.”

Jason looked at the mace. At Shayera. At the mace again.

He added to his notebook: HAWKGIRL — ALLY — HAS A MACE — WILL USE IT.

Hal Jordan was the last.

He took the notebook. Held it. Looked at Jason over the top of it.

“Kid,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You broke into the most secure facility in the solar system.”

“I didn’t break in. I had the code.”

“You had the code. You traveled to space. You walked past armed security personnel. You entered a classified briefing attended by people who could, collectively, restructure the planet’s geology. And you sat down and filed a formal complaint about a radio station playing Mariah Carey too early.”

“Yes.”

“And now you’re organizing a strike.”

“Yes.”

“With a mascot.”

“Gerald.”

“With Gerald. And a website. And flyers. And a proposed corporate boycott of a major media company.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re six.”

Jason pushed his glasses up. The gesture was patient. The gesture said: I am aware of my age, thank you. My age is irrelevant. The issue is the issue.

“I’m almost seven,” Jason said.

Hal signed the petition.

Then, in parentheses, beneath his signature, he wrote: (This kid is going to run the world, and honestly, we should let him.)

Jason reviewed the signatures.

He counted them. One by one. Moving his finger down the list, his lips moving slightly, the way children’s lips move when they count — a small, unconscious, devastating detail that Dick Grayson watched from two feet away while silently perishing.

He cross-referenced the signatures with his ALLIES list. Made notations. Drew small check marks next to confirmed supporters. Added threat assessments — not of his allies, but of the problem, with annotations about which ally’s particular skills would be most useful at each phase of the campaign.

It was, in miniature, a tactical briefing.

It was exactly what his father would have done.

Bruce saw this. Saw the small head bent over the notebook, the unnecessary glasses sliding down the small nose, the careful hand making careful marks in careful categories. Saw the organizational system — the color-coded tabs, the cross-referencing, the instinct for structure that no one had taught him, that lived in him the way rhythm lives in a musician, native and inalienable.

And Bruce Wayne — the Batman, the Dark Knight, the most emotionally disciplined human being on the planet — felt something happen behind his eyes that had nothing to do with cowls or criminals or the fate of the world.

It was pride.

It was so much pride it hurt.

“Okay,” Jason said, closing the notebook with a definitive snap. “Here’s the action plan.”

He stood up in the chair. Kneeling, really — one knee on the seat, one hand on the table, his full three-foot-seven commanding the attention of gods and kings and the most dangerous people in the solar system.

“Dick: flyers. Every telephone pole. By Friday. Use Gerald.”

“On it,” Dick said.

“Tim: website. Social media. Audio monitoring. Data. All of it. I want to know every Christmas song played on every station in Gotham and I want to know it in real time.”

“Already building the scraper,” Tim said.

“Alfred: the letter. Hand-delivered. Tomorrow. Wear the scary suit.”

“I beg your pardon?” Alfred said.

“The dark grey one. With the thin tie. The one that makes people think you’re going to fire them.”

“Ah,” Alfred said. “The Saville Row.”

“That one. It’s intimidating.”

“I shall endeavor to be appropriately formidable.”

“Daddy.” Jason turned to Batman. Full eye contact. Glasses to cowl. Teal to white. Six years old to forever. “The statement. By Wednesday. And I want to review the final draft before it goes out.”

“You’ll have it Tuesday night,” Batman said.

“Good. And I want — I want a meeting. A real meeting. With everyone. To review progress and adjust strategy. This Friday. Here. Same time.”

He looked around the table.

“Everyone’s invited,” he said. “Bring your own juice boxes.”

He sat back down. Picked up his apple juice. Took a long, deliberate sip through the straw — the sound of it, the small slurp, the most mundane and childlike sound in the universe, echoing through the silence of the room where gods convened.

Set it down.

“Good meeting,” he said.

He placed the notebook in the briefcase. The flyer designs. The draft statement. The petition. He organized them — tap, tap, tapping the edges straight — and closed the briefcase lid.

Click.

Click.

He hopped down from the chair. It was a controlled descent this time — one hand on the armrest, a brief pause on the chair’s base, then a clean landing on both polished shoes. He straightened his coat. Adjusted his scarf. Pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose one final, ceremonial time.

He picked up the briefcase.

He looked at the room.

“Also,” he said, and his voice was quieter now, not softer but quieter, the way a voice gets when it’s about to say the thing that matters most. “I just want to say one more thing.”

He paused.

“Thanksgiving,” he said, “is a holiday about being grateful. About being with your family. About pie, and stuffing, and going around the table and saying what you’re thankful for. And it doesn’t have a mascot — I mean, it has turkeys, but turkeys don’t have a song. Turkeys don’t have Mariah Carey. Thanksgiving is just — it’s quiet. It’s a quiet holiday. And quiet holidays need people to protect them, because nobody else is going to.”

His voice wavered. Just slightly. Just enough.

“So that’s what we’re doing,” he said. “We’re protecting Thanksgiving. We’re protecting quiet. And we’re telling Mariah Carey — with all due respect, because Daddy says you should always be respectful even when you disagree—”

“I do say that,” Batman confirmed.

“—we’re telling her: wait your turn.”

He nodded once. Sharply. The way his father nodded.

Then he turned, and he marched out of the conference room of the Justice League, his little shoes clicking against the floor, his briefcase swinging at his side, his unnecessary glasses glinting under the Watchtower’s lights, his bat socks hidden beneath his ironed trousers, his dark curls still — somewhere, probably — containing a fleck of Halloween glitter.

The door slid shut behind him.

No one spoke.

The silence lasted fourteen seconds. Clark counted.

Then Clark said, “Bruce.”

“Don’t,” Bruce said.

His voice was rough.

“Bruce, that was—”

“Don’t.”

Dick had his face in both hands. His shoulders were shaking. He was not laughing. He was not crying. He was doing something that existed in the space between those two things, a third state of emotional expression that had no name because it had never needed one until now.

Tim was still typing. But he was smiling — the rare, unguarded, full-faced smile of a thirteen-year-old boy who spent most of his life behind walls of composure and analysis and who had just watched his little brother march into a room full of legends and demand justice for Thanksgiving.

Alfred rose from the table. Collected the cups. Arranged them on the tray with the same precise, unhurried care he brought to everything — to ironing, to cooking, to holding a family together across decades of grief and glory and the small, bright, impossible joy of a child in a peacoat.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Alfred said. “Master Jason has school to attend. And I have a letter to deliver.”

He paused at the door.

“Also,” he said, turning back. “I trust no one at this table will mention the bat socks.”

“What bat socks?” Diana said.

“What bat socks?” Clark said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Barry said.

“I didn’t see anything,” Hal said.

“None of us saw anything,” Shayera said.

“There were no bat socks,” J’onn confirmed.

Alfred inclined his head.

“Good morning,” he said.

And followed his grandson out of the room.

Three days later, Gerald the Turkey went viral.

Tim’s website — GeraldTheTurkey.com — launched at midnight on November fourth and received 1.2 million unique visitors in its first seventy-two hours. Gerald, professionally digitized from Jason’s crayon original but retaining every ounce of hand-drawn indignation, appeared on the front page holding his picket sign with the caption: “WHERE IS THE RESPECT?”

Below Gerald, in an elegant font that Diana had personally selected, was J’onn’s quote in both English and Martian: The seasons must be honored in their time. To rush one is to dishonor all.

The petition went digital. It collected four hundred thousand signatures in a week.

Dick distributed 11,247 flyers across Gotham in a single night, setting a personal record for non-combat-related nocturnal activity. He was spotted by three different security cameras, all of which showed a masked figure in black taping a picture of an angry turkey to a telephone pole, and the Gotham Gazette ran a story the next morning with the headline: “NIGHTWING JOINS ANTI-CHRISTMAS-MUSIC CAMPAIGN — OR DOES HE?”

Alfred delivered the letter to WGOT’s station manager in person, wearing the Saville Row suit with the thin tie. The station manager, a man named Douglas Fenn who had been in broadcast media for thirty-one years and had weathered FCC investigations and corporate mergers and the 2008 financial crisis, later described the experience to a colleague as “the most terrifying seven minutes of my professional life.”

Batman issued a statement. It was three paragraphs long. It had been edited seventeen times — twelve by Bruce, five by Jason, who had rejected the first draft as “too wordy” and the second as “not enough Gerald” and the third through eleventh on various grounds of tone and emphasis before finally approving the twelfth with the note “this is acceptable but next time let me write the first draft.”

The statement was projected on the Bat-Signal.

Not the regular Bat-Signal. A modified Bat-Signal, adjusted by Tim to project, beneath the bat emblem, the silhouette of a turkey.

Commissioner Gordon saw it from his office. He stood at the window for a long time. Then he went home and told his daughter, and Barbara laughed so hard she fell out of her wheelchair.

WGOT 97.3 did not stop playing Christmas music in November.

But they did receive, within a single week, four hundred thousand petition signatures, a seven-page letter of such surgical rhetorical precision that their legal team asked to frame it, a corporate inquiry from Wayne Enterprises regarding advertising standards, a formal diplomatic communiqué from the Kingdom of Atlantis (which their intern initially mistook for a prank and then, upon reflection, did not), and a handwritten note from Wonder Woman in Ancient Greek that they could not translate but that made the entire office feel, inexplicably, nervous.

They switched to a compromise format — fifty percent Christmas, fifty percent “seasonal autumn content” — and issued a public statement acknowledging that “the holiday season should be celebrated in its proper time and that all holidays deserve respect.”

Jason read the statement at the breakfast table on Saturday morning. Alfred had placed it next to his juice box. Bruce sat across from him, drinking coffee, watching.

Jason set the statement down.

“It’s a start,” he said.

He pushed his glasses up.

“But we’re not done.”

He was already drafting the follow-up petition. It was more ambitious. It addressed not just radio stations but retail stores, television networks, and streaming platforms. It proposed a formal “Holiday Integrity Act” — Jason’s term — establishing December first as the earliest acceptable date for Christmas content in any medium.

Gerald the Turkey was on the letterhead.

Tim had given Gerald a tie.

“I like the tie,” Jason had said, studying the updated design on Tim’s laptop. “It makes him look official.”

“It’s a power tie,” Tim said. “Red. Classic authority color.”

“Gerald deserves a power tie,” Jason said, with the quiet conviction of a man who understood that symbols matter, that presentation is substance, that a turkey in a power tie could change the world.

The follow-up petition was in the briefcase.

It was always in the briefcase.

The briefcase was ready.

EPILOGUE

On December first — at 12:00 AM, midnight, the exact first legal second of the first legal day — Jason Todd Wayne sat on the living room floor of Wayne Manor in his pajamas, surrounded by his brothers, with Alfred in the armchair and Bruce on the couch, and pressed play on the old stereo system.

Mariah Carey’s voice filled the room.

“I don’t want a lot for Christmas…”

Jason closed his eyes.

“Now it’s time,” he said.

And it was.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

[midnight-khaos]

A Book of Culture

Alfred Pennyworth had seen many things in his years of service to the Wayne family. He had weathered interdimensional crises, alien invasions, and the particular horror of Master Dick’s attempt to cook a Thanksgiving turkey at age twelve. He considered himself, with some justification, unflappable.

Which made the full-body double take he executed in the doorway of the Manor library all the more remarkable.

He’d been passing by on his way to collect the afternoon tea service, had glanced in as was his habit, and seen exactly what he expected to see: young Master Jason, curled into his favorite armchair like a small, contentious cat, a book propped against his knees. The boy’s reading habits were, in Alfred’s professional opinion, one of his finest qualities. At eight years old, Jason Todd-Wayne devoured literature with the ferocity other children reserved for sugar cereals and cartoons.

Alfred had smiled fondly and continued walking.

Then his brain caught up with his eyes.

He stopped. Reversed. Leaned back into the doorway with the careful precision of a man defusing a bomb.

Jason was still there. Still curled up. Still reading. His small brow was furrowed in concentration, his lips moving slightly as they did when he encountered a word he didn’t know—which, given the book in his hands, was likely happening with alarming frequency.

Because the book in Jason’s hands—held carefully, spine uncracked, because the boy treated books like sacred objects regardless of their content—was Fifty Shades of Grey.

Alfred felt his left eye twitch.

He blinked. Looked again. The title had not changed. The garish cover had not transformed into something more appropriate. The silver tie on the front cover stared back at him with what Alfred could only describe as malicious intent.

“No,” Alfred said quietly to himself. Then, with more feeling: “No.”

He crossed the library in six long strides, his polished shoes barely making a sound on the hardwood, though his pace could only be described as urgent. Jason didn’t look up until Alfred was directly beside the armchair, at which point the boy raised his head with the vaguely annoyed expression of a reader who’d been interrupted mid-sentence.

“Hey, Grampy,” Jason said, perfectly casual.

Alfred reached down and, with the gentle but implacable authority of a man who had once disarmed the Joker with a cricket bat, removed the book from Jason’s hands.

Jason blinked. His fingers stayed curled in the shape of the book for a moment, hovering in empty air, before he lowered them to his lap and stared up at Alfred with an expression of pure, uncomprehending bewilderment.

“Grampy?” Jason’s voice pitched upward. “Why’d you grab my book?”

Alfred held Fifty Shades of Grey at arm’s length, as though it were a particularly aggressive species of spider. He resisted the urge to drop it directly into the fireplace—lit or unlit, he wasn’t feeling particularly discriminating at the moment.

“Master Jason,” Alfred said, and he was proud of how steady his voice was, truly he was, “where, precisely, did you acquire this… volume?”

Jason’s confusion deepened. He tilted his head, dark curls falling across his forehead, and Alfred’s heart clenched the way it always did when the boy looked so painfully young and earnest.

“Some kids outside school gave it to me,” Jason said, with the matter-of-fact tone of someone who didn’t understand why this was a noteworthy event. He picked at a loose thread on the armchair. “They’re always calling me a nerd ‘cause I read real books. They said I gotta—” he made air quotes with his small fingers “—‘read more pop culture stuff’ if I wanna be cool. So Tommy Garrison gave me that one and said everybody’s read it.”

Alfred closed his eyes briefly. Tommy Garrison. He filed the name away with a precision that would have impressed Batman’s own detective work. Tommy Garrison’s parents would be receiving a very pointed phone call in the near future. Or possibly a visit. Alfred hadn’t decided yet.

“And how much of this book,” Alfred said carefully, “have you read, Master Jason?”

Jason shrugged one small shoulder. “Like, barely any. I just started and it’s already super weird.” His nose scrunched up. “There’s this lady, right? And she meets this guy who’s supposedly really cool but honestly he just sounds like a creep. And then—” Jason’s face twisted into an expression of theatrical confusion “—there’s something about a contract? Grampy, why does a boyfriend need a contract? That’s not how you do boyfriends. Even I know that and I think romance is gross.”

Alfred let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. The boy had barely scratched the surface. Thank God. Thank every deity in every pantheon across every dimension the Justice League had ever visited. An eight-year-old should not be reading this. Frankly, in Alfred’s literary opinion, no adult should be reading it either, but that was a separate grievance he maintained privately between himself and the works of the Brontë sisters.

“You are correct, Master Jason,” Alfred said, tucking the book firmly under his arm where it could do no further harm. “That is decidedly not how one does boyfriends. This book is—” he paused, selecting his words with the care of a surgeon “—not appropriate reading material. For you. Or for anyone with functioning taste in literature, but especially for you.”

“But why?” Jason asked, because Jason always asked why. It was one of Alfred’s favorite and most exhausting things about him.

“I am going to call Master Bruce in to have a conversation with you,” Alfred said. “Stay here, please.”

Jason’s eyes went wide. “Am I in trouble?”

The raw edge of anxiety in the boy’s voice—still so quick to surface, even after a year in the Manor—made Alfred soften immediately. He reached down and smoothed Jason’s hair back from his forehead with a gentle hand.

“You are not in trouble, my boy. Not even slightly. You didn’t know. But this requires a conversation that is rather above my pay grade.”

“You don’t have a pay grade,” Jason pointed out. “You told Bruce you work for emotional fulfillment and the satisfaction of keeping him alive.”

“And today,” Alfred muttered, pulling out his phone, “I am deeply questioning both.”

Bruce Wayne arrived in the library four minutes later, which meant he had either been in the Cave or had sprinted from wherever he’d actually been. His hair was slightly disheveled and there was a smear of something that might have been engine grease on his jaw, but his expression was pure Concerned Father—a look he’d been perfecting over the last year with the desperate dedication of a man who’d received no instruction manual.

“Alfred said there was a situation,” Bruce said from the doorway, his eyes scanning the room as though expecting a supervillain. His gaze landed on Jason, still in the armchair, looking small and confused and slightly defensive. Then it moved to the book Alfred was holding up like a prosecution exhibit.

Bruce read the title.

Bruce’s face went through approximately seven emotions in two seconds, cycling through surprise, horror, disbelief, a flash of fury that was clearly directed at someone not in the room, and finally settling on the grim determination of a man who was about to have a Parenting Conversation and was not remotely prepared.

“Ah,” Bruce said.

“Indeed, sir,” Alfred replied.

Bruce crossed the room and sat down on the ottoman across from Jason’s armchair, putting himself at eye level with the boy. Jason watched him approach with the wary stillness he still sometimes defaulted to—the watchfulness of a child who’d learned early that adults could be unpredictable.

“Hey, Jay,” Bruce said, keeping his voice easy. “Alfred tells me some kids at school gave you a book?”

“Outside school,” Jason corrected, because accuracy mattered. “And then Grampy took it away and he won’t tell me why and I barely even read any of it and it wasn’t even good, Bruce, the writing is honestly terrible. The prose is really—” he waved a hand vaguely “—repetitive. She uses the same descriptors over and over. My English teacher would’ve given it a C minus.”

Bruce’s mouth twitched. He pressed his lips together firmly.

“Your English teacher would be right,” Bruce said. “Jay, that book… it’s not for kids.”

“Because of the contract thing?” Jason asked, seizing on the detail that had baffled him. “Because I gotta say, Bruce, that part was really weird. I don’t get why—”

“It’s an adult book,” Bruce said, with the careful emphasis of a man walking through a verbal minefield. “It’s got… adult content. Things that are for grown-ups to read about, not kids.”

Jason’s expression was magnificently unimpressed. “I read Les Misérables,” he said. “In the original French. There’s literally a revolution in it. People die, Bruce.”

“This is a different kind of adult content.”

“What kind?”

Bruce looked at Alfred. Alfred looked at Bruce. A silent, desperate conversation took place between them in the span of half a second, conducted entirely through eyebrow movements and minute shifts in expression—a language they had perfected over decades of cohabitation.

You explain it, Bruce’s eyes said.

I called YOU in for precisely this purpose, Alfred’s eyebrows replied.

I wasn’t READY, the slight tightening of Bruce’s jaw communicated.

One is never ready, sir. That is parenthood, the subtle tilt of Alfred’s chin conveyed.

Bruce turned back to Jason and took a breath.

“It’s—”

The library door burst open.

“I heard there was a CODE RED,” Dick Grayson announced, skidding into the room in his socks on the hardwood floor with the dramatic flair that was his birthright. He was twenty years old, home from Blüdhaven for the weekend, and apparently had been monitoring the family group chat with the vigilance he typically reserved for criminal activity. “Alfred texted ‘library, urgent, Jason, inappropriate book.’ I came as fast as I could. What’s the inappropriate—”

He saw the book in Alfred’s hand.

Dick’s face went through its own journey of emotions, though his version included a beat of recognition, a bark of startled laughter that he immediately smothered, and then exaggerated solemnity.

“Oh no,” Dick said, in the tone of a soap opera actor. He dropped onto the arm of Jason’s chair and slung an arm around his little brother’s shoulders. “Jay. Jay. Baby bird. Who gave you this?”

“Some kids at school said I need to read pop culture stuff,” Jason said, leaning into Dick’s side automatically. “I don’t see what the big deal is. I barely read any of it. There was a lady and a weird guy and a contract—”

“It’s a romance book,” Dick said, choosing the simplest possible explanation with the instincts of someone who’d spent the last year learning how to talk to his new little brother. “It’s a grown-up romance book. With lots of kissing.”

The effect was immediate and spectacular.

Jason recoiled so hard he nearly fell off the armchair. His face contorted into an expression of such pure, visceral horror that it rivaled anything Bruce had ever produced while facing down Scarecrow’s fear toxin. His mouth dropped open. His eyes went wide. A full-body shudder rippled through his small frame.

“KISSING?!” Jason shrieked, as though Dick had just told him the book contained live scorpions. “That book is about KISSING?!”

“So much kissing,” Dick confirmed, biting the inside of his cheek hard. “Like, extensive kissing. Constant kissing. Kissing on practically every page.”

Jason looked at the book in Alfred’s hands with the expression of a person who had just learned they’d been handling radioactive waste. He physically scooted back in the armchair, pressing himself against the opposite side as though the book might leap from Alfred’s grip and attack him.

“That is DISGUSTING,” Jason declared, with the righteous fury only an eight-year-old could muster. “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard. And I lived in Crime Alley. I’ve seen dumpsters, Dick. I’ve seen things in those dumpsters. And kissing books are worse.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Dick said, his voice strangled. His shoulders were shaking. Bruce had turned his face away entirely, one hand pressed over his mouth.

“I don’t even wanna look at it,” Jason continued, gesturing aggressively at the book with both hands in a shooing motion. “Get it away. Get it out of here. Burn it. Throw it in the ocean. I don’t care. I can’t believe—” he broke off, looking personally betrayed. “I can’t believe Tommy Garrison gave me a kissing book. He knew. He knew and he gave it to me anyway. That’s—that’s biological warfare, Bruce.”

“I’ll speak to Tommy’s parents,” Bruce managed, his voice not entirely steady.

“Don’t speak to them. Arrest them. They raised a menace.”

Jason threw himself off the armchair with the offended dignity of a cat that had been shown a cucumber. He stalked across the library, his small shoulders rigid with indignation, and pulled a well-worn hardcover from the shelf with the reverence of a priest retrieving a holy text.

He turned around, holding Pride and Prejudice against his chest like a shield.

“This,” Jason announced, lifting the book with both hands, “is a book of culture. This is literature. Mr. Darcy doesn’t need a contract. Mr. Darcy writes a letter. Because he has class. And yes, there is some kissing at the end, but it’s tasteful and earned and comes after extensive character development.”

He dropped back into his armchair, cracked open Pride and Prejudice to his bookmarked page, and pointedly ignored every adult in the room.

“I need to cleanse my palate,” Jason muttered, already reading. “Jane Austen is the only cure for this level of betrayal.”

The three of them—Bruce, Dick, and Alfred—stood in a frozen tableau for a long moment, none of them trusting themselves to speak. Dick was crying silent tears of laughter, both hands clamped over his mouth. Bruce had his eyes closed and was breathing through his nose in the way he did when he was trying very hard not to laugh in a situation where laughing felt inappropriate. Alfred was gazing at the ceiling with the expression of a man offering fervent thanks to a higher power.

Finally, Alfred broke the silence.

“Shall I dispose of the offending volume, sir?” he asked Bruce, holding up Fifty Shades of Grey between two fingers.

“Burn it,” Jason said from behind Pride and Prejudice, not looking up.

“The fireplace is out, Master Jason.”

“Light it.”

Bruce pinched the bridge of his nose. “Just… put it somewhere he can’t find it.”

“I don’t want to find it!” Jason’s voice rose over the top of his book, indignant. “I want it to be launched into the sun! I want it to be banished to the Phantom Zone! I want—”

“Jay,” Dick interrupted gently, still wiping his eyes.

“What?”

“Read your book, baby bird.”

Jason huffed, wriggled deeper into the armchair, and returned to Elizabeth Bennet with the fervor of a man returning to civilization after being lost in the wilderness.

Dick leaned over to Bruce.

“I’m framing this memory,” he whispered. “This is the greatest thing that’s ever happened in this house.”

“Don’t you dare tell the Team about this,” Bruce whispered back.

“I’m telling everyone. I’m telling the Justice League. Clark is going to cry.”

“Dick.”

Alfred, meanwhile, carried Fifty Shades of Grey from the library at arm’s length, descended to the kitchen, and deposited it directly into the trash compactor with a sense of satisfaction that bordered on the spiritual.

He paused, then reached for his phone and composed a brief, polite text message to the contact labeled GARRISON, PATRICIA & THOMAS SR.

It read: Good afternoon. This is Alfred Pennyworth of Wayne Manor. I believe we need to discuss your son’s reading recommendations. At your earliest convenience. Sincerely.

He hit send, adjusted his cuffs, and went to make tea.

In the library, Jason turned a page of Pride and Prejudice and sighed happily.

“Now this,” he murmured to no one in particular, “this is the good stuff.”

END

[midnight-khaos]

The Monkey Family Reunion

A One Piece Fanfiction

The Thousand Sunny bobbed lazily in the harbor of a small island, the Straw Hats scattered across the deck in various states of relaxation. It was supposed to be a quiet supply stop — in and out, no trouble.

Then Luffy’s head snapped up from where he’d been draped over the figurehead like a rubber noodle, his nostrils flaring. His whole body went rigid, hat tilting back as he stared toward the far side of the port.

“Oi,” Zoro said, one eye cracking open. “What’s wrong with you?”

Luffy didn’t answer. He was grinning — not his normal grin, not the one that meant adventure or meat. This was something sharper, more feral, the kind of grin that made Nami’s wallet-sense tingle with dread.

“Everyone get down,” Nami said immediately.

“What? Why?” Usopp looked around wildly.

But Luffy was already moving.

He launched himself off the figurehead without a word, rocketing over the rooftops of the port town like a slingshot, laughing — cackling — in a way that made every single member of his crew freeze.

“Was that… joy?” Robin asked, tilting her head.

“That was a war cry,” Sanji said flatly, cigarette nearly falling from his lips.

On the other side of the port, Vice Admiral Monkey D. Garp was striding down the gangplank of a Marine warship, his massive frame casting a shadow over the terrified local merchants. His crew — battle-hardened Marine officers — flanked him in neat rows, backs straight, faces grim with professional discipline.

“Bwahaha! Smell that sea air!” Garp bellowed, scratching his nose. “Reminds me of — “

He didn’t finish the sentence.

A blur of red and rubber came screaming out of the sky at a velocity that should not have been possible for a human being, and a fist — stretched back a full city block — slammed directly into the side of Garp’s head with enough force to crack the stone beneath his feet.

“GOMU GOMU NO — “

CRACK.

“GRAMPS! I GOT YOU!”

Every Marine on the dock went white. Vice Admiral Garp — the Hero of the Marines, the Fist, the man who had cornered the Pirate King — had just been sucker-punched into a building by a teenager in sandals.

The dust cleared.

Garp was buried in rubble up to his chest, a fist-shaped welt blooming purple on his temple. His eyes were wide.

Then they narrowed.

“You little — “

Luffy was already bouncing on the balls of his feet, fists raised, grinning so wide his face might split. “Shishishi! Your guard was totally down, old man!”

Garp exploded out of the rubble. “YOU BRAT! IS THAT HOW YOU GREET YOUR GRANDFATHER?!”

His Fist of Love came down like a meteor.

Luffy dodged — barely — the impact cratering the ground where he’d been standing. He swung a rubber leg around in a wide arc. Garp caught it with one hand, yanked him forward, and drove a knuckle into the top of his skull.

“OW!”

“THAT’S WHAT YOU GET!”

“THAT HURT, YOU CRAPPY OLD MAN!”

“IT’S SUPPOSED TO HURT! IT’S LOVE!”

They were everywhere — smashing through market stalls, tearing across rooftops, trading blows that sent shockwaves rippling across the harbor. Luffy was laughing the entire time, stretching and snapping back like a living rubber band, and Garp was bellowing insults between haymakers that could have leveled mountains.

And then, as abruptly as it had started, it stopped.

Luffy — mid-dodge, mid-laugh — flung himself forward and latched onto Garp’s back like a koala. His arms wrapped around the old man’s neck twice, his legs coiled around his torso, and his chin hooked over Garp’s shoulder.

Garp froze mid-swing.

“Gramps,” Luffy said, and his voice had gone soft, warm, buzzing with excitement. “Gramps, guess what.”

“…What,” Garp said slowly.

“I punched a Celestial Dragon.”

Dead silence.

Garp’s eye twitched. His jaw clenched. A vein pulsed dangerously in his forehead.

“You — “

“AND it was awesome! He was being mean to my friend so I just — POW — right in the face!” Luffy smacked his fist into his palm right next to Garp’s ear. “Oh, and I broke into Impel Down! Well, I broke into it and then out of it. Both directions. Also I beat up a guy made of sand. AND a guy made of lightning! Nami helped with that one. OH and I have a musician now! He’s a skeleton! He’s SO cool, Gramps, he does the skull joke — “

“Luffy — “

“And THEN we went to an island in the sky — THERE’S AN ISLAND IN THE SKY, GRAMPS, did you know that?! — and I rang this huge bell, it was really loud, and there was this guy who thought he was God but I beat him up too — “

He was talking a mile a minute now, chin bouncing on Garp’s shoulder, gesturing wildly with one rubbery arm while the other stayed locked around his grandfather’s neck. Garp had stopped trying to throw him off. The old man was just… standing there, hands at his sides, a complicated expression working across his scarred face.

“— and Sanji makes the BEST meat, and Chopper is a tiny doctor who’s also a reindeer, and Robin can make hands grow everywhere which is kinda creepy but also really cool, and Franky built our ship and it’s SUPER — “

“Luffy.”

“— and we even got a dog! Well, not a dog, but Zoro kinda acts like a dog sometimes, don’t tell him I said that — “

“LUFFY.”

“What?”

Garp didn’t say anything for a long moment. His crew stared from the dockside, mouths open, watching their terrifying vice admiral stand perfectly still while the most wanted rookie in the world clung to his back and babbled about sky islands.

Then Garp’s hand came up — not in a fist, not in a Fist of Love — and settled on top of Luffy’s straw hat, pressing it down gently.

“You’re an idiot,” Garp said gruffly.

“Shishishi.”

“An absolute moron.”

“Yeah!”

“You’re going to get yourself killed.”

“Nah.” Luffy tightened his grip, pressing his forehead against the back of Garp’s head. “I’m gonna be King of the Pirates.”

Garp let out a long, suffering sigh that seemed to come from somewhere deep in his soul. “…At least you’re eating properly.”

“SANJI MAKES SO MUCH MEAT, GRAMPS.”

Back at the docks, the Straw Hat crew had arrived just in time to witness all of it.

Nami’s map was on the ground. Usopp’s slingshot hung limp at his side. Chopper had shifted to Brain Point and was staring with his mouth open. Sanji’s cigarette had burned down to the filter without him noticing. Franky’s sunglasses had slid down his nose. Brook’s jaw — such as it was — had detached slightly.

Zoro looked like someone had just told him sake was illegal.

Robin, naturally, was smiling.

“Did… did our captain just attack a vice admiral,” Nami whispered.

“And win?” Usopp added, his voice climbing several octaves.

“That’s not winning, that’s cuddling,” Sanji said, sounding personally offended.

“Is he… is he on his back?” Chopper squeaked. “Like a baby?”

“SUPER weird,” Franky muttered.

On the Marine side, the reaction was worse. A dozen hardened officers — people who had survived the Grand Line, who had fought pirates and sea kings and come out standing — were watching their commanding officer get used as a jungle gym by a wanted criminal.

“Sir,” one of them said faintly. “Should we… should we arrest him?”

The officer next to him grabbed his arm. “Don’t. You’ll die.”

“From the pirate?”

“From Garp.”

Another Marine, a younger woman who had only been assigned to Garp’s ship a month ago, turned to the veteran beside her. “Is this… normal?”

The veteran — a man with grey temples and the hollow eyes of someone who had seen too much — just nodded slowly. “Welcome to Garp’s crew.”

“— AND THEN THE ZOMBIE GRABBED USOPP AND HE SCREAMED SO LOUD — “

“Bwahaha! That’s my grandson! Punching gods and fighting zombies!”

“I KNOW, RIGHT?!”

Garp had started walking back toward the dock, Luffy still attached to his back like a barnacle, still talking, still gesturing, and the old man was laughing. Not his booming public laugh — something quieter, rougher, something that made the Marines who knew him best look away, because Monkey D. Garp did not look like that. Not ever.

“He looks happy,” Robin said softly.

“Which one?” Zoro asked.

She smiled. “Both.”

Nami dragged her hands down her face. “Our captain,” she said, her voice muffled, “is going to cause an international incident because he wanted to play with his grandpa.”

“To be fair,” Robin said, “the Vice Admiral doesn’t seem to mind.”

“THE VICE ADMIRAL?!” Usopp, Chopper, and Nami screamed in unison.

“Monkey D. Garp,” Robin clarified pleasantly. “The Hero of the Marines. Luffy’s grandfather.”

Usopp sat down on the ground very carefully. “I’d like to go home now.”

“We don’t have homes,” Zoro reminded him. “We’re pirates.”

“I’d like to acquire a home and then go to it.”

Garp eventually dropped onto a crate at the edge of the dock, Luffy still on his back, still talking — he’d moved on to Thriller Bark now, complete with sound effects — and pulled a bag of rice crackers from somewhere inside his coat. He held one up over his shoulder without looking.

Luffy snatched it and kept talking with his mouth full.

“— mff — an’ Brooph playeb his violin an’ all th’ zombies fell — “

“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

“— FELL DOWN and it was so funny — “

“Hopeless,” Garp muttered, but he was already holding up another cracker.

The Straw Hats watched this scene in stunned silence for a long time.

Finally, Sanji lit a new cigarette with shaking hands. “I need to make lunch for a vice admiral now, don’t I.”

“Probably,” Robin said.

“Does he like meat?”

From across the dock, as if he’d heard — which he absolutely shouldn’t have been able to — Garp’s voice boomed: “I LIKE MEAT!”

Luffy threw both arms up. “SEE?! HE’S THE BEST!”

Sanji closed his eyes. “Of course he does.”

END

[midnight-khaos]

Ashes of the Gotei

Chapter 1: The Fall of Everything

——————————————————————————————

The morning started wrong.

Ichigo couldn’t explain it—couldn’t rationalize the crawling sensation beneath his skin, the way his reiatsu flickered and surged without provocation, the way his hands wouldn’t stop shaking as he sat at his desk in his apartment and stared at nothing.

Something was wrong.

Not the distant, nagging kind of wrong that came with a stray Hollow slipping through the cracks between worlds. Not the low-grade tension of an approaching threat he could brace for. This was visceral. This was the kind of wrong that lived in the marrow of his bones, that whispered through the blood in his veins like a warning siren pitched too low for conscious hearing but loud enough to make his soul scream.

He pressed his palms flat against the desk and breathed. In. Out. In again.

It didn’t help.

His phone sat silent beside his hand. No missed calls. No frantic messages from his father—which itself was unusual, because Isshin Kurosaki never went more than twelve hours without some form of chaotic contact, whether it was a dramatic voicemail about the trials of running a clinic alone or a blurry photo of Yuzu’s latest culinary creation captioned with seventeen exclamation points. Karin usually texted him at least once a day, even if it was just to complain about her soccer team’s defensive line or to inform him that their father had done something idiotic again.

Nothing. For three days, nothing.

He’d told himself it was fine. He’d told himself they were busy—that the clinic had a rush, that Yuzu was consumed with a school project, that Karin had a tournament. He’d told himself all the reasonable things a reasonable person told themselves when the people they loved most in the world went suddenly, completely silent.

But Ichigo Kurosaki had never been a reasonable person. And the thing living in his chest—the thing that ran deeper than instinct, deeper than intuition, the thing that was less feeling and more knowing—that thing had been screaming for three days straight.

He reached for his phone again.

Dialed his father.

Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring.

Nothing.

Karin.

Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring.

Nothing.

Yuzu.

The number you have dialed is no longer—

He was on his feet before the automated voice finished. The chair crashed backward into the wall. His reiatsu spiked so violently that the window cracked down the center, a thin silver fracture splitting the glass like a lightning bolt frozen mid-strike, and somewhere in the apartment below, a dog began to howl.

No longer in service.

Yuzu’s phone was no longer in service.

He grabbed Zangetsu from its place against the wall and ripped himself free of his body with the kind of desperate, graceless urgency he hadn’t felt since he was fifteen and still learning how dying worked. His physical form crumpled to the floor like a puppet with severed strings and he didn’t spare it a glance—just tore open a Garganta with his bare hands because he didn’t have time to find a Senkaimon, didn’t have time to do this properly, didn’t have time for anything except the animal desperation clawing its way up his throat.

The Garganta resisted. It always resisted—the space between worlds wasn’t meant to be forced open by a single soul, no matter how powerful, and the darkness that filled the gap between dimensions pushed back against his reiatsu like something alive and hostile. He didn’t care. He shoved his way through by sheer force of will, running across a path of solidified spirit energy that crackled and sparked beneath his feet, his breath coming in harsh, ragged gasps that had nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with the fact that Yuzu’s phone was disconnected and his father hadn’t called in three days and something was wrong, something was wrong, something was—

He emerged on the other side gasping, and the Seireitei spread out below him like a painting.

White walls. Blue sky. The ordered perfection of a city built by gods and governed by laws older than human memory.

And reiatsu—so much reiatsu, concentrated in a single point near the center of the city, a dense knot of spiritual pressure that Ichigo could feel pressing against his senses like a thumb driven into a bruise. Dozens of Captain-class signatures, all gathered in one place.

Sōkyoku Hill.

He knew, then. Knew it the way he’d known when Rukia was about to die on that same hill years ago—knew it in his soul, in the place where Zangetsu’s voice lived, in the hollow space behind his sternum where his Hollow breathed. He knew, and the knowing almost buckled his knees, almost sent him plummeting from the sky, because the reiatsu signatures tangled up in that dense knot of power included three that he would recognize anywhere in any world in any lifetime.

His father.

Karin.

Yuzu.

Their reiatsu was dim. Muted. Suppressed the way spiritual pressure was suppressed when someone was bound in sekki-sekki stone—the way Rukia’s had been, small and guttering and dying, when they’d chained her to the scaffold and prepared to execute her for the crime of existing in a way that was inconvenient.

Ichigo moved.

He didn’t flash-step. Flash-stepping implied technique, control, the careful modulation of speed and spiritual pressure that Yoruichi had spent weeks drilling into him. What Ichigo did was closer to detonation—a single, explosive burst of movement that cracked the air in his wake and left a sonic boom rolling across the Seireitei like thunder, shattering windows in a six-block radius and sending unseated officers stumbling as the shockwave hit them.

He covered the distance to Sōkyoku Hill in under four seconds.

And what he found there stopped him dead.

The hill was crowded.

Not with spectators—or rather, not only with spectators. The ranked officers of the Gotei 13 stood in ordered rows along the perimeter, their white and black uniforms stark against the pale stone of the execution ground. Lieutenants. Seated officers. And at the center, arranged in a loose semicircle before the scaffold—

The Captains.

But they weren’t united. Even from the air, even with his mind half-shattered by panic, Ichigo could read the fracture lines. The Gotei 13 was split.

On one side of the divide stood Yamamoto. The Captain-Commander’s reiatsu was a furnace—immense, ancient, crackling with barely leashed heat that made the air shimmer and distort around him like a mirage. Beside him: Suì-Fēng, her face an expressionless mask of duty. Komamura, his massive frame rigid with something that might have been reluctance but manifested as obedience. Mayuri, who looked less like a man attending an execution and more like a researcher observing an experiment. Unohana stood apart from the group, her gentle expression fixed in place like porcelain, her hands folded inside her sleeves, and Ichigo couldn’t tell whose side she was on because Unohana’s side was always her own.

On the other side—

Kenpachi Zaraki stood with Yachiru on his shoulder and his hand on his sword, his reiatsu a roiling, jagged storm of killing intent directed squarely at the Captain-Commander. His grin was gone. His bells were silent. Every line of his enormous body radiated a single, unmistakable message: Try it.

Byakuya Kuchiki, who had once stood on the side of law when that law demanded Rukia’s death, had apparently found his limit. He stood slightly ahead of the others with Senbonzakura drawn—not released, not yet, but drawn and gleaming in his hand like an argument made in steel. His expression was its usual aristocratic mask of indifference, but his reiatsu told a different story. It was ice-cold and sharp-edged and vibrating with a fury that Ichigo had only felt from him once before: when Tsukishima had invaded his home and touched his family.

Gin Ichimaru—alive, apparently, which was a revelation Ichigo didn’t have the bandwidth to process—leaned against a pillar with his arms crossed and his ever-present smile stretched into something that had absolutely nothing to do with amusement. His eyes were open. Actually open. Slitted and red as arterial blood and fixed on Yamamoto with an intensity that suggested he was calculating exactly how many seconds it would take to extend Shinsō through the old man’s chest.

Shunsui Kyōraku had his straw hat pulled low and both swords drawn, which was a sight Ichigo had never seen outside of a battlefield. The man was many things—lazy, irreverent, perpetually half-drunk on sake and philosophy—but he was also one of the oldest and most powerful captains in the Gotei 13, and the reiatsu he was putting out was crushing. It pressed down on the hill like an atmosphere’s worth of additional gravity, and his eyes beneath the brim of his hat were hard and dark and completely devoid of their usual warmth.

Tōshirō Hitsugaya stood at Shunsui’s left with Hyōrinmaru already in shikai, the temperature around him plummeting so drastically that frost was creeping across the stone in a widening circle. His young face was set in an expression of absolute, incandescent fury—the kind of fury that came from a sense of justice so deeply held that its violation felt like a physical wound.

And Renji. Renji Abarai, who had learned once before—painfully, shamefully—what it cost to stand on the wrong side when the people you cared about needed you. He had Zabimaru out and extended in its shikai form, and he was standing closest to the scaffold, physically interposing himself between Yamamoto’s faction and—

And Ichigo’s family.

They were kneeling on the scaffold.

All three of them. Isshin. Karin. Yuzu. Bound in sekki-sekki chains that suppressed their reiatsu to nearly nothing, dressed in the plain white robes the Seireitei reserved for criminals condemned to death. Isshin’s face was a ruin of bruises, one eye swollen shut, his lip split and crusted with dried blood. He’d fought. Of course he’d fought—he was Isshin, he was a father, and whatever else he was or had been, he would have fought like a cornered lion before he let anyone touch his daughters.

It hadn’t been enough.

Karin was kneeling upright with her jaw clenched so hard the tendons in her neck stood out like cables. She wasn’t crying. Her eyes were blazing with the same defiant fury that Ichigo recognized because he saw it in the mirror every day, and even bound and chained and kneeling on a scaffold, she looked ready to bite the throat out of anyone who came close enough. There was a bruise on her cheek. Someone had struck his little sister hard enough to bruise, and Ichigo’s vision went white around the edges.

Yuzu was crying.

She was trying not to. She was trying so hard not to, her small shoulders shaking with the effort of suppressing the sobs that kept breaking free despite her best efforts, her face blotched and swollen from tears she’d already shed. She was thirteen. She was thirteen years old and she was kneeling in execution whites on a scaffold in a world she barely understood, and she was crying, and nobody—nobody—was comforting her.

“—the charges are as follows,” a voice was saying, and Ichigo recognized it as one of the Central 46 adjudicators, a man in formal robes reading from a scroll with the practiced dispassion of someone reciting a grocery list. “The former Captain Isshin Shiba, also known as Isshin Kurosaki, stands accused of desertion, dereliction of duty, unauthorized fraternization with a human, unauthorized reproduction resulting in spiritually anomalous offspring, and high treason against the Soul Society. The humans Karin Kurosaki and Yuzu Kurosaki stand accused of existing as spiritually aware beings of Shinigami descent whose continued existence poses an unacceptable threat to the balance of—”

“Their existence,” Tōshirō snarled, and his voice cracked through the adjudicator’s drone like a whip. “You’re executing children for existing?”

“The decision of Central 46 is final,” the adjudicator said, without looking up from his scroll.

“Central 46 is a room full of cowards hiding behind tradition,” Shunsui said, and his tone was conversational, almost gentle, which made it infinitely more dangerous than shouting. “I’ve sat through a lot of questionable decisions in my centuries of service, but this one? This is the one that breaks it.”

“Captain Kyōraku.” Yamamoto’s voice rolled across the hill like the first rumble of an approaching wildfire. “You will stand down.”

“No,” Shunsui said simply. “I don’t think I will.”

“This is lawful,” Suì-Fēng said, though her voice was tight and her eyes kept darting to Yuzu—to the crying thirteen-year-old in chains—and darting away again. “Central 46 has ruled. The sentence—”

“Is murder,” Byakuya cut in, and every head on that hill turned to look at him, because Byakuya Kuchiki defending someone against the law was like watching the sun rise in the west. “I have obeyed unjust orders before. I stood on this very hill and watched my sister walk to her death because I believed that law superseded love. I was wrong then. I will not be wrong again.”

“Pretty words, Kuchiki,” Gin murmured, his smile widening into something feral. “But words ain’t gonna stop what’s comin’. Might wanna skip ahead to the part where we start killin’ people.”

“Zaraki,” Yamamoto said, ignoring Gin entirely. “This is your final warning.”

Kenpachi laughed. It was a low, ugly sound—not his usual battle-manic cackle but something darker, something that came from a place of genuine contempt. “Warning? You’re gonna warn me? Old man, you’re standing up there about to murder a couple of kids because some paper-pushing bureaucrats decided they were inconvenient. I’ve done a lot of bad shit in my life, but I ain’t never killed a child. You want my sword sheathed? Come over here and make me.”

It was at that moment that Ichigo landed.

He came down on the scaffold itself—between his family and the assembled captains—and the impact of his arrival cracked the stone beneath his feet in a spiderweb of fractures that radiated outward for twenty feet in every direction. His reiatsu erupted outward in an uncontrolled wave that sent the nearest unseated officers stumbling back, some falling to their knees, and even the captains—even Yamamoto—braced against it.

“Ichi-nii!” Yuzu’s sob shattered what was left of the air in his lungs.

“Ichigo!” Karin’s voice—fierce, desperate, relieved—cut through the noise like a blade.

“Son—” Isshin started, but his voice broke on the word, and Ichigo saw something he had never seen before in his entire life: his father’s face crumbled. The man who had kicked him awake every morning with a flying elbow drop, who had wept theatrical rivers over Masaki’s poster, who had been so absurdly, relentlessly, aggressively alive in every moment of Ichigo’s childhood—that man looked at Ichigo with eyes full of something raw and broken and whispered, “You shouldn’t have come.”

“Shut up,” Ichigo said, and his voice didn’t sound like his own. It was too low. Too rough. There was something layered underneath it—a harmonic, a second voice echoing beneath the first, and he knew what that meant, knew what was rising inside him, and he didn’t push it down. “Shut up, Dad.”

He turned to face Yamamoto.

The Captain-Commander stood twenty paces away, Ryūjin Jakka planted before him, both gnarled hands resting on the pommel. His eyes—ancient, heavy-lidded, burning with the weight of millennia—regarded Ichigo with something that might have been regret.

“Kurosaki Ichigo,” Yamamoto said. “You will not interfere.”

“Let them go.”

“The sentence has been passed. Central 46—”

“I don’t care about Central 46!” The words tore out of him like shrapnel. “Those are my sisters! That’s my father! You chained them up—you put them in execution whites—Yuzu is thirteen! She can barely see spirits! She’s never hurt anyone in her life! What threat—what possible threat—does a thirteen-year-old girl who likes cooking and flowers pose to the Soul Society?!”

“The balance of souls—” the adjudicator began.

“If you say one more word,” Ichigo said, turning his head to look at the man, “I will cut out your tongue and feed it to you. I am not making a threat. I am telling you what is going to happen.”

The adjudicator went white and silent.

“Ichigo.” Shunsui’s voice, from behind him, careful and measured. “We’ve been trying. We’ve been arguing your family’s case for three days. We—”

“Three days.” Ichigo’s hands were shaking. Zangetsu’s wrapping creaked as his grip tightened until his knuckles went bloodless. “They’ve been here for three days and nobody told me. Nobody—” He stopped. Swallowed. The thing behind his sternum was pulsing now, hot and dark and hungry, and the air around him was beginning to distort, rippling like heat haze over asphalt. “Who took them. Who came to the human world and put chains on my family.”

Silence.

“It was a covert retrieval squad,” Renji said, because Renji had never been a coward and had never flinched from delivering bad news. “Ordered by Central 46. Executed by Second Division operatives under Suì-Fēng’s command.”

Ichigo looked at Suì-Fēng.

She met his gaze. To her credit, she didn’t look away. But her jaw was tight, and her hands—clasped behind her back in a parade rest—were trembling almost imperceptibly.

“You sent soldiers to my home,” Ichigo said quietly. “You sent soldiers to kidnap my family in the middle of the night. My little sisters. You dragged them here in chains. And you’ve been holding them for three days while you— what? Deliberated? Discussed? Debated whether a thirteen-year-old girl deserved to die?”

“I follow orders,” Suì-Fēng said.

“Yeah,” Ichigo said. “I know you do.”

He turned back to Yamamoto. Behind him, he could feel his family—their dim, suppressed reiatsu flickering like candle flames in a storm. Yuzu’s sobs had quieted to hiccupping gasps. Karin was whispering something to her, something fierce and low that Ichigo couldn’t quite make out but that sounded like It’s okay, he’s here, it’s going to be okay.

It was going to be okay. He was going to make it okay. He was going to—

“Kurosaki Ichigo,” Yamamoto said, and released his reiatsu.

The full, unrestrained spiritual pressure of the Captain-Commander of the Gotei 13 descended on Sōkyoku Hill like the wrath of a god. The stone cracked. The air ignited. Officers who had been struggling to stand simply collapsed, their bodies folding under a weight that transcended the physical. Even the captains staggered—even Kenpachi, even Byakuya, even Shunsui—and Ichigo felt it slam into him like a wall of molten iron, pressing against his skin, trying to force him to his knees.

He didn’t kneel.

He couldn’t kneel. Not here. Not in front of his sisters. Not while Yuzu was crying behind him and Karin was telling her it would be okay because her big brother was here.

“You were warned,” Yamamoto said. “The sentence will be carried out.”

And the Captain-Commander moved.

He was old. He was ancient. He was the oldest Shinigami in existence, a being who had been wielding a sword since before human civilization learned to write. And despite his age, despite the weathered body and the stooped shoulders and the long white beard, he moved with a speed that defied comprehension—a single flash-step that crossed the distance between his position and the scaffold in a heartbeat.

Ichigo moved to intercept.

He was fast. He was one of the fastest beings in any world, a hybrid of Shinigami and Hollow and Quincy whose speed had once outpaced Byakuya’s Senbonzakura and matched Grimmjow in Resurrección. He threw himself forward with everything he had, Zangetsu raised to block—

And Yamamoto wasn’t aiming at him.

The old man went around him. A feint—a masterful, devastating feint that exploited Ichigo’s desperate forward momentum to slip past his guard—and suddenly Yamamoto was behind him, and Ryūjin Jakka was unsheathed and burning with flames hot enough to melt steel, and the Captain-Commander was between Ichigo and his family.

“NO!”

The scream ripped itself from Ichigo’s throat as he spun, as he reached, as every fiber of his being strained to close the distance—

But Yamamoto’s blade was already falling.

Three strikes.

Three strikes so fast they looked like one—a single arc of fire that painted the air in an afterimage of white-gold flame, and Isshin Kurosaki jerked once as the blade passed through him, and Karin’s defiant snarl cut off in a choked gasp, and Yuzu—

Yuzu didn’t make a sound.

The chains clattered to the stone. The execution whites darkened, spreading crimson. And Ichigo’s father and his two sisters—the last of his family, the only people left in any world who shared his blood and his name and his mother’s smile—crumpled to the scaffold like broken dolls.

Isshin fell forward, and even in death, his body curved toward his daughters. Protective. Shielding. A father’s last, useless instinct.

Karin fell sideways, and her eyes—still open, still blazing with that furious defiance—went glassy and fixed on nothing.

Yuzu fell against her sister. Small. So impossibly small. A child in white robes stained with red, her tear-streaked face finally, terribly still.

The world stopped.

Ichigo stood six feet away with Zangetsu in his hand and watched his family die, and the world stopped.

Silence.

A silence so complete, so absolute, that it seemed to swallow sound itself—the crackling of Ryūjin Jakka’s flames, the distant hum of the Seireitei, the breathing of every soul on that hill. All of it consumed by a void of quiet that radiated outward from the place where Ichigo Kurosaki stood motionless and stared at the bodies of his sisters.

Then—

A sound.

Low. Subsonic. A vibration more than a noise, felt in the teeth and the bones and the deepest chambers of the heart. It was the sound of something vast and ancient and hungry stirring awake in the space behind a young man’s eyes. It was the sound of a door opening that was never meant to be opened. It was the sound of every chain and every lock and every carefully constructed wall of self-control that Ichigo had ever built shattering simultaneously, because the things those walls had been built to contain no longer had any reason to stay contained.

There was nothing left to protect.

There was nothing left to be human for.

Ichigo’s reiatsu didn’t spike. It didn’t surge or flare or erupt. It simply changed. One moment it was the reiatsu of a Shinigami-Hollow hybrid—vast and powerful and sharp-edged but fundamentally controlled, fundamentally Ichigo. The next, it was something else entirely. Something that made Yamamoto’s released spiritual pressure feel like a campfire beside a supernova. Something that hit the collective consciousness of every spiritually aware being within a hundred miles like a psychic scream—a blast of raw, unfiltered wrongness that tasted like grief and iron and the absolute, uncompromising finality of a soul that had been pushed past the point of breaking and come out the other side as something that was no longer entirely a soul at all.

The transformation wasn’t gradual.

Ichigo didn’t struggle with it. Didn’t fight it. Didn’t scream or resist or try to hold onto his humanity the way he had every other time the Hollow inside him had clawed for dominance. He let go. He opened his hands and he let go of every single thing that had ever made him Kurosaki Ichigo—the boy who protected, the teenager who fought to bring people home, the young man who smiled and scowled and loved fiercely and recklessly and with his whole enormous heart—and in the empty space that letting go created, something else rose to fill the void.

His skin bleached white.

Not gradually—instantaneously, as if someone had drained all the color from him in a single heartbeat. Bone-white, corpse-white, the white of sun-bleached skulls and ash and the endless, empty sands of Hueco Mundo. His hair grew, lengthening and darkening until it cascaded down his back in a wild mane of pure black that moved independently of the wind, writhing like living shadow. His fingers elongated, the nails sharpening into talons—black as obsidian, curved and vicious. Red lines—markings, like war paint drawn in blood—crawled across his chest and arms in patterns that evoked something primal and predatory.

His eyes bled to gold on black.

And the mask formed.

It grew from his face like bone from a wound—spreading outward from the bridge of his nose in both directions, white and smooth and terrible, with long horns that curved forward like a bull’s and red lines that striped across its surface like claw marks. But it wasn’t the same mask he’d worn before. Not exactly. The shape was right—the long horns, the feral elegance, the primal terror of it—but there were new marks on it. Marks that hadn’t been there before.

Tear tracks.

Twin lines running from the eyes of the mask down the sharp planes of its cheekbones—not red, not painted, but etched into the bone itself, shallow grooves that caught the light and glistened with something wet. As if the mask was weeping. As if the monstrous, beautiful, terrifying face of the Vasto Lorde was crying tears it couldn’t actually shed, because the thing wearing this form wasn’t a mindless Hollow but a boy—a devastated, shattered, grieving boy—and his sorrow was so immense that even the transformation couldn’t contain it, and it bled through the mask like water through a crack in a dam.

The Vasto Lorde opened its mouth.

And screamed.

The sound was indescribable. It was not a roar. It was not a battle cry. It was the sound of absolute, annihilating grief—a wail that carried in it every moment of love Ichigo had ever felt for his family, every breakfast Yuzu had cooked, every soccer game Karin had won, every idiotic attack his father had launched at him in the name of “training,” every Christmas and birthday and quiet, ordinary evening spent together in their small, warm house. It carried the sound of Masaki’s death—the first loss, the foundational wound—and layered over it the unbearable, incomprehensible reality of a second, and a third, and a fourth, until the grief was so dense and so total that it ceased to be an emotion and became a force of nature.

The scream shattered windows for miles. It cracked the scaffold beneath his feet. It drove every unseated officer on the hill to unconsciousness and brought the seated officers to their knees. Captains bled from their ears. The air itself seemed to curdle, warping and distorting as the sheer volume of spiritual pressure being released bent the fabric of reality around a single point of uncontainable anguish.

Shunsui, even braced against it, felt his eyes burn. He’d been a captain for longer than most civilizations had existed. He’d seen wars. He’d seen massacres. He’d seen cruelty and injustice on a scale that would break most minds.

He had never heard a sound like that.

“Gods,” Shunsui breathed, and for the first time in centuries, the word wasn’t an expletive. It was a prayer.

Yamamoto turned to face the Vasto Lorde.

And Ichigo attacked.

There was no technique. No strategy. No calculated application of speed and power and skill. The thing that Ichigo had become did not fight the way Ichigo fought—it fought the way a hurricane fought, the way an earthquake fought, the way the ocean fought when it rose up and swallowed cities. It was force without direction, destruction without intent, annihilation without thought.

It was grief with claws.

The Vasto Lorde closed the distance to Yamamoto in less time than it took a human heart to beat. One moment it was standing on the cracked scaffold, the air around it thick with distortion and fury. The next it was on Yamamoto, and one taloned hand was wrapped around Ryūjin Jakka’s blade—wrapped around a sword made of fire—and squeezing until the metal screamed.

The flames didn’t touch it. The fire—Ryūjin Jakka’s fire, the fire that was said to burn as hot as the sun itself—licked and roared and surged against that bone-white skin and found no purchase. The Vasto Lorde’s hierro was absolute. Its spiritual pressure was so immense that lesser attacks simply ceased to exist in its presence, devoured by the sheer density of its reiatsu like sparks swallowed by a flood.

Yamamoto’s eyes widened.

The Vasto Lorde’s other hand came up—a blur of white and black, talons extended—and struck. The blow caught Yamamoto across the chest and launched him. The Captain-Commander flew backward, his feet leaving trenches in the stone as he fought to arrest his momentum, and the front of his shihakushō was shredded, four parallel lines of red welling up across his torso.

First blood.

On the Captain-Commander.

“All captains engage!” Yamamoto roared, and his voice carried the weight of absolute authority, the command presence of a man who had led armies since before the concept of armies existed.

Nobody moved.

Or rather—the wrong people moved. Suì-Fēng and Komamura stepped forward, drawing their zanpakutō, and Mayuri reached for something inside his coat with an expression of clinical fascination. But the others—the captains who had stood against the execution—didn’t obey. They did something else entirely.

They moved to intercept.

Kenpachi stepped into Komamura’s path with a grin that was all teeth and no humor. “Nah,” he said. “I don’t think so, big guy. You wanna get to the kid, you go through me first.”

Byakuya appeared in front of Suì-Fēng in a flash-step so fast it left afterimages. “Scatter, Senbonzakura.” A thousand blades bloomed between them like a wall of pink razors.

Tōshirō raised Hyōrinmaru, and a wall of ice ten feet thick and thirty feet high erupted from the ground in a semicircle around the scaffold, blocking any advance from the assembled officers. “Nobody gets close,” he said, and his voice was shaking—not with fear, but with a fury so cold it burned. “Nobody touches them.”

Renji planted himself in front of the bodies. In front of Isshin and Karin and Yuzu, lying still and broken on the stone. “Over my dead body,” he said to anyone who would listen, and meant it.

Gin watched it all with his bloody red eyes and his terrible smile and said nothing at all, but Shinsō was extended to its full length and anyone who tried to approach from his flank would find themselves impaled before they completed their first step.

And in the center of it all, the Vasto Lorde that had been Ichigo Kurosaki hurled itself at Yamamoto again and again and again, each attack more devastating than the last, each blow carrying the weight of a grief so vast it had its own gravity. The old man defended himself—because he was Yamamoto, because he was the strongest Shinigami who had ever lived, because his power was genuinely, legitimately immense—but he was giving ground. Inch by inch, step by step, the Vasto Lorde was driving him back, and every time those golden-black eyes fixed on him, every time that masked face turned in his direction with its tear tracks and its horns and its silent, eternal weeping, Yamamoto saw something in those eyes that even he—even a being who had lived for millennia—recognized as dangerous.

He saw a creature that had nothing left to lose.

The Vasto Lorde caught Ryūjin Jakka’s blade on its forearm. The flames roared. The hierro held. And the creature leaned in—pressing forward against the sword’s edge with a total disregard for self-preservation that went beyond bravery into something that looked terrifyingly like a wish for it to end—and opened its mouth, and between its teeth, a Cero began to form.

Not red. Not the standard crimson of a Hollow’s Cero.

Black.

Black edged in red, dense as a collapsing star, and the spiritual pressure it generated made the air scream. A Cero Oscuras—the forbidden technique, the final attack of a Vasto Lorde at the peak of its power, concentrated into a point-blank blast aimed directly at the Captain-Commander’s face.

Yamamoto’s expression, for the first time, showed genuine alarm.

The Cero fired.

The explosion carved a trench through Sōkyoku Hill fifty feet wide and a quarter mile long. Stone vaporized. The air superheated. The shockwave flattened buildings in the surrounding district and sent a column of black-red energy into the sky that was visible from every corner of the Seireitei—a pillar of devastation that screamed of power so far beyond Captain-class that the existing scale of measurement simply ceased to apply.

When the dust settled, Yamamoto was still standing.

Barely.

His left arm hung at his side, scorched and smoking. His shihakushō was in tatters. Blood ran freely from a gash above his eye, painting half his face in red. He had blocked the Cero—deflected the worst of it with Ryūjin Jakka’s flames—but the impact had cost him. For the first time in living memory, the Captain-Commander looked wounded. Truly, meaningfully wounded by a single opponent.

The Vasto Lorde stood at the other end of the trench, its white form barely marred, its horned mask tilted at an angle that was almost quizzical—like a predator examining prey that had failed to die when expected. The tear tracks on its mask caught the light, glistening. Its chest heaved with breaths it didn’t need, the motion purely vestigial, a ghost of the human reflex that the boy beneath the monster couldn’t quite shake.

It screamed again.

Shorter this time. Sharper. Not the world-ending wail of initial grief but something rawer—a sound like a child calling for someone who would never answer, repeated over and over in a voice that was not human but carried in it all the terrible, fragile, unbearable humanity of a boy who had just watched his little sisters die.

Yamamoto raised Ryūjin Jakka.

The Vasto Lorde charged.

And then—

A Garganta tore open in the sky above Sōkyoku Hill.

Not the ragged, forced-open tear that Ichigo had used to enter the Seireitei. This was precise. Controlled. The edges were clean and sharp, held open by a framework of golden kidō that crackled with a familiar, unmistakable energy.

Three figures stepped through.

Kisuke Urahara landed first, Benihime already drawn, his hat casting his eyes in shadow and his expression—for once—completely stripped of its usual playful ambiguity. His mouth was set in a hard, thin line. His reiatsu, usually so carefully concealed behind layers of misdirection and false mediocrity, was fully unleashed, and it filled the air around him with a pressure that was surgical in its precision—a scalpel to Yamamoto’s bonfire, sharp enough and focused enough to cut through anything.

Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez came through second. The former Sexta Espada was already in his Resurrección—Pantera’s armor gleaming blue-white in the sunlight, his tail lashing behind him, his feline eyes taking in the scene with a rapid, predatory intelligence that most people forgot he possessed. He saw the bodies on the scaffold. He saw the Vasto Lorde. He saw the tear tracks on the mask.

“Shit,” Grimmjow said, very quietly.

Coyote Starrk stepped through last, and for once—for perhaps the first time in his long, lonely existence—the Primera Espada was wide awake. His guns were in both hands, Lilynette’s presence echoing in the spiritual pressure that rolled off him like a slow, heavy tide. His brown eyes, usually half-lidded with perpetual exhaustion, were sharp and clear and deeply, profoundly angry.

The three of them took in the scene in the span of a single breath.

Kisuke’s gaze swept the hill: the divided captains, the ice wall, the trench carved by the Cero Oscuras, the blood on Yamamoto’s face—and then his eyes found the scaffold, and the bodies, and he went very, very still.

“No,” Kisuke breathed.

He looked at the Vasto Lorde—at the tear-streaked mask, the anguished golden eyes, the way it moved with the desperate, directionless fury of a creature in so much pain it could only express it through violence—and understanding hit him like a physical blow.

“No, no, no. Ichigo.”

The Vasto Lorde didn’t hear him. It was already lunging for Yamamoto again, a wordless shriek tearing from its throat, talons extended, Cero already building between its horns for another blast—

“Grimmjow! Starrk! Now!”

Kisuke moved.

He didn’t flash-step toward Yamamoto. He flash-stepped toward Ichigo. Toward the Vasto Lorde. Toward the screaming, weeping, rageful thing that his student had become, and he moved with a speed and precision that betrayed the truth he usually kept so carefully hidden: that Kisuke Urahara, for all his clownish affectations, was one of the most dangerous souls ever created by the Soul Society.

He intercepted the Vasto Lorde mid-lunge.

Not with a block. Not with an attack. With his body. He stepped directly into the creature’s path and wrapped his arms around it—around the bone-white chest, around the thrashing limbs and the lashing tail of energy, around the horror and the grief and the fury—and he held on.

The Vasto Lorde shrieked. Talons raked across Kisuke’s back, shredding his coat, drawing blood that spattered across the white stone. Kisuke didn’t let go. His arms tightened. His face pressed against the side of that horned, tear-tracked mask, and his mouth moved, forming words that were almost inaudible beneath the creature’s wailing.

“I’ve got you. Ichigo, I’ve got you. I’m here. I’m here.”

Grimmjow hit them a half-second later—not attacking, not fighting, but joining. He crashed into Ichigo’s other side and wrapped his armored arms around the Vasto Lorde’s torso, adding his considerable strength to Kisuke’s desperate grip. The talons found him too—ripping across his shoulder, his arm, his ribs—and Grimmjow snarled at the pain but didn’t pull away. He pressed his forehead against the back of the Vasto Lorde’s neck, between the black mane and the shuddering shoulders, and held on with everything he had.

“Stop it, Kurosaki,” Grimmjow growled, and his voice was rough, cracking at the edges. “Fuckin’—stop. We’re here, you goddamn idiot, stop fighting us.”

Starrk appeared in front of them. He holstered his guns with the calm, deliberate motions of a man who had assessed the situation and made a decision. Then he placed one hand on the Vasto Lorde’s chest—directly over the Hollow hole that gaped there, dark and empty as a wound in the world—and the other on the side of its masked face, cupping the tear-tracked cheek with a gentleness that seemed impossible from a being who held the rank of Primera Espada.

“Easy,” Starrk murmured. “Easy, cub. We have you.”

The Vasto Lorde thrashed. It screamed. Its reiatsu surged and bucked and tried to throw them off, a wild horse of spiritual pressure kicking against the hands that held it—not because it wanted to hurt them but because the pain was too big, too much, too everything, and it didn’t know how to contain it, didn’t know how to exist inside a body that held this much agony without tearing itself apart trying to let it out.

The tear tracks on the mask widened. Deepened. And from the eyes of the Vasto Lorde—from behind the bone-white facade, from the place where Ichigo Kurosaki still existed, small and broken and drowning in the wreckage of everything he had ever loved—tears fell.

Actual tears.

Not spiritual pressure. Not reiatsu made manifest. Tears. Human tears from inhuman eyes, sliding down the grooves in the mask and falling from its jaw to splatter on the white stone like rain.

The screaming changed.

It lost its edge—its sharpness, its rage, the killing fury that had driven it to carve trenches through mountains and crack a Captain-Commander’s guard. The rage bled out like blood from a wound, and what was left beneath it was so much worse. What was left was grief. Pure, unadulterated, world-ending grief—the grief of a boy who had already lost his mother and sworn to protect what remained, and had failed, and had arrived seconds too late, and had watched, and could not undo it, could never undo it, could never go home again because there was no home without them.

The Vasto Lorde stopped fighting.

Its arms, which had been clawing and striking and reaching for Yamamoto, went limp at its sides. Its head tipped forward until the horns of its mask rested against Starrk’s shoulder. Its massive, bone-white body—this engine of Hollow destruction, this apex predator, this thing that had just gone toe-to-toe with the Captain-Commander and won—began to shake.

And the screaming became sobs.

Deep, wrenching, terrible sobs that wracked the Vasto Lorde’s frame and shuddered through the three beings holding it like electric current. Sobs that didn’t sound like a monster. Sobs that sounded like a nineteen-year-old boy who had just lost everything, and the dissonance—the cruelty of that human sound coming from that inhuman form—was enough to make even Grimmjow’s jaw clench and his eyes burn with something he would deny to his dying day.

Behind them, Kenpachi, Byakuya, Tōshirō, Shunsui, Renji, and Gin formed a wall.

Not a coordinated defense. Not a planned formation. It was instinctive—the unconscious response of warriors who had collectively decided, without discussion, that the boy in the center of that desperate embrace was theirs to protect, and that anyone who wanted to reach him would have to go through all of them first.

Kenpachi stood at the center of the line, his sword resting on his shoulder, his single visible eye fixed on Yamamoto with a look that dared the old man to take one step forward. Just one. Please.

Byakuya flanked him, Senbonzakura dissolved into a cloud of a million blade-petals that orbited the group in a protective vortex—a sphere of razor-edged steel that would shred anything that tried to pass through.

Shunsui had his hat pulled low and both swords crossed before him in a guard that Ichigo’s teachers at the academy would have recognized as the opening stance of his bankai. His reiatsu was a physical weight on the air.

Tōshirō’s ice was spreading. It crawled across the stone in every direction, climbing the walls, sealing the paths, transforming Sōkyoku Hill into a frozen fortress with the grieving Vasto Lorde at its protected heart.

Renji stood over the bodies. He had sheathed Zabimaru and knelt, and with hands that shook, he had closed Karin’s eyes and straightened Yuzu’s robes and arranged Isshin’s arms so that even in death, even in this violated, desecrated resting place, the family looked like a family. He stood guard over them with Zabimaru drawn again and tears on his own face that he made no effort to hide.

Gin watched the perimeter. His smile was gone. In its place was an expression that nobody on that hill had ever seen Gin Ichimaru wear—an expression of pure, uncomplicated hatred directed at the institution that had done this, at the system that had made this possible, at the smug and ancient certainty that the Soul Society’s laws were just because they were old.

Yamamoto assessed the situation.

He was wounded. His left arm was compromised. The Vasto Lorde had proven capable of matching him blow for blow, and the three new arrivals—Urahara, the Sexta, the Primera—added a staggering amount of combat power to an already formidable opposition. Six captains and three Espada-class combatants stood between him and the completion of the sentence, and every one of them was prepared to die before they let him pass.

The math didn’t work.

Even for Yamamoto—even with Ryūjin Jakka, even with the full might of the Gotei 13’s remaining loyal forces—the math simply did not work.

“Stand down,” Yamamoto said.

It was unclear whether he was speaking to the rebels or to his own forces. Perhaps both. Perhaps neither. Perhaps the words were directed at the situation itself—at the spiraling, uncontrollable cascade of consequences that had begun with a tribunal’s arrogance and ended with a boy’s family dead on a scaffold and a Vasto Lorde weeping in the arms of his enemies-turned-allies.

Kisuke didn’t look at Yamamoto. He didn’t look at the captains. He didn’t look at anything except the shaking, sobbing, disintegrating boy in his arms, and his hands—steady, precise, the hands of a scientist and an inventor and a man who had spent his entire life solving impossible problems—moved with infinite gentleness to the Vasto Lorde’s forehead.

“I’m sorry,” Kisuke whispered. “I’m so sorry, Ichigo. I should have been here. I should have known. I’m sorry.”

His fingers found the space between the mask’s horns—the smooth, warm bone directly above where Ichigo’s forehead would be, the place where the boy still lived beneath the monster—and pressed.

A pulse of kidō. Soft. Warm. Not an attack, not a seal, not a binding. A lullaby in spiritual pressure—a technique Kisuke had invented decades ago and never used, never needed, never wanted to need. It was designed to do one thing and one thing only: to tell a soul that it was safe enough to let go. That someone else was holding the weight. That it was allowed to stop fighting, allowed to rest, allowed to surrender consciousness without surrendering survival.

The Vasto Lorde’s golden eyes flickered.

“Sleep,” Kisuke murmured, and his voice broke on the word, cracked clean in half like a bone under too much pressure, and for a single, unguarded moment, the mask Kisuke Urahara wore—not a Hollow mask but the one he’d built for himself out of smiles and fans and half-truths—fell away, and what was underneath was a man who was shattered by what he had failed to prevent. “Let go, Ichigo. I’ve got you. We’ve all got you. Sleep.”

The Vasto Lorde’s eyes closed.

The tension went out of its body all at once—a marionette with its strings cut, a wave reaching the shore, a fire burning out. It slumped forward into Kisuke’s arms and Grimmjow’s arms and Starrk’s steady hands, and the three of them bore its weight without staggering, because the boy was lighter than he should have been, lighter than a being of his power had any right to be, and that lightness was its own kind of heartbreak.

The mask cracked.

It didn’t dissolve—not fully. It fractured, pieces flaking away like plaster from a wall, revealing glimpses of Ichigo’s face beneath. His eyes, closed. His cheeks, wet. His expression, even in unconsciousness, a landscape of devastation—brows drawn together, mouth pressed into a line that was trying desperately not to tremble, the ghost of his last conscious sob still etched into the muscles of his jaw.

The tear tracks remained.

Even as the mask receded, even as the bone-white skin faded back to brown and the talons retracted and the horns crumbled, the tear tracks stayed—faint marks on his human skin, tracing the same paths they had carved into the Hollow’s bone. A scar. A memento. The physical evidence of a grief so profound it had marked both the monster and the man.

Ichigo hung limp in their arms, unconscious, his face pressed against Kisuke’s shoulder, and he was nineteen and he was alone and his family was dead.

Kisuke looked up.

His eyes found Yamamoto’s.

And in that look—in the flat, grey, merciless regard of Urahara Kisuke’s unmasked gaze—the Captain-Commander saw something that even he recognized as a promise. Not a threat. Threats could be negotiated with. Threats implied conditions, terms, the possibility of resolution.

Promises were absolute.

“We’re leaving,” Kisuke said. His voice was steady now—artificially, dangerously steady, the steadiness of a man who had locked his emotions in a box and buried the box in a vault and sealed the vault with every kidō he knew. “We’re taking Ichigo. We’re taking his family. And if anyone—anyone—attempts to stop us, I will demonstrate exactly why Central 46 had me exiled instead of executed.”

Silence.

Yamamoto said nothing.

“Renji,” Shunsui said softly. “Bring them.”

Renji nodded. He knelt again, and with a care that bordered on reverence, he gathered Yuzu into his arms. She was so small. So heartbreakingly, impossibly small—a child, barely a teenager, light as air in his grip, and the bloodstained white of her execution robes fell around her like a shroud. He held her against his chest the way he would have held a sleeping child, one hand supporting her head, and stood.

Kenpachi, without being asked, picked up Isshin. He did it carefully—more carefully than anyone who knew Kenpachi Zaraki would have believed him capable of—cradling the dead man’s battered body with an almost ceremonial solemnity. He didn’t say anything. His bells were still silent.

Tōshirō knelt beside Karin. He was the closest to her age—the only captain who understood, in his bones, what it was like to be young in the Soul Society—and when he lifted her, his hands were shaking and his face was frozen in an expression of anguish that he didn’t try to hide. Ice crystals formed on her execution robes where his reiatsu touched them, delicate and glittering, and they looked almost like flowers.

Byakuya opened the path. Senbonzakura’s petals swept outward in a corridor of gleaming steel, carving a clear route from the scaffold to the edge of the hill where the Garganta still hung open, Kisuke’s kidō framework holding it stable.

Gin took the rear guard. He walked backward, facing the assembled captains and officers, his red eyes moving from face to face with an expression that made it absolutely clear: he was memorizing them. Every face. Every name. Every soul who had stood on the wrong side of this moment. He would remember them all.

And Shunsui walked beside Kisuke, his massive reiatsu spread like a blanket over the group—a shroud of spiritual pressure so dense and encompassing that it obscured their individual signatures, tangled their reiatsu trails, made it impossible for anyone to track them once they disappeared.

They walked to the Garganta.

Nobody tried to stop them.

Not Yamamoto. Not Suì-Fēng. Not Komamura. Not Mayuri, who watched them go with an expression of intense, unsettling fascination. Not the assembled officers, who stood in stunned, horrified silence as six captains, three Espada-class Hollows, and the unconscious body of the most powerful hybrid being in existence walked calmly off Sōkyoku Hill with three corpses in their arms.

Kisuke stepped through the Garganta first, carrying Ichigo. Grimmjow flanked him on one side and Starrk on the other, and between them, the unconscious boy was held as securely as if he were encased in adamantine. Behind them came Renji with Yuzu and Tōshirō with Karin and Kenpachi with Isshin, and then Shunsui and Byakuya and Gin, and the Garganta sealed shut behind them with a sound like a door closing on the Soul Society forever.

——————————————————————————————

Hueco Mundo.

The eternal night sky stretched overhead, star-scattered and vast, the crescent moon hanging low and heavy like a half-closed eye. The sands of the desert spread out in every direction—white as bone, white as ash, white as the mask that had covered a boy’s grief.

Las Noches rose in the distance, its broken dome and crumbling towers a monument to a war already fought, but they didn’t head for the fortress. Kisuke led them instead to a place he’d prepared months ago—a contingency, a safe house, built into a natural cave system beneath the desert floor, reinforced with kidō barriers and stocked with supplies. He’d always planned for the worst. He just hadn’t imagined the worst would look like this.

The cave was large enough to hold them all. Kisuke had expanded it with spatial kidō—the interior was wider than the exterior suggested, with separate chambers branching off a central space that was dry and sheltered and warm enough despite Hueco Mundo’s ambient desolation. Lights flickered to life as they entered—kidō lanterns embedded in the stone walls, casting a soft, golden glow that was nothing like the harsh white light of the Seireitei.

Kisuke laid Ichigo down on a bedroll in the central chamber, lowering him with the same exaggerated care he would have used for something made of glass. The boy’s face was slack in unconsciousness, but even asleep, even with his muscles forcibly relaxed by the kidō, the anguish hadn’t fully left his features. His brows were still drawn. His jaw was still tight. And the tear tracks—those faint, strange marks running from his eyes to his jaw—were still visible, pale as old scars.

Grimmjow crouched beside him and didn’t move. Just stayed there, one hand resting lightly on Ichigo’s shoulder, his blue eyes fixed on the unconscious boy’s face with an intensity that had nothing to do with rivalry or battle lust and everything to do with something he didn’t have a name for and wouldn’t have admitted to even if he did.

Starrk stood at the chamber entrance, his back to the room, his guns holstered, his gaze fixed on the passage that led to the surface. Standing guard. Quietly, naturally, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

In a smaller chamber off the main space, Renji and Tōshirō laid down the bodies.

They did it together, in silence, with a care that went beyond duty or obligation. Renji had found cloth somewhere—clean, white, not the execution robes, not those fucking execution robes—and he and Tōshirō wrapped the bodies gently, methodically, the way soldiers wrapped their fallen. Yuzu and Karin were placed side by side, their small, still forms barely raising the fabric, and Isshin was placed beside them, and when it was done, Renji stood looking at them for a long time without moving.

“She was thirteen,” Renji said. His voice was destroyed—hoarse and cracked and barely audible. “She was thirteen.”

Tōshirō couldn’t answer. He was standing with his arms rigid at his sides and his hands clenched into fists so tight that his nails had drawn blood from his palms, and his face was wet, and he didn’t wipe it away because there was no shame in mourning children.

Kenpachi stood in the corner of the main chamber with his back against the wall and Yachiru sitting quietly on his shoulder, her small face uncharacteristically solemn. He said nothing. Hadn’t said a word since they left the Seireitei. But his hand was on his sword, and his eye kept moving from Ichigo’s unconscious form to the cave entrance, and every line of his body communicated a single, unwavering message: Let them come.

Shunsui sat cross-legged near the entrance, his hat pushed back, his swords across his knees. His face was older than it had been that morning. Not physically—he’d looked the same for centuries—but in the weight behind his eyes, in the depth of the lines around his mouth, in the way he held himself like a man who had just watched the institution he’d devoted his life to commit an unforgivable act.

“I stayed,” Shunsui said, to no one in particular. “Through Aizen. Through the Quincy war. Through everything. I stayed because I believed—I needed to believe—that the Gotei 13 was fundamentally worth saving. That whatever mistakes were made, the core of it was just.” He paused. “I watched him kill a thirteen-year-old girl today.”

“Shunsui,” Byakuya said. Not in disagreement. Not in comfort. Just the name, spoken quietly, an acknowledgment that the words had been heard and the weight of them understood.

Gin was seated on a rock near the far wall, sharpening Shinsō with a whetstone he’d produced from somewhere. The repetitive scraping of metal on stone was the only constant sound in the cave—a rhythm, a metronome, something to anchor the present to. His smile was gone. His eyes were closed. And in the steady, methodical motion of his hands, there was something almost meditative—a man processing fury through the careful maintenance of the weapon he intended to use when the time came.

Kisuke was the last to settle.

He checked the barriers first—walked the perimeter of the cave system with Benihime in hand, reinforcing the kidō at every point, layering concealment over concealment over concealment until the cave was invisible to reiatsu detection, undetectable by any means short of physical discovery. He checked the supplies—water, medical equipment, rations. He checked the separate chambers, the structural integrity of the stone, the ventilation. He checked everything, because checking things was what Kisuke Urahara did when the alternative was standing still and thinking about what he had failed to prevent.

When there was nothing left to check, he returned to the main chamber and sat beside Ichigo.

The boy hadn’t moved. His breathing was slow and even—artificially so, regulated by the kidō sleep, but steady. Grimmjow had shifted to sit against the wall nearby, his arms crossed, his eyes closed, but the tension in his frame made it clear he was as far from sleep as it was possible to be. Starrk had taken up a position just inside the doorway, Lilynette manifested beside him as a small, subdued presence tucked against his side.

Kisuke reached out and brushed a strand of orange hair from Ichigo’s forehead.

Such a stupid color. Such a bright, defiant, living color in a world that kept trying to drain the color from everything and everyone Ichigo loved. The boy had been born blazing—too much reiatsu, too much power, too much heart—and the world had been trying to punish him for it ever since.

“We’ll bury them in the morning,” Kisuke said. His voice was quiet. Controlled. The vault was still sealed, the box still locked, the emotions still buried beneath layers of composure that he knew, with the clinical precision of a man who understood his own mind, would not hold indefinitely. But they would hold for now. They had to hold for now, because when Ichigo woke up, someone needed to be functional, and Kisuke had long ago accepted that the someone was usually him.

“Where?” Renji asked from the doorway. His eyes were red.

“There’s an oasis,” Starrk said, and everyone looked at him. He shrugged one shoulder, his expression unreadable. “Half a mile east. Underground spring feeds it. There are trees—small ones, but real. It’s the only place in Hueco Mundo where things grow.”

A place where things grow. For three people who would never grow again.

“There,” Kisuke said.

Nobody argued.

The cave fell quiet. Not the tense, charged silence of the standoff on Sōkyoku Hill, but something deeper—the exhausted, gutted silence that followed catastrophe, the silence of people who had witnessed something they could not undo and were sitting with the weight of it, letting it settle into their bones because there was nowhere else for it to go.

Ichigo slept.

His face was wet. Even unconscious, even sealed in kidō slumber, the tears leaked from beneath his closed lids and traced the paths the Vasto Lorde’s mask had carved—down his cheeks, along his jaw, falling onto the bedroll in a slow, steady rhythm that was worse than screaming. Because screaming meant the pain was being expressed, released, given an outlet. This silent, unconscious weeping meant the pain was so deep it didn’t need Ichigo to be awake to manifest. It was woven into the fabric of his soul, and it wept on its own.

Grimmjow watched the tears fall and said nothing.

Starrk watched the entrance and said nothing.

Kisuke sat beside his student and held his hand—gently, carefully, the way you held something precious and irreparably damaged—and said nothing.

Outside, Hueco Mundo’s eternal moon cast its pale light across the desert, and the sands stretched on forever, and somewhere in that vast and empty darkness, a makeshift family of rebels and outcasts and former enemies sat vigil in a cave and guarded a sleeping boy who had lost everything.

And in the chamber where three bodies lay wrapped in clean white cloth, the air was cold and still and silent, and the only movement was the faint, impossible glitter of ice crystals that Tōshirō’s grief had left on Karin Kurosaki’s shroud—small and perfect and delicate as flowers, catching the kidō light and scattering it like stars.

[midnight-khaos]

Crowley's Little Brother - Little Brother In Need Of A Big Brother (on Wattpad) https://my.w.tt/rbGpH3k7h7 When Sam says some cruel things to Dean and cuts family ties with them leaving him broken and alone, who will be there for him. When Crowley visits dean he didn't expect his favorite hunter to be in a nightmare induced panic attack. What will he do and where is the angle that's always there for him.

[midnight-khaos]

Tony Starks Last Moments

I'm not bashing pepper all im saying is I think that pepper kinda ruined the father-son moment tony and peter were having for the Last time! And when she said he could rest I was TRIGGERED ummmmmm no you can't you just got Peter back!! And you have a daughter and friends to go back to you can't die yet! But you know whatever I'm not mad.

[midnight-khaos]

[midnight-khaos]

A beautiful rose after a rainy day! #rainislife #rose #rainyday (at Duarte, California) https://www.instagram.com/p/B5O_mI7Bdjl/?igshid=8gy1jqoqcsj4

[cleastrnge]

IDIOTS

[quarryknightcosplayandcustoms]

I made another comic

[letsgayguys-blog]

Godamnit this has me cr y in g

[midnight-khaos]

Hahahaha awesome!!!!

[tomhiddlestonscheekbones]

[idek-anymore46]

[punpkin-314-pi]

VACCINATE YOUR FUCKING KIDS

[nyxwoven]

while yes you should vaccinate your kids, you can’t vaccinate for bubonic plague. also this couple ate a raw, dead rat, which is how they got it. they then didn’t go get antibiotics, which in most modern cases of bubonic plague allows for a full recovery.

yes, PLEASE vaccinate your kids, but don’t use scare tactics to spread false information.

[incompetentantagonist]

I’m sorry I think the question that should be asked is why they are a raw dead rat

[midnight-khaos]

[midnight-khaos]

[baba-yaga-not-only]

Mads Mikkelsen