I had to split this chapter into 2 parts again because it was so long for site limitations. make sure you read part 1 because i posted both at once.
Raven sat on his left, pressed into the corner of the sofa with her legs crossed and her arms folded in a posture that radiated get me out of here with the intensity of a signal flare. She'd dressed in something I'd never seen her wear before, a charcoal turtleneck and fitted black jeans that hugged her legs down to a pair of ankle boots. It was more casual than her usual style, almost deliberately understated, but the turtleneck couldn't hide the generous curves beneath it and the jeans emphasized the shape of her thighs in a way that made my succubus instincts murmur appreciatively.
Kara occupied the right end, and she was the only one who didn't look like she wanted to phase through the floor. She wore a yellow sundress with a white cardigan thrown over it, her golden hair pulled back in a casual ponytail that made her look about twenty years old and approximately three times more wholesome than anyone in this house had any right to be. Her bright blue eyes were bouncing between the two sofas with the wide, slightly frantic energy of someone watching a tennis match where both players were armed with live grenades.
Starfire sat alone on the opposite sofa.
She'd arranged herself with studied casualness, one long orange leg crossed over the other, her hands resting on her knee. Her chin was lifted, her luminous green eyes bright and defiant and, if you looked closely enough, glistening with something suspiciously close to tears that she was holding back through sheer force of alien willpower.
Goddamn, I walked into an emotional storm didn't I? Or it was more like the storm decided to drop in unannounced…
Nobody had said a word when I paused in the doorway, but three things happened in rapid succession when they noticed me.
Dick's eyes found me first, and I watched his gaze track down the black dress with an involuntary flicker of appreciation that he immediately, visibly suppressed. He swallowed, adjusted his posture slightly, and fixed his attention on my face with the determined focus of a man who had been trained to maintain eye contact by Batman and was going to maintain eye contact if it killed him.
Kara noticed me second, and her reaction was the opposite of subtle. Her eyes widened, her lips parted, and a blush crept up from the collar of her cardigan to bloom across her cheeks. She looked away quickly, then looked back, then looked away again, then gave up and just stared with the endearing helplessness of someone whose Kryptonian brain was processing the dress at superspeed and arriving at conclusions that flustered every single one of them.
Raven noticed me last, because her attention had been locked on Starfire with the heat-seeking precision of someone mid-argument. When she finally glanced toward the doorway, her expression went through a fascinating transformation. The anger in her eyes softened, then sharpened in an entirely different direction, then forcibly neutralized itself into something she probably intended to look composed and unaffected but actually looked like someone had just slapped her with a photograph she wasn't prepared for.
"Hi," I said from the doorway, surveying the disaster area with what I hoped was a breezy smile. "Everyone comfortable?"
"Your new mother is terrifying," Dick said immediately, in the tone of someone who'd been holding that observation in for several minutes and couldn't contain it any longer.
"What did Bellatrix do?"
"She told me my bone structure was 'acceptable for a Muggle' and that if I ever made you cry she would remove my spine through my throat and wear it as jewelry."
"That's actually quite restrained for her. She must like you." I lied. I knew for a fact, that she did not like him… I stepped fully into the room, and the click of my flats on the hardwood seemed unnaturally loud in the residual silence. "And my actual mentor already told me she's studied your bone structure, so apparently it's a topic of discussion in this household."
Dick opened his mouth, clearly uncertain whether to be alarmed or flattered. He settled on a confused half-smile that made him look unfairly boyish.
"Amara." Raven's voice cut through the room, and everyone stiffened slightly at the flat, controlled quality of it. Her amethyst eyes slid from me back to Starfire. "Perhaps you can explain to your... guest... that eavesdropping on private communications and then showing up uninvited to someone's home is not considered acceptable behavior. On any planet."
Starfire's jaw tightened. The bright, unguarded joy that had defined her personality since I'd met her dimmed noticeably, like a lamp being turned down to its lowest setting. When she spoke, her voice carried a careful steadiness that sounded rehearsed, as though she'd been practicing what to say during the agonizing minutes of silence before I arrived.
"I did not eavesdrop," Starfire said, straightening on the sofa and meeting Raven's glare without flinching. "Your conversation was loud, and I was on the same floor in the tower. Tamaranean hearing is more sensitive than human hearing. I simply... heard."
"And then decided to fly here ahead of everyone else without being invited."
"I wished to see Amara. I did not realize I needed your permission to visit a friend!"
The logical move would have been to sit with Dick, Raven, and Kara on the left sofa. They were, after all, the people who'd actually been invited to visit. The people I'd been building something with over the past weeks. The safe choice.
But Starfire was sitting alone on the opposite sofa, and the way she held herself reminded me uncomfortably of a girl I used to be. A girl who sat alone in orphanage dining halls and told herself she preferred it that way…
I crossed the room and sat down next to Starfire.
Dick's expression flickered with something complicated. Raven's jaw tightened a fraction. Kara looked between the two sofas with the expression of someone watching a social chess move she hadn't anticipated and wasn't sure how to evaluate.
Starfire, however, reacted with joy. Her entire body turned toward me, and before I could establish even the pretense of personal space, she scooted across the leather cushion until her thigh pressed flush against mine. Her skin was hot.
"See!" Starfire announced triumphantly, looking directly at Raven with an expression of vindicated delight. "Amara and I are very good friends! Good friends sit together. This is Earth custom, yes?"
The warmth of her pressed against my bare thigh where the dress had ridden up sent a pleasant shiver through my nerve endings that I diplomatically chose not to acknowledge. Starfire's arm hooked through mine with the casual possessiveness of someone who genuinely did not understand why anyone would object to physical closeness, and I found myself caught between amusement and something softer.
"Starfire," I said gently, "you don't need to prove anything."
"I am not proving," she replied, and some of the performance dropped from her voice, leaving something quieter. "I am simply sitting with my friend. That is all."
The silence stretched for another three agonizing seconds. Then Dick exhaled.
"We came here for Amara," he said, and his voice was steady and warm in a way that I recognized as his Nightwing voice bleeding into civilian Dick Grayson. "That's what today is about. I don't want anyone's personal history turning this into something it doesn't need to be." His blue eyes moved to Starfire, and something shifted in them. Not coldness, not anger. Something closer to exhaustion, and underneath it, buried deep enough that you'd need to know him to find it, a flicker of genuine sadness. "That includes ours, Kori."
Starfire's grip on my arm tightened almost imperceptibly. Her luminous green eyes held Dick's gaze for a long moment, and I watched something pass between them that was too dense and too old for me to fully parse. Then she nodded and some of the tension in the room loosened like a belt notch being released.
The silence that followed was different—less pressurized. More like the quiet after someone opens a window in a stuffy room.
It was Kara who broke it.
"Oh thank Rao," she muttered, slumping back against the sofa cushion with visible relief. "I was kind of enjoying the drama though, honestly? We never had anything like this on Krypton. Everyone was so private and formal about relationships. If two people were courting, they'd submit a compatibility assessment to the Science Council before their first date. Romantic disputes were handled through bureaucratic mediation. There was an actual form you could file if your partner offended you. I think it was called a Grievance of Emotional Dissatisfaction, or something equally soul-crushing." She said all of this in a rambling, slightly too-fast cadence that betrayed how nervous she actually was, and she only seemed to realize she'd said it out loud when every single person in the room turned to look at her. Kara's face went pink. Then red. Then a shade of scarlet that would have been alarming on anyone who couldn't survive reentry through Earth's atmosphere. "That was... out loud," she said, her voice climbing half an octave. "That was definitely out loud. I was, um. I was saying that inside my head. Except I wasn't. Because you all heard it."
"Every word," I confirmed, unable to suppress the grin spreading across my face.
"A Grievance of Emotional Dissatisfaction," Raven repeated in a monotone that somehow communicated profound judgment.
"The Science Council sounds like an absolute riot at parties," Dick added, and the corner of his mouth twitched in a way that told me he was fighting hard not to laugh.
Kara pulled her cardigan tighter around herself as if the yellow fabric could somehow retroactively muffle her words, and sank lower into the sofa cushion. "Can we please move on? Please? Let's talk about literally anything else. The house. Let's talk about the house. It's a great house! You have good taste Amara!"
"Thanks, but I had nothing to do with picking it out…"
Kara groaned and hid her face in her hands.
Dick gave her a lifeline and changed the topic again. He cleared his throat, straightened in his seat. "You guys almost gave our butler a heart attack, you know that? Alfred doesn't spook easily. The man has patched up Bruce after fights with literal gods and hasn't broken a sweat. But when he told us Morgana le Fay showed up at the front door with wine and her mother, I swear his left eye twitched when I rewatched the security cameras! I've never seen him almost lose his cool like that…"
"Morgana makes a strong first impression," I said.
"She introduced herself as your sister."
"We're going with that, yes."
Dick shook his head slowly, but he was smiling. That particular Dick Grayson smile that managed to be both exasperated and fond simultaneously, the one that said I cannot believe the things you put me through, but I'm choosing to be here anyway. "Look, you moving in next door was a surprise. A big one. Bruce had... opinions about it."
"I can imagine."
"But I know you." Dick's voice softened. Something earnest and vulnerable surfaced in its place, and I watched his hands clasp together between his knees, fingers interlacing with a tension that suggested the words coming next weren't rehearsed. "I know you wouldn't try to hurt me or my family. I know that. Whatever else is complicated between us, whatever lines we're still figuring out, I trust you, Amara. So welcome to the neighborhood."
He smiled at me then, open and unguarded, and my stupid, treacherous heart did a full somersault behind my ribs.
I tried to formulate a response. Something witty, something deflective, something that would acknowledge the sincerity without letting it crack open the part of me that still didn't know how to handle being trusted by good people.
But before I could speak, Starfire leaned toward me from her position pressed against my side and announced, "Amara, your heart rate has increased significantly. It was steady at sixty-two beats per minute, and now it is at ninety-one." She turned her glowing eyes toward Dick with an expression of analytical appreciation. "Dick has gotten very skilled at the flattering of beautiful women since our relationship ended. He was never this smooth when we were together. Perhaps heartbreak has improved his romantic technique."
The room went very still.
Dick's face performed an extraordinary gymnastics routine, cycling through surprise, mortification, a flash of something that might have been guilt, and finally landing on resigned acceptance. His hand came up to rub the back of his neck in a gesture I was beginning to recognize as his default response to emotional exposure. "Kori..."
"It is a compliment!" Starfire insisted, apparently baffled by his reaction. "On Tamaran, noting a partner's improved mating skills after a separation is considered high praise. It means the emotional growth was productive."
"Different planet," Kara murmured from the other sofa, her blush having finally receded to a manageable pink. "Different rules, Star."
I was still processing the fact that Starfire could apparently monitor my heart rate, which raised concerning questions about exactly how much of my physiological responses she'd been tracking since she sat down. My succubus biology made me a walking hormone factory under the best circumstances, and having an alien lie detector pressed against my side while Dick Grayson said nice things to me was not the best circumstances.
"We brought gifts!" Raven blurted, and the abruptness of her announcement snapped every head in the room toward her. She seemed startled by her own volume, her violet eyes widening slightly before she schooled her expression back into studied neutrality. But the faintest wash of color had risen in her grey cheeks, and she was sitting straighter now, hands gripping her knees with a tension that betrayed how much the last few minutes had cost her composure. It was the voice of someone who had been searching for a way to re-enter the conversation for the last five minutes and had finally decided that brute force was preferable to continued silence.
I looked more carefully and noticed, for the first time, that all three of them had bags. Dick had a rectangular package wrapped in navy paper sitting beside his feet. Kara had a bright yellow gift bag with tissue paper erupting from the top like a cheerful paper volcano. Raven had a small, dark bundle in her lap that she'd been clutching so tightly it was a wonder the contents hadn't been crushed.
"You didn't have to bring anything," I said, genuinely touched and slightly thrown off balance. I wasn't accustomed to receiving gifts from people who weren't part of my coven. The concept of someone walking into a shop and thinking of me, choosing something for me, wrapping it for me, all without being bound to me by dark magic or sexual favors or coven loyalty, was still novel enough to make my chest ache.
"It's a housewarming tradition," Kara said, her earlier embarrassment evaporating as she perked up with visible enthusiasm. "You bring something for the new house. Martha Kent said the gift should be something practical, something pretty, and something personal. I tried to cover all three." She held up the yellow bag and gave it a little shake, making the tissue paper rustle invitingly.
Starfire shifted beside me, and I felt her arm loosen from mine. When I glanced sideways, her expression had changed. She looked down at her empty hands, then back up at the bags and wrapped packages the others had brought.
"I did not know that gifts were a part of this ceremony," she said, and her voice had lost its usual bright projection, dropping to something almost small. But then she straightened, and I watched determination crystallize in her green eyes. "I know! I can compensate for the lack of a material gift by offering you a personal one instead. It is traditional among close Tamaranean friends."
Something in the particular emphasis she placed on "personal" made every instinct I had sit up and pay attention.
"I can make this up to you, friend Amara," Starfire declared with the absolute conviction of someone who had identified a problem and arrived at what she considered the optimal solution, "by giving you multiple orgasms. If you would like! I would be more than happy to do the feasting on your pussy if you would like me too!" She said this the way someone might offer to help carry groceries. Brightly. Helpfully. With the sincere, uncomplicated generosity of a person for whom physical pleasure was simply another form of kindness between friends.
Then several things happened at once.
Kara "eeped" and launched off the sofa. Her Kryptonian reflexes fired with enough force that she actually left the cushion by about six feet before gravity remembered it was supposed to apply to her too. She caught herself mid-hover, realized what she'd done, and dropped back to the floor with an audible thud that rattled the coffee table. Her face had achieved a shade of red so vivid it bordered on luminescent, her hands flying up to cover her cheeks as though she could physically contain the blush if she just pressed hard enough.
"Nope!" Kara squeaked, the single syllable climbing through at least three octaves. "Nope, nope, I cannot... that is not... Stars and Rao, STARFIRE! HOW CAN YOU JUST OFFER THAT IN FRONT OF ALL OF US?!"
Dick had gone rigid, his spine snapping straight like a steel rod had been driven through it. His mouth opened, closed, opened again. No words came out the first two times. On the third attempt, he managed: "Kori, that's... you can't just offer that."
"Why not?" Starfire asked, her brow creasing with the honest confusion of someone who could not for the life of her understand the problem. "On Tamaran, shared physical pleasure between friends is the most personal and meaningful gift one can give. It says I value your comfort and happiness above material possessions. It is far more intimate than any object in a bag."
"That's actually beautiful from a cultural perspective," Kara said weakly from where she stood, still pressing her hands to her burning face, "but on Earth it's... it's really, really..."
Raven had not moved. She sat in her corner of the sofa with her arms still crossed, her expression frozen in a mask of such aggressive composure that it had circled all the way back around to being obviously, painfully affected. The faint purple blush on her grey skin had deepened to something closer to violet, spreading down her neck and disappearing beneath the collar of her turtleneck. "Starfire," Raven said, and her voice was level, controlled, and approximately two degrees away from absolute zero, "you cannot offer to have sex with someone as a housewarming gift."
"I did not say sex. I said orgasms. These are different categories. She does not have to reciprocate the pleasure unless she wants to!"
I closed my mouth before I could respond with anything stupid. My brain, my traitorous, lust-cursed, succubus-wired brain, had already begun constructing an extremely vivid mental scenario based on Starfire's offer. It hadn't consulted my higher reasoning. It had simply received the input "Starfire" plus "multiple orgasms" and started rendering the scene in full sensory detail with the enthusiastic efficiency of a demon that had been handed exactly the kind of material it thrived on.
I could feel the heat pooling between my thighs, my nipples tightening traitorously beneath the thin fabric of the dress, my succubus instincts purring with the deep, resonant satisfaction of a predator being offered prey on a silver platter.
And Starfire, pressed warm and solid against my side, could absolutely detect every single one of those physiological responses because she'd already demonstrated she could monitor my heart rate.
I swallowed hard and dug my nails into my own palm, using the sharp bite of pain to drag my focus back to the present.
"Starfire," I said, and was mildly proud that my voice came out steady, "thank you. Genuinely. That's... I understand the cultural significance, and I appreciate the intent behind it. A lot." Too much. My brain appreciated it far too much. "But let's table that for now, yeah?"
Starfire studied my face for a moment, and something knowing flickered in those luminous green eyes. She could see right through me. She knew exactly what her offer had done to my body and she wasn't even slightly sorry about it. But she nodded with gracious acceptance and settled back against the sofa, resuming her position pressed against my side.
Kara drifted back down onto the left sofa, tucking her legs underneath herself and smoothing her sundress with hands that still trembled slightly. She took a deep breath, held it for a count of three, and then released it with the deliberate calm of someone who regularly practiced breathing exercises to manage overwhelming stimuli. "Okay," Kara said, and her voice had found its footing again, though a residual pinkness still clung to her cheekbones. "So! Moving on from that! We actually had another announcement we wanted to make. Before the, um. Before the orgasm thing derailed us."
I raised my eyebrows. "There's more?"
Kara looked at Dick. Dick looked at Raven. Raven, who had apparently used the Starfire interlude to reconstruct her composure from the ground up, uncrossed her arms and leaned forward slightly.
"We're leaving the Titans," Raven said. I watched Raven's face as she said it, searching for hesitation or regret, and found neither. The look of someone who had made a decision and was at peace with its consequences. "Dick and I have discussed this extensively," she continued, her eyes steady on mine. "The Teen Titans were formed when we were teenagers. The name made sense then. We were young, learning, figuring out who we were and what we stood for. But we're not teenagers anymore. I'm twenty. Dick is twenty-two. The 'teen' label doesn't fit, and more importantly, the structure doesn't fit. We've outgrown it."
Dick picked up the thread with the ease of two people who had clearly rehearsed this conversation, or at least had it enough times between themselves that the words flowed naturally from one to the other. "The Titans will keep operating. Cyborg's taking lead. Beast Boy, and some of the newer potential recruits will stay on. But Raven and I want to build something new. Something that operates differently. Our own team, our own rules, our own priorities."
"And I am leaving the Justice League," Kara added, and there was something in her voice that was lighter, freer, like a bird that had just discovered its cage door was open. "I love Kal. He's my cousin and he's been incredibly kind since I arrived on Earth. But the League is..." She paused, searching for diplomatic phrasing. "It's a lot of very powerful adults who've been doing this for a very long time, and they have their own way of handling things. I'm the youngest member by at least a decade, and I always feel like the kid who got invited to the grown-up table but isn't actually allowed to speak." "Also," Kara continued, and her bright blue eyes dimmed just slightly, the cheerful mask slipping to reveal something more troubled underneath, "Kal has been acting strange lately. Not in a big, obvious way. Just... off. Small things. He missed our weekly dinner for the first time ever last week and didn't even mention it afterward. Diana seemed distracted during the last briefing. Barry was uncharacteristically quiet. Bruce has been..." She trailed off, glancing at Dick.
"Bruce has been dismissive of things he'd normally obsess over," Dick finished, his expression tightening. "I flagged some intel for him last week that should have triggered a full investigation. He barely looked at it. Said it was a lower priority and moved on. That's not Bruce."
I filed it away for the moment, thinking that was strange, and the timing was even worse considering trigon was making moves.
Wait…? Could the Justice League be…
"So the three of you are starting a new team," I said instead, steering back to the announcement. "That's... actually really exciting."
Kara's brightness returned immediately. "Right? I mean, think about it. Dick has all the tactical and leadership experience from running the Titans. Raven has magical expertise and empathic intelligence that would make her the best reconnaissance specialist on the planet. And I can, you know." She gestured vaguely at herself. "Punch things really hard and fly into space!"
"You're selling yourself short," Dick told her with a grin. "You're also the team's designated sunshine. That's an actual strategic resource."
Kara threw a cushion at him. He caught it without looking, because of course he did.
"That is wonderful news," Starfire said, and to her immense credit, her tone was warm and congratulatory and almost entirely free of the tremor I could feel in her arm where it still rested against mine. "A new team, unshackled from old structures and expectations. I think this is a very brave and admirable decision." She paused. Her chin lifted. "I would also love to join this new team. I have extensive combat experience, I can provide aerial superiority, and I believe my abilities would complement the group's existing capabilities very effectively. I would also bring diplomatic experience from my time as Crown Princess of Tamaran, which could prove invaluable for the missions requiring interstellar or interdimensional coordination."
It was, I had to admit, an objectively excellent pitch. Concise, professional, highlighting legitimate skills and unique value propositions. Starfire had clearly thought about this, had probably been constructing this argument from the moment Dick mentioned leaving the Titans.
The problem was the faces staring back at her.
Dick's expression was careful, controlled, and absolutely devastating in its gentleness. The kind of face you made when you cared about someone and were about to say something that would hurt them anyway. Raven had gone very still, her eyes fixed on a point just past Starfire's shoulder, refusing to meet the Tamaranean's gaze in a way that spoke louder than any words.
Kara was the one who couldn't hide it. Her blue eyes were wide with transparent sympathy, her lips pressed together, her entire body radiating the discomfort of someone who wanted desperately to fix something she knew she couldn't.
Starfire read the room. Of course she read the room. She was an alien, not oblivious. Her smile didn't falter, exactly, but something behind it shifted. The brightness dimmed to something more fragile, more glass-like, as though it might shatter if anyone touched it.
"I see," she said quietly. "I was not being invited." The words hung there, delicate and sharp.
Dick leaned forward. "Kori, it's not about your abilities. You know how strong you are, how valuable..."
"Then what is it about, Dick?" Starfire's voice didn't rise, but something in it thinned, stretched taut over the bones of something she'd been carrying much longer than today. "Is it because you do not wish to work alongside me? Because seeing me every day would be too difficult?"
"It's because we need time," Dick said, and the honesty in his voice was almost painful to witness. "Both of us. This team needs to start with a clean foundation, without the weight of our history pulling at it. That's not a reflection of your worth as a hero, Kori. That's me being honest about where I am."
Starfire held his gaze for a long, trembling moment. Then she nodded once, looked down at her hands in her lap, and said nothing.
I could feel the heat of her skin against my side, could feel the almost imperceptible tremor running through her. And I hated this. I hated the whole ugly, tangled mess of it, the way good people could hurt each other without anyone being truly wrong.
Well—Okay—Kori WAS in the wrong! BUT, Dick should have probably discussed cultural expectations before dating a freaking nympho alien babe!
Dick's attention turned to me. "The invitation was actually for you, Amara."
I blinked. "I'm sorry, what?"
"You," he repeated, and a smile broke across his face, warm and certain and infuriatingly earnest. "I've told you before that you could be a hero, and I meant it then, and I mean it more now. You saved Robin's life. You fought beside the Titans against the Trench and put yourself between civilians and monsters. You've protected Raven, helped Kara, and every time you've been given a choice between walking away and stepping up, you've stepped up."
"Dick..."
"I know you don't see yourself that way. I know you think being a hero means wearing white and following rules and never crossing lines." He shook his head. "But that's not what it means. It means showing up when it matters. And you keep showing up!" His blue eyes held mine, and the sincerity in them was almost too much to look at directly, like staring into something bright enough to leave afterimages. "You will be an amazing hero, Amara. I know that. I've known it since the first time we met. And I am going to keep telling you, over and over, until you believe it too."
I blushed at his speech. This was old-fashioned, human, completely involuntary embarrassment caused by someone saying something kind and meaning every word of it. "That's..." I started, and my voice came out softer than I intended, slightly rough around the edges. "That's really sweet, Dick. It is. And I'm not going to pretend it doesn't mean something to hear you say that."
His smile widened, turning hopeful.
"But I'm not hero material," I continued, and watched the hope dim but not extinguish. "And I'm not saying that to be self-deprecating. I'm saying it because three days ago, when I was walking through Gotham to buy a present for Raven, three men tried to attack me and I burned them alive without hesitation, without remorse, and without losing a single second of sleep over it afterward. I walked over their smoking remains and continued shopping…"
The room went quiet again. A different kind of quiet.
Dick didn't look away. I had to give him credit for that. A lot of people would have looked away. His expression shifted to something more complicated, more layered, but he held my gaze.
Kara let out a long, slow breath that sounded like it had been squeezed through something tight. She tilted her head back against the sofa and stared at the ceiling for a moment. "Okay," Kara said to the ceiling, her voice carrying the strained quality of someone negotiating with their own conscience in real time. "As Superman's cousin and a member of the Justice League—since I haven't quit just yet—I am definitely not supposed to hear about extrajudicial killings. That is definitely information that creates ethical obligations I do not want to deal with today." She lowered her head and fixed me with those bright blue eyes, and the look in them was somehow both deeply conflicted and fiercely affectionate. "So I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that," she said firmly. "Just like I pretended not to hear it the last time. And the time before that. Because if I start keeping a tally, I'm going to have to arrest someone I really, really like, and I don't want to do that, so. Selective deafness. That's my superpower now. I have heat vision, freeze breath, super strength, and the ability to not hear things that my friend says about lighting criminals on fire."
"That's very emotionally healthy of you, Kara," I said, and I meant it, mostly.
"It's not healthy at all and I know it," she replied with disarming honesty. "But I'm Kryptonian. We're great at compartmentalization. It's literally in our DNA. Our entire civilization collapsed and I just... moved on. Filed it under 'tragic but manageable.' I come from a long line of people who could watch a planet explode and then have a calm discussion about agricultural reform."
"That's the saddest funny thing I've ever heard," Dick said.
"Welcome to being Kryptonian." Kara shrugged, but her eyes were still on me, and beneath the humor there was something genuine. Something that said I know what you are and I'm still here, and I wish you'd let us help you become something more.
It was Raven who drew my focus next. She hadn't spoken during my confession, hadn't reacted to the mention of the murdered men. But something else had caught her attention entirely, and I watched the realization spread across her features like dawn breaking over still water.
"You bought me a present?" Raven asked.
– Damien Wayne –
The Batcave was sixty-three degrees Fahrenheit, which was precisely the temperature Father maintained year-round regardless of the season above. Damian Wayne had memorized this fact at age eleven, the same week he'd memorized the cave's exact square footage (forty-seven thousand square feet across three primary levels and nine sublevel chambers), the make and model of every vehicle in the vehicle bay (seventeen, not counting the prototypes), and the precise number of bats roosting in the upper cavern network at any given time (approximately fourteen thousand during summer months, dropping to nine thousand in winter when the brown bats migrated to secondary cave systems in the Palisades).
Knowledge was control. Father had taught him that.
Or rather, Father had demonstrated it through years of obsessive example, and Damian had absorbed the lesson the way he absorbed everything: completely, precisely, and with the unshakable conviction that he could do it better.
He sat in the secondary command chair beside the main console, legs crossed, spine rigid, wearing a black compression shirt and grey tactical pants that he'd been training in before the session was abruptly cut short by the absence of a training partner.
His katana rested across his thighs.
He'd been sharpening it for the last twenty minutes. Not because it needed sharpening. It was already sharp enough to split a hair lengthwise. He was sharpening it because he was bored, and because the rhythmic scrape of whetstone against folded steel was meditative in a way that almost compensated for the fact that the one person who was supposed to be here, training with him, sparring with him, pushing him to be faster and stronger and more lethal, was instead across town doing absolutely nothing of value.
Somewhere behind him, near the medical bay alcove where the cave's only non-combatant resident spent most of her time, Jonathan Kent was making soft, idiotic cooing sounds.
"Who's a good cow? Who's the best cow? You are. You're the best cow in the whole cave!"
Damian's jaw tightened.
Batcow stood in her designated area, a comfortable pen that Father had grudgingly constructed after Damian had rescued her from a slaughterhouse three years ago and refused, with the immovable stubbornness of someone raised by the League of Shadows, to return her. The cow was brown and white, roughly twelve hundred pounds, and possessed of a temperament so gentle that she had never once startled at the sound of the Batmobile's engines or the occasional explosion that rocked the cave during weapons testing.
She also wore a small black mask across her eyes, because Damian had put it there, and because it was appropriate.
Every resident of the cave had a mask.
Batcow was no exception!
Jonathan was scratching behind her ears with both hands. Jonathan Kent had the emotional range of a golden retriever and the physical capabilities of a demigod, which was an absurd combination that should not have worked as well as it did. He was also the closest thing Damian had to a best friend, which said rather a lot about the limited social options available to the biological son of Batman and the daughter of the Demon's Head.
"She likes it when you scratch right behind the left ear," Damian said without looking up from his katana. "There's a spot where the hide is thinner. It itches."
Jonathan adjusted his scratching accordingly. Batcow let out a low, contented sound that was almost a purr if cows were capable of purring, which they were not.
"Dick hasn't been hanging out with me for days," Damian said. The words came out sharper than he'd intended. He drew the whetstone along the blade's edge with more force than necessary, producing a screech that echoed off the cave's limestone walls and made several of the closer bats shift uneasily on their perches.
Jonathan glanced over his shoulder, reading the tone with the practiced ease of someone who'd spent enough time around Damian to know when casual observation was actually a loaded weapon. "He's been busy, right? With the new team thing I heard about? Which is good because I can't wait for us to join the Titans!"
"He's been busy," Damian repeated, "simping over his new villain girlfriend."
Jonathan's eyebrows rose. "His what now?"
"The Black Witch. Amara Black. Morgana le Fay's apprentice." Each descriptor was delivered like a prosecution listing charges. "She is a wanted criminal, a practicing dark sorceress, a confirmed killer, and apparently so physically attractive that Richard Grayson, a man who was trained by Batman to resist psychological manipulation, has completely abandoned his responsibilities to his family in order to chase after her like a lovesick puppy."
Damian set the whetstone down with a decisive click and held his katana up to the cave's fluorescent lighting, examining the edge with critical precision. The blade gleamed, perfect and deadly, catching the light along its entire length.
"He was supposed to train with me every Tuesday and Thursday evening," Damian continued, his voice dropping into something quieter, something that a person who didn't know him might mistake for simple irritation but which Jonathan, who did know him, recognized as hurt trying very hard to disguise itself as anger. "He hasn't been here for a single session in two weeks. And when I called him about it, he said he had 'other commitments.' Other commitments!"
He said this as though "other commitments" was a euphemism for something profoundly offensive, which in Damian's worldview, it essentially was.
Jonathan gave Batcow a final pat and walked over to lean against the console beside Damian's chair. He was taller than Damian by three inches now, a fact that Damian pretended not to notice and resented with quiet intensity.
Puberty was an unreliable ally indeed...
"That sucks, man," Jonathan said. Jonathan didn't try to explain away other people's failings or offer optimistic reinterpretations of clearly unacceptable behavior. He just acknowledged the situation and stood beside you in it. "But honestly? I kind of get it. Both my parents are always busy too. Dad's either at the Planet or, you know." He gestured vaguely upward in the universal shorthand for flying around saving the world. "And Mom's been just as busy since she manages a whole team of writers now…"
"At least your parents have legitimate excuses," Damian said. "Clark is saving lives. Your mother is supporting the family with her high paying job. Dick is attending housewarming parties."
"Housewarming parties?"
"She bought a mansion. The witch. She moved into the estate on the far side of the hill from Wayne Manor. She is literally our neighbor now, and Dick is currently over there bringing gifts and socializing as though she isn't a murderer who burned an entire family compound in Britain to the ground less than a month ago."
Jonathan let out a low whistle. "Okay, yeah. That's... kind of a lot."
"It is unacceptable is what it is." Damian slid his katana into the scabbard strapped to the back of his chair with a fluid, practiced motion. "I saved her life once. Did I tell you about that?"
"The ninja thing? With the League of Shadows guys? Yeah, you mentioned it."
"She saved mine too," Damian admitted grudgingly. "I was outnumbered. Many opponents. All highly trained. She intervened without being asked and eliminated them with fire magic that was..." He paused, searching for the right word, his expression shifting into something complicated. "Efficient. Her combat instincts are sound, her magical abilities are formidable, and she didn't hesitate under pressure. If she weren't a criminal, she'd make an acceptable ally."
"Sounds like maybe Dick sees the same things in her that you do?"
Damian shot him a look that could have flash-frozen steel. "Do not compare my tactical assessment of a combatant to Dick's hormone-driven infatuation."
Jonathan raised both hands in surrender, but the grin pulling at the corners of his mouth suggested he was enjoying this more than a supportive best friend probably should have been. "I'm just saying, maybe she's not all bad if even you think she's got good instincts."
"She likes to kill men by burning them alive and then she usually tosses their bodies in dumpsters… The people at Waste Management have been sending numerous complaints to commissioner Gordan…"
"Were they bad guys?"
"They were attempted rapists."
Jonathan's grin faded. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and rocked back on his heels, his expression cycling through the particular sequence of emotions that Damian had come to recognize as the farm boy's moral processing routine. Initial shock, then consideration, then the careful weighing of principles against pragmatism that came from being raised by both a Kansas farmer and an alien god. "I'm not gonna say they deserved it," Jonathan said slowly, "because Mom raised me better than that. But I'm also not gonna pretend I feel bad about it, because Dad raised me honest."
Damian appreciated this answer more than he would ever verbally acknowledge. "Regardless," Damian said, steering back to the core grievance, "Dick's obligations to this family should take precedence over his infatuation with a dark sorceress, no matter how tactically competent she might be. Perhaps I should pay this witch another visit. Remind her that associating with Richard Grayson comes with certain expectations!"
"You're gonna go threaten her?"
"I'm going to communicate boundaries."
"With your katana?"
"The katana communicates on my behalf. It's very articulate!"
Jonathan snorted a laugh, then caught himself and tried to look serious. He failed completely. "Damian, I don't think threatening Dick's maybe-girlfriend is going to make him want to hang out with you more… Maybe he's just growing up and branchin' out more"
Damian opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. He hated when Jonathan made valid tactical observations, primarily because it happened more often than he was comfortable admitting. The farm boy's emotional intelligence consistently outperformed his academic credentials, which Damian found both frustrating and, again in the privacy of his own thoughts, useful.
"Then what do you suggest?" Damian asked, and the fact that he was asking at all was a concession that Jonathan correctly chose not to draw attention to.
"Maybe just tell him you miss training together? Like, actually say that? With words?"
Damian stared at him as though he'd suggested solving crime through interpretive dance. "I am the son of Batman and the grandson of Ra's al Ghul. I do not express emotional vulnerability through verbal communication."
"Right, I forgot. You express it through increasingly aggressive sparring sessions and pointed silences."
"It's a system that works."
"Does it, though?"
Before Damian could formulate an appropriately withering response, Jonathan shifted his weight off the console and cocked his head in that particular way that meant his superhearing had picked up something the merely human members of the household couldn't detect. "Hey," Jonathan said, his playful tone evaporating. "You hear that?"
Damian's hand was on his katana before the sentence finished. He didn't hear anything, which was precisely the problem. When Jonathan Kent asked if you heard something, the correct response was not to listen harder but to prepare for whatever was about to happen!
"What kind of sound?" Damian asked, already rising from the chair, his body shifting into a combat-ready posture that was as natural to him as breathing.
"It's... mechanical? Like servos. Heavy ones. And something else." Jonathan's blue eyes narrowed, his head tilting further as he filtered through layers of sound. "Energy buildup. Coming from the lower tunnels!"
Damian's mental map of the cave system activated. The eastern shaft was a secondary access point, rarely used, sealed with reinforced titanium blast doors and monitored by three independent sensor arrays. Anything approaching through that corridor should have triggered multiple alarms long before reaching the main cavern!
No alarms had triggered…
That fact alone turned Damian's unease into something colder, sharper, more focused. His fingers wrapped around the katana's grip. He drew the blade in a single fluid motion.
The explosion came from the far eastern wall of the main cavern.
The dust swirled, caught in the cave's ventilation currents, momentarily obscuring whatever had made the entrance. Then the currents shifted, the cloud thinned, and something walked through the hole.
The first thing Damian registered was the shape. Humanoid. Tall. Broader across the shoulders than Father but with a similar general silhouette, which was immediately and deeply wrong in a way that activated every threat-assessment protocol Damian had ever internalized. It stood approximately six feet four inches, its frame constructed from a material Damian couldn't immediately identify.
Designed to look intimidating. It was a robot. Clearly, unmistakably a robot.
On its chest, a bat symbol blazed with deep crimson light.
The face plate was smooth, featureless, polished to a mirror sheen that reflected a distorted image of the cave back at them. But set into the upper portion were two narrow optical sensors that burned the same pulsing red as the chest emblem. They swept the cavern with mechanical precision.
Those red eyes found Damian first.
Then Jonathan.
Then Batcow, who let out a mournful, frightened sound and pressed herself into the farthest corner of her pen…
How dare you frighten Batcow, you robot bastard!
The robot stopped walking precisely twelve feet from them. Close enough to be threatening. Far enough to demonstrate it wasn't concerned about their proximity. The positioning was deliberate. Calculated.
Familiar…?
It was the way Father positioned himself when entering a room—close enough to strike, far enough to react, angles optimized for maximum tactical advantage.
This machine moved like Batman.
Damian's grip tightened on his katana until his knuckles whitened beneath the leather wrapping. In his experience, which was considerable for someone who had not yet reached his fifteenth birthday, most robots were evil. It was simply a statistical reality of the superhero world.
For every Red Tornado, there were twelve Brainiacs, six Amazos, three Grid iterations, and an apparently infinite supply of disposable murder drones produced by every mad scientist with a 3D printer and delusions of grandeur.
He tried to think of another exception to the rule. Red Tornado was a good robot. An actual hero, one who had earned Damian's grudging respect through years of consistent, selfless service. And then there was...
Huh?
That was it. That was the entire list. One. One good robot in the entire history of robotics as it pertained to Damian's personal experience. Everything else with a circuit board and an attitude had tried to kill him, kill his family, or destroy the world, usually in that order!
Jonathan drifted forward, positioning himself between Damian and the intruder. His fists were raised, his feet hovering six inches off the cave floor. "Who are you?" Jonathan demanded, his voice dropping into the lower register he used when he was trying to sound authoritative.
It actually worked reasonably well, Damian noted. The farm boy had been practicing.
The robot's optical sensors pivoted to Jonathan with the smooth, mechanical precision of a targeting system. When it spoke, the voice that emerged from its featureless face was flat, modulated, stripped of inflection in a way that sounded less like a machine attempting human speech and more like a human voice that had been methodically drained of everything that made it human.
"My designation is Failsafe," it stated. "I am a contingency protocol. My activation parameters have been met. I require the location of Batman…"
Damian's eyes narrowed. Contingency protocol?
Father had contingency protocols for everything. There were contingency plans for alien invasions, dimensional breaches, rogue metahumans, compromised Justice League members, and at least four separate scenarios involving the theoretical heat death of the universe….
But Damian had never heard of a contingency called Failsafe. And he knew about almost all of them.
Almost.
"I don't know where he is," Damian said, and the admission cost him more than he showed. He hadn't seen Father in days. Not a call, not a message. "But I can kick your ass instead," he added, because acknowledging uncertainty without immediately asserting dominance was a weakness he could not afford. The katana came up, its blade angled across his body in the third defensive stance of the League of Shadows' primary combat form, edge aligned with the robot's midsection. "So either explain what you are and why you're in my cave, or I'll disassemble you and find out the hard way."
"Amusing," Failsafe said, and the word carried no humor, no contempt, no inflection of any kind. It was simply a clinical observation that someone had attempted to threaten it, and that the attempt had been noted and categorized as irrelevant. "Your combat capabilities have been assessed and logged. You are Robin. Current iteration. Son of Batman. Trained by the League of Shadows from birth, subsequently retrained by Batman and Nightwing in applied crimefighting methodologies. Threat level: moderate. Not sufficient."
The flatness of the assessment stung more than Damian would ever admit. Moderate. The machine had looked at everything he was, everything he'd trained to become, and assigned him a rating of moderate. Not high. Not considerable. Moderate!?
"You are not my target," Failsafe continued, its head rotating with eerie smoothness to scan the cave's exits. "Batman is my target. His absence is... unexpected. It suggests his behavioral patterns have deviated from baseline parameters. This deviation is itself significant and will be investigated." The red eyes pivoted back to Damian.
"Secondary target: Nightwing. Current alias: Richard Grayson. Last confirmed location: Gotham City, specifically the property adjacent to Wayne Manor known locally as Black Manor. Nightwing maintains the closest operational relationship with Batman and will have current intelligence on his whereabouts…"
"You're not going anywhere near Nightwing," Damian said. "Not until you explain exactly what you are, who built you, and what these activation parameters are that you claim have been met."
"That information is classified," Failsafe replied. "Priority level: Omega. Accessible only to Batman."
"I am Batman's son."
"You are not Batman."
Jonathan shifted beside Damian, his floating form drifting slightly left to cut off the robot's most direct path to the cave's main exit. "Look," he said, his voice carrying the reasonable, let's-all-calm-down tone that he'd inherited from Clark, "nobody's trying to start a fight here. But you just blasted through a wall into a private space, you're refusing to identify your purpose, and now you're talking about tracking down our friend. You have to understand how that looks from where we're standing."
Failsafe's sensors fixed on Jonathan for precisely two seconds. "Kryptonian hybrid. Jonathan Kent. Designation: Superboy. Son of Superman and Lois Lane. Threat level: significant." There was a brief pause, the mechanical equivalent of consideration. "However, your emotional attachment to the individuals in this room creates exploitable vulnerabilities. You will not attack with full force while Robin is within potential collateral range. This limits your combat effectiveness by approximately sixty-seven percent."
"That's not..." Jonathan's jaw clenched. "You don't know that."
"I know everything Batman knows," Failsafe said.
A machine that moved like Father? That assessed threats like Father? That positioned itself in a room like Father?
"Resuming primary objective," Failsafe announced. Its head turned toward the cave's main exit with the smooth, inevitable rotation of a gun turret acquiring a target. "Nightwing will be located and questioned regarding Batman's current status. Cooperation is preferred. Noncompliance will be addressed with appropriate force escalation."
"The hell it will," Damian snarled.
Jonathan didn't wait for further discussion. He launched himself forward with the explosive acceleration that only Kryptonian physiology could produce, crossing the twelve-foot gap in a fraction of a second. His fist cocked back.
He never connected.
Failsafe's left arm came up with mechanical speed that matched Jonathan's trajectory, and its hand opened. In the center of its palm, nested in a recessed compartment that hadn't been visible until this exact moment, sat a crystal the size of a golf ball.
It glowed green.
Jonathan's forward momentum died as though he'd slammed into an invisible wall. His fists unclenched, his fingers splaying wide in a reflexive spasm. A strangled sound of pain tore from his throat as the kryptonite radiation washed over him, and his body, which had been cutting through the air like a missile an instant before, crumpled in on itself.
He hit the cave floor with a sound that made Damian's stomach clench. Jonathan rolled once, twice, and came to rest on his side, curled into a loose fetal position, his face twisted with agony and his breath coming in ragged, wet gasps.
"Jon!" Damian took a step forward, katana raised, every muscle in his body screaming to attack, to cut, to protect the person on the ground who was his best friend and who was hurting and who needed him to do something right now.
But Failsafe didn't press the advantage.
The kryptonite retracted back into its palm compartment, the panels sliding shut with a soft mechanical click. The green glow vanished, sealed away as quickly as it had appeared. Jonathan groaned on the floor, his body already beginning to recover as the radiation source was removed, but still too weakened to stand.
Failsafe turned away from them.
It walked toward the cave's main exit with the same unhurried, measured stride it had used to enter, each footfall ringing against the stone floor with the weight of something that did not doubt its own invulnerability. It didn't look back. It didn't issue warnings or threats. It simply walked, because neither of them had registered as worth the additional attention.
"What the fuck…" Damian breathed.
XXX
Do you also want to read a few chapters ahead of my posts on this site? You can!
You can check me out on "Pat-reon.-com / Starwaves" to support me and read a few chapters ahead of everyone else!