Chapter Text
“Fetch your brothers. Return to the Manor immediately.”
Dick hummed all of the top 40 tracks under his breath as he walked along the edge of a highway. He believed he was somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, given the trees, the mountains, and the slight tinge of magic that wasn’t his. There were old beings sleeping under him, older than humans, and the concepts that they had used to create godlings like him.
They weren’t the reason he came here, though.
He was here for a much newer god.
He sniffed the air like a hunting hound and stopped abruptly.
A truck clattered past him, not stopping, not seeing.
Dick searched along the grass and found his telltale, a small roadside memorial in the form of a white wooden cross was tipped over to the side. Its paint was peeling off, sloughing off in fat chunks. The wood underneath it was molding into black. The forgotten husk of a teddy bear decomposed into the ground beside it. Artificially coloured flowers that would never get the blessing of decomposure lay partially buried in the dirt. A faded picture of a girl, brown-haired and big-smiling, was nailed to the cross, and it fluttered slightly when another car passed.
Written on the photo, in faded pen and running ink, the second half of a sentence could just barely be read: “-was last seen here”.
Dick snorted.
Tim was nothing if not predictable.
He turned off of the road and went into the forest beyond it.
He doesn’t know what happened here; it wasn’t his jurisdiction. Tim could probably tell you. Talk to you about how that girl’s car had been broken down, or maybe she had stopped to help an ‘innocent’ bystander, or maybe she had met a secret boyfriend for a drive. He could tell you about the days before, how she was in life before it was cut short, what innocuous things were the dominoes stacking up before the whole thing tipped over.
It was a conversation that Dick had had with Tim before, but not one that interested him much, given that she hadn’t become the center of America’s media circus. Instead, her story ended here. In a forest, with a wooden cross and a cold case sitting in some podunk town somewhere.
Dick’s gaze flicked through the foliage, across a tattered piece of fabric caught in a bush’s branches, across the loose threads from torn clothes that would have been too small for the human eye.
Around him, the forest chattered and whispered, quietly saying what had happened in a way that he couldn’t quite hear. It told the entire story if you knew how to listen. Tim did. Bruce did. But Dick didn’t. He only knew the clues enough to follow them to the edge of a lake.
The bright blue lake was like a hole in the forest’s coat. Trees parted to make room for it, and it reflected the sky back on itself. It was a pristine blue, except for a blotch out in its middle.
There, amongst the endless sky water and the sparkling ripple of waves, was a body.
It floated in the suspended reality of the water, bobbing with restless motion despite the stillness in its limp form. It was completely naked, revealing pale and pasty skin to the world. The colour was greyer than any living human should be and unnaturally mottled with green and blue. All the warmth of life had been leached out by its watery grave, leaving only a grisly shadow of what it had been. The knobby ridges of its spine jutted into the air. Its neck stuck at an unnatural angle, and there was an occasional peek at a slash of raw, exposed flesh. Little chunks of meat, bitten and pulled off by fish and birds, floated next to the corpse.
Dick waited, his foot tapping against the shore of the beach.
The body kept floating there, buoyant from the bloat of gasses captured in its stomach. Long hair rippled with the waves.
He sighed, put two fingers up to his mouth, and whistled. The sound pierced across the lake and hung in the air for a few seconds.
Then, the body twitched, limbs locking back into physical control. It shook and then moved its arms to sit itself up, raising up on the water like someone awakening from a nap. It sat up, and Dick could see the remnants of her face. It was torn, like someone had dragged it, and let pieces of it come off like ribbons to then be eaten by the water. Skin hung. The eyes were gone. Her jawbone was visible through a large gaping hole in her cheek. Flesh had been picked apart by fishes and other creatures. It was a portrait of a death. Her death, he supposes.
The face of her stared at him until suddenly it wasn’t her’s anymore.
In between two of his breaths, the figure on the lake had changed into something Dick recognised much more.
“What?” Tim snapped from his seat on the water, legs tucked close and looking very much like a teenage that had been interrupted from his twin bed. Waves lapped at the edges of him, but they might have well been blankets and sheets. Dick is pretty sure he’s seen Tim in this exact position at the Manor, comforter knotted up all around his legs with his laptop balanced on his lap.
He gave Dick the same annoyed, haughty, ‘you’re bothering me’, look that every younger sibling seemed to have mastered.
“I’m here to pick you up,’ said Dick, his tone bouncing. “Dad wants us. It’s time to come back.”
Tim’s eyes narrowed, and the temperature of the air turned down a few degrees. “I’m not a kid that needs to get fetched from his room.”
Dick snorted and shrugged. “Trust me. I’ve been trying to use that argument for centuries. A millennium before you were even thought up. It doesn’t work.”
Tim stayed staring for a few moments before he groaned and collapsed back into the water. The movement exposed a weeping gash on the body’s side, the flash of her ribs was poking out from the meat. There were bruises on her belly and up her chest. Tim laid on his back, staring up at the sky and rocking with the slight ripple of the lake.
“I guess telling him I’m busy won’t dissuade him?”
“Nope.”
Tim sighed and rolled to hop off of his makeshift bed. His legs splashed into the water, but only raised halfway up his thighs. He trudged his way towards Dick, and as he did, the memory of the dead girl shed off of him. His body healed over the gashes. His neck clicked into the right place. A baggy hoody and jeans manifested onto himself. His hair dried, shortened, and any caught leaves or twigs fell out of it. By the time he reached the shore, the only remnant left of the girl was the slight corpse tinge on Tim’s skin. It was a little too pale to be alive, a little too blue and green not to suggest decomposition, but even that was being erased away.
“You figure out your little mystery?” Dick asked, watched Tim shake the last of the lake and the girl off of him. ‘You’ve been out here for a few weeks.”
“Not really,” said Tim, as he grabbed an Airpod out of his hoodie pocket and shoved it into one of his ears. “Finding the body is easy. Filling in the holes in the middle is always harder.”
He also drew a maroon beanie from his hoodie pocket and stuck it on his head.
“And floating out there in the middle of the lake is essential?” Dick teased and Tim gave him a venomous frown. It wasn’t the first time Dick had found him in a rather deathly position despite Bruce trying to ban it multiple centuries ago.
Tim drew a beat-up white sneaker from the hoodie pocket and then another. “Living through the last moments is very informative.”
Dick grinned, and Tim’s glare dropped. “Wait, you’re not telling Dad are you?”
Dick hummed with a smirk, and Tim looked like he wanted to throw something at Dick’s head. “I hate you, you know.”
“Alright, alright, maybe I won’t tell him.” He raised his hands in surrender and gave Tim a smile that usually made people fall in love with him. Usually. But Tim wasn’t people, and he sure as hell knew that behind all the pretty grins, Dick’s teeth were sharpened and his tongue could give the most beautiful lie.
His gaze remained suspicious, but eventually he shook his head and changed the subject, apparently done with Dick’s game.
“What the hell are you wearing anyways?”
Dick blinked, taking a second to remember exactly how he was appearing at the moment. It was his normal body in its normal shape. He double-checked to confirm he was male, and yep, in the male configuration. All of this was stuff Tim had seen a million times before, so it wasn’t something with the body.
It must be the outfit.
It took a second but he remembered he was wearing a glittery, blue sequined leotard that cut high up on his hips and had large hearts emblazoned on it. Matching the leotard, he wore a glittery cowboy hat and a pair of heart-shaped glasses that did little to hide the bright blue shadow on his lids. He also had on gold cowboy boots that went to his knees and gloves that stretched toward his elbows. A row of beaded tassels hung from the leotard and this shimmered when he breathed.
He had been at a concert when he saw the text from Bruce to retrieve Tim.
Concerts were more his speed than all of Tim’s moody floating in the woods. Modern concerts were a spectacle and he lived for spectacle. He didn’t really care about the music or the artistry; he always found those to be the most boring parts, but he loved the sheer grandeur of their shows. He adored the way the pulse of the crowd rocked into his bones and filled his lungs. He reveled in how the thrum consumed you into a part of itself. He drank the fizzy pop of power that came from a thousand people all chanting the same sounds. It was intoxicating. It was thrilling. It was a vestige of him.
How he was.
Back when humans filled coliseums and circuses were the center of the world.
It came close to satisfying the vicious yearning he still had for blood sprayed across Roman sands and the clatter of chariot wheels.
No more though. He had to get his fill from a different type of spectacle now.
“I was at a music thing,” Dick said with a waved hand. “Some little Missouri girl is calling herself a princess, and people are eating it up.”
Tim raised a curious eyebrow, eyes going over Dick’s outfit. He knew the rules of Dick’s god hood, generally the bigger, the flashier, and the more flash in the pan, the better. “That seems like a boon for you.”
“It’s fast,” said Dick with a shrug. “It’s fun. But it's music, which always means it's only half a meal for me.”
After all, he wasn’t a god of music. He didn’t care about the melody or the words, if anything it was competition for what he truly wanted. He wanted something much more primal. Much more ancient.
Ironic that most of it lived in the moments and flashes of social media. The newest technologies to satisfy the most basic of needs.
He had to adapt if he wanted to live, and this is where that got him. He knew Tim understood because he wanted something similar. Something that was ugly to most of the modern world, and yet survived with each new revolution.
Sure enough, Tim nodded and walked towards Dick’s side.
“Are we going straight to the Manor?” He asked, eyes looking forward and momentarily tabling the mystery in the lake. His mind was already turning on something new, trying to figure out why Bruce had called them all back.
It wasn’t… unusual for Bruce to call them all together back to the Manor but the timing was odd.
They had mostly recently been called back a few months ago and Bruce usually let them have a couple years in the field before he was itching to have them back again. It was a deviation of their pattern and given that Bruce was an ancient god with ancient habits, it took a lot to break their patterns.
Something was up.
Something that required all of them to be home.
“We have to go get Jason,” said Dick, the world already changing around them. “Then we will go home.”
Tim followed Dick to wherever the older god felt Jason was. He could have probably gotten there on his own, but Dick was generally better at finding Jason given their extra centuries together. Tim would have gotten them in the right area, but there would have been more walking.
When they came back into the world, they were somewhere in Arizona. The air was hot and dry, burning slightly against the back of Tim’s throat and making the last of the damp still stuck on Tim’s skin steam off. The world was much brighter here, glaring against the sand, the buildings, the bustle of humanity all milling about. In the distance, there were the peaks of mountains arching their back towards the sky. Like the forest, there were old ancient gods sleeping somewhere beneath the earth, immune from human influence and settled into something beyond Tim’s mind.
The building immediately in front of him was some sort of school. The building was red brick, and in front of it, there were multiple flags for the nation and the state. Artificially coloured playground equipment was enclosed in a rectangle of fencing, and a collection of tiny children were skittering all around it. A few of them must have caught Dick and Tim’s introduction back into the world because they were pointing and whispering to each other.
A little smile couldn’t help but tug onto Tim’s face as his instinctual affection towards humanity swelled.
Humans were… they were amazing. He could feel the brush of their emotions nuzzling against Tim’s soul like the nose of an affectionate puppy. The bright pop of their minds adding to the tapestry of the world. As a god of mysteries, of rumours, of questions with no answers, he could feel the children inquiring towards each other and beginning to form little mysteries in their heads. Their little murmurs effortlessly formed rumours and theories, silently contributing towards the well of Tim’s godhood.
Beside him, Dick chuckled undoubtedly also feeling the gentle, tickling whispers of the kids’ minds. He looked towards them, lowering his glasses and shooting them a winning smile that had made generations fall in love with him. Then he gave an exaggerated wink, snapping the world around them slightly and dipping them both into invisibility in a flourish of sparkles.
The kids squealed in delight, their voices and laughter burbling together in a little stream as they chattered together about the gods.
Who were they?
Were those superheroes?
Wizards? Like in Harry Potter?
Magic isn’t real.
But they disappeared with glitter!
Dick and Tim hadn’t actually moved at all, the kids just couldn’t see them. They really should have entered into the world while being hidden from human eyes, but… well, Dick preferred the spectacle of causing a disruption with his entrances and disappearing in a cloud of smoke.
Kids especially were easy to cause wonder in, and Dick must have suspected they were going to a school.
He guessed that he shouldn’t have been surprised that Dick had brought them to a school. Jason had been spending more and more time around school. More time than he would have liked.
Sometimes gods did not get a choice in what their godhood adopted.
“What do you think?” Dick asked, eyes flicking across the bouncing heads of the kids as they began to back away from the fence and resume running across the playground. A bell rang and doors to classrooms began to open. Teachers, mostly women, began to lead lines of children through hallways. “Big or small?”
Tim’s mind latched onto the little puzzle and he felt all his focus immediately pulled into the question.
His gaze snapped onto the scene before him, and he systematically began to eliminate the important details from the chaff. Trying to find Jason through his trace of power was useless. They were too close to him and it wouldn’t provide a more precise location. He had to rely on deduction and his knowledge of Jason’s habits.
And, given that he had known Jason for going on five hundred years now, he would say he knew his brother pretty well.
Although physical forms weren’t huge hints given a god’s ability to change them on a whim, he knew Jason generally preferred male and usually defaulted to the rusty dark brown hair he had when he first manifested. He had an inclination towards red but not blood red. Jason had seen too much dark sanguine red to willingly choose to clothe himself in the color, but bright was often a popular choice. Skin colour would probably be light, mirroring the tone of the German-French border he had been created in. In an elementary school, he would favour an innocuous form. Something that wouldn’t scare the children and wouldn’t draw eyes. He’d lean small because small was safe. Perhaps even the runt of the litter.
Tim’s gaze scanned across the tiny heads of the children, bobbing up and down with baby hairs licking the wind.
There was a boy, almost so small that he almost appeared undernourished, which made sense because a full belly had never fully sat well on Jason. He was wearing a bright red hoodie with the hood drawn up. He was chattering rapidly with another kid, but there was a worried crinkle in the corners of his eyes.
A human would probably look at the kid and see abuse or neglect. Jason had eyes that were too old, no matter how young his face was. He knew things children should never know and the shape of his face could never fully erase that. It was normal for a god. They had centuries on humans, and they could never really shake the look of it. Usually, they got it in little comments.
You have an old soul.
Unsettling eyes.
Piercing gaze.
I can never tell what you’re thinking.
It attracted some people. It drove others away.
“He’s over there,” Tim said, completing the little puzzle Dick put before him and tugging on a little string of the magic that connected him and Jason.
Jason’s head shot up immediately and he snapped in their direction. The movement was too fast and direct for a human child and almost unsettling on the small body. Sure enough, it was the little boy in the bright red hoodie.
Dick sighed and waved Jason over. “Guessing games aren’t fun with you.”
Tim snorted. As if Dick hadn’t known exactly what he was feeding Tim. As if the other god didn’t understand that Tim was a being based upon the drive to find an answer to a question poised. As if that pursuit wasn’t written into Tim’s bones and what breathed life into his soul.
“Get a better game than, dick,” Tim replied lightly as he watched Jason break away from the group of children and trudge his way towards them.
Jason was tiny, probably around nine or ten, and he didn’t change his looks as he approached them, even though he barely came above their elbows. The small stature did little to hide the sheer amount of power rolling off of him.
Jason was the most powerful one of them at the moment.
Because they were godlings, born of human emotions and bound to a facet of human culture, their power and access to magic were determined by how much humans interacted with their subject of godhood.
All gods were born as amorphous swirls of human emotions as they felt emotions about the world around them. There were millions of beginnings of gods created through fleeting human thoughts, and nearly all of them died because the emotion that created them wasn’t strong enough. Their entire existence was being a little blob that floated through the world until they faded out. But every once in a while, a blob would catch onto something strong - a feeling, an event, a place - and was imbued with enough emotion that they could manifest into a godling. Once they were a godling, they could take human form and carve out a piece of existence for themselves by defining the subject of their godhood further. Although the founding subject of their creation couldn’t change, godlings often could shift their godhood around to fit human progress. It was pretty necessary actually, given the fickle whims of humans and the fact that gods without godhoods faded into nothingness.
Changing what you were the god of was often a matter of survival rather than desire and all three of them were familiar with the process.
Dick had needed to change his multiple times through the centuries as coliseums crumbled and circuses took on a different meaning. Tim was born with the printing press and, though he hadn’t needed a change as drastic as Dick’s, he had grown to encompass an interesting new genre called ‘true crime’. Jason…
Well… Jason had the hardest time of them all.
None of them had been born through happiness. They weren’t created through the joys of human emotion.
Jason had been born in 1212 during the Children’s Crusade and he had represented the children who died for unworthy causes. He represented the kids that were failed by their parents, their fictional deities, and their governments. He was there for the kids who died from neglect or were soldiers in a war, not their own. He was the innocent, tiny victim. And for centuries he was one of the few gods that was happy about his godhood becoming weaker and smaller. Child mortality went down, the use of children as pawns became rarer. He didn’t worry about fading away because there were always tragedies, but then something happened.
Human culture changed.
What had been rare became common. Increasing tenfold in only a few years.
It fit Jason’s godhood so well that he felt himself changing against his will. Adopting a part of humanity that he never wanted, growing with a power he didn’t desire, turning into something as ugly as the concept it represented.
Jason had never wanted this and yet, here he was, in an elementary school with children who were entirely too young to deserve the bullets that would rip through them.
Tim’s face turned towards the school, wondering when it would come and if it was inevitable yet.
Gods and godlings could not interfere with the events of humanity, but sometimes, they could very subtly change the course. Jason’s presence here could be enough. It could also not be.
“How close is it?” asked Tim as Jason came within speaking distance.
His older brother shrugged one of his tiny shoulders. “Too close. The police are working but… they do not recognise the tragedy on their hands and are still… they are waffling about which boy it is.”
Jason’s gaze flicked towards Tim, and he hesitated. Tim knew what he was going to ask before he asked it, and Tim already knew he would give it. Although he did feel human death the same way that Jason did, they were siblings.
“I can give them a hint. Close off a few of their incorrect theories,” Tim said with a dip of his head.
“Thank you,” said Jason, relief thick in his voice, though they both knew it could all be for naught.
“Just make sure it’s nothing too big, Tim,” Dick warned, his voice a little harsher. “You know that Clark and Diana are always watching.”
“I know. I know. I’m not born last century,” Tim snapped back, though he knew Dick was only speaking from experience. He knew better than all of them what drawing the attention of the rest of the Trinity could bring. “It will be small. There will be barely a trace for Clark to find.”
“Good,” Dick warned. “Make sure of it.”
Tim nearly snapped something to Dick about not giving him orders, but he bit his tongue. It wasn’t the time or the place, and there wasn’t really a purpose.
“Why are you both here?” asked Jason, jarring Tim from his thoughts.
“Bruce texted me and told me to bring you home,” said Dick, showing Jason the message on his phone. Jason squinted as he read the words.
“That’s… we’re out of schedule.”
They were. It was a weird time for them to be due home, especially with the brisk tone of the message.
“Something’s wrong,” said Tim, finally saying the words he knew must also be floating in his brothers’ heads. “Something that requires us to be at the Manor and close to Bruce. Something that would cause him to be nervous about being far away from him.”
He looked between Dick and Jason, narrowing his eyes and trying to see if either of them would have an answer to his question. Or perhaps a confession.
Neither of their faces revealed anything, though, and Tim wasn’t sure how to take it. He knew both of them could be excellent liars, but would they lie to him? They all had their issues, but lying was not generally one of them, and if they weren’t lying, then, what could scare Bruce so much?
Questions, questions, and apparently, Tim wasn’t going to get the answers here.
They would have to go to the Manor.