miss maggie (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bossymarmalade) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thejusticelounge2013-07-28 02:17 pm
bossymarmalade) wrote in thejusticelounge2013-07-28 02:17 pm
contact
Kyle showed up at the appointed time, back in Queen Tower and headed straight down into the sub-sub-sub basement where the HSR awaited. He went into the control room again, mostly just to brace his arms against the console and flip on the power to the HSR, bathing it in a dim light. It looked as perfect as the first time Bruce sent him in there.
To say that Bruce Wayne—Batman— never got nervous would be a mistake. It wasn’t that he never felt the fringes of his nerves give, fray in the wind with certain situations, or with certain people. It’s just that, unlike any of his colleagues, his peers, Bruce just doesn’t let it show.
Still, there were tells: the bob of his knee as he turned in his chair, the way he flicked his wrist, a bit too hard, to look at the time. The way his shoulders hunched as he moved over towards the elevator, located on the long stem of the E shaped hallway, gave him away and he pushed the tension down when Kyle emerged from the HSR itself, at the end of the hall, nodding at him: "Is she here yet?"
Kyle noticed absolutely nada of Bruce’s quirks when he arrived and instead gave the older man a chipper grin. "Who? The HSR?" Kyle asked dumbly. “Someone else is coming here? Kate?"
Bruce shook his head, and looked past the Lantern, to the elevator as it dinged shut again. He frowned a touch, and looked back to Kyle. "Kate?" The older man mused, out loud, unsure of what Kyle meant by that statement. The knit in between his brows grows.
Kyle stared back at him and ventured another guess. "…Diana? Is she who here yet? I don’t know who she is."
Bruce folded his arms over his chest and stated, voice curled over the consonants and vowels of the woman’s name carefully, almost tenderly. “Mar’i."
"Oh!" Kyle threw up his hands and then curled his shoulders in again, tilting his head in utter confusion now.
"Mar’i? She’s not here? Bruce you know I’d do anything for the - for, for the good of the team," Kyle said, glancing at the HSR screen and then back at Bruce, “But I just showed up, same as you."
A few floors above the HSR chamber, Mar’i landed on the rooftop of Queen Tower with a soft crunch, heels pressing into the gravel surrounding the helipad. She pulled out her phone for what could be the fifth or sixth time at least, staring down at Bruce’s texts, trying to decipher what Bruce would need at Queen Tower of all places.
After a moment, she tucked her phone back into her skirt’s built-in pocket. At least Bruce had given her a reason to come to Star City, she thought with a considerable amount of warmth, looking out across the rooftop to a nearby penthouse building. She presses her access code into the entryway, then entered the lift, punching another code to be taken down to the floor Bruce had requested in his texts.
Bruce nodded and watched as the elevator reached the top floor—the single slivers of light at the top of the threshold let Bruce know where ground level was—before they began to descend again. He glanced to Kyle then, briefly, before he nodded and explained:
”..what we’ve been working on," his voice hardened a touch, a hand lifting from where he had folded his arms, to gesture behind him, at the HSR’s control room, behind them.
"—part of it, it’s for her." He turned, slightly, to look at the Lantern, just over his shoulder. “I wasn’t sure if telling you that from the beginning would have changed your desire to help me."
Kyle blinked and replied. “Okay." It was a drawn out acquiescence, one that neutrally prompted Bruce to explain more. Either talking, showing, whatever. It wasn’t that Kyle didn’t trust him; hell, Kyle couldn’t wait to get here again - he just wanted to know as much as he could before he even started to formulate any opinion. So far, Kyle was complacent about all of this.
The elevator dinged for each floor it passed, and it took Mar’i a moment to realize the numbers were suddenly out of order, like she was entering a set of floors that weren’t following the order. She choked back a laugh, imagining Bruce feverishly locking off floors to elevator access for all his Bat-secrets. There was a final ding, and the doors pulled apart, revealing a long corridor empty except for polished military-grade steel floors and walls.
"The hell," she muttered, looking down at the only door available to her. After a short walk down to that door, then another, then another after that, and now she was following the instructions Bruce had sent like a Google Maps directions page, she entered the same room as the two men, face already contorting in confusion.
"We got Doomsday chained up in here or what…" she trailed off, looking up at the machine visible to her through the open door. “Woah…"
The Lantern two-finger saluted Mar’i to say hi, and suddenly remembered being in the HSR, asking Bruce about utilizing Mar’i to amp the power of the machine. Bruce’s response had been so terse. Was whatever he’d been planning for Mar’i and the use of the HSR been in the Bat’s mind even then?
Well duh of COURSE, Rayner, Kyle reprimanded himself. The guy probably keeps calendars for his calendars.
Bruce’s nerves flare up again. Good. It was a good sign for him, for them, for him to have felt that way, it kept him on his toes, and he looked to Mar’i, arms still folded over his chest. He looked to Kyle, but only briefly, before he turned the heavy blue of his gaze to Mar’i.
"I’ve been working on something, for the past few months," Bruce began, his articulation heavy and careful. “It might not work, but I—" He shook his head, and stood, giving Mar’i and Kyle his back as he began to draw up the charts he had been using the last time he and Kyle had worked in the HSR. “I needed to see if it could work."
At this point Kyle figured it was best to stay silent and let Bruce talk. He glanced at Mar’i - just once - and realized that she was as much in the dark about what was going on as he was. Possibly even more; which made Kyle shift slightly, moving slightly away from the two star-crossed relatives.
Mari’ blinked. Twice. “Do I need to…" she looked at Kyle, but he was already moving away, clearly confused like her. “Can I help? Is it solar-powered?"
Bruce shook his head. “No, it’s all done." He slowly stood upright, his spine unfurling, until he was at his full height, all six feet and nearly three inches towering over them as he turned to look at Mar’i, at Kyle, and then, Mar’i again. It’s odd, the gentleness of his expression juxtaposed by the looming presence of him, then, as he exhaled once, twice and then spoke: “I believe.. I’ve found the Earth you came from, Mar’i."
Suddenly the room was ten times smaller, and it felt like there were far more than two sets of eyes focused on her. Mar’i swallowed a gulp of air, staring up into Bruce’s eyes—her grandfather’s eyes, only so much younger—and released it slowly, in little puffs.
"But…but Choi said," she looked at Kyle again, eyes crinkling up in confusion, before spinning back to look at Bruce. “Could.. could I go home?"
For a moment Kyle felt a bolt of panic run down his spine as that question came out of Mar’i’s mouth and his first instinct was almost to blurt out ‘No!’ — but he held his tongue, folding his arms tight against his chest as he shifted his weight back and forth on his feet and stared at Bruce.
Bruce ripped his gaze away from Mar’i’s face, because it was much too difficult then, to look at her and feel the weight of her eyes on him. He looked back to the screen, where he had pulled up a series of schematics: for a moment, it looked like a coil, tightly wound on itself, almost like a Slinky. But as the seconds passed, the coil expanded, becoming individual spheres—separate, large and small; planets, really, but sans-topography, no oceans, no rivers, no mountains—they began to eliminate, disappear, one by one, as Bruce spoke.
"I don’t know," he admitted, but without the gravity normally woven into his speech. “I’m not even sure that it is your Earth, but I—" He brought his gaze back to Mar’i. “I isolated a molecule of carbon from your DNA, Mar’i." He began to speak in the low, tempered cadence that any of the children—his children— would recognize: the science of it, the way he had done what he had, laying out the tapestry of thought, in case they ever needed to hearken back to it, in his absence, they would be able to do.
"Down to the last mole, the atomic weight was nearly identical." He looks to the graph on the window that doubled as a screen; it’s gone opaque, the spheres still eliminating themselves as he speaks. “Except.. then, suddenly, it wasn’t."
Kyle, quite honestly didn’t understand what Bruce was saying, or showing; but he was paying attention to why he felt so discombobulated - it was the way Bruce was talking. Kyle knew there were periods where Batman wasn’t always one-hundred percent stoic Batman; but this level of.. familiarity he was using with Mar’i was very new to Kyle. He looked over at Mar’i, trying to gauge this situation and what it meant for her.
Mar’i moved so quickly to Bruce’s side she didn’t even realize she’d moved at all. Only when her arm brushed his as she stared off into the map of little planets, appearing and disappearing like little fireflies on the screen, did she realize how fast she must have moved.
"What does that mean?" And that she was holding her breath. “C-Choi," she stopped, breathing hard, “Choi said he tried to trace the chronal energy that was on me when I first got here, but he couldn’t pinpoint its origin.
The top of her shoulder pressed into his bicep even harder as she stares at all these charts, graphs, projections, how long had Bruce been working on this?
"What does that mean?" she repeated, her voice still quivering.
Bruce shook his head, glancing down at her, his expression hard.
"He wouldn’t have been able to use chronal energy without some sort of displacement device to capture it," Bruce explained, patiently, and then, his voice softened at the sight of her cheek, pressed against her hair, the high apple of it. "..I tried doing that, too."
He looked back to the screen, diverting his attention away. “But.. using the weight of your carbon mole, relative with the pull of our Earth’s gravity and in comparison to how our carbon related, I was able to transmute that information, the way your cells.." He looked across the screen, searched for the correct word. “Vibrate.. into something useable, trackable," his voice evens out, calm and level.
Bruce knows this, the realm of numbers and logic, easily. How his heart twists in his chest at the thought of sending this young woman, just barely out of girlhood, some far-away Dick’s baby girl away from them.. away from him.. Bruce didn’t understand that. Not yet. Perhaps, not ever.
Thank God for science, then.
”..I used it to design an algorithmic pattern that I could calibrate—tack on to any transmission I sent out, searching for your—" He doesn’t say the word, somehow, he can’t, really, and he’s thankful for having the screen to look to, focus his attention. His hands paused and he turned back, around to look at the young woman, leaning his weight towards her a touch, to anchor her, and nodded, mostly to himself. Bruce’s expression sets into a mask of sorts, devoid of emotion.
"And in my search, I found something," He glanced at Kyle, then back at the screen, where the planets had stopped eliminating themselves, and now, only one remained, a ghostly, silvery sphere of identical size, geography, characteristics.
"Granted, the signature is ..more advanced," Bruce frowned a bit, before he shook his head, nearly smirking as he hummed, thoughtful: “But, I figured that in twenty years or so, the ..nature of my mathematical would, naturally, be.. older. More.. mature." Bruce looked to Mar’i, and allowed his meaning to settle in, before murmuring, quietly: "..they’re looking for you, Mar’i."
With those few words, it felt like her head exploded. A swarm of emotions—emotions she hadn’t allowed herself to fully feel over the last six months—clashing upon her, hitting her in waves. Her hands started shaking so hard she had to shove them down on the console, careful of the buttons, gripping at the cool polyfiber edge like it was the only thing saving her.
She opened her mouth once, closed it, then opened it again, but no sound emerged. She didn’t have to ask who ‘they’ were, even if Bruce didn’t know himself. She could already see them, three generations of men pouring over computers and graphs, speaking three different languages natively but all of them saying her name again and again.
"Oh, X’Hal," she finally muttered, but she couldn’t find the words to say anything else.
Bruce turned, then, to shield her a bit from Kyle’s sight. Not because he feels a threat from the Lantern, but because what he says next, is really meant only for her. If Kyle aids them, fine, if he declines, also, fine. Slowly, the trepidation evident in the sluggish rise of his hand, he settles his touch against her shoulder. "..Do you want to attempt contact?"
Mari looked up at him, eyes already shiny despite her best attempts to hold it together. “W-will it be okay?" she asked in return, mirroring his soft tone, still looking at him.
Bruce nodded and squeezed her shoulder, once, before he looked to Kyle. His expression is heavy, and with a careful bob of his chin, he spoke.
"You understand now, why I couldn’t be forthcoming with all the details.." Bruce explained, gesturing to the opaque screen, the HSR on the other side. “It wasn’t all mine to tell." He looked back at the Lantern, jaw setting into a tight clench. “Are you still willing to help?"
Watching as Bruce turned - no, curled more - in against Mar’i’s frame, hearing their soft tones to each other, Kyle finally put two and two together. He looked back towards the HSR itself, the womb where Kyle had last been, filling it with his own energy and charging it.. impregnating it with amplified powers. Bruce needed to see if it would work. That was why he’d called him.
The Lantern slowly unfolded his arms and let them hang at his sides, watching the two, who suddenly seemed almost illogically but yet absolutely related. Whatever that meant, in any sense of the term. His ring flickered and his Green Lantern uniform started from his feet, sliding in a border of bright green light up his body and down along his arms. It finished off with his crabmask. It was pointless, given his currently audience; and yet Kyle felt relieved when it slid over his face and blocked his eyes from their intense, almost overwhelming range of emotions.
Kyle nodded once.
"Yep. I’ll go to into the HSR," he said, brief and all-business and then he stepped out of the control room, stalking through the corridor and ending up in the womb of the machine.
Bruce turned towards the machine as he began to pull up the screens he’d need, the same set of charts and graphs, glancing at Mar’i, sidelong, before he looked down, past the screen and into the HSR.
Mar’i finally drew her eyes away from Bruce back to Kyle. For a moment, she smiled at him, and it’s was a sad smile, a terrified smile, a please help me I don’t know what to do smile, but then he’d already gone to the HSR and all she could do was turn back to Bruce.
Her fingers latched onto the sleeve of the closest wrist, clutching at a small portion of the ribbed fabric, skin never meeting his skin. “It won’t hurt Kyle will it?" she asked, and her voice came out more like a child than an adult.
"Same as the last time," Bruce stated, as the plates lit up, bioluminescent blue as Kyle moved inside the cavernous, womb-like room. Under his fingertips, the configuration the HSR had been in shifted, fluidly, recognizing the power source that was at that moment, named Kyle Rayner. It would have been disconcerting, if he’d been anyone other than who he was. Nodding, he looked down, at Kyle, and depressed the intercom button.
"Start up, the way you did last time, Kyle." He shook his head, and turned to Mar’i, answering her finally. “No." He felt the corners of his mouth tilt, the tiniest bit, attempting to afford her a touch of comfort. "..I’ve taken every precaution to make sure he’ll be fine."
With the literal, physical disconnect between him and Mar’i and Bruce, Kyle felt more focused and able to corral his roiling feelings into connecting with the HSR. He didn’t need any of Bruce’s schematics or graphs. All he had to do was plug himself in and the HSR would do the rest.
An image of Mar’i’s expression before he’d left the control room suddenly caught up with him, he was so busy trying to NOT see them that he hadn’t realized she’d been trying to express something to him, right then. She was smiling, hopeful but tremulous; and Kyle tasted soju against his tongue before he almost forcibly packed all of that away. For another time. Right now it was him and the HSR.
Mar’i nodded for a moment, still clutching at his sleeve as his hands moved about the keyboard, her arm moving softly with it, unable to let go for the longest time. She was still reeling from all this, all the things Bruce said and all the things that had been done without her and all the things she wanted to say, but instead of saying anything, she simply released Bruce’s sleeve, muttering a soft, repeating: “Okay, okay."
"Hey, time for our second date," Kyle murmured with a crooked smile, floating up into the air but forgoing the Jesus pose this time. They were too familiar now, beyond all that stuff. He did close his eyes though, no longer needing to ground himself with human faces. The HSR had a life of her own and Kyle poured his will into that, slow and steady.
On the screen, the schematics dropped down, into a low corner as satellite feeds are brought up: it seemed that the placement of the HSR in Queen Tower wasn’t a coincidence, either. The curved scimitar halves amplify the signal, the Watchtower bouncing it even further into space, and sooner rather than later, strings and strings of cipher-laden data filled the screen as Kyle began to glow, beyond the monitor.
Bruce, his eyes on the screen, on the data, slowly settled into the chair at the console, spine erect and held immobile as he worked. He tilts his head, his hands moving over the keyboard as he begins to type, nodding to himself as he monitors the power Kyle is emitting, how it translates to the signal he is boosting through the Watchtower.
"More, Kyle," he stated, suddenly, but not loudly. He knows, after the last time, that he doesn’t need to speak at more than a whisper for Kyle to hear him. Besides, his attention is too focused, to centered on what he’s doing as he types, the motion nearly feverish. He murmurs something, to himself, his brow knitting as he tilts his head, looking at the windows that are brought up. As he opens up applications, written and rewritten a few dozen times by now, all by him, before against the grain, the filmy white, a screen emerges against the window, backlit by Kyle’s green glow in the HSR.
Kyle’s mind blanked over as he stopped thinking about anything else except the machine. He’d become a living battery, nothing more or less. His only hint to any realization that he was still an independent and sentient being were whispers, coming from another human. Low and husky and brushing up against Kyle’s consciousness, making him react like hitting against raw open nerves - "More, Kyle," - the whispers said, and Kyle obeyed.
The image didn’t pixelate, like Earth-based transmissions did, nor did it come in the hashes, splices of image and sound that most near-space communiques might. Instead, as Bruce watched, his head tilted to the side, as the image on the center of the screen materialized, as if it were being lifted from the bottom of a river. Sediment and grain fell away from the darkness, the edges of metal piping in the background, a steel staircase came into view.
The first thought Bruce had, is that it was the Cave, but no, there is sunlight streaming in, now, that illuminated steel infrastructure, and glass. Glass walls, glass windows. Potted greenery in the corner, a glittering cascade of water to the left, and then, staring back at him suddenly, another man. Bruce managed to contain the arching of his eyebrows.
There, across the woven fabric of space and time, another Earth’s Bruce sat, his posture straight and erect, and met the unamused stare of his younger, alternative counterpart with a heavy smirk. The image strengthened, and he spoke, sarcasm crackling in his dry voice: "..at least we won’t waste time with exposition."
Mar’i was already imagining what it’d be like to be home. Lian and Avia and all the others laughing, hugging her, telling her what she’d missed. Uncle Ryand’r coming to see her, pulling her into a nearly painful hug. Her father and grandfather waiting for her, Ibn.. Ibn.. She stopped herself, a strange thought coming into her mind.
She didn’t know how long this would take, but if she was going to be leaving she should at least.. she pulled her phone out and opened the contact list, her favorites already pulled to the top. Her thumb lingered over a single name for a moment and she was just about to press call when she saw the image pull up on Bruce’s screen. Her phone hit the floor—she didn’t even know she had dropped it—and she found herself speaking.
“Grampa?”
Vaguely, Kyle heard Mar’i speak. It was not Bruce’s urgings that made him open his eyes, but that one small word from Mar’i, the waver in her voice sounding like a tidal wave breaking against rock. In a way it felt very much like that imagery - as Kyle opened his eyes to see his world and then look upon the other, simultaneously and visibly existing. A world far darker than theirs. He wasn’t unfamiliar with multi-verses, but this one took on a whole new meaning of ‘alternate universe’. What was especially curious to him was the tinge of green around the edges of his eyes, like a frame. He wondered if it looked like that to everyone else and then recalled Mar’i once telling him that Alan was the only Lantern in her world. Kyle smiled a bit sadly and poured more will into the HSR, with an almost lazy assurance. He would stretch this out for Mar’i for as long as he could manage, even…well. Even if that meant saying goodbye.
Ibn al Xuffasch rose, slowly, from where he tended the golden-blush orchid on the landing upstairs— one of her favorites, and one that he’d nurtured without fail because he knew for certain that one day she’d return to it, to him. The transmission in the open foyer downstairs seemed to manifest from nowhere as his father spoke calmly to whomever operated the source of it, and the melodic voice he heard reply made him descend down the staircase with slow, deliberate steps as if he were in a dream, the heavy green train of his traveling cloak trailing over the stairs behind him.
The older man, the older Bruce’s expression softened, incredibly so, upon seeing the young woman, and the tremor that passed through his body—even with the braces that laced his arms, his back.. the younger Bruce noted these, his own expression shifting at the sight of them—was visible, even across the transmission. His tension. His shock at seeing her, alive and well. He didn’t rise from his seat, but the tension was there, as if he might do stand at any moment; he spoke, the nearly hawkish focus of his dark blue stare settling on her face, and nowhere else. His Korean was nearly flawless: “자두 꽃, are you well?"
Mar’i started to open her mouth, but the near-sob that emerged caused her to instead clasp a hand over it. Tears welled at the edge of her eyes, almost sizzling against the heat pouring off her cheeks as she nodded once, then again, carefully lowering her shaking hand back to the console. "네," she began, before switching back into English, “yes, Grampa, I’m fine."
Ibn moved more quickly now, one hand rising to unclasp the gold band around the collar of the cloak, freeing himself of its weight as it pooled on the stairs in his wake. She spoke again, and he knew he wasn’t suffering some demonic hallucination designed to torment him. “Mar’i," he breathed as he halted near his father’s shoulder. His dark eyes were brightened from within, but he maintained his calm manner of speech otherwise. “Oh, Mar’i, habibati. How sweet to see your face once more."
Bruce didn’t lift his eyes from the screen, even as he monitored Kyle’s levels in relation to the HSR, and the transmission. His expression was knit, into a patchwork of lines and flat planes, that only deepened when he heard how soft his own voice—that was.. strange, but it only took a moment for Bruce to compartmentalize it, store it away for later—lowered, tender and caring, on the other end of the transmission. He cared—no, that man, that Bruce, loved Mar’i, and a perverse sense of jealousy flared in him, tamped down by anger, and then—then—
Bruce made the mistake of looking up, pupils contracting to pinpricks when he saw the green travelling cloak, the flash of black hair—he nearly opened his mouth to warn them of who was behind them—and then he spoke. Called her by name. Bruce’s visage went pallid, the color draining from the sculpted, angular edges of his cheekbones, until he looked like he might be ill. His hands still, entirely, and he looked to Mar’i, then, standing beside him, blinking as if seeing her for the first time. He swallowed, forcing his eyes back to his work, pupils nearly vibrating as he willed his fingers to type. But.. Type what?
Suddenly, the monitor focused on the Older Bruce’s world filled with loud yelling and the sound of frantic footsteps.
“MAR’I?!" a voice called out, and suddenly Bruce and Ibn were being pushed aside by a middle-aged Korean man with salt and pepper hair. “MAR’I, IS THAT YOU?!"
His face leaned in, temporarily blocking the others, and he mirrored her clasped hand over his mouth, a stream of Korean spurting out between his fingers. He turned to Bruce, still talking a thousand miles a minute, hands motioning frantically to the young woman on the other side of the screen.
Kyle’s eyes widened and twitched when the second person appeared beside the older Bruce. It was.. Damian. Except not Damian. He was so surprised to see the older Damian, he jolted slightly as a flash of something skittered across the back of Kyle’s mind - it didn’t originate from the HSR, but from inside his own subconscious. The thing felt nauseating and dragged behind it a lump of memories. Memories that weren’t his, but were mined out of another, by that something, when it owned his body and mind; and then discarded these alien memories within Kyle’s own remembrances - like unwanted trash - when it was vanquished.
The Lantern clenched his jaw tight for the first time stepping foot in the HSR, his constant swell of green light power adjusting into will AND effort, energy that Kyle poured on to keep those alien memories at bay and keep himself and the HSR connected as one, for as long as it took. ‘For as long as it took, dammit Rayner. You owe her that much.’
The older Bruce shifted, the braces nearly a second-skin for him—his mouth twitched, should he warn his younger counterpart? Should he explain where the first major break would happen? What it would feel like, and hope that the message gets through his stubborn, thick-head?—and looked to Duk-Ga, reaching up to set a hand on his shoulder, as if to calm him. The message is clear: let her speak, even as his hands moved across the console, mirroring his younger counter-part’s, the minute flicks of his fingers nearly identical. His mouth twisted, amused.
Ibn clasped his hands at his back as Mar’i’s father nudged his way in front of him, head tilted and eyes soft as he focused upon her heartbreakingly beautiful visage upon the screen. His fingers twitched where they were joined, desperate to reach out for her.
As more and more people crammed into the monitor before her, Mar’i gradually broke into sobs. It started off with her grandfather, stoic-faced and warm-eyed, then…then him. Her lips pulled apart, and she looked up at the man Damian Wayne would never grow into. Golden eyes where Damian’s were a green-grey, angled cheekbones where Damian’s were soft. No wonder she had been able to push him so far back into her mind, that she had been able to see that little boy so many times a week and not just break into tears. No wonder she had been able to…she couldn’t finish that train of thought because suddenly her father was leaning into the screen, eyes searching her face for signs of injury or abuse.
She reached up instinctively, her hand trying to touch the monitor that was just out of reach. "아빠…" she began again, a fresh sob issuing from her lips. “Are you all…" she swallowed heavily, “are you okay?”
Ibn broke into a smile at the question, his high shoulders falling as his fond amusement left him in a heavy exhale. “We are well, my darling, aside from searching for you every waking second of the day. And now you’ve found us." He stepped closer to the screen, the long fingers of one hand stretching forward to almost touch it.
Bruce, still at the console, shifted as his right hand drifted from the buttons to curl in, against his thigh. He clenched it, released, clenched again, the rows of his teeth coming to a fine, firm set against each other. So hard, he knew, it was shifting the placement of the molars, his jaw flaring as Duk-Ga, Mar’i’s father, appeared upon the screen.
Bruce watched, all from his peripheral vision, as the other Bruce set his hand, a smooth, easy, practised motion, against the young man’s shoulder. The sound of the Korean—Bruce knows the language, of course he does—mirroring his own Dick’s frantic cadence. Bruce watched, the dark blue of his eyes bottoming out, pupils flaring, and rather than it being something to warm him, it is eerie and discomfiting to witness. His hand clenched again, and he turned his face, to the intercom input, voice low as he spoke: “Bring it back up, Kyle."
Duk-Ga turned at the feel of the hand on his shoulder, eyes already sharp with anger. After all they had been through, after all this time she had been gone, for Bruce—for the man who knew him better than anyone else—to try and calm him? There were still wounds between them, open gashes still rotten around the seams, but Mar’i had always been the thing they could agree on.
From the moment she came into the world and Bruce held her for hours while Duk-Ga and Kory slept, to the day Kory left and Mar’i cried for days and Bruce had had food delivered to the house because Duk-Ga couldn’t even remember how to do anything besides hold his daughter and sob into her dark locks, to the day his baby—their baby—was ripped away from both of them. The bonds the two men had repaired after that long exhausting battle—all for her. And now, for Bruce to hold him back.
He made an angry noise under his breath, but as he looked into his adopted father’s eyes, it quickly melted into fear and anxiety. ‘What if she leaves again?’ his eyes asked Bruce when his mouth couldn’t.
The older Bruce shook his head, once, at the sight of the fear, the anxiety in Duk-Ga’s eyes. Even seated, crippled, the strength that he emanates is coming off in waves, sheets of it. Confidence. Know-how. What if she leaves again? his son asks, and his mouth curling, the older Bruce squeezed, his thumb pressing into the hard, proud rise of Duk-Ga’s shoulder, giving his answer plainly, as honest and as true as anything ever was from his side of things. Then, we will find her again. He dropped his hand, bringing his gaze to his younger counterpart.
"Bruce," he stated, his brow quirking as he said it, wondering if the other man would respond. He continued, attempting to not sound too condescending. “I’m going to adjust the sequence you’re using, open a free port for transmission.. And.. ’Kyle’?" He inquired, head tilted to the side a touch, hands sliding over his own console.
Mar’i’s face suddenly crumpled from tears into confusion.
"Transmission?" she asked, looking between the two Bruces. “What are you going to transmit?" A sudden fear hit her like a wave, and she realized that the answer might very well be herself.
She looked into the HSR room, Kyle’s energy pulsating a bright green that reflected back into her eyes. Their gazes met through the glass for the briefest moment, and suddenly she realized that she might not want to go home just yet. ‘Kyle,’ she thought to herself as she looked at him, staring at his form floating in the air. ‘What should I do?’
The older Bruce looked up and over at the screen to Mar’i, a frown rumpling his features as he brought his gaze to the younger Bruce, the lines deepening.
Bruce lifted his hand, and brought it to Mar’i’s back, pressing his touch to her spine, and shook his head.
"My math is.. in need of modification," he murmured, quietly, the words stilted at first. Then, rapidly, in the face of her distress, becoming softer, less harsh. "..he’s.. adjusting it." The conclusion is punctuated with a tiny quirk of his own eyebrow, meeting his elder counterpart’s eyes for a moment, smirking at him.
Ibn looked down to his own father, to the younger reflection of him rippling into the foyer across fathomless time and space. His gaze returned to Mar’i, the first vestiges of uncertainty beginning to seep past his careful composure.
"We are going to bring you home," he clarified softly; there could be no question that it’s what she wanted too, what she’d dreamed of since the moment she was torn from the world to which she belonged. He glanced down at his father again. “Aren’t we?"
Kyle listened to all the voices going on around him, warbles and tones and languages that spanned near-impossible borders, until one voice cut through the rest. It wasn’t like the others because it was in his mind, not filtered through the HSR. It was Mar’i and when Kyle looked at her she was staring back at him, straight at him.
He smiled at her and somewhere in the back of his mind, that mass of alien memories unfurled just a bit like shy petals under a tentative sun. His mask dissolved so he could look at Mar’i, and Kyle thought, ‘Mar’i, you need to make the choice. It’s what you knew would have to happen.’ He was quiet for a while, because - it was one of those Catch 22s and they both knew it. Mar’i barely had any time to even think, never mind make choices that would affect her ENTIRE life…but in Kyle’s experience, sometimes that was the best time to make a decision, on one’s own pure instinct. ‘It’s yours to make! No one else’s here or there, just yours. We all lo—’
Kyle bit back hard into his jaw, snapping off the sentence and crushing the side of his tongue with his molars. The violent movement drew blood and effectively silenced him. He abruptly turned away from Mar’i, maximizing his full attention on the HSR. She was a jealous thing, perhaps, but Kyle didn’t mind. He could feel his ring strain - his body straining even more - but he didn’t mind one bit.
Mar’i looked up at Kyle, her head ringing as his words reverberated back and forth in her brain. Her brows furrowed, everything else temporarily forgotten as she listened to him, trying to figure out why his lips weren’t moving, her body turning against her will to face him. She took a few steps forward, arms wrapping around herself as she shuddered involuntarily. “Kyle,” she said aloud, voice quivering, “Kyle, is that you? Why do you sound like Roy?”
The older Bruce nodded at his son. His posture unflagging—really, even before the braces, he remembered, looking across the rip of time and space at his younger counterpart..this was the way he always sat, when he did—his hands moved across the inlaid screens on his end, and nodded again. "자두 꽃," he called to Mar’i, quietly, using only her pet name before he swapped Korean for English. "..you need to remove everything, in order for you to come across.” He paused, carefully manicuring his speech, no shame or personal upheaval in his words: he sets the tone for any reactions, from anyone, with how he says what he does next, even his speech defensive of the young woman. “Your clothing.. all your jewelry—"
An ovoid of green light appeared behind the older Bruce in the other world, parts of it folding inward as the form of the Green Lantern folded outward, gaining speed with each spiked segment creating the substance of the man.
When the shape of him was full, complete and solid in bulky green armour, Alan Scott stepped forward, eyes on the screen, body already in motion. Bruce, to the side of him, his attention still on Mar’i only turned when the Lantern’s hand slid across the buttons in front of him, when he uttered the word that stilled all motion, on both sides of the universe:
”..Parallax."
"It’s Parallax, “ Alan repeated, with no elaboration, in a tone that sounded more as if he were mentioning that he’d ordered his tea with honey and not milk. “We’re shutting this down." Green hatchmarks began to appear over the control console, sinking into them. Alan looked down at Bruce, playing no attention to Ibn or Duk-Ga. “I’m shutting it down."
“ALAN!" Kyle yelled out, mouth spewing blood and spittle since he hadn’t even used his actual voice in a while. He’d been relying on the HSR to communicate for him. “ALAN, NO! JUST A BIT LONGER, ALAN!"
Bruce, the younger Bruce, jerked upright at the appearance of the other Lantern, his eyebrows nearly clicking together as he pushed himself forward, against the edge of the console, hands flying to the buttons.
"Parallax." It nearly sounded like a question, leaving the man’s dry lips, mumbled and Bruce shook his head, the colour draining from his face, twice in less than an hour. A record, really. Bruce rose, the seat skidding out from under him, bounced against the wall behind them, drifting into the threshold of the room, at the abruptness of the motion, how quick the man had risen.
Alan looked up at the sound of Kyle’s voice, the green chickenwire netting and ensnaring the console dissolving away.
"I am Guardian here, monster," he said, in the same conversational tone. The edges of his mask sputtered purple, mirroring Mar’i’s hair, then solidified back into green. “You speak with Kyle Rayner’s voice, but I see inside you. And I can’t allow you to have this world, even if you’ve concealed yourself from your companions in that one."
Ibn al Xuffasch surveyed the Lantern with seeming placidity, but the strain in his voice made his fear apparent.
"Father," he began, and still the title was a hesitant one even after the last few years. “Can we retrieve her safely regardless of what he claims?" Some risks were worth the rewards. His heart hammered, torn between his desire to hold her again and to ensure her safety. If some battery-powered demon were unleashed in the process, so be it.
The older Bruce did not stand, but his hands continue to move, almost in tandem with the other Bruce’s own motions, even as Batman’s voice, hard and amber-raw, boomed across the universe, at the younger man, all the raw fury of every mistake, every. single. one., turned inside and out at the younger Bruce: “You idiot.”
"Mr. Scott?" Mar’i breathed, and then he said the name and every nerve in her body went stiff with fear. She could feel it breathing on her neck invisibly the same way it did the day it attacked them all, the day it crawled into her mind and tore out her deepest fears like they were loose teeth in the back of her mouth.
Her head turned in time to see Kyle spit up blood and saliva. “Kyle?" she called out, but her voice was nearly gone with terror.
"Parallax?" Kyle echoed in confusion, and the alien memories opened up in the back of his mind, full and complete as he twisted to stare at Mar’i. That chittering, that something in the back of his mind, the chittering and skitters and overwhelming onslaught of Mar’i’s personal experiences and memories from her real world, that Parallax dug into and viciously tore at like tendons of her psyche.
"NO!" He didn’t want those memories, they were forced out of Mar’i without her permission, and when Parallax abandoned them in his mind, Kyle made himself forget. Because they weren’t his to remember. It wasn’t right.
"NO!!" He yelled angrily, with more force, but it was unclear who he was yelling at.
Bruce gritted his teeth as this all happened, as his older counterpart raged at him, but understood the man’s tone, the statement therein, because yes, his hands grew steady against the harshness, yes, even as Mar’i spoke, the world shuddering around and against them, yes, the darkness in the older man’s voice steeled him, brought everything into focus.
Kyle shouted. Yes, idiot, Parallax. Parallax. Bruce’s eyes narrowed, fingers flying as the data began to jump from one screen to the other. Bruce moved his head as fast as he could, back and forth, the motion bordering on.. well, frantic.
“Kyle!" He half-shouted, down at the comm. “Kyle, pull the power back, but don’t cut out all at once!"
The older Bruce growled at Ibn, at Duk-Ga. “If we’re going to get her back, you both need to get in there, NOW." He pointed off screen, no doubt, at a similar chamber to the HSR. He brought his gaze back, to his granddaughter, his voice still rough with anger, but sublimated, pushed into a far corner. “Mar’i, you cannot be wearing anything when you go into the chamber—goddamnit, Alan!" He shoved the Lantern away from the controls with a hand.
Ibn snarled as the transmission clearly came into danger of being cut by the loss of the Lantern’s channel. “Leave the conduit!" he ordered across the screen, pushing past his and Mar’i’s fathers, and it was easy enough for him to refer to this human life that meant nothing to him as a mere cog in the machine that would return Mar’i to him. “Father, bring her back now!"
The older Bruce pointed, and rose from his chair, finally, the braces grating, a foreshadowing grate of metal against metal, as he shouted in Arabic. "GO!”
Son Duk-Ga tensed up, hands slamming onto the Elder Bruce’s own console, eyes locked onto his daughter, slowly being pulled away from the screen by something unseen from his vantage point.
"Bruce," he said suddenly, spinning, “Bruce, she looks terrified. What the hell is happening!?"
Ibn rushed into the chamber without any thought of what it might mean for himself, centering himself in a hub similar to the one occupied by the Lantern in the other world.
Alan Scott, almost nauseating in its force and vibrance, hummed loudly with lime-green energy.
"THIS IS FOLLY," he intoned, voice infused with the power of the Lantern buried inside his body. “I CANNOT ALLOW THIS, BATMAN." He turned his attention to the otherworld Lantern, dark green rimming his eyes. “I CANNOT ALLOW PARALLAX TO TAINT US."
Mar’i couldn’t hear her grandfather even if she wanted to. There was a voice in her head, now, and it was Kyle and it was Roy and it was Ibn and Duk-Ga and both Bruces and it was her mother, of all people, and it was speaking four different languages at least, and it was growling at her to come back to him.
She felt her shoulders roll into a dry-heave, a hand slapping up to catch at side of her mouth, the other wrapping around her stomach as intense fear ripped through her abdominal muscles.
"Kyle," she called out in a near-croak, tears rolling down her cheeks as she felt herself starting to stumble. “Kyle, you have to let go."
But instead, Kyle heard Bruce yelling “Full power now" in addition to something else, some piddly specifics that were irrelevant to Kyle. He’d heard all he needed. Bruce wanted full power and Kyle was already aghast at the nerve of this Alan, this Green Lantern who wasn’t even connected to the Central Battery - telling HIM that he was a monster and Parallax was still a part of him. No. No. NO. Kyle threw out his arms now, grinding his teeth so hard he felt one crack under the strain as he utilized the HSR’s exponential power-feeding system, pushing the machine and himself as hard as he could.
"Full power. FULL POWER." The chittering got louder, it filled Kyle’s ears and those alien memories on Mar’i’s felt like they were being torn asunder, but it was no longer inside his brain. The rip was not coming from inside his brain. Kyle opened his eyes and saw that something.
And it was outside of him, looking right back at him.
whoom
A noise—powerful and low, blossomed like a foetid, crimson blossom, in the control room, almost displacing air—Bruce almost feels it against his cheeks—as it erupts, from no where. Once
whoom
twice, it suddenly sounded like a jet engine, no, like a transformer splitting on a light pole in the middle of a
whoom
thunderstorm, the machinery under their hands trembled, circuits rupturing at the juncture of male to female, the wrap of copper wiring around the edges of raw terminals ripped clean, another fluctuating pulse of noise that bellowed from—somewhere.. before the screaming tear of metal that split the air is barreled in, from all sides, wailing and haunted. Metal grated against metal in a screaming, banshee howl that made the edges of Bruce’s nails feel like they were lifting from the bed, his ears ached at the assault.
Bruce winced, slamming a hand to his ear, and moved back, away from the controls. A father’s instinct, the darkness, whatever it was, Bruce didn’t know, but he wrapped an arm around Mar’i, hauling her bodily towards him, against the side of his body as he moved back, sluggish against the sound.
“KYLE!" Bruce shouted, his hand curling around Mar’i’s shoulders, dragged her towards the door, kicking the rolling chair he had been seated in away. The pressure of the noise grew then, the pitch and fury of it scraping the soft insides of Bruce’s fucking skull, all the soft innards coming up pink, flesh ragged, loose—
The HSR’s console dinged, wildly, the knobs and controls shifting on their own, the back of Bruce’s throat feeling like it might collapse and he grit his teeth, eyelids shifting down, over his eyes as he looked into the room.
“Kyle, let go!”
Far, far away, owner of a separate life than the boy Bruce called Damian, Ibn al Xuffasch gripped the angled handrails overhead as the force of the energy slicing through the HSR in his world threatened to drive him to his knees.
"Lantern!" he rasped through the screech of twisting machinery, certain the parallel operator could hear somehow. “If you release the transmission, I will cross any number of hells and universes and I will come for you!”
Alan raised his hand, his spear of green light energy appearing in it, the double-pronged edge gleaming. “I WILL STOP THIS NOW." He barely seemed to register any of the people around him, focused solely on the young Green Lantern convulsing in the energy of the twinned HSR.
And, all the while, the older Bruce worked, even as his younger counterpart wrapped his arms around his granddaughter—good, he thought grimly, he cares—he moved his hands against the buttons, the console’s edge, attempted to do something from his end, watched through the edge of his vision that blurred, slightly, because he doesn’t blink, because he can’t. He doesn’t shut his eyes often, and he isn’t going to start now.
Older Bruce lifted his voice, gravel-rough and hard: “Alan, you goddamn fool, you’re only making it worse!" Then, shifted his eyes to Mar’i, the plum-blossom, his first grandchild. The love of his waking days and nights for the past twenty years. “Mar’i. Mar’i, I’ll find you again——자두 꽃," His voice goes hard, flat, desperate.
Duk-Ga ran so hard to Ibn’s side in the HSR that he could feel an old knee injury tear back open. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. His father yelling instructions, Alan yelling ultimatums, Ibn yelling threats—none of it mattered. He could start to see her now, like the walls of the HSR were going a little transparent, and Bruce, a young Bruce, was cradling her.
Suddenly, he was twenty-three years younger and she was crying in Bruce’s arms, a little thing, his first grandchild. Her hair was a mop of curls and she was still covered in blood, but Bruce had taken her from Duk-Ga’s shaking arms just the same.
"Starshine," he called out, and his voice was so calm, so gentle, “my starshine, I’m so proud of you. Your mother was so proud of you. 사랑해.”
The pressure mounted, vague emotions filtered in through the din but no, now it was too much, and Bruce turned his head in, bringing his lips to Mar’i’s hair, his brain still ticking away: where had he gone wrong?, even as his tongue depressed on its own, shoved into the back of his throat with the mounting pressure in the small control room.
Bruce gagged, reared his head back and turned away from the machine, looped an arm around Mar’i’s ribcage. Pulled. Dragged her forcibly away from the HSR, from the splintering, cracked glass—it had been triple reinforced, Bruce chided himself for a split-second, so, how was that possible?—towards the hallway.
“K—Kyle," he retched forth, a tangle of consonants and hard vowels, his eyelids burning at the seams, the corners of his eyes, as he slumped, attempted to drag Mar’i away from the machine, the source of the pressure.
Ibn went still the moment he recognized the inevitable, and though it pained him to succumb to it, he would not allow her last memory of him to be one of a man entirely undone by the void in his world that she alone could fill. “Be well, my most beautiful," he called as the current screamed around him and Duk-Ga. “Until we meet again."
Mar’i struggled against Bruce’s arm the moment it grasped her, and her arm came out from, reaching towards Kyle’s glowing form. The color was going putrid, it was going putrid, can’t you see grampa, it’s yellow grampa, it’s all yell—
And then the room exploded.
She could hear her own voice screaming, a high screech, but she didn’t remember opening her mouth. But she knew why she was screaming. It was in front of Kyle, and it was moving. Then, suddenly, their voices were back in her head, too, and she turned her head to see them.
It was the last time she’d see them. She knew it.
The arm reaching for Kyle turned, then, and reached for them instead. “I’ll always—" she choked herself with a sob, squirming harder in Bruce’s arms, “I’ll always love you! All of you! I promise!" And her fingers clenched close, catching that promise, sending it down her arm and into her heart—her ever-burning Tamaranean heart.
Alan Scott lifted his spear, waves and rushes of thick, heavy light energy spooling around it in a whirlwind to go shooting off elsewhere, finding its way into the HSR, the control console, the people unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity.
He could feel the chittering corruption there, maddeningly at his fingertips, and he lurched forward with the battery in his own body to snatch at it, sink his fingers into the mad pus-yellow ichor that prickled his nose and his back teeth. “Parallax," Alan snarled. “You will NOT have this world, or these people. Keep to your own time and its own failed heroes."
The older Bruce slammed his hand against the console, the pain lancing up his broken limbs and spine, and roared at the dying transmission: "Bruce!”
He raised his voice and shouted again, teeth gnashing as he stopped trying to help. It was going. The image was dying, and it was taking her with it. “Eli.. remember the source, and God help you," his voice crackled under the seething force of his rage, the sound turning to ash in his mouth,".. take care of her!”
Kyle wasn’t listening to anyone any more. The HSR’s voice was lost. The human voices from his world lost and the voices from Mar’i’s world nothing but some distant fantasy, utterly lost.
He could only see something far more captivating, that thing which pinned open a rift between the two universes. ‘It isn’t Parallax,’ Kyle thought dully at first, staring almost unfeelingly, curiously at the Something peering back at him. It chittered and clawed the rift open more. ‘It isn’t Parallax,’ Kyle realized with a shock and he looked up to see Alan’s constructs warring with something that wasn’t there as their universe folded in on itself. The meeting of the two worlds was over and Kyle couldn’t be bothered with Mar’i’s world anymore. It was safe, it was fading away. Instead he turned towards the control room, that was completely obliterated by…Kyle didn’t even know - but the rift got wider. He was looking for Bruce and Mar’i.
"IT’S NOT PARALLAX!" Kyle bellowed desperately, voice hoarse and hollow without the HSR boosting him. His ring sparked up and Kyle backed away from the rift, turning to face it with his ringed fist pointed at it, trying to guard the other two with a green shield.
"BRUCE! MAR’I!!! I NEED Y—"
The world became blank.
To say that Bruce Wayne—Batman— never got nervous would be a mistake. It wasn’t that he never felt the fringes of his nerves give, fray in the wind with certain situations, or with certain people. It’s just that, unlike any of his colleagues, his peers, Bruce just doesn’t let it show.
Still, there were tells: the bob of his knee as he turned in his chair, the way he flicked his wrist, a bit too hard, to look at the time. The way his shoulders hunched as he moved over towards the elevator, located on the long stem of the E shaped hallway, gave him away and he pushed the tension down when Kyle emerged from the HSR itself, at the end of the hall, nodding at him: "Is she here yet?"
Kyle noticed absolutely nada of Bruce’s quirks when he arrived and instead gave the older man a chipper grin. "Who? The HSR?" Kyle asked dumbly. “Someone else is coming here? Kate?"
Bruce shook his head, and looked past the Lantern, to the elevator as it dinged shut again. He frowned a touch, and looked back to Kyle. "Kate?" The older man mused, out loud, unsure of what Kyle meant by that statement. The knit in between his brows grows.
Kyle stared back at him and ventured another guess. "…Diana? Is she who here yet? I don’t know who she is."
Bruce folded his arms over his chest and stated, voice curled over the consonants and vowels of the woman’s name carefully, almost tenderly. “Mar’i."
"Oh!" Kyle threw up his hands and then curled his shoulders in again, tilting his head in utter confusion now.
"Mar’i? She’s not here? Bruce you know I’d do anything for the - for, for the good of the team," Kyle said, glancing at the HSR screen and then back at Bruce, “But I just showed up, same as you."
A few floors above the HSR chamber, Mar’i landed on the rooftop of Queen Tower with a soft crunch, heels pressing into the gravel surrounding the helipad. She pulled out her phone for what could be the fifth or sixth time at least, staring down at Bruce’s texts, trying to decipher what Bruce would need at Queen Tower of all places.
After a moment, she tucked her phone back into her skirt’s built-in pocket. At least Bruce had given her a reason to come to Star City, she thought with a considerable amount of warmth, looking out across the rooftop to a nearby penthouse building. She presses her access code into the entryway, then entered the lift, punching another code to be taken down to the floor Bruce had requested in his texts.
Bruce nodded and watched as the elevator reached the top floor—the single slivers of light at the top of the threshold let Bruce know where ground level was—before they began to descend again. He glanced to Kyle then, briefly, before he nodded and explained:
”..what we’ve been working on," his voice hardened a touch, a hand lifting from where he had folded his arms, to gesture behind him, at the HSR’s control room, behind them.
"—part of it, it’s for her." He turned, slightly, to look at the Lantern, just over his shoulder. “I wasn’t sure if telling you that from the beginning would have changed your desire to help me."
Kyle blinked and replied. “Okay." It was a drawn out acquiescence, one that neutrally prompted Bruce to explain more. Either talking, showing, whatever. It wasn’t that Kyle didn’t trust him; hell, Kyle couldn’t wait to get here again - he just wanted to know as much as he could before he even started to formulate any opinion. So far, Kyle was complacent about all of this.
The elevator dinged for each floor it passed, and it took Mar’i a moment to realize the numbers were suddenly out of order, like she was entering a set of floors that weren’t following the order. She choked back a laugh, imagining Bruce feverishly locking off floors to elevator access for all his Bat-secrets. There was a final ding, and the doors pulled apart, revealing a long corridor empty except for polished military-grade steel floors and walls.
"The hell," she muttered, looking down at the only door available to her. After a short walk down to that door, then another, then another after that, and now she was following the instructions Bruce had sent like a Google Maps directions page, she entered the same room as the two men, face already contorting in confusion.
"We got Doomsday chained up in here or what…" she trailed off, looking up at the machine visible to her through the open door. “Woah…"
The Lantern two-finger saluted Mar’i to say hi, and suddenly remembered being in the HSR, asking Bruce about utilizing Mar’i to amp the power of the machine. Bruce’s response had been so terse. Was whatever he’d been planning for Mar’i and the use of the HSR been in the Bat’s mind even then?
Well duh of COURSE, Rayner, Kyle reprimanded himself. The guy probably keeps calendars for his calendars.
Bruce’s nerves flare up again. Good. It was a good sign for him, for them, for him to have felt that way, it kept him on his toes, and he looked to Mar’i, arms still folded over his chest. He looked to Kyle, but only briefly, before he turned the heavy blue of his gaze to Mar’i.
"I’ve been working on something, for the past few months," Bruce began, his articulation heavy and careful. “It might not work, but I—" He shook his head, and stood, giving Mar’i and Kyle his back as he began to draw up the charts he had been using the last time he and Kyle had worked in the HSR. “I needed to see if it could work."
At this point Kyle figured it was best to stay silent and let Bruce talk. He glanced at Mar’i - just once - and realized that she was as much in the dark about what was going on as he was. Possibly even more; which made Kyle shift slightly, moving slightly away from the two star-crossed relatives.
Mari’ blinked. Twice. “Do I need to…" she looked at Kyle, but he was already moving away, clearly confused like her. “Can I help? Is it solar-powered?"
Bruce shook his head. “No, it’s all done." He slowly stood upright, his spine unfurling, until he was at his full height, all six feet and nearly three inches towering over them as he turned to look at Mar’i, at Kyle, and then, Mar’i again. It’s odd, the gentleness of his expression juxtaposed by the looming presence of him, then, as he exhaled once, twice and then spoke: “I believe.. I’ve found the Earth you came from, Mar’i."
Suddenly the room was ten times smaller, and it felt like there were far more than two sets of eyes focused on her. Mar’i swallowed a gulp of air, staring up into Bruce’s eyes—her grandfather’s eyes, only so much younger—and released it slowly, in little puffs.
"But…but Choi said," she looked at Kyle again, eyes crinkling up in confusion, before spinning back to look at Bruce. “Could.. could I go home?"
For a moment Kyle felt a bolt of panic run down his spine as that question came out of Mar’i’s mouth and his first instinct was almost to blurt out ‘No!’ — but he held his tongue, folding his arms tight against his chest as he shifted his weight back and forth on his feet and stared at Bruce.
Bruce ripped his gaze away from Mar’i’s face, because it was much too difficult then, to look at her and feel the weight of her eyes on him. He looked back to the screen, where he had pulled up a series of schematics: for a moment, it looked like a coil, tightly wound on itself, almost like a Slinky. But as the seconds passed, the coil expanded, becoming individual spheres—separate, large and small; planets, really, but sans-topography, no oceans, no rivers, no mountains—they began to eliminate, disappear, one by one, as Bruce spoke.
"I don’t know," he admitted, but without the gravity normally woven into his speech. “I’m not even sure that it is your Earth, but I—" He brought his gaze back to Mar’i. “I isolated a molecule of carbon from your DNA, Mar’i." He began to speak in the low, tempered cadence that any of the children—his children— would recognize: the science of it, the way he had done what he had, laying out the tapestry of thought, in case they ever needed to hearken back to it, in his absence, they would be able to do.
"Down to the last mole, the atomic weight was nearly identical." He looks to the graph on the window that doubled as a screen; it’s gone opaque, the spheres still eliminating themselves as he speaks. “Except.. then, suddenly, it wasn’t."
Kyle, quite honestly didn’t understand what Bruce was saying, or showing; but he was paying attention to why he felt so discombobulated - it was the way Bruce was talking. Kyle knew there were periods where Batman wasn’t always one-hundred percent stoic Batman; but this level of.. familiarity he was using with Mar’i was very new to Kyle. He looked over at Mar’i, trying to gauge this situation and what it meant for her.
Mar’i moved so quickly to Bruce’s side she didn’t even realize she’d moved at all. Only when her arm brushed his as she stared off into the map of little planets, appearing and disappearing like little fireflies on the screen, did she realize how fast she must have moved.
"What does that mean?" And that she was holding her breath. “C-Choi," she stopped, breathing hard, “Choi said he tried to trace the chronal energy that was on me when I first got here, but he couldn’t pinpoint its origin.
The top of her shoulder pressed into his bicep even harder as she stares at all these charts, graphs, projections, how long had Bruce been working on this?
"What does that mean?" she repeated, her voice still quivering.
Bruce shook his head, glancing down at her, his expression hard.
"He wouldn’t have been able to use chronal energy without some sort of displacement device to capture it," Bruce explained, patiently, and then, his voice softened at the sight of her cheek, pressed against her hair, the high apple of it. "..I tried doing that, too."
He looked back to the screen, diverting his attention away. “But.. using the weight of your carbon mole, relative with the pull of our Earth’s gravity and in comparison to how our carbon related, I was able to transmute that information, the way your cells.." He looked across the screen, searched for the correct word. “Vibrate.. into something useable, trackable," his voice evens out, calm and level.
Bruce knows this, the realm of numbers and logic, easily. How his heart twists in his chest at the thought of sending this young woman, just barely out of girlhood, some far-away Dick’s baby girl away from them.. away from him.. Bruce didn’t understand that. Not yet. Perhaps, not ever.
Thank God for science, then.
”..I used it to design an algorithmic pattern that I could calibrate—tack on to any transmission I sent out, searching for your—" He doesn’t say the word, somehow, he can’t, really, and he’s thankful for having the screen to look to, focus his attention. His hands paused and he turned back, around to look at the young woman, leaning his weight towards her a touch, to anchor her, and nodded, mostly to himself. Bruce’s expression sets into a mask of sorts, devoid of emotion.
"And in my search, I found something," He glanced at Kyle, then back at the screen, where the planets had stopped eliminating themselves, and now, only one remained, a ghostly, silvery sphere of identical size, geography, characteristics.
"Granted, the signature is ..more advanced," Bruce frowned a bit, before he shook his head, nearly smirking as he hummed, thoughtful: “But, I figured that in twenty years or so, the ..nature of my mathematical would, naturally, be.. older. More.. mature." Bruce looked to Mar’i, and allowed his meaning to settle in, before murmuring, quietly: "..they’re looking for you, Mar’i."
With those few words, it felt like her head exploded. A swarm of emotions—emotions she hadn’t allowed herself to fully feel over the last six months—clashing upon her, hitting her in waves. Her hands started shaking so hard she had to shove them down on the console, careful of the buttons, gripping at the cool polyfiber edge like it was the only thing saving her.
She opened her mouth once, closed it, then opened it again, but no sound emerged. She didn’t have to ask who ‘they’ were, even if Bruce didn’t know himself. She could already see them, three generations of men pouring over computers and graphs, speaking three different languages natively but all of them saying her name again and again.
"Oh, X’Hal," she finally muttered, but she couldn’t find the words to say anything else.
Bruce turned, then, to shield her a bit from Kyle’s sight. Not because he feels a threat from the Lantern, but because what he says next, is really meant only for her. If Kyle aids them, fine, if he declines, also, fine. Slowly, the trepidation evident in the sluggish rise of his hand, he settles his touch against her shoulder. "..Do you want to attempt contact?"
Mari looked up at him, eyes already shiny despite her best attempts to hold it together. “W-will it be okay?" she asked in return, mirroring his soft tone, still looking at him.
Bruce nodded and squeezed her shoulder, once, before he looked to Kyle. His expression is heavy, and with a careful bob of his chin, he spoke.
"You understand now, why I couldn’t be forthcoming with all the details.." Bruce explained, gesturing to the opaque screen, the HSR on the other side. “It wasn’t all mine to tell." He looked back at the Lantern, jaw setting into a tight clench. “Are you still willing to help?"
Watching as Bruce turned - no, curled more - in against Mar’i’s frame, hearing their soft tones to each other, Kyle finally put two and two together. He looked back towards the HSR itself, the womb where Kyle had last been, filling it with his own energy and charging it.. impregnating it with amplified powers. Bruce needed to see if it would work. That was why he’d called him.
The Lantern slowly unfolded his arms and let them hang at his sides, watching the two, who suddenly seemed almost illogically but yet absolutely related. Whatever that meant, in any sense of the term. His ring flickered and his Green Lantern uniform started from his feet, sliding in a border of bright green light up his body and down along his arms. It finished off with his crabmask. It was pointless, given his currently audience; and yet Kyle felt relieved when it slid over his face and blocked his eyes from their intense, almost overwhelming range of emotions.
Kyle nodded once.
"Yep. I’ll go to into the HSR," he said, brief and all-business and then he stepped out of the control room, stalking through the corridor and ending up in the womb of the machine.
Bruce turned towards the machine as he began to pull up the screens he’d need, the same set of charts and graphs, glancing at Mar’i, sidelong, before he looked down, past the screen and into the HSR.
Mar’i finally drew her eyes away from Bruce back to Kyle. For a moment, she smiled at him, and it’s was a sad smile, a terrified smile, a please help me I don’t know what to do smile, but then he’d already gone to the HSR and all she could do was turn back to Bruce.
Her fingers latched onto the sleeve of the closest wrist, clutching at a small portion of the ribbed fabric, skin never meeting his skin. “It won’t hurt Kyle will it?" she asked, and her voice came out more like a child than an adult.
"Same as the last time," Bruce stated, as the plates lit up, bioluminescent blue as Kyle moved inside the cavernous, womb-like room. Under his fingertips, the configuration the HSR had been in shifted, fluidly, recognizing the power source that was at that moment, named Kyle Rayner. It would have been disconcerting, if he’d been anyone other than who he was. Nodding, he looked down, at Kyle, and depressed the intercom button.
"Start up, the way you did last time, Kyle." He shook his head, and turned to Mar’i, answering her finally. “No." He felt the corners of his mouth tilt, the tiniest bit, attempting to afford her a touch of comfort. "..I’ve taken every precaution to make sure he’ll be fine."
With the literal, physical disconnect between him and Mar’i and Bruce, Kyle felt more focused and able to corral his roiling feelings into connecting with the HSR. He didn’t need any of Bruce’s schematics or graphs. All he had to do was plug himself in and the HSR would do the rest.
An image of Mar’i’s expression before he’d left the control room suddenly caught up with him, he was so busy trying to NOT see them that he hadn’t realized she’d been trying to express something to him, right then. She was smiling, hopeful but tremulous; and Kyle tasted soju against his tongue before he almost forcibly packed all of that away. For another time. Right now it was him and the HSR.
Mar’i nodded for a moment, still clutching at his sleeve as his hands moved about the keyboard, her arm moving softly with it, unable to let go for the longest time. She was still reeling from all this, all the things Bruce said and all the things that had been done without her and all the things she wanted to say, but instead of saying anything, she simply released Bruce’s sleeve, muttering a soft, repeating: “Okay, okay."
"Hey, time for our second date," Kyle murmured with a crooked smile, floating up into the air but forgoing the Jesus pose this time. They were too familiar now, beyond all that stuff. He did close his eyes though, no longer needing to ground himself with human faces. The HSR had a life of her own and Kyle poured his will into that, slow and steady.
On the screen, the schematics dropped down, into a low corner as satellite feeds are brought up: it seemed that the placement of the HSR in Queen Tower wasn’t a coincidence, either. The curved scimitar halves amplify the signal, the Watchtower bouncing it even further into space, and sooner rather than later, strings and strings of cipher-laden data filled the screen as Kyle began to glow, beyond the monitor.
Bruce, his eyes on the screen, on the data, slowly settled into the chair at the console, spine erect and held immobile as he worked. He tilts his head, his hands moving over the keyboard as he begins to type, nodding to himself as he monitors the power Kyle is emitting, how it translates to the signal he is boosting through the Watchtower.
"More, Kyle," he stated, suddenly, but not loudly. He knows, after the last time, that he doesn’t need to speak at more than a whisper for Kyle to hear him. Besides, his attention is too focused, to centered on what he’s doing as he types, the motion nearly feverish. He murmurs something, to himself, his brow knitting as he tilts his head, looking at the windows that are brought up. As he opens up applications, written and rewritten a few dozen times by now, all by him, before against the grain, the filmy white, a screen emerges against the window, backlit by Kyle’s green glow in the HSR.
Kyle’s mind blanked over as he stopped thinking about anything else except the machine. He’d become a living battery, nothing more or less. His only hint to any realization that he was still an independent and sentient being were whispers, coming from another human. Low and husky and brushing up against Kyle’s consciousness, making him react like hitting against raw open nerves - "More, Kyle," - the whispers said, and Kyle obeyed.
The image didn’t pixelate, like Earth-based transmissions did, nor did it come in the hashes, splices of image and sound that most near-space communiques might. Instead, as Bruce watched, his head tilted to the side, as the image on the center of the screen materialized, as if it were being lifted from the bottom of a river. Sediment and grain fell away from the darkness, the edges of metal piping in the background, a steel staircase came into view.
The first thought Bruce had, is that it was the Cave, but no, there is sunlight streaming in, now, that illuminated steel infrastructure, and glass. Glass walls, glass windows. Potted greenery in the corner, a glittering cascade of water to the left, and then, staring back at him suddenly, another man. Bruce managed to contain the arching of his eyebrows.
There, across the woven fabric of space and time, another Earth’s Bruce sat, his posture straight and erect, and met the unamused stare of his younger, alternative counterpart with a heavy smirk. The image strengthened, and he spoke, sarcasm crackling in his dry voice: "..at least we won’t waste time with exposition."
Mar’i was already imagining what it’d be like to be home. Lian and Avia and all the others laughing, hugging her, telling her what she’d missed. Uncle Ryand’r coming to see her, pulling her into a nearly painful hug. Her father and grandfather waiting for her, Ibn.. Ibn.. She stopped herself, a strange thought coming into her mind.
She didn’t know how long this would take, but if she was going to be leaving she should at least.. she pulled her phone out and opened the contact list, her favorites already pulled to the top. Her thumb lingered over a single name for a moment and she was just about to press call when she saw the image pull up on Bruce’s screen. Her phone hit the floor—she didn’t even know she had dropped it—and she found herself speaking.
“Grampa?”
Vaguely, Kyle heard Mar’i speak. It was not Bruce’s urgings that made him open his eyes, but that one small word from Mar’i, the waver in her voice sounding like a tidal wave breaking against rock. In a way it felt very much like that imagery - as Kyle opened his eyes to see his world and then look upon the other, simultaneously and visibly existing. A world far darker than theirs. He wasn’t unfamiliar with multi-verses, but this one took on a whole new meaning of ‘alternate universe’. What was especially curious to him was the tinge of green around the edges of his eyes, like a frame. He wondered if it looked like that to everyone else and then recalled Mar’i once telling him that Alan was the only Lantern in her world. Kyle smiled a bit sadly and poured more will into the HSR, with an almost lazy assurance. He would stretch this out for Mar’i for as long as he could manage, even…well. Even if that meant saying goodbye.
Ibn al Xuffasch rose, slowly, from where he tended the golden-blush orchid on the landing upstairs— one of her favorites, and one that he’d nurtured without fail because he knew for certain that one day she’d return to it, to him. The transmission in the open foyer downstairs seemed to manifest from nowhere as his father spoke calmly to whomever operated the source of it, and the melodic voice he heard reply made him descend down the staircase with slow, deliberate steps as if he were in a dream, the heavy green train of his traveling cloak trailing over the stairs behind him.
The older man, the older Bruce’s expression softened, incredibly so, upon seeing the young woman, and the tremor that passed through his body—even with the braces that laced his arms, his back.. the younger Bruce noted these, his own expression shifting at the sight of them—was visible, even across the transmission. His tension. His shock at seeing her, alive and well. He didn’t rise from his seat, but the tension was there, as if he might do stand at any moment; he spoke, the nearly hawkish focus of his dark blue stare settling on her face, and nowhere else. His Korean was nearly flawless: “자두 꽃, are you well?"
Mar’i started to open her mouth, but the near-sob that emerged caused her to instead clasp a hand over it. Tears welled at the edge of her eyes, almost sizzling against the heat pouring off her cheeks as she nodded once, then again, carefully lowering her shaking hand back to the console. "네," she began, before switching back into English, “yes, Grampa, I’m fine."
Ibn moved more quickly now, one hand rising to unclasp the gold band around the collar of the cloak, freeing himself of its weight as it pooled on the stairs in his wake. She spoke again, and he knew he wasn’t suffering some demonic hallucination designed to torment him. “Mar’i," he breathed as he halted near his father’s shoulder. His dark eyes were brightened from within, but he maintained his calm manner of speech otherwise. “Oh, Mar’i, habibati. How sweet to see your face once more."
Bruce didn’t lift his eyes from the screen, even as he monitored Kyle’s levels in relation to the HSR, and the transmission. His expression was knit, into a patchwork of lines and flat planes, that only deepened when he heard how soft his own voice—that was.. strange, but it only took a moment for Bruce to compartmentalize it, store it away for later—lowered, tender and caring, on the other end of the transmission. He cared—no, that man, that Bruce, loved Mar’i, and a perverse sense of jealousy flared in him, tamped down by anger, and then—then—
Bruce made the mistake of looking up, pupils contracting to pinpricks when he saw the green travelling cloak, the flash of black hair—he nearly opened his mouth to warn them of who was behind them—and then he spoke. Called her by name. Bruce’s visage went pallid, the color draining from the sculpted, angular edges of his cheekbones, until he looked like he might be ill. His hands still, entirely, and he looked to Mar’i, then, standing beside him, blinking as if seeing her for the first time. He swallowed, forcing his eyes back to his work, pupils nearly vibrating as he willed his fingers to type. But.. Type what?
Suddenly, the monitor focused on the Older Bruce’s world filled with loud yelling and the sound of frantic footsteps.
“MAR’I?!" a voice called out, and suddenly Bruce and Ibn were being pushed aside by a middle-aged Korean man with salt and pepper hair. “MAR’I, IS THAT YOU?!"
His face leaned in, temporarily blocking the others, and he mirrored her clasped hand over his mouth, a stream of Korean spurting out between his fingers. He turned to Bruce, still talking a thousand miles a minute, hands motioning frantically to the young woman on the other side of the screen.
Kyle’s eyes widened and twitched when the second person appeared beside the older Bruce. It was.. Damian. Except not Damian. He was so surprised to see the older Damian, he jolted slightly as a flash of something skittered across the back of Kyle’s mind - it didn’t originate from the HSR, but from inside his own subconscious. The thing felt nauseating and dragged behind it a lump of memories. Memories that weren’t his, but were mined out of another, by that something, when it owned his body and mind; and then discarded these alien memories within Kyle’s own remembrances - like unwanted trash - when it was vanquished.
The Lantern clenched his jaw tight for the first time stepping foot in the HSR, his constant swell of green light power adjusting into will AND effort, energy that Kyle poured on to keep those alien memories at bay and keep himself and the HSR connected as one, for as long as it took. ‘For as long as it took, dammit Rayner. You owe her that much.’
The older Bruce shifted, the braces nearly a second-skin for him—his mouth twitched, should he warn his younger counterpart? Should he explain where the first major break would happen? What it would feel like, and hope that the message gets through his stubborn, thick-head?—and looked to Duk-Ga, reaching up to set a hand on his shoulder, as if to calm him. The message is clear: let her speak, even as his hands moved across the console, mirroring his younger counter-part’s, the minute flicks of his fingers nearly identical. His mouth twisted, amused.
Ibn clasped his hands at his back as Mar’i’s father nudged his way in front of him, head tilted and eyes soft as he focused upon her heartbreakingly beautiful visage upon the screen. His fingers twitched where they were joined, desperate to reach out for her.
As more and more people crammed into the monitor before her, Mar’i gradually broke into sobs. It started off with her grandfather, stoic-faced and warm-eyed, then…then him. Her lips pulled apart, and she looked up at the man Damian Wayne would never grow into. Golden eyes where Damian’s were a green-grey, angled cheekbones where Damian’s were soft. No wonder she had been able to push him so far back into her mind, that she had been able to see that little boy so many times a week and not just break into tears. No wonder she had been able to…she couldn’t finish that train of thought because suddenly her father was leaning into the screen, eyes searching her face for signs of injury or abuse.
She reached up instinctively, her hand trying to touch the monitor that was just out of reach. "아빠…" she began again, a fresh sob issuing from her lips. “Are you all…" she swallowed heavily, “are you okay?”
Ibn broke into a smile at the question, his high shoulders falling as his fond amusement left him in a heavy exhale. “We are well, my darling, aside from searching for you every waking second of the day. And now you’ve found us." He stepped closer to the screen, the long fingers of one hand stretching forward to almost touch it.
Bruce, still at the console, shifted as his right hand drifted from the buttons to curl in, against his thigh. He clenched it, released, clenched again, the rows of his teeth coming to a fine, firm set against each other. So hard, he knew, it was shifting the placement of the molars, his jaw flaring as Duk-Ga, Mar’i’s father, appeared upon the screen.
Bruce watched, all from his peripheral vision, as the other Bruce set his hand, a smooth, easy, practised motion, against the young man’s shoulder. The sound of the Korean—Bruce knows the language, of course he does—mirroring his own Dick’s frantic cadence. Bruce watched, the dark blue of his eyes bottoming out, pupils flaring, and rather than it being something to warm him, it is eerie and discomfiting to witness. His hand clenched again, and he turned his face, to the intercom input, voice low as he spoke: “Bring it back up, Kyle."
Duk-Ga turned at the feel of the hand on his shoulder, eyes already sharp with anger. After all they had been through, after all this time she had been gone, for Bruce—for the man who knew him better than anyone else—to try and calm him? There were still wounds between them, open gashes still rotten around the seams, but Mar’i had always been the thing they could agree on.
From the moment she came into the world and Bruce held her for hours while Duk-Ga and Kory slept, to the day Kory left and Mar’i cried for days and Bruce had had food delivered to the house because Duk-Ga couldn’t even remember how to do anything besides hold his daughter and sob into her dark locks, to the day his baby—their baby—was ripped away from both of them. The bonds the two men had repaired after that long exhausting battle—all for her. And now, for Bruce to hold him back.
He made an angry noise under his breath, but as he looked into his adopted father’s eyes, it quickly melted into fear and anxiety. ‘What if she leaves again?’ his eyes asked Bruce when his mouth couldn’t.
The older Bruce shook his head, once, at the sight of the fear, the anxiety in Duk-Ga’s eyes. Even seated, crippled, the strength that he emanates is coming off in waves, sheets of it. Confidence. Know-how. What if she leaves again? his son asks, and his mouth curling, the older Bruce squeezed, his thumb pressing into the hard, proud rise of Duk-Ga’s shoulder, giving his answer plainly, as honest and as true as anything ever was from his side of things. Then, we will find her again. He dropped his hand, bringing his gaze to his younger counterpart.
"Bruce," he stated, his brow quirking as he said it, wondering if the other man would respond. He continued, attempting to not sound too condescending. “I’m going to adjust the sequence you’re using, open a free port for transmission.. And.. ’Kyle’?" He inquired, head tilted to the side a touch, hands sliding over his own console.
Mar’i’s face suddenly crumpled from tears into confusion.
"Transmission?" she asked, looking between the two Bruces. “What are you going to transmit?" A sudden fear hit her like a wave, and she realized that the answer might very well be herself.
She looked into the HSR room, Kyle’s energy pulsating a bright green that reflected back into her eyes. Their gazes met through the glass for the briefest moment, and suddenly she realized that she might not want to go home just yet. ‘Kyle,’ she thought to herself as she looked at him, staring at his form floating in the air. ‘What should I do?’
The older Bruce looked up and over at the screen to Mar’i, a frown rumpling his features as he brought his gaze to the younger Bruce, the lines deepening.
Bruce lifted his hand, and brought it to Mar’i’s back, pressing his touch to her spine, and shook his head.
"My math is.. in need of modification," he murmured, quietly, the words stilted at first. Then, rapidly, in the face of her distress, becoming softer, less harsh. "..he’s.. adjusting it." The conclusion is punctuated with a tiny quirk of his own eyebrow, meeting his elder counterpart’s eyes for a moment, smirking at him.
Ibn looked down to his own father, to the younger reflection of him rippling into the foyer across fathomless time and space. His gaze returned to Mar’i, the first vestiges of uncertainty beginning to seep past his careful composure.
"We are going to bring you home," he clarified softly; there could be no question that it’s what she wanted too, what she’d dreamed of since the moment she was torn from the world to which she belonged. He glanced down at his father again. “Aren’t we?"
Kyle listened to all the voices going on around him, warbles and tones and languages that spanned near-impossible borders, until one voice cut through the rest. It wasn’t like the others because it was in his mind, not filtered through the HSR. It was Mar’i and when Kyle looked at her she was staring back at him, straight at him.
He smiled at her and somewhere in the back of his mind, that mass of alien memories unfurled just a bit like shy petals under a tentative sun. His mask dissolved so he could look at Mar’i, and Kyle thought, ‘Mar’i, you need to make the choice. It’s what you knew would have to happen.’ He was quiet for a while, because - it was one of those Catch 22s and they both knew it. Mar’i barely had any time to even think, never mind make choices that would affect her ENTIRE life…but in Kyle’s experience, sometimes that was the best time to make a decision, on one’s own pure instinct. ‘It’s yours to make! No one else’s here or there, just yours. We all lo—’
Kyle bit back hard into his jaw, snapping off the sentence and crushing the side of his tongue with his molars. The violent movement drew blood and effectively silenced him. He abruptly turned away from Mar’i, maximizing his full attention on the HSR. She was a jealous thing, perhaps, but Kyle didn’t mind. He could feel his ring strain - his body straining even more - but he didn’t mind one bit.
Mar’i looked up at Kyle, her head ringing as his words reverberated back and forth in her brain. Her brows furrowed, everything else temporarily forgotten as she listened to him, trying to figure out why his lips weren’t moving, her body turning against her will to face him. She took a few steps forward, arms wrapping around herself as she shuddered involuntarily. “Kyle,” she said aloud, voice quivering, “Kyle, is that you? Why do you sound like Roy?”
The older Bruce nodded at his son. His posture unflagging—really, even before the braces, he remembered, looking across the rip of time and space at his younger counterpart..this was the way he always sat, when he did—his hands moved across the inlaid screens on his end, and nodded again. "자두 꽃," he called to Mar’i, quietly, using only her pet name before he swapped Korean for English. "..you need to remove everything, in order for you to come across.” He paused, carefully manicuring his speech, no shame or personal upheaval in his words: he sets the tone for any reactions, from anyone, with how he says what he does next, even his speech defensive of the young woman. “Your clothing.. all your jewelry—"
An ovoid of green light appeared behind the older Bruce in the other world, parts of it folding inward as the form of the Green Lantern folded outward, gaining speed with each spiked segment creating the substance of the man.
When the shape of him was full, complete and solid in bulky green armour, Alan Scott stepped forward, eyes on the screen, body already in motion. Bruce, to the side of him, his attention still on Mar’i only turned when the Lantern’s hand slid across the buttons in front of him, when he uttered the word that stilled all motion, on both sides of the universe:
”..Parallax."
"It’s Parallax, “ Alan repeated, with no elaboration, in a tone that sounded more as if he were mentioning that he’d ordered his tea with honey and not milk. “We’re shutting this down." Green hatchmarks began to appear over the control console, sinking into them. Alan looked down at Bruce, playing no attention to Ibn or Duk-Ga. “I’m shutting it down."
“ALAN!" Kyle yelled out, mouth spewing blood and spittle since he hadn’t even used his actual voice in a while. He’d been relying on the HSR to communicate for him. “ALAN, NO! JUST A BIT LONGER, ALAN!"
Bruce, the younger Bruce, jerked upright at the appearance of the other Lantern, his eyebrows nearly clicking together as he pushed himself forward, against the edge of the console, hands flying to the buttons.
"Parallax." It nearly sounded like a question, leaving the man’s dry lips, mumbled and Bruce shook his head, the colour draining from his face, twice in less than an hour. A record, really. Bruce rose, the seat skidding out from under him, bounced against the wall behind them, drifting into the threshold of the room, at the abruptness of the motion, how quick the man had risen.
Alan looked up at the sound of Kyle’s voice, the green chickenwire netting and ensnaring the console dissolving away.
"I am Guardian here, monster," he said, in the same conversational tone. The edges of his mask sputtered purple, mirroring Mar’i’s hair, then solidified back into green. “You speak with Kyle Rayner’s voice, but I see inside you. And I can’t allow you to have this world, even if you’ve concealed yourself from your companions in that one."
Ibn al Xuffasch surveyed the Lantern with seeming placidity, but the strain in his voice made his fear apparent.
"Father," he began, and still the title was a hesitant one even after the last few years. “Can we retrieve her safely regardless of what he claims?" Some risks were worth the rewards. His heart hammered, torn between his desire to hold her again and to ensure her safety. If some battery-powered demon were unleashed in the process, so be it.
The older Bruce did not stand, but his hands continue to move, almost in tandem with the other Bruce’s own motions, even as Batman’s voice, hard and amber-raw, boomed across the universe, at the younger man, all the raw fury of every mistake, every. single. one., turned inside and out at the younger Bruce: “You idiot.”
"Mr. Scott?" Mar’i breathed, and then he said the name and every nerve in her body went stiff with fear. She could feel it breathing on her neck invisibly the same way it did the day it attacked them all, the day it crawled into her mind and tore out her deepest fears like they were loose teeth in the back of her mouth.
Her head turned in time to see Kyle spit up blood and saliva. “Kyle?" she called out, but her voice was nearly gone with terror.
"Parallax?" Kyle echoed in confusion, and the alien memories opened up in the back of his mind, full and complete as he twisted to stare at Mar’i. That chittering, that something in the back of his mind, the chittering and skitters and overwhelming onslaught of Mar’i’s personal experiences and memories from her real world, that Parallax dug into and viciously tore at like tendons of her psyche.
"NO!" He didn’t want those memories, they were forced out of Mar’i without her permission, and when Parallax abandoned them in his mind, Kyle made himself forget. Because they weren’t his to remember. It wasn’t right.
"NO!!" He yelled angrily, with more force, but it was unclear who he was yelling at.
Bruce gritted his teeth as this all happened, as his older counterpart raged at him, but understood the man’s tone, the statement therein, because yes, his hands grew steady against the harshness, yes, even as Mar’i spoke, the world shuddering around and against them, yes, the darkness in the older man’s voice steeled him, brought everything into focus.
Kyle shouted. Yes, idiot, Parallax. Parallax. Bruce’s eyes narrowed, fingers flying as the data began to jump from one screen to the other. Bruce moved his head as fast as he could, back and forth, the motion bordering on.. well, frantic.
“Kyle!" He half-shouted, down at the comm. “Kyle, pull the power back, but don’t cut out all at once!"
The older Bruce growled at Ibn, at Duk-Ga. “If we’re going to get her back, you both need to get in there, NOW." He pointed off screen, no doubt, at a similar chamber to the HSR. He brought his gaze back, to his granddaughter, his voice still rough with anger, but sublimated, pushed into a far corner. “Mar’i, you cannot be wearing anything when you go into the chamber—goddamnit, Alan!" He shoved the Lantern away from the controls with a hand.
Ibn snarled as the transmission clearly came into danger of being cut by the loss of the Lantern’s channel. “Leave the conduit!" he ordered across the screen, pushing past his and Mar’i’s fathers, and it was easy enough for him to refer to this human life that meant nothing to him as a mere cog in the machine that would return Mar’i to him. “Father, bring her back now!"
The older Bruce pointed, and rose from his chair, finally, the braces grating, a foreshadowing grate of metal against metal, as he shouted in Arabic. "GO!”
Son Duk-Ga tensed up, hands slamming onto the Elder Bruce’s own console, eyes locked onto his daughter, slowly being pulled away from the screen by something unseen from his vantage point.
"Bruce," he said suddenly, spinning, “Bruce, she looks terrified. What the hell is happening!?"
Ibn rushed into the chamber without any thought of what it might mean for himself, centering himself in a hub similar to the one occupied by the Lantern in the other world.
Alan Scott, almost nauseating in its force and vibrance, hummed loudly with lime-green energy.
"THIS IS FOLLY," he intoned, voice infused with the power of the Lantern buried inside his body. “I CANNOT ALLOW THIS, BATMAN." He turned his attention to the otherworld Lantern, dark green rimming his eyes. “I CANNOT ALLOW PARALLAX TO TAINT US."
Mar’i couldn’t hear her grandfather even if she wanted to. There was a voice in her head, now, and it was Kyle and it was Roy and it was Ibn and Duk-Ga and both Bruces and it was her mother, of all people, and it was speaking four different languages at least, and it was growling at her to come back to him.
She felt her shoulders roll into a dry-heave, a hand slapping up to catch at side of her mouth, the other wrapping around her stomach as intense fear ripped through her abdominal muscles.
"Kyle," she called out in a near-croak, tears rolling down her cheeks as she felt herself starting to stumble. “Kyle, you have to let go."
But instead, Kyle heard Bruce yelling “Full power now" in addition to something else, some piddly specifics that were irrelevant to Kyle. He’d heard all he needed. Bruce wanted full power and Kyle was already aghast at the nerve of this Alan, this Green Lantern who wasn’t even connected to the Central Battery - telling HIM that he was a monster and Parallax was still a part of him. No. No. NO. Kyle threw out his arms now, grinding his teeth so hard he felt one crack under the strain as he utilized the HSR’s exponential power-feeding system, pushing the machine and himself as hard as he could.
"Full power. FULL POWER." The chittering got louder, it filled Kyle’s ears and those alien memories on Mar’i’s felt like they were being torn asunder, but it was no longer inside his brain. The rip was not coming from inside his brain. Kyle opened his eyes and saw that something.
And it was outside of him, looking right back at him.
whoom
A noise—powerful and low, blossomed like a foetid, crimson blossom, in the control room, almost displacing air—Bruce almost feels it against his cheeks—as it erupts, from no where. Once
whoom
twice, it suddenly sounded like a jet engine, no, like a transformer splitting on a light pole in the middle of a
whoom
thunderstorm, the machinery under their hands trembled, circuits rupturing at the juncture of male to female, the wrap of copper wiring around the edges of raw terminals ripped clean, another fluctuating pulse of noise that bellowed from—somewhere.. before the screaming tear of metal that split the air is barreled in, from all sides, wailing and haunted. Metal grated against metal in a screaming, banshee howl that made the edges of Bruce’s nails feel like they were lifting from the bed, his ears ached at the assault.
Bruce winced, slamming a hand to his ear, and moved back, away from the controls. A father’s instinct, the darkness, whatever it was, Bruce didn’t know, but he wrapped an arm around Mar’i, hauling her bodily towards him, against the side of his body as he moved back, sluggish against the sound.
“KYLE!" Bruce shouted, his hand curling around Mar’i’s shoulders, dragged her towards the door, kicking the rolling chair he had been seated in away. The pressure of the noise grew then, the pitch and fury of it scraping the soft insides of Bruce’s fucking skull, all the soft innards coming up pink, flesh ragged, loose—
The HSR’s console dinged, wildly, the knobs and controls shifting on their own, the back of Bruce’s throat feeling like it might collapse and he grit his teeth, eyelids shifting down, over his eyes as he looked into the room.
“Kyle, let go!”
Far, far away, owner of a separate life than the boy Bruce called Damian, Ibn al Xuffasch gripped the angled handrails overhead as the force of the energy slicing through the HSR in his world threatened to drive him to his knees.
"Lantern!" he rasped through the screech of twisting machinery, certain the parallel operator could hear somehow. “If you release the transmission, I will cross any number of hells and universes and I will come for you!”
Alan raised his hand, his spear of green light energy appearing in it, the double-pronged edge gleaming. “I WILL STOP THIS NOW." He barely seemed to register any of the people around him, focused solely on the young Green Lantern convulsing in the energy of the twinned HSR.
And, all the while, the older Bruce worked, even as his younger counterpart wrapped his arms around his granddaughter—good, he thought grimly, he cares—he moved his hands against the buttons, the console’s edge, attempted to do something from his end, watched through the edge of his vision that blurred, slightly, because he doesn’t blink, because he can’t. He doesn’t shut his eyes often, and he isn’t going to start now.
Older Bruce lifted his voice, gravel-rough and hard: “Alan, you goddamn fool, you’re only making it worse!" Then, shifted his eyes to Mar’i, the plum-blossom, his first grandchild. The love of his waking days and nights for the past twenty years. “Mar’i. Mar’i, I’ll find you again——자두 꽃," His voice goes hard, flat, desperate.
Duk-Ga ran so hard to Ibn’s side in the HSR that he could feel an old knee injury tear back open. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. His father yelling instructions, Alan yelling ultimatums, Ibn yelling threats—none of it mattered. He could start to see her now, like the walls of the HSR were going a little transparent, and Bruce, a young Bruce, was cradling her.
Suddenly, he was twenty-three years younger and she was crying in Bruce’s arms, a little thing, his first grandchild. Her hair was a mop of curls and she was still covered in blood, but Bruce had taken her from Duk-Ga’s shaking arms just the same.
"Starshine," he called out, and his voice was so calm, so gentle, “my starshine, I’m so proud of you. Your mother was so proud of you. 사랑해.”
The pressure mounted, vague emotions filtered in through the din but no, now it was too much, and Bruce turned his head in, bringing his lips to Mar’i’s hair, his brain still ticking away: where had he gone wrong?, even as his tongue depressed on its own, shoved into the back of his throat with the mounting pressure in the small control room.
Bruce gagged, reared his head back and turned away from the machine, looped an arm around Mar’i’s ribcage. Pulled. Dragged her forcibly away from the HSR, from the splintering, cracked glass—it had been triple reinforced, Bruce chided himself for a split-second, so, how was that possible?—towards the hallway.
“K—Kyle," he retched forth, a tangle of consonants and hard vowels, his eyelids burning at the seams, the corners of his eyes, as he slumped, attempted to drag Mar’i away from the machine, the source of the pressure.
Ibn went still the moment he recognized the inevitable, and though it pained him to succumb to it, he would not allow her last memory of him to be one of a man entirely undone by the void in his world that she alone could fill. “Be well, my most beautiful," he called as the current screamed around him and Duk-Ga. “Until we meet again."
Mar’i struggled against Bruce’s arm the moment it grasped her, and her arm came out from, reaching towards Kyle’s glowing form. The color was going putrid, it was going putrid, can’t you see grampa, it’s yellow grampa, it’s all yell—
And then the room exploded.
She could hear her own voice screaming, a high screech, but she didn’t remember opening her mouth. But she knew why she was screaming. It was in front of Kyle, and it was moving. Then, suddenly, their voices were back in her head, too, and she turned her head to see them.
It was the last time she’d see them. She knew it.
The arm reaching for Kyle turned, then, and reached for them instead. “I’ll always—" she choked herself with a sob, squirming harder in Bruce’s arms, “I’ll always love you! All of you! I promise!" And her fingers clenched close, catching that promise, sending it down her arm and into her heart—her ever-burning Tamaranean heart.
Alan Scott lifted his spear, waves and rushes of thick, heavy light energy spooling around it in a whirlwind to go shooting off elsewhere, finding its way into the HSR, the control console, the people unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity.
He could feel the chittering corruption there, maddeningly at his fingertips, and he lurched forward with the battery in his own body to snatch at it, sink his fingers into the mad pus-yellow ichor that prickled his nose and his back teeth. “Parallax," Alan snarled. “You will NOT have this world, or these people. Keep to your own time and its own failed heroes."
The older Bruce slammed his hand against the console, the pain lancing up his broken limbs and spine, and roared at the dying transmission: "Bruce!”
He raised his voice and shouted again, teeth gnashing as he stopped trying to help. It was going. The image was dying, and it was taking her with it. “Eli.. remember the source, and God help you," his voice crackled under the seething force of his rage, the sound turning to ash in his mouth,".. take care of her!”
Kyle wasn’t listening to anyone any more. The HSR’s voice was lost. The human voices from his world lost and the voices from Mar’i’s world nothing but some distant fantasy, utterly lost.
He could only see something far more captivating, that thing which pinned open a rift between the two universes. ‘It isn’t Parallax,’ Kyle thought dully at first, staring almost unfeelingly, curiously at the Something peering back at him. It chittered and clawed the rift open more. ‘It isn’t Parallax,’ Kyle realized with a shock and he looked up to see Alan’s constructs warring with something that wasn’t there as their universe folded in on itself. The meeting of the two worlds was over and Kyle couldn’t be bothered with Mar’i’s world anymore. It was safe, it was fading away. Instead he turned towards the control room, that was completely obliterated by…Kyle didn’t even know - but the rift got wider. He was looking for Bruce and Mar’i.
"IT’S NOT PARALLAX!" Kyle bellowed desperately, voice hoarse and hollow without the HSR boosting him. His ring sparked up and Kyle backed away from the rift, turning to face it with his ringed fist pointed at it, trying to guard the other two with a green shield.
"BRUCE! MAR’I!!! I NEED Y—"
The world became blank.