Double Trouble - raven_of_hydecastle - Batman (2024)

Chapter 1: Prepare For Trouble, But Make It Double

Chapter Text

Life was binary. Every object had its opposite. Light and dark, good and evil, chaos and order, yin and yang. Balance was a universal constant.

The case of Klarion’s nemesis should have been no different, but like everything in the Witch Dimension, it went sideways.

“Are you sure?” Klarion’s mother asked the Witch Doctor. “Even for us, this is strange.”

She and Klarion sat on velvet cushions in a cluttered hovel stranded somewhere in the fuchsia zone of their reality. Brass scales, alchemical instruments, and glass vials stuffed with oddities covered every surface. Above them, bizarre herbs hung to dry, dripping unknown substances on the floor.

The Witch Doctor sat on the floor, their many limbs full of various projects. Their attention, however, was focused on Klarion’s . . . situation.

“Strange, but not unheard of,” the Witch Doctor replied. “Your spawn is just lucky. Not many witchlings have a nemesis turn into a friend.”

Klarion’s mother hummed thoughtfully. “I suppose you’re right, but it is dashedly inconvenient. He’ll have to choose a new nemesis, and those are never as good as a natural one.”

They all stared at the anomaly.

It was a boy identical to Klarion in every way—sallow skin, black hair, pale blue eyes. The only difference they could tell was that they were left-handed while Klarion was not.

They’d have been twins if Klarion hadn’t been an only child. It’d happened when the nemesis manifestation was botched and this Not-Klarion appeared out of thin air.

So far, the anomaly hadn’t spoken, aside from giggling and saying “surprise!” when he’d manifested, exuding an aura of chaos so pure it gave everyone vertigo.

(The summoning had been meant to manifest Klarion’s opposite into existence. They were expecting a lawful alignment, not something equally chaotic as Klarion).

“I’m sure your son will manage,” the Witch Doctor said. He handed the squirming child back to Klarion’s mother. “There are plenty of Lords of Order he can challenge. As for this one, his soul has the echo of Order within it, but pay it no mind. He’s got the soul of a Lord of Chaos, so we’ll treat him as such.”

“Very well,” Klarion’s mother said. “If I must.”

The three of them left the Witch Doctor, careful to walk on the brick path floating through the ether. Around them, fragments of reality popped out of existence and morphed into new shapes. To a mortal, it would have driven them mad. For them, it was home.

“I like it here,” the anomaly said, taking Klarion’s hand so they wouldn’t be separated. “It’s fun.”

“Uh huh,” Klarion said, kicking a rock as it turned into a frog with ten eyes. “best place ever.”

Nothing was static in the Witch dimension. It shifted and changed at the drop of a hat, mutating into fantastical shapes and horrifying visages. It was the opposite of the disgusting, bland neatness the Ordered Ones admired.

“Ha!” the anomaly giggled as the frog was flung into a black hole and turned into spaghetti. “That was funny. This is why I changed my mind. You make a better brother than a nemesis.”

Klarion’s mother arched an eyebrow. Her hat arched its brim as well. “You chose to reforge your alignment?”

“Yup,” the anomaly said. “Rules are boring. I want to have fun.”

He smiled brightly, showing off a mouth of yellow, crooked teeth.

Klarion was so happy his gravity wore off. He floated a foot into the sky, tethered only by his new sibling’s hand. “Yes! Mom, my wish came true. I told you I wanted a brother.”

All those animal sacrifices were paying off. Marvelous.

“Yes, you did say that.” Klarion’s mother tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Well, the nemesis situation isn’t ideal, but this saves me the trouble of childbirth, so I’ll allow it. Besides, there’s nothing more chaotic that reorganizing the structure of your soul. Welcome to the family, child.”

Klarion and his double cheered.

“You’ll need a name,” she said without enthusiasm. “Bother, I dislike giving those out.”

She manifested the family tome and flipped to the names their house had ownership of, mumbling under her breath as she looked at the available options.

Klarion hoped his brother got a good name. Mother wasn’t the best at choosing them, and the family was so large most of the dramatic ones had been taken. Still, there was a chance this mystery sibling could have a decent one.

“If you’re not me, who are you?” Klarion asked, levitating next to Not-his's head.

His double looked up at him and smiled. “Dunno. The fun part is finding out. Maybe I’ll take your name.”

“No, don't do that,” Klarion giggled. “Mine’s the best.”

“Well, now I gotta,” Not-Klarion said. “You’re basically daring me too.”

Reality buckled around them. Klarion was a lord of chaos, so his brother was too. Their dimension was fluid, but it didn’t handle two magically supercharged children testing each other with their auras very well.

Order and Chaos were meant to be balanced, but there was no order here, which was why the Witch Dimension had to be so careful. If its denizens tipped the scales too much, the whole thing would implode.

“Stop that, you two,” Mother said, snapping the book shut. “I’m in a cross mood. There was only one name left and it is quite banal. Darling child, I’m afraid you’re Timothy from now on. I do apologize. We’re out of other names.”

Klarion and his brother both wrinkled their noses.

“Timothy?” Timothy said. “That sounds so . . . Orderly.”

“I noticed,” Mother said. “Hence why I’m unhappy. You’ll have your work cut out for you, making that moniker suit your nature.”

Timothy crossed his arms, looking less than pleased to exist. “We’ll start by shortening it. Call me Tim. I’ll work on making the sounds less Ordered.”

It was a start, but still an irritating name to be given.

Though, to be fair, Tim was supposed to be born an agent of Order to balance Klarion’s malice. Normally, the name would have been perfect, but since he’d manifested on the wrong side of the spectrum, there hadn’t been time to prepare a better, more chaotic name.

If Klarion was honest, nothing was more chaotic than being born with the opposite alignment fate ordered you to have.

So much for destiny.

***

Tim was the perfect sibling, both whip-crack smart and devious. Where Klarion was spontaneous and exuberant, Tim was patient and conniving.

Klarion was the better magic user, but Tim had a sly smile that promised misery for his playthings and the intelligence to play the long game. Between the two of them, peace was a fantasy dreamed by the dead.

“You’re the best sons a Master of Chaos could hope for, even if I only gave birth to one of you,” Klarion’s mother said a few years into raising them. “The forces of Order won’t stand a chance when we send you out to harass them.”

Just harassment, nothing else.

Conquering the Ordered lords wasn’t on the agenda, since that would ruin all the fun. Chaos was best when it was unexpected, and if the world was nothing but chaos all that was ruined. The Witches’ perfect world was one balanced on a knife’s edge, flip-flopping between poorly maintained order and cataclysmic disasters.

“They’ll hate us so much,” Tim giggled. The phantom of Orderliness still clung to his soul, but that just made his actual alignment more hilarious.

Witch folk rarely had children, so nobody would expect two Lords of Chaos to appear.

The Ordered folk wouldn’t see them coming at all.

***

It was a right of passage for witchlings to go to other dimensions to train their magic. The Witch Dimension was magically charged and perfect for their wild natures, but it was delicate. When witches hit adolescence, it made more sense to chuck them into other realities to hone their craft rather than risk destroying the fabric of their home plane.

Klarion was eager to make his mark on a new reality. By the time he was ten (Witch years, not human ones), he was ready to go. He had Teekl (the best familiar ever), years of pent up hatred for authority, and Tim on his side.

“When we get to Earth, let’s make a bet who can cause the most trouble,” Klarion said.

“Okay,” Tim said, smiling reservedly. “If I win, I get your name.”

“And if I win, I swallow your essence,” Klarion said. “That’s a fair exchange.”

Swallowing Tim’s essence would mean he ceased to exist. If they were proper nemeses that would mean Klarion won. Now, it was just brotherly rivalry.

“That seems fair," Tim said. "Deal."

They shook on it and made a binding promise. Magic curled around their hands and seeped into them, sharp, vicious, and comforting.

“It’ll be hard for you to win without a familiar,” Klarion said, hugging Teekl proudly. “You’ll barely be able to tether yourself on the earthly plane.”

Klarion’s chosen animal companion was a purebread magical conduit of near mythical proportions. Another like her would be nearly impossible to find, but Timothy could get one if he wanted. The problem was that he was pickier than Klarion and still hadn’t chosen an animal buddy.

“Let me worry about that,” Tim said. “You’re not the only one studying magic on your lonesome. I know how to anchor myself just fine.”

Klarion giggled in delight. “This is why you’re my favorite sibling. You always have something up your sleeve.”

“I’m your only sibling,” Tim said. “And I have to be good at planning, otherwise you’d have all the fun.”

“Now, now,” Mother said, cajoling them forward. “The portal isn’t going to stay open forever. I’ll see you both in a few decades, once you’ve mastered your magic. Have as much fun as you can—and please, when you find a Lord of Order, kick them in the pants for me. Those slimy rule makers deserve it.”

Klarion and Tim promised they would, then jumped into the portal.

The dimensional rift buckled under their combined power, but that was normal. It was only when it stablized that Klarion realized something was wrong.

Tim screamed next to him, and a flash of light blinded Klarion to what happened next.

When he woke up, hours later, he was lying in a wheat field, Teekl unconscious beside him.

Tim was gone.

Chapter 2: Strange Men Distributing Helmets Are No System For Proper Order!

Chapter Text

Nabu—Doctor Fate—had one job: maintain order.

You'd think it'd be easy, given that he was a Lord of Order, superhero, and ageless construct designed to watch unceasingly and never die.

Life, as always, found ways to test him.

He stood in the middle of the Tower of Fate, pinching the bridge of his helmet in irritation. His host, Zatara Zatanna, seemed amused.

Bloody magician. This was the opposite of amusing. It was a disaster.

"Two of them?" Nabu muttered. "Two?"

This was against regulation. There was only supposed to be one Lord of Chaos on this dimensional plane. It was a necessary evil to keep the balance, and something Doctor Fate put up with longsufferingly throughout the ages, and should not have any deviations.

Lords of Chaos were dangerous, amoral beings with a penchant for mischief. The young ones, which often filtered into this reality, were seldom evil, but that was cold comfort when their idea of a prank ranged anywhere from putting glue in milk to staging intergalactic wars.

Nabu could contain one easily enough. They were slippery, hard to catch creatures, but anything could be imprisoned with enough practice. He’d had decades to prepare for cleansing the stink of disorder from this plane when it was time for the next spawn of chaos to reveal itself.

He had not prepared for double the trouble.

“Bloody Lords of Chaos, always changing the rules,” he muttered.

This was going to be tedious.

Luckily for Earth, Nabu had eons of experience wrangling interdimensional goblin spawn.

All he had to do was set an elaborate series of alarms to warn him of incoming Chaos children and wait for the fabric reality to ripple. After that, kidnapping them was as easy as taking his host's body from his soul.

***

A sealing spell was what he defaulted to. Containment rather than immediate elimination. He needed to see how the Witches from Beyond spawned two children of similar age. That was almost unheard of.

Nabu was glad he checked. What he found was . . . bizarre.

He’d been unable to capture both children. His containment spell activated perfectly, but one of the Witches released so much reactionary magic that it’d shaken the other loose from their confines. A lucky escape, but Nabu would track them down soon enough. For now, he needed to solve this mystery.

“What are you?” He said, pacing the orb where the thing was trapped.

“Your worst nightmare. Let me out!” the tiny Witch said. They pounded on the magic shield, releasing static discharge with each strike.

They were an uncanny, pale child who radiated dangerous energy. The standard Witch familiar was nowhere to be seen, but the boy (?) showed no sign of leaving the mortal plane. So, he'd found a way to tether himself without an animal companion.

Nabu's eyes flickered to the brass ring on the boy's finger. A physical object then, used as a temporary stopgap against de-tethering. Interesting.

Even more curiously, the boy's soul echoed with the ghost of Order.

“Fascinating,” Nabu said. “You were once like me.”

Lords of Order spawned in tandem with Lords of Chaos. It was a universal law. Nabu had assumed he simply hadn’t found the latest addition to the Order, but this changed things.

The Lords of Chaos had stolen this child and twisted him into his natural opposite. It made a mockery of creation itself.

“I’m nothing like you,” the Witch child said, glaring hatefully at Nabu’s helmet. “I hate rules, structure, and Order. I’d rather die than be stuck like you!”

Oh, how far this creature had fallen. His raw power was significant, though not spectacular. He must have been the nemesis for the other Lord of Chaos before disorder hooked its claws into his flesh. It was a shame to see such potential wasted. Nabu could use another Lord to shoulder the burden of this plane with, but there was no room for an abomination like this to exist. It was the embodiment of chaos's infection and needed to be rooted out.

“Die you shall,” Nabu said. “Balance must be restored.”

There was no place for this much disorder. The child needed to die.

Nabu snapped his fingers. The orb began to constrict. It would crush the Witch down to his atoms and feast on his essence. A fitting end for something that existed to sow the seeds of destruction on this planet for amusem*nt.

“I’m not scared,” the Witch boy said, squaring his shoulders as his death approached.

His lip wobbled, betraying his brave face.

He’s just a child. Have mercy.

Nabu frowned. “Zatara, silence. You know we cannot allow it. Order must be maintained.”

Nabu’s host did the equivalent of rolling his eyes, despite being an incorporeal soul with no control over his body. There is more than one way to maintain order. He doesn’t have to die. We are better than that.

“Leave a seed in a ditch, and it will flower into a weed,” Nabu said. “You are young, Zatara. You haven’t seen the danger this boy poses.”

Lords of Chaos were slippery. Once caught, it was imperative to snuff them out. Otherwise, they'd grow even more wiley and hard to capture.

You are hardly a paragon of virtue yourself, Zatara said bitterly. Still sore about the possession, it seemed. Nabu foresaw another snide lecture about consent. Don’t kill him. Help him.

The orb was starting to bear down on the boy’s shoulders. A tear rolled down the Witch boy’s cheek. He curled into a ball and glared at Nabu as the magic started to burn his skin.

Please, Zatara sounded panicked. You said his soul feels like yours. That makes him a victim.

“A dark experiment on the Witch’s part, no doubt,” Nabu said without sympathy. “They changed his nature.”

Then we should change it back.

The orb paused its constriction. The boy hyperventilated inside it, knees tucked against his head.

“Go on,” Nabu said, intrigued.

If this is a ploy by the Lords of Chaos, they’ll do it again with a new Ordered child, Zatara said. It would be better to find a cure than lose future Agents of Order. Look for one now, and you’ll save countless lives in the future.

“You wish for me to forcibly change his alignment back to Order.” Nabu had to admit, the idea had merit.

The witch boy's breath hitched. He struggled anew. “No, I don’t want that. Rules are evil, and I like being Tim. Don’t change me!”

“Realigning a soul is delicate work,” Nabu said, ignoring the boy's words as he appraised the child with new eyes. “But if it’s done right . . .”

You’ll save him, rather than destroy him, Zatara said encouragingly.

Young souls were malleable. All it would take was magic, strict observation, and a co*cktail of exposure to Order to return this Witch to its proper form. Its destiny was not lost. In fact, with Nabu’s hand, it was fated to be rediscovered.

And this witch boy had such potential.

Nabu knew his host had misgivings, despite being the one to come up with the idea, but all Zatara's objections were emotional ones. The child was screaming and pounding on the sphere again, thick tears rolling down baby cheeks. The Witch had chosen a very young appearance, which no doubt played with Zatara’s morals.

Fortunately, Nabu wasn’t burdened with fickle qualms such as those. He lived and died for only one thing; balance. And if there was a way to even the scales and make this amalgamation of chaos into something Ordered, he’d take it.

Who knows, if this was successful, he could attempt it with other witchlings. It would be a useful tool in his arsenal.

“No, no no no, just kill me,” the Witch pleaded. “Don’t make me into something I don’t want to be. I’d rather die!”

Nabu raised his hand. Beautiful, structured magic rolled off it. “Your will is meaningless in the grand scheme of the universe, child. You will understand that too. Unlike the barbarians of the Witch Dimension, our kind looks at the bigger picture. You will see your place in it soon.”

“No—!”

The child gasped and slumped against the side of the sphere. Nabu’s fingers sparked with the spell of slumber he’d just performed.

He's so young, Zatara whispered. Don’t hurt him

“I won’t, aside from what is necessary,” Nabu said. “We want him to be useful, after all.”

It would take years to reorder a soul this corrupted. It’d be a delicate balancing act. Too much Order all at once, and the boy would perish. Too little, and no progress would be made at all.

He would need to be left in an environment where chaos was present, but rigid obedience required. Somewhere that melded order and anarchy, but pointed him unerringly to the correct path.

Nabu knew the perfect location.

All it would take was some minor alterations to set the stage, then all Nabu would have to do was monitor the boy over the years and make sure the boy's only thoughts were how to fix broken things and follow the conduct required of a Lord of Order. Even with exposure to chaos, he would be so indoctrinated into Orderliness that it would seem alien and sinister.

Magic sparked on Nabu's fingers again. Yes, this would work.

What are you doing? Zatara demanded as Nabu began weaving his next spell. I told you not to hurt him. Na—

Nabu silenced his host. Humans—ideal to puppet, but too entrenched in morality. They didn’t understand the sacrifices needed to balance the forces of the universe. Good and evil had no place in those spheres. There was only order and chaos, and Nabu would do anything to maintain them.

The witch boy, Tim, would understand. If not now, then eventually. When he did, he would agree with Nabu. Be grateful, even.

The Tower of Fate thrummed with energy as Nabu cast his spell. The floor glowed with runes, each drawn in perfect, geometric shapes and timed to activate at regular intervals. Tim lay unconscious in the center of the circle, still trapped within the containment sphere.

Nabu frowned. That name was too disordered. It was tainted by the Witch Dimension. It was hardly a proper thing to call the boy now.

“Timothy has a much better ring to it,” Nabu said, and finished the spell.

A sibilant hiss echoed through the Tower of Fate, shaking the building by its foundations. A delicate mist rolles over the circle and into the sphere, settling over the witch boy like a second skin.

Nabu smiled as the young Lord of Chaos lost every memory stamped on the thumbprint of his soul. Now he was a true tabula rasa, pure as undriven snow. Perfect for a fresh start on existence.

“S—stop,” Zatara said, actually forcing Nabu’s lips to move.

“Nonsense,” Nabu said, wrestling control away once more. “You’re overreacting, Zatara. This is what you wanted.”

The boy was crying in his sleep, hands spasming as magic ran through him, but it was no more painful than it had to be. Besides, memories of chaos would only get in the way of his rehabilitation.

They weren’t necessary at all.

Not for what Nabu had planned.

***

Stranded in a wheat field, Klarion got to his feet and started calling for his brother. His cat, Teekl, mewled in distress as she noticed the absence of her favorite Not-Klarion.

After an hour of looking, Klarion had to take a break to cry, then slapped himself. Tears wouldn't get his brother back. He was better than this.

"Come on Teekl," Klarion said, bundling his familiar in his arms. "He has to be here somewhere. We'll get him back in no time."

But no matter how much they searched, no trace of Tim could be found.

***

Hundreds of miles away, in an orphanage in Bristol, Jack and Janet signed the final papers for their new child.

Timothy Jackson Drake was taken home that day, with absolutely no idea that he’d ever been anyone else.

Chapter 3: It’s A Hard Knock Life

Chapter Text

Timothy Jackson Drake was discontent.

He’d learned that word yesterday during his vocabulary lesson. It didn’t cover the breadth of irritation Tim felt toward his entire existence, but it was close enough. Living with the Drakes was torture.

If his new parents knew he felt that way, it’d be a short stop to lectures about gratitude and respect. They’d stretched out their benevolent, gold-studded hands and saved him from the nightmare of poverty, and (as they reminded him daily) they could throw him back into it if they wanted.

“Really, Timothy,” Janet said two months into Tim’s stay, “you must be better behaved. If you don’t do as you’re told, we’ll have to find another child.”

Tim winced at the use of his full name. He didn’t know why, but it made him itch. A lady at the orphanage had called him Tim once, and it’d been a lightning rod of comfort. Each time he was “Timothyed” it made him want to hiss.

The Drakes were goodish people. They were doing a good deed, taking care of Tim. All they asked for in return was complete obedience.

That was the problem.

Tim viscerally, with every fiber of his being, hated being told what to do.

If they asked him to wash his hands, he covered the floor with soap. When Jack told him to pick up his toys, Tim dismantled them and put the screws in his dad’s shoes. When Janet wanted him to learn a Bristol accent, Tim would go out of his way to slur his vowels in the worst Crime Alley jargon he could come up with.

Home life quickly turned from domestic bliss into a war zone. By the three month mark, they were all at their wit’s end.

“You will listen,” Jack said as he hauled Tim up the stairs for a bath. “Or I’ll throw a toaster in the tub with you.”

“Jack, don’t joke about that,” Janet snapped. “He’ll take it literally.”

“I’ll never surrender!” Tim howled, trying to bite Jack’s wrist. “Death first!”

Jack held him by the ankle and scowled. “Face it, Jan, this one is a dud. We should give him back to St. Mary’s and get a better one. I kept the receipt.”

Tim’s vague memories of the orphanage said it wasn’t a place he wanted to go back to. They’d been strict too. Rules upon rules upon rules.

Thinking about it made him want to scream, so he did. Loudly.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Jack,” Janet said over Tim’s howls. “I want this one.”

Jack shook Tim, who was still screaming while being held upside down. “This one? For the love of God, why?”

“Because—” Janet tossed a thin envelope to her husband. “—the test results just came back. He has an IQ higher than Lex Luthor, and figured out calculus in the margins of his math exam. He has potential, and I’ll be damned if I don’t take advantage of it.”

Tim gasped in betrayal. He thought those tests had just been for fun. Nobody told him they’d be used for evil. “Boo, I hate you. Damn you, rebel scum!”

He started making lightsaber noises and kicked his shoe into Jack’s face.

Jack responded by dropping him on the floor. Tim hit the carpet shoulder first and yelped in pain.

“I’m not wasting time with this brat,” he said. “We agreed to raise an heir, not wage war with devil spawn.”

Tim got up and rubbed his head. A goose egg was beginning to swell. He started to sniffle.

Janet patted his head, running her fingers through his hair. Her nails scratched his scalp, just sharp enough to not be tender. (Bizarrely, Tim felt like he’d experience this before. That there was another terrifying woman he’d known that hadn’t understood how to be affectionate, but gave it the old college try anyway.)

“There, there, sweetheart,” she said to Tim. “We’re not getting rid of you.”

The way she said it should have been comforting, but wasn’t. Still, she was the nice one right now. Tim didn’t want to make Jack madder, so he got up and clung to Janet’s pant leg.

“You don’t have to shout at him to make him more obedient,” Janet told Jack. Her fingers continued to drag through Tim’s hair. “He’s not even five. There’s plenty of time to make him see things our way before he inherits the company.”

Tim frowned. That age felt wrong. He could’ve been four. He was very small. But it was anybody’s guess how old he actually was. Four seemed like a safe bet.

He tried to remember when his last birthday was—but, like everything before the orphanage, there was only fog and a sense of loss.

“How do you propose we fix him, then?” Jack said, glaring at Tim. “He’s a menace, Jan. He put Koolaid in the laundry machine this morning.”

“Clothes are better with fun colors,” Tim huffed.

He wanted to make tie-dye, but when he put the whole rainbow in the detergent it turned brown.

“Those were designer shirts, young man—”

Janet cleared her throat. “We’re getting off-topic.”

Jack and Tim glared at each other again, but stopped bickering. Tim had a feeling this would be the status quo of their relationship.

Janet sank to her knees so she was eye-level with Tim. Her pantsuit (black with pinstripes) was ironed as smooth as marble and her flawless skin was pristine. There wasn’t a hair out of place. She looked perfect.

Tim had the sudden desire to kick her in the shin, just to mess that up. He didn’t like things without fault. They were icky.

“Timothy,” Janet said. “We told you to behave when we got you. You don’t want to go back to the bad people, do you?”

“No,” Tim said reluctantly. The orphanage had been awful. “But I don’t like the rules.”

“You have to follow the rules,” Janet said. “That was the deal. You keep your promises, don’t you?”

Tim pouted before nodding. “Promises are important.”

Never, ever break one if you could help it. That was drummed so deep into Tim’s head that it pierced through the fog around his memories.

“Good, I’m glad you understand that,” Janet said. “However, you’ve been very bad, so your father and I are going to have to be stricter with you from now on. But if you do as we say, we’ll stop. Alright?”

Janet’s fingernails were little knives on his scalp.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll be good.”

A thick, invisible rope tied itself around Tim’s throat at the thought of more rules. The itching got worse. It took all his concentration not to scream again.

His new parents smiled.

Tim pretended they were nice expressions.

***

Janet’s solution was a correctional facility for troubled youth. Tim spent two months there, learning to be good.

They used a reward system. The better Tim behaved, the more treats and rewards he got. If he acted out, however, bad things happened. First his blankets got taken, then his bed, then his meals, and so on. At one point, he got locked in a closet all day. Not fun.

Tim faced a crucible two weeks into living off plain oatmeal and water. He could either keep screaming whenever people entered the room, or do what they said and eventually go back home.

(Because Drake manor was home, even if it sucked.)

It broke his heart, but anywhere was better than here.

The next time one of the supervisors came in, Tim behaved as best he could, hiding how miserable it made him.

After two months, he got to go home.

His manners were perfect, and Tim was a broken child.

***

Tim’s fifth (?) birthday was a mockery of his entire identity. Jack and Janet chose June 19^th because it was the day he was taken home from the correctional facility. They were suitably impressed with his new obedience to stupid rules like taking his shoes off indoors and not cutting their clothes up with scissors.

Weirdos.

“You were right, Jan, I gave up on him too soon,” Jack said, ruffling Tim’s hair. “He’s not so bad now.”

Tim bit his cheek to stop from glaring mutinously at the man. That wouldn’t be polite, and Tim was good now, so he knew better.

Janet, for her part, looked delighted. “Yes, it would be a shame to send him back. He’ll be great for the company once he’s old enough to take over. We should celebrate.”

Celebrating meant going to the circus.

Tim now hated the circus on principle.

Or, he wanted to, but it was hard when Haley’s Circus was so cool.

“Mom, Mom,” he said, dragging Janet toward the big top. “Look, they have all the colors everywhere. Mom, that man is eating a sword, I want to do that too. Can we buy a sword for me to eat? Please, please, please—”

“Stop pestering me, Timothy,” Janet said. “It’s not polite to be so loud in public.”

“Oh.” Tim snapped his teeth together and went quiet. Manners. Right.

He trailed behind his parents, looking wide-eyed as performers mingled with the guests. Someone was juggling sticks set on fire, another man walked over them on stilts, and a lady with a beard chatted with a trucker about mousse. Music blared on the speakers and the air smelled like popcorn.

Tim wished he was allowed to have more fun. There was so much unpredictability here. It made him feel safe, unlike the bad school he’d been stuck in for so long. The less structure things had, the better.

“Oh, look, Jack,” Janet said. “Those are the stars. Let’s see if we can get a picture with them.”

The Flying Graysons were warm, happy people with big smiles and loud laughs. Tim wanted to know why they were allowed to be boisterous in public and he wasn’t. That was so unfair.

“You’re cute,” their son, Dick, said. He squished Tim into a hug. “I’m gonna keep you. Mom, look, free brother!”

“Brother?” Tim whispered. The ghost of something pressed against his mind, just out of reach.

“Uh huh, I’ve always wanted a baby brother,” Dick said. “I’m going to teach you all my tricks.”

“Yes, yes!” Tim said. He clapped his hands and bounced on his heels.

The adults around them laughed.

“Sorry,” Mrs. Grayson said to Tim’s parents. “He’s been like this for months. I promise we won’t kidnap your baby.”

“Unless you need a vacation,” Mr. Grayson said with a wink. “We could always use another aerialist.”

More laughter, but Tim didn’t understand why. Being in the circus sounded awesome.

“No worries, you know how kids are. Boys will be boys,” Jack said, as if he hadn’t wanted to throw Tim back into the orphanage a couple of months ago. “Sorry, Timothy, but the Graysons travel too much. Dick won’t be able to teach you anything.”

Tim and Dick made upset sounds. Why were adults so lame? This blowed.

Janet and Dick’s parents soothed the kids’ ruffled feathers by posing for a photo. A picture wasn't as cool as learning to do flips, but it Tim’s first picture with someone that he could remember, so he took the bribe.

“Don’t worry,” Dick said. He got to hug Tim for the photo. “I’ll do a special quadruple somersault tonight just for you.”

“Promise?” Tim said.

“Promise.”

Tim sank deeper into the hug and smiled. Promises, he knew, were very, very important. Dick wasn’t allowed to break it.

***

When they first got to the circus, Tim had been excited. The chaos outside the tent was intoxicating, but once the performance started . . . Tim was bored.

The performers were amazing. Tigers jumped through flaming hoops, people contorted into crazy shapes, and the ringmaster made jokes that gave Tim the giggles.

But it was static.

Everything was rehearsed, practiced, and done to the beat of the schedule. The performers were masters of their bodies, but even Tim could tell they had their routines planned to the 1/16th of a second.

In short, it was orderly.

Tim hated it.

That word made him growl. He didn’t know why, but it made him want to set something on fire. It was only the two months at the correctional facility that kept him in his seat. He didn’t want to go back—he really didn’t want to. He had to be good, even if the performance made him itch all the way in his bones.

People shouted and clapped as a lady climbed silk ropes and spun through the air. The smell of popcorn was suffocating. A drum beat in a steady, unerring pattern.

Regular.

Steady.

Perfect.

Then it was Graysons turn. They waved from the top of the trapeze. Dick grinned at Tim and gave an exaggerated wink.

They flipped through the air, catching each other a split second before falling. Dick’s quadruple somersault made the crowd gasp in delight.

That hadn’t been in the script. It’d been improvised. Dick’s parents looks shocked by it.

Tim felt the tension in his heart ease slightly, but not enough. There was still too much sameness.

He wanted to cry. It was so boring. Why couldn’t something exciting happen? Something interesting and unexpected? Something like—

Tim felt his skin buzz, louder and hotter. Not an itch, more like a relief, like a muscle he didn’t use woke up.

He breathed a sigh of relief.

Then the Grayson’s lines snapped.

People screamed

the routine shattered

and everything fell apart.

***

“Good god, that was horrid,” Jack said. “Did you see that, Janet? They splattered against—”

“Don’t, Jack,” Janet snapped, green-faced. “Don’t.”

She tugged Tim out of the tent and picked him up. Her shoulders shook as she pressed him against her shoulder on their way to the car.

The audience was exiting en masse, whispering and crying after the performance’s grisly finale.

Before the tent flap closed behind them, Tim saw Dick crying by his parents. A dark shape stood behind him, like a piece of the night cut out of the sky. It reached a hand toward Dick, who threw himself against the stranger in a bone breaking hug.

“So much for a family night out,” Jack said when they reached the car. His hands shook as he pulled out the keys. “Good God. This will haunt me.”

They peeled out of the parking lot, far away from the circus and its tragedy. Jack and Janet were silent, pale-faced and upset.

Tim was quiet. He kept his hands pressed against his face, hiding his mouth. He’d been doing it since the line snapped.

He didn’t want Janet to see his smile.

People weren’t supposed to laugh when people died. Especially not nice, happy people like Mr. and Mrs. Grayson. That part of tonight wasn’t fun.

But the rest?

The intoxicating surprise of something truly unexpected?

The disorder, chaos, and pandemonium as the carefully ordered evening fell into disarray?

Ooh, he liked that.

It was only those two months at the facility that stopped Tim from clapping his hands and giggling. He shook with suppressed laughs, doing his best to keep up his manners.

“Shh, shh, it’s okay, Timothy,” Janet said, hugging him tight. “It’s okay. You’re safe.”

He burrowed his face into her shoulder, a spark of mischief slipping through the fog.

He wanted more nights like this. Not the death—no, dying was boring—but the excitement and thrill. He ached to cause them.

To make people scream, just like they had at the circus tonight.

It was a promise in his bones, ancient and older than he was. No matter how coiffed and proper he looked on the outside, it burned in his bones like a cancer.

But Janet and Jack didn’t notice his grin. They were too distracted to pay attention to him at all.

Tim kept his hands pressed against his cheeks and grinned wider.

Right now, the Drakes were too wrapped up in making him their perfect heir. It was rules, rules, rules . . . but someday, if he pretended to be good enough, they’d loosen up and Tim would get his chance.

If they didn’t know he was causing trouble, they couldn’t stop him. As long as he minded his manners in front of them, it’d be fine.

Someday was a long way off, but he was good at playing the long game.

All he had to do was wait.

Chapter 4: Chaotic Things Are Afoot At The Circle-K

Chapter Text

Nabu’s headache was more persistent than his host’s attempts to wrest control back to his body. There was a constant ache between his temples. Worse, Nabu couldn’t even rub his head because his helmet was in the way.

Tracking down the remaining witchling was proving difficult.

Unlike the disordered, alignment-confused gremlin Nabu had contained, the other Lord of Chaos was vexingly good at magic. If the two witchlings were the same age, then this meant Timothy's brother was a prodigy.

Nabu’s head throbbed a little harder. Prodigies were tedious. It was best to track them down immediately, otherwise they grew into significant threats.

Killing the witchling wasn’t an option. Unlike the Timothy, Nabu needed this one alive or the balance would be thrown off. However, that didn’t mean he had to let him run free. As long as chaos existed, balance would prevail. That said nothing for what condition the boy had to be in.

There was a special prison in the Tower of Fate set aside for the remaining witchling. Pure white walls, no exits, and inscriptions of endless runes—it was a prison that’d taken nearly two years to craft, but was impossible to escape. The payoff would be worth it.

An eternity staring at blank walls, with only his familiar for company, was a fitting fate for Nabu’s foe. Maybe if the witchling was contained, this blasted headache would finally go away.

And maybe someday I’ll get my body back, Zatara muttered.

“Quiet, magician,” Nabu said. “I’m allowed to dream.”

As am I.

Nabu sighed. His host had been cantankerous ever since erasing Timothy’s memories. Attempts to take the helmet off were becoming more frequent, although they were never successful.

He didn’t have time for this. Rampant chaos, rebellious hosts, the newly formed Justice League changing Earth’s status quo . . . Nabu was spread six ways to Sunday with no breaks between. He was exhausted.

His only consolation was that sooner or later, the witchling would slip up. Once he did, Nabu would be ready.

And then there would be one less thing to worry about.

***

After over two years of fruitless searching, Klarion was ready to tear his hair out. It regrew fast, so it'd just be for dramatics, but it’d be satisfying. Looking for Tim was a nightmare.

“This is most vexing, Teekl,” Klarion told his cat. The two of them floated over a Circle-K at dusk, the sunset painting them a thousand colors. “How am I going to win our bet if I can’t find him?”

They couldn’t prove who was more chaotic if they couldn’t meet up, which meant Klarion wouldn’t be able to devour his essence. It wasn’t fair!

(Plus, Klarion missed Tim. Causing chaos wasn’t as fun without him.)

“At this rate, I’ll forget I even had a brother,” Klarion grumbled.

He’d been ping-ponging across the globe looking for a trace of his brother’s magic for two whole years. That was basically an eternity!

He’d tried scry spells, locator magic—he’d even thrown himself into the most chaotic situations he could find on the off chance the ambient disorder called to Tim’s soul.

Again, nothing.

It was uncanny. Normally, Klarion could sense his brother as easily as breathing air. But ever since arriving on this plane, Klarion felt like he was inhaling smoke. He choked whenever he tried to smell Tim’s magic. The entire planet stank of Orderliness. Gross.

Klarion still needed to tell Mother about Tim being missing, but contact with the Witch Dimension was limited. It’d been understood that they wouldn’t talk, write, or send messages until Klarion and Tim’s stay on Earth was over. Chaotic though Witches were, none of them wanted to go through the effort to finding another dimension to colonize. It took forever and was super tedious.

Besides, Klarion didn’t even know why Tim was missing. If it wasn’t serious, Mother would hate to risk the fabric of reality without a good reason. They were big kids, they could handle themselves.

“Perhaps my theory that he went missing on purpose is true,” Klarion mused. “It would be just like him to pretend to disappear to win the game.”

Of the two of them, Tim had always been more devious. His brand of chaos was terrifyingly easy to miss if you weren’t familiar with it.

Tim had plans for Earth. Vanishing into thin air and avoiding all the fun chaos did not sound like part of said plans, until Klarion remembered how schemey his brother could be. It made sense for him to get Klarion to panic, then sneak around doing dastardly deeds when nobody was looking to win their bet.

“What do you think, Teekl?” Klarion asked, floating down to sit on the Circle-K billboard. The neon lights glowed in the fading sunlight. One of them flickered with a low buzz. “Has Tim been fooling us this whole time?”

Teekle gave a grumpy “merp!” that meant she’d be angry if that were the case, but also relieved because it meant Tim wasn’t in trouble.

Klarion scratched behind her ears. It was adorable how much his familiar liked Tim. Teekl rarely liked anyone.

“Yes, that does sound like something he’d do,” Klarion muttered.

After Tim’s manifestation, they’d spent every waking moment together, testing each other’s magic and seeing where the lines of their identities blurred. Understanding their deviations was important to knowing what being brothers meant. Although they were similar, there were some notable differences.

“You’re weird,” Klarion had told him after a game of Morph-Tag. “You keep letting me win. We’re falling into a pattern.”

Tim giggled at him. “That’s what you think. It’s all part of my plan.”

Klarion poked him with the stem of a Moonflower. The leaves stuck to Tim’s skin like suction cups and had to be yanked off with loud pops. “How is acting Orderly a good plan?”

Tim tugged Klarion’s ear and stretched it like taffy. “Because the best chaos happens when somebody things everything is going according to plan. It’s all about expectations. You gotta balance it so that when the rug gets pulled out from under them, they never see it coming.”

“That sounds like a lot of work,” Klarion had said.

“I know,” Tim grinned. “That’s why the payoff is so sweet.”

Tim was all about the long game. Manipulating the line between structure and disorder was his favorite passtime. Mother suspected the echo of Order inside him made him more sensitive to the balance. Klarion figured Tim was just Like That to balance out Klarion’s wanton love of spontaneous chaos.

Klarion could plan, but he disliked it. For him, the fun came from improvising. His skill with magic and spell work meant he never lacked for creative solutions to his schemes. Tim could keep his elaborate plans and carefully plotted madness. Klarion lived for the thrill of the moment.

(They weren’t nemeses, but the nature of Tim’s existence meant they were still each other’s mirrors.)

“Perhaps Tim simply does not want to be found,” Klarion said. He scratched Teekl’s ears. “He did have plans for our time on Earth. This could be part of it . . . I suppose we’ll simply have to cause as much chaos as possible until he emerges. That way, when he does show up, I’ll have won the bet.”

Klarion nodded to himself. Yes, this was a good plan. Starting now, he’d leave Tim to his own devices. Spending this long searching for him had been more than generous. Klarion had more important things to do than stress over this.

“Come, Teekl, there is much to be done,” Klarion said, rising into the air. “We have a lot of catching up to do if we’re going to win that bet.”

He’d wasted two years already. Tim was probably so far ahead. Klarion would need to cause a lot of chaos to even the scales.

Luckily, there were plenty of options available.

Lords of Order to harass, magic to learn, a cat to pamper—the sky was the limit. Klarion didn’t know how many decades he had left in his stay on earth, but he knew they’d be jam packed with adventure and full to the brim with trouble. Just the combination a growing witchling needed to thrive.

Tim had better enjoy his essence while it lasted, because once Klarion was on a roll, he was impossible to stop.

“Let’s see,” Klarion hummed, sharing a sharp smirk with his cat. “Where should I start?”

The Circle-K’s neon sign flickered again, and Klarion’s eyes were drawn to the small corner store below.

Teekl meowed with interest.

“Just what I was thinking,” Klarion said. “Good kitty.”

Enchanting every Circle-K in the United States would be a good start to his career. If he worked fast, he could get half of them done tonight.

Now, what would be a good curse to put on them?

***

Nabu was in the middle of a tense, time-sensitive spell. His attention (as usual) was divided between monitoring Gotham, the Tower of Fate, and several dimensions that were bordering Earth’s natural plane too close for comfort.

He needed the utmost concentration to seal the latest breach he’d found, which was wearing down the walls between Earth and another plane that had insects as the dominant life form instead of bipeds.

His concentration broke as the world lurched.

Well, that didn’t feel good, Zatara said blandly as Nabu’s spell fell apart.

“You don’t say,” Nabu said, swallowing frustration as hours of hard work undid themselves. He’d have to start over.

But later, because lurching worlds were rarely benign things.

He stalked over to the crystal ball he kept in the parlor. It was much easier to use it than to hone in on magic ills, rather than do complicated summoning rituals.

In the glass was a small convenience store. It had grown chicken legs and was wandering down the highway, customers screaming inside.

Nabu would need to go there in person to confirm what caused it, but it didn’t take a genius to figure it out. Chaos magic had a unique flair.

I’d hoped he’d stay hidden longer than this, Zatara said bitterly. If only to avoid you.

“A foolish hope,” Nabu said. “Lords of Chaos are unable to resist their true natures for long.”

Neither can you.

Nabu didn’t refute the statement. It was true, after all. Zatara was the strange one for expecting anything else. He was lucky Nabu was indulging him with the Timothy Experiment. Any other Lord of Order would have snuffed that aberration out regardless of their host’s desires.

Nabu left the crystal ball and headed for the door. The Tower of Fate had many exits. He was sure he could find one close to the convenience-store on legs.

It was time to pay the last witchling a visit.

Chapter 5: Double, Double Toil and Trouble

Chapter Text

Klarion knew Lords of Order were lame sticks in the mud, but his mother’s grumbles didn’t prepare him for the sheer ew of meeting one in person.

Here he’d been, minding his own business (transforming a major highway and all the nearby buildings into mutated animal hybrids) when the sky lit up with gold magic.

Klarion almost dropped Teekl in his attempt to cover his nose. Order smelled like a carpet cleaner and lightning. It made his stomach heave.

That was the downside of having such strong natural magic. Klarion could sense it to the point of over-stimulation. Mother said that’s why he needed to go to Earth—to learn to channel that ability safer—but it didn’t mean Klarion had to like it.

Teekl rubbed his face with her nose and purred. The familiar smell of cat and chaos muddled the ickyness of Order.

“Thanks Teekl,” Klarion said. “You deserve a treat.”

He’d steal her some tuna from the store on chicken legs. Only the best for his familiar.

But first, he had an enemy to meet.

Klarion crossed his legs as he floated in place stroking his cat, and eyed the horizon. The golden glow was coalescing into a portal. Instead of the wibbly-wobbly rips in reality Klarion preferred, it was a clear-cut ankh the color of sunshine. Each line was crisp and even, making the portal look as if it’d been stamped with a cookie cutter instead of willed into existence.

Disgusting.

Klarion idly turned a blue Chevy’s hood into a mouth—complete with a tongue and molars—just to balance out the types of magic in the air. The person driving the car screamed and swerved into the median, which had been enchanted to Velcro itself to the car tires.

Much better.

“So,” a sonorous voice boomed, “you are the latest witchling to disturb our world.”

A man dressed in gold and dark blue emerged from the portal, a metallic cape flaring behind him. He hovered in the air as if levitating was something to impress people with rather than the best way to get comfy after a long day of dealing with gravity.

“That’s me,” Klarion said, grinning as wide as a slice of watermelon. “Klarion the Witch Boy. Bum bum bum!”

He’d started adding a happy jingle to the end of his name for flavor. Best decision he’d ever made.

“I’m guessing you're this world’s Lord of Order,” Klarion said, floating upside-down now. “What’s with the helmet? It feels like—oh, ew. You’re one of those.”

The Lord of Order was wearing a human as an anchor, puppeting living flesh instead of bonding with a familiar. It was a fad that’d fallen out of fashion in the Witch Dimension.

Turned out, if you killed the body’s soul the flesh suit rotted from the inside out and polluted one’s magic. Keeping the original owner alive, however, was tedious and bothersome. One wrong step and the entire jenga tower fell apart, so it was hardly worth doing at all.

Trust the Ordered Ones to keep it up. They probably loved all the fine-tuning required to find a compatible body. Weirdos.

“I am Nabu, Doctor Fate, guardian of this reality,” The Ordered One said. His face was blocked by his dumb helmet, but Klarion bet he was looking at him with the same, unimpressed look he was giving him. “Your kind are not welcome here.”

“Boo hoo,” Klarion said, blowing a raspberry. “Like I wanted your invitation. This world is boring, it needs some flair. Good thing I’m here to help you with that!”

He snapped his fingers and reality buckled, warping further. The road groaned and lifted itself up like a snake in a cartoon. Cars swerved off it to avoid being flung into the storm ditches.

“Cease this.” Dr. Nabu Fate (lame name) raised a hand and released a bolt of light. It hit the road and froze it in place.

Klarion felt his spell disintegrate as it was struck by concentrated magic. “Hey, I worked hard on that. Meanie!”

Animating inanimate things was hard. Klarion made it look easy, but even Timothy couldn’t do it without a spell circle and a paragraph of incantations. Klarion was unappreciated in his time.

“Your childish tantrum ends here,” Dr. Nabu said, hand still raise. His entire body glowed with golden light. “It is bad enough your kind’s infection leaks into other dimensions. I will not have you endanger innocent lives for your own amusem*nt.”

Klarion frowned. “Witches aren’t an infection. We’re your opposite. Did you lose your brain?”

Witches were supposed to travel between worlds. They’d only colonized the Witch Dimension so they could have a place to take naps without nasty Ordered Ones stinking up the place. Hardly any Witches spent more than a few years at a time there because there was so much delightful chaos to sow elsewhere.

“You are disrupting this plane’s equilibrium,” Nabu Fate said. He flexed his fingers and bent the highway back into its original position. Below them, dozens of humans continued to shout, pointing at the sky and their now-alive cars in a panic.

“Phooey, I’m making it better,” Klarion said. Teekl mewled in agreement.

Earth was ripe for chaos. It’d been lulled into complacency (Nabu’s influence, no doubt) but the dominoes were lining up for a spectacular explosion of disorder. Klarion could sense it, and nothing would make him happier than shaking up the bland sameness starting to take root in this world.

There was nothing fun about a place where everything went as expected. Humanity should be thanking him for adding more excitement to their humdrum lives.

Klarion hadn’t even killed anyone. Probably. He hadn’t really been paying attention.

“That’s what they all say,” Nab-Nab-Drab-Blab said, using a voice that Klarion was learning to connect with lectures and annoying adults. “I have been alive for millennia, witchling, and your kind has brought nothing but violence and suffering with them. Wars started for amusem*nt, innocents slaughtered on whims, natural disasters summoned for the sole purpose of entertainment. You are a plague upon this Earth, and it is my duty to stamp you out before you cause further harm.”

“You’re boring and mean,” Klarion pouted. “Like you guys are any better.”

Lords of Order weren’t “good,” just like witchlings weren’t. Those were human scales. They didn’t weigh themselves with them. Besides, Klarion didn’t want to start wars. Right now, he just wanted to make people scream a little, and maybe steal some cat food.

Mother never talked to him and Tim like this. When she got annoyed with them, she threw them into the hungry pit full of teeth, which was far pleasanter than being talked down to like a child.

Please. Klarion was an ageless embodiment of primal magic. So what if he was also still too short to ride rollercoasters legally? He could be taller if he wanted.

“I have served humanity all my life,” Fat-Fate said. Magic crackled in his hands. “I will do whatever it takes to maintain the balance, regardless of whether I am called a hero or villain. You, Klarion the Witch Boy, are a threat to it. Don’t think I am unaware of your kind’s latest scheme.”

Klarion let more of his magic slip to the surface. His eyes glowed red as trails of ruby lightning ran across his skin. Teekl meowed, fur bristling as she started to grow in size. Her claws sharpened into hooks. “I don’t do schemes. Not my style.”

“No?” Nabu chuckled. “Then I suppose it’s your elders to blame for corrupting what would have been my successor.”

Succes—

Klarion had to drop that train of thought—and Teekl. Dr. Foosball shot a bolt of gold magic at him so fast it grazed his hair. Thunder crackled where it split the air.

“Hey, not fun!” Klarion hissed. There hadn’t even been a warning. “Two can play at that game.”

He made finger guns and shot ten rounds of magic bullets at the guy, muttering a larger spell under his breath. His magic stretched from doing so many things, but this wasn’t even close to Klarion’s limit. (Tim was a ridiculously good schemer—Klarion had to assert his own dominance somehow, so he'd chosen spells to be the thing he was good at).

Nabu cast a shield to block the bullets, which bounced off without even cracking it, then returned the volley.

Klarion frowned and teleported behind the Ordered One by melting into a shadow, then finished his backup spell—a construct of an ax, which he swung at Dr. Fate’s neck.

Dr. Fate reached behind him and blocked it with a gauntlet. The ax shattered against his armor.

“You’ll have to try harder to hurt me, witch boy,” he said.

Klarion did not gulp. He was intimidated a tiny bit, but not scared. He didn’t do scared.

Still, that’d been a strong spell to block that easily.

Their fight turned into a complex weave of magic that made the air ripple. People fled their cars, the chicken-footed Circle-K ran for the hills and vanished over the horizon, taking several truckers and an exhausted cashier with it, and the highway curled into a snake-like coil and played possum. Reality flip-flopped between Chaotic and Ordered so rapidly it seemed to lag.

Dr. Fate preferred simple spells that relied on brute force; energy blasts, rays of light, and enchantments designed to subdue and restrain.

Klarion was the opposite. Normal attacks were boring, and his powers were still growing. He couldn’t hit Ducky Fate with enough concentrated force to hurt him. The stick in the mud had enchanted his armor too much for that. But there were other ways to win a fight.

“Whoops, my fingers slipped,” Klarion said. “Butter toes, that’s me!”

He sent a ray of red and black energy behind him. It exploded a streetlight and turned the shrapnel into sparrows. Their beaks were made of twisted metal and broken glass. They shrieked and dive bombed the fleeing humans.

Dr. Fate swore and cast a shield around them. The shrapnel sparrows pecked at it, enraged they didn’t get to snack on people.

“Your petty distractions won’t work on—” Dr. Fate began, but Klarion was already firing spells at another five lamp posts.

The air was full of the sound of sentient murder-birds and panicked civilians. Klarion followed his aerial attack up with seeding magic into the ground and turning the asphalt into gooey black mud. The people in the shields started to sink.

He wasn’t going to kill them (submerging them completely took too long) but Dr. Fate didn’t need to know that.

Why waste energy hurting the man directly? Klarion didn’t need to win. He just needed to make it so Nabu couldn’t either.

Teekl meowed from the bushes. Klarion saw her lick her paw from the corner of his eye, fur puffed in annoyance.

“I know!” he said. “I promise I’ll get you a snack soon.”

It’d take forever to track the Chicken convenience store down, but it’d be worth it. They had mini-hotdogs in the fridge, and Teekl had been wanting to try them. Klarion just had to teach this Lord of Order a lesson first.

He turned a semi-truck into a giant metal centipede and sent it careening toward a farmhouse by the highway.

Nabu threw a shield over the centipede before it reached the porch, trapping it like it was a spider in a glass cup. An old, wrinkly human looked out the farmhouse window, saw the chaos, and closed the blinds with a shake of the head.

Klarion was affronted. His theatrics deserved a panic attack at the very least.

He huffed in annoyance and let his guard down for one crucial second.

The next thing he knew, a ray of magic hit him in the chest.

It felt like having a bowling ball dropped on his stomach. Klarion wheezed and lost his concentration. The levitation spell snapped and he plummeted thirty feet to Earth, landing in a bush.

“Ow,” he said, and scrambled to his feet.

He almost got up, but a gold-plated boot kicked him back down and pinned him on his back.

Dr. Fate stood over him, cape singed and eyes narrowed behind his helmet. “I told you, this ends here, Witch boy.”

Klarion tried to pry the man’s boot off him. For once, he regretted choosing such a tiny body to run around in. If he was anything like Mother, he’d be spindly even as an adult, but any body mass was better than no body mass.

“I’m just doing what I’m supposed to, lay off, you big jerk,” Klarion said. Teekl hissed from the bushes nearby. “You don’t get dibs on this plane. There’s supposed to be Order and Chaos.”

He wasn’t even causing real chaos. This was just for funsies.

“While that is true, I know a plot when I see one,” Dr. Fate said. “Your youth may offer you protection against the naive heroes of Earth, but not from me. Whatever the Lords of Chaos are planning, I will put a stop to it regardless of your age.”

“What plot?” Klarion said. “I told you I don’t scheme.”

“No, you simply enchant and torment,” Nabu said, nodding toward the swatch of reality Klarion had rewritten within the last five minutes. “Such raw talent is dangerous. It must be pruned.”

Klarion felt the hum of Ordered magic. Dr. Fate wasn’t muttering an incantation, but that meant nothing when one was good at magic. If he’d been alive as long as he’d said, he probably had an entire grimoire memorized.

“You will be imprisoned in the Tower of Fate where I can monitor your magic,” The Lord of Order said. “An eternity of blank walls will stop you from indulging in wanton destruction.”

“I’d rather die,” Klarion said. His fingers ached with a spell of his own—one he hoped Nabu couldn’t sense over the dozens of other spells he’d already cast.

Dr. Fate chuckled. The sound echoed harshly off his helmet. “You sound like your brother.”

Klarion froze, as still as a statue.

Around them, the shrapnel birds continued to screech. Humans huddled behind the golden domes Nabu created, asphalt clinging to their calves. It was a cacophony of noise, but it might as well have been silent.

“What?” Klarion breathed.

Dr. Fate’s foot pressed down harder. “You think I do not monitor travel between realms? I noticed your clever trick immediately. Sending two Lords of Chaos through the barrier destroys the entire balance. It had to be righted. Luckily, I was there to fix it.”

“What did you do?” Klarion demanded. “Where’s Tim?”

Nabu stood over him, a monster of magic with millennia to hone his craft. “This world cannot handle the strain of two witchlings. I dealt with him appropriately.”

Klarion

forgot to breathe.

“Y-You—”

Everything was invisible, except the gleam of Dr. Fate’s gold helmet and the watery blue of his eyes.

Cold eyes. Dead ones.

Dead like—

“Your fate will be different,” Nabu said. “But only because the universe cannot afford another imbalance. We must have order above all else.”

He reached down, hand glowing gold.

The ocean roared in Klarion’s ears. It was a sea of anger, magic, and—

Fear.

Acting on instinct, Klarion flung the magic off his fingertips. A viper made of purple flames lunged at Nabu’s eyes, fangs extended.

The Lord of Order leaned back to swat it aside, shifting his weight off Klarion.

Teekl chose that moment to pounce. She grew to the size of a mountain lion and sank her teeth into the back of Nabu’s knee where the armor didn’t cover.

Nabu grunted and tried to right himself, but the damage was done.

Klarion rolled to his feet and grabbed his familiar.

There was a chance he could win if he kept fighting. Normally, he’d take it, eager to sharpen his claws against his natural enemy in a high stakes game of fun.

But this wasn’t a game, and Klarion was terrified.

Instinctual magic was dangerous, even for the chaotically aligned. If you didn’t know what your spells were doing you couldn’t control or contain them. They’d bleed into everything they touched, twisting and mutating into the opposite of the castor’s intent.

Klarion used it anyway. He clung to Teekl and screamed the first spell he could think of, letting every ounce of raw power explode from his soul.

A shockwave of red and black magic knocked the Nabu backward. Glass shattered in every building left standing, the lamp posts bent like palm trees in a tsunami, and the shrapnel birds disintegrated.

Klarion looked down and saw he was disintegrating as well.

He discorporealized into ash—one of the oldest teleportation tricks in the book—and left the Lord of Order far, far behind.

***

Nabu got up with a groan, then saw the destruction around him and groaned again.

Civilians up to their waists in asphalt-quicksand, vehicles cursed with eldritch body parts, a partly sentient highway system playing possum, and a helicopter for a local news station filming the whole thing.

Witchlings. They certainly knew how to cause a stir.

Nabu forced himself to his feet and got to work restoring order. Untangling Klarion’s enchantments was more tedious than he wanted to admit. The boy had an affinity for complicated magic—someone his age shouldn’t be able to turn a pencil into a garter snake, much less cast over three hundred separate sentience spells without incantations.

Nabu was right. Leave a weed unattended and it would strangle the whole flowerbed. That boy was dangerous.

“Sir, thank you,” a middle-aged woman said as he pulled her and several others out of the quicksand. “How can we ever repay you?”

“Nothing is necessary,” Nabu said, although he wouldn’t be opposed to a nap.

You don’t sleep, Zatara muttered. His sole contribution to their shared inner monologue since leaving the Tower of Fate.

The equivalent of a nap, then. Nabu had been spellcasting all day before this, trying to close the rift in that other reality. Before that, he’d been monitoring Gotham and the JLA, and reapplying his wards to the Tower of Fate. After fighting a prodigy witchling, he was exhausted.

A harsh, grating zap tore through him.

Nabu swore in an ancient dialect and turned away from the humans. They were all out of immediate danger. He’d return later to undo the sentience on the rest of the objects, but there was no time for that now.

A ward had been broken. Several of them.

His Gotham ones.

Something was happening to Timothy.

***

Klarion recorprealized.

His body coalesced into physical form in the surf of a warm beach. The moon shone wanly overhead as gentle waves covered his feet.

Klarion collapsed into the sand and cried.

“I dealt with him appropriately.”

Dealt with Tim.

That didn’t mean—

Tim couldn’t be—

But Nabu had been ready to lock Klarion in a prison for eternity. White walls and sameness, which would drive him mad and deny him his true nature. It was a fate worse than death for a creature like Klarion, who was meant to walk between realities and shatter order where he went.

If Dr. Fate was willing to do that to Klarion for just existing, what had he done to Tim?

“Teekl,” Klarion sniffed, “Teekl I think he—I think he ki—”

He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t let the words make it real.

Teekl purred sadly, nuzzling against him. Her fur was soaked by the water they were half submerged in, but for once she wasn’t hissing about it.

Tim had been her favorite too.

“This isn’t right,” Klarion said.

Tim didn’t do anything wrong. He and Klarion hadn’t even gotten to Earth before that bright flash of light tore them apart.

Klarion hiccuped, remembering suddenly how the portal had stabilized before everything went black. The lines had straightened into neat, orderly rows . . . Just like Nabu’s portals.

Tim couldn’t be gone. He couldn’t.

But even after only talking with the Lord of Order for a few short minutes, Klarion knew he wouldn’t have let Tim go. Not with the balance on the line.

He let go of Teekl and buried his fists in the sand. Grit got under his nails. It wasn’t a cold beach, but the sea was still cool against his skin.

It wasn’t enough to calm the coals lighting in his heart.

Magic spread through his fingers, red-hot and molten. The sand beneath him turned to glass.

“You want chaos?” Klarion hissed. “ I'll give you chaos.”

If Nabu was so paranoid about a Lord of Chaos wreaking havoc, then Klarion would give him a show he’d never forget.

The waves grew stronger as Klarion let more of his true self show. His skin bubbled as his bones elongated, and baby fat slid away to reveal sharp cheekbones and sallow skin.

Tim and Klarion had loved being children. They’d used their small size to get in big trouble. Youth afforded them innocence, but Klarion couldn’t hold onto it anymore.

Revenge was a grown up’s business.

“Come on Teekl, we have work to do,” Klarion said, standing up to a more impressive height. His familiar wove between his gangly legs, purring with satisfaction.

It would take cunning to destroy a Lord of Order so entrenched in this reality. The cards were in Nabu’s favor; his turf, his advantage, his masterly honed magic.

But Order never cheated, and Chaos was always dishonest. Klarion wasn’t one for scheming, but he’d make an exception this time.

“I hope you like fighting, Dr. Fate,” Klarion growled. “Because you just made yourself a nemesis.”

Chapter 6: Reflections Of A Forgotten Past

Chapter Text

One Week Prior

Tim woke with a splitting headache.

He groaned, stuffed a pillow over his head, and wished he hadn’t been born.

Most mornings were like this. He dreamt of a fantastical world of morphing shapes and delightful trickery, only to wake up feeling like he’d gone on an upside-down rollercoaster for hours.

A familiar wash of affirmations pounded against his skull as he stumbled out of bed: You are Timothy Jackson Drake, loyal son. You are Timothy Jackson Drake, fixer of broken things. You are—

“Shut up,” he grumbled. “It’s too early for this.”

He washed his face and glared at the mirror, wishing he didn’t look so sickly. People at school said he looked like a zombie. Privately, Tim thought the witches in old paintings were more on the money, but never mentioned that. Magic was getting more well known, and New Jersey was too close to Salem for comfort.

Tim pulled on his Gotham Academy uniform and threw his books into his bag, preparing for another day of monotone, structured education. Classroom learning made him sick. Manners, niceties, structure, and the sheer number of rules rankled him like a sock put on backwards.

They were almost as bad as the prickly, invisible eyeballs all over the house. Tim couldn’t see them, but he knew they were there, watching him. Jack and Janet said he had an overactive imagination and wouldn’t believe him. The eyeballs were probably theirs, making sure Tim followed all the rules.

Stupid rules. Tim was allergic to them.

“I’m not meant for this provincial life,” he muttered.

He’d known that since before he could remember. Patterns, normalcy, and structure gave him hives. Alas, the universe seemed determined to inflict such suffering on him in droves.

“Rough night, kiddo?” Jack said when Tim plopped into his seat at breakfast.

“No, sir,” Tim mumbled. He glared at his cereal. “Can I have an ibuprofen?”

Janet set a cup of coffee by Jack and sent Tim a concerned glance. “Of course, Timothy. Is it another headache?”

He nodded and rubbed his temple. He’d started getting them after the circus. Most of the time they went away by mid-morning, but lately they’d been getting worse.

Jack and Janet exchanged looks. An entire conversation was held without opening their mouths.

After eating half his cereal, Tim was excused and given the key to the medicine cabinet. He shook a dose of child-friendly painkillers into his hands and chewed them up. They tasted like sour chalk. Ew.

Tim hoped they worked this time. On Tuesday, he’d had to stay home because the throbbing got so bad. It’d felt like something was trying to claw out of his skull. Spots had danced behind his eyes, turning into strange shapes and prickly sensations. The entire day, his skin crawled, hot as a stove, and he’d cried himself to sleep.

Through it all, the usual thoughts had echoed through his head like a broken record.

You are Timothy Jackson Drake. You are—

“Shut up,” Tim said again, and slammed the medicine cabinet shut.

The doctor lady Janet took him to, who worked with kids from “challenging backgrounds,” said the voice was how he coped with trauma. It was an affirmation to let him know he was safe, even though he couldn’t remember what he was safe from.

“Stupid brain voice,” Tim huffed. His coping mechanism sucked.

His origins were a mystery. The caretakers at the orphanage said they’d found him on the steps struggling to breathe, but they had no clue where he came from. The only clue to his past was a brass ring on his left hand, studded with a green stone.

Tim had never taken the ring off. He was tempted (he didn’t like things on his hands) but there was something about it . . . he had a feeling something bad would happen if he removed it, so it stayed. Now, he barely noticed it.

What he did notice were the glaring holes in his brain. Fog, spots, and the ever-present itchiness were torture. It wasn’t something he could talk about to his parents though. Janet was helping him with the headaches, but Jack said he was just being whiny and ungrateful.

His life was a Cinderella story. A happy future running a multibillion-dollar company? Educational and professional opportunities thousands would kill for? A comfortable existence where all he had to do was as he was told? It was a lemming’s paradise, and Jack hated it when Tim complained about it.

Unfortunately, Tim was not a lemming.

“Someday,” he muttered on his way down the stairs, “I’m going to do what I want and nobody will stop me.”

His skin burned like lightning was crawling under it. Tim hissed quietly, so nobody wouldn’t hear. Children were meant to be seen, not heard, after all.

Tim paused when he heard his parents talking in the kitchen.

“This the third one this week,” Jack said. “He’s getting worse, Jan.”

“It’s nothing another trip to that specialist won’t fix,” she said. “I’ll have my secretary book an appointment for this afternoon. He’ll be able to squeeze us in.”

Tim heard newspaper crumple. He could picture his dad setting down the morning news, face pinched in his semi-permanent frown. “It didn’t help last time. The MRI machine didn’t even work.”

Tim grimaced as he remembered the big, scary machine they’d put him in. It’d started to hum really, really loud, and Tim panicked. Luckily, the thing shorted out and started to smoke, so it couldn’t finish looking at his brain.

“Face it, Jan,” Jack said. “The kid’s got something wrong with him—aside from his personality.”

“Don’t talk about him like that,” Janet said. Her chair squeaked she stood up. “He’s been doing wonderfully. We haven’t had an incident since—”

“Since he got better at covering his tracks,” Jack said. “I’ll be damned if half the things that go wrong in our lives aren’t his fault somehow. That kid is a menace.”

Tim bristled. He’d been on his best behavior for ages. Jack couldn’t prove anything. He didn’t have any evidence, and neither did Gotham Academy. Nobody could prove he pushed those kids off the slide, or snuck Vaseline into his teacher’s sandwich, or put food dye in the class fish tank, or dumped jello powder in all the toilets.

Tim was on his best behavior in front of people. It wasn’t his fault they didn’t pay attention when their backs were turned.

“That kid is seven years old,” Janet replied. “We have plenty of time to channel his energy somewhere productive. Now, finish your toast. You have a long drive to the office.”

“Just me? Where are you going?” Jack asked.

Janet’s voice was frosty. “To drive our son to school, since you never do.”

Tim hid as his mother exited the kitchen. He took a side-hall down to the front door and met her there, the picture of innocence.

Janet was dressed in a tailored suit, as usual. Everything from her hair to her shoes was polished perfection. Tim’s uniform was equally pristine, but he planned to wrinkle it as soon as he was inside the school gates.

“Come along, Timothy,” Janet said, putting her hand on his back. “We’ve got a big day ahead of us.”

They left the house and drove to Gotham Academy. Tim’s head pounded in an erratic beat as they crossed the bridge into the city proper. Spots began to dance in the corners of his eyes.

Looked like the pills weren’t working. Great.

***

Janet was concerned.

She was also irritated, because Jack was right. Something was wrong with Timothy. She’d known that the moment she laid eyes on him in the orphanage. It was one of the reasons she’d picked him to be their heir.

The child psychologist said he lacked empathy, and whatever he’d experienced prior to his adoption had given him deep trust of authority. Ruthlessness and wariness were good skills for a businessman to have, provided they were channeled into the right areas.

Said channeling was the problem.

“Structure will help,” the psychologist had said. “Rules and boundaries will teach him what his limits are, and help him know what to expect.”

To be fair, enforcing strict rules had been effective. Timothy’s manners were coming along nicely and his temper tantrums had gone down significantly over the last two years. That wasn’t the problem.

What concerned Janet was that as soon as Timothy became more well-behaved, the headaches started. Debilitating, alarming ones that nobody could explain.

Janet didn’t waste thousands of dollars adopting a child only for him to have an unknown, incurable condition. Restarting with another child would take years. Not to mention, she doubted she’d find such a clever one a second time. Timothy was a diamond in the rough. Discovering a flaw in him was intolerable.

“Ma’am,” her secretary said. “I’ve booked you and your son at Gotham General for three thirty this afternoon. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

Janet rubbed her temple. “No, Micheal. Thank you, but that will be all. I’ll be leaving early today. Make sure my meetings are canceled.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

He left and closed the glass office door behind him. Janet stared at her computer screen, fingers pleated under her chin.

Jack was ready to abandon ship and throw Tim back into foster care. He wanted an easier child—one that didn’t glare, misbehave, or destroy his possessions. (Timothy thought he was sneaky, but Janet knew he was stealing his father’s ties and cutting up Jack’s credits cards when he could get away with it. The boy wasn’t as subtle as he thought he was, though he was brilliant at creating alibis.)

However, Janet didn’t want to get rid of Tim. He’d grown on her. Give him fifteen years and he’d be the perfect CEO for Drake Industries,.

They just had to get rid of these blasted headaches first.

Unbidden, a memory of Timothy’s first headache came to her. Timothy had been six-years-old. He’d woken up, stumbled downstairs, and told them he didn’t want to go to school because he felt itchy and icky.

Jack hadn’t believed him until Timothy doubled over and threw up all over his designer shoes. To this day, Jack swore Tim did it on purpose.

Janet stayed home that day, sure that he just had a mild fever. They’d turned on the TV, but Timothy’s cartoon had been interrupted by a report of armed gunmen robbing a bank.

“Why do all the bad guys look the same?” Tim asked, frowning at the TV.

The robbers were dressed in ski masks and dark clothes. They looked almost identical.

“That’s just how they do things around here,” Janet said, running a hand through her son’s hair. “It’s one of the bad guy rules.”

“Bad guys have rules? That’s dumb.”

Janet had rolled her eyes. “Everybody has rules, sweetheart. It’s how the world works.”

Onscreen, Batman appeared and through something at the leader’s gun. Robin, the brightly colored child that followed the vigilante around, jumped from the rafters and kicked a man in the teeth. Whatever cameraman was capturing this deserved a raise.

Timothy giggled next to her. “I like Batman’s rules better. He’s silly.”

“He’s vengeance, baby,” Janet said. “He’s not supposed to be silly.”

Batman was a monkey-wrench in the GCPD’s well-oiled machine. He was changing all the rules just by existing. Janet didn’t trust the man, but she had to admit he was effective.

“He makes things not boring,” Timothy said, snuggling closer to her. “I wish he had funner villains to fight. Weird, silly ones that like to laugh.”

He’d fallen asleep shortly after, muttering about feeling hot and itchy.

Janet had planned to leave him on the couch and make some business calls, but he whimpered when she tried to move him. He just . . . looked so small.

He still looked small at seven-years-old.

Janet tapped her pen against her desk, then got up and opened the office door.

“Micheal,” she said. “Schedule another meeting with the nutritionist as well. I want to revisit Timothy’s diet plan.”

“Yes ma’am,” he said.

Janet went back into her office and tried to focus on work. But all she could think about was Timothy; too small, too sickly, and showing no signs of improvement.

Jack was right. Something was wrong, but Janet would be damned if she didn’t fix it.

***

Janet left DI earlier than planned, because she got a concerning call from Gotham Academy.

Timothy had skipped his last two classes and locked himself in a supply closet. When the P.E. teacher found him, Timothy had bitten him and called him words that’d make a dockworker wince.

She pulled up to the school and found him in the principal’s office looking as bedraggled as a wet cat.

“Timothy, if you were feeling ill, why didn’t you go to the nurse?” Janet asked. “I could’ve come and gotten you.”

Her son’s eyes were dilated, no doubt from the headache. The left one was blown wide.

“Not good manners,” Tim mumbled, rubbing his face.

Janet released a slow breath. Great. They’d overcompensated with the rules. Lovely. Another thing to course-correct.

Janet smoothed things over with the faculty and apologized for Tim’s behavior. The P.E. teacher shrugged and said he’d heard worse. He had a distinct Bowery drawl, so Janet didn’t doubt it.

“I know you want to move him ahead again,” the principal said as Janet lifted Timothy into her arms, “but I would strongly advice against it. He needs to spend time around children his age.”

“That’s a conversation for another day,” Janet said.

Tim was currently in seventh grade. The plan was to have him graduate high school by the time he was ten, but Janet would need to revise that. The principal was right. He didn’t have friends, had no idea how to socialize, and didn’t know how to ask for help with adults.

Clearly, being treated like an actual child would be better for him in the long run.

“Are we going home?” Timothy asked as they headed to the car.

“Not yet, sweetheart,” Janet said. “We’ve got a couple more stops first.”

“Are you mad at me?” Tim said. His shoulders shook. “I was good. Don’t put me back with the bad people.”

It was unclear whether he was referring to the underfunded orphanage they’d salvaged him from, or the behavioral clinic Janet sent him when he was younger. Janet was just glad the threat was still effective. Carrots were good for encouragement, but sticks got results.

“You’re not going anywhere, kiddo,” Janet said, smoothing his hair. “Not as long as you do your best. I promise.”

***

Nothing.

That’s what three hours of appointments got Janet.

“Stress headaches,” the doctor said. “Perfectly normal, though not usually seen in someone so young. I have some suggestions for pain relief, but aside from that he’ll just have to live with them.”

Janet and Timothy glared at him. Living with debilitating awfulness didn’t appeal to either of them.

The nutritionist was similarly useless.

“By all accounts, you’re doing everything perfectly,” they said, flipping through the dietary plan they’d been using for Tim. “He shouldn’t be so small after this long.”

Childhood malnutrition couldn’t be completely reversed, but Janet had done her best to repair it as soon as Timothy was theirs. Yet, he’d only grown a few inches in the last two years and looked half his age.

“I can be tall if I want to,” Tim huffed from the exam table. “I just like being small.”

“Sure you can, kiddo.” The nutritionist patted his head and gave Janet the number for another child dietary specialist, in case she wanted a second opinion.

Janet didn’t, but knew she’d call them anyway. It never hurt to be thorough.

“You’re certainly a handful,” Janet told Timothy as they left the nutritionist’s office, hand in hand. “A medical mystery.”

Luckily, he didn’t seem to have a tumor. As long as nothing was chronic or terminal, Janet could learn to live with Timothy’s headaches, even if they were irritating. Nothing bothered her more than when things didn’t go according to plan.

Janet thrived on order. Arranging her life to the tenth of a second with no room for error was her favorite hobby. Unexpected occurrences were her mortal foe, and Timothy seemed to be plagued with them.

“Mom, I don’t feel good,” Timothy muttered, rubbing his eyes.

“I know, sweetheart.” Janet said as they stepped into the elevator. The doors closed behind them and the descent began. “We’ll be home in half an hour, then you can rest. If it’s still bad in the morning, I’ll let you stay home from school. Alright?”

“’Kay.”

He didn’t even argue. Janet pursed her lips. Timothy had excellent manners now (thank the lord for behavioral clinics) but he still loved to “debate” things to get his way. Normally, he’d be trying ot negotiating for the rest of the week away from school. He must have been exceptionally exhausted.

They got to the ground-floor. Janet dug through her bag for her wallet. She needed to speak with the receptionist on the way out, then it’d be home, dinner, and putting Timothy to bed.

“I really don’t feel good,” Timothy said, tugging her sleeves. “My brain is stuffy.”

“It’s just stress, honey,” Janet hummed, fishing for her insurance card. The lobby was in front of them, down a short flight of stairs with the desk in full view of the front doors. “You’ll be alright.”

“No,” Tim said. “It’s super bad. I’m itchy again. It—”

Whatever he was going to say was cut off as the lobby doors burst open.

Janet froze as a dozen men in clown masks stormed in, dressed in ragged suits and carrying guns. The leader—a pale man in a purple suit—pointed a pistol at the receptionist.

The woman barely had time to look up before there was a bullet between her eyes.

Janet covered her mouth with a manicured hand, staring at the pool of red spreading on the linoleum tile. Her plans for the rest of the day unraveled into static. The only thing left in her mind was the echo of the bullet and the color scarlet.

“Woah,” Timothy breathed, squeezing her hand. “She went splat.”

The man in purple (with green hair. Why was it green?) looked up at her and Timothy, who were standing at the top of the stairs, and smirked.

Ice-water flooded her veins.

Janet grabbed her son, turned on her heel, and ran back toward the elevator as the intruders opened fire on the rest of the lobby.

“Mom, my head hurts,” Tim said, pressing himself against her shoulder.

He was as hot as she was cold. His forehead felt like a stove.

Above them, the ceiling lights flickered. Red, white, red white—red like the blood in the lobby—and Hyena-like laughter echoed off the walls as people began to scream.

Chapter 7: Laughter Is The Best Medicine

Chapter Text

Tim was out of it.

Groggy, dizzy, nauseous, the list went on. He did a lot of vocabulary practice for school, so he had a dictionary of synonyms to describe the ickiness weighing him down.

He wanted to go home and take a nap. It didn’t matter that home had invisible eyeballs and weird, buzzing walls. His bed was there, and it had puffy blankets and stuffed animals he could burrow into. That made the gross watched-feeling worth it.

Puffy. Fluffy. Fuzzy.

His head felt like that—like the fog in his brain was covering every nerve and numbing it like snake venom. It eased the pressure in his skull that’d been bothering him all day, but made him tired and disoriented.

There’d been a loud noise and a splat of red, but he was already forgetting what that had been about. No thoughts, just ickiness.

“Mom, are we going home?” He asked. His skull pounded as a thousand pounds of something tried to get out, but couldn’t.

Janet didn’t answer. Tim cracked his eyes open and hissed as the bright ceiling lights burned his eyes like strobes. He buried his face back into her shoulder and felt another tingle of static run through his arms.

“Mom?”

“Shh, shh, we’re going to get home a little late,” Janet said. “Just be quiet for me, Timothy. Remember your manners.”

Her voice shook as she held onto him extra tight.

She was running, Tim realized. Her heels clicked against the floor like typewriter keys going clack-clack-clack. There were other noises too, muddled by the cotton in his brain. They were familiar sounds. They reminded Tim of—

A piercing scream broke the air. Tim relaxed.

—the circus.

Several gunshots rang out in the distance, like fireworks and party favors. It reminded him of the smell of popcorn, Dick’s hug, and the Graysons’ laughs before they’d fallen and got squished.

An alarm on the wall started ringing. Tim covered his ears in annoyance. It was covering up the screams. He wanted to hear those!

His fingers burned. The alarm stopped as the lightbulb exploded in a shower of glass. The pressure in his skull eased slightly, but not enough to make a difference. It was like trying to drain the ocean with a waterspout.

Janet swore and dodged the shrapnel.

They made it to the elevator. Janet smashed the “up” button, but nothing happened.

“sh*t, lockdown,” Janet said.

Tim squinted as a man in a clown mask appeared at the end of the hallway. He was dressed in funny clothes and had a gun.

“There you are,” the man said, stalking forward.

Janet swore again and abandoned the elevator. She turned the corner as two bullets hit the drywall where her head had been.

“Mom, you’re going the wrong way,” Tim said as Janet ran toward a stairwell. An exit sign glowed above the door frame like a beacon. “The teachers said you can’t use the emergency doors. You’ll get in trouble.”

Tim had opened a few (dozen) when he first started school and got in big trouble. He stopped when they realized he was doing it on purpose, but it’d been a glorious couple of weeks.

“Not now, Tim,” Janet said. Tim felt himself relax when she used his preferred name. “Just be good for me. We’re going to be fine, but you have to—”

A shot rang out. Janet screamed and went down. Tim hit the floor with her.

The cotton left his head as soon as he smelled iron.

“Mom!” Tim said, shaking her arm.

Janet groaned and got on her hands and knees. Her right calf dripped bloody. “It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything is fine.”

She shoved her phone into his hand and pushed him away from her. “Run and call the police, Timothy. Hurry!”

“But—”

But she was his mom. He didn’t want to leave her. She was hurt.

“Go!”

Janet shoved him again. Tim stumbled back and decided to do what he was told. Janet liked rules more than anything, She’d be happy he listened to her. And this was a hospital. He could get one of the doctors in the white coats to help her.

Tim clutched the phone in his hand and ran toward the exit. The door opened before he reached it and a man in a Gorilla mask stepped out, fingers curled around a baton.

Tim didn’t even have time to panic. White-hot fear shot through him, and suddenly the man tripped on air, clutching his chest with a pained grunt.

Tim dove between his legs and ran down the emergency stairs, ignoring the angry shouts behind him.

He held back a sob as he ran, leaving his Mom behind.

***

Janet didn’t relax when Tim got away. Her calf throbbed, dripping rusty red on the white floor, and adrenaline made her hands shake, but she breathed easier.

She moved to stand, but froze as the barrel of a gun was pressed against her back.

“Well, well, well,” the man who shot her said. “What have we here? A little bird with clipped wings. You’re not looking too good, hot stuff.”

Janet forced herself not to flinch. She was Janet Lynn Drake, Co-CEO of a multimillion-dollar company and mother of a precocious trouble-maker. This wasn’t the first time she’d been held at gunpoint, and she would not tarnish her image by panicking.

(She pointedly did not think about how this could be the last time she was in this situation. Such thoughts were unnecessary and would only make her spiral.)

“Hey, Bobo, get up,” the clown said to the other thug. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

The gorilla-man got back on his feet, gasping for air. “H-heart—feels like—gonna explode.”

“Your pacemaker break or something?” the clown sneered. “Nobody cares, dipsh*t. Now, help me get this broad back to the lobby.”

“Don’t touch me,” Janet snapped. She swatted the gorilla-man’s hand away. “I’m perfectly capable of—”

The clown-masked man kicked her injured leg. Janet crumbled and bit back a sob.

“Now, don’t be like that miss,” the clown said in a sickly sweet voice. “Didn’t you hear? Hospital’s under new management, and our Mister J is looking for new patients. He’ll want a look at that leg. I’m sure he can fix you right up.”

Janet was dragged back to the reception desk by the hair. Her injured leg dragged on the ground, leaving smears of red behind.

Janet prided herself on being a fighter, but only in a verbal sense. Good oratory skills didn’t guarantee surviving terrorist attacks. She prepared herself for the possibility that she wouldn’t make it home.

Her one solace was that Tim was safe.

For now.

***

Tim’s heart pounded. Everything was in hyper-focus. It was like the circus all over again; chaos, disorder, panic (so much panic) soaking into his skin and swirling through his blood like soft-serve.

But unlike last time, Tim wasn’t having fun.

The bad guys shot his mom. They ruined her perfect suit and pretty smile, and wanted to hurt her worse. Tim loved imperfect things. He’d wanted to make his mom messy and disorganized for years, but not like this. He didn’t didn’t want her dead.

At least, he didn’t think he did. He was . . . confused. Disjointed.

Screams were nice when he got to decide who did them and why. They weren’t fun when it was someone he cared about being hurt. (Only he was allowed to break his toys, and Janet was his.)

Tim made it to the bottom of the emergency stairs and shouldered though the door into a parking garage.

The tips of his fingers burned. His skin tingled. Something wanted out.

You are Timothy Jackson Drake, you are Timo—

“Shut up!” he yelled at the voice. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

He knew his name and it wasn’t Timothy. It was Tim. Just Tim, and he was sick of people getting it wrong, especially his dumb coping mechanism.

“Leave me alone, I don’t have time for you,” Tim yelled, rubbing his eyes.

Overhead, the garage’s lights flickered as the bulbs began to melt.

Tim huddled behind a concrete pillar and took big breaths, like Mom taught him to do when his feelings were too big for his body. He had to stay calm. He was a Drake. He knew better than to panic.

He uncurled his fist and pried Janet’s flip phone open with shaky fingers. He hated rules, but for once he was glad every adult he’d ever met (teachers, parents, etc) made him memorize 911.

“Hello? Hello, I need help,” He whispered into the receiver. “Bad guys are going to kill my mom.”

He told the lady on the other end what was happening and where he was. He didn’t know which hospital it was in Gotham, but there was a statue of a kid in a wheelchair outside it that she seemed to recognize.

“Stay where you are,” the lady told Tim. “You’ll be safe there.”

“No thanks,” Tim said, and hung up.

The deep breaths were helping. He was getting his focus back, and that meant he could think.

Janet was still in danger. She needed help, and Tim wasn’t going to wait for it. He’d seen enough news reports to learn all the bad guy rules, and they all had something in common—civilians always got hurt.

That’s what Janet was. A civilian.

Tim stood up and grit his teeth as the fog tried to swallow him again. It wanted him to stay in the garage, like he was told to. Tim knew the drill. Be quiet, be good, do as he was told. But it was hard when every fiber of his body burned to do the opposite. His head pounded with the urge to do something, except he didn’t know what.

Forget it. If Janet was allowed to use the emergency doors, Tim was allowed to do what he wanted.

Janet would probably send him back to the behavioral school after this, but Tim didn’t care. If he didn’t do anything, he wouldn’t have a mom at all.

He headed back toward the staircase, chin held high.

She could punish him as much as she wanted later. For now, Tim had a rescue mission to begin.

Behind him, the lights went out as the bulbs finished melting.

A line of red lightning skittered across the ceiling, then left everything dark.

***

Janet was thrown onto the tiles next to a couple other unlucky patients. The bodies of an old man and a middle-aged woman stared at her with glassy eyes. Their faces were twisted into horrific smiles, and they were splayed on the floor like dolls among the shards of a shattered vase.

Janet looked away from them. She wanted to keep her lunch in her stomach.

The man in purple, who seemed to be the leader, strolled over with predatory grace.

“Found another one, Mister J,” the clown said, nudging Janet with his shoe. “The kid got away, but we brought her back.”

“Joe, Joe, Joe, I told you, it’s Joker, not Mister J. Let’s not be so formal,” the man grinned. “Phooey about the little one. I was hoping for a younger crowd here. You’d think there’d be more tykes breaking arms on the playground on a fine day like today.”

Janet’s eyes flicked toward the huddle of hostages in the corner. Those who weren’t laughing hysterically were covering their kids with their bodies, whispering soothing words under their breath. Luckily, none of the kids seemed to be hurt yet.

Joker stepped closer and stared down at Janet. “You’ll have to do, I suppose. At least until the bat gets here.”

Batman.

Janet had never given much thought to the vigilante. He was usually spotted in the Bowery or near the docks, but she prayed he’d visit to this side of the city today. If he saved her, she’d personally sponsor the local bat sanctuary for the rest of her life.

“If it’s money you want, you can get it,” Janet said evenly. “Drake Industries will pay for my release, along with everyone else in here. Nobody else needs to get hurt.”

Joker tutted, shaking his head. His skin was too pale to be natural. It was like looking at a paper cutout of a person. “Oh, sweetheart, I don’t want money. That’s just a toy for rich people to play with. I’m after something much more valuable.”

His smile got wider. Too wide.

There was a bone-deep eagerness in his face that Janet could feel like a physical thing. A dangerous, unfiltered yearning for trouble. It reminded her of Timothy, but distorted in a funhouse mirror, replacing her son’s naive love of mischief with calculated malice.

It made her sick.

“Nobody is going to rescue you,” Joker said. “The elevators are shut down and none of those nasty pigs outside will come in without my say so. I’ve got you right where I want you.”

Joker giggled and straightened. He spun like a ballerina and spread his arms. “You’re all guests to the very first Joker Convention! Dr. J will be helping you experience true joy today. True, delightful, happiness and laughter, like you were meant to feel! Aren’t you grateful? Excited? Tell me how happy you all are. Tell me—now.”

The hostages clapped. Several people laughed and kept laughing like they couldn’t stop.

Janet didn’t make a sound. She carefully moved her hand until her fingers brushed against a shard of the broken vase. She palmed it, careful of its sharp edges.

Outside, police were lined up. Janet recognized the commissioner when he began talking into a megaphone, reciting the standard deescalation procedure that Janet had heart a thousand times on news recordings.

God, if this went poorly she’d be one of those criminal statistics, Jack would tank the company if left alone for five minutes, and she’d become a footnote in a common place tragedy. And Tim—Jack would probably throw Tim back into that orphanage, wasting all the work they’d put into him.

Unacceptable.

Somebody had better show up and fix this.

She glared at the Joker again, wishing she could incinerate his skull with her mind, then scanned the room, hoping against hope there was a strange man in a batsuit lurking in the corner.

Instead, she saw a seven-year-old crawl behind the reception desk.

Her seven-year-old.

Janet clenched her fist and felt the skin break against the vase shard.

Timothy—tiny, fearless, stupid Timothy—peeked his head out from behind the reception desk, as if there weren’t a dozen active gunmen in the room that wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him.

He’d had one job—stay out of danger—and this was what he pulled?

Janet bit the inside of her cheek to stop from screaming.

Timothy better enjoy these last few moments of freedom, because after this she was never letting him out of her sight again.

***

Tim was sneaky. He was good at avoiding attention. Slinking through shadows, just out of people’s perception as easier than breathing.

It helped that the fog was pushing back, so he could focus easier. Now that it wasn’t distracting him, Tim noticed all the dark corners to hide in, and moved on quiet feet. (Sometimes it felt like he didn’t even touch the ground.)

He’d gotten back up the stairs and retraced his steps to the lobby. Luckily, the gunmen weren’t patrolling the halls, so nobody caught him, and the Green and Purple guy—the Joker?—had started laughing and talking about “fixing people’s smiles,” which distracted everybody enough for Tim to hide behind the desk where the dead lady was.

He wrinkled his nose as her blood soaked into his pants. Yuck. Tim had never been a fan of the smell of blood.

“Sorry, lady,” he whispered, crawling over to grab the lanyard off her neck.

When he’d started school two years ago, he’d found out that Gotham Academy put barcodes on the teacher’s name tags so they could unlock doors. When Tim “accidentally” acquired two or five key cards, he could go almost anywhere in the school.

Not everywhere used the same system, but the hospital did. He’d noticed the employees using their lanyards the first time he’d visited, and had been hoping to snag a few IDS ever since. Tim just had to get the dead lady’s lanyard to open the front doors, then the police could come inside.

He squeezed the plastic card in his hands, ignoring the blood making it slippery.

Getting across the lobby looked a lot harder than he’d expected. There were too many people and not enough shadows. Half the normal people were rolling on the floor laughing, and the rest were frozen in a penguin huddle while bad guys stood next to them.

Gorilla-man was rubbing his chest still. Tim narrowed his eyes in consideration, then shook his head. He outran the monkey man once, but there wasn’t a staircase to disappear down this time.

Sneaking wouldn’t work. Tim would have to be clever instead.

“Hey, Stupid-face,” he said, getting to his feet. “Spirit Halloween called and wants their costumes back.”

The Joker stopped pacing. He turned slowly, eyes fixed on Tim.

He wasn’t smiling now.

Tim really, really hoped this worked.

***

Boarding school.

Juvie.

Locking him in the attic like a sickly Victorian child.

Those were all too kind.

Janet was going to kill this kid.

***

“Hey, it’s that kid,” the gorilla-man said. “How’d he get back here.”

Tim stepped out from behind the desk. The keycard was hidden in his pocket. He hoped the blood on it wasn’t soaking through the fabric. That’d give him away.

“I was looking for my mom,” Tim said, stepping closer to the Joker. He was tall, like an aspen. About as pale, too. “Why’re you dressed so weird? It’s not Halloween. What’s your name?”

Tim stepped closer with each question, and co*cked his head the way that Jack said was manipulative and unnatural. (Everyone else said it made him look sweet.)

“I’m the Joker, kiddo,” the Joker said. “The Clown Prince of Crime. I’m here to make people happy. What’s your name, little boy?”

Tim licked his lips. “Timothy.”

It sounded wrong on his ears, but he didn’t want to say Tim. Not to this guy.

Tim was cajoled closer to the Joker by one of the goons, who prodded him with a gun. He stood in front of the (very tall) bad guy and looked up and up and up.

“What were you saying about my clothes, Timothy?” The Joker asked.

Tim curled his fists for bravery. “Mom says bad guys dress the same. It’s the rules, and you’re breaking them.”

He was halfway across the lobby. He just had to make it another thirty feet to the door scanner.

It felt like a mile.

“I’m not like the other bad guys,” the Joker said. “I make my own rules.”

Normally, hearing that would make Tim elated, but Janet was on the ground a few feet away, eyes wide as dinner plates, and her leg was still bleeding. Joker may have hated order as much as Tim did, but he was being mean to the one person Tim cared enough about to be obedient.

Unacceptable.

The buzzing in his brain got louder. The You are Timothy voice and his own were talking over each other, telling him opposite things. The need to do something was loudest of them all, but Tim didn’t know what. Unless he could get the Joker to move, it was a stalemate. But all he had were words, and his innocent-act would only go so far.

(He was missing something. An obvious solution, right on the tip of his tongue but just out of reach.)

“You know, kiddo,” the Joker said, stepping closer until he was only a few inches away from Tim. “There’s nothing more important than laughter. No matter how many bad days you have, life’s always better when you look on the sunny side. All the suffering in the world can tell you to be sad, sad, sad, but a little laughter fixes that right up.”

He put his hands on his knees and leaned into Tim’s face.

“Suffering makes the world go round,” Joker said. “Shows us how absurd and pointless everything is. So why not have a laugh, just for kicks? You’re a big boy. You understand, don’t you?”

Tim shook his head and took a step back. The gorilla man pinned him in place with a meaty hand.

“No? You don’t get it?” The Joker said. There was a needle in his hand. A big one, like the kind the doctor used to give Tim shots when he was younger. “That’s because you’re sick, kiddo. But Dr. Joker is going to make you feel better, just like he’s been doing to everyone in here.”

He lifted the syringe. Tim stared at it with wide, unblinking eyes. Do something. Do something. He had to—

“Get away from my baby,” Janet yelled. She slashed at the closest clown, cutting him on the thigh with a shard of ceramic. “Don’t you dare hurt him or I’ll—”

One of the clowns hit her in the face with the butt of his gun. Other people shouted. A few grown-ups stood and started forward. Tim heard several guns click as the safety was turned off. The hostages froze.

Tim’s fingers burned with static, like lightning was dancing across his fingers. A thousand zaps of something thundered behind the fog in his head, but

it

wouldn’t

come

out.

He couldn’t even scream. It felt like he was being choked.

Janet clutched her face, a bruise blossoming across it, and stared at him in horror. But her eyes weren’t on his face—or even the syringe. For some reason, she was looking at his hands.

Joker laughed. “It’s like you guys haven’t heard of a punchline! You really are diseased. Don’t worry, I’ll get to you next, and then you’ll understand. But first—” He reached for Tim with long, thin fingers. “—let’s put a smile on your face.”

He grabbed Tim’s arm and yanked up the sleeve, hissing as static ran between them. Tim thought he saw a tendril of red lightning snake across his own arm, but couldn’t be sure.

“Let go! Leave me alone!” Tim said.

The words echoed off the walls, louder than they should’ve been. The Joker actually loosened his grip, eyes going glassy for a second.

Tim’s head throbbed like his skull was about to crack open, and the You are Timothy voice turned into hands around his windpipe.

“Hey!” a new voice said. “Pick on someone your own size.”

The Joker, Tim, and the entire lobby looked up. A flash of red, yellow, and green flipped from the ceiling in a streak of color and landed feet first on the Joker’s face.

Tim’s jaw dropped. In his surprise, the static abruptly died, along with the invisible hands on this throat.

There was a moment of silence, then Robin, the Boy Wonder, grinned from his perch on the Joker’s broken nose.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Did I miss anything?”

One of the clowns said something witty and opened fire.

Robin exploded into a blur of motion as he dodged, then leapt forward and kicked the man in the face. A moment later, Batman appeared as well, descending from the same skylight as Robin.

He looked murderous.

The dam burst and suddenly everyone was moving. Robin jumped over tipped over chairs and danced through the air, darting between gunmen too fast for them to get a shot off. One of the hostages stood up and punched the goon closest to him.

Tim ran for the front door. He heard his mother shout his name, but didn’t look back.

He fumbled the keycard out of his pocket and slammed it against the scanner. The light turned green just as someone yanked him backward.

Tim yelped and struggled until he realized it was his mom. She pulled him to the floor and wrapped herself around him as guns went off around them.

“You stupid, stupid child,” Janet said. “What did I tell you? You were supposed to listen to me. I could’ve lost you.”

Slowly, numbly, he hugged her back.

The doors dinged and opened. A cacophony of sirens echoed from the street, and the police surged inside, dressed in riot gear.

“You’re grounded forever,” Janet said, her stoic facade crumbling. “Do you understand? You’re never leaving my sight again.”

“Okay,” Tim said, slightly bewildered. Janet was never this panicked, or so clingy.

. . . He liked it a lot.

But it was hard to focus on her. His mind was stalling, replaying the moment Robin came down from the ceiling like a broken record.

(A leap, a plunge, a flip that went one—two—three—four—)

He may have been two years older, but Dick Grayson hadn’t changed a whit.

“Mom,” Tim whispered, as gunshots fired over their heads and people screamed and laughed with abandon. “Mom, it’s like the circus.”

“I know, baby, I know.” She hugged him tighter. “It’s that damned circus all over again.”

***

After beating up the Joker and his cronies were handcuffed and escorted out by the police. Paramedics and people with shock blankets stormed the room to help the hostages. Tim got a fluffy yellow one the color of Robin’s cape. He wrapped himself up in it like a burrito while Janet got her leg looked at by the paramedics.

“Mrs. Drake,” the paramedic was saying. “Please, calm down, you’ll be—”

“I’ll calm down when somebody tells me how long that psychopath will be on death row before they electrocute him,” she said. “He almost killed my son!”

In the corner, half-hidden by shadows, Batman was lecturing Robin. Tim scooted closer to listen in, becoming a stealth burrito.

“This was completely irresponsible,” Batman said. “I told you, reconnaissance only.”

“He was going to kill that little boy,” Robin pouted. “I was helping.”

“You’re lucky you weren’t shot,” Batman growled. “We have rules for a reason, Robin.”

“Yeah?” Dick squared his jaw. “Well, rules are made to be broken. I’d do it again.”

Tim was dragged back to his mother by a paramedic, who told him gently not to wander off. Janet had noticed he was gone and tried to get out of the stretcher again. She was serious about keeping him in grabbing distance.

Tim went back to her, but kept his eyes fixed on Batman and Robin. They were perfectly balanced, like the sides of a scale. What a picture they painted; Mr. Rules-and-Order, and his disobedient partner, soaring through the air on grapples that might as well have been wings.

They were much better than the Joker, who wanted to hurt what was Tim’s. Robin was unpredictable but good, and Batman made up rules to do crazy things until nobody thought he was following rules at all.

Tim wanted to stare at them forever.

Janet pressed him against her chest and lectured him about disobeying her.

“I told you to get to safety,” she said. “Instead, you walked into a room of murderers. That is not acceptable, Timothy.”

He flinched at the name. She’d called him Tim earlier, and he’d loved that. He wanted to be Tim again.

“Sorry, Mom,” he said. “I just wanted you to be okay.”

She may have been an uptight stick in the mud, but Janet mattered to him. Sometimes, when Tim’s headaches got really bad, he got her confused with someone else—someone else bad at emotions and off-put by children, but loved him anyway—and that made Tim want to cry with homesickness for a place he couldn’t recall.

“Oh Timothy, don’t be,” Janet said. “There’s nothing you could’ve done against them. You’re a child. That’s not your job. I’m supposed to look after you.”

Tim frowned. “But I did do something. You saw me.”

Her grip on him tightened. Janet was already pale from blood-loss, but Tim thought she looked a little more sallow.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “You did.”

She shushed him again, and asked the paramedic if she could borrow a phone to call her husband. Janet’s voice was steady, but her arms shook slightly. Tim could hear her heart pounding.

His head was collecting cotton again, building a wall around his brain that made concentrating hard. Tt was back, dampening everything, just like before. But his hands still burned like little stoves, his skin was tight, something roiled under his skin, just out of sight.

Something that wanted out.

Something that was waking up.

***

Janet held her son as tight as a vice.

She could compartmentalize almost anything. Insane man injecting people with lethal laughing gas? Done. Being shot? Easy. Having her son nearly murdered in front of her? She’d manage, eventually.

But almost wasn’t everything, and she had no idea how to rationalize what she’d seen earlier.

Timothy, with red lightning dancing on his fingertips, yelling words that rang so strangely they stopped the Joker in his tracks. He had done something.

Something unnatural.

sh*t.

She and Jack were going to have to talk about this.