Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was the first day of high school, and freshman Dick Grayson already had a plan.

The plan was simple: Make no friends. Keep his head down and focus on his studies. Spend his afternoons playing video games. And wait for it all to end. Before he knew it, he’d be getting out of this town—at college, he told himself, then life would truly begin.

The first hitch in the Plan came as soon as Dick got acquainted with his locker. A hyperactive blonde boy appeared at his side and started talking at a hundred miles per hour.

“Dick Grayson! You’re Dick Grayson right? Just kidding, I’d recognize you everywhere! Hey, are you excited about starting the school year? I know I am! High school’s gonna rock! All the wild parties, the girls, the dances, girls, did I mention girls…”

One moment, Dick’s life was quiet, and the next one, there was this guy.

Dick knew what this was. He’d figured some of the kids at this school would remember him from middle school. Those who didn’t know him would’ve heard about him from those who did. He’d prepared for it. He didn’t need to look around for a group of giggling students who’d sent their most talkative member to try and make contact with the infamous Dick Grayson; he knew they were there.

He simply stared impassively through his sunglasses and waited for the boy to leave. He wouldn’t give them what they wanted.

But then the boy’s face dropped, and he said, “You don’t remember me, do you?” He immediately lit back up. “You used to come to my house all the time! Purim parties, and birthdays… Remember!?”

And Dick was persuaded to take another look at the kid. He was shorter than Dick was, and scrawnier. Wispy blond hair fell over a tanned face splattered with freckles. Huge green eyes stared at him cheerfully, relentlessly. Dick noticed a bit of an underbite when he smiled.

He sported a backwards cap, and a purple hoodie with the hood pulled up, over ample grey Bermuda shorts. Dick thought he looked like he’d chosen his clothes based on an amalgamation of what other people thought was cool.

“I haven’t gone to holiday parties since…” Dick struggled to think. Since primary school, really. “What did you say your last name was?”

“Logan! Gar Logan! Garfield, but don’t call me that. I haven’t gone by Garfield since I was eight, and I couldn’t figure out why kids kept laughing when I told them my name, right? Because I’d never had a TV back then! And then I found out about this stupid cat…”

The name rang a bell, but Dick struggled placing it, as Gar went off on a tangent again. Logan, Logan…

Dick thought he remembered a big house with an indoor garden, then a big backyard on top of that. He remembered end-of-year parties, with several of his parents’ friends and their children, and a messy boy in a corner playing with animal cookies and never eating them. The image fit well enough with the boy in front of him that Dick was satisfied with the memory.

Only then did Dick look around the hallway. There was no group of students looking on and giggling. It seemed like Gar had really reached out to reconnect with an old acquaintance. Dick had been too paranoid.

“Yeah, I remember now,” he said, interrupting Gar’s rant. He clasped the boy’s shoulder. “Well, great seeing you again, Garfield. See you around.”

When Dick tried to walk away, Gar followed as if pulled by a magnet.

“Wait! What’s your first class?” he asked.

“History.”

Dick watched with relief as Gar grimaced.

But Gar asked, “What’s your second class?”

“Biology.”

“Ha! Me too!” And then, to Dick’s dread, Gar slid an arm around his shoulder. “I got a feeling we’re gonna be the best of friends, you and I.”

Oooh no, Dick’s mind screamed. Oh no no no no no.

Here’s the thing. Dick had already done the Type A lifestyle.

He’d shown a talent for gymnastics early on -his parents had been acrobats, so that was a given-, so he’d done competitions. He’d won prizes. He’d gone to Nationals and been in newpapers. He’d also done karate, fencing, Eskrima, and a long etcetera, all before middle school. He was tired of all that.

Going into high school, Dick was on a firm plan to laze his way through it. He wanted to have a four-year hibernation, to finally wake up in the spring of being-able-to-get-out-of-the-city-for-good. That meant no extracurriculars, the bare minimum of studying, and no ties to fellow humans. That meant no friends—especially friends like Gar Logan.

Dick wasn’t fretting at first. He assumed Gar was just a nervous freshman, who latched onto any kid who could be a friend. Soon he’d meet other people, see Dick wasn’t friend material, and wander off to a better group. Dick gave it a week before his solid scowl and one-word responses turned the other boy away for good.

Except as the week wore on, that wasn’t happening. Everywhere he looked, there Gar was. Day after day after day. Delivering uninterrupted monologues on anything under the sun. On Thursday, Dick broke. He pointed to another group at lunch and outright said, “Don’t you wanna hang out with them?”

Gar said, “No. I’m hanging out with you!”

And Dick realized he had a big problem: Gar was loyal.

On Friday, in Biology class, they had to partner up for a project. D would have been lying if he said he wasn’t slightly relieved he knew who he’d be teaming up with. Gar predictably turned to Dick and asked to be his partner, and Dick agreed. He guessed the Stockholm syndrome had begun to take its toll.

Gar reacted the way people usually did when they saw Dick’s house.

“Whoa. You live here? This is your house?” he asked, staring at the grand Georgian-style manor. It was an impressive house out of an impressive block of expensive-looking houses.

“Yep,” said Dick, used to the double-take. “Come on in.”

As soon as they walked through the door, a voice called out, “Dick!”

Dick halted on his way up the stairs. “Shit,” he muttered. “I thought he wasn’t in.”

“Who?” Gar asked, following as Dick changed his path to further into the house.

“My uncle. Bruce,” Dick responded as they came to an office.

The voice had belonged to a broad-shouldered, imposing-looking man, with cropped black hair and sharp blue eyes. Even sitting down at the table, Gar could tell he was tall. And jacked. He wore a formal suit liked he was used to wearing one every day. Next to him was an actual butler. Gar realized when he laid eyes on him that he’d never thought he’d ever see a real-life butler in his life.

“I got a call from your principal today, Dick,” said D’s uncle. “He was concerned you weren’t joining any extracurriculars.”

“I’ve been thinking about it.” Dick’s tone was detachment itself.

“Have you?” retorted Bruce, not the least convinced. “We’ve been over this, Dick. I know you think-” The butler did an ever-so-slight cough, and the man got the hint. “Of course, I won’t scold you in front of your friend.”

“He’s not my friend,” said Dick.

Gar tried to keep from pouting. He followed Dick silently when he left the office, ignoring his uncle still talking to him, and they went upstairs.

Dick’s room was about three times the size of Gar’s own, but entirely emptier. There was a wardrobe, a dresser, and a neatly-made bed for furniture. No pictures on the walls, no decorations, not even curtains on the window. Gar thought Dick either had just moved or had seriously overdone his spring cleaning. The most interesting thing was a couple of boxes by the bed, and Gar leaned down to inspect them. They were full of trophies and medals.

Dick, who had kept arguing with Bruce on his way up the stairs, finally made it inside his room and shut the door.

Gar dropped his bag on the floor and dove into the boxes. There were awards for gymnastics, Kung Fu, Taekwondo, even some competitions Gar didn’t know existed. What the hell was a Junior Detective?

“What’s all this?” he asked.

“Old stuff,” replied Dick. “I want to get rid of it, but Bruce isn’t letting me.”

Gar set the tokens back. “Okay, I’m gonna put it out there—your uncle totally reminds me of Blackwolf.”

Dick shot him a funny look. “What about Bruce makes you think of an international superhero?”

“You know, it’s just, the glower, the tall and dark persona… he gives off a Blackwolf vibe. Wouldn’t it be cool if he were secretly a superhero?”

“He’s just a boring old businessman. I promise.”

“So you live with your uncle now?”

Dick had nearly forgotten Gar knew him from before. Of course—he remembered his parents. He must be wondering where they were. “Yep. Bruce raised me, sort of,” he replied, and braced himself for the inevitable onslaught of questions.

But Gar kept looking around the room and said, “I get that. I’m adopted too.” And then he changed the subject. “I can see why he wants you to keep doing clubs. Looks like you’re really good at… well, a lot of stuff.”

“It’s dumb. With his money and connections I could go to any college, even with no extra credits and a bad GPA.”

Gar looked a bit stunned. “Whoa. I’ve never heard someone admit that out-loud,” he laughed. “So you’re gonna ride through high school doing nothing?”

“Nah. I’ll join something eventually. Just to get Bruce off my back. Something as boring as possible and not demanding.”

“Hey. Why don’t you make your own club? Dedicated to napping and playing video games.”

Dick cracked a smile. Gar was way better company when he wasn’t desperately clinging and chasing Dick through school. Physically being in Dick’s house seemed to have calmed him down. Dick fished his Biology book out of his bag. “Let’s get this assignment thing over with, okay?”

They worked on the assignment for the next hour, got tired, agreed to split the rest of the work, and went back to talking about superheroes.

“Blackwolf is overrated,” said Gar.

“No way! He’s the best thing that happened to the Justice Union,” returned Dick.

“He’s fine if you like supers who stay on the sidelines and don’t do much.”

“He seems like he’s not doing much. He’s really the brains behind the team. It’s just he doesn’t have flashy powers like the other members.”

“I’m a Transmuto fan myself,” said Gar.

“Sure, if you like supers who care more about showing off than defending anyone. I prefer Lodestar.”

“Lodestar rocks. All the Titans rock,” said G. “I just like both of their powers. Imagine controlling all elements. But yeah, you can tell something’s wrong with a super if his own son rolls his eyes at him when he’s giving a speech.”

“Are you talking about the mayor’s Fourth of July act? That was a misleading video. Lodestar was just looking up at the sky.”

“He was laughing in the background with Lux Piper all the time his dad was talking. I found a website that broke down the scene in slowed-down gifs and it really shows.”

“Nerd.”

Gar took the label with a good-natured grin. “Who’s your favorite Titan? Mine’s Chameleon.”

Dick smirked. “’Course she is.”

“It’s not just ‘cause she’s hot!” Gar protested. “She’s got a great sense of humor. You can tell. Like when she turned up at that news segment wearing a Starmaker hoodie. I mean a hero who wears supervillain merch, really. What’s not to love?”

“Mine’s Kismet.”

Gar furrowed his nose. “Really? She’s hard to like. But I’d trust her with my life, though.”

“Exactly,” smiled Dick. “She was in a league of mercenaries like two years ago. She was raised by the bad guys, to be a bad guy, and now she’s the leader of the Titans. And no one in the superhero world questions her loyalties. No one doubts she was forced to do evil before, and now she’s one of the good guys. That’s huge.”

“You’re right. Sometimes I forget what she used to do.”

“Sure, she’s blunt. But the media doesn’t let her catch a break. And that’s just this country being mad a Black girl is the leader of a superhero team.”

Gar was throwing his pencil case in the air and catching it. “No one ever has Fimm as their favorite Titan,” he mused.

“Yeah, he’s just weird.”

“Do you really believe he used to be a fairy?”

Dick chuckled. “I don’t know, man. The world we live in is really weird.”

That night, long after he had gone home, Dick brought Gar up to his uncle over dinner. “Bruce? You know the kid that came over today?”

“Vaguely.”

“Garfield Logan. He says he knew me when we were younger. That I used to go to his house for the holidays. Why would I have gone to his house?”

Bruce paused. “Logan of the scientist Logans? Mark and Marie?”

Dick shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Your parents were friends with them.” Dick wondered why Bruce seemed suddenly somber.

He tried to remember. Back when his parents were alive…. That whole era seemed like a sleuth of people and colors, different towns, the lights of the circus nights. But he could set apart the Jump City memories. It was the only time he saw Bruce back then. He remembered parties at different adults’ houses, and being dumped with the other children. “I think I remember the Logans. But Gar said he’s adopted.”

“Yes. Mark and Marie Logan are dead.” Bruce took a few moments to eat before he continued. “They were doing research in Africa and they had a boating accident. For years people thought the boy had died with them, but then he cropped up two years later. He’d been taken in by some embezzlers who were trying to take control of his inheritance. Eventually he was rescued, and brought over here. Last I heard of him, he was going from foster home to foster home in Star City. You say he got adopted? I’m glad.” He paused. “That kid’s had a hard life, Dick.”

“Yeah…” The air was suddenly poignant, and Dick was starting to regret the way he’d mercilessly tried to shake off the boy all week.

“You’re better off finding more well-adjusted friends,” Bruce finished.

“What?” Dick stared at his uncle in shock. “That’s cold even for you, Bruce.”

“I’m just being tactical. I want you to have the best connections available.”

“More well-adjusted people,” Dick repeated. “What, like you and me?”

His uncle stopped eating to glare at him. “Fine. Do what you want.”

Chapter Text

On Monday, Gar came up to Dick’s locker like he usually did. Today he was waving a flyer around, calling out,

“Dude! I thought about it! I have the solution to your problem!”

“What problem? I don’t have problems,” said Dick.

“I was bursting to tell you all weekend! But, well, I don’t have your phone.” Gar paused, looked at Dick sheepishly as if trying to decide whether to make the hint obvious, then seemed to realize Dick wasn’t going to bite and cut himself short. “But—here! Remember when I told you to make your own club? Let’s do it! Let’s make a club, specifically to laze about!”

“A whole club just to laze about? Somehow I don’t think they’ll let us do that.”

“Dude, look at some of these clubs!” Gar argued, waving the flyer in Dick’s face until Dick grabbed it. “Like this one. Swing club. Why do we have a swing club?”

“It’s sewing club,” Dick corrected.

“Oh.”

“But there’s a disco club, though, so your point stands.”

“See, all you need is a name, a few members, and a teacher to sign!”

“What teacher would approve of this?”

“There’s a cheese club, dude. We’ll get whoever agreed to that.”

“So you’re saying,” said Dick, leaning back to take some distance from the whirlwind that was Gar, “that we could start up a club, give it an obscure name, write a really complicated description, make it really unappealing and boring and weird to make sure no one wants to join it, and just use the space to hang out?”

Gar froze. “Well, uh… You do need at least five people to start one,” he posed, and in that moment Dick saw through to the boy’s motives clearly.

For Gar, this was just another attempt at getting -and fastening- friends. Being in a club together would ensure he and Dick were stuck together, in addition to the future third, fourth and fifth members they’d have to get.

Dick found himself wondering, for the umpteenth time, why Gar clung to him so stubbornly, and also why he didn’t just join any other existing club. A guy like him would fit in anywhere.

Dick gave the flyer back to Gar. “It sounds like way more trouble than it’s worth,” he sentenced.

He could have sworn Gar’s ears actually dropped.

“Well, then… what club are you gonna join?” Gar asked.

“I don’t know yet. I’m thinking I’ll make my freedom last as much as I can, until I see my uncle’s about to blow a fuse. But hey,” he clasped Gar’s shoulders in what he hoped was an encouraging gesture, “you should definitely join something, though.”

With that he left. For once, Gar didn’t follow him. Dick could only hope he’d take his advice, too.

Gar watched the other boy go. For once he was too tired to chase after someone who didn’t want his company. Gar wasn’t dumb—he knew Dick was desperately trying to shake him off.

But the night before the first day of school, a night Gar wouldn’t sleep a wink of, his adoptive dad had suddenly remembered about the Graysons. How they were friends with Gar’s parents and Gar had known Dick as a child. Steve said Dick was enrolled in Gar’s school this year, and he went on to talk about Dick’s many achievements. The point Steve was really getting at was that Dick was so accomplished that Gar was useless in comparison, but Gar had taken something else from it.

The fact that Steve made him remember Dick the night before school was a sign.

Suddenly Gar knew his fate: he had to make friends with Dick Grayson, the boy wonder. If he did, he’d be popular by extension, bullies wouldn’t get near him, he’d be invited to the coolest parties, and girls would notice him. High school would go down easy, and everything would be fine. He already had a foot in the door—they were childhood friends.

But when he school actually started, he’d seen another picture. You could tell in the first day of high school who was going to be popular and who wasn’t –even Gar, who had only been in formal education for all of six years, knew that- and Dick was never going to be popular. He was cute enough to aim for cool loser, but that was it.

But even though he saw now Dick wouldn’t be the winning ticket Gar had thought he’d be, Gar didn’t regret his trying to get close to him. Because Dick didn’t have any other friends.

If he had, Gar would have admitted defeat and left him alone a long time ago. But Dick would be alone if it wasn’t for Gar. And Gar couldn’t wrap his head around someone choosing to be alone. Surely even Gar’s company was preferable to complete solitude, right? Surely Dick couldn’t have such high standards that he preferred being alone to being Gar’s friend?

He was at a loss. So he kept trying. At least for now.

Despite his easy dismissal of Gar’s plan, Dick kept thinking about it as the day went by.

Almost unwonted, his mind worked on the logistics of a sham club. How would one go about making a club so unappealing that no one would want to join? Hypothetically of course.

He guessed he kept thinking about it because the alternative was being mentally present at his Geography class. At the front right now, a football player was butchering his presentation on the state rivers, and their at least octogenarian teacher was nodding along, enacting a pantomime of an academic evaluation, when everyone knew the player would pass no matter what. He was too important to the school’s glory to be kept from the team for something like grades, and everyone knew it—except, perhaps, the nervous kid himself.

Out of pure spite, Dick raised his hand at the end of the presentation. “Mr. Immotu, I thought the presentation was supposed to be on rivers, not lakes.”

The teacher glared at him. The football player’s eyes snapped up, and he looked at his papers, then at the teacher worriedly.

“The important thing to acquire in this exercise was knowledge of our territory,” Mr. Immotu said.

“Then why is it okay he named lakes up north of here and didn’t name some of our local ones?” Dick returned.

The teacher’s eyes narrowed. “Remove your sunglasses while you’re in my classroom, Mr. Grayson.”

Dick didn't, because that was simply code for Shut up. He chose to stare out the window and zone out for the rest of the class.

Dick didn’t understand adults—or anyone who had the power to change things for the better, and didn’t. It was a childish thought, and he hadn’t spoken it out-loud in years; but as he kept growing up, he still felt it.

Really, why shouldn’t he make a fake club? The world was already a stupid, unfair place, high school was the navel of hell, and teachers had no respect for students. Why shouldn’t he play the system and laugh back at them from the comfort of a school-issued clubroom, all while raking up college credits?

In Literature, probably because he was thinking so hard about it, he overheard a conversation relevant to his thoughts.

“…My brother knew her. She was the only girl keeping the Forestry club going,” said a girl seated in front of Dick.

“She was in a club by herself?” asked the girl next to her.

“Yeah, it’s really sad.”

Dick’s interest was piqued. After class, he went to the front office and knocked on the window.

The Murakami High secretary slid the window open and looked at him like she always did—like she didn’t actually work here and he was a kid bothering any old woman in the street who didn’t owe him anything. She was a woman of utterly undiscernible age—her orderly bun was completely white, but she stood straight and firm.

“Miss, I want to know about the Forestry club.”

“Yes?” she prompted impatiently.

“Is it true it had only one member? I thought a club needed five people.”

“You need five people to start a club. That club must have been preexisting.”

“So you only need one person to keep a club going?” Dick asked, his brain working fast. “How about if an old club stopped existing for a while and one wants to restart it?”

“Restarting a club needs two student members.”

Dick fought back a smile. “Thank you.”

He went to the library next. He pulled up the list of the school’s active clubs on his phone. Armed with that, he cross-examined it with the clubs in old yearbooks.

He searched through dead and forgotten clubs until he got one that gave him pause. A ‘Project Club’ dissolved in 1997.

Dick felt an instant kinship with a title so perfectly ambiguous. A quick read-through told him that what they actually used to do was community outreach, of the tree-planting variety.

Dick stopped his search there. That was it.

He went to find Gar after third period.

“Hey. Gar. You still wanna start a club?”

And he watched Gar’s face light up so bright it almost hurt to watch.

“Here’s the con,” Dick told Gar over lunch. “You need five people to start a club, but to restart one, you only need two.”

“So, who’s the lucky club?” asked Gar between mouthfuls of his sandwich. Gar brought his lunch packed from home—he was a vegan and trusted nothing in the building that was unpackaged.

Dick showed him the picture of the yearbook page he’d snapped on his phone. “The Project club. Closed for decades. They used to do like trash pickup, community gardens, fundraisings… stuff like that.”

“So we take their name but make the club really dumb so no one will want to join?”

“Exactly.”

“Okay, we need a teacher,” said Gar. “What about Mr. Bill? Everyone says he’s nice.”

“Absolutely not,” replied Dick. “Someone nice is gonna get invested. He’ll make us be an actual club, with events, and… other people.”

“Then who’d you have in mind?”

Dick smiled. “Principal Blood.”

“The principal? Why?”

“Think about it. He’s always busy. He’s not gonna pay attention to a small club. And he doesn’t look like the type to get invested in anything, does he?”

Gar thought about it. Blood’s regular state of being looked bored out of his mind. He slowly smiled. “So, we get or own clubroom, and what? Play video games all afternoon? Can I bring my console?”

“Sure!”

“And a mini-fridge?”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Gar smiled at Dick. Dick noticed he didn’t even ask about getting other members. He felt a pang of guilt, because while Gar seemed to have decided he was content with Dick’s friendship alone, Dick was still conniving to get rid of Gar.

He forced himself to smile back.

The checklist on Dick’s mind was now as such:

1. Get Blood on board. Survive club rush day. Start the club.
2. Find a large, diverse group of cool and amazing friends. For Gar. So he’d leave Dick alone.

And finally, 3. End up blissfully alone in his clubroom and hide out there until the end of high school.

The Murakami High teacher staff didn’t look like other schools’ teaching staff. It wasn’t the first time Dick had thought it.

Maybe it was just because he knew each of them individually—maybe this happened to every kid, in every school: as you got to know your teachers they began to seem bizarre in a unique way.

But as Dick advanced into the teachers’ lounge, he couldn’t help but think they looked way more like a collection of misfits from various walks of life, as one might assemble to save the world. Or, no. That wasn’t exactly it. They looked more like a team of supervillains. Yeah, that was it.

Just now there was Mr. Mod, the odd-looking, Beatles-haired, brightly-dressed man who taught American history despite being, himself, British. Talking to him was Miss Mae Eye, the plump, sweet-looking but oddly terrifying girls’ gym teacher. Mr. Fixet was the Woodshop teacher turned Computer Science teacher: his class involved no computers and all his assignments were theory-based and had to be turned in handwritten in paper. There was Professor Chang, an old but upright man who looked like a crazy scientist who’d committed heinous crimes against humanity in the name of science and was hiding from the law as a school teacher. And then, on the corner, there was Mr. Bill, The Last Normal Teacher of Murakami High. With his tucked-in button-up and sensible hairstyle, his only transgressions were bad puns, plus the times he’d pulled out a guitar to try to sing his Maths lesson. Dick politely asked to speak to the Principal, and was let into the office of Mr. Blood.

“Right, so you’ve submitted your club application,” the principal said, glaring at the form Dick had handed him. “Quite late, I might add.”

“We were polishing off some last details,” said Dick.

“So this is why you weren’t joining any other clubs. It could’ve saved me a conversation with your guardian had I known your… intentions.”

Blood always made pauses in odd places of his speech, as if he was willing you to get more from his words than what was apparent.

“Well, the Project Club is Murakami High legacy. Gar and I wanted to make sure we did it justice. We’ve been planning it since the summer, you see.”

“That’s wonderful,” Blood replied, in a completely flat tone. “Do you have a teacher advisor?”

Dick put on a winning smile. “Actually, we wanted you to be our advisor, sir.”

Blood looked up, icy eyes glaring at Dick. “You know as your principal, I don’t have much time left over to run after a new club. But, I suppose I could oversee it.”

A less keen observer might not have noticed Blood’s ego had been stroked.

“Have you got the forms you would give the students?”

“Yes.” Dick handed him a bright and orderly-looking form, which clearly detailed club goals and meeting times, around a nice stock picture of kids jumping. Dick had even gone and found one without a watermark.

Blood looked over it. “It looks like you’ll do well. I don’t think you need me to overlook the table and posters and things.”

“No, I don’t think so, sir.”

“Now, since this is so last-minute, I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with the room that’s left.”

That was the first time in the entire process that Dick’s smile waned. “What’s the room that’s left?”

Minutes later, having followed Blood’s directions, Dick stood next to Gar in a two-by-four room, fuming.

“This is barely a room. It’s barely not a storage room.” He seethed, looking around accusingly. “I guess we should be grateful there’s a table.”

Gar clasped his shoulder. “Dick, my friend, look. I say we just count our losses and call it a day. We got the room, we got the club! It doesn’t matter that it’s not perfect.”

“Yeah, maybe you’re right.” It’s only gonna be me in here in a week, he thought.

“Did Blood buy the fake forms?”

“Yes,” said Dick, and, being reminded of it, he took out the paper he’d shown Blood and ripped it in half. “You have the real ones?”

“Feast your eyes,” Gar said, handing Dick a stack of forms. “It’s my greatest work.”

Dick inspected them. He had been afraid Gar might have second thoughts and try to make the club appealing. He was relieved at the perfectly awful forms in his hands. All black and white, no pictures, typesetting all over the place. Clearly, the kid was loyal. “Spelling mistakes. Nice touch.”

“Uh… yeah. That was totally on purpose.”

“We meet Monday through Saturday, three pm to ten pm?” Dick read.

“I know. Genius.”

“Fifty bucks entry fee.” Dick looked up at Gar, mystified. “For what?”

Gar wiggled his eyebrows and tapped his forehead with his forefinger. “Exactly.”

Dick had to laugh. “No one’s gonna touch this club with a ten-foot pole.” He clasped the other boy’s shoulder. “Gar. Let’s do terribly at club rush day.”

“Aye, team leader!”

Principal Blood didn’t show his face at club rush day, just as Dick had hoped.

The plan seemed to work. Most people took a look at their undecorated, sad booth, then at the two unpopular freshmen manning it, and passed right by. Those who did stop typically read through the form, were quickly appalled, and moved on. Those who persevered enough to ask them questions directly got repelled by the conversation that ensued.

“What do you actually do?” asked a kid.

“What it says on the flyer,” answered Dick. “Fun learning, new experiences and activities.”

“What does active engagement mean?”

“It means we do so many fundraisers,” answered Dick, and the boy walked on.

“You meet six days a week?” asked a girl in disbelief. “That’s longer than the rules allow.”

“We got special rules, because it’s such a prestigious club,” answered Gar, and Dick felt honestly proud.

“I want a club that prepares you for college,” said one driven soul.

“Model UN is that way.”

“How can you be so ambitious and not have a delineated plan of objectives?” asked a boy.

“Oh, you had to do that, Gar.”

“No, you had to do it, Dick.”

“Ugh,” went the boy, and finally left.

So come the next afternoon after school, Dick walked into his new clubroom, looked around on his rightfully acquired space, and smiled. He took one of the three chairs and leaned back, looking forward to the next four years like he thought he never would, now he had a cave to burrow in. Finally, he could relax.

Gar popped his head into the room. “Hey, Dick? Blood wanted a full explanation of our fundraiser plans?”

Dick groaned, getting up again to his great regret. Okay, maybe one last thing before relaxing.

Chapter Text

As the weeks wore on, it looked like the Club was out of danger. No one had tried to join, and Dick was completely happy.

The daring plan had settled into a known routine. He and Gar finished the school day and went to the tiny clubroom, which now sported a video game console with a monitor that doubled as a TV that only got air channels, and a mini fridge tucked under the shelves. Dick had brought some random papers from Bruce’s discarded work as decoy Club Stuff; they sat in boxes in the corner and shelves, in case Blood ever came to check.

One day, Dick sat in the clubroom, idly browsing on his phone, savoring the last few moments of quiet before Gar arrived. The door opened, and instead of Gar, in came a girl all dressed in black. She didn’t look at Dick as she crossed the room, settled on a chair on the furthest wall, next to the window, dropped her bag on the floor and pulled out a book.

Dick knew who Raven Roch was. So did a lot of people. She was a freshman, and already she had a reputation.

Legend had it that on the first day of class, Chemistry teacher Zatanna Zatara had singled her out during roll call. When she’d gotten to Raven’s name, she had glared at the girl. Some kids had turned to see what she was doing, but Raven had been sitting still. The class was shushed into silence. Some kids knew Miss Zatara from her being a judge in middle school Science Fairs, and they knew her to be kind and fair; they had never seen her be mean to a student.

Miss Zatara had said, “We hope you’ll be on your best behavior, Miss Roch. We’ve been warned about you. We all know about you back at the office.”

Raven’s reaction was noticeable in that there had been none. She’d glared back at the teacher and hadn’t said a word. She’d just sat there, looking… well, kind of evil.

No one knew what to make of the exchange; rumors quickly rose to supplant facts. Raven was fresh out of Juvie. Raven had a murder charge and had been let off on a technicality. Raven was supposed to be in a psychiatric hospital and the government was forcing Murakami to take her as part of a nation-wide experiment. Raven only posed as a high school girl but was part of a cult that had killed Miss Zatara’s father. Etc., etc.

The rumor mill could have faded there—students might have moved on to the next thing. Except the next week, Miss Zatara stopped coming to school. A few days later, they had a new Chemistry teacher. Raven’s infamy solidified: right now the lore was that those who crossed her didn’t last long in school.

Dick hadn’t been on that class that day, and even when Raven had been pointed out to him in the hallway, he’d been skeptic that this small, quiet girl was as striking as some said. He bet she wasn’t scary at all. He bet she was just blunt. People weren’t kind to girls who didn’t care what people thought of them.

But now, alone in the room with her, he could kind of see it. As she calmly read her book, like she’d already forgotten Dick was there, he found he couldn’t bring himself to say a word.

The spell was broken when the door opened again, admitting Gar.

“Hey, dude-!” was all Gar got out before Dick pushed him back out the door. “Was that Raven Roch in there?” Gar asked, as Dick closed the door behind them.

“Yes, it was.”

“Is she part of the club now?” Gar smiled.

He looked not against the idea at all, which strengthened the suspicions Dick was already harboring.

“Well, she just came in and started reading. It’s as if she knows exactly what this club really is.”

“How’d she find out?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” said Dick, looking pointedly at Gar.

Gar gaped when he got Dick’s meaning. “Me?”

“Yes, you!”

“Why me?”

“Look, did you tell her or not?”

“Of course not!”

“Did you let it slip to someone else?”

“Why are you suspecting me?” Gar demanded.

“There’s just me and you in this club.”

“Well why couldn’t it be you?”

“Because it wasn’t! Now think! Did you tell anyone, at all?”

“No.”

“Not your parents?”

Gar back-tracked. “Oh, well, I told my mom I was in a Club.”

“And does she have ties to Raven? To the school?”

Gar shifted his weight. “I mean,” he started. Then he sighed heavily. “She is married to the gym teacher.”

Dick paused. “Whoa. Wait. Coach Dayton is your dad? The guy you say is always yelling at you and grounds you and ungrounds you twice a day? That was the Coach?”

“Adoptive dad,” Gar muttered.

“How did I not know this?”

“Because he wants to keep some distance while in school,” Gar explained. “Not like it’s gonna stay on the down low forever.”

“Well, there’s the connection.”

“Hold up. I just told Rita I was in a club. I didn’t tell her it was a front. Besides, Steve doesn’t give a shit what I do at school. Even if she told him, I bet he tuned her out. And how would Raven find something out from the boys’ coach?”

Dick considered. “Okay. Whatever. It doesn’t matter how, she’s here. How do we get her to leave?”

“Do we have to? What’s the problem with her being here?”

“This was a two-person ploy, remember? The more people know about this, the worse our chances are of keeping the club!”

Gar grimaced and didn’t look at Dick in the eye. Dick could see plain as day that he wanted her to stay. Even if Dick wasn’t good at reading expressions and body language –which he was-, Gar’s face was transparent. Evidently, he didn’t care that Raven was scary. A girl in the club was still a girl in the club.

With the same clarity, Dick saw Gar’s face brighten up to mark the moment he came up with a way out.

“Okay, well, what d’you say we do? Are you gonna tell her she has to leave?”

Dick opened his mouth and closed it again, remembering the odd trepidation he’d fallen on in Raven’s presence. But he was too proud to back down when Gar was clearly wagering on his cowardice. He swallowed, summoned all the courage he didn’t feel, and said, “Yes. Yes I will.”

Raven Roch didn’t stir even when the two boys were directly in front of her.

“Hey,” said Dick, intelligently.

Raven looked up, annoyed. She had short black hair, middle-parted, falling pin-straight around her small olive-toned face. Big dark blue eyes nested under strong long eyebrows and glared at Dick. On her forehead sat a diamond-shaped red stone.

“If you want to join the club, there are requirements.”

“Class enrolment, perfect grades… I’ve seen the list. I’m good,” said Raven, returning the glare Dick was giving her.

Gar looked back and forth between them. She seemed as determined to stay as Dick was to kick her out. He had no idea whose will would prevail.

Dick started again, “You need to fill a form. Copy of your birth certificate. Your last semester’s…”

Raven took a bunch of papers from her bag and slapped them on Dick’s chest.

Dick flipped through them, and in the meantime she went back to reading. Dick seemingly couldn’t find anything wrong in her papers, because he returned to glaring at her in frustration.

“There’s an initiation,” said Dick.

Raven looked up. Gar thought he saw the stone on her forehead glisten.

“Gar and I did it,” added Dick.

Gar protested lowly, “Duude.” But Dick elbowed him to shut him up.

Raven stood up.

She was a small human—probably one of the shorter girls in their year. But they were fifteen, the awkward age where girls looked like women and boys still looked like toddlers. She was the same height as Dick, and she decidedly towered over Gar. And just then, Dick felt the same trepidation he’d gotten when he was first alone with her.

“No, I don’t,” she said. Dick’s skin prickled under her glare. “Because you didn’t.”

Moments later, Dick and Gar were back in the hallway.

“Clearly she has an informant,” said Dick.

“I definitely didn’t tell Rita we didn’t have an initiation.”

Dick suddenly hit his head with his palm. “I should have told her we didn’t allow girls!”

Gar made a face. “That’d earn you a discrimination sanction from the school. Plus I don’t think I’d wanna be in that club.”

“Then don’t be. Leave me and her, we just need one person to keep it going.”

“Hey, I helped make the club. Maybe I’ll kick you out, and keep my buddy Raven. And welcome all the other girls.”

“Seriously now. What do we do?”

Gar looked at the closed door, at the austere black-and-white ‘Project Club’ sign printed in Times New Roman, 12-point. “Hey Dick. Call me crazy. But I have the feeling she wouldn’t enjoy having a lot of people in a club either. Like out of all the people that could possibly storm the club, she’s like the least disruptive presence I can imagine.”

Dick sighed. “Yeah, I see your point. It’s probably way more effort to kick her out then just let her be.” His voice hardened. “But that’s it. Three people. It’s a three people ploy.”

The next day, Victor Stone walked into the clubroom.

He let himself into the clubroom and slapped a bunch of papers in the table in front of Dick and Gar. “Hey. I wanna join this thing.”

Dick put on an expressionless face and took the papers. “Great. Let me see.”

While Dick went through the papers, Gar fully gaped at the newcomer. He’d never seen Victor up close before.

The boys knew of Victor Stone—of course they did. Last year he’d been simply benignly popular as the star of the JV football team. But it was the car accident in the last weeks of the school year that had shot him to celebrity status. People said he’d only survived because his dad, an important scientist, had pulled all the strings to get Victor experimental surgery and prosthetics. It was easy to believe, because Gar had never seen anything like him before.

Most of his body was metal: white and blue metal pieces clashing against his rich brown skin. All four limbs were prosthetic, and some people said what was left of his torso was protected by a metal plaque as well. Even half of his head sported a plaque, complete with a bionic eye that flashed red.

Gar stared until Victor finally shot him a glare. Gar started and quickly looked away.

Victor paid a curious look to Raven reading quietly in the corner, seemingly having just noticed her, and then turned back to the boys.

By then, Dick had found a problem in Victor’s form. “I’m sorry to say this, you don’t have the grades to join us,” he said, trying to keep the glee out of his voice.

“Ah, yeah, I heard about your crazy requirements,” said Victor, his good eye laughing at them. “It’s bullshit. You can’t ask for a perfect GPA. I know because I was the football team captain in middle school. I’ve read the rules.”

“This isn’t the football team,” Dick fired back. “This is a prestigious academic-minded…-”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Victor cut him off. “Listen, I’ve seen most of the clubs in this damn school and they are swarmed. You guys are the ones with the lowest member count, I don’t even know how you got it approved, but that’s exactly what I want. Something quiet, something chill, just an easy college credit.”

Gar leaned over to whisper to Dick. “His head is in the right place.”

Dick elbowed Gar back into place. “This isn’t chill. This is high stakes. We have outreach hours, and academic competitions, and we meet six times a week…-”

“Right, the seven-hour meetings,” Victor cut him off. “That’s against the rules too. Who was your advisor? Blood? You tell me that if I went to him he’d tell me he’s approved all this?”

Dick kept his face impassive as he inwardly seethed. Just his luck he got a smart football player, who’d had club leader experience to boot. It kind of felt like being struck by lightning in the middle of an earthquake.

Victor leaned into Dick’s face. “I know this club is a front. Just let me in, man. You need people, and I need me some college credits. You know, since a sports scholarship isn’t an option anymore.” The bitterness in his tone hit them like acid.

Dick recovered and said, “We don’t need people. Not really.”

“Oh? Fine,” Victor spat. “How’s this? You let me in and I don’t tell everyone this club is a sham.”

Dick looked at Gar. “Hallway.”

“I mean,” Gar said when they were outside, “having someone popular will probably protect us or something.”

“He’s not popular anymore, Gar, wake up,” replied Dick. “Or he’s soon to not be. You think his jock friends are gonna keep him around if he can’t play sports?”

“Well, maybe having him won’t help us. But if we don’t take him, he’s definitely gonna snitch on us.”

Dick nodded reluctantly as Gar told him what he already knew. “Alright, fine. We have four people now. But no more, you hear me? Not. One. More.”

When they re-entered, they saw Victor had taken a seat and started a video game, clearly of the mind that his membership was a foregone conclusion.

Dick looked around and sighed. “We’re gonna need to bring in another chair.”

Chapter Text

Starting school a month into the year was never Kori’s ideal situation, but here she was.

She knew her older sister would manage to turn the situation around. She’d make a glorious entry as the cool, mysterious newcomer. Kori wasn’t sure she could work the same magic.

But she chased those thoughts away. This was the first time in her life she was in a school her sister wouldn’t be attending, and she wouldn’t ruin it by invoking Komila. Her sister was far away finishing high school in Spain, and this was Kori’s chance to get out from under her shadow.

First things first. She went to the Secretary’s window, got her schedule and found out what her first class was. Then she faced an American locker for the first time in her life. She had only just figured it out, when a girl’s voice said, “Hi.”

Kori turned with a smile. Three girls were looking at her with smiling faces. “Hello,” she returned, relieved and nearly giddy. Was she being engulfed by a friend group already? Could it be so easy?

“Oh, I really love your hair, honey,” said the girl who had first greeted her. She herself had smooth tan skin and long black hair.

“It’s so red!” said another girl, the one with rosy pale skin and a blonde pixie cut. “Isn’t it, Jade?” she asked the first girl.

“Thank you,” Kori made out.

Jade laughed. “Aww. Just like Komi said, so sweet and shy.”

That was when things started going downhill. Kori slowly lost her smile.

Jade turned to the other blonde. “Kitty, this is who we were telling you about. Komi’s little sister.”

“The little sister who used to stick rocks up her nose,” said the girl with the pixie cut, covering her mouth in a mock whisper. “And had to be rushed to the hospital one time.”

“Oh my God, that’s her?” Kitty dutifully added.

They were freely snickering now.

“Okay, stop, you guys.” Jade made a show of looking at the others reproachfully. “What’s your first class, sweetie?” she asked Kori, and made a grab for her schedule.

Kori held it close to her chest. She would have liked to defend herself, except she had forgotten what little English she knew. So she simply closed her locker and walked away, with the three girls’ now unabashed laughter following her.

She dashed to wherever –because she had no idea where her first class was- and tried not to cry. Komi’s shadow followed her. She’d been a fool to think she could ever get out from under it.

Dick first became aware of Kori in Dr. Light’s Physics class.

“Korina Andro… Androko…-” struggled the teacher.

“Androkinova,” the girl said helpfully.

Dick heard laughter arise with her intervention, inexplicably. Had he missed something? The name wasn’t funny.

He tuned into the whispers that rose around him, and heard a girl tell someone, “That’s Komila’s little sister.”

Which meant nothing to him.

The girl at the front of the class had incredibly green eyes, an enormous smile, warm golden-brown skin, and lots of red curly hair. She was tall, and stood to her full rightful height. He thought she looked older than them—more like a diplomat model sent to talk to them than a fellow classmate—and the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. He looked away before he did something stupid, like blush.

Were the other girls sneering at her because she was too pretty? …Did girls do that in real life?

The girl introduced herself in tentative English, proving Dick’s impression that he was before a foreigner. When Jade Nguyen-Crock openly laughed at it, Kori looked at her with a cool hatred that froze Dick in place, and he wasn’t even the recipient of it. That glare promised trouble. It surprised him that he kept hearing the giggles; those girls seriously didn’t know what they were messing with.

Every single guide and list Kori had anxiously googled in preparation for her first day of school agreed in a single point: the best thing for making friends was joining a club.

So in her first free period, Kori went hunting for one.

To say it went badly would be an understatement. A few clubs told her they had already filled their quota—apparently the maximum number of members for some clubs was thirteen, or eight, or four. Others told her she had to have been at school for a longer period of time, or she had to have joined the middle school version of this club to get in. The Chess Club adamantly denied that they were the Chess Club, even as they sat inside the room whose door said Chess Club, with several chess games going on around them.

After the tenth club rejected her, she was forced to admit there was a pattern. Her suspicions kept pointing back to those three girls—Jade, Angel and Kitty, she had learned. She had to conclude they were sabotaging her; the alternative was thinking there was something so wrong about her that no one wanted her around, and Kori wasn’t ready to succumb to that level of hopelessness yet.

Before the day was over, she was going to confront those girls. It wasn’t as much a decision as something Kori knew would inevitably happen. She was finally free from her sister’s influence. Would she let her minions defeat her? Kori sat in her fourth period class and glared at the back of Jade’s head. No. Certainly not without a fight.

In the hallway, one of the popular girls talked to Dick, which was weird.

“Hey. You have a club, right? You’re the leader?”

“Yeah?” Dick admitted.

The girl tossed back her glossy blonde hair. This was Kitty, Dick knew. Popular people were like popular songs: you were forced to know them, whether you wanted to or not.

“Okay, listen, this new girl who just started here, the redhead?” Kitty said. “I wouldn’t let her into your club if I were you.”

“Uh-huh,” was Dick’s noncommittal reply.

“Yeah, I heard she steals from the treasury from whatever club she’s in,” Kitty said, putting on fake concern in her voice. “That’s why she got transferred from her last school.”

“Really.” Dick saw the real message the girl was trying to deliver. The popular kids hated the new girl. If you let her into your group, you were getting bullied too.

“Yeah. So keep that in mind.” Kitty was watching for his answer closely.

Dick decided to go with sarcastic deference. “How could I not trust you?”

She looked him up and down, appalled. “Are you flirting with me? Ew.”

And she flew away in disgust, which worked well enough for Dick.

A school day, when you’re all alone, stretches to unbelievable degrees. Kori trudged on, weighed down by the anxiety and boredom that came with belonging to no one in a brand new place. Every time she went back to her locker, she noticed the changing patterns of sunlight on the hallway as the hours passed, with nothing better to occupy her mind. Friends talking cheerfully around her sounded too loud to her ears, and cast a stark contrast on her own aloneness. These were all sensations Kori knew well.

Her earlier courage had all but evaporated. She couldn’t confront her sister’s friends. What if she was wrong? She had no proof against them, and with her shaky command of the language, she had no way to eloquently prove them to be villains.

And really, maybe… maybe she’d been too quick to decide she wasn’t the problem. Maybe it was her after all. Maybe she was so weird and off-putting that she didn’t even realize how much she turned people off. Maybe there was no great ploy against her: maybe it was just Kori herself.

By her lunch period, she was exhausted. She was already wary of cafeterias from what she’d seen in movies, so she didn’t even try to enter this one. She looked around the school for a deserted spot instead.

That was how Dick found her, making camp in a hallway next to a stairway.

Something pushed him to ask, “Hey. You okay?”

Kori looked up and locked her impossibly emerald eyes on Dick. Mr. Mod had just yelled at Dick to take off his sunglasses in school, so Kori got to appreciate his light blue eyes in turn. In that moment where the two first properly met, all of human history slid to a stop and fate rearranged itself, to make space for the epic love story those two were meant to have.

But for now, Dick only thought again how pretty she was, and when that subsided, he recognized the sadness in her eyes.

Then he noticed she was holding a sandwich in a paper bag.

“Hey, um… it’s actually against the rules to eat in the hallways.”

“Oh,” she said simply. There went one more mistake. She was close to not caring. “What if no one comes?”

“Well then I guess nothing’s against the rules,” he reflected. Then he decided, what the hell, and sat next to her. “Tell you what. Let’s both get in trouble.”

Kori was immensely relieved, even over the nervousness that she’d blow this. In any place in the world, she thought, there was always the rare kind specimen who would be nice even to someone as odd as her.

Dick took out a bag of cookies –it was all he had since he would’ve bought lunch at the cafeteria- and struck up a conversation. “Your name, is it Russian?”

“That is close,” she replied, smiling. “It is Tamaranean.”

Dick stopped chewing. “I’ve never heard of that place.”

“It is a little country, and it is near Russia.” She doubted then. “You… did not know my sister, then?” People she met usually already knew about Tamaran—because they knew Komi.

“I don’t think so,” Dick replied. “Maybe I just missed her. I was homeschooled for a year before coming here.” He was met with a vacant glance, then she looked away. “Uh, that’s when you don’t go to school and tutors teach you at home instead. Or sometimes it’s your parents, but… I had tutors.”

She nodded in understanding. “Perhaps I would like to try that instead of come here,” she said, smiling sadly.

No, don’t, thought Dick, though he couldn’t say why. He saw the pamphlets peeking from her bag and commented, “Wow, you’re joining all those clubs?”

Her gaze was suddenly liquid again. “No,” she said simply.

And then he remembered the conversation with Kitty in the hallway. Dick wanted to kick himself. He hadn’t been paying enough attention to connect the dots, and now he felt like an idiot.

He put his cookies down. “Hey, listen. I need to tell you something.”

He told her what he knew—about Kitty’s warning against her, and how he thought she was probably saying that to everyone. As he talked, he thought her sad eyes solidified into strong emerald, relief washed over her face, and Dick knew he’d done the right thing.

“I thank you for saying this to me,” she said solemnly. She stood. “Please excuse me now.”

Dick watched her walk into the cafeteria and felt an inexplicable growing dread. Led by something he couldn’t name, he quickly picked both of their stuff and followed her.

The next chain of events happened extremely quickly.

Kori making a beeline for the popular kids’ table. Kori pushing Jade Nguyen-Crock down onto the bench, and holding a lunch tray to her head for some reason. Dick running after Kori to try to talk her down. Kori saying something along the lines of ‘Never coming after her again’ before continuing in another language. Jade looking terrified in an undignified way, as Angel Edenfield screamed bloody murder, and Kitty obediently followed suit. Suddenly the principal was there. Next thing Dick knew, he and Kori both were sitting outside Blood’s office, waiting for a verdict and under the watchful eye of the school Secretary.

Kori had morphed back into her harmless soft self, and she was currently throwing Dick guilty glances. Dick was in silence, still processing what had happened. When the secretary left the office for a moment, Kori leaned over to Dick.

“I do not know enough English to defend myself with words,” she whispered, “I am so sorry you are in this problem too.”

It took Dick a second to understand that was the explanation as to why she’d resorted to violence. He had never seen someone so cute and dangerous at the same time. He was fascinated. “Don’t worry about it,” he replied. “Detention’s not a big deal to me.”

Principal Blood came out and indeed decreed detention for the end of the day. They were allowed out after an hour, having served detention under the half-hearted vigilance of the school Secretary.

Dick looked up at Kori –she was like a full head taller than him- and said, “Okay, listen. I happen to be a club leader. That’s why I knew what Jade’s group was doing to you. Would you like to j-”

“Yes.”

Kori had still been contrite as they left the classroom. Now her entire vibe had changed. She was brimming with excitement.

“No, let me finish. Here’s the thing about the club-”

“I accept, let us go.”

Kori pulled him along the hallway. Dick let himself be pulled.

When they went into the clubroom, the other three were still there. Gar and Vic did a double-take at them. Raven, as usual, didn’t.

“Kori, this is Gar, Victor, and that’s Raven.”

Kori went forward and said hello to both boys. She gazed at Raven, hesitated a moment, and ultimately went to the elusive girl.

“Uh, Dick?” Gar started. “Why did you invite the crazy girl everyone says almost killed Jade?”

“Because I’m a genius, Gar,” Dick replied.

It slowly dawned on Gar, and he smiled. “If you add the girl no one wants in their club, no one else will want to join ours. Dude!”

Vic looked downright skeptical at Dick. “Yeah. The fact that she’s hot has nothing to do with it.”

Dick ignored him, and they watched as Kori tried to make contact with Raven. The redhead had gotten as much as a passing glance, and even a returned handshake before Raven delved back into her reading.

Admitting defeat, Kori made her way back to the boys. “I realized I did not let you tell me the… the meaning of the club?”

They boys turned to Dick. Gar with unmitigated faith; Victor was just waiting expectantly for the new bullshit.

“The meaning of the club,” Dick said airily, “is celebrating laziness.”

Kori’s presence in the clubroom was marked by the addition of a portable stove, an electric kettle, and a few pots and pans and utensils, because she said she wanted to make them recipes from her country. For now, those additions simply occupied the entire counter and half a shelf, making the small clubroom seem even smaller.

Gar examined their new existence. The new normal was the five of them bothering each other in a too-small space most days starting three pm. During the day, they moved separately, each going through their particular set of obstacles, in Gar’s case mostly in the form of bullies, because Jade had made good on her tacit promise and the five of them were marked for associating with Kori. But in the afternoons, they came together, they’d go to the clubroom and… did that count as hanging out if they barely talked to each other?

Right now, around the clubroom, Dick was doing some kind of homework. Victor was scrolling on his phone. Pretty soon he’d get a text from one of his friends and leave. Raven had her nose deep in a book. Was it always the same book? He didn’t dare look at her long enough to find out—let alone ask her. Kori was reading a magazine with way more attention than it probably deserved, lost in her own little world. Everyone was quiet; everyone was doing their own thing.

The clubroom was a safe place, yes. They were getting credits for nothing, which Gar didn’t really care about. But was that all he could hope for? Were they never going to be more than… ploy partners?

Gar tried to break the ice one day. He waited until they were all about to leave; they were in the hallway and Dick was closing the door when he said it.

“H-hey. Guys. Let’s keep this going, right? Who wants to go to the carnival? I heard it’s a really good one.”

Even as he was saying it he knew it was hopeless. The four looked at him, then at each other, like they couldn’t think why on Earth they’d go along with that.

Dick said, “Can’t. I got a ton of homework.”

“Yeah, maybe some other time,” Victor said, sarcastically, which was maybe worse than Dick’s white lie.

Raven had just walked away without saying anything.

Gar looked at Kori. She gave him a sympathetic smile and walked off as well.

That had been a week ago. Now, it was Halloween, and Gar wouldn’t have known unless he looked at a calendar. There was no acknowledgement of it in town –in the way of spooky decorations, party flyers or costume bundles in stores-, let alone at school, and the lack of awareness for his favorite holiday of the year put him on edge. Of all the places he’d lived in, Jump City was the one with the least Halloween spirit.

Entering the cafeteria, he glanced at Victor, who always ate with his old friends. The football table was so… homogenous. All hulking dudes wearing the same jacket, all participating in the one conversation.

He tried to talk to Victor, sometimes. Victor just looked at him like the twerp way too many steps below him in the high school food chain they both knew he was.

Gar sat at his usual table. After he’d sat down, he watched Raven walk into the cafeteria, not spare a glance his way, and choose an empty table. He tried not to feel snubbed.

In reality, he couldn’t decide whether he’d want her to sit with him or not. The more people the merrier, he always thought; girls counted for two people. But Raven was a special case. He didn’t know exactly why she was scary. She looked at you and always seemed one second away from… jumping at you, or hexing you, or saying something cutting and humiliating you in front of everyone. He wasn’t sure. She had the potential of danger. Or at least of meanness.

In any case, he decided he’d better lie to himself and pretend she hadn’t seen him.

Eventually, Dick came in and sat with Gar, and for that he was glad. There was nothing he hated more than eating alone.

Two tables away, Kori sat with Raven and attempted to make conversation; Gar considered that girl was his kindred spirit in terms of attempting to extract friendship from unwilling recipients.

In the afternoon of Gar’s favorite holiday ever, Victor arrived to the clubroom after all of them, stayed for a few minutes, then checked his phone, put his letterman jacket back on and said he was leaving.

“If you’re never here maybe you should quit the club,” Dick said after him.

“Nah, I like the easy credit,” answered Victor. “And you like the arrangement, don’t you? It’s not like you like hanging out with me, short stuff.”

“And whose fault is that?” Dick asked after he was gone. “That guy isn’t exactly a joy to be around. Bet his old friends only stand him ‘cause he was good at football.”

Gar kept playing video games. One gone, three left, he thought. He already knew he wasn’t going to ask them to do something for Halloween, though. He’d learned after last time. They hadn’t gotten any closer since then.

Gar stayed a while longer. Dick was scrolling on his phone, Kori was hard at work in a recipe, and Raven was…

…not there. Her seat by the window was empty, her things were gone. When had she slipped out?

“Hey, where’s Raven?” Gar asked, referring to her in a much more daring tone than if she had been present.

Kori looked toward the window in confusion. “I am sure she came today.”

“Yeah, she did,” confirmed Gar. “Damn. She’s way too quiet.”

He stayed until Kori’s project started smelling like wet laundry, somehow. When Kori was done cooking, usually only Dick stayed behind. Gar made up an excuse and ran.

That night, Gar stayed home and waited for kids to come trick-or-treating. Rita had warned him kids in this town didn’t do that, but he couldn’t quite believe her; he got enough candy to fill a big bowl just in case. She was right, though. They ended up having the candy themselves over a spooky movie marathon, so the night was kind of nice after all.

When Gar was little, he used to go trick-or-treating with the other foster kids, and he never got to keep the candy, because the bigger kids stole it as soon as the neighbors closed the door. He always seemed to be the smallest kid in any given house. One year, he connived to eat the candy as soon as the adults put the candy in his bag, which got him some alarmed looks; the older kids just beat him up for the sake of it that year.

Even that Halloween was better than this one.

Technically, he had a group of people he hung out with every day. But in reality, did he have friends? If he did, he wouldn’t be alone night after night.

He’d once thought Dick was his ticket for a smooth ride through high school. He thought he could work his destiny so everything would be easy and nice. He wasn’t so sure anymore.

Chapter Text

The most notable development time had brought was that Gar didn’t seem to be afraid of Raven anymore. He’d used to steer clear of her, like everyone else did; he’d used to jump when she glared at him, and now he just… didn’t. Like he’d developed an immunity. Victor thought he had never been in more danger.

“She didn’t come to club yesterday,” Gar was telling him now. “You think she’s coming today?”

“Little dude, I don’t know why she even joined,” replied Victor. (Another thing that was new was, Victor had given up and condescended to talk to Gar. There was only so long a guy could talk at you before it became easier to just engage with him.)

Gar replied, “Oh, it’s because she wanted a quiet place to read. I think her house is really noisy or something.”

Victor peered at him. “And how do you know that?”

“I asked her,” Gar said blithely.

Victor could just see the scene. Raven would have been strongly hinting at Gar that she wanted quiet from him, and he’d taken it to mean she was at the clubroom because her house was loud. He shook his head. “Well, see, that’s your problem right there. You shouldn’t be talking to her. You ever see how happy she looks when you’re not bothering her?”

They looked across the hallway. Raven was calmly taking the books she needed out of her locker.

Gar made a face. “Raven never looks happy.”

“Well, peaceful. Whatever. The point is, you should keep out of her hair. And you know this. It’s just you’re reckless and you got the memory of a goldfish.”

“You know goldfish actually remember stuff up to five months, it’s a myth that they have bad—oh look, she’s leaving! Hey, Raven! Wait up!”

“Okay, please learn from the goldfish, then!” he shouted after Gar, who had already ran up to Raven.

Victor regretted openly talking to Gar in the hallway a moment later, when two of his friends came up to him. Thankfully, they didn’t seem to notice Gar, or else they were letting Victor’s transgression slide. Victor greeted his old friends and slipped into an easy normalcy—but when he was bumping fists with Jerry, he saw his own prosthetic arm, and the smile on his face was fake from that point on. Nowadays, at least, he didn’t have to watch his strength lest he hurt a friend, like back when the arms were new. But he still had to see those ugly things all the time, and feel like the freak he was. Everything was at least a little bitter, since the accident.

Gar returned to Victor, unfortunately. “She says she’s coming today. She says yesterday she went home early ‘cause it was Diwali.”

Victor uttered a sort of acknowledging grunt, turning away. He hoped Gar would take the hint.

Victor’s friends didn’t turn away from Gar, though. “Aw, this one of your new club buddies, Vic?” said Zach.

Victor’s grunt had renounced Gar, so they considered him fair game for mocking.

“We were never that small as freshmen, were we?” said Jerry.

Zach made a show of kneeling down to Gar’s height. “How much do you weigh, pipsqueak?”

“Uh…” Before Gar could answer, he was lifted clean off the ground from his backpack. “Hey! Let me go!”

The two laughed.

“Zach, come on,” Victor said lowly, and it was like a magic phrase. Gar was dropped to the ground.

Victor caught a glimpse of a resentful look Gar shot him when he realized Victor wasn’t going to actually stand up for him. Gar walked away without another word, and Victor realized something had just shifted. The boy hadn’t held it against Victor all the other times in the past when he would stand by as the football players messed with him, because back then Victor was ignoring him all the time. But this –this being friendly in private and then turning around and disowning him in front of the others-, this he didn’t seem willing to forgive.

He might just have to make it up to the little guy. Maybe. He’d see.

Kori was forced to notice the other girls made her target her at dodgeball ten times more often than they did the other girls. She didn’t mind as much she perhaps should: she gave right back what they dished out, and she enjoyed the exercise. The other girls’ scheme was a stupid one when Kori was worth ten players.

But when class was done and they were out of the field, though, she was fair game. The latest thing Jade and her posse were doing was make a show of steering wide of Kori when she passed by, shuddering away in fear in an over the top way. Kori understood the wisdom of such a strategy: Jade was still afraid of her, so she wouldn’t outright provoke her—but an exaggerated show of fear turned the onus on Kori. It shone on a light on Kori being so savage she was to be feared.

Kori knew she couldn’t compete with them in words or subtle social tactics. She was good at the technical side of languages. Grammar and spelling? Check and check. Vocabulary was trickier. Idioms were impossible. Pronunciation wasn’t her strong suit either, and she plain didn’t like contractions; they sounded off to her, like she wasn’t actually pronouncing the word, and was in fact missing verbs. And even if she could be eloquent, they had the sway of the crowd. They were a group, and she was only one girl.

Raven would know what to do. She too was just one girl, but she was a host unto herself.

Kori had been in the vicinity when Kitty Moth had directed some words at the dark-haired girl. “Some people here go around threatening perfectly respectable teachers out of their jobs and shouldn’t be let out with the rest of us civilized people,” the blonde had said, as all the girls sat on the bleachers, in the space of time while Miss Mae was getting the volleyballs from the closet, and no one could escape.

And it would have seemed impossible to Kori that one could win an argument by staying quiet, but that was exactly what Raven had done. When Kitty had looked at her to see how her insult landed, Raven had glared at her. Kitty had broken first, and looked away with a small ‘hmph!’, like she was the one who’d been crossed somehow.

Speaking of Raven—Kori took her mind away from her miserable social state and looked to see where Raven was in her after-gym routine; seeing she was already putting her clothes back on, Kori sped up. Following Raven was a full-time job; Kori had to catch her before she slipped out of the gym. That girl moved like water.

Out of her new group of friends –which was what Kori had immediately decided the Project Club was- Raven was the one Kori was most afraid of, and not for the reasons everyone else feared her. Kori had a feeling the somberly dressed but decidedly cooler girl would, like most other girls, shake her head at Kori and abandon her at the first social misstep. But she wasn’t cruel like other girls. She didn’t go out of her way to push herself above Kori: she just existed, and she seemed comfortable in her just existing.

Growing up as an outsider, either because she didn’t get a certain language much or simply because she was shy, Kori had acquired a specific way of judging people. Because Kori never had social clout, because there were no consequences to being mean to her, there were always people who openly mocked her in front of everyone, and then there were people who were nice to her in front of others and promptly ignored her when they were alone. For her, neither of those types of people were nice. Only the people who acted the same in a group as when they were alone with just Kori were worth anything to her. Raven was one of those people. So Kori had chosen her.

Plus, she was the only other girl in the Club. Kori had decided Raven was her destiny, roughly in the same way Gar had decided as much about Dick earlier in the year. She would win her over. One way or another.

Across the school in the outer field, Gar got hit in the head with a football and went down hard on the ground. The reason the impact toppled him was that gym class was already over—he hadn’t been expecting that.

He started to get up and was pushed down again, this time by a human hand. The boys that walked past him called, “Tell your dad not to be such a dick, Logan!”

Ah. That’s right. He’d seen Steve give a bunch of junior boys extra laps for some reason. When that happened, sometimes they took it out on Gar afterwards. So much for not letting people at school know Gar lived with the Daytons. Gar chose to stay on the ground until the juniors moved on to the locker rooms.

As he lay on the ground, Dick came into his field of view. “You okay?” he asked.

Gar replied, “Sure. I’m used to it.” He sat up. “Uh, you go ahead if you want. I’m just gonna hang out here until they leave the locker room.”

But Dick wasn’t having it. He said, “Come on,” reached out his hand and pulled Gar to his feet.

Once in the locker rooms, the three juniors did hurl some insults at Gar, and Dick talked back at them, effectively succeeding in making the older boys back off. This was nothing short of a miracle to Gar—but it was a magic Dick could work. It was probably something you could do when you knew you could back up your words with your fists if needed be, like Dick could. On some level, thought Gar, it was evident Dick was a good fighter in a way the bullies could perceive.

The juniors had forgotten all about them by the time Dick and Gar left the locker room. Perhaps because Dick’s gesture made Gar feel more secure in their relationship, he found himself unburdening some thoughts that had been nagging at him.

“Hey, uh, about the club,” he started. “Have you noticed how we don’t hang out at all? I mean it’s like we’re all in this club, but we’re not really… friends.”

Dick looked at him like he’d spoken in another language. “Well… we’re all so different, Gar. And this is high school.” Truth be told, Dick had too much on his mind right then to really absorb what Gar was talking about.

“So you think we’ll never be friends?” Gar asked point black, and it was the closest he’d ever come to asking Dick, specifically, if he saw him as a friend now.

Dick didn’t look up from working his locker combination. “Frankly, I don’t think we stand much of a chance.”

“…Okay, well… see you around.”

After Gar walked away, a girl immediately occupied the space next to Dick’s locker.

“Hey, Grayson. What’s up with your weird club?”

“What about it?” he returned.

“Well, what do you actually do? ‘Cause the weird girl told me it was a preparing the leaders of tomorrow kind of thing, but my friend heard you were like training to overthrow the hall monitors?”

This girl treated him like she knew him from before. Dick didn’t remember half the people he’d gone to middle school with, but he had to assume this girl was one of them.

“Well, there you go,” he said.

“What?” she replied. “Which one?”

“Both. Look, it makes sense when you’re in it,” Dick said. “And hey, thanks for the interest.” He put a hand on the girl’s shoulder, ignoring her frowning at him, and bolted. He couldn’t think of an explanation for her. He didn’t have the context of what she’d heard. Besides, she’d said ‘weird girl’, and Dick never knew if that meant Kori or Raven.

This was the thing that had been on his mind. Gar’s worries were a blip in Dick’s radar compared to the phenomenon he was seeing.

This week alone he’d had people come up to him to tell him several theories as to what their club was. The hall monitors thing was the weirdest take he’d heard so far, but not the only adventurous one.

He’d also heard people say the club was obviously an art club—as in art projects. He’d heard the name was so vague because it secretly offered therapy to students. Chris Folinsky, an overweight freshman boy with stringy ginger hair, had cornered Dick and insisted that he knew that club was about them trying to contact the Team Titans. It had even gotten back to him that some people thought they did dancing in there. At least he knew who to blame for that one: Gar said he’d panicked.

He knew his fellow club members were out giving different answers to people. He’d found out pretty early on that every single one of those kids were wild cards, and he’d sat back and let it be. He thought uncontrolled chaos was the best way to mislead people.

But before, he and Gar would give stupid eluding answers, and people would leave them alone. Now, people were left staring at him, trying to devise something behind his words. What was going on? Why did people suddenly care?

He stopped before he got to the clubroom and observed. From this vantage point, he watched Gar go into the clubroom first. He saw Kori follow Raven in, holding a unilateral conversation. Then Victor arrived, early for once. And Dick saw things clearly.

Because, he answered himself, it’s not just you and Gar anymore. It’s you and Gar and the former jock star, and the mysterious exchange student, and a suspected cult-belonging witch delinquent. The lineup is weird. People want to know how that happened.

With that worked out, he joined the others in the clubroom. Then he couldn’t think anymore, because he walked straight into chaos.

“This is not a request!” Victor was shouting. “I need to charge, and I need both the sockets!”

“I get that!” returned Gar, matching his tone. “But there’s better ways to go about it! You storm in here, unplug my game, unplug Kori’s stove-”

“I can wait for my glorg,” Kori said, trying for peace.

“That’s not the point!” Gar told her.

Raven was moved to intervene from her window seat. “Just do one thing and then do the other. It’s not that hard.”

“Oh, look! She talks!” Victor retorted.

That was enough to make Raven regret intervening; she rolled her eyes and returned to her book.

Dick closed the door behind him. “Whoa, whoa, what’s going on here?”

“Victor walked in and unplugged everything to plug his arms on the wall!” Gar accused.

“Oh, I’m sorry if I put a damp on everything with my prosthetics,” Victor stated, his voice turned bitter.

Gar winced. “Oh, come on, that’s not…”

“Can we not bring an extender?” Dick cut him off. “Why is this even a problem? Come on, shake hands, and stop yelling.”

Gar just turned his back on Victor. Victor made no move to shake hands either.

Dick ignored them ignoring him. He had more important things to think of. “Listen, who here said the club was for overthrowing the hall monitors?”

Gar snickered, so Dick looked at him. “Hey, it wasn’t me,” said Gar.

“No, it was me,” Victor admitted, smirking. “You should’ve seen their faces.”

“Remember what we agreed,” Dick told him. “Whatever explanation you give for this club has to be boring.”

“Aw, I couldn’t resist. Lighten up, man.”

“Well, you’re playing with the club’s livelihood,” Dick returned. “Does everyone like having a place to hang out? To play video games, cook, and read, and chill?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “Then stick to the rules.”

“Spoilsport,” Victor said under his breath.

Dick pretended he hadn’t heard that. He took his seat and pulled on his headphones, leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. If another fight started, he wouldn’t have to know.

He had peace for a while longer, until Gar pulled on one of his headphones.

“What?” snapped Dick, taking them off fully.

“Someone’s knocking at the door.”

Dick looked at the door. “Well… I don’t know, answer.”

“Me?” asked Gar.

“Yeah. You’re… vice-president or something.”

“Okay, cool.” Gar jumped to answer the door.

“He’s VP?” asked Victor. “Who’s treasurer?”

Dick looked around. “Raven.”

Raven looked up, having only heard the part where he said her name.

“Wanna be treasurer?”

“What do I have to do?” she asked.

“Nothing. We don’t have money.”

“Then yes.”

“What am I?” asked Victor.

“Nothing. You came fourth, you get nothing.” Dick was smirking.

Victor actually looked upset. “That’s not how it works.”

“It’s how it works here.”

“You skipped secretary,” said Victor. “You don’t even know how to…-”

Gar came back into the room. “Okay. Problem. There’s a girl here asking us to help her find some lost exams.”

“What? Why?” reacted Dick.

“Apparently she thinks that’s what we do? Like, that’s our projects in the Project Club?”

Dick decided to go deal with it himself.

The girl outside the door was small, with painstakingly straightened black hair. She was pouting slightly.

“Hi,” he greeted her. “I’m sorry for the wait. What was it you needed and what exactly have you heard about us?”

Moments later, Dick was back inside the clubroom.

“Who here said the P in Project stood for Patrol and that we’re a Titans knockoff group that keeps the halls safe?” Silence answered him. “Okay, then someone’s making rumors for us now.”

The four club members were paying a previously unseen amount of attention. Gar had put down the game on his phone and Kori had saved her magazine. Raven was looking up.

“The P in… It’s not even an acronym,” breathed Gar. “What’re we gonna do?”

“Tell her to go away,” said Victor. “We’re not errand boys.”

“I have another idea,” said Dick. Maybe he’d had that idea all the while he was talking with the girl. It took him until he was facing the others to realize it. “We have to take the job.”

“We what?” went Victor. “Have to?”

“Okay, look,” Dick started. “This club is standing on shaky ground. No one knows what we do, and people are asking questions. How long till teachers start asking too?”

“But I thought we were hiding what the club is,” said Gar.

“That isn’t working anymore. And, I mean, there’s worse things we could do than this. Think about it. It’s a… an advice and help club.” Dick looked at them one by one. All four still looked unconvinced. “Guys, this situation?” He pointed at the door. “This is a one-off. Who the hell else would come to us for help?”

“But letting people think we would might stop the rumors,” Victor sighed, sounding resigned.

“Exactly,” said Dick, who had previously thought Victor would be the hardest to turn. “The one thing we all have in common is we want this club to keep existing. I think this is what it takes.” He was relieved to see the four look more convinced now. “Everyone agrees? Okay, we’re doing this.”

Dick opened the door.

“Sorry for the delay, you’re our first, uh, client.”

The girl stopped at the word ‘client’. “Wait, you guys charge?”

“Uh…” Dick thought about it. “No. No, of course not. Please, sit down. Your name?” Dick was glad he’d brought in an extra chair back when Kori joined them, in case a sixth contingency waltzed in. He motioned for the girl to sit down and moved to the other side of the table. Kori, Gar and Victor flocked around him, drawing chairs with them.

“Clara,” she replied. “Thank you guys for doing this.”

“Of course,” said Dick. “That’s why we have a club. Otherwise we’d just be in other clubs. Or at home, without a reading spot next to a window,” Dick said, progressively turning to look at Raven.

Raven returned the glare he was giving her.

Then she closed her book with a snap, left it on the window sill, and drew her chair to join the rest of the group.

“Okay, Clara,” Dick said. “Now tell us your problem. Start from the beginning.”

“So my dad is an SAT officiator,” she began. “He had the graded tests here at school in a desk in an empty classroom. Well, someone went and stole them.”

“I heard the date to get scores back was postponed,” said Victor. “That’s what happened?”

“He was supposed to keep them safe. He’s the one who’s gonna get in trouble if the tests don’t show up. Can you help?”

Dick was aware that everyone was awaiting his lead. “I don’t see how…”

“I know who took them,” said Clara. “This guy is selling them. They’re gonna make the exchange today at five. If you go to Lincoln Road 4011, you’ll see it happening.”

Dick nodded at her. “We’ll do what we can,” he said.

Clara looked heartened as Dick led her to the door. Dick was floored as to how well the pantomime had gone. Everyone had kept up the charade. If he didn’t know better, he himself might have been fooled.

“Okay, first things first. We need to organize,” said Dick. He took a piece of paper and began scribbling a double-entry table including all their names. “I want you guys to write down your contact info so we’re all in touch.”

A part of himself wondered what on earth he was doing. Most likely he was just trying to regain some sense of control over things.

The form was passed around. When it got back to him, he saw gaps in Raven’s part. “Raven, you didn’t write down your phone number.”

“I don’t have a phone,” she replied.

Dick gave her a look.

“I really don’t,” insisted Raven.

“Okay, your house’s landline then.”

Raven said, “I’m not allowed to give it out.”

Silence took over. During that silence, all of them remembered the rumors perpetually surrounding her. They were mostly ridiculous, but Raven’s odd remark had just fed them, and Dick frankly didn’t want to dig too deep.

“Okay, but no email?” he asked.

“No.”

“No social media at all?”

She sighed. “My house doesn’t have an internet connection.”

“Are you serious?” Gar piped up. “You don’t have a computer? Wait, how do you do homework?”

“Before the internet, Gar, there was a thing called books,” said Raven.

“I know,” he replied, peeved. “But doesn’t that take you forever?”

“Okay, never mind,” muttered Dick, since Raven looked pissed off and Gar wasn’t taking a hint. “We don’t… need to be in contact, I guess. Let’s just go.”

The Project Club took a bus and then walked five blocks to get to the address. Dick went a little ahead, checked the door number was correct, and returned to the others. “Well, this is the place.”

“So, now what? Do we stay out here and wait?” asked Raven.

Dick looked at the bunch of them. Gar was currently wearing a tie-dye shirt, baggy jeans and a green and red cap. Even if Kori hadn’t been wearing a bright pink skirt and a yellow top, her furiously red cloud of hair made it hard for her to go unseen. Victor was just a huge guy—tall and wide; even though he always wore his hood pulled up when he was outside and you couldn’t see most of the prosthetics, he was still noticeable. Raven, contrary to what one may think, was not dressed for camouflage despite being forever in dark clothes: she was a solid black smudge in a suburban background that was rather grey. And the contrast created between the five of them wasn’t helping, either.

Dick didn’t think he could put together a more conspicuous group for spying if he tried.

“Let’s go watch from the other street,” he said.

Across the street there was a park. They settled behind some bushes and waited. And waited. Enough time passed that all of them grew self-conscious. They felt too much like children playing spies to properly pretend they were teenagers loitering, as they should have been.

Finally Victor sighed. “This is dumb. What are we even doing here?” He sounded annoyed he even had to whisper. “I bet that girl was playing a prank on us.”

“What if she wasn’t?” asked Dick, patiently. He’d been ready for dissent.

“Don’t use that tone with me, man.”

Gar intervened. “Hey, Dick’s right, we should do all we can to keep the club going.”

“We really don’t,” said Raven. “If the club’s meant to fall apart, it will.”

“I think,” said Kori, “even if we did not have the objective, the day is nice to be outside and just… do the hanging out, correct?”

“If you wanna leave,” Dick said to Raven and Victor, “just leave. You’re good at that anyway, Victor.”

“Fine! I-”

Kori interrupted them. “Dick, Victor, look.”

A car had stopped in front of the house. The five shushed, and watched with a degree of impatience, fully expecting a disappointment.

A teenage boy with brown skin and cropped blonde hair got out of the car. The door was answered by a hulking man with an ashen face and spiky grey hair. Across the street, the five watched with growing interest. The man let the boy in and closed the door without a single word exchanged between them.

“That… could have been a number of things,” said Victor.

Dick slowly nodded. “Yeah… it could.” He should have brought his binoculars.

Victor only noticed Dick had climbed up the tree next to them when his voice suddenly came from above. “I can see better up here,” he explained. He followed the movement of the two inside the house. “There’s the tests!”

“What? You sure?” Gar said, choking on his excitement.

“They just passed by that window with the blue curtain carrying a bunch of papers!”

The five of them focused on that window. When the papers were left on a table by the window, they all could see it.

Victor cried, “That window’s open, let’s get go grab them!”

“Wait,” said Dick, jumping down in front of Victor and putting a hand on his chest.

“What’s your problem?”

“We can’t just break and enter a house,” said Dick.

“They won’t catch us if we move now,” Vic argued.

“I said no. No way.”

Across the street, the door opened again. The boy was carrying the papers and put them in his car.

“Look, you made us miss our chance,” Vic accused.

Dick didn’t hear Victor continue to disparage. He was busy watching how the boy turned around to keep talking to the man—and didn’t lock his car again.

Dick didn’t hesitate. He skulked across the street and came to squat next to the car. The others watched breathlessly. Vic jumped out of hiding. He crossed the street drawing a wide circle, walked up to the men from the sidewalk and caught their attention. “Hi! Excuse me! I’m looking for Park Ave, where is that?”

Meanwhile, Dick opened the car door soundlessly, slipped a hand in the backseat, grabbed the papers, and inched the door closed, which meant it didn’t lock. When he got into his car, the boy would notice the back door was open, and then he’d notice the papers weren’t there; by then Dick would have to be gone. He dashed back across the street.

Once he got to the mini-park, Raven took the papers from him and hid them under her jacket, as she was the only one of them wearing a second layer.

“Run,” Dick hissed to the three of them. “Run, run, run.”

They went through the park to the next street’s bus stop and tried to look like normal kids who weren’t hyperventilating. Raven put her hood up. Victor rounded up the corner from the opposite way, having pretended to follow the directions the men had given him.

“So? You got them?” he asked.

Getting told yes, he sat next to them and no one said another word.

Only once they got on the bus Raven took out the papers to look at them. “It’s definitely the SAT’s,” she whispered to the others.

“Why would an adult sell the tests?” wondered Kori, sitting next to her. “Is it that much the need of money?”

“Yeah, I thought we’d find a kid,” said Gar, sitting in front of the girls next to Vic.

“It’s people trying to get an edge however they can by playing the system,” said Dick, wisely, standing next to where the girls were sitting.

“He probably tried to sell them to kids from other schools,” said Vic. “And almost made an entire batch of kids to retake their SATs in the process.”

“Dude, let’s photocopy them, right?” said Gar, looking at Raven through the gap between the seats. “You know, for future reference.”

Raven gave him a disapproving look and put the papers back in her jacket.

“We’re giving them back,” ruled Dick. “And then mission’s over.”

He chuckled despite himself. This had been fun.

Chapter Text

They met Clara outside of school at the end of the day and handed over the tests.

“Thank you so much,” she gushed. “You saved my dad.”

“Don’t mention it,” Dick smiled. “Seriously. Don’t tell your friends about any of this.”

“Gotcha,” she replied, winking.

As she walked away, Dick glanced at Victor. “Uh, good job back there, man. If you hadn’t distracted those guys, they might’ve caught me.”

The other three perked up, picturing a ceasefire between the two belligerent boys.

But Victor scowled at Dick. “Good job? Who’d you think you are, my coach? Who made you leader anyway?”

Dick frowned. “I’m just saying.”

“If you hadn’t kept us from taking the papers out the window, we could’ve gotten them with less risk.”

“It was the right thing to do,” Dick argued. “And if you don’t like me making decisions, don’t look to me to make them.”

“You’re the only one who looks to you for decisions!”

“Okay, what’s your problem with me?” Dick snapped. “Is it because I’m younger than you, or is your head really that big from being good at throwing a ball around once upon a time?”

They thought Victor’s head would explode. “You!” he boomed. “You think you’re so smart because you made a fake club! You think you’re pulling a fast one over everyone!”

“A club you’re taking advantage of! Don’t stay if you’re gonna criticize it!”

“Fine! Then I quit!” shouted Victor, and he stalked away.

“Good, let him go,” he heard Dick say, and it made Victor walk faster.

It was just as well. Now he was free of those losers.

He crossed the school, taking a route he knew well. He started to smile as soon as he caught sight of the football field. Sure enough, his friends were still at practice. The familiar sounds and cries greeted him as he neared the field.

Victor leaned on the netting fence as his friends gradually noticed him.

“Hey! It’s Vic! Hey, man!”

Jerry, Zach and Seth came to the fence.

“Wanna throw the ball around?” Zach asked. “Practice’s almost over.”

“Actually, I had something more permanent in mind,” said Victor, smiling. “I’m gonna ask coach to let me back in the team.”

For something he’d been gearing up to say for a while and that gave him a great deal of excitement, his announcement didn’t cause the reaction he expected. His friends’ smiles fell, and they looked at each other doubtfully.

“I thought you couldn’t play anymore,” said Jerry.

Victor sputtered, “I mean, a few months ago, yeah, when I was still getting used to the… implants, but…” he looked at his friends’ faces. “I’m over that. I’ve got everything under control …Why’re you looking at me like that? I’m fine!”

Zach spoke up. “Vic, dude, we all remember when you smashed a desk trying to-”

“That was four months ago!” Victor cut him off.

“But they’re not just implants, are they?” asked Seth, who’d never been one to mince words. “You said your legs let you jump super high, right? You said your fake eye could see in the dark.”

“That has nothing to do with football,” said Victor.

“That can qualify as an unfair advantage by the rulebook,” Seth persisted, as the other two avoided Vic’s eyes. “That can make other schools say we’re cheating.”

Victor’s face darkened. “So I can’t control my body or I have an unfair advantage? Which one is it, man?”

“Vic, don’t get upset,” Jerry tried, but Seth muttered, “It’s really both.”

Coach Harris had made his way over. “What’s going on here?”

“Nothing,” answered Victor. “Forget about it.”

He let go of the fence and stalked off. The fact that his friends didn’t try to call him back –that they seemed relieved this was done and over with- hurt more than the entire confrontation had.

Victor walked back home in the dusk, feeling like he’d lost something important. He saw it now. Deep down, he’d been waiting for the day he could waltz back into his old life. Now he was laying that hope to rest.

He had more metal in his body than skin, he still couldn’t look in a mirror without wincing, and now he was all alone. Vic got a flash of himself eating alone the next day in lunch, like the freak he was. How had he fallen so far?

He should have died in that accident. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought it. He should have gone out in a blaze of glory. ‘Star player tragically killed in a car accident’ was a better headline than ‘Star player comes back as a cyborg freak no one wants around anymore, left to beg for the scraps of his old life’. Then at least he’d be remembered as a whole person—then at least all of this would be over.

He was self-aware enough to know this was his shallowness talking. If he felt he’d fallen in life, that was just his idea that he somehow deserved to be popular, so now he was being robbed of something. But no one was safe from tragedy turning their life upside down: he knew that now.

The new obvious, glaring truth was that he fit in more with that group of weirdoes from the Club than he did with his old friends.

With Gar, who was preternaturally obnoxious; Kori, so sweet and so awkward; and Raven who… well, Vic didn’t have any set opinions about Raven yet. Sometimes he forgot she was even there. And then there was Dick.

Vic’s face curdled at the pavement. That little shit. Victor remembered him as a gymnastics prodigy in elementary school. That kid could be doing anything with his life, and yet there he was, letting his gifts shrivel. He didn’t even know how good he had it: he still had the choice to waste them.

The announcement came in the middle of third period. The speakers came to life and Principal Blood’s voice said, “My students. As your principal it is my sad duty to announce that the SAT exams taken last Monday… have been lost. If they do not appear, the SATs will be scheduled to be retaken.”

Kori froze in her seat. Surely she’d understood it wrong. Surely he wasn’t saying what she thought he was saying. She turned in her seat to look at Dick, just to be sure, and she saw the same shocked expression on his face. Then he shook his head slightly at her, and Kori got the message. She turned around and pretended everything was normal.

This classroom was mostly freshmen, so no one despaired. But they heard the shouts and cries from other classes. That finally convinced Kori a catastrophe had happened.

After being let out of class, she asked Dick, “What happened? Do you think she had not returned the tests to her father? That they do not know yet? Or…”

“Or we’ve been tricked somehow,” finished Dick.

Next period was lunch, and it became the first time the five of them had lunch together.

“You guys heard that announcement?” asked Gar, sitting with Kori and Dick.

“Indeed we did,” said Kori.

Gar was startled when Raven set her tray and sat beside him. “What the hell happened?” she asked.

“We’ve been played is what happened,” said Victor, coming up behind her. “Clara tricked us.”

“But why?” asked Kori.

“Okay, here’s what we know,” started Dick. “The tests were stolen. We had them in our hands. We gave them to Clara, and she didn’t return them. …Who were those guys we stole them from?”

“That’s what we should’ve found out before we took the tests back,” said Vic. “We should’ve checked her story. Maybe her dad isn’t even an officiator! Damn it, how were we so dumb?”

“It’s useless to dwell on what we didn’t do,” said Raven. “For now, we need to find out who that girl’s father is, and who lived in that house.”

“Good idea,” said Dick.

Gar said, “Guys. Clara is sitting at the popular girls’ table now.”

The five looked over. Their first client was sitting beside Jade and Angel. Kitty, banished to the other side of the table, did not look happy.

“What are you thinking?” prompted Dick.

“Maybe she did this as a favor to for them,” said Gar. “I mean, she’s just a sophomore, right? What does she care about the SATs? But Jade is a senior.”

“This was her last chance to take the exam,” said Victor.

“You think she blew them?” Raven posed.

“And asked Clara to get them so she would have another opportunity?” Kori finished.

“We need to confront her,” Vic stated.

“No,” said Dick. “No one’s confronting her until we know more.”

“Here we go again,” Victor bristled. “Man, listen for once in your life!”

“Are you gonna fight every suggestion I make?” Dick challenged.

“Are you gonna keep giving orders like you’re the boss of us!?”

And the other three leaned back to get distance from their loud argument.

When the end of lunch was near and they hadn’t arrived to a conclusion, Dick said, “Let’s go to class. We’ll reconvene at the club this afternoon.”

And so came the first time everyone was early to the clubroom.

“Alright, so far we think Clara worked this with Jade and Angel,” said Dick as form of greeting.

“Should we not tell a school authority of all this?” asked Kori.

“That’s the last thing we should do,” said Dick. “We’re the ones who stole the tests. This could turn ugly for us pretty quickly.”

Raven raised her hand. “I’m team finding out as much as we can before we do anything else.”

“We should get a computer in here,” said Gar, looking around the clubroom.

Vic stood. “Let’s go to my house. It’s close by.”

A block away from Vic’s house, Raven asked them to stop.

“Let me call home quick,” she said.

“Do you wanna just use my phone?” offered Dick.

“No, I’m calling a landline,” Raven replied, never slowing down on her way down the street.

It took a while for Vic to realize she was walking towards a payphone. Before today, he’d had no idea there was a public payphone down his own block, and he’d lived in that house all his life. Funny the things you didn’t notice when you didn’t need them.

“Guess she wasn’t lying about not having a cell phone, huh?” Gar commented.

“Yeah, and it seems her parents don’t have one, either,” replied Vic.

Dick tried to picture Raven’s parents. He imagined formal, upright people. They were probably strict, if they didn’t let her have a phone and wanted her to call when she was a little late.

Once Raven returned, they went on to Victor’s house.

Vic’s house was a medium-sized detached house ten streets away from the school. From the outside it looked stylish and modern. Inside, it was sheer chaos. The house was an open-floor plan. There was the living room, a dining area and a kitchen along the furthest wall, and there was mess as far as the eye could see.

Old food containers and trash on the counters, chairs and a couch covered with clothes, books on the floor in front of teeming bookcases. They followed Vic without a word as he led them through a clean path to their left. It led to his bedroom, which was a perfect contrast: when he opened a window, they saw a perfectly clean and tidy room.

“Here’s the computer,” he said, cracking the laptop open over an ample desk. “Knock yourselves out. I’ll go get us some food.”

When he came back with snacks, Dick was sitting to his laptop. “We found Clara’s dad in LinkedIn and he’s a dentist,” he told Victor.

“Okay, so that’s fuel to the theory of her plotting with Jade,” said Vic, giving out bags of chips. “Now how do we find out who that was in the house where the tests were?”

“We could look through a phone book,” said Raven.

Gar looked at her in askance. “We don’t need a phone, Raven, we need an address.”

“Seriously?” she returned. “You’ve never opened at a phone book?”

“I don’t even know if we have one,” said Vic, standing up. “Let me check.”

He came back a while later with an old one he’d found at the bottom of the living room’s bookcase. “I don’t know what good it’ll do, though,” he said as he handed it to Raven. “I mean, are you gonna look through every name in town?”

“I just want to see it,” she said simply.

Vic shrugged and let her be. “The LinkedIn profile didn’t give out his address?”

“It didn’t,” said Dick.

Kori asked, “Have you searched the address where we went?”

Dick tried it. The first page of results yielded no results; the following ones didn’t either.

Then Raven said, “Guys, the house we went to is owned by a guy named Crock.” She had her finger on a line in the phone book.

“As in Jade Nguyen-Crock!?” reacted Gar.

Victor covered his face with his hands. “You’re telling me… that the guy we thought was selling the tests to some kid… was Jade’s dad?”

“Wait, that makes sense!” Dick jumped to his feet, needing space to accommodate the realization he was having. “That’s why those two were tense going into the house, but then they turned around and had a whole conversation by the car. They felt the tests were safe as soon as they were out of the house. Jade’s dad was trying to get them away from her.”

“I found him on Jade’s Instagram,” Gar announced, showing them the picture on his phone. “The guy we saw was definitely her dad.”

“Search him on LinkedIn,” instructed Kori.

“His name is Lawrence Crock,” supplied Raven.

Everyone waited in anticipation as Dick searched for him. “Found him,” he said. And then, “And he’s an STA officiator.”

Victor leaned back, floored. “So Jade was probably inside the house, and we were her living alibi that she wasn’t stealing the tests.”

“Holy shit, she’s an evil genius,” said Gar.

The five seemed to exhale a collective breath.

Then Dick clapped his hands. “Okay, we know what happened, now how do we get those tests back?”

“Oh, this keeps going?” went Vic. “I was kinda done with all of this.”

Dick glared at him. “We have to see this through.”

“We don’t really have to do anything,” Vic returned. “What I’m thinking is, we already got played. The damage is done. We should cut out losses and let it go.”

“How can you not want to fix this?” Dick asked him.

“Please do not fight again!” called Kori.

Dick minded her, and he and Vic both took a step back. Dick tried to make his tone civil. “We can’t let Jade get away with this. We’d be letting kids who studied hard have to retake their SATs, all because we’re too lazy to-”

“It’s not our problem!” Vic cut him off. “Why’re you making your own life hard?”

“We have a chance to do the right thing here. I just think we should take it.”

“You wanna go around solving people’s problems now? Who do you think we are, the Team Titans?”

Dick paused. Victor was telling him, You’re acting like a child playing at superheroes, so Dick was supposed to look admonished and back down. But when Vic said it like that, Dick realized something else.

“No. The Titans would never bother with this type of thing,” he said quietly. “That’s why it’s up to people like us. Look, there’s a million things in the world that we can’t change. But we have the chance to fix this one thing right now,” he shrugged, “and I just really think we should take it.”

Dick’s mouth had kind of kept going without his consent. He didn’t know where his words had come from. The four other kids looked at Dick as if they didn’t know how to react, which was appropriate, because Dick didn’t know what to make of his outburst either. He half expected them to burst out laughing.

Raven was the first to say, “I’m in.”

Everyone’s gaze turned to her. Her expression was serious, and as unreadable as ever. She wasn’t kidding.

“I agree,” said Kori, beaming. “I want to mend this as well.”

“Screw it, I’m down,” said Gar. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Victor looked at them. He’d never been one to go out of his way to resist peer pressure. “Fine. I guess I need to make sure you all don’t get yourselves expelled.” He turned to Dick. “How’re you gonna do this, wonder boy?”

“I have a plan,” he replied. “Follow me.”

They got to what they now knew to be Jade’s house to see Jade herself sitting on her porch, open books around her.

She smiled when she saw them arrive. “Oh look, it’s the Project Club.”

“Studying for the new exam date, Jade?” asked Victor.

“The tests going missing were a stroke of luck for a bunch of people,” she said sweetly, and stood. “Guess you figured everything out. Good for you. Bit late, though.”

Kori went forward. “We are not leaving until you give back the exams you arranged to steal.”

“You think I’d be so dumb as to keep them in the house?” Jade returned. Though watching Kori warily, she seemed emboldened by the fact that Dick was safely holding her back. “I gave them to Kitty. Good luck going past her house’s security. She has her dad wrapped around her finger,” she said, her tone getting a note of resentment towards the end. She threw her hair back. “Look, children, eat it. You got tricked. Get over it. Go home.”

Dick said, “What if we were to tell your dad, the SAT officiator, that you stole the tests?”

“Go ahead,” Jade retorted. “Dad already thinks I did it. He just has no proof against me, and neither do you.”

“Yeah, until now,” said Gar, taking out his phone. “Until you confessed to everything and we recorded it.”

Jade blanched. “We live in a two-party consent state,” she spluttered.

“What?” asked Dick.

“It means you’ll get in trouble for recording me without my knowledge!”

“Yeah, after you get in trouble for stealing SAT tests,” said Dick, rolling his eyes. “Keep up.”

“Come on, Jade. It’s over,” said Vic. “Return the tests by tomorrow or we give this recording to Blood. Simple.”

She only glared at them, like she refused to give them the satisfaction of hearing her agree. Dick shrugged and turned to walk away, the others following after.

They were almost out of her front lawn, when Jade suddenly jumped on Gar’s back with no warning. Gar yelped and tried to shake her off. Dick dove forward to get Gar’s phone, and at the same time Kori lunged and picked Jade clean off his back. She held Jade down on the ground by the shoulders, and instructed something potently threatening in another language. Meanwhile, Dick quickly uploaded Gar’s recording to the Cloud. Just in case.

They managed to walk off in peace after that. Kori looked positively upbeat after finally getting to trash Jade around. That worried Dick just a little bit.

The next day at school, the five were unable to think about anything else until the speakers came to life during first period, and Blood announced that the tests had been found and results were going to be announced in time. Only then did the five truly breathe, in each of their classrooms. Vic’s Algebra class clapped.

“Yeah, not the way I imagined Jade Nguyen-Crock jumping my bones,” Gar said over lunch. “But hey, I’ll take it!”

“Do you think people will someday know that we allowed the exams to be saved?” Kori asked the others.

“Probably not,” said Vic.

“I think Jade’s gonna make sure this whole thing gets buried,” said Dick.

“If we tried to tell someone it was us…” started Raven.

“They’d just think we were crazy,” finished Gar.

Dick smiled. “Good. Who here wants to be famous, right?”

They talked about their success with all the more gusto because Jade and Angel kept glaring daggers at them from their table. Clara was nowhere to be seen. Only Kitty looked cheerful.

“Look, I’ll admit it,” started Victor. “It was a good deed, and I’m not sorry we did it. Even though we didn’t have to.” He pointed a fork at Dick as he said this.

Dick smiled back as all response.

“…So was this a one-time thing?” Raven asked.

Gar wondered whether she was asking more than what was apparent. Not just about the Club, but about them as friends. Today they had come together for lunch naturally –even Victor had forsaken his football friends!-, and Gar almost dared to hope this would keep up. He didn’t want it to be a one-time thing, either.

“Well…” Dick trailed off. “I mean if people keep thinking the P stands for Patrol… and they keep coming to us for help… who are we to deny them?”

“The Club could really be what we told Clara it was,” said Kori, smiling.

“Still think it’s not our job,” muttered Vic.

Dick looked straight at Victor. “Are you doing something better with your time?”

Vic looked back at him. “Honestly, I’m not.”

“I know I’m not!” declared Gar. “I’m all in.” He made a show of raising his juice carton for a toast. “Here’s to our first mission!” No one bumped their drink against his, so Gar bumped his against Dick’s himself. “And to many more like it,” he declared, and then he drank.

Dick couldn’t help but smile back at him; Gar’s excitement was contagious.

Chapter Text

“Why’d you want us to go to a music contest?” Dick asked when Gar finally got off the table.

“Because, Dick,” Gar answered, “this contest happens to count with my amazing performance! For the first time in Jump City! One night only!”

“Gar, you sing?” asked Kori, delighted.

“I sure do, Kor!”

“Gar, this contest’s been open for a month. Why’s this the first time we hear about this?” asked Dick.

Gar’s smile waned. “Well, it was kind of a last minute decision.”

“Right,” went Dick, bracing himself. “I’m sure it’s gonna be great.”

“Save your compliments for after I blow your hats off.” Gar confidently put two flyers on Dick’s and Kori’s hands, and then looked past them, towards Raven sitting quietly by the window. Despite what Victor believed of his foolhardy tendencies, Gar always needed to work up his courage before going up to her. He was especially having trouble inviting her to an event he knew she wouldn’t want to go to.

The door opened to admit Victor. “Vic!” went Gar, and he climbed the table and drew a big breath. “Ladies and gentlemen! Boys and-”

“Don’t do the whole bit again,” complained Dick.

So Gar jumped off. “I’m in a music contest today in the Jump City Auditorium,” he told Vic, giving him his flyer. “I’m gonna be singing and playing guitar.”

“Since when do you play guitar?” reacted Victor.

Gar gasped in mock indignity. “I’ll have you know I’ve dabbled for years!”

“Oh, you dabbled. I’m sorry,” Victor quipped. He read through the flyer he’d been given. “You have your own song? This thing says it’s an original song contest.”

“’Course. Wrote it myself,” bragged Gar.

“And you have your own guitar?” Victor asked.

Here Gar hesitated. “I have my ways of getting hold of one,” he said airily.

“Yeah, like how?” challenged Dick.

Then Dick and Victor both were drilling him on his experience and commitment to music, and Kori was behind them probably asking them to make peace—Gar couldn’t hear her over the other two. He had to shout to make himself be heard.

“I’m very serious about it, guys! Right now, I’m leaving video games behind to go practice!”

“You already played three rounds-” Dick started.

“Goodbye!” said Gar, and he was gone.

The club settled down into a calmer space once Gar was gone. Dick assured Kori they had only been teasing Gar in a friendly way, that Gar was in on it, as Vic started up a match on the console.

“You guys are going to Gar’s thing, right?” Dick asked.

“Yeah, can’t let the green bean down,” said Vic.

“I will go too,” Kori confirmed.

Dick was putting his coat on. “Good, ‘cause I can’t go. My uncle asked me to join him at this charity thing. Tell Gar I said hi.”

“Sure,” Vic waved him off, and simply started a match against the computer instead.

“Please, why do you call Gar a green bean?” asked Kori.

“Oh,” went Vic. “It’s a personal story… I’m sure Gar wouldn’t want me to tell you.”

“Alright,” said Kori, and leaned back to watch Vic play.

“But I’ll tell you anyway! Okay, so back when Gar was eight or nine, he went to summer camp, okay? So one day this other kid dares him to eat all the cans of green beans in the deposit…”

The story ended with green-tinted bodily waste, an incident Vic had decided never to let Gar forget ever since he’d made the mistake of sharing it. Raven stopped listening by that point and let herself focus on her book.

By the time she became aware of her surroundings again, Victor had slipped out of the room, and Kori was on the phone. Raven had only tuned in because Kori sounded distraught.

“…alright. Yes, thanks.” Kori hung up and turned to Raven. “Oh, Raven. I just had a call from my apartment lord. A plumbing pipe broke in my floor above. I will not be able to go to Gar’s concert.”

“Mhm,” acknowledged Raven.

“I need to go home. And I need to google what is a plumbing pipe,” Kori said to herself, as she too left the clubroom.

Seeing as she was left alone, Raven packed up her things to leave. On the way out, she ran into Vic, who was coming back in.

“You’re leaving?” he asked. “Hey, are you going to Gar’s thing?”

“What is Gar’s thing?” Raven asked, reluctantly. She hadn’t quite gotten the gist of it half-listening to the four of them.

He cocked his head at her. “He has a song contest thing in the Jump City Auditorium. Surprised he didn’t tell you.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want me to come,” she said.

Victor snickered. “Yeah, right. Nah, I’m sure he just forgot.”

Raven waited until Vic got his bag from the clubroom and they left together.

“But you should come,” he said.

She knew they both knew what he was doing. He would gently push her to go, without really expecting she would—they both knew she didn’t want to.

So she replied, “I’ll check my schedule.”

Victor’s easy smile vanished. “Wait… Oh, shoot. I can’t go. I’ve got a check-up today. Well, guess Kori’s gonna have to represent us all.”

“Right,” went Raven, before she snapped out of it. “Wait, but Kori said…-”

“It’s okay, Kori will go,” Vic said, quickly walking away in a sudden rush.

Raven watched him disappear down the hallway. As she was left alone, she became aware this had just turned into a pivotal moment. This was her first choice of whether to reach out, or draw back.

She could ignore what she’d heard, go home and play it safe; she would hear Gar demand the next day why none of his so-called friends had shown up to his thing, hear the others explain the misunderstanding, and shrug at her part in it. Or she could take a risk and do a solid for a budding friend, putting herself out there like she’d historically never done before.

Honestly, she was leaning towards the former. …Gar hadn’t even invited her in the first place.

The prospect of putting herself out there was harrowing. She was picturing getting back to her warm, familiar home with uncharacteristic enthusiasm.

But wasn’t this –this rush of social nervousness, this renewal and change- exactly what she’d wanted? When she’d followed the inkling that drew her to the clubroom, wasn’t that what she’d had in mind?

She’d just been so bored that day. She’d been sick of going home every day, to be surrounded by the holier-than-thou adults she’d always felt so out of place with. She wanted to be with people her age, even if it was just existing in a room while they interacted with each other. It was better than being home and being told all her feelings were wrong. She preferred being with kids her age and seeing how unapologetically out of control they were. It made her feel more normal.

And she enjoyed her time in the Club –she must, there had to be a reason she kept coming back-, but day after day, she sat on her corner reading as things happened around her. She only read and heard the background noise of scattered conversations, the sounds of the console, the low bass that escaped from Dick’s headphones, and the hum of cooking equipment, until it was time to go home.

Somewhere, a shift had occurred. From a point in time, the other four had started acting more like friends. One day, Victor had suddenly stopped talking to his old friends. She didn’t know what had happened, but she knew when: it was marked by the first day she’d seen him without his letterman jacket. She didn’t know if the others had noticed it then.

Now Vic and Gar were acting like they’d been friends forever. Dick and Victor had seemed to get on a truce one day that had lasted until forever; they hadn’t fought in weeks. Kori had always been sweet; now she’d just found readier soil for her friendship.

At some point, everyone had moved forward… except her. Raven was still on step one.

If she went to Gar’s contest, that was a way to give another step out of her comfort zone. She just didn’t know if she wanted to take it.

The Jump City Auditorium was dark when Raven walked in. Her first impression of the venue was that it had been built a century ago and left to fend for itself since then. She also thought she might be the youngest person here. Everywhere she looked she saw college to middle-aged people. Her all black clothes and dark makeup stood out as unsuitably teenage in a sea of more toned-down attire—from the tired new adults in hoodies to the older people in business casual.

She found a seat. As the seats at either side of her filled, she felt more and more trapped. No going back now. She couldn’t begin to fathom Gar’s reaction when he saw none of the friends he’d invited and only her in the audience. Sticking out like a sore thumb.

He’d certainly be confused. Maybe even disappointed. Could she play it like she secretly loved music? No, that was dumb. She wished she could skip to after the show, when she could explain to Gar why she was here.

…It was a weird sensation for her to want to talk to Gar at all.

The theater darkened, and the host called all contestants to stand on stage.

Apart from Gar, and two other individual performers, the other contestants were all bands. Gar held a worn-down acoustic guitar—so he’d managed to get one, at least. It seemed to Raven that every other instrument on stage was much shinier.

Then Gar finally saw her. His face showed an initial confusion, and then it beamed in a joy-filled way that it made Raven feel relieved as well.

She breathed, and even considered enjoying the show. She wasn’t in such a rush to explain anymore.

Admittedly, Raven didn’t know music—but she was pretty sure no music history was made that afternoon. There were acts she could tolerate and acts she couldn’t, and none of them made a lasting impression on her. Her only note was that this contest must contain every last white boy with dreadlocks in the city.

When it was Gar’s turn, she braced herself. She thought she’d heard it all, but there was the possibility that his go would be even worse.

The last band finished removing all their equipment, and out came Gar; just him and his acoustic guitar. He grabbed the microphone, announced the song was called ‘Lessons’, and began strumming the guitar. Raven thought he looked as comfortable on stage as out of it.

When he started singing, Raven found herself pleasantly surprised. …She hadn’t even considered the possibility that he’d be good. He sung like he didn’t care whether he won, which was a good look on him. Every other song was about love or loss of love. Gar sung about his thought process being on detention on a sunny day, where he could see people outside having fun through the window. She especially enjoyed the lines, ‘Now the teacher fell asleep / could I make a break for it? / Running out for me would be the last choice / Classroom’s on the third floor / And the door is locked / Should have come to school with a saw’.

Perhaps it was only because he was her friend, but she enjoyed his turn. For the second time today, she was immensely relieved.

“Dick had to go to a charity function with his uncle,” Raven finally explained an hour later. “Kori got a call from her landlord about a burst pipe, and Victor forgot he had a checkup.”

“And no one knew about the others?” asked Gar.

They were sitting on the low stone fence outside the venue. The sun was on its last rays, but it wasn’t too cold because the wall behind them shielded them from the worst wind, and the chilliness was a welcome change from the dark and smoke-filled venue anyhow.

Raven nodded. “No one knew the others couldn’t make it, so I just came myself.”

Gar lost the smile he’d been wearing. “Wait, so, you came out of pity?”

“Well, you never actually invited me, so,” she pointed out.

“Yeah…” Gar rubbed the back of his head. “I guess I didn’t think you’d wanna come.”

“I probably wouldn’t have,” she said lightly. “I came out of pity, remember?”

Gar looked a bit stunned, and then realized she was actually teasing him—she was making a joke in her no-nonsense tone and serious face. He laughed in appreciation, and she looked away, pretending she didn’t have a sense of humor.

“So, how was I?” he asked her.

She turned back to him. Gar thought that when Raven looked at you, it felt like a shock of cold. Sometimes it was freezing, and it made you step back. Other times, like now, it was just cooling. She was a sobering presence; everything slowed down and cooled under her gaze.

“You’re actually not bad,” she told him. “I was relieved to find out I wouldn’t have to lie to you about that.”

“Really?” he asked, swinging his legs off the side of the wall.

“Your song had a nice melody. And original, if not metrically adequate lyrics.”

“You mind going back in there telling that to the judges?” he asked, waving his Twelfth Place ribbon.

“The other contestants had expensive equipment and amplifiers. You never stood a chance. There was also a share of nepotism. I saw the host greet the first-place winners like they knew each other from before.”

And because she had said it, and she was Raven, he believed it, and he had a much higher view of his music from that day on. The things she said became the things he’d forever think about his music. Not that bad. Original, not metrically adequate lyrics. And economically disadvantaged.

He gave her a wide grin. “Thanks, Raven.” He hesitated for the next thing he wanted to ask her—but he’d already been wrong not to ask her something once that day, so he went for it. “Hey, uh, you wanna grab something to eat?”

Raven looked at him, and she thought she could tell what he was thinking. If only for that, she replied, “Sure.”

She was hungry anyhow.

He jumped from the fence and hooked the ribbon on his jacket, where it sat huge and ridiculous looking.

“You’re not gonna wear it like that, are you?” asked Raven.

He turned with an indignant expression. “Of course I will. I won it fair and square.” And he turned and strode along the street, not looking to see if she was following, walking with his arms and legs spread out as if to embarrass her more.

Raven shook her head, beginning to regret all the reaching out she had done today. Was it too late to go back into her comfort zone?

Chapter Text

The study session was interrupted by a booming sound, the last and the loudest in a series of them.

“Does that sound like supervillains to you guys?” asked Gar.

Kori, closest to Victor’s bedroom window, cranked it open and looked outside. “I cannot see anything.”

“Sounds like it came from north of here,” said Dick.

Vic turned on his TV. The local news channel told him that, effectively, Black Glove had escaped from prison and was causing havoc downtown. The Titans were already on it. The noises had been the supervillain’s brand new sonic gun; the live feed’s lag was only a couple of seconds compared to what they were hearing.

“That’s really close,” said Vic. “You think they’re gonna tell us to evacuate?”

“Maybe the Titans will get it first,” said Gar, and lounged back on Vic’s bed. “Hey, you ever wonder what if we were superheroes? What our powers would be?” he asked wistfully, staring at the ceiling.

“Gar. You have a Biology test tomorrow,” said Raven.

“Relax, I know enough for a B.”

“I’m absolutely sure you don’t,” she replied.

“Okay, Vic would be the Lux Piper,” started Gar. “Like, the computer whiz who can work any tech.”

“How’d you figure that?” replied Victor, in a dark tone.

“Kori,” Gar went on, “I see you flying and hitting people with the elements, like Lodestar.”

Kori was the only one engaging with Gar, listening to his daydreaming with a sweet smile. “That sounds marvelous,” she replied.

“Raven. I see you like, making illusions like Chameleon, you know? Like enchanting and cheating people.”

“So I’m a witch,” she surmised. “That’s creative.”

Gar turned to Dick, but Dick beat him to it. “Gar, your power would be amazing distraction, keeping the rest of us from getting any work done.”

Gar frowned at him. “Okay, you know what? You’d have no powers. None at all. You get left out of everything. And you feel terrible about it.”

Dick seemed strangely ticked off. “That would never happen,” he said. “If anything I’d be Kismet. She mainly fights physically. Her powers are an extra.”

“She’s so good at fighting because she has the precognition,” Raven argued.

Before Dick could protest, another explosion went off.

“What’s the point of studying now if they’re probably gonna tell us to evacuate in a sec?” Gar posed.

As if on cue, Vic’s phone buzzed. “Yep, that’s the notification,” he informed the others. “They’re telling us to get out of here.”

The five picked up their backpacks and coats. Victor pulled out his emergency bag from his closet, put his laptop inside, and took it as well as his school bag.

“What would be your powers, Gar?” Kori asked as they left the room.

Gar shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Vic could tell without looking at him that he was waiting for someone else to ascribe powers to him, like he’d done for everyone else.

Kori was the one to humor him. “Well, you love animals. Perhaps you would turn into animals!”

“Hm.” Gar assumed a thinking poise, but he was obviously satisfied. “That’s cool, I guess.”

The fight sounded louder outside. Gar peered north of Vic’s house and caught a glimpse of Paragon being slammed against a building. He smiled when the hero took back to the skies via an ice bridge.

Was it arrogant to say he felt a kinship to the Titans now? Like the five of them were now part of something bigger than themselves—a web of people doing good things for other people? Okay, so maybe they had put the idea of using the Club to help people on hold until midterms were over. And yes, when they had agreed to meet up today it was officially just to study, like none of them wanted to admit they were friends yet. Gar liked to think there was more to it, though. He liked to think they’d make something out of this—both the Club and each other. He let himself imagine things would be a smooth ride from here on out.

Vic called out to him. “Gar, come on. You’re not getting out of studying so easily.”

“Let’s go to mine,” Gar said, running after his friends.

They all liked going to Gar’s house because it was so normal. It was a two-story, orderly place with a mom who offered them snacks; the weirdness of Steve also being a teacher was outset by the fact that he was so normal in his own house—strict in a TV dad way.

Rita came out with cookies in a bowl just now. She was a slender, remarkably young-looking woman, with flushed cheeks and soft brown hair that curled outwards at her shoulders in an almost sixties’ style. Gar had told the others she’d been an Olympic swimmer, and had tried her hand at acting when she was younger, and they could see why; she was a charismatic and agreeable presence. She was now a swimming coach.

“I’m just glad my dad was at work for the evacuation,” said Vic, munching on the cookies. “If he’d been cooped up in his home lab, it would’ve been hell trying to make him leave.”

“Is your dad the okay?” Kori asked cautiously.

“You mean ‘cause the house is such a mess?” asked Vic.

Kori covered her mouth delicately. “I… I mean…-”

Vic responded quickly, because he hadn’t meant to put her on the spot. “He feels guilty.” Vic looked like he was gearing up to say more. The others stayed silent to give him a chance to. “He didn’t ask if he could do this to me,” he said, raising his bionic arms. “I mean, I was in no position to sign a form or something, but… So he feels guilty about it, so he’d rather not see me. So he’s never home. And we used to hire a cleaning service, but he doesn’t like people to come if he’s not home. And whenever he is home, he’s not great at cleaning up after himself. I mean, I keep my own space clean. I’m not gonna clean up his mess.” He dusted cookie crumbs off his hands and spoke louder, “The bright side is he tries to buy my love now! That’s how I got my Mac.” He patted his computer affectionately.

The others chuckled, accepting his attempt to lighten the mood after spilling out his guts like that.

After the cookie break, Vic passed his History guide around the group for them to take pictures of.

“Here’s the class summary. Uh, I guess you can keep it, Raven, seeing as you don’t have a phone,” he said as an afterthought.

“Thanks,” she muttered.

Steve Dayton passed through the living room in that moment and saw them taking pictures of the papers.

“I trust you’re not copying homework,” he said, coupling a warning tone with an affable smile. “I’d have to turn you in if you were.”

“No, coach,” said Victor, turning on his adult-charmer voice. “It’s a class summary.”

“Is that one of Mod’s summaries of his history lessons?” Steve asked, peering over Victor’s shoulder. He was a burly, broad-shouldered man, with a strong jawline and brown hair graying at the temples. His small blue eyes were always watchful, and he tended to stare accusatorily in general, as if just in case someone needed to confess to any wrongdoing.

“Yeah,” said Vic. “He gave them out to us last year, but he didn’t give it to the freshman class this year. That’s why I’m sharing it with the group.”

“Well, Mod’s the most inconsistent man I’ve ever met,” Steve said. “Doesn’t follow lesson plans, never takes roll call… It’s because he didn’t want to be a teacher in the first place, you know? He wanted to be a fashion designer.”

“What? Really?” Dick asked, four out of the five turning to Steve in interest.

“He went to fashion school,” Steve continued. “I hear he had a shop for a while. It closed because he didn’t get any customers.” Considering he’d ingratiated himself sufficiently with the kids, he turned stern again. “No word of this at school,” he warned, and left the room.

Gar rolled his eyes when he was gone. “He doesn’t actually like you, you know. He just wants you to like him.”

But his friends just said they had to be nice to teachers either way.

“Let’s just move up to my room,” Gar replied.

The first reaction to Gar’s room was always ‘Wow, you must really like green’, because that was the nicest thing to focus on after the first real thing you noticed, which was the fact that it was a mess.

Because once you got past the clothes littering every inch of the floor, the half-open drawers and the crazy tokens everywhere –it didn’t even seem like the mess had ever been created; it seemed like it had been there always, eternal, inescapable, weaved to the fabric of the universe-, you were bound to notice the fact that the walls, the bed sheets, the drawer tops, and most of the ornaments were all shades of green. A few movie posters decorating the walls were the only respite in the otherwise monochromatic room.

As the last one to enter, Raven closed the door behind her, and Gar went back and opened it halfway, because that was the rule when he had people over. He opened the window, pulled out a bird feeder with suction cups from under his bed, filled it, and stuck it outside the window.

Then he began to tell his friends about all the animals he fed. “There’s the big white dog, and the brown Shepherd, and the Collie with mismatched eyes. And recently, there’s been a horse that comes from-”

“A horse?” interjected Raven.

“Yeah, a horse,” confirmed Gar, “She comes from one of the farms up north and lets me pet her. There’s a family of four squirrels –I’m pretty sure they’re always the same squirrels-, and then there’s all the birds…” he paused. “I mean, I don’t keep track of all the birds. That would be insane.”

“And Steve has no clue why all those animals are constantly surrounding his house?” asked Dick.

“None at all,” said Gar, grinning wide.

“You’re a Disney princess,” said Dick.

Kori giggled in delight. “Oh, what a lovely comparison!”

“I bet Rita and Steve love you for this,” laughed Vic.

They had caught on by now that Gar had a thing with terminology around Rita and Steve. For some reason, he called Rita ‘Rita’ to her face, and ‘mom’ when she wasn’t there. Steve was just ‘Steve’ in any situation. Someone saying ‘your mom’ was perfectly acceptable, but ‘your parents’ wasn’t, and ‘your dad’ even less so.

Dick sat on the floor and anxiously cracked open a book. “Can we move on to Maths?”

Vic smiled at the four of them, so worried about the first batch of exams. He still remembered his first midterms.

This year the school had given all freshmen brand new notebooks specifically for test prepping, as one of those half-hearted measures to attempt for better scores. Vic had gotten one, since he was taking mostly ninth grade classes, but he didn’t use it—he was fine with the ones he was already using. The other four were using theirs, like they considered it a charm to do well.

They went through Math and Geography, and it was dusk when Kori was done sharing her notes—Kori’s class notes were the best.

Gar had been silently scribbling for a while before he suddenly turned his notebook around. “Hey, guys. Check it out.”

It was a drawing of Mr. Mod. He stood before a full classroom (there were circles for people and rectangles with sticks for desks) and held up garishly colored clothes. A text bubble coming from his mouth read “New grading system! If you buy my clothes, you pass!”

Vic chuckled. “Okay, that’s pretty funny. He would if he could.”

“I knew you couldn’t be studying,” said Dick. He stood. “Well, that’s it for me. My brain is full, and if you’re not gonna study, I’m off.”

“Would you like to share an Uber?” said Kori, also getting up.

“Yeah, it’s late, anyway,” said Vic, as Raven packed her things silently.

When they were all almost out the door, Gar looked through his notes and finally began to worry about tomorrow’s Bio test. “Uh, Vic?” he asked. “Can you explain this osmosis thingy to me one more time?”

Victor looked at the shorter boy making puppy eyes, and sighed heavily.

It was two hours later when Vic finally left Gar’s home, and the household sat down for dinner right after.

“You feel alright for tomorrow’s test?” Rita asked Gar.

“Yeah, Vic explained everything really well,” Gar replied, praying that enough things had actually stuck to his brain.

“You keep that one close,” said Steve. “He’s the only one out of your new friends that’s worth anything.”

“You just say that ‘cause he played sports,” Gar replied.

“I say that because he’s respectful and honest, and has a good head over his shoulders.”

In reality, Gar knew Steve was saying that because Vic had duped him with his Nice Boy façade like he duped every other adult. But he ate his potatoes and said nothing. He wasn’t gonna blow Vic’s cover.

“I mean, that Grayson kid?” Steve continued. “He has an evil look in his eyes. I almost prefer it when he’s got those stupid sunglasses on. And that girl who’s dressed in black. You know there’s rumors she thinks she’s a witch?”

“Oh, every teenage girl goes through a witch phase,” said Rita. “Steve, I know you’re gonna say you know those kids more than I do, but I happen think Gar’s friends are alright kids.”

Gar smiled gratefully at her, though she avoided the look. Too much of Rita siding with Gar would surely tip Steve over the edge. For now, since Rita had spoken lightly and then paid close attention to her plate, Steve’s only reaction was to look resentful.

“All I’m saying is you could find some better friends,” Steve insisted. “Some who aren’t so… such freaks.”

Gar pushed his food around with his fork. “Steve, I’m a freak. Look at me.”

Steve made a pause that was the calm before the storm. “You live under my roof,” he boomed. He wasn’t quite yelling, but this was no longer a conversation. Gar stopped eating. “I’m responsible for you and I have to worry about who you hang out with. If I don’t want you to hang out with certain kids, you should know there’s a reason for it. Listen to me or don’t, but I know better than you.”

“Steve…” tried Rita.

Steve kept boring holes into Gar’s face. “Do you hear me, Gar? Can you at least admit I have more life experience than you do?”

There was no way around it. Gar internally sighed, straightened his back, made his face blank, looked at Steve and said, “Yes, sir.”

Thankfully, the deference was enough that Steve calmed down. He allowed the meal to continue in peace and was soon talking with Rita normally. Gar finished eating in silence.

Chapter Text

Midterms week came and went. On Friday at 3 p.m., Gar walked through the hallway throwing his study notebook in the air and catching it.

“So what’s the deal? We don’t use these again till the next round of exams?” he asked Raven.

“Apparently.” Raven was carrying the last exam’s attendance record to the office.

The school was deserted. Everyone had cleared it as soon as it was humanly possible. After she handed in the folder, she too would be free.

They stopped at the Secretary’s window and knocked on it. As the Secretary slid the window open and took the record from Raven’s hands, two other girls approached the window sill.

One of them was nearly bouncing in place. “Hurry up and hand that in, Cass. The mountain slopes are waiting.”

Gar looked over at them. “I’d like to be tucked away in a log cabin with you two, ladies.”

The girl who was bouncing stopped moving. “Ugh,” she went, and walked away.

“Brooke!” her friend demanded, upset at being left behind. She left a permission slip on the Secretary’s side of the sill and went after her friend. “Hey, you forgot your notebook!”

Gar shrugged as they left. “You have to put yourself out there,” he told Raven, who was thoroughly unimpressed. “Shoot your shot and whatnot. It’s all a numbers’ game, you know.”

“Uh-huh.” Raven was about maxed out on her Gar tolerance for the day.

And she had to endure him yet a little longer. He’d offered to walk her to the bus stop and wait for her bus together. The boy seemed to want to spend the least amount of time in his own home as possible—which was fine. She of all people got that. But that didn’t mean he necessarily had to pester her.

The Secretary leafed through the folder and gave Raven the okay.

Raven told Gar, “We’re free, let’s go.”

Gar was rummaging through his bag. “Hey, you seen my notebook?”

“The one you just had on hand?” asked Raven.

Gar looked around and tried to rewind time in his head. “Shit, I think that girl took it,” he said. Then he smiled. “Heh, guess I can’t study for the rest of the year!”

Raven wasn’t laughing. “You lost the study notebook?”

“Yeah.” Gar shrugged.

“The one where you drew that offensive cartoon of Mr. Mod in the first page?”

Gar looked like the world had fallen to bits around him. “…Oh no.”

Moments later Gar was running out of the school, looking frantically at all sides. Raven came up behind him seconds after. Gar pointed to the bus parked at the bus stop. “There!”

Raven managed to see the two girls taking a seat in the bus.

And then the bus took off.

Raven looked at Gar apologetically. “Well,” she started in a deflated tone.

But Gar still had that crazy look in his eyes. “We gotta follow the bus!”

“You’re not serious.”

“Raven, my life will be over!” he yelled, grabbing her by the shoulders.

She removed his hands from her shoulders and tried to speak patiently. “Gar. The bus already left. You can’t follow it, and even if you took the next one, you won’t see where that girl got off. Forget it, it’s over.”

“My life will be over if that drawing gets out! Steve’s gonna know I did it! Everything’s gonna go to hell!”

“I understand that, but she’s gone.”

“We can find out where she lives.”

Raven peered at him. “Does Steve have a record of students’ info?” It was the only way she could conceive he could see a way out.

“No…”

“Then what are you thinking of?”

Gar got a look in his eye that almost scared her.

Victor opened the door to a frantic-looking Gar and an incredulous Raven.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” she said in a defeated tone as way of greeting, and then Gar was grabbing the collar of his shirt.

“Vic! I need your help! Raven won’t break into the school with me!”

After a minute of explanations, Vic was fully caught up. “You say this girl gave her friend your notebook,” he began, sitting on his porch and massaging the bridge of his nose.

“Brooke,” said Raven. “That girl thought it was her friend’s Brooke and gave it to her.”

“And you,” Vic turned to Gar, “you’re proposing we break into the school, get some girl’s personal records, and somehow retrieve your notebook from her house.” Gar nodded profusely. “How important is this notebook?”

“It’s life or death! As in, Steve is gonna kill me!” Having made his final appeal, Gar shot up. “Look, I’m gonna do it! Whether you guys help me or not!” And he walked away without looking back to see if they were following.

Raven and Victor exchanged a look, had a moment of indecision, and then the sense of responsibility won out over the sense of self-preservation. They followed Gar.

Vic parked his car a street away from school.

Technically, he wasn’t supposed to be driving without his dad on the passenger seat—which meant he wasn’t driving much at all, and that his dad would definitely lie in a few months’ time when he had to declare how many hours of supervised practice Vic had gotten. But he figured he was about to break into his school, so clearly the law was not his top concern today.

They decided Raven would stay outside and keep watch while the boys snuck in. They tried all the side doors and they proved to be closed. Then they tried the main door, and that happened to be open. Gar looked at Vic wonderingly, but they took the boon from the universe and went in.

They walked through the silent, dark halls.

“I can’t believe I’m back here in my first day of break,” muttered Vic. “I’m gonna get back at you for this.”

“Help me find my notebook so I can live, and then we’ll talk,” replied Gar.

The teacher’s lounge was also miraculously unlocked, as was Blood’s office within it.

“Okay, we’re looking for a freshman named Brooke, right?” Vic asked, as he looked through the files. He pulled one out. “You’re so lucky, there’s only one Brooke in ninth year.”

“Take a pic and let’s get out of…” Gar trailed off. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Hey… Can you hear that?”

Vic listened. A moment later he heard it. A steadily growing shuffle in the hallway—like a considerable number of people were walking through it rather slowly. Victor was suddenly glad they had closed the lounge’s door. The shuffling got louder as it got closer –the people seemed to be coming from the back of the school going towards the front- and then it subsided.

“What was that?” Vic whispered when it was over.

Gar didn’t answer. He skulked out of the lounge, cranked the door open a tiny bit, saw nothing, and went fully outside.

“Gar,” hissed Vic. He scrambled to follow him, stopped himself, leafed through Brooke’s file, memorized the address, put everything back and then followed.

Gar was at the other end of the hallway, following the sound of low chanting.

“It sounds like they’re in the auditorium,” he whispered when Vic caught up with him.

“Why are you trying to go to people? Let’s just get out!”

“The door’s a bit open. Let’s just check it out,” Gar insisted.

The curiosity got the better of Vic too, partly because now he could say Gar had pushed him to it if things turned sour.

They got to the auditorium door and peeked through the crack, Vic crouching under Gar and Gar standing on his tiptoes to get above Vic.

There was no easy way to process what they saw. About two dozen people, covered head to toe in red robes, stood with their arms raised above their head. One person in a white robe was walking through the room towards the stage. The windows had been covered in black cloth, and the room was illuminated by candles only.

They could now hear what they were chanting.

“Brother Blood, Brother Blood, Brother Blood…”

Vic and Gar broke apart from the door to face each other. Then they found they had nothing to say to each other, and went back to looking.

The person in white had now removed the hood of his robe, and was unmistakably Principal Blood.

“My children!” he said in a booming voice. “The world we live in has succumbed into isolation and despair. We are the ones who have transcended the ways of wicked excess! We remember the truth of the rites of blood! We are fated to rise from the blood of our enemies!” As he spoke, he was met with cheers and applause. “Now, my children—pray!”

Gar and Vic both seemed to decide they had seen enough. They broke away from the door and walked away, until they treaded a long enough distance that they felt safe to talk.

“That… that was Mr. Blood,” said Vic, intelligently.

Gar cleared his throat and tried to throw humor at the situation. “I mean, his name makes more sense now, right? Like what, um… what else would you be with a name like that?”

“A surgeon. A biologist. A chemist. A freakin’ dentist.”

They fell in silence.

Vic said, “Maybe… maybe we’ll deal with this after Winter break.”

“Yes,” said Gar immediately. “Good idea.”

Both of them seemed to know they were never going to talk about this again.

The auditorium door was too close to the front of the school. Concluding those guys would hear them if they tried the front door now, the boys went to try the doors in the back of the school, but they found everything else locked. The classrooms were locked too, as they painstakingly tested out.

“We have to get out of here quick,” said Vic. “They might leave out the front door and Raven might think it’s us.”

Gar gave the back door one last tug. “You know this school better than me. What else opens to the outside that’s not a door or a classroom window?”

Vic closed his eyes to think. “Okay. There’s a boys’ bathroom in this floor with windows.”

“You think they won’t have locked the bathrooms?”

“Well it’s our only shot.”

They collected a stray chair from the hallway and went to find the bathroom. Thankfully, it was unlocked.

Vic stood on the chair and touched around the tiny window. “What the hell? Where’s the lock on this thing?” He explored around the window more, and then blanched. “I think they’re on the outside.”

“What!?” reacted Gar. “What do you mean?”

“I think they installed this window backwards,” said Vic, throwing back his head.

Gar was in disbelief. “Vic, they couldn’t have…”

“Well, where’s the lock then? Look! This is the outside part of the window! There’s bars in every classroom window and yet this school has a completely stupid security hazard!” Vic cried. “Oh, and we can’t call Raven cause she doesn’t have a phone! I should have left her mine. Stupid!”

But when Vic climbed down from the chair, he saw Gar had his phone to his ear.

“What are you doing?” asked Vic.

Gar fixed him with a crazy determined look. “Getting outside help. I’m doing whatever it takes to get that notebook back, Vic. Whatever. It. Takes.”

Raven was standing outside the school, bored of conjuring scenarios in her head as to why the boys were taking so long. She would have thought they had left without her ten times over, if not for the fact that she still had full view of Vic’s car.

She was even more confused when Kori walked up to her, striding over like she was on a mission. She took Raven by the hand, only said “Come,” and dragged her towards the side of the school.

Raven was caught up by the time they reached the boys’ bathroom window. Kori propped Raven up and Raven unlocked the window.

A moment later, Gar came flying through the window, evidently having been propelled by Vic on the other side, and fell face down onto the ground. Then Vic himself climbed out carefully, getting a leg through, then an arm, then jumping to the ground.

Once both boys were released, they received Kori like the saving angel she was, swarming her with hugs and thank you’s.

Gar could tell Kori was torn between looking disapproving at the situation and flattered at the gratitude. So he hugged her some more just to be safe.

They all climbed onto Vic’s car, who was breaking the law a bit more with each new passenger, and drove to Brooke’s address.

The address was for an apartment building. Vic said the file had only specified ‘Fifth floor’, so they had to assume it was one of those apartments where you owned the whole floor. The four stood across the street in front of the building.

“Okay, we’re here, what’s the plan?” asked Raven.

Gar said, “We break in, find this girl’s room, get the notebook… get out.”

Vic rounded on him. “Wait, wait, wait, no, no, no. This is someone’s house, not a school! I thought we were gonna knock on the door and explain the situation calmly!”

“And in the time we explain, she can look at the notebook and see the drawing! We have to do this quietly!” Gar countered. “Look, the building has a fire escape! That’s gotta be a sign!”

“Please, hush,” said Kori, putting a hand up. “Dick is calling me,” she said, and answered the phone.

“Don’t-!” went Vic, too late.

They were silent as Kori talked to Dick. “Hi. I… do not know what we are doing tonight. I do not know if anyone is doing anything. …Well yes, I am with our friends… What we are doing?”

The other three gradually realized Dick was going to end up finding out the truth.

“Uh…nothing fun,” Kori said.

Vic buried his face in his hands.

At the other side of town, Dick laid in his bed, more confused the longer the call with Kori went on. He’d only meant to find out where everyone was, if maybe they were up for celebrating the end of exams. Now it was clear he’d interrupted something stupid.

So he let Kori ramble on for a while longer. Then he asked, “Kori. What’s going on?”

Kori paused. Dick heard someone talk to her in the background. Then Kori came back on the call and told him where they were and why.

Dick shot up from his bed.

“What’s the address? …Okay, I’m coming over there. No one’s breaking and entering, you hear me?” Dick dictated, putting one of his arms through his jacket as he left his room. “You tell Gar to stay put!”

Dick only breathed when he arrived and saw the four were lounging around on the sidewalk across from the building. Only Gar wasn’t sitting down, being that he was a bundle of nerves.

“Finally!” he spat at Dick. “Now can we move?”

“No!” answered Dick. “What I wanna know is how all four of you thought the best solution for losing a notebook was breaking into-”

“We don’t have time for this!” cried Gar. “We have to move!”

“Look, man, I kept thinking about it,” said Vic. “Maybe Gar’s right. ‘Cause if we just ring the doorbell how do we explain that we knew her address?”

Dick thought to ask ‘how did you get her address?’, because Kori hadn’t told him that part, but he decided that didn’t matter now. “I don’t care. I am not breaking and entering.”

Raven stood. “Hey, look. She’s leaving.”

They looked across the street. Brooke had left her building and was walking down the street, oblivious to her five classmates considering breaking into her floor.

“And without her bag,” noted Vic.

Gar looked at Dick defiantly. “It’s now or never.”

Dick grabbed Gar firmly by the shoulder. “We’re getting your notebook, but not the way you think. I have a plan. Just follow my lead.”

Dick, Gar and Kori rang the doorbell to the fifth floor of the building.

“And if there’s no one home?” asked Gar.

“We’re fucked,” said Dick.

The intercom buzzed regardless. A woman’s voice asked who was there.

“Hi, we’re friends with Brooke?” Dick said to the intercom, flawlessly switching to his talking-to-adults voice. “I think we swapped notebooks. Can we come in and check?”

And then they were in Brooke’s room, her exceptionally trusting mom having left them to check themselves. Gar went straight to the school bag as soon as the door closed.

Across the street, Raven and Victor stared at relevant floor like they were going to see anything in the first place.

“We didn’t think one thing through,” said Raven.

“What?” asked Vic, who felt sick to his stomach as it was.

“What’s gonna happen when Brooke gets told her so-called friends were in her room going through her stuff?”

Vic was about to answer, but the words caught in his mouth, and his eyes widened. “We have bigger problems!” He pointed Raven to the end of the opposite street, where Brooke was walking back home.

“Text Dick,” said Raven. “Now.”

“It’s not here,” Gar said, and his voice sounded alien to his own ears. He went through Brooke’s bag again even after he said it, unable to believe his own words.

“What’s you mean it’s not there?” Dick rejoined.

“The only study notebook here is hers!” said Gar, taking it out and flipping the pages at Dick as proof.

“Did she take yours with her?” asked Kori.

“Why would she!?” replied Gar.

Then two things happened at once. Dick’s phone went off with Vic’s text, at the same time the apartment’s front door opened. The three inside Brooke’s bedroom felt their blood freeze.

They scrambled—each seemed to have a different idea, as Gar bolted for the window, Dick searched through the bag himself, and Kori tried to order the things they had displaced. Then, seeing each other’s reactions, they switched; Dick half-heartedly made for the window, Kori went for the bag, and Gar smoothed the bed cover.

By the time Brooke entered her room, Dick had one leg off her window sill and Gar was hiding the school bag behind his back, but Kori had changed her mind and was now advancing towards Brooke, obscuring the other two from her view.

“Brooke, please do not be upset. We need your help,” she said, hands clasped in earnestness. “We have told your mother we were your friends in order to access your room and find my friend Gar’s notebook, which held documents which may well ruin his reputation and his life. Please, understand that we did what we did to help our friend.”

Dick and Gar had made their way over and tried to look appropriately contrite. Brooke looked at the three of them. It looked like she believed them. It looked like she’d take pity on them.

“Please,” smiled Kori, “return my friend’s notebook to him.”

Brooke looked at Gar. “I don’t have your notebook.”

Everyone looked at Gar. “What?” he made out, feeling the universe crumble around him for the second time that day. As Dick and Kori’s gazes burned into him, he went back in his memory. “No, I… I saw your friend give you my notebook.”

“And it wasn’t mine, so Cassie took it.”

Gar sat down on the floor, suddenly feeling very tired.

“Where does your friend live?” Dick asked, taking over.

The four phones of all present buzzed at roughly the same time. Gar looked at it on instinct, as Brooke gave Dick her friend’s address. It was a notification that someone had tweeted tagging the school.

“Dick,” Gar said, tugging his friend’s jacket. His voice was hollow. “Don’t even bother.”

Two weeks later, school was back on, and the five started the new term with a visit to Blood’s office.

As if Brooke’s friend posting the Mr. Mod doodle on her Twitter wasn’t enough, she’d also posted the front of the notebook where it said Gar’s name, leaving absolutely no doubt as to who the author was. Then Brooke had commented on the post about the five coming to get the notebook, linking all of them to the crime.

Cassie only got a request to take down the post. The five were told they’d talk when the term started.

Currently, Blood was taking out each of their student records in a painstakingly slow succession.

Vic and Gar avoided looking at each other. The memory of the last time they had seen their principal was still too fresh. They didn’t need to look at each other to know the other was thinking it too.

“Androkinova,” Blood said as he took the records out of the box. “Logan. Roch. Stone.” Kori and Vic’s records were the lightest. Raven and Gar’s were a bit thicker, and more or less the same size. And then the last one was so fat Blood used both hands to set it on the table. “…Grayson.” He looked up at Dick. “I was surprised to see such a record. But I must say… it does explain a lot.”

The other four looked at Dick. Dick kept staring straight ahead. Sometimes, even when Dick wasn’t wearing sunglasses, it looked like… he still… was. It was hard to explain. But now was one of those times.

“With the exception of Stone and Androkinova, none of you have spotless records,” he said. “And that might just be because I could never get a hold of your old records back in your home country, Miss Androkinova.”

Kori was standing with her back straight in her regal pose, returning Blood’s gaze.

“Miss Roch, you’re not new to disciplinary action. Although character defamation is a new one.”

Raven remained with her arms crossed, looking past the principal to a point in the wall.

“Mr. Logan, how did you know Mr. Mod used to have a clothing store?”

Gar shrugged. “I have a cousin who remembers him having the store,” he said, which was the lie he’d planned.

“Right,” droned the principal. “Your father being a member of faculty has nothing to do with it.”

“Adoptive father,” Gar muttered.

Blood ignored him. “It’s only the second term of your freshman year. I suggest you calm down, or you’ll be regular visitors in my office.” He waved a hand as if dismissing peasants. “Detention. Two weeks.”

They filed out onto the hallway to another type of punishment: people had been waiting to take pictures or direct mocking looks at them.

“Great way to start the term, Gar. Thanks a lot,” said Dick as he walked past him.

“I can’t believe I have a mark in my record for the first time in my life thanks to you, Gar,” said Vic.

Kori walked by him rubbing her arm. “It is lamentable that I should already have a mark on my new record.”

Raven didn’t say anything, but she shook her head at him when she passed by, which maybe stung worse.

But Gar had lived the two weeks of winter break in fear of Steve finding the tweet. He’d smiled through Hanukah gifts while feeling like a fraud inside. Rita had asked Steve to be nice for the holiday—Steve now had two weeks of forced good behavior to offset with anger when he found out about this. Now Gar could be absolutely sure going home would be a nightmare, but at least he was sure now. The very slim silver lining was that he could now stop worrying about it. Now, he just felt tired.

So much for a smooth ride from here on out, he thought.

End of December.

Chapter Text

In a single trip to the bathroom, Dick passed in front of a blown up toilet, avoided the one sink that was cracked open, then came out onto the hallway to circumvent the entire area they had to close down because someone had torn a few lockers off the wall, and finally stopped next to a drinking fountain that had been smashed in. That last one was new. The exposed pipe was currently creating a long puddle in the hallway.

This is getting ridiculous, he thought. It seemed every morning brought a new act of vandalism. Dick wouldn’t be surprised to find the school a smoking pile of rubble one day.

From the opposite end of the hallway, Mr. Bill slipped and fell on the wet floor.

“Oh, of course I of all people fall in the goddamn…” he was mumbling when Dick made his way over to help him up. “Oh! Mr. Grayson!” Bill seemed embarrassed when his student helped him stand. He fixed his thick-rimmed glasses. “I’m sorry you had to hear that. I’m afraid I lost my temper,” he said, as if Dick hadn’t had to sit in class as Mr. Mod raged for a good twenty minutes about the ungrateful, ruined youth of today in much more colorful language just a couple of days before.

“It’s alright,” Dick replied. “Mr. Bill, does anyone know what’s going on here?”

“You mean who’s behind all of this?” the teacher asked, as they both stepped away from the puddle. “No, I don’t think anyone knows. Someone’s getting something out of their system,” he sighed, and smiled sadly at Dick.

Dick watched the teacher go on his way, an idea forming in his head. He went to the cafeteria to find his Club.

When he sat down, Gar was vying for the others to try his tofu meal, to a resounding lack of success.

Dick interrupted him to say, “Guys. I have a… task for us.”

They looked at him.

“A task?” asked Kori. “What do you mean?”

“You know, a good deed, for the school,” Dick explained. Very eloquent, Dick. “What we decided we’d do back when we saved the SAT’s.”

“Oh. We’re actually doing that?” Victor asked, looking uninspired.

“Just because we never got another request doesn’t mean we’re not doing it,” said Dick, making his voice sound more secure. “You know Jade probably buried everything. So it’s not like the radio silence is an indication we’re not needed or whatever.”

“No, but I was hoping you’d forget about it,” Vic replied.

“You know I’m in,” said Raven from the other end of the table, and then went back to eating.

Raven had always been into the good-deeds thing from the start. Dick had wondered why. But he hadn’t dared ask her yet.

“I am as well,” said Kori. “The concept of doing heroic things is simply lovely.”

“So who’s the client?” asked Gar.

“Yeah, who requested our services?” asked Vic, with a bit of edge in his voice.

Dick shoved Mystery Meat in his mouth. “No one,” he said after a moment.

“No one?” echoed Raven.

“I propose we solve this vandalism spree that keeps getting worse every day.” Dick’s statement was met with uncertain faces. “Okay, look at it this way. If we catch the vandals and it gets out that we did, people will know what we do, and we’ll get more requests. It’s like, working for free for the exposure or something. And taking the school’s defense into our own hands.” He was getting too good at rousing speeches.

“Well, if the club’s goal is to do good deeds for the school, this is the right thing to do,” surmised Raven.

Gar shrugged. “Let’s go, Project club.”

But that afternoon in the clubroom, they found they didn’t know where to start. They shared the rumors they each had heard around the vandalizing, and then they were stumped. They had no clues.

“Detectives can dust for fingerprints, then run them through a database,” said Vic. “Or get access to security footage. How the hell are we gonna figure out who did it?”

Dick thought. “…We can talk to the victim.”

“Meaning?” asked Gar.

“The janitor. He’s the one who has to clean it all up.”

They found the janitor mopping floors on the east wing.

Dick went forward. “Mr. Duncan? We wanted to ask you about the vandalism that’s been popping up lately.”

The Janitor just looked at them. He was a short man with an impressive moustache, who didn’t usually talk to students if he could help it.

“I mean have you ever seen anyone in a suspicious attitude?” Dick elaborated. “Someone hanging around the vandalized areas? Maybe during class-”

“This doesn’t happen during the day,” the janitor answered. “I leave at seven p.m. I do a last check-up before I leave. And in the morning I find all this mess.”

“You mean someone’s entering the school at night to do it?” asked Gar.

Dick cocked his head. “You never thought of sticking around to see if you could catch the culprit?”

Mr. Duncan stared him down. “I work twelve hours a day, kid. You’d better believe that as soon as I can leave, I do.”

To his credit, Dick recanted quickly. “Right, right. Sorry.”

“Now, if the school wanted to hire a night custodian—that’s the day they’ll get twenty-four hour security, but until then-”

“I get it, I’m sorry.”

Gar pulled Dick away. “He was raised rich, excuse him.”

The five met in a circle. “So we have to find some way to be in the school through the night,” said Dick.

The other four avoided his eyes for a second.

Dick never had found out that Gar and Vic had actually broken into the school. As such, they hadn’t told him about the backwards window in the boys’ bathroom. After the whole fiasco, Dick had innocently asked Raven, “How did you even know that Brooke girl’s address?”

Raven had taken her time to think. When she’d faced Dick, her face was stone. “I don’t know how Gar knows the people he knows.”

Dick had looked convinced. Raven had breathed again.

That window in the boys’ bathroom would have been a key advantage for this task, but it would expose the rest of Gar’s –and really all of their- misdeed. The four covertly eyed each other, wondering if anyone would speak up. Dick was too busy thinking to notice them, and then he thought of something else, so the others guessed this was now an unavowable secret between the four of them.

Dick said, “We need to ask Mr. Duncan if we can stay in school after he leaves, and if he can leave like a side door open so we can get out. Then we’ll see how this person gets in, face them, and make them stop.”

The janitor had moved up the hallway while they discussed this. Once settled, the kids went to him.

“Is there any way we can stay in school past seven tomorrow?” Dick asked him.

“What?” The janitor peered at them. He wasn’t a stranger to kids wanting to come in after hours. This was just the first time a group had asked him to his face.

“We want to stay and see if we can catch whoever’s vandalizing the school,” Dick explained.

“Why would you do that?” Mr. Duncan retorted.

Dick felt himself blush. This was the hard part, he thought: being forced to admit their motives in front of burnt-out, judging adults. It made Dick feel like an idealistic child again. He ended up saying, “We wanna do this for the school. To help protect it.”

The janitor leaned on his mop. “You want me to sanction you staying in the building after hours so you can save the school from this other kid.”

“We were thinking you could close up at seven like usual, except leave one door open so we can get out.”

“Well leaving a door open is a security hazard.” Mr. Duncan looked them over. “Tell you what. I’ll leave you the key when I leave. That way you can close up yourselves, and I don’t have to go to bed knowing I locked you kids in here.”

Dick couldn’t help but look surprised. “You’re giving us a key? Really?”

“Yes. I’m retiring next year anyway,” the janitor said. “And if I find out this is some sort of party or occupation or prank… well. I’m an old fool.”

Dick smiled. “It’s not. It’s just us. We promise.”

The janitor looked them over with an unreadable expression. “That vandal probably gets in through the front door. There’s a key that’s been missing from the teachers’ lounge all week.”

“Oh. Thanks for the clue.”

He nodded at them and got back to work.

“Whoa. We’re really doing this then,” Gar said, but he was smiling.

“So, we’re gonna have to stay in school the entire day and night?” asked Vic.

The weight of what they had agreed to do fell on all of them.

Dick thought about it. He really looked for a better way of putting it. But he found none. “Yes.”

“…Fine,” sighed Vic.

“I’ve got Math homework,” said Gar.

“Bring it,” said Dick.

“Do we bring sleeping bags, a change of clothes?” asked Raven.

“Yes, all of that.” Dick confirmed, gratefully.

“Food,” said Kori.

“A few of us will go out to get some dinner,” replied Dick. “The rest will stay to open the door.”

Thus decided, it was a bit anticlimactic then to go home for the day, but they managed.

When school let out the next day, Vic went out to the parking lot, took his car out, left it a block away, and came back into the school. They stayed in the clubroom, closed the door, shut the window, kept all the lights off, and waited until everyone left. The boys passed the time playing video games on mute.

After a while of them not hearing any sound, they went out, quietly, to investigate. Seeing no one but the janitor, they then hung out in a random classroom, for variety’s sake.

The first few hours were calm. They did homework, ate snacks, even unearthed a chess set, and started a tournament that immediately left only Vic and Raven going against each other.

Meanwhile, Gar wandered close to Dick.

“Hey, Dick? I just wanna say sorry for the Mr. Mod doodle thing again.”

Dick eyed him. “Sure, Gar. It’s okay.”

“Yeah, I’m really sorry I added to your surprisingly large record that you still haven’t explained.”

Dick frowned. “I’m not telling you about my record.”

Gar feigned innocence. “I didn’t-! Did I ever ask?”

As a response, Dick walked away from Gar. From a distance, Vic raised his eyebrows at Gar. Gar shook his head.

Dick had turned towards Kori. “That reminds me, Kori. That film I wanted to show you is in the library. You wanna go see it?”

Kori was instantly delighted. “Oh, yes.”

They left. Vic, who had never stopped staring at the chess game, started smirking. “Hmm. Betcha this is when they get together.”

Raven and Gar looked up at him. It was the first time any of them acknowledged aloud something that was very palpable and obvious.

“You think?” laughed Gar.

“It’s after school, we’re all alone, they drifted off together…” Vic said. “Yup. I think this is it. Way overdue, too.”

In a corner of the library, Dick and Kori used the AV club projector and pointed it to a rolled down window curtain.

“See, the thing is,” Dick was saying, “Rocky is the original underdog story. Like, it’s a typical rise to glory story, but it was the first to do that, and the thing no one remembers is he actually lost his final battle, which I think is really cool to show…”

Kori was enjoying Dick’s commentary more than the movie itself—when he talked, it was an excuse for her to look at his face. She was really only striving to concentrate on the movie because he wanted her to experience it.

When Dick had first told her the Club was about being lazy and taking advantage of uncaring, distracted school officials, it had seemed off to her. She didn’t know Dick at all back then—but it seemed to her he was… hiding, somehow.

Dick always looked like he was trying to blend in and go unnoticed. Kori saw it in his stubborn use of sunglasses, in his generic teenage boy clothing –as he was usually in jeans and some sort of red or blue sports jacket-. It was as if he wanted to sit back and look at the world without the risk of the world looking back at him.

But it was clearly not what he’d been born to do. Dick commanded attention without meaning to, perhaps without noticing. He was a person people trusted, though Kori couldn’t put her finger on why.

When they had decided to dedicate the Club to helping people, Kori could tell this was the real Dick. Right now, he was positively glowing, activated, revived. Kori knew she was seeing who he was meant to be all the time.

And being alone in the darkened library with him, able to watch all of that from a front row seat… What more could she want? She mindfully enjoyed every second of it.

“Banana!” Gar exclaimed in the empty classroom.

Raven looked at him. “I don’t know what-”

“Just say who’s there.”

“I already did.”

“One more time.”

Raven sighed, and Vic snickered. At some unfortunate moment in time, Gar had learned that Raven had never heard some of the most classic jokes. Now he’d made it his life’s purpose to tell them to her. All of them.

“Who’s there,” Raven uttered through gritted teeth.

Oblivious to the danger in her tone, Gar said, “Orange! ………Orange you glad I didn’t say banana!?”

“I’m certainly glad this sad joke is over.”

Vic chuckled to himself. He gave Raven props for even listening to Gar. He didn’t know why she did it.

When Victor got up to wander around the school, he left the two of them doing what by now was a routine of theirs, where Gar would promise her that, “One day, I’m gonna make you laugh real hard.”

And Raven said, “That’s never going to happen.”

“Okay, you once said I was funny, remember?”

“I don’t recall, no. Maybe you dreamt it.”

“Oh, come on!”

The little to no offense Gar took from Raven’s put-downs made them feel less vicious and more like friendly banter. Vic thought Gar was probably the reason Raven felt more reachable to all of them.

Victor roamed the hallways. The afternoon sun filtered through closed crevices. The school was still unnatural in its emptiness. The five of them were here secretly, and that tickled a childish delight for sneaking around, but no one was saying it. They were all more confident in their self-imposed purpose now.

If he went down the west wing, he could hear the sounds from the football practice and the cheerleaders. He steered clear of windows and doors, lest the people outside saw a shadow from inside the school.

At a certain point –Kori would never know how much time had passed- Dick checked his phone for the time, said they should be getting back to the others, and the spell of coziness they were in was lifted. They put everything back in its place and left the library.

Dick texted Vic asking where they all were, and they followed his directions to the second floor.

Kori scrolled on her phone as they walked through the hallways. She’d set up notifications for articles that talked about the Team Titans –she’d been trying to learn as much as she could about what were now her local superheroes- and it dismayed her how many news focusing on Lux Piper were negative and insulting; the article she had pulled up was titled ‘Obese superheroes promote a dangerous model to the American public’ and it affirmed Lux ‘being allowed to be in a prestigious team while fat’ was detrimental to public health. She had shown it to Dick to get some clarification. “I had thought your country was freer and… body positive. But then this article is not that.”

“Well, there’s still a lot of backwards views,” Dick said. “But to be honest, articles like that tend to be click-bait. I mean…”

“I know click-bait,” she assured.

“Okay,” smiled Dick. “Look, I’d ignore this website entirely. It tends to come out with this trash.”

“At least the comments are, uh… crucifying them.” And she peeked at Dick to see if that was the right shape of that word.

Dick smiled. “Yeah, I bet they are,” he returned, subtly approving her.

He looked over to her. The empty school was kind of chilly, and Kori was only wearing a sweater. Dick himself was fine in one jacket, but girls were different. Raven had been wearing her outdoor coat in the classroom, before.

“Are you cold?” he asked. If she was, he was going to give her his jacket.

“I come from Tamaran. I have not got cold on this country yet.” A second later Kori realized she should have said she was cold, so he’d give her his jacket. But then she would have boiled.

When they got back to their other friends, they found Gar and Raven looking away from each other, each with arms crossed, and Vic in the middle trying to appease them.

He had a hand in each of their shoulders, and was talking to Gar in a sing-song lecturing voice. “You can’t force a person to share, Gar. Someone like you is happy to spill everything about his life, but Raven won’t. You have to respect that.”

Gar crossed his arms and huffed childishly, in an action that perfectly matched the overly patient tone Vic was using.

“What’s going on here?” demanded Dick.

“Gar’s prying,” said Raven.

“I’m trying to have a conversation!” protested Gar, waving his arms at her.

“I don’t understand why you need to know everything about my life,” Raven said.

“In case you don’t know, friends talk about stuff! It’s weird that you’ve moved house so much in your short life! How did I just find out you were born in Gotham?”

Raven looked down at him. “Because you make me regret telling you anything.”

Dick sighed. He’d come to hope that by now Raven and Gar were more stable in their relationship, but it seemed they were really too different to be peaceful. “Gar, leave her alone. Vic’s right, she doesn’t have to share if she doesn’t want to.”

“Hmph,” went Gar.

“Now let’s go. Janitor’s about to leave, and then we have to focus on what we came here to do. Okay?” Dick looked at both of them pointedly.

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” said Raven.

Gar dragged his feet behind the rest of the group.

Chapter Text

The janitor quizzed them again when giving them the key to the Eastern door. “You’re not conniving with some seniors for a prank, are you? I mean I know you’re not seniors, because you look like babies.”

“No sir,” said Dick, his hand held open for the key.

“Okay, now, listen. I’m coming in at ten to seven tomorrow. I’ll knock on this door, you’ll open for me, and then I’ll open up the school. If you’re not here, and I can’t open up the school, I’ll sell you out faster than you can say I duped the old janitor for popularity points with the seniors we’re conniving with. Understood?”

“Alright,” replied Dick, and was finally handed the key.

“I’ll say you beat me up and stole the key,” clarified the janitor, walking away.

“Gotcha.”

Dick locked the door after him, the sound echoing in the empty halls.

Now the school was really just the five of them.

Kori asked, “What will we do, when the vandal comes?”

Dick tried to appear secure. “Face them. And tell them we’ll say it’s them. Like we did with Jade.”

“So we’re professional tattlers,” said Vic.

“What else do you want us to do?” Dick asked him. “We’re the good guys here. We’re the snitches by default.”

“Do we take pictures? And record everything, like last time?” asked Gar.

“Yes,” said Dick. He looked the group over. “Maybe you girls should stay hidden and take pictures, and Vic, Gar and I will face them.”

“And why’s that?” droned Raven.

Dick scratched the back of his neck. “Don’t be difficult, I’m just trying to protect you.”

“Look, I don’t know how to fight,” admitted Raven. “So as far as I’m concerned, I agree. But I’ll have you know that I’ve seen Kori deadlift the back of a car with her bare hands.”

Everyone looked at Kori, who was wearing a bashful smile.

“Uh… when?” asked Gar. “And why?”

“Oh, it was weeks ago,” said Kori. “I was trying to convince Raven to join me in hanging out at the mall of shopping.”

“Why would that convince her to hang out?” Vic asked.

Raven shrugged. “I was impressed.”

“Okay. But have you ever been in a fight?” Dick asked Kori.

“Have you?” Victor asked Dick in turn.

“Yes. I have,” said Dick, his voice heavy.

“Me too,” said Gar. He hoped no one would ask if he won them.

“I haven’t,” said Vic.

“Really?” asked Gar.

“Yeah. One thing I learned, no one wants to fight you when you’re as big as me,” replied Vic, but as he held up his hands he lost his smile. “And now… well. I don’t know if people feel threatened or don’t want to pick on a cripple.”

“Well, I have not been in a fight,” said Kori.

“You’ll be our secret weapon, Kor,” said Dick, smiling at her.

Kori happily smiled back. Victor tried to detect a change in their interactions that would support his idea that they had to have gotten together, but he found the same bashful nervousness between them as had existed before.

“So now what?” he asked. “We kick back and wait for this guy to show up?”

“Not much else to do,” Dick agreed.

“Hey, shouldn’t we have a battle cry when we face them?” asked Gar.

“Like what?” replied Dick.

“You know, like the Titans have. When Kismet goes…” Here Gar straightened his face into perfect seriousness and followed in a calm, low voice, “Titans, go.”

“We’re not the Titans,” said Dick. “And I’m not Kismet.”

They settled down in a second-floor hallway, right next to the indoor balcony from which they’d have ample view of the front of the school. The plan was, if the kid showed up, the boys would take the side stairs and surprise them, and the girls would stay in the balcony to record them.

Vic brought out a set of playing cards, and Dick decided to show Kori how to play gin rummy. The game went slow as Kori tried to take the mechanics in, but she laughed through her mistakes and made them laugh in turn.

Then disaster struck. Gar didn’t particularly care that the game was so slow, but he had a moment where his mouth went off before his brain could catch it, and he said, “Speaking of dim bulbs.”

Dick turned and glared at Gar, but Kori did a double take. Gar instantly knew he’d screwed up. Kori’s smile fell, and her doe eyes opened up and looked at the others, seeking an answer. “What?” she reacted.

“Gar’s just being an asshole, Kori,” said Dick.

There was a horrified silence as they all realized she’d actually taken offense. Kori looked at her cards, then seemed to change her mind and set them down. “I do not need to play.”

Immediately there were spurs for her to play.

But Kori had stood, making sure to smile. “It is fine. I am going to the bathroom.”

As soon as she left the room, the other turned on Gar.

“Nice one,” said Raven.

“What were you thinking?” demanded Vic.

“What? I didn’t tell her to stop playing!” said Gar.

“But you made her feel self-conscious,” said Dick.

“I was just teasing,” insisted Gar, “I didn’t mean it. That’s just something you say.”

“Yeah, but it made her upset,” replied Dick. “You need to apologize to her.”

“For what? It was a joke!”

Then Kori came back, and all discussion stopped. Dick glared at Gar throughout the game, and Raven and Vic too snuck glares at him, but Gar stayed put, arms crossed, mouth shut, and glaring back at anyone who looked at him.

He himself could hardly say why he was being stubborn. Maybe it was just because the others had ganged up on him. Maybe he would have apologized if it was just him and Kori, but now he’d made a point, and he felt he had to stick to it.

In truth, he thought he shouldn’t have to apologize because she took offense to perfectly innocent banter. How many times had Raven insulted his intelligence? How many times had Dick and Victor? Granted, Kori was someone they took care of; she was kind of off-limits for banter and ribbing. But still…

Kori was one of those girls who was perfect. Gar refused to believe someone like her could be brought down by something he said. Kori, who clearly had a crush on Dick—Dick who was so competent and… so in girls’ radars, in a way that Gar definitely wasn’t. Gar firmly believed girls like Kori soared above everyone else. How could she possibly care what Gar thought of her?

The round came to an end and they started another, with Dick insisting on walking Kori through what was happening though she wasn’t in the roster. People had stopped glaring at Gar, and now they were ignoring him—and now, instead of resentment, Gar felt a stab of fear.

He’d just gotten this group of friends. What if this was the way it ended? With him sticking his foot in his mouth and then refusing to back down? He’d tried so hard to get these people. Why was he screwing it up?

And then they heard the front door, echoing in the silent building. The five found each other’s eyes, and sprung up with adrenaline. Dick signaled Vic and Gar follow him, as was the plan.

As they skulked through the hallway in silence, Gar went too far ahead and knocked into Vic. Vic turned and glared at him with a fury that caught him off guard.

Why was Vic angry…?

Oh, right. The Kori thing.

Before the boys rounded the corner, they heard voices. Dick motioned for them to stop and listen.

“…who keep pushing us around. They’ll learn when it all goes boom, brother!”

“Correct, brother. Today, this school burns down to the ground.”

First, the three froze into place. Then Dick signaled for them to go back to where the girls were.

“We couldn’t catch anything yet,” said Raven when they arrived. “All we got was footage of them walking in.”

Dick made the girls step away from the railing. He took a deep breath. “There’s been a change of plans. The good news is, that’s definitely the vandal. Bad news is, there’s two of them, and they’re actually here to blow up the school.”

There was nothing like imminent danger to make them all forget they were angry at Gar.

“Do they have names?” asked Raven.

“They just called each other ‘brother’,” said Vic. “Did you get a look at them?”

Kori put her phone forth, showing them a video. “There is a big fat one and a skinny short one.”

“What do we do?” Vic asked.

“Dick?” called Kori, because Dick wasn’t talking.

Dick made up his mind. “Tail them. See what they do.”

“We should still try to film them,” said Gar.

“There’s no time,” decided Dick, now sure of himself. “We need to prioritize making sure they don’t do what they came to do, and staying hidden ourselves. We can’t do that if we’re trying to record at the same time.”

They listened to him. They always did when Dick sounded certain like that.

Gar said, “Dude, we can’t let them destroy the school. I can’t go back to online classes. I nearly failed third grade with the first pandemic.”

“Why are these guys doing this?” posed Raven.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter right now,” returned Dick.

“Maybe we should find out,” said Gar.

“Maybe we should,” agreed Kori. “What could these brothers have against our school? It is quite odd.”

“That’s dangerous,” said Dick. “If they plan to blow up the school, they have the tools to do it on them. I don’t want anyone talking to them yet.”

The five followed the brothers like shadows through the hallway. At one point the brothers split, and Dick motioned them to split too. He took Raven and Vic with him to follow the skinny one with spiky blonde hair.

The guy stopped in a hallway and took something out of his bag, fastening it to the wall. When he moved on to the next hallway, the three came out.

They stared at the grey stick stuck on the wall.

“This is an explosive, right?” asked Raven. “Can’t we douse them with water or something?”

“We could throw them into the pool,” said Dick.

Vic stopped them. “No, nobody touch anything. Look, I don’t know exactly what this is, but I do know not all explosives should be doused with water. Some of them explode anyway.”

“So what do we do?” asked Raven.

Dick posed, “Wait, exactly why are they planting these things? They’re not gonna come back and light each one of them, right?”

“Meaning?” asked Raven.

Vic said, “They’re most likely gonna use a bigger bomb to detonate these.”

There was a pause, before Dick said, “We should take them. No charges, no boom.” And he started pulling the sticks out of the wall.

Raven turned away, “I’m gonna get bags from a supply closet and meet you.”

“Good,” Dick approved over his shoulder.

She heard Vic say, “I’ll hold the sticks, you follow Skinny so we don’t lose him.”

Only when she’d ran away did Raven come down from the high of adrenaline to realize what they should really do was call some sort of authority. She kicked herself, but she was already on her way, so she told herself she’d tell Dick when she went back.

Kori and Gar tailed after the big one. He was carefully carrying something big in a trash bag.

They turned a corner, and then got hit with a trash can from behind. Kori was able to swirl around and put her arm before her face, but Gar got it full on the head, and it sent him to the ground.

The skinny brother was behind them. “Surprise!” he said. “Brother, come!”

His brother came quickly and stood beside him. “Who are you?”

Gar’s world was still half pain. He realized he was on the ground, with Kori kneeling over him.

“We are the ones who will stop you,” Kori stated.

The skinny brother bristled. “You and who else?”

From what Gar could gather, the brothers both lunged at them. Kori pulled Gar up with surprising ease, swung his arm over her shoulders and, given she was a lot taller than him, made him run along nearly on his tiptoes. Gar didn’t know where they were running to. When the world regained focus, they were in the swimming room.

Kori closed the door behind them. It was a double-edged sword—they were safe and they were trapped. The brothers loomed outside the door. Soon they heard the distinct sound of wood on metal—they were passing something through the handles, effectively locking them in.

Kori looked at Gar helplessly. “I am sorry.”

“No, it was the right call to run,” Gar replied, a bit stunned she would have second thoughts on this. His world had only just stopped spinning; he couldn’t have helped her out there.

“You watch them, brother,” one of them said on the other side. “I’ll go take care of the bombs.”

“Hey, come back!” Gar shouted at them. “Who even are you guys? Why are you doing this?”

Skinny’s face occupied the circular window. “To you, little one, we are the gods of Lightning and Thunder.”

Gee, what a douchebag, thought Gar. “You do realize if you do this, there’s no going back for you two? What do you think will happen when you blow up the school? I’m pretty sure you get tried as adults for something like that!”

“Think again, little one,” the god of Lightning said, his angry breath clouding the glass. “Our father is a diplomat. Nobody can touch us.”

“Go, brother,” said Thunder. “I’ll watch these two.”

Gar stepped away from the door and took out his phone. “I’m telling the others,” he told Kori.

When he looked up, Kori was giving him a look he couldn’t decipher. She turned away when he looked at her. It made Gar remember about earlier all of a sudden.

“Hey, are you still mad at me?” he asked.

“I never was mad at you,” she replied.

“Oh. Cool!” said Gar, brightening up. “Then it was really just the others making a big deal out of it. You know it was just a joke, right?”

Here she frowned. “Gar. I do not mean to offend. But how can you realize the effects of the actions of other people, and yet you cannot devise the effect your words have in your world?”

Gar deflated. “I… what? What do you mean?”

“You have just told those boys that their actions have consequences. But you do not seem to see that your words have effects too. I can see you do not feel you hurt me, but you did.”

Gar winced. “But… come on, you can’t take me seriously. You know I just… say stuff.”

“You are my friend. How could I not take you seriously?”

Gar felt simultaneously chastised and touched. “I guess I don’t… have… a lot of experience with that.”

“Having friends?”

Gar nodded, and felt a surge of panic that he was confessing this. Didn’t he usually keep this stuff close to his chest? Maybe the odd atmosphere of the pool was getting to him. The heat from the sun-filled windows, the reflection of the water in the tiled walls, the smell of chlorine. It made him feel like they were in another world.

But then Kori said, “Neither do I.”

He looked up. “What?”

She was smiling. “I have never had a group of friends before.”

“Really? You?” Gar reacted. “But you’re so… so nice, and pretty! How did you never have friends?” He narrowed his eyes. “Is there something you’re not telling us?”

Kori laughed. She sat by the pool and hugged her knees to her chest, motioning for Gar to sit next to her. “It is, as you say, a long story. Growing up, children did approach me. But whenever I did have any friend, they were taken away by my older sister.”

“That’s so crappy,” Gar replied. He ran a hand through his hair, still bewildered. “I guess I always thought you were really popular all your life.”

“At this moment, I am only lucky you have not met her,” she replied.

It took him a while to understand what she meant. “Whoa, Kori… even if we did meet her, she couldn’t take us away. We’re your friends.”

Kori looked like she debated saying what she said next. “My sister and I moved schools a lot. She always took to the languages so easily, but I do not find languages easy. So Komila’s easiest route was to say to people I was slow and could not keep up with them. The kids would see me in that light, think of me badly, and leave me behind.”

Gar felt sick to his stomach as it dawned on him. “That’s why you got upset when I said that about the card game.” He sunk his head. “Oh, Kori. I’m so sorry.”

“I forgive you.”

In turn he told her, “We wouldn’t think badly of you or leave you. Even if your sister was here, it wouldn’t matter. Hell, if she made us choose between the two of you, we’d choose you. You were our friend first. Plus, she sounds like she has enough friends.”

This time his words seemed to sink in.

She hugged him. Gar felt like he’d been blessed; the forgiveness vibrated off her body.

When they parted she looked at Gar. “Why did you grow up without friends?” she prompted him sweetly.

Gar threw his head back. “Oh, you know how it is. The other kids felt intimidated by my sheer…” Kori’s knowing look cut through him. Gar cut himself off, coughed and reconsidered. “Um, I was the only kid in the village where I grew up. And after that, I was always the runt of any orphanage or foster house I was in. So kids picked on me, and… nobody wanted to be friends with a target.” He shrugged.

He didn’t feel better after telling it; he felt hollow. Reality was overrated, he’d always thought. He much preferred a nice story, even if it was fake.

But then Kori reached for his hand and thanked him for telling her, and that did feel different, in a good way. He was now in possession of her story and she was in possession of his. It was new and alien and he still felt kind of icky and uncomfortable… But maybe this was what having friends really was. Letting someone else be the depository of your secrets; letting them see your true self, even when you didn’t like that guy a whole lot.

Chapter Text

Lightning walked down the hallway whistling, and was nearly at the other end before he noticed anything was wrong. “Why’s…? Where’s the TNT?”

Dick, Raven and Vic were crouched around the hallway.

“You sure you can take the big guy?” Dick asked Victor.

“I told you, yes, now let me go let Kori and Gar out,” answered Vic.

“And you’re sure you know the garden shed has a hose?” Dick asked Raven.

“Positive,” answered Raven.

Dick nodded. “Okay, wait till I have him.”

He stood in the hallway where the boy could see him. “Hey. Sparky. Someone told me you wanted to start the school term with a bang.”

“Ooh, he went with a whole one-liner,” commented Raven from around the corner.

“Gar would’ve loved to be here,” Vic whispered back.

Lightning’s eyes bulged. “More of you? Who are you people?”

Dick debated it for a moment, then said it. “We’re the Project Club. And you are going down.”

Lightning lunged at him. Dick waited until the last moment to duck out of the boy’s reach, then kicked his legs from under him and quickly held him to the ground. Vic and Raven kind of wished they could stick around to watch.

But Dick looked back and told Victor and Raven, “Now. Run.”

They came out of hiding and ran—Vic into the school towards the pool, Raven outside to the yard. Lightning saw them run past and briefly stopped struggling. “How many of you are there?”

“Ready?” Gar asked Kori.

Kori nodded.

They approached the door and Gar tapped on the window. “Hey.”

“Nothing you say will make me free you,” Thunder warned them, with his back turned to them.

“We only wish to know why you are doing this,” said Kori. “What are you hoping to achieve by this destroying of the school?”

Gar replaced Kori in the window. “Yeah, I mean, I hate Mondays too, but not this much.”

“We don’t care about your school,” Thunder snapped, glowering at them. “It’s just a means to an end. We just want to go back home. This will make father listen.”

“Where is home?” Kori asked him.

“Oklahoma,” he replied, very fondly.

Gar had really expected something way further off, with the way these brothers spoke. “Okay, but you’ll destroy an entire school just to stick it to your dad?” Gar surmised.

Thunder seemed to hesitate. “Tavis—my brother, says it will not be so bad. Buildings can be rebuilt.”

“Look, I’m sure you guys really wanna go home,” Gar told him. “But do you really want it this much? Enough to leave a lot of kids without school for years, probably? To leave teachers out of their jobs? When you could just stay here and do your thing in our school! We’re pretty cool once you get to know us. You like destroying things, right? Take up wood work!”

Thunder said, “I like the sounds things make when they explode. My brother likes to watch fire.”

“Okay,” Gar started, wondering if he should be more concerned about that.

“There is a pyrotechnics club,” offered Kori.

“Really?” Thunder smiled. Then doubt replaced the smile. “But, Tavis says we’ll never fit in here.”

“That is a lie,” said Kori. “I myself am from the country of Tamaran. And I have found myself very welcome here.” She smiled at Gar as she said this, found his hand and squeezed it.

“He would never agree to this,” said Thunder.

“What do you want?” answered Gar.

They saw Thunder’s hesitant face a moment longer; then it disappeared. Then they heard the bar being pulled from the door handles.

Kori and Gar followed Thunder –whose real name was Gan- through the school. He opened the door to a storage closet, and there was the big bomb. To Gar it looked like an elaborate watch, but big. It even had a counter.

“This was to detonate the TNT,” Gan explained. “We need to hurry and get to my brother.”

“Why?” asked Gar.

“Because he has the…” as Gan spoke, the artifact came to life, and the timer started counting down. “…Oh no.”

Dick stared stunned at the other boy. “What did you just do?”

“Ha! Fuck you! I did what I wanted anyway!” he mocked, and Dick realized for the first time the two brothers’ formal inflection was entirely affected. “If I were you, I’d get my friends and get out of your beloved school, for it’s about to…” he trailed off as he focused behind him. “…Brother?”

Dick looked behind them too. He blanched. He didn’t have time to wonder why the fat brother was next to Kori and Gar, or where Victor was, because Kori was holding the bomb. He let go of his adversary and ran to her.

“This thing is on?” he demanded as he took it from her hands, because he thought panic allowed him one stupid question.

“Yes!” Kori dutifully replied. Then she waited—Dick had taken the bomb from her so quickly she’d thought he had a plan, but once he had it he just stood there, hesitant. “Dick?”

Dick bolted down the hallway like he’d been electrocuted. After their surprise subdued, Kori and Gar ran after him.

Outside the school, they didn’t see Dick.

Soon Vic ran up to them instead. “The pool was empty!” he demanded at them.

“Gan let us out,” said Gar.

“Who’s Gan!?”

Being reminded of them, Gar looked for the two inside the school, to see them fighting it out in the hallways. “Oh no. Kori, we turned two brothers against each other.”

Vic said, “Good, let them kill each other! We have other problems!”

Dick ran back to them. “I threw it on the football field,” he panted. “I threw the bomb on the football field,” he clarified for Victor’s sake.

“You’re gonna let it explode?” Vic demanded.

“What else you want me to do?” Dick returned.

“Where’s Raven?” asked Gar.

“She’s coming with the-”

The bomb exploded with the loudest sound any of them had ever heard.

The four checked themselves over reflexively, to find themselves alright but for soot. Raven came out from the side of the school with a hose already turned on. She stopped, counted all four of her friends, and went on to water the burning grass.

When the ringing in their ears subsided, they heard the sirens.

“Firemen?” asked Gar.

“We called them,” said Dick. Then he called out, “Raven, leave the hose on the ground, we have to leave.”

With smoky clothes and covered in soot, with the sirens booming so loud they thought the firemen should have been stepping on their heels by now, the five ran out of the school parking lot, out the school grounds, along the street, and climbed on Vic’s car. Right as they closed the doors, the fire truck rolled by past them in the direction they had come from.

Victor let out a big breath. “Okay. Whose house doesn’t currently have any parents in it?”

Gar looked out the massive tenth-story window, city lights twinkling in the distance.

He turned to Kori, who was gently squeezing her hair towel to dry her hair.

“So this whole apartment is all yours?” he asked.

“It is for my use until I graduate,” Kori explained.

“That’s so cool. You live like a college student.”

“Very soon my little brother will start… his school.” Kori hesitated. “It… it is a school where he sleeps there?”

“Boarding school,” said Dick. Like Gar, he was sitting on the floor, still covered in soot and waiting his turn in the shower. Raven was in Kori’s room after her turn. Vic was taking a long time in the shower. Then again, Gar wasn’t sure how he showered, and surely it was an arduous process.

“Boarding school,” agreed Kori. “And then my k’norfka will come stay with me.”

“Your what?” asked Gar.

“It is like… a nanny, I think?”

“You have a nanny?”

“He raised my brother and sister and I. He also took care of my parents’ house and ground.”

“Oh, so like a nanny-slash-housekeeper,” said Gar.

Kori seemed to accept this.

Raven emerged from Kori’s room a while later, wearing what was probably Kori’s most monochrome clothing: blue leggings and a grey t-shirt with the NASA logo. Kori’s apartment was warm; she had cranked the heat way up for them to shower, and Gar thought he’d never seen Raven’s bare arms before.

That was the night Gar found out his female friends wore makeup. He’d thought Kori looked off when she’d come out of the shower. When Raven came out, he’d figured it out. In her, the lack of heavy eye makeup was really noticeable. That and the fact that Kori’s clothes were a little baggy on her made her look—younger, somewhat vulnerable.

Kori sat on her couch with her phone and discovered a notification for the Titans hashtag. She smiled at the tweet from Lux Piper. It was a selfie from the Titans’ gym, captioned ‘Out here promoting a dangerous model to the American public’. She wore a grey sports bra, her short black curly hair pulled back, black winged eyeliner contrasting on her fair skin, and a big dimply smile on her pretty heart-shaped face.

Finally, Vic came out of the bathroom, and Gar dashed in.

When Gar came out of the shower, his friends had already made sleeping arrangements and ordered pizza, which they all ate half in dreams. Afterwards, the girls went to Kori’s room, Vic slept on the couch, and Dick and Gar shared a mattress on the floor. Gar fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

As agreed, the five went to school early the next day to meet the janitor.

Mr. Duncan paid them a wide-eyed look as he took the keys, having seen the news of the attempt on Murakami High, but he said nothing to the kids.

None of them had known what to expect from the janitor the day after, but it wasn’t this. Mr. Duncan wouldn’t meet their eyes, and seemed to regret giving them the key. When the five had set out to do this, they hadn’t known it would be this dangerous either.

As the rest of the students arrived, the atmosphere grew charged. Someone came up to the unsuitably calm group of five, judged they were obviously out of the loop, and demanded, “You guys didn’t hear what happened? Someone tried to blow up the school last night!”

“Really? That’s insane,” Dick replied, flatly.

The guy gave them an odd look and left them to their inappropriate response. But they couldn’t even fake excitement; they were nursing a sort of post-danger hangover.

The five hadn’t realized how weird the scene looked while they were fleeing it.

A detonated bomb with a turned on hose dousing the grass on fire around it. Through the wide-open back door, two brothers fist-fighting in the middle of the deserted hallway of what would have been a blown-up school. A heap of sticks of TNT in a garbage bag in the sports shed at the opposite end of the school from the football field.

The most creative rumors as to the origin of the attack only lasted through first period. After that, it became known that two new students called Tavis and Gan had gone and confessed everything to Blood.

Everyone was sure they would get expelled. The five, knowing what they had told Gar and Kori about their influential father, knew they would likely only get suspended, if anything.

Halfway through the day, Gar got a text from an unknown number requesting a meet-up.

The five of them met Gan and Tavis in their lunch period, in a tucked away corner outside the school.

“I wanted to apologize,” said Gan. “And thank you. You made us better. We were going down the wrong path. I see that now.”

“I don’t,” said Tavis, arms crossed. Then he uncrossed his arms and softened, looking at his brother. “But, we go everywhere together. I’m willing to give this trying to fit in a try.”

“Besides the apology, we thought you should know why we were going to blow up the school,” said Gan.

“Didn’t you say it would make your dad listen and take you home?” Gar asked.

“No, I said that was the end result,” said Gan. “Our father wouldn’t pay attention to something so little as a school blowing up. The deal was we would be interceded to him if we did it.”

“The deal?” Dick echoed. “Someone put you up to this?”

“We don’t know who it was,” Tavis said. “We got the letter in the mail with the keys to the school.”

“Is that how you got all that TNT?” asked Dick. “And that bomb?” That had been gnawing at Dick’s mind since the day before. He’d held that bomb in his arms: it was no homemade thing. It was sophisticated. It had a timer, for fuck’s sake.

Gan confirmed it. “Everything was in a dumpster for us to pick up when we came in yesterday.”

“And you have no idea who contacted you,” Raven.

The brothers said no.

After that, the brothers were picked up by a chauffeur. They were being transferred to another school uptown. Gan promised they’d try a pyrotechnics club in their new school, or start one, if there was none.

Before his friends could start theorizing, Victor herded them to the cafeteria, saying they should get some food in them in the lunch time they had left.

Once fixed with food in front of them, Gar broke the silence. “It was someone with access to the keys.”

“So every teacher, every admin. And the janitor,” said Dick.

“Or anyone who could break into the teacher’s lounge,” said Raven.

“Can one break into the lounge?” asked Kori.

“Are you saying we’re morally obligated to break into the teacher’s lounge to see if it can be done by a student?” asked Vic.

There were tired laughs.

“Not today anyway,” decided Dick. He sat a bit straighter as something occurred to him. “All that aside… Gar. Tavis threw a trash can at you. Are you okay?”

Gar grinned. “I’m fine, dude! I’m hard-headed!” He knocked on his head for effect.

“Okay, I’m glad,” said Dick, cutting off Victor who was about to quip something. “But it got me thinking. I’d thought we could just do this and stay out of sight, not come into contact with people who could hurt us, and it would be fine. But that’s clearly not true. So, if we’re gonna keep doing this, we have to start training. I have an old gym room at my house we can use, and I can teach you what I know.”

“I can contribute,” said Kori. “In Tamaran I was trained in… well, fighting disciplines with Tamaranean names you will not understand,” she trailed off bashfully. “I also master several types of weapons.”

The others stared at her.

“I thought you couldn’t fight,” said Dick.

She looked confused. “I said I have never been in a fight. I only have been trained.”

“Oh. Awesome,” breathed Dick.

Two kids walked past them, gossiping about the incident.

“I’m telling you, one of those brothers just had a change of heart. That’s why they were fighting when the firemen found them.”

“Then why did neither of them say they had called the fire brigade, Sam? There was another person at the scene, clearly.”

Dick waited until they were gone before he said, “You know, this task… ended up kind of messy. Maybe we don’t tell people this was us.”

There were murmurs of tired agreement.

“Next time. Next time’s gonna get us the exposure.”

Vic didn’t say anything. He just shook his head and ate.

End of January.

Chapter Text

“So, uh, remember. Don’t trust condoms. They’re only 16% effective. Abstinence is the only way to really make sure…”

“That can’t be right,” Dick said in a low voice to Gar and Vic.

They were in Murakami High’s annual comprehensive Sex Ed seminar. Sex Ed in Jump City was, as a rule, abstinence-only, fear-based, limited, false, and/or around three years too late—often many of those things at once. Dr. Light, who had drawn the losing number as this year’s instructor, didn’t make eye contact with the boys and didn’t chastise anyone for being on their phones, and in fact looked outright thankful no one was paying attention to him for once.

“Again, condoms, 16% effective,” he valiantly went on, writing the figure big on the blackboard. “Abstinence, 100% effective. Condoms have pores, and human, schperm,” he coughed out, “can go through them.”

Vic said, “It’s not right, look.” He showed his phone to Dick. “That info is for lambskin condoms, not the normal latex ones,” Vic said.

“But this says even those are 16% ineffective,” Dick said as he passed the phone to Gar. “He inverted the figure.”

Vic snickered.

“In summary, again, abstinence is the way to go,” the teacher wrapped up. Then he heaved a sigh of relief and announced now they were going to watch a video.

The video was a horrific series of descriptions of STD’s, which ended without any indication of how to prevent them. Or even get them.

Gar craned his neck back towards Victor. “Condoms prevent these, right, Vic?”

Vic tried to remember. “Some, not all.”

Gar’s eyes went round. “Which ones?”

“Man, you have Google too,” Victor responded, kicking the back of Gar’s chair.

When the video ended, the seminar was finally over. The three rejoined Kori and Raven in the hallway, who were coming from the girls’ side of the lesson.

“Did you guys learn anything new?” Gar asked them. “I didn’t.”

“Actually? No,” said Raven. “Miss Mae only talked about menstruation. She pretended nothing else existed.”

“Damn. At least we got the scary pictures of diseases,” said Vic.

Dick said, “I got more from the book that was mysteriously left on my bed when I was ten.”

“Ten? That’s so early,” said Gar.

“Not if you’re folding sex stuff in with puberty stuff,” said Dick. “What, did you guys get the Talk from an actual human?”

“The library was my teacher,” said Raven.

“You mean…” Vic prompted.

“Let’s just say I’ve had an adult library card since I was in middle school,” Raven said simply, not looking at anyone. “I didn’t mean to find what I found. I just found it.”

The others laughed as Raven nonchalantly took a swig from her water bottle.

“My uncle took care of the Talk for me,” said Vic. “He told me way too much.”

“Okay,” said Gar, to signal he was about to launch into a story. “So Rita told me one day Steve was gonna give me the Talk, right? And I was dreading it for days. But then nothing happened, so I forgot about it. Then one day, like a month later, Steve bursts into my room, all nervous. He points at me, goes, You know what condoms are, right? I said, Sure. And he said Don’t be an idiot. Then he left.”

Kori felt hot even as she laughed with the others; she could tell they were all just pretending to be casual about this conversation. It didn’t escape her notice that they weren’t looking at each other, and the laughter between anecdotes was nervous. “My mother had always taught me,” she said herself. “She managed before I began traveling.”

Vic was laughing with his friends one moment, and the next, like a sign from the universe, Marcy came into his field of vision. Victor could always pick out his ex-girlfriend in a crowd very easily—she was the one keeping her gaze down and trying to scurry past as quickly as possible without Vic seeing her.

He almost felt he’d summoned her. Vic’s uncle had given him the Talk when he started dating her. Not that he’d ever had the chance to put any of his new knowledge to work; they were only freshmen then, and they dated for four months.

And then the accident happened.

He tried to push the thoughts aside and get back into the conversation with his friends. He would gratify his ex by pretending he didn’t see her, like she wanted him to.

Vic had been standing in line for his coffee for several minutes now. When some sort of internal clock told him the person in front of him was taking way longer than her allotted time, he put his phone away and tuned back to the world around him.

Apparently, the girl in front of him was short on money, and she was trying to convince the guy at the cashier to cut her some slack, all she wanted was a fruit bowl, he could keep the stupid complementary juice and let her pay a reduced price, to which he adamantly told her he was not allowed to do that.

Victor had noticed Jenny Hex at school before. She had a… peculiar way of dressing. It was a mix between goth and that Japanese fashion trend of dressing like little girls in a pretend tea party Vic could never remember the name of. Right now she was wearing a purple vest over a frilly black shirt, a purple and black skirt, and torn black tights. Her light brown pigtails bobbed angrily as she argued.

Vic heard the argument a while longer before he decided to take matters into his own hands.

He moved forward. “I’ll pay the difference.”

Jenny glowered at him, and sustained the glare while he placed his own order and paid for his coffee plus her two missing quarters. Vic didn’t particularly care she wasn’t happy with him. He’d done it to speed his own day along, not as a favor for her.

Her frown eased and she received her food, and she suddenly smiled at him.

“Since you helped pay my meal, come sit with me.”

And she made his decision easier by pulling on his jacket to drag him along.

Since he’d arrived at the table by coercion, Vic was surprised when he found himself easily conversing with Jen.

She said she was going to her gym just now, but she was starving, she just wanted a few carbs to pull her through. Victor asked what gym she went to.

“The Dark Side Gym.”

And Vic echoed, “The Dark Side Gym? We just got one in this city, right?”

“Yep, it’s brand new.” Jenny cocked her head at him. Her eyes were of a washed-out blue and they stared at him closely, in a way that reminded him of a cat that wanted something. “You’ve heard about it.”

“I heard they’re all super elitist.”

“Well, my dad pulled some strings to get me in.”

“Lucky,” he muttered.

“My middle name,” she smiled.

“So is it true it’s like an obstacle course-based thing where two teams fight for a token?” Vic asked. Rumors about the gym said the exclusivity was due to it having questionable practices, letting people act as in a no holds barred match.

“No, it’s like that, but a tad more illegal,” Jen said, with a completely straight face. Swinging her bag on her shoulder, she smiled at him. “You wanna come with?”

“Uh…” Vic hesitated, “I don’t know if it’s my kind of scene.”

“Well how will you know if you don’t try it?”

Vic had been on his way home to do a ton of homework. But he found himself fascinated by the way his day could potentially change like this. Jenny seemed so carefree, she made him feel carefree too.

“Well… okay!” he decided.

He sprang from his seat and followed after her.

When they go to the gym, Jen used her ID to let them both in. She told Vic not to worry about it—the instructor liked her, he’d be fine with it.

If it had been a few weeks earlier, he would have worried he was out of shape, as he’d been out of the game for months at that point. Now, thanks to Dick’s decision of making them train, he felt up for the challenge.

He’d trained hard the last few weeks, because he’d missed it, mostly, and also because competing with Dick was a fantastic incentive. He thought Dick had been thinking along the same lines about him. Of course, when Victor had actually gotten to Dick’s training room, he and Dick both realized it was Kori they had to set their sights on. On the first day, she’d casually strode to Dick’s squat rack and lifted the barbell as it was, before Dick could warn her it wasn’t adjusted. That had been 300 pounds.

The three boys had stared. They had slowly turned from Kori to Raven, as if questioning why she looked unfazed. “Told you,” she’d said. “Car, bare hands.”

So Kori was their champion. Vic and Dick went toe to toe. Raven and Gar were slower on the uptake; they were the only ones who had never trained or pursued a sport. But Raven learned fast, and Gar was agile. Vic had faith they would get there.

Beyond the main desk, Victor followed Jen through a corridor. The sounds of cheering and whistles came louder and louder, until they reached a door, and walked out to a wide space, ending in a balcony. This was where everyone was. Jenny ran and leaned over on the railing. Below and around them was an entire stadium. People cheered to an arena all the way down below, where two teams wrestled each other for a flag in an elaborate, inter-divided obstacle course.

He was beginning to get what Jen meant by illegal. One of the players had broken off a bit of a Styrofoam obstacle and was trying to coke another kid with it.

Jen didn’t let them hang. She pulled Vic back into the main building, where she stopped at the sight of a tall, bald man in a purple tracksuit. “That’s the teacher,” she told Vic, and made them run over. “Mr. Simon! Vic, Mr. Simon is our instructor here at the Dark Side Gym.” She had put on a sweeter tone, one Vic had heard when she addressed some of their teachers.

Vic put out his hand. “Hi. Victor Stone.”

The man shook it. “My name is Mr. Simon Jones, the P is silent.”

“…The P where?”

“Mr. Simon, we have a four-people team today,” Jen said.

“I’ll choose your enemies carefully,” the teacher nodded. “Victor, I don’t know how much Jenny has told you. In my gym, we don’t limit ourselves. We celebrate people’s different capabilities here. Anything goes.” The man smiled and leaned in. “I look forward to seeing you in action.” He looked Vic up and down in a way that made him frankly uncomfortable.

Right, thought Vic, the prosthetics. This man wanted to see what capabilities those gave him.

Jen pulled him along through the building, and took him into a locker room, where she introduced her team. “That’s Gizmo, the brains. That’s Mammoth, the dumb muscle.”

Victor looked at the two. He’d seen them at school, too. Mammoth was a hulking, hairy eighteen-year-old freshman, with ashen skin and long ginger hair. He was the kind of big kid people had expected to see go into football or wrestling, but he’d been content to keep detention as his only extracurricular. Gizmo was the eleven-year-old prodigy who’d been bumped to their high school; they said his temper tantrums cleared out any room he was in.

Neither of them were the people he’d expected to see here, especially little Gizmo… but he guessed it was the different capabilities thing again.

He also couldn’t think those were their real names.

“Are we all using codenames?” asked Vic tentatively.

“Yes,” replied Jen. “Keep up, Stone.”

Neither of the others looked happy to see Vic there.

“What the frick, Jinx?” Gizmo demanded, pulling his green-rimmed goggles over his bald head. “We were supposed to go against Rock, Paper and Scissors! Now what loser team are we gonna get?”

Jen snapped, “That’s up for Simon to decide, now shut up and look happy about our new teammate!”

Clearly, Jen ruled through fear.

“We didn’t need a new teammate,” grunted Mammoth.

Jen glared at him in turn. “As if The Fearsome Four doesn’t sound so much better than The Fearsome Three.”

Sure enough, when it was time for the match they were introduced as The Fearsome Four. They ended up going against The Card Tricks: Diamond, Club, Heart and Spade.

Only as they were going out into the arena Vic noticed Jen hadn’t changed clothes, like he’d expected her to when they went into a locker room. It was too late to ask if she planned on fighting in a skirt. He guessed it was part of Anything Goes.

They went out into the arena. Mr. Simon had taken center stage, in an elevated podium.

“The rules are but one. Obtain the flag through any means necessary, then take it to the end of the arena. The winning team gets to keep the flag, and your enemy’s undying hatred. And this box of chocolates from our sponsors at Mother Kettle’s Candy Factory.” He showed off the box to the crowd. It was a decent-sized box, twenty chocolates or so.

The fighting started when the teacher sat down; there was no whistle. Jen took the lead, shooting out to get the girl who had a heart on her shirt.

Mammoth took the Club, tackling the boy with an unnecessary amount of force. Gizmo waited until the one wearing Diamond got close enough, then he electrocuted her with a hidden gadget. Vic understood the anything goes motto more.

Spade went for Vic. Vic ducked under the boy’s arms and held him off. He pushed Spade away and squared off; but the other boy suddenly shook and went down, electrocuted by Gizmo.

“What’s the point of being so big if you can’t even take them out properly?” Gizmo demanded.

Vic could, of course he could; he was holding back. He looked up. On the podium, Simon was frowning at him, looking mildly disappointed.

They Fearsome Four went through the door to the next stage of the obstacle course.

On the other side was a series of platforms, too high for a human stride. On top, needing you to crane your neck to see it, the flag was hooked.

…Even the arena didn’t look like it was made with fairness in mind.

“How are we gonna get to that?” asked Vic.

Gizmo sneered at him. “You clearly don’t know about Jinx.”

Jen had ran to the end of the room. She broke into a run and lunged into a handspring that landed her on the first platform, and then a series of unbroken, precise flips took her to the top. She landed elegantly on her feet, collected the flag, turned around and bowed to the crowd.

On the ground, Vic whispered, “Whoa.”

They hadn’t noticed the other team get into this room, and by the time they noticed, Spade and Heart were tearing at the pole that held the platforms together. At the top, Jen’s platform wobbled and she struggled to keep her balance. Vic’s blood ran cold. If anything went, anything could happen.

He realized a second later they didn’t really mean to knock Jen off the platform, only to knock off the other platforms and give her no way to come down before the clock ran out, but by that time Vic had made up his mind.

He ran to the door. Gizmo yelled at him to come back, because Club and Diamond were trying to keep him and Mammoth from jumping their teammates, but Vic ignored him. He grabbed at the ten-foot wall that separated them from the other section of the arena. It was painted acrylic, and just as he thought, his arms could break it off easily. The crowd got louder when he did. He fetched the material and laid it against the top platform, securing it until Jenny could slide down. Then he went back and knocked Spade out for Gizmo.

Vic and Jen laughed as they walked away from the gym.

“I still can’t believe you tore down the divider wall!” she laughed.

“Hey, the Card Jerks broke the arena first,” Vic laughed back, and took another chocolate from their half of the box. “Isn’t it counter-productive that a gym would give out chocolate as a prize?”

“This isn’t a regular gym, Vic,” Jenny replied.

“I gathered that, funnily enough.”

He hadn’t felt so energized in a long time. Dick’s training was different from football; the Gym had been another world still. There, he didn’t have to think about whether he was using a fair amount of strength. He could use his edge. He could play dirty. “Not bad for a first day, huh?”

“Oh, I knew you’d make yourself useful. What’d you think, I chose you for your caring personality?” Jen stopped at the end of a street. “This is me. Unless you wanna walk me all the way to my front door. But you don’t wanna risk your jock friends seeing you with me.”

Vic laughed because of how off the mark she was. It was always a small comfort, to find out how little people on the outside noticed about your life.

That time he’d left his old friends on the football field was the last time he ever spoke to them. The next day, he’d glowered at them, and Seth had kept Zach from going over, and that was it for that. Now they were all pretending their friendship had never existed.

But he pushed all of that out of his mind to quickly reply, “Why would I mind being seen with a pretty girl?”

With a satisfied glint in her eyes, Jenny smiled, got closer and said, “You stink, Stone. You need a shower. See you in school!” And she skipped down the street.

Victor watched her for a moment, before shaking his head and going on his own way.

His mood somewhat deteriorated as he dragged himself home, because he knew his dad would be there. Silas Stone was still in his lab coat as he unloaded TV dinners on the kitchen counter. He grinned up at Vic when he entered, his overgrown grey moustache curving upwards in a goofy expression Vic hated. He kept smiling as he watched Vic get some filtered water from the fridge.

“How’s the socket pain coming along?” Silas asked. “I see you can move your elbow more freely now.”

“I could weeks ago.”

“Huh.” Silas didn’t lose his bouncy tone. “Nice of you to tell me. We did agree you’d keep me in the loop.”

“My doctor’s up to date, so,” Vic grunted.

He went through the fridge and blocked out his father. For fifteen years, Silas had never known what was going on with his son’s life. He’d never known about Vic’s nutrition plans or training routine or practice times. He’d never shown up to a game or a competition. Now, suddenly, he wanted to know everything, just because Victor was part machine. He’d had to become a cyborg for his dad to understand and care and see him.

“By the way,” Silas started. “Friday two weeks for now, I’m hosting the annual research fundraiser thing. It’s my turn, what you gonna do? You’re gonna wanna be out of the house that night, as per usual, hm?”

“Yeah,” replied Vic without listening.

What was he talking about? Oh, right, the annual fundraiser. Vic hadn’t gone since he was a kid. He’d always had something better to do starting at age twelve. But this year, it was different. This year he had only freshmen friends who hadn’t seen any good parties yet, as far as he knew. Maybe he could show them one—make it up to them for consistently being an asshole for the first few weeks they knew him.

Vic turned on his favor-asking voice. “Hey, dad? What if I came this year, with my friends?”

(Months ago, when Vic had still been recovering in a STAR Labs bed, when he’d been in pain and miserable and indifferent to everything, that was when Silas had bought him his car. Back then it hadn’t cheered Vic up. How could it, when he was in pain, in denial, in horror of what Silas had done to him? Only way later, when he got back up and could bear to start thinking of the future again, making plans and feeling some acceptance and hope for his life, only then he’d come to appreciate the gift. The car was much nicer than what they had agreed on before Vic’s accident. That was when Victor had understood Silas had decided to mitigate his guilt the only way he knew how: with gifts.)

Now Silas turned, and said, “Sure!” with emotion, relieved as he only got nowadays when he could do something for Vic.

Vic made sure to respond casually, nodding soberly in response. If he started looking too happy, Silas might start acting like a careless jerk again.

Chapter Text

“I’m just saying,” said Dick, closing his locker, “we might be more motivated to train if we were moving towards mastering something.”

“Okay, but weapons?” replied Raven.

“When I started learning with throwing stars, it was a load of fun,” Dick said.

“Shouldn’t we master the basics first?” Raven insisted.

“Yeah, basics,” said Gar. “Like laying down. Maybe someday, sitting.” His words were due to the fact that every muscle in his body ached.

“I support the weapons,” said Kori. “Our enemies will grab anything to stop us. We must be prepared.”

Raven looked from her to Dick, who was nodding vigorously. “I think you two are getting ahead of yourselves.”

“Oh, here comes Vic,” said Dick, seeing him walking down the hallway. His opinion would be the one to break the tie. But Vic walked right past Dick’s locker and beyond. Dick snorted. “There goes Vic.”

Vic only stopped further away, at Jenny’s locker, where she received him with a smile.

The four shared a smile. That was something else that had happened unexpectedly over the last few days. Those two had been meeting between classes and talking a lot. They had even seen Vic carrying Jenny’s books into class at one point.

Dick finally got Vic’s opinions on training with weapons in lunch period. “Hmm,” Vic said. “If we’re training for the real world, it makes sense to introduce weapons. But let’s do it at the start of training and then keep mostly working basics.”

“Okay, I can live with that,” said Dick, and it was decided. Then he smiled. “So. You and Jen, huh?”

Vic scratched his head, smiling and coloring brightly. “I know it’s weird. It just happened.”

It was weird—but Vic looked happy, happier than they had ever known him. He laughed more easily, and he’d stopping pulling up the hood of his jacket whenever he possibly could—like his life was aligning to his idea of how it should be, or maybe like his idea of life was aligning to what he had. Like he was coming out of his shell, anyhow.

“Are you… dating?” Kori asked, and it being a colloquial term, she was proud of herself for feeling confident enough to use it.

Vic said, “We’re talking,” which floored Kori and set her back all over again.

“Why’d you like her?” Gar asked, genuinely curious.

Vic shrugged, smiling. “I just do.” He reached over and ruffled Gar’s hair. “You’ll understand when you’re older, green bean.”

Gar shook his hand away. “Hey! I understand now!”

“…And then, Jen made up a long-winded story to prove she was the bar owner’s niece, and she actually got us in!” Victor related to Dick, Raven and Kori.

“Was this before or after you had to jump a fence to get out of that party the cops busted?” Raven asked.

“I don’t remember!” Vic exclaimed. “Man, what a night.”

Then Gar walked into the clubroom, and closed the door behind himself with a bang.

“You guys really thought I wouldn’t find out?” he asked dramatically, looking alternately at Dick, Raven and Victor. “You really thought I wouldn’t know what you were keeping from me?”

“Gar, what do you mean?” asked Kori, getting concerned.

Gar produced a paper and slapped it on the table. It turned out to be a black and white print of the online city newspaper.

“Jump City has its own haunted house urban legend!” Gar exclaimed. “And you never thought to tell me?”

“I forgot you loved spooky stuff,” said Vic. “And now I see how you’re reacting, I’m glad I didn’t tell you.”

“Did you print this out just to make a scene?” asked Raven.

Gar ignored them both. “Dudes! This is our next big mission thing! We have to go check it out!”

“How is this a mission?” asked Dick. “It’s not even a mystery. It’s a money trap for middle-schoolers.”

“Yeah, how does this translate to helping the student body or whatever it is we’re doing?” asked Vic.

“We’re cleaning the city!” said Gar. “Defending our fellow citizens!”

“You just wanna go to a haunted house,” said Raven.

Gar grinned in response, as if admitting the accusation, but then he kept arguing his point. “Look, I looked into it. This thing is not a business. No one knows who the owner is.”

“Okay, you may have a point there,” admitted Dick. “No one ever understood how the haunted house operated.”

“What if… it’s not even fake?” said Gar, and let the question linger dramatically in the air as he leaned back slowly.

“Oh, it’s fake,” said Vic. “Trust me. I went in sixth grade.”

“Well, say what you will, but I’m turning Dick around,” said Gar, crossing his arms.

“I’m not turned around,” argued Dick. “I just hadn’t noticed before. That house is unregulated.”

Despite his protest, the others could see he was being turned. Dick had incredibly expressive eyebrows. Either that or they were all so used to not seeing his actual eyes that they had learnt to tell his expressions by the merest morsels of a gesture—he always wore sunglasses so they had to. Right now, they could see plain as day that his curiosity was spiked.

Vic shook his head and got up from the table. “Anyway, you guys don’t forget tonight is the party.”

“It was black tie, right?” asked Dick.

“Yes, but really wear whatever you want,” said Vic.

“Good, ‘cause I’m not wearing a dress,” said Raven.

“I don’t even know what black tie means,” said Gar.

“It means you wear a tuxedo or an evening gown,” said Dick.

“Yeah, I don’t have either,” replied Gar.

“We will be there at the appointed time, sharply,” promised Kori.

“Yeah, or, you know, come whenever,” said Vic, making Kori and Dick exchange a puzzled look as he went out the door.

The four rang Vic’s door at nine pm anyway.

Kori stood in full-length gold dress. She touched a hand to her updo, and looked nervously at Raven, in black jeans and a black shirt with long flared sleeves under a blue jacket. Raven’s style was too dark for Kori’s taste, but it was constant, just like Raven herself was unflappable; she was elegant in everyday life and she didn’t go all out for special occasions. Her feathery black hair was down and her makeup was the same she wore to school. She wore the same black and gold rings, black stone earrings, and the big gold necklace with the red stone she always wore, not to mention the jewel on her forehead.

Kori pulled at her white evening gloves. Clearly one of them had gotten it wrong.

“I do fear I committed overdressing,” she said.

“No, Kori, you’re fine,” said Dick, reassuringly. Dick was the only one that seemed comfortable with his life choices; in a tuxedo, he knew he was dressed correctly. “I mean it’s not like you wore a band shirt, a multicolor hat, and stuck on a bowtie like it was a necklace,” he said, looking directly at Gar.

Gar, who was indeed wearing exactly that, said, “Hey, don’t hate.” He stood on his tiptoes in order to drape an arm around Raven. “Raven and me are chill. We don’t need fancy black tie stuff.”

Raven shook him off. “Don’t group me in with you.”

But Kori thought the disparity between her and Raven in particular must reflect badly on them as friends. She knew –she’d seen it in movies- that normal female friends got ready together, and agreed to ending up looking similar, but she already hadn’t dared ask Raven to get ready together for tonight, and now she suffered the consequences. Raven herself didn’t seem nervous, but she always seemed comfortable in her skin. Kori wished she knew what that felt like.

They were admitted. The house was unexpectedly big when it was uncluttered, cleaned and well-lit. There were tables along the walls with finger food, and soberly dressed scientists filled the room.

They spotted Victor and Jen immediately, because Jen was in a purple corset, with a wide black tulle skirt, complete with fingerless gloves and even a tiny frilly hat resting sideways on her head.

“Well, you don’t have to worry about standing out now,” Raven told Kori. “She outdid you.”

Vic, in a grey tuxedo with no tie, saw them and made his way over, boisterously saying, “Guys! You made it!”

The six of them were the only kids in sight.

Gar leaned in close to Vic. “Dude, there’s alcohol here, right? Can I get some?”

Vic shrugged. “Go right ahead.”

Gar sprinted into the party. He was on a mission to get drunk for the first time.

A second later, Silas approached them. “You must be Vic’s new friends. It’s great to finally meet you.”

They murmured likewise. Vic’s dad was two heads shorter than his son, slender but for a considerable belly that seemed more obvious by his wearing a slightly poor-fitting tuxedo. He seemed particularly personable and good-natured.

“Now, listen, kids,” he said. “There’s alcohol at this party, but the waiters won’t serve you. I will let you have champagne with the toast at midnight, but that’s all. I hope you can forgive me.” He smiled as Victor rolled his eyes. “But I don’t want your parents at my throat.”

From a vantage point, Dick could see Gar was on the prowl as Silas talked to them. He observed Gar observing a couple talking animatedly, waiting until they left their glasses on the table, skulking behind them, taking the drinks and walking away.

Silas showed them into the party. Kori was at ease quickly; she was used to this kind of formal parties. She began hoping there would be dancing. Getting a dance with Dick would be nice.

Dick was also used to these parties. Too used to them—he was quickly bored.

Raven walked around the party, picking at the food, looking at people. She wandered upstairs, to an area previously too cluttered to pass, away from the noise. She bumped into what looked like a private library, and stayed to check out what books Vic’s father had.

Gar approached Dick and Kori, carrying two glasses. “You guys want these? I keep getting water.”

“Why’d you go for the clear liquid?” Dick asked, grabbing a glass, if only because it made them look less suspicious.

“I keep thinking it’s gonna be vodka,” explained Gar.

“There’s no vodka,” supplied Vic. “There’s wine, champagne, whisky and brandy.”

“Don’t help him,” said Dick through gritted teeth, though Gar had already bolted back into action.

On watching for abandoned glasses, he ran straight into Jen, who looked at him with disgust. “You’re an amateur,” she told him, and she moved the window curtain to reveal several open bottles of red and white wine, which she had presumably lifted from the kitchen.

Gar hung out with her for the next while.

Raven was skimming a tome on Philosophy when the door bust open. In came a man and a woman locked in a passionate kiss, who closed the door after them. Then the woman discovered Raven, slapped her partner’s chest, and they both stood frozen. Raven raised an eyebrow at them.

When she walked back out into the party, the dancing had started.

Victor took Jen out on the floor almost immediately.

He knew his friends were wondering at him for pursuing Jen. He himself saw it was odd. But he was reveling in liking a girl he wouldn’t have been able to go for before.

He liked Jen because she liked him as he was, with his new body, while the girls he knew from before didn’t know how to talk to him anymore—Marcy couldn’t even look at him.

But he’d never even talked to Jen before the accident. And here she was, agreeing to be with him. Not because of a shared past history, but because she liked him as he was now.

Plus, he was thriving off doing what felt right and not necessarily knowing what he was doing. All his life he had toed an imaginary line because he’d thought he’d get to reap the benefits; he’d thought it meant things would go his way. Now he’d lost his body, his status at school, his prospects for the future, his whole life as he knew it—he decided he wanted to see another way of living. Something closer to Jen’s wildness. He wanted to stop thinking and just have fun.

Dancing now, Jenny told him, “You never would have looked at a girl like me twice before.”

She was wearing a sly smile, but Vic hated to think she felt insecure about that, deep down. He kept smiling down at her. “And that would have been my mistake.”

She smiled wide. “Are you ever not perfect?”

Her face sobered when he got closer. She closed her eyes as he dipped down and kissed her.

After the chaste kiss, still inches away from his face, Jen smirked. “You wanna blow this joint?”

Kori observed the two sneaking out of the house, giddy in their own world, and felt a pang of yearning. She turned back to Dick and returned to her previous occupation, which was trying to think of how to hint that she would like to dance. She started off with a simple one. “Do you enjoy dancing?”

Dick almost said No, not at all, because that was the truth. But he got it was an invitation right before he said it, and smiled at Kori. “I never liked it,” he told her. “But then I haven’t done it in a while.”

He offered his hand, and when Kori took it, a couple strode to them—the man held up an unconscious Gar in front of them. Kori gasped.

“I believe this belongs to you?” said the man.

Silas held the door open as his guests filed out one by one, about two hours before they were supposed to, cheerfully offering his apologies. He closed the door after the last person and then went to the kitchen, where his son’s friends were. He pointed at Gar, sprawled out on the couch. “How’s the patient?”

“He’s breathing,” replied Raven.

“We’re keeping an eye on him,” said Dick. “He’ll be fine if he can sleep it off.”

“You know you’re not supposed to try and sober him up with coffee or a cold shower?” asked Silas.

“Yes, and we must keep him on his side,” said Kori. “We have just googled it.”

“Well, when he wakes up, tell him he made this party an incredibly entertaining one for a change,” Silas grinned. “Now, I’m gonna make you three some hot chocolate, and- no, no, I’ll hear no objections against it,” he remarked over the three kids’ protests.

As he made the chocolate, he asked them if they knew whether his son was coming back tonight.

The three exchanged a look. Dick said, “Uh, he didn’t say anything to us, Mr. Stone.”

“Please, call me Silas,” he said, and smiled at them over his shoulder. “I’m glad to see my Victor surrounded by nice kids,” he said, and they had to wonder what his standard of ‘nice kids’ was, given the current situation they were in. “He’s going through a rough time, getting used to a whole new life.”

He placed four mugs of chocolate on the table and sat with them to drink his own.

There was a palpable awkwardness in the room. Tonight was the first time they talked to Vic’s dad, and he was much friendlier and more pleasant than Vic’s comments and anger against him had led them to believe.

“My Victor was always such a driven boy,” Silas said. “So goal-oriented. Things had to be this way, they had to fit a plan, or it was no good. It was always a football scholarship for a great school or nothing else. I keep telling him, believe in fate, don’t try to control everything, things happen for a reason, but he hated me saying that even before the accident, let alone after.” He finished his drink and smiled at them. “But take me for example. My father trained me to be a film developer like him. He was determined I take over the shop someday. But film developing died—you kids don’t even know what I’m talking about! And I had to go back to school, in my thirties. I picked something that looked fun, and here I am, years later, a successful scientist. I loved film developing and I also love what I do now. Life works out no matter what.” He set his empty mug down and looked at the time. “Well, I’m going to bed. You kids will be alright?”

Dick stirred. “Yeah, uh, we’ll just call and Uber and get Gar-”

“Oh, no! It’s late. Please stay here.” Silas moved up. “If you get up before I do, help yourself to anything in the fridge, though I’m pretty sure I’ll beat you to it.” He stopped and pointed at Gar. “And for him, there’s Advil in the bathroom upstairs. He’s gonna have a rough time tomorrow.” He left his mug on the sink and then disappeared up the stairs.

“Okay, he’s insanely nice,” said Raven once he was out of earshot.

“Yeah, who else wouldn’t give us crap about this shit show?” Dick echoed, motioning at Gar, who was shivering on the coach under two blankets. He looked at Kori and nodded at her phone. “By the way. Nothing?”

“Victor does not respond,” she said.

“Let’s just go to sleep,” decided Dick. He collected all their mugs and began to wash them on the sink; it felt like the least he could do.

Raven noticed Gar was still wearing the stupid bowtie. If he needed to throw up on the night something on his throat would get on the way. She went to sit on the couch and untie it. Gar’s eyes fluttered open at the touch and focused on her, reassuring her that he really was just sleeping and not unconscious, before they closed again. She left the bowtie on the armrest. “Are we gonna leave him here?” she asked the others.

“Yeah,” said Dick. “I’ll sleep on the floor and keep an eye on him. You guys take Vic’s bedroom.”

Dick woke up the next morning to Gar shaking him awake. “Dick, we’re going to the haunted house today, right?”

“Yeah, we’re still going, Gar,” he answered groggily. He couldn’t open his eyes completely. There was Gar’s face and the entire sun behind it. No one had drawn any curtains the night before.

Gar skipped over Dick’s body and went to the fridge.

“Silas says to help ourselves to any food,” Dick told him.

“I know, I heard him,” Gar replied. “There’s no fruit here.”

Dick sat up on the floor and looked at him. “How are you feeling, Gar?”

“Fine, why?”

Dick watched him skip around the kitchen. “Because you got blackout drunk last night,” he said, watching his friend change his mind about being in the kitchen and go knock on Vic’s door instead.

“Girls, wake up!” he called. “Today’s the day we go to the haunted house!”

Dick watched in puzzlement as Gar went back to the kitchen and went through the pantry. “Ooh, cool, oatmeal.” He got a bowl and a spoon and sat to the counter.

“Why aren’t you hungover?” asked Dick.

Gar paused, shrugged at him, and began to eat.

“Huh,” went Dick, getting up and folding the blanket he’d been sleeping on. “Maybe everything they tell you about hangovers isn’t true.”

The girls got out and they all had breakfast. Silas’ prediction had been wrong: they had beat him in getting up.

“Vic had replied,” Kori let them know.

Gar said, “Make sure he’s coming tonight.”

“No, wait,” Dick stopped her, and grabbed his own phone. “It’s time we made a group chat.”

Chapter Text

Dick, Kori and Raven heard Gar arrive with Vic and Jen before they saw them—the two boys were arguing on the way.

“…not with how you pretended to be drunk last night,” Vic was saying.

“I didn’t pretend! Why’d you keep saying that?” Gar protested.

“There’s no way you didn’t get so much as a headache today. You’re faking it!”

“Dick, did I or did I not drop into the floor last night?” Gar asked Dick directly, because they’d gotten to where Dick and the girls were.

“Yes, you did have to be picked up and carried around,” Dick muttered.

“See!?”

“Did he throw up?” Victor asked Dick.

“Nope.”

So Vic crossed his arms stubbornly. “Then it’s bullshit.”

“It’s not! I’ll show you next time!” said Gar.

“Next time you pull the same crap?” demanded Dick. “Tell me when it’s gonna be so I won’t be there.”

Meanwhile, Jen had gingerly gone on to the girls. “Hey, guys.”

“Hi, Jen,” Raven and Kori dutifully returned.

They had never interacted before.

Jen cocked her head at Raven. “You were in jeans at the party too. You don’t like to even try to look pretty, do you?” She turned to Kori. “And you like to try way too hard.”

Kori just looked stunned at the sudden aggression, but Raven dished it back for both of them. “This coming from someone who dresses like a Victorian doll come alive?”

Jen grinned; it seemed she was only recharged by open hostility. Right now she was wearing Victor’s old letterman jacket. It clashed with the rest of her frilly outfit tremendously, but Vic thought she got a kick out of how the sleeves went really far past her hands. She swung her arms so they flapped around right now, as she shot back at Raven, “Don’t be jealous. Not everyone was born to look awesome.”

Vic went forth before a fight could break out. “Uh, babe.” He took Jenny aside and grinned sheepishly at Raven and Kori. “It’s just her sense of humor.”

“Right,” muttered Raven.

Victor realized that up until that moment, he’d subconsciously thought Jen and Raven would get along well. It was only when he saw them together that he had the strong sense that it would never, ever happen—though he’d still be hard-pressed to explain exactly why.

Dick coughed. “Uh, can we focus on what we came to do?” he said lowly. He always felt strangely self-conscious about the whole Project Club thing with a third party around.

Jen seemed to be able to smell fear, because she turned on Dick. “Oh, Vic told me all about this missions thing. Aren’t you guys a little old for playing superhero?”

“That’s not what we’re doing,” Dick mumbled.

“I’m focused!” cried Gar. This was his ideal mission and he wasn’t going to let anyone ruin it. He looked around eagerly. “Where’s the house?”

Vic pointed ahead. “You’re looking at it.”

Gar observed the house. It was old, yes, but that was about it. It didn’t even have some gothic façade. It just sported the same New England style as the rest of the houses around it. Some windows were barred, but that didn’t look out of place for the neighborhood either.

Gar would have been lying if he said he wasn’t a little disappointed. He wanted to say This is it?, but what he said was, “…Alright! Awesome!”

“Is this the correct address?” asked Kori.

“Look at the sign right there,” said Vic.

There was a half-hearted yard sign that said ‘Historic Haunted House for Children’. Gar let it hearten him.

“Maybe it’s not even open,” said Dick.

“I mean it’s a Saturday,” said Vic.

“Yeah, but it’s also February,” said Raven.

Gar said, “It’s not a haunted house attraction. It’s just a haunted house. It’s gonna be haunted year round.” He went forth. “Come on! We’re braving this house, and if it’s a hoax, we’ll expose it!” The others followed. He turned the knob and the door opened. He smiled back at the rest. “Ha! See? It’s open!”

The inside of the house was dark, chilly and deserted. An entrance hall led to a double staircase, with a door on the ground floor between them. Next to the front door, a sign said ‘Pick your path’. A layer of dirt covered everything.

Dick said what they were all thinking. “This is it? This is just someone’s home!”

“Vic, is this as you remember when you visited as a child?” asked Kori.

“I don’t know,” Vic replied. “It was a long time ago.” He looked around again. He didn’t feel like he’d ever been in this place at all. And he’d loved the place as a kid; it had seemed really magical.

“What now?” asked Jen, grinning. “Do we look for clues in the spooky old house? To solve the spooky mystery?”

Vic coughed. “Uh, so you enter through this door, you go through the house, and you leave out the backdoor. That I do remember.”

“Why’s this so empty?” insisted Dick. “It looks abandoned.”

Jen focused on him. “Are you purposefully looking for a mystery to distract you from the fact that you’re using a Saturday night to investigate a business meant for little children?”

Dick looked like he was about to explode.

Vic raised a finger. “Do you guys wanna split up?”

“Yes!” went Dick, Raven and Gar at the same time.

Raven and Gar took the stairs to the right.

That door led to a lounge-like room. Though covered in dust, the room fulfilled Raven’s inner decorative goals. Moonlight filtered through the barred windows and made everything look beautiful. Raven picked up a statue of a creepy angel with red eyes, admiring it. For a haunted house for kids, the relics looked elegant and expensive.

“Shouldn’t there be actors by now?” she asked Gar. “I mean how do we know where we’re meant to go now?”

“Don’t worry, I got this,” said Gar, sauntering confidently towards the three doors at the end of the room. He would die before he admitted he’d never been to a haunted house before. “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe! Come on!”

They opened the door and came face to face with a zombie.

It was an admirable portrayal. The person had flawless decaying skin, thin hair and rotting clothes. Gar opened his mouth to say, “Heh, you wanted actors.”

But then the zombie unhinged his jaw and let out an unearthly scream, and his jaw fell all the way to his chest, held on by a layer skin. Gar and Raven heard themselves scream and Gar shut the door on instinct.

They pushed their backs to the door on the other side, and breathed hard.

“Okay, that was… good,” said Raven, voice shaky.

Gar forced himself to laugh. “Really good.”

He glanced up at Raven nervously, to see if there was more to her words, because there was definitely more to his. Both of them glanced at each other out of the corner of their eyes, trying to see if the other was doubting the fakeness of this house, like they themselves were.

Dick and Kori took the door on the ground floor, which led to the dining room.

Dick thought it was as underwhelming as the entrance hall. It was simply old and dirty. The nicest thing to do was watch Kori explore the room, stopping at intervals and looking at things with care and interest.

“Are we meant to… investigate?” Dick wondered aloud. “Nothing jumps out at me.”

And then he heard a rustle behind them.

“Gah!” he made out, as a very pale, yellow-eyed woman pounced on him. Her hands dug into his arms like claws.

“Turn back! Don’t trust the Doctor!” she screeched.

The lights went out. When they came back on, she was gone. Dick reeled.

Kori had rushed to him. “Are you alright?”

He’d tried really hard not to jump at the first scare in front of Kori. He fixed his face.

“I hate places where the actors can touch you,” he replied, dusting himself off.

He had to commend the quality, though. The image burnt in his mind was of black stringy hair, a completely white face, yellow eyes and long ears. A vampire; a very convincing one.

They both jumped at a screech on the opposite side. One of the doors on the opposite wall was closing; they managed so see the edge of a white dress escape through it before it did.

Dick put a brave face on. “Pretty sure we’re meant to follow that.”

This place was way too good for children.

Jen and Victor took the stairs to the left. They walked around a library until Vic saw a paper stuck on the wall. “Oh, this I remember. There’s instructions!”

Jenny said, “Instructions? Great. Now we have homework.”

“We just follow them and get through the house,” said Vic, smiling.

“Here’s an idea. What if we ditch your friends, go out the front door and get burgers?”

“You can’t go back out the front door in a haunted house. You have to go all the way through and out the exit door. Everyone knows that.” He ignored his girlfriend’s glare and read the note. “Follow the crumbled pieces that the Doctor left our lives.”

“What the hell does that mean?” reacted Jen.

They went through the next door. Halfway through the small office, a side door opened, and they got the actor. They were disappointed. It was a normal enough, if disoriented-looking man. He trembled his way to where they were, and Vic wondered if he was supposed to be a zombie. Then the man unexpectedly crumbled into little pieces, and the pieces crept under the next door.

Vic and Jen took a moment to adjust their minds to what they’d just seen.

“How did they… do that?” asked Jen.

Vic said, “It’s gotta be a hologram… or something.”

With their backs still blocking the door, Gar and Raven began to feel dumb.

“Okay, this is ridiculous,” Raven decided. “We’re gonna have to go past him eventually.”

When they opened the door, the zombie wasn’t there.

“Oh,” breathed Gar. “Okay. Good. Come on.”

On the other side was an open-sided hallway, that looked down onto an ample hall on their left. Raven saw a note stuck to the wall to their right. “Look. Is this for us?” She took it.

“Be sure to know who your friends are?” Gar read. He shrugged at her.

Walking down the hallway, Raven suddenly stopped, and walked behind Gar, grabbing his arm. Gar initially thought she was scared, which would have been unexpected—and cute. But she shook his arm until he looked at her. She took a finger to her lips and motioned below. She was still grabbing his arm, so he could only lean slightly over the rail. His stomach dropped. The hall was occupied by ghostly figures, dancing.

He looked back at Raven, nodded, and they walked single-file. Because she’d delivered her message, she let go of his arm.

At the end of the hallway, they crossed a door into… another hallway. But this one was closed, and there were no ghosts around.

Gar looked up at Raven. “Least this one’s not ghostly.”

“Yet,” she returned.

“Wonder what’s gonna jump out next. Mr. Mod in a dress?” Gar said as they walked, trying to lift the tension. His comment was ignored. “Mr. Immotu just as he is would be right at home here.”

Nothing. Raven kept ignoring him.

“Oh, come on, not even a sarcastic…” he turned around. Raven wasn’t there. “…comment? Raven?”

He looked around. The hallway was deserted.

The room Dick and Kori followed the vampire into seemed like a study. A long desk was cluttered with books and stray papers with notes. Bookcases were bursting. One wall was almost entirely newspaper clippings.

Dick lingered at the doorway at first, and examined the room from that vantage point, detail by detail. Kori had moved on to flutter about the room, picking up things that stood out to her.

She was reading a heavy journal for a while before she said, “Dick, look. This is the woman from the other room.” He approached her to read it. Drawings and observations of the woman before and after. The following pages went on with other characters. “Is this all the monsters we will find in the house?”

Dick said, “I don’t get this. Why put up all this stuff? Kids aren’t gonna trace the story.” The journal had been half buried on the table. It could have been an empty prop for all they knew.

He moved on to the wall of news clippings. They were all centered about a Doctor Morbise and his achievements through the years. “This must be the doctor the vampire woman was talking about.”

He was still treating as a make-believe mystery, but really he was supremely uncomfortable. He didn’t feel like they had stepped into a finely crafted model of a crazy scientist’s den. He just felt like they had barged in on someone’s real study.

“Dick.” Kori was pointing at a note stuck on the wall.

“Guess this are meant to guide us through the house,” he said. He read out loud, “Let your hair down and take our sad stories for a spin.”

Kori shrugged at him.

They opened the door. At the other side was an ample hall, full of ghosts, dancing.

The next note was stuck to a door. Vic read it. “Keep your eyes closed, no matter what comes up to greet you.”

“Ugh,” concluded Jen.

They opened the door and peeked in. On the other side was a long hallway. Portraits of different sizes hung at both sides of it.

“Do you also get the feeling those people aren’t staying in their portraits?” Victor said.

Jenny shook her head. “Nope. No way. I’m going back. I’m done with this house.”

She went back to the door they came in through. Vic reluctantly followed.

When they went through the door, they came out onto an exact replica of the room they were in. They stood in it, reeling, terrified. Jenny ran to the door again. Vic tried to grab shoulders to keep her from running out again, but she slipped past him.

But this time she stopped dead at the doorway, and he nearly ran into her. He saw it over her head: it was the same room, but there was now a gigantic hand in a fiery hole in the middle of the floor; its fingers beckoned them to come, daring them.

Jen slammed the door shut.

“How is this a kids’ place!?” Jenny demanded at Vic. “Who sends their child here? Who thought this was okay!?”

“This makes no sense,” muttered Vic. “I came here as a kid. I survived this as a kid. Why is it like this now? …Why am I so scared?”

He leaned on the table and stayed still, as Jenny paced through the room.

He straightened and said, “Okay, let’s calm down. We have instructions. Clearly we just have to follow the rules, and we’ll get out no problem.”

He faced the door, preparing himself for the hallway full of portraits.

He turned around at the crackling noise. Jenny had her leg on the side of a bookcase, trying to tear off the plywood sheet with her hands. When it came off, she came up, sweating and angry, and swung it behind her shoulders.

“I’ve got a better idea!” she exclaimed.

Gar walked back and forth through the hallway. “Raven,” he hissed. “This isn’t funny,” he said half-heartedly. He couldn’t even pretend to believe Raven was pranking him. It wasn’t her style. “Raven. Victor. Dick. Kori? Anyone?”

He had no choice but to try the rooms along the hallway. He took a deep breath and entered one.

Lo and behold, Raven was there, sitting on a bed, her back to him.

“Rae. What are you doing?” He closed the door behind himself. “Hey.” She was strangely immobile. He touched her shoulder. “…Are you tired?”

Raven stood and turned slowly. He thought she had a weird look in her face. Before he could figure out why, her eyes went white, she opened her mouth and blood gushed out.

Gar screamed, propelled himself out of the room, closed the door, and heard “Gar,” next to him.

Raven was next to him now, and he jumped away from her, screaming some more.

“Why the hell did you go into that room?” she asked. “Didn’t you hear me call you?”

She took a step towards him and he jumped back. “Don’t!”

She stopped, taken aback.

“Are you actually you?” he demanded.

“What?” she returned softly.

“You’re not gonna puke blood and go all blank-eyed?”

“…Is that what’s happening now?”

Gar watched her. Raven had looked kind of hurt when he’d been scared of her, then surprised when he told her what he’d seen, then her eyes had softened as understanding dawned on her: in a few seconds she’d shown more emotion than the fake Raven in that room.

…He hadn’t realized how many of her little gestures he’d learned to read until he faced a version of her that was truly expressionless.

But he was too frazzled to trust his gut right now. “Look, why don’t you tell me something only Raven would know?”

“Something you would know I would know?” she deadpanned.

“Crap, that’s right, we don’t know anything about each other.” He looked at her. She looked and sounded real enough to him. He felt like he could let himself calm down. “Well, never mind, let’s just go.”

At the end of the hallway, the last door to their right said ‘Peek in if you wish to understand.’ Gar looked up at Raven. She nodded at him.

It was a bedroom, much like the one Gar had found the fake Raven in. It was simply furnished, but evidently lived in. The bed was made, but the desk was cluttered with papers, and clothes sat in disarray on top of a trunk. Gar went towards the bedside table, which had a journal sitting on it.

He threw it to Raven. “Here. You can read faster than me,” he said, assuming that was true.

She made her way over to him. She looked like she’d been deep in thought when he called her over.

Raven passed the pages quickly and told the story to him. This room housed a man who’d come answering a mysterious call for young scientists eager to conduct cutting-edge experiments. This man was excited about Doctor Morbise’s eccentric but obvious genius. The man was progressively concerned about the doctor’s experiments on bringing people back to life. The man reported a growing number of the guests were concerned, especially since a few started disappearing mysteriously. The rest of the pages were incoherent promises of revenge and reckoning, written in what looked like blood, and then the diary ended abruptly, the empty pages somehow more menacing than what came before.

Raven closed the diary solemnly. Like it wasn’t a prop in a fake haunted house.

“Back to life?” whispered Gar. “So like… this was the zombie’s old room? Before he was a zombie?”

Raven gave him back the diary and turned her back on the desk.

“How did they make an illusion of me?” she asked softly.

Gar looked at her. She was hugging her elbows.

“How did they make you not see or hear the real me?” she asked, staring at him. “I’m beginning to think you were right about this house. I don’t understand any of this…” She looked around the room, looking lost. Gar realized he’d never seen her so nervous. It made him feel all the less safe. “…But it could be really haunted.”

Gar gulped. But if she wasn’t her normal unfazable self, it looked like it was his turn to be reassuring. “Look, let’s just focus on getting out of here. We can do it. Kids do it.”

“How, though?” She pointed to the hallway. “That was horrible. You looked like you were in a trance. How do children keep coming here?” She looked around. Gar thought she was trying to see beyond her material eyes, beyond what the clues told them, trying to connect with the house. “Maybe it used to be for kids. But… something went wrong along the way.”

“Either way… all the more reason to figure it out and shut it down.” He’d moved towards her and held her arms to steady her. He realized after he did it that she would have shaken him off in any other circumstance.

He didn’t have a long time to marvel on it, as then the roof got blown off.

An unearthly wind took everything light off the ground. Papers flew, vases and tokens swirled around them and shattered. Gar cracked his eyes open to see the roofless top didn’t open up to a regular night sky: the dark seemed to be darker, starless, the fabric of the very universe. Raven’s hair rose in the air, mingling with huge black birds that flew in the swirl—ravens, Gar realized. They seemed to be guiding the wind.

It stopped as suddenly as it had begun. When Gar looked again, the roof was back on. The wind subsided, but the room was in disarray. He was still holding Raven’s arms, and now she was holding onto him back.

She broke away to move the hair out of her face. Any other time, the sight of her usually pin-straight hair in disarray would be hilarious.

“Here’s something to know about me,” she said. “I fucking hate ravens.”

Chapter Text

“It’s a trick with lights,” said Dick. “It’s gotta be.”

They had closed the door to the ghostly ballroom and gone back into the study to gather their bearings.

Kori said, “If that is so, we could simply… walk through the room, yes?”

“Yeah. Sure,” said Dick, though he wasn’t convinced any of this was fake anymore. “But… we’re probably better off following the instructions.”

“You mean…?”

Dick made himself smile as he offered his hand. “May I have this dance?”

Kori nearly forgot she was in a haunted house when Dick led her out into the ballroom.

She remembered soon enough, when they were surrounded by swirling, transparent figures. Space was made for them in the dance floor. Kori and Dick danced as naturally as they could, and advanced through the room to the other side.

They really thought they could get to the other side. But then the music changed note, and their partners changed too. One moment Dick and Kori were looking at their friend, the next they were inches away from a ghostly face. Their faces were horrifying in their resigned pleasantness; their hands were unbearably cold.

These weren’t lights.

The ghosts didn’t take well to rejection. When Dick and Kori tried to catch each other’s eyes, their ghostly partners pulled on their hands.

“There’s plenty time to dance with every guest,” said the woman dancing with Dick. “This house is ours now. We took it back, and we can do what we want. We deserve this party.”

“Let us tempt you to stay,” said the man dancing with Kori. “We’re celebrating being rid of the Doctor. It’s so much better without him around.”

At a turn, Dick and Kori managed to lock eyes. It was as if they shared a mind link for a moment. They both knew what they had to do. They nodded at each other, and dashed to the end of the room. The ghosts were on their tail immediately. Dick and Kori didn’t need to turn to know they were being followed, and they closed the next door on an army of ghosts.

Dick looked around the new room manically, discovered simply a quiet pantry, and panted on the floor with Kori for a while.

When Kori could breathe, she said, “Is it a custom in this country to terrify your kids?”

“Not like this,” panted Dick. “I-I don’t know what’s going on. Why is this place so good?”

“Dick. Do you believe that… that this might be real?”

“I don’t know, Kori,” he finally admitted. “I don’t understand what’s going on.” He got up and took her hand. “Look, we’ll get through this. I promise.”

“And our friends?” she asked. “Will they be able to get out as well?”

Jenny went through the hallways of portraits, smashing everything breakable. Vic walked after her, horrified. She was moving in a way that he was pretty sure she had her eyes closed—for extra protection.

The door at the end opened into the exact same hallway, with the exact same portraits. After a moment’s surprise, Jenny smashed her way through as well.

They repeated the same hallway until Vic lost count. Every time Jen got angrier and angrier, but she didn’t let down until she’d burst every portrait.

Finally she burst open another door, but this time she and Vic got pulled forward, as if by a gust of air. They fell on the ground, and it was grass.

Vic raised his head. They were at the back of the haunted house, looking at the back of neighboring houses, in the quiet suburban night. He rolled around just in time to see the back door of the house, closing. The house had spat them out.

“How… we were on the second floor,” he murmured to himself, as Jen flipped her hair out of her face.

The spatial disconcertment faded, and gave way a mere disappointment at being kicked out early.

The latest note said Trust the specter.

The specter was there when Gar and Raven moved onto the next hallway.

She was all the more frightening perhaps because she looked like a normal person, albeit one dressed in 1920’s garb. She extended a hand at Raven.

Raven moved forward. Gar caught a look at her face when she walked on, and she didn’t look scared. She looked like she was trying really hard to understand.

The ghost took Raven’s hand and led her forth. Gar eventually followed after them.

He thought Raven was all backwards. The people who were nice to her, she rebuffed. But creepy old ghosts she was all nice with.

They walked, and the house half-faded into an open scene. Gar could see pieces of a sunny field.

“Was this your home?” Raven asked softly. Gar saw a bit of it too, a house at the end of the field. But if he focused he could still see the house.

Gar had always called bullshit at horror movies, or any movie, where the person cried out the other’s person name when they were in danger. He thought that was unrealistic and affected. It wasn’t until he was in the situation that he realized how true and automatic it was.

He watched as Raven followed the ghost to a point in the open hallway where the rail was broken off, and it just erupted from his throat. “Raven! Raven! Raven!”

He felt his own body propel forward. He grabbed Raven by the middle and pulled her backwards, and they both fell on the ground. He didn’t need to explain: she panted and stared at the spot where she’d almost walked off into a certain fall. He didn’t realize he was still holding her until she pushed him away.

The ghost was gone, but Gar still pulled Raven up and pushed her into another room. He wanted them nowhere near any stairs.

They came into a lounge. It was the wrong choice—at the end of the room there was another zombie, looming, threatening.

Perhaps it was because he was at the end of his rope, but something clicked in Gar.

He started waving at it. “Hey.” He could feel Raven’s eyes on him. “Hey, dude. Yeah, you. You mind giving us a little privacy?”

The zombie opened his jaw and gave a chilling scream.

Gar resisted the urge to cover his ears and tried to shout over the noise. “Yeah. You, buddy. You can’t just sneak up on people like that. I get it’s tough, being undead. I can’t begin to imagine, don’t get me wrong. But I’m gonna ask you to knock it off.”

Gar and the zombie sort of squared off for a moment. Gar stood his ground. Then the creature seemed to dissolve in the wind, leaving them alone.

“What was that?” Raven demanded.

“I’m breaking the rules,” said Gar, though he hardly understood it himself. “Look, everyone’s always scared in horror movies, right? I always wondered… what if people chose to like, not be scared?”

“Then they get killed,” she replied.

“That thing back there, that almost made you jump? We listened to it because the card told us to. What if we keep going the way this house wants and that gets us killed?” That gave Raven pause. “Think about it.” He cupped his hands around his mouth and did a terrible impression of yodeling at the top of his lungs. Then he looked at Raven. “Are you still scared?”

“I’m feeling other things now,” she deadpanned.

“See! It works!”

“Gar, that doesn’t make sense. If this is all real, then these are actual vengeful ghosts and monsters. They don’t care whether or not you’re scared.”

But Gar had to push his point—he saw no other way out. “Look, do you trust me?”

“Not really.”

“Raven!”

She held her head like it hurt. “Okay, so according to your theory, what do we do? Not take anything seriously?”

“Exactly. You laugh at what you’re scared of,” said Gar, and he prayed he was right.

The next note for them said ‘Face danger head on’.

Gar looked at Raven defiantly—and walked backwards into the next room.

Dick and Kori gingerly explored a hallway.

“What if we followed the servant’s quarters?” asked Kori.

Dick looked where she was pointing. At the end of the hallway there were narrow stairs, that seemed to lead to the servants’ area. “It’s worth a shot.”

They went down the stairs and arrived into a small lounge-like room. Bright, modern artificial light shone on simple white wood furniture.

“It looks cleaner,” she observed.

“You’re right. Maybe we can find a way out of the house this way.” But he whispered it, like he was scared the house would hear the loophole.

There were two doors opposite to them, and a hallway. Did either of the doors lead outside, or was this still the house? They were all turned around by now. But before they could choose their path, banging was heard from down the hallway. They froze.

Dick called out, “Who’s there?” It was the most stupid horror movie move, but he’d been thinking it might be their friends. It was weird they hadn’t ran into anyone yet.

Louder, angrier banging came as response.

“You wanna go back up?” he whispered at Kori.

Kori’s face had solidified fear into cold anger. “Let us go on,” she said confidently. “I want to finish, leave this house, and then vanquish it so no one will suffer it again.”

As if on cue, the room went completely dark; then it began to spin around. It spun so fast for so long, they were pushed to the walls. When it finally stopped, Dick called out “Kori!”

“Here,” she returned.

He heard her voice to his left, so he reached out in the dark, and found her hand.

“It’s okay,” Dick said, as he shakily stood. “It’s okay, we’ll get out of this.”

“Dick, this is horrible,” she was saying. “I cannot see.” They were only talking to fill the silence.

The lights came back on. Dick found himself staring at Kori from across the room; she was wearing a shocked expression that matched his. Her arm was extended too, holding no one’s hand.

Dick looked at his hand. He still retained the feeling of someone’s hand in his. He had even heard Kori’s voice right next to him…

Kori and Dick met halfway across the room. He’d never seen her look so pale.

“The room’s different…” she whispered.

There was now writing on the walls. The scribbles went along the lines of ‘This is our house too’ and ‘We took the house back’. Arrows pointed towards the hallway. On the table, there was a golden key and a note. Most importantly, the two doors had disappeared. There was only the hallway.

An arrow next to the hallway had ‘Reckoning Room’ scribbled on top of it. The banging from within seemed louder.

Dick picked up the note on the table. “Deliverance will come, if you accept judgment and punishment.” He looked up. “That means we have to go through there.”

Kori took the key from the table. She still had on her warrior face.

“We will keep running in circles if we do not play along. We need to finish this the right way.”

Dick nodded at her. “No more running in circles.”

The hallway was as dark as the rest of the house had been. There was one door and nothing else at the end, and the plaque reading ‘Reckoning Room’ was fastened on it. Kori and Dick inched closer as the banging grew more urgent, as if what was inside perceived them.

“What could be there?” asked Kori.

“I think it’s the doctor,” said Dick.

He had taken in the signs around him. No other door in the house was under lock and key. Every other specter and being came and went as it pleased; they weren’t stuck to the same place, banging repeatedly in the same way. They had taken the house back from the Doctor. This was how they kept their former captor.

They ignored all their sense of self-preservation as they came up to the door and turned the key.

The door closed by itself when Dick and Kori went through it. The room had a storm inside it.

It was all dark purple, endless night sky, with clouds and lightning. The terrible giant head floating with the storm was made of darkness.

“You came with ego in your hearts!” it boomed, in a voice that shook them to the core. “This house will never be torn down!”

One moment, Dick couldn’t see through the darkness. The next, there was a door at the other end of the room.

“Never come to this place again!” roared the head.

Dick took Kori’s hand and they made a run for it.

Dick and Kori burst out of the house. Outside they saw the normal city night. Victor was pacing with his hands in his pockets, Jen was sitting on the curb.

“You got out!” said Kori.

Dick got up. “And Gar and Raven? Will they come out?”

And Vic’s bored face made him come down hard into reality. “Of course, man. It’s just a game.”

From the door, Raven watched Gar feed the monster vegan crackers.

The note had said ‘Face danger head on’ because the creature had a ball of fire for its head. The crackers were devoured by the fire, but Gar still made airplane noises as he sacrificed each one.

At one point Gar turned and gave Raven a thumbs up. He didn’t expect her to admit anything, but she looked at him like she was exasperated he turned out to be right, and that was enough for him. The monster crumbled, and Gar lost his smile when it appeared in front of Raven.

Raven jumped when its arms grabbed her.

“Laugh at it, Raven!” Gar called.

Up close, its head was a horrifying well of fire; she could see past the fire to the melted skin, and she could smell the burning flesh, too.

Raven mustered up all her courage in order to make her face straight. “There’s a cream for that,” she told the monster. And Gar was right, it didn’t seem so scary anymore.

She left the monster behind, and she and Gar went on their way.

They came into a cramped hallway, where the only option was a door with a plaque that read ‘Reckoning Room’. Gar and Raven looked at each other, wondering the same thing; had they reached the end of the line? They went inside.

Up until now they had been in a dark, dirty, looming old house. Now they came out into a well-lit, pastel-colored sitting room. Raven and Gar blinked at the sudden light. An old man sat in a green couch, stirring a cup of tea.

Was there a dream-like glow to the room? Or was it just the contrast from everything that came before that left them reeling?

The old man smiled at them. “You. You two challenged the very notion of fear. Clever kids! You might be my favorite in a while.”

“Who are you?” asked Raven.

“I’m the Magician. I’m the owner of this fine establishment,” the man answered. “The same establishment you came in here trying to expose for a fraud. You were arrogant in that. But most of all, you were misguided.”

“Big words coming from someone who almost killed us!” retorted Gar.

“You were never in danger,” the Magician said.

“You almost made her jump off the stairs!” cried Gar.

“Ah, but she didn’t.” The Magician went on to explain. “This house is age-adjusted. The things that scare children wouldn’t scare you. And the house had to scare you when it felt you were here to shut it down. It reacted accordingly. It defended itself.”

“You’re saying none of it was real,” deadpanned Raven. “That the house wouldn’t have attacked us if we’d just come here trying to have fun.”

The man smiled at her, pleased she had gotten it so quickly.

Gar grabbed his head. He wondered aloud, “How can people have fun if they think stuff like that can exist? Even children.”

“You still have it wrong.” The Magician took the time to sip his tea. “You’re thinking of it like adults. When children come, they understand the truth of this place. That nothing is ever so cut and dried as real and unreal. But children grow up—that’s the problem. They grow up and try to control everything.” He shook his head. “It takes great wisdom to leave something alone that’s not meant to be completely understood. I hope you take this as a lesson.”

Gar was looking at the Magician and Raven alternately. She seemed to have accepted the man’s version, but Gar was still unconvinced. “This isn’t so harmless, like what if someone dies of a heart attack ‘cause they’re so scared?”

“You think I wouldn’t know about that?” the Magician returned. “Everything’s adjusted to the people entering. No one is ever at risk.”

“What is this place?” Gar asked.

“It’s a haunted house,” the Magician said simply. “And I’m just a simple man who’s happy to provide the community with one.”

Raven and Gar walked out of the house to find their friends spread out on the lawn, waiting for them.

Dick stood. “Come on,” he said, and they walked around the house towards the front, and then away from it.

As Raven and Gar walked, the impression of fear was washed from their minds, and what was left was the feeling of having spent a thrilling evening in an almost too-intense haunted house attraction—same as it had happened with everyone else.

“You’re actually mad about me breaking everything?” Jen asked Vic. The two walked a bit ahead of the others in order to have an argument.

“There were cards with instructions,” Vic said, “we could have just followed them, without wrecking a spot of my childhood memories.”

“I got us out before everyone, didn’t I?”

“But you ruined the fun of it.”

“It already wasn’t fun. Only you would think something like this is fun…”

Dick made an effort to tune them out. “All in favor of leaving this house alone forever?” he said to the other three.

All four raised their hands. Dick just assumed that Victor, if he wasn’t currently in the middle of an argument with his girlfriend, would vote the same.

“I’ll take you guys home if you can squeeze in the back,” Vic said when they got to his car.

“I think I’m gonna walk,” said Dick, leaving the group.

“I’ve got a bus about to come,” said Raven, going to the bus stop.

“I’ll take you up on that, Vic,” said Gar.

“I will as well,” said Kori, a bit dejected as she watched Dick walk away.

Dick had held her hand tonight –they had even danced- and she didn’t even get to enjoy it.

Kori and Gar rode in the back of Vic’s car. The price was hearing Jenny and Vic argue some more.

End of February.

Chapter Text

Dick, Victor and Gar sat patiently in Blood’s office, avoiding the principal’s piercing gaze. They still hadn’t been told what sort of trouble they were in, and they couldn’t think of anything themselves.

The door opened, and the Secretary admitted Kori, who looked mildly alarmed to be here.

“Ah, Miss Androkinova, nice of you to join us,” said Blood, as Kori sat next to the boys. “You must be wondering why I called you here. Well, I’ve heard you’ve become quite dedicated to… solving the school’s problems.”

The four perked up.

Blood didn’t wait for them to respond. “I’m sure you’ve seen the dreadful graffiti plaguing our halls. I was… wondering if your attention had fallen on it.”

Dick’s eyes narrowed. The other three exchanged looks. They had all seen the red and black graffiti that invaded hallways, bathrooms, and even classrooms.

“You want us to find out who is tagging the halls?” asked Victor. Normally Dick would have taken the lead, but he was being uncharacteristically quiet, so Vic took over.

“I wouldn’t dream of tasking you with such a reprehensible and unlawful extra-curricular,” intoned Blood. “But if you were to solve it, and if you were to solve it quickly, well, I’d want you to know you’d have the school’s unending gratitude. The school, surely,” he stared straight at them, so they were all sure what he really meant, “would never forget it.”

“The janitor must have told him about the thing with Thunder and Lightning,” said Vic once they left the office. “It’s the only link I can think of.”

“But hey, this a good thing, right?” asked Gar. “We’re being recognized. In a way. Finally.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so,” smiled Vic, letting himself get excited. “It’s what we wanted.”

“It is an official mission,” cheered Kori. “Is it not, Dick?”

“I guess,” Dick said through gritted teeth.

“What is bothering you?” she prompted.

Dick looked up to see his friends looking at him. He seemed to just then realize they had eyes that could see he was acting odd. “Nothing,” he said. “I mean, you know. We’re being used by Blood here, is all.”

“But I thought you wanted something like this,” said Vic. “To be openly a club that does these tasks. We were gonna get a mission from faculty sometime.”

Dick turned away from them. “Like I said. Guess so.”

“Oo-kay,” went Vic. “Anyway, here’s another problem. Raven left right after her last class. She has no idea we have an urgent mission. Do we start tomorrow, or start without her?”

“Maybe we can go to her house now and let her know about the mish,” proposed Gar, grinning.

“Not a chance,” said Vic, immediately stern.

“Why not?” protested Gar. “We got a mission from the principal, we should hurry!”

“You know she wouldn’t want us to drop in unannounced,” replied Vic. “Every time I offer to drop her off or something, she doesn’t want to.”

“Exactly!” cried Gar. “This could be our only chance to see her house!”

“Gar makes a point,” said Kori. “The principal did specify the need for speediness.”

Vic, who had been about to shut Gar down hard, paused seeing Kori also thought the mission warranted this exception.

(In reality, Kori didn’t care about how quickly they had to solve the mission, she just wanted to see Raven’s house—she was as curious as Gar was, she just did a better job of hiding it.)

Vic finally turned to Dick for a tiebreaker. “Dick? What do you say?”

Dick been staring at the wall, at a specimen of the graffiti that was now their mission: a big red X over a white skull. He stopped glaring at it to shrug at his friends. “Sure. Let’s go to Raven’s house.”

“Wait, really?” Gar asked, who hadn’t really believed he was going to pull this off. He pounced on Dick’s back. “We’re really going to Raven’s house?”

“Yes. Don’t be weird about it,” Dick said, and pried Gar’s hands off his collar.

Gar exploded anyway, leaping off Dick to pump his fists at the ceiling. “Oh, man. This is gonna be awesome!”

Dick unearthed the crumpled paper with everyone’s contact information from the bottom of his backpack. Only the home address part was filled in Raven’s section. They followed the directions downtown.

“Look, I’m just saying it’s odd we’ve never seen her house,” said Gar as they walked down the street. “We’ve been friends for months, and every time we suggest going to check it out-”

“You suggest,” interjected Vic.

“Every time, she deflects,” Gar finished. “Wonder what she’s hiding.”

Vic, who had grown increasingly irritated at Gar, and was now deathly afraid he was going to say the wrong thing to Raven when they got there, stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to yell at him. “Nothing! It will be a normal house. I know this is a novel concept to someone like you, but some people value privacy. She’s just a private person.”

From the front of the line, Dick called out, “Look, we’re going to her house, we’re telling her about the mission, and that’s it. It doesn’t have to be a huge thing.” He had begun to comprehend he’d made mistake by avowing this. Because he’d been distracted, he hadn’t thought this through, and now he would have to deal with the consequences.

Kori walked happily, secretly glad events had conspired in a way that they would get to see Raven’s house.

The address they had led them to a medium-sized apartment building. It was five floors high and stately-looking.

“See?” said Vic. “Normal.”

Gar had his arms crossed. “I’ll be convinced when I see the inside.”

Dick rang the doorbell and told them all to shut up.

They had to wait for it, but eventually the door was answered by Raven’s mom.

They instantly knew it was her mom—she was an older, taller version of Raven. She shared her daughter’s pin-straight black hair. She had the same blue eyes and olive-toned light brown skin. She wore white: a long-sleeved shirt that fell to her knees, and loose pants underneath.

“Yes?” she said. If possible, she sounded like she had reached an even higher state of serene detachment than her daughter.

Dick smiled. “Hi, is Raven home?”

Immediately Raven’s mom looked like all inner peace had left her. She posed a hand on the doorway, as if for grounding. As if this was the only question she never would have expected. When she spoke again, she sounded like she was afraid of her own voice. “And you would be?”

“Dick. Richard… Grayson.” Dick’s tone got lower as he saw no spark of recognition in the woman’s face, nor any inclination to let him inside.

“Just a moment,” she said, and promptly closed the door.

Dick stared at the closed door, then back at his friends, who stared back in askance.

Time passed. After a while, Vic spoke. “Should we leave?”

Dick said, “Let’s wait a little while.”

After yet a while longer, the door opened again, and it was thankfully Raven herself. They never thought they’d be so glad to see her little face scowling at them.

“What the hell are you guys doing here?” she asked.

Dick stammered an explanation. “Uh, we got a mission. Principal Blood wants us to take care of the graffiti that’s been showing up in school.” He rubbed his neck sheepishly. “We just wanted to get started right away. Sorry, I… we could have waited till school tomorrow.”

“Yeah, you could have,” said Raven, arms crossed.

She lingered in the doorway. The four stood there. They’d had to take a bus and walk ten blocks to the house, and they were wondering if they would have to make all that way back. Raven seemed to come to the same realization as to how far away her house was, and her eyes softened. She opened the door all the way and moved aside, sighing. “Come in. You already freaked out my mom anyway.”

They entered.

They came into a hallway, which opened to a living room on the left, where some people were fluttering around. They reached the end of the hallway, went through another door, and the scene changed completely. Now they were in a massive circular room, bathed in light from a central skylight. Dozens of people walked two and fro. On the center of the area were raised garden beds with vegetables, and people tending to them. Beyond the furthest wall they could see a big greenhouse. Three stories rose around them, with open hallways that led to hundreds of doors.

The four struggled to grasp their surroundings as they followed Raven, who hadn’t slowed down her pace.

The people around them were either peaceful-looking people dressed in white, or more regular-looking in normal street clothes, but none paid any mind to them, which made the four feel even more like they’d been dropped in on an alternate dimension. The length they had walked didn’t correlate with the size or shape the building seemed to have from the outside.

Raven took a left and took them through a door. As they came out into another grand hallway and just kept going, Vic suddenly realized they should be in the next two houses over by now.

Raven’s four friends were all thinking something along the same lines. Ever since they met Raven, they had disregarded the numerous rumors around her as just that—rumors. For the first time ever, they were starting to give the one about her being in a cult some consideration.

They followed Raven to a set of stairs. The higher they went, the more the striking elegance of the grand salon faded into a regular apartment building. They went up three floors before Raven led them onto a hallway, and up to a door with a small whiteboard marked with a hand-written, half faded ‘Roch’. They went through it.

“Take your shoes off,” Raven instructed them, as she removed her own and left them by the door.

The inside was a regular apartment. In the kitchen area, Raven’s mom was sitting to the table. She got up when they entered.

“Mom, these are the guys from the club I told you about,” Raven told her.

“It’s very nice to meet you all,” Raven’s mom said, tremulously but sincerely.

“And guys, this is my mom, Arella.”

There were murmurs of courtesies. Raven’s friends guessed they were pretending like their first interaction hadn’t happened.

“Right… We’ll be in my room, mom,” Raven said, and led them further inside. The four didn’t think they had ever heard her speak so softly to someone before.

Raven’s room was normal, but perhaps only by comparison to what they had just seen. It was dark and full of creepy-looking trinkets. But it was very Raven, and therefore familiar, and they could breathe easily in there. Gar’s eyes weren’t big enough to take in the sheer density of small trinkets and decorations. He went for one of the bookcases, and was pulled to a statue of a dancing Shiva like a moth to the flame; he promptly got his hand slapped by Raven, who told him not to touch her stuff.

“Now, what was that urgent thing you had to tell me?” she asked them as she sat on her bed.

“Like Dick said, we got our first mission from the principal,” said Vic, smiling. “Finding out who’s behind the graffiti and stopping it.”

“That’s what couldn’t wait until tomorrow?” Raven returned.

Dick frowned. “What do you want us to do? We can’t call you.”

“Okay, do you wanna buy me a cell phone?” Raven retorted.

“No. A landline would be fine.”

“I told you, I can’t give out the house number.”

It was the same thing she’d told them months ago. But the words seemed to have a deeper meaning, given what they’d just seen. The four fell into an awkward silence.

Gar was the one to break it. “What is this place, Raven?”

Raven leaned back against the wall and regarded her friends. Kori had taken a seat on Raven’s bed; the boys were still standing around. All were watching her intently.

“It’s the church of Azarath,” she said. The title felt heavy, like the words alone donned some unearthly dignity. “It’s a kind of… sanctuary. People come here for protection and to get away from society. It’s like a secret hideout from the world hidden in plain sight.”

Vic dared to ask it. “Is it like a cult?”

“It’s not a cult,” said Raven, not offended. Really she was grateful someone had asked, so she could clarify it. “This place takes all religions. I mean, my mom and I are still Hindu. It’s more of a collection of like-minded people who all believe in pacifism and wanna live in a self-sufficient community. And people are free to come and go. Many people use it as a shelter and stay for a few months at most.”

“And how long have you guys lived here?” asked Dick.

Raven looked away. “Longer than that.”

Dick was quick to change the subject. “You’re self-sufficient,” he said. “That’s why there were all those gardens? You grow all your own food?”

Raven nodded. “Exactly. Priests and priestesses also make their own clothes.”

“That’s cool,” said Dick, giving her a grin.

“The priests and priestesses were the people in white walking around?” Kori asked.

“Yeah.”

“Is your mom a priestess?” Vic asked, remembering her mom had been dressed in white.

“Not exactly.” Raven shifted on her feet, clearly uncomfortable being the center of attention for this long. “She’s kind of a half priestess. She is close to Azar—um, that’s our leader. That’s not her name, it’s just a title. The first Azar lived a thousand years ago.”

“Whoa,” went Gar.

Victor said, “Wait, so this thing is really old. But I’d never heard of it.”

Raven pushed some hair behind her ear. “It’s managed to stay hidden for a long time. I don’t really know how. It really seems like the kind of thing someone would have talked about by now.”

There was a meaningfulness to her words, and Dick caught it. “Well, our lips are sealed.”

“Indeed,” agreed Kori.

Raven actually gave them a small smile.

Then Gar said, “So… what’s wrong with your mom?”

“She’s just delicate,” Raven spat, her eyes spitting fire.

For once in his life, Gar wisely dropped it.

“So then Blood called us after class and dropped that on us,” recounted Vic, sitting on the floor next to Raven’s bed.

“So we’re catching another delinquent,” said Raven, sitting cross-legged on her bed opposite to Kori. “Are we gonna do the whole stay-after-school, record-everything thing again? And hope there’s no bomb this time?”

“But I remember that when the graffiti near the cafeteria appeared, it happened in the middle of the day,” said Kori.

“In that case it’s not gonna be so easy,” replied Vic.

Gar listened to the conversation while wandering through Raven’s room. He stopped by the window, and looked down to determine where they were. After the long walk and endless flights of stairs they took to get here, they seemed to be at a house they had passed on the way here, two doors down from the one they had rung. It would be so much easier to drop from this window than do it all back again.

“What are you looking for?” Raven asked him, just noticing him.

Gar shrugged at her and moved away from the window.

“But if we’re doing this by Blood’s request, surely we’ll have permission to be out of class to do this, right?” asked Raven.

“Not quite,” said Vic. “He didn’t so much request as hint that if we did this he’d owe us one. We’re really on our own-”

“Aha! Jackpot!” said Gar suddenly, and they looked up to see him going through Raven’s bookcases.

“I told you to quit going through my stuff!” she called out.

“I’m sorry, Rae, but this is too good.” He turned around and she saw what he was holding—he’d found her bag of Tarot cards, and taken the cards out. “I can’t believe you’re into this…” he was going to say ‘crap’, but he took one look at Raven’s face, recognized she was about to lose it on him, considered he’d probably already pushed her enough today, and backtracked. “I mean, who knew, right?” he said, turning his tone from teasing to innocent. “That rumor about you turned out to be true. You’re really into magic or whatever.”

“Bring me those cards over here,” she commanded.

Gar complied, but plopped down on the bed next to her. “Ooh, ooh! Ask the cards who’s behind the graffiti!”

Raven took the cards and put them back in their bag, ignoring him.

Vic laughed. “That would be a good idea, though.”

Kori clasped her hands together. “Oh, Raven, please, demonstrate! I always wanted to go to one of those fairs with, the women with cards and those, glass balls!”

“Crystal balls,” droned Raven, hating her friends.

“Come on, Raven! Please?” insisted Gar, and they all looked at her imploringly.

Is this what peer pressure looks like? she wondered. She was considering acquiescing, because if she said what she really wanted to say –that those cards weren’t toys, and that she wasn’t really into magic or whatever, thank you very much, as much as magic was into her- she’d look even crazier than she already did with the whole Azarath thing.

So instead she sighed, took the cards back out and started mixing them, to the glee of three of her friends—Dick was still plopped down on the chair next to Raven’s bed, uncharacteristically not taking part in the mission discussion. Raven tried to ignore all of their presence and concentrated on the relevant question—the identity of their vandal. She’d never done this in front of people before.

“So how does this work?” asked Gar, moving to sit on the ground so Raven would have space.

“It works with silence,” she chided him. But she wasn’t hating this. She was thinking maybe things didn’t have to be grave and secretive all the time; maybe she could welcome her friends into her house, trust them with her secret, and do a tarot reading in front of them, and the world wouldn’t in fact explode around her.

She arranged five cards in a cross pattern and turned them slowly.

“Wow,” she breathed when the picture was full.

“What, what?” asked Vic.

“All but one are reversed,” she replied.

“What does it mean?” asked Kori.

“Basically that the meaning of the card is… worsened. Darker, so to speak.”

They were all around her now, watching the cards intently. Only Dick stayed plopped down in the chair, watching them from afar.

Raven tapped one of the reversed cards, which was called The Emperor. “I see problems with authority. No surprises there. Bad habits, probably inherited from a father figure.” Her eyes shifted to the rest of the spread and came back. “…Definitely inherited from a father figure.”

“What else, what else?” prompted Gar.

“He’s currently facing a time of crisis,” said Raven.

“It’s a he?” asked Vic.

“Oh, yes,” she affirmed. “Look at this spread. It’s a sausage fest.” They looked; all the cards were male.

“That matters?” asked Dick, from the chair.

“Everything matters,” replied Raven.

“Raven, are you sure?” asked Kori. “There is graffiti in the girls’ bathroom, but none on the boy’s.”

“Maybe he did that on purpose to throw us off,” said Gar.

Vic turned to him. “Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you believe this crap.”

Raven stared daggers at Vic. “Excuse me?”

“Ah… I didn’t mean…” Withering under Raven’s glare, Vic briefly wondered why it was that Gar was able to push and push Raven to the edge, and yet Vic recoiled at the first hard gaze. But he accepted it as Gar’s personality making him disregard danger and decided himself to keep his life intact. “I’ll shut up.”

“Anyway.” Raven focused back on the cards. “He’s very misunderstood. Everyone thinks they know exactly who he is, but everyone’s wrong. He projects a certain image, but he’s much more complex. And he’s determined. He’ll burn himself out trying to get his goal.”

“Okay, let me piece this together,” said Vic, looking at the cards intently. “Where’d you see all that?” he asked.

Raven thought he was just trying to analyze the process to make up for his earlier scorn of it, but she went with it. “Here’s the problems with authority, here’s the time of crisis, here’s the troubled personality,” she said, methodically pointing at three cards—The Emperor, The Trial and The Magician. “But most importantly… I see nostalgia. I see a lost friendship. I see a need for healing. Here.” She tapped the sole upright card, The High Priest. “There’s this presence that speaks of… mentorship, buffering. Either he needs someone like that, or…”

“Or?” prompted Kori.

Raven didn’t stop staring at the cards, like if she looked away she would sever a connection. “I think at one point he had that, and he lost it.”

Dick suddenly jumped from his seat. “Where’s your bathroom?” he asked Raven, mostly to justify his outburst.

“Down the hall. Last door,” said Raven, and Dick all but ran out of the room. When he was gone, Raven turned to the rest of her friends. “Okay. What’s going on with him?”

“He’s been acting weird all day,” said Gar. “Ever since we got the mission.”

“I thought the getting a mission from the principal would be what he wanted,” said Kori.

“It should be,” said Vic. “But now he’s saying he thinks Blood’s using us. I don’t know what he expected to happen if we’re really gonna do this defense of the student body thing.”

“Please, Raven, tell us what we need to look for so we can solve this mission quickly,” said Kori.

“The way I see it,” said Raven, looking at the spread, “this guy’s betting his all on getting this one person’s help and attention.” She paused. “We should look for someone new. Someone who just transferred or moved from another town. Someone with a record, obviously. Someone who… just seems reckless and wild.”

“That’s not a clue, that’s subjective,” said Vic.

“It’s a profile,” returned Raven. “Police do that.”

“Hey, Raven, what about this card?” Gar asked, pointing at The Lovers.

“That’s where I saw the need of friendship,” replied Raven.

Kori said, “It is reversed, because he is seeking friendship but… going about it in a wrong way?”

“Exactly,” said Raven, mildly impressed at how quickly she’d gotten it.

“So, our juvenile delinquent just needs a friend?” surmised Vic.

“We can provide that,” said Kori, smiling. “That would make for such a happy ending!”

When Dick came back, Raven was putting the cards back in their bag, but Gar stopped her.

“Oh, Rae, Rae! Read our future now!” (Gar had heard Victor call her ‘Rae’ once. He’d immediately loved it, and hated that he hadn’t thought of it first. Since then he had appropriated it to the point everyone forgot Vic had been the one who’d done it first.)

“Oh, yes!” echoed Kori.

“I don’t think so,” said Raven. “It’s not a good idea to read for friends.”

Gar’s eyes flashed, and he decided in a split second to go for broke. He propped himself up with his arms on the bed, got close to Raven’s face and cocked his head, smirking. “Aaw, Rae, I didn’t know we were that good of friends.”

Her eyes locked in his. He was challenging her.

Using all her might not to blush, Raven glared at him. “Good point,” she said. “You barely count. Come on, then.” And she got the cards back out.

Kori relinquished her spot on the bed, and Gar jumped on in a flash, sitting cross-legged in front of Raven. Dick decided to join the group for this, and sat on the floor where Gar had just been.

“Okay, what do you want?” asked Raven, shuffling the cards. “Are you asking a question? Do you want to hear your future? Or you want to hear about yourself?”

Gar rested his head on his hands, elbows on his knees. “Mmh. Do I have to tell you the question?”

“Strictly, no, but it would make things easier.”

Gar considered this, then waved his hand. “Nah, just tell me about me.”

“His favorite topic,” said Vic.

Raven handed Gar the deck. “Shuffle them.”

Gar did so. When he gave her back the deck, Raven cut it. Gar got the flash of a really weird feeling when she did it: as if in shuffling the cards he’d tried to hide something, and in cutting them Raven had left that out in the open. It was a second-long impression, and it passed immediately. But being this close, watching Raven’s concentrated expression and methodical motions as she took six cards and arranged them in a cross pattern, Gar began having second thoughts about this whole thing.

He looked around the room, as if appreciating for the first time the grand and forbidding creepiness of it. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and inside, the flickering candles in her desk and bookcases stood out against the new darkness, and made the trinkets and crystals and bottles twinkle and seem to come alive. Gar did a double take at the scene. He leaned towards Victor.

“Um, dude, were those candles always lit?” he whispered.

“What?” Vic returned.

“Those candles over there and there. Have they been lit this whole time?”

Vic shook his head. “Gar, you have the attention span of a mosquito.”

“So they were?” Gar asked desperately.

“Uh…” went Vic, considering that he wasn’t sure himself.

“Gar?” Raven called. “You can turn the cards now.” She was pretending she didn’t notice his discomfort. This had been his idea—now he was going to have to deal with it.

Gar visibly hesitated.

Dick and Victor looked on amusedly.

“It’s okay, Gar, you can back out,” said Dick. “If you’re a chicken.”

Vic then imitated a chicken.

That made Gar angry enough that he stuck his chin up, and started turning the cards defiantly.

Everyone looked down at the spread.

“They’re mostly upright,” said Gar, grinning.

“Um, no, they’re mostly reversed,” said Raven. “Now the cards are facing you.”

“Oh.” Gar’s smiled dropped. Then he brightened. “Oooh, I see the lovers in there!” he said, and made his eyebrows wiggle.

“That one was also there in the last read,” Vic reminded him. “It just means friendship.”

“The same cards can mean different things in different sessions,” said Raven, staring at the cards.

Gar hawked at Vic. “Ha! See? What’d they mean here, Raven?”

“They do mean a romantic future is on the way,” she said off-handedly. She wondered how they had failed to notice that The Lovers was reversed.

“Okay,” Gar smiled wanly, not understanding why she was being so unforthcoming. “That’s good, right?”

“Um, I also see something ending badly,” said Raven, forcing it out. She wanted to kick herself—this was why you didn’t read for friends.

“Oh,” made Gar.

“Hey, remember it’s just a game,” Dick told him. Raven didn’t correct him; it was better if Gar thought it was.

Her eyes darted through the rest of the spread, wondering how she was going to get out of this situation.

Gar’s cards were a mess. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this. So… intense, so extreme and so negative. The Devil in his remote past? That inverted Star in his near future? She didn’t want to look at these cards; she didn’t want to know what they would tell her. She stuck to the middle, to the Fool and the High Priestess crossed over it. That she could deal with.

“Okay, this represents you. The Fool.” She made a pause so Vic could tease him (“I coulda told you that myself!”) and went on. “It speaks of a free spirit, an open and curious mind, a person ready to go with the flow.”

Gar looked extremely satisfied. “Yep, that’s me!”

“And the High Priestess speaks of a wise, enlightening figure in your life. A feminine presence that guides you.”

“What, like my mom?” asked Gar.

“Could be,” Raven replied.

Then she was stuck again; in light of the four other troubling cards, she decided to finish the picture. She drew four more cards from the deck, arranging them vertically next to the others. She told Gar to turn them, and he did so silently.

The four new cards didn’t make it much better.

Raven bit her lip. Gar was sure he’d never seen her do that before.

She stuck to the good cards—The Magician and Strength. “Okay, I see you having all sort of tools at your disposal to rise above every obstacle. I see hardships that will wind up on you becoming a strong, solid person.”

“What kind of hardships?” asked Gar.

The Sun, reversed, was calling to her in answer to his question. Above it, The World, also reversed, wanted to join it. But Raven didn’t want to know more. She didn’t want to hear what these cards would tell her.

“I can’t say,” she lied. She leaned back on her bed, as if to signal the read was over.

“Wait, is that it? There are so many cards,” said Vic.

Dick said, “You’re only talking about the ones that are upright.”

Raven breathed deep, rolling her eyes away so as not to face Gar or the cards. “Okay, just…” She finally looked at the rest of her friends. “Step into the hallway for a second.”

Dick was unsettled. “What?”

“Can you go out onto the hallway?” she said. “Just for a second.”

Dick, Victor and Kori exchanged alarmed glances.

Vic was the first to stand up. “Um… sure.”

The three got up gingerly. Raven got up after them and closed the door behind them. She stayed there a while, her back to Gar.

Gar felt hot and cold. He was conscious he had supremely fucked up. Why had he asked the cards about himself? He should have asked a question. He should have said to focus on the future. What the hell had she seen?

After a while, his need to know was stronger than the fear. “Raven?” he called. “What did you see? …Why’d you tell them all to leave?”

She responded, “I have a reputation to maintain, don’t I?”

Gar gaped. “What?”

She came back to her bed, smirking lightly. “When they come back, pretend I told you something big.”

Gar stared at her for a while before her meaning got through; slowly, he began to smile, and then laugh. “Oh Rae, you sly dog, you!”

Raven shushed him and moved to gather the cards. When the others came back, he did his best to act casually shocked. Raven quickly changed the subject back to the mission, and the others went with it.

At no point did Gar truly believe her—he could tell she was lying. She just didn’t want to tell him what she’d seen. But he only let himself dwell on that after he got home: what had shocked her so much that she had to lie?

Over the next few days, he found himself looking at her. Wondering if she knew something about him now that the others didn’t. If she knew something Gar himself didn’t know.

He always meant to google the meanings of the cards himself—find out by himself what she could have seen and rip the Band-Aid off. But he never seemed to get around to it, and slowly, he began to forget the names of the cards he’d gotten.

Chapter Text

Gar and Vic stopped by the Secretary’s window on their way into school, only because Dick was there, but when they did, Dick looked uncomfortable enough to puzzle them.

The secretary came to the window with a stack of files. “The principal corroborates your story,” she told him formally. “Here are the files.”

“Thanks,” replied Dick, not looking very happy.

“What are those?” Victor asked, after the Secretary closed the window.

Dick hesitated. “A list of new enrolments to the school. Raven said we should look for someone new, so that’s what I’m doing.”

“Oh. Great,” Gar said. “Quick question. Why are you being so weird about this whole mission?”

Dick frowned. “I’m not. I told you, I just feel like Blood-”

“Is using us, yeah, you said,” Vic cut him off, having no patience to hear the whole spiel again. “That doesn’t explain why you go and do mission stuff behind our backs.”

“I was gonna tell you guys about this today,” Dick argued, not looking at them. “I have to go to Bio, I’ll see you at lunch, goodbye.”

Gar and Vic watched him go.

Gar said, “’Least he’s doing mission stuff. He’s not gonna quit the Club like you said.”

“Yeah. ‘Least there’s that,” Vic replied. Then he was bent forward as Jen jumped on his shoulders from behind.

“Morning!” she sang out. “Did my handsome boyfriend catch the evil criminal yet?”

“Nope! Still working on it,” Vic returned, grinning, as he swung her around and kissed her.

Then they were making out, so Gar left them to it. He spotted Kori and Raven and went to them. The girls were at Kori’s locker, talking closely together when he arrived.

“…and she said it was because they’d been at the ski rink, but Vic doesn’t go skiing, so even that was a lie,” Raven was saying.

Kori returned a quiet, “That is what she said.”

“See my problem with her is, she fucking lies,” Raven said.

“What are you guys doing?” Gar asked.

“We’re talking shit about Jen,” Raven told him, never one to sugar coat even her own actions.

“Oh, cool,” said Gar, who was generally down with whatever, and also didn’t particularly like Jen.

But Kori looked conflicted and regretful at Raven’s statement. “We do not mean to speak badly,” she said.

Raven said, “We’ve just been noticing she’s a chronic liar, that’s all. She told Kori and I that she and Vic went to a new indoor skiing rink on the weekend that no one’s heard about yet.”

“But Vic hates the ice,” said Gar.

“Exactly,” said Raven. “I asked him and he said he hasn’t gone skiing in years and doesn’t plan to.”

“Now that you mention it,” said Gar, “there was this weird thing once. She was talking about something being on the second floor of her house, but I remember Vic said she lived in an apartment.”

Raven turned to Kori. “See?”

“Some apartments have stairs within,” Kori tried, weakly.

Both Raven and Gar gave her a tired look. Kori offered a grimace back at them, then looked away from their disapproving faces. She’d never been comfortable with talking badly of people behind their back, and she knew that was uncool, but she didn’t see herself changing any time soon.

Along the course of the school day, new X’s appeared, inexplicably, in the rather high ceiling of the third floor girls’ bathroom. They were pink. Mr. Mod ranted about it in class in detriment of his entire History lesson. The mission became slightly more urgent.

That afternoon in the clubroom, Dick did share the files he got from the Secretary with the others. Victor found himself wondering if he would have still shared them if he and Gar hadn’t caught him, and now he figured they would never know.

“So do we interview these new arrivals?” Kori asked cautiously.

The clubroom was slightly tense and quieter than normal, as if Dick’s being closed off exerted a pull on everyone else.

“Yeah. We could do that,” Dick said quietly, sitting with his feet up on the table. His noncommittal response seemed to communicate the opposite of what his words had expressed.

Vic was thinking of how to push him, when the door burst open.

In came a redheaded boy. His eyes scanned the room, located Dick at the table and strode to him.

“What the fuck are you doing with your life, Grayson? I know you know it’s me doing that graffiti.”

Dick swung his feet off the table, stood to face the boy and answered in the same tone. “I’ve known it was you since I saw the first stupid X, Rex.”

“Then why’ve you been a pussy and not come confront me?” Rex demanded, hitting the table with his fists.

“And why would I do exactly what you wanted me to?” Dick returned. “If you want something from me why didn’t you come confront me?”

“Fine, I’ll be honest, you dick. Do one thing for me and I’ll stop the graffiti shit.”

“No. Go break your legs in a hole.”

“Okay, great, how ‘bout this? Do the thing and I won’t tell everyone who you used to be.”

“Blood already has my file, Rex, that ship has sailed.”

“Do the students know? You with this new goody-goody image-”

“Some of these kids went with us to middle school, so I’d say yes. And guess what, nobody cares!”

Rex grabbed at the files on the table without breaking eye contact with Dick. “If you don’t care, then what’s this?”

Dick ripped the files from his hands. “I wanted to know for sure you were starting here. If this was really your fucked-up announcement that you’re back.”

“It’s a fucked-up announcement that I need your help, asshole.”

“You have nothing on me and I don’t want to help you. You’re on your own, Rex.”

At this, Dick sat and crossed his arms.

Rex glowered down at him. “You owe me, though. Remember?”

The he stalked out of the clubroom, slamming the door.

Dick took a deep breath and gingerly glanced up at his friends. They were as lost and bewildered as could be expected. But he avoided their eyes and the consequences of this little scene for the time being. “Just—give me a second.” He got up and left the clubroom.

Rex was waiting outside, just as he’d known he would be. He glared when Dick came out.

“Explain,” said Dick. “What trouble are you in now?”

Rex shoved his hands in his pockets. “I just need to drop some money with these guys.”

Dick resisted the urge to find out more about the who and the why. “And what’d you want me to do?”

“I’d just like some backup. Thought I’d ask an old friend,” Rex spat.

“And I told you, we’re not that anymore,” said Dick, turning to the door.

“I don’t trust these people, Dick.” Rex’s voice had taken a different tone.

Dick stopped with his hand on the knob. But he went into the clubroom anyway.

He opened the door too roughly—his friends, leaning on the other side, nearly toppled over each other as they jumped away and tried to pretend they weren’t listening through the door. Dick gave Raven a disappointed look. Even you?

Dick moved back to his spot on the table, as if nothing had happened. “He’s not gonna bother us anymore. And he’ll stop the graffiti.”

“Dick, who the hell was that?” Victor asked.

Dick sighed. “That was Alexander Red. We used to be friends… in middle school.”

His friends assembled around him, communicating to him they were going to get the full story or nothing else.

Dick had no choice but to launch into it. “You know how, when we got in trouble with Blood over Gar’s doodle of Mr. Mod, I had this huge record?”

“Yes!” exclaimed Gar. “Are we finally gonna hear that story!?”

Dick glared at him. “Before you guys met me, I wasn’t… like now,” he started. He closed his eyes. “I was… a bit of a delinquent.”

Victor snorted. “I’m sorry,” he said immediately. “No, really I’m sorry, but that’s too good,” he added, and turned around to snicker in peace.

“What do you mean, delinquent?” asked Kori. She hoped he wouldn’t explain the definition, when what she wanted was clarification.

Dick thankfully got her meaning. “Means I was running around, tagging halls, breaking stuff, breaking into stuff…”

“You?” asked Raven, not being able to hold back any longer. “Really?”

“I know.” Dick closed his eyes. He hoped he hadn’t fallen too much in their eyes. He’d reinvented himself so hard for high school, he had no idea the cognitive dissonance his friends must be experiencing right now. And he couldn’t look Kori in the eye.

“Wait, I’m confused,” said Gar. “I had this idea that you were this obedient, perfect, Type-A, prize-winning prodigy when you were younger.” He was a bit embarrassed—he was supposed to be the childhood friend.

“Before Rex, I kinda was,” Dick responded.

Dick realized it then: he had accidentally managed to find four people who hadn’t known him in his Rex era; four people whom not even rumors had touched. Gar only knew him from childhood, Victor only from primary school, and Kori and Raven hadn’t even living been in the city two years ago. It could have been perfect… if Rex had never showed up.

Kori asked, “How did you become friends?”

“I was starting middle school here after moving in with my uncle,” Dick said. “First day of school, a boy said I was a pansy rich boy who couldn’t throw a punch if my life depended on it.”

“And Rex defended you,” Kori completed.

Dick frowned. “No. I could defend myself, thank you very much. I broke the boy’s nose.”

“So where does Rex come in?” asked Raven.

“Rex was that boy,” Dick said, smiling despite himself. “We were just inseparable after that. It’s weird to explain it like that, but… I think he just wouldn’t have made friends with anyone who couldn’t take him in a fight. We were each other’s only friends.”

“So… why’d you stop being friends?” asked Gar.

Dick stopped smiling. “One time we let it get too far. We were at a party one night. But we blew that off and went out to do our own thing. We stole someone’s bike, and we broke into a random house just because it had a pool. We’d done it before, only this time we got caught. We got charged with breaking and entering. My uncle got me off because he is who he is, but Rex went to Juvie. That’s why I was homeschooled last year.” He grimaced. “That’s why he says I owe him. …He’s not wrong.”

Gar had seen Raven and Vic exchange glances trough the story. Vic was shaking his head at Raven, who was raising her eyebrows, and they were clearly disagreeing in the silent debate. Gar thought he knew what the debate was. And he agreed with Raven.

Raven cleared her throat. “Um, you blew off a party, rode through town, and broke into a house to take a dip in the pool?” she surmised, looking at Dick intently. But he only nodded along. Raven went for broke. “Were you guys friends, or…?”

“Best friends,” said Dick, with a wistful smile, oblivious to the looks.

“Alright.” Raven seemed to give up. “So why aren’t we helping your old best friend?”

“Because I’m not involving myself with him anymore,” Dick responded. “I can’t go back there. We’re not helping him, and he’s gonna stop with the graffiti, and that’s all there’s to it.”

Dick’s tone was so stern they didn’t dare contradict him. The graffiti was a mission from faculty, but for Dick, it entailed a deeply personal issue. If only because of that, the four let it be.

At the end of the day, Dick said goodbye to his friends, left the school, and went around to the side of the school, at the opposite end from the parking lot. He turned a corner and there was Rex, leaning against a wall, just like he’d expected.

They regarded each other. Rex nodded to his left, and they both went in that direction.

“Tell me about these guys you got involved with,” said Dick.

“Regular mob-like group,” said Rex. “They have an office on Ashton Street. I’d done some work for them before.”

“What kind of work?”

“Various stuff.”

Dick stopped walking and stared at Rex.

Rex said, “I set fire to some shrubs outside a farm and vandalized a few neighborhoods to lower the cost of living.”

Dick raised his eyebrows. That was a new one.

Rex shrugged. “It paid well.”

“And how much did you borrow from them?”

Rex looked around, even though they were alone in a deserted parking lot. “Thirty K.”

Dick stifled his shock. Rex had outdone himself. “What did you need thirty grand for?” he hissed.

Rex looked away. “Mom’s medical bills rack up, Dick.”

Dick’s eyes softened. “How is she?”

“She’s fine,” Rex answered. “She’s a fighter. Misses you, though.”

Dick remembered the afternoons in the tiny studio apartment, the smell of Mrs. Red’s cooking and her incessant jokes, where Dick had almost felt like he had a mom again. He ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t see how my being there will help.”

“We always got out of things when it was the two of us.”

Dick refused to share that much of a rose-colored view of the past. “I don’t know how we did it, though.”

Rex clapped his arm, bright again. “It’ll come to us. Come on.”

He led Dick to a really nice motorbike.

Dick’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Where’d you get the bike?” he asked.

“Jealous?” Rex returned simply, handing him a helmet.

Rex took them to a diner. He sat with his back to the window and told Dick the office they were going to was across the street, in an alleyway between two buildings. Dick could just about make out a metal door in that alleyway, next to a dumpster.

Rex ordered them fries.

“For the record, I heard about the pink X’s in the girls’ bathroom?” Rex said. “That wasn’t even me. I mean, why would I do pink?”

“Great, that just means you started a graffiti trend,” Dick replied.

“Got your attention, though.”

“Still don’t get why you wanted it, though.”

“I told you, I wanted backup,” said Rex, annoyed. “This isn’t like the guys we used to run with, Dick. This is bigger.”

“We always dabbled with stuff too big for us,” Dick said dismissively.

“Yeah, but we’re older. It’s different. They don’t see us as little kids anymore. They won’t mind hurting us.”

Dick resented how Rex had already changed ‘I’ for ‘we’ and ‘us’. He was also starting to doubt the story itself. This diner was in their old middle school neighborhood. They used to come here all the time. Maybe this was all a set-up, an excuse to reconnect. He wouldn’t put it past Rex.

At the same time, Dick could tell Rex was angry Dick kept doubting him, and insulted he had to try this hard to get Dick on board.

The waitress came to leave their fries, smiling at them. “Are you two brothers?” she asked them without preamble, in a way Dick was sure she and the other staff had been arguing over whether they were.

Dick and Rex answered, “No,” in unison, not breaking the glare between them.

The girl dropped it there and left the food in silence.

When she left, though, Rex’s face eased into a smirk. “Haven’t heard that question in a while.”

They had gotten that question way too many times in their life for it to be natural. Dick had no idea why people were obsessed with whether or not they were brothers.

They didn’t look alike at all. They had similar body types and that was about it. Beyond that, Rex was pale with freckles, and his hair was auburn red. Dick had black hair and an evenly tan skin. Rex’s eyes went golden, hazel, green, and Dick’s were always solid blue. Rex dressed primarily in black; Dick liked a pop of color here and there.

Dick perked up when Rex’s expression became alarmed. Rex looked at Dick to make sure he had his attention, and then nodded almost imperceptibly towards the counter.

The man who had just entered was big and arrogant-looking. He sauntered to the cashier like he wanted to take as much space as possible. Dick took note of him and looked away.

Unfortunately, the man noticed Rex, and made his way over to their table. He spread his arms on the table and leaned down next to Rex. “This a friend of yours?” he asked, nodding towards Dick.

“Nah,” Rex made out.

Dick made a point to keep eating his fries.

“You ready to come see us?” the man asked. “Hope you have the dough, kid.”

“Sure, Randy,” returned Rex, trying to look simply annoyed where he was also scared.

Rex only relaxed when the man left the diner.

Dick said, “So this wasn’t just a way to get me back. You’re really in trouble, you idiot.”

Rex looked outraged Dick had actually said it. “You thought I made up this whole thing for you? Nice to know your self-esteem’s healthy as ever.”

“No, you’re just that big of a manipulative asshole.”

“You’re as paranoid as your guardian now. Always seeing the worst in me.”

“God, Rex, you’re the reason I’m scared of having friends!” Dick snapped. “I’m always watching my step looking at who may influence me and how, because of you!”

“It’s not my fault you’re malleable, bird boy,” Rex retorted. “You think your new friends are an upgrade? I was the only one who saw the real you, with all you could be, and you just couldn’t handle that.”

“I wouldn’t be your friend again if you were the last person alive,” Dick stated.

The waitress came back with the check. They each paid half.

“Ready?” Rex asked.

“Sure,” replied Dick, and they left the diner.

Rex took them through the alleyway. They eyed the door, and Dick stopped them before they went all the way in. “Rex, wait.” He made Rex face him. “You don’t have the money, do you?”

Rex looked at him. His expression almost made fun of him—an ‘of course I don’t’ grin.

Dick kicked himself or ignoring what he already knew. He pushed Rex on the chest, as if to get rid of some frustration.

“How did you burn through thirty K?” he asked, futilely.

“I went through twenty-five K, for the record,” Rex clarified. “And I already told you it was the medical bills.”

Dick didn’t let up. “What about the bike?”

Rex looked guilty. Dick always had thought his face was too transparent for him to be such a rascal.

“I have to be able to get around!” Rex protested.

Dick hung his head. “What did you really want me to do here? That bank account I used to have…”

“I know.”

“It’s locked.”

“I just wanted you to be there. In case things got sour.”

“In case they got sour? You don’t have this money, how else could it go?” Dick snapped. “What was your plan all along then?”

“For us to get out of trouble somehow, like we always did. You can use your name.” Dick raised an eyebrow. “Well, your uncle’s name. You know, like before. Say the magic words and get us out of trouble.”

There was a strong note of disdain in his tone, which was grand for a guy who was asking him to use the very influence he was scorning.

“Breaking into the Carlton’s place was your idea,” Dick told him. “You know that, right?”

“And I took the fall for it. While you got to sit back in your literal mansion.”

“I was trapped there for a year.”

“I was in Juvie!”

“You were posting pictures of you having a blast!”

“I was lying to myself. Nice of you to keep up with my social media, though.”

Dick refrained from answering that one. He knew from history this argument would get them nowhere. He balanced himself on the balls of his feet, looking around, thinking things through. This was bad, and he was moving backwards, he knew. But he couldn’t help it. His mind rushed with possibilities of how to get Rex out of this; familiar machinations and a familiar need to protect him.

“Come on,” he said, grabbing Rex’s hand and pulling him towards the door. “We’ll figure something out.”

And Rex’s relieved expression looked oh-so-familiar as they went inside the office together.

Chapter Text

Dick and Rex were greeted by the smell of cigarettes and the sound of raucous laughter before their eyes adjusted to the darkness.

“I told you he’d bring his little friend,” a voice laughed.

Every mob-like office was the same, thought Dick. Every one of them imitated the movies. There was a fat boss sitting to a desk, two goons at either side of him, and another by the door.

“What’s the matter, kid? Afraid to come alone to talk to your old friends?” Randy from the diner teased. He was standing at the boss’ left.

The boss spoke jovially. “Why would he be afraid? Alexander has my money. Don’t you, boy?”

Rex looked at Dick. Dick nodded at him. Rex swallowed and took out the five thousand dollars from his bag. On the table it looked like a particularly pathetic pile, clearly short of anywhere near enough.

“What’s this?” asked the boss in a disgusted tone.

The room tensed up. No one was laughing anymore.

“I needed the rest of the money,” tried Rex. “My mom’s medical bills-”

“You spent my money, and you brought this other boy to protect you?” the boss asked, pointing a fat finger at Dick. “All you did was sign his death sentence, too.”

Dick went forward. “Look, he’ll work the debt off. There’s no need to-”

The boss waved him off. “I’m not interested. Alexander was paying off a credit to another when he came to me in the first place.”

Dick looked at Rex. Rex grinned sheepishly.

“He’ll be a good worker this time,” insisted Dick. “I’ll vouch for him.”

“And who are you?”

“This is Dick Grayson,” said Rex, clasping Dick’s shoulders and bringing him forward. “He’s Bruce Wayne’s ward.”

The boss observed Dick, and his face didn’t betray any change. But then, Dick knew from experience, they never did. It didn’t mean Bruce’s name didn’t have an effect.

“We can come to an agreement,” Dick tried again. “We’ll sign a contract. Rex can make partial payments and we’ll set a final time he’ll have the rest of the money by.”

The boss sounded like he was listening to Dick, puffing his cigar and looking off in the distance. When Dick had said his piece, however, he shook his head. “He wasn’t that good of an employee. Not interested.”

He raised his hand and made a swift movement at his goons. Dick’s body tensed with muscle memory—he knew how this was ending.

Dick and Rex were plopped down in the hospital lobby’s chairs, staring at white walls. Thankfully the ER wasn’t crowded a Thursday afternoon.

“If you smell alcohol, does that mean you have a concussion?” asked Rex, holding his head.

“It’s a hospital, it does smell like alcohol,” Dick told him, his voice muffled by the flyer he was pressing to his bloody nose. “But you can go in first.”

“I’m really glad their secret lair is within walking distance of a hospital,” said Rex.

“Yeah, that was considerate of them,” said Dick.

Dick tried taking the flyer from his face. The bleeding seemed to have stopped, so he left it off. He inspected the paper for the first time. “What’s this flyer you gave me? Electric Vibes Festival? What is that?”

“Look, man, it was meant to stop your nose bleeding, not enrich you culturally.”

Rex shifted in the seat, wincing at the pain from his abdomen. The goons had gone to town kicking him, but he could tell nothing was broken. “Should’ve known they’d take the bike.”

“We got off lucky. The five K, the bike, and a bit of a roughing up. Could’ve been worse.”

“Would have been, if we hadn’t mentioned your uncle in the nick of time.”

“Works every time,” said Dick, bitterness dripping from his tone.

“Bet it made you miss the old days, huh?”

The slight undertone of uncertainty nearly broke Dick’s heart. He knew Rex was hanging on his answer. “Rex, I know you want things to just go back to how it was. But they can’t.”

Rex snickered. “Psh. Yeah. I know. ‘Cause you’re all straight-laced now.” He shook his head, laughing to hide his frustration. “We did so much shit, and the one time we get caught… you get all spooked and call it quits. All of it. Even us.”

Dick closed his eyes. “It’s not like that.”

“I went to Juvie,” Rex muttered, “and that was alright. I was relieved you weren’t going with me. I was happy you could be spared. I come out, and I’m not allowed in your house. Fine, I saw that coming. Your uncle had finally banned me. But then you stopped answering your phone. You didn’t wanna see me.”

“I needed a clean break.”

“I’m not some drug or something!” he snapped. “I was your goddamn best friend. You were my brother. Four years, Dick. You threw away four years of friendship.”

“I wasn’t myself back then,” Dick said, turning to face him. “I was crazy. My parents had just died…. There were things I needed to get out of my system. But that wasn’t me. I’m more than a juvenile delinquent.”

“And I’m not? Is that what you’re saying?”

“No. That’s not you either.” Dick looked at the other boy intently. “But you have to figure that out yourself. The two of us, together? That’s moving backwards. We bring the worst out on each other.” He turned to stare ahead. “At least for now it’s like that.” Dick knew what was right for him. He knew he wasn’t himself when he was with Rex. He hardly knew what had even happened today. He had to get rid of the guilt, the nagging fear that Rex might go even more astray without him, and let him go. “…I’m sorry. I really am.”

Rex stayed silent for a while. Dick didn’t look at him. He knew Rex—if he was processing Dick’s words, he wouldn’t want Dick to look at him right now.

The next time Rex spoke, his voice sounded subdued, like he’d reached an end of acceptance. “Sorry. Right.”

And they fell into another spell of silence.

The next thing he said was, “Your gang’s here.”

Dick turned to the door. Sure enough, his four friends had entered the hospital.

“What are you guys doing here?” Dick asked when they approached him.

“Your uncle called us,” said Gar.

Dick suppressed a groan. He could just see the scene. The hospital had called Bruce, Bruce had gotten a déjà vu of when Rex was in their lives, he’d called Dick’s friends to see if they were with him—and when he saw they weren’t, he’d sent them to Dick. It was just like Bruce to send people as a message: ‘I know you’re with Rex, because you're not with these four.’

Discomfort was palpable in the hall. Raven was frowning, Gar scratched his arm awkwardly, Vic was glaring at nothing, and Kori had her hands clasped in front of her chest, like when she was conflicted over something.

Rex must have sensed it too. He stood. “Alright! I’ll let you kids talk, I’ve gotta go a man about a concussion.” And he made for the main desk.

When he was gone, Dick addressed his friends. “Everything alright?”

“Alright?” echoed Raven. “You went behind our backs to do a mission, which you told us was a non-issue to begin with.”

“Guys, this wasn’t a real mission,” Dick said. “It was just a thing I had to do so Rex would stop tagging the halls.”

“A thing you didn’t trust us with,” said Gar, in a small voice.

“We could’ve helped you, man,” said Vic, “we could have kept you from ending up in hospital.”

“Are we in this together, or aren’t we?” asked Raven.

Dick frowned. He had known this would be jarring for them. But they didn’t understand that the way he’d gone about things made things easier and cleaner. “This was my old friend. My problem to solve. It had nothing to do with you.”

“I guess that’s a no, then,” surmised Raven. “I’m glad you’re fine. I’m going home.”

She turned and walked out. Gar and Vic followed her. Kori was left standing there.

“Why did you not tell us?” she asked after a pause.

“Rex is part of my past,” Dick responded, calmer. “I didn’t want him to seep into my present.” He could always talk honestly to Kori. When he said was talking to her, things seemed cleaner, purer, realer.

“Is that all?”

He was lost. “What do you mean?”

“The reason why you did not trust us,” Kori clarified. She sat next to him, folded her hands over her lap and looked at him. Her eyes were solemn and serious. “Dick. I believe you act as if forming this club was your idea, instead of something that came from all of us. Do not misunderstand—we know you are our leader. We never discussed, and Vic may not recognize it, but we know it is true. But that does not mean you are the only one who wants to do this work. And it does not mean you are able to pick what things to hide from us.” Her eyes shone. “We are your friends, and we are part of this club. We are next to you. Not under you.”

Dick looked at her, stunned.

Kori was so gentle and nice that it was startling to get this quiet no-nonsense calling out from her. It was the first time, but it would not be the last, that Dick was floored by how much she perceived, and how swiftly she could put things in perspective for him.

“Kori, I never meant…” he trailed off. He was rethinking all his actions up to that point, all the things he’d been sure of since the start of the Club. Did he see his friends as unequal to him? Did he think he cared more for the work than they did? Was that why he took over the decisions, why he thought he knew better?

…How could he know so well what was right for him about Rex’s bad influence on him, and screw up so grandly with his brand new friends?

“You should tell us more things,” she said, as if to spare him from his evident crisis. With that she got up.

As he watched her leave, Dick thought that, at least, he could be sure he’d do better from now on. She had left him no option but to.

Victor was having lunch with Jenny when he saw Dick walk through the cafeteria and approach their usual table. Vic saw him say a few words to Kori, Gar and Raven. The three of them looked at him, exchanged looks with each other, and said something back to him. Then Raven scooted over. Dick smiled in relief and sat with them.

Vic smiled approvingly.

“I still don’t get what the big deal is,” Jenny was saying, also watching the scene. “Just a little paint on the walls. I mean you did Blood’s dirty work for him. And for what? You could have just left the damn X’s alone. I thought they were pretty. And I always say a little chaos is welcome in a place like this.”

“Yeah, you made the way you felt about it very clear,” Vic said, turning to face her.

Jen stopped mid-bite and stared at him, watchful, expressionless.

Vic chuckled. “Please, Jenny. Like I wouldn’t know it was you with the X’s in the girls’ bathroom.”

Her face broke into a devilish smile. “Did the pink give it away?”

“That, and who else do I know that can possibly balance on top of a stall to paint something on the ceiling?”

Jenny laughed like it was a compliment, and drew in closer to him. “Okay, here’s my prank idea. When they clean the X’s in the halls, we paint new ones, but red. Pretend like it’s still that Rex guy doing it. What’d you say? Ruffle Dick’s feathers a bit?”

Victor looked at her with a tender smile and didn’t say anything.

Jen’s smile waned. “Babe? Hello, Earth to Vic?”

“You know the day we bailed from my dad’s party, that thing you asked me? If I wanted to be a goody-goody my whole life?” Vic was talking slowly, as if to delay this as much as he could. “I think that’s exactly what I want, yeah.”

Jen’s face went through a series of considerations of emotions. It began to make confusion, then indignation, then teasing, then sadness, then anger. She closed her eyes tight as if to clean the slate, went “Whoa,” and jumped to stand by the table, turning her back to Vic. When she turned around, she’d settled on proud disbelief. “Are you actually telling me we’re on opposite sides of good and evil and thus we can’t be together?”

“Mm, more like, you almost threw the search because we thought the culprit was a girl, and you’ll probably try to sabotage missions in the future, wherein I’m gonna have to choose between going against my friends and turning you in.” Vic made a sad smile. “And I don’t wanna do either.”

Victor had seen his new friends throw themselves into the idea to make the Club a place to help people. He had been a little slower to take to it. In fact, so far, he’d grumbled every step of the way.

They were younger than him. He’d seen their comings and goings with a degree of detachment, amusement even. But perhaps in this they had been more mature than him—going into something with all their hearts, while Vic was still at a crossroads, with a foot in each world. He’d thought his circumstances gave him a free pass to go wild for a while; he still thought that was true. But he had to make a choice sometime.

Right now his life could go either way. He could go off the rails with his cute girlfriend, or he could follow his idealistic group of freshmen friends into a better tomorrow, maybe. And Vic had chosen his path.

Jen stared at him, then let out a forced laugh. “Damn.” She shook her head at him. “I had high hopes for you, Stone. I was gonna make you into a cool vandal like me.” She cupped his face, smiling wide. “It was fun, though.”

“Oh, it was a blast,” Vic returned, smiling up at her. He hoped she would kiss him one last time.

But she let go of his face instead. “And now I’m officially you ex,” she said, never dropping her smile. “I can’t wait to make your life miserable for dumping me.”

With that she danced away, and Vic’s smiled froze. Should he regret the last few weeks of his life?

…Eh, whatever. He’d live and learn.

He took his tray to his friends’ table to shake the dread off.

He made his entrance with a, “Ha! Look what the cat dragged in!” directed at Dick.

“They already told me off, Vic,” said Dick.

“I didn’t,” Victor replied, sitting next to him. “I just wanna say one thing. Dick.”

“Yeah, I’m listening.”

“Nope, that was it,” Vic said, smiling wide at him. “Dick.”

Gar let out raucous laughter. Raven smirked.

“Very funny,” said Dick.

“With the name you have, you deserve it,” Vic laughed.

Kori finally asked, “Why?” She’d been lost for the last ten seconds.

Gar stopped laughing. Everybody froze; they’d forgotten about Kori. The four looked at each other in askance, before Raven finally turned to Kori and spoke matter-of-factly, “Because Dick also means penis.”

“Raven!” protested Dick, as Vic gasped at her.

“What? If I didn’t tell her, she would have googled it, and that would have been worse,” she argued.

“Ah, fair point,” accepted Vic.

But Kori was now more confused, as well as alarmed. “What?” she made out. “Why did that… become a… name?”

“No, no, it was a nickname ages before it meant…” Dick tried before he trailed off, frustrated. He was bright red and he contented himself with hiding his face from Kori.

Vic turned to Raven and Gar. “I was gonna say we had to find a way to make him pay for sneaking behind our backs, but I think this is enough for me.”

Raven and Gar agreed.

End of March.

Chapter Text

Raven surveyed the folded clothes and assorted items spread out on her bed. Dick had given them all a list –well, he’d texted it to the others and given it to her in a piece of paper- of things they should take on the trip, but something within her rebelled against packing so heavily.

She had never packed a bag before, she realized; any time she’d had to move, her mother had packed for her. But once she had gathered most of what the list said, she’d taken a look at the quantity of it, and decided Nope. She had no experience with luggage, but she did trust her instincts. So she took out the insect repellant and added an extra towel; took out the flashlight and added a book; she left out pots and pans and cooking utensils, all the medicine, the extra socks and underwear, and the plastic bags and shampoo. Her instincts had never led her astray before.

A knock came at her door, slow and deliberate.

“Come in,” said Raven. She had known Azar was in the apartment. A while ago her mother had opened the hallway door, and then Raven had heard chairs being drawn, and the cupboard doors open and close. Arella only ever entertained Azar in their apartment for any long period of time.

The elderly woman entered. As every time she saw her, Raven was put at ease by the peace that emanated from Azar. She was a thin woman, pale and white-haired, wearing a loose white dress. When she smiled, the corners of her mouth settled in wrinkles. Raven found herself easily smiling back. Most of the time she felt out of place in Azarath. But she never felt out of place around Azar.

“Are you all ready?” Azar asked.

“Almost,” Raven replied. “Thank you for convincing my mom to let me go.”

“Arella worries about you, Raven. But I know how important the work of this Club is to you. And your Club is important to the world.”

Raven looked away, embarrassed. “I mean, we haven’t actually gotten anything done since we decided to do this.”

The five of them had been talking about it the other day. Nothing they had done after rescuing the SAT exams had felt right. That was why, when Dick had come up with this mission, they had all jumped on board.

“You will get there,” Azar responded, unaffected by Raven’s pessimism, as always. “Hard work is always rewarded, one way or another.”

Raven eyed her tentatively. “I know Azarath is more about reaching peace in isolation, not really doing stuff to affect the world.”

“Azarath precepts advocates for purity and detachment from society, yes. But, Raven, your mother found meaning in Azarath. It does not mean you have to as well.”

“…Are you disappointed? That I’m not following the Azarath ways?”

It was the first time Raven dared ask her; it had been on her mind for a while.

The people in Azarath kept themselves pure through strict mental control and detachment from the world. They kept their thoughts and their spirits high and magnanimous in a way that had never clicked for Raven. But in the Club she’d seen a path for her: if she did good things, if didn’t matter what her thoughts were, it didn’t matter what she was like inside: she was still putting out good in the world.

Azar pushed Raven’s hair behind her ear affectionately. “My dear, you are making good. You have conquered your nature and forged your own way, separate from your heredity. You’ve found purpose in something that makes sense to you, and you’ve found a group of people to share it with. How could I be disappointed?”

Raven breathed, and let the words fill her with relief and approval.

A rustling noise made them turn towards the window. By now it was familiar, but Raven couldn’t get used to it. In another moment, Gar had climbed into her room.

“Speak of the devil,” muttered Raven.

Gar did a double-take when he saw Azar. “Oh. Hi,” he said, scratching his hair. “Sorry, uh… Rae told me I could climb in if the window was open.”

“What I said was that if you couldn’t refrain from climbing up here, that at least you respected when the window was closed,” stated Raven.

Azar was smiling. “Which one is he?”

“Gar. The annoying one,” said Raven. Then she told Gar, “This is Azar, our leader.”

“It is nice to meet you,” Azar told Gar, who grinned at her in response. She turned to leave, saying, “I’ll leave you to it. Oh, when are you returning, Raven?” she asked as an afterthought.

Raven thought about it. “Maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after. Depends on what we find in the lake.”

Azar nodded. “I see. I will keep Arella calm if you are out longer,” she said, almost conspirational. “Do good work,” Azar told both of them.

When she’d left, Gar turned to Raven. “Wow, you told her the truth? Dude, your cult leader’s so cool. I had to lie to my mom to get her to let me go.” He sat on Raven’s bed. “I told her we were doing a Biology project.”

“Azarath is not a cult,” Raven said. It wasn’t the first time she’d had to tell him that. “Did she believe you?”

“Or she pretended to, so Steve would let me go.”

“How did it get past an actual member of faculty that no subject requires us to go on a road trip for independent study?”

Gar shrugged. “Anyway, I just came to see if you needed help packing.” And he proved that statement by laying on her bed next to her luggage. His shirt rose a little when he threw his arms behind his head, baring a stretch of tanned skin on his stomach. He had to notice that, right? Raven couldn’t think he didn’t. It had to be a show of forced carefreeness that he didn’t move to fix it.

Raven moved her eyes to his face when she went to stand over him. It got his attention—his eyes snapped open.

“Have you noticed that I have you guys take your shoes off whenever you come over,” she said, “and now, because you insist on climbing through my window, you’re wearing shoes in my bedroom?”

Gar froze, grinned sheepishly, took off his shoes and jumped to go and leave them under the window sill.

He hung out with her for a while, fluttering about the room and talking his head off, and not helping her pack in any way. Raven simply packed around him, watching where he was out of the corner of her eye.

Of all her new friends, Gar was the one she could never relax around. He was always so aware of people, always looking to put on a show; and he was always on her face in particular, pushing her to her limits and then watching for her reaction. She had told him he was funny once, when she was feeling nice, and it had been the worst mistake of her life; he wouldn’t let her forget it, no matter how much she tried to deny it had ever happened.

For someone like Raven, who had been raised in restraint and asceticism, someone like him would always be puzzling. She had no idea what went through his mind as he jumped around, at home in the spotlight, exposing his every thought and feeling. He was so out of control, he made her feel out of control.

Everyone else toed an invisible line around Raven; they seemed to instinctively know she valued her space, and they respected that. Gar stomped all over the line like it didn’t exist. And since Raven had to push him back, and enforce the line over and over, she was always on edge around him. There was no telling when he would hug her from behind, or snake an arm over her shoulders, or when she would turn around and find his grinning face way too close to hers. No one else did that; she was eternally flabbergasted that he even dared, and she had a feeling the others were too.

When Gar got bored, he left. That was his way: he entered her day like a hurricane and left just as suddenly. There was a much appreciated silence afterwards. Whenever Gar left anyplace, the silence seemed to be extra-silence.

The morning of the trip, Raven left her room and dropped her bag in a chair by the door. It was still dark outside, earlier than when she normally got up for school.

As soon as she entered the kitchen area, she could tell her mother had worked herself into a state of nerves. Arella fluttered about the kitchen, making ten moves where she’d normally make one in the process of checking the idlis being cooked in the steamer and setting the table.

Raven braced herself.

As she was mid-idli, it came.

“I don’t know about this trip, Raven,” Arella said.

Raven resisted the urge to roll her eyes. It was just like her mother to ignore a situation for days and then freak out at the last possible minute. Arella wanted Raven to have friends—in theory. But when the moment came to actually let her do stuff, she balked.

“You already said yes, mom. Remember?” Raven responded, not looking at her.

Arella sighed and fell in silence. After a few moments, she insisted. “Do you have to go? I mean do they need you specifically?”

“Yes,” Raven stated. I like to think so, she thought.

“But why do you need to go outside of town?”

“Because that’s where the lake is,” said Raven. “Mom, normal people go camping. Azar told you, it’s good for me to…-”

“Yes I know, but Azar is not your mother,” said Arella, and those words made Raven’s mouth clamp shut. It was unusual that Arella asserted this. Usually she preferred to let Azar make the tough calls. “I already hate that you come home late every day because of this Club,” Arella went on. “And now this camping thing, in the woods, with God knows who…” she trailed off.

“You’ve met my friends.”

“I haven’t met their parents,” Arella pointed out suddenly, as if it had just occurred to her.

“You’ve never met anyone’s parents,” Raven snapped.

As soon as she said it she wished she could take it back. Raven had only meant to remark this was new for both of them—she’d never had friends, so of course Arella could never have met their parents. But once it was out it she realized it had sounded more like an accusation. I see you, Arella must have heard, Don’t pretend to be a mom with rules. We both know you’re making things up as you go. And it had clearly struck Arella as the latter.

She froze like she’d been struck, dropped her gaze, and began to tear up. Raven began to regret every harsh word she’d ever said to her.

Arella stood suddenly and went to the counter, opened cupboards and gathered some herbs jars, as if to make chai. Raven had stopped eating a while ago. Then Arella stood still, hands on the counter. She turned around.

“You don’t need to rub it in my face, you know. I know that I’m bad at this. That I don’t know how to parent.”

Then the dam broke. Arella leaned back on the counter and cried. Raven abandoned her breakfast and went to hug her. She slid down to the floor as her mother did.

Raven held Arella tight. When she was little, she used to imagine she could take her mother’s suffering for herself, and that thought always came back when they were in this type of situation. The more Arella cried, the harder and drier Raven felt inside. It had always been like that. Raven partly owed it to Azarath’s emphasis on emotional suppression, also to years of Bala Vihar classes at the temple instilling in her values of discipline and self-control; but on top of that, maybe the most important part of it, it had always been second nature for Raven to neutralize her own emotions so as not to upset her mother, who was so fragile to begin with.

“You are a good mom,” Raven told her mother.

It was mostly a lie, but the truth wasn’t welcome where it would only hurt.

They sat there a while. Raven cradled her mother’s head, shaking alongside her as sobs racked her body, until they subsided.

Then Arella sighed and moved away; Raven broke the embrace. Arella looked at Raven almost apologetically. “I don’t like the boy to girl ratio of this trip.”

Raven closed her eyes, and covered her face with her hands. “Mom.”

Arella was having none of it. She took Raven’s hands from over her eyes and secured her chin. “Raven, men are nice and trustworthy, until they’re not. You know this, right?”

Raven gazed at her mother, because she had to; otherwise Arella would keep trying to make her point until Raven showed she was listening. But she thought, Where are all your Azarath ideals on cleansing yourself of your past now, when you’re attaching yourself to what your trauma taught you?

“We’re all friends,” she muttered back.

“Alright,” Arella said diplomatically. She let go of Raven’s chin and smiled dotingly. “Alright. You should go on the trip.”

Yeah, after you already ruined it for me, Raven thought resentfully.

Nevertheless, her friends came to pick her up fifteen minutes after that. Raven loaded her bag in Vic’s trunk and Arella waved from the doorway as they drove off, like a normal parent. Like nothing had ever happened.

The sun was a mere orange line in the horizon when they set off, and the general mood in the car was excitement.

They had been hearing the rumors for days. The big lake south of town had turned to ice overnight—this being an area that never saw any bodies of water freeze in the winter, let alone in April. The five of them had sat on the issue at first. They had talked about it, debating over whether they should go or not. Whether this wasn’t beyond their pay grade.

Odd things happened regularly in Jump City. Sometimes a seemingly innocuous thing was part of a big supervillain ploy. Citizens tended to err in the side of caution and avoid anything remotely out of place as a result; the whole town was avoiding that lake right now. But then, they reasoned, this was just a lake freezing over—the problem could have been filed under weather issues. And if it was a supernatural, villain-related happening, how come the Titans had let it go on for so long?

So when days passed and the Titans didn’t stir from the Tower, Dick decided it was probably nothing, so they might as well check it out, if only to come back and meet the rumors with an explanation of what was going on. He’d submitted it to a vote –he was trying to be better leader, after Kori’s talk down had chewed out his head and put it back on the right way- and they had unanimously decided to check it out. Specifically, Gar had jumped on the table as soon as the words ‘road trip’ had been uttered.

“We have to go. Monday’s a holiday, and Vic can finally drive without an adult in the passenger seat. It’s sign!”

Vic was happily driving the car right now. Raven noticed a change in his attitude recently—normally he would have grumbled about the mission, fought Dick on whether or not this was their territory, and brought it back around to whether they should be doing this missions thing at all. Lately, though, it seemed like something had clicked for him, and he’d decided he was all in with the Club.

Raven felt she understood all of her new friends quite well by now. Sometimes, Vic’s reactions puzzled her, but she could always think on it and trace it back to the fact that they had met him in a weird time of his life, when he was adapting to his new life and body. She felt like he’d been calibrating himself back and forth all year, and now he had finally reached a balance.

Dick had also made sense for her since they had learned about Rex. Before, when Dick had spurred them to make the Club into a place for doing good deeds, Raven had seen him as an almost mythological being: a person who did the right thing for no reason other than it was the right thing. Now she saw the cracks in him, she saw a struggle –that there was an atoning laced with the idealism-, and she trusted him all the more for it.

And where Raven had once thought Kori’s bubbly and overt nature would always clash with hers, now Raven realized they were more alike than she’d given the other girl credit for; Kori was simply in tune with her emotions, and the same could be said for Raven. Kori was the only person none of them had ever bickered with, and Raven saw it was because Kori neutralized ill feelings and gave back understanding and insight where others would put forth anger. Raven felt comfortable with Kori, and thought Kori trusted her back.

Gar suddenly cried out along with the music’s lyrics, apparently just to startle everyone.

Raven felt she understood all her new friends more now… Except him. She would never understand Gar.

As Dick and Vic laughingly shouted at Gar to calm down, Raven turned to look out the window, and wondered just what she’d entailed herself in. She had no clue what camping was like, and she hadn’t thought much about it until now.

When she’d said she wanted to go on this trip, she’d found easygoingness in Azar, which didn’t challenge her, and fearful resistance in her mom, for which she had to be assertive and fight back—and at no point had she had even considered how she felt about going. It was strange for her not to think things through extensively, but her life went much faster now: things happened before she could overthink and meditate on them. She had simply come because her friends were coming, and she trusted her friends. How impossible that idea would have been a year ago.

A half hour into the trip, the initial wide-eyed enthusiasm gave way to ordinary road-weary annoyances. The sun, higher in the sky, warmed the car a little too much. Kori’s hair kept getting in Raven’s face, the music Vic had put on since the beginning of the trip began to grate on her nerves, and Gar was being Gar. Right now he was drumming his hands on the back of the driver seat, making Vic’s back vibrate, and both Vic and Dick were seething in the front.

“Just turn off the music,” Dick told Vic.

Both Gar and Vic protested. “What? No!” cried Gar, at the same time Vic said, “No way! I’m not going this whole way without some buffer sound!”

“At least put something more chill,” Dick, taking out his phone.

“Touch the aux cord and you’re dead,” Vic warned him.

Raven took off her sweater and put it in her bag. She’d already taken off the jacket she’d come out with, when the morning had been chilly. She didn’t quite regret her jeans and boots—it looked like it would be a hot day, but she didn’t know what she’d find in the wilderness. Kori had come out with shorts and a halter top, but Kori was seemingly impervious to cold. Also, Kori seemed to Raven like the type of creature who would just as soon prance into the woods like a fairy and miraculously not come back with redbug bites.

Right now, she was looking out of Raven’s window, so Raven could appreciate her dimply smile and how the early morning light made her golden-brown skin glow and her green eyes stand out. Raven thought, not for the first time, how Kori was the single most beautiful person she’d ever seen. She wondered if the other girl knew she was physically perfect; she wondered how that must feel.

There was abrupt silence as Dick unplugged Vic’s phone from the aux cord.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing,” Vic stated, his voice dark and dangerous. He tried to catch the cord from Dick with his right hand.

“I need to listen to something that doesn’t make my head explode,” said Dick, holding the cord far away from Vic.

“You dare! Change my music! In my car!” Vic shouted, and soon his and Dick’s argument became an incomprehensible but familiar confusion.

Kori sighed. “It makes me so sad when they argue. I had hoped this trip would be… congenial.”

“This is just how they communicate,” said Raven.

“Yeah, they don’t mean anything by it anymore, Kori,” echoed Gar.

Like he hadn’t been the indirect cause of the argument in the first place, thought Raven.

“What is the reason,” Dick was asking Vic, “that I can’t have a single go with my music!?”

“Because driver chooses the music! Everyone knows that!”

Vic’s statement was met with an eruption of protests, even from Kori, who had been hoping to share her own music with the group, and even from Raven, because she just wasn’t fond of the idea of listening to electro-house and Synth-pop for the rest of high school.

“Okay, okay, okay,” went Vic, admitting defeat, “here’s an idea. Each trip, a different person gets to choose the music. ‘Kay?”

“And who’d get to go next?” asked Dick.

Vic said, “Uh… Let’s make it alphabetic. Well, I’m the last letter. So if it starts again…” he trailed off, and then grumbled, “…Gar’s next.” He really hadn’t thought that one through.

“Sweet!” said Gar.

There were groans of anticipated dread.

“I think I’d rather Vic kept choosing,” said Raven.

“Hey, I have great taste in music!” protested Gar.

The statement would need to be proven or disproven on the trip back.

Halfway through the trip, Kori gave out some candy she’d brought. It was a brand Raven had never seen, and the wrappers had crappy knock-knock jokes on the inside. Raven’s was piña colada flavored. They were delicious. She wished she knew where Kori found half the stuff she sprung on them.

“I am so excited to see a frozen lake again!” Kori gushed. “I have bought a new pair ice shoes.”

“Snow shoes,” corrected Vic.

“Actually, she means ice skates,” said Raven, who had seen them.

“Oh,” said Vic. “Well, you’ll have fun then.”

Dick addressed the whole car, “You guys, remember we’re there to find out why the lake’s freezing over. This is a mission, not a road trip.”

“It’s both a mission and a road trip,” said Vic. “We agreed to check this out to protect the town or whatever, but it doesn’t mean we can’t still have fun.”

“Yeah, Dick,” said Gar, sticking his head in the space between the front seats. “You suit yourself. I’m gonna take the chance to play on the lake. Who else has never seen a frozen lake?” Silence. “Oh, come on! Am I the only one?”

Raven sighed. “Me neither,” she said reluctantly.

Gar reached across from Kori in the middle seat to grab both of Raven’s hands. “Rae, it’s gonna be awesome!”

“It’s just ice,” Raven said, shoving him off. “And how would you know?”

Kori turned to her with a smile. “It is the awesome.”

Gar went, “Ha!” and stuck his tongue out at Raven.

Raven turned to the window again. This was going to be a long trip.

Chapter Text

Gar shot off running towards the lake as soon as Vic stopped the car. Dick got the mental image of a dog being set loose on the beach.

The others got off from the car at normal speed, and Vic leaned against his car to peer at the lake. “Okay, looks like the lake’s not frozen.”

“Yet,” Dick replied. They observed Gar, who was almost at the lake. They would never use him as a guinea pig—but if he was already going ahead on his own, they weren’t going to stop him. He stopped by the shore, plunged his arms into the water, and all seemed good, so they resumed conversation. “There’s still the chance it freezes at night,” Dick finished.

Vic was noncommittal. “Let’s make camp,” was all he said.

He opened the trunk, lifted a bag and his arm shot up. He looked at the bag, wondering why it was so much lighter than he expected. “Whose bag is this?”

“Mine,” said Raven, reaching out for it.

“Did you, uh, follow the list?” he asked her.

“No,” she replied, taking her bag and walking away.

“Gar!” Dick called out.

Gar turned around, and they saw he had about half a dozen frogs crawling up each arm. “Yeah?” he replied.

Dick stared at him for a moment, wondering if there was really something about Gar that attracted animals. “Come get your bag!”

The first thing Vic did was hook a couple of loudspeakers to his car and play more music from his phone. Raven had hitherto been looking at the trees and sky thinking this would be a perfect spot to meditate, perhaps even on her feet as they went about. That was out of the question now.

Dick had gone to observe the lake up close. He was visibly disappointed by the time he came back. He looked up to Vic, who was smiling at him for some reason. “Guess this is really just a road trip now,” Dick told him, sounding sorrier about it than he meant to.

Vic chuckled. “Come on. Let’s fight against some evil tents. You’ll feel better.”

When Vic looked over, however, Kori was holding one of the tent bags, dutifully reading the instructions, and Vic got a glint in his eye. “Uh, Dick, you and Kori can handle this one, I’m gonna help those other two unload!”

Raven was unloading the car with Gar when Vic skulked towards them. He craned his neck to shout back at Dick and Kori, “Don’t worry! We got this!”

Raven scrutinized him. She’d been glad to see Victor was more of a team player lately—but now he was being too accommodating.

“Vic, what are you-?” she began.

“Sh!” he cut her off, which got Gar’s attention.

He peered at Dick and Kori, saw them laughingly attempt to mount one of the tents, and leaned in closer to Raven and Gar. “Listen up. I’m giving those two a chance to be alone. This is when they’re getting together, okay? In this trip. This is it.”

Raven and Gar exchanged a puzzled glance. “Because you just decided it?” questioned Raven.

Vic turned to them with a determined look in his eyes that they had thus far only associated with Dick. “Because it’s a camping trip. This is where stuff happens! You know—you get a nice fire and you sit by each other, the girl gets cold and you lend her your jacket, you roast marshmallows for each other, you stargaze, you end up alone in a spot of the woods and you start making out…”

Raven was floored. “That’s idiotic,” she said. Just when she thought she got her friends…

“You guys just follow my lead,” said Vic. “I’m gonna get these two in a relationship by the end of this trip, you two just watch me.”

He didn’t say ‘If it kills me’, but it was implicit in his tone.

Raven looked at Gar to see if he was as disturbed as her. Gar shrugged at her.

“You wanna try to do the other tent?” he asked her.

“Sure,” she replied.

When they set up lunch, Kori had brought enough pots and pans that Raven was glad to not have brought her share of cooking utensils. Vic pulled out sausages from an ice chest. Gar failed to tempt them with his tofu dogs.

In the afternoon they organized a volleyball match, where the net was a line in the dirt. Raven stayed on the sidelines to referee.

After that they split for a while. Gar had run off in chasing a fox. Raven picked out a nice shady spot next to the tents and settled down with her book, but when Kori came to join her, she put it aside and talked to her instead; the view of the forest was too nice to stare at a book anyhow. Dick offered Vic they take a little hike, which turned into a climbing competition when the terrain turned steep.

When they came back to the campsite, Kori and Raven were still talking.

“I wonder what they talk about,” Dick mused.

Vic cupped his hands around his mouth to yell out, “Who’s hungry?”

Kori came running over, because she had been promised the traditional s’mores.

“Where’s Gar?” Dick asked, looking around. Raven shrugged.

Vic cracked open his fire starting kit and got a fire going in minutes. They made a circle around it.

Gar appeared shortly after, shirtless and dripping water.

“Gar, you swam in the lake?” asked Dick, stunned.

“Sure did,” Gar replied.

“But it’s freezing,” said Dick.

“Yeah it is!” Gar agreed, and shivered. “You guys should definitely not go in there.”

Gar made for the bags, seemed to think twice about it, and turned back to his friends. “Uh, did any of you guys bring a towel?” he asked sheepishly.

Vic shook his head. “Nope. Wasn’t in the list.”

“Because it’s too cold to go for a swim,” said Dick, sounding annoyed that this could pass for an oversight on his part.

Raven waited until the last possible minute. But when everyone else shook their head and shrugged, she sighed, got up and went towards her bag. Gar followed her gratefully.

“Hey Raven, are you actually magic?” Vic asked from the circle.

“What?” she replied.

“Your bag was light as a feather. But you still brought everything you needed. Do you have a Mary Poppins bag?”

“Oh, yes. I have the magic of prioritization,” she replied dryly, and held her towel out for Gar.

Gar was grinning widely at her, showing off his underbite. He opened his mouth to say ‘Thanks, Rae’. But then he got another idea—he rose his dripping arms and lunged as if to hug her, going, “Thaaank youu, Rae.”

Raven threw the towel on his face to defend herself, and got away to their other friends, who laughed at Gar’s antics. Gar dried himself off and then draped Raven’s towel over his head and shoulders as he joined the circle.

Victor was glancing at Dick. “Hey Dick, Kori looks cold.”

Dick and Kori both looked at him, puzzled.

Kori said, “No I am not.”

Gar was eventually dry enough to put his shirt back on. He handed Raven her towel. “Thanks, Raven. I’m warmer now.”

Gar, who had been tasked with bringing the ingredients for s’mores, distributed the crackers, marshmallows and chocolate between his friends. He watched as Raven gingerly picked a cracker and split it, because it was what the others were doing. “You know how to make them?” he asked her.

“Doesn’t seem like rocket science,” she replied, defensive.

“No, because it’s an art. Observe.” Gar took the cracker halves from her, set the chocolate on one half, topped it with a marshmallow and the other cracker half, and gave the s’more to her. “Here. Be amazed.”

Vic got inspired watching them. “Hey Dick, why don’t you make one for Kori?”

“Oh, I wanted to make one myself,” said Kori. “I brought peppers to try with them.” Kori produced no less than three bell peppers and tucked them in a s’more between chocolate and marshmallow. Her friends watched the whole process. They should be used to Kori’s odd palate by now, but they weren’t.

Vic was disappointed but not deterred. He insisted, “Dick, why don’t you show her the right way of making them, huh?”

Dick and Kori both turned to him in confusion.

“Let her do it how she wants to, jeeze,” said Dick.

Raven tried her s’more. Because Gar was watching for her reaction, she challenged him, “Is this still vegan?”

“’Course it is,” he said. “Graham crackers are vegan, those are vegan marshmallows, and chocolate is chocolate.”

“Marshmallows are made with honey,” Raven said.

Gar replied, “Harvesting honey is good for bees. If we didn’t do it, the hives would overcrowd and rot.” It was only when she looked unsettled that Gar realized she’d been challenging him. She didn’t reply and he smirked at her knowingly. “Surprised you, didn’t I?”

Raven ate her s’more and didn’t look at him. “Fine, you did your research,” she muttered.

Gar didn’t respond, but glowed like he’d been handed a prize.

Dick was prevented from enjoying his own s’more by Victor’s burning glare. “What, Vic?”

Vic snapped out of it. “What? Me? Nothing.” He looked away and pretended to be plotting nothing.

“He’s still trying, huh?”

Raven said this in an amazed tone as Gar sat next to her on the towel she had set on the ground. A distance away, Vic was painstakingly lighting a bunch of candles in the dark night.

“He’s trying to set some sort of stargazing scene for them,” Gar said. He had taken one look at what Vic was doing and decided to go sit with Raven.

Raven shook her head. “He’s taking his breakup terribly.”

“What?” Gar returned.

“He’s throwing himself in Dick and Kori’s relationship to distract himself from his own breakup,” she explained.

“Oooh,” went Gar. “That’s what’s going on?”

They watched as Dick came out of the tent and saw what Victor was doing. They couldn’t hear, but they saw plain as day that Dick was questioning him, Vic looked sheepish, and Dick looked increasingly suspicious.

“No amount of stargazing is going to make Dick and Kori take a step forward,” said Raven.

Sometimes Raven gave those affirmations and Gar didn’t know if she just knew things about everyone. Were they opinions or decrees? “You sure about that?” he asked tentatively.

“It’s what I think,” she shrugged.

So his doubt went unanswered. They watched Vic light a growing number of candles, with no end in sight. After Dick had walked away he’d just gone right back to it.

“It’d be funny if this ended with us starting a forest fire,” Raven commented.

Gar snickered. “Only you can protect our forests from talentless matchmakers,” he quipped, putting on a TV announcer voice, and glanced at her to see if she laughed. It was a groundless habit at this point. She never did.

“I’ve never seen the stars like this before,” she said instead, looking above.

“You’ve never seen them outside of a city?” he asked. She shook her head. “When I lived in Upper Lamumba I saw them like this all the time.”

She paused. “You lived in Upper Lamumba? In Africa?”

Gar had said it without thinking, and now he experienced an onslaught of conflicting emotions. Horror at realizing he was opening up too close to his Nope zone. Confusion that she didn’t know this already, because ever since she read him with her Tarot cards, he’d just assumed she knew all about his life. Relief, because if she didn’t know about this, maybe she didn’t know that much at all. Pride and surprise and glee that he’d gotten her to ask a follow-up question. Anger that the one time she did, it was about something he didn’t want to answer.

In the face of all that conflict, what he chose to do was get up and run away, claiming that he heard someone calling him.

Raven was left staring after him, completely taken aback. She’d thought they were having a normal conversation for once. She truly would never understand that boy.

And like all things she didn’t understand, Raven let it be.

Gar untied the strings of his rolled-up sleeping bag inside the boys’ tent. From here he could hear Dick and Victor argue outside. Gar set to eavesdropping, and found out that while Kori had loved the candles when she’d seen them, Dick had refused to stay out stargazing, and Vic was trying hard not to show he was pissed off about it—if he wasn’t trying to do anything, there was no reason to be upset that it hadn’t worked.

“But what were you trying to do with those candles?” Dick asked. He sounded like he was trying to keep his tone light and playful.

“What do you mean?” Vic asked, trying to sound innocent. “I wasn’t trying to do anything.”

Gar covered his mouth to keep from laughing.

“You know what I mean,” said Dick. “Who are you trying to make this trip romantic for? Are you trying to get with Gar or something?”

“Yeah, right. I barely like him as a friend!” Vic laughed.

Inside the tent, Gar’s smile twisted. He tried hard not to let that sting—he knew Vic was probably joking. He told himself as much.

But when he heard the two come near the tent, he got out of it through the opposite flap. Just in case. He didn’t want to see if their faces fell when they realized he’d heard them—then he’d know for sure they hadn’t been joking. He came out into pitch darkness. When his eyes adjusted, he realized he was still holding his sleeping bag, so he just rolled it out next to where their fire had been and got inside it.

There, looking up at the stars, he went through the whole trip in his head. He’d been annoying in the car, yes; then he’d imposed tofu on the group, when he knew they would say no; then he’d bothered Raven out of her towel. Those things were fine if you were a liked member of a group; not when you were the kind of friend the others barely liked.

Gar wasn’t sure what category he fell in with these four friends. All his life he’d been in the latter one, and that he knew for sure—people had let him know about it. He’d always been the annoying one; he’d always been too much.

What if he was still there? How would he know if he’d stopped being unlikable? Maybe he wasn’t better, maybe he and his peers were just older, and these kids in particular were too nice to reject him outright. Maybe he was only in this group of friends because he’d wrung his way in. Maybe the others didn’t like him as much as they had just… given in. Maybe his place in the group was shakier than he’d ever thought.

Garfield wasn’t able to shake his dark thoughts that night; he just fell asleep on them.

Kori came out of the tents first the next morning. She breathed in deeply, filled her lungs with the fresh morning air and smiled at the rising sun. She went to wake up Gar, who was asleep belly down next to where their fire had been.

“Gar… Gaar,” she called softly.

Gar raised his head to see Kori’s sweetly sleepy face, with faded makeup and hair still wrapped in a scarf. He gave her a thumbs up and planted his face back on the ground.

Raven came out next, surprised to have woken up with the sun well up in the sky. She had pictured she would naturally wake up early and get some nice meditation time by nature. But instead of introspective, she woke up cranky from feeling dirty all over. Why did people go camping? What was the point?

Eventually the boys’ tent stirred. Raven heard the sound of deodorant being sprayed and held her breath for the next few seconds.

Dick and Victor went by the lake one last time. Vic said, “We’ve officially been here twenty-four hours. Call it a day?”

Dick nodded. “Yep. It was nothing but a rumor after all.”

They had apparently made up since last night.

The five set up a quick breakfast of cookies and powdered milk with the lukewarm water from Kori’s thermos. Then they started loading up Vic’s car.

Gar gave a final stroll along the lake. His ears prickled. Something was wrong—it had been wrong for a while, but he’d been too sleepy to realize it until now.

“Guys,” he said. “I can’t hear anything.”

“It’s the lack of Vic’s music,” said Dick, “he’ll fix that soon enough.”

“No, really, listen,” said Gar. “…There’s no birds.”

Later, they would say it was mostly Gar’s warning that gave them a sense of dread of what was to follow. But perhaps they would have felt something in the air even if he hadn’t said anything.

In any case, there was a crackling sound—unsettling, not so much for being loud as unnatural. They turned to see the lake turning to ice before their eyes.

Chapter Text

They woke up quickly after that.

“It started from there,” said Kori, pointing towards the west.

“But we’ll have a better vantage point from up there,” said Dick, pointing at the east.

Vic lunged forward. “Let’s split up! I’ll take these two!” Vic swept up Raven and Gar and ran.

Before Dick could even question the logistics of splitting up –whether it was even necessary, what territory each team was taking, or any parameters on where to meet in how long-, Vic was a good distance up the hill with the two.

When he considered they were far enough, Vic stopped. “Okay, I’m gonna leave you guys now.”

“Where are you going?” Raven asked, though she already knew.

Vic gave them an intense look. “Step four of the plan.”

“Because the other steps worked?” deadpanned Raven.

“Step four,” he repeated, glowering at her. “Have them be scared together.”

“Dude, I don’t think that’s a great idea,” said Gar. “I mean, this is a mission again.”

“I can’t believe I’m agreeing with Gar, but-” Raven started.

Vic didn’t pay them any mind. “What do you know, Gar!” And he ran down the hill.

Gar stared after Vic, wishing he hadn’t said anything. Vic’s words from last night came back all at once and left a bad taste on his mouth. If Vic really didn’t see him as a friend, of course he wouldn’t care about his input.

“Gar?” called Raven. She had gone on walking up the hill and looked back at him with impatience. “Are we still doing the mission?”

Thus chided, he followed. “Oh! Sure!”

Kori and Dick followed the line of the frozen lake. The temperature got increasingly low as they walked on, to the point where they knew it couldn’t be natural. They walked in silence, and when the lake ended, a cave rose in front of them. The eerie orange glow coming from inside it was enough for them to know that whatever was happening owed to whatever was in there.

Dick and Kori looked at each other. He wordlessly put the hood over his head –with his grey jacket, his dark hair and his sunglasses, he was leaning more towards camouflage-, and went to take a closer look as Kori stayed behind. Peeking into the cave, he spotted an artifact stuck to the wall. It could have been a sensor. He returned to Kori.

He gave her a look, and they silently agreed to fold back.

They didn’t know when they became aware someone was following them; on the way back, they heard it—the crackle of steps of leaves, walking when they walked, always just a few steps behind. They looked at each other and knew the other was hearing it too.

Halfway to the campsite, Kori saw a sizeable branch on the ground and threw a glance at Dick, who nodded. Kori went into action: she picked up the branch and swung it back, towards the rustling.

It hit a tree and Vic cried, “Wait! Stop! It’s me!”

And then Vic proved it by stepping out in full view, wearing a sheepish grin.

“Victor!?” Kori and Dick cried.

“What’s wrong?” asked Raven.

Gar gaped at her. “Huh?”

Raven couldn’t believe he looked surprised she’d noticed anything, as if his dismay wasn’t palpable—as if he wasn’t an open book.

“You haven’t started a rambling story or told a joke or annoyed me once since we split up,” she explained.

“Do you want me to annoy you?” he asked, with a testiness that caught her off-guard.

Something was definitely wrong. And also what kind of question was that? “Well, I’ve come to expect it,” she replied, because she didn’t know how else to respond.

That seemed to be the wrong answer, because Gar’s sullen expression deepened. “But you’d rather I didn’t do it, right?” he insisted, and it seemed to be a genuine question.

But when she stared at him, unsettled, he seemed to think better of it, and got out of her inquisitive gaze by walking ahead of her.

They walked in silence for a while, mainly because she had no idea what to do with this new, brooding, silent Garfield. Had he fought with someone? How hadn’t she seen it, if they had been together all this time?

Also distracting her was the fact that she was boiling under the sun at this point. She’d been shedding layers of clothing since she woke up. Now she took of her dark long-sleeved shirt and was left with her final, short-sleeved shirt. It was a washed out light blue and baggy, and she didn’t like it; she’d thrown it on because she hadn’t expected to be wearing it alone. But everything today had already been so out of control, she thought, Screw it.

They reached a considerable height and stopped. Raven kneeled down and moved the foliage to look down at the lake.

“I can’t see anything that could be causing it,” she said.

Gar sat down next to her. “Yeah, me neither,” he replied.

“Could it be just a weather phenomenon?” she wondered aloud.

There was a space usually filled with a joke or quip from him. Instead he just stared at the lake, thoughtful, dejected.

“It’s really weird that you’re gloomy,” she told him.

“It’s weird that you’re being chatty,” he replied.

She stared at him again. Gar felt bad he kept rebuffing her, even in the fog of his misery and self-doubt—the last thing he needed was to alienate Raven, too. But she didn’t look upset; she just looked unsettled. Maybe because he’d just made her realize how they were perfectly switched.

And then she said, “Alright.” And, in the same no-nonsense tone she always had, “Then I’ll cheer you up.”

At that he raised his face, which by itself brightened his previously brow-knitted expression.

“I’ll tell you a joke,” Raven elaborated.

“Excuse me, what?” he laughed. His woes were momentarily forgotten—this was much more interesting and weird than his identity crisis. “You will tell me a joke?” he repeated.

Raven was smiling lightly at his change in demeanor. “I knew you couldn’t stay sad for long.”

Gar laughed more, because she was right. He did feel better. “Wait, was that the plan?”

“No, I was really going to tell you a joke,” she confirmed, looking away, rendered almost shy. She herself didn’t know why she was doing this. Perhaps it was just because she could; she knew he would get a kick out of this. If she was being honest, she was getting a kick out of surprising him, too.

Gar rubbed his eyes and smiled in delight. “This is so great. Please tell me the joke.”

Raven channeled the joke from Kori’s candy wrapper and struggled to remember how it went. “Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?” Gar couldn’t believe this was happening.

“Nobel.”

“Nobel who?” He’d never been so excited in his entire life.

Raven said, “Nobel, that’s why I knocked.”

Gar smiled, then burst out laughing. He’d heard the joke before—that wasn’t the point. The point was Raven’s voice thinning out at the end of the punchline, like she couldn’t believe she was doing this. The point was that she’d gone out of her way to cheer him up and achieved it. The point was that he loved these moments where Raven acted so out of character, for reasons known only to her.

It didn’t so much cheer him up as completely knock everything else right out of Gar’s mind. He couldn’t believe he’d been so hung up on the Victor thing that he’d forgotten how precious Raven was.

Raven was looking at the lake, fighting a smile; he knew in another moment she would succeed in squishing it, and her blush would go down, and he didn’t want that to happen. And he didn’t know what to do to prolong this moment. And then he knew exactly what to do.

He kissed her.

When he parted –soon, because the kiss had been like a hiccup, he’d been propelled forward with a force he barely controlled- she was looking at him with an expression on her face he’d never seen before. It was dazed, and… relaxed, and so irresistibly open.

It was all he could do to kiss her again. This time he didn’t let go so quickly.

Neither Victor nor Dick said anything as Kori berated Vic for sneaking up on them—none of them had heard Kori be angry at someone before. It didn’t last long; Kori caught herself and said she was going away to cool off.

After she left, Dick spoke. “Vic, can I talk to you for a second?” he asked. “What were you really up to?”

Vic wasn’t looking at him, but frowning at the grass. “I told you, Gar pulls pranks all the time, I don’t see why the world ends when I decide to-”

“Cut the crap. I know you weren’t playing a prank.” Dick pulled Vic further aside from where Kori had walked off too. He dropped his voice to a hiss, “Are you actually doing what I think you’re doing? Jeopardizing the mission to play matchmaker?”

Vic’s eyes were hard. “I think you’ve already decided that’s what I’m doing. Why are you asking?”

“To give you a chance to explain!” Dick snapped.

He knew Vic well enough by now to know nothing would be gained from yelling at him—Vic had hardened into an unbreakable shell; nothing would get through to him. It didn’t stop Dick from saying his piece.

The sounds of Dick and Victor squabbling could be heard when Raven and Gar arrived back to the campsite.

They approached Kori, who was watching the fight with arms crossed and a troubled expression.

“What’s going on?” Gar asked her.

“I am not sure,” replied Kori. “Vic tried to play a prank on us by scaring us. I admit I lost my temper on him. And now he and Dick will not stop fighting.”

The three couldn’t make out the words at this distance, but Raven and Gar were pretty sure they knew what this was about—Vic’s matchmaking attempts had finally imploded. They watched as Dick seemingly said his final piece and stalked away from Vic, stomping to the campsite and entering the boys’ tent.

Kori took Raven’s arm and pulled her to their own tent. Gar tried to catch Raven’s eye before she left, but she was already gone with Kori.

Vic was pacing among the trees, so Gar went to him first.

He looked up when he saw Gar. “Hey,” he said, darkly.

“Hey,” returned Gar. “What happened?”

Vic’s frown eased for the first time in a while. He sat on the ground and buried his head in his knees. “I fucked up.”

Gar put a hand on Vic’s shoulder. “Hey, don’t worry about it. It’s you and Dick. He’s gonna forget in no time. And Kori’s already sorry she yelled at you.” He didn’t feel any awkwardness next to Vic anymore—thanks to Raven, he couldn’t even remember what had brought on his previous doubts about his group of friends.

“Do you still think they are just communicating?” Kori asked Raven sadly in their tent.

Raven put her long-sleeved shirt back on. The sun was going down, and she was getting chilly.

“No,” she admitted. “But they’ll make up. Like always.”

Gar entered the tent, where Dick was sitting tying a rope around a flashlight, a kitchen knife and their oil spray, with a purpose that eluded Gar.

Before he could say anything, Dick beat him to it. “Vic tried to set me and Kori up.”

Gar did his best to look shocked. “No.”

Dick peered at him. “You knew?”

“I found out way too late to do anything about it,” Gar declared. That was the version he was planning to stick with. “Soo, and I’m not saying I agree with Vic’s methods but, why did it bother you so much what he was trying to do? I mean, this trip could have ended with you hooking up with Kori.” Gar laughed. He was still a lot giddy himself. “Don’t tell me you don’t want to.”

Dick looked straight at him. “I don’t.”

Gar stared back him. Dick sounded serious, and Dick never joked around. There was no reason to doubt him: it was just Gar couldn’t believe it was true.

Dick seemed to notice Gar’s confusion and explained. “I mean… First off, it’s insulting, what Vic did. Like I can’t take care of my own relationships. Like I can’t make the first move.”

Gar furrowed his eyebrows. “Well…”

“But also it’s just a bad idea, however you look at it. I mean with what we’re doing, if we’re really gonna use the Club to do this missions kind of thing, we can’t afford relationships within the group.”

“Oh,” went Gar. “Oh. That’s what you’re worrying about?”

Dick shrugged. “That’s the cliché, isn’t it? Friends become a couple, couple breaks up, and the friend group goes poof.”

Gar stared at him, then looked down, suddenly feeling hollow. “Yeah. I guess.”

Dick held up the rope, inspected it and then tied it around his hips. “Right. I’m all set. Let’s go.”

Gar watched him absent-mindedly, lost in his own thoughts. “Go where?”

“To check out the weird glowing cave Kori and I found down the stream.”

Gar got his train of thought knocked from his head for the second time that day. “What?”

Gar felt vindicated when their other friends were equally shocked when Dick told them his plan.

“We’re going to keep investigating this?” Raven questioned. “I’d think this is where we’d tap out.”

“We haven’t done what we came to do, though,” Dick pointed out. “We haven’t found out why the lake is freezing over.”

“We’ve confirmed rumors that it is freezing over and that it’s unnatural,” said Raven.

“And you’re content with that?” Dick countered. He was having a hard time speaking mildly and not imposing his will on the group.

“No, but this got really weird,” responded Raven. “What if we’re in over our heads?”

Dick didn’t reply.

“We will be protected by vegetation,” Kori said. “We can look at what it happening from safety.”

“Yeah. We can take a look and be out,” said Dick, emboldened.

“Dude, what if it’s a supervillain thing?” posed Gar. “We could get in huge trouble.”

Dick considered him. “But how could it be a supervillain thing? The Titans wouldn’t have let it go on this long.”

Raven almost pitied Dick. He was trying to defer to the group, but he couldn’t help that he really wanted to go and check this out.

And they apparently couldn’t help being infected by his enthusiasm. Kori was already in. One by one the others agreed; Raven ended up voting to go, Gar did too, and Vic was currently trying to pretend he was part of the foliage, so he went along with the majority.

“The cave’s surroundings are really cold,” Dick told them. “So you better bundle up. This time, we stick together. No more messing around,” he said at Vic, who glowered at him.

They put on all the layers they had brought and went forth.

The five took the same path Dick and Kori had walked earlier. It was probably noon by then, and the sun shining so gloriously likely gave them the dangerous notion that nothing too bad could be happening. In a single file led by Dick, they peered into the mouth of the cave. The single artifact Dick had seen wasn’t the half of it. There were people inside—armed guards in uniform patrolling back and forth.

They froze. Dick carefully inched back –it was like common sense had been forced back into his body-, and signaled his friends to return.

They turned around and began a slow trek back to the path. Dick was sure they had never been so in sync for anything ever before.

And then one of them stepped on a branch.

The next thing they knew, they were surrounded with guards pointing intricate-looking weapons at them, ordering them to freeze.

As the five were forcefully pushed inside the cave they had been trying to escape, a huge operation opened up to them—the cave had been made into a laboratory, minions walked around hard at work, and dozens of tanks containing several insect-like creatures the size of dogs rose to the full height of the cave. Everyone was wrapped up like they were in the Artic, and the temperature was freezing. They kids were baffled by how big the operation was—forget the Titans, where was any superhero at all?

The five were presented before what was most likely the main Mad Scientist in charge. He was a short man in a lab coat and googles. “What have we here?” he said, breaking away from his control panel to look at the five kids. “Easy prey for my children? Excellent! Throw them into a holding cell.” He turned his attention back to the tanks. “Finally! The planets have aligned, and my plan of weeks comes to fruition on this day! Not tomorrow, not yesterday, but TONIGHT!”

Dick closed his eyes. “For fuck’s sake,” he whispered, full of feeling.

Chapter Text

They were pushed further inside the cave and finally thrown into locking cells, a hole on the wall where a force field came up to keep them in.

Dick breathed deeply and tried to calm himself down enough to face his friends.

“Okay. Alright,” he began. “Civilians get caught in the crossfire of supervillains all the time. We’re gonna be fine.”

“Except we got caught because we were meddling,” Vic pointed out.

“The Titans won’t know that,” Dick said, scathingly. “So it’s fine.” He looked out through the force field. “And if the Titans don’t come, then it’s gonna be Transmuto. And if not, it’s gonna be Blackwolf. Or Gaia. Or Inferno and Glacier.”

It was hard to stay angry, or scared or brave, for the whole duration of their time in the locking cell. They didn’t know how many hours they spent trapped. Outside it must have been nighttime, but the lit laboratory was timeless as a spaceship. Dick hardly spent a second of that time sitting down. He tried the energy field at all its corners, went through the whole perimeter of the cell, tried to find a weak spot. He tried hitting everything with the hammer he’d brought. He tried to make something happen with his flashlight and his magnifying glass, in case fire did something to the force field. And he would have gone through every tool on his makeshift belt, if the others hadn’t told him to stop.

Finally, a guard let them out. They were cuffed and taken back to the main area. The insects in the tanks looked different: they were skittering, looked ready to leave the tanks.

Gar began to wonder how it would feel like to be eaten.

And then one of the machines exploded.

Out of the sparks, Fimm materialized, hawking out a “Woo-hoo!”

And then the rest of the Titans were upon them.

For the next few minutes, Gar felt like he was inside a video game. He didn’t know where to look.

Over here was Lux Piper, her nano-tech full-body armor taking hits and rearranging itself, as its owner fired sonic shots at minions with deadly precision.

Over there, Fimm dodged his opponents with a smirk, zapping through the battlefield as a spark, going inside machines and making them explode, then taking out minions in human form, his lithe body jumping around—he zapped some, kicked others, and even pantsed one.

Lodestar fought from the sky, delivering his signature air blows. In another part of the battle field, Chameleon was cloning herself, disappearing and reappearing, confusing minions into attacking each other. And Kismet! To see her fighting was a privilege; her clairvoyance made it seem like the battle was just a choreographed dance stilted entirely in her favor; the foes were just rag dolls to her precise strikes.

It was over before Gar could decide who to devote his attention to.

The guards who’d been knocked out laid on the ground; those awake, plus the Mad Scientist Guy, were safely secured after Lodestar morphed the cave walls into stone restraints.

Fimm approached the creatures. “That is sick and wrong,” he said, sadly stroking the glass. “I can’t bear to look at them.” He turned back to his team. “I say lemme eat them.”

“Fimm!” Chameleon cried. She was so appalled her blonde hair turned pale blue.

“That is not an option,” Kismet said, quietly but decisively.

Lux Piper had receded her armor into her wrist guard, and had moved to the control panel, from where she cried, “GUYS! These things are gonna hatch now!”

Lodestar flew down to her. “What? You sure?”

“We have twenty seconds to decide what we’re gonna do with them!” Lux confirmed.

As if on cue, the creatures stirred.

“Lodestar, Fimm, take those kids away from here!” Kismet hadn’t even looked at the five; Dick had been sure the Titans hadn’t noticed them. He should have known better.

As soon as the order was out, her two called-upon teammates moved.

Gar felt himself rise off the ground, at the same time as Kori and Vic and Lodestar himself. He looked down; they were on a sort of invisible platform, a foot from the ground. So this is what it felt like to be near Lodestar’s hard air thingy.

They flew through the air—out the cave, over the woods and onto high ground. He felt as if inside a bottle, like the air around him was a comfortable but inescapable suit. The suit dissolved when they got to the hill.

As they touched ground, he saw a jumping spark next to him become Fimm and Dick and Raven. Both of his friends fell to the ground on arrival, dizzy. Fimm laughed at them, which was his usual response.

But he stopped laughing, and leaned down to be face to face with Raven on the ground. Gar thought he was going to help her up, but he just stared. He fixed his gaze on her –inhumanly amber eyes on a rich ochre face- and said, “What are you?”, like he’d never seen a girl before, and she could only gape in response.

Lodestar was already at the edge of the hill. He looked at Fimm over his shoulder and told him, “Fimm! Come on.”

He flew back to the battlefield, and Fimm followed suit, sparking away without another word.

The five couldn’t see the cave from here, or the lake, let alone Vic’s car. They were miles away from where they had set camp. The Titans had meant to get them as far from danger as possible, but now they would spend a while trekking back to their stuff.

They looked at each other, feeling the whiplash from being swept aside from the fight so suddenly. Dick suggested they got moving, and they did. None of them saw the point in staying to find out what the Titans did with the creatures. They knew the team would win, and that had nothing to do with them. This had never been their mission.

They walked in near silence. At some point while they trekked through the forest, the Titans’ ship flew away, presumably to the police station and then back to their Tower. The five arrived to their campsite in the dead of night, exhausted, filthy and cranky. Both the tents were still thankfully up, although squirrels were attacking Kori’s bag. Gar didn’t stop to coo at them; that was how tired they were.

Dick had taken off his makeshift belt in the way. He shoved it in his bag as soon as they made it to camp.

As Vic made towards the car, Raven said, “You shouldn’t be driving now. Don’t you want to rest a-”

“No,” he cut her off. “I just want to get home.”

Raven didn’t argue further, and neither did anyone, because they were all starving.

They clambered into the car.

They drove in silence a few miles until Vic said, “Hey, Gar. It was your turn with the aux cord.”

Gar got off a stupor. “Oh. Uh… actually, I kinda just want to sleep.”

“So I am next!” exploded Kori, with a suddenness that showed she’d already worked out the succession and had been waiting for the chance. She quickly connected her phone, and they were treated to a mix of bubbly pop.

Gar stared out the window, letting his thoughts catch up with life for the first time in several hours. When they were in the cell, the thought had passed through his head that at least the very last thing he’d done in life was kiss a cute girl a couple of times. Now they had survived, he kind of wished he’d ended up as hatchling feed, rather than deal with the aftermath of what he’d done.

Who was that guy who’d kissed Raven back in the woods? Who’d been that girl, for that matter? Back there, for a while, it had been like all the planets had aligned, and kissing her had seemed like the best thing—the only possible thing to do, and now he couldn’t remember why. Now, Raven was looking out her window, not taking to anyone and looking vaguely disgruntled, and it was like the real world had settled back in.

For a while, after he and Raven got back to the others, he’d felt so good. He’d felt like he was walking on air. Like his life had just gotten to the movie ending—kissing her had been the natural closure of an amazing year, the year where he’d found friends, and now he’s gotten the girl too.

Then Dick had said what he’d said. That was when Gar began to realize he’d made a big mistake. Now he was actively panicking.

There was no way to sugar-coat it: he regretted it. In a big part because he could keenly feel she regretted it, too.

Vic had gotten in his head with all the talk of the romance of camping trips—that had to be it. He hadn’t meant to kiss his friend; it was all wrong, they both knew it. They were as different as two people could be. What would dating her even look like? What would they do? What would they talk about? They were so different, he’d never thought of her in that way—right up until the moment he realized he kind of did.

While Gar internally panicked, Kori gushed about the Titans, and how exciting it had been to see them fighting up close, and how lucky the city was to have the team. She was very transparently trying to rescue the good parts of the evening. To pretend like the real heroes sweeping in to do their actual job hadn’t made them all face their own arrogance, their own shortcomings.

She was the only one with any spirit in the ride back. On the front seat, Victor and Dick were ignoring each other.

Gar felt bad for Kori. Dick and Victor were in a fight she didn’t understand, and as far as she knew, he and Raven were ignoring her for no reason. She probably thought they were all down about the Titans thing, so she kept talking, and occasionally sang to the songs—whatever it took to fill the silence. Gar, who would usually be trying to bring up the morale along with her, just didn’t have the energy to rise up.

“Sorry, Kori, I’m too tired,” Gar told her at one point, when the song she was singing along to ended and he’d noticed she sounded tired at the end of it.

“Yeah, we’re all tired, Kori,” echoed Dick. To Gar’s ears he sounded relieved somebody had said something.

Raven stayed silent.

The sky was clearing by the time they got to Dick’s house. Soon the sun would come out.

Dick unlocked the back door for them and entered through the kitchen. Kori saw Vic lock his car and power-walk after Dick, so she wisely went straight to the bathroom when she entered the house.

In Dick’s kitchen, Victor sunk his hands in his pockets, and pulled out one of Kori’s candies from before. He approached Dick. “Do you want a green tea candy?”

Dick had opened the fridge aimlessly –he knew there was nothing in there he would like- and now closed it. “Um,” he went. He didn’t really feel like it. He felt mentally hungover with crashed excitement and bad decisions, and he was hungry for a meal, not candy. But he felt like refusing it was to deny an offer of friendship, so he took it. “Sure. Thanks.”

Vic sighed. “Look, man, I never told you this, but… When we first met, when I was trying to join the Club, the way you treated me was really important to me.”

Dick looked at him searchingly. “What do you mean? I treated you badly. I tried really hard to kick you out.”

“Exactly!” cried Vic. “You didn’t care who I was or what had happened to me. You just wanted me the hell out of your Club. You were the first person who didn’t treat me with silk gloves after my accident. And you kinda set the bar for those other guys.” He gestured vaguely outside the house, then folded his hands together. “That clubroom was the first place where I didn’t constantly think about what happened to me. It became like a haven.” He shook his head. “What I’m getting at is, I never meant to make you feel uncomfortable in your own group of friends. I’ll stay out of your business. I promise.”

Dick moved the candy around inside his mouth as he listened. Either the sugar was acting on him, or Vic was being really heartwarming. “Thanks, Victor. Really. And for the record, thanks for trying so hard to do something nice for me. I know your heart was in the right place.”

Vic nodded solemnly, and clasped his shoulder. Dick smiled, but then moved the candy too near his throat and he choked.

Victor laughed and hacked him in the back. “You okay there?”

“Too many feelings,” Dick choked out, with tears in his eyes, and they both laughed as the tender moment got away from them.

Gar didn’t have to try too hard to catch Raven alone. When Dick and Victor entered the house, Gar just lingered by the porch and waited. Raven caught his eye and slowed down, letting Kori get ahead and enter the house.

It was the first time they faced each other after… the incident, and Gar found himself remembering how she felt wrapped up in his arms, precisely because he was telling himself not to think about it. He dropped his eyes and balanced on the balls of his feet.

“Hey,” he said, when she came to a stop in front of him.

“Hey,” she replied.

They both started talking at the same time. “I’m-” started Gar, as Raven began, “We-”

They stopped themselves. Raven signaled him to go first.

Gar said, “I’m sorry I made things weird.”

“No, you…” Raven trailed off. She frowned at the distance. “It obviously wasn’t just you.”

Her face was unreadable. Gar wished she wasn’t able to make her face so damn neutral. He wished he knew exactly how much she regretted it: whether she was delicately deciding to pull back to being friends, or whether she was disgusted with what had happened.

He heard himself saying, “Look, I don’t want to make things awkward… with our friends and all.”

“Yeah,” she said, finally looking up. She sounded relieved. “Yeah. Me neither. I mean it’s not like we’re…”

She trailed off, but Gar completed it in his head. It’s not like we’re Dick and Kori.

Dick and Kori were the couple everyone expected and everyone rooted for. They were the ones doing a constant dance of offhanded flirting and blissful denial, always staying in the brink of it, locked in a harmony where they never argued and seemed to have a supernatural understanding.

He and Raven… lacked that grace. If they got together, Gar knew, they wouldn’t end up together—provided he survived long enough to see the end of it. They would eventually split up, and carry that split to the rest of the group.

And it wasn’t even just about the group. Gar sincerely didn’t want to be nervous around Raven. He didn’t want to have coupley fights with her. He didn’t want to sit up in his bed wondering if he should call her or not. He didn’t want to have to mince his words and thoughts as one would around a girlfriend. He liked their friendship as it was.

Which didn’t mean he wasn’t dying to know how she felt about it. Gar knew he was an open book; people had told him his face was transparent. But Raven was a mystery. He would have been willing to meet her halfway and tell her what he was thinking. He wished she would just give him something, anything, to go by.

But perhaps it was better that they didn’t say any more about this. He wasn’t sure he could explain to her why he’d kissed her. There was a moment under the golden sun where it felt like all their differences didn’t matter. She’d gone out of her comfort zone to tell him –him!- a joke. She’d surprised him. How could he explain to her that she’d been smiling, and when she smiled the sky opened up and unicorns came riding out of rainbows, and that still didn’t mean they should be anything more than friends?

“No,” he finally said. “We’re not Dick and Kori.”

Vic’s voice boomed from the inside. “Guys! We’re calling for pizza! Place your orders now or face meat lovers’ pick by default! Got that, Gar?”

Neither of then made a move to answer him.

“I think I’m just gonna go,” said Raven.

She walked past him. He stared at the ground while she did. After she passed him, he turned, about to tell her to text when she got home safe, because he thought that was a more appropriate note to end on. But then he remembered she didn’t have a phone, and on holding himself back, he made a sound with his throat, and Raven turned back, eyes wide, attentive to what else he could want to tell her. Gar realized with horror that he’d made it seem like he’d stopped himself from saying something else—something much more passionate, much more important. But she dropped her gaze quickly, as if to endorse his decision to hold himself back, so he stayed put, too. When she was out of sight, he turned and buried his face in his hands, cringing away the entire past day and a half.

He only emerged from his hands when the door opened, and it was Dick. “Hey, didn’t you hear? Vic’s serious about the meaty pizza thing.” He looked around, obviously searching for Raven.

“Rae went home, and… I think I’m gonna do the same. Later.”

Gar left before Dick could say another word, and walked home quickly. After all the excitement and weirdness, he only felt empty.

The news broke a day later. The Team Titans had been in outer space for the last few weeks, helping out the Justice Union against an alien threat. The mission had been kept under wraps until it was resolved. On their way back home, the Titans had even stopped by the outskirts of Jump City to foil the plans of a brand new supervillain attempting his first exploit.

The news thankfully said nothing of a group of teens caught in the crossfire.

When Raven woke up that day, however, their lapse in judgment with the mission wasn’t the first thing on her mind. What made her feel like the day before had been a dream was the fact that she’d ended up kissing Gar. Class clown, gratingly obnoxious, little blond sideways cap-wearing Gar. Her friend she didn’t even like.

She forced herself to calm down and sat cross-legged on her bed. It almost seemed wrong to bring this to her meditation—something so petty and juvenile. But she couldn’t hide from it, either. Like it or not, it had happened, so now it was part of her life story, and she had to work through it.

First off was the guilt, because her mother had been kind of right after all. Raven had told Arella they were all just friends, and then Vic had tried and set Dick and Kori up, and she herself had gone and had her first kiss. Maybe her mother had seen through something Raven didn’t; maybe Raven had been naïve to think a camping trip would just be a camping trip.

As for why the kiss had even happened, she could only think it was because Gar the impulsive unpredictable person that he was, and she… well, she was getting kissed by a cute boy, one who regularly made her feel out of control in the first place. She wasn’t immune to hormones. It was just… people usually backed off at her glowering; they left her alone naturally and she’d never had to learn to reject people—she’d never gotten to the point of needing to turn down a kiss. He’d caught her off-guard. And it was her first kiss. She guessed it was… natural that she’d gone along with it.

Kissing did make you a bit mad; it was electrifying, like books and songs and movies promised.

When she thought back to that moment, she remembered she’d wanted to kiss him, as much as that was inexplicable to her right now.

And who knew what Gar was thinking. He was kind of girl-crazy. For all she knew he was just taking a chance at something—he was reckless enough that she’d believe it. The fact that even he regretted it too said a lot about his wrong this was.

She had never gone camping before. She had never spent so long outside, with people who weren’t family. The entire day could be written off as a fever dream, because she’d been so overwrought with too much experiencing things and not enough processing. Of course things had slipped through the cracks. She didn’t have to understand it. She could simply let it go.

End of April.

Chapter Text

“I’m telling you this is so unnecessary,” Gar was telling Victor, his voice pleading as his friend went through his math textbook. “I was gonna skip anyway. I’ll just skip and then I won’t have to do the homework.”

“And I’m telling you, I’m not letting you do that,” Vic said calmly, and pointed to a line in the textbook. “Here’s the formula you need. Get cracking!”

Gar sighed and began working on the math problem slowly, dragging his metaphorical feet. Halfway through, he looked up. “Just let me skip, Vic,” he said, giving his best puppy-dog eyes.

Vic wordlessly pushed Gar’s head down towards his notebook.

Kori sat on the other side of Gar, supporting Victor’s goal. “Mr. Bill cares greatly about attendance, Gar. He said so to me when I arrived to this school.”

When Gar finished the problem, Vic indicated what he needed to do for the next one. Such was the problem with math: it never seemed to end. Kori smiled when Gar turned to her. Raven was reading, unaware of the world, and Dick was doing whatever on his phone—no one would speak up for him. Gar looked out the window in dejection before diving into the task. It was so warm and flowery outside, going to class seemed sacrilegious.

A knock on the clubroom door made everyone go quiet. Before they had time to regroup, a girl with long blond hair and thick glasses peeked in. “Hi? Is this the Project Club?”

Dick jumped to his feet. “Yes. Come in.”

He drew the extra chair to the table, as Kori, Vic and Gar cleared the table of Gar’s homework and Raven shoved her book in her bag to join the group. The girl observed the five shuffling from their previous occupations with dismay.

“Okay, what can we do for you?” Dick asked, all business.

The girl closed the door behind herself but ignored the chair, staying by the entrance. “You guys really do jobs for people?” she asked. “My friend told me she heard Jenny Hex talking about it… Was she joking?”

“No, we’re really…” Dick trailed off. “Um, we’re trying to be a club that helps people… and stuff.”

The girl didn’t look too convinced. “Okay… Well. I don’t know if you can help with this… I-I don’t even know if this is what you normally do, or…”

Dick met the girl’s uncertainty with cool assurance. “Why don’t you sit down and tell us what it’s about, and we’ll see what we can do about it?”

The girl finally acquiesced, and took the chair. “It’s just my sister’s driving herself mad with this,” she said as introduction, and launched into the story.

Her older sister Miranda had been working for a medical research non-profit. Miranda had been seeing money go missing for months now. She’d gone to management several times and had been sent away. Meanwhile, the donation money for research funding was a fraction of what it should have been, and no one was doing anything about it. Management had told Miranda that unless she had proof and a suspect, they could do nothing about it. “That’s screwed up, right?” said the girl. “I mean, they should be the ones investigating. It’s like they don’t care this money isn’t going where it needs to.”

“Yeah. They should be,” agreed Dick. “Okay, great. We’re on it.”

The girl opened her eyes wide. “Wait, really?”

“Yeah,” said Dick. “We’ll do some digging and see if your sister’s on to something, uh… what’s your name?”

“Itziar,” the girl said. She looked at all of them in turn. “Did you really save the school back when those two kids tried to blow it up?”

Dick nodded gravely, thinking it inappropriate to let her in on how thrilled he still was that that incident had happened. “Yep, that was us.”

“And principal Blood really asked you for help with the graffiti a while back?”

“That too.”

Itziar seemed to look at them differently now. She picked up her notebook and wrote something down. “Well, here’s the address for the Foundation. And I’ll give you my number, ‘case you need anything.”

After she left, Dick looked at the piece of paper with satisfaction. “I know we decided to keep the Thunder and Lightning thing a secret, but maybe it’s better that it’s out in the open, you know?” he told his friends, letting himself smile now their new client was out of sight. Who knew Vic’s ex-girlfriend would come in handy this way? Now word was getting around about them, and that was exactly what they needed. Missions would pick up from now on.

And then he turned to look at his friends, who were being uncharacteristically quiet. The four of them exchanged glances between themselves with a gravity Dick didn’t like. None of them would meet his eyes.

“Okay, what is it?” he asked them.

The four looked at each other, and seemed to decide Gar would take the floor. He stepped forward.

“We’ve just been wondering, Dick, like…” he started, scratching his hair. “If we should keep… doing this.”

Dick felt a twist in his gut. “This being?” he asked. He knew, but he wanted to hear it.

“The running around playing at being superheroes,” Vic snapped. “Or, heroes, I guess.”

Dick frowned at all of them. “Why?”

“What’d you mean, why?” retorted Gar. “Last month, we ran straight into a supervillain plan and got swept aside like bugs, by the real heroes trying to do their real job!”

“Fine, so that was a mistake,” said Dick. “But what about this mission? This is right down our alley!”

“Is it?” asked Raven. “Do we even know what our alley is? We’ve just been sticking our nose into different situations that did not need us.”

“Yeah, and I mean, how much are we really helping?” asked Gar.

“It’s not like we’ve been useless,” argued Dick. “We kept the school from being destroyed for fuck’s sake!”

“And what if that was a one off?” asked Vic. “What if there’s never anything big like that again?”

“We had no business going to the lake,” said Raven. “If anything, we were a hassle for the real heroes.”

“And we got lucky no one found out about that,” said Gar. “Imagine if this gets out of hand to and we really get embarrassed.”

Dick frowned to himself. In his head, he had answers for all his friends –Yes, this is right down our alley Raven, I know because it’s a student asking us for help, asking us to look into something that would go fly under superheroes’ radars. We’re gonna keep getting big cases, Vic, if we just keep doing the work. And who cares about what people think, Gar? Let them try to embarrass us for trying to do the right thing.- but there was no point to saying any of them. This wasn’t a debate. If they didn’t want to do the work, he couldn’t force them.

He just asked them, “You all feel this way?” And he asked this looking at Kori, because she hadn’t spoken up yet. She was actively avoiding his eyes.

Victor answered him. “This was always a pipe dream. We should quit while we’re ahead.”

“Look, we’ll find some other front for the Club, okay?” said Gar, trying to smile.

“Yeah. Sure,” muttered Dick.

He left the clubroom. Five minutes ago, he’d felt excited for the future. They had gotten a request—a real one this time. He felt like they were finally getting somewhere. But unbeknownst to him, his friends had already backed down.

He went to his locker and got the books he needed for first period, moving in automatic. He felt the irrational sensation that there was no point in going to History, no point in to coming to school, now he didn’t have the Club. Like school was already his daily obstacle he dealt with in between missions. What would he occupy his brain with while slacking off in class, if not looking for missions, working out problems, looking forward to the next task?

Back in the clubroom, the others lingered in guilt after Dick slumped away.

“We weren’t bad, right?” Gar asked the others. “We were just honest.”

“At least it’s done and over with now,” said Vic.

Raven turned to Kori to say something along the lines of Big help you were. But the redhead looked so distraught already, Raven held his tongue.

“I wish I hadn’t told Jen anything,” said Vic. “We might have never gotten another mission if I hadn’t.”

Kori heaved a big sigh. “I fear we have committed a terrible mistake.”

Gar turned to her. “Come on, Kor. We discussed this. We all agreed.”

Kori said, “But he seemed so down, and it seems so awful to put down someone so… idealistic like him.”

And in that the others couldn’t help but agree.

Dick had always been good at compartmentalizing; he ignored the issue for the majority of the day. He got home, had dinner, went to his bedroom, and only when he had finished all his homework did he look up from his laptop to think about it again.

The room had darkened around him while he finished working, though the sunset outside was still burning in the sky. He sat on his bed, watched the rectangles of fire projected on the wall opposite to his window, and sincerely wondered why he cared so much.

When he thought about the Club, his brain was forever fixed in the moment after they got Jade to return the SAT’s to the school. That lunch period, as he sat with his newfound group of friends, as they all savored that triumph, felt to Dick like the beginning of the rest of his life. It was the moment his life had fallen on the right path, and in his new goal he’d found the person he wanted to be.

After that things had somewhat deviated. They had ran around looking for the next thing, and Dick had tried for them to stay on track. But maybe Vic was right, and the Thunder and Lightning thing had been a one-off, and really the SAT’s thing had been them righting something they themselves got wrong. Perhaps people got a quota of heroism in their lives, and that had been theirs. Well, regular people. People who weren’t born with powers or got transformed by a lab accident. People like them.

Maybe they should quit. Maybe with the forest supervillain his friends had woken up from a dream, and Dick should follow suit. Maybe he was just being too stubborn about it.

And why should it be a huge deal? What was wrong with him, that he needed to have a huge hero project to feel like he wasn’t wasting his life? Why shouldn’t he be normal, and mind his own business like the rest of the world?

Right there and then, Dick decided to quit. When he did, he felt like he was shrugging off a load that, once gone, left him empty.

And when the moment was over, his brain started thinking about the mission again. What could be happening at that nonprofit and how could he go about finding out and who would fix it if not him. It was useless—he couldn’t quit. It wasn’t in him to do it.

He opened his laptop again and began investigating the nonprofit.

Dick scoured the Foundation’s website, contrasting any piece of information against state laws. After a while of twisting his brain on taxes and laws, he decided to get help. He knocked and then popped his head in Bruce’s office. “Bruce? Can you help me with a school thing?”

Bruce waved him in. “Come in. Give me a second to…” he trailed off as he typed in his computer. Dick drew a chair close to him and waited until Bruce wrapped up his work and looked up at his charge. “Do you want to go to the study, or…?”

“No, I just have a couple of questions,” said Dick. “Are all nonprofits supposed to be government funded?”

“No,” Bruce answered. “There are several types of nonprofit and not all of them get government grants.”

“What about a medical research charity?”

“I’d say those usually get grants. If you let me check…-” he moved to the computer.

“So what happens if they’re government-funded also ask for membership dues?”

Bruce focused on him. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you can’t have both, can you?”

“Yes. Why wouldn’t they?”

Dick nodded, trying hard not to look disappointed.

“A nonprofit can have government grants, require membership dues, and get donations,” Bruce went on. “All at the same time.”

“Right,” said Dick. He wanted to kick himself for feeling let down. Of course the charity was okay after all. He’d just been seeing things because he wanted a mission too much.

Bruce was peering at Dick. “They’re teaching you about taxes in school?”

“Yeah, we have to make up our own nonprofit,” lied Dick.

“I guess I stand corrected about public school,” muttered Bruce. “But why are you looking for fraudulent activity?”

“Oh, one of the exercises is judging the legality of what other students come up with.” Dick scared himself sometimes—he’d come up with that on the fly.

“Well, in real life, the first sign of fraudulent activity is tax evasion.”

“But you’d never find out. Tax records are private, right?”

“Not for public government-funded nonprofits they’re not.” Bruce moved to his computer, and this time Dick let him work. “The 990 forms are public record. You can look them up on the IRS website,” he said, and Dick quickly wrote it down on his phone. “You got all that?”

“Yes. Thanks, Bruce!” Dick jumped up from the chair, heartened.

“Good luck with the project,” Bruce said, delving back into his own work.

Much to his disappointment, when Dick found the Foundation’s taxes easily—it would have been too easy to take them down for not making their taxes public. It looked like… an okay list of taxes. Since he wasn’t actually being taught about taxes in school, all he could attest was that their 990 form existed.

So he changed his tactic; he looked up the taxes for a bunch of other nonprofits and started comparing them. That was when things started coming out. That was when he started taking notes. And then it occurred to him to run the recurring names trough social media, and that was when he really started going down an investigative rabbit hole.

It was well into three a.m. when he started printing.

The next day, Dick made a beeline for his friends’ lunch table, sat down and looked at then earnestly. “Hear me out.”

He was met with knowing, dreading faces.

“Just—just hear me out,” he insisted. He pooled his findings on the table and pointed at one paper. “This is the charity’s website main page. Remember what Itziar said yesterday about there being members who pay dues? No word of that in the website. So it’s shady right off the bat.”

“That’s grasping at straws,” retorted Raven.

“I looked through other charities’ pages,” Dick went on, paying them no mind. “They all explain what kind of nonprofit they are and tell you whether or not they ask for dues. This charity gets government grants, member dues, and donations, but it only asks donations on their page. It hides everything else.”

“Maybe they had a bad web designer,” said Gar.

“So I went looking for their tax forms.” Dick pulled up the relevant papers. “Looks fine, right? Now compare it to these taxes from the other charities.” He waited a few moment to let them get to their own conclusions.

“Okay, it looks pretty bare in comparison,” Raven admitted. “But-”

“But it could still be a mistake, right?” guessed Dick. “But look at the lines I highlighted. Look at the difference between researchers’ salaries and their total assets. Now compare them to the other nonprofits.”

He leaned back and waited for their eyes to widen.

“There is no comparison,” Kori said.

“The assets are astronomical for a nonprofit,” Dick agreed, unable to hold back. “And the salaries are way lower than those of other charities. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You see the president of the charity, Stan Deering? He’s the son in law of this guy,” He put forward the printing of a LinkedIn profile. “Henry Allard, billionaire. He’s the family patriarch. Through the years he’s put his family in different spots of power. And these,” he put up a bunch of other papers, “are news articles of different charities he’s had open and close through the years. All of them crashed and burned after a few years. Eventually a new one opens under another family member’s name. And all of these people? They don’t advertise having worked at any of those charities on their social media. Like they’re always trying to keep it under wraps as much as possible.”

His friends were quiet now. As they studied the papers and Dick waited with baited breath, Jenny came by their table.

“What are you Titans fanclub losers working on now?” she asked.

“All requests are confidential, Jenny,” said Dick, deciding that right then and there. It sounded logical, anyway.

Vic shrunk on his seat, trying to pretend he wasn’t there.

“Hey, we at the cooler table have a bet going on,” Jen said, motioning to where Gizmo and Mammoth were sneering at them. “Settle it for us, will you?”

“No,” said Raven.

“Here goes,” said Jenny. “Would you say you made this club as a desperate cry for attention, or are you really deluded enough to think you’re gonna help anybody?”

As she asked, she grabbed at some of the papers and examined them.

“Give that back, Jennifer!” Dick said as he grabbed the papers, with enough force that Jen was actually discouraged from bothering them any further. Annoying Dick was high-quality fun, until it wasn’t.

She walked off, muttering, “Why does everyone always think my name is Jennifer…”

Dick watched her walk away and made sure she was gone, then turned to his friends. “Well? What do you think?”

Vic said, “Let’s say you did find shady stuff. What I don’t see is a reason why we should take care of it.”

Dick said, “Because we were asked to. And because we can.”

Victor gave him a hard gaze. “If we do go digging deeper, and we do find something big, what are we gonna do with it?”

“We give it to the police,” Dick replied. He’d already come to the conclusion it was the only thing they would accept. “There’s not much we can do, except bring them a ready case.”

Raven was leafing through the papers, undecided. “You’re saying we’d be like… reporters, if anything.”

“Yes.” Dick would have said yes to anything anyone came up with at that moment. He could have done this without them—but he really preferred to have them with him. “Raven, are you in?”

She looked at him, and Dick thought she looked surprised at being singled out. But it had been instinctual on Dick’s part: she’d always been on board with the Club since the start.

“People are giving to this charity thinking it’s gonna help people,” she said, almost to herself. “This organization is taking money and not helping advance medicine. Screw it, I’m in.”

Kori spoke. “You have already found something no one else has found,” she told Dick. “It should be a shame to let it pass.”

Dick smiled at them in gratitude.

Vic set down his sandwich. “Are we really gonna give whatever we find to police?”

“Yes,” said Dick, nodding profusely.

“Are we gonna duck down and not bring attention to ourselves at any moment?”

“Yes, yes.”

“And after this is over, are you gonna want us to take more missions?”

Dick stayed silent. He couldn’t promise Vic otherwise; they both knew it would be a lie.

Vic started to smile. “Fine. Let’s go, you… you activist boy wonder.”

Gar smiled. “Let’s go, future reporters of America club.”

That afternoon, they parked near the address Itziar gave them. The NHT Foundation was across them. It was a simple building, three stories tall, but it might as well have been a fortress to the five. They watched real-life people coming in and out of the building, and the gravity of the situation fell on them for the first time.

“Okay, here we are,” Vic said. “…How are we gonna do this?”

“How do people do this in the movies?” Gar asked.

Dick thought back really hard to the last things he’d watched. “They like, cook up a reason I never pay attention to to enter the building. Then they just, go down the wrong hallway.”

“Avoiding all the cameras because they know where they are,” added Raven.

“Or someone escorts them into an elevator, then they beat him up and go wherever they want,” said Gar.

“Or they split up and some of them distract the secretary,” said Vic.

“Which one do we do?” asked Kori.

“We can’t go around beating people up,” said Vic.

“Absolutely not,” said Dick. He leaned forward on his passenger seat to look at the whole length of the building. Thick clouds covered the sky—the day had started out sunny and quickly deteriorated towards the afternoon. He knew they were waiting on him to decide what they should do.

“What were you hoping to find here, again?” Raven asked Dick.

“We need more info if we’re gonna trace where the donation revenue’s really going,” Dick said mildly. In reality, he knew they needed more data, but he didn’t know how he was picturing getting it. Every movie scenario they could come up with sounded too much like forced entry for his comfort; and they might run into sensitive information while they were digging.

“But Dick, will we find it?” asked Kori. “Why would they keep the proof of their misdeeds in their building?”

“I asked Bruce the same thing. And he told me they might, because the accreditation system isn’t perfect. There’s a high chance they’ll never get caught even with the proof on them. The proof could be in plain sight and nothing would get done. I mean, the taxes are just online and I found something weird there.”

“Doesn’t your uncle get suspicious you keep asking really weird questions?” Gar asked.

“No. I was asking weird questions long before I started hiding things,” said Dick.

He looked at his friends in the car. It would be so easy to turn back now, but no one wanted to be the one to suggest it. Vic was so nervous he was still holding the wheel; he seemed to be going through worst case scenarios in his head. As he looked at them, Gar and Raven did something weird. Gar was scratching his head, then when he brought down his hand, he accidentally touched Raven’s arm, and jumped, and sent his hand behind his head and then down to his lap. Raven just glared at the space ahead as all proof that anything had transpired. Dick wondered if they had fought or something; Gar had been really jumpy around Raven lately, like he was scared of her all over again. Kori alone was the same as always, focused. Dick breathed and tried to calm his thumping heart. Even worse than being about to do this was being the reason they were all about to do this.

Dick turned back to the building, as if he would gain more information just from observing it. “Maybe we’ll be lucky Itziar’s sister will be at the front desk,” he said, and wished he could take it back immediately. The best he could offer them was a wane hope?

“And we’ll be like, whaddup we’re the teen detectives your sister hired, and she’ll show us to the financial room?” Gar said.

“There is no financial room,” said Vic, and Gar curtly informed him he had been kidding.

While they bickered, Dick observed the building, and built himself up with courage he didn’t really feel. “Here’s the plan,” he said, cutting the other boys off. “We’re doing a school report. On how nonprofits work. We ask uncomfortable questions on where revenue goes and try and find things out from that.”

“We’re gonna talk to people?” Vic questioned.

“Anything else verges on law-breaking,” said Dick, and almost convinced himself he was as confident as he sounded. “We know management doesn’t care about the problem, but Itziar’s sister can’t be the only one who’s noticed the oddness and wants things to change.”

“So we ask like, the ways people donate and where it shows up on paper?” asked Raven.

“Yes,” Dick decided. “Exactly. Everyone got it? Okay, let’s go.”

He herded them out of the car before anyone could get second thoughts.

Thought the glass door, they saw a middle-aged woman who probably wasn’t Itziar’s sister was at the front desk. They rang the doorbell, and saw when she looked up at them and pressed the buzzer to let them in.

“You’re here early,” she said.

Dick staggered. “Ma’am?”

The woman peered at them. “You’re the teen group for the research study?”

Dick kept a straight face. “Yes. Yes we are.”

The woman produced five forms. “Fill these out. Did you get the consent forms on email?”

“Of course,” said Dick, taking the forms.

“Sit wherever you want. The doctor will be with you at six. Hopefully,” she grumbled.

She went right back to her work, and Dick signaled his friends to go down the hallway to her left.

They came into another waiting area, which contained no people. There was also a receptionist’s desk, but this one had no receptionist. Dick turned to his friends. “Okay. Find people and ask.”

Kori said, “It is five thirty-three. We have twenty-seven minutes until the doctor arrives.”

“And the real group of teens,” said Vic. “Let’s move it.”

Dick picked a door and peeked in. It turned out to be an office; there were rows of desks with desktop computers and only one woman sitting to one; she looked up at Dick with a supremely bored expression.

“Hi,” Dick started, and came halfway through the door. “I’m doing a school report on nonprofits and I was wondering if I could ask you some questions?”

The woman looked as if she’d woken up from a daze. Finally she got up from her desk, her mouth pressed into a disapproving line. As she made her way over, Dick said, “I’ll only be taking a minute of your time…” But when the woman got to him, she closed the door without a word, pushing Dick outside.

Back in the hallway, Dick saw his friends were gaining similar results to him. Every person they saw looked stressed out or pissed off. Clearly the morale in the building wasn’t great.

A man in a lab coat suddenly rushed through the hallway. Kori tried to talk to him, but the man ignored her and kept walking.

“Let’s try the second floor,” Dick decided.

The second floor was mostly lab spaces. At either side of a long hallway were small rooms where the windows saved them the need to try every door. The first adult Gar saw was a woman who sat inside a lab on her phone; she went out to tell Gar they shouldn’t be here, focus groups were handled on the ground level.

They regrouped near the stairs.

“Where the hell are people?” Vic whispered.

“I found a janitor,” Raven said. “I asked him if this place is always so deserted and he said yes.”

“It is five minutes to six,” said Kori. “We should leave.”

“The receptionist talked like the doctor was always late,” said Dick, who had already made for the stairs to the third floor.

“You heard the lady, time’s up.” Victor told Dick.

“But there’s another floor,” protested Dick.

“So be it, if we stay we get caught.”

“We have to at least peek at the third floor.”

“No more peeking!” Victor forcibly pulled Dick’s shirt down the stairs and onto the first floor.

When they got to the first waiting area, Vic peeked around the corner. The lady at the front desk was on the computer, with full view of both the main door and the hallway they were escaping from. The group decided they would wait until she left to get coffee or something.

Then a group of seven teens walked in. The five froze, but when they receptionist acted like all was normal, they realized the study must contain a lot more kids.

They waited some more. Some fifteen minutes must have passed, and there was still no sign of any doctor. The moment the woman left her post, the five went out of hiding single-file and power-walked out of the building. Dick even permitted himself to put the forms she’d given them back on her desk, unfilled.

“That was… cool I guess,” said Gar, once in the car. “Bit boring at the end with all the waiting, but still.”

“I think we just snuck through a building for no reason,” Raven droned.

“We know there’s definitely something weird going on in that building,” Dick. “It was deserted.”

“Didn’t the forms you found include a bunch of key employees?” asked Vic. “Where were all those people?”

“I was thinking the same thing,” said Dick. “Let’s go somewhere I can spread their 990 form.”

Vic drove them to a nearby park. They set camp around a fountain and Dick pulled out the papers from his backpack.

“Here we go. All directors, trustees, officers and key employees. All people listed as working full-time who weren’t there today.”

“Wait.” Gar picked up a profile. “This is the woman on the second floor. I remember.”

“So at least we know these people exist,” said Raven.

“This is a good lead,” said Dick. “Let’s look up these people online.”

They split all the names they had and set to googling them in silence. An elderly couple strolled by them and the man made a comment about teenagers always being on their phones, to which his wife shook her head in agreement.

“Do you get any people who mention the Foundation on their social media?” Dick asked after a while.

“Nope, and people mention other places as their current jobs,” said Vic.

“Here too,” said Raven. “I googled Miranda Ricou and she does have the Foundation on her LinkedIn.”

“What was the receptionist’s name?” Gar asked. “Denise Yeh, right? I’m gonna try her.”

“If you are a researcher working full-time for a foundation, you would list it in your social media,” said Kori. “And how can they keep more than one full-time jobs?”

“The receptionist mentions the Foundation too,” Gar let them know.

Vic put his phone down. “Hey. Remember the researchers’ salary was so low? It was comparable to the admins. That’s Itziar’s sister, and if she works there part-time…”

“What are you thinking?” prompted Dick. “They could be declaring people as full-time, but paying them for part-time, just to show up for a little while or not at all? Just to look like a real place?”

“That’s a good angle!” Vic said, finally getting excited. “If a charity is shady in its presentation, that’s not prosecutable. If they have more assets than what they pay employees, that’s just tax evasion. Nepotism is run of the mill. But if no one’s actually working in that place…”

“That’s it!” exclaimed Dick, jumping to his feet. “Okay, we need hard evidence of this. We need to keep digging—get our hands on clock-in records and prove no one actually works there…” Dick stopped, looked at his friends, saw the look in their faces, and backtracked. “I mean. We need to give this to the cops, because… this is enough for them to open a case … and that means our job is done.”

“That’s more like it, man,” said Victor, hacking Dick’s shoulder a bit too hard. Dick did not wince. “Now let’s go get some pizza!”

Dick pulled out his phone as he followed his friends. “I’m calling Itziar.”

Chapter Text

They took the pizza to Vic’s house, where they organized the files to take to the police as they ate.

Dick texted Itziar to get her up to date as Victor worked on his laptop, taking screenshots of the profiles of the Foundation’s so-called employees to print. There was a small workshop going on around him: Gar was next to the printer receiving the papers, Raven was in charge or highlighting relevant info and writing the post-it notes, and Kori arranged everything they had –the old and the new- on a folder.

At the police station, Dick took the lead. He tried to be nonchalant as he set the folder before the officer at the main desk. “Hi. We’ve uncovered evidence a nonprofit called NHT Foundation is a sham.”

Their time at the station was even more anti-climactic than their adventure at the Foundation. The officers there took a long time understanding they weren’t there to file a report, but to give them a case, and also took a long time understanding the minutes of that case. Then they took a long time getting someone to see them, making the five wait around on the precinct. They went through three different officers. The third guy they told the whole story to finally took the folder in his hands.

Now the man –he had introduced himself as Sergeant- heaved a long sigh. “Are any of your parents in a rival facility or something?”

Dick shook his head. “No, this is just something we found out, so we thought we’d bring it to you,” he droned.

The officers’ collective indifference had drained out their enthusiasm for the case, too. They felt the need to undersell what they’d done just to match their surroundings and not feel like stupid kids.

The Sergeant took off his glasses. “Right. Well. Thanks for bringing this to us. We’ll look into it.” He looked pointedly at them as he spoke, like he was humoring them; Dick’s mood plummeted even more. “We’ll check it out,” he repeated, which seemed a sure sign they wouldn’t, and nodded at them as if to tell them it was time to go away now.

The sun had gone down by the time they left, and it had rained at some point, because the streets were wet. All five were different measures of let down, ranging from Dick’s supreme vexation to Kori’s cautious optimism.

“Well that was a waste of time,” said Raven. She was a close second to Dick.

“We did our part,” said Vic, though his tone was dark. He was in the middle. He felt like he’d been hit with a fresh dose of reality. He didn’t know how he’d ever trusted the police would take this. It seemed he’d been so swept up in Dick’s idealism he’d thought he lived in a world where cops were there for the people.

Dick hung his head, himself having lost all his idealism. “I feel like a little girl at a fake tea party and they’re pretending to eat our pretend food.”

“That’s oddly specific,” said Gar. “Something you wanna talk about?”

Dick huffed in response.

“Look, man, I’m angry too,” said Gar.

“Do you think they truly will not… check it out?” asked Kori. “Perhaps they were pretending the case was not important because they did not want us to keep doing the digging.”

“You really think that?” asked Raven.

“It is possible,” replied Kori.

“It’s the other way around for me. They were so indifferent I think we proved it’s up to us to keep investigating,” posed Raven.

“Yeah, I think so too,” said Vic, to Dick’s absolute surprise.

Dick whipped around to them. “Yes! Thank you!”

Victor smirked at him. “Let’s go, Project club. I’ll drop you off at your houses and we can start planning tomorrow. Mainly how we’re gonna show our faces in that charity again.”

“Maybe we can pretend we’re still doing the teen research thing, maybe it’s a several meetings thing,” posed Dick, assuming a thinking pose. “We can see if they advertised it anywhere and work out-”

“I said tomorrow,” replied Vic, basically shoving Dick into his car. “Go to sleep, Dick.”

Vic made a turn on the avenue, and the car behind them started flashing blue lights for them to pull over.

“Ugh,” went Vic.

“As if we hadn’t seen enough cops today,” grumbled Dick.

“I wasn’t even going fast,” Vic said as he parked.

“You know they’re just stopping us because we’re a car full of teenagers,” said Gar.

“Yeah, that’s why I’m being targeted,” retorted Vic, glaring at him through the rearview mirror.

Raven was fully turned around looking at the car that stopped them. “That’s not a police car.”

Vic looked through the mirror as he parked. “Yeah. Am I getting pulled over by a Camaro? What is this?”

The man approaching them wasn’t in uniform. He approached Vic’s car slowly, and in that time the air turned tense.

“You shouldn’t have stopped,” said Raven.

“I couldn’t not stop,” argued Vic, hands gripping the wheel.

What is wrong, Raven?” asked Kori.

“I have a bad feeling,” she answered.

Vic rolled down the window when the man arrived to them.

“Do you know how fast you were going?” the man asked.

“I…” Victor racked his brain for the least confrontational response. “How fast was I going, officer?”

Instead the man said, “You like meddling, don’t you? Butting into things you don’t understand.”

“Huh?” reacted Vic.

“You’re the kids who dropped in on the station this afternoon, right? The little assholes with the conspiracy theories.”

Vic looked back at the others. “Yeah. I guess that’s us.”

“You’re gonna drop that now, you hear? You pissed off a lot of people already. Don’t make it worse.” The man peered at all of them and made sure they all nodded. Then he got up, muttering, “Stupid fucking kids.”

They watched him walk back to his car, footsteps echoing on the wet street.

When they go to Dick’s house, at first it was just to regroup. Raven and Vic, at least, were still intending to go back to their own homes soon. In the end, though, they were both calling home saying they’d stay at Dick’s tonight. Dick went down and asked his uncle if his friends could stay over, and Alfred put them up in four different guest rooms. They still stayed up late in Dick’s room, talking.

“At this point, we should tell our families,” said Vic, sensibly.

Raven closed her eyes to massage her temples. This would kill her mom. If it came to it, she’d only tell Azar.

Vic insisted. “I mean. We’re being threatened.”

Gar was camped next to Dick’s window and never looked away from it for too long. He didn’t really think anyone was going to send an assassin to climb into their rooms and take them out while they slept. But it was a primal thing: he was scared, and he wanted to watch his surroundings. The fact that you could barely see anything amidst the dark rain didn’t help his nerves.

“I don’t see the point,” he said. “What can our adults do? If we tell them, one of them might actually try to report it to the cops. I know Steve would be stubborn enough to do it.” Steve would say that it obviously hadn’t been a real cop that stopped them, that they were too stupid to recognize a blue light, and what station would target them, they were just being silly.

Kori didn’t say anything to that. She had no family here. This wasn’t her call. “Do you think it was a real police?” she asked instead.

“If he wasn’t, that means this organization’s got the means and the guts to get a blue light and impersonate a cop,” said Raven. “And if he was, that means they have the means and the guts to buy the police. And I don’t know which is worse.”

“Does it matter?” asked Vic. “The result’s the same. We were threatened, and we can’t talk to police about it, because there’s a high chance they are the police.”

Kori looked towards Dick. He’d been quiet for a while, and he wasn’t facing them. “Dick? What do you think?”

Dick didn’t answer immediately.

Victor turned to him too, almost angry. “Dick, you do know we have to let this be, right?”

Dick said, “Yes. Of course we do.” He sounded certain, and also like it killed him to say it.

The next morning was bright; the sky was blue and proud and the sun left no memory of the rain from the previous day. It inevitably made them less afraid of their situation. They went to school, because they had to. After school, Dick and Kori went to the grocery store for beef and then went to Kori’s apartment to have it for dinner. It was kind of a Tuesday night tradition by now, for them to make a meal together on a boring day.

On the bus, with shopping bags at their feet, Kori was talking animatedly, but Dick couldn’t access a good enough mood to engage with her. He couldn’t get over the way the mission had ended. He kept replaying when they’d had to tell Itziar they were dropping the mission. Her eyes had widened when they told her what happened, and she’d assured them she understood, and she would have tapped out as well. None of that made it better for Dick; it actually kind of made it worse.

Perhaps he would have liked to believe they were above normal people, so to speak; that they were braver, and would keep going beyond the point where others would tap out. The way they had been stopped cold by a higher evil –an established and organized institution of unstoppable corruption- proved to him they weren’t.

He thought Kori couldn’t tell he was down. He was taking comfort in the fact that she was still talking animatedly, until she covered his hand with hers, looked him in the eye and told him, “Dick. I know you are disappointed. But you must not despair. Remember the past cases we did? This one only did not work because there were powers involved too big for us. We will find other cases like the last ones. We can still make a good difference.”

He felt himself blush, and he didn’t know if it was from her touch or the embarrassment of being so seen. “Kori… Thanks,” he said. He looked away. “I-I can’t stop thinking about it,” he confessed, as an apology.

She didn’t stop smiling. “I know. That is you.”

He wondered if she meant that in an endearing way or if she was just smiling because she always smiled. He decided not to ask.

When they got to her apartment and she unlocked the door, Dick immediately noticed something was off. He held Kori’s wrist, and she stopped talking. He nodded to within the apartment. “Did you leave your window open?” he whispered.

Kori looked in. An uncommon light came from the hall that led to Kori’s bedroom, like the window there was indeed open. Kori silently shook her head at him.

The fear and paranoia from the previous day came back to them all at once. Kori quietly set down her grocery bag on the floor, and Dick imitated her. She picked up a metal from bat behind the door that Dick had never noticed before; on her hands it looked like a sword. He looked around for a similar weapon. Before he could find one, Kori armed him with a pan from her cooker.

They heard movement from the hall. Kori swung the bat behind her head.

The man who stood on the doorway actually blocked the whole light that came from the hall behind him. When Dick saw the gigantic creature, he felt lightheaded. What kind of Viking nightmare had they hired to take them out?

Kori had the complete opposite reaction. She dropped the bat, which hit the floor loudly, opened her arms wide and went towards the man, cheerfully speaking in what Dick was pretty sure was her first language.

Only when he heard the same language from the big guy Dick began to understand. The man hugged her back, lifting her off the ground, and they talked for a while before Dick sheepishly set the pan back on the cooker.

Finally, Kori was set down, she turned to Dick and tuned back to English. “Oh, Dick! May I present Galaktion Fyodorovich, my k’norfka. He took great care of me since I was little. I call him Galfore, and you may as well.”

As Dick went to shake hands with Galfore, he found himself wondering if everyone in Kori’s country was golden-skinned, green-eyed and redheaded, before he dismissed the thought as ridiculous.

“It’s great to meet you,” he said, smiling to feel safe, pretending he didn’t notice the man glowering at him. Then he also had to pretend the subsequent handshake didn’t crush his hand.

Galfore grunted at him in response.

Kori noticed nothing, having moved on to unloading groceries into her fridge with giddy energy. “I am so happy you are here finally! Oh! And on the day I was going to make Sis’lyk!”

Kori noticed Dick retreated into himself during dinner. She was talking to Galfore –she couldn’t stop smiling every time she looked at him and he was there; she’d missed him so much- and whenever she turned to Dick, he was far away, lost in thought. He must have taken Kori being diverted by her k’norfka as permission to slip away. He did that often; if he was in a group and people were talking around him, it was like something in him took it as sanction to go into his own mind. Kori thought he might not even have noticed if they had continued the conversation in Tamaranean. He would occasionally tune back—but she always caught him drifting away.

When they said goodnight by her building door, Kori thought he looked apologetic. But she didn’t mind; how could she mind something he couldn’t help? She went back upstairs, and her step picked up as she crossed the hallway, thinking that for the first time in forever, she was coming back home to family under her roof.

“So that’s Dick,” Galfore said in their language. They were back at her table, eating sweets he’d brought from Tamaran. “The way you talked about him… he’s not what I expected.”

“What did you expect?” she asked, humoring him.

“Someone taller,” he chose to reply.

Kori laughed. “He was preoccupied tonight. Please don’t judge him too harshly. He’s just being his hardworking, noble self.”

“You’re not even dating, and already making excuses for him.”

Kori reddened. “Galfore!” She punched his arm in protest, and her k’norfka laughed.

“I want to meet your other friends,” he said, granting her a change of subject.

“I want you to meet them too. I’ll bring them around as soon as possible. But how is my family in Tamaran? How did you leave Ryan? How are my parents and Komila?”

“Ryan is sulking, but he went to school willingly enough. Komila… between you and me, she’s about to drop out of school. Your parents don’t suspect it yet. Expect a storm.”

But Kori found it hard to believe there would be a storm. She knew her parents wouldn’t condemn Komila even if she did drop out. She could almost guess her parents’ train of thought. Koma was smart, she would figure something out; it was dear Korina they had to worry about.

“You seem preoccupied as well, Kotenka.”

She smiled. “You know me well, Galfore.” She knitted her hands. “There was… something we had to do. And we couldn’t complete it, because circumstances overtook us.”

“That doesn’t sound like you,” Galfore stated resolutely.

Kori thought her k’norfka gave her too much credit; he still remembered her as a headstrong little girl. “I was always naïve about a lot of things, and I was always… sheltered.”

“You weren’t sheltered, you were trapped,” he responded, swelling with rage.

Kori held his hands, willing him to calm down. She knew he blamed himself, as unfounded as that was.

He stared at her, waiting for the full story. She drew her hands back and took a deep breath. “You remember the Club I told you about?”

Bruce had been persuaded to go upstairs by the loud shuffling and banging coming from Dick’s room. What he found was Dick surrounded by more chaos than usual. His wardrobe doors were wide open, boxes were empty with their contents scattered around them, books were on piles on the floor, and Dick was standing in the midst of all of it, glaring at the clock in his hands. He looked up with a frown when Bruce poked his head in.

“What are you doing?” Bruce demanded.

“Tidying up,” answered Dick, like it was obvious.

Bruce looked at the room and back at Dick. “What’s wrong?”

Dick let the clock down on the floor as he mulled on his answer. “School is going terrible. It’s horrible and terrible and crap,” he replied, making an effort to mind his language. “And I don’t wanna talk anymore about it.”

“Okay,” agreed Bruce. “How’re you gonna solve it?”

“I can’t. It’s…” he trailed off. “Something unfair is going on, and I can’t do anything about it. The… An evil teacher… won.”

Bruce leaned on the doorframe. “You won’t want me to go talk to the school.”

“No,” confirmed Dick.

“So you’re giving up.” That earned Bruce a glare. He shrugged. “I’m just checking.”

“I can’t do anything. I can only keep my head down and graduate and…” Dick trailed off again, because his frustration was no longer communicable in the parable he was trying to make up for Bruce. He would graduate, and then what? Try to change the world as an adult? Become a jaded adult and not try to change things at all? Try only to be stopped by higher powers, like now? What was the difference between Dick as a teenager and Dick in the future? If he tapped out now he’d tap out then, too. Maybe he was never meant to be any sort of… hero. Dick wrinkled his nose. Even thinking the word made him feel pathetic.

“Take care of your belongings,” Bruce told him as he turned to leave. “No matter what you end up doing, you’re going to need your things.”

Galfore had stayed quiet for a while after Kori told him everything.

“Are you certain this organization would come after you?” he finally asked.

Kori shrugged. “I can’t know that. But the man who may or may not have been a police officer sounded serious. I would readily believe he had people backing him up.” Galfore nodded slowly. Kori looked at him pleadingly. “What do you think I should do?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Galfore said immediately. “But I can tell you want to follow through.”

“My friends already decided to drop it.”

“Is this what Dick was angry about?”

Kori nodded. “He hates this as much as I do. That they won. That they make us feel scared and powerless.”

“You’re not powerless.” Galfore shifted on his seat and leaned forward to take Kori’s hands. “I won’t lie to you and say there is no danger. But there is always danger. Kotenka, the schu’ka is in the sea to make the karas stay alert. You cannot pretend there is no danger. But you can acknowledge it, and decide if it is worth it.”

Tears were prickling at her eyes. God, she had missed him. She’d always felt like he was the one who could straighten her path with a few words. “You make it sound heroic.”

“I’m just reminding you of what you are. You’re a warrior, Kotenka. You weren’t made to live small.”

She dabbed her eyes and smiled at him. “Galfore, why do you always think so highly of me? You have more faith in me than I have in myself. Do you praise me so much to make up for everyone else in my family?”

“No, Kotenka. I truly think what I say of you. Not only do I think it—I am right that you’re special. That your mother and father don’t see that is their own problem.”

After she cleared the table –Galfore protested that she should let him do it, but they compromised in that he’d do the dishes if he let her do this- and went in her room for the night, Kori called Dick. He picked up with a, “Hey. I was just about to call you.”

“About what?” she asked, English sounding hard on her tongue after talking in her language for so long.

“The mission.”

Kori smiled to herself as she heard him take a deep breath.

“I don’t think I can live with myself if I don’t follow through,” Dick said. “I wanted to tell you, because… I don’t want to do my own thing secretly again. But my mind is made up… What do you think?”

“Dick, I agree,” she said, savoring the words. “We have to do it.”

“Wait, really?”

“I decided to… pick the danger that is worth it,” she said, faltering. She shook her head at herself. It sounded better in Tamaranean.

Dick seemed to get it anyway. “Kori, that’s great.”

“I think we will still need the help of an authority, if not police”

“And we have to find a way to keep the others out of it, if they don’t wanna be involved.”

“We will avoid all mention of them, if they still do not want to join.”

She could just see Dick nodding and pacing through his room. “Yes, yes. We’ll talk more tomorrow. Okay?”

“See you tomorrow.”

After the call ended, she fell back on her bed. Dangerous proceedings aside, she allowed herself a moment to smile. She couldn’t help but notice they had changed their minds in the same way at the same moment. Were they connected, she wondered? She put her pillow over her head to stifle a giggle—she wasn’t alone in the house anymore.

Gar, Raven and Victor listened to Dick and Kori in silence as they told them how they were going to go through with the mission, and made clear the three of them had no obligation too. The three looked at each other, but said nothing. Then they walked away to speak among themselves. Now Dick and Kori watched them from afar.

Kori couldn’t hold back. “Do you think they will…?”

“Give them a second,” said Dick. “Maybe they’ll come around.”

They saw Vic and Gar arguing animatedly, while Raven stood by them, lost in thought, saying nothing. Eventually Vic stalked away. Gar leaned against the wall, then began talking to Raven. The two talked for a while.

Dick and Kori held their breaths as the two approached them.

“We’re in,” said Raven.

When the four walked out of school at the end of the day, Vic was waiting for them in the parking lot. They stopped when they saw him.

“You’re barreling through, aren’t you?” Victor asked them.

“Yeah,” admitted Dick.

Victor pointed to his car. “Let’s go.”

“I thought you said-” Gar began.

“I know what I said.” Vic begrudgingly smiled. “But if you’re doing this, then I’m in too. Get in.”

Minutes later, they were in Dick’s room, planning. Dick had simply moved the remnants of his failed tidying up aside, just enough to clear a space on the center of the room.

“Okay, talk to me,” said Dick, pacing in front of his friends sitting on the ground. He’d set them up on cushions borrowed from the living room; his bed and couch were covered in stuff. “How are we doing this?”

“We’ve established you have to be buzzed into the building, and there’s no side doors or back doors,” said Vic.

“Yes,” said Dick.

“And the only way to get inside without breaking in is to go during business hours,” continued Victor.

“And you want us to avoid breaking in,” said Gar.

“Always,” smirked Dick.

“We should go when Itziar’s sister will be there,” said Kori. “We shall find out when she goes.”

“And we tell her to pretend to believe whatever excuse we give to get in,” said Vic.

“We should make sure she’s still on board with this,” said Raven. “We’ve only ever talked to Itziar.”

“Yes to all of that,” said Dick.

“What’s the plan for covering our asses?” asked Vic.

“We will give the new information to an authority we can trust,” said Kori. “Someone we know will do the right thing. We get sure it is on the news.”

“And we make sure the information we have is good enough that it runs the Foundation to the ground,” added Dick. “The best chance we have to be safe is to make sure the organization no longer exists. And with the information we’re gonna have after this, I think we can.”

“And the family,” said Raven. “We have to make sure the people behind this get repercussions, or we’ll never be safe.”

“And then, if there were real cops involved, they’ll wash their hands off this nonprofit,” said Vic. “And if that was someone impersonating a cop that stopped me, they’ll go down with the Foundation.”

Dick nodded along to all of that. “It’s worth a shot. Does anyone see any problem with this plan?”

There was a moment of silence. Then Gar raised his hand. “Are we gonna walk back out the front door with the documents? What if someone’s waiting for us inside this time?”

Dick thought. “We need an exit strategy.” He thought for a while, then looked up at Gar in a manner that made him vaguely uncomfortable.

“Why do you even have a grappling hook?” Gar asked Dick, as Victor tied the rope attached to one such tool around Gar’s torso.

“I don’t remember,” said Dick, unconvincingly, as he opened the window and looked down. “Just test if we can use it to climb down and up again.”

They were in a guest room on the east side of the house. The window looked to the back of the house, where hopefully no one would bother or see them.

“Wait, I have to climb back up?” asked Gar. “Thought this was an exit strategy.”

“You should just climb up ‘cause if not you’re gonna enter my house twice,” Dick replied.

“Dude, I can’t climb up this rope,” said Gar. “And I could just come in through a side door.”

“What’d you mean you can’t climb it?” asked Vic.

“Have you seen me in gym class?” Gar muttered, his voice gaining some bitterness. “I can go down, but I can’t climb back up.”

Dick massaged the bridge of his nose. “Fine, come back through the kitchen door.” He turned to the others. “Who here is confident they can climb a rope?”

Vic and Kori raised their hands.

“Okay, guess we just found who’s making it into the building,” decided Dick.

“Does that mean I don’t have to go out the window?” asked Gar.

“I still want you to test it, you’re the lightest,” Dick said, and he regretted it instantly. He’d said it factually, but now Vic was snickering and Gar was giving him a death glare Dick didn’t think him capable of.

Gar went to the window without another word. Vic fastened the hook on the window sill but stood next to it just in case.

Dick turned to Kori. “Did you get a hold of Itziar?”

“She is expecting us,” answered Kori, reading off her phone. “Her sister will be home at five.”

“Great.”

“Grass stain made it to the ground,” Vic let them know. He watched as Gar unfastened the rope from around his torso.

“So we know how you’re getting out, but what’s the plan?” asked Raven.

“We need a panorama of the building,” said Dick. “That’s why we’re going to see Itziar’s sister.”

Chapter Text

Itziar was waiting outside when the Project Club got to her house. The young woman sitting on the porch steps next to her must have been Miranda. When the five got out of the car, the woman sprung up. She waited for them with arms crossed and an intense look of disapproval fixed on her face.

“Okay, look,” she said when they arrived. “I’m grateful that you tried to help me. Really, I am. But what you did? Never should have happened. And I never asked for it.”

“She doesn’t think I should have called you,” explained Itziar. Her mild manner contrasted with her sister’s snappy intensity.

Miranda turned on her. “You had a group of children infiltrate a private facility! What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking about you!” Itziar exclaimed, matching her sister’s volume, in a voice they had never heard from her before. “About how you were worrying yourself sick for weeks! And driving all of us insane!”

“Itziar, I was torn between whether or not to go to HR with this. It was not a job for your school friends.”

“Well I was done hearing about whether you should quit or not!”

“Well you don’t need to anymore, ‘cause I’ll definitely quit now!”

“Um, actually,” interjected Dick. “We need you not to quit. At least not until after tomorrow.”

Miranda turned to him. “Why?”

“There’s some information we need to get, and it’ll look really suspicious if you quit right before we go in to get it,” replied Dick.

Both sisters peered at them.

“You’re going again?” asked Itziar.

“What you kids need to do now is lay low,” said Miranda.

“Look, we don’t care if you think we’re doing the right thing or not,” Dick said. “All we need from you is to tell us where Accountancy is, and at what time there’s the least amount of people-”

“Absolutely not,” stated Miranda, opening her eyes wide in astonishment that they were even asking. “I’m not gonna help you get hurt by some rich businessman with a grudge.”

“How can you not want to do anything about this?” Raven asked her. “What about the people it’s defrauding?”

Miranda turned to her. “Sweetie, I’m angry too, but this is not your job. Get out of high school and become auditors, if you want! But right now, you need to drop it.”

“We’re going to see this through whether you want us to or not,” Dick stated. “If you don’t help us, it’ll just be a little bit harder.”

He was emboldened by the change in Miranda’s face. His declaration had given her pause. She stared at him, hesitating, but ultimately said, “I can’t,” and went inside her house.

Dick didn’t say anything, nor was he deterred. He just turned his gaze on Itziar, silently questioning her.

“…I’ll see what I can find out,” she said, and followed her sister in.

“Nothing changes,” Dick told his friends. “We wait until tomorrow to see if we get the info from Miranda. If we don’t, we go in without it.”

The next day, Itziar texted them that Miranda said the best time to go to the building was after six, as most people started to leave their shifts. She also sent them a hand-drawn map indicating where Accountancy was. It was on the second floor. Dick had everyone memorize the map.

The man at the front desk boredly waved them in when they said they were following up on the teen research study, as Dick had been counting on. They got to the second floor and found Accountancy empty. Once inside, they followed the plan: in silence, Dick locked the door they came in through, Kori blocked the door with a chair for reinforcement, and Vic started a computer. By the time Dick opened a window to the outside, just in case, Victor was locating the employee clock-ins for the last year and was downloading them onto his pen-drive.

Gar and Raven leaned against Vic’s car, looking anxiously up at the relevant window.

‘“Guess this establishes us as the least athletic members of the team, huh?” Gar commented. “We’re gonna have to find our roles in the team.”

Raven sent her terrible cutting glare down on him. “Why? You’re already the guinea pig.”

Gar visibly deflated.

“I really hope they don’t actually need the grappling hook. I mean.” Raven looked around. “This street is packed. They’re gonna climb down the side of the building like an out-of-uniform baby branch of SWAT?”

Moments after she said it, the rope was thrown down the window, and their three friends climbed down. First Kori, then Victor, then Dick.

“Get inside,” said Raven, unnecessarily, because Gar was already opening the backseat door. By the time Raven got inside the car, Gar was stretching towards the front seat, pressing the button to start the car.

As their friends rushed to the car, Raven could see they hadn’t used the emergency exit for the sake of it—a security guard appeared on the window just then, looked frantically around, and shouted at Vic’s car when it sped away.

Dick realized then that they shouldn’t have sped away. They should have left calmly. Or they should have ducked down and waited, and only driven off a while later. Or someone else should have learned how to drive so that he, Vic and Kori could have ducked into the back seats and another person would have driven away calmly, after waiting for a while. But all that strategy came too late, and what was done was done.

“Oh God, okay,” went Vic, speeding out on the street. “Where to?”

“Mine,” said Dick.

Gar was the first to notice the car that got behind them was following them too closely. Before he could voice a concern, however, the driver started flashing blue lights. For the second time that week, they were being pulled over.

“Oh,” went Dick, a single sound, like a deflating balloon; the sound of an unforeseen happening.

He hadn’t thought they’d chase after them so quickly. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Vic slowed down the car reluctantly, like he fought against the inevitability of events.

“I’ve got no choice. I have to stop.” Vic said helplessly, mainly at Dick, though Dick wisely hadn’t protested.

He parked. They waited as the same man as before got out of the car.

“You don’t have to let him search the car, though, right?” Dick asked, desperately. There was no time for him to kick himself. “You can say no? Right!?”

“Wait,” said Gar. “That’s not even a red light.”

“What?” returned Dick.

“That guy doesn’t have a red light, it’s just some blue lights from his dashboard,” Gar said rushedly. “If a car’s unmarked and the guy’s out of uniform, you don’t have to stop your car, you can keep going if you call a station to tell them why!”

“You’re absolutely sure?” confirmed Dick, whipping around.

Vic, however, took him at face value. “That’s good enough for me!” he said, and he brought his foot down hard on the gas pedal.

Gar watched the man stumble in confusion, run back to the car and start chasing them again. “Who’s calling the cops?” he asked.

“I am!” said Kori, and started typing 911 immediately. “I am foreigner, they will more readily believe I got confused.”

Vic took a sharp turn on Elgin Street.

“Why did you take Elgin Street?” asked Raven. None of them lived through here.

“I don’t know!” returned Vic, and they all realized he was only focused on driving the car, and possibly losing the man chasing them, and wasn’t thinking of a destination.

Kori’s call went through. “Hello,” she said, slowly and clearly. “I am trying to ask if a car is under the cover. It is trying to stop me with lights but it does not look like the polices.”

Raven and Gar shared a look of admiration. Kori was exaggerating broken English on purpose.

“What kind? It is…” Kori turned around to look at the car. “Orange. It is orange. …The license? It is RV 459. …Yes, thank you, I shall wait.”

They had to stop at a red light, with the car right behind them, still blaring its dashboard lights at them. The five could see out of the corners of their eyes the other cars turning to look at them, wondering why they weren’t stopping, but they refused to turn to acknowledge them. At least until Gar’s attention was turned to an advertisement for an amusement park. “Ooh, they’re opening Jump Park already? Huh.”

Raven and Kori, the latter with her phone still pressed to her ear, turned to him with a disbelieving look, that spelled out We are still currently on a literal car chase. Gar appropriately cast his eyes down sheepishly, resolving to stay in the present.

Kori snapped back to the call. “Yes, I am here. …There is no record of that car?” she asked, and all of their hearts sank. To hear that made this real. “So I do not have to stop? …Hello? …Yes, I shall wait.”

“I don’t think they’re gonna tell you outright you don’t have to stop,” Gar told her.

Kori covered the end of her phone. “They told me it must be an administration mistake,” she whispered back.

“Yeah, right,” went Raven.

“Guys?” asked Vic, gripping the steering wheel too tight. “Where the fuck am I going?” he demanded, reminding them all that they were still just driving around with no direction.

“Hold on,” said Dick, and took out his own phone.

“Who’re you calling?” asked Gar.

Dick ignored him as the call was picked up. “Hey, Bruce? Just a question, if you had to go with something really important to police you really really trust, who would you go to?”

“…What?” cried Bruce on the other side.

“We’re going out the avenue now,” warned Vic.

“Take the interstate!” said Raven.

“No, go to the suburbs!” cried Gar.

Vic gripped the wheel and looked close to collapse. “I can’t make decisions right now, I’m yielding the wheel to whoever yells louder!”

“Dick, where are you?” asked Bruce.

“I’m at a friend’s house, can you answer this rhetorical question?” Dick returned.

“If we go to the suburbs we could end up on a dead end!” shouted Raven.

“If we take the interstate we can get trapped in a traffic jam!” argued Gar.

“It’s past seven, what jam?” returned Raven.

“Tell me what to do now!” bellowed Vic.

“Bruce, come on,” Dick urged.

“I’d go to Gotham, and I’d ask for my friend Jim Gordon,” Bruce finally said.

“Gotham. Got it.”

“This is just a question, right?”

“Sure!” Dick ended the call. Then he yelled directly in Vic’s ear. “Floor it till Gotham City!”

The car followed them soundlessly for a good twenty minutes after they left Jump City. Then it turned around, and everyone heaved a sigh of relief.

Kori stayed on the phone the whole time. The lady at the other side had ended up telling her they didn’t find any record of the license plate she’d given out belonging the any police in the country, but to pull over anyway, since it must just be a mistake. Kori only ended the call after she informed them the car had turned around.

Dick got a single text from Bruce after their call was over.

Please tell me if you’re not okay.

Dick replied, I promise we’re okay.

After a while on the silent, empty road, Gar asked them to put on some music. It was Dick’s turn with the aux cord, but they all remembered his taste for hip hop and death metal and considered it considered it too much for their already strung out nerves, and collectively decided to bump it to Raven’s turn, who who tended to have chiller pieces. She came through with a series of string pieces with soft vocals.

“What’s this called again?” asked Victor.

“Carnatic music,” Raven replied. It helped relax all of them a great deal.

It was another two hours until Gotham City. Gar even dozed off on the way. When they got to the sign, ‘Welcome to Gotham City – Home of the Blackwolf’ they shook him awake.

Jim Gordon was reaching the end of his night shift when he was told a group of five teenagers wanted to see him. “What’d they do?” he asked.

“No, sir, they walked in themselves. Say they need to deliver something.”

Gordon’s interest was piqued, and so was his wariness. He shook himself awake and put his guard up after he sent for the group to come inside his office. It was paranoid, yes, but one couldn’t be too careful in a world of costumed super-powered individuals, who Jim opined seemed to get younger and younger every year— Blackwolf or no Blackwolf watching over them all.

He was even more intrigued when he was met with five perfectly regular teenagers. The boy who seemed to be their leader turned to him immediately. “Commissioner Gordon?”

“That’s me.”

“Sir, my name is Richard Grayson. Bruce Wayne is my uncle. We uncovered fraud in a medical research nonprofit that paid employees to pretend to work full-time while generating revenue in tax breaks and stealing members’ contribution and donations for themselves. We got threatened and intimidated on the process of getting evidence, twice, and we want to tear down these people, by principle, and for our own protection.”

Dick had known that with the adrenaline they were all carrying he would surely come on too strong and overwhelm a tired cop in the middle of his night shift, so he was willfully trying to slow down. Seeing Gordon’s face, he could see plainly that he was failing.

“Whoa, whoa, slow down,” said the Commissioner, taking off his glasses. “What do you mean evidence? What’s the evidence?”

Dick presented the drive Victor had loaded up. “Records of all the employees who clocked in to the building for the past year,” Dick said, trying his hardest to speak slowly. “We also have their tax forms and screenshots of the so-called researchers hiding they worked there on their social media. We had to give up the original folder… but we can send it to you now.”

“And what do you mean you were threatened?” the Commissioner asked next.

“Both times we left the Foundation, we got tailed by a car pretending to be a police car,” said Gar.

“We were pulled over, and the first time the guy straight-up told us we’d regret it if we kept digging,” said Vic.

“What happened the second time?” Gordon asked, almost too afraid to ask.

“We kept driving,” said Kori. “I called the station and was told they could not find the car in a record of police cars.”

Gordon looked at all of them and asked the best question. “Why did you do this?”

The kids looked at each other. “I guess because we could,” said Dick.

Gordon put his glasses back on. “Right. Send me all the files you’ve got. Meanwhile, you’re under threat. You’ll stay in this station until we figure this out.”

Dick looked up from inviting him into their Cloud. “Uh, we have school tomorrow. In Jump City.”

Gordon peered at him. “Who did you say you are again?”

Dick smirked as he re-introduced himself—he was glad to discover the Commissioner had taken the case for its own sake, not because he’d name-dropped Bruce. The second time he said it, it got through to Gordon.

“You’re Mary’s kid,” he breathed. Dick’s heart flipped; he hadn’t realized the Commissioner had known Bruce for that long. Gordon nodded to himself, seeming more convinced. “That explains a lot. And who are the rest of you?”

Dick introduced his friends and said, “This is my… team.” He thought it sounded better than Club.

They arrived in Jump City at the break of dawn and with a police escort.

Jim Gordon had an officer drive Vic’s car back, demoting Vic to shotgun, which Gar, in the backseat with Raven, gleefully pointed out. Gordon himself rode shotgun in a police car before them, with Dick and Kori in the backseat. Another police car flanked them, with the other three officers who would complete the guard Gordon had assigned each of the kids. As for the Commissioner himself, he’d stay in town until the Foundation was down.

In the first car, Kori pulled out her phone. “I shall text Itziar, before she does not see us until next year.”

Gordon had told them they wouldn’t go back to school until the issue was resolved.

Dick told her, “You did great, Kori. Really.”

Kori was overwhelmed by the look he was giving her. “We all did.”

“Yeah…” he admitted, looking away. “But thanks for, you know, meeting me halfway, early on.”

He smiled at her. As always, the rest of the world ceased to exist to Kori.

They pulled up on Wayne Manor. The five exited their respective cars and gathered up.

“No, no, no,” Gar was saying. “I wanna hear it again how you liked the songs I chose.”

“I said that your selection surprisingly didn’t make me wanna jump out of the moving car,” said Raven. “It’s not a compliment.”

Gar snickered. “I have great taste in music and you know it.”

“Your taste in music is, according to yourself, everything, so even you are bound to get something right.”

Dick smiled, basking in the normalcy of it all. Among many other things, he was glad Gar and Raven seemed to be back to normal.

Then he spotted Bruce, staring at him from second-floor window, kind of looking like a gargoyle, and his smile soured.

Victor came up behind Dick. “You gonna be okay?”

Dick felt strangely protected. “It’s alright,” he told him.

When Bruce came out of the car, Gordon crossed the yard to meet him. They shook hands and talked on the porch.

Bruce always looked vaguely out of place like whenever he stepped out in direct sunlight. The entire time he talked to Gordon, he looked directly at Dick. Dick gulped, but stood a little straighter. There was a high chance this has been their last mission ever. He intended to savor it.

He turned to his friends. “We did a good thing, guys. Go home, enjoy the early vacation, and stay alert for the news.”

“I’m gonna catch up on so many video games,” said Gar.

“Enjoy it while you can,” said Vic. “We’re still gonna have finals, just later than everyone.”

“I only wish to sleep,” said Kori.

“Good luck,” Raven told Dick, glancing at Bruce.

They moved to the cars, and their respective officers moved with them.

Soon after his friends left, Jim Gordon wrapped up his conversation with Bruce. As he walked past Dick, he told him, “We’ll be in touch.”

Minutes later, Dick sat on his living room couch, awaiting the lecture. But Bruce just stared at Dick, like he wanted him to explain.

“Jim Gordon told you everything, right?” Dick started.

“About the case, yes. But I want to hear it from you. What is this all about?”

Dick sighed. “I guess I can’t keep you in the dark forever. Me and my friends, we’re, uh…”

“Taking vigilante justice for a spin,” finished Bruce.

“Pretty much, yeah.” Dick always hated how it sounded when other people talked of it. No one really got it. Not all of it.

“I assume this wasn’t your first case.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“I mean, the sudden excessive training, the coming home with cuts and bruises, the weird out of the blue questions, the shine in your eye like you’re single-handedly saving the world…”

“…You knew something was up,” Dick surmised, dejectedly.

“Of course I knew.”

Dick shook his head. “Look, I know it’s dangerous, and I know it’s not what I should be doing-”

“I assumed you were being careful, though. I think I taught you better than to not be.”

“Well… Yes, you did.”

“And you’re not too prideful. You kept your head in this. You called me, even though it meant ruining the secret. That’s impressive for a fifteen-year-old, you know that? Especially when that fifteen-year-old is you.”

“…Why does this sound like constructive criticism instead of the prelude to a four-year grounding?”

Bruce sighed heavily as he sat next to him on the couch. “Dick, honestly. You were never going to be normal.”

“…Okay?” Dick returned, not knowing whether to be offended.

“What kind of guardian would I be if I tried to stifle your natural propensities? I would only get you to lie to me. And if you’re using your abilities to better the world… what more could I want?”

“Are you serious?” Dick couldn’t believe his ears. “You’re really gonna let me keep doing this.”

“I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t worried sick tonight, and that I didn’t want to kill you myself when you came back.”

“Right.”

“But… I don’t think this is going to end here. And I’d rather know what you’re up to.”

Dick began to smile.

“I’m going to need some things to change,” Bruce warned. “If you’re serious about it, and I don’t remember you ever not being serious, about anything… I’m gonna need you to be honest with me. At least about where you are. And what order of people you’re pissing off.” He leaned back. “You’ve been equipping your friends with some command of self-defense, right?”

“Yeah, we’re all training.”

“Then I have nothing to worry about,” Bruce concluded.

Dick gave him an incredulous look. He still thought his uncle had a lot to worry about, but he wasn’t going to ruin his own case.

Bruce saw his expression and put a hand on his shoulder. “Look. I didn’t actually expect you to join some club. Not the way you started this year. Not after Rex. But I also knew if I didn’t push you to do something, you might let all your abilities go to waste. I figured forcing you to take an extra-curricular was one way to get you to wake up and do something of your own.”

“Wait, you… planned this all along? Like some long ruse for me to grow into myself?” Dick stared at his uncle, whose face was always an unreadable mask. He narrowed his eyes. “…I hate that I don’t even know if you’re bullshitting me right now.”

Bruce sipped his coffee, hiding a self-satisfied smile inside the cup. “Get some sleep, Dick.”

Dick watched his uncle stand and walk out of the room. “You could point out that, while you’re fine with it, my friends’ parents still don’t know about anything about this.”

“That’s not my problem,” Bruce stated.

“Bruce,” Dick called.

His uncle came back.

“Do you think we did it?” Dick asked. “That we’re gonna run down the organization? And the people who orchestrated this will go to jail?”

Bruce said, “I trust Jim. I think he’s going to do something. And I believe some people are going down for it. Maybe not everyone who was involved will.”

“Like the family that started all this,” said Dick, bitterly. “They’ll go to another town and open another sham charity.”

“You can’t clean the whole world in one sweep, Dick. That I can tell you right now.” He stopped and observed his nephew. “Is that what you set out to do? Save the world?”

Dick answered honestly. “I didn’t stop to think about it. I just wanted to do something.”

Dick thought it was the wrong answer, but he looked up to see Bruce smiling.

“How much do you remember from Hebrew school?” he asked. “Remember tikkun olam? Putting the world back together through acts of loving-kindness? It’s not about completing the task, it’s about not giving up on it.”

Dick began to smile too. “And that’s enough?”

Bruce pressed his nephew’s shoulder firmly. “Yes. That’s enough.”

End of May.

End of Year 1.