Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Metropolis was quieter than usual that night — too quiet, if you asked Konner Kent. He hovered above the skyline, the city lights flickering against the dark like a thousand restless fireflies. His cape fluttered lazily behind him, catching the high-altitude breeze as his eyes scanned the streets below. He’d been doing this long enough to know when something felt off. And tonight? Everything felt off.

He touched down in a narrow alleyway, the sound of his boots echoing off the concrete walls. There was movement in the shadows — faint, fleeting, but there. He narrowed his eyes, heat vision softly simmering just under the surface, like the hum of a barely restrained storm.

“Alright,” he muttered under his breath, voice low, almost a growl. “If this is another one of Lex’s bio-toys, I swear—”

Before he could finish, something moved. Fast. Too fast. Konner’s body reacted before his brain did; his arm shot forward in pure instinct, his fist cutting through the air—

“WHOA, WHOA, WHOA!”

Jon ducked just in time, laughing breathlessly, his dark curls falling over his forehead. “Jeez, Kon! Trying to knock your baby brother’s head off or what?”

Konner froze, blinking once, twice. His pulse was still pounding in his ears. “Jon—what the hell—”

“Language,” Jon said automatically, grinning that infuriatingly calm grin that made Konner want to smack him and hug him at the same time. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

“I thought you were a ghost,” Konner muttered, letting out a shaky breath. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at Jon. “You can’t just sneak up on people like that! You’re supposed to announce yourself or something.”

Jon raised an eyebrow. “You mean like, ‘Hey Konner, it’s me, your cooler and younger brother, don’t punch me in the face’?”

Konner rolled his eyes. “You wish you were cooler.”

“Oh, please,” Jon said, floating a few inches off the ground just to make a point. “I’ve got style. You’ve got… brooding.”

“That’s called maturity,” Konner shot back.

Jon smirked. “That’s called being old, dude.”

Konner opened his mouth to retort—but then Jon’s expression softened a bit. His gaze flickered over Konner’s face, the set of his jaw, the tension in his shoulders.

“Hey,” Jon said quietly, “you okay?”

The question caught Konner off guard. He blinked, half ready to deflect, half tempted to actually answer. But old habits died hard.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Just… weird night.”

Jon nodded. “Then let’s make it less weird. C’mon, we’ll do one more sweep together. It’ll be like old times.”

Konner couldn’t help the small, reluctant grin that tugged at his lips. “You mean like when you used to follow me around and ask a million questions?”

“Exactly,” Jon said proudly.

They took to the skies again, side by side. The city stretched beneath them, silver and gold and alive. For a while, it felt normal—two Kents on patrol, two brothers with the night at their backs. They joked, they bickered, they laughed. Jon told a story about how Damian had nearly burned Alfred’s eyebrows off trying to cook “something romantic.” Konner snorted and countered with how Tim once tried to surprise him with breakfast in bed but accidentally short-circuited the toaster.

“Guess we both have type-A geniuses for boyfriends,” Jon said with a smirk.

“Yeah,” Konner admitted with a smile. “And somehow they both think we’re the reckless ones.”

“Because we are,” Jon said cheerfully.

“Speak for yourself.”

They were mid-laugh when it happened.

It was fast — faster than either of them could track. A sting at the side of Konner’s neck, sharp and almost electric, followed by another near Jon’s. His hand went up instinctively, fingers brushing the small, metallic dart embedded in his skin.

“What the—” Konner started, but his vision was already tilting. The world spun, edges blurring.

Jon was saying something — shouting, maybe — but it sounded far away.

“Konner! Someone— injected—”

His muscles locked, his knees buckled. This wasn’t possible. Kryptonian skin wasn’t supposed to break. Nothing on Earth could pierce it. And sedatives? Forget it. He’d once drunk a full vial of concentrated tranquilizer just to prove a point to Bart.

So why—why was his body shutting down?

He tried to focus his x-ray vision, his hearing—anything—but it all slipped like sand through his fingers. He caught the faint silhouette of someone—someone fast, someone cloaked in black—before darkness swallowed everything.

The last thing he heard was Jon’s voice—fading, breaking, scared.

Then nothing.

Star City had that kind of wind that could bite through leather and attitude alike. It was one of those nights—half-quiet, half-simmering with the kind of tension that made Roy Harper’s instincts twitch. The kind of night where even the streetlights buzzed like they were anxious.

He’d been on patrol for hours. His bow hung across his back, his red hood down, the streets below him slick from a passing drizzle. Crime was quiet tonight—too quiet. Either every thug in the Glades had turned in early, or someone bigger was planning something. Either way, Roy was hungry.

And hungry Roy didn’t make good tactical decisions.

“Alright,” he muttered to himself, hopping down from the edge of a roof. “Time for a tactical burger.”

He landed beside a run-down diner that looked like it hadn’t seen a health inspection since the Reagan administration. The flickering neon sign said MEL’S DINER—though the “M” was long dead, leaving it to proudly proclaim EL’S DINER.

“Perfect,” Roy muttered, pushing the door open.

The bell over the entrance gave a pitiful little ding. A waitress with tired eyes and a name tag that said “Debbie” looked him over once—red leather jacket, quiver on his back, scruffy stubble—and didn’t even blink. Star City folks had seen weirder.

“Coffee?” she asked, already reaching for a mug.

“Make it two,” Roy said, sliding into a booth. “And whatever burger’s least likely to kill me.”

“That’d be none of them, sweetheart,” she said, pouring his cup full. “But I’ll make you the one that kills slowest.”

“Now that’s service,” Roy said with a grin.

He ate in silence, chewing thoughtfully, eyes flicking out the window every few seconds. He liked moments like this—quiet, greasy-spoon calm. A man, a burger, a city that pretended it didn’t need saving.

When he finished, he left a few bills on the counter and nodded at Debbie. “Keep the change.”

She glanced at the tip—way too much for a diner meal—and just smiled tiredly. “You take care out there, Red.”

“I always do,” Roy said. Which was, of course, a complete lie.

He took his food to go—pie this time, because he wasn’t dead inside—and climbed a nearby fire escape to one of his favorite rooftops. The city stretched beneath him in its usual chaotic beauty: a mess of lights, noise, and broken dreams. He kicked back on a vent, unwrapped the pie, and took a bite.

That’s when he saw it.

A black card. Small. Glossy. Sitting there at the edge of the roof like it had just appeared.

Roy blinked. “Huh.”

He frowned, leaning forward. No logo. No symbol. Just sleek, black nothingness—catching the city light in an odd, oily shimmer.

Now, Roy was many things: archer, addict, father, hero, professional disaster—but most importantly? He was curious.

“Don’t do it,” he told himself around a mouthful of cherry filling. “This is how horror movies start.”

He stood up anyway.

The wind caught the card, nudging it toward the edge.

“Oh, no you don’t,” he muttered, already moving. He leapt across the rooftop, boots hitting the wet surface with a slap, arms outstretched like a man trying to catch a winning lottery ticket in the rain.

The card skittered. He lunged again.

It moved.

Not like it was blown by wind—like it chose to move.

“Okay,” Roy said aloud, panting slightly. “That’s not creepy at all.”

He chased it again, because of course he did. It flipped once, twice, sliding into the next alley like it was mocking him.

“Buddy, you picked the wrong guy to mess with,” Roy growled, drawing a small flashlight and vaulting over a railing.

He landed hard, rolled, and spotted the card resting neatly against a brick wall. Perfectly still. Waiting.

“Alright,” he said slowly, pointing a finger at it. “I’m gonna pick you up. You’re not gonna do any weird voodoo stuff, got it?”

No answer.

He crouched, one gloved hand reaching—

—and something slammed into the back of his head.

The world exploded into white.

He barely had time to grunt, one hand reflexively going for his bow. But his fingers felt heavy, his knees gave out, the ground came up fast. His vision blurred, his hearing tunneled.

He caught a glimpse—just a silhouette above him. Someone tall. The faint smell of smoke and metal.

Then nothing.

Just the black card beside him, perfectly still again, glinting like it was laughing.

Keystone City at night had a rhythm — a kind of heartbeat that only Wally West could keep up with. The hum of streetlights, the whir of distant traffic, the pulse of the city’s lifeblood under his feet. Most people barely noticed it. But for Wally, it was music — a symphony that played at light-speed.

He was just a crimson streak on the skyline, laughter slipping past his lips as he darted between rooftops and alleyways. Patrol nights were his favorite. The city was quieter than Central, fewer world-ending catastrophes and more “guy with a crowbar trying to break into an ATM” type of crimes. Easy work. The kind that let him clear his head.

Besides, Dick had told him he was “incapable of sitting still for more than twelve seconds,” and Wally, being the mature adult he was, had decided to prove him wrong by… doing exactly this.

“Technically,” he muttered to himself, skidding to a stop atop a streetlight, “I am sitting still. Just… you know. In intervals.”

He smirked under his mask. His breath misted faintly in the autumn air. His hair, flattened under the cowl, itched like crazy. He really needed to wash this suit more often.

Below, Keystone’s downtown glimmered — quiet, calm. A few college kids wandered out of a diner, laughing too loud. Somewhere, a siren wailed, but far off. Nothing urgent. Nothing world-ending. For once, everything was fine.

And then he saw it.

A flutter of green.

Wally froze. Narrowed his eyes. “No way.”

On the ground, right near a sewer grate, lay a twenty-dollar bill. Crisp, lonely, and just… there.

Now, there were a lot of things that could tempt a superhero: fame, power, justice. But for Wally West, the man who’d once lived on instant noodles and Dick’s leftover granola bars for an entire month — a loose twenty on the street? That was destiny.

“Okay,” he whispered to himself. “Don’t overthink it. It’s just… a lucky twenty. Happens all the time. Totally normal.”

He zipped down from the lamppost in a blink, sneakers touching the pavement with a soft scuff. He crouched in front of the bill, tilting his head.

“Alright, pal,” he said to the money. “You and me. We’re about to make someone’s vending machine dreams come true.”

He reached for it—

—and then BAM.

Something slammed into the side of his head so hard it sent him sprawling face-first onto the pavement.

“What the—?” he groaned, dazed, blinking stars out of his vision. The twenty fluttered mockingly in front of him.

He pushed himself up on one elbow, head pounding, and glanced around. Nothing. Just the empty street, the quiet hum of a traffic light switching from green to yellow.

“Seriously?” he muttered. “You hit The Flash over twenty bucks? Is this… is this my villain origin story?”

No response. Not even a whisper of movement.

He rubbed the back of his head. “Ow,” he mumbled. “Oh, Dick’s gonna love this one.” He could already hear the voice — that calm, half-scolding, half-exasperated tone. ‘Wally, how do you get knocked out at superspeed?’

“Because I’m special,” Wally grumbled under his breath.

He scanned the street again, faster this time, eyes flicking through every possible hiding spot — the alleys, the rooftops, even under cars. Nothing. Whoever hit him was fast. That shouldn’t have been possible.

And that was when he realized… the twenty was gone.

“Oh, come on!” he shouted, throwing his arms up. “Really? You mugged me for twenty dollars?”

A breeze swept through the street — sharp and cool — and for a second, he swore he heard something like laughter. Low. Mocking.

Then everything started to tilt.

The world blurred at the edges, his balance faltered.

“Oh, that’s— that’s not good,” he mumbled, trying to stand. His legs felt like jelly. His vision rippled.

He managed one last thought — a distinctly Dick-Grayson-shaped thought — before his knees buckled and he hit the ground again.

Dick’s gonna kill me.

Darkness swallowed him whole.

Gotham smelled like rain and gunpowder—because, well, it was Gotham. Even when the night was calm, the city had that thick, metallic tang in the air that said something’s about to go wrong.

Stephanie Brown stood on the ledge of a half-collapsed apartment building, her purple hood pulled low, the city stretching beneath her in all its grimy, neon-lit glory. The Spoiler costume fit snug, the fabric clinging to her shoulders like muscle memory. She cracked her neck, rolled her wrist, and exhaled through her nose.

“Patrolling Gotham,” she muttered to herself, voice muffled through her cowl. “Because apparently, I’m allergic to sleep.”

Her comm crackled softly in her ear. Barbara’s voice came through, clear and calm, the sound of keys clicking faintly behind her words.

“Spoiler, you’re in the Narrows grid, correct?”

“Yup,” Steph replied, hopping down from the ledge and landing silently in a puddle. “Nothing to report. Just the usual rats and broken dreams.”

“You know, sarcasm is not an adequate deterrent against armed criminals,” Barbara said, her tone dry enough to parch concrete.

“It keeps me warm at night,” Steph shot back, smiling under the mask. “Also, Cass says it’s part of my charm.”

“Cass has questionable taste sometimes,” Barbara teased.

“Excuse you,” Stephanie said, hand to her chest in mock offense. “She has excellent taste. I mean, have you seen me?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Many times.”

Steph rolled her eyes. “Okay, Oracle, I see how it is. You’re just jealous of the purple aesthetic.”

Barbara’s laugh—small, genuine—echoed through the line. “Stay focused, Spoiler.”

“I am focused. I’m just also incredibly funny.”

She was about to continue the bit when she caught something—a faint sound behind her. A footstep. Too deliberate to be random.

Her shoulders stiffened.

“Oracle,” she said quietly, shifting into a defensive stance, hand instinctively brushing her utility belt. “I think I’m being followed.”

There was a pause—no typing now, no humor in Barbara’s voice. “Describe.”

“Nothing visual yet. Just that… feeling. You know?” She started moving again, slower this time, scanning reflections in windows, the corners of rooftops. “Like the world’s worst secret admirer.”

“You’re in the Narrows. Could be a gang tailing you, or…” Barbara trailed off. Steph could hear her pulling up surveillance feeds. “Keep talking. I’ve got you on satellite.”

“Copy that.”

For the next hour, it didn’t stop. The sound of faint footsteps, the brief flicker of movement in the periphery, the subtle pressure of being watched. Whoever it was, they were good. Like, Cassandra good.

At first, Steph brushed it off. Then she got annoyed.

By the forty-minute mark, she was muttering curses under her breath. “Seriously, dude? You’ve had your fun. Either come out or get a new hobby.”

By the hour mark, she was done.

She clicked her comm. “Oracle, I swear to God, if this is one of Bruce’s ‘stealth drills,’ I’m quitting. Again.”

“Not me, and not him. Keep your cool.”

“Yeah, sure, totally cool,” Steph said through gritted teeth. “I love being hunted through Gotham’s dampest alleyways. It’s practically foreplay.”

“Stephanie—”

“Relax, Babs. I got this.”

She thumbed the comm again. “I’m calling Cass. If anyone’s gonna watch my back, it’s my hot ninja girlfriend.”

But before she could hit the frequency, someone moved—fast, from above. A shadow dropped from a fire escape, landing just behind her.

“Too slow,” Steph said, whirling around and driving her elbow back hard.

The stranger dodged, barely.

She kicked his legs out, pivoted, and threw a punch that connected. The figure stumbled, and Steph grinned under her mask.

“Nice try, creeper. I don’t do autographs after midnight.”

The guy didn’t answer. Just lunged again.

Steph ducked, swept his feet, kicked him in the ribs—she was winning, and she knew it. Her pulse thrummed with adrenaline, her laughter slipping out despite herself.

“Oracle,” she panted between blows, “tell me you’re seeing this. Because I’m kicking some serious—”

The man feinted left. She dodged—right into his trap. A gloved hand caught her wrist, twisted, and in one smooth motion, something cold pressed against her neck.

There was a sting.

“What—” she started, but her voice slurred halfway through.

Her limbs went heavy. The world tilted.

“Babs,” she whispered, swaying. “He—got me…”

“Stephanie? Stephanie, respond.”

The comm hissed with static as she fell, her vision fading to black.

The last thing she saw was the shadow kneeling beside her, retrieving something from his belt—then glancing up at the nearest security camera. Right at Barbara’s eyes.

And smiling.

Chapter Text

When consciousness crept back in, it came in pieces—tiny, confusing pieces.

The first thing Konner Kent noticed was sound. Gentle, rhythmic, rolling. Waves. The soft crash and hiss of water folding into itself. That was… odd. Metropolis didn’t exactly have beaches, unless someone had done a major redecoration overnight.

The second thing was texture. Something grainy, soft, and suspiciously warm under his fingers. He flexed his hand, felt it sift through his palm. Sand.

The third thing was pain. Specifically, a sharp, pinching sensation on the bridge of his nose.

“—Ow, what the—”

He opened his eyes—and found himself face to face with a crab.

A very angry, very territorial crab.

“AAAAAHHHHH!”

The scream was instant and utterly unheroic. Konner shot upright, smacking the crab off his face with a startled yelp, sending the little creature cartwheeling into the surf.

“DUDE—what the hell!” came a voice beside him.

Jon shot up from the sand, hair sticking in every direction, his T-shirt plastered to his back, one eye squinting in the sun. “Why are you screaming like that? What—are we under attack?”

“Yes!” Konner said indignantly, pointing to the retreating crustacean. “By seafood!”

Jon blinked once. Twice. Then burst out laughing.

“Oh my God,” he wheezed, clutching his stomach. “Superboy: defeated by a crab. Wait till Damian hears—”

“Do not tell Damian,” Konner snapped, brushing sand from his shirt. “I’m serious, Jon. I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Too late,” Jon said, smirking. “I’m telepathically preserving the memory as we speak.”

“You don’t even have telepathy.”

“I will learn it just for this.”

Konner groaned and scanned the horizon. It was, indeed, an island—lush greenery in the distance, turquoise water shimmering around them, a line of palm trees swaying lazily. No buildings. No ships. Just—nature. A perfect tropical postcard.

Jon followed his gaze, frowning. “...Where the hell are we?”

“I was hoping you’d tell me,” Konner said. “You’re the one who always keeps track of coordinates and safety check-ins and whatever.”

Jon threw his hands up. “I don’t know! One second we were in Metropolis, next thing I know, I wake up covered in sand next to you—which, no offense, is not how I pictured dying.”

Konner gave him a flat look. “Yeah, dying next to your brother’s not exactly top of my bucket list either, thanks.”

They were about to argue further when a distant sound cut through the lazy hum of the waves.

A scream. Long. Desperate. Full of agony.

Jon went rigid. “That sounded—human.”

Konner’s posture snapped to alert. “Someone’s in trouble.”

Without another word, they were both airborne—well, Jon was. Konner got about six feet up before realizing his powers felt… sluggish. Like flying through molasses.

“Uh,” he said, mid-air wobbling. “Jon? I think my solar batteries are running on 2%.”

“Same,” Jon said, grimacing as he landed in the sand again. “Let’s run.”

They sprinted toward the sound, weaving through palm fronds and overgrown brush until they reached a small clearing.

And there, standing knee-deep in the surf, was Wally West—bright red suit half unzipped, sand in his hair, and an expression of existential devastation.

“—MY TWENTY!” he shouted at the ocean. “It was right there! Twenty dollars, gone! GONE!”

Jon blinked. “...What?”

Wally turned dramatically, pointing at them like a man betrayed by fate itself. “Someone STOLE my twenty-dollar bill! I got mugged by karma!”

Konner put his hands on his hips. “You screamed like you were being tortured.”

“I am being tortured!” Wally cried. “That was my lucky twenty! Dick gave it to me when I stopped my first mugging! He said, ‘Don’t spend it, it’s symbolic!’ and now it’s in the sea!”

Jon bit his lip, trying not to laugh.

“You think this is funny?” Wally demanded. “You think this is a joke?”

“Well,” Jon said carefully, “I mean… a little bit.”

Before Wally could respond, another voice groaned from nearby.

“Oh for the love of Gotham, can someone tell me why I’m sunburned and mad about it?”

They turned to see Stephanie Brown trudging up the beach, Spoiler hood pulled back, her face streaked with sand and irritation. Behind her, Roy Harper was dragging a bow case and muttering under his breath.

“I swear,” Roy said, brushing sand off his arm, “if this is one of Oliver’s weirdo trust-building retreats, I’m shooting something. Preferably him.”

“Oh, great,” Steph said, hands on hips. “We’ve got Team Red and Team Purple, all stuck on the same deserted island. What could possibly go wrong?”

Jon raised an eyebrow. “You two got knocked out too?”

“Yeah,” Steph said, glaring at the sun like it owed her money. “One second I’m on patrol, next thing I’m face-planting in the sand. Also, a crab tried to eat my boot. So that’s apparently a theme.”

“Join the club,” Konner grumbled.

Roy squinted at the group. “So… none of you know where we are?”

“Not a clue,” Wally said. “All I know is my twenty’s dead, and Dick’s going to laugh himself unconscious.”

“Tim’s gonna kill me,” Konner muttered. “He’s gonna track my phone, see I’m in the middle of the ocean, and assume I went surfing without sunscreen.”

Steph snorted. “Cass is gonna think I wandered into another trap and left my brain at home.”

Roy sighed. “Jason’s… not gonna care. Probably. Maybe. He might.”

Jon nudged him. “You said that with a lot of emotion for a guy who’s ‘not into him.’”

Roy glared. “Shut up, kid.”

“Uh-huh,” Jon said, smirking. “Denial looks good on you.”

Before Roy could retort, Wally flopped dramatically into the sand. “I can’t even call Dick,” he moaned. “No signal. No snacks. No twenty. This is it. This is how I die—stranded, broke, and sunburned.”

Steph dropped beside him, deadpan. “Great, you can haunt me later. I’ll make you a little shrine out of seashells.”

Konner was scanning the treeline now, brow furrowed. “Jokes aside, we should figure out why we’re here. This isn’t random. Someone put us here.”

Jon nodded. “Agreed. But who’d kidnap four superheroes and one speedster with poor money management?”

“I HEARD THAT,” Wally said, still face-down in the sand.

Roy looked around, then whistled low. “Whoever it was, they’re good. They took us all down—quick, clean, no trace.”

Steph crossed her arms. “And dumped us on the set of Gilligan’s Island.”

“Guess we’re Team Beach Episode now,” Jon said.

Konner sighed. “This is gonna be the worst group vacation ever.”

From somewhere deep in the jungle, a faint rustle echoed—a deliberate, steady sound.

They froze.

Then, from the shadows, came a voice.

“...Finally. You’re awake.”

Five pairs of eyes turned toward the sound.

Wally groaned. “Please don’t be another crab.”

The rustling grew louder until something small and metallic shuffled out of the foliage.

Everyone froze.

Wally, who had half a handful of sand ready to throw like it was a weapon, lowered it slightly. “Okay,” he said slowly. “Either that’s the world’s most confused toaster, or we’re in a weird sci-fi episode.”

The “toaster” beeped indignantly, flashing bright blue eyes. It was barely two feet tall, with spindly little arms, a round chrome body, and antennae that twitched when it spoke.

“Greetings, participants!” it chirped, voice cheerful in the way that only truly ominous things could be. “Welcome to Operation Prove-Your-Love!”

There was a long, stunned silence.

“…What?” Stephanie said flatly.

The robot’s eyes blinked twice, unfazed. “You are all here because your romantic partners have achieved exceptional success in their respective fields—justice, heroism, emotional repression—”

Roy squinted. “Did it just say emotional repression?”

“—and you, as their significant others,” the robot continued, “must now demonstrate that you are equally worthy of them!”

“Oh hell no,” Wally said, standing up. “I did not get kidnapped for a relationship assessment! Dick already makes me fill out color-coded lists for date night!”

Konner pinched the bridge of his nose. “Wait. Are you saying we were kidnapped so some bucket of bolts could judge our love lives?”

“Affirmative!” the robot chirped. “You are currently located on a remote island, approximately 3,400 miles from any major landmass. For the next thirty days, you will survive using only your wits, teamwork, and affectionate cooperation!”

Jon’s eyebrows shot up. “Wait—thirty days?”

“Thirty!” the robot confirmed proudly. “Also, as an additional challenge, the Kryptonians’ and Speedster’s powers have been—” it paused for dramatic effect, little antennae spinning “—temporarily neutralized!”

Wally blinked. “Neutralized?”

“Correct!”

“Meaning—”

“You are, as humans say, ‘running on empty.’”

Konner exhaled sharply. “Fantastic. So, no powers, no tech, no communication devices. We’re stuck here.”

“Exactly!” the robot said, glowing like it had just announced Christmas. “Isn’t this exciting?”

“No!” everyone said in unison.

The robot seemed to ignore that. It rolled forward a few inches, a hatch popping open from its side. Out tumbled a small pile of clothes—plain, casual, and distressingly normal-looking.

“I have provided appropriate attire for your stay!” it chirped proudly. “Please enjoy these durable, breathable cotton garments! No logos, no spandex, no armor—just good old-fashioned fabric!”

Stephanie blinked down at the clothes, then back up. “Okay, you kidnapped five superheroes, stole their powers, and now you’re giving us vacation outfits? What kind of weird social experiment is this?”

Roy crouched down, poking at the pile with his bow. “This better not be like one of those ‘Lord of the Flies’ situations. I don’t do loincloths.”

Jon raised an eyebrow. “You sure? I bet Jason would—”

Roy shot him a look. “Finish that sentence and I’ll use your bones as kindling.”

Jon smirked. “Denial’s a river, my dude.”

Wally groaned. “Okay, time out. We can’t be here for thirty days. Dick’s gonna think I ghosted him. He’ll panic, call Bruce, and next thing you know, Batman’s interrogating Alfred for ransom money.”

“Tim’s gonna find me,” Konner said, crossing his arms confidently. “He tracks my location every six hours. He’s probably already halfway here.”

Steph snorted. “Cass doesn’t even need a tracker. She’s gonna feel that I’m being stupid somewhere and show up in a minute.”

“Damian,” Jon said proudly, “is going to murder whoever did this. And then me. For getting kidnapped.”

Roy rubbed the back of his neck. “And Jason’s probably just gonna laugh and go back to bed.”

“Classic,” Wally muttered.

The robot cleared its little mechanical throat. “Please note that communication and rescue will be impossible for the next thirty days. All technology on this island is under my control. Once you have proven yourselves, you will be permitted to return home!”

Steph folded her arms. “And what exactly counts as proving ourselves?”

“Love,” the robot said simply. “True, selfless, deeply human love.”

There was a pause.

Roy blinked. “...Yeah, we’re doomed.”

Jon threw his hands up. “I mean, that’s kind of vague! What are we supposed to do, hug each other into enlightenment?”

The robot hummed cheerfully. “That’s the spirit! I look forward to observing your progress!”

Then, before anyone could respond, it made a soft beep-beep-beep.

Konner frowned. “Wait, is that—”

BOOM!

A small explosion of sand and smoke erupted where the robot had been, showering them all in a fine layer of soot and glittering circuitry.

Everyone stood there for a moment, blinking.

Finally, Wally coughed. “Did that thing just… self-destruct?”

“Yup,” Steph said, brushing sand out of her hair. “Cool. Great. Love that.”

Roy kicked a tiny metal leg away from his boot. “We’re stranded on a weird therapy island with no powers, no phones, and no escape. I’ve had worse Tuesdays.”

Konner looked around at the group, sighing. “Alright, since we’re apparently stuck here, we should set up camp. Shelter, water, food. Basic survival. Everyone remember your wilderness training?”

Wally squinted. “Does camping in Dick’s living room count?”

Jon grinned. “No, but it’s adorable that you tried.”

Steph threw her hands up. “Okay, fine, but I’m calling dibs on not sharing a tent with the crab magnet.”

Konner glared. “That crab was vicious.”

Roy was already trudging toward the treeline. “Let’s go, lovebirds. If we’re gonna survive thirty days of this nonsense, we better start before I start hearing inspirational background music.”

Jon snickered. “I give us two days before we turn feral.”

“Two?” Wally said, deadpan. “You’re optimistic.”

Steph sighed, pulling on one of the bland cotton shirts the robot left behind. “I swear, if this turns into a group therapy exercise, I’m blaming Batman.”

Konner adjusted his shirt, squinting toward the setting sun. “Nah. This has Tim’s paranoia written all over it.”

The group groaned in unison.

Somewhere in the distance, a seagull cried.

And on the edge of the jungle, hidden by vines, a small red light blinked—watching.

The sun was climbing higher, merciless and golden, glinting off the sand like it was personally trying to fry them all alive. Somewhere behind them, the smoking crater that had once contained a perky little robot was still hissing faintly.

The “outfits” it had left behind weren’t much of an improvement.

“Okay,” Stephanie said, standing with her hands on her hips, staring down at herself. “First of all, these clothes are a hate crime.”

Wally snorted. “What, you don’t like the beige?”

“They’re matching beige, Wally.” She gestured at the others dramatically. “We look like a cult. The Beige Lantern Corps.”

Roy laughed, running a hand through his disheveled red hair. “Nah, this is more like Survivor: Dysfunctional Edition.”

Konner tugged at his shirt—plain, cotton, a size too small, which did not help the fact that he looked like he walked out of a fitness ad. “I feel like this thing is mocking me.”

Jon, adjusting his own shirt (which, somehow, made him look even younger), snickered. “Yeah, you look like you’re about to sell protein powder on Instagram.”

Konner shot him a brotherly glare. “You’re one to talk, Little Kent. You look like you got lost on your way to summer camp.”

Jon spread his arms. “Not my fault the robot didn’t include a fashion upgrade feature.”

Stephanie, meanwhile, groaned loudly, dragging her hands down her face. “I cannot believe I’m stranded on a deserted island with three superpowered boy scouts and one emotionally unavailable archer.”

Roy raised an eyebrow. “Hey. I’m plenty emotionally available. I just… schedule my feelings in advance.”

Wally laughed, a flash of gold even without the suit. “That’s one way to say ‘denial.’”

“Bite me, Speedy 2.0.”

Stephanie rolled her eyes, grabbing a stick from the sand and pointing it like a sword. “Okay, enough. We need shelter, water, fire, food. You know—basic survival things before one of you starts writing a sad ballad about your boyfriend.”

“Hey,” Konner said, mock defensive, “if Tim were here, he’d already have a spreadsheet for this.”

“Exactly my point.” She sighed. “Alright, Kon—forest with me. We’re getting firewood. You’re tall, and I’m bossy, so we’re basically the dream team.”

Jon perked up. “Hey, what about us?”

“Beach duty,” Steph said, already walking toward the treeline. “Food, water, make yourselves useful. Don’t blow anything up.”

Wally saluted lazily. “You got it, Cap’n Beige.”

Roy watched her go, then looked at the others. “You heard the lady. Let’s get this over with before she comes back and starts giving us matching nicknames.”

In the forest

The island’s jungle was surprisingly lush—dense green shadows, birds shrieking overhead, and the faint hum of insects that never quite stopped. The air was hot, heavy, sticky with the scent of salt and leaves.

Stephanie stomped through the undergrowth, whacking away vines with a stick. “You know what this reminds me of?”

“Please don’t say one of Tim’s training simulations,” Konner said, lugging a massive branch under one arm.

She shot him a grin. “One of Tim’s training simulations.”

He sighed. “Called it.”

“Except this time, there’s no Oracle monitoring us, no Cass ready to kick someone’s face in, and no Batman popping out of the bushes to judge us. Just… us.” She gave him a sideways glance. “You okay?”

Konner shrugged, stepping over a fallen log. “Yeah. Just… weird being powerless again. Feels like walking around with the volume turned down.”

“Tell me about it.” Stephanie bent to grab a dry stick, tossing it into the pile. “You know how many times I’ve been kidnapped, tied up, or left in a warehouse? I’ve got trauma punch cards.”

He laughed, a low, warm sound that made the humid air feel a little lighter. “Yeah, but you always bounce back.”

“Of course I do. Brown girls don’t quit.” She straightened up, brushing off her hands. “You, on the other hand, look like you’re overthinking.”

He opened his mouth, hesitated. “…Tim worries too much. I just know he’s tearing through Metropolis right now with five laptops and a murder board.”

Stephanie chuckled. “Yeah, Cass is probably halfway here already. She doesn’t need gadgets, just vibes.”

Konner smiled faintly. “I envy that.”

They walked a bit in silence, gathering branches until their arms were full. The forest around them buzzed quietly, the ocean barely audible in the distance.

Then Stephanie huffed. “You know, if this turns out to be one of those weird moral tests or bonding experiments again, I’m going to lose it.”

“You mean like that time Batman made the Batkids do a ‘trust-building retreat’ and Jason set the tent on fire?”

“Exactly like that,” she said with a grin. “Except now I can’t even text Cass about it. She’d never let me live it down.”

Konner chuckled. “You two are good together.”

“Yeah,” she said, her voice softening. “She’s… she’s my calm. You know?”

He nodded slowly. “Yeah. I know exactly what you mean.”

They shared a quiet, knowing smile—one that only people who’d been through hell for love could share—before trudging back toward the beach.

Meanwhile, on the beach

Wally, Jon, and Roy stood in a loose triangle near the water, staring down at a crudely fashioned “fishing pole” made of a stick, a vine, and a paperclip Wally had scavenged from the robot debris.

Roy squinted. “This is either genius or the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Wally grinned. “You’re welcome.”

Jon crouched beside the tide pool. “I mean, it’s better than nothing. We need protein.”

Wally jabbed at the water. “See? I knew my middle school science project would pay off someday.”

Roy smirked. “You mean the one where you set the gym on fire?”

“That was chemistry,” Wally corrected. “Totally different subject.”

Jon laughed, shaking his head. “You two are hopeless.”

“Oh, I’m hopeless?” Roy pointed at the fishing line. “You’re the one who’s been making kissy faces at your reflection for the last five minutes.”

Jon blinked. “What? I was checking for sunburn!”

“Uh-huh.”

Wally snorted, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. “You’re lucky Damian’s not here, kid. He’d bite your face off for flirting with yourself.”

Jon smirked. “He’d still think I’m cute, though.”

Roy groaned. “God, they’re all like this. Why is every bat-related relationship so codependent?”

“Because they have feelings, Roy,” Wally said in mock seriousness. “You should try it sometime.”

Roy gave him a flat look. “I have feelings. They’re just classified.”

Jon laughed so hard he almost fell into the water.

A small crab scuttled past his foot, and he yelped, jumping back.

Wally lost it completely. “Oh my god, the crab’s back for revenge!”

Roy chuckled, throwing a piece of driftwood into their growing pile. “If that thing starts talking, I’m swimming home.”

By the time Stephanie and Konner came back, the group had managed to catch exactly one fish, half a dozen crabs, and a very shiny rock that Wally insisted was “morale-boosting.”

“Good news!” Stephanie announced, dropping her armload of branches. “We didn’t die. Bad news, the forest is full of bugs that think I’m a buffet.”

Konner followed, equally sweaty but grinning. “We’ve got enough wood for a fire.”

“Perfect,” Wally said, tossing the fish in the air and catching it. “Dinner à la Flash.”

Roy rolled his eyes. “Please don’t start calling yourself that.”

“Too late.”

As the sun dipped below the horizon, the five of them sat in a rough circle around the crackling fire. Their beige uniforms were wrinkled, their hair a mess, and their moods a mixture of exhaustion and disbelief.

And yet, for a moment, it almost felt peaceful—five heroes on a beach, stranded but not broken, laughing at each other’s misery like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Stephanie poked at the fire. “Alright, let’s get one thing straight—if we’re here for thirty days, I’m in charge of morale. Roy’s in charge of sarcasm, Wally’s in charge of stupidity, Jon’s in charge of youth, and Konner’s in charge of lifting heavy stuff.”

Konner smirked. “So, same as usual?”

“Exactly.”

Wally grinned. “Man, we’re gonna make the weirdest island sitcom ever.”

Roy snorted. “Yeah—‘Stranded and Emotionally Unavailable.’ Coming soon to HBO Max.”

The group burst into laughter as the fire crackled brighter, the waves whispering nearby.

They didn’t know who had brought them here, or why—but for now, at least, they had each other.

And that, for better or worse, was enough.

By nightfall, the island had quieted down to a strange, almost peaceful rhythm—the kind of stillness that felt earned, like the world had finally decided to stop laughing at them for one second.

The fire crackled low, throwing long shadows across the sand. The air was warm, sticky with salt, and the stars above were impossibly bright—too bright for people used to city skylines and light pollution.

And, miraculously, they had shelter.

Stephanie Brown, a woman forged by Gotham’s unending chaos and a thousand “make-do-or-die” situations, had singlehandedly wrangled a mess of palm fronds, vines, and stubborn determination into three semi-recognizable tents.

“See?” she said, wiping sweat from her brow as she knelt in the sand, tying one final knot with a length of vine. “I told you—Boy Scout merit badges have nothing on Bat training.”

Roy tilted his head, eyeing the closest tent skeptically. “You sure this thing’s not gonna collapse in the middle of the night?”

She gave him a look. “You can sleep outside if you want, Robin Hood.”

“Nah,” he said quickly, hands raised in surrender. “Looks great. Love what you’ve done with the... uh, leaves.”

Wally whistled low, pacing around the setup. “Okay, gotta admit—these are actually decent. Dick’s idea of camping is a hotel with bad Wi-Fi. I’ve never seen this much manual labor in my life.”

Jon was crouched by the fire, roasting something that might’ve been a fish—or might’ve been an unfortunate coconut crab. “You’re not bad at this, Steph. Damian would totally be impressed.”

Stephanie beamed, hands on her hips. “Oh, I know he would. Cass taught me this trick—Batman used to make her and me do survival drills when he got bored.”

Konner frowned. “Bored?”

She nodded solemnly. “Bored. The man’s idea of ‘fun’ was stranding us in the woods with one batarang and a moral lesson.”

Roy snorted. “I suddenly feel better about my childhood.”

Wally flopped down onto the sand, stretching out. “Speak for yourself. I once had to share a sleeping bag with Dick on a stakeout. He talks in his sleep.”

Konner grinned. “Let me guess—’Justice never sleeps!’?”

“Worse.” Wally’s voice dropped dramatically. “‘Did we feed the pigeons, Alfred?’”

The entire group lost it, laughter echoing across the beach. Even Roy cracked up, wheezing so hard he had to lean on his bow for balance.

When they finally calmed down, the night air settled again, the fire popping softly between them.

Stephanie dusted off her hands. “Alright, we’ve got three tents. Roy, you’re with me. Wally gets one to himself because, no offense, he moves too much in his sleep. And Konner and Jon can share the last one.”

Jon immediately groaned. “Aw, come on, why do we have to share?”

Konner smirked. “Because you’re the youngest, and I’m the only one here with actual big brother energy.”

“Big brother? You’re, like, eight years older than me.”

“Exactly,” Konner said, deadpan.

Wally chuckled. “I mean, if you snore, Jon, we’ll all hear it anyway.”

“I do not snore!”

Roy coughed. “Sure, kid.”

Stephanie clapped her hands once, satisfied. “Good. Settled. Now everyone shut up and go to bed before I start assigning night patrol shifts.”

Later that night…

The beach had gone still except for the sound of waves and the occasional whisper of wind through palm leaves.

Wally lay sprawled out in his solo tent—if you could call it that. The thing looked more like a cocoon than a shelter. He stared up at the palm-frond ceiling, sighing dramatically. “This is so not how I pictured a vacation.”

He could almost hear Dick’s voice in his head: ‘You’d complain about a five-star resort if the pillows weren’t color-coordinated.’

He smiled a little despite himself, pulling the rough blanket up over his chest. “You better be looking for me, gorgeous,” he muttered. “Because I am not dying in a tent made of salad.”

In the next tent over, Jon was still awake, propped up on one elbow and squinting through the dark.

“Kon,” he whispered.

“Mm?”

“This thing’s poking me.”

“It’s sand, Jon.”

“No, like, something sharp.”

“Then move.”

“I can’t, you’re huge.”

Konner exhaled sharply, rolling over. “You know, Damian would’ve killed you already.”

Jon grinned. “Yeah, but he’d look good doing it.”

Konner groaned, dragging the blanket (a huge leaf) over his head. “I’m not hearing this.”

Jon laughed softly. “You’re such an old man.”

Konner’s muffled voice came through the fabric. “And yet, somehow, I’m the only one here with any survival instincts.”

Meanwhile, in Tent #3—the Steph-Roy Special—peace was… relative.

Roy was lying on his back, staring at the palm-frond ceiling with the look of a man resigned to his fate. Stephanie, sitting cross-legged beside him, was reorganizing her utility belt with laser precision.

“So,” she said casually, not looking up, “you and Jason, huh?”

Roy’s head snapped toward her. “What? No. No, no, no. Absolutely not.”

Stephanie arched an eyebrow. “You said that too fast.”

He pointed at her accusingly. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You said a lot, actually.”

Roy huffed. “He’s my best friend.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Steph—”

She grinned. “Denial’s a river, Harper.”

He groaned, dragging his hands over his face. “Why does everyone keep saying that?”

“Because it’s true. You’ve got that ‘brooding crush’ energy all over you. It’s practically glowing in the dark.”

He turned to glare at her. “You’ve been spending too much time with Cass.”

“Yeah,” she said cheerfully. “She’s a great influence.”

There was a beat of silence before Roy finally muttered, “He’d never go for it anyway.”

Stephanie looked at him, her smirk softening into something gentler. “You’d be surprised what people go for.”

Roy didn’t answer, but the look in his eyes said plenty.

Outside, the waves rolled in and out, steady as breath.

The fire had burned down to glowing embers, their light flickering against the tents.

For a brief, surreal moment, everything was calm—the island, the air, even their thoughts. Just five heroes, stranded and exhausted, pretending this wasn’t the weirdest mission they’d ever been on.

Stephanie adjusted the tent flap, smiling faintly to herself. “Good night, boys.”

“Night,” Roy murmured, eyes already drifting shut.

“Night,” came Wally’s voice faintly from the next tent.

“Night,” Konner added, his tone resigned.

Chapter Text

The first thing Roy Harper heard that morning wasn’t the sound of birds, or the waves, or even Wally snoring from his solo tent.

It was a scream.

A loud, panicked, teenage scream that shot straight through the morning calm like an alarm clock from hell.

Roy sat up so fast he smacked his head against the palm-frond ceiling of his tent. “Ow—what the—”

Another scream.

Then: “NOOOOO! MY SKIN!”

Roy stumbled out into the sunlight, hair sticking up, eyes half-shut, bow still clutched in one hand out of pure instinct. “Kid’s being murdered by a coconut,” he muttered. “Great.”

He pushed through the sand until he found the source of the noise: Jonathan Kent, crouched by the shoreline, staring in horror at his reflection in the water.

Jon’s curls were a mess, his cheeks slightly sunburned, and his hands were clutching his face like a man in existential crisis.

“Jon?” Roy croaked, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “You good?”

Jon turned to him, eyes wide and full of despair. “Roy… my wrinkles are forming.”

There was a long pause. The waves lapped gently at the shore.

Roy blinked. “Your what?”

“My wrinkles!” Jon repeated, as if announcing a death sentence. “Look at this—this line! Right here! That’s new!”

Roy squinted at him. “Kid, that’s sand.”

Jon frowned harder, touching his cheek. “It’s a wrinkle.”

By then, Konner had wandered over, still shirtless, carrying two coconuts like a responsible big brother slash part-time himbo. “What’s going on?”

Roy pointed at Jon. “Your brother’s having a midlife crisis at eighteen.”

Konner groaned, setting the coconuts down. “Jon, you don’t have wrinkles. You barely have pores.”

“Yes, I do!” Jon said defensively. “Look at this! I used to have the smooth skin of youth, but now I’m aging like milk!”

Stephanie, who had emerged from her tent mid-rant, took one look at the scene and burst out laughing. “Oh my god. Is this what I woke up for?”

Jon spun toward her, eyes wide with betrayed dramatics. “Steph, don’t laugh! My face is deteriorating!”

“Oh please,” she said, walking closer, hands on hips. “I’ve fought assassins, alien clones, and Bruce Wayne’s emotional constipation. You think I’m gonna panic over your imaginary wrinkle?”

“It’s not imaginary!” Jon huffed. “Damian’s gonna think I let myself go!”

At that, Konner lost it. “You think Damian Wayne cares about skincare?”

“He literally wears a silk sleeping mask!” Jon shot back.

Steph laughed so hard she nearly doubled over. “Oh my god, that’s true. Cass told me! It’s black with little bat ears!”

Konner smirked. “So he does have a beauty routine.”

“Exactly!” Jon said, triumphant. “And I have to keep up!”

Roy pinched the bridge of his nose. “I survived a heroin addiction and global conspiracies for this.”

Wally, who had been half-asleep near the fire pit, finally dragged himself into the conversation, hair sticking up like a startled cat. “What’s going on?”

Roy gestured vaguely toward Jon. “Skincare emergency.”

“...Oh no,” Wally said, instantly awake. “Is it bad?”

Steph blinked. “Wait—you too?”

Wally ran a hand over his own face, frowning. “Well, we’re stranded on an island, no moisturizer, no shade, and I can feel the UV damage setting in.”

Konner groaned. “Not you too, man.”

“I’m serious!” Wally said, grabbing a cracked coconut half. “This is hydration and exfoliation. Dick’s not gonna want to kiss me if I come back looking like a dried mango!”

Roy looked skyward. “Lord, give me strength.”

Jon stood dramatically, hands still cupping his cheeks. “See?! He gets it!”

Konner rubbed his face, muttering something about “alien patience.” “Jon, we’ve been here one day. You’re fine.”

Steph grinned. “He’s not wrong, though. You’ve got that baby skin glow. It’s almost annoying.”

Jon perked up a little. “Really?”

“Yeah,” she said with a smirk. “You look like you stepped out of a toothpaste commercial.”

Konner nodded solemnly. “She’s right. It’s gross.”

Jon gasped. “Konner!”

Wally reached out, patting Jon’s shoulder in sympathy. “Don’t listen to them, kid. We’ll do a natural skincare regimen—coconut oil, aloe, sand scrub—”

“SAND SCRUB?” Roy cut in, scandalized. “That’s not a regimen, that’s torture!”

“Hey, desperate times,” Wally said with a shrug. “You gotta protect your face. Dick’s obsessed with sunscreen. He once made me reapply in the Batmobile.”

Stephanie rolled her eyes, already walking away. “You’re all insane. I’m going to look for food before this turns into a Sephora commercial.”

“Bring me back some cucumbers!” Jon yelled after her. “For my eyes!”

“Eat them, Kent!” she shouted over her shoulder. “They’re for survival, not spa day!”

Konner sighed, raking his fingers through his hair. “Jon, seriously—there’s no wrinkle. You’re just dehydrated.”

Jon frowned. “So you see it too!”

“...I didn’t say that.”

“Yes, you did!”

“Okay, fine, maybe a tiny one—”

Jon gasped again, clutching his heart. “It’s happening! I’m aging!”

Roy dropped back onto the sand. “Can someone knock me out with a coconut?”

Wally, crouched beside Jon, tried to soothe him. “Hey, hey, it’s fine. Look—our skin just needs a reset, alright? You and me—we’re gonna bounce back. Trust the process.”

Jon sniffled. “You think so?”

“Totally,” Wally said with solemn sincerity. “We’ll age gracefully—like superheroes in a skincare ad.”

Konner facepalmed. “This is the dumbest crisis I’ve ever seen.”

Steph returned a minute later, holding a mango. “Breakfast!” she announced, only to stop dead at the sight of Wally and Jon smearing coconut oil on their faces.

Roy looked at her with dead eyes. “Don’t ask.”

Steph sighed, sitting down beside him. “You know, if they survive thirty days here, I’m making them do a group therapy session with Leslie.”

“Good,” Roy said, biting into the mango. “They’ll need it.”

The sun was rising higher, the sea glinting gold, and on the sand, two of Earth’s most powerful young heroes were desperately trying to “rejuvenate” their faces while a former vigilante and a Gotham dropout quietly questioned every life decision that had led them here.

And somehow, despite everything, it was almost peaceful.

Konner leaned back, smirking. “If this is day two, we’re doomed.”

Steph grinned. “Completely.”

Jon gasped again, peering into the water. “Wait—are those eye bags?!”

Roy groaned into his hands. “I’m swimming out to sea.”

The forest was hot and humid, the kind of sticky that made your clothes feel like regret.

Leaves crunched under Jonathan Kent’s boots as he followed Wally West deeper into the shade, swatting at the occasional bug with all the grace of a Broadway diva.

“Okay,” Jon said, hands on his hips, “so what exactly are we looking for again?”

“Hydration, exfoliation, rejuvenation,” Wally said in total seriousness, like he was reading off a top-secret mission briefing. “Basically anything that’ll make us look less like we’ve been marooned on a cursed island and more like we’re starring in a sunscreen commercial.”

Jon frowned. “So… mud?”

“Exactly!” Wally snapped his fingers. “Mud, aloe, berries, coconut husks, anything that screams natural glow-up.”

Jon squinted ahead, the sunlight breaking through the trees in warm shards. “I don’t think Bruce Wayne trained any of us for this kind of survival.”

“Bruce Wayne doesn’t moisturize,” Wally said, deadpan. “He broods until the wrinkles fear him.”

Jon laughed so hard he nearly tripped over a root. “You think Damian would agree with that?”

“Damian?” Wally chuckled. “That boy probably uses a face mask that costs more than my car.”

Jon puffed up proudly. “He totally does! Imported from Switzerland. It’s got diamond dust or something in it.”

“Diamond dust,” Wally repeated flatly. “Of course it does. Nothing says ‘I’m a Wayne’ like exfoliating with gemstones.”

Jon smiled, kicking at a rock as they walked. “He says it’s for ‘discipline of the flesh.’”

“Translation: he likes shiny things,” Wally said, grinning. “How’s that going, by the way? You two still in the honeymoon phase, or has he started training you to fight in your sleep yet?”

Jon’s ears went red. “We, uh—yeah, I mean, we’re good! Damian’s just… Damian. He’s not really the ‘romantic getaway’ type.”

“Shocking,” Wally said, feigning surprise. “Mr. I-Stare-at-Crime-Scenes-for-Fun isn’t a flowers-and-candles guy?”

“He tries!” Jon said defensively. “Last Valentine’s, he got me—uh—” He hesitated. “A sword.”

Wally stopped walking. “He got you a sword?”

Jon smiled sheepishly. “He said it was symbolic.”

“Of what, exactly? Your love or your impending death?”

Jon shrugged. “Both?”

They both burst out laughing, the sound echoing between the trees.

“You know,” Wally said after a moment, bending down to inspect a patch of moss, “I kinda get it. Dick’s like that too. He’ll do something ridiculously over-the-top romantic one day, and then the next he’ll forget our anniversary because he’s too busy fighting a mafia clown.”

Jon raised an eyebrow. “And you’re still married?”

“Oh, please,” Wally said with a smirk. “I didn’t marry him for his organizational skills. I married him because he looks like a Greek god in Kevlar and calls me ‘Sunshine’ when I’m mad.”

Jon smiled softly. “That’s actually… really sweet.”

“Yeah, until he forgets to put the dishes away,” Wally muttered. Then, after a pause, “How about you and Damian? You guys say ‘I love you’ yet?”

Jon tripped again. “Uh—well—”

“That’s a no.”

“He’s said it!” Jon protested. “Once! Kind of. He said, ‘You are tolerable company, Jonathan.’”

Wally laughed so hard he had to lean against a tree. “Oh yeah, that’s the big L-word right there.”

Jon grinned sheepishly. “It’s fine. I know what he means. He’s just not good with words.”

“Trust me,” Wally said, kneeling to scoop some damp earth into a coconut shell, “the ones who can’t say it are usually the ones who feel it the most. Dick didn’t say it for months. First time he did, we were both crying and covered in soot.”

Jon blinked. “Soot?”

“Yeah,” Wally said casually. “Building collapse. Long story.”

Jon tilted his head. “You two are kinda goals, honestly.”

“Ha!” Wally grinned. “You’ll feel that way right up until your partner starts snoring in Sanskrit.”

Jon chuckled and crouched beside him. “Okay, so what’s this mud thing we’re making?”

“It’s simple,” Wally said, mixing the mud with some coconut oil from earlier. “A little hydration mask, courtesy of Mother Nature. Natural minerals, earth nutrients—boom. Spa day.”

Jon eyed the mixture skeptically. “That looks like something you step in, not put on your face.”

“Trust the process,” Wally said with a knowing nod, smearing a bit across his cheek. “You gotta nourish the skin, kid.”

Jon hesitated… then copied him. “Feels kinda weird.”

“Beauty hurts.”

“Feels like it’s eating my soul.”

“That’s the toxins leaving your body.”

Jon laughed, trying not to flinch as the mud dripped down his jawline. “You do this often?”

“Once a week,” Wally said proudly. “Dick and I have ‘self-care Sundays.’ It’s important for emotional stability.”

“Really?” Jon said, genuinely touched. “That’s… actually kinda nice.”

“Yeah,” Wally said, smearing more on. “We do masks, foot soaks, watch The Great British Bake Off. Last week he fell asleep with cucumbers on his eyes and almost ate one in his sleep.”

Jon burst out laughing, wiping a tear from his eye. “Damian would never.”

“Give it time,” Wally said with mock wisdom. “One day you’ll come home to find him doing a mud mask while sharpening a batarang.”

Jon grinned, imagining it. “Yeah… maybe.”

For a moment, they just sat there, the forest humming quietly around them, two heroes-turned-beauty-gurus on a ridiculous tropical exile.

Then Wally suddenly frowned. “Wait.”

Jon froze. “What?”

“Do you feel that?” Wally said, standing up. “Like… we’re being watched?”

Jon looked around, heart skipping. “Maybe it’s just Roy spying on us again.”

“Roy wouldn’t survive the humidity this far in,” Wally muttered.

A branch cracked somewhere behind them.

They turned, wide-eyed, mud still dripping off their faces like camouflage.

“...Okay,” Jon whispered, “if this turns into Lost, I’m blaming you.”

Wally smirked. “At least our skin’s gonna look flawless when we die.”

By the time Jonathan Kent and Wally West made it back to the beach, they were sprinting full speed—faces still caked with half-dried mud, leaves in their hair, and expressions of sheer nope.

“RUN!” Jon shouted, waving his arms like he was signaling an evacuation.

Stephanie, who had been trying to braid a palm frond into something vaguely resembling a mat, froze mid-motion. “What did you two do this time?”

“Nothing!” Jon gasped, bending over and wheezing. “Something—something moved in the forest!”

“We’re not sticking around to check what it was,” Wally added, pointing behind them. “I’ve seen too many horror movies, thank you very much. I’m not gonna be the redhead who says ‘let’s split up.’”

Roy, meanwhile, was pacing near the campfire like a man with something important to say. “You know what?” he announced dramatically, ignoring the panic entirely. “I think I like Jason.”

That stopped everyone cold.

Konner blinked. “Uh… yeah, we know.”

Roy shot him a glare. “No, not like that. I mean, yeah, like that, but not like that.”

Stephanie facepalmed. “Roy, that sentence just had three ‘like that’s’ and none of them helped.”

Roy pointed at her accusingly. “You don’t get it, Brown. It’s complicated.”

Wally flopped down on a log, still covered in mud. “Oh boy. Here we go.”

Jonathan, still out of breath, straightened up beside him. “Wait—what’s going on?”

“Roy’s having another Jason Crisis,” Stephanie said, exasperated, tying her palm fronds into a knot that looked like it wanted to strangle her. “He has one every two months.”

“I do not!” Roy snapped.

“Last time, you called him ‘pretty’ twice in the same sentence,” Stephanie pointed out.

Roy crossed his arms. “He is pretty. That doesn’t mean anything. I appreciate aesthetics.”

“Yeah,” Konner muttered, leaning back against a coconut tree. “Aesthetics that you apparently want to marry.”

Roy ignored him, getting more and more animated as he talked. “Look, Jason and I—we’ve been through stuff, okay? We’ve fought side by side, we’ve saved each other’s lives, we’ve… we’ve shared chili fries. That’s brotherhood.”

“Uh-huh,” Wally said, inspecting his fingernails. “So, totally platonic, sharing chili fries under the stars while making eye contact?”

“It was nighttime!” Roy exclaimed, flailing his hands. “There were no other seats!”

Jonathan, bless his heart, tried to be supportive. “You know, there’s nothing wrong with liking him romantically, Roy.”

Roy spun toward him. “Oh, don’t start, Smallville Jr.! This is not romantic. It’s a deep, meaningful, emotionally intimate—uh—bromance.”

Stephanie raised an eyebrow. “Bromance that involves what, exactly?”

Roy opened his mouth, then immediately closed it again. “None of your business!”

Wally grinned. “You kissed him, didn’t you?”

“WHAT?!” Roy turned red. “No! I mean—maybe! It was a situation!”

Konner laughed. “A ‘situation’? Dude, you’re thirty-six. That’s not a situation, that’s a confession.”

Roy threw his hands in the air. “Okay, you know what, you people are impossible. I can’t have a serious emotional crisis with you all around acting like I’m starring in a CW show.”

“Roy, this is your third emotional crisis this week,” Stephanie deadpanned. “I’m getting whiplash.”

“Oh, and what about you, Brown?” Roy shot back. “You and Cass practically make heart eyes at each other through your cowls!”

Stephanie crossed her arms smugly. “Yeah, because we’re dating. We’re healthy and functional. You should try it.”

Konner snorted. “Define ‘functional.’ You set her kitchen on fire last week.”

“That was a bonding exercise!”

Wally leaned over to Jon, whispering, “This is better than daytime TV.”

Jon whispered back, “We should probably tell them about the forest thing, though.”

Wally waved a hand. “Nah. Let them finish the drama first.”

Roy, meanwhile, was on a roll. “Jason’s just—he’s complicated, okay? He’s broody, and smart, and he gets it. He doesn’t judge me. He just… looks at me with those stupid blue eyes and—” He stopped mid-sentence, realizing what he’d just said.

Stephanie smirked. “There it is.”

“—and it’s annoying!” Roy added quickly, his voice cracking slightly. “Infuriating! He’s like… like if Batman had emotions!”

“Congratulations,” Wally said. “You’re in love with Red Hood.”

Roy buried his face in his hands. “Oh my god, shut up.”

“Dude,” Konner said, still grinning. “It’s fine. Jason’s hot. I get it.”

“Thank you!” Roy said, pointing at him. “Finally, someone—wait. You agree?”

“Of course,” Konner shrugged. “I’m dating a genius billionaire with emotional damage. I see the appeal.”

Jon blinked. “Wow, that’s… accurate.”

Stephanie groaned. “I swear, if we’re stuck here for thirty days listening to Roy’s gay panic monologue, I’m swimming home.”

Wally clapped her on the shoulder. “Hey, at least it’s entertaining.”

Before Stephanie could reply, something rustled from the edge of the forest again—a low, slow movement that made everyone freeze.

Roy looked over. “...That better not be Jason.”

Jon swallowed. “We told you there was something out there!”

Stephanie immediately grabbed a stick. “Okay. Everyone calm down. We don’t panic. We assess.”

Wally nodded solemnly. “Right. Assess.”

Roy’s voice dropped. “Assess what? Whether it eats us headfirst or feet first?”

Konner sighed, rubbing his temples. “Great. Day two of island hell, and we’ve already got mud masks, gay crises, and potential jungle monsters.”

Stephanie glared at the forest. “Whoever kidnapped us better be paying for therapy after this.”

And with that, the rustling stopped—leaving only the crash of waves and five heroes staring at each other, silently realizing they might be in way over their heads.

Chapter Text

By the time the first week rolled around, the five of them had settled into what could only be described as the bare minimum version of civilization.

They had tents (somewhat), a campfire that smoked more than it burned, and a food schedule that alternated between “fish” and “fish again.” Roy had made a spear. Wally had made a hammock. Stephanie had made about three dozen sarcastic comments about how she was going to strangle whoever thought this was a good team-building exercise.

So when the rustling started again, halfway through dinner, it didn’t take much to set everyone on edge.

Stephanie froze mid-bite, her spoon of coconut soup halfway to her mouth. “You hear that?”

Konner looked up lazily. “If it’s another crab, I’m not saving you this time.”

“This isn’t crab-level rustling,” Stephanie said seriously, standing up. “This is bush-level rustling.”

Roy groaned. “Steph, you’ve said that every night since day two.”

“And I was right about the lizard invasion on day four!” she shot back, already creeping toward the treeline.

Wally sighed, setting down his coconut bowl. “If she gets eaten, I am not writing that report to Bruce.”

Jon frowned, glancing into the dark. “No, she’s right. Something’s moving out there.”

“Okay,” Roy said, pulling his bow from beside his tent, “everyone stay put. I’ll—”

He didn’t finish, because Stephanie lunged forward with the kind of speed that made the rest of them blink.

There was a scuffle—a muffled yelp—and then she reemerged from the shadows, dragging a man by the collar of his shirt, like she’d just caught an overgrown raccoon.

“Got one!” she announced proudly, tossing him down in the sand.

Konner stood up. “Whoa, you just kidnapped a guy.”

“He was spying on us!” Stephanie said defensively.

The man—mud-smeared, wild-eyed, clearly terrified—started babbling in a language none of them recognized.

Roy knelt down cautiously, holding up both hands. “Hey, buddy. We come in peace, okay? We’re just—uh—lost.”

The man blinked at him, said something that sounded vaguely like “guh-rah-rah,” and then backed away on all fours.

Wally frowned. “What did he just say?”

Jon squinted. “I think he said your hair’s weird.”

Roy glared at him. “How would you know?”

“I don’t,” Jon admitted cheerfully. “Just felt right.”

Then, from the treeline, more rustling.

Konner turned, his expression shifting instantly to alert. “Uh, Steph? You might wanna let that guy go.”

Because suddenly, there weren’t just one or two figures emerging from the forest—there were dozens.

Men and women, all dirty, sun-darkened, wearing torn clothes made of animal hide and leaves. Their eyes gleamed in the dim light of the fire.

Wally stood up slowly. “Okay. Okay, that’s… that’s a lot of people.”

Roy stepped forward, hands raised. “We’re friendly! Totally friendly! Please don’t—”

But the moment he started talking, they all went silent.

Every single one of them.

Dozens of eyes, fixed on Roy Harper, bow in hand, mouth half open.

He froze. “…Okay. Not big talkers. That’s cool. I can do silence.”

Jon, meanwhile, looked thoughtful. Then, with the unearned confidence of someone who once believed he could solve problems with charm alone, he took a step forward.

“Maybe they’re primitive,” he said. “Maybe we need to communicate in, like, universal sounds.”

Konner looked at him, already horrified. “Jon, don’t you—”

Too late.

Jon puffed up his chest, smiled brightly, and started making monkey noises.

Full-on monkey noises.

“OOH! OOH-OOH-AH-AH!”

The tribe stared.

Stephanie dropped her face into her hands. “Oh my god, he’s actually doing it.”

“Is this how humanity dies?” Wally whispered. “Because I can’t go out like this, man.”

Roy, torn between amusement and secondhand embarrassment, muttered, “I take back every bad thing I ever said about Jason. He’d never do this.”

Jon continued proudly, completely unaware that everyone was mentally writing his obituary. “See? It’s universal! We’re showing we’re not a threat!”

The tribespeople blinked.

Then one of them let out a sharp, guttural shout.

And the next second, they charged.

“OH GOD—RUN!” Roy yelled, diving for his bow.

“WHAT DID YOU DO?!” Stephanie shrieked as she grabbed Jon by the arm.

“I DON’T KNOW, I WAS TRYING TO BE FRIENDLY!”

“Friendly doesn’t mean Planet of the Apes, you idiot!”

Wally was already sprinting, yelling over his shoulder, “I TOLD YOU WE SHOULD’VE LEFT THIS PLACE! I SAID IT HAD JUNGLE SACRIFICE VIBES!”

Konner picked up Jonathan with one arm like a football and bolted after them, muttering through gritted teeth, “I swear, Tim’s never letting me live this down.”

Roy loosed an arrow over his shoulder—not to hit anyone, just to make noise—but it didn’t slow the crowd behind them.

“They’re gaining!” Wally shouted, glancing back.

Stephanie swerved toward the campfire and grabbed the biggest flaming branch she could find. “Not if we make a distraction!”

She threw it behind them, the dry leaves catching instantly. Flames roared up, blocking the charging group for a moment as the five of them burst back into the open beach.

They collapsed in the sand, panting, the sounds of shouting and crackling fire echoing faintly behind them.

Roy looked around, wide-eyed. “What the hell was that?!”

Stephanie leaned on her knees, still catching her breath. “They were human, but… I’ve seen faces like that before. On missing person files. Some of them looked like they’ve been here for years.”

“Years?” Jon asked, rubbing the back of his neck. “You mean, like—abandoned survivors?”

“Or captives,” Konner said grimly. “Whoever brought us here… they’ve been doing it for a long time.”

Wally groaned, flopping onto the sand. “Great. We’re on an island with feral castaways and zero Wi-Fi.”

Roy sighed, running a hand through his hair. “And the kid made monkey noises at them.”

Jon mumbled, “It was a valid attempt at communication.”

Stephanie glared at him. “No, it was a valid attempt at getting eaten.”

Konner chuckled despite himself. “You really are Damian’s type.”

Jon scowled, crossing his arms. “At least I try to make friends.”

Wally looked up at the sky, voice tired but dry as ever. “Next time, maybe try ‘hello’ instead of oo-oo-ah-ah.”

“Noted,” Jon muttered.

The waves lapped quietly at the shore. The forest burned faintly in the distance.

Stephanie exhaled, staring toward the treeline. “They’re scared of something,” she murmured. “Not us. Something else.”

Everyone turned to her.

Roy frowned. “Something scarier than you?”

Stephanie smirked faintly. “Hard to imagine, I know.”

Konner’s gaze lingered on the dark forest beyond. “Then what the hell is it?”

And somewhere far away, deep in the trees, something howled.

A sound that wasn’t human.

By day thirteen, the island had stopped feeling like an adventure and started feeling like a breakup nobody wanted to talk about.

Their camp had improved a little—more sturdy tents, a half-decent fire pit, and what Roy proudly called “furniture,” which was really just a log with delusions of grandeur. But the group itself? The morale was rotting.

Stephanie sat on a rock, sharpening a stick with intense focus—mostly to stop herself from screaming. Konner was pacing near the waterline, muttering to himself. Jonathan was poking at a coconut like it had personally offended him. Roy was lying in the sand, staring blankly at the sky. And Wally—normally the sunshine in any situation—was quiet. Too quiet.

The moment Stephanie noticed it, she frowned. “You’re brooding,” she said.

Wally didn’t even look up. “No, I’m not.”

“You’ve been staring at that same cloud for fifteen minutes,” she said, standing. “You’re brooding. Classic post-marital silence-brood.”

Wally sighed, still not moving. “You ever wonder if your husband forgot you exist?”

That made everyone look up.

Konner stopped pacing. “Whoa. That’s dark, dude.”

“Yeah,” Jonathan said gently. “You and Dick are, like, disgustingly in love. You’re the couple everyone wants to untag on Instagram.”

Wally laughed weakly. “Yeah, sure. Until one of us disappears and the other moves on with his life because apparently that’s what happens now.”

Stephanie crossed her arms. “Wally. You’ve been married for eight years. Dick would sell his soul to find you.”

Roy groaned from the sand. “Oh, please. You’re all acting like your partners are still alive out there. I’ve accepted it. Jason’s probably sitting on some rooftop, forgetting my name.”

Stephanie gave him a sharp look. “You’re not even dating Jason.”

“Not technically,” Roy said. “But we’ve got, you know—vibes.”

“Vibes,” Konner repeated flatly. “You mean denial.”

Roy pointed his stick at him. “You’re one to talk, Mr. ‘I’m Totally Chill That My Boyfriend’s Probably Not Looking for Me.’”

Konner stopped, turning slowly. “Excuse me?”

“Come on,” Roy said. “Tim Drake’s a workaholic. You think he’s not glued to a monitor somewhere, muttering, ‘Just one more lead,’ while forgetting to eat and shower?”

Konner’s jaw tightened. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“Maybe!” Roy said helplessly. “At least you’ve got a guy worth stressing over. Jason’s probably forgotten my birthday again.”

Jonathan perked up, half-heartedly. “When is your birthday?”

Roy hesitated. “…That’s not the point.”

Stephanie rolled her eyes. “Oh, this is pathetic. You all sound like middle schoolers who didn’t get texts back.”

Wally sat up finally, face flushed from sun and sadness. “Steph, I know Dick. He’s careful, he’s logical, he’s responsible. But it’s been thirteen days. Thirteen! No signal, no superspeed rescue, no—no Bat-jet on the horizon! What if he’s just… moved on?”

Konner squinted at him. “With who?”

“I don’t know!” Wally said, throwing up his hands. “Nightwing’s attractive, Konner! He could move on with anyone!”

Jonathan muttered, “That’s fair.”

Stephanie groaned. “Oh my god, we’re going to die on this island surrounded by emotional disasters.”

Konner dropped into the sand next to Wally. “You know what’s funny? I keep telling myself Tim’s working on a plan. But every night I go to sleep wondering if maybe—maybe he decided I wasn’t worth the risk.”

Roy snorted softly. “You two ever listen to yourselves? None of them are like that.”

“Oh, I forgot,” Stephanie said sarcastically. “You’re the expert on commitment.”

Roy glared. “Hey. I am committed—to the possibility of Jason realizing he loves me.”

Jonathan grinned. “That’s the saddest sentence I’ve ever heard.”

“Shut up, birdspawn junior.”

Wally rubbed his temples. “We’re losing it. All of us. I can feel my optimism slipping away, like… like my Speed Force’s emotional support hamster just died.”

Stephanie plopped down next to him, handing him a half-eaten mango. “Eat this before you spiral into full poetic despair.”

“Thanks, mom.”

“Don’t ‘mom’ me. Eat.”

Konner sighed. “It’s weird, though. We’ve all been in worse situations before. This feels different. Like the silence itself is taunting us.”

Jonathan frowned. “You think whoever took us wanted this—to make us doubt they’d come?”

Stephanie didn’t answer. She just looked toward the jungle, where the charred edge of the fire from days ago still scarred the trees. “Yeah,” she murmured. “They want us scared. Alone. Forgotten.”

Roy sat up, grimacing. “Well, jokes on them. I’m already all those things.”

“Roy,” Stephanie warned.

He shrugged. “What? You think Jason’s tearing the world apart looking for me? The guy doesn’t even text back when he’s in the same city.”

But the moment he said it, something in the air shifted.

Wally gave a weak laugh. “Yeah, right. Dick probably hasn’t even noticed I’m gone either.”

Konner gritted his teeth. “Tim’s… probably too busy.”

Jonathan’s voice was small. “Damian… doesn’t talk about feelings.”

Stephanie exhaled slowly, looking at each of them. “You all realize that’s insane, right? They’re Bats and Supers and Speedsters. If we’re not home yet, it’s not because they forgot. It’s because something’s stopping them.”

“Something,” Wally echoed, eyes on the horizon. “Like what?”

Before anyone could answer, a faint sound echoed from deep within the jungle.

A distant metallic clang.

Then another.

Rhythmic. Deliberate.

Konner stood instantly, eyes narrowing. “That’s not an animal.”

Stephanie grabbed her staff. “Nope. That’s man-made.”

Roy muttered, “Great. Just when I was enjoying my self-loathing arc.”

Jonathan adjusted his glasses, nervous but trying to sound brave. “Maybe it’s… the others?”

Wally’s eyes sparked faintly red for just a second. “Or maybe it’s whoever took us.”

The five of them exchanged glances.

For a long moment, no one spoke. Then Stephanie exhaled sharply, twirling her staff. “Alright, heartbreak squad. Time to channel our abandonment issues into survival instinct.”

Roy smirked faintly. “That’s the most Bat-family thing I’ve ever heard.”

They moved toward the trees, silent but determined.

And somewhere, far away across the ocean, five others—Dick, Tim, Damian, Cassandra, and Jason—were tearing through the world, refusing to stop until they found them.

But their partners wouldn’t know that. Not yet.

Because for now, the only thing louder than the jungle was the sound of Wally whispering, almost to himself, “Please, Dick. Don’t let me be wrong about you.”

Chapter Text

The jungle was silent again.

Too silent.

After the rhythmic clang echoed into the evening, everyone had gone tense—eyes darting, bodies low, weapons ready (or in Roy’s case, a “very sharp stick that’s seen things”). But nothing moved. Nothing breathed. Until the trees ahead hummed.

“Uh,” Wally said, narrowing his eyes, “please tell me that’s not the jungle developing Wi-Fi.”

Branches parted with a creak, and there it was—the same small robot that had greeted them when they first arrived, its metal casing still dented from when Stephanie had, on instinct, kicked it that first day. Its eye-light flickered weakly, like it had walked through the depths of hell to get there.

Stephanie sighed. “I thought I destroyed that thing.”

“You did,” Roy said. “Ten out of ten dropkick, by the way.”

“I thought I did,” she muttered. “Apparently not hard enough.”

The robot clicked once, then projected a shaky blue light into the air—a hologram flickering between static and sound.

Everyone stepped back instinctively, half-expecting it to explode again.

But this time, it didn’t speak.

Instead, an image took form.

And that image nearly knocked the air out of them.

---

First came Tim.

He was sitting in the Batcave—hair a mess, shirt wrinkled, caffeine practically radiating from his bloodstream. His voice trembled from exhaustion as he barked orders into a comm.

“Track the energy signature again. Cross-reference with every known villain tech from the last ten years. I don’t care if it’s improbable—run it.”

Behind him, Bruce stood silently, jaw clenched.

Tim’s hands shook as he typed. “It’s been thirteen days. There’s no pattern, no ransom, no message. Whoever did this knew how to hide from me—and that scares the hell out of me.”

Konner’s throat went dry.

His Tim—so calm, so controlled, so composed—looked wrecked.

---

Then came Damian.

He was in the Batmobile with Alfred, driving—no, storming—through a stormy night. His uniform was torn, his knuckles bloody. He gripped the wheel hard enough to dent it.

“Father doesn’t understand,” Damian growled. “They’re not missing, they were taken. I can feel it.”

Alfred said gently, “Master Damian, you have not slept in four days.”

“I will sleep when I find Jonathan,” Damian snapped, eyes blazing. “He’s probably making some foolish attempt to be brave right now.”

Jonathan winced, cheeks flushing. “Okay, he didn’t have to be so specific.”

Wally smirked. “Aww, he knows you so well.”

Konner elbowed him. “Not the time.”

---

Then the image shifted again.

Now Cassandra was shown in a silent alley, her Spoiler-purple scarf tied around her arm like a promise. She moved with her usual eerie grace, taking down three goons in total silence. Behind her, Babs’ voice echoed faintly through her comm, “Still nothing on satellite. Steph’s signal disappeared mid-transmission.”

Cassandra froze for half a second at the sound of Stephanie’s name. Then she hit the last thug harder than necessary.

Stephanie smiled softly, despite herself. “God, I love that woman.”

Roy coughed. “Yeah, you might wanna, uh, not say that out loud right now, you’re gonna make the rest of us look bad.”

---

The projection flickered again.

Now it was Jason.

He was in Star City, leaning over a map spread across a diner table. He looked furious—hair wild, eyes burning. Dinah Lance stood nearby, saying something about “taking a break,” but he ignored her.

“She’s wrong,” Jason muttered, tracing routes with a knife. “Roy wouldn’t just vanish. He’s not that stupid.”

Roy, watching, whispered to no one, “I mean, I am that stupid, but… thanks, Jay.”

Jason’s voice dropped lower. “If anyone touched him… I’ll kill them.”

Stephanie gave Roy a pointed look. “You sure it’s just a bromance?”

Roy crossed his arms and huffed. “It’s an emotionally complicated partnership, okay?”

Konner grinned. “So, gay panic with weapons.”

“Shut up, Kent.”

---

Finally, the hologram shifted one more time.

Dick Grayson.

He was in his Nightwing suit, standing on a bridge overlooking the water, wind whipping through his hair. His mask was off. He looked tired—more tired than Wally had ever seen him.

He was talking to Bruce on comms. “We’ve checked every route from Keystone to Metropolis. Nothing. Barry’s running scans every hour. Wally’s gone. He’s—” Dick’s voice cracked. “He’s gone, Bruce.”

“Richard,” Bruce said, quiet but steady. “We’ll find him.”

Dick swallowed hard, blinking rapidly. “We’d better.”

Then he turned away from the edge, whispering something to himself that the comm didn’t catch. But the robot’s audio enhancement did.

“I can’t lose him again.”

Wally’s hands trembled. He took a shaky breath, the kind that comes right before you start crying—or running forever. “He—he’s looking. He’s really looking.”

Stephanie grinned weakly. “Told you. They’re all losing their minds over us.”

The group stood in silence for a long while. The only sounds were the waves and the faint crackle of the fading hologram.

Then Roy sniffed, rubbing his eyes. “Okay, but like, am I the only one who’s kinda turned on by Jason threatening murder on my behalf?”

Stephanie smacked his arm. “Yes. Yes, you are.”

Jonathan was still staring at where Damian’s image had been, trying to hide a small, trembling smile. “He hasn’t slept in four days,” he murmured. “He’s going to be insufferable when I get back.”

Konner finally exhaled, his eyes wet. “Tim looked like he was breaking.”

Wally laughed softly, the sound watery. “They all do.”

The robot let out one last click. Then its single eye light turned red and it spoke for the first time since appearing.

“Do you understand now? The test is not to doubt your worth. The test is to remember it.”

Then it self-destructed—again.

This time, nobody screamed.

They just stood there in the smoke and sand, hearts pounding, the ghostly afterimage of their partners burned into their minds.

After a long silence, Stephanie cleared her throat. “Well… guess we’re not as forgotten as we thought.”

Roy sniffed again. “You’re crying too, right? Just so we’re clear.”

“Shut up, Harper.”

Konner smiled faintly, his voice thick. “We’re getting home. I don’t care how. We’re getting back to them.”

Jonathan nodded, eyes fierce. “Together.”

And as the smoke cleared, the five of them—battered, sunburned, and emotionally wrecked—felt something they hadn’t felt in days.

Hope.

The smoke from the robot’s explosion drifted lazily over the sand, carrying with it the faint scent of burnt metal and ozone. The five of them stood there, eyes still fixed on the charred patch of beach where the hologram had shimmered moments ago.

No one spoke at first. It was as if they all knew that the first one to open their mouth would have to say it—that quiet, awful truth they were all trying to ignore.

It was Stephanie who finally broke the silence.

“Okay,” she said, voice steady but sharp, “before anyone gets emotional—which, looking at all of you, seems inevitable—I just wanna say it.” She crossed her arms, chin high, Spoiler confidence cranked up to eleven. “That could’ve been fake.”

Roy looked at her like she’d just stepped on his childhood dreams. “Fake? Steph, that was Jason. The man said he’d kill people for me. That’s not exactly out of character.”

“Yeah,” she said, “which is exactly why it could be fake. They showed us exactly what we wanted to see.”

Konner frowned, sand crunching under his boots as he took a slow breath. “You think the robot… was lying?”

“I think it was programmed to make us compliant,” Stephanie replied. “Classic psychological conditioning. Show the prisoners something they need—hope—and you control their emotions. Batman taught me that when I was fifteen.”

Jonathan made a face. “Man, your childhood must’ve been fun.”

“You have no idea.”

Wally crouched down, rubbing the sand between his fingers. “She’s got a point, though. That’s Villain 101—mess with the head before the body. Make you believe you’re safe or that help’s coming when it’s not.”

Roy ran a hand through his hair. “You’re saying that video of Jason wasn’t real? That he’s not out there threatening homicide over me right now?”

Stephanie hesitated. “…I’m saying we can’t know.”

Roy slumped onto the log they’d been using as a bench, looking absolutely betrayed. “Great. So I get one tender moment of emotionally unstable affection in my life, and it’s CGI.”

Jonathan nudged him. “It could’ve been real, though. You don’t know it wasn’t.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know it was, either.”

Konner sighed, rubbing at his temples. “Steph’s right. It’s exactly the kind of psychological manipulation you’d use on people like us. Make us hesitate. Make us sentimental. And then when the real test comes, we break.”

“Or worse,” Wally added, “we sit around waiting for rescue instead of trying to escape.”

Jonathan groaned, flopping dramatically onto the sand. “So what now? We pretend our boyfriends and girlfriends aren’t probably losing their minds out there?”

“Exactly,” Stephanie said, pointing at him. “We keep going like it’s just us. Because if that was real, they’ll find us anyway. And if it wasn’t…” she trailed off, her voice softening, “…then we can’t afford to depend on something that isn’t real.”

There was a beat of silence before Wally let out a long sigh and leaned back, squinting up at the sky. “I hate how logical that is.”

Roy snorted. “Yeah, it’s giving ‘Bat-family trauma realism.’”

Konner chuckled faintly. “She is dating Cassandra. It’s contagious.”

Stephanie smirked. “You’re all just jealous Batman never taught you survival psychology while you were still losing your baby teeth.”

“Yeah,” Wally said dryly, “jealous is exactly the word I’d use.”

Jonathan sat up, picking at a seashell, expression tight. “I just… I don’t want to believe Damian’s out there suffering for nothing.”

“You can believe he’s trying,” Konner said gently. “Just don’t let it be what keeps you from fighting.”

Wally nodded slowly. “Yeah. That’s it. Hope’s good. But not the kind that makes you stop running.”

Roy raised his eyebrows. “Philosophical, West.”

“I’m married now,” Wally said with a shrug. “It happens.”

Stephanie clapped her hands together, cutting through the heaviness. “Alright, therapy circle over. We have a fire to maintain, food to ration, and I’m not letting any of you die on this beach because of ‘hope poisoning.’”

“Hope poisoning?” Roy repeated. “That’s not a real thing.”

“It is now,” she said briskly.

Konner looked toward the tree line where the robot had come from, his eyes narrowing. “Whoever’s running this—whatever this is—they’re testing us. That robot said it from the start: ‘Prove yourselves worthy.’”

Jonathan crossed his arms. “Worthy of what, though?”

“Of surviving,” Stephanie said, tone grim. “Of each other. Of them.”

Roy let out a dry laugh. “Great. Nothing like a good ol’ mystery cult to spice up our vacation.”

Wally kicked a bit of sand at him. “Shut up and help me rebuild the shelter.”

“Why? Planning to invite the fake holograms for dinner?”

“Only if they bring salad,” Wally shot back.

Jonathan smiled faintly, but there was still worry in his eyes. “Even if it was fake, it felt… real. Like, the way Damian moved—he had that little twitch in his eyebrow he gets when he’s angry but scared.”

Stephanie softened a little. “Maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s both. Maybe it’s real and fake. Doesn’t matter.”

“Because?” Konner asked.

She met his gaze, firm, stubborn, unshakable. “Because we use it anyway. Whether it’s true or not, it gives us a reason to keep going.”

Roy stood, brushing off his pants. “So our grand plan is to treat possibly fake emotional torture footage as motivation fuel.”

“Welcome to the Bat way,” Stephanie said cheerfully.

Konner laughed, shaking his head. “Man, Tim’s right—you’re terrifying.”

Stephanie winked. “That’s why Cass likes me.”

Wally groaned. “Can we not talk about your superior emotional health while I’m having an existential breakdown over holograms?”

Jonathan got to his feet and stretched. “She’s right, though. Real or not, it’s all we’ve got. And if Damian’s really out there looking for me, I wanna make sure I’m alive when he finds me.”

Konner nodded. “Same for Tim.”

Roy smirked faintly. “Same for Jason. Even if it’s just a bromance.”

“Roy.”

“Fine. A very intense, romantic-adjacent, homoerotic bromance.”

Wally wiped his face with both hands. “You guys are so weird.”

Stephanie grinned. “Says the guy married to a circus acrobat.”

“Touché.”

And for the first time in days, laughter rippled through the group—not the kind born from denial or hysteria, but the real kind. The kind that stitched people together even when everything else was falling apart.

When it faded, Stephanie said quietly, “We keep moving. We keep fighting. And if that video was real…”

Wally finished softly, smiling through it, “Then they’d want us to.”

The night was heavy with humidity, the fire crackling weakly as the island wind whipped through the palm fronds that Stephanie had expertly woven together for their makeshift shelters. The group had eaten roasted coconuts and some sort of weird fruit Konner insisted “probably wasn’t toxic,” though Roy was still unconvinced. Now, they sat around the campfire in a circle—dirty, sunburnt, hungry, and restless—but not broken.

“Alright,” Stephanie said, tossing a piece of driftwood into the flames. “We’ve been here almost two weeks, and morale’s tanking. So, we’re doing what every stranded group of semi-functional heroes does—scary stories.”

Roy snorted. “Steph, last time I told a scary story, it involved Oliver Queen’s chili recipe. You don’t recover from that kind of trauma.”

“Oh my god,” Wally groaned, leaning back with his hands behind his head. “Don’t even say that. I can smell the flashbacks.”

“Not fair,” Jon chimed in, hugging his knees to his chest. “I’ve never heard it.”

“You don’t want to, kid,” Roy said grimly. “You’re too young for gastrointestinal horror.”

Stephanie smirked. “Okay, okay, I’ll start.” She leaned in, her Spoiler hood down, her blonde hair sticking out in messy curls. “So. Picture this. Gotham, 3 a.m., raining so hard the gargoyles are crying. I’m tailing a perp, when suddenly—”

Roy groaned. “Steph, no offense, but your scary stories always end with you beating someone up.”

“Because that is the horror!” she shot back. “You ever chase a guy through Crime Alley in heels?”

“Fair,” Konner said with a laugh, lounging next to Jon. “My turn. Ever heard of the ghost of the Fortress of Solitude?”

Stephanie blinked. “Your what now?”

Konner adjusted his posture, putting on his best spooky narrator voice. “Legend says, late at night, when the Arctic winds howl, you can still hear the faint hum of the hologram projector Lex Luthor broke in 2005. It turns on by itself, whispering math equations you’ll never solve…”

“Bro.” Roy raised a brow. “That’s not scary, that’s just… nerdy.”

“Tell me you’ve never been haunted by math, Roy,” Wally said, smirking.

“Okay, that’s fair,” Roy admitted.

Jon leaned forward. “Can I go next?”

“Go ahead,” Stephanie said, grinning.

“So,” Jon began, eyes wide and serious. “It’s night. You’re alone. You hear rustling behind you—”

“Please don’t tell me this is about those weird forest guys again,” Konner interrupted.

“No! This is worse!” Jon continued dramatically. “You turn around—and it’s… your boyfriend. And he says—‘Babe, I accidentally killed your houseplant.’”

There was a beat of silence. Then Wally burst out laughing.

“That’s horror alright,” Wally said between snickers. “I once saw Dick’s face when I chipped the Nightwing mug. That’s a trauma arc.”

Roy smirked. “Okay, West. You’re up. Scare us.”

Wally cracked his knuckles, face illuminated by the firelight. “Alright, so once upon a time, there was a man named Wally West. He lived a good life, had a loving husband, a nice house in Blüdhaven—until…”

He leaned forward, whispering. “…He woke up one morning… and realized…”

Everyone held their breath.

“…his husband reorganized his comic collection.”

Stephanie threw a piece of bark at him. “You’re ridiculous.”

“No, he’s relatable,” Roy said with mock solemnity. “That’s betrayal on a spiritual level.”

Jon laughed so hard he nearly fell backward, and Konner caught him easily, shaking his head. “You guys are hopeless.”

“Hopeless?” Stephanie said, feigning offense. “Excuse you. We’re surviving an island kidnapping and keeping our skincare intact. We’re icons.”

“Barely,” Roy muttered, scratching at his stubble.

The laughter lingered, the fire crackling softly as the night deepened. The shadows stretched long across the sand, and for a brief, precious moment—it almost felt normal.

No kidnappers. No mysteries. No fear. Just five heroes, tired and alive, telling ghost stories to chase away the real ghosts waiting in the dark jungle beyond.

And when a faint rustling came from the treeline again—none of them moved.

Stephanie just sighed. “If it’s another murderous robot, it can wait till morning.”

“Agreed,” Konner said, curling closer to Jon.

Wally poked at the fire. “Yeah. Let the horror movie wait till after breakfast.”

“Finally,” Roy said, stretching out on the sand. “A team with some sense.”

And somewhere, far beyond the flicker of the firelight, something watched—and waited.

The island had finally gone quiet.

Not peaceful quiet—because there was always the chirping of insects, the restless hiss of the waves against the sand, the faint metallic hum from whatever bizarre tech powered this place—but that eerie kind of quiet that fell when everyone had run out of energy to stay awake.

Most of the group had retreated into their palm-frond tents, exhausted and half-delirious from the day’s chaos. The campfire had burned down to red coals, flickering faintly like the heartbeat of something too stubborn to die.

In one tent, Konner and Jon lay side by side, both staring at the roof that Stephanie had constructed—a marvel of improvised engineering and duct tape. Jon’s curls were a mess, his face faintly illuminated by the dying glow outside. Konner’s arm rested behind his head as he stared up at the woven ceiling, the weight of silence pressing on both of them.

After a while, Jon sighed. “Konner?”

“Mm?”

“Do you ever… think about how weird this is? Like, one minute we’re eating breakfast, the next we’re in some Hunger Games tropical nightmare?”

Konner chuckled softly. “Yeah. Welcome to superhero life, baby brother.”

Jon frowned. “You’re not my brother.”

“You sure? ‘Cause you sound exactly like me when I was your age—whiny, confused, existential.”

“Hey!” Jon protested, swatting his arm. “I’m not whiny. I’m just… freaked out.”

“Understandably,” Konner said, voice softening. “I mean, we got kidnapped by a robot, hunted by forest people, and Roy might actually be in love with Jason Todd. So yeah, I get it.”

That earned him a laugh. Jon buried his face in the crook of Konner’s shoulder. “God, I can’t even talk about the tribesmen. They creep me out.”

“Then don’t,” Konner said easily. “Let’s talk about something else. Like… taxes.”

Jon blinked. “What?”

Konner rolled onto his side, facing him with mock seriousness. “If you want to be a functional adult, you gotta understand taxes. I’ve seen too many heroes get their lives destroyed by the IRS. It’s scarier than Darkseid.”

“Okay, but like…” Jon squinted. “You can just laser your W-2 if it annoys you, right?”

Konner sighed dramatically. “And that’s why you’re eighteen.”

“I’m serious!”

“So am I,” Konner said, sitting up slightly. “Taxes, man. You think saving the world’s hard? Try itemizing deductions after a Justice League paycheck.”

Jon laughed so hard he nearly woke the others. “Okay, fine, Mr. Responsible. Tell me more about our boring adult future.”

Konner smirked. “Alright. When you and Damian get married—”

Jon’s cheeks turned crimson instantly. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, we are not talking about that—”

“Too late,” Konner continued, grinning. “When you and Damian get married—he’s going to pick the most dramatic venue possible. Like, a castle. Probably guarded by live panthers.”

Jon groaned, covering his face. “You’re ridiculous.”

“And,” Konner said, ignoring him, “you’ll have two kids. No more, no less.”

Jon peeked out between his fingers. “Two?”

“Yeah. It’s a good number. Balance. One who’s quiet and brooding like Damian, and one who’s loud and chaotic like you.”

Jon smiled despite himself. “That sounds… nice, actually.”

Konner’s expression softened. “Yeah. You’ll be a good dad someday, Jon.”

Jon looked up at him, eyes a little glassy. “You think?”

“I know.”

A moment passed. The fire popped outside, and a soft wind rustled the leaves above.

Then Jon nudged him. “Okay, your turn.”

“My turn?”

“Yeah. You and Tim. Marriage. Go.”

Konner’s grin widened lazily. “Oh, that’s easy. I’m gonna propose at breakfast.”

Jon blinked. “That’s… anti-climactic.”

“Nah,” Konner said. “That’s romantic. He’s half-asleep, I bring him coffee, drop a ring in his cereal—boom, lifelong commitment.”

Jon burst out laughing again, clutching his stomach. “You’re hopeless.”

“Hey, he knew what he was signing up for when he fell for a clone.”

They both laughed until their sides hurt, until the fear of the island faded for a little while.

Then Jon whispered, “I hope they’re okay.”

Konner’s voice went quiet. “Yeah. Me too.”

He reached over, gently ruffling Jon’s hair. “Go to sleep, little Kent. We’ll get home. And when we do—you, me, Tim, Damian—we’re all having a double wedding. It’ll be the worst event Gotham’s ever seen.”

Jon chuckled softly, eyes drifting shut. “You promise?”

“Promise.”

Meanwhile, in the other tent, Wally had very pointedly refused to sleep alone again.

He was squished between Roy and Stephanie, a red-and-yellow burrito of fear and awkwardness.

“Don’t judge me,” he whispered, clutching his blanket tighter. “Something moved last night.”

“It was a crab,” Stephanie mumbled into her pillow(a rock).

“A crab with intentions,” Wally muttered.

Roy groaned, half-asleep. “If you don’t stop fidgeting, I’m throwing you in the ocean.”

“Then I’ll haunt you,” Wally shot back.

“You already do,” Roy said flatly, and drifted off again.

Stephanie snorted softly into the dark. “We’re doomed.”

“Yup,” Wally whispered. “But at least we’re doomed together.”

And that night, pressed close for warmth and sanity, the island’s castaways slept—dreaming of home, love, and tax forms.

Chapter Text

By the time the twenty-first sunrise cracked over the horizon, the island had gone from “mysterious tropical nightmare” to “five-person sitcom set in hell.”

They’d fallen into a kind of rhythm—if you could call it that.

Stephanie had turned into a sort of jungle mom, running the daily operation with the kind of stern precision only a Bat could achieve. Roy hunted and fished, complaining all the while that the fish were mocking him. Konner and Jon handled the heavy lifting—building, carrying, climbing—while also trying not to accidentally kill a coconut tree with super-strength. And Wally…

Well, Wally had snapped.

Not in a bad way, but in that Wally West genius-scientist-meets-desperation way.

---

That morning, he sat cross-legged on the sand, surrounded by a massacre of robot parts, wires, and shiny fragments. His red hair was sticking up at ten different angles, his Flash suit was rolled down to the waist, and his expression was one of manic focus.

“This,” he declared dramatically, holding up a circuit board, “is my Mona Lisa.”

Roy, who was sharpening a stick nearby, looked up. “Looks more like modern art.”

Wally ignored him. “If I can just rewire this thing—strip the transmitter from the processor—I can build a makeshift radio.”

“Out of robot scraps?” Jon asked, incredulous.

“Out of hope and science, Jon-boy,” Wally corrected, pointing the circuit board at him like a wand. “I can feel the electromagnetic potential.”

Stephanie walked by, balancing a bucket of water on her hip like it was nothing. “You’ve been talking to the robot parts again, haven’t you?”

“They’re the only ones who listen!” Wally shot back, clutching the pile protectively.

Konner was the one who stepped in to defuse it, crouching down beside him. “You think you can actually get a signal through whatever blocked our powers?”

“Maybe not through it,” Wally said, his tone dropping to something surprisingly serious. “But around it. I’ve been studying the static from that thing’s detonation. There’s something artificial—something coordinated. If I can find the frequency—”

“—you could send a distress signal,” Konner finished, his expression softening. “That’s… actually brilliant.”

Wally gave a weak grin, rubbing the back of his neck. “Yeah. Well. Desperation’s the mother of invention.”

Then, quieter: “Dick always said he liked my ‘science brain.’”

Everyone froze for a moment—not because it was awkward, but because they could all feel how heavy that one sentence was. Wally tried to laugh it off.

“He used to make fun of me for geeking out over circuit diagrams. Said I’d start naming my gadgets. I told him, ‘You named your car, Dick. Don’t start with me.’”

Stephanie knelt down beside him, placing a hand on his shoulder. “You’ll see him again. You know that, right?”

Wally’s voice cracked just slightly. “I hope so. He’s probably tearing Gotham apart looking for me. He gets… obsessive when I’m late for dinner.”

Roy leaned against a palm tree. “Yeah, well, good thing you’ve got a whole buffet of coconuts here. You’re not starving.”

“Roy,” Stephanie said dryly, “not the point.”

---

By midday, Wally was surrounded by a growing sprawl of tools made from island junk—sticks sharpened into screwdrivers, flattened metal serving as soldering plates, coconut shells filled with wet sand to ground his circuits. He was muttering equations under his breath, sometimes in full sentences that no one else could follow.

Meanwhile, the rest of the group scattered into their usual tasks.

Konner and Jon headed inland, hauling empty water containers and teasing each other the entire way. Jon had decided to make it his life’s mission to prove he could climb faster than his genetically engineered brother. He couldn’t, obviously, but that didn’t stop him from trying.

Stephanie went hunting for more palm leaves, planning to reinforce the tents in case it rained again. She hummed something tunelessly under her breath, muttering about how Batman had trained her to survive anything—including “five overgrown children stranded in paradise.”

Roy wandered along the shore, bow in hand, trying to fish and complaining out loud to nobody in particular. “I can’t believe I’m gonna die surrounded by pretty boys and coconuts. That’s not how I thought I’d go.”

---

Back at camp, Wally was sweating, sand-streaked, and somehow still smiling. His fingers worked fast—too fast for a normal human, even without his speed. Habit. Muscle memory.

As he twisted a copper wire into place, a soft crackle came from the half-assembled device. His head shot up, heart pounding.

“Come on, come on…” he whispered, turning the dials he’d carved into the metal. Static hissed, then—

“...zzzt—Metropolis... search perimeter... all known associates...”

Wally froze. The voice was distant, garbled, but unmistakably human.

He almost dropped the device, fumbling to adjust it. “Oh my god, oh my god—guys! GUYS!”

The others came running—Jon tripping over a branch, Konner barreling behind him, Stephanie skidding through the sand, Roy half out of breath.

“What is it?” Konner demanded.

Wally pointed at the tiny, flickering speaker. “It’s them. It’s home. I got a signal!”

The static flared again—louder this time, a burst of overlapping transmissions.

“—Oracle... repeat... no sign of Spoiler or Flash West... Kent family still—”

Then the line went dead.

Just as quickly as it came to life, the signal fizzled out in a puff of smoke, leaving behind only the faint smell of burnt copper.

Wally stared down at it, eyes wide, breath caught somewhere between laughter and tears. “I did it. It worked—for a second, but it worked.”

Stephanie knelt beside him. “Then you can fix it. You will fix it.”

Jon grinned, bouncing on his heels. “We’re gonna get out of here!”

Konner clapped Wally on the back so hard the poor man nearly face-planted. “I knew that science brain of yours would save us.”

Wally laughed weakly, wiping his eyes. “Yeah… Dick always said I’d make a better nerd than a hero.”

Roy chuckled. “Guess you’re both.”

And for the first time in three weeks, they allowed themselves to feel it—hope.

Wally looked out toward the ocean, his chest tightening. “Hold on, Dick,” he murmured under his breath. “I’m coming home.”

The waves crashed softly against the shore. Somewhere in the distance, something metallic hummed again—but none of them noticed. Not yet.

Gotham was quieter than usual that night—not in the peaceful sense, but in the way of a city that had collectively stopped breathing.

Every rooftop felt colder. Every siren sounded sharper. And in the Clock Tower, every person inside was teetering between hope and dread.

Barbara Gordon—Oracle—hadn’t moved from her monitors in hours. Her glasses reflected six glowing screens at once, each filled with static, signal maps, and waveform analyses. The room smelled faintly of burnt coffee and old circuitry. The moment she caught that faint ping—just a blip, a hiccup in the data—she’d frozen.

Now, her hands were shaking slightly on the keyboard. “I caught it again,” she said, more to herself than anyone else. “A pulse. Low frequency, inconsistent, but definitely engineered. It’s them.”

From across the room, Damian scowled, arms crossed over his chest. “Define ‘them,’ Gordon. You’ve been saying that for an hour.”

Tim, who had been pacing back and forth with a cup of long-cold coffee, stopped dead. “She means our partners.”

That got everyone’s attention.

Jason looked up from where he was leaning against the wall, arms crossed. “You sure it’s not just some random signal bouncing off the Bay?”

Barbara swiveled toward him, narrowing her eyes. “I’m sure. You know who built it.”

Jason frowned. “How the hell would I—”

“It’s Wally,” Dick interrupted, his voice rougher than usual. He was standing right behind her, still in his Nightwing suit, mask pushed up into his hair. His expression—tired, hopeful, determined—said everything.

Barbara gave him a small nod. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

The others exchanged glances. Damian rolled his eyes first. “You’re saying the Speedster somehow managed to cobble together a communication device with his bare hands while stranded on an island?”

“Yes,” Dick said flatly.

Tim smirked, rubbing his temple. “That’s… actually the most Wally thing I’ve ever heard.”

Jason huffed. “I mean, the guy once built a defibrillator out of a toaster, right? Yeah, okay. I’ll give him that.”

“See?” Dick said, leaning against the desk. “You get it.”

“Yeah,” Jason said dryly. “Doesn’t make it less insane.”

Cassandra, perched silently on the edge of the table, finally spoke. Her voice was soft, but every syllable hit like truth. “Stephanie helped. I know it.”

Tim nodded. “She’d make sure they stayed alive long enough for Wally to figure out the tech.”

Damian muttered under his breath, “And Jonathan would likely have caused three explosions in the process.”

Tim smirked. “And Konner would’ve tried to eat the transmitter to see if it worked faster.”

That earned a small laugh—weak, but real—from Dick. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

The laughter didn’t last long. The screens still glowed with that single line of broken code—the remnants of a distress signal that had barely survived transmission.

Barbara zoomed in on the waveform. “Here’s the pattern. It repeats every sixteen seconds. That’s not random. That’s a Morse sequence—short, long, long, short.” She typed rapidly, and the screen translated the data.

‘WE’RE ALIVE.’

The silence that followed was deafening.

Tim exhaled first, the sound shaky. Damian’s fists unclenched slowly at his sides. Jason’s usual sarcasm melted away for a second, replaced by something unreadable—hope, guilt, both.

Cassandra’s lips curved into the faintest smile. “Stephanie…”

Dick’s eyes glistened just slightly. He reached out, brushing his fingers across the monitor. “That’s my husband,” he said, voice cracking with pride and disbelief. “That’s Wally. I told you he’d figure something out.”

Tim turned toward the others, voice sharp again, all business. “Okay. We know the signal exists. We need to find its source. Barbara, can you triangulate it?”

“I can try,” she said, fingers flying across the keyboard. “Problem is, it’s weak. Someone—or something—is jamming it. Whatever island they’re on is wrapped in a dampening field that’s interfering with satellite mapping.”

“Then we find another way,” Jason said. “You said there’s a pattern. We follow the pattern. Cross-check the frequency with every global anomaly in that range.”

Tim shot him a glance. “You been studying my playbook, Todd?”

Jason shrugged. “Nah. Just picking up what you mutter when you’re sleep-deprived.”

“Touché.”

Damian stepped closer to the monitor, scanning the map that Barbara was pulling up. His eyes narrowed. “If this island is artificial, then whoever built it wanted them there. Perhaps they’re testing them.”

“Testing them?” Dick echoed.

Damian’s tone was razor-sharp. “For endurance. Or loyalty.”

Cassandra frowned, shaking her head. “Cruel.”

“Exactly,” Damian said simply.

Tim’s gaze hardened. “Then they picked the wrong group to mess with.”

Barbara’s screen pinged again.

The map flickered—and a faint red dot blinked somewhere off the Pacific grid, near coordinates that didn’t exist on any official registry.

“There,” she whispered. “Signal origin confirmed. South Pacific. About two hundred miles from any known route.”

Jason pushed off the wall. “Then what are we waiting for?”

Dick’s expression was already set in stone—focused, determined, furious. “We’re not waiting,” he said, already pulling his mask down. “We’re going to bring them home.”

Tim cracked his knuckles, eyes sharp behind his lenses. “Then let’s get to work.”

The Batjet tore through the night sky like a blade, cutting across the clouds with a sound that was more vibration than noise. Inside, the air was thick—silent, tense, the kind of silence that pressed down on the lungs.

The red glow from the cockpit instruments bathed everyone in dim light: Damian sat forward, eyes narrowed, jaw clenched tight; Jason leaned back with his boots propped against the console until Dick smacked them off without looking; Cassandra’s hands were clasped so tightly together her knuckles were white; and Tim—Tim sat dead still, eyes locked on the glowing coordinates in front of him, face unreadable but every line of his posture screaming don’t fall apart.

No one spoke for a long while. The hum of the engines filled in for words that couldn’t find their way out.

When the Batjet finally broke through the last layer of clouds, the island appeared below them—a jagged shape rising out of the ocean, blanketed in mist and dense jungle. It looked untouched, wild, almost prehistoric.

Dick’s voice was the first to cut through the static. “Oracle, we’ve got visual. Island matches the coordinates.”

Barbara’s voice crackled faintly over the comms, distorted by interference. “Copy that. Signal origin still reads active but unstable. Watch for anomalies—”

And then the line fizzled into nothing.

“Perfect,” Jason muttered. “We’re on Lost Island with no cell service.”

“Don’t joke,” Damian snapped. “Focus.”

“I am focused,” Jason said. “I just cope better when I imagine this is all a bad TV episode.”

Tim’s voice, quiet but firm, cut through the bickering. “We’re landing in sixty seconds. Everyone—suits up, masks on, keep comms tight. We don’t know what’s down there.”

Even Dick, who usually made some light comment to keep the team from spiraling, said nothing. His grip on the controls was too tight, his expression too dark. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

The Batjet landed on a small patch of sand that passed for a beach. The air outside was humid, heavy, and smelled like salt and wet earth. The sound of insects buzzed faintly in the distance, and waves crashed against jagged rocks.

They moved out in formation: Damian ahead, silent and tense, blade drawn; Cassandra close behind him, scanning the treeline; Jason flanking right with a rifle on his shoulder; Dick leading left, eyes sharp; and Tim at the center, scanner in hand.

It didn’t take long before they found the first sign of life.

A circle of charred wood. The remnants of a campfire—ashes long gone cold.

Dick crouched, brushing his fingers through the blackened dirt. “This wasn’t random. Someone built this carefully.”

Jason knelt beside him, picking up a piece of metal half-buried in the sand. He turned it over. “Looks like part of a transceiver.”

Tim walked closer, scanning it with his wrist display. His voice was clipped, clinical. “It matches the signal frequency from Wally’s transmission.”

Cassandra stared at the debris. “They were here.”

Damian stepped around the site, eyes narrowing at the footprints pressed faintly into the dirt—faded, nearly erased by time and rain. “Not recently. Weeks. Maybe months.”

Tim swallowed hard. “Three months,” he said quietly. “That’s when Oracle picked up the last pulse.”

Jason looked up sharply. “You’re saying—”

“I’m saying,” Tim interrupted, voice tightening, “someone wanted us to find this. Someone sent that signal now—not three months ago. That’s what doesn’t make sense.”

Dick straightened, turning toward him. “Tim—”

“Think about it,” Tim said, forcing logic over emotion. “If this camp’s been abandoned for that long, and the signal was just sent, that means it wasn’t them. It was whoever took them. Maybe they’re already—” He stopped himself before finishing the sentence.

The silence that followed was brutal.

Jason’s jaw tightened. “Don’t you finish that thought, Drake.”

Tim’s voice wavered just slightly. “We have to be logical.”

Dick rounded on him, anger flaring hot. “Logical? You think being logical is going to bring them home?”

Tim’s tone snapped like a whip. “It’s the only thing that’s ever worked.”

That landed like a slap. Dick looked away, breathing hard. Damian’s hands clenched into fists, but he stayed quiet, eyes darting between them.

Cassandra, however, didn’t move. She was staring at the campfire again—silent, still—and then, without warning, she dropped to her knees. Her hands dug into the ash, trembling.

“Cass?” Jason said softly.

She didn’t respond. Her breath came in short, sharp gasps. Her voice, when it came, was small and broken. “Stephanie sat here.” Her fingers traced the dirt. “She was cold. She—she was trying to stay warm. I can feel it.”

Dick knelt beside her immediately, hand on her shoulder, but she shook her head, pressing her hands to her face. “She’s gone, Dick. She’s gone.”

The words tore through all of them.

Jason turned away sharply, hiding whatever flashed across his face. Damian looked down, biting the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste blood. Tim froze—he wanted to comfort her, to say something, but he couldn’t find the words.

Dick’s voice, when it came, was hoarse. “We don’t know that. Not yet. Wally’s smarter than that. They all are.”

Tim’s scanner beeped faintly. He looked down at the display. “There’s residue—burnt oil, battery fluid, fragments of an old radio. It’s real. The signal did originate here.”

Jason exhaled slowly. “So maybe it’s both. Maybe they were here—and someone else used what they left behind.”

Damian’s eyes flicked toward the jungle. “Then we’re not alone.”

That sent a chill through everyone.

They set up a perimeter near the ruins of the camp as night fell. The shadows grew long and deep, the jungle alive with faint noises that didn’t sound entirely natural.

Tim sat apart from the others, scanning the fading signal data over and over, each line of code burning into his eyes. His chest ached with something cold, something hollow. If this was fake... if this was bait...

Jason dropped down beside him, tossing him a protein bar. “Eat. You’re gonna pass out if you don’t.”

Tim didn’t look up. “I’m fine.”

Jason snorted. “You’re a Drake. That’s the exact opposite of fine.”

Tim managed a weak smirk. “You’re one to talk.”

Jason shrugged. “Touché.”

Across the clearing, Dick was helping Cassandra calm down, his voice low, gentle. Damian kept watch, silent and rigid, his hand tight around his blade.

The wind shifted, carrying the faintest trace of something—ozone, smoke, maybe memory.

Tim looked up, eyes distant. “If they’re alive,” he said softly, “we’ll find them. But if they’re not…”

Jason glanced at him, expression hard but not unkind. “Then we find whoever did it. And we make damn sure they regret it.”

Tim nodded slowly, his throat tight. He didn’t say it aloud, but he was thinking the same thing.

He was also thinking of Konner’s laugh. The way he’d say babe like it was a secret.

And the sound of his heartbeat—steady, real, alive.

Tim couldn’t let himself believe it was gone. Not yet.

Chapter Text

By day twenty-six, the island felt less like a nightmare and more like a fever dream they’d all somehow gotten too comfortable with.

The air shimmered with heat, the ocean a blinding sheet of light that made everyone squint. Somewhere in the distance, birds screamed like they were arguing, and the waves hissed against the rocks like they were plotting something.

Stephanie Brown sat cross-legged under a palm tree, sipping coconut juice straight from the shell with a little flourish—pinky finger out, mockingly elegant. She wore what used to be part of her Batgirl uniform, now repurposed into a beach outfit courtesy of Wally’s scissors and Jon’s "this totally works, I swear" sewing job. Her hair was wild, sun-streaked, and she’d declared herself the group’s morale manager.

“Okay,” she said, swishing her drink and squinting toward the treeline. “Who thinks we’re officially island hot now? Like, you know, sunburned and tragic enough to be in a movie about survival and found family.”

“I think I’m about to lose my mind,” Roy muttered from a few feet away, staring blankly at a half-finished spear in his lap. His shirt was unbuttoned halfway, his face tanned and unshaven, and he looked like every artist’s rendering of a man who’d seen too much and still hadn’t gotten over himself. “Day twenty-six. Twenty-six days. No rescue. No boats. And I’m talking to sticks again.”

Stephanie tipped her coconut toward him. “Maybe the stick has good advice.”

“The stick told me Jason’s too good for me,” Roy said, dead serious.

Stephanie blinked. “You might wanna see a therapist. Oh wait. We’re on an island.”

Roy groaned and flopped back into the sand. “I don’t even like him like that. It’s a bromance. Purely platonic. Totally normal. I just—think about him. All the time. His stupid hair. The way he chews gum like he’s mad at the concept of breathing. God, what’s wrong with me?”

Konner, about twenty yards away, stopped mid-punch and turned to look at him. “You’re in denial, dude.”

Jonathan, midair beside him, shouted, “Deep denial!” before landing in a roll that sprayed sand all over his brother’s boots.

Roy raised a hand in their direction without lifting his head. “Thanks, kids. Go wrestle a coconut or something.”

Konner smirked. “We were sparring.”

“You call that sparring?” Stephanie said, sipping again. “It looked like you were trying to invent a new form of interpretive dance.”

“Hey, this is Kryptonian sparring,” Jon said defensively, tossing his hair out of his eyes. “It’s an art form.”

“It’s an excuse to hit your brother without getting grounded,” Stephanie replied.

Jon grinned. “Maybe.”

Meanwhile, just beyond the camp, Wally West was knee-deep in robot guts.

His hands were stained with oil and sand, his red hair sticking out in ten directions. He was muttering equations under his breath, surrounded by scavenged metal, wires, and two coconuts that—based on the pen marks on them—he had named “Volt” and “Amp.”

“Okay, Wally,” he muttered to himself. “You can do this. You’re not just a speedster—you’re a science guy. A man of intellect. A husband of a man who once said, ‘I fell in love with you because you knew how to rewire the toaster.’ You can absolutely rebuild a transmitter out of robot scrap and wishful thinking.”

He squinted down at a circuit board. “Okay, maybe not wishful thinking. But a little prayer wouldn’t hurt.”

Stephanie wandered over, her coconut still in hand. “So how’s your evil genius moment going, Dr. Frankenstein?”

He looked up, eyes wild and bright. “Better than you’d think! I got the robot’s voice box to repeat swear words!”

“Productive,” she deadpanned. “Can it call for help?”

“Not yet,” Wally admitted, running a hand through his hair and leaving a streak of black oil across his forehead. “But I think if I reroute the frequency here—” He gestured vaguely at some wires. “—and amplify the output through the coconut shell…”

Stephanie blinked. “You’re not serious.”

He grinned. “You’d be surprised how conductive coconuts are.”

“Remind me to never let you near our kitchen appliances again.”

He laughed weakly, then paused, his expression softening. “Dick used to say that too.”

For a moment, the air went still.

Stephanie set her drink down and crouched beside him. “Hey,” she said gently, “we’re gonna get home. You’ll tell him about this and he’ll never let you live it down.”

Wally smiled faintly. “He’ll probably make a scrapbook about it. Title it ‘The Time My Husband Nearly Lost It on a Deserted Island.’”

“Subtitle: Featuring Roy Harper’s emotional breakdown and Jon’s monkey impressions.”

“Exactly.”

They both laughed, though it was quieter this time—tired laughter, the kind that held too much hope and too much fear at once.

Over by the trees, Jon and Konner were still sparring—or at least pretending to.

“You’re holding back,” Jon said, breathless, his T-shirt clinging to his back.

Konner grinned. “I don’t want to break you.”

“You won’t. I’m not a kid anymore.”

“You’re eighteen, dude.”

“And Damian’s twenty,” Jon shot back. “He’d wreck you if you said that to him.”

Konner laughed, lowering his fists. “Fair point.”

They stood in silence for a moment, the sound of the waves filling the space between them. Then Jon said softly, “You think they’re still looking for us?”

Konner’s eyes flicked toward the horizon. “I know they are.”

“You sound sure.”

“I am. Because Tim doesn’t stop until he finds answers. And I don’t stop believing in him.”

Jon smiled faintly. “That was disgustingly romantic.”

“Hey, you’re one to talk. You and Damian are practically engaged.”

Jon turned red. “We’re not—! He’s just—”

Konner raised an eyebrow. “You talk about joint bank accounts.”

Jon scowled. “That was hypothetical.”

“Sure.”

Jon huffed, then after a moment: “If we ever get out of here, I’m gonna marry him. Like, for real. Two kids. Maybe a house.”

Konner smiled. “Same.”

“You’re marrying Damian?”

“No, Tim.”

Jon grinned. “You’d be a good dad.”

“So would you.”

They bumped shoulders, and for a moment, the world felt almost normal—just two brothers, sweaty, tired, talking about the future like it wasn’t so far away.

Back at camp, Roy rolled over and groaned loudly. “You ever think about how this could all be a government experiment? Or aliens? Or a punishment for my sins?”

“Which sins?” Stephanie called from across the beach. “You’re gonna have to narrow it down.”

“Fair,” Roy said, staring up at the sky. “Maybe Jason’s out there right now, laughing his ass off that I’m stuck on an island, losing my mind.”

Stephanie smirked. “Knowing Jason? He’s probably burning down the world to find you.”

Roy paused. “...You think?”

“Absolutely.”

Wally looked up from his work and nodded. “Oh yeah. I give it a week before Gotham’s skyline looks like a heavy metal album cover.”

Roy grinned faintly. “Yeah. That sounds like him.”

The sun began to dip below the horizon then, the sky bleeding gold and violet, and for the first time all day, no one spoke.

For a brief moment, surrounded by laughter, static, and the hum of makeshift science, they almost forgot they were lost.

They almost believed they were safe.

By day twenty-eight, Stephanie Brown had decided she didn’t like this island anymore.

Not that she’d ever liked it to begin with—too many bugs, too much sand, and not nearly enough shampoo—but lately, something about it had begun to feel wrong. Wrong in the way that made the back of her neck prickle and her instincts—the ones honed by years under Batman’s shadow—start screaming pay attention.

It started small.

The tides, for instance. They came in from both directions one morning. Stephanie had been the first to notice—because she was the only one with enough patience (and enough mild paranoia) to watch the waves while drinking her coconut juice.

“Guys,” she had said, frowning, “I think the ocean’s having an identity crisis.”

Roy, sprawled beside the fire with his shirt open and a piece of straw between his teeth, had squinted. “What, the water’s gay now?”

Stephanie gave him a look. “Roy.”

“What? I’m supportive.”

“I mean it,” she said, pointing. “The tide’s coming in from two directions. That doesn’t happen. It’s like the ocean can’t make up its mind.”

Konner had looked up from where he and Jon were rebuilding their makeshift training dummy out of driftwood and vines. “That’s… weird, yeah. Maybe it’s some kind of undercurrent pattern?”

Stephanie narrowed her eyes. “Maybe it’s magic. Or maybe we’re not where we think we are.”

Wally snorted from his spot by the campfire, hunched over what was left of the robot parts. “Steph, we’ve been over this. No magic. No aliens. No time travel. Just a bunch of super-powered idiots and a really bad vacation package.”

“Yeah,” Jon added, “I checked the trees yesterday—no invisible portals.”

“You checked?” Konner raised an eyebrow.

Jon shrugged. “I poked them.”

Stephanie pinched the bridge of her nose. “You’re all idiots. Loveable, brave idiots, but idiots nonetheless.”

But the more she watched, the stranger things got.

The leaves moved even when there was no wind—soft, deliberate movements, like something unseen was breathing just beneath the canopy. Yet when a gust of wind did come through, some leaves didn’t move at all, while others swayed in the opposite direction.

She didn’t say anything the first time. Or the second. But by the third day of it—when the trees themselves seemed to ripple like a mirage—she’d had enough.

That morning, while Konner and Jon were off collecting water and Wally was fine-tuning his coconut radio for the thousandth time, Stephanie pulled Roy aside.

“Hey,” she said, crouching next to him as he half-heartedly sharpened a stick. “You ever notice how weird this place is?”

Roy didn’t look up. “Weird like I haven’t had a hot shower in a month or weird like you’re about to tell me we’re in the Matrix?”

“The second one.”

He sighed. “Oh boy.”

“Roy, think about it,” she pressed. “The tides. The leaves. The air. It’s like the physics here are… wrong. Like they’re faking it.”

“Steph—”

“No, seriously. What if this isn’t even Earth?”

Roy raised an eyebrow. “You mean like an alternate dimension?”

“Yes!” she said, exasperated but excited. “What if the robot didn’t just kidnap us—it displaced us? That would explain the tides, the light, even why our powers are gone. Maybe it’s not that our powers were blocked. Maybe they just… don’t work here.”

Roy stared at her for a long moment. “You’ve officially gone full conspiracy podcast.”

“Shut up and listen!”

“I am listening. I’m just—okay, fine, you might have a point.”

Stephanie blinked. “Wait. You agree with me?”

“I mean… a little. The jungle’s too quiet sometimes. I’ve done recon in plenty of forests, and they always have sound. Bugs. Frogs. Birds. Here it’s like—”

“Like everything’s pretending to be a forest,” Stephanie finished.

Roy snapped his fingers. “Exactly.”

They exchanged a long look—part fear, part recognition—and then, in perfect synch, yelled for the others.

Ten minutes later, the entire group was gathered by the fire.

Wally looked like he hadn’t slept in days—oil-stained, twitchy, and halfway through disassembling his makeshift transmitter. Konner and Jon stood shoulder-to-shoulder, both sweaty from sparring, their foreheads creased in concern.

Stephanie took a breath. “Okay. I think we’re not on Earth.”

Wally blinked. “What.”

Jon tilted his head. “Not on Earth? Like… where, then?”

“I don’t know!” she snapped. “That’s the problem! But the tides are wrong, the gravity’s inconsistent, and the forest feels fake. Like it’s all being… simulated.”

Wally opened his mouth to make a joke, then stopped—because part of him remembered the way the radio’s signal had flickered strangely last night, like it was bouncing off itself.

“…Okay,” he said finally. “You might not be wrong.”

Roy crossed his arms. “So what, you think we’re in the Phantom Zone or something?”

Konner frowned. “No. I’ve been there. This doesn’t feel like that. This feels…”

He trailed off, searching for the word.

Jon supplied it softly. “Manufactured?”

Konner nodded slowly. “Yeah. Like we’re in someone’s… experiment.”

Stephanie pointed at him. “Bingo. That stupid robot said we had to ‘prove ourselves worthy of our partners.’ What if this is some twisted test? Some simulation running off reality itself?”

Roy groaned. “Great. So we’re basically The Truman Show, but with more sand and emotional instability.”

“Hey, at least we’re all in it together,” Wally said, trying to keep it light. “If this is a simulation, I call dibs on being the comic relief.”

Stephanie gave him a flat look. “You already are.”

Konner ran a hand through his hair, his tone more serious now. “If Steph’s right, we need to find a way to break it. Maybe the radio’s signal can punch through.”

Wally nodded, though his expression faltered. “Yeah. Maybe. But if it is a simulation… whoever’s running it probably doesn’t want us making calls home.”

Jon looked between them, his brow furrowed. “So what do we do?”

Stephanie crossed her arms, her face set. “We keep watching. We stay alert. And if this place starts showing cracks, we pull. Hard.”

Roy smirked faintly. “You sound like Bats.”

She shrugged. “He taught me well.”

That night, when the others had settled around the campfire, Stephanie stayed awake, her eyes fixed on the treeline.

The forest seemed still at first—but then, just barely, she saw it.

A shimmer in the air. Like the outline of something moving just beyond sight.

And when she blinked, it was gone.

Her coconut drink tipped slightly in her hand as she whispered under her breath:

“Yeah. Definitely not Earth.”

The sun had long since stopped being a comfort. By day twenty-nine, the light was almost mocking—too bright, too unbothered, too normal for a place that had spent nearly a month gnawing on their sanity.

Konner was kneeling near the treeline, his hands pressed into the dirt, eyes narrowed. He wasn’t looking for anything specific—he just needed something to make sense. The others were nearby: Wally hunched over the half-gutted remains of his radio project, muttering in speed-speak; Stephanie perched on a rock, sipping coconut juice like it was a cocktail; Jon and Roy were arguing about whether or not coconut crabs counted as “aggressors.”

But then Konner froze. His hand hovered above a print in the sand. Not just any print—a boot mark. A solid one, deep, precise. Heavy heel, armored sole, angular pattern.

He knew that print.

His stomach dropped, his pulse spiked, and for the first time since the crash, he felt cold.

No one else wore boots like that. No one else could.

Tim.

Konner ran his tongue over his teeth, trying to ground himself, but the recognition hit him like a punch. He’d been kicked by those boots before—during sparring sessions, patrols, in training, in fights where Tim got too intense. He’d been pulled up by those boots, too, Tim’s heel pressed into the ground as he offered his hand, breathless but smiling.

“Hey,” Konner muttered, voice low, shaking the air with a nervous laugh. “No. No way. This is… it’s gotta be a coincidence, right?”

He traced the outline again with his fingertip. Not a coincidence. Not random. Tim’s boots. He’d bet his heat vision on it.

He stood up too fast. “Wally!”

Wally jolted, screwdriver clattering. “What, did someone finally find coffee?!”

“Boot prints,” Konner said. “Tim’s.”

Wally squinted. “...Tim? Like, our Tim? Boyfriend Tim? The one who’s probably losing his mind back home Tim?”

“Yeah. Those are his boots.”

Jon jogged over, brow furrowed. “Wait, are you saying your boyfriend’s out here too? On this island?”

“Not just him.” Konner’s gaze darted around the trees, scanning the shadowed perimeter. “I think they all are. Dick, Damian, Cass, Jason—everyone. But… they can’t see us.”

Stephanie frowned, lowering her coconut slowly. “Are you saying ghost rules? Or multiverse rules?”

“Parallel dimension,” Konner said firmly, pacing now. “Steph, you said it yourself—the tides don’t move right, the air moves wrong, and half the plants seem to ignore physics. What if the others did find us? What if they’re right here—just... phased out of sync with us?”

Roy crossed his arms, raising an eyebrow. “So what, they’re on the same island, but, what—different channel? Like AM versus FM?”

Konner nodded. “Exactly. Maybe the kidnapping wasn’t about taking us somewhere—it was about splitting us. Locking us in another frequency.”

Jon’s eyes widened. “Like… quantum isolation. That’s actually—”

“Terrifying?” Roy offered.

“—cool,” Jon corrected.

Wally stood, running his hands through his hair. “Okay, okay, let’s assume you’re right. How do we cross the frequency? Do we just… scream louder?”

“Maybe that’s what the radio was doing,” Stephanie said suddenly, pointing toward the pile of wires and scrap metal. “You said it was emitting a weird resonance, right? What if that wasn’t just static—it was a bridge?”

Konner turned sharply toward her, realization blooming across his face. “You’re saying Wally’s radio might’ve reached them.”

Stephanie grinned. “Bingo.”

Roy groaned, rubbing his temples. “You’re all assuming the best-case scenario. For all we know, this island’s a trap—and this is the part where the monsters respawn in new skins.”

“Or maybe it’s both,” Wally said quietly.

Everyone looked at him.

Wally’s voice wavered. “Maybe it’s a trap. And maybe it’s still home. Because if there’s a chance Dick’s out there, hearing our signal… I’m not giving up now.”

The group went silent.

The ocean hissed like static, the wind flickering through the leaves in two directions at once.

And somewhere, faintly—so faintly that they couldn’t be sure—it sounded like footsteps mirrored their own.

Konner turned toward the sound and whispered, “Tim?”

No answer.

But he knew what he’d seen.

He knew those boots.

And if they were really split between dimensions, then Konner Kent was going to find a way to break the barrier.

Even if it tore the island apart.

It started like all their bad ideas did—half hope, half desperation, and a sprinkle of “Wally’s had too much coconut water.”

It was late afternoon on day twenty-nine, the light bleeding orange through the trees. The air had that weird, charged stillness again—the kind that made every leaf twitch even when the wind was dead. Stephanie was walking beside Wally, both barefoot, both following a trail of half-prints pressed into the soft dirt near the treeline.

“Okay,” Steph said, squinting. “You’re seeing that too, right? I’m not hallucinating?”

“No, no,” Wally said, crouching to examine one of the prints. “It’s real. Definitely real. The sand’s compacted differently—look, whoever made this had weight, mass, distribution—”

“English, please.”

“Someone’s walking here,” he said. Then he paused, and his grin wavered. “But it’s not us.”

The prints weren’t fresh. But they weren’t old either. They moved like something—or someone—was walking alongside them, invisible, half a breath out of phase.

“Do you think it’s them?” Stephanie asked. “Our thems?”

Wally looked at the footprints for a long time. “I think it’s gotta be.”

They trailed the footprints for nearly a hundred meters before they just… stopped. Mid-stride. No turning, no fade—just ended.

Stephanie sighed, hand on her hip. “Okay. Either our partners are ghosts, or this island’s physics are having a breakdown.”

“Or,” Wally said, snapping his fingers, “maybe—just maybe—they’re in the same space, but slightly off. Like—uh—two songs playing at the same time, one half a beat late. And we’re the bad remix.”

Stephanie groaned. “You and your metaphors.”

Wally straightened, eyes bright. “No, listen! If we can see their footprints, maybe they can see our writing. Like—if I write something on the ground, they’ll see it from their side.”

“Wally…”

He was already scribbling HI DICK in the sand. Then below it, MISS U BABE ❤️.

Steph facepalmed. “That’s the message you’re sending across dimensions?”

“What? He’ll know it’s me.”

They stood there, staring at the sand. Waiting.

Nothing.

The wind blew. The tide pulled. The words vanished under shifting grains.

“Okay,” Wally said. “Maybe they’re just not looking down.”

“So what, we need to get creative?”

“Exactly.”

For the next two hours, the beach became a battlefield of ridiculous experiments.

They broke leaves to form arrows. They dragged sticks in spirals. They made rock piles shaped like Bat symbols (“They’ll definitely notice that,” Wally insisted). Steph even spelled out WE’RE HERE, YOU IDIOTS in giant letters across the sand.

Still nothing.

Roy eventually showed up mid-effort, chewing on a piece of sugarcane. “You guys look like you’re losing a fight to gravity.”

“We’re trying to contact the other dimension,” Steph said matter-of-factly.

Roy blinked. “Cool. Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

“Not helping,” Wally muttered.

Jon and Konner arrived next, sweaty and dirt-streaked from training. Jon tilted his head. “What are you guys doing?”

“Writing messages to our boyfriends,” Wally said. “Science experiment.”

“Oh!” Jon’s face lit up. “Can I try?”

“Be my guest.”

Jon grabbed a rock and walked to a nearby tree trunk. “If sand and leaves aren’t working, maybe the trick’s permanence. Like carving something that’ll stay no matter what.”

Wally blinked. “That’s… actually smart.”

Jon grinned. “I have my moments.”

He started scratching into the bark: HELLO?

The sound echoed faintly, like the wood itself was humming back.

Then everyone froze.

The sand shifted behind them. The half-prints—they were moving again.

Jon dropped the rock. “Uh. Guys?”

The footprints drew nearer, slow, deliberate, as if whoever was making them was reading the word carved into the tree.

Then, right in front of them, the bark started to burn.

Letters appeared, glowing faintly—not carved, not written—just manifesting.

WHO’S THERE?

Stephanie gasped. “Oh my god. They can see it. They saw it.”

Wally stumbled backward, hands trembling. “Oh my god—oh my god, that’s Dick. That’s Dick’s handwriting.”

Konner grabbed Jon’s shoulder, eyes wide with hope and panic. “Then that means—Tim’s here too.”

The air thickened, like reality itself was straining to hold two worlds at once.

Roy swore under his breath, staring at the glowing words. “Okay, I take it back. This is way worse than ghosts.”

But Wally was already reaching for the tree, heart pounding, fingers shaking as he whispered, “Hang on, babe. We’re coming back.”

He pressed the rock to the bark and began to write back.

IT’S ME. WE’RE HERE. WE’RE ALIVE.

And somewhere—though none of them could see it—a matching message shimmered into existence on another tree, in another world.

Five pairs of eyes—Tim, Dick, Damian, Cass, and Jason—stared in disbelief as the words appeared before them.

And suddenly, the island didn’t feel so empty anymore.

The moment the words burned themselves into the tree, silence hit the clearing like a thunderclap.

Tim was the first to move. He stepped forward, boots crunching on the underbrush, eyes wide but sharp—scanning, calculating, believing even when his brain screamed it wasn’t possible.

“It’s me. We’re here. We’re alive.”

The handwriting was unmistakable. Jagged, frantic, carved by someone who’d been running on caffeine and sheer panic for days.

“Wally,” Dick whispered, voice cracking right down the middle.

Jason looked between them all, frowning hard. “Okay, hold up—someone explain to me why words are appearing on trees now. ’Cause last I checked, that’s not standard Bat-protocol.”

Damian folded his arms, expression caught somewhere between disbelief and scientific curiosity. “It’s not magic. I would have felt it.”

Cassandra, standing a few steps behind, traced her gloved fingers over the glowing bark, her movements hesitant—like she was touching a ghost. “It’s real,” she signed, then added aloud, softly, “Steph.”

That broke something in Dick. He dropped to his knees beside the tree, pressing a shaking hand against the bark. “He’s alive. He has to be alive. That’s his handwriting—I’d recognize it anywhere.”

Jason crouched beside him, squinting. “So what, they’ve been living here this whole time? What, we just missed them for months?”

Tim, meanwhile, had gone eerily quiet. He stepped forward, took a small utility knife from his belt, and began to carve into the wood beneath the message.

WHERE ARE YOU? WHAT HAPPENED?

He didn’t even blink while doing it—just wrote like he’d been preparing for this moment in his head every night for weeks.

Cassandra crouched beside him, watching the letters form.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then, slowly, new words began to etch themselves into the bark, thin and sharp—like someone writing from the other side of a mirror.

WE DON’T KNOW. WE THINK WE’RE IN A PARALLEL DIMENSION. WE CAN SEE YOUR FOOTPRINTS.

Jason froze mid-step. “…Parallel dimension? Seriously?”

Tim’s knife slipped slightly as he stared at the answer. “Of course. It makes sense.”

Jason scoffed. “No, it doesn’t! It’s nonsense!”

“Think about it,” Tim said quickly, turning toward him, eyes alight the way they got when he was mentally ten steps ahead of everyone else. “Everything that didn’t add up—how the coordinates never matched, how every heat signature phased in and out, how time stamps didn’t align. It’s not just an island—it’s another layer of reality. We’ve been tracing echoes of them this whole time.”

Jason blinked at him. “That’s not an explanation, that’s a sci-fi pitch.”

“Welcome to our lives,” Damian muttered.

Tim ignored them both, scribbling another question:

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN THERE?

Seconds later, the answer appeared.

28 DAYS. THE ISLAND’S WRONG. THE TIDES MOVE BACKWARDS. STEPH THINKS IT’S A SIMULATION OR SOMETHING ELSE.

Cassandra leaned closer, eyes narrowing at the precision of the letters. “Steph’s theory,” she murmured. “Always patterns.”

Dick’s throat tightened. “He said twenty-eight days… He’s keeping count.”

“Of course he is,” Tim said quietly. “They all are.”

Jason crossed his arms. “Yeah, well, I still don’t get it. If they’re in some kind of mirror world or whatever, how come they can see our footprints and we can’t see theirs?”

“Because the dimensional planes might not overlap perfectly,” Tim said, as if that explained everything.

Jason blinked. “...Okay, nerd, translate that to English.”

Tim sighed. “It’s like—imagine two TV screens showing the same scene, but one’s half a second behind. They’re seeing echoes of us, we’re seeing echoes of them. But when both sides act at the same time—like now—the connection syncs for a moment.”

Jason stared. “You’re seriously saying we’re writing fanmail to ghosts.”

Damian rolled his eyes. “He’s saying we’re communicating through a quantum phase overlap.”

Jason snapped a finger at him. “That’s exactly what I just said.”

Cassandra smiled faintly at that, the first real smile she’d managed in weeks. “You sound like Roy,” she told Jason.

Jason flinched like she’d hit him. “Hey, don’t start.”

Dick, meanwhile, hadn’t moved from the tree. He’d pulled off one glove and pressed his bare palm to the bark. “Wally,” he whispered again.

The bark shimmered faintly, as if answering. Then new words appeared beneath his hand.

I KNEW YOU’D FIND US. I NEVER DOUBTED YOU.

Dick let out a shaky breath, half laugh, half sob.

“Parallel dimension or not,” he said hoarsely, “I’m getting him back.”

Jason sighed, rubbing a hand over his face. “Yeah, well, if we’re doing this, somebody better tell me how to punch through a dimension.”

“Simple,” Damian said. “We find whoever put them there and make them undo it.”

Tim was already pulling out his laptop, opening every signal frequency Oracle had logged. “That’s the plan,” he said. “Now we just have to find the right crack to break through.”

Cassandra leaned back, eyes on the glowing tree. “They can hear us,” she said softly.

Jason grunted. “Yeah. Let’s make it count, then.”

And for the first time in weeks, the Batfamily’s silence wasn’t heavy—it was charged.

Because now, they had proof.

Their people were alive.

Chapter Text

Deep in the thickest, most tangled part of the forest—where the trees grew so close together they looked like they were trying to hide something—the air was heavy. Damp. Almost buzzing with heat.

The sound of waves couldn’t reach this far, nor could the laughter of five stranded heroes sitting by a fire near the beach. Here, the world was all whispers and rot.

The cult’s camp was small but unnervingly neat—rows of tents built from animal hides, bones arranged like symbols in the dirt, a crude altar in the center made from coral and skulls. The only light came from the blue fire flickering in a pit, burning cold and unnatural.

A man in tattered robes stumbled toward the altar, panting. His hands shook as he clutched a carved wooden talisman shaped like an eye.

“Leader—” His voice cracked. He stopped, forced himself to breathe. “Leader, it’s happened.”

The figure at the altar didn’t move right away.

He was tall, cloaked in something blacker than night, his face hidden behind a mask made of smoothed stone, carved with strange symbols. He sat cross-legged, meditating in front of the fire, motionless except for the faint tilt of his head when the other man spoke.

“...What happened?” The leader’s voice was calm, but it cut through the humid air like glass.

“They—they’ve discovered it,” the cultist stammered. “The subjects—the five castaways. They’ve realized they’re not on the real island. They—uh—they’re communicating with the other side.”

At that, the leader finally moved. Slowly, he rose to his feet. The air shifted. Even the fire seemed to lean away from him.

“How?”

“The Kent one. The older one,” the cultist said, wringing his hands. “He saw footprints that weren’t theirs. He recognized them. He thinks they’re overlapping dimensions.”

The leader stared for a long, horrible moment, and even though his face was hidden behind that stone mask, the other man could feel the fury building behind it.

“And you come to tell me this now?”

The cultist flinched. “I—I thought—”

“You thought.” The leader’s voice was silk wrapped around a knife. “You thought. You were supposed to watch.”

“I—”

The leader’s hand snapped out, gripping the talisman from the cultist’s trembling fingers. He held it up to the firelight, the carved eye seeming to glow with a pulse.

“They are not meant to awaken to this truth,” he said quietly. “They are subjects, not seers.”

The cultist swallowed hard. “What should we do?”

For a moment, there was silence. Just the crackling of that ghostly fire. Then the leader turned slightly, staring into the darkness beyond the camp.

“Release it.”

The cultist froze. “Sir, the Beast—”

The leader turned fully now, and even without seeing his eyes, the cultist could feel the cold weight of his stare.

“They’ve seen too much. The Beast will reset the balance. The island must consume what it shelters.”

The cultist hesitated—just long enough for the leader to tilt his head again. A small, deliberate motion that said: Don’t make me repeat myself.

With shaking hands, the cultist reached for the chain attached to a massive stone slab at the edge of camp. It was carved with runes that shimmered faintly, holding something underneath.

Something that breathed.

“Forgive me,” he whispered.

He pulled the chain. The runes glowed red-hot.

A low, rumbling growl echoed from beneath the slab, deep enough to rattle the ground. Then, the stone cracked.

The first thing that came out wasn’t a claw or a head—it was mist. Thick and black, curling upward like smoke. The growl deepened, and the fire guttered out, leaving only the faint blue glow of the runes flickering across the forest floor.

The cultist stumbled back. “Oh God—”

The leader raised a hand. “Do not pray,” he said softly. “It listens.”

And then, something enormous moved in the shadows.

A shape like a nightmare—long limbs, too many eyes glowing faintly in the dark, its body made of something that wasn’t quite flesh.

The leader’s cloak rippled in the sudden wind that rose from nowhere.

“Let it hunt,” he said. “Let it remind them why no one escapes this island.”

Behind him, the cultist bowed low, even as the thing slid into the forest with a sound like whispering leaves and cracking bones.

Far away, on the beach, Wally West suddenly stopped mid-sentence. His head tilted toward the trees.

“...Did you guys hear that?”

But the forest was still.

For now.

The sound came like thunder—low, rumbling, wrong. It wasn’t a storm. It wasn’t an animal either, at least not one anyone had ever heard before. It echoed through the trees and rolled across the sand in long, vibrating waves, the kind that made your chest feel tight just from the sound of it.

Wally froze mid-sentence, coconut shell halfway to his mouth. “...Please tell me that was your stomach, Roy.”

Roy didn’t even look up from the half-burnt fish he was poking with a stick. “Dude, my stomach doesn’t sound like Satan gargling gravel.”

Jonathan was already standing, eyes darting toward the tree line, that half-Kryptonian instinct in him flaring up despite the lack of powers. “That didn’t sound like an animal,” he murmured. “It sounded like—”

“Something big,” Konner finished, rising beside him. His tone was sharp now—alert, serious. The way he got when he slipped into protector mode. “Everyone, pack up whatever you can carry. We need to move.”

Stephanie sighed dramatically, brushing sand from her purple tank top (the “island chic” clothes the robot had left them). “Move? We don’t even know where to go, farmboy. The only thing deeper than that forest is how much I regret not letting Cass teach me how to camp properly.”

“Steph,” Konner said flatly.

“Yeah, yeah, I know—‘Batman would want me to survive.’” She rolled her eyes but got to her feet anyway, grabbing a half-full coconut and her belt. “Still, if I die, I’m haunting whoever thought this was a team-building exercise.”

Wally crouched, palm pressed against the sand. He could feel it—something faint, a rhythmic pulse, like footsteps… but too heavy, too far apart. His skin prickled. “We’re not alone. Whatever that is, it’s moving fast.”

Roy, ever the master of denial, shrugged his bow onto his back. “I’m sure it’s fine. Probably just a wild boar or a mutant raccoon. You know, normal island stuff.”

“Roy,” Stephanie said, “if a raccoon makes that sound, it’s winning an Oscar for best horror performance.”

Konner crouched near the tree where they’d been writing to Tim and the others. The bark was still scarred with messages—burned words written in urgency. His hands shook slightly as he etched another line with a sharp rock.

SOMETHING’S WRONG. IF WE DON’T ANSWER SOON, WE’RE RUNNING. SOMETHING’S IN THE FOREST. TELL TIM I LOVE HIM.

He hesitated, then added one more line—quick, almost messy:

TELL EVERYONE TO STAY SAFE.

Jonathan leaned over his shoulder, reading it. “You think they’ll see it?”

“They’ll see it,” Konner said firmly. “Tim always notices things. He—” He stopped, taking a steadying breath. “He has to.”

Another roar ripped through the air, closer this time—louder. The trees shook. Birds scattered in every direction, screeching, vanishing into the sky like an explosion of feathers.

Stephanie winced. “Okay, new plan: we’re moving. Preferably in the opposite direction of Godzilla’s angry cousin.”

Wally was already shoving makeshift tools and pieces of the robot’s parts into a bag. “I hate to break it to you, but this isn’t how I imagined my tropical getaway. I wanted Dick, some sun, maybe a drink. Not—” He gestured vaguely toward the forest. “—whatever that was.”

“Shut up and run, Wally!” Roy barked, already jogging backward toward the treeline, scanning for movement.

Jonathan glanced once more at the writing on the tree. For a second, he thought—just maybe—he saw something shift, like new words forming in answer. But before he could be sure, Konner grabbed his wrist.

“Come on, Jon!”

They took off through the sand, the wind hot and heavy, the sound of that impossible roar chasing them into the trees.

Behind them, the waves crashed against the beach, indifferent. The writing on the tree still burned faintly in the bark.

WE’RE RUNNING. I LOVE YOU.

And just before the next gust of wind blew through, faint letters shimmered back, unseen by them—like someone, somewhere else, was answering.

WE’RE COMING. HOLD ON.

The cave was dead quiet except for the sound of typing — fast, angry typing. The kind of typing that sounded like a declaration of war.

Tim’s fingers blurred across the keyboard, eyes glued to the screen, his jaw tight enough to crack. The hum of the Batcomputer reflected off the walls, casting blue light over his face — pale, tired, furious.

"Okay," he muttered under his breath. "Parallel dimension, distorted energy signature, communication through temporal frequency distortion—" He slammed his hand on the desk. “—and now something with teeth is after them. Great. Fantastic. Just another Tuesday!”

“Drake,” Damian said sharply from behind him, voice like steel wrapped in silk. “You are not helping anyone by throwing a tantrum.”

Tim turned his head slowly, like a predator locking onto movement. “I’m sorry, are you implying I should relax while my boyfriend is stuck in an interdimensional pocket being chased by a mystery monster?”

Damian, of course, didn’t flinch. He crossed his arms, leaning against the console with his usual controlled calm — though the twitch of his jaw betrayed him. “I’m implying that you should be strategic. Someone must maintain clarity while the rest of you lose your composure.”

Jason scoffed from where he sat slouched on the armrest of a chair, tossing one of his pistols up and catching it repeatedly. “Oh yeah, clarity. That’s what this situation needs. Meanwhile, my maybe-boyfriend — not that he is — is apparently getting chased through a tropical hellscape by a freaking kaiju. So yeah, real zen right now, Demon Brat.”

Damian’s eyes narrowed. “You’re deflecting.”

Jason pointed his gun at him — not threateningly, more like punctuation. “And you’re projecting.”

“Boys,” Dick’s voice cut in, warningly — but it was shaking. Not from humor. From frustration.

He was pacing. Hard. Each step echoed across the cave floor. His knuckles were white around a Batarang he’d been gripping for the last ten minutes. He looked like he was about to punch a hole in the nearest wall — or, honestly, reality itself. “I swear, if someone doesn’t tell me who or what took Wally soon, I’m gonna—”

“—go full crisis event?” Jason offered helpfully. “’Cause I’d pay to see that.”

Dick shot him a glare so sharp it could’ve cut steel. Jason held up both hands, smirking. “Kidding. Mostly.”

Meanwhile, Cassandra — who hadn’t said a single word since the message appeared — was already halfway up the steps toward the hangar.

Tim finally noticed. “Cass? Where are you going?”

“Zatanna,” she said simply, her voice quiet but absolute.

“She’s performing in New York tonight,” Dick said immediately, eyes darting toward the big monitor as if checking a mental map. “You’re gonna fly the Batjet there alone?”

Cassandra didn’t even slow down. “Yes.”

Jason whistled low. “Guess we know who’s winning the ‘most emotionally stable’ award tonight.”

Cass stopped, turned slightly, and gave him one of those tiny, knowing smiles — the kind that said you’re lying to yourself and I can see it. Jason’s smirk faltered.

“She’s right,” Damian said suddenly. “Zatanna’s our only practical option. If magic is involved, she can locate the dimensional distortion faster than our sensors.”

Tim exhaled shakily and rubbed his temple. “Okay. Fine. Yes. Zatanna. That’s— that’s good. I can reconfigure the data logs to match whatever dimensional resonance she finds.”

“Translation?” Jason asked.

Tim didn’t even look at him. “Translation: I’ll be busy, don’t talk to me.”

Jason snorted. “You’re cute when you’re bossy.”

“Jason,” Dick said again, more warning this time.

Jason spread his hands. “What? Just saying. The guy’s about to hack the multiverse, least I can do is appreciate the effort.”

Tim gave him a look that could’ve frozen fire. “You can appreciate it quietly.”

Dick stopped pacing long enough to rest a hand on Tim’s shoulder, squeezing gently. It was rare — one of those big brother moments that carried all the weight of shared trauma and sleepless nights. “We’ll get them back, Tim. We always do.”

Tim swallowed. “Yeah, but we’ve never had to fight through dimensions before.” He blinked rapidly, staring at the monitor again — where faint, burned letters still shimmered across the digital projection of the tree bark. We’re running. I love you.

The words had burned themselves into his mind.

He clenched his fists. “Whoever did this—whoever took them—is going to regret ever touching him.”

Jason grinned, dark and feral. “Now that’s the spirit. Tell you what, you find ’em, I’ll shoot ’em. Teamwork.”

“Maybe you can confess your feelings while you’re at it,” Damian muttered under his breath.

Jason turned. “What was that, gremlin?”

“Nothing,” Damian said coolly, though a faint smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Merely an observation. You’ve been particularly irritable since Roy vanished.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I just don’t like seeing my friends get kidnapped by creepy cultists!” Jason snapped — a little too fast.

“Right,” Dick said dryly. “That’s all it is.”

Cass had disappeared by then, the Batjet engines already starting to roar to life above them.

The rest stood in silence for a moment, the tension thick enough to choke on.

Tim stared at the words glowing faintly on the screen, his reflection fractured across the glass. We’re running. I love you.

He muttered quietly, almost to himself, “Hold on, Kon. Just hold on.”

Behind him, Damian was already pulling up a secondary map, calculating every known energy anomaly across the city. Jason loaded his guns. Dick paced again.

And from above, the sound of the Batjet tearing through the night sky thundered like a promise.

Cassandra was already on her way to bring magic into a problem that logic couldn’t solve.

Because if love couldn’t cross dimensions, then Bat determination sure as hell would.

The cave was silent except for the hum of the Batcomputer, which now felt more like a pulse than a tool—beating, erratic, alive. Tim sat slouched in front of it, eyes wide, hair sticking to his forehead with sweat, and fingers trembling on the keyboard. His lips moved, muttering words under his breath, sometimes repeating sentences over and over, other times cackling quietly at jokes only he could hear.

Damian leaned against the wall, arms crossed, eyes sharp but flicking constantly to Tim. He had his usual mask of calm, but the tightness in his jaw betrayed irritation—and, yes, concern. “Drake,” he said finally, voice clipped. “Sit up. Focus. You’ve been staring at that screen for hours.”

Tim jerked his head toward him, grinning wildly, eyes glittering like broken glass. “Focus? Focus is boring, Damian. Boring! We’re supposed to be rescuing them. Saving them. Fighting them. Finding the exit—or maybe the entrance,” he said, laughing low and weird, “because who even knows which side of the dimension is up? Up is just another word someone made up. HA!”

Damian’s eyebrow twitched. “You haven’t taken your medication in days. This isn’t clever. It’s reckless.”

Tim leaned forward, hands slamming on the keyboard, and then flopped back into his chair with a dramatic sigh. “Reckless is fun. Reckless gets results. But boring—boring gets you dead,” he whispered, almost tenderly, like he was telling a secret. Then he laughed, a low, staccato chuckle, and his fingers flew over the keyboard again.

Damian scowled, stepping closer. “Tim, stop it. You’re not helping anyone in this state. You’re useless like this. You think I like watching you tear yourself apart while the people we care about are in danger?”

“I am helping!” Tim shot back, voice rising in pitch, hands trembling. “I see things you can’t see! I know things! Did you see the footprint? Did you see the writing? Did you—did you—” He threw his hands up, swiping at the air like the words themselves were dancing in front of him. “You don’t understand!”

Damian pinched the bridge of his nose, letting out a long, frustrated sigh. “I do understand! I understand that you’re trying to do too much, and you’re hurting yourself, and—God, you’re going insane!”

Tim’s grin split his face, and his head tilted almost too far back. “Insane? Maybe. Or maybe I’m exactly sane enough to see the truth.” His voice dropped to a whisper that made Damian’s skin crawl. “The others… they think they’re in control. They think. But they’re not. I see it, Damian. I see everything.”

“You’re not seeing anything rational!” Damian snapped, voice echoing off the cave walls. “You’re imagining connections, making patterns out of chaos! You’ve gone off the rails, Tim. You’re supposed to think, not—”

“Think?” Tim interrupted, standing suddenly, pace wild, pacing around Damian in erratic circles. “Think is for people who don’t have to save the people they love. Think is for people who don’t have to deal with parallel dimensions, cults, beasts—monsters! I see them! I hear them! I know exactly what’s happening, and if I don’t act—if I don’t break the rules—we’ll lose them!”

Damian’s calm finally cracked. “Break the rules?! You’re breaking yourself, Tim! You’ve done nothing but tear yourself apart for three days without medication! Look at you! You’re a mess—completely unhinged—do you even realize what you’re doing?”

Tim stopped, breathing hard, head spinning slightly as he whirled toward Damian. And for a moment, the grin was gone, replaced by a flicker of vulnerability, almost human. “I… I can’t… not do this. Not now. Konner… Jon… Wally… Stephanie… They’re out there, running, being hunted. And I—” His voice cracked. Then he laughed again, quiet but chilling. “I have to do something. Anything!”

Damian’s hands clenched at his sides. He hated this. He hated seeing Tim like this, the boy who usually had everything calculated, who was the steady one, the strategist, reduced to a manic storm of panic and obsession. “Then we do it smart. You don’t get to destroy yourself while doing it!”

Tim tilted his head, eyes narrowing, and for a heartbeat he looked like the old Tim, sharp and calculating—but then the mania slid back in, the grin returning, the jittering hands. “Smart? Smart is boring! Smart doesn’t save people—it doesn’t grab the reins and ride through fire! You want smart? Fine. I’ll be smart, but…” His voice dropped, sweet and dangerous. “…I’m still me. And me, Damian, is not bored. Me is… chaotic. Me is unstoppable. Me is—”

Damian pinched the bridge of his nose again, whispering, “God help us all.”

Tim’s hands clenched the edge of the Batcomputer console, knuckles white, eyes wide and bright. “Yes,” he whispered. “Yes, it will. It has to.”

Damian backed away slowly, his cape brushing the cave floor. Calm and collected on the outside, but inside… inside he was terrified. Not for himself. Not for the Batfamily. But for Tim. For the man he trusted to lead them, the boy who loved Konner, the strategist who was slowly unraveling right in front of him.

And in that cave, surrounded by blinking screens and shadows, Tim Drake’s laugh — low, wild, and tinged with mania — filled the air like a storm ready to break.