Revelations
The results on the screen didn’t make much sense to Jason, or rather, they were so explicitly clear that what they implied didn’t make much sense. Rolling his chair over to a small metal tray nearby he picked up a syringe.
“Hey, Dick, come over here.”
Dick looked over to his brother, eyebrow raised as he approached.
“What do you need littlewi-”
He let out a small yelp as the needle pricked the skin of his upper arm, a tiny hole made in the NIghtwing suit as Jason took a blood sample.
“What the hell man? What’s this about?”
“Need to check if you’re radioactive.”
“ Excuse me?!”
“You’re excused.” Jason rolled back over to the monitor, shoo-ing his brother back towards the others in the cave as he loaded the sample into the batcomputer. “Go play with the others.”
Dick just rolled his eyes, walking over to the batcomputer’s monitor to see what Jason was doing, and mildly concerned that he thought Dick might be radioactive. Leaning down on the back of the chair his head was just above Jason’s shoulder. He was glad to see that Jason wasn’t bristling at this closeness, they had come a long way from how it was when Jason first came back. It would never be quite the same, but for him to be here at all? Dick could be happy with that.
Jason’s focus was all on the screen, now pulling up the results from the blood scan. Three samples were on screen now, on the left was an old one for Dick that was stored in the batcomputer expressly for comparison and safety reasons (every member of the batfamily and even a few outside it had a blood sample recorded just in case), in the middle was one that looked quite similar but wasn’t exactly the same, and on the right was the fresh sample Jason had just taken from Dick.
Jason was too deep in thought to remember to be annoyed at Dick’s closeness right now. Slowly but surely he was arriving at a conclusion but it was not one he liked. The sample on the left was just Dick’s blood, which was all fine and dandy. The one on the right was Dick’s blood from just now, a little different than the one on the left but nothing that couldn’t be explained through the normal amount of mutation, and absolutely nothing worrying.
The middle was where things got interesting. The DNA was broken in such a way that-
“So why are you checking if I’m radioactive?”
Of course the dickwad above his shoulder would break his train of thoughts. He sighed, maybe talking it through out loud would help him spot any possibilities he missed, and Dick would probably be a better conversation partner than the bat-themed rubber duck on the desk’s corner (Tim had gotten it for Bruce as a joke years back, but it had remained a treasured member of the bats ever since).
“This is why.” He pointed to the middle sample of blood, specifically zooming in to the DNA strands, before doing the same to the other two samples for comparison.
“I’m sure you recognize the sample on the left, and the right is the one I just took, but the middle one is from the old ACE chemicals building.”
“You mean the one that got partially destroyed last week?”
“The very same. Bruce wanted me to investigate it so I did. With the scale of the damage the running theory was some sort of drop pod or perhaps some supportive failure that caved the roof in then that weight collapsed the next two or so floors.”
“Okay… so where do I fit in?”
“That’s the problem, you don’t. You’ll note that neither of our theories at the time involved people. The scale of the damage made it unlikely anyone would survive, let alone in condition to get up and leave.”
“And?”
“And so it was a problem when I discovered blood on the scene. That in conjunction with a more thorough examination of the way it collapsed and we’re looking at someone , not some thing that crashed into the building. So I take a sample and bring it back here, and well, here we are.”
“So wh-”
“Shut up, this is where it gets interesting.”
Dick smiled to himself, as much as they all poked fun at Tim for getting dragged way too deep into investigations, Jason could and would do the same thing at times, though it usually involved more anger.
“So, I load up the sample in the middle here, and the batcomputer immediately pings it as yours. At first I thought it was just bugging out but look. These genetic markers here–” He pointed to a spot on the DNA strand, then another spot, “–and here match up perfectly, and it’s like that all the way down the genome. Just listen.”
He hit a button to prompt the computer to check the samples against each other, with a tolerance parameter to ignore base level mutations. A second later and a digital voice chimed out “100% genetic match”.
Jason looked up to Dick to see his reaction, but Dick was too busy looking at the screen in confusion to notice.
“But-”
“Exactly. So at this point I was going to just tell Bruce to fuck off and ask you about it, but it was nagging at me. Right here and here–” He pointed to the screen again. Dick secretly enjoyed the fact that Jason just couldn’t seem to use the cursor to point something out, he had to point at the screen. “–we’ve got telltale signs of radiation damage. You can see the sugar-phosphate backbone of the strand is broken, but instead of the DNA repairing itself or the cell suffering apoptosis, it instead has this sort of additional strand of DNA branching off from the break. And again, it’s like this all the way down the genome. So of course I took the fucking time to check large swaths of it manually, trying to figure out why it was recognizing this as your blood.”
His voice was getting a bit louder now, his expression just a step past frustrated and nearing anger. Anger at the mystery, or at his time being wasted like such, Dick couldn’t tell.
“But I couldn’t find it, everything not on these additional strands matched the sample we had, and now it matches the sample you just gave me. It doesn’t make any sense, this blood is your blood Dick, but I don’t understand how.”
“Well have we tried-”
“Wait! Shut up again!”
Dick smiled to himself once again as Jason sat bolt upright, clearly having had some sort of epiphany. Meanwhile Jason was desperately tapping away at the keyboard, reframing the testing parameters before running it again. With bated breath he awaited the results.
After a few minutes, the computer’s digital voice once again spoke:
“Test Complete. Sample contains 112% expected genetic material. 100% Match to Richard Grayson. 12% unknown. Sample mildly radioactive, far below minimum safe levels for exposure, far above minimum safe levels already within sample.”
“What does that all mean?” Dick asked, not knowing the exact parameters Jason had put in.
“It means that firstly, it’s a miracle the blood isn’t tearing itself apart with that much radiation in it. It’s not enough to actually escape the cells so we’re fine, but the cells frankly shouldn’t be stable. More importantly, it IS your blood Dick. Someone used radiation to affix additional genetic material to your DNA. Precisely 12% of additional genetic material it seems. Someone out there has your blood in them, Dick, and I think we know who.”
–––––
He was staring out a window again, in front of him the vast blackness of space. Stars shimmered in the distance, so unfathomably far away yet still so pretty. Off to the right was the start of a nebula, color seeping into the view before it was cut off by the edge of the window. To the left were asteroids, floating slowly through the void.
It was another dream, of course, he was fairly good at picking up on it at this point. Turning away from the window he was faced with a tragic scene. Before his eyes was rubble and fire and screaming, all eerily silent. People were crushed, in twisted masses of metal, fire was lingering along the edges of the room, and in the middle of it all stood Thanos. His Twisted lackeys around him as one presented him the Tesseract. On the far end of the room Peter could just barely make out Thor, trapped in a mess of metal as he watched on.
He didn’t want to see this. Why was he seeing this?
Out of the shadows to one side came Loki. Slinking towards Thanos and saying something Peter could not hear. For a moment Loki paused, turning towards Thor, before turning back towards Thanos and finishing his approach. It seemed then that he almost kneeled and for a moment, even in what was a dream to him, Peter felt that volent green anger rise in him, his vision turning cloudy, distorted. And then Loki sprung upward, lifting a knife to Thanos’ throat, and in that second all anger left. He had tried to kill Thanos, and for it Thanos began to lift him by the throat, and then it all paused. To his right Peter heard something shimmer into existence, and suddenly there was a hand on his shoulder. It turned him around, back towards the glass and towards Loki. A new Loki. Though he was wearing the same as his counterpart with Thanos, his eyes were older in a way that couldn’t be defined.
“Our second time meeting, little spider, and you dream of the death of my people.” It wasn’t said with menace, or anger, or even sadness. It was for all purposes a matter of fact as he looked out towards his other self, before turning to face the window himself. THere he stood, side by side with Peter as they stared out into the beauty of the universe.
“Why?”
“I do not know, and I do not expect you to either. Perhaps you needed to see me again, and perhaps… Perhaps the cosmos is trying to show me something.” The last part was said with a sigh, as if he had been taught one too many lessons in quite the same manner.
Peter willed himself to look out the window, to forget what was behind him, but in the reflection of the glass he could still make out the silhouette of Thanos, arm raised, and Loki, struggling with all his might.
“What happens next?”
“I think you know, spider.”
For a moment they stood in silence, the god’s hand on his shoulder a grounding force, even in this dream realm.
“How are you here? If this is… If you die?”
“I am the God of Stories. So long as stories of me live on, so do I, even if I am trapped within them.”
“Trapped?”
“You did not think it a coincidence I only show up when you dream of me, did you? I am confined here, in a sliver of your mind. It is either that, or sit alone on the outside of it all.” His eyes grew hazy for a moment, as if he was seeing something far, far away.
“So you’re not real? You’re just part of the dream?”
Slowly Loki came back from his reverie, thinking for a moment before answering.
“I am as real as you are, or as these stars are, or this steel we stand on. It’s all part of the dream spiderling, but for now, for when it matters, it is all real. If you place such importance on the physical than I am only as real as your spider sense is. Untouchable, unseeable, yet present all the same.”
“Why are you being so nice? I mean you weren’t… evil… last time we met, but you weren’t like this. It seems a bit weird for the god of mischief…”
He laughed at that, then slowly he settled into a soft smile.
“Maybe I was a long time ago, but the cosmos seems to have deemed it fit to humble me. Remind me what happens when I live my life being something I’m not. A lesson I learned quite harshly on this very day.” For a moment he turned to look behind them, back where the Mad Titan stood with the God of Mischief in his hand.
“Why are you here, Loki?”
“Because you dreamed of me. And believe it or not I’d prefer your company over the emptiness I mentioned before. And because I think, to some extent, you need me. To help you with these dreams and visions of yours at the very least, if not more.”
“You can help with the dreams?”
“I can’t prevent them if that’s what you mean, but I can help you understand why it’s happening. Perhaps even control them somewhat.”
Peter perked up at that.
“When can we start?”
“Now I suppose, though I fear you;re expecting the wrong thing, spiderling. This isn’t training, it’s simply me explaining. What you do with my explanations, if it's even possible to do anything at all , is up to you.”
“Alright alright, just start explaining already.”
Loki sighed, putting a hand up to his forehead in exasperation before he turned towards Peter.
“Alright, let’s start at the beginning. These dreams of things you’ve never seen. They started when you passed between dimensions, yes? Your universe kicked you out and a new one took you in. Quite by accident I suspect but all the same it took you in.”
Peter just nodded.
“Right, to be clear, most people. No, ignore that. Most beings could not survive a trip between universes. It’s quite frankly extraordinary that you did so, even with your healing factor. Being that as it is, we now come to the matter of what exists between universes. Now you may think you know the answer, that it’s nothing. Nothing exists between the universes. But it's not nothing spiderling, it's everything. Everything, all at once. Time does not progress linearly outside the universe. Space does not behave as you might expect it to. Universes take everything from this space between and all they really do is impose rules on it. All of this is a rather long winded way to say that you’ve been exposed to quite literally everything. Of course the mortal mind cannot comprehend this, and so large swaths if not all of it go missing, never to be remembered.”
“Now you, spider, happened to have both extraordinarily good and bad luck, as well as a healing factor. So it’s not quite the surprise it should be that your mind is retaining some of that, slowly processing it all in the background of your day to day life. These dreams of things you’ve never seen aren’t just dreams. This happened—“ he gestured to the scene around them. “—and not just this. I cannot tell you what you’ll see or remember or feel, but you are in tune to things that are outside the rules of time and space, and while you may not be able to interact with them, you can feel them. You’ve already experienced it once in your waking world with that door.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I’m a God, spiderling, and a God in a rather unique position at that. I exist either in the void that is everything between worlds or in the incorporeal stories of me. There is a reason I went from God of mischief to God of stories.”
Peter wanted to ask more, but either Loki was tired of talking or had nothing else to say as the dream around him begin to darken into uniform grey, the grey of the back of his eyelids as he woke up in the broken down offices once again.