The Exposition
Tim aimed another kick at the punching bag, accompanied by several sharp jabs and punches. Tim’s face was perfectly impassive, but his actions betrayed his true feelings. That, and Dick had had years of being this wreck’s older brother— knowing what Tim was really feeling was a point of pride for him. Dick finished wrapping his hands and stepped into Tim’s line of sight. “Come on, give that thing a rest. Spar with me?”
Tim stilled, holding the bag still as he turned to Dick, eyebrow raised. “What’s the point in doing this? Are you trying to get me to discuss my feelings? Cause, if you are, then I don’t see the point. You know what I’m feeling.”
Dick pursed his lips. This might be harder than he thought it would, but Dick was a Bat— stubborn to the very end. “I figured I’d wear you out, that’s all.”
“Then what, force me to take a break?”
Yes.
“What? Don’t be ridiculous!”
Tim clearly wasn’t buying it, but relented regardless. “Fine.”
The two faced off, before Dick lunged forward with a kick. Tim caught it halfway, trying to wrench it to the side, only for Dick to pull himself free and use the momentum to spin around and aim a kick at Tim’s back. Tim took it with a grunt, falling forward slightly before righting himself and punching Dick’s stomach. Dick twisted just a little too late as the punch clipped his side. Dick managed to get a hand on Tim’s wrist and twist it upwards, raising an unimpressed eyebrow. “Can we talk now?” the older Bat asked.
Tim huffed. “Fine, sure. Not sure what there is to talk about, but yeah whatever floats your boat.”
Dick rolled his eyes and released the younger man, who glared at him. Dick was more than accustomed to Damian’s glares by now, so, while intimidating, this did not faze Dick in the slightest. Dick sat cross-legged on the training mat, patting the seat next to him. Reluctantly, Tim joined him, and Dick waited for the younger Bat to start talking. When he didn’t, Dick followed his eyes and found them lingering on the case with Peter’s costume in it. “Ah. I see,” Dick mused.
“Do you though? Do you really?”
“It’s not hard to put two and two together, Tim. I might not have been dubbed as ‘Detective’ by Ra’s al Ghul, but I can do pretty decently in that area. You are upset and think that you have failed Pete, right?”
Tim didn’t answer, which was an answer in and of itself. Dick continued, “Well, if you did, then you’re not the only one. Kory and I were down there with you, you know that. And we hadn’t just gotten the shit blasted out of us with whatever Luthor was firing at us.”
“That’s not Lex.”
Dick squinted at him. “What?”
“I didn’t believe Lex initially when he said it wasn’t him, but I certainly believe him now. In that armor, Lex’s power blasts are green, not that white-yellow color that this Lex was using.”
“Who else could it be?”
“That’s the thing, I don’t know. I just… I don’t know. Maybe it could be a Lex from another dimension? Peter and I… we did catch one of the pieces of tech that the Cadre was trying to get their hands on. It was from Dr. Stone’s old research.”
“Cyborg’s dad?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.” Dick rested his hands on the ground behind him and leaned on them, gazing at the stalactites above him.
“But… I just don’t know, Dick. I don’t like that Peter’s gone, I don’t like not knowing who the leader of the Cadre is, and I don’t like the fact that some of our most powerful heroes have been captured by a madman with a super villain army! You want me to talk about my feelings? Fine, there you go. I don’t know what’s going on, and I…” Tim sighed, shaking his head. “I just don’t know.”
“We’ll figure it out, Tim.”
“Yeah, we will. But it might be too late by then.”
Light was streaming in through the weird stasis field thing that kept them trapped, reflecting off of the icebergs in the distance. Peter sat bolt upright, gasping as his Spidey Sense screamed at him. In the cot next to him, Raven did the same, sucking in a sharp breath as her head whipped towards Peter. “What? Peter, what is it?”
Peter threw the sheets off, crouching on the cot as a portal opened up in front of him. Lex stepped through and the portal closed behind him. Raven was out of bed in an instant, hovering protectively in front of Peter with a snarl, her eyes morphing into two sets of red ones. “If you so much as touch a hair on that kid’s head—”
Raven was blasted to the side, bowling into a sleeping John who was now wide awake. Raven recovered quickly enough to fly towards Luthor, dark magic accumulating in her hands. She threw up a shield in front of them as John stumbled out of bed and immediately started chanting, his hands lighting up with yellow energy and symbols and circles that reminded Peter all too painfully of Dr. Strange. Lex lit his hand with that weird energy and swiped it across the force field, dismissing the half-demon’s magic, causing Raven to stagger back from the backlash. Peter began to back up, only for Lex to grab him roughly by the arm and yank him towards him. Peter pulled back with all his strength, looking at the man with wide eyes when it did absolutely nothing. Peter stuck his feet to the ground; Lex paused, giving an unconcerned glance between Peter and the floor. He tugged again, and Peter grit his teeth as his arm was nearly torn out of its socket.
“I wouldn’t resist if I were you,” Lex remarked nonplussed. “I could seriously harm all the people in this room, Peter, you know that. Let me strike a similar bargain to the one we had last time, shall we? You come with me, and no one gets hurt.”
“We both know you need everyone alive,” Peter stated clinically, ignoring his instincts flaring at the mere thought of his people being hurt.
“Alive, yes, but seriously injured? Their magical energy will remain the same whether they’re whole or not.”
He’s bluffing, he had to be. Surely their magic would be stronger if it wasn’t focused on healing? But, could Peter really take that chance? Peter reluctantly un-stuck himself and let Lex pull him out and into his portal.
Peter squinted at the sudden harsh wind, trying to adjust to the bright sun reflecting off the snow at the same time. Glancing around, Peter realized that they were at the top of the tower-thing Luthor had built. In front of them sat a large metal slab that acted as the connecting points for two metal prongs that stretched into the sky. It almost looked like… “A tuning fork?” Peter whispered.
Ignoring him, Lex shoved Peter onto the human-sized space at the base of the tuning fork. Peter tried not to flinch when metal restraints locked in place, one around his chest, one around his neck, one around each of his upper arms, his forearms, his thighs, and his shins. Peter narrowed his eyes, swallowing. “Are you going to at least let me know what I’m dying for?”
Lex stopped what he was doing and slowly turned to Peter. “I did promise you I would tell you its purpose if you came with me, didn’t I? Very well, I suppose that starts with you seeing who I am.”
Lex twisted a device on his wrist, and the image of the bald man in a business suit faded away. A red-haired man in golden armor was standing before Peter, with the shadows he cast seeming to reflect thousands of stars. “You may call me Alex. I am the son of Lois Luthor-Lane and Lex Luthor Sr. I had to watch them die in front of me, along with everyone else I ever loved. Just as I saw the anti-matter wave coming towards me, I knew I had an option: I could either die like everyone else, or I could try to do something else. So, I cried out for help, and wouldn’t you know it? Someone answered, told me that if I agreed to help him, I would make it out alive. So I did, obviously, and now we’re here.”
Peter summoned his courage. He was going to die anyways, wasn’t he? (Peter was none too happy about the fact that he kept finding himself in situations where this was his instinctive thought.) “That doesn’t tell me what this is for.”
“No, I suppose it doesn’t. I agreed to help Krona see the beginning of a universe. That is what this machine is going to allow me to do, little spider. I am going to recreate my universe, get back everything that was taken from me. The only problem was, I couldn’t just get the power from this universe, I had to take it from other multiverses as well, so until someone from another set of multiverses came along, I was rather stuck. I began to build this machine, and waited. I was expecting to have to wait a century or more, but no, there you were! A being from an entirely different set of multiverses. I knew I needed a power source, a strong one, so I started collecting magic users as I worked on my machine. I needed someone besides myself to hold off the Justice League, with their pesky Green Lantern members, so I posed as this world’s Luthor and I started the Cadre. More than 500 villains sit at my command, can you believe that? Well, a good portion of them are trapped next to your friends down there, but what does that matter? I just need to harness the energy from your universes and your new universes, then I can create my own, bring back my family and everything that I love and cared for. There are other universes, other worlds where these heroes won’t be killed, so what does one set matter? What does one boy matter in the face of a universe?”
Peter was quiet, his mind reeling as he tried to absorb this. “You can’t create a new universe,” he mumbled.
“What was that? Speak up.”
Peter glowered at him. “I said, you can’t create a new universe!”
“And why not?”
“You can’t create something there’s already infinite of, it’s impossible! And even if it wasn’t, the last time Krona built a machine like that, it shattered the universe, breaking it up into an infinite number of tiny pieces, and that was before the machine was able to fully operate! If you do that again, you will destroy everything!”
Peter heard the faintest of whispering, so faint even he couldn’t make it out. Alex’s face twisted, like he had just bitten something sour. “You don’t know that,” he accused.
Strange’s magic flowed around Peter, seemingly reacting to the information, impressing upon Peter that yeah, he did know that. “Yes, I do! And you do too, you’re just too deaf to hear it!”
Alex’s jaw twitched to the left erratically. He grit his teeth, glaring at Peter. “Shut up.”
“No, I’m right and you know it! I know what it’s like to have to leave everything and everyone you’ve ever loved, it fucking sucks! But that doesn’t mean you get to take it out on everyone else. The world moves on and you find a new family, new people to love. I’m sorry you had to go through that, but it’s not worth this. It’s not worth sacrificing the energy needed from millions of universes just to create one! Kronos is lying to you, and you’re just too focused to see it!”
“I said, shut up!” Alex roared, whirling around and socking Peter in the jaw. Peter’s head flew to the right, smacking against the metal painfully. Peter cringed at the taste of blood filling his mouth. He spit the blood to the side, glaring fiercely at Alex.
“Don’t listen to Krona, he’s wrong and you know it. You can be better than him, be better than whatever destroyed your universe.”
Alex spun around on his heel and walked towards the edge of the platform, opening a portal and walking into it without another word. Peter blinked, looking around and pulling at the restraints. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t give, leaving Peter to just kind of sit there in the cold Arctic air, trying to not let his body slow to a crawl. Peter glanced at the tracker Tim had stuck on him, silently begging his family to hurry.