Dark Matter

Dick Grayson paces the perimeter of his one bedroom apartment in Blüdhaven. It’s a barren mess of a place; clothes, books, and his utility belt are strewn across the well worn couch and part of the floor. Starfire is sitting on the arm rest, cross legged, perfectly balanced, and watching him with deep concern. He glances at her and sighs, rubbing the back of his neck.

“You don’t have to stay here, you know. I’m safe now.”

“That remains to be seen,” she says quietly. “In my experience, assassins are not so easily chased away from their intended target.”

“Kory--”

“I am not leaving you,” she says, her tone calm, warm, and final.

Despite everything, despite the pain, and grief, and guilt, the warmth that follows her words makes him smile. It’s brief, and small, but it’s there. “Right. Okay.” He pauses for a moment and says, quietly, “Thank you.”

She smiles at him, and starts to say something when someone knocks on his door. Dick is instantly tense and alert, stalking towards the door warily. Starfire stands and then floats towards the high corner of his apartment, wreathing her hands in silent flame. She hovers in a spot that gives her a clear shot at the door, but limits the view of whoever is standing in the hallway. Dick waits until she gives him a little nod--essentially saying I’m here, I’ll protect you--before he opens the door.

It’s Tim, rosy cheeked from the cold, and shivering in the breezeway outside of Dick’s apartment. He brushes the ice and snow out of his hair and visibly relaxes when he sees Dick.

“Hey,” he says, his words tumbling out in a rush. The air is cold enough to steal his breath, and Dick can hear his teeth chatter. He blinks at the apartment behind Dick, squints, and then relaxes before adding, “Hi, Kory.”

“Hello, Timothy,” Starfire replies warmly.

Dick grabs Tim’s arm and pulls him inside, shutting the door behind him. “Jesus, Tim, you just got over a cold. What the hell are you doing out here? You should be at the manor.”

Tim pulls off his scarf and coat, tossing them over a dining chair in Dick’s kitchenette. He shrugs. “I wanted to check in on you. You haven’t been answering your phone. We’re all a little worried about that. Including Alfred.”

That last gets him a side eye. It’s a rare Batkid that doesn’t immediately buckle under extreme guilt when someone points out how their actions are upsetting Alfred. Including Bruce himself. Dick sighs, rubbing his eyes.

“I needed some time away from Gotham. I think I’ve earned that, considering everything,” Dick mutters.

Tim gives him a sympathetic look. “Yeah, I know. But you know Bruce, too. He’ll come get you when he realizes you aren’t at the manor. Jason, too.”

“God, that’s going to be a disaster,” Dick mutters. He pauses. “How is Jason?”

“He’s barely said more than three words to Duke. He blames himself,” Tim says with a sigh, dropping down on top of the clean laundry pile on Dick’s couch.

Starfire resumes her earlier position on the couch, dismissing the flames around her hands with a casual flick of her wrists. She offers Tim a folded up blanket from the back of the couch, and he takes it gratefully, bundling up in it.

“That makes two of us, I guess,” Dick mutters. He resumes his earlier pacing. “What I don’t understand is why they’ve become so focused now. I’ve been doing this for literal years. And I’ve been in Blüdhaven more often than not lately. Why am I a target now?”

“Let’s take a look at the facts,” Tim says, calm and even, the way he gets when he’s found a problem to solve. “Start from the beginning.”

Dick wonders if Tim knows how much he sounds like Bruce when he speaks like that. “What beginning? This came out of nowhere.”

“Let’s start with the weird stuff. It’s been going on for awhile,” Tim suggests. He offers a brief shrug. “Weirder than usual, at least.”

He takes a deep breath. “Right. From the beginning of the weird stuff: Earlier this summer, weird bat mutants show up and attack different parts of the city, looking for something. Most of them are killed or disappear within two weeks. Late summer and early fall, Bruce is called away from Gotham because of Justice League business. Superman and Wonder Woman went off the grid--”

“Maybe just Gotham stuff,” Tim suggests. “I doubt Superman or Wonder Woman have anything to do with Gotham.”

A fair point. They’ve always been very localized. Superman and Wonder Woman barely even visit Gotham. “Okay. The bat mutants disappear, the gangs start getting riled up, and then someone blows up the docks trying to smuggle in kryptonite.”

He pauses. That was the first night he met Peter. He can still see the scene: Peter, standing on a roof ledge, looking down into the city with a frighteningly focused expression on his face. His startled jump when Nightwing spoke to him. He’s not sure if Peter was going to jump or not--the kid’s legs were braced for a jump, at least, so there was a good chance of it happening--but he’s glad he ran into him before it happened.

“Kryptonite, which we still haven’t found,” Tim remarks.

“Which we still haven’t found,” Dick confirms, pacing again. “I hope you warned Connor about that.”

“Of course I did. Haven’t you noticed he hasn’t been around much?” Tim replies dryly. He pauses and frowns for a moment. “Actually, he still hasn’t answered that message I sent him about it. That’s not like him.”

“Maybe he’s been busy trying to help Clark?” Dick suggests.

“No, he would have told me,” Tim says firmly. He sighs, rubbing the back of his neck; a sure sign of his anxiety. Conner’s silence is definitely bothering him. “I’ll have to find him when things calm down around here.”

Fair enough. Dick is about to continue when Starfire speaks up.

“Would the kryptonite not be a concern for Superman?” she asks, frowning.

“Normally, yes, but he was missing when it showed up at the docks,” Tim says. “Connor’s the only Kryptonian that shows up in Gotham. And even that isn’t exactly on a regular basis. It’s way more likely that the kryptonite is being used as a power source.”

“Oh,” Starfire says. She doesn’t sound entirely convinced, but she doesn’t press on. Merely frowns in thought. A crease forms between her eyes. Dick’s always thought that crease is adorable.

“Right,” Dick says, pacing again. “Bat mutants. Explosion at the docks. Traces of kryptonite in the explosion. Then the break out at Arkham Asylum while Bruce is out of town handling League business. All of the escapees immediately start to work together and coordinate plans. Not just spur of the moment alliances, either. Active cooperation.”

“Focusing on physics labs, energy sources, and destabilizing Gotham. More than usual, that is,” Tim says. “Spider-Man found some plans. They’re trying to build something.”

“Which is also massively weird,” Dick mutters. “Someone breaks out most of Batmans’ worst enemies and manages to get them to agree to work for them. On top of that, they convince them to work together. Not even Bane managed that.”

“And they were all aimed at you,” Starfire says quietly.

Tim frowns at the name, squinting at the far corner. “Actually, are we sure they were aiming for you and not Spider-Man?”

Dick stutters, almost stumbles. In an instant, he sees it all again, hears it, feels it. His own breathless grunt when Spider-Man drives a shoulder into his side, the feel of the gravel when he rolls back to his feet, the shaky green of the laser dancing over Spider-Man’s side, the thundering crack of the sniper rifle--

Kory is suddenly there, holding his hand. She murmurs softly, “Richard.” and he comes back to himself with a start.

“They were aiming for me,” Dick says. “Spider-Man wouldn’t have gotten hit if he hadn’t pushed me out of the way.”

Tim starts to say something else, pauses, and then nods. Dick can all but see him put ‘Spider-Man’ as a topic directly into a box labelled ‘don’t talk about this.’ He clears his throat.

“Okay, but this didn’t start tonight,” he says.

“No, it started with Bane,” Dick says. He keeps his hand in Kory’s, intertwining their fingers and idly drawing a thumb across her knuckles while he thinks. He freezes. “Shit. Bane. Have we heard anything from him?”

“No,” Tim says. He pauses, then snatches up his phone. He unlocks it and starts to tap away at the screen. “We last saw him in Old Gotham with Joker and Scarecrow. That was before Killer Croc attacked the school. He’s been a secondary concern ever since--”

“And isn’t that a little weird?” Dick asks. Silence follows his question and he turns to face the couch, still holding Starfire’s hand. Tim is frozen in place, pale and stiff and terrified. “Tim? What’s wrong?”

“I can’t connect to the Manor’s servers,” Tim says, staring at his phone.

“What?” Dick asks, his grip on Starfire’s hand growing tight.

“Someone’s cut off the network. Babs can’t get in. Neither can Duke or Jason or anyone else. We were cut off twenty minutes ago,” Tim says. He grows more agitated by the second, shifting from one app to the next on his phone. “The BATCHAT is offline. I can’t pull up the manor’s security system. That isn’t supposed to be possible, at all.”

“Suit up,” Dick orders, snatching his own suit off of the couch.

“Will you be able to make it there in time?” Starfire asks, frowning.

“Probably not, no,” Dick answers. “Can you--”

“I’ll carry you,” she says.

* * *

Something happens as Peter sleeps. There’s a distant clunk, and the lights go out, along with the furnace. The manor is suddenly filled with the peculiar sort of silence that only comes from a home deprived of power. A few seconds later, Peter starts awake with a weak and startled cough. His senses are going haywire. It takes him some effort to get up, and he gets the strange feeling that there are nearly a dozen people standing around him, yelling at him to wake up, to move, to defend himself. They fade away as dreams often do shortly after waking.

But the electric buzz of his spider senses does not. In fact, it only grows stronger and louder until a shot of adrenaline chases away the fogginess of his half asleep mind. He shoves the blankets away, stands, sways, and catches himself against the bed. His borrowed Superman shirt clings to his chest and back from sweat, and he’s absolutely freezing. He fights back a shudder as he pushes sweaty hair out of his eyes and takes in a deep breath. He nearly bends over from the effort to keep from coughing. There’s a distinct rattling sound to his lungs that wasn’t there earlier. How did he manage to get sicker while sleeping? He muffles a coughing fit against the inside of his elbow. The coughs sound suspiciously like chuckling. He decides to not think about that. Not right now. Something is very wrong at Wayne Manor.

The manor suddenly seems too large without light. The darkness is held at bay by the snow outside, but the interior is dim and shadowy. Peter tenses, falling into a light footed crouch as he moves towards the door, pressing his ear against it. He can hear voices, but they’re muffled by distance and the dark. One deep, and hard, and cold. Another, much younger, with a slight accent that Peter can’t place. And then Alfred’s, raised in alarm.

The deep voice speaks, and Peter’s danger sense spikes hard. He braces himself against the wall, closes his eyes, and manages to get control of his breathing before slinking down the dark hallway and over to the stairs. It’s hard to place where the voices are coming from; the manor is soundproofed well, and it carries echoes in such a way that he can’t place them. The damn place is designed like a medieval fortress in some respects.

So he relies on his senses instead, and finds himself in a shadowy hallway, just outside of a parlor. He’s crouched beside an end table, peering into the room from behind a massive marble bust of Bruce Wayne. A kid, no older than eleven, who could be Bruce Wayne’s clone were it not for the deep brown of his skin, is tied to a chair, reeling with sickness and, judging by his heartbeat, two seconds away from a total freakout. Alfred is sitting across from him, also tied to a chair, clenching his jaw, staring up at the third man.

And the third man---

Jesus Christ, he’s the fucking Hulk. Peter finds himself staring up at a man nearly seven feet tall and absolutely bristling with muscle. He’s wearing combat boots, cargo pants, a tank top that strains against his muscles, and a luchador helmet. The helmet’s eyes glow dimly in the dark, letting out a gentle red light over the man’s captives. A thick tube protrudes from the back of it, snaking down the length of the man’s back and into a small pump clipped on the man’s belt. Bright green fluid flows through the tube; Peter can see the man’s muscles throb in time with the pump.

He’s the fucking Hulk on steroids.

“There is nothing personal in this, you understand,” the man says. He settles his massive hands on Alfred’s thin shoulders. “But someone in this city has a particular item that my new friend deeply desires. An ancient thing. He told me I would know it if I saw it. I know Mr. Wayne has quite the artifact collection.I intend to find it. And to leave him a message.”

He raises his hands and grips Alfred’s head. The old man looks shockingly frail in Bane’s grip. “I will start with you. It will be quick. The people of Gotham need their spirits broken, and I will start with their favorite playboy and his family.”

“Please. Not in front of the boy,” Alfred begs.

Okay, Peter’s heard enough. He grabs the marble bust, rears back, and then launches it at the Hulk-like figure looming over the old man. It strikes the side of the man’s head with a heavy thump, making him stagger back and away from Alfred with a snarled curse. It doesn’t seem to do much more than that, which is probably a bad omen for the rest of the fight.

Whatever.

“Pick on someone your own size, asshole!” Peter shouts. Well, the first half is a shout. He rapidly runs out of breath by the end of the sentence and barely chokes out the last word before smothering a cough.

The kid’s head whips around to face Peter, his dark eyes widening in shock for a moment before he begins to shift in his chair, wriggling against the tight restraints tied around his chest and middle. Alfred spares a glance at Peter, his face pale.

“Peter--”

The large man faces Peter, flexing his hands, nostrils flaring in rage. The pump at the man’s waist is working overtime, and Peter can all but hear the guy’s massive heart thumping.

“You aren’t one of Wayne’s children. You idiot. You could have survived this if you’d just stayed out of it,” he remarks, stalking towards him. “Now I have to kill you.”

“You’ll have to catch me first, prick,” Peter says. He sees the man pause at that and turn to consider Alfred and the kid. That’s not good. Peter grabs the end table the bust had been resting on and throws that at him, too. The wood is finely made and heavy and unbelievably expensive. “Hey! Tough guy! You forget you were in a fight or what?”

The man bats the table away with a snarl and stalks down the hall towards Peter, hands clenched into fists. The man is huge. The Hulk might be taller, but Peter’s pretty sure this guy has the same amount of muscle on him. He keeps a healthy distance between them, backing away from the man and drawing him further and further back into the hallway and away from Alfred. He hears someone in the dining room slip free of their bonds; either the kid or Alfred, Peter can’t tell. Shortly after that, he hears a button gently click into place.

A panic button. The police or maybe some private security force should be on their way.

But with the blizzard outside, who knows how long it’ll take for them to get here? He’ll have to stall until Alfred and the kid get into a panic room or something. They should have one of those, right? Rich people always have some weird safety box to hide in during disasters. And ‘Hulk On Steroids’ definitely meets that criteria.

He’s in no shape to fight. He’d be hard pressed to fight a giant like this even on his relatively few good days in Gotham, and today is definitely not a good day. So he’ll just have to rely on his charming personality to keep from getting pummeled to death.

“So, before we start hammering at each other, what’s your name?” Peter asks. The man is closing the distance between them steadily. Peter is rapidly running out of hallway to back away from.

“I am called Bane. I won’t ask for your name. You are an unfortunate diversion that will be put into place and soon forgotten,” Bane sneers.

“Well, someone has a high opinion of themselves,” Peter remarks. “You’re acting like you’ve already won.”

"Everyone in this manor is already dead. Who would stop me? You? You won't last longer than five seconds against me."

He's right. Peter might stand a decent chance if he was in good health and in practice. But he's not; he's wheezing, feverish, and his limbs feel impossibly heavy. Which just means the fight is slightly uneven.

Peter smirks, falling into a loose boxer's stance that Rhodey and Happy had shown him once upon a time. When he speaks, his accent comes through thick as mud. "Pal, I could do this all day."

He can't. He'll be lucky if he's standing and capable of coherent thought in the next five minutes. But giving up means the kid and Alfred are killed, and Peter won't let that happen. So Peter tries to stand straight, dressed in a sweaty Superman shirt and sweatpants.

The shirt isn’t much defense. The first punch hits him squarely in the chest. He can feel his ribs creak from the force of it, and all of that coughing and wheezing comes out full force. Bane has, essentially, beaten him with one punch. And it’s not even his strongest punch; the man was clearly holding back.

Bane has him dead to rights.

Help me, Peter thinks. A strange tension tugs at the back of Peter’s eyes, as if he’s using an overextended muscle, stretched to its absolute limit. But help does come.

Bucky Barnes appears out of an explosion of orange and gold light. He drives his fist into Bane's stomach, digging his metallic knuckles up and under the man's ribs in a strike to his liver. Bane wheezes, drops Peter and staggers back, clutching his abdomen. Bucky spin kicks Bane across the jaw, knocking him back, and then disappears.

Peter, gasping for breath, falls into a coughing fit strong enough to keep him on the ground. Deep, wracking coughs, sabotage his every breath. The worst of them sound like bitter laughter.

Something dark flashes by the window beside them. Peter glances at it, frowning. His coughing fit grows worse, and there’s a sharp pain behind his eyes now. One that pulses in time with his heartbeat. It’s getting hard to keep his breath, and harder still to keep his focus.

Bane stands up slowly, snarling furiously at Peter. "You will pay for that--"

The hallway is suddenly filled with the unmistakable sound of a shotgun getting cocked. Half a second later, it’s filled with the sound, light, and smell of a shotgun being fired. Bane staggers forwards by a couple of steps, and then whirls around to face his new attacker. His back is a mess of blood and torn cloth; Alfred isn’t using slugs in his shotgun, but birdshot. And the shot has shredded the thick tube carrying Bane’s steroids.

“You--” Bane starts.

“You have two seconds to step away from the boy before I blow your bloody head off,” Alfred says coldly. He cocks the shotgun again. “The first shot was a warning. The next will be much more final.”

“That little gun won’t kill me,” Bane growls, stalking towards Alfred. He stands in front of a grand window, bleeding profusely from his back. The window looks out into a blur of white and gray; the blizzard is weaker than before, but still going strong.

“No, but he will,” Alfred replies, nodding past Bane.

At first, Peter thinks Alfred is nodding at him. And then he sees the shadow pass by the window, building momentum. A moment later, the window beside them explodes as a black shape launches through it.

Oh thank god, Batman's here, Peter thinks, slumping against the wall. And he didn’t come alone. Red Robin and Nightwing follow him through the window.

The beating Bane gets after that is one for the record books. Batman’s strikes are powerfully brutal, at complete odds with their fight together in the warehouse. He’s not holding back at all, and neither is Nightwing or Red Robin. Bane doesn’t stand a chance against the three of them.

Red Robin does a double take when he sees Peter, and Peter offers him a weak wave before falling unconscious.

* * *

He dreams. And, as always, he walks with another. It's Dr. Strange and Nick Fury this time. They’re walking through the Avengers Compound together. It’s summer here, unlike Gotham, the air pleasantly warm and calm under a sea of stars that, logically, shouldn’t be visible with the bright light of the Compound nearby.

Peter takes a moment to soak in his surroundings, then turns to face Dr. Strange, tilting his head curiously. “You have something to say.”

“You can tell?” Dr. Strange asks.

“It’s getting easier to feel your emotions,” Peter says. He pauses. “For the record, I’m not sure I’m cool with that.”

"You’ll learn to adapt. And you’re right. I wanted to let you know that we can't help you for awhile after this," he says. "We’ve used too much power, stretched our limits. It's weakened us."

"Oh," Peter says, frowning.

"We'll still be here, watching you, but we won't be able to help. Hell, you probably won’t even hear from us," Fury says. He pauses for a moment. "This also means that we can't protect you if you need help."

"That includes your nightmares," Dr. Strange adds.

Peter winces. Nightmares have followed him for most of his life, and they’ve only gotten worse in Gotham. Add in that letter Dr. Strange sent...

Well, he’s not eager to see what the shadows of his mind are going to show him.

“So, on top of everything else, I’m going to have nightmares again,” he says. “Great. We’ll see how long I last at Wayne Manor before they kick me out.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” Fury says dryly.

Peter frowns at him, but goes silent, walking with them. Finally, he asks, “Will I hear or see you guys again? At all?”

“Eventually, yes,” Dr. Strange says. Peter feels his shoulders slump with relief. “But it will take time. We need to recover, and so do you.”

“Right. Okay. I can do that, I think,” Peter says.

“Good,” Dr. Strange says. “You’ll need it.”

And then he snaps his fingers. Dr. Strange and Nick Fury disappear, and Peter falls into a dreamless sleep.

* * *

The steady, calm beep of a heart monitor draws Peter out of his rest. It’s a gradual process; every time he wakes up, the warmth and comfort of the bed pulls him back into sleep. He hears voices sometimes; distant murmurs, low whispers, conversations centered around words like ‘security system,’ ‘his ghosts are gone, man,’ ‘Joker toxin’ and ‘odd blood test results’ mostly. Peter can’t keep track of them, so he sleeps through them.

Until the nightmares start, that is.

It isn’t exactly a coherent dream: just darkness, dust, icy cold, and an overwhelming feeling of dread and despair that robs him of his breath and leaves him clawing at his blankets. He starts awake, kicking at his blankets with a startled gasp that turns into a weak cough. The heart monitor spikes, and Peter takes a moment to catch his breath and his bearings. He’s in a hospital, he can tell that much by the scent of the room alone. There’s a cold sterility to it that lends weight to that assumption. Hospitals are always a little oppressive, no matter how fancy they are.

Peter blinks up at the ceiling, willing his eyes to focus. His head is pounding. His chest is tight and sore; he can feel a massive bruise along the length of his torso, and the tightness from it makes his labored breathing even more difficult. He’s burning from a fever, and shifts restlessly on his bed, accidentally kicking off his blankets.

He lets out a frustrated groan that leads into a wheezing cough.

“Easy,” a man’s voice says, gentle and unfamiliar. The voice is smooth, rich, and carries the same distinctive old money accent that Tim has. The blankets return, the man tucking Peter in gently. “There, better. Are you awake?”

Peter slowly turns his head away from the ceiling and towards the source of the voice. He has to squint against the light and movement; his headache is actually a migraine, which explains why he’s having so much trouble seeing. Ugh.

After a moment, his vision clears, just a bit. He’s in a very expensive hospital room. Half of the lights are dimmed around his bed to at least give the illusion of darkness to let him sleep better. He’s hooked up to an IV (ugh), a heart monitor, and probably something else, but he can’t be bothered to figure out what just yet. He’s also very much not alone; his room is crowded with people.

Duke, Tim, and their brother, Dick, are all sprawled out in chairs and benches at the edge of the room. All three of them are deeply asleep. Steph is near the door, playing on her phone; she glances up when she feels Peter’s eyes on her and gives him a small, relieved smile before standing and slipping out of the room, raising her phone up to her ear.

Peter blinks after her, and then realizes that someone is standing beside his bed. The owner of the voice that helped him with his blankets. He squints up at him.

"Hi, there," the man says, friendly and curious. His suit is tailor made, cut from the finest cloth, and his shoes are polished to a gleam. He's every bit as put together as Tony, though he stands taller and his shoulders are almost as broad as Captain America's. Honestly, he looks like Tony with a protein shake and massive steroid habit. “My name’s Bruce Wayne.”

Peter, laying in his hospital bed, dressed in a patient gown, and confronted with the man he’s stolen from, suddenly feels very out of his depth. "Uh."

The man offers Peter his hand, still with that friendly smile, though he can see the man's eyes wander over Peter's room. Peter takes his hand, offering him a firm, businesslike shake, just the way Tony had taught him. It seems to impress the man. Or, at least, it seems to.

So he has that going for him, at least.

Bruce smiles, releasing his hand. "We haven’t had a chance to meet yet, but my sons have told me all about you. I’m sorry our meeting is happening here, but well, Gotham has been a bit more lively than usual. As I’m sure you’re aware.”

"It’s been a little rough lately, yeah," Peter mumbles, glancing around. Peter has a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“Rougher on some more than others,” Bruce replies. He looks at Peter, and there’s nothing ‘playboy billionaire’ about it. There’s a sharp intellect behind those blue eyes. Peter glances away.

“How’s Alfred?” he asks. “And the kid. Were they hurt?”

“They’re both fine,” Bruce says. He moves away from Peter, grabbing blankets from a cart set near the door and gently placing them over Duke, Tim, and Dick. “Damian activated the alarm system, but Batman, Nightwing, Red Robin, and Starfire were already on the way by the time it reached the police. Starfire and Nightwing are the ones who brought you to the hospital.”

“Oh,” Peter says woozily. “That’s lucky.”

“Lucky for you especially,” Bruce says, spreading the last blanket over Dick before glancing at Peter. “Alfred told me what you did. That was a very brave thing you did.”

“Couldn’t just stand there and do nothing,” Peter says, yawning. “Had to help.”

Bruce tilts his head at that. A small smile forms. “I understand. You should rest.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think I’d better,” Peter mumbles, sinking back into the bed with a weary and slightly wheezy sigh. Bruce pats his shoulder and dims the lights a little more for Peter.

“We’ll speak again soon, Peter,” he says.