Chapter Text
John Constantine blew out a plume of smoke as he stared at the Justice League. His eyes, casually scanning around the room, were probably showcasing his annoyance with the situation. Bloody capes and cowls. He’d wash his hands of the lot of them if not for the fact that he got paid ten grand per consultation.
And for Z, if they were on again. It built good will either way with her.
Still, this was the fucking stupidest sort of bollocks he’s heard in a good long while. And he felt the need to say so to the most powerful people in the world.
(Once you sucked the Devil’s cock a couple of times and/or had several ill-advised flings with King Shark, you stop feeling the fear of normal humans. Or even normal superhumans.)
“Summoning a deity from another world is batshit,” he said, eyes sliding over to Batman, who had been in a right bloody state the past couple of months. “And, yes, that is a bloody bat pun because I know that this whole fucking idea was Bats.”
Judging by how The Flash grimaced, he was right on the money. Listen, John wasn’t without bloody empathy. Losing one of his little birds to the unholy eldritch ocean of the multiverse was as good as saying that the kid was dead. But the man had taken his paranoia to a whole new level in the interim. He was pretty sure Bats needed time away from all this nonsense.
However, John was a magic consultant, not a psychological one. Even if he had some level of telepathy, he wouldn’t even try to touch Batman’s mind. That just seemed to spell a bad time for everyone involved.
But, still, summoning a deity was a dicey prospect at best. Summoning an alternate universe’s deity was another level of ill-advised bollocks.
“It is said that we need a god associated with both the Sun and liberation in order to stop this curse,” Wonder Woman said, crossing her arms. She didn’t look happy about this either, John noted. However, he could tell there was no talking her out of it. “This one is the only one that we could find within what few texts from other dimensions we have: Nika.”
Well, Sun gods were usually alright in general, so were gods associated with freedom. Z had him look over the curse as well, and it was a nasty bit of ancient magic, done in a dialect no one knew about anymore, let alone spoke. They had no Rosetta Stone in the wings for that.
Still a dicey game, but perhaps better than anything else they could have come up with.
“Zantana vouched for the summoning ritual,” Batman continued, tapping at a tablet. He sounded exhausted, but whether that’s from another of his kids being eaten by the cold and uncaring universe or just everyday wear and tear, no one could really say. Constantine certainly wasn't touching that emotional mess with a twenty-foot pole, not until Bats decided to do something with demons and/or necromancy. “Though she said that you were best at summonings, something about the art of negotiations.”
“Best done with beings that I, at least, have a fuckin’ understanding of,” the warlock groused, but pulled the papers closer to him. The ritual was straightforward enough, and given what he knew of the ill-defined “curse” that would essentially enslave the whole world to some slumbering, dark nasty, it should be removed. “Thing is, I won’t be able to send him back for a month.”
“A month?” one of the other brightly colored heroes said. John didn’t bother to learn their name. They all became the same sort of garish eyesore after a while, and the roster was always changing.
He sighed, tapping some ash from his cigarette into a tray, “One of the ingredients needs to be picked fresh at a specific time and used quickly in concert with the ritual. No way around it. Interdimensional summonings are a fucking finicky business, mate.”
“A month isn’t so bad,” someone said, trying for positivity. It was probably Superman.
John rolled his eyes.
“Do the ritual,” Batman commanded. If he wasn’t footing John’s consultancy fee, then he would have told him to piss off, that he wasn’t his Da. But he was paying him.
While gods of freedom and the sun were generally alright enough, usually pretty fun at parties, there was some niggle in the back of his mind that said this could go either spectacularly well or spectacularly poorly.
Either way, John’s going to make sure that he will be booked and busy for the next month until he has to send the poor sod back. He certainly wasn’t going to babysit a god with the title “He Who Plays The Fool”.
“S’your funeral, Batsy.”
John stood to exit so he could gather the ingredients for the ritual. Either way, he was getting paid and he did his due-bloody-diligence, which was his good deed for the year.
Here’s the thing, because there’s always one with Batman, isn’t there?
Tragedy is carved into his bones, into his story. There really isn’t a way to get around it or through it.
His parents were murdered right in front of him.
A tragedy.
His son was murdered as well, and he couldn’t save him.
A tragedy.
Every relationship he’s ever had, he ruined with his own two hands. Nothing can fix him. The Batman, because he can’t even call himself Bruce in his own head, is too far gone to fix. It’s a sacrifice made to save a city that doesn’t want to be. But he will fight the hopeless fight for The Mission because it's tattooed into his very soul at this point.
But he never expected to wake up from his trip through time.
He never expected to be told that Tim had saved him, but they lost him as well.
That Ra’s al Ghul did something.
There was no body, and there was nowhere on this Earth, in this Universe, that had Tim in it.
Tim lost him and saved him. Bruce lost him again.
Batman Inc. was a convenient excuse to avoid Gotham. He made sure Lucius’ place as CEO was secured. Dick was doing well enough as Batman, and Damian was his Robin. And Bruce wasn’t ready yet for a new Robin.
So he went on international missions and tried to pretend like he wasn’t avoiding home. He didn’t meet Jason’s eyes when Alfred insisted on weekly family dinners, barring the end of the world or extended trips. He lost another son, and he didn’t even have a body to bury. He failed Tim when Tim had never failed him.
And there were…things that happened. Things unsaid that Bruce didn’t know or understand, didn’t want to know.
He made up a lie about a motorcycle accident, a coma, paid off doctors who could be trusted, and spun a story that even had Vicki Vale backing off in the face of such clear grief.
The Batman was never meant to be happy.
At least, this Batman wasn’t.
The ritual required drums and paint, and the plant freshly plucked and ready to use. It was an odd sort of beat, Clark thought.
Doom-Dut-Da-Da
Doom-Dut-Da-Da
But Constantine kept beating the drums as he chanted the summoning. As they got further into the ritual, splashes of color seemed to erupt from the instrument. Clark could feel the sort of strange staticky electricity feeling that always accompanied powerful magic. It left him breathless, like all the oxygen was being sucked out of the room, even though he could breathe.
And then a portal appeared, and someone was starting to be pulled through. The god? Clark thought it was the god. The chanting and the drumming seemed to have reached frenzied and frenetic pace. Almost like a beat of a racing heart.
Doom! Dut! Da! Da!
Then, on the other side of the portal, Clark heard a, “FUCK! CAPTAIN!” and “LUFFY!” and “What the actual hell?!” There were more voices in various exclamations and curses.
That was…unexpected. He could feel his shoulders tense at that, preparing for a fight. Nearby, he could see Diana, who tensed with him, and Bruce, who had been tense since the ritual started, go for their weapons.
Constantine continued the drumming and the chanting, though he looked a bit perplexed. Or, less perplexed, and more like an I told you wankers bloody so was on his lips.
In the light of the portal, a second person appeared, hauling the other back. But the hurried tempo of the drums quickly started to make everything feel like a summer camp with the weirdest game of tug of war as the centerpiece. The magic of the spell versus whoever was trying to keep the god on the other side.
“This is new,” Wally muttered under his breath, having taken over as The Flash while Barry was on paternity leave. It was only the inner circle members of the Justice League here. Clark could only agree, though, admittedly, he didn’t have a lot of experience with magical summonings of deities from other universes.
He could see from the corner of his eye that Billy, in his adult form, was biting at the inside of his cheek to stop himself from laughing. Clark’s shoulders eased ever so slightly at that. If the presence from the other side was malicious, then Captain Marvel would be the tensest, besides Bruce.
However, the pull of magic was apparently too strong, as with what seemed like a mighty yank: the god and about ten other people who formed the human tug of war chain were pulled through the portal with a decisive bang on Constantine’s drums. The portal disappeared behind the group.
The motley assortment of folks spilled onto the summoning circle in a tangle of limbs and groans. Clark blinked, seeing what looked like some kind of fish person groaning underneath a large cyborg of some sort.
They were an assortment of bright colors, various states of being clothed, and an odd mishmash of styles.
“My dear Robin,” another voice said theatrically. “Your elbow is in my eye. If only I had an eye for you to take out yohoho! Skull joke!”
“Shitty cook fucking move! Your bony ass is digging into my kidney.”
“Fuck you, mosshead! Chopper, get your hoof off my cheek!”
“YOU GUYS GET OFF OF ME!” bellowed a voice at the bottom of the pile. They barely had time to act before something expanded, which dispersed the bodies that had come through the portal. Everyone was flung every which way from the summoning circle.
A small furry creature in a hat landed in Diana’s arms, who blinked down at it.
It blinked up at her.
“Hello,” Diana said. Clark could tell she was melting. Wonder Woman was weak in the face of something cute and cuddly. The small creature stared up with wide eyes before jumping out of her arms with a yell and scampering to its comrades. It climbed up on the giant fish person, whom Arthur was eyeing curiously.
Clark could only hope that this wouldn’t end in a fight. It was always a pain to repair the Watchtower. And then they would have to redo a training module about property damage.
Again.
In the center of the summoning circle stood a young man, breathing heavily. His red shirt was open, revealing a harsh-looking scar in the shape of an “X” across his chest. He had old cut-off blue jean shorts, a bright yellow sash, and sandals. An old, beat-up straw hat with a red ribbon perched on his head. Sharp, dark eyes with a scar under the left one scanned the room as he took big, heaving breaths.
“That,” he said with all the gravity of a king. “That wasn’t very nice. Whatever you all did. Luckily, we were in port. Otherwise, something bad could have happened to the Sunny.”
Oh boy. This wasn’t going well already.
Damage control, Clark, damage control.
He put on his most comforting smile because, well, it was rude what they did. But there isn’t any sort of summoning check-in from what he was aware of. But something about this young man, the feel of his gaze, the tang of ozone, it had some primal part of Clark riled up.
He knew this was the god.
“Our apologies,” Clark said gently. “We’re in rather desperate straits and needed to summon the Sun God, Nika, to help us. And there is no warning for it.”
Constantine raised an eyebrow at the young man’s questioning look.
“Listen, mate, if I could arrange a time for summonings, then it wouldn’t solve all my problems, but it would stop me having to stay up until three am painting esoterica with chicken blood from the butcher.”
If they got through this okay, Clark was going to get donuts from that hole in the wall in Brooklyn and stress eat them on the globe of the Daily Planet offices.
Nika’s dark eyes blankly considered Constantine, then Clark, then the room at large. He was hard to read. It was different than Bruce’s blank face, which he knew well enough to read the microexpressions. With this guy, however? It was like there were no thoughts behind those eyes to read. There was a sort of terrible pressure in the air, pressing down on his shoulders, and it…
...
Disappeared as Nika’s shoulders relaxed.
He seemed to accept the explanation.
“Oh,” he stuck his little finger in his ear. “Well, why didn’t you say so? That’s me. I guess. Nika or whatever.”
“Luffy,” a voice said. “We talked about this.”
Everyone in the room froze at the sound of the voice.
Because that voice was familiar.
That voice disappeared six months ago when Ra’s al Ghul pushed him from a window with a mysterious device that caused him to vanish before he hit the ground.
Bruce’s voice was like a whip crack in the sudden stillness on the League’s end.
“Watchtower execute lockdown protocol Delta-Epsilon Three.”
Nika (or Luffy? He called him Luffy, was it really him?) and his crew seemed to tense as if expecting battle as the protocols engaged. Two figures, however, didn’t move. One was a woman with a Mona Lisa smile and dark hair and the other…
Bruce stepped forward, pulling down the cowl from his head. It’s such a rare occurrence that even amongst the core members, who knew his identity, seeing his bare face in the Watchtower was always a shock.
Clark was very good at reading Bruce Wayne’s face. He could see something half like hope and half like heartbreak in the slight crease between his eyes. He felt a stab in his heart.
How cruel the world was that Bruce had to know the world’s worst sort of heartbreak. And the miracles tend to be harsher than the man could take.
“Tim?”
Timothy Drake-Wayne smiled.
He looked a little older. No longer the lean kid of seventeen, half insane from grief and desperate to find Bruce. (And did. He did find Bruce.) His hair was longer, a low-hanging ponytail. He was taller, the barest touch broader in the shoulders. His ears were pierced and his posture was open. In his clothes, he looked more like a cool skater punk than the teen CEO that everyone was expecting big things from.
He looked lighter, Clark thought, happier.
Like he looked before, the world kept on taking from him without stopping.
Tim smiled at Bruce, hands in his pockets, surrounded by this strange group that they had summoned from a portal. Working, apparently, with a god.
“Hey, Bruce. It’s been a while.”