Chapter Text

CH. 1

“Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives. The real service to the state is to detect it in embryo.”

Isaac Asimov. Foundation.

Gotham City 

T-minus 00:00:01:4:02:15:23 

When the Monolith appeared, it did so all at once. 

There was no warning - no strange readings, no light show, no suspicious stirring of Rogue activity. There was no opportunity for prevention or interception. There was, in the instant before, unoccupied space: the empty weave of it that was not empty in truth, that carried life-giving nitrogen and oxygen and water alongside smothering methane and ozone and choking particulates. There was a chaos of matter organized by thermodynamic principle, by electromagnetism and gravitational forces, and, too, by human perceptions and efforts that shape the middling of reality.  

All of that entropy organized, in only the loosest of terms, into a lake and a park, and the great enclosing wall of urbanity that surrounded it. 

Then there was the Monolith. 

It appeared abruptly over the east end of the reservoir, and its appearance was announced with the shattering sound of expanding, displaced air. The explosion shattered windows and triggered car alarms in its vicinity. Its appearance sparked a commotion of wings and clouds of flying bodies and avian screeching as every free bird in the city fled. 

And it stayed there, hung ponderously and immobile. A hexagonal column whose height split the sky, its ends cut at opposing angles into faceted tips. It was a strange, deep grey, a color that captured and held that peculiar liminality of dusk. 

The Monolith hummed . It began at the moment of the Monolith’s appearance. It was a deep, resonant thing that was felt in the depths of one’s chest. It felt like being grasped by the internal structure of the spine, like having the delicate nervous architecture of it pulled apart and taut and forced to sing with animal fear and apprehension. 

And this Monolith was not alone. 

T-minus 00:00:01:4:02:14:40

“Oracle, what the fuck am I looking at?” Tim’s body was held stiff with tension as Babs remotely minimized and rearranged his digital workspace to reveal a multitude of camera views of Robinson Park and the strange, floating spire that seemed to have just appeared over the reservoir’s east end. 

“No idea. This thing just appeared there without any warning. Police are just starting to mobilize; patching you into comms now.”

Tim spared a moment’s instinctual paranoia and hit the switch under his desk that would send his office into lockdown and alert Tam of an emergency. Then the comm unit in his ear sparked to life. 

“- new rogue?” He caught the tail end of  Duke’s question, alarmed. As their dedicated daytime patrol, he was most likely already en route himself. 

“This thing? No way,” Steph cut in. 

“We don’t know enough to-” Dick began, but was himself interrupted. 

“What I know is it’s right on the edge of my turf,” Jason sounded pissed , but if Tim had to guess that anger was at least halfway composed of fear. It was good to know, though, that in a sufficiently large emergency the Red Hood could be persuaded to join comms. 

“Everyone. Status report,” and there was Bruce. Tim let the details mostly wash over him as he clicked through the camera angles Babs had provided. This thing only appeared in the last minute or so - there wasn’t going to be any significant data yet. When it came to him, he responded that he was in his office and preparing to mobilize.

“Alright,” Bruce said once everyone had provided their report, “We’re engaging contingency UE-X-0A. That may change as new information emerges. Everyone keep on comms.”

Contingency UE-X-0A was the first protocol to engage with the appearance of an unidentified entity, particularly when that entity seemed nonhuman or extraterrestrial in nature and was not immediately accompanied by the appearance of whoever was responsible. Tim figured this floating obelisk was as good a match as anything. So their initial priorities would be to approach and observe, keep watch for opportunist crime during the inevitable city-wide panic, and to collect as much quantitative data as possible about the entity. 

To that end, Tim pulled up his backdoor into Gotham Observatory. Their large radio telescope, built in the seventies and rendered largely useless for deep-space exploration by the encroaching Gotham electromagnetic pollution, was still able to perform large-scale spectroscopy on the surrounding region. 

It would take twenty minutes for the dish to reorient and then collect preliminary data. Plenty of time for him to get to the Batcave, where he would be able to connect to much more advanced instruments. Tim sent Babs an update and hightailed it out of his office. 

“The bridges are already backing up,” Babs warned him as he got to his car. “Careful. Oh and - hold on,” she switched them over to the main channel. “I’m receiving word that this isn’t the only Monolith. It looks like three others appeared at the same time. Two of them are hanging over the capitol in D.C. and the UN Plaza in New York. The third is in geosynchronous orbit just over eleven-hundred kilometers from the Watchtower.”

It was a testament to their collectively trained focus that the comms did not erupt into further alarm, but Tim froze for just a moment, hand outstretched to the car door.

Was this an invasion? The UN, the Capitol and the Watchtower were obvious political targets, which implied that whatever directed the appearance of these structures had performed at least cursory reconnaissance on the political landscape of the US. That being said - 

Why Gotham?

“Nightwing, contact the Watchtower. We’ll need to liaise with the JL but Gotham comes first.”

Dick confirmed, and then Duke spoke:

“Can’t seem to get within a certain distance of the object in question,” his voice had the hunched, calm quality that conveyed a sort of banked panic. “I’d say maybe a hundred yards, or a little more. I can just almost see a glowing field around it, but it’s hard to describe. Whatever it is, it isn’t a physical barrier. It’s like once I get close enough my body just. Refuses to get any closer. My limbs lock up.”

“Noted possible psionic interference then,” Tim said as he tore out of the parking. His hopes that the spectroscopy would reveal anything useful dimmed. 

“I’ll see about approaching by drone,” Babs added. Tim’s hands flexed over the steering wheel. 

The first signs of unrest were already descending on Gotham: people in the streets, and not in the normal way. The harried movement of pedestrians and traffic through the city had swelled around pockets of stationary gawkers who gathered around TVs, phones, and in groups to discuss while others made to leave the city. Police were organizing themselves at key choke points - Gotham was not new to mass chaos, after all. Still, the movement of crowds showed that bystanders were not treating this like their routine rogue attacks, and that might prove to be dangerous. 

Provided that, it wasn’t as bad yet as Tim suspected it would be. This was relatively nonviolent, if flashy, compared to their rogues. Nothing had even exploded yet, as far as anyone knew. 

Gotham was holding its breath - bracing , he thought.

Tim wished he wasn’t in his civilian vehicle in broad daylight so he could just dip into one of the tunnel entrances. As it was, he was stuck taking the bridge west and then north out of Old Gotham while he kept up with the steady flow of observations on comms. 

By the time he’d made his way up the coast and into the nearest tunnel entrance that he could access, covertly, the bats had managed to confirm the following details:

Firstly, that nothing directed by sentience seemed to be able to get within a certain distance of the monolith. Anyone could approach up to a certain point, at which their bodies simply refused to cooperate. Even the bats, equipped and trained to resist psionic and even magical compulsion to an extent, could not will their bodies to move any further once they touched that boundary. Animals in the region had already fled, and there was an observable border in the reservoir’s waters that fish didn’t cross. Even drones piloted remotely stopped, and that effective radius seemed to apply vertically as well as horizontally. Best estimates at the radius, pending measurement with a laser, were one-hundred ten yards.

Secondly, that everyone in the city and a good ways outside of it felt the chest-deep thrumming that hadn’t stopped since the monoliths appeared. It was - the sensation had Tim on edge, anticipatory. He felt like a rabbit crossing a wide-open field, unobscured and unprotected from aerial threat. As if there was an uncovered angle of attack that he just couldn’t sense. 

Thirdly, that the other manifested structures seemed to have all the same properties as theirs did. They seemed identical.

Lastly, that nothing else seemed to have happened yet. Oracle, the Batcave and the Watchtower were monitoring for any potential method of communication that they could measure for an opening, and hadn’t found anything. These structures were just - there . Sure, it hadn’t been long, but if this was some sort of attack, then their aggressor was rapidly losing the element of surprise. 

Tim couldn’t think of many other reasons for the abrupt, simultaneous manifestation of the monoliths. It could be an intimidation tactic - or perhaps an attempt at communication. But what sort of communication did the monoliths’ creators expect to have after such a threatening opening move?

“We have activity coming out of the alley,” Babs reported on comms. “Hood, any info?”

“Yeah, I have eyes on a bunch of goons with a fucking RPG ,” Hood panted. “They’re headed t’the park. Moving to intercept-”

“Signal, move to assist.”

“On it!”

T-minus 00:00:01:4:01:56:15

Bruce, Damian, and Alfred were gathered in front of the Batcomputer when Tim arrived; Dick was seated at a satellite workstation, still in contact with the Watchtower. Steph, Duke, and Jason were already on-site, the latter two moving to intercept a dozen or so as-yet unaffiliated goons with missiles. 

Things were not off to an auspicious start. 

“Updates from the Watchtower?” he asked off-comm as he passed by Dick. 

“Nothing good. Martian Manhunter is incapacitated. All telepathic, empathic and similarly psionically-oriented supers are prohibited from entering the objects’ area of effect. Flash and the Lanterns are trying to get more details about the one in orbit.”

“Damn,” Tim intoned as he sat at his own workstation, waving off Bruce’s cursory acknowledgement as he did so. 

“Yeah. I’m going to hand off comms to Oracle and get out into the city. We’re expecting chaos to break out before too long.”

“Sound call,” he said as he pulled the backdoor into the Observatory up and began to collate his results. Then, into his comm, “Oracle, I think we should run a visual comparison of the object through the JL database against known alien tech. Maybe we can find something with similar architecture or characteristics.”

“Noted. I’ll have that running -”

“Motherfuckers - ” Jason, abruptly on comms. “They got a shot off!”

“We need to-” Bruce began, before a change on all monitors cut him off.

Abruptly, they were shown an updated surveillance angle that pictured the fired missile careening towards the Monolith from a low angle near a park entrance, and then - passing through it. 

Through the monolith, uninterrupted, and then following its continued trajectory into the upper floors of a high-rise across the park.

“We’re increasing urgency,” Bruce began again. “Nightwing, get out into the city. Agent A, make contact with Batwoman and Batwing, call them in. Oracle, mobilize the Birds of Prey according to your judgment. I’m taking Robin with me to Arkham. We can’t afford for anyone to take advantage of this chaos and spring an escape.”

“Spoiler moving to triage,” Steph called out over comms. 

“Signal, join Spoiler once you finish assisting Hood.”

Tim took all this in as he scanned the results of the large-scale spectroscopy, his brain refusing to accept the data presented to him. “Oracle, has the JL confirmed results for any long-range sensing on the objects?” 

It took a beat for the response to come. “It looks like they’re cycling through the usual scans at the moment but haven’t compiled the results. Anything in particular you want?”

“As much detailed spectroscopy as they have.” Then, after a moment’s consideration, “Signal, describe the Monolith.”

There was the sound of a grapple over the channel and the soft grunt of effort. “A little busy here, Red Robin. Why-”

“Spectroscopy is yielding unconventional results. I want to know if your sight provides any clarification.”

“Got it.” The acknowledgement was punctuated by the sound of an impact and someone else’s pained grunting. “The object resembles a floating pillar with six flat sides and tapered ends. It’s grey, but there’s an appearance of something beyond that. Like - I would call it a green light, but I’m not even certain I’m - it’s hard to say. It’s like as soon as I focus on it, it changes in a way that I can’t really describe.” A frustrated exhale. “Spoiler, I’m en route.” Acknowledgement from Steph. “Other than that, there’s a ring around the base of the object, about halfway between the monolith and the surface of the water. It looks more metallic.”

“A ring? We can’t see a ring,” Tim said, “Or the green light you described.”

“I don’t know what to tell you man. I can’t get close enough to get a better look, and just looking at the thing kinda makes my head hurt.”

“No, that’s helpful. Spectroscopy reports that the spectrum of emitted light is - well, mathematically impossible,” Red began to report, looking again at the data as if it might make sudden sense if he just checks it one more time. “Which may explain some of what you’re seeing, though I can’t even guess at why.”

“Impossible how? We can see the thing, or at least most of it,” Oracle asked.

“There is a detected wavelength of electromagnetic radiation with a negative frequency,” Red continued. “Which violates the mathematical relationship between the frequency of light and its energy. It implies negative energy.”

“Are we sure the scan was correct?”

“The scanning software isn’t even set up to display that result - which it shouldn’t be - I had to access the raw data and recalculate it to get around the error code I got. I’ll know more once I get data from the Watchtower.”

“Damn aliens,” Hood swore over comms again, this time earning a chastising from Agent A, who took over the Batcomputer in Batman’s absence. “Does anyone else feel this - I dunno, hummin’?”

“Yeah, it makes my teeth hurt,” Spoiler said. “It looks like most of the hit building’s residents already evacuated, and there’s minimal ground-level rubble. Signal is moving up to check inside.”

“Alright, I’m moving you two and Agent A onto a dedicated channel to coordinate the search,” Oracle responded.

Ten minutes later, two rescued civilians, fourteen captured goons, and a math-induced headache later, things changed. Abruptly, the primal fear inducing, strung-out-nervous humming along Tim’s spine changed in quality. The hum, which wasn’t actually a sound so much as a soul-deep vibration, suddenly felt communicative. 

Tim’s breath caught with the change, and he could see from the small reactions of Agent A seated nearby that he felt it too. His mind felt, for a moment, as if it were snowed with static, like a television changing channels, or a radio honing in on a communicating bandwidth, and then he understood it. It filtered into his consciousness, first granular and then fine. 

Words, or - thoughts, understanding that felt both native to his consciousness and not, projected into him from the monolith. A message that, as it played out within his mind, brought him to a tense, paralyzed stillness. 

The dead greet the living. 

We are those who wait at the end of all existence. We are those whose outstretched palm grasps infinity. We are the unchanging conclusion. We are your reflection and your foil.

You are the infant, new from the cradle. You are they who sit upon our palm. You are the delicate assembly of experience and change. You are the unfolding entropy. 

We greet you on the knife’s-edge of the Balance that you have broken. We seek that which you have taken and sundered. We reach, now, from within that palm, to correct your blind fumbling.

Summon your counsel. Await our arrival.

The comms were silent. The snowing sensation had resolved within Tim’s mind but it was still there, a banked presence that he could reach for, and when he did, he heard the message again. His breathing came faster and harder. 

Jason was the first to react. 

“What the fuck ?”

Then, all of their monitors flickered, dark for an instant and then back on, engaging emergency reboot. 

“What was -” Bruce began to ask -

“Already on it. That wasn’t internal. It looks like a power fluctuation that affected the entire city. It must have been local to each of the - Monoliths, whatever we’re calling them. The Watchtower experienced a similar flicker, and they’re all-hands double-checking the status of their environmental, life support, and security systems.”

Tim registered the ongoing status updates, but it all seemed distant. His hands were frozen over the keyboard. He should be checking - telemetry, or Watchtower archives, or something. Yet his skin and bones still hummed with the message, the not-language that had still resolved itself as communication within his mind. He couldn’t stop hearing it. 

     We are those whose outstretched palms grasps infinity. 

          … to correct your blind fumbling.

     Summon your counsel . 

“Red Robin!” Bruce’s - no, Batman’s - voice broke him from his spiral. 

“I’m here,” Tim said quickly. “Just, um. Accessing other telemetry. The message, interference, whatever it was, it interacted with us on a subconscious level and it wasn’t detected on any normally communicative frequency. I think it was psionic in nature.”

“Telepathy, then?” Damian asked, and he seemed to be taking the situation seriously enough that the question wasn’t even snarky. 

“I’m not sure. It didn’t have the same quality as Martian telepathy or any other I’ve experienced,” Tim replied. 

“Hn.” Bruce nodded. It was his grunt of tentative agreement.

“It felt like,” Tim thought out loud, “Like it hijacked my own native thoughts and perception to create meaning. It wasn’t language. But I understood it somehow. Did you all receive the message?”

There were scattered affirmatives over comms, minus those on their isolated channel. 

“They said to summon counsel,” Oracle said. “That seems diplomatic in intent to me, or maybe judicial. Given their chosen locations, that creates three likely political bodies to involve: The United States Federal Government, the UN General Assembly, and the Justice League.”

“We still don’t know why they’re here . In Gotham of all places.” When Jason chimed in it gave Tim pause. His voice seemed - shaken. Uncharacteristically so. 

“Hopefully we’ll get a chance to ask them,” Tim sighed and leaned back to swipe a gloved hand across his brow. “Batman, I think you need to make contact with the Commissioner and the Mayor’s office to discuss how to handle this if it does become a first-contact scenario, if they do show up in Gotham. Protocol UE-X-1C.” He turned to look at the map that showed the location of all of their suit trackers and watched Batman’s and Robin’s progress towards the bridge to Arkham. 

“That will be prudent once we’ve ensured that Arkham is secure,” Batman replied, and the low hum of the Batmobile’s engine was audible just under his voice. For a single, pained moment, Tim felt as if that sound harmonized with the humming in his neural architecture and cringed. 

“Noted. In the meantime, I think it’s worth looping in Zatanna to rule out magic, too.”

“Already in communication with her,” Oracle added. “She’s en route to the New York site to examine the object there. Reached out to Constantine too, and he hasn’t responded.”

“Asshole’s probably hungover or on a trip through Hell,” Jason sniped, and Tim was unreasonably comforted by the sarcasm. 

“Less chatter,” Tim was surprised it had taken Bruce so long to try and rein them in. “Update as needed or every thirty minutes otherwise. Robin and I are closing in on Arkham.”

T-minus 00:00:01:3:23:44:59

The afternoon gave way to evening, and the anxious, bankedly curious peace in Gotham gave way by inches to panic. 

The hum refused to settle or fade. It had long sunk into Jason’s bones, and he felt like he was being cored out by a sonic drill, long-undisturbed sediment being shaken into disintegrating. It kept him on his feet, prowling his territory and fighting the green tint to his vision that he hadn’t honestly struggled with in months.

Zatanna claimed there was death magic involved and was, apparently, busy complaining to Barbie and Timber about bullshit magitech . It didn’t rule out aliens, but it didn’t necessarily support the theory either. They were stumbling in the dark. 

The green didn’t like that. Jason didn’t know shit about death magic but he knew his skin was crawling and he needed to do something about it. 

It wasn’t until he’d exhausted his nonlethal clips and found himself firing live ammo at an attempted looter that he forced himself to stop. 

He was running himself ragged. It was only his finely honed awareness and training that allowed him to catch on and shift his aim to avoid greviously injuring a guy who was only guilty of trying to lift a fucking TV. 

At least it was enough to put the fear of Red Hood in the asshole.

“That was a warning,” he all but growled as his near-victim fell on his ass. “Get off the damn street.”

“Narrows,” he said abruptly into the open comm. “I need some relief while I break and restock.” 

Jason may have been on better terms with the bats lately, but there were only two that he trusted to watch over his territory in his absence. The Signal was usually his first choice; the kid understood the Alley’s people and respected Jason’s rules.

“You got it,” Duke chimed back, fatigue evident in his voice even as he tried noticeably to push past it. 

“Negative Signal, Hood,” Jason’s hands tightened to fists as Bruce decided to add his fucking two cents. “Signal is done for the night. Someone else will have to go.”

It shouldn’t have surprised him, necessarily; Duke was day shift and he’d been on patrol for hours before this bullshit had even happened. 

“You can’t seriously expect me to go to bed with all this going on,” Duke argued before Jason could snipe back.

“We don’t know how long to expect this situation to last,” Batman said. “We need to be prepared to have multiple hands on deck at all times of day for the foreseeable future. Managing rest will be crucial to that effort.”

There was a beat of silence over the call. Nobody liked to admit when Bruce had a point.

There was always the second person that Jason trusted; unlike Duke, though, he tried not to ask -

“I need to get out of the cave for awhile anyway,” Tim broke through the silence, and Jason could feel the relief and surprise in equal measure. He shouldn’t be surprised - his replacement always came through for him. They weren’t close - hell, he didn’t particularly like Tim - but the kid had latched on early to any chance to back Jason up, respected his rules, and didn’t undermine his work. That had transformed eventually into trust.

Still. Even if Tim’d made his willingness to help abundantly clear, Jason never quite felt he’d earned the right to ask . 

“Fine,” he grunted and grappled up the side of the nearest building. “I’ll be about three hours and then you can get back to your IT shit.”

“At least I’ll get a good workout in.”

T-minus 00:00:01:3:22:12:31

Tim hadn’t lied about the workout. He’d only been watching Hood’s territory for about an hour and a half, and he’d stopped plenty of crime in progress and dished out plenty of warnings. The evening didn’t seem to be settling people’s panic at all, and he mentally prepared for things to be awful for the foreseeable future.

Still, though, it was almost nice to have an outlet for his own strung-out nerves. 

Updates on comms became more sporadic, mostly relegated to periodic check-ins. Everyone still out on patrol was too tired for their usual banter. Frankly, Tim was just happy that there hadn’t been an Arkham breakout. Yet.

It wouldn’t do to jinx it. 

At the moment, he was perched on a rooftop on the edge of Robinson Park and observing the Monolith. The sun had breached the horizon line beyond the city; the skyline reduced by shades to greys and purples and emerging pinpoint lights. 

In front of it all loomed the Monolith, the spearpoint of it silhouetted against the bruised orange sky. It was as beautiful as it was ominous. He kind of wanted his camera.

Oracle’s voice broke the silence.

“I’ve picked up something strange on the long-range frequency net - UHF military band, bouncing off of multiple repeaters. Encoded, but somewhat damaged.” Her voice, even modulated, was hard and tight.

“Is it relevant to the objects?” Bruce asked and Tim sighed, aggrieved on Babs’ behalf. 

“I wouldn’t have brought it up if it weren’t, Batman.” She paused, perhaps waiting to see if Bruce would be making any more ill-advised interruptions. “It’s fragmented - a lot of packet damage. But listen.”

“Put it through.”

A moment later, patchy radio audio came in:

     Directive Response 14.01; Agent A-dash-B. 

     Dimensional incursion detected. Ecto-entit - Emergent class suspected.

        -harmonic disturbance. Multiple sites-

        -protocol: noninterference. Attempts to restore may - cascade failure.

     All assets: maintain absolute quarantine - sever observational links.

There was a long pause. 

“They knew,” Tim said into the silence. “Whoever is behind this transmission either knew this was coming or understands what it is. They mentioned dimensional incursion. Is this multiversal in nature?”

“That seems likely,” Babs said. “There are a few new keywords to follow up on. In particular, the transmission refers to ‘ecto-entity’ and ‘emergent class’. This implies that whoever is behind the objects is a known quantity, but neither of these terms brings up anything in our databases. I need Red Robin to follow up. I have my hands full trying to break past the quarantine procedures of whoever this is.”

“I’ll get on it when I’m done covering Hood’s route,” Tim said, eagerness edging into his tone. This was - something , at least, beyond impossible physics. A thread to pull. “If this event is multiversal somehow, I need some additional sensing equipment from the Watchtower. Anyone willing to be on pickup duty?”

“I might as well head up there anyway,” Dick sounded as tired as Tim and Babs did. “I have to touch base with them and the Titans - speaking of, Batman, we might want to consider getting a couple JL members in the city.”

“Hn.” That was Batman’s grunt of ‘I’m displeased but willing to consider what you’re saying’. If Jason could be motivated to get on comms in a sufficiently large emergency, then maybe Bruce would allow them to have a couple allies on call in case of that same emergency. 

The kind that was heralded by the sudden arrival of physics-defying alien tech. 

“That would be great, Wing.” Tim spared them all the likelihood of an argument.

“Just get me a list of what you need, Baby Bird. I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”

Another two hours, and Jason took his patrol back with a level of exaggerated grievance that convinced Tim that even just that brief rest had done wonders for his brother’s state of mind. 

Twenty minutes later and he was back at his workstation in the cave. His cape, tunic and cowl, bandoliers, and gauntlets were set aside for cleaning and maintenance later, and then he’d collapsed in his seat in just the armored leggings, boots, and bodysuit. His ribs ached. At this point, he wasn’t sure if it was exhaustion, the ever-present humming, or a chance blow he may have taken out in the Alley that was responsible. 

What he knew was that he had work to do. His first order of business was to pull up search and classification algorithms he’d built out for just this sort of research and enter the following keywords: ecto-entity, emergent class, harmonic disturbance. He also included a few derivative keywords and, on a half-formed thought courtesy of Ghostbusters, ectoplasm. The algorithm would need a couple hours to perform a comprehensive search of the internet as well as the wide array of databases that he had infiltrated and built backdoors into, then collate the results in a way that would be efficient to parse. 

In the meantime, he took to catching up on updates provided by Babs, Zatanna, and the Watchtower. Zatanna was pursuing a lead that she hadn’t disclosed yet. The Watchtower far-range sensing was confirming Tim’s initial work, and he admitted that that was a little vindicating. Oracle had traced the intercepted transmission -

“Master Tim,” he blinked and sat up. Alfred stood next to his workstation, straight-backed against the improbability of the day - now night - one brow arched. 

Huh. He’d lost time - or maybe he’d dozed off. 

“Uh - yes, Alfred?”

“It appears it may be time for you to retire. I’m sure the data will be there for you in the morning.”

Tim sat up, resisting the urge to bristle . “Alfred, I can’t just leave this all undone. I have work to do.”

“A few hours’ rest would not be remiss. You recall Master Bruce’s instructions on the matter.”

Tim huffed and looked back at his terminal. Really, this level of sleep debt was well within parameters for him, usually. He hadn’t even hit forty-eight hours yet. Usually, he’d be hitting his stride right about now, if with the aid of a Zesti. The lines of text on the screen seemed to coalesce into one blur. His skull hummed , his thoughts in exhausting resonance with the Monolith’s interference. 

It was taxing in a way he hadn’t foreseen. It was draining his mental stamina just to deal with it - to be internally braced against it at all times.

“Right,” he said, terse, and went about putting all processes except the background work of his search algorithms to sleep. “I’ll be heading home then.”

“Given the situation in the city at large,” Alfred didn’t miss a beat, “It may be best for you to stay here at the manor, Master Tim. Your room is prepared, as always.”

He didn’t try to argue. It did chafe - while the situation between him and his family was leagues better than it had been in the time since he brought Bruce back from the timestream, he still felt restless in the manor. 

The old insecurities didn’t quite plague him - thoughts of pretender and interloper and the stopgap Robin had been largely put to rest with time, difficult conversations, and more than one fist - but it would never be the same home that it had been. Tim just wasn’t the same person. He wasn’t sure that those relationships would ever be what they had been.

But Alfred wasn’t wrong. If there were any new, time-sensitive developments, it would be better to be at the manor and able to respond than stuck with another twenty-minute drive. 

Plus, the shower and bedtime snack were heaven . 

Bat-engineered water pressure; enough said.

All that provided, his spare laptop was very tempting when he did make it to his room. He’d just check remotely on the status of his search algorithms -

Oracle seemed to have placed an update in the system before she, too, had been made to log off for the night. The transmission was successfully traced through its various repeater stations to its place of origin, a Cold War-era installation that now belonged to the Department of Homeland Security. More specifically, it belonged to a suppressed investigative task force referred to only by the acronym GIW. GIW servers were, apparently, digitally sequestered from other DHS networks, and somehow Oracle had hit a roadblock breaking into them. 

There was an initial draft for requested in-person reconnaissance of the site - Black Bat, most likely - both to gather physical documentation of who the GIW were and to plant direct network scanners that would give Babs the boost needed to break through their firewalls and IDS/IPS measures. With approval from the big bat, which seemed likely, Cass would be leaving as early as the next morning. 

Things were proceeding, and smoothly at that. They’d found a couple of threads to pull at, and so far security in the city was uncharacteristically smooth. 

It wasn’t enough. There was a gaping hole in the puzzle in the shape of the probably-alien structure floating over the reservoir, and that situation could explode in any number of ways without indication or warning. It made Tim’s teeth itch, animal fear instincts that he normally didn’t feel. That sensation of exposure to an unknown angle of approach hadn’t left him. 

He read through her report again, left a couple comments. Switched to his WE profile to check his emails - Tam had sent him a flurry of updates that he’d need to catch up on in the morning. Tensions were likely to rise before long, and the level of property damage with it, so it would be good to have some preemptive strategy in place for WE resources, disaster relief. 

The text on the screen was green. 

Tim blinked, lethargic. Leaned forward in his seat. 

The text was blurry, but it wasn’t green. It just - 

It was green. 

There was a fault line in the screen. It almost looked like a crack, but he was certain he hadn’t damaged his laptop. There hadn’t been a crack there mere moments ago. He reached, fingertips a hairsbreadth away from gliding over the screen.

And then it unfolded. 

The world shattered sideways. 

Not like glass - not like a breaking, nothing so physical. The fault line in his computer's monitor seemed to push away from him, drawing reality with it as if it were creased paper, and then it twisted and broke along tens more, and then thousands - kaleidoscopic - fractal - 

He reached forward, and he reached behind, and he reached into, and through, and his hand was within his hand was within his hand, and his hand was spread out along a two-dimensional plane, all flattened bone and tissue and cells and - 

He pulled his hand back, drew it back to his chest, and back through his chest, and back from within itself, and back -

Tim was going to vomit. He choked it down on the thought that he didn’t know where in space his sick would end up if he did lose it.

The light bent through the prism of reality and tinted green. It formed - a tunnel, Tim thought, though there was nothing that physically resembled a tunnel less than this crystalline construction. He wanted to step through it. He could see the tunnel, and he could see beyond it to the dark, starry sky of some other place. That sky, too, was folded, constellations twisted into funhouse distortions.

Tim felt drawn to it. The shifting configurations of stars bent the light into something he could just - almost - perceive. There was something there. A figure - white hair, a hand grasping its chest, a star whose light was a bright, ice-white blue - 

Tim tried to step forward, and the fold tightened around him. The tunnel drew tense. Reality winced . There was a shearing wrongness to it. 

Tim should have stopped. 

Tim had never, in his life, known when to stop . He tried to push forward - someone screamed - 

He jolted awake to the feeling of hands on him - 

“Tim - shit -”

Duke dodged the instinctive strike to his shoulder as Tim came gasping to wakefulness. 

There was a pen in Tim’s other hand, gripped tightly enough that it had snapped. When he released it, his hand felt more like a claw of a thing than a human hand. Broken plastic shards fell to the floor and ink dripped from his palm.

“What was-”

“You screamed in your sleep,” Duke drew alongside him and knelt, having decided that Tim had gained enough lucidity not to attempt another nerve-strike. When Tim turned to look at him, he found that Duke’s attention wasn’t on him. It was on a notepad next to Tim’s laptop - screen displaying black text, now, and uncracked. 

There was, scrawled on the yellow lined paper, a shape that Tim didn’t recognize. A figure that didn’t particularly resemble anything that his adrenaline-blanked brain could drag forth. It was traced over itself in layers of heavy black ink as if it had been traced obsessively, and the pen pressure had been enough to leave deep grooves in the pad. 

“Just a bad dream,” Tim said, but found that his own gaze didn’t leave the drawn figure. It looked like it could have been a glyph, or maybe a sigil. 

“Must have been some dream.”

Yeah,” he huffed, wry, blinked, and then leaned back in his seat. “ ‘M sorry I woke you. I think this is a sign to actually go to bed this time.”

Duke just nodded, having dragged his own gaze away from the paper, and Tim could identify the moment where he decided to leave it be. “No problem.” He groaned as he straightened back to standing. “Night,” he called behind himself as he left the room.

Tim turned the notepad over and then dragged himself to bed.