Chapter Text
Danny stared blankly as the customer continued his meltdown over the fact that his macchiato had “too much coffee.”
Maybe next time, she thought distantly, don’t add three espresso shots to your order.
It was barely eight in the morning.
Barely eight, and Gotham was already testing her restraint.
She resisted the urge to sigh, keeping her expression carefully neutral as the man gestured wildly at his cup like it had personally betrayed him. Danny really, really did not want a repeat of the last Angry Ethan Incident.
Last time, Ethan had snapped.
One moment he’d been wiping down the counter, the next he was calmly explaining—far too calmly—exactly how he would dispose of the customer’s body while aggressively chopping a carrot with a knife that had absolutely not been there a second earlier.
He’d gone into detail. Anatomical detail.
The customer had gone pale. Luke had dropped a mug. Martin—who had stopped by for coffee—had very slowly backed toward the door.
No one ever figured out where Ethan got the carrot.
Or the knife.
Or the chopping board.
Luke and Martin could only speculate later in hushed voices, equal parts fear and awe, about the efficiency of the demonstration and the unsettling fact that Ethan never once raised his voice.
Danny cleared her throat now, stepping smoothly between Ethan and the counter before history could repeat itself.
“Sir,” she said mildly, reaching for the offending drink, “I can remake that with fewer shots.”
The customer huffed but relented, muttering under his breath as Danny turned toward the espresso machine.
Behind her, Ethan’s smile faded—just enough—as he picked up a towel and went back to wiping the counter like nothing had happened.
Danny breathed out slowly.
Gotham was cursed.
But at least her staff was terrifying enough to keep it in check.
For the last two weeks, Danny had been researching obsessively—online and buried deep in Gotham’s library archives, haunting the historical section like a ghost with a grudge. She chased timelines until the dates blurred together, stringing events across centuries that should not have lined up.
What she found was surreal, to put it mildly.
Messing with time was already a nightmare. Clockwork had drilled that into her—had shown her, over and over, that even he didn’t fully control the outcomes. Time didn’t bend cleanly. It fractured. The universe split into alternate realities, each one valid, each one real.
You’d think, at the very least, that the past wouldn’t change the future—because it already happened.
Except that wasn’t exactly true.
In one model, the timeline self-corrected. Events resisted change, snapping back into place no matter how much you pushed.
In another, the timeline rewrote itself entirely, branching into something new the moment you interfered.
Both were messy. Both were survivable.
This wouldn’t even be a problem—
except Gotham didn’t follow either rule.
For some reason, Gotham didn’t branch.
It didn’t correct.
It looped.
Events repeated without resetting. People reappeared without aging. Monsters persisted without origin or end, cycling through different faces like the city was recycling roles instead of letting them die.
That wasn’t time travel.
That was time rotting in place.
And Danny had no idea how—or why—Gotham had managed to break a system even Clockwork treated with caution.
“…That’s not how this is supposed to work,” she muttered, rubbing her eyes.
But Gotham had never cared about how things were supposed to work.
It raised another question.
How the fuck were people aging?
And why the fuck hadn’t anyone noticed that some kids… didn’t?
The answer came by accident.
Martin had gotten his yearbooks back from home and, like any sane person, decided to bring all of them—from freshman year onward—to the café. Danny had a great time flipping through them, absolutely losing it over pictures of a painfully emo Martin with too much eyeliner and a haircut that screamed mid-2000s angst.
She was midway through teasing him when she noticed.
The dates.
Some students aged normally. Faces changed. Hairlines shifted. Growth spurts happened. Martin himself progressed through grades exactly as he should have.
But others—
Others didn’t.
Same faces. Same smiles. Same posture. Same everything.
Year after year.
Same grade.
Same classroom.
Same lockers.
They weren’t held back.
They weren’t transfers.
They were repeating—quietly, seamlessly—like a skipped record that no one questioned.
And nobody noticed.
Teachers changed. Administrators retired. Buildings were renovated. But those kids stayed exactly the same, cycling through the same academic year over and over again, socially present but temporally frozen.
Danny’s stomach tightened.
Gotham wasn’t just looping its monsters.
It was looping its people.
She didn’t say anything. Didn’t point it out. Didn’t ask Martin a single question.
Instead, she cooed loudly over a photo of baby-faced freshman Martin and absolutely roasted him for his eyeliner phase until he turned red and tried to grab the book back.
But her mind stayed locked on the pattern.
Some people moved forward.
Some people stayed.
And the city made damn sure no one ever thought to ask why.
“Ehem… so?” Martin asked for what had to be the billionth time. “Why don’t you two talk anymore? I thought you said the date went well.”
He leaned back against the coffee roast shelves, arms folded, clearly settling in for this conversation.
“It just didn’t work out,” Danny said lightly. “Me and him are way too different.”
Yeah, because he’s human and I’m not, she added silently as she fed fresh receipt paper into the register.
“And besides,” Danny continued, pushing the drawer closed and leaning back against the café counter, “I’ve been busy.”
Martin eyed her. Unconvinced. “Busy doing what?”
Danny smiled—pleasant, practiced, and absolutely uninformative.
“You know,” she said. “Life. Gotham. Existential dread.”
Martin snorted. “Sure. Totally normal answer.”
Danny’s smile didn’t fade.
Busy didn’t even begin to cover it.
Ethan pointed at Martin with a rolled-up newspaper. “Watch it. When I was with my Maria, it took some convincing. Let Danny be—when she’s ready, she’s ready.”
Luke, suddenly very invested, sat up straighter on his counter stool. “So when did you know it was time for you?”
Ethan’s expression softened. His eyes went misty as he spoke with absolute sincerity.
“When she threw me off a boat in the middle of the Atlantic.”
The café went dead silent.
Ethan sighed dreamily, clearly lost in memory. “Ah… those were good years. Before she ran off with a billionaire.”
Luke stared at him.
Then slowly turned to Danny with a look that very clearly said, What the actual fuck?
Danny had no answer. She just shrugged and dropped a dollar into the Ethan Jar.
They’d been running bets for months now—Martin, Luke, and Danny—trying to guess what kind of life Ethan had lived before being hired. The current frontrunners were mercenary, hired assassin, or spy.
It wasn’t paranoia.
It was Gotham.
Even Jacky seemed to agree. The espresso machine let out a soft, sympathetic puff of steam, as if offering Ethan quiet consolation.
Danny wiped down the counter, expression carefully neutral.
Some mysteries were better left unsolved.