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If the Justice League has learned anything over the years, it’s that friendship conquers all, justice isn’t about winning, and that magic is bullshit.
So far as occupational hazards go, it is the most irritating by far-- and this is from a team that semi-regularly interacts with Guy Gardner. Regular physical attacks by robots or aliens threaten health and morale, but magic threatens both dignity and patience. Everyone’s been stuck in a medieval version of the universe, has swapped bodies with a teammate or villain, been trapped inside an evil amulet, or transformed into an on-the-nose-personality-wise animal at least once in their career. Even that would be tolerable if such problems could be resolved quickly or, failing that, with minimum effort, but more often than not, dealing with the fallout of any one magical adventure requires an entirely separate follow-up magical adventure, usually with some glib, extra dimensional being following you around, cracking puns, and trying to teach you some overwrought fable-esque lesson about yourself.
It would be a study in understatement to say that when the Justice League arrives on the scene to see a wizard, absolutely no one is in a good mood.
This was one of those weeks.
****
Zatanna shook her head and handed Superman back to Diana. The baby-- toddler?-- was wrapped in his own red cape, the first available option as his uniform had essentially fallen off of him the second the light enveloped him. “Not a chance.”
“Come on, Zee,” Wally said, flashing to her side and pressing his palms together with the most beseeching look he could muster. “You have to do something. We need him, or at the very least, I need him to cover my monitor duty shift on Thursday like he promised. Can’t you at least try to change him back?”
Zee crossed her hands in the air. “Not happening. Trying to even touch his spirit with magic would be like putting a drunk Booster Gold in charge of PR. It’s not about whether damage will be done so much as trying to guess how severe it will be. Even if it were an emergency--”
“I have a date,” Wally groaned. “And it’s taken months to line up. It is an emergency.”
The magician ignored that. “I still wouldn’t want to risk it, especially to reverse a spell that has a built in time limit. Seriously. Give it two weeks, max, for the magic to run out of steam and he’ll revert on his own.”
Diana sighed, looking down at the toddler in her arms, his chubby face swiveling to fasten vigilantly on the face of whoever was speaking and framed by an explosion of black curls. “It’s as we feared. There’s an additional complication you should be aware of, however. He seems to have all of his powers still, or at least most of them. Kal once told me that his own gifts didn’t appear naturally until he was about ten. We don’t know quite what to make of that discrepancy or whether it implies a bigger problem.”
Zatanna shrugged. “That’s because it’s a de-aging spell, not a time machine. He’s little, and his brain and body are little now too, but they still carry the same experiences, so to speak.” She pointed to herself and asked the oddly attentive baby, “What’s my name?”
“Zee,” Clark answered confidently, removing his chubby fist from his mouth to do so. He’d gathered a handful of his cape in it and had been chewing on it for the better part of a quarter of an hour.
“And who is this?” She pointed to the Flash.
“Wa’ee,” he said. Scrunched up his face. Tried again. “Wall-ee.”
“See?” She folded her arms. “He remembers who he is and who everyone else is, but all that is being translated from a baby’s neurological perspective. It’s fine, I promise. You just have to wait for the magic to stop altering his physical body. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go. I got called in to a failed seance an hour ago. Some amateurs summoned Santa instead of Satan. Not only is there a hole ripped in this dimension’s time-space, but there’s a bunch of excited kids converging on my crime scene.”
****
“What do you mean, what should we do with him?” Bruce snapped, placing his palms flat on the surface. The Founding team was seated around the conference table, save for Superbaby, who was in a green light crib that John had begrudgingly conjured. Their de-aged leader watched their faces with not-quite-focus as his eyes drifted shut of their own accord before he’d jerk himself awake. Naptime was long overdue, evidently. “He’s obviously not going to be fighting crime like this. Just send him back to Kansas. His parents will be overjoyed. They’re always complaining he doesn’t visit enough.”
“I would not advise placing him with human civilians,” J’onn said, raising a diplomatic hand. “He has retained many of his powers but little of his former restraint. We do not want to create an unsafe situation for his carers. ”
“Agreed. You weren’t there when he transformed,” Diana told the billionaire, tapping the screen inset before her seat on the tabletop. A picture appeared on the main projector of a damaged city street. “When he realized what happened, he shrieked so loud it shattered the closest six glass storefronts. It took ages to calm him down.”
“So we buy them earplugs,” Bruce muttered, but the fight had gone out of his words. He sighed and leaned back in his seat. “Do we know anyone who would be up to the task of watching him? Anyone who wants to volunteer?”
Shayera gave him a flat glare. “What are you looking at me and Diana for? Screw you, Bats. Boobs don’t make us babysitters.”
“If we can’t risk his parents and there’s no one we know of who can mind him, we’ll just have to keep him here. At the very least, it’ll help us contain the information that one of our heavy hitters is out of commission and we can keep him under observation in case Zatanna misunderstood the nature of the spell. We’ll assign each member of the team to watch him in rotating shifts-- possibly merged with monitor duty depending on how demanding his care is.” Batman spared a glance for the sleepy looking baby in the crib, slumped upright and jolting awake, looking around the room and for the tiny little life of him, trying to appear like he too was taking part of the meeting. “Unfortunately, I won’t be able to cover more than one or two of them. I will be on the Watchtower and can make myself available for emergencies, though.”
“Why do you get to skip out of diaper duty?” John demanded, crossing his arms.
“You mean as the one member of the team who actually has children at home to care for in the meantime?” Bruce drawled. He slumped ever so slightly in his chair. “It’s the end of the fiscal year. Unfortunately, one of our accountants evidently found a magical stone from a case that hadn’t been documented properly and was using it as a paperweight. From what we can glean, when he sat near it, it transported his mind into that of an alternate dimensional self. One similar enough to this dimension that no one spotted the difference until someone audited his work and found a truly astronomical amount of discrepancies.”
“So you have to figure out what to do about the stone?”
Batman scowled. “No. That’s already done. I have to dig through expense reports and documentation instead, so that way our ledgers aren’t sixteen million dollars off this year. It’s going to take ages. Evidently, some alternate version of ourselves expensed at least a quarter of a million dollars on pogo sticks.”
****
While the Watchtower Facilities Manager, Tamara, raised an eyebrow at the paperwork, it didn’t take long before one of the secure residential rooms had been transformed into a makeshift nursery. A small toddler bed had been set in one corner (best guess suggested Clark was hovering around 18-ish months as he could wobble around for short distances), a small row of drawers holding extra baby clothes, and even a cute little stars and spaceship mobile hung over his play area. It was cute and cozy for something that had been thrown together in less than four hours.
Babysitting turned out to be an even easier gig than monitor duty, as it didn’t require complete attention. Clark didn’t need supervision so much as coordinated fingers to open fruit snacks for him; not only was he content to self entertain, he definitely didn’t seem inclined to shove inedible objects in his mouth or his finger into light sockets. He could be relied on to ask for help when he wanted it, meaning his minders were free to space out and work on whatever they wanted: Shayera was fond of weapons maintenance, J’onn would meditate, and Batman spent his one and only shift scarcely looking up from his financial reports.
So far, this was shaping up to be the most straightforward magical resolution they’d ever encountered. Relaxing, even.
John shut his book as Wally sped into the room, reclining in an overstuffed lounge chair by the door. Glanced at the toy bag clutched in the speedster’s hand. “I’m pretty sure he’s already got enough toys,” he said, jerking a thumb at where baby Clark was happily stacking blocks into towers, roughly in the same layout as Metropolis. A plastic bouncy ball seemed to designate one as the Daily Planet, but that was just a guess. He only knew a handful of words and spoke in that high, baby voice that was hard to parse sometimes, not that anyone was trying to interview him on the regular. “That operations lady was pretty damn thorough.”
“I know, I know,” Wally said, dropping the bag onto the couch beside him and upturning it. “But he doesn’t have these.”
“Are those…?”
“The complete set of Justice League plushies,” Wally said proudly, “featuring all of the seven founding members.”
“I count six.”
“Well, he doesn’t need one of himself,” Wally said, crossing his arms. “Anyway, I just figured that since he’s stuck under house arrest, he might want to still have adventures with his friends.” He picked up his own, tiny stuffed version of himself and grinned. “Come on. If we’re going to have to watch him play for the next couple of weeks, it might as well be adorable.”
John snorted. “Ten bucks says he picks a favorite. My money’s on Batman.”
Wally raised an eyebrow, already plucking off tags. “Count me in, but make it twenty. It’s totally going to be Wonder Woman.”
“You’re on.”
****
Tiny Clark was absolutely thrilled with his plushie team and squealed softly in delight as he took turns turning them each over in his hands, admiring the silky, fuzzy texture of each one before giving them welcoming hugs. They were the first toys he’d grab when he woke and the last to be put away, though even that was debatable, considering that every night he insisted they needed to be tucked into bed alongside him.
The whole team. All of them.
Clark, evidently, was very equitable in his affections. Wally swore the toddler rotated the dolls’ on a tighter schedule than the actual members followed for official duties. If one sat for more than an hour neglected, somehow, Clark would find a reason to lavish them with his direct attention or make them the leading hero in whatever mock battles he was set up in his block city against his less cherished stuffed animals. His commitment to his stuffed team was heart-melting considerate: the Flash doll was often surrounded by plastic food from his kitchen set, Shayera had spotted him trying to polish her stuffed avatar’s mace, and even Martian Manhunter’s doll was always carefully kept shielded from the heat of the nearest floor vent.
It was both adorable and infuriating. The man had no favorites.
John declared it a draw within 24 hours. Wally was tempted to insist they kept their bet standing, just in case, except he’d spotted Supes hugging Batman, and just Batman, when he thought no one was watching.
He might be out of a date with Iris, but at least he’d get to keep his twenty bucks.
Frankly, Wally should have seen it coming. Diana was a well respected badass, sure, but Bats and Supes weren’t called the World’s Finest for nothing. Baffling though their enduring, seemingly incompatible friendship might be, it did have a yin and yang logic to it. The League certainly counted on them to average out the worst of each other. Batman kept Superman from veering steadily into optimistic pacifism in the face of obvious deceit, and Superman kept Batman from committing the occasional war crime. The drama and snipping at each other was a given, but ultimately a small price to pay for stability.
Though twenty dollars was still twenty dollars.
****
Diana’s mouth dropped open. “He what?”
“Beheaded Batman,” J’onn repeated, rewinding the security tapes with a sigh. While this was certainly no cause for an official meeting, mentioning what he’d observed to Wally had resulted in the speedster grabbing John from the hallway, followed by Shayera and Diana in the canteen. Finding the right spot in the recording, he hit play. “It’s unclear as to why.”
On screen and dressed in bright red footed pajamas, Clark happily plays “Justice League”: Hawkgirl, Lantern, and Martian Manhunter swoop through the air, clutched in two tiny fists, well above the buildings of Blocktropolis, aiming for the giant villain attacking said city, Giant Stuffed Pig. They attack, but are thrown back: Clark tosses them through a block skyscraper where they crash into their teammates stationed on the ground, showering them all in building materials.
Wally smirks. “Cute, right? Wait for it.”
Clark toddles over to the fallen group, arms spread as though he were flying in to save the day. Frowns down at them, scattered across the carpet, with open concern.
First, he picks up the closest comrade, Flash, looks at him, then sets him down. Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, and Martian Manhunter follow soon after. Last, he gets to Batman and holds him in his chubby little palms, brows furrowing as he contemplates the printed fabric face of his friend. Staring down at him solemnly, Clark flicks a finger across his neck and promptly decapitates the doll.
Shocked silence, both on screen, and in the room.
“What the fuck,” Shayera muttered, wide green eyes riveted on the tape. “What the everloving fuck?”
Baby Supes shares her sentiment. He stares at the white stuffing leaking out of the doll in naked horror. “Oh, no, Boose…” he whimpers. Looks down at the head on the ground. Grabs it. Tries to put it back on the Batman plushie’s shoulders. “Boose okay?”
It drops away with a soft thud. Clark tips back his little head and screams.
On screen, J’onn claps his hands over his ears. The light levels in the room changes as the lightbulb of the nearest lamp shatters. The block city wobbles and topples from the force of the soundwaves.
Back in the security monitor room, Wally pushed his mask back and dragged his hands over his face and hair. “What does this even mean?”
John snorted. “We’ve gotta show this to Bats.”
Shayera jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow and crossed her arms. “I can’t believe you guys are even worried about this. Kids break toys when they play too rough with them. It’s normal.”
“He stared right at him,” Wally insisted. “For like a minute. It was unsettling.”
“It was a rather strange twist to the game,” Diana concedes, fiddling absently with one star earring. “But he seemed regretful of the outcome. Odd as it looked, I agree with Shayera. It was likely an accident. I don’t think that it is something we should concern ourselves with. How is he now?”
“Napping,” J’onn said. “I asked Tamara to acquire another Batman doll and managed to soothe him with it.”
“Well, that’s done then.”
“Not quite.” John hesitated. “It took some persuading. As you can see from his highly distressed response to the game, he does, in some part, regard the dolls as entities. Actual versions of us, else he would not mourn their loss. When I came in with the new doll, he got upset and insisted it wasn’t Bruce. That it was a copy. An imposter.”
Wally squinted at him. “Jesus. Okay, how did you get him to take the new one?”
“I engaged him with his imaginative play,” J’onn said, waving a dismissive hand. “Altering the narrative slightly. When--”
“Say no more.” John held up a hand. “Because I gotta see this myself. Play the tapes, man.”
J’onn shrugged and hit a few buttons. The screen changed to show the nursery, with baby Supes sprawled inconsolably on the soft rug, tear tracks streaking his face, wailing softly. He must have been at it for some time; he was running out of steam, if not sorrow. The headless plushie is squashed against his chest.
The martian enters the room and offers him the new doll. “Here. Continue your game.”
Supes’ face scrunches and he stubbornly looks away, clutching the ‘dead’ Batman to his stomach and hiccuping. “No! Trick. Not Boose.” He begins sniffling again, looking down at the deceased doll with tear filled eyes. “Sorry… sorry…”
On screen, J’onn is quiet for a moment, hand drifting to his chin in thought. “I see Bruce has managed to trick you with that false body you’re holding, Superman,” he announces suddenly. “I agree, it is a very convincing replica. I take it that he did not warn you that this was his plan all along?”
Clark whips around to face the new doll, flailing into an upright sitting position. Drags his sleeper’s sleeve across his snotty nose.“Plan?” He stares suspiciously between the two dolls.
“Yes, Batman’s plan,” the martian confirms gravely. “To fake his death and trick our enemies. Of course he didn’t tell us before he did it, so our grief would be convincing. I believe the phrase is, ‘that’s just so Batman’, is it not?”
Clark drops the tear-stained, headless doll like a disenchanting rock and snatches the newcomer out of J’onn’s hands. “Boose!” he scolds, holding it out in front of him. “Mean!” He scowls down at it before drawing it into a tight hug. “Not nice…”
Back in the security room, J’onn gestured to the screen, where Clark was rapidly calming and quickly returned to his game. “As you can see, his remorse was quite genuine, even if the circumstances leading up to the doll’s “death” were quite odd. As I was telling Wally, I do not believe that this is worth concerning ourselves over, especially as an isolated incident. He is an oddly conscientious toddler. I am sure he will play more gently with the toy from now on.”
John leaned back in his rolling chair and raised his eyebrows. “Agreed. Still. We’re making copies of this tape and showing Bats, right? I can’t wait to see his face…”
****
What the actual fuck? Shayera demanded over J’onn’s mind link as she entered the nursery, hands over her ears. There’s no way this is an accident. Not twice in twenty four hours.
Flash handed her a pair of thick yellow construction grade noise dampeners, pointing to his own pair that were doing a decent job at counteracting the howls of despair from the toddler in his arms. He bounced him a few times, but the noise didn't let up. I don’t get it. Why would he do it on purpose? Look at him. He’s heartbroken.
Superman beheaded the Batman doll again , J’onn provided as Diana and Bruce joined the link.
Who was watching him? Bruce demanded.
Me. It was exactly the same as last time , Wally added. Same doll, only this time, Batman was the one to get thrown through a block tower. He just went over to it, called your name, and popped it’s head off.
Shayera snatched one of the other dolls off the ground and compared it to the Batman plushie she’d brought with her. It’s the same fabric as the others. The stitching seems sturdy. I don’t see why it would get more damaged than the rest. I think he’s got it out for you, Bruce.
It’s a doll , came the acerbic reply. Don’t read too much into it .
****
Superman had been a baby for less than 72 hours and already Wally was on his hands and knees on the floor, wailing, “Why are you doing this? I thought you were friends .”
The actual toddler rolled across the rug, ignoring the very literal adult having a tantrum next to him, the fifth beheaded Batman at his feet. “Boose…” he sobbed. “Boose….”
Wally groaned into his hands and pushed himself onto his knees. Took a deep breath. “Okay, real talk here, Clark. Spill. It’s got to be personal-- it’s him every time . Did he piss you off? Say something mean ‘bout your mom? The cape? You don’t even seem to be enjoying getting your revenge. Why are you doing this to yourself?”
The door to the nursery slid open to reveal Shayera, delivering a replacement doll. Wally had no idea how they’re going to convince him to take it-- Clark has grown skeptical of how many times a day the Bat supposedly faked his own death; apparently, even his toddler brain suspected the number has grown a little excessive. If anything, he’s gotten harder to console and now it takes upwards of an hour to massage his ‘imaginative narrative’ to the point that he’ll accept the tradeoff.
Shayera groaned. “This isn’t working. We gotta do something.”
****
“Ah, hell. Well, we might as well give it a shot. Get in here.” John turned to face the sobbing toddler on the floor. “Look,” John said, stepping aside as Bruce entered the room, his dark cape flaring slightly. “It’s the real Batman. Not dead. Right here. Alive.”
Clark stared at the doll in his hands (the eighth to lose it’s head) and up at the real Batman. Back at the doll in his hands. Back to its life sized doppelganger, who matched Clark’s openly uncomfortable stare and awkward body language. His chubby baby face scrunched in negative-leaning uncertainty.
“Great,” Bruce sighed. “Glad this could be unsettling and weird for the both of us.”
****
The conference room door slid open to reveal Tamara, head of facilities, and current bearer of the flattest expression to currently orbit the planet. She thrust a large cardboard box at Diana, the nearest person to the door. “Here. I ordered sixty batman plushies. For the love of god, stop sending my people out to get them one at a time. They’re cheaper in bulk.”
It slid shut behind her.
“That woman deserves a raise,” John pointed out.
Batman grunted in agreement, massaging the bridge of his nose through the cowl. “Where are we with the Clark situation?”
Wally spread his hands and slammed them against the table. “You tell us! Twelve plushies, Bats. Twelve. What the hell is so wrong with your relationship that he’s ritualistically killing you every two to four hours?”
“I have no idea,” Bruce snapped. “We’ve been fine lately. I haven’t done anything to offend him--” he tilted his head at the look his statement garnered. “”--beyond the ordinary.”
“Here’s a theory: maybe your relationship with him is so dramatic, he cannot literally conceive of any version of you not causing him distress,” John muttered, unflustered when Batman pointedly ignored him.
“Examining our adult relationship is beside the point,” Bruce went on. “He appears shocked and horrified every time. Whatever this compulsion is, it’s clearly not voluntary. Possibly mind control.”
“Who would mind control a baby? He’s not in the field. We’re not consulting him. There’s no point.” Shayera snorted and leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms. “Come on. Has anyone tried just not giving him another doll and letting him cry it out?”
Wally scrunched up his face. “Rude. He’s a baby. You can’t just let him suffer like that.”
Diana held up a hand, interrupting the argument before it could begin. “I tried twice to avoid replacing the doll by hiding the broken one when he wasn’t looking. The first time, I told him Batman had to go back to Gotham to fight the Joker but that he would return tomorrow.”
Bruce raised an eyebrow. “How did that go?”
She snorts. “It’s like he knew I was lying. At first he seemed to accept the story but then he decided that he wanted to play Justice League in Gotham to help you fight the Joker. So I gave him the obvious reason why he couldn’t--”
“No metas in Gotham,” J’onn provided.
Diana nodded. “--but it was a no go. He gave me this angry, suspicious baby look that shouldn’t have been cute but somehow was, then ripped the eyeglasses off of his storytime stuffed bear, put them on, and insisted he was just going to visit Alfred as “C’ark”. We debated that point for a few minutes until he started tearing up-- I got the impression he thought I was trying to conceal Bruce’s death from him-- so I gave in and gave him a new doll. When he beheaded that one during that same shift--”
“Is anyone else concerned by how short the intervals are getting?” Shayera asked the room.
“--I tried a different tactic,” Diana went on. “I told him that Batman had returned to Gotham to check on Robin and drink tea with Alfred. I hoped a mundane excuse would garner less concern, or at least not give him an excuse to turn it into a mission. Again, I was subject to his full suspicion and he kept checking in with me every two minutes to ask if you were done yet. Lying to him clearly wasn’t keeping the grief at bay so at the end of my shift, I let J’onn give him another doll when he came to relieve me.”
Shayera put her fist on the table. “Way to chicken out, Diana. You have to stay strong and power through it. Outlast him. I say, next time, no one replaces it. We just let him cry himself out. If he asks, tell him the Batman doll died because he wasn’t careful with his toys. Make him take responsibility for his actions. We can’t keep doing this. Forget pogo sticks, how much of our yearly budget have we spent on dolls ?”
Wally’s eyes grew huge. “Are you insane? He’s a baby! Do you not know what those are?”
John shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “That does seem a bit heavy handed, Shayera. Maybe we should try to get him to watch more TV. Steer him away from playing altogether.” He shrugged. “What? He’s going to be a kid for a week. It’s not like it will actually rot his brain.”
“Already tried that,” Batman muttered. “Our PR department’s too good. All the children’s channels have either advertisements for our products or those public service campaigns we did way back when. It puts him in the mood to play. He’ll ignore the screen to find his dolls.” He sighed. “Whatever this is, we’ll just have to work around it until he’s returned to normal. We just need to wait it out.”
Shayera stared at the ceiling, shaking her head.
****
“I cannot believe you,” John bit out. “How could you do that to a baby?”
“You’re overreacting,” Shayera insisted, glaring around the table. “Come on. We all knew it was worth a try. No one else just wanted to be the one to do it.”
“He cried for eight hours, Shayera.” John gripped his head in his hands. “Christ, woman. You are going to give a toddler PTSD.”
“He was just getting it out of his system. We all know he’s the sentimental type.”
J’onn’s voice was thick with rare disapproval. “When I arrived for my shift, he was despondent and in the process of improvising a funeral service. All the plushies and stuffed animals were arranged into rows, his twizzler snacks formed a cross, and he was running out of blocks to build a mausoleum.”
“It was that big?” Bruce asked, sounding almost touched, just as Wally muttered, “That is so cute and fucked up.”
“He was using his best fire truck as a casket. There were logistical considerations to be had for the ladder,” J’onn said.
Diana waved a hand, voice trailing. “I hate to ask but, Shayera’s tone-deaf child care aside, if he’s accepted that the doll isn’t coming back, we may consider leaving things as is. It’s not an ideal solution, but if the problem has resolved itself….”
John stared at her. “Not ideal? Diana, he thinks he’s killed a man .”
There was a round of winces.
“I already addressed it,” the alien intoned with a grimace. “Fearing the long term consequences of having an adult’s understanding of death tangle with a child’s neurological capacity for grief, I erred on the side of narrative correction. It took an hour, but I managed to discreetly levitate away the previous doll and replace it with an undamaged one. Of course, that would do no good without an explanation for his revival, lest he reject Bruce’s return as a shapeshifter’s tricks. I wracked my brain for an excuse we hadn’t already used. The cross suggested to me that Clark was raised with at least a passing knowledge of Judeo-Christian mythology so I asked him if he’d prayed for assistance. When he tearfully said yes, to God and to Rao, I convinced him that, actually, he needed to ask Elohim to collaborate on the matter as well, because Bruce’s mother was Jewish and thus presented a jurisdictional snag. Not only did he accept Bruce’s miraculous resurrection, but he made an impassioned appeal to the divine for increasing ongoing teamwork on behalf of mankind. A theological Justice League, if you will.”
Everyone groaned, though not a one of them looked surprised.
Bruce rolled his eyes hard enough to give himself a headache. Rubbing his temples, he muttered, “I am astounded that even an infant thinks I could fake my death, suffer from amnesia, or be revived by mythical beings so many times per calendar year.”
“I don’t know,” Wally said, awkwardly fiddling with his hands. “It does kind of sound like you.”
Bruce grit his teeth at the number of considering, affirmative nods that garnered. “Flash,” he said. “I think you just volunteered for Clark duty. As we’ve found, our best solutions reduce down to giving him another doll. Therefore, we should minimize that gap. We know what behaviors precedes the beheadings-- violent play altercations with pretend villains, followed by picking each doll up one by one-- so Wally is just going to have to stay alert and swap the doll as quickly as it’s beheaded. With any luck, we can cut down on the screaming, not to mention the number of weird fucking explanations we’re going to have to give him as an adult. I’ll put in another bulk order of dolls. Dismissed.”
****
Supergirl is clearly unprepared for the Flash to half collapse on her in a relieved hug as soon as she drew level with the nursery door. Awkwardly patted his back. “Um… It’s great to see you too?”
“Oh, thank god,” the speedster moaned. “You’re back. We need your help.”
“Right,” Kara said, gently extricating herself as she glanced around the empty hallway. It was empty, apart from a stack of cardboard boxes beside the door. “So Clark is a baby now and keeps murdering his Batman dolls? That’s weird.”
“Yes, that’s it exactly. Please, please, please say you’ll babysit. It’s just been me and Diana trading shifts because no one else is fast enough to swap out the dolls before he realizes he killed the other one. My feet haven’t touched the Earth’s surface in days. Days. Think of my houseplants. Please do it.”
Kara sighed. “Sure. Just for a few hours though-- the Legion needs me to--”
“Great, thanks so much, bye--” she heard, before a red blur slid across her vision in the direction of the teleporters.
****
Batman loomed over Kara where she sat in one of the security room’s rolling chairs. Behind him, Diana and John have their arms crossed. “Care to explain this?” he asked, slamming his palm on a button.
On the screen, footage of Kara’s one and only babysitting session began to play.
Clark is spinning, dolls clutched in his arms as they all cavort around today’s cityscape-- which Batman is displeased to note, rather resembles the decidedly off limits Gotham-- making whooshing and punching noises as needed. Apparently, Light-Up-Tummy Stuffed Bear, today’s evil nemesis, unleashes some kind of explosive device that sends all the Justice League members hurling in every direction.
It’s easy to guess where it was going.
Clark picks up each doll one by one, leaving Bruce for last. He seems to almost be putting it off, as though dreading the encounter, yet inexorably, his shaking little palms scoop up the black felt figure and flips it over. He tears up, clearly recalling the last dozen times he’s gone through this ordeal, his stubby little fingers reaching for his neck.
On screen, Kara glances up from her phone and tugs out an earbud. “Hey,” she says. When Clark looks over at her, Kara taps her ear and nods to the doll. “I can hear him. He’s good.”
Clark lets out a shuddering breath and nods. Holding Batman aloft, together they charge back into the fray to take out the bear. Kara’s attention has already returned to her phone.
Batman stabbed the button, halting the playback. “Let’s not mince words: what the fuck was that?”
“Ignore his tone,” Diana said, holding up a beseeching hand as Kara scoots away. “We are asking you seriously. We haven’t been able to stop him from decapitating Batman once, even when we try to talk him down before he actually does it. What did you do?”
Kara glanced between their earnest faces, still looking moderately incredulous as she pensively snapped her gum. “I mean…” she said after a minute. “it’s what he trained me to do in combat, and, well, he’s playing combat. It seemed obvious.”
Batman slammed a palm on the table. “What is ‘it’?”
“So much for visiting Ma and Pa before my next mission,” Kara sighed, glancing at the clock. “It’s a super senses thing. Clark says it's our job to keep track of our team during major attacks and make sure anyone seriously injured gets medical attention. He was doing the same thing with his toys. First, he tried to listen for their heartbeats, but well--” clear blue eyes give them dubious looks. “-- they’re dolls , so they don’t have any. That’s not necessarily weird for us in the field, though. If we get slammed into pavement or through a brick wall, it can mess with our inner ears. When that happens, we manually check that everyone is conscious, then move on to looking for bleeding and broken bones.”
“I have to admit,” John said slowly. “This whole ‘checking for injuries’ thing does fit his lead up behavior, but how does that result in decapitation?”
At that, Kara raised an eyebrow. “Have you seen that doll?”
****
To give credit to whoever did the character design at Plushies International, their commitment to authenticity was commendable. Not only were the broad strokes of their costumes rendered in lovingly accurate approximations, but great effort seemed to be put into capturing each superhero’s public “essence.”
Diana’s doll had a beaming, confident smirk, radiating strength and wisdom. John’s expression was sterner, but noticeably proud, as though victory were already assured. Shayera’s doll wore a fierce grin, stamped beneath the bright eyes shining from her mask in a way that came off as eager rather than outright predatory. Even J’onn’s green face had a gentle, serene smile, reassuring in a muted way. Wally’s mouth was practically a U shape, clearly conveying a bright and optimistic child-friendly personality.
Batman’s doll stood out like a sore thumb.
Frankly, it was a baffling choice for a children’s toy.
Instead of smiles and bright eyes, Batman’s cowled gaze offered a study in inscrutability. That alone made his toy’s visage oddly hostile compared to the others, but no amount of soft fabric and shiny thread could detract from his only visible facial feature: an I-beam level flat, horizontal line for a mouth.
It betrayed nothing. Not emotion, cognition, or even life.
Again, credit was due to whoever was so beholden to realism that they refused to give his character even so much as a slight smile. Instead, this individual had graced at least (Bruce checked the sales data three times, even filtering for their own bulk purchases) five hundred thousand children’s nurseries with Batman’s dead eyed stare, somehow managing to convey both existential ambivalence and a jaded disillusionment he’d only ever encountered on a middle-aged hooker dying of cancer.
Again, not exactly inaccurate. That was more or less the spirit of Gotham.
The more Bruce pondered the apathetic black hole of his doll’s near Lovecraftian gaze, the more the entire concept of a Batman plushie seemed breathtakingly ill advised in the first place. Some lunatic, somewhere, had seen an image of a man so pushed to the edge by local crime that he’d devoted his life to dressing up in themed armor and punching out his feelings, and thought to themselves, “You know, I bet my infant child would like to snuggle to sleep with a tinier version of that person.”
And then 500,000 adults entrusted with both money and children agreed with them. He set it down on the desk next to him. Maybe they all lived in Gotham.
****
“Wait.” Wally tugged on his hair, staring down at one of the many replacement dolls now scattered around the watchtower. “You’re saying that this entire time, Clark was decapitating Batman because he was trying to pull off his mask to check that he was conscious?”
J’onn made a point of tugging on the plushie’s neck, ever so gently. “It does not detach, but given that Clark does not seem to distinguish heavily between Batman as a concept, the man himself, and the doll, I do not think it occurred to him as a natural limitation of the fabric. There is no face to uncover. X-ray vision wouldn’t work either.”
Wally laughed, holding the doll up to catch it’s expression from every possible angle. “Oh, my god. I never looked that close at this thing. Look at his face . He could totally be dead and you wouldn’t be able to tell. No wonder Clark was freaked out. I’m shocked he’s even willing to play with it.”
Diana shrugged, lips twitching. “You could make a similar comparison about their actual adult selves.”
“I still can’t wrap my head around how they’ve been friends for years. I’m not convinced Stockholm Syndrome isn’t involved somehow,” Wally said. He held the doll up again. “So what do we do about it? I tried to reassure Supes that I could hear Bat’s heartbeat the last time he went to check, but he just stared at me like he was disappointed I’d lie so brazenly to him and then did it anyway, so that’s out. It’s great to at least know that he doesn’t secretly hate Bats, but I don’t know if it helps us any.”
“Perhaps,” J’onn said. “Batman said he knew how to handle it.”
****
Tanaka Sumiko, thirty two year old textile art designer, shook rain off her umbrella as she stepped inside. Mind already on to which frozen meal to heat up for dinner, she recoiled as she turned on the lamp nearest the door of her Tokyo apartment.
Batman turned in a slow circle to face her, a dark wraith back lit by the reflected neon lights of the street below. One current-edition Batman plushie from the Classic Justice Deluxe collection clasped in a claw-like gauntlet. “I need a custom doll.”
****
“We’re waiting for what?” Tamara asked, one weary, exasperated eyebrow cranking itself aloft. She actually paused mid-installation of the new plastic shatterproof light bulbs in the room.
Wally shrugged and glanced at where Clark was busy playing on the rug beside them. The little tyke could probably overhear him anywhere on the tower, so he was kind of counting on him being too preoccupied with his game to pay them much attention. “For Batman to figure something out. He’s been gone for an hour, but we don’t know when he’ll return.”
“And all of this is because his stupid doll doesn’t smile?” she demanded, jerking at the room and the many, many alterations and special orders she’d had to place because of it.
Wally winced. “Yes?”
Tamara gave him a flat, disgusted glance and then walked over to where Clark sat on the rug, pantomiming Martian Manhunter’s victory over Optimus Prime (which Wally suspected was actually a stand in for Toyman). “Excuse me, Superman. Can I talk to Batman for one minute? I need to go over some budgetary concerns with him before we finish auditing the current fiscal quarter,” she said kindly and reasonably, in the way that adults with actual childcare experience tended to.
Baby Supes glanced up at her absently, grabbed Batman from where he was sitting with the rest of the team off to the side, and handed him over before going back to his game.
Tamara stepped just outside of his line of vision and gave Wally a scathing look. Pulled a Sharpie out of her purple uniform pocket. Clicking it to life, she pressed it gently to the doll and made a tiny, almost imperceptible flick.
Tucking the pen back in her pocket, she pointedly showed Wally the Batman doll’s now smirking face and said, “All done. Thanks, Superman” before returning it to the pile with the rest of his seventy-five-percent organic cotton coworkers. She stalked out of the room.
Wally slowly activated his comm, voice hushed. “John? When Batman gets back, tell him we definitely owe Tamara a raise.”
****
Batman stared at him. “That’s it? And he hasn’t decapitated it once?”
“Not a once,” John said, propping his feet up on the couch in one of the several break areas scattered along the Watchtower. He stretched out his back, sighing as a soft crack emanated from his spine. “My shift was the quietest eight hours I’ve had in days. He checked on the team six times. Not a peep. You can ask Shayera. She’s in with him now.”
Batman scowled. “Glad I went out of my way to get one with a face.”
John chuckled. “How did you manage that? I thought you were more finicky than Clark about your secret identity. Don’t tell me you showed some doll-maker what you look like under there.”
“Of course not,” Batman said. “I made the doll maker and her boss sign NDAs even to speak with me. They made us a blank version of the same doll with a removable cowl, with iron-on versions of every facial feature and eye color the company’s ever put on a plushie that size. Easy to assemble, with no leaked information on any identifiable features.”
“Wow.” The Green Lantern gave him a dry look. “What did you threaten them with?”
“Absolutely nothing.” Batman allowed the silent disbelief to stretch. “I merely pointed out that the NDA is in effect for only three years, after which, were the details to leak, they might face the PR nightmare of being the company that made baby Superman cry. They felt very accommodating after that.”
“I’m sure they did. Where is it?” he asked, swinging his legs over the side and sitting up. “I want to see this thing.”
“I left it with Wally.” He took in the look that netted him. “What? Doubt his faculties as much as you like, but the man can safely puzzle out how to work a clothing iron and color match my hair and eye colors. Besides, it doesn’t matter now. We don’t need it anymore. Tamara’s version works fine.”
****
“Aw, but Bats, he likes this one so much better than Batsmirk. Look at him.”
It was astounding how much concise language Batman could push past clenched teeth. “If I’d known you wouldn’t take what was an admittedly easy job seriously--”
“I did take it seriously!”
John made zero effort to stifle his laughter. “He’s got you there, Batman.” He looked again at the image on Wally’s proffered phone screen and devolved into chuckles again. “It’s uncanny.”
Across the room from them, a tower of blocks clattered to the floor, sending knee-jerk bolts of adrenaline through the adults standing nearby. They immediately fell silent. The actual Bat-signal couldn’t inspire this much dread in even the most timid of criminals.
Clark wobbled over to the fallen and began his checks. If he was unnerved by the laser focus of his three friends standing by the door, he didn’t let it pause him in his game.
The new Batman plushie was carefully plucked from the rubble. Clark stared at it’s flat, expressionless mouth, a little bemused. It was virtually indistinguishable from the dozens of other dolls that had perished in the Safety Check Wars, up to and including the lack of the statistically-proven decapitation reducing smirk.
“Boose okay?” he murmured, before glancing around the room. Spotting his audience, he scooted until a still-standing block tower shielded the doll from sight (Bruce had to admit, it was reassuring that even as a toddler Clark took discretion and protecting his secret identity with such seriousness, even if their superior heights at this distance meant they still had a full view). The soft fabric cowl slid upwards, exposing a withering, glacier-blue glare. So far as expressions went, it went well beyond ‘grumpy’ and straight to ‘offended and salty about it’, as though the doll were recriminating the alien for daring to check on him.
Clark beamed and tugged the mask back into place. “Yep. Boose okay.” With that, he clasped his irritable stuffed friend to his chest and planted a kiss atop it’s cowled head. “Missed you.”
John whipped around, jabbing a finger at Wally. “I knew it! You owe me twenty bucks.”