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All things considered, Damian preferred working the evening shift at the animal shelter.
For starters, it was quiet. No one was bringing in their child to adopt a puppy this late, or dropping off an unwanted litter. It was just Damian and the animals, which he naturally preferred. He cleaned the bedding, topped off the water bowls, took the dogs that needed it on one last walk, and mopped the floors.
If Alfred could see him these days. Damian Wayne, mopping floors.
The timing was convenient—by the time he switched off the light and locked the door, it was time to head out on patrol. And this job earned him credit towards his animal science degree at Metropolis University. Really, it all served him very well.
Which was why he was so annoyed when he heard the bell above the front door jingle just as he was collecting the leashes for that night’s walk. He was in no mood to deal with some imbecile who was too short-sighted to spay their cat or keep her indoors and now had a box full of kittens to unload. Of course, he was never in the mood for that, but even in a major city like Metropolis, there were enough idiots who couldn’t grasp the concept of “indoor cat” to keep him busy.
But when he went into the front room, the young woman standing there wasn’t holding a box, or a bundle of old bedding to be donated, or anything at all. She stood with her hands shoved deep in the pockets of her oversized sweatshirt, humming something lilting and vaguely familiar.
“We’re closing soon,” Damian said. He was supposed to say “Can I help you?” but he didn’t particularly want to help her, and there was no one to make him.
The girl focused on him. “Damian Wayne?”
“Yes?”
“We have Bio Stats together. In Carter Hall?”
“Do we,” Damian said.
He wasn’t in college to socialize, no matter how much Richard tried to insist that was half the point. He’d never spoken to anyone in his Bio Stats class. But his training had made him observant, and he knew the faces of the other seventy-four students in the class. This girl wasn’t one of them.
“I suppose you’re here to borrow my notes,” he said, glancing through the front window to see if there was anyone lurking on the street. If this was an attempt to kidnap him and ransom him back to Father, she had to have brought at least one accomplice. She didn’t look like she could overpower Horatio, the arthritic chihuahua in the back room, let alone a healthy twenty-one year old man.
She laughed. “No, nothing like that. I just wanted to tell you not to go to Centennial Park.”
Damian frowned. “What?”
“It’s forbidden. You’ll have to give him something.” She shrugged, and her voice changed tone slightly, as if she were quoting someone. “Either gold rings, or green mantles, or else their maidenhead.”
“Excuse me?”
She smiled again. There was something not quite right about her eyes, and for the first time Damian considered that she might be after drugs. Sometimes desperate people thought the shelter carried tranquilizers the way that animal hospitals did.
But all she did was take a hand out of her pocket and wave. “See you in class, Damian!”
And then she left. No one burst through the front window or the back door to put a bag over his head and shove him into a van. There was no sound at all, except for the faint snores of a couple of the dogs in the back.
Damian locked the front door. Then he headed to the back, where he began opening the kennels and clipping leashes to collars, one by one.
“Well,” he said, when he’d assembled the seven dogs that needed walking. “Shall we go to Centennial Park?”
They wagged their tails.
It was a nice night, the first in October. Metropolis was warmer than Gotham despite being geographically relatively close, and September had felt like a balmy extension of summer. But now there was a sudden crispness in the air, as if the weather had checked the calendar and realized it was time for fall. Orange paper Jack O’Lanterns grinned from shop windows, and the cafe on the corner was unsubtle in its attempts to communicate via desperate chalkboard signage that yes, pumpkin spice lattes were back.
The dogs knew their way well, and so did Damian. He’d been living in Metropolis for a little over three years now, and volunteering at the shelter for most of that time. He’d surprised himself by choosing Metropolis University for his undergraduate degree, but they had an excellent animal sciences program, and it was a convenient distance from Gotham in case Father needed assistance. He’d gotten into a dozen universities, but something about Metropolis had just felt…right. Like it was exactly what he was looking for.
Operating as Robin had been a little trickier to figure out. Metropolis wasn’t Gotham, and it didn’t have Gotham’s problems. What it did have, of course, was Superman, who made much of what Damian could do superfluous.
But there was still street crime that escaped Superman’s notice when he was on the other side of the planet or in outer space, and Damian had managed to put together an effective patrol route in the rougher parts of the city. He rarely encountered Superman, in fact; so rarely that he’d sometimes wondered if the other man was avoiding him. And when they did unavoidably run into one another, Superman seemed…different than how Damian remembered him years ago. Muted, somehow.
It was probably just the contrast between a child’s reaction to a man who could fly and Damian’s more experienced, adult perspective. Superman wasn’t the one who had changed—Damian had.
The light changed, and Damian and his little pack of dogs crossed the street into Centennial Park. The sun was setting behind the trees, meeting the leaves that were just starting to turn in a blaze of orange.
“I just wanted to tell you not to go to Centennial Park.”
Why would anyone want to give Damian that message? Robin, yes, if something illegal was going on in the park, but Damian Wayne? He had some small notoriety at school—that was unavoidable, with his last name—but even if he’d been the tabloid playboy Father pretended at, it wouldn’t explain the warning.
So did the girl know he was Robin? If so, how? And that still didn’t answer the original question: why warn him away?
“You’ll have to give him something. Either gold rings, or green mantles, or else their maidenhead.”
There was something naggingly familiar in that phrasing, just like there had been in the tune she’d been humming. Gold rings, Damian had, or could easily get. Green mantles—well, his cape was black and yellow, but he owned plenty of green clothing, including in his costume. He was wearing a green shirt right now.
He did not have a maidenhead to speak of, not being a maiden. He was…not experienced, sexually, but that wasn’t any business of the girl’s, or whatever strange him was lurking in the park demanding things of Metropolitans. Damian couldn’t help wondering if it was just a very odd way of describing muggings and sexual assault.
His fingers tightened on the leashes. Well, if that was what was at the bottom of this, Damian would take great pleasure in making the perpetrators very sorry indeed.
The park was moderately busy, as it always was at this hour, as Metropolitans got home and took their dogs for their evening walks. The shelter dogs exchanged polite sniffs with the other canines they passed, tails wagging. Damian kept his senses peeled for anything unusual or illicit, but saw nothing to merit the girl’s strange warning.
He turned the collar up on his jacket as a breeze stirred the leaves littering the path. There was something melancholy about fall, a feeling that was sharper here than in Gotham, where the weather was chilly and dreary year-round. Although to be honest, Damian had started noticing it before he’d moved here. Since he was about thirteen, maybe—a wistfulness with the changing of the seasons.
The dogs’ tails weren’t wagging anymore.
Damian looked up sharply. There weren’t any other pedestrians around—no dog walkers, no joggers, no hot dog vendors making their way home. A mist had rolled in unexpectedly, swirling around Damian’s ankles.
And the trees… The ones to either side and behind him were the same as the ones all over the park, red maple and white oak, their leaves sliding into crimson and orange as the season turned. But the ones lining the path directly ahead of him were still green, a green so deep it was almost black, and Damian couldn’t identify the species.
Father had drilled Damian on over a thousand species of trees and how to identify them. A bit of crushed leaf in the tread of someone’s shoe could solve a case that all the surveillance footage in the world couldn’t. Damian could always identify the species.
He stopped walking.
There was no way this was a coincidence. Whatever he had been warned away from, whatever him was in the park taking mantles and maidenheads, had to be connected to this strange mist, these unseasonal and unidentifiable trees. Damian would have marched in and confronted whoever he was without hesitation, but he didn’t want to risk the dogs.
And then a figure emerged from the mist.
He was young, younger than Damian, but a few inches taller. White, with black hair falling in loose, messy curls across his forehead and long, dark lashes to match. When he saw Damian, he smiled, a wide and unguarded expression that made Damian take half a step back.
“Damian!” he said. “Wow. It’s been…it’s been a really long time.”
Damian frowned. “Who are you?”
A flicker of hurt crossed the other man’s face. Damian ignored it. Yes, if he was honest with himself, there was something vaguely familiar about this stranger. But he was a stranger, and one in an otherworldly part of Centennial Park that hadn’t existed this time yesterday evening, at that.
“Damian, it’s me,” the man said. “Jon. Jon Kent.”
Kent. Like Clark Kent? Damian shifted back another half step. “I don’t know any—”
Memory struck, so sharp and sudden it hurt as it lanced through Damian’s mind.
“Your safety! You kidnapped me!”
“I suppose they want us to become brothers-in-arms or something.”
“Staying close to Damian—being a friend in good times and bad—is the answer, not pushing him away.”
Damian gasped, doubled over with the force of it. One of the dogs whined worriedly at him and he hastily straightened up, clutching at his aching head with one hand, squinting at the man in front of him with bleary eyes.
Jon. His friend, first begrudgingly and then with wholehearted codependency. They’d done everything together—sleepovers, school, fighting crime—until suddenly Jon was just gone one day. And Damian hadn’t noticed until now.
“Jon,” he managed. “What happened? How could I…”
Jon beamed, lighting up the shady, tree-lined alley. “You do remember. I thought you might, if you saw me. If I spoke to you.”
Damian shook his head—not disagreeing with Jon’s theory, but with all of it. “How long…?”
Jon put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. He wasn’t wearing jeans, like Damian had first thought, but some kind of blue woolen trousers, and a red vest over a white shirt. The shirt didn’t have any buttons, just ties at the front. “Oh, it’s been a while.”
Now that the memories were back, they were crystal clear. “I was fourteen the last time I saw you,” Damian said. “A while? It’s been seven years!”
“Hey, you know I was never a numbers guy.” Jon was smiling again.
“Superman,” Damian said suddenly, and Jon’s smile fell. “Superman wouldn’t just let his son disappear. Why didn’t he tear the world apart looking for you?”
Jon shrugged again, this time less carelessly. “She made him forget, same as you. She made everyone forget.”
“‘She’? Who is ‘she’?” The vagueness reminded Damian, suddenly, of the girl in the animal shelter. Was she the one Jon was talking about? “Are you the reason I was warned away from the park? Are you taking…” He couldn’t bring himself to say “maidenheads.” “Are you hurting people?”
“What? No! No, I would never, you know that,” Jon said. “Look, do we have to talk about work? I just wanted to see you. It’s been so long.”
“Seven years,” Damian repeated, stiff-necked. “Seven years since the best friend I ever had suddenly disappeared and neither I nor anyone else noticed.”
Jon brightened again. Had his smile always made his eyes crinkle like that, or was that new? “The best friend you ever had? Still?” he asked.
“If I ever actually had you and you aren’t a telepathic projection or something equally insidious,” Damian said. “Are you going to answer any of my questions? Who is she?”
Jon turned his head as if he’d caught a sound, even though the alley was dead silent. “I should go,” he said. “I…it was really good to see you again, Damian. Will you…will you come back?”
Damian glowered. “Oh, I’ll come back. I’m going to figure out what you really are, and if it isn’t what you’re claiming, I promise that I will make you very, very sorry.”
Bizarrely, Jon beamed again at that. “Good old Damian,” he said. “God, I’ve missed you. I’ll see you soon!”
He turned and took a step into the mist, then another, and then, far too quickly to be natural, the mist filled in the space where he had been and he was gone.
“Jon Kent,” Damian said to himself. The mist was thinning, leaving the trees looking the same as they always did. The dogs were looking up at him as if to ask him why he’d stopped their walk. There was no evidence that anything had happened at all.
Except that Damian had about a year’s worth of memories in his head that hadn’t been there before.
*
There were three possibilities:
One: Jon was telling the truth—and so were Damian’s memories—and Damian’s childhood best friend really had been abducted at age eleven by a mysterious woman who had made everyone forget he ever existed, even his own father.
Two: Damian’s memories were accurate, but the thing Damian had met in the park was not Jon, and was using his memories to manipulate Damian for some nefarious purpose, presumably connected to whatever had made Jon disappear in the first place.
Three: Jon Kent had never existed, and the thing in the park had implanted those memories in Damian’s mind—again, for nefarious purposes.
It was tempting to believe in the first option. Damian’s memories of Jon were so clear: clinging to Goliath’s back and laughing as they soared through the night sky. Crouching by his open window, daring Jon to be bad for once and sneak out. Swearing to Superman that he would protect him.
If Jon was real, Damian had failed profoundly to keep that promise.
But anyone trying to manipulate him would make his imaginary friend as tempting as possible. Damian had once trusted Jon as he had trusted very few people in his life, or at least he thought he had—and that was why he couldn’t trust him now. Not until he was sure.
The next night, he took the dogs on an earlier, shorter walk than usual, just around the block a couple of times until they could fulfill their biological needs. Then he returned them to their kennels and let out one more dog, a white mutt of no easily identifiable breed.
“Come on, boy,” he said.
It was cloudier than the evening before. Damian walked unhesitatingly to the park, and then to the place where the park he knew had given way last night to…somewhere else. Of course, if the strange alleyway of trees didn’t appear this time…
But no, there was the mist swirling around his ankles, and there were the trees that didn’t know it was autumn, and there, stepping out of the shadows, was Jon. He was smiling, of course.
“You came back,” he breathed. “I wasn’t sure if you would.”
Damian hadn’t stepped fully into the alley last time, unwilling to trust that he could find his way out of it. Now he took several deliberate steps forward, until he was fully within that odd and unnatural space.
The world went abruptly silent. No birds or squirrels rustling in the trees, no voices in the distance, no skateboard wheels on asphalt. The dog pressed against Damian’s leg, his attention fixed on Jon.
“I wasn’t sure if I could find this place again,” Damian said. “Apparently I could.”
“I opened the gate for you,” Jon said, smiling easily. “I—wait, is that…”
The dog was straining forward now, his nostrils twitching as he picked up Jon’s scent. Suddenly his ears perked up and he lunged forward. Damian hastily dropped the leash before his arm got ripped out of its socket.
“Krypto!” Jon shouted as his dog barreled into him, whining and panting, jumping up to lick at his face like he’d forgotten he could fly. “Hiya, pal! Hiya, buddy! Did you miss me? Did you? Did you?”
And that was confirmation. An illusion might fool Damian’s eyes, but not Krypto’s nose. And a telepath might get through Damian’s defenses, but they’d have a much harder time with the mind of a Kryptonian dog.
Damian’s chest tightened unexpectedly. This really was his best friend. He really was back.
Which meant someone really had taken him from Damian.
Jon looked up where he was kneeling on the ground, still petting a frantically squirming Krypto. His eyes were red, but he was smiling. “Thank you,” he said. “I didn’t think I’d ever see him again. Either of you.” Suddenly the smile vanished off his face. “You didn’t tell my father you’d seen me, did you?”
Damian shook his head. “I wanted to determine if you were real first. If you were a fraud, I’d be wasting both of our times. I asked Timothy to ask the clone for a favor.” He paused. “Jon…what happened to you?”
Jon looked down to where Krypto had rolled onto his back and rubbed the dog’s belly. Krypto wriggled in delight. “You really went into favor debt with Tim for me? Wow, that’s a pretty big deal, Damian—”
“Jon.”
Jon’s hair was long enough that looking down like this, his curls shadowed his eyes and hid his expression. “I can’t tell you.”
“Unacceptable.” Damian folded his arms. “You’ve been gone for seven years. Do you think this is really an appropriate time to be coy?”
“I’m not. I mean, I can’t tell you,” Jon said, looking up at Damian. The frustration was evident on his face. Krypto whined and licked his hand.
Damian considered. Jon clearly hadn’t left of his own free will. And he clearly wasn’t staying here, in whatever this place was, of his own free will, either. So when he said he couldn’t tell Damian what had happened to him, he might be trying to be secretive—but it was more likely that he either literally physically couldn’t answer the question, or some leverage was being used against him to keep him from speaking openly. A threat against his family, perhaps, or maybe even Damian himself.
But… She made everyone forget, Jon had said yesterday. That had slipped out. Maybe, if Damian didn’t press, he’d learn more about this mysterious she who was also very likely behind Jon’s uncharacteristic silence. Subtlety wasn’t Damian’s strong suit, but he could manage it.
“All right,” he said. “What do you want to talk about instead?”
Jon’s relief was obvious. He stood, and Krypto pressed himself against Jon’s legs.
“Let’s talk about you,” Jon said. “What are you doing in Metropolis?”
And so Damian told him about the last seven years, walking down that tree-lined alley, Krypto refusing to lose contact with Jon for even a second. Damian couldn’t help glancing behind him as they walked. He didn’t really think Jon would lead him into a trap…but seven years was a long time, and Jon was clearly under the influence of someone with power and ill intentions, and most importantly, having been childhood friends with someone a long time ago was no excuse to be foolish now.
But the mouth of the alley, where the ordinary park beckoned, never seemed to get any further away no matter how long they walked for, and the twilight around them never seemed to darken into full night. Damian could escape, if he had to.
“...so now I’m in my final year of undergraduate studies,” he said. “Metropolis University’s general education requirements don’t have the sort of academic rigor that would challenge me, of course, but their animal science program is adequate.”
“Of course you’re going to be a vet. You haven’t changed at all, have you? Except physically, obviously.”
Jon was smiling at him with such embarrassing fondness that Damian had to turn away. “What do you mean, physically?” he asked, glancing at his hands as if they would give him the answer, and then frowned at the sight of green gauntlets. “What—I was in civilian clothes.”
“Oh.” Jon looked mildly startled, as if he hadn’t noticed Damian’s clothing changing any more than Damian had. “I guess this is just how I imagine you, so it sort of…” He made a vague, shruglike gesture at the trees around them.
Damian scowled. It wasn’t just his gauntlets; he was wearing his old Robin suit, from his first hooded cloak to the childish kneepads and red bootlaces. Everything fit as if he hadn’t outgrown it years ago. “I am not something you imagined,” he snapped, uncomfortable with the idea that he’d been re-dressed not just without his consent, but without even realizing it had happened.
“No, I know that,” Jon said, but he wouldn’t meet Damian’s eyes. He was wearing the same archaic clothing he’d been dressed in before, though the red cloak evoked his old Superboy costume.
“What.”
Jon opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “You aren’t something I imagined. Obviously. You’re real,” he said. “But Damian…you have no idea how much I have imagined you.”
It was Damian’s turn not to know what to say. Jon’s cheeks were scarlet.
“Why didn’t you want me to tell your father I’d seen you?” Damian asked.
It was an effective way to dispel whatever strange tension had sprung up between them. Jon winced and looked away.
“He forgot me, didn’t he?” he asked. “Him, my mom, Kara, Conner. Just like you did. She said she made everyone forget.”
There was that mysterious she again. “He did,” Damian said, because Superman hadn’t torn the world apart looking for his son, and surely that meant he’d forgotten he ever had one.
But on second thought…maybe whatever she had done wasn’t as all-encompassing as it was intended to be. Damian didn’t interact with Superman very often, even living in Metropolis, but now that he thought about it, Superman had seemed…different, these past seven years. Quieter. Almost melancholy, in a way that didn’t match up with Damian’s younger memories.
Almost like Damian himself had felt, he thought uncomfortably.
Jon didn’t seem to have noticed Damian second guessing himself. “I’m not sure I even could open the gate for him,” he said. “She would have thought of that, I’m sure. And even if I could see him again, or Mom, or anyone, Dad wouldn’t have his powers here, and I couldn’t leave with him. So it would just hurt them, and I don’t want to do that. Promise me you won’t tell him. Or anyone.”
“But what if—”
“Promise!”
Damian sighed. “All right. I promise.” For now, he thought.
If Superman wouldn’t have his powers here, did that mean Jon didn’t? That Krypto didn’t? Damian had brought the dog partially for protection, but now he thought maybe Krypto hadn’t forgotten he could fly earlier—maybe he simply couldn’t right now.
As for the rest…Jon was unwilling to see his family for fear of hurting them, but he’d opened the gate, whatever that meant, for Damian. Damian wasn’t sure if that meant Jon was fine with hurting Damian, or if he simply assumed that remembering Jon and then being forced to leave him behind wouldn’t cause Damian any pain. Probably the latter. Damian had worked very hard to eradicate sentimentality from his relationships. He should be pleased.
Of course, there was a third possibility.
“Could I get you out?”
The look Jon gave him was so fond, Damian almost didn’t mind that it was also extremely condescending. “Damian. Are you really asking if you can do something Superman can’t do?”
“I can do plenty of things Superman can’t do,” Damian scoffed. “Lie convincingly. Eat properly seasoned food. Accurately assess a threat instead of assuming everyone I meet is my new best friend…”
“Assuming everyone you meet is an enemy isn’t automatically more accurate,” Jon said, but he was smiling. It was an old argument. “And my dad loves spicy food, you know that. Remember when he brought us that hot pot and even you couldn’t eat it?”
“No,” Damian lied.
He couldn’t help but notice how neatly Jon had diverted his question without seeming to refuse to answer him. He certainly hadn’t learned that sideways deceptiveness from his father. Then again, it had been seven years. Maybe Jon had changed more than Damian had.
He thought of Jon’s comment that Damian had changed physically. It was true for Jon too, although Damian had recognized him almost immediately. He was taller, of course, his shoulders broader, his face less round. His cheekbones were more defined, though there were still tiny freckles scattered across them. Damian wondered how he got those in this eternal twilight. Jon must be able to see the sun sometimes, which was reassuring. He belonged in sunlight, and not just because of his Kryptonian DNA.
Jon’s eyes hadn’t changed, of course. They’d always been that unusual shade of violet. And surely his eyelashes had been that full and dark when they were boys…
Damian looked away.
“What kind of trees are these?” he asked, not caring how graceless the subject change was. “I doubt they’re native to Delaware.”
“Oh. I don’t know if they have names. A lot of things here don’t, or they don’t tell me the names,” Jon said.
Now there was a they to go with she. Damian reached for a low-hanging branch and rubbed one of the leaves gently between his thumb and forefinger. It was oval, maybe two inches long, and a deep, dark green that was nearly blue.
“I assume the leaves change later than the ones in the regular part of the park. Those are all starting to turn.”
“The leaves here never change.”
Interesting. Damian considered the risk he was about to take, decided he was equal to it, and tugged. The leaf broke free of its branch.
There was a flicker of reaction over Jon’s face, but that was all. The tree didn’t lunge at him; the leaf didn’t burst into flames in Damian’s palm. It was almost disappointing.
“So who were all those dogs you were walking yesterday? Were they all yours?” Jon asked.
They kept walking, and Damian told Jon about his volunteer work, and the animals at the shelter, and how his own pets were faring back home in Gotham—lavishly spoiled, even if Father would never admit to doing so. Almost before Damian realized it, they were back at the border separating this alley from the ordinary park—which was strange, since he didn’t recall turning around.
They stopped. Jon knelt to press his forehead against Krypto’s, who whined, knowing Jon was saying goodbye.
“Will you come back?” Jon asked without looking up.
“Yes,” Damian said. He didn’t share Jon’s skepticism. There was a way to take Jon out of this place, and Damian would find it.
“Okay. Cool.” Jon straightened up and smiled.
Damian picked up the leash that had been trailing on the ground this whole time. “Krypto, come.”
“Wait.” Suddenly Jon looked embarrassed.
“What?”
“The leaf,” Jon said. He rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s the rules. You took something of hers, so I have to take something of yours. A tribute.”
You’ll have to give him something, the girl in the shelter had said. Either gold rings, or green mantles, or else their maidenhead.
Damian’s eyes narrowed. “What if I don’t want to give you a tribute?”
Jon’s shrug was sheepish. “That’s just how it works.”
“Right.” Damian turned to face the mouth of the alley, where the ordinary park with its yellowing leaves beckoned, and took a step.
Suddenly Jon was in front of him. Damian knew Jon didn’t have his superspeed in here, and the fact that he couldn’t tell how Jon had moved like that without it made him uneasy.
Now Jon looked apologetic. “I’m sorry, Damian. It really is the rules. I can’t do anything about it.”
Damian’s grip tightened on Krypto’s leash. He didn’t really think Jon would hurt him—this was Jon, after all—but then again, seven years was a long time, and he didn’t know what leverage the mysterious she had over Jon. And if it came down to a fight, he didn’t know which way the dog would go. “And what exactly is this tribute supposed to be?”
“It depends. On what the trespasser takes, and what they have.” Jon’s eyes flickered over Damian, then brightened. “Give me your hand.”
Still frowning, Damian extended the hand that wasn’t holding Krypto’s leash. With a click, Jon undid the fastening that kept Damian’s gauntlet in place. Then he cradled the back of Damian’s hand in his left palm and tugged gently on the middle finger of the gauntlet with his right hand.
The gauntlet slid over Damian’s skin slowly, a whisper of fabric. His hand felt oddly vulnerable without it, cradled in Jon’s palm, skin to skin. Jon should have felt cool and otherworldly, like everything else in that place, but he didn’t; he felt warm and alive. Damian’s pulse raced for no good reason.
He looked up. Jon’s face was very close, his violet eyes bright in the twilight. His cheeks were flushed.
“There,” he said, holding up the gauntlet, a brilliant scrap of color in the dark. It wasn’t a mantle, but it was green. “That’s your tribute.”
“Fine.” Damian was surprised by how even his voice came out, and then annoyed with himself for being surprised. “Krypto, come.”
Krypto whined again but obeyed. They stepped forward, into the sounds and scents of Centennial Park. Damian was back in his civilian clothing.
He didn’t know if the other park was still there behind him. He didn’t turn around to see.
*
When Damian returned to his apartment after delivering Krypto back to Conner, he went straight for his bedroom closet. He opened the false back of it to reveal the deeper closet where he stored all of his gear: birdarangs, utility belt supplies, spare costumes.
The gauntlet to one of his costumes was missing. In its place was a single dead leaf.
*
Jon might have been skeptical that Damian could succeed where Jon was certain Superman would fail. Damian was not.
It was, perhaps, a reflection of what Jon had been through in the past seven years that he was so pessimistic now. He used to think his father could do anything. He used to think Damian could do anything, for that matter. He used to look at Damian like…well. Differently than he did now. The way he looked at Damian now…
It didn’t matter. If Damian needed to play the optimist this time around, he would.
The obvious suspect was Poison Ivy. The pronoun fit, of course, and the strange trees, and the compulsion; her pheromones were documented as working on Kryptonians, and Jon was half-human anyway. Not to mention she’d taken over a park before—Robinson Park in Gotham, after the quake. She’d protected children then, though, so it was odd that she would have abducted one this time.
Not that Jon was a child anymore.
Damian shook it off. He had work to do.
No one in the family had fought Ivy recently, but that didn’t mean she was hard to find, not when Damian had remote access to Barbara’s files. Security footage had picked Ivy up living in an abandoned fertilizer factory on the outskirts of Gotham. Damian had two lectures today, but his GPA was excellent. He could afford a day trip back home.
He took the precaution of putting on a gas mask before he broached Ivy’s lair, which would protect him from airborne particles as well as covering some of the skin left exposed by his costume. Part of the roof of the factory had fallen in. Damian landed lightly on the roof and crept to the edge of the intact part to get a bird’s eye view—no pun intended, no matter what Richard would have said—at what Ivy was up to.
Something snaked around his ankle.
Before Damian could react, he was yanked off of the roof. He scrambled for his grapple gun, but before he could fire it he was brought up short, dangling upside down by his ankle, his head a few inches from the ground. He twisted to see what was holding him. A vine, of course.
Irritating. He holstered the grapple gun and reached for a laser cutter.
A pair of delicate, bare feet approached. The beds of the toenails were faintly green. “Robin. To what do I owe the displeasure?”
“I want to talk to you about what you’re doing in Metropolis.” He pulled the laser cutter out of his belt and was about to flick it on when another vine caught his wrist.
“I’m being hospitable, even though you’re rudely intruding, because you’re a child,” Ivy said, and the vines tightened uncomfortably. “Start slicing up my babies and I’ll be a lot less hospitable.”
“I’m twenty-one,” Damian said, although he left the laser cutter off.
“Really? Jesus.” The vines lifted Damian until he was eye level with Ivy, although still upside down. “What’s this about Metropolis?”
“You took over Centennial Park. Or part of it, at least. You have a prisoner there.”
“What? No, I didn’t.”
“I was there. I saw it. I saw him.”
“I don’t know who or what you saw, little bird, but I spend as little time in Metropolis as possible.” Ivy gave a delicate shudder. “All that concrete and steel…it’s worse than Gotham. There isn’t a single tree in that city that wasn’t planted by men in the past hundred years, did you know that?”
Ivy could lie when she felt like it, but she didn’t often feel like it. Ecoterrorists were more likely to crow about what they’d done than hide it, after all. Besides…Damian twisted again to peer at the vines that were holding him. A particularly hardy Virginia creeper. And all the plants that had burst through the factory floor and up the walls were familiar ones, native to New Jersey: butterfly milkweed, mountain laurel. Nothing like the strange and unidentifiable trees Damian had seen in that twilight alley.
“Can I show you something?” he asked.
Ivy narrowed her eyes at him. “If you’re about to try to slap a pair of handcuffs on me, remember that the human body makes excellent fertilizer.”
“I’m not as stupid as some of my predecessors.”
She snorted at that, but the vines lowered him to the ground—not particularly gracefully, but he didn’t split his skull open on what was left of the factory floor, so he would consider it a victory. He stood up and reached into his belt for the leaf, which he’d placed in a clear plastic evidence bag. “Do you know what kind of tree this is?”
Ivy rolled her eyes. “If this is all because you needed help with your botany homework…wait. Let me see that.”
She held out her hand for the bag. Damian felt a sudden, ludicrous reluctance to give it to her, like it was his only connection to Jon.
It wasn’t. It was just a dead leaf. Damian could see Jon tonight, if he wanted.
Ivy opened the bag and shook the leaf into her palm. “Careful,” Damian warned.
“Where did you get this?”
“I told you. Metropolis.”
“No, you didn’t.” Ivy picked the leaf up by what was left of the stem and turned it over, examining it from every angle. Her eyes were wide. “This didn’t come from Delaware. This didn’t come from any plant I’ve ever seen.”
“You can’t have seen every plant.”
She looked up at him. Damian knew from Father’s files that Pamela Isley was forty-six years old, but for a second the green of her eyes was fathomless, as ancient as the most towering oak, and Damian felt very foolish.
“What does that mean?” he asked. “That it’s a plant you don’t know? Could it have been bioengineered?”
“Any new plant would have had to come from an old root, no pun intended,” she said. “No, this is from somewhere else.”
“Somewhere else?”
“Another planet. Another dimension. Magic. Take your pick.” She offered the leaf back to him.
He didn’t take it. “Can’t you, uh…ask the Green?”
“Excuse me?” she asked, one eyebrow arching in distinct amusement.
“Batman’s files say some of you have a connection to something called the Green. You, Floronic Man…”
Ivy’s lip curled. “Woodrue. Ugh. I wouldn’t recommend flying to him for help, little bird.” She twirled the leaf’s stem between her fingers. “The Green connects plant life, and this leaf is dead. Swamp Thing might be able to tell you something more about it, if he’s in a telling mood, which isn’t a guarantee. Or I might be able to deduce something from a live plant, if I’m in a telling mood…which isn’t a guarantee, either.” She offered him the leaf again, and this time he took it. “My advice is this, Robin: leave strange plants alone.”
“It’s not the plants I care about,” Damian said. “It’s the boy who’s trapped with them.”
“Well, it wasn’t me who trapped him,” Ivy said. “And it sounds like it’s going to take more than a leaf to get him out.”
*
Damian should have spent the night following up on more leads. Ivy had said “magic,” and that rang true to Damian. Magic would explain the forgetting; it would explain why Kryptonian powers didn’t work in that other place.
There were plenty of villains who used magic in the various files Damian had access to: the Batcomputer, the Justice League, the Titans. It would probably take more than one night—possibly many nights—to track them all down, but Damian wasn’t one to be daunted by a difficult task. He should be punching a warlock in the teeth right now.
Instead he was in the tree-lined alley. With Jon.
“What did you do today?” Jon asked, smiling down at him. He’d been smiling at Damian since he’d first emerged from the shadows. It almost made Damian forget how irritating it was that Jon, who had been an inch taller than him even when Damian was thirteen and Jon was only ten, was now nearly half a foot taller. He was broader, too—mostly in the shoulders. His waist was—
Damian looked away. “I went to Gotham.”
“To see your dad?”
“No.” Damian hadn’t stopped by the manor. Father was not emotionally intuitive at the best of times, but he did have an instinct for knowing when Damian was keeping a secret at the worst of times. Damian didn’t mind lying to Father, but it was tiresome lying to him when they both knew he was doing so—and he certainly couldn’t tell Father about Jon, because Father would want to tell Superman, and Damian had promised not to do that. Not yet, anyway.
“Is everything okay between you two?” Jon asked, with the same little worried line between his brows he used to get when he was ten. “I know back before I left you didn’t always used to get along—”
“I want to talk about your father,” Damian interrupted. “Does he have any villains who use magic?”
Jon, who had looked wounded when Damian cut him off, went still. “Why do you want to know?”
Damian held his gaze. “I’m writing a paper for school.”
Jon’s jaw twitched. They both knew why Damian was asking—and Jon’s tense reaction meant that Ivy had been right, and magic was involved, and Jon was now treading very close to the edge of what he was allowed to say.
“Not a lot of heavy hitters,” Jon said finally. “There’s Blaze and Satanus. Silver Banshee. Atlas’s strength comes from magic, technically. And Dad’s fought magic villains with the League, but I couldn’t tell you who all they were.”
A sudden idea struck Damian. “What about, um. That irritating little creature in the bowler hat?”
Jon grinned, the tension in him briefly dissipating. “You still can’t say Mxyzptlk?”
“I prefer to spend my energy fighting real villains, not practicing the names of the annoying ones,” Damian sniffed, and Jon grinned wider. “But he…you’ve had run-ins with him before, haven’t you?”
“Run-ins” was more than a little euphemistic, but Damian wasn’t sure if saying the truth—that Mxyzptlk had abducted Jon and caused his parents to forget his existence once before already—would be too close to what Jon couldn’t talk about. Mxyzptlk being behind this didn’t explain the mysterious she Jon had referred to, but maybe he was working with someone else.
“I have,” Jon said grimly. “But I haven’t seen Mxy in years.”
Meaning he wasn’t behind this particular abduction. “Which of your father’s villains have you seen more recently?” Damian asked. “Or, no…if I listed them, could you tell me—”
“Stop.”
Jon was tense, his jaw tight. Damian had pushed too far.
“Does it hurt?” Damian asked, a cold anger unfurling inside of him. “If you talk about something you aren’t allowed to talk about?”
Jon shook his head. “No. I just can’t talk about it, like I literally can’t say it. But it doesn’t…she’s never hurt me. Not like that. But if I push too hard on the rules, she’ll notice and…” The side of his mouth curled up, rueful. “You’re not really supposed to be here.”
“Here. Where is here, exactly?” Damian asked, and Jon winced. “I mean, is it just this little bit of trees? Because that’s a really boring way to spend seven years.”
Jon visibly relaxed as Damian redirected the conversation into inanities. “No, there’s more. There’s other parts. This is just the bit I’m supposed to guard. I don’t think I could take you to my bower or anything.”
Damian’s eyebrows went up. “Your bower?”
“It’s where I sleep,” Jon said. His cheeks were turning pink. It was oddly fascinating. “It…it doesn’t matter. Oh! I bet I could take you to the garden!”
“The garden?”
But Jon was already grabbing Damian’s wrist and turning around. They walked for a few feet, and suddenly, emerging out of a space they’d traversed a hundred times, was a magnificent rose garden.
Jon turned and beamed at Damian. “Neat, huh?”
Damian stepped forward, feeling Jon’s fingers slip from his wrist. It wasn’t a tidy, cultivated garden with neat beds and hedges, like Alfred’s had been. It was an untamed, unruly riot of color and scent, with roses of every breed he’d ever seen and plenty he hadn’t—spilling over the paths, climbing up trellises and arches, every single one of them full and open like it was the sunniest day in June instead of an endless twilight in what might or might not still be October.
Jon followed Damian under one of the arches. It was low, too low for Jon’s height, and as his head brushed the bottom of it, a few petals broke free to tangle in his curls, pink and white and dewy.
“This is one of her favorites,” Jon said. He’d lowered his voice. “I’m really not supposed to bring anyone here.”
Damian looked away, his finger skimming over the stem of the nearest rose, mindful of the thorns. Red, of course. “I can imagine,” he said. “If plucking a leaf cost me a glove, what would picking a flower cost?”
“Damian,” Jon said. His voice was still so low. “I told you. There’s rules. I don’t have a choice.”
“You don’t have a choice about taking a tribute,” Damian said. “But do you have a choice in what you take?”
“Yes.”
Damian looked back at him, at the familiar little line between his brows, at his violet eyes, so dark in the twilight. Without breaking eye contact, he broke the stem.
A leaf had cost him a green “mantle.” He had no gold rings on him. But Jon would never hurt him, so…
Jon leaned down and brushed his lips against Damian’s, so softly Damian barely felt it.
“There,” Jon said. “A stolen kiss. The tribute has been paid.”
“Oh,” Damian said, and they walked on.
*
That night when Damian got home, there was a dead rose on his pillow.
*
Damian sat at the Batcomputer, a steaming cup of jasmine tea in his hands, and waited while it processed the search criteria he had given it.
It was a week and a half since he’d last come to Gotham. Somehow the days had seemed to slip away from him, between classes and work and patrol. And of course, meeting Jon in the park every night. Whatever geas Jon was under that kept him from naming his captor meant that he wasn’t much use when it came to solving his own mystery, but Damian still found himself in Centennial Park nearly every twilight. He was Jon’s only connection to the outside world, he told himself. He couldn’t take that away from him.
He was careful not to pick any more roses, though.
He could, of course, access the Batcomputer’s files through any of his own devices. Oracle had provided them with a completely secure network they could access from nearly anywhere on the planet. But something about the massive screen and the chill of the Cave, the echo of water dripping deep in the recesses of the vast caverns, helped Damian to think when he was stuck on a case. And there was always the possibility that…
“Oh, hey Damian.”
Damian sighed inwardly as Timothy came down the stairs. Then he remembered that he didn’t care what Timothy thought, and sighed outwardly, too.
If he was honest with himself, he’d been hoping Richard would choose this weekend to come home. He couldn’t ask anyone for help, of course, not in so many words. He’d promised Jon he wouldn’t tell anyone about him until Damian had won his freedom. But Richard would respect Damian’s privacy if he needed to talk around the problem in order to ask for advice. So would Duke and Cassandra. Father would not, but he had the most experience. Even Jason would have had something to contribute, having been the most directly touched by the mystical.
But no, Damian got Timothy, who was of no use whatsoever in the question of magic, and nosy besides. The only more useless member of the family on offer was Batcow.
“Thanks, Damian, it’s great to see you, too,” Timothy said as he reached the bottom of the stairs. “So nice of you to ask how I’m doing.”
“If you wanted pleasantries, Drake, you should have gone to Bludhaven,” Damian said.
“Well, I would have, but I don’t want to pick up several weird rashes, and also I needed to analyze these samples, and Bruce’s equipment is better than what I have at my place,” Timothy said, holding up a few small evidence bags. “What are you working on?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Damian said, but Timothy was already leaning on the back of Damian’s chair and peering at the screen.
“Magic villains spotted three times or more within a fifty mile radius of Metropolis,” Timothy said. “Run into some hocus pocus?”
“What do you think?”
“Blaze and Satanus,” Timothy read out loud instead of answering him. “Conner’s fought them, he says they’re a pain in the ass. Klarion the Witch Boy, ugh, hate that guy. Not sure if Silver Banshee counts as a villain right now. Queen of Fables—”
“Don’t you have some samples to analyze?” Damian snapped.
Timothy’s eyebrows went up, reflected in the shine of the monitor. “Yikes, okay. I’m going. Don’t push me off the dinosaur again.”
Damian rolled his eyes as Timothy walked over to the forensics station. Some people never got over anything.
He scrolled through the results the Batcomputer had pulled up, only half-processing what he was reading. A few yards away, he could hear the faint clinks and rustles as Timothy worked through his samples.
He couldn’t tell anybody. He’d promised Jon.
But he’d once promised to keep Jon safe, too.
“Drake.”
“Yeah?”
“You have…a lot of friends,” Damian said, glaring fixedly at the screen. “For some reason.”
“Uh…yeah? I mean, I don’t know what constitutes ‘a lot.’ Dick probably has more. But I’ve been pretty lucky in my friends, sure,” Timothy said.
“Did you ever.” Damian stopped. “Have you ever…”
Timothy came back to the Batcomputer, this time leaning against the desk so that he could face Damian—arms crossed, head tilted attentively.
Damian changed his question. “Have you ever had a friend who had…a problem,” he said slowly, “and you couldn’t help? Or they wouldn’t let you help? And you couldn’t tell anyone?”
Timothy’s brow furrowed. Damian fought the urge to break eye contact. He was not in the habit of asking Timothy for advice, and they both knew it, but if he had to bend that rule, the least he could do was not betray how invested he was in the answer.
“Yeah,” Timothy said finally. “Couple of times. I’m assuming you can’t tell me what this is about?”
Damian didn’t dignify that question with a response. “Did you intervene?”
“Not as much as I should have.”
“You’re not going to tell me I should respect his—their—decision?” Damian asked, raising an eyebrow.
Timothy shrugged. “I mean, depends on what the problem is. If it’s normal life stuff, yeah, a lot of times people need to figure things out for themselves. If it’s related to all this…” he waved a hand at the Cave around them “...that’s not the kind of problem that goes away on its own. That’s the kind of problem that needs to be punched.”
“I don’t know what to punch,” Damian said, frustrated.
Timothy gave him a sympathetic grimace. “So I see,” he said, jerking his head back towards the computer. “My advice? No matter what your friend said, I’d figure it out quick, demon or banshee or whatever. Because these kinds of problems? Eventually you run out of time.”
*
Timothy was right, though Damian would never admit it to him. October slipped through Damian’s fingers like sand. Every day was shorter and colder, and he was no closer to solving Jon’s riddle.
He went to class. He worked at the shelter. He patrolled.
And almost every twilight, he met Jon in that other place, in the otherworldly coolness of the alley. They walked for hours through the silent trees, past whispering fountains and under ancient, crumbling arches. They wandered through the rose garden, the flowers blooming as fervidly as ever, a riot of colors and too-sweet scents.
Neither of them ever touched the roses.
Damian told Jon more about his classes and the dogs at the shelter and patrolling. Jon, in exchange, told vague stories about people he didn’t name, with clear gaps where details had been omitted and no endings. Sometimes he laughed at stories that weren’t funny at all, like the time he’d been lost in a hedge maze for several days as a child, or the time he’d insulted…someone…and every time he reached for food for a month, it turned rotten before he could touch it.
“But I don’t really get hungry here, so it didn’t matter,” he’d said with a careless smile. “Well, I do get hungry. But I don’t starve. So I guess it was pretty funny.”
It wasn’t funny to Damian. It sparked the same unexpected protective instinct he’d had when they were children, when the difference in their ages had felt so much more significant. Ten-year-old Jon, for all his bravado, had been totally unseasoned, so certain that the world was a friendly place. Now that naivete was gone from his eyes, replaced with something darker, but Damian still wanted to put himself between Jon and anything that might hurt him. The maddening part was that he didn’t even know what the thing was that was hurting Jon.
And then one evening Damian walked into the alley, and he knew right away that something was wrong.
“What is it?” he asked. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing.” Jon’s smile was brittle. “How were your classes today?”
Damian’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t push. Somewhere in the past seven years, Jon had learned to be evasive, and challenging him too directly might lead to…well, Damian wasn’t sure. Damian suddenly back in the regular park with its mortal trees. Jon panicking over his mysterious captor noticing them.
“My classes were fine,” he said. “We dissected a pig cadaver today.”
“Gross!” There was an artificial lightness to Jon’s disgusted laugh, but Damian could hear the relief in it.
“You are the most squeamish farmboy I’ve ever met.”
“Out of how many farmboys?”
“That’s not the point.”
They ended up in the rose garden, on a bench shaded by creeping vines and unreal indigo roses. At least, it would have been shaded if the sun ever rose here.
Damian tried to keep the conversation up, but Jon was clearly distracted. He kept drifting off, gazing through Damian like he was using his X-ray vision, but of course he couldn’t be. He didn’t have his powers in here.
“Right, that’s enough,” Damian said after the third awkward silence when Jon missed his cue to speak. “There’s something wrong. Tell me.”
Jon’s eyes finally focused on him, and there was so much grief in them that Damian’s breath caught. “I…I might not…see you anymore.”
“What? Why?”
“I…there’s something happening. Tomorrow night,” Jon said. “It’s important. It’s why she took me. And I have to…I don’t think I’m coming back.”
“Then let’s go!” Damian said, jumping to his feet. “Right now, let’s run for it, I’ll pull you out.” He couldn’t believe he’d never thought of this before. There were no chains on Jon, no locked gates at the end of the alley. What if he could just step out, if Damian was with him?
“It won’t work,” Jon said, shaking his head. “She’ll know, and…”
“So what?” Damian said. “Let her come! I’m the son of Batman. You’re the son of Superman. We can fight anyone.”
“It’s not that kind of fighting!” Jon said. “Batarangs won’t fix this. Punching and heat vision won’t, either. Not that I…” He held up his hands, then dropped them into his lap helplessly.
“You’re just going to give up? Without even trying?” Damian demanded.
“Do you think I haven’t tried?” Jon snapped, standing up too. “I tried the whole first year I got here, every morning at dawn, when she’s weakest. I tried running, I tried sneaking, I tried fighting my way out. It got me nothing but punished.”
“So you just spent the next six years doing nothing, just waiting for…whatever is going to happen tomorrow night?”
“Why do you think I wouldn’t let you tell my dad where I was?” Jon’s anger seemed to vanish as suddenly as it had come. “It was always going to end this way, Damian. I just wanted more time with you before it happened. I’m sorry. It was selfish.”
It was Damian’s turn to shake his head. “No,” he said. “She can’t have you. I won’t let her.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
Damian looked helplessly at Jon. His best friend, and Damian had spent seven years without him, feeling the raw ache of his absence without ever knowing why. And now Jon was saying Damian was about to lose him for good, and there was nothing Damian could do about it.
“So this is goodbye, then,” Damian said. His voice didn’t come out the way he wanted it to; too harsh, too angry. “That’s what you’re telling me.”
“I wish I wasn’t.” Jon’s eyes were so sad, their color as implausible as the indigo roses. He looked distant already, in his archaic clothes, his skin unnaturally pale from seven years in darkness.
He should have been bathed in sunlight. Jon had always been beautiful by the light of day.
Damian turned away.
Then he reached out and yanked the nearest roses off their vines with both hands. Two flowers, and then four, and then six, throwing them at his feet as the vines tore and the climbing frame shook. The thorns bit through his gloves, but he didn’t stop pulling until he’d lost count, until he felt Jon’s hand on his shoulder.
“Damian.” Jon’s eyes dipped down to the roses littering the ground and then back up. “What are you doing?”
Damian’s chest was heaving. “I owe you a tribute.”
And then Jon’s mouth was on his, and Damian flung his arms around Jon’s neck and kissed him with everything he had, again and again and again, once for every rose he had pulled. He buried his hands in Jon’s curls, heedless of the thorns still lodged in his palms. And if he tasted salt, if someone’s cheeks were wet, Damian’s eyes were shut too tight to see which one of them was crying.
*
It was much later that Damian found himself in Centennial Park with swollen lips and an aching heart—so much later that the sky to the east was starting to lighten. He rubbed at his stinging eyes and headed for home.
There had to be a way to stop whatever was going to happen tomorrow night, no matter what Jon thought. Damian didn’t give up that easily, and there had once been a time that Jon didn’t, either. Maybe it was finally time to tell Clark what was going on. Maybe Damian should tell everyone, his whole family and the Justice League and the Titans and anyone else he could reach…
He jerked back at movement out of the corner of his eye and then realized it was only one of those irritating motion-activated skeletons propped up outside of the dry cleaner’s, of all places. At least Halloween was tomorrow, and all of these stupid decorations would get packed up after that. October had flown by, so much of it lost to those stolen hours with Jon. But now that was over too, unless Damian found a way to stop it.
He frowned. Whatever was going to happen to Jon was happening tomorrow night…on Halloween. Could that be significant? Something about it was itching at his brain…a distant memory, or a story he’d heard somewhere…
He pulled out his phone. His first few searches only brought up stupid Halloween movies, but then he caught a phrase in one of the search results that looked familiar and clicked.
Tam Lin.
Damian had read it as a small child, before he had known Jon—before he had even known his own father. He could barely remember it, but there was something about being imprisoned by the Queen of Fairies for seven years, and a sacrifice on Halloween. There was even something about picking roses.
But that was a story. Damian was willing to entertain the idea of the Queen of Fairies existing—he had died and been resurrected, he owned a pet dragon, he knew the world contained any number of fantastical elements—but how could Jon be trapped in a work of fiction that had been written five hundred years ago?
Trapped in a book. That triggered another faint memory, prickling at the back of his mind…something else he had read, something on the big monitor in the Batcave…
“Oh,” he said out loud. “Not the Queen of Fairies. The Queen of Fables.”
He glanced back towards the east, where the sun was very definitively making its way over the horizon, and then broke into a run. He had a lot of research to do, and only until sunset to do it.
But Jon Kent was not dying tomorrow night.
*
There were any number of variations on the story of Tam Lin, but a few elements remained consistent.
Tam Lin was a mortal man who had been captured by the Queen of Fairies. She planned to sacrifice him to Hell on Halloween night, but Tam Lin had told his lover how to break the spell that ensnared him: pull him down from the white horse he rode and hold him, no matter what dangerous creatures the Queen of Fairies turned him into. Hold me fast and fear me not, he bade her.
But this wasn’t the Queen of Fairies.
“The Queen of Fables,” Damian said when Timothy answered the phone. “That was during your time as Robin, wasn’t it?”
“Do you know what time it is?”
The sun wasn’t fully up yet. “Were you asleep?”
“No.”
“Then talk.”
“Uh, I mean, I wasn’t really involved in that mission, but I remember she messed up New York City pretty bad. Turned it into a magic forest,” Timothy said. “She was kind of speed-running Snow White. Put Wonder Woman in an enchanted sleep. I think Aquaman woke her up by kissing her? Because a kiss from a prince could break the spell?”
“He’s a king, not a prince.”
“I guess the idea is that there’s a baby prince hiding inside every king? I don’t know. It seems like she has to play by whatever rules she sets up. I think Bruce trapped her in a book about taxes for a while. Is she your magic baddie?”
Damian rubbed his temple. None of this was new information. He’d pulled up the Batcomputer’s records on the Queen of Fables when he’d gotten back to his apartment, along with everything he could find on the internet about Tam Lin. “She was spotted in Metropolis before this.”
“So she is your magic baddie. I don’t know, Damian, I never fought her.” There was a pause, and Damian heard the clicking of a keyboard. “Okay, I’m sure you’re looking at the same thing I am, but apparently after that whole Aquaman thing, she decided Superman was her Prince Charming and he rejected her.”
“And she decided to take revenge by abducting his son,” Damian said, more to himself than Timothy.
“Uh, Kon hasn’t been abducted, I saw him yesterday,” Tim said. “Also, I don’t know if ‘son’ is the word he would use…”
“Not Conner,” Damian said.
“What? Are you saying Superman has another kid?” Timothy asked. “Damian, do you need help?”
Damian wasn’t sure what Timothy thought he could do against an immortal, reality-warping sorceress, but either way, it didn’t matter. In every version of the story, it was Tam Lin’s lover who pulled him down from his horse and held him through his transformations. It made Damian’s face go hot to think of himself as Jon’s lover, but that was the role he’d cast himself in, wasn’t it? When he’d plucked that first rose. She had not picked a rose, a rose, a rose but barely one.
Or perhaps it had been Jon who’d put Damian in that role, when he’d taken Damian to the garden—or even earlier, when he’d opened the alley so that Damian could walk in. Did he know what story he was trapped in? He didn’t seem to be fighting his fate, but maybe he was, with this final desperate play—a play that would look like going along with the Queen’s game, even as he undermined it.
Or maybe it had been someone else. Damian thought again of the girl who had come into the shelter that first night he had seen Jon again, warning him not to go to Centennial Park. She had quoted Tam Lin, he was sure of it. Either gold rings, or green mantles, or else their maidenhead.
Damian had given Jon the closest thing he had to a green mantle. And something else besides.
“Damian? Do you need me to come to Metropolis? Should I call Kon? Or Dick?”
Damian twitched. He’d all but forgotten that Timothy was still on the phone.
“No,” he said. “I’m the prince this time.”
He heard Tim sigh. “Okay, you’re really worrying me, so this is maybe not the best time to revert back to your haughty old Son of the Bat, Heir to the Demon self…”
“No. I mean, I’m the only one who can break this spell,” Damian said. “I know what story she’s telling, and I know what part I’m playing.”
“A prince,” Tim repeated.
Damian let him believe it. It was better than admitting he was playing a girl named Janet. “If I don’t check in tomorrow, you can tell Father,” he allowed. “But I don’t think there’s anything anyone else can do until after Halloween.”
“You are extremely bad at being reassuring.”
“Goodbye, Timothy,” Damian said, and hung up.
*
When the sun started to sink towards the western horizon, Damian was back in Centennial Park.
He hadn’t slept. He’d read every version of the ballad he could find, listened to every recording, scoured every analysis and every note on historical context. He’d glanced over a few other common fairy tales as well, just in case the Queen decided to pivot to a new story, but he didn’t think she could. She was bound by her own rules as tightly as Jon was, and had been for seven years.
Seven years of keeping Superman’s son from him, just for rejecting her. Damian had brought along the most miserably dry pharmacology textbook he owned in hopes of trapping her in it. It wasn’t anywhere close to sufficient payback, but it would do for a start.
He wasn’t sure he could trap her in the book. He wasn’t sure about anything that would happen after he broke the enchantment on Jon. And if he failed…would he be pulled into Hell alongside Jon? Would he become the Queen’s new prisoner?
It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t fail. He wasn’t letting Jon go.
He had wondered if he would have to try to evacuate the park. After all, Metropolis was a large and populous city, and Halloween was a night that tended to see more people than usual in the streets. He was prepared to try; he was wearing his Robin uniform, and Metropolitans tended to listen to superheroes’ orders more willingly than Gothamites. But even though the time of year meant that it was still relatively early when the sun began to set, the park grew quieter and quieter, civilians streaming towards the exits as if they could somehow sense that they didn’t want to be anywhere near what was about to happen. Perhaps they could. Humans had always had an atavistic fear of the Fair Folk, and things that happened in the dark.
The last rays of the sun died in the west. A minute later, the streetlamp closest to Damian winked out.
When the park was shrouded in darkness, they came.
Bearing candles, pale and flickering and lighting the scene much more brightly than they should have. They were all on horseback: goblins and sylphs and pixies, some tall and regal and beautiful, some furred or horned or winged or all three.
On a coal-black stallion with burning eyes rode the Queen of Fables. She was the most beautiful woman Damian had ever seen, so beautiful it hurt to look at her, with moon-pale skin and rose-pink hair, a heart-shaped beauty mark on her perfect skin. She was made for mortals to fall to their knees before her and worship her, to waste away from hunger as they knelt transfixed by her beauty.
But Damian didn’t care, because behind her was Jon.
He rode a white horse, as the ballad had promised. The Queen had dressed him in what Damian assumed was meant to be her own private joke, a sick parody of his father’s costume: blue shirt, gold waistcoat, scarlet cloak. Unlike the Queen, he wasn’t perfect. His dark curls were in disarray, and his cloak was awkwardly twisted behind him by the wind. If Damian got closer, he’d be able to see that Jon’s bottom teeth were slightly crooked, and the little scar on his chin he’d gotten when his flight had temporarily failed when he was eleven. He was flawed and he was real and he was Damian’s, not the Queen of Fables’, not anyone else’s.
Jon wasn’t bound in any way, but he was staring straight ahead, his violet eyes wide and vacant. Drugged, or perhaps this was just part of the enchantment.
“Jon!” Damian shouted, and ran for him.
Some of the fairies reached for him. He twisted out of their grasp, shaking off hands and claws and talons, until he reached Jon. With one hand on Jon’s warm, solid thigh and the other on his shirtsleeve, he pulled Jon down off of his horse.
Jon gasped like he was emerging from water, and his eyes focused on Damian’s face. “Damian? No, you have to go, you have to get away!”
But the Queen of Fables had already turned and was looking down at them from her own horse. “And who are you, little mortal, who would steal my hard-won prize?” Her nose wrinkled. “You stink of the Bat.”
“My father,” Damian said, clutching Jon more tightly. He didn’t know when the transformations would start and he didn’t want to be caught off guard. “I brought a nice new book for you, Your Highness.”
“You want him back?” the Queen asked. “Let’s see if you can hold him.”
“Damian, no, you have to let go of me,” Jon said.
“Don’t worry,” Damian said. “I read the story, I know what she’s going to turn you into.”
“No, you don’t understand.” Jon was shaking his head. “She doesn’t have to, not with my powers, she just has to—”
His voice cut off suddenly and he went limp in Damian’s arms, his head lolling back. Damian craned his neck, trying to see Jon’s face. “Jon? Jon, say something, what did she do—”
“And she will turn me in your arms into a swan so wild,” Jon said. His voice sounded very far away. “But hold me fast and fear me not, I loved you as a child.”
And then he shot up into the sky.
It was only Damian’s training and his determination to hold on to Jon at all costs that saved him. He wrapped his arms around Jon as tightly as he could as they rocketed up, up, out of the park and higher, above the Metropolis skyline. “Jon, stop! What are you doing?”
Even as he said it, he knew it was obvious. Jon hadn’t transformed in any literal way: there were no feathers, no beak, no wings. But the powers that had seemed dormant while Jon was trapped in the fairy realm appeared to be back in full force now, and the Queen of Fables was controlling them.
“It’s okay,” he said, pressing his face into Jon’s shoulder to protect it from the freezing wind as they soared ever higher. It seemed impossible that Jon could hear him over the wind, but if the flight was working, maybe the superhearing was, too. “I’m not letting go. I’m not letting her have you.”
Jon was still going up. The air wasn’t thin yet, but it would be soon. With an effort, Damian got his legs up around Jon’s hips, clinging like a limpet. “Swans can’t fly this high,” he managed.
All of a sudden, Jon stopped. Damian wasn’t sure if it was because of the technicality he had pointed out or because it was time for the next part of the enchantment. At least, not until Jon said: “And she will turn me in your arms into the swiftest hound, but hold me fast and fear me not, in your arms I am found.”
“Oh no,” Damian said.
Jon plummeted to Earth, somehow even faster than he had risen. Damian shut his eyes involuntarily, his stomach lurching into his stomach. He felt the impact as Jon’s feet hit the ground, and then they were running, streaking across the surface of the planet.
Damian cracked his eyes open, protected behind their lenses. The wind tore at the rest of him, at his cape so that it nearly strangled him, as the landscape shot by: forests, deserts, prairies, the silvery surface of a lake. Jon had run with him before, when they were children, but either he hadn’t been this fast, or the spell kept Jon’s natural aura from sheltering Damian like it used to. Either way, it took everything Damian had to hold on.
He had less than a second to process Metropolis looming in the distance before they were in the park again, Jon still and quiet before the Queen of Fables’ horse. He wasn’t even breathing hard, but Damian’s heart was racing.
“You have girdled the Earth in less time than it takes to say it, and the toll you paid is visible,” the Queen said. Damian’s face, his only exposed skin, was raw. He didn’t dare lift a hand to touch it. “Will you stop this foolish attempt to steal what is mine, and let tonight proceed as it must?”
Damian glared at her. “He was mine first.”
“Very well.” The Queen waved a hand.
“And she will turn me in your arms into the lion’s might,” Jon intoned obediently. “But hold me fast and fear me not and we’ll see through this night.”
And suddenly he was pushing at Damian, spreading his arms, trying to shove Damian off of him. He was stronger than any normal man should have been, stronger than Damian, and it ached to resist him.
But maybe now the enchantment was working in Damian’s favor, because if the Queen was playing by the rules, Damian had to have a fighting chance. If Jon had used his real Kryptonian strength, the strength that had been even greater than Clark’s when he was younger, Damian couldn’t have held on for even an instant. But though it hurt to fight against Jon’s struggles, he was—just barely—able to keep his grip.
Still, he felt a bone in his wrist snap. He pressed his face into Jon’s shoulder again to keep from crying out. “I’m not letting go, I’m not letting go…”
But there was worse to come, he knew. Damian had had broken bones before. That was nothing. But though there were countless versions of Tam Lin, and though the Queen could put Jon through any number of “transformations,” there was one that almost always turned up. And it mapped very neatly onto one of Jon’s remaining powers.
Jon stopped fighting him. Damian’s stomach turned.
“And she will turn me in your arms into a burning iron,” Jon said, craning his neck to look at Damian. There were pinpricks of red in his pupils. “But hold me close and fear me not—”
But Damian was screaming too loudly to hear him anymore, because Jon’s heat vision had ignited, and was burning him.
It hurt. It hurt as badly as Damian had ever felt, worse than dying, Jon’s eyes burning into his arms and side and face. He couldn’t think, he couldn’t breathe. All he wanted to do was get as far away from the pain as possible, to release his grip and fall to the ground and sob.
But he would not let Jon go.
As suddenly as it had started, it was over. The pain vanished, though the memory of it left Damian tingling and wary. He lifted his head and opened his eyes, which had shut again. Was that it? Was it over?
Jon let out a sudden gasp and dropped to his knees, nearly dislodging Damian. As they hit the ground, Damian realized with a start that Jon was naked. He had no idea when Jon’s clothing had disappeared, whether it had happened when Damian was lost in his own pain or just now.
“And she will turn me in your arms into a naked knight,” Jon gasped, his own voice sounding as raw as if he had been the one screaming. “Then cloak me in your green mantle and hide me out of sight.”
Damian didn’t have a green mantle, but he did have a cloak. With one hand still gripping Jon, he unclasped his cape and draped it over his friend, kneeling beside him. It seemed silly to be embarrassed after all that, but he still looked away as he covered Jon’s nakedness.
The Queen of Fables glared down at them. “So, son of the Bat,” she said, her voice tight with fury. “You have, indeed, stolen what was mine. If I had known, I would have put your eyes out, right there among the dogs.”
“I am my father’s son,” Damian said, one arm still wrapped protectively over Jon. It was the one with the broken wrist, although the break seemed to have vanished.
“As he is his father’s. It was what made him such a pretty prize. What say you, my sweet?” she asked, turning her attention to Jon. “I gave you seven good years carousing amongst the fae. Would you return to me, and immolate yourself for my love? After all, you were mine for so long. Don’t you fear you’ll miss it?”
Jon shifted and sat up a little straighter. “Like he said,” he retorted, his voice still a rasp. “I was his first.”
The Queen scowled. “And yet the Hallowe’en sacrifice must be paid,” she said. “You would see your Queen fed to Hell?”
“Not if I thought it would kill you.” Jon’s gaze was steady. “But I’m sure it won’t.”
It looked like Damian might not need the pharmacology textbook after all. “You’re just going to ride into Hell?” he asked dubiously. Then something she had said earlier, about the dogs, struck him. “Wait. It was you, wasn’t it? The girl who came into the shelter and told me not to go to Centennial Park. I would never have found Jon if you hadn’t done that. Why would you warn me?”
The Queen looked impatient now. “I had to,” she said. “That’s how the story goes.”
And with that, she turned away from them, back in the direction she’d come from. Damian half expected the twilight wood to reappear, but instead he saw an orange glow on the horizon, burning brighter and brighter.
“Seven years,” the Queen said without looking back. “Seven years must I serve in Hell. But then, my prince, my little batling, I will be free again, and I will have my revenge.”
And the Queen of Fables rode out of the world, and her followers rode after her.
When the last of them passed through the glowing gateway, it flickered out, leaving Jon and Damian in semi-darkness. Damian blinked against the sudden change, releasing Jon and getting to his feet. “I think it’s over.”
“It’s over,” Jon repeated with a shudder in his voice. Suddenly his tone changed and he scrambled to his feet, the cape slipping away. “Damian, oh my god, are you okay? I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t want to do any of it but she made me—”
“I know, it was her magic. I know,” Damian said, averting his gaze again from Jon’s nakedness. It was still light enough that he could make out…things. “And I’m fine. As soon as we broke the spell, everything healed.” There were no burns on him, no broken wrist, not even windburn from the first “transformation.”
“Are you sure? You’re making a weird face.”
“You’re naked,” Damian hissed, his face heating.
“Oh!” Jon picked up the cape. Out of the corner of his eye, Damian watched as Jon first tried to drape it over himself the correct way, realized it was too small, and wrapped it around his waist like a towel. “Sorry. They don’t really care about nudity there. I got used to it not mattering.”
“It’s fine.” It wasn’t that Damian found Jon unpleasant to look at naked, but preferably not in a public park. And there were…things that they needed to discuss, first.
Jon looked around him, visibly marveling. “I’m free. I’m really free. I’m home! I can see my parents again, and Kara and Conner, and, and everyone.”
“You should go see your parents. I’m sure they missed you, even if they didn’t know they did.” Damian certainly had.
Jon paused. “You’re making another weird face.”
“No I’m not,” Damian retorted, childishly. “I…you should see your family, Jon. I won’t keep you.”
He was unprepared for the look of hurt on Jon’s face. “You…but I thought…”
“What?”
Jon bit his lip. “You said I was yours. You said you wouldn’t let me go.”
Damian’s heart started to beat wildly in his chest. Jon tilted his head like he could hear it, and then Damian remembered that he could, now that his powers were back.
“You’ve been a prisoner for seven years,” Damian said carefully. “You were trapped in an enchantment with very specific rules. I don’t want to hold you to anything that you…that might not have been your choice.”
“Damian,” Jon said, and the look of fond exasperation on his face was so familiar in the growing light. “I just said I loved you when we were children.”
“You were also speaking in rhyme, forgive me if I assumed that not everything you were saying was by choice.”
“I opened the gate for you. Every night!” Jon put his hands on his hips, the picture of indignation. “I took you to the garden!”
“Where you were magically compelled to kiss me!”
“No,” Jon said, shaking his head. “I told you. I had to take a tribute. It was my choice what it was.” His mouth curved. “Besides, you’re the one who picked all those roses the second time.”
Damian scowled. “Oh, shut up,” he said, and kissed Jon.
When he pulled back, several long minutes later, it was light enough to see the violet of Jon’s eyes, the tiny freckles that years of eternal twilight hadn’t faded, the pleased flush in his cheeks. Damian looked over his shoulder to the east, where the sun was rising. “Halloween’s over.”
He felt Jon’s hand slide into his. “Happy November.”
He looked back at his best friend, standing in the sunlight for the first time in seven years. He was beautiful in the light, as he always had been. Damian had been right the first time: he was never letting Jon go.
“Now should we go see your parents?” Damian asked.
Jon’s smile widened at Damian’s use of “we.” “Yeah,” he said, and tightened his grip on Damian’s hand. “I’m ready to come home.”