Chapter Text
The salt on the breeze at New Rome didn’t taste like the Atlantic. It lacked the jagged, wild tang of Montauk, the smell of rotting kelp and old boardwalk wood that Percy Jackson had grown up with. Here, the water was curated. It was clean, pristine, filtered through Roman efficiency and the gentle, architectural perfection of a college campus built for people who had survived their teenage years against all mathematical odds.
At twenty-one, Percy was starting to think he might actually get to be old. It was a terrifying, beautiful prospect.
He sat at a concrete picnic table near the edge of the campus docks, a heavy textbook on marine invertebrate morphology propped open before him. The pages were covered in dense, tiny Latinate script that usually made his dyslexia spike so hard the words scrambled into a school of panicked minnows. But today, he was managing. He had a blue highlighter capped between his teeth, a notebook full of messy sketches of Clione limacina—sea angels—and a lukewarm cup of coffee that Annabeth had kissed the top of before running off to her advanced structural engineering seminar.
Life was, dare he say it, normal.
Then the water in his water bottle started to boil.
It wasn't a violent explosion, just a sudden, rhythmic thrumming against the plastic. The ice cubes he’d scavenged from the dining hall melted in three seconds flat, and the vapor rising from the mouth of the bottle didn't smell like municipal New Rome water anymore. It smelled like deep-ocean trenches. It smelled like a storm gathering three hundred miles off the coast of Montauk.
Percy sighed, spitting the blue highlighter out onto his notebook. "Dad," he muttered, looking around the sunny plaza. A couple of legacy kids were tossing a frisbee nearby; a Lares ghost was floating lazily past a marble archway. Nobody else noticed the atmospheric pressure dropping by ten millibars. "I’m in the middle of a chapter on mollusks. If this is about the plumbing in the third-cohort barracks again, I told you, that’s a Triton problem."
The water didn’t answer with words, but the temperature shifted. A cool breeze rolled off the lake, carrying a scent that didn’t belong in California. It smelled of sulfur, diesel smoke, and heavy, wet smog.
Gotham, a voice resonated, not in his ears, but directly at the base of his skull, deep and resonant as a tectonic plate shifting. Percy. I need you to go to Gotham.
Percy leaned his head back against the concrete table with a low groan. "No. Absolutely not. We had a deal. I get my degrees, I do my time, I don’t do errands for Olympus unless the world is literally cracking in half like an egg."
The world is fine, Poseidon’s voice rumbled, sounding a little amused but carrying an underlying thread of genuine urgency that made the hair on Percy’s arms stand up. But a thread of our blood is untethered in the dark. A child, Percy. Unclaimed. Unprotected. In the one place where our light rarely pierces.
"Gotham is a dead zone," Percy whispered, his eyes narrowing as he looked down at his textbook. Every demigod knew about Gotham. It wasn't that monsters didn't go there; it was that the city itself was so thoroughly toxic, so choked with human misery and mundane horrors, that the Mist there was thick as molasses. Demigods didn’t survive Gotham because the city usually ate them before the harpies could. The gods avoided it because it belonged to a different kind of darkness—one that didn't care about ancient Greek prophecies. "Why would there be a kid of yours in Gotham? You haven't been to New Jersey since the nineties."
I am the sea, Percy. I go where the tides demand, even into the foulest harbors, Poseidon said, his voice softening with a rare touch of vulnerability. I did not know. Not until recently. The boy's mother... she kept him well-hidden behind walls of iron and wealth. But his power is waking. If the creatures of the deep smell him before you do, he will not last the winter. Go to Gotham. Find your brother.
The connection snapped. The water in the bottle settled, turning instantly back into lukewarm, flat water with a single, half-melted ice cube bobbing at the surface.
Percy sat frozen for a long time. Brother.
The word carried a heavy weight. He thought of Tyson, big and sweet and smelling of peanut butter and forge smoke. He thought of Triton, distant and arrogant but ultimately blood. Now there was someone else. A kid. In Gotham.
"He looks like he's about to fight a minor deity," a voice said from above him.
Percy blinked and looked up. Annabeth was standing there, her gray eyes sharp and perceptive, her blonde hair pulled back in a messy ponytail with a wooden pencil stuck through the bun. She was carrying a leather portfolio stuffed with architectural blueprints, and she looked so grounded, so entirely his, that the cold knot of anxiety in Percy’s chest loosened just a bit.
"Worse," Percy said, sliding his textbook shut. "My dad wants me to go to New Jersey."
Annabeth dropped her portfolio onto the table and sat down across from him, crossing her arms. "Gotham?"
"How did you know?"
"Because you look like you just swallowed a spoonful of old fish bait, and because the wind smells like coal dust," she said, leaning forward. "He told you about the signature?"
"He said there's a kid. A half-blood. My... my younger brother." Percy rubbed the back of his neck. "Annabeth, it's Gotham. Demigods don't go there. The last time a child of Athena tried to map the underground architecture of that place, she came back talking about giant bats and clowns and refused to look at a sewer grate for three years."
"That was thirty years ago, Percy," Annabeth said, though her expression was thoughtful. "But... it’s not completely a dead zone. You know who's there."
Percy blinked, then a slow grin started to spread across his face. "Oh. Right. Pam and Ed."
Annabeth laughed, a bright, clear sound that drew looks from a couple of passing Roman larvae. "Exactly. Pamela is practically running the botanical gardens down there—or, well, her own version of them. Her mother hasn't checked on her in a decade, but she's stable. Mostly. And Edward... well, Apollo’s poetry genes took a weird, mathematical turn with that one, but he’s harmless enough if you don't give him a pencil."
"They're still alive," Percy mused. "In Gotham. If they can make it there..."
"They survive because they found their niches," Annabeth said gently. She reached across the table, covering his hand with hers. Her palm was calloused from years of sword work and drafting pens, warm and real. "Percy. If there is a son of Poseidon in that city, alone, without anyone to tell him why the water listens to him... he's a ticking time bomb. Or a target. You have to go."
"I have an exam on Friday on the reproductive cycles of echinoderms," Percy protested, though they both knew it was a weak front.
"I'll take notes for you," she promised, leaning across the table to press her forehead against his. "Just... don't get shot by a guy in a purple suit, okay? I don't want to have to go down there and tear that city apart brick by brick to find you."
"Deal," Percy said. He stood up, packing his pens into his backpack. The blue highlighter went into his pocket. He looked out toward the bay, where the small, controlled waves of New Rome were lapping against the stone.
Deep down, past the college student, past the guy who just wanted to grow old with his girlfriend, the hero of Olympus stirred. His brother was out there, breathing in smog and wondering why the ocean was calling him from five hundred miles away.
Percy grabbed his jacket. It was time to go to Gotham.
𓇼 ⋆｡˚𓆝 𓆟 𓆞𓆝 𓆟 𓆞𓆝 𓆟 𓆞𓆝 𓆟 𓆞𓆝 𓆟 𓆞⋆｡˚ 𓇼
The sky over Gotham wasn’t blue; it was the color of a bruised plum that had been dropped in a puddle of motor oil.
Timothy Drake didn't care about the sky. He had his headphones cranked up so loud that the bass was vibrating through the soles of his Vans, rattling his teeth every time he struck a crack in the pavement. He was flying down the concrete incline of the Bristol hills, his skateboard ticking against the expansion joints like a metronome.
At fourteen, Tim’s brain was already a hyper-threaded processor running too many programs at once. For the past year, he had been living a double life that should have crushed a normal kid. By day, he was the quiet, unassuming Drake heir adjusting to life under Bruce Wayne's roof after his parents’ long absences. By night, he wore the red, green, and yellow of Robin. He was the Boy Wonder. He was the logical counterbalance to Batman's darkness, a tactical mind trained to see patterns, analyze data, and predict a criminal's next move before they even made it.
But lately, the most confusing data points were coming from his own body.
There was a weird, phantom pressure at the base of his skull that had been steadily growing for months. It felt like an old radio frequency trying to tune in through a mountain of static. He couldn't explain why, but his habits had undergone a silent, involuntary shift. For one, his usual, borderline-unhealthy reliance on caffeine had acquired a weird companion. In the Batcave, his workstation was always cluttered with empty thermos flasks of black coffee, but right next to them, he had started keeping a massive, uninsulated metal water bottle. He didn't just drink it; he felt like he needed it nearby. When the tension in the cave got too thick—when Bruce was brooding or a case was going cold—just wrapping his fingers around the cold steel of the water bottle calmed his racing pulse.
Then there were the showers. Tim had never been a kid who lingered in the bathroom, but lately, his post-patrol routines had become absurd. He would stand under the piping-hot spray of the master bathroom in Wayne Manor for forty-five minutes at a time. The weird part was, the water never felt hot enough, yet it never made his skin prune up. He would just lean his forehead against the tile, letting the torrent slam into his back, feeling a deep, bone-deep recharge that sleep simply couldn't give him anymore. He’d emerge from the steam completely refreshed, his bruises from patrol faded to faint yellow marks in a fraction of the time they should have taken to heal.
And then, there was his geography.
Whenever he got a rare afternoon of free time to clear his head, he didn't head for the skate parks or the indoor plazas. He always wound up skating down by the Gotham riverfront. The Miller Harbor boardwalk was a rotting, industrial eyesore, choked with diesel grease from the container ships and the sulfurous stench of the Atlantic, but Tim found himself drawn to it like a magnet. He would kick and push his board along the cracked asphalt of the piers for hours, watching the dark, churning waves slam against the wooden pylons.
Even on patrol, it had become a noticeable tick. Last week, while tracking a smuggling ring run by the Penguin's goons, Batman had caught Tim lingering on the edge of a crane overlooking the dark, toxic waters of the outer docks. Tim had just been standing there in his Robin suit, his cape blowing in the wind, staring down into the freezing blackness of the bay. He had been completely entranced, losing himself in the rhythm of the tide until Bruce’s gravelly voice over the comms snapped him out of it. “Robin. Focus. The handoff is moving toward the warehouse.” Tim had shaken his head, feeling a bizarre wrenching sensation in his chest as he tore his eyes away from the harbor, unable to explain why the polluted water felt safer than the rooftops.
Now, he shifted his weight on his deck, his eyes narrowed behind his bangs. He was currently playing hooky from a mandatory history tutoring session, using his board to burn off a manic surge of energy that had been buzzing under his skin all morning.
In his ears, the frantic, high-energy electronic beat of BBpanzu’s Bang Bang Bang was keeping perfect time with his hyperactive heartbeat. It was a weird, chaotic track, but it matched the inside of his head. The song hit a massive drop, the lyrics blasting straight into his eardrums, vibrating through his skull with aggressive, frantic energy:
"Whats this? How could I have forgotten? The power oh so strong They made an atom bomb The fear of war arising I don't love Chainsaw Man I love America!"
Tim laughed out loud, his voice swallowed by the rush of the wind. He loved the sheer absurdity of the lyrics. He leaned into a hard heel-side turn, preparing to slide across the asphalt of the empty intersection, his body carving low to the ground.
He didn't see the rock.
It wasn't a big rock—just a jagged, unforgiving chunk of Gotham limestone, probably shaken loose from a crumbling retaining wall by the constant, heavy rumble of the city’s underground transit. It was exactly the size and shape required to completely stop a 54mm skateboard wheel dead in its tracks.
The board stopped. Tim didn't.
Physics is a harsh mistress, especially in Gotham. Tim’s body kept moving forward at roughly fifteen miles per hour while his deck remained stationary. For a fraction of a second, he was perfectly airborne, his arms flailing like a startled crow, his headphones slipping off one ear so that the tinny refrain of Bang Bang was mixed with the sudden, sharp rush of wind.
Then came the concrete.
He hit the ground face-first. It wasn't a clean, rolling slide; it was a brutal, scraping impact that started at his right palms, moved through his forearm, and ended with the right side of his jaw cracking hard against the concrete curb. The world went white for a second, a sharp, metallic taste filling his mouth as his teeth slammed together. He rolled into the gutter, the wind knocked entirely out of his lungs, his ribs aching like he’d just taken a direct hit from a baseball bat.
"Ow," he choked out, his voice a pathetic squeak against the asphalt. "Oh, that’s... that’s going to leave a massive mark."
He lay there for a solid thirty seconds, waiting for his brain to finish registering the damage inventory. Left wrist: sprained, probably. Right cheekbone: currently throbbing with the force of a thousand dying suns. Right palm: shredded. Dignity: entirely vaporized.
Slowly, painfully, Tim dragged himself up onto his hands and knees. His skateboard was sitting ten feet away, upside down, one wheel still spinning with a lazy, mocking whir-whir-whir. He spit a small amount of saliva and gravel onto the street. His face felt like it was on fire. He could already feel the heavy, tight swelling blooming beneath his skin. Bruce was going to look at him with that quiet, analyzing Bat-glare, trying to deduce if Tim had been attacked by a assassin or if Robin was just incredibly clumsy.
Tim’s eyes darted upward. This was Bristol, the wealthy district, which meant two things: private security, and high-definition surveillance.
Sure enough, mounted under the eaves of the high brick wall surrounding the adjacent estate was a sleek, black dome camera. It was a Wayne Enterprises model—the good kind, with low-light enhancement and 4K resolution.
Tim sighed, pulling his dangling headphone back over his ear. He looked directly into the black lens, his jaw throbbing painfully as he spoke.
"You saw that, didn't you, Babs?"
The camera didn't move, but Tim knew better. Barbara Gordon kept an eye on half the feeds in this district from her clocktower setup, and even if she wasn't actively watching, the automated motion logs would definitely capture the newest member of the Wayne household eating absolute dirt on a Tuesday afternoon. He could already feel the sarcastic text message arriving in his inbox before he even reached the manor gates.
"Great. Fantastic. Put it on the blooper reel," he muttered to the camera.
He dragged himself to his feet, picking up his board. The tail was chewed up, but the trucks were straight. He tucked it under his arm, his body aching with every step as he began the mile-long walk up the winding, tree-lined road back toward Wayne Manor. He didn't want to skate anymore. His center of gravity felt entirely broken, and his right knee was stiffening up fast.
As he crossed the boundary line through the towering wrought-iron gates of the Wayne estate, the sky finally delivered on its promise.
The clouds broke with a sudden, violent crack of thunder that sounded like an artillery shell detonating over the Atlantic. Within seconds, the drizzle turned into a sheet of slate-gray rain, the kind of heavy, fat drops that stung when they hit bare skin.
Tim didn't have a jacket. He was wearing a thin black hoodie and jeans, and he could already feel the cold water beginning to seep through the fabric. He hated the rain. Gotham rain always smelled like old pennies and sulfur. Walking into Wayne Manor looking like a drowned rat was bad enough, but doing it while bleeding from the face was going to kickstart an entire interrogation.
I just want to get to my room, Tim thought, his teeth chattering slightly as the wind picked up, swirling the leaves around his sneakers. I wish... I just wish I wouldn't get wet. Just this once. Let me get inside without having to explain why I look like I fought the pavement and lost.
Deep within his chest, right where that strange, heavy current had been building for months, something clicked. It didn't feel like a muscle tightening; it felt like a floodgate violently giving way, a sudden, warm rush of pure, unadulterated power surging through his veins.
He closed his eyes for a second, stepping onto the long, winding driveway that cut through the manicured lawns of the manor, bracing for the freezing downpour to drench his scalp and soak through his clothes.
The rain poured down. He heard it—a deafening roar as thousands of gallons of water slammed into the gravel driveway around him, into the heavy rhododendron bushes, into the stone gargoyles flanking the path. He felt the mist of it against his face, a cool, strangely soothing sensation that seemed to wash over his burning cheek and his scraped palms.
The pain in his jaw gave a sudden, sharp throb, and then... vanished.
Tim blinked, stopping dead in the middle of the driveway.
The rain was falling all around him, a solid wall of gray, but when he looked down at his arms, the water wasn't soaking into the black cotton of his hoodie. It was rolling off. No, that wasn't right—it wasn't even touching the fabric. The drops seemed to curve away from him at the last millisecond, sliding down an invisible, millimeter-thick barrier that encased his entire body like an atmospheric shield. His shoes were entirely dry. His hair, while damp from the ambient humidity, wasn't dripping.
And his face didn't hurt anymore.
He reached up, his fingers trembling slightly as he touched his right jawline. There was no swelling. No heat. No scraped skin. The palms of his hands, which had been raw, bleeding, and embedded with road grit less than ten minutes ago, were smooth and pink, the skin completely whole.
"What..." Tim whispered, his voice lost in the roar of the storm.
He stood there for a full minute, staring at his hands, while the sky tried its best to drown New Jersey. He felt completely fine. Better than fine, actually. He felt a strange, electric current humming right beneath his ribs, a sensation like he’d just swallowed a handful of lightning bolts and they were currently doing laps in his stomach. The exhaustion that had weighed on his bones for weeks was entirely gone, replaced by a terrifying, hyper-alert clarity.
He shook his head, forcing his legs to move. He walked up the stone steps of the porch, pushing the heavy oak front door of Wayne Manor open. The warmth of the interior hit him, smelling of lemon polish, old paper, and beeswax.
"Are you alright, Master Tim? You look distraught."
Tim jumped, nearly dropping his skateboard onto the expensive Persian rug. Alfred Pennyworth was standing at the base of the grand staircase, a silver tray held under one arm, a lint roller in his other hand. The old butler’s eyes were narrowed, his brow furrowed in that specific, sharp way that meant he was currently assessing Tim for signs of concussions, internal bleeding, or severe psychological trauma.
Alfred looked past Tim, out the heavy glass panels of the door where the rain was coming down so hard it was bouncing six inches off the stone porch. Then he looked back at Tim.
Tim’s clothes were bone dry. There wasn't a single drop of water on his shoulders. His sneakers left absolutely no wet footprints on the polished hardwood.
Tim swallowed hard, his mind racing through fifty different logical explanations and rejecting all of them in a fraction of a second. Atmospheric anomaly? Hydrophobic coating on the hoodie that I forgot about? Hallucination brought on by the head injury? Did Bruce install a localized forcefield around the property that I didn't get the memo on?
"I'm fine, Alfred," Tim said, his voice a little too high, a little too quick. "Nothing happened. Just... caught the tail end of the storm. I’m going to go up and change."
Alfred didn't move for a long second. His eyes lingered on Tim’s face—specifically the right side, where the skin should have been black, blue, and scraped to ribbons based on the telemetry Barbara had undoubtedly just pinged to the Batcomputer. He knew the boy had been out skating. He knew the weather reports. He knew Tim had a habit of lingering by the docks on patrol, staring at the sea. But Alfred was, above all things, a gentleman of absolute discretion.
"Very well, sir," Alfred said quietly, though his tone suggested he was adding this incident to a very long, very complicated mental file. "There is hot tea in the kitchen should you require it."
"Thanks," Tim muttered, already taking the stairs two at a time, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
He practically threw himself into his bedroom, slamming the heavy door behind him and locking it with a sharp, echoing click. He dropped his skateboard onto the rug and sprinted across the room to the en-suite bathroom, his breath coming in shallow gasps.
The mirror was large, framed in dark mahogany. Tim leaned over the marble sink, grabbing the edges so hard his knuckles turned white, and stared at his reflection.
His skin was perfect. The right side of his face, where he had literally felt the stone curb crush his flesh, was smooth, pale, and entirely devoid of even a scratch. He pulled back his sleeves. His forearms were clear. His wrists flexed without a single twinge of pain.
He reached over and turned the faucet on, letting the cold water run into the basin. He dipped his hand into the rushing stream.
The water didn't wet his skin. It pooled around his fingers like liquid silver, refusing to stick, sliding away the moment he lifted his hand out of the stream. He could feel it—it felt like a cool, living thing, humming against his palm, waiting for a command he didn't know how to give.
Tim stared at his dry hand, then up at his own wide, terrified blue eyes in the glass.
"What the genuine fiddlyfuckingfugerknuckleshit is this?"