Phantom 40 (Patreon)

“You push too hard.”

“What?!” Harry shouted as he climbed up the rocky shore, clothes transforming into a loose shirt and shorts. Ahead of him, the King of Atlantis stood at the entrance to the lighthouse, clad in a similar ensemble, his golden hair flowing in the salty wind, his oceanic eyes sparkling like sunlit water.

“You push against the water too hard when you move your caudal fin!” Arthur shook his hand, before raising his other one to gently slice through the air. “You are supposed to cut through water, not push against its weight.”

“Are you hosting swimming classes now, Your Majesty?” He nodded in the direction of the lighthouse. “Bit too dry for that, eh?”

“Yes, well, that is why I got us some beer,” he chuckled as they began to walk towards the entrance to the tower, and Harry looked at the dilapidated structure carefully. X-Ray vision came to the surface on instinct as he analyzed everything inside those bricks… including the old man currently connected to a dialysis machine inside the middle room.

“I got the snacks as promised,” he continued the conversation as they crossed over the jagged rocks and came onto the smooth, cemented platform.

“So, where is your pet? Could have brought over that weird horse of yours.”

“Hors—oh, you mean my Patronus? That is not my pet,” Harry shook his head and waved a hand, conjuring the spectral avatar into being with silent command, the once brightly pulsing Patronus now nothing but a controlled, perfect piece of magic that looked no different than an ordinary Thestral. “It is just a magical construct used to repel Dementors in my homeland. It is not breathing or living in any sense of the word, though.”

“It looks real enough,” Arthur commented as the construct snorted and walked away from them, its wings flapping once as its soulless, black eyes stared out at the world.

“Yeah, well, that took a bit of work and thought,” he laughed, focusing upon the Patronus, and in an instant, the Thestral turned into a glowing, blue-white construct that shone with the trademark happiness and brightness associated with the spell. “That is what it looks like normally. But I didn’t want that brightness or the mental effects of the spell every time, especially since there are no Dementors around us. So I just reverse-engineered the spell and created the modified version.”

“You sure you are not a hundred years old? Reverse-engineering a spell? Going to mention that in your résumé once you get to the ‘Justice League’?”

“Not even crossed fifty yet,” he snorted, before tapping the side of his head. “Though I do have an entire lifetime of memories of another wizard stashed in here, about seventy years’ worth of them.”

“Damn,” he whistled, crossing his hands behind his head as they crossed the dingy entrance, and the musty smell of rotting wood and stale water hit them at once, tempered by the salty air from the sea. Thankfully, Harry had not been going overboard with his senses; otherwise, he might have very well lost his olfactory nerves.

“And I am not going to join the League,” he mentioned as they sat down, rolling his eyes at the skeptical, surprised look Arthur threw his way. Waving a hand in the air, Harry sighed, “I have had my fill of armies and groups formed for charity and greater good. That part of my life is over and done with.”

“Ah, so you were a hero,” he grinned, picking up a beer from the side and throwing it to him. Blinking as he caught the chilled drink, Harry flicked its cap open with a thought and looked at the man before him, trying and failing to find words.

So instead, he just drank, pushing down the memories of those seven years—of thwarting every evil plan that had raised its head at Hogwarts and his friends.

“Where are those snacks? I saw some of that food joint you were running a couple of years ago. Must say, never seen a burger so delicious,” Arthur commented after a moment, and Harry just shook his head as he waved his hand, summoning the food he had cooked on his island to the table before them, still hot and fresh owing to the stasis charms upon it.

“Oh, that’s good,” Arthur grinned as the smell of burgers, cooked tomatoes, and basil enveloped the place, and the man reached forward, grasping a cheeseburger easily in his large hand. “You could have overtaken some big names with your magic and skill. Why did you stop?”

“Eh, things kind of simmered down after a complication with my sister, and then Faust happened,” he shrugged. “I doubt I will go back to that gig. I like cooking, but commercializing it is not my thing anymore. Though I am liking woodwork as a hobby nowadays, so who knows… I might open an artisan’s shop in the coming days. What are you going to do? Work here in the lighthouse when you are not in Atlantis?”

“Just until Dad’s replacement arrives,” Arthur nodded, biting into the burger and closing his eyes for a moment, just enjoying the flavors as sauce dripped down his chin. “I have been invited to the Justice League though, so I might take that offer up.”

“They pay good enough to bring you into the fold?” Harry laughed, and Arthur laughed along with him as they both drank at the same time.

“It’s not the money,” he shook his head and raised the bottle with a smirk. “I am the King of Atlantis; I could find enough riches in the ocean’s bottom to last me generations. It’s about this being a way to bring Atlantis before the humans in a positive way, and vice versa. It has been a long while since Atlantis has secluded itself to the world below the oceans. That cannot remain so any longer. Our psychics have confirmed that Apokolips will return, and the isolationist policy of Atlantis is no longer beneficial for us. There is no benefit in standing alone against an empire, neither for us nor for the surface.”

“I bet the United Nations and America and Europe would be right pleased with that,” he snorted, fishing his beer and summoning another one to his hand, feeling the light-headedness creep in as he popped it open, and Arthur sighed at his words.

“Nuidis has warned me about it,” the monarch nodded, tiredness coming over his face as he bit into the burger again. “Besides, I grew up amongst humans. I know how this thing is going to go down, but I can’t avoid it any longer. Better that we come forward on our own through the League acting as a buffer than someone finally breaches past our borders and finding us. I’d rather not get labeled as an alien anyway.”

“Technically, your species predates humans by a good amount of recorded time,” he pointed out. “If anything, you have more of a claim on the oceans. But yeah, I doubt they would see anything past the ‘unlawful occupation of resources.’”

“You sound like you speak from experience.”

“Eh, somewhat,” he shrugged, before sighing as he saw the inquisitive look on Arthur’s face. “I am searching for a way to locate a particular universe, the one from which I arrived here, in this one. During my experiments, I have… had what you might call glimpses of other universes or timelines, where things played out differently for me. In one of those, I saw how one of my friends attempted to broker trust and cooperation between my society and the humans, only for it all to belly up and a war to erupt between us. We had barely begun to win it after the initial setbacks when some eldritch horror descended on that planet and sucked every bit of energy out of it.”

“Ahh.”

“Yeah,” he nodded at the blank look on Arthur’s face, tipping his bottle towards him. “My reaction exactly. I watched my school and home turn to atoms, you know, not a good experience, even through Merlin knows how many universes separating us.”

“What happened to your version in that universe?” he asked. “Did he survive?”

“Who knows?” Harry sighed, shaking his head. “I saw him get sucked up into the storm of energy, and then he just vanished.”

“So he is dead.” He leaned back, raising the bottle. “Cheers then, to a Harry Potter who was taken down by a cosmic entity.”

“Hah!” He shook his head again and clicked his bottle against Arthur’s. “Bet you a thousand bucks that he is reborn somewhere even more absurd; that is just how my luck goes, even across universes.”

“Well, here’s to a good rebirth then.”

“Mother, you are awake,” Donna breathed as she rushed inside the room, still dressed in her armor, the breastplate splattered with droplets of dark blood as she carried her feathered helm at her side, her sword sheathed at her waist. Her sister’s eyes snapped towards her, and Diana saw the accusation in them before Donna even opened her mouth. “You could have sent for me!”

“You were on patrolling duty,” she crossed her arms, tapping the rune on the side to erect the slicing wards around her mother’s chamber. “Now that your shift is done, you may clean and store your armaments, cleanse yourself, and join us here.”

“Fine,” she muttered after glancing at Hippolyta and finding the Queen Mother just staring at them both emotionlessly, her ruined eye currently covered by a patch of salve and bandages.

“She has changed,” Hippolyta rasped out as Donna exited the room, and Diana watched her mother’s eyes track towards her. “What happened after that monster cut off my arm?”

“I intercepted his next strike,” she began, mentally wincing as she remembered the pain that had shot up through her ribs when the brute had kicked her across the length of the ground into the ruins of the tower, almost cracking her ribs with his monstrous strength. “But I was thrown away to the side. You were about to be killed… when Harry appeared.”

“I thought I had seen him there, but the memories are still coming back to me,” Hippolyta muttered, before looking down at the healed wound on her stomach, where she remembered seeing that giant axe embed itself, as well as her completely healed arm. “This is his handiwork, I presume?”

“It is,” she nodded, before she nodded at Hippolyta’s face. “He would have healed your eye too, but battling Steppenwolf was more important at that time.”

“Of course,” her mother nodded, serious, before her eye narrowed upon her. “Continue. I wish to hear of how you defeated that Usurper.”

“Harry wielded his magic and physical might both against the enemy commander, and we both kept him on his toes as we were finally able to put some pressure on him—no offence, Mother,” she paused for a moment, flushing a little as she realized just what she had said in the subtext, but Hippolyta just shook her head.

“’Tis no fault of yours, dear daughter,” she sighed. “We have known for decades that you have far surpassed any other Amazon in martial talent and physical strength. It is no wonder that I fell short of being a sound partner in combat against an enemy that could overpower you. Your paramour, on the other hand, seems to be able to keep up well enough with you. Outside your chambers, too.”

“Mother!” she gasped, glaring at the amused-looking Queen before looking behind her to see if Donna had returned. Whipping her head around to glare at a smirking Hippolyta, she placed her hands on her hips and raised a finger. “It was one time! One time!”

“You forget the day when we had dinner, and you defiled my table,” she shot back, and Diana just pouted at that. It was not her fault that reconciliation coupling was so goo—

“But we are digressing,” Hippolyta broke her out of her thoughts, her voice stern again. “Continue with the tale, daughter.”

“Steppenwolf’s armor was a big problem, and so were the dozens of Parademons lunging at us each moment,” she sighed, turning her gaze away to look outside the window, eyes landing upon the Amazons working in the fields and the grounds, removing dead bodies, cleaning wreckage, and preparing for the final rites of hundreds of Amazons. “Our army was losing, Mother, our sisters unable to keep up with the ever-increasing numbers of Parademons.”

“Harry did something, didn’t he?” Hippolyta’s voice was tinged with something. What it was, Diana didn’t know, but she kept her eyes away all the same. Truth was, even she couldn’t bring herself to agree with what he had done. She understood the necessity of it, and the impact it had had on the battle… yet…

“Do you remember, Mother, when he first arrived on Themyscira?” she asked instead, hearing the faucets in the bathchambers open, yet nothing could shift her mind from that coldness—that inhumane sensation of death which had covered her senses and drowned her thoughts in nothing but instinctive terror and horror.

“I do,” her voice quivered at the admission, slight enough that most would have missed it—but not Diana. She knew that Mother was seeing the same thing she had been for the last two days: the wilting of leaves, the disappearance of warmth, the way the world had recoiled at Harry’s presence in that glade, when he had torn an arrow out of his eye and declared his power to them and the Gods both.

“He used that power… the power of the Master of Death.”

“...” Diana could only nod in agreement, trying to find the words which would explain to her mother what exactly he had done with the power. Necromancy was already a forbidden magic for them, with a sworn oath to the Lord of the Underworld that any such practitioners must be put to death or sealed away into dimensional prisons.

Had Harry only reanimated the Parademons, maybe the act could have been written off, considering the chaos that the Amazons had barely been surviving, especially with more and more Parademons arriving each moment.

But he had instead…

“He used his power to raise the dead,” she whispered, mind flashing back to the sight of her sisters’ crooked, bent, torn, burnt… dead bodies rising from the ground, hands that had been slack with death now holding onto their weapons. Hemera, one of her teachers when she had been a child… she had seen her old mentor walk the land with half her head blown off, sightless eyes tracking Parademons as she had whipped her spear around with the same brutal efficiency as when she had been training her.

“Look at me, Diana,” her mother—the Queen of Amazons—ordered, and Diana obeyed. Turning towards Hippolyta, Diana met her single, focused eye with both of her dismayed ones. “What exactly did Harry do?”

“He raised our sisters as well, those who had fallen in battle… he raised them all to fight the Parademons so that those who were living would have a chance,” she whispered. “We battled Steppenwolf then, and he used his magic to break through the enemy’s guard while I called Zeus’ powers to my aid. But Steppenwolf had some kind of unexplainable energy tied to his armor, one that rejected our attacks effortlessly… Harry then decided to use that fell power in full and eradicated Steppenwolf into nothing but a ruined skeleton. He removed the enchantment on our sisters, and we rushed to the Human World to end the threat completely.”

“...Have the Gods sent any missive yet?”

“About that…” she sighed, remembering that due to the onset of battle, she had never gotten the time to tell her mother about what had transpired on Olympus. By Ha—hell, she was still coming to terms with the fact that the Elder Three were gone from the world, leaving only nine Olympians to govern them. Looking at her mother, who was still waiting for an answer, Diana nonetheless continued, “When I reached Olympus, Lord Poseidon greeted me, and took me to the throne room of the Gods…”

“Don’t you think you are overthinking things?”

“Not after getting my face ground into literal dirt and almost creating a singularity,” Kara answered, standing before the computer in the Fortress, uploading the data from the suit into the interface, and watching a dozen screens pop up before them. Each showed a different moment of the angle of the fights she had been in, from the initial Parademons swarms to Kalibak himself.

“She is right, Kal,” his father’s voice came from their right, and Clark watched Jor-El’s projection appear before them, hands clasped behind his back as always, “Apokolips was relatively silent regime during my lifetime, having stopped its expansionist ways due to the truce with the High Father. But even then that doesn't change the danger they represent, especially if it has set its eyes on this world you call your home.”

“Then what do we do now? Orion did send Kalibak back, and we are forming a team to stop this kind of thing in the future.”

“Learn, like she is attempting to do,” Jor-El spoke, waving a hand to retrieve data from his bodysuit as well, “Your opponent showed formal training in martial combat. His manner of fight may have been sloppy and brutish on appearance, but under that, he has shown remarkable efficiency and ability to adapt to your levels of strength as you increased them. You put up an admirable effort in dissecting his style, but experience is where you truly fell short.”

“I need formal training in martial arts as well,” he sighed.

“That is the first step, yes,” Jor nodded, “Torquasm-Rao is not enough with the type of combatants that you have been facing. You need something more. Thankfully, humans have developed hundreds of combat styles based on shape, size, and type of engagement.”

“He needs to stop brooding too!”

“I don’t brood!” Clark frowned, crossing his arms as he stared at his cousin, who was giving him look as if saying ‘really’. Amending his thoughts as she continued to stare at him, he said, “I just sometimes have a lot on my mind.”

“Which is equally as dangerous as a sloppy combat, perhaps even more,” his father interrupted, nodding slightly in his direction. “You have emotions, Kal,” Jor-El said, voice softer now, the projection’s light pulsing like a slow heartbeat. “Perhaps the humans do not always see this, and perhaps even you try to forget it, but I know what it means to feel as you do. You hear every cry, every heartbeat. You carry them all when you rise into the sky. That weight is not weakness—it is what makes you real.”

“But it can also bind you. Thought, doubt, compassion…they can slow the hand that must act. In the smallest heartbeat of hesitation, the world can change beyond your reach. I have seen such stillness before, when a protector’s mind was divided between what he perceived as right and what he should have been doing instead.”

The crystals dimmed; the air seemed to still around his words.

“You must learn to rise above that, Kal-El. Not because you are invulnerable, but because you have chosen to be more than that. You have chosen to be Superman. And for those who look to you, hope itself cannot falter. When you waver, they will waver. When you stand, they will find the courage to do the same.”

Jor-El’s image regarded him with faint, proud melancholy. “You are their mirror, my son. Guard that reflection well.”

Kara looked up from the console. “Translation? Think less, act more, and try not to drown in feelings while you’re saving the day.”

Clark managed a tired smile. “Something like that.”

The Fortress fell quiet again, the wind outside brushing over the ice like a slow exhale, and the two Kryptonians stood beneath the living light, one analyzing her physical battles, the other thinking about his mental ones.

“Who are your initial team members, Master Bruce?”

“Superman, Wonder Woman, the Green Lanterns, Flash…and Aquaman has accepted Superman’s idea of joining the front.”

“No Appolina or Phantom?” his butler raised an eyebrow.

“Phantom is a barrel of gunpowder with a lit wick,” he responded, “Appolina is his sister. I am against including either, because for all we know, the UN might declare him a criminal in the list they are presenting during the convention.”

“Ah,” Alfred breathed, nodding, “Potential teammate to wanted criminal.”

“Exactly. If that doesn’t come to pass, then I am open to inviting Appolina. She has shown remarkable powers and displayed precise control over them, especially in this recent confrontation. She is also able to listen to direction and coordinate with a plan of action instead of rushing in with her ego, qualities that are needed in a team.”

“And it gives you a plausible way of keeping tabs on Phantom by proxy.”

Bruce just grunted, eyes turning towards one of the several displays arrayed before them, each showing a different angle, a different lens through which he was analysing his latest mission. Grunting to himself, Bruce pushed off the railing and tapped a button on watch, illuminating the garage on the other side of the cave, as well as the tables and stands that stood in the way between.

“Are you sure you should be rushing out tonight, Master Bruce?” Alfred asked instantly, and the sigh that escaped his childhood caretaker turned friend was all too loud in his opinion.

“There is nothing on my to do list, Alfred,” he answered, walking down the stairs and removing his tie, throwing it to the side where it landed on the table harmlessly, lights flickering on over his suits—his regular one still needed repairs from the series of events of three days ago, so he would need to have do with his older one for the day.

“You could rest, there have been no active cases that demand your attention tonight.”

“There has been one,” he grunted, removing his shirt to pull on the underweave as Alfred turned around from the computer, and gave him a flat stare.

“The Graysons,” his butler muttered, steepling his hands before his face, “A couple of no-name circus performers interest Batman?...or is it Bruce Wayne I am speaking too.”

“Hn,” he just grunted, knowing the answer that they both knew to be true.

“You did good, Master Bruce, comforting that boy,” Alfred continued, picking up his clothes and stuffing them into the washer on the side as he clasped his vambraces in place, before pulling on the upper part of his armor.

“Keep an eye on that boy. See if we can get him to one of our orphanages instead of the state foster care,” he replied, “Send a message to Lucius too, to come to the manor. I have some data I cannot share over the server, it needs to be physically looked into.”

“I hope you are not late in returning, Master Bruce. You do have to go to the United Nations on Friday, as Batman this time—not Bruce Wayne. And tomorrow there is a Board Meeting to attend, called by Samwell about LuthorCorp partnering with the Government.”

“Yes, I saw the dossier,” he answered, putting on his cowl and activating the systems, before he swung his leg over his bike, “Activate the trackers and the cameras throughout the city.”

The engines growled awake, the silent whine of the engine sending a quiet tingle up his spine. Alfred’s fingers danced across the terminal, patching into the police frequencies. “Scanners active. You’ll find the circus cleanup near Bristol Docks—still too many reporters and not enough tact.”

Bruce adjusted the gauntlet clasp and checked the HUD as the rocky outcropping before them began to lower. “I’ll manage.”

“Of course you will,” Alfred muttered, voice thinning under the rumble of the hydraulic systems. “And when you’re done managing, do remember to eat. Tea is hardly dinner, no matter how darkly you take it.”

The entrance finally disappeared into the ground and cold mist from the waterfall swept over him, the city’s pulse calling beyond. Alfred’s silhouette stood below, still, precise, framed in the soft blue light of the monitors.

“Master Bruce,” his voice echoed once more, quieter now, “if you mean to build a League, start by remembering you were never meant to stand alone.”

Bruce didn’t reply. He just pulled on the accelerator, and the Batmobile shot into the rain. Behind him, the Batcave went silent again—one man watching a shadow vanish into another long night, the other one riding out, seeing a reflection of himself in the eyes of Dick Grayson.