DC: All for One Chapter 18 — Sanctuary (Patreon)

The Watchtower's medical wing was busier than it had been in months. In the span of only a few months the occupied beds went from zero to four. 

Hal Jordan sat on the edge of the furthest bed with his right arm held out at an angle while Martian Manhunter worked on extracting the bone fragment that was still embedded through his bicep. The bone spike protruded from both sides of Hal's arm in a white spear that was streaked with dried blood, and every time J'onn adjusted his grip on the fragment Hal's face tightened and a vein pulsed visibly at his temple.

"I cannot believe," Hal said through his teeth while J'onn applied a pressure to the surrounding muscle to prevent tearing as the spike shifted, "that he stabbed me. He actually stabbed me. With a bone. He grew a bone out of his arm and put it through mine like I was a piece of meat on a skewer. Do you know the last time someone put a foreign object through my body? I don't, because it doesn't happen, because I am the damn Green Lantern."

Superman stood near the doorway with his arms crossed watching J'onn work on Hal without interrupting, meanwhile Flash moved between the supply cabinets along the far wall gathering additional medical supplies and helping out. Wonder Woman stood beside the middle bed where Dinah lay propped against the raised back of the mattress with a blanket pulled to her waist and an expression on her face that was difficult to read.

Robin lay in the bed nearest to Bruce's, propped at a slight angle against the raised back of the mattress as lying flat sent a white-hot lance of pain through the left side of his chest where three of his ribs had cracked under the force of Mindy's enhanced kick. His right arm was immobilised in a rigid medical brace that ran from his wrist to just below the shoulder, the bone having fractured cleanly across the radius. J'onn had already set the breaks, but the pain was still throbbingg beneath the medication every time he breathed too deeply or shifted his weight.

He had lost again. 

The thought sat in the centre of Robin's skull like a stone. He had fought the girl and he had beaten her the first time, yes, but it had been close even then, closer than it should have been against someone who had been locked in a cell for months, but the second time she had come at him with those stupid bunny ears he had barely seen the kick before it hit him. 

He had gone down. 

Again. 

He had watched the masked man walk away with his recruits. Again. And now he was lying in the Watchtower with three broken ribs and a fractured arm next to Bruce's unconscious body while people who should not have needed to be here at all dealt the problems he started.

"The fragment is out," J'onn said as he withdrew the bloodied spike and set it carefully in a sterile tray beside the bed. He placed a scanner over the wound and held it there for a moment, reading the tissue beneath the skin to confirm that no secondary damage had been left behind by the extraction. "The muscle is intact. You will need to keep the arm immobilised for forty-eight hours while the regenerative patch completes its work, but there should be no lasting impairment."

Flash appeared at Hal's side almost instantly with the regenerative patch, which J'onn took from him and pressed over the wound site, Hal nodded his thanks before he leaned back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

"He had laser eyes," Hal said. "He had stretchy arms. He had ice powers. He could teleport. He could fly, or float, or whatever the hell that was. He grew bones out of his body and used them as weapons. He punched like a freight train and he could make massive light bombs. One guy. All of that in one guy. And I'm pretty sure he was holding back, because at the end there when he clicked his fingers and flashbanged me he just walked away."

J'onn moved from Hal's bedside to Robin's and began a secondary examination, placing one hand lightly against the brace on Robin's arm while the other hovered above his ribcage snd assessed the progress of the healing. Robin didn't acknowledge the examination beyond a slight tightening of his jaw when J'onn's hand moved across the area where the fractures were worst.

"The ribs are setting properly," J'onn said after a moment. "Two of the three breaks are clean and will heal without complication. The third has a minor displacement that I have corrected. You should not engage in strenuous physical activity for at least seventy-two hours." He paused and looked at Robin's face with an expression that suggested he already knew how that recommendation would be received.

Superman's expression had not changed during any of this. "How many distinct abilities would you estimate he used during your engagement," he asked, directing the question toward Hal.

Hal held up his good hand and started counting on his fingers. "Teleportation. Flight. Super strength. Laser vision from his eyes. Ice generation. Air blasts. The bone thing. A flashbang that came from snapping his fingers. The stretchy arms. Oh, and durability, because I hit him with a jet construct at full speed and he got up from it like I'd thrown a pillow at him." He paused. "That's eleven. And he used every single one of them like he'd been doing it his whole life. There was no hesitation, no fumbling, no figuring-it-out-as-he-went. He knew exactly what he had and exactly when to use it."

"He kept up with Ted too," Dinah said from her bed. "I was fighting Poison Ivy so I didn't see all of it, but I saw enough. Ted was pressing him hard and the guy matched him blow for blow. He adapted mid-fight, changed his style, adjusted his timing. That's not something you can fake with superpowers. That's real skill. Whoever trained him did a hell of a job."

Robin finally looked away from the ceiling. "It's Ethan Kane," he said.

The room shifted slightly. Superman turned his head toward Robin. "Dick," he said. "Barbara was at Robinson Park during the time of the breakout. She saw Ethan Kane there in person, running a food distribution event in the East End. He was at the park at the exact time that All for One was inside Arkham."

Robin went silent.

His jaw tightened and his good hand curled around the bedrail until the knuckles whitened, he stared at Superman for a long moment before his gaze dropped back to the ceiling. He didn't argue. He didn't offer a rebuttal. But the silence he produced was not the silence of someone who had been convinced. 

"Regardless of who he is," J'onn said as he straightened from Robin's bedside and moved toward Dinah's bed to begin his examination of her, "what is clear from tonight is that this individual possesses the ability to wield multiple meta-human abilities simultaneously, and to do so with a level of fluency that suggests either long practice or an intuitive integration that is functionally equivalent to it he represents a threat classification that we should not take lightly."

"Don't forget Dinah, her ability is gone, while I don't want to speculate, the most likely outcome is a that he stole her ability," Wonder a woman added. 

"It's worse than that," Robin said without lifting his eyes from the ceiling. "The girl I fought. First round she was good, trained, fast, but human. No powers. Then he touched her head and she sprouted ears. Rabbit ears. And her legs changed. She went from being a skilled hand-to-hand fighter to being able to launch herself at speeds I could barely track. She kicked me across the corridor and through a concrete wall." He paused and his uninjured hand moved unconsciously to the brace on his broken arm. "That's how this happened."

Wonder Woman turned from Dinah's bedside and looked at Robin. "You believe he transferred an ability to her," she said. 

Robin nodded slowly. "It's the only explanation. She didn't have those abilities when we started fighting. He put his hand on her head and she changed. If he can do that, if he can take abilities from meta-humans and redistribute them to whoever he wants, then it's not just about how dangerous he is by himself. He can make other people dangerous. He can build a team, arm them with stolen powers, and create something his own army of Metas."

"Well, that's terrifying," Flash said from the supply cabinet where he had paused with a roll of bandaging in one hand and his other hand resting against the shelf. "Just throwing that out there. The idea of a guy who can collect powers like trading cards and then hand them out to his buddies? We might be in trouble..."

Superman was quiet for a long moment while he processed what had been said. "This is a serious threat. If this individual can take abilities and grant them to others, then every engagement a meta human hero has with him could be dangerous. Dinah has already lost her Canary Cry tonight. We cannot afford for that to happen again."

He paused and looked around the room before continuing. "I think we need to consider the possibility of relocating additional support to Gotham. The Arkham breakout has released dozens of dangerous individuals back into a city that is already destabilised by Batman's absence. The GCPD is overwhelmed. Robin and Batgirl are doing extraordinary work, but what happened tonight is beyond what any two people should be expected to handle alone. If I moved to Gotham temporarily, I could assist with recapturing the escapees and provide a deterrent presence while we develop a strategy for dealing with All for One specifically."

Robin's head turned on the pillow. "No," he said, and there was no hesitation in it. "Absolutely not. You want to know why Bruce never wanted any of you setting up shop in Gotham? Because every time one of you moves to a new city, your villains follow. That's how it works. Superman shows up in Gotham and two weeks later Lex Luthor is cutting deals with whoever's left of the Falcone family and Metallo is tearing up the waterfront. You'd bring more problems than you solve, and the city would end up worse than it is now."

Superman didn't look offended by the response. If anything, his expression softened slightly. "I understand your concern, Dick. And I don't disagree that the risk exists. But we're past the point where Gotham's problems can be contained by the people currently trying to contain them. Tonight proved that."

Wonder Woman broke the silence. "Then let me go," she said.

She stepped away from Dinah's bedside and stood in the centre of the room with the same natural authority that she brought to every space she entered, and she looked at Robin directly as she spoke. "Themyscira's waters have been calm for months now. New York has been quiet. Cheetah is contained, and the rest of those who would call themselves my enemies are either imprisoned or dormant. I am, at this moment, the member of this team with the fewest active threats demanding my attention. Let me come to Gotham and help you stabilise the situation while we work on identifying and neutralising All for One."

Robin looked at her for a long time from the bed, the reluctance in his face was visible, but it shifted gradually and eventually, he exhaled through his nose and gave a nod. "Fine," he said. "But you follow my lead when it comes to the city. I know Gotham. I know how it works, I know what it responds to, and I know what makes it worse. You're there to help, not to take over."

"Agreed," Wonder Woman said without any hesitation. "You know your city better than I ever could, and I would not presume to tell you how to defend it. I am there as your backup, nothing more."

"And I want in too," Hal said from his bed. "Not full-time, I've still got my sector to worry about, but when I can be there I want to be there. That guy put a bone through my arm and walked away from me like I was a minor inconvenience. That doesn't sit right with me, and it's not going to sit right until I've put him in a cell."

Superman let the exchange settle before he turned and walked across the room to Dinah's bed. "How are you doing, Dinah," he said. 

Dinah was quiet for a moment while she looked down at her own hands where they rested on the blanket. "I'm fine," she said a little hesitantly. "Physically I feel normal. Nothing hurts that shouldn't hurt after a fight. No dizziness, no nausea, nothing like that. It's just..." She trailed off and her fingers curled slightly against the blanket. "It's been with me for so long. My power. It's been part of me since I was a teenager, I've spent so many years learning to control it and use it and live with it that I forgot what it was like before I had it. And now it's gone. It feels strange in a way I don't really have the words for yet."

She exhaled and straightened slightly against the mattress. "But I'm fine. I can still fight. I can still do the job. I've always been more than my power and I'll prove that if I have to."

Superman placed his hand on hers and held it there for a moment before he looked up at J'onn. "J'onn, are there any negative side effects we should be concerned about from the loss of her meta-gene? Anything that might manifest later or require monitoring?"

J'onn was silent for a moment before he shook his head. "She is in perfect health," he said. "The extraction, while traumatic, was remarkably precise in its execution. There is no residual damage to the surrounding tissue, no neurological disruption, and no indication of systemic complications that might emerge over time. The meta-gene has been cleanly removed as though it were never there. Her body is functioning normally in every other capacity, and I see no reason to expect that to change."

Dinah let out a breath that she might not have known she was holding and nodded. "Silver linings, I suppose," she said quietly.

After a moment of silence Wonder Woman finally acted.  "I will leave now," she said as she looked at Robin one more time. "The longer those escapees have to scatter, the harder they will be to find."

Robin looked as if he were about to stand up but Wonder Woman held her hand up. "Rest," she said to him with a firmness that was not a suggestion. "I will handle tonight. You heal."

She then nodded to each of her teammates before heading out of the medical wing and on her way to the planet. 

_____________________________________

The sewers beneath Gotham were not the worst environment Ethan had ever moved through, but they were not far from it.

Mindy had been complaining since approximately thirty seconds after they entered.

"This is disgusting," she said for what was at minimum the sixth time since they had descended through the junction point. "This is actually the most disgusting thing I have ever walked through and I once crawled through a ventilation shaft full of dead rats to get to a drug lab in the Bronx, and even that, even that, was less revolting than this. I've got sewer water in my shoes. I can feel it between my toes. It's warm. Why is it warm? Actually I don't want to know. Don't tell me."

Her new ears were pressed flat against her head in what appeared to be an involuntary response to the environment. "If we don't get out of this tunnel in the next five minutes I'm going to start breaking things," she added."

Ivy walked several paces behind the group with her bare feet placed carefully along the raised edge of the tunnel where the walkway was driest. "I have a rather big distaste for being underground," Ivy said with a tightness in her voice that suggested she was using a great deal of restraint not to express herself more forcefully. "I need air. I need actual air. Not whatever this recirculated chemical soup is that passes for an atmosphere in this tunnel."

"Be patient," Ethan said from the front of the group without slowing his pace or turning around. "We are nearly there."

Sofia walked between Ivy and Ethan in the same withdrawn posture she had maintained since the beginning of the evening, her arms wrapped around herself and her head down, though she had not complained once about the smell or the conditions or anything else since they had entered the tunnel system it was clear to see they bothered her. 

They walked in relative silence for another minute before Mindy's curiosity overcame her revulsion and she jogged a few splashing steps forward to fall in beside Ethan, her new ears perking upward slightly. "Okay, so, the ears," she said while she reached up and flicked one of them with her finger, wincing slightly at the unexpected sensitivity of the touch. "And the legs. What the hell is the deal with that, it's weird, it's very weird, but it's also kind of amazing."

Ethan kept walking while he answered. "The ability I transferred to you is called Rabbit Anatomy," he said. "It restructures your lower body musculature to replicate the proportional leg strength and fast-twitch fibre density of a rabbit scaled to human dimensions, which is what gives you the explosive jumping and sprinting capability you experienced during the fight with Robin. The ears are a secondary expression of the same ability. They provide you with enhanced hearing across a wider frequency range than the human ear can normally detect, as well as a form of spatial awareness that allows you to map your environment."

Mindy processed that while she bounced slightly on the balls of her feet, testing the coiled tension in her legs. "So I'm part rabbit now," she said. "Like, permanently?"

"For as long as I allow it, yes."

"And the ears are just... going to stay there. On my head. Forever."

"They are part of the ability's physical expression. If I were to remove the ability, they would recede."

Mindy reached up and touched one of the ears again, more gently this time, and she felt it twitch under her fingers. "Okay," she said. "Okay, fine. I can work with this. I can definitely work with this."

She was quiet for approximately four seconds.

"So how did you give it to me?" she asked. "What happened when you put your hand on my head? Did you pull it out of someone else first? Is there some poor rabbit running around out there with no legs?"

"That is what my ability is," Ethan said, and the simplicity of the statement carried more weight than its length suggested. "I can take meta-human abilities from those who possess them and I can give those abilities to others. It is the core of what I am. Everything else I carry is secondary to it."

Ivy, who had been listening from several paces behind without contributing, spoke up with a note of genuine interest. "That is an extraordinarily powerful ability," she said. "The capacity to redistribute meta-human traits across different hosts implies a level of interaction with the meta-gene that I did not believe was possible. If what you are describing is accurate, then you are not simply powerful. You are a vector. You could reshape the meta-human landscape of this city, or any city, at will."

"Yes," Ethan said.

"How many abilities do you currently hold?" Mindy asked.

"Not enough," Ethan replied.

They walked on in silence for another few minutes before Ethan slowed his pace and stopped in front of a section of wall that looked identical to every other section of wall they had passed for the last quarter mile. The brickwork was the same age and the same colour, there was nothing about it that would have drawn the attention of anyone passing through the tunnel for any reason.

Ethan raised one hand and knocked against the wall in a specific pattern, three quick strikes followed by two slow ones followed by a pause and then a single final strike. 

A mechanism engaged somewhere behind the surface with a mechanical click vibrated through the floor beneath their feet, a section of the wall approximately six feet wide and eight feet tall receded inward by several inches before sliding to the left along a concealed track, revealing a corridor beyond. 

Mindy's ears shot straight up.

"No way," she said while she stepped forward and leaned through the opening with both hands braced against the frame, her head swivelling back and forth as she took in the corridor beyond. "No way. A secret door. An actual secret door. That is the coolest thing I have ever seen in my entire life. This is some straight-up spy movie James Bond villain lair shit and I am here for it. I am so here for it."

Ethan walked through without commenting on her enthusiasm, and the others followed. The corridor beyond the hidden entrance was clean and well-maintained, with smooth concrete walls that had been sealed and painted in a matte grey. It extended for perhaps fifty yards before it opened out into something that stopped all four of them in their tracks, though for different reasons and to different degrees.

The cavern was enormous.

It had been part of a train station once, that much was immediately obvious from the arched ceiling and the remnants of platform infrastructure that were still visible along the far wall, but whatever it had been before had been so thoroughly transformed that the original function of the space was almost an afterthought.

The ceiling rose forty feet overhead at its highest point, and the walls curved inward, but it was what filled the space beneath that architecture that drew the eye. 

Greenery. Everywhere.

Trees rose from beds of soil that had been laid across the old platform surfaces, their canopies spreading outward to fill the upper reaches of the cavern both to support the ceiling and walls. 

Flowering bushes lined the walkways between the planted areas, and climbing vines covered the support pillars that ran the length of the space, wrapping around the old steel and concrete. The air was different here, warmer and fresher and carrying the rich, 

 scent of living earth and growing things that was so dramatically removed from the sewer tunnel they had just walked through that it felt like stepping through a doorway into another world.

"Holy shit," Mindy said as she stood at the entrance and turned a slow circle with her mouth hanging open. "It's like Alice in Wonderland. It's like we fell down the rabbit hole and ended up in some kind of underground garden paradise."

Ivy had stopped walking entirely.

She stood at the threshold of the cavern with  her lips parted and her eyes moving across the greenery with an expression that was so far removed from the guarded demeanour she had maintained since the cell that it might have belonged to a different person. She had felt a great deal of plant life pulsing beneath the city during their walk through the sewers, more than she would have expected to find this far below the surface, but she had assumed it was root systems from the parks above or feral growth in abandoned infrastructure. 

She had not expected this.

"How," she said, her voice was softer than it had been at any point during the evening. She turned to look at Ethan with an expression that demanded an answer. "How did you do this. These are not weeds or strays. That is a Japanese maple. That is a ghost orchid, which is critically endangered and requires extremely specific humidity and light conditions to survive outside of its native range. That fern along the far wall is a species I have only ever seen in the cloud forests of Costa Rica. These plants need true sunlight to thrive. They cannot survive under artificial lighting, I have tried, the spectral profile is never correct and the growth suffers until the plant eventually dies. How are they alive down here?"

Ethan walked into the cavern and gestured upward toward the lighting array that was mounted across the ceiling in a grid of panels. "I developed those," he said. "The panels replicate the full spectral range of solar radiation at the precise intensities required for photosynthesis, including the ultraviolet and infrared bands that conventional grow lights either omit or deliver in incorrect proportions. The intensity cycles follow a programmed day-night rhythm, and the humidity and temperature in the cavern are regulated by a climate system I built into the ventilation network."

He paused and looked around the space with something that might have been quiet satisfaction, though the mask made it difficult to read. "I brought the plants from across the world. Some of them I sourced through specialist dealers. Others I grew from seeds and cuttings that I acquired through less conventional means. The ghost orchid you noticed came from a population in the Fakahatchee Strand in Florida. The cloud forest fern came from Monteverde. The grove of cherry trees along the eastern wall came from a nursery outside Kyoto that has been cultivating that particular variety for over two hundred years."

He turned to face all three of them. "This is Sanctuary," he said. 

"This is where we live. This is where we train, where we plan, and where we rest when the work above becomes too much to sustain without respite. The facility has everything you will need. Living quarters for each of you, a fully equipped laboratory, a workshop, a medical bay, a kitchen, a training area, and a library. The entire structure is lined with shielding that prevents detection by any scanning technology currently available, including superman. Every access tunnel that once connected this station to the wider underground network has been sealed and concealed except for three, each of which exits into the industrial district above us where I own every factory and warehouse on the surface. Those properties are where we will conduct our operations when the time comes."

"Why go through all this effort," Sofia said. It was the first time she had spoken voluntarily since the corridor outside the high-security ward. 

Ethan turned to look at her. "Because what I am going to require from each of you will be tiring and exhausting in ways that you have not yet experienced," he said, "you will need to be operating at nothing less than your absolute best at every moment. I cannot ask that of you if I do not provide you with a place where you are safe, where you can recover, where you can exist without looking over your shoulder or sleeping with one eye open. The least I can do."

A blur of motion shot upward from the floor as Mindy launched herself off the ground in a single explosive bound that carried her nearly thirty feet into the air, her body arcing through the canopy of one of the larger trees before she caught a thick branch with one hand and swung herself up onto it. She settled into the length of the branch, reached out toward a cluster of large apples that hung from the limbs above her, and plucked one free before sinking her teeth into it.

"Sounds good to me," she said through a mouthful of apple while she dangled her legs from the branch.

Ivy, meanwhile, had walked slowly away from the group and toward the nearest stretch of open ground where the grass grew thick and green between two rows of flowering shrubs. She lowered herself to her knees and then sat back on her heels, she placed both of her palms flat against the earth and closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

"The Green is happy here," she said. "It is thriving. It is loved." She opened her eyes and looked around. "It is beautiful."

Ethan let them have the moment before he spoke again. "Your rooms are through the corridor on the eastern side of the cavern," he said. "Each of you has a private space that has been prepared in advance. You are free to do with them whatever you wish, to furnish them or decorate them or leave them bare, that is your choice. For the next few days, I want each of you to rest. Sleep, eat, recover from tonight, and become familiar with the facility. We are going to be busy for a very long time after that, and this may be the last period of genuine rest any of us gets for a while."

He looked at each of them in turn before he turned and walked toward the corridor that led to the western side of the cavern, where his own quarters were located.

The room Ethan kept for himself was sparse. A bed against the far wall. A desk that occupied most of the left wall, covered in an organised sprawl of components and tools and half-assembled circuitry. A wardrobe that held three identical suits and a small collection of casual clothing. A mirror. A sink. Nothing on the walls, nothing on the floor, no personal effects of any kind beyond the functional.

He reached up and disengaged the seal on his helmet, lifting it from his head and setting it on the desk before he began taking his suit off. The bruises revealed themselves as the fabric came away from his body. A large purple bloom across his ribs where Green Lanyerns construct had caught him. 

A darker mark along his left shoulder where the jet construct had driven him into the ground. A shallow cut along his right side where one of the Lantern's sword constructs had slipped past his guard. He rotated his left shoulder experimentally and felt the pull of damaged muscle beneath the skin, but it was a manageable pain, the kind that would be gone by morning.

He changed into a pair of dark trousers and a plain long-sleeved shirt, rolling the sleeves to the elbows as he settled into the chair at his desk and let himself sit for a moment.

Even if he was tired and in pain, It was difficult to be weighed down by it right now.

Everything had been a success. 

Every element of the plan he had constructed for this evening had executed within acceptable parameters, and several of them had exceeded his projections. 

Sofia was free and had already demonstrated a resilience that suggested the hollowing she had undergone at Arkham had not destroyed as much of her as it had appeared to. Mindy was exactly what he had hoped she would be, aggressive and skilled and motivated by a cause that aligned almost perfectly with his own targets. And Ivy was perhaps the most significant acquisition of all.

These were his leaders. 

The ones who would stand beside him when the work began in earnest. And they were only the first. There would be others, he had no doubt of that. The world was full of people who had been failed by the systems that claimed to protect them, and when he showed them what he was building, they would come.

For now, though, he should take a moment to breathe, maybe continue working on the project that had been occupying his off-hours for the past several weeks. He pulled the half-assembled prototype toward him across the desk and began reconnecting the components he had been soldering before he left for Arkham. The device was a smartphone, or rather it would be a smartphone once it was completed, though the word felt inadequate for what he was building. The processing architecture alone was generations ahead of anything currently on the market.

He worked for hours and made a lot of headway into completing the first workable prototype when he was distracted by Sofia who stood in the doorway.

She was wearing a white dressing gown that had been among the supplies he had stocked in each of the prepared rooms, her dark hair was wet, falling in damp strands across her shoulders and leaving small spots of moisture on the fabric. She didn't knock. She didn't announce herself. She simply stood there in the doorway and looked at him for a moment before she stepped inside.

Ethan set down the soldering iron and turned in the chair to face her. "How are you adjusting," he asked.

Sofia didn't answer immediately. She walked further into the room with gentle steps, her eyes moving across the sparse furnishings and the bare walls. "It was nice to have a hot shower," she said eventually. "At the asylum they hose you down with cold water every week. They line you up in a row and they spray you like animals, they don't give you towels afterward, they just send you back to your cells wet and shaking and make you sit there until you dry."

She paused and her fingers curled around the lapels of the dressing gown, pulling it slightly tighter across her chest. "They would come to your cell three times a day with a cup of pills and they would stand there and watch you take them, if you didn't open your mouth wide enough afterward to show that you had swallowed, they would hold you down and force them into you."

"The pills made everything slow. They made the world feel like it was happening behind glass, like I was watching my own life from the other side of a window that I couldn't break. I couldn't think clearly. I couldn't feel anything clearly. I knew things were happening to me but I couldn't make myself care about them because the medication had taken the caring away along with everything else."

She had moved closer to Ethan while she spoke, crossing the small room in increments that were so gradual they were almost unnoticeable. 

"And the electroshock," she continued. "They would strap me to the table put something in my mouth so I wouldn't bite through my tongue and then they would turn it on, every time it happened I lost something. I could feel it going. Pieces of who I was, memories, thoughts, things I used to believe about myself, they would just... dissolve. Like sand being washed away."

"After a while it felt like there was nothing left to wash away, and that was when I stopped caring about anything at all. I stopped caring about getting out. I stopped caring about what they did to me. I stopped caring about whether I lived or died. I just... existed. Like furniture. Like something that had been put in a room and forgotten about."

"So many other things... so much pain... I remember it all now thanks to you healing me..."

Her eyes lifted to meet his. "My family did that to me. My father put me in that place. I was his blood and he threw me away like I was nothing, the feeling of that, the helplessness of knowing that the people who were supposed to protect you are the ones who put you in the cage... that was worse than the medication and the shocks and the cold water and everything else combined. It hollowed me out until I didn't even feel like a person anymore."

She took the final step toward him and stood directly in front of the chair where he sat, close enough that the damp ends of her hair nearly brushed against his face.

"I will give you everything I am," she said. "Everything. Heart and soul, just like you asked for in the cell. My body. My mind. My loyalty. All of it. It's yours. Every part of me is yours if you can make it so that I never feel helpless again."

Ethan studied her face for a long moment from the chair. Then he stood. He rose from the chair slowly and to his full height, which put him nearly a full foot above her, and he looked down at her face.

"You're sure you want to make that kind of deal," he said.

Sofia looked up at him and nodded, and the dressing gown shifted on her shoulders and fell open revealing her breasts and the patch of hair between her thighs. 

Ethan was silent for a moment.

"Then it's good that you don't have to," he said.

Something flickered across Sofia's face, confusion, maybe, or the beginning of the shame that she had been holding at bay through sheer force of will while she made the offer.

"I do not need you to be loyal to me," he continued. "I need you to be loyal to my vision. To what we are building together. Believe in the world I am trying to create and work toward it with everything you have, and that will be enough. More than enough. You do not need to sell yourself to earn a place here, Sofia. You earned that place the moment you chose to walk out of that cell instead of staying in it."

He raised his right hand and touched the tips of his fingers to her cheek. Sofia felt a slight buzz through her body that felt rather pleasant, she closed her eyes a moment as it filled every part of her. When Ethan lowered his hand, she stood very still for a moment while she processed what had changed.

"What did you do," she asked.

"I took away your helplessness," he said.

She looked at her own hands, turning them over slowly, and then looked back up at him with a question in her eyes that she didn't quite know how to phrase.

"The ability I have given you is called Pain Induction," Ethan explained. "It allows you to cause pain to any living person within approximately ten metres of where you are standing. The pain is real, it is neurological, and it is severe enough to incapacitate most people within seconds of activation. The mechanism is projected, which means you do not need to touch them, you do not need to see them, you only need to be aware that they are there." He paused. "There is a caveat. The pain you can inflict is limited to pain that you yourself have experienced. The more you have suffered, the wider the range of what you can project. And given what you have told me about Arkham, Sofia, the range of what you are now capable of inflicting is considerable."

Sofia stared at him. Then something shifted in her face, something that moved from the hollow, exhausted blankness that had been there since Arkham to something that was not a smile exactly but was the closest thing to one that her features seemed willing to produce.

"Thank you," she said softly.

She stepped forward and placed a lingering kiss against his cheek, her wet hair brushing against his jaw as she held the contact for several seconds before she drew back. She pulled the dressing gown closed around herself and turned toward the door, and she had almost reached it when she stopped and looked back over her shoulder at him.

"You may not have accepted my deal," she said, "but you are going to have me regardless." And then she walked out.

(AN: So Ethan has introduced his leaders to their base of operations and has given Sofia her ability which I think will fit her well. She's not the type to be a front line fighter but she can be quite intimidating. Anyway hope you enjoyed the chapter.)

1) All for One

2) Hyperadrenal

3) Voice Imitation

4) Enhanced Agility

5) Regenerative Saliva 

6) Scent Masking

7) Mass Adjustment (Self)

9) Expanded Vision

10) Wall Crawling

12) Explosive body parts and fluids

13) Ice Manipulation

14) Laser Vision

15) Flashbang

16) Healing Touch

17) Bone Manipulation

18) Air Blast

19) Stretchy arms

20) Static Charge

21) Durable Skin

22) Plant Manipulation

23) Bunny Anatomy (Given to Mindy)

24) Blink

25) Muscle Augmentation

26) Pain Induction (Given to Sofia)