DC: All for One Chapter 25 — Talon (Patreon)

Ethan came awake the way he always did, not with the disorientation that most people carried in the first few seconds after sleep, but all at once and completely, his eyes opening to the dark ceiling of the bedroom and his mind already running through the information available to him before his body had fully committed to consciouniousness.

It was still dark out, the only light being the city light that was shining throogh the windows. Sofia was still asleep beside him, her arm curved over the empty space where his torso had been. He pushed back the sheet and stood up from the bed without waking Sofia and picked up the shirt he had left on the chair by the window and put it on over his bare chest without buttoning it, then walked out of the bedroom and down the hall into the kitchen.

He filled a glass at the tap and stood at the island with the glass in his hand. He simply stood there looking out the window to Gotham which was a beautiful view considering how tall his apartment building was.  

Eventually he decided to end the charade. "Are you going to come out, or would you prefer to stand in the dark all night."

The shadow in the far corner of the kitchen, the one that sat in the angle where the refrigerator met the wall and that had not moved since he walked in, shifted.

A stranger stepped out of it and rose to his full height which was even taller than Ethan. He was lean and long, dressed head to toe in grey and white armour that had the texture of something old like leather, the plates fitted close to the body without bulk and jointed at every flex point with a precision that suggested it had been made for his specific body and no other. 

The mask was stylised into the oval of an owl's face with red lenses where the eyes would have been, and the gauntlets on his hands had a faint gleam to them that was not metal exactly but was not anything Ethan could easily classify.

Ethan looked him over casually while taking a sip of his water. "You have the look of the bat family," he said. "I'd be surprised if there was one that I missed out on."

"We are not related to the bat," the stranger said. "I am the Talon and what you are looking at predates whatever you think you know about this city's protectors by a considerable number of years."

"Alright," Ethan said. "Then you're here to kill me?"

"No," the Talon said. "Though I will use force if you make that necessary."

Ethan considered that for a moment, his eyes moving across the  Talon's shoulders and the way his weight was distributed across his feet, and then he threw the glass.

Not at the Talon's face, which was the obvious target and which the Talon's hands were already moving to deflect before the glass had left Ethan's grip, but at the light switch on the wall behind him, the glass hitting the panel with enough force to shatter and plunge the kitchen into complete darkness in the same instant Ethan came around the island at a dead run.

He covered the distance in two strides and drove his shoulder into the space where the Talon's chest had been, but the Talon had already moved, sidestepping with a speed that should not have been possible for a man his size, and Ethan's shoulder caught only air before the Talon's elbow came down across the back of his neck in a strike that was precise enough to suggest it had been aimed at a specific vertebra.

Ethan rolled forward with the impact, taking the force across his shoulder blades rather than the back of his neck, and came up on his feet facing the window.

The Talon was already there with his hands open and at his sides. 

Ethan threw a jab that the Talon slipped by turning his head a fraction, the punch grazing the edge of the owl mask with a scraping sound, and he followed immediately with a kick aimed at the back of the Talon's knee that the Talon checked on his shin and turned into a sweep that took Ethan's planted foot out from under him. Ethan went down but caught himself on one hand and pushed off and was back on his feet before the Talon could close the distance. 

The Talon then came forward with a combination that was unlike anything Ethan had catalogued from his study of conventional martial arts. Ethan blocked two of them and took the third across the ribs. He grabbed the Talon's extended arm with both hands, twisting at the elbow to force a rotation, and drove his knee up into the man's midsection three times in rapid succession, each impact sending a tremor throughout the man's whole body.

The Talon absorbed the first two with a forced exhale and caught the third by locking his core and letting the force spread through his body rather than concentrating in the point of impact. The Talon then reversed the arm grip faster than he should have been able to and sent Ethan sideways into the refrigerator, the door handle catching him across the shoulder. 

Ethan reached back without looking and wrenched the freezer drawer out of the bottom of the unit and swung it in an arc at the Talon's head, the contents scattering across the kitchen floor in a spray of ice and frozen food, but the Talon caught the drawer on his forearm and let the impact push him backward a step before he threw it aside.

"You're good, you use a very unconventional martial art that is clearly designed to make it difficult to adjust to," Ethan said as he stretched his neck and raised his fists again. 

The Talon moved again, faster this time and without the patience he had shown earlier. The combination he threw was designed to create a specific response which was for Ethan to raise both forearms in a cross-block that would expose the inside of his left elbow, and Ethan recognised the setup too late, his arms came up and the cross-block formed and the Talon's left hand bypassed it entirely and the needle in his right gauntlet found the inside of Ethan's elbow and discharged.

Ethan felt it immediately, not as pain but as a spreading cold that moved up his arm and into his shoulder and then into his chest and he understood in the two seconds before his legs stopped working that whenever wanted him put a large amount of thought into getting him. 

He hit the kitchen floor on his knees and caught himself on one hand and looked up at the Talon standing over him with the gauntlet still extended.

"Don't fight it," the Talon said.

Ethan didn't reply he only let out a small grin before the cold reached the base of his skull and the kitchen went away.

...

When he woke up he was seated upright in a chair in a room that was large and circular, it was also clearly underground. Ethan could tell because the ceiling stone was the same foundational stone that most of the old tunnels in Gotham used, though where he was in the city he wouldn't be able to tell. 

The lights surrounding him were level with him and almost blinding, it seemed that whoever had brought him here didn't want to be recognised as they put a lot of effort into blinding him. but he could still tell there were people in the room thanks to expanded vision. They were just on raised platforms kind of like a judge's chair but high enough that the light blinds you when you try and look up.

He counted them without moving his head, using his peripheral vision and the slight turns that he disguised as the natural movement of someone coming awake. Forty or so figures in chairs arranged in a curved row that followed the line of the wall, each of them in formal dark clothing and each of them wearing a mask in the shape of an owl's face, identical to each other except for the faint variations in the age and cut of the fabric surrounding them that suggested these were not costumes purchased from the same supplier but old things, personal things, maintained over time.

The one in the centre of the row, the chair that was marginally larger than the others and positioned at the apex of the curve, raised a wooden gavel and struck it against a small block on the arm of the chair.

"Ethan Kane," the central figure said. "You have been brought before the Court of Owls."

_____________________________________

Wayne Manor was quiet these days, it wasn't unusual for a place so large but even the manor had the occasional sounds of laughter or conversation between the occupants. But now the most common sound was of the heart rate monitor hooked up to Bruce on his childhood bed. He had been brought here by the Justice League as they couldn't do anymore to help him and believed he'd be more comfortable here where Alfred could take care of him and where Dick and Barbara could visit when they pleased. 

Right now Clark sat in the chair beside the bed with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped together, still wearing the suit and tie he had put on that morning for work at the Planet. 

"So then Perry calls me into his office and tells me the piece on the water treatment scandal needs another five thousand words by Friday, which is fine, I can do that in my sleep, but then he says he wants me to interview the head of the sanitation department and I'm thinking Perry, the man has been dodging reporters for three weeks, what makes you think he's going to talk to me? And Perry just looks at me over his glasses the way he does and says Kent, you have a face like a puppy even I struggle telling you no. I still don't know if that was a compliment."

He paused and looked at Bruce's face. "Stopped Livewire last Tuesday," Clark continued, his voice a little quieter now. "She was hitting the power grid again, same routine as last time. I talked her down for about forty seconds before she threw a transformer at my head and then it was the usual. She's in holding now. Probably be out by Thursday if her lawyer's as good as last time."

He sat back in the chair and rubbed his face with both hands.

"Everyone misses you, Bruce. Diana asks about you every time I see her. Barry brings it up at least once a week, usually right before he says something inappropriate and then apologises for it. Hal pretends he doesn't care but he flew over Gotham three times last month just to check on the city."

He tried to smile and couldn't quite get there.

"Dick is holding it together. He's doing a good job, better than anyone has a right to expect from someone his age carrying what he's carrying. But he's angry, Bruce. He's so angry, and he's getting angrier... and I... and I just don't know how to help him... because in a way I'm angry too."

Clark leaned forward again and looked at his hands.

"I don't know what to do," he said, and his voice dropped to something that was almost a whisper. "Part of me believes Dick is right. Part of me believes Ethan Kane is All for One and that whatever he's doing to Gotham is building toward something terrible, even if there isn't any evidence."

He was quiet for a moment.

"But I'm scared of acting. I know that sounds ridiculous coming from me, the guy who can bench press a building, but I'm scared. I'm scared of what it looks like when Superman throws his weight around. I'm scared of the precedent. I'm scared of becoming the thing that people like Lex have always said I am, an alien who thinks he knows better than everyone else and who uses his power to impose his will on people who didn't ask for it."

He looked at Bruce's face again.

"But then I look at you lying here, when I look at you in this bed, and I think about what Ethan did to you. I think to myself how can I sit here and do nothing? How can I follow the law when the law is letting a killer walk free?" His voice cracked slightly on the last word and he pressed his hands together harder.

"I'm sorry, Bruce. I'm sorry I wasn't there that night... I'm sorry—."

The door opened softly behind him.

"I do apologise, Mister Kent," Alfred said from the doorway, a tray in his hands with tea and a small plate of biscuits that he had clearly prepared before coming upstairs. "I didn't mean to interrupt. I thought you might appreciate some refreshment, but if you'd prefer more time I can—"

Clark stood up and turned and smiled at Alfred. "No, it's alright, Alfred. I was just leaving. Thank you for letting me sit with him."

"You are always welcome here, sir. Master Bruce would want you to know that, even if he is temporarily unable to say so himself."

Clark looked back at the bed one more time. Then he walked to the window and placed one hand on the frame.

"Take care of him, Alfred."

"I have been doing so for longer than you've been alive, Mister Kent. I don't intend to stop now."

Clark smiled again, smaller this time, then he pushed off the windowsill and was gone, the curtains billowing once in the displaced air before settling back into place.

Alfred stood in the doorway for a moment looking at the empty chair and the bed and the man in it, then he walked in and set the tray down on the bedside table and straightened the sheet across Bruce's chest the way he had done every morning and every evening since the night they brought him home.

"He worries about you a great deal, sir," Alfred said quietly. "As do we all."

He picked up the tray and left the room and closed the door behind him.

...

Clark landed on the fire escape outside his apartment window in Metropolis fourteen minutes later, ducked inside, and changed out of the suit and into jeans and a button-down shirt in approximately four seconds. He checked his watch, realised he had twelve minutes before he was supposed to be at Lois's place, and quickly grabbed his jacket and his keys and was out the front door before the window had finished closing behind him.

He stopped at the flower stand on the corner of Sullivan and Fifth and got the uusal. The old woman who ran it had started keeping a bunch of yellow tulips ready for him on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. 

"For the lady?" she asked.

"For the lady," Clark confirmed, handing her a ten and telling her to keep the change the way he always did.

He then quickly walked the six blocks to Lois's building with the tulips in one hand and his jacket over his arm and pressed the buzzer at the front entrance and waited.

"You're almost late, Smallville," Lois's voice said through the intercom.

"Almost late is the same as on time where I come from."

"Where you come from they think overalls are formalwear, now get up here."

The buzzer sounded and he pushed through the door and took the stairs two at a time to the fourth floor where Lois was already standing in her doorway. She was wearing a loose white blouse tucked into jeans with her dark hair down around her shoulders and no shoes. "Tulips," she said, taking them from his hand and holding them up to her nose. "You're consistent, Kent, I'll give you that."

"I like tulips," Clark said. "They're honest."

"They're cheap is what they are, you coming in?"

He followed her inside and took a depth breath, the apartment smelled like garlic and something with tomatoes and the radio on the kitchen counter was playing something old and jazzy. The table in the small dining area had been set for two with mismatched plates and wine glasses. 

"I made pasta," she said from the kitchen where she was putting the tulips in a glass and adjusting the stems until they sat the way she wanted. "Before you ask, yes I made it myself, no I didn't order it, and no you can't check the trash for takeout containers because I already took the trash out."

"I wasn't going to ask."

"You were thinking it."

"I was not thinking it."

"Smallville, I have been a reporter for five years. I know when someone is thinking something, now sit down and pour the wine."

Clark sat down and poured the wine and Lois brought out the pasta in a big ceramic bowl that she set in the centre of the table, and it was actually good, better than the last time she had cooked for him which had involved a smoke alarm and a lengthy discussion about the difference between broiling and burning. 

They ate and they talked, Lois told him about the story she was working on, a corruption piece involving a Metropolis city councillor who had been funnelling public housing funds into a shell company owned by his brother-in-law. She told him about Perry's latest attempt to get her to mentor a junior reporter, which she described as being asked to teach a golden retriever to write longform journalism. She told him about her mother's latest phone call, which had lasted forty minutes and covered three topics, none of which Lois had been interested in discussing.

Clark told her about the water treatment piece and Perry's comment about his face. He told her about a cat he had rescued from a tree in Centennial Park that morning that had immediately scratched him, which Lois found much funnier than he thought she should have. He told her about the new coffee place that had opened on the corner near his apartment that made the worst espresso he had ever tasted but that he kept going back to because the owner was so nice he couldn't bring himself to stop.

After dinner they cleared the table together, Lois washed and Clark dried and then they moved to the couch where Lois curled up against his side with her wine glass balanced on her knee and her head on his shoulder, and they watched half an episode of something neither of them was paying attention to before Clark excused himself to use the bathroom.

The hallway to the bathroom passed a door on the left that was slightly open, the gap wide enough that the light from the hallway spilled inside and caught the edge of what looked like a corkboard covered in paper. 

Clark stopped for a moment, he knew he shouldn't look. He knew it was Lois's private space, but he was also a pretty curious guy by nature and couldn't help but take a glance. 

"That's my war room," Lois called from behind him where she had seen him stop walking. "Don't judge the mess, I work better in chaos."

"Can I see it?" Clark asked.

"Sure, hit the light, it's on the left."

He pushed the door open, found the switch and the room lit up. It was small, probably a second bedroom that had been converted, and every surface was covered. The desk was buried under stacks of paper, notebooks and printed photographs. The walls had three corkboards mounted on them, each one covered in clippings and notes and photographs connected by pins and coloured string. A filing cabinet in the corner had its top drawer open and folders were sticking out of it at various angles.

"This is impressive," Clark said from the doorway.

Lois appeared behind him and leaned past him. "This is where the magic happens, Smallville. The stories that make it to print start right here in this beautiful disaster of a room." She walked him through the boards, pointing out the councillor story on the largest one, a half-finished investigation into a pharmaceutical company on the second, and a collection of smaller stories on the third that she was tracking but hadn't committed to yet.

Clark nodded along and was genuinely impressed by the depth of her research and the way she connected pieces that seemed unrelated until she drew the line between them, and Lois preened at the praise, lifting her chin slightly and pushing her hair back from her face.

Then Clark saw the corner.

It was a small board, separate from the others, tucked into the space between the filing cabinet and the wall where it would have been invisible from the doorway. It was smaller than the main boards and less developed, maybe a dozen items pinned to it, but the photograph in the centre stopped Clark's breath in his chest.

Ethan Kane.

Red strings ran from the photograph outward to other items, a hospital security camera still, a printed forum post, a hand-drawn timeline, a map of Metropolis with four locations circled in red marker.

Clark went still.

He went so still that Lois noticed immediately. "Clark?" she said. "You okay?"

He didn't answer.

"Clark." She touched his arm. "Hey, Earth to Smallville, what's going on, you look like you've seen a ghost."

She followed his gaze to the small board in the corner and her expression shifted from concern to understanding. "Ah," she said. "You found that one, must surprise you right?"

Clark turned to her and tried to arrange his face into something casual, something that looked like mild curiosity rather than the alarm that was currently running through every nerve in his body. "What is this?" he asked trying to keep calm. "What's the story here?"

Lois looked at him for a moment with narrowed eyes, it was clear she had many questions she wannted to ask, but she let it go and walked over to the board and tapped the central photograph.

"This started about a year ago," she said. "I was doing a story on meta-humans in Metropolis, nothing major, just a human interest piece about what it's like to live with abilities in a city that already has Superman. I found this girl who agreed to an interview. Nice kid, early twenties, had a minor ability, nothing flashy."

She paused and folded her arms.

"We were sitting in her apartment doing the interview when someone knocked on the door. She answered it and someone drugged her using some kind of cloth over her face, she was out in seconds. I tried to fight him off but he was fast, way too fast for a normal person, and he put me down before I could even use my taser. When I woke up maybe twenty minutes later the girl was conscious but something was wrong with her, the way she said it it was like her ability had been sucked out of her."

"Why didn't you tell me about this?" Clark asked, his hands tightening at his sides.

"We weren't dating then and honestly it wasn't a huge deal at that point. He didn't hurt me, not really, the whole thing was over in less than a minute."

"He knocked you out."

"Less painful than you'd think," Lois said with a slight laugh that was meant to deflect and that Clark did not find funny at all.

He shook his head and turned back to the board. His eyes found the hospital security photo, a grainy image taken from a ceiling-mounted camera showing a young man in a lab coat walking through a corridor, his face partially visible, enough to match against the central photograph.

Lois saw where he was looking. "That was taken the day the hospital exploded. You remember that? When Superman flew in and tried to blow the fire out but it kept getting bigger?"

Clark remembered it well, but he had always assumed it was a chemical accident.

"I think he did it," Lois said. "The evidence is circumstantial, I can't prove it, but the type of fire that was set on that roof was specifically designed to be the exact kind that Superman would struggle with. Magnesium with an oxygen acceleration and chemical accelerants that reignite on contact with air. There's no way that's an accident."

Clark's hands were shaking slightly, so much so that he had to put them in his pockets.

"I questioned the girl and learned that she had used a messaging forum," Lois continued. "She said she'd posted about her ability on a message board for metas, a place where they could talk about their experiences and connect with people going through similar things. I tracked the forum and found three other users in Metropolis, all of whom were attacked by someone and their abilities taken."

"And you're sure it's Ethan Kane," Clark said.

"Hundred percent," Lois said without hesitation. "I got a good look at his face before he put me down. It's him. Same kid who's on TV in Gotham selling phones and playing Jesus."

"Why haven't you taken this to Perry?"

Lois snorted. "Have you seen Gotham lately? They worship the ground he walks on. There is no way Perry would run a story based on what I've got. One eyewitness identification from a reporter who was drugged, three anonymous forum posts, and a security camera photo that a defence lawyer would tear apart in ten seconds. Besides, what am I going to write? Ethan Kane is a power vampire who blew up a Metropolis General? Perry would think I'd lost my mind."

She shrugged. "When I saw where things were going and how thin the evidence was I shelved it. It's been sitting in that corner ever since."

Clark moved forward and was already unpinning things from the board, his hands moving quickly, pulling photographs and printouts and the map and the timeline and stacking them together. "I'm sorry, can I take this? All of it? I know it's yours but I need it, I'll explain why later, I just need it right now."

Lois watched him strip the board with both eyebrows raised. "Sure, Smallville, I've got copies of everything on my laptop. You want to tell me why you're suddenly acting like the building's on fire?"

"A friend of mine has been investigating Ethan Kane," Clark said, folding the map and tucking it into the stack. "This information could be exactly what they need. I can't say more than that right now."

"A friend," Lois repeated, her eyes narrowing. "Which friend?"

Clark let out a nervous laugh. "I have to protect my sources."

"You don't have sources, Clark. You write about water treatment plants."

"I have sources."

"Name one."

"I can't name them, that's the whole point of protecting them."

Lois stared at him for a long three seconds and then rolled her eyes hard enough that her whole head moved with them. "Fine. Keep your mystery friend and your mystery investigation. But you owe me a fancy dinner for this, and I mean fancy."

"I'll start saving," Clark said, tucking the last of the documents under his arm.

"And if you find anything interesting you tell me first. Not Perry, not your mystery friend, me. I am still a reporter and this is still my story even if I shelved it."

"You'll be the first to know."

"I better be."

He leaned down and kissed her and she kissed him back with one hand on the side of his face and when they separated she kept her hand on his cheek for a moment. "Go," she said. "Do whatever you need to do. I'm not mad. I get the itch to investigate, believe me, I invented the itch. Just call me tomorrow."

"I will."

"And bring me coffee when you do. The good kind, not that garbage from your new favourite place."

Clark smiled and kissed her forehead and then he was gone, out the front door and down the stairs and through the lobby and into the alley beside the building where there were no cameras and no windows facing the right direction, and he launched himself into the sky hard enough that the air cracked behind him.

He climbed until the city below was a grid of light and then he turned east toward Gotham, the documents from Lois's board held tight against his chest under his jacket.

The smile was gone from his face. 

The warmth and the nervousness and the gentle fumbling that made Clark Kent the person that people trusted and liked and invited into their homes had all fallen away, and what was left was something considerably less patient.

He was done sitting on the sidelines. 

He was done waiting for evidence. 

All for One.

No.

Ethan Kane.

He was going to be brought to justice.

_____________________________________

"You have been brought before the Court of Owls."

Ethan sat in the chair in silence for a moment, his eyes moving slowly across the row of identical white masks that lined the upper seating area. "I always considered the idea that there was a group like this," he said. "A hidden hand behind Gotham keeping it the way it was. I dismissed it, because on the surface it seemed almost childish, the kind of thing that conspiracy theorists invented to explain why the world felt unfair, but it seems I was right." He paused and turned his attention back to the central figure.

"Since the criminal families are gone you likely old money, perhaps even the founding families. The Elliots. The Crownes. The Wycliffes, The Powers." He tilted his head slightly. "And the Kanes."

There was a deafening silence after he spoke. 

"Your deductions," the central figure said, "are accurate... it seems you are, in every regard, precisely what we believed you would be and perhaps even more."

Ethan frowned at the implication that they seemed to have known about him for a long time. 

"Do you know why you are here?" the central figure asked.

"I have broken the status quo," Ethan said. "I have changed the course of Gotham away from whatever equilibrium you've been maintaining. The crime families that you used as the primary mechanism for controlling the city's underground economy are gone and I've taken control over the city."

"Indeed," the central figure said. "Your misguided philanthropic tendencies, if we may call them that, have redirected this city away from its proper destiny. The balance that we have maintained across generations has been disturbed in ways that cannot simply be corrected."

"Why bring me here to tell me that?" Ethan asked. "You had your Talon in my home meaning you had plenty of opportunity to get rid of me."

"There are special circumstances," the central figure said, "that apply to your particular case. Circumstances that make your elimination both impractical and, we have concluded after considerable deliberation, undesirable."

Ethan looked at the central figure and then at the figures on either side of him, reading the slight shifts in posture that the masks could not entirely conceal. "What circumstances?" He asked, slightly curious now. 

The central figure turned his head slightly toward the figure on his immediate right, a small movement that passed something between them without words, and then looked back at Ethan. "You were raised by a family named Kane," the central figure said. "Thomas and Maria Kane, residents of the East End, with histories that we need not revisit in detail. You believed them to be your biological parents."

"What point are you trying to make," Ethan said.

"Those lesser lifeforms were not your biological parents," the central figure replied. 

The lights along the walls flickered and shut off all at once, until the room was lit only by two spotlights that came down from somewhere overhead and fell on the far end of the chamber, and in that light two figures stepped forward from the row of the parliament.

They stopped perhaps ten feet from Ethan's chair.

"You were not born to Thomas and Maria Kane," the figure on the left said. "You were born to us. Nearly twenty years ago, in the year when a great many children disappeared from this city in circumstances that were never adequately explained to the public, you were among those who were lost. We spent years searching for you, and when we finally found you, you had already been in that household long enough that we were uncertain whether recovering you would be of benefit or whether you were just too damaged to acclimate to our family."

Ethan looked at them and felt something move through him that he did not have a name for, the closest thing he had felt was the anger of being forced to call the police after Iron Row attacked his apartment. Despite how he felt he still managed to keep his face emotionless though he couldn't stop his hands from clutching the arms of the chair. 

"You are our son and we are so proud of the way you rose above your disabilities," the woman on the right said. 

The pressure behind his sternum intensified but he breathed through it. "You knew where I was and you still left me there," he said.

"We believed it was the lesser harm," his father said. 

"Then why bring me here now," Ethan said in the same emotionless voice as always.

"Because you have proven to be every inch a Kane regardless of the circumstances of your upbringing," the central figure said from his position along the wall. "And because the Kane family, which is among the founding members of this Court, finds itself at present without a rightful heir."

"Our daughter, your sister has left Gotham," his father said. "She appears to have no intention of returning and while we could force her it would be preferable she return on her own."

"I see," Ethan said slowly, turning the information over. "I have a sister." He let that sit for a moment before he looked back at his father. "You said my actions were misguided, in what way?"

"Bruce Wayne," his father said. "What you did to him was a mistake that extends beyond anything you could possibly imagine. Bruce Wayne is not simply a man in a costume, Ethan. He is something this city will require when the moment comes, and that moment is approaching faster than you may understand."

The figures along the wall stirred slightly.

"He cannot be harmed again," another voice said from the row, an older man's voice, from the far left of the group. "Whatever grievance you hold with him or whatever value you assigned to removing him, it is over. He is to be left alone, and if circumstances present themselves where he is at risk, he is to be protected."

"He is your cousin through your mother," Ethan's father said, watching Ethan's face. "Your mother's family and the Wayne family have been connected for generations. Bruce Wayne's mother was a Kane and that blood runs in you both."

"I find it strange," Ethan said, "that a secret organisation powerful enough to have maintained the balance of an entire city across centuries places this much importance on a single man, even one as capable as Bruce Wayne."

Nobody answered that directly and seemed to in fact ignore it. 

"We are offering you a place amongst us," the central figure said instead, shifting forward in his chair. "With the resources of this Court available to you, the work you have undertaken in this city could be accelerated and protected in ways that you cannot currently manage on your own. Your vision, whatever we may think of its methods, has a scope that this Court recognises and respects. We are not asking you to abandon it. We are asking you to pursue it within a framework that can sustain it."

"But there is one condition," his father said.

"Indeed, one that is non negotiable," the central figure confirmed. "There is a man operating in this city under the name All for One. He leads the organisation you call the Saviours. He is an unknown quantity, which makes him a danger to the stability that this Court exists to protect. We know that you have a personal connection to him as you have made use of his saviours to your own ends. Expose his identity to us, allow us to address the threat he represents, and everything this Court commands is at your disposal."

Ethan looked at the row of masks along the wall and then at his father and his mother standing beneath the two spotlightsn "Before I answer that," he said, "I want to understand something as the explanation I have been given so far does not satisfy me."

"Speak and I shall answer," The Central figure confirmed.

"You have maintained this city across centuries. The families that compose this Court have more wealth and more reach than most governments. You tell me that my actions have disrupted Gotham's destiny, but you have not told me what that destiny is, or why keeping it on its current course is worth the extraordinary lengths you have gone to in order to preserve it. You are not doing this simply to maintain a power structure. So tell me what you actually are."

The room was quiet for several seconds.

"You are more perceptive than most who have sat in that chair," the central figure said.

"Tell me," Ethan said.

The central figure sat back, and the quality of his stillness changed, something settling into it that was older than anything else in the room and that had the weight of genuine belief behind it.

"The Court of Owls exists to prepare this city," he said. "Not to preserve it as it is, but to prepare it for what is coming. There is a force, older than this world and older than the civilisation that built this city, that seeks entry into this universe. A being of extraordinary power and glorious purpose. Our god. Our Lord. The one who will remake everything into something greater and more perfect than anything the limited imaginations of ordinary men can conceive of."

He paused.

"Gotham is the door," he continued. "It has always been the door. The darkness of this city, the suffering that is woven into the very foundation of it, is not an accident or a failure of governance. It is by design. Darkness of sufficient depth creates the conditions through which our god may enter. The families of this Court have been maintaining those conditions, feeding that darkness, ensuring that it does not resolve or heal or transform into something that would close the door."

Ethan looked at him.

"You have been keeping this city broken on purpose," Ethan said. "Every gang, every corrupt official, every family you empowered to ensure the violence continued, all of it was designed to maintain the conditions necessary to bring something through from wherever it exists into this world."

"To bring our god home," the central figure said.

"All hail Barbatos!" They all shouted. 

Ethan's father stepped forward from beneath the spotlight and lifted his mask from his face. The face beneath it was undeniably familiar because Ethan saw a similar face in the mirror every morning of his life. His father's eyes found his and held them, and there was something in them that was not performance, but a genuine need for connection that had been waiting in this man for a very long time.

"This is good news, Ethan," his father said. "You don't have to stand outside of it anymore, you were born into this great purpose. Whatever you have been trying to build, whatever world you have been trying to make, it finds its fulfilment here, in this. With us. With your family."

He took another step forward.

"Tell us who All for One is," his father said. "That is all we need. Let us remove the obstacle that stands between you and coming home."

Ethan looked at his father's face for a long moment.

Then he looked at his mother, who had also lifted her mask and whose eyes were wet and whose hands were clasped in front of her with a tightness that communicated everything she was not saying.

Then he looked back at his father.

The restraints on the chair were thick metal bands at the wrists and the ankles and across the chest, designed to hold even the strongest of people.

Ethan tore through them.

The metal bands snapped and he stood up from the chair in one movement and the pieces of the restraints falling to the floor around his feet. He then let the mask he wore drop and the real Ethan come out, none had ever seen this before and those who had were long dead. 

The parliament along the walls shifted as a suffocating otessure formed on them, like they were in the presence of something truly terrible.

The Talon moved from his position by the entrance and snuck towards Ethan intent on taking him out before he could do any damage. 

Ethan raised one hand and the Talon stopped moving.

The telekinetic grip closed around the Talon's body from four feet away. The Talon fought against it but it was useless, he was fighting against something he couldn't touch. Ethan's hand turned slowly and the Talon's left arm bent backward at the elbow, then his right arm did the same, the Talon's scream cutting through the chamber and then cutting off as Ethan twisted his neck 180 degrees killing him. 

The chamber erupted as people tried to escape in a panic.

"What have you done!" his father shouted, stepping backward. "Stop this! You do not understand what you are doing, you are throwing away everything, you are throwing away the perfect world!"

Ethan turned to face the parliament along the wall, all of them now on their feet or trying to be, several moving toward the doors at either end of the chamber, his arms rose slightly from his sides and every door in the room slammed shut simultaneously, the sound of them hitting their frames like a gunshot.

"You brought me here," Ethan said, "to offer me a place in an organisation whose purpose is to keep this city broken so that something from outside the boundaries of this universe can use the suffering of its people as a door. You asked me to betray the one project in my life that has any meaning so that you could remove the final obstacle between yourselves and the arrival of a foreign god that none of you can comprehend."

He looked along the row of frozen figures.

"No foreign god will rule over humanity," he said. "Not yours. Not anyone's. The world I am building will belong to the people who live in it and to no one else, and no being from outside this universe will set foot in it. Not while I am alive. Not while I have the power to prevent it."

"You are one person," one of the figures along the wall said, the voice shaking. "You are one man with an ability and an extraordinary level of arrogance and you have no idea what you are standing against."

"There is only one god of humanity," Ethan said.

He looked at them all.

"His name is All for One."

Several of the masked figures along the wall actually took a step backward as Ethan rose off the ground, his feet leaving the stone floor as the Float ability lifted him slowly until he was hovering.

His father's voice came out broken. "Ethan, stop this, please, you don't have to do this, we are your family, whatever you feel toward us we can discuss it, we can—"

Ethan looked at his father from the air, the expression on his face was not anger, it was not hatred, it was nothing at all, the same blankness that one could see if they turned the lights off and looked into the dark. .

"Let us out," his mother said, and she reached toward him with one hand. "Please. You are our son. Whatever this is, whatever you have decided, please let us out."

"I am going to show you something beautiful... it is the most I can give you," Ethan said. "But still more than you deserve..."

He turned his palm upward and held it open toward the ceiling of the chamber, then a light began to form in his in his palm.

It started as a faint glow, a blue-white luminescence that was brighter than the fixtures along the wall and purer than anything any of them had ever seen, and it spread upward from the centre of his hand in a column that climbed toward the ceiling in a haze that was not quite light in the conventional sense because it did not cast shadows the way light did, it filled the space differently, penetrating rather than illuminating.

It was beautiful.

Every face in the room turned toward it. Even the ones that had been turned away and trying to find some way through a sealed door, every face came around and looked up at the blue-white column rising from Ethan's open palm toward the ceiling.

The first person to fall to their knees did so without any visible reason. They simply went down, heavily, their hands going to their mouth, and then the person beside them did the same, and then the ones further along the row, one after another, each dropping in a sequence that moved along the wall like something toppling. 

Shortly after that they threw their masks off and started throwing up again and again, their bile turning red after the first time. 

His mother went down wnd his father staggered and caught himself on the arm of the nearest chair before his legs gave out and he sat down hard on the stone floor. 

The blue-white light continued to rise from Ethan's palm toward the ceiling. Meanwhile Ethan simply watched the chamber and watched as everyone there died. 

It took a long time but eventually they all did either die or pass out 

Ethan closed his fingers and the light went out and he descended slowly until his feet touched the floor again, where he stood in the centre of the chamber among the still figures of the parliament and looked around at all of them.

He walked toward the two who lay nearest to the centre of the room, the two who had removed their masks and whose faces bore the lines that his own face would bear in thirty or forty years, and he stood over them and looked down at them.

His father's hand moved, rising from the floor by perhaps three inches before the strength left it and it settled back against the stone.

His mother's lips moved without producing any sound.

Ethan looked at both of them for a moment, then crouched down and picked up his father's outstretched hand in both of his own and examined it. 

For a fleeting moment. 

A mere nanosecond of time. 

Ethan wondered how his life might've turned out if he had been raised by these people instead of the drug addicted degenerates that he'd been left with. 

Would he be normal?

Is the court the reason why he lacks so much that makes a person human. 

Would he be happy?

But just as quickly as that moment came it left and Ethan dropped his father's hand. It does not do well to question destiny. Had he not grown up the way he did then it's possible he would not become the god he was meant to be in order to create the perfect world. 

He got up and walked to the far end of the chamber where a series of shelving units and locked cabinets lined the wall, he moved along them slowly, opening each cabinet in turn with a telekinetic pulse and looking through the contents without touching most of what he found.

In the fourth cabinet, in a case that had been sealed with three separate locks and lined with a material, he found a belt.

He lifted it out and held it up in the ambient light of the chamber, turning it in his hands. The metal was unlike anything in his frame of reference, not steel, not titanium, not any alloy he could place, a dark grey that carried a subtle iridescence at certain angles, warm to the touch in a way that metal wasn't, the weight of it wrong for its size in a way that he could feel without being able to quantify.

In the same cabinet, set into the foam beside the belt's case, was a small glass vial sealed with a metal stopper, filled with a liquid that moved like mercury but was darker, closer to black, shifting on its own inside the sealed glass.

He pocketed the vial and walked out of the chamber.

The corridor beyond it was long and carved from the same old stone, lit at intervals by fixtures that had been retrofitted into gaps in the masonry, it curved upward gradually until it became a staircase that terminated in a door that opened with a simple lever mechanism on the inside.

He pushed through it and stepped out into the morning. When he emerged he recognised that he was in the Gotham Hills, a place where most of the rich people built their manors and homes, not that far away from Wayne Manor if his memory served him. 

He stood on there for a moment and oriented himself, identifying before he looked up, though when he did a frown crossed his face. 

He saw Superman.

The hero was motionless in the sky maybe five hundred feet in the air just hanging there with the city spread below him, and as Ethan watched the figure he dropped suddenly plummeting toward the street level at speed before pulling up short and vanishing into a side street for perhaps ten seconds, then reappearing and rising back to the same height and resuming the same stillness.

Ethan's jaw tightened and his fists closed at his sides.

He was targeting saviours, there was no other explanation. 

This meant he was now getting involved.

After all this time of standing at the edge and watching and waiting and deciding he didn't have enough to act on, something had finally pushed him across the line.

Now a God had decided to walk amongst men.  

(AN: Now some of you might be a bit confused as to how Ethan killed all of them and while there were hints I'll give a big one here. He basically created something and the effect of that was the Cherenkov light and that's what killed them all. Anyway hope you enjoyed the chapter, we are getting close to the end now maybe.)