DC: One for All Chapter 6 — A Surprise Guest(s) (Patreon)

On the outskirts of New York on a rainy night a girl sat alone at the bus stop.

The rain had been falling for about an hour now, the kind of  rain that wasn't heavy enough to justify finding shelter but wasn't light enough to ignore, it had soaked through her hoodie and her shoes making her shiver slightly. She was small, maybe fifteen, with short black hair plastered to her forehead and dark eyes that watched the empty road from under her hood. 

The bus stop was on the outskirts of New York's industrial district, a bench under a plexiglass shelter that had been cracked and repaired and cracked again so many times it was more tape than glass. There was no one else around. The street was empty. The nearest working streetlight was half a block away and it was flickering.

She then felt a buzz in her palm.

She looked down at the phone in her hand, a cheap thing with a cracked screen. 

Richard: Please come back

A few seconds passed. Then another buzz.

Richard: I know it wasn't your fault just come back and we can talk about it.

She stared at the messages for a long moment, her thumb hovering over the screen, the rain dotting the glass with droplets that distorted the words. Then she put the phone in her pocket and wrapped her arms tighter around her knees and went back to waiting.

Whistling

It came from somewhere in the dark behind the bus stop, from the direction of the rail yard, and at first it was so faint it could have been the wind or the rain or the creak of metal from the old warehouses lining the street. But then it got louder, just slightly, just enough to resolve into words, and the words were wrong.

"I've been working on the railroad... all the livelong day..."

She recognised the voice... how could she not, it occupied her deepest nightmares every night. 

"I've been working on the railroad... just to pass the time away..."

The girl tightened her hands around herself hoping she was just imagining it. 

"Can't you hear the whistle blowing... rise up so early in the morn..."

The girl's head came up.

"Can't you hear the captain shouting..."

"Dinah, won't you blow your horn..."

She was on her feet.

She didn't look toward the voice. She didn't try to see where they were or how close they'd gotten. She just ran.

She cleared the bus stop and hit the street at a full sprint, her shoes slapping the wet asphalt, the rain hitting her face. She cut left toward the rail yard hoping to lose them in the maze of tracks and warehouses. 

The rail yard opened up around her, rows of freight cars sitting on parallel tracks, and she vaulted the chain-link fence at the perimeter without slowing, her hands catching the top rail and her body swinging over in a flip. She hit the gravel on the other side and kept going, weaving between freight cars, ducking under couplings, using the maze of trains to break any line of sight.

The first shuriken hit the freight car six inches from her head.

The throwing star embedded itself in the steel, and she dropped instinctively, sliding under the car on the wet gravel, coming out the other side and rolling to her feet. She could hear them now, not just the singing, which had stopped, but footsteps. 

Three of them came over the fence behind her and they moved through the rail yard like shadows, splitting up without verbal communication, one going left, one going right, one straight ahead, a triangle that was designed to close around her from three directions.

She read them their intentions easily enough. 

The one on the left was going to cut around the tanker car and come at her from the north end of the track. She could see it in the angle of his shoulders and the distribution of his weight and the way his right foot planted on his third step, already committing to the turn before his body had completed it. 

The one on the right was faster, a woman based on the hip movement, and she was going high, planning to climb the freight car and attack from above. The one coming straight had a katana, she could see the shape of it under his coat, and he was the most dangerous of the three.

She ran toward the straight one.

His reaction told her everything. The slight widening of his stance, the shift of his hand toward the blade, the micro-adjustment of his center of gravity. He was going to draw the katana in a diagonal slash that would start from his right hip and cut upward across her chest. She knew this before he knew it, reading the intention in his muscles before his brain had finished sending the signal.

She dropped into a slide on the wet gravel just as the blade came out and cut the air above her, the steel passing through the space her neck had been in, and she caught his lead ankle with both hands as she slid past and twisted. His foot came out from under him and he went down hard on his back and she was already up and running, planting one foot on his chest as she passed and using him as a springboard to launch herself onto the coupling between two freight cars.

The woman from the right was already on top of the car, running along the roof, and she dropped down at the girl with a spinning kick that was aimed at her head. The girl read the attack and she swayed backward just enough to let the kick pass, caught the woman's ankle at the end of its extension, and redirected her momentum into the side of the freight car. The woman hit the steel with a crash that dented the panel and slumped to the ground.

The man from the left was closer now, closing fast, he had two knives, one in each hand, and he threw the first one while he was still running. The girl snatched it out of the air by the handle, a movement so fast it looked choreographed, and threw it back. It buried itself in the gravel at his feet and he had to jump to avoid it and the jump cost him two seconds and two seconds was enough.

She climbed the side of the freight car and ran along the roof jumping the gap between the first car and the second and then the second and the third, putting distance between herself and her pursuers with every stride.

The man with the katana was back on his feet and coming along the ground below her, matching her speed, and the left-flank man was climbing a car behind her, they were herding her, she realized, pushing her toward the end of the rail yard where the tracks converged and the fence closed in and there would be nowhere left to run.

She changed direction.

Instead of continuing along the freight cars she jumped off the edge of the roof, dropped fifteen feet, hit the coupling of a car on the adjacent track, bounced off it, and landed on the gravel running. She cut between two more cars, vaulted a switching mechanism, and sprinted for the warehouse complex on the east side of the yard where the old loading docks connected to buildings that had been abandoned long enough to have broken windows and missing doors.

A shuriken caught her across the outside of her left arm as she ran, slicing through the hoodie and the skin underneath, she stumbled but didn't fall, her hand going to the wound for half a second before she pulled it away and kept running.

She hit the fire escape of the nearest warehouse at full speed, jumping to catch the lowest rung of the retractable ladder and pulling herself up. She climbed fast, hand over hand, blood from her arm making the rungs slick, and reached the second floor landing where she swung herself over the railing and ran along the exterior walkway toward a window that was missing most of its glass.

The left-flank man appeared at the end of the walkway.

He'd gotten ahead of her somehow, circled around, and he was blocking the window, crouched in a fighting stance with a short blade in his hand. 

The girl didn't slow down. 

She read his body movements, the tension in his front leg, the position of the blade, the weight distribution that told her he was going to lunge forward and cut at her midsection when she got within range. She accelerated instead of decelerating, closed the distance before he was ready, dropped to her knees and slid under his lunge, and as she passed beneath his extended arm she grabbed his wrist, twisted, and used his own momentum to redirect him over the railing.

He went over with a shout and hit the gravel twenty feet below.

The katana man was coming up the fire escape behind her. She could hear his feet on the metal steps, so she turned to the window, kicked out the remaining glass, and dove through it.

She hit the catwalk on the other side hard, her shoulder taking the impact, she rolled and came to a stop on her hands and knees on the metal grating. She was panting. Her arm was bleeding, the shuriken cut deeper than she'd thought, and there was a sharp pain in her left knee where she'd landed wrong on the catwalk. She pressed her hand against the arm wound and crouched there on the grating, trying to catch her breath, trying to think, trying to plan.

Someone landed on the catwalk behind her.

Not from the window but from above. Straight down from the rafters in a drop that dented the walkway.

She turned.

He was standing ten feet away, dressed in dark tactical clothing that was different from the others, more tailored, the clothing of someone who led rather than followed. His eyes were pale and emotionless and they were looking at her with an expression that was akin to disappointment.

"Running," he said, and the word came out with a sigh. "Again with the running. I'll admit I'm disappointed. I trained you better than this. I trained you to face what's in front of you, not to scramble across rooftops like a frightened cat. Where is the girl I raised? Where is the weapon I built?"

She backed away from him along the catwalk, her eyes locked on his body.

He closed the distance between them in two steps and hit her.

The first blow was an open palm to the side of her head that rattled her brain and sent her stumbling into the railing. "You left without permission," he said. The second was a knee to her midsection that folded her forward and emptied her lungs. "You went to that man's house and you played at being normal." The third was an elbow to the back of her head that dropped her to the grating, the metal biting into her cheek. "You forgot what you are."

He grabbed the back of her hoodie and lifted her off the ground, her feet dangling, her hands grabbing at his wrist, and he held her there at arm's length. 

She kicked.

Her right foot caught him in the chin, not hard enough to hurt him but hard enough to make his head snap back, and she used the moment to twist out of his grip and drop to the catwalk. She spun sweeping at his legs, and when he jumped the sweep she was already up, already inside his guard, and she drove the heel of her palm into his solar plexus with everything she had.

He grunted making her press the advantage, throwing a combination that she'd learned not from him but from her friend she had stayed with, a style he hadn't taught her and therefore couldn't predict, a quick jab to set up a cross that she converted into an elbow strike when he slipped the cross. The elbow caught him on the cheekbone and his head turned.

For one second she thought she had him.

Then his hand was around her throat and the world inverted. He lifted her and slammed her down onto the catwalk, the metal grating bending inward from the force, the bolts connecting it to the supports groaning and popping. Her back hit the metal and the impact emptied everything out of her, all the air, all the fight, all the desperate hope that she might actually get away this time.

He crouched over her, one hand still on her throat, not squeezing enough to choke but enough to hold, and he looked down at her with those emotionless eyes.

"Here is what is going to happen," he said blankly. "You are going to come with me. You are going to complete your training. You are going to fulfil the purpose you were created for. And you are going to stop acting like a child who thinks she has choices. You have never had choices. You are a tool that I built, and tools do not get to decide how they are used." 

He paused, tilting his head. "Or I can try again. Build another one. From scratch. It would take years, but I've always been a patient man."

Her legs moved.

She hooked both of them around his torso, locked her ankles behind his back, and then torqued her entire body sideways in a wrestling reversal that used his own weight against him, her hips bridging upward while her legs pulled him forward and over. He went sideways, his hand leaving her throat as his balance shifted, and his hip hit the catwalk railing and the railing was old and the bolts were rusted and his weight was too much.

The railing gave way.

He went over the edge of the catwalk and dropped fifteen feet to the warehouse floor below, hitting the concrete with a sound that would have meant broken bones on anyone else. On him it meant he'd be back on his feet in seconds.

She was already running.

The catwalk shook under her feet as she sprinted along it toward the far end of the warehouse, blood from her arm leaving a trail on the metal grating, her injured knee screaming with every step. 

Behind her she heard him laugh. "There's nowhere to go, sweetheart," he called up from the warehouse floor. "There's nowhere you can run that I can't follow."

The far end of the catwalk terminated at a window overlooking the rail yard.

Beyond it, maybe thirty feet below and twenty feet out, a freight train was moving, just pulling out of the yard. 

She didn't slow down.

She hit the window at full sprint, her arms crossed over her face, and the wire-reinforced glass exploded outward around her in a shower of fragments. A moment later she hit the roof of the freight car.

Her right ankle folded on impact and she heard the snap before she felt it, a  sound that was swallowed by the grinding of the train wheels on the track, and then the pain hit and she collapsed flat the metal roof, sliding on the wet surface, her fingers scrabbling for a grip. She caught the edge of a ventilation housing and held on, her body flat against the car, the rain beating down on her back, but the train kept moving, carrying her away from the warehouse, away from the rail yard, away from the man standing in the broken window watching her go.

He didn't chase her.

He stood in the window frame with the rain blowing in around him and the broken glass at his feet and he watched the train shrink into the distance, his eyes tracking the freight car she was lying on.

The train rounded a curve and the warehouse disappeared behind a row of buildings, and the girl lay on the roof of the freight car with her broken ankle throbbing and her arm bleeding and her body shaking, and the rain kept falling and the train kept moving and New York kept getting further away.

She didn't know where the train was going.

She didn't care.

Anywhere was better than here.

_____________________________________

"I told you not to worry about me, Bruce," David said, leaning his head against the passenger window of the Aston Martin as the Gotham skyline grew in the windshield ahead of them. "I've had worse injuries."

Bruce didn't reply. Instead he tapped the steering wheel twice and a holographic display materialized between them, projected from somewhere in the dashboard, and David's body appeared on it, annotated with red markers at every point of damage. 

There were a lot of red markers. 

The stab wound through his abdomen was highlighted, the fractured ribs showed as red lines across the left side of his torso, the Omega Beam burns were mapped in overlapping patches across his chest and shoulders, the dislocated shoulder joint was circled, and there were smaller markers scattered across his arms and legs indicating microfractures, torn muscle fibers, and what the display labeled in small clinical text as "unknown cellular disruption."

David stared at the hologram for a moment and then looked around the car's interior with narrowed eyes. "Do you have a scanner in here? Built into the seat of your sports car?"

"You should spend a few weeks at the manor," Bruce said, ignoring the question. "Rest and recover properly. Alfred can monitor your vitals and I have medical equipment that—"

"He's right," the Second Holder cut in inside David's head. "You did significant damage to yourself by pushing One for All past what your body was prepared for. The cellular strain from operating at 1,000% alone would take weeks to repair, and the Gearshift usage on top of that caused tearing in nearly every major muscle group. Right now, if you tried to use One for All past five percent before you've fully recovered, you would cause permanent damage."

David grunted. "My apartment is fine," he said. "I just need a bottle of painkillers and a hundred dollars."

Bruce sighed through his nose but didn't argue further. They drove the rest of the way in a silence, and when they reached David's building Bruce pulled to the curb and let the engine idle.

"I'll come check on you," Bruce said, looking straight ahead through the windshield. "But I'm going to be busy for the next few weeks. This Justice League situation requires more infrastructure than I initially anticipated, and coordinating six people who all think they should be in charge is proving to be exactly as difficult as I predicted."

David snorted. "Yeah, good luck with that. Sounds like a blast."

Bruce paused for a moment, his hands still on the wheel. "Are you sure you don't want to be part of it?"

David waved him off and opened the car door, swinging his legs out onto the curb. "Thanks for the ride, Bruce. I mean it." He pulled himself up and out of the car, wincing as his ribs let out a sharp pain, and shut the door. He patted the roof twice and Bruce pulled away from the curb and the Aston Martin disappeared down the block.

David stood on the sidewalk for a moment, looking up at his building. He fished his keys out of his jacket pocket, the same battered leather jacket Selina had returned to him, and let himself in through the front door and up two flights of stairs to the door marked 3B.

He unlocked the door and pushed it open and stood there for a second taking in the space he called home.

It was bad. 

Even by his standards it was bad. 

The apartment doubled as his office, a single room arrangement that was simultaneously the worst of both things, with a desk against one wall buried under papers and takeout containers and coffee cups, a couch against the other wall that had a permanent dip in the center from years of being slept on more than the bed, and a kitchenette in the corner that appeared to be growing something in the sink. 

Clothes were draped over every available surface. The blinds were broken on two of the three windows. There was a filing cabinet in the corner that he was fairly sure contained files but he hadn't opened it in years so who knows.

He kicked the door shut behind him and crossed the room in three steps before falling face-first onto the couch and kicking his boots off, each one tumbling across the floor in a different direction.

"Home sweet home," he muttered into the cushion.

He lay there for a long moment, just breathing. Then he reached his good arm underneath the sofa, felt around blindly for a second, and came back with a bottle of Captain Morgan that was about a third full and slightly sticky from whatever it had been sitting in down there.

He also reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the prescription bottle of painkillers the hospital had given him.

"David, do not do what I think you're about to do," the Third Holder said immediately.

"You know what happens when you mix alcohol with that medication," the Fifth added. 

"The last time you did this you woke up on a roof in your underwear," the Fourth pointed out. "The time before that you somehow ended up in Blüdhaven with no memory of how you got there."

David chuckled as he popped the cap off the painkillers and shook two into his palm. "It'll be fine," he said. "I'm way too banged up to get into any trouble. I'm just going to lie here and watch the ceiling and not move for approximately forty-eight hours."

He tossed the pills into his mouth and washed them down with a long pull of rum.

"David—" All Might started.

He blacked out.

_____________________________________

A man with the mechanical arms was standing in the middle of Fifth Avenue of Star City. The four appendages sprouting from the harness on his back were each tipped with a focusing lens that glowed red, and when the lenses fired, the beams cut through concrete and steel like paper, carving lines across the front of a bank that was already half collapsed.

Paragon hit the side of the building across the street at full sprint, his feet finding purchase on the vertical surface as golden lightning crackled across his massive frame, he ran up the wall before launching himself across the gap. He sailed over the man's head while the mechanical arms tracked him, four red beams converging on his position, but he was already gone, kicking off the air with a burst of compressed force that redirected him sideways toward the civilians trapped behind an overturned bus.

He landed in front of them and scooped up a woman and her child in one arm while using the other to grab the edge of the bus and flip it upright, creating a barrier between the civilians and the firing line. "Get behind the bus and stay low!" he shouted, setting the woman down and already moving again, vaulting over the bus and into the street.

The mechanical arms tracked and fired. Paragon dove under two beams, twisted between the third and fourth, and closed the distance. Black Whip erupted from his right hand and wrapped around two of the mechanical arms, yanking them together so their beams crossed and shorted out, and he used the momentum to slingshot himself forward and drive his fist into the harness itself. The metal crumpled under the impact and the remaining two arms went limp and sparked and the man inside the harness went down, the fight leaving him along with his power source.

Paragon stood over him, barely breathing hard, the golden lightning dancing across his shoulders as the crowd that had been sheltering behind cars and in doorways began to emerge.

No casualties. 

Not one.

A reporter pushed through the crowd, microphone in hand, her cameraman struggling to keep up. "Paragon! Paragon, can we get a statement? You've only been active for a few months now, how does it feel to be following in All Might's footsteps? What drives you to do this?"

Paragon turned to the camera and smiled, the big bright unwavering smile that he was still learning to wear. "I can only thank my predecessor, All Might, for showing me what a hero should be," he said, his voice carrying the resonant warmth he was training into it. "And more importantly, I want to thank my patron, Maxwell Lord. Without his support and his resources, none of my hero work would be possible. He believed in me when—"

_____________________________________

David woke up in a dumpster.

He knew it was a dumpster before he opened his eyes because of the smell, which was a unique combination of rotting food, wet cardboard, and something chemical. He was lying on his back on a bed of garbage bags, one arm hanging over the side, and when he opened his eyes.

He groaned as he pushed himself upright, garbage sliding off him as he tried to climb out. His foot slipped on something wet and he tipped forward over the edge and landed face-first on the alley pavement.

"That was remarkably predictable," the Third Holder said.

"We tried to warn you," the Fourth added.

"Every single one of us told you not to take those pills with the rum," the Second said. 

David rolled onto his back on the alley floor, staring up at the thin strip of sky between the buildings above him. "Give me a break," he said. "I don't even remember what happened."

"Oh, we know," the Fifth said. 

"Would you like me to explain?" All Might offered. "In truth we only have bits and pieces, but when you blacked out after a while you called her."

"Her who?" David asked, pulling himself up against the side of the dumpster.

"The one with the pigtails and the baseball bat and the extremely colorful vocabulary," the Seventh supplied helpfully.

David's blood ran cold. "No."

"Yes," all eight of them said simultaneously.

David pressed his forehead against the cold metal of the dumpster. "Why didn't anyone stop me from calling her?"

The outrage was immediate and total.

"WE DID!" the Second shouted. 

"I begged," the Fourth said.

"I tried to trigger a muscle spasm in your dialling finger," the Third admitted. 

"Okay, okay," David muttered, pushing himself to standing and leaning against the dumpster. "So what happened after I called her?"

"You called her and invited her to your apartment," All Might said. "You used language that I would prefer not to repeat. Something about needing a 'sexy little nurse' to 'kiss your booboos.' She arrived approximately twenty minutes later and after some... initial activities... the two of you left the apartment and proceeded to have what I believe is referred to as a 'bender.' After that I'm not sure what happened."

"Great," David said, rubbing his face. "Fantastic. So where is she now?"

"What do you mean?" the First asked. "She's exactly where you are."

A yawn rose from inside the dumpster. "Whatta night," the voice said, eyes still closed, arms stretching upward out of the garbage like a creature emerging from a swamp. "I mean really, seriously, whatta freakin' night."

David sighed and let his head fall back against the dumpster.

"Ugh, what IS that smell?" the voice continued. "This is what I'm talkin' about Davy, this is EXACTLY what I'm talkin' about, you shoulda come back to MY place. MY apartment don't smell like a raccoon died in a shoe. Your apartment, oh my GOD your apartment, I've been to actual landfills that had better feng shui—"

"I know you're awake, Harley and I know you know this isn't my apartment," David said, looking down at her with an expression so flat it could have been used to iron shirts. "You don't need to keep trying to hurt my feelings."

Harley Quinn stuck her tongue out at him, her eyes snapping open to reveal smudged mascara and a grin, she sat up in the dumpster and leaned on the edge right next to where David was standing, close enough that he could smell the combination of perfume, whiskey.

"Daveeeyyyy," she said, drawing his name out into about four syllables. "Whatcha doing here?"

David looked at her. "What am I doing here..."

"Yeah because last I remember you were upside down on a chandelier in the Iceberg Lounge singing show tunes."

"That's actually what I was going to ask you. What happened last night?"

Harley found this extremely funny and laughed hard enough that the dumpster shook, slapping the metal rim with her palm, her head thrown back. "Oh my GOD, you don't remembah? You don't remembah ANY of it? Oh Davey, Davey Davey Davey, that is the saddest and funniest thing I have heard in at LEAST a week, and last week Batman got his cape stuck in a revolving door so the bar was already pretty high—"

"Harley," David said, pinching the bridge of his nose.

She punched him in the shoulder, her fist connecting with the exact spot where the parademon had bit him three days ago.

"You can at least buy a girl breakfast before ya start givin' her the fifth degree," she said, hopping up to sit on the dumpster's edge and swinging her legs. "A gentleman would, and I KNOW you ain't a gentleman but you could at least pretend for twenty minutes."

"Yeah, yeah," David said, reaching up and helping her out of the dumpster, which involved grabbing her waist and lifting while she wrapped her arms around his neck and dropped down beside him with considerably more grace than he'd managed. "I could go for some food."

"Wait wait wait," Harley said, holding up one finger before turning and diving back into the dumpster headfirst, her legs kicking in the air as she rummaged through the garbage. After about ten seconds of loud clanging and muttering she emerged triumphantly holding a black umbrella with a curved handle shaped like a penguin's beak, ornate silver detailing running along the shaft, and what appeared to be a trigger mechanism built into the grip.

She held it above her head like Excalibur. "TA-DA!"

David sighed. "Oswald is going to be pissed."

"Screw Oswald," Harley said cheerfully, tucking the umbrella under her arm and walking out of the alley without looking back. "He's got like forty of those things, he won't even notice. Besides he called me a bad word last night so consider this reparations."

David followed her out onto the street where the morning sun hit them both and neither of them looked remotely presentable for public interaction. He was in the same clothes from yesterday, wrinkled and stained and smelling like garbage, and Harley was in what had once been a very nice dress that was now torn and ripped, accessorized by smeared makeup and the stolen weapon of a major Gotham crime boss.

They found a food cart two blocks down, Harley ordered a breakfast burrito the size of her forearm, loaded with everything, and David got the same.

"Okay," David said, unwrapping his burrito. "Now talk. What happened last night?"

Harley took a massive bite out of her burrito and chewed slowly, her eyes on David's face, watching the impatience build. She swallowed. Then she took another bite.

"Harley."

"Hmm?" She pointed at her full mouth as if to say can't talk, eating.

David leaned over and took a massive bite out of HER burrito, ripping away about a quarter of it in one go.

"HEY!" Harley shrieked, snatching her burrito away and holding it protectively against her chest. "What the HELL is wrong with you, that's MY food, you got ya OWN food, I will stab you with this umbrella I swear to—"

She lunged for his burrito and he held it above his head and she jumped for it, the two of them struggling on the sidewalk like two feral cats fighting over a fish.

"TALK and I'll stop," David said, holding his burrito at full arm extension while fending her off with his other hand.

"FINE!" Harley shouted, ceasing her assault and smoothing her dress.

"So you called me around, I dunno, midnight? Maybe one? And you were WASTED, Davey, I mean absolutely gone, and you started goin' on about how you were in so much pain and how you needed your sexy little nurse to come take care of him and—"

"Shit did I really say that," David said flatly.

"Don't interrupt," Harley said, jabbing him in the side with the penguin umbrella hard enough to make him grunt. "So I went over to your place and you were layin' on the couch looking like you'd been hit by a bus, which I later found out was basically accurate except the bus was an alien, which, by the way, RUDE that you didn't invite me to that fight. So I kissed your little booboos better, gave you your medicine, and by medicine I mean we—"

"I get the picture."

"—and THEN you said, and these are your exact words, 'let's go have fun I just saved the world and I deserve it,' and who am I to argue with having fun? So we went out. We hit O'Malley's first, then that jazz bar on Fifth, then the Stacked Deck, then somewhere I don't remember the name of but it had a mechanical bull, and you rode the mechanical bull, and then we went to the Iceberg Lounge where you got into an argument with one of Penguin's guys and I stole the umbrella and then we, um, in the coat check room and screwed—"

"Moving on."

"—four times total across the night if you're counting, and I was, and one of those times was on the roof of the GCPD against the bat signal? And then at some point I think you may have also done some kind of drug that one of the guys at the Stacked Deck gave you because your eyes got REAL big and you started talking about colors that don't exist, and after THAT it gets fuzzy for me too. I blacked out sometime after we left the last place and I genuinely do not know how we ended up in that dumpster."

David stared at the sidewalk for a long moment. "I am never mixing alcohol and painkillers again," he said.

"You say that every time, baby," Harley replied, taking a bite of what was left of her burrito.

She finished chewing, swallowed, and then stepped directly in front of David and stopped walking so that he had to stop too. She put her free hand on her hip and looked up at him and the playfulness drained from her face, replaced by something sharper and more direct.

"So why don't we talk about the elephant in the room," she said.

"What elephant?"

Harley's eyes narrowed and the shift from playful to genuinely angry happened fast enough to give David conversational whiplash. "What ELEPHANT? Are you SERIOUS right now? You haven't called me in MONTHS, David. Not a call, not a text, not a carrier pigeon, NOTHING. You just disappeared, like you do, like you ALWAYS do, and I'm sittin' there like an idiot waiting for you to remember I exist and then outta NOWHERE at one in the morning you call me drunk off your ass because you're LONELY and you need someone and I come RUNNING like I always do because I'm an IDIOT and now—"

David cursed under his breath and gave her the rest of his burrito, pressing it into her hands. "There's a really important reason I haven't called," he said in a serious tone. "And it has to do with that man right there." He pointed over her shoulder at a random pedestrian walking past them on the sidewalk.

Harley turned around. 

The man, a middle-aged accountant-looking guy in a grey suit carrying a briefcase, froze under her gaze.

"I didn't do anything," the man said, raising both hands.

Harley turned back around.

David was gone.

He was already thirty feet away, rounding the corner at the end of the block at the fastest limp his injuries would allow, and Harley's scream echoed off every building on the street.

"DAVID BECKETT YOU GET BACK HERE RIGHT NOW! I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE! I KNOW WHERE YOU WORK! THEY'RE THE SAME PLACE BECAUSE YOU'RE TOO BROKE TO AFFORD SEPARATE ONES! AND I AIN'T ON THE PILL SO YOU BETTER START SAVING FOR CHILD SUPPORT!"

Inside David's head the vestiges had thoughts.

"Smooth," the Seventh said.

"You are a coward," the Second said. 

"I've watched eight holders of One for All and you are by far the worst with women," the First observed. 

"HAHAHAHA!" All Might's vestige erupted. "Young Beckett, you must stop running from women, especially ones as passionate as Young Harley!"

David limped around a second corner, cut through an alley, and made it back to his apartment building wheezing and sweating. He fumbled with his keys, let himself in and pushed through the door of 3B.

"I am never leaving this apartment again," he said to no one as he kicked the door shut behind him and took two steps toward the couch.

Then a kick hit him between the shoulder blades.

It was fast coming from the shadow behind the door and the force of it sent him stumbling forward. He went with the momentum instead of fighting it, rolling over the couch and coming up on the other side where he grabbed a whiskey bottle off the floor and hurled it behind him.

A hand caught the bottle out of the air without any visible effort, and the same hand threw it back at twice the speed. David ducked and the bottle shattered against the wall behind him, spraying glass and whatever had been left inside.

"I am WAY too hung over for this!" David shouted, shaking glass out of his hair.

[One for All: 5%]

Gold lightning flickered across his body and he vaulted back over the sofa and rushed forward, throwing a jab that should have been too fast to see, followed by a cross, a hook, an uppercut, a spinning backfist, five strikes in just over a second, each one aimed at a different target.

Every single one was blocked.

Each one met by a hand or a forearm that was already in position before the strike arrived, as if the attacker could see the punches forming in David's mind before his muscles received the instructions. The blocks were precise to the millimeter, using exactly enough force to redirect each strike and not an ounce more.

The attacker caught David's last punch, the backfist, and used the captured momentum to pull David off balance. A foot hooked David's ankle and pulled it out from under him while a palm strike to his chest sent his upper body backward, the combined effect folded him in half in midair. Hands caught him on the way down, one on his collar and one on his belt, and they redirected his fall, swinging his body around and driving him back-first through his own desk.

Papers and takeout containers and coffee cups erupted in every direction, the wood splitting down the middle, and David hit the floor amid the wreckage with all the air driven out of his lungs.

"Disappointing," a voice said from above him. "The David I remember had the potential to become one of the greatest martial artists of his generation. I would have bet everything I had on it. What happened to you?"

David lay on his back in the ruins of his desk, staring up at the ceiling, blinking. He knew that voice. He hadn't heard it in years but he knew it immediately.

"Richard?" David said. "Is that you?"

A man stepped out of the shadow near the window moving into the light. He was tall and muscular, somewhere in his late thirties, with ginger hair and a trimmed beard. He pulled a chair from the corner of the room, the only piece of furniture David owned that wasn't destroyed, and set it in front of the remains of the desk before sitting down in it with his legs crossed and his hands folded in his lap.

David groaned and pushed himself up out of the debris, shaking splinters out of his hair and picking a piece of paper off his face. "You know, most people knock," he said, climbing to his feet and brushing off his clothes. "Or call ahead, what they don't do is power bomb their friends onto their furniture."

"I was making sure my former top student was keeping his skills sharp," Richard replied, his eyes carrying the faintest trace of amusement. "Based on what I just saw, the answer is no."

"You caught me on a very, VERY bad day," David said as he limped around the destroyed desk and dropped into his office chair, which rolled backward a few inches on its squeaky wheels. He ran a hand through his hair and let out a long breath. "But it's good to see you, Richard. It's been a while." He paused, looking at the man in the chair across from him. "So why are you here? I'm sure you didn't track me down just to kick me through my own desk just to test my reflexes."

Richard leaned forward. The amusement left his eyes and what replaced it was something else. "I need your help," Richard said. "With a missing person."

David looked at him.

"Who is missing?" David asked.

Richard held his gaze.

"Her name is Cassandra Cain..."

(AN: So this is the start of the new arc and we are moving into the league of shadows and we are starting with Cassandra Cain. Anyway I hope you enjoyed the chapter.)