DC: All for One Chapter 36 — The Runaway Girl (Patreon)

The Watchtower's training room occupied an entire deck of the station and could be reconfigured into almost any environment through a combination of hard-light projections and adaptive flooring that shifted beneath the user's feet to simulate terrain. 

Right now it was set to open arena and the combat bots were set to their maximum difficulty, twelve of them circling the perimeter, their targeting systems locked on the woman standing in the centre.

Diana stood with her feet planted, her sword and shield drawn while breathing hard. Her hair was plastered to her face with sweat and there were scorch marks across her armour where the bots' energy weapons had tagged her during the previous wave. 

She had been in here for four hours.

"Begin wave seventeen," she said.

The bots moved.

The first two came from the front in a pincer formation and Diana met them head on, her shield catching the first one's energy blast and deflecting it into the second one's leg which buckled and sent it stumbling, she stepped into the gap between them and drove her sword through the first one's torso casing and tore it free and spun and took the head off the second one with a backhanded slash that sent the severed unit clanging across the floor.

Three more came from the left, the lead one fired a sustained beam that she blocked on her shield, the energy splitting around her in two arcs that scorched the training room walls on either side. She advanced through the beam step by step until she was close enough to grab the bot's weapon arm and rip it from the shoulder socket and swing it like a club into the face of the second bot, caving in its faceplate, and then she kicked the third one in the chest hard enough to launch it across the room where it hit the wall and shattered into components.

The remaining seven closed in simultaneously.

Her sword cut through bot after bot while her shield absorbed hits that would have killed a normal person ten times over, and she moved through them like they were standing still, her body turning and slashing and blocking and striking leacing a wreckage in every direction. She drove her shield edge-first through one bot's chest and used the embedded bot as a battering ram against two more, then tore the shield free and threw it like a discus and it took the heads off two bots before curving back to her hand.

But she wasn't stopping when they went down. She was hitting them after they fell. She drove her sword into a disabled bot that was already sparking on the floor and twisted the blade and pulled it free and stabbed it again. She stomped on the head of another one that had already shut down, her heel cratering the faceplate, and she kept stomping until there was nothing left but a flat disc of crushed metal.

"Begin wave eighteen," she said without waiting for the debris to be cleared. "Maximum aggression."

The new wave materialised and these were faster than the previous ones, their movements tuned to push her reaction time to its limits. Two of them hit her simultaneously from both sides and she caught one on her shield and blocked the other with her sword but the force of both impacts together drove her back three steps and her feet skidded on the floor. A third one came from behind and she spun and slashed it across the chest but a fourth one caught her in the ribs with a blunt-force strike, she felt the hit through her armour and grunted.

She answered the hit by grabbing the bot's arm and tearing it clean off and beating the bot with its own limb until it stopped moving, and then she threw the severed arm at another bot hard enough to pierce its chest casing. Two more closed on her and she fought them both at the same time, her sword and her shield working independently, she took a hit to the shoulder from an energy blast that burned through the outer layer of her armour but she didn't slow down, she just turned toward the one that had shot her and launched herself at it and drove her sword through its faceplate and out the back of its head.

The last bot in the wave was the heavy variant, twice the size of the others and reinforced across every surface. It grabbed her sword arm and her shield arm simultaneously and lifted her off the ground but she kicked at its chest and the kicks dented the plating but didn't break through and it slammed her down onto the floor on her back hard enough to crack the training room surface.

She hit the ground and lay there for a moment, the wind knocked out of her, and the bot stood over her ready to finish the job.

"End simulation."

The bots froze then disappeared leaving Diana alone on the ground. She pushed herself up onto one elbow and saw Batman standing at the observation window with his arms crossed.

"I was not finished," Diana said as she stood up and retrieved her sword from where it had fallen. 

"We need to talk," Batman said.

"Then we shall talk after I have completed my training." She walked toward the console to restart the simulation.

Batman stepped away from the window and walked into the training room and caught her wrist before her hand reached the controls. "Diana."

She looked down at his hand on her wrist and then up at his face. "Release me."

"This is about Thalia."

The change in her was immediate. Her jaw tightened and her shoulders squared and the warmth that was usually somewhere in her face, even in its most serious expressions, vanished entirely. "I do not wish to discuss that subject."

"I know you don't. That's why I'm bringing it up now instead of waiting for you to bring it up on your own." Batman released her wrist and stepped back. "She's been ready to visit Earth for months, Diana. J'onn completed her psychological assessment weeks ago and cleared her without reservation. Her control over her abilities has improved consistently since her last incident. There is no legitimate reason to continue keeping her confined to the Watchtower."

"There are many legitimate reasons," Diana said, turning away from him. "She possesses the combined strength of a Kryptonian, an Amazon, and an Atlantean. She is barely six months old in terms of lived experience regardless of what her body looks like. She has exhibited emotional volatility that has caused significant damage to Watchtower property on multiple occasions. Sending her down to an environment where she is surrounded by billions of fragile people who cannot survive a single mistake on her part is not a decision I take lightly and nor should you."

"And what's the real reason," Batman said.

Diana turned around. "That is the real reason."

"No it isn't." Batman took a step toward her. "I've seen you give much more leeway to people who didn't deserve it half as much. So what is different about Thalia that makes you unable to extend the same faith to her that you extend to them?"

"You are a great detective, but not everything is more than what it appears to be on the surface. Sometimes caution is simply caution."

"You have a younger sister in Themyscira. Would you treat her with the same neglect you're showing your own daughter right now? If she wanted to come to Man's world would you deny her that because she might hurt someone?"

"THAT THING IS NOT MY DAUGHTER!"

The words came out of her with a force that shook the the training room, and for a moment after she said them the room was completely silent.

"She is NOT my daughter," Diana said again, and now that the seal had broken the rest of it came pouring out. "She is a weapon. She is a thing that was built in a laboratory by a monster who used my body as raw material without my knowledge or my consent, one who violated me. He took parts of me while I was unconscious and he used them to create something that was never supposed to exist, something that carries his blood and his nature and his potential inside it, and every single time I look at her face I see him looking back at me through her eyes."

She was pacing now, her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides.

"Do you know what it is like to look at someone who shares your face and see the man who murdered your friends? Do you know what it is like to watch her smile and see his smile? To watch her lose her temper and wonder if that is where it starts, if that is the moment where whatever is in his blood begins to take hold and turn her into what he was?"

She stopped pacing and turned to face him.

"She should never have been born. When we found her in that tank we should have ended it. We should have destroyed it before it had the chance to grow into something we could not stop. That is what I believe and I will not apologise for believing it."

Batman stood there and let her finish. 

"She has Ethan's DNA," Batman said. "But she also has Clark's."

Diana's mouth closed.

"The same Clark who spent his entire life dedicating himself to helping people and gave his life trying to stop a tyrant. That DNA is in Thalia. And that makes me think she has every chance of being just as much a hero as he was."

Something shifted in Diana's face, something that might have been shame behind the anger, and she opened her mouth to respond but before the words came the alarms went off.

ALARM

Red lights flooded the training room and the station-wide alert tone cut through the air and Martian Manhunter's voice came over the comms. "Batman, we have a situation in Metropolis. Multiple hostile entities have appeared in the downtown area. Significant civilian casualties are being reported."

Batman pressed his finger to his ear. "Confirmed. Diana and I will respond. Prep the teleporter for immediate departure."

He looked at Diana. "We will finish this conversation later."

Diana picked up her shield and walked past him without another word.

_____________________________________

A girl sat in an alleyway in metropolis. 

The alleyway smelled like rotting food and the dumpster she was sitting behind hadn't been emptied in weeks but the girl in the purple cloak had stopped caring about things like that a long time ago.

She was thin, her cloak was torn at the hem and stained with dirt and something darker that might have been dried blood. Her hands shook as she reached into the dumpster and sorted through the contents, pulling out a half-eaten sandwich that she examined and then put back and a bruised apple that she held up to the light from the street and turned over before taking a bite.

The apple was mostly brown on the inside. She ate it anyway.

She sat down against the alley wall with the cloak pulled over her knees and her hood up and her arms wrapped around her shins. She was so tired that her vision was doubling and her head kept nodding forward and jerking back, the cycle repeating itself every few seconds, her body desperately trying to drag her under while she fought it with everything she had.

She couldn't let herself sleep.

Every time she felt herself slipping toward the edge of unconsciousness she dug her fingernails into her palms or bit the inside of her cheek or pinched the skin on the back of her hand hard enough to leave marks, anything to jolt herself back.

She had been living like this for three months.

Three months of sleeping in alleyways and abandoned buildings and bus station bathrooms, eating out of trash cans and stealing from gas stations and drinking water from public fountains. Three months of staying awake for as long as her body could manage, sometimes thirty hours, sometimes forty, once an agonising fifty-two before she had finally collapsed behind a church in Bludhaven and woken up to nearly be caught.

She had barely escaped that time. She still had the burns on her forearms from it.

She pulled the cloak tighter and pressed her face against her knees and tried to think about what to do next. She needed something to keep her awake. Coffee, pills, anything. She had run out of the caffeine tablets she'd stolen from a truck stop two days ago and the withdrawal from the sustained sleep deprivation was getting worse, her hands shaking constantly now and her thoughts fragmenting in ways that made it hard to hold on to a plan for more than a few minutes.

She waited until the street outside the alley was quiet and then she stood up on legs that trembled beneath her and pulled the hood lower over her face and slipped out onto the sidewalk.

The convenience store was three blocks away and she watched it through the window for five minutes before she went in, counting the customers and noting the position of the clerk and the location of the cameras. There were two customers and one clerk and the energy drinks were on the far aisle near the back wall.

She went in and walked to the aisle and picked up two cans and slipped them inside her cloak and turned toward the door.

"Hey."

The voice came from behind her, the man standing at the end of the aisle was in plain clothes but the badge clipped to his belt and the holster visible under his jacket told her everything she needed to know. Off duty. Wrong place, wrong time.

"Put them back," he said, and his hand moved to his hip.

She tried to reach for the magic. The words formed in her mind, the incantation that would wrap shadow around her body and carry her through the wall and out into the night, but the exhaustion had eaten too deep and the power came up dry, a faint flicker behind her eyes that sputtered and died before it reached her hands.

"I said put them back. Now. And keep your hands where I can see them."

She put the cans back on the shelf and raised her hands and the off-duty officer called it in and twenty minutes later she was sitting in an interview room at the Metropolis Seventh Precinct with her wrists cuffed to the table and her head hanging forward and her eyes closing.

She bit the inside of her cheek so hard she tasted blood.

Stay awake. 

Stay awake. 

Stay awake.

The light above her buzzed and flickered and her head nodded forward and jerked back and nodded forward again and the buzzing got louder and the light got dimmer and her eyes closed and opened and closed and—

She woke up to someone tapping on the table.

Her head came up and her heart was already hammering because she knew, she knew before she was even fully conscious, that she had just made the worst possible mistake.

"How long," she gasped, looking around the room. "How long was I asleep, what time is it, WHAT TIME IS IT?"

The detective sitting across from her was a middle-aged man in a rumpled suit with a coffee stain on his tie, and he leaned back in his chair and looked at her without any particular urgency. "About forty-five minutes," he said. "You were out cold."

"Forty-five minutes," she repeated, and the blood drained from her face. "No. No, no, no, I have to leave, you have to let me go right now, please, you don't understand, everyone in this building is in danger, they're coming, they'll have found me by now, PLEASE you have to let me go!"

"Calm down," the detective said, holding up both hands. "Nobody is coming for you. You stole two energy drinks from a gas station, kid, that's not exactly the kind of crime that sends people after you. Just calm down and—"

"You don't understand, they can find me when I sleep they could already be—"

"I said calm down," the detective said, and his voice had changed. His eyes had changed too. The brown had bled away and been replaced by a deep red that glowed from somewhere behind the iris, and when he smiled the teeth behind his lips were too sharp and too numerous.

"Why would you want to go anywhere, little sister?" the detective said. "Father misses you terribly."

She threw herself backward in the chair and the cuffs bit into her wrists and the table bolted to the floor groaned but held. "No," she whispered. "No, no, not again—"

"AZARATH METRION ZINTHOS!"

The words tore out of her and the last reserves of energy she had left came rushing up from deep inside her body and converged in her hands. Black energy erupted from her palms and hit the detective in the chest and blew him through the two-way mirror behind him, though the body that tumbled through the observation room on the other side was no longer wearing the detective's face, the human form melting away to reveal something larger and darker with red skin and four eyes and horns that curved back from its skull.

She wrenched at the cuffs, the black energy pulsed through the metal and they shattered, then she was on her feet and running for the door.

She hit the corridor and turned right and there were two more of them waiting for her.

They weren't bothering with human disguises. One was tall and thin with elongated limbs and burning red eyes, the other shorter and broader with a mouth that split open wider than a human mouth should and rows of teeth that went back in three layers. Both of them were smiling.

"Raven, Raven, Raven," the tall one said. "Always running. Don't you ever get tired of running?"

"AZARATH METRION ZINTHOS!"

The black energy surged forward in a wave that hit both of them and threw them backward through the corridor wall and into the offices beyond, desks and filing cabinets and computer monitors exploding outward as the two bodies tore through them. 

She ran past the holes they'd made and kept going, the corridor ahead of her stretching toward the exit, though behind her she could hear them getting up.

The tall one caught her at the stairwell. He came through the ceiling above her head and dropped down onto her back and his elongated fingers wrapped around her throat and squeezed. She stumbled and almost fell to the ground but her eyes went white and a pulse of energy exploded out of her sending her brother flying back, but not before he managed to slash at her. 

"Don't damage her too badly," the broad one called from behind them as he came through the corridor at a run. "Father needs her healthy. You know that."

"She started it," the tall one muttered, picking himself up.

She threw open the stairwell door and descended three flights in a fall, her body bouncing off the railings, and she burst through the ground floor exit and out into the lobby where two officers who had heard the commotion were reaching for their weapons. "Get out!" she screamed at them. "Run get out of the building now!"

She didn't wait to see if they listened. She hit the front doors and crashed through them onto the sidewalk the night air hit her face and she started running. 

Behind her the front wall of the precinct building blew outward as all three of her siblings came through it at the same time.

The tall one landed on a parked car and crushed the roof flat. The broad one hit the street and cracked the asphalt. The first one flew through the hole in the wall and hovered above the street.

She ran to the centre of the intersection and stopped then raised both her shaking hands and began to chant,. "Azarath Metrion Zinthos, hear me, by the power of the Dark Place, by the covenant of Azar, I call upon the Between to open before me and carry me from this place—"

A blast hit her in the back.

A concentrated beam of red energy that struck her between the shoulder blades and threw her forward onto her hands and knees, the skin on her back splitting open and the blood spraying across the pavement.

"CAREFUL!" the broad one snarled at his brother. "What did I just say about damaging her?"

"She was casting a portal spell, what was I supposed to do, let her leave?"

"You could have grabbed her instead of blasting a hole in her back, you idiot—"

"Both of you shut up and grab her before she finishes the spell—"

But the spell was already half-cast and the portal was forming in front of her, a disc of black energy that shimmered in the air above the pavement, she dragged herself toward it with one arm, she could feel the portal stabilising, she could feel the Between reaching for her, she just needed another second, one more second—

Then suddenly a barrage of missiles hit the intersection from above.

Two explosions detonated on either side of the three siblings and the Batwing screamed overhead with its engines roaring, banking hard and coming around for a second pass.

Wonder Woman dropped out of the sky behind the jet and hit the ground in front of the girl and she hit it hard enough that the pavement cracked in a circle around her boots. She was already moving before the dust settled, her sword drawn and her shield up and she threw herself at the nearest sibling without hesitation.

Diana reached the tall one first and her sword took his left arm off at the shoulder in a single cut, the blade continuing through and catching him across the chest and opening a gash that went from his collarbone to his hip. He screamed and lashed out with his remaining arm and the claws caught her across the face, four parallel lines opening from her temple to her jaw, but she didn't flinch. She didn't react at all. She drove the pommel of her sword into his face and felt the bone beneath his skin give way and then she grabbed his horn and pulled his head down and drove her knee up into it and the impact lifted him off his feet and she slammed him into the ground.

The broad one came at her from the side with his mouth open and his triple rows of teeth snapping. Diana spun and caught him with her shield, the edge connecting with his jaw and slamming it shut on his own tongue, blood spraying from between his lips, and she followed with a straight kick to his chest that threw him backward into a parked truck hard enough to fold the vehicle in half around his body.

The first one, the strongest of the three, dropped from the air behind her and hit her across the back with both fists locked together and the force drove her to one knee. But she stood back up and turned and hit him with her shield so hard that it rang like a bell.

He answered with a blast of red energy from all four eyes that hit her in the chest and pushed her backward across the intersection, her boots digging trenches in the asphalt. She braced against it with her shield and kept pushing forward, step by step, gaining ground against the beam until she was close enough to reach him, and she dropped under the beam and tackled him she was on top of him with her sword drawn back. 

He caught her arm before it came down and threw her off him and she rolled across the pavement and came up on her feet and he was already on his, and the two of them came together in a clash that shook the ground and they traded blows that would have killed anything mortal, his claws raking across her armour and her sword cutting through his guard, both of them bleeding, both of them taking hits that should have stopped them and neither of them stopping.

The broad one recovered and came at her from behind and she spun and took his hand off with a cut that went through the wrist and then drove her elbow into his throat and grabbed his remaining arm and threw him into his brother and both of them went tumbling across the intersection.

The tall one was back up too, one-armed and bleeding but still fighting, he came at her from the left and she caught his strike on her shield and answered with a headbutt that broke his nose and then a knee to the stomach that folded him and she grabbed his horn again and slammed his face into the ground three times before she threw him aside.

Batman ejected from the Batwing and descended toward the intersection, the girl on the ground in the torn purple cloak was crawling toward the portal she had opened, which was flickering and destabilising, and he landed beside her just in time to see her pull herself through the disc of black energy and disappear.

The portal snapped shut behind her.

The siblings saw it close and the sound that came out of all three of them was not human, a roar of frustration and rage that vibrated through the ground and cracked the facades of the buildings on either side of the street.

"SHE'S GONE!" the first one screamed. "THE PORTAL CLOSED, WHERE DID SHE GO?"

"I DON'T KNOW, I CAN'T SENSE HER ANYMORE, THE PORTAL SEVERED THE CONNECTION—"

"THEN WE KILL THESE TWO AND WAIT FOR HER TO SLEEP AGAIN—"

The second and third one launched at Wonder Woman distracting her while the first one launched himself at Batman and his brother came from the other side, but Batman was already moving, pulling two explosive batarangs from his belt and throwing them in a crossing pattern that detonated against both of them simultaneously but only slowed them for a fraction of a second. The first one's fist came down where Batman had been standing and cratered the asphalt and Batman rolled sideways and came up throwing two more batarangs that caught the second one across the face and detonated.

The first one reached for Batman with both hands and the claws were inches from his throat when something hit the sibling from the side with enough force to send him flying.

The body went spinning through the air and didn't stop for nearly a mile, tearing through three buildings along the way before it finally came to rest somewhere in the Metropolis skyline.

Thalia floated where the sibling had been standing, she looked down at Batman with an expression that was a little guilty. "I'm here to help," she said quickly. "Please don't be mad."

The remaining two siblings managed to throw Wonder Woman through a building then turned toward Thalia and then they attacked together.

The broad one came from the left and swung at her with his remaining hand. Thalia caught the fist and held it, the ground beneath her cracked from the force she was absorbing but she didn't move. She twisted his arm and threw him over her shoulder and he hit the street and she followed him down with a punch that drove him three feet into the pavement.

The tall one came from the right and wrapped his single arm and both legs around her body and squeezed, and Thalia struggled against the grip, her inexperience showing as she failed to break free cleanly. She managed to pry one of his legs loose but he readjusted and locked it back down and his arm tightened around her throat.

She panicked and fired her heat vision wild, the beams cutting across the street and through the side of a building, and civilians who had been watching from a distance screamed and scattered. Diana saw it and broke off from coming back into the fight and flew to the building and caught the section of wall that was falling before it hit the people below and held it until they cleared.

Thalia finally broke free by spinning in midair fast enough to throw the tall one off her, and she hit him with a powerful right hand that sent him tumbling across the street, but the broad one was back up and he opened his mouth wide and a cone of red energy poured out of it and hit Thalia full in the body and she was thrown backward into a bus that crumpled around her.

Batman threw a freezing batarang that caught the broad one in the chest and encased his upper body in ice for the three seconds it took him to shatter free. The tall one gathered himself and joined his brother and they both turned toward Thalia who was pulling herself out of the wrecked bus.

The first one, the strongest, came flying back from whatever buildings he had been thrown through, and all three of them looked at each other and seemed to reach a decision at the same time.

The strongest one gathered energy between all four of his eyes and the light built and built into a swirling red sphere that grew to the size of a car, and he threw it not at Diana or Batman or Thalia but at the crowd of civilians who were still running from the intersection.

"NO!" Thalia screamed, she flew and caught the energy sphere in both hands and pushed it upward, redirecting it into the sky where it detonated harmlessly a thousand feet above the city.

Diana caught a chunk of falling debris that was heading for a group of people and threw it aside and then caught another one and threw that aside too, and when she looked up the three siblings were gone, vanished into whatever place they had come from. 

Diana landed in the intersection and her eyes swept the area and when she confirmed they were gone her face twisted and she slammed her fist into the ground hard enough to leave a crater.

"They escaped," she said through her teeth. 

She turned and her eyes found Thalia, who was floating down to the street with burns on both her palms. 

"This is your fault," Diana said.

Thalia's face fell. "What? No, I helped, I came to help, one of them almost got Batman and I—"

"You fired your heat vision into a building full of people," Diana said, walking toward her. "You lost control of a basic ability and nearly killed a dozen civilians. If I had not been here to catch the wall that you cut through, people would have died tonight because of you."

"I didn't mean to, he had me in a hold and I panicked, I just, I wanted to help, I wanted to show you that I wasnt a villain, that I could be—"

"A hero," Diana repeated, and the word came out cold. "You are not a hero. You are a child playing a game she does not understand. You have no training. You have no discipline. You have no understanding of what it means to carry the power you have and you proved that tonight when you almost killed the very people you claim to want to protect."

"I can learn," Thalia said, and her voice was cracking. "I can get better, just give me a chance, please, I just want—"

"What you want does not matter. What matters is what you are capable of, and what you showed me tonight is exactly what I feared. You are reckless. You are untrained. You are dangerous. And you do not belong here."

"Diana—" Batman said from behind her.

"The world does not need another child in a cape who thinks bravery is a substitute for competence. The last thing this world needs is someone with your power who cannot control it, we have already seen what happens when that kind of power ends up in the wrong hands, and I will not allow—"

"STOP."

Batman's voice cut across hers and the single word carried enough weight that Diana's mouth actually closed mid-sentence.

But the damage was done.

Thalia was crying.

She looked at Diana for one more second, her eyes searching for something, anything, the smallest sign that underneath all the words there might be something other than rejection.

She didn't find it.

Thalia launched herself into the sky so fast that the sonic boom shattered what was left of the windows on the block and she was gone, a streak of light climbing into the darkness until she disappeared.

Batman walked up to Diana until he was standing directly in front of her, close enough that she could see her own reflection in the white lenses of his cowl.

"You are becoming a bigger problem for this League than the threats we face," he said almost angrily. "You are acting less like a hero and more like—"

"A warrior," Diana finished. "Yes. That is exactly what I am. A warrior. And that is what was necessary tonight and every night since Ethan Kane proved to every one of us that we were too soft to stop him."

She straightened to her full height.

"The Justice League should take Ethan Kane as a lesson. A lesson about what happens when we are careless. When we are trusting. When we extend compassion to those who use it as a weapon against us. We cannot afford to be soft anymore Batman. We cannot afford to give chances to every unknown quantity that walks through our doors and hope for the best."

She picked up her sword from where it had fallen during the fight and sheathed it.

"There is no space for children who want to be heroes," she said. "Not anymore."

She flew up into the night sky and disappeared.

_____________________________________

Ethan sat cross-legged on the floor of his shack with his chin resting on his fist as he watched his ants.

He had six terrariums now, lined up along the wall beneath the window on a shelf he had built from scrap wood. Each one held a different colony and each colony had been collected from a different part of the hillside over the past several months. 

The first one had been an accident, a trail of leaf-cutters that had found their way into his shack through a crack in the wall and that he had followed back to their nest and excavated carefully and transferred into a glass container. 

The rest had been on purpose.

He leaned closer to the third terrarium and watched the workers moving along the tunnels they had carved through the soil, each one carrying a fragment of leaf many times its own size, the line of them stretched from the surface down through the first chamber and into the second and then into the fungus garden at the bottom where the pieces were deposited and broken down into the substrate that fed the colony.

They were remarkable.

He had watched humans for nearly twenty years and he had never understood them. He had studied them, analysed them, modelled their behaviour, predicted their actions with a degree of accuracy that bordered on the supernatural, and none of it had ever produced understanding. He could tell you what a human being would do in any given situation with near-perfect precision but he could never tell you why they did it, not really, not in the way that understanding required. The gap between predicting behaviour and comprehending it had been the central frustration of his entire life.

But ants he understood.

Ants were simple. 

Their motivations were transparent. 

Their social structures were logical. 

Every action an individual ant took served a function that could be traced directly back to the survival of the colony, there was no deception in it, no performance, no gap between what they appeared to be doing and what they were actually doing. An ant carrying a leaf was carrying a leaf. There was no hidden agenda behind the carrying. There was no secondary motive. There was no mask.

He found that restful in a way he couldn't fully articulate.

He also found the way they built things to be extraordinary. The tunnels in the third terrarium had been carved in a pattern that optimised airflow through the entire structure without any individual ant having designed the system. No single ant understood the architecture. No single ant had a blueprint. And yet the colony as a whole produced something that was, by any engineering standard brilliant. 

He had tried to build a perfect world through force of will and intellect and it had collapsed. The ants built a perfect world every single day through nothing but cooperation and instinct and they never failed.

There was a lesson in that. 

He was still trying to figure out what it was.

How he wished he could talk to them like the others. 

He pushed himself up from the floor and walked to the window and looked out across the slum. From his shack he could see all across the slum and even beyond it to the city proper where those not under the poverty line lived.

It had been a year now.

A year since Wayne tower. 

A year since the explosion. 

A year since he had woken up in the dark with half his body burned and the other half broken. 

It had been a year and he still hadn't found what he was looking for.

He turned away from the window and was about to sit back down in front of the terrariums when it hit him.

The emotional surge came in like a truck. It slammed into his chest so hard that his knees buckled and he barely caught himself on the edge of the shelf. His vision went white for a second before he managed to grab hold of the [Forced Empathy] and dial it down the way he had learned to do over the past year, reducing the input from a flood to a stream.

He stood there breathing hard with one hand on the shelf and the other pressed against his chest.

Even dialled down the emotions were strong. Stronger than anything he had felt from the people in the slum. This wasn't the emotions of everyday hardship and hunger and exhaustion that he had grown accustomed to.

There was pain in this. A lot of it. Physical pain layered on top of something deeper... a tiredness so deep it was closer to death than sleep. Anger too. And underneath all of that, resignation.

He grabbed his coat from the hook by the door and pulled it on and flipped the hood up and walked out of the shack.

He moved quickly through the paths of the slum, following the emotional signal. He turned a corner into a dead-end alley that terminated at the back wall of a concrete block house and stopped.

A girl was lying on the ground against the wall.

She was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, with very pale skin that had a greyish undertone to it that wasn't just from illness or exhaustion but seemed to be part of her natural colouring. Her hair was purple and matted and falling across her face, and in the centre of her forehead was a red gem. 

Her cloak was purple too, torn and filthy and soaked through with blood from a wound across her back that had been bleeding for a while based on the amount of it that had pooled beneath her. Burns covered both her palms and there were older injuries visible on her forearms.

She was unconscious but even in her sleep Ethan could feel every bit of what she was feeling pouring off her in waves, the suffering of a body that had been pushed past every limit and was now shutting down because it had nothing left to run on.

He crouched beside her and studied her face.

He looked at her for a long moment before he reached down and placed his hand on her forehead.

[Healing Touch]

The warm light spread from his palm across her face.

(AN: So here we go Raven is introduced. More information on Ethan's time after he was defeated later one. But yeah hope you enjoyed the chapter.)