DC: All for One Chapter 43 — Road Trip (Patreon)

They had been driving for forty minutes and neither of them had said a word.

The highway was empty only with the occasional truck coming the other way and washing the inside of the car with light for a second before it passed. Ethan kept both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road and drove at a speed that was five kilometres under the limit. 

Meanwhile Thalia was staring at him.

She was aware that she was staring at him. She had told herself three separate times over the last twenty minutes that she was going to stop and each time she had managed perhaps ninety seconds of looking out the windshield before her head turned and her eyes found him again, but she couldn't help it, every time she looked away she found herself needing to check that he was still there.

But more than that she felt herself feeling a great deal of confusion. 

The way Robin had talked about Ethan, you'd think he was the literal Devil. Even the public reports about him paint him as a figure of pure evil, a monster. 

He didn't look like a monster.

That was the part she kept getting stuck on. In her head she had built a picture of him that was closer to a force of nature than a person. Something enormous. Something that filled a room. The man who had killed Superman with his bare hands should have had much more presence and inspire so much more fear.

Instead he was thin if a little muscular. His face was drawn and there were hollows under his cheekbones and he was wearing a tight shirt he had taken off a clothesline outside the city because his own clothes had turned to ash. His hair was untidy just reaching past his ears. There was a healed burn scar running up the side of his neck and disappearing into his hairline.

But more than anything he looked tired.

"Is there a problem?"

Thalia jerked upright in her seat. "No."

Ethan didn't take his eyes off the road. "You've looked at me forty-one times in the last twenty minutes. I'm not raising it as an objection, I'm simply noting that it usually indicates that a person has something they want to say."

"You were counting?"

"I was."

"Of course you were," Thalia muttered, and she turned her head deliberately toward the window and fixed her eyes on the darkness outside.

She stayed like that for a while.

"I should be taking you in," she said eventually, still looking out the window. "You know that, right? I'm not supposed to be sitting in a car with you driving to wherever it is we're going. I'm supposed to be flying you to the Watchtower and putting you in a containment cell eo you can answer for your crimes."

"Yes," Ethan said.

"I should have called it in the second I recognised you." She pressed her fingertips against her temple. 

"I appreciate that you haven't called them," Ethan said.

Thalia's head turned toward him.

"And I meant what I said before," he continued, changing gears as he switched lanes. "You have my word that once I've helped Raven, whatever the outcome of that is, I'll go with you. I won't run, I won't fight you and I won't try to talk my way out of it. You can take me in and hand me over."

Thalia stared at him for a moment and then something in her chest went flared in anger.

"Stop doing that," she snapped.

Ethan glanced at her. "Doing what?"

"THAT!" She twisted in her seat to face him fully. "Being like that! Talking to me like, like you're reasonable, like we're two people having a normal conversation about a normal situation, like you're some, just some guy. You're a villain! You're not just a villain, you're the villain! You killed Superman! You killed Green Lantern! You murdered a million people in one afternoon!"

Her voice had climbed and it cracked at the end and she hated that it cracked.

"So stop giving me your word," she said. "Stop being polite. Stop apologising for things and stop pretending to be decent. I don't know what you're doing but I know you're doing something."

Ethan drove in silence for a moment.

"I have no ulterior motives," he said.

Thalia scoffed and folded her arms across her chest and turned back toward the window.

Because of course he would say that. That was exactly what he would say. Someone who had spent an entire year convincing an entire city that he was a philanthropist while running a criminal empire out of their basement would absolutely look you in the eye and tell you he had no ulterior motives while holding a knife behind his back.

He was doing something. 

He had to be.

She ran through it in her head. Maybe he needed her power for something. Maybe the girl in the purple cloak was bait and the whole thing was designed to get Thalia somewhere isolated. Maybe he was going to try to absorb her, which was the thing Robin had specifically warned her about, the thing Robin had said with absolute certainty would happen if she ever found him. Maybe he was manipulating her because she was young, and manipulating people was the single thing he was best at in the entire world.

That was it. 

That had to be it.

Except he had given away one of his abilities. She had watched him do it.

She didn't have an explanation for that.

What could he possibly gain from doing that?

A follower in the future?

And underneath all of that, underneath the analysis and the suspicion and the anger, there was a smaller and worse thought that she kept trying not to look at directly.

Why aren't you doing the right thing.

You know what the right thing is. 

You could reach across this car right now and hold him and fly straight up and be at the Watchtower in ninety seconds and it would be over. 

Every single thing you have been told about who you are and what you're going to become, every look Diana has ever given you across a room, every conversation that stopped when you walked in, all of it could be changed in ninety seconds by walking into that command centre with Ethan Kane in your hands and putting him down on the floor in front of them.

She would have to look at me differently then.

She would have to.

And instead she was sitting in a car on a highway in Brazil letting him drive her somewhere she didn't know, because when she looked at him she felt something in the middle of her chest that she absolutely refused to admit to.

She thought about Diana standing over her in the ruined intersection in Metropolis. She thought about the words. You are not a hero. You are a child playing a game she does not understand. She thought about what Diana would say if she could see this, if she could see her daughter sitting in the passenger seat of a car being driven by the man who had absorbed her into his body and kept her chained to the floor of a bedroom by her own lasso for weeks.

She would never look at me again.

Thalia's eyes went hot and she blinked hard several times and pressed her lips together and stared out the window. 

"Are you alright?"

"I'm FINE," she snapped, without turning around.

"You aren't," Ethan said calmly. "I can sense your emotions and yours are quite turbulent right now."

Thalia's head whipped around.

"Are you serious?" she said. "You've been sitting there this whole time reading my feelings like a book while I sit here two feet away from you and you didn't think that was worth mentioning?"

"I'm mentioning it now."

"Oh, well, thank you, that's so much better." She threw her hands up. "That's so incredibly not okay, do you understand that? It's such an invasion of privacy!"

"I apologise," Ethan said immediately and without hesitation. "You're right of course."

Thalia opened her mouth to keep going and then closed it because she hadn't expected that.

"I would tune you out if I could," Ethan continued, his eyes still on the road.

He paused.

"But I can't do it with you."

"What do you mean you can't."

"I mean the filter doesn't work on your signal. It comes through at full strength regardless of what I do. I've been trying since we got in the car and I've achieved nothing." He changed gears again as the road levelled out. "It also isn't range-limited the way the ability normally is. For the past several weeks I've been experiencing intermittent emotional feedback from an unidentified source at extreme distance, which is not something the power is capable of. I assumed it was a malfunction. It wasn't. It was you."

Thalia went very still.

Because she knew what he was talking about.

The connection.

"I have two working theories," Ethan said. "The first is that the connection is genetic, that the forced empathy is interacting with the fact that a substantial portion of your genome is derived directly from mine, and that the ability is treating your emotional signal as an extension of my own and therefore cannot filter it out any more than a person can choose not to feel their own feelings. The second is that it's structural, that something in the way I constructed your neurology created a resonance between us that didn't exist before you were born and that neither of us has any control over."

He was quiet for a second.

"The first theory is the one I favour."

Thalia sat there with her arms folded and she didn't say anything for a moment. She didn't know why she felt such an ache in her chest at the moment. 

No that wasn't true. 

She did know why. 

He hadn't said because you're my daughter. He had said a substantial portion of your genome is derived directly from mine.

That was how he thought about it. 

That was how he thought about her.

"I don't care," she said finally, but her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to. "I don't care about your theories. Just stay out of my head."

"It isn't your head," Ethan said. "Only your—"

"STAY OUT OF IT."

He was quiet.

"I'll try my best," he said.

Thalia turned back toward the window and neither of them said anything else for a while. 

"Where are we even going?" she asked eventually.

"Gotham City," Ethan said.

Thalia's whole body went rigid in the seat and her head came around fast. "Gotham? Why, what's in Gotham, what are you planning?" Her voice had climbed and her hands had gone to the edges of her seat and she was already running through scenarios in her head, wondering if this was it, if this was the moment the mask came off, if he was driving her to the city he had once conquered so he could pick up where he left off with her at his side as the weapon he had designed her to be.

"The creatures that took Raven are unknown to me," Ethan said. "Until I saw them on the hillside I did not believe in the supernatural. My understanding of the world is built on science. Which means that if I'm going to find Raven I need to find someone who understands the rules of whatever system these things operate within. I need someone who knows about magic."

Thalia's grip on the seat loosened slightly but her eyes stayed narrowed. "And how do you know this person will be in Gotham?"

"I don't," Ethan admitted. "But Gotham is the city I know best and the city where I had the most contacts." He paused. "Whether any of them will speak to me now is another question entirely. I imagine my name isn't particularly popular in Gotham these days. But there may be one or two who will hear me out, and if even one of them can point me toward someone who understands what Raven's brothers are and where they took her, that's enough."

Thalia looked at him for a moment considering his words. It sounded plausible. That was the problem. Everything he said sounded plausible, but was that just a manipulation? Is he manipulating her now?

"Are you planning anything?" she asked as she looked at him intensely. 

"Other than what I said, no."

"Good." Thalia straightened up in her seat and crossed her arms. "Because if you try anything, if you so much as look at a Saviour uniform or try to pick up where you left off, I will beat your ass so badly you'll wish those demons had finished the job."

"I'm sure you will," Ethan replied.

They drove in silence for another twenty minutes before Ethan checked the fuel gauge and put on the indicator and began pulling off the highway toward a cluster of lights set back from the road, a service area with a gas station and two or three restaurants grouped around a parking lot that was mostly empty at this hour.

"What are you doing?" Thalia asked.

"Dying took a significant amount of energy out of me," Ethan said as he guided the car down the off-ramp. "I need to eat."

Something shifted in Thalia's face. The suspicion didn't leave entirely but it moved aside enough to let something else through, her posture changed, and the stiffness in her shoulders eased by a fraction.

"What are we going to eat?" she asked a little excitedly. 

Ethan turned to look at her. "Your Kryptonian DNA should provide you with all the nourishment you need through solar absorption. Your cells are designed to convert yellow sun radiation into—"

"I know how my cells work," Thalia cut in with annoyance in her voice. "I've had it explained to me a hundred times. I know I don't need to eat but I like eating. Food is fun. There are so many different flavours and textures and combinations and every single time I try something new it's a completely different experience and I love it. I've only been alive for less than a year and I've barely tried anything and there's an entire planet full of food I haven't tasted yet." She paused, slightly out of breath. "So yes. I want to eat."

Ethan was quiet for a moment.

"I see..." he said. "I have no strong preference for what we eat. If you would like to choose the restaurant, you're welcome to."

Thalia actually smiled.

It was small and it disappeared quickly but it had been there and through the forced empathy Ethan felt the spike of something warm come off her before she pushed it down.

The service area came into view through the windshield and Thalia leaned forward to look at it, scanning the buildings, her eyes moved across the gas station and a small convenience store and then settled on the restaurants, one that looked like a chain fast food place and another that was smaller and independent.

"That one," she said, pointing at the smaller restaurant. "Go there."

Ethan turned the wheel and pulled into the parking lot and found a space near the entrance.

Thalia had the door open before he had taken the key out of the ignition. She was already walking toward the restaurant entrance by the time he climbed out and closed his door, he then followed her across the lot.

The restaurant was mostly empty. A man sat alone at a corner table with a beer and a newspaper and two women occupied a booth near the back where they were talking over cups of coffee.

They sat down across from each other at a table near the window and a waitress came over almost immediately, a woman in her forties with her hair pulled back and a notepad in her hand.

"Boa noite, o que vocês vão querer?" (Good evening, what will you have?)

"Arroz com frango grelhado e legumes, por favor," Ethan said. (Rice with grilled chicken and vegetables, please.)

He turned to Thalia. "What would you like?"

But Thalia wasn't listening to him. She had the menu open in front of her and her eyes were moving across it with an intensity that Ethan had previously only seen directed at him during the fight on the hillside. Her mouth was slightly open and her eyes were wide and she was turning the laminated pages like it was a holy book.

"Thalia," Ethan said.

No response.

"Thalia."

She looked up as if she had forgotten he was there. "What?"

"The waitress is waiting."

Thalia looked at the waitress and then back at the menu and then she started talking.

"I want the steak and the rice and beans. And the fried plantains. And the cheese bread, all of the cheese bread, however many come in an order I want double that. And the chicken coracao, what is chicken coracao, actually it doesn't matter I want those too. And the fish stew. And the pastéis, three of those, no, five, what kind do they have, it doesn't matter I want one of each kind. And the feijoada. And the farofa on the side. And a salad." She paused. "And whatever that is." She pointed at a picture on the menu of a dessert that appeared to involve caramel and custard.

Ethan raised an eyebrow.

He turned to the waitress, who was staring at Thalia with the expression of a woman who was trying to determine whether this was a joke, and he repeated the order in Portuguese, item by item, and the waitress's pen moved across the notepad. By the time he reached the dessert she had turned to a second page and she looked like she wanted to blow her brains out. 

The waitress left and Thalia immediately leaned forward over the table with the menu still open in front of her.

"What is chicken coracao?" she asked.

"The hearts of chickens, skewered and grilled. They're a common street food here."

"Do they taste like chicken?"

"They taste like a more concentrated version of chicken. The texture is firmer than breast meat but softer than gizzard."

"What's a gizzard?"

"A muscular organ in the digestive tract of birds that grinds food."

"People eat that?"

"People eat many things."

"What about this." She pointed at the feijoada on the menu. "This looks like soup but it's black. Why is it black?"

"It's a stew made from black beans cooked with pork, including several cuts that most people outside of Brazil would not typically eat. Ears, feet, tail. It's considered a national dish. The colour comes from the beans."

Thalia looked back at the menu and then up at him. "And pastéis?"

"Deep-fried pastry pockets filled with various things. Meat, cheese, palm hearts, sometimes chocolate."

"Palm hearts. Hearts of palms? Like the tree?"

"Yes."

"People eat parts of trees?"

"The inner core of certain palm species is edible, yes."

"What does it taste like?"

"Mild. Slightly nutty. Similar in texture to artichoke."

"What's an artichoke?"

Ethan looked at her across the table. "You ordered all of this without knowing what any of it was."

Thalia sat back in her chair and crossed her arms but the gesture carried none of the hostility it had in the car. "How will I know I like it if I don't try it?"

Ethan was quiet for a beat.

"True," he said and nodded.

The food started arriving ten minutes later, and it kept arriving for a while after that, the waitress making trip after trip from the kitchen with plates and bowls and baskets that she set down across the table until there was no visible surface left between them.

Thalia started with the cheese bread.

She picked one up and turned it over in her hands, examining the golden crust and the way the bread yielded slightly under her thumb, and then she put the whole thing in her mouth and chewed and her eyes closed and she made a sound that caused the man with the newspaper in the corner to look up.

"Oh," she said, reaching for a second one before she had finished chewing the first. "Oh that's good. That's really good. That's, what is that, it's stretchy. Why is it stretchy?"

"It's made with tapioca flour and queijo minas, a type of fresh cheese that produces the elasticity you're experiencing when it's mixed into the dough and baked at high temperature."

Thalia ate three more in rapid succession and then moved on to the pastéis, biting into the first one and holding it at arm's length to look at the filling that was oozing out of the corner.

"Meat," she announced, chewing. "That one's meat. It's crunchy on the outside and soft in the middle and the meat is salty and there's something else in there, onion maybe, it's amazing, this whole country is amazing, why didn't anyone take me here before?"

She worked her way through the five pastéis one by one, providing running commentary on each filling, the cheese one was gooey, the palm heart one was weird but interesting, the chicken one was her second favourite, the chocolate one made her close her eyes again and go quiet for a moment.

Ethan ate his rice and chicken like a robot while he watched her.

The steak arrived and Thalia cut into it and held the piece up on her fork and studied the pink centre before putting it in her mouth and chewing slowly, and her expression went through several changes that she did not attempt to hide.

"This is different from the burger," she said. "This is, this is really good. The burger was disappointing but this is, it tastes like something incredible."

She ate more and then she started on the feijoada, spooning the dark stew into a bowl of rice and mixing it together the way she had watched the women in the back booth do with theirs. The first bite made her pause.

"It's heavy," she said. "Like the flavour is really rich. Is that the pork?"

"Mostly. The extended cooking time allows the collagen from the tougher cuts to break down and integrate into the broth, which produces the richness you're tasting."

She ate more and then she tried the fried plantains, picking one up with her fingers and biting into it and looking at the golden interior with curiosity.

"It looks like a banana," she said. "But it doesn't taste like a banana."

"Plantains and bananas are closely related but the sugar content develops differently. Plantains are starchier and are typically cooked before eating rather than consumed raw."

"You know a lot about food," Thalia said, reaching for another plantain. "For someone who doesn't seem to enjoy eating it."

Ethan looked down at his own plate, which was half-finished and neatly arranged with the rice on one side and the chicken on the other and the vegetables separated by type. He had been eating without any visible reaction to any of it.

"I understand the science of food," he said. "The chemistry of flavour, the physics of cooking, the biology of taste perception. I can tell you exactly which compounds are responsible for the Maillard reaction that produced the crust on your steak and which volatile molecules are creating the aroma that you're responding to."

Thalia looked at him and something in her expression shifted. "You really can't taste it?" she asked. "Like at all?"

"I can taste it." He pushed a piece of chicken across his plate with his fork. "But that is where the process ends. The signal arrives and is catalogued and that is all. There is no, I don't know how to describe it. There is no second thing. The thing that happens to you when you close your eyes, whatever that is, it doesn't happen to me... at least not anymore."

"You mean pleasure."

"Perhaps. I have difficulty distinguishing between the various categories of positive emotion as I have limited experience with most of them."

Thalia stared at him.

Then she picked up a cheese bread from the basket, the last one, and held it out across the table toward him.

"Try this," she said.

"I've had cheese bread before. The woman who sold them near the clinic used my recipe to improve the—"

"Just try it."

Ethan looked at the cheese bread in her hand and then at her face.

He took it and put it in his mouth, chewed and swallowed. 

"Well?" Thalia asked.

"Queijo minas, tapioca flour, eggs, salt, oil. Baked at approximately one hundred and eighty degrees. The cheese-to-flour ratio is slightly higher than the standard recipe which accounts for the increased elasticity. The crust formation suggests—"

"Stop." Thalia held up her hand. "Stop analysing it. I didn't ask you to tell me what's in it. I asked you if it was good."

Ethan was quiet for a moment.

"I don't think so," he said.

Thalia looked at him across the table full of food and sighed. She then picked up a pastél from her plate, the chocolate one, and put it on his plate without saying anything.

"Try that one too," she said, and went back to her feijoada. "It's my favourite one so you'll have to like it."

Ethan looked at the pastél on his plate for a moment.

Then he picked it up and took a bite and chewed it slowly, and the chocolate filling spread across his tongue.

He chewed for a long time, longer than he actually needed to. 

"Well?" Thalia asked without looking up from her bowl.

"It's fine..." Ethan said again.

But this time he took a second bite.

...

"I can't believe you don't have any money on you."

Thalia stood at the industrial sink in the back of the restaurant with her sleeves rolled up to her elbows and a plate in one hand and a sponge in the other.

"How do you not have money?" she continued, scrubbing a plate with more force than the plate deserved. "You walked into a restaurant and ordered food, and at no point during any of that did it occur to you to check whether you had any way of paying for it?"

Ethan stood at the sink beside her with his own sponge and his own stack of plates he was working through. "Everything I had was on my person when I died," Ethan said while scrubbing a pot. "I didn't think about it because I don't think about money much. It's never been something I've had to worry about."

"That's stupid," Thalia said.

"Yes," Ethan agreed.

"That's really stupid. You're supposed to be the smartest person on the planet and you walked into a restaurant without checking if you could pay. A child would have checked. A five-year-old with a piggy bank would have thought about it before ordering a meal."

"It could be worse," Ethan said.

Thalia slammed a plate into the drying rack with enough force that it cracked. "How? How could this possibly be worse? We're washing dishes in the back of a restaurant on a highway in Brazil at midnight because you forgot that money exists. Tell me how this gets worse."

Ethan didn't look up from the pot he was scrubbing. "Some restaurants in this region are fronts for criminal organisations. They operate as legitimate businesses during the day and then after hours they serve as processing points for human trafficking operations. Had we walked into one of those establishments instead of this one, the consequences of being unable to pay would have involved significantly more than washing dishes. They might have attempted to take our organs."

Thalia's hands stopped moving.

She turned her head slowly and looked at him with an expression of pure horror, the sponge dripping suds onto her shoe.

"Although," Ethan continued "given that we both have bulletproof skin, they would have had a very frustrating evening."

Thalia's face went from horror to confusion.

She stared at him.

"Was that," she started, and then stopped. "Did you just, was that a joke?"

Ethan continued scrubbing.

"A friend told me once that during situations of minor social discomfort it helps to defuse the tension with humour," he said. 

Thalia opened her mouth to say something and then closed it and then opened it again and in the end nothing came out and she just turned back to the sink and picked up another plate and started scrubbing it.

They washed in silence for a while, the only sounds the running water and the clink of dishes being placed in the rack and the distant sound of the restaurant owner watching television in the front room while he waited for them to finish.

"Couldn't you just use one of your powers?" Thalia asked eventually, not looking up from the bowl she was rinsing. "You can make crystal, right? You could grow a piece of gold or a diamond or something and trade it. Or you could teleport us out of here. Or you could, I don't know, do literally anything other than standing here scrubbing pots."

"Yes," Ethan said.

Thalia looked at him.

"I could do any of those things," he confirmed.

"Well then why don't you?"

Ethan set the pot he had been scrubbing into the rinse basin and picked up the next one and began working on the layer of burned rice that had been caked onto the bottom of it.

"Using a power to escape the consequences of a situation I created through my own lack of foresight demonstrates a fundamental absence of responsibility," he said. "I forgot to check whether I had money. That was my error. If I were a normal person without abilities I would have no option but to accept the consequences of that error, which in this case means standing here and washing dishes until the debt is cleared. By using a power to bypass those consequences I would be treating my abilities as a substitute for accountability, and the more often a person does that the easier it becomes to do it the next time, and the time after that, until eventually the concept of being accountable for anything at all ceases to exist because there is always a way to make the problem disappear."

He scraped at the burned rice.

"If we were normal people we wouldn't have the option of teleporting away or growing diamonds to cover the bill. We would just have to wash the dishes. And we should hold ourselves to the same standard that a normal person would be held to, because the moment we start treating our abilities as a reason to operate by different rules, we stop being people and start being something else."

He paused.

"Which happened to me," he said quietly. "I used [All for One] to solve every problem I encountered. When something was in my way I used my power and removed it. When someone opposed me I took their strength and added it to my own. I never had to deal with the consequences of anything I did because there was always an ability available to make the consequence disappear. And over time that became the only way I knew how to interact with the world. Take. Accumulate. Overpower. I stopped being a person so gradually that I didn't notice it was happening until there was nothing left of the person to notice."

He went back to scrubbing.

The kitchen was quiet for a long time after that.

Thalia stood at her sink with a plate in her hands, the water running over her fingers. She didn't move, she didn't speak, the only thing she did was stand there holding the plate and letting what he had said settle over her.

"Let's hurry up and get them finished then," she said finally. 

_____________________________________

Robin walked down the stairs into the Batcave with a split lip and a bruise forming across his left cheekbone and the satisfying ache in his knuckles that came from beating the crap out of criminals.

Crime was coming back.

Two armed robberies. A carjacking on the east side. A string of break-ins along the waterfront that had the signature of someone organised behind them. A huge number of mugging and assaults.

It wasn't good. But Robin would be lying if he said it didn't make the job more interesting than chasing television thieves.

He pulled the domino mask off, rubbed his eyes and walked through the main platform of the cave toward the central computer array, expecting to find it dark and empty at this hour.

It wasn't.

Batman sat in the primary chair in front of the main screen with his cowl down and his face lit by the glow of multiple video feeds playing simultaneously across the display. Batgirl occupied the secondary station beside him, her own cowl pulled back and her red hair tucked behind her ears, she was leaning forward with her chin in her hand scrolling through a timeline of footage that stretched across her entire monitor.

Robin walked up behind them and looked at the screens, which showed a patchwork of shaky phone camera footage, dozens of clips arranged in a grid, each one showing different angles of what appeared to be the same event.

"What is this?" Robin asked, pulling a chair over and dropping into it.

Batgirl glanced at him and then back at the screen. "Bruce tracked the energy signature from the Metropolis attack to a slum in Brazil. When he got there the place had been hit hard, same kind of entities, same energy readings, but this time there were six of them instead of three. He had me pull footage from every phone on the local network to piece together what happened."

Robin looked at the grid of videos playing across the screens, the red-skinned figures hovering above burning buildings, the explosions, the people running. "Why do you need to go through all of it? Nearly every clip shows the demons from what I can see. We've already got their profiles from Metropolis. What's left to identify?"

Batman spoke without turning from the screen.

"I'm not trying to identify the demons," he said. "I'm trying to get a clear image of the person who was fighting them."

Robin frowned. "Someone fought them?"

"He did more than fight them. Based on the accounts I gathered on site, he engaged all six of them while positioning himself between them and the civilian population. He sustained multiple fatal injuries including stab wounds, and then he was burned alive by the largest of the six." Batman paused. "And then he got back up."

Robin's frown deepened. "Got back up from being burned alive?"

"That's what they said."

"And you believe them?"

"I believe them enough to want to see who we're dealing with. Most of the footage is too shaky or too far away to get a clean look at his face. He was wearing a hooded coat through most of the fight, which didn't help."

Robin looked at Barbara, who shrugged slightly without looking away from her screen. "We've been at this for four hours," she said. "Most of the clips are useless. Either the angle is wrong or the resolution is too low or the hood is covering everything. I've run facial recognition on every frame that shows even a partial face and gotten nothing back, which either means he's not in any database or the partials aren't clear enough for a match."

She kept scrolling through the timeline, advancing frame by frame through a clip that showed the fight from a rooftop two levels above the action. The figure in the long coat was visible but his face was turned away from the camera, and the hood covered everything above his jaw.

"Here," she said suddenly, and she stopped scrolling and sat up straighter. "Wait. This one."

She clicked on a clip near the end of the timeline, one that was timestamped several minutes after the demons had departed. The footage was better than most of the others, filmed from a window approximately thirty feet away, and it showed the aftermath rather than the fight itself.

The camera was pointed at a section of destroyed path between two collapsed buildings, and in the centre of the frame a figure was kneeling in the rubble with his back to the camera. 

Then the figure turned.

Batgirl hit pause.

The frame froze on the screen, the face caught in three-quarter profile, and for a moment nobody in the cave said anything.

Robin stared.

Batman stared.

Batgirl stared.

The face on the screen was thinner than they remembered. The jaw was sharper and the cheekbones were more pronounced and there was a scar running from the left temple to the jawline that hadn't been there before. 

But it was him.

The same pale blue eyes

The same face that had been on every screen in Gotham once upon a time.

Ethan Kane was alive.

The silence in the Batcave stretched out for what felt like a very long time, the three of them sitting in the glow of the frozen frame.

Batman turned in his chair and looked at both of them. 

"Not a word of this to anyone," he said.

(AN: Ethan and Thalia have started their little road trip together and now Batman is aware that Ethan Kane is alive. Hope you enjoyed.)