Chapter Text
Carter Hall
Montana National Park. Montana
2015.7.10. 3:32PM
“Area clear,” He called over the comm. The fire had died down a lot, thanks to the help of Iris and her superspeed in sucking all of the oxygen away from the flames. He was just there to keep an eye on everything in case it got out of hand.
“The fire is one hundred percent contained. No other missions as of now,” M'yri'ah said over the comms.
Iris sped over to him as he landed, “You wanna grab a milkshake?”
“Ah, no thank you,” He said, “I don't deal well with milk.”
“We could get FroYos.”
“Sorry, not a sweets person.”
She shrugged, “Gyros?”
He sighed, “What do you want?”
Iris looked around, “Kara's not Earth-side is she?”
“No. The U.N called her to look into something on the International Space Station.”
“I need your opinion.”
“With?”
“Jay.”
“Garrick?”
“How many Jays' do you know?”
He shrugged.
She continued, “Well... It's a sensitive subject. I wanted to get your opinion on it because... well... that one time two years ago...”
“When I time-traveled and teamed up with the Justice Society? Yes, I know what you mean, but what's wrong with Jay? He's not developing something like dementia is he?”
“No! Nononono... It's just... There's just something I need to explain to you, I'd rather not do it here.”
He shrugged, “You could come to Hall Manor, unless of course you have somewhere else in mind?”
“I guess it doesn't matter... just that... I dunno, I've been kinda paranoid about it.”
“Then where shall we meet?”
“I guess your house?”
He arrived at the manor first, she was just behind him, “Sorry if I kept you waiting, stopped to eat.”
He opened the doors and stepped in, she followed in after him, zipping around the room, looking and inspecting all of the clutter he'd gathered over the years. He should purge his collection every once in awhile, or else he might just find that there would be no space for him to walk or fly through his own home anymore.
He settled on taking her to the library, it was where he conducted all of his business, not that he had much business anymore. It was a tall room with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, and his desk was over at one end of the room.
“What was it that you wanted to tell me about Jay?”
“Well... it kinda also has to do with Martha.”
“How so?”
“Well...” She sighed, “He told me not to tell anyone, but, I sort of found out where the gun thing came from.”
“Where at? What does this have to do with Jay, then?”
Iris frowned, “I only tell you this because you're close to the Justice Society too.”
He became suspicious, “What does this have to do with the Justice Society?”
Iris fiddled in her seat, she was nervous. He had never once seen Iris nervous in all the years that they had spent together as colleagues and friends. It only made him more suspicious.
“Look, it's something bad, and if it gets out to the League that the Society was involved, what then?”
“Well, it would depend on what it was that they were involved in, I suppose.”
Iris sighed, “I think that the gun thing that made Batwoman disappear was from the Society.”
He was taken aback, “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“What proof do you have?”
Iris bit her bottom lip before continuing, finding anywhere to look but at him, “I thought about what Kara said about the night that it happened. Martha had just been at a fire that had been started by a burglar.”
“So?”
“The burglar we know is the one who was selling the gun to Luthor. She had followed him from the place that he had stolen from. It was Hawkins Lab.”
“Sandy Hawkins?”
“Yeah. I looked up some stuff afterwards... It was one of his labs and all the scientists there were under not only NDAs, but most of them had their own personal security team paid for by Sandman. Whatever it was that was in there he didn't want getting out, and they're all dead now so it's not like we can ask any of them.”
He leaned back into his chair and thought. Sandy Hawkins had been dead for years now, what sense did it make bringing information like that up if it was only going to hurt the only two remaining members of the Society? They were the heroes before the rest of them had even been conceived or thought of. They were legends. What sense did it make to make their lives difficult, since whatever this thing was, was probably not even theirs. Or if it was, then it was something that had been made a long time ago
“You said this was about Jay?”
“I took some sketches of the gun to him. He got real weird about it when I told him what I'd found out.”
“Weird how?”
“He got so... so serious all of the sudden. I don't know how to explain it... He told me not to tell anyone else, but I thought you were a safe bet.”
“Was there anything else that he said?”
“Only that I keep him up to date on everything I find out... what do you think?”
Carter mulled it over in his mind, “It's hard to tell. It could have been a natural reaction for him.”
“Well, I've never seen him like that.”
“Neither have I,” He replied, “But Jay and Sandy were very close, you know.”
“They were?”
He nodded, “They made a perfect team, best friends, really. I stayed with Jay and Joan in their spare room until I could come back to the present. From what Joan told me, Sandy stayed with them for a few years prior.”
“I never knew that.”
He shrugged, “I know Jay doesn't like to talk about it. Sandy was the first of the Society to die, and I guess it was just too much to lose his best friend like that. He's just overprotective of him, I suppose.”
“It makes more sense, now of course. But I hadn't known.”
“If you had, would you have come to me for advice?”
“I dunno... probably not. It was still kind of... weird.”
“Sixth sense weird?”
“Yeah.”
He sighed, “I don't know what to tell you. Obviously we shouldn't bring it up to the League. If it was made by Sandy, then the reason was taken with him to the grave.”
The room fell into silence and he contemplated the situation. He looked across the desk to Iris, laying her head back and staring off somewhere to the shelves above. She looked weary, and for a moment he was angry with Jay for putting her through this sort of stress. Of course they wouldn't tell the League, but what could they do? They didn't have Sandy to ask what kind of device it was, and his memories of the building itself – the brief time he had been to Hawkins Industries – were vague at best.
He let his mind churn over what he knew from that time period, then came up with an answer that he felt stupid for not realizing before.
“You said that the gun came from Hawkins Industries in Gotham?”
“Yeah?” Iris looked back to him.
“I went there once.”
“You did?”
“Briefly. Sandy was working on time-travel, and thought that he could send me to the present with his devices. He said he was close to a breakthrough, but he hadn't accomplished it when the magic that had brought me to the past had reopened the gateway.”
“Wait... waitwaitwaitwait- Are you saying that Sandy was working on a time-travel device?”
“Yes.”
“When was this, though?”
He thought a moment, “Sometime in the middle of Nineteen-Fifty-Seven. It was only a few months before he had died.”
Iris got excited, “Don't you know what that means?”
He nodded, “He could have had a breakthrough after I had left. It would mean that possibly Martha isn't dead.”
“She would be trapped in the timeline! We would just need to find her!”
He hummed, “But how would we find her?”
“A lot of math, a lot of physics, and a lot of coffee.”
Mera
Steve Trevors' Apartment. Washington D.C.
2015.7.29. 8:34PM
It had been a month since she and Steve had been able to work through Magicians' Tophat. She was disappointed to find that most of it was redacted, but with copies of the Atlantean archives they were able to cross-reference many of the things that they did find.
Progress was slow since each time they met up to work on it had to be when their schedules aligned and when they were sure Kara was off-planet. There was no knowing how well Kara's super-hearing was, and she intended to not cause suspicion amongst the rest of the League.
Steve copied from both sources into what could almost be called a completed file by hand, though there was much that was missing from it. They were reading through it again when Steve groaned and let his head fall back onto the armrest of his couch.
“What's the matter?” She barely looked up from her reading.
Steve grumbled, “There's still a lot missing.”
“Well that's what happens when information gets split up.”
“We don't even know who built it. Was it WayneTech or Atlantis?” He asked.
“It wasn't built for the depths of Atlantis. It would have never worked.”
“But WayneTech doesn't seem to have much more information that Atlantis did.”
She shrugged.
Steve grabbed his notebook and placed it over his face. She thought he was going to take a nap, but after a minute he bolted straight up and sent the notebook flying across the couch.
“The information is split up!”
“We already knew that.”
He turned to her, his eyes almost wild, “Why would you want to split information up?”
“I don't know.”
“Because it's too powerful. It's why there's two keys to initiate a nuclear launch, because it's too powerful for just one person or one company to own!”
“So you think that there's another company who has the rest of the information?”
“Yeah!”
“Well, I have a list of Queen Atlanna's contacts, but there were several businesses, WayneTech was one of them. I investigated because it was too much of a coincidence to have not been them. We'd have to go through the whole list.”
“We don't have to!”
“What do you mean?”
“The Magicians' Tophat file and the Atlantean archives are about a third of the information each, which means only one other company would have the final piece.”
“And?”
“And! We know exactly who has it!”
“Do we?”
“Luthor Corp!”
“Luthor Corp?”
“Lena Luthor tried to steal the gun, remember? She must have had something to do with it, and where else would she get that information?”
“If she had her own source.”
“Which means that Luthor Corp has the final piece to all of this!”
“But how are we going to find any of it? Luthor Corp is much more secretive about their stuff than WayneTech is.”
Steve flopped back onto the couch and pondered for a minute. He pulled his laptop to him and began to type as she watched him. He sat back up and pushed the laptop to her, news articles about Lena Luthor listed in his search.
“How's this going to help us?”
“Lena must've found out about it. If there was a weapon, a powerful weapon, would you wait around for long to go and get it?”
“No, but I don't see what that has to do with this,” She gestured to the screen.
“Lena took an unexpected trip to Gotham from Seattle, where she was attending a charity ball. The only Luthor Corp building nearby is a storage facility two miles north of Lake Cavanaugh.”
“So then what? We go in and copy the plans like we did for WayneTech?”
“Well, yeah.”
They got up to prepare, and Steve was halfway out the door when a thought occurred to her, “Wait, wait.”
“What?” Steve turned.
“Do you think that Lena Luthor would have deleted the files?”
“No. Why would she?”
“To cover up her tracks. She's not new to the criminal game and she's definitely not going to leave a trail that can be followed so easily.”
“Well, she can't have deleted them. They would have included how to operate it, like ours do.”
“But maybe she took it with her, don't you think? Hidden it away.”
“Might be on a personal laptop, if she was planning to use the gun.”
“That's what she was doing, wasn't it?”
Steve hummed, “So maybe it could be in her office at Luthor Corp?”
“Unfortunately I think that her office got raided by the police when she was arrested.”
“There's not much else we can try for. We might get lucky?”
She sighed, “Well, we'll have to do it soon. Kara is getting off monitor duty in an hour.”
“Gotta make every minute count.”
It was a little difficult to approach Luthor Corp tower in the middle of the day, but it might have just been that she was being overly paranoid of everything that was happening. They dropped down from the roof to the balcony of Lena's personal office and entered. It had been tidied up after the police raid, but there were still signs that things had been taken.
“Laptop's gone.” She went to the shelf that was only half-filled with binders. Most of them were taken away as evidence.
Steve grumbled and leaned against the desk.
“Are you going to do anything?” She complained at him.
“I'm thinking.”
“Thinking isn't going to get us out of here before Kara comes Earth-side, or before we get caught red-handed.”
“Stopping and thinking is what got us here, didn't it?”
“It almost got us in Washington, if you remember correctly.”
“Still might get us to Washington, if this doesn't prove useful.”
“I know one thing that isn't proving useful.”
“What's that?”
She looked at him.
“Hey!” He frowned at her. She laughed at him and he stuck his tongue out. He went back to thinking and she went back to searching through the shelves of information. There was mostly business figures and copies of things that the police had thought to be low priority, but there was nothing there that was linked to Magician's Tophat.
“I got it.” Steve snapped his fingers. She turned to him and watched as he walked to the other side of the desk.
“What have you got?”
“There's always a secret drawer.”
“No there isn't. What's the use of having a secret drawer?”
“To hide things. You said it yourself Lena isn't new to the criminal game.” In a moment he was down under the desk searching. She came up to watch him. He banged his head on the bottom of the desk, twice, before he had found anything.
“A button,” He said softly, pressing it. There was a click and nothing else happened. Steve opened every drawer there was in the desk until they came upon one with a false bottom popped open. He grabbed a laptop from the hidden spot and opened it up.
“There's a password.” He grumbled.
“Password.” He typed as he mumbled. It was incorrect.
“Try Lena?” She suggested. He typed. It was incorrect.
He stared at the screen and she was sure that there had to be a better way to break into Lena Luthors' laptop.
Then he typed and the laptop came up to the desktop.
“What was it? The password?”
He turned to her and looked her in the eyes before flatly saying “Superwoman.”
She paused, then laughed. He searched through the contents of the laptop for a few minutes, then apparently found what it was that he was looking for. It was a file named 'Lawful Association'.
It was transferred to Steve's thumbdrive and he replaced the laptop back into the secret compartment. They left the office just as they had found it and returned to his apartment right about when Kara was getting off of monitor duty.
“I'll copy everything down and try to make sense of it.” Steve said, “I guess we'll have to go through it some other time.”
“Yeah. I'll see you when I can.”
He nodded and they parted ways.
Jay Garrick
Hawkins Mansion. Gotham Hills. New Jersey
2015.8.1. 11:59AM
He watched Alan as he crossed the room from the front door and sat down across from him with a grunt.
“You want something to drink?” Rang through the air after him.
“Can't have anything stronger than juice.” Alan grumbled, “Doctors' orders.”
Alan looked across the table expectantly, “You going to deal or what?”
He waved him off, “There's other things we need to talk about. Society business.”
“Society business.” Alan grumbled, narrowing his eyes and frowning at him, “We have poker night once a month. It's the only time we see each other.”
A glass of apple juice was set down in front of Alan. Sandy sat down at the other seat at the table, Alan thanked her and went back to grumbling.
“It's important.”
“How important can it be? You have super-speed, you could have told us any time you wanted.” He turned to Sandy, “How was your time in China, anyways?”
“The Sand-Demon strikes again.” She smiled her still-youthful smile. She was still the twenty-something when they had met her fifty years ago. “And the business meetings weren't so boring as feared.”
“It's about Hawkins' Industries.”
“The one that burnt down? I already know about that.” Sandy replied coolly, “There wasn't that much left in there except for a few prototypes. They would've all went up in the fire.”
It was his turn to grumble, “Apparently not. One of those things of yours got out.”
“Did it now?”
“The League has it. Lena Luthor stole it from the building and they intercepted it.”
“And do they know what it is?”
“No. But they might soon. They're investigating.”
“So what?” Alan interjected, “They'll look into it a little bit and then it'll probably end up in a vault somewhere collecting dust.”
“They're not going to leave it be. I know they won't. The thing caused Batwoman to disappear.”
“When'd that happen?”
“June.”
“Why didn't we hear anything about it? There's still a Batwoman, isn't there?”
“Different woman, same bat.”
“She disappeared?” Sandy asked.
“Yeah.”
“Well, I can rule out one of the ones that turns people inside out.”
“What?” Alan looked at her, “I thought that was a joke?”
“I don't joke about the outcomes of my experiments. The interns weren't happy about that particular clean-up. The cow was less happy.”
“Iris already knows that it came from your lab.”
“Iris who?” Alan asked.
“The new Flash.” He explained. “I'm not sure who else in the League knows, but Iris hasn't told anyone about it.”
Sandy pondered some, “I wonder what happened to Batwoman.”