Archive of Our Own

Sparrow’s mission was simple. Get to a clinic, find a doctor, keep zyr body (and, by extension, it’s uninvited guest) alive. It sounded so easy.

It was rather complicated by the prayers.

“... oh heavenly Father, thank thee for thine blessing…”

Sparrow’s knees were starting to ache because wow, Manny sure was out of training. He was so out of shape that he may have never been fully in it. Sparrow could literally feel about two hundred pounds of loose flesh compressing zyr kneecaps into the floor.

Xie shot a look at Manny over the curved back of the supplicant rapidly giving extended thanks at the altar. Manny, looking like a weird, frazzled victim of a cosplayers duel of honour in xyr body, just shrugged and nodded to xyr helplessly. He was clearly of the opinion it was just better to let his mother do… whatever it was she was doing.

When she’d come down as they were coming up out of the basement, Sparrow had truly thought they were sunk. She was either going to call the police or get out a gun.

Getting a beatific smile and a “Praise the Lord, my son has finally become a man!” While the cheeks of all other parties involved glowed red with horror and embarrassment, Manny’s mom had clasped her hands over a pretty gaudy looking crucifix and started giving ecstatic praises to the heavens. Then she had announced “Come, let us pray!” and hadn’t been willing to take no for an answer. She’d summarily dragged them both up to the living room to pray, seemingly not giving a moment’s thought to the fact the Sparrow’s body was clad head to toe in body armour and wearing a cowl.

With the blood on the floor and the candles everywhere down in the basement, the gods only knew what kind of kinky stuff she was assuming her son had been up to. She hadn’t seemed to notice or care about the red stains slowly seemed through the packed bandages on Sparrow’s body, but her eyes held a glittery, otherworldly light in them that told Sparrow that she might not be the most observant person in the world.

The prayer session had lasted a good twenty minutes. Both Sparrow and Manny were sweating through it, since they knew they were on a ticking clock. Sparrow was stuck though; if they caused a fuss - and the woman prostrated at the altar looking like a champion level fuss-raiser - this would take even longer. Manny-the-mediocre-mage’s face was a thousand-word picture of resignation, humiliation and despair. Clearly, this was just how his mother was.

There was more red seeping through the bandages Sparrow had slapped on xyr own hands.

“Amen,” Sparrow cut through the endless praises and genuflections loudly. “Uh, sorry… mom, but I really should get my… friend home,” xie said, trying to sound as convincing as possible. “Xie.. uh, she’s got, you know, church, in the morning.” 

The spare woman whipped around to glare at her son’s body, but appealing to her guest’s steadfast upkeep of moral hygiene did the trick. Her beady eyes relaxed and her thin face was wreathed with smiles. “Oh, of course, darling. You run along with your little friend. I’ll do midnight prayer on my own tonight.”

“Thanks mo...uh,” Manny choked as he remembered. “Thanks Ms Woodhaven. We’ll… uh, we’ll just be going now.”

“Come back any time, dear. Maybe for dinner!” Ms Woodhaven suggested brightly.

Sparrow and Manny both looked at each other in rising embarrassment and beat a nearly unseemly retreat to the garage, hastily calling back farewells as they went.

They lived in a pretty big townhouse so there was a garage with room enough for both an SUV and a van. Sparrow called Robin up for xyr first check in while Manny griped and grumbled, trying to find where he’d ditched the van keys after hustling his kidnap victims out of the garage and down into the basement.  

“What the fuck, Sparrow?” Spoiler’s angry pitch in Robin’s syntax came down the line. “I told you, check in every fifteen minutes!”

“I’m sorry!” Sparrow said hastily, feeling weird about the phone being gripped in Manny’s plump, clammy ham hands. “Manny’s mom found us trying to get out of the house.”

“Did she call the cops?”

“Worse! She started praising the lord that her son had finally become a man and dragged us both inside to pray at a home altar in thanks. It was awful! Forget blood loss, I could have died of embarrassment!”

Silence. And then “Wait a fucking minute. You’re telling me that a woman found her son in cahoots with a stranger who, out of context, looks like he shops at Madam Venom’s House Of Pain and who, in any context, looks about ten years old, and she's perfectly fine with that being her sons… rite of passage?”

There were semi-naked women painted on the side of the van. Usually that wouldn’t be strange, except the art was so hilariously bad they looked like deformed monsters. The Shining version of eroticism. It was just about the saddest thing Sparrow had ever seen. “Well, when you put it like that,” xie said slowly. “That sounds really bad.”

“No shit!” Robin said furiously. “Get the fuck out of there, Sparrow. Where’s the moron mage?"

“Getting the…” the engine roared to life. “He just got his van started. We’re heading for the clinic now.”

“Are you on speaker?”

“No,” Sparrow frowned. “Why?”

“I got a side mission for ya,” Robin said seriously. “Try to find out everything you can about that Manny fucker. You still got the knife?”

“Yeah, it’s wrapped up in my backpack.” It was a weight currently slung over one of Sparrow’s now too broad shoulders. 

“Good. Keep it away from him. If he tries to jump you, kick him in the balls and leave. We’ll track him down later if we need to. But in the meantime, just try to find out as much as you can about him.”

“Okay,” Sparrow said quietly as Manny swore at the chair adjustment levers. “But why?”

“Because that shithead is lying about something. No one, even a dumbfuck like that, tries something this fucking crazy stupid for fun. I wanna know just what the fuck he needed a gods help with. If it was just to attract girls, trust me, he’d’ve said so.”

Right. Manny wasn’t exactly the suffer in silence type but he’d been a bit vague about just what he wanted godlike powers for. World domination didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would motivate someone like him. He’d likely consider it way too much effort. “Okay, got it. I’ll try to report in by the next check in. Have you had any luck finding Gem?”

“Nah, but the Pensacola Parlour just started giving away free ice cream, so we’re starting there.”

Sparrow blinked. “What? ”

“Think about it,” xie could hear Robin’s smirk. “If you were a ten year old with godlike powers, what would you do with them?”

*

Robin hung up the phone and then cursed as he automatically tried to slip it into its pouch only to realize, once again, he was in the wrong damn body wearing the wrong damn uniform. You’d think he wouldn’t forget with his constant spasms of revulsion when something above moved where it shouldn’t or something below didn’t when it should, but hyperfocus was both a blessing and a curse right now.

All around him scores of people were happily enjoying their free ice cream in the brightly lit, never sleeping commerce district of Gotham. Suddenly he scowled. “Hey!”

Spoiler was happily munching on a huge, overloaded waffle cone, oversaturated with toppings. “What?” she said through a mouthful of ice cream. “I never get to have this much ice cream without having to spend three freaking years working it off my thighs. If I’m currently gonna be a giant slab of muscle, I’m gonna take advantage. And also,” she took another bite. “Itsth ‘ree.”

Robin rolled his eyes. ‘Number one, that’s my fucking thighs that are going to be wearing that, thank you.”

Spoiler looked at his admittedly magnificently muscled and tanned thighs, so toned you could literally bounce bullets off them. She gave him a look of withering disdain. 

“Okay, fair,” Robin didn’t miss a beat. “But, number two, that,” he jabbed a finger at her monster cone. “Ain’t free. They’re giving them away, sure, but it ain’t free. Look at the workers faces.”

Spoiler obligingly turned and looked. “They look happy enough,” she observed, puzzled.

“Just keep watching,” Robin told her. “You’ll see it in a minute.”

She kept watching and watching. Slowly the sheer creep factor in the workers smiles started dawning on her. “Holy shit!” she exclaimed. “They never fucking stop smiling!”

They didn’t. In fact, the grins stayed fixed no matter who was demanding, yelling, or complaining at them and was so unnerving that it was starting to drive people away. Gothamites had had too many run ins with Joker gas to trust a smile that manic.

“I just hope they don’t fucking know what’s going on in there. Their suppliers and the company’s franchise lawyers sure are by tomorrow and then all sorts of shit is gonna hit the windmill. Fucking magic,” Robin said grimly. “It fucks you up and makes you happy to get fucked up.”

Spoiler looked down at her guilty ice cream cone and looked sick.

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Robin reassured her. “That’s what the B-VOCA is for.”

“B-whatsit now?”

“Bat Victims Of Crime Account,” Robin absentmindedly took a cone off a dazed worker who was wandering the crowd, handing them out. “Some time tomorrow the store’ll get a neat little anonymous cash transfer, enough to cover any loss of income, tips included. Hey, punching isn’t all we do to help people in this town, you know,” he added to her shocked look.

“What the fuck, asshole?” It was so weird watching himself glare at… well, himself. “You could have told me that earlier! I nearly threw up!”

“Yeah, but that’s the lesson,” Robin said around a mouthful of salted caramel. “You really want in on this vigilante beat? You gotta think about shit like that. You beat down a mugger, you gotta think about why he’s reduced to waving guns at people in alleys. You see people handing out free stuff, yeah, you can have some, but you gotta remember that this is not some perk of the job. Someone’s getting hurt to get you this. Maybe you can’t do nothing about it, but just because you can’t doesn’t mean you get to ignore it, capiche? This job is fucking dark, even when you’re on the lighter end of the spectrum. If you don’t get mindful of the shitty ethical quagmires you’re about to sink neck deep into, if you don’t have your fucking moral ducks in a hard and immovable fucking row, well, let’s just say that you’ll probably eventually be meeting the Bat in the worst possible way. There ain’t that much difference between vigilante and villain, you feel me? You better figure out real fast which side of that line you wanna stay on and fucking commit to it. Or quit,” he shrugged.

She looked away from her own keen, sharp eyes. “I can’t do that,” she said lowly. 

“Can’t do what?” Robin asked. “Commit?”

“Quit,” Spoiler replied.

“Then stop actin’ like this is some kinda hobby,” Robin advised, digging the phone out of his… jacket front. 

“I don’t!” she protested.

“You do, kinda,” Robin retorted gently. “I mean look at this,” Robin waved to the purple, currently over-padded costume. “You hid your face, you got a good eye for having good boots in the field. But then you pretty much called it a day. Almost no armour, certainly not the kind that’d stop anything that’d kill you extra hard, no useful pockets, no extras, nothing.”

If his complexion was suited for it, she would have flushed. As it was she just snapped “Hey, rich boy! I dunno if you noticed looking at my shitty apartment, but I’m not exactly swimming in disposable income! Not all of us can afford a fucking exploding suit with fifteen damn smart phones attached!”

“Yeah, but not even a pocket knife?” he asked archly, starting to scroll on the Batphone. “A set of knuckle dusters is easy to get in this town. Or hell, you could Crime Alley-special that shit and just use a roll of dimes. A burner phone, ‘cause using your personal one’s just asking for trouble if you lose it. Come on, you’re pretty resourceful, you musta thought of this shit. You didn’t do it because you didn’t think it mattered.”

Spoiler grimaced. “I told you,” she muttered. “I’m not in this to save Gotham or whatever the hell you and the Batman do. My area of focus is really fucking narrow, okay?”

“Because Cluemaster’s your dad.”

Spoiler narrowed his own eyes at him.

“Dude, I saw your baby pictures,” Robin shrugged. “Arthur Brown’s ugly mug is all over our database. I recognized him.”

“Well, fuck,” she kicked a wadded up napkin irritably. “Is this the part where you laugh at me? Because I’m pretty sure I could break your jaw with one of these things,” she shook a huge, bunch up fist in his face.

“You’d be breaking your own jaw, genius,” Robin neatly blocked her. “And I’m the last fucking person in the world who’d give someone shit over having a shitty father, ‘kay? Mine was an asshole. At least yours is an interesting asshole. My old man wasn’t even that. He was just a shitty, violent drunk.”

“Oh,” Spoiler looked shocked. “Wow. I thought the Bat was, like, your dad.”

Robin felt his borrowed face twist weirdly. “Sort of? He is my mentor, I guess. Me and B are kinda complicated, but I guess you could say he’s responsible for me.”

“Not your mom?”

“She’s out of the picture,” Robin replied. “Has been for a while.”

“Sorry.”

Robin shrugged, going back to his tracking - which for now was limited to electronic. Good thing about Gotham, though, was that there was no end of people willing to take photos of weird shit. “Hey,” he smirked and held up the phone. “How about a little trip down to the carousel at Istley Reserve?”

Spoiler looked at the photos he showed her. “Holy shit!”

The phone rang. She handed it back. “Red tone again,” she reported.

“Sparrow, what’s the sitch?” Robin’s frown deepened when he heard the answer. “You’re learning to what now?”

*

“Drive,” Sparrow replied grimly, trying to ignore exasperated horns going off around xyr. “Manny’s feet can’t reach the pedals because this rust bucket’s seat adjusters are in about as good a shape as the engine.”

Clutch, stick, arg, where was the stupid gear?

“Will you stop that?” Manny shouted from the rear, where he’d swooned in despair. Sparrow had told him to prop his feet up on the back door but otherwise been forced to deal with transport. “You’re stripping the gears!”

“I’ll call you back,” Sparrow said irritably over the sound of Robin’s muffled snorts over the height issue and hung up. Cars were just straight up slaloming around the van now.

Sparrow sighed internally. In theory xie knew how to drive. Xie liked to be prepared for any eventuality and had calculated the likelihood of having to a) drive an ambulance or b) commandeer transport for one of xyr patients. Xie’d designed a transport vehicle but hadn’t gotten around to actually building it because making xyr armour and the rest of her field equipment took priority and there was only so much abuse of xyr parents company’s fabrication department xie could reasonably hide. Sparrow’s parents were largely absent from xyr life, but they were on the ball when it came to the company. Xie had to be very, very careful not to tip them off to xyr semi-illegal hobby. 

But anyway, driving. Xie’d prepared for the reality of it as much as xie had been able. Xie’d read the road rules and absorbed as much information about the art as possible, but driving games weren’t the greatest real life simulations of actual driving and it’s not like xie could borrow one of the cars and do practice doughnuts at the Estate. Xyr parents were sure to notice that.

The reality of getting this clapped out hunk of junk to move was far more difficult than anticipated. At this rate it was going to take hours to get to what was literally the next borough. 

Time they didn’t have. Sparrow gritted xyr teeth and kept pressing the gas.

“Oh my god,” Manny moaned in the back. “I feel sick. Everything’s going dark!”

Sparrow risked death by taking xyr eyes off the road. “Stay with me, Manny!”

“I can’t breathe!” he wheezed, xyr own voice wobbly and shrill. 

Sparrow breathed out through xyr nose. Manny was panicking… again. Hopefully. “Check the phone screen. Tell me what the big numbers up top say. Can you do that?”

“Ummm….” Manny fumbled for it. “There’s a ninety five and a sixty five. Oh god, that’s low isn’t it? That’s low! I’m gonna die!”

“Yes, it’s low, and no it is not low enough to kill you,” Sparrow’s firm voice cut across his panic. “That’s only a little bit lower than what I normally am. Relax, you’re not losing volume like you’ve punctured an artery. It’s a slow bleed, this stupid knife curse. Lucky us,” xie added in a mutter.

“Are you sure? That seems low to me!” Manny said hysterically.

“Yes, I’m sure,” Sparrow tried not to snap. “My pressure is normally lower than average anyway.”

“What? Why?”

“Because a) I’m pretty young,” xie confessed like it was some guilty secret. “And b) I’m an athlete. Ergo, my pressure is lower than normal. Which is, actually, kinda normal. Just relax. The faster your heart beats the faster the blood gets pumped out.”

Manny moaned again. 

Sparrow tried the clutch, stick, gas combo again. It might be xyr imagination, but the routine appeared to be getting a bit smoother. Xie was still banging xyr hands against things and hitting the pedals way too hard. This body was big. Xie felt hulking and clumsy in it.

The… shapes and various other differences felt… weird. Like, xie knew there were things missing. There were also things emphatically there that xie couldn’t ignore. The changes were discomfiting. 

And inconvenient. Every time xie twisted or moved some way xie knew xyr body could actually move, because of gymnastics and other training xie’d done, xie was continually frustrated by the fact that Manny’s body couldn’t . He wasn’t in shape and xie couldn’t make the heft of the body keep up with xyr usual lightning quick reflexes. The feeling of the wobbling flesh was actually more disconcerting than whatever was going on between xyr legs right now, frankly. 

“Oh my god, I feel cold! I’m feeling cold! Is that normal?” Manny piped up shrilly from the back.

“Tap the red icon at the bottom of the screen,” Sparrow ordered crisply. “Then hold the phone up to your forehead like you’re trying to take a selfie of it.”

“Okay, okay,” Manny choked. He had one saving grace - hysteria made him compliant. There was a familiar beep from the back.

“Reading?” Sparrow prompted impatiently as xie took a corner at the speed of an arthritic sloth. 

“Uh… the numbers say 98.4,” he read.

“That’s fine,” Sparrow said. “You’re fine.”

“I’m not fine!” he wailed. “I’m dying here! ”

Sparrow slammed on the brakes trying not to hit any other cars. “Look, could you,” xie cast around for something, anything, to distract him. “Tell me about your mom,” xie tried. “What’s her deal?”

“What do you mean?” Good. He sounded resentful and defensive, but thankfully, not panicked.

“Like, what is up with her?” Sparrow asked, genuinely curious. “She’s a bit… weird.”

“She’s not weird,” Manny protested, but his defense was halfhearted. 

 “Manny, her first reaction to seeing her son come up from the basement with a child size person in what looked like high end bondage gear was to assume you had somehow,” Sparrow felt Manny’s cheeks go red. “... passed some rite of passage into manhood, the details of which I don’t even want to think about, and then drag you and your ‘date’ - once again, child size and seemingly in bondage gear - into a frankly alarming large home altar and pray for almost half an hour. I dunno what your idea of,” Sparrow abruptly wrenched the wheel as they skidded around an intersection to blaring horns. “... normal is, but that isn’t it.”

“She's just like that sometimes,” Manny admitted in a resigned voice. “She got, like, super involved in the Lightfoots after the divorce.”

“The what?”

“Lightfoots,” Manny made a face. “Pastor Lightfoot? They’re this big tent revival thingamie type church.”

Sparrow made a face. “You mean those guys who do snake handling and faith healing and stuff?”

“Snake handling no,” Manny replied. “Faith healing? Big yes. The power of the lord commands you to be well!” he chanted, which was weird to hear in xyr own voice. “Lots of that. I went a couple of times,” Manny grimaced. “The food was good.” Was the best he could do for a positive recommendation. Clearly he hadn’t seen the same light as his mother had.

“And your mom’s into that sort of thing?” That was… well, between his father’s apparently full working magical witch doctor whatever practice and his mother’s church, Sparrow was beginning to see how Manny got messed up enough to dream up some half baked kidnapping plot and an equally ill-planned problem solving workshop with an ancient Babylonian god. Even with the odd, fuzzy feeling on Sparrow’s current physical lips, Manny wasn’t old. Older than xyr, older than Robin, but still young. The more time xie spent in his company the more it dawned on xyr that he was emotionally a lot younger than he seemed.

“Since the divorce, yeah,” Manny said gloomily, his emotional issues briefly eclipsing his physical panic. “She goes to every meeting, day and night. She completely buys the whole schtick, you know?”

“You don’t,” Sparrow pointed out.

“That shitty pastor has got porcelain caps on his teeth,” he muttered resentfully. “Like, what’s that? Five hundred large? Mom keeps giving that con our money and he sure ain’t spending it on the poor!”

“What about your dad?” Sparrow pressed, watching him keenly through the rear view mirror (before momentarily jolting back into the lane they were supposed to be in).

Xyr face made a complicated series of expressions. It was off putting to see xyr face contorting like that. “Who cares,” Manny snapped angrily. “He went and fucked off after the divorce, didn’t he? Him and his shitty, weirdo friends are going off and have a gay old time,” his tone was bitter as unripe crabapples. “Dancing naked under the moonshine or whatever shit he does. It’s all very well for him. Mom wouldn’t have doubled down on the stupid church if he hadn’t left her! This is his fault!”

Huh. Xie seemed to have struck a nerve. Manny-the-mage’s home life was a source of anger and pain. Xie carefully filed away that information. Robin was of the opinion this was more personal than teenage dumbassery and hormones; Sparrow wasn’t going to disagree with him.

“Okay, okay,” Sparrow said soothingly. “Try to stay calm, okay? You really don’t have any idea where your dad is?” Sparrow asked hopefully, because it would, quite frankly, solve a tonne of problems.

“No,” Manny said irritably. “I don’t exactly pick up the phone when he calls.”

Sparrow added ‘father still trying to stay in contact’ to xyr list. It seems the opposition to his company was more on Manny’s or his mom’s side - not quite the deadbeat dad abandonment Manny had painted it as.

Sparrow, mindful of the sullen silence emanating from the back, stopped pressing for information and focused on the roads. Just as well, because the route turned into the twisty turns of an older Gotham, one that had been around before the advent of the automobile, and definitely before this clapped out hulk of a van.

The roads weren’t busy. They also weren’t real well lit. 

“Are we there yet?” Manny whined. “I feel all weird again. Oooooh, I might actually throw up!”

Sparrow rolled xyr eyes. “Actually,” xie peered at what street numbers were available. “I think so.”

Xie pulled up at the first space that didn’t actually require xyr to fumble through parallel parking. It was in front of a fire hydrant but this place wasn’t likely to use it, even if it was needed. Xie killed the ignition hauled xyrself out of the driver's seat, flailed as xie landed on the sidewalk because xyr legs were too long and then stumbled around to get the doors open at the back.

“Come on, Manny,” Sparrow tried to inject some cheer into xyr voice. “The doctor’s right across the street.”

“I can’t,” Manny moaned dramatically, sprawled out in the back. “I’m all dizzy. I’m not gonna make it!”

“What do you expect me to do, carry you?” Sparrow asked incredulously.

“Well, you’re a guy now,” Manny pointed out. “You got all the upper body strength you need.”

“Yeah, but you don’t,” Sparrow flexed one arm, ripples of pudge dangling in the flickering streetlights. “Come on, just work with me a little here. I’m not leaving you in the back of the van. We’re in the middle of the Bowery. Bad things happen to abandoned kids here.”

Manny was out of the van and on the street so fast he almost broke the sound barrier. “The Bowery?” he shrieked. “Why the hell are we in the Bowery? It’s the Bowery!” he announced, as if both Sparrow and the local denizens were somehow unaware of the fact.

“That’s where the doctor is,” Sparrow slammed the doors shut. “Come on, it’s just across the street,”

“But my van!” Manny wailed, grabbing the bumper. “She won’t be here when we get back!”

It was true, but “Manny, it’s the van or your life! Literally!”

Manny looked down at his too small hands miserably. Red was seeping through the layers of gauze Sparrow had wrapped them in. “This is the worst moment of my life,” he mumbled, defeated.

Sparrow patted him on xyr own shoulder. “At least you’ve still got one, and will continue to if you keep cooperating with me. Come on.”

They made their way to the clinic, tucked deep into an alleyway no one sane would venture into, even in daylight. 

Then they ran across another complication.

“I take it back,” Manny wailed. “This is the worst moment of my life!”

Sparrow took xyr phone back from Manny with a sinking feeling in her chest. “Robin, it’s me,” xie said without preamble when it connected. “We’ve got a little problem here.”

*

“She’s not there?” Robin repeated, aghast. He pushed an inquisitive nose gently away as it snorted in his ear.

“The sign says she’ll be back Thursday,” Sparrow reported dismally. “And says to try at the Row Street free clinic if it’s an emergency. I don’t think we can go there; all they’re likely to do is suture the wounds and that won’t help.”

Damn, damn, damn, Robin thought to himself. Not that she didn’t deserve one, but Doc Thompkins had picked a hell of a time to go on vacation. 

Another snort in his ear. Robin pushed the nose away again irritably. “Shit. You might have to try for the free clinic and just fucking hang out in the waiting room. If Manny keels over, they won’t ignore it.” Hopefully, he added in his head, fingers crossed. 

“They’ll unmask me,” Sparrow replied, for the first time sounding close to his age.

“Yeah, I know. It sucks,” Robin scrubbed his hair, feeling useless. This situation was stupendously shitty. “Look, just, head in that direction, okay? I’ll make some calls. Maybe I can find another option for you. Or shoot, Maybe BG has found that fuckers father by now and he can fix this mess. You on speaker?”

“No,” Sparrow said quietly. “Manny can’t hear.”

“Did you get anything?” Robin asked equally quietly.

“Trouble on the domestic front,” Sparrow reported. “Sounds like it was an ugly divorce. Dad is the named bad guy, but I think most of that world view comes from mom, and mom didn’t seem all that… mentally stable. I’m not in any way an expert, but I could see there being a real possibility of some kind of histrionic personality disorder or maybe late onset schizophrenia. She was on some other planet.”

And that, right there? That might be the stressor that sent an ill-prepared and purposeless young man hieing off into the dark and dangerous realms of using magic to fix one's problems. Mind you, Robin thought as he shifted and tried, once again, to ignore the weirdness on his chest, that didn’t necessarily win Manny-the-moron-mage a sympathy vote. A somewhat pitiful motive did not mitigate dumbassery this terminal. “That’s great, Sparrow. That’s what we need, little bits and pieces like that. Keep in mind we still don’t know what the fuck is going on here, not really.”

“Any luck with Gem?” Sparrow asked anxiously.

“We’re definitely on the right track,” Robin pushed away another curious nose. 

“Robin,” Sparrow said quietly. “I… don’t have any evidence,” he prefaced uncertainly. “But… I think Manny knows more about his dad’s whereabouts than he saying. It’s nothing in particular. Just a feeling.”

“Yeah, that’s called instinct, kid,” Robin nodded. “Though I personally think of it as a bullshit meter. Moron-Manny doesn’t strike me as someone who gives much thought to the consequences of his actions. It might not hit him that we need to fucking find a real mage if he wants to go on living until he can’t pretend shit ain’t happening anymore. Keep an eye on him. If he starts to sweat, step into him. He hasn’t got time to be an idiot, and neither do you.”

“Got it. Whoops, gotta go!”

“Call back in… oh, fuck you, you little midget,” Jason hung up the phone. 

Something snorted in his ear again.

It was a horse.

It had all the normal trapping of a member of the horsey kingdom. Four hooves, tail, mane, dish shaped face with a look of slightly baffled suspicion.

It was also, not to put too fine a point on it, cotton candy pink.

It also had an eerily gross looking, excessively frilly and decorative rococo pole sticking out of it’s back. 

“This,” Spoiler said, absently patting a powder blue one. “Is really fucking creepy.”

“So fucking creepy,” Robin agreed, watching the loose herd roam, poles wavering like flagposts in the breeze, among the fascinated crowds in the reserve. Beyond them the famous century old carousel that usually drew people here sat, a roof and a floor and not a thing in between.

“My mom used to take me on that thing when I was little,” Spoiler said sadly, apropos of nothing. 

Robin shook himself. “I’m gonna scour the grounds. You start chatting to people, see if anyone saw our missing girl and how long ago.”

Spoiler looked uneasy. “I’ve never interrogated anyone before. Shouldn’t you be doing that? This whole investigation stuff is kinda your thing.”

“Yeah, but right now you are Robin,” Robin shrugged. “They don’t know Spoiler from a hole in the ground, but Robin? Robin’s got a good rep. Batman and Robin save people and citizens remember that. People in this town trust us enough to talk. Just be polite, tell ‘em you’re looking for a missing girl, give a description. Remember to mention she might be bleeding, people tend to notice that sort of thing when it’s a kid. Sparrow and Gem are both on a ticking clock. Any information we get is less time we run around chasing our tails.”

Spoiler’s expression firmed over Robin’s jaw. “Okay.”

Robin left her to it, and started doing a quadrant by quadrant grid search. Staring from the carousel and spiralling outwards. Looking for blood drops. It was possible the kid had bound up her cursed injury, but listening to what Sparrow told him, it wouldn’t do much good for long. The bleeding was, in Sparrow’s words, ‘slow, but relentless’.

Robin was gearing up to kick Mister Meathead Mage Manny right in his fucking balls, the very minute the guy had his own back. 

He poked his ear, cursed as he remembered he had no easy, breezy comm system anymore and tapped a commline code into the phone. 

“How’s your night going, kiddo?” Batgirl picked up on the first ring.

Robin wordlessly took a shot of a peach and orange monstrosity of a horse and uploaded it to her.

Silence. Then “Holy horse of a different colour!”

“BG, seriously? Nightdick’s out of town and we don’t need to fill the ‘painfully awful exclamations of surprise’ niche that badly,” Robin grumped.

“Sorry, force of habit,” Batgirl was clearly grinning. “Is it bad I kind of want to come down there and ride one? Dad used to take me to that carousel all the time.”

“My mom too, but as nice as this whole childhood fantasy come to life is, I got one kid and one kid-vigilante who are gonna wave bye-bye to vital signs if we can’t find someone who can deal with a freaking cursed knife, as if Gotham isn’t cursed enough. Did you find our guy?”

“Not yet,” Batgirl sobered. “ Josef Caliente is not an easy man to find. He had plenty of records up until about two years ago - financial, not criminal,” she clarified. “Ran a new age bookshop which sold various and sundry, probably dealt in magical artefacts on the side. B had a notation on him, but if they don’t cause trouble, B tends to leave the fringe communities alone. Caliente appears to have been the sensible kind of practitioner - he kept his head down, practiced very quietly and was careful not to get into shady deals with any of the criminal elements. Actually, from what I can tell, his business was a legit, honest concern. He turned a respectable profit off mostly mundane sales.”

“But he sold the business, right?” Robin asked shrewdly even as he scoured. “Sparrow’s been getting some info from our wouldn’t-be mage. Apparently he went through a messy divorce.”

“Messy divorce is one way to put it,” Batgirl agreed. “Total annihilation is another. You should see some of the filings his wife lodged with the court. She cited all kinds of moral and spiritual depravities in the fight over assets, and in the custody fight too. Custody took the longest, Caliente didn’t fold easily. Unfortunately his wife could afford a better lawyer. She got the lot; every last penny, and the kid. After that Caliente was a nowhere to be found. He lived in a couple of crummy SRO’s in the Alley area and then moved into various house shares. The constant court battles meant he was forced to take night work, mostly casual employment. He’s got no credit card, his bank statements are all over the place. He’s getting paid by a company called Lunalux Entertainment LLC, which seems to be a small-fry nightclub entertainment service. I went to the place where his checks are being mailed and it’s basically an illegal warehouse boarding house for street walkers and the like. A couple of the people there also work for Lunalux but they claimed to have never heard of a Josef Caliente. I’m looking into the corporate filing to see if it’s a front for something, but in the meantime Caliente is in the wind. There’s some charges on his statements that indicate he has female company he’s buying clothes and cosmetics for. Some of his online shopping has stuff being shipped to an address in Robbinsville under the name Primrose Hexe. The name is so new on the Gotham city hall record it’s practically still wet which leads me to believe she’s an entertainer of some sorts. I’m heading there now to see if I can find her and ask her about Caliente's whereabouts. She's the only person I can see he's been in any sort of regular contact with.”

There! Robin crouched down on the paved walkway. He’d need the luminol from his field kit to confirm, but that definitely looked like blood. No way to know if it was from their girl, but given that no one else was bleeding in the vicinity, odds were good. “If we can’t find Caliente, I need you to call in the big guns,” Robin winced to say it and at the thought of his upcoming reaming out, as well as general humiliation, but the fact that he’d literally never live this down wasn’t enough to make him want to put Sparrow’s life in any more danger, or the lost kid's for that matter.

“Understood,” Batgirl agreed. “Relax kid, the embarrassment won’t last as long as you dread it will.”

Robin sighed and hung up. 

“Hey, Robin?” Spoiler came shuffling up to him. “I think I have something.”

“Yeah, me too,” Robin gestured to the blood. “Maybe. Any eyewitnesses?”

“Yeah,” Spoiler brightened. “A couple of people said they saw a girl wearing a pink and white peony dress and white shoes hanging around the park. She rode the carousel and was, apparently, still on it when, well, this happened,” she gestured to the multicoloured group of creepy horses. “According to the witnesses she was one of the few kids actually having a good time riding an actual horse. It scared the shit out of most of them. I spoke to one guy, he said he grabbed her down off her horse after he’d gotten his own kids off and asked her where her parents were. It was only then she burst into tears; he noticed it because that seemed really backwards to him. She yelled something like ‘sand cat’ he said, which he didn’t understand, and then she ran off. Oh, and he did notice she was bleeding from a wound on her arm.”

Robin’s brow wrinkled. “Sand cat?”

“That’s what he said,” Spoiler nodded. “She was crying pretty hard at the time, so maybe what she meant to say was messed up.”

“So… riding a suddenly alive horse is fun,” Robin mused. “But talking about her parents is a no go? Maybe she’s a runaway?”

“I’m pretty sure she’s not a street kid,” Spoiler mused. “I mean, she looked pretty clean from what I saw of her when that weird magical mindmeld happened. Plus, I looked up the dress online,” Spoiler waved her phone. “It’s from a new spring line, high end kids fashion outlet, the kind that has boutiques in the Diamond District. It is not cheap. So she’s not from poor circumstances and if she’s a runaway it must have been very recent.”

“Look at you!” Robin grinned. “You’re getting the hang of the detective thing. Well done!”

“What, you think I’m right?” Spoiler looked inordinately pleased, which softened the line of Robin’s jaw.

“That’s all detectiving is, kid,” Robin shrugged. “Having an idea and then testing it to see if it’s right. If she’s from the richy-rich spectrum, I bet someone has put out an amber alert.” He tapped something into the Batphone. “Huh. Or not, apparently.”

“What, nothing?” Spoiler’s eyebrows went up.

“Nope, no missing females matching that description,” Robin frowned. “Which is not a good sign. Either she literally got snatched minutes after she ran or whoever supposed to be taking care of her just hasn’t noticed yet. No parent in their right mind in Gotham wouldn’t know where their kids are this late in the night.”

“She only started crying after someone said parents,” Spoiler said sadly. “Maybe they’re the shitheel variety.”

That was grimly probable. Well, good news was that if they could find her they might be able to do something about that. “Which way did your eyewitness say she went?”

“Oh,” Spoiler’s face gave a weird grimace. “I know which way she went.”

The strangeness of her face was explained when they went further into the park, past the carousel and found the woman.

She was dressed in a fancy maroon dress from what looked like the Victorian era, complete with hat and gloves, and she was also twirling a parasol. Her face had the manic, fixed smile that the ice cream parlour workers had had, her eyes disconnected and dull, her movements as natural as an animatronic statue 

“Okay?” Robin hesitated. “Now what?”

“I think I know this one,” Spoiler murmured. She stepped into the woman’s immediate sightline.

“What is ahead of you, but can never be seen?” the woman asked.

“The future,” Spoiler replied promptly. 

The woman jerkily pointed down the left fork, parasol twirling away.

Spoiler turned to Robin. “Come on. This way, I guess?”

“What the fuck was that?” Robin asked, baffled.

“She’s one of the Guides of Knowhere,” Spoiler said quietly. “It’s like this… picture book, it’s kind of a choose your own adventure type thing, where you have to solve puzzles and stuff. My dad wrote it,” she added leadenly. 

“Arthur Brown wrote a kids book?” Robin’s eyebrows shot up under Spoiler’s face mask.

Spoiler grimaced. “Yeah. A long time ago.”

They continued down the path towards the streets beyond in silence for a while. Robin kept a weather eye out for blood drops, and he did find one or two telltale ruby marks. They were just lucky the park wasn’t very busy this time of night so there was no one to trample over them and fuck up the trail.

“He wasn’t always like that, you know,” Spoiler muttered eventually. “Cluemaster, I mean. He used to be a local big shot entertainer.”

“The Cluemaster. As in, the game show host,” Jason said neutrally. “Yeah, I know.”

“He used to make a lot of money,” Spoiler’s voice got softer. “I remember living in a townhouse when I was really little. I had one of those beds, you know, with the curtains all around? And I remember we had a big Christmas tree one year. Like, huge.”

“So, what happened?” Robin asked.

Spoiler shrugged. “The industry changed. Who watches game shows anymore? I mean, a couple of the really big ones kept going, but some crummy little local joint? No chance. Brown hated that. It wasn’t losing the job that really got to him, though. He hated losing the audience. He always needs to be the fucking smartest guy in the room, even though he’s manifestly the biggest dumbass you will ever meet. As if memorizing weird facts and puzzles makes you somehow wise.”

Robin glanced down at her fisted hands. He was willing to bet that under his gloves the tendons were in stark relief over his knuckles. “I don’t get it,” he said abruptly. “Are you spoiling his plans to keep him out of jail?”

“Fuck no,” Spoiler spat furiously. “I want that fucker to go to jail and fucking stay there, for once. Only, he’s not classified as a violent offender, right, because his stupid games aren’t usually, like, intended to cause mass harm. Usually he just does it to challenge the Bat.”

“So he’s on the rehab roundabout,” Robin sighed. It was one of those things he couldn’t quite get, and one place where he couldn’t agree with B. B was all about rehabilitating people but Robin was a lot more dubious about people having the capacity - or the desire - to change.

“Yep,” Spoiler was gloomy as they hit the road at the edge of the park. “In, then out. In, then out.”

“And your mom keeps taking him back?” Robin asked incredulously. “She seems like a real sensible lady.”

“Oh, she doesn’t,” Spoiler shook the head she currently had. “Not anymore. The first few times she gave it a try, we both did, but… he never fucking changes. He doesn’t care about us; he wants applause from the audience and we’re a shitty one in his not-humble opinion. She gave up… and so did I,” she threw up her hands.

“So you and your mom disowned him,” Robin tried to map this situation. “It doesn’t sound to me like he’s all that interested in being in your life, either. So, why the big crusade?”

“Because he keeps getting out!” Spoiler replied, seething with old anger. “He gets to trot out the ‘I just want to be a good dad’ lie to the parole board every time, waving my picture like he even knows what’s going on in my life, or even fucking cares. And they keep buying it! They keep fucking buying it! Out he pops through the revolving door, pretending to be an upstanding citizen for about five seconds before it’s back to the same shitty-ass egomaniacal dumbassery that keeps getting him in trouble. And usually I’d be happy to let him fuck off and keep getting his ass kicked because, hey, asshole, serves you right, but people keep finding out. About mom and me,” she viciously kicked a discarded can, watching it skitter into the far distance. "How we're related to him."

“You know what it's like going to school and having everyone know you’re the daughter of a fucking villain? What the other kids, who lose people to the Joker and Scarecrow and shit, think of someone like me?” Spoiler asked furiously. “I might as well be a fucking leper. On a good day, everyone from the teachers downwards just pretends I don’t exist… on a good day,” she repeated grimly, indicating these were rare. “The only reason mom can even hold down a job is ‘cause turnover in a Gotham slaughterhouse ER is so rife they’ll take Jack the Ripper as long as he shows up to a shift. That asshole doesn’t even bother to see us and he still manages to ruin our lives every time he’s running around like a demented mental patient, as if he could ever actually match wits with the Bat.”

“So, you spoil his plans,” Robin summarized. “The Spoiler. You’re fucking him up any way you can.”

“I know it’s pathetic,” Spoiler admitted. “But I’m so fucking angry about it, all the time! The courts can’t do shit and thanks to Cluelessmaster’s putting his game show winnings into a Cayman Island account where mom can’t use it to show he needs to at least pay child support, we haven’t got the money to move out of this hellmouth while he’s set for life! Do you know what that fucker has bought with that money? He bought a fucking blimp!”

“What?” Robin gaped. “Why? What the fuck he is gonna do with a blimp?”

“Fucked if I know,” Spoiler shrugged. “But he’s got one, squirreled away somewhere. We can’t touch him,” she said gloomily. “The ‘justice’ system barely gets in his way. He’s got it good. Fucking up his stupid clue trails were the only way I ever found that could actually hurt him. He fucking hates it when one of his plots goes all wrong. The applause high only works if the game works. And really? I’m better at playing his games than anyone else on earth. I’m better than him at them. He hates that too. Or would, if he’d ever bothered to even notice me. Anyway,” Spoiler shook her too-big body. “Sorry for dumping all over you.”

“Shit, I get it,” Robin told her. “Sometimes the only person you can really talk to about putting on a mask is some other guy in a mask. We’re all angry misfit weirdos.”

“Including the Bat?” Spoiler raised an eyebrow.

“Dude, he’s our fucking king.”

Spoiler snorted a laugh.

“Oh, hello,” Robin looked down the road leading from the park.

There was a man there, in a ridiculous yellow top hat and frock coat. He swung an old fashioned pocket watch on a chain in a lazy circle, his face calcified into a benign, vapid mask of amusement. “Only those that can find the key can go through the door,” he announced as they approached. 

At his feet was what looked like a sudoku puzzle, drawn in chalk.

“Okay,” Robin asked quietly. “Give me the skinny on how this picture book thingie of your old man’s worked.”

“It was basically a book and a game in one,” Spoiler explained. “The ‘you’ kid wanders into the woods blah, blah, and you meet these characters, like him,” she jerked a chin at Top Hat. “The Guides. Each Guide had a puzzle, or a riddle, or a problem, like that. You gave the right answer and you’d be directed to a new page somewhere in the book. You give the wrong answer, it would send you to another page in the book. The goal was to get to the end. The more wrong answers the longer it took.”

“Quickest route was how many?” Robin asked shrewdly. 

“Seven Guides,” Spoiler replied easily.

“Longest?”

“About twenty five.”

Robin groaned. “So I’m guessing if the kid is recreating her favourite book, we need to get the answers right or we’re going to be running all over Gotham all night?”

“Relax,” Spoiler grinned, showing Robin’s gleaming canines. “This bit of crazy vigilante shit I totally got.” She picked up a piece of chalk and began scribbling without pause.

Robin had to admit, she was fast. Faster than him, and he’d been trained in this kind of problem solving.

Still, the night was wearing on, there was telltale blood of the pavement and Robin was grimly aware that the clock was ticking.

“Where the fuck is this kid going?” he muttered to himself, drawing out the Batphone. He meant to start a system search, seeing if they could bypass the crazy-magical picture book come to life, but it rang instead. “Sparrow? How’d you go with the hospital?”

“Uh," said Sparrow. “Well…”

Wait a second, that was Sparrow’s actual voice; in the body Sparrow was no longer occupying. “Hey Dickbag, put Sparrow on the phone,” Robin growled.

“Uh… hi there, Batman. Uh yeah, everything’s going just fine at the moment, yeah. We’re totally fine.”

Robin stared at the phone.

*

“What the actual fuck are you talking about? Put Sparrow on! NOW!” 

Sparrow winced as the now came through pretty loud and clear. The guy holding the gun on xyr ineptly while the van swayed around corners scowled and jabbed it at Sparrow menacingly, the threat absolutely crystal clear.

“SorrybitbusyrightnowgottagoBYE!” Manny squealed in a rush into the phone and jabbed the end call button with a bloody finger. Sparrow needed to change his dressings soon. The ones xie’d slapped on were soaked through and wet. 

Xie hoped it was xyr imagination, but the bleeding seemed to be getting worse. Maybe the curse just kept getting stronger the longer it went on.

Sadly, it wasn’t their biggest concern right now. The gang member and his crony sitting in the back of the van holding them at gunpoint kind of was. The van burped and shuddered it’s way deeper into the Bowery, helmed by a third gang member.

“We better not have a Bat on our tail,” the gang leader snarled menacingly. “I can put you both down cold before that fucker can knock my teeth out.”

“He isn’t, I swear!” Manny squealed in a voice that made Sparrow want to groan in second hand embarrassment. Xie knew it didn’t actually matter, but xie’d worked hard to get a rep for professionalism in a crisis, dammit.

“You idiot,” xie muttered. “Why the heck did you jump in the van? What were you gonna do, wrestle it away from three assailants and cuff them?”

“But it’s my van,” Manny replied sullenly. “Mine.”

“Hey, this van’s yours?” the gang leader suddenly looked more interested. “Hey, does it got them rocket launcher things the Bat has? Shoot peeps, this rusted out old clunker might net us more than we thought!” He seemed almost cheerful.

“No you won’t,” Sparrow said grimly. “It’s my van. And it’s a shitbox.”

“Hey…” Manny protested feebly.

“And Sparrow was just doing his job, right? Trying to protect people from criminals?” she shot Manny a diamond tipped stare.

It suddenly seemed to occur to Manny that he was in the wrong body once again. “Oh. Oh, uh, right. Protecting the citizens and… stuff.”

Sparrow wanted to facepalm.

The gang leader narrowed his eyes at them. “You’re pretty fucking shit at this vigilante thing, loser.”

“Hey!” Manny protested, all affront. “I’m not that bad at it!”

“Fucker, I once got arrested by Robin,” the gang leader snorted. “Little fucker took me out with a spin kick to the head. It was kinda awesome, though I don’t really remember much of it. I was a viral video once!” he seemed almost proud of it. “The little fucker could fight. He didn’t just hang on to a bumper until the guys let him into the stolen car while his fat fucker boyfriend nearly gave hisself a heart attack trying to chase.”

“Hey!” Manny repeated.

“Trust me, I know I’m overweight,” Sparrow assured them, ignoring Manny’s outraged look. Xie was very aware of it in this moment, actually. Xie usually had full confidence in how fast xie could move. Manny’s pudgy body felt like a weighted suit, rendering xyr clumsy and imprecise. Uncertainty wasn’t a helpful feeling when you were faced with possibly having to actually disarm someone.

The van swayed again. The driver wasn’t being particularly careful about corners.

“Oy, you got anything yet?” The gang leader asked his fellow member who had confiscated Sparrow’s precious medical backpack and was busy trying to work out how to unfold the many pockets and rolls in it. 

“I got first aid shit,” gang member number two made a face. “There’s a couple of weird tube things and… uh, there’s some needles. Hey,” he shot a glare at Sparrow. “Where’s the good stuff?”

“Good stuff?” Manny quavered.

“You know, painkillers and shit! Paramedics carry that shit!”

“I don’t know!” Manny waved xyr hands frantically. “Check!”

They both sent Manny odd looks. “You don’t know? How could you not fucking know?”

“Uh… well, u-uh,” Manny fumbled.

“Don’t be stupid, it’s not like Sparrow has access to morphine!” Sparrow jumped in. “That’s a restricted substance. There’s probably only, like, ibuprofen.”

The gang members both stared at xyr. “Fucker, what fucking town to you live in? I can get that shit on any street corner!”

“Legally, I mean,” Sparrow rolled Manny’s eyes. “Masks are supposed to be upholding the law. With one giant catch, of course.”

“Fuck, you mean we got fucking nothing?” gang leader’s face screwed up. "What the fuck are we keeping you two for, anyway?”

“Hold up,” gang member number two’s face cleared. “Check out this shit!” He withdrew a packet tightly wound in bandages, which he unwrapped to reveal a long, heavy knife. It gleamed sinisterly in the low light of the van.

“Holy shit! Jackpot,” gang leader grinned nastily. “That’s a nice fucking knife!”

Manny and Sparrow shared a look of mutual panic.

“Put that back!” Manny burst out in terror. “That thing is really dangerous! Seriously, put it away!”

He squealed as the gang leader snatched the knife and jabbed it right up into his current face, tip hovering dangerously next to the pale skin right at the juncture of Sparrow’s jaw where there was no armour. “Seems to me it's supposed to be dangerous, asshole!”

“Oh my god,” Manny shrieked. “Please don’t kill me! You wouldn’t kill a girl, would you?”

Sparrow sent him a look of sheer consternated appall. One, because he was using xyr body to pull the most pathetic and embarrassing wounded gazelle gambit ever and two, because he seemed genuinely convinced that it would actually work.

So this is what it’s like to die of humiliation, though Sparrow dismally. 

The gang leader, predictably, burst out laughing. “Holy shit, the bondage freak is a girl! An actual girl,” the knife wavered next to Manny’s chin, causing him to swallow heavily. “And she actually believes that losing pretty white girls isn’t Gotham’s number one industry.” He leered into Manny’s stark white face. “I know a couple of people who’d pay real good money for a pretty little thing like you.” His teeth showed. “Real good. Don’t worry ‘bout lover boy, darlin’, we’ll leave his body somewhere no one’ll find it.”

“Seeing as we’re heading for the Dixon Docks,” Sparrow said to this calmly. “I’m guessing you mean the roadworks near the university. Lots of fresh concrete.” 

All heads swivelled towards xyr.

“Hey, it’s pretty obvious we’re on the Schwartz Bypass right now,” xie added. “In fact, we’re about to hit the big roundabout before the interchange right about… now.”

The van swayed, rocking on its shoddy suspension.

That’s when Sparrow lunged, using the extra momentum to add more force to the tackle. Xyr currently heavyweight body slammed hard into the gang leader, forcing him against the van wall and away from a terrified Manny. Sparrow used the surprise to get a hold of the gang leader’s wrist and dig xyr nails into a nerve cluster, forcing him to yelp and let go of the knife.

Off to the side, Manny squealed and grabbed his wrist.

That’s when Sparrow realized; xie didn’t actually have mirror-touch synesthesia to contend with right now.

That meant that, for once, xie could hit as hard as xie possibly could with none of the usual consequences.

“Grab the knife!” Xie bellowed to Manny as xie kneed the gang leader straight in the balls.

“Grab the fucking gun, dumbass!” The gang leader wheezed to his crony, trying to gouge Sparrow in the eye.

The sheer flabbiness of Manny meant he was hard to get a grip on, but the gang crony was scrabbling for the abandoned gun. That gun was pretty much the ultimate trump card.

Sparrow was forced back after the gang leader got in a lucky jab with an elbow and then got a hard punch in the gut as a follow up.

Manny threw up, which instantly distracted everyone.

“I got it! I got it!” The gang crony said triumphantly.

Gritting xyr teeth past the splitting pain in xyr diaphragm, Sparrow lunged desperately, heart racing. Not for the now gun-wielding assailant, but for the gang leader again. Xie planted xyr stance as low as xie could in the swaying van, grabbed gang leader and then blessed the unexpected serendipity of being in the body xie was currently in. Woefully out of training or not, Manny had the shoulders of a linebacker. Sparrow managed a judo throw xie’d always previously struggled doing with perfect ease. Gang leader went flying towards his crony, who wildly flailed as his boss crushed him into the back of the driver’s seat.

The gun went off in a deafening explosion of noise. The bullet, by some miracle of physics, ricocheted off the van roof instead of going straight through the cheap metal, bounced into the front and shattered the windshield. The driver shrieked and slammed on the brakes, sending them into a wild skid. Shuddering bumps, punched in dents and angry horns indicated they’d likely just turned the roundabout into a bumper car ride.

Through the cacophony of swearing and yelling from the gang members, Sparrow gained xyr feet, dove for the knife that was skittering wildly and wickedly across the van floor and crawled for a moaning Manny, who was huddled near the far end of the van. 

Gritting xyr teeth, xie hit the emergency override button on xyr braces. Usually xie operated them by the movements of xyr leg and foot, but there was no time to teach Manny a skill xie’s perfected through months of training. There was a telltale whine as the kinetic charge stored by xyr bionic knee joint was transferred into the braces.

Xie forced a bewildered and disorientated Manny around so that he was crouched facing the door. Then xie pressed up against him back to back, so that Sparrow’s bigger body was acting as a brace point.

“Manny, kick the door!” Sparrow ordered, clutching the knife in both hands and pointing it outwards.

The gang members had untangled themselves and weren’t swearing at cross-purposes anymore. The van hadn't actually stopped moving, but it was clearly limping it’s way out of an accident zone.

“Wh-what?” Manny asked, baffled.

The gang leader wrenched the gun from his hapless crony, a look of death in his eyes.

“Kick the damn door!” Sparrow roared at the top of Manny’s voice, which could hit a decent enough force and volume when there was effort behind it.

“Oh-okay!” Manny agreed hastily. He curled Sparrows braced feet up and kicked out at hard as he could.

Sparrow felt the force of the supercharged kick travel all the way through xyr spine. Xie was jolted forward as Manny was jolted back into xyr.

The doors flew off their hinges like they’d gotten caught in a shockwave and bounced along the road.

Sparrow could feel Manny’s drop jawed astonishment. Xie certainly saw the gang members. Sparrow flashed xyr most winning and reassuring I’m-medic-and-I’m-here-to-help-you smile and said “You have a good evening now.”

And then grabbed a screaming Manny and jumped.

The world became a spinning and stinging maelstrom of night air and unforgiving tarmac. Manny grunted and yelped, but he was mostly okay. Sparrow had been extremely thorough when designing xyr armour in the fabrication units in the Drake Industries R&D lab. Xyr armour was more than tough enough to keep him from leaving skin layers of the road.

Manny’s band shirt and cheap jeans? Not so much.

There might have been a gun fired after them, but the van didn’t stop. In the distance behind there was a halo of flashing blue lights as police attended the accident the van had caused. They were no doubt in pursuit.

“Oh my god,” Manny groaned, face down on the road. “Why the fuck did you do that?”

Sparrow gritted xyr teeth and forced xyrself up, raw, wet red patches all over xyr arms. “Would have preferred to get shot? Come on!” Xie hauled Manny upright ruthlessly. “We need to get to those bolsters and hide before the police come.” Xie scooped up the cursed knife from where it had landed. “Unless you feel like answering a bunch of questions about what you’ve been up to tonight.”

Manny scowled sullenly but did as told. They jogged towards the bolsters and just managed to hunker down as blaring police cars rushed by it in hot pursuit of the stolen van.

“My van,” Manny moaned.

“It’s not worth your life, Manny,” Sparrow said wearily, thoroughly done with his attitude. Xie leaned forward and yanked open various compartments on xyr bandolier on Manny, withdrawing what few first aid supplies they had left.

Xyr bag was still in the van, Sparrow thought dismally. So was xyr phone. All xie had to work with was what xie had stashed in her pouches, which wasn’t nothing but certainly wasn’t enough. 

Triage, xie told herself. First things first. “Are you dizzy, nauseous?” xie asked Manny curtly as xie got out some cotton swabs and a tiny bottle of disinfectant. “Did you hit your head when you landed?”

“No I… arrrrg!” Manny shrieked as xie began swabbing xyr own injuries. “What the hell. Why does that hurt me?”

“I am not going to explain the myriad expressions of neurodiversity I call normal,” Sparrow continued cleaning as best xie could. “Let’s just say my brain is wired weird. It can’t tell the difference between other people getting hurt and me getting hurt. Just don’t look, it’ll be easier for you.” 

“That’s… weird,” Manny frowned, then looked down at his currently braced legs. “Are you some kinda… you know, superman, or something?”

“If you mean meta,” Sparrow cleaned yet more road rash, wincing. “Then no. No powers.”

“You kicked the yeouch,” he flinched as he unwisely looked at Sparrow cleaning a nasty patch of red. “You kicked the doors off my van. And you’re saying you aren’t, like, superstrong or some shit?”

Sparrow sighed. “That was technological. The braces,” was all xie would say. Manny was not a deductive genius by any stretch of the imagination, but the tech in xyr bionic joint was unique and traceable. Xie wouldn’t risk even a dim bulb like Manny knowing about it. Hopefully he would remain too discomforted by being in xyr body to really twig to the wrongness of xyr knee joint.

“Give me your hands,” xie said once xie’d done everything xie could. The dressings were sodden, now. Manny - well, actually, xyr body was naturally pale but xie didn’t think xie was imagining the fine sheen of sweat or the barely discernible bluish tinge to the fingertips. It was happening slowly, but xyr body was fading and taking Manny with it.

Xie briskly yanked more pouches open.

“Are those pads,” Manny yelped. “Like girl stuff pads?”

“Cheap, absorbent, sterile,” Sparrow shrugged. “In a pinch they make excellent bandages. I don’t know if you noticed but we’re a bit short on equipment.”

“Shit,” Manny said, looking at the pressure cuff still strapped to his arm, leads dangling off it. “You should probably take my pressure again.”

“Can’t.”

“Why not?!”

“Because the battery that made that thing compress,” xie pointed to it. “And the machine that actually took the reading were both my phone. Which is still in the van. No equipment, no diagnostics, sorry. I can take your pulse, I can maybe tell when you’re about to go into shock, but not much else.”

Manny’s face fell. “Oh,” he said in a small voice.

“Come on,” Sparrow rose up, wincing as fabric brushed against xyr grazes. “There’s no point in sitting here. We have to find one of those emergency phones and call Robin.”

Manny heaved a sigh but for once didn’t start whining. He staggered to xyr feet, grimacing at the bizarre feeling of his too-small hands over-padded with devices no man wanted to examine too deeply. “This sucks. I’m wearing period pads for gloves.”

“Manny, please, just keep moving,” Sparrow told him curtly as xie started to trek along the shoulder.

“Geez, okay,” Manny mumbled. “That time of the month or something, huh?”

Sparrow’s jaw tightened. “No.”

“Then why do you have these, then?”

“There are a lot of street kids out there,” Sparrow informed him coldly. “Some of them need stuff they can’t afford. I help out where I can.”

Manny looked at xyr skeptically. “Whatever. I still say some of your malfunction is a ‘that time of the month’ problem. You’re mad at me because I jumped in the van, aren’t you? You’re mad and you’re pretending you’re not. Girls always do that, especially when they’re on the rag.”

Sparrow spun on him so fast that he backpedalled. “Number one, I don’t need permission from my endocrine system to be mad at you, you creepy, child-napping, dimwitted disaster of a mage! You are literally bleeding my body to death through your own stupidity, and then you had the gall to compound the whole idiotic problem by trying to save a worthless piece of trash van from guys with guns! And that’s after giving me, the one trying their best to fix the mess you’ve made, a twenty minute litany of woe about how you’re about to die any second! And second,” xie loomed right up in her own face, then thought the better of it and stepped back. “Second,” xie said in a calmer voice. “I’m not a girl, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t blab around that I am one. Especially but not limited to gangs who likely have ties with prostitution rings, okay?”

Manny gaped at xyr. Then xyr own face screwed up as he grappled with yet another difficult thought. “What do you mean you’re not a girl? Unless you’ve got serious problems south of the border or were in a shitty accident, you’re a girl”

“Biologically female, yes,” Sparrow replied sharply. “But on the ground I’m a lot of things. Sometimes I’m a boy too. Sometimes I’m neither.”

Manny’s face turned sour. “Oh,” he said flatly. “You’re one of those freaks.”

The sudden slur shocked xyr. “I’m a what now?”

“You know,” Manny waved xyr hands in a parody of moralistic distaste. “Those weirdos who pretend they’re not who they actually are. Boys becoming girls and girls becoming boys as if that’s actually a thing people can do.”

Sparrow gaped at him. “People do do it! They have done it! For centuries, culturally, and physically for well over fifty years!”

“And look at how they’re fucking things up!” Manny snapped, hands on hips. “Do you know how fucking wrong this feels right now! You freaks go around thinking shit like this is normal and then you start ragging on people who are just trying to get on with their lives. Oh, we can’t use the standard pronouns any more,” Manny sneered. “Oh, we have to have a third bathroom. Oh we can’t offend this one particular person who likes to deny he has dangly bits because… what? Reasons, I guess. It’s like all you rainbow assholes are fucking trolling us.”

“It’s got nothing to do with you!” Sparrow spluttered, robbed of eloquence in the face of this unexpected attack. “Like, at all!”

“Bullshit!” Manny yelled angrily. “You people live to make us look bad! Like, we just go around like normal and you all call us neo-nazi’s because we call people what they are! Or you just let us go on believing a lie. It’s like a huge fucking prank that the normals aren’t in on! If people weren’t letting other people - stupid kids - get away with this shit, I wouldn’t have grabbed a boy and the ritual would have worked and we wouldn’t be in this mess!”

“Look asshole,” Sparrow growled. “Gem is a girl! She’s a girl if she wants to be, if that’s how she feels inside! No one gets to dictate it to her but her. And you know what? Even if that does make us freaks and weirdos, at least our freakishness doesn’t hurt anyone, which is a lot more than I can say for dumbass cishet white boys who think that it’s perfectly fine to kidnap kids and assault them just so they can snap their fingers and make the world in their image, as if they didn’t have the privilege of doing that for all of goddamn history, magic or not! And then have the gall to whine about the mess they made and leave the freaks to fix it!”

The sheer disdain in xyr voice made Manny go beet red. He opened and closed xyr mouth a few times, trying and failing to come up with a scathing retort. “Look, you wanna live in some fantasy world where you can be a boy, fine,” Manny muttered lamely, marching on as if that would give him the last word. “Everyone needs a way to get attention. Go off and dance under the moonshine or whatever the fuck people like you do. Just leave me out of it.”

Sparrow scowled at xyr own back. Manny’s prejudices had come at xyr sideways. Xie wished with all xyr heart that xie could unleash the blistering tirade that haunted the tip of xyr tongue, but bitterly swallowed it. Fighting him wouldn’t go any good. Pointing out the sheer irony of his position given the current situation likely wouldn’t even penetrate.

They travelled in fraught and seething silence up the still dark and mostly silent expressway until they finally hit an emergency phone glowing like an oasis under a safety light. Sparrow grabbed the handset and jabbed out a number code on the keypad with fast fingers. Technically these could only be used to reach emergency services, but you could hack into the phone system with the override code; something that xie and a lot of emergency workers had learned to do. Crazy shit happened in Gotham; cell phone systems were attacked every second week. 

Xie dialled Robin’s comm code number from memory. The Bats believed in system redundancy too.

It connected. “Robin? It’s me. There’s been some… complications.”

*

“What do you mean you got hijacked by gangsters?” Robin roared while in the background Spoiler worked through a word puzzle with yet another ‘Guide’. “You just said you were out of the van! Why the fuck couldn’t you just let them take it?”

“Hey, I wanted to,” Sparrow sounded irritable. “Manny was the one who grabbed the bumper trying to stop them.”

“Fucking asshole,” Robin despaired.

“Pipe down, I’m concentrating,” Spoiler said absently from where she was solving a puzzle written on a wall.

“We got away, obviously,” to Robin’s fine tuned ear, Sparrow didn’t seem as happy about that as he could have been. “But I lost my field pack, and my diagnostic phone.”

Robin pinched the bridge of his nose. “Where’s the knife?” Because a cursed knife in the hands of low level scum would just be the icing on the cake at this point.

“Between grabbing the phone and grabbing the knife, I picked the knife,” Sparrow reported. “I didn’t have time for anything else before we jumped to avoid getting shot.”

There was way too much to unpack in that statement. “Jumped. Like, when they stopped moving, right?”

“Not exactly…”

Robin cursed. “You are giving me fucking grey hairs kid.”

“I’m sorry.”

Robin hesitated. Sparrow sounded disheartened and upset. He didn’t need Robin getting shitty with him; he was having a bad enough night. “Don’t worry about it,” he said gruffly. “Shit happens, especially in this town. Good thinking with the knife. Everything else we can replace. How is the dumbass?”

“He’s fine,” Sparrow’s report was unexpectedly clipped where Manny was concerned. “Well, mostly. The bleeding is getting worse, Robin. Which means it must be getting worse for Gem. You have to find her, fast.”

“Shit,” Robin replied succinctly. “Where are you right now?”

“Emergency phone on the Bypass,” Sparrow said. “The nearest medical facility to me right now is… Arkham.”

Robin sucked in a breath through Spoiler’s full face mask. “That is the exact opposite of ideal, kid.”

“Tell me about it.”

Fuck. The complications were coming thick and fast. “Hold on Sparrow. I’m gonna conference with BG to see where she’s at with finding that asshole’s dad and then... well, we’ll see what our options are.”

Spoiler had finished whatever she’d been doing - her puzzle solving and general trivia knowledge had been unerring so far. They hadn’t been steered wrong once yet. “What’s the scoop?” she asked, looking at the grim lines of Robin’s shoulders. He was tracking the blood drops on the pavement. They’d been steadily getting less sparse as they went.

“Manny’s fading faster,” Robin said as he dialled. “So Gem must be too. How many more, you think?”

“Fuck, I don’t know,” Spoiler said tensely. “It’s not following the order of the book. The puzzles aren’t the same either. But I did notice we seem to be heading north west, with some twists and turns.”

“Towards the Hill,” Robin muttered. “I noticed too. What the fuck would the kid want at the Hill? She lives in Coventry. BG,” he said as the line connected, putting the call on speaker. “Please tell me you’ve found Caliente.”

“No dice, kiddo,” was Batgirl’s ominous report. “I managed to catch our Miss Primrose before her show at the Moonshine Club. She said she had lived with Josef Caliente for a long time, but he’s been gone a while now. ‘Into the loving aether’ was her exact words. In this city that might mean he ran afoul of something and ended up in the river. She’s probably using his cards until they expire or get cancelled.”

“Shit,” Robin cursed. “Then we got a fucking problem, because apparently the curse gets worse the longer it’s on. Sparrow and Gem will be dead by sunrise unless we can find some way to reverse this.”

“Time to call in backup, kiddo,” was Batgirl’s brisk assessment. “I’ll get on the horn to the JL and see if they can’t rustle up an emergency magician. Where are Sparrow and the perp now?”

“They got carjacked,” Robin kicked a wall in frustration then winced as he remembered that Spoiler didn’t wear steel caps. “They escaped, but they’re stranded on the bypass. Sparrow had to call me from the emergency phone.”

“And Gem?”

“Wandering around fucking Gotham turning it into a picture book fantasy and bleeding to death, fuck it!” Robin seethed. “We’re tracking her towards the Hill area.”

“You focus on her,” Batgirl ordered. “I’ll take my bike to one of the auxiliary storage units and grab one of the Batmobiles so I can pick up Sparrow and his cohort. We’ll worry about compromised identities and the body switching problem after we’ve got them medical assistance.”

“Roger,” Robin sighed, and hung up.

“That didn’t sound promising,” Spoiler muttered.

“No time to moan, which way?” Robin asked. After getting a direction from Spoiler that both headed that way at a dead run, Robin dialling as he went. He waited for someone to pick up the phone. “Sparrow? I’ve got bad news and worse news.”

“....worse news first,” Sparrow said resignedly.

“Josef Caliente was a wash,” Robin said grimly. “Batgirl tracked down his lady friend - Primrose Hexe, apparently, at the Moonshine Club - and apparently he’s been persona evanidus for a while; as in, vanished. It can also mean ‘extinct’, which is not impossible either.”

Silence. Then, “What do you need me to do?”

Robin had to hand it to the midget, he didn’t waste time panicking or lamenting. “I need you to stay put. BG’s going to get a car and come and collect you. We’re going to get you help. We’re also going to see if we can get some kind of practitioner to weigh in on this mess. Just stay there near the phone, kid. We’re coming for you.”

“What about Gem?” Sparrow asked worriedly. 

“I’m on the trail,” Robin assured him. “We think she’s heading for The Hill. She’s leaving a big-ass trail behind her with her new magical powers. I don’t think she can control them very well. Look, do you know anything else about her? Something that might tell us where the fuck she’s going?”

“I only met her tonight,” Sparrow answered. “I got the feeling she was a runaway, but only very recently. Like in the last day or so. She was pretty cagey about answering my questions, but all the street kids are kinda like that at first. All I know is she lives in Coventry and she doesn’t like the people she’s living with.”

“Maybe she’s trying to find someone who works around the Hill?” Robin essayed as he and Spoiler kept moving at a steady canter. 

“ The only people on the Hill …” Sparrow automatically spouted the Gotham truism.

“Are liars on the docks and those-” Robin stopped dead, verbally and physically, almost sending Spoiler crashing into him as the rest of the old saying ran through his brain. “... that lie still. Holy shit! I got it! Sparrow, I’ll call you back,” he hung up the phone and started dialling Batgirl’s number.

“What?” Spoiler panted. “What’s going on.”

“Sand cat,” Robin spouted in disbelief. “I’m a fucking idiot.”

“Hey! I mean, you are, but watch my mouth, asshole!” Spoiler grinned. “You figured out what that means?”

Robin waved her to silence as he connected. “BG, I know where Gem is. I’m heading for St Catherine’s on the Hill. Can you bring Sparrow and Manny there?”

“Roger wilco,” Batgirl replied briskly. “I’m about ten minutes from the car.”

“Right, thanks BG,” Robin hung up. 

“St Cathrine's?” Spoiler frowned, puzzled. “Like, a church?”

“Graveyard,” Robin corrected. “It’s big among the Latinx community. They call it Santa Cat’s, from Santa Catalina, the Spanish name for Saint Catherine.”

“Wait, if that kid is heading for a graveyard…” Spoiler’s voice trailed off.

“Then her parents are likely dead,” Robin said grimly. “And if you were a little kid and you suddenly had the power to do anything you wish for as far as you knew….”

“Well… shit,” Spoiler muttered. “Would that work?”

“No,” Robin shook his head. “Every magical practitioner I’ve ever spoken to has been pretty damn firm about the hard line between the living and the dead. Even with the juice she’s got right now, I don’t think Gem would have the requisite knowledge you need to cross it, and if she does cross it, then she definitely doesn’t understand the consequences.”

“Which are what?”

“Two words,” Robin replied grimly, dialling again. “Equivalent Exchange.”

He meant to update Sparrow on the situation.

But to his shock and rising worry, the phone rang and rang. 

Nobody picked up. 

*

The phone was a distant buzz in the background as Sparrow hefted Manny in xyr arms and hauled him towards the concrete bolsters edging the bypass. Xyr body was pale and clammy under the emergency phone light. “Manny, stay with me! Manny!” Sparrow shook him a little.

Many moaned feebly. He’d been pacing up and down agitatedly while Sparrow had been on the phone. He hadn’t reacted beyond a series of grimaces when xie told him they hadn’t been able to find his father; half worried, half trying to hide it.

But then he’d wavered on xyr feet and folded up. 

Xie got his booted feet braced a foot high on the bollards and locked xyr braces, essentially trapping the legs in position. Then xie checked his pulse (rapid) and the makeshift dressings on his hands. They were soaked through.

The more harrowing end of being in the wrong body hadn’t affected Sparrow deeply. While xie’d resented the clumsiness and lack of fitness, the dysphoric aspects of the experience had aroused mostly intellectual curiosity rather than revulsion. Sometimes Sparrow felt like a boy; especially when xie was Sparrow. Getting a dim insight into matching up the gender identity with the physical self in real time had been fascinating as well as disconcerting.

Watching xyr own body slowly dying? That caused xyr insides to lurch. Maybe xyr inner self was in constant and sometimes fraught negotiations with xyr outer self, but it was xyr body. Viscerally and fully xyrs. If at some point in the future xie felt the need to have it amended in some fashion, that was fine. Xie’d never once, even for a second, considered trading it in entirely for a new one.

“Oh god,” Manny moaned, fat tears starting to leak out of the cowl messily. “I’m dying, aren’t I? I’m really really dying this time! Like, really, really!”

“We’re dying,” Sparrow told him, stripping off the soaked sanitary pads and digging in xyr harness pouches for more. “I’m in this too. That’s my body, Manny. But you’re not going to die, okay?” Xie did xyr level best to keep her voice calm. “We’re going to stay calm and wait for our pick up to arrive and then we’ll be okay.” Xie grabbed the pads and also dug a tourniquet out of another pouch. Xie only had the one so xie rapidly grabbed the edge of Manny’s expansive band shirt and started tearing strips off of it with deft fingers.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Manny cried harder. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen!”

“I know, Manny,” Sparrow said gently as xie wrapped his hands as tightly as xie could and then wrapped a tourniquet around one wrist and a strip of fabric around the other, tightening them both as much as xie dared. What little xie could see of the hands past the dressings started to tinge faintly blue.

“Ouch,” Manny mumbled, for once quiet and meek rather than whiny.

“I know it’s uncomfortable, but I have to keep as much blood in you as possible right now,” Sparrow explained. Xie took his pulse again with one hand and tugged open a larger pouch at xyr waist, withdrawing a small silvery square that rapidly unfolded into a full size shock blanket, tucking it around Manny, including his raised legs. “I’m sorry,” xie added remorsefully as xie tugged out another square; this one a white linen handkerchief.. “I should have asked you to sit down and conserve your strength before this. Or maybe just called a stupid ambulance,” xie added bitterly, looking at the emergency phone. Xie still could. Xie hadn’t even thought of that, even though xie’d promised xyrself when xie went out that the patients came first, even above keeping xyr identity. 

Guess that hadn’t been as hard and fast a rule as xie’d told xyrself it would be.

Xie cleaned up his clammy face as best xie could. Seepage under the spirit gum of the cowl was always uncomfortable. 

He looked at her in silent misery. “Why are you still helping me?” he asked. “You don’t even like me.”

“You’re my patient, Manny,” Sparrow explained patiently. “It’s my job to help you. It doesn’t matter what I think of you personally, or what you think of me. If you decide to help people, you can’t just help the people who like you. You help everyone, regardless.”

He absorbed that while xie cleaned him up and took his pulse again. Xie tried not to read anything ominous into the dark shadows xie could just about make out, seeping up through the dressings. “It’s bad, isn’t it?” he asked in a small voice.

“It’s not ideal,” xie admitted slowly, but kept xyr voice calm and level. “But it’s not over yet. Batgirl, you know her? She’s going to come pick us up. She’ll have medical supplies with her. Bloodpacks. Crystalloid fluids. Plasma. We’ll get you onto those and then it’ll be fine, Manny. It’ll be fine.” Xir crossed her fingers and hoped Batgirl bought medical supplies. Xie couldn’t imagine Robin hadn’t fully briefed her on the situation, but Sparrow was grimly aware she had no idea what the Bats supply lines looked like from a medical perspective. If xie was running the show, xie’s have caches of useful things seeded all over town; which Sparrow did, actually. But the Batman, crazy-prepared though he usually was, might operate differently.

Xyr reassurance didn’t land as well as xie could have hoped. Manny silently started tearing up again, lost in despair. “I’m gonna die, aren’t I?”

“No, you’re not,” Sparrow replied. “You have to keep thinking positively. Believe it or not, that actually helps.”

“But I can’t,” Manny whispered. “I feel all cold and everything hurts and… and everything’s wrong! I’m sorry!” he began to sob. “I’m really, really sorry! I’m sorry about the knife! I’m sorry about the ritual and the kidnapping! It was only supposed to be a little blood! I never meant to hurt anyone! I never meant for any of this to happen!”

“What did you mean to happen, though?” Sparrow asked, hoping to at least keep him calm. “I mean, what were you actually planning to do with an old god’s powers? What did you need to fix so bad that that was a viable option?”

“I just wanted everything to be normal again!” Manny cried harder, big, snotty tears seeping out from under the cowl. “Dad fucked off and Mom went crazy and started praying all the time and… and… I just wanted us to be normal again! I just wanted my Dad back! I thought the magic would fix him! I asked him to try it and he said he couldn’t and now he’s out there dancing and Mom’s getting sicker and what could I do?” he wailed.

Sparrow’s brow furrowed. “Dancing? You’re dad is-” xie stopped. Xyr eyes narrowed. “You said that before. A couple of times. Dancing under the moonshine. You wouldn’t happen to mean The Moonshine Club, by any chance?”

Manny shouldn’t have had enough blood to flush, but a faint pink tint came up anyway. “Don’t make me say it,” he muttered. “It’s too embarrassing!”

“Manny!” Sparrow shouted. “This is your life we’re talking about! Now does your Dad work at the Moonshine Club or not?”

Manny’s sullen, if resigned, silence and uncomfortable squirm was confirmation enough.

“Oh my god, you idiot,” Sparrow admonished as xie got up and lunged for the emergency phone, dialling with frantic fingers. Despite xyr scornful criticism of Manny, xie felt a glimmer of hope that the night was finally going, somehow, right. “Robin, it’s me! Has Batgirl got the car yet?”

“Sparrow! Holy shit kid, what happened? Why didn’t you pick up the phone? Is Manny…?”

“Manny’s still well enough to be an idiot!” Sparrow declared. “Has Batgirl got the car yet?”

“Yeah. She’ll be there soon."

“No! You need to tell her to go back to the Moonshine Club and pick up Josef Caliente!” Sparrow told him furiously.

“Primrose Hexe said she hadn’t seen him in weeks,” Robin pointed out.

“No, that’s just it! We’re getting all confused by how people with gender identity issues cope!” Manny moaned a denial in the background, but Sparrow ignored him. “Primrose Hexe didn’t know Josef Caliente…”

*

“...Primrose Hexe is Josef Caliente! She’s a transwoman!”

Robin stopped cold. “Holy fuck. Why the fuck didn’t that idiot tell us that?”

“He was too embarrassed!” Sparrow sounded as exasperated as Robin felt. “That’s why he did this whole stupid caper! He wants his dad to be ‘normal’ again!”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Robin cursed, wishing he could let the rest of the blistering tirade on the tip of his tongue loose, but they didn’t have the time to cover the sheer breadth and size of it. “Hold on.” He hung up the phone, redialled Batgirl and impatiently waited for it to connect. “I’m gonna punch that fucker in his fugly face the minute he's back in it,” he growled, his voice still sounding all weird ass to him. He shifted position, one brief signal coming from the area of his chest that just tripled his ire. “And his dick. BG,” he didn’t waste time with salutations at it connected. “Turn the fuck around and nab Miss Primrose. Drag her out by her hair if you have to, though be careful, I’m pretty sure it’s a wig.”

Silence. Then, “Fuck me, I knew something was off about how she said it,” Batgirl muttered. Distantly there was a high pitched noise, probably the squeal of tyres as Batgirl negotiated a turbocharged course correction. 

“You knew, huh, Ms-trained-by-Batman?” Okay, snarking the person doing most of the legwork helping you out of a ridiculous farce of a scrape was not the wisest course of action, but fuck, after the shitty night he’d had he had to take what he could get. Plus, he almost never got the chance to give Batgirl shit. Like ever, she was way too good and she rarely made a bad judgement call. He wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity, even if he knew how much it would cost him.

“Just for that, kiddo, I’m not gonna password protect this case report to keep Nightwing from finding it,” she snarked right back.

Oooh, she knew where all the weak points were. Robin snorted and hung up. So worth it, he decided. She was vastly overestimating how much he cared about Nightwing’s opinion. 

Plus, BG didn’t know it, but he’d been improving his technical skills on the sly. He bet he could slip a little data blackout algorithm into the system, because she wouldn’t expect him to know how to do that. It wouldn’t stop her from just telling the dick, of course, but Robin was reasonably assured they were still on the off-cycle of their crazy-ass on-off relationship right now. He’d take a gamble.

“Robin,” Spoiler’s voice drew him back to business. They’d taken a sweaty and, in Robin’s case, jiggly run all the way to the Saint Catherine's and had clambered over the high fence and into the graveyard.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t rush a quadrant search. Saint Catherine’s was expansive and they had to work through it row by row, using Robin’s flashlight and his backup because that was another piece of equipment Spoiler hadn’t thought she'd need.

Seriously, Robin had to sit her down and walk her through the basic field kit essentials. She was lucky she hadn’t died out there, walking around in a homemade suit and not much else.

He saw what she was talking about instantly. The overgrown grass, sticking up in wild tufts and swaying micro-jungles over the graves. In the hush of the night, you could hear the crackling sound of it growing. It shot up half an inch even as Robin watched it.

Flowers bloomed in their holders, brief bright bursts of colour under their torches before they faded and crumbled away just as fast.

The air was filled with the sheer stink of new greenery, ever chased by the faint whiff of quickly following decay. The stone markers and border, not to mention the crypts, were not coping well against the sudden pitched battle with nature. Moving past them in a wave the ground moaned like a wounded animal, peppered with cracking and crumbling edges. The air was filled with the hard-edged hissing of stone grinding on stone as everything shifted and kept on shifting.

The entire place was moving, more like the ocean than anything else.

“Okay,” Spoiler said in Robin’s voice, hitting a pitch Robin wouldn’t have thought possible since his puberty blues kicked in. “I am officially creeped the fuck out. What the fuck do you people do about something like this?”

“Same thing we always do,” Robin said grimly. “We acknowledge we are in over our heads and then we go in anyway. After that we mostly wing it.”

“We can’t go in there!” Spoiler waved her hands at the crackling, groaning, swelling landscape. “Look at it! We’ll die!”

Robin shrugged. “If I even stopped to think about shit like that, I’d never get out of bed. Yeah, we could die. Why do you think we put on these masks? Did you think it was just for fun?”

Spoiler stared at him. “You’re all fucking crazy!”

“You’re just figuring that out now?” Robin smirked. “Yeah, dude. We’re fucking nuts. Tetched. Not on speaking terms with reality. All that shit. But that’s the thing, kid. Crazy can go places and do things that sane can’t. It’s because we’re crazy that what we do works. When you tuck yourself in at night, you don’t worry about ice rays or carnivorous plants or Joker gas. Those things are manifestly real and have been used before, but still no one in this burg worries about them day-to-day. Why? Because they know the masks are out there, cleaning up the crazy shit. I guarantee you, a hundred percent, Batman has saved your life at least a dozen times. Eleven of them you’ll never even know about and the twelfth you’ll never comprehend just how close you got. If you’re going to be wearing this,” he pointed to her mask. “Even if you claim your bailiwick is just your asshole dad, you’re not in a position to say ‘it’s not my problem’ anymore. You’re not gonna get a choice. Some asshole rogue is gonna make it your problem, just because you wear it.”

“Is this the whole ‘give up your childish crusade talk’?” she asked archly. “I expected that from the big Bat.”

“Oh, no, his has slideshows,” Robin smirked, wading into the knee high grass. “And I ain’t the kind of person who gets off on telling people what they should and shouldn’t do where this life is concerned. If you gotta, if this is the only control you can take over your life, then go for it. I’m just telling you what I wish someone had explained to me at the start. It’s always gonna be bigger than you think it will be. It’s always gonna mean more than you think it will. I just think that you should make the choice fully informed. Not many of us actually get that.”

Spoiler looked away.

“There’s a girl in the middle of this right now who is dying,” Robin said grimly. “I have no idea how powerful she is. She might be able to snap her fingers and wipe me from existence. I’d have to be nuts to think I could take that on. But I’m going in anyway,” Robin shrugged. “That’s what makes us heroes. That’s why people in Gotham sleep at night. I get this wasn’t what you signed on for. If you want to stay out at the gates and wait for BG, then fine, no judgement here. But that kid is dying, Spoiler, and I’m Robin. I can’t just sit here and wait. I have to try.”

And with that he waded into the tall grass, now up to his waist and climbing.

Luckily Spoiler’s face mask covered her whole face. Robin could keep his grin to himself as Spoiler’s soft curse rang out, followed by the rustle of her wading after him. Since her confidence was shaky enough, he opted not to give her a snarky ‘welcome to the life’ speech.

Honestly, once they were picking their way through the thick greenery, shot through with pieces of slowly disintegrating monuments, it wasn’t so bad. The mass upswell of growth was certainly bizarre, but it didn’t seem to be actively hostile. It seemed to just be an area effect of whatever else was going on.

Eventually Spoiler spoke up. “Um… I hear something? It’s… sort of blue-ish. It sounds like crying.”

Robin concentrated. Yes, it was extremely faint against the writhing foliage and toppling gravestones, but every once in a while he could hear a soft, human sound in the gaps within the white noise. “Look for the trail. You should be able to follow the sound back to the source.

She squinted. “There’s a lot of colours going off… uh… this way, I think,” she stepped forward hesitantly but nodded to herself and gained more confidence as she went.

Robin, bereft of his special method of tracking, kept his torch and eyes trained on the ground ahead of them. Tracking footprints was a no-go in this boiling mass of movement, unfortunately, but every once in a while the torchlight would catch on an odd tuft that was tipped in red. 

Sparrow had been right. The bleeding was getting heavier.

Between Spoiler’s trailblazing and Robin’s crosschecking they unerringly found what they were looking for. Pushing past a line of wildly overgrowing trees (and trying gamely not to think about just what those shapes getting levered up out of the dirt by the roots were) they hit a sudden pocket of silence and stillness.

Suddenly the sobbing was very loud.

There was their girl, plopped down in front of a double-wide grave. She was crying fit to burst, pages of a falling apart book scattered around her. She had, at some point, managed to acquire some birthday candles which she’d stuck around the grave, their dim light hardly doing anything about the darkness around them. 

On her arm there was a wound. Robin’s eyes narrowed at it; it healed and then open, healed and then opened again. Either she was trying to close it, or something else was. Judging by the livid red streaks on her arms and ugly red-brown patches staining her dress, it wasn’t working.

“You h-h-have to,” she sobbed. “You’ve go-got to! I did it like the sc-sc-scary wuh-wuh-wizard did it! That’s magic!” she raged and cried. “It ha-ha-has to work!”

Then, creepily, she said “I cannot bring back the dead, child. That wheel only turns in one direction.”

“No!” Gem burst out angrily. “I did it! I did the ritual! You did everything else! Everything I could think of! You said you were my friend! You said you’d help me!”

“I am helping you, child,” the weird something said through Gem's mouth. “I am.”

The wound opened, then closed again.

Then opened.

“But it’s magic,” Gem wailed. “It has to work.”

“Magic isn’t like that,” Robin spoke up softly.

Gem whipped around so fast that she fell over. She stared at them with wide, swollen eyes. “Who’re you?” she asked, voice scratchy. She squinted at Spoiler. “You’re Robin. I saw you on the news once.” Then she eyed Robin suspiciously. “I don’t know you.”

Robin stepped forward. “I’m Spoiler. I’m a friend of Sparrow’s,” he kept his movement as slow as he could. “You know Sparrow, right?”

Gem nodded, scrubbing her face with one hand. “He was nice. He chased after me when the bad man grabbed me. He was trying to see if he could find me some food,” she slumped. “I forgot to take my pocket money with me.”

“When you ran away?” Robin asked.

Gem nodded miserably.

Robin gestured Spoiler forward and promptly started raiding his own utility belt when she got close enough. “Sparrow was real worried about you,” he said as he started dragging out bandages. “He sent me to find you.”

“How did you find me?” Gem snuffled. “I gots magic powers now. I can apparate and transfigure and conjure and… and…” suddenly her face crumpled. “I don’t really know how to make it work, though.” 

“The Guides showed us how to find you,” Spoiler told her as Robin started bandaging like mad. “The Guides of Knowhere.” She hesitated. “That was my favourite book, when I was your age. My Dad used to read it to me all the time. We used to solve the puzzles together.” 

“Mine did too,” Gem sniffled, scrubbing her nose with a snotty forearm. “Before they died.” Her face crumpled even more. “Why did they have to die? We used to live together and I had my own room and everything and now I have to live with stupid Aunt Regina and I don’t have my own room anymore ‘cause now I have to share with stupid cousin Hector and they keep trying to cut my hair and they keep telling me I’m a boy and I’m not a boy and I want them back. Please make them come back!” she dissolved into sobs, slamming her fists against a startled Spoiler’s armoured chest plate. “Please!”

She helplessly put her arms around the bawling kid and shot a panicky look at Robin, who was trying to fix the bandaging after Gem’s outburst had ripped the bandages right out of his grip before he could secure them. Sighing, he started again. He gave a subtle head shake at Spoiler’s opening mouth. Sometimes you just had to let people get whatever it was out of their systems.

He’d managed to get the arm bandaged up by the time Gem’s sobs dwindled to hiccups. “I think you’re a very pretty girl,” he said idly while he finished up. “I dunno what your aunt is seeing.”

Gem sniffled. “She’s stupid,” she grunted angrily. “She keeps saying Mama and Daddy indulled me. She says they were too lint.”

Spoiler’s lips moved. “Lenient?” she guessed. “She thinks they shouldn’t have let you be a girl.”

“I am a girl!” Gem asserted hoarsely. “I am, Robin!”

“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that,” Spoiler said hastily. “I meant, um, you should be a girl if that’s what you are. But your aunt doesn’t understand that, does she?”

Gem shook her head vigorously, messy brown tendrils of hair whipping left and right. “She keeps saying I need to cut my hair and wear shorts and do boy stuff.” There was a sneer of disdain in her voice for the dreaded boy stuff. 

“I didn’t think there was much boy stuff out there that girls couldn’t do too,” Spoiler replied. “What does it matter who’s doing it?”

“That’s what I said!” Gem said indignantly. “But my cousins all say I can’t play Justice League if I’m a girl because Renata already plays Wonder Woman an’ Nita plays Wonder Girl even though she’s only three and I said I’d be Robin and they said I’m stupid because Robin is a boy but I keep saying I’m a girl so I must be making it all up for ‘ttention, Aunt Regina says,” more frustrated tears leaked out. “I can be a girl and Robin! I think Robin could be a girl too!”

“You know what?” said Robin, grinning. “I agree. There’s absolutely no reason Robin can’t be a girl too.”

“Yeah, what she said,” Spoiler gave a trademark Robin smirk. “Batman should really get on that.”

Robin snorted. “Look kid,” he said to Gem. “I know it’s rough now, with your parents gone. And I know it’s sh- uh, crummy living with people who don’t understand you. Who won’t even try to understand you. But you know it was stupid to just run. You know how dangerous the streets are. Just look at what happened!”

Gem protested. “But I got magic powers!”

“Yeah, but kiddo,” Spoiler pointed out reasonably. “You must have read Harry Potter, right? Then you should know that you can’t use magic to raise the dead. I mean, if it didn’t work for Harry, who was actually taught magic, I don’t think it’s gonna work for you.”

Gem slumped, crestfallen. “I don't like those books anymore. Besides, this is real magic,” she mumbled mutinously. “Not books or anything. It’s real. It can make people give you ice cream. It brought the carousel horses to life! Look, everything is growing!” she waved around the extremely verdant graveyard, gravemarkers either destroyed or swallowed by the endlessly growing grass and trees. Somewhere in the distance a large crypt groaned and collapsed, ripped apart by the questing, tearing fingers of tree roots. “It works! It has to work! I copied the magic circle and dropped the blood in the middle just like the scary wizard man did! All you have to do is go into my parents!”

It wasn’t clear who she was talking to before her mouth opened up and a whispery voice intoned “It does not work like that, child.”

Robin felt himself tense. Spoiler went rigid.

“You must be Marduk,” Robin muttered, willing his voice to be level. They’d briefly set aside the reality of the fourth member in the trio of mixed up bodies.

“Hey asshole,” Spoiler growled in what Robin had to admit was a pretty Robin-like swing at pure menace. “You better get the fuck out of her body poste haste. Don’t you dare think I won’t find a way to punch a god if I have to!”

Marduk laughed, their voice whispery and metallic, nothing like Gem’s vividly alive and emotional tones. It was weird. Marduk seemed to just be a voice; Gem’s expression didn’t match what was coming out of her mouth.

“You can’t send him back!” Gem burst out as the creepy windy laughter faded. “I need the magic powers!”

“Child,” the forgotten god’s voice followed her outburst implacably. “I cannot raise the dead.”

“Liar!” Gem retorted, starting to cry angrily. “Look at all the grass! You’re making it grow!”

“It grows from seeds, or from what is already growing,” Marduk replied, his presence a dim sheen in Gem’s eyes. “Things with the potential for life. Nothing under the ground here,” Gem’s fingers trailed idly across the grave edge. “Has the potential for life. What life they had has departed. It cannot be grown back. That is the way the wheel turns. Life, then death, then new life again. When people die, they are replaced with new life; the old cannot come back as new again.”

“But the horses!” Gem argued, voice thin with desperation. “You bought the horses to life!”

“An illusion. A trick. They looked alive, but they are no more alive than the stones yonder. They never had the potential for life, only the look of being alive. I could make an image of your parents from your memories... ” ahead of them, flickering, two figures coalesced out of nothing, a tall, dark haired man and a curly headed woman, smiling and laughing, and waving at them. “But that’s all I can do. I cannot make them real.”

They stared at the flickering images for a while. They were distressingly real. Their clothing and hair moved right, they even seemed to have weight. But even a casual observer would have seen it; the ghostly, empty disconnect in their eyes, they way they did not, could not react to their environment. The longer you looked, the deeper into the uncanny valley they fell, human shaped but manifestly not human. 

“No,” Gem sobbed, covering her eyes from the ugliness of them. “You’re lying!” 

“Aw kid,” Robin hugged her as she broke down. “I’m sorry about your folks. I know it’s hard when you lose someone.”

“It’s hard when the people who are supposed to love you keep letting you down, too,” Spoiler murmured, almost to herself. 

“An’ it’s gonna be a long time before it stops being painful,” Robin added. “It’s gonna take a while to get used to… all the new stuff you have to get used to. It took me a long time to feel right after my mom died and I was on my own. Some days I still don’t feel like I belong, even though I’m in a loads better place now. But it will get better, I promise. You just gotta hang in there. And if you don’t like where you’re at, then you tell your teacher or your friends or your friend’s parents. Talk about how unhappy you are. You let ‘em know, and they’ll help you. It won’t be the same as having your parents, but there are plenty of people out there waiting to love you.”

“But they were the only ones who un-un-understood,” Gem wailed inconsolably. 

“I understand,” Robin retorted swiftly. “I understand, kid. You feel like your body is all wrong for you and you don’t like it’s shape and you don’t like how it makes you feel, like you’re wearing the wrong clothes that don’t fit, only it’s your skin, so what can you do about it, right?”

Gem nodded.

“Well, I’ve felt like that all night,” Robin pointed to himself. “I’m Robin. She’s Spoiler,” he pointed to Spoiler’s current body. “When the stupid magic went all wrong, she and I got caught up in it. We got switched around so now we’re in the wrong bodies. I absolutely know what that feels like now, to feel like the skin you're in is wrong. How people are seeing you wrong and thinking of you the wrong way because your body is saying one thing to the world but your head is thinking something very different and you feel so stupid every time you try to explain it and no one listens anyway. You just feel bad all over about it.”

“Boy, do you,” Spoiler chimed in. “Like I’m a girl and I just hate this body. I mean, it’s not a bad bod or anything; but it doesn’t feel right for me.”

“Yeah,” Gem said eventually. “That’s how I always feel too. Mama and Daddy said that was okay, though. They helped me pick out a new name and stuff and it made me feel lots better.”

“Gem,” Robin nodded. “To Kill A Mockingbird, right? I love that book.”

“I do too!” Gem gave a tremulous smile. “I always thought Gem was the girl’s name and Scout was the boy’s name and then I found out that it was the other way around and… and I liked that Gem could have a girl-sounding name but is actually a boy and…” she leaned forward conspiratorially. “ No one cared. It was a bit scary at first, thinking ‘bout a new name so I thought… I could be Gem and it could be a girls name but if people laughed I could just say it could be a boys name too and show them the book. It could be both.”

“That’s clever,” Spoiler grinned. “I bet no one tried to argue that!”

“Aunt Regina could argue with anything,” Gem grumped. “Aunt Regina could argue with rocks.”

“Some people are like that,” Robin said. “And they’re pretty crummy and miserable people to be around. Is your whole family like that?”

“No-o, Aunty Imelda is really nice,” Gem said thoughtfully. “She lives with Aunt Esme only Regina says Aunt Esme isn’t really my aunt. She’s a better aunt than Aust Regina!” Gem added bitterly.

“I think maybe you should talk to your Aunty Imelda about all this, kiddo,” Robin advised. “Seems to me she might understand. It’s better than running off with no clothes or food or money. What were you gonna do when you got hungry, huh?”

Gem opened her mouth to reply, but then her face changed. “You must hurry,” Marduk’s whispery voice came out. “The child is running out of time.”

The next instant Gem wavered. “I don’t feel very good,” she said, swaying.

“Damn!” Robin cursed, grabbing at her. The dressing he’d slapped on the kid was soaked through. When he peeled it back, the wound was open and bleeding and no longer closing up and then re-opening. “Shit, fuck, damn it! Why the fuck did you stop healing it, you moldy old Babylonian fucknugget?”

Gem’s face was grey, even in the low light. “I did all I could. I transferred as much life force into her as was available, but the river has run dry.”

Marduk was right. The grass, once so verdant and lush, was browning and withering all around them. The trees were shedding leaves, limbs decaying and crackling to skeletons. 

“What the fuck? I thought you were a fucking god!” Spoiler pulled the girl on her lap as Robin frantically tore a strip of her dress to use as a tourniquet. “Do something!”

“I am but a voice on the wind,” Marduk turned his head towards the free bleeding wound. “All but forgotten. I have no temples, no worshippers. I have no power to break this curse, simple though it may be. At best, I can stave off the effects for a short while.”

Spoiler and Robin shared a frantic look. 

Robin dragged out his phone and dialled. “BG, we need you here yesterday! Sitrep and ETA, stat!”

“I got Primrose Hexe, her idiot son and Sparrow in the back seat,” Batgirl reported briskly. “The son is out cold, Sparrow has him hooked up to fluids to keep his body’s pressure up. ETA a minute and a half, tops. Hang on.” There was a click, a moment of dead silence.

Then Sparrow’s borrowed voice came down the pipe. “Robin, give me Gem’s vitals.”

*

“Barely conscious,” came the terse voice of Robin, all business. “Pulse is rapid and thready, but I can feel it going strong. Apparently the Babylonian god currently hitching a ride in her body was doing his best to keep her breathing and I guess it sort of worked.”

“Well, she’s doing better than Manny,” Sparrow reported back, swaying as the car took turns at death defying speeds, rapidly punching commands into a second IV pump. Xyr body was laid out flat, the head laid in the worried and spangly lap of one Primrose Hexe, still painted with makeup from her show at the club. “My body lapsed into unconsciousness as we loaded him into the Batmobile and I haven’t been able to wake him up. I’ve got him on crystalloid fluids to deal with the hypovolemia, and I’ve done everything I can to cut off circulation to his hands short of literal amputation, but the bleeding won’t stop. We’re gonna have to move fast once we get there. Mx Hexe,” Sparrow barked, making the woman jump. “Is there anything they can do at the gravesite to make the ritual go faster?”

“Um,” Primrose’s tightly wound face went thoughtful. “Uh… yes! Yes, there is. Can he hear me?”

“I read you,” Robin’s borrowed voice came over the speakers. “What do you need us to do?”

“Okay, so, undoing this is actually really simple,” she had the knife gripped tightly in her hands. “I need you to draw a circle in the ground - clockwise and starting from true north. That’s important, okay? It doesn’t have to be deep but you do need to make it all the way around in one unbroken line start to finish. Oh, and it has to be big enough for Sparrow, Manny, little Gem and you both to fit inside of it.”

“Roger that,” Robin bit out. “And lady? You better be prepared to slap a fucking magic muzzle on your son and teach him the basics of magical ethics, or I’m gonna fucking do it for you.”

“Oh believe me, I will,” Primrose’s face was grim under her stage makeup. 

“Good. Sparrow? Hang in there, kid,” Robin added, before there was the click of him disconnecting. 

Sparrow got on with xyr work in the fraught silence that followed.

“I really am very sorry about this,” Primrose murmured, gripping her son’s current forearm with white knuckles. 

“While I understand your circumstances were complicated,” Sparrow replied neutrally. “I am wondering about the sheer brain fart level decision making that made you leave a bunch of obviously dangerous objects and magical manuals in the hands of a disaffected, angry and insular young male and a manifestly mentally ill religious zealot. That’s not a risk of disaster, Mx Hexe. That’s the promise of it.”

Primrose winced. “I know. Why do you think I’m working the Clubs while tooling around on friends couches and crummy SRO’s? I mean, I love expressing my true self through art and performance, but they also pay a wad of cash. Enough to get me some better lawyers. To get my son back,” she sadly ran her fingers across Sparrow’s cowl. “Even if he didn’t want me, it would be safer with me than where he’s at now.”

Sparrow raised Manny’s eyebrow at her. “Surely you can make that argument now. The courts aren’t going to leave a minor in that position without support. At the very least they’d emancipate him so he could make decisions about the money.”

“My ex-wife hasn’t ever been officially diagnosed schizophrenic,” Primrose sighed. “She won’t either, not unless someone forces her into an assessment. She was starting to show signs years ago, but that was the time that I started making some realizations about myself and also the time when the marriage started to fall apart. It wasn’t because of that, but it sure didn’t help. 

“It was the shittiest timing imaginable for the strain of family madness to suddenly pop up. By the time I had sorted my shit out enough to realize how bad she’d gotten, she was all cozy with the Lightfoots and the Lightfoots’ lawyers, and up in arms about my supposed moral decay. I fought like a bastard to the end, but she wriggled out of ever having to go from a mental health assessment while I got scrutinized every which way. The courts aren’t always particularly empathetic to divorcees who go through a queer awakening. It was shitty, and Manny got caught in the crossfire, I know that. I can only imagine what bullshit she’s been feeding him about me because she’s bitter. I couldn’t just smile and pretend anymore. I did my best, but I couldn’t possibly control this situation.”

Sparrow sighed. “Madam, you are literally holding a cursed knife in your hands. Your ex-wife could have sold it. It could have ended up on the streets, these streets. I have compassion for your domestic breakdown and the trauma engendered by your coming out, but when you made yourself the custodian of that and goodness knows what else, you had a responsibility to do everything in your power to make sure it didn’t fall into the wrong hands. Including your son’s. Including your ex’s. 

“That’s my body, lying there, Mx Hexe. It’s not perfect, I have had issues with it, but right now it’s dying because you made a giant assumption that the people you left that knife with would never get the slightest bit curious. And then there’s the girl - the child - your son kidnapped and assaulted, however lightly, who is lying in a graveyard where her parents are newly buried, dying slowly too, because he found out about power but was never taught the responsibility that came with it. Let me tell you, as terrifying as that is to watch, it is probably about a thousand times more terrifying to experience and while I’m not well versed in all this magic stuff, I’m pretty damn sure there’s no magic that will take away the scar that memory will leave on either of them. You can’t sit there and say you have no part in this trauma, or that it’s not just as much on you as it is Manny, or Manny’s mother.”

Primrose looked away.

They were silent for the rest of the short trip.

There was a click over the speakers at Batgirl commed ahead to Robin.

“Robin? We’re here.”

*

This was how it ended.

Anticlimactically in the ruins of a once pristine graveyard, with five bodies crammed into a magical circle while a glammed up nightclub entertainer spoke in crisp, clear diction and greeted an ancient Babylonian god like they were an old and treasured friend. 

Sparrow woke up, feeling oh so right but oh so wrong, sick and cold even though xie was bundled in shock blankets and was more tube than person.

Xie moaned.

A big hand patted xyr cowl.

“Try to stay awake,” Robin rumbled. “Batgirl’s called in the Agent A ambulance service. Agent A’s… well, he’s kind of an assistant at home base. And our contracted medic, thank you very much Mister Concierge Medical Service.”

“Robin,” Sparrow beamed weakly. “You’re back. Gem!” the rest of it suddenly hit xyr and xie wriggled to try to rise. Xie dimly remembered fitting Gem with a catheter and getting her on fluids, but it went a bit hazy after that.

“Oh no,” Robin pinned xyr as easily as a newborn kitten. “You ain’t moving an inch, kid, don’t even try it. Gem’s fine. Spoiler’s over there with her, see? She’s in better shape than you right now. The curse is lifted or broken or whatever the fuck so your papercuts are just papercuts now. Agent A reckons a blood pack or two and you and Gem will be good as new.”

Gem was, indeed, talking quietly to Spoiler from Spoiler’s lap, IV hanging from an angel statue’s finger on one of the few still mostly-standing monuments. The graveyard was a dystopian mess.

“No hospitals,” Sparrow mumbled.

“Yeah, yeah, no hospitals,” Robin muttered. “And you’ll also note I’m not going after your alter ego either, thank you and you’re welcome.”

“You’d totally unmask me if there weren’t civilians around,” Sparrow objected to this faux virtuousness.

“I totally would,” Robin agreed amicably. “You are a literal tiny child who shouldn’t be running around Gotham in a mask.”

“Pot, meet kettle,” Sparrow muttered.

“I’ve got backup and combat training. And we had a deal, remember? We don’t shut you down hard and fast and you don't go wandering off on your lonesome.”

“Pot , meet kettle,” Sparrow snorted again. “Neither of those did you any good tonight! And you weren’t actually supposed to be out at all either, you recovering bird-on-a-spit!”

“Hey, good thing I was out or our secret identities would have been really compromised,” Robin said. “It was just as well, really.”

“Batman is never, ever, ever going to buy that.”

“Shh, leave me with my illusions.”

Sparrow settled back down. “Where’s Manny?” she wondered. 

“Currently? Waiting with BG and Primrose for the totally-not-fake ambulance to get here. Maybe Agent A can help him coax his dick back out of hiding; Primrose all but ripped it off him when she laid into him. It did my heart good to see.”

“Sorry I missed it,” Sparrow murmured. 

“He actually cried. It was totally awesome,” Robin grinned meanly. 

“Robin, the guy nearly died,” Sparrow muttered, but xyr protest was at best half hearted. Even xie, who tried to make compassion xyr go to response for everyone, had trouble dredging up more than a small handful of sympathy for Manny. He’d caused a lot of trouble and damn near killed himself and a poor kid, his awful domestic situation notwithstanding. If this ever went to court - which Sparrow was judging unlikely at this point - he would have been tried as an adult. He was more than old enough to understand what he’d done. Hopefully he wasn’t too old to change.

“You nearly died, kid.” Robin said heavily. 

“And if I hadn’t been there, Gem probably would have died,” Sparrow pointed out. “It was just as well, really.”

“Oh my god, shut up, you compact-sized, cursed, cornerstone of chaos,” Robin griped. 

“Not cursed anymore,” Sparrow grinned.

“Trust me kid, no ritual in the universe could banish your propensity for finding trouble,” Robin grumbled. 

Sparrow hmm’d without agreeing or disagreeing. Xie drifted in pleasant, tensionless fugue for a little while, the false dawn just beginning to colour the horizon. “So… what was it like to be Spoiler for the night?”

“Fucking weird,” Robin admitted. “Like, there were all these girls parts and Jesus, every girl in the world must secretly be an amateur structural engineer to keep all that jiggling under control.”

“I’m pretty sure she feels the same about your manhood,” Sparrow giggled. “If I know Spoiler she told you so, too.” 

“Yeah,” Robin smiled. “Spoiler’s okay, though. She was a big help. I’ve given her some shit to think about vis a vis the glamourous life of a vigilante.”

Sparrow blinked. “You want her to quit?”

“Fuck no,” Robin grinned. “She’s smart and adapts and she takes no shit. I think she’d do alright if she really doubled down and committed to it.”

“Oh,” Sparrow said slowly, taken aback by his easy, breezy acceptance of a new mask on the scene. "That’s not exactly Batman’s party line."

“Batman can suck my dick, of which I’ve just regained, figuratively speaking,” Robin retorted. “I love the guy but he can be the world’s greatest hypocrite about some shit. Spoiler’s in the life. It’s personal to her. She ain’t gonna stop any more’n I will. We either go along with it or we leave her to fend for herself and that shit ain’t gonna end well. I think I’m gonna ask BG if she needs an intern or some shit, I think Spoiler might find her a bit easier to deal with than B. Plus, I know BG feels left out since Nightwing got his Flamebird. This might work.”

“Oh,” Sparrow replied, voice flat. “Goodie for her, then.”

Robin blinked down at xyr, taken off guard by the tone. “What? What’d I say?”

“Nothing,” Sparrow wrestled the sudden irrational jealousy gamely, trying to keep it out of her voice. A bland, “You’re right, that will probably work,” was the best xie could manage.

Robin’s brow wrinkled as he squinted at xyr. “Are you… are you jealous of Spoiler ?” He was half laughing about it.

“Heavens no!” Sparrow burst out with bitter sarcasm, stung beyond reason. “You, rolling out the red carpet and the complimentary bouquets and chocolates for a newcomer with whom you had one successful and positive shared case with while I kept getting scathing criticisms for months on end while, I might add, saving your asses every damn time, regardless of whether you thought I could or not? Can’t imagine why that would upset me at all!” Sparrow hated that it had come out like that, and xie also hated that xie was trapped in a shocky, useless body, which apparently had no brain to mouth filter operational and also one xie couldn’t use to move away from Robin’s stare. All xie could do was turn xyr head away, feeling like a useless, stupid, hysterical girl.

Robin’s mouth opened and shut. “I… fuck, kid, I didn’t mean it like that at all. Shit,” he ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t think about what that would sound like to you. And I… I know I’m really shitty at saying it, but I really appreciate having you with us in the field. Like, it’s nice to know you’re there, watching out for us. When I rant at you I just… that’s just our jam, that’s how we talk. I never mean it. I haven’t for months. I haven’t since you saved Flame from that building. Shit, did you actually think I didn’t want you there? I mean,” he corrected honestly. “I dunno if I want to see you in the middle of an actual fight ‘cos, you know, that’s different, but you always said you were medical only and you’ve always respected that line in the sand. You never once stepped over it. 

“And… and I trust you out there," he added earnestly. "I really do! I even trust you handing out insulin and checking on the street kids. I just don’t want you to do it without some kind of check-in or beacon or something,” Robin flailed clumsily trying to correct his misstep. 

“Honestly? The only reason I’m giving Spoiler a chance is because of you. I kept expecting you to fuck up and you never once did. And I realized that I had no right to judge you for putting on a mask and going out into danger. I didn’t have the right to judge anyone else for that either. Just ‘cause I’m more trained, doesn’t make me special somehow. Spoiler might prove herself or she might not, but I know she deserves a chance because… because we never gave you one and you proved yourself anyway,” Robin finished, feeling the lameness. 

“I’m sorry,” he added miserably, rubbing xyr shoulder. “That was shitty of me, to never say that before. Just because you’re all confident doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be told you’re doing a good job.”

“Okay,” Sparrow said in a small voice.

“Hey, Sparrow?” Robin waited until xie looked at him. “You handled yourself really well tonight. You kept a cool head and did exactly what you were supposed to do. I’m really fucking proud to say you’re a member of my team.”

“Even though I volunteered for the ritual?” Sparrow asked tentatively.

“Even that,” Robin nodded. “I might bluster and gripe, but I’d’a done the same, we both know it. You saved her life.” Robin jerked his chin at a happily chattering Gem. “No mask I know woulda done better. Not even B.”

Sparrow smiled as the dawn started and the ambulance came rolling up.