Chapter Text
One morning at work, Mary McGinnis gets a call from the cemetery.
“We’re so sorry,” they say. “Your son’s grave has been robbed. Please get down here as soon as possible.”
She phones Bruce Wayne the moment they hang up.
--
“Empty,” Batman growls later that day.
She’s at the cemetery. She’s been here plenty of times before as Dana in the years since they buried her high school best friend, but never as Batman. It was chilling to see the plot she had so often visited cordoned off for investigation. It was even more chilling to see that the reports were true.
The earth was dug up.
The coffin was empty.
Someone had taken Terry McGinnis’ body without a trace.
It was frustrating her to no end. The only one of her villains who would have something against Terry was Blight- but not only was he in prison, he usually did things with a bit more flare. Another detail that didn’t add up was how Warren’s grave lay untouched. It was well known that Derek Powers hated Bruce Wayne and would do anything to hurt him, and occasionally that meant bringing up the McGinnis murders to remind Bruce of his failure. That was murders plural, though, so the fact that Blight had apparently passed up the opportunity to capitalize on both deaths set off suspicions in Dana’s mind.
She might have ignored those suspicions four years ago- but she hadn’t been Batman four years ago.
She did another sweep of the scene.
She was about to declare it empty again when Bruce’s voice said “Wait,” in her ear.
“On the headstone- was that mark always there?”
“No,” she whispered, sidestepping the police investigators (an easy task with the suit’s camouflage) and approaching the headstone, excited to finally find a clue. “It’s fresh. Do you recognize it?”
“If the person I think made it actually made it, then they’re a lot less dead than I thought, and they want us to find them,” Bruce remarked grimly.
“Great,” Dana sighed. “Grave robbers and zombies. All we need now is Dr. Frankenstein himself.”
“There might be some truth to that,” Bruce warned.
“Good. I always did want to sock Victor.”
--
When Batman and Robin made it past the guards and into the Lazarus pit chamber, they weren’t quite sure what to make of the metal ferris wheel-looking contraption set up next to the sinister green pool. The strangeness was soon brushed off in favor of taking down the remaining guards and severing the devices power- at which point Ra’s (in Talia’s body) emerged from one of the two ferris wheel pods with an enraged shout and a new battle began.
Ra’s was good, but kept stumbling over his feet and hesitating at odd moments. Dana felt mildly disappointed that he went down as easily as he did, purely because when she knocked him out cold she didn’t want to stop hitting him. Ra’s was conscious again within the minute, but by that time Dana and Matt had him restrained securely.
“Where is my brother’s body?” Matt demanded, low and dangerous in a way that really reminded her how much he had grown into his role as Robin since that first night as a lanky sixteen-year old kid.
Ra’s just sulked, and Dana had no qualms about letting Matt knock him out again with a quick (and slightly excessive) blow to the head and hypo spray while she scanned the room.
Then the other ferris wheel pod started groaning in distress. A scan from her visor’s infrared settings revealed a humanoid form trapped inside, so with a leap she was at the pod using her suit’s strength to pry the doors apart.
She had just gotten to the ‘are’ part in ‘hey, are you okay?’ when the figure inside shot forward and tackled her with a wild shout. Getting the better of them was laughably easy once she overcame her surprise, and the desperate thrashing underneath her knee once she had them pinned on their stomach convinced her that they were lashing out in terror rather than with the intent to do harm.
Robin’s hypo spray calmed them down quick, and when they finally unconscious she eased off, checked their pulse, turned them over to assess for injuries and found-
Terry.
With warm skin, and a strong pulse, and a breath.
“Bruce…” she said, raising a trembling hand to make sure her comm connection was true. “I thought you said the Lazarus pit can only revive live subjects?”
--
One evening at work, Mary McGinnis gets a call from Bruce Wayne.
“Mary,” he says. “No one’s hurt, but you need to be here. Now.”
She’s out the door the moment he hangs up.
--
He wakes up heaving.
It’s cold. It’s sharp. He shuts his eyes and hears the rush of blood in his ears.
There’s some kind of fabric underneath his hands. He can reach up and rub his eyes. The last few times he had woken up his body had been restrained and there had been liquid in his lungs. The memory alone forces him to cough. He’s sitting upright. A wave of nausea slams into him. Everything aches.
It takes a moment for him to blink away enough of the fog to make out his surroundings. He’s somewhere very big, and very dark. There’s light around the area he’s in- which has medical equipment of some kind. If this is a hospital, it’s the weirdest hospital he’s ever seen.
Something touches his shoulder and he flinches, turning to find not a nurse- but a person dressed in pure black and with a red symbol that he thinks he recognizes. They’re speaking to him. Saying something. He can’t figure out what. They reach for him again but stop when he starts trying to scoot back. They could overpower him if they wanted to, like those people who had shone lights in his eyes and poked and pulled him around the last times he had woken. He can barely hold up his own weight, much less struggle free in the state he’s in now. The figure in black doesn’t, though. They step back and hold out their hands, mouth moving like they’re speaking again. All he can hear is his own breathing.
The figure reaches up to their own face, peeling away the vaguely familiar mask to reveal- someone familiar? He knows them. He doesn’t know how, but he knows them. Their face sparks recognition, but his memories are murky. Distant. He thinks their name is Dana? That sounds right.
It’s Dana, but something’s off, and he doesn't know what.
Someone else appears beside Dana, wearing a more colorful suit with an ‘R’ on their chest. Their face looks weirdly familiar too, but he’s sure he’s never seen them before. They approach and he almost collapses in his haste to get off the bed and away from them. They look shocked and hurt. His hearing has just recovered enough to make out their soft “It’s okay, Terry,” when he hears a gasp and turns towards the stairs he hadn’t noticed earlier.
There’s a person standing there. A woman. He knows her.
“Eomma,” he cries, vision already blurring with the force of the hot tears that have sprung forth. He stumbles towards her over the cold stone floor on shaky legs, but all pain is forgotten the moment her arms are wrapped around his bare torso in the tightest hug he’s ever gotten in his life.
“Eomma,” he repeats because he’s so scared but his eomma is here now and everything will be okay. “Eomma, eomma, eomma- what’s happening? What’s going on? I don’t understand eomma, what’s happening?” he pleads, but she just shakes her head and squeezes him tighter while sobbing “Terry. Terry, my baby. My baby.”
He thinks that’s his name. He tries to speak again- to assure her that he’s here- but finds he can’t around the lump in his throat and dryness of his mouth. He can’t think of the words to say it anyways.
At some point he becomes aware of the heat of another body being drawn close to his. His eomma whispers the name “Matt” and all of a sudden a new set of memories are coming back to him.
“Eomma, where’s Matty?” he gasps, gripped with the need to see his little brother again.
The body beside him stiffens.
“Terry,” says a voice. Hesitant and unfamiliar.
He turns and sees the person in the ‘R’ suit.
“Terry, it’s me,” they say, voice cracking with emotion. “I’m Matt.”
“Matt?” he repeats, because it’s completely unbelievable. Matt is a tiny little kid, not this well-muscled twenty-something year old. Matt has baby fat, a voice that sounds like an annoying fire alarm, and barely comes up to his waist. This stranger is chiseled and adult-ish, almost standing at eye level and looking at him like something was wrong.
Something is wrong, he realizes. He remembers seeing Dana and scans the room again for her presence. He finds her standing a couple of feet away with tears in her eyes. He had thought that something was off about her image, but now that he gets a better look he thinks she looks… older?
He swivels his head to look at the person who had said they were Matt. Their appearance was all wrong- tall where Matt was short, strong where Matt was skinny, old where Matt was young- but there was still a resemblance there that he didn’t know how to explain any other way.
His breath hitched.
“Terry,” eomma says, placing a tender hand on his cheek and guiding him to look at her. She… she looks older too.
“Eomma, what’s happening?” he begs quietly.
She shuts her eyes and takes in a breath that sounds as shaky as he feels.
“Ter, honey, you’ve been… gone. For a very long time,” she finally manages.
“How long?” he asks.
She doesn’t answer.
“Eomma, how long?” he asks again, gripping her wrists with as much strength as he can muster. It isn’t a lot, but he’s terrified now and he needs to know.
“Twelve years,” whispers the person beside him, wearing such a familiar heartbroken expression that it suddenly doesn’t seem so impossible for them to be Matt.
Terry sinks to the ground hard.