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Bruce had expected, based on the Lantern dossier, that the threat would be a hundred aliens with guns. But when he got to the warehouse ahead of the rest of the League, it was empty.
Or— that wasn’t quite right. Lying in the center of the vast echoing space was a small metallic box. Bruce took a step towards it, and it unfolded, casting a blue glow across the polished concrete floor.
“Possibility,” the box said, in a soft, chiming voice. It pulsed, blue light spreading from the corners, and then the glow subsided, almost expectant. Bruce should have stepped away, should have waited for Zatanna, or Blue Beetle, someone who could analyze the box and determine what it was, and what kind of threat it might pose. But he didn’t. He bent down and picked the box up, pressing it between both palms, and then— a rush of air, like an exhale; a twist of blue light; a swirling sensation behind his breastbone— and he was standing in the doorway to Jason’s bedroom.
He wasn’t wearing the suit. All of Jason’s posters were back on the walls; a pair of dirty socks lay strewn across the floor. His desk was covered with papers: algebra homework and a pile of well-thumbed novels; the English essay he’d won an award for, and only told Bruce about the ceremony thirty minutes before it was happening. But the essay wasn’t finished yet. This wasn’t the clean copy with the little “A+! Great job!” comments in pen at the top. This was Jason’s first draft; Bruce could see where he’d scribbled sentences out.
And at the desk, his feet tucked under the chair, worrying a pencil between his teeth, was Jason. His back was turned. At the base of his neck, his hair was growing too long again, curling under. Those curls had been wet with blood, the last time Bruce had seen them, a few short months ago.
“I know I'm in trouble,” Jason grumbled, without looking up. “I don't need another lecture.”
Bruce found himself unable to speak. Possibility, the box had said. He needed to say something. There had to be a way— if he said it right, if he let Jason know— he could fix it. He could make it so that none of it would ever happen. They would go to the essay ceremony, and they would never go to Ethiopia, and Jason would stay like this, bright and brilliant and a little petulant. He would be wearing a hole through his socks, and biting his pencil, and he would be safe.
But when Bruce opened his mouth, all that came out was a soft, broken little “Jason.”
Jason looked up, his eyes narrowing. Bruce needed to school his features, needed to look normal, as though this were an everyday school night, and not an unlooked-for miracle; as though seeing his son alive in front of him again was something he did not know to appreciate. But he could not do it, not quickly enough, or perhaps he had trained Jason too well. He had always been so perceptive.
“Dad?” Jason began to get up from his desk, to cross the room towards Bruce. “What's wrong? Jesus,” and Jason gave the nervous little laugh he would never grow out of, “you look like someone—”
And then the world began to dissolve into a thousand points of triangulated light, and Bruce was on his knees in the middle of an empty warehouse, his palms pressed flat to the little box. “No,” he heard himself saying, and his voice sounded unfamiliar, as though it was coming from a great way outside of him. “No,” he said again, and beat his fist on the box, and then smoothed his palm against it in apology, because if he destroyed the box there would be no chance of fixing any of it, ever again.
The box pulsed again. Bruce pressed his palms against it so hard the box should have creaked, if it were made of normal metal. It didn’t. “Please,” he said.
Again the light, the twist, the breath of air. He was standing in the big top of Haley’s Circus, watching John and Mary Grayson do their pre-show checks. Somewhere in another tent an elephant was grumbling. A little black-haired boy came bounding up to him. “Hello,” he said, with a broad bright grin that exposed a missing tooth. “You’re a little early, you know.”
“Yes,” Bruce said, to a Dick as yet undimmed by tragedy. He’d forgotten how small Dick had been. But Dick hadn’t had a missing tooth when they’d met; and this Dick wasn’t wearing a costume. Either he hadn’t changed into his outfit, or he wasn’t yet part of the act. “I think I am.” He looked down at Dick’s tousled hair, his small uncalloused hands, the way he was bouncing lightly in place, as though he were dancing to a song playing in his head. He could save Dick everything that would come after, all the horror and the grief and the rage, if he could only find the way to word it.
“I’d like to speak to your parents, if I could,” Bruce said, and Dick frowned a little, and said, “well, they’re a little busy, but if it’s important…”
“It is,” Bruce said, and he made it halfway across the ring when it began to crumble beneath him and he did what he had never done before. He fell.
The concrete was cold beneath his knees. He’d caught himself, instinctively, on his hands, and the box lay innocuous and luminous, boxed between his outstretched forearms. He stared down at it, a sick sense of urgency rising in him. And then he reached his hands out, and picked it back up.
Light. Air. Sensation.
He was in the Manor again, but it was changed, somehow, and he realized with mingled horror and nostalgia that this was because he was seeing it from a different angle.
Someone was calling his name. Her voice was light and low, a warm throaty alto he hadn’t heard in decades. He had forgotten the exact quality of it, though he had tried with increasing desperation not to. There was a thread of exasperation in her voice, and he had forgotten that too, because what child sees their mother as a person?
“Bruce, come on,” she was calling, “we’re going to be late.” Her feet on the stairs. She was in heels already. He realized, with some embarrassment, that he was crying, in the hiccupping, unselfconscious way of a child. His body had not yet learned how to hold back tears.
She was rounding the corner. He could not stop crying. “Bruce,” she said, all the frustration in her face falling away, and she was coming towards him, her arms outstretched.
“I can’t,” he sobbed, thick and hysterical. “I can’t, I can’t.” If she took him in her arms, he would not be able to leave them. He would not be able to go to the theater and into the darkened alley and watch her die. He would not be able to do what needed to be done— because unlike Dick, or Jason, whose pain he could still fix if he could figure out how to use the box right, he could not undo the defining grief of his life without undoing all the rest of it. If he never became Batman, how many would die? How many times would the world end? But by the same token, to ask him, by his own inaction, to spill the pearls, to pull the trigger— he knew his own limits. He was not strong enough.
“Bruce, honey,” she was saying, and she was trying to coax him out from under the side table he was cowering under. “Sweetheart, come on.” Her hand clasped his, and he was able to register the cool sensation of her rings against his sweating palm before the world fell out from under him and he was back in the warehouse, on the concrete floor.
His face was wet. He could almost still smell her perfume. The hateful box glowed gently between his shaking hands.
This wasn’t right. This wasn’t what he needed to change. But surely if he went back in— the box had already taken him back to the beginning. Surely it could take him to the end.
Light, and then darkness. The mountain air was cool and dry. He could taste smoke and hot metal on the wind. At the bottom of the hill in the distance he could see the aid tents, and closer still, moonlight skimmed over the twisted wreckage of the warehouse where Jason had died a few hours before. “No,” he said. “No, no, no,” and he scrabbled in the dust as though he could somehow dig himself back in time. The box had brought him to the end, as he had wanted, but, just as he had been the first time around, he was too late. The dust began to fall, like grains of sand, began to glow blue, and he felt a sickening swoop of relief as the world crumbled.
Again. He could do it again. He wasn’t holding on tightly enough to stay for enough time to make a difference, or he wasn’t focusing his energy on the right moment. He tried to envision what point might be the crucial one, the crux on which the whole disaster turned, and then he pressed his palms together, and the box took him away.
The mountains again, but this time he was in a tent, thick with the scent of sun-hot canvas and cigarette smoke. Sheila Haywood looked up at him, her eyes wide and blue and startled. For a moment, he could see the resemblance that had escaped him. when they'd first met. “You can’t be in here,” she said, and that brief likeness vanished as her features narrowed into a squint. If she recognized him as Bruce Wayne, she gave no sign of it.
“Dr. Haywood,” he said, to the woman whose cowardice and greed had killed his son. “I have reason to believe you’re in danger.” Because that overdeveloped sense of self-preservation was the way to appeal to her, to stop her from planting the lure that would draw Jason into the Joker’s trap.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” she said, turning away again. “If you don’t have anything useful to do here, you should go.”
“The Joker is using you,” he said, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. “You will not survive that encounter.”
“Who are you?” she said, and her voice was shrill and harsh, all that brash unconcern fallen away. “How did you get in here? Who told you about me?” She fumbled with something under her desk.
“Dr. Haywood. Sheila,” he said, but then her bullet sang towards him, a hot metallic flash, and then it fell, like everything else, into blue.
He had failed. He had failed Jason again. He grabbed the box, and this time the rush of wind was so strong he could not hear anything over the roaring in his ears.
The mountains again. He was running across the rocks, a dead sprint towards the warehouse he could see glinting just in front of him. His feet kept slipping, the way they did in his nightmares, but it was just the uneven ground. And maybe this time he would be fast enough.
“Bruce!” someone shouted, and Clark was there, and maybe this was a dream after all, because Clark had never been here. Clark hadn't even been on the planet. Bruce had not had time to scream for him. He had trusted in his own speed, and he had been wrong. But maybe this was what could fix it.
“The warehouse,” he shouted, over the rising wind. “Jason– there’s a bomb–” but Clark wasn’t moving. Why wouldn’t Clark move? Jason was in terrible danger, and Clark was just hovering there, his face a mask of pre-emptive grief.
“Oh, Bruce,” Clark said, and swooped down towards him, and at the bottom of the hill the warehouse exploded, and the world collapsed with it.
He was aware that he was desperate, and clutching, that his grip was too tight. If Clark had been anyone else, he would have had bruises. He let go of Clark’s arms and reached for the box again. Somewhere, there was a moment where he could have stopped it all. Where he could have said no, and things would have fallen into place; or, if not happened perfectly, at least come out better. If he could just find that moment— if he could just get there—
Clark's hand on his wrist was almost gentle. ”Bruce,“ he was saying. “Bruce, we have to go.”
But Bruce could not go, could not leave— not when there was the possibility— how could Clark ask it of him? How could Clark ask it?
He was shuddering, gasping, whole body heaves. Clark's arm was around his shoulders. Clark was lifting him into the air. He struggled, but of course he should have known better. He could not fight Clark.
“I know,” Clark was saying, in that hateful calm voice. “I know. I know.” And he flew Bruce away from the box that held every good thing that could have happened to him, and had not. Bruce looked down through the hole Clark had blasted in the warehouse roof. On the concrete floor the box was a small point of blue possibility. And then it winked out.
—
It had been a torture device, of course. The box had been the threat, and Bruce had fallen into its trap as neatly as if he had closed its jaws around his leg himself. “I’m sorry,” Clark said. “I’m sorry it took me so long to get to you,” and he looked nobly apologetic. The knowing pity in his face made Bruce want to jump out a window. That wasn’t what Clark ought to apologize for, and they both knew it.
It was the core tenet of all his years as Batman. No one was beyond fixing, and so no one died. Everything, every horrible situation, every bleak and ugly moment, could be made better if only everyone was still alive to work at it. It was a stunningly arrogant philosophy, and he knew it, and the box had known it too. The box had given him his every failure, cracked open to see its workings, and then snapped them closed around him. And the worst part was that it had been real. The box did open the time stream, neat and cruel as a carving knife. That was why it had been so dangerous.
“You’re all right?” Clark said. He had seen the last thing the box had shown Bruce. He could probably imagine what the rest of it was like.
“Yes,” Bruce said, and shrugged off the hand on his arm. “Nothing happened.”
And nothing had.
—
He didn’t think about the box again for five years, until he found it in a containment pod in a dusty corner of the Watchtower’s armory.
He picked it up. The pod opened easily before his authorization. The box felt almost warm in his hands, as though it was meant to be there. As though it were welcoming him.
The mountainside was familiar, at this point. He hadn’t seen the box in five years. But he had relived this moment plenty of times before.
“Aw, shit,” someone said behind him, and he whipped around. Jason stood there, his helmet and the barrel of his gun gleaming.
“Let go,” Jason said. “Bruce, you have to let it go.”
“No,” Bruce said. “No, it isn’t too late. I can still save you.”
"No, you can't." Jason pulled the trigger, and the world shattered.
He was still talking when Bruce landed back on the floor of the Watchtower. “If I live, none of the rest of it happens. You and Dick never speak again. Tim spends the rest of his life as some kind of horrible business boy. Cass flies under the radar. And Damian." He did not have to say what would happen to Damian, if Jason’s presence never angered Ra’s enough for Talia to feel unsafe, for her to pull her son out of the League. They both knew.
Jason did not lower his gun. Bruce did not remove his hands from the box.
"Fuck you, old man," Jason said. "Fuck you for making me do this. Fuck you for making me ensure that I live the worst moments of my life. Drop the goddamn box."
The cube clattered to the floor. It made such a small sound, for such a momentous thing.
Jason swooped down and closed the containment pod around it with another curse. Bruce realized, distantly, that his own hands were shaking. He thought of all of the things he had wanted to say to Jason five years ago, standing in the bedroom looking at the boy who he had lost, and found again.
“Jason,” he began.
“Save it,” his son told him, and turned on his heel.