Chapter Text
Kyle wakes up to Klarion hovering over him, cold concrete against his back. His body feels weird, limbs feeling too short and too long at the same time. Why can’t I just have one normal week?!
They stare at each other for a few seconds, before Klarion grins widely and turns his head.
“I’ll be back!” the True Fae says, disappearing in a puff of purple smoke. “Have fun!”
Kyle stands up and checks himself over, and swears when he realizes that he is currently five. Even worse, it’s not just de-aging- he’s been bodyswapped with his five-year-old self. He’s wearing 50s children’s clothes, his ring is nowhere to be found and he’s holding a composition notebook full of crayon drawings.
A quick check of his jacket pockets reveals six crayons, a well-used pencil, a small paper bag full of beef jerky and a plastic vial half-full of powder with the distinct fizzy-cranberry aura-scent of owlsblood jasper. Thank you for insisting I carry snacks around when going out of the house, Past Iris.
Kyle glances around at the alley he’s in, and sighs when he realizes all of the signage is in Japanese. Thankfully, he knows enough Japanese(both spoken and written) to get by, even if he only learned it to be able to watch the original dubs of anime without subtitles.
Then a man turns the corner, and Kyle gapes as he realizes that they have a floating black metal sphere for a head. Okay, Boku No Hero Academia. Not the worst anime I could be stuck in.
“Kid, what are you doing here?” the man asks, thin blue horizontal rings lighting up on his head. “It’s not safe to be out after dark.”
Well, he’s been seen. Time to pull out the acting skills. Thankfully, Kyle is very good at acting. He’s not anywhere near Bat levels, but he can definitely play the role of “scared and confused six-year-old”.
“I d-don’t k-know!” Kyle hiccups, letting fake tears build in his eyes. “I w-want my m-mom!”
The man’s head lights up entirely blue. “Okay, kid. Where did you last see your mom?” he says in a soft voice.
“A-at home.”
“Where did you last see your dad, then?”
“With M-mom.”
“How’d you get here, then?”
“I-I d-dunno.”
“Kid, I’m going to call the police and they’ll help you get back to your mommy and daddy, okay?. Just stay put, okay?” Dammit, I'm going to be in the system now. No choice about it, though- running away would be more suspicious.
“O-okay.”
The man dials emergency services and informs them of Kyle. It takes about seven minutes for them to arrive, while the man tries to comfort him with facts about sea life, Kyle letting himself "calm down" gradually.
Eventually, a cat-headed police officer arrives to collect him, bending down to look Kyle in the eye. Huh, it’s Officer Sansa. Guess I’m going to run into as many canon characters as possible.
“My name is Sansa. What’s your name?” Okay, I have to make sure that I can be traced back to any of my or my family’s counterparts as little as possible, and have a convincing story. Thank God that six-year-olds aren’t expected to know much.
“Rayner.” Kyle looks up innocently. “Where’s my Mom?”
“I don’t know, but I can help you look for her if you come to the station with me.”
“Okay!”
Sansa helps Kyle into the car, and they ride back to the station. Kyle figures out a semi-decent cover story on the way there.
And of course , the detective assigned to interrogate him is Naomasa Tsukauchi. With Kyle’s luck being what it is, he probably has the fanon lie detector quirk.
“Hello, my name is Detective Tsukauchi. I’m going to ask you a few questions, okay? You don’t have to answer them if they make you feel bad.”
“Okay.”
“What’s your name?”
“Rayner.” Tsukauchi notes that down on his phone. Kyle’s pretty sure he’s using some kind of premade incident form.
“What’s your family name?”
“Dunno.” Tsukauchi writes that down too.
“What are your Mom and Dad’s names?”
“They’re my Mom and Dad.” Concealed non sequiturs, in Kyle’s experience, don’t trip supernatural lie detection as long as you think of them as non sequiturs.
“What’s your Quirk?”
Kyle has already thought this out. “I’m a dragon!” he says cheerfully.
“Oh?”
“Can I show you?”
“Yes, you can.”
Kyle shifts into dragon form, then back into human form after showing off his dragon form- a Western dragon, currently about the size of a corgi, with batlike wings connected by a fringe from his shoulders to his hips, shiny, gemlike scales(currently green with blue accents), cheek frills and tiny horn stubs.
“What are your parents’ Quirks?” Detective Tsukauchi continues, furiously Googling something. That’s probably a bad sign.
“Mom goes super fast and Dad makes glowy things and flies.” Switching Barry and Hal should be enough, right? They’ve both been his Mom and his Dad at various points, so it isn’t a lie.
“What do they do when they go to work?”
“Stop bad things from happening.” That could apply to hundreds of different professions.
“Well, I think I’ve found your parents. Point to your Mom and Dad if you recognize them.” Oh no. Detective Tsukauchi pulls up an image on his phone and holds it out.
It’s a PR photo marked as being from the Flash-Lantern Agency, with Barry, Hal, Wally, Dick, Kyle’s older self, Jason and Damian all standing there in their hero costumes. They’re all in hybrid form except for Jason. Thankfully, Barry’s current human identity is female, and she’s got her face pressed against Hal’s cheek in the photo, so Kyle can just go with his actual parents. Whew.
Kyle points to Barry and then Hal. “That’s Mom. That’s Dad.” Alternate versions of his family should cover for him if he can get all of the details over.
Tsukauchi nods. “Okay. How did you get from America to Japan?”
“Dunno. I just woke up on the road.”
“What were you doing before you woke up on the road?”
“Sleeping.”
“Okay. I think we’re done here. Do you want a snack?”
“Yes!” Kyle is playing the excitable child for all it’s worth. More snacks never hurt.
“Is there anything you can’t eat?”
“Veggies and cereal.”
“And is there anything you need to eat?”
“Food?”
“Anything special that other kids don’t?”
Kyle pulls the vial of jasper powder out of his jacket pocket and holds it out for a few seconds, before putting it back.
Detective Tsukauchi nods. “Stay here. I will come back with snacks for you.”
Alright, that went better than expected.
Naomasa has a headache. An American hero duo’s six-year-old son being kidnapped from his bed and dumped in a random alley in Musutafu, completely unharmed, is not the sort of mystery that he was expecting to deal with today, but here he is, contemplating his life choices yet again.
He calls Aizawa as soon as he can and breathes an internal sigh of relief when he picks up on the first ring despite the late hour.
“What do you want, Detective?”
“There was an incident with a kid."
“What’s special about this murder that you’re calling me now?”
“That’s the thing. It’s not a murder. The boy’s alive and completely unharmed. Someone kidnapped him while he was sleeping and dropped him off in an alley.”
“And why is this kid worthy of a direct phone call? Just return him to his parents.”
“About that.” Naomasa winces. “They’re in America. And also pretty famous heroes that will probably be searching the streets instead of waiting for phone calls.”
“Who?"
“Flash and Green Lantern.”
“Which ones?” It’s a fair request, considering that the Flash-Lantern Agency just keeps reusing the same hero names and the 35th Flash, Jared Rayner, is still alive, even if he retired ten years ago.
“The current ones- Beryl and Halton Jordan. Flash 36 and Green Lantern 37.”
Aizawa sighs. “I didn’t know they had a third child. Are you sure this is the right kid?”
“Yeah, well, the kid said his parents “stop bad things from happening”, that his Mom goes “super fast” and his Dad “makes glowy things and flies”, and he recognized their hero costumes on sight. Plus, his Quirk is a dragon transformation effectively identical to Kel Garrick’s.”
Completely duplicate Quirks are basically unheard of, but the whole dynasty of heroes descended from the original Green Lantern, Flash and Nightwing have had remarkably consistent Quirk expressions. Every single Nightwing has had feathered wings, every single Green Lantern has had hard light telekinesis and every single Flash has had a speed enhancement- without a single exception or missed generation since the Dawn of Quirks.
It would be revolutionary for someone to have exactly the same Quirk as their great-uncle, but considering the precedent with this family? Not impossible.
Aizawa sighs. “Call the agency. I’ll look into motives and suspects.”
“Thank you. I’ll forward the reports to you.” Naomasa hangs up. Too late, he realizes that he hasn’t mentioned that Rayner speaks fluent Japanese(albeit with a mangled accent and childish vocabulary), despite being only six and both of his parents being native English speakers.
Ah well. It’s in the case report.
Rayner is curled up in Quirked form under his chair when Naomasa gets back from the supply room with beef jerky- the only carnivore-safe food in there that he’d trust a small child to not make too much of a mess with.
“I brought some jerky.”
“Yay!” Rayner slips out from under the chair and shifts back to normal. He holds out the vial of gemstone powder to Naomasa. “Can you put some of this on it?”
Naomasa can’t help but note that the unusual dietary requirement is probably inherited from his distant ancestor Ruby, whose Quirk both allowed and required him to ingest small amounts of gemstones. (Ruby was only famous nowadays for being the first top 100 hero who didn’t rely on his Quirk, instead favoring a personalized weapon that was simultaneously a staff, a taser and a sword. Which was a shame, since he’d also standardized numerous parts of America’s emergency hotline and anonymous tip line system that had previously- no, focus, Naomasa. )
“How much should I put on?”
“A little bit so it doesn’t taste too much like cranberry.” So he can eat fruit. I hate interviewing children, and not just because it means they were involved with a crime.
Rayner is still staring at him in anticipation, so Naomasa tries his best to figure out how much powdered semiprecious gemstone(Jasper? Agate? Carnelian? He’ll just go with jasper) is “a little bit” in the eyes of a six-year-old, and how to get only a little bit out of the poorly designed container.
Thankfully, the jerky is in a resealable bag, so he pours about half a teaspoon in, closes the bag, and shakes it vigorously before handing it back to Rayner.
The kid eats the entire bag surprisingly quickly for someone so small, then looks back to Naomasa. “When is Mom going to get here?” he asks.
“I don’t know. I’m going to call them to find out, okay?”
He ends up bringing Rayner with him while tracking down and using the station’s international phone, just because there’s no one else to watch him.
“Flash-Lantern Agency, Chameleon speaking. What do you need?” a bored-sounding male voice recites.
“This is Detective Naomasa Tsukauchi of the Musutafu Police Department. We’ve found Rayner Jordan. He is unharmed, but has somehow been transported to Japan.” Naomasa says, thankful for the fact that police work requires high English grades.
“May I have the associated reports and transcripts? We need to confirm this is truly Rayner.”
Naomasa sends them over, and the faint sound of typing echoes through the line for several seconds before stopping.
“Alright, everything checks out. I will contact Flash and Green Lantern to update them on the situation. They will be here within the hour.” Chameleon hangs up, and Naomasa breathes a sigh of relief.
He turns to look at Rayner, and finds he’s somehow obtained a paper bag full of more jerky.
“Where did you get that?”
“Pocket.” Rayner says cheerfully, patting his left pocket. True. Of course the kid had snacks and just didn’t mention it to get more- he’s six.
Wait. Why does he have stuff in his pockets if he was sleeping? Actually, why is he wearing a jacket?
“Why are you not wearing pajamas?”
Rayner pauses, thinking it over. “I was when I went to bed.” True. Well, that’s just creepy.
“Well, Chameleon says that your parents will be here soon. It might take up to an hour, so we’ll figure out something to do.”
“Okay!”
Thyme “Tim” Merritt, AKA Chameleon, formerly long-dead Tim Drake, has a problem. Said problem is figuring out how to explain to Barry and Hal why a five-year-old version of Kyle ended up in Japan.
Tim reads the incident report and checks the station’s security footage, and raises an eyebrow. This isn’t traditional de-aging- Kyle is sitting right next to him, so something else must be going on.
Well, considering that he told the Japanese police that his name was Rayner, not Kyle, he’s definitely been de-aged and isn’t a clone.
He’s betting Klarion or some other True Fae dropped an alternate universe counterpart here and de-aged them to five because they thought it was funny. Unfortunately, Kyle has used the last name Rayner pretty often, so that doesn’t really narrow down his original age that much.
Tim makes a fake identity based on the incident report- Barry and Hal’s third child Rayner Jordan, six years old, quirk Weredragon, currently homeschooled to hide him from the media. It will make the next time Kyle swaps human identities easier to have him established as existing as a child, even if this Kyle ends up returning to his home universe.
Now that that’s done, he forwards the Japanese police files, Rayner Jordan’s records and his personal report on the situation to the rest of the family, accompanied by texts to Barry and Hal reading “Congratulations: it’s a boy!” that he promptly deletes all traces of.
Seconds later, he gets a series of frantic texts back from Barry asking what he’s talking about. Hal is presumably still asleep.
Tim tells Barry to check his email, and turns to Kyle “Hey Kyle? You have a little brother now.”
“I what?! ” Kyle makes to get up, presumably to go yell at Hal and Barry, and Tim raises a hand to stop him.
“Don’t get up just yet!” Tim waits until Kyle gets back in his seat to continue. “There’s a five year old alternate universe counterpart of yours in Japan.”
Kyle sighs. “Okay, that’s so much better than Barry and Hal just forgetting to tell me about a new egg.”
“Yep. I’m pretty sure Barry is going over to pick him up right now, so you get to see yourself as a five-year-old. He’s adorable.”
Kyle(well, Rayner, now) was expecting Barry to show up within two minutes of being called. The police are very much not, considering it’s an eleven-hour flight from Coast City to Musutafu.
Still, they are nice enough to only look shocked momentarily when Rayner shifts into dragon form and rushes towards Barry as soon as he feels the tell-tale Speed Force ripples.
“Mom! You came!”
Barry shakes seawater off her wings and picks Rayner up, letting him bury his face in the scarlet feathers of her left wing. Barry’s ozone-and-lemongrass aura-scent is a lot more comforting than it should be, and he ends up changing color to mirror her like an actual hatchling. Dammit, five-year-old brain!
She turns to Detective Tsukauchi. “Thank you for taking care of Rayner, Tsukauchi-san.” she says in perfect Japanese.
“It was my pleasure. Also- did you run across the ocean?!”
“Fastest way to get here.” Barry shrugs. “And really, the hard part is navigating.”
“I suppose that’s reasonable. Now, just sign these forms.” He pauses. “It would probably be a good idea to dry your hands first, though.”
“My costume is waterproof and frictionless, just not my wings. There’s no water on my gloves.”
Detective Tsukauchi hands over the forms and a pencil, and within seconds they’re filled out in neat block print. “Alright, you can take him home.”
Barry nods, and they take off running. Rayner clings tightly to his mother’s neck and shoulders as the Speed Force surges and she takes off, running through urban areas through the countryside to the coast, then speeding up and sprinting across the Pacific. Rayner only gets flashes of the environment- he can’t speed up his mind to the same level as a true speedster. (It’s still much more than he can speed up his body. That’s low superhuman at best.)
A deliberate spray of seawater and sand is the only sign of Barry slowing down once they’re back in California. People stare as she rushes past a beach resort and into the farmland surrounding the Coast City metropolitan area.
She slips into a wealthy suburb of Coast City, slowing down to a walking pace as she approaches a large and well-kept house.
“Right. So, how’d you get here?” she asks once they’re inside. “Tim gave me the police files.”
Rayner sighs, jumps back off of Barry and shifts into human form. “Klarion dumped me here. I just woke up here, with him hovering over me. He told me that he’d be back and to have fun, which I assume means “you’re getting back once you mess with the locals enough”.” he reports.
“Are there any notable differences?”
“Well, my universe is pre-quirk, but someone made an anime about Quirked society called My Hero Academia, which I’ve already met two minor characters from. And I got dumped in Japan instead of America, so I’m probably supposed to mess with the canon characters.” Rayner sighs. “The problem is, I’m six and you and Hal are in America.”
Barry thinks for a few milliseconds. “Our Kyle has been wanting to go on an international work study, and UA’s been trying to hire a TA to work with All Might for some time but haven’t got any qualified and willing candidates in Japan. I’m sure we could arrange for him to take the position and bring you with him.” That's awfully convenient.
“Right. Where’s Hal?”
“Sleeping.”
“Let’s prank him.”
Rayner explains his idea and Barry laughs. “Okay, that’s awesome. I have some suggestions, too.”
Rayner shifts into dragon form, turns back to his preferred green and blue color scheme, then lets Barry tie a red ribbon into a bow around the back of his neck.
Barry carries him into their bedroom, where Hal is curled up under the covers.
“I got you a present!” she calls.
Slit-pupiled green eyes blink open, glowing faintly in the darkness. “What is it?”
Barry sets Rayner down on the foot of the bed and gestures to him. Hal looks down, and blinks furiously as he takes in the sight of a tiny five-year-old version of his son.
“Uh…” he says, rubbing his eyes.
“Hi, Daddy!” Rayner chirps.
“What.”
Barry smiles. “Ran all the way to Japan and back for this. Isn’t he adorable?”
“Barry, that is an entire hatchling.”
“You said you missed having hatchlings small enough to pick up.” Barry points out.
“So you deaged Kyle?!”
“Do you not want me?” Rayner says worriedly.
“No, of course I do!” Hal says quickly.
“Okay. I was worried cause Kyle’s still at work and I thought you might want him more.”
Hal freezes, glancing back and forth between Barry and Rayner. “You…what…he’s a clone?!”
“Nope. Alternate universe.” Barry says.
“Barry. What have you done?!” Hal shrieks. “You don’t steal other people’s children!”
Barry’s only response is hysterical laughter that peters off into choked giggling. “Oh my god, your face!”
Rayner sighs and shifts back into human form, removing the ribbon, sitting up straight and crossing his arms as Hal looks absolutely stricken. “Klarion dumped me here and de-aged me. And well, it looks like I’ll be stuck here for a while.” he says, thankful that he can finally act his (mental) age. “We couldn’t resist pranking you, though.”
‘How old are you actually?”
“Fifty-four.” Rayner sighs. “Now come on, we’ve got things to do.”