Chapter Text
May Parker had spent thirty-two years learning to expect the unexpected.
As a senior paediatric nurse at a clinic in Queens, she’d seen it all: toddlers who’d swallowed foreign objects, teenagers with suspiciously creative explanations for their injuries and more than a few cases that required a gentle smile while internally screaming. It wasn’t fancy work—not like the big hospitals in Manhattan—but it was honest.
Her patients were the kids from the neighbourhood, the families who couldn’t afford private care, the ones who came to her because she spoke their language, literally and figuratively. She’d learned enough Spanish to get by, a smattering of Mandarin and thanks to the small but vocal Thai community in her catchment area, enough Thai to understand when a grandmother was really worried about her grandson’s fever.
At fifty-five, May had earned the right to a quiet life. Instead, she’d gotten Peter Parker.
Not that she’d trade him for anything. Her nephew, now seventeen and officially the youngest CEO-in-training in Stark Industries’ history, had a habit of making normal impossible. She’d watched from the sidelines as Tony Stark—Tony Stark—had taken Peter under his wing after that whole fiasco with the ferry. Then came the Vulture business, which May still tried not to think about too hard. Then Germany, whatever that had been about.
Then the Stark Internship that wasn’t really an internship at all.
Then, somehow, Peter becoming the billionaire’s protégé, eventual successor and apparently the son Tony had never planned on having. May had stopped being surprised by any of it around the time Peter casually mentioned, between mouthfuls of her famous lasagne, that he’d helped save the world twice before breakfast.
Compared to that, her life was blissfully, wonderfully ordinary.
Which is why, she reflected, the universe had clearly decided to balance the scales.
It had been approximately one hour since May Parker had been yeeted—yes, yeeted, she’d picked that up from her younger patients and it felt appropriate—into what she could only assume was another dimension. The shock had worn off after the first twenty minutes, replaced by a kind of weary acceptance that this was simply her life now.
The crying had lasted another ten.
The remaining thirty had been spent climbing fire escapes, because apparently when the multiverse dumps you somewhere, it dumps you on a rooftop, and rooftops have fire escapes, and fire escapes lead down to streets, and streets in this particular city looked like they’d been designed by someone with a profound love of gargoyles and a deep distrust of sunlight.
She was currently sitting on said rooftop, her back against a rusty air conditioning unit, her cardigan distinctly unsuitable for the chilly evening air.
The city beneath her pulsed with a strange, unsettling energy—darker, more jittery, like Queens after midnight but missing its usual cadence. She’d glimpsed street signs. Gotham. The name had made her snort, because of course. Of course she’d landed in the one city every chatty teenager in her clinic had described in exhaustive detail.
She’d figure out how she got here later.
Right now, she just needed to survive until Peter came to get her.
He’d come. He always came. He was a clever boy, and he had Tony Stark and his entire arsenal of genius at his disposal. They’d be working on a solution already, she was sure of it. Probably arguing about the best way to retrieve her while Happy made them all coffee.
So. Survive. How hard could it be?
May Parker eased herself off the rooftop and onto the fire escape. The ladder descended in stages, each landing giving her a better view of the city below. Gotham was... a lot. Even from several storeys up, she could feel it pressing in on her—the weight of all those gargoyles, the shadows that seemed to move when she wasn’t looking directly at them, the distant sound of something that might have been a scream or might have been a siren.
She’d lived in New York her whole life.
She knew loud and chaos, but this place had a different flavour entirely.
The fire escape ended in an alley.
Of course it did. May paused at the bottom, her hand still on the ladder, and took stock.
The alley was narrow, brick on both sides, with a single flickering streetlight at the far end. Dumpsters. Graffiti. The smell of something that had definitely been there too long. Standard urban alley fare, really. She could be in Brooklyn right now if she squinted and ignored the way the architecture seemed designed to make her feel small.
She checked her pockets.
Phone: dead, which was expected given the whole dimension-hopping situation.
Wallet: present. Keys: her actual keys to the flat in Forest Hills, which were deeply unhelpful here, but which she couldn’t bring herself to abandon. A packet of tissues. A half-eaten granola bar. Her work ID badge from the clinic, complete with her photo and the faded Thai script on the back that one of her patients had added as a joke. They’d written ‘grandma’ because apparently at fifty-five she qualified.
And her watch.
May touched the slim band around her wrist.
Pepper had given it to her eighteen months ago, after the Vulture situation had made it clear that being associated with superheroes came with certain risks. “It’s nanotech,” Pepper had explained, demonstrating how the band could expand into a basic defensive shield. “Tony wanted to give you something more elaborate, but I talked him down. This will protect you from most physical threats. It won’t make you invincible, but it’ll give you time to run.”
May had thanked her politely, worn the watch dutifully and secretly hoped she’d never need it. She’d also, after that conversation, signed up for self-defence classes at the community centre. Three evenings a week for six months, then ongoing sessions whenever she could manage it. Happy had heard about it somehow—probably Peter, who told Happy everything—and had started showing up at her flat on Sunday mornings with bagels and an offer to spar.
“You’ve got good instincts,” he’d told her after their third session.
She stepped out of the alley and onto the street.
The neighbourhood was run-down.
A few shops with metal grilles over their windows. A Laundromat with flickering fluorescent lights. A bodega that looked like it might actually be open, which was promising.
May started walking toward it, keeping her pace steady and her head up. Look confident, look like you belong, look like you know exactly where you’re going—that was rule one of being in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, whether in Queens or wherever this was.
She’d made it half a block when she heard the footsteps behind her. She didn’t turn around, just adjusted her grip on her keys and kept walking, but she listened. Heavy footsteps, deliberately loud. The kind of footsteps that wanted to be heard.
“Well, well.”
May stopped, turned slowly and faced them.
Three men, like she’d thought. Mid-twenties maybe, dressed in the kind of cheap jackets and worn trainers that said they spent a lot of time on these streets. The one in the middle had a scar through his eyebrow and a smile that was trying very hard to be threatening. The other two hung back, watching, letting him do the talking.
“Little late to be out for a stroll, grandma.”
Grandma. Right. May had been called worse by teenagers in her clinic.
She kept her face neutral, her posture relaxed but ready.
“I’m just looking for a hotel,” she said calmly. The voice she used with scared parents and difficult patients. “I seem to have gotten turned around. If you could point me toward something reasonable, I’d appreciate it.”
The man with the scar laughed. His friends didn’t. They just kept watching, their eyes moving over her, assessing. Looking for weakness. Looking for value.
“Hotel,” he repeated. “You got money for a hotel?”
May considered her options. She could run. She could scream. She could activate the watch and hope the shield was enough to get her clear. But running meant not knowing where shewas going, screaming meant drawing attention she couldn’t predict, and the watch was a last resort. Best to try the simple approach first.
Slowly, carefully, she reached for her wrist. The men tensed. She held up her other hand, palm out, wait and unfastened her ordinary watch—not Pepper’s nanotech, her actual watch, a simple Timex she’d had for years.
“Look,” she said, holding it out. “It’s not fancy, but it’s a decent watch. Take it. Take whatever you want from my bag. I’m not looking for trouble, and you don’t want the hassle that comes with it. Let’s just all go our separate ways.”
The man with the scar stared at her. Then he laughed again, louder this time, and stepped closer.
“You think we want your watch, old lady? We want—”
He didn’t finish. None of them did because something dropped from the fire escape above, like a cat deciding to descend from a height simply because it could, and landed between May and the three men with barely a sound.
May’s first thought, absurdly, was that it was a very small Batman. The same cape and the same dramatic silhouette against the flickering streetlight. But this one was tiny and compact. The size of a child, really, though the way it held itself said nothing childlike at all.
The three men stumbled backward, recognition flashing across their faces.
“Robin,” the scarred one breathed. Then, to his friends: “It’s the new one. The demon.”
“Relax,” one of the others muttered nervously. “He’s still wearing the ‘R.’”
“Means he doesn’t kill. Means we can take him,” the third one said, louder now, puffing himself up
May watched this exchange with the detached fascination of someone who had stumbled into a nature documentary. They were scared—she could see it in the way they shifted their weight, the way their eyes kept darting toward exits—but they were also calculating. Three grown men versus one child. The math, in their world, probably seemed simple.
The child in question hadn’t moved. He stood between May and the thugs, his back to her, his posture so still he might have been carved from stone. The cape stirred slightly in the cold air. The domino mask caught the light.
And May, for one dizzying moment, thought of Peter.
Peter in his suit, doing whatever it was he did when he swung through Queens at night. Peter facing down men twice his size with nothing but his wit and his webs and that stupid, stubborn refusal to give up. Peter, who she’d raised since he was six years old, who she’d patched up and fed and worried over and never, ever seen in action. Not really. Not like this.
She was about to get a front-row seat to someone else’s child doing someone else’s impossible job.
And she knew, with the uncomfortable clarity of someone who had listened to far too many conversations with a nine-year-old named Krit, exactly who that child was.
Damian Wayne.
The current Robin. The youngest. The one Krit talked about with the breathless enthusiasm reserved for truly problematic favourites. “He was raised by assassins,” Krit had told her, wide-eyed, during one appointment. “His grandfather is Ra’s al Ghul. He runs the League of Assassins. And his mother is Talia al Ghul, and she’s also really dangerous, and they raised Damian to be the perfect killer since he was born. Like, literally since he was born. In a lab. Sort of.”
May had nodded along, checking his vitals, only half-listening. “That sounds intense, sweetheart.”
“It is! And then Batman took him in, and now he’s Robin, but he’s really mean to everyone because he doesn’t know how to be nice, and he thinks he’s better than everybody because he totally is, and he has a sword, and he’s only ten.”
Ten. The word had stuck with May, even as the rest of the comic book nonsense had faded. Ten years old, raised in a cult of assassins, dropped into Gotham City and told to be a hero. It was the kind of backstory that would have broken most children. This one, apparently, had broken other people instead.
The scarred man made a grab for May’s bag.
May saw it coming. She saw the weight shift, the hand reach, the moment of decision. She could have moved. Could have dodged, or blocked, or activated the watch. But she didn’t, because the child moved first.
It was beautiful, in a terrible way.
Robin flowed forward like water, like something that had never known hesitation. His hand caught the man’s wrist and twisted. Then, the man screamed and dropped to his knees. The other two lunged, and Robin met them with the same economy of motion. A kick to the back of one knee. An elbow to the jaw of the other. Two more men on the ground, groaning.
Thirty seconds. Maybe less.
Robin stood among them, breathing evenly, and looked down at the scarred man with an expression of pure contempt. “You are beneath me,” he said. His voice was high—he was a child, after all—but it carried a weight that made the word cult feel suddenly, terrifyingly literal. He turned his back on them without a flicker of concern and faced May.
For a long moment, they simply looked at each other.
May saw the too-straight posture, the too-cold eyes behind the mask, the too-old set of a jaw that belonged to a child who had never been allowed to be one. She saw, too, the blood on his knuckles… probably someone’s.
She thought of Peter, who at ten had been building Lego.
She thought of Tony, who had taken one broken kid and given him a family, and Batman, who had apparently done the same with a completely different kind of broken.
Robin huffed before marching up to May, stopping just outside her personal bubble.
“You are either remarkably courageous or possess the survival instincts of a lemming,” he said, crossing his arms over his armoured chest. “This is the Diamond District, and although it lacks the overt filth of Crime Alley, it is a haven for high-end predators. Walking here at this hour without a tactical escort is an act of gross negligence. You have now compromised my patrol route, as I cannot leave a civilian of your... advanced maturity... to be accosted by the next set of bottom-feeders. I shall see you to your residence.”
“Thank you for the rescue,” May said. “I apologise for wasting your time. I’m a bit lost, you see. I was just looking for a place to stay the night.”
“Lost?” Robin echoed, the word sounding like an insult. “Gotham is a grid of logical, if decaying, infrastructure. Only the truly incompetent get ‘lost’ in the Diamond District.” He stepped closer, inspecting her. “Are you a thief who stole a nurse’s identity?”
“I’m a nurse, I promise,” May replied, smiling despite herself. She held out her ID card.
Robin took the card with two fingers, as if it were contaminated.
“Queens? New York?” He looked at her as if she had just claimed to be from Mars. “I have memorised the global atlas, woman. New York is a state, yes, but its primary metropolitan centres are Metropolis and New Carthage. There is no ‘Queens.’ Even the minor boroughs of Gotham do not possess such a ridiculous name.”
The streetlight caught the edge of his domino mask, and May found herself studying him despite the absurdity of the situation. “Tt. Your ‘ID’ is a fascinating piece of forged plastic, but it is ultimately irrelevant,” Robin said, handing the card back with a stiff, formal gesture.
He looked her over once more and sighed.
He wasn’t leaving.
That was the first thing she noticed. He could leave. He had no reason to stay. The thugs were down, she was unharmed, and he was a vigilante with an entire city to patrol. But he remained, weight balanced on the balls of his feet, eyes scanning the darkness behind her with the automatic vigilance of someone who had never been able to relax.
“I will lead you to the nearest safe-zone hotel. I suggest you stay there until the sun rises and your brain decides to rejoin reality. It is a high-end establishment and you likely cannot afford the tea, but I can ensure you are not thrown back into the gutter.”
She found him absolutely adorable. She also knew that he would be mortified if he knew.
May followed him, watching the way he constantly scanned the rooftops. He was a good boy, underneath all that cold training and “son of the Bat” posturing. He reminded her so much of Peter—the weight of the world on shoulders that were still too small.
They walked in silence for a block, then two.
Robin moved like he owned the pavement, his small form casting long shadows in the uneven light. May watched him as they walked—the way he checked every alley without seeming to look, the way his hands stayed loose and ready and the way he positioned himself slightly between her and the street. Automatic. Instinctive.
They rounded a corner onto a marginally brighter street, and Robin slowed. The hotel he’d mentioned was visible ahead—a modest building with a faded sign and a single light over the entrance. Acceptable. Manageable. May could work with this.
She stopped walking.
Robin stopped too, turning to face her.
“The entrance is there. I have fulfilled my obligation. You can—”
“I’m not from here,” May said quietly.
“I know.” His voice had dropped, lost its performative disdain. “You have established that. Your identification is fraudulent, your origin is non-existent and your understanding of basic geography is appalling. These facts are not new.”
“No.” May shook her head. “I mean I’m not from here. Not from this city. Not from this dimension.”
The silence stretched.
Robin stared at her. For the first time since she’d met him, he looked genuinely uncertain.
“That’s impossible,” he said finally. “Dimension travel is—”
He stopped. Started again. “There are protocols. Events. Nothing spontaneous.”
“I didn’t say it was spontaneous. I said it happened.” May held his gaze. “I’m in a city I only know from the comic books my patients read to me while I’m working. I know who you are. I know about your grandfather and your mother and the League. I know you were raised to be a weapon. I know you’re ten years old. And I know—” She took a breath. “I know my nephew is going to come for me. He’s smart and he will find a way. I just have to survive until then.”
Robin hadn’t moved. His face, what she could see of it behind the mask, was unreadable.
Another long moment.
Then, the boy turned and continued walking toward the hotel, his cape swirling behind him.
“If you are going to be insane on my watch, at least do it indoors.”