Chapter Text
The digital clock on the wall marks the time as exactly 07:58 when Robert trudges his way into SDN on a perfectly normal Tuesday.
He’s expecting the usual start of the week slog. Maybe a low-level minion thinking they can get away with some bullshit, or perhaps a minor dispute between ego-driven heroes that’s getting in the way of the day’s essential tasks. Despite feeling groggy and tired, Robert is fully prepared for the dreadful spreadsheets, even more dreadful incident reports to fill in and the frantic yapping of the Z-Team in his ears.
But the moment Robert crosses the threshold into the main bullpen, something feels…off.
The usual chatter is replaced by a nerve wracking silence, broken only by hushed whispers of other dispatchers between themselves.
Robert frowns, his grip tightening on his coffee thermos.
This kind of vibe only exists around when one of two things is happening. Either there is some earth-shattering gossip going around, or something very serious is currently happening on the front lines.
Alright. Change of plans. Maybe this isn’t just a normal Tuesday after all.
He barely has time to drop his battered thermos on his desk before Mandy arrives, the rapid-fire clicking of her heels against the tiled floor announcing her arrival. There is a tension in her jaw and a frantic glimmer in her eyes that he doesn’t like one bit.
“Robert. Thank god,” she says, and Robert decides that whatever is happening must be a Shroud-level catastrophe for Mandy to forgo a greeting.
“Good morning to you too—aaaand we’re going away, okay.”
A vague distracted nod is the only response he gets before Mandy grabs him firmly by the elbow to guide him away from his station and down the hall to one of the rarely-used training rooms. It’s in the older section of the office floor that had somehow survived relatively unscathed. Out of the way and out of sight.
Oh, boy. This is definitely going to be a long day.
And his coffee got left behind. Which is for the best, really. It tasted like shit this morning.
“I haven’t even logged in yet,” he mutters as they stop right outside the door. “What’s going on?”
“It’s urgent,” she answers, scanning the hallway to ensure no nosy idiot has followed them. Her arms are crossed tightly over her chest, which is a sure enough sign that she is trying to find the best way to tell him something difficult.
Immediately, Robert’s mind jumps to his team. Had they screwed up? Had Chad set another property on fire? Had Courtney socked another reporter in the nose? They’d been doing fine lately, practically exemplary. Hitting all of their targets and keeping a very nice spot on the leaderboard.
He fixes Mandy with a pointed look, both brows raised as he urges her to just spit it out and tell him what the fuck is going on.
She wastes a few more seconds chewing on her bottom lip before, at last, giving him some answers.
“We have a…situation,” she explains cautiously, gesturing toward the still-closed door. “We found a group of children.”
“Children?” Robert echoes.
Whenever a notice for missing persons popped up, especially an entire group of children, SDN would be the first to know and be on the look out for them. Statistics show a higher percentage of successful rescues when supers are involved, as long as the case is under twenty-four hours old. It’s some new collaborative protocol between the company and local PD, but…if this is the case and a different team has already secured them, why is he being pulled aside to be informed about it?
“Have you notified the parents?”
“Yeah…” Her nose wrinkles into a worried expression he’s never seen on her face before. It’s as if she’s trying to find a way to tactfully work around what she’s going to say next, which Robert takes as a bad sign for worse news.
Oh, yeah. Now, he’s genuinely worried.
“...And?”
“Well…” Mandy says slowly. She hesitates, as if picking several different ways to phrase the unthinkable before settling with: “They, uh. They named you.”
Robert stares at her. A moment passes, then several more.
“What.”
“Yeah.” She grimaces, a hand moving to settle on the door. Robert assumes the pack of kids must be inside, but it’s a little too quiet on the other side. Eerily so. “They all named you as their parent. It’s, um… It’s pretty wild.”
“Mandy,” Robert says, finally finding his voice. He’s trying to be calm about this, because surely there is a rational explanation, but his tone comes out a lot flatter than he intended. “That’s not possible. This kid must be confused or something—”
“Kids,” Mandy corrects.
Right. Plural. Of fucking course.
“...Okay, how many kids are strolling around the place calling me ‘Dad’?”
Mandy winces again. “About…eleven of them.”
Holy fucking shit.
“Eleven?”
“I already contacted our DI department about it. Long story,” Mandy explains, as if that means anything to him.
“M-My point stands,” Robert argues back, his confusion mounting by the second. “You know I can’t—”
“Have any? Yeah. I know.”
She should. She’s had enough access to his medical records to have been able to read all about how the mech’s crash fucked his body up a lot more than it should. The internal trauma alone cut his chances of conceiving, let alone carrying a kid, down fifty percent. And that’s without even factoring in a decade of testosterone and poor life choices.
“Yeah, you know. And I would definitely know if I had pushed out eleven kids.” Robert shakes his head. “Just— Hang on. What’s this about the DI? Do you really need an entire department to look into this? If this is a missing persons case…why not turn it over to the authorities?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that. Do you know what they do?”
No fucking clue.
He searches his mind for the definition, trying to remember if it had been mentioned at orientation during his first week at SDN, but he comes up short. SDN operates a large number of odd branches and departments teeming with all sorts of unique supers. This has to be one of the most obscure divisions, and he’s clearly not ranked high enough to get the full picture.
Until now, that is.
Robert glances at the door. The old glass is too darkly tinted to see inside, which only adds to his wary curiosity. He can’t spot any movement or catch a single sound from inside. Are they really in there?
“...No,” he admits, eyeing Mandy with a mix of suspicion and dread. “Remind me again. What do they do?”
“They’re SDN’s Dimensional Investigations unit. They handle interdimensional and multiversal anomalies, and they detected a big one in the middle of the night, right here in Torrance.”
Fuck.
“At the center of that anomaly,” Mandy continues, “we found…them.”
Fuck fuck fuck.
Mandy gives him a careful smile. “I think you’ll understand when you see them why we know they’re not lying about you being their parent. You…well, you likely are, in eleven different lives.”
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Fuck!
This can’t be happening. This cannot be seriously fucking happening.
Maybe it’s a prank. Some elaborate crappy joke that the Z-Team are in on. Or maybe it really is the truth, and Robert has no idea how he’s supposed to feel about that. Regardless of his inner turmoil, there are children in that room who need help getting home.
“Ready to go in and meet them?” Mandy asks, despite already pushing the door open.
Robert arches a brow at her, and waits for a moment. There is still no movement inside, which means he’ll have to physically walk in to deal with this.
Here goes nothing.
“Sure,” he says, despite feeling wildly unprepared to handle the situation.
He walks in before her, expecting to see a group of toddlers huddled around a table, maybe with crayons or keeping themselves busy with some snacks. Really, he’s expecting anything except for what actually happens.
Instead, he’s jumped by a soccer team’s worth of children, screaming at the top of their lungs.
“Get ‘em!”
“Take this!”
“Taste my fury!”
What the fuck, Robert thinks as an avalanche of tiny fists and feet and miscellaneous items rain down on him. One of the terrors gets a mean right hook to his thigh, and another whacks him over the head with what feels like a tube of cardboard. He’s endured worse, of course, but getting unexpectedly ganged up on and tackled to the ground by a group of nursery-aged kids is not something he typically prepares for.
Thankfully, Mandy had anticipated the chaos and is quick to swing into action, prying little people off him as he’s being sprayed down with an almost incessant stream of bubbles.
“Okay, okay, that’s enough now. Let poor Robert breathe.”
Apparently, those are the magic words to call off the brutal attack.
The moment Mandy speaks his name, the ambush changes swiftly from kicks and punches to tears and wailing. Robert doesn’t even have time to process the whiplash. One second he’s curled in on himself, arms up in a defensive block, and the next—
“I missed you!”
“Papa!”
“Dad, where have you been?!”
“I’ve been so scared!”
The weight on him changes and, instead of declaring war on him, those little hands now cling to his clothes and limbs as faces press into his shoulders, his chest and his neck.
And there’s crying.
A lot of crying.
“...Oh,” Robert says intelligently, because his brain has completely frozen over, leaving him with no idea what to do or how to navigate what he’s currently experiencing.
There are so many of them.
Tiny bodies have crowded around him, piling into his space like he’s some kind of lifeline they’ve been cut off from for far too long. If what Mandy says is right, they’ve been separated from their version of him for a good few hours. One kid has latched onto his arm with a grip that would make a pro wrestler proud. Another is pushing other kids out of their way to curl into his lap. There’s a damp patch forming on his shirt where someone has buried their face and is sobbing as if the world just ended.
“Uh…Hey, you’re okay,” Robert tries uncertainly. This is going great. Fucking stellar. He’s really handling this like a professional.
He does not know where to put his hands, holding them up as if in surrender. Hugging them back seems like the best way to get them all to calm down and soothe the chaos so, very carefully, he wraps his arms around as many of the kids as he can reach.
It doesn’t stop the sob-fest, but the volume of it does shift drastically from dramatic wailing to a chorus of hiccuping sniffles.
Mandy, traitor that she is, has stepped back. There is a look on her face that tells him she is absolutely not stepping in to save from this. He is, officially, on his own to handle eleven crying children.
“Okay, guys,” he says gently. Or, what he thinks is a gentle tone. He doesn’t know shit about talking to kids. “How about we back up a little? You’re gonna suffocate me.”
“No!” one of them responds, which is enough to urge the rest to remain perfectly glued to him.
“Cool,” he mutters, because what else is he supposed to fucking say? These kids have been through a lot in a very short amount of time. If what they want is to be held by someone who is, apparently, an alternate version of their father, who is he to say they can’t?
Eventually, the collective grip on him loosens just enough for him to breathe without inhaling someone’s hair.
Robert takes this chance to conduct some quick inventory and get a good look at these kids. Mandy has likely already checked them over, but he wants to see for himself that everyone is unharmed.
One. Two. Three. Four. Fi—
He stops when one of the kids, a little boy, grabs his face.
“Dad?” he says, very seriously. “Are you okay?”
Robert blinks.
The child is…him.
Not exactly him, but close enough that he sees it instantly. His own features, but smaller. Softer around the edges, with big eyes and messy hair.
But it’s him.
And then there’s something else that makes his stomach drop.
“...Oh, you’ve got to be shitting me,” he whispers as he takes in the uncanny resemblance to none other than Herman.
“Papa said a bad word! That’s a dollar in the swear jar.” another voice chirps in. Literally. This kid is actually fucking chirping and it’s no wonder given that, just like Victor, her entire head is that of a bat that somehow has his freckles. Her fur resembles his hair colour, too, as if he needed further confirmation as to who she belongs to.
“Move! You’re squishing me!” a voice snaps from a little boy at his side with reddish skin and horns on his head.
“No!” replies a girl with a pink and blue bow in her hair.
Robert finally does get a good look at them all, now, and quickly realises who the other parents of this troop of troublemakers are.
The rest of the goddamn Z-Team.
