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Metropolis was on fire, and not in the poetic sense.
The sky above the city had gone the color of a bruise — sick purple-orange, veined with the crackle of Apokoliptan energy — and in the middle of it, wading through a collapsed skyway like it was a puddle, was Darkseid. Seven feet of gray granite hatred, Omega beams carving smoking Xs through three parking structures, and a voice that didn't so much speak as press down on everyone within a half mile.
"Anti-Life," Darkseid said, almost bored, "is closer than you know."
"Yeah, well, so is my fist," Superman said, and put it through his jaw.
It didn't help much. Nothing had, not for the last eleven minutes — not Wonder Woman's lasso, not Flash's speed, not Green Lantern's constructs, not the concentrated firepower of a Javelin's entire missile payload, which Cyborg had rerouted through his own arm cannon in a move that should have violated at least four laws of physics. Batman crouched on a girder forty feet up, watching all of it happen through three different camera feeds and thinking, with the cold clarity he reserved for exactly these moments, we are losing.
And that was when the yo-yo hit Darkseid in the eye.
Not hard. Not even particularly forceful, as these things went — it was a small red yo-yo, spotted black, on the end of a wire, and it bounced off Darkseid's craggy face with a bonk that was almost comedic. But it was precise, and it was fast, and it came from a rooftop across the plaza where a girl in a red suit with a ponytail and a domino mask stood with one hand still extended from the throw.
"Down here, ugly!" she shouted, in French-accented English, and Batman's threat assessment quietly rewrote itself from the ground up.
New variable, he thought, and zoomed the cowl's optics in.
She was small. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. The suit was flexible red-and-black, form-fitting in the way of a costume built for movement rather than intimidation, and she carried herself like someone who had absolutely no business being on a battlefield with a New God — except that she'd just gotten Darkseid's attention, which put her ahead of everyone else on the roster.
"Who," Wonder Woman said over comms, landing beside Batman's position without being asked, "is that?"
"Working on it," Batman said, which was Bat for I don't know and I don't like not knowing.
Below, Darkseid had turned the full weight of his attention on the girl, and one of his hands came around in a backhand blow with enough force behind it to level a building. She rolled under it — barely, the edge of it still catching her shoulder and spinning her half around — and for one bad half-second her mask slipped, knocked loose at the strap, exposing her face to the sky and to eleven separate satellite and drone cameras currently trained on the plaza.
She caught it. Slapped it back into place before she'd even finished the roll, cursing in French, and kept moving. It took less than a second and a half, start to finish.
It was still enough. Batman's cowl had already frozen the frame, cross-referenced it against every facial database he had clearance for and several he technically didn't, and by the time Ladybug was back on her feet a small red text box had appeared in the corner of his HUD that read: MATCH FOUND — 97.4% CONFIDENCE. He didn't open the file. Not yet. There wasn't time, and some old, stubborn piece of him wanted to watch what she did next before he let a name turn her into a case file.
What she did next was throw a rubber duck.
"That's it?" Flash said, skidding to a halt beside a fire hydrant. "That's the Hail Mary? A duck?"
The girl didn't even look up. She was already scanning — rooftop, fire hydrant, downed power line, Superman's cape snagged on rebar twelve feet away, Darkseid's massive raised boot about to come down on a bus full of people who hadn't made it out — and something in her face shifted, the specific, electric look of someone who had just seen the whole board at once.
"Superman!" she yelled. "Your cape — hook it on his boot heel when he steps forward, then pull! Flash, hydrant — soak the wire so it conducts! Cyborg, hit the power line the second his boot's grounded!"
Nobody argued with her. That was the strange part, Batman noted, filing it away — nobody so much as hesitated, because there was something in the specificity of the plan, and in the calm, total confidence with which she gave it, that made argument feel like a waste of the half-second they had left.
It worked. Darkseid's own considerable weight, redirected through Superman's cape and a fire hydrant's worth of well-timed water and eighteen thousand volts down a grounded steel wire, did what the collective might of the Justice League hadn't managed in eleven minutes: it dropped him. Not defeated — nothing short of the full combined League and probably several hours would actually defeat Darkseid — but dropped, staggered, disoriented long enough for the Mother Box containment field Cyborg had been building this entire time to finally snap shut around him like a bear trap forged from a dying star.
The plaza went silent except for sirens and settling rubble.
The girl exhaled hard, hands on her knees, and said, in the specific tone of someone whose brain was only now catching up to what her body had just done: "Okay. Okay, that worked. That is never going to work twice."
"That was," Wonder Woman said, dropping down beside her, "an extraordinary piece of tactical thinking. What's your name?"
"Ladybug," she said, straightening, still catching her breath. "I'm usually more of a local hero. Paris. Got pulled into this one. Long story, and I'm — really hoping somebody has a chair, because I think my legs are filing a formal complaint."
"Regroup at the Tower," Cyborg called, already routing coordinates through the comm channel. "Everybody. Full debrief, full med checks, no exceptions — that includes you, Duck Girl, nice work down there."
"It's Ladybug," she said, without much heat, and looked up — genuinely, for the first time, taking in the full shape of what she'd just spent the last twenty minutes fighting alongside — and added, faintly, "Wait. The Tower. Like, the space Tower?"
"You'll want to sit for the beam-up," Flash said, not unkindly. "First-timers usually do."
Ninety seconds later she was gone in a column of light, and Batman, still crouched on his girder, finally let himself open the file.
Marinette Dupain-Cheng. Sixteen. Paris, France. Two and a half years of documented heroic activity. No known institutional support. No known adult supervision of any kind.
He closed the file, dropped off the girder, and went to find a Zeta tube.
-----
The Watchtower's medbay smelled like antiseptic and recycled air, and Marinette Dupain-Cheng was sitting on the edge of a cot with a foil blanket around her shoulders, still transformed, still in the suit, watching Earth turn slowly outside a reinforced window the size of a garage door and thinking, with the specific delirium of a person who has been awake for nineteen hours and fought a god for the last forty minutes of them, I am going to fail my chemistry test tomorrow and nobody is ever going to believe why.
"You're cleared," said the medical officer — a woman named Mera, apparently, who had introduced herself with a handshake that could have bent rebar — checking a scanner. "No serious damage. Miraculous healing does most of the work, from what I can read here, which is either very convenient or extremely alarming, I haven't decided."
"Little of both," Marinette said. Beside her, tucked into the collar of her suit, Tikki made a small, exhausted sound of agreement.
"Rest here as long as you need. There's a lounge through that door if you want somewhere less clinical." Mera hesitated, glancing past Marinette's shoulder toward the doorway, and something in her professional composure flickered, just slightly, into something that looked almost like sympathy. "Also — heads up. Incoming."
"Incoming what?"
"Him," Mera said, and left.
Marinette turned around, and Batman was already standing three feet away, having apparently materialized out of the actual architecture of the room, because that was, she was rapidly learning, just a thing he could do.
"Ladybug," Batman said. "I'd like a few minutes."
"I just fought a god," Marinette said. "With a duck. Can it wait until I'm not actively vibrating?"
"It's important."
"So was the duck," Marinette said, but she sat up a little straighter anyway, because something in his voice had the specific gravity of a person who was not going to be talked out of this conversation regardless of how tired she was, and she'd learned a long time ago that the fastest way through those people was straight ahead. "Fine. Go."
"I watched your performance out there," Batman said. "Tactically exceptional. Beyond what I'd expect from a trained adult operative, let alone a sixteen-year-old with no formal combat education. I also reviewed your operational history. Two and a half years of continuous, escalating solo combat against a high-threat adversary, with no institutional backing, no government liaison, no trained support structure, and — as far as I've been able to determine — no adult in your life who is equipped to manage the specific demands of what you do."
"That's — a lot of research," Marinette said slowly, "for the forty minutes since we landed."
"I work quickly."
"You work concerning-ly."
"I'd like to offer you a formal arrangement," Batman continued, entirely unbothered, and produced — from somewhere, she genuinely did not see where, the man had pockets like a magician — a small dark tablet, already displaying a document header that read GUARDIANSHIP AND SUPPORT FRAMEWORK — DRAFT 1. "Training. Resources. Legal protection. A support network built specifically around the demands of operating at your level. I have experience integrating young people with dangerous double lives into a safe structure, and I believe—"
"Stop," Marinette said.
He stopped.
She looked at the tablet. Looked at him — cowl, cape, the whole grim silhouette of him, silhouetted against a window with the entire curve of the Earth behind it, holding out a legal document to a girl who had put her mask back on mid-roll less than an hour ago because the alternative was being unmasked on live international television — and something in her, already stretched thin by the day, simply ran out of patience.
"No," she said.
"I understand this is sudden—"
"No," Marinette said again, more clearly. "Not 'let me think about it.' Not 'that's a lot to consider.' No. I have parents. I have a family. I have a whole life in Paris that exists whether or not you've run a background check on it in the last forty minutes, and you are standing in a medical bay, less than an hour after I fought a literal god, holding out a tablet with a document on it, asking a teenager to sign over some percentage of her legal guardianship to a man she has known for four minutes." She pulled the foil blanket tighter around her shoulders, mostly for something to do with her hands. "I get that you mean well. I even believe you mean well — I've heard of you, everyone's heard of you, you've done good things for kids who genuinely had nobody. I am not one of those kids. I have a mom and a dad who know exactly who I am and love me exactly as much with the mask on as off. So the answer is no, and it's going to stay no, and I would really, really appreciate it if the next thing out of your mouth wasn't a counter-offer."
Batman was quiet for a moment. Not the calculating quiet of a man reloading an argument — she'd have recognized that, she'd spent two and a half years reading Chat Noir's every micro-expression under a mask — but something closer to genuine recalibration.
"Understood," he said.
"Thank you."
"I'd still like the opportunity to—"
"Understood was a great word," Marinette said. "You should try just leaving it there."
He didn't, obviously, because this was apparently a man constitutionally incapable of leaving a good exit line alone, and he opened his mouth again — something about "resources don't require guardianship, I can still offer support without the formal—" — and that was the exact moment Marinette Dupain-Cheng decided she was done negotiating with him personally and was instead going to outsource the problem to the two people on Earth best equipped to make a grown man reconsider his life choices.
She pulled her phone out of the yo-yo's pocket dimension — a skill that had taken her nearly a year to master and that she was, in this precise moment, more grateful for than she had ever been for anything — and typed, thumbs moving fast despite the tremor of exhaustion in them:
Marinette: mom dad. i am fine. everyone is fine. i am currently in a SPACE STATION with a man dressed as a bat who is trying to get legal guardianship of me forty minutes after a fight ended and will not TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER. i am too tired to deal with this. please come deal with him. i love you. bringing you up now.
The reply came back in under thirty seconds, from her mother, in French, in all capital letters, which Marinette had learned over sixteen years of life meant that Sabine Cheng had already stood up from whatever she was doing.
Maman: WE ARE COMING. GET THE MASKS, TOM.
"Everything alright?" Batman asked, watching her thumbs move with the specific wariness of a man who had, on some instinctive level, correctly identified that he had just made a serious tactical error.
"Everything's about to be extremely un-alright for you, specifically," Marinette said, and stood up, brushing the foil blanket off her shoulders. "I need Kaalki."
Marinette reached into the small pouch at her hip — another Guardian trick, a fold of fabric that was considerably bigger on the inside than the outside — and withdrew the Miracle Box, and from it, a slim bracelet of pale, sand-colored metal. She slid it onto her wrist over the edge of her glove, closed her eyes, and said, quietly, "Kaalki, buckle up."
Nothing visibly changed about her. No second transformation, no burst of light — just, for one strange moment, a kind of doubled quality to the air around her, like two photographs laid slightly out of register — and then she raised one hand, drew a shape in the air with two fingers that left a faint, shimmering seam behind it, and pulled.
The seam split open into a doorway, roughly six feet tall, edged in soft gold light, and through it — clear as a window — was the kitchen of the Boulangerie Patisserie Tom & Sabine Dupain-Cheng, mid-afternoon, flour still hanging in the air from an abandoned batch of dough.
Down the hall, Flash, who had wandered past with a smoothie at exactly the wrong moment, walked directly into a doorframe.
"That's — okay, that's a portal," he said, backing up, smoothie forgotten. "She just — that's a portal. Our Zeta tubes take, like, four seconds of calibration and a full retinal scan and she just drew a door in the air—"
"Not now, Flash," Batman said, already turning back toward Marinette with the specific dawning alarm of a man who had just heard footsteps coming through a portal at a dead sprint.
Tom Dupain-Cheng came through first. He came through the portal already moving at the pace of a man who had, in the last ninety seconds, gone from kneading a batch of levain to sprinting through a hole in reality, and he had not slowed down for the transition. Flour dusted his forearms to the elbow. His apron — the reinforced one, the one with the extra canvas layer stitched in eight months ago after a conversation that had started with "just in case" and ended with Sabine buying a sewing machine specifically for the purpose — was still tied on. In one hand he carried a rolling pin. In the other, hooked over two fingers by their elastic straps, were two red silk masks.
Sabine came through half a step behind him, moving with considerably more precision and considerably less noise, already tying her own mask into place one-handed as she walked, the other hand occupied with a rolling pin of her own.
Both of them stopped, for exactly one second, upon registering that they had stepped out of their kitchen and directly onto a metal catwalk overlooking the curve of the actual Earth, hanging vast and blue-white in a window forty feet wide, with several extremely famous superheroes staring at them in various states of alarm.
"...We are in space," Sabine said, in French, faintly.
"We are in space," Tom agreed, in French, and then, recovering with the speed of a man whose priorities were extremely clear, turned to scan the room, spotted the tall figure in black and gray standing three feet from his daughter, and said, in English, at considerable volume, "YOU."
"Papa—" Marinette started.
"Is this him?" Tom asked her, not taking his eyes off Batman, already unhooking one of the two masks from his fingers and holding it out toward his wife without looking, a gesture so practiced it might as well have been choreographed.
"That's him," Marinette confirmed, sitting back down on the cot with the specific relief of a person handing off a problem they were finally, gloriously, no longer required to solve personally.
"Sir," Batman said, holding both hands up, palms out, the universal gesture of a man recognizing, slightly too late, that a situation had escalated past his control. "This isn't necessary. I understand there's been a miscommunication—"
"You tried," Sabine said, tying her own mask, voice carrying the flat, dangerous calm that Marinette had heard exactly twice before in her life — once during the Kung Food incident, and once when a customer had tried to return a half-eaten éclair — "to take legal guardianship of our daughter. Forty minutes. After she fought a god. Before you had said one word to us."
"I offered her a support framework, not—"
"He had a document," Marinette called from the cot, unhelpfully.
"He had a document," Sabine repeated, and something in her stance shifted, weight settling low and even, and across the command deck several members of the Justice League had, without quite seeming to decide to, begun drifting closer, drawn by the specific gravitational pull of a situation everyone could tell was about to become extremely interesting.
"Is that—" Wonder Woman said slowly, watching Sabine's stance with the focused, professional interest of a warrior clocking another warrior, "— that's a proper southern wushu foundation. Where did she—"
"I have questions too," Flash said, "but I think we should let this happen first and ask questions during."
"I am not," Superman said, drifting toward the small crowd with the expression of a man who had personally defeated a New God today and still felt distinctly out of his depth, "going to be the one who tells Batman he brought this on himself. Somebody else has to say it."
"I'll say it," Cyborg said. "Bruce. Man. You brought this on yourself."
"I did not ask for commentary," Batman said, backing a step as Tom rolled his shoulders and hefted the rolling pin with the loose, ready grip of a man about to do something he had, apparently, prepared for.
"You did not ask for a lot of things today," Tom said, "and you got them anyway. Welcome to the consequences, Monsieur Wayne."
"You know my name."
"My daughter looked you and others up when she became a superhero," Tom said. "She keeps a folder which can be accessed by us anytime we want."
"I am the one who keeps a folder on others," Batman muttered, and then Tom's rolling pin was already coming around in a short, economical arc, and there was no more time for talking.
-----
He came in low and fast for a man his size, the rolling pin swinging in a short, economical arc aimed not at Batman's head but at his lead knee — a smart strike, Batman noted, even as he pivoted out of range, the kind of strike thrown by someone who'd either trained properly or spent a very long time defending a bakery counter from overenthusiastic customers — and Batman caught the follow-through on his forearm guard with a crack that shivered up to his shoulder.
"You," Batman said, backing a step, genuinely reassessing, "have had training."
"I have had," Tom said, swinging again, "sixteen years of practice frightening off anyone who threatens my daughter, Monsieur Wayne, and you are significantly less alarming than the boy who put gum in her hair in the fourth grade."
"She's an only child," Batman said, blocking again.
"THAT'S HOW SCARY THE BOY WAS."
Behind him, Sabine had circled wide, and Batman — mid-block against Tom, weight committed — caught her movement half a second too late as she planted, pivoted, and put a spinning heel kick into the side of his ribs that would have cracked them clean through if the Kevlar-weave undersuit hadn't been doing exactly the job it was built for. As it was, it still knocked the air clean out of him and sent him stumbling sideways into a console, which several crew members scrambled to protect with the specific urgency of people who had just watched Batman get kicked into an eight-figure piece of hardware.
"THE MONITORING ARRAY," someone shouted.
"MY MACARONS WERE MORE IMPORTANT," Tom bellowed, apropos of a memory only he had, and swung the rolling pin at Batman's head with rather more feeling than before.
"Focus, Tom," Sabine said, following her kick with a flurry of short, precise punches that Batman found himself giving ground against for the first time in longer than he wanted to admit, because she wasn't fighting like a mother defending her child in the desperate, adrenaline-fueled way he'd trained against — she was fighting like someone who had drilled this, calm and economical and completely, terrifyingly unbothered by the fact that her opponent was seven feet of black Kevlar and thirty years of training beyond her own.
"OUR DAUGHTER," Sabine said, punctuating each word with a strike Batman had to actually work to deflect, "is not — A LINE ITEM — in a LEGAL DOCUMENT —"
"I never said—" Batman caught her wrist, redirected, and she rolled with it smoothly, coming up with a fistful of flour — brought through the portal on the sleeve of her own apron, because Sabine Dupain-Cheng did not go into a confrontation unarmed even by accident — and flung it directly into his face.
Which, to be fair, worked. Batman had trained against gas attacks, blinding agents, and a truly alarming number of clowns with chemical sprayers, and none of it had specifically prepared him for a face-full of all-purpose flour thrown by an enraged baker's wife at point-blank range aboard an orbital space station, and he staggered back coughing, night-vision lenses instantly useless, looking — Wonder Woman would note later, with visible and entirely unprofessional delight — exactly like a man who had walked face-first into a powdered doughnut machine.
"I would like to state for the record," Green Lantern said, forming a small, unnecessary set of bleachers out of hard light and settling onto them next to Flash, "that I have fought Sinestro Corps war criminals with less commitment than this man is currently facing."
"Should we intervene," Superman asked, not moving to intervene.
"He hasn't called for help," Cyborg pointed out, already recording. "And also I want to see how this ends."
Tom's rolling pin caught Batman across the shoulder blades while he was still blinking flour out of his eyes, and Batman went down onto one knee, and it was at this exact moment — flour-coated, kneeling on the deck of the Justice League's own orbital headquarters, facing down two masked bakers wielding kitchenware with the calm competence of Olympic athletes, in front of an audience of the single most powerful beings on the planet — that Bruce Wayne had the distinct, humbling realization that he was, for the first time in a genuinely long time, losing, and that several of his closest colleagues were, near as he could tell, taking bets on it.
"I have," he said into his comm, with as much dignity as the circumstances allowed, "a request for backup."
"You're calling for backup?" said Damian's voice, sharp with disbelief, from a speaker somewhere in Gotham. "Against what?"
"Two civilians," Batman admitted.
There was a pause. "I'm coming," Damian said, in the tone of a boy who would not have missed this for any amount of money, and the line clicked off and the zetas came to life immediately.
"Enough," said a new voice, from the cot, and everyone froze.
Marinette had stood up. She hadn't transformed back, hadn't needed to — she just stood there in the wrecked half of the command deck, in her suit, in front of the entire assembled Justice League, and said, "Enough," and the room obeyed her the exact same way the battlefield had forty minutes earlier, immediately and without question, because there was something in her voice that made argument feel like a waste of time.
Slowly, the rolling pins came down.
"Maman. Papa." Marinette rubbed both hands over her face. "Thank you. I mean it. But I think we've made the point."
"Has he learned the point," Sabine said, not lowering her stance entirely, "is the actual question."
"That's between him and me," Marinette said, and turned to look at Batman, still on one knee, flour settling in the creases of his suit, cowl slightly askew, looking — for possibly the first time any member of the Justice League present had ever witnessed — genuinely, thoroughly humbled. "Bruce. Can I call you Bruce? I already told you no once. In the medbay. Forty minutes into the worst day of my week. You said 'understood' and then kept talking anyway, which is how we ended up here, with my parents flying — sorry, portaling — several hundred kilometers to make the same point with rolling pins that I already made with words."
"I heard you," Batman said, slowly getting to his feet, flour drifting off his shoulders. "I didn't fully absorb it. There's a difference, and it's mine to own."
"It really is," Marinette agreed. "Here's what I need you to understand, and I'd like you to actually hear this part, because I don't think you have yet: I am not an orphan you found in an alley. I have a family. I have parents who know exactly who I am and have known for two years, who make me a hot meal after every single akuma fight, who kept my identity secret from an entire city that was trying to guess it, who apparently — and I want you to actually sit with this — made matching combat masks, just in case, on the theory that if I was ever going to need backup that badly, they wanted to be ready. And you didn't ask any of us. You saw one battle, ran a background check in under an hour, and decided you already knew what I needed better than the people who've spent sixteen years actually raising me."
The command deck was very quiet. Somewhere behind her, Green Lantern's hard-light bleachers dissolved, quietly, as if even he understood this part didn't need an audience commentary track.
"You're right," Batman said.
Marinette blinked. Somewhere off to the side, Flash mouthed he's never said that to Cyborg, who nodded gravely.
"I have a pattern," Batman continued, slowly, like a man forcing open a door he generally kept shut, "of seeing a young person in danger and moving to solve the danger before I've fully considered the person attached to it. I did it today faster than I usually do, because I watched you carry a battle that should have needed six adults and you carried it alone, and something in me — reacted, before it thought. That's not an excuse. It's a flaw. I have people who tell me this regularly." A beat. "I didn't listen to you the first time. I'm listening now."
"I don't want your custody," Marinette said. "I have parents. Good ones. Extremely — " she glanced at the rolling pins, still held ready, " — dedicated ones, as you may have noticed."
"We noticed," Batman said, and there was something almost like dry humor in it, cracked and quiet but real.
"What I might actually want," Marinette said, slower now, thinking it through as she said it, "is what you were probably trying to offer underneath all the paperwork and the terrible timing. Training. Resources. Someone who's done this — who understands what it's like to fight something that big and then have to go to school the next day like nothing happened. I could use that. Not instead of my parents. Not taking anything from them. In addition."
"That," Batman said, "I can still offer. Without the document."
"You're going to write a document anyway," said a new voice, and Marinette turned to find a boy roughly her own age stepping out of the Zeta tube, dressed head to toe in Robin green and black, arms already crossed, taking in the flour, the rolling pins, the two masked bakers, and his own father kneeling in the wreckage with an expression of profound, delighted disbelief. "You always write a document."
"It'll be a smaller document," Batman said, with dignity.
Tom, who had been quiet through most of this, finally lowered his rolling pin the rest of the way and spoke, and his voice had lost the flat, dangerous calm of the fight and gone back to something warmer, though still edged. "Monsieur Wayne. If you are going to be part of our daughter's life — as a mentor, a teacher, whatever this becomes — you will learn one thing first."
"What's that?"
"You do not," Tom said, "negotiate with a father before you have eaten his bread. This is not a metaphor. I have bread. It is currently in the oven, because I left in the middle of baking to fly through a hole in the sky and defend my daughter's honor, and it is very possibly ruined, which is, frankly, also your fault." He gestured at the portal, still open and shimmering at the edge of the command deck, patient as a held door. "Come to Paris. Properly. Eat something. Then we will discuss terms like people, instead of like a man kneeling on a space station covered in flour."
Batman looked at the portal. Looked at Marinette, arms crossed, watching him with the exact same evaluating expression she'd worn on that Metropolis rooftop right before she'd read the whole battlefield in half a second and won. Looked, finally, at Sabine, who had not yet smiled, but had — he noted, with the specific relief of a man recognizing a very small victory when he saw one — untied her mask and was folding it with something that was almost, almost gentle.
"I'd like that," Batman said. "I'll bring Damian. He clearly won't let me leave him behind."
"I would not have," Damian confirmed.
"Good bread requires good company," Tom said, and, for the first time since a rubber duck had fallen out of the sky over Metropolis, smiled at Bruce Wayne like he meant it.
-------
The bread, as it turned out, was fine — a little over-proofed, Tom pronounced with the grave disappointment of a craftsman, but salvageable, and salvageable turned out to be more than good enough for the conversation that followed, back on solid ground, in the small warm kitchen behind the bakery, with the portal closed and the Justice League several hundred kilometers overhead presumably still discussing what they'd just witnessed.
The final agreement — hammered out over two hours, an entire fresh baguette, and what Damian would later describe in a private, grudging text to Tim as "an alarming quantity of pastry" — was three pages long and contained no reference whatsoever to custody, guardianship, or relocation authority of any kind.
It specified quarterly training sessions, focused on tactical planning rather than combat, since — as Sabine pointed out, not unreasonably, while refilling Bruce's coffee with a hospitality that had thawed considerably over the course of the afternoon — her daughter's combat instincts had already defeated a New God and required no improvement from Bruce Wayne specifically. It specified a direct emergency line to the Batcave, to be used only in situations exceeding Paris's local capacity, with the explicit understanding that exceeding local capacity would be defined by Marinette, not by Bruce. It specified — this clause added at Damian's insistence, delivered with the particular gruffness of a boy trying very hard not to seem like he cared — regular sparring sessions between himself and Marinette "for mutual skill assessment," which everyone at the table recognized as a request for a friend and no one commented on directly, out of mercy.
And it specified, in a final clause Tom insisted on writing himself, by hand, at the bottom of the page, that any future conversation regarding Marinette's wellbeing would happen at this table, with bread, with Marinette present from the first sentence — and that this clause could not be amended, revised, or portaled around by any document Wayne Enterprises legal cared to draft, ever, under any circumstances, full stop.
Bruce signed it. Tom and Sabine signed it. Marinette signed it last, reading every line first with the same total focus she'd brought to reading a battlefield, and when she set the pen down she looked, for just a moment, less like a girl who'd fought a god that morning and more like what she actually was — sixteen, tired, and quietly, cautiously glad that the day had ended with a signed piece of paper and a plate of pastries instead of a fight that had never really needed to happen in the first place.
"For what it's worth," she told Bruce, walking him and Damian to the door as evening settled over the street outside, "you're not the worst almost-adoptive-father I've had this year."
"There was another one?" Bruce asked, alarmed.
"Long story. Involves a peacock. I'll tell you at the first training session."
Damian fell into step beside her for a moment on the doorstep, hands in his pockets, and said, with the stiff formality of someone who had rehearsed this line and was determined to get through it before he lost his nerve, "Your mother's kick technique is exceptional. I'd like to spar with her, as well as you. Purely for research."
"She'll like that," Marinette said, smiling for the first time all day that didn't have exhaustion underneath it. "She'll make you eat something first, though. It's non-negotiable."
"I can accommodate that requirement."
From the car, Bruce watched the two of them for a moment — his son, who had once tried to kill him within a week of meeting him and now stood on a Parisian doorstep awkwardly negotiating pastry-based diplomacy with a girl who'd beaten a New God with a rubber duck and then beaten him with her parents — and felt something in his chest ease, slightly, for the first time since he'd watched the Metropolis footage and started, with characteristic overcorrection, trying to solve a problem before he'd bothered to ask if the girl at the center of it wanted his help solving it that way.
"You should have asked me first," Alfred's voice said, dry as ever, over the car's comm, having listened to the entire debrief in real time from the manor with what Bruce suspected was considerable, silent enjoyment. "I did mention this, sir. Several times, over the years."
"You did," Bruce admitted.
"And instead you proposed guardianship to a child forty minutes after she fought a god, were refused, did not accept the refusal, and were consequently assaulted by two bakers on the Justice League's own orbital satellite, in front of Superman."
"Also correct."
"I do hope," Alfred said, with the specific, devastating gentleness of a man who had earned the right to say it, "that you've learned something today."
Bruce watched the bakery's lights glow warm and gold in the window behind them, watched Marinette wave once before heading back inside, and thought about a girl on a rooftop who'd read an entire battlefield in half a second, and a mother who'd thrown flour like a professional, and a father who negotiated peace treaties over bread and had absolutely meant every word of it.
"I did," he said. "Ask first. Every time. No exceptions."
"A start," Alfred said. "A very small one. But a start."
Behind them, in the kitchen, Tom was already sweeping flour off the counter while Sabine hung her mask — carefully, almost fondly — on the hook behind the register, right next to the family photos, in the place reserved for things that had mattered.
"Do you think he'll actually listen next time?" Tom asked.
"He asked before he left," Sabine said, watching their daughter through the doorway, already texting someone — Damian, probably, going by the specific exasperated fondness on her face — and smiling despite herself. "That's new. That's something." She untied her apron, folded it over the back of a chair, and looked at the closed sky outside the window, unable to help the small, proud laugh that escaped her. "We fought Batman in space, Tom."
"We did," Tom agreed, wonderingly. "For our daughter."
"For our daughter," Sabine said, "worth every kilometer."
THE END