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lunanovakat · 5 months

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Sneak Peek of a Future Project

This is barely even half of this first chapter and it keeps growing... I wanted to share the rough draft before it gets too big and seven-years pass before it's one day uploaded.

I've just been so in love with Marvel/DC crossovers lately, I have so many DC or Marvel crossovers tbh, and honestly I have so many WIPs that leaking peeks of them are probably how half of them are going to be able to see the light of day.

Feel free to pester me in curiosity bc I'd love to rant about my never-ending list of work and maybe also use them as an excuse to not feel hella stressed.

Still thinking of a name for it, so we'll see how that comes out.

Sandman's in jail for the millionth time - exhausting as always but worth it - the general destruction the man was known for having been kept to a minimum, thankfully, and Spider-Man waved away by shifting cops who aren't really sure how to treat the hero-framed villain-vigilante. And it's nice, even if he's going home to a too cramped one room apartment he could barely even afford without any friends or family to make him think life was worth living.

Something under his skin mourned his life - maybe grieving with him, it was a funny thought considering no one knew who Peter Parker was anymore and anyone who would've had moved on to better things or died.

His chest aches - he pushes it down, he has the funny feeling Mr. Falcon was disappointed in him.

Has a funny feeling several heroes he knows or knew were slightly disappointed in him for some reason, and the thought of them made the gaping void in his chest twinge-

Actually, his chest is aching, painfully, enough that Peter cringes and tries to swing towards a roof to check if he received a wound he hadn't noticed - something like Mr. Dr. Strange panicky and worried about magic as Peter's spidey-sense screams like a Banshee. His hand phases through his web, not misses or is unable to reach, the web phases right through his hand mid-swing and he starts to fall - and fall -

And fall.

New York dusk, a colorful kaleidoscope of faint smog and red-orange-yellow, turns into a darkly dreary cloudy smog filled night, but Peter's head hits concrete and all he knows is unconsciousness.

He doesn't wake up for three days - he doesn't feel as human when he wakes up either.

The first thing he realizes, brain melting out of his ears and his organs humming, is that he's not in New York anymore.

He's not even in the same dimension.

"Um.. Excuse me?" A young, familiar voice whispers to her - a voice she's heard on patrol since she'd been a child, again and again - and it has Barbara already rolling her eyes at Dick's antics before she even knew what they'd be - always a bother and a brother, and great at doing both.

She loved him, she did, too much blood spilt for the other for either of them to ever be anything less than family with one another but she was busy and, unless Dick had coffee and some good news, she wasn't really in the mood for one of his playful 'cheer-up' schemes. Dick would understand, obviously, once she had a chance to explain herself and relax when the livelihoods of others weren't actively hanging over her head but she was wrung thin for the moment.

"Not now, Dick - you know B wants this report tonight." They needed to find the missing teens and they needed to find them quickly, they'd already found too many bodies already. And still no reason as to why, which might bother her just as much as the death toll.

Half of her suspects magic, the other half of her hopes it's just a new killer hoping to make a name - either way Barbara is tired and the deaths are wearing away her conscience.

Barbara expects a gusty sigh, or an audible cringe, something so like Dick that her tension melts away and she, for a moment, is able to relax in the presence of family she knows will look out for her - instead, horrifyingly, she's met with a quietly stuttered out, "Oh.", and she snaps her head up to find the wide-eyed baby-face of a child looking back at her.

One that looks so much like the Dick she grew up with, had worked as Batgirl with, that Barbara feels winded for a few seconds and unable to restart her brain.

"Sorry," The boy starts after an awkward bit of silence, "I didn't - I'm sorry for bothering you." And he goes to turn away, shoulders high and anxious, and she can't let that happen.

"No!" Barbara snaps quickly, cringing at the flinch the boy offers her action in return - god, he was like a skittish pre-teen version of Dick, except his hair and eye-color were wrong - sitting up as straight as she could and plastering on an apologetic smile, "I'm sorry - really - I thought you were a friend of mine named Dick."

There's a dark, ugly purple bruise on the kid's cheek and Barbara feels sort of sick noticing it. And the darker, spotted with irritated red, bruises she can see under the collar of the kid's rough looking shirt that climb up his neck like he had been strangled don't make her feel any better. Something sits, angry, in her gut at both being on a poor kid that looked like Dick got frisky with a brunette without protection - and, well, just a small kid to begin with.

God, had Dick had a secret child? No. That couldn't be...

But maybe he had - Dick had had a wild series of flings when he was eighteen and the kid looked like he was around ten.

If she wanted to stretch it, she could say he was ten through thirteen - or, maybe, fourteen or fifteen but really young looking, but he looked too young to just look young.

"Like Tom, Dick, and Harry?" The kid asks, still tense and awkward but trying to ease himself into a false sense of comfort, offering Barbara a smile that's too much like Dick's it makes her heart squeeze with how out of place the kid looks like he feels.

With how out of place it looks on someone who isn't Dick.

"Exactly, kiddo." Barbara confirms, a flicker of amusement at the boy's disgruntled look stoking a warmth to replace the heaviness in her gut, and she motioned towards the phone on the desk next to her, "A friend of mine said he planned on dropping by soon - since it's so late, I assumed you were him. I've just been so busy with my second job that I didn't realize the person speaking to me didn't have the same voice as my friend - Dick'll have a field day with that, but I'm not going to tell him."

By now, the kid was relaxed - still tense in a way that made her heart ache and something angry and hot want to crawl up her spine, but far more relaxed since she accidentally insulted him. He still looked too much like Dick that her mind was trying to connect the two and was short-circuiting when no leads or explanations came up for her to grapple around with.

Barbara had been there for Dick whenever a pregnancy scare or scam happened to him, knew almost every past flame Dick had as much as she didn't want to, but she knows there had to be an explanation. A piece to the puzzle was missing or she was overlooking something, and she couldn't let the kid leave just yet without a possible answer to her question - for all she knew, some past flame had been severely unhinged and stole a used condom or something, stranger things had happened.

"Now that that's out of the way - sorry, again - what can I help you with?" She smoothly added on, still keeping up her friendly smile to the mini-me of her best friend, "If you're looking for a specific book or curious about what our library has to offer, you can ask me any question you'd like."

Mini-Dick, because he looks so much like him - so terrifyingly identical in a way she nearly thinks cloning at first, but then saw the lighter skin and the warm brown eyes and the dark brown hair and way his jaw curved more upwards instead of staying in Dick's diamond cut - and she doesn't know his name, flushes slightly when he offers her a wider and relieved smile. It's Dick's smile, the way it crinkles a dimple in one cheek and not the other and makes the kid twinge his nose just a little as his eyes squint and his brow-bridge twitches, and it takes Barbara's breath away.

If this kid wasn't Dick's son, she'd fight condiment king in her civilian clothes without a single complaint for a month. Cloning would make the kid more similar to Dick, only minor patches in Dick's genetic code needing to be corrected with someone else's, and even if someone knew that Dick was Nightwing there wasn't anything overly impressive in Dick's DNA to make him worth cloning.

It could be a ploy to get to Bruce, as Batman, but something in the bottom of her lungs told her the kid was too genuine and too skittish to be some sort of plant - Dick's smile altered enough, nose twitching the wrong way and the outer corner of his eyes crinkling more than the inner unlike Dick's that did both equally, the kid could claim it as his own. Alike but different, not a replica but just how the kid was.

"Oh, thanks - I, um, I was wondering where the public computers are?" The kid starts, a tension in his frame leaving in minutiae milliseconds, the shape of Dick's eyes warming like the honey-brown of his irises, "And, uh, if you had anymore of those 'Welcome to Gotham City' pamphlets? A.. Nice lady at the diner nearby said there was one…"

Dick's kid - because it has to be his son, not a brother or cousin or clone when he looks so much like Dick but different too, and so distantly like Dick's parents who she's seen photos of mixed with pieces of some people else - shifts on his feet, small and awkward and wary, and Barbara's heart all but shatters in her chest at the realization the kid is running from something. No one came to Gotham willingly, and never with a good and happy reason either, add in the bruises she can see as plain as day all over the kid -

The tip of a thick scar, jagged and crude, peeks from the collar of his shirt when leans in on himself a little too much - hiding himself, hoping he'd be small enough no one spots him, shifting on his feet silently and waiting to flee, aware of his surroundings but pretending not to be-

Barbara knows a kid in a bad situation when she sees one - she feels like crying at seeing Dick looking so small and wary and scared, even if the kid was pretending he wasn't. Trying to hide his wariness as much as possible instead of focusing on Barbara, a known friend of Dick and the Oracle, pretending he was okay even when he wasn't - either he was a kid who was really just running, the greatest actor she's ever seen, or a kid being used and terrified of it.

He was so tiny, either way.

She could barely breathe, he was too tiny.

#writing #marvel #dc comics #marvel/dc #spiderman #peter parker #barbara gordon #'dick grayson is DC richard parker' my beloved #spiderman in dc is just adoption bait supreme #i am suckerpunching the batfam in the gut with peter's presence #batfam #batman #peter is going to go through it #i am not nice to my muses #will this be edited and made longer? yes...#why? i have no control over myself #rough draft

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