Hey guys!

I hope this being just a little longer than usual makes up for the month of waiting you had to do. I have to say, though, that this story is a lot more popular than I thought it would be. So, I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for the reviews, followers, and favorites that this story has in the time it's been out here.

As always, enjoy the read and let me know what you thought about it in the reviews.

And remember, leaving a review saying my story is absolute garbage isn't helpful. Tell my why it's absolute garbage. Explain your thoughts and I'll do my best to take them into consideration with what I have planned out. Seriously, I get these reviews that insult my work, but so very few of them actually manage to elaborate on why they feel this way or what I could be doing better.

Anyways, I'll see you all in the next chapter!

Bye~

"Robin, are you alright?" Batman asks, his eyes momentarily leaving me to quickly check up on the young man in question.

The bad news: I've just mentally restrained Robin, preventing him from going after Pamela and Harley, and have therefore pissed off Batman. As well as put him on edge, most likely, from doing so without moving.

The good news, however: Kevin Conroy! Yay!

"Yeah…yeah, I'm fine." He gets into a fighting stance but looks over his shoulder to where a green mass of plants is hauling ass into the distance. "But Poison Ivy and Harley got away."

My hands immediately go into my pants pockets, with my right one wrapping around and pressing and holding the 'up' arrow on a square device that, had it been outside of my pocket, wouldn't have looked out of place in a Saturday morning cartoon. A gray crayon box-sized device with two red and green buttons and two arrows facing opposite directions. As well as a small antenna sticking out of its center-top.

The antenna was, admittedly, to make it look cooler. Again, not that anyone could see it at the moment. But none of that really mattered…to anyone other than me, that is. As long as it worked, that's all that truly mattered.

"We'll worry about them later. For now, focus on the fight in front of us." His eyes narrow at me; it's so weird how he can do that with his mask on. I wonder what kind of material it's made of. But that's honestly not what I should be worrying about at the moment.

He goes to throw a Batarang at me, but I'm having none of it. "Uh, woah, hold the fuck up! What fight in front of us?" I look around the street, doing a full spin all dramatic-like. "Who's fighting? 'Cause I'm not fighting." It's funny to see him stop mid-swing, but it's something I'll have to laugh about later. "I don't know what you think just happened, Batman, but it definitely wasn't anything to do with me."

"…you involved yourself the moment you helped two wanted criminals escape." Technically, I did. But I'm not interested in being caught up in technicalities if it gets me into a fight with these two.

"I call bullshit." I state flatly and quickly. "All I did was save one of them. The clown chick. Harley Quinn, was it? She was seconds away from bleeding out; among other things. Poison Ivy is the one who scooped her up and took her away once she knew she wasn't dead."

I didn't give him room to say anything else. How could I? Letting him take control of the situation was a sure way to lose all of my moral high ground. "If that's all you were going to come after me for, because I know you're not going to try and fight me over whatever the hell happened to the kid suddenly getting pulled to the ground from where he was in the air, I'm going to go ahead and leave."

I turn on my heels and begin to walk away, internally debating whether I should feel badass for stopping freaking Batman in his tracks or terrified that he can now recognize my face. Letting out a silent sigh of relief at the comforting thought that the scrambler/mobile EMP in my pocket was keeping his helmet or bodysuit or wherever it was he kept his camera from recording me.

A bit pointless if he can spot me on sight, but at least he won't have any way to accurately map out my facial features with biometrics. Well, unless he's also a master artist alongside his many other convenient skills…that overpowered dick.

Speaking of him being a dick,

I hear the Batarang before I see it, and I drop to snatch it out of the air before it hits the ground in front of me. Presumably done to intimidate me into not walking away from him. Fat lot of good it did him, man was my confidence in facing him a lot higher now that I'd effectively brushed him off, as I put it away in my empty pants pocket. I'd need to check it for trackers later, but other than that it'd be a good souvenir to go with all the others I've picked up from his many fights across the city.

I keep walking, though, testing the possibility that he only did so to try and get me to use my telekinesis or to have me fight back in some way. Normally it'd be something I find out for sure with my mind. But there was this one comic, or maybe an episode of one of the animated shows he was in, where his mind was portrayed to be under his own control due to his borderline unnatural mental fortitude.

…never mind what I said about that earlier confidence boost. Batman is still intimidating as fuck! Agh! I hate that he's so cool! It's incredibly inconvenient for me now that I'm trying to work around his notice!

They do nothing as I leave them to…whatever it is they plan on doing with the rest of their night and walk off into the night. At least, that's what they think as I disappear around the diner's corner and walk into the alley. Instead, I find myself toeing the line of the threat/promise the ladies gave me about not messing with their heads, as I focus on sending them a message with, and I love knowing I can say and do this, the power of my fucking mind.

It was a lot more difficult of a trick to pull off since I couldn't see them. But, at the very least, they were close by. So that helped ease the strain it placed on me. A master of this skill, I am not.

'Wait until the Dynamic Duo leave and then quietly make your way out the back of the diner. Also, grab some of the leftover food if you can. I'm still hungry.'

Even after all we ate, there was still a shit-ton of food left. And I didn't plan on letting it all just go to waste. I just hope Oswald didn't mind me bringing in any outside food to his place of business.

Then, while I wait for the girls to meet with me, I focus my hearing on the two vigilantes standing near where I left them. And by near, I mean up on the rooftop of the building beside the bank.

Probably to stand guard as the police came and handled whatever mess they left behind. And if the faint sounds of mad cackling mixed in with wet coughs coming from deep within the bank, probably the vault, are any indication, then they want to make sure that the sick fuck inside doesn't get away so soon after they caught him.

So, they'll probably track the car or truck that'll take him to Arkham.

It's a bit difficult to hear everything what with the horde of sirens starting to come into range among the other noises of the nocturnal city, but I can still make out the majority of their conversation.

"…ou don't think he was really just out on a walk, do you?" Robin.

"No, I don't." Batman.

"Right? The timing is too convenient. He shows up in time to save Harley from…dying…" I can hear the shocked realization and regret in his voice. "She almost died…the Joker almost killed her…and we couldn't do anything to stop him. I mean, he's always been crazy and he's never exactly strayed away from getting physical with her…but…" He trails off.

But the Joker's probably never done anything as violent or as near-life ending to Harley as whatever he did that ended in her smashing out of a window and down several stories into a pile of glass and metal in the shape of a car.

"From his appearance and the short amount of time it took to heal Harley from what should have been , I'm almost certain he is who I think he is." My heart starts to beat a little faster and a small chill starts going down my spine.

No. Don't you fucking dare know me. It's too soon to be on your radar.

"Who is he?" Come on, come on~

"As far as I know, he doesn't have an actual name. But everyone who he comes into contact with knows him as Magic Man." I know I expected it, and desperately hoped it wouldn't be, what with Bruce Wayne being in the group of Gotham's elite and therefore in the circle of people who knew about me. But, seriously, FUCK!

How much did he know about me? How long had he been keeping an eye on me? Has he seen me using any of my other powers aside from my Healing? Did he let me go just now to play the long game? Was he actually going to tail the Joker back to Arkham? There were too many unknowns! Robin, quick, keep asking questions! Be the clueless fucker I know you can be! Channel your 1960s live-action self! I know Burt Ward is deep in their somewhere!

"He showed up in Gotham around two years ago. So far, he's gained a reputation amongst Gotham's wealthiest families for being a 'miracle worker'. Curing diseases and injuries that modern medicine can't in exchange for small fortunes." I can't tell if he's being disdainful or not. His 'I am the night!' voice, while cool as shit to listen to, is throwing me off.

"Regardless of whether or not he may have done anything tonight, it doesn't mean he won't try something at some point in the future. The Batarang he picked up had a tracker on it, so we'll see where he goes from here once we get to the Batcave. If we can find where he lives, we can keep a closer eye on his movements."

Aha! I knew he was trying to pull some tracker shit. Point: me. But too bad it won't work, bitch! This time, anyway. "So, we let him go now to catch him later?" A silence falls, and I assume he goes for a solemn nod. I can picture it in my head and it's honestly kind of surreal.

"As for Harley, we'll-" The sound of sirens, now seconds away from pulling up, drowns out whatever it is he says after that. Which sucked, because I was curious as to how he was going to handle telling an eleven year old boy that this wasn't going to be the worst thing he'll be seeing in their line of work. Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken him three years to see something as terrible as this in a city as terrible as Gotham.

From there, it takes fifteen minutes before the Joker and his goons are carefully loaded into the back of a police van and taken away to Arkham, most likely, with Batman and Robin following closely behind. And then another five for Grace and Caitlin to make their way out to the alley while simultaneously avoiding the police that have only just then decided to check out the plant-overrun diner.

The door leading into the diner's kitchen opens quietly as Caitlin and Grace come through. What isn't quiet is Grace having to squeeze herself and the paper bags of food she's carrying through the comparatively small door.

I hop down from my place on the fire escape. "Oh, awesome! Here, let me get that for you." The bags leave her arms and hover in the air between the three of us. One does come towards me, however. Hopefully one with a-ah! Yes! A burger. Before I take a bite, I look at the two of them. "And, uh, sorry for the surprise telepathy. Considering we just had a whole thing about how I wouldn't mess with your minds…you know."

"Well, you didn't fuck with us or anything, right?" Caitlin narrows her eyes.

Shaking my head, "No. If I was going to mess with your mind in a significant manner, I'd do it when I had a lot of time on my hands and was able to be in a lot of physical contact with you." God was that a bold faced almost-lie; as I told them of my methodology rather than declare my willingness or capability. I could do it right now and they wouldn't even suspect that I did, probably. They didn't need to know that. Because knowing that I could mess with their minds was one thing. But I still needed to be able to surprise them if things came down to it.

Absolute trust was not something the four of us had nor was it something I could see myself placing in anyone else. Not in the immediate future, at least. No, wait, not even in the distant future. That's the kind of thinking that gets you betrayed. That's just not the way the DC Universe works in any medium.

Anyone can betray me at any time whether voluntary or involuntary. And vice versa.

It was better this way.

Safer. For all of us.

The two search my face for any traces of a lie but find nothing. Which of course they didn't. I've long since taught myself how to lie properly. There are a surprising amount of very helpful tutorials online, and a few decent ones in book form, for just about everything. Needless to say, lying with a perfectly straight face was just one of my many new talents. Oh, man…am I going to be an overpowered fuckhead now?

Because I can live with that.

"Okay." Grace drawls. "But remember, we're done if you even think about it."

I nod. "Of course."

The solemn moment is slightly ruined as I take a crunchy bite of my burger. My delicious cheeseburger. Mm~ Oh! I swallow. "Okay, so we should probably head out before any cops come looking back here again. I've already had to shoo them away like three times." Seriously, there are only going to be so many times I can handle Officer Douglas before someone notices that he keeps coming back without remembering why he left.

They nod and we're suddenly in the air, high enough to be mistaken as birds but low enough to avoid getting my food wet from the cloud moisture. It'll be a bit cold, but I'm okay with that as long as my food is good.

Over the sound of the wind, I call out to them. "So, we'll be going to Oswald's place next." Blank stares. "Oswald. The Penguin? You know, whose real name is Oswald Cobblepot? Or, well, Kapelput."

The reactions I get consist of "Oh~ Right. I remember now." and "Yeah, you did say something about that earlier, didn't you?"

"Yeah. Now, Oswald won't be a part of things like you three are and how some of the others will be. I'm almost positive he'd rat us out to Batman or whoever else come knocking on his door about us if put under enough pressure. But since our only other alternatives are going to either the Falcone Family or the Black Mask, I'll gladly go to Oswald. Of the three, he's the most predictable and the easiest to deal with."

"…any way you could go and talk to him without me there?" Caitlin asks.

I furrow my brows. "Why? Did you piss him off or something?" Which I could definitely see. Caitlin didn't seem the type to put up with his expectations of how people were to treat him. Especially in his own lounge.

"Yeah. You could say that." Figures. She looks off to the side.

"What? Did you rob him or something? Kill some of his guys? I'm not sure that he'd be the sort of person who'd mind anything like that for too long." Though that was just a guess.

"…I may have said some choice words about his mother after some…unfortunate business. An attempt at teaming up against Batman gone wrong." Anger beginning to tint her voice. "Which was entirely his fault! All because that stupid fish-eating freak had to waste time gloating instead of getting away with our money! Ugh!"

Oof. That's not good. If Gotham, the live-action show that was so fucking good from beginning to end, was any relevant indication, talking about Oswald's mom was a quick way to piss him off for life. I can't imagine it being much different here and now.

"Okay. That's all good, no worries. In fact, it's better if you both stay outside for this. No sense in giving away the fact that we're working together, right? I'll go inside and do what I need to and you two can just, uh, you'll just stay on a nearby rooftop with the food." I smile, taking another bite of my burger and following up after swallowing. "Arguably the more important job."

They nodded.

A few minutes into our short journey, we land on the rooftop of the building across from Oswald's place. It's an old apartment building. Whose location sucks for the tenants since those spotlights occasionally flashed across basically every window as it moved. But I figure they might have gotten some light resistant curtains to deal with that, so I don't think much on the passing observation.

Before I can say anything, though, Grace speaks as she begins digging gingerly through one of our bags. Damn it, I wanted those tenders… "Hey. Back there with Batman, you could've easily taken him down, right? Back in Arkham, you ripped off cell doors made of metal like they were nothing and shattered the glass to mine with just a few punches. Hell, you cracked it with just the tips of your fingers. So why not just do the same with him?"

Alright, fair question.

"Yeah," Caitlin pipes up. "or why not use your mind powers to mess with his mind or something? Which I'd be totally cool with, by the way, since it's not me. You just walked away and left him to come after us later. That's setting us up for failure down the road, if you ask me."

I nod. "Well, I can tell you, Orca, that using my powers to deal with Batman is not an option. Not right now. As far I know, he's only aware that I have the ability to bring people back from the brink of death. Like he saw me do with Harley. Oh, I should mention that Pamela and her friend who happens to be a girl, I would love it if you could do me a favor and call Harley that whenever you talk about her, are safe for the time being. In case you, you know, care at all. I'll just need to pick her up in a little bit. But, back to what I was saying, letting Batman know there's more to me than what he's seen in dangerous."

They smile conspiratorially and nod, knowing full well just what kind of calculative mind the man they've been struggling against for years has under the cowl. How easily he can pick apart weaknesses to his advantage. And also because teasing Pamela sounds like fun. In just an hour of light conversation, I'd discovered how easy it was to get under her skin with certain topics.

Harley being her not-girlfriend, but yes she actually was (SHIP CONFIRMED! THERE IS NO DENYING IT NOW PAMELA YOU GODDAMN TSUNDERE!), was now added to the list. Alongside that was, obviously, the Joker, mankind's oppression over plants and the Earth in general, and not being taken seriously. Funnily enough, almost all of which have just cemented myself in a positive light she's probably not going to betray, for the time being, in her mind.

Saving Harley from a Joker-related death, saving the Earth form mankind, taking her environmental concerns seriously when just about everyone else brushed her off both before and after she became Poison Ivy, and soon I'd be killing the pasty-faced fuck himself.

Yes, I do believe I've managed to sway her form what she originally planned. Which was, as I found out from peering into her mind outside of Arkham, to slowly turn my future group against me and wait until I'd succeeded in powering them up before using them to fulfill whatever goals she had in mind. Which was none, as of the few minutes it had taken her to come up with the plan.

You know, I don't think I should be thinking of monitoring her mind for any thoughts of possible betrayal so casually…ah, well. What can you do?

"So, it's better for me to avoid directly fighting with him until we have a stronger leg to stand on. And, Caitlin, I didn't fight with him now because one: if I did he'd be hounding after us until we all ended up in Arkham. And two: because incapacitating him now is, quite simply, a fucked up thing to do to Gotham City."

I get confused looks, as if they never thought of Batman as anything more than a nuisance and couldn't see any detriment to him being gone. "You probably don't think about this often enough, since you were young children at the time, but do you remember what Gotham was like before Martha and Thomas Wayne were murdered?" I'd done a lot of research the last two years in order to satisfy my curiosity as to which DC Universe described 'pre-Crime Alley shooting Gotham' the right way.

As expected, they shook their heads.

"Not really." Grace. "I mean, my grandpa always complained about how things 'were better' when they were around. But I'd always just brush that off as something that all old people say when they're bitter about life." Caitlin hums in reminiscent agreement, a bittersweet smile on her face.

"I don't really remember how the city was, either. But that's funny, Orca. My grandmother and my parents were all the same exact way growing up. And I remember that whenever we went to visit her in Blüdhaven when I was real young, she and my parents would always spend the time listening in to the speeches and interviews the Wayne's gave on tv. And, you know, there must have been a lot of them because we went over to her place just about every weekend. But I was, you know, a normal kid. I was more interested in building my model rockets and reading ahead in my science textbook for school."

Grace and I stared at her blankly. Scratch that, Grace was looking at her with the 'oh, my gosh, you too?' look. I was giving her the blank stare of 'you're kidding, right?'. But I push on past their definitely nerd-like childhood passions. Despite my intelligence now, I wasn't always like this. I was actually a jock in high school, if you could believe it, so looking down on spending one's daylight hours inside when there was a world outside the house waiting to be explored is almost a way of life by this point.

But we're losing focus, so I push on.

"Gotham was on the up and up when they were still alive. Or, at least, they were working hard towards getting it there. And they were close. In their lifetime, at least from the time that they took over as heads of the Wayne family, crime was looking to be at an all-time low. Rapes, murders, robberies, hell even pollution, and just about everything else was being committed maybe once every few days by the people who were set in their criminal lifestyle. No different from, say, New York. Which was a vast improvement from being like how Blüdhaven is today.

Employment was up because of Wayne Enterprises following the direction of Thomas Wayne's vision of improving the city as much as he could with everything he could, the homeless weren't as rampant an issue what with Martha Wayne's hands-on initiatives, the economy was much more stable and the people were happy to live in a place that truly symbolized what they thought of as The American Dream.

And yet, in the twenty years since their deaths, everything they achieved through all of their no doubt countless hours of dedication and arduous work was flipped on their heads. Employment is down, since none of the men and women on the Board of Directors was half the visionary Thomas was and was twice as inefficient. Martha's guiding hand and unrelenting attitude was no longer putting up a nigh impenetrable resistance against the interference in her programs from greedy assholes in suits trying to capitalize either politically or financially on the suffering of the lower class. And the dream had given way to a nightmare that would come to serve to be the stomping grounds for a whole host of supervillains," The two looked sheepishly to the ground, since they knew they were part of that 'host of supervillains'. "and the remaining assholes in suits that would come to terrorize anyone and everyone in their path."

I could tell Grace was starting to pick up on what I was saying. Caitlin not so much. "…okay, but what does that have to do with Batman?"

Grace cuts in before I can explain. "Batman is part of the reason we're not back to Blüdhaven levels of rape and all that other stuff despite the Waynes dying, alongside Bruce Wayne doing what he can on his own. He doesn't just go after the 'supervillains'. He goes after everyone who's a criminal. Something we forget because nowadays only the fights he has with us make it to the front of the newspapers and the nightly news."

Caitlin's eyes widen in understanding. She turns back to me. "So, if you were to take him down-which you definitely could, right? You're not just scared of fighting him or anything, right?"

I make an 'eh' sound and shrug my shoulders. "It's not fighting him that I'm afraid of. The dude is just terrifying in the sense that he is relentless. Short of killing him, which I can't and won't do for personal reasons, Batman will most likely never stop trying to get me if I were to make it apparent that I was a supervillain that needs to be gotten. If I were to be seen in his eyes like you guys are, he would dedicate however long it would take to study me, learn my weaknesses and plot up some way to kill me, strip me of my powers though I wouldn't really know how, or something equally as terrible. It's better to remain neutral for as long as I possibly can. Hopefully he dies or something before he decides I'm a threat." I shrug again.

"Right. Good to know. Anyway, so, if you were to take him down, then it's not just us superpowered bad guys that would be able to do what we want…"

"It would be all the worst of the worst of the regular people too. Not that there aren't some of those with superpowers either. The point is…Batman dying or otherwise being out of the equation is essentially giving the green light for people to do as much terrible shit as they can before some other vigilante is inspired by what Batman did for the city and comes and takes over. That's essentially why I didn't go all out or even try to fight him. Either way, depending on whether he lives or dies, Gotham and the helpless people in it lose. And I know I said I wasn't a superhero or a vigilante, I'm technically not even a decent person all of the time, but I'd rather not have to deal with the guilt of knowing that somewhere out there, Batman isn't stopping a woman from being raped, a child form being kidnapped, or some guy from getting beaten to death in an alley."

We stand in silence for a few minutes before I clap my hands together. "Well! That was somber, and I think it's time to move on. Unless there's anything else you wanted to know?"

"Nope." "I'm good."

"Awesome. Now, I shall be back in a little while, once I get Oswald to deliver a message for me." I walk to the edge of the roof, step up to the edge and turn back to face them. "Stay out of sight just in case any bats decide to show up. I have a feeling he won't take kindly to finding you two out of Arkham."

I turn back to face the edge, below me a dark alley facing the entrance to the Iceberg Lounge, only to turn back around once again at the sound of Orca's voice. "What message? Who's it for? Someone on the list?"

Letting out a laugh, I shrug. "That depends on who Oswald can get in touch with first! We'll be taking this thing one step at a time, remember that! But I'll let you know who it is when I get back!" Then I step off and drop to the damp and dirty ground below.

I loved doing this next part.