Author's Note: alright, so I suppose the word for this story would be a drabble. It's really just an excuse for me to return to writing two characters I know and love, and a send-off for another I had just gotten to know and love: Lex Luthor and Tim Drake, and the dearly departed Bart Allen, respectively. As I wrote this, I got to thinking about the various things going on in the DC Universe lately, and how sidelined Luthor'd been since the initial One Year Later story 'Up Up and Away' by Johns and Busiek. Hence using him here. You might be asking: why Luthor and Robin together, or What a strange mix you've got here. Well, you're right and for that I have no excuse other than this: it may just be a sign of the apocalypse (or Apokolips?) that Luthor of all people is serving as an emotional guide to Robin. Hopefully, when/if you complete this story, you won't hate me too much for transmogrifying Luthor into a semi-father figure. At any rate, this story was originally meant to be a nice send-off to one of my favorite characters from DC: Bart Allen--as well as a nice return to writing Luthor and Tim. But, strange little bugger that I am, this story on its own may or may not be a possible prologue to something else percolating at the back of my head. With any luck, Dear Readers, as with my own wacky little take on Infinite Crisis a few years back, I might just come up with my own wacky take on the up-and-coming DC Universe. Thanks for reading.
My name is Tim Drake.
Slightly over a year ago, my best friend died saving the universe. Sounds strange, doesn't it? Yes, it does. But that's the world I live in. The world I wanted to be a part of.
What kind of world is that?
A world of responsibility.
Tonight, another friend just died.
And as I sit at the console in the cave, I wonder. What kind of world did I sign up for?
The call came down at 11pm, just after the last Family Guy rerun had actually lightened my mood. It was Jay—Jay Garrick. The Flash. One of the Fastest Men Alive. Phoned to tell me another one wasn't coming home.
As soon as he tells me, the detective instinct kicks in. The same instinct that led me to Bruce to begin with.
"Who did it?" I asked. And "Can you be sure?"
"Pieter's already on the autopsy, Tim. With luck we'll have a full report by lunch tomorrow," Jay said, and across the distance of time and landline I felt a grandfatherly pat on the shoulder. "I…expect Bruce will want a copy for himself?"
I thought about it for a moment.
"Yes," I said. "Yes, he will." And I thought about what Bruce thought about Bart. He…liked him—as much as Bruce can like a human being that's not part of his war. He named Bart. Impulse, yes. That was the name he liked. The name he used until Deathstroke tricked him and blew a hole in his knee.
Thereafter, Bart cleaned up his act. Started acting like Wally. And like Barry.
I never knew Barry Allen—barely knew Superman before Doomsday got ahold of him—but I remembered Bruce and Clark and Wally talking about him at the Thanksgiving dinners.
Barry Allen. The legend of legends. When his archenemy almost killed his fiancée, Barry snapped—and ended up killing Eobard Thawne for a crime almost committed too close for comfort.
And when the skies turned red those years ago, Barry disappeared. Last anyone heard of him, he had appeared to Batman and the Joker in a vision before disappearing again. Then he died. Saving the universe, Bruce told me. And I believed him.
I hung up with Jay, and stared at the computer screen for a moment longer.
I stood abruptly and went to the lockers. Went to get dressed. And five minutes later, went to my motorcycle, and was gone.
Gone to the city, gone to the highest point on the Vauxhall Opera House. Gone somewhere…where the cool night air and the misty breeze rolling in fro the Atlantic would combine with the muffled Chopin I heard from within.
And calm my senses.
And as I stood there, amidst the misty breeze and the music and the gravity of the situation, I began to hope it would rain. So I could lie to myself and say the sheets pouring down my face were God's tears and not mine.
I thought about a lot up there, on top of that Opera House.
How five years ago, it had been nothing. A pile of rubble in the middle of Two-Face's territory during the No Man's Land. How three years ago, three blocks from here, Tommy Elliot's plan to take Bruce's life ended in Harvey Dent betraying him. How two years ago, a gang war almost tore the city apart again. A gang war started by Stephanie Brown.
Steph.
Spoiler.
I thought about her. And how the Black Mask took it upon himself to squeeze the last bits of life out of her before finally putting her out of her misery. How Leslie Tompkins let it happen. How Bruce…
How Bruce tried to stop it. How he's always tried to stop it from happening to anyone else.
It can't. Can it?
So what did we have. We had Steph. And my father. And we had…
Conner.
In the midnight breeze, my lip quivered, and I bit it to hide the emotion.
It was too much. Steph. My…parents. Connor. All of them cut down in the line of inadvertent fire.
My earpiece communicator buzzed sharply three times. That's the signal from Bruce. I tapped my ear to access the line.
"Yeah," I said in a tonal gruff.
"Well," a voice that wasn't Bruce's said. "Manners, my dear boy."
"This is a private channel," I said. "Play your jokes elsewhere."
The voice said, "I assure you this is no joke, Timothy." That got my attention. "Do I have your attention now?"
"Yes," I said flatly.
"Good," it said. "Now get on that motorcycle of yours. 520 Kane Street. I trust you can find your way. Luthor out."
On the way to Kane Street, halfway into the Bowery, I occupied myself with these thoughts. Luthor? What the hell does he want with me? Come to gloat, as he always does. Come to lord Bart's death over me like he's lorded everything else over me. He's a bully, I concluded in the most basic of terms.
A rich…bald…bully.
Come to denigrate you, Tim. Come to ruin your life ever more so than it already is.
520 Kane Street.
A derelict on the outside. Some months ago, at least as far I could tell since returning to Gotham, it housed a faction of Intergang—possibly more stashed elsewhere in the city.
Intergang.
Bruce and I leave for a year, and we came back to Intergang and an all-new, all-homicidal Harvey Dent. This is my life. The endless complications.
Getting in is easy enough, consisting of breaking down the criss-cross two-by-fours covering the threshold. I knelt just inside the door and ran one finger through a thick layer of dust. If Intergang was indeed here, they've since vacated.
Leaving the building to worse clientele.
The foyer was misleading—my first hint something was amiss. Too dirty would be the easy excuse. But it's dirty and neglected enough for not being occupied in at least five months. The problem, though was in organization. Fleeing criminal syndicates, even ones financed and headed by New Gods, don't leave neatly stacked piles of dust; they just leave dust.
Hence Luthor. Good little jackal that he is, he came in and ordered the place up, and hasn't touched it since.
Too busy elsewhere. Too busy in his lab.
I stepped across the slat floor methodically, listening and feeling for any break in the otherwise solid lumber; anything that would lead me downstairs to where mad scientists lacking hair usually put their labs.
I was so focused on the floor that I didn't even notice the elevator four meters in front of me util it pinged open.
Luthor.
Standing there in the open elevator. Standing there in a white labcoat covering a purple-weave—probably Kevlar--armor, with green jodhpurs and purple alloy boots stopping at knee-length.Standing there with one hand on the open button, making sure the doors don't close in his smug face and ruin the big theatrics of revealing himself to me.
"Give me a break."
He frowned and rolled his eyes when I said that. And stood aside. After three surprisingly short seconds, he asked, "Well?"
I played off him, rankling for a two-fold effect. Pissing him off would lighten my mood. And I went into the elevator, highly doubting he could tell me anything I didn't already know.
Because that's Lex Luthor. The smartest man in this or any room from here to the Manor. A supremely confident man, to be sure, but one with some lingering anger issues. Yes anger, and hate. And he's probably the righteously angry type. Angry at a world that denied him so much and yet gave him a multinational company that he uses regularly to crush dreams and attempted-murder the last Kryptonian.
That's Lex Luthor. Who thinks he has all the answers, and hasn't gotten enough ass-kickings to be otherwise enlightened.
"You're awfully quiet," he said in the silence of the elevator.
I frowned. "What's in your head, Lex? We're friends now?"
"Hardly," he scoffed. The elevator slowed, and the doors pinged open. Surprise, surprise we landed in his lab: a stainless steel and glass affair going on pretty much as far I could tell. Nearest stood a semi-circle of stainless steel cabinetry, and on the countertop—
"A comparatively smaller version of your average electron microscope." Luthor answered the question with admittedly good timing. "The patent cost me more than your private schooling."
I stopped following him.
"So that's it?" I asked and didn't expect an answer. "You found out everything and now you're just milking it." I turned and let the cape flow out on inertia. "Good-bye, Lex."
"Tim," he said and said it forcefully. Like a father reprimanding a child. Like…my father.
I turned back.
"I've known everything," he corrected. Folded his arms over his chest and leaned into the viewer on the electron. "For years. Before I was so ceremoniously elected to the White House by the fine, repugnant people of this country, your mentor dealt me some idle threats. I threw some back. The only difference was that I followed through on mine." He looked up momentarily. "Patriot Act, Freedom of Information Act, NSA, executive privilege. Take your pick."
I flashed him a depreciative smile and said, "So you know everything, then."
"I choose to not know certain things. Makes the game more interesting, I find. I've since gone soft on the idea of finding out the minutiae of my enemies' lives."
"Enemies?" I asked. "Plural?"
Luthor looked back at me dourly. "Please."
He went back to his microscope for another minutes, twisting knobs and altering what could have only been graph coordinates on the nearby keyboard.
"Lex," I said slowly, and thought about what it meant to call him by his first name instead of the much more powerful and supervillainy sounding Luthor. "I can spend my time doing better things than being a lab assistant."
"And I cannot help but notice something, Timothy." No one's called me Timothy since the fourth grade.
"Which is?"
"Ever read Ian Fleming? James Bond?"
"No."
"For Your Eyes Only," Luthor said shortly and came away from the viewer. "A short story in that book called 'Quantum of Solace—'"
"Amount of comfort," I added without thinking.
"Amount of comfort," Luthor repeated. "Something you appear to be lacking of late. Especially since the loss of your father and your…friends."
A slight fire crept up my spine. And I launched out of place. One fist clocked Luthor across the chin and sent him to his knees. I crouched and pivoted on my heels and drove another foot up against his adam's apple.
Nailing him to the floor.
"You don't get to say that, Lex."
His eyes burned green hatred even as oxygen left them. He found the strength somewhere to say, "Get that foot—off of me."
And for some reason I still don't understand, I did.
He stood and straightened his jacket. His eyes weren't burning anymore but they looked just as intense.
This was Lex Luthor. A wolf in sheep's clothing.
"Conner was your friend, Tim, and he was my son." Luthor emphasized the words 'my son.' I really thought he believed it. Even up until the end.
"Your son," I said quietly, trying to rationalize it. "Who you loved, and when you put that crystal in his jeans you knew you were sending him to his death." I raised one arm and pointed a spiteful finger at him. "You knew it! And you didn't care! You sick bastard!"
His expression didn't change.
"Life is cruel," he said. "Why should incurring more hate from the superhuman community be any different? And if you know about the crystal, then you know I didn't send him to his death. I wouldn't have sent him anywhere that wasn't commensurate with his abilities."
Luthor leant away from the counter and went to one his plasma screens. Turning it on, he pulled a remote from his labcoat and went through channels of security footage. He landed on a playing image of…
"Are those…are those the Rogues?"
Luthor turned away from the screen and nodded to me.
"You see how it happened," Luthor said, leaning close to me and narrating what I was watching. "They built their machine, and then they ganged up on him, your friend Bart. They tricked him like the snivelling little men they are. The Rogues surrounded your friend. And beat him to death."
On the screen, the actual scene is obscured by Abra Kadabra's cape.
My lips quivered, and I tasted something foul at the back of my throat.
"They killed him, Tim," Luthor repeated for sympathy and for emphasis.
"How…" I struggled to say it. "How did you find this?"
"I have my ways," he said shortly. "And I'm showing it to you for a very specific reason."
"Which is?"
Luthor paused the footage and turned off the screen. He leaned on the table in front of screen so I couldn't even see it. "Because I've seen that look—the one in your eyes right now, despite that mask—I've seen it before. The look of loss. Confusion. The look of no purpose." I tracked Luthor as he made his way across the lab to a stainless steel bureau. And I said nothing. "I'm 38 years old, Boy Wonder. And I think you and I have experienced a collective fair share of violence and death and betrayal."
"Speak for yourself," I said thickly.
"Let me ask you something," he said, turning back to me with two tumblers full of what could only be Scotch. "You sought out Bruce Wayne after the death of Jason Todd, yes?" I nodded. "And you presented yourself as the logical, viable, necessary candidate to be Robin." I nodded.
Luthor held out one tumbler to me. I looked at it for a second before taking it. He sipped at his won tumbler, and went on. "And what has that life ever given you—the life of Robin, Boy Wonder. The street credit of beating the hell out of people like The Joker and Two-Face—people who regularly terrorise your mentor. But aside from the street credit…what? Your schooling a shambles. Your parents, dead. Every girl you've ever fallen in love with has fallen prey to the endless complications of a superheroic life. And your two best friends have died within a year of each other."
And standing there in Lex Luthor's lab, staring at an untouched tumbler of what—upon smell—is indeed Scotch…it occurred to me that Bruce was right all along. Luthor was dangerous because he was smart, but I never figured him this smart.
He'd studied me.
Every last inch.
Luthor leaned close. "Everyone you've ever loved is dead, Tim."
I couldn't even being to think about that. To rationalize that.
I snapped out of it and asked him, "What about you? Why are you saying all this, to me of all people?"
"I already told you," he pried. "Smartest man in this or any other room. Of all the women in my life I've only ever loved two. One was taken from me, and the other I drove away…into the arms of Kent."
Lois. He's talking about…he…he loved her.
"And," he went on, "my daughter—my lifeblood and my heir—has been taken from me. I haven't seen her since I left office all those months ago."
Left office, he said. You were disgraced and deposed.
"My point," Luthor concluded. "Is that…sometimes, people are similar. More similar than the law or mentors or even prevalent wisdom would have you think, Tim."
Maybe…there was something to what he was saying. Or maybe I was finally starting to crack up under the pressure of so many dead in so short a time. Maybe…comparing my life to Luthor's was truly a sign of the end times.
He finished his Scotch and got the hint about mine, taking it back for himself.
"So," I said at last. "What's the point? That misery loves company? And you and I are…what?"
"More alike than you know," he said simply, and stood away from the counter, setting the tumbler back on it. He extended his hand to me, and I stared at it with all the bad manners one could think of.
My eyes narrowed behind the mask.
"It's that, then," I said, half-amazed. "It's always been that, hasn't it. You've spent your adult life trying to get her back."
His jaw tightened.
"Slade told me of your attempts at cloning Conner." I wasn't surprised, either at the change I subject or his name-checking Conner, but he looked at me like I was. "Nothing slips past me, Boy Wonder. Not even the many ways in which you're becoming more and more like your mentor. As days go by and circumstances dictate…you will be Bruce Wayne someday."
He looked at me with a halfhearted frown.
"This is me calling your bluff, Lex. You think…that because my friends and parents are dead, that I'm gonna start beating the Joker to pulp on a weekly basis?"
He raised one of his eyebrows.
"You're wrong," I said and tried to keep it together. "If I was meant to be like Bruce Wayne…I would have done it years ago!" The mask feels weird on my face, and as I point an accusatory finger at Luthor, I figure out it's because tears are seeping out.
My arm drops. My arms feel heavy, and my head droops to stare at the floor.
"It…it wasn't supposed to be this way," I said, cracking. "We were supposed to be heroes. We were…we saved the world. Saved it from worlds at war, saved it from Deathstroke more times than you or anyone knows, Lex. So lecture me again and I'll break your goddamn nose."
I stood there, waiting for a response. And Luthor just stared back at me. His eyes had lost none of their intensity, and he crossed his arms tightly over his chest. The light from the ceiling glinted dully off his forehead. And for once I didn't find it funny.
"If," I said at last. "If I was on my way to becoming Bruce Wayne, I would have put a gun in my mouth by now."
Luthor's head cocked up, genuinely surprised by that.
I wondered, and wondered if my apprehension was showing, if he thought I was being serious about that.
"Is that so?" he asked. "I'm to understand the only thing that keeps you from an untimely death is your conviction that you're your own man. Is that it?"
I nodded slowly. "I've come too far to throw my life away for Bruce's."
Luthor stood from the counter and smiled thinly. He pushed me aside and ejected a disc from the screen-viewer, handing it to me.
"What's this?"
"Leverage," he said blithely. "As I said before in no uncertain terms. The Rogues beat your friend to death. More theatrically put, they robbed him of life. Think of it like killing a cop—incidentally, try not to think of Barry Allen—and then think about what will happen when your mentor and his friends will go gunning for the Rogues."
He laid the disc in my open palm, and I stared at it for a moment while he went on.
"The Rogues have been content to stay out of the way, haven't they? Ask yourself on your way home why they would do something as egregious as killing their great and worthy opponent, The Flash."
Behind the star-lite lenses in the mask, my eyes rolled up to meet Luthor's own burning greens.
"The Rogues are going to burn," Luthor said and looked rather like he meant it. "When you present that little information there to your mentor—and to this new Justice League—keep me in mind."
"Why?" It was the only logical thing I could say.
"Because, Tim, like your mentor I possess resources beyond comprehension. Resources I want to use to keep Bush Leaguers like the Rogues from making serious business into a game of Checkers. Understand?"
I nodded slowly.
"Now get out of my lab before I change my mind."
He waved one hand expressively, ushering me to the elevator.
And I was gone. Gone home to look over that footage of the Rogues beating Bart to death. Gone to lose sleep looping through it again and again.
Three hours after leaving Luthor, a warm hand on my shoulder was enough to bring me out of a light slumber, and slight slobbering on the Batcomputer's console. It was Bruce, back from patrol or going out to patrol—I couldn't tell.
He looked at the paused vision on the screen—Captain Cold staring into the camera while the other Rogues circled Bart and went to work. Bruce stood there for minutes just staring at the one paused frame. I looked at him, at the frame, and back again.
"Well?" I asked.
"I'm…sorry, Tim," he said with about as much strength as he could've ever mustered. Because that's Bruce Wayne. Who goes out every night and sees death and destruction, and takes all of it to heart. Who, after ten years doing this, still feels for the dead and for the about to die. Who cannot let go of the past, though very logical impulse in his body desperately wants to.
He was still looking at the screen when he spoke again. "Dr Mid-Nite phoned earlier, said the autopsy was done. If…you wanted…"
"No," I said and thought a moment longer, looking at Bruce. "Are any of the jets ready?"
"Yes," he said swiftly. "We can go now if you like."
"Yes," I repeated. "I need to see it."
Needed to see the Flash Museum. Needed to see what if anything was left of Bart—and if there was, I was certain it would be there. And as the batplane roared over Kansas, I made a note in my head of things to do. Trying, as I only suspected normal people do, to prioritize Bart's death. Call Raven. Another statue. Call Cassie. Bear the bad news like I always do. Call…who? There was no one, I thought. Everyone who knew him was either already there, en route—or else dead or displaced in time. No one to honor Bart Allen.
520 Kane Street.
"Why did you help the boy," the voice said and maintained its characteristic calm.
"He's the only one left now. The only one who hasn't lost his mind to self-loathing or resurrection cults or to Deathstroke's narcotics." Luthor half-turned and wore a thin scowl. The voice belonged to the dark and motionless figure standing half in and half out of the darkness at the far end of Luthor's lab.
Larger than Luthor's own height. Skin darker than Luthor's own. Eyes burning red with the militaristic intensity of ages behind them. Broad and defined arms clasped confidently behind his back.
Darkseid. Lord of Apokolips.
"You require a new mole, then." It wasn't a question. "And nurturing the boy's need for paternalism was a play on his naivete. You are a gifted actor, Luthor."
Luthor's eyes narrowed. "Hardly. Suffice it to say, my once and future ally, that I have my reasons for my plans. I'm more than certain that you have the same."
Darkseid nodded once, curtly. "Then we have an accord."
"Yes," Luthor said off-handed. "Our individual goals in pursuit of the larger goal. And I must say, I'm actually surprised it took you this long."
"Your erstwhile impersonator's tampering with space-time delayed my plans," Darkseid reprimanded. "I seek what is left of his foolish squanderings, and I shall not rest until I have that which is by right mine. You and certain others of our cabal have the means to bring the myriad parts of the 52 together in a way heretofore unthought.
"Palmer," Luthor said, amused at his own ingenuity and knowing the answer was right.
Darkseid nodded. And smiled. A deep and wicked smile.
Bruce set the jet down a block from the Museum in Keystone. I ran the half-mile down the street.
And I was wrong. About people not mourning Bart.
The courtyard was filled. End to end, entrance to sidewalk, tree line to tree line. Candles and banners and signs, and at the center of it, a statue of The Flash—larger than life, in mid-run, speeding off to the next adventure on the horizon.
I stood there for hours, just staring at the Flash statue. I knew it wasn't Bart. It may have been Wally, and probably could've even been Barry. But it was meant to be all of them.
My friend, and my brother, and my parents.
He was all of them. And now he was gone.
Luthor was wrong, I thought as Jay Garrick came up to shake my hand. I wasn't becoming Batman. I couldn't become Bruce anymore than Bart could've become Wally.
We couldn't become our mentors. Just learn from them. And keep trying to make it a better world, so that maybe…maybe the Bart Allens of the world won't go unnoticed. Or unloved.
I miss you, Bart.
Love.
Tim.
The End?