Family
Chapter 6: Discoveries
Disclaimer: all characters are property of their respective owners.
Spoilers: to the end of season 7 of Buffy (I'm not including the season 8+ comics in this continuity), general spoilers for Batman and mild spoilers for X-Men: Evolution season 1.
Author Note: the version of the Batman that will appear here draws from several versions.
A.N. 2: Chapter 1 has been rewritten heavily to remove a big problem with the geography.
A.N. 3: And this is the end of the backlogged material for Family. So the next chapter may be some time away, depending on how fast I write.
I wish to give thanks to JediKnight for betareading and general creative input.
Monarch Chemical Plant. Gotham City
It seemed that he had underestimated Buffy's stealth, as well as her hearing. He quickly reviewed his options and discarded them one on one. So, at the moment only one option remained: dithering.
"Not here." Batman hissed "Too many ears."
"That's why I never was a good Secret Identity Girl. I never cared about who was listening." Buffy said with a mock surprised tone. When Batman glared at her, she only smiled.
"We need to make ourselves scarce." Batman said, "This district's precinct is notorious for being more than a bit trigger happy and corrupt.."
"And being shot is not of the good." Buffy said. "Do you remember where you parked the Batmobile?"
Batman didn't answer, instead using his grapple pistol to go to the roof of the plant, and started to go toward the front, not before sending down another line for Buffy to climb. When Buffy reached the front part of the roof, Batman was standing, almost on the edge.
"What are you...?" Buffy started to ask when he heard a high-output engine close by. "...waiting for?" she concluded lamely, as the Batmobile parked itself before the plant.
It was so fleeting that, afterwards she wasn't sure if she had really seen it, but she could swear that Batman had smirked. Then, he using the grapple gun in a nearby building, descended in a great arc in the air, and fell standing up over the canopy of the car, that opened to let him enter. Buffy jumped directly down into the passenger seat. The canopy closed and they sped out of the plant just as the first emergency vehicles started to arrive.
"Do you have some way to call from here? My phone broke during the fight with Blackout."
"I was wondering what happened to the headset you were wearing earlier." Batman said, pushing button in the driving wheel, which transformed a screen into a numeric keyboard. "Call her."
"Okay. So what's the real story, Bruce?" Buffy said, as she was keying the numbers. "Why did you became Batman."
"You know why. My parents." Batman said. "What did you get from that demon?"
"He is a small fry that survives by selling his services to the Mob." Buffy said, letting the obvious attempt to change topic slide, "Apparently most of his family is still sealed away, thankfully, as a whole bunch of high-powered demons working together? Not of the good at all."
"And what did you to him?" Batman said "Did you slay him?"
"No. When I was interrogating him, he pulled a fast one on me." Buffy said. "I thought that by blindfolding and tying him, he wouldn't dare to use his powers, but I was wrong."
Wayne Tower Penthouse
Dawn was beside herself with worry. She had been experimenting a bit with her newfound portal opening ability, having finally gotten the hang of it, when Buffy's signal shut out during the fight with Blackout. Despite the dorky name, if he was really from Lilith's brood, he could be dangerous.
She paced around for several minutes, increasingly worried, until her smartphone started to ring. It was a hidden number, but she had the feeling that she knew who was calling. If Buffy's phone broke, as it was becoming usual, she probably asked Bats for something like that.
"Dawn Summers here." She said.
"Hiya, Dawnie." She heard the voice of Buffy.
"Buffy! What the Hell did happen?" she said, relieved.
"The phone broke. Sorry for having worried you." Buffy said, "I'm calling from the Batmobile, and well, something has happened."
"Are you hurt?" Dawn said, worried again.
"Nah, it's something I can't discuss by phone." Buffy said, "Look, Bruce's butler, Alfred Pennywise..."
"Pennyworth." Dawn corrected her. "Alfred Pennyworth. Pennywise was the clown demon from 'It'"
"Whatever" Buffy said, and Dawn could see the eyeroll from where she was standing. "Look, you need to go to Wayne Manor. Alfred is going to pick you up."
While Buffy spoke, Dawn looked at herself. She only had to put the sneakers on to be able to get out. As she reached for them, she had another idea, and checked two locations in Google Maps, distance and direction between them. She then opened a portal, that showed the front porch of a stately manor. She quickly looked at the pictures of Wayne Manor in Google and saw that it matched.
"Dawn? You have become very quiet all of a sudden." Buffy asked as Dawn ended to put on the sneakers.
"No need for Alfred to come for me." Dawn said, crossing the portal.
Dawn stepped out of the portal, finding herself in front of Wayne Manor. And she quickly found herself having to take refuge in the manor porch, as the drizzle that have been falling intermittently for quite a while was starting to become a serious storm.
Nonetheless, she looked around and thought that the pictures that she had seen on Internet didn't do the old building justice. It looked a lot more homely, than the creepy manor that the pictures showed. She then remembered that she still had the phone in her hand.
"Buffy, remember what I said earlier of things keyed to me?" Dawn said to the phone.
There was no answer, so she then looked at the phone, and found that the call had been cut. She face palmed hard, realizing that obviously the same cell towers wouldn't service the city center and a Manor located in the outskirts of the city, near the coast.
She put the phone in her pocket, went to the main door and rang the doorbell. If she knew her sister Buffy would call her as soon as she could, so better to get it with the program to see why Buffy wanted for her to come to Wayne Manor.
The door opened, revealing Alfred in his spotless butler uniform.
"Hello, Alfred." She said.
"Miss Summers?" he said, arching an eyebrow. "What an amazing coincidence, your sister called earlier, asking me to bring you here."
"Ah, well, it's a long story, and I would like to tell it to everybody at once." Dawn said, fidgeting a bit.
"Of course." Alfred said, before stepping out of the way for her to enter. "If you may come with me, I'll prepare you some refreshments while your sister arrives."
"Thank you very much, Alfred." Dawn said, entering the manor and following Alfred to a room that looked like a mix between a living room and a library, that was dominated by a big portrait of a couple, Thomas and Martha, she assumed, over the fireplace.
"Now, If you excuse me, Miss." He said, before disappearing on a side corridor.
As with the apartment, the place was furnished with taste. The sofas and armchairs were comfortable, and in a corner there was a grandfather clock… that was not working. Intrigued despite herself, she went to check if there was some problem with it, starting with manipulating the clock hands. They were a bit stiff, so she had to lean on the clock to exert more strength. So, when the wall behind the clock moved she fell forward, onto a set of stairs. Fortunately, Dawn managed to stop in a turn of the twisting stairs before she could fall down more. She got up with difficulty and checked herself. Some bruises, but nothing serious.
She was about to call Alfred, but she topped herself, remembering Buffy's words about Bruce hiding something. And whatever it was it was probably related to these secret stairs.
She checked that her smartphone had not broken and activated the flashlight app. The stairs were carved on the rock, supplemented here and there by some concrete, and descended into a stygian darkness. The door that she had fallen through had a handle to open it from the inside, so she closed it carefully, trying not to make a noise.
She walked down the stairs, until she found a door at the end of it. A heavy door, the style you would find in a fallout shelter. She opened it and stepped into... the Gray Ghost Lair?
Okay, it was a pretty faithful recreation of the lair, with some updating in the technological aspect. She had seen more than a few episodes over the years, as it was one of Xander (and Andrew) favorite series. She was going to look around, but a noise attracted her attention. The noise of a car coming from… a tunnel to her right, and it was getting louder.
She hid behind a rock, in one of the areas of the cave that haven't been worked over to give space for… this, whatever it was. She didn't have to wait much, as the car soon appeared. A sleek black car with a bat-shaped front that could double as a battering ram.
'Wait a minute! Bat?' she thought, the pieces finally falling into place. 'Bruce is Batman!?'
The car parked in a circular platform, and soon enough, as she already suspected, Buffy and Batman got out of the car.
"Now, we'll see how Dawn takes the news." Buffy said.
Batman didn't answer immediately, instead looking around until he was looking straight toward her.
"No need for that, she already knows." He said, removing his cowl to show the face of Bruce Wayne, "Dawn, come here."
The Batmobile. Racing through Gotham's outskirts. A few minutes ago
"Hold on. Alfred, can you repeat?" Batman said, as Buffy was trying, unsuccessfully, to call Dawn again. "Don't bother, Dawn is in Wayne Manor. The reception is spotty at best there."
"How can she...?" Buffy said, before she realized what had happened "Oh, God, so that's what she meant!"
"What are you talking about?." Batman said.
Buffy took a deep breath before she started to explain
"It's a long story, but to make it short, there was a prophecy about a Key to open a portal to a Hell dimension, and Dawn… well, she fit the bill." She said, "Well, there was a time limit to use her as the Key, so we tried to run, but she was captured and some bozo tried to sacrifice her. We managed to stop it in the proverbial nick of time and she only suffered a couple of nasty wounds." She put the hand on her temples, as if to forestall a headache "The kick is that a portal really started to open after the blood started to flow. She has never shown signs of having any ability to open portals afterwards, though."
"Until now." Batman said
"Yeah, until now." Buffy said, thoughtful. "She must have opened a portal to Wayne Manor, somehow."
"...Okay." Batman said. He sensed that there were more to the story than what she had said, but he wouldn't pry, for now.
They didn't talk for a while, the Batmobile going through a dirt road until they reached a craggy rock wall, not too far from Wayne Manor. The dirt road ran parallel to the wall for quite a while, but after Batman pressed a button in the steering wheel, a section of the wall, just in front of the turn of the road, opened, revealing an underground access.
"Wow, so your underground base is under Wayne Manor, right?." Buffy said, "How... Zorro of you."
Batman pursed his lips but he didn't say anything. She wouldn't know, of course, about the movie they had gone to see that night. His thoughts were interrupted by an alarm that showed in the HUD integrated in the cowl. Somebody had opened the access to the Batcave, and hadn't pressed the button to stop the alarm. Probably Dawn, although he wouldn't discount the possibility that somebody had used the distraction provided by her arrival to enter the cave.
He made a mental note make more difficult to find the right combination in the clock, just in case another guest tried to fiddle with the clock, as well as placing some cameras in the passage. Anyway, they would know soon enough, anyway as the car started to go through the passage toward the cave.
Not too long afterwards he was stopping the Batmobile onto the platform. When they both got out, Buffy talked while he was looking for the intruder.
"Now, we'll see how Dawn takes the news." She said, her voice tinged with some worry.
He didn't answer immediately, looking around until he saw part of a sleeve behind an outcropping of rocks.
"No need for that, she already knows." He said, removing his cowl to show his face, "Dawn, come here."
"Hi." She said, as she stood, waving her hand and smiling sheepishly. "Sorry, Bruce, I saw that the clock was broken and tried to fix it…"
"And you accidentally opened the secret passage." Bruce said, with a sigh. "I need to improve security there." He thought for a moment, before adding "I'll call Alfred, he must be looking for you all over the mansion." Then he pointed to a zone that seemed to be separated from the rest of the cave by scaffolding, which also seemed to hide whatever was there from view. "If you don't mind, can you wait for me there?"
"No problemo, Bruce." Buffy said, as she took Dawn arm and walked there, while Bruce talked to Alfred through the communicator integrated into the cowl, about the last development.
After they had stopped talking he went toward the place he had indicated to the sisters. As he expected, when he arrived Buffy and Dawn were looking all over the device that was sitting there, with a chair before it. The device looked like a big screen surrounded by smaller screens.
"Bruce, what the hell is this? It looks like a computer, but I can't see..."
"One moment." Bruce said, sitting on the chair, and pressing a hidden button on its arms. A panel slid open, revealing a lens. When Bruce put his eye in front of the lens, it scanned the eye and the main screen turned on, and a female digitized voice said:
"Password: Criminals are..." and it left it hanging.
"A superstitious and cowardly lot." Bruce said, ignoring Buffy's 'Really?' reaction, although he would be the first to admit that the line was a bit corny.
"Voice recognized. Welcome, Batman." The voice said and a holographic keyboard and trackball appeared before him, at the same time the computer initialized.
"A sweet setup you have here, Bruce." Dawn said with a whistle.
"Don't let Andrew near it, like ever." Buffy said, and both Summers sisters shuddered.
"Who is Andrew?" Bruce asked.
"Watcher in training, he is an uber-nerd." Buffy said. "He was of great help during the last weeks on Sunnydale, though."
"I presume that Sunnydale's collapse wasn't a natural event." Bruce said, while correlating the data on the computer.
"No, it wasn't. Sunnydale was built over a Hellmouth, and yes, a Hellmouth is exactly what it sounds like." Buffy said, "When we managed to close it, the cave system that contained the Hellmouth proper collapsed completely."
"Hum." Bruce said, as he put a map of Gotham City on the screen. Twelve red points appeared over the Bowery and the Narrows, the two worst districts of Gotham, "The Bowery murders, they are quite spread over the district, but if we add the last places where the victims were seen..." other twelve points appeared on orange "...and we add the last places where the people missing during the spikes of missing people were seen last time." A good number of yellow dots appeared, and a pattern had emerged. A good of them seemed to be concentrated over a narrow strip close to the border between the Bowery and the Narrows.
"What is there?" Dawn asked.
"Grant Avenue, that is where it crosses with state route 39." Bruce said, enlarging the map and showing a map of Gotham county and the adjacent counties with the road highlighted. "On a couple of the victims the forensic department found traces of a kind of clay that appears in a few places in the state, but only one of those places is close to route 39." The map zoomed into a undeveloped zone north of Gotham, close to a marshland area called Slaughter Swamp.
Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters
"I hope that we didn't ruin your date, Jean." Ororo said to the redhead who was walking down the corridor with her.
"Not really, I was already on my way back, when I received your call." Jean said with a wave of her hand. "Whatever plans Duncan had, they were ruined by the storm."
"It wasn't mine. The storm, I mean." Ororo said, before adding with a pensive face "It is a weird one, though."
"How so?" Jean asked, curious.
"On itself it isn't really unusual, other than its suddenness, but there is a straight line of storms from the Mid-Atlantic all the way to New Mexico." Ororo explained, "Something that we better investigate later."
"You are the one with weather control, Ororo." Jean said "So, what's the problem?"
"Cerebro has detected another mutant, but Charles won't be back until tomorrow, and by then the trail will be too cold." Ororo said.
"And as I am the only telepath in the team, and the professor have been training me to use Cerebro..." Jean continued. "I'll see if I can retrieve it."
They finally enter Charles study, where Ororo got the secret panel to open and Cerebro was there. Jean took a deep breath and sat in a chair in front of the device, putting the headset on her head. Immediately she was assaulted by the thoughts of everybody and it took all her training to block it, down. She closed her eyes and focused into following the sign of mutant activity that the machine had detected.
Her mind-self flew South, following the direction that Cerebro had recorded, until she found the trail she was looking for, and read the psychic traces associated with it.
"Dawn... Summers..." she said, picking the name from it.
"Dawn Summers, are you sure?" Ororo said.
"Yes... why?" Jean said, still trying to get the location of the girl.
"Because she is Scott cousin, I met her earlier today." Ororo explained, before noticing something, "Jean, your nose…"
"Just… a moment." She kept reading the traces, despite the pounding she was starting to fell in her head "Portals… open portals… Gotham City… Wayne Manor." She said and then after a moan of pain, she started to add "I'm going to…"
Suddenly she became aware of a dark presence. It felt asleep, but even asleep it was hungry and malevolent and devoid of anything that could be considered... human. She wanted to get away, but its might and hunger had drawn her to it like a moth to a flame.
She fought, she fought with all her psychic might until she felt something shift in her mind, and a voice that sounded like her own, but crackling in flames said, as she felt like a wall in her mind started to crumble:
'SHE'S MINE!'
And she didn't know anything else. She awoke, finding herself again in Charles study.
"Jean, what has happened?" Ororo said, "You started to bleed from the nose, you looked like you were in pain, but before I could disconnect Cerebro you glowed like a flame for a moment, and fell down from the chair."
"I… don't know." Jean said, the last minutes of her using of Cerebro having vanished from her mind, as if something didn't want Jean to remember what had happened.
TO BE CONTINUED...