Hayate gave up on his silence in the late morning, after he and Kei were already awake and trying to maneuver around each other in a too-small space. While before the apartment felt a little stifling, because Kei's worry kept them from just leaving, now it was outright oppressive. Even when Hayate retreated to the bathroom or to the bed, behind a small mound of pillows and blankets, his sister was too close by when he was already irritated with her. He wanted enough space to fume and then burn off his feelings through exercise.

It wouldn't have even taken her that much effort to put Akaboshi in a submission hold long enough for him to rethink his non-plans. Akaboshi might've been as big as Jiraiya, but Kei was way stronger than her frame suggested and had Isobu backing her up. No contest. Hayate could've just yelled from the sidelines until the lesson stuck.

But instead of helping Hayate handle the situation, Kei retreated behind excuses about Hayate's safety and just ran away. He'd never—Kei didn't do that. She was an S-class shinobi all on her own, afraid of basically nobody on the battlefield. She'd fought the Fourth Hokage to a near-standstill more than a year ago. With Isobu, she was a force of nature.

But during the end of that conversation, half her chakra signature was just frustration and spite instead of real fear, with a baffling hint of actual jealousy swirling around at the edges.

And after everything, Akaboshi still felt like an avalanche more than a person. Someone who was gonna hit the ground in unrecognizable, destructive fractals and never be the same again. There was no telling who would be going down with him.

Nothing was fixed.

Hayate gnawed on that thought until he fell asleep, with his phone tucked under his pillow in case Akaboshi finally called, and woke up without a solution. He lounged in bed for a little longer, flipping himself like takoyaki in the pan a couple of times, then rolled off the bed to start his morning exercises. There wasn't anything else to do before breakfast.

On the couch, Kei was asleep for a little longer. While Hayate stretched, he peered over the back of the couch to find her curled up like a shrimp, blanket kicked half to the floor, and debated whether he wanted to wake her. While it wouldn't be difficult, and Kei wasn't one of those shinobi who woke up swinging, but… Hayate still didn't want to act like last night's argument hadn't happened.

And the shadows under her eyes were practically gray, so maybe Kei would appreciate more time to rest, too.

Hayate continued his stretches until the sequence was complete. He started with the ones meant to strengthen his knees and ankles, sitting on the floor. If he didn't keep up exercise, sometimes his bad leg would twinge in the mornings. Then, when he was on his feet again, Hayate placed his palms flat on the floor going forward, stretched each foot over his head in turn, and manipulated his arms joint-by-joint until he felt completely awake. It was the sound of his knuckles cracking in sequence that finally got Kei to stir.

"Morning, Neesan," said Hayate, omitting the "O-" and most of any morning cheer he might otherwise wield against his slow-waking sister. He leaned over the backrest of the couch as she levered herself up into a sitting position. "Sun's up."

"I can see that," was her dry reply as she squinted at the blackout curtain. After yawning, she grasped the blanket and started to fold it up, occasionally pausing to rub at her eyes. "Did you sleep well?"

"No."

Kei sighed. "Fair."

They made breakfast together, shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen even though the space was small and Hayate still felt a little like climbing out a window. Even if he was upset—more than upset, given everything they'd been through in this city so far—Hayate didn't hand over okonomiyaki duty even to Kei. Hers were fine, but she was out of practice and Hayate didn't want to give up control of the stove just yet. He could still do this.

Even if Kei was being needlessly tyrannical.

"Did Isobu-chan have a good night, at least?" Hayate asked as he prepped the batter.

Kei's hands stilled as soon as her knife touched the cutting board, so she could safely glance at the ceiling as she pointed the question toward Isobu. The pile of shredded cabbage in front of her was at least four centimeters high. "He…says it was fine. He liked being outside—" a concept that Hayate agreed with wholeheartedly— "but didn't run into anybody who could talk. Next time, he says he wants to come with us instead."

Kei didn't sound happy about the idea, exactly. But because Hayate was still stepping around the minefield of feelings, he just said, "I can call him cute to his face if he wants."

"He'd appreciate it." Kei looked down at her cutting board again. "After we finish breakfast, I'll break or pop the clone or whatever and we can try again."

After breakfast—in which Hayate realized someone had once again bought "American" mayonnaise but caught it in time—Kei went to their respective sleeping spots and started tidying. She left the dishes to Hayate. It was clearly a stalling tactic, because normally she'd do the dishes if she hadn't cooked.

Hayate still let Kei get away with it.

Kei kept secrets all the time. And yeah, Hayate didn't have her security clearance level. He wasn't in the Hokage Guard or a jinchūriki or the student who most took after the Fourth Hokage. But at some point, he'd gotten used to at least being able to deduce her reasoning. Most of the time, she either welcomed it or was out on a mission. Kei never just shut him down like she had last night. He'd thought that the brew of sympathy and irritation would still work out—that Kei would actually confront Akaboshi about his issues. They were so clear that Hayate didn't see how everyone else didn't already know.

And Kei just walked away. Made Hayate leave, too, in favor of this tiny apartment and its so-called safety.

What happened to her?

While Hayate scrubbed and grumbled at the skillet, he pondered that. Visions of some of the villains Kei talked about came to mind immediately, but Kei hadn't said that she'd met them. Only Akaboshi, who didn't do anything except maybe annoy her. There was the city itself, which ate at her, but…

Across the room, Kei finally sat down and laid out her fūinjutsu kit on the low table again. She made contemplative noises as everything clacked and rippled. Anticipation-curiosity-exasperation swirled around her.

Nothing happened, besides Hayate finding out that there was a scratch down the side of the skillet somehow.

Kei swore under her breath, doing something else with her chakra coils—

Alarm-pain-what?! exploded across Hayate's brain.

It wasn't his.

It was—

Hayate whirled, soap suds flying off his fingers. He found Kei bent double over the table, hand forming a rigid claw over her chest as Isobu's chakra surged.

Confusion-fear-shock—

That was Isobu. All of that power just flailing in alarm, because something was wrong.

"Oneesan!" The word was almost ripped out of Hayate's mouth. He didn't think about it.

Not when Kei slid—slumped—down to the floor, gasping.

And still, Isobu rolled in like the tide. Like a flood. And Kei's entirely human self—even her chakra—couldn't get out of the way fast enough. She shuddered breathlessly against the furniture, chakra quavering in distress at the same time.

Hayate was at her side an instant later, shoving the couch backward so fast that its feet screeched on the floor. When his hands landed on her shoulder and arm, it was as though he felt her entire body in flames. Pain zigzagged up and down her limbs, led by ugly embers of Isobu's chakra straying from the seal. They pumped through her body like clots.

All Hayate could do was hang on. Using his chakra to shore up Kei's was a dangerous gamble—they were only so compatible, despite being family. Instead, Hayate got a pillow under Kei's head and held her hand, even though the pressure from her inconsistent grip was turning his fingers white.

It felt like a long time.

But, eventually, Isobu's chakra went placidly back into place.

Kei coughed when the worst of it was over, still lying on the floor. Sweat stuck to her face and her mouth was a gritted-teeth grimace when she closed it, but she jammed her hand against the floor until she could heave herself onto her side instead of her back. When Hayate tried to help her, the arm in his grasp trembled.

"What was that?" Hayate asked, electing not to haul her up.

"A lot of pain." Kei rubbed at her eyes even as she kept lying there, curling a little around Hayate as he sat there with her. The fact that she couldn't stay on her back, even as exhausted as she was, was a sign that Isobu was probably directly influencing her again. "Ow."

Hayate managed to pry her fingers loose, but made up for it by leaning heavily on Kei's waist and ribs as though he could turn himself into a blanket. Maybe a big hunting cat, only if they kept that weird liquid quality all cats had. "Do you know what caused it?"

"Heh." Even Kei's laugh was more of a dry, unhappy chuff. She felt almost…embarrassed? "My own fault."

Which she wouldn't be saying if there was a simple explanation. Hayate shifted over so that he could hook his chin over her shoulder, then folded his arms so that she couldn't move without totally dislodging him. "You're avoiding the question, Oneesan."

"So I am." Kei mashed the heel of her hand against Hayate's forehead, in an ineffectual attempt to pry him off. The regret was stronger now, but Hayate refused to budge. "Get off me."

"No."

"Hayate—"

"No." Hayate actually zapped her with one fingertip when she tried to move him again. As Kei hissed, he said, "Tell me what happened. I'm not just a kid anymore. I felt that."

Kei groaned something that sounded like Akaboshi's foreign curses, letting her head thump back into the pillow.

Hayate poked her again, but without the lightning.

"Fine," Kei said, closing her eyes. With bitterness she rarely showed, she muttered viciously, "I screwed up the Tailed Beast Clone and didn't account for what would happen if Isobu's puppet exploded all at once. All his chakra rushed back, but it—it was like I'd never gotten used to using it. Chakra burns, of all the asinine—" A breath. "It's pain and it just hurts. No lasting damage. But I didn't remember what it felt like at the beginning."

Hayate didn't move for a while, considering Kei's truthfulness with exaggerated care. At least in this, she wasn't lying to him. It was near-impossible to fake pain when Hayate's chakra sense was so sharp and Kei was so close. And she didn't try to dislodge him until he already shifted his weight to get up again.

Clack.

And he paused, behind Kei's back at the source of the noise. "Oneesan?"

"What?"

"Why were you sitting on another scroll?"

"I…wasn't?" Kei eased into a lotus position as Hayate helped her up, twisting her neck to peer behind her. A spike of anxiety gave away her thoughts even before she said, "That's not one of mine."

Hayate picked up the red scroll case first, turning it over in his hands. By all appearances, it was an official Konoha mission scroll case, ordinarily distributed only when the Hokage felt like mission details needed to be booby-trapped or at least hidden and locked in the field. It was even properly sealed, like that was something that happened to just be hidden under the furniture in a safehouse Kei had warded against outside interference or notice.

Kei held out her hand, so Hayate gave the scroll to her. As she messed with it and the end cap unscrewed, Hayate slid onto his belly to check under— "Hey, there's another one. It's under the bed."

"Grab it."

In short order, Hayate retrieved the second scroll and shuffled back over to where Kei was sitting, slowly unrolling the first and staring down at the results like she didn't know what to say. Her chakra was a mess of emotions again— fear-confusion-hope— and Hayate got close enough that his knee dug into Kei's thigh. When he placed the other scroll down, Kei let out a faint noise.

"Oneesan?" She'd probably done some mysterious fūinjutsu master thing to be sure that the scrolls weren't actively dangerous. At least, Hayate hoped so.

"I never showed you Tsuruya's summon scroll, did I?" Kei ran a fingertip over the border of a large fūinjutsu circle, bookended by a clawed footprint on one side and feathering pattern on the other. "This isn't the real thing, but it's a…guest summoning option, essentially. With this and some blood, you'd be able to summon her."

There was one really, really obvious problem with this. "Cranes are daytime birds, though. Would Tsuruya even be able to see enough to help? We do all our fighting here at night."

"Aaaand even if she wasn't, we can't practice the summoning process in here," Kei admitted, after looking at the distance between the walls, floor, and ceiling again. "The room's too small." A sigh. "Still, if—for some reason—we had to split up, I'd feel happier if you took this scroll with you just in case."

"I mean, I will. That just makes sense." Hayate hadn't fought beside Tsuruya before, but he did know how she fought. Mostly ranged, and always with her feathers, in the manner of a dancer. Or a very angry contingent of archers. Who used swords as ammunition. And sometimes summoned dust devils with those same wings.

…Yeah, Hayate needed to practice fighting around that.

"Then you take it for now. We'll try to carve out some time, given…" Kei trailed off uncertainly, as though just realizing that they weren't really free. That just because she'd told Akaboshi's plots and plans to leave them alone, it probably wasn't going to happen.

While she might want Hayate to stay out of trouble, forever, safe inside a fūinjutsu bubble or something, Hayate knew better. There was nothing really safe about the way they did their jobs and lived their lives, even if Kei tried arguing with it. Sooner or later, chaos came to them and started knocking on the door, and there wasn't really a barricade to hide behind that would last.

Kei rolled the scroll back up and put it back into the case, setting it on the side of the table. "Anyway, let's take a look at the other one."

"How do you think they got here?" Hayate wondered, leaning over the table to look closer.

"That's…a good question." Kei was still in the middle of unscrewing the second scroll as she paused. "We know Shimika-senpai can get her summons here, so…there must be some way to access this world from home. I still thought I warded the place against prying eyes."

Hayate made a listening noise, then asked, "Would it matter if it's just something you've never thought about trying to avoid?"

"Probably." Kei muttered something under her breath. "Maybe…the Hokage's crystal ball? Sensei would have it in storage, but…"

"If it was his only option, he'd use it, right?"

"Right. Probably earlier than that, because it's something that makes sense. More sense than using Obito for this kind of scouting mission, at least. You can put way more power safely into an object like that," Kei mused. She had a tendency to talk a little in circles when she did that. She finished opening the scroll and started to roll it out. "Maybe this'll help us figure out the mystery."

"Or it'll just make things worse." Shinobi were good at obfuscation, and sometimes it even had a point. "Okay, what have we got?"

The scroll turned out to contain a series of storage seals, each one saying "box" or some other container. If Hayate hadn't seen Kei use the things-inside-of-things method of stacking objects inside of her work, he'd have been way more confused. Of course, this meant that it took furigana-style notes on the outside of the seals to tell the reader what in the world was in each of them, but no plan was perfect.

"Box of letters" was the first one Kei opened.

Paper spilled out in a wave. Even Isobu's chakra sat up and paid attention, almost as though he was peering over both their shoulders. As Hayate picked up the first card he touched, he flipped it open. His eyes immediately caught on the signature.

Inoichi-sensei! And there was a little fingerprint next to it, in black ink, that had to be little Ino-chan's version of a personal seal. Almost immediately underneath that card, there were two more that looked like they'd been written by Yūgao and Iruka. Past that, Anko and Genma and Gai and Ebisu and Chōza-sensei, mostly addressed to the pair of them together.

Kei made a noise, almost a sob. Hayate looked over to find her with her hand over her mouth, staring down at a scrupulously neat letter that unfolded like a fan, filled with some of the smallest handwriting he'd ever seen. When Hayate leaned over far enough to read it, he spotted the hallmarks of Kei's entire team. All the way down to eight different-sized pawprints spaced evenly along the edges of the paper because ninken didn't have personal seals.

Hayate nudged her with the side of his head. He rested his cheekbone against her shoulder. "Do you want me to read it? Out loud?"

Kei shook her head. Her eyes were squeezed shut and her breathing uneven, but her emotions were a positive whirlwind. Homesickness warred with relief and joy and dragged wariness in its wake like a stubborn dog on a leash. Her lip quivered as she fought back tears.

"You didn't cry when you found me again." Hayate was careful to keep his voice light, just in case.

"Crying in a m-mask sucks. Wasn't gonna," Kei replied, and managed to force a smile that didn't stay and settle. Her breath came out in a stuttering, shuddery mess, and she wrapped her arm around Hayate's shoulders hard enough to pin him in place even if she fought. "Love you."

"I know, I know."

"Don't just 'I know' me, brat."

Isobu's chakra pulsed inside of Kei's body, and she shook her head just before rubbing her eyes to clear any stray tears. Maybe he was just reminding her that there were other things to look at before they could dissolve into weeping puddles.

After a couple of minutes—in which Hayate eventually wriggled himself free to cut up some apple slices—Kei stopped sniffling and returned her attention to the scroll's other contents. She piled up almost all of the letters in a little stack on the couch for later reading, except for one with an official seal. It looked like a table of contents, just in case Hayate and Kei missed the notes on the sides of the actual arrays.

It was meditative to do something with his hands for a little bit. When he got a chance to really sit and read those letters, maybe he might cry, too. But Hayate was also a little embarrassed that Konoha clearly learned about and was reacting to them being missing for so long. Hayate had let himself forget—a bit—that it was even possible to find a way back to their world without…

Hayate sighed. Set the knife down in order to think his way through, because he couldn't trust his distracted hands.

For all of the last month, he'd mostly just sat on his butt and poked things, subtly pushing Akaboshi to quit trying to destroy himself. It hadn't even worked. Sure, he didn't know any space-time ninjutsu—not even summoning, the most basic type—and couldn't have contributed shit even if he hadn't been snatched from Konoha. And sure, Hayate didn't know enough to really persuade anyone to change their course, but…

Well, he'd hoped. For a while.

I guess I've been pretty useless. It almost made him laugh, just out of self-pity, but he held back.

The butterflies were a sign that their friends back home were able to reach out, a little, but it didn't feel real. Hayate couldn't let them go around threatening the citizens here, so he'd killed some because there was no one minding them and telling them to stop feeding. But now, stuck in place, Hayate wondered exactly how long everyone back home had been trying—almost clawing at the door the whole time—to rescue them.

Guilt and relief, gripping his heart with matching hands.

Hayate ate half the bowl of apples before even leaving the kitchen, as his cut. His stomach hurt a little from the too-soon snack, especially after a fully-loaded okonomiyaki, but there was no going back.

He didn't end up having time to brood on it for long. Alarm spiked through Kei's chakra, almost screeching, and a half-second later her voice followed with, "Are you fucking kidding me?!"

"What is it?" Hayate darted over, letting the bowl of apple slices spin to a stop on its own. As soon as he got to the table again, with all its files laid out in crowded stacks, his hands came down just in front of Kei's clenched fists. "Oneesan—"

And then he looked down.

"Oh." Hayate's voice didn't shake. Mostly because, he thought, there was barely any room for fear.

A Zetsu's face—one eye, warped flesh, green hair wild—stared up at them from the page. It was entirely slack and dead, and someone had hacked this one's throat to bits with a kunai, but Hayate knew there had been tons of corpses left lying around after the attack three years ago. A lot of their abilities were kept under wraps to keep potential public panic down, but Konoha kept really good records for itself. They had to. The actual cleanup had taken weeks. The full campaign to get rid of the Zetsu in the ground was probably still ongoing.

"They didn't get a photo of the one they caught, so they just sent this and a tape of the expedition. Like we'd ever forget." Kei said. Her chakra was a storm in her coils and threaded through with Isobu's wrath, "But the report says there's at least some of these things in the city. Shimika-senpai's butterflies killed one a few days ago."

Hayate just sort of made a noise to show that he'd heard and understood. He couldn't quite get his voice to work.

"We could watch the tape if—" Kei pinched the bridge of her nose. "If we had a player for it. Which we don't."

"Okay."

The sound of Hayate's deadened voice seemed to snap Kei out of her mood, and she reached across the table to wrap both hands around one of Hayate's. "Hayate? We'll handle this. They won't get a chance to touch you. I'll kill them first."

Hayate nodded, and Kei leaned far enough to cup both her hands around his face. "I know."

"Good," she said, just before pinching Hayate's cheeks and then letting him go.

Hayate could feel his fingers and toes again, so he forgave her.

Kei glanced down at her paperwork again. Her fingers drummed on the file. The paper under her hand looked a lot like a mission, complete with the village's seal on top. To find and kill the infiltrators before they caused any more damage.

"A mission? Now?"

Kei nodded. "We have some prep work to do."

And Hayate might've been fine with that. Might have. He'd just putter around the apartment and play games on his phone and think about gearing up for real once night fell. Maybe call Akaboshi and tell him to stay indoors for the night, in case their hunt led them through Crime Alley.

Instead, Hayate couldn't help but notice that Kei's moping mood was gone as she started laying out papers and studying them like any other mission scroll. While hiding in her fūinjutsu-fortified lair was safe, it was a passive position. But getting orders changed the rules, and Kei's behavior with it. If she had a goal—a target—then everything was simpler. It gave her a project more responsive than "Hayate's safety" to work on.

Hayate wasn't sure it was a good thing.

But what could he really do about it?

Tim took back anything he said about a tense atmosphere from before they discovered the Red Hood's identity.

It was like—

It was like the entire house was in mourning. Only there was no body in the grave.

This time they'd checked. The casket was empty. Cracked open. The grave filled in, without ever notifying the family of "vandalism" at the cemetery two years ago. A dead mortician a year ago, ostensibly of complications with his heart medication. Files backdated and security alerts deleted, if there ever were any.

Tim still wasn't sure if the al Ghuls had stolen Jason's body, or if he'd—

There were scrapes and gouges on the inside of the coffin!

—or if he'd escaped.

None of them knew. The only person who knew the whole story was Jason, and he was busy. Busy clawing at Gotham's underworld like a wraith. The only other person who might have insight and not shoot them on sight was Talia al Ghul, and she hadn't answered any of Bruce's increasingly furious calls.

Tim hadn't been here; not immediately after Jason died. He knew the facts of the case backwards and forward. He'd seen Bruce's skull-shattering recklessness in the field every night. Seen with a knowing stranger's eyes, rather than from the perspective of someone inside the family. Six months of increasing terror in the city as Bruce channeled his pain into the mission and couldn't stop. He'd shatter.

The likelihood that one day there would not be a Batman anymore—either because Bruce went out and just let Death catch him like a net, or because he finally went too far and killed someone amid his grief.

There was no coming back from that. Not for Bruce Wayne. He—was all or nothing. There was a reason that the Dark Knight had a crusade.

The Red Hood had gone silent in a bad way since the rocket launcher incident. The Joker had escaped Arkham, leaving a trail of Black Masks's enforcers and two security guards in his wake. The League of Assassins was still sniffling at the door—at every door—like they were searching for a weakness, and most people couldn't come close to handling them.

It was like the whole city was bracing itself for impact, ever since the alerts went out.

In times like this, the Bats needed to hit the streets more consistently than ever. Alongside them, the Birds of Prey were mobilized and Oracle was running their op. Batwoman was coordinating more than usual, tackling her beat with an eye for putting the problems to bed before they escalated. Alfred—Agent A, tonight—kept the operations in contact so no wires were crossed. It wasn't like regular crime stopped when major Rogues went on a tear. In fact, they often got worse, and it was all hands on deck.

And Tim still fucking needed to track down Genbu and shake her to figure out what insights she'd been holding back.

"Robin," said Babs's voice over Tim's line, just after he'd crossed the city limits on his motorcycle. He'd been headed out specifically to meet up with Steph, who was being looped into the Bats' line just to be safe.

"Here, O," Tim responded immediately.

"Genbu made contact on her monitored line and asked if anyone was available to meet. I said you'd be interested in the opportunity."

Yeah, because Tim shared his "Genbu lies by omission literally all the time" theory with the class, and asked specifically to be the one to handle her. Insofar as anyone did, Tim liked to believe that he and Steph had formed a rapport with Genbu. Especially after the last time Dick visited them, that fact stood out with three whole loops of red ink in Tim's mind.

But Steph, the Crime Alley vigilante, was desperately needed on her home turf right now.

"I'm up for it," Tim responded, already making route adjustments in his head. If he spent too long talking to Genbu, then he'd make Steph wait, and that wasn't ideal. None of them were patrolling alone right now, just in case.

But he had a lot of things to ask their resident turtle.

"Do you still have that safehouse as a point of interest?" Meaning: did everyone know to keep people the hell away until the residents actually pledged to follow Bat rules of engagement? Because while they were nice, the two outings thus far had been distinctly suboptimal.

"At this point," Babs said, "it won't be anything else until Genbu and Suzaku leave. They keep to themselves well enough."

Tim wasn't terribly optimistic about improvement there, but hope did linger at the edges. "Thanks, O."

"Always." Then, all business: "Any concerns about meeting Spoiler for the rest of patrol?"

"No, we're good." Hopefully, Tim could get to the bottom of this whole thing soon and carry on as usual. "I'll keep in contact the entire time."

"Good. Oracle out."

Tim made it to Genbu's place—not her apartment—within ten minutes, using both superior knowledge of Gotham's backstreets and grapple gun to end up at the fire escape window right on time. Instead of Genbu, Suzaku was the one to raise an eyebrow about a second before sliding the curtain aside and the window up in its frame. Genbu must have disabled her traps ahead of time or something.

"Good night," Suzaku managed in his strong accent, forgetting to close off the last word. It seemed like he'd been trying to pick up some English in the last few days. "Robin!"

"Good evening, Suzaku-kun," Tim said in hesitant Japanese, and Suzaku visibly brightened at the effort. Tim inwardly cheered that he'd remembered that much, and let Suzaku slip past him to sew up the gap in the safehouse's security again. What was the next thing he had to say…? Oh! "Doing good?"

"Good," Suzaku replied, but in English. He repeated it a few times under his breath to be sure.

Tim scooted into the main part of the room, noting details as he went.

The main room wasn't much of a mess, by Tim's standards, but it was still noticeable that some things had changed since the last time he was here. Papers, hanging loose in manila folders, were stacked all across the coffee table and the floor near it. Someone had gone to the trouble of including Japanese color-coded tabs for some of them, while others had bright red warnings stamped across them. There were even more scrolls here and there, with one in a case on Suzaku's belt and two others unrolled, revealing blank magical circles or something along their lengths.

"Hey, Robin. Thanks for stopping by," said Genbu, from her spot on the floor.

Genbu had shoved the couch back a little to get more floor organizational space, and was making do without a corkboard to pin things to. She had also acquired a grid-ruled composition notebook with that boring black shattered-field pattern, and was writing diligently despite taking frequent breaks to massage her writing hand.

"Couldn't refuse an invite from my favorite ninjas," Tim said.

Genbu didn't look impressed. "That's such a low bar, it's in hell."

"I retain the right to put you two at the head of a list that has a thousand League ninjas as would-be rivals." Mostly because there was a point where Ra's al Ghul stopped trying to futilely recruit Bruce as a son-in-law, only to make grabby hands at his proteges every once in a while. "Also, I disqualified all the Bats for unfair advantages."

That seemed to stump her. "I… Sure. If you say so."

Sometimes, it was really hard to keep "Genbu is a lying liar who lies" in the forefront of his mind. Sure, she was cagey and sometimes flighty, but she was so good at acting like just any awkward teenager that it was hard to remember until a person was already staring down both barrels of their imminent ass-kicking. Her intimidation superpower—which she'd never actually explained— didn't mesh with the person Tim knew. At the same time, it was her. There was no one else besides Genbu who was going around blasting people with psychic fear effects. They'd checked that Crane was in Arkham six times in the last month.

At this point, Suzaku came back from closing and locking and warding the window and said something.

Tim had to consult his gauntlet computer for the answer Suzaku gave, even distractedly. The kid just talked too fast. The first part came out as, I'm fine. Everything I tried last night actually went worse than expected, and most of the news we have now is bad. But we're safe, so there's that, I guess.

Because that was totally what Tim needed to see right now. A situation that alien magic ninjas considered a problem. After consulting his translation app for a recommended response and a pronunciation guide, he managed in Japanese, "What happened?"

This apparently opened the door to Suzaku's idea of a vent session. Suzaku made Tim sit on the couch with a plate of weird egg salad sandwiches—crustless, like Tim was somehow the younger one here—and kept talking into the recorder like he'd never made Dick freak out in this exact spot. That was either decent acting or an impressive lack of emotional awareness, and Tim didn't think someone who blundered around passing people off could've survived being acquainted with Red Hood for so long.

It was all a distraction. Tim couldn't forget that.

And it turned out Suzaku really hated both American bread (for the sandwiches) and American mayonnaise (in general). They ruined things, he said. Insisted, really.

"I think he's been channeling his anxiety over everything into cooking," was what Genbu offered as an explanation, when Tim looked at her incredulously during the food portion of the rant. "Hope you don't mind high-calorie snacks."

Suzaku, who was already segueing back into arguing that his sister was being unsupportive for not wrestling Red Hood to the ground and sitting on him until he calmed down, said, "Just because you know words I don't doesn't mean you win this round. Or any round. Ever."

Genbu waited until her brother stared at her challengingly, chin jutting, and then took the time to roll her eyes. "Anyway. Robin?"

"It's fine. I just wish I had some chips to go with them." The last thing was mostly a joke—he'd seen some weird stuff in their cupboards. Then deliberately turned back to Suzaku and nudged him to continue talking. His translator could store plenty of text, and Suzaku spoke clearly most of the time.

Then they turned to more serious news, finally.

Apparently, Suzaku and Genbu had visited Red Hood last night—confirming that they did in fact know how to find Jason on a whim—and failed to get any traction with persuading him to change his plans. Suzaku was still upset because he felt like his sister hadn't even tried, and instead the two older teens had just decided that they'd keep up a ceasefire centered around Suzaku. No one else. Not even really each other. But, thankfully, no punches had been thrown and

(Also, there was some kind of inter-world mailing system now. Which was where Genbu had gotten all of the file folders from. Genbu was annotating them, and she kept muttering under her breath whenever Tim took the time to listen.)

"I had a question for you, Genbu-san," Tim said, only remembering the honorific at the last moment. With Suzaku taking a break to make and eat his own sandwiches, it was the best time to ask. Tim had eaten his in about four bites each, while listening to the disorganized testimony. He was still getting crumbs out of the grip texture in his gloves. "If that's okay."

"Shoot," Genbu replied, looking up from her self-appointed task. She cracked her knuckles without apparently thinking about it, as though she'd never heard of threatening people with the sound.

Might as well start small. "You look like you're headed out tonight."

Genbu and Suzaku both blinked at him, as though Tim wasn't expected to tell the difference between their lounge clothes and their combat uniforms. While, yes, there was obviously less contrast here than between Tim's daily wear outfits and his Robin costume, the two ninjas were wearing shoes in their living space. Both of them. Their masks were both on their heads or hanging off their necks. Weapons and pouches were strapped to their bodies in plain sight.

"Yeah," Genbu said, at last. "It turns out we have some outside problems to deal with."

"More outside than the League of Assassins," Tim guessed.

There was a slight crease between Genbu's eyebrows as she frowned. "It's…more that they're our outside problems."

It took Tim a couple of seconds to parse that phrasing. When he did, ice flooded his veins.

Honestly, he'd halfway discarded the idea that Genbu and Suzaku were actually from a different world. It was one thing to adapt to technological gaps or advances—Suzaku being a pretty good case study, really—but culture had a steeper learning curve because the whole thing was, frankly, dependent on human interaction. And if there was one thing Genbu didn't seem to get in Gotham, it was a lot of time with other people.

That didn't make her, or the things around her, any less dangerous.

Tim leaned forward anyway. Anticipation was a familiar feeling, once he'd run trepidation through mental filters a few times. It was all about compartmentalizing anything that could be dealt with later. "What do you have?"

"A translation. You can take a picture of it and the original, for comparison, or wait for Suzaku to text you or Oracle." Genbu flipped through her work and then offered him a folder. As Tim took it from her, she handed him her notebook and added, "The more of your people know about these things, the better."

Tim set both an official-looking report and Genbu's handwritten account side-by-side. It was easy to tell which pages matched, because Genbu had copied most of the formatting and included her own version of the clear postmortem photo in the upper left corner. She'd gone as far as to give her drawing—otherwise a decent caricature—some impressive googly eyes.

"Quite the look."

"Petty revenge." Genbu sighed. "It's what we've got."

When Tim glanced up, Genbu's expression was still humorless. Suzaku, despite coming back to peer down at all the papers halfway between Genbu and Tim, pointedly looked away from the photo like it burned. Noting that and worrying about that sudden lack of boisterous—or dismissive—confidence, Tim said, "I'll send it straight on to Batman."

"Good. But…" Genbu pursed her lips. "But this is really meant just to be a warning of what the threat is."

Even in Genbu's somewhat scraggly handwriting, Tim could pick out the notes about the dead man's height, weight, and general description. The corpse was of an Asian man in his early twenties or thirties, but with white skin entirely devoid of secondary pigmentation. There was none of the translucence of ordinary human flesh. The slightly open mouth showed teeth more horse than a human, strangely flat. The flesh had warped around a series of strange, zigzagging creases that reminded Tim, viscerally, of a clay model smushed out of spite.

"We call them White Zetsu," Genbu said while Tim paused, in the middle of double-checking the lighting and pointing his mask camera down at the "matching" pages. "Or just Zetsu, because they only come in one color nowadays."

Suzaku spat something vicious that Tim knew Genbu wouldn't translate.

Genbu said something back and got an equally sharp reply, after which she handed Suzaku another file.

Suzaku took it to the other side of the room and started methodically snapping photos of the contents.

"Just in case," was all Genbu said about it.

Everything about this situation was a warning klaxon, blaring. Genbu didn't volunteer information until backed into a corner, and it was basically never what they really asked for. Even if no one realized it until later. Tim hadn't even gotten a chance to segue into the conversation about how the fuck she knew so much she shouldn't. Given how she talked, it seemed like she wasn't willing to shift off this topic for the time being, either.

Click went the subtle vibration in Tim's mask, already uploading the picture to Oracle's databases. The recording of this conversation could only help.

And give them all nightmares as a bonus.

"Zetsu are…" Genbu trailed off for a moment, eying her brother with concern. "They're a problem endemic to our home—our world."

Suzaku's camera clicked even faster. The artificial shutter sounds were kind of annoying, so Tim tried to put that out of his mind.

"I'm trying to imagine what would give someone like you trouble." Tim's skin crawled just looking at the autopsy photo. Even if he didn't know the corpse's individual name—just a title—death was on his mind more than it had been for a long time. If he stared until the image blurred, there was overlap with every postmortem photo he'd ever seen. "After all, you're 'a city-destroying monster' in your own words."

Genbu's half-lidded eyes had a yellow gleam to them now, giving away the demon's presence. Or maybe just its attention. "When something kills your mother in front of you, you remember it."

Janet Drake had been thousands of miles from Gotham when she died. Tim hadn't seen his mother's autopsy photos, thankfully. He remembered the Christmas funeral instead.

Small mercies. Smallest in the fucking world.

Suzaku handed Tim a water bottle, still sealed. Tim hadn't seen him cross the room.

"Thank you," Tim said anyway.

"Is fine," Suzaku said, and eased back out of Tim's space. He consulted his phone before saying, with difficulty, "Learn."

"And boy is there plenty of that. The learning curve is practically vertical." As she spoke, Genbu nudged her other hand through another pile of paperwork, pulling out a sheet that looked like the kind of thing that would have TOP SECRET plastered across it. But it didn't. "Our mission is to get them before they can kill us. Since they're embedded with the League of Assassins, it might be messy."

"How do you know they're with the League?" Tim cracked the seal on the water bottle a moment later, realizing he maybe should have taken the chance to get his thoughts in order. "You haven't been in contact with them since before we set you up here."

Unless she'd lied again.

"First, the written report here confirms it," Genbu said. "Second, the delivery included a VHS tape of the evidence that…we can't play here, but you probably could." She cleared her throat a little. "The investigation team killed a Zetsu while spying on the League of Assassins, and these jerks don't keep total control of their magical disguises after they die. There's this…face-melting effect."

"And your investigation team couldn't pull the two of you back home before racking up a killcount?" As soon as Tim said it, he just shook his head. He already knew based on Genbu's earlier interactions that she had asked the same thing. "Never mind. I know you'd rather run than—"

"And see you get eaten? All because you wouldn't see the enemy coming?" Genbu scoffed. "How heartless do you think we are?"

"Eaten," Tim repeated.

By this point in his career, Tim had faced off with some of the worst people in Gotham multiple times. Hell, his first night out as Robin came down to stealing the costume with Alfred's help and rushing out to save Bruce and Dick from Two-Face. Even Killer Croc—Gotham's premier maybe-a-cannibal, since he was at least genetically human despite the mutations—didn't draw the kind of fear from him that Genbu and Suzaku plainly felt at the idea of "Zetsu." And besides that, Tim had once kicked Croc's ass solo while sick with the flu.

"Yes, eaten. If Zetsu were human, they're cannibals. If they're not, they're still the kind of monster that'll eat whatever they can catch, and probably won't even wait until they've killed you first." Genbu tilted her head, as though listening, and the glow in her eyes faded away. "Neither of us want to see that."

If this was all true, it slid neatly into some of the blanks left in Genbu's story. With someone like Genbu, who backed down when challenged in any arena other than combat, who hid behind her traps and threw out breadcrumbs like someone feeding birds in the park, it was hard to spot her real personality under everything. That she was hissing and spitting now was only because her brother was right here with them.

Tim grit his teeth for a moment. Not for the first time, he wished Steph was here for backup. She'd weasel the truth out of Genbu sooner than Tim could.

"If you don't believe me—"

"You lie all the time," Tim pointed out. It was time to push. "I'm just supposed to believe you when you talk about—about shapeshifting alien monsters? He turned into Hood without any problem."

Suzaku seemed to catch the vibe and just waved. He was busy typing something on his phone by now, having closed the file folder after taking all those pictures.

"Guess that answers if you saw Nightwing's video…" Genbu sighed and corrected him with, "I keep secrets, Robin. And so do you." She flicked a hand toward Tim's mask, as though that made her argument for her, and it kind of did. Secret identities and all that. "Not even the 'World's Greatest Detective' has a right to all of them."

"But you do have to admit that you're not an honest person. This is still about trust—" Tim tried, even after hearing the air quotes around Bruce's title.

"And what would work? For you, if not Batman." Genbu shook her head again. "Bats don't trust like that, right?"

Tim couldn't immediately find an answer he believed. He didn't dislike Genbu, or her brother. The Teen Titans and Young Justice had both dealt with absolute nonsense dragged up by either their lifestyles or their pasts or some kick in the pants from the Upside Down. It was just incredibly difficult to cram those two concepts together in a way that didn't make Tim automatically jerk back when Genbu said the enemy needed to die. Anything that grim needed a step back to be sure the whole picture was in view. There was always another option.

Suzaku, behind him, looped back to the coffee table and traded out his file folder for another, and the sound of the artificial shutter continued.

"I like you," Tim finally said, trying to push for honesty in his body language and expression. Hesitation was not allowed. "I think we can work well together. But I'm afraid of what you'll do while trying to complete your mission. The collateral damage."

That brought Genbu up short a little. "This isn't my usual beat, so…I get it."

"Can't we negotiate with them? At all?" At least to keep them talking long enough for a nonlethal takedown.

Genbu grimaced. "Putting aside that I don't want to and my brother would never forgive me—"

"Understandable," Tim assured her. Trying for a conciliatory tone and kind of failing at it, aware that he'd just demanded the impossible from her.

He—liked to think he might have been able to force a dialogue with the Obeah Man if he had the chance, or at least stopping him, but there wasn't much purpose in wondering now. His mom was still dead and his father still in a coma, and there was no changing it.

"—you can talk all you want, but they'll still gut you." Genbu's gaze was grim and distant. A little like Batman. "Laughing the whole time."

Like the Joker would, Tim thought. The only consistent thing about the Joker was his sadism. Because Gotham totally needed more murderous, grinning monsters running hither and thither at night, this time with alien magic. One was more than enough. "Can't say I'm unfamiliar with the concept."

"Again, I don't want any of you dead. Neither does Suzaku. It's—not your problem, or at least not one your people caused. I'm not even sure the League of Assassins understands what they've let into their house." Genbu sighed again. "You had a bunch more questions, didn't you?"

Genbu usually avoided giving useful answers instead of outright lying. Tim kept staring at her, though his mask's lenses made it easy to cut a glance at Suzaku without being noticed. He'd been the one to identify Red Hood from training alone, from what these two said before. "Yeah, but only one more that was really important."

Probably. Suzaku had been a weird mix of perceptive and oblivious the whole time Tim knew he existed. His attention was selective. And right now, it was selecting his phone as the main object of interest in the apartment.

"Okay. What was it?"

Tim hated dangling threats when he felt the sewing shears closing in. And it really did seem like the only way to get an answer about this particular problem was to ask. "None of the intuitive leaps you've made—about Red Hood, about Gotham—make any sense with what you've shared of your background."

"Parallel universe" should've canceled out "knows English on a colloquial level." At a minimum. And then "new to Gotham" countered "knows a lot about Red Hood and the League of Assassins." It was possible that everything she'd said so far was a lie, too, and she just piled more on and on the more Tim dug into the morass, but…

"Oh. That." Genbu's eyes glowed with yellowy light again, just for a moment. "I'm psychic."

You've gotta be fucking kidding me. Tim, a mature vigilante who could wield professionalism as a weapon, did not smack himself in the face like he might've while with his team. He also didn't go out of his way to egg on Genbu's nonsense, which was the other main tactic in keeping Young Justice on target—or at least pointed in the same direction.

"And Suzaku?" Tim prompted, instead of arguing.

"Also psychic. Just differently specialized."

"Your answers are just…incredibly unhelpful sometimes."

"If Suzaku could understand you right now, I'm sure he'd say 'only sometimes?'"

"So you're doing that to him, too." Not a great sign.

"He's used to it."

Tim was, briefly, completely tempted to dismiss Genbu's overly casual attitude as another sign of dishonesty. The problem was, metahumans of any type could have truly random abilities. Throwing demon possession and other kinds of weird interference into the process meant it all got even worse. Kon, for one example, developed tactile telekinesis from his human side long before his Kryptonian powers came in with a vengeance. Everything about these two so far meant they used magic, but they had a very broad wheelhouse as a result.

Tim opened his mouth to put some of that into words, and the fire alarm opened up with a piercing shriek.

Suzaku jolted from his spot all at once, darting to the door and the flashing light on the wall in a clear attack stance.

Genbu snarled something, which froze her brother in place. Then: "Robin, is there anything from Oracle?" She was already packing up her papers into pockets and magic scrolls even as she spoke.

"Not yet," Tim said, and raised his hand to his ear. Tapped the button twice, to avoid trying to fight with an alarm for decibels.

Suzaku took advantage of the exchange and tore the fire alarm off the wall with his bare hands to silence it. The rest of the building still screamed like a chorus of metallic demons, but inside the apartment was much more tolerable. Then Suzaku started pulling the magic talismans off the wall.

"—Robin, come in," called the computer-distorted voice of Babs, Oracle mode fully engaged. "Robin!"

"Here, Oracle," Tim replied. "The fire alarms just went off. Do you have anything?"

"The third story is on fire already, and the fire department has been notified," Babs replied. The faint clicking of keys was all that was audible for a moment. "I can see four hostiles headed your way on street and building security. They're scaling the side. They must have set the fire as a distraction."

"Or to flush us out. Got it," Tim replied. He got to his feet and pulled his bo staff from his belt, extending it to its full length by pressing the switch. Tim then slipped from the coffee table to an ambush position next to the window. He tilted the curtains a little, just to get a better look at incoming trouble.

Smoke already, thick and black. No easy view from this side.

How much accelerant did they use?

"Genbu, Suzaku, are you ready to go?" Tim asked over his shoulder. A quick glance confirmed that both ninjas had put on their masks and the pile of loose papers was gone, but only Suzaku's had any kind of air filter. If the League chose to use gas— "Preferably now."

"Do you need backup?"

"I—"

There was a knock at the door.

Everyone tensed, going perfectly still.

"Call you back, Oracle," Tim murmured into the line, just loud enough that he could hear his own voice. "The situation is developing."

"Understood."

Another knock.

Genbu made a hand gesture Tim didn't recognize, getting silently to her feet. All the loose possessions around her had disappeared into the scrolls clipped to the small of her back. She shifted her weight to the balls of her feet.

Tim opened his mouth to try and discourage the aggression before thinking better of it. The light was on, so the person knocking had to know there was someone here. He'd just heard about shapeshifting monsters, and it made him hesitate. Someone could work it out—

A lot of things happened at once.

The first was a fist crashing through the wall next to the door, grabbing for Suzaku's throat.

The window to Tim's back shattered. Broken glass caught on the blackout curtains as something surged through, and Tim slammed his staff directly into what would have been a person's brow bone.

And before there was any chance for follow-through, Genbu ripped the first guy away from Suzaku, hurled him the length of the room she'd crossed in a blink, and—

And then both Suzaku and Tim's attackers were flying out the window. The blackout curtain, caught up in the movement, was ripped right off the curtain rod and trailed the men down like Batman's cape.

Tim checked. He had to check. He didn't go as far as to stick his head all the way out the window, but he did look.

Both of the attackers had caught themselves on the fire escape of the next building and were already climbing back up. That had to be an arc of at least forty feet between buildings, even in Gotham, and an ordinary human would've just crashed through the structure and died.

One of them was down an arm, somehow—

"That's fucking gross," said Genbu's voice, distracted.

—Which Suzaku threw past Tim's head and into the darkness. There was no blood. Just gross whitish-orangish goop that probably splatted on the street between the two apartments.

"Zetsu," Suzaku hissed through the mask as he drew even with Tim. His mask jerked in Tim's direction, almost in a nod. She drew her sword this time, holding it between them and the window. "They sent the drones first. Disposable."

"Treated that way by both sides." Before Genbu could make even the first dismissive noise clearly building in her throat, Tim held his hand to his ear again. "Oracle, did they start the fire at the ground floor?"

"The first two. There's no way out for any residents besides the fire escapes on each side." Babs's artificially enhanced voice still sounded grim. Some more clicking. "The emergency response time is seven minutes on average."

Shit, Tim thought. There were thirty-four people in this building aside from the two ninjas, because Batman couldn't just snap up an apartment complex in Midtown without somebody noticing. Neither could they turn the building into a fortress. There were inherent vulnerabilities anywhere but a nuclear bunker, and the League of Assassins specialized in taking advantage of everything they could.

Suzaku dashed out the window and whirled, then shot up the wall like some kind of gecko. He'd handle what he could.

Genbu had put herself not exactly between Tim and the window, but between Tim and the enemies' sight line.

And Tim—

"Stay or go?" Genbu asked, as one of the enemies finally reached the opposite rooftop. Probably trying to figure out how to attack again.

Tim didn't have to think about it, except for assessing the methods at his disposal. He could help here. He could coordinate evacuation even if ninjas were trying to kill him. He grabbed the window frame, already prepared to work. "Stay. Someone needs to."

"All right. If that's—"

A gleam, even in the dark. A gun.

Tim shoved Genbu out of the line of fire. Only an instant later did his reasoning catch up to his reflexes with: Do not let the demon girl get hit with—

Pain, bright and sharp in his arm. Deep enough to touch bone. And then fire and trembling spread up from his wrist to his elbow to his shoulder to—

Fear toxin, part of Tim's brain rattled off, recognizing the design of the dart in his arm even as Genbu grabbed at the needle. The fire was gone, gone, and then the numbness followed in its wake. Tranquilizer. Shit.

"Dosage is—fuck. Too high. Fuck." Genbu shouted something at the ceiling and the words slithered past Tim's ears. A hundred voices shrieked back at her, senseless. "Robin, it's gonna be okay—"

The walls were swaying. The smoke coiled into heads and eyes and hands—claws. Dragging shadows.

Darkness fell.

Notes:

1. Kei really needs her fūinjutsu development study group back to catch formulation errors like this. There goes V2 for a bit.
2. "I don't know what that sexist fossil thinks he's getting out of this, but just because Zetsu aren't planners doesn't make them controllable. He's playing chess without noticing someone's eating the pieces." — Kei's thoughts about the whole Zetsu thing
3. Kei and Hayate packed up all the cards once they'd read through and had a good, long cry about them. It didn't resolve their issues, but it did remind them that they were sorely missed.
4. Tim has one of those on-panel diets that really feels like it's about 75% junk food. He's a highly active teenager, but still. One hopes someone is getting this kid to eat his vegetables.
5. Kon-El, also known as Connor Kent or Superboy, only had touch-range/tactile telekinesis as his powerset when he was first introduced. Depending on which story you read from that point forward, he later develops the entire Kryptonian package—of which the telekinesis is sometimes treated as just one.