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Las Vegas
"Good news, I found The Gentle Man."
"Bad news?" Damian said as he jumped up; he had sat down in a corner, fiddling with some of his tech while he waited.
"It took me almost an hour because someone was blocking my attempts to locate him. Someone well-versed in several different occult magics." The suspicion on Zatanna's face was evident.
Clark asked before Damian could. "Any guesses as to who?"
"Yes, but we don't have time to confirm, we've got to go. Between the three of us I think we can handle whoever it is."
Gotham
"Yes, it's hilarious! About 1,200 years ago pretty much everyone had agreed that magic was a bad thing and practitioners of it get forced underground. Then, just a few hundred years ago, they decide that natural philosophy is somehow different from magic and that it's okay!"
Julian laughed. "And this science is what gives power to the little magic boxes everyone carries?"
Angela nodded emphatically, giggling.
"I wonder if that will be good for society." Julian said in a mocking tone he had learned from Angela.
This and a lot of the other inside jokes they had come up with over the past few days were directed at the foolish behavior of humanity over the centuries. Angela had related to Julian countless stories from her thousands of years on Earth waiting for him. Julian in turn, had shared some stories of his own, but the nature of his imprisonment had led to few noteworthy experiences. Their reminiscing was cut short by Constantine's overly dramatic entrance. He had done little to endear himself to them over the short visit, but his-until now-respect for their privacy was one of those things.
"Sorry to interrupt the eternal ramblings of immortal beings, but we may have an issue. Someone detected you through my cloaking, which means we probably only have a few hours before we can expect a full-scale assault."
"Why would someone want to attack me?" Julian asked, bewildered.
Constantine contemplated whether or not to tell him the truth. The truth was that his replacements' friends were extremely powerful and upset that their friends had been tricked. But if he told Julian the truth, he might very well feel guilty and decide to go back to Gehenna. Constantine, however, needed to fulfill Gabriel's wishes and deliver The Gentle Man back to Gehenna in a little over a day if he wanted to see Astra.
"I just need you to trust me. This is why Gabriel sent me to look after you."
The Gentle Man nodded. "Shall I prepare for battle?" He might not trust this Constantine all that much, but he knew and trusted Gabriel.
"If you don't mind." Constantine shut the door on his way out.
Gehenna, Year 527
"Thomas Wayne." Bruce cut down a beast. "Martha Wayne." Another monster fell to his blade. "Alfred Pennyworth." He parried and counter-attacked. "Dick Grayson." A blow hit him, but he barely felt the pain as he ruthlessly ended his aggressor. "Jason Todd."
"Hippolyta." Diana lunged forward, driving her spear into where she could instinctually tell a heart would be. "Antiope." She spun and fell another. "Phillipus." She drew her sword. "Artemis." Another. "Clark Kent."
"Tim Drake." He stabbed a monster bearing down on Diana. "Damian Wayne." He cleaned off his sword.
A hundred or so years ago, Bruce and Diana had begun to struggle remembering things. Their whole lives had been consumed by their daily routine, but they found that chanting the names of those they still remembered as a sort of mantra helped them stay grounded. Despite the mantras, they would still occasionally have these dangerous, existential-crisis episodes that left them completely debilitated.
In these episodes, one or both of them would begin to question if their life before Gehenna was actually real. It felt like a dream, that fighting the hordes was all they had ever known. It was especially bad for Bruce, who now had significantly more memories in Gehenna than on Earth. Every time they got into one of these fits of madness, they had to compare notes, drag each other from the brink. Sometimes the only thing keeping them sane was the belief that if they both remembered something happening it had to have been real.
Their mantras seemed to help with this, extending the amount of time between fits of madness. What helped even more was that there was a large intersection of names on their lists, reminding them that they had known a lot of the same people. Most of the time, their memories felt real enough, and they would talk about them like they had been, but every few years they would struggle to remember something that felt important.
When the fight was over, Bruce and Diana knelt down, driving their swords into the ground point first. Bruce began:
"There is a song all of humanity sings. We sing it with our lives, with our actions, with our thoughts. It's a song of loneliness, of confusion, of angst. As we look into the void, we sing: Why am I here? To live? To die? To love? To achieve? To succeed? To hope?"
Diana finished:
"And a quiet voice answers back: You have said it. But no one hears it. No one hears it over our song: Why are we here?"
It had become a sort of prayer they said after each battle. Parts of it they no longer understood, but most of it made sense, and even the parts they did not, brought them comfort. All they truly, stupidly knew, was that the horde is everlasting, and they were its keepers.
Their nightmares had not stopped either. They would grow close for a while, reaching new depths of understanding, coming to know each other better and better. And then, they would have nightmares reminding them of all their reasons for not pursuing a relationship on Earth. So, even as their old lives faded, their reasons for not dating remained fresh. It was a Hellish existence.
"Bruce, I have to be completely honest with you." Diana said as they walked back.
"Hmm?"
"I know that these dreams we have are targeted. For whatever reason, someone, something, or maybe even our own minds are trying to keep us apart. But even so, I can't seem to shake the fear they instill in me."
"I know. I feel the same. They've been training us… like dogs. Every time we grow close, they keep us awake at night, they make us fear each other. I've been fighting it for years, just out of spite."
"So have I." She paused, thinking. "Do you think that's the appropriate response? Shouldn't we love each other out of… well, love, rather than force ourselves to do so out of spite?" Even as she said it she thought of several counterarguments, but she wanted to hear Bruce's answer.
"I don't know, Diana. What I do know is that before those dreams, I loved you, and after those dreams, I want to love you, even if I fear the consequences. So what if the main motivation is spite? We aren't dogs; maybe we're spiteful to counteract the very training that works on dogs."
"My thoughts exactly." She grabbed his hand, pushing down the nightmares. "How long have we been here?"
"I lost track. Hundreds of years."
"Can't you redo the math?"
He shook his head. "Without some memory of how many Gehenna days it has been, I can't calculate how many Earth days it has been. What does it matter anyway?"
She pointed at the sky as the night moon became visible. "I think the moon has changed. I've had the feeling for a while now, but dared not hope until I was more sure. I remember it being important for some reason."
He shrugged and squeezed her hand. "I think I remember that too. Maybe we can figure it out based on our old math."
When they got back to their homestead, they got out some of their old calculations and blueprints. The ink was faded, so by firelight they puzzled out what they could, tracing over the disappearing scratches. They could not get it all, and were sometimes frustrated with their inability to figure out missing words and numbers based on context. But, they forged on; each character restored awoke something dormant within them, something that felt like memory or hope.
Diana stopped suddenly. "I think I remember." Bruce looked at her expectantly. "The moon was supposed to give us some idea of how much longer we'd be here."
Bruce's brow furrowed as he thought about this new information, then something clicked. "Wait, yes! Some of these calculations are for time dilation! The moon was important because it was the only measure we had for how much time is passing outside of Gehenna."
The memories of the night they had decided to watch the moon came flooding back as they looked through their past scribblings. A number underlined several times jumped out to Diana from the mess of parchment: '60+'.
She held the page up to show Bruce. "This can't be right. Based on these calculations we didn't expect to be here much more than a hundred years."
Bruce took the page from her and his brow furrowed again as he went over the math on it. "No. These are right, as long as we were only supposed to be gone for a week on Earth. The problem is this was a lower estimate of the factor of time dilation. That sixty was based on a lack of reference, we now have hundreds of years of reference."
"So we need to find out how much the moon has changed." Diana was already on her way outside as she said it.
Bruce followed her with a piece of parchment that had a faded circle with a partially filled in crescent on it. He assumed it was a drawing of the moon from when they had first started watching it. There were some measurements and other calculations on it, but they were very hard to make out.
Diana squinted at the crescent in the sky. "I can tell the crescent is thicker than it used to be, but without seeing…" Bruce held the diagram up next to the moon in her vision. "Three days." She blurted it out.
Bruce gave her a funny look. "You can tell-based on this picture-that the lunar cycle has advanced three days?"
"Well, approximately three days, but yes." Bruce raised an eyebrow. "I don't know, Bruce. If I remember correctly I used to worship the moon or something like that. The name 'Artemis' comes to mind." She shrugged.
"That does sound like you." She elbowed him in the ribs.
"Shut up. I'm sure I had my reasons."
He paused for a moment, rubbing his side. He started to stare into the distance, looking distracted and concerned with something far away.
"You know what this means, princess?"
"What?"
"If you're correct in your estimation, we were correct to assume a week, and that moon is at all comparable to whatever moon we had on Earth; we're only halfway through this, if that."
Another mantra they had, came to Diana's mind. This one they would never forget the meaning of: "The horde is everlasting."
"σὲ ἀγαπῶ, Diana."
"σὲ ἀγαπῶ, Bruce."