Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A little-known truth of the world is that Ra’s al Ghul, head of the League of Assassins, was once a healer—a physician, centuries before our time. It was through his pursuit of restoration, not destruction, that he first discovered the Lazarus Pits: by lowering a dying prince into the emerald depths and watching, astonished, as the boy returned to life. The prince, already cruel in spirit, emerged altered—more vicious, more erratic—a side effect of the Pits’ unnatural grace. Not long after, he murdered Ra’s own wife. His father, a reigning king, absolved him of guilt and blamed Ra’s instead. A betrayal layered in politics and grief.

Tragic, yes. But it was nine centuries ago, and Talia, in private moments, wonders if her father might consider moving on.

Still, he clings to relics of that life—nostalgia dressed as discipline. Among them: his particular fondness for physicians. Across League strongholds worldwide, one can find nurses, medics, biologists, and field surgeons on permanent retainer. Even here, in the mountain compound, they are ever-present. Talia understands their utility in rare moments, but their constant presence has long struck her as a quiet insult. She has spent years refining her own skills in medicine, poisons, and anatomical warfare. She trained her disciples herself. She does not need help.

Which is why, today, she finds it strange—irritating, even—that her son has taken such an interest in one of them.

The man is short, pale, clearly British, and muttering nervously under his breath while stitching up one of her disciple’s (Aya, going by the pleated hair) arms. Damian is beside him—not clinging, but close, watching. Observing. His hands are at his sides, his spine straight, eyes fixed not on the man’s face but on the needle’s path through flesh. The boy says nothing, but he tilts his head occasionally, as though analyzing the technique.

The medic doesn’t flinch. His hands stay steady, even as his mouth runs unchecked—currently elaborating, with great intensity, on the difference between elaichi and lychee.

“No, no, they’re completely different, I swear—one’s a spice and one’s, well, fruit-adjacent, I suppose. Lychee’s got that weird eyeball texture, doesn’t it? Lovely flavor though—unless you get a dodgy one, in which case, not to be dramatic, but you’ll probably die, I will at least. Anyway, back to the arm—this stitching is going great, by the way—if it starts tingling violently, just, you know, let me know…”

She does not know how to respond to this. Damian has never been easy. His temper is volatile, sharpened by her father’s disdain and Bruce’s absence. These early years have been difficult. Still, they have made it to the formidable age of seven—and in her own private way, she is proud. He is aloof, solitary, and serious. He prefers to study reptiles and battle formations over games, and Talia, accustomed to the rigors of League life, often leaves him in the care of trusted guards when duty calls. He dislikes it—prefers to sleep curled beside her, though she tells herself he is too old for such clinging.

And yet… when she looks at his peaceful face, feels the slight weight of his body leaning toward her, she cannot bring herself to deny him.

What unsettles her is this: Damian has never reached for anyone. Not like this. Not with silent curiosity and ease. Not with interest, freely given. It sparks something sour in her—jealousy, perhaps—before she checks herself. He is seven.

The medic finishes his work, gently instructs Aya on aftercare, and ruffles Damian’s hair without hesitation. The boy doesn’t resist. He allows it with quiet tolerance, a ghost of amusement flickering in his eyes.

The man is still talking—nonsense, but detailed nonsense—and for the briefest moment, she wonders if he is simply mad. Then again, the League has harbored stranger men for lesser reasons.

“Right, so—clean it twice a day, no heavy lifting, no sword work for at least 72 hours—yes, I know that’s unrealistic, but I have to say it legally. Er—well not legally. There’s not really a board of medicine here, is there?”

She steps forward. The medic spots her, and his blood drains in real time. Her disciple slips away while she has the chance. Good on her. Talia does not smile, but she feels something like satisfaction stir in her chest.

He stammers—a string of flustered British noises—and she raises one brow. He falls silent at once. Good. She studies him as one might study a rogue variable in a chemical formula. Then, in crisp Oxford English, she asks, “What are you doing with the little Prince?”

He blinks. Slowly places Damian on the ground. Raises both hands.

“Uh, so sorry—did you say prince? I thought he was one of the guard’s kids. Honestly. Just wanted to make sure he didn’t, you know, tip anything flammable on himself or bleed out—he just kind of clung on, and I told him about mitosis, and then I think we bonded? Maybe? I don’t know, I’m very sorry—I’ll be out of your way now. Please don’t report me—I mean, if you need to, I understand, obviously, I broke protocol and played peek-a-boo with a random child—goodbye!”

He vanishes. The hallway he runs down leads only to a dead end and the tea room. He will be back. She lets out a quiet snort and lifts Damian from the floor, cradling him close. He shifts but doesn’t resist.

He is so small. And yet within those green eyes—eyes not unlike his father’s—there is something impossibly vast. And ancient. And terribly awake.

The man must be executed.

He played with her son. He entered a restricted space without clearance. He stitched her disciple without reporting it. His presence here is suspicious—and she has little tolerance for loose ends. So when he returns, trying sheepishly to slip out the far door, she does not hesitate. She strikes cleanly. As he crumples to the floor, he lets out a muffled:

“Oh, fuck.”

And then he goes still. Damian does not cry out. He watches the man fall, lips slightly parted. Then he turns his gaze to her—displeased, not afraid. Talia feels, in that moment, both accomplished and profoundly uneasy.

She drags the medic by the ankle toward an interrogation room.

-------------

Benjamin Dunn has been working for the League of Assassins for about three years now--which, honestly, still feels weird to say out loud. He was originally picked up from some low-level tech division no one important cared about, and somehow got promoted into what he likes to call the “need-to-know” group. You know, the part of the organization that actually knows it’s a cult. With knives. And rituals. And murder. Is it still a company? He’s not sure. There are departments, technically. Benefits are decent. But there’s a lot more swordplay than your average IT gig.

Anyway, the moment he laid eyes on the League’s network infrastructure, a true horror show of tangled wires and outdated firmware, he immediately filed for a department transfer. To medical. Where the standards were somehow higher, despite all the blood.

They said yes.

For a while he did field medic work: warzones, skirmishes, very hush-hush missions. Mostly patching up people the League needed to survive, occasionally… letting nature take its course on the ones they didn’t. He tries not to think too hard about that part. The work is fast-paced, borderline terrifying, and morally gray at best--but hey, it keeps his brain busy, the pay is weirdly good, and the travel perks aren’t bad. He’s been to six countries and three hidden mountain fortresses. His therapist (if he had one) would have questions.

Lately, he’s carved out a little niche for himself. Not officially, but everyone knows where to find him if they want to get stitched up quietly--no reports, no questions, no paperwork. His not-technically-an-office has become the go-to for quiet fixes. Until today.

Today, a child walks in.

At first, Benji panics. Because: one, this is not a place for kids; and two, what if the kid’s bleeding? (He’s not. Thank god.) But now Benji’s got a new problem: why is there a child here? And how does one gently remove said child without sounding like a kidnapper?

He tries peek-a-boo. That fails.

Then--maybe out of desperation--he starts explaining mitosis. Loudly. With hand motions.

And weirdly? That works.

Now the kid’s following him. Like, everywhere. Apparently he loves mitosis. Wants more mitosis. Benji can’t decide if he’s proud or alarmed. Stranger danger is clearly not a concept this child understands, which is concerning in a compound full of professional assassins. Still, if the kid had to imprint on anyone, he supposes it’s better that it’s him. He’s harmless. Janice from Storage would’ve taught him how to use a garrote.

He figures the kid’s guardian will come looking for him soon, hopefully before Benji runs out of cell biology facts, but of course, that’s when it happens. A very tall, very beautiful, very terrifying woman walks in, looks Benji up and down, and asks, with ice in her voice, what he’s doing with “the little Prince.” 

Prince?

Oh no. Benji starts apologizing-- rapidly, trying to explain that he didn’t know the child was important, or royal, or attached to someone who radiates lethal energy like a Bond villain on a bad day. He’s escaped and returned because of course that’s a dead end and is trying to meekly sneak past into the other doorway when she gives him one raised eyebrow and--

Oh. Okay. He’s been chopped on the back of the neck.

That’s fine.

He’ll just… rest his eyes for a moment.

-------

Benji wakes to the unmistakable sensation of pain blooming down his spine, the kind that screams you’ve been taken alive. His mouth tastes like iron. His head like it’s been tossed into a blender and set to “pulse.” There’s a lantern somewhere, casting green light across the stone walls of whatever cozy medieval murder chamber he’s in now.

He’s shackled. He notes this first. Then: he’s still alive. Weird.

That means someone had a reason to keep him that way. A shape moves beyond the green-lit threshold. He doesn’t need to see the silhouette to know who it is because it is unfortunately at this moment that he connects the dots.

Talia al Ghul enters like she was born from shadow, which considering everything she probably was, calm and cold and so perfectly still it hurts to look at her directly. She’s dressed down from her ceremonial armor, in a kurta and billowing pants, but somehow this makes her more dangerous. The way she stands, arms folded, jaw set—not like a soldier, but a monarch moments before the execution order.

Benji winces. “Uh… morning?”

She doesn’t answer. Yeah okay. Instead, she stares at him, her eyes unreadable, and he has the strangest feeling that she’s not angry. She’s disappointed. Which is so much worse.

“You stitched up an asset without authorization,” she says finally, voice as flat as marble. “You intervened in a secure operation. You breached med protocol and put yourself in proximity to a child who was not yours to distract.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘distract’ exactly, more like… entertained. He wandered in and I didn’t want him poking the cauterizing tools.”

“He followed you. He follows only when he decides something is worth following.”

Benji shifts slightly, the metal biting into his wrists. “I didn’t ask him to. I just… tried to keep him busy. Said some things about biology--I-er-being a doctor and all, and well—he likes mitosis?”

Talia’s lips press into a line so thin it disappears. She walks closer, not drawing a weapon, which somehow feels more threatening. “You were not meant to stand out, Mr. Dunn. You were hired to assist, to patch, to listen. Instead, you stitched weakness that should have died and spoke where silence was expected.”

Benji swallows hard, ah he’s dead. “Right. So… not ideal.”

“Do you know what happens to those who act outside their purpose in this organization?”

“Oh. I—yeah, no. I mean. I have a guess, and it’s not… great?”

He braces for the blade. For the whispered order. But none comes.

Instead, she stands before him, gaze lowered—not in respect, but in ruthless examination. As if peeling back the layers of who he is to determine whether anything inside is salvageable.

“He has a mind like mine,” she says after a beat. “But his heart—he gives it recklessly. He follows ghosts. People who won’t stay.”

Benji’s breath stutters.

“I’m not trying to be a ghost,” he says awkwardly.

“No,” she agrees, stepping back. “But I wonder if you know what you’re becoming.”

A pause. Then:

“You’ll live. For now. I want to see what happens next.”

Benji blinks. “Oh. Thank you?”

“Don’t thank me,” she snaps. “You’re still under review. You’ll report to my staff for minor med work. No unsupervised procedures. No wandering. No more talking to my son unless asked.”

“Right. Minimal wandering. Minimal son.”

Talia’s jaw tenses, but she says nothing more. She turns to go.  Benji sags a little against the restraints, relief washing over him like a bucket of ice water. Still alive. Still stupid. Still not sure how he keeps doing this.

At the threshold, Talia pauses. “I do not trust you, Benjamin Dunn,” she says without looking back. “But I’m not the only one watching.”

And then she’s gone.

Outside, standing just past the shadows, Damian is waiting. Staring at him through the cracked door, small and furious and silent.

Benji offers him a weak smile, raising a manacled hand.

Damian doesn’t return it. He doesn’t walk away, either. Benji will take his wins where he can get them. 

Chapter Text

The first time Damian slips into Benji’s unofficial workspace (after the whole disaster of mitosis facts, and despite direct orders to stay out of that room), it’s just after dusk. There’s no ceremony to it—no guards alerting Benji, no scolding mother right behind him. Just a nine-year-old boy standing beside a makeshift table of antiseptic, gauze, and disassembled tablets, watching him reset a fractured wrist with trembling fingers.

Benji nearly drops the splint.

He was warned to stop treating the assassins. Told, quite plainly, that he wasn’t part of their hierarchy, and that this room—claimed quietly one night after a mission—was not his. But no one else had sterilized the surfaces or inventoried the bandages, and someone needed to realign the broken thumb of the poor bastard who challenged Talia to spar last week. So here he stayed, slipping into roles that didn’t belong to him. Again.

He blinks at Damian. “Do you want something?”

Damian doesn’t answer. He just tilts his head and watches.

Benji gives it three days before reporting him. Maybe four. Instead, it becomes five. Then two weeks.

The League has no curfew, just the kind of discipline that makes curfews redundant. Yet somehow, every few days, Benji turns around to find Damian perched on a crate or crouched in the shadow of a cabinet. Silent. Observing. Occasionally poking around in a very expensive bag of surgical tools.

Eventually, Benji gives up and starts talking to him.

Not about feelings—God, no. That would be absurd. Instead, he pulls on the only thing he has: facts.

“The human body has around thirty trillion cells,” Benji tells him, unprompted, during a long night of inventory.

Damian, who is sitting cross-legged and pretending not to listen, grunts. “Everyone knows that.”

“Sure, but did you know red blood cells don’t have nuclei?”

“I did.”

Benji pauses. “Right. Of course you did.”

He doesn’t stop.

They go from red blood cells to cellular respiration. From that to the states of matter. Damian starts correcting his Latin, occasionally offering the Arabic term instead. Benji responds by downloading a crash course in historical etymology to his tablet, and the next time Damian sneaks in, they argue over whether Avicenna or Galen would’ve survived longer in a modern operating room.

Benji doesn’t tell him to leave.

He doesn’t tell Talia either, which is probably a death wish. But the kid’s kind of endearing, and even if he did ask, he doubts Damian would listen. 

The visits are harmless. Benji is cautious, always checking for signs of manipulation, making sure there’s no conditioning in the kid’s eyes when he speaks. And there isn’t. Not really. Damian isn’t asking him to betray anything. They’re both orbiting around each other, ignoring the fact that neither of them are really supposed to be here at all.

And in the end, the kid’s just… curious. Lonely.

Benji understands lonely.

----

It happens on a Thursday. She always hated Thursdays.

Talia has been in meetings all morning. One with a North African cell leader who insists the League should invade Algeria next, another with Ra’s, which ends—as most things do—with her father’s disappointed scoff echoing in her chest like a cracked sternum. She has spent her life taming chaos. Coaxing order from bloodied soil. She has learned to break the world and reassemble it with precision. But nothing in her training, not even Ra's ruthless standards, had prepared her for the emptiness of her son’s room.

Not just empty—erased. No footprints in the rug. No scuffed books on the shelf. No small, telltale shadows under the desk. She checks the inner courtyard. The west tower. The sparring rings. Nothing.

She doesn’t panic. Not yet.

She sweeps through the fortress like a knife through silk, barking orders sharp enough to draw blood. The guards tremble. The techs back away. She checks every corridor, every surveillance feed. Comms. Trackers. Files.

And then, after the fifth hour, real fear opens its teeth.

She shoves open another sealed door with her pulse pounding and her nails biting into her palm—and—

“—and that’s why meiosis has two rounds of division,” Benji says from the cot.

Damian is curled next to him on a crate, chin resting on one palm, scowling with intense concentration. A half-eaten bag of dried fruit lies between them.

The breath Talia releases is not relief. It is closer to rage than reprieve, sharp and involuntary.

“You have got to be kidding me,” she mutters.

Damian lifts his head.

Dunn turns slowly. “Oh. Hello. Didn’t hear you knock.”

She steps inside. Then slams the door behind her.

“I have spent the last twenty-two hours turning this fortress inside out. Lockdown was initiated. Drones were deployed. I was half a breath from torturing a gatekeeper. Do you understand what that means, Mr. Dunn?”

He gulps. “That you… missed me?”

“It means I had to fabricate three separate security threats to cover for my son’s absence. Because while I was consulting with command, he was consulting with a defanged field medic with delusions of mentorship.”

Benji raises a hand. “Alright, in my defense, I didn’t exactly lure him in. He just—keeps appearing.”

“Then chase him out!” Talia’s voice cuts the air like wire.

“I tried. Believe me. I brought out algebra. Anagrams. A twenty-minute lecture on the inner ear canal—”

Damian interjects calmly, “He attempted to compare earwax production to magma. It was not persuasive.”

Benji shrugs. “Worth a shot.”

Talia presses her fingers to her temple. The headache is mounting now, louder than logic. The tension has to go somewhere.

“You are both impossible.”

There’s a pause. Then her voice breaks. Not loudly. Not with fragility. But in the way that signals a dam quietly shifting under pressure.

“I am the leader of over three thousand operatives. I am the only daughter of Ra’s al Ghul. I have carried the League on my spine since I was sixteen.”

The words are not a confession. They are facts. Cold and heavy.

“And I have done it without aid. While raising a child my father never wanted. I built an empire and raised a boy inside its walls. You think that’s ease?”

Benji tries not to flinch. He fails. “Not really. I get very overwhelmed by paperwork, though. Like properly spiraling.”

She doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t soften. She looks at him the way one might study a foreign artifact—curious, uncertain if it should be destroyed or archived.

“You are not a soldier. You are not one of mine. You do not know how to handle him.”

Benji scratches the back of his neck, voice tight. “Yeah. Obviously. I’m not trying to be his handler. Well—maybe I am. A little. Just trying to help.”

“He nearly strangled his fencing partner last week.”

Benji winces. “Right. Yeah I got that vibe.”

Another silence. Heavy. She looks at Damian now, watching how the boy sits in ease beside this awkward outsider. It shouldn’t matter. But it does. Her son does not relax. Not with the tutors. Not with the guards.

But here—

“He has his father’s eyes,” she says, voice quieter now. “And none of his walls.”

Benji answers after a long pause. “That’s why he likes you, I presume. You have enough of them for the both of you.”

Her gaze flickers. The moment almost cracks.

“You sound like you’ve been reading therapy books.”

“I haven’t. I did Google trauma bonding once, though, didn't get very clear results."

That earns a breath. Not quite a laugh. But close enough. She composes herself in a blink, spine straight, hands still.

“He likes you,” she says.

“I guess so.”

“I don’t. Not yet.”

“That’s fair.”

Damian watches them both now, quiet, calculating. It’s not fear in his eyes. It’s something closer to awe. Not that he’d admit it.

Talia straightens.

“If he is going to keep finding you, then I would rather it be under watch than in secret.”

Benji blinks. “You want me to… what? Watch him?”

“Not train. Not command. You’re not capable. But you make him feel—” She cuts off. Swallows it. Tries again. “He lowers his guard around you. That is… occasionally useful.”

Benji is quiet. “You say that like it’s a liability.”

“It is. But sometimes liabilities are necessary.”

A beat.

She glances once more toward her son, toward the half-stacked diagrams and faint ghost of laughter.

“If my son insists on treating you like his own personal science correspondent, I’d better ensure you know how to dodge a throwing knife.”

Benji smiles, slightly. “Thank you?”

She turns to leave. Brushes Damian’s hair back on her way past.

“Next time, leave a note,” she says.

“You would’ve tracked me anyway.”

Talia’s smile is razor-thin. “Yes. But I wouldn’t have broken a window.”

The door closes softly behind her.

Benji exhales.

Damian tosses him a dried fig. “You made her laugh.”

“I also made her nearly commit homicide.”

“She does that.”

Benji hums. What a day. 

————-

The room felt colder after Damian left.

Not in temperature—though it probably was, given the League’s total disdain for insulation—but in a way Benji couldn’t explain. Like someone had pulled the plug on the gravity generator and left only the silence behind.

He sat for a while on the edge of the cot, elbows on knees, staring at the discarded fig stem and the faint scuff on the floor where Talia had stood. The shadows stretched long now, slicing across the stacked tablets and sterilization trays like prison bars. He hadn’t turned on the lights. Couldn’t quite bring himself to.

There were bruises blooming in his thoughts. Not from any blow—just the echo of her voice.

You’re not a soldier.

You’re not one of mine.

You don’t know how to handle him.

He shouldn’t care. It wasn’t like he disagreed. He didn’t belong here. Not in this fortress, not in this world. He wasn’t an assassin. He wasn’t even a proper medic. The only reason he’d made it this far was because no one had physically thrown him out yet. And even that felt like a clerical error.

He picked up the fig stem. Rolled it between his fingers. Set it down again.

The truth was—he liked the kid. A lot. Not just tolerated him, not just survived him. Damian was brilliant, sure. But he was also a little bit awful in a way Benji recognized. Too smart. Too watchful. Always calculating what version of himself was safest to show.

Benji knew that math.

Maybe that’s what scared Talia. That her son was lowering his guard around someone like him. Someone who bled too easily and talked too much and had never held a dagger with intent.

He sighed. Then, because the silence was starting to buzz, he reached for the emergency kettle tucked under the table. A backup for missions, used now for unofficial psychological triage.

Jasmine. That seemed safe. He’d read somewhere it helped with nerves. Or maybe that was chamomile. Or… gin. Either way, it was what he had.

The tea steeped unevenly. The bag had broken a bit, so there were loose leaves swirling around in the water like algae. He poured it anyway, careful not to spill, then scoured the back shelf for a clean mug. The only one left was chipped on the rim.

Perfect.

He stared at it for a long moment. Then stood.

He left the mug outside her door.

Didn’t knock. Didn’t write a note. Just… set it down on the stone step like a hopeful offering to a very dangerous god.

Then he walked away—slowly, trying not to think about how insane it was, trying not to imagine her opening the door and finding it. Trying especially not to imagine her flinging it at his head in the morning.

He didn’t expect thanks. Or forgiveness. Or acknowledgment.

But maybe—just maybe—she’d know it wasn’t sarcasm.

Just someone trying to help or maybe acknowledge.

In his own incompetent, badly-steeped way.

Chapter Text

Over the next few months, Benji finds himself becoming increasingly and inescapably acquainted with Talia al Ghul—and despite his best efforts to form a coherent opinion, he still can’t decide whether that’s a deeply unfortunate turn of events, an unlikely stroke of luck, or just another one of the League’s countless moral gray areas that he’s somehow stumbled into. She’s prickly, unquestionably—which is fair, considering he accidentally became the center of her son’s attention and now seems to function as some sort of unofficial science tutor-slash-babysitter, which is, frankly, a bizarre job description even by League standards. Honestly, if their positions were reversed, Benji suspects he’d already be plotting something theatrical and entirely too elaborate in retaliation. But she runs the League of Assassins—she’s certainly seen worse, tolerated worse, and in some strange, exacting way, perhaps even begun to… accept him.

And if he ignores the casually delivered threats, the razor-sharp tone of her voice when she’s irritated, and her uncanny habit of appearing behind him without so much as a footfall—well, her presence becomes… not comforting, exactly, but steadying. Sharp around the edges, yes, like a whetted blade against the throat, but grounding in the way only high-functioning terror can be: efficient, calculating, and entirely without illusion.

It’s more than he expected. More than he’d dared hope for.

During his first year here, Benji made a few half-hearted attempts at integrating—most of which involved awkward nods, a lot of misjudged small talk, and several doomed attempts to bond over circuit faults. Unsurprisingly, those efforts fell flat. The majority of League operatives were either deep in silent meditation or preparing for ceremonial bloodletting, and none seemed especially charmed by his impassioned rants about firewall redundancies or the nuances of semiconductor failure. So he stopped trying. Kept his head down. Repaired what needed fixing. Filled the oppressive silence with haunting operatic arias and the repetitive click of his smuggled Game Boy.

And then of course Damian showed up.

Now there’s a child who critiques his Latin syntax with deadpan severity and a terrifying commander who corrects his French with surgical precision—and for the first time in what feels like forever, people who actually respond when he speaks. Even if it’s to correct him. Even if it’s mostly with disdain.

He’ll take it.

Talia hasn’t dragged him into an interrogation cell in nearly a month, which he’s decided to interpret as a good sign. A sign of improvement. Progress. Character growth. For both of them.

And Damian, well. Damian is—dare Benji say it—delightful, albeit in a murdery, overly-serious, tiny-Roman-emperor sort of way. Benji used to babysit in university for some extra cash, and compared to the jam-smeared gremlins he used to corral, Damian is practically a Nobel candidate. Sure, he once broke a trainee’s nose for laughing at his form during drills—but he also folds his clothes, never forgets a thank you, and asks genuinely intelligent questions about immunoglobulin subclasses. That’s got to count for something.

Somehow, they’ve found a rhythm. Benji talks, Damian listens. Sometimes corrects. Occasionally—rarely—smiles.

It works.

What doesn’t work, what really and spectacularly doesn’t, is the knife training.

Talia follows up on it up one afternoon without preamble, all composed steel and calculation. “If you’re going to remain near my son,” she tells him, gaze unreadable, “you need to be capable of defending yourself.”

It’s a reasonable request. Logical, even. On paper, it makes perfect sense. In practice, however, it’s an unmitigated disaster.

Benji is too slow, too easily startled. He flinches at every sudden movement, tracks the arc of the blade instead of his opponent’s stance, and can’t seem to stop narrating his panic in a steady stream of nervous commentary. He doesn’t want to flinch—but when one of the knives grazes the curve of his ear, it feels less like cowardice and more like basic instinct.

Everything he tries so hard to keep buried—his hesitations, the automatic duck of his shoulders, the apologetic “sorry” that slips out with each mistake—rises to the surface, raw and unavoidable.

And what makes it worse, so much worse, is the way she looks at him.

Not angry. Not mocking. Just… bewildered. Disappointed, maybe. Like she’s genuinely trying to understand how someone could exist this long and still be so incapable of basic physical self-preservation. As if she’d expected more.

Which stings.

Damian watches from the edge of the mat, as unreadable as ever. Those sharp, exhausted eyes flick between them, taking in every failed parry and flinch with clinical detachment.

Benji forces a laugh. It sounds brittle, thin. “I was never much for gym class. Or confrontation. Or… knife-throwing death drills, honestly.”

Talia says nothing. She simply tilts her head and stares him down like she’s examining a particularly frustrating lab sample. “Again,” she says.

The next blade misses him by an inch. On purpose, he hopes. Probably. When she finally departs—fluid and expressionless, leaving only silence and the scent of iron behind—Benji stays behind to clean up. He gathers the weapons one by one, wraps them in a spare cloth napkin, and lowers himself to the edge of the mat, muscles aching and pride shredded.

It’s not just the bruises that hurt, or the sting of skin near his temple. It’s the implication that none of the things he’s actually good at matter here. That all the hours he’s spent triaging trauma, stabilizing wounds under pressure, keeping soldiers alive with nothing but gauze and grit and borrowed time—none of that counts because he can’t hold a blade correctly. Because he isn’t designed to cut.

He knows better. He knows his value. He’s trained. Certified. Tested in crisis after crisis. He’s saved people—people who should’ve died. But here, in a place where skill is measured in blood and silence and blade-work, it feels like failure anyway.

Still, the shame clings to him.

He doesn’t want to be a killer. He never has. But he wants to be useful. To be something more than the soft center in a place that prides itself on sharpness. He wants to belong, even if he knows he shouldn’t.

The tea helps, though. Small victories. He’s learned Talia prefers mint over jasmine, and that Damian likes his black with far too much sugar. He feels oddly proud of that. Like maybe, he’s contributing something worthwhile.

——-

There is discipline in patience—and Talia’s, honed razor-sharp over decades, is wearing thin.

She reminds herself of that as she watches Benji Dunn bungle another pivot, his footing a mess, his movements halting and tentative as if his bones are unsure of their alignment. This is their sixth session. Damian is mercifully elsewhere.

She has corrected his form repeatedly. Slowed her tempo to a crawl. Adjusted for his reach, his height, his clumsy posture. Still, he moves like a man in the wrong body, half-guessing his way through muscle memory he never formed.

“I said pivot with your whole leg,” she snaps, slashing her blade low. “Not your heel. You are exposing your flank.”

“I’m trying!” Benji gasps, sweat stinging his eyes. “It’s just—the timing—you feint left—”

“Because that is what opponents do,” she says, voice laced with ice. “They deceive. They strike without warning. If you can’t adapt, you will die before you hit the floor.”

“Cheerful,” he mutters.

She doesn’t dignify that with a response. Instead, she resets her stance, movements fluid, her patience held together by threadbare self-restraint. They spar again. He lunges. She sidesteps. Disarms. Clean, efficient. But this time, in his flinch, her blade clips his upper arm.

It’s a shallow cut. Barely worth registering. Still, her irritation simmers.

Benji recoils instantly, horror on his face. “Oh God—was that me—? I didn’t mean—I’m sorry—”

“Stop talking.”

He freezes.

She studies him, really studies him, and the fine line of tension behind her eyes finally fractures.

“Do you understand what just happened?” Her voice is calm. Controlled. Cold. “You moved on instinct. You lost your form. You cut me. Accidentally. But for the first time, you connected.”

“It was an accident,” he whispers.

“No one intends to fail,” she replies. “Intent does not stop a blade.”

His hands hover, useless. “You’re bleeding. Let me—”

She steps back. “Do you truly believe an apology makes you safe to keep near my son?”

That one hits.

She watches him go still, stricken.

“You want to protect him?” Her tone is quieter now, surgical. “Then tell me what you plan to do when someone comes for him and you can’t hold a knife.”

“I’m not here to fight,” Benji says softly.

“Exactly,” she murmurs, turning.

And then he speaks again—low, sharp, angry. A flicker of something she didn’t expect: steel beneath the softness.

“No,” Benji says, stepping forward, “I’m not here to fight like you do.”

She halts.

“I’ve seen what fighting looks like. I’ve held together the aftermath of what you call victory. Collapsed lungs. Broken ribs. People choking on their own blood while backup’s still minutes out. You think protection only counts when it wounds.”

She turns slowly.

“And you think a medic’s needle makes you immune to consequence?”

“I think you don’t get to dismiss what I do just because it doesn’t leave scars.”

For the first time, she studies him—not as a threat, not as a liability, but as something else. Something irritatingly persistent.

“You think healing is clean?” she says. “That your work is not violent? Stitching skin is still cutting. Surgery is still blood.”

“Yes,” Benji says. “But it saves people.”

“It arrives after failure.”

“It prevents death.”

“Reaction is not protection.”

“It gives people another chance.”

Talia’s gaze narrows. “You’d let someone hurt my son to prove you’re principled?”

Benji flares. “I’d die for your son. But I won’t kill to prove I deserve to.”

That, she cannot answer. Not immediately.

“You’re bleeding,” he says again. “Let me help.”

She hesitates. Then—almost to her own surprise—offers her arm.

He works quickly. Efficiently. His touch is firm, his hands steady, and for the first time, she wonders if perhaps his presence here is not a complete waste.

When he finishes, he murmurs, “You’ll live. Tragically.”

“Your bedside manner is lacking,” she says dryly.

“I’m not used to treating people who insult me while I do it.”

She doesn’t argue. Doesn’t leave.

He tries again. “I’m not trying to be a weakness. But I won’t stop helping people.”

“And when help fails?”

“I’ll try again. That’s what I do.”

She watches him. Something unreadable flickering in her gaze.

“Hope,” she says at last, “is not armor.”

“No,” Benji says. “But sometimes it’s enough.”

She retracts her arm. Glances at the bandage. “Acceptable.”

He exhales. “Wow. Glowing review.”

She turns. Pauses.

“You are still a liability.”

“I know.”

“But perhaps,” she adds, almost reluctant, “not a useless one.”

Benji blinks. “Was that a compliment?”

She arches a brow. “Don’t push your luck.”

Then she’s gone. And Benji sags, still aching, but burning with something fragile and real:

He stood his ground.

And for once, he wasn’t just tolerated. He was heard.

————

She watches him as she goes, shoulders hunched like a dog scolded too hard, and wipes the residual blood from her arm with deliberate care. The bandage is functional. His hands were steady.

So he is good for something.

Talia folds the cloth neatly and sets it aside. Her muscles still ache from restraint, not exertion—there’s a kind of tension that comes not from movement but from standing still while everything in you demands a blade. Or a word. Or a severing.

And yet.

She considers what he said, truly said—not the obvious defensive trembling, not the clumsy stubbornness, but the thread beneath it. The refusal to kill, yes. But more than that. The insistence that his way matters. That it could be enough.

And perhaps… perhaps it could.

Benji Dunn is catastrophically bad at combat. That much is irrefutable. But what he is is persistent. Loyal. Protective in his own soft, misguided, maddening way. And when he talks to Damian—when he listens to him, answers his questions, lets him wander off on some trivial tangent about chlorophyll or sodium ion channels—Talia sees something rare reflected in her son’s eyes.

Curiosity. Humor. Something like safety. She exhales, low and slow, and lets herself be honest—at least internally.

If Damian must be accompanied on field excursions, there are worse things than a medic who would die before letting him get hurt. And if someone must supervise them both… well.

It may as well be her.

What an elegant solution. What a horribly convenient excuse.

She will keep Dunn alive, if only because it gives her cause to remain close. To assess. To correct. To protect. And no matter how he flinches or fumbles, he has, so far, kept her son engaged and breathing.

That’s more than she can say for half the League.

She finds her father in the inner sanctum, where time goes to steep and curdle. He is seated beside the ceremonial basin, sharpening a blade that hasn’t tasted blood in weeks. The air is thick with incense. Somewhere behind him, a torch hisses softly in the stone.

“Father,” she says.

Ra’s al Ghul does not look up. “You’ve returned. And not with a corpse.”

She crosses the room slowly. “Damian’s training requires adjustment. I’m taking over full supervision.”

He slides the whetstone down the blade in a long, unbroken stroke. “You already oversee his combat regimen.”

“And now his missions.”

Ra’s lifts his gaze. His eyes—green, ancient, unimpressed—settle on her like a weight. “The boy is a distraction.”

Talia does not move. “He is your blood.”

“He is an investment. One with increasingly poor returns.” A pause, sharp as a drawcut. “You waste your energy on sentiment. And on that twitchy little medic who plays at defiance.”

“Benji Dunn is… useful.” She hates the word, but uses it anyway. “He keeps Damian thinking. Engaged. Cautious.”

“He’s a liability.”

“So is every operative who cannot be replaced.”

Ra’s studies her, lips thinning. “You grow soft.”

“No,” she says evenly. “I grow strategic.”

A beat.

Then, with something like amusement: “You always were better at pretending mercy was a move.”

She does not smile. “It is a move. And for now, one that keeps Damian learning. Alive. Focused.”

Ra’s considers this, then waves a lazy hand. “As you like. Keep the Brit. He bores me.”

Talia dips her head once. “Thank you.”

“But mark me, daughter—when sentiment fails, I will cut it out of you.”

Her gaze is cold steel. “Then I suggest you pray it never does.”

She turns and leaves without waiting for dismissal. Her father’s voice does not follow. 

Later that evening, as she passes the infirmary, she hears Benji humming to himself while cataloging something—a tune that doesn’t belong in the League. She doesn’t pause. Doesn’t comment. But her steps slow just slightly.

She’ll allow it.

For now.

And tomorrow, she thinks, he can walk behind them. 

Chapter Text

Damian Al Ghul is, as Benjamin Dunn might say, a well-rounded individual. 

By the age of seven, he has already achieved advanced proficiency in armed combat, subterfuge, psychological manipulation, and forgery. These are the expected disciplines. But a true heir to the League must go further—must master not only the art of death, but also the irritatingly mundane practice of survival. One such requirement is basic field medicine.

Damian is aware his mother finds it distasteful—“unnecessary,” she calls it, “if you are good enough not to bleed.” He has chosen not to argue with her on that point, but privately disagrees. After all, to inherit both the League and the cowl of the Bat, he must prepare for every possibility. As his fencing tutor once said: “One must always assume lesser ability in oneself. Arrogance is simply planned failure.” He had relieved her of a toe the following week. The lesson had, in turn, proven instructive.

Another discipline that demands study—though fewer in the League would admit it—is the skill of conversation. Unlike blade forms or bone-setting, it has no formal structure, no set of drills. It demands patience, subtlety, and emotional precision. And while Damian possesses all these things, he has not yet had the opportunity to test them on an unsuspecting adult.

Until now.

It begins with a guard assigned to watch him for the day. Or rather, it begins with Damian slipping that guard entirely. He has memorized the lower levels of the Himalayan compound and reasons there must be a medic down there somewhere. Not a formal one—those are occupied, and under surveillance—but someone mid-task. Casual. Distracted. A way for Damian to knock out two birds with one stone.

After several empty storerooms and two locked equipment closets, he finds one: a man with black-dyed hair (the blond eyebrows are a giveaway), stitching up a tired guard and talking a mile a minute. Perfect.

Damian steps into the room without a word.

This, he realizes too late, may have been a tactical error. The man—Benjamin, or Benji, as he insists—is already halfway through a strange and unnecessary monologue about “fluids” and “regulation” and seems to require no assistance holding a conversation. He glances at Damian only briefly before saying hello, then returns to his work, which appears competent, if unusually tidy. The man does not ask his name. Nor does he seem to realize Damian is seven, not five.

Interesting.

Damian stiffens slightly, certain the man is scanning him for weakness. He offers none. Benji, however, keeps talking, occasionally glancing up with a baffled kind of concern, as though Damian might vanish at any moment. It is only when the word mitosis surfaces—utterly unfamiliar and therefore deeply compelling—that Damian allows himself to engage.

The man is more than happy to elaborate.

It is… not unpleasant. In fact, it is educational. Benji does not condescend, though he clearly does not realize he is being evaluated. He explains things in a way that is oddly energetic. Animated. Curious. He seems to forget himself as he talks, drifting from diagrams to metaphors to—at one point—a rambling discussion of how octopuses regrow limbs. Damian listens carefully. And when Benji, apparently feeling bold, reaches out and ruffles his hair—

Well. That is not permitted.

But Damian allows it, this once. He has, after all, achieved an excellent result: the man is softened, unaware, and entirely manipulable. He has provided Damian with useful knowledge and failed to notice the power dynamics shifting around him. It is, objectively, a success.

His mother, naturally, ruins it.

She arrives in a fury and nearly kills the man. Benji survives, barely. But what matters is that afterward—though forbidden—Damian returns. And the man lets him. No alarms are raised. No guards are called. Instead, Benji offers him facts. Stories. Tea. Not British tea. Real tea. Shai bil na’na. Masala chai. He brews it terribly at first, but seems to master it with unexpected skill in time, and Damian—who knows the value of a good poisoner—checks every cup. It is safe. It is good.

Benji, for all his pitiful performance in sparring drills and a frankly humiliating failure to parry a dagger from Mother, remains present. He keeps talking. He keeps teaching.  He has an uncanny ability to draw unprofessional snorts out of Damian, and despite the shame it brings him, Damian indulges himself here. And so Damian stays.

--------

Damian’s eyes are bright with pain, but he doesn’t make a sound. He’s bleeding. Not badly—but it’s enough. A sharp, angry red blooming from a shallow tear across his ribs. Too high to be very dangerous, too low to ignore. One of the guards moves forward instinctively.

“Get the medic,” he says.

Damian doesn’t blink. “No.”

There’s a pause.

The guard hesitates. Talia—already standing to the side with blood on her own blade—arches a brow.

“No?” she echoes. A challenge, not confusion.

“I want Benjamin,” Damian says.

The guard looks to Talia. She does not look away from her son. “You’ll be treated by whoever is available.”

“No,” Damian says again, sharper this time. “I want Benji.”

There’s a ripple then, small and strange—like something delicate clicking into place beneath steel and stone. The silence isn’t heavy. It’s expectant. Talia narrows her eyes. She watches the set of her son’s shoulders. The way his chin lifts—not stubborn, not childish, but calm. Certain.

“Summon Dunn,” she says. It’s becoming a stunningly common phrase in her mouth. 

Benji arrives in an oversized tunic, breathless, holding what might be a tea kettle in one hand and a satchel of hastily grabbed supplies in the other.

He sees the blood and nearly drops both.

“Oh god. What happened. Are you—?”

“I’m fine,” Damian says, already sitting on the low bench beside the training mat. His uniform top is unfastened at the ribs. There’s more blood than Benji would like to see. “You were summoned.”

“I was—I was summoned, yes. Right. To treat you. Yes that’s normal. Love that.”

He drops to his knees, still muttering, and pulls on gloves with fumbling care. His hands don’t shake, but his voice does.

“You should’ve called someone else, they could have gotten here sooner,” he says without looking up.

“I did not want someone else,” Damian replies simply.

Benji’s fingers still for half a second.

“…Okay,” he says.

He cleans the wound in silence, only breaking it to murmur instructions about breathing and pressure. Damian obeys all of them without comment. He doesn’t flinch. Talia observes from the other side of the room. She doesn’t speak until Benji begins bandaging. “You’re fond of him.” The “too” is left unspoken. 

Benji jolts. “I’m—what? No. I mean, yeah, kind of hard not to be?”

“I see,” she says, as though that answers something else entirely.

Later, the summons comes. An outer cell in Kathmandu. A corrupt broker holding something valuable to the League. A three-man infiltration: clean, fast, silent. Talia selects herself, of course. And Damian, it’s standard and allows her to supervise. He’s ready. By now the third name surprises no one.

“Dunn will go,” she says.

One of the guards snorts. “To bandage?”

Talia turns her gaze on him slowly. “To learn. And to keep my son alive.”

Benji looks up from where he’s double-checking supplies. He swallows. “You sure that’s a good idea?”

“No,” Talia says, once the guards have left. “But it’s the only one I have right now.”

As they prepare to depart, Damian stands near Benji in the snow-covered courtyard, already dressed for the mission. His coat’s too big, so he looks comically small, but he wears it like armor. He looks up.

“I do not want a replacement,” he says.

Benji blinks. “Uh. For what?”

“For you.”

“…Right.”

“Should you perish, I will be very irritated.”

Benji snorts. “That’s fair. I’ll try to die politely.”

Damian nods. “See that you do.”

From the stairs, Talia watches them both.

She says nothing. But she waits until they walk ahead, Damian just a pace in front, Benji beside him like a shadow. Then she follows.

As she turns, candlelight catching the faint sheen of sweat on Benji’s brow, she allows herself a rare indulgence:

Satisfaction.

He no longer trembles when he sees her. The tea is—barely—drinkable. His posture is still abysmal, but the apologies have dwindled to tolerable levels. Progress. She watches him as one might observe a prototype: still flawed, still laughably fragile, but no longer useless. And more importantly, no longer afraid of her. Not completely.

That, too, is by design.

She placed him near Damian not as a kindness, but as a strategy. Her son listens when others speak—yes—but he questions when Dunn speaks. That distinction matters. Curiosity begets caution. Connection begets discipline. And though it wounds her pride to admit it, even privately, her son is steadier now. Sharper. More discerning.

Because of him.

She had not expected to find use in softness. But Dunn, stubbornly, has made something of it.

So be it.

Let him trail behind them on missions. Let him brew terrible tea and fumble through field briefings and hold, with infuriating reverence, the bodies that others would discard. Let him cling to his principles like they’re armor. So long as he continues to keep Damian alive—to keep him human—she will permit it. 

For now.

She walks after them without looking back. But she thinks—just briefly—that the tea will be better tomorrow.

And for the first time in years, she does not feel all so alone.

---------------

As it turns out, League missions have a way of forcing familiarity—if not quite trust, then the shape of it. Benji suspects it’s the pace of things: long bursts of tense, wordless danger, followed by stretches of downtime so quiet they echo. There’s no space for awkwardness. Not in an extraction van while he’s elbow-deep in a calf wound. Not in the high grass outside a Nepalese checkpoint while they wait, breath held, for a patrol to pass. Not in a safe house where only three people sleep and the walls are thin and no one snores except, apparently, him.

“You breathe like a lawnmower,” Talia announces one morning, over tea that he made too strong.

Benji blinks at her across the table. “You stab like a left-handed toddler.”

Her eyes narrow. They both know he’s blatantly lying. Damian noisily sips his tea. No one actually gets stabbed, surprisingly. 

Talia does most of the work. That’s not up for debate. She scouts. She plans. She leads every infiltration with such elegant, vicious efficiency that Benji sometimes finds himself forgetting to breathe while watching. Even when she’s outnumbered, outflanked, outgunned—she doesn’t falter. If anything, she fights better with blood on her hands. Better with purpose.

Benji, by contrast, is backup. Not a liability anymore, but not the front line either. He’s there for when the plan goes sideways—when Damian bleeds, when something explodes, when someone needs to do math faster than anyone else can think. He is very good at that.

“Do not engage,” she reminds him before each mission. “Observe. Stay with Damian. React only if necessary.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Benji says. Every time.

And every time, she nods once. Just once. That’s all the approval he gets. It’s all he needs. He obeys. And when he doesn’t(very rarely), they argue—quietly, in motion, over comms or behind cover or during the long, cold walk back to the safehouse, their voices low but undeniably growing sharper with familiarity.

They fall into a rhythm: Damian flanks her, shadow-quiet and hungry to prove himself. Talia takes point, blades like lightning, voice clipped and commanding. Benji lingers behind, his role invisible to most enemies but utterly clear between the three of them. He carries equipment. He tracks vitals. He keeps count.

And when it’s safe, when they’re clearing rooftops or trudging through backroads or waiting in an abandoned checkpoint for the right hour to strike—then Benji educates. He explains nerve clusters. Surveillance blind spots. Why certain poisons target muscle and others blood. It starts small, with murmured facts during downtime, but Damian listens. And asks. And applies what he learns.

Sometimes Talia corrects him before Benji can finish. “That’s a carotid, not a jugular. If you sever it, don’t expect silence.”

Benji doesn't flinch this time. “Yes. That. Good point. Add that to your notes, Damian.”

And so this transitions into teaching Damian together. Not officially. Not in any way the League would recognize. But the boy absorbs everything—Talia’s precision, Benji’s improvisation, both of their values even when they don’t mean to share them.

“Do not trust your allies to be right,” Talia warns after a messy takedown. “Trust them to act.”

“And if they’re wrong?” Damian asks.

“Correct them later. Never in the field.”

Benji nods. “What she said. Also, uh, maybe don’t dive headfirst into tripwire. Just as a general principle.”

Damian blinks. “I was testing its trigger range.”

“You triggered it with your face.”

“Successful test,” he says coolly.

Benji sighs. “I’m raising a goblin.”

“You’re patching my son,” Talia corrects, standing. “Don’t get attached.”

But later, when she finds Benji asleep in the safehouse armchair with a med book half-fallen from his lap and Damian curled at his feet, she does not wake either of them. She just puts out the lamp.

Their habits begin to sync, though none of them talk about it. It’s just proximity, Benji tells himself. Circumstance. He starts keeping a second cup of tea warm in the mornings—not for her, obviously, just in case someone wants it. Talia takes it without speaking, and pretends not to smile when it’s decent. Damian critiques the steep time with academic precision, then drinks it anyway.

They learn each other’s paces.

Talia rises before the sun, already dressed, already sharpened, as though sleep is a tactical error. She meditates before breakfast. Benji does not ask where or why. Damian watches her. Then copies her. Then pretends not to.

Benji stumbles out of the spare room late—always late—hair wild, shirt misbuttoned, clutching notes he was scribbling at 3 a.m. He is a mess. But he is a consistent mess. Talia sighs in disgust, but no longer comments. Damian asks about his formulas, and Benji tries to explain. Talia doesn’t listen. Not really. Until he uses one to predict a guard rotation, and then she never questions his scribbles again.

It’s strange, he thinks, how easy it becomes. Not warm, not relaxed—not quite. But smooth. Functional. Familiar. He learns that Damian likes silence when injured, but appreciates narration. That Talia sharpens her weapons by sound, not sight. That both of them prefer rice over bread, that neither of them care for Western sweets, and that Talia will, without hesitation, kill for the last cup of ginger tea.

“Touch it,” she warns once, during a long, cold night with a storm outside and no power, “and I’ll find out if your spleen is strictly necessary.”

Benji, half-frozen and hunched by the gas lamp, considers her. “You know I keep you alive, right?”

“I can keep myself alive.”

“But you can’t make your own ginger tea?”

“Irrelevant” She sniffs. 

Benji groans. “God, it’s like arguing with a wall”

“Then stop arguing,” she says mildly. “And fix the heater.”

Chapter Text

The tea is not sweet enough today. He knows it before he hands it over.

Damian accepts it anyway, without a word. Which is almost worse.

Benji watches as the kid blows gently on the surface—one sharp exhale, precise and practiced—before sipping like it’s not boiling water from a dented tin cup. He doesn’t flinch. He never flinches. Talia, across the room, lifts her own cup—no thank you, no comment—and takes a single sip. Her brow lifts. Barely. Then she sets it down and moves on.

Benji exhales, long and slow, like a deflating tent.

This is the new rhythm. Morning tea, field prep, soft silence. Damian reviews intel aloud, sharp-eyed and laser-focused. Talia reads near a window, calm and unreadable, but always watching. He used to count the seconds between her corrections—she’d snap when his measurements were off, when he babbled, when he didn’t take his own advice.

She still does. But now, sometimes, she waits until after he finishes.

That’s new. And terrifyingly endearing.

He finds himself cataloging these moments now—tiny, incidental markers of change. The way Damian hands him his satchel before missions, instead of Benji scrambling to remember it. The way Talia tosses him spare data drives without explanation, trusting he’ll know what to do. He doesn’t always know what to do. But she doesn’t hover anymore. She doesn’t correct his grip when he holds a cooking knife, or ask twice when she says “stay close to him” and means Damian.

That part—that part—keeps him up at night.

Because she used to supervise every second. Sit within arm’s reach when Damian so much as looked his way. She once corrected Benji’s bandage folds mid-suture like it was a war crime even though they both knew he’d done it nearly perfectly. And now?

Now she lets Damian sleep beside him in the safehouse while she keeps watch. Now she trusts Benji to treat her son’s injuries with no one else in the room.

Now she says “Go,” and means it—means, I’m not following. I trust you’ll bring him back.

It’s absurd. It’s humbling. It’s… a lot.

And Benji, being Benji, of course immediately spirals into oh god I am going to ruin this I am going to die and ruin everything and they’re going to realize I’m just a man who got here by mistake.

That realization—the weight of it—hits him hardest on nights like this, when the fire’s too low, and the shadows too sharp. Damian’s curled up nearby, half-snoring in a pile of poorly folded maps, and Talia’s in the next room, sharpening knives she doesn’t need to sharpen.

Benji sits on the floor with a cup of too-sweet tea cooling in his hands, and thinks: I love them.

Not romantically. Not like that. God, never like that.

But he loves them like gravity—quiet and constant, a force he didn’t ask for, pulling him toward something heavy and rooted and terrifyingly real. He loves the way Damian pretends to hate figs but always finishes them. The way Talia never explains her orders but watches to see if he understands anyway. He loves how she always knows when Damian’s about to interrupt and raises a finger without looking up. How they both move with this eerie synchrony, like a two-person storm system, and he’s just the dumb bird they’ve decided not to crush.

He loves them.

And that is a problem.

Because the League doesn’t tolerate attachments. And he’s not built for family. And Damian is starting to look at him like he matters. Like he’s something to live up to. And Benji knows—knows—that’s a mistake.

It starts earlier that day. On the way back from a mission, nothing fancy, just a data intercept and one mildly stabbed courier. Benji didn’t even break a sweat. Which should’ve made it fine.

But halfway through the hike back, Talia pauses, presses a comm to her ear, and says evenly, “You two go ahead. I’ll join you in twenty.”

She doesn’t look at Benji when she says it. Doesn’t ask if he can handle it. Doesn’t clarify. Just turns and disappears into the trees.

And Damian? Damian doesn’t even blink. He steps into stride beside Benji like this is normal. Like this is fine. And Benji walks. He talks, because of course he does, about fungal pathogens and the absurd humidity, and Damian corrects his Arabic pronunciation mid-sentence, and it’s easy. Too easy.

It’s halfway through a long-winded digression about ant colonies that it hits him: She left him with me. On purpose.

She trusts him.

And Benji—fool, failure, flinchy with knives that aren’t scalpels and terrible with silence—suddenly feels the weight of it, like a crown made of thorns.nBecause what if he’s wrong? What if he slips up? What if Damian gets hurt because of him?

What if, for once, someone looks up at him, and he can’t live up to it?

By the time they reach the safehouse, Benji’s sweating, and it’s not from exertion. He makes tea with shaky hands. Misses the sugar ratio by a mile again. Damian drinks it anyway.

Later, when Damian’s asleep and Talia walks past him in the hallway, she pauses. Doesn’t speak. Just rests her hand on his shoulder for half a second—steady, grounding, nothing more—and keeps going.

Benji nearly drops the cup in his hand.

He doesn’t tell anyone.

He doesn’t say that the touch was the most comfort he’s felt in months. He doesn’t tell Damian that hearing “I want Benji” in the field nearly broke him in half. He doesn’t say that he would burn the world down before letting either of them fall.

But in the quiet, in the flicker of low firelight, he admits it to himself. He loves them. And that scares him more than dying.

Because dying? He’s fine with that. Been bracing for it his whole life.

But being wanted?

Being trusted?

That’s worse.

Because if he breaks that trust—

If he lets Damian down—

If he fails Talia al Ghul, who once said “you are a liability” and now hands him her son with quiet hands and full permission—

Then he won’t survive the guilt.

He just won’t.

————-

She doesn’t know when he became familiar.

Not useful—he was always that, though she’d initially refused to admit it—but familiar. A presence in the corner of her awareness. Like a blade worn into her belt loop. Like something she didn’t expect to carry, but reaches for anyway.

Benji.

He argues. With her. In whispers, but persistently.

And she lets him.

That, more than anything, tells her the truth she’s been avoiding.

She’s grown used to him. Beyond Damian. Beyond necessity. She realized it two days ago, after a failed mission extraction in the snow. Her comm had cut out. Her side was bleeding. Her backup was twelve minutes too far.

And Benji was there.

Too thin in the cold. Arm around her shoulder. Already pulling out gauze with one hand and recalibrating the evac coordinates with the other. Muttering to himself, probably about frostbite or improper field dressing—but steady. Anchored. Present.

She hadn’t even needed to give the order.

She’d leaned on him.

Just for a moment.

And when she pushed off again, he didn’t say a word about it. No smug look. No needless fuss. Just checked her vitals and gave her a nod like she’d done him a favor. It was… aggravating. And oddly reassuring. They have begun, somehow, to operate as a pair.

Not a team. Not equals—Benji wouldn’t dream of it—but as something closer to a partnership. He is still a medic. Still a civilian in the League’s eyes. But she’s found herself glancing to him first when something goes wrong. She consults his judgement without preamble. Shares information. Waits for his thoughts.

And he gives them freely. Earnestly. Often with too many caveats. She’s stopped correcting him.

The boy is still his reason, she knows. Damian is the thread that first tethered them. That has not changed.

But the connection has grown. She has caught Benji watching her with quiet concern when she returns limping. There is nothing romantic between them, no, but there is something. She has felt the way he drifts slightly closer in moments of tension—not to interfere, never that—but to be there, in case. As if that counts for something. And, damn him, it does.

He gives her space. But he is never far.

And she finds herself choosing proximity. When they sit at camp, she often chooses the seat beside him. Easier to share schematics. More efficient, she tells herself. She does not examine the lie. He does not ask questions he should. He does not make assumptions. He does not praise.

But he listens.

And that, Talia realizes, is more rare than she remembered.

Ra’s noticed. Of course he did.

It was during a review of their recent assignments. The casualty count had been low, the mission complete, but Ra’s had paused over one name on the roster.

“Still you bring the medic,” he’d said, voice sharp and dismissive. “The one with no discipline.”

Talia hadn’t looked up from her datapad. “He is essential.”

“To the boy?” Ra’s asked, one brow lifting.

“To us.”

It came out colder than she intended. And too fast.

Ra’s studied her. For a moment, he looked amused. But he said nothing further. And Talia felt something fierce rise up in her chest. Not for defense. Not exactly. Just… certainty.

Benji Dunn is not one of theirs. But she has claimed him anyway.

-------------

She crosses the room now. Damian sleeps nearby, tangled in half-unrolled maps. Benji is still awake, seated by the dying fire, blinking blearily at a cracked tablet and a steaming cup of something he’ll forget to drink.

He doesn’t hear her approach until she’s close. She sees him tense, then relax, the way he always does around her now. 

She rests a hand on his shoulder, brief and deliberate.

She doesn’t say anything. She never does.

But she stays just a moment longer than she used to.

Then she walks on.

She doesn’t look back, she never does. 

She doesn’t need to.

-------------------------------

(Two years later – America)

The kitchen isn’t really a kitchen.

It’s a vaguely partitioned corner of a temporary safehouse in upstate New York, where the pipes groan and the walls are too thin, and the old range clicks like a ticking bomb before it agrees to light. The window is fogged more often than not, framing pale trees and asphalt. There’s a single wood counter stained with turmeric, a knife sharp enough to earn Talia’s grudging approval, and a bag of dried curry leaves hanging from a nail in the wall like a charm warding off everything that might still go wrong.

Benji cooks anyway.

Not because he’s good at it—though he’s better than he was—but because it gives his hands something to do while he waits for the quiet to settle. Because Damian once spat out a plate of Tex-Mex with such scorn it startled a waitress. Because Talia once said, in passing, that the League food was tolerable but uninspired, and left behind half her rice. Because British food—his food—is famously an atrocity, and Benji, being very British and very white, feels compelled to atone for that with every properly-seasoned dish he places gently in front of them.

He starts small. Chana masala, borrowed from a crumpled recipe smuggled in from a Montreal contact. Jeera rice, sometimes. Lentils when the weather turns colder—first watery and apologetic, then thicker, more confident, with a proper tempering of mustard seeds and curry leaf. Damian never asks for seconds. He just eats faster when it’s good.

Talia never comments on the taste. But once, when he left the cumin out, she looked at him like he’d forgotten how to breathe.

That, more than any word of approval, told him he was getting it right.

-------------

America feels different now.

Not just because of the mission—though that hums in the background, constant, anticipatory—but because Damian is leaving. Really leaving. Not for an afternoon, or a scouting loop, but an extended solo test mission, issued by the higher echelon, masked as a routine field survey but quietly intended to assess loyalty, language fluency, restraint.

Talia doesn’t say so, but Benji knows this is the one they’d prepared him for. The one that echoes Bruce’s early years under Ra’s. The one where the League watches from a distance and waits to see if he breaks.

Talia sees him off at dawn. Quiet, still, beautiful in a way that is not fragile but sharpened. She adjusts Damian’s collar like it’s ritual. No embrace. No warmth. But the touch lingers longer than it used to. Benji doesn’t follow them out. Not because he wasn’t invited—but because he was. And that, somehow, is more intimate than if she’d said nothing at all.

He waits by the door. Just in case.

When Damian passes, he knocks—just once. Benji opens it. They look at each other for one long breath.

“Try not to get stabbed,” Benji says.

Damian shrugs, adjusting his bag. “Try not to poison anyone.”

And then, softer: “You still have the decoder?”

Benji nods. “Taped behind the pantry. Under the garam masala.”

A twitch of the mouth—barely a smile. And then Damian is gone.

------------

That night, everything echoes.

The safehouse feels wrong in a way Benji can’t name. Quieter. Unmoored. Like it’s waiting to be filled with someone’s voice and isn’t sure whose. He cooks slowly, trying to make khichdi the way he remembers reading about it—soft rice, moong dal, a touch of ghee, nothing too harsh. Comfort food. Easy to digest. Something a boy might come home to, if he still believed in home.

He forgets the salt.

When Talia joins him, it’s without a word, just the soft sound of her steps against concrete and the cool scent of sandalwood trailing behind her. She says nothing about the missing seasoning, nothing about the quiet, nothing about the way the safehouse feels like it’s been exhaled.

She simply takes her place at the small steel table. Waits.

Benji serves. One bowl for her. One for him. One he sets aside for later.

They eat in silence. Like they always do. Like they’ve always done.

But tonight it feels gentler. Or maybe just lonelier.

Talia finishes first. She does the dishes herself, as she always insists on doing. And then she says, very simply: “He will do well.”

Benji nods. He knows she’s right. That doesn’t make it easier.

“I still hate it,” he says, voice quiet.

“I know,” she replies.

Not a comfort. But not a denial either.

She turns to go, long hair falling loose down her back now that the day is done. But at the doorway, she pauses. Looks back.

“You forgot the salt,” she says.

Benji winces. “I’ll do better.”

“You will,” she replies.

She doesn’t smile. But she lingers a moment longer.

Then she’s gone.

Benji sits at the table a while after, alone now, nursing a third cup of tea gone lukewarm. He doesn’t write Damian that night—he doesn’t want to crowd the boy’s first dispatch. But he checks the decoder anyway. Taped exactly where he said.

He adjusts it.

Just in case.

Chapter Text

Damian’s solo mission goes well, he returns startlingly normal, if not with an extra knife in his beltloop. And though she won’t admit it, both Talia and Benji breathe a sigh of relief. Damian is 9 now. A bit older and firmly in his angsty preteen era, Talia pretends it doesn't amuse her, Benji doesn’t even try. Still, they move like a unit. An odd one, yes—functionally lopsided, utterly unconventional—but efficient. Reliable. 

Between Talia’s planning, Damian’s execution, and Benji’s frantic, improvisational clean-up, they haven’t lost a single operative or failed an objective in over six months. Word spreads. Whispers bloom like rot in the lower cells. Some call it luck. Others assume blood rituals. A few think Talia’s bribing senior command, as if she isn’t senior command. Benji doesn’t bother to correct any of them. Let them assume whatever nonsense they like, it’s easier than explaining the truth.

Because the truth is quieter. The truth is: they’ve just… learned each other. Talia doesn’t have to say what she needs; Damian doesn’t have to ask where to stand; Benji doesn’t have to explain that yes, he really did restock the trauma packs again, and no, it wasn’t because he expected failure—it’s because he knows what failure looks like and would rather not repeat 

Every now and then, Talia manages to carve out a few unassigned days under the guise of recovery or regional scouting—softly worded requests slipped through the cracks of League scheduling. No one questions it. Not directly. And so they end up, for a few precious windows of time, somewhere unarmed by expectation.

He can feel something though, in the long absences of sound and hot air of southern Asia. Not unlike the feeling of Damian’s first solo mission. Something will be happening, and happening soon. He tries to push away the feeling, it’s likely just nerves. 

——————

It is on these trips that Benji realizes how young Damian is, Damian 9--going on 10. He is so skilled in so many areas but Benji finds himself mourning for the carefree childhood Damian could have had, that he doesn’t even know he could have had. He tries to provide it in his own ways, engaging Damian in games disguised as training, and he knows Talia does too, in these off-record trips. 

Talia tells him, casually, as they disembark in the city’s crowded outer ring—that she once took sabbatical here, long ago, back when she still pretended such things could be restful. Benji doesn’t ask what brought her then. He’s learned better than to reach for her past. He just nods and adjusts the bag on his shoulder and follows her through the noise.

They visit Dilli Haat on the second day. It’s colorful and humid, the kind of dense city heat that wraps around your spine like steam. Vendors stationed at every corner. Someone’s frying something that smells like it could power a small jet. Damian moves through the crowd with unsettling grace, never brushing shoulders, never bumping elbows, as if the chaos parts around him on instinct.

He pauses briefly at a paper-mâché birdhouse, hand hovering just over the lacquered glaze. He doesn’t ask for it. He doesn’t even look at Benji.

Benji buys it anyway, slipping a few folded bills into the vendor’s hand with barely a word. Talia, ever observant, distracts Damian with a nearby stall of live birds—ringnecks, squawking in bursts of indignation—and launches into a brief, unprovoked lecture on migratory patterns in arid climates.

They eat samosas in the shade. Benji, having just learned Tamil and wildly overestimating his fluency, orders dessert with ill-advised bravado and ends up with something that makes his eyes water. Damian finishes his portion and then most of Benji’s without blinking. Talia watches them both with a look that might almost pass for amusement.

It rains on the walk to the safehouse.

A soft, muggy downpour that dampens the backs of their necks and plasters curls to Damian’s forehead. He doesn’t complain. Neither does Talia. Benji almost does—but stops himself. There’s something peaceful in the heat and the noise and the weight of silence that settles over them as they walk. When they reach the safehouse, they’re soaked through, bags heavier, steps slower.

They eat mangoes with their hands in the kitchen, using mismatched bowls and the edge of a repurposed knife sheath as a peeler. Juice runs down their wrists. Damian swears he can taste the difference between Alphonso and Kesar. Talia raises a brow but lets him make his case, Benji knows she secretly agrees Benji offers a clumsy scientific justification that doesn’t quite land. Damian snorts. There’s laughter. Not loud. But real.

And for one impossibly fragile moment, Benji lets himself imagine that this is what normal looks like. Not peace, not really. But something adjacent. Something close enough to press against and remember later.

He catches himself before he says it. Before the word family slips into his thoughts without permission.

Because it isn’t. Not technically. This isn’t family. They’re not his. He’s not theirs. And yet—he finds himself moving as if he is. He finds himself watching Talia for signs of fatigue, correcting Damian’s posture mid-task, packing extra antiseptics without being told. He finds himself listening for the sound of their voices in other rooms, finds his hands making tea before they even ask for it.

He knows better than to name the shape of what they’ve built.

But in moments like this, mango juice on his fingers, laughter still echoing faintly in the hall, and the sound of rain soaking the windows—he can almost believe it has a name anyway.

Almost.

——————

The mission stretches just past a week—long enough for the edges of purpose to blur into routine, long enough that Damian stops keeping count of the days in terms of hours and begins instead to measure them by the sound of his own footsteps echoing through empty buildings, the weight of silence between League dispatches, the absence of familiar voices.

He completes the objectives without complication. Slips past guards. Gathers intel. Extracts key data nodes. He is underestimated by nearly everyone he encounters, his height and face offering him unintentional access. It wounds his pride—but only for a moment. Opportunity wins.

The assignment, near the end, shifts.

He receives the kill order two days before extraction.

No explanation. No elaboration. Just a name, a location, and the directive. It is not framed as a test. Not presented as some rite of passage. Just another task.

He does it. Of course he does it.

Not cleanly—but effectively. The man turns at the last second, sees his face. There’s a flicker of something in the man’s expression—not fear, not surprise, but resignation. As if he knew this was coming. As if he understood exactly what Damian was and what he’d been sent to do.

It’s over quickly. The man doesn’t scream. Damian doesn’t hesitate.

And yet.

When he’s leaving—fading into the crowds of a city too bright to notice blood—he carries something in his chest that doesn’t settle.

It isn’t regret. Not in the way Benji means when he talks about field casualties. Not in the way civilians mean when they talk about innocence.

It’s more the shape of something incomplete.

Something… missing.

He flies back alone.

And somewhere between the third security bypass and the last encrypted check-in, Damian realizes he’s counting down the minutes until he sees them again. His mother. Benji. Their quiet friction and sharper rhythms. The strange equilibrium the three of them manage to keep, even when it shouldn’t work.

He tells himself it’s just comfort. Familiarity. A return to predictable variables.

But when the jet door opens at the airstrip near their current location—a discreet compound in northern India—and he hears Benji’s voice first, whining about a busted relay like the fate of the world depends on it, followed by Talia’s unbothered reply that, yes, she already fixed it thirty minutes ago, he feels the tension in his chest ease in a way that doesn’t make sense.

He’s back before they expect him. Benji startles, glances up from his tools with a too-wide grin. “Hey! Look who didn’t die in a ditch. Want to tell me if I need to sanitize the medbay, or are we good?”

Damian shakes his head. “Uninjured.”

“Miraculous,” Benji mutters, and hands him a cup of tea before returning to whatever half-disassembled nightmare he’s debugging.

Talia doesn’t look up from her desk right away, but he sees the flicker in her gaze when she registers his presence. There is a moment, so brief it nearly disappears, where her posture softens—where he knows, with a certainty that should embarrass him, that she missed him too.

She doesn’t ask what happened.

She trusts him to tell her.

And that’s the problem.

Because she wouldn’t have minded. She’s not squeamish about blood. Death has always been part of the vocabulary she taught him—method, leverage, finality. The kill itself wouldn’t have unsettled her. If anything, she might have approved. Might have commended him for carrying it out without supervision. For getting the job done. But he didn’t tell her.

He didn't because the League told him to. Because protocol dictated secrecy. Because that’s how he’s been trained. But standing in the space they share—the too-small, too-temporary flat crowded with field gear and the scent of cardamom from Benji’s tea—he feels the weight of that lie like an error he hasn’t accounted for.

He doesn’t flinch when Benji claps a hand on his shoulder as he passes. He doesn’t answer when Talia finally asks, hours later, “Any trouble in the north?” Her voice is neutral. Calm.

“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” he replies, and the words taste metallic.

He keeps the rest of it to himself.

That night, he lies awake in his room, staring at the ceiling, remembering every movement of the kill in exacting detail—replaying angles, pressure, timing. He doesn’t write it down. That would be reckless. Evidence is liability. Benji would’ve said as much, even while looking at him with that quiet, careful worry he wears like a second skin.

But Benji wouldn’t have liked this. Damian knows that instinctively. He can hear it already, the way Benji might say it—not cruel, not angry, just… disappointed. Like something in him would fracture a little if he knew.

And it’s not that Damian regrets the act itself. It’s that he did it, and then returned to the two people he trusts most, and chose not to say a word. He doesn’t know how to explain that. Not in a way that won’t ruin something. He doesn’t know if mother would see it as disobedience or independence. If Benji would look at him differently. If he already does.

So he says nothing.

But he catches himself more and more in the coming days, pausing before decisions, adjusting his grip on his training knives, weighing whether force is needed at all. His thoughts sound a little less like Ra’s, a little less like doctrine. A little more like mother, balanced, and strategic, and caring. And sometimes—frustratingly—like Benji, cautious, flustered, always hoping there’s another way.

He doesn’t know who he’s becoming. Only that the version of himself who stood over that body and felt nothing… isn’t quite the one who came home.

Chapter Text

It’s too quiet, by Benji’s standards—no hiss of soldering irons, no midnight sword drills in the courtyard. Damian’s been out with Talia on a recon mission two days now, and without his running commentary or Talia’s clipped corrections, the compound feels off-kilter. Still. Balanced on the edge of something.

The medbay smells like antiseptic and metal, and for once, that’s oddly reassuring. Benji kneels on the cool stone floor, cross-legged, sleeves pushed up, inventory spread around him like a carefully arranged shrine to nervous energy. Gauze rolls, tourniquets, dermal glue, vials. Everything is sealed. Everything is clean. He runs through the checklist again, lips moving soundlessly. It’s his fourth time tonight. Maybe fifth. He’s lost count.

“Do you ever sleep before missions, or is this a nightly ritual?”

Benji looks up, startled. Kavi leans in the doorway, arms crossed, expression somewhere between amusement and concern.

“Sleep’s overrated,” Benji mutters. “Besides, this one’s supposed to be easy, right? Simple extraction. Local insurgents. Quick evac. Nobody dies.”

Kavi’s smile fades a little. “Nobody should die on our side. Doesn’t mean we stop caution.”

Benji’s hand stills over a dose of morphine. He looks down at it, frowns. “Yeah. Exactly.”

Benji hasn’t slept, not really — not since Ra’s called him down to the sanctum three nights ago, while the others were away, while no one was there to see the look on his face, or the words catch behind his teeth, or how fast his pulse jumped the second the firelight caught the edge of Ra’s’ blade and lit the space between them like a forge.

“There is an operative,” Ra’s said—not even looking up at first. “Aya. You know her.”

Benji had said nothing, which was already, somehow, the wrong answer.

“She is wavering. Not outwardly, not catastrophically, not yet. But I’ve seen this before. Sentiment, pride, fracture in loyalty, she will defect. Soon.”

Benji had blinked once, mouth dry, and that was when Ra’s turned toward him and smiled, slow, sharp, not kind.

“You will be on her mission team tomorrow,” he said. “If she survives the assignment, and proves disloyal, you will kill her.”

There had been no question in his tone. No room for confusion.

Aya isn’t kind to Benji.

She never has been.

She doesn’t like him. Doesn’t trust him. Doesn’t get him—and makes no effort to pretend otherwise. Even while using his help, even while he sews her up against protocol because she doesn’t want to do the paperwork for what she calls a small nick. 

She reminds him of Talia, in the cruel, cold way that heat sometimes lingers in things long after the flame has left, not because she tries to be like her, but because she can’t help it. Because something in the cut of her voice, the tilt of her eyes, the way she holds her knives like she’d sooner slit her own throat than let them fall, it echoes.

She is not warm. She is not safe. She is not grateful. And still, he wants her to live. Of course he does. He wants everyone to live.

Because that’s the kind of fool he is, the kind who walked willingly into the heart of a centuries-old assassin empire believing he could stay clean, that he could help without becoming complicit, that he could somehow be both their doctor and their conscience, like he was any kind of moral compass at all.

And maybe that should’ve been the moment he left. Maybe that should’ve been the moment he realized he was too soft for this world, too brittle, too human, too wrong—that his hands weren’t made for this kind of service, that the mask he kept trying to hold together was already slipping.

But he didn’t leave. Because Damian is here. Because Talia is here. Because they let him stay. Because they need him.

Or maybe it’s just because something inside him wants to be punished, wants to be tested, wants to hurt and break and bleed for a cause that makes no space for softness, and still, stupidly, tries to offer it anyway. Maybe he came here thinking he could redeem something. Maybe he stayed because he thought pain was proof of loyalty.

Maybe he thought if he suffered enough, he’d stop being afraid.

And now he is here.

Aya brushes past him in the prep bay, offers him the smallest glance, and says, “Don’t slow us down.”

And that’s it.

The mission is surgical.

In. Out. Four of them. Clean target. Low risk.

Benji stays back. Watches her. Every step, every pivot, every breath — waiting for something to justify what he’s been told to do.

Waiting for her to hesitate.

She doesn’t.

She’s perfect.

And then, the gunshot.

Short. High. Clean.

She goes down hard, a choked sound tearing out of her throat as blood fountains between her fingers, bright arterial red already soaking her leg.

He is at her side before anyone else moves.

“Aya. Hey. You’re okay. You’re okay, I’ve got you.”

“Shut up,” she grits out, and he would laugh if his chest weren’t cracking open from the inside.

“I’m trying to save your life,” he says, and it sounds stupid, too honest.

She doesn’t answer.

She is bleeding fast.

The wound is deep. Too deep. There’s no exit—he checks twice—and then he sees it. A flicker of something silver beneath the torn muscle. Not bone.

Metal. Fragment.

And in that moment, he pauses.

Just one second.

One small, awful, human second.

Because if it’s in a vein—if he seals it in—if it shifts—He hesitates.

And then—he moves. Flushes the wound. Packs. Closes. Compresses.

“You’re okay,” he’s saying. “You’re okay, you’re okay, just—please, just hold on, please—”

But her breathing’s gone ragged. Her grip slackens. Her eyes don’t meet his.

She goes still.

And he knows. He tries anyway.

Compressions. Airway. Desperate measures. He would have cut open his own chest if it meant shocking her heart with it.

But she is gone. She is gone, and he did not save her, and he did not kill her, and still—she is dead.

He walks back in silence. They let him. Maybe out of pity. Maybe out of discipline. Maybe because there is nothing left to say. The body is covered. Loaded.

He doesn’t go to the medbay.

He sits outside it. Back to the wall. Gloves still stained. Muscles locked.

He keeps seeing her face.

He keeps hearing the silence.

He keeps thinking—You chose to save her. And she died anyway.

Talia finds him there.

Much later. Quiet. Composed.

She crouches beside him, says nothing for a long while.

Then: “She’s dead.”

He nods.

“I wasn’t there,” she says. “That was intentional.”

He nods again.

“She wasn’t weak.”

“No,” he whispers. “She wasn’t.”

“And you didn’t kill her.”

“I didn’t save her either.”

And Talia stares at the far wall—distant, burning—and thinks of her father, and the fire, and the sick gleam in his eyes when he handed Benji back to her like a dull toy he no longer found amusing, and remembered 

“You always were better at pretending mercy was a move.”

She does not smile. “It is a move. And for now, one that keeps Damian learning. Alive. Focused.”

Ra’s had considered that. Then waved one lazy hand. “As you like. Keep the Brit. He bores me.”

She had dipped her head once. “Thank you.”

“But mark me, daughter — when sentiment fails, I will cut it out of you.”

Her gaze had been cold steel. “Then I suggest you pray it never does.”

She thinks of that now, watching Benji broken on the floor, guilt soaked into him deeper than blood.

And realizes Ra’s didn’t cut the sentiment out of her.

He cut it out of Benji.

And now it’s bleeding everywhere.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It’s the silence that does him in. Not the death. Not the guilt. Not even Ra’s, with his cold-blooded calculus and casual orders to kill. It’s the silence that follows. Aya’s body is gone. The team scattered. The mission scrubbed from record. And somehow, no one says a word. No rebuke. No praise. No accusation.

He walks through the compound like a shadow. The others nod. One claps his shoulder. Another hands him tea. No one asks how it happened.

They assume he did it.

And he lets them.

Because it’s easier that way. Easier than explaining that he didn’t pull the trigger. That he hesitated. That he tried, and it wasn’t enough. That he wanted her to live and that somehow makes it worse. He ends up in the medbay. Not to work. Just to sit. He stares at the cabinets. The shelves. The supplies he’s arranged a thousand times. He picks up a roll of gauze and unwinds it slowly, watching it fall into his lap like a line unraveling.

He thinks about Talia. The way she watched him on their last mission together, like she was waiting for him to prove something. Or fail to. The way her hand lingered an inch too long on his arm when she handed him the briefing packet, like she wasn’t sure if it was a goodbye.

He thinks about Damian. The way the kid had pulled a book from the medbay shelf one night and read beside him without saying a word. The way he’d made Benji taste his tea the week before and said, awkwardly, “You make it better.”

They don’t say things outright, not here. They don’t offer love. They offer routine. Protection. Space. Talia gives him fond silence instead of punishment. Damian gives him company instead of words. It’s more than Benji expected.

And still, it doesn’t feel like enough. Because they don’t see him, he thinks. Not the real him. Not the one who breaks down behind medbay curtains. Not the one who shakes every time a mission briefing includes children or hospitals or the word cleanse. Not the one who hides bruises from off book training and calls them clumsiness. They see someone useful. Someone tolerable.

But not someone permanent.

And he—God, he loves them.

He loves the boy who still asks him science questions at midnight. Loves the woman who slices men open without hesitation but brings him a clean shirt when he sweats through his own.

He loves them like family.

And he would die before he ever told them that.

Because he doesn’t think they’d want it.

They are League. Blood and loyalty and mission.

And he is… what? A medic with bad field scores. A man who saves people the League marks for death. A liability dressed as a lesson in control.

They’ve kept him this long. That’s something. But even that has an expiration date. The truth has been circling for weeks now, just beneath his skin, just out of reach. He isn’t meant to stay. He isn’t meant to survive this.

They gave him Aya’s mission. Told him to kill.

Then watched him fail.

Now, they’ve assigned him to this new op. Talia, Damian, and him. Small team. Minimal support.

And no med evac.

It’s a warning.

It’s a setup.

It’s the kind of mission where a misstep becomes a memory, and a lost agent becomes a footnote in a debriefing no one will cry over.

Benji breathes in.

And for the first time, it doesn’t hurt to imagine dying.

Because what else is left?

He can’t leave. Not yet. Not while Damian still looks at him like he expects answers. Not while Talia still says his name with tentative kindness.

But he can’t stay, either.

Not like this.

He’s not built to be their shield and their sin.

So maybe this is mercy. Maybe this is the cleanest way out.

If he dies in the field, it’s simple. No betrayal. No goodbye. Just blood and fire and silence. And they won’t have to carry him. Won’t have to decide when to let him go.

He’ll do it for them.

Like he always does.

Benji doesn’t sleep.

Chapter Text

Benji doesn’t sleep.

Not because he can’t. Because he won’t. Because if he does—if he slips for even a second—he’s afraid the weight of what’s coming will crush him before the sun even rises. He lies awake instead, watching the ceiling breathe in the dark, and pretends that stillness counts as rest. Pretends the quiet doesn’t scrape.

He tells himself it’s just another mission. Just another directive.

But he knows better. He’s worked with the League long enough to recognize the signs. The omission of backup. The lack of medical evac. The vague instructions wrapped in precision and threat. This isn’t a test. It’s a verdict.

And the truth—sharp and unrelenting—settles into his chest like a second set of ribs, tight and splintering: he doesn’t want to come back.

Not to the silent pain in Talia’s eyes. Not to the awful grief behind Damian’s. Not to a world where he has to keep stitching wounds he didn’t prevent, keep standing by while children become killers, and try—futilely—to be a good man in a place that punishes goodness like weakness.

He wants to come back to laughter. To morning tea rituals and Damian’s corrections about Latin declensions. To the small, incidental family they never named but almost became. But that’s a fantasy. And Benji is too old, too ruined, too brittle to believe in fantasies anymore.

The League doesn’t make room for softness. And neither, if he’s honest, does he. He was a mistake—some bug in the system that got overlooked too long. A medic in a war zone who thought he could save people without learning how to break them first.

He stares at the blade Talia gave him. Still unused. Still pristine. Still wrong in his hands.

Dawn leaks into the city like spilled gold and diesel fumes. Kathmandu hums alive around them, the streets already bustling with horns, heat, and the scent of fried dough. It’s so different from the League—louder, messier, unbearably alive. A place with too much heart to be cruel, and too much motion to stop for grief.

They move in silence. Talia takes the lead, spine straight, every step a weapon in waiting. Damian walks behind her, too quiet for nine, face unreadable, posture taut—already a shadow of the man they want him to be. The one Benji never wanted him to become.

Benji trails behind. One step off. Out of sync. Like a misaligned gear in a machine that would function better without him. A weak point. A flaw. A fuse already lit.

The mark is at the edge of the market. A handoff. Easy. But nothing is easy anymore.

Benji doesn’t like the way the crowd moves—too many people in the wrong rhythm. One man by the fruit stand lingers too long. A second adjusts his jacket at the wrong moment. A third is watching without blinking.

And then a fourth. A fifth.

“Five more,” Benji murmurs into the comms. “West approach. Armed.”

Talia answers, low and unbothered. “Maintain position.”

But the flare goes up.

Green. Wrong. Fast. Too bright.

And the world pivots.

Civilians scream. The market breaks apart like glass under pressure. One of the couriers pulls a knife—too close to Talia. The third man makes for Damian. Another moves toward Benji. There’s no time to assess, no time to breathe.

And Benji—Benji sees it all happening again.

He sees Talia glance over her shoulder, just half a second too late. He sees Damian’s foot shift, off-balance, hesitation flickering across his face. The boy is reaching for a weapon, but the angle’s wrong. The cover is gone.

It’s déjà vu and death all at once.

If he thinks, he’ll freeze.

So he doesn’t.

He runs.

Not toward safety. Toward them. Toward the danger. Toward the edge of the mission he knows he can’t walk back from. Because he remembers the last time he hesitated, the last time his hands shook, the last time someone bled out while he chose wrong.

He doesn’t freeze this time. He chooses.

He shouts something—garbled, guttural, a command or a warning, he doesn’t even know—and throws himself into the open.

He makes himself the target.

It’s instinct, or maybe reflex, or maybe some pitiful attempt at atonement that’s been building for weeks, months, years. A desperate bargain: Take me instead.

And it works.

The attackers redirect. The threat pulls from Talia and Damian to him, and in that flickering breath of distraction, Damian slips away. Talia follows. They vanish into the chaos like they were never there.

Benji stays.

He doesn’t look back.

He doesn’t need to.

Because this—this—is the one thing he knows how to do. Not fighting. Not killing. Not leading.

Atoning.

He’s been doing it his whole life. Quietly. Stupidly. Willingly. And maybe this time, it’ll mean something.

Maybe this time, it’ll be enough.

---------------------------------------------------

Benji runs.

Through the smoke, through the sound of cracking glass and metal folding under panic. His lungs burn. His muscles scream. But all he can think is: Don’t stop. Don’t let it happen again.

He ducks into the alley—narrow, wet, cornered by rusted stairwells and walls scarred by old graffiti. A dead end.

They follow him.

Of course they do.

He counts three—maybe four—boots hitting the pavement behind him. Fast. Professional. Trained. Not thugs. Not freelancers. League men, their own. Or League-wannabes with something to prove. Either way, they’ll be thorough.

Benji slides behind a stack of crates. Catches his breath in shallow sips. He’s not armed the way they are. He has the blade. The one he never uses. The one that feels like a betrayal every time he even thinks about unsheathing it. Stinging pain in his muscles. 

But for once, the pain is clarity.

Because this—this panic, this madness—feels more like freedom than anything he’s known in months.

He can survive today. He can kill to do it. He can follow the mission, go home, face the silence, and live with what he’s becoming.

But he doesn't want to.

He can't. .

Benji’s not made for this. Not the League. Not the cold. Not the calculus of acceptable loss.

If he goes back, he’ll lose himself. Or worse—he’d hurt them. Talia. Damian. Just by staying. And got he loves them fuck he loves them, but they have love themselves and it doesnt include him. It can’t. 

He doesn’t reach for the blade.

He doesn’t fight.

He just breathes in, once.

They don’t shout demands. They don’t hesitate. The first man rounds the corner and barely blinks before lunging.

Benji steps wide, blade up—not to kill, but to stop. He’s always been good at slowing things down, stalling just long enough to find another way. But not today. Not here. The man crashes into him, heavier, taller, a blur of fists and metal. Benji takes the first blow to the ribs, stumbles, counterattacks.

The knife slices skin—his, not theirs.

Too slow.

Another man grabs him from behind. He throws an elbow, catches a jaw, spins, slashes—blood splatters the alley wall in a long arc. Someone screams. Might be him. Might not.

It becomes chaos.

Grimy. Close. Intimate. The kind of fight that leaves everyone marked. By the time it’s over, Benji is on his knees.

Breathing like the world’s ending. Bleeding from too many places to count. Blade gone. Hands shaking. One eye already swelling shut. His mind is fog, filled with the echo of a child’s name he didn’t shout loud enough.

One of them stands over him now.

Face blank. Expression unreadable. Efficient. League.

“This is the part,” the man says softly, almost regretful, “where you stay dead.”

Benji almost laughs. Almost.

Because he knows.

This isn’t punishment. This is policy.

They can’t have him in the way anymore. He knows too much. Cares too much. Fails too openly. And worst of all—he’s loyal to the wrong people.

He tilts his head back against the alley wall. Closes his eyes.

He thinks of the boy with his mother’s fire and his father’s silence.

He thinks of mornings. Tea. Books with broken spines. A smudge of paint on his shirt he never washed off.

He thinks—maybe this is better.

And then—

Gunfire.

One, two, three quick pops. Controlled. Professional.

Then silence.

When the smoke clears, Benji is gone.

And all that’s left behind is a blood trail that ends in nothing.

------------------------

Talia arrives to fire and blood.

The alley’s been burned out—League sweep protocol. But the fire’s wrong. Too precise. The ground too clean. No body. Just a long, dark smear across the courtyard. A few charred scraps near the temple wall.

The local team confirms it. “Nothing left.”

She says nothing.

She walks the alley three times. Kneels by the blood trail. Finds no trace of his kit. No blade. No signal.

And no Benji.

He is simply—gone.

A medic. Not a soldier. Not an asset.

She remembers how he always hesitated after patching wounds—eyes lingering, hands soft. How he refused to watch executions. How he spent nights awake teaching Damian how to disinfect lacerations as if that would save him from this life. How he carried mint tea in his med bag, as if comfort were part of triage.

He was soft.

And soft things crumble when no one is there.

She stands.

“Burn the perimeter.”

They do.

Damian doesn’t cry. Not in front of her.

But that night, in her chambers, he slams his fist into the wall.

“You didn’t look for him.”

Talia doesn’t flinch. “There was no signal.”

“There was no body.”

“He was bleeding out. He ran. There was nothing left.”

Damian rounds on her. “You think he’d just vanish? He was--he is a medic. He’d leave something behind. A mark. A message. He wouldn’t disappear unless he wanted to.”

Talia’s silence says too much.

“He thought we didn’t want him.” Damian’s voice fractures. “He thought we—he thought you—saw him as broken.”

“He was broken,” she whispers.

Damian’s eyes fill. He doesn’t wipe them.

“He was better than us.”

She says nothing. Because it’s true.

That night, Damian pulls the blanket up higher than usual, over his ears. Pretends he’s just tired. Pretends the weight behind his eyes is just exhaustion, not grief calcifying into something permanent

In the quiet, Talia finds his mug tucked beneath a cot in the infirmary. The ceramic is chipped. The bottom still smells faintly of mint. A comfort he always made for others, never himself.

She holds it.

And, for the first time in years, she weeps.

Not loudly.

But deeply. Something unspoken inside her has wavered.

They never recover the body.

The League files it as a loss: Benji Dunn, field medic, failed to adapt. Deceased.

Talia doesn’t dispute it.

Damian stops asking after him. But neither of them ever walk past the infirmary again.

What they don’t know—what they can’t—is this:

Benji didn’t die in that alley.

The League weren’t the only ones watching.

By the time Talia arrived, the scene had already been cleared. Body gone. Blood cleaned. Gear extracted. He woke up hours later under bright white lights, shoulder stitched, ribs stabilized.

“Mr. Dunn,” someone said. “You’ve been off the radar for some time.”

He opens his eyes. 

He wakes up wrong.

Fluorescent light behind his eyelids. Clean sheets. Not clean like laundry—clean like bleach, like nothing ever happened here.

He was supposed to be dead.

Benji lies still, body screaming in quiet pulses. There’s tape across his ribs. Something cold in his shoulder. He can’t feel his feet. That might be normal. That might be blood loss.

He blinks once.

Then again.

A man is sitting beside the bed.

Not League. Not anyone he knows. Not anyone, really. Just a suit and a clipboard and eyes like the lights that never turn off.

“You’re awake,” the man says, like it’s an inconvenience. “Good.”

Benji doesn’t speak. He can’t. His mouth feels full of cotton and smoke. His brain’s still in the alley, still bleeding out against the wall. Still letting go.

“You were dying,” the man continues. Calm. Clinical. “We intervened. Your injuries were extensive. You won’t run marathons anytime soon, but you’ll live.”

Benji lets his head roll to the side. Sees a tray. A file. A black envelope.

The man notices. Taps it once.

“You have a choice,” he says, with the flat finality of someone who already knows which one will be made. “You can leave. We’ll give you a name. You’ll rot in some prison for the rest of your life. You can forget everything.”

Benji swallows glass.

“And the other?” he whispers.

The man’s mouth twitches like a smile, but doesn’t quite get there.

“You open the envelope.”

Benji doesn’t move. Doesn’t ask what’s inside. Doesn’t ask who we is.

He already knows the answers won’t matter.

“You open it,” the man says, “and it means you accept. All of it. No one will thank you. No one will save you. But you’ll make sure someone else gets to live. You’ll join us.”

Benji stares at the ceiling like it might fall on him. It wouldn’t be the worst thing. He’s so tired. Not from the blood loss. Not even from the pain. From being.

From having hands that never do enough. From watching soft things get carved into weapons. From waking up.

“I wasn’t… supposed to,” he says, or maybe thinks. He’s not sure if the words come out right. “I wasn’t—meant to come back.”

The man says nothing.

Just sits. Waiting.

Benji stares at the envelope.

He doesn’t want it. Doesn’t want anything. He had his ending. He’d earned it. Quiet, ugly, alone—but final. And now some stranger has dragged him back into the narrative and handed him another role like he’s a prop that won’t break right.

He laughs once again—short, joyless. “And what, exactly, do you people do?”

The man smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “We save the world. Quietly. At cost.”

Benji lets the silence stretch until it snaps. His hand shakes a little as he reaches for the envelope—not from fear, but something closer to memory. Trauma wrapped in routine. A habit of being chosen last for things that kill first.

“You know,” he says, fingers resting on the seal, “I died in an alleyway today.”

The man nods. “We noticed.”

Benji breaks the seal.

Inside: contract. Oath. Burning bridge.

He reads every word.

Then signs.

Not out of hope. Not out of patriotism—he’s not even American and god knows how and why he’s here. Not even survival.

Out of spite. Because if the League didn’t want him, and the world didn’t need him, then maybe he’d give himself to the one thing cruel enough to pretend it could use him. Maybe “saving the world” wouldn’t fix anything.

The pen drops after the last letter.

He doesn’t look at the man again.

Doesn’t ask what happens next.

He just lies back down and stares at the light like it’s something he deserves, wishes it’s a different one. 

But If the world is going to break him, the least he can do is bleed where they’ll notice.

Chapter Text

IMF Tech Department, Three Months Post-Extraction:

Benji hadn’t expected the fluorescent lights to feel this judgmental.

He shifts uncomfortably in his chair, pulling his sleeves down over his wrists, as if the fabric can muffle the weight of his own skin. The hum of the server room buzzes just high enough to mimic tinnitus. He prefers it to silence. Silence is where the memories live.

“Dunn,” someone says—his supervisor, probably. Generic tie, clean shave, the kind of man who wouldn’t last ten seconds in a League ambush but somehow outranks Benji because he filed the correct paperwork. “That code recompile on the Riyadh satellites?”

“Done,” Benji mutters. He keeps his eyes on his screen. “And updated. Next time the Saudis try to ping us, we’ll just redirect them to a goat yoga livestream.”

The man snorts. “You’re weird, Dunn.”

Benji grins without teeth. “Cheers.”

He doesn’t mention he wrote the redirect protocol in under five minutes while suppressing a memory of disarming landmines barefoot at age seventeen. Doesn’t explain that his nervous banter isn’t actually a personality—it’s triage.

———

Tech, they told him, is where he belongs.

“You’re gifted,” the recruiter had said, watching Benji toggle four encrypted channels with one hand while setting up a VPN maze with the other. “Brains like yours are wasted in the field.”

Benji had nodded. Smiled. Signed the papers. He hadn’t told them that he’d trained to use a scalpel on arteries smaller than twine. That he could amputate, cauterize, and carry someone half his weight uphill for forty minutes without breaking pace.

He hadn’t told them that he stopped being a medic because it stopped being enough.

Now he monitors mission feeds like a glorified babysitter and waits for something to go wrong—except here, when things go wrong, they send a recovery team. In the League, they just sent a cleanup crew.

Benji keeps his past buried under seventeen layers of misdirection. Fake birth records, forged credentials, an accent he occasionally softens just to seem “normal.” He tells them he grew up in Brighton. That he studied engineering. That he got recruited after a government internship.

It’s all very plausible. None of it’s true.

He dreams in smoke and foreign languages. He wakes with old bruises screaming under new scars. His hands twitch for weapons he hasn’t touched in months. And still, every time he walks through IMF headquarters, he feels like a fraud.

There are no assassins here. No blades. No Lazarus pits. Just suits, guns, protocols. He should be relieved. Instead, he’s restless. Like something vital got left behind.

In Nanda Parbat, Damian breaks his own sparring record and doesn’t comment when the younger recruits cheer. He doesn’t talk much anymore, not even to Talia. Not unless he has to.

His movements are sharper. Harder. As if precision could compensate for the absence he refuses to name. In training, he chooses older, stronger opponents. He lets them bruise him. Bleed him. He never says why.

He doesn’t have to.

Everyone knows.

The boy who used to hover near the infirmary for “no reason” is now the one who doesn’t flinch when his shoulder dislocates mid-fight. Talia watches from the shadows, lips tight. She never says Benji’s name aloud.

But when she sees Damian walk away from a spar with blood on his collar and glass in his eyes, she wonders if his grief would be better handled outloud. Then she kicks herself of the ridiculous notion. 

Benji writes code like penance. Every line perfect. Every system he fortifies a small apology. Every firewall another layer between who he is and who he used to be.

He doesn’t talk to people unless he has to. Declines group lunches. Avoids eye contact in elevators. Once, someone tries to make small talk about rugby and he nearly snaps a pen in half.

He misses Damian’s voice. Misses the way Talia used to let her silence curl around him without judgment. Here, even the silence feels artificial.

Sterile.

He keeps Talia's knife in the deepest layer of his locker—sealed in a lead case, password-locked, hidden inside a casing labeled “Personal Cooling Fan Parts.”

He opens it only once.

Not to use.

Just to check it still exists.

Six months in, the headaches start.

Benji tells himself it’s the screens. But deep down, he knows it’s guilt. He should have stayed. Should have died. Should have—

No. He stops the thought. Every time. Instead, he files for a field comms role. Just once. Just to see. 

It gets denied in under an hour.

Psych profile: “Avoidant, hypervigilant, inappropriate humor masking elevated anxiety. Not field-cleared at this time.”

Benji laughs for a full minute.

Then he goes back to running diagnostics.

In Nanda Parbat, Talia walks past the old infirmary. Pauses. Stares. The cot Benji used to sleep on is gone. Burned, maybe. Or stored. No one told her.

The mug he used—chipped ceramic, League crest half-scratched off—sits in her private quarters. She tells herself it’s there by accident. She tells herself she keeps it to remind Damian what failure costs.

She doesn’t tell herself it’s because she misses him.

At IMF HQ, Benji finds a rhythm.

Sort of.

He becomes the guy who can crash a satellite feed in under thirty seconds and reboot it in twenty. The guy who leaves Post-It notes on unsecured files with snarky comments like “Imagine if I were hostile. Fix this.” The guy who never takes vacation days and keeps a flask of ginger tea concentrate under his desk like a Victorian ghost.

They call him eccentric.

He lets them.

Better that than the truth: that he has nothing else. That all his softness—the part that once bled and bent for others—is now locked behind League conditioning and too many regrets.

He keeps thinking: maybe one day Damian will show up. Maybe he’ll hack the IMF servers just to say I know where you are. Maybe Talia will send a message encoded in League syntax.

Maybe someone will remember him.

But they don’t, and he did accidentally fake his death so maybe it’s expected. 

And he tells himself that’s good.

It means they’re safe.

In Nanda Parbat, Damian stands in the training courtyard as the sky darkens. He’s alone. Shirtless. Bruised. The edge of his blade trembles only slightly.

“He’s not coming back,” a voice says behind him.

Talia.

He doesn’t turn.

“I know,” he says. Voice like gravel.

Talia says nothing more. Just stands beside him in silence.

Together, they watch the moon rise.

Benji, alone in a supply closet, breathes through a panic attack. It’s triggered by a sound—someone closing a case too sharply. Too loud. Too familiar.

His vision tunnels. His throat closes. For a moment, he’s back in the League vaults, surrounded by smoke and fire and the promise of mission before mercy.

He presses his forehead to the wall until the shaking stops. Then he files another request. This one simpler: No field deployment. Permanent tech designation.

It gets approved.

He doesn’t laugh this time. 

———

The Vatican mission was, on paper, clean.

Benji tells himself that as he calibrates the uplink for the surveillance overrides. Just another extraction. In, out, job done. He’s seated in an IMF tech van that smells like plastic stress and burnt coffee, staring at twelve screens and pretending that his palms aren’t sweating through his gloves.

He’s good at this. That’s what they say. Whiz kid. Backroom miracle. Rewrote an entire telecom protocol to fake a cardinal’s retinal pattern in under three minutes.

Still, his stomach twists.

Because this kind of operation—elite agents going undercover in cassocks and latex masks, tiptoeing into one of the most secure places on Earth—is familiar.

Painfully familiar.

He’s done this before. Not with latex. With blood. And no one came back with clean hands.

Benji swallows, eyes flicking across the feed. There’s Ethan Hunt, all polite deflection and tight smiles, moving like someone built of instinct and guilt. Luther’s voice buzzes calmly through the comms, measured, focused. Zhen leans against a support wall, checking the mission clock.

He’s the only one not physically there. Because of course he isn’t. He should be of the mind that’s a good thing. 

He’s the tech guy.

And tech guys don’t get their hands dirty.

Except when they do.

He disables the external CCTV for exactly twenty-three seconds. Long enough for Ethan and Zhen to swap into their disguises behind the Vatican columns, long enough to scrub their shadows from existence.

He’s done this before. For the League, once. Different names. Different gods. Same silence.

In the old days, the League wouldn’t have used fake masks. They would’ve slit throats. Posed as corpses. Left nothing to decode. They wouldn’t have used codes at all.

Benji flinches when Ethan smiles at him through the camera, just before ducking into the catacombs.

Not a mean smile. Just polite. Confident. Familiar.

It reminds him of another smile. A smaller one. Green eyes that blinked up at him mid-dissection of a frog, deadpan and too old for their age.

“You’re doing that wrong,” Damian had said. Seven years old. Judging his frog technique.

And later, when the laughter had come—a rare and warm thing—it had been sharp and startled. Like joy was foreign.

Benji stares at the feed until it dissolves into static. Swallows it down.

He taps in another line override. Breathes.

It’s routine.

Then why are his fingers shaking?

Luther’s voice cuts in: “Benji, we need eyes inside the reliquary hall. Can you give me five seconds of blackout on Camera 11?”

“Yep, just… one second—uh, there.” His voice sounds too bright. Like tin.

Luther doesn’t notice. “Perfect. We’re in.”

The window flickers. Ethan’s silhouette glides past rows of gold and velvet.

Benji exhales.

Still here.

Still not bleeding.

The mission succeeds.

They get Davian. No civilian casualties. Minimal complications. Ethan even compliments the uplink afterward. Zhen nods at him once, like he’s passed some test. Luther slaps his shoulder.

Benji smiles, cracks a joke—something stupid about cassocks and Italian fiber optics.

Everyone laughs.

It hits him like a backhand.

He hasn’t heard laughter like that since the League.

It’s the first time anyone’s laughed at his jokes in years.

And it makes him want to vomit.

He excuses himself, fast. Says he has to “run final debrief compression.” Locks the van door. Breathes through his mouth. His throat burns.

He remembers another aftermath. A different op. Standing in a cave in Tibet, wrapping gauze around a dying boy’s leg. The boy had asked if he was going to live. Benji had lied. The boy didn’t make it. No one laughed that time.

When he finally stumbles into the safehouse hours later, the others are already sleeping or debriefing. Ethan nods at him from the kitchenette, offering a quiet “good job today.”

Benji nods back. Tries to meet his eyes. Fails. Ethan is kind. Too kind. And Benji knows what happens to kind people.

They get buried.

He dreams that night.

Of laughter in the dark. A child’s voice asking about mitosis. Blood on his gloves that never comes off. A mango slice, untouched. Damian, eight years old, eyes hard.

“You left.”

Benji wakes up gasping.

The next day, the report is logged. The mission archived. Another success for the IMF. Another clean extraction. Another lie.

Because somewhere inside himself, Benji knows: he killed something yesterday.Not a person. Not a target. A possibility.

The possibility that he could ever be normal again.

Later, when Luther offers him a drink and Ethan asks if he wants to join the next mission briefing, he says no. Too quickly.

He’s not one of them. He can’t be. If they knew—really knew—what he used to do, who he used to be…

They’d never let him near a comm again. So he locks that part of himself away. The League. The missions. The blood.

And instead, he becomes what they want:

Benji Dunn. Quirky. Brilliant. Tech-only. A good man with no past.

But alone in the server room, long after everyone’s gone, he whispers something to the dark:

“I miss you guys."

And no one answers.

Because no one can.

Not anymore.

—————-

Ethan’s first impression of the tech—Benji Dunn, newly cleared, provisional duty only—is that he’s sharp.

Quick-talking, weirdly specific, and visibly running on caffeine and nerves, but sharp.

He works fast. Speaks faster. But doesn’t ramble. Everything has a purpose, an edge of dry wit threading through the stress.

Ethan’s worked with dozens of tech agents. Most are brilliant. Most want to be in the field and won’t shut up about it.

Benji is different. He doesn’t want to be seen. He just wants them to live.

“Camera 14 is on a four-second delay,” Benji mutters over the line. “Avoid the northeast corridor unless you want to be canonized for idiocy.”

Zhen smirks.

Luther grunts. “Copy that.”

Ethan glances once at the live monitor feed. He watches the flicker of looping footage in the northeast wing and nods slightly to himself. The kid’s good. Like, worryingly good.

Back in the van, Benji peels off his gloves to type faster. He doesn’t notice Ethan watching him through the mirrored feed. He doesn’t see how Ethan frowns—not suspicious, just curious—as if trying to work him out.

The tension in Benji’s shoulders. The way he flinches at loud sounds. The split-second pause when Luther jokes about getting caught in priest robes.

It’s subtle.

But Ethan notices.

Benji doesn’t laugh at that joke.

He only pretends to.

They move into the infiltration stage. Ethan and Zhen enter in full disguise, bypassing the guards with ease. The camera loops hold. The interference Benji is sending out is surgical.

And still—Ethan hears his voice hitch.

Benji’s breathing changes.

Not enough for anyone else to notice. But Ethan does.

It’s the sound of someone keeping it together by force.

Benji disables the final security node. “Six minutes. Make it poetic.”

His voice is light.

But Ethan, mid-mission, feels something else flicker at the edge of it.

Fear? No.

Grief.

He wants to ask—how long have you been doing this? But now isn’t the time.

There’s something about Benji that reminds him of someone freshly stitched. Like he’s holding himself closed.

Like someone broke him once, and he’s made peace with the wound, but not the scar.

Ethan watches him laugh with the team, watches how fast he leaves afterward, like it costs him something. It’s not unusual. Even field agents get weird after ops. Adrenaline does strange things.

But Ethan doesn’t buy it. There’s something else there. He files it away quietly. That night, when the others are unwinding, Ethan finds Benji alone outside, standing near the edge of the mission safehouse courtyard.

No comms, no screens. Just air.

Ethan steps out. “You alright?”

Benji startles slightly. “Oh—yeah. Fine. Just, um… recalibrating. Mentally. You know. Like a human firewall.”

Ethan leans against the railing beside him. “You did good. Just wanted to say that.”

Benji doesn’t answer for a second. Then: “It’s easier when I’m not… in it.”

“In what?”

Benji waves vaguely toward the world. “The noise. People. The rest of it.”

Ethan doesn’t push.

He just nods.

Then: “If you ever want to be more than tech-only, you’ve got the instincts.”

Benji blinks at him. Once. Hard.

Then forces a smile. “That’s flattering. But I think I’m good right here. Behind the curtain.”

His eyes, though, flicker. Not with pride.

With fear.

And something else.

Ethan knows the look.

It’s the same one he saw in the mirror for years after Julia.

After Benji leaves, Ethan lingers.

Watches the empty spot where he stood.

He doesn’t know what Benji’s story is.

But he knows this: whatever it is, it’s not over.

Not by a long shot.

Chapter Text

IMF Headquarters, Four Months Post-Extraction

1. Luther brings him coffee.

The first time it happens, Benji thinks it’s a mistake.

He’s halfway through recalibrating the Geneva satellite relay, eyes bloodshot, a half-eaten protein bar on his desk, and two browser tabs open to “Medieval Encryption Ciphers Used in Monastic Orders”—when a paper cup appears beside his keyboard.

Hot. Black. Exactly how he takes it. He glances up, startled. Luther’s already walking away.

“Fuel,” the man grunts without looking back.

Benji stares at the cup like it might explode. He waits a full sixty seconds before touching it, just in case there’s been some catastrophic confusion and the real recipient shows up, furious about their missing caffeine.

No one comes.

The coffee is strong, slightly over-brewed, and scalding. It tastes like war and comfort.

Benji drinks all of it.

The next morning, it happens again.

No comment. No explanation.

Just coffee.

Benji doesn’t thank him. Doesn’t know how. Instead, he writes a subroutine that shaves 1.2 seconds off the satellite handover delay and labels it L.STICKELL_PING_BOOST in the codebase.

He doesn’t think Luther notices.

He’s wrong.

------------------------

2. Ethan asks for help.

Benji’s in the server vault, wrist-deep in a cluster of heat sinks, when someone knocks.

Knocks. As if people do that in IMF black zones.

It’s Ethan.

Benji nearly drops his screwdriver. “Shouldn’t you be… detonating a jetliner in reverse or something?”

Ethan smiles, that slow, polite half-smile that makes Benji feel both seen and terrifyingly visible. His voice is warm and even. “I’ve got an upload issue. Briefing file won’t sync to the Geneva relay.”

Benji raises an eyebrow. “And IT couldn’t help?”

Ethan shrugs. “They said I should ask you.”

Benji stares. This is absurd. He’s not even cleared for direct briefings. And yet—

“I could, um. Look at it.” He clears his throat. “Might take a bit.”

Ethan nods, unbothered. “Mind if I stay?”

“…Why?”

Ethan looks at him. Not through him—at him. “I figure I should understand how the wizard behind the curtain works.”

Benji’s hands hesitate mid-keystroke.

He doesn’t answer. Just scoots over and opens a second terminal.

They work in silence. Ethan stands a little too close. Not in a threatening way—just present. Intent. Benji pretends not to notice the warmth of him, the way he smells faintly like smoke and clean linen.

He fixes the issue in five minutes. Ethan stays the whole time.

And when he leaves, he says, “Thanks, Benji,” in that voice, low and sincere, and it lodges in Benji’s chest like a splinter.

The next time Ethan needs something, he asks for Benji by name.

Benji tells himself it means nothing. He doesn’t fully believe it.

--------------------

3. Luther sits beside him.

No one sits in Benji’s workspace.

It’s an unspoken rule, like the quiet in a hospital at midnight. He occupies the far-left desk in the Tech Wing’s bunker room. Two monitors. A privacy screen. A drawer full of off-brand antacids and one very sharp, very illegal knife.

People pass. They don’t linger.

Then one afternoon, Luther sits.

No warning. No fanfare. Just drops into the second rolling chair, opens a laptop, and starts typing.

Benji glances sideways. “Did I do something?”

“Nope.”

“You’re… here.”

“Yep.”

“…Why?”

Luther grunts. “Trying something.”

Benji blinks. “What kind of something?”

Luther doesn’t answer. Just hands him a second coffee.

They sit in silence for an hour.

Benji types faster than he has in days.

He thinks of the way Ethan leaned against the server rack. Thinks of the look on his face—curious, a little amused, oddly gentle.

Then he erases the thought. Keeps typing.

4. Ethan lingers after briefings.

At first, it’s subtle. Everyone else clears out, and Ethan just… doesn’t.

He asks Benji questions. Not about tech. About him.

Where did he learn to code like that? (Benji dodges.)

Has he ever considered field certification? (Benji lies. Says no.)

Does he sleep? (Benji says yes. That’s the biggest lie of all.)

But Ethan never pushes. Never pries.

Just listens.

Sometimes he leans forward when Benji talks, elbows on knees, chin tilted just so. Like the sound of Benji’s voice is something worth paying attention to. Like the rhythm of Benji’s thoughts is interesting. Important.

Benji doesn’t know what to do with that.

Kindness, in the League, was frequently a currency. A setup. A trap.

But Ethan doesn’t want anything. Not really.

Except maybe for Benji to stay alive.

And somehow, that’s worse.

5. Luther takes him shopping.

Benji’s bleach job is born from desperation and a two-for-one sale at CVS.

The black dye—League-standard, mission-issue, identity-obscuring—has long since grown out in uneven patches. It looks less “mysterious vigilante” and more “malnourished raccoon.”

So he bleaches it, and cuts.

By himself.

In a safehouse bathroom, using gloves pilfered from the medkit and a mirror too small to reflect the damage.

It comes out bright.

Too bright.

He looks… soft. Exposed. The next day, Luther raises an eyebrow.

“No more goth phase?”

Benji shrugs. “Dye ran out.”

Later that week, Luther corners him in the corridor. “You doing laundry today?”

“…Yes?”

“Good. We’re going shopping.”

Benji blinks. “I have shirts.”

“You have three shirts. One of them has a hole the size of Texas.”

Benji frowns. “It’s a strategic hole.”

Luther doesn’t even dignify that with a response. Just hauls him into his car and drives to a quiet outlet store outside Langley.

They don’t talk much.

Benji buys four new shirts. Neutral colors. Soft cotton. Nothing with bloodstains.

Luther buys socks and one horrifying Hawaiian shirt, which he insists is for “undercover beach missions.” Benji doesn’t ask.

On the drive back, Luther lets Benji pick the music.

He picks cello concertos. They don’t talk about it.

Later that week, Ethan walks past him in the hallway, does a double-take, and says, “New shirt?”

Benji glances down. “Yeah.”

Ethan gives him that smile again. “Looks good.”

And Benji short-circuits just a little.

--------------

+1. 

It’s after a mission.

Low stakes. Just a surveillance job. Ethan in and out of a black-market auction with a camera pen and Luther on overwatch.

Benji patched comms from home base. Nothing fancy. Just enough to keep the signal stable in the mountains.

They finish early. It goes smoothly. Unnaturally smooth.

Which is why Benji panics when Ethan shows up at his door three hours later.

He knocks. Like a normal person.

Benji opens it in sweatpants and bare feet, bleached hair still damp from the shower.

“Hey,” Ethan says, holding up a paper bag. “I owe you dinner.”

Benji blinks. “You don’t.”

“I’m doing it anyway.”

He pushes inside like it’s no big deal.

Benji’s safehouse or just house he supposes, is exactly what the IMF gave him: a converted storage unit with a hot plate, one plant (Luther’s), and a bunk that still smells faintly of military disinfectant.

Ethan pretends not to notice. Just opens the bag and pulls out Thai food. Extra rice. Ginger tea. No onions.

He remembered. Of course he did.

They eat in silence for a while.

Benji stares at him.

Then down at the food.

Then back at Ethan.

And something in him—fragile, quiet, long-hidden—uncoils.

He swallows.

Then says, quietly, “I bought a laundry hamper.”

Ethan smiles. Something softer than usual. Warmer.

“Progress.”

Benji huffs a laugh. “Don’t tell Luther. He’ll gloat.”

Ethan raises his takeout box like a toast. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

And Benji—still bruised, still guarded, still full of ghosts—clinks his own carton gently against Ethan’s.

He feels… present.

And possibly, if he lets himself admit it—

A little bit wanted.

Later that night, when Ethan leaves, Benji locks the door. Stands there for a long moment, and goes to bed.

-----------

It’s nearly midnight when Ethan pulls up outside his apartment and doesn’t get out of the car.

The engine ticks. The takeout bag rustles where it’s crumpled in the passenger seat. His fingers rest lightly on the steering wheel, but he’s not really paying attention to the street or the silence or the keys. 

He’s still thinking about Benji.

Not the mission. Not the code. Not the fact that Benji rerouted three encrypted comm lines while eating dry cereal and humming Bach. Not even the way he managed to predict a data leak two minutes before it happened, just from noticing a half-second delay in uplink response time.

Ethan had expected brilliance. Luther warned him. “Don’t underestimate Dunn,” he’d said.

No, what’s stuck in Ethan’s head isn’t brilliance.

Ethan exhales, staring through the windshield.

There’s something about Benji—something Ethan hasn’t quite pinned down.

He’s sharp, yes. Brilliant. But there’s a wariness to him, too. Something in his posture, the slight flinch when someone speaks too loudly, the way he always sits with his back to a wall.

He’s carrying something.

Something old. Heavy. Private.

Ethan recognizes the shape of it. That haunted stillness.

It reminds him of himself, years ago, after Prague. After Nyah.

But Benji’s still reaching. That’s the part that gets Ethan. Despite whatever’s in his past—whatever shadows he’s learned to live with—Benji hasn’t shut the door.

He’s still trying.

And God help him, Ethan wants to see what happens if that door opens further.

Not professionally. Not strategically. Just—wants to.

He doesn’t know what that means.

He’s not the kind of man who entertains want for very long. Not seriously. Not since Julia. A wound so fresh and expected. 

And yet.

There’s a moment stuck in his head, looping quietly on repeat: Benji in a too-soft t-shirt, hair messy from the shower, blinking at Ethan like he’d expected the world to be cruel and hadn’t yet decided if this was the exception.

Something about that expression—

Ethan scrubs a hand down his face.

It’s nothing.

He puts the car in park. Grabs the empty bag. Heads inside.

He’ll think about it later.

Or maybe he won’t.

Either way, Ethan knows one thing for certain.

He wants Benji Dunn alive.

Not just because he’s useful. Not just because he’s clever.

But because he’s Benji.

And that’s starting to feel like reason enough.

-------------------------

IMF Headquarters, Five Months Post-Extraction

Benji gets restless easily, perhaps that’s why he did so decently for himself at the League—the constant willingness to do things. He finds it very hard to focus on just one thing, or maybe that’s what he’s telling himself to diminish the fact that he’s gone to management three separate times this week for permission forms.

Permission forms for field training.

And yes, it was only a month ago he’d asked for permanent tech designation, but hey, people change. And maybe the psych evaluation got to him a bit. And maybe Ethan had a bit of an influence—but the man hasn’t even been at base for at least five weeks so really that’s irrelevant. (His absence totally has no influence either.) And well, look—he’d gotten used to the friendly faces, but he knows from their extensive reputation Ethan and Luther are usually assigned around the world on external operations, ergo: not near him and out in the field. And does it make him feel a bit pathetic that he misses the men so much after knowing them for like, two weeks?

Yes. But Luther makes really good coffee, and well, he’s gotten used to his own moral failings.

He’s a social creature. What can he say?

Well actually all this to say he’s going to be a field agent if it kills him, and he’s really not opposed to either idea.

The problem, unfortunately but not unexpectedly, is the psych evaluation.

He failed the first one. Spectacularly. He’d answered the intake questions too fast, and too flippantly. Or too precisely. He wasn’t sure which. His heart rate spiked on innocuous questions and stayed rock steady on ones like “have you ever harmed someone under your care?” which probably wasn’t the look they were going for.

The IMF psychologist, a kind woman with deliberate penmanship and a PhD in subtle disappointment, told him she wasn’t convinced he had “processed his prior affiliations with appropriate emotional distance.”

“Right,” Benji had replied flatly. “Sorry, I’ll go write a poem or something, shall I?”

She didn’t laugh. 

It takes him three weeks to actually go through appealing the denial. In the meantime, he trains unofficially—covertly, sometimes. Works through tutorials, picks locks in the dark, memorizes pressure points on a dummy’s skin. He rewatches IMF field footage obsessively and dissects the footage like an engineer would disassemble a bomb.

He’s not ready. But he’s going to be. That’s the only option.

The next psych eval, he comes in quieter. Still twitchy, still a mess of nerves, but focused.

He fidgets with a worn cuff of his sleeve as the test begins again: standard format. Lie detector rigged to biometric feedback, baseline honesty questions to calibrate. Have you ever broken a bone? Are you currently experiencing a headache? Then the deeper ones. Probes. Trauma hooks.

He prepares to fail.

Then something shifts.

Not consciously. Not performatively. Just… something.

Because when the clinician asks, “Do you believe you’re capable of keeping a teammate alive under pressure?” Benji says:

“Yes.”

And he means it.

Not because he’s a hero. Because there are people—Damian, Talia, even Luther now—that he’s not willing to lose. Not again, not ever. 

The needles twitch. The computer logs the truth.

They pass him. Just barely. Provisional clearance. There was a lot of questioning on his sudden reversal. But he can train now—under supervision. No solo exercises. No certification yet. He nods, and thanks them, and immediately, compulsively, makes a joke about still having a 60% chance of accidentally knocking himself unconscious with a grappling hook.

No one laughs. He’s fine with that.

So he tries training again. This time under actual supervision. It’s not League training—it’s slower, cleaner, less interested in obedience and more in strategy. But his body still expects brutality. He over-corrects. Stumbles. Recovers. Pushes forward again. He’s horrible really, but the most painful part isn’t the failure, it’s the phantom sensation of Talia breathing over his neck correcting his stance, the memory bittersweet. 

His body aches every night. His knee still twinged from that fall last week, and his bruises were healing in slow, ugly gradients. He memorizes disarming sequences before bed and re-wraps his own ribs with textbook precision in the morning. It’s not glamorous. It doesn't even feel brave.

The League had been constant motion—relentless, brutal, choreographed. There, combat wasn’t something you prepared for; it was something you endured. Violence was inevitable, so you bled early and learned fast. There was no space for fear or reflection. You didn’t hesitate. You just moved.

In medical work, he’d found the opposite. It mattered what you touched. It mattered how you cut. There were rules—measurable, repeatable, sometimes even kind. He’d learned how to stop bleeding instead of cause it. How to stabilize instead of destroy. He never felt more fragile than he had in surgery bays, holding someone else’s life in his gloved hands, knowing exactly what he could lose if he got it wrong.

And tech—well. That had always been a kind of shield. A sanctuary made of code and logic, where his mind could spin outward and outward without anyone bleeding on the floor. He could isolate variables. Control outcomes. He could sit in a chair, half the world away from the danger, and still make a difference.

But neither had been enough. Not anymore.

He doesn't want to be the one who sends others in. Not if he can go too.

He’s not there yet. He knows that. Still has to check in with supervisors before every drill. Still wears the vest with “TRAINEE” stenciled across the back like a warning label. Still has to prove, every time, that he’s not a liability.

But he’s learning.

Painfully. Stubbornly. One sprained shoulder and a half-healed knee at a time.

Somewhere deep down, he still carries the voice that says he doesn't belong here. That he missed his window, or broke too many things to be trusted again. But another part of him—quieter, older, bone-deep—believes maybe this was exactly where he was supposed to be. Not because he is good enough yet. But because he is still trying. Talia once told him he wasn’t made for the field. That he was too gentle, too human, too concerned with the small, breakable pieces of the world. And she hadn’t meant it as a compliment.

But maybe she was wrong.

Because he is still here. Bleeding slower now. Fighting cleaner. Choosing this every day. Not because it is easy. But because it matters. 

And maybe, if he keeps showing up—if he keeps training, keeps learning, keeps refusing to break the way they expected—he can become the kind of person who makes a difference before someone needs saving.

Stuck in his thoughts, he miscalculates a roll on concrete and lands badly—shoulder crunching under him with the ugly pop of ligament strain.

They offer him painkillers. He waves them off. He doesn’t want to feel better. Doesn’t want the edges smoothed. It has to hurt, otherwise it doesn’t count. Otherwise it’s just pretending. So he wraps the shoulder himself and keeps going, half-limping through the next sequence. His trainer, to their credit, doesn’t stop him. Just watches with a look that’s part bafflement, part respect. He wonders if Talia would be proud. 

He passes. Barely. That night, he re-wraps the shoulder properly and tucks a small medkit into his locker. It’s not standard issue. Just something he built from habit: gauze, trauma shears, a vial of lidocaine he has no intention of using. He hides it beneath a thermal shirt and a neatly folded IMF windbreaker.

--------------

Sometimes, after training, after coding, and pretending he’s all fine and dandy, he finds himself in the server room.

The IMF walls are smooth here. Too smooth. No blood. No voices. No proof. Just glass and fiberoptic silence. He codes to stop thinking. Routes diagnostics. Overwrites things that don’t need overwriting. Programs simulated stressors into test sequences just to make his brain believe there’s danger. It’s the only time his hands stop shaking.

Because at least then, there’s a problem to solve. And that means there’s a version of him who can solve it.

------------

Damian draws.

He doesn’t mean to. He hates how sentimental it feels. But his hand keeps moving without asking permission. At first it’s just sketches of muscle structure, anatomy, blood vessels. Then slowly, inevitably, it becomes him.

Benji’s hands, mostly. The way he held a tea cup. The messy sweep of hair. The subtle crook of his nose, always out of joint from something. And the smile, the softer rare one, that Damian had always pretended he never saw. He doesn’t show mother. He tears up half the sketches. Keeps the others. Pinned behind a wall panel. Hidden. He can’t forget Benji, he won’t allow himself to. 

—

It’s three weeks after the injury, and Benji’s nearly got full motion back in the shoulder, when Luther finds him still at the training floor, long after sanctioned hours.

Benji’s running evasive drills. Sloppy ones. He’s already bruised along his ribs again, left knee swollen.

“You trying to get yourself benched permanently?” Luther says, casual.

Benji huffs, breath short. “Just… rewiring muscle memory, you know? Or trying to.”

Luther hums. Doesn’t comment further. But the next morning, there’s a printed set of personalized training protocols on Benji’s desk. Notes in the margins. Alternate stances. Injury-friendly positioning.

And a cup of very good coffee. 

Chapter Text

There is a difference between silence and stillness.

Talia al Ghul has known both. She was raised in rooms where the hush of discipline was mistaken for reverence, where sharp obedience passed for strength. She had learned to command before she could vote. She memorized ten languages before she got her first scar. Stillness, then, was holy. But silence?

Silence hides rot.

She learned that too.

It begins again tonight, with the scrape of a chair against stone. A small sound. One she might have ignored, once. She doesn’t now. She hasn’t ignored anything in weeks.

She cannot sleep.

That in itself is nothing new. Rest is a privilege. An affectation of the safe. But the reason is different. What was once grief—clean and sharp—has warped. Doubt trails behind it. And now: questions. The kind she’s been trained to dismiss. The kind that makes noise in a place that values quiet above all else.

Benji Dunn has been dead for nearly a year.

She knows this like a fact carved into her. Clean. Certain.

But certainty does not settle her anymore.

Benji was, by every metric the League respects, a liability.

And still—

He was hers.

She did not name it then. She does not try to now. But there is something about the loss of him that no longer sits cleanly in her mind. Something off in the pattern.

Benji Dunn is dead. Or so the League says. She lets them say it. She lets Damian believe it. She lets herself believe it, too—because the alternative is treason.

And yet.

She is not stupid. A leader does not survive by trusting silence. For months now, something in the story of his death has itched beneath her skin. It’s not grief. Or not only that. It’s doubt.

She has been losing favor with her father. She knows this. Her devotion—once absolute—has been questioned in shadowed council rooms and whispered training grounds. There are rumors. That motherhood softened her. That the Brit changed her. That love makes women weak. They are wrong, of course. And she spares no expense cutting their betrayal out of them, Talia Al Ghul has never moved without intention. 

She’s reviewed the mission brief six times.

Tonight will make seven.

She slips into the archives. Her presence there is unremarkable. Her clearance high. The guards don’t ask why. She opens the file without ceremony. The League’s internal logs are meticulous. Each mission generates layers—logs, side reports, kill codes, asset summaries.

She isn’t sure what she’s looking for. Just that she’s missed something. Something buried.

Then she finds it. 

[Operative Dunn: Termination approved. Oversight: R. Al Ghul.]

And below it: [Rationale: Emotional disruption. Compromised focus of Heir.]

The air feels stiller afterward.

Talia reads it again. Not for comprehension—it’s already clear—but because something in her refuses to accept it the first time.

Her father ordered Benji’s death.

She had not known. She had not even been told the truth afterward. She doesn’t move. Not yet. She lets the betrayal settle. Names it fully. Not just for Benji’s sake, but her own.

She has watched her father for decades, slipping faith behind strategy. Sacrificing people like loose stones to protect a path only he sees. And she—she has followed. Out of belief. Out of love. But belief that cannot be questioned is not loyalty. It is control. And the worst part is that this isn't about strategy. This isn't about control.

It’s about who is allowed to matter. 

She walks back through the corridors before sunrise. The stone is cold underfoot. Familiar. She’s lived half her life in this compound, and still—she’s never seen it quite this way. Her son is asleep. She steps into his room and watches him breathe. One arm flung across the bed, his mouth open slightly. He looks younger like this.

She crouches beside his bed. Gathers a half-finished drawing he’s left on the floor. Benji again. The tea kettle. The laugh-lines. The way he’s drawn Talia, too—taller than she is, fiercer than she feels.

She sets it down, hands steady.

There are things a child should never have to draw from memory.

Benji taught her son to laugh. That hadn’t been the plan. But it happened. And someone decided that was a threat. Someone who thought he knew what was best. Someone who thought she wouldn’t question it. She is starting to think she should have questioned everything a long time ago.

This isn’t sentiment. It would be easy to call it grief. Easier still to dismiss it as softness. Motherhood. A woman’s attachment.

But that isn’t what this is. It never has been. Benji was a valuable operative. Not because he killed efficiently, but because he didn’t. Because he saw things others ignored. Because he made people better. Because he made her son express something. The League calls that weakness. Predictable. They think emotions are just obstacles to precision.

But they didn’t lose Benji. She did. And now her son dreams in silence and sketches the people he’s not allowed to speak about. There’s no strategy in that. Only loss.

She returns to the vaults once more. Not for Benji. For herself.

There’s a recovery log misfiled in the wrong quadrant. Likely intentionally. A post-interrogation asset record. Failed mission. America. Minimal detail. A time signature that overlaps with another mission she recalls.

Something about it catches her attention. And given how her investigation had gone last time she gives in. She reroutes the encryption.

The file opens.

It’s a video, timestamped months ago.

A boy, barely conscious, blood at his temple, body trembling from trauma. The footage is dark, but the identity is unmistakable. Talia had heard whispers. An American, her Beloved’s. A Robin killed by explosives. She thought he was dead. Was told he was dead. 

Jason Todd. Wandering around the state of Wyoming like a zombie, very obviously not dead. She had believed him dead. Everyone had. But this—this is no corpse. This is someone they’ve chosen to forget. The League has labeled him unstable within these files, while still holding him in containment in one of their smaller bases. Beyond use. Not worth the Lazarus Pit’s cost.

They would leave him, she knows. Let him slip into permanent damage. Likely exploit him as a one off distraction against Batman and then kill him off.  Talia watches the video again. And then she makes her decision. She is not going to let this happen a second time.

There is no announcement. No briefing.

She moves him herself, a long train trip while finishing up a separate mission in Washington and she’s got him, she makes her way back without issue. Quietly. She knows which security feeds to loop. She built half of them.

Jason jerks when the Pit takes him. The water sears. The room fills with that ancient, bitter scent—like rust and ozone and fury. 

She’s done this before. Enough to remember the risk. Enough to know the signs. But this time, she’s the only one who made the call.

When the healing starts, his body thrashes once. Then collapses.

She holds him under steady. She cannot sew up his wounds or transplant his failing organs but she can watch as the pit seals up layers of flesh and bubbles start to form from under his head. Letting go would feel too much like retreat so she holds. 

Later, he breathes.

She doesn’t speak to him then. There’s nothing to explain. She doesn’t need this to be an act of forgiveness. Or penance. Or defiance.

It’s a decision. It is hers.

She sits with him until he sleeps again.

When she leaves, she doesn’t report it.

She doesn’t tell the League she acted alone.

They will find out eventually. Or they won’t. But when they do, she will be ready.

She is not interested in being asked for justification.

She has spent too long waiting for someone to notice what she already knew: that she is not uncertain. That she does not need permission to decide what survival should look like. Back in her chambers, she scrubs her hands clean from the green liquid.

The water stills.

She looks at her reflection and doesn’t flinch.

There are things she has done that she cannot undo. But there are things still within reach. She doesn’t need to prove that love is powerful. She doesn’t need to frame her care as rebellion.

It simply is.

That’s enough.

There is a shape to fire. You learn it only when you watch it closely—not as destruction, but as transformation. You learn how it spreads. What it feeds on. What it refuses to let stand..

Everyone has taught her something. Damian, with his fierce certainty. Benji, with his quiet conviction. Even Jason, whose pain still pulses in the room she left him in.

But these lessons aren't revelations. They are reminders.

Talia has always known how to see the shape of something unfinished and make it whole.

She just forgot she was allowed to do that for herself.

----------------------------

The first thing Jason knows is pain.

Not sharp. Not clean.

Something older. Sunk deep in his bones, like he’s been crushed and melted and scraped back together. Like his body is trying to reject itself. Like the air itself is wrong.

He’s not breathing at first.

Then he is.

Too fast. Too much.

There’s something in his mouth. Blood. Ash. Water?

No—worse.

His eyes snap open. The light burns.

Stone above him. A ceiling? No—just dark. Just too much of it.

He can’t see. He can’t move.

Where is he?

Where is—?

The name tries to rise but doesn’t make it past his throat. Something inside him recoils from it. Like it hurts too much to say.

He remembers a crowbar. He remembers laughter. He remembers screaming until his voice cracked.

Dad—please—

Then the sound of bone breaking.

Then heat.

Then nothing.

The air stinks of metal. Rot. Old smoke and something else, something chemical and unnatural. Like blood boiled down into something that shouldn’t exist.

He’s on a slab. Stone. Cold beneath him.

He doesn’t know how he knows that. Doesn’t know how long he’s been here.

But he knows this isn’t Gotham.

And he knows he’s not dead.

That’s the part that hits hardest.

He was supposed to be dead.

His limbs don’t obey at first. Nerve signals flicker like static. His hands twitch, then curl. His legs shake. He groans without meaning to.

There’s a shadow in the room.

A figure. Unmoving. Watching.

He stares at her, blinking hard, vision swimming. Tall. Still. Not familiar.

He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t have the breath for it. His heart’s too loud.

She doesn’t come closer. Doesn’t talk.

He wants to ask—Where am I? Who are you? What the hell is happening?

But nothing comes out.

Not yet.

She leaves eventually.

Or maybe he blinks and she’s gone.

Time is strange. Thick around the edges. His mind trips over itself trying to thread memory into logic. Nothing connects.

One minute he’s underground. The next, he’s drowning. Then he’s gasping on a slab in a room full of smoke and stone and the sharp sting of not-quite-death.

He should be dead.

He was dead.

He’s sure of that.

Later—minutes, hours, he doesn’t know—he sits up.

Or tries to. His body rebels. His arms shake like they don’t know how to hold his weight.

But he gets there. Eventually.

Every part of him hurts. His skin is raw. His mouth is dry. His brain won’t stop skipping.

And still—he’s breathing.

He touches his own chest, disbelieving.

No bandages. No burns. No blood. Just… healed.

Like it never happened.

But it did. He remembers the sound of bones cracking. The Joker’s voice, lilting. The explosive beeping faster and faster. The stink of oil and fear.

The worst part is—

He can’t remember who found him. If anyone did.

Why is he here?

What brought him back?

And why now?

He tries to stand.

The room tilts around him. Cold walls. Carved archways. It’s not a hospital. Not a morgue. It feels ancient. Sacred, almost. Wrong.

It feels like a tomb.

He stumbles to a basin at the far end of the room. There’s water. Or something close to it. He leans over, sees his own reflection in it—pale, gaunt, too wide-eyed.

It’s him.

But not like he remembers.

His skin is smoother. Unscarred. His hair’s longer. His shoulders sharper.

He looks like someone drew him from memory and forgot to make it human.

There’s no explanation.

No one waiting.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been dead. Doesn’t know who did this to him.

He doesn’t feel grateful.

He doesn’t feel anything but cold.

And beneath it, something worse.

Something he won’t name.

Rage, maybe. Or hunger. Or grief, so deep and sour it feels like rot.

He should be gone. Should be dust under Gotham. Should be buried next to the last boy who tried to help. Instead he’s here. Awake. 

Jason throws up. 

Chapter Text

Benji had prepped the mask printer four times before Jane finally told him to stop.

“It’s not going to go faster just because you hover,” she said without looking up, her voice sharp with strain. “Why don’t you go double-check the comms or something.”

He didn’t reply. Didn’t say that the comms had already been checked—twice—and that the printer’s glitching had nothing to do with his presence. Didn’t say he’d rather be here, next to the glitching machine and the hum of failing tech, than out there with the rest of them. Out there it was just him and the mission and the people who kept looking at him like they weren’t sure he belonged here at all.

Which, to be fair, he wasn’t sure either.

“Sorry,” he muttered, stepping back.

Jane didn’t answer. She hadn’t been unkind. Just frayed. They all were. And rightly so.

In the last seventy-two hours, they’d been blamed for the bombing of the Kremlin, cut off from official IMF resources, and informed that the Secretary of the Impossible Mission Force—their only link to legitimacy—was dead. In his place was Ethan Hunt, resurrected from a Moscow prison and somehow already running the op with the same terrifying calm as if he were making tea. The man hadn’t blinked once since they’d left Russia.

Budapest had been a blur. He hadn’t been on the ground when Agent Hanaway died, but the fallout had landed squarely on all of them. Hanaway had been tracking an assassin—Sabine Moreau, a French contract killer—who stole nuclear launch codes right before shooting him at point-blank range. Benji had seen the security footage. He’d watched her pull the trigger like it meant nothing. Like it was business.

He’d flinched. No one else had.

He hadn’t known Hanaway well, but that hadn’t mattered. Watching someone die with that much ease—watching the way Moreau didn’t even look back—made Benji’s stomach twist in ways he thought he’d trained out of himself. But that was the thing about training, wasn’t it? You could memorize everything but the moment.

After that came Prague. Benji had helped break Ethan out of prison as part of a blacksite extraction. In the chaos, they’d picked up Bogdan—a Russian asset whose intel pointed them toward a man known only as “Cobalt,” a strategist obsessed with nuclear war as a means of societal evolution.

Cobalt’s real name turned out to be Kurt Hendricks. A Swedish-born nuclear theorist. Brilliant. Unstable. And now in possession of nuclear launch codes.

Benji had hoped they would get backup.

Instead, the IMF was disavowed.

And they were alone.

Ethan had said it like it was the weather. “There is no backup.”

The four of them—Ethan, Jane, Brandt, and Benji—were standing in a luxury suite on the 130th floor of the Burj Khalifa. Tallest building in the world. Floor-to-ceiling windows, a view of the entire city, and a meeting scheduled in less than twenty minutes between a weapons buyer and the assassin who’d killed Hanaway.

The problem? They had to pretend to be both parties—Jane impersonating Moreau, Ethan impersonating the buyer. They were going to run a simultaneous double-cross from two rooms across the same hallway. The plan depended on their mask printer… which had failed.

Their solution? Improvise.

Benji had handed Ethan a pair of magnetic gloves. His own design. Unfinished. Untested. Then he’d suggested the impossible: climb the outside of the building to reach the server room, reroute the door access, and take their positions before the real buyer and Moreau arrived.

Benji’s voice had cracked just a little when he said it, but Ethan had already stripped down to the gear, calm as ever. Focused. Unblinking.

Benji watched him go out the window.

Watched his body shrink against the glass as he scaled the side of the skyscraper like a spider in reverse. The gloves chirped with each impact. The wind howled.

And Benji remembered.

Nanda Parbat had cliffs.

Not the polished, geometric kind you found in Dubai. Real cliffs. Carved from snow and rock and centuries of ritual. Talia had led them there during one of the colder months, when the frost made the stone brittle and the air stung your lungs if you breathed too deeply.

“You climb, or you fall,” she’d said. Her tone hadn’t been cruel, it never was. Just final.

He remembered Damian beside him, smaller than the others but already sharper. A child raised on survival, not comfort. Benji had followed, palms raw, blood running cold.

The climb hadn’t been the worst part.

The worst part had been watching—when someone lost their grip and the League didn’t reach for them. When death wasn’t punished. Just accepted.

Watching Ethan now, Benji’s stomach twisted. Not because Ethan might fall. But because Benji knew what it was like to watch someone drop and not move.

But Ethan didn’t fall.

Ethan never did.

Benji exhaled like surfacing from too deep.

The bellboy con worked—barely. Benji ran the visual deception system between both rooms, They faked the sale. Moreau was intercepted—then killed in a scuffle with Jane. Wistrom, Hendricks’s second, escaped.

Benji didn’t say a word on the way out.

Mumbai was heat and adrenaline.

Hendricks had used the launch codes to initiate a nuclear strike. The missile was in the air. His plan was simple: provoke mutual destruction. Let the strong survive.

Ethan chased him through an automated car park to retrieve the control device. Jane handled the systems upstairs. Brandt ran interference.

And Benji?

Benji was alone in the satellite control room, hands flying across dead terminals.

“We need power to the abort server,” he said over comms. “Jane, flip the breakers—no, the ones on the south panel—”

The floor shook.

Lights flickered.

Then came footsteps. Fast. Heavy.

A man rushed in—Hendricks’s last mercenary. He had a gun.

Benji turned—and saw Brandt, halfway through the door, unarmed.

The man raised his weapon.

Benji moved.

No hesitation.

He fired once.

The mercenary dropped.

It didn’t hit until later.

Not in the moment. Not when Brandt clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Nice shot.” Not when Ethan punched in the abort code with five seconds left. Not even when the nuclear missile was diverted and detonated harmlessly in the ocean.

It hit after.

When the dust had settled and the air had gone still.

Benji ducked into a utility closet, locked the door, sat down on the tile floor—

And threw up.

His hands shook for fifteen minutes.

His mouth tasted like iron.

He stared at his fingers like they didn’t belong to him.

“You made a choice.”

Talia’s voice echoed in his head, memory-precise. She had said it once, years ago—after a mission gone wrong, after he’d been the one left breathing.

“You made a choice, Benjamin.”

Not an accusation. Not a comfort.

Just a truth.

Later, in the mirror of the safe house bathroom, Benji looked at himself like he was someone else.

His reflection looked older. Not tired. Aged.

“You made a choice,” he whispered.

And then, softer: “No one here wanted me to.”

Not like the League.

The League had drilled death into his bones. Kill or be killed. The purity of it. The efficiency.

But here—at the IMF—no one had ordered him to shoot. No one had trained him for this moment. They had trained him to avoid it. The mission always came first—but lives? Lives were the point.

So when the time came, and he pulled the trigger—

He hadn’t done it because someone told him to.

He had done it to save Brandt.

To keep someone else from falling.

And it broke something anyway.

He didn’t sleep for six days.

When Jane asked, he said it was the jet lag.

Brandt didn’t ask.

Ethan looked at him across the room, eyes unreadable, and said, “You okay?”

Benji had nodded.

Ethan didn’t believe him. But he let it go.

That night, Benji sat on the hotel balcony with his laptop.

He wasn’t coding anything specific. Just letting his hands move. Letting the logic replace thought. If he stopped, he’d think of the sound the body made when it hit the floor. Of what it meant that he hadn’t missed.

Below, the city glowed.

No cliffs. No war rooms. No betrayal drills.

Just lights.

He typed until the sun came up.

Chapter Text

Benji doesn’t speak to Ethan for seven days. Not out of malice. Not even avoidance, not really—not in the active sense. It’s more like holding his breath, like if he opens his mouth even once, the rot might come spilling out.

So he keeps it in. Keeps himself in.

He stays in the gear room longer than usual. He reroutes inventory requests through another handler. He picks the night shift on purpose, fiddles with outdated comm tech, rewrites mission diagnostics that don’t need rewriting. When Luther pings him with a “you good?” message, he doesn’t answer. Just turns off the notifications and tells himself silence is easier.

The gloves don’t help, but they give him something to hold on to. Black nitrile, snug and sterile. They hide the places where the blood has sunk in. Cover the way his fingers still shake. Cover the way he doesn’t trust himself not to touch something clean and ruin it.

It’s a field kill. The report says so. Justified. Proportional. Necessary. It had saved Brandt’s life.

Benji can’t stop seeing the blood anyway.

It isn’t like the League. Not in action, not in context. But it’s close. Close enough to crack something open. Close enough that when he washes his hands afterward—in the cheap hotel sink, the water pink with guilt—he stares into the drain and thinks: I’m not a doctor anymore.

He hasn’t said the Hippocratic Oath aloud in over a decade. But it lives in him, silent and curled around his ribs like a second spine. First, do no harm. Even in the League, he’d clung to that. Found ways around their orders, lied about fatalities, turned his own hands into shields instead of weapons.

And then he’d pulled the trigger.

And someone died.

And now he can’t sleep without seeing it.

The recoil isn’t bad. He remembers that, stupidly. Not enough to bruise. He remembers Brandt’s panicked yell. He remembers the flash of the assailant’s blade, the trajectory that would’ve cut straight through Brandt’s throat—and then he remembers nothing, except his own hand, rising without permission, pulling the trigger before he even thinks about it.

He remembers after.

The man falls in a heap. Not instantly. There are convulsions. A wet, rattling gasp. The kind of death that doesn’t feel cinematic. It just feels long.

Benji stares at the body. Not even human, not in his brain. Just a shape. A reminder. A failure.

Then he throws up behind a generator.

No one sees. No one asks.

He starts wearing gloves the next morning.

—

There’s a thin sort of horror to it. The kind that doesn’t scream, but lingers. The kind that festers.

In the League, they’d taught him to kill in ten different languages. They’d placed blades in his hands like prayers. Told him there was no higher purpose than elimination. But Benji had clung to the idea that he hadn’t. That he’d escaped, somehow. That walking away had meant the part of him capable of this had withered.

But now he knows the truth. It’s still there. Still inside him. Like a switch. Like a pathogen waiting to activate. He tries to remember the League soldier he’d lost—Aya, maybe, or someone like her. The woman he’d misdiagnosed, misdosed, mistimed. She had bled out in a hallway, eyes wide, waiting for a miracle that didn’t come. He hadn’t killed her with a weapon. But she’d died because of him.

And he hadn’t pulled the trigger then, either.

This time, he had.

This time, it’s a deliberate choice.

And isn’t that worse?

Isn’t that the thing?

He keeps thinking about his hands. How many lives they’ve held. How many wounds they’ve stitched. How many fragments of shrapnel they’ve removed from screaming bodies. He used to tell Damian that medicine was just slow magic. That healing was a kind of rebellion.

What is this, then?

He’s quiet at work. Not like before—this is something different. Not tech-focused, not distracted. Just… off. Like all the air in him has been siphoned out and replaced with static.

Luther would’ve noticed, if he’d been around. Ethan has noticed, obviously, but Benji won’t let him get close enough to ask.

He avoids the break room. Avoids eye contact. Avoids mirrors. One night, while updating system logs, he stares at the line of code he’s written five times and thinks: I should be dead instead of him.

Not because he knows the man. Not because he values the stranger’s life over his own. But because the man hadn’t taken anything. He hadn’t pulled a trigger. Benji had.

That matters.

That still matters, doesn’t it?

—

He tries sleeping without gloves once. Wakes up with his nails dug into his palm and the sheets stained red from reopened callouses. He’s been clawing at something. A dream. A memory. A face.

Talia’s voice echoes in his skull sometimes: You made a choice. She hadn’t said it with blame. Just clarity. The same way she explained anatomy—efficient, bloodless, inevitable.

And he had made a choice.

That’s what haunts him.

Because if the choice is right, then why does it feel like losing? Because if this is what rightness feels like, maybe he’s too far gone to know the difference anymore.

------------

On the seventh night, he finds himself staring at his reflection in the microwave door of the safehouse kitchen, half a cup of tea forgotten in his hand. He hasn’t added sugar. Damian would’ve mocked him for that. Talia would’ve handed him a lemon slice with that maddening expression of unspoken critique.

They are ghosts in his chest now.

He’s made a choice. And he has to live with it. That doesn’t mean he forgives himself.

He turns the kettle off, gloved fingers tightening around the handle, and mutters under his breath, “Never again.”

It doesn’t matter that no one else hears.

He doesn’t say it for them.

He starts cooking again on the eighth day.

Just for the rhythm of it—the clean geometry of a cutting board, the hiss of oil hitting heat, the moment just before garlic burns when everything is still salvageable.

The IMF safehouse kitchen is cramped, fluorescent, and criminally understocked. But he finds chickpeas in the cupboard and leftover rice in the fridge. He soaks onions in vinegar and starts prepping spice blends like he’s performing surgery.

The gloves come off. Only while he cooks. He scrubs his hands beforehand like it matters. Like it’ll make them worthy again. He keeps the nitrile nearby, folded on the counter like a promise. Still, it’s something. Still, it’s a start

He makes chana masala first.

It’s instinctive. Something Talia taught him—not the full version, not what her mother made, but a practical version with what was on hand, cooked in silence by firelight, high in the mountains when everything else was war.

“You always overseason,” she’d told him once, eyes narrowed. “Spice isn’t compensation for your British complexion Benjamin.”

Now, in the empty kitchen, he imagines her saying it again, standing just behind his shoulder. A ghost made of coriander and criticism. He laughs before he means to. It’s short. Quiet. It dies quickly. But it’s real.

—

By the time Ethan walks in two hours later, probably from a supply run turn actual run going by the sweat he does not linger his eyes on, the kitchen smells like cumin and tomatoes, and Benji is carefully plating rice like he’s on a cooking show for spies. Which it kind of feels like he is. 

Ethan stops in the doorway. Doesn’t say anything. Just watches.

Benji doesn’t look up. “You allergic to chickpeas?”

Ethan’s silence is the kind of soft that carries weight.

“No,” he says, eventually.

Benji nods once. “Good.”

—

The food is good. Not great. The texture’s off and the turmeric is shy and Benji didn’t have fresh ginger, but it’s warm and edible and it doesn’t come from a vacuum-sealed pouch.

He eats standing up.

Ethan joins him. Doesn’t ask questions. Doesn’t make it weird.

That helps more than Benji can say.

By the end of the week, it’s a routine.

He cooks most nights. Doesn’t announce it. Doesn’t ask if anyone wants any. But there’s always enough for more than one plate. And somehow, word spreads, and because of course his safehouse has become the house for wayward agents to stay if they don’t want to take the effort to go all the way back to their own IMF designated safehouses, and like the workaholics they all are, most just end up with him.

Luther is the first to comment. Back from whatever temporary assignment pulled him away, he walks into the kitchen, sniffs the air, and says, “So this is why no one’s stealing my MREs.”

Benji shrugs, bashful. “Figured it was my turn to contribute something edible.”

Brandt’s more blunt. “You okay, man? You’re… uh. Different.”

“I shower now,” Benji deadpans.

“Okay, yeah, fair. But also you’re—” Brandt makes a vague jazz-hands gesture. “Weird again. In a good way!”

Benji doesn’t know what to say to that. But also Brandt just climbed in through his window to eat his butter chicken so he decides the man can live without a response.

He wants to say thank you. He wants to say I’m still dying inside. He wants to say I’m sorry for killing someone and I don’t know who I am anymore and is this what healing looks like or is it just a different kind of mask?

Instead, he makes lentils the next night. Toasts mustard seeds in ghee. Doesn’t flinch when the oil splatters. He tells a joke halfway through dinner and Ethan laughs so hard he drops his fork.

The sound lodges in Benji’s throat like something holy.

—

He doesn’t talk about the gloves. They’re still in his pocket. Still on the counter. Still in the drawer by the sink, always reachable. He doesn’t need them right now. But he might.

He keeps imagining what Talia would say. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it doesn’t.

More khatta, she would mutter, stirring without looking. You need balance. Everything else is too heavy.

She’d meant the food.

But Benji thinks about it every time he walks into a room and pretends to be fine.

He’s getting better at pretending. He isn’t sure if that’s good or not.

The team notices. He makes it easier to talk to him again. Doesn’t snap. Doesn’t flinch when someone brushes against his shoulder. He still has nightmares, but they stay behind his eyes now. He still hears the shot, still sees the body, still wonders if he’s broken beyond repair—but he can fry onions without crying, and that counts for something.

And Benji—terrified, wrecked, guilty to the bone—feels something inside him shift.

Not peace. Not forgiveness. Never.

But space. A little more space.

Enough to breathe. 

He’ll take that.

He’ll start there.

———————————————-

The first time he’s allowed out of his quarters without surveillance, Jason nearly decks the guard just on principle.

He doesn’t. Barely.

Because then he remembers he’s in some ancient mountain compound run by assassins who probably trap the hallways, and also that he’s been out of the Lazarus Pit for less than two weeks. Everything still feels a little sideways.

Instead of bolting, he rounds a corner and nearly walks into a kid.

“You’re Damian,” he says, because he might as well get that out of the way.

“And you’re concussed,” the kid replies without blinking. “But recovering.”

Jason grits his teeth. “Charmed.”

“Mother said I’m to observe you.”

“Babysit, you mean.”

Damian tilts his head. Doesn’t deny it. “You throw a knife at me, I throw it back.”

Jason’s mouth curls. “Fair.”

It’s not, of course. Nothing here is.

The mountain compound is colder than Gotham, older than his memories, and the only reason he’s even breathing is because Talia dunked him in a glowing death pit and whispered nothing while his bones cracked themselves back into place. He owes her something. Probably. Maybe. And this—this weird, silent charge—Damian—is the cost. Jason’s good at paying.

So he shrugs, sticks his hands in his pockets, and follows the kid to the sparring floor, he feels the urge to say something, but doesn't quite know what.

Jason decides he’ll stick with this whole blunt thing, it hasn't gotten him killed yet. “The knife thing’s comforting. You say that to all your brothers, or just the undead ones?”

Damian blinks once. “You’re not technically my brother.”

Jason exhales, alright so that’s where they are. “You’re not technically wrong.”

It’s been a lot, the last couple weeks. Discovering Bruce had a biological kid. Discovering said kid was raised by the League of Assassins. Discovering the League of Assassins even existed. And then there’s that whole thing where apparently they had some kind of in-house medic who everyone was weirdly attached to and who died a year ago.

Jason’s brain is doing that thing again. Trying to form opinions about people he’s never met.

Right now, though, there’s a sparring mat and a kid in front of him with Bruce’s mouth and Talia’s murder-glare. So he shrugs.

—

Talia shouldn’t be watching.

But she is.

From the upper walkway, half in shadow, her tea cooling untouched.

Jason isn’t what she expected. There’s a brittleness in him that isn’t quite anger—more like confusion that hasn’t found its shape. He hasn’t asked for answers. Not about the League. Not about Bruce. Not about the boy currently leading him across the training floor like they have history.

But he looks at Damian the way someone looks at a puzzle they recognize parts of.

And he’s gentle, in his way.

Too rough to be soft. Too burnt around the edges. But not cruel.

They start sparring with wooden blades. Damian is precise. Jason is clumsy, but fast. He misses his block and Damian taps him hard in the ribs.

Jason grunts. “Okay, okay. I see how it is. No mercy for the recently dead.”

Damian shrugs. “You’re slower than I expected.”

“Wow. You’re just a ray of sunshine, aren’t you.”

On the second day, Jason moves like a soldier. Nothing like Bruce. Nothing like Benji.

He’s rougher. Less disciplined. But more grounded somehow. Not weightless, not perfect. Tangible. It’s the first time Damian’s trained with someone who doesn’t expect perfection, just effort.

They fall into a rhythm. Three days in, Jason lets him lead the warmup. By day five, they’re sparring in silence without having to name the moves.

On day seven, Jason fakes a low sweep and knocks him into the dirt.

Damian stands, wipes blood from his lip, and says, “Sloppy.”

Jason grins, half-wild. “You’ll thank me later.”

On the second week, Jason throws a dagger a little too close to the wall. It thuds into the wood, an inch from Damian’s head.

Talia doesn’t flinch. Neither does her son.

Jason looks alarmed. “Shit—sorry, kid.”

“I knew you’d miss,” Damian says calmly, brushing past the knife.

Jason blinks. “That’s either the most badass thing I’ve ever heard or the most worrying.”

Damian arches an eyebrow. “Why not both?”

Jason laughs, then mutters something about him being a short little twerp. 

It’s the first time Talia’s heard him laugh. It sounds like Bruce. She looks away before it can hit too deep.

The first time Jason brings back groceries from the market instead of weapons, she says nothing.

When he burns the lentils, Damian yells. Jason yells back.

She’s never been so tempted to laugh.

She doesn’t.

But she remembers the last time her son raised his voice in a kitchen.

Benji had dropped a spoon and tried to salvage the masala with something he claimed was science. Damian had threatened to exile him from the kitchen for culinary war crimes. Benji had declared himself a neutral medical entity and hidden behind a saucepan.

And she—she had felt safe. Just for a moment.

She watches Jason mop the counter in silence and feels that memory like a bruise under the skin. Not pain. Just the memory of it.

-----------

Jason is less irritating than anticipated.

Still annoying, still loud, and occasionally smells like old coffee. But he doesn’t talk down to Damian. Doesn’t treat him like a child. Doesn’t ask dumb questions. Which, honestly, is a refreshing change. They train most mornings now. Sparring, mostly. Some strength drills. Jason keeps pace better than he should, considering he was basically feral when he arrived.

Damian keeps waiting for the Lazarus Pit rage. The flare of madness he was warned about. It hasn’t come. Instead, Jason just mutters about muscle memory and insults the League’s choice of training music.

“You people ever heard of a playlist that doesn’t sound like ritual sacrifice?”

Damian side-eyes him. “It’s ambient Tibetan throat singing.”

Jason groans. “Exactly.”

They don’t agree on anything. Not technique. Not music. Definitely not the rules of engagement.

But Jason listens. Sometimes lets Damian lead. Sometimes gets hit on purpose to prove a point. Once, when Damian overcorrects a backstep, Jason catches his elbow without comment.

Just steadies him. Then let's go.

It’s small. But it lands

------------------------------

It’s like walking into a movie halfway through. That’s what this place feels like. No context. Just mood. Vibes. Everyone mourning a character he never met. He keeps hearing about this medic, but never by name. Someone British. Kind. Tactical. Dead. No one talks directly about him.

But Jason feels him. In the air. In the way Damian sketches in the corners. In the way Talia hesitates in the kitchen sometimes, staring at the spice rack. And Damian’s voice—Jason hears it one day, mid-conversation, and blurts, “Okay, not to be weird, but do you have, like… a British accent?”

Damian frowns. “I am not British.”

“Yeah, but like, that’s not an American accent it’s… posh Hogwarts British, or…?” He snaps his fingers. “No, wait. It’s like a guy I saw on a cooking show once. Super calm. All ‘don’t burn the garlic, mate.’ That kind of thing.”

Damian freezes for a moment. Something unreadable flickers behind his eyes.

Then he shrugs. “Mother hired a lot of tutors.”

Jason doesn’t push. But he files it away. Something about it feels like an answer. Even if he doesn’t understand the question yet.He lets Jason braid his hair on week three. Jason’s not good at it, but he doesn’t joke about it. Doesn’t call it girly or stupid. Just shrugs and tries again when he messes up.

Damian holds still. There’s comfort in the pull of hands on his scalp.

A memory comes unbidden—Benji, warm and sleepy, pressing a bowl of rice into his hands after a nightmare. “Eat something, mate. It’ll help.”

He hadn’t known how much he’d needed that until it stopped.

Now, he sits while someone else fills the silence. Not the same way. Not soft. But present.

He thinks Benji would’ve liked Jason.

He thinks Jason might like Benji, too—if he knew him.

But he won’t.

He never will.

And that hurts more than he can say.

———————————

The quiet doesn’t last.

It never does, in Nanda Parbat.

Talia watches Jason and Damian leave the training floor, bickering over blade grip and posture. Jason has started limping again, not from real injury, just pride. Damian doesn’t mention it, but adjusts his pace to match.

She does not smile. She finishes her tea and doesn’t refill it.

There is peace here, sometimes. Not softness. Never that. But brief interludes of silence, where no one calls for blood, and memory can speak freely. She has learned to savor these moments like breath underwater. Ra’s interrupts them the way he always does, without warning.

“Talia,” he says, stepping into the balcony. “We must speak.”

She doesn’t move at first. Then, slowly, she turns. “Then speak.”

He unrolls the scroll in his hands without ceremony. Parchment, old and cracked, she really needs to get him to learn how to send an email, maybe then he wouldn't interrupt her so often. 

“These are the Succession Protocols,” Ra’s says, voice like dry stone. “You’ve long known their theory. Now you will understand their intent.”

She reads. Her eyes don’t skip. She has trained her whole life not to flinch. And still, when she understands what it says—what it truly says—something inside her freezes. This isn’t succession. She’s heard about the succession, assumed naturally that she will succeed her father once he perishes or gets bored of the league as it seems he so often does, as his only heir.

The scroll outlines a possession ritual in clinical detail: transference of will, neural rewriting, mental saturation. Ra’s will not name it that way, but she sees it for what it is. Her father intends to take her son’s body. His body. Damian’s mind will be overwritten. Piece by piece. His memories. His instincts. His voice. Until all that remains is Ra’s, in a younger skin.

The child she bled for. Trained for. Loved.

“When my body falters,” Ra’s says, “the League must not.”

He looks at her with satisfaction. “Damian will become me.”

Her voice is low. “And what of my legacy?”

Ra’s replies, simply: “It is mine.”

It is not shock she feels. It is fury. Cold and exacting.

Her hands tighten at her sides. She does not look away. “You will kill him.”

“He will ascend.”

“No,” she says, calm and dangerous. “He will die.”

Ra’s frowns slightly, as if confused by her tone. “You raised him for this. You made him strong. Obedient. Ready.”

And she had. She had thought strength would protect him. That obedience would keep him safe. But now she sees what those tools were for. Not armor. Scaffolding, not for his future, but her father’s.

She thinks of the years she carved herself hollow to meet this man’s standard. Of all the praise he never gave. Of the warmth she only glimpsed through someone else’s hands—Benji, foolish and flawed and uncorrupted. Who made tea when she wanted silence. Who held her arms with gentle hands because he had never been taught to crush. 

“You would hollow him,” she says. “To preserve yourself.”

Ra’s says nothing.

Because he knows she is right.

Because he no longer sees it as wrong.

“I need time,” she says coolly.

He allows it.

A mistake.

She leaves without bowing.

—

She walks, not aimlessly but with purpose. Each step carving a map. She does not weep. Rage gives her no room for it. She thinks of how close she came to mistaking endurance for resistance. Mercy for rebellion. Letting go for action. She sees now that all of it was stalling.

No more.

Benji had told her once, on one of their many long talks, “Mercy is not weakness. But it’s not the same as change.” He was spitballing they both had, tossing ideas and words back and forth until something stuck.

It had not stuck. She had not understood. Now she does.

She picks up the blade Damian left behind on the windowsill. The balance is good. The grip small. His hand is still growing.

He is not ready for this war.

But she is.

Chapter Text

Benji Dunn’s default state might as well be yearning. Not the sweeping, cinematic kind. Just… the low-grade, daily ache of someone who’s good at survival and not much else. He misses Damian—his precision, his strange loyalty. He misses Talia, though that feels more complicated now. Even after everything, a part of him still listens for her footfall in the dark.

He misses Luther, who always made the room feel less sharp around the edges.

And he misses Ethan. Not in a romanticized way. Not even with hope. Just in that steady, practical way you miss a limb you trained with. Like something essential’s gone, and the world doesn’t balance right anymore.

Missing has never been the problem. It’s what’s left after you’ve made all your choices.

He’s thinking about this again when they hook him up to the polygraph. Different room. Same routine. Some CIA woman adjusting straps, checking wires, not making small talk. They never do. Benji doesn’t blame them. He wouldn’t know what to say either.

He’s gotten used to it by now, which is the worst part, maybe. That this is normal now. That being shuffled into a beige room once a week and answering questions under federal surveillance is just another item on his schedule. Monday: meal prep. Tuesday: Halo. Wednesday: “Are you aiding and abetting Ethan Hunt?”

“State your name,” the agent says.

“The King of Norway,” Benji replies sarcastically.

The needle jumps.

“See, that was a lie. I’m actually third in line to the throne,” Benji adds, without smiling.

League training taught him how to lie without flinching. Without blinking. How to keep his pulse steady no matter what. He lets his pulse spike at this though, it wouldn't be good to let them know that. But of course they have to jump straight into it. 

“Has Ethan Hunt contacted you?”

“Why would he contact me?” he asks lightly.

They drop the folder on the table. Images. Ethan. Havana. Faust. A dozen near-misses. Benji’s face doesn’t move. Has he been tracking Ethan’s movements through low-res footage in airports across five countries? Yes. Has he blurred those images before the system could flag them? Yes. Has he built a mental spreadsheet of Ethan’s possible destinations in case there’s a window to bump into him, even for thirty seconds? Yes. But Ethan hasn’t contacted him. And that’s the part that matters. So really he’s telling only the honest truth here. 

“He always manages to stay one step ahead of us. I’m wondering how.”

“Are you suggesting I’m helping him?”

Hunley watches him too closely. The tech fidgets. The polygraph records. Benji breathes once. Keeps it even.

“Six months I’ve been here,” he begins. “Half a year sifting through mountains of metadata, exabytes of encoded excrement. I’ve decrypted, processed, parsed, and interlaced more data than anyone in my section. And every week you haul me in and ask me the same question in a different way.”

“And today you haven’t answered it.”

“You seem to think I have some obligation to him. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ethan is still out there in the field, and I’m stuck here answering for it. He has never called. We are not friends. I owe him nothing.”

No fluctuation. Not even a twitch.

They let him go. He picks up his coat.

“Same time next week?” he says.

He walks back through the corridors like nothing is wrong. But Hunley is still watching him. He returns to his cubicle, reloads Halo 2, and opens a side window to make it look like he’s running diagnostics. Turandot is playing through his headset—looped all week. It’s a strange comfort. The dissonance suits him.

Then he sees it. An envelope. Thick. Cream-colored. No postmark. No note.  Two tickets to Turandot, Vienna. He stares at them. Could be a mistake. Could be a prank. Could be bait. But a part of him, against all logic, wonders—Ethan? He hasn’t been in contact. Not once. But this… it feels like something he’d do. Just bold enough to work. Or, God help him—Talia. The hope is so immediate and absurd that it makes his stomach turn. She wouldn’t reach out. She doesn't even know he’s alive.  Still. No way to know. So he books the flight. Rents the tux. And tries not to hope too loudly.

-----------

The Vienna State Opera is a stone cathedral of velvet, gold, and champagne. Benji steps off the subway, already adjusting his cuffs, when someone collides with him. A man presses a paper bag into his hands and vanishes into the crowd.

Benji frowns, opens it. A showbill. And glasses.

He puts them on. Ethan’s voice clicks in, too familiar to process immediately.

“Welcome to Vienna, Benji. Miss me?”

It catches him off guard—the sound of it. Too casual, too familiar. His throat tightens.

“Good to hear your voice,” he murmurs. It comes out too quietly. He clears his throat.

“Ethan, where are you? Where the hell have you been?”

He says it like he hasn’t been sabotaging CIA scans for months. Like he hasn’t charted this man’s movements from a dozen blurred glimpses. Like it still matters to play dumb.

“Actually—don’t tell me,” he adds. “That’s just another thing I’ll have to lie about in my polygraph this week.”

“Everything’s going to be fine,” Ethan says. “Just keep walking. Make sure you’re not being followed.”

Benji makes a face. “I didn’t win those opera tickets, did I?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“So where do we meet?”

“For your sake, we shouldn’t be seen together. You have mail.”

Benji checks his phone. There it is—a sketch. Man in dark glasses, severe face.

“Who is he?”

“That’s what we’re here to find out. He’s our only possible link to the Syndicate. I have reason to believe he’s going to be here tonight. But I can’t find him alone. Are you in?”

Benji hesitates, then realizes that’s pointless. “Yes. Of course. Of course. Um… what’s the play?”

“Simple. You find him, we tag him. I follow him wherever he goes.”

“And after that?”

“After that you’re on a plane. Back at work Monday morning. No one is the wiser.”

Benji holds back a scoff. Inside, the glasses sync to overlays—heat maps, entrance logs, hidden cameras. The Chancellor of Austria walks in, flanked by security.

Benji exhales. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Am I correct in assuming that is the Chancellor of Austria?”

“Yes, you are.”

“Did you know he was going to be here?”

“No.”

Benji grimaces. “Right. Well. We have a European head of state here, at the same time as we are looking for a nefarious terrorist.” A pause, dry as bone. “And I’m sure the two things are completely unrelated.”

“Benji.”

He keeps moving, slipping through a maintenance hallway. “Meanwhile, I will try and overlook the fact that you’re an international fugitive wanted by the CIA! And that this little unsanctioned operation is tantamount to treason.”

No reply.

He cracks open a security panel and connects the tablet. Their firewall is laughable.

“If you’re going to bring me all this way,” Benji mutters, just a bit petty, “you could at least give me something a bit more, you know, dramatic.”

“Benji, we’re trying to keep a low profile.”

Benji sighs. 

Ethan continues. “You want drama? Go to the opera.”

What a cunt. Camera feeds open like doors. Thermal overlays pulse with figures on the catwalks and in the wings.

“There,” he says. “Two targets. One on the north gantry, above the chandelier. One in the lighting booth. Neither are security.”

He tracks another figure—moving lightly, efficiently.

“I’ve got a third movement pattern—southeast catwalk. Smaller profile, bright yellow dress. That’s not a crew member either.”

She moves muscle. Like someone trained. Ethan doesn’t respond. Benji doesn't follow up, just keeps working. Onstage, the aria begins. Ethan appears above the rafters, walking into position. He seems to get into a scuffle but Benji can’t hear much because his coms cut out. Switching feeds, he sees another man—rifle raised—in the lighting booth.

Benji curses under his breath and runs. He throws open the booth door just as the shooter turns. They crash into the wall. The rifle clatters. The man lands a blow to Benji’s ribs that nearly folds him. Benji fights dirty—IMF training doesn’t favor fair fights. He grabs a lighting cable and swings, catches the man in the chest. They go down together, but the man is far from incapacitated.

Benji feels the sniper raise his weapon, and out of the corner of his eye watches yellow dress do the same thing—just as Ethan fires.

The Chancellor falls.

The man lunges. Too late. Benji knees him. A shot cracks. The shooter in his arms stiffens. Benji looks up. The woman in the yellow dress lowers her gun. Gone in seconds. Sirens. Chaos. He wipes the system, burns the footage. Walks out with the crowd.

A car pulls up. No headlights.

Benji gets in.

The world explodes in heat and noise.

Benji watches it happen from the BMW’s front seat, engine idling, hands clammy on the wheel. He’s angled on a side street, exactly where the vehicle tells him to wait—and then the Chancellor’s motorcade goes up in a bloom of fire. The first blast is distant, almost subdued. Then a second one lifts the lead SUV clean off the ground, flinging it into the air like a toy. Glass and debris scatter across the cobblestones. A police motorcycle spins into the crowd. People scream. Benji doesn’t think. He slams the gear into drive.

Ahead, Ethan is sprinting from the side of the opera house. A woman is with him. Benji doesn’t ask questions. Not yet.

“Get in!” he yells, wrenching open the rear door as he brakes hard enough to jolt the car. The BMW squeals as he hits the gas. They tear away from the blaze, the burning wreckage shrinking in the rearview mirror.

Only once the fire is far behind them does Benji glance in the mirror—and nearly crashes the car.

“You!” he blurts. “You tried to shoot me!”

Yellow dress doesn’t flinch. Ethan’s voice cuts in before the argument can escalate.

“That doesn’t make her a bad person.”

Benji spares him a disbelieving look. “That is absolutely up for debate!”

“I need to search you,” Ethan adds, shifting into that grim, quiet cadence that means he’s doing spy things.

“You need to let me out.”

Benji doesn’t answer, it probably wasn't directed towards him anyways. Just lets the silence hang. Ethan glances back. “I assumed you were deep cover back in London,” he says casually. “But isn’t this taking the role a bit far?”

Benji stiffens.

“You knew who she was?” he asks, voice sharp with disbelief.

Of course he did. He said it back at the opera. Still, hearing Ethan confirm it like it’s no big deal makes Benji’s jaw tighten.

“We haven’t formally introduced,” Ethan says, “but I’m pretty sure she’s British Intelligence.”

Benji wants to laugh. Or cry. Instead, he clenches the steering wheel tighter and says nothing. Ethan pulls a knife from her thigh. Benji doesn’t react. Not visibly, at least. But he catalogues the weapon automatically. Angle, size, reach. Not an MI6 blade. Too elegant. Too lethal.

“Ilsa Faust,” she offers, smoothly. “And you’re Ethan Hunt.”

Benji watches through the mirror as Ethan confiscates a lipstick. Probably a weapon He tries to focus on the road. Every few seconds, his eyes flick to the mirror, once more. Ilsa hasn’t blinked.

“What were you doing at the opera tonight?” Ethan asks.

Benji knows the answer before she gives it. But hearing it still makes his stomach churn.

“Saving your life in London put me in a tight spot with some very dangerous people. I was sent to kill the Chancellor to regain their trust.”

Benji doesn’t turn around.

“So you admit you killed him?”

She doesn’t blink.

“No. I went through the motions. That’s not the same thing.”

Benji exhales, long and slow. The League used to teach that. Performance versus execution. How to appear lethal without pulling the trigger. Still, Benji whips around, furious. 

“You thought you’d put him in the hospital,” Ethan says. “Take him out of harm’s way.”

“The same thing you tried to do,” she says without irony.

Benji huffs under his breath. “Oh good,” he mutters. “Bonding over near-fatal diplomacy.”

He looks at Ethan sideways.

“You still think she’s one of the good guys?”

Ethan doesn’t answer. Ilsa just shrugs. Ah fuck, she’s got swag, he’s got to admit. 

“Those other two idiots were redundancies.”

Ethan turns, thinking. “One man to kill the Chancellor if you missed, the other to kill you. A test.”

Ilsa’s voice drops. “The second one I’ve failed, thanks to you.”

Benji can feel Ethan’s silence next to him. He knows what this is. Complications. Ghosts. Old favors and new debts. Why does it always have to be so complicated. 

Ethan adds, “And the car bomb was insurance.”

“And shooting me? What was that?”

Ilsa lifts her chin, calm as ever.

“I didn't shoot you, I shot the sniper. I had a choice of two targets. I’m beginning to regret my decision.”

Benji snorts.

“That makes two of us.”

She turns her attention back to Ethan.

“It was never my intention to kill anyone. I certainly didn’t plant that bomb in the Chancellor’s motorcade.”

 “You did, however, shoot him,” Benji says, eyes still on the road.

Ethan, deadpan:

 “I shot him. She missed.”

Benji’s head whips around. “You shot the Chancellor?”

Ethan shrugs. “I saved his life.”

Benji considers opening the door and rolling himself out into traffic.

Ilsa says calmly, “We merely delayed the inevitable. Now please—for your sake, and your friend’s—let me out.”

But then Ethan’s voice sharpens. “Who is he?”

He holds up the photo again. The sketch.

Ilsa doesn’t answer.

Benji sees it first in the rearview mirror: a vehicle accelerating fast, too fast. He doesn’t even have time to warn them before—THUMP THUMP THUMP.

Gunfire. The back window absorbs the impact, bulletproof glass shuddering.

“We’ve got a tail!” Benji shouts, twisting the wheel. “They’re shooting at us!”

Ilsa leans forward. “This needs to look like an escape. Just throw me out. Now.”

“Are you mad?” Benji barks. “They’ll kill you!”

Ethan is silent. Then: “Let her go.”

Benji grits his teeth. Hits the brakes.

Ilsa yanks the door open and jumps, hitting the ground in a practiced roll.

Bullets sing past the window as two black SUVs screech to a halt, and men leap out. Benji slams his foot down and accelerates again, Ethan leaning around to watch the street behind them vanish.

It’s cold. The kind that cuts through even the sharpest adrenaline. His tux is damp with sweat, bruises blooming beneath it. He still feels the opera in his bones—the crescendo, the chaos, the sniper’s rifle cracking through air like glass.

Benji drives in silence. His hands on the wheel feel locked, frozen in position. The car hums beneath him, tires skimming cobblestone, but all he can hear is the phantom echo of gunfire and the roar of the Chancellor’s car exploding. Smoke’s still caught in his throat. The kind that doesn’t come out with coughing. The kind that settles under your ribs and makes a home of it.

They ditch the car in an alley, double back on foot, and enter the bolt-hole—an old IMF safehouse behind a crumbling bulkhead and a rust-bitten canal gate. It smells like wet concrete and years of disuse. It reminds Benji of rooms he trained in. Not at the IMF.

He slams the door harder than he means to.

Ethan sets the bag down on a fold-out table and starts unpacking. Like nothing’s wrong. Like they’re just finishing a job. Benji can’t take it.

“You don’t get to do that,” he says. His voice cracks. Just slightly.

Ethan looks up. “Do what?”

Benji steps forward, heart pounding.

“You don’t get to disappear for six months, call me out of nowhere, and then just send me home like I was never meant to be here.”

Ethan straightens, but doesn’t speak.

Benji keeps going. “You dragged me into something you’re calling treason. I got shot at, chased, blown up—and now what? You think you’re going to pat me on the head and fly me back to Hunley like I’m someone’s underqualified intern?”

“Benji—”

“No!” It comes out louder than he meant. His throat is tight. He forces it down. “I deserve to be here. You called me. Not Luther, not Brandt. Me.”

He swallows hard. The adrenaline has nowhere to go, so it turns to fury.

“Do you have any idea what it’s been like since you left? What it’s been like watching Hunley’s men try to pick you apart on monitors every day? Listening to them talk about you like you’re a criminal while I sit there smiling like I don’t know better?”

His fists are clenched. His voice has dropped.

“I’ve spent six months lying for you. Covering for you. Redirecting surveillance files and wiping footage before it can flag your face. I’ve done it with a smile. Like it’s easy.”

Ethan’s jaw tightens. “You didn’t have to do that, you shouldn't have, it puts you in danger.”

“I had to.” Benji’s voice is shaking now, but not weak. “Because no one else was going to.”

He takes a step closer, almost daring Ethan to argue.

“I’m not going back,” Benji says. “You don’t get to make that decision for me.”

Ethan looks at him—really looks at him. There’s something unreadable in his face. Fatigue, maybe. Or guilt. Or the slow understanding that Benji isn’t the same tech guy who used to get queasy on training day.

“You shouldn’t have to live like this,” Ethan says quietly. “Watching your back. Taking the fall for me.”

Benji laughs once, dry and small. “Ethan, I’ve been watching my back since long before you ever knew my name.”

It slips out before he can stop it. Not the whole truth—never that—but enough to feel raw. He shifts, covers.

“This isn’t the worst I’ve been through,” he mutters, and hopes it lands like bravado.

It doesn’t.

Ethan studies him. “Why didn’t you say anything, reach out?”

“What would I say? ‘Please let me help you destroy an international black-market terror cell so I can feel useful again’?”

Ethan gives a faint, incredulous shake of the head.

Benji presses on, quieter now. “I want to be here. With you. Not because I want to die, but because I know what side I’m on, and it’s certainly not the CIA.”

There’s a long silence.

Then Ethan nods, once.

“Alright,” he says. “You stay.”

Benji exhales. It doesn’t feel like relief, exactly. More like a slow, painful breath after being held underwater too long. But it’s something. Ethan turns back to the bag. Pulls out the lipstick Ilsa left behind.

“She said we had everything we need to find her.”

He twists the base. A USB key emerges.

Benji takes it from him, already moving toward the laptop on the table. His hands are steadier now. Not because he’s calm. But because for the first time in months, he’s not just sitting at a desk pretending. He’s in it. Fully.

And if something inside him still screams that this will end badly, he ignores it. He’s gotten good at that.

That night, after Ethan goes still—sleeping or pretending to—Benji lies flat on the cot, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. Sleep takes him eventually. Not because he wants it to, but because his body gives in.

In the dream, Damian is still eight. Angry in that singular, surgical way that only children of assassins know how to be. They’re in the courtyard at dusk, stone warm from the sun. Damian sits cross-legged with a slice of mango in one hand and a glare on his face.

“I’m not eating it unless you do,” he says.

Benji kneels across from him. The air smells like rain and iron. Everything is sharper in dreams.

He reaches for the fruit. His hand passes through it like mist.

Damian frowns. “You always leave before I’m done talking.”

“I’m not trying to,” Benji says, but his voice sounds like someone else’s.

Damian turns away.

“You’re going to leave anyway.”

Benji wakes up without meaning to. Quiet. Still.

In the corner, Ethan’s breathing evenly.

Benji closes his eyes again, but he doesn’t expect the dream to return.

It never does. 

——————————

The kid’s been quiet since training.

Jason doesn’t ask. Just sharpens his knife again. Same one as before. Doesn’t need it sharper—just likes the rhythm.

The door creaks. A pause. Then Damian slips in and leans against the wall like he hasn’t made up his mind about staying.

Jason keeps his eyes on the blade. “Dinner optional now?”

“No.”

“You eat anything?”

“I said no.”

Jason sets the knife down and wipes his fingers on a rag. “Funny way of saying yes.”

“I’m tired.”

“That the excuse today?”

Damian doesn’t bite. Just moves across the room and drops into a squat, arms loose around his knees. Jason watches him sidelong. He looks small like that. Young.

After a beat, Jason says, “Y’know, most people get chatty when something’s stuck in their teeth.”

“You assume I want it gone,” Damian replies, dry.

Jason cracks a grin. “Nah, you’d just sulk louder.”

Damian doesn’t respond. Doesn’t leave either.

Then, out of nowhere: “He liked lentils.”

Jason blinks. “I’m sorry—what?”

“He tried cooking them once.” Damian’s voice is flat. “They were dreadful.”

Jason frowns. “Okay. Is this a metaphor, or am I meant to know who we’re talking about?”

Damian gives him a look. “No.”

Jason twists the rag in his hands. The pieces line up. “One of the ghosts, huh.”

Damian shrugs, noncommittal. “He was always in the wrong wing. Med bay. Storage halls. Once the kitchens. I thought he was up to something.”

“Was he?”

“No. Just… not where he was told to be.”

Jason tilts his head. “And you followed him?”

“I was curious.”

“And he didn’t turn you in?”

“Didn’t even flinch.”

Jason leans back, lets his head thud gently against the wall behind him. Yeah. One of those. The ones who don’t last long.

“Let me guess. Didn’t toe the line. Bit of a bleeding heart.”

Damian’s eyes flick over to him. “Not quite.”

Jason lifts an eyebrow. “No?”

“He didn’t talk down to me. Didn’t give me anything to prove. Just… existed nearby.”

Jason goes still for a moment.

Dangerous type.

He doesn’t say it out loud. Just hums. “So where’s he now?”

“Gone.”

Jason doesn’t push. Just nods. “Figures.”

“I asked once.” Damian’s voice is quieter now. “They said he lacked discipline.”

Jason huffs. “Classic.”

Damian picks at the hem of his sleeve. Carefully, like it might unravel wrong if he pulls too hard.

Jason watches. Says, “Let you get used to him. Then didn’t stick the landing.”

Damian looks up. “That your professional opinion?”

Jason shrugs. “I’ve seen the type. You don’t hate them, but… you stop leaning on anything after that.”

“Benji didn’t choose to die.”

“Doesn’t really change the outcome, does it?”

They fall quiet. The air between them is still. Full of things not being said.

Then Jason nudges the knife toward Damian with the toe of his boot.

“You wanna lose again, or should I just let you pretend you would’ve won?”

Damian eyes it. “I’ll let you dream a little longer.”

Jason grins. “Generous.”

Chapter Text

A hawk crashes into the window at dawn. Jason hears it before he sees it—a hollow thud against the greenhouse’s side wall, the kind of sound that isn’t just impact but consequence. He assumes it’s some stunned songbird or a pigeon that misjudged the glass. It wouldn’t be the first time. He doesn’t move, not right away.

But then he catches the faint scrape—wings against tile, feathers against stone—and by the time he reaches the corner, he’s already muttering something like a curse. It’s a hawk. Red-tailed. Female. Juvenile. Not native. Wingtips bloody, twisted just slightly in the wrong direction. There’s a gouge on her flank, not deep but angry-looking, and a tremble to the feathers along her back that Jason recognizes with sick familiarity: panic and pain kept just barely in check.

He crouches in the grass, staring at her for a moment with something between admiration and exasperation. Then he mutters, “You dumb, beautiful bastard,” and shrugs off his jacket.

She flinches as he reaches for her, talons flexing, beak opening—not shrieking, not quite—but there’s no strength behind it. Her breath is too ragged. She knows she’s vulnerable.

“Don’t bite me,” he says, voice low. She doesn’t. He wraps her gently and carries her back inside.

Damian’s already awake. Of course he is. Jason finds him in the central hall sharpening a dagger he doesn’t need to sharpen. It’s just habit now, something precise to do with his hands when everything else is out of reach. His eyes flick up as Jason enters, tracking the wrapped shape in his arms.

“You’re bleeding,” he says, more observation than concern.

Jason glances down at the line of red across his palm. “She panicked. I guess I would too if I’d just flown headfirst into a wall.”

“She?”

Jason unwraps one side of the bundle, revealing the hawk’s head and one outstretched wing. “Red-tailed hawk. Young. Hit the edge of the greenhouse. Probably clipped the outer vent.”

Damian approaches. He doesn’t crouch or reach out, just studies the bird with a sharp, silent focus that makes Jason feel like he’s the one under inspection.

“She’s not one of ours,” Damian says.

Jason shrugs. “Check the jesses. Old leather, League style. Not standard wildlife issue.”

Damian steps closer. He does look now, carefully, and then straightens. “Then someone abandoned her.”

Jason exhales through his nose. “Yeah. Exactly.”

A beat.

Damian turns, brisk. “She’ll need a splint. Quiet. And food.”

Jason blinks. “That’s it?”

“You didn’t bring her here to let her die.”

That’s true. But he wasn’t expecting Damian to agree so quickly.

“You’re helping?”

“I dislike waste,” Damian says. “Especially skilled predators.”

Jason almost laughs. Not because it’s funny—because none of this is funny—but because how is this his life? Smuggling injured birds into a compound full of ghost assassins and exiles and emotionally damaged quasi-siblings, and this kid, who used to threaten to kill him on principle, is now calmly helping him field-dress a hawk like they’re in some low-budget wildlife documentary. It’s ridiculous. It’s maddening.

And, worse, it’s starting to feel almost normal.

They set the wing first. Jason is more careful than he usually lets on. Damian is all exactness and surety, like he’s done this a thousand times. He probably has. They don’t talk for a while. The hawk makes no sound. Jason cuts a strip from an old T-shirt for the wrap. Damian holds the wing steady. They breathe in tandem.

Then, as Jason knots the fabric: “You got a name for her?”

Damian glances over. “You’re the one who brought her.”

“I figured you’d have a list. You always do.”

Damian’s quiet for a beat. Then: “Tariq.”

Jason raises an eyebrow. “Hindi?”

“Arabic, it means ‘he who knocks at the door.’ It’s what my grandfather used to call certain types of hunters.”

Jason huffs a half-smile. “She’s a girl.”

Damian shrugs. “Names of power are not bound by gender.”

Jason rolls his eyes, but doesn’t argue.

“Tariq it is.”

They sit beside the perch that night, watching the hawk sleep beneath the warm glow of a rigged heat lamp. The compound is quiet except for the hum of the garden lights and the faint scuttle of geckos across tile. Jason’s arms are crossed over his knees. He leans back just far enough to let his spine crack against the wall.

“Y’know,” he says slowly, “this might be the stupidest thing I’ve done all month.”

Damian doesn’t look away from the hawk. “You walked out of an official trainee meeting because someone insulted your jacket.”

Jason smirks. “Still my favorite jacket.”

“Your taste is suspect.”

Jason glances over. “You ever read anything that isn’t tactical or ancient and miserable?”

Damian scowls. “I read Beowulf.”

“That explains a lot.”

Jason picks up a fallen book from the floor, flips it over. It’s a medical text, annotated in looping, careful handwriting. Damian is one to talk about taste. 

“You ever try fiction?” he asks.

Damian hesitates.

Jason leans back. “I read Watership Down after I came back. Weird book. Rabbits, yeah, but also—grief. Loyalty. Survival. Built something in me that hadn’t been there before.”

Damian doesn’t reply right away.

Then: “Benji liked fiction.”

Jason’s heart hurts for the kid. Jason’s lungs tighten at the mention of the man. Jason nods. “Yeah. I could see that.”

“He read the same books over and over, Science Fiction mostly. I asked him why once. He said you find something more in each new memory."

Jason goes still. Not because he’s surprised, but because something about that hurts. Soft and sudden. He doesn't want to grieve for this man too. He wants to hate him, hate him for leaving Damian, hate him for leaving like Bruce. He wants Damian to move on. He wants to move on. 

“Did he ever read to you?” he asks instead.

“No,” Damian says. “But he let me doodle in the margins.”

Jason smiles, slow and aching.

Tariq eats the next morning. It’s messy. Hesitant. But she picks apart the thawed mouse and swallows with a strange, jerky elegance that makes Jason feel something he doesn’t have a name for.

“She’s angry,” Damian observes, kneeling beside the perch.

“She’s earned it,” Jason replies.

Damian strokes one finger over the uninjured wing. “She’ll fly again.”

Jason studies him. The certainty in his voice. The way he says it like it’s not a guess but a promise.

“You sound sure.”

“I am.”

Jason nods. “Good.”

A pause.

Then, softer: “Benji would’ve done this.”

Jason glances at him. Unable to keep the slight loathing out of his voice. “Yeah?”

Damian doesn’t look up. “He was always finding injured things. A fox. A kestrel. Once, a goat. He knew how to fix things that weren’t people.”

Jason doesn’t answer. Later, Jason sits out in the sun, staring at an old scar on his wrist. He doesn’t mean to fall into silence. It just happens. Muscle memory. Damian joins him. Sits. Doesn’t say anything. Jason lights a cigarette and doesn’t offer one. Thank god Damian doesn’t ask.

“She’s not gonna thank us,” Damian says eventually.

Jason exhales. “The hawk?”

“She’ll fly off and never look back.”

Jason tilts his head. “Is that what you’d do?”

Damian shrugs. “I might. If I had wings.”

Jason nods. “I used to think leaving meant freedom. But it doesn’t. Not always.”

“Sometimes it’s just silence.”

Jason glances sideways. “You’re good at that.”

Damian doesn’t smile, but his eyes flicker like he almost did. 

“You’re good at noise,” he says.

Jason laughs. It’s sharp, real, involuntary. “I really am.”

Near midnight, Jason finds Damian asleep in the chair beside Tariq. He’s just out—arms crossed, brow furrowed, a thread of tension still coiled in his spine, like even sleep can’t quite unmake the soldier in him. Jason sympathizes, watches him for a long moment. Then sits beside the hawk, letting the warmth of the lamp blur the edge of his vision.

-------------------

Ilsa Faust learnt long ago that trust is a currency with a shelf life. You can spend it, borrow it, forge it—but it always comes due. And when it does, the ones who hand it to you inevitably turn to ash in your mouth. She stopped pretending otherwise. Stopped pretending she isn’t trading in lives. Still, it scrapes at something inside her when Ethan looks at her like that.

They are already past Casablanca by the time the sun begins to rise over the edge of the desert, the orange sky flaring against a world that looks, to her, like the edge of everything. Benji sits in the back seat, fidgeting with cables. Ethan drives, steady hands on the wheel. Nobody speaks. Ilsa keeps her eyes on the window.

She brings them here, on Solomon’s orders, to steal something. A ledger. The ledger.

The Syndicate’s bones.

She should be focused.

She isn’t.

Because in thirty-six hours, she is supposed to deliver that drive to Atlee, her handler. And maybe—if she plays everything just right, if she betrays just enough people to satisfy him—it will finally be over.

MI6 tells her she is deep cover. Praises her infiltration. Her endurance. Her loyalty. But they don’t warn her how quickly that line will blur. Don’t warn her what it feels like to be locked in a room with Solomon Lane and see her own reflection looking back. The Syndicate doesn’t operate like the Service. It isn’t a hierarchy. It’s an infection. You don’t join it. It rewrites you. And the worst part? They let her.

Atlee tells her to get close. To play her part. To do whatever is necessary. He doesn’t pull her out when the assignments stop making sense. When the targets become civilians. When the kill orders stop being political and start being personal. She asks to come home. He tells her to keep working.

So she does. Until one day, she slips poison into a wine glass that isn’t hers, and Lane smiles too knowingly across the table, and she realizes—she isn’t undercover anymore.

She is owned.

Ethan is different. Not because he is noble—though he is, in that strange, exhausting way of his—but because he never asks her to prove anything. Not once. He simply assumes she’ll do the right thing. It is a terrible kind of pressure. There was a moment back in Vienna—after the gunshots, after the rooftop escape—when she could’ve walked away. Left the world behind. Left him behind. Yet he looked at her with that infuriating calm, even after she aimed a gun at him.

Now here she is. At the end of a winding road in Morocco. Preparing to fake cooperation while hoping, quietly, that this will all somehow break in her favor.

They are going to steal the ledger.

And then she is going to steal it from them.

It is the only way.

She will take the drive back to Atlee. Prove she is loyal. Buy her freedom. Not just from MI6—but from Lane. From this entire loop of blood and silence.

She will be free.

If she survives.

She changes in the back of the van, slipping into the cream utility jumpsuit meant to pass for plant staff. Her hair is already pinned back. She straps a medkit to her thigh. Checks the folding blade tucked into her belt. Benji watches her out of the corner of his eye. Like he is still trying to decide if she is friend or foe. She doesn’t blame him.

She isn’t sure either.

When Ethan lays out the plan, she doesn’t flinch. Not even when he says he’ll be the one diving into the pressure vault. No gear. Just two and a half minutes of breath and a series of vents timed down to the second. She doesn’t argue. Arguing never seems to work on Ethan. She just nods.

“I’ll be waiting by the gantry,” she says.

Ethan looks at her then. Too long. Too knowing.

“It’s okay,” he says, so quietly Benji doesn’t hear.

“You don’t know what you’re saying yes to,” she replies.

But he does.

Because they both know she’ll take it.

Because she has to.

He wants her to. She sees it in his eyes. Sees it in the slight shift of his shoulders. The silent permission: take the drive. Go. So she will. And it will break something in her. But it might also save her life. The water is louder than she expects.

Down in the control gantry, she stands alone, watching the wristband track Ethan’s progress through the submerged torus. She can hear the turbine blades spinning somewhere in the dark, the steady pulse of pressure moving around the vault like a heartbeat.

She hates this part.

Waiting.

Knowing the risks. Calculating how long it would take to sprint to the gantry hatch if Ethan doesn’t surface in time. Knowing she’ll have to bring him back, or lie about trying. The drive is copying. Benji is in the system now. She can hear his breath occasionally crackle through the comms—too frequent, too tight.

He is scared.

She understands that too well. She sees the red light on the control panel flash. Ethan is off-course. The turbine current has caught him.

He is drowning.

She hesitates.

She doesn’t hesitate.

She slams open the hatch, dives in, and lets muscle memory do the rest.

Lane trained her to be many things. Underwater operative wasn't one of them. But she trained. And she is fast. She gets to him just as he starts to go still. Dead weight. She hauls him up. Breaks the surface. Drags him to the metal ledge, choking on the pressure in her lungs.

And then she does the one thing she never thought she’ll have to do. Not to a man so immortal as Ethan Hunt. She brings him back.

The makeshift defibrillator works on the second jolt. His body convulses. Coughs.

She feels something in her chest give way. It isn’t relief. It is fear. Because now she has to leave. Benji finds them seconds later.

He looks at her. Then Ethan. Then back again. She sees it on his face—the suspicion, the pain, the betrayal she hasn’t earned yet but knows is coming. She doesn't think even he is aware he is giving so much away. 

He asks if she’s alright, hands her dry clothes. His hand brushes hers. And in that tiny kindness, she nearly loses her nerve. But she can’t afford it. Because she isn’t supposed to stay kind.

She is supposed to survive.

So she turns her back. Changes quickly. Keeps her eyes down. Takes the one path open to her. And when Benji sits beside Ethan—when he reaches down and smiles and thanks him—she moves fast. One shot. One jolt.

Benji drops like stone.

She hates herself for it.

But she runs anyway.

-------------------------

The drive sent them to Africa. They drove for hours through dust and wind, and net with Ilsa, skimming the edge of Morocco’s inland roads, trailing too close to a mission no one had quite agreed to.

A hydroelectric power station, Ethan had said. Deep in the desert. On the surface, it looked like any other energy facility—but underground? There was a pressure vault. A torus-shaped data chamber suspended in water and cooled by a self-contained turbine loop. No radio contact, no satellite link. Total isolation.

The data Ethan needed—the Syndicate ledger—was stored there, sealed in a biometric drive.

“Not hackable,” Benji had muttered. “Because of course it isn’t.”

It could only be retrieved physically. And of course he was given the honor of entering such a facility while Ethan and Ilsa changed the security cards in the torus to allow him access and prevent him getting disintegrated. 

Benji never thought he’d miss the impossible simplicity of cliff faces. There was at least a kind of honesty to them—the wind, the cold, the sheer drop. You didn’t mistake a cliff for something safe. But this—this was worse. The sterile curve of the hallway. The hum of electricity in concrete bones. Gait analysis. Retinal scans. A corridor moving like a mouth about to close.

It could have been League.

He pressed his hand to the wall, just once, before pulling it away like it burned. The Moroccan facility was supposed to be just another secure location—but everything about it hummed with familiarity. Too much quiet. Too much control.

His voice didn’t shake when he gave the false name. His fingerprint didn’t falter under the scanner. He moved with surgical precision, each step rehearsed. But inside, his mind raced, a rattling freight of memories. He remembered the pressure of similar halls beneath Nanda Parbat. Remembered walking this same pace beside Damian, who was seven years old and could already break a man’s windpipe. He remembered drills. The kind that didn’t end when you passed.

You only passed if you lived. The first lock clicked open beneath his card. The second: a thumbprint. Third: combination. Every layer felt more surreal. As if the vault wasn’t protecting something—it was protecting him, trapping him in a role he no longer played. A spy, a ghost, a weapon carved out of a boy who once wanted to be a doctor.

In his sleeve, the pulse monitor ticked, too fast. He tried to breathe evenly. Ilsa’s voice from the earpiece had faded. Ethan’s was never there. Down below, they were both navigating the torus. Drowning without tanks. He was supposed to worry about them.

He reached the last security barrier. Gait analysis. The corridor turned right and narrowed—no disguises, no tech would get him through this final check. The machine was mounted on a rail, tracking every twitch of muscle, every angle of joint.

Benji exhaled. Too sharply. He stepped forward.

The scanner clicked to life.

And all he could think was: They will know me. 

Not just the machine. Not just the guards. Them. The League. If they were watching. If somehow the camera feeds reached back to any of the hundred shadowed corners of his past—he’d walked like this before. In mission drills. In field tests. In executions.

His body remembered it all. The straightening of his spine. The tension in his neck. The clipped pace that always drew praise. And punishment.

He walked.

The lights tracked him like crosshairs.

It cleared.

He reached the terminal.

Still calm.

Still standing.

He sat, inserted the drive, and watched the files begin to copy. Just names at first. Code strings. He opened the second layer. Then the third.

That’s when everything changed.

Because he knew those names.

Aya.

Tomás.

Jinhai.

And—God, no—Sayeed.

His hand curled so hard the drive nearly snapped.

These weren’t just Syndicate operatives.

These were League.

Some still active. Some—some were children. Recruits who’d never been chosen. Names that should never have made it out of Nanda Parbat. No one outside the mountain should even know they existed.

Benji couldn’t breathe. This wasn’t just a ledger. This was a list. Not just of assets. Of targets. He sat back and swallowed a sound. Too close to a sob. This wasn’t just Lane’s creation. It was a merger.

And suddenly, he understood why the security felt so familiar. This whole operation bore the League’s fingerprints. The Syndicate wasn’t just a rival power. It was seeded. Fed. Maybe even raised.

Lane was clever. But someone else had to have handed him this. He copied the names for himself, the whole drive for the mission. Kept the segment unlinked to the main IMF database, deleted and separated it from whatever else the drive contained. He’d encrypt it later. Maybe destroy it. Or maybe—

He never finished the thought.

Damian.

Benji hadn’t seen his name, not exactly. But the encryption key, something he used so unconsciously to open the drive because it was practically second nature to him. It used the same sequence from one of Damian’s earliest assignments—one that only Benji would recognize. A private joke.

Except it wasn’t private anymore. He staggered to his feet, and the panic hit him full force. If he saw it—someone else might have too.  If the League had seeded Lane’s ledger, they’d also have their fingers on the tripwires. The second he accessed it, it would ripple across whatever surveillance threads remained. A ping. A ghost in the system.

Someone would know.

And in Nanda Parbat, someone did.

The comms lit up.

“Benji? You’re clear.”

It was Ilsa. But her voice sounded strained. Wet.

He yanked the drive and ran.

He reached the gantry just soon enough to witness as Ilsa collapsed beside Ethan’s body, soaked and shivering, something must have gone pear shaped. Benji’s heart stuttered. “No—no, no, no—”

And then Ethan moved.

Gasps. Coughs. The faintest wheeze of life.

Benji exhaled. Too fast. Too loud.

“I knew you could do it,” he said. “Three minutes is nothing. I mean, I had this terrible feeling—”

He stopped himself. Reavaluated, saw the soaked clothes. The defibrillator. The way Ilsa was shaking, not just with cold but with fear.

“…Are you okay?” he asked.

Ilsa didn’t answer. Just stared, he winced at the expression, muttering a small apology and handing her some dry clothes. She turned, to change. He took her place beside Ethan.

The man’s eyes roll towards him something like recognition flickering through them.

“Benji?” Comes Ethan’s soft rough voice.

“Hey buddy,” Benji said quietly. “You’re going to be fine. Just a bit of sunshine and you’ll be good as new.”

He forced a smile and held up the drive. “We got it. I knew we would.”

Ethan blinked blearily at him. Tried to speak.

Benji looked down at him and added—quieter now, like it was meant for Ethan alone:

“I owe you my life, man. Thank you.”

That’s when Ilsa moved.

A blur. A twist. The defibrillator discharged against Benji’s chest and everything went black.

He came to with Ethan crouched beside him, blood rushing in his ears. The drive was gone.

““She took it,” Ethan said.

Benji rubbed his chest, still sparking with aftershock. “She—what?”

“Ilsa,” Ethan said. “She took the drive.”

Benji stared at him. “And you’re surprised?”

Ethan didn’t answer.

Because he wasn’t.

Benji sat up slowly. “I cloned it. Before she got there. We have everything.”

Ethan nodded. “Good.”

“She saved your life,” Benji said.

“I know.”

“You let her take it.”

Ethan met his eyes.

“She has no one else.”

Benji doesn’t respond. They end up chasing after Ilsa, they have to at least act like they’re trying to get the drive back. He probably gets a concussion. Ethan crashes a motorcycle. Brandt is here? And so is Luther? In any other circumstance he’d be thrilled, but he isn’t. He’s distracted. 

His mind is still on the encryption. He can feel it, seared into his memory. A list of identities, funds, contact protocols—but that isn't the part that scares him.

It is that it makes sense. Lane had created the Syndicate using resources that were too exact, too intimate to be gathered without help. British Intelligence might’ve built the infrastructure—but the League?

The League recruited the people.

He felt nauseous.

And the worst part?

He should’ve said something.

He should’ve told Ethan, the moment he saw those names. That the League was involved. That this wasn’t just another mission.

But he hadn’t. And he wouldn’t. 

Because he still isn’t sure where the line was between spy and survivor. Or maybe—maybe some part of him is still afraid that saying it out loud will make it real. That telling Ethan would mean telling him what he really is. Who he used to be.

And who he might still be, if this mission keeps dragging him backwards.

All he can think about is those names.

The way Damian’s encryption key had flickered. And the way, somehow, even after all this time…

…it had worked.

Chapter Text

Damian thinks Benji should have taught him about grief before he had to teach himself.

Benji had been good at that—at teaching. He made it feel like a conversation, give and take, even if Damian hadn’t spoken in the last half hour. Even if his answers came only in the margins of his sketchbooks, in nods or grunts, or the rare glance that asked for nothing in return.

Damian used to talk more. When he’d had someone safe to speak around—without consequence, without leak or lecture. He talks now, of course. To his mother, to Jason, to the rotating sequence of tutors. But not like he used to. He does not ramble. He does not let his mouth run while his mind walks. He is deliberate, mostly. It is not a horrible thing. He simply does not know what he would say.

He scarcely enters the field anymore. He spends most of his time in Nanda Parbat: tracing the outlines of new chambers, navigating the unfamiliar cadence of new faces and old ghosts. It seems everyone is part of a revolving door of names and uniforms, and he—he is simply what remains. He sketches. He paints. He sneaks around the compound in search of the best hideaway nooks. By most measures, he is… fine.

Jason is new.

Jason is his brother. Son to the man who sired them both. Jason was dead. He came back. Damian, to his own faint surprise, does not dislike him. The man—or older child—is an agreeable presence. Loud at times. Evasive at others. But familiar, too. So much like Benji it aches.

Jason is very American, but he is eager to learn. He enjoys time spent working rather than leisure, something Damian respects. They are kindred in that way. Jason asks absurd questions. He gives absurd answers. He does not like Benji the way Damian had assumed, but perhaps that is simply the consequence of being confronted with someone too similar to oneself. You resent the echo.

And yet, Jason is kind to most anyone. This part throws Damian most of all. This contrasts sharply with his opinion of their father.

Damian does not understand. Jason had died. Father had not saved him. Had not avenged him. But neither had Damian. And yet Jason does not hold him accountable. There are no journals full of red-rimmed plans detailing his revenge toward Damian. No threats. That honor, it seems, is reserved solely for Bruce.

Damian knows, knows with absolute certainty, that if he were to die, his mother would avenge him. Damian also knows that if he were to die, Benji would not have done the same. He would have wept.

Damian cannot fault him for that now. He had done the same in return.

He had not tracked down Benji’s killer. Had not crossed the oceans in fury. He’d told himself it would not help. That there were no answers left. But the truth had always been simpler. He was afraid. Of the knowing. Of being too late. Of being right. The guilt lingered.

So when the ping hits his wristband, when an old access code of his is used in a hardrive briefly uploaded to the web deep within a Taurus subfacility—he checks. He knows the encryption. Knows the systems. Knows that no one else should have been able to open it.

No one but Benji.

He runs the trace twice. The encrypted alert hadn’t come from a stray League system. It had originated from a compromised Syndicate node—a buried server still linked to their archives. Damian knows those, too. He’d been briefed on them. Used them once. The files there weren’t random.

The drive was Syndicate. Which meant whoever opened it hadn’t just tripped an alert—they’d drawn blood. He pulls the footage. Slows it. A figure moves through the biometric corridor. Controlled gait. Limp held too steady. Shoulders too square. There’s too much familiarity in the angles. In the precision.

Damian freezes the frame. Zooms.

He knows that walk.

“No,” he whispers. But the word is hollow. He already knows the truth.

Benji’s alive. But worse—Benji is in danger. If the Syndicate drive triggered that alert, then someone had flagged it for internal watch. And that corridor—those movements—they meant something else, too.

The Syndicate hadn’t just been breached. He suspects they’d recruited. Benji’s access, his access, was never meant to be there. Which meant the only way he had access was if someone gave it to him. Not IMF. Not League. Syndicate.

Damian grips the edge of the console so tightly the plastic creaks. The thought makes him sick. The Syndicate was a machine that collected the broken. That repurposed them. Ghost agents. Burned assets. People thought to be dead.

Jason finds him half an hour later.

He’s hunched over a laptop, light flickering across his face in blue and gold. Tactical screens hover in midair. Topographical data of Morocco. Three transport routes. Medical loadouts. An old IMF safehouse tagged with Benji’s name in faded grey. Syndicate directories. 

Jason leans against the door. Watches him work. “You planning something?”

Damian doesn’t answer.

Jason crosses the room, arms folded. “You wanna tell me why you’re pulling old League exfil routes and tapping into ghosted IMF safehouses?”

Still nothing.

Jason sighs. “Okay. The hard way, then.”

He slams the computer closed with one flat hand. Damian is on his feet in an instant, eyes flashing like drawn steel.

“Don’t,” he says. Quiet. Cold.

“Don’t what?” Jason fires back. “I can pretend to not know what you’re doing here and have you admit to your hair brained scheme, but really. What? Don’t stop you from running off half-cocked on some half-truth? Based on what, a shadow in a corridor?”

Damian doesn’t blink. “It wasn’t a shadow.”

Jason snorts. “You’re seeing what you want to see.”

“No.” Damian taps the console. It reactivates. Footage. Data. Images. He brings up the frozen frame—the figure in the corridor.

“That’s him,” Damian says. “He accessed a Syndicate redbox. A digital vault. Using my encryption sequence.”

Jason stares. He goes very still.

“You’re saying—” He swallows. “Your Benji’s alive?”

“Yes.”

Jason doesn’t say anything. Just stares. His knuckles go white.

Damian continues, anxious, which is unlike him, but determined. “And it’s worse than that. The drive, it wasn’t just a standard data vault. It was Syndicate. Active. Monitored.”

Jason lifts his head. “You think they recruited him.”

“I think they targeted him. He’s… perfect for them. Technically skilled. Disillusioned. Already declared dead.”

Jason flinches.

Damian sees it, uses it. “Just like you.”

Jason steps back. The silence twists. It was a dirty move, he admits. But Damian is feeling quite desperate right now. 

“I think he’s in over his head,” Damian says. “I think they’re going to kill him for what he saw.”

Jason breathes in, sharp and ragged, resigned, and Damian knows he’s won. “Then we get him out.”

Damian nods. “That’s what I’m planning.”

Jason looks at the screen again. The slow-motion footage. The limp. The stiff gait. Benji.

“I wasn’t saved,” he says, voice raw. “I came back and there was no one waiting.”

Damian looks at him.

Jason continues, quieter now. “Bruce didn’t save me. No one did. I had to crawl out of my own grave. Alone.”

Damian doesn’t interrupt.

“I told myself I was okay with that,” Jason says. “But I wasn’t. Not really.”

A long pause.

Then Jason looks up. “Maybe this is it. The thing that balances the scale.”

Damian frowns.

“We save him,” Jason says, it’s firmer this time. 

Damian exhales. “Together?”

Jason nods.

Damian studies him, then offers a hand. For a long moment, Jason just looks at it.

Then, slowly, deliberately, he clasps it.

---------------------------------

The trick to respect is not in speaking. The trick is in silence. A single omission, repeated over time, becomes a pattern. A pattern, once noticed, becomes prophecy.

Talia learned this as a girl, listening in the shadowed corners of the mountain citadel, legs folded neatly under her as assassins murmured in the halls. Her father’s voice had always been the loudest. She made a study of the others.

She never needed to lie. Not once. Not really.

Now, standing in the cool hush of the archive chamber, she watches the message decrypt itself into existence. One of the council’s secured lines. Authentic. Untouched. She waits for the transmission to finish, then lifts her hand.

The script flickers. She doesn’t rewrite. She only removes two words. An adjective here, a closing remark there. Not even the sender would recognize the loss. Her reflection watches her from the obsidian glass of the desktop. She does not blink.

Ra’s had said once that power was clarity. That true authority requires no disguise. Talia had smiled at that, carefully, the way she always did when he tried to sound immortal. She does not believe in gods anymore. Only in the weight of consequences and the gentle, deliberate angle of a knife in a man’s ribs.

One message isn’t enough. She seeds five over the next week. Lets them drift through the system at intervals, each one clipped and void of the usual flourish her father favors. And yet it is his own voice, after all—recorded and sealed weeks ago, meant for limited council ears. Talia knows his cadence better than she knows her own heartbeat. By the third message, Master Arif begins to ask questions in the war room.

“He speaks of legacy again,” he murmurs, voice low as if afraid the walls will breathe. “Of continuity. Of acceptance.”

Master Khalid tilts his head. “And why shouldn’t he? The Lazarus effects don’t hold as long as they used to. We’ve all seen it.”

“She is too close to him,” says another voice—Sabirah, old and watchful. “The daughter always walks beside the deathbed.”

Not yet, Talia thinks, perched above them all on a solid steel beam. But soon.

She stands with her arms on her knees, eyes downcast as they speak around her, never to her. It suits her well. Talia knows the shape of power better than any of them. It is a blade balanced delicately across the bones of allegiance. It is the moment a general wonders, silently, what will become of his command if his leader fades.

She plants the doubt, then walks away before it grows teeth. On the fourth morning, her father summons her. Not in anger. Not yet.

“Talia, daughter,” Ra’s says, watching the garden mist roll through the pines beyond his chamber. He stands barefoot on the stone, a robe loose over his shoulders, white showing stark at his temples. “You’ve taken to the records again.”

It is not a question. She does not pretend otherwise.

“There were errors in the mission briefings from Prague,” she replies. “I corrected them.”

Ra’s hums, quiet and deep. “You’ve always been diligent.”

Talia waits. After a pause, he turns. The firelight does strange things to the lines of his face now. He looks… mortal. Has he always?

“I wonder, my daughter, if you think me weak.”

Ah. There it is. The first crack. She tilts her chin just enough to seem puzzled, to suggest gentleness.

“Of course not, Father.”

He smiles, faint and humorless. “Even in youth, you are too poised to flatter.”

“I only speak what is true.”

Ra’s watches her for a long moment. The wind catches the edge of his sleeve, and he lifts one hand to still it.

“You would not know this,” he says, “but the older one grows, the more the League whispers. They believe endings must be dramatic. Explosions. Betrayals. Collapse.” His voice roughens with scorn. “They forget that slow erosion has killed more empires than fire.”

“And what do you believe?” Talia asks, careful, looking down at the shorter man.

Ra’s lifts his gaze to hers. “I believe that with legacy—one must sharpen it while there’s still time.”

She inclines her head. He’s quite repetitive. 

When she leaves, she does not speak of it to anyone. But she listens, more sharply now—to the council’s mutterings, to the subtle shift in stance when Ra’s enters the war room, to the way Master Arif glances at the maps with too much interest, as if seeing borders rearranged in his mind.

The rot had taken hold. All she has to do is let it.

A week later, the council meets without Ra’s present. This is not unprecedented. But it is rare. She keeps a small, smug smile to herself. 

“We must consider succession,” says Arif, voice clipped and measured. “Not because we doubt The Head—but because we respect the order he’s built. It would be unwise to leave the transition to chaos.”

Khalid nods slowly. “There are precedents.”

Talia sits in silence at the far end of the table, gaze cast downward. She wears no blade today, no overt symbols of power. Only the ring at her finger—the sigil of her house. That alone is enough.

They do not look at her when they speak of succession. But they do exclude her, either.

Sabirah clears her throat. “He has not yet named an heir.”

A pause. Then Khalid, careful: “There is only one name that makes sense.”

They all know it.

They will never say it aloud. Not yet.

Talia breathes once, steady. She says nothing. Her silence becomes permission. She feels the urge to chuckle.

Later, she stands at the edge of the courtyard and watches the rain. It’s thin and silver in the mountain air, whispering down the stone like the memory of a song. She wonders what Damian would say if he saw her now—if he’d recognize her in this posture, still and waiting, a knife hidden beneath her shawl and no expression on her face. He is still a boy. Still half-dreaming of monsters and heroes.

But he is beginning to see the shadows behind the masks. Just as she did. Benji would have told her this was unwise. Not the manipulation—he’d understand that. But the cost. The emotional weight of cutting someone down, even gently, even with ceremony. Benji had always believed in other ways.

But Benji is gone. And she cannot grieve in the open. So she gives the League something else to mourn.

Ra’s will falter soon. What matters is what follows.

What matters is who follows.

And whether that legacy will bend, at last, towards something new.

Chapter Text

So they’re heading to London now. Benji isn't quite sure why, but he’s not quite sure about a lot of things right now. He knows the contents of the hard drive are a virtual redbox—at least the part not connected to the League. The part that is, he scrubbed. Painstakingly. Paranoid doesn’t begin to cover it. He’d rerouted half the power draw from the safehouse just to run double-layer forensic sweeps before giving anything to Luther.

And yet.

None of them can open the redbox. Triple-encrypted, British state-secrets level, tied to the Prime Minister’s biometric credentials. The kind of encryption that makes even the IMF sigh. So unless someone decides they’re kidnapping the Prime Minister—

Ooooh.

Lane is going to kidnap the Prime Minister.

Benji closes his eyes. Exhales. "Fuck."

Of course he is. Of course. And now they’re on a train. Hurtling toward London. No clear plan, no backup, no authority. Just six bags of gear, and Ethan—who is currently arguing with Brandt about whether MI6’s involvement is going to get them all shot or knighted.

Benji doesn’t weigh in. He’s trying not to think about the list on the drive. The part he didn’t tell them about. The part that started this whole spiral.

He’s halfway through spiraling again when Luther interrupts—calm as always.

“We found her,” Luther says.

Benji jolts. “Ilsa?”

Luther nods and tilts his laptop. A still image pops up: CCTV. Paddington Station. Platform 1. She’s walking alone, coat drawn tight against the chill, hands empty.

Ethan moves first. Benji follows.

----------

The station hums with movement, but nothing feels alive. The air is stale. The color’s wrong — all grey coats and washed-out signage. Benji trails Ethan through the crowd, eyes scanning left to right, cataloguing exits, faces, angles. It’s instinctive now. Not just IMF reflexes. League, or rather Talia’s training, it never left him, not really. He, Luther, Brandt, and Ethan are all spread out across the train station. 

He spots her first. Ilsa. Upright. Composed. She’s not running—which is what makes Benji’s stomach twist. She looks at him across the terminal before going to greet Ethan. And mouths: Run.

He doesn’t even have time to try.

The pressure at his back isn’t rough. That’s the worst part. The hands that find him are practiced, professional. They don’t drag. They guide. A press behind his ribs. A tilt at the base of his neck. One step. Two.

There’s a train pulling in. Noise swells around him like fabric.

He sees Ethan turn.

Then the floor tilts, and he’s gone.

---------------------

Steam rises in ribbons. The chamber is empty but for her.

Talia al Ghul walks without sound.

No gold. No ceremonial armor. No audience.

She wears black leathers reinforced with layered weave. A curved blade at her hip. Another across her back. Functional. Lethal. Clean.

Jason and Damian are already gone—off chasing freedom, or each other. She let them go. Did not speak. Did not explain.

This part, they cannot witness.

This part must be hers.

She enters a separate hallway into one more chamber, the final one. Ra’s al Ghul stands at the center of the ritual circle, Lazarus mist curling around him like a coronation of ash. He is gaunt but unbent. Still dangerous.

She knows how he fights. He taught her. She learned everything—

Except how to stop loving him.

That ends now.

“You’re late,” he says, without turning. “The renewal ritual has already begun.”

She steps into the light.

“I know,” she replies. “I started it.”

He turns. Slowly. Deliberately. The hem of his robe whispers across the stone.

His eyes are sharp. Ancient. He studies her the way he once studied battlefield maps: searching for weakness.

“You always had the timing of a knife,” he says.

She unsheathes her sword. No flourish. Just sound—steel on steel.

He raises a brow. “You think you can kill me?”

“No,” she says. “I think I can end you.”

------------------------------------------------------

Benji comes to in transit. The air shifts—recycled and frigid—and there’s the telltale hum of reinforced steel. They’re underground. He doesn’t remember being moved. That terrifies him more than pain.

His wrists are bound. Efficiently. Painfully. His mind offers up the name: the Bone Doctor. His shoulder aches from the angle. A flicker of memory—being carried. He tries to inhale and feels a sharp pain in his neck.

Benji opens his eyes.

A hotel room. Blackout windows. High up, judging by the pressure behind his ears. There’s a chair across from him. Empty. And then it isn’t.

Solomon Lane walks in with the kind of patience that screams control. He says nothing at first. Just looks.

Benji doesn’t blink. He glares.

Lane takes the chair. Folds his hands. Smiles—or whatever mimicry passes for it.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Lane says, mildly.

Benji gives a weak huff. “You’re not a ghost yet… but you will be.”

Lane hums, like he’s considering it.

“You didn’t say a word on the way here. That’s discipline. Or shock.”

Benji doesn’t rise to it. He’s still piecing together how many hours he’s lost.

Lane tilts his head slightly.

“Scrub yourself clean all you like, Benjamin. Rot leaves residue. And you, I think, are still damp.”

Benji’s breath catches. Just for a second.

Lane notices.

“You can forge credentials. Fabricate loyalty. But decay seeps in, doesn’t it?”

A pause. Then, leaning in slightly—close enough for Benji to feel his breath, he whispers. “I’m not the ghost in this room.”

Benji meets his gaze. Something cold flickers in his gut. He exhales:

“If you’re trying to psychoanalyze me, you’re going to need better lighting.”

Lane’s smile goes thin and clinical.

“I know what you are.”

Benji’s voice lightens, almost flippant. A defense.

“Really? Suppose we’re at an impasse, then, Mr. Lane.”

Lane doesn’t blink. Doesn’t move. His fingers curl once around the armrest, slow and quiet.

“Tell me,” he murmurs, “does Hunt know?”

Benji’s heart skips. Lane notices that too. Like a scientist cataloging symptoms.

“Does he know what you were trained for?”

“What would your IMF colleagues say, if they knew you once belonged to Ra’s al Ghul?”

Benji stills.

“Does Ethan know?” Lane continues, voice soft as ash.

“That you were one of them? That your hands weren’t always clean? You were trained to kill before you learned to drive, all members are. You stitched wounds after you opened them.”

“I wonder—when Hunt sees your hands, does he ever imagine the necks they held?”

Benji laughs. Sharp. Ugly.

Lane is wrong ironically so—but close enough that it burns, that he can feel the gloves on his hands. 

Lane pauses. Watches.

Benji lifts his head. Eyes bloodshot.

“I’m not afraid to die,” he says. “I did it once already. For someone who mattered more than me.”

“And look where that got you,” Lane replies, dispassionately.

Benji leans back, breath rattling.

“I am a living corpse, Mr. Lane. Rotting produce isn’t worth the shelf space.”

Lane’s jaw flicks tight. For a moment.

“I don’t need you to argue,” he says, tone back to glass. “I only need you alive. For now.”

He turns his head slightly, voice directed past Benji.

“Get him ready.”

A man at the edge of the room moves. Benji closes his eyes.

He’s been in worse rooms. But never one this familiar.

Benji comes to on cold tile, coughing blood through his teeth.

Two things register first: his shoulder is dislocated, and there’s a contact lens in his left eye.

The rest follows like a migraine.

Wrists still bound behind him. Copper in his mouth. Jacket gone. Comms gone.

Then the weight on his chest. Mechanical. Dense.

He looks down.

A bomb.

Standard casing. Localized detonation. Enough to kill him, and everyone nearby. Probably not the entire building. Just enough.

A voice speaks, thick and clipped. German.

“His vitals are stable now. I’ve calibrated the lens. He’ll hold.”

The Bone Doctor. Because of course. He jinxed himself.

Benji turns his head. The man wipes off a scalpel like he’s just finished a routine appendectomy.

Then steps back.

The glass rises.

Benji is in a sealed chamber. Transparent walls. Nowhere to run. And in the reflection:

Solomon Lane. Watching.

“Welcome back, Mr. Dunn,” Lane says, almost warmly.

Benji doesn’t respond. He’s focused. Calculating the adhesive lining of the vest. Weight distribution. Wire paths.

Deadman trigger. Most likely.

Lens is transmitting. Camera above. One in the lens. Feed is live.

“You’ve been upgraded,” Lane says. “Biometric lens for me. Bomb for persuasion. A clean equation, don’t you think?”

Benji breathes shallowly.

“We had an optometrist at the League,” he rasps. “Didn’t strap bombs to people. Mostly just gave me prescription lenses. No murder.”

Lane smiles, like someone amused by a toddler’s misunderstanding of math.

“This is your problem, Benjamin. You believe murder and strategy are separate disciplines.”

Benji spits blood on the floor.

“You believe a lot of things Mr. Lane.”

Lane circles the glass. Not pacing. Floating.

“You know why you’re here.”

Benji says nothing.

“Ethan Hunt will come,” Lane says. “Because that is what he does.”

“He will see the bomb. He will see your face. And he will do exactly what I need him to.”

Benji’s mouth twitches.

“And if he doesn’t?”

Lane taps the glass. A single, decisive click.

“Then we lose you. A pity. But acceptable.”

“Just like that?” Benji asks. “You give up your bargaining chip?”

Lane raises a brow.

“I have studied you, Benjamin. Before the Syndicate, before the IMF. Even then, you believed in something. That makes you predictable. And you and Hunt are one in the same this way.”

Leaning closer, softly.

“Hunt will come for you. And he won’t win. Because he cares. And caring, in this world, is death.”

Benji swallows.

He hears it now. The soft whirring of the lens.

Recording.

---------------------------------

Ra’s strikes first.

Of course he does. He moves like he had a thousand times before—all speed and ruthlessness, trained precision and generational muscle memory.

Talia meets him head-on.

Steel rings against steel. The shock echoing through her arms. Her boots slide on the stone. She pivots, letting his weight pass her, slashing across his ribs. A shallow cut, but it makes him curse. The man is still unused to injury. 

He strikes again. And again.

She dodges the first, blocks the second, lets the third slice her shoulder.

Pain flashes red. She uses it.

They clash  hard.

It is the fight she has imagined her whole life—and worse. Not because he is stronger.

Because she doesn't want to win like this.

But there is no other way.

He knocks her down once.

She rolls, and comes up with her backup blade.

They circle. He is breathing hard now.

The Pit boils louder in the background. Time is thinning.

---------------------------------------------------

Benji feels the wires on his vest, mentally calculating, if he’s lucky—he’ll fry the ignition chip. Detonate just himself. Maybe. The glass door hisses. Ilsa steps in. She looks drawn, something’s being peeled out of her, inch by inch. She kneels beside Benji. Doesn’t touch him. Doesn’t speak. Just looks. 

“I’m sorry,” she says.

Benji studies her face. “For what?”

“That you’re here.”

He shrugs. “I’ve slept in worse rooms.”

She chokes on a laugh. Then looks down at the bomb.

“I can’t disarm it.”

“I know.”

“They’ll kill you if Ethan doesn’t give them the redbox.”

“I know.”

She looks up.

Benji’s voice is too steady when he says it.

“Ilsa. You need to go.”

She doesn’t flinch. But she doesn’t move, either.

“I’m serious. They’ll use you too. If you stay—if you hesitate—”

“Then I won’t hesitate.”

“Please. You have to warn Ethan. You have to stop them—”

Her voice drops.

“You think I haven’t tried?” she says, low. Tired.

“You think I haven’t spent every second since Atlee burned me trying to undo this? Trying to find another way?”

She exhales. Flat. Final.

“There isn’t one.”

Benji looks at her. Then—

“Then let me finish it.”

She doesn’t understand. Not right away. Just watches him.

Then he moves.

Fast. Efficient. Familiar. His fingers slip beneath the vest, toward the manual arming latch.

“Don’t,” she says.

He doesn’t stop.

“Benji—no.”

His thumb brushes the trigger.

She tackles him.

Not hard. Not cruel. But precise. A field agent navigating a minefield.

“Get off—run—” he gasps. His voice cracks.

“No.”

“Please--if I do this, Ethan won’t have to come. I’m not leverage anymore—”

“Shut up.”

Her hands clamp down over his. Wrench the trigger free. She’s gasping—not from effort. From fury. He stares up at her, chest rising fast.

“I can’t let them win,” he says.

“And you think killing yourself means you beat them?” She snarls. 

“I think being a hostage is worse.”

“I have known you for a very short time, Benjamin Dunn, but I am not stupid. You’re trying to take it back, control that is,” she says. “Because you’ve lived your whole life being turned into a weapon. By the Syndicate. By the IMF. Even by yourself.”

Benji tries to look away. She doesn’t let him.

“You think if you die on your own terms, that makes it cleaner. Like it somehow redeems what came before.”

She leans in, voice deadly quiet.

“I’m not letting you die for that lie.”

“Why not?” he asks, brokenly. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“I don’t,” she agrees. “But I do owe the world one less avoidable death.”

That silences him.

“I think that you think you’re helping,” she says. “But dying will not help, you’re just ensuring more misery for your team. I am done watching people bleed out just to make assholes feel clever.”

She lets go of the wires. Breathes.

“I didn’t come back to the Syndicate be a tool. I didn’t survive Atlee just to stand by while the Syndicate turns another person into an example.”

-------------------------------

“You always wanted to be me,” Ra’s says between strikes. 

“I survived you,” she hisses

Then she goes low.

She slashes his leg, stabs his thigh, ducks under his elbow and lands the hilt of her sword into his sternum. He staggers.

She disarms him.

He falls to his knees.

The tip of her blade pressed to his throat.

But she doesn't strike.

Her hands are trembling.

“Talia,” he says—softly, almost kindly. “What are you doing?”

Her voice breaks.

“Stopping a war.”

She stills the blade.

And pulls the syringe from her sleeve with her other hand.

“What is that?” he rasps.

“Synthetic neural agent,” she says. “Paralytic. Leaves the mind intact.”

“You’d leave me alive?”

“Yes.”

Her hand shakes.

“Why?”

“Because I love you,” she said. “And I hate what you made me.”

She steps forward, kneels beside him. Looks him in the eye.

“You told me pain made us strong. But all it made me was tired.”

He looks up at her—a little afraid now.

“Talia—”

“I am so tired Baba,” she whispers.

Then she drives the needle into his neck.

-------------------------------------------------

Lane had hollowed Benji out, filled him with wires, and now sat comfortably in the hollowed-out part of his chest where dignity used to live, pulling the strings from somewhere just out of sight. And the worst part? Benji had almost helped him. Willingly.

If Ilsa hadn’t stopped him, he would have yanked the wires and taken them all out. Not for glory. Not even for strategy. Just to end it before it got this far. Every movement, every breath, is a reminder that he hadn’t even been allowed that choice.

Ilsa walks beside him like a tether, her hand looped lightly through his elbow. It is barely a grip at all, but it might as well be a handcuff. She knows what he is thinking. Of course she does. And she’s not letting him go anywhere near the Thames.

The waterfront restaurant sparkles in the dark, all fairy lights and glass, something out of a travel brochure. It is almost laughable. Of course this is where Lane arranged the meeting. A beautiful place full of people. A perfect arena.

“This is us,” Ilsa murmurs, and Benji wants to scream.

He sits when she tells him to. He doesn't protest. 

Her voice is quiet. “Careful.”

Benji’s hands stay flat on his thighs. His eyes find the puddles on the cobblestones, bouncing back the city lights like a faulty kaleidoscope. He doesn't want to look at her. Doesn't want her to see what is left of him.

But he still feels her fingers, brushing sweat from his forehead, adjusting his hair, straightening the fabric of his coat like it makes a damn difference. He wants to laugh. He wants to cry. He does neither.

He sits.

“Subtlety’s not their strong point, is it?” he mutters, spotting Lane’s men lingering like mold at the edges of the restaurant. Ilsa gives a short, exhausted huff of amusement. That is all.

Benji doesn't turn when Ethan enters. He doesn't need to. He felt him. They always seem to find each other. Like gravity. Or magnets. And for the first time in his life, Benji doesn't feel relief. He feels fear. Because Lane could say it. Lane could drop the word. League. Or traitor. Or worse, failure. He doesn't know which version of himself Ethan will see when he looks across the table. He lifts his eyes when Lane orders him to. Slowly. And there Ethan is. So achingly familiar that it hurts.

Benji’s skin itches with sweat. His mouth tastes like battery acid. His voice feels like something he stole from a stranger as he opens his mouth and says the words:

“This is the end, Mister Hunt.”

His voice. Weaponized. Lane’s voice in his throat. It is a special kind of hell. He sees Ethan’s eyes move—sees him calculate, assess. Seeing the exact moment he understands that Benji isn't just wired. He is wired.  And then, a gesture: Ethan’s hand on his shoulder.

Benji doesn't know if it is comfort or resignation. He doesn't care. He memorizes the pressure anyway. Might be the last kindness he ever gets.

Ilsa says, “Be careful,” for the second time in an hour, and Benji barely hears it through the roaring in his ears.

Ethan looks mad. He always looks mad when he is scared. Benji knows that. Knows it like muscle memory.

“Be good, and repeat after me.” Lane’s voice enters his ear.

Benji does. Like a marionette. He delivers Lane’s threats. Word for word. Because if he deviates, people will die. Because if he makes a single mistake, they’ll be scraping him off the restaurant walls for weeks.

He says everything he is told to say.

And still—Ethan doesn't look away.

Not once.

“Human nature. My weapon of choice.” Benji says shakily, then continues, echoing Lane “Everything you’ve done is because I wanted you to do it. From the moment I killed that woman in the record shop, I knew you’d stop at nothing to catch me. And I also knew Ilsa wouldn’t have a choice. Whether she broke you that night you met or let you go, whether you let her run in Morocco, whether she went to Attlee or not--”

“You were certain we’d end up where we are right now,” Ethan says, staring into his eyes. “Then again… so was I.”

Benji blinks.

This isn't in the script.

But Ethan is on a roll, in that passionate way he gets, uncaring od the deviation “I know you, Lane. Somewhere along the line you had a crisis of faith. Am I fighting for the right side? Should I risk my life for a world that doesn’t seem to care? One day the answer was no. Human life didn’t matter anymore or maybe it never really did.” 

“Either way,” Ethan continues, “you’d killed too many innocent people without ever asking who was giving the orders or why. You blamed the system for what you are instead of yourself. You wanted revenge. But Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day. You needed help. You needed money. A lot of it. And you’ll stop at nothing to get it. That’s how I know I’m gonna put you in a box.”

Lane goes quiet.

Benji sits frozen.

Ethan’s eyes don't leave his.

He looks furious. And calm. And very, very alive.

And Benji, with a bomb on his chest and death clinging to his heels, looks back and thinks:

He’s beautiful. 

Huh. That’s a new thought. Or well, not really new, just strange for the situation he supposes. Maybe Solomon Lane really is homophobic and that’s why he’s done this. The thought is so ridiculous it almost produces a wet laugh before he chokes it down.

It doesn't matter.

“Where is the disc?” Benji asks. 

Ethan scribbles something down and raises a napkin.

“You like to play games. I have a game for you. I’ll give you 50 million dollars to let Benji go.”

Benji almost laughs..

“What the fuck,” he whispers, a breath—not even audible. A ghost of a sound.

And then Lane asks the question again:

“Where’s the disc?”

Benji repeats it, automatically, because Lane tells him to.

“You’re looking at it. I am the disk. I memorized it. All two point four billion in numbered accounts. If that vest goes off, you get nothing. And without this money you’re nothing. Without me you’re nothing.”

Benji’s chest aches. Not just from the bomb. From the guilt. From the knowledge that he almost ended all of this before they even got here. From the fact that Ethan is still fighting for him.

“Right now you’re thinking it’s a bluff. I’d never let me friends die. I couldn’t possible memorize the entire disk. There’s only one way to be sure. Let. Benji. Go.”

Another long silence. The time counts down rapidly. 12 seconds, 5, 4, 3--

Then—

Lane gives the code.

Benji’s hands move fast. Shaking. But precise. Still precise.

He pulls out the earpiece first. Yanks the lens. Can’t breathe until they are both gone. Then comes the vest. He wraps it in his coat like a relic. Still dangerous. Still real. Ethan slides a phone across the table. 

Benji stares.

“Go.”

“Ethan—”

“Luther and Brandt are waiting. Go.”

Benji’s hand touches his. His legs barely work. His chest is vibrating with the adrenaline dump from twelve straight hours of hell.

But he stands.

He leaves.

He does not look back.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Ra’s stiffens.

Tries to move. Fails.

She catches him as he topples, lowering him to the floor with care her training never allowed.

“You told me I had to kill you to lead,” she says. “You were wrong.”

The cryochamber hisses open.

She drags him in.

His eyes still move. Still track her.

There is no rage left in him. Only the slow, dawning horror of being left behind.

“I will not become you,” she says.

“That’s why I will not kill you.”

The door seals.

The frost rises.

And Ra’s al Ghul—the Demon’s Head—is gone.

------------------------------------

One foot. Then the other.

Through the dark. Through the cold.

The phone vibrates. Brandt’s voice comes through:

“Go.”

“It’s me,” Benji says. “Where am I going? And please tell me there’s a plan. A very good one.”

“It’s a great plan. Respectably dramatic. You’re going to love it.”

The call ends.

Coordinates come through.

Benji stares at the screen, then at the skyline.

It is beautiful, he supposes.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Talia walks the corridor in silence.

There is blood on her hands. His. Hers. She doesn't know.

No one stops her.

There are no guards.

No acolytes.

Just stone and steam and the weight of having done it.

Not won.

Not ascended.

Ended.

She enters her quarters without ceremony. Her throat is raw.

Alone in her quarters, she opens the trunk. Not for weapons.Inside: the chipped mug Benji left behind.

She holds it. Remembers the first time he made her tea — weak, sweet, clumsy. He’d known she likes the burn of the ginger. He made it every time she was injured. Every time she didn’t say thank you. She learned to steep it herself, eventually. To get the ratios right. She had to.

She makes the ginger tea the way he used to. Grates it by hand. Breathes through the steam. Four cups. Hers. Damian’s. Jason’s. And the one she never stopped waiting for.

She sets them down.

Watches the steam curl.

Waits. 

She hadn’t cried when she stabbed her father.

She didn’t cry when she sealed the pod.

But now—

Now, looking at the mug across from her, she breaks.

A shuddering sob escapes before she crushes it into silence with both hands. 

She does not want her sons to hear her like this.

The device clicks on. Not off.

She hears voices. Familiar. Close. A name.

“…Benji…”

She stills.

Breath locked. Spine straightening.

Benji.

Alive.

Alive.

“You stubborn bastard,” she murmurs.

She closes the feed.

Wipes her hands.

Picks up her sword.

And packs for London.

Chapter Text

The Syndicate isn’t supposed to exist. That’s the point. It’s a ghost story, a whispered contingency—a what-if tucked into the black edges of bureaucratic paranoia. And for a while, Ethan Hunt believes it’s just that: fiction.

Until it isn’t.

It starts with a body. Solomon Lane traps him in a glass box and forces him to watch as he murders someone, and Ethan can do nothing. The timing—just after Berlin, just before the CIA pulls the plug on the IMF—isn’t coincidence. It’s a message. A surgical cut to the tether holding the agency together.

The Syndicate is real. Solomon Lane makes sure of that. Ethan has survived disavowal before. It’s practically his job description. But this is different. The IMF is gone. Absorbed. Sanitized. He is alone. And that might be fine—Ethan works alone. He’s always worked best that way.

But then he finds the bodies in Minsk. Then the gas attack in Marrakesh. Then Vienna.

Every time, the same calling card. Every time, the same kind of silence.

Solomon Lane is the inverse of Ethan Hunt. Cold where Ethan is warm. Meticulous where Ethan is intuitive. Lane believes in systems—he thinks humanity can be reduced to algorithm and threat assessment. And he thinks Ethan is the final glitch. The one variable he can’t predict.

That makes Ethan dangerous.

That makes Ethan hunted.

He goes dark. Off-grid. Six months of exile and adrenaline. He lives off caffeine, fear, and fake passports, stitching his way through hostile cities and burned contacts, convinced that every face in the crowd might belong to the man who wants him dead.

He has only one constant. One tether.

Benji Dunn.

Which is insane. Because Benji isn’t supposed to be in the field. Benji is the tech guy, the comic relief, the accidental miracle-worker. But somewhere along the way—between Dubai and Mumbai—Benji becomes something more.

He starts insisting on being in the room. On wearing a vest. On looking Ethan in the eye and saying, “I’ll go.”

And Ethan lets him.

Maybe that’s the first mistake.

Maybe it’s the only choice he ever has.

He sends him opera tickets in Vienna. Benji shouldn’t answer. Ethan shouldn’t send them. He’s radioactive. Everyone near him gets hurt. But when he sees Benji there, in a too-tight tux, grinning like a kid sneaking into an R-rated movie, Ethan forgets to be afraid.

For one second, it feels like the world is still worth saving.

Then the bullets start.

A Chancellor is assassinated. Ethan nearly kills a man onstage. Ilsa Faust—beautiful, terrifying Ilsa—saves his life and disappears again.

And Benji, who should never be there, who should never be anywhere near this level of madness, drives the getaway car.

Afterward, Ethan yells at him.

“You can’t do this, Benji. You can’t risk everything for—”

“For you?” Benji asks, voice breaking just slightly. “I’m already doing it.”

That’s when Ethan realizes the awful truth: he’s dragging people into his orbit again. He should send Benji home. He should disappear.

But instead, he lets him to stay. Gives him a burner. Because the truth is—Ethan needs him.

Not just for the tech. Not for the logistics. But because Benji is proof that good still exists. That loyalty survives. That Ethan Hunt, reckless idiot that he is, might still be human.

Ilsa Faust appears and disappears like a dream. Or a threat. She saves Ethan’s life. Then steals vital intel. Then saves it again.

Every time she crosses his path, Ethan sees pieces of himself reflected back. A woman shaped by duty. Wounded by loyalty. Drowning in masks.

Ilsa still believes in escape.

She still thinks she can get out clean.

Ethan stopped believing that years ago.

Morocco breaks him.

Ethan surfaces. Ilsa runs. The drive is gone.

And Benji—sweet, stubborn Benji—stays.

Solomon Lane finally makes his move in London.

He kidnaps Benji.

Straps him to a bomb in a glass cell. Forces Ethan to watch. Tells Ethan to accept the mission.

Ethan stares at Benji. Bloody. Wired to explode. Still trying to smile.

And Ethan makes his choice.

He gives Lane the money. Lies to him. Plays him.

He trusts that Benji will hold on just a little longer.

And Benji does.

Of course he does. When the bomb is disarmed, when the glass breaks, when Ethan finally reaches Benji again, he doesn’t hug him.

Just tells him to leave.

Benji does.

Ilsa betrayed them earlier. Then comes back. Then betrays Lane.

Ethan understands.

He understands because Ilsa, like him, believes she isn’t allowed to want anything.

Not rest.

Not love.

Not peace.

And yet she wants, anyway.

Ethan trusts her with the plan. Trusts her with the last act. Because at the end of the day, Ilsa is like him: broken open by the very thing that should’ve made them invulnerable.

They care.

Lane represents everything Ethan fears he might become. Clinical. Detached. Righteous in his violence. The kind of man who thinks the world needs cleansing, not compassion. By defeating him, Ethan won’t prove he’s right. He just buys them time.

Ethan Hunt is a lunatic. That’s what Brandt used to say. What Luther still mutters when Ethan jumps off a rooftop without backup. But the truth is: Ethan Hunt is insane because he cares.

He saves people who betray him. He trusts people who lie to him. He throws himself between bullets and strangers because he cannot bear to watch the world burn without trying to stop it. He is suicidal. He is widowed. He is unmoored.

He is in love with everyone and everything when he shouldn’t be.

Especially Benji.

Not that he admits it.

Not even to himself.

But there are moments—brief, glinting moments—when Benji looks at him like Ethan is still a man worth saving. When Benji laughs at one of his terrible jokes. When Benji hands him a gadget with too many wires and says, “Don’t worry, it won’t explode. Probably.”

Moments where Ethan feels something crack open. Something soft. Something unbearably human. He tells himself it’s nothing. Benji is just a friend. Just the only person who makes him laugh without reservation. Who makes him remember who he was, once—before the ghosts.

He tells himself it’s nothing. But the glass doesn’t shatter that day because of explosives. It shatters because Ethan runs toward it. Because he can’t lose him. Because caring isn’t Ethan Hunt’s weakness. It’s his entire fucking point.

--------------------------------------------

Benji stands still, hands loose at his sides. There’s a faint tremor in his left one, but he keeps it subtle. Focused. Functional. He’s good at that now.

Ethan’s voice crackles in his ear. He’s getting chased by Solomon Lane right into their trap. And as he drops down into the abandoned car park from a grate in a construction site, Benji’s standing in the shadows, not too far, watching the monitor, watching the hallway. Watching Lane take each careful step closer, cautiously jumping down after him, unaware he’s already walked into a cage.

He can hear his own heartbeat. Not loud, but insistent.

Lane’s coming closer.

Benji’s mouth is dry. He looks across the room. Ethan’s eyes don’t leave the man. Benji tries not to shift. Not to fidget. But the collar. The bomb. The feel of Lane’s voice in his ear, soft and clinical, from only a few minutes ago—he hasn’t shaken it yet. Might never.

A beat.

Solomon Lane raises his gun. 

Benji tenses.

Ethan presses the switch.

CLANK. HISS.

The box slams shut around Lane in an instant. Bulletproof. Airtight. Sealed. Lane’s expression doesn’t falter immediately. It takes him a second to process. To realize. To understand his circumstance. 

Benji watches him through the glass. Doesn’t blink. Lane takes a step forward, slowly. Realizes there’s nowhere to go. Tries the edge of the enclosure. Pushes. It doesn’t budge. He knocks. Then pounds.

Benji flinches—just a little. He locks his jaw. Breathes in through his nose.

Ethan moves beside him.

Lane’s fists are hitting harder now, his voice finally audible—shouting things that don’t matter. Demands. Rage. A Lane slams his fists against the glass, once, twice, like a trapped animal. Benji just watches.

“Mr. Lane. Meet the IMF.”

Benji can’t stop the breath that leaves him. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a sigh. Just… release.

Because for one long, echoing second, it’s real. Lane is trapped. Contained. Disarmed without blood. And Ethan’s still standing. Benji looks at Lane, contained in bulletproof glass like a specimen under observation. He doesn’t feel victorious. He doesn’t feel triumphant.

He just feels tired. Not weak. Not broken. Just… hollowed out from everything it took to get here. The memory of Lane’s voice in his ear still lingers—clinical, calm, inhuman. Benji breathes through it. He’s here. He’s not alone.

Ethan stands beside him now, eyes locked on the man behind the glass.

Lane is still yelling. Words muffled by his own containment. The irony’s not lost on Benji.

Lane is not powerful. Lane is not special. He’s just another man who thinks the world owes him something. And Ethan Hunt—who Lane tried so hard to deconstruct—still chooses to care. Still chooses to save. Even after all of it. Benji feels Ethan glance sideways, just briefly.

Benji nods once. Just enough.

“I’m alright,” he says softly. “We’re alright.”

Benji releases knockout gas into the box, they roll him into a (stolen) police van and head on out. Benji grins, just a bit. 

Lane can keep hitting the glass.

They’re not listening anymore. 

———————

Jason knows it’s stupid. He says this three times while they steal the jet. Once when Damian overrides the hangar’s biometric lock. Once more when Jason climbs into the pilot seat muttering something about “You owe me gas money for this, kid.” And a final time, muttered under his breath as the sky cracks open above them and they vanish into it, bound for London.

But he follows. Because Damian’s not wrong. They’d flagged the footage an hour ago—London surveillance sweep pinging League recognition software. Just one frame, grainy and inconclusive. A man in a bomb collar, at a restaurant, the flash of this man—Benji?—mouthing something off-camera before disappearing from the cameras.

It shouldn’t be possible. It shouldn’t be him. But Damian hasn’t stopped shaking since.

So Jason flies.

They search the restaurant where the man had been spotted 6 hours prior, there are gunshots in the glass panes and a police perimeter so they search elsewhere. The safehouse they end up at is a US Government affiliate of some kind—quiet, crumbling, practically invisible to civilians. They find it after rerouting half the city’s security feeds and bricking the League’s trace system with Damian’s own counter-code. It takes twenty-seven minutes. Damian doesn’t blink once.

They land in a field three miles off, cloak the jet. Jason hangs back as planned. Damian goes in through a rooftop vent. Benji is asleep, or the man they assume to be him. He’s half-curled on a fold-out mattress with a thermal blanket thrown haphazardly over him. One hand is tucked under his cheek like a child. His mouth is slack. His brow furrowed.

Damian freezes in the doorway. It really is him.  He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t breathe. He steps forward, then stumbles, knees hitting the floor before he realizes he’s falling. Benji doesn’t stir.

So Damian whispers:

“Benji?”

And Benji flinches so hard the blanket slips from his shoulders. His eyes fly open—bloodshot, confused—and then fix on the figure in front of him. For a heartbeat, they just look at each other. Then Damian breaks.  He launches forward—not a tackle, not an attack, just a crash of arms and fists and sobs muffled into Benji’s shoulder.

“You bastard. You—stupid—dead idiot—”

Benji doesn’t speak. He wraps his arms around Damian and holds him like he’s trying to memorize his. After a second, he exhales—choked, shaky.

“Yeah,” he says, voice raw. “That’s… fair.”

Damian chokes out something between a laugh and a sob.

“I thought you were gone.”

Benji looks down at him, dazed, blanket fallen from his shoulders, like he’s not quite sure what he’s seeing is real. 

“Not for lack of trying,” he says softly. 

Damian stares. A silence passes. Damian kneels in front of him, knuckles white where they grip his sleeves.

“You’re taller,” Benji says after a moment. It’s barely a joke, but it’s enough of one to hold off the flood.

Damian snorts, eyes glassy. “You’re not.”

Benji shrugs, like it’s not worth much either way. “Yeah. They don’t let you drink milk in the IMF.”

Damian doesn’t laugh. His hands twitch once, then still.

“You really weren’t going to come back,” he says.

Benji falters. “I wanted to. I swear, I—I did.”

He stops. Breathes.

“I just thought maybe… maybe it’d be better for you if I didn’t.”

Damian jerks back, eyes wide. “You thought I’d forget you?”

“No,” Benji says, and his voice cracks hard. “I thought you’d hate me. I thought Ra’s would erase me. That you’d have already filled the space. A placeholder,” he says, like it’s a confession. “That’s all I was.”

Damian stiffens. “A placeholder?”

Benji’s hands flutter, defensive. “I mean—I was never trained like you. Or born into it. I was background. I didn’t fit. I just didn’t die fast enough to leave quietly. I wasn't-I’m not your dad.”

He doesn’t notice Damian move until small, furious hands fist in his shirt.

“You don’t get to say that,” Damian says. His voice is low and sharp and trembling. “You don’t.”

Benji goes still.

Damian’s face is twisted—not angry. Grief, layered and old and wearing armor.

“You were the only one aside from my mother who saw me as more than a mission. You read to me when I was concussed. You made me tea when I dislocated my shoulder. You never made me earn softness. You just… gave it.”

He swallows.

“And you think that didn’t make you family?”

Benji exhales, staggered. “I didn’t know,” he whispers. “I didn’t know that counted.”

Damian’s voice is shaking now.

“Then why didn’t you come back?”

Benji hesitates. “Because I was scared,” he says. “Because I didn’t want to look at your face and know I didn’t belong to you anymore.”

“You always belonged,” Damian says. He pauses. The next words fall like steel on stone.

“You were wrong. I wanted you. I missed you. We both did.”

And that’s when Benji breaks. He covers his mouth, but it doesn’t stop the sound. The sobs tear out of him, gut-deep and gasping, his whole frame shaking like he’s unraveling from the inside.

Damian pulls him closer. Arms wrapping tight. No technique, no training—just need.

Jason crouches on the fire escape outside the window, every muscle wired tight. He hadn’t meant to stay this long. It was just meant to be a perimeter check. In, out. A gut read. Maybe a punch. If Benji Dunn turned out to be some manipulative League washout who’d walked out on Damian, Jason was fully prepared to break his nose.

But then he’d heard crying. 

Jason hears Benji’s voice again, cracking mid-sentence—“I missed you, kid—God, I missed you.” And something in him flinches.

Because it’s real. Jason’s heard too many lies to mistake this for one. He watches them—Damian curled into Benji and Benji holds him like he’s anchoring himself to the world.

Jason doesn’t breathe while they talk. He just watches from the fire escape, heart clenched like a fist. And for a brief second he wonders—

If he went back. If he knocked on the manor door again. Would Bruce hold him like that? Would he cry? 

For the first time since Damian dragged him into this madness, Jason thinks: Maybe this guy really is family. He shifts his weight.

The metal groans underfoot. Inside, Benji’s voice cuts off. His head turns toward the window, sharp and alert.

“I know that sound,” he murmurs.

Damian sits up, still sniffling. “Jason,” he says hoarsely.

Benji blinks. “Jason? Like… someone you know Jason? Not an assassin sent to finish me off Jason?”

Damian nods.

Benji exhales slowly, he seems to try and collect himself. “Great. An additional ninja. Fantastic. Just what this breakdown needed.”

The window creaks again. Jason drops through like gravity’s second choice. Lands without grace. Dusts himself off.

“Wasn’t spying, I’m not a ninja,” he mutters.

Benji raises an eyebrow. “You were perched on my fire escape for twenty minutes, watching me cry. What would you call it?”

Jason crosses his arms. “Security.”

Benji hums, eyes still red, any intimidation factor he may have had is squandered by his gentle hold of Damian. “Right. Stealthy brooding. The League’s most advanced tactic.”

Damian rubs at his face, voice rough. “Benji, this is Jason. Jason, Benji.”

There’s a pause. Jason doesn’t meet either of their eyes. He lingers near the door, like it might call him back. This is awkward. 

“You two,” he mutters, “are the most emotionally unstable assassins I’ve ever seen.”

Benji wipes at his face. “Takes one to know one.”

Jason doesn’t argue.

Damian pats the mattress beside him. “Sit.”

Jason hesitates. His whole body says no. His eyes scan the room. His jaw tightens.

Damian lifts a brow. “You flew a stolen jet halfway across the world and sulked on a fire escape for an hour. Don’t pretend you’re not invested in this.”

Jason mutters something about “guard duty” and “bad choices,” but he moves. Perches stiffly on the edge of the mattress like it might judge him for being here. Benji doesn’t say anything. Just lifts the corner of the blanket in invitation. Simple. No drama.

“Rude,” Jason mutters.

But after a second, he shifts closer. Shoulder to shoulder.

Benji hums. “Physical proximity confirmed. That’s practically legally binding. You’re ours now.”

Jason groans into the pillow. “I don’t like you.”

Benji smiles faintly. “That’s chapter one, yeah.”

Damian snorts. “He’s sulking. That means yes.”

Benji doesn’t respond. Just lies there, one hand on each of them, like a tether. He breathes. Soft. Steady. For the first time in years, the air doesn’t fight him.

Not for lack of things to say—just that the words come too heavy, too fast. Instead, Damian hiccups every so often. Jason mutters about how it’s just allergies. Benji lies in the middle, one hand on each boy’s shoulder like a tether.

Eventually, they all fall asleep.

---------------

When Benji wakes, it’s morning.

The room smells faintly of metal and mango skin. There’s a folded piece of paper next to the pillow where Damian’s head had rested. Benji blinks blearily, fingers brushing over it.

It reads:

Not a dream. Call.

— D&J

A burner phone is tucked beneath it. Benji stares at it for a long time. Then he picks it up. Presses it to his chest. And breathes. Just once.

Then he gets up. He has tea to make.

The team is scattered, quiet. Luther and Brandt packing gear into the car. Ethan outside, double-checking exit routes. The London sky is gray with half-light, the kind that comes before weather or answers. Benji lingers inside the safehouse a little longer than he needs to.

The boys are gone. The bed is made. The tea cups are rinsed and left to dry. But he can’t quite make himself walk out the door, instead lingering around the kitchen. Which is why he hears the soft knock before anyone else does. Not the front door. The back. Benji opens it without thinking. Not very smart considering the events of the previous day. He opens it. And there she is.

Talia al Ghul.

Hair slightly mussed from travel. Pale from altitude. Posture perfect. One strand out of place. She does not smile. But her eyes soften—just slightly. Just enough.

Benji blinks, might as well happen, he’s too tired from yesterday's events to fake shock. A beat of silence.

Then, carefully, she raises one hand and touches his cheek. Benji doesn’t flinch.

“You’re thinner,” she says.

“So are you.”

Another pause.

“You didn’t die,” she murmurs.

Benji exhales. “Working on making that a long-term trend.”

Talia closes the space between them. Presses her forehead gently to his, just for a moment. A gesture not meant for what it says, and always means more than it shows.

“You left without saying goodbye,” she says.

“I didn’t think I had the right.”

“You never needed permission.”

Benji’s voice breaks a little. “I missed you.”

Talia’s smile is almost nothing. But it’s real. A curve like a blade pulled half from its sheath.

“Good,” she says. “You should have.”

They stand like that for a long moment. Just breathing.

Then she pulls back. The softness folds away. The steel returns.

Her tone sharpens. “Who took you?”

Benji’s jaw tightens, he doesn't try to lie. “The IMF. Then the Syndicate. Solomon Lane.”

She doesn’t blink. “Bomb?”

He nods.

Talia’s mouth hardens. “He suffers long.”

Benji huffs. “He’s being transferred for police interrogation, as proof of the Syndicate’s existence"

I’m being merciful.”

“Oh?”

“I considered worse,” she says. “But the League is… under reconstruction.”

She pauses, attempting to collect her words. “Ra’s is no longer an obstacle. I assumed full command last night.”

He doesn’t ask for details. He doesn’t have to.

“And the boys?” he asks. 

Talia’s gaze darkens—not angry, but clipped. Irritated, in the way only someone who loves them could be.

“I did not know where they had gone,” she says. “The transition of power was… turbulent. I wasn’t watching closely enough.”

Benji nods. He understands. She doesn’t say that sort of thing lightly.

“I found out only after Ra’s was subdued,” she continues. “By the time I accessed communications, they were already en route. Already with you.”

She exhales. Once.

“They should have told me. I…worried. I thought you wouldn’t be you.”

Benji hums softly. “I wasn’t. Not for a bit. Lane made sure of that.”

Talia’s face flickers. Not sorrow. Something older. Deeper. Regret sharpened into something useful.

“I--the IMF is mine now, I…I can’t leave. I don’t know how to be both,” he says finally. Might as well bring up the topic while he can. Before Talia disappears. Before his contact is restrained to messages and phone calls. 

“Both?”

“League. IMF. Yours. Theirs. I don’t know how to be… everything.”

“You don’t have to,” she replies. “You just have to trying to be nothing.”

Benji’s throat tightens.

She sets her mug down. Her voice softens—not in volume, but in precision.

“They’re your family too I assume. You always had a way of making one,” she says. “So are we. The League. The team. The boys. Me. We are…in your corner, Benji.”

Chapter Text

No one died. Not this time. That’s the part that keeps catching Benji off guard—waking up and realizing there’s still air in his lungs, lights on the ceiling, emails in his inbox. The impossible happened, again. He lived. Lane was caught. The bomb didn’t go off. Ethan didn’t die. Benji didn’t either. It should feel like a victory. Instead, it feels like the silence after a fire—when everything is intact but still smells like smoke.

He moves slowly these days. Not because of the injuries—those healed weeks ago, though his ribs still twinge in the cold—but because the world feels heavier now, like walking through a museum of moments he might not have lived to see. The kettle boils. His monitor hums to life. Light slants through the blinds in his flat above the London field office, casting bars across the carpet. It’s quiet. Normal. Unremarkable.

Except it’s not.

He’s working, ostensibly. There’s an ongoing decryption case and a barely-operational IMF communications satellite that needs patching. Brandt and he grab coffee and complain about the government every other Saturday. Luther’s left notes. Ethan left coffee. Benji has barely touched either. His screen glows with lines of code he should be combing through, but his hands don’t quite listen today.

Instead, he sits on the floor—legs folded under the low coffee table, soldering a circuit board not because anyone asked, but because it’s something to do. Something that requires precision, not presence. Something he can control.

The first time Damian shows up after Lane, Benji doesn’t hear him. There’s no knock. No creak of the window latch. Just a shift in air pressure—something subtle that sets the hairs on the back of his neck rising. By the time he looks up, the kid’s already crouched beside him, plucking a resistor from the kit on the table.

Benji startles. The soldering iron jerks. “Jesus—”

“Your perimeter’s unsecure,” Damian says, not looking at him. “You should switch to a pressure-sensitive trigger on the balcony frame.”

Benji blinks. “Good to see you too.”

Damian smiles in a shy scamp-like grin that Benji’s come to associate with Talia and the new kid, Jason, and strangely enough, himself. Damian sets the resistor down, brushes ash from the back of his sleeve, and leans his chin on one hand, watching Benji work like he never left. Like the last time they saw each other wasn’t in a half-lit safehouse with blood in the sink and too many unsaid things between them.

They don’t talk much that first visit. Benji has reached his limit for emotionally vulnerable conversations for at least a few months. Benji keeps soldering. Damian starts organizing wires by color. When he leaves, it’s without a word. No door opens. No camera pings. Just a faint ripple in the curtains and then he’s gone.

Benji doesn’t tell anyone. He does buy some chai and a bit more sugar than he usually would.

Jason comes next. Benji doesn't quite know what to think of him. But Damian loves him, that’s clear enough, and Benji is a soft sod at heart so--a week later. Maybe two. Benji’s lost count. He’s asleep on the couch this time, legs dangling off the edge, a half-open Blade Runner novel tented across his chest. He wakes to the unmistakable sound of something clattering in the kitchen. He tenses—immediate, trained, too-fast—and rolls off the couch in a graceless heap, palm going to the drawer with the tranq gun. He’s halfway to it when a low voice says, “Relax, Doc. Just checking what you’ve got in the fridge.”

And so instead of shooting the intruder. Benji peers over the armrest to see: Jason the ninja, Damian’s new bodyguard is rummaging through his condiments.

“Oh,” Benji says faintly. “Hello.”

Jason shuts the fridge with a boot. “Do you know you have three bottles of mustard and no actual food? I thought you were a cook.”

“I cook things,” Benji insists, sitting up. “Sometimes.”

Jason’s brow raises. “Sometimes?”

“It’s been a weird month. I had takeout”

Jason leans against the counter. He looks less tired than last time—still armored, still heavy around the edges, but more grounded. Benji doesn’t ask how he got here. Or why. Or if Damian sent him. Instead, he pats the couch beside him. “You want to stay?” 

Jason shrugs. “I’m not here.”

Benji nods. Of course. No one is.

They don’t talk much either. He and Damian are similar in that sense, or maybe Jason is just anxious. It’s sweet how Jason sharpens one of Benji’s kitchen knives at the table. And then when he leaves, he takes the mustard. Benji accepts he’s not getting rid of them even if he wanted to. 

Benji doesn’t lock the windows after that. He buys more mustard. It’s a good brand apparently. 

The visits keep coming. Never with a pattern. Never announced. Sometimes just Damian. Sometimes just Jason. Sometimes, bizarrely, both of them curled into opposite corners of the couch while Benji watches an old Doctor Who rerun and tries not to cry from how achingly ordinary it feels.

One night, he’s at the desk adjusting satellite telemetry logs when he hears it—the faintest click behind him. A window opening.

He doesn’t turn. Just keeps typing.

“I’ve got almond biscuits in the kitchen,” he says. “And the good kind of green tea, the one with mint.”

There’s a pause. Then the brush of fabric as Damian drops into the armchair across from him.

Benji glances over. “Rough day?”

Damian frowns. “I’m fine.”

“You smell like smoke.”

“Jason taught me to hotwire a car.”

Benji hums and smiles against himself. “So a good day, then.”

They never stay long. Sometimes twenty minutes. Sometimes two hours. They leave no trace. The security logs stay clean. Ethan doesn’t know. Luther doesn’t notice. Jane, who’s now  handling local IMF transport, just thinks Benji’s gotten more mellow. No one suspects a thing.

Because life moves on. Ethan’s planning new rotations. Lane’s trial is underway, he’s being transferred all around the world to countless governments. The IMF is rebuilding from the inside out, again. Benji’s been asked to submit reports. Debrief statements. Surveillance patches. And he’s doing it. Slowly. Carefully.

But he’s also waking up to the smell of tea someone else brewed. Finding his clothes folded differently than he left them. A box of mangoes on the windowsill one morning—ripe, heavy with juice, the way Damian likes them. Little yellow post -t notes with hand drawn birds and fruits, Jason’s cursive handwriting.

It seems Benji has found himself some sons. The thought is terrifying but not as much, not anymore. 

-------------------------------

Benji gets a message. Not a formal communiqué, not one of the encoded League directives or IMF dispatches Benji is used to parsing in dead languages and corrupt code. Just a note, folded once and left tucked inside the inner pocket of his jacket—one he hasn’t worn since London, since the glass cell and the bomb and everything that cracked him down the middle.

He finds it late. Almost doesn’t recognize the handwriting.

“Come if you can. Don’t bring anyone else. —T.”

That’s all.

No location. No signature flourish. Just that maddening minimalism that can only belong to Talia al Ghul.

Benji doesn’t hesitate.

He packs light—medical kit, data tablet, tea bags—and slips into the night without telling the team. Luther would raise an eyebrow. Ethan would follow him. He can’t afford either.

By dawn, he’s in the Nanda Parambat, breath sharp in his lungs as the League’s mountain stronghold crests into view, half-shrouded in mist. It’s quieter than he remembers. Less militarized. The guards still track him like a threat, but no one bars his path. The air tastes like cardamom and cold metal.

Talia is waiting in what used to be the east strategy hall. It’s bare now, the long table dismantled, the war maps removed. The windows are open, light spilling in, a reluctant truce.

She’s standing with her arms crossed, spine taut, but her hair is unbound and she’s wearing a long coat instead of ceremonial armor. When she sees him, she doesn’t speak at first—just looks.

He smiles. She does not.

“Talia,” he says. “You rang?”

She exhales. “I need your help.”

Benji blinks. “I’m sorry—could you say that again? I think the altitude’s affecting my hearing.”

She narrows her eyes.

“I need your help,” she repeats, clipped. “With the League.”

A beat.

“I—okay,” Benji says slowly, setting his bag down. “That’s vague. And terrifying. And… weirdly flattering?”

Her jaw tightens.

“I’ve ousted my father,” she says. “The old guard is disoriented. We are in the process of dismantling several regional kill cells and eliminating succession protocols. The Lazarus Pits are sealed. The governing structure is… fragmented. I need some stability.”

“And you thought—me,” Benji says, gesturing to himself. “Erm not to be rude but….Why?”

Talia doesn’t answer. She turns instead, leading him through the hall, her footsteps sharp against the stone.

The medical wing is a mess. Not in the aesthetic sense—League facilities are always immaculate—but in the way systems rot when no one dares question them. There are four different supply chains, three contradictory patient charts, and a surgical inventory that still includes ampoules labeled with Ra’s al Ghul’s initials in ancient Greek.

Benji starts cataloging before Talia finishes her sentence. They set up in a corner suite near the former healing chambers. The walls are lined with polished obsidian and carved tracking scripts—some meant to bless the wounded, some designed to curse invaders. It’s very League. Very them. 

Benji opens a new chart on his tablet and exhales.

“Alright,” he says, rolling up his sleeves. “First question. Do you want me to fix what’s here, or build something else entirely?”

Talia looks at him. “That depends. Do you believe this place can be fixed?”

Benji is quiet.

Then, hesitantly: “Not like it was.”

She nods once. “Then build me something better.”

The day blurs.

Benji moves through the facility like an exposed nerve—sorting, labeling, rebuilding. His hands are steady, his tone clinical, but there’s a coiled ache behind his eyes that doesn’t lift. This place holds too much memory: of blood, of failure, of softness punished. But he’s here now, with permission and purpose. It is terrifying.

Talia joins him every evening. Not with orders, just presence. She watches him inventory, occasionally questions a dosage, sometimes adjusts a formula herself. They fall into a rhythm: tea steeping on the windowsill, medical files spread across a table between them, and two people trying—awkwardly, honestly—to define a future neither of them ever imagined living long enough to see.

Benji drafts new care protocols—emphasizing prevention, triage, long-term stabilization. No more patch-and-bleed operations. No more “acceptable losses.” Everything has to be documented now. Tracked. Accountable.

Talia doesn’t push back. Much.

“This won’t make them gentler,” she says, arms folded as she reviews a sample mission medpack.

“I don’t need them gentle,” Benji replies. “I need them alive.”

“Some will resent it.”

“Most resented me the moment I walked in. We’re used to that.”

She pauses, glancing at him sidelong. “Bold, it’s a good look on you.”

He winks at her. “You’re too kind”

She snorts. “Don’t ruin it.”

Jason drops into the northern hall unnoticed. Benji’s been here for three days now, and the air has already shifted. Less knives. More clipboard energy. The sound of someone arguing about electrolyte balance echoes faintly through the corridor.

Jason leans against a column, arms crossed, watching Benji and Talia talk.nIt’s weird. Watching them work together.

Not because they’re awkward (they’re not) or mismatched (god help him, they actually aren’t), but because this is the most he’s seen either of them… comfortable. Benji gestures too much. Talia raises an eyebrow every time but lets him talk. She even writes things down. Jason didn’t know she owned pens. He thought she just like stabbed orders into people’s souls or something.

He finds himself smiling—just a little. Benji’s handwriting is already scrawled across four of the new training logs. One note reads: “Don’t forget vitamin K, you absolute buffoons.” It’s underlined twice. Jason kind of loves him for it.

Jason doesn’t sleep much. But sometimes, when he’s hovering outside the medwing at three a.m, and he sees Benji asleep at his desk—face down in a pile of diagnostics, glasses askew, with a mug still steaming beside him. Talia is still there too. She never sits. But she watches him for a long time before turning away. Jason doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t tease. Doesn’t even leave a note. But the next morning, Benji finds a thermal blanket tucked around his shoulders.

Talia calls the new wing the Hall of Restoration. Benji calls it “an actual functioning clinic.”

They start each morning with rounds. Not just for the wounded—but for anyone needing checkups, questions, care. A system built around showing up without punishment. Talia insists it be mandatory.

“If it’s optional, they won’t come,” she says, matter-of-fact.

Benji glances at her, then down at the list of former kill unit leaders now being asked to get vaccinated for the first time in their lives. “Guess I’m the school nurse now.”

“Head surgeon,” she corrects.

“I’m not officially certified for that.”

“You don’t need it. You’re better..”

She doesn’t say it like a compliment. Just a fact.

Benji swallows. “You have too much faith in me.”

“Good,” she says. Then slightly hesitantly. “It means you’re worth trusting, I have good judgment."

“I have to be back in London by Monday--and then the US for a few weeks.” Benji lightly protests. 

“Multitask. You know how to use email, it’s just management.” 

Benji groans. Talia knows she’s won. 

Talia takes Benji to the archives one night.

She shows him blueprints—old and new. Facility plans. Strategic fallback points. Lists of dead operatives, some dating back centuries.

“I used to memorize these,” she says.

Benji runs a hand along the faded ink. “Why show me?”

“Because I want to build something that doesn’t need these anymore.”

He looks at her. “That’s ambitious.”

“You said you’d help.”

He nods. “I did.”

She sighs, then adds, quietly, “I don’t want him growing up with these blueprints in his blood.”

It takes Benji a moment to realize she’s talking about Damian.

“I know,” he says.

Damian is not an oblivious child, he is quite observant actually and he notices. In the way mother moves through the compound like a general who’s finally learned to breathe. In the way she makes tea now without checking the ingredients three times. In the way she pauses before speaking. In the way she lets him rest because she can now. And no matter how many times Damian tells himself that he doesn’t need anyone, that he’s strong enough alone—he knows. He knows what it means to be loved like this. To be chosen. He sharpens his sword that night while listening to Jason loudly complain about the quality of the new soap Benji ordered, and mother letting out a rare cackle as Benji rapidly details the amount of said soap Jason has stolen from him before this. And he smiles, just barely

Jason doesn’t think about Gotham much anymore. Not in the way that hurts. Not like the early days, when he woke up in the Pit screaming and thought the city had killed him, and that the only way to survive was to burn it all down. No, that part’s dulled. Muted under the new aches. There’s always something louder now—Damian’s scowl, Benji’s tea commentary, Talia’s sarcastic stillness.

But sometimes, in the quiet, it creeps back in. The rooftops. The laughter. The cracked leather of his old boots. The shape of the Batsignal in the rain. The way he used to look at Bruce and think, God, that’s what a father’s supposed to be.

The first time Benji threw a protein bar at his head and said, “Look, I don’t care if you murder twelve people today, you still need vitamin B12,” Jason nearly punched him. Then he saw the man do the same thing to both Talia and Damian. 

The second time, he just caught it and ate it.

He’s starting to see the pattern.

Damian’s changed, too. He’s calmer when Benji’s nearby. Smirks more. Corrects people less aggressively. Jason once found them painting together in the greenhouse—a scene so surreal he almost broke the door turning away. They don’t talk about it. But Jason sees it every day: Benji, pouring tea for Damian with practiced ease. Damian, reading out loud from a logistics report and then setting it aside to ask Benji—genuinely—how he’s feeling.

It stings something painful. Jason traces a crack in the stone with his boot. The hawk, Tariq, circles back overhead. Sometimes Jason can feel the wind in his feathers as he watches the bird and thinks about the little boy who used to think Robin was magic. Bright colors. Second chances. Flying toward something bigger than himself. He’d loved it. He’d loved Bruce. He’d loved saving people. 

Jason snorts. Rakes a hand through his hair. The wind stings a little against the fresh scar along his jawline. Courtesy of a guy who didn’t want to give up control of the League’s northern medical cache.

Benji stitched it himself. Didn’t even scold him, just said, “Well, at least this one’s dramatic. You’ll look roguish. Like a villain in a romance novel.”

Jason didn’t punch him. That’s when he knew he was doomed. He tries to be angry about it, sometimes. About how fast he’s fallen into this life. How easy it it to fit into this mismatched family of theirs and of course it has to come out in one of the most humiliating ways Jason can think of.

Benji is hunched over a supply crate, muttering about mislabeled antiseptic vials. Jason’s cleaning a blade nearby, trying not to seem like he’s hovering.

Benji asks, “Did you recalibrate the scanner on your gauntlet? It’s been pinging inconsistently.”

Jason shrugs. “It’s just old. I’ll fix it later.”

Benji makes a face. “You said that last week.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Right. Busy playing ‘League Whack-a-Mole’ on the northern border.”

Jason rolls his eyes. “Do you want me to recalibrate it right now, Doctor Dad?”

Benji freezes.

Jason doesn’t look up.

Silence stretches.

Then Benji snorts. “Well. That’s new.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m touched.”

“Don’t make it a thing.”

Benji grins. “Too late.”

It does become a thing.

He only says it when it’s funny—when it’ll derail Benji’s stress spiral or distract Damian from chewing glass with his teeth again. But the others catch on. Damian smirks the first time. Talia raises an eyebrow like she’s cataloging it for later analysis.

Benji doesn’t protest.

He just keeps showing up. With supplies. With food. With bad jokes. With silence, when that’s what Jason needs.

And slowly, the old fury gives way to something else.

Not peace. Not exactly.

But something adjacent. Something he can live with.

Jason closes his eyes.

He doesn’t believe in reincarnation. Not in the cosmic sense.

But maybe redemption works that way.

You fold yourself small. You fly again.

You find another bird with a broken wing, and you stay until it heals.

And maybe—if you’re lucky—someone becomes your Doctor Dad.

And they don’t flinch.

They just smile.

And hand you a cup of jasmine tea.

Chapter Text

Benji can’t sleep. Not fully. Not the sort of sleep that sticks, anyway. He’s done the usual—catnaps, meditation, breathing exercises, a half-lukewarm bath where he nearly drowned because his brain wouldn’t shut up long enough to float.  He’s camped out at the IMF safehouse kitchen table now, lights low, tea lukewarm. There’s a burner phone under one hand. His regular one beside it. And an empty mug that still smells like elaichi and honey.

His hands shake. Only a little.

It’s not the adrenaline anymore. It’s the fact that everything is… quiet.

Benji has never done well with quiet.

He remembers the pressure vault in Morocco. The lock sequences. The hum of sealed concrete and biometric scans. The way it echoed like Nanda Parbat’s lower floors, how it felt in a corridor that could close behind him forever.

How it felt like a test he hadn’t studied for—except he had. His whole life. He remembers Damian walking beside him as a child, echoing his pace. Tiny fists clenched. Eyes sharper than they should’ve been. He remembers mango juice and graphite sketches, and learning how to cook with so much turmeric because someone complained about blandness and he couldn’t bear the idea of letting them down.

He remembers Talia, too. Her frustration. Her fire. Her conviction that care had to be earned. He remembers arguing with her over scalpels and stitches, over the right kind of strength. Over what it meant to protect. And he remembers Jason—angry and brittle, thrown into the quiet war they were all waging with their pasts.

He’d never expected to become anyone’s anchor. He was just trying to survive. But survival in the League had looked a lot like tenderness carved into necessity. Like tea rituals and field dressing and never letting anyone cry alone unless they wanted to. He hadn’t meant to become part of something. And then he had.

Then came Lane. And the IMF. And Ethan.

And—

God.

It’s not just guilt, though there’s plenty of that. It’s not just the dreams—of wires, of locked doors, of Ethan’s hand on his shoulder and the cold steel in Lane’s voice when he said, “Be good, and repeat after me.”

No, the real problem is that he doesn’t know who to be anymore. League ghost? IMF tech? Medic? Family? A spy, a ghost, a maybe-something-more in the corner of Ethan Hunt’s ridiculous, soft gaze?

He’d felt that hand on his shoulder and catalogued the pressure like it was a data point. He’d memorized the warmth of Ethan’s palm without knowing if it was kindness or contingency. Because the truth is: he’s not sure Ethan should trust him. He’s not sure he’d trust himself.

Benji rubs at his face and opens his laptop. Tabs slide open. One for the IMF. One for the League. One for something in-between.

He knows how to juggle. That’s never been the problem. But none of the plates feel fake anymore. Jason and Damian coming to him—how they fell asleep in one bed, both of them stubborn and angry and loved. How Jason muttered that he didn’t like Benji and curled into his side anyway. How Damian had written “not a dream” on a folded piece of paper. It matters.

Benji presses the edge of that note to his lips now, breathing it in like a prayer. He misses them. More than that, he misses being useful to them. Being theirs. He is their’s he sees them so frequently and yet he can’t wave the heavy homesickness settled upon him. 

The IMF doesn’t see it. They see competence. Nerves. Dedication. They don’t see the way Benji can hold a boy’s pulse through a panic attack and count in Arabic under his breath. They don’t see the way he can name every pressure point on a body without ever striking one.

But Talia saw it. She saw it and didn’t flinch. She made him part of something. He never got that at his old IT job. Or the old League. Or the CIA. Not even really at the IMF.

Only—

Ethan.

In the worst moments. In the best. And he never looked away.

Benji picks up the burner phone. Stares at the blank message screen. He could text them. He could ask how Damian’s arm is healing. If Talia’s been eating. If Jason’s made that ridiculously indulgent lemon rice recipe he’d scribbled down in a mission margin. But—

No.

He can’t be their tether and a secret. Not now. So instead, he opens a tab and types a name he hasn’t typed in weeks.

Ilsa Faust.

The search results are few. Carefully scrubbed. There’s one security feed timestamped two weeks ago—Lisbon. Another, older, from Marrakesh. There’s no recent intel. But Benji isn’t looking for intel. He’s looking for patterns.

Ilsa had made a choice. Like she always did. Benji had let her. Let her take that choice from him. Because he didn’t want it. Because he didn’t trust himself with it anymore. Because survival is messier than heroism.

And sometimes being alive is the only victory you get. 

He thinks about how much worse that would’ve felt if Ilsa hadn’t been there. If there hadn’t been someone else navigating the edges of impossible choices. Someone else balancing on the line between duty and ruin.

It wasn’t love. They’d barely known each other. But it was something. And right now, Benji needs to understand what that something is. He closes the tab. Reopens it. Sets a tracker script to run in the background—non-invasive. Discreet.

No one at the IMF needs to know.

It’s just a check-in. Just a precaution.

Just…

Just someone looking out for someone.

The kettle whistles. He forgot he’d put it on.

He gets up, moving like someone inside a dream. Pours the water. Adds the tea. He doesn’t know where any of this is going. But maybe—just maybe—he can follow the threads anyway.

Ilsa. Talia. Damian. Jason. Ethan.

Ethan.

He catches himself smiling. Curses softly.

The tea steeps.

And somewhere out there, the future sharpens its teeth.

-----------------------------

Benji tries very hard to be subtle about his double allegiances.

He’s worked for so many organizations that secrecy is practically habit by now.

And yet—he still manages to walk into a mission review meeting without realizing he’s wearing a League tunic.

Well—not a full tunic. More like a tastefully embroidered kurta, tucked (badly) into combat pants, half-covered by an IMF-standard vest that clearly wasn’t designed to accommodate asymmetrical embroidery.

No one comments for the first ten minutes. Partly because the mission went surprisingly well. Partly because Ethan looks like he hasn’t slept in four days and is trying very hard not to look directly at Benji’s collarbone.

It’s a really distracting collarbone.

And it’s attached to a man currently scribbling notes in a language none of them recognize, humming what might be an old lullaby.

Ethan should absolutely be worried.

Instead, he just feels warm.

The next time something like this happens, Ethan hears him laughing.

Benji’s on the safehouse rooftop, resetting his comms. Through the vent shaft, there’s his voice—light and breathless in a way Ethan rarely hears.

“No, no, I told you—disinfectant first, gauze second. Because that’s how infection works. I don’t care what Zahir said, Zahir once glued someone’s stitches closed with tree sap, he doesn’t get a vote anymore—”

Beat.

“No, I’m not back permanently. I’m on a work assignment. In Europe. Because I’m very employable, thank you.”

Another pause. Then:

“No, Damian cannot put a smoke bomb in his chemistry teacher’s desk. Even if it was ‘for science.’ Yes! Tell him I said that. And to stop drawing people and leaving the pictures in their beds with their names underlined in red ink—it’s threatening and I’m the one who gets the letters.”

Another pause. His tone softens.

“Tell him I said I miss him. And that I’ll bring sweets next time. Yes. Yes, with the cherries.”

It’s such a normal thing—domestic, even—but it cracks something open in Ethan. That voice, that affection, the ease. He wants to knock, to say something, to ask. But he doesn’t. He steps back, lets the sound drift down into memory, and pretends he didn’t hear anything.

Benji reappears a few minutes later, flushed and smiling too easily.

Ethan stares at the curve of his wrist as he pours tea.

Benji doesn’t notice. Or maybe he does.

Ethan tilts his head. “I like it. You, like this.”

Benji goes very still.

Then, without looking up, says, “It’s not going to last.”

“Why?”

Benji doesn’t answer.

Instead, he hands Ethan the mug. Their fingers brush. Ethan swallows.

The air thickens with something unspoken.

Ethan breaks first. “This smells amazing.”

Benji smiles, just barely. “It’s all about balance. Heat. Time. Attention. It’s not that different from tech. Or—relationships, I guess.”

Ethan’s pulse stutters. “So you’re good at those, too?”

Benji laughs softly. “God, no. But I keep trying.”

Ethan sips.

It’s perfect.

He doesn’t ask what’s on Benji’s mind. Doesn’t ask where he goes when he’s “away,” or why he’s always checking two phones.

He just stays. And drinks. And lets himself be quiet with the man he’s slowly falling for.

Benji, alone in the dark later that night, stares at a message on his screen from someone signed simply T:

“Mission successful. The kids are pleased. You look pleased. Are you?”

Benji smiles, aches.

Not always. But today, yes.

-----------------------------

Jason’s been thinking about Gotham.

Not in the usual way—not the old itch, not the nightmares of crowbars and glass. It’s different this time. Like the air before a thunderstorm, all pressure and inevitability.

He’s perched on the roof of a League safehouse, a half-eaten samosa in one hand, Damian’s latest sketchbook in the other. It’s full of birds this time. Mostly hawks, a few wrens. One painfully accurate rendering of Benji mid-sneeze.

Jason’s boots are propped against the railing, the heel of one tapping out an unconscious rhythm. Below, Benji is in the courtyard arguing with himself—or possibly with a tea kettle. Hard to tell. His vest is half-zipped, his curls are sticking up, and he’s wielding a tiny mortar and pestle like a weapon.

Somewhere in the background, Ethan Hunt’s name is probably being whispered with something approaching devotional longing.

Jason huffs a laugh.

God, this place is weird.

But it’s home. For now.

And maybe that’s the problem.

It crept up on him, the way comfort does when you’re not paying attention.

At first, he was on edge constantly—half-expecting to be poisoned or interrogated or ignored. But the League, under Talia’s watch, wasn’t what it used to be. Not since the restructuring. Not since Benji got his hands on the medical wing and started whispering nonsense about cross-contamination protocols and emotionally intelligent combat debriefs.

Jason had spent years clawing his way out of the pit—literal and metaphorical. Rage had carved him into something jagged. But here? With Damian bickering about turmeric ratios and Talia slicing apples with horrible spacing scowling like they’ve insulted her lineage and Benji hovering with honey spoons and gauze?

Here, he felt… seen. Not handled. Not managed. Just—seen.

He still wouldn’t call Talia “Mom,” but they’d moved into a weird space where she offered him second helpings and occasionally let her hand rest on his shoulder longer than necessary. She never pushed. Never pried. And he never thanked her. But it worked.

Even Benji—absurd, nervous, chatterbox Benji—was steady in a way Jason hadn’t expected. He didn’t try to fix Jason. Didn’t ask him to soften or behave. He just handed him tea and warned him that Damian had stolen another set of scalpels.

And Jason—Jason found himself talking. Not a lot. Not about the Pit or the Joker or the cave. But about the little things. Gotham’s humidity. What Alfred’s biscuits tasted like. The difference between real gun oil and the cheap crap the GCPD used.

Benji listened. Made sarcastic faces. Called him “kid” like it didn’t mean anything, and somehow that made it mean more.

And then, somehow, he was laughing more. Cooking again. Letting himself be known.

Which is exactly when the city started calling him back.

—————-//——-

It starts small.

A few flagged surveillance logs. Penguin’s name showing up again, slimy and casual in a low-level gun smuggling case. Then a supply chain: Wayne Enterprises-linked shipping containers, repurposed for trafficking.

It clicks into place like a lock finally turning.

Gotham is spiraling. Again. Still. Always.

But this time, Jason doesn’t just feel angry.

He feels responsible.

———

He brings it up with Damian during cooldown after sparring—both of them bloodied, half-grinning, trying to pretend the argument about ink quality and throwing knives hadn’t escalated quite so far.

“I’m going back,” Jason says casually, wiping sweat off his temple.

Damian doesn’t blink. “To where?”

“Gotham.”

Now that gets a pause.

“Why?”

Jason stretches his sore shoulder. “Because I know it. Because it’s mine. And because if I don’t go now, someone worse will.”

Damian cocks his head. “You think you’ll succeed where Father didn’t?”

Jason considers it.

“No,” he says finally. “I think I’ll succeed where he couldn’t. Because I understand what Gotham really is. Not just what it looks like from a rooftop.”

He leans back, gaze turned upward.

“Bruce always saw Gotham as a war. A monster to fight. But I grew up in its belly. I know the way poverty eats people alive. I know what it’s like when your only options are a gang or a grave. He tried to scare Gotham into submission. I’m going to try giving it something to believe in.”

Damian says nothing, but his eyes are sharp.

Jason smirks. “Don’t worry. I’m not going full idealist. I still believe in fear and all that you know. Just not only fear.”

Damian’s mouth twitches. “You’ll tell Benji?”

Jason shrugs. “He’ll figure it out. ”

Damian snorts at that.

Except Benji doesn’t figure it out. Jason tells him directly, which is worse. He curses Damian for invoking this.

He catches him in the pantry, alphabetizing the spice rack, a man with too many feelings and not enough control.

“Hey,” Jason says, leaning in the doorway.

Benji startles. Drops a tin. “God, Jason. Don’t lurk. It’s unnerving, jesus, can none of you people have footsteps like normal hunans.”

“You love it.”

Benji glares, unconvincingly. “You need something or are you just haunting me again?”

“I’m leaving.”

Benji stops stacking jars. Just long enough to register it.

“To where?”

“Gotham.”

Benji exhales. “Yeah, ehm, okay. That tracks.”

“You’re not going to talk me out of it?”

Benji looks at him. Really looks.

“No. I wouldn’t even try.”

Jason nods once. “I want to do it right. Better than last time.”

Benji turns back to the shelf. “And better than your dad.”

Jason flinches—but doesn’t deny it.

“I-I loved him, Benji. That’s the worst part. I really did. I thought he was the strongest, smartest, kindest person in the world. And when I needed him most—he didn’t come. He moved on. Found another Robin Just like that.”

Benji doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t offer platitudes. Just waits.

“I-well, I’m not angry the way I used to be,” Jason says. “But I’m done idolizing him.”

He picks up the coriander jar, rolls it between his palms.

“I’m not going to try to be a better Bruce. I’m going to try being a better me. The kind of person Gotham needs.”

Benji hums softly. “Well kid, I won’t stop you. But there’s more than Gotham in this world, remember that. Your dad dedicated himself to that city right? Maybe you should switch it up.”

“Gotham is my world, It-I can’t abandon it.”

“Okay. You’ll always have us though, don’t be a stranger. You’ll bring sweets for Damian before you go?”

Jason grins. “Obviously.”

Benji shakes his head, smiling. “Try not to start a war your new health infrastructure can’t handle.”

That night, Jason writes a plan.

Not a manifesto. Not a vendetta. A real structure—safehouses, supply lines, communication hubs. He starts recruiting in his head: former mercs, medics, kids like he used to be. People who know what it’s like to be left behind.

He wants a Gotham that doesn’t need saving because it saves itself. He won’t be Batman. He won’t be Robin. That role’s taken. Still haunted.

But he’ll be the one in the alleyway with a first aid kit and a loaded gun. The one who scares the predators and shelters the prey. The one who remembers what hunger feels like, what eviction notices look like, what it means when the only warmth on your block is a trash fire and two-dollar whiskey.

He zips up his jacket. Slips his mask into the bag.

He’s doing this for the kid he used to be. The one who thought Robin was magic. The one who thought love looked like a man in a cowl pulling him out of a gutter and telling him he mattered.

Jason knows better now.

Love is messier than that. But it can still be a hand held out. A door kept open. A city guarded from the shadows, not with perfection—but with purpose.

He zips up his jacket. Pulls on his gloves.

The road back to Gotham isn’t paved with forgiveness.

But maybe it can be paved with fire.

And maybe—just maybe—this time, it won’t burn him alive.

Chapter Text

The first thing Jason notices is that Gotham smells the same.

Rain-soaked brick. Oil and trash and fried food. Something damp and sour in the air like rotting concrete. It hits him the second his boots touch the rooftop ledge off Bowery and 9th—a place he used to crash behind a busted HVAC system when he was thirteen and didn’t want Bruce to see how bad his nightmares had gotten.

He stands there for a second, helmet under one arm, hood pulled low. Watching.

The city’s darker than he remembers. Not literally—the lights are still there, flickering in gas stations and pawn shop windows. But something’s different. Slower. Exhausted. Like Gotham’s been holding its breath for too long, and now it doesn’t have the strength to exhale.

Jason knows the feeling.

He breathes in.

Then he jumps.

The safehouse he picked isn’t much. Concrete basement in an abandoned tenement in East Tricorner. The ceilings drip, and the walls smell like mildew. But the locks are good, the water’s functional, and there’s a back entrance no one’s touched in years.

Perfect for a new beginning.

He doesn’t hang up anything yet. No pictures. No files. No League insignia or Bat tech. Just the basics: med kit, burner phones, blackout curtains. Food. Ammo. Burner stashes.

He lays the helmet on the rickety table and sits across from it.

“Alright,” he mutters. “Let’s see what you’re worth.”

He doesn’t start with a war. He starts with groceries.

It’s all intel. Jason’s always known that. You don’t fix a city by punching it harder. You fix it by knowing it. By remembering the kid who used to swipe peaches from the corner vendor just to keep from fainting during school.

So he walks.

Red hoodie pulled over his hair. Hands in his pockets. Low and slow.

He clocks every security cam. Notes where the lights don’t reach. Counts the cops who look away when a woman on the corner gets shoved into a wall. Takes mental inventory of who flinches when he passes and who doesn’t.

The corner boys working Burnley are underfed and jittery. A teenager named Vince eyes him like he wants to impress someone, maybe for the first time in his life.

“Yo,” Vince says, chin out, “you not from around here.”

Jason cocks his head. “Used to be.”

“You lookin’ to buy or talk?”

Jason smiles. Just slightly. “Neither. I’m lookin’ to build.”

He breaks up a drop that night.

Small arms shipment, three cars, one guy with a shaved head trying to cosplay mob muscle. Jason lets the first two cars go—he’s not greedy. Just wants a message.

The third gets a tire spike to the front axle and a flashbang in the engine block.

He moves fast. Efficient. Two cracked ribs, one broken nose, zero fatalities.

The driver tries to pull a pistol and finds a boot to his temple.

Jason crouches beside him, helmet visor dimmed to blood-red. “Tell your boss Red Hood’s back.”

The guy groans, dazed. “Red who?”

Jason grind. “Exactly.”

The name spreads slow. Whispers at first. Ghost stories.

Then video footage—grainy, time-stamped, his silhouette framed by fire as he walks off the docks carrying two duffel bags full of medical supplies.

Not cash.

Not drugs.

Not turf.

Bandages. Naloxone. Clean syringes.

The message is clear: He’s not here to rule. He’s here to serve. But only if you’re not a bastard about it.

Which makes him terrifying. To the right people, that is.

He makes his first alliance in a church basement.

Sister Reina has been running a free clinic out of St. Jude’s for fifteen years. She’s patched up more gang kids than the ER and knows exactly how many city officials pretend not to see her.

Jason shows up with two crates and doesn’t say who sent him.

She opens the first one. Bandages, antiseptics, protein bars.

The second one: burner phones, signal blockers, encrypted walkie sets. She doesn’t ask for his name.

He leaves with a mug of bitter coffee and a new list of neighborhoods to check in on.

Nights blur.

Sleep is thin.

Benji texts once—encrypted line, of course. Just three words:

You eating kid?

Jason smirks, wipes blood off his knuckles, and replies:

don’t worry mom i eat

A minute later, another message arrives. Damian.

i haven’t heard about anything yet so you’re doing something wrong 

Jason laughs. For the first time in days, it doesn’t feel like it might shatter something inside him.

He doesn’t reply. But he does steal a bagel on his next patrol and eat it without getting blood on it.

Progress.

The city tests him.

One night, three blocks from where his mother overdosed behind a coin laundry, he finds a girl hiding under a fire escape. Sixteen, maybe. Her arm’s been cut bad, and her eyes are too sharp for someone that scared.

She holds a screwdriver as a weapon.

Jason doesn’t try to talk.

He kneels, helmet retracted, hands visible. Sets down a field kit. Waits.

It takes ten minutes before she crawls toward it.

Another five before she lets him tape her arm.

She doesn’t ask who he is.

But she asks where to find him again.

That’s when he knows he’s doing it right.

It’s not all easy.

He gets shot twice. One clean graze, one that needs stitching.

He sends the bullet to a fence who owes him a favor and gets back a name: Chet Moreno. Low-level gang enforcer, moving up too fast to not be dirty.

Jason finds him in a bar in South Narrows and pins him to a table with one knee.

“I don’t kill,” he says, blade pressed lightly to the man’s throat. “But I do remove fingers. Index ones, mostly. Typing’s harder without them.”

Chet sings like a canary.

The next week, two safehouses get raided—with zero civilian casualties and an anonymous tip to Reina’s clinic offering resources for the displaced.

The message spreads faster this time.

Red Hood doesn’t kill for fun.

But he doesn’t play games, either.

He sits on a rooftop two weeks in, helmet off, sweat cooling on his neck.

Gotham sprawls beneath him. Still chaotic. Still ugly. But… different. Maybe not safer. Not yet.

There’s a rhythm to the streets now. People looking over their shoulders less. Kids walking home with pepper spray they didn’t used to afford. Dealers cutting fewer batches with poison.

It’s small. But it’s a start.

Jason leans back against the chimney.

Pulls out his phone. Types a message.

”network pending ill send sweets”

He adds a cherry emoji.

Then another.

Then deletes them both and sends the message plain.

Benji will know what it means.

He always does.

Jason pockets the phone. Pulls the helmet back on.

Red Hood walks into the night, and Gotham doesn’t look away this time.

Jason doesn’t set out to become a mob boss.

He sets out to fix a hole.

Red Hood HQ starts as a decommissioned subway control room just north of Bristol. Concrete walls, moldy corners, forgotten by everyone except pigeons and ghosts. Perfect. Off the radar. Close enough to the Narrows to matter, far enough from Wayne surveillance for plausible deniability.

He clears it himself. Wires in comms, builds redundancies, stocks the med lockers with supplies looted from a corrupt GCPD depot. He doesn’t hang pictures. Doesn’t need sentimentality staring at him while he stitches bullet wounds in his thigh.

He moves quietly. No announcements. No symbols. Just whispers: there’s someone in the East End who doesn’t work for Penguin, who’s keeping street dealers off school corners, who dropped a crate of anti-venom at a pet clinic and left without saying a word, who blew up a warehouse full of human traffickers. 

They start calling him Red Hood. Which is ironic 

He doesn’t correct them.

Tim Drak, the new robin, hears about him by week three. Batman flags a heat signature at the docks the night Jason takes out a low-level trafficking op.

But they don’t make contact.

He knows they’re watching—drone sweeps that linger just a second too long, WayneTech pings that pop up and vanish near his safe routes.

They’re suspicious.

But they don’t know it’s him.

Not yet. 

And Jason’s not ready to be found.

He wants to be seen first.

Really seen.

HQ grows faster than he expects.

A former gang medic shows up with bandages and a clipboard. A mother of four brings crates of canned food and two stun guns. A kid from farther down the Narrows with too-sharp eyes starts organizing supply routes, using old school bus maps like he’s playing a game of strategy only Jason can understand.

They look at the helmet and see order. Clarity. Protection.

They start calling it “Red Net.”

He groans when he hears it.

“This isn’t a network,” he mutters one night, eating lukewarm dumplings on the HQ stairs.

The kid from the Narrows snorts. “Tell that to the twelve nodes you’ve set up, boss.”

Jason points a fork at him. “Don’t call me that.”

“Would you prefer Commander?”

“Do I look like a GI Joe?”

The kid grins. “Honestly? Kinda.”

Jason glares and keeps chewing.

But he updates the safehouse manual that night to include comm protocols.

Just in case.

By the end of the first month, he’s got:

• Four safehouses.
  
  
• Two encrypted signal repeaters courtesy of Benji’s paranoia.
  
  
• A distributed surveillance patchwork of teenagers with cracked phones and excellent instincts.
  
  
• A food rotation schedule.
  
  
• A list of clean doctors and off-the-books clinics.
  
  
• And a guy named Mo who refuses to go by anything but “the bookkeeper,” and insists Jason keep receipts “in case we ever get subpoenaed.”
  
  

Jason blinks at him. “Subpoenaed by who?”

Mo shrugs. “Can’t be too careful, boss.”

Jason wants to argue. Instead, he writes his first expense log and gives Mo the account book.

The man brings in a secondhand safe and a new filing cabinet the next day.

“Not your typical mob boss,” Mo says, labeling folders. “But I’ve worked for worse.”

Jason stares at the label: Community Logistics & Enforcement.

“…You think I’m running a gang,” Jason says.

Mo doesn’t look up. “What do you think this is?”

Jason doesn’t answer.

Because if it walks like a duck, sets up protection networks like a duck, and sends local goons coded moral philosophy memos on the difference between justified force and punishment—

Maybe it’s a duck.

Batman gets closer.

One night, Jason’s patching a busted comms array on the roof when he sees the silhouette.

Cowl. Cape. Still as a gargoyle, watching from across the block.

He freezes.

Not in fear. Not even anger.

But… calculation.

He doesn’t call out.

Neither does Bruce.

They just watch each other from rooftops.

Jason’s in his armor. Hood on. Unmistakable.

But it’s been years. And he’s changed. Taller. Harder. Calmer.

Bruce doesn’t recognize him.

And Jason lets him walk away.

He doesn’t know why he doesn’t make contact.

Pride, maybe. Or just survival.

Or maybe it’s because deep down, he wants the work to speak first. Not the face. Not the name.

Let the Bat think Red Hood is another problem. Another vigilante. Another would-be warlord with too much firepower and a god complex.

Let him underestimate what Jason is building.

Because Jason remembers what it’s like to be a Gotham kid caught in the crossfire. And he’s not about to waste a single breath on posturing.

He’s not the ghost of a dead Robin.

He’s something else now.

The operation stabilizes in month two.

They build a rotation. Clean routes for safehouse runners. Patrols of local volunteers. A field med unit. A standing rule: no drugs, no exploitation, no egos.

If someone breaks it, they get one warning and a full lecture on the ethics of violence Jason wrote after a three-hour call with Benji.

If they break it again, they’re gone.

No questions. No execution orders.

Just done.

Mo loves the order. Starts calling it “the council ”

Jason facepalms. “We’re not a council .”

“Sure,” Mo says. “Tell that to the three minor gangs that just merged under your command.”

Jason blinks. “What?”

Mo slides him a document: graffiti tags combined. Local hierarchy charts. A revenue redistribution plan written in scratchy handwriting on the back of a poker receipt.

“They’re reorganizing,” Mo says. “Under your rules.”

Jason stares at the paper.

Jason doesn’t know what to say to that.

So he files the chart. And updates his org chart. And calls Reina to schedule another supplies run.

Because apparently, he’s a mob boss now.

But maybe this time, that’s not a bad thing.

He doesn’t wear the helmet every day anymore.

Sometimes, he shows up to HQ in a hoodie, backpack slung low, half a bagel in his mouth.

Sometimes he leaves field kits in alleyways without waiting to see who picks them up.

Sometimes he wakes up to find one of his lieutenants has ordered folding chairs and whiteboards for the “command center,” and he doesn’t stop them.

He’s not building a war.

He’s building infrastructure.

The kind Bruce never could.

Not because Bruce didn’t care. But because Bruce never trusted the city enough to share it.

Jason does.

Because Gotham made him.

And this time, he’s going to make something back.

——————————-

There is silence in Nanda Parbat.

Not the silence of readiness. Not the pause before battle or the breath drawn before orders. This silence is deeper. Stranger. Unsettled. The kind of silence that seeps into stone and refuses to leave.

Talia has never trusted silence.

And now she is steeped in it.

The war maps are gone. The tapestries, scorched. The Pits are sealed beneath four tons of reinforced steel and a new security system keyed only to her breath pattern and retinal scan.

She has done what she came to do.

Her father sleeps in a cryogenic tomb. Alive, conscious, and useless. The League bows—what remains of it, scattered and shell-shocked, forced to adjust to new doctrine written in the bloodless ink of not anymore. No more protocols. No more succession trials. No more inherited cruelty.

She should feel triumphant.

She feels… tired.

Not the kind of tired one trains through. The bone-deep, numbing kind. She keeps mistaking it for stillness, until her hands start to tremble. Just slightly. Just sometimes.

She hates it.

She has begun to rebuild.

Jason left two weeks ago.

He did not ask for permission. He did not leave quietly.

He told her, plainly, where he was going—Gotham. My Gotham. To fix what you and he and they never did.

She had not argued. She does not regret letting him go. But she misses him, in the way you miss a sharp edge you forgot you relied on. He took a medkit, three of Benji’s signal repeaters, and her spare burner with encrypted League access.

He left a note in her office:

You gave me a second chance. I’m going to do something with it.

The kid is so dramatic, she supposes it runs in the family. She finds herself rereading it sometimes. Not sentimentally. Just to remember the exact curve of his pen stroke, the weight of that trust returned.

He is not a tool.

He is family.

The medical wing was first. A battlefield triage zone disguised in obsidian and ritual. Benji had been quiet when she brought him there. No scoffs. No pointed jabs about outdated materials or ceremonial redundancies.

Just: “Do you want this fixed, or replaced?”

She had not known the answer.

He did. He always did.

She let him choose.

He rebuilt.

Now, even without him there every day, the shelves stay in order. The supplies replenish on a schedule. There are lists, laminated. Procedures. Labels. Someone replaced the ancient poison-testing kit with a compact centrifuge Benji scrounged from a Swiss biotech firm’s junk auction.

It still smells like ginger tea.

Sometimes she lingers there longer than necessary. It is the only wing in the compound that runs without her input.

This is what he gave her: a system that doesn’t collapse when she forgets to breathe.

She had mourned him. Once. Twice. Three times.

First when he left. Second when she thought him dead. And third, most confusingly, when he returned—alive, sharp, changed. She is still cataloguing her grief for the space he didn’t fill. And now does again, imperfectly. Secretly. IMF-marked.

He is not a ghost anymore.

He is family.

She has not taken up the ceremonial armor since the coup. It sits on its mannequin like a threat. Instead, she dresses in linen and canvas and long, loose coats with pockets deep enough for notebooks.

There is so much to unlearn.

Power is no longer granted by sharpness. Not only. She finds herself sitting in on repair team meetings. Arguing over energy supply chains. Drafting educational protocols for the youngest initiates, the ones too small to remember the blood rites.

She does not know how to do this.

She is not good at it.

The spreadsheets overwhelm her. The inconsistency of human error gnaws at her patience. And the questions—so many questions—so many things she cannot answer without triple-verifying the data and cross-referencing it against three months of field reports. She stims when she’s frustrated: tapping fingers against her collarbone, organizing cutlery drawers by weight and sound, writing numbers down twice.

It helps. She does not explain it.

Damian notices. He begins doing the same.

She pretends not to be proud.

He’s not an heir.

He’s family 

They spend mornings together now. Mornings and more. She rearranges her schedule so they can spar gently, walk the perimeter, drink tea and discuss troop logistics without urgency. She sits beside him in silence and lets him be fourteen. Or fifteen. Or sixteen. (She has stopped counting.)

He’s always been precise. Sharp. Angry. She sees the edges softening—not dulled, but redirected.

She tells him stories now. Quiet ones. Not parables. Not warnings. Just memories.

He listens with a strange, aching stillness. Sometimes he leans against her arm and pretends he doesn’t.

She lets him.

She was not taught how to love this way. But she learns.

Jason’s name returns often, in reports from Gotham. Red Hood disrupting trafficking operations. Red Net expanding. No fatalities. A syndicate reorganized under ethical mandates.

She smiles when she reads them. Not indulgently. But with pride.

She told him, before he left, that she would hunt what remained of the Syndicate. That she would pursue Solomon Lane’s international threads and cut them clean. She has begun that work. Quietly, efficiently.

They move slower now that Lane is locked away. But there are offshoots—cells, mimics, mercenary-minded fools still weaponizing chaos. She tracks them. Sends strike teams. Sometimes goes herself. Always leaves a symbol: a broken ring. A door nailed shut. A satellite silenced.

This is her penance.

And her promise.

Benji visits less than she wants and more than he should, by his standards. The IMF permits it—for now. He wears civilian clothes in the compound, which bothers no one but her. It feels informal. Vulnerable.

She does not say this.

They talk sometimes. Quietly. About load-bearing beams and medkits. About Jason. About Damian. About tea.

She does not know how to tell him that she grieved him in the dark, in the quiet, in the very rooms he built.

So she does not.

Instead, she teaches herself to make ginger tea the way he does—boiled fresh, no honey. And when she gets it right, she leaves a thermos outside the door of his guest quarters.

He never comments.

But the thermos is always returned clean.

Airports have become a reprieve.

She’s passed through twenty-seven since the coup. Mostly alone. Sometimes with Damian. Never with escort.

She waits in line. She reads in corners. She wears wraparound scarves and mirrored glasses and no one stops her.

She knows the flows now. The layout logic. How airports across the world translate pressure into motion.

She is soothed by the signage. The repeated instructions. The smell of too-strong coffee and floor polish and migration.

It reminds her that movement is possible without violence.

She buys books in translation. Tea in regional tins. Ceramic mugs. She alphabetizes them on a shelf in her new wing. She does not throw anything away. Even broken things.

Especially not broken things.

She does not know what she is doing.

She says this aloud only once.

It is late. Damian is asleep, curled on her reading couch, one leg still twitching with dream-logic. Jason is in Gotham. Benji is away on assignment. The compound is too quiet. She is reviewing dossiers by lamplight and the words blur into useless shapes.

“I do not know what I am doing,” she says, voice thin.

Damian stirs. Doesn’t wake.

She breathes. Gets up. Covers him with a shawl.

Then goes back to work.

She speaks to her father’s cryo-chamber only once. Not for reconciliation. Not for confession. Just to hear herself say it:

“You were wrong.”

Then she powers down the chamber interface and orders it permanently sealed.

There is a mug on the windowsill of her office. Chipped. Blue-and-white. A line of script curling around the rim, faded with time.

Benji left it.

He used to keep his tea there. Ginger. No sugar.

She makes it sometimes now.

Not because it is comforting. But because it reminds her to be better.

It reminds her that softness can survive.

Even here.

She does not believe in redemption.

But she does believe in change.

In patience. In systems. In teaching new hands to hold sharp things with care.

She is not good at it.

But she is learning.

And perhaps that is enough.