˚ ༘✶ ⋆ 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕒𝕣𝕔𝕙𝕖𝕣˚ ⁀➷

OPEN

The ripple of whatever the hell was going on in Sokovia had been felt throughout the entirety of the multiverse. Just a twinge - something familiar but frustrating pulling at the edges of her awareness. One well-placed stomp of her foot had landed America safely just outside Matchak, in a crackling blue star, before she had started the long hike into town, hair swept up into a twist with rogue curls framing her face.

“Fucking Demiurge,” she muttered to herself, eventually crossing into the square of the town. Sharp eyes scanned for anything unusual.

Nothing as of yet. Reluctantly, she steered herself to one of the benches to park herself for a moment and watch. Someone would come along eventually. Eventually, her gaze locked with someone’s across the way. The moment held for long enough that it looked suspicious. America raised a challenging eyebrow.

There were perks to having a chaos demon almost destroy the world. Strange, but true. Kate couldn’t remember the last time she had run into so many familiar faces in such a short period of time. Kate grinned at the familiar mop of curly hair sprouting over the bench. America’s face was granite with a glower chiseled into her eyes; it was nice to see that some things never changed. 

Oh, crap. He should have predicted that Kate would search him out for some smug reminder that her little band of troublemakers was nearly all under the same roof, under his supervision. Sure, two of them had avoided a large-scale threat to the balance of their universe, but it didn’t change the fact that they were still too young for some of their missions.

“If you’d been there, you’d know that this divine intervention was a chaotic cosmic force that nearly ripped the fabric of our reality. No wonder your friends got involved,” he reminded her, an eyebrow raised. “But no, you’re not responsible for their arrival, they’re here with my permission. That doesn’t mean you can start leading them in borderline suicide missions, come on, work with me a bit.” He sighed, unwilling to hide how that mere thought exhausted his already limited patience. “I’ve invited them to stay with us for protection.”

“Exactly,” Kate held up her hands like a preacher for hire and grinned, “it’s our destiny.” She wanted to ask if Tommy and Billy asked for his permission before they blipped into the country to fight chaos demons, but she’d save that bit of sass for later when she wasn’t trying to prove that they didn’t need a babysitter in spandex every time went outside the castle grounds. “You know,” she picked up a paperweight off of his desk and rolled the glass ball from one palm to the other, “Billy would probably feel a lot better with something to keep him busy...I mean the whole spirit mom thing is a lot, and I know that the key to keeping his powers from going wiggy is making him feel like he’s in control.” Shrugging her shoulders, Kate chewed on the corner of her mouth and tried to look innocent, “Can’t really control the Wanda situation, but I’m sure there’s something else we could help with.”

TOMMY: oh ok miss “conglomerate” and “manifestation” ig we’re really pulling out the 5 dollar words tonight TOMMY: do you really think damian is going to scare me out of the rathole TOMMY: he can’t even scare me out of the batcave. his own house

He stared at the last message, chewing on the inside of his cheek. Tommy was staying, of course. For a lot of reasons—until they better understood this whole soul-splitting business, it was probably safer to keep he, Wanda, and Billy relatively close together. And then there was the matter of the FOMO he would have if the whole goddamn team moved into Sokovia and he was still out living in New Jersey; there were enough reasons for him to feel more like a guest spot than a team member without adding all your friends are off having fun adventures without you onto the list. 

But answering that now felt like a trap, somehow. An admission of something soft that he didn’t want to admit ever, and certainly not now, to Kate of all people. When the entire world moved around you at a snail’s pace, developing some sense of observation was inevitable—and for as dense and up his own ass as Tommy could often be, there were things he noticed, too, like how Kate had been the first to try to make sure he didn’t feel like a visitor or a guest on the team, how she led without asking for her leadership to be recognized, how her presence was loud and demanded their attention and respect, no matter how much she might not want it to. But that was the thing about Kate: once you knew she was in a room, it was hard to look anywhere else. It was what made her their de facto leader and, surely, the reason she’d gone to Sokovia long before the rest of them had even thought about it.

…But he didn’t want her to know any of that. Not from him.

TOMMY: maybe. we’ll see. you know me TOMMY: can’t stay in one place for too long TOMMY: not that im ever more than a 6 sec run away if u need me, toots

Or a few knocks, quick and staccato, against the door he’d determined was hers. “Yo, tell me more about my vision board baby self.” 

KATE: Well, I am a 10 dollar woman, Zippy. KATE: You should not be proud of tempting death so casually.

The thing about Tommy was that the only way their little arrangement worked was when Kate breached the limits of her comfort zone. If it were up to him, nothing would ever happen...other than, y’know, the horizontal––sometimes vertical––tango. It was up to Kate to ask the important questions. Normally, she didn’t have a problem with that. She led the Young Avengers with confidence (after Eli messed up so spectacularly), and she had no problems saying the things that needed to be said. With Tommy...it was different. The game of hot potato they played was less fun the longer it went on and the higher the stakes got. She’d started to care about him like nettle...like poison ivy––like she couldn’t touch it––but the roots went all the way down, and she’d built an ecosystem that’d gotten used to him. So, it wasn’t like she could just cut him out.  

But he could.

That was un-fun part.

There was a rap on her door before she could reply to his latest texts. She rolled off her bed to the ground, hissing as her bare feet touched the dawn-chilled stone floor. Would it kill Batman to install carpet, or at least buy some comfy rugs?

BILLY: Lalalala I’m covering my ears

He was calling bullshit. Honestly, it made no sense to Billy that two people could be good friends and have those periodic… rendez-vous without calling it dating. Just because they ignored feelings or were afraid of commitment, it didn’t make it any less true, but he’d long before stopped trying to give them advice. He had to remember that not everybody wanted what he had – as foolish as that sounded.

BILLY: I’m never smug

BILLY: Okay fine, I may have thrown a few ‘I told you so’s around, but it’s been half a day and that’s long enough that I’m freaking out a bit

He could barely take care of himself or fully control his powers, what if that turned out to be a challenge too big to tackle? What if he crumbled again and disappointed people that were counting on him? What if… he tapped his fingers on his phone to check if Kate had replied, taking a big sip of coffee.

KATE: Hardly effective for a text, Billiam.

It was probably even stranger for Billy now that they knew Tommy was actually his brother––spiritually, but still. Before, he was kind of like his little orphan delinquent he scooped up into his white-picket family (or, at least, tried to despite Tommy’s yearning for rat-infested, mold-ridden squalor). Or maybe it wasn’t that different. Billy had always been more perceptive than the rest of them. Maybe, he’d always known that Tommy was a part of him the way he’d always known that he was connected to Scarlet Witch. Kate hadn’t ever felt any connection to her own, biological family, so she had no idea where that kind faith came from. Perhaps, that was another one of his powers: hope in spite of all the depressive spiraling. 

KATE: Alriiiiiight. Punishment over. Let’s take it one freak out at a time. 

“I’ve read more theory than you have on military command and leadership.” He didn’t think he’d ever be the person that was relied on for interpersonal issues, but he chalked that up to being a Wayne. His father looked something like he’d just put a spoonful of citric acid in his mouth whenever he was asked to settle disputes among his flock of sidekicks. “You’re lucky to have someone actually combat trained to work with you, not to mention now you need my family’s money.”

He knew he was useful for that, at least. Now that Kate was estranged from her father, Damian was the one who could supply them with hotel rooms and supplies and repairs to their suits and disguises. At the very least they had to be nice to him for that. Ugh, a disgusting lack of confidence. He should be more secure now that he had allies he trusted here. Instead, Cassie had shown up and his confidence was shaken. He hadn’t been forced to confront her yet, but it still shook him just to see her. Remembering how they fought practically twice a day. Her standing over him as his last memory before he blacked out in the fight that nearly killed him. He resisted the urge to slap Kate’s hand for touching him and instead pushed her chair just enough to move her an inch in revenge. “You’re disgusting and desperate for the Wayne money, I won’t be your ticket back to wealth and fame, Kate Biashin. Not unless you somehow managed to learn something new and useful about Wanda’s outburst and what it could mean about Wiccan’s potential to do the same.”

“And yet, I was voted prom queen,” Kate hummed drolly with a tired smile. There was no doubt that Damian would take her literally, but she’d become rusty in the art of translating nuance and sarcasm in his absence. For the last year, she’d barely had any interaction with law-abiding citizens outside of the odd text in the YA group chat. There wasn’t much conversation involved in shaking down a cheating husbands and white-collar criminals. Actually, Damian might understand that dialect more than her usual sardonic flair. 

TOMMY: the fuck you mean you met me as a baby

Was there a less sexy combination words in the English language than “I met you as a baby”? No. No, there were not. And while Tommy was pretty sure there’d be enough Tinder and/or Grindr action even in a place like Sokovia to make up for losing whatever arrangement he and Kate had going ( they hadn’t really put much thought into defining it besides uncomplicated, which was good enough for Tommy Shepherd ), how would he be able to keep the joy in one-upping Billy and Teddy whenever they were being disgusting on main ( main being the Young Avengers’ shared group chat, plus Damian Wayne ) if he and Kate were no longer sleeping together? He could not, was the sad truth. It was pretty hard to prove to anybody you were a pretty fucking good lay without some brat to corroborate. It was one of the few compliments Kate would willingly give, anyway—after all, it reflected poorly on her if this arrangement kept up and Tommy couldn’t even deliver the goods. Which he could, by the way. He could deliver many, many goods.

All this to say—what a bummer to have to give it up. At least until the next couple of texts from Kate, which put his mind more than at ease, enough for Tommy’s restless leg to start jittering not unlike goddamn Thumper from Bambi all ‘cause he was about ready to start searching the whole of this damn place himself. 

Except, you know. True players could never look too eager.

TOMMY: hell yea bless hawaii TOMMY: the fuck kinda time zone are they in anyway TOMMY: w/e not important. u living in the rathole or what

KATE: I think it was technically some sort of magic conglomerate Wanda brought to fruition through sheer force of manifestation, so maybe more like your vision board clone.

Babies all kind of looked the same to Kate, with their facial features all squished together by fat and a tiny skull, but Wanda’s twins didn’t really look like Tommy and Billy to her. This was exactly why she preferred shooting mafia thugs with arrows; magic gave her a headache. 

Tommy also gave her a headache, and, truthfully, sometimes he confused her just as much as the metaphysics of chaos magic did. There was the Young Avengers Tommy, and there was the Tommy who sometimes fucked her, and then there was another one who was somewhere in-between. They all existed at once, and yet could not inhabit the same space––now that was a real reality warping conundrum. 

KATE: I know you know what it’s called. 

She typed out her next reply and paused before pressing send. Partially, because it would be far too quick to play off as ambivalent, but mostly because she had to give herself a once over in the cracked mirror hanging crookedly over the baroque chest of drawers in the corner. The entire point of their arrangement was things like shaving and dark circles didn’t matter, but Kate would always be a perfectionist. He wasn’t allowed to see her until her hair was combed and her teeth were brushed, regardless of how many times he saw her covered in a slick coat of sweat after a training session or smudged with dirt and blood after aliens attacked Earth again. That was a different Tommy all together.

KATE: Yeah. I’m on the same floor as Damian, so, y’know, enter at your own peril.

She waited another moment before adding:

“You jest, but you could probably use it.” Damian watched her blink away sleep and rub at her face to wake up. He should probably be more sympathetic to waking her up just to start demanding she get the team back together, but he wasn’t really known for getting gold stars in sympathy.

“What are you doing, Kate. You’ll only get worse back pain falling asleep like that and you’ll be dealing with enough back and shoulder problems from working with bows all the time anyway, don’t make it worse.” He leaned over her chair anyway, invading her space to look at her screen and read what she had been researching. The mythos around Wundagore and the artwork within it. At least she was doing real work. “If you intend to lead the team again, you can’t spend your time complaining about lower back issues. Speed will get bored and stop listening.”

Kate scrubbed her hands over her face and sighed when her hands came back with black smudges across the palms. “I think we’ve established your area of expertise isn’t leadership or team dynamics,” she hummed as she wiped the flakes of mascara off on her leggings. She shot him a little grin because even through hazy, sleep-deprived observation, she could deduce why he was being nosy. “Don’t worry. We’ll keep you anyway.”

BILLY: I won’t ask, what you and Tommy talk about may not be the kind of things I ever want to hear from either of you

Coffee was ready, the food was carried through the air to two plates. When he looked at the phone again, the most recent messages made a twinge of guilt pull at his heartstrings. She was too good, they were too good to him. The team still existed, even after he had been the first to break down and step away, even after those months where he had barely managed to muster up enough energy to check his texts.

BILLY: I know. I wasn’t thinking, it was all too fast

BILLY: Promise to let you know next time, if you join me for breakfast

BILLY: Unless my soul brother is waiting for you in bed right now, then I DEFINITELY do not want anything to do with this

KATE: Well, to be fair, we don’t really do a lot of talking.

Ugh.

TOMMY: jjjjjesus TOMMY: ok ok ok ok do you know wanda maximoff TOMMY: bc like

No time like the present to rip off the band-aid, right? Just say it, Tommy. Wanda Maximoff is my mom. Sort of. She’s my soul mom. The mom of my soul. A fragment of her soul lives in me, and it makes me her baby, or something, and we had to expel a chaos demon from eating her soul partly because it couldn’t get her WHOLE soul because part of her soul is in me. And in Billy. Because we’re soul brothers. Like the Blues Brothers, but less jazz. Why were they call the Blues Brothers, anyway? Yeah, they sang the blues, but they weren’t the BLUES blues. They were more like the jazz blues. Not the same thing. Tommy sighed, tapped a few experimental messages into his phone, backspaced, typed a few more. Something told him deep-diving into the wonders of having a soul-mom and a soul-brother were not going to end in him getting off that night, or possibly any night in the near future.

TOMMY: so ig she’s my mom TOMMY: and also billy’s mom TOMMY: but like spiritually. TOMMY: we had to fight a chaos demon

Kate stared at her phone for a solid minute, only remembering to blink when her eyes screamed for moisture. They had come across enemies from alternate timelines, armies from other planets, and several magical entities––but this doozy might take the strange and unusual cake. Wanda, at least the one she had met briefly, was barely older than them...and, holy fuck, the drooling babies she had with her were twins, too. 

KATE: Ew. I think I briefly met you as a baby. 

@gdikate

So. The team was all in one place. Not really his team. He was just around it. He had considered the Titans his team, but he hadn’t really heard from any of them since the incident. And he had never considered this his team, but somehow until the ISA shut down Gotham, they had all been in contact with him. ​It did take a near world ending crisis to get them all in one building again, though. Damian never really understood why they broke apart, lots of feelings were involved. A lot of feelings were involved in Wanda nearly destroying a small nation and a demon and magic soul shards, but Damian didn’t know how much he was actually supposed to know and how much he’d snooped out of conversations and connected together himself. Either way it meant Kate looked both more stressed than she had since he’d found her here, and much happier than she had since he found her here. The twins had that effect on her, it seemed.

“You and Wiccan will have to find a new brunch spot. You did most of your good decision making for the Young Avengers over waffles at nearly eleven, and I assume they will be looking to you for leadership again. Though, the moniker Young Avengers doesn’t work when there aren’t any Old Avengers at the moment. You were the only one with a real Avenger mentor anyway.”

Kate had been restless since her arrival at the castle. She had far too much time on her hands which, ironically, led to far too many sleepless nights. She shifted into every possible sleeping position until her flannel sheet were tangled by her feet. Strangely (or perhaps not so strange to anyone who waned to look beyond Kate’s cool exterior), right after the twins arrived she managed to fall asleep in the middle of some research on Mount Wundagore.  She woke up to the sound of Damian’s pompous, quasi-British voice with square indentations on her cheek from sleeping on top of her laptop’s keyboard. “Young Avengers thanks you for your invaluable input,” Kate drawled, stretching her jaw until it popped, “please submit your survey into our suggestion box.” Sadly, there wasn’t a trashcan nearby to gesture to, but he probably got the hint from the expression on her face. 

There was a lot going on in his head, but Billy didn’t fault Kate for making him work for her forgiveness. It ruined her cool girl attitude to be caught having feelings, and he happened to be one of the lucky ones to receive that care. And if he pouted a bit over not immediately getting his way, at least there wasn’t anyone else in the kitchen to see it.

BILLY: Damn, I expected to get Teddy to forget about all that over breakfast in bed, but if I can’t even bribe you with food maybe I should rethink those plans too

BILLY: Sorry I didn’t reply yesterday! It was… definitely a birthday to remember

BILLY: I’m surprised that Tommy didn’t beat me to it in explaining things to you. We were in an ancient chaos god temple, it was a real emergency

KATE: Yeah, I’m sure it was the food that convinced him. 

She supposed there was something endearing about the way Teddy and Billy were in a constant battle for who was orbiting around whom. It was difficult to determine who was the sun when they were both the center of each other’s universe. Personally, Kate couldn’t imagine allowing something as unpredictable as a person to be her sun.  KATE: Being a speedster doesn’t cover instant logic, unfortunately. His first priority was...not an explanation.  Which was entirely why Tommy was her first choice for some casual bedroom fun-time. He wasn’t looking for anything that would require a delay to instant gratification. She rolled onto her back and bit down on her bottom lip, staring at the oak arch supports on the ceiling and wondering if she’d made Tommy wait long enough until her phone chimed with another text from Billy. Her brow creased as she reread the message three times and tried to make sense of the words. 

oh, FUCK. Shit, fuck, motherfucking god dammit motherfucker— 

What an idiot he was! An absolute rube! Sure, Zatanna, Mistress of Magic, I’d love to step through your magic little portal of doom into a nightmare mindscape on my birthday, what else do I have going on? The answer, dear reader, was that Tommy had A LOT going on, actually! The proof was in the pudding, in the case where pudding meant nine - nine! - missed texts from Kate Biashin.

But, listen. As if Tommy was about to let some tsundere as fuck little minx know that he was (a) disappointed about missing out on what he could only assume was an awesome birthday hookup and, like, who knows, lingerie if he dared to dream, and (b) sorry for scaring her, so naturally, the only response - which he had to type five or six times; computers were fast, but Tommy’s fingers were faster, and in the flurried panic of having nine missed texts ( after all, how often was it Tommy had someone who worried enough to double text him? ) to answer to, his typing was flying far too quickly for his poor, simple little OS to keep up - he could offer her was:

TOMMY: aw did u miss me TOMMY: shit got wild i’ll explain later but just know billy is gonna be a smug ass lil bitch for so long because of this TOMMY: hey u still free or what

Because spirit moms and brothers and demon magic babies be damned, it was - or, it had been - Tommy Shepherd’s birthday.

The audacity in his response was unmistakably Tommy Shepherd, so at least she didn’t have to worry about if he was alive anymore. Now, her greatest fear was how long Tommy was going to hold this over her head. It was much easier to be a tsundere when he didn’t know exactly how long it took for her to resort to panicking at the thought of him in immediate peril. At least, she had more time to calculate her response now. She rolled onto her stomach and crossed her ankles in the air as she gnawed off the last of her vanilla chapstick with her right incisor before deciding on something sufficiently impersonal. 

KATE: I’m starting to forget the benefits to being your friend.  KATE: Are you free in like an hour?

...

KATE: Oh yeah, happy birthday ig. I have a present for you. KATE: That’s not entirely a euphemism. 

....

KATE: Okay, don’t be fucking rude, asshole. You can at least say thanks. 

....

KATE: Teddy needs proof of life. He’s spiraling without his emotional support boyfriend.

...

KATE: I swear to god if you aren’t on the brink of death, I will kill you. 

...

Text message to @gdikate

BILLY: Sorry for all the… disappearing without notice, yesterday

BILLY: Since we’re staying at the same place for once, come meet me at the kitchen? I’m currently making breakfast and there’s leftover cake

He set the phone down on the counter. There was a chance that Kate wasn’t up yet – or perhaps that she hadn’t yet gone to bed at all, but the invitation still stood. Billy had the coffee machine dripping a strong brew to start off the morning, and to the side the kitchenware moved around seemingly on their own accord to make scrambled eggs and oatmeal with fruits. Another movement of his hand and his phone began playing Be Our Guest  – from the animated movie, not the live action, of course.

Kate didn’t like to express herself candidly. Alright, alright, so that wasn’t exactly true when it came to her opinions on everything she disagreed with, but she didn’t like people to see all the vulnerabilities burning holes through her reputation. With Billy, however, it was different. 

KATE: Happy birthday to you. Give me a minute to wrap up my ruptured heart.

Okay...maybe it wasn’t that different at first, but under every over-dramatic outburst lay a kernel of truth. 

TEDDY: This morning before I left. We made plans to meet up with me, him, and Tommy. I got them a cake :(

TEDDY: I’m freaking out Kate.

.

Oh, shit. Clint paused where he’d been rifling through the armory for gadgets that may or may not have been the intellectual (and actual) property of a certain League’s mustachioed archer. (When the Gothamites are away, the assassins will play… or something.) He’d ask how Kate knew exactly where to find him, but frankly, it was probably a sixth sense of hers at this point. 

“Power suit time is really just a state of mind, Katey-Kate,” he replied cheerfully, setting down the helpfully marked boxing glove arrow. “There are like, five billionaires in this damn castle, and you’re gonna need to outdress them for the both of us.” He grinned, rounding the table and raising his hand to show the plain band on his left ring finger. “So. You going to congratulate me properly?”