Chapter 598: Promises of Love & Vengeance

"How do you feel?" Bruce asked.

"Hard to say, honestly," Arthur admitted, leaning back against the wall. "But good. Great, even. I don’t think I’ve stopped smiling since I walked into that room."

"I expected something more precise from you," Bruce said, the faintest trace of dry humor in his voice. "You’re usually rather exact about how you describe things."

"Some things resist exactness," Arthur said.

"Is that so."

"You’ve held a newborn before, Bruce. Surely you understand."

"I have," Bruce agreed. "Precision still applied, in my case."

"Then you’re a better man than I am, today," Arthur said, smiling.

Bruce studied him a moment longer, something unreadable behind his eyes. "Do you worry," he said slowly, "about what she’ll grow up into? Given who her parents are?"

Arthur considered the question seriously, without any of the deflection Bruce might have half-expected from a being of his power. "Every day, probably, from here on. I worry she’ll inherit more power than she knows what to do with before she’s old enough to understand the weight of it. I worry the world will look at her and see a weapon before it sees a person. I worry I won’t always know how to protect her from that, even with everything I am."

"That’s a very human worry," Bruce said.

"I’d like to think it is," Arthur said. "I’d hate to raise her only ever thinking in terms of thrones and armies and legacies. I want her to have an actual childhood, if that’s possible for someone like her."

"Is it? Possible?"

"I intend to make it possible," Arthur said, an edge of quiet determination entering his voice. "Whatever else I am, whatever I’ve had to become to protect the people I love, none of that has to touch her. Not if I can help it."

Bruce nodded slowly, something in his expression shifting, though he gave no outward indication of why. "And if she chooses differently, someday? If she wants the throne, the armies, the legacy, after all?"

"Then it’ll be her choice to make," Arthur said simply. "Not mine to hand her, and not mine to deny her either. I only want her to have the option of an ordinary life first, before anything else is asked of her."

"That’s a remarkably measured answer," Bruce said, "for someone who commands an army of the dead."

Arthur huffed a quiet laugh. "I contain multitudes, apparently."

"Apparently." Bruce’s mouth twitched. "Tell me something. If someone came to you tomorrow and told you the safest thing for the universe would be to raise her isolated from all of it, there would be no love, no attachments, purely trained as a weapon, for her own protection and everyone else’s, what would you tell them?"

"I’d tell them to leave," Arthur said, without an ounce of hesitation, something harder settling into his voice now. "And I’d make certain they understood exactly why that was the wrong question to even ask me. Power without love isn’t safety, Bruce. It’s just a weapon waiting for the wrong hand, or the wrong moment of loneliness, to go off. I’ve seen what that path does to certain people, people you also know. I have no intention of walking Aurora down it."

Bruce said nothing for a long moment, simply watching him, something in his expression settling into quiet, genuine consideration.

"One more," Bruce said finally. "If it ever came down to a choice.. the world, or her which way would you go?"

Arthur’s eyes met his, steady, entirely unguarded. "That’s not a fair question, and you know it."

"Answer it anyway."

"Her," Arthur said. "Every time. Without hesitation, without guilt, and without apology to anyone who thinks that answer should have been harder for me." He held Bruce’s gaze evenly with his yes glowing, menacingly violet. "I’ve spent most of my existence learning exactly how far I’m willing to go for the people I love. That answer was settled a long time before she was ever born."

Bruce studied him for a long moment, and then, slowly, he smiled, a real one, entirely unlike the careful half-smiles he usually allowed himself in public.

"So," Bruce said, tone shifting, lighter now, as though the last several questions were nothing. "What’s her name?"

"Aurora," Arthur said. "Aurora Blackwynd Zor-El."

Bruce’s brow lifted. "Zor-El?"

"It was something Kara and I agreed on," Arthur said simply, a quiet warmth returning fully to his voice. "Kara wanted her to carry something of Krypton with her. I wanted her to carry something of the family I built here, on Earth. It felt right to give her both."

Bruce nodded slowly, and for once, offered no further questions.

"Congratulations, Arthur," he said. "Truly."

"Thank you, Bruce."

Bruce moved past him toward the door, pausing only briefly with his hand on the frame, glancing back once.

"For what it’s worth," he said, "I think she’s going to be just fine. With parents like the two of you."

He disappeared into the warm, crowded room before Arthur could fully answer, leaving him alone in the quiet hallway a moment longer entirely unaware that every question Bruce had just asked him had been carefully and deliberately chosen, and that somewhere behind that rare smile, the world’s greatest detective had just quietly, thoroughly satisfied himself of something he’d been wondering about for a very long time.

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Above all realms, beyond the reach of mortal cosmology, in a place that existed outside the ordinary architecture of space and time entirely, the Sphere of Gods turned in silent, eternal majesty a realm where concepts older than creation itself held court, where the true and unfiltered forms of beings who cast mere avatars into lesser universes finally, truly resided.

There, upon a throne carved from pure, condensed darkness, sat the true Darkseid.

For the first time in an age beyond reckoning, something in that ancient, unshakeable stillness had cracked.

His hand rose slowly to his chest, to a wound that should not have existed at all, a wound that had, impossibly, followed him here, through layers of reality his avatar’s death should never have been able to touch. Dark, blood-black light seeped faintly from beneath his fingers, refusing to close, refusing to heal at the rate anything wounding him should have allowed.

"He was not bluffing," Darkseid said, low and rumbling. "About that weapon of his."

The admission cost him something. He did not often admit to being wrong about anything, let alone about a threat he had dismissed as beneath his notice for so long.

His eyes, twin embers of red, furious light, narrowed toward the endless dark beyond his throne.

"That bastard," he said, and though his voice carried no true heat, "has crossed a line he should never have dared to cross." No being, in the whole of recorded existence, had ever dared challenge even the avatar he cast into lesser realms let alone reach far enough to wound the truth of him, here, in the one place he had always considered inviolate.

He sat with that thought a long moment.

"He has too many allies," Darkseid said finally, "powerful ones. That dragon among them." His expression darkened further, considering. "Perhaps it is time the right and left hands of the Great Darkness finally set aside old grievances and act as one again.. Though the fool managed to get himself sealed away before he could be of any use to me now. No matter. That is not a problem beyond my ability to solve, given time."

He rose from his throne, slowly, the wound at his chest still weeping its faint light, and something in the Sphere itself seemed to recoil at the sheer, building malice gathering around him.

"Give me time, Shadow insect," Darkseid said, his voice dropping into something far colder. "And I shall curse everyone you love into an eternity of torment. I will build realities where they are nothing more than insects themselves.. crushed, and remade, and crushed again, without end, without mercy, for as long as it amuses me to continue."

His eyes blazed fully crimson now, twin furnaces of promised annihilation burning against the endless black of the Sphere around him.

"As for you," he continued, "I will craft a universe built entirely around your suffering a world where you are hunted, endlessly, by every soul you have ever claimed as your own. Where death offers you no rest, and no escape, only the next hunt, and the next, forever."

The darkness around him seemed to pulse in answer, drawn taut by the sheer weight of his fury. "That," Darkseid said,"is my promise to you."

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