Chapter Text
Billy Kaplan had long ago learned that saving the world and building a life were not the same thing.
By the time this story begins, Billy was many things at once: a former Young Avenger, a veteran of too many cosmic wars, a young man whose magic had once shattered the world badly enough to leave scars across everyone he loved, and now the Sorcerer Supreme of his universe. He had spent years growing into power that had once frightened him, learning—imperfectly, painfully—that love did not justify control, that guilt could not be allowed to become destiny, and that being able to reshape reality did not mean he had the right to decide other people’s lives for them. He had also spent those same years trying to remain human inside all that scale: still Billy, still someone who loved too hard, still someone who wanted warmth and touch and home even when home had become a shifting thing.
At the center of that home was Teddy Altman.
Teddy, once Hulkling and now Emperor of an interstellar empire, was still the great love of Billy’s life. Their relationship had survived distance, war, betrayal, grief, and the difficult truth that adulthood did not simplify anything. They were committed, honest, and deeply in love. They also lived apart more often than together, separated by the demands of empire and magic. Over time, they had built something mature enough to survive reality as it was rather than fantasy as they might have preferred it: a loving, openly negotiated relationship that allowed room for other lovers when duty and distance made exclusivity a shape their lives could no longer comfortably hold. It was not always easy. It was not always painless. But it was real, and Billy had come to understand that honesty was sometimes the most romantic thing two people could offer each other.
Still, there were costs to being the Sorcerer Supreme. Billy’s life had become one of thresholds and emergencies, of seeing threats before anyone else did, of standing alone too often because some problems belonged more to the keeper of reality than to a team. The New Avengers were still his friends, still his family, but they had their own battles, their own planets, governments, crises, and griefs. And Billy, perhaps more than he liked to admit, had grown used to solving impossible things himself.
In another universe entirely, Damian Wayne had learned a different version of that lesson.
Damian was the son of Bruce Wayne—the Batman of his world—and he had been raised from childhood inside violence, legacy, expectation, and war. He had spent his life being treated alternately as heir, weapon, disappointment, prince, son, and threat. For years he had lived in the shadow of a father who was presumed dead, only for Bruce to return and bring with him not restoration, but damage: buried truths, old corruption, and the slow collapse of the fragile lives the Bat-family had built in his absence. Damian had loved, fought, married, and broken under that history. He had been with Tim Drake once, fiercely and ruinously, and the end of that marriage had left wounds that did not heal just because new years passed over them.
But Damian had endured. More than that, he had changed.
He had fought monsters in masks and men wearing his father’s face. He had learned the difference between control and leadership. He had inherited Batman’s mantle not as a child playing at legend, but as a man choosing what parts of that legend could remain and what parts had to die. By the time this story begins, Damian was Batman in his own right: younger than the myth Billy might have imagined, sharper in edge, colder in first impression, and utterly real. He was also no longer alone. His life in Gotham was bound to Stephanie Brown, to the complicated peace they had built together, and to their young son Richard—a child who had become the clearest proof that Damian’s life was no longer organized solely around war, inheritance, and pain.
That mattered. More than almost anything, it mattered.
Because if Billy had become the kind of man who held reality together by sheer force of will, Damian had become the kind who held himself together the same way. Discipline was not simply a trait in him; it was architecture. So was suspicion. So was the instinct to answer violation with fury and vulnerability with teeth.
There was one more piece of history that mattered too.
Not long before this story begins, Damian had fought his own father after Bruce had been twisted into something monstrous—an amoral Talon wearing Batman’s body and habits without Batman’s conscience. Damian had survived that. He knew, in a way few others could, what it meant to stand before a Batman-shaped thing that still possessed all the tactical genius, physical mastery, and symbolic power of Bruce Wayne while lacking the ethical center that made Batman a hero rather than a predator. He did not know every old story from childhood in perfect detail. He did not carry every file in his head. But he knew the pattern. He knew the smell of corruption inside legacy. He knew how quickly admiration could become liability when the face in front of you was familiar and mercy had gone missing from behind the eyes.
So this is where they stood before the first page turns.
Billy Kaplan: Sorcerer Supreme, powerful enough to alter worlds, lonely enough to make dangerous choices when necessity pressed too hard, still deeply in love with Teddy, still vulnerable to guilt, still trying to learn the difference between saving someone and deciding for them.
Damian Wayne: Batman of his own universe, son of Bruce Wayne, husband, father, survivor of betrayal and family collapse, carrying hard-earned leadership beneath armor so severe it often looked like cruelty to those who did not know better.
They had never met.
Soon, one of them would make a choice in desperation. The other would pay for it first.
And somewhere in the dark between universes, something wearing Batman’s grin was already laughing.