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In the city of Manchester, New Jersey, Stephanie Brown lives on 647 Gardener Street with her father, failed gameshow host Arthur Brown and her mother, Agnes “Crystal” Bellinger-Brown.
The house next door, 645 Gardner Street, is occupied by Helen Claiborne, a dentist. She’s lived there for three years now, ever since she divorced her ex-husband Jim and returned to the neighborhood where her parents had lived.
The house across the street from Stephanie, 648 Gardner Street, is currently empty, but the moving van in the driveway tells Steph that it won’t be that way for long.
Helen, a tall woman with dark hair with white streaks framing her face, is Steph’s favorite babysitter and neighbor. And she invites Steph to come with her to bring a tray of cookies over to meet their new neighbors.
Steph leaps at the chance. Dad is newly out of prison, and he’s been locked up in his basement-lab for weeks now, only emerging to argue with Mom and Steph about the late mortgage payment. Mom has a bruise covering half of her face from when he threw her into a wall, and Steph had spent three hours locked in a closet before her mom had managed to break the lock with a crowbar.
So that’s how Stephanie Brown meets Bartholomew Allen the Second.
He’s shorter than her, with afroed hair that nearly makes up the difference and comically large feet. He has a smatter of freckles across his dark skin and huge, nervous smile.
Max Crandall is tall and thin, with long grey hair and a cautious look to him.
“Nice to meet you,” he says, his dark eyes lingering on Helen.
Steph figures that it’s a grownup thing and asks Bart if he wants to show her his room.
They’re both fourteen, so she tells him about Manchester Junior High. “So is Max your dad?”
“Pff, no,” Bart snorts. “He’s my uncle, or whatever.”
“Oh. Cool?”
“Is Helen your mom?”
“No. She’s my neighbor. My mom’s at work and my dad’s busy, so she asked if I wanted to come with her. I think she knew there was another kid my age here.”
He nods. “So what do you do for fun?”
“Gymnastics, reading, SquashHeroes—”
“Oh, I love that game!” Bart perks up. “I’ve got it set up in the basement, want to play?”
Steph brightens herself. Her dad had taken her console apart for parts ages ago, and so she can only really play at Carol’s house. “Sure! Who do you main as?”
“Flash, duh.”
Steph grins. “He’s good, but I like Wonder Woman better.”
“You’re wrong. But I guess that’s okay,” Bart says to her, and then he grabs her hand and tugs her down to the basement.
And that’s how Bart Allen and Stephanie Brown become friends.
Steph is tall, blonde, and talks so slowly, but less slowly than people who aren’t Max-or-Wally, so that’s better than he could have hoped for his first friend in the past, as far as Bart can tell.
She offers to walk with him to school, but he says no, because he wants to run. Walking is so slow. Why does no one understand this?
He’s never had to walk before, never had to talk at this speed, has never had to deal with chores.
But Max insists on them.
“But why do I have to make my bed when I’m just going to crawl back into it?” He asks Max, again.
“It’s a good habit to get into,” Max replies, turning a page on his physical newspaper. God, Max is so old.
New Jersey is awful. It’s so far away from Grandma and Wally and any of the Flash stuff. He doesn’t want to be here, doesn’t want to be normal. Why can’t he just be a superhero all the time, like Superboy? He’s met Superboy a few times. He’s cool.
“Calm down,” Max says in that infuriating way of his. “You’ve already got a friend here, right? You’ll get to spend more time with her at school.”
“But she’ll be busy learning,” Bart says, making a face. “What does school have that I don’t already know?”
“Manners, socialization, how to interact with your peers,” Max says immediately.
“Gross.”
Max chuckles and ruffles his hair. “I know. But do your best, okay? You know it’s important to your grandma.”
Bart slumps. It’s true. Grandma Iris has opinions about his education coming entirely from the virtual reality simulation back home, and opinions about socialization and the effect it has on his “development.” And Wally’s told him that if he does well at school this year, he can maybe join him in Central City in the summer and do superhero stuff.
Bart doesn’t really trust that “maybe” and summer seems really far away, but it’s worth a shot, probably.
Not that Wally can really stop him if he wants to be a hero. Bart has his own costume and his own name, and as long as he stays out of Nebraska and isn’t caught on cameras—which is way easier here than back home, because frame rates suck—there’s no way that Wally will know.
Well, unless Max snitches.
Which he probably will.
He’ll work on him.
The day he starts school at Manchester Junior High, Bart Allen starts a riot in the football field.
Stephanie Brown gives him a look as she sits next to him in the bleachers, watching half of their class beat each other up for the honor of fighting Bart, not realizing that Bart is nowhere near the actual fight. “Really?”
Bart shrugs and gives her a grin.
She props her hand up on her palm and examines him.
“I think we’re going to be great friends,” she tells him. Then she offers him her granola bar.
Steph turns up at school one day with a black eye, and Bart doesn’t know what to do.
“It’s okay, Bart,” she says, batting his hands away as he tries to poke it. It’s not his fault; he has a healing factor, and so he doesn’t really keep bruises, not the way that other people do. And Steph is his first friend who’s not like him, or Wally, or Max. Well, there’s Grandma and Joan, sure, but he’s never seen them with their arms covered in yellow-green-and-purple, or their eyes blackened. “My dad’s just a bastard, that’s all.”
Bart takes a moment to go from the dictionary definition of bastard to the colloquial use of bastard. English isn’t exactly his first language, so he wants to stop and check a few times.
“Your dad this to you?”
Bart never met his dad, but he knows his dad was a hero.
Steph looks at him, and she has a strange look on his face. “Yeah. Doesn’t matter. Can we just drop it?”
Bart wants to ask her questions, but he wants Steph to stop looking like that more than anything, and so he just nods, and resolves to ask Max about it later. Or maybe check the public library.
Because no one else, throughout the day, seems to want to say anything. Carol winces, but doesn’t talk about it, and one of their teachers looks at Steph all upset, but doesn’t do anything, and—
“Why didn’t Ms. Jefferson say anything?” He asks at lunch, picking at his packed lunch, even though he’d normally eat the whole thing in a blink of an eye. He’s hungry, but something about Steph’s face is putting him off his food.
Steph shrugs. “No one does.”
Bart frowns. “But—”
“Bart,” Carol says. “Drop it, okay?”
Bart likes Carol. She’s great.
But he thinks she’s wrong about this one.
He really needs to ask Max.
He asks Max that night when they’re doing vibrating practice. Max has a bunch of old weapons that he dug out of somewhere and he’s throwing them at Bart. If Bart slips up, Max runs up and moves him out of the way, so it doesn’t hit him.
They used to use rubber balls, and then sticks and rubber bullets, but Bart would sometimes forget to vibrate away from those because they didn’t matter. The real danger helped him concentrate, even though Max didn’t let them actually hit him.
Max frowns as he listens. “You should ask Stephanie,” he warns. “But if you’re right, we’ll have to tell someone.”
“Why ask?” Bart demands.
“Because I’ve heard things about Stephanie’s father,” Max says. “And we want to be sure that us interfering won’t make things worse.”
“Worse? How?”
“If the people who we get involved can’t actually do anything, Stephanie might get hurt worse.”
“Then I’ll protect her! That’s my job… right?”
Max looks… proud? Weird. “Yes it is. But while we can keep her safe, that doesn’t help with the fact that he’s her father, and he can cause a lot of problems for her and her mother.”
“Okay… but what do we do then?”
“One step at a time,” Max says. “Talk to her first. Then, we can figure out how we’re going to help.”
“But we are going to help right? Because everyone else’s solution is just ignore it.”
“We’re going to help, Bart,” Max promises. “But we need as much information as possible to make sure that we help in the right way.”
Bart nods and then crosses the street after changing out of his costume.
Steph has a big tree outside of her window. Climbing trees without superspeed is a lot harder than he expected it would be, so it takes him a few tries and he gets a lot of twigs in his hair before he finally manages it, but soon enough, he’s knocking on the glass, face pressed against it trying to peak through the blinds.
The blinds open up, and Steph stares at him. “What are you—get in here, you’re going to fall!” She grabs him by the collar of his t-shirt and yanks him inside, but he overbalances as it happens, and the two of them go sprawling onto the floor of her room.
Oof.
“What are you doing here?” She demands, pushing him off her.
Bart looks around. He’s never been in Steph’s room before, and it’s very different than his—lots of colorful posters and a small shelf on the wall crowded with trophies and—
“Ooh, what’s this?” He has to stop himself from using his speed, but he lunges forward towards the spool of purple fabric on her bed.
“Bart!” She yelps, even as he grabs hold of the lined notebook paper with drawings on it.
“Who’s the Spoiler? She looks cool!”
“Just a comic book character!” She tries to grab it out of his hand, but he holds firm.
“Is this a cosplay thing? What series is she from? I want to read it!”
“It’s like—”
“I didn’t even know you liked comics! What’s your favorite?” Bart relinquishes his grip on the paper once he realizes she’s about to tear it. Then he frowns. “Uh… Steph, is that a bulletproof vest?”
“No,” Steph says weakly, but it’s a pretty bad lie. Bart has felt a lot of bulletproof vests while carrying around people, and also, this one still has the agency name on it in big white letters, visible through the layer of purple fabric paint.
Bart frowns as he also sees the big belt, with big open pouches that are full of like… real stuff, rather than cosplay stuff.
Bart starts to grin.
“Bart, wait, it’s not—”
He grabs her in a tight hug, not even bothering to hide his speed. “You’re a superhero? That’s the best thing ever!”
“What? No. Not yet? I mean I guess?”
“Oh you’re about to make your debut? That’s awesome! We’ll have to team up!”
“… team up?”
“Well yeah,” Bart says. “I mean, I’ll have to ask Max if it’s okay, but he says that it’s usually fine to do superhero stuff if I’m doing it with other people, because that means it’s helping. Do you have powers? Or are you going to be like Batman?”
“Bart!” Steph yelps. “I think you skipped some important parts here. Are you a superhero?”
Bart blinks. “Oh. Right.”
So Steph’s neighbor is a superhero. Like, with superpowers. He’s the Flash’s grandson.
But he’s… Bart.
Actually, that makes a lot of sense. His backstory is a little weird and very sci-fi, but it does put some pieces into place.
She’s just not sure what to do with this.
He offers to beat up Dad for her while he’s doing crime, offers to help her take him down, offers a lot of things, including to strand Dad on a desert island in the middle of the ocean (apparently he can run on water).
But she’s not sure what to do about any of it, so she asks him to let her think, and when Bart is having his school counselling sessions, she skips class and goes to see Bart’s uncle.
Squinting at Max Crandall as he opens the door, she tries to see if she can tell that he’s a superhero now that she knows he is one. But he still seems… normal. He looks like an ordinary old guy, with his hair in a ponytail and a lot of lines on his face.
“Mr. Crandall?” She asks, shifting from foot to foot. She can tell that he’s looking at the bruise on her face. “Can… we talk?”
He looks at her for a long moment, before he sighs. “Bart told you, didn’t he?”
Steph bit her lip. “Sort of?”
He shook his head. “Come on in.”
She follows him inside. There are stacks and stacks of books wherever she looks; mostly history books, crammed onto shelves and piled on just about every available surface. Most have bookmarks sticking out of them; some are real bookmarks but others are pieces of paper or leaves or whatever else Max had been able to get his hands on. The walls are mostly bare, except for a few framed newspaper clippings. Thick rugs cover the floor, and large boxes are stacked in corners, filled with everything from antique looking spears to bolts of cloth to what looks like a robot head.
He catches her looking at that one. “A souvenir from a fight. The Flash—the first Flash, that is—thought I should have it back now that I’m ‘settled.’” He shrugs.
“Bart didn’t tell me much about you,” Steph admits. “Just… that you’re like him?”
He shakes his head. “And what did he say about himself?”
“He didn’t mean to tell me,” Steph defends him. “He saw my costume and he got excited, that’s all.”
Max looks at her for a moment, then shakes his head, but he’s smiling. “I suppose I can understand that. He’s… lonely.”
“He is,” Steph agrees. “Maybe… it’ll help? That he can talk to me about all of it, not just some of it?”
“I hope so.” He gestures for her to take one of the armchairs. “So. What did Bart say?”
“He’s a Speedster, like the Flash,” Steph ticks off her fingers. “That the second Flash is his grandfather, but he’s from the future, and something was wrong with his superspeed so he came to now to learn to slow down and that’s where you come in, and you won’t let him do superheroing too often because you think he needs to be normal.”
Max’s mouth twitches slightly. “I imagine he had some colorful things to say about that part.”
“There might have been elaborate diagrams involving pie throwing machines.”
Max’s shoulders hitch as he tries not to laugh. “I see.” He shakes his head, and he’s smiling. “I’m a time traveler as well, but from the other direction. I’ve jumped forward several times over the years. This one looks to be more permanent than most of them, since there’s several Speedsters active, which will hopefully prevent me from being pulled into the Speed Force again, even if I approach my top speed.”
Steph looks around at all the books. “Are you… catching up?”
“Backreading,” he agrees. “A lot happens when you skip forty years.”
“I bet.” She looks around, then takes a deep breath. “You can’t call CPS.”
That stops him short. “Oh?”
“I know my dad deserves it and he’s a really bad person and I really want him to leave us alone but if CPS gets involved then they’ll find out about Mom and they might take me away from her and I don’t want to leave her. She needs help. Not…” She trails off, embarrassed by the flow of words.
But Max nods. “So that’s why you’re going the vigilante route?”
“He fights Batman and Robin all the time, but ever since he’s gotten back from Arkham, he’s not leaving clues anymore. So they can’t track him. But I can. But no one paid attention when I called in the tips anonymously. But if someone in a mask paints the tips on the side of the building and makes them a puzzle to solve…”
“They’ll call in Batman and Robin,” he finishes. He raises an eyebrow. “And that’s where you’ll stop?”
Steph shrugs. “I mean… probably? I can throw a punch and do a flip but I’m not… Batman, you know?”
He raises an eyebrow. “I know Batman. I could just tell him myself. You don’t need to get involved at all.”
Something in Steph tightened at that and she shook her head. “No it’s… I want to do this. I have to do this.”
Max taps his fingers on his armchair. “So you’re asking me to leave you in an unsafe environment and not alert any proper authorities while you, a fifteen year old girl, handles this herself?”
Steph feels herself wilting. “… yes?” When he says it like that…
He shakes his head. “I can’t do that. However,” he holds up his hand to cut off her protest. “We can reach a compromise. You and Bart can do that part together, on the condition that you spend the nights either here or at Helen’s house.”
“But my mom—”
“I’ll keep your mother safe, Stephanie.”
“She’s… sick,” Steph protests.
“I’m aware,” he says, not unkindly. “Those are my terms. Bart comes with you to help you should you find yourself in danger, you don’t sleep in that house while that man is there, and I keep your mother safe. Agreed?” He holds out a hand for her to shake, like she’s an actual adult and they just made an actual agreement.
She hugs him instead.
“You hit Robin,” Bart informs her, a few nights later.
Steph, a pillow pressed against her face, refuses to look at him. “I know.”
“With a brick—”
“I know!”
Bart snickers. “It’s okay,” he says.
They’re in his room, which Bart has reluctantly cleaned up for the occasion of Steph being there. She was technically sleeping at Helen’s house—it turned out that she was Max’s daughter who he had accidentally left behind during his last time jump—but Bart worried about her so he tended to sneak into Helen’s house at night to stay with Steph anyways and so Helen and Max had formally given up on that, although Max had pointedly reminded Bart about his sex-ed modules before he fully dropped the subject.
Bart still wasn’t sure what the point of that was, but then again, it was Max.
“Can I coat myself in chemicals and get superspeed? It’s not too late is it?”
“You’re older than Wally but younger than Grandpa Barry, so you probably could manage it,” Bart says. “But I think the chemicals and lightning thing only works if you have the metagene? Do you have one?”
“How the hell do you know if you’ve got a metagene?”
“If you survive being struck by lightning and coated in dangerous chemicals, I guess?”
“Ugh.”
“Sorry?”
Steph finally lowered the pillow she’d been screaming into since they’d come home. “Dad tried to fake his death,” she complains.
“It’s okay, I stole the fake body, so he can’t be declared dead!”
“… thanks.”
Bart beams at her. “But really we should go and find Batman and Robin and explain,” he says earnestly. “They know it’s him now and Max has your mom checked into rehab so we can totally do a real teamup now!”
“They’re going to try and make me stay behind,” Steph says.
“Then I carry you?” Bart tilts his head to one side. “It’s not like they can stop me. The worst they can do is try to get Max and me to leave New Jersey and if we have to leave New Jersey we’ll take you with us and we’ll go to Central, which is way better than Gotham, and it’ll be awesome.”
“Bart, I can’t just move,” Steph says. “Mom has her job, and we have the house, and—”
“Max and Helen will figure it out!” Bart says confidently. “They’re the best. Uh… don’t tell Max I said that.”
“Lips are sealed,” Steph says, bemusedly.
Bruce looks at Spoiler; a fifteen-year-old girl clutching a homemade mask with a scowl on her face and the fading remains of a blackeye.
He then looks at Impulse; also fifteen years old, excitedly whispering into Spoiler’s ear, clearly trying to distract her from Bruce’s own stare.
“Impulse,” Bruce interrupts. “Where’s Mercury?” He can feel a headache building. Impulse is just like Wally West at that age. At least there was only one of him? Usually when he was dealing with Wally, the entire Teen Titans had been there.
But he stared at Spoiler, who still hadn’t blinked, and he wondered if he should reconsider that.
“Oh? Max? He’s busy. He said that if he tried to stop us we’d sneak off and do it anyways but more dangerous so it was best to let us handle it. So he’s helping Spoiler’s mom file for a restraining order and getting their finances separated and then he’s working to find her a sponsor for once she’s done with her treatment program and he says that might take a while but he knows some people and—”
Spoiler elbowing him in the side isn’t subtle, but it does the job.
“We agreed that when I let you move into the area, you’d stay out of Gotham—” he began.
Spoiler scoffed.
“What are you, the mob boss? The landlord? You don’t own Gotham. You can’t just tell people that they’re not allowed in city limits!”
“Vigilantism—”
“You don’t get to tell people where they do their illegal masked vigilantism either,” Spoiler argued, crossing her arms. “You’re cool and all but you’re not the boss.”
“Your guardians—” He tries.
“As of five minutes ago, that’d be Max Mercury, so you can take it up with him.”
“Yeah!” Impulse declares. “Foster siblings!” He holds up his hand for a high five. Spoiler, still not taking her eyes off Bruce, obliges.
“You can either waste time trying to stop us or you can work with us and take down Cluemaster,” Spoiler tells him. “And Impulse is really good at wasting people’s time when he wants to.”
“It’s true! I can derail Spanish class in three words and math in four.”
Bruce somehow does not doubt that.
“Alright,” he says, suspecting that he is unleashing something he doesn’t quite understand. “What’s your plan?”
After the dust settles, Arthur Brown is being taken into police custody, and Max shows up.
“How’d it go?”
Steph is leaning against a brick wall. “He tried to kill me but Bart stopped him and then I punched him in the face.”
Max puts his hand on her shoulder. “It’s going to be okay,” he tells her.
Steph nods. She’s numb. Adrenaline crash, almost certainly. “Bart will take you home,” he tells her. “I’ll handle Batman.”
Bart pops up at her side. “Max I managed to not break the glass wall when I ran up it earlier! I was really worried because of how fast I was going and Spoiler was on top of it and if it fell she might get all cut up even if I caught her but I remembered what you said about the vibration field and I managed to keep it intact!”
“Good job,” Max says, proud. Bart’s environmental awareness isn’t always his best trait, considering that he sometimes forgets that the rest of the world is real after having spent so much of his development in virtual reality. This is huge progress. “Now go. Helen’s going to be worried.”
Bart nods. Steph climbs onto his back, throwing her arms around his neck, and then the two of them are gone.
Leaving Max to deal with Batman.
Max has been dealing with ornery superheroes for years. Batman’s no different. Just… a bit more intense and self-assured.
If necessary, Max will call in backup. Batman has a soft spot for Ted Grant, and Ted owes Max a couple dozen favors from World War II that he’s not above calling in.
Six Months Later
Spoiler is perched on a rooftop, spying on Two Face through a pair of binoculars, when she feels the familiar displacement of wind that signifies her best friend arriving.
She immediately holds a finger up to her lips to cut off the stream of chatter that is sure to follow, then, knowing she’s only bought herself about a second, throws herself off the roof to fight the bad guys.
Reckless? Sure.
But not that much when you’ve got a speedster at your back.
After the goons are all unconscious and Two Face is trying not to freak out after Bart trapped spun his coin at superspeed so fast that it wore both sides completely bare, only then does Steph throw her arms around his neck.
“I was wondering where you were!”
“Sorry,” he says sheepishly. “Me and Superboy and Robin were busy fixing the whole kids and adults world thing and Robin said we needed to leave you and Batgirl in charge of Gotham and so we couldn’t come get you.”
She glares at him.
He shrugs.
She sighs.
“Fine. But I get to tag along next time. I want to be apart of this new superhero team thing.”
“It’s not a team, okay? We’re just us!”
“Uh-huh.”
“I already told Superboy all about you! He says he’ll sign your poster—”
“Impulse!”
“What?”
Steph buries her face in her hands. “I’m calling Cissie. She and Batgirl and I are going to go find Wonder Girl and we’re going to make our own team and I will never have to speak to Superboy ever.”
“Can I come? I miss Cissie!”
“Bart, we saw her yesterday when we broke into her school to bring her cookies.”
“Still!” Bart pauses. “Do you even know Wonder Girl?”
“No but that won’t stop me.”
“… so… can I come or not?”
“You’ll come even if I say no.”
“Well… yes. But Helen says invitations are important.”
She shakes her head. “Maybe Batgirl will beat up Superboy if I ask her to.”
“He’s like… super though.”
“So? She’s Batgirl.”
Bart thinks about her argument, then nods. “Fair enough. Is she coming over after patrol?”
“I think so? She shrugged but Oracle has been on her about her reading lessons and if she skips too many in a row O asks Max to go get her and she sulks something awful whenever Max has to fetch her so she will probably come on her own?”
“She can do target practice with me again!” Bart immediately volunteers. “She’s getting way better at punching speedsters.”
Steph laughs. “So, what do you want to do tonight?”
“Take over the world?”
“No that’s not how you—okay we’ll try again next time. I’ll meet you back home after I report back to the big guy, okay? The briefing will take a while so you don’t want to stick through it probably.”
“Yeah probably,” Bart agrees. “I’ll go talk to the Riddler again! I really think I’m getting better at answering them!”
Steph winces in a rare moment of sympathy for Eddie Nygma.
“I’ll see you later,” she says, before he grins at her.
“Want a ride?”
Steph grins.
“Always.”
And she jumps onto his back.