A steady rhythm of clashing blows carried from the inner room. They rounded the corner to find Oliver gripping a pair of bamboo swords, engaged in a sparring match.
His opponent was Dick Grayson—Nightwing—whose mastery of the short staff translated cleanly into paired blades. The two were well-matched. Neither was pulling ahead.
Thea beckoned Damian over and pieced the story together.
Tim Drake was building his own superhero organization. Where Dick was methodical and Jason favored brute force, Tim's approach was fundamentally different—strategic, coalition-minded, unifying a group of people toward a shared objective. In his view, that was what genuine heroism looked like. Any real organization needed a proper base: somewhere to train, coordinate, and operate from. And he wasn't going to Batman for it. He was doing this himself.
His options were limited, so he'd set his sights on Green Arrow.
Queen Construction wasn't worth as much as Thea's tech portfolio in market value, but between the Blackest Night wiping out Coastal City and a third of Central City—plus a dozen smaller towns—real estate had become a foundational pillar of the national economy. Bottom line: Oliver controlled a significant amount of property.
Tim wanted to base the new team in San Francisco. Far from established hero territory, but with a crime rate that justified a permanent presence—ideal for a fresh operation to prove itself.
Oliver had agreed on the spot. He had, however—being Oliver, and having entirely too much free time—attached a condition: a sparring match.
No stakes, no wager, no "don't look down on the young" posturing. Win or lose, Tim would still get the building. Oliver simply wanted to use the occasion to remind the younger generation not to grow complacent.
The outcome was predictable. The close-combat fighters walked away with actual bumps and bruises. Tim had entered the ring personally and fared no better. Even stripped of his bow, Oliver in pure hand-to-hand was operating at a different level entirely.
Out of options, they'd called in Dick. Which raised the ever-uncomfortable question of where Nightwing actually stood in the generational hierarchy.
He had fought crime for over a decade—more than enough to count among the veterans. But his bond with Batman had always been that of father and son; grouping them together as peers felt awkward. Calling him a young hero was equally absurd: he was two years younger than Oliver and two years older than Thea, which placed him firmly outside anyone's definition of youth.
The Justice League had approached him more than once about a formal seat, operating under the Nightwing name. He'd been sitting on the decision.
And now here he was, fighting on behalf of a group of teenagers. Thea found herself amused by the symmetry of it.
She assessed the match with a glance. Dick wasn't going to win.
As Batman's heir, Nightwing had refined every facet of his ability to its peak—uncontested at the upper tier of non-powered fighters. The Oliver she'd met in the original timeline would have had a genuine struggle against him without a bow. But this Oliver had received more than one round of enhancement from Thea. A slight gap in baseline physical capacity compounded dramatically in actual combat. Oliver was actively trying to suppress it—consciously keeping himself from jumping three meters into the air—but he couldn't calibrate it with perfect precision.
When Oliver noticed Thea and Diana had arrived, he pulled back immediately. The two combatants agreed on a draw.
After the younger crowd had dispersed, Oliver asked what brought them.
Thea certainly wasn't going to admit that she and her mother had known for ages and simply never mentioned it. She laid it entirely on magic—claimed it had surfaced in a divination reading.
"What—I have a son out there? He's already ten years old?!" Oliver nearly jumped out of his skin, towel forgotten mid-wipe.
"Eleven, actually." Thea delivered the news, jotted the boy's name and address on a notepad, and tucked in a recent photo she had taken at the house—a candid shot of mother and son. What he did from here was entirely his decision.
Oliver stared at the photo for a long moment. "I genuinely don't have any recollection of this woman..."
Thea grabbed Diana's hand and walked out. What came next had nothing to do with her.
Diana went back to work. Thea thought it over and decided to swing by her own offices—it had been a while since she'd checked in.
She cleared the backlog of administrative matters at speed, then settled into reading a few recent issues of the comic series that had been running her and Diana as characters. Her secretary knocked and showed in a visitor.
"Who's this?" Thea glanced up briefly, registered an unfamiliar face, and looked back at the screen.
Her secretary's expression was somewhere between knowing and suppressed laughter. The man beside her looked close to actual tears. "It's me, boss!"
Thea put down her reading and really looked at him.
Disheveled but recognizable. Strong brows, sharp eyes.
Boston Brand.
In Thea's perception, the dead always appeared as they had been at the moment of death. Boston, to her senses, had always been the red-costumed specter wearing black eye makeup. Seeing him alive, cleaned up, and standing in her doorway—it took a moment.
The spiritual link between them was still intact.
She adopted an expression of mild curiosity. "Something come up?" You're broke and came to collect, didn't you.
The reality was a bit stranger. Boston Brand's soul resonance had shifted considerably since his resurrection, and his Yellow Lantern ring no longer recognized him as a match. He was still enough of a hero that he couldn't go robbing people. He was genuinely struggling to survive.
The complicating factor: he had a girlfriend.
Her name was Dawn Granger—the younger of the Dove sisters, the current holder of the White Dove mantle. By his own account, she was remarkable, he had thrown everything he had into pursuing her, and now the only obstacle between him and happiness was a modest shortage of money.
Thea asked no further questions. She wrote a check. Take it, spend it. Then she put him in touch with someone who could help restore his documentation—his original records had been voided years ago when he was officially declared dead. Social security number, driver's license, all of it.
She privately suspected he wouldn't stay alive much longer. But let him live well in the meantime.
A month slipped past quickly. She still hadn't found her moment.
Several things happened during that time.
Tim Drake formally established the Teen Titans. Founding roster: Tim himself, Wonder Girl Cassie, Impulse Bart Allen, Raven, Beast Boy, Blue Beetle, Miss Martian, and a slightly-older-than-the-rest Arsenal Roy Harper.
Damian had been turned away on the grounds of being too young. Thea suspected the real reason was that Tim didn't want Bruce left alone—father and son together, at least they had each other.
Dick Grayson had been Tim's first choice for team leader. He had the credentials. Dick declined, offering instead that he and Starfire would provide backup when needed.
The second development was harder to classify.
In the ruins of Coastal City, a white lantern had manifested.
Several heroes had attempted to lift it. None succeeded. Thea walked up and lifted it without effort.
The timing was ideal—her White Lantern ring had been running critically low on power.
The defensive network she had woven over Earth had held as well. The Black Lantern entity's spiritual contamination had not reached the surface. The Brightest Day was cleanly avoided. As for what missions the Entity had issued to those it resurrected—Thea had no involvement.
There was one more development, less visible than the rest.
The antimatter cannon had severely wounded the Black Lantern entity—but in doing so, it had also destroyed a section of the timeline. Normally, time was self-correcting, and the Time Masters Council could assist with manual repairs. She hadn't worried about it at first.
But the gap was closing at a pace that was nearly imperceptible. The elder Booster Gold admitted he had no way to accelerate it.
She didn't have a solution either. The Anti-Monitor's power exceeded hers. A concentrated antimatter blast channeling an entire universe's energy—that was not something she could have blocked. The breach was large. Someone was going to slip through it before it healed.
Thea felt the sting of it. Not long ago she had told Batman that every road she walked became a path. The words had barely faded before the universe delivered a hard slap in the face.
She would deal with whatever came through. Handle each problem as it appeared. And wait for the wound in time to close on its own.