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Chapters, chapters, who wants some chapters~?

Well too bad. You're only getting one.

Spoiler: Chapter 10: Cause and Effect

The Cave was as cold as ever, making him very grateful for the hot tea and cookies in his hands, not to mention the sweater. Bruce and Jason had been moving very fast apparently, neither of them being anywhere in sight when Sora finished walking down the stairs. He followed their voices to the medbay, taking another sip of tea to ease the sudden chill down his spine.

“Seriously B,” Jason was saying, “Might as well stick a shunt in my arm and be done with it. All this poking is getting annoying.” He nodded in greeting when Sora walked in. He was sitting on one of the beds, sleeve rolled up with Bruce bending over a needle in his arm, the vial attached to it filling with deep red liquid. When the container was full, he pulled the needle out of Jason’s arm and quickly pressed a cotton ball to the small hole in his skin. Jason held it there as Bruce turned to the nearest computer, dropping the sample in for testing. “What’s up Sora?”

“Not much.” He took a bite out of his cookie, demolishing half of it in one go. Once it was safely swallowed, he said, “Just curious.”

“Ah.” Jason jumped off the table, and led him to the computer. “Well, this is one of our diagnostic computers. We can stick pretty much any substance in there and it’ll tell us what it’s made of, what’s wrong with it, and hand out a list of things we can do about it.” He tossed the cotton ball into the garbage and rolled down his sleeve. “Within reason of course. If it’s an unknown substance, it can give us a good guess. We still have to do quite a bit of the leg work to figure what else it is.”

Bruce, his face obscured by the microscope he was looking down, grunted an affirmative. “Which is why I needed another blood sample from Jason. To see if the unknown substance is still there and, if it is, determine what it is.”

“And?” Sora prompted. “Is it still there?”

Bruce spent another moment or two staring down the microscope, eyebrows creeping towards each other until they were almost touching. “Yes.” Finally looking up, his expression was grim. He did not like the idea of some mystery substance swimming around in Jason’s bloodstream. “It keeps vanishing at a rapid pace though.” He had a suspicion of what it was, but he wanted confirmation.

Jason sighed again. “I’ll get a shunt.” If the stuff kept disappearing once it left his body, Bruce would need an almost steady supply to figure out what it was. He would accept a shunt, but he didn’t want a million needle holes in his arm.

While Jason was rummaging in the supply closet, Bruce brought up a recording of the substance, floating around Jason’s red blood cells.

It was like nothing any of them had ever seen; a dark slithery kind of substance that seemed to attach itself to Jason’s red blood cells before breaking apart and forming into an almost symmetrical copy of the cell, losing its shape and dissolving into a liquid-like substance again. Bruce stared at the display, playing, pausing, and rewinding the footage as he observed the strange reaction. This was odd, very odd, and Bruce didn't like his lack of knowledge on the matter at all. This could be a poison, a negative kind of immune reaction to whatever Xehanort had done to his son, or something even more sinister. He had a bad idea that this was the latter.

“Whatever this thing is,” Sora began, “wasn't here until Jason was made into a Heartless right?”

Bruce nodded absentmindedly as he studies the cell’s reactions.

“Well.” Sora said. “I was turned into a Heartless just like Jason was. Could I have the same thing in my blood that Jason has in his?”

That caught Bruce's attention. He swung around in his chair and stared at Sora. “The same process happened to you before?” He asked carefully.

“Well yeah.” Sora said, faltering a little under the man’s intimidating gaze. “It's a long story, but my friend's heart got trapped in me and I had to release it, and the only way to do it was to use a Keyblade and turn myself into a Heartless.”

“You stabbed yourself!?” Came Jason's surprised voice as he popped his head out of the drawer he had been rummaging in.

“Like I said, long story.” Sora shrugged dismissively. “The point is… well, I don't really know about any of this science stuff, but maybe I could be helpful in finding out what is in Jason's blood because of my blood?”

“Hmmmm.” Bruce scratched his chin thoughtfully.

It was something to go off of at least. In any case, he could narrow down his options. “It's worth a try if you're willing to help,” he said finally.

“’Course I am! Just tell me what I have to do!”

Bruce directed him to a bed and told him to roll up his sleeve. He then went through the process of cutting off the arms circulation and then, after disinfecting the spot with alcohol, carefully sticking a needle into the crook of Sora's arm. He flinched slightly – he had never done this before – but otherwise sat patiently through the process. As soon as Bruce had a vial of blood he wasted no time dropping it into the computer’s scanners and analyzing the data.

“Ah, found one!” Jason finally reappeared from the medical cabinet.

He looked from Sora to Bruce, then tossed the supplies on a bed and walked up behind the older man, studying the screens. “Well look at that.” He said roughly, comparing the two videos playing. “You and me match Sora!”

Jumping off the bed, Sora came over to gaze at the screen with the others. He could see the strange substance surrounding his blood cells, taking on the circular shape perfectly before dissolving once again. Sora simply watched, mesmerized. Whatever Jason had, Sora had it too.

“It can't be.” Came Bruce’s astonished voice. Both boys looked down at him. He was again studying blood under a microscope, his face creased with concentration.

“What is it B? Give it to us straight. How long do we have?” Jason joked. But Bruce didn't laugh, just kept peering down at the slide, focusing intensely.

After a couple of seconds the man straightened up. “I'm sorry but I am going to need both of you to stay down here tonight. It is vital that I isolate whatever this foreign matter is and analyze it personally. We can't take any chances.

Jason leaned against the wall huffing while Sora stuck his hands into his hoodie pockets thinking.

“What do you think this stuff in our blood is?” he asked Bruce. “Do you have a theory or something?”

Jason was the one to answer as he shook his head slowly. “He's not gonna tell us anything until he figures out for sure what this stuff is kid. That's just the way he works. Annoying as hell, but not much we can do about it. All that's left is to leave him to it.”

So for the next few hours, Sora and Jason sat on the beds in the med bay, leaning against the cold wall and dozing on and off. Bruce had in fact placed intravenouses in both their arms and was drawing blood regularly. At one point Sora had woken up to see that blankets had been placed on both him and Jason. Definitely Alfred’s doing. He had fallen back asleep, and woke again when something wet touched his face. He blinked and looked up tiredly into the face of the dog Titus. Sniffing and walking around in a circle, Titus plopped down beside Sora who smiled and stroked his warm head. He could hear Damian's voice and assumed he was talking to Bruce. Unfortunately at that point he fell asleep again. It was almost 4 AM, according to the clock on the wall, and it had been quite a long exhausting day.

The third thing that woke him up was hands shaking his shoulders. “Sora, wake up!” That was Dick’s voice. “Bruce says it's important that you get up now!”

Startled but awake, Sora looked around confused. Titus had left, and was curled up on the floor next to Damian who was asleep leaning against a desk. Tim was also there, curled up in a chair and stirring in response to Dick’s grave voice. Bruce was shaking Jason, waking him up too, the latter not being all too happy about it.

“Jesus Bruce. What time is it?” he snapped. Jason had never been a morning person.

“Irrelevant,” the man said mechanically. “You two need to come with me now!”

Halfway through a stretch, he stopped at the man’s tone. “What’s going on?” Sora opened and closed his hand a few times, preparing himself to summon his Keyblade at a moment’s notice.

Instead of answering, Bruce and Dick grabbed the other two’s hands and pulled them towards the main computer. Filling the screen were two side-by-side videos, clearly of blood cells, one labeled “Jason”, the other labeled “Sora”. Sora’s blood hadn’t changed from the time of the first sample. The dark substance, whatever it was, still replicated his cells, then dispersed. However, in Jason’s, the substance was steadily getting more abundant. It copied the cell and then stayed, duplicating itself even as more of the substance copied another cell.

Mouth set in a grim line, Bruce spoke, his level tone betraying none of the dread he had inside. “These are the samples from an hour ago. As you can see, the substance is no longer dissipating, even now that it’s outside of Jason’s bloodstream.” He fiddled with the keyboard, typing a few commands. “This is the only difference I could see in the two samples.”

Sora’s half of the screen zoomed drastically. In between the cells were tiny flecks of light. Whenever the substance tried to replicate a blood cell, the flecks would gather, attacking and dispersing it. Shocked, Sora held up his hands, staring at them as if he could see through the skin, as if he could see the tug-of-war happening in his blood stream. The entire idea made him slightly queasy. Thus far, all Heartless attacks hadn’t really injured him. They were either blunt force trauma or directly affected his heart. If he got stabbed in the chest, he wouldn’t have bled: his heart would have simply flown off into Kingdom Hearts. For some reason, all this talk of blood didn’t sit well with him.

He looked up at Jason, wondering if this was as difficult for his friend as it was for him. Probably not. The Bats seemed… not comfortable with blood (who would be, really), but used to it. However, the look of abject horror on Jason’s face caught him off guard. He was staring at his hands as well, which were threaded with very faint dark lines, following his veins and arteries perfectly.

Bruce, still contemplating the two screens, noticed the second Robin’s unusual silence and turned. His eyes widened at Jason’s expression, then further when he noticed the lines. Before anyone in the room could blink, he had grabbed Jason’s hand and shoved it under a microscope. “Sora. Any ideas why you have these light particles and not Jason?”

Sora sat on the ground, knuckles to his forehead, wracking his brain for anything, anything, that could help. He had been carrying Kairi’s heart and had stabbed himself with the Keyblade of People’s Hearts to release it. Then he had gotten turned into a Heartless, and the light in Kairi’s heart had turned him back when she had hugged him. “Kairi?”

Bruce’s head snapped up, turning immediately to Sora. “Explain. Thoroughly.”

“Kairi is a Princess of Heart. That means that she has no darkness in her heart, none at all. Over a year ago, our island got swallowed by the darkness and Kairi lost her heart. But since it’s impossible for her to turn into a Heartless, it sort of went inside me. I carried it around for a little while, until I used the Keyblade of People’s Hearts to free it. Her heart was returned, but I got turned into a Heartless and then I wandered around Hollow Bastion for a while. I ran into Kairi and she recognized me and hugged me and the light in her heart turned me back.”

Dick’s eyes widened. “Kind of like how I turned Jason back?” Suddenly, the subject of their conversation stiffened, his face contorting in pain. His eyes flickered yellow and back.

Bruce wasted no time. He grabbed Dick, pushing him towards Jason. “Whatever you did last time, do it again.”

Grabbing his brother in a tight hug, he again thought of all the good times he had had with Jason. He closed his eyes, trying to focus. If he had kept them open, he would have noticed a soft light building in between them, and a faint dark cloud floating off of Jason’s skin. The lines on his hands faded, his muscles slowly relaxed. Finally, both light and dark vanished, leaving Jason, for the second time in as many days, passed out in Dick’s arms.

Bruce allowed himself a moment to feel relief, then went back into business mode. He grabbed a spare vial and attached it to the shunt in Jason’s arm, grabbing yet another sample of his blood. He prepared a slide, dropped it on the microscope stand, and stared at it for a long minute. Two pairs of worried eyes bored in to the back of his head until he finally sat back with a sigh. “It’s back to how it was ten hours ago.”

Both Sora and Dick sagged in relief. Dick gazed at the brother sleeping peacefully in his arms. “Now all we have to do is figure out how to stop it from happening again.” He sighed as well, then hefted Jason’s substantial weight in his arms and carried him off to a gurney in the medbay. Tim and Damian had both fallen back to sleep. Dick couldn’t blame them. It had been a long day after all.

Back in front of the computer, Bruce and Sora were staring at the screen, trying to will an answer to appear for them. Venturing a suggestion, Sora said, “Maybe we should give this info to Riku. He might have an idea.”

Batman’s eyes narrowed at the thought of sharing anything before he could figure it out. But he had to admit that this kind of thing was out of his knowledge base (for now), and until he learned more, it might be a good idea to get an expert opinion. Without answering Sora, he opened a link to one of his satellites, searching around until he found the gummi ship’s frequency in orbit above Gotham. He hacked in, the pitiful security giving him no trouble. He edited the file, taking out Jason's name – just because he trusted Sora with that information did not mean he trusted Sora's space friend – and then sent the entire thing over.

~*~​

In the ship, Riku had been napping in his seat, feet propped up on the console. The loud beeping of a received file woke him, startling him out of his chair. He bumped his injured leg on his way back up, but was pleasantly surprised to find that it didn’t hurt anymore. Maybe he was healed! Riku’s happiness at this lasted until he opened the file that had rudely been shoved into his computer.

Uh oh.

~*~​

“Can you hear me Batman?” Came Riku's voice from out of the computer’s speakers.

“Yes.” Batman replied. “I assume you have received the files I have sent?”

“Yeah, I did. And you could have just asked to transmit them instead of hacking my system. But that's not important right now. Do you know what you just sent me?”

“Only partially.” Bruce admitted hesitantly. This was no time for pride. “We know that Sora doesn't seem to be negatively affected by it, while Red Hood lacks whatever is in Sora's blood stream that is showing a resistance to it. But we don't know what this substance is or what it does. I...we were hoping you might be able to assist us with that.”

“I wish I didn't know about it,” Riku's voice was hoarse, “but I have some firsthand experience with it. Not in the same way Hood does, and the information has never been presented to me in this way, but I think I know exactly what is going on.”

Batman stiffened, every fibre of his being focused on the voice vibrating out of the computer. He didn't notice as Alfred seemed to magically appear beside him, placing down a steaming mug of rich coffee.

“It is possible,” Riku began slowly, “to accept total darkness into your heart. To use it to your advantage and turn away from any source of light in the world. By doing this, you can use the darkness to gain amazing powers. But it has a price. Having no light in your heart...well, it's not a nice concept as I'm sure you can imagine.”

Bruce placed both elbows on his desk, leaning further towards the computer and clasping his hands together.

“Most people are always fighting with this darkness and light. It is a normal struggle. But sometimes, people are less immune to darkness then others. It seeks them out, and slowly takes them over.”

There was a pause as Riku studied the information on the screen carefully. “I've never actually seen the existence of darkness presented to me like this before. I knew there was a physical reaction to it, but not at a cellular level. I can only guess that Hood and Sora's hearts, which were unprotected and completely exposed to the world, developed a kind of... I don't know, magnetic quality to darkness. The Keyblades must have something to do with it, because this reaction doesn’t appear in people who have lost their hearts to Heartless. But it looks like the process of releasing someone’s heart with a Keyblade attracts darkness more readily then is the natural process.”

Bruce's head was spinning as he listened to the young man talk. This whole subject was so far out of his understanding, which was unacceptable. But in any case, he needed to focus, to understand what Riku was trying to tell him.

“So what you are saying,” Bruce said slowly, “is that Red Hood is attracting this darkness, and that if it builds up, it will turn him back into a Heartless?”

“Not a Heartless.” Riku corrected. “He will be whole, but it will be up to him to fight his way back out of it. And that... it isn't easy. “

“Can anything be done to negate the effects?” Bruce asked, his calm voice greatly contrasting the emotional turmoil he was experiencing.

“Unfortunately a Princess of Heart like in Sora's case won't work for Hood. Sora's heart was brought back with a heart of complete light. Hood's was not.”

Riku typed on his keyboard surfing quickly through a few files. “I don't know of any other ways.” He said finally. “But I can look for you. I have some contacts I can ask if you want.”

“Yes.” Bruce said quickly. “Whoever you can. Ask anyone who might know something. It is very important!”

“Of course.” Riku agreed. “I'll get back to you as soon as I have any new developments.”

With that the channel closed. Bruce leaned back in his chair, rubbing his face with his hands. He spied the coffee Alfred had left him. It was now lukewarm but still wonderfully inviting as he took a sip.

What a mess Jason was in.

Glancing back Bruce spotted Sora standing a few feet away, looking tired yet alert at the same time.

“Get some sleep.” Bruce said to the kid, standing up. “It's late and we all need the rest.”

Bruce was surprised at his own advice.

Sora nodded and slowly walked over to the medbay, digesting all of the previous conversation as he went. He would rather sleep down here with everyone then trudge back up to his room. He was way too exhausted for that.

Bruce went to sit down in another chair in the med bay close to his boys. There was nothing to it, Riku was much better equipped to research this topic then he was. Bruce was simply out of his element. Jason would just have to deal with Dick and his hugs until they found a solution. Bruce smiled at that. Jason would not be happy. Not a bit. And with that last thought, he settled into his chair, wrapping a warm blanket that had been mysteriously placed around his shoulders, and fell quickly asleep. Despite the caffeine, despite the worry and stress, and despite the enormity of the past day, exhaustion won out.

I do appreciate your point, but the striking contrast Bruce uses in his vernacular just hits me harder. It flows so perfectly with both dialogue and exposition. I'll be sure to check out more of Bruce's work though. What can I say, you've convinced me.

No man, Wayne is the best. Between his line work and his colours, everything is so perfect. Ah, now I'm going to reread more of his stuff, just for the art.

It's a very comprehensive list, but I'm not sure I agree with all of it. I find Bruce's writing to be way more dynamic and lifelike than Bruce's. Although Bruce does have his own merits above the others as well.

As for art, I don't know. Wayne's has always popped to me, but I can see why you would put him below Wayne. It's a bit stylized. Still though, loving your choice for number 1. Wayne is definitely my favourite.