Chapter 7 — Demon of Gotham, Part 7
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The ruins stretched endlessly.
Ben Tennyson was ten years old again, small and thin, his green eyes wide as he picked through the rubble of what had been Metropolis. Dust hung in the air like fog. Somewhere beneath the broken concrete and twisted steel, something still smoldered. He didn't know what he was looking for. He called for his mom. He called for his dad. His voice came out smaller than he wanted it to.
Then the scenery shifted without warning.
He was fifteen now, standing in front of his childhood home — or what remained of it. The structure was gutted by fire, the windows blown out, the front door hanging off one hinge. His clothes were dirty, a black short-sleeve shirt and blue jeans smudged with ash and grime. The Omnitrix glowed faintly against his left wrist, casting a pale green hue across the back of his hand. His hair — longer now, brown strands brushing toward his eyes — caught the hot air rising off the flames.
"Why couldn't you save them?"
A woman's voice. Soft. Familiar in a way that made his stomach drop.
"Save us."
A man's voice, this one lower, rougher at the edges.
Then more. Dozens. Hundreds. A chorus building from silence into something deafening, all of them saying the same thing, the words bleeding together.
Save us. Save us. Save us.
Ben pressed his hands over his ears. He shut his eyes hard enough to see color behind them. His jaw clenched.
"I didn't have it back then," he said through his teeth. "I didn't have the Omnitrix — I couldn't have — "
Silence fell like a hammer.
When he opened his eyes, Metropolis was gone.
He was standing in Gotham. Except Gotham was dead. The skyline was shattered, the streets cracked open, every building either gutted or collapsed entirely. There was no sound. No wind. No distant sirens. Nothing.
And then, far ahead, at what should have been the center of the city — a mountain of bodies. An impossible, grotesque structure of the fallen, piled so high it blotted out what little sky remained.
"Omnitrix or not."
Ben recognized the voice immediately. It lived in a specific part of his memory that he kept sealed off and rarely visited. Low and vast, like sound generated by something that had never needed a throat to speak.
Darkseid.
"It will make no difference. You will still fail to save anyone."
Ben's gaze dragged across the pile. He didn't want to look. He looked anyway.
Kevin was there. Gwen was there. And beside them — Aunt Natalie, Uncle Frank — still, pale, stacked among thousands of others like they weighed nothing.
Something cracked open in Ben's chest.
The scream that came out of him wasn't grief. It was rage, raw and formless, the kind that had nowhere to go.
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DEET DEET. DEET DEET.
His eyes snapped open.
Green irises caught the pale glow of a phone screen in the dark. Ben sat up sharply, chest heaving, the sheets twisted around him and damp with sweat. He grabbed the phone from the nightstand.
4:00 AM.
He stared at the numbers for a moment, then set the phone back down and dropped onto his pillow, staring at the ceiling.
Five years. The dreams had been a constant for five years, never exactly the same but always arriving at the same destination — him, standing somewhere in the wreckage of something he hadn't stopped in time. He had stopped trying to analyze them early on. At some point the nightmares had simply become part of the rhythm of his nights, as reliable as the alarm that cut them short. He'd grown used to them the way you grew used to a scar — not comfortable, exactly, but no longer surprised.
He lay there for another few minutes before giving up on sleep entirely and sitting up.
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His room was large. Generously, almost aggressively large, the kind of space that still felt slightly foreign to him even after years of living in it. Kevin and Gwen had furnished most of it — or rather, Gwen had furnished it and Kevin had carried things and complained the whole time — on the grounds that the four bare walls, a desk and a bed Ben had started with was, in Gwen's words, genuinely depressing. The result was a room with more in it than Ben strictly needed: a full bookshelf he used maybe a third of, a desk with a lamp and a secondhand gaming setup Kevin had insisted on, curtains that actually matched the walls.
It was all possible because of Gwen's parents. Uncle Frank was a successful attorney, well-established enough in Gotham that his name carried weight in certain rooms. Aunt Natalie had published two novels since the incident, both well-received, and her royalties had done quietly well. The mansion was theirs, and they'd let Ben in, without discussion, without condition. He hadn't asked them to. He was still not entirely sure how to carry the gratitude.
He stood, crossed the room, and pushed open the door to the ensuite bathroom.
The room he stepped into was a significant upgrade from anything he'd had growing up. White marble tile ran from floor to ceiling, the grout lines clean and precise. The vanity stretched the full length of one wall — a long slab of dark stone countertop with an under-mount sink and matte black fixtures, a wide mirror above it framed in dark oak. A glass-paneled shower stood in the far corner, large enough to feel unnecessary for one person, with a rainfall head mounted flush to the ceiling. Folded towels sat on a heated rack beside it. The lighting was soft and warm, recessed into the ceiling, and came on automatically at the slightest motion — something Ben had startled at the first few weeks and now barely noticed.
He turned on the tap and let the water run cold before cupping it in both hands and pressing his face into it.
He straightened and looked at himself in the mirror.
Dull green eyes. Brown hair grown just past the point where it sat properly, strands falling toward his face without quite committing to a style. Tired in a way that sleep didn't fix. Some people — Gwen had mentioned it, Kevin had made a joke about it once and then looked annoyed that he had — said he was good-looking. Ben neither agreed nor disagreed. It wasn't something he thought about.
His gaze dropped.
Left wrist. The Omnitrix sat there against his skin, faintly luminescent even in the bathroom light, the hourglass symbol unmistakable if you knew what you were looking at.
He touched it with two fingers. It was a new habit — not comfort, exactly, but something to hold onto. An orientation point.
Then he opened the cabinet above the sink and pulled out a bandage roll.
The wrapping was routine by now, muscle memory more than thought. He started just below the elbow and worked down in careful, overlapping layers, covering the watch's profile — the bulk of it, the symbol, the distinctive outline that the Omnitrix left against the skin even through fabric. He left only his fingertips exposed. The tension was practiced — firm enough to stay in place, not so firm it cut circulation. He'd gotten that wrong early on, woken up with a numb hand twice before Gwen had sat him down and walked him through the correct technique.
It had been Gwen's idea, after they realized the Omnitrix wasn't coming off. With Gotham PD running down any lead connected to the hourglass symbo — wearing it openly would have been foolish. When people at school or in the neighborhood noticed the bandaging and asked, Ben told them he had bad scarring and residual swelling from an old injury. The shape of the Omnitrix was just visible enough beneath the wrap to sell it, and nobody pushed. Five years out from the Darkseid invasion, Gotham was a city full of people who understood that some injuries didn't have clean explanations, and that it was rude to press.
He finished with a firm tuck at the wrist and flexed his fingers once, checking. Good.
---
He went back to his room, pulled on a black hoodie and dark shorts, laced up his running shoes in the dark, and moved quietly through the hallway toward the stairs. The mansion was still. Gwen and Kevin were asleep. Aunt Natalie kept late hours when she was writing but her light was off. Uncle Frank had an early court appearance and would be dead to the world until six.
Ben reached the front entrance, touched the interior control panel beside the door — a flat, backlit keypad recessed into the wall — and entered the code. The mechanism at the gate clicked softly at the end of the driveway.
He slipped outside.
The air hit him immediately — cool and slightly damp, carrying the particular smell of Gotham at pre-dawn: wet concrete, something metallic underneath it, the faint residue of exhaust that never fully cleared even at this hour. The streetlights cast long orange pools across the sidewalk. Above the rooftops, the sky was still dark, the edge of morning not yet visible.
Ben pulled his hood up and started to run.