It happened without intention.
That was the most dangerous part.
Night had settled fully by the time the tension inside him reached a point it could no longer ignore. Not a breaking point—nothing so dramatic—but a threshold, the way ice accepts weight until it suddenly does not. He was walking along a service corridor between two apartment blocks, a place lit unevenly and used only by those who had learned to avoid main streets.
He had chosen it deliberately.
Quiet places made it easier to listen inward.
The air was cold, sharp enough to keep the senses awake. His breath fogged briefly before vanishing. He slowed, then stopped, aware of a familiar distortion creeping in at the edges of perception. The world felt thinner here, stretched tight between surfaces. He could feel the space between walls, the distance not as measurement but as something pliable.
A mistake.
He should have moved on.
Instead, he focused.
The pressure within him responded instantly, like a vast mechanism recognizing its cue. It did not surge outward. It folded inward, compressing, aligning. The sensation was vertiginous—not spinning, but collapsing. Space lost its certainty. Depth inverted.
The alley dimmed.
Not dark—hollow.
For a fraction of a second, the world peeled back, revealing something behind it. Not another place exactly, but the absence of place. A void that was not empty, only unoccupied. It did not feel hostile. It felt… available.
His heart skipped—not from fear, but from recognition he did not remember earning.
Stop.
The command came from everywhere and nowhere, layered with urgency that cut through discipline. He reacted on instinct alone, wrenching his focus away, grounding himself in sensation: the cold bite of air, the roughness of brick beneath his fingers, the steady rhythm of breath.
Reality snapped back.
The alley reasserted itself with a shudder too subtle for anyone else to notice. Light returned to its proper angles. Sound resumed its natural delay. The city inhaled.
He staggered—not physically, but internally—then steadied. His pulse hammered now, belated and angry. Sweat chilled on his skin.
He had not moved.
But something had.
The space where he stood felt wrong, like a room entered moments before someone else arrived. He stepped back, then another pace, eyes scanning for witnesses. The corridor was empty.
Still, the sensation lingered.
He had touched something.
Not power.
A mechanism.
His hands shook once. He clenched them until they stilled.
Contain, he told himself again, more fiercely now.
Whatever that was—it was not ready. And neither was he.
He left the corridor immediately, choosing brighter streets, noise, chaos. Places where the world was too crowded to thin. The city welcomed him back with indifference, neon signs buzzing, traffic snarling. Normality pressed in like ballast.
The pressure inside him subsided, but not completely. It felt… pleased.
That frightened him more than any threat he had encountered so far.
Far away—far beyond night and street and steel—someone paused mid-step upon a bridge of dreaming glass.
Dream turned, slowly.
He felt it then, distantly, like the brush of a gaze passing over a scar. Not scrutiny. Not judgment.
Recognition.
The anomaly had slipped.
Only briefly. Only imperfectly.
But that was enough.
Dream did not speak.
He did not intervene.
He simply watched, because stories that bend space without knowing why are the most dangerous kind.
And in Gotham, unaware and unconcerned, a boy walked beneath flickering lights, carrying a door inside him that should not exist.