Chapter Text
Bruce leaned back in the chair at the monitors, eyes sliding shut. He should go shower, go upstairs to bed. The last few weeks had been far too busy. Criminals and super villains and occasion alien conquering gods had demanded all his attention.
"You really need sleep," Wei Wuxian commented as he perched on the monitors.
"So do you," Bruce said.
Wei Wuxian"s eyes had deep purple bags under them. His hair hung lank instead of bouncing the way it normally did. The golden tone of his skin had gone pale and wan. He"d clearly been using far too much resentful energy.
"You promised you wouldn"t work on the Burial Mounds without me," Bruce commented.
"No, not that," Wei Wuxian said. He smiled wryly and shrugged when Bruce frowned at him. "You up for one more trip out?"
"Where to?"
"Arkham Island," Wei Wuxian said. "I have a… surprise there."
Bruce slowly sat up. A surprise. Not necessarily one for him.
Well. There could only be one person that would need a surprise on Arkham Island. Ra"s. The beginning and, potentially, the ending of Bruce"s cultivation. He nodded and pulled the mask back on.
Wei Wuxian didn"t bounce and poke all the buttons and switches in the Batmobile. He sat there, quiet and still, watching Gotham go by. They didn"t go to Arkham Asylum, of course. The heart of Gotham wasn"t there. It was in the caves on the other end of Arkham Island.
Bruce had gone there shortly after he returned to Gotham all those many years ago. He"d sealed the place up, put up security and monitoring which had to be replaced every few months in a vain effort to keep Ra"s from getting at it. The arrays that he and Tim had designed and installed with Cass" help had more of an effect, but Ra"s still regularly broke them.
It was a twisted little game in Ra"s" mind.
It was only an annoyance in Bruce"s.
The blood pool had long since been corrupted and turned green. Bruce suspected that it had been corrupted since before Bruce was even born. The moss and slime molds that lived on the rock around the blood pool, the Lazarus pit, weren"t what existed in the Burial Mounds. He"d only ever seen them around Ra"s" Lazarus pits.
They got out of the Batmobile together, walking in time to the array-hidden entrance to the blood pool"s cave. Bruce frowned as he sniffed the air. The familiar smell of rot and electricity was gone.
"Blood?" Bruce whispered, eyes going wide behind his mask.
"Blood," Wei Wuxian agreed. He smiled, small and proud. "Took a lot of work but I figured it out. Damian gave me the clue I needed."
Inside, the walls had been scoured clean. Bare rock adorned by fresh, new arrays glowed with an eerie red light. Bruce"s heart lifted as he bit his lip and then hurried up the tunnel to where the blood pool lay.
Every bit of the moss and slime mold was gone. Wei Wuxian had crafted an incredibly complicated array around the blood pool that looked to have been inlaid with enameled paint. Warding, protection, purification, pacification; Wei Wuxian had woven it all in.
Ra"s stood just outside of the array, hands clenched behind his back and shoulders tight with anger.
"You have destroyed a powerful artifact," Ra"s said, barely glancing over his shoulder to glare at Bruce and Wei Wuxian.
"Nope," Wei Wuxian replied as he leaned against the cave wall, arms over his chest with a tired smile on his lips. "Fixed it. You"re the one who tried to destroy it. This isn"t the way to immortality, Ra"s. You know that. If you want to live forever, you know exactly how to do it. Pity that you can"t, anymore."
Bruce blinked and turned back to Ra"s whose shoulders had gone even more tense.
Oh.
Oh, of course.
"I never wondered," Bruce admitted. He shook his head and laughed at his younger self for never once having asked that question. "I never wondered why you needed Lazarus pits to stay alive when you were a cultivator. But you"re not, are you? You have no golden core. All you have is demonic cultivation. The pits are what keep you from destroying yourself with your techniques."
Ra"s leveled a venomous glare on Wei Wuxian. "You should ask how that came to be."
"Crushed his core?" Bruce asked.
"Mm," Wei Wuxian confirmed with a little nod. "I expected that it would kill him. It didn"t, obviously. Of course, there"s better questions for you to be asking right now, Ra"s. Like what, exactly, I"m distracting you from."
Ra"s went very, very still. One hand rose to the communicator in his ear. A tap. Then a second, more forceful tap. Then Ra"s turned and ran from the cave, cursing in ten different languages. No, eleven.
"You did this one last?" Bruce asked.
"Yep," Wei Wuxian said. His grin was a tired, sad thing instead of its normal wild glory. "Come on. Let"s go home. He"s probably not gone for good, but this should keep him busy enough that we can go off and visit the Burial Mounds with the kids. I think we might, finally, be able to open them up if we all work together the way we did for the Darkseid battle."
Bruce caught Wei Wuxian"s shoulder in one hand, keeping him from sauntering off as if he hadn"t just solved one of Bruce"s biggest problems all by himself. Wei Wuxian"s expression went shifty, so Bruce didn"t thank him. He didn"t even pull Wei Wuxian into a hug the way Bruce desperately wanted to.
"If you think either of us are getting out of the Manor without about sixteen hours of sleep and our body weight in food, you"ve got another thing coming," Bruce said, laughing as Wei Wuxian"s eyes widened. "Alfred will get Lan Wangji involved. He"ll call Sizhui. He"ll call Barbara."
"Gah!" Wei Wuxian groaned, throwing up his hands in dismay. "Fine! Sleep and food first. But then we"re going home for a visit."
"Deal," Bruce said. "And gladly."
They walked out together, Wei Wuxian with one arm slung over Bruce"s shoulders, Bruce with an arm around Wei Wuxian"s slender waist. As they got into the Batmobile, Bruce paused, looking back at the blood pool"s cave.
"Huh."
"What?" Wei Wuxian asked.
"Just thinking," Bruce said as he fastened his seatbelt and then poked Wei Wuxian into doing the same. "Those arrays. Could they be altered to protect the Batcave?"
Wei Wuxian"s grin came back full-wattage. "I don"t know. Why don"t we go find out?"
Bruce laughed and gunned the engine, sending them flying back across Gotham towards home.