"No!" Easy shouted, his voice carrying across dimensions. North's head jerked up, his dark eyes wide with recognition even as his face twisted in another wave of supernatural agony. Eye contact, strong and intense, broke through the supernatural static.
"Instructor Easy?" North whispered, his voice barely audible over Fly's labored breathing and the soft sound of phantom wings beating against air.
Easy tried to stay in the vision, to anchor himself there, but he was being pulled back like a fish on a line. The luxury hotel room wavered, colors bleeding at the edges. He shouted through the fading connection, his voice carrying all the authority he'd ever wielded over these two young warriors, "Hold on! We're coming!"
The vision snapped like a rubber band, and Easy gasped back into his own body, Astraea's worried face swimming into focus above him, her cool, soothing hands stroking his arm.
He reached up, cupping her worried face. "I'm all right, babe."
But she knew differently. Her eyes told him that she was aware of everything that had to do with the world ending, what he and his teammates had been called to handle.
She smiled, shook her head. "You always say that, and sometimes I almost believe you," she said fiercely. "I'm here for you. All of you. Always."
He nodded, pulling her down until their foreheads touched. "I love you," he whispered.
"I love you, through all this madness. Let me know what you need."
The bedroom was crowded with shadows and the familiar bulk of his teammates. Tex stood by the window, fully dressed,jaw set in that way that meant decisions had already been made. Bondo leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, his expression grim. Flash, Shark, Twister, Dagger, and Brawler filled the remaining space, all carrying the same haunted look, the residual echo of shared visions still ghosting behind their eyes.
"Astraea," Tex said quietly, his voice gentle yet commanding, "we need a moment."
She looked between Easy and the team, reading the situation the way she always did, smart, intuitive, understanding that something beyond her experience was happening. She squeezed Easy's hand once, then slipped from the room without a word.
Easy was already moving, rolling out of bed and reaching for his clothes. His legs felt unsteady, but his purpose was crystalline. "They're in trouble. We've got to go."
"We saw," Tex said simply. "All of it."
All eyes turned to Flash. "What's happening?"
Flash shook his head, his expression contained but worried. "This might be our first battle, guys, and we're losing."
"Fuck that shit. Talk to Veil guy…the Guardian," Bondo ordered.
Flash looked at him, his eyes heated. "What the hell do you think I've been doing through all of this, twiddling my thumbs? He's…not responding, and I'm getting this?—"
"Sense of doom," Brawler added. He shifted his shoulders, rubbing the back of his neck. "Emily says the Veil enhanced something that was already there. Like it amplified what I could already feel, made it sharper." His jaw tightened. "Right now? I'm picking up terror. Not just yours, Flash. Something bigger. Something ancient is scared shitless."
The room fell completely silent. The weight of that statement settled over them like a lead blanket.
"Is that firecracker onto something?" Twister asked, his usual humor strained. He hugged himself. "Because all the feels right now are pretty fucking dark."
Brawler snorted, but there was no humor in it. "Yeah, she's onto something."
"We know Twister is safe. We never break our medic," Dagger said, his voice steady but his eyes sharp.
“We could bruise him a little bit,” Brawler said, giving Twist the side-eye.
Twister chuckled, but the sound was hollow. "I have immunity, big guy, and I don't even need a necklace."
* * *
The sound of his teammates'conversation drifted to the background as Flash tried once again to reach the Guardian. He'd carried the ancient being under his skin since the night the trident first burned beneath his heart, the night a voice named him keystone. What the Guardian looked like, Flash couldn't have said. He arrived as a voice more than a sound, vast and patient and old as the dark between stars, and on the rare times he showed himself at all, it was a shifting blur of faces, a thousand of them, never settling into one. Most days he was the hum that he heard in his mind.
He closed his eyes, reaching along the thread of energy he'd come to recognize, the connection that had become as familiar as his own heartbeat.
Nothing.
The connection felt severed, not just silent. Like trying to call through a dead phone line. He pushed harder, feeling the trident mark pulse weakly, the fractured edges of it sending sharp stabs of pain through his chest. But instead of the Guardian's steadypresence, he got static. Discord. The sound of something vast and desperate struggling against forces he couldn't see.
