The conference room was quiet too quiet for a facility built beneath fifty feet of reinforced concrete. No windows, no sunlight, just humming fluorescent lights and the ever-present low whir of data servers thrumming behind the walls. A large, steel table cut through the center of the room. Around it sat five people, each of them dressed in civilian attire that couldn't have looked more ordinary.
But there was nothing ordinary about the way they sat. Still. Cold. Measured.
One of them a man with thin-rimmed glasses and a scar just below his jaw leaned forward and placed a tablet on the table. A silent image played. Surveillance footage, grainy and distant. A van. A crash. Blurred figures dragging something or someone away.
He tapped the screen once. It froze on the image of a body being pulled from the wreckage.
"Agent Talbot and Agent Rios were en route to extraction," he said. "We lost contact three days ago. Follow-up surveillance suggests their vehicle was forcibly disabled. They've vanished since."
A woman across the table exhaled slowly. Blonde hair tied back in a tight bun. Sharp cheekbones. "Dead?"
"Likely," he said. "No recovery of remains. No trace of their signal beacons. Their embedded telemetry went dark just before the crash. There was no distress call."
"That's not a coincidence," a third voice said older, raspier. The man didn't look up from the stack of files in front of him. "Someone knew what they were doing."
"Or," the blonde woman said, "that shit hole of a city happened."
A faint scoff around the table.
Another agent nodded. "That city eats everyone eventually."
"Doesn't change the fact that this was supposed to be routine. Two well-trained field agents sent to recover a teenage meta with uncontrolled psychic potential. No heat. No federal oversight. And now they're ghosts." Her fingers tapped the steel table. Once. Twice. A third time.
The man with the glasses sat back. "We believe the girl's abilities manifested again during the abduction. Likely a telepathic blast mc possibly reactive defense. It's unclear. She may have pulled something out of Rios's head before they could sedate her."
"Pulled something out?" one agent repeated.
"Memories. Protocols. Names. Not like she doesn't have all of that and more already. The higher ups are going to be pissed."
The blonde woman's eyes narrowed. "So she knows even more now, we have to find her."
"It's probable she doesn't understand what she saw," the man with the glasses said. "But the information is there. And if she's still in Gotham someone's hiding her."
"They're not just hiding her," said the older man at the head of the table. He finally looked up, pale eyes glittering. "They're protecting her."
Another pause. The tension thickened.
"This wouldn't have happened," he continued, "if we had pulled her earlier. Before the instability. Before the powers. But no we waited. Monitored. Evaluated."
"Orders were to let her condition evolve organically," the woman said. "Let the trauma play out. See what kind of meta she became."
"Well, congratulations," the old man said. "Now we don't know what she is. We don't know what she knows only that it's practically everything because she was strong enough to mind incenerate our genomorphs. And someone in Gotham knows enough to kill two of our agents and vanish without a whisper."
A long silence followed.
Then, the man with glasses leaned forward again. "Permission to escalate?"
"To what degree?"
"Local sweep teams. Discreet. No insignia, no flags. Operatives familiar with the undercity. If she's embedded with the homeless population, we'll find her."
"And if this was more than a random rescue?" the blonde asked. "If she has protection?"
"Then," said the man with pale eyes, "we scrub the entire sector."
He stood, the chair scraping against the floor.
"Find the girl. Before her mind starts remembering things it shouldn't. Before she starts talking. And goddamnit it better be before our bosses find out."
And with that, the meeting dissolved into silence again. Chairs scraped. Doors opened and closed.
The room went still.
Only the tablet remained on the table, frozen on the last image of the van.
Burning.
Empty.
Gone.
***
The music thumped through the speaker perched on the marble countertop of the owner's suite not the garish kind you'd hear in nightclubs, but smooth, toe-tapping jazz, something Sinatra might've whistled on a good day. The kind of music that didn't ask for permission to make you feel good.
Quentin moved with it.
Loose, easy, a rhythm in his step as he spun across the polished floor in a tank top, sweatpants, and mismatched socks. A thick cigar dangled from his mouth unlit but thoroughly gnawed and in one hand, he cradled a half-full bottle of scotch he'd found in the suite's vintage liquor cabinet. In the other, a crystal glass with maybe two sips left in it.
The owner's suite was untouched by the chaos below. Tall windows opened out onto the lower cityscape, where Gotham's streets sprawled in dark veins of neon and rust. Even if the hotel wasn't scraping the clouds like Wayne Tower, the view had its own charm—honest, grimy, alive.
Quentin leaned against the glass, gazing down at the flickering streetlamps, the blurred taillights, the aimless wanderers.
"Could get used to this view," he muttered, exhaling around the cigar. "Yeah… yeah, I could live like this."
A sharp voice broke the moment.
Kieran appeared shaking his head, "We need to talk."
Quentin groaned, rolling his eyes skyward.
"Of course you do." He replied with a shooing motion
Nolan had to hold back his laugh, "Seriously we need to talk about what comes next."
Quentin turned away from the glass, walking slowly back toward the center of the room. "You two ever think about how much you talk? Like, ever just sit in the quiet and vibe?"
Kieran scoffed, "There are decisions to make. People are depending on us. The hotel is functional, yes, but it's not just a safehouse or a vanity project. It's a base. A signal. Cadmus is still out there. Penguin might not be finished. We're not done, and I didn't spend all of that time getting this hotel just for us to lose it all."
Nolan nodded, "We've come this far. We can't just float now. We need to plan for what's next. Before someone else makes the next move for us."
Quentin held up a hand, wiggling his fingers like he was pushing their voices aside. He walked over to the record player setup in the corner he liked the aesthetic even if it was just for show and dropped the needle again. The jazz returned, warm and crackly.
"You both sound like parents on a PTA call," he said with a smirk. "You've had your fun—Kieran with his suit-and-smile routine, Nolan with his broody weightlifting montages. Me? I got stuck in the backseat while you two pretended we were normal."
He took a long drink from the glass. Then another.
"I'm not normal. We're not normal. And for once, I don't feel like apologizing for it."
There was silence. Not the absence of sound, but the pause of minds calculating how to respond.
Nolan, quieter now:
"You're avoiding the conversation."
Quentin's expression twitched not quite a smile anymore.
"Maybe. Or maybe I'm just not ready to dive headfirst into a war room while there's still music left to dance to."
Kieran smiled, "The renovations started today. Our name's being whispered. People are watching. You know this."
Quentin set the empty glass on the counter and slowly made his way back to the window. The city still pulsed below, indifferent, unaware.
He pressed a hand to the cool glass and stared down.
"Give me a few more hours," he said softly. "You've had your turns. Let me have this."
Silence again.
Kieran sighed understanding what it's like to be on the back burner, "…A few more hours."
Nolan, "Don't get lost in it, Q. I don't want to wake up hearing about a bank robbery."
Quentin smiled faintly, eyes on the glowing streets.
"No promises."
He tapped ash from the end of the cigar even though it hadn't been lit, watching it scatter across the marble. The jazz curled around him again, wrapping the suite in lazy warmth. Downstairs, the renovations would be grinding on. Walls knocked down. Rooms rebuilt. Futures shaped.
But for now, Quentin stayed still.
Toasting the window, toasting the view, and savoring the rarest thing in Gotham: peace.
—
A/N: kind of a silly end to the chapter but think it shows a lot of their growth as characters. Btw you will see the beast in 10 chapters exactly his personality is a bit different but its still the beast