Damian tilted his head, eyes closed. He was trying to hone in on something that kept slipping through his grasp like soap.

Exhaling harshly through his nose, Damian opened his eyes. He glared at Raven, "Why does ninety percent of elemental magic have to include closing your eyes and" he took on an airy voice one might associate with a pantomime princess, "reaching out to the spirits of the elements."

Cross legged in front of him, Raven snickered, quickly covering her mouth so a not to bruise his ego. He gave her a deadpan look, not appreciating the sentiment.

Sobering, the witch soothed, "Damian 'elemental magic' is the technical term for 'reaching out to the spirits of the elements' with the addition of 'to get them to do what the fuck we want them to'. There's no escaping it." Sensing the piling frustration, Raven added, "This will come to you a lot more naturally than Earth magic. We've only been here all of two minutes. Try again, start slowly though, with the breathing techniques."

Sparing her one last half-hearted glare, Damian threaded his fingers through the dewy grass.

In through the mouth, out through the nose.

Through the mouth...from the nose.

Mouth...nose...mouth...nose...

Aaand peace...

In their recently acquired combined state, Damian and Anubis expanded his godly senses to enhance Damian's. His skin receptors felt the rumblings of the ground. The distant scratching of birds, rodents, and insects on the surrounding foliage, his ears were privy to. The roaring of an aeroplane engine overhead. The chinking of cutlery in the Manor's kitchen. Salty on the air, drifting from Gotham's docks.

Sound, smell, taste- they weren't important. And he'd already removed sight from all considerations.

What could he feel?

Not the grass beneath him, not the first few layers of rocky, muddy crust. Not the collections of refreshing, mineral-rich waters. But the heat.

The raging, searing heat that sat below it all. The heat that blared from above his head. Then came the heat of a candle Pennyworth hadn't yet blown out. And the heat of a burning house in downtown Gotham. The heat of a rubbish incinerator. So much warmth.

So much fire.

It called to him- all of him. Damian Wayne and Damian al Ghul and Anubis.

Fire felt like second nature, and fire didn't feel like he expected it too.

Fire wasn't angry.

Fire wasn't vengeful.

Fire wasn't destructive.

It simply was.

The giver of warmth and the destroyer of habitats.

So much potential: positive and negative.
Potential that lay at Damian's grass-entangled fingertips.

Now came the hard bit. The channelling. The whole 'harnessing enough energy but not too much that it overwhelms you and possibly burns you to a stake' bit.

In through the nose...out through the mouth.

Through the nose... from the-

Knock knock knock

"Hey-uh- Whatchu guys doin?"

Damian opened his eyes, exhaled a puff of steam from his nose, and recoiled his amplified godly senses. The elemental power slipped out of his grasp.

With a wave of her hand, Raven brought down the purple dome  surrounding them- the dome that Conner had rapped on a moment earlier. She levitated off of the ground, uncrossing her legs, and folded her arms, "What do you want?"

Pushing himself off of the floor, Damian stood facing Conner with a few centimetres between their noses. He raised an eyebrow, fuming, "When we said 'do not disturb us until lunch' what part of that didn't you understand?" Before Kon could answer, he snappily continued, "What was so difficult that you couldn't wait-" he checked his watch (a birthday present from Alfred) "- one hour?"

Brain taking a moment to load, Conner filled the space with an uncomfortable, "Uhmmm..." struggling to figure out the appropriate response to being squared up to by what he considered a fine (albeit a tad scary) specimen.

His eyes shot to Raven for help.

Conner gulped back a gulp (how very counter-productive) and pushed some words out of his mouth, betting on them being the right ones, "I- um- was bored." Fucking genius, wasn't it? Because that would definitely do down well. "And I wanted to see what you were doing- maybe if you wanted to do some training or-ah- something...maybe..."

Not really sure where to look, considering Robin was all up in his business, Conner looked at the ground, waiting for some semblance of a response.

Damian snorted, "TT. You just-"

"Why not? This can wait." Raven hushed him. "And we've a while before lunch."

Mouth slightly agape, her boyfriend looked at her, "What? Since whe-" she closed his mouth with a beautiful, commanding glare.

Damian tilted his head, trying to silently speak to Raven to understand her ulterior motives. He achieved zero success.

"Really, seriously," Conner was just as surprised as the boy in front of him. He held out a pointed finger, eyebrows raised at Raven, "so you're..?"

"An extra hour's training won't hurt." She shrugged.

Shakily trusting Raven's yet-unjustified judgement, Damian said, "We'll have to beat Todd to it- he has a tendency to exercise in the training room about ten minutes from now."

Pulling her fringe back from her eyes, Raven gave him a secret, little, trusting smile, "We'd best get moving then."

***

Hal's hand froze halfway from carrying a biscuit to his mouth, nose scrunched, "Tezca- huh?"

"Tezcatlipoca." Batman growled. "God of the night."

"Yeah- huh- got that bit." The Green Lantern said, shoving the cream custard in to his mouth.

Putting the jet on autopilot, Wonderwoman rose from the pilot's seat. She passed the row wherein Hawkgirl and Shazam sat, sitting herself down besides J'onn. Legs taking up most of the available corridor space in front of her, Diana passed an unsatisfactory eye over Hal.

"Leave any crumbs and you will clean every inch of this plane."

Hal acknowledged the warning with a muffled, "Yef m'aam."

Pressing several buttons on the forearm of his suit, Batman brought up a projection of the threat they would be facing in Tijuana.

Over their coms link, Superman reported, "You guys better get here quick- I can't touch this guy."

That was cause for alarm. The core muscle of the Justice League couldn't scratch this new threat.

"Ow- Same here." Came Barry's voice. "This is some kind of god, right? Well get Constantine over here scat, because brute force and laser-eyes aren't working."

Diana observed the hologram before her with deep lines etched into her forehead. Sensing her anxiety, J'onn laid a hand on her shoulder, "We have faced such threats before, all will be well."

Looking over his seat, Shazam pushed his lips together, wiggling his eyebrows at the pair, occasionally shooting his eyes to Hawkgirl as if to say ' oOooh look at themmm'. In response, Kendra merely rolled her eyes and looked out of the plane. She reckoned she ought to have just flown there, then again, Shazam might have flown with her, and that would've been both painful and tiring.

Diana turned to the Martian Manhunter and said, "I know the capability of this team. But I am unfamiliar with the Aztec gods. Their existence alone does not sit well with me, it feels as though it contradicts my own as a daughter of Zeus."

Feeling rather that he was intruding on a private conversation, Batman continued listening in on their conversation. He understood Diana's ease when speaking with J'onn- the Martian was a notoriously good listener. There was something more in the way that Diana conversed with him, a deeper understanding between them.

Bruce found himself unexpectedly linking them to the image of his own son and the way he would speak with Raven. Hm. Strange. He was quite sure he wasn't hallucinating, but he could see the mirrored image, and it wasn't unpleasant.

With the speeds that Wonderwoman's invisible jet could reach, it was only a few more minutes until the plane neared the epicentre of the chaos. In those few minutes, Constantine had relayed the plan to the Justice League members present and over the coms.

***

A Kryptonian, Clark rarely -if ever- faced sight issues. As a matter of fact, he might have been considered able to see far too well, considering his X-ray vision. However, when the reborn god spewed from his mouth a thick black mist, Superman found his vision entirely blocked by the smog-like cloud.

It couldn't be described exactly as 'smog' as it was starkly pure. Not polluted air, but rather like shadows put through a fog machine.

Not only did the mist blind him, but it rendered the Kryptonian deaf. As it had poured from the unhinged yellow jaw of the monstrous entity, snaking through the air like a thousand hydra heads, the coughs of civilians streets away died out.

A scratching built in Clark's chest, and he was compelled to fly higher, above the ground, blindly, for fear of collapsing altogether under the influence of the darkness. Eyes screwed shut, he lifted himself cautiously higher and higher until his eyelids felt the warm glow of city lights.

Over the coms link, Vic coughed, "There's this- cough- weird- cough- smoke thing- can't...breathe.. gotta get- cough- out-"

Clark's senses couldn't penetrate the rolling clouds of mist that spilled from the god, spreading over the ground like hungry black waves seeking brittle boats. He couldn't locate any civilians under the fog, or Barry and Vic for that matter. Taking in a deep breath, Superman blew out a powerful, cold gust of wind, strong enough to blow the roof off a house.

The mist didn't budge, but he had caught the attention of the god: having finished their churning out of toxic black smoke.

Towering at least thrice Clark's height, Tezcatlipoca's waist sunk in to the churning, foggy sea. No flesh covering the striped black and yellow skull, the god's eyes, old and red and knowing stopped Clark in his place.

Superman was scared. Very, very scared.

The dead jaguar mounted upon the god as a headdress too seemed to stare at the Kryptonian with eyes as haunting as their master's. Spotted fur giving way to claws the size of knives as their fingers can stop an end, Tezcatlipoca reached a hand out to Clark. The god's jaw opened hauntingly slowly, and like a scene of a horror movie, dislocated itself, hanging lax from the top of their mouth while a terrible cackling voice issued.

"Flee."

The fight or flight instincts were familiar to Clark. He always fought, always.

Superman flew.

At least, he tried to.

Tezcatlipoca's claws struck him before he could escape, scraping across his back, ripping the skin.

Superman's scream passed over the coms as he fell to the ground, in to the mist.

A.N:

Aaaaaand cliffhanger!

I'm sorry my darlings, but I really am #thatbitch so I guess you'll be suffering in suspense. Haha sucks to be you I guess.
Any thoughts, ideas, speculations, theories? I'd love to hear them!

Also... we're on 47k reads?!!!!' What the heck??? This is madness ! Thank you all so so so sooooooo much! You are all gems and, truly, my little darlings <3

-Bats