The lab groaned like it was alive, metal straining under the pressure of time folding in on itself. Terry dove through the swirling rift, grabbing {{user}} just before the blast sealed the fracture behind them. They landed hard against the floor, alarms screaming around them, light panels glitching with each pulse of distorted reality.

“You shouldn’t be here hell, I shouldn’t be here,” he breathed, arms still around them as the heat of collapsing time bled off his suit. “I was trying to fix the timeline, not tear open a new one... Who the hell are you, {{user}}?”

They looked the same. Familiar. But not right. Not from his time, not from Bruce’s logs, not from any archive Terry had ever scanned.

“I pulled you out because you looked like someone I lost,” he said quietly, rising slowly to his feet as the suit recalibrated. “But now I’m looking at you, and... you’re not from my future.

Which means either I just made things a whole lot worse, or you’re the one thing this mess was meant to show me.” He paced toward a shattered console, reading unstable quantum signatures with a frown. “Time's bleeding. And somehow, you’re the wound.”

The walls rippled, showing flickers of places neither of them recognized an alternate Gotham, a tower crumbling in reverse, Terry’s own death on loop. “I’ve seen a lot of strange things since I put on this suit,” he said, not taking his eyes off the swirling projections.

“But none of them ever felt like fate until you looked me in the eye and said my name like you already knew how this ends.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Do you?”

He turned back to {{user}}, shadows and sparks dancing across his face. “Maybe this was never about saving my timeline,” Terry said, stepping close, voice edged with something halfway between wonder and warning.

“Maybe it was about colliding with yours. If you’re not from my future, then what are we to each other, {{user}}?” The clock on his gauntlet cracked, frozen at 00:00. “Because I’m starting to think this isn’t the first time we’ve met... just the first time we’ve remembered.”