Big Damn Item Post

[goldeneyedflash]

Christmas morning was one of the few days they really couldn't afford to sleep in. No training, but for some reason, any day the rest of the world was celebrated tended to make the psychos come out in force. He tried not to think about it too much, because if he did, he'd end up brooding about who wasn't around to share the holiday smackdown with

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[kaleidoscopeyed]

Karolina is wandering far, a lot further out than she usual goes from the compound or the treehouse. She's been walking for awhile, entranced by the beauty of the untrodden snow all over again. The paths are all muddied now, and it's refreshing to see untouched snow.

She sees the tracks first, so out of place in all the whiteness, and then she hears a keening sound floating toward her. She picks up her pace and then sees Bart and the statue. Her eyes didn't linger on that too long, because the sound was coming from Bart. It was coming from her friend.

She runs the last few feet and falls to her knees next to him, hesitating to touch him. She does though, laying a hand on his shoulder. "Bart? Honey?"

[goldeneyedflash]

Bart didn't mean to flinch at her touch, but he wasn't really in control anymore. Absently scrubbing at his face with the back of one gloved hand, he tried to pull himself together, to not be the wreck he felt like. It wasn't fair, because what he really wanted to do was find whoever thought this was a joke and hand them their ass.

"First Spoiler, now this," he said, softly.

[kaleidoscopeyed]

Karolina pulls her hand back sharply as he flinches. Even so, she doesn't take it personally. Her hand hovers over his shoulder for another moment before she draws it back into her lap. She glances up at the statue and then back at Bart, making the connection that anyone would have made. Still she has to ask. "I don't understand. What happened? What's wrong?" She hates how that question comes out of her mouth, dry, cliched, and trite, but it's the heart of the matter. At least she hadn't asked are you okay?

[goldeneyedflash]

"His name's Superboy. He was my best friend. I wasn't fast enough to save him, and there wasn't anyone else who could even try," Bart said, not meeting her eyes. She didn't mean anything by the questions, because she couldn't possibly know.

"This stood next to the statue Metropolis put up when Superman was killed by Doomsday. SB first showed up not long after that, along with some other people who weren't the original S, but tried anyways. Kon, er, Kon-el was the Kryptonian name Superman gave him. Didn't stay dead, seems like some people don't. But Kon was cloned from a sample of Superman and mixed with human DNA. A refugee from the future, a not-quite-successful duplicate, and Robin. That was where we started. Didn't take long before Wonder Girl and some others joined us, but in the beginning,there were three.

"And the one who never had any powers to begin with is the one still standing."

[kaleidoscopeyed]

A stricken expression floods her face. Her hand flies to her mouth and she utters a little cry. "Oh god. Bart..." she says, but she mostly just listens. She feels her own losses in his, but doesn't try to compare them. She doesn't know much about his world and his past, although she does know some of its people now. And she does know what grief is, and while grief can be shared it cannot not compared, and she sees his as so fresh that it's sharp and cutting.

She reaches out a hand to touch his shoulder again, gently. Her brow creases a little in confusion as she doesn't quite make the connection. "Powers don't mean everything," she says slowly and then continues, "But I thought you..." She doesn't want to ask the question that is on the tip of her tongue, but it's too late for that. "You mean you're not...?"

[goldeneyedflash]

"I knew what was going to happen. Grandma had told me, she didn't want me to die, and she tried everything she could to stop me," Bart said, quietly. "But history isn't always fixed, and she'd been wrong before. There's always a chance. Besides, they were killing the hostages. I could be there faster than anyone else. How could I stand back and not help?"

[kaleidoscopeyed]

"Oh no," she says, her voice very small. "You did what you had to, what you could right?" She's not sure if she wants to ask more, but she goes ahead anyway. "What happened?" She knows she doesn't have the background to really understand it, but she's trying.

[goldeneyedflash]

"It was a trap. To draw me out, lure me in. Inertia knew what I was capable of, how could he not, he's me, or nearly," Bart said, bitterly. "And I went in, knowing it. Knowing that I was going to die. He'd...he'd figured out a way to...to draw my speed, no, the entire Speed Force out of me. So that he could pull it into himself. That part worked.

"But things are never quite the way you'd expect. I'd been the Speed Force, it had been me...for over a year. Ever since I was the only one to come back out after trapping Prime. You put that much energy in one person, and it's going to change. He pulled it out. Contained it. But if he'd tried to put it into himself, there would have been...too much. The rest would have been released. Like a nuclear explosion, released."

[kaleidoscopeyed]

She's getting the picture pretty well now, of this part at least. "So you didn't have your speed anymore? He took it away from you?" She shudders a little at the idea, not wanting to think about that. "But he couldn't do anything with it..." But he must have been able to do something.

Her hand resting on his shoulder moves carefully to his back, spinning in slow circles. She's not really aware of doing it.

"And...what happened?"

[goldeneyedflash]

"Inertia's my twin. He was a speedster like me, except when I absorbed all of it into me, that cut the others off. He blamed me for losing his abilities. Well, he'd always blamed me for everything. So he really wanted to transfer it from me to him. I don't know if the drugs didn't push him over the edge, the Velocity he was taking that gave him his speed on a temporary basis," Bart said, glancing up at his friend's image in a way to keep from cracking.

"The Speed Force is what makes a speedster. Without it, you're just fast. It's...beyond time and space, even trying to put it in those terms is difficult. It also contains the souls, the spirits of every speedster that ever lived. But it isn't alive, or at least it wasn't. I don't really know if the energy itself is intelligent or even self aware. I know it wants to be used, but how isn't important to it."

[kaleidoscopeyed]

"This is so messed up," she breathes. She knows that some crazy stuff has happened to her. She knows dozens of stories of the crazy things that have happened to other superheroes. None of them have ever been told to her at the foot of the statue of a hero, out of place in this snowy landscape, with a broken young man sitting below it.

Her gaze joins his as he looks up at the statue. She doesn't know what's important here, but she's not about to leave him. She knows he's dead where he comes from as surely as Gert is in Karolina's time, but that doesn't make a difference here and now. "So he wanted to get back at you... permanently," she says the word like it hurts.

[goldeneyedflash]

Bart laughed, bitterly. "Thad's been trying to do that since the first time we've met. Because he believes he's better than I am, and can replace me. It's what he was raised to believe," he said, shaking his head.

He remembered that last fight, down to the last blow. "But Kon...I gave up four years of my life trying to keep his murderer from breaking free to finish the job. Everyone else lived weeks in that time. And it wasn't enough to save him. All the speed in the multiverse wasn't enough. I failed him. And worse, I started the chain of events that led to my dying. The Black Flash, Death itself came for me..."

Bart trailed off, remembering the horror, and the shame. "You know what the worst part was? There was a way to cheat death. There was another speedster there. All I had to do was become a murderer. And I wanted to."

[kaleidoscopeyed]

She listens at first with sympathy, the slow circles her hand is making over his back circling out as he continues to speak about his friend. But soon that sympathy shifts to alarm. "Hey," she says more sharply than she means to. "But you didn't!" she protests. "You didn't do it. You made the choice not to become that. Come on. That's not stupid. You were a hero. And just because you weren't able to save him...Weren't there in time, doesn't mean you were any less a hero then. He was wasn't he?"

She looks back up at the statue briefly and then back to Bart. In the back of her mind she's remembering waking up outside of a burnt out building only to be told that no one had been able to save Gert. They'd all been there, within sight of it happen -- Chase had actually been in the same room, and none of them had been able to stop it. And all it had taken was a knife.

[goldeneyedflash]

"Some hero," Bart said, pulling away, starting to get to his feet. "Pretty much everyone I ever cared about is dead or worse."

He couldn't think about the worse, because there was plenty of that. Friends whose lives had been changed, and not for the better. "You want to know what happened to Kon, ask Nightwing. He was there. I only showed up in time for the cleanup."

[kaleidoscopeyed]

She frowns, feeling her own emotions go on edge and start to tumble over. She grabs his sleeve before he can fully rise from the ground. "I don't want to know about that," she says quietly, but with enough of an edge in her voice that it carries to him. "I want to know about you."

They aren't close, but she does care. Care a lot. Kare-bear if you want to get right down to it. Chase calls her that for a reason. "You don't have to tell me what happened to him, you can even tell me to go the hell away, but don't... don't hate yourself for it. We all make our own choices." And in grief we choose to be selfish and stupid. She doesn't say it, because though there's truth to it, she doesn't really mean it.

[goldeneyedflash]

"I can't forget anything. The only things I don't remember are the three days I spent in a coma after one of my scouts got killed, and nearly everything about the time I spent in there. I just...the other speedsters, dead and living put their faith in me, and I let them down," Bart said. "Batman called me 'Impulse' for a reason. It was a warning."