This is a fic that's an AU where in Bart's future the Justice Lords happened, but he was part of the Outlaws (yes, those Outlaws) which grew and basically opposed them. I'll explain better later on in the fic.
Please review because it would mean the world to me - this prologue's kinda boring but it'll get more interesting later on (if I do continue it, which I plan to do only if people seem to like it). Anyway, Disclaimer - don't own, yada yada.
Please enjoy!
Prologue – Humanity
Bart Allen arrives in an abandoned alleyway of Gotham City, immediately smelling the horrible stench coming from a dumpster beside his machine.
He wrinkles his nose and climbs out of the transport, taking a moment to survey his surroundings. He takes in the walls, dirty and grimy. He notes the sky, partially visible directly above him. He sees the cat scurrying away, probably terrified of his arrival, the poor thing.
He blinks.
This is nice, compared to where Bart's from.
The first order of business is getting rid of the time machine. It would be horribly easy to just zip off and ignore it entirely, but in the long run Bart just can't risk the Justice Lords getting their hands on such technology. That could lead to them discovering his existence, then his identity, then where he's from and… no. He can't allow that happen.
So he hums a jaunty tune as he dismantles it. Bart half expects to look up and see Batman looming behind him at any given moment, but much to his luck no such thing happens. It's a welcome occurrence, and after several moments of speed-working, he's got pieces of a time machine scattered in front of him.
Bart frowns for a brief second, wondering what to do now, before the look flickers off his face and is replaced by a smile. Burning will do, he decides. It won't leave any evidence behind – none that anyone can use, anyway, and if the old stories are true, and Gotham is as bad as he's been told, then surely just some metal being burned in some alleyway won't be enough to warrant the Batman's attention.
He finds a cigarette, abandoned but still burning, sitting on the top of a vandalised bin, holds it up to some paper discarded as litter on the floor, and soon he's got the beginnings of a fire. He speeds it up with his vibrational powers that he learnt a couple years ago, turning the sparks into a blaze, and within minutes the metal is melting and he thinks it's a shame that he's had to destroy his time machine.
Still, he's got other things to do. He lets a smile come to his face when he thinks of all the good he's going to do. He's going to save the world, and become a superhero, just like Grandpa Barry!
"It'll be crash!" Bart comments enthusiastically to himself as he zips away for Star Labs, gazing in wonder at the brilliant and bright and intact buildings as he zigzags through them. Time to get to heroing.
He stops a mugging and drops the rough-looking woman with a gun at the local police station. He trips over a couple of thugs, undressing one chunky man to his underwear and sending one woman with harsh features crashing into an alley wall. He pulls a little boy out the way of the incoming bus with bright headlights. Bart grins the entire time, enthusiastic and happy.
Only been here – what, five minutes? Maybe not even that, and he's already a better hero than the Justice Lords ever were.
Upon arriving at Star Labs, Bart breezes in as a flash of light and sweeps up a pass to the restricted section, a newspaper and a cup of coffee. On a bench a couple of miles away, he sips at the coffee (still warm, he vaguely notes) and speed-reads (literally) through the newspaper, realising that it is exactly two weeks before the Flash is due to get murdered. Good, he thinks. That gives him plenty of time.
Several of the articles are about the Justice Lords, Bart notices, and his nose crinkles with distaste on instinct. This makes him decide that this particular newspaper is not worth reading – what Jason told him was true, he realises. The Lords really did have everyone wrapped around their little fingers'.
He'll change that.
One man has potential, though, he notes. G. Gordon Godfrey openly criticises the Lords and apparently appears to make semi-regular rants about them. Most people seem to view him as a troublemaker, but honestly Bart's just glad that someone's got their head on straight.
He dumps the newspaper and now-empty coffee cup in the trash before he zips away, not really caring if anyone sees him openly displaying his powers. He's moving too quickly for anyone to see his face, anyway. No, what he's more bothered by is the fact that the coffee burned his tongue (and, wow, real coffee – how crash is that?), but that's soon fixed by speed healing.
Bart smiles. He loves being a speedster.
Next, he's just got to this era and he's already bored, so he uses that pass to get into the Top Secret area of Star Labs. He smirks as he zooms past the scientists, moving so incredibly slow. Odds are they haven't even discovered that the pass is missing yet.
Bart flicks through a load of files, raising his eyebrows at some of the things he sees, before deciding that someone could come through the doors at any minute and it'd probably be better for him if he found somewhere quiet to go through everything. He starts to run off, snagging some more coffee straight from a bedraggled-looking scientist's hands, and as he does so he notices someone leaving for their home.
He slows down for a brief moment, but speeds up just as quickly and chooses to sit down in Metropolis, just because he can. He frowns slightly as he sips his still-warm coffee, thinking about homes.
Bart needs somewhere to live, of course, but how to go about it? Though he's incredibly old by their standards of what people have endured, apparently in the past he still registers as legally underage and, thus, needs a guardian. What a pain. He's a speedster, he should run free and wild, not tied down by someone who can't keep up.
He thinks of his old guardians. Jason Todd – either still dead or newly revived, either way in no position to look after him. If he is alive, he'll be on some sort of rampage and Bart's going to be too busy to bother dealing with that sort of thing. The Original Roy Harper – still in his tube, which he considers busting him out of but quickly decides against it. It would draw too much attention towards himself. Koriand'r – not even on this planet, at the moment, and it would be incredibly hard to get her to Earth early, and probably even harder to get a legal identity and assign her as his guardian.
All the other people are all in similar situations – either brainwashed by the Lords at current time or busy with something else, whether it be being dead or just faking it or locked in a tube or being raised by assassins or something of the like.
Bart breathes out slowly and drains the last of his coffee, throwing it in a bin as he zips away. He may be new to this ear, but that's not going to make him into a litter the option of having a real guardian has been thrown out of a window (metaphorically, of course), Bart settles for creating a fake one. In the future (past, future – whatever, Bart's past) he met Babs a couple times before she was killed, and those few times were enough to teach him how to create fake identities. The Rewrite Project was being planned ever since before he arrived in the protection of the Outlaws, so he's had plenty of opportunities to prepare.
He ends up hacking a computer of a local library in Central City, and he makes two identities – one for Bart Allen and one for some randomer he's decided to make up called Max Crandall, because why not? He leaves little hints of himself attending made up schools and puts his real parents' names – Don Allen and Meloni Thawne, because seeing as they haven't been born yet that shouldn't be a problem. He's done an amateur job and he knows it, and anyone who looks too closely will be able to unravel it in just a couple hours, but hopefully he won't be drawing enough attention to himself to warrant that kind of attention.
Then comes the actual house – Bart chooses to have a base instead, because that would be crasher (cooler, people say cooler in this time) and he ends up finding an empty warehouse in a place called the Gobi Desert, and he's not quite sure what the hell a warehouse is doing there but he chooses not to complain. He looks around, sees that it's big but not too big, just the right temperature, in the middle-of-nowhere where no one will ever think to look and it's a little dark, but nothing some yellow paint can't fix.
"It's perfect," he says aloud to no one, and his voice echoes in a really crash way and Bart decides that he could be happy here.
Bart chooses to make a mental list of events in order to clear up the timeline for himself; luckily, he has eidetic memory, so he knows some of these things, but he decides to only strongly note the important stuff, the stuff he wants to change.
He starts with the most important.
01 – Flash is killed by Neutron.
He cares about Grandpa Barry, of course, despite never having met the man, but this event was important in the long run, too. In a fit of rage, Superman killed Nathaniel Tyron and became the first Justice Lord to publicly kill, and the rest was quick to follow.
02 – Superboy kills Aqualad.
As an Outlaw, Bart became privy to this knowledge, but Kaldur'ahm of Atlantis was not actually a traitor. He didn't really kill Artemis, either – just pretended to. She was posing as his right-hand Tigress, but Superboy (who had apparently already suffered a mental attack from his girlfriend Miss Martian) followed his mentor's example and killed Aqualad and his new crew, including Tigress, who he never found out was actually his live and well friend.
03 – Justice Lords have fight with Rimbor.
Bart is sure that once Jason mentioned something about the Justice Lords being mind-controlled and ordered to go off-world, but they didn't and then the people of the place they attacked came here and had a fight with them. The Lords were told that they would be expected in several months' time, and then they agreed.
By the time they were supposed to leave, they had already turned. They wiped out both the Reach and the soldiers of Rimbor alike, and after that it was pretty common knowledge that Earth was to be left alone.
04 – Jason goes sick at Batman.
This is something that might not seem very important overall, but it's something that Bart sees as vital nonetheless. In his time, Jason was his mentor and one of the most powerful people he knew, super abilities or not. According to the older man, he was resurrected and initially pleased that the Lords were now doing what he felt needed to be done, but those feelings quickly vanished once he realised that the Joker was still alive, even then.
"He would kill for Flash but not for me," Jason had said to Bart, and then went on to describing his becoming the Red Hood and so on and so forth.
Bart doesn't want Jason to be upset in the same way again, not if he can stop it. And, okay, he probably can't, but once he's dealt with the beginnings of the Justice Lords turning and the Reach, he'll focus on that.
Bart wants to do more, but he's tired by now and so steals a mattress from a furniture department store (and how crash is it that he can just waltz in and grab one? Seriously, it's great). He carries it all the way to his warehouse and dumps the mattress on the floor, and the floor's kinda damp and that's kinda disgusting but he can deal with that later.
Right now, he sleeps. Saving the world can wait for tomorrow.
I know it might not make a whole lot of sense right now, but it will later, if I hopefully decide to continue. Hope you enjoyed and please review!