Wally's tirade about his past based off of what little I know of his comic book history. His bitterness really stands out here.

The citizens of Jump had no idea who they owed their sorry asses to in the subsequent weeks after my little death stint.

I lived. Consequently, Robin would delight in reeling me into his world of leadership abusing and painful, terse sessions of lecturing. And, man, those were painful. Robin had a...way of railing in on you that made you feel not only incredibly guilty, but incredibly stupid.

I would feel less of the former and more of the latter. I refuse to feel guilt over refusing Robin's initial order of not giving the enemy chase should they flee. It had been a rule he'd established from the very start of our Brotherhood of Evil hunt, but I always thought it a hindrance, another example of Dick's sterling and stifling safety sense. Not only was he whipped by our girl Star, but he was obsessive about being the Ideal Leader.

What Ideal Leader...what the hell was that supposed to be? I hardly think Batman should be a template for his aspirations—but, hey, who am I to talk? In any case, Robin was—he was not the Dark Knight. He wasn't even the proper sidekick! Do sidekicks skip half across the country to up and leave their mentors?

Robin was never meant to restrain that height of his capacity business, much less his own. He was anal, an unforgivable perfectionist. Were he a fellow student of mine, I would've long slapped on the overachiever label on his head and left him alone to his all-nighters, laughing in the face of his baggy bags. I like my sleep, thanks.

Heck, he probably would've been one of those kids who'd have gotten into those uppity eastern coast colleges—all for Mommy and Daddy's sake, of course. Silver spoon and all. He might have even been that snobby, sneering transfer student who hailed from Gotham City and broken out the check book for every minute transaction.

Of course, this was all ridiculous speculation—Robin would never have been like that. Not in this universe, the next, whichever. Robin was not a pretty boy, rich boy.

Instead, he was something much worse.

He was a leader. And as my leader responsible for my actions, he was understandably pissed. With me. A hard thing to do, I'm sure. When I first met the guy, he was this insufferable do-gooder—the stuff of comic books, you know? At least he hadn't that gungho superhero mentality and his personality had been lacking...well, I guess he's still that same guy, only not. You'd have thought the ones to have flown the coop would have burst into reckless, post-parental guidance behavior.

But not Robin. That would have been the most outrageous thing he could have done. Instead of tripping over his not-so dainty feet towards that glorious and bright freedom, he turned right around and formed a team.

I did not have a falling out with my mentor. That man—he's the last person I'd go out of my way to insult. You know how it is, though: The kiddy deal with the serving of spandex yellow and red dished out on the side? Wouldn't anyone get sick of it? Getting fed the same thing day in and day out...what was a sidekick but a tag-a-long, wannabe hero playing with the big boys? Lectures this and that, but he didn't need words to make me feel ashamed. Whenever he caught me in my experimentation with my own powers. Whenever I abused them for petty, petty things.

I was a kid. Okay? I was a kid. So somehow I grew up into this disillusioned teenager and now I somehow never manage to find the time to drop in on my hometown of Central. Amazing feat, isn't it? Me, the fastest boy alive, never exploring his roots for those good days gone by sort of nostalgic deal. It wasn't like I was avoiding them or anything—the people there, the people I knew. The family I lived with once under one roof. And the disappointed mentor? Right around the corner...

But, hey, what can I say? I got sucked into Robin's fervor with only the vague purpose of protecting mankind to look forward to in my future. Surely that could have been my feeble retort, my justification, for never coming back home. I was sick of that place, right? I'd run away—not really. More like...like I was chased out.

Of course not. I had that shiny, polished badge proclaiming my superhero status, all nice and golden and pinned to my chest—didn't I? Ignominy wasn't my thing, so why would I even think about it in the first place? Besides, it wasn't like the situation was that extreme. Nobody knew a thing except me and—

So I used them for petty things, my power. Unnecessary things. It didn't mean I was a murderer.

Ah. The crux of the matter, wasn't it? Gee, why did I turn out so jaded and twisted? I know that guy's death wasn't my fault. I wasn't so stupid as to automatically think the world ended twice fold just 'cause of an accidental death—by me—but did he have to rub it in, that man?

The man who'd been afflicted with me as his partner apparently was more concerned about the whack-job nature I'd turned my powers into more than some random dude's death. Or maybe it was the latter. In those last days of my ill-fated, not-so illustrious affair with the sidekick gig, I wasn't able to read him much at all.

Maybe I'd been inspired. He was a great guy, great superhero. He kicked ass daily and I knew ever since the first day of my job that that'd be who I'd become. The hero. The Flash. With all the public fawning and admiration included—and niffty powers, to boot.

I was such an idiot. The whole damn country turned a blind eye to our freakish abilities. For christ's sake, there were even insurance companies out there just to cover up for our sloppy deeds. The civilians were the ones to clean up our messes. They were the ones to suffer. They were the ones who were always caught up in the middle of everything.

Not to say they were entirely guilt-free. The whole world would be a better place if there was no one around, I'd imagine, but was it my job to imagine? To think beyond the suffocating boundaries that being a superhero called for? We were in the limelight—that superficial glory. Yes, we saved lives. Yes, we stopped all the evil henchmen that were apt to run about like headless chickens—yes, I bet we even saved goddamn cats stuck in those dumb trees. It was called the superhero training wheels, kiddies.

But what about the criminals? Don't lecture me—don't you dare. I have never advocated crime and I never will.

But the world isn't cast in black and white shades, though. There are grays. And shoved in between those gray is the necessity for survival, that primal drive to succeed. That evolution thing Darwin kept ranting about back in the day—the fittest will survive.

Society isn't so bendable, flexible, or even radical enough to accept those grays. Criminals were to be condemned. The end. There was no denouement, no...happy epilogue waiting for men on death row. If you broke the law, off to prison we go.

I thought just like that. That all bad men were bad men from the core and from the start. That they should be punished, condemned—it was the mentality I strove for because, otherwise, how could I have survived? To actively hunt men...men who I could've been.

Perhaps I'd been so interested in Robin originally because he'd been tutored by the world's best. Gotham's infamous Dark Knight wasn't so dark; rather, he saw the world as it really was. The only question that particular man had to answer to then was...how to respond.

My mentor did no such thing. When it was revealed the impetus for all the tireless work I put into mastering my own abilities, all those months of experimentation, my mentor didn't pat me on the back and congratulated me. No, he sat me down and fairly yelled at me. And he wasn't the type to yell, either. He was shrewd, didn't say stupid or meaningless things, and raised me fairly well under the circumstances.

Maybe it bothered him that I tried to break the law myself by breaking out an inmate. The inmate, the one who was apparently destined to die because of my decision to break taboo, had a family. He didn't deserve to die on the government's beck and call. He didn't deserve to be imprisoned for doing something so innately good as to save his wife and kids. Not the only civilian who knew what I was but didn't treat me any differently for it. Not the guy I'd been friends with for weeks upon weeks.

His methods were a little wrong, so they threw him into jail? Where was justice to be had? I was a kid then, but I wasn't stupid and I wasn't a metahuman of the last generation—too set in the old, honorable, chivalry-crap, comic book worthy days.

No, I was a kid who lived in a world constantly slapped with warfare and steeped in all things bad. A kid in that kind of world trying to be some do-gooder? There was only so much naivety my inner-doubt and skepticism could take.

So I tried to be brave in my own little way, and my own little way just happened to end up killing the guy I'd been trying to save. Vibrating through walls hadn't been a problem once I figured out how to do it. The only matter was how to bring something else through with me.

More specifically, a person.

I killed a man at age eleven. With all the bravado and ego and arrogance of a child hero, I thought I could do good. Save a life, a friend. Selfishly think that I had such power...

I'd been frustrated with my mentor. The details are a little foggy now—it's been years—but I do remember the kid gloves I was handled with. As if I couldn't take what life could throw at me. I wasn't going to break down and cry just 'cause of a little injustice in the world. I was Kid Flash, I was my mentor's sidekick.

I could handle it, I thought. Maybe I wanted to do something stupid like proving myself. To the world? To that man.

That man didn't teach me all he knew. Like he knew that I wouldn't know how to accept the responsibility that came with our powers. He was right. My experiments probably screwed me over, but at age eleven every kid thinks he's invincible.

I learned how to walk through walls. I figured out how to separate my molecules all own my own, with no mentor in the backseat and no instructions given previous. At the time, it was the most surreal experience of my life.

When I distanced myself from the Flash, I met a man of a decent sort. He didn't judge me. He accepted me for who I was. He listened to me, gave me advice, let me take up his time just by talking to him.

He lived in the poorer parts of Central. You know, the run down neighborhoods that left old geezers shaking their heads in all of their self-righteous snobbery? But I never saw the guy differently for it. He was intelligent, smart. He knew things. About life. Jaded and weary, but he was nice. He never looked down on me.

Did you know his daughter wanted to grow up and get enough money so that they could all move away? Little Janice was a grade school kid, a little younger than me, but she was already taking care of her mom and dad. Her little brother—christ, he wanted to do some good in the world. A figure of authority, like a policeman. The kid should've been thinking of the lack of toys he had or...or something. So selfless! How could a kid his age be so thoughtful?

Their mom was sickly, but she was bright and cheerful. She always greeted me with a smile.

Her husband was a good man. A good man.

I talked to him, but I didn't know him. It was why I was thrown when he was jailed. For something I couldn't even understand. He was taken in by some shady guys—blackmailed, threatened, whatever. They didn't threaten him, they threatened his kids. They threatened his wife, to kill her. Alone, helpless—how could a vulnerable woman like her stand up to such bastards?

He acquiesced. They were affiliated with a mob. He knew that. But he still gave in because he couldn't stand to see his family hurt.

I was a kid. I was helpless. What could I do? He never told me anything. He never told me how troubled he was or how much he was suffering, alone, with no one to confide in. He kept his family in the dark, never told me anything, so I had to learn that he'd gotten wrapped up in such a situation through the news!

Humiliation. Anger. Disbelief. Why hadn't he told me anything?

Wasn't I the Flash's sidekick? Wasn't I Kid Flash? Couldn't I have helped him in any way? Wasn't I a hero? Wasn't I powerful?

I was sick of it. It used to be all a game. The Flash hadn't listened to me. The police discredited anything I had to say. No one understood. No one even cared! All they could focus on was the scandalous nature of it all.

But I'm not just a metahuman. I'm human, too. I can't be upstanding and moral and good all the time. I'm not some American icon, something to put up on a pedestal, someone to look up to.

I was just a kid back then. I didn't confuse myself with obligations—I saw something wrong, so I tried to fix it. It backfired on me. Of course it had to. Nothing was easy, was it?

My parents were ashamed of me, of the publicity I'd garnered. Afraid that I would be linked to them! Those moral, upstanding citizens! But they'd long cast me out and hoisted me off onto my aunt.

My uncle revealed his true self to me when I started abusing my powers.

The damnedest thing, yeah? What a coincidence—the Flash, my relative! Have we got some freak genes or something? Apparently, the superhero gig was in my blood from the getgo...

That was all it was supposed to be. A gig. And then the man I killed was stuck in a wall. Did you know that something can't be made to occupy a space already filled with mass? The bricks seeped red that day...

Disillusioned, I fled the public scene. I wallowed a bit in Central before I got so sick of it all. Or maybe I was in grief. I ran.

Robin hooked me up with Jump City and his crew. Gave a place to stay for the night and fed me stuff. Worn out from all the running I'd done, I'd crashed at the fellow junior superhero's house without any warning. Or wariness—I was so tired. Funny how strong our friendship grew after that. He'd been just a boy I had passing acquaintance with...

Funny how he could grow to know me so well.

He didn't even bat an eye at my story, although I left out the nitty gritty bloody bits about the inmate's death. He didn't condemn me for trying to save a man, though he clearly disapproved of my reckless behavior. He was also confused; he didn't understand why I felt I had to save that man.

But it wasn't an obligation. It was for moral's sake. It was called being human.

Robin hadn't been able to see the grays. His world was too staunchly set full of whites and blacks. In a way, he didn't understand me—or know me—at all. He couldn't, not with that gungho superhero mentality.

But I moved beyond that. Is that an arrogant thing to say? But it was true. I wasn't going to be somebody's hero. I did my job, yeah, but I was detached. Nothing to hurt me, nothing to affect me—it was all part of a game.

Robin let me play. Robin let me play precisely because he disapproved of my flippant attitude. He knew someday, somehow, an event would jarr me from my apathy and make me see.

I lived.

The citizens of Jump had no idea who they owed their sorry asses to in the subsequent weeks after my little death stint.

I lived. Consequently, Robin would delight in reeling me into his world of leadership abusing and painful, terse sessions of lecturing.

That was what I believed.

But Robin didn't rail at me in the aftermath. He didn't yell at me or even act like that cold steel persona of Ideal Leader.

He wasn't Robin in that moment. He was Dick Grayson. And that meant more to me than anything.

Honesty. Trust. The brilliant and flashy world of superheroes had little of these. Trusting a teammate was an obligation, a decision in order to make a well oiled machine out of a team. Honesty? What honesty? Everybody had duel identities...

I'm so sick of being Kid Flash.

With Robin it was different. With him I could take off all masks. I never felt mad when he couldn't return the favor. I knew that he had this inability to take off the mask, cast aside the persona, peel back deceptive skin in order to reveal the true face...

Robin was his true face. That was why he could never be fully honest. With me or anyone else, he couldn't detach himself from his other life. He couldn't escape the mechanics of duality. I never begrudged him for it—it was a result of his hard line upbringing, training. I accepted it as a part of him. I understood that it was a core part of his character. I understood that this was his flaw.

In the beginning, I didn't understand. But in the beginning, I was disillusioned and mistrusting of the whole superhero thing. In spite of that, a friendship grew. Steadily, carefully, slowly...strongly.

And I was finally rewarded. For the first time, he was Dick Grayson in my presence.

It made all the difference to me.

Robin was finally beginning to trust me. It only made sense to do the same for him.

He knew there was anger inside of me. He knew that with all my jaded, distrusting outlook on the world that I could never be the vigilante he would be. I could never be him, not a team leader. Not a guy with all these grand responsibilities.

What he didn't know was why I would choose working in the slums over working in the Tower any day. He didn't know how weary I was of this life or that I wanted, desperately, for everyone and everything to just shut up and leave me be.

I think, sometimes, I'm a hypocrite. I want to let loose and rail on the world for screwing me over, but I don't have the fucking energy. Yet at the same time the weakening of my powers blows my mind—I can't accept it. Maybe metahumans are like that, freaks who can't live without being biologically freaky. Maybe it's against our gene natures to lose our powers. Who knows.

I don't really care what happens to me now. I want to die, I want to live. I want my powers, I don't want them back—because that would mean that I'd still be a metahuman. I'm just so full of contradictions it makes my head hurt just to think of them all.

I don't know what I want. Somehow, I should care about the rut I'm stuck in, the inevitable fall towards listlessness, apathy, and all that good stuff, but I don't care. I really don't. But now I do. Now I want to live. I want her to see me! Only me.

Not some stupid dream figment in her head, in her past, that's never going to come back. I hate her, I love her. I want her to stop having this power over me, this innate tether bond that ties the two of us together. Not like she cares, knows, or wants it. Not like me.

Rachel doesn't like me that way.

It hurts. It hurts, damn it—it hurts.

I'm recuperating in the T-Tower. I hate it here. Cyborg goes all out to impress, apparently, he and his stupid technology. Sterile, cold, I can't stand hospitals much less a fake ward playing at medic.

His little robots tend to me here. Almost like they're sentient. They watch me with freaky red eyes.

Ultimately, Cyborg and his little pets are all hooked up to the tower mainframe. However, it does not bring me any sort of comfort to be stitched and sewn and assembled back together by mechanical things that can't even call my name.

Everyone else is too damn busy tracking down the Brotherhood of Evil Gits to even drop by my prison and say hello.

Is it so wrong just to want to hear my name? I'm a person. Metahuman, yes, but I'm alive. Not well—maybe. I need some conversation or I'll go crazy. Four days I've been in here. Once I got my wits about and realized that Starfire took me to a freakin' French hospital, I ran out of there like it was nobody's business. And it wasn't! I wasn't going to die, and I'm quite alive now, aren't I?

Robin didn't let me sulk off to the slums to lick my wounds in the goddamn dinky walled privacy of my pad. I could have seen Rachel. I could have done a lot of things.

Now I'm here. In a place where I don't belong and don't want to belong. In a place that represents all the goodness, teeth-rotting sugar cane, cotton candy crap in the world about teenage vigilantes. God, I don't want to be in this wreck of a fun house.

Meanwhile, robots creep me out. Cyborg doesn't have the freaking confidence to do some healing aid on me all by lonesome himself. A technician, not a healer, not a medic. I suppose being a seven-foot-tall metal tower himself taught him not to mess with tinkling and delicate things—like surgery. Like healing. Aw, who cares anyway! His own damn fault for not watching my back when the Brotherhood first got a hit on me.

I know he's beating himself over and over and over because of that. Guilt is making him stay far from my vicinity. It pisses me off, it does. I don't blame him, either—evil dudes and dudette being a pain in the ass and all—but I hate his avoidance. Can't we just sit down and talk like reasonable adults? But of course, we're not adults; we're kids. Playing at superheroes. In a superhero world.

Is it any wonder I'd felt my life was a game before I got slammed into the ground by the now-not-wussy-Brotherhood of Evil?

I want him to call off his robots. Right now. I want these people to get over themselves and come and at least pretend to give a damn about me. Hypocrite, aren't I? I don't like them. I don't want them to like me. But I still want to see their faces. A lot. Right now.

Humans aren't meant to be caged like animals. Metahumans are not animals, either. We're not showthings. We're not circus freaks. I'm getting claustrophobic in here just because I'm not used to metal walls.

Back home—not Central, never that—there weren't any metal walls. The slums, my home? No. But nearby is where I really live. And where I really live is where Rachel really lives. You get the picture?

She used to cry in her sleep, all pathetic and mewling like. That was before I thought to get to know her and thought she was a really creepy lady who never came out of her room. I thought she was old, too, being some years older than I.

It doesn't matter anymore.

My point is: do you know how thin those apartment walls really are? Seriously. I could hear her.

She doesn't cry anymore—my girl Rachel is made of tougher stuff. Or maybe she's getting over Dream Boy. Not likely. Why? Because she's still lovesick, horny, and mooning for a prepubescent boy who's probably forgotten all about her. It's been, what, over ten years?

God, I hate him.

Sometimes I hate her, too.

I slap myself at that point, but my heart's not only mutinous. It's masochistic. It loves to throw me for a loop when it wrenches my feelings this way and that. It loves to see me be tortured. It loves my suffering, beating wildly and manically when the damn girl's around, and then hurting, hurting, hurting when she's not.

It loves flopping all over, flipping crazily between love and hate, because I'm a sick masochist and I don't even care.

I should move. Where? Don't care—but far. Far, far away from here. Damn my obligations, and damn my teammates!

But I can't abandon Richard; he's not an obligation. He sure as hell isn't a teammate, either. He's something else, more.

A friend.

Damn you, heart. Damn you to hell.

Not...a happy chapter. Next chapter will revert back to Raven's very muted tone. I'm sensing a POV pattern here.

Jinx should pop up in future somewhere. Considering that the episode Lightspeed should happen quite soon, it's a possibility.

The chapter's not edited, but I'll get to it. Took a break from Teen Titans and during that time I practiced using present tense. I've given up making this fic nice and neat, but I still like it since it's all one big experiment. The jarring differences between Raven's and Wally's POV is pretty cool.