I'm tired of obscuring the Catalyst, so I sat down and dragged Nightwing in for a semi-confrontational but very informational scene with Red X. But this update only reveals the political aspect of the Catalyst, and I want to play around with the terrorist characters a bit more, which is awfully convenient since that would involve delving into the three-year period of the Catalyst. More future chapters to come, obviously.
Canon Notes: Slade ends up destroying Blüdhaven. The circumstances surrounding that are not important, only that it allows Nightwing to be free of his Blüdhaven obligations. The chapter takes place a significant amount of time after the Nightwing comic line, so while Dick's still a cop, I've taken creative license with his role.
Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker is referenced vaguely and justifies Bruce's one moment of OOC; BBeyond changed Batman's attitude towards sidekicks because the Joker ends up screwing Tim Drake over.
Blüdhaven was the type of town that was full of squealing degenerates Nighwing would have sooner spat upon than thrown in jail.
He threw them in jail.
An economically troubled city, it was largely looked over because of its sprawling, metropolis neighbor, Gotham. But Gotham would've overshadowed anything, really, if one only looked at its statistics on crime. There wasn't a resident alive in Gotham who wasn't prepared for a whole assortment of nasty surprises, having evacuations for nearly everything from rampaging insects to giant robot attacks to Joker gas release. The last one wasn't a happy drill, and Gotham was probably even prepared for the day Batman went bat-shit crazy on all of them.
Screw off, the Dark Knight would say, before BSing the world and going dark. Of course, Batman wouldn't have done that. The man was no coward, Nightwing could easily admit that, but he wondered at times why Bruce even bothered. The old man was still going on strong. He may have been feeble and he may have been training some protegee or another and he may have needed a cane to get on by...but Bruce was still Bruce, and Batman wouldn't hang his cape and cowl so easily. Physically, yeah—Batman was no god and he knew full well he was mortal and made all sorts of crazy plans in preparation for his retirement days—but otherwise...
Gotham was...indescribable. It took awhile, but the city finally bounced back to its good old, crazies-ridden self. Unbelievably, the filthy city made its way out from the Catalyst mostly unscathed. Maybe a little more unhinged, but Gotham locals were already a bit off from the start. It wasn't like a near-global economic disaster would have knocked the city off its foundations—no, of course not because America needed its dumpster, its dirty little secret, and Gotham was it.
Blüdhaven had the fortunes to be located close to its sister city that it managed to survive. What a shame. Too bad they were far enough away from the west that the cities couldn't have conveniently offed themselves. It would have saved him a lot of stress.
Nightwing wondered why he even bothered anymore. And then something happened that he'd thought would never happen.
The Batman finally snapped. Every Robin, by then, had been so screwed up by the job that Bruce went crazy about ending everything that was the Dark Knight's legacy—his legacy. Confiscated everybody's suits and went personally after Nightwing's when he didn't show up for the farewell ceremony. Dick stopped the vigilante gig after Bruce snapped up his uniform, but only because he was so sick of Batman and everything Gotham. Batman had made a point that night, but it was a gesture, a warning, and he respected the old man's wishes. He officially gave up the cape and cowl business and never entered Gotham in the capacity of Nightwing. It wasn't like he completely stopped crime fighting—he wouldn't leave the wastrels of Blüdhaven to run free—but the days of costuming were over. He had another way to fight wretches now.
Dick Grayson was a cop. Brow raised high, the former Boy Wonder drawled into the phone, "Now? You want me over right now?"
He really, really didn't want to deal with Bruce.
"Come now," the older man demanded in that ultra-cool-I'm-Still-Your-Mentor-You-Punk sort of way, before he hung up.
Dick lifted the ancient, corded phone away from his face and grimaced into it.
Yeah. Sure, Bruce. Pull the Batman card on him. He wanted Grayson all the way up in Gotham? Fine, he would go, but he was going to give as good as he got.
He was going to go as Nightwing. Maybe not physically, but...Bruce may have taken his identity, his one way to lash out against the world, against the criminal filth that populated its cities...but he had not taken Nightwing. He had not taken his pride. His anger.
Dick smiled bitterly as he made his way out of his office, wanting nothing more than to punch a certain old man at the moment, when he was stopped.
The secretary was yawning as she handed the papers over. "Here you go, Commish. Knock yourself out."
He accepted them, unsmiling. "Don't tell me another costumed freak came to town?"
"Nah." Around another yawn, she added, "And nobody's broken out yet, so it's your usual fare now."
"Only scum this time?"
"Yup." She looked bored and tired and she was juggling folders and a cup of coffee. "You look like you're raring for some action. God knows where the hell you get your energy in the morning."
"It's part of the job."
"Right. A nice and comfy desk job for ya. I don't know how you can pull it off."
Looking wry, he said, "Is there anything else you wanted?"
"Yep, that report you commissioned? It should be waiting for you at your desk, but, uh...I'm guessing you didn't see it, huh?"
Cursing, Dick swung back around to enter his office while the secretary only shook her head.
"The Mikron files?" he called out, riffling through the thick packet on his desk. "How long—?"
"Only last night, sir. The activity you've been hoping to see? Yeah, it's all there. Some really weird stuff is happening and..."
"You saw?"
"It's what you pay me to do, sir. You've only yourself to blame for your laziness."
He was muttering as he ripped out a page. "Listen, could you hold fort while I'm gone?"
"You're going somewhere, Commish?"
"Yeah," Dick said grimly, donning a coat. "I'm off to Gotham."
"Godspeed, sir."
Yeah. He was going to need it, too.
xx
He was a cop and though the judicial system was as fucked up as he was, he would still try. He'd swim and struggle and scream against the downpour and at the end of the day he would collapse on his couch and wonder why he cared. A workaholic, nobody understood why the commissioner tried so hard; he didn't have an answer either.
Something was driving him, forcing him to act—pressuring him. He couldn't ignore crime; he suspected the sights of it were so deeply ingrained in him that it was all he could do to not notice it. It didn't mean he wasn't disgusted. After all, he'd almost recoiled at the sight of his chosen city before realizing that he had to do something to help.
So, he'd become a cop. Even as Nightwing, he'd been a cop. He had his bad days here and there with loads of corrupt coworkers, but, hey, he'd clawed his way to the top. In the end, he'd been able to secure himself a position where he could do something more substantial, more long lasting, than just throwing criminals in jail. He was the commissioner.
Bruce had good timing after all. Dick didn't feel like tromping through Gotham's sister city as both Nightwing and its police head. Juggling identities aside, he'd invested too much passion in his job. Maybe too much. He needed Nightwing to vent—maybe he did need Nightwing to even make a difference because it wasn't like he liked his job...
It didn't mean he didn't take it seriously.
Imagine his surprise when Blüdhaven was destroyed, completely demolished, when he arrived after a rare trip from Gotham. And to learn that it was Slade who destroyed it? Bullshit—well, not quite Slade, not the monster from his youth, but Deathstroke or whatever the guy was going by these days.
The bastard.
If there was one thing Nightwing regretted about being Robin, it was his childish ethics. The boy Robin had grown to hate Slade, so much so that the Teen Titans had worried over his anal retentive, obsessive compulsions about said villain, but he was still a boy. A stupid kid embittered by his origins and sick of being the Batman's sidekick. All this and Dick never ended up killing Slade? After everything the man had ever done against his team? After coercing him into becoming his apprentice, throwing the traitor Terra on them, threatening Raven by being the middleman of some intergalactic rageful demon, and over all being a pain in the ass? Outrageous. Preposterous. Un-fucking-believable.
He blamed his Bat morals. He blamed Bruce for a lot of things.
He even blamed his aging mentor for getting him caught up again in his dealings as Robin. Again. He'd put that identity to the side—he had never wanted to see that traffic-light-colored disaster of a suit ever, but there went Bruce and dragged him back to the past.
Jump was gone. The Titans were disbanded...what more did Batman want from him? What would it take for the old man to let him be Dick Grayson—just Dick? Hadn't the man stolen enough years from him? Was the matter so important that he had to get his ass over to Gotham to see what Bruce wanted now?
Apparently, it was.
He couldn't stop his team from falling apart. He couldn't stop that godforsaken anger in him. He couldn't even stop Blüdhaven from going up in flames.
Slade—it always went back to Slade. Deathstroke. Whatever.
"Do something about this," was the first thing Bruce demanded of his protegee. Probably the first in twenty-five years. The suit-confiscation incident didn't count, and Dick no longer adhered to Batman's orders.
Still. This was Bruce talking to him, tired, old, jaded Bruce Wayne—not the Batman.
So, he listened. He regretted, but he still listened.
Batman wasn't completely dead to him, after all.
xx
It was the first time he visited Jump again and it was long after Wally had died. His first glimpse of his old haunt after they'd all disbanded, and it years after the Catalyst had ravaged the city. Illegally dodging past borders and tromping through difficult geography—it had been extremely difficult to get into the west coast, but Nightwing had done it. He'd done it to finally allow himself time to grieve.
"C'mon, big guy." A grin that quirked wider. "You're not gonna find me under the ground. No way. When I die, I'm going to get someone to burn me up and scatter my bits on the wind. You know, my ashes?"
"How poignant," Robin had said dryly.
It turned out, Kid Flash had been serious. For hours and hours, Nightwing had tried to locate his grave in vain—damn the earthquake!—only to remember what Wally had said about dying. About how horrible it must be to have been able to run so fast in life you could turn back time, but to settle down as a slowly rotting, decomposing corpse. About how terrible it must be to be nothing more than another body in the ground. About how wrong it was to force that kind of fate on anybody calling himself the Flash.
Wally had been the same. He could run as quick as he liked, but it didn't stop the fact that he was going to die someday. So, he made plans. Long before Robin had ever realized it, Wally West had made plans.
"You're asking me to guard your city? You're going where...? Holy—! Man, Robin, why don't you tell me these things?! I could've helped you guys with the Brotherhood...Yeah...well, it's not like I'm with the Flash anymore and—you know I work alone these days. I'm not looking to join a team, sorry. Whatever...I'm out."
And these plans, of all things, came to light only through his death. Jump didn't have any answers—that ruin?—but Steel did. The directions had said to come for Steel City and not Jump...but it was a necessary detour.
The man turned to face the front when he balked. Growling, he rolled forward with a glower. "I thought I told you not to come yet, kid! That was the agreement with—"
"Sorry," Nightwing interrupted tersely, stepping into the light, "but I don't do orders, Red X."
"It's been twenty fucking years since I've seen you, right?" God, he could never have forgotten that raspy voice. At least the guy had the decency to not have used the X suit for the meeting, but the mask still stayed on. Skull white eyes stared at him back, and Nightwing wondered if the other even had a civilian identity anymore or if he was forever trapped as Red X? "If you wanted to see the other kid, you missed him by years."
"The Catalyst."
"Kid, everybody uses that excuse nowadays—as if an earthquake could stop you. You missed his funeral, which was sad."
Nightwing stared. "You were there?"
"Bird boy, I'm everywhere. Remember? You guys kicked Jinx out, but at least you made up with West. The guy was pathetic for awhile."
"We did not kick Jinx out."
"And that's important now," Red X said thinly, "...why?"
"You told me you know how Wally died, so talk. I'm not here for anything else and I don't want anything from you. Just info. Once I've taken part in Blood's degradation, I'm leaving."
"And as I've said," he started, settling back into his wheelchair, "Blood killed the kid. I bet that caught your attention, huh?"
"Why did you choose to reveal this now?"
"Still so stiff. This sounds awfully like an interrogation."
Nightwing leaned in forward very slightly. "This is an interrogation."
Red X barked out a laugh. "Still the same I see. The same Titan we all know and love, but with a badass side to boot? You're just like me, kid, with that cutthroat, Machiavellian mentality. But where's your city now, oh Dark Prince?"
Faster than Red X could have stopped it, Nightwing thrust an erect hand at the man's neck and held it fast before it could hit. "Do not," Nightwing said, voice low, "reference my mentor. We are nothing similar to the likes of you. I'm no one's dark anything."
Supremely unimpressed, Red X drawled, "Even to Blüdhaven? Kiddo, it was all over the news. Even I got the scoop easily enough, and we're damn near isolated from the rest of the country over here. Slade Wilson went off for bigger, better things and blew up your town, right? Where is he now, I wonder. Are you still looking for him? Or did your precious father send you over here for something else...like the good little boy you are?"
Nightwing ignored the insult, though he withdrew his hand. "I've commissioned a report on Mikron, ever since he'd first broken away from the H.I.V.E.." Tone steely, he added in a murmur, "But now D.C. is in on the action here...and it's not enough. People are still dying and the tech I've tracked are..."
"Ah," Red X said, "and the former resident golden boy is interested in the latest thing. You're not the first to try and get the info out of me and certainly not the last."
"I'm not interested in Gizmo anymore." Eyes hard, he murmured, "He died a long time ago. During the Catalyst, his subordinates fell apart without him to lead them."
"And instead they all went crazy," Red X noted. "Yeah, that Mikron's definitely dead, but did you really think his legacy would stay down like a kicked puppy? Mikron's back, but the guy masquerading as him is bastardizing the role. He's not playing it right, so a certain key character is aiming to take him down."
"Jinx."
"Hm, aren't you well informed..."
"I'm not interested in her," Nightwing interrupted. "However way the government wants to use a petty terrorist like her isn't any of my business. I'm here for one thing and one thing only, and there's a reason you haven't given it to me yet. What do you want?"
Even behind that bleach white mask, he could tell Red X was smirking. "You haven't shown me any of your cards, so why should I show any of mine? Scratch that, you already know what I have in spades. Goody, goody info...and a darling message from the late Flash."
Nightwing held himself very still, but his precise control did nothing to keep his voice from being cold. "We both know you're going to tell me anyway, so why should I do anything to benefit you? I have nothing that interests you besides being another pawn in this game you're playing."
"Whatever do you mean."
"Blood...you were always in it for yourself, weren't you? You've been supplying the new Mikron with the cargo he wants. The raw materials."
"I see," Red X said abruptly, a little coolly. "You've done your homework, have you? Good job. Do you want your gold star along with that? Or do you want to hear what our dead, mutual friend has to say already?"
Nightwing grimaced. "...But much as I hate to say it, you're being blackmailed. Whatever hold Blood has on you, you'd do well to sever it. There's no gain for you here. A little counterproductive, isn't it, to be so willing to work with superheroes when you're one of the backers to Blood's little terrorist spree?"
Now the villain's gaze was a little too speculative. "You...have been trained by the best. Best keep those lessons close to heart, kid, because not everything is so cut and dry as that."
"As a cop," Nightwing responded, "I've learned that the simplest explanation is most often the right one. What I can't understand, though, is why..." His lips tightened. "Why is it that you were the one Wally talked to in the end? To think, he came to you when I..."
"Bitter, party of one," he drawled, "your table's ready."
"Funny."
"I don't see you laughing."
"Sorry. But after having to deal with psychopaths on a regular basis, your antics don't amuse me anymore."
"It's the suit, isn't it?" Red X mused aloud. "You've always been sore on the subject. It's not like you're going to go traipsing around as me anytime soon."
"Drop it."
"Fine, but what's your deal with the other kid? West was a great guy. Swell, even. Does it bother you that he was so willing to run around with the bad guys?"
"Wally," he corrected, "I had no problems with. You, on the other hand..."
"I still say you're bitter." Red X shrugged. "But I'm tired of this game. I'd been running around Jump for god knows how long and now I'm a cripple in the big city. Titans East doesn't give a damn about me as long as I don't do anything particularly spectacular, even if I am only on their border. You've become pretty big yourself, and I'm sure I'm due some credit for putting something in that bird brain of yours."
When the vigilante's eyes narrowed, Red X knew he was right.
"Don't push your luck," Nightwing said abruptly. "I still don't like you."
"That's fine," the man replied. "I still don't like your shitty self either."
"...The plans?"
"Not much of a plan." Voice dry, Red X added, "You know the kid. As much as a smartass he was, he didn't think ahead sometimes. But when you're dealing with Blood you gotta stay four steps ahead of the game. He didn't remember that and unsurprisingly paid for it, leaving grieving children behind, I'm sure..."
"Did you grieve?"
"I'm not too into the whole grief thing. I was making a name at the time and my hands were full dealing with Jinx."
"Were you," Nightwing started quietly, "the one to convert her back? The only reason the original Mikron had her assistance was because you brought her back into the field, didn't you?"
"My, my. There is a limit to how knowledgeable you can be, and you've just broken it." The light almost humorous tone Red X had adopted dropped immediately. "Get off her back, kiddo. I may be to blame, but she's got nothing with you."
Nightwing said nothing.
Red X continued. "Not too long after she quit the terrorist gig, she rounded up the remnants of H.I.V.E. and Blood went along placidly like sheep. Jinx isn't stupid, though. She prepared to deal with him, but at the moment she has no idea..."
He stilled suddenly. "...Why did Wally die?"
"Now you're catching on. It's not important how he died—it's important why. Until you understood that, I wasn't going to give you anything to go on." It was with a relish that Red X leaned back into his chair. "Finally! We're going somewhere, but I'll have to put you on hold. My ward is getting a bit hungry, see."
"What?" Nightwing scowled, irritation twisting his features. "You don't have a ward, X."
On cue, a boy stumbled into view, and Red X seemed too smug for his own good. Nightwing only narrowed his eyes, both incredulous and angry. "Who, X? Who the hell would entrust a child to you?"
"I beg to differ," Red X scoffed, but gently guided the boy from behind the counter. Nightwing managed to catch the kid's expression before the boy ducked beneath Red X's arms and peeked shyly from behind the wheelchair.
Something caught in his throat. Nightwing demanded, "Is that—Kyd Wykkyd?"
"Blood may have dealt the killing blow," Red X murmured, "but West didn't die in vain and Kyd Wykkyd just happens to be...the result."
The vigilante was shaking, but his voice did not. "Around fifteen years ago, Jinx caught a virus. Something the Brotherhood had left lying around. Something bad. Are you telling me that this entire time another person was infected? The Titans—we never knew of this. Why were we not told?"
"Kid, that was in the middle of your falling out with West. Patience was never really your thing, was it? West didn't up and become evil or some snit like that—he was working with the H.I.V.E. Five. He was trying to save Jinx. But I bet it didn't look like that from your side of things, did it?"
When Nightwing didn't say anything, Red X's chuckles were low. "West being all secretive and tagging along with villains on their little adventures...you didn't know what to think. Not everyone's out to betray you, kid. You just never knew the real story."
"Then tell me." Fists clenched, Nightwing slammed a hand onto the counter, glaring. "Tell me the real story behind Wally's death. Tell me why."
"Don't you want to hear the grand plan involving little Elliot here first?" Red X drawled. "Calm down, bird boy. You're scaring him..."
It was true: Kyd Wykkyd was now practically cowering behind his guardian. And despite his casual tone, Red X looked anything but amused.
He'd lost control. Over Red X of all people. It was enough to kill his anger, and Nightwing sank against the wall. "I'm sick and tired of this," he muttered. "I'm fucking sick of your games."
"Games are all I have left to play," Red X countered calmly. "Elliot hasn't been himself in over a decade and it was his own conscious choice to save Jinx. What does he have left? But he knew what it entailed. During the time of West's and Jinx's torrid affair, West never knew when his girlfriend caught her freak disease, only that she did."
"What did he do then?" Nightwing started, but then stiffened. "Was that when..."
"Bingo. Distancing himself from the Teen Titans was his own conscious decision. He hadn't wanted to get you guys involved in the shit the H.I.V.E. were in, so he teamed up with them instead. Followed Gizmo around, chased after the ever elusive remnants of the Brotherhood of Evil...ah, good times."
"We were finished with the Brotherhood."
"You guys only froze their asses, tossed them into prison, and threw away the key. Actually, not even then. You weren't 'finished' with them—don't glare at me like that, kid. West didn't end up killing anybody. Wasn't even that brat, Gizmo. It was all Blood."
"Start at the beginning. Now."
"You know that the virus originated from some nefarious experiment of the Brain's, right? Or maybe it was that asswipe monkey..."
"Get on with it."
"Right. Gizmo liked to play with things. Big things. When the showdown between you guys and the Brotherhood of Evil happened, the H.I.V.E. Five were there, too. Short one member, of course, but if Jinx was sure of one thing, it was that her old team was lazy as all fuck. Why would they willing join up in ultra evil villain hijinks when they were only interested in screwing with small-time crime? Unless..."
"Don't tell me—."
"Ah." Even in that raspy, wheezing voice, Red X managed to sound grim. "And there's the crux of the matter. Without Jinx's mollycoddling and such on the team, the smartest underling stepped up to the plate and took a bitter front against good guys plus converts—a.k.a. Jinx."
Nightwing, unseen under his mask, flicked his eyes towards Kyd Wykkyd and back to his long time enemy. "Mikron was not as stupid as to use untested biological weaponry."
"Mikron wasn't quite Mikron yet. Sure, Gizmo liked his tech, but Blood has a strange fondness for biological warfare...the kid hated to use it, especially what he did to Jinx."
"Why feel regret? He stole the virus to use it on her."
"True...broke into their databank, flitted through their files, and downloaded all their pretty little secrets. Twisted it up a bit and..voila, he'd made the virus a specially packaged finished product." Red X paused delicately. "Of course, let's not forget the Teen Titans had only come to this bit of knowledge because a certain teammate of theirs, oh, I don't know...caught it as well? Certainly, they couldn't keep their noses where they didn't belong after that..."
"I thought that Wally was keeping it from me."
"What, the cure? Moron. So West roughed you guys up a bit...and you snap after jumping to conclusions? As I remember it, West keeping you guys busy allowed his new crew to flit away unnoticed...he'd done his job. He'd kept you away. But not once you tried to figure out the kid's ulterior motive? My, my..."
"It was a mistake." Nightwing's lips were tight lipped and his voice was bit through gritted teeth. "What else were we supposed to assume?"
Red X shrugged, adopting a casual tone. "Well, it's all in the past, right, kid? It wasn't like West was tracking down the last vestiges of the Brotherhood organization all over the world or anything...to look for a cure. No, of course not."
Nightwing glared.
Red X shrugged again. "The kid had speed, and they needed a cure. Jinx was his dying girlfriend, so of course she would be his top priority. He honestly had no idea Gizmo's stupid handling of the disease ended up being loose in Jump City. Give him a break, kiddo; it's not like goth girl died from that little episode."
"She recovered on her own, but we had no idea she would at the time! How...tell me, X, how were we supposed to know otherwise?"
"West had no idea. You guys had no idea that he had no idea. You're both even. Aren't you a little bit curious to what happened to Jinx?"
"She's alive," Nightwing said flatly. "She's alive and a criminal and fully and completely lucid. I don't need to know what happened to her."
"Whatever viral side effects were bringing Raven down had nothing on what happened to Jinx," Red X answered just as flatly. "In case you haven't realized, bird brain, but Gizmo wasn't exactly a biotechie guy. He specialized in electronics and machines. He wouldn't have known that a fucked over disease like the one he'd modified would have had such disastrous consequences in Jinx's system. Her own magic was eating her alive, kid. Bet you didn't know that, huh?"
"You're lying. She would be dead by now."
"You seem...shocked. Dare I say it that that demon chick was able to bounce back from her disease, no problem at all?"
Nightwing was snarling. "So Jinx had top priority, X. Hurry up and tell me what you've been getting to all this time."
"Still a compassionless bastard, I see. World still too black and white for you? You just can't fucking admit that you think West died for the wrong side. Is that what you think?"
Nightwing jerked away from the wall and started to pace, taunt and furious and all strained control, but Red X only cocked his head. "Hit a sore spot, did I?" he said, and the metallic twang through the mask was a little cool.
He stopped abruptly. "If Wally didn't die in vain, then what did he die for? He told me...nothing. Absolutely nothing at all! He only said—"
"The agreement was for you to come to not come right now. What the hell did you think my orders were for? Yes, damn you, they were orders! Kiddo, by the time the Catalyst rolled around, you were already half-way across the fucking country to your precious Blüdhaven. By the time the Teen Titans finally stopped tripping over themselves in trying to be the good guys in every single freaking situation, Raven was already healing up nicely. Without your steady string of orders, your quack team was doing a hell of a job sticking their noses into everything."
The vigilante said nothing, only stared coldly.
Behind the mask, Red X spat, "By that time...you were so sick of being little, helpless Robin that you went ahead and up and left the place without first finding out their side of the story. The H.I.V.E. Five weren't just villains—they were beginning to regroup and gather straggling teenage villains for mutual protection. You couldn't see past the fact that Jinx couldn't let go of her roots, of her old teammates, and that the Flash was not a cut-and-dry superhero. You realized that you two had become two people. Scared fuck you were, you assumed Gizmo off and betrayed the lot of them and sometime, somewhere, killed Wally West."
"Mikron was making a name for himself by the time the Catalyst—"
"Well, damn," he snapped. "I guess you were happy in your assumptions because you happy go-lucky freaks who stood up for the helpless innocents of the U.S. of fucking A. had no idea that the very people you were protecting were the very people who were going to kill you all."
"That isn't true! The Justice Elite would have never allowed it. Those were rumors, X! The government was not so corrupt as to do what terrorists like Mikron claimed they would. There was no genocide of metahumans. There were no killings in that context."
"Genocide? Fuck it, America wasn't capable of genocide? When the fuck were you so naïve and why the hell didn't any of your past tutelage teach you anything?"
And when Nightwing slammed a fist against the wall, Red X could only give a sharp hiss. "Bastard," the frustrated man muttered. "Elliot. Get into the backroom." He didn't turn when he had addressed his ward.
Nightwing flinched; he'd completely forgotten the little boy was in the room with them. He'd lost control again...why? Why was it always with Red X...?
"If...it was true..." he started.
Red X gritted out a sigh and latched the backdoor shut. When he was turning his wheelchair around to face Nightwing again, he seemed considerably calmer. "Listen, kid. Just...listen. Churn that damn brain and yours and think. What was the H.I.V.E. advocating as they started to gain influence?"
"Refuge. Jinx was..." Nightwing held back a scoff, "...she was helping to gather supervillains together, but Mikron soon took over operations. She didn't even care."
"That's not the point. Keep going."
"And there were no protests." His dark mood broke at his own surprise. "To the public, there was no strife within the H.I.V.E., not even with the hostile relations with the rest of the metahuman community. What did Mikron do? Couldn't any of them see that they were fools to follow him?"
"Of course," Red X intercepted smoothly. "Why do you think Jinx is still considered the leader today? Mikron eventually broke off with his own faction. They had their own goals, their own plans...plans too radical for the scared villains who sheltered themselves in the combs of H.I.V.E.. Cowards and idiots, but Jinx wasn't going to refuse their presence, not when they were so willing to cooperate with her in maintaining the H.I.V.E. as one body. Mutual protection against a public that wanted to destroy them."
But Nightwing was preoccupied with something else he'd said. "Plans too radical...? No—it can't be..." He went very still. "There were—rumors. Villains were frenzied in the west, but news eventually reached Gotham...that there was a massive retaliation effort. That there were terrorists who were calling on their help for chaos. Ruthless, mass destruction. That was the only thing that Mikron was calling for."
"The second year into the Catalyst and Mikron was already tearing up the country. The first year were quiet attacks. A strike against a company here. A sharp spike of bankruptcy there. Carefully, very carefully, the first phase of his plans came about as the economy was sneakily starting to plunge."
Red X sighed. "I stayed out of it as much as I could, but even when H.I.V.E. had started to split apart with Mikron's little rebellion, there were those agents who were still under his influence. They were to ones to help...he and his buddies hardly had the numbers to back them up for the first plan to come into effect. Jinx was...a bit pissed. Didn't see it at first until there were insubordinations left and right."
"It was the same time that she publicly announced her supervillain status. H.I.V.E. had been too good at flying beneath our radar. It'd happened so fast, within only a year before the Catalyst." He grimaced. "The missing year. We never knew."
"Of course you didn't. Jinx's sole purpose was to help keep the H.I.V.E. together and hidden. Sanctuary. Elysium. Pretty names for the simple concept of refuge...and there were villains out there who were scared shit of what was happening, kid. Amateurs playing at the big league. They decided to take up crime in a year where the government decided to be a bit creative in their solutions."
Nightwing tensed. "What you said about the public was true...there was no idealism in the concept of superheroes by that time. We all knew that, but it doesn't mean there'd be such fear to justify...There was no hint of the genocide you're talking about."
"No, of course not," Red X countered calmly, "because they were executing supervillains."
Gizmo stole an incomplete project from the Brotherhood of Evil—a virus—with the intent of using it on traitor!Jinx, but he didn't end up using it; someone else stole it off of him and finished the job. Post-series, the Brotherhood is still around but severely weakened. They're gone at this point, but you have to admit...pretty diabolical of them to begin making a virus targeted for superhero magic-users.
No Terra-Jericho conclusion yet, but as Terra isn't random, she'll be back. And people seem to think Slade's important, but he's really not. Wouldn't it be interesting to know what he did in the last 20 years of Gimmick's, though?
Nightwing left the Titans 5ish years after the end of the series, roughly around the same time Jinx was revealed to be sick. The first time he visited Jump again was after the Catalyst, after a blockade was set up to separate eastern and western continental USA, and after Nightwing checked up on his old city, he headed over towards Steel to meet Red X. Red X had earlier contacted Nightwing because, with Jinx freed, a Take-Down-Brother-Blood plan was supposed to be put into effect. Nightwing isn't needed, but Red X is taking advantage of all his resources and contacts.
