Sideshow 02b: 'your strength is in the starlight'
The sound of breaking bones is distinctive, but Kori couldn't have detected it herself from rooms away. It's lucky they have teammates and friends with enhanced senses, and trust them without hesitation or demur.
She grits her teeth with determination as the mob of them, everybody who was in the kitchen when the noise began, all burst into the control room together. "Freeze!" somebody shouts, and Kori blasts the figure in grey with a starbolt from each hand. The villain dodges, but it drove them away from the broken form of the Flash, so she feels nothing but satisfaction with the result of her attack.
It is a man, she sees, not large, and lacking any distinctive war-gear. Hunched warningly inside a grey-hooded sweatshirt. Raven, Dove, and a few other comrades not called after birds surge toward the broken form of Flash, while the rest of them charge the intruder, with more fury than strategy. He's on the defensive, retreating, but as Changeling and Hawk close in on him he drops, spins, kicks, and there's an elbow jab that makes something crunch, and he breaks three of Lilith's fingers, and then Koriand'r nails him in the shoulder with a righteous fist, sending him flipping back—and she sees under the hood.
It's Nightwing. It's Dick.
No time to question or hesitate. They fight. He's as skilled as he always has been, but together they are too much for him, and his face is blank and his tactics do not reveal the deep familiarity he should have with each of their abilities, so at least Koriand'r's heart is swelling with rage at the violation of her beloved with no inclination toward breaking in confused betrayal, as she pinions his left arm.
Cyborg has the other, and several others are holding onto him as well, as though with his madness he may have developed the 'super' strength to tear through her grip as if it were no more than a chain of flowers. Well, he did just defeat the Flash. It is not impossible. Carefully, they force him to his knees, and all his resistance comes to nothing.
Someone has flipped the hood back, hoping perhaps that a clearer view would reveal imposture, and there is an expression in his eyes, she thinks, though nowhere else. He is terrified. The pulse running through the wrist under her fingers races with it. His breath is shallow with it.
"Who are you," Kori demands, because while this is almost certainly no mere impostor, possession is the easiest of the other scenarios, the most straightforwardly mended, and if the possessor is so frightened of them, then threat is the best road to better knowledge. "What have you done?"
Her Nightwing's throat rolls in a way that says surrender, though she's seen it more often in much sweeter circumstances than this. He jerks his head up, defiance, and meets her eye without recognition. "My name is Richard Grayson."
He says it like a challenge, flatly daring them to disagree, and fury like Starfire's simmers from each of her companions. Raven's healing alone may not be enough to save Flash, and the emergency physicians have not yet arrived though she believes she heard someone summon them, and none of them know who to punish.
"Uh…" says a voice from across the room, and—it is Dick, in the doorway, marvelously, unbelievably, Dick in a blue hooded jacket with the proper startled, searching wideness to his eyes at the sight of them with their blank-eyed captive, and bags of food and drink dropping from his hands to free them for potential battle. "Mind telling me what's going on?" he asks.
He steps into the control room, and his eyes fall on Flash lying bloodied, barely breathing, and so he is not looking at his twin when the man repeats—grim, expressionless, and yet still somehow wildly reckless—"My name is Richard Grayson."
Changeling scoffs, at that. "Yeah, that isn't going to work when we have the genuine article right in front of us."
The prisoner twists his head enough to look at the green-skinned man and says, biting off his words in a way that lends them an inflection that is otherwise absent, "My name is Richard Grayson."
"I'm getting tired of hearing that," says Dick, keeping calm in the face of this so well Kori can't help being proud of him.
The prisoner's teeth grind against one another and he jerks in her and Victor's grips as though he has unjustly renewed his confidence in the value of struggling. Garfield sets the flat of his hand against the impersonator's breastbone and holds his eyes, telling him without words to back down. He has no chance. He must realize this. He should submit himself to their mercy.
The prisoner bridles, and without any wasted motion, or any show of feeling stronger than affront, he sinks his teeth into Changeling's green wrist.
Garfield makes a sharp little sound that's almost as much surprise as it is pain, and with his other arm backhands the captive hard enough to knock his head back, taking the biting teeth with it, which Kori considers restrained of him. Changeling can hit much harder with his closed fist, let alone the fist of one of his ape forms. Even with this restraint, a red new bruise blooms across the false Nightwing's cheekbone in seconds—and then fades, almost as quickly. He turns his head back slowly toward Changeling, locks his eyes when Garfield looks up from the blood beading on the back of his wrist.
His face is blank, and not stiff with tight control but smooth, as though there is no feeling to show. Only his pulse against her fingers, ready for action, and the tension in his neck betray the anger that must be there. She would say, if she did not know him so well, but this is not the man she knows, and perhaps she has only been imagining that she could read his face.
"Okay, break it up," Dick says firmly, abandoning the middle of the room to join the knot surrounding his impersonator, who flicks his attention completely to Nightwing. "Gar, back off. Get that bite cleaned out. Jericho, could you get some restraints so Vic and Kori don't have to stand there all night."
Starfire appreciates the thought.
The false Nightwing does not. But neither does he offer to bite anyone else. It will do.
She hopes Dick doesn't think she's about to let the impostor out of her sight.
"Raven?" their leader asks, turning to their chief medical authority. "How is Flash looking?"
"Alive," the mystic replies shortly. She has not taken her hands from their place on both sides of the Flash's neck, and Kori can only guess that his steady, labored breathing depends on the steady flicker of power she's expending. The expressions on her assistants' faces are not encouraging. Dove is checking Flash's pupils.
Flash is hardier than his light and fragile constitution seems to imply, Koriand'r knows. She could break him with one hand, if she could catch him, but he would probably recover, if she did.
She hopes that strength will be enough.
A/N: His name is Richard Grayson. In case you missed that.