AN: I'm sorry for the wait. I was out of town and before that I had computer issues with my new laptop and that's not including the lack of inspiration as my muse has abadon me the last few months but I managed and incredible bought of inspiration this morning so please forgive any errors you many notice. Also if anyone reviews could you please include either a 1 or a 2 after your review i know that makes no sense but trust me it may be vital to the ending of the story.
But Above All, There Was Determination
The pier was always dark. The city street lights couldn't reach beyond the windowless, shadowed buildings crowded by the sea. Any light seemed to be swallowed up as it stumbled its way across the road and spilled over the sea wall. The darkness was broken only in pools, gathered around the exterior doors in shades of red, garish orange, or dull yellow. The occasional LED cut through the black like a knife. A white gap with a sheer edge, asserting itself in the night making the surrounding shadows seem deeper, formidable, and tangible.
Starfire alighted on the concrete pier. Even with the darkness, she felt a familiarity. The setting was foreign without the sparkling lights and the cruise ship, its reflection glimmering across a smooth, glassy surface, provided by the harbor-sheltered bay.
But she remembered.
"Robin, this is…"
"Yeah I remember." Robin stepped up beside her. Having left his motorcycle parked on the sidewalk. He braved the darkness on foot following Starfire's gentle green glow.
They faced the sea and looked out, Titan's Tower was a black silhouette against a blacker sky, and all the lights, even the stars, were out.
To their right was one solitary lamp. Hanging above a thin rusted door with a severe rectangular window.
"That's the one." Robin said as he turned to it, "He was right here the whole time. Perfect view of the Tower, right there when I was stuck with Kitten and Killer Moth was trying to take over the city."
Robin fell silent, and after several minutes Starfire began to grow antsy.
"Robin?"
"I think I met him." His head jerked up to look at Starfire. "I think he ran into me, that night, Remember?"
Starfire blinked, but no matter how hard she tried she couldn't remember, her mind had been clouded that night and her emotions had raged.
Robin shook his head "He was right there."
"Just right there."
The helicopter blades thumped relentlessly overhead. They powered through the night sky and obliterated the quiet air. The instruments cast and eerie glow, but none surpassed the eerie pallor of the snowy-haired gentleman riding in the copilot's seat.
He was pale and cut from a devilish mold. His suit was crisp, severe, and pristine. Freshly pressed and starched. His hair was equally severe, oiled, gelled and neatly combed; it was tightly restrained in a sensibly trimmed ponytail. Additionally he maintained a neatly groomed goatee which accented a defined and chiseled chin.
He was a man of definition and of later years, a man of impregnable silence and merciless wit.
He exuded an ever present air of cold anger and mild hate. Toward whom it was unknown, but his enemies did not wager to chance that it was not meant for them. The multi-billion dollar CEO held sway over the largest organizations in the United States, he all but owned the bureaucracy.
His mere whim could threaten their very existence.
And yet the whispers came none the less, Vlad Masters was changed.
For who could fear a dreary castle in Wisconsin, when its walls and towers were haunted by a single, sad old man…
After the decidedly ineffective conversation with the Titan's, Masters' private jet had landed on an airstrip inland from the coast and it still another hours flight to this fledgling city known as Jump.
And so there he was, with the helicopter's blades chopping relentlessly through the air, powering on to the sea.
He sat in the copilot's seat lost deep in thought. He could see nothing in the darkness beyond the glow of the instrument and the tinted glass.
But when the forest of lights blossomed as they passed over a hill and the sea glittered faintly in the moonlight, the lonely old man sat forward in his seat.
"I let you go once Daniel. I won't make that same mistake again."
It was cold.
Everything was cold.
Darkness had turned to dawn and dawn gave way to the sun. The autumn day had come and gone and still, he was cold. Night had descended. He had left it far behind.
The broken blinds, the trashed hotel room, the "Out of Order" signs.
But he was cold.
And the voice was coming.
He was laughing at him out of the alleyways and leering through the dead glacial eyes trapped under the frozen manhole covers.
His cackling was in the chattering of neglected a car engine driving past on wobbly legs. His wailing echoes across the night sky as the jet planes roared overhead. His voice is in everything. His eyes are everywhere.
And Danny stumbles down the sidewalk, angry pedestrians hurrying home for the night shoot him angry looks as he brushes by, stumbles past, trods over, and bumps into them.
The shout for him to take his issues into a dark alley, so they might not be subject to his drunkenness, or to get himself home and stay there until he's decent.
But there's no home for him to go to, and there are no toxins polluting his blood, he is drunk on fear and the night keeps him running.
"You can't run and you can't hide boy."
"You couldn't save them and you can't save yourself."
"I'm apart of you and you will become me."
"You're not me; I'm not you so just SHUT UP!"
Danny screamed his frustration and fell to his knees. His hands gripped his head and he fought the tears that threatened to fall from his eyes.
Several bystanders stopped in their tracks. The paused to stare at him and whispers passed between them. Several went wide as they skirted around him, following the edge of the building or stepping off of the curve. Their natural hesitation and immediate fear, as though they were afraid they might catch the madness from him, or else be caught in his sudden wild need to lash out.
But his eyes were squeezed, and he was trying desperately to shake the voice from his head. The evil, laughing, taunting voice. It was him; it was him laughing at himself, at weakness, at his loathing, at his confusion.
"You're not sad that you let your family die, you're not angry at me for killing them, you sad and angry at yourself because you know you're the one who killed them. You murdered them all the same, and you'll do it again. Over and over, whether in this dimension or in the next one after that, in an infinite cycle, because you always become me and I make sure you always do."
He roared will laughter and those red eyes blazed brighter than ever before, until everything was bathed in red.
"JUST SHUT UP!"
There were tears streaming down his face. The laughter was impossibly loud, it echoed off the buildings, and the parked cars, and the street light, and bounced off the walls of his skull, and spiraled inside his head in a whirlwind that never died. It was deafening and silencing and drowned out everything eyes, even the aircraft that flew overhead and it never ended and never stopped and…
"Danny?"
Silence.
His eyes flew open.
Sam?
"Hey, finally found you man."
Tucker?
"Are you alright Danny?"
Jazz?
"Danny?"
"NO!" he screamed "You're not real, just stay away!"
He scrambled to his feet and dove away as they reached out for him, stumbling into the street."
"Danny wait! LOOK OUT!"
Headlights, and screeching tires. He threw his hands up as the double lamps blinding him. The startled bystanders screamed and looked away, waiting for the sickening crunch, instead there was a flash of brilliant white light, and chilled wind blew past them.
The horn from the car bellowed and then skid to a stop some distance down the road. The engine was frozen and the tires were iced. The driver stumbled out.
White as a ghost.
And there was Danny, unharmed in the road on his knees, he looked at his hands and they were gloved in white, his body was clothed in black. A long white cloak and hood over his head, the soft white light kept the darkness at bay. The laughter, and the smile, and the glowing red eyes.
For the first time he felt safe, for the first time again he felt warm.
He looked back at the gathering crowd. Standing at the front…
It wasn't Sam, it wasn't Tucker, and It wasn't Jazz.
It was a grey-skinned girl cloaked in blue. It was a green-skinned boy struck with awe. And it was an orange-haired girl with her hands over her mouth in a silent gasp.
Two more arrived as he looked on.
A mechanical man who stood at the back and a small, dark-haired boy who came to the front.
The boy was older and wiser than he seemed, he approached with caution and stood some distance from Danny.
"Daniel? Daniel Fenton."
The crowd seemed to be holding its collective breath, traffic had ceased and cars waited, their idle engines humming softly under the street light which popped on one by one.
Danny sighed and all of the fight seemed to leave him.
"You can just call me Danny."
Then all his strength faded away and he collasped and lay spread eagle on the road. He stared up at the stares. His hair turned white had grown too long and obscured his eyes, but he stared as the sky went dark and caught the first few stares before the street lights washed them out.
But there was something wrong with him, because the stars were falling and it was loud. There was thumping sound in the night sky that was growing louder and louder into a thundering, pounding roar.
The stars grew brighter and brighter until they became the landing beacons of a helicopter accompanied by a spotlight and the thumping was its rotor blades as they sliced through the air. The helicopter landed as sirens wailed in the distance. The security forces hot on the tail of whoever was so bold as to land a helicopter on city streets.
A figure stepped from the cap of the helicopter and stood silhouetted against the brilliant beams of light. The figure stood tall and stiff the outline of a suit buffeted by the wind and long hair pulled tightly back whipped erratically in the rotor wash.
Danny scrambled to his feet. His eyes grew wide and both fear and anger flooded his chest, he felt the panic rising, and the pain.
The figure stepped forward from the light and his features grew clear. A sad old man with snow white hair, ever so carefully put together, neatly trimmed with a suit trimly pressed, but in his eyes he was falling apart.
The moment couldn't have been more cinematic, or more surreal.
Two men staring at one another in a darkening street. The buffeting wind of a helicopter behind one, and the gather crowd behind another. The street lights flicker on one at a time. A car sits forgotten just down the road, its door flung open and the driver on his knees. A pack of superheroes stands aside, usurped of their stage as two man stare at one another under the lamp light.
They are opposing in every way and yet so much the same. One is a boy barely even a man whilst the other stands on the stoop of the fading years of his life. The boy is disheveled and broken and lost, and in every way an outcast at first glance. The old man… is the same.
Though his clothes and his hair do not show it, his station does not warrant it. Vlad Masters is every bit the outcast and Danny made himself to be. And only in the eyes could one see they were the same.
The overcast gaze of one who is lost.
Danny had been plunged into loneliness with the suddenness of loss and finality of death. Vlad's loneliness had simply gone from relative to absolute.
Both were taking their toll.
Danny was horror struck, his knees began to shaken, his entire body trembling with fear. His eyes searched frantically for a way out, an escape route, of any kind. There was nothing but shops, all closed up or else the owners were part of the crowd steadily growing larger and closing him in.
There was one, an alleyway just beyond the chopper whose blades were beginning to slow and the engine to die with a whine.
But it meant getting past him…
His eyes hovered on Vlad Masters who to him was like a demon herald reaching from the underworld to undo everything he had done to save the world from himself. To drag him back to the depths of hell and become the monsters that put so many souls there.
A voice skittered across the back of his mind, his body went numb and he shivered, he could feel the hands of the monster around his neck, then he realized his hands were around his neck and snatched away from his throat.
"Daniel?" Vlad took a step forward.
The instantaneous fear shot through Danny followed by a piercing flash of cold.
"STAY BACK!" he shouted his hands balled into threatening fists and frost poured from them in a glittering cascade.
Vlad put his hands up in gesture of peace and took two steps back.
"Daniel please, I'm just…"
"SHUT UP! You shouldn't be here!"
"Daniel I…"
"SHUT UP."
Ice exploded around his feet and the asphalt, contradicting with the cold, split is a sharp crack.
"You stupid fruit loop, you have no idea what you're doing, what could happen because you're here."
It was Vlad's turn to clench hands into fists, and the Titans from where they stood could see many things in his eyes. There was loneliness, and fear, panic, anger, frustration, even anguish, but above all, there was determination.
And with that determination Vlad stepped forward, taking purposeful strides towards Danny.
A wall of jagged ice blasted past him, just barely missing. Several of the crowd screamed and the more fearful skittered away back into the shops as the ice struck the helicopter, knocking out a landing strut and causing the entire vehicle to collapse onto one side, the pilot scrambled from cockpit and dashed into the crowd to join those who had chosen to continue watching from a much safer distance. Many looked to the Titans, waiting for some heroic undertaking or sudden attack from the teenage heroes, but Robin did nothing. Right now, they could only observe, or else undo everything they had done thus far.
Despite the mayhem, Vlad didn't stop until he stood directly in front of Danny, who, though he had grown in the last three years, was still shorter than the older man, if only by an inch or so.
"You don't think I don't know exactly what you going through, do you think I wasn't terrified when I first discovered my abilities, terrified that I might lose control and hurt those I care about. I know exactly how you feel the only difference is that you have the opportunity… no… the luxury of knowing precisely what will happen if you do lose control. You know who will suffer, who already has suffered. I know who the ghost was that you fought three years ago when… when it happened, but even though they're gone and he is the one who caused it the future is not set stone, regardless of what that blue-faced, age hopping, clock-winder says otherwise."
Vlad took a deep breath and calmed himself. Danny was staring at the ground, his shaggy mop of white hair glittered with frost, there were tiny crystals gathering on Vlad suit. Slowly, hesitating for an instant, he put his hand on Danny's shoulder. Immediately his hand numbed and turned blue from the cold.
"Maddie and Jack were the most caring people this world has ever seen or will ever see again, you're sister Jasmin was a wealth of potential and intellect, your friends were beyond resourceful and true, and your teacher can't have held more value or wisdom. I am ashamed of the bitterness I held for so many years that I failed to see any of it. I'm here to make up for it now."
Danny was silent, he stood rooted to the spot, but Vlad could feel the warmth returning to his hand and his suit jacket dampened as the frost began to melt. Then without warning Vlad pulled Danny into a hug as though he were just a child again and for likely the first time in three years, Danny felt the first vestiges of warmth coming back to him.