Brotherhood
Chapter 5: Shadows of the Past
"Jesus," Raven said as she levitated to circumvent the fifth drug-infested shanty they'd come across in the last half-hour. "This place couldn't be any more decrepit if it tried. No wonder Robin got out of here as soon as he could."
Damian leaped nimbly from tin rooftops to wooden ones, easily keeping up the empath's pace. It was liberating to be free from the Red X armor and in civilian clothes for once; not only did he move faster, but it kept him from getting overconfident in the abilities of the Xynothium that powered the suit.
"I don't know about that, Raven," he countered, hand-springing smoothly over a gap in a rotten pair of wooden beams without missing a beat. "I think you and Robin are just looking at this from the wrong angle. Gotham's slum district is the haven for fiends, rapists, murderers, drug addicts and whores by the dozens, true. But if crime is your business, there's no other place on the East Coast where business booms quite like it does here in Gotham."
"And you're fine with just trafficking in human lives like that?" Raven countered sharply, feeling disgusted. "Haven't you ever thought about helping people instead?"
Damian sighed wearily, crouching for a moment on the rusted steeple of a ruin that had once been the neighborhood's chapel. The new vantage point offered him a much better view of the surroundings, and he swept his eyes from side to side over the rotting landscape below him.
"You sound like my father, Raven," Damian said after a moment, his voice hard and devoid of its usual abrasive cockiness. "He would always tell me stuff like that, the few times he would actually bother to come and see me. 'You should be helping others,' he'd say, or 'What's the point of ruling a city if the only people you're ruling over are pimps and serial killers?'; that was another one of his favorites. And you wanna know something for nothing, Raven? One time, I actually did give the Good Samaritan thing a try. Found this girl on the corner, overdosed on some cheap, back alley heroin rip-off. Mary, she said her name was.
"I picked her up and got her to a hospital, even came back to check on her from time-to-time in between my missions to make sure she was doing all right. It felt good, I will say that much."
"So what happened, then?" Raven pressed, trying to push Damian out of his sudden silence.
"She got out of the rehab program the hospital had enrolled her in a few weeks later, with a clean start courtesy of the Wayne Foundation's anti-drug program. But there're some things not even the Wayne name can get around, and having no real-world skills to speak of and track marks up and down both of your arms are pretty good ways to make sure no one in their right mind would ever, ever hire you for a nine-to-five job. So I convinced my father to take her on as a menial employee in the lower levels of the Wayne business, and I figured that would be enough. But soon enough, the skeletons in Mary's closet came calling.
"Her boyfriend found out where she was living and managed to sweet-talk his way back into Mary's life, despite me snapping one of his arms almost in half and breaking his jaw. She even stepped in front of me and stood up for the cocksucker, if you can believe that. A few days later she was back on the spike, and a week later she'd been kicked back out on that same corner again. Last I saw of her, a rat was picking the muscles off of her bones. Face it, Raven," he finished, leaping from the steeple and landing with poise on a nearby rooftop,
"Some people just don't give a flying fuck what happens to them, and will keep on chasing the dragon until it kills 'em. And if they're going to die anyway, I say it's a waste to not make some money off of them before it happens."
Raven held her retort back on the tip of her tongue, instead wondering with pity just what Damian had been put through to wind up seeming so nihilistic. Robin had grown up in Gotham as well, from what little she'd heard of her leader's past, and his outlook could not have been more different from Damian's.
"Hang on," Damian's voice broke in to Raven's thoughts, stopping the empath in her tracks. "I think we've found him."
Raven stopped and looked where his finger was pointing, seeing a figure in a black, hooded cloak walking along the ground and towards the dim light seeping out from between the boarded-up windows of a bar. Before she descended to the ground, though, Raven's senses picked up another person just on her periphery.
They'd been tailed here, and by someone good enough to avoid detection all this time. Instantly concerned, the empath opened up a quick connection with Damian's mind in order to speak without words.
"There's someone following us," she told him. "I'm going to find out who they are. Do you think you can take the Black Hood alone?"
Damian met her concern with a simple smirk.
"Who d'you think you're talking to, Raven?" he quipped back through the connection. "Do what you need to, and keep this line open while you're at it. I'll be in touch."
Raven gave a short nod and the pair split up, Damian touching down silently on the ground with another leap while Raven stayed airborne, trying to pinpoint that intrusive presence she'd felt just moments ago. It was like trying to get a grip on something covered in oil: every moment she thought she'd found the source, it would flit away and pop up somewhere else. As if it was taunting her.
"Taunting?" A strangely familiar voice spoke out from the darkness, creeping through the rough shadows to increase Raven's already-rising unease. "Come now; 'taunt' is such a base word to use. This is much more like a game, in my mind. Do you not enjoy games, sweet Raven?"
The nickname helped her to place the voice to a face, and the face to a name. Rather than be shocked or scared, however, the only thing Raven felt was anger. Raw, boiling anger that was just a few moments from sweeping away her restraints completely.
"Is that really you, Malchior?" she asked, her voice quiet but fiercely focused. A lilting laugh was her reward, and the dragon himself floated out from the shadows... in the form of the human, white-haired, cowl-wearing wizard Rorek. Only one other thing was different from their past encounter, apart from the fact that Malchior seemed no longer bound to the pages of his Book in any way: the red, runic Mark of Scath was emblazoned in the center of his forehead, glowing menacingly in the dark.
"What's wrong, Raven?" Malchior asked flippantly, unconcerned with her anger. "Still holding a grudge against me, after all of this time?"
As Raven scrambled to put the pieces together of how this was even happening, she decided to keep her old enemy talking to buy herself some much-needed time.
"How did you get out of that portal Herald trapped you in, you bastard?" she pressed, flames of black energy already dancing in her palms. "And don't try to screw with me; I've had a really crappy couple of days, and trust me when I say you do not want to see me get angry."
Malchior smiled behind his cowl, his light-blue eyes glinting with malicious mirth.
"On the contrary, dear Raven," he countered, "that is exactly what I want to see."
The white-haired young man disappeared in a flash, the movement so sudden that even Raven's enhanced perception couldn't pick it up. The next thing she felt was a hand resting on her shoulder, and the empath spun around just in time to see Malchior's face barely inches away from her own. The cowl was removed from his face, and an almost predatory smirk danced about the corners of his mouth.
"Your father sends his regards, Raven," he whispered, before moving with snake-like quickness and closing the space between them, placing his lips on top of Raven's own in a forceful kiss. The empath's eyes went wide as the unexpected contact—her first kiss—sent her emotional controls completely haywire. Her heart began to pound rapidly against her ribs, only serving to further heighten her instability. Indignation warred with Confusion, which in turn grappled fiercely with newly-awakened and undiscerning Lust. All of these petty emotions, however, were dwarfed and utterly trounced as Rage surged into the fray, obliterating all rational thought.
That bastard.
How dare he.
Rend his flesh. Feast upon his soul as you draw it out of his bleeding carcass!
Send him screaming into hell and eternal torment!
Kill him!
Raven was helpless to resist the crushing tide of her instinctive rage, her eyes turning blood red and gaining another pair above them as Trigon's long-dormant will once again claimed sovereignty over Raven's body. Malchior grunted in pain as he was forced away by lashing whips of dark energy, but the attack didn't provoke him in the slightest. Rather, his smile widened as he licked a drop of blood off of his chin, his eyes glinting even brighter.
"There's the Raven I've been waiting to see," he said with admiration. "Making a pact with your accursed father was worth it just to witness this much power, I must say."
"Take a good look, then," Raven rasped, her voice twisted and distorted by Rage's influence. "Because this is the last thing you're ever going to see, you scrap of filth."
Malchior chuckled and ignited a fireball in each of his hands to match the energy that had surged up once again around Raven, hurling the flaming projectiles at her before vanishing again in a flash. Raven dodged and weaved past the two attacks, locking on to Malchior's energy signature like a bloodhound and shooting off further into the night.
She didn't even slow down as she felt the connection she'd made with Damian get severed under the strain, her mind completely dominated by Rage and utterly focused on destroying the enemy.
Damian walked into the bar, relieved that it was relatively empty. His target was sitting at a corner table with their back to the wall, perfectly positioned to see anyone who might be coming in to or going out of the bar. Even if it had been pretty easy to track this punk down, Damian had to admit that he was no slouch at tactics. Having no reason to hide who or what he was, the League of Shadows' prince walked over confidently and sat down across from the Black Hood.
"I've heard of you," he opened simply enough, and the person hidden beneath the hood chuckled.
"I've heard of you, too, Damian Wayne," they parried lightly. "What's your point?"
The voice that spoke was surprisingly feminine, but dangerous at the same time. In a word, Damian found it enticing, and he was never one to walk away from that.
"Not that many people have faced down Lady Shiva and lived to tell about it," he replied gamely, holding up one open-palmed hand and lightly waving his fingers. "In fact, I could count them all on this hand, if I wanted to. You included. And that makes me very, very interested in knowing exactly how you did it."
The Black Hood laughed again, and Damian was now absolutely certain that the person he was dealing with was not a man, but a woman. Hopefully, she would turn out to be a young woman near his age; it had been way too long since he'd found someone capable of keeping up with him, and the pent-up energy was starting to get to him.
"Buy the next two rounds," the Hood said in a low voice that made the hairs on the back of Damian's neck stand up in anticipation, "and I'll tell you anything you want to know."
Damian knew in the back of his mind that this chick, whoever she was, was already setting up some kind of ploy. You didn't grow up with a pair semi-immortal crime lords for teachers without learning when to spot a gambit in action, after all. But all the same, he judged it best to let the chips fall where they would, and smiled as if he suspected nothing at all.
"Done," Damian said, motioning to a nearby waitress. "Double Jack and Coke for me," he began, "and my friend will be having…?"
"The same," the Black Hood filled in, a smirk to her voice. "So," she continued a moment later, "what exactly do you want to know?"
Damian's brown eyes glinted sharply in the dim light.
"Why don't we start with a face and a name, and go from there?"
A pair of slender hands reached up to the hood and pulled it back, exposing a face that Damian found at once familiar and completely unknown.
"The name's Komand'r," she said, a pair of dark purple eyes shining brightly out from between the long bangs of black hair that framed them as she smiled mischievously,
"But you can just call me Blackfire."
Raven stopped dead in midair, her pursuit of Malchior cut short abruptly as her other, rational side began to fight back for control against her primal rage. Doubled over and with all four eyes shut in strain, the manifestation of Trigon's demonic power fought for control of Raven's body despite her protests.
"Let… me… go!"
The push from within as the rational Raven tried to retake her mind was incredibly intense, backed by every single other one of those damn facets that lived in Nevermore. But Rage was stronger than them. She carried within her the fire of Trigon himself, and the unbending, unyielding force of his destruction. She would not give in, and she would not surrender control of this body. Not after she had spent so long alone, in exile, in the cold, lifeless corners of Nevermore. No longer would anyone else impose their wills upon her, lock her away in a cage.
"Enough!" Rage bellowed, forcibly quelling the protests of her former mistress and grinding them into dust. From now on, Raven would know what it was like to languish in a cage. From now on, Rage would impose her will upon anything and everything that dared to deny her right to exist.
Starting with that green-skinned, pointy-eared little punk that had helped to shackle her in Nevermore so many years ago.
From his perch on a flat, concrete rooftop not too far from where the battle for control of Raven's mind and body had just concluded, Malchior allowed himself a pleased smile. Mission done, he disappeared once more, off to report the latest development to his master back in Jump City.
No doubt, things were about to get a lot more interesting.
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A/N: Okay, so I didn't have the space in this chapter to get to Beast Boy's current situation, and for that I apologize. I just realized the chapter ended better here and made a better segue into the next chapter this way, so I cut it off here. But rest assured, Beast Boy will be the main focus of the next chapter, alongside Damian and Blackfire's developing situation.
That said, I hope you still enjoyed the chapter, and reviews are as welcome as ever. The support so far has really been great, and a huge 'Thank You' goes out once again to everyone who has reviewed so consistently, namely ImmortalPhantom22, Wolvmbm, anon and Dwarg91. You guys rock.