BtVS by Whedon and Mutant Enemy. Marvel U by the parent company and its many artists/writers. The Kingpin's quote comes, more or less, from an episode in the animated series. As far as I know, his attitude carries over to the comics.

We've started the first night of Season Five's 'Listening to Fear'. My thanks to BuffyWorld dot com for providing shooting scripts full of stage directions and dialog that didn't make the final cut of the show.

Remy idly flipped back to the first page of the journal, where it read, opposite the memory card: Monday - Well, so much for impressing my brother's friends with my storytelling skills... Now I'll have to do this the hard way...

"Dis all happened because you're living in Tucker's shadow?" Remy spoke smoothly and softly, shaking Andrew out of his shocked state. "Non, I think you're using the boy as an excuse. You're afraid of being different than him. Whenever you try to do something dat he couldn't do, ever, like being creative, you set yourself up to fail. Dis is why you broke th' video camera."

"No." Andrew stomped his bare feet on the carpet. "Cyrus did that, him and the sandbags. He's the reason I decided to take my revenge on the play. He's why I released the monkeys ahead of my scene where I was supposed to summon them, as the witch, with the golden cap. I had to time it so he'd be on the stage when they attacked."

Remy nodded. "I took th' time to meet th' guy after the play. You set him up to be quite the hero. He was strong enough to be the first one to his feet when Tara started her magic. He could've tried running on his own, but he wouldn't leave the stage without saving at least one person. Football player. Handsome, no? I could see the muscles on his scratched-up chest but I'd never have known just how covered in 'luxuriant' hair dey had been without your detailed entry on him..."

"I don't think I like what you're implying."

"Denial and repression. I believe those were your first sins, th' ones dat spiraled out into everything else. As a first step, you need to accept th' fault for your own actions. You were the one who 'borrowed' your parents' video camera without permission and you were the one that took it into an area you knew to be dangerous. Accidents happen, but you made the consequences worse by putting something unnecessary at risk."

Andrew's lip curled up in disgust. That clearly was not something he wanted to hear.

"Speaking of faults," Remy said, rising to his feet in order to pace around the room. "We need to talk about why you make a bad summoner, a bad supervillain and a bad human."

Andrew's eyes narrowed at the last word. He muttered, faintly, 'You're one to talk.'

With apparent calmness, Remy walked up to Andrew, grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and pulled him up to meet his blood-red eyes. "I've met many bad things in my time. The worst of them - mad scientists without conscience, aliens driven by hunger and obsession, demons running on fear and hate - all have one thing in common. Dey want me to be just like them, too."

Andrew blinked and tried not to struggle. "Hey, I'm not racist. If there's one thing Star Wars taught us, it's that monocultural stratified systems can't win."

Remy released his grip. Sitting back in the chair, he fished out a deck of cards. Without appearing to glance at the pack, he withdrew the King of Clubs. With two fingers, he held it up to the side of his face. "Pop quiz," he said, charging the card. The painted king's expression seemed to take on a skeletal grin. "Who did you hurt the most - who did you destroy with your attack on the play?"

"Uh, Sarah? Cyrus? Myself?" Sweat beaded down Andrew's forehead as he rattled off a list of increasingly unlikely names, including Jonathan's and Tara's. "Uh... You're here. I didn't somehow kill you, did I?"

After withdrawing almost all the charge from the card, Remy flicked it into the air. The card burst apart with a soft pop, sending ash raining down on Andrew's head.

"No." Remy frowned. "Listen to yourself, you just denied being 'racist' and then backed up your claim not with the concept that others have the right to exist but with the fact that you're capable of recognizing them as useful. You view those 'lesser' than you as tools, things made to serve a purpose and then easily discarded."

"Oh, yeah? Name one person I've treated like that."

"Allow me to build up to th' reveal. I can charge inanimate objects until they explode. I can't charge living beings. I can charge zombies raised by outside entities. I can charge hair. Before we resorted to burning the frozen monkeys, I tried exterminating them myself, especially the bits of sheared hair they'd weaved into themselves. The charge didn't take. Whatever else they were, whatever mystical power fueled them, my power recognized them as 'alive.' And you killed them."

In the seedier part of town, where warehouses came to die, Riley sat in a darkened room. He shuddered as fangs pierced his arm. His mind filled with the rush of pain and the knowledge that he was no longer in control.

He loved it.

This was what he lived for.

He was tired of performing as a soldier. He was tired of the walls that Buffy had formed around herself, of the secrets she was keeping. He had been physically stronger once, due to experiments done without his consent.

He loved Buffy, but he had realized that, regardless of whether or not he could be enough for her, she wouldn't let him be enough for her. She would always want something else, something darker.

All the vampire on his arm wanted was his blood and his money.

He had killed the first vampire to invite him into a consensual relationship. She had been beautiful and well-spoken, both of which had appealed to him as a man. She had been sired by a vampire version of one of his friends from an alternate universe, which really appealed to his scientist/commando leanings. He'd spent his time with his unit collecting rare demons like some people collect pokemon.

He regretted the fact that, without the right equipment, he'd had no chance to truly compare her physiology to that of the purely 'native' vampires before he'd taken her life. He also regretted, faintly, that he'd staked the only vampire to approach him who he might have, some day, actually wanted to know as a person.

All he was left with now was a series of meaningless business transactions.

##

And the rush.

Remy continued speaking, over Andrew's protests. "I'm not saying dat you meant for them to die. I'm saying dat you sent them to attack a place guarded by someone you knew to be a hero, in a town where she could easily call for help. When the hero's backup arrived, you gave no order to withdraw or to regroup. You let things take their course. Your spell resulted in a horde of entities and you could have just as easily disrupted the play with a quarter of them, holding the rest back for another day. You could, without effort, have had a self-sustaining group of loyal, or at least controlled, minions. Something for you to care for. Something for you to care about. And now you have nothing."

##

"Dis thing about stealing th' spells to unlock and bind th' crystal?" Remy paid close attention to Andrew's eyes as they slid over to the ransacked backpack. Remy smirked. It was nice for him to know the young man was predictable. "Not a good idea either. These are heroes you're talking about. Do you know what dat means on a basic level?"

"Yeah, yeah. Don't mess with the good guys."

"Wrong. Some people need a good antagonist. Makes them stronger. The best villains are the ones who the good guys respect, the ones who they'll know will stick by their ideology in a moment of crisis. Even the worst mobster in Manhattan, a man who's orchestrated hundreds of deaths, can be counted on to stay true to himself. His words, more or less: 'I am a businessman. The destruction of the world is bad for business. Therefore, I, and my vast resources, are, for now, at your disposal.'"

Andrew tilted his head suspiciously at Remy. Fingering the cord that kept his arm restrained to the bed, he waited for the other shoe to drop.

Remy leaned back in the chair and spread his arms. "You can't mess around wi' stuff you don't understand, stuff you don't have th' background on. If you saw a hero you didn't like chasing a bank robber, you couldn't just stick out your foot and trip the good guy. What if the robber had already tied explosives to some hostages and he was fleeing with the deactivation code? Wouldn't their deaths be on your head?"

"Hey." Andrew sneered. "I needed that crystal. My reasons weren't 'pure' so I couldn't get it the honest method, but I knew they'd save me. If I study the binding spells I'll be able live up to my improved reputation. I'd have given the parchment to the good guys already, if I thought I could get it back. I'll be done with it in six months, maybe a year, tops. Whatever's in their crystal isn't getting any older. They're resourceful. They'll be able to pull something out of their ass. The world's not ending because I blocked one route to them... It isn't, right?"

Remy sighed. "Truth be told, I don't know. Dey don't even know what they're dealing with, besides a form and a name. Things are bad though, and they're going to get worse."

Andrew had been brooding about something. "Wait a second. What about the bad guys with ideals like world destruction or complete unpredictability?"

Remy felt an involuntary shudder course through his body as he flashed back to what had been done to him and the people of his New York in the name of comedy. Shaking his head, he forced a smile onto his face. "Yeah, but you don't want to be like them, do you? You want what's best for yourself, right? You want freedom to pursue your own goals. You want to have resources so you can tell stories and collect things that remind you of truly potent stories. You want to create. You want to destroy. You want the rush."

Andrew closed his eyes, imagining what the world would be like if he had the power to walk away and create his own.

As Remy looked at the expression of pure bliss on the young man's face, he felt something snap inside him. "Of course," he said, reaching into his pocket. "The mobster I mentioned? You don't want to be like him either."

When something bumped into Andrew's chest, he opened his eyes. Looking down, he saw a photograph falling to the sheets. It was a face with bruises.

As Andrew's face and shaved head turned pale, shock and betrayal filling his being, Remy finished the sentence. "Because he has blood on his hands."

Remy tossed another photo at Andrew, then spread the rest in his hands like they were cards and he was about to do a magic trick. Holding his arms apart, he arced the photos smoothly from one hand to the other as if each was attached to the one behind it.

The grin on Remy's face was still there, but it was hard and his eyes were cold. He tossed photos one by one onto the bed, each focusing on a different injury sustained by the people of the play. Several showed attempts to capture the pain in the victims' eyes. They'd been taken at the auditorium, for the more stable ones, and at the hospital, for the rest.

"Scratches. Bruises. Shock," Remy intoned. "Nightmares. Fear. These people took pride in their appearance and in their acting ability. They were brave enough to go on stage. Instead of giving them your thanks you gave them something barely on dis side of rape. You released things that were strong and you gave them permission to take what they wanted without worrying about the consequences. You gave them th' appearance of modesty but rape... It's about forcing your will upon others, stripping them of choice, forcing them to react and acknowledge you, using them as a means to an end. For you, it's about power and the destruction of what you want."

"I-"

"I don't know how dis crypt of witches worked, but you must have been repressin' your rage hard not to have seen it sooner. You're attracted to certain things about certain people dat you don't want to be and you hate yourself for it and you hate them for letting you feel that way. You went into the crypt and came out with a tool that would let you express the worst of what was in you and it clouded the issue so you couldn't learn from it. Nah, Gambit be giving that too much credit. You did it yourself."

Andrew stared at a bruise that had formed below a ripped pant leg and realized that while he had set limits on where the demons would have to stop their search for hair and what clothing would have to remain intact, he'd set no limit on where they could put their hands. Beyond the avoidance of death and broken bones, he'd set no limit on what they could do to restrain a person, where they could put their weight.

"Most of these people are going to have nightmares for years. They've suffered at the hands of demons in a society that doesn't believe in them. Half of them won't see a psychiatrist because they'll be afraid the first thing their 'treatment' would include is the attempted destruction of a 'false memory.' Instead of being confident people many of them will be empty shells, scared of their own shadow. Some of them, now given a taste of the darkness th' world can hold and afraid of the darkness they carry inside them, will lash out at others, jus' like you."

Andrew began to cry.

##

Remy stepped out the window and closed it behind him. A short time later, he eased open another second-story window on the house and climbed into Tucker's bedroom.

After locking the door, Remy moved around the space, making himself comfortable. It appeared that, while Andrew's older brother hadn't slept there in awhile, presumably because he had a dorm room at school, the bed was in good repair.

That late at night, Remy wasn't about to go around hitting up his sister's friends for a place to stay. From what he knew of magic there was going to be a lot of rushing around the next morning, so he was going to get a good night's rest.

After making sure that his window was wide open, Andrew prepared a small bowl with coals from his summoning supplies and set them alight. One by one he dropped the photos of the victims into the fire, watching each as they burned down to white ash.

When he was fairly confident his tears had run out and the involuntary sobbing had mostly stopped, he cleaned his face, pulled out his ravaged diary and began to write.

He almost had me there. He just had to push it, didn't he? Oh, yes, my dear Readers, I have not described him yet. I will save that for a better time. This man came to me, tonight, as sort of an intervention, but he was petty and he made me cry. If I truly wanted to seek redemption for my sins then I know now what I would have to do. I would have to give up what they have gained for me.

There is a D&D game next week and I have bought a seat at it with the tears of others. I will be there and I will be happy. True change can not be forced. It has to come from within. Someone has attempted to push me from my path onto the straight and narrow but all he has done is shown me some of my mistakes and shown me some of his. I hope to look back at this moment and know that this was key in all that has come to pass, but it will be my own future. If it has to be forged with the pain of others then so be it.

At least I'll know what I'm doing.

##

After blowing out the coals, he went to bed. His wrist had been rubbed raw from where he'd had to work his way free of the cords on his own.

It was sometime past sunrise, Saturday morning.

##

Andrew was wearing a long-sleeved shirt to help hide the abrasion just above his hand.

##

Mr. Wells was a tall man with glasses. Standing behind his chair, he leaned down to set some grapefruit on the table, with the intention of sitting down later on, once he'd prepared his cup of coffee.

Mrs. Wells was a short woman with brown hair. That morning, she was still working on fixing the rest of their breakfast.

"Pardon me, sir." Remy eased behind Mr. Wells on his way to the front door, careful to brush against the man as little as possible.

Andrew spluttered, his spoon clattering noisily into his bowl of cheerios.

##

After opening the door and stepping onto the threshold, Remy turned and gave them his most charming grin. There was a sparkle in his eyes and his hair was freshly showered. "You better watch that boy," he said. "He's into some pretty weird stuff."

Remy walked away, leaving the front door wide open.

##

Mrs. Wells was the first to recover enough to speak, but her expression was still one of utter shock. "Andrew!"

"Mom!"