trans_9 | What dreams may come [Open, bendytimed to before GTFO plot]

Kon kicks the teeth away, but it breaks a window to his little Hawaiian compound. Except it doesn't matter, because the windows are all broken, and the place is run down and empty.

There's a picture on the floor in a cracked frame, and he picks it up. It's of him and a blonde girl, a balding, sleazy looking man, a grey alien thing with horns, and a beautiful Hawaiian girl with black hair. In it, Kon looks vastly different--garish fade haircut, red and blue tights, pointless belts, and he even has an earring. The grin on his face is cheesy.

Carefree.

Kon looks around the little shack. "Cassie?"

She's not here now.

"Cassie, you weren't supposed to leave me, too. I thought you were going to be the one to stay..."

This isn't the first dream he's ever had about this, about abandonment, and it probably won't be the last, but having dreams like it don't help him realize it is a dream.

Kon doesn't let go of the picture as he walks outside to the beach. There are places in the trees that are in the shadows if Roxie wants to follow.

Roxie moves, soft and slow, as a slurking thing in the shadow. She shouldn't really be here, after all, and this is a bare step away from just not existing, all form and no substance.

Between the trees, she moves like falling rain, always staying a little behind Kon.

He walks through a field of broken glass. Jagged columns of glass are there, broken tubes large enough to hold a person.

By the time he hits the sand, the picture has turned into a cape. Red with a yellow shield with an S in it.

Off in the distance, a reassuring beacon, like a lighthouse, is a tower shaped like a T, and he sits down in the sand and wraps the cape around his shoulders like it's a blanket--it's far too big for him.

Overhead, Legionnaires fly around, sweeping in arcs through the air, like a flock of birds, and beyond them, the stars are bright and clear.

He is, however, ultimately alone on the beach. Even with the Tower, even with the Legion. One boy and the universe, wondering about his place in it.

After a moment, the sea starts to look like swaying grasses, even while being the sea at the same time, two homes merged in his mind, the ocean and a sweeping expanse of Kansas fields.

For all his being a social butterfly, this place is empty. Not desolate, just very open and solitary. Maybe that's why he tries to fill his time up with people's attention so much, to compensate.

Roxie follows, and as the trees thin, the shadow that she is stretches, undulating like a snake, a python in outline but darkness in substance. The snake—or the shadow, for it's not so clear what it is—dapples across the glass and sand, curling to twist up at the sky and then down again.

There are so many, she thinks, as she reflects the clear stars, becoming a sinuous languid nebula against the sand. Everyone she's had to really look up to has been in dreams and visions and memories.

Kon lays back in the sand, except when he does, the grass-sea sweeps in around him and the sky opens up to clear, bright Kansas morning. He's now wearing a flannel shirt, jeans, and glasses.

In the distance, a dog is flying around in the sunshine near a cozy little farmhouse. There's a baseball diamond nearby, and Young Justice and the Teen Titans are playing a baseball game against DNAliens there. Dubbilex, the grey-skinned person in the picture from earlier is pitching. Kon looks over at them and looks like he's going to join them, but a shadow falls over him, as things rise out of the ground.

Offsetting this comfy, little scene are the two monolithic statues that rise up to each side of him. One is of an impressive-looking man with features like Kon's, and the same cape he'd had wrapped around himself earlier, flowing in the wind, even though it's made of stone. The statue stretches up into the sky, not intimidating, but still daunting, something to measure up to. The other is a far more intimidating statue of a bald, smug-looking man. It threatens to block out the sun.

The gaze that looks down on him from those stone eyes is a judgmental one, from each.

"Stop it," Kon grumbles. "Stop looking at me like that."

The Lex Luthor statue sneers. The Superman statue just looks a little sad and reproachful, as if he's more disappointed than anything else.

Roxie adjusts the baseball cap and lightly-shaded sunglasses she's wearing. Her clothes are nicer than she's used to--not more expensive, exactly, but better-fitted--but they're still about a million miles from anything really girlish.

"Who are they?" she asks gently, looking up at Kon.

He looks somewhat jarred as he sees her, but not jarred out of the dream. He still doesn't realize he's dreaming. She's one of the baseball players, come over to talk to him.

"They're the halves of me," he says matter-of-factly. "They're who I'm supposed to be. One or the other, even though I'm both."

He winces, and then snaps at them.

"I don't want to be either of you!" he cries at them both. To the Superman statue, his expression softens, as he looks up at it, admiringly. "I don't think I can ever be as good as you. Not that I wanted to croak, but I was sort of glad to find out that people would remember me like that. And knowing I'll come back is great, but now I'm scared like I always am that I'll mess something up somehow." He takes off the glasses. "I can't be you, I just want to be like you. But everyone's always wanted me to be you. 'You're not Superman.'"

This is something he'd never say in the waking world, maybe even something he'd never let himself think. It comes from wanting and wanting, and the unconscious worry that comes from being afraid you'll never measure up, never be as good as you want. He loves and admires Kal-El too much to ever let it come to the surface, though.

The statue, however, looks less stern at this confession, and as understanding as one can be when their face and all the goodness and glory that they are is set in imposing stone.

The Lex statue scowls at Kon for saying he wants to be like Superman and Kon scowls back. "And I don't want to be anything like you."

With a grinding noise, the Lex statue moves his granite arm to point to a tank, a complete one similar to the broken tanks from earlier. Blue and and a sort of nasty purple swirl around together in it, yin and yang, and it should be immediately clear to Roxie where the blue comes from, bright and honest, and where the purple comes from, like a poison.

The swirling colors compress, and disappear, but before long, they can see the little clump of cells growing, budding into more and more cells, getting more and more complex, until they're looking at a developing fetus. There is no umblical cord, however, just some sort of mixture it's soaked in, letting it grow.

Kon looks down at his belly button and pokes it.

"I didn't actually have a belly button, originally. When I was old enough, they added that surgically, so I looked normal."

He looks over at Roxie, and his body has subtly changed. The way his body looks is as if it's made of...parts. Plastic, all snapped together. His blue eyes are glass, still bright, and everything fits together so smoothly, it's almost impossible to tell he was built rather than born. But only almost.

And Roxie changes—

Seven points of light/darkness/energy/consciousness, all in inextricable bundles, up her spine. From there they web out to everything else... but the connections are more invasive than they once were, and the metaphysical webworks are taking over more functions, choking out the native organs from being much more than puppet-pieces. One could imagine that if the progression continues long enough, eventually it will all atrophy away... And what then? What sort of thing could be made, when the human body is discarded like an old shell? What things might be lost in the change?

"Did you want to look normal?" She's looking at the two statues, not Kon.

Kon shrugs.

"They did it while I was still in the tube. Wasn't like I had a say in anything they did. No one gets to choose if they're born, or how they're born."

The fetus still growing in the tube in front of them has now grown into a little boy with black hair, eyes closed, all curled up and sucking his thumb as he floats there. He's maybe 2 or 3 now, and it's starting to become very obvious who he is.

Roxie leans forward a little, looking at the tube. The chakra points glow softly around/through the clothes she wears as she moves.

"Some people might, but not many people get the chance to make themselves."

"I've still had too many choices made for me though."

The boy in the tube is almost teenager now, smaller and skinnier than Kon is, a bit younger, but closer to his current age.

A man is standing there at the tube, in a lab coat. He has grey at his temples. Director Westfield. "You're going to be the next Superman, son! Our Superman!"

Then another scientist, Carl Packard, frowning at a readout. "The code words just aren't taking. He's resisting. If we have the change the entire structure of his unconscious to make the control words stick, then do it. He can't be allowed to have an individual mind--we need to be able to control him."

"But you must have made some of your own," Roxie suggests. It seems like an appropriate juncture. "If you hadn't, you'd just be..." She gestures over at both of the statues.

"Yeah, I've made a lot of my own choices."

It flashes to Kon wearing red and blue spandex, and a red cape like he was earlier, an S on his chest. A red-haired man is standing there--much like the bald statue, minus the bald. The same man, though, even though at the time he was pretending to be his own son.

"He's perfect," says the man. "It's been over sixteen days and its skin hasn't decayed into chalk."

A technician off to the side says: "That's because the human DNA is stabilizing the cellular structure. You're a genius, Mr. Luthor."

"Hm." The man called Mr. Luthor just stands there, staring, transfixed.

The technician sounds downright ecstatic that it's worked, that Kon hasn't degraded like all the others. It took Luthor's sneaky intervention to make it so. "He's special, isn't he?"

Luthor's voice is a low rumble of pride, pride for what he's accomplished himself in his creation, for the fact that his creation carries his own DNA, pride for the things he's very sure his son will accomplish, even if they're things that most wouldn't be proud of. "He's my boy."

"It's awake, Mr. Luthor." And the boy in the tube is, twitching and thrashing slightly, but unable to stop what's being done to his mind.

"And Dr. Westfield should be held up at the Lexcorp Medical Seminar for the rest of the day," Luthor intones smugly.

Another technician says: "Programming should be complete within the hour. Project: Superman, aka, Project: Luthor, is sixty minutes away from being successful."

"This project needs a name," Luthor says, still looking up at his "son." His creation. "...Lionel. Yes. Lionel Luthor. Because as my father always said in his drunken stupor, and smug arrogance--Vincere aut mori." He taps once on the glass, and looks immensely satisfied. "Conquer or die."

The scene around them changes, and rather than just watching it, now they're living it. Kon's there, still plastic, but his companion apparently doesn't see it. He's in the T-shirt and jeans getup, standing there on a rooftop with Robin.

"Now that Luthor's dead, you going to tell them?"

"I don't know. Maybe. And it's not your problem to worry about," Kon insists.

"I'm just saying..."

"Not a word. Not a syllable."

The scene changes again, to Kon in his room, just about ready to tell the Titans about where the half of his DNA comes from, finally ready to let someone help him deal with it--when his computer is hacked, and that same rumbling voice from before plays over it: "Vincere aut mori."

He goes rigid and walks out, and the rest--the rest is all stuff he'd rather not remember. His eyes blazing red, nearly tearing the Titans apart, hurting Cassie (he hurt her, he hurt her, he hurt her), breaking Tim's arm with a sickening crack.

Screaming from the inside of his own head, all because he was too cowardly to tell everyone what he was. He could've been checked out at S.T.A.R Labs, before Luthor took control.

The scenes flash faster and faster and faster, from different points in his life.

A red-haired woman caving a man's head in as Superboy watches, shocked, utterly horrified. ("You--! He's! ...You really did kill that cop, didn't you!?")

"TAAAAANAAAAAAA!" A young woman, falling, her head smoking as an explosive goes off at her neck

He and a beautiful black-haired girl, dressed up in a bat costume are chained up in a room filling with water, because he rushed off to play hero...

Impulse, stupid hysterical Impulse, one his scouts getting fried on Apokolips. Watching his best friend die because he had to fight with Robin to be the leader, he had to be the big man...

Asking Guardian to take down Shrapnel so he could rest, rather than taking care of it himself. "Go Guardian! Get busy~ Kickin' metal booty~" And coming back to base after the easy mission and being pointed in the direction of Guardian's helmet. Bloody. Gouged open...

And then after that blistering trip of sight and sound and emotion--and failure, so many mistakes--they're back where they were, between the two statues, as Kon sits there, still plastic, drawing up his legs.

"Lots of bad choices."

He looks up at the Luthor statue. "The one thing I wonder all the time is...is it evil if you just screw up too much? If people get hurt?"

"Stupid, maybe. But I don't deal in good and evil." Her voice trails off as she says that. It's true, isn't it? She frames it as good and evil, sometimes, when she deals with others, but...

"People aren't 'good' or 'evil'. They're people. There is no absolute. If there's something there, it's because you've put it there."

She thinks, glancing over at Kon. "When you do something, do you judge it as you're doing it? Or do you do it for some other reason?"

Kon thinks about it.

"I do a lot of stuff because I want to be good. Sometimes I do it for stupid reasons like pride. Because, I guess I try too hard."

He frowns, still looking at the ground, and then looks up at her.

"But most stuff I just do because it's right. Protecting people when you're capable of helping them is right."

As he says that, the plastic fades a little into flesh.

"If it was me, I wouldn't worry about it, but I'm not you," Roxie says, looking over at Kon and then back at the two statues. "I'd think about what I want to do in the world, not the kind of person I want to be. The latter comes out of the former, anyway."

"...That's kinda crazy-good advice from someone your age."

He sees you now, Roxie, but he's still caught up in the dream. He thinks he's dreaming her without knowing he's dreaming.

Roxie tilts the baseball cap back, but she keeps the sunglasses on. She doesn't feel quite comfortable without something to frame her eyes, even in the dreamlands.

"I do my job. It's my duty. If that makes me a bad or good person as somebody else sees it, I don't really care."

"I'm sorry, by the way," he says, after a moment of silence.

"Sorry for what?"

"Treating you like a little kid. I know how annoying that can be, when you've seen a lot of crazy stuff, and fought a lot, and don't feel like a kid inside, after all you've done."

He drops his chin on his knees.

"All you kids remind me of...me, I guess. Yuri's the only one of you that's careful. The rest of you aren't afraid of anything."

He tears out some grass and starts playing with it in his hands.

"I just...I don't want to see any of you have to learn stuff the hard way. Like I did."

It's then that he admits something he'd never admit in the waking world (because he's invulnerable. He's Superboy. And invulnerable people don't feel pain, inside or out. They have to be stone. Strong).

"It hurts."

And he doesn't want to see any of them get hurt.

What dreams may come [Open, bendytimed to before GTFO plot]

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