The Lurking Fear - Group 14

[cityship]

Nightmare becomes reality....

_{[roster: Leader - Batman, Brainiac 5, Duncan Idaho, Invisible Kid, Brenda Del Vecchio, Hellion]}

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[crusades]

If this is a nightmare, than it can only have been conjoured from the mind of the most terrible egotist. This corner of the ship is a flurry of fists and boots, batarangs and bolas as Batman dukes it out with... well, what appears to be himself.

"Snivelling idealist!" one of them roars over the pang! of his grapple gun, lodging in the wall and propelling him feet firt into his adversary, "You're obsolete, old man! Darkseid made me stronger, faster, smarter, bolder."

As if to iterate, he allows his opponent the time to recover, before planting a knee in his gut and a fist across his jaw, "I'm going to give you what you always dreamed of. I'm going to give you peace." An elbow is brought down upon the back of his silent adversary's head, driving his face into the floor, "From now on, Batman is compromised by nothing. His One Rule is broken. Batman kills, and you're the first casualty."

Batarang in his fist like a knife, the killing blow swings down.

Thud! Crack! Pow!

Before Darkseid's twisted supersoldier can christen his crusade with blood, Batman, the real Batman spits red and grins. Faster than fast, a hand finds the executioner's wrist and stronger than strong, he squeezes until something breaks. With a punch he hurls his deranged doppleganger clear across the room and he hauls himself to his feet.

"Nightmare King? You're a joke. If you want to scare me, take note--" bolder than bold, a hand disappears into the folds of his cape and returns with an alien hand cannon. The weapon that claimed Orion, the weapon that claimed Darkseid, "I really hate guns."

The pretender is dead and fading from existence before it even hits the floor. Patching his own wounds as he runs, Batman sets off in search of others in trouble.

1/2

[shes-intense.livejournal.com]

Brenda's gotten used to wandering, pacing the halls of the ship at night to keep herself from sleep that doesn't help. The special weapons lab is a frequent haunt. Tonight she wanders in and is met with unusual silence. Usually she can hear Brainy and Lyle bantering, or Koko making chittering noises in the background, but it's silent.

Then she sees the white sheet on the table and feels her chest clench. Of course it's quiet. They're still mourning the dead...

B5's corpse is stretched out on a worktable, the white sheet over him and the blond hair just above it's edge look stark and bright under lights above him. She steps close to the table, breathing in smells of formaldahyde and stale water, and reaches out to tousle his hair a little. Why did she never talk to him more? He was so...


...warm.



His head feels like flesh and not metal.



She was calm a moment ago. Now her blood runs cold and her spine stiffens up, and she wars with herself wether or not to lift up the sheet and see, terror and curiosity deadlocked over that throbbing pain in her chest.

His name slips past her lips, and her fingers tremble, tracing the dead man's features through the sheet.


"Querl...?"

"You couldn't look at your mother either."


Brenda whips around, backing up against the table, smothering a shriek at how CLOSE he is. Her father is only steps behind her, unshaven and bag-eyed, reeking of alcohol. How did she not NOTICE HIM?!

"Not gonna say hello?"

He regrips the whiskey bottle in his hand, thumbing the cap slightly closer to unscrewed, a slow squeaking scraping sound that puts Brenda's teeth on edge just like it always used to. She backs up a step, but only shoves the wheeled table off center, bringing the glaring lights down on her own head. The sheet ruffles up under her hands as she stumbles and tries to catch herself.

Her father nods toward the body, closing the gap between then with slow steady steps.

"You told him you missed me. 'Every day' you said, mi hija."

She chokes on the words, tears spilling over her cheeks.

"This isn't the you I miss, papi..."

It only takes a split second for his voice to rise to a thundering roar.


"LIAR!"

The whiskey bottle goes up, and slams down, and she barely dodges out of the way. Pans and bottles of medicine clatter on the floor as she pushes through underneath the autopsy table and stumbles out it's other side. She turns back around to find the white sheet stained transparent gold and her father angrily yanking on the stem of the bottle, it's broken edges pierced into Querl's chest.

"GET BACK HERE!"

He braces a foot on the table, pinning the arm of the corpse between his boot and the edge, and PULLS. The bottle comes free, the table flips as his leg follows through on it's countering push and Querl, ribs shattered, face nicked by broken glass, reeking of whiskey, hits the floor with a wet smack, almost on top of her along with the table.

Brenda knows she's screaming but doesn't quite hear herself, scrambling in a puddle of alcohol to run as her father tramples the table, then the body, and chases her into the depths of the lab.

2/2

[shes-intense.livejournal.com]

She should know the place better than he does but it's all alien now. She crashes through an unfamiliar door and crouches on it's other side, hearing the squeak of his boots on the floor outside and trying not to breathe too loud. Then she finally looks around where she's ended up and gives herself away with a scream.

Tubes, hundreds, a hallway lined with them, the grate floor emmitting eerie smoke and a sickly orange glow, lighting up the few recognizable faces on a thousand mangled bodies.

Jaime is floating in front of her in some kind of thick bubbling soup. His beetle armour is fractured around him like wrapping paper torn off a gift. His head is only half-intact, toungue loling out of an open mouth that a broken jaw won't close.

She hears the bootsteps stop and turn outside and she staggers to her feet, running down the hall. The place is like a maze and in no time she's lost, stumbling into a corner where Paco floats in one tank and his arm in another. She smothers another scream, wheels down a side hall, footsteps clanging on the grates, and smashes straight into Sean. His body seems intact, and is pressed against the glass. When she lays her head on the curve of it's surface, crying, trying to catch her breath... it cracks.

Brenda jerks her head up to see the spiderweb fracture blooming across the pane, and then Sean twitches. His hands clench, his mouth opens clumsily underneath the ninja mask that shrouds his face, and his eyes are glowing an inhuman red.

She bolts, hearing the crack and splash of the cylinder coming apart, the scream of hunger that's haunted her since the zombie flood. Her father's voice echoes after her from another direction - "GET BACK HERE, BRENDA! WE NEED TO HAVE A LITTLE TALK ABOUT HONESTY!" - and she dodges down the next side run she sees, ducking her head away from Jekka, Danny, Lyle, Kelly, Leon as she goes.

Her feet hurt, her lungs burn, and all she can do is keep running.

[crusades]

... Head on into a different kind of nightmare entirely. Great, angular shadows dance away from the orange light swelling from the floors. The din of beating wings - or so it sounds - floods the room. A swirling darkness darts through the corridor of tubes.

[shes-intense.livejournal.com]

Brenda drops, tripping and crashing into the grate floor as the cloud of black, and din of flapping noises, swells over her. She curls into a ball and covers her head and face, feeling her hair tossed by the swirl of the wind.

[crusades]

A hand takes her arm and lifts her back to her feet. A voice level amid the insanity, "On your feet, soldier. You're not done yet."

1/2 [Warning: For self-harm stuff.]

[cabbage-butt.livejournal.com]

"In other news, the Legion of Superheroes has just defeated the Fatal Five again after their short-lived escape from Takron Galtos. Current Legion Leader Shrinking Violet credits the team's victory to their newest member, Gral Lax, of Colu, who replaced Brainiac 5 in the lineup after the latter's terrible accident on--"

The channel is flicked, but then the viewer doesn't pay attention anymore. He's focusing on his meal, pre-made, heated up in the food service unit in his kitchen.

Legionnaires got paid rather handsomely, although most of it was tucked away for the time they eventually retired from service as Legionnaires. His apartment would be very nice if it wasn't in a state of squalor, but there's rubbish all over, food cartons and such. He'd kept it clean at the beginning, when he was still seeing Dr. Dr. Ryk'rr in her private practice. He'd also kept all his plants alive then--botany had been something to occupy his time. Now the plants are all brown, dried and dead.

It had been different around the beginning. He'd helped a bit around Legion World, here and there. But with all the support staff they had, there hadn't been much he could do, and there were others more suited to the support roles they'd tried to place him in. After overhearing Cos express frustration about it when he hadn't realized Brainy was listening, he'd gracefully stepped down.

He wasn't going to hold his team-mates--his former team-mates back.

Still, even after that, the others still visited him, still kept in touch with him. But he'd never really been one of the social niceties and never had much to talk about. Perhaps they'd interpreted his behavior as purposefully antisocial, as him not wanting to keep in touch. Perhaps.

He liked to tell himself that for a time.

Eventually the visits trailed off until only a few stopped by and only occasionally. Ayla, Shikari, Gates, Jasmin, Lyle...

Ayla had been the one that visited the longest. But then that lightning storm had happened on Winath and she'd been busy, very busy helping rebuild.

Life moved on--they had a universe to save, and he...

He could no longer contribute. It made perfect sense to him that they'd just be...too busy to allow him to occupy their time. He'd thrown himself into various hobbies--his botany, reading, even piano for a time. Then there'd been the girl across the hall. The redhead.

Brenda.

She had been very kind to him, occasionally brought him meals when she made extra.

Very kind.

At least until she told him she was moving. When he'd expressed his fondness for her, she'd made it quite clear she had no interest back, that she'd only been kind out of pity, and told him she was glad he was doing better than when she'd first met him, to take care of himself, while she joined her boyfriend on Braal.

Very kind of her, to tell him to take care of himself. Very kind.

2/2

[cabbage-butt.livejournal.com]

Time had passed, the visits had long since stopped, the calls had dwindled down to nothing. His days were filled with the same routines, except those routines started to slowly change to take him out of the apartment less and less. There just seemed to not really be much point after a time. Why go out to a restaurant and sit there to a meal alone when he could order in and just eat on his own couch? Why go see a play or a holo when he could just watch the links at home?

Why shower or shave when his lack of hygeine wouldn't offend anyone else if he stayed in his apartment? Why throw out the trash if he didn't mind it sitting there?

Why get out of bed some days when there was nothing to get out of bed for?

It was a rare day that he actually cooked for himself that he discovered something interesting. He accidentally burned his hand and...

The endorphin rush, he knew was the logical cause of it, affecting the dopamine receptors in the brain--he knew that much even after the accident. It was basic. But it also was like a splash of red in a world of gray, some color at last, that feeling of pain.

It had been such along time since he'd felt anything at all, and it brought him back out of those distance places he occupied in the space of his now enfeebled mind. It brought him to the present, to the here and now.

It let him feel something.

It started with "accidents." That's how he rationalized such behavior. Cooking for once so he "accidentally" burnt his hands. "Accidentally" nicking himself, "accidentally" banging his knees on his coffee table. Little moments of color in the gray. Fleeting moments of being in the present.

Then he decided to drop the pretense entirely. He still had some of his old tools. His soldering laser worked best, making clean, straight little lines on his arms that were instantly cauterized.

Sometimes, when he went to sleep at night, he would run his fingers up and down his arms, comforting himself, feeling the little bumps of the scars, trying to find himself in the present by the texture against his fingers, and the pain at the end as his fingers ran over the more recent burns. It was soothing. It helped him fall asleep.

There had been times that he'd considered mood stabilizers, seeing Dr. Rykk'r again, but there really was no point. What he was doing wasn't healthy, certainly--but what was there that he needed to healthy for? There were no Legion psych evals, no reasons not to indulge and it was quite easy to rationalize. Were he to take mood stabilizers, he'd be just as dependent on those. He might be somewhat more functional but there wasn't really anything he needed to be functional for.

Right now, Querl Dox sits on the couch alone, as he does every night, arms stinging, in clothes that he hasn't changed out of in three days, and his face covered in the stubble he hasn't shaved in four. He watches the holo-links, stuffing a bland pre-made meal into his mouth, so drawn into what he's watching that some drips down his chin. He doesn't bother wiping it off.

His stories are on.

Yolande just got abandoned by her alcoholic mother and her friends have turned their backs on her and she's dating Brent, who's secretly a Durlan that doesn't love her and--

And--

And he lets out a scream of anguish and his bowl is suddenly tossed at the screen so hard it cracks. Then he just sits there, staring at where the program had been, wondering why exactly he did that.

Then he sits there staring at nothing at all, trying to recall the feeling of what it was like to not be useless, trying to remember what it felt like to be a part of something, to have friends.

The feelings won't come anymore. No feelings will come anymore.

He digs through the trash to find his soldering laser, considering the idea of starting on his legs. He's starting to run out of room on his arms.

[shes-intense.livejournal.com]

Brenda wanders up the hall, hunting along the placards for the name she wants. There are super-modern looking keycard and fingerprint systems on the doors, sleek tile, sharply designed lighting, futuristic but definetely residential.

Seeing her own name startles her for a second - B. DelVecchio is crossed out beside a door with the number 201. She turns around and across the hall on the placard next to 202 is 'Q. Dox'.

She spares a glance at Batman who has been following her up the corridor, letting her lead since she knows Brainy better. Brenda points to the door - "It's this one." - and after a moment of consideration she just... knocks.

"Querl? Are you here?"

[crusades]

Batman was never one for the soft-peddling treatment. He directs Brenda out of the way before there's a cracking sound and the door pops from its hinges.

Lowering his boot, he turns back to her and stares blankly as if to say, 'well, go on then.'

[cabbage-butt.livejournal.com]

He starts, alarmed, and the laser is put away. Having his door kicked in is no small matter.

Therefore, they come into an empty room, filled with discarded food cartons. What looks like a super thin TV screen is broken and a bowl of some kind of soy meal is on the floor on its side, its contents on the carpet.

Brainy stands behind the wall near the doorway of his kitchen, blaster in hand, perfectly calm, pressing a button to contact the Science Police, just in case the security system didn't do it automatically. It will still take several minutes for them to arrive, however. That hand then goes to his belt--he no longer wears the shield belt as he lacks the intelligence to operate the complicated controls, but he's used to having certain tools and items on hand, and he pulls a device free from the belt.

Legionnaires have enemies. It's publicly known that he's lost his intelligence. On the one hand, a rare few enemies would dare target a former Legionnaire--on the other, there are still a few. But he's prepared.

[Closed thread, for now]

[telekinetic_badass]

"Come on, work!" Julian stared at his hands angrily. Not even a spark, or the slightest glow of power.

One moment he was fine, then the next, flatscan'd.

"Don't do this to me; I'm not human!"

He was so busy focusing on the loss of his powers that he didn't notice how much his surroundings had changed.

Re: [Closed thread, for now]

[so-pregnable.livejournal.com]

"Uh, Julian?"

Re: [Closed thread, for now]

[telekinetic_badass]

"What?" His powers were stripped from him.

His powers were stripped from him!

He just got reduced to a mere human. He's in a bit of a mood, Kon.

[so-pregnable.livejournal.com]

"MOVE!"

Not that Julian noticed, because he had been whining, but they're on a battlefield, in a devastated city (the nightmare of two of the others unbejnownst to them). There's the whine of an artillery shell, what Kon had thought he'd heard (although it felt like he was listening through cotton) and as it gets louder, he bodily tackles Julian around the midsection and knocks him over a half-demolished wall and to the ground, acting as a human shield.

It's instinct, really. And even without his invulnerability, he's a thick, sturdy guy. If any shrapnel hits them, it might not cut all the way through him to Julian. They're showered in dirt and stinging bits of cobblestone.

He's dealt with this before, when Young Justice had been zipped around to different times (and genres, technically). He'd had powers then, but felt powerless. Now he is for real. They both are.

[telekinetic_badass]

Julian wiped the dirt off of his face. "What the hell?"

He had been in such a state of shock over potentially being M-Day'd that it took the explosion to make him remember there was a world outside of himself.

"Dude, you okay?"

[smartnass.livejournal.com]

Lyle looks through the files again.

His handlers are already going to be angry at him for being late. But the conscience he'd sworn was dead is tugging at him, refusing to let him move from this spot. The sheer magnitude of ...

It would be another Durlan.

He's been careful since then. So much more careful than he thought he'd been. That, that had been entirely his fault. He'd even talked them into it. They'd expressed their concerns, and he'd said, I'll go. I'll pretend to be a diplomat. I'll spy on them for you.

He hadn't thought he'd given them anything they could actually use against the Durlan. He hadn't realized how little they needed. He had inflamed hatred, destroyed an entire people, for what? Because he needed a vacation?

Because he couldn't handle murdering his best friend?

Oh, right, it wasn't murder. More like ... negligent homicide? No, manslaughter at least. No, outright murder. He'd set a trap with hostile intent, and it killed someone. His handlers cleaned it up, hid her away, hid him. He almost thought they were happy about it. Now they could say: we own you.

He'd let them. He should have told the truth right then. But he'd lied to the family that was practically his own. He'd been overcome by what he had done (an excuse, like telling himself it was an accident or that it was her fault, not his.) He'd gotten himself assigned to the middle of nowhere so he could hide better than any serum would let him. And his bumbling self-centeredness and idiocy had killed again.

That really should have been the end of it. He should have come out and protested even if it cost him his life. He'd protested to his handlers, but wasn't a naive kid anymore. They knew they had a hold of him.

He should've left. Disappeared. Hidden for the rest of his life and tried to do some good to wipe the blood of off his hands. But he'd told himself they'd just replace him with some other murderer they'd drafted. That at least he would try to control the damage. That he could at least do less harm.

He's a fool. He'd always been a fool.

He'd pushed away the Foccarts out of guilt. He'd pushed everyone else away out of fear. He'd lost touch with society, with his conscience, with his humanity, perhaps with his very sanity.

But he isn't this much a fool.

He will take this to the press. He'll take everything to the press. They'll know it was him; he'll be the next person whose life ended in a tragic "accident".

The question is only whether to run and hide or whether to stay and fight. It might be just like the good old days, except Jacques won't be there to have his back.

Well. Whose fault is that?

[cabbage-butt.livejournal.com]

"Really, Norg," says a voice behind him. "Do you honestly think someone of your intelligence would settle on a life like this rather than seek out one with more meaning? Where is the logic in that?"

[shes-intense.livejournal.com]

"Time to wake up Lyle."

Brenda, holding onto Brainy's hand, is right behind him too.

[smartnass.livejournal.com]

Lyle doesn't really hear what they've said. He turns and stands, startled. The movement immediately rekindles the pain in his back, but he ignores it as well, his eyes immediately fixed on Brainiac 5.

A Legionnaire. They'd sent the Legion after him.

His thumb automatically presses the send button. Hopefully, the files have gone far and wide now, but if they'd had time to block his signal ... he needs to get away, he needs to deliver these in person.

No more time to wallow in his mistakes. He'd chosen the museum carefully. It was relatively private so he wouldn't be so easy to find (so much for that.) It was public enough that they'd have to keep it legal. And he was right in front of a few choice exits.

He only needs to ... to ... what? He's still visible. How did they manage that?

Oh, sprock it all, he's running.

[cabbage-butt.livejournal.com]

Brainy's eyes roll skyward.

It can never be easy, can it.

He tugs Brenda's hand to get her running alongside him.

"Brenda, your assistance in subduing him would be greatly appreciated."

It's likely going to take both of them to tackle him.

[standaloneshell.livejournal.com]

It was simple, really; deceptively simple. Plausible, even, if you could ignore the bald impossibility of it. It was like being in gunfight mode, the way the world bend and curled around her, time and every breath pushing against her consciousness like a heavy hand.

Breath? Why was she...Motoko didn't need breath.

Still, the breaths came, and it was only by trial of elimination that the Major was able to recognize that the soft wheezing was coming from herself. It was that recognition that began the hyperventilation. the world was quite suddenly a confusing place— strange, the hallway had been normal before, but to Motoko's perceptions it warped and flashed, sound and touch being perceived as light and balance-sense. Gone was the clean read-outs of chemical substitutes and gyroscopic reports. By some grace her hindbrain was working, so the Major continued to breathe, but that did nothing for the drunken reeling her mind continued to do.

When had she laid down? For a handful of heartbeats Motoko managed to separate the weak thread of data that was the view of the ceiling and realized she was sprawled on her back. What? What had happened? An EMP? Thinking was like wading through waist-high cement, and as the buzzing pain of headache manifested as an auditory hallucination, the Major raised a hand to ward off the sensation; it blundered into her line of sight and crystallized in her brain. What was that? The shape, it was...

A hand? Yes. Yes, she knew what a hand was.

Whose hand?


Staring at the appendage in rapt fascination, Kusanagi realized with great horror that the hand was her own, and her eyes rolled back as the world went gray and then black. To an observer it probably looked like nothing more than a dizzy spell; someone falling to the ground in a relatively normal stretch of fleshy hallway. To someone who knew Motoko at all, this was a vastly frightening sight; Major Kusanagi does not simply fall unconscious for no reason.

The Major hadn't had an organic brain since she was six years old.

[crusades]

Batman enters the room, and very much unlike the usual precedent, he makes himself heard. He had just fought himself, after all. It wasn't so easy to move like a ninja when you're nursing several lacerations, two cracked ribs and most likely a concussion.

He's managed to follow her omnicom signal this far, but has yet to catch sight of her through the shifting dreamworld that the ship had become, "Major?"

[standaloneshell.livejournal.com]

It was like the echo of a memory, and her own twisted perceptions warped his voice dreamlike from sound into vision— and the Nightmare effect twisted that into reality, a grey-blue cloud of smoke that echoed in Batman's voice and then Batou's. In response, Bruce was treated to the ghostly apparition of Batou standing beside him in that damn brown jacket he always wore. He took a puff of a cigarette, and blew out the smoke along with his appearance as it faded to nothing. On the floor, Motoko swam back to a more proper consciousness.

Major?

Her eyes opened, then closed as the world spun dizzily around the two of them, touch and the taste of bile in her throat manifesting as splashes of nauseous violet and red on the pulsing walls. Motoko held as still as she could and picked through the myriad noises as slowly as she could. She lost her place and began again. The voice? Familiar, but not....not that. Who?

"Wh..." She hadn't the breath. Oh. Oh, wait, wasn't...speaking connected to respiration somehow? The Major made a concerted effort to find the control software. Nothing but a multicolored haze of sensory-feedback answered the practiced call, but the sound of an automatic inhalation caught the edge of her attention, enough that she knew to speak, "Whah...t...Who?"

[crusades]

Bruce levels the Batou-spectre with a curious look as it nonchalantly stood there and smoked. One of her people? Then the room lights up with her nausea, as if she herself were projecting, and all he has to do is follow the garish daubs of colour and, homing in on that small rasping noise at the far end of the room.

"Major, it's me," he gingerly kneels next to her, clutching at a freshly reopened wound, "It's Bruce. I need you to wake up."