Superboy / Kon-El (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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ya_assemble2015-05-12 10:19 pm
matchmadeinhell) wrote in ya_assemble2015-05-12 10:19 pm
"You have to start out learning to believe the little lies to believe the big ones."
They had to try their best to do this thing incognito. After all, the plan was get in, get the shard, get out, and while several of them were total unknowns in this world, three of them ran the risk of being recognized by some of the resident superheroes and supervillains since they were from a similar dimension and had equivalents here.
Nightwing, not so much since he usually wore a mask, but Cassie and Kon didn't wear masks as part of their costumes, and Kon especially wore a very familiar face. He was younger than Kal but still approaching adulthood now and that meant his cloney resemblance to the current de facto ruler of the world was pretty uncanny now.
That was why Kon was in disguise. He was wearing his usual jeans, black long-sleeved shirt, black boots, and black gloves. But he had a dumpy, shapeless, brown jacket over top of it all, a blue baseball cap, and a pair of dorky, large-framed glasses. Fortunately, spring was only just starting in this world and hadn't quite chased away the chill of winter so they could all bundle up with clothes that made them look innocuous.
The magical door had appeared in an alley, against a nondescript wall. As soon as they were all through and had closed it behind then, Kon peered around a corner to see if he could recognize where they were by the city's night-time skyline.
"Looks like Gotham." A pause. "It's hardly recognizable, though. I've never seen Gotham this clean."
He squinted instinctually, trying to peer around some more with his X-ray vision and found it working in full when he usually struggled with it back in the Guardians' universe. He held up his hand and poured on the teke, creating a field around it.
"My powers seem to be stronger here for some reason. The ones that are limited in the Guardians' universe are back, like my teke. You guys feeling the same? Most of us are superheroes or equivalents in our worlds. Being in a superhero universe might be amping up our powers or something. Maybe making the belief stronger."
It all ran on narratives, right? Stories? This was a story superheroes were supposed to be in.
Nightwing, not so much since he usually wore a mask, but Cassie and Kon didn't wear masks as part of their costumes, and Kon especially wore a very familiar face. He was younger than Kal but still approaching adulthood now and that meant his cloney resemblance to the current de facto ruler of the world was pretty uncanny now.
That was why Kon was in disguise. He was wearing his usual jeans, black long-sleeved shirt, black boots, and black gloves. But he had a dumpy, shapeless, brown jacket over top of it all, a blue baseball cap, and a pair of dorky, large-framed glasses. Fortunately, spring was only just starting in this world and hadn't quite chased away the chill of winter so they could all bundle up with clothes that made them look innocuous.
The magical door had appeared in an alley, against a nondescript wall. As soon as they were all through and had closed it behind then, Kon peered around a corner to see if he could recognize where they were by the city's night-time skyline.
"Looks like Gotham." A pause. "It's hardly recognizable, though. I've never seen Gotham this clean."
He squinted instinctually, trying to peer around some more with his X-ray vision and found it working in full when he usually struggled with it back in the Guardians' universe. He held up his hand and poured on the teke, creating a field around it.
"My powers seem to be stronger here for some reason. The ones that are limited in the Guardians' universe are back, like my teke. You guys feeling the same? Most of us are superheroes or equivalents in our worlds. Being in a superhero universe might be amping up our powers or something. Maybe making the belief stronger."
It all ran on narratives, right? Stories? This was a story superheroes were supposed to be in.
no subject
But the cynicism wasn't quite as cynical as it could've been.
"Space kind of gets cooler and simultaneously loses its appeal when you've been up to it," he said. "Though to be fair, the one time I was up there, it was to help the Justice League take down a creepy alien death satellite. Annnd I wound up falling between dimensions for a few seconds and a whole year passed back home."
No Brother Eye in this universe, but there had still been hostile aliens using Reach technology.
"I've always thought about, like, maybe seeing how far I could go with the scarab, because I'm pretty sure he can make portals or something but I was always afraid to go too far from home, in case something bad happened and I couldn't come back."
Lots of hostile aliens out there. Like the Reach.
"Still, I hoped I'd get to maybe poke around the solar system a little bit, you know?. I wanted to do a lot of things." He went quiet for a moment. "But I couldn't risk being seen in the suit."
He'd had to deny a part of himself all this time. The scarab had to deny a part of itself, the part that had become something more than a weapon. There had been so much good they could have done, so much that Jaime could've explored and taken joy in. After figuring the suit out, after the scarab had become his friend and he'd no longer been terrified by the strange creature inside his body, being in the suit and having the powers had made him happy. Helping people had made him happy.
"I think that's what I hated the most," he admitted, and whether it was that Danny felt approachable or that finally talking about all this made it easier to keep talking about it - or both - he kept talking. "The scarab and I, we're -"
It was hard to put into words and he didn't know if it'd sound creepy when he did.
"We're both separate people. But when we're the Blue Beetle, we're both someone different together. When we're in the suit - when he is the suit - we're something else that isn't just Jaime and isn't just Khaji Da." He was his friend now, always in his ear, but when they were the Blue Beetle, they flowed in and out of each other and were something different. Better. "I don't care that much about my legs. The chair's a pain in the butt but the suit can make me legs if I want to fight, even if it hurts. But all this time, thanks to them, we haven't been able to...to be."
He paused his careful gathering of notebooks and notes - and what looked like a journal - and just looked at the surface of his desk, his expression almost haunted.
"They took who we are away."
He sounded a little shaken over that, as if he hadn't realized how deep and terrible a wound it was until now, until realizing what he'd lost by taking it back again.
no subject
"When I was about 15, I got pulled into an alternate universe. Depowered, forced into gladiatorial games for the amusement of a dictatorship, not able to do anything about it...there was a lot more to it than that, but I really don't want to go into too much detail. Let's just say Panem blows and leave it at that. And when I got back home, I couldn't do anything to help the people who were still stuck there."
no subject
"When I was about 15, I got pulled into an alternate universe. Depowered, forced into gladiatorial games for the amusement of a dictatorship, not able to do anything about it...there was a lot more to it than that, but I really don't want to go into too much detail. Let's just say Panem blows and leave it at that."
It had been a mess, and he still had nightmares about it occasionally.
"Took me about two years of therapy to get past it. If you get a chance once this is all over, I'd actually suggest it. I know, we're superheroes, we should be able to deal with anything on our own and not dump our personal problems affect anyone else, but...sometimes we need to."