I am Invincible Chapter 4 — Author of your own Demise (Patreon)

Eve was watching when it happened.

She had the feeds up across all four monitors, the preparation room on the big screen, corridor cameras on the other three. She'd been sitting there for twenty minutes with her knees pulled up in her chair, chewing her thumbnail raw while Dinah paced beside Mark's table. Mark was out cold, but the staff were there treating him so he should be fjne, at least that's what she had been telling herself for the last ten minutes.

But then the door opened on the feed.

Eve leaned forward.

The man who walked in was tall, white-haired, moved like a machine. He raised something in his right hand, there was a small flash on the camera, and the nearest medical worker dropped. Eve's thumb stopped moving against her teeth. The second worker turned and dropped. The third one slid down the wall.

"No," Eve whispered. "No, no, no, no."

She watched Dinah dive behind the table and then  come up fighting a few seconds later, she thought that maybe Dinah would win until a second figure came through the door, younger, white-haired too, and hit Dinah from behind. Dinah's knee buckled, her arm got twisted back, the man hit her in the neck and she went down.

Eve's hands were on the keyboard, though she didn't know why, what could she possibly do? But then again she didn't just want to sit there doing nothing. 

She was then brought out of her thoughts when Luca Falcone walked through the door.

Eve stopped breathing.

She knew his face. She'd known it ever since Mark had first told her what happened to his mother.

He stood over Mark, but then looked over at Dinah. "Take her too," he said on the feed.

She watched Deathstroke lift Mark off the table and walk out into the corridor. On the corridor camera she watched them carry both of them through the building, through a loading bay, and through a service door at the back. A van was there for about three seconds. 

Then it was gone.

Eve sat in her chair a look of disbelief on her face. 

She couldn't feel her hands and her chest was doing something bad, her ribs were tightening from both sides like somebody was squeezing them together, the air wasn't going deep enough, it was hitting the top of her lungs and bouncing back out. She tried to take a deep breath but it wouldn't come. She tried again, got half of one, snd lost it on the way out.

She shoved away from the desk making the chair roll and hit the wall behind her, she then stood up and grabbed the edge of the desk with both hands.

"Think," she said out loud. "Think, think, think. He's in a van, find the van, you can find the van."

She couldn't sit down, her legs were carrying her away from the desk and she was moving toward the front door.

"Good," she said to herself, the words coming out between gasps. "Good, okay, leave, go outside, go to the colosseum, do something, go, just go, just open the door and go."

She got within three feet of it.

Her hand was reaching for the handle.

...

And suddenly she was fourteen again and in the kitchen of her old home. 

Her mother was at the stove with her back to her, stirring something in the rice pot, laughing at a joke Eve had made about the neighbor's dog. The steam was rising from the pot and fogging the window. The boy from across the street pressed his face against the glass and made a face at her.

Then the flash happened. 

The flash was small. It was always small.

When her vision cleared the rice pot was still on the stove, the steam was still rising, but her mother was not there anymore. There was something on the kitchen tiles, it looked like a blob of a dark red mush that was constantly shifting. Whatever it was it wasn't her mother, it didn't even look human anymore. 

"e.....Ve..eeee"

...

"NOOO!!!" Eve's knees hit the floor of her apartment. Eve panted as she looked up, the door was right there. She tried to reach for it but her arm came up about six inches and stopped. The muscles in her shoulder locked and her fingers curled into a fist against her thigh.

"Please," she said. "Please, just let me, I have to, he's going to die, Mark is going to die, just let me open it, please." But her body did not move toward the door.

She slammed her forehead into the wall.

"Useless," she said. She hit her head against the wall an again. "You're useless. You can't even open a door. You can't even open a fucking door, Eve. Mark is out there and he's hurt and you're sitting on the floor of your apartment because you can't touch a door handle. You're pathetic. You're a coward. You killed your own mother and you can't even leave the room you've been hiding in ever since."

"Please... just... please... open the door..." she sobbed as she started to cry. She wrapped her arms around her own ribs and she squeezed, something inside her chest felt like it was coming apart.

"You're a monster," she whispered between the sobs. "You're a freak, you killed your mother, you can't help anyone, you can't do anything, you are the most useless person alive." She sat there on the floor, three feet from the door, and cried until the sobs turned into something quieter, something that just shook her shoulders without making noise.

"I'm sorry, Mark," she said to the empty apartment. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I couldn't come. I'm sorry I'm like this. I'm sorry."

She sat there on the floor for a long time.

_____________________________________

Light came back in pieces, first there was the white of the ceiling, then the edges of the room started to fill in around it. Mark blinked. His eyelids felt heavy, like someone had glued weights to the underside of them, each blink taking longer than the last to complete. He tried to lift his head off whatever surface he was lying on and got it up about two inches before the muscles in his neck screamed at him and he let it drop back down.

The cold was the next thing he noticed, the kind of cold that sinks into bone. He tried to move his right arm to push himself up, it went about half an inch before something dug into his wrist, a strap, pulled so tight against the skin that he could feel his pulse beating against it. His left arm was the same. His ankles too, locked down at the bottom of the table by straps he couldn't see but could feel biting into the tendons every time he pulled.

His vision cleared the rest of the way.

He was in a room that looked a lot like a hospital room. It was full of medical equipment and different types of monitors, but the most prominent part was the big steal door that lead into the room. 

"HEY!" he shouted, his voice cracking from dryness. "HEY! WHERE AM I! LET ME OUT!"

Nobody answered.

He pulled against the straps, every muscle in his upper body firing at once, his wrists grinding against the leather until he could feel the skin peeling underneath, but the straps held. He tried again, throwing his whole body into it this time, his back arching off the table, his teeth locked together, a roar building in his chest that tore out of him and filled the room.

"LET ME GO! WHOEVER THE FUCK IS OUT THERE, LET ME GO RIGHT NOW!"

He fell back against the table, panting hard, his wrists already raw from the leather. He pulled at his ankles. Same result. The straps had no give in them at all, they had been designed for someone his size it seemed.

Suddenly he hewed footsteps outside the door, a moment later twopeople walked in. The first was a man in his fifties, thin, grey at the temples, wearing a white coat over a blue shirt with a clipboard tucked under his arm. Behind him came a younger woman in scrubs, a nurse, carrying a steel tray with several items on it that Mark could not immediately identify.

"What the fuck is going on," Mark said, pulling against the straps again. "Where am I. Who are you. Let me out of these straps right now, I swear to God if you don't untie me I will break every bone in your body when I get free."

The doctor did not even look at him, instead he walked to the monitors on the wall, tapped the screen twice and studied whatever numbers appeared. He then turned to the nurse. "Prep him for the first injection, use the yellow compound, sixty milliliters."

"Don't you dare," Mark shouted angrily, his whole body shaking in rage. "Don't you dare touch me. I am talking to you. Look at me. Look at me!"

The doctor still did not look at him. He lifted the clipboard, made a note on it with a pen from his breast pocket, then walked to the side of the table and placed two fingers against Mark's wrist, above the strap, checking the pulse. He held it for about ten seconds, glanced at his watch, wrote another number down.

"Vitals are stable," he said to the nurse. "The damage the patient suffered beforehand has healed fully. Heart rate elevated but that's to be expected given his state of consciousness. Blood pressure is high but within tolerance. He's ready."

Mark stared at the ceiling.

The damage from the fight had healed. 

It was just then but he remembered about the Colosseum and the fight he had taken part in. Those injuries should have taken weeks to heal. Months for the internal damage.

"How long," Mark said. "How long have I been here. How long was I unconscious."

The doctor did not answer.

"How long!"

"I want to see whoever runs this place," Mark said, pulling at the straps again. "I want to see the people who own the Colosseum. Get me whoever's in charge and get me out of these straps."

The doctor stopped writing and breathed out through his nose in a long exhale, and for the first time since he had entered the room he looked at Mark directly. "The Colosseum is not involved in this particular project," the doctor said. "They will be of no help to you now." He then turned back to the nurse, who had set the tray down on the steel cart beside the table. On the tray sat a syringe. It was large, the kind used for intramuscular injections, the barrel was full of liquid that was bright neon yellow, almost glowing under the fluorescent lights. "Now stay still," the doctor said. "This will be significantly less painful if you don't fight it."

Mark looked at the syringe.

"No," he said. "No. Don't put that in me. Don't you fucking dare put that in me, do you hear me, I will kill you, I will kill both of you, DON'T!" He threw himself against the straps with everything he had. The table shook so hard the wheels screeched against the floor, the leather at his wrists groaned, one of the buckles rattled, something in the frame of the table made a popping sound like a bolt coming loose.

The doctor stepped back quickly wnd the nurse froze with the syringe in her hand. 

They looked at each other.

"Additional restraints," the doctor said. "Now."

The nurse set the syringe down, opened a cabinet against the wall, pulled out two more straps. She and the doctor worked fast, threading one across Mark's chest and another across his thighs, pulling them tight enough that the leather compressed the muscle underneath.

Mark was still thrashing, still screaming, the words coming out of him in a torrent that had stopped being coherent. The doctor picked up the syringe, found the vein on the inside of Mark's right elbow, and pushed the needle in.

For about two seconds nothing happened.

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!" Mark screamed as every muscle in his torso contracted at the same time, his back arched so far off the table that only his head and his heels were still touching the surface, the chest strap stretching to its limit, his wrists pulling against the leather hard enough that the buckles started to warp. His vision went white, then red, then white again, his teeth clamped together so hard that something in his jaw cracked, his whole body vibrating like a plucked string.

The additional straps held. Barely. The doctor and the nurse looked about ready to run out the room, rather than face this hulk of a man. 

The convulsions went on for what felt like an hour, though it was probably closer to ninety seconds. When they stopped Mark collapsed back against the table, drenched in sweat, his chest heaving, every breath a wet ragged gasp that pulled at muscles that had been stretched past their tolerance. His vision was blurred, his ears were ringing and could taste blood where he had bitten through the inside of his cheek.

The doctor leaned over him and checked his pupils with a penlight. He straightened up, made another note on the clipboard, and nodded. "Congratulations," he said. "You survived."

He turned away from the table, lifted a radio from the cart, pressed the button. "Subject four-seven-six has survived the initial injection. Vitals are holding. He's stable enough for transport."

The radio crackled and a voice came through. "Bring him to testing area three."

The doctor clipped the radio back to his belt. He gestured to the nurse, who released the locks on the table's wheels, and together they started pushing the table toward the door.

Mark turned his head toward the doctor. His voice was a whisper now, hoarse from the screaming, barely audible. "Why are you doing this. Why are you doing this to me."

The doctor kept pushing the table. He did not look down at Mark, instead he looked straight ahead at the corridor they were entering. "Because I want to be on the forefront of evolutionary science," the doctor said. He said it the way a man might say because I prefer tea to coffee, with no weight behind it at all. "The work being done here is going to change what it means to be human. You should feel honored to be part of it."

Mark wanted to answer that, but his body had nothing left to give. The injection had hollowed him out so he just lay on the table as they wheeled him down the corridor.

They turned a corner and went through a large steel door that opened automatically as they approached. They entered a room that was much larger than the one he had woken up in.

It was a wide open space, concrete floor, high ceiling with industrial lighting, the kind of room that might have been a warehouse or a loading bay in another life. There were people in it. Guards, four of them, wearing black tactical gear, carrying weapons at their sides. A man in a white-haired ponytail was standing near the far wall with his arms crossed, tall, built heavy through the chest, wearing civilian clothes that did not fit the setting.

But none of that mattered, because standing beside him, talking on a phone with one hand and holding a glass of something amber in the other, wearing a dark blue suit with his hair combed straight back, was a man Mark had seen in his nightmares every single night for the last five years.

Luca Falcone.

The rage he had to constantly bury beneath him in the very core of his being exploded before he even knew it. 

He pulled against the straps with a force that made the leather groan and the buckles start to bend. The chest strap snapped first, the leather tearing apart at the weakened point where the buckles had warped during the injection. His right wrist came free next, the strap ripping clean off the table frame, and he used the free hand to tear the left wrist strap apart, then the thigh straps, then the ankles.

He rolled off the table, his feet hit the concrete floor and he was running before he was fully upright.

"FALCONE!" The word tore out of him so loud that it echoed off every wall in the room. "I'M GOING TO KILL YOU! I'M GOING TO RIP YOUR FUCKING HEAD OFF YOUR SHOULDERS, YOU HEAR ME? FALCONE!"

The guards reacted quickly and two of them stepped into his path with stun batons, the tips crackling blue with voltage high enough to drop a horse. The first one jabbed the baton into Mark's chest and the electricity hit him like a wall, his muscles seizing, his teeth locking, white light flooding his vision.

Mark grabbed the guard by the throat.

He lifted the man off the ground with one hand, the electricity still pouring into his body through the baton still pressed against his chest, and he swung the guard sideways into the second one with such force it snapped the man's neck. 

Mark then kept going like a juggernaut.

Luca's eyes widened and he took a step back and dropped his phone. 

Deathstroke moved.

He stepped into Mark's path, caught his leading arm, turned his hip into Mark's body, and threw him. The floor came up fast and Mark hit the concrete on his back, the impact driving the air out of his lungs in a rush. Before he could push himself up Deathstroke was on top of him, one knee on his spine, both of Mark's arms wrenched behind his back and pinned.

Deathstroke laughed. "He really hates you," he said, looking up at Luca. "He really, truly hates you. Look at him. Naked, half-dead from the injection, outnumbered, outgunned, doesn't matter, soon as he sees your face he goes feral. I think he might be doing what everybody else in this city is thinking."

Mark's face was pressed against the concrete. He could taste his own blood in his mouth from where the stun batons had made him bite his tongue. He turned his head sideways enough to see Luca's shoes, expensive, polished, standing about six feet away.

"I'm going to kill you," Mark spat, his voice nearly breaking from rage. "I don't care how long it takes. I don't care what you do to me. I'm going to kill you."

Luca crouched down. He didn't come close enough to touch, just close enough that Mark could see his face from the angle he was pinned at. He tilted his head slightly, the way you might tilt your head at a dog that had done something you didn't expect.

"Do I know you, kid?" Luca said. "Have we met somewhere before? Because you seem to have a real strong opinion about me for a guy I've never laid eyes on."

"Debbie Grayson," Mark spat.

Luca raised an eyebrow. He looked at Deathstroke. He looked back at Mark. "Who?"

The sound that came out of Mark was barely human. He pushed against the concrete with everything he had, trying to lift himself, trying to get his arms free, trying to do anything. "MY MOTHER! YOU KILLED MY MOTHER! DEBBIE GRAYSON! SAY HER NAME! SAY HER FUCKING NAME!"

Luca looked at him for a long moment, then his face relaxed, a small nod, understanding settling onto his features. "Oh," he said. He stood back up and took a sip from his glass. "Yeah, okay, I get it now. That explains the whole thing. Look, kid, I'm going to be honest with you I kill a lot of people It's part of the job description. I've been doing it for thirty years. I'm not gonna sit here and pretend I remember some whore from, what, five years ago? Ten? Whatever it was. I don't remember her. I'm sorry about that, I really am, it's nothing personal, it's just numbers. You shoot enough people, the faces start to blur."

Mark's whole body lifted off the floor.

With Deathstroke's full weight on his back, with both arms pinned, with the aftereffects of the injection still turning his muscles into something that didn't quite work right, he got his knees under him, he got his chest off the concrete and he started to push up.

Deathstroke's eyebrows went up by a fraction.

The butt of the pistol came down on the back of Mark's skull with a crack, his vision flashed and he hit the concrete face first. He was still trying to get up when the second hit landed in the same spot and he went limp. 

Luca stepped back and brushed a piece of dust off his sleeve. He sighed. "I hate these kinds of people," he said. "You know the type. My mother, my father, my dog, my goldfish, somebody wronged me somewhere and now I'm going to dedicate my entire existence to revenge. They show up every couple of years, some kid who's been stewing in his own shit for a decade, and it's always the same thing. The speeches, the screaming, the I'm going to kill you. And where does it go? Nowhere. They end up dead, or they end up in a cell, or they end up right here, strapped to a table, and the whole grand revenge saga turns out to be a bad joke." He drained the rest of his glass. "It's boring. All of it. Every single time."

Luca walked over and crouched in front of him. "Okay, kid. Let me explain your future to you. Try to pay attention, because I'm only doing this once."

"Fuck you," Mark mumbled. 

"You belong to me now. Your whole life, everything about it, who you are, what you eat, whether you sleep, whether you breathe, that's all on my say-so from this point forward. I own you the same way I own this building and the people in it. You're property."

"GO FUCK YOURSELF! YOU THINK I'M SCARED OF YOU? YOU'RE A DEAD MAN, FALCONE! YOU'RE ALREADY DEAD, YOU JUST DON'T KNOW IT YET! I'M GOING TO RIP YOUR THROAT OUT WITH MY BARE HANDS AND WATCH YOU BLEED OUT ON THIS FLOOR, YOU HEAR ME? YOU FUCKING HEAR ME?"

Luca tried to talk over him. "If you'd just shut up for a second I could explain what's about to happen to you in a way that might actually be useful."

Mark did not shut up, he just kept screaming. The words were running together now, a continuous stream of profanity and death threats that echoed off the walls of the testing bay and made one of the guards wince.

Luca looked at Deathstroke and he pulled a cloth from his back pocket, rolled it into a thick strip, and shoved it into Mark's mouth. Mark bit down on it and tried to spit it out but Deathstroke held his jaw shut until the cloth was wedged between his teeth.

Luca sighed. "Right. Short version then."

He stood up and put his hands in his pockets. "You survived the injection, which means your body has the meta gene. That makes you a candidate for the trials. The point of the trials is to unlock whatever superpower is hiding in that gene. For that to work we need to stress your body to the point of death. Push you so far past your limits that your DNA doesn't have a choice except to activate. Hell, you might actually die. A lot of them do. But if you don't, if something triggers, then you come out the other side with abilities that will make you very, very valuable to some very, very wealthy people. And I get paid."

He looked at Mark with a grin. "I expect your full cooperation."

Mark screamed through the gag. The sound came out muffled but it filled the room anyway.

Luca chuckled. "I thought not."

He raised his hand and snapped his fingers. One of the guards walked to a panel on the wall and pressed a button. A section of the wall behind Mark slid sideways, revealing a thick pane of glass that looked into a second room, identical to the one they were standing in.

Dinah was in it.

She was strapped to a table, naked, surrounded by doctors and nurses in white coats who were checking monitors and adjusting equipment. Her head was turned toward the glass and she was awake, her eyes wide, her mouth moving, she was shouting something Mark could not hear through the glass.

Mark threw himself forward against the gag, his whole body convulsing, the scream that came out of him was loud even through the cloth.

Luca walked between Mark and the glass and stood there, blocking his view. "Lucky, really, that she was there when my people went to grab you. Makes this whole thing much simpler."

He pointed to the wall on Mark's side of the room. Two buttons were recessed into a metal panel at about waist height, one red, one blue. "Here's how it works. In this room there are two buttons. One of them activates the trial on your side. The other activates it on her side. She doesn't get any buttons, so the choice is entirely up to you. You can choose to take the trial yourself, or you can choose to put her through it instead. Every round, every day, your choice."

He stepped closer and lowered his voice, though his tone didn't change. "And if you choose neither, if you decide to be clever, if you think you can just sit in here and wait it out, then neither of you gets food or water. Simple as that. I've got thousands of people running through these trials across a dozen facilities. Only a couple dozen of them are going to survive to the point where something triggers. I don't need you specifically. You're just another number on a very long list. So if you want to starve yourself and the girl to death in this box, you're welcome to it. I truly do not care."

He turned toward the door. Behind him Mark was thrashing against the floor, screaming through the gag, the veins in his neck standing out like cables.

Luca stopped in the doorway and looked back over his shoulder. "Survive," he said. "So I can line my pockets." He smiled. "It's what you're for."

He walked out.

Deathstroke crouched beside Mark, pulled the gag from his mouth, and then hit him in the temple with the butt of his pistol before Mark could get a word out. Mark's head hit the concrete and his eyes rolled back.

_____________________________________

When he opened his eyes the room was empty.

He was lying on the concrete floor in the testing bay, alone, naked, with the lights buzzing above him. He pushed himself up slowly, every muscle in his body protesting, his head throbbing from where the pistol had hit him. Slowly he got to his knees and then his feet. He blinked a few times to clear his vision and looked across the room, the massive glass plane was still there and on the other side of it Dinah was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, her knees pulled up andher arms wrapped around herself. 

She saw him stand up and she was on her feet immediately, running to the glass, slamming both palms against it.

Her mouth was moving, but couldn't hear her. The glass was too thick, or the rooms were soundproofed, or both. But he could read her lips well enough.

'Mark. Mark. Are you okay. Mark.'

He walked to the glass and put his hand against it where hers was, their palms separated by about two inches of whatever material the pane was made of.

"I'm okay..." he said in a rough voice, hoping she could read his lips. He then turned away from the glass and looked around until his eyes settled on the door. The door was the metal one he had been brought through, heavy, no handle on the inside, set into the wall.

He walked to the door, balled his fist and hit it. The impact rang through the room, but door did not move. He hit it again, harder and his knuckles split against the metal and blood smeared across the surface. He hit it a third time, a fourth, a fifth, each one harder than the last, each one accomplishing nothing.

Behind him Dinah was banging on the glass, trying to get his attention.

He hit the door again.

She kept banging.

"RAAAHHH!!!" He hit it one more time before he stopped. He leaned his head against the door while panting heavily, with his bloody knuckles still forming a fist.

After a while he turned around.

Dinah was standing at the glass with her palms flat against it, looking at him.

He walked to the glass. He put his forehead against it.

'Where are we,' she mouthed.

"I don't know," he said. He said. "Some kind of facility, Luca is running a meta human experiment program or something."

Dinah's face went still and her eyes widened. 'Why do they want us here,' she mouthed.

"He wants us as test subjects, apparently he's running thousands of people through this thing, only a few dozen survive, and the ones who trigger get sold." He paused. "He's trafficking metas, Dinah. That's what this whole thing is. He makes them and sells them."

She stared at him for a long moment. Then she shook her head and mouthed the words carefully so he could read each one.

'Do not play along. Eve saw what happened. She'll get help.'

Mark looked at her through the glass and frowned. He knew she was right. He knew Eve had been watching. He knew Eve would have called someone by now. He knew that the smart thing, the rational thing, the thing Dinah would want him to do, was to sit down on this concrete floor and wait.

He looked at the door.

He looked at the buttons on the wall.

He thought about Luca's face.

'I'm not gonna remember some whore from what five? Ten years ago?'

'Do I know you kid?'

'It's all boring...'

He was going to tear his heart out and make him eat it.

He walked to the panel on the wall.

Behind the glass Dinah saw where he was going. She slammed both palms against the glass. She shook her head. 'No. No. Don't.'

Mark looked at the two buttons. Red and blue. One for his side, one for hers. He pressed the red one and for a second nothing happened.

Then a section of the wall on his side of the room opened. A panel about three feet wide slid upward into the ceiling, revealing a dark space behind it, and from that dark space came a sound that Mark recognized immediately because he had heard it a thousand times on the streets of the Narrows at night.

Growling.

They came through the opening fast, five of them, dogs, large ones, pit bulls and mastiff mixes with ribs showing through their skin. They had not been fed in a long time. Their eyes were wide and their jaws were open and strings of drool hung from their teeth. They spread across the room in a loose semicircle as they came through the opening, every one of them locked on the naked human standing in the center of the space.

Mark backed toward the wall.

The first dog lunged.

It came in fast, aiming for his left calf, its jaws opening wide enough to show the pink of its gums. Mark kicked it. His bare foot caught the dog under the jaw and snapped its head upward and it skidded sideways across the concrete. The second dog was already airborne before the first one had finished sliding, it leaped at his chest with its full weight behind it. Mark caught it by the throat with both hands and the momentum drove him backward until his shoulders hit the wall. The dog's jaws snapped inches from his face, its breath hot and rotten, its teeth clicking together in the air between them. Mark squeezed. He squeezed until he felt the cartilage in its throat collapse under his fingers and the dog's body went rigid and then limp.

He threw the body at the third dog as it came in from his right. The dead dog hit the living one and knocked it sideways. The fourth dog got to him while his hands were empty, its teeth closing around his left forearm just above the wrist. The bite went deep, the canines punching through skin and into the muscle underneath, and Mark felt the grinding of teeth against the bone of his forearm.

"RAHHH!!!" He screamed and swung his arm sideways and the dog came with it, its jaws locked, its body swinging through the air. He slammed it into the concrete wall and the impact loosened its grip. He slammed it again. The teeth came free and the dog dropped to the floor, its jaw broken, its skull dented on one side. It tried to get up. Mark stomped on its neck, hard, once, twice, and felt it give on the second stomp.

The first dog was back. It had recovered from the kick and it came at him again, lower this time, its teeth finding the back of his right ankle and biting down. The pain was much worse than his arm, like several hot pokers being dug into his leg. Mark reached down and grabbed the dog by the scruff of its neck and tore it free, taking a strip of his own skin with it, and then he held the dog at arm's length, its legs kicking, its jaws snapping, and he drove it headfirst into the concrete floor.

The skull cracked on impact and the dog stopped moving.

Three down.

The third dog, the one that had been knocked sideways by the thrown body, was circling now. It had not committed to an attack yet, it was watching, waiting, its teeth bared and its body coiled low to the ground. The fifth dog was still at the back of the pack, the smallest of the five, a lean brindle thing that was hanging back near the opening in the wall.

The third dog charged.

It went for his groin. Mark twisted his hips at the last second and the teeth caught his inner thigh instead, high up near the hip, a ragged bite that tore through skin and opened a gash about four inches long. Mark got his hands around the dog's midsection, lifted it, drove it down spine-first across his raised knee. He felt the vertebrae separate under the impact. The dog yelped and then its back legs stopped moving and it slid off his knee onto the floor.

The fifth dog was still by the wall. It was shaking.

Mark stood in the middle of the room, bleeding from his forearm and his ankle and his thigh, breathing hard, surrounded by four dead or dying animals. He looked at the last dog. The last dog looked at him.

It turned around and went back through the opening.

The panel slid shut behind it.

Mark stood there for a long time. Blood was running down his left arm from the bite wound, dripping off his fingers onto the concrete. The bite on his ankle was deeper than he'd thought, the skin peeled back in a flap that showed the white of the tendon underneath. The thigh wound was bleeding freely but it was not deep enough to have hit anything important.

A buzzer sounded somewhere in the ceiling.

The small slot at the bottom of the door slid open. A tray pushed through from the other side. On it were two bottles of water, a bowl of rice and a piece of bread. Through the glass he could see the same thing happening on Dinah's side.

Mark looked at the tray wnd walked to the tray wnd he picked up the water and drank. He drank the whole bottle without stopping, the water running down his chin and mixing with the blood on his chest, then he set the empty bottle down on the concrete beside him and reached for the bread.

Behind the glass Dinah was on her feet and banging on the pane with both palms, her whole body leaning into the glass like she could push through it if she just hit hard enough. He could see her in his peripheral vision, the shape of her, the way her hands kept coming back to the same spot on the glass over and over.

He did not look at her.

He knew what she was going to say. 

'Stop.'

'Don't play their game.'

'Wait for help.'

'Be smart.'

She wouldn't understand...

She couldn't understand, because she hadn't spent five years with Luca Falcone's face burned into the inside of her eyelids. She had not woken up every morning since she was thirteen with the sound of a gunshot ringing in her ears. She had not built her entire life, every hour of training, every broken bone, every night in the Narrows, every fight, every scar on her body, around the single purpose of getting close enough to the man who had killed her mother.

Luca Falcone was in this building. 

He was here. 

Right here. 

Closer than he had ever been. 

He was walking these corridors, drinking his scotch, sleeping somewhere under this same roof. Every trial Mark survived was another day in the same building as Luca. Every day was another chance for something to go wrong in the security, for a door to be left open, or maybe even for him to unlock this mystery power Luca seemed to think he would.

He was not going to let someone pull him out of here. He was not going to sit on this floor and wait for his grandfather or Batman or anyone else to come and carry him to safety. Not when Luca was this close. Not when the distance between him and the man he had been chasing for half his life had finally collapsed to the width of a few walls. 

He tore the bread in half, put one piece in his mouth and chewed slowly as his jaw still ached. The bread was stale, dry and hard to swallow without more water, but he forced it down because his body needed it. He picked up the rice and ate that too, scooping it into his mouth with his fingers, not tasting it, just putting fuel into a machine.

Dinah was still banging on the glass. He could feel each impact vibrating faintly through the floor.

He didn't listen or acknowledge her, he just sat with his back against the wall, his legs stretched out in front of him on the blood-slicked concrete, the dead dogs still lying where they had fallen. Eventually he closed his eyes and let his body start the slow work of trying to hold itself together.

Behind the glass Dinah eventually stopped banging. He didn't see her stop, but he felt it when the vibrations in the floor went quiet.

...

The days that followed were the worst of Mark's life.

They came for him every morning when he pushed the button, or at least he thought it was morning, there was no window in the room and the lights never changed.

On the second day it was a man that came through where the dogs were. A big shirtless man built like a brick shit house. He came through the panel with a length of chain wrapped around his right fist which he swung it at Mark's head before the panel had finished opening. 

Mark ducked it, got inside the arc and threw a straight right into the man's jaw that rocked his head backward, but the man did not go down, did not stumble, did not react to the punch at all. On closer inspection Mark could see his eyes were completely blown out and whatever they had given him had turned off the part of his brain that registered pain. Mark had to choke him unconscious, lying on the concrete with the man's fingers tearing at his forearms, squeezing for nearly two full minutes before the body went limp.

On the third day it wasnt a person he had to fight but just plain old electricity. The walls of the room lit up, every surface suddenly active with electrical currents, the concrete floor becoming a grid that pulsed with voltage that hit him in waves. 

He could not stand on it. 

He could not sit on it. 

He could not touch the walls. 

He ended up in the center of the room, crouched on the balls of his feet with his arms wrapped around his knees, trying to minimize how much of his body was in contact with the floor while the electricity pulsed through him in ten-second intervals, each pulse strong enough to lock every muscle in his body and make his vision go white. 

It went on for hours and when it finally stopped he was lying on his side in a puddle of his own urine, shaking so badly that he could not hold the water bottle when it came through the slot.

On the fifth day they flooded the room.

On the seventh day it was fire.

On the ninth day it was two men with knives, and one of them got close enough to open a wound across Mark's stomach that took a week m to close on its own because there was no medical treatment, no stitches, no bandages, nothing but the concrete floor and the water that came through the slot twice a day.

Through all of it Dinah watched.

Every trial, every fight, every hour of torture, she saw it. She was five feet away from him the entire time, separated by a piece of glass she could not break.

Mark could see her during the bad ones, standing at the glass with both palms against it, her mouth open in what he knew was a scream even though he couldn't hear it. 

He could see her during the knife fight, watching the blade open his stomach, her fists hammering against the pane hard enough that blood appeared on her knuckles from where the skin had split. He could see her on the day they released something into his room that burned his skin wherever it touched, a chemical mist that turned the air white. She had been on her knees at the glass with tears running down her face, her mouth forming his name over and over.

She did not eat on those days. He could see the trays sitting untouched in her room, the water bottles unopened, the food going stale on the concrete. She did not eat until he ate, and sometimes he could not eat for hours after the trial ended because his body would not cooperate, and she would sit at the glass and watch him lying on the floor. 

The infection started in the second week.

The wound across his stomach turned red first, then hot, then swollen around the edges. A yellow crust formed along the cut. The skin around it became tender to the touch, then painful, then so sensitive that the anything pressing against it when he breathed made him wince. 

He had no antibiotic and had little clean water to wash it with, only the drinking water that came through the slot. The dog bites on his forearm and ankle got infected too. The forearm and ankle wound swelled until the skin was shiny and the flesh underneath felt hot enough to cook on.

By the third week his body was running a fever that did not break. He shivered even though he was hot. His joints ached and his vision blurred at the edges on bad days, the kind of blur that came and went.

But despite that he kept pressing the button.

Every morning the buzzer would sound and he would drag himself across the concrete to the panel and he would press the red button and he would face whatever came through the wall. 

Some days he won quickly. 

Some days he won slowly. 

Some days he barely won at all and he ended up lying on the floor afterward with his chest heaving and his blood mixing with whatever else was on the concrete, too broken to move for hours.

He never pressed the blue button. Not once. Not even on the worst days, not even when his body was screaming at him that it could not take any more. The blue button was Dinah's side, Dinah's room, Dinah's body, and he would die on this floor before he sent anything through that glass to her.

On the thirty-first day they sent three men through the panel with crowbars.

They had the same look as the man from the second day, the same slack faces and blown out eyes, the same blankness that told Mark they had been given something to dull whatever was left of their survival instinct. They came through the panel in a line, each one carrying a steel crowbar, and they spread across the room without speaking.

Mark had been sitting against the wall beneath the glass pane when the buzzer sounded, the walk to the button had taken him longer than it should have because his right ankle; the one with the infected dog bite, had stopped bearing weight properly three days ago. 

He had been limping for a week and was also shaking with a persistent tremor in his hands and his legs that came from the fever and the accumulated damage of thirty days without medical treatment.

The first man swung the crowbar aimed at Mark's ribs on his left side. Mark stepped back, felt his ankle buckle under the shift of weight and caught himself against the wall, making the crowbar hit the concrete where his ribs had been.

Mark pushed himself off the wall and threw a right hand at the first man's face. The punch landed on the cheekbone and the man's head turned but his body did not move, he just turned back and swung the crowbar again. This time it caught Mark across his infected forearm, the steel bar hitting the swollen tissue directly and the pain was so intense that Mark's vision whited out for a second. 

The second man came in from the right wnd his crowbar came down from overhead in a chopping motion aimed at Mark's shoulder. Mark got his hand up and caught the bar on the downswing, his palm wrapping around the steel, stopping it about six inches from his collarbone. The impact traveled through his arm and into his shoulder and something in his wrist popped, but he ignored it and tore the crowbar out of the man's grip and swung it sideways into the man's knee making the knee bend inward with a crack.

However the third man managed to hit Mark in the back.

The crowbar landed across his kidneys in a heavy impact that compressed everything inside his lower back and sent a wave of nausea up through his stomach. Mark staggered forward, turned, swung the stolen crowbar at the third man's head. It caught him across the temple, the steel connecting with the skull with a wet thud, the skin splitting open along the hairline and the man went down.

But the first man was still coming and he swung at Mark's legs, trying to take his feet out from under him, the crowbar whistling through the air at shin height. Mark jumped, barely, his ankle screaming as he left the ground, the bar passing under his feet. He came down on the first man's leading arm with both feet. The arm broke at the elbow with a sound like a branch snapping.

Mark then picked up the crowbar he dropped and hit the first man three times, once in the ribs, once in the face, once in the side of the head. The first blow cracked ribs. The second broke the nose and split both lips open. The third put the man on the ground.

The second man, the one with the broken knee, was crawling toward his dropped crowbar. Mark walked over to him, stood on his outstretched hand, and brought the crowbar down across the back of his skull until he stopped crawling.

The third man was already unconscious from the temple shot, but Mark still walked over to him and slammed the crowbar into his head for good measure. Though the effort in doing so left his whole body shaking, he had blood running from a dozen places on his body. The old wound on his stomach had reopened, the infected edges pulling apart to show the raw tissue underneath as well as a stream of red and yellow running down his abdomen. 

The dog bite on his forearm was oozing something that was not entirely blood. The fever was so high now that the room seemed to pulse around him, the walls breathing in and out, the lights leaving trails and blurs when he moved his head.

He didn't realize he was falling until his knees hit the concrete, the crowbars clattering out of his hands. He caught himself on his palms and stayed there on all fours for a moment, his head hanging between his arms, blood dripping from his face onto the floor. Then his arms gave out and he went down onto his side and then onto his back where he lay there on the concrete staring up at the buzzing lights.

He was close to something.

Or was he?

He didn't know if he was close to breaking through a barrier or simply just so close to death that he was in a constant state of euphoria. He didn't really feel the pain anymore, it had been going on for so long it had all blurred together and merged into an all consuming weight that burned into every single cell of his body. 

He couldn't even drag himself to the food slot. He tried and did manage to get one arm out in front of him 

but his body would not cooperate, would not do what he was asking it to do. He got about a foot before his arm gave out and he lay there with his cheek against the floor and his hand still extended toward the slot where the tray would come through.

'I guess that's as far as I'm making it...'

Mark lay there as he wondered if this was where he'd die, if this was what everything he done up until this point was worth. Breaking his body over and over again only to fail in sight of the finish line. 

Mark truly believed he'd be able to break through his own limitations and get whatever power Luca thought he could get. 

But he hadn't. 

He was dying. 

He didn't know how long he had or when it would happen, but he knew he wouldn't make it out of this cell alive. 

'I'm... sorry... Mom...'

Eventually a door somewhere opened and two men in grey coveralls came in the way they always came in after a trial and loaded the three dead men onto the sheet and dragged them out through the panel. One of them stopped beside Mark on the way out and nudged Mark's ribs with the toe of his boot just enough to see if the body moved.

Mark's fingers twitched.

The man in the coveralls grunted, stepped over him, and walked out.

Meanwhile on the other side of the glass Dinah was kneeling at the bottom of the pane with her forehead almost touching the glass.

Mark was lying on his back about two feet from the divider, facing the ceiling. He could see her in the very bottom of his vision, a blur of blonde hair and skin through the glass. She was talking. She had been talking for a while, he thought, her lips forming words he could not hear, though even though he couldn't hear them it wasn't hard to piece together what she was saying when he saw her lips. 

'Please stop.'

She pressed her face closer to the glass.

'You don't have to do this.'

'You are worth more than this, you are worth so much more than this, Mark.'

'You are not just a weapon, you are not just a body, you are not a thing that exists to hurt and be hurt.'

'You are a person... you are a good person.'

'You are the best person I have ever known and I am watching you destroy yourself for a man who is not worth the dirt on your shoes.'

'Luca Falcone is nothing.'

'He is nothing, Mark.'

'He is a small, pathetic man who hurts people because he is too weak to do anything else... and... you are letting him take everything from you, everything, your body, your mind, your life, all of it, for what? For revenge?'

'He took your mother and now you are letting him take you too.'

'I cannot sit here behind this glass and watch you die for him.'

'Please stop.'

'Please just stop pressing the button.'

Her voice cracked on the last word and she started crying again. .

'Please,' she mouthed. 'Please, Mark. I can't lose you. Not like this.'

It took everything he had, the muscles in his neck screamed, the fever made the room tilt, his vision blurred and then cleared and then blurred again. But in the end he managed to turn his head until he was facing the glass and look at her through it. 

Dinah stopped sobbing for a moment and looked over to him when she saw he was trying to move. 

Slowly he began to lift up his arm, his arm shook the entire way up, the muscles in his forearm spasming, but he got his hand up to the height of the glass and pressed his palm against it.

On the other side Dinah put her palm against the glass where his was.

They stayed like that for a long time, their hands separated by two inches of glass.

He stayed there until his arm could not hold itself up anymore, until it dropped to the concrete beside him. The last thing he saw before the dark closed over him was her hand, still pressed against the glass, still holding the place where his had been.

_____________________________________

Luca Falcone stood in the observation chamber that had cameras and screens that could access every testing bay in the facility, and he watched people die with a look and of indifference as he slipped on the whiskey in his hand.

The first one was a young woman who had been put through something that involved water and freezing temperatures, her body had simply stopped on the table while the a doctor and nurses crowded around them, the doctor turning to the camera and shaking his head. 

The second and third went almost together, two men in adjoining rooms who had been pushed past whatever their hearts could take. The fourth was an older man who had lasted longer than most and who, in the end, died the same way all the rest of them died, which was without ever showing the slightest sign of the thing Luca had paid so much money to find.

He set his glass down on the console hard enough that the liquid jumped over the edges. "What the hell are you people doing down there!!!" He said angrily as he started to clench his fists.

The lead doctor, a fat man with sweat already showing through his collar, turned from his station. "Mr. Falcone, I understand your frustration, but we knew going in this wasn't an exact science. We are working in territory that nobody has ever charted before, and the failure rate at this stage is consistent with everything the research predicted. Triggering a dormant meta gene through stress response is fundamentally unpredictable and the mortality rate was always going to be 99%."

"It's been a month and there's no progress you fucking fat snivelling cockroach." Luca almost growled. "I have buyers. I have people who put money down on my word that this would work, and every week I go back to them with nothing, I look weaker. You understand that? You understand what it means when men like the ones I deal with start thinking I can't deliver?"

From the corner of the room Deathstroke laughed.

He was sitting in a chair with his boots up on the edge of the console, his arms folded across his chest, watching the screens. "You know," he said, "if you keep this up somebody's gonna get tired of waiting and I might end up getting a call." He tilted his head. "Be a funny way to go, Luca. Killed by the guy you've got on payroll."

Luca did not turn around. "Slade, if I wanted commentary, I'd have hired a comedian."

Deathstroke shrugged and went back to the screens.

Luca turned to the lead doctor again. "Who's close. Out of everyone you've got down there, who is the closest to triggering."

The doctor pulled up a list on his screen and scrolled through it. "There are two with elevated markers. Four-seven-six and four-seven-seven. They came in together, about a month ago. The male and the female. The readings on both of them have been climbing steadily, which is rare, most subjects either trigger early or plateau and die. These two are still climbing."

"Put them up."

The doctor tapped a command, and the wall of screens shifted, all of them blinking off and then resolving into an another feed.

On one side, the woman was leaning against the divider, her forehead resting against the glass, her hand pressed against it.

On the other side, the man was on the floor.

Luca stepped closer to the screen and studied him. Four-seven-six was lying on his back near the glass, not moving, his body covered in wounds in every stage of healing with some even failing to heal. Even from the camera Luca could see the swelling, the discoloration, the wrongness of the body. "He looks half dead," Luca said. 

The doctor cleared his throat. "He is, sir. That's the strange part. Subject four-seven-six has activated the trial on his own side every single day since intake. It's quite incredible we've never had a subject voluntarily request maximum stress for thirty consecutive days. Most break within a week and start choosing the other button, the one that punishes their companion. He never has. Not once."

Deathstroke's boots came down off the console.

"Thirty days," he said. "Of straight-up torture and he's still going on? The kids not bad, a shame he had to be wasted like this." He looked at the screen with something that had not been in his face a moment ago. "Lady Shiva isn't going to be happy when she finds out."

"She knew the risks, if she had a problem she can fuck off," Luca said as he stared at the screen a moment longer. "How long since his last test."

The doctor checked. "Five hours."

Luca was quiet for a moment before he picked his glass back up off the console, looked at it and downed the drink. "Run it again," he said. "On his side."

The doctor turned in his chair. "Sir, with respect, he won't survive another cycle in his current state. His vitals are already critical. If we activate now, we lose the subject, and we lose four weeks of accumulated data with him. I'd strongly recommend we let him stabilize for at least—"

"I didn't ask for a recommendation."

"Mr. Falcone, I'm telling you, as the person responsible for these results, that if you do this you will kill him, and—"

BANG

Luca had pulled a pistol out of his coat and shot the doctor in the head without hesitation. The doctor went backward out of his chair and hit the floor, blood starting to pool around his head as his body spasmed slightly. 

Luca lowered the pistol and looked at the second doctor, a thin younger man who had gone very still at his station. "Run it again," Luca said. "I want him to trigger or die. Do you have a problem with that? Or do I need to find another doctor?"

The young doctor's hands were shaking, but they moved. "Y-yes. Yes, sir. Right away." He pulled up the controls. "W-what... s-should I release into the room."

Luca considered it while he looked at the screen, at the broken thing on the floor that had survived thirty days of everything they had thrown at it.

"Release the junkie hopefully he dies too he's been taking up enough space here," he said.

Deathstroke sat up straight in his chair, and for the first time all night he looked genuinely interested. "Oh," he said. "Now that, I want to see."

...

Down in the room the buzzer sounded.

On Dinah's side of the glass she came off the divider and turned toward the wall, the buzzer meant a trial, and the trial was clearly starting on Mark's side, but Mark had not pressed the button. 

She threw herself at the glass.

"No!" she screamed, hammering both fists against the pane. "No, no, you can't, he didn't press it, he didn't press the button, you can't do this, it's not fair, HE DIDN'T PRESS IT! STOP! STOP IT!"

The panel in Mark's wall began to slide upward.

Meanwhile on the floor Mark stirred.

He had been somewhere far away, somewhere dark andm quiet but the sound of the buzzer reached down into that place and pulled at him. Even if  didnt want to. Coming back meant pain, and he was so tired of pain, he had been swimming in it for a month, and whatever this dark place was didn't have any pain in it.

But the panel was opening and something was coming through it.

Mark opened his eyes and rolled onto his stomach, the movement of which tore something in his abdomen. He then got his arms from under himself and pushed up to his knees where he started panting. The infected ankle would not hold his weight, so he put his weight on the other leg and dragged himself up the glass divider, his whole body trembling with the effort of simply standing up straight.

'NO MARK!!! NO!! ITS NOT FAIR! HE DIDNT PUSH THE BUTTON!!!'

Mark took another deep breath before he pushed himself up straight and to his full height. 

"MARK!!!'

Mark raised his fists and got into his stance despite the fact he was barely even conscious. Through the glass, Dinah stopped screaming and stared at the panel with tears falling down her face. 

The thing that came through the panel was a man, or had been a man. He was thin, wasted, his arms covered in old needle scars, his eyes wild were blown wide and constantly twitching. He held something in one hand, a thick tube connected to a port that had been surgically embedded in the back of his neck, and as he stepped into the room he jammed the tube into the port and pressed the plunger and a green fluid pumped into him.

The man's body began to swell, his muscles ballooning outward, his bones cracking and lengthening, his skin stretching tight and splitting in places along his shoulders and forearms. In the space of a few seconds he went from a wasted junkie to a creature eight feet tall, two hundred and fifty kilograms of grotesque overgrown muscle.

He looked at Mark. "RAAAHHHHHHH!!!" Then he charged like a bulldozer. 

Mark ducked the first swing, a wild haymaker that passed over his head and cracked into the divider, he then stepped inside and drove his fist into the creature's stomach with everything his ruined body could produce. Yet the junkie didn't even flinch, it was as if he'd simply tapped the person rather than thrown a full body punch. 

A backhand caught Mark across the chest and lifted him off his feet and threw him into the divider making the glass shudder. Mark slid down it and tried to get back up but the creature was already on him, a fist the size of his head slamming down into his face, then his ribs, then his back. 

Mark swung again and caught the thing in the jaw but still accomplished nothing. The junkie grabbed him by the throat and lifted him off the floor and then slammed him down into the concrete hard enough that the floor cracked beneath him.

"MARK!!!" Dinah screamed as she pounded the glass. 

"NO! LET HIM GO!!!" She shouted as she became more and more desperate. 

Mark was slammed into the floor again and again, each time his body became more and more limp. 

Dinah slammed herself against the wall again and again trying to get through but it made no difference. All she could do was watch as Mark was beaten to death before her very eyes. 

"MAAAARRRRRRRKKK!!!!"

Something inside Dinah broke.

It came up out of her from a place she did not know she had, all the helplessness of being trapped a month behind glass, all the horror of watching Mark be destroyed in front of her one piece at a time, all of it rising up her throat all at once.

SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

The scream that came out of her was not a normal scream. It left her mouth as a concussive blast of pure sonic force that hit the glass divider and made it ring like a struck bell. It was so powerful that the divider which was designed to be be bullet as well as bomb proof started to crack under the intensity of it. 

...

Up in the observation room Luca came out of his chair.

"YES!" He slammed his hand on the console. "Yes! There it is! That's it, that's the trigger, the girl, the girl triggered!" He spun toward Deathstroke and the guards along the back wall. "Get down there. All of you. Right now. Detain her before she comes down off it. I want her sedated and restrained and ready for transport inside ten minutes do you hear me?"

The young doctor looked up. "What about four-seven-six?"

"Keep him alive," Luca said, already moving toward the door. "As long as he's alive and hurting she won't fight us."

...

Meanwhile in the room the creature slammed Mark into the floor again. Mark tried to get his hands up, tried to grab the wrist at his throat, tried to do anything, but his body would not answer and eventually the edges of his vision went dark and the dark rushed inward and he passed out. 

Dinah screamed again.

SKREEEEEEEEEEE

The second scream tore more cracks across the glass, chips of it actually breaking loose and falling to the floor, but she held the note too long, and somewhere in her throat something tore. She felt it rip and the scream choked off and she doubled over coughing with blood on her lips.

A moment later the door to her room opened.

Deathstroke came in first, with six guards behind him. Dinah didn't even hesitate, she came up off the floor and met them and for a few seconds she was magnificent. 

She caught the first guard with a spinning kick that put him down and broke the second one's arm and threw him into the wall. She ducked a baton and swept the legs out from under a third.

But in the end there were too many of them and a fourth guard caught her with a taser in the back and the voltage dropped her to her knees, and then they were on her, three of them pinning her arms, dragging her down.

She opened her mouth to scream again and push past the pain but Deathstroke moved faster than she did. He had a muzzle in his hands, a heavy thing of leather and steel built for the ones with super strength but would work for someone like Dinah, he forced it over her mouth and jaw and cinched it tight at the back of her head. When she tried to scream into it the sound came out muffled and contained. 

Luca walked in a moment later, stepping over the guard with the broken arm and crouched down in front of where they held her pinned.

"Hey. Hey, look at me." He took her chin in his hand and turned her face toward his. "There she is. You did it, sweetheart. You actually did it. Do you have any idea how long I've been waiting for one of you to do what you just did?" He smiled. "A scream that cracks reinforced glass. That's a destructive sonic capability, fully manifested, in a young, healthy, trained body. Do you know what you're worth now? Do you have the first idea? There are men on three continents who will empty a vault for what you just became."

Dinah screamed into the muzzle but it came out as a strangled groan.

Luca stood up and brushed off his knees. "Get her ready for transport. I want her on the boat and out of this city within the hour."

_____________________________________

Mark was in the void.

Some might find the idea of nothing scary, but Mark was just so tired and he felt so weak that he didn't mind it. He let the void consume him as he floated along, only hoping he could finally rest... not just from the last 30 days but from the past 5 years. 

Maybe staying here forever wouldn't be too bad. 

"Mark."

He knew the voice before he even turned, how could he forget it... even if he had not heard it in five years except in his dreams. 

He turned and standing there in the void with him was his mother.

Debbie Grayson stood in the dark in front of him, whole, unhurt, her dark hair around her shoulders, looking exactly the way she had looked before Luca Falcone ever became a part of their lives. 

She was smiling at him.

Mark's face crumpled. "M-Mom," he said, his voice breaking on the single word. "Mom, I'm sorry.... I'm so sorry. I couldn't, I couldn't keep you safe, I was right there, I was right there in the room and I couldn't do anything, I just stood there, and then I, I tried, Mom, I swear I tried, I spent everything, I spent my whole life trying to make him pay and I couldn't even do that, I couldn't even avenge you, I'm so weak, I'm sorry for being so weak." He was crying now, the tears running freely.

"I'm sorry I failed you. I failed you when he killed you and I failed you every day since."

His mother stepped close and put her hands on his face. "Oh, my boy," she said softly. "My sweet boy. You have it all so wrong."

"Mom—"

"Listen to me, you did not fail me. You were thirteen years old, Mark. You were a child. There was nothing you could have done that night, nothing, and the fact that you have spent five years believing otherwise breaks my heart more than anything that man ever did to me." Her thumbs wiped at his tears. "It was never your job to protect me. It was my job to protect you. And I did. When he came for us, the only thing I cared about, the only thing in the whole world, was that you got to live. And you did. You lived. Do you understand what that means to me? You got to grow up. That was everything I wanted. That was the only thing I wanted."

"But I—"

"I have watched you carry me like a stone around your neck for five years," she said. "I have watched you turn yourself into a weapon, I have watched you bleed in basements and alleys, I have watched you give up every happy and good thing in your life to chase a ghost."

"Mark if you spend your whole life holding on to the past, the past will kill you. It will take everything, the way it has been taking everything from you. You have to let me go. Not because I don't matter... but because you do."

She pulled back and looked at him. "I am so proud of you," she said. "You are such a kind and brave boy, but there is nothing left for you to do for me, baby. I'm gone. What's happened is in the past and it's going to stay there. You cannot save me."

She tilted her head, and her expression changed. "But there is someone else you can save."

And then, faintly, from very far away, Mark heard it.

He heard Dinah screaming and he heard Luca's voice over the top of it. 

'Get her ready for transport. I want her on the boat and out of this city within the hour.'

"No," Mark said. He turned toward the sound. "No. Dinah. Dinah!"

"She needs you, Mark," His Mom whispered. 

"But I can't," he said, and the helplessness came flooding back. "I can't, Mom, I can't even stand up, my body's done, there's nothing left, I've got nothing left to give, I can't—"

She pulled him into her arms.

She wrapped him up the way she had when he was small, though he was so much bigger than her now. "You are so much stronger than you think you are," she whispered against him. "You always have been. You've spent your whole life holding it all in, the anger, the grief, the love, all of it, packed down so tight, so deep, because you were afraid of what would happen if you let it out." She pulled back just enough to look at him. "Stop holding it back Mark, just let it all go."

Mark was afraid to, he wa afraid of letting everything he'd kept inside himself free. He was afraid of what he'd find, but in the end he could only look up at his mom and see her smile at him and nod. 

So he let go. 

It started in his chest, where it had always lived, the bottomless thing behind his sternum. But this time he did not push it down. This time he let it rise. The rage came firs all five years of it and behind the rage came the grief, the entire ocean of it that had swallowed his entire soul every night when he slept, and behind the grief came something else, something strange, something he couldn't name. 

It poured out of him and came up and out in a flood that had no bottom, and as it came his body began to burn, not with pain but with power.

"That's it," his mother said, and she was glowing now too, or he was, the dark all around them lighting up gold. "That's my boy. Let it all go."

The light grew and it filled the void.

"Live, Mark," his mother said, her voice fading as the light swallowed everything. "Live a good life. A happy one. For me. And go. Go save her. Go."

He looked at her one last time.

She was smiling and crying. 

Then the light took everything and threw him up and out of the dark.

...

Mark's eyes opened.

The creature still had its hand on his chest, still pressing him down into the cracked concrete, drawing back a fist to deliver the blow that Luca had said should keep him alive but not awake.

A growl started in Mark's throat and he pushed up. He got his hands up under the massive arm pinning him and he pushed against it, and at first nothing happened, the creature was simply too big. But Mark gritted his teeth and pushed harder, his arms shaking, and the arm still would not move.

"Get her on the boat," Luca said to the guards. "Out of the city within the hour, like I said."

"LIKE HELL I'LL EVER LET THAT HAPPEN!!!"

The room went quiet and everyone turned to look at Mark. Dinah seemed to have damaged the divider so much that it was no longer sound proof so they'd all heard what he said.

Luca raised his eyebrows and looked almost amused. "Knock him out," he said to the creature. 

The creature drew its fist back and drove it down at Mark's face but he caught it, his hand snapped up and closed around the descending fist and stopped it dead, the impact traveling up his arm without moving him an inch. Mark then drew back his other fist and he punched the creature in the chest.

CRACK

The creature left the floor and flew backward across the entire room and slammed into the far wall the wall cratering around it, and the creature slumped down out of the crater and did not get up.

Deathstroke's hand was already on his pistol. "Luca," he said quietly. "We need to leave."

"He triggered," Luca said, and there was something almost greedy in his voice. "Did you see that? Did you see what he just did? We have to take him—"

"Luca." Deathstroke did not raise his voice. "I just watched a half-dead kid one-shot a Venom junkie through a concrete wall. Take the win on the girl and let's go before he gets all the way up."

Luca looked at Mark, who was rising to his feet on the other side of the room. "...Fine," Luca said. "Fine. Move. Get the girl in the van, we leave right now."

The guards dragged Dinah backward through the door. She fought them the whole way, her muffled screams coming through the muzzle, her eyes locked on Mark.

"Dinah!" Mark breathed heavily as he walked to the glass divider. He then drew back his fist and hit it making the cracks Dinah had started spread further. He hit it again, and again, each blow widening the web, and on the third blow something inside him let go completely, the last of what his mother had told him to release, and he put it all into one final punch.

CRASH

The glass exploded outward in a shower of fragments.

"DINAH!" he roared, stepping through the broken divider into her empty room. "DINAH!"

He went for the door they had dragged her through, his legs nearly buckling under him as his body was still wrecked, still feverish, still running on nothing but whatever had woken up inside him. He hit the door at a stumbling run and lowered his shoulder driving into it and tearing it off its hinges.

When the door fell off he fell out with it out into the corridor beyond. When he looked up from the ground he saw that the corridor was full of guards. Dozens of them, lining both walls, all of them armed with electric batons and tasers and riot weapons, the non-lethal gear they used to handle subjects without damaging the merchandise.

"On the ground!" one of them shouted, leveling a baton. "Get on the ground right now or we drop you!"

Mark pushed himself up off the broken door, then started walking forward.

"I said get DOWN!" The guard jabbed the baton into Mark's chest.

Mark grabbed the baton, and the man holding it, and threw both of them down the corridor into a cluster of guards who went down like bowling pins. 

The rest of the guards erupted and came at him from both sides. Mark grabbed the nearest guard by the front of his vest and threw him into the wall hard enough to leave a dent in the concrete. He caught a baton swing on his forearm, took the baton away, and broke it across another guard's helmet. He then drove his elbow into a man's chest and felt the ribs crack as the man was launched off the ground. He picked up a guard by the leg and swung him like a club, scattering three others. A taser caught him in the back of the neck and he turned and put his fist through the wall beside the man's head, and the man dropped his weapon and ran.

In under a minute the corridor was full of bodies, groaning and mostly unconscious. Mark stood among them, breathing hard, and grabbed the one nearest to him by the collar and hauled him up off the floor.

"The prisoners," Mark said. "Where do they take them for transport."

The guard's eyes were wide. "I, I don't, please—"

Mark tightened his grip. "WHERE."

"The garage! It's at street level at the end of the east corridor, up the ramp, that's where the vans are, that's where they take everyone, please, please don't—"

Mark dropped him and slammed his head against the all knocking him out before he started moving.  He went down the corridor at a run, his body screaming with every step. 

As he passed the cells that lined the walls he saw the faces behind the small windows in the doors. People. Dozens of them. Subjects like him, like Dinah, locked in rooms waiting for their turn to be tortured to death.

He did not slow down, but he did not pass them either.

He slashed the first door with his hands at a run and tore it off its frame, then the next, then the next, ripping the doors away one after another as he ran, and behind him the people inside spilled out into the corridor.

He tore the ninth door off its frame and a woman fell out of the cell behind it, blinking against the corridor light. Mark was already moving to the next one when the air to his left went wrong.

There was no warning, one second the corridor ahead of him was empty, and the next something hit him in the side of the head with the force of a swung pipe and was gone before the pain even registered. Mark staggered into the wall and grasped the side of his head before he turned toward where the blow had come from only to find there was nothing there.

A voice came from behind him. "Big guy, pretty strong too, but doesn't really matter how strong you are if you can't touch me."

Mark spun and threw a punch at the voice and his fist met empty air.

The next hit came from the other side, three blows in a flicker hitting his jaw, ribs and kidney all landing in the time it took him to blink, each one snapping his head or folding his body, and then a blur shot past his vision and the voice was somewhere down the corridor laughing.

The man came into focus for half a second, a lean man in a a guard ourfit, his whole body shimmering at the edges. "Try to keep up bitch!" He said before he was a streak again, closing the distance. 

Mark swung early to where he thought the man would be and missed by a foot.

A hand then closed around Mark's ankle and the corridor became a smear. The speedster ran, dragging Mark off his feet and behind him at a dead sprint. Mark's body hit the first wall and went through it, then the next, then a support pillar that cracked across his back, then another wall, the world a blur of dust and broken concrete, the speedster never slowing, just running him through the building like a wrecking ball on the end of a rope.

Finally he let go and Mark tumbled across the floor and slammed into a stairwell railing hard enough to bend the steel.

"Thirty seconds," the speedster said, jogging in place at the far end of the corridor. "That's how long I'm going to need to put you down." He blurred forward.

Mark could not track him, he was way too injured and could barely see straight as it is. But he didn't need to track him, he just needed to slow him down. With a small smirk on his face he dropped to one knee in the center of the corridor and raised both fists over his head and brought them down onto the floor.

CRACK

The concrete cracked in a ring around him and the whole corridor jumped. The speedster, mid-stride, felt the floor shift under his foot and stumbled, his momentum carrying him sideways into the wall, and for a fraction of a second he was not moving fast at all.

Mark slammed his fists down again much harder.

The floor heaved and a web of cracks raced outward in every direction and the support pillars along the corridor groaned and the ceiling shed a curtain of dust and chunks of concrete. The speedster scrambled to get his feet back under him, to find solid ground to push off from, but there was no solid ground left, just buckling, shifting, breaking floor that pitched him off balance every time he tried to plant a foot.

"What are you—stop—" The speedster was flickering now, trying to run, trying to get traction but he couldn't. 

Mark hit the floor a third time and the whole section dropped six inches at once.

The speedster pitched forward onto his hands and knees.

Mark then launched himself off the ground and rushed towards him, maybe not at speedster level speeds but definitely faster than an Olympic athlete, and unlike the speedster he was strong enough to make a foothold with each step. 

The speedster saw him coming and tried to launch off a kneeling start, but his back foot found a crack instead of solid concrete and slipped, and the launch fired him sideways instead of away, and Mark caught his leg as he went past.

The speedster screamed and twisted and tried to wrench free, his body vibrating so fast in Mark's grip that it buzzed against his palms, but Mark just tightened his hold and brought his other hand down across the knee and snapped it sideways.

"AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!" The guard yelled as he dropped to the floor, clutching the ruined joint. He tried to get up but Mark grabbed him by the neck and threw him hard enough into the wall he went through it and slammed into what looked like a tv in a break room. 

Mark looked at him for a moment before the shifting of the building caught his attention. It was groaning all around him now, the tremors he had set off still working their way through the structure, and somewhere above him the ceiling let go and a section of it came down. Mark broke into a run for the east corridor, up the ramp, the floor still trembling under his feet, the whole facility coming apart behind him as he ran.

He came out into a large concrete space at street level, open to the night through a wide vehicle door, and he saw the van. He saw Dinah being lifted into the back of it and immediately rushed towards her. 

However an explosion caught him in the chest and threw him backward off his feet.

Deathstroke walked toward him across the garage, a heavy rifle braced against his shoulder, he fired again, wnd the round exploded against Mark's shoulder and spun him around. He fired again, into Mark's leg, again into his back, walking forward the whole time, each explosive round driving Mark down further until Mark was on his hands and knees on the concrete.

"You know," Deathstroke said, reloading without breaking stride, "this was a good gig. A really good one. Good money and all I had to do was stand around and look scary and occasionally kill somebody who got out of line. Easiest paycheck I've had in years and the best place stay while recovering." He fired another round into Mark's side. "And now it's all going up in smoke because some kid with a dead mother decided to have a tantrum. Do you have any idea how annoying that is? Do you have the first idea what you've cost me tonight?"

"Who fucking asked?" Mark said as he brought his hands together and clapped them in front of his chest, the shockwave that came off the impact ripped through the air and hit Deathstroke and lifted him off his feet and threw him twenty feet back into a parked car.

Mark pushed himself up and grabbed a heavy piece of chain that was next to him. 

Deathstroke was getting up. "You little—"

Mark swung the chain with everything that he had and it caught Deathstroke across the back. Even Mark winced as he heard the sound of Deathstrokes spine breaking in hall and his body bending over backwards. Not that he felt sorry for the guy, but that was a rough way to go all things considered. 

Rumble

The floor beneath Mark started to shift and crack, it seemed he'd done more damage to the building than he thought and the whole sub level was collapsing in on itself and bringing this place down with it. Mark dropped the chain and jumped the collapsing section of floor and landed near the van just as it cleared the threshold of the garage. He managed to grab the rear doors just before it took off letting him get dragged along. 

The van hit the street doing sixty and accelerating, and Mark's body snapped out behind it like a flag in a gale, his legs trailing along the asphalt.

The driver knew he was there as the van swerved hard right, then hard left, weaving through the traffic, sideswiping a parked sedan so close to Mark that the impact nearly tore his grip loose. The van jumped a curb, came down hard, the suspension bottoming out, and Mark's hands slipped to the very edge of the doors before he hauled himself baxk up.

"He's still on us!" the driver was screaming inside. "He's still on the back, he won't—"

The van fishtailed deliberately, the driver yanking the wheel back and forth, trying to whip Mark off the way you'd snap water off a towel. Mark's body swung wide on the second whip, his feet leaving the road entirely, his whole weight hanging off two fistfuls of steel door, but he held on, and on the recovery he pulled himself in tight against the back of the van.

He got one foot down toward the road and then after a moment the other, he then dug his heels in.

The asphalt opened up and two long trenches ripped through the street behind the van, smoke and torn road spraying up on either side of the van. The van's tires spun and screamed and lost the fight as Mark dragged the whole vehicle to a shuddering halt. 

Then the passenger window came down and Luca leaned out with a rifle and there was a loud boom as the explosive round hit Mark square in the chest and blew him off the van. He hit the road on his back and skidded across the ground as the van's tires found their grip and it tore away down the empty street.

"You should've stayed DOWN, kid!" Luca shouted while laughing. 

'NO! He can't get away...' Mark rolled onto his front and got up on one knee. He set his foot against the torn road and brought his other leg up behind him and pushed his fingertips down against the ground in what looked like a runners pose. 

He looked at the van shrinking down the street.

And pushed off.

The road cracked apart where his foot left it, a crater blasting out behind him, the air screamed past his ears, and the distance between him and the van vanished in a heartbeat. 

To anyone watching it would have looked like he flew. 

He hit the back of the van like a thrown car and made it swerve before it went up and over, end over end down the empty street. 

Mark held on and rode it through every rotation with his hands locked on the frame, until it left the road and punched through the front wall of an abandoned building and came to rest in the dark in a cloud of dust and falling brick.

For a moment everything was still.

Then the driver's door of the van creaked, and Luca Falcone kicked it open from inside and stumbled out, coughing, dragging one leg, with blood running down the side of his face. He looked around the interior of the ruined building before he started coughing. 

Mark was on the floor a few feet away, he was trying to get up but his body would not let him. Whatever energy he had before was gone and now he was just a wrecked, feverish, half-dead boy on the floor of a collapsed building.

Luca saw him and coughed again before he stumbled back towards the van and pulled a shotgun from inside, racked it, and limped over. "You," he said, while breathing hard. "You stupid, stupid fucking kid."

He aimed the gun and fired, the blast hit Mark and threw him onto his back. Mark tried to rise and Luca fired again, knocking him flat, and again, and again, until Mark stopped trying to get up at all.

"All of this," Luca said, standing over him, racking the shotgun. "All of this, the facility, my buyers, my whole operation, years of work, gone, blown up, because of what? Because of a woman I shot who knows how many years ago? You want to know the truth, kid? You want to know the real truth?" He leaned down. "She didn't matter. Your mother. She was nothing. She was a name on a list, a job, a Tuesday. I have killed more important people than her by accident. She didn't matter to me then and she doesn't matter now and you have torn your entire life apart and burned mine to the ground over a woman who was so insignificant I can't even picture her face. How could one stupid, worthless life possibly be worth all of this?"

"I don't expect," Mark said, and he planted one hand on the floor, "someone like you," and he pushed himself up, "to understand that."

He stood.

Luca's eyes went wide and he raised the shotgun and fired point-blank into Mark's chest.

The bullets but him, but Mark did not move.

Luca racked it and fired again.

The bullets slammed into Mark again and yet they did nothing to him. 

Luca racked it again but the gun clicked empty.

He took a step back. "Now, now hold on," he said, dropping the shotgun, raising his empty hands. "Hold on, kid, let's, let's talk about this. Let's be reasonable. I'm a businessman, alright? Everything's negotiable. You want money? I've got money, more than you could spend in ten lifetimes, it's yours, all of it. You want power? I can set you up, I can make you somebody in this city, you'd never have to fight in a pit again. You want the girl? She's yours, free and clear, no charge, I'll have my people release her right now, this second, you'll never hear from me again. Anything. Name it. Anything you want, it's yours."

Mark said nothing and continued to walk forward.

"You think you're a hero?" Luca said, backing away. "You think this makes you a good man? You just killed dozens of people back there, you brought a whole building down, you're a killer, you're no better than me, you—" He hit a piece of fallen rubble and stumbled and went down on his back. "Listen man I'm hurt, you can't... I mean come on I'm defenceless, you wouldn't—"

He stopped and looked up at Mark, and whatever he saw in his face emptied all the bluster out of him, and what was left underneath was just a frightened man.

"Please," Luca said desperately, his voice cracking. "Please. Please, I'm, I'm sorry, okay? I'm sorry about your mom, I'm sorry, I didn't, I shouldn't have, please, I don't, I don't want to die, please, I'll do anything, please don't, please, I'm begging you, please—"

Mark got down on top of him and put his hands around Luca Falcone's throat. 

Luca clawed at his wrists, his eyes starting to go wild, his mouth moving but no sound coming out now but a choked wheeze.

"You are," Mark said quietly, "and have always been, the author of your own demise."

Luca hit him, he clawed at him, he punched him but nothing would move Marks grip that seemed to be tightening more and more. 

Mark looked down into Luca's eyes and he saw it...

The same look his mother had just before she died. 

"You feel it now don't you..." Mark whispered. 

Luca choked and gagged but he couldn't speak. 

"You feel exactly what she felt just before you killed her..."

Luca's gagging got louder as he tried to speak. "...p-p-pl-e-ease..."

Mark snapped his neck.

Luca stopped gagging and went still beneath him.

Mark knelt there for a long time with his hands still around the dead man's throat. Then his strength gave out all at once and he toppled sideways off the body and onto his back on the rubble-strewn floor.

He lay there looking up.

There was a hole in the roof of the building, and through it he could see a patch of sky, and as he watched, a light appeared in it. A bright, descending light. He thought, that he might be hallucinating, that this was the end, that his brain was giving him something nice to look at while he died.

The light resolved into a shape.

His grandfather came down through the hole in the roof, flying, slowing as he descended, his face stricken, and behind him another shape dropped down on a line, a cape spreading wide against the night, Batman landing in a crouch on the rubble a few feet away.

"Mark," his grandfather said, rushing to him, dropping to his knees beside him. "Mark, oh God, Mark, I'm here, I've got you, I'm here—"

Mark looked up at his grandfather's face.

He smiled, if he was going to hallucinate something before he died then he was glad it was his Grandpa. 

Then his eyes closed.

(AN: So the Origin story is over. Mark now has his Viltrumite Powers and in my opinion a much better backstory than the original Life Can Change. Tbf they are completely  different but I felt like Debbie was kinda useless in the original Life can change and I say that because I was always forgetting about her. Now she's dead. Mark has his Grandpa who I feel I can make into a much more interesting character. Anyway hope you enjoyed.)