Veritas [Vi, Clarie]

[Violet Schultz]

"Oh, that's disturbing," Violet muttered, shaking her head at Will. "You just had to go there, didn't you?"

There was just a hint of amusement in her eyes. She had been called far worse things in her life, and it didn't really bother her much that Virage was trying to push that button. She wasn't ashamed of her relationship with Will, and she wouldn't apologize for it. She was a little sorry that she'd punched him so hard, but it had been the best idea at the time... Oh well. It was a little strange that she ended up punching him so often for his own good. She never did plan it that way, but it just kept happening. How did he keep getting into situations where the only options available to her were punching him or letting him get hurt?

No time to muse.

"Really, though. What kind of sick girl would help out someone as sadistic as Slade?" she taunted. "How did you come to be in the service of that man?"

Her words seemed careless, as there could've been multiple meanings, none of which said much for Virage's character, but she had a reason. First, she was trying to find out if there was anything to Will's theory about Destiny. Also, she was trying to see if Virage even knew anything about her own past. And if she took it the wrong way and assumed that the service she was providing was not as a fighter... That was an added bonus.

[claire]

"You both think you're so clever," Virage said with a sigh, "but you know nothing. I work for no one."

Her words were calm, but there was something stirring at the back of her mind. Working for Slade? Surely not. Their goals just happened to coincide. Wait, just happened to? She didn't believe in these kinds of coincidences, and it was terribly suspicious that she should make a target of the boy that Slade wanted to break. Why did she want to break this boy so badly? She'd broken people before for pure fun, but usually she lost interest before she went to these lengths. She felt so driven to do this... What was her relationship to Slade? She couldn't...couldn't remember. Why couldn't she remember?

Her hand moved to the back of her head, where a migraine was rising.

When the empathetic attack hit, she cried out and clutched her head, taken by surprise when she was already distracted by her lack of memory. A powerful wave of telekinetic energy spread out from her, slamming everything near her away and shattering the pavement around her for a radius of ten feet. She shut out the emotions as she sank to the ground, shivering and clutching her arms. She looked up, fierce anger in her eyes, her head pulsing in pain.

[William Talbot]

Despite the effort it took to focus his powers in such a way, and then project them rather than draw from them, Will had the good sense to step back, his hand reaching out and pushing Violet back the same distance, and it was this forethought that kept them from getting leveled by the instinctive reaction Virage used to push back at them with.


Glancing at Violet in a questioning manor, he jerked his head at Clarie slightly as he spoke over he link; "Wait... We've been assuming that because of the way she's been attacking and taunting me that she's worked for Slade... What if she isn't?"

It was an option that he had only thought of in passing, however at her assertion that she didn't work for Slade Will started to question the path his thinking had taken.

Then he could sense her confusion, and the fuzziness in her mind, like water spilling over the rim of a chipped cup, he could sense it, her defenses starting to crumble slightly thanks to his attack, and it caused him to think of another attack.

"Sure, okay you're just a sick and sorry excuse for a person who torments others because it deadens the pain you hold in your own heart, fine then, I guess you're special someone you left behind won't miss you when you're a crater then, will they?"

Gathering a sizable fireball in his hand Will then flowed a triple helping of kinetic force into it, launching the fiery sphere like a cannon shot at her, the force fragmenting the flame ball into long jagged darts of blue heat and light that lanced at her legs, a wave of despair and anger following on it's heels...

[Violet Schultz]

Will, she might not even be aware that she's acting on Slade's behalf, Violet reminded him. Even if she thinks she isn't, the facts all point to it. We need to keep pushing until we find out.

She didn't want to keep reminding him about their past dealings with Slade, considering all that the mercenary had done to him, but it was those encounters that gave them the best clues that they had. If this girl had something done to her similar to what Will had suffered, she could very well be acting on Slade's behalf without even knowing it. They couldn't lose sight of the fact that she was acting in a way that the clearest beneficiary was Slade himself, or the fact that she didn't seem altogether right in the head. This girl clearly had issues, but as much as Violet wished that this was a problem that could be solved with brute force, she couldn't think of any other way to take her down than mental warfare. That shield prevented either of them from getting close.

"Why, Virage?!" she pressed. "Why would you go through all of this trouble? Is the pain fun? Do you even know why you're trying to do this?"

Eerily familiar conversation, this one. Fighting, getting inside of her head, trying to help someone against their will... Yeah, this kind of thing was getting too common. People with special abilities taking orders from someone who only saw them as means to an end could usually be stopped if one awoke their own will. Once a person realized that their goals weren't what they thought they were, the fight often stopped without either side getting seriously hurt. What was she, some sort of field therapist? How did this keep happening? Her face didn't change at the thought, but her mind was full of dry exasperation.

[claire]

"Shut UP!!" she shrieked, winging another series of knives in their direction.

She extended her hand and concentrated a ball of telekinetic energy before shooting it toward his attack to cancel it out. The streams of flame met her own attack and both expanded on impact, causing the flames to seem as if they had hit an invisible wall in midair. With knives in between all of the fingers of both hands, Virage flung more in their direction, ready to get them back on the defensive. The migraine was getting worse, and she didn't want to hear any more of their ridiculous conclusions, their prying questions.

She really wasn't sure why this was so important for her to accomplish. She didn't know why she had memories from Slade, or how she had gotten them. She didn't understand why her head hurt more the more she thought about it. While she attacked, she was searching her own mind with her powers, searching for the answers that kept eluding her. Why had she waited to find the answers about her past? All this time she had kept pushing it back, not really considering what these flashes of memory were that she got when she saw Blaze. She had to know! She had to know so that she could shut them up, and calm the storm of questions she had.

A flash of a younger Will than the one before her, his face laughing and carefree, their hands so close that they were touching. A beautiful woman with snowy wings and golden hair. A school lunch table, surrounded by people but across from the only one whose opinion really mattered.

...what?

[William Talbot]

"True enough, still... What if we're wrong?" he asked softly, suddenly wishing they where wrong, as something in his mind started to click back into place, as sense of knowing as he looked at Clarie, then shook his head and blinked his eyes clear, and just in time too...

"Down!" Will shouted as he pushed Violet to the side and sent out a pulse of hard light to deflect the knifes, one of them grazing his arm, clipping the fur and causing a shudder as a rash like itch erupted across his arm for a few moments and a trickle of blood seeped out from the wound.


"I think we hit a nerve there... Didn't we?" Will taunted as he circled the area and looked at her, a bundle of energy forming in his hand before he unleashed a combination of heat, light, thought and emotion, a lance of raw energy aimed right for the center of the barrier, as a fire ball arced from his other hand onto the building wall behind Slater, a single thought flashing from his mind, directly into Violet's "GO!"


It was time to see if the plan they had formed before all of this would work...

[Violet Schultz]

Violet's eyes flashed to his arm as it was cut, narrowing in worry. She didn't know how much damage a cut like that could cause if he didn't take care of it right away, but in the heat of battle, there was no time for that. They would have to end this quickly if she wanted to look at it. She didn't waste a moment as he gave the signal, but reappeared in the flames and lunged forward, striking three pressure points in succession. All they needed was a knock-out, and she knew that she didn't have the neccessary time to store just enough kinetic energy to punch her out without breaking her neck.

Instead, she could use her extensive knowledge of the human body's weak points to take her down. There were points on the human body that only needed a relatively small blow to take a person down. Some were fatal points, but she never used them. What she did use were knock-out points. First strike, left of the spine, lower back: intense pain. Second strike, base of the neck at a downward angle: disorientation. Last strike to the base of the skull on the right side, angle just under fifty degrees: knock-out strike. All three strikes in less than a second before she disappeared in another flare. If she missed or the strikes failed for another reason, this kind of proximity was dangerous.

She reappeared next to Will, her eyes on Virage. The best part about that type of fighting was that it took very little out of a person. It was challenging, but not physically challenging if someone knew what they were doing. She did. She rarely missed. Her eyes faded back to their natural dark blue as the last wisps of flame were extinguished.

How's your arm? she asked, her eyes still on Virage.

Her inner voice was level, but her mind resounded with worry.

[claire]

Claire extended her hand to thicken the barrier, warding off his attack. The impact made a thunderous crash, like a bomb against a wall. Her concentration was waning as the migraine int he back of her skull grew more painful, and she had to focus all of her energy into maintaining the wall so that she could prevent both his physical and mental attacks from getting through. The flashes of memory were growing in intensity, and the emotions were coming again, as true as they had been when apparently they'd first occurred, and with each passing moment, the pain grew. She felt as if she was approaching something in her mind, something that was somehow significant to her missing past.

Her eyes widened as she lost track of the girl, and an instant later, she felt tremendous pain in her back, the barrier in front of her waning for a moment as she grunted. She reached for her powers before another strike to her neck left her shoulder numb and her eyes hazy, but it also triggered something else in her mind. The strike had lessened her conscious mind, and gave her access to her sub-conscious that she hadn't been attempting to use... Destiny? Destiny! That was her name. And Will was that boy from... from the memories. Her past was coming back to her, and it almost confused her more as the veil that had been hiding it from her fell away.

Slade!! She could finally...

The last strike hit something hard in the back of her head, where there should've been a cluster of nerves. Her hand lifted to the strange bump before earthshattering pain hit in a flash. Blood ran down her lip from her nose and she collapsed to the ground, curling up in pain as she clutched her head. The mask fell from her face, and lay discarded on the ground as she cried out. She could feel the bump at the base of her skull vibrating, and she dimly realized what it was. Slade had put it there as a safeguard in case she regained her long-term memory. No, no! No! She had to tell Will, she had to warn him. She had to apologize for what she'd done.

"Will, I'm so sorry..." she whispered. She cried out again as another wave of pain wracked her skull.

[William Talbot]

Raking his claws lightly over his arm he shrugged mentally in reply as she reappeared beside him; "Ehh, it itches like crazy, but it's not bad, so I'll live."


Looking to Slater, William suddenly hit the ground on his knees, holding his head in his large furry hands, a deep, loud and soul chilling howl as the confusion, pain and flashes she was suffering from somehow attacked him, and being just distracted enough, they bombarded him from all directions, and pummeled his empathic barriers and control...


It suddenly all clicked as she fell to the side, nose bleeding profusely, her mask gone, the face he remembered from the Library suddenly a face he remembered from better, innocent days, his eyes flashing with recognition and then pain as she cried out and then whispered to him, her voice suddenly softer, and identifiable, clearly a voice he knew, and knew well instead of the sneering and cold voice they had been hearing until now.


"Des? ... Oh God... DESTINY!" Will cried as he morphed back into his human form and sprang up running, straight to her, his knees again crashing to the street as he fell next to her and scooped her up in his arms, his eyes pouring out tears as his own head pounded the back of his eyes and ears, memories suddenly falling into place, others that where fuzzy, snapping into sharp focus, doubt being banished away like darkness from a sun beam.

"Oh Des, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry... No, stay with me Des, fight it, fight him!" he said as he held her up and wiped the blood and dirt from her face, a deep and primal fear slowly tickling its way up his spine and taunting the depths of his heart with darkness of a softer, if not more tragic kind, as he sensed the unnatural throbbing, an electrical current starting to form...

[Violet Schultz]

Violet's eyebrows raised and then drew together as Virage went down, her nose streaming blood. Her eyes went to Will as his empathy gave him a taste of what she was feeling, and she looked back at Virage with bewilderment in her eyes. None of those strikes could possibly cause anything like this, so what exactly was going on? She didn't feel what Will was feeling, but she could sense it, and it cleared up her confusion. So, they hadn't been wrong. This was definitely Destiny. Why was she bleeding, and what was hurting her so badly? The last time they'd fought, it had been mental feedback from Violet's powers, but this time she had no idea.

She walked to stand behind Will, sadness entering her eyes as she realized what was happening. He'd thought that he had lost her to Slade once, and now he really was. Somehow she had survived Slade's attack the first time, but she was dying now, and Violet could guess that the electric current she sensed in the back of her skull was involved. Could Slade have surgically implanted something in her that was causing this? It made sense that Slade wouldn't just let her go, memory or no memory. She knelt beside them both, knowing but not saying that there was probably nothing that they could do. If Slade wanted Destiny dead, she would probably be dead.

She looked up as several civilians started tentatively toward them, and they backed off at a shake of her head. They were known in the city by now, and the citizens generally respected the wishes of the Titans. She didn't want anyone interrupting what was probably the last time that Will would be able to talk to Destiny. She kept those thoughts to herself, suppressing them so that Will wouldn't hear them through the link.

[claire]

There was no time... no time to tell him all that she wanted to say, or to apologize enough for what she'd done to him. The device was killing her slowly and painfully, the electicity stimulating the pain centers of her brain and closing down the unconscious life processes that kept her alive. Her heart beat was slow and confused, trying to save the organs as they stopped receiving oxygen, but not receiving the stimulus it needed. Her hand was shaking violently as she raised it and touched Will's temple with two fingers, sending her thoughts directly to his mind since she couldn't get her lungs to work enough to speak.

Communicating with the mind directly was not an exact science, and what she said was communicated more in images and emotions than in words. She showed him what had happened, Slade's attack, how Slade had faked her death. He had killed his parents first, and easily overpowered her before giving her an injection to mimic death. She showed him how Slade had taken her and how he had tortured and broken her, fracturing her mind and causing her to forget everything about herself. Tears rolled from her eyes as she showed him how sorry she was, how she still cared about him.

She entered his thoughts and touched them with her mind, dispelling the last of the barriers that were blocking off his past from conscious recall so that he could remember what Slade had made him forget. Her own mind was wavering, blurring in and out with flashes of color before her hand fell back lifelessly to the ground and she retreated from his mind.

Her face contorted with pain once more before she went still, her eyes half-closed and glassy as her heart stopped with a last sluggish beat. She was dead.

[William Talbot]

All of his physical senses where dulled, and all that existed for an unknown passage of time, was himself, and Destiny, their minds linked by her touch, and his will, his hand reaching up to steady her hand on the side of his face, as she told him everything he needed to know, loosing his mind fully, and freeing her own mind to collapse, his mind reaching out to hers as she started to slip away, slowly but surely, as the pictures, and sounds flooded his thoughts, and flowed away into his memories, to mix and file with his own conscious mind’s record of life, a part of her saved for as long as he himself breathed and lived, as her own spark was painfully and cruelly smothered and crushed by the hunter and exporter of pain and misery that even now, without fully realizing it, was molding William further, but not in the way he would have hoped.
“I’ll always love you Des…” Will whispered softly as she started to fade away at last, her eyes glowing softly before she blinked one last time, her ocean tinted blue green eyes going glassy and dull, still capturing and haunting even as the last vestiges of life drifted from their gaze into the air, her aura fading into a pale gray mist that hovered over her now still and lifeless body a moment before swirling around him slowly, as if giving him a final embrace and kiss, before the final moment of Destiny’s existence on this plane passed, and she was truly no longer bound to the earth.


Slowly, Will reached his hand to her face, and gently closed her eyes, a single kiss falling from his lips to her forehead, as he cradled her lifeless body there a few moments longer, and then lowered her slowly, reverently to the street, and pulled his jacket like top off, and draped it over her head and chest, his bared top showing little damage other than a puffy and purple scratch on his bicep, a slow thin trail of thick blue blood trickling down, pulled towards his hand, and trailing off down two fingers onto the dead girls body and the street.

“She… She deserved far worse and far better than this… I deserve… I… It was me… All along it was me, he wanted, they all just got in the way, if… Olivia was the only one saved because of circumstances, everything else was my fault… Or so he told her, lied to her, to me…” clenching his fits so tight his knuckles popped like a dozen small gunshots, and he actually drew blood from both palms, Will shook for a moment, every muscle he had tensed, veins bulging, glowing with a blue tint, his heart pounding so hard, he knew for a fact that Violet could hear it’s pumping even from where she stood, just as well as she could likely feel the sudden chill in the air as every speck of heat around them was drawn to Will as the air rippled about him until he closed his brilliantly glowing eyes and let out a long steaming hot smoke filled breath through his nose, a hazy blue gray fog flowing out of his nostrils like the spirit of some annoyed deity, a rippling like flames washing over his skin and hair, a moment before he turned, hot steaming tears of flame drifting up from his eyes, walked to Violet, and wrapped his arms around her, then cried bitterly…



“I’m going to kill that man…” he whispered to no one in particular, a dark presence felt some distance away…

[Violet Schultz]

"No, Will, it's not your fault," she said quietly, holding him close as he cried. "None of it. There is a reason that we're the Titans and he is evil. He takes lives without a second thought, and you can't think for one second that being a target makes you responsible."

She wouldn't rebuke him for his anger, but it was a safe bet that this subject would come up in the future. It had come up many times in her past, since for her and many others like them, it was far easier to kill the target of their anger than to leave them alive. She had learned her lesson at an early age, and it had cemented her resolve not to kill. This wasn't the time to talk to him about something like that. He was in the grip of some very powerful emotions, and he wasn't in the mood to be shaken from his anger quite yet. She just had to be there for him now and later on, be a voice of reason.

She couldn't let the guilt take root in him, either. That emotion was one that was nearly impossible to uproot. Even now, many years later, she still felt entirely responsible for what had happened to her parents. She would never entirely forgive herself for it, even with it being an accident, and even with it being when she was only six. Guilt was a powerful thing, and she didn't want him burdened by it the way that she had been for so long. The hatred could wait for now, since it was the simpler emotion to defuse. He had a good heart, and she didn't believe that he would be impossible to dissuade from it.

"I wish we had been wrong," she said sadly.

The citizens watched from a distance, but Violet's unspoken warning kept them back. They had no clue what was happening, but this turn of events seemed strange to someone unfamiliar with the details.

[William Talbot]

She was shorter than him, by about nine or so inches, and she was at her widest point, still five inches narrower then himself, his shoulders almost cartoonishly wider, his build strong and almost bulky, hers strong but sleek and nimble, his whole body dwarfing hers in some way or another, and yet, for the moment, Violet was all that was holding him up right now, her slender but strong arms around him, her long raven locks pressed into his cheek, her soft voice pushing through the torrent of emotion, she was keeping him in check, his inner flame a dull glow that rippled with energy, his own humble explosive power quelled by her words and her presence, her inner calm, tainted with the sorrow she held for the situation, and yet, her sorrow was like a gentle tap on his shoulder, reminding him that he was not alone in all of this, and that it wasn't just him that was being hurt...


"Yeah..." he muttered softly, only half believing both her and himself, since this felt insanely personal, and horrifically one sided, the burning in his chest not only cold and painful, but dark and seething with resentment, for everything one could think of, from his loss, to his parents not acting faster, to his own existence, yet it was held at bay, if only just by a sliver of hope that maybe justice would be served, and served swiftly, and that, one day, things would be better then they where now.

"Call Robin, tell him... Tell him what happened... And Vi..." He said softly as he slowly let go of her and backed away, unable to look at the covered body in the street next to them; "I want to take care of the details... All of them, just..." he closed his eyes as he started to turn slowly, "Just get her body to the tower, I'll be there waiting..."


And with that, knowing she would honor his wishes, he turned fully and walked away, slowly making his way to the tower, unable to think of or conceive anything else, a heavy sorrow filled weight resting on his shoulders, tinged with blood and love, lost forever, the realization that there where now only three people he truly could say he loved more than anything, only served to drive the spike deeper into his heart, a cold hard iron spike that would one day, turn into a blazing hammer that would smite...

A darkness not even realized yet.