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thejusticelounge2012-05-12 07:37 pm
bossymarmalade) wrote in thejusticelounge2012-05-12 07:37 pm
Entry tags:
an adventure finds me
“It is good to be back,” I think to myself. I have lived in many places, in many lives. But since losing Mars, I have never felt more at home than here in the Watchtower among my friends.
Although I am alone in meditation in my chambers, I can sense the minds of those around me. Some are at peace, some are troubled. Some even turn their thoughts towards each other. But all have a higher purpose, a calling to justice. That is why they are here.
It is while contemplating this when I notice a shift in the emotions of one mind in particular. A mind that has become focused - on a mystery? On trouble? I cannot yet tell, but I feel that I may soon learn. The focused mind approaches; there is a knock on my door. “You may enter,” I say, rising. I am curious now, maybe even a bit excited to know what has been brought to me.
The door slides open and I hear the familiar polite custom earthlings have of clearing their throats. I open my eyes and turn to greet my guest, wondering where this will bring me next.
“Yes? What can I do to help?”
“Nothing, likely.” Damian walks about the Manhunter’s quarters for a moment, examining his surroundings before turning to the occupant. His young face is hardened with skepticism, and his gray eyes scrutinize the tall form before him. He puts his hands on his waist and looks the other up and down, assessing his potential worth.
“I’m not keen on alien voodoo,” he warns, “but I need to make use of your powers. They say you can read minds. I had an encounter with nanobots recently. They made me believe I was… someone else.” He trails off cryptically, hesitant to share the specific details. “I must know why— what they found in me that caused me to assume this particular identity. If indeed you possess such capabilities.”
The boy’s eyes flash in challenge.
“I can read minds. But doing so is a either a sacred or violent act reserved only for those whom grant us permission or those with whom it is necessary. It is a thing I do not do lightly” said the Martian, answering the young boy’s challenge. “But with some strong emotions, it is impossible to avoid. Such as yours. I feel such doubt, such confusion in you. It is especially troubling coming from one so young.”
The Martian Manhunter takes a step closer to this newest Boy Wonder and places a hand on his shoulder. “I can help. But only in the right way…”
“Hmph.” Damian glances at the hand on his shoulder, half-considering batting it aside. He permits the contact for now, thinking the Martian Manhunter may be of use to him yet. “I’m not plagued by doubt, Martian. I’m certain of who I am and who I will be when I become an adult and claim my father’s mantle.
But perhaps my mind has been tampered with previously without my knowledge. It’s the only explanation for what transpired in the desert.” Damian nods once to himself. Yes. That must be the reason. “What method do you consider suitable for discovering the root of my transformation?”
“Certainty is the root of all loss. We must all be open to our futures, whatever they may be” the Martian cautioned the young boy. But he could sense right away the boy was not yet open to the wisdom of Mars. The Martian Manhunter removed his hand from the boy’s shoulder in deference. Had he overstepped his bounds? Though he had lived on Earth for decades, he still had trouble relating to humans emotionally. He could read them fine, though. And he sensed a strong determination in the young Robin. “And as for my method for discovery - it always begins at the beginning. You mentioned a personal transformation that occurred in a desert? I suggest we start our search there.”
The Manhunter of Mars stepped back to allow the son of the Bat to lead the way…
Damian takes a seat in a chair that seems designed more for practicality than comfort, clutching his small hands around the edges of the hard seat. He looks down at his boots swinging an inch above the floor, and his confidence falters for a moment, breaks the arrogant facade he elects to present when confronting someone he hasn’t yet met. “The nanobots supposedly identified something I wanted, an essential desire to prevent me from struggling against their invasion. But that can’t be right, because I became… a young boy. Younger than I am now,” he clarifies, recalling belatedly that he’s still considered young despite how old he sometimes feels. “A cheery, foolish young boy, a gypsy child flipping about for the amusement of others. I have never wished such a life, Martian. My legacy was defined before I was born, and I accept it— anticipate it eagerly.”
Damian looks up to meet his eyes, desperate to find the answer to his conflict in them.
“Many times the desires of the heart are different from the desires of the mind. We must be careful to…” The Martian’s words trailed off as he could not help but see the young boy’s thoughts - his thoughts of another child, of garish colors and organ music. He saw the young boy before him not as himself, but as another in another time, with another family. He saw a circus. He saw a trapeze. He saw…
“Moons of Mars!” He saw Dick Grayson. This boy before him, this boy who had been raised by the League of Assassins, had a secret buried deep in this heart. And when that secret had broken through to the surface, it had shattered his perceptions. What he had been told to desire and what he truly desired were in conflict. This boy was so sure of his life plan, his destiny, that he had not even considered what it would have been like to grow up under different circumstances. He had repressed his dreams. And now they were in danger of wrecking the boy’s life.
But the Martian Manhunter knew that we were all nothing more than the sum of our experience. He knew that he himself had been shaped by his youth, by his love, by his loss, and by those he cared about and those who cared for him. He knew this to be true of all beings - even this young Robin’s father. Batman can be dark, brooding, stoic and distant. But the Martian Manhunter knew that he, like Nightwing, had a past. They had a childhood that had been denied to Damien.
This boy’s deepest desires had been accessed, and the results were frightening. And so, carefully treading deep emotional waters, J’onn J’onzz asked him a simple, yet direct question. “What do you know of your father’s youth?”
The inquiry is unexpected, and it sets Damian on edge. “I don’t see how that’s relevant,” he snaps, but the Martian’s gaze is calm and measured, and the boy finds himself compelled to answer despite his deep-rooted inclination to defy. He shrugs his shoulders with an impatient sigh. “Father doesn’t speak much about his childhood, aside from the night his parents were killed. And I’m certain you— and everyone else aboard this station— have heard about that.”
Damian laughs morbidly under his breath. It’s not an event that inspires reverence or sympathy in him. Father references it enough that it’s something of a joke to his son who cannot relate to the loss, who has never felt such a bond with anyone else that their loss would rip his world asunder. Or so he thinks. “It’s a blatant weak spot for him,” he decrees aloud. “Father is strong otherwise. But that one point, that one memory, could be exploited to destroy him. I sometimes resent him for being so childish about it.
“But he’s never childish in other ways, and I don’t think he has been since that night. He doesn’t waste his time on trivial amusements, and I respect that. Though he did take me to an amusement park last week,” Damian adds as an afterthought, a smile creeping across his face. He’s quick to suppress it though, glancing up at the Martian with a stern expression once more. “I’ve never seen him… like that. I tried to ask if he’d ever been to one before, but he just mentioned something about his dead parents.”
Damian rolls his eyes, annoyed by the burden of his father’s eternal grief.
The Martian Manhunter sensed a different emotion under the boy’s annoyance toward his father’s grief, but he could not yet pin point it.
“Damian, your father’s grief is well known and even legendary. But have you ever asked yourself what caused so deep a despair? Your father vowed to become what he is today not because someone else told him that he must, but because of his emotions. You speak of a weak spot…” For a brief moment, the Martian’s eyes betrayed his own grief at the loss of his own family. ”But I say to you again, we are what our experiences made us. Nightwing would not be who he is if he were not first a happy child in the circus, if he were not first Dick Grayson. The same is true of Tim, of Stephanie, of even Alfred. And yes, the same is true of your father. Thomas and Martha Wayne are not simply bodies in a grave. They helped raise him, they helped shape who he is today. And that included things that may seem trivial to you - like trips to amusement parks and family outings.”
J’onn paused, considering his words carefully. ”Inside all of us - deep, deep inside even your father - there exists at our core who we truly are, no matter what kind of outward appearance we wish to portray.” The Martian Manhunter’s body began to move as his feet stayed planted firmly on the floor. He grew taller, more gaunt. His fingers grew slender. His head lost its familiar round shape and took on a more elongated and angular feel. His eyes grew larger and his voice changed slightly as his vocal cords took on their new shape. ”All of us have a true form, a true self inside. And few are privy to see it. But we must all at one time acknowledge to ourselves who we are and how we became that way. If these nanobots truly reached your inner desires, then you must be brave enough to face them. An uncertain destiny can be a powerful enemy if you let it be. But it can also be a strong ally. It can allow you to shape your choices more freely, make you more like the person you aspire to be, whomever that may be…”
In an instant the familiar form and voice of J’onn J’onzz had returned. ”All of our futures are uncertain. But some of us are not ready to face this yet. Some of us are still searching for who we are. In time, I hope you can make peace with what happened to you.” The Martian Manhunter’s eyes reflected the boy’s own. ”You are strong boy, growing in to a strong man. You may surpass us all one day. But strength is not all physical or even mental. Strength can be gained from making the right choices, even if that choice may seem to run counter to what you have been told.”
A slight smile crossed the Martian’s face. ”And sometimes that choice means eating all of the cookies…”
The explicit mention of Grayson causes Damian a moment of panic— had the Martian discerned his secret already? He realizes it’s irrational, that the entire purpose of his visit revolves around the Martian discovering his jaunt as a younger version of his mentor and identifying the cause of it. But it troubles him still to hear it aloud. A recent memory flashes in his mind, Grayson’s blue eyes bright with good cheer as they regarded him. “I’m free,” he’d told Damian when the little boy accused him of being irresponsible, and Damian was perplexed and fascinated. He had no point of reference for discerning what Grayson meant.
“Free from what?” he’d wondered aloud. But for one day beneath the desert sun, he started to understand it. For one day, he felt release from the pressure of a bond he never before realized restrained him.
The memory of that day is dangerous. It challenges every fundamental belief he has about what he expects of himself, of others. Grayson’s outlook is an improvised dance, timely, measured, but fluid with graceful and spontaneous motion. Damian, however, must march to the steady tick of the metronome, and the hitch of an unexpected step derails his entire performance.
And Grayson is nothing if not an unexpected step in Damian’s life, a sprightly maneuver that trips him and forces him to start anew even when he thinks he’s finally mastered the pattern. He nods in affirmation when the Martian speaks of his potential future— I will surpass all of you, he thinks smugly— but the discussion of choices brings his conflict back to the front of his mind. He made a good choice, he thought, when he left his training as an assassin to serve at his father’s side. He made a bad choice, he knew without a doubt, when he tried to murder his own mother.
“I must be rid of the memory,” he announces, confirming the decision to himself before turning his imperious gaze upon the Martian again. “I’ve made unfortunate choices since then, and none of them involve cookies. I can’t have the boy I became fighting in my head with the person who I rightfully am. I need you to erase that day from my mind.”
“As you wish.”
The Martian’s eyes flashed red and he resumed his true shape once again. “Make calm your thoughts. Allow me control.” His slender, alien fingers touched the boy’s temple and Damian’s perception of time stood still.
J’onn was now inside the mind of the boy assassin, the boy wonder, heir to the cape and cowl. He felt the whirlwind of emotions held in check only by Damian’s will power and rigid training. The Martian Manhunter traveled deep into the boy’s mind, into its emotional core. And there before him, he saw the memory the boy wanted gone. He saw the boy as the boy saw himself that fateful day. Damian was Dick Grayson.
Being contemplative by nature, J’onn paused for a moment there, before making two fateful decisions. He hoped they both were right. He took the memory of the boy’s desire, planted by the nanobots and hid it deeper in Damian’s subconscious. It would no longer be a surface memory, but it would also never be gone. The boy would never be able to force his mind to find that memory again, but his dreaming mind might. The Martian then took what he knew to be a leap of faith and went further into the boy’s subconscious with a plan.
Deep inside, deeper even than the memory of the nanobots’ creation, the Martian Manhunter created one of his own. In it, the boy Damian would no longer see himself as someone else entirely, but would retain his own identity. In this alternate reality, J’onn placed Damian as a young boy of eight at a sunny Gotham City amusement park on a family outing. Damian was there with both his parents – Bruce and Talia holding hands and watching their son as he rode a carousel and waved to his parents. The family was enjoying a care-free day so common to ordinary people, and all had smiles, and all had love.
The Martian Manhunter knew that he was playing with fire, the most dangerous of all elements. But to him, fire was both creator and destroyer, both death and art. Fire was H’ronmeer, god of light and life. He took a risk with this young boy because he felt that given time, even Damian would see the value in happiness, in human connection, as J’onn J’onzz so often longed for.
He knew the boy would sense his memory as Dick Grayson gone. But both that memory and the newly created reality were buried deep. It would take time and it would take growth. But one day, the boy may experience one or both of the implanted memories again – as dreams, as fleeting thoughts, as half-formed desires. And when that day came, the Martian knew the boy would have a difficult choice to make: to surrender to his emotions or to fight them again.
Removing his fingers from the boy’s temple and returning to his original shape, the Martian released Damian from his mental thrall.
It’s hard to say what surprises Damian more: the alien form looming toward him, or the fact that the Martian complies with his demand. He’s accustomed to being dismissed by those older than him as an insolent child, his orders rarely considered, much less obeyed. He’s pleased as the Martian nears him to fulfill his impulsive wish, as the elongated forehead and burning red eyes stoop down to his level.
And as the cold fingers splay over his face, he’s also frightened for one uncertain moment.
But the Martian’s consciousness is swift as it merges with his own, and Damian’s will is floating outside of himself, watching the purging of his own mind like someone peeking through a cracked door. The memory of his hours as Grayson are tattered photographs borne away on a colorless wind, sepia-toned images of a boy and a man wandering the stark background of the desert. Grayson… and Rayner. Kyle. If the mind had fingers, Damian might have stretched them out in wistful regret toward the dispersing fragments of a borrowed identity. He can only accept his choice, feel the pangs of confusion ease as Grayson’s recollections are fully separated from his own, as Damian Wayne once again becomes the only person to have ever occupied his conscious brain.
And then there is a dark but peaceful void, as the Martian delves deeper and Damian no longer is aware of the rearrangement that takes place in the furthest recesses of his young mind. He comes out of his reverie only when he is released, blinking, wondering at the verdant-skinned creature before him. He knows he entered this chamber with a purpose, but he can no longer recall the exact reason. It’s strange, he thinks, for he is not generally absent-minded.
He stares at the Martian for a moment and then looks under his chair, sensing he’s misplaced something. He’s not certain what it is, but he has a feeling that, should he not find it, he’ll miss it sorely.
Although I am alone in meditation in my chambers, I can sense the minds of those around me. Some are at peace, some are troubled. Some even turn their thoughts towards each other. But all have a higher purpose, a calling to justice. That is why they are here.
It is while contemplating this when I notice a shift in the emotions of one mind in particular. A mind that has become focused - on a mystery? On trouble? I cannot yet tell, but I feel that I may soon learn. The focused mind approaches; there is a knock on my door. “You may enter,” I say, rising. I am curious now, maybe even a bit excited to know what has been brought to me.
The door slides open and I hear the familiar polite custom earthlings have of clearing their throats. I open my eyes and turn to greet my guest, wondering where this will bring me next.
“Yes? What can I do to help?”
“Nothing, likely.” Damian walks about the Manhunter’s quarters for a moment, examining his surroundings before turning to the occupant. His young face is hardened with skepticism, and his gray eyes scrutinize the tall form before him. He puts his hands on his waist and looks the other up and down, assessing his potential worth.
“I’m not keen on alien voodoo,” he warns, “but I need to make use of your powers. They say you can read minds. I had an encounter with nanobots recently. They made me believe I was… someone else.” He trails off cryptically, hesitant to share the specific details. “I must know why— what they found in me that caused me to assume this particular identity. If indeed you possess such capabilities.”
The boy’s eyes flash in challenge.
“I can read minds. But doing so is a either a sacred or violent act reserved only for those whom grant us permission or those with whom it is necessary. It is a thing I do not do lightly” said the Martian, answering the young boy’s challenge. “But with some strong emotions, it is impossible to avoid. Such as yours. I feel such doubt, such confusion in you. It is especially troubling coming from one so young.”
The Martian Manhunter takes a step closer to this newest Boy Wonder and places a hand on his shoulder. “I can help. But only in the right way…”
“Hmph.” Damian glances at the hand on his shoulder, half-considering batting it aside. He permits the contact for now, thinking the Martian Manhunter may be of use to him yet. “I’m not plagued by doubt, Martian. I’m certain of who I am and who I will be when I become an adult and claim my father’s mantle.
But perhaps my mind has been tampered with previously without my knowledge. It’s the only explanation for what transpired in the desert.” Damian nods once to himself. Yes. That must be the reason. “What method do you consider suitable for discovering the root of my transformation?”
“Certainty is the root of all loss. We must all be open to our futures, whatever they may be” the Martian cautioned the young boy. But he could sense right away the boy was not yet open to the wisdom of Mars. The Martian Manhunter removed his hand from the boy’s shoulder in deference. Had he overstepped his bounds? Though he had lived on Earth for decades, he still had trouble relating to humans emotionally. He could read them fine, though. And he sensed a strong determination in the young Robin. “And as for my method for discovery - it always begins at the beginning. You mentioned a personal transformation that occurred in a desert? I suggest we start our search there.”
The Manhunter of Mars stepped back to allow the son of the Bat to lead the way…
Damian takes a seat in a chair that seems designed more for practicality than comfort, clutching his small hands around the edges of the hard seat. He looks down at his boots swinging an inch above the floor, and his confidence falters for a moment, breaks the arrogant facade he elects to present when confronting someone he hasn’t yet met. “The nanobots supposedly identified something I wanted, an essential desire to prevent me from struggling against their invasion. But that can’t be right, because I became… a young boy. Younger than I am now,” he clarifies, recalling belatedly that he’s still considered young despite how old he sometimes feels. “A cheery, foolish young boy, a gypsy child flipping about for the amusement of others. I have never wished such a life, Martian. My legacy was defined before I was born, and I accept it— anticipate it eagerly.”
Damian looks up to meet his eyes, desperate to find the answer to his conflict in them.
“Many times the desires of the heart are different from the desires of the mind. We must be careful to…” The Martian’s words trailed off as he could not help but see the young boy’s thoughts - his thoughts of another child, of garish colors and organ music. He saw the young boy before him not as himself, but as another in another time, with another family. He saw a circus. He saw a trapeze. He saw…
“Moons of Mars!” He saw Dick Grayson. This boy before him, this boy who had been raised by the League of Assassins, had a secret buried deep in this heart. And when that secret had broken through to the surface, it had shattered his perceptions. What he had been told to desire and what he truly desired were in conflict. This boy was so sure of his life plan, his destiny, that he had not even considered what it would have been like to grow up under different circumstances. He had repressed his dreams. And now they were in danger of wrecking the boy’s life.
But the Martian Manhunter knew that we were all nothing more than the sum of our experience. He knew that he himself had been shaped by his youth, by his love, by his loss, and by those he cared about and those who cared for him. He knew this to be true of all beings - even this young Robin’s father. Batman can be dark, brooding, stoic and distant. But the Martian Manhunter knew that he, like Nightwing, had a past. They had a childhood that had been denied to Damien.
This boy’s deepest desires had been accessed, and the results were frightening. And so, carefully treading deep emotional waters, J’onn J’onzz asked him a simple, yet direct question. “What do you know of your father’s youth?”
The inquiry is unexpected, and it sets Damian on edge. “I don’t see how that’s relevant,” he snaps, but the Martian’s gaze is calm and measured, and the boy finds himself compelled to answer despite his deep-rooted inclination to defy. He shrugs his shoulders with an impatient sigh. “Father doesn’t speak much about his childhood, aside from the night his parents were killed. And I’m certain you— and everyone else aboard this station— have heard about that.”
Damian laughs morbidly under his breath. It’s not an event that inspires reverence or sympathy in him. Father references it enough that it’s something of a joke to his son who cannot relate to the loss, who has never felt such a bond with anyone else that their loss would rip his world asunder. Or so he thinks. “It’s a blatant weak spot for him,” he decrees aloud. “Father is strong otherwise. But that one point, that one memory, could be exploited to destroy him. I sometimes resent him for being so childish about it.
“But he’s never childish in other ways, and I don’t think he has been since that night. He doesn’t waste his time on trivial amusements, and I respect that. Though he did take me to an amusement park last week,” Damian adds as an afterthought, a smile creeping across his face. He’s quick to suppress it though, glancing up at the Martian with a stern expression once more. “I’ve never seen him… like that. I tried to ask if he’d ever been to one before, but he just mentioned something about his dead parents.”
Damian rolls his eyes, annoyed by the burden of his father’s eternal grief.
The Martian Manhunter sensed a different emotion under the boy’s annoyance toward his father’s grief, but he could not yet pin point it.
“Damian, your father’s grief is well known and even legendary. But have you ever asked yourself what caused so deep a despair? Your father vowed to become what he is today not because someone else told him that he must, but because of his emotions. You speak of a weak spot…” For a brief moment, the Martian’s eyes betrayed his own grief at the loss of his own family. ”But I say to you again, we are what our experiences made us. Nightwing would not be who he is if he were not first a happy child in the circus, if he were not first Dick Grayson. The same is true of Tim, of Stephanie, of even Alfred. And yes, the same is true of your father. Thomas and Martha Wayne are not simply bodies in a grave. They helped raise him, they helped shape who he is today. And that included things that may seem trivial to you - like trips to amusement parks and family outings.”
J’onn paused, considering his words carefully. ”Inside all of us - deep, deep inside even your father - there exists at our core who we truly are, no matter what kind of outward appearance we wish to portray.” The Martian Manhunter’s body began to move as his feet stayed planted firmly on the floor. He grew taller, more gaunt. His fingers grew slender. His head lost its familiar round shape and took on a more elongated and angular feel. His eyes grew larger and his voice changed slightly as his vocal cords took on their new shape. ”All of us have a true form, a true self inside. And few are privy to see it. But we must all at one time acknowledge to ourselves who we are and how we became that way. If these nanobots truly reached your inner desires, then you must be brave enough to face them. An uncertain destiny can be a powerful enemy if you let it be. But it can also be a strong ally. It can allow you to shape your choices more freely, make you more like the person you aspire to be, whomever that may be…”
In an instant the familiar form and voice of J’onn J’onzz had returned. ”All of our futures are uncertain. But some of us are not ready to face this yet. Some of us are still searching for who we are. In time, I hope you can make peace with what happened to you.” The Martian Manhunter’s eyes reflected the boy’s own. ”You are strong boy, growing in to a strong man. You may surpass us all one day. But strength is not all physical or even mental. Strength can be gained from making the right choices, even if that choice may seem to run counter to what you have been told.”
A slight smile crossed the Martian’s face. ”And sometimes that choice means eating all of the cookies…”
The explicit mention of Grayson causes Damian a moment of panic— had the Martian discerned his secret already? He realizes it’s irrational, that the entire purpose of his visit revolves around the Martian discovering his jaunt as a younger version of his mentor and identifying the cause of it. But it troubles him still to hear it aloud. A recent memory flashes in his mind, Grayson’s blue eyes bright with good cheer as they regarded him. “I’m free,” he’d told Damian when the little boy accused him of being irresponsible, and Damian was perplexed and fascinated. He had no point of reference for discerning what Grayson meant.
“Free from what?” he’d wondered aloud. But for one day beneath the desert sun, he started to understand it. For one day, he felt release from the pressure of a bond he never before realized restrained him.
The memory of that day is dangerous. It challenges every fundamental belief he has about what he expects of himself, of others. Grayson’s outlook is an improvised dance, timely, measured, but fluid with graceful and spontaneous motion. Damian, however, must march to the steady tick of the metronome, and the hitch of an unexpected step derails his entire performance.
And Grayson is nothing if not an unexpected step in Damian’s life, a sprightly maneuver that trips him and forces him to start anew even when he thinks he’s finally mastered the pattern. He nods in affirmation when the Martian speaks of his potential future— I will surpass all of you, he thinks smugly— but the discussion of choices brings his conflict back to the front of his mind. He made a good choice, he thought, when he left his training as an assassin to serve at his father’s side. He made a bad choice, he knew without a doubt, when he tried to murder his own mother.
“I must be rid of the memory,” he announces, confirming the decision to himself before turning his imperious gaze upon the Martian again. “I’ve made unfortunate choices since then, and none of them involve cookies. I can’t have the boy I became fighting in my head with the person who I rightfully am. I need you to erase that day from my mind.”
“As you wish.”
The Martian’s eyes flashed red and he resumed his true shape once again. “Make calm your thoughts. Allow me control.” His slender, alien fingers touched the boy’s temple and Damian’s perception of time stood still.
J’onn was now inside the mind of the boy assassin, the boy wonder, heir to the cape and cowl. He felt the whirlwind of emotions held in check only by Damian’s will power and rigid training. The Martian Manhunter traveled deep into the boy’s mind, into its emotional core. And there before him, he saw the memory the boy wanted gone. He saw the boy as the boy saw himself that fateful day. Damian was Dick Grayson.
Being contemplative by nature, J’onn paused for a moment there, before making two fateful decisions. He hoped they both were right. He took the memory of the boy’s desire, planted by the nanobots and hid it deeper in Damian’s subconscious. It would no longer be a surface memory, but it would also never be gone. The boy would never be able to force his mind to find that memory again, but his dreaming mind might. The Martian then took what he knew to be a leap of faith and went further into the boy’s subconscious with a plan.
Deep inside, deeper even than the memory of the nanobots’ creation, the Martian Manhunter created one of his own. In it, the boy Damian would no longer see himself as someone else entirely, but would retain his own identity. In this alternate reality, J’onn placed Damian as a young boy of eight at a sunny Gotham City amusement park on a family outing. Damian was there with both his parents – Bruce and Talia holding hands and watching their son as he rode a carousel and waved to his parents. The family was enjoying a care-free day so common to ordinary people, and all had smiles, and all had love.
The Martian Manhunter knew that he was playing with fire, the most dangerous of all elements. But to him, fire was both creator and destroyer, both death and art. Fire was H’ronmeer, god of light and life. He took a risk with this young boy because he felt that given time, even Damian would see the value in happiness, in human connection, as J’onn J’onzz so often longed for.
He knew the boy would sense his memory as Dick Grayson gone. But both that memory and the newly created reality were buried deep. It would take time and it would take growth. But one day, the boy may experience one or both of the implanted memories again – as dreams, as fleeting thoughts, as half-formed desires. And when that day came, the Martian knew the boy would have a difficult choice to make: to surrender to his emotions or to fight them again.
Removing his fingers from the boy’s temple and returning to his original shape, the Martian released Damian from his mental thrall.
It’s hard to say what surprises Damian more: the alien form looming toward him, or the fact that the Martian complies with his demand. He’s accustomed to being dismissed by those older than him as an insolent child, his orders rarely considered, much less obeyed. He’s pleased as the Martian nears him to fulfill his impulsive wish, as the elongated forehead and burning red eyes stoop down to his level.
And as the cold fingers splay over his face, he’s also frightened for one uncertain moment.
But the Martian’s consciousness is swift as it merges with his own, and Damian’s will is floating outside of himself, watching the purging of his own mind like someone peeking through a cracked door. The memory of his hours as Grayson are tattered photographs borne away on a colorless wind, sepia-toned images of a boy and a man wandering the stark background of the desert. Grayson… and Rayner. Kyle. If the mind had fingers, Damian might have stretched them out in wistful regret toward the dispersing fragments of a borrowed identity. He can only accept his choice, feel the pangs of confusion ease as Grayson’s recollections are fully separated from his own, as Damian Wayne once again becomes the only person to have ever occupied his conscious brain.
And then there is a dark but peaceful void, as the Martian delves deeper and Damian no longer is aware of the rearrangement that takes place in the furthest recesses of his young mind. He comes out of his reverie only when he is released, blinking, wondering at the verdant-skinned creature before him. He knows he entered this chamber with a purpose, but he can no longer recall the exact reason. It’s strange, he thinks, for he is not generally absent-minded.
He stares at the Martian for a moment and then looks under his chair, sensing he’s misplaced something. He’s not certain what it is, but he has a feeling that, should he not find it, he’ll miss it sorely.