Vigilante Justice - A Young Justice Fanfiction

Chapter 23: A Banana Projectile Gets Projected

This...couldn't be real. He'd watched Bollocks die; dove at him as a bullet went right through the other man's skull.

Were zombies a thing he was going to have to deal with now? Because Dick was not emotionally equipped to deal with zombies.

Despite his disbelief, Dick had also seen a lot of strange things in his life. So...maybe? Then again, this could all be some trauma-induced psychosis causing Dick to finally lose his mind.

But those hands on his back, pushing him from the roof, had been real, as were the cracks in the pavement. Very, very real.

Bollocks, if that was really him, grinned again as Dick took another stumbling step back.

"What?" His mind raced, slowly scrabbling at clues that weren't aligning themselves properly in his head. M'gann again? No. An illusion? No. Fake? No. Insanity? ...Possibly. "How?"

His voice cracked over the word and he cleared his throat, shoving away his frayed emotions so he couldn't get distracted by their clamouring confusion.

It didn't matter if Bollocks was here, alive and suddenly looking like an undead WWE champion. He could puzzle out the hows and whys later.

Bollocks took a step forward, his body moving with fluid grace. Unnatural grace. There was no way a rookie like Bollocks had mastered that through normal means in a matter of weeks.

When he was supposed to be dead, no less.

"Admiring my new modifications?" The man—could he even be called that anymore?—asked, taking another one of those feline-esque steps in Dick's direction "My master's work has turned out most excellently."

Dick's back pressed up against the alley's dead-end wall and he couldn't figure out whether that was a good thing or not.

On the one hand, there wouldn't be any attacks from behind. On the other, he was also cornered by a recently resurrected co-worker who was currently belting out a supervillain laugh like he was trying for an Oscar.

And again with the whole 'master' thing? What connected Bollocks, who was a previously dead rookie cop, to characters like Sniper and Copperhead?

This whole situation was starting to sound like a bad joke. And give Dick a massive headache.

Why me? Dick thought distantly as Bollock's laughter cut off just as quickly as it'd started. Why couldn't I have become a crossing guard? Or a librarian? Surely they didn't have to deal with stuff like—

A fist colliding with his stomach sent all other thoughts flying out of his skull.

Bollocks had been standing several feet away one minute, then the next he was in front of Dick and delivering a nasty blow.

The vigilante's head collided with the brick behind it, his breath exiting in a wheezy gasp.

"Hm," Bollock's bare feet scraped the pavement as he took a step back, surveying Dick with a detached stare. "He said you had an excellent reaction time, but that was rather pathetic. Of course, I am a little special now." The man flexed his fists, stretched-too-thin skin splitting even further. "Much more special than you."

Dick didn't give two shakes of a rat's ass how special Bollocks was. And he would've said so, too, if his lungs hadn't been currently collapsing in on themselves.

"You're probably wondering how I'm still alive," Bollocks was watching him now, looking disturbingly like a spider that'd just caught a particularly interesting fly. There was nothing left of that rookie cop in his eyes, just cold, glittering intelligence.