The vortex of death was back, and Rachel was in the center of it. The winds around her spun faster than she could keep up with, picking up everything from cars to street lights and signs, the debris rotating dangerously close to her.
She was in the eye of the storm. Rachel tried to step out, into the vortex - maybe to die, to end this nightmare quickly. She wasn’t even sure what that would mean for her in the real world, but at this point, she was desperate for release from this hell. But no matter what Rachel did to try and step forward or crawl out of the center, the winds seemed to somehow adjust to fight against her, their force greater than any strength she could muster up to defeat them.
As Rachel continued to fight anyway, her heart sunk as she felt a familiar towering presence take form behind her.
“Raven. My disciple... my protege! How I love to see your powers fester and grow into even a fraction of what they soon will become. We shall be a great team, daughter.”
Rachel turned to see the demon king in all his glory. Somehow, while the rest of the dream felt as hazy and out of focus as it always did, Trigon was in high definition, his glowing red eyes piercing into Rachel’s soul. There were a million things she could ask him in this moment - even though she wasn’t sure whether this dream Trigon was the real thing, or some figment of her mind’s unrelenting imagination. “Why do you call me Raven?” is all she could settle on, however.
Trigon’s smile widened. It was an appraising, calculating expression - like the look a tiger gave its prey before it swallowed it whole. “Your mother chose to hide your true name from you. Perhaps a pathetic attempt at trying to thwart fate, as if this lack of knowledge would somehow prevent your destiny to fall.”
“My birth certificate says Rachel,” she countered weakly. “What does it matter what you named me? What you choose my destiny to be?”
“Ah, yes. The interdimensional, all-encompassing power of the human birth certificate.” Trigon chucked coarsely. “I did not name you Raven, for the record. It was a name already given. Just as your destiny was. And just as my destiny to bring universal order was... through mass destruction, of course.”
A creeping dread filled Rachel as her father spoke - the dread of knowing that her life was out of her hands and that what she’d started could not be stopped by any means. She’d always known she was a screw-up, but bringing about literal armageddon? That was probably a new low for her.
“Oh, don’t be so pessimistic about it, Raven.” Trigon said, somehow replying to her. Raven let out a high pitched utterance as she raised a hand to her head, watching her father simply laugh. “Yes, I can read your thoughts. You can do it too, if you would just apply yourself.
Being the daughter of the future king of every universe does have its perks, you know.”
Fury rose from deep inside of Raven. “I am not your daughter. And you will be king of nothing as long as I’m alive to see it.”
“Funny. I thought all little girls dreamed of being princesses.”
“That ship sailed ten years ago, and you weren’t there to see it.” The winds around Raven started picking up in speed, their endless whistling making it hard to see or hear. It was the way all of her nightmares ended, she realized - all of them, somehow connected to Trigon. The vortex closed in and the demon in front of her disappeared into it, his fiery eyes the last thing to leave her field of vision.
“Trust me when I tell you, Trigon, that I will destroy you,” Raven muttered as she felt her body give way again, bracing herself for her impending slip out of consciousness “If it’s the last thing I do...” she finished with her last breath.
***
Rachel woke up with a gentle start, uncharacteristic for her usual knockout induced nightmare-filled sleeps. What was more strange, her head felt fine for probably incurring more than a few concussions. Even when she pressed her hand against the spot where her mother had hit her earlier, there was no pain, only the slight sensation of pressure. Maybe she had somehow lost the ability to feel pain - knocked out some kind of crucial nerve ending or part of the brain that was responsible for that sensation.
Her gaze turned to her surroundings - a pristine, white bedroom, with all the shades open. Sunlight streamed in through the floor to ceiling windows, leading out into a glistening cityscape. Rachel crouched over the edge of the bed, looking down, then immediately pulling back from the windows, trying to hold back the nausea and vertigo. They were - she couldn’t even decipher what floor of a building she could possibly be on - extremely high up. Briefly, Rachel entertained the idea that she was in heaven, or some other afterlife equivalent to it. Then, she heard a loud crash and the sound of a man’s loud groan from the other room, breaking the illusion. Unless angels were clumsy, angry men.
She got out of the bed, placing her feet on the ground tentatively before placing weight on them. Rachel could only vaguely recall the pain she was in before she’d passed out last night, but it was enough that she knew she couldn’t have been completely okay now. Somehow, though, she felt completely fine, standing and walking around with basically no problem. She almost felt better than she had before she’d gotten all banged up yesterday. Maybe better than she’d felt in a long time.
She was still in her ratty hoodie and jeans, which were fully scraped up and soiled with blood and dirt. Still, probably better than half of her wardrobe. Rachel checked herself for bruises and scrapes all over her body, but there were little more than faded scars in the places she’d gotten hurt earlier. She swallowed thickly. It made no sense. None of it made any sense - not the past day, not last night, not her nightmares (or trips to alternate dimensions, as she now realized they were more likely to be), and now, not even her own body.
Rachel walked out into the living room, looking around in awe. When she had been six years old, her mother had temporarily gotten a real adult job and moved them into the best place Rachel had ever lived. The apartment was probably in one of the worst parts of town, and she was sure there were shootings and homicides going on every night, but that crappy studio had been a kind of luxury Rachel wasn’t used to. It had working faucets, and even floors that weren’t completely littered with every kind of snack food, piles of used condoms, and the stench of alcohol that somehow never left carpeting. It was a sort of heaven, and since then, Rachel had promised herself she would move back into an apartment like that the moment she graduated from high school and could afford it.
This apartment was nothing like what she had dreamed of. There were, inexplicably, two whole floors in the single room, a whole wall covered completely with windows, a large flat screen TV literally implanted into the wall, and the kind of post-modern furniture she associated with Star Trek spaceships.
“Holy shit.” Her voice carried through the arched ceilings, echoing against the seemingly cavernous walls of the apartment. Although, she wondered, could it even be considered an apartment at this point?
There was another crash of pots coming from the other room - what Rachel safely assumed to be the kitchen, and Dick Grayson walked out into the doorway between the two rooms. “You’re awake? You’re awake!” He yelled.
Rachel felt herself flinch in response to his rather loud enthusiasm. “This is your place?”
She vaguely remembered Kori complaining to her about Dick’s reluctance to ever invite her over (and, consequently, her three-hour analysis session in which she went over every scenario about why he didn’t like her as more than a friend and never would, despite the numerous dates he’d asked her out on). Rachel had assumed that he’d lived like her - in squalor, in what was more of a shack than a house - and was just too embarrassed to let Kori into that part of his life. Not that it would have made a difference to Kori at all, as accepting and loving as a person she was, but Rachel understood the comfort that sometimes came with hiding a part of your life away from other people. Like if you didn’t discuss it, it simply didn’t exist. But why hide an expensive, luxury apartment?
“What? Yeah,” Dick replied dismissively to her question, then looked at her in disbelief. “Geez, Rachel, I thought you were going to die for a minute there. Didn’t know how I was going to explain that one to your mom.”
She laughed bitterly, almost as a reflex, then caught herself before he asked for an explanation for the odd response. “So,” she began slowly, “you’re a superhero.”
“Hardly.” Dick disappeared behind the kitchen wall again, and Rachel followed him, not ready to drop the conversation.
“Right, the cape and mask outfit and punching out the bad guys is just supposed to be some advanced training for MMA club?” she challenged.
He chuckled. “I meant that I’m more of a... freelance worker.”
“Vigilante.” Rachel mused, “You don’t strike me as the solo type.”
“Really. The brooding, awkward persona at school didn’t give you a hint?”
“Oh, please, you are nowhere near brooding. You’re literally one of the most popular guys at our school!”
Dick grimaced, as if the notion of high school popularity and politics was foreign to him - which made sense, Rachel realized, if fighting crime and superpowered masked attackers was his side job. “People at school like me because I’m some idealized version of a tough guy stereotype that does nothing but perpetuate the violence and anger we already see so much of.
People see what they want to see in me.” He flipped a pancake.
Rachel blinked, stunned into silence. After another flip of the pancake, Dick sighed and continued. “Anyway. Sometimes I think Kori is the only one who ever sees another side of me. A side that isn’t just punching dummies in the weight gym until they break.”
Rachel softened. “She really likes you too, you know. Even if she’s terrible at saying it sometimes... most of the time.” The thought of her best friend - and all the time she’d spent apart from her by this point - made her heart ache slightly.
Dick smiled slightly at this assertion, dumping the pancakes onto two plates and drizzling syrup onto one of them. He held out the bottle to Rachel. “Want any?”
“You made me pancakes?” She took the syrup, taking care to drizzle very little onto the second plate. Rachel already felt bad enough for taking up Dick’s time with her demonic misadventures. A chill ran down her spine as the memories from her nightmares flashed in her memory again.
“Figured your blood sugar was low after that fight.” Dick shrugged, bringing both plates to the table. He eyed her lack of syrup. “You know you can take more, right? Unless you’re a weirdo who likes syrup-less pancakes.”
Rachel rolled her eyes, taking the bottle from him again. “Do you always pair homemade breakfasts with insults?”
“Yes,” Dick deadpanned. “But only after daring rescues in the middle of the night.”
Rachel bit into the cakes, savoring their sweet flavor, only compounded by the cloying taste of syrup. Her mother had never let her break into anything sweet, often giving Rachel nothing more than oatmeal for lunch and ‘encouraging’ her to find her own food past that. School days were spent eating at school but every other day was a challenge to find anything edible that wasn’t random club snacks. “This is amazing,” she said happily.
“Thanks. It's nice to know I do have more talents than parkour.”
“And following the recipe from the back of a pancake mix box is one of them.”
They ate in silence for a few minutes, Rachel taking a moment to just focus on the fact that she had real food. The last few days had been unquestionably awful, and the dread that filled her stomach when she thought about the destruction that would probably follow didn’t necessarily calm her down. But, for now, even with the inevitable destruction of the world by her absentee demon father, she felt she deserved to enjoy the pancakes.
After a moment of quiet enjoyment, Rachel finally broke the silence. “About last night, then,” she began. Dick shook his head.
“You mean two nights ago.”
“Wait, what?”
“You were out for almost 48 hours. I thought you were going to die for the first eight but then,” Dick paused, drumming his fingers against the table, his brows furrowed and gaze looking past Rachel. “I don’t know. You just started...coming back online.” “Back online?” Rachel asked, thoroughly confused now.
“Literally, in a way. It was bizarre. I mean, look-” He reached over, pushing slightly into her shoulder - the one that had been hit by the first blast. Rachel moved back reflexively, but didn’t feel any pain in the area, just like earlier. “You had at least three broken ribs when I hauled you out of that alley. Now it’s like you were never even touched by a fly, let alone beat up by four superpowered criminals.
“Right,” Rachel said softly, bringing a hand up to her torso, where she’d felt the current build up, where she knew that black hole was.
“So, how long have you had healing powers?” Dick asked.
Rachel tried not to look taken aback. It was weird to think of all these strange changes that were happening to her as powers. Like she was some sort of witch. Or, maybe more accurately, some sort of demon. “Um,” she stammered, “Well it’s not really- I don’t think I ever had them before last night. I mean - yesterday night.”
“Friday night,” Dick corrected gently. “Today is Sunday.”
“Sunday. My sixteenth birthday.” Rachel suddenly felt her breath become shallow as she remembered the prophecies in the book, the return of her father being foretold once his legacy reached an age of “ripeness”. Whatever that meant - medieval witching books were quiet outdated.
“Oh. Well, happy birthday. Maybe I should’ve put candles on the pancakes.”
“Thanks, but it’s been a pretty shitty one anyway. Not one I want to remember.” Rachel grumbled leaning back into her chair. “I could do without these powers.”
“Speaking of your strange powers. Is that why those guys were after you yesterday? Did you fight someone while using them?”
“No!” Rachel said. “Of course not. I’m not a vigilante. I literally just woke up one day and,” she gestured with her hands, “I guess I had strange black magic powers.”
“Right,” Dick said. “And you were out on the street at 3 AM not being a vigilante but being inexplicably chased by superpowered villains because...”
Rachel’s eyes narrowed at his line of questioning. “Why should I tell you anything? How do I know you don’t hunt down people like me as part of your vigilante work?”
Dick rolled his eyes. “Come on. If I wanted to hunt you down, I wouldn’t have waited through your two day coma and then made you pancakes. Besides, you know me!”
“I don’t though, do I?” Rachel countered, standing up. “I thought you were just a normal popular kid who ran the MMA club and had a nice normal life, and it turns out you have a weird whole outfit and a persona and you kill people after dark and you live in this weird large mansion apartment all alone - where are your parents, by the way?”
There was a beat, and Dick blinked slowly, taking her tirade in. “Okay,” he said, finally. “I get it. You have questions, and assuming you’re telling the truth about just spontaneously getting your powers, you’re probably really disoriented right now.”
“I’m just really sick of no one answering my questions,” Rachel finished, defeated.
After a second, Dick sighed. “Well, for starters, Nightwing doesn’t kill people...or I try my best not to. Usually I just fight against immediate crime, temporarily incapacitate the criminals so someone can call the police to let them handle it.”
Rachel smirked slightly. “Nightwing, huh?”
“Shut up. It sounded cool when I was thirteen.”
“Thirteen?” Rachel looked at Dick, slightly in shock. “You’ve been a vigilante since - what
- middle school?”
Dick looked away from her. “Look, the place I come from isn’t like here. I mean, it’s just so much worse. There’s evil around every corner. People trying to murder good people just to make a quick buck. Every institution’s basically just a formally organized crime syndicate with a local government sticker on the front. When I was a kid, my family and I survived as trapeze artists in the city. One bad act, and I lost my parents in what they said was an accident seven years ago. So I left and never looked back.”
“I’m sorry,” Rachel said. It was all she could say.
“Anyway,” Dick said. “That explains the lack of parents and the parkour, I guess. And, well, people don’t pay too terribly to make sure their businesses don’t get overrun by the mafia.”
“So you were just on your nightly mafia patrol on Friday before you just so happened to run into the guys that attacked me? And I got lucky?”
“Not exactly.” Dick met her gaze, his tone suddenly more measured. “Rachel, I’m going to make a conscious decision to trust you.” “Okay?” Rachel replied, confused.
“Which means I’m going to tell you the truth about what I think is going on - what I’ve been hunting for the past few days. But it also means that I trust you to tell me the truth if you know anything about it. If you’re in trouble.” At Rachel’s stiff nod, Dick walked over to the large, wall implanted TV and turned it on. Instead of displaying the cable news or Keeping up with the Kardashians, the screen displayed charts and readouts from different measurement devices.
“What is all this?” Rachel asked.
“It’s my control center. Of sorts. Vic helped me build a lot of it - told him it was just for advanced gaming and he was sold on it.”
Vic Stone was the resident computer genius at their high school, the guy who ran the computer club but often sat back in the shadows, probably operating as some kind of high stakes hacker for secret organizations. At least, that’s what Rachel assumed of him every time she tried to have a conversation with the guy. Logan, however, was in awe of him, especially when he fixed his gaming PC for free. Rachel gaped at the complexity of the system. “Vic did this?”
“Man is a genius,” Dick admitted, opening up one of the readouts. “But this is what I wanted to show you. Friday evening, I got this weird readout from one of my nuclear energy meters. They’re normally supposed to measure for large accumulations of it just in case of a nuclear attack or plant meltdown. There was a spike that evening, but in a place that made no sense - somewhere out in the outskirts of town. Then I started putting my meter on the highest sensitivity, and it detected random spikes all over the city, as if nuclear energy was somehow travelling.”
Trigon, Rachel’s mind whispered, but she kept quiet as Dick continued.
“I followed it to that area - the cafe - when I saw you there with that baker. For some reason, the readout wasn’t as high, but there was still a small spike with the same energy signature. So I bid my time, did a bit of a stakeout-” “-not creepy at all,” Rachel groaned.
“-because it was my only option ,” Dick continued, “and stepped in when those attackers tried to kill you later that night. I grabbed a hair sample from one of them after I tied them up, and strangely, they also have the same signature, but just at a low intensity. Like energy was transferred to them or something.”
“So this weird nuclear energy is in a lot of people then?” Rachel asked, panic rising in her.
“That’s just it. I checked your signature again-”
“Wait, hold on, you took a sample of my hair while I was comatose? Dude, not cool.” Rachel deadpanned.
Dick sighed. “I know it wasn’t ideal but I needed to figure out where this was coming from. Anyway, your signature right after the fight was through the roof. Almost as strong as the original signal from out in the boonies. I checked a couple more times after that, though, and it slowly leveled out.”
“Which means I probably just got it from their weird powers, right?”
“Well you still show the signature, just to a lesser extent. And you had it before the fight too... which is why I think they’re linked with your powers.”
Rachel bit her lip. “But if I have nuclear energy, shouldn’t you be wearing some kind of shield around me? You know, so you don’t get cancer or something?”
Dick frowned, looking back at another readout. “Thought of that, but you aren’t actually radioactive. None of the energy is seeping out of you. It’s all contained inside, like you’re a reservoir for it. Almost like you’re a one-woman nuclear plant.”
“That’s...terrifying.”
“And extremely powerful. If I knew this and I were the attackers, I would have definitely ran,” Dick said, sounding impressed, if only slightly disturbed by the findings.
“So what do you think caused that original spike?” Rachel asked tentatively.
“Nope!” Dick shook his head. “I’ve answered a lot of your questions, so now it’s your turn. Luckily for you, unlike your bombardment of questions, I only have one.”
Rachel chewed the inside of her cheek, bracing for what was coming. “Ask away!” she replied, plastering a smile onto her face.
“I need you to tell me,” Dick started, his face complete seriousness. “What was the inciting event for your powers? Did your have any big magical outbursts? Did you level a city? Wreck a forest? Kill someone?” The suggestions sounded bizarre and out of touch, but Dick mentioned them without a trace of a smile or a hint of mirth. Rachel shuddered. Were her powers that bad in his eyes? Did he think her capable of murder? Mass destruction? Trigon sure seemed to think so.
“Where’s my backpack?” She blurted out. Caught off guard, Dick simply pointed over to the item, which was propped up against the wall and nearly zipped, probably thanks to Dick - which wasn’t a good thing. Rachel rushed over to it and started digging through the contents, only stopping in relief when her hands touched the cool, worn leather on the summoning book.
“So? Don’t deflect my question. Are you somehow a weapon of mass destruction?”
“I- what? No! I didn’t do anything. Nothing that could have caused all those weird readings - at least, not to my knowledge.” Rachel felt terrible lying, keeping the truth about Trigon a secret, especially when Dick seemed to genuinely want to help. But now she wasn’t sure she could risk him turning against her when he found out she had demon blood. It was better this way, she reasoned. “Maybe it was some kind of freak nature thing that cause my powers to happn. That’s common, right? Radioactive explosion causing mutant superhumans?”
Dick laughed darkly. “I’ve seen it once or twice.”
And the scary part was that Rachel completely believed him.
