DC: Crystalizing

"Why don't you cheer, boy?" Mrs. Hightower's scratchy voice startled him. Adrian blinked, looking up to see her staring down at him, her eyes sharp and knowing. "Don't you feel better knowing they pushed that bastard Darkseid back where he came from?"

"No," Adrian whispered.

She tilted her head, crouching down so they were eye level. "Why not?"

Adrian clutched his bear so tight it hurt. "They didn't stop him," he said, his voice trembling. "They didn't stop anything. They just…they just made him go away. But he'll come back. He'll come back, and my mom and dad won't—" His voice cracked. He shoved his face into his bear so she wouldn't see the tears slipping down his cheeks.

Mrs. Hightower sighed, sitting down beside him again. She didn't say anything this time. She just patted his shoulder, her hand heavy and warm.

---

That night, Adrian stared at the ceiling of the tent, listening to the whispers and sniffles of the people around him. His head was full of too many things: his mom's laugh, his dad's tired smile, the sound of that monster roaring.

He didn't understand everything. He was just a kid. But he understood one thing: the heroes weren't enough. They didn't fix anything. They didn't save his parents. They didn't kill Darkseid.

Adrian turned onto his side, clutching his bear close. He etched the name into his mind, carving it deep where it couldn't be forgotten.

Darkseid.

One day, he'd make him pay.

Adrian stopped being a child the night his parents died. He didn't know it then—not really—but by the time he turned 7, he could feel it, like some invisible weight on his chest that never went away. He wasn't like the other kids, the ones who still laughed too loud or cried when someone said something mean. They didn't carry the kind of anger he did. They didn't wake up from dreams about glowing red eyes and jagged claws, their mouths dry from screaming.

Adrian watched the world change from one shelter to the next, one foster home to another. 

The foster homes never felt like homes.

His first one was in Gotham. A family named the Morrows took him in. They were nice enough. The mom was quiet and smiled a lot, and the dad liked to talk about how proud they were to take in "a child in need." But Adrian didn't want to talk to them. He spent most of his time in his room, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. He didn't cry when the mom tried to hug him. He didn't yell when the dad told him he needed to "try harder" to fit in. He just sat there, waiting for it to be over.

It was over six months later, when they sent him back to the agency. They told him he was "too withdrawn" and "not adjusting well." Adrian wasn't surprised. He didn't care.

From there, it was a blur of faces and places. Some homes were nicer than others. Some weren't. There was the old couple in Metropolis who thought they could fix him with ice cream and smiles. There was the woman in Star City who locked him in his room when he refused to play nice with her other foster kids. There was the man in Blüdhaven who drank too much and yelled at him for everything.

Adrian learned not to get attached. He didn't unpack his things. He didn't try to make friends at school. Every time someone asked him where he was from, he just shrugged. It didn't matter. He wouldn't be staying long.

By the time Adrian was 12, he'd stopped thinking of himself as a kid. He felt old—older than the adults who tried to tell him what to do. They didn't understand anything. They didn't know what it felt like to see their parents' blood on the floor, to hear the screams that never stopped echoing in his head. They didn't know what it felt like to see the world call someone a hero when they hadn't saved the people who mattered most.

He kept up with the news, though. He couldn't help it. Every day, there was something new. Another villain, another city in flames, another heroic speech about how justice had prevailed. It made him sick. He started to memorize their names, the villains and the heroes alike. Joker. Luthor. Sinestro. Cheetah. They were all the same. Monsters. Parasites. People who deserved to be wiped out for good.

But the heroes wouldn't do it. They would fight, they would win, and they would let them live. Over and over and over.

Why? Adrian thought. Why do they get to live when my parents didn't?

He'd lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling of whatever foster home he was in, imagining what it would feel like to end it himself. To stop the villains the way the heroes never could. To make them pay.

---

By 15, Adrian had learned how to survive on his own.

He'd been through so many foster homes by then, he stopped counting. The last one—a run-down house in Coast City—had ended with a screaming match. The foster dad had tried to take away the old stuffed bear Adrian still kept in his backpack, calling it "kid stuff" he didn't need anymore. Adrian had thrown a chair at him. They called the agency, and he was gone the next day.

That was the last straw for him. He'd had enough of pretending to care, pretending to fit into these fake families who didn't want him. So he ran.

Life on the streets wasn't easy, but it made sense to him in a way the foster system never did. He found ways to get by—sleeping in shelters when he could, stealing food when he couldn't, picking up odd jobs when someone was willing to pay a scrawny teenager a few bucks. He kept his head down and his ears open, listening to the buzz of the city around him.

He still kept up with the heroes and villains. The Justice League had grown, adding new faces every year. More heroes. More villains. More destruction. He hated all of it. Every time he saw a headline about another fight, another city torn apart, his anger burned hotter.

---

By 18, Adrian was barely holding it together.

He'd been living on the streets for almost three years, bouncing from city to city. It didn't matter where he went; it was all the same. The heroes kept fighting. The villains kept killing. And people like him—the nobodies, the orphans, the collateral damage—kept getting left behind.

He hated the heroes almost as much as he hated the villains now. They acted like gods, flying above everyone else, pretending they were better. But they weren't. They were just people who had decided their rules were more important than justice. They didn't care about the ones who fell through the cracks.

Adrian sat in the shadow of a crumbling building, clutching his backpack to his chest. His stomach growled, but he ignored it. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten. His mind was too full anyway, buzzing with the same thoughts that always haunted him.

Why couldn't they kill them?

Why couldn't they stop them for good?

Why do the bad guys get to come back, and my parents don't?

He clenched his fists, his nails digging into his palms. The heroes didn't save the world. They just survived it.

And he was sick of surviving.

Author Note: More chapters on [email protected]/LordCampione.