"Inertial Impulses"

Part 1: "A Kid's Game"

Chapter 1

Disclaimer: Teen Titans belongs to DC Comics, not me.

Author's note: Last week, I came to the realization that DC Comics seriously lacks for anti-hero speedsters. It has villainous and heroic speedsters, but never speedsters who walk the fine line between good and evil. Marvel Comics, on the other hand, has speedsters who are more likely to be seen as anti-heroes, such as Quicksilver of X-Men and Avengers fame or Speed of the Young Avengers. In this vein, I give you Inertia, the doppelganger of Bart Allen, currently known as the Flash and formerly known as Impulse and Kid Flash.

Why Inertia? Why not? In my opinion, DC missed an opportunity with Inertia, who started out as a living weapon of the Thawnes' hatred for the Allen line. In his last pre-OYL (One Year Later) appearance in a DC comic, Inertia came to the realization that his own life had been left cold and empty by the purpose of his existence and he ran away, presumably to find a new purpose. OYL, he's still a villain, only (in my opinion) he no longer has a motivation for being one. My idea, which you will see unfold in this story, is to make him a "dark hero" of sorts, someone who wants to do the right thing and atone for his crimes but doesn't know how to do it.

To do this, I am rewriting much of Teen Titans v3, starting with the events collected in the TPB known as "A Kid's Game." From there, you will see Inertia make his debut as an anti-hero.

In San Francisco, California, a sports car tore down the street, its driver and other occupants fleeing the cops. They could barely hear the loud sirens behind them, which they took as an indication that they had outrun the police. The driver gunned the car even faster, laughing and whooping with sheer animalistic joy at his getaway. One of his passengers in the backseat shouted, "Hell yeah! No way they'll get us now!"

Suddenly, the occupant of the passenger seat yelped. "What's wrong with you?" the driver asked.

"I saw something!" the occupant of the passenger seat replied. "A blur!"

"Come off it, man," another of the occupants of the backseat said. "The Flash is in Keystone City. Not San Fran."

"I'm not exactly the Flash," a young male voice spoke darkly from in front of them.

The driver frantically slammed the brakes, trying not to run over the owner of the voice. He felt the car stop, but not necessarily according to his will. It almost felt as though the car was being made to stop by an external force. However it happened, the car stopped, the headlights bright enough to illuminate a small teenage boy in a skintight black suit with a thick green lightning-edged stripe down the middle of his uniform. Black boots with green straps at the tops covered his feet and calves, while black gloves with green straps around the gauntlets covered his hands. A green mask with orange goggles and ear-caps with lightning-like wings covered his eyes, leaving his nose, mouth, jaw, and blond hair exposed.

"What the hell?!" one of the occupants shouted. "Who the hell are you?!"

The boy's only answer was to run toward them, disappearing from view as he did. When he reemerged, he was behind the car with a grim smile on his face. Suddenly, the car split in half and the two halves fell inward, leaving the occupants trapped inside. Screams of terror escaped from the halved car.

"Want me to get you out of there?" the boy asked. With a vicious kick and a sonic boom following, the halves of the car scattered, rolling over the street and finally landing with the open sides up. Of course, the occupants had fallen out due to the fact that none of them were wearing seatbelts. The occupants managed to rise to their feet, but barely. "Don't even think of running."

They tried to run away, but the next thing they knew, they had been waylaid and dropped on their backsides by the boy. They smelled something that vaguely smelled like burning meat . . . and screams of pain followed. They had been burned . . . somehow, the boy who seemed so insurmountably quick had burned them! What the hell was this kid, that he could do this to them?

Smoke emanated from the boy's hands. "I dare you to try that again. Seriously, I do. I could stand the exercise."

"#$ you!" the driver of the wrecked car shouted, running at the boy. The boy simply moved out of the way of the driver and swept his leg out to brutally trip the driver.

"So slow," the boy murmured. "Even when you're falling."

One of the driver's partners rushed the boy, but the boy again moved out of this way. This time, though, he moved behind the young tough and grabbed him by his hood, slamming him face-first onto the asphalt. The boy leaped off him swiftly and kicked the other two with superheated feet, knocking them down as well. He heard increasingly loudening sirens, meaning that the cops were approaching. The boy simply disappeared.

The boy was Thaddeus Thawne, alias Inertia. He was the doppelganger of Bart Allen, alias Impulse, created in the same future Bart came from to kill Bart and thus avenge the Thawne bloodline on the Allen bloodline. He had nearly succeeded, but seeing Bart Allen and his guardian Max Mercury's willingness to sacrifice themselves for each other showed him a truth he had desperately tried not to acknowledge. That truth was that unlike Bart, there was no one to love Thad, no one to genuinely care about him. With only a mission given to him by people consumed with hatred, his life was cold and empty. He was alone.

With that realization, Inertia had fled, trying to find a reason to live. And that was why he had shadowed Impulse, shadowed the boy he had been created to kill. In that time, he had come to regard Impulse as a twin brother of sorts, born of the same blood as they were. He had come down to San Francisco because he'd heard that that was where Cyborg had set up the new Teen Titans and Impulse was one of them, so . . .

Inertia stopped when he saw a news screen on one of the skyscrapers alight with the image of Cyborg holding an injured Impulse. He could see well enough to know that Impulse was bleeding from one of his knees and doing so quite profusely. Inertia gritted his teeth in rage. Bart was hurt. Impulse was hurt. His brother was hurt. Whoever did this would pay . . . and he would take that toll in blood.

The blond speedster ran, stopping only when he saw people fleeing from the local library screaming about a ghost. He spotted Robin, Superboy, and Wonder Girl trying to calm the fleeing patrons. Idly, he observed that Superboy had developed some serious muscles since the last time he'd seen the Teen of Steel. He also noticed that Superboy had gone casual, wearing a black S-shield T-shirt and jeans. He discerned that Wonder Girl was now wearing a midriff-baring vestigial-sleeved shirt with Wonder Woman's emblem on it and skintight red pants with black boots and the standard Amazonian bracelets. He grinned wickedly as he noticed the wonderful things those red pants did for her backside.

Then he snapped back into reality, realizing that it wasn't a ghost . . . but a speedster. He ran inside, accelerating himself to the same speed as the speedster inside. Invisible to everyone except the other speedster, Inertia moved to find him. When he did, his eyes widened in disbelief. It was a brown-haired boy, none other than Bart Allen, reading a book with an expression of hard determination that his doppelganger had never seen on the young speedster's face before.

"Bart?" Inertia uttered.

Bart paused from his reading, apparently stunned by the sound of his own voice coming from somewhere other than his vocal cords. He turned and saw Inertia. "What are you doing here, Inertia?" he asked. "You wanna take your shot, too?"

"No," Inertia replied. "I've given that up. What's with the books?"

"I'm trying to learn how to think," Bart answered. He held up the book he'd been reading at the time, the California Penal Code. "This'll be useful when I start rounding up crooks again. Need to know exactly what laws they're breaking."

"Your knee," Inertia said.

"Prosthetic," Bart replied. "It's fine."

"Who did that to you?" Inertia questioned.

"Why do you care?" Bart asked.

"Because I was created from you," Inertia replied. "And you're the closest thing to a brother I have. Now who did that to you?"

"Deathstroke," Bart answered. "He wanted to prove a point."

"And what point would be proven by kneecapping you?" Inertia inquired in a tone of repressed anger.

"'Kids shouldn't wear costumes,'" Bart quoted.

Inertia heard the sound of something rolling. "I'll be back," he said to Bart and jogged toward the sound. It didn't take him very long – sped up as his brain was – to realize that the rolling object was a grenade. He looked up and realized that Robin, Superboy, and Wonder Girl had spotted the grenade as well. Knowing that he didn't have too long before the grenade exploded, Inertia picked it up and ran it outside, throwing it as high into the air as he could.

The explosion was still powerful enough to disorient him somewhat, but Bart and his friends would be all right; that was what counted. When Inertia regained his bearings, he found himself staring up at a tall, muscular man garbed in dark blue with lighter blue chain-link mesh around his arms and abdomen. Orange gloves, buccaneer boots, and utility belt added to the ensemble, completed by a mask with the right side a blank dark blue and the left side orange with a semi-opaque white lens.

"Deathstroke," Inertia snarled.

"Impulse," Deathstroke uttered with what had to be a smirk in his tone. "You've changed your colors."

"The name's Inertia . . . and you're a dead man," Inertia threatened. Following through with his threat, he whirled into a hyper-fast roundhouse kick, one that Deathstroke managed to stop by catching Inertia by his ankle. Inertia simply vibrated out of Deathstroke's grip and spun into a low kick that knocked the mercenary's feet out from under him. Deathstroke compensated by landing on his hands and flipping backward onto his feet, drawing his sword and slashing at Inertia, who moved out of the way but barely, surprised by Deathstroke's speed.

Inertia ran around Deathstroke and moved to chop him in the back of his neck, but Deathstroke whirled to catch his wrist. Inertia simply grabbed Deathstroke's arm with his free hand and swung himself into a super-speed kick. He bolstered that kick with a detonation resulting from the acceleration of the molecules between his foot and Deathstroke's chest. The most it did was stagger Deathstroke, as his armor had absorbed much of the impact, but Inertia was free of his grip. The blond speedster lunged at Deathstroke and assaulted him with a flurry of super-speed punches, each precisely delivered at weak spots in his armor and pressure points in his body and augmented by heat created from directly manipulated air friction.

As Inertia and Deathstroke fought, Robin, Superboy, and Wonder Girl had come out to find the cause of the explosion they'd heard. What they saw was quite surprising to them.

"Inertia!?" Superboy exclaimed in shock. "What's he doing here?"

"Apparently, fighting Deathstroke," Wonder Girl replied. "But why? I thought he hated Bart."

"Maybe he's just mad Deathstroke got to Bart before he could," Superboy suggested.

Finally, Deathstroke managed to slip inside Inertia's guard and strike him hard in the rib cage, stopping Inertia's assault. "I have to give you credit," he remarked. "You're a lot better than I expected."

Inertia was ready to resume the fight, but Robin had lunged at Deathstroke, armed with his collapsible bo staff. The Teen Wonder managed to land a blow on Deathstroke, but only one blow. Of course, he wouldn't have very many opportunities for another blow. Deathstroke shattered Robin's staff with a punch, that selfsame punch finally landing on Robin's mouth and jaw, knocking him down. Robin got up and attempted to attack again, only to be brutally beaten down by the mercenary. Finally, Deathstroke pulled his rifle on the fallen Teen Wonder and pointed it squarely at his head.

"Tell me, Robin . . . is that mask bulletproof?" Deathstroke asked.

The moment the masked mercenary fired, time slowed down. Inertia could see the bullet moving toward Robin's forehead. Despite the pain in his chest, he began moving to catch the bullet before it could pierce Robin's skull. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted someone else moving at the same speed he was, catching the bullet in his red-gloved hand.

"Isn't this overkill?" the other speedster asked. "I mean, you're using a nitro express cartridge with a speed of two thousand fps and a striking energy of four tons. Totally wrong caliber to go hunting with. I read it in a book." All that had been said as the other speedster dismantled Deathstroke's rifle, and now Inertia could see who it was. A chagrined groan escaped his lips.

"Impulse?" Robin asked.

"Not anymore," the other speedster said, slowing down enough to be seen clearly by the others. "Kid Flash!"

End Notes: Well, I'm sure those of you who read the early issues of Teen Titans v3 would know where this came from. I'd keep going, but that would just ruin a good cliffhanger ending. In the meantime, I'd like to know what you thought of this opening chapter.

Next chapter: The new Kid Flash and Inertia, along with the other Titans, battle Deathstroke . . . only for the teen heroes to find the shocking truth behind Deathstroke's new goal!