Know Thyself

[kid_devil_you_dont_know]

Knowing myself isn't the problem. The problem is that no one else here knows me.

They look at me and they see him, the stupid boy that I ran away from being.

I shouldn't have been able to run. I shouldn't remember a world that no longer exists and never existed in the history of the universe I departed. But I've spent five years living in a universe cobbled together from the scraps of ravaged alternate worlds, and things never work as they should. Not there.

I did run. I got away and I came here and everyone expects the desperate fool who wants to be a Teen Titan. The idiot who thinks he needs superpowers to be a vigilante.

I don't even look like him -- for one thing, I don't look like the pop culture concept of a devil, but I don't even look like he used to. (I keep my hair short because it's a pain to stuff anything longer than chin length under the helmet, but it has the added benefit of keeping me distinct from the Eddie Bloomberg who popped into existence along with New Earth.) But it doesn't help.

They don't know me. They don't know that all I want to do is go home, to a home that no longer exists and that they don't even realize ever did.