Impulse didn’t laugh at the joke. He wasn’t humored, wasn’t calm, wasn’t collected. He wanted Damien gone, wanted him out of Silver Lake because the people there were too nice for him and he didn’t deserve it. He’d gone there for a break and instead he’d gotten an anti-Christ trying to get into someone’s pants, which seemed like the only thing he ever did. It got on his nerves. It was disgusting. It made him feel bad for Logan and the girl. He did something to them. Narcissa had told him that he could draw people in and keep them there. He didn’t like that.
There was a maximum of three people in the world hated by Impulse and Bart Allen. One was Lex Luthor, a man who was a lost cause, someone who couldn’t be helped. He did things for self gain and mistakenly thought he was doing what was best. He despised Lex for what he did to people, for what he’d done to him and his friends. Damien was something different. Damien had hurt him more than Luthor had hurt him. He suffered at Lex’s hands and there was a reason for that. Lex had wanted information and he’d stolen things from him, had played a game that was deadly, a game that would get him hurt. He knew there was the chance.
Damien tortured him in an alley and the reason was this: he’d said something about his cousin and that had set him off. It wasn’t enough to deserve what he’d gotten.
He never forgot the people who hurt him and depending on what they’d done, forgiving them was optional, sometimes not possible.
Three people he would never forgive; Lex Luthor, Damien Thorn, a man in a gray trench coat, no name that he knew of. Black eyes and long, lank hair, pale hands. He had been twelve, almost thirteen, and she had been his first real friend outside of Keystone. She was fifteen, older than him. She ran away. Her stepfather hit her. Her mother didn’t care. She told Bart that he reminded her of her brother.
He’d gone from a perfectly kept house, parents who loved him, school every day, to nothing. She found him on steps leading up to an old factory and he followed her around like a puppy trying to learn how things were in a new place. She was a pickpocket and the money she stole from people kept them fed. She taught him what she knew about surviving on the streets, where not to go, who to talk to and who to avoid. One day she pulled him under a blue tarp, spread over a walkway in front of a locked building nobody used anymore.
That was the last time Bart ever fell asleep out in the open. He never saw the man who held him, hand over his mouth, tight against his chest. He saw the one who raped his friend, the one who made her cry before dragging a knife across her throat. One slip up and Bart had been gone, faster than lightning through the streets of Philadelphia.
If he’d known that Damien could look into his eyes and see something like that, he would have looked somewhere else. But he didn’t.
He locked his eyes to Damien's and didn’t flinch. “You heard what I said. Don’t play stupid.”