Laila Greene was born in a private room, in a private ward, in a private hospital, with a private doctor.
Only the best for the heiress of a multi-million dollar clothing company. Only the best for Laila, the darling princess.
(Laila was always used to the best. She was born with a silver spoon in her mouth.
But it was something…deeper. Like she was always royalty, even longer than she was alive. Like she was a Queen that lived in an expansive forest, before she was this modern Princess.)
Laila could have anything she so desired. She had the best clothes, the best food, the best tutors.
When Laila was old enough to voice her preferences and understand them, she insisted on having her dresses be spring greens and warm yellows and autumn oranges. At ten, she got her room to painted as an idyllic meadow scene. When she hit her teens, face smeared with as many high-end products to reduce acne as was possible, she threw a tantrum to allow her hair to be died a soft green—paler than grass and as beautiful as silk.
(She always held an affinity to nature and plants and flowers. She even had a green thumb; could plant and care for anything and it would bloom in a few days.
She was Mother Nature, she was Spring incarnate. She was a force of nature, and she could control the world, if she wanted to.)
A personal garden? Check. Flowers imported from the tropics? Check. Jewelry spun from delicate gold, encrusted with teardrops of emeralds and rubies and sapphires? Check. A future in the fashion industry, all lined up and ready for her when she turned eighteen? Check.
Laila could have anything she so desired, except for one thing: a young man with a bright smile that wore blue and had feather-like hair that glowed in sunlight.
Most things were within Laila Greene’s grasp, except for a person that only lived in her dreams.
Someone like that young man that made her heart flutter and a smile bloom when she awoke—someone like that wasn’t real. But maybe…Maybe…
Maybe, somewhere out there, there was someone like him. Maybe he was even fictional, but he was out there.
A teenaged Laila—hair died green, but still looking like it was made of a perfect sheet of silk—turned to fantasy to assuage her itching need to find the literal man of her dreams.
Movies—well, no one could come up to the image of her dream man, and only certain celebrities had one or two traits going for them. Books were a medium that could be riveting, but didn’t have the visuals she so desired.
Searching for answers, hope in her hands, the princess saw a trailer for a video game on a television screen and realized that she had been completely ignoring a viable possibility.
Video games. Something that everyone knew, but not truly. At least, she didn’t, before she had her eyes opened.
Suffice to say, Laila bought as many video games that featured handsome young men that she could get her hands on, playing each and every one. Searching. Hoping. Knowing that maybe, just maybe, there would be an equivalent to the perfect young man she dreamed of regularly in this fantastical, digital realm.
It’s a whirlwind, an obsession, that she never gets out of. Video games. Hoping she’ll find someone that looks similarly or acts similarly to the smiling man in blue that is there when she sleeps, but never when she wakes.
Her parents thought it was just a phase, but, no. It isn’t. Just like how she loves green from deep in her core, or how she will always be a princess, she will look through title after title in the digital world, chasing her dreams the only way she knows how.
Laila still has to ‘grow up’. She still has whatever she could want or need, still has a bright future in the fashion industry lined up for her, so she takes it.
By day, she designs and hems and chooses fabrics, brainstorming ideas, hashing things out with mentors and teachers. By night, she holes up in four-poster bed, screen of her video game system glowing in the waning sun and falling darkness, before drifting into slumber so she can meet her prince.
When she designs clothing, it’s always for the same man with the same body type, in different shades of blue. Sometimes, there’ll be an added cape, or gold-trimmed boots, or shells from the sea used as accessories. Sometimes, she insists the man modeling must bleach their hair, because it’s part of her vision.
(Of course, she manages to miss her prince from her dreams, because she’s looking in all the wrong places. In the real world, where she exists and lives, there is a young man with sun-bleached white-blonde hair that loves wearing blue and has the brightest smile, who’s an Olympic swimmer-in-training.)
Zach Morgan was told all the time that he learned to swim before he learned to walk.
Swimming was his passion. Always was, always will be.
There was just something about the water…Something about sinking down and opening his eyes beneath the surface, something about the burn of muscles and the fluidity of his movements when he’s in the water.
(Zach even thinks, sometimes, that he can control that water to his will. It flows around him, spurs him on, never slowing him down or holding him back.
He thinks he should be able to raise it up into waves, waves large enough to surf on, can swim up and down rapid waterfalls. His parents would call him crazy or water-obsessed, if he ever said this aloud, though, so he keeps it to himself. To just something he daydreams, something he can look forward to when he slumbers after a long day.)
It’s no wonder that he swam in his local YMCA gym since elementary school, no wonder he joined the swim team in middle school, no wonder he went to high school and got recruited to train for the Olympics. It was like he was made of water, with how well he swam; he was phenomenal.
He trains, and trains hard. There are people that are just as naturally gifted as he is, and he wonders if in the their past lives, they were merpeople or fish.
(But that’s silly, right…? There’s no such thing as past lives. Not really. Just the here and now.)
Zach would train hard—but sometimes, too hard. Sometimes he would train until he passed out into a fitful sleep, black out entirely, and not dream.
Zach didn’t like not being able to dream. He held such sweet, lively, fantastical dreams. Mountains, forests, meadows, cities, backpacking across the country with a group of people—friends, most likely—that he could never remember the specifics over.
He couldn’t really remember how anyone looked like in his adventures while asleep, couldn’t even remember their names. He just knew that there was a brunette girl who he always wanted to protect like a little sister, a pair of latinos, a little boy, a bubbly teenage girl who dragged a grumpy young man. But the one person he always could get specifics from, who he could always remember with distinguishing characteristics, was a young woman in green with long hair that always captured his attention and made him feel… whole.
When not training, Zach liked to go out and take long walks through gardens and parks and meadows. He’d go out on these walks, as if he was half-searching, because it all reminded him a lot of the woman in his dreams that wore a fine green dress.
Zach rarely had downtime. But he would catch glimpses on the TV, and wonder if any of the people in his dreams where out there, right now. Maybe the young woman in green was a known botanist, who traveled meadows and tropics, and she was having a happy life. However, the most he caught up with was the news, sports channels, and occasionally a recent episode of the newest Batman cartoon reboot.
(He would never cross paths with the girl of his dreams, because she was looking at all the wrong places and he was traveling to places she would never be, but…He would, in fact, catch glimpses of someone that featured in his dreams, on the TV screens.
It’s just that the girl didn’t exist in his life as a ‘real’ person, and as a cartoon, is all.)
Melisa ‘Mimi’ Echoes was born in Gotham City, with a love of gymnastics, flying, daisies, and a sixth sense for danger. She was born a lover and a dreamer.
(She may also have had psychic powers—but maybe that was just something she hoped she held. Something that seemed natural and right, something she always held when she dreamed of blood-pumping battles and crossing forests and flying through the skies.
Sometimes, while she dreamed, it was of a grumpy young man with long hair and electric blue eyes, tagged along by a young boy with sunshine hair. Sometimes, when she wasn’t dreaming, she would try to call up her dormant-maybe-nonexistent psychic powers, and call them to her. Because the serious-looking young man and the sunny boy were a dominant part of her wonderful, unreal dreams, and she really wanted to meet them.)
Mimi’s mama encouraged her to enter gymnastics and learn self-defense when she was a little girl— and it wasn’t until years later when she was sixteen and having to bury the only parent she ever knew that Mimi realized that this was because Stephanie Brown was a superhero-slash-vigilante.
Finding the suit and accessories hidden in removable panels and in secret rooms, through the help of decoding a message in her mothers’ will, Melisa Echoes found out that her mother was Batgirl.
And this was the start of it all.
Mimi brought fresh bouquets of daisies and wove daisy chains for her mothers’ grave, and then donned the spandex suit, making adjustments of her own.
A black cape, spiked and mimicking bats’ wings, more reminiscent of Batman, the urban legend of Gotham City. The suit ending just above her knees, like shorts, instead of the full spandex suit, so her legs could breath and she could have more mobility. Flat, plain black sneakers that could give her grip and protect her bare feat, but wouldn’t have the dramatic leather and the heals that her mothers’ boots held.
She added a bit more color, a bit more life, to the design as well. A pink heart clip that held her cape together, hand-made heart-shaped flash bangs clipped on her yellow belt—because she may be the newest incarnation of Batgirl, and her mother may have loved the original design, but Mimi loved justice and righteousness and a self identity more than just a superhero suit. And she wasn’t afraid of taking up her mothers’ mantle, while making changes.
All things have to evolve at some point, after all.
While she jumped from rooftop to rooftop, Mimi would spread her arms and her cape, and pretend that she was actually flying. When the nights were slow, she would stand at the tallest point, close her eyes, and feel the wind caress her short hair, ensconcing her in something comforting.
Batgirl would make her rounds, saving people and fighting evil villains, teaming up with her fellow superheroes. But she always, always, remembered to leave fresh daisies on her mama’s grave. And she always kept an eye peeled for a young man with captivating blue eyes, and a young boy with the hair and smile like sunshine.
Mimi bumps into a young grouch of a man with electric blue eyes and a dark shadow hanging over him, tries to get to know him, to learn his story… but it turned out later that he was a villain with the moniker Blue Thunder.
During an attack that may or may not have been orchestrated by Blue Thunder, a little boy with sunshine hair and a yellow raincoat—such vibrant colors contrasting starkly with the bleak grayness of the buildings and the rain—dies in an explosion with dozens of other civilians.
The handsome, blue-eyed villain gets buried alive in a cave, and Batman had to drag Batgirl back before she dove forwards, shrieking in horror. She wanted to talk to Blue Thunder, to convince him to repent and reform—even to have him brought to justice—but not dead.
She never, never, wanted anyone dead.
Mimi cried herself to sleep that night, dreaming of meadows and forests, a young man with electric blue eyes and a little boy who was like sunshine. She woke up gasping, tears streaming down her face. Half-remembered images are stuck behind her eyelids— of escaping from a rockslide, of a beam shooting a hole through her chest, of the sunshine boy becoming a sunshine teenager and sobbing at a grave.
(What she didn’t realize was that the two males that dominated her dreams weren’t exactly like the people that she met in her life. They just so happened to resemble them, is all.
The young man in her dream held black hair with white stripes, sclera a vibrant yellow, with white lightning tattoos on his arms. The boy held spiky yellow hair the color of sunshine, yes— but he also held piercings on his face, yellow clothing lined with purple fur, bandages wrapped around his fists and shoeless feet.
So maybe…She was psychic after all.
Or maybe the writers just couldn’t tamper fully with the memories of a past life.)
It was too much. Too much violence. Too much death.
Mimi put up the costume, and decided to never be Batgirl again.
(Her life was real to her— but she didn’t have an inkling that to other lives, hers was just fictional.
A young man she’d known in a past life would watch a television screen, and see her escapades—her struggles and her story—within it. Another man—a Latino with an odd sense of humor and a bit of swagger— would live a life full of danger and violence.
But this Latino would also live in a world that wasn’t fully ‘real’, like hers, even if it had real-life people in it.)
Rubio Torres was born in Juarez, Mexico— a desert city where it was every man for himself. In order to survive, he turned to a life of crime, and did things he never wanted to do.
He wanted more, naturally. He wanted freedom. A new chance. And so, when he was a young man, he and a group of friends made their way to America.
(He dreamed of being with a woman, who would live with him in a life full of peace and love, who would build a family with him. And he knew, that if he staid where his sins were, he wouldn’t have that dream come true.)
Only half of his group managed to cross the border—the other half either shot or detained. But he made it into America, and Rubio settled down in El Paso.
Naturally, his old ties to the cartel still held him back, haunted him. He settled down, married, and had children…but he was never fully gone from the cartel. Not really.
His old boss sent someone looking for him and his family. Threatened his wife and children, taking them. And he couldn’t say no.
He agreed that he would become a drug smuggler so that they couldn’t harm his family. But it was only an excuse, a ruse.
Rubio Torres was gone, replaced by Rex Texas. He was a cowboy-hat-toting, sunglasses-wearing, pistol-carrying vigilante. And he would do anything to get his family back, and kill the bastards that took ‘em.
Rex carved a path of destruction. From city to city, he questioned people, killed the henchmen, and kept moving. Never stopping. Always leaving a trail of blood and bodies.
The journey was only a few weeks, at most, but it felt like months.
(And that was because it was months. Rex Texas was the main character of a popular Mexican telenovela, played by the actor Ricardo Gonzalez.
Rex Texas only lived on the screen, as a story, not anything truly ‘real’. But in the story—in the story, this character was real, was struggling and feeling and hurting.
Ricardo pitched ideas, of course, for side characters and plot points. He convinced the executives to hire a sassy, curvaceous woman to play his wife. He was very insistent on how she looked and acted. He wasn’t married nor held a family himself—but he always had a dream that he would spend his life with a woman like that, whether platonically or romantically.
This insistence to detail led to Rex Texas having almost prophetic dreams, in-story.)
At some point, in trying to take down some of the warehouses of the cartel, Rex gets shot and injured. Dragging himself to a barn house, he gets nursed to health by a farmer, with his wife and young son. The farmer’s wife and son are surprisingly pale-skinned, the boy’s hair a light brown that’s near blonde; must have been rich, or descended from the rich Spaniards that had occupied Mexico hundreds of years ago.
Rex gets holed up in the farmers’ homely house. The little boy chatters, tuned in constantly to the three channels that show on the old-fashioned box TV, when he’s not chided to go feed the chickens or help do chores. He showed Rex his favorite toys, and was convinced that Rex was an actual cowboy.
Rex heals enough that his wounds don’t instantly open up every time he moves, and leaves with the well wishes of the family and one of their horses, to the next town. They’ve apparently got a cousin that will take the horse back to them, but Rex still thinks they’re too trusting.
Hopefully, that trust won’t backfire on them; he’d hate it if he doomed this little farmer family because of his presence.
Rex gets closer and closer to his goal every day. He doesn’t let his wounds stop him, constantly patching himself up. He sabotages, destroys, full of fury and fire.
He will get his family back. He’ll do anything for them. Family…it’s what matters most.
(As Rex Texas, Ricardo Gonzalez puts all his emotion, his hopes and dreams.
Rex Texas isn’t truly real. Not like Ricardo himself is.
And that spunky woman that’s the wife in their dreams…? She’s real, too. Even if they got it close enough for the telenovela, she doesn’t fully exist there, in that fictional world. But she’s real, and she lives in the ‘real’ world as well.)
[[This is part 1 of 2 of a Myths of Unova Reincarnation AU, for @kynimdraws. I’ve got ideas for the other four of our ‘main’ cast, but just haven’t written it out yet.
The Owl City song I used for the title/intro may sound upbeat, but its lyrics seemed kind of fitting for this half-fic, so I used it *shrug*]]
