DB Multiverse

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
Winston Churchill

The old man looked around him.

He didn't understand anything.

Whatever his eyes fell on, there was nothing but smoking rubble covered by acrid dust. Everything was grey. A uniform and dreary grey. A grey that suited the occasion. No matter how bright it was, all that grey dust made you forget the azure of that nice summer sky. In one moment, the greyness had erased the happy sparkles of life that had filled the air not so long ago.

Yes, not so long ago there had been a town in this place, one of those jovial and provincial small towns. The kind of town in which everyone mixed with one another, everyone knew each other and everyone helped each other.

There had been a nice small town once... and now there was nothing anymore.

Nothing but that grey dust... and that silence.

The grey dust, the silence and some figures emerging from the rubble. The old man grimaced. Those shadows, he didn't recognize them. They were not part of his world. His world had been this small town with its bar that was open at any hour of the day. His world had been this small town with the barber from across the street who always had a joke to tell, with the smile of the grocer, with Jojo, the garage owner, and his loud laugh, and with Alba. A sob died in his throat: “Alba.”

Once again, the old man tried to push away the enormous mass that was crushing the lower part of his body. He gritted his teeth, his hands clenched, his hands that felt they're nothing but a huge wound on the dusty concrete. He moaned as he gathered the last of his strength... before letting himself fall, once again, panting.

He closed his eyes as big tears diluted the blood and the dust that stiffened his cheeks. His right hand filled with that grey dust, that burning and cold dust, that dust... lone vestige of past happiness. Never again he'd see the sweet smile of his Alba.

Times went several decades in the past and she was here, as in the day when they first met: radiant with beauty, basking in the glow of youth, wearing the cute blue dress that had so gracefully underlined her slender waist. He had felt his heart beating fast when he had watched her coming closer, brighter than a jewel in the case of her pure wedding finery. He had admired her, she had been radiant, their new-born child in her arms. He felt a surge of happiness when he remembered the so reassuring smell of her tasty cooking, and the caresses of her gentle hands on his skin, in his hair, her scent. It's almost as if he could smell it, feel it, for real.

Alba. A boundless pain twisted his stomach before moving up to make a sore lump in his throat. He would never see his sweet Alba again, he knew it. That thought rekindled the pain that filled his broken body, that went through his spine down to his waist. He made an effort to swallow his saliva, but it was the taste of blood that went down in his throat that the dust has dried up.

What had happened? How could his world collapse in the blink of an eye?

He looked up and at the figures that has gathered in the distance. Who were they, those strangers from the sky? They seemed so ordinary... well, except for one of them. Yet, that wasn't the one that had the strangest body that was the most surprising. Oh, no.

Would it be possible?

But no, it couldn't be. Otherwise it wouldn't be. He'd have prevented all of this, that tragedy, that dreadful carnage. An archangel would have stopped those demons before the merciless hellfire engulfed them all.

Why? Why dear God? Why?

But then, who could be that mysterious stranger?

It hadn't been a dream! He had seen him with his own very eyes. Pinned under the grey dust, he had felt the ground tremble and the air vibrate when that unknown person suddenly blazed in that golden light, when that fighter's whole body was enshrouded with the same aura than the one that surrounded the saints' and the archangels' head in the Gospel. He had felt deep inside the terrific power that this being obviously cut out to fight now emitted.

Such a light, such a strength, such an energy could only be divine, so why? How come God's hand proved to be so useless?

Of course that unknown being had arrived after the tragedy, of course they couldn't do anything for Alba and the others anymore; but to see those murderers pay for their crimes, evil submit to the righteous … that'd have been only fair!