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Lord Ballister Blackheart was not a man unaccustomed to loss.
Indeed, it seemed, as he avoided eyecontact with his reflection in the mirror, he was a vacuum. And it was the nature of a vacuum to consume wholesale while remaining forever empty.
These days, there was nothing emptier than his eyes.
Nothing could survive a vacuum, it's lack of life and matter.
And nothing could survive Lord Blackheart.
An experiment: what happens at the conception of a child destined to destroy?
A hypthosis: gravitational pull dictates all in its path must be drawn in, to their ultimate detriment.
A consumate scientist, he knew that critical inquiry was the rigid backbone of logical appeal. There were steps. A set path and pace to discover the cold hard truths of the world.
And logically he knew, he knew he was spiraling. Had been in a nosedive, truly, since the joust, only exacerbated by...by her. Him. The fall of the Institute. So rational minds must prevail, and thusly...thusly Lord Ballister Blackheart fell back into method, into control.
An experiment.
A hypothesis.
And a lifetime of data at his fingertips.
Time had passed in a slurry, since Nimona had-
Since Ambrosius was-
The institute had imploded. That was safe ground to think on. The institute had imploded in the midst of the end of his world, and every other thought was slippery and hard to grasp. Between then and now, enough time had passed that he could feel the maddening itch and burn of healing flesh: how he'd arrived at his lair, how he had cared for himself in the interim was a mystery.
The world had become hazy, snippets here and there of long stretches glaring at blank walls, willing for some kind of tether or sense to reinstate itself.
Ergo: the method.
If the world had ended and he remained, it stood to reason that he was at fault. And if his world had been ending since birth, the evidence would corroborate the hypothesis: his was an existence meant to destroy all those in his path. A villain from birth.
To wit:
1) born to a single mother, Ballister had cursed her to a life of meager rations and chillblained hands worked to the bone until, having spent her body to care for him, she died. He was too young to mourn and too small to work and so to the orphanage he went.
And villain that he was, he could not remember her face.
2) Ambrosius. His first love. His only.
And so vile was Blackheart's corrupting touch that the sweet faced child he first fought to protect had curdled into a vain man so bent on success, his only recourse was to...was to destroy Ballister. Ballister, fool that he was, had thought himself capable of love, but his wormhole heart had twisted the recipient and now...
When Ambrosius had woken in the hospital, half blind, more than half dead and calling for him, Ballister had left.
A villain at his core, he'd failed to save those that were the most precious. He refused to break them further with his presence.
3) The girl. Roommate, daughter, sidekick.
Deeply traumatized child.
A kid, like he had been, cast aside and kicked around until she'd been left hollow and furious. And how was a void to fill a void? He'd been nothing but angry for decades, and he saw himself in that pink haired cretin. But Ballister's humanity had atrophied in the intervening years since he'd been booted from heroics, and he couldn't save her.
He couldn't save anyone. He had never been a hero, you see.
Another point of secondary evidence for the board.
Nimona loved being a shark. He'd thought nothing of it at the time, of course. He'd had his schemes, after all. But a shark always had to move forward, and a shark could smell blood in the water for miles around.
She had scented a like blood when she found him. A kindred spirit, an injured, floundering soul. Both had to keep moving forward, or they would die.
Nimona had died trapped in the trauma of her past and believing he had betrayed her.
Ballister didn't want to keep moving forward.
Instead, he sat curled over his table, charting the proof of his burdens on crumpled papers, the lab grown stale with unchanged bandages and room temperature anchovies.
The evidence was conclusive.
Damning.
Hypothesis proved: Lord Ballister Blackheart was a creature devoid of good. A Midas touch, all within his reach turned not to gold but shit.
Yes. He was not a man unaccustomed loss. It was the forty years of guilt and loathing he couldn't bear.