Villain Doctor Light

Once upon a time, a villain came to Jump City who was very sure of himself.

His name was Arthur Light, though he called himself Doctor Light, which sounded more impressive to him. He had invented a suit of his own design — the kind of project that takes years of fussy, precise work — and the suit could do something quite remarkable: it could capture light and bend it and shape it into solid things. Walls. Cages. Chains. A mirror that sent beams back the way they came. A spotlight so bright you couldn't look at it without squeezing your eyes shut.

Doctor Light arrived at Jump City harbor on a Tuesday afternoon, when the water was glittering and the sky was blue, and he made both of those things much worse. KSHHHH! Beams of white light cracked across the harbor. Buildings flickered. Car alarms went off for two blocks in every direction. People ran.

Doctor Light stood in the middle of all of it, completely satisfied with himself.

The Teen Titans came quickly, as they always did.

Starfire flew in first, her green starbolts blazing. Doctor Light smiled and made a mirror construct, and the starbolts bounced back toward Starfire so fast she had to dive sideways — CRASH — right into a delivery van. She was fine. She was annoyed.

Robin threw his grappling hook. It caught in a cage of frozen light and yanked the hook out of his hand. Beast Boy became a falcon and then a rhinoceros and then a large green gorilla and got no closer to Doctor Light than the gorilla managed before being swept back by a wave of light. Cyborg fired a full-power sonic blast — BOOM! — and Doctor Light split it into a harmless spray of colors, like sunlight through a prism.

Doctor Light laughed. He had a big, satisfied laugh, the laugh of someone who believed things were going exactly according to plan.

All this time, Raven had been standing at the edge of the fight.

She was not frightened. She was not uncertain. She was watching.

See, Raven had grown up in Azarath, where the monks had taught her that the most important thing you can do in a difficult moment is stop, breathe, and pay attention. And she was paying attention now. She was watching how Doctor Light's constructs traveled — straight lines, every single one. How they bounced, how they reflected, how they moved the way light always moves: predictably, in one direction, following the rules.

Light had rules. Darkness had none.

Raven stepped forward. Her soul-self rose behind her — that great dark raven, her own shape made of living shadow — and she spread it wide across the harbor. The beams hit it and disappeared. Not bounced. Not redirected. Simply absorbed into the dark, the way light disappears when a cloud passes over the sun.

Doctor Light blinked.

He fired again. She swallowed it.

He aimed his most powerful beam straight at her — a bar of white energy wide as a car, bright as noon — and Raven raised one hand, quietly, and her telekinesis deflected it sideways through the air and into the bay, where it hit the water and fizzed out in a cloud of steam.

Hsssssss.

Then, very carefully, Raven extended her shadow toward Doctor Light's suit. She found what she was looking for almost immediately: the power node at the center of his chest, the small glowing point where all the energy in the suit was gathered and managed. She wrapped her shadow around it, gently, the way you might cup your hands around a candle.

And then she let the shadow fall closed.

CLICK.

The suit went dark. Every construct dissolved. Every beam stopped. Doctor Light stood in ordinary afternoon sunlight, without any of his inventions working, looking at the young girl in the dark blue cloak and not entirely sure what had just happened.

Cyborg crossed the harbor in about four strides and had containment cuffs on Doctor Light before another second passed.

Starfire floated back over the water, her hair drifting, a small dent in one boot and a brilliant smile on her face. She looked at Doctor Light and told him — very cheerfully, the way Starfire told everyone everything — that on her home world of Tamaran, there was a specific word for a person who makes the mistake of underestimating an empath. It was a very long word in Tamaranian. She started to explain what it meant.

Doctor Light looked like he wished she wouldn't.

Raven said nothing. She pulled her cloak straight and waited beside Robin while he called the Jump City police. She did not need to say anything. She rarely did.

There is a lesson here, and it is a simple one: darkness is not the opposite of light. Darkness is patient. And patient is powerful.

Raven knew that better than anyone.