I'm about the last person you'd expect to end up in Gotham. One minute I'm chillin' at a roadhouse, minding my own business, then the universe says "YEET". Also, I was dead. And blond. I was kind of... perfect. I was like looking in a mirror. I have...
If you're going through some sort of shit in your life, chances are, someone else has been through the same thing before you, and they've written it down. Some poet or philosopher has been through the same type of crap, and they've written about it. And when you find that poem or that piece of writing, and you think, bloody hell, this bastard's just summed it all up, it's kind of comforting.
You know what I mean?
The Chinese reckon that man is a bridge between Heaven and Hell, the middle ground between the Yin and the Yang. One side is white with a little bit of black. And the other side is black with a little bit of white.
See something that's good can still have a bit of bad in it, and something that's bad still has that little bit of good.
Cold seeps throw my prison orange, and I shiver so hard my hip and shoulder are turning to bruises. The walls are damp and the sharp smell of it chokes the air of the cell.
I've seen all sorts of bad on the inside. Those who start good and turn bad; those who seen bad but aren't bad at all; and then there those who are bad in blood and bone because they born that way. That about described half those screws in Belle Reve. They took those jobs inside because they were drawn to their own kind, all those killers and psychopaths they were pretending to guard when all they were doing was feeding their own evil beast that lay dormant inside the cells of their own fucked-up heads.
They bashed me across the head to instruct me to turn around; kicked me in the arse when they wanted me to bend over; elbow me in the nose when they wanted me to step back. I've got a big purple bruise around my left eyes and the right corner of my mouth.
With no sense of time in solitary confinement, I train myself to sleep, inviting the blackness. Waller, Strange, the screws, have all underestimated my spitefulness. I could use the "me time".
That's dumb.
Next time the guards come, I take their weapons. I'll use them.
They beat me.
Left their mark on me.
Everyone can see it.
I don't know how to stand this.
Only I do know.
The names.
Red Hood, Jason Todd... Dad, Mattew Kelly... My brothers... Darren "Two-Bits" Kelly Dick Grayson... Damian Wayne... Tim Drake... Duke Thomas... Mum, Christina Kelly...
I'm glass thrown against rock.
My connections are broken.
I grab hold of bits of myself.
Push the pieces back together.
Jason Todd... Dad, Mathew Kelly... Brother, Darren Kelly...
Dad's voice speaks:
The law that let the English take Irishmen from their homes lasted for generations. Your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandfather was a quiet and secret man. He had been ripped from his home in Tipperary and transported to the prisons of Van Diemen's Land. I do not know what was done to him, he never spoke of it. When they had finished with their tortures, they set him free, and he crossed the sea to the colony of Victoria. He was thirty at the time, red headed and freckled as you are. So the story goes, Red Kelly had sworn an oath to evermore avoid the attentions of the law so when he saw the streets of Melbourne was crawling with policemen worse than flies he walked forty-five kilometres to the township of Donnybrook and soon met the woman that he would marry. Ellen Quinn was eighteen years old she was dark haired and slender, the prettiest girl on a horse he ever saw, but your grandma was like a snare laid out by God for Red Kelly. She was a Quinn, and the police would never leave the Quinns alone.
And here is the thing about your great grandparents, they were Australians, they knew full well the terror of the unyielding law, the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS was in their blood. You could be a bank clerk or an overseer, and might never have been done for nothing, but you'd still know what it was like to be bound down by iron chains in prison, you'd know what it was to be lashed for looking a copper in the eye. The knowledge of unfairness is deep in your bone and marrow.
Red Kelly was arrested again for horse stealing and died in prison. He didn't know how to endure.
But I know.
There's one small, slotted window in the cell; I can see Devastation on the other side of the hall in her cell.
"I wish I had a baseball," I say.
"What?"
"I said, I wish I had a baseball. You know, like... like Steve McQueen."
"Yeah?" she grunts throw her slot. "Well, I wish I had a bat. So I could bash your freakin' head in!"
"Okay." I shrug, leaning back against the wall. "Ah, so much for the "Bonding in solitary" moment."
"That's why it's called solitary, convict," says a cold voice, and I'm fully convinced that Amanda Waller has no soul. I hear keys jingling and then my cell door swings open with a creak.
"Hey, first off that feels personal, Waller," I say, but my stomach turns. Suicide mission, here we come.
"Welcome to Task Force X."
From this moment forward, I know there's going to be hell to pay.
Meme of the day
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