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100YoP - Chapter One "Such are the polite fictions..."
🕑 Added 2021-11-16 22:54:37 +0000 UTCI woke up at around ten thirty in the morning, to the sound of my alarm and someone shouting in the apartment next to mine.
Weighed down by last night's mistakes, alcohol-based and not, I crawled miserably out of my bed and under the shower for a quick scrub down. Through my apartment's thin walls, I could hear names being called, something about him throwing their daughter in the closet again.
I walked out of the shower, shaved the patchy bits of beard that managed to grow overnight, changed into a clean outfit, and started the pot, feeling vaguely more human. He screamed at her about thinking he's stupid, she yelled about him acting stupid. I heard the meaty thwack of a hand striking a face.
I opened my fridge, removed a tupperware holding the previous day's leftovers (shepherd's pie) and on a whim I also grabbed some ice cream I'd been saving for myself. I put it away and prepare my breakfast; cup of coffee, glass of orange juice, aspirin and cookies. I read on my phone while I hear her cry and him continue yelling at her.
I went into my bathroom, got the first aid kit, used a bit of it then put it next to the tupperware and ice cream. As I put on a hoodie and a jacket, I heard the door open and be slammed shut, and then heard my neighbor stomp on his way down the strairs because the elevator had been broken for as long as there'd been a building.
I waited a minute, waiting for the sound of her sobbing to go down, then walked out of my apartment with everything in hand and knocked on my neighbor's door.
After a moment where she peeks through the peephole, Crystal Brown opens the door and smiles at me, "Hey, Sammy."
"Hey, Ms. Brown," I told her. The corner of her mouth went up, like it always did when I pretended her husband didn't exist. "Had some leftovers, and since I'm going out to eat with some friends tonight I thought you might wanna have 'em before they go bad."
"Really," she didn't sound very impressed with my excuse. "Is that unopened tub of ice cream going to go bad tonight as well?"
I looked down at it, then at her, "I mean, if it's out of your freezer for much longer it'll melt. And that seems like an awful waste of perfectly good vanilla."
She laughed, and took the things. She was a pretty woman, blonde short hair, square glasses. She looked smart, and I knew she was.
She didn't mention the first aid kit, or the bandages covering my knuckles and the band-aid over my eyebrow. I didn't mention the purpling bruise on the side of her jaw, or how I took out the stronger painkillers before giving her the kit.
The only time we didn't meet like this was when I was going down the stairs, still a bit cut up from a job gone wrong, and she was coming up, returning from a late shift with a bruise still fresh over her eyes. She looked at me, told me she worked as a nurse, and offered help when I needed it. I looked at her, said I was good, and gave her my keys so she could help herself to the casserole. She took them with a bit of shame.
We never talked about that meeting again.
Such are the polite fictions that kept things civil between neighbors with unpleasant lives.
"Thanks, Sam," she said. "You're a good kid."
"Just being neighborly, ma'am."
"Hah," She smiled and gestured a bit with the stuff. "I'll leave this on your windowsill when we're done with it."
"Take your time," I said. I was gonna walk off, but I saw someone leave the bathroom behind her, holding a bag of ice over her own bruised ribs.
Shorter than her mom, who was already rather short, with a lighter shade of longer blonde hair, a stubborn set to her jaw and a much lower tolerance for bullshit than her mom, Stephanie Brown looked at me and said, "Have a fun night, Reyes?"
Stephanie didn't care much for the polite fictions that kept things civil between neighbors with unpleasant lives.
I shrugged. "More or less, miss Brown. I met a nice girl."
"That's nice," Crystal said, desperate to keep things pleasant.
"I don't think she liked me much," I said. I nodded at them and walked away, pretending not to hear Crystal chastising her daughter or Stephanie arguing against taking what I gave.
I walked down the stairs, nodding at what neighbors I passed by, and came out to the cold autumn air. Summer was well and done, and with the heat waves on their way out random violence would go down, leaving room for organized crime. Usually a good season for me.
But after the previous night...
"Hey, buddy!" someone shouted from across the street, "Why are you just standing there, fuckass?!"
I flipped whoever that was off, put my hands in my pockets, and walked off.
Gotham's a shit hole.
{[ X ]}
Butcher's Shop was a lot of things. Chief among them, as far as most were concerned, was a dive bar. A damn good one, too. Wooden floors, cushy booths, quality drink, brick walls and sometimes, on Saturdays, live music from local talents. Besides that, it had lunch options, sold various narcotics and functioned as a bank for multiple gangs and independent thieves across Gotham.
For me, over the years it'd become a home away from home.
The owner, Kevin Daniels, used to be a bonafide gangster, the 'never lost a fight' type that got sent to do dirty work. Hence why everyone called him 'Butcher'. Ten years before, my eight-year-old self had walked in, snuck into the back room with a backpack full of homework, and asked for a job.
He laughed in my face, until I showed him that I was doing homework for tenth graders and pointed out I'd snuck in past the bartender. After that, I think he took a liking to me.
I got put to work selling coke and dope on a corner, showed promise when I kept my cool despite cops questioning me, and moved up. I grew up, put on muscle and started attending three muay thai classes a week for years, and started getting recommended for very specific jobs.
I can't quite remember what my first job as a minion was. I just remember that one day I had a mask on, and I was moving a crate in some random-ass warehouse, and I thought, oh my god, I'm exactly the kind of person that gets their shit rocked in a Batman Cold Open.
It's a decent living, if you don't focus on the risk of getting your knees inverted by a grown man in a leather fursuit.
I opened the door, got waved in by the bartender (not the one I snuck past, a more reliable guy) and stepped into Butcher's office.
The man himself looked up from his papers, took one look at me, nodded, and said, "You still look like shit."
"I still feel like it," I admitted, dropping on the chair at the other side of his desk. "The job went south so hard I thought I was gonna end up in the old country, Butchie."
"Oh, this'll be a story, I can tell," Butcher sighed and leaned back. "Alright, tell it. How did you fuck up a job moving and stashing boxes?"
I frowned at him. "Don't put this on me, Butchie. The shitshow started right after I finished the actual job."
I'd met up with the guys near Crime Alley, and had ridden an unmarked white van with some other goons like we were headed for a NAMBLA meeting.
After we were dropped off at the docks, where a lot of other hired muscle was waiting for us. A lot of 'em got sent to different parts of the city, I only caught a few, but I remember being surprised because almost half were being sent deeper into the city, away from those damn empty warehouses that plague this fucking city.
I was in the other half, one of those sent to drive a moving truck full of 'cargo', whatever that was, into said fucking warehouses.
So Mike and I--Mike, that fat white guy I came in with the other day?--Mike and I get out, we open the back, and we start unloading. We unload about five crates, all in all. Each a good distance away from the other. As soon as we're done, he passes me a crowbar and tells me to open the crates.
Personally, I thought it was just supposed to be a 'move and stash' kinda job, like you said. But fuck it, right? Bosses are always going to drain every bit from you than they can, and it's not like bitching was gonna make Mike stop bothering me about it, so I decided to just do it.
So I open the first fucking crate, and immediately the day goes to shit.
"Mike?" I asked, "Have I recently lost my mind?"
So fuckin' Mike looked at me weird, saying, "Uh... not as far as I can tell?"
"That's nice," I said, "Then would you like to explain to me why the fuck I'm seeing explosives inside of this crate?!"
"You can't be serious," Butcher said.
"Like a fucking heart attack," I spat. "Full to the brim of dynamite, like a fucking cartoon. The only thing missing was the big 'ACME' sign."
"Fuck's sake," Butcher spat. "I specifically asked that crazy bastard for no high-profile shit and he goes and mixes you in with some bullshit."
Despite myself, I felt a smile tugging at my lips. Butchie was always looking out for me. For a 'cold-blooded motherfucker', as he described himself, he was pretty softhearted when he took a liking to you.
"It gets better," I told him. "So after I politely inquired about the demolition materials, fucking Mike goes-"
"Two Face needs us to set up the explosives and rig the place to blow up if anyone breaks in," Mike said, like that was a totally reasonable sentence. "In about ten minutes, there's a van coming 'round full of hostages. The idea is that Two Face is gonna make the Bat choose between saving the people here, or the people in some other place."
Now, I don't really mind Mike. He was a bit annoying, always clicking his tongue and using any conversation as an excuse to make up stories about his love life, but he worked hard and never acted unprofessionally, so I could ignore a few annoying habits and work with the guy to get a job done. Sometimes we even went out drinking!
No. My real problem with Mike was that he's... a zealot, let's say. He adores villains, thinks they're the coolest people in the universe. You know why he got into henching? Because he wanted to be near them, like a psycho.
He even likes the fucking Joker. He just loves 'em.
Says he likes how free they live. How totally wild and untamed they are.
He almost punched me when I pointed out they spend most of their time in designated padded cells inside Arkham.
So, in his eagerness and adoration, Mike tends to miss a few details. Luckily, as his more sober counterpart, I am usually happy to point them out to him.
"Mike," I said, in my endless patience, "Neither of us knows how to arm bombs, and even if we did, we'd be putting the lives of who knows how many people in danger!"
Now, I felt like this was a very reasonable point, but Mike felt like this wasn't an excuse to not do our jobs. The more time I spent arguing and not working, the angrier Mike got, until we were shouting at eachother.
"Then what happened?"
"Remember what I said," I asked him, "About how supervillains need to stop using warehouses with skylights?"
"Yeah?"
"Well, my point was proved last night, because that's when one of the Bats showed up."
The moment of smug satisfaction I felt when I saw the skylight break under the weight of a dark cloak with a ninja at the end of it was overshadowed by the terrible knowledge that I was going to get my shit rocked.
I wouldn't even call it a fight. The figure just descended on Mike and by the time he hit the floor it was halfway to me.
And it met me with my hands raised, saying, "I'm good, I give up!"
"Bitch."
"Hey, fuck you, if Dent wanted me to fight ninjas for him, he should have paid for it and asked me to."
"Still a bitch."
"Whatever," I said, "After that, the ninja stopped, and looked at me, and I realized it was Batgirl."
"That's the redhead, right?" he asked.
"Not anymore," I said. "Now it's a new girl."
"What's she like?"
"Well, she didn't talk much. Couldn't see her hair, had a bigger cloak, longer ears." I see Butcher make note of the description, probably thinking that he could spread word of this description. Good looks at the Batfamily were rare, just knowing what to look out for was valued among the lower level criminals of Gotham. "And also she didn't have a face."
"I'm sorry, what the fuck?!"
So I'm standing there, hands up like a fucking idiot, and all I can think of is that it looks like the material for under and the material for above the line of stitches in her mask must be different.
She stares at me for a minute, then very clearly turns to look at the crowbar I'm still holding.
"Shit, right, yeah," I dropped it, then I backed away a little. She turned away from me and looked at all the boxes around us.
And at this moment I figured 'fuck Two Face', right? So I said, "Hey!"
She looked at me over her shoulder, then went back to looking at the crates. Every so often, she pointed at something or tilted her head slightly, like someone was speaking in her ear. I figured she must have someone speaking to her over radio, and if she was pointing, they were probably recording.
"I know where some of the guys taking hostages are going, if you don't know already."
"You sold out Harvey motherfuckin' Dent?!" Butcher asked, barely managing to keep it to a whisper-shout instead of screaming out like he probably wanted. "Fucking Two Face?! Have you lost your mind?!"
"He wanted to put people under bombs, Butchie!" I said. "Innocents! Civilians!"
"Fuck the civilians!" Butcher said, standing up, "Dent is going to carve you like a fucking turkey if he finds out! Which he probably already did!"
I stood up and looked him in the eye, putting a finger to his chest. "Butcher, I've told you when I asked for a job that I didn't want to hurt any civilians. I said I never would, and now it's ten years later and while I've done a lot of shit I never thought I would, I still have never put a gun to a civilian."
"But this isn't you putting a gun to a civilian!" Butcher argued. Pleaded, even. "It's not your word getting those people grabbed and blown up. It's Dent's!"
"Like it's any better if my silence gets them done in?" I challenged.
We stared each other off for a moment, and eventually Butcher sighed, sank into the plush leather armchair I got him for his birthday a few years back, and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
After a while, he reached under his desk, pulled out two shot glasses and a bottle of rum, and poured.
After I took one, he said, "Not like I can do change your mind after the deed is done, right?" and we drank. It tasted like shit, since I was still shaking off part of the morning's hangover, but I forced it down.
"Well?" Butcher said, "Continue the story."
I obliged.
Saying that actually got her (or 'their') interest, as she turned around and approached me.
She just kinda stared at me for a moment, so eventually I just started talking. "I was there when they were giving us orders, I remember thinking it was a little odd that not everyone got sent to a warehouse. I think there were... four, to match the four that got sent to the warehouses..."
So I keep talking, trying to remember every detail I can. The whole time she's just standing right there, right in my personal space, staring me with those unblinking white eyes.
I'm so focused on trying to remember every detail I can, and if there was any mention of where Two Face would be that night, that I didn't notice Mike getting up. And apparently neither did Batgirl.
But we both heard him say, "You fucking traitor!", and when we turned around, we saw him put a gun to the nearest crate and fire.
I didn't even react, Batgirl just grabbed me and tackled me, putting her body over mind.
It's a good thing the bombs were so far away from each other. As it was, I was only thrown through the room and slammed into the wall by the one bomb, leaving me with a few cuts, lots of bruises and maybe a fractured something.
Batgirl got it worse, though. Eventually my ears stop ringing, I manage to move and get her off of me and I see her back is covered in sharpnel, burns and cuts. And seeing how she kinda saved my life, I decided to return the favor.
So I lift her up a little, say in her general direction, "If there's someone listening on the other side, I'll be taking her to Doctor Thompkins in case someone can pick her up."
So I put her over my back, ignore how my everything cries in pain, and I walk out of the warehouse before anything else can blow up.
It's roughly four blocks later that I hear this big roar, and I turn around and I see it.
The BatMobile.
No, I'm not fucking with you. The actual, goddamn BatMobile.
It stops right next to me, the window goes up, and there's Nightwing, just staring at Batgirl.
"Is she okay?" he asked me.
It takes me a while to answer, because this is the prettiest goddamn man I've ever seen in my entire life. Like, you know I've got my preferences, but if he asked I don't think I would say no. I mean, just the curve of his jaw...
... oh, right. Sorry, got distracted.
Eventually I manage to answer without drooling all over myself, and I tell him she's breathing.
He nodded, got out, and helped me put her in the passanger seat. Once that's done, he just kinda looks at me before offering me a handshake.
I gave it, because holy shit, of course I did, and he just nodded, thanked me for helping his sister, and left.
"After that, I came here, asked you to patch me up, told you I'd explain later, went home, and drank all of that bottle of tequila you got for me last Christmas." I clapped my hands. "And now we're caught up."
Butcher considers me for a moment. "... the whole bottle?"
"... Yeah?"
"Sammy, that bottle had a worm in the bottom." Butcher said. "It was a gag gift."
"Ah," I thought it over. "Come to think of it, that last sip was oddly chewy."
Butcher sighed, "The more time I spend with you, boy, the more I understand what my father meant when he said youth is wasted on the young."
"Did he tell you that before or after the invention of the wheel?"
"Fuck you," he replied. "So what now? Two Face probably don't know what you did, but still, I'd expect some trouble to be headed your way."
"Yeah," I frowned, rolling the shot glass between my fingers as I thought. "I thought so too."
Eighteen years. Eighteen long, hard years in this odd new universe. Moved to Gotham at four, single mother, helped around the house. And I wasn't idle, either. I'd graduated five years early outta high school, gotten my mother a nice apartment in Metropolis, by any metric I'd done as well for myself as could be reasonably expected of someone in my lot in life.
But... I was more than that. I'd had a leg up on most others by the foggy memories of my past life, and now here I was doing the dirty work of some mentally ill fuck with a kangaroo court fetish.
Eighteen fucking years, doing my thing. And I'd almost died, caught in someone else's plan? A second life, wasted? Wasted?!
No. Not only 'no', but 'fuck no'. I remember a Sandman comic where Death said, as she reaped a babe's soul, that they'd gotten a life, just like everyone else. But I got so much more.
So why the fuck was I letting the nutbags of Gotham run it for me? Why was I wasting this treasure no one else had? How could I be so infinitely selfish and wasteful and lazy?!
"-am? Sam! Are you listening to me?!" I looked at Butchie. He said, "I said, 'what the fuck are you gonna do now?'"
I chewed my lip, thought it over, and decided. "I'm gonna make sure I never have to work another fucking henchman job again."
I looked at Butchie, smiled, and told him, "I'm gonna fuck with every last villain in this goddamn town, and if they try to fuck me back, I'll kill them."
"And how the fuck are you gonna do that?" Butchie asked.
"Easy," I said, "You're gonna help me."
